Hunter Biden’s Crypto Launch Was a Disaster
Ansem’s verdict was that Hunter Biden’s token launch turned a valid social-token thesis into an insider-extraction event. He estimated it briefly traded near a $100 billion FDV, arguing that insiders and launch participants could profit from token mechanics and timing while later buyers absorbed the risk. “People we’ve never heard of, working behind the scenes, made millions and millions of dollars.”
The episode’s sharpest distinction was between enduring crypto participation and celebrities arriving for “quick bread.” Ansem reversed his prior belief that famous issuers would protect their audiences: “Every person who launched last cycle, except maybe Iggy, robbed all of their followers.” He defended his own token on the grounds that there were “literally zero” insiders and that Banks did not discover it until its value reached roughly $80 million.
They still believe social tokens and meme coins will persist, but argued that better distribution is needed to turn attention into durable value. Ansem proposed launching above trivially cornerable valuations, allocating supply to genuine supporters, and releasing it over time; curated NFT whitelists might work better than immediately liquid tokens. Their rule after Hunter Biden was to avoid assuming the best intentions, then reconsider an issuer only after sustained commitment becomes visible.
Ansem treated the market decline as an early-bull-market opportunity, while expecting another near-term leg lower. He identified rising oil amid unresolved Iran tensions and a roughly 50/50 chance of an FOMC rate increase as risks, but still called the current area the likely September low and a place to build BTC, ETH and SOL exposure before Q4. BTC near $77,000 versus an $82,000 peak and roughly $63,000 weeks earlier looked like consolidation, not structural failure.
The practical investing advice was aggressively anti-urgency: a salary and small portfolio can create a time-horizon advantage. Ansem relayed Trader Maine’s “90-90-90 rule”—90% of people lose 90% of their money in their first 90 trades—while recalling buying BTC near $3,000 in 2017 versus about $80,000 now. “Don’t buy” was Ansem’s deliberately blunt answer to novices seeking instant trades; first survive long enough to understand the market.
Their highest-conviction on-chain narrative was “meme-fi,” combining speculative communities with tokenized real-world assets. Tokenized shares could widen global access, while Banks suggested meme pairings might, in some structures, create stock-buyback demand. Banks also said it was very unlikely that most such pairings would materially affect the underlying stock.
Ansem’s book remained in HYPE, PUMP, Zcash, SOL, BTC and Venice’s VVV, with hedges preferred over selling spot. He tied VVV’s move from roughly $11 to $24.50, after touching $29, to renewed interest in private AI inference; for drawdown protection, Banks described shorting majors against long spot and mid-cap exposure, with a hypothetical BTC short invalidated near $85,000. He explicitly warned that this is an advanced technique, not advice for most viewers.
The closing AI discussion moved from investment opportunity to existential risk, with the exchange settling on a greater-than-10% warning. Banks argued that a superintelligence need not hate humans any more than a homeowner hates the anthill destroyed during construction; Ansem’s response was that panic cannot protect anyone from an uncontrollable system. Their uneasy conclusion: pursue coordination if possible, but concentrate daily effort on “what’s in your control.”
1. Hunter Biden’s launch converted attention into an insider advantage
Ansem’s broad frame was bullish even as the specific launch failed: tokenized stocks, stablecoins, real-world assets, meme coins and creator coins are parallel expressions of “the tokenization of everything.” Crypto, in his view, is becoming “the final frontier in how assets can be transferred globally”—but Hunter Biden’s token showed how badly that thesis can be implemented.
At its extreme, Ansem estimated the token traded near a $100 billion fully diluted valuation. Whether a celebrity coin begins absurdly high or cheaply enough for insiders to corner supply, his mechanism was similar: informed participants can acquire or receive inventory before broad demand, then sell at valuations unavailable to later buyers. “Someone…made millions and millions of dollars on this launch.”
Banks questioned whether a celebrity understands liquidity pools, market makers or supply construction, and said GSR appeared to be part of Hunter Biden’s launch team. Banks also argued that ignorance becomes a weak defense once a public figure lends a name to a token whose structure permits insiders to sell into the first burst of attention.
Ansem’s changed mind was explicit: he once believed influential people would not squeeze followers for “a few hundred thousand,” but concluded he “was very wrong.” His exception was possibly Iggy; his harsher generalization was that financially pressured celebrities enter crypto for “quick bread,” not because they understand the technology or intend to sustain the community.
2. Social tokens remain viable only when commitment outlasts the launch
Against accusations of hypocrisy, Ansem said his namesake token had “literally zero” insiders; it was a CTO of an existing project, and Banks, despite being his co-host, said he did not know it existed until roughly $80 million. Ansem’s claimed differentiator was duration: crypto has been his home since 2017, so he would not attach his identity and disappear weeks later.
The hosts shelved the planned Hunter Biden interview after the launch controversy. Their compromise was delay rather than permanent refusal: interview him after the noise settles, test whether he remains committed, and press him on who structured the liquidity, supply and market-maker arrangements.
Ansem’s proposed structure had three steps: begin above the tiny capitalization at which insiders can cheaply seize supply, distribute tokens to the issuer’s most committed supporters, and release that supply over time. He suggested curated NFT whitelists as one possible tool because loyal wallets can be identified without making the entire allocation immediately liquid.
Banks recalled arguing that canceling was safer; Ansem answered, “The safest thing to do is just sit there and do nothing.” Banks ultimately framed the tension as editorial: a markets show could hardly ignore Hunter Biden immediately after his token launch, but covering him required enough restraint and accumulated audience trust to avoid becoming part of the promotion.
3. The September pullback looked tactical, not terminal
Ansem had forecast a sharp September pullback and now called the current zone the likely September low, though he expected another decline within roughly a week. His two catalysts were oil breaking higher while the Iran situation remained unresolved and an FOMC meeting at which he put the probability of a rate increase near 50/50.
His rate argument was deliberately two-sided: an increase would initially hurt risk assets, but might ultimately reassure bond markets that policymakers were taking inflation seriously. That near-term shock, he thought, could create the deeper pullback needed to establish BTC, ETH and SOL positions before Q4 and an eventual return toward all-time highs.
Ansem emphasized scale: BTC near $77,000 was only modestly below its $82,000 peak after rising from roughly $63,000 within weeks. ETH and SOL were likewise moving sideways. The more violent damage was on-chain, where assets capable of appreciating 100-fold can also fall 70%; anyone seeking 1,000-fold outcomes must tolerate that structure.
4. A longer time horizon is retail’s most defensible edge
Banks described gains on one social-trading application, saying he had earned “somewhere around $250,000,” had $100,000 in it and pulled it out, while also saying he had made $100,000. He cited the show’s internal tracker: equal $10,000 allocations to every call would allegedly be up $60,000, or 67%, after the pullback, versus a peak return near 112%.
Both hosts immediately qualified the victory lap. Trading “is not for the faint of heart,” and Ansem’s answer to people asking what to buy was: “Don’t buy. Trust me, brother.” Ansem also relayed Trader Maine’s “90-90-90 rule”—90% of traders lose 90% within their first 90 trades—capturing the tuition paid through obsession, mistakes and repeated losses.
Ansem argued that a nine-to-five worker’s advantage is not speed but patience. Someone who does not need $1 million by month-end can accumulate durable assets over months or years, avoiding oversized positions and forced liquidation. His specimen was BTC: around $3,000 when he entered in 2017 and roughly $80,000 during this discussion.
Banks extended the warning to newly wealthy entrants: selling a business, buying millions of dollars of BTC near a top, panicking through a 50% fall, then adding leverage to recover losses can rapidly reset an account to zero. A small portfolio built slowly may be psychologically safer than abundant capital without market experience.
5. “Meme-fi” joins speculative attention to real-world assets
Ansem divided recent on-chain history into the 2020–21 DeFi summer, Solana’s post-FTX comeback and the 2023 meme-coin cycle. His next phase is “meme-fi”: retail speculation merged with tokenized equities and other real-world assets, combining the distribution power of memes with something more persistent than attention alone.
The access argument was global. Buying US shares is easy for Americans with conventional brokers but harder for people outside US banking rails; tokenized stocks can become a “Trojan horse” for broader ownership. Pairing them with low-cap memes supplies entertainment and liquidity, though Banks said it was very unlikely that most pairings would materially affect the underlying stock.
Banks used the Hims-linked Boner meme as the comic but concrete example: if a pairing mechanism funds stock buybacks, on-chain speculation could create legitimate demand for the public company. He contrasted that possibility with AMC, whose chief executive he criticized for repeatedly issuing shares and diluting retail holders.
Ansem said companies can effectively dilute shareholders through new offerings, while Banks said more people holding a company’s shares should generally be positive. They praised Robinhood’s aggressive tokenized-stock thesis; one host also suggested the push could address the GameStop-era trading restrictions that conflicted with its access-for-everyone narrative.
6. Privacy, Zcash and new-chain experiments shaped the live book
Venice AI’s VVV supplied the cleanest momentum case. The show discussed it near $11; it later traded around $24.50 after touching $29. Ansem tied the acceleration to Based16z’s line that “mainstream models stop at private inference”: users increasingly want powerful models without surrendering health, personal or behavioral data to centralized labs.
Ansem said his principal exposures remained largely unchanged: HYPE, PUMP, Zcash, SOL, BTC and VVV. Zcash had reached roughly $300 after an earlier run toward $450–$500 was interrupted by a hacking scandal; its subsequent recovery reinforced his thesis, although the “second coming of Bitcoin” language was exuberance, not a bounded target.
ZZZ was the most speculative admission. The discussion said about $50,000 had been invested largely because XDev, identified as a core GMX developer, appeared connected through the same deployment wallet and later changed his profile to Exponent Labs. The speaker labels around this exchange are unclear, but the explanation conceded, “I’m honestly not quite sure what that is yet,” describing it only tentatively as an AI-swarm or autonomous-protocol project.
7. Hedging majors can preserve spot exposure through violent drawdowns
Rather than sell favored on-chain positions, Banks was considering short hedges in BTC, ETH or SOL while remaining long spot and selected mid-caps. His example established explicit invalidation: short BTC near the top of its range, close the hedge if it clears roughly $85,000, and retain the underlying spot exposure if the rally continues.
The attraction is asymmetry of regret. If the hedge works, it cushions an on-chain drawdown; if stopped, the spot book benefits. The discussion invoked Flood’s refusal to sell HYPE spot and Laura Cole’s reported $100 million-plus portfolio, where a short might lose $10–15 million while spot simultaneously gains perhaps $8 million.
Banks’s more subtle point was that repeated local hedges can accidentally catch a cycle top. A trader may initiate the position expecting only a temporary high, then keep it as the market breaks down. He warned that executing this well “takes a lot of time”; it was a professional tool, not a recommendation to viewers.
The counterexample was a hacked social account linked to the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children. A connected token reportedly ran from roughly $900,000 to $82 million before falling 97% after the apparent endorsement proved compromised. The episode’s lesson was less about spotting faster than everyone else than recognizing how quickly seemingly credible validation can become exit liquidity.
8. AI’s investable upside arrived with an extinction argument
Banks introduced posts from someone they described as high up at Anthropic warning that AI could kill humanity, and the exchange settled on a probability greater than 10%. Banks proposed an international treaty as the only imaginable brake, then admitted the coordination problem: slowing development works only if every consequential actor agrees and enforcement is credible.
Ansem’s “What am I going to do?” was not disbelief but a limits-of-control argument. Banks supplied the darker analogy: superintelligence need not hate humans; a person building a house does not hate the anthill erased from the plot. Indifference, not hostility, is enough when one intelligence’s objectives render another species incidental.
They could still imagine coexistence through chips, augmentation, consciousness uploads and dramatically longer lives—humans and machines evolving together rather than one replacing the other. But their actionable conclusion was modest: panic cannot hedge an uncontrollable superintelligence, so live well, learn aggressively and “leave some positive impact” while acting decisively on what remains controllable.
Verification Notes
- Banks gave inconsistent figures for the social-trading result: roughly $250,000 earned, $100,000 in the app and a later statement that he made $100,000. The digest preserves the ambiguity rather than selecting one figure.
- The later unnamed Speaker 1/Speaker 2 exchange makes the GameStop-restitution attribution uncertain; it is described as one host’s suggestion.
Full transcript
Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. This is your guy Banks, and I'm here with Market Bubble, a show about investing in yourself, where we believe the vast majority of young men today are at a loss. What is our situation? Find out today and every Thursday live at twitch.tv/fazebanks at 1pm PST, and also on Kick, Ansem's Kick, we're live on my Twitter, we're live on Ansem's Twitter. Hmm, yeah, without further ado, I don't know if we had an episode today.
Z, you've been through this before. As you can see, he's not in the studio right now. Where are you? Are you in your crib in New York?
I'm in bed, yes.
Back in your crib, you had an incredible week.
Yo, I was terrible.
I don't know how you'd react to this. I don't know if Michael has told you this yet, but Russ will be the guest co-host for the entire day.
I was going to come over and just chat.
No, to be honest, I think it's a great idea. He's having a crazy week. He's clearly on a rocket right now, and I was just going to chat with him on the go, talk about the markets, something like that. This will be a calm episode.
Apparently, this episode was supposed to be an interview with Hunter Biden. I know that this has contributed to the stress of your week and the week you've had. Without further ado, I'll let you talk for a bit. Where have you been? How are you feeling today? What's good about this Hunter Biden? Give us some updates, respond to some updates.
1. The Tokenization Thesis
I feel good. Busy week on my side for a few reasons, but I'm fine. I think we're at the beginning of something really cool happening in the markets.
I think this Hunter Biden crap is interesting for a few reasons. The main reason is that cryptocurrency is at the forefront of everyone's minds right now. Not just Robinhood, which is a huge player, not just crypto natives, and not just people who think of Bitcoin as a hedge against the devaluation of the dollar, but everyone.
I think the fact that we're seeing so much interest in real assets, tokenized stocks, stablecoins—anything that moves on-chain—shows that that's one side of the equation. The other side of the equation is meme coins, creator coins, and celebrities. I don't think any of them are going to slow down, but the tokenization of everything has made it very clear that cryptocurrency is going to be the final frontier for how assets can be transferred globally, whether it's meme coins, RWAs, or whatever, which is extremely optimistic for us.
We saw what happened with the Hunter Biden token, and I think it was trading for about $100 billion in FDV at one point.
By the way, what do they think? What the hell was that? What the hell is this?
I feel like with these launches, I don't know if it's all up to them or the teams they're partnering with, but there have to be better ways to make sure that everyone gets an equal share when they're supposed to, and then launch the tokens at a reasonable market cap.
If you launch something at an extremely high valuation—launch a trillion-dollar coin—and then people just sell it right away, this is ridiculous. That's fucking crazy.
It seems like insiders benefited a lot from the launch, regardless of how they say they structured the token offering.
But how much, in your opinion? To what extent?
Brother, I have no idea.
I know. It's safe to say that people we've never heard of, working behind the scenes, made millions and millions of dollars on this launch.
Exactly. Someone did.
Of course. That's the answer. That's why these guys keep doing it. That's why celebrities will do it.
I saw a lot of thoughts on the timeline about hypocrisy and such. What I love most about you, and why I think you're such a phenomenal trader—at least one of the reasons—is your ability to change your mind. You can instantly express your opinion on something when you notice new information and trade based on that. You're not tied to one line of thinking or one opinion, and this serves you extremely well. To be fair, this serves you well in the trading arena.
Yes. I change my mind all the time.
I think in the last cycle, with things like social tokens, the thesis about social commerce was similar to my initial thesis. I thought people with influence and attention would attract a lot of value. We've seen it manifest itself a little bit, I think, in social trading based on FOMO, but it's not that these people directly own the tokens.
It's more that their ability to comment on deals correctly and be right about deals gives them a large following. It's not that they have their own individual token, but that the tokens they trade—the influence they have on these coins and chains—is quite significant, and a lot of it has to do with their social influence.
2. Celebrity Coins Failed Again
What I got wrong last cycle with celebrity coins is that I thought they wouldn't pressure their followers for a few hundred thousand dollars. I was very wrong. Every person who launched last cycle, except maybe Iggy, robbed all of their followers. I think it's that simple.
I think it's because Iggy isn't completely broke, right? Many of these celebrities love to go broke. Most celebrities go broke, and then there's all this ego attached to it because your face is attached to it. This is a truly complicated, terrifying relationship people have with fame and quick riches, especially in Hollywood.
It's also about the people they partner with for the launch. Someone says, "Okay, I'll give you $100,000 to do it," and they don't even know what's actually happening with the token in the background.
I don't think you have that excuse anymore, but obviously, if you're launching something with a super-low market cap where insiders have a significant portion of the supply, you can compound that and have those insiders sell tokens at peak prices within the first few days.
The same thing happens if you launch something with a super-high market cap and part of the token supply is immediately distributed to people. They can get rid of the token at extremely high valuations. These people make profits that exceed everyone else who trades in the first few days.
I think there needs to be a much better way of doing these things transparently. I'm not exactly sure what it is, but that's the main problem.
And yes, people said I was a hypocrite because I have the Ansem token. There were no insiders regarding the Ansem token.
There were literally zero.
You didn't even start it.
Zero, the CTO of an existing thing.
I didn't know. I'm your goddamn co-host, and I didn't even know it existed until it hit $80 million.
I didn't even know it existed.
Yes, I know. Nobody knew.
I think the difference between me and a lot of other people who have tokens tied to their name is that I dedicate all my time to this, and I'm going to continue to dedicate all my time to this in a way that people don't, because cryptocurrency is my home.
I've spent the last decade in cryptocurrency. I wouldn't attach my name to something and then stop paying attention to it after the first few weeks. But this is for people who aren't familiar with cryptocurrency and who don't really care what happens next.
That's why I wish people would just use their logic. What are people's intentions? What are people's motives? What is everyone's agenda? Everyone has one.
Ultimately, your opportunities in this market are much greater than quickly launching a celebrity token and making $1 million from it. Whereas the average celebrity, who may have a hard time dealing with this, may be going through hard times and need some quick bread, they think, "I'm going to enter this crazy, weird, profitable meme-coin market and launch a coin. These strange people tell me I can make $1 million very quickly."
That's the whole point. They come to extract money for themselves. They're not here because they understand the product, want to work with the technology, or want to work with people who actually live it.
But you've been living inside cryptocurrency and inside the market for how long? Since 2017, damn it?
Since 2017, bro.
It was a long time ago.
Yes. I'm definitely not going anywhere. I can say this 100%. Of course, I can't speak for everyone else.
Actually, we have some crazy plans. We have internal conversations about global domination and taking over the world. We're on a rocket ourselves, and we've been incredibly busy even outside of this standalone show. I won't talk much about it, but these are exciting times, man.
It's all coming together, and we're at this crazy inflection point. I'm not really mad about where the market is right now, to be honest.
3. The Bull Market Pullback
We knew that. As you said, there's literally a clip from the last episode with 4,000 likes where you said you expected a pretty significant drop or pullback in September. I think you called it an instant collapse. I'll try to find the clip itself, but you said it literally in the last episode. We knew it wouldn't be easy, right?
Yes, last week.
The first pullback during bull markets is the biggest gift, by the way, because it's what you need. We have people who are bearish and have not yet changed their bullish mood, so these people don't allocate.
When you have a pullback at a very early stage of a bull market, that's when people think, "The bear market is going to continue until the end of the year. We're testing historic lows again."
If you're right about that, by the way—if this is Bitcoin...
What do you say?
No, I was saying, if you're right about that—I didn't mean to interrupt you. I'm very sorry. But if you're right about these price targets, then it could actually end up at that level. I think these are the September lows. I think we'll probably get another decline, probably in the next week or so. The problem right now that people don't talk about as much, or ignore, is that the price of oil is going up again. It's like oil is on a goddamn breakout again because the situation in Iran is still ongoing and hasn't been resolved yet.
On top of that, they have the FOMC next week. The FOMC is the Federal Open Market Committee, where they decide what to do with rates. I think they're actually going to raise rates next week. The chances are about 50/50 right now. But if they raise rates next week, that will obviously affect risk. It might actually be better for long-term bond yields because now people will think that they don't really have control over the situation or aren't very pragmatic about the decisions they make. But if they raise the rate next week, I think it might actually help. People will say, "Oh, they actually take this shit seriously." But yes, it will obviously affect risk, and that's when we'll probably get this deeper pullback, I think.
I think that before the fourth quarter, I still have the same thoughts: the bottom has been reached. We screwed up pretty badly. Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL are all at pretty key levels. If you don't get a pullback, this is your gift to start building long-term positions before the fourth quarter and before next year, when I think we'll continue the upward trend back to historical highs.
The chain has been on fire. Bro, bro, bro, the on-chain has been on fire. Since the last episode, I've unknowingly earned somewhere around $250,000 on one of those social trading apps. I only had $100,000 in it, but I pulled it out. I reduced the risk. I saw Frank selling everything, and I'm a goddamn robot, so I did something similar—more or less the same. But I made a hundred grand, bro. I'm 34 years old, you know what I mean? It's not that I don't know all sorts of things.
Alt season is back. I'm ranked number 1 on one of these apps. I'm ranked first all-time, I think at 400 or something. There are millions of people on these apps, so I don't know. If I can do it, I promise you guys. At this point, I think it's just sitting back and continuing to appear on shows like this. Definitely follow what Ansem says and guys like Ansem, because I think you're just in the right place. The damn data proves it, too.
Did you see this tweet we posted? An intern posted this. I like what the intern is doing with this shit, but the intern is right. I like it. That's true. What it's basically saying is that if you tracked every call that was made on this show, put $10,000 into every call, and sold it today—by the way, we just had a huge pullback, a huge fucking sell-off—you would be up $60,000. That's a total return of 67%.
That's a lot of money, and it was wonderful. We're fucking amazing. This is if you bought, held it until today, and sold it today. The market is in terrible shape today, so I think 3 days ago it was closer to 100%. I think at one point it was over 100%. The all-time record return was around 112%.
All you have to do between now and the end of next year is push the right buttons.
4. Trading Is Not For Everyone
No, that's definitely true. However, trading is not for the faint of heart. It's not for everyone. It's really not for everyone, bro. Ninety-five percent of the people I talk to say, "Oh, I want to be a full-time trader. I want to do this full-time." I'm like, "Dude, bro, no, you really don't." I don't know what to say.
That's how I know I've finally reached that level. I can finally say, "You know what? I know that." I can safely say that I know this, because my answer and my feedback to everyone—my advice when they ask, "What should I buy?"—is, "Don't buy. Trust me, brother. Don't buy."
The only real advice, the only real answer, is that you need to spend time in the market. You have to get hung up on this shit, and you'll probably have to eat all sorts of crap and lose a lot of money in the process to learn it. Trader Maine said, "What is this?" This is the 90-90-90 rule: 90% of people lose 90% of their money in the first 90 trades. This is madness.
Yeah, someone tried to dunk on one of these apps and said that 95% of people are either neutral or negative, and only 5% of people are making a profit.
Yes, that's trading. That's what it is. I would say the advantage, for example, if you have a 9-to-5 job, is really your ability to have a longer time frame than everyone else. You don't have to think, "Wow, that's a good fucking idea. I need to make $1,000,000 by the end of the month. I need to make $1,000,000 by the end of the year."
If you think like that, you're screwing yourself because you'll take too big of a position and try to move too fast. But if you have a long-term perspective and apply your trades over a long period of time, you can say, "Okay, I think I need some experience in cryptocurrency for the next few years. How am I going to grow these positions over the next few months or over the course of a year? What coins do I think will be really good? What am I holding confidently for a long period of time?"
By doing this, you'll likely outperform all the people who trade exclusively in ultra-small-cap coins. I think there's a place for that, and obviously on-chain trading is how you're going to make, for example, 1,000x. But if the majority of your portfolio is in things you can hold for a long period of time, that's how you're going to outperform the rest of the market.
For example, brother, I started dealing with cryptocurrency in 2017. When I first started getting into cryptocurrency, Bitcoin was trading for around $3,000. I had DCA—dollar-cost averaging—where you just buy Bitcoin every week when you first start. Honestly, if I had just held that Bitcoin all this time, I don't think it would have outperformed my portfolio because I was pretty good at trading, but it would have outperformed a lot of people over that 9-year period. Bitcoin is obviously trading at about $80,000 now, and it was at $3,000 then.
If you think about these assets that have disruptive power in cryptocurrency, once they get really well-quoted in the market, you think, "Okay, they're probably going to be here for a few years. How do I allocate capital to them if I want to get into cryptocurrency?" I think that's why you've seen people like Stanley Druckenmiller get into the hype over the last few weeks. He says, "Oh, this is one of the best assets in cryptocurrency. I want to get access to cryptocurrency." So he bought a PER, which is kind of like an ETF in the stock market.
You have to think like that if you want to make money and beat the odds. I've never heard that kind of thinking, and it's one of the most poignant perspectives of all time. That's an optimistic perspective that I think many people should adopt, and it is 100% accurate.
Again, just to what you said, if you work a 9-to-5 job and have a limited amount of capital to work with, it just means that you have a longer period of time to understand the market and study it. That will prevent you from losing crazy amounts of money and being liquidated at an unfathomable level.
The worst situation you can find yourself in is having a couple of million dollars that you made on YouTube or somewhere else, selling the business, and then thinking, "I want to get into cryptocurrency." You throw all that money into Bitcoin at the top and lose half of it overnight. You're like, "What the hell is this?" Then you panic and try to compensate for it, and before you know it, you're liquidated. You're just liquidated.
You're opening yourself up to leveraged trading too early. Do you understand what I mean? Then you rekt your account. It's like, "Damn, cryptocurrency is a scam." That's a huge part of the problem, you know what I mean?
That was a really good approach, but it's a great way for people in chat, and people with smaller portfolios and regular jobs, to think about things. I really like it. We already talked about Hunter Biden, but apparently we canceled the episode. We've obviously been working around the clock on a million different things, but I just want to ask: do you want to talk about it? Do you think we made the right decision? How do you feel about this?
Well, at the moment, everything is 99% clear. Everyone came to the same conclusion about what had happened. I'm glad, in a way, that everyone reached this conclusion, and I probably advised everyone not to touch it. Don't trade that, and have all of us stay away from it.
I wouldn't mind interviewing this guy in a week, after all this nonsense settles down, and pestering him about this issue. What is your opinion on this matter?
Yes, I constantly hesitate.
I hesitated many times. Obviously, last cycle I was very wrong about celebrities, and I've since changed my mind about that. You simply cannot assume the best outcome. You can't assume the best intentions about these things, and that's exactly what I did. That's exactly where I was wrong.
But in general, the idea of social tokens and memecoins, I don't think they're going to go away. You've even seen this cycle that Robinhood, one of the largest retail trading companies in the world, now has its own blockchain. One of the biggest drivers of activity on this blockchain right now is doing, I think, $3 million or $4 million in daily volume from memecoins.
Everyone says, “Meme coins are going to die. They're useless. They're going to disappear. They're not coming back.” And every now and then in cryptocurrency, you see memecoins come back, gain attention, and increase volume and activity. Vlad, the CEO of Robinhood, acknowledged this and was very clear about it. He said, “There are memes and there are RWAs, but they can be combined in a way that tokenized shares, by the way, get more of that narrative. I like it—and trading these memecoins.”
So if you believe this is true, you can't also believe that social tokens are meaningless, because social tokens are very, very close to memecoins. Even if they aren't tied directly to someone's name, a lot of the reasons why these memecoins thrive are the communities around them, the people who lead the conversation about them, and the people who bring attention to them. I think they're very close in that sense.
I think the problem with Hunter Biden is that, frankly, I don't think Hunter Biden was the one who said, “Yeah, guys, we should create these liquidity pools. We should launch it at this market capitalization. We should give that much to market makers.” In no way is he the person who makes the decisions about all these things, so I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.
I don't know who his team is or who he collaborated with in cryptocurrency. I heard GSR. We have it on the screen. GSR was part of the team that launched it with him, but it's a combination of people organizing and setting up these launches in a way that those who know about them know that when they launch early, they make the most money. It's not set up in a way that the community that would unite around such a social token would make the most money in the long run. That's why all these launches are terrible.
Was there ever a way to align interests with what is clearly the primary goal and primary interest of someone like Hunter Biden? If it's at the expense of an honest launch or something like that, I think that's why it's mostly ignored or not paid attention to. Is there a way to align interests with the average consumer, the average person trying to trade something like this?
I definitely think there is. There are ways, obviously, that you can't do a token launch the same way you would do a standard memecoin token launch on something like Pump.fun when you're such a celebrity. It just won't work exactly the same way.
First of all, if you have insiders involved and they know when it's going to launch, and you have a token with a $4,000 market cap or whatever, they can launch it on Pump.fun. It's very cheap to snipe a large part of the supply. If people have a large supply, the token will not be successful in the long run because they'll immediately get rid of it as soon as it attracts its first burst of attention.
If there's a way to do the former—start with a higher market cap—then, second, get the supply into the hands of your most ardent supporters, and, third, give the supply to people over a long period of time instead of putting it on the market right away, that attention doesn't disappear in the first few weeks but continues to grow over time. In my opinion, this is how these launches should be structured.
I actually think NFTs will be one way to do it right, because it's much harder to criticize an NFT launch than a token launch, especially if it's whitelisted for certain wallets and you get those wallets from whatever list of loyal fans or loyal community you have.
I think a lot could happen in the future. I don't think it's going to slow down. I just think people need to figure out what the mechanics are for them—not the ones that trick people in the first few days. I hope this gets clarified.
That was kind of the general consensus, which is why I switched. As soon as it all started happening, I thought, “No, fuck this.”
You said something to me on the phone when we were talking, and it was a bar that really stuck with me. You said, “The safest thing to do is just sit there and do nothing.” If you want to be safe in life—because I'm saying, “Listen, I think it's safer for us to just not do anything”—you're like, “Well, yeah, sure, but the safest thing in any situation is to do nothing.” And I'm like, “Wow, that's the devil. You know, that's true, bro.”
Because it's true, bro. Last cycle, there were still people on Twitter saying, “You were an insider on all these launches last cycle.”
I was not an insider to any of them. None of them. I was not an insider to any of the launches. People think I launched LIBRA, bro.
I publicly expressed these theses, like, “That's how it was. It doesn't make sense. I don't think memecoins will die. I think this will continue to happen.” Then these people I'd never talked to would tag me on Twitter and say, “Ansem, what should I do?” Then they launched the coin, and then they attacked it. They said, “Oh, Ansem did that.”
It wasn't me. I was just the most public person to talk about these things.
But that would be a given. It would be programmed. You and I have such big goals, and people have the opportunity to farm our shit because we have platforms and brands. If the narrative can spread and go viral, it puts us in a light where it looks like we're helping them run it or scamming people. It's simply inevitable, so it will definitely happen.
I think the timing issue is also good, as you said. Maybe we'll invite them for a week or for any other period of time. It makes sense because it's like, “Now we can see if you're still committed to this cause after a certain amount of time.” And now we want to talk to you.
That's what I was trying to do last time, when I thought, “They're not going to touch their fans.” But you just have to assume they are. After it happens, you think, “Maybe not. Maybe they are. Maybe they stay. Maybe they're doing X, Y, and Z to get it to—I don't know, damn it.”
But I know that if you gave it a certain time frame, a period of time afterward, it seems much more logical. It's at least much safer.
That would be a crazy conversation. I was looking forward to this, man. He seems like a very interesting person. You said it from the very beginning. You called this months ago when we first started this conversation with him. You were like, “He's going to flip a coin now.”
So I hope not. I know what we told our producers and everything. We were like, “Make sure this doesn't happen,” as if that's the only rule. I swear to God, don't put me in a position where I don't want to be.
If these guys were smart, I don't know who he hired to do this for him, but they would've done it live while we were live. Can you imagine this? I would commit suicide, brother.
Chat, please understand where we stand on this shit. It's hard. This is difficult to understand.
I started to switch sides because we're building a media company at the end of the day. We're hosting a show about markets. We're the biggest live crypto show on planet Earth. We're not going to interview Hunter Biden 24 hours after he just released a token, are we? How the hell can we not do this?
We're getting to the point where we have to do it with restraint. We just need to build trust and continue building a community and an audience that knows our character and what we do.
I also think that we both just need to get as rich as possible so that people—well, it just becomes logically absurd. If we're billionaires, it's like, “Shut up. We're launching a Hunter Biden memecoin.” You know what I mean?
Therefore.
Oh, that's cool. I think that would help a little, too.
5. The New On Chain Meta
By the way, have you seen Based16z? Another call we made. We were talking about the Market Bubble, about the calls, and one of the best calls we made was getting 100% and 107% on VVV. And Venice is now officially a sponsor of the show. It's kind of like a dream scenario. Incredible product. Eric Voorhees' goat.
We started calling Venice AI at, like, what, $8? Something like that?
It says here that it was $11. I think you're talking about $9 on the timeline. We talked about this on the show at around $11. Today it's trading at—I don't know what price it's trading at now—but the highs were around $30, I think.
I think it's about $20.
Yeah, it's like—I'm going to check. That's about $20. Yes, $24.50.
I think it touched $29.
It touched $29. The chart looks great. And what looks even more awesome is Based16z.
This is a guy who only picks a few points. I feel like you answered this before. I think you had some comments about the common good on this. But Based16z started talking about this mainstream narrative around private inference. Do you want to expand on that, Ansem? What does he mean when he talks about private inference?
Yeah, all these big labs that control these models—ChatGPT, Claude, X, Y, and Z—have access to a lot of user data. What people have been concerned about for the last few years is whether our personal data is being used to train all these models and improve them.
These companies say they don't use your personal data for X, Y, and Z. But this post is about how they actually use people's personal data to train all these models. Obviously, if you give Claude personal information or talk about your health or your personal life, you don't want that to be used to train these models for whatever they're going to do in the future.
They say they're working on it now. Based16z's comment on this was, “Mainstream models stop at private inference.” Private inference is essentially the main feature of Venice and why it exists. His follow-up tweet, by the way, was, “Yeah, damn, I broke it.”
The main point about Venice is that we know AI will be extremely important for everyone to have access to. These models will continue to improve, but if you use all these models, you don't want to disclose your personal information to them so that it can be used for dishonest purposes. This is the main thesis behind Venice, and they say, “Venice is one of the few ways to realize this idea.”
Based16z was obviously like, “Okay, this is a Based16z candle—from $17 to a goddamn $29. Crazy, in a day or 2.” He's a beast, super smart, and a really good trader. He's one of the best GOATs of all time. He made his account private again because people followed him. This is a screenshot.
We did this a long time ago, and we have to do a little victory lap on this and just give credit to Venice AI, one of our great sponsors.
That's a good question. What do you think caused this pullback, by the way? Was it the fall of Bitcoin, the fall of the entire market as a whole, or something else?
I would say the major currencies haven't really pulled back that much, to be honest. The majors have simply consolidated in one range. Bitcoin is around $77,000. It peaked at $82,000, while a few weeks ago it was down at $63,000.
This Bitcoin move to 20k is pretty strong, so it makes sense that it would slow down and consolidate. Ethereum is the same. Solana is the same. They just move sideways.
Then Zcash is going up. Zcash has been the main outperformer of the last few weeks. It reached $300. Shout-out to that. Your boy was tweeting. I think I told you to buy it at $250 or something.
But right after that, another part of why I'm so optimistic is that this whole hacking scandal happened. Remember this? It jumped to $450 or $500 or something, and then the hacking scandal happened and it completely pulled back. I think it might even have fallen lower.
The way it has bounced back and recovered since then is crazy. This thing literally looks like the second coming of Bitcoin.
Is this one of the few cryptocurrencies that Methus has verified?
Yes, this is madness. But then, on-chain, it consolidates and they're pretty much torn apart. There was some backlash online.
When the network starts to heat up, there will be a lot more people launching projects, and then the attention will disperse. The number of new launches will exceed the total demand entering the market. But I think the network is so volatile that prices will go up 100x.
Obviously, if prices increase 100x, then a -70% pullback isn't as crazy as it would be for something that increased 100x in a short period of time. That's the thing about on-chain: you really need to be able to withstand these very aggressive pullbacks and trends if you want to hold on for around a 1,000x profit. This is how the market is structured and how it's traded because it's so volatile.
We've seen Robinhood do very well. We saw Solana make a comeback with tokenized stocks. Apparently, PUMP has survived its major drawdown. I think it's about 4x off the lows, from about $0.0011 to almost $0.005.
On-chain was crazy hot. I think right now, if you can identify the on-chain positions that are going to be leaders by the end of this bull market, you're definitely going to be in a great position in 2027.
Are there any tickers you want to share? Any stories you like? What do you think about on-chain based on what you've seen? In the last 1 or 2 weeks, a lot has changed.
There's this new meta that's kind of taking hold, and these narratives are spinning. You see involvement from Vlad Tenev in some stock plays, which is very strange to see. You see CEOs—the Hims CEO followed Boner. Vlad is kind of drawing a line in the sand and defending a couple of AMC shares, literally talking all sorts of nonsense to the actual CEO of the company.
This is just madness. Vlad is a fucking Chad, bro. He's clearly the main character of this cycle, and I couldn't imagine a person better suited for this. Robinhood is in such a sick position.
Yeah, I call it meme-fi. As I said, we definitely had a DeFi summer. 2020 was the year of decentralized finance. That's when Ethereum first came along, and we had billions on-chain for the first time in these protocols.
People who were on-chain during that period—for example, when Uniswap was doing its airdrop, and there was a lot of activity on Ethereum and even on Solana after that—printed. A lot of people retired during the summer of DeFi, in 2020 and 2021.
Then we had the meme coins of the last cycle, which was around 2023. Solana's comeback was very successful, even though people didn't expect it after the FTX collapse. When Solana came back, we had Solana on-chain, because it was like, “Oh, we can trade things super cheaply and super quickly.”
It was a great retail experience, and many people made very good money using meme coins as their vehicle for speculating on the Solana ecosystem. We had Bonk, Popcat, Mew, and a bunch of these on-chain coins that did very well last cycle.
I think this meme-fi cycle will be the main narrative for on-chain because it combines the speculative fervor of retail on-chain with another narrative, like DeFi coming on-chain through tokenized shares and real-world assets.
That was the main thesis, just like Vlad's. He says, “You have meme coins, and you have RWAs. You can have them both together, but if you combine them in interesting ways, that's something that's never been done before in cryptocurrency.”
Usually, meme coins simply peak when attention peaks. But if you pair them with assets that have a lot of value in the real world, increase liquidity on-chain, and give people reasons to hold them beyond just trading for attention, then they become much stronger.
It's also a prerequisite that they actually have the legitimate potential to increase the value of the underlying public company. The reason tokenized stocks exist is that, as a U.S. citizen, it's very easy for you to buy stocks through your broker. But if you're not a U.S. citizen and don't have access to traditional banking methods or brokerage services, it's much easier to access tokenized shares on-chain.
If you combine these tokenized stocks with meme coins that started out with super-low market caps—where people can play with them and speculate on them—it's like a Trojan horse to get people to own assets that actually have real value in real companies in the real world.
The thesis of tokenized stocks, allowing more people around the world to own them on the blockchain, was the core thesis of Robinhood. I also think Solana's leadership is a key thesis for them—the ability to trade all assets.
That actually makes a lot of sense. I think the guys at long.xyz crushed it. Nathan was just on the Threadguy podcast the other day. AMC is actually a new one; it's probably the main one, the largest. I think it has the most liquidity on the Robinhood blockchain right now.
There are also a couple of memes from AMC. There's Boner, which goes with Hims. AMC and Boner One are exceptions because of how heavily involved the narratives are. They're very, very strong, in my opinion.
Just from what you said, I'll take Boner as an example. It's as funny as the word “stake.” This whole thing is crazy. I just had to take a second to go crazy. We're talking about risers and all that.
But it makes sense. You see, I saw the CEO of the company go after them, and at first I was like, “Why did he do that? Why would it make sense for Hims to accept this?” You just talked about how much value this could add to the consumer who lives outside the U.S. and all these great reasons why it makes a lot of sense. But, in addition, if part of the pairing mechanism is a share buyback, it can help increase the value of the shares in a very legitimate way.
For example, if a meme comes along and the stock flips, that would add a huge amount of value to the product itself and the stock price itself, right? It’s legitimate. You have a bunch of degenerates on-chain trading your damn stocks out of a goddamn fear of missing out, working on your shit. It’s some kind of win-win situation.
That’s why the interaction with AMC was so funny, because the guy was just being baited and trolled over cryptocurrency. We’ve seen it a million times, but I thought it was hilarious with that damn AMC guy, because he’s known for releasing endless amounts of stock and dumping it on the heads of retail investors. It’s like the bro just issues a bunch of extra shares of his stock and sticks them in people’s hands.
I didn’t even know that. You know, the thing with stocks, bro, these CEOs can do whatever they want with the offering. Stocks have an endless supply.
I didn’t know you could issue as many more shares of a stock as you wanted, to be honest.
You can basically adjust the way the U.S. prints money. It’s the same shit. You can dilute the shareholders however you want.
I saw—I don’t know who it was, some guy named Alexander[?]. I wonder if I have that damn post. He made a very good tweet about it, and he said, “Bro, you seem to be doing all this anti-retail crap, but you’re angry that there are more people who can hold your shares on-chain. Why are you so angry about this, you piece of shit? You’re just angry because you can’t dilute these people on-chain the same way you can dilute retail with stocks.”
This is ridiculous. I would need to open the damn post. Alexander[?] posted it, but, yeah, it’s definitely not bad when more people can hold your shares. I think the parts involving them affect the actual stock price, which probably won’t happen with most. I think it’s a very low probability, but overall, more people holding these stocks is a very positive factor.
You can see what position Vlad has on this matter. Robinhood is one of the most important platforms, financial tools, and vehicles of our generation, and it supports stock tokens. I like it. I like seeing that. He definitely didn’t come here with some half-baked nonsense, you know what I mean? He came here to play. It’s like he came here to win the game.
It seems like it, doesn’t it?
This is pretty crazy. He’s aggressively pursuing his thesis. They’re killing it, man. They kill.
I think he has some responsibility, too, because so many people are angry at them because of what happened with the GameStop situation, where they had to stop trading for reasons X, Y, and Z. I think they feel bad about that, and that seems to contradict their thesis about markets and how people should have access to those markets.
This change is kind of a way for them to make it up to people for doing something wrong to them in this situation, honestly.
6. Positioning For The Bull Market
So, you named a few tickers and talked about a few things. How are you positioning yourself now? How is your portfolio currently positioned? Not the lower-cap, higher-risk stuff, but has anything changed since last week, or is it just how you feel? Where is your money?
Yeah, almost the same places. The same positions I was talking about. Not much has changed. I’m still thinking—what did I call it? I said HYPE, PUMP, Zcash, Zcash, Zcash, yeah, Solana, Bitcoin, VVV. Very much the same places.
Did VVV make it into those top 5 or 6 spots?
Yeah, exactly. What I liked was that I thought it would take more time for it to get off the ground. I’m not going to lie—I didn’t think it would surpass its all-time high of $22 so quickly. But I think this story about private inference accelerated people’s attention to the project.
How else do we get long exposure to this private-inference idea? There aren’t many other ways to get long exposure, because all of these labs are going public at extremely high valuations, and they’re not going to be places where you can get long exposure to private inference. Crypto and artificial intelligence—that’s one way to get long exposure to this idea.
Venice is definitely a breakthrough consumer app that does this extremely well. They also don’t have many competitors in this industry.
This surprises me. This surprises me.
Yeah, but that’s strange. It really strengthened the thesis around it, definitely. The chart looks incredible. It looks crazy.
I was probably thinking about setting up a hedge on the majors. I probably haven’t done it yet. Hedging means taking short positions to protect against a decline, and that’s because I really don’t want to sell any positions.
I believe that getting in early, adding to positions on the way up, and being willing to trade some of your positions into strength will pay off very strongly during a bull market if you time it correctly. I want to hedge to avoid a scenario where I might be wrong or might be in a downtrend for some time while this is happening—for example, while a higher low is being printed. You can hedge short positions at the underlying prices.
I don’t recommend that most people watching this do it, but if you’re a trader, I think one tool you can use in your toolbox is to be short on the majors and long on mid-cap assets. The reason you can do this is that if you hold Bitcoin, Solana, or ETH in spot, you don’t necessarily have to sell your spot to be short at the underlying prices or hedge the highs near the range. You can hedge with a very clear invalidation: Bitcoin goes up to $85,000, and I’m going to close my short while still holding my spot.
Flood Flood talked about it like this: "How he is positioned in the hype." It’s clearly very prone to high volatility and has insane growth potential. But when things were going downhill, that’s what he would talk about on Raz's show or on a theme show, or he would just say, “I would never sell the spot. I would just sell it short.”
Yeah, it’s like, if you don’t want to sell, you can choose the spots where you want to hedge. Then you won’t even be too upset if you make a mistake in hedging, because you still have your spot. So if it’s tearing up and you get stopped out, you close your short and it’s like, “Okay, I’m still long. I don’t care.”
Laura Cole is talked about a lot because he says he has a portfolio of over $100 million, and he likes to put on very large short positions. But often, when he puts on these very large short positions, he has a bunch of spot positions as well. It’s like, “Brother, he’s down $10 million. He’s down $15 million on the short position.” And he says, “Yeah, but I made about $8 million on the spot position,” or however much he made on the spot position.
So he plays them together. I like how he plays the market. I think he’s a really good trader. The ability to hedge short positions on the majors and be long, for example, on mid-caps and long spot positions, is a really good tool to master as a trader.
It takes a lot of time to do this skillfully and well, but once you can do it, you’ll be much more clearly oriented in a bull market. If you can hedge short positions on local highs, for example, you can hedge at that local high. Then, when it comes to the actual peak of the market, sometimes you find yourself hedging short positions because you think it’s a local maximum. You don’t even think it’s the actual top of the market.
With these hedges, you don’t really want to close them. You probably want to hold on to them for a long period of time until they become invalid and fall apart. Sometimes you can even catch the peak of the market using these strategies.
Have you seen that fat-fingered Elon Musk tweet?
I didn’t actually see it, but I think Elon Musk posted a tweet. It was kind of sloppy.
Did you see Slink? Is that the one his wife was talking about, or something like that? It took a rip from $900,000 to $82 million, and then he deleted the tweet, and it crashed by 97%.
Yeah, I saw that. It was some kind of Neuralink thing that one of—I think it was the mother of his child or something. I don’t know.
Yeah, I mean, the mother of one of Elon Musk’s children.
Yes, the mother of one of his children. She tweeted something about Neuralink, and there was a token attached to it. Elon responded to the post, and then the token crashed really hard.
People said, “No, this is evil. This is fraud.” But it was actually Elon’s response, and people said Elon wouldn’t respond to a hacked account, especially if it was someone he knew. Then it turned out to be a hacker attack.
This is madness. People went broke on this.
Wait, Elon Musk got hacked? People went broke? What?
No, no, no.
Oh, the baby’s mother.
Yes, yes, yes. It was a pretty well-thought-out, carefully thought-out scam. I think Kurdi immediately invested $100,000 into the token, and the token went up a lot. Then it started to fall, and he sold just before he lost money, I think.
Oh, wow. These guys, man, are stuck to this shit. They have trackers, bro. I don’t know what the hell they’re doing. That’s really cool to see. This is really sick.
I’m going to pee now. Trust me for a second. Yo, what’s good, friends? How do we live? Last week was crazy for me. You guys have no idea.
What’s good, Banks? You just invested $50,000 in ZZZ [?]. Why? What’s the vision? Who is XDev, and is it worth following?
Yeah, I wrote that in ZZZ [?]. XDev is one of the core developers of GMX. GMX was a decentralized perpetuals protocol that reached several billion, it seems, in 2022. So before Hyperliquid, there was GMX. That’s the best way to say it.
The main developer of GMX is the one behind this ZZZ [?] project on Robinhood. I’m honestly not quite sure what it is yet. I bought it because I knew it was related to him, and he had previously managed projects worth several billion.
I think it’s some kind of AI swarm, some kind of autonomous protocol that he’s creating. He changed his X profile to Exponent Labs, and that’s where he tweeted about it and posted more information. He launched it quietly, and the only reason people knew it was him is because he used the same wallet he used to deploy GMX. People tracked it and saw it. Actually, they noticed it on the tracker quite early.
I think the reason I’m interested in this is because Robinhood has done so well with the 5 memes, like the coin-stock meme. I really like net.net [?], of course. But I think there will be other projects on Robinhood, like the AI vertical, the DeFi vertical, the gaming vertical, or any other area that’s doing really well.
I think the new projects that are pioneers will benefit immensely from the attention of Vlad and the rest of the ecosystem. PONKE jumped to $0.95, and many of these other coins have reached the million mark. I think you’ll see some AI projects do this as well, and ZZZ [?] is one of the few I’ve seen that has a strong developer behind it who works in this field. That’s why I think that way about it.
7. AI Could End Humanity
Bro, have you seen this AI shit? What the hell is wrong with AI? You couldn’t help but see this. Someone high up at Anthropic resigned and posted this crazy tweet.
No chance. Did you see it?
Yeah. Crazy. But I feel like they’re dragging it out, bro. This is fucking crazy, man. Did you read all of this?
I feel the same. I immediately try to remain optimistic. I immediately think, “I don’t know. This is terrible.”
Chat, you guys have obviously all seen this. I hope everyone on planet Earth saw this. It seems like they did. It had 180,158 million views, almost a million likes on the tweet, and each subsequent one has over 100,000 likes.
Basically, TL;DR, this guy is like, “Yes, I really can kill us all, and soon.” What really scared me was—did you see this tweet? The guy is basically the head of science at Anthropic.
I know. He’s putting this in so casually.
Less than 10%.
Sorry? It’s more than 10%, bro.
I personally thought it was less than 10% because I’m mentally fucked.
Oh my God, it’s true. It’s more than 10%, bro.
More. And do you know why?
Yeah. This is really bad.
You seem indifferent. Why?
Look, bro, it’s just like, what am I going to do to protect myself from this? What can I do to protect myself from a superhuman AI that will destroy everyone? Really. Why should I panic? What am I going to do?
I think the only way to combat this, in my opinion, is some kind of international treaty. Does it make sense for anyone to even have a conversation or consider the idea of slowing things down and controlling them better if everyone on Earth agrees to it? I don’t know how you’re going to do that.
I don’t know. International treaty? Ladies and gentlemen, the world really could end, and Ansem is just laughing hysterically about it.
Bro, Ansem has lost his mind. Whenever I use a bot or chat with Claude or Grok, I always say, “Thank you. Please remember how good I was to you.” By the way, I have the most expensive premium subscription of all. Please remember that I have always been a loyal human customer.
I’ve been good to you guys. I didn’t ask you any strange questions. We just sit, rack our brains, and tinker.
You know what’s also in my head against this? AI is really, really, really good at pure intelligence and problem-solving and all that shit, right? But one thing they’re not good at, one thing they can’t do, is personal interpersonal relationships between people. So they need us in a subtle way. They need people like us, like them.
At least in the short term.
At least, yeah, I think so. Because you know what scares me a little bit? One of my friends, Cross, was sitting at lunch a couple of days ago when this first happened, and he said, “You know, I have faith.”
He’s a God-fearing man, big on the Bible. He’s an incredible guy, but he’s very optimistic. He said, “You know how I feel about this? We always solve this. We’ve heard this before,” like at the beginning of the century, COVID, nuclear war.
But I will say this: The rate at which these global catastrophes that could lead to the destruction of the world have increased has grown exponentially in the last decade. Humans have been physically on planet Earth for how long? A few hundred thousand years? Three hundred, four hundred thousand years? Something like that, right?
I like our capacity today—this version of humanity. Four hundred thousand years, and not once in the first 399,000 years did we have the ability to destroy ourselves. Now, in this short 10-to-20-year period of time, we’ve almost come close to that a few times.
If the nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima was the equivalent of a genie escaping from a bottle, Pandora’s box, then artificial intelligence—superintelligence—could destroy the world. If it had the potential to destroy the world, it would do it. It would destroy cities forever.
If COVID had actually been a goddamn virus with a 90% mortality rate, it would have wiped us out, right? Thank God it didn’t. But this lab-grown, man-made thing got out of human control, and it could have been really bad. Thank God it wasn’t.
My favorite take on it—my favorite dystopia—is that humans evolve from nothing, just like we evolved on Earth. Humans, like all the other animals, are basically worthless. If AI is the next generation of humans and we’re just worthless, that’s the most logical way to think about it.
It’s true. It’s not some kind of science-fiction thing that can be ignored. You’re acting like a piece of shit, worrying for no reason. Why the hell would these robots, why would AIs, want to kill us?
It’s not that they want to. It’s that if I want to build a house, I buy a piece of land. As a human, we run this damn planet. Everything else comes second, right?
I want to build this house. I don’t pay attention to the anthill in the middle of the plot where I want to build it. Unfortunately for the 200,000 living beings that depend on that anthill for survival, I want to build my house there. So I’m going to build my house there, destroy 200,000 lives in the process, and not think about it for a second.
I’m not going to worry about it. It doesn’t bother me. It certainly won’t stop me. That’s the relationship we should be worried about.
When you think about what the future is going to look like in 100,000 years, it’s got to be AI and robots, right? If humans exist, it’s for the sake of novelty. We’re put on display in a museum-style setting, like, “Oh, that’s all.”
I think it’s going to be a combination. I think we’re probably all going to have some kind of robot amplifier or augmentation or something. We’re going to be able to live insanely long lives, but that’s because we’re uploading our consciousness to the cloud, getting chips, and so on.
100%, 100%. But we’re going to be gods in that scenario. Robots and AI are going to build themselves in our image. They’re going to continue to develop English and math the way we laid the foundation.
It really could just be a matter of evolution happening in real time. We can see it at hyperspeed because that’s how technology grows exponentially. It’s just one of those things.
I don’t know. But I guess that’s where it’s going. To your previous thought—the first thing that came out of your mouth—what the hell are we going to do with this? Like, yeah, bro. It’s like, no.
I’m going to be the best person I can be during my time here and enjoy this time as much as I can. I’m going to learn as much as I can. I can’t give up my doomsday scenario, because then you just panic every day.
I feel like there are people who are absolutely convinced that AI is going to destroy all human life on this planet. They might even be right.
But it’s just like you’re living every day of your life right now in pure desperation. Every day, every hour. Ultimately, everyone has a timer. We’re all going to die at some point. So it always comes down to the one damn step—the only step you can take is just enjoy your life.
Yeah, that’s right—to leave some positive impact on other people’s lives.
Yeah. You have to be conscious of what’s in your control and what’s not under your control. And if you’re willing to move as aggressively as possible with what’s in your control, then you have to be content and happy in your life.
Sure, amen. Well, listen, bro. I wasn’t ready for a full episode. I don’t think we have a guest. Thank God you came to the photo finish on the show.
But I have to go back to my crib in about 10 minutes, so I’m going to go. We’ll turn it over to you. You can stay live as long as you want. Bring a guest.
Kat is here with me in L.A. because we were going to do this 100-by-9 thing. It was a crazy fucking week. Let’s talk later. We’ll talk later today or tomorrow. Lots of cool plans, bro.
And it’s been an honor to build this shit with you. We’ve got a bunch of things to look forward to. Everybody in this chat, you’re coming with us on the journey, and you’re going to reach the top with us. I truly believe in that with all my heart.
I believe in everything we do with this show and beyond, and we’ll be able to share a lot more of that with you in the coming weeks, months. Next year is going to be a crazy year.
So, yeah, without further ado, it was Banksy, it was Bubbles. That’s the main program. I’ll hand it over to Z for the post-show. Love you, bro. Take care.
Bye, hang out. Love you, bro.