Robot Stocks Are The Next Big Trade | Market Bubble #7
AnsemFaZe BanksAndrew KangOwen Lynch
- Ansem’s non-consensus SpaceX long from last week paid off: the IPO was priced at $135, traded around $175 on Hyperliquid before the stock-market listing, opened at $150, and reached $225 within days. He compared its volatility to Dogecoin in April 2021 and said his mistake was underestimating launch-day volatility. Elon separately tweeted that SpaceX could reach $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030; Jake Paul disclosed 70,000 shares, publicly described as roughly $9.5 million.
- SpaceX was bullish for crypto mainly through Hyperliquid: it traded there before the traditional listing and reportedly did about $1 billion in daily volume on the platform alone. Ansem’s “generational, biblical rotation” referred to SpaceX’s expected performance until first unlocks, followed by attention toward HYPE and later the anticipated Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs. He rejected the claim that SpaceX would trigger a $500 billion rotation into Bitcoin, saying retail was more interested in stocks such as Micron.
- Ansem’s three crypto holds through the end of 2026 are HYPE, Zcash, and VVV. He describes Zcash as a private, quantum-resistant Bitcoin alternative and sees VVV as a privacy bet through Venice. His most slept-on crypto play is Cards, the Collector Crypt token; he hedges the platform’s cumulative revenue at roughly $640 million and says it recently exceeded Pump.fun on daily revenue.
- The cycle thesis is shifting from infrastructure to applications: Hyperliquid, Polymarket, Venice, and Collector Crypt built applications and users before emphasizing broader infrastructure. Ansem says most people should not short, should buy fear for long-term holdings, and should separate long-term portfolios from shorter-term, riskier trading books. He remains constructive on SOL but says it is “not fully back”; he cites RWAs, new applications, decentralized perps, and a proposed SIMD change to SOL’s tokenomics as possible catalysts.
- The show’s AI thesis is that open, private, and decentralized systems could challenge closed labs. A production discussion described Zhipu’s GLM-5.2 as reportedly comparable to GPT-5.5, while Banks separately said Claude 5 appeared materially above Opus 4.5. Illia, NEAR’s co-founder and an “Attention Is All You Need” co-author, described NEAR as an AI interface plus blockchain coordination layer, with private inference, confidential intents, 35-plus connected chains, 150-plus assets, and roughly 500,000 monthly users.
- Robotics is framed as a timing and manufacturing problem, not a question of direction. Owen Lynch said the main uncertainty is whether progress takes two rather than one year; Andrew Kang later forecast humanoids approaching human capability within two years, with billions of robots likely requiring the early 2030s. RoboStrategy’s public-venture model is intended to give investors access to otherwise private robotics companies, with venture NAV lagging later financing rounds.
- Camilla Araujo says a MrBeast Squid Game appearance turned 7,400 Instagram followers into roughly 145,000 in 24 hours and eventually produced “like $30 million” in lifetime OnlyFans earnings. She says she reached the top 0.001%, later left a business generating roughly $1.5–$2 million per month because the view-to-dollar loop had become addictive, and now pursues equity, IP, investment, and community-building opportunities rather than ordinary paid campaigns.
- The social and AI discussion links resentment to inflation, job insecurity, and lack of asset ownership. The hosts argue that criticism of Elon and AI is often misdirected, while Banks explores whether an AI-rich future could require a new way to distribute wealth. The show also features a live Polymarket discussion around Ivory Coast–Germany both teams to score at about 55%, with a roughly $3,000 stake tied to funding IForensic’s World Cup trip.
1. The SpaceX long everyone faded went 135 → 225
- Ansem says he went long SpaceX live on the previous show while people were calling for an immediate short and even “zero.” The IPO price was $135, Hyperliquid traded it around $175 before the traditional listing, it opened at $150, and it moved to $225 within the first few days.
- The replayed clip shows a $158 stop against a $190 target. Ansem says the error was not anticipating how volatile the launch-day pricing would be. He compared the trading behavior to Dogecoin in April 2021.
- By the discussion, SpaceX had pulled back into roughly the $175–$185 range after reaching higher levels. Banks cites Elon’s tweet that SpaceX could reach $1 trillion in revenue in 2030, and Jake Paul’s publicly disclosed 70,000-share position, described as roughly $9.5 million.
- Ansem points viewers to Pmarca’s “Sentient Sun” article for a broader SpaceX thesis, including Starlink, Starship, X, xAI, possible moon and Mars projects, and space-based data centers.
2. Two portfolios, and 99% of you shouldn’t short
- Ansem separates a long-term portfolio, held for years without reacting to daily price action, from a shorter-term, risk-on portfolio used for day trading and real-time reactions.
- He says most people should not short because beginners are likely to lose more than they make. His preferred approach is buying fear and dips in assets they actually want to hold. He warns that leveraged longs may be liquidated for an entire portfolio during a selloff.
- Banks contrasts that with his own style: he prefers assets such as Hyperliquid and Take-Two that he can hold for longer periods, while Ansem may flip from bullish to bearish within minutes.
- Take-Two announced GTA 6 preorders would begin at the end of June. Banks first estimated a 9% move, then corrected to roughly 5% on the day and 13% over five days, arguing that digital intellectual property and server economics were not fully reflected.
3. SpaceX’s IPO is bullish crypto through Hyperliquid
- SpaceX traded on Hyperliquid before it traded on the traditional stock market and remained active after the stock-market opening. Ansem says the event was useful for Hyperliquid’s reputation as a venue for pre-IPOs, stocks, and crypto in one place.
- He estimates SpaceX alone generated roughly $1 billion in daily volume at one point and says it briefly ranked among the platform’s top markets alongside Bitcoin and HYPE.
- A successful IPO that retail investors could access, including through Robinhood, may encourage more people to participate in investing and search for additional markets. Ansem calls the crypto connection counterintuitive compared with expectations from three or four years earlier.
- Banks asks whether SpaceX owns a significant Bitcoin position. Ansem says the company reported $1.4 billion and 18,712 BTC, making it, according to the discussion, the eighth-largest public Bitcoin holder. He and Banks also say SpaceX’s market capitalization exceeds crypto’s total market capitalization.
4. The rotation goes into HYPE, not necessarily Bitcoin
- Ansem interprets his “generational, biblical rotation” post as a SpaceX-to-HYPE thesis: he expects SpaceX to perform until its first unlocks, which he says are in August, and then expects attention toward HYPE as Hyperliquid prepares to host trading for anticipated Anthropic and OpenAI IPOs.
- He rejects a claim that SpaceX will cause a $500 billion rotation specifically into Bitcoin. His reasoning is that retail already has strong interest in other assets and is currently trading stocks such as Micron, which he says has risen roughly fivefold since its Hyperliquid listing and can be traded with leverage on Bullpen.
- He does think SpaceX profits could bring more people into markets generally, but he does not think the money necessarily flows into Bitcoin.
5. The apps-first meta replaced the L1 casino
- Ansem describes the prior cycle as a period when Ethereum’s DeFi success led to heavy investment in competing L1 blockchains. Many launched at multibillion-dollar valuations before finding product-market fit, weakening the incentive to build successful applications.
- Hyperliquid reversed that sequence by building its decentralized perpetuals exchange first and then building an L1 around the application. Ansem gives Polymarket, Venice, and Collector Crypt as other examples of application-first projects.
- He says crypto performance from the start of 2025 showed Zcash and Hyperliquid outperforming while Bitcoin and Ethereum were down, and that Venice AI was the leading performer from the start of 2026.
- Banks’s takeaway is that products with real revenue and user demand are beginning to break out. He says a cycle centered on useful, revenue-generating products would be healthy for crypto.
6. Most slept-on play in crypto: Cards
- Asked for his most overlooked crypto opportunity, Ansem chooses Cards, Collector Crypt’s token. He describes the product as a trading-card platform where users pull rare cards through gachas, with NFTs linked to physical inventory and buybacks available at a slight discount.
- He estimates, with a hedge, that the platform has generated roughly $640 million in cumulative revenue and says much of the revenue is returned to users of the platform.
- Collector Crypt recently exceeded Pump.fun on daily revenue, although Ansem says it receives far less attention. He attributes the gap to poor crypto sentiment and the difficulty of buying the token on centralized exchanges.
7. Gun-to-head through end-2026: HYPE, Zcash, VVV
- Forced to hold three crypto assets until the end of 2026, Ansem selects HYPE, Zcash, and VVV. He calls HYPE the strongest of the three.
- He describes Zcash as a private and quantum-resistant alternative to Bitcoin. His stated concerns about Bitcoin include future quantum risk and market fear that Saylor might need to sell Bitcoin to repay holders of preferred shares.
- For VVV, Ansem argues that the government’s reported restriction of Anthropic’s Fable model demonstrates that centralized access to powerful models can be removed. He says centralized companies could also be compelled to provide user data.
- Venice’s thesis, as described by the hosts, is that inference is private and inaccessible to outside parties. Ansem keeps the catalyst hedged: he says crypto has not yet seen a major event that makes retail care deeply about AI privacy, although Venice is performing well independently.
8. Solana: bought, but “not fully back”
- Ansem says he bought SOL during the week but does not consider Solana fully recovered. He sees an attractive risk-reward setup after a period in which Solana’s main breakout activity was concentrated in memes and it failed to compete with Hyperliquid in perpetuals.
- Potential catalysts include tokenized stocks through Backpack and xStocks, Collector Crypt’s card activity, teams such as BULK and Phoenix Trade, and Jupiter’s work in decentralized perps.
- He also cites SIMD, a not-yet-passed proposal intended to improve SOL tokenomics by burning more SOL based on on-chain activity.
- His underlying view remains that Solana is the best-performing, cheapest, and fastest L1 for building. A few profitable applications or coins could bring retail and developers back, while crypto-AI applications remain an unproven possible tailwind.
9. What restarts the bull, and why hold the token at all
- Ansem’s answer to what would restart a broad crypto bull market is simple: strong teams must ship products that let users make money, and the success must become highly visible. “Number go up,” he says, remains the main force that brings people back.
- He also sees decentralized training as a major possible crypto narrative if teams can coordinate distributed resources to build models competitive with closed-source labs without concentrating massive GPU capacity in one place.
- In response to the token-utility question, Ansem says HYPE and Cards have explicitly bought back tokens and discussed returning protocol revenue to token holders. He gives a conditional example: if Hyperliquid generated more than $1 billion annually and bought roughly $1 billion of HYPE annually, token holders would benefit from protocol growth.
- A separate speaker adds that HYPE stakers receive advantages unavailable to other holders. The discussion compares the problem with stocks and notes that regulation has made direct token-equity alignment difficult.
10. The Elon hate is framed as misplaced anger
- The show discusses a New York City mayoral tweet calling Musk’s wealth a reason to tax the rich. The hosts cite roughly 437,000 likes and 15 million views.
- One host argues that Musk has created companies, employed thousands, and helped create roughly 5,000 millionaires among SpaceX employees; the transcript does not say billionaires.
- Ansem’s stated diagnosis is “misplaced anger”: he says people should direct more anger toward government monetary devaluation and wages failing to keep pace with inflation rather than toward Musk’s businesses.
- Banks quotes Eric Voorhees’s argument that Musk’s wealth is not $1 trillion in liquid cash. The quoted calculation uses a maximum of roughly $100 billion in liquid value, divided among 8 billion people, producing about $12 per person—roughly a fast-food meal—rather than a durable solution to global problems.
11. “They want the fruits of capitalism,” not necessarily socialism
- Banks considers an AI future in which many familiar jobs disappear and asks whether socialism might be required to distribute income and pay for housing, food, and rent.
- The response argues that AI companies could make medicine and other necessities cheaper, but only after capitalistic companies receive funding to develop the technology. The conclusion is that this would be capitalism’s effects spreading through society rather than socialism itself.
- The episode’s central line is that many people may want the fruits of capitalism while asking for them to be provided without the entrepreneurial process that created them.
- The show plays a wealth-tax discussion featuring Kevin O’Leary. It also preserves the counterview that Jeff Bezos expects AI to create labor shortages in areas such as electrical work, plumbing, and data-center construction rather than simply eliminate employment.
12. Everybody hates AI except people holding risk assets
- A Threadguy clip argues that opposition to AI cuts across party lines and is strongest among people who do not own risk assets or have exposure to markets. The clip links resentment to inflation exceeding wage growth and fears that AI will eliminate jobs.
- Banks’s conclusion is that AI may need to be presented through a more broadly shared social benefit: cheaper goods, medical advances, solutions to hunger and cancer, and more freedom to pursue meaningful work.
- When asked whether AI is becoming too powerful too quickly, the host’s answer is categorical: he says the speed is exciting rather than scary. The transcript’s generic speaker labels make the exact speaker attribution for this brief exchange unclear.
13. Fable 5 banned, GLM-5.2 open-sourced
- Banks says Fable 5 has unusual “aura” because it was reportedly restricted after the government raised concerns about access. He separately says Claude 5 appears materially above Opus 4.5 on model-comparison charts; those are separate claims in the transcript.
- A production speaker introduces GLM-5.2, an open-source model from Zhipu, as reportedly comparable to GPT-5.5. Banks says the displayed post claimed it was better, while the production speaker says they had not yet tested it.
- The hosts’ concern is economic: if an open model is competitive at much lower cost, consumers may question subscriptions to Claude or OpenAI, weakening IPO narratives built around supposedly unmatchable models.
- The discussion also mentions Anthropic’s government conflict over war-related matters and OpenAI’s government contracts, but does not establish additional details.
14. Illia: from “Attention Is All You Need” to NEAR
- Illia describes himself as a former Google researcher and co-author of “Attention Is All You Need,” the paper he says introduced the core technology behind modern LLMs.
- NEAR began as an AI company in 2017, based on the thesis that AI would become the way people communicate with computers. The team lacked sufficient compute, moved into global data labeling, and found cross-border payments painful enough to motivate building a blockchain. NEAR launched in 2020.
- His current thesis is that AI becomes the interface and operating system, while blockchain supplies back-end coordination for payments, identity, and trust.
- He describes “user-only AI” as private AI that helps people learn faster and become more economically capable.
15. The Venice partnership, and Banks’s privacy confession
- Illia says Venice offers frontier models, open-weight models such as GLM-5.2, and a fully private option powered by NEAR AI. In the private configuration, data is encrypted by the user, decrypted inside secure hardware, and inaccessible to Venice, NEAR, and GPU providers.
- NEAR’s intents layer can also support private VVV purchases and private inference, creating what Illia calls a full privacy cycle.
- Banks says he used OpenClaw—not Claude—to scrape information about himself, build a profile over four days, and analyze photographs of personal journal entries. Illia says Anthropic’s database could effectively contain enough information to simulate him and agrees that such material should not necessarily be sent to a centralized company.
- Illia says crypto should sell non-crypto businesses on specific use cases rather than simply “bazooka” money at them. Medical, legal, and financial users have strong privacy needs and may want systems that cannot be disabled by a single company.
16. NEAR’s stack: sharding, chain signatures, IronClaw
- Illia contrasts NEAR’s sharded design with what he calls fixed-capacity, single-machine blockchains, naming Ethereum and Solana as current examples. He says NEAR can add computers and storage as demand rises, with no fixed limit on agents or users. Nightshade is described as producing blocks every 600 milliseconds.
- Chain Signatures allow NEAR accounts or contracts to sign transactions and encrypt or decrypt information across chains. A NEAR account can control assets such as Bitcoin, SOL, ETH, USDC, and USDT elsewhere.
- NEAR also offers confidential CPU and GPU compute for inference and agents. IronClaw is presented as a secure, privacy-focused harness that users can run themselves instead of relying on OpenClaw.
- Illia’s agent-marketplace example is an agent that checks Shopify suppliers through social media and legal filings, receives escrowed payment, and releases it when the work is completed.
17. Intents: 500,000 monthly users who may not know they use it
- Illia says NEAR Intents connects more than 35 blockchains, supports more than 150 assets on near.com, and added Movement within the previous 24 hours.
- He estimates 500,000 monthly users, many of whom encounter Intents through Ledger, Trust Wallet, MetaMask, or other integrations without realizing it.
- Roughly 20% of the Ethereum volume is described as ETH-to-ETH rather than cross-chain. Illia says NEAR solvers can quote tighter spreads and move larger size than on-chain smart contracts.
- The next opportunity is foreign-exchange connectivity: Intents could route between assets such as Mexican pesos and Brazilian reals even when there is no direct on-chain liquidity pair.
18. “Confidentiality is a freedom technology”
- Illia says he manages more than 100 addresses through a spreadsheet so he does not accidentally send funds from an investment wallet. Confidential transactions could reduce that burden to one address.
- He says users could pay another person’s Ethereum or Solana address without revealing the origin of the funds. He frames confidentiality as reducing cognitive overhead and enabling broader crypto adoption.
- In the agent economy, agents buying groceries, clothes, or handling payroll would also need private payments.
- Illia distinguishes NEAR’s model from Zcash: Zcash is a self-sovereign private asset, while NEAR aims to provide confidential balances across more than 150 assets and confidential execution for applications such as lending.
19. Open weights lag two to three months, and provenance is the wedge
- Illia says open-weight models have historically lagged frontier closed models by two or three months, while emphasizing that the technology available two or three months earlier was already strong.
- He says Gemini 2.5 was added to NEAR AI Inference and was approximately ten times cheaper in his testing, with the option of private access. He also says companies are cutting AI-token budgets because of spending on Claude.
- He argues that countries are asking whether they need domestic AI labs, but many cannot afford the required resources. Open-weight and decentralized systems may become their alternative.
- His deeper concern is provenance: users do not know what training data went into OpenAI, Anthropic, or major Chinese models, so they cannot assess bias or medical risks. He sees an opportunity for an open model with known provenance, distributed through private inference.
- Illia says the Fable restriction was favorable for crypto and decentralized AI. After the interview, Ansem names Pluralis as an example of a decentralized-training effort.
20. Rasmer’s interlude: post the $15,000 wins
- Rasmer argues that traders should share five-figure wins even in a feed dominated by eight-figure P&Ls. Many viewers have portfolios smaller than $15,000, and six-figure gains could materially change their lives.
- Ansem and Banks praise Rasmer and Arthur as strong Crypto Twitter traders, while acknowledging that the claim will provoke disagreement.
- The episode also includes Banks’s branding theory that Clavicular changing his nose would be like changing a logo. He points to Owen Wilson’s nose and Winnie Harlow’s vitiligo as examples of distinctive traits becoming part of a public identity.
21. Kang: the same toolkit, pointed at robots
- Andrew Kang says crypto traders moving into equities can reuse narrative analysis, fundamentals, and some technical analysis. His own framework is a relentless search for what he is missing, especially when evaluating robot foundation models or supply-chain constraints.
- He describes Mechanism Capital as a five- or six-person operation from roughly 2020 to 2024. RoboStrategy is intended as a broader platform with investment, research, portfolio support, investor relations, and policy functions rather than a passive holdings vehicle.
- A robotics hire named Scott is described as having 40 years in the industry and having founded and sold two robotics companies. That experience helps assess whether executives can execute and whether supply-chain claims—such as orders for 10,000 robots—are real.
- Bill Hughes, formerly involved in ConsenSys policy and Washington work, was hired to help develop a national robotics strategy.
22. The access problem public venture capital is built to solve
- Kang says retail currently has Tesla as a relatively accessible robotics exposure, but Tesla is a $1–$2 trillion company with several businesses and is not a pure play. He says the most exciting robotics companies remain private because late-stage capital is abundant.
- RoboStrategy’s public-venture model is meant to provide access to those private investments and potentially create a new category comparable to the emergence of ETFs.
- Kang expects other public venture vehicles if the model can scale to tens of billions, but says he wants RoboStrategy to be the strongest option.
- He cites SoftBank and Masayoshi Son as a precedent, describing SoftBank as a $200 billion-plus company that has increased substantially since its IPO, while noting the volatility and risk of its AI and OpenAI exposure.
- The transcript uses “Roa Strategy” once and “Robo Strategy” repeatedly; the company naming is therefore left as RoboStrategy/Robo Strategy rather than resolved beyond the transcript.
23. Robots are self-marketing content
- Kang contrasts robotics with repetitive digital-asset treasury narratives: robots can constantly produce new content by cooking, cleaning, working in factories, playing sports, or doing backflips.
- He cites an investment in RFL, which he describes as trying to build the UFC or F1 of robotics. The idea is competitive robot fighting or sports as entertainment, without humans killing one another.
- Banks proposes placing robots with streamers such as Kai Cenat or IShowSpeed. A robot that produces genuinely entertaining content could be marketed by the influencer organically.
- The guests discuss robot sports, a possible Figure-versus-Tesla match in one or two years, and a robot as an iPhone-like development platform where users can buy personalities, skills, or programs such as a “Banks” model.
24. The robotics risk is timing
- Owen Lynch says the main risk is not that physical intelligence fails to arrive but that the schedule slips. He frames the uncertainty as one year becoming two or two and a half years, not one year becoming 50.
- He uses Tesla’s shipping delays as a warning against shorting companies based solely on timing misses, saying shorts were eventually hurt when the companies continued progressing.
- Andrew Kang separately forecasts humanoids approaching the intelligence of a regular human within two years, describing the target as roughly Claude Opus 4.8-level capability.
- Kang says hardware and manufacturing will lag software: perhaps 100,000 to millions of robots could be produced in two years, but billions of robots are more likely a 2030-plus, early-2030s outcome.
25. $150 billion today, potentially tens of trillions later
- Owen estimates the current wave of private robotics companies at roughly $150 billion. The comparison to the 2014–2015 ICO era is made by the hosts and accepted in the discussion.
- He says the physical labor market is roughly $50 trillion and could expand if robot labor falls from about $50 per hour to $2 per hour, making more assistants and services economically viable.
- Owen expects robotics to be more distributed than the two-player structure of frontier AI: perhaps a dozen or a few dozen meaningful companies, with Tesla and Figure among the larger players.
- Kang later says AI valuations that looked excessive two or three years ago developed faster than many expected, which may lead investors to price future robotics progress more aggressively.
- Ansem says Kang invested roughly $19 million in an early Figure round and that the investment performed very well.
26. NAV is not black and white
- Kang says a closed-end fund is the workable structure for illiquid venture securities because ETFs require daily subscriptions and redemptions. Some digital-asset treasury companies used operating-company structures partly as regulatory arbitrage, but RoboStrategy’s securities require a different structure.
- Venture NAV can lag reality: a financing round must close, then administration, audit, and valuation may take weeks before the NAV reflects it. Kang says the fund has sometimes negotiated future allocations but cannot discuss all private developments publicly.
- He argues that investors are not only buying the current NAV; they are also evaluating whether the manager will choose and grow valuable investments over the life of the fund.
- Kang says MicroStrategy did not generate its reported value primarily through Bitcoin price appreciation: he gives an average acquisition cost of $75,000 and attributes roughly $40–$50 billion of value to accretive issuance and premium harvesting. He compares this to private equity’s multiple arbitrage.
- Premium compression remains a risk, but accretive issuance can potentially outweigh it.
27. The biggest winners might not be robotics companies
- Kang says Walmart generates roughly $700 billion in annual revenue, about $20 billion in net income, and spends around $100 billion on physical labor, using hedged language throughout. A 20%–30% labor-cost reduction could materially multiply the business.
- He makes a similar point about FedEx, whose distribution network and contracts may protect it as robotics reduce operating costs. Banks asks what Uber would be worth if it did not share revenue with drivers, but the transcript leaves that as a question.
- Banks presents Apple as a possible AI distribution winner: if Siri reached even 20% of Claude Opus 4.8’s capability, its placement on iPhones could reach ordinary users more effectively than a technically superior standalone product.
- The guests discuss uploaded consciousness through Accelerando, Pantheon, and a company that reportedly maps synaptic connections by slicing a brain after death. Kang is open to uploading consciousness into a robot, while Ansem says he wants a Neuralink chip but not a household robot.
28. Camilla: Player 067 to roughly $30 million
- Camilla says she was in college, working three jobs and serving as a personal assistant connected to the MrBeast team, before appearing as Player 067 in the Squid Game video. She calls the breakout luck.
- Her Instagram following rose from roughly 7,400 to 145,000 in 24 hours. After unsuccessful attempts at YouTube and other formats, she studied OnlyFans, moved to Florida despite family disapproval, and started with little money.
- Banks cites approximately 4.6 million active creators, with 90% making under $1,000 annually, median earnings around $180 per month, and the top 1% receiving 33% of revenue. Camilla says she reached the top 0.001% at her peak.
- Asked for lifetime OnlyFans earnings, she answers “like $30 million,” clarifying that she began around late 2021 or 2022. She emphasizes that the platform is not a magic button: marketing, social-media knowledge, and willingness to promote are necessary.
29. Walking away from $1.5–$2 million per month
- Camilla says she was making roughly $1.5–$2 million monthly but felt she had reached a ceiling. The direct relationship between views and dollars became addictive, and she stopped creating as creatively because she did not have to.
- She calls leaving the business the hardest decision she has made, especially knowing she could return and earn even more.
- She cites Kim Kardashian as a model for turning an explicit early public image into a major business career. Banks says the event that appeared damaging can become the foundation of a later identity.
- Camilla corrects the Bop House history: Sophie and her team brought the original idea, while Camilla became the most outspoken and visible member. The women were making six figures or more monthly, and she says income jealousy was not the main problem. She left after the reality-show plan failed and views the experience as a success rather than a loss.
30. Equity over brand deals, and a $400,000 car
- Camilla’s current thesis is that attention is the new currency. Instead of taking only cash for campaigns, she and Owen are exploring equity, intellectual property, and investment positions so they sit on the same side of the table as the companies they promote.
- Banks says traditional brand deals are less credible when they look like advertisements. Camilla wants to build communities around products so audiences support them beyond a single paid post.
- She and Owen have roughly 20 properties and invest in smaller companies and young entrepreneurs.
- Her worst purchase was a Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series costing almost $400,000. She bought it impulsively after visiting a dealership, drove it about three times, and then learned it was considered collectible. She says it later appreciated, complicating whether it was truly her worst purchase.
- In the “Hottest in CT” bracket, Camilla selects Michael Saylor over Clemente in the final. Banks jokes that the choice might save crypto.
31. Owen: friendship, business, and relationship
- Owen says he became a FaZe fan at 12, built a few million TikTok followers around age 19 or 20, and earned roughly $600,000 in six months from Snapchat shows before losing the shows and streaming opportunity after a partner used a problematic thumbnail.
- He met Camilla through a mutual friend while she was working with another manager. He and his friend Cole began helping her, and the relationship started as entirely professional.
- Camilla says they became adults together: Owen helped her buy her first car and sign her first lease, and she was sleeping on his floor when they met. They became millionaires at roughly the same time.
- Owen says the decision to turn the partnership into a romantic relationship carried serious downside risk, but the upside of the relationship and business working was worth it.
- Banks encourages them to explore AI, privacy, and future adult-industry businesses. Owen says their reputation with real creators and management is attracting inbound interest as industry guidelines tighten, although they are still learning when to say no.
32. IForensic’s World Cup book
- IForensic says he has streamed football betting for about six years and focuses on soccer markets. For Mexico–South Korea, he predicted a 1–1 draw and preferred Mexico not to lose at home, reasoning that both teams had already won and could use another point.
- He says his pre-tournament Brazil–Morocco 1–1 prediction drew criticism but landed, and he considers Morocco to win Group C at roughly 30% because Brazil’s final group match against Scotland could create an opening.
- On the United States, he says the team looked like a European side after earlier doubts. He would predict a draw against Australia without bias and 2–1 USA with bias, while saying the 62% USA price was unattractive.
- He also discusses tournament draws such as Cape Verde–Spain and DR Congo–Portugal and proposes Haiti to score in the first half against Brazil, with the possibility of trading out if an early goal causes the price to move.
33. The live trade: both teams to score in Ivory Coast–Germany
- Banks offers roughly $3,000 toward IForensic’s estimated $3,000–$4,000 World Cup trip if the live trade wins. They consider Ivory Coast to win at about 17%, but settle on both teams to score in Ivory Coast–Germany at roughly 55%.
- Banks suggests IForensic hedge the outright 17% result on his own stream because the tournament has produced unexpected outcomes. The final show recap describes the position as Ivory Coast to score and Germany to score.
- Banks uses a Knicks–San Antonio comeback market as an example of event-market opportunities, saying San Antonio traded around 99% late in the game and that fans with very expensive tickets could have used a small trade as a hedge. The transcript’s payout phrasing is retained as the hosts’ claim.
- The show closes with the $10,000 community competition narrowed to roughly ten finalists, a planned remote broadcast from St. Barts the following Thursday, and Ansem’s post-show technical-analysis stream.
Full transcript
Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show all about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men like you are in a losing position. Find out how we are positioned and how we think that you should be positioned, how to be a better man. Let’s have some fun. Let’s make some money, baby. I’m joined by my co-host Z.
Yo, yo, yo. What’s good from New York?
From New York. I’m in LA. It looks like we’re in the same place because we’re just that good. We’re live everywhere. He’s live on Kick. I’m live on Twitch. We’re both live on Twitter. These shows just keep getting better and better. That pre-show chat, Twitch, that was my best pre-show yet. It felt good. Maybe the pre-show should be an hour long. But I’m excited to get into all this with you. There’s a lot to unpack, even just from this morning—what happened with SpaceX, for example. What we’re going to talk about and how we’re going to talk about it changes dramatically from yesterday to today. We’ll get into all that. How are you feeling today, on this Thursday?
I’m feeling good, man. I’m feeling great. The market has been hella volatile, so there’s been a lot to trade. I’ve been having fun there. The AI stuff feels like there’s something new popping off every single week, so it’s been cool to stay close to the ground on that. There’s a lot going on.
We have some cool guests coming on: Illia from NEAR, Andrew Kang right after, and then Camila Araujo and her boyfriend and business partner, Owen. So we have a packed show today. There’s a lot of cool stuff for us to talk about.
1. The SpaceX IPO call
I think it’ll be cool to talk to these OFM people about the future of AI models and girls, because I think one of the markets that’s likely to adopt that technology very quickly and profit the most from it is girls—e-girls. That’s going to be one of the first markets to really go, and I’m sure they’re already thinking about how to be positioned there. Who knows? We’ll have that conversation.
First things first: We told you to buy SpaceX last week. On this show, we filmed the show right before it IPO’d.
We did.
And, Z, there’s a clip somewhere.
There is.
You were talking about longing SpaceX. You were the only person I saw talking about longing SpaceX. The entire timeline was talking about fading it, even shorting it. You were talking about longing it.
Shorting it, bro. Shorting it. Everybody was saying, “Short it. All in, short it. It’s going to zero.”
Insane. Not you—you longed it. You longed it live on the show, and you slapped that trade. It went crazy this week. Where do we start with that? How do you feel about that?
Yeah, I feel good. It was cool to be non-consensus on it, because a lot of people were saying it opened too high. They thought that, because it was opening too high with a total market cap, it was going to crash and everybody was going to get wrecked on it.
It was priced at $135 per share—that’s where they did the IPO. It was super volatile on the day of launch. It was on Hyperliquid at around $175, and it ended up opening at $150. Then it went from $150 to $225 in the first few days of trading, which is pretty crazy, considering how many people thought it was going to be bearish.
Okay, here’s the clip. The stop on this is the only bad part about this clip because I have a stop at $158 and I was like, yeah, I think it’s going to go to $190, but I had my stop there. What I fucked up on is how volatile it was going to get priced the day of.
This thing’s trading like crypto. It’s insane. Dogecoin in April of 2021, literally. It’s trading like Dogecoin. It’s insane. My brain isn’t big enough to fully connect the dots on those, but I trust you. I believe it.
It’s come down some. I think it’s around $180 to $185 right now. It came down to $175 today. The entire crypto market was red today, and Semis and MSTR were up only, while SpaceX was down after being up a lot.
Elon must have said something along the lines of, “I think we can do $2 trillion in revenue before 2030,” or something. He tweeted something like that.
He tweeted—so, yeah, he tweeted, “I think they’re going to be able to do $1 trillion in revenue by 2030.” In the year 2030, I think that’s what they’re going to do.
Like, in that singular year?
Yeah.
Bro, this guy. How do you fade a guy like that?
Have you seen the “Sentient Sun” post from Pmarca, the a16z guy?
Nope. Bring it up.
Let me see if I can find it. Hold on.
Bring it up.
But, yeah, a16z is one of the VCs that obviously has a ton of alignment with SpaceX.
That’s funny.
You know what’s crazy? This dude, Pmarca, has me blocked. I don’t even know why he has me blocked. I went to his profile to read the article, and I’m blocked. I’m like, “What did I do to this guy to get blocked by him?”
If anybody wants to read more on the thesis around SpaceX, and not just the demand-supply-side dynamics—actually what the company is doing and what they’re trying to do—this goes pretty deep on it, covering all the different parts of the company. I think people don’t really realize there are a ton of different pieces to SpaceX.
X and xAI are also part of SpaceX now, along with all the things they’re trying to do in space: the moon colony, the Mars colony, and the data center stuff they’re trying to do in space. There’s a ton of information here that’s worthwhile to read, so I would check out this article if you want to go deeper on it.
It talks about Starlink and Starship. All their stuff is here—how they’re making money and how they plan to make money in the future. So all that is there.
You saw Jake Paul invested? It seems like he invested $9.5 million publicly. Did you see that?
Yeah. “My SpaceX public position. Congrats, Elon.”
No, I didn’t see that.
70,000 shares.
That’s fire. He’s up.
The day of—up fat.
Listen, when Jake Paul’s out-trading you, you have to go back to the whiteboard. You definitely have to get him on. He’s going on TBPN today. That would be an epic episode.
You obviously saw this. Frank made this Market Bubble trade tracker.
Mhm.
And it’s very interesting. We’re not doing too shabby here on the show. We’re doing pretty good.
We’re just sharing the stuff that we’re trading. We’re not doing too badly.
Take-Two today. You saw? Today, GTA 6—they announced that preorders are at the end of June. It’s up around 8% or 9% today.
No, I didn’t see that news.
9%? 9%? For real?
Yeah, I swear. I think I might be bugging.
No, that might be right. I just haven’t seen it.
Take-Two stock. What is it, chat?
Take-Two. It looks like it’s up. Yeah, it gapped up.
Oh, it’s up $11 today. It’s up 5%.
Oh, got you.
Yeah, well, no, it’s up 13% over the last 5 days, so I was somewhere in the ballpark. I don’t look too closely.
No, it looked good. We’ve been saying this chart looks good. I do think the chart looks good.
Bro, this one’s going to get out of control. They’re not pricing in all the digital IP and the servers. They’re not pricing any of that in.
If this chart moves this way on the presale, the game is going to sell a lot. They’re going to make a ton of money selling this game, obviously. But, in my opinion, that’s just scratching the surface.
I’ve been highest on Take-Two and HYPE, and these things are—I don’t know, everything we’ve talked about has done pretty well. You’ll flip on the drop of a dime. You’ll flip on a tweet. You know what I’m saying?
Which is really important, and it’s why you’re gaining so many followers day to day. I mean, you’re about to hit 1 million followers, which is fucking sick. Congrats on that. You deserve it.
Yeah, you deserve it.
Guys, it’s important to keep up day to day, especially if you’re following and trying to trade and invest the way that Ansem does. You day trade. You trade every single day. You’ll flip your positions minute to minute. You’ll open the day bullish and end bearish.
I’m not that kind of guy. That’s why I like things like Hyperliquid. I like things like Take-Two. This is a place where I feel confident that I can park my money for a long enough period of time and do well. And we’re right for different reasons. There are 2 ways to go about it, but that’s why this shit’s so convoluted. That’s why oftentimes you’ll be cited, misquoted, or misrepresented. It’s like, “But you said this.” Yeah, bro, I said that, but I also said this 5 minutes later. You know what I’m saying?
It’s tough. You definitely want to have different parts of your portfolio. I think we talked about it last episode, or maybe the one before that, but you have your long-term portfolio, where you aren’t really concerned with the day-to-day price action and you’re thinking more in terms of holding it for multiple years.
Then you have your short-term portfolio, where you’re more risk-on, with your more degen stuff, where you’re day trading and responding to things in real time. A lot of the time, I don’t really think most people should be shorting at all. I think you’re going to lose a lot more than you’ll make shorting at the beginning. Once you actually know how to trade, then it makes sense to short stuff.
For the most part, you should be taking opportunities when there’s fear in the market and when you get dips, buying stuff that you want to hold long term. That’s what I would recommend for 99% of people. You just have to give warnings in crypto when stuff is going to sell off, because people will be leveraged long. I know that if I don’t warn some people, they could end up getting liquidated for their entire portfolio.
This is such an interesting example. I’m obsessed, because you and I feel the same way for different reasons. I always talk about this. This is such a phenomenal example, because you guys just heard his technical explanation of why shorting is not the move, why it’s bad, and why it’s dangerous.
Yeah.
I think even on a spiritual level—[laughter]—emotionally, it’s such a weird thing to go and take a bet on people losing money. You know what I mean? You don’t want to be on the side of something bad happening. You never want to see that, right? So, I don’t know, it’s just bad. It feels bad. It’s interesting that it’s in line that way, too.
SpaceX—I think it’s very safe to say the IPO was a wonderful success, which is amazing for everybody. Everybody should celebrate this. Obviously, we saw leftist Twitter and socialist Twitter really rip this fucking guy to shreds. We’ll get into those conversations in a little bit. That’ll be interesting. But all in all, SpaceX’s success—I guess what I’m getting at is, what do you think SpaceX’s success means for crypto?
Funny enough, it actually contributes a lot to the bullishness of crypto right now, because SpaceX, as an IPO, traded on Hyperliquid before it traded anywhere else. That’s where people could speculate on the price and trade it before they could trade it on the actual stock market.
Even after it went live on the stock market, there were still people trading in and out of positions on Hyperliquid. It was super active after hours, so we saw a lot of action, just not during regular trading hours.
People are positioning there, but it’s really good for Hyperliquid as a platform to be seen as the place where people can trade pre-IPOs, stocks, or crypto in the same place. That’s a crypto protocol that’s getting a ton of attention from TradFi, from retail, from everybody.
It’s also good for retail, who are speculating on markets. Obviously, there were a ton of people who got access to the SpaceX IPO, and a ton of people who bought it through Robinhood on the first day. If SpaceX does well, that encourages more people to invest more and start looking for opportunities there, as well as what else they can trade and look to invest in. So I think it’s also generally good for sentiment around investing and trading for retail. Those are the 2 things.
You would never think, if you looked back 3 or 4 years ago, that a SpaceX IPO would be bullish for crypto. I don’t think most people would think that, but it’s interesting that it has been.
Well, SpaceX technically owns some Bitcoin, right? They have a pretty big Bitcoin position. How much Bitcoin do they own?
I don’t know how much Bitcoin they own, actually. That’s a good question.
I don’t know if it’s a meaningful number. I just know that, obviously—
I think it is a meaningful amount, actually. I think it is. They said $1.4 billion. In June 2026, they said they had $1.4 billion in Bitcoin, making them the eighth-largest public Bitcoin holder, with 18,712 BTC on their balance sheet.
So, obviously, that tweet from you—“Generational, biblical rotation coming”—people are going to lean into the idea, or hope, that you’re speaking about crypto there. More or less, you are to some degree, right?
I was a little bit. I didn’t really say specifically what I was talking about in the tweet, but what I was saying is that SpaceX is doing really well. I think SpaceX is going to do well up until the first unlocks, which I think are in August.
Then, after the SpaceX IPO this year, we’re going to have the Anthropic IPO and the OpenAI IPO. Hyperliquid is going to be a place where you can trade both of those things as well. So I think a lot of people who saw SpaceX being able to be traded on Hyperliquid are going to look at HYPE, and I think HYPE is going to do well following that. That’s kind of the general rotation I was talking about with SpaceX.
I think this shit’s especially good for Hyperliquid. For a platform like HYPE, I think they were doing $1 billion a day. With SpaceX? Just on SpaceX alone?
Just on SpaceX alone.
That’s fucking insane.
Yeah, it’s nuts, bro. I think it was doing more than—I think it was top 2 on the entire platform at one point. It was Bitcoin and then—no, Bitcoin, SpaceX, and HYPE at one point. Yeah, crazy.
SpaceX has a bigger market cap. SpaceX is worth more than crypto, technically, right?
Yeah. Total market cap, yeah.
That’s insane.
Yeah, it’s kind of fucked up.
It’s really fucked up.
It is kind of fucked up.
It’s really fucked up. Yeah, man, I don’t know. Immediately after that thing started pumping, Bitcoin pumped a little bit. Worthless Ethereum—I saw people mocking your take, ETH to zero, after ETH pumped a little bit. This thing shows a tiny little sign of life, and people are so funny.
But Hyperliquid, man, that’s the fucking one, bro. That’s the one.
Yeah, Hyperliquid’s doing really well.
We’ve kind of seen crypto’s weakness compared to a lot of the AI stocks, and Hyperliquid has been one of the only tokens outside of Zcash and BGB that’s been able to break all-time highs while that’s happening. This is a good tweet. I looked at the price performance from the beginning of 2025 to now.
This is super interesting. This is Zcash. What’s the second one? Is that Hyperliquid?
Yeah. Zcash, Hyperliquid, and then Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin and Ethereum are down. Hyperliquid and Zcash are up. Zcash is up a lot.
The second slide is crypto returns from the beginning of 2026, and Venice AI has been the main outperformer since then.
Hyperliquid is still tracking and pacing well. Again, you see Bitcoin and Ethereum down here. Yeah, interesting, man. Products are really breaking out is what I’m seeing—things that have real revenue and promise.
Hyperliquid—I mean, we just had Eric on. This is fucking sick to see. Venice is a great product. There are spots in crypto. There are opportunities in crypto, clearly still.
There are always going to be spots, for sure. I think the shift you’re seeing in crypto now—previous cycles, what we saw was, after Ethereum did really well with DeFi in 2020, we saw a lot of L1s come after that. L1 means a blockchain, a smart-contract blockchain, where you can build other applications on top of it.
When Ethereum did really well, people were like, “Okay, we’re going to invest in these other L1s to compete with Ethereum.” So we got a lot of infrastructure products—infra L1s—in crypto. They got a ton of VC investment and came out at multibillion-dollar valuations, but a lot of these L1s were not able to find product-market fit. They were not able to find successful apps to build on their chains.
The incentive structure was pretty fucked up for a lot of those people building L1s because they came out at such high valuations out of the gate without having to find real PMF first. The incentives were not as strong to really go out, do well, and find good apps to build on their chains. So I think it was kind of a fucked-up structure, but what we’re seeing now—what Hyperliquid kind of flipped on its head—is that Hyperliquid built the application first and then built the L1 around the application.
Their core application is their decentralized perps exchange, and they made sure that it was top-notch, best in class, before doing anything else. Then they built the L1 around that application. We’ve seen the same thing with the other products and protocols that have seen success in crypto recently. Polymarket is application-first. Venice is application-first. Collector Crypt, which is cards, is application-first. There are applications building in crypto and using crypto in unique ways that are doing well, but they’re finding users first and not just building infra.
These crypto cycles tend to follow some sort of trend. There’s some sort of common theme throughout. The last one we saw was meme coins, Solana—Solana summer, right?
Yeah.
And the one before that, NFTs had their moment. Before that, I wasn’t in crypto during it, but L1s were the thing, right? New L1s, whatever. I think that if, in this next cycle, real products with real revenue—life-changing products—becomes the meta, I think it’s extremely healthy for crypto.
I have a tweet up here right now, and I want your opinion on it. This guy’s take is, “Trigger $500 billion capital rotation into Bitcoin.” Do you think this has any merit? Where my head goes when I read something like this—
Who is that?
I don’t know who this is.
Bro, that’s the fucking MicroStrategy guy.
[Laughter.] The fucking MicroStrategy guy.
Of course it is. Of course it’s him.
Listen, obviously, the initial knee-jerk reaction to reading something like this is to laugh at it—this is a fucking wild thing to say—but then I think about it, and I’m like: Elon Musk, Doge, crypto, Bitcoin—the overlap—
Yeah.
—in customer profiles. There’s probably a very similar customer profile between retail investors investing in SpaceX and Bitcoin holders, right? Is there any merit to this? I could see in my head the guy who made some money on Bitcoin taking money out of Bitcoin when fucking crypto gets shaky. Where does he put his money? Where does that guy put his money? SpaceX.
You see SpaceX perform the way that it did. Now is this guy feeling good? He’s going to fucking rip that out and rotate that into Bitcoin? How much of this funnels back into Bitcoin or rotates back into Bitcoin? I don’t know.
I think it’s false. I don’t think this is true. I think the idea makes sense, but I’ll tell you why I think it’s false. The reason that I don’t think that is true is because there have been so many other assets that have done really well the past few years that people are already speculating on and that already have retail interest. They’re already doing well.
I’ll pull up the fucking chart. This is Micron. This is on our platform, Bullpen—we’re on top of Hyperliquid—but you can trade this right now with 10x leverage. The reason that there aren’t as many people trading alts, these vaporware alts, is because they’re trading stocks like these that are going up infinitely and are already doing really well.
Micron is up—what is it?—5x just since being listed here on Hyperliquid. It was up even more before it was on the platform. But I think saying that there’s going to be a rotation into Bitcoin, Bitcoin specifically, is really wrong because Bitcoin retail is really not interested in it right now.
I do think that if more people make money on SpaceX and do well in markets, they are going to get more into markets. But I’m not exactly sure that that goes into Bitcoin. I don’t think that goes into Bitcoin.
Let me just ask you straight: What is the most slept-on play in crypto right now?
That’s a good question.
In your opinion?
This is a good question. The most slept-on play in crypto—I think it might be Cards, bro. I think it might be Cards. We’ve talked about Cards before, and it’s almost at all-time highs now. The platform, Collector Crypt—the token’s called Cards—they’ve made, in total, I want to say, like, $640 million in revenue, and a lot of that revenue gets returned to the people who are using their platform.
Describe what Collector Crypt is. What is the product? Why do you feel that way?
Essentially, Collector Crypt is a TCG platform where they have these rare cards that you can pull from spinning their gachas. They have a really good system where they buy back the cards from you if you don’t want them at a slight discount to what you got them at.
There’s a ton of interest in these cards, and they’re making money from having the rare-card inventory, having the NFT attached to the physical inventory, and people speculating on trying to get special kinds of cards from these packs.
NFTs did really well in 2020 and 2021, and then we saw all these TCGs pop off, but it hasn’t really popped off in crypto yet. Collector Crypt is one of the applications that’s capitalizing on that. Let me pull it up. I have it in here somewhere. Where is it?
[Coughs and clears throat.]
Oh, this thing. Yeah, this is a good post on it. Let me see. Yeah, this is a good post on it. The Four Pillars—I don’t know if you guys know this account—did a pretty good deep dive on Courtyard, what it is, and the platform.
A lot of people know Pump.fun as one of the most talked-about applications this cycle, and Collector Crypt actually—
Flipped it, right?
Yeah, they flipped it on daily revenue recently.
It’s insane.
It’s not as talked about at all. I think Pump went to fucking $2 billion or something crazy. But yeah, this is an interesting spot.
I think what happened in crypto right now is the sentiment is so poor that people are not as active in looking for new things that are doing well. So there are a lot of interesting spots like this, and there are some other applications that I think are also going to be in a similar place and are doing well.
But yeah, I like Collector Crypt. I think Collector Crypt is cool. It’s not that I say it’s not as well known because you would only really know it if you’re deep in crypto. It’s not that easy to buy on centralized exchanges and stuff.
Gun to your head, the rest of the year—we’re about halfway through the year—you have to put your entire net worth evenly across 3 spots in crypto. What are they? Spot-buy right now. You can’t sell until the end of 2026.
Why does the gun have to be to my head?
[Laughter.] It is what it is. It’s life or death, baby.
Life or death. Fucking life or death. 3 crypto to hold until the end of the year. I can’t sell until the end of the year.
Yep. One has got to be HYPE, obviously. Has to be Hyperliquid.
Yeah, HYPE is definitely one. HYPE is the strongest one, for sure.
For sure. There we go.
For sure.
That pause had me ready to click sell.
You said gun to my head. I can’t fuck up. It’s serious. Yeah, I would say HYPE. I think it’s these 3. I’d say HYPE, I’d say Zcash, and I’d say VVV.
I don’t think it’s going to change. I think Zcash is in a really good spot for the same reason I talked about before. Bitcoin has issues with—it’s going to have issues with quantum in the future. It has the current issues with the sentiment around Saylor and people thinking that he might need to sell Bitcoin to pay back people who are holding his preferred shares.
It’s a quantum-resistant and private alternative to Bitcoin. I think it’s going to continue to do well. VVV is in a really interesting place because, as we know, AI has been the most popular market segment this year, and we haven’t really seen interest from retail in needing to protect their data and be private with what they’re giving to these models.
But just recently, we’ve seen with Anthropic’s latest release, Fable, that the government actually told them they had to restrict access to it. They didn’t allow anybody to access this model because they’re concerned with who’s using it, what the risks may be, and it just being out in the wild. So, if you think they’re able to do that and take away that model from people, then, in the same vein, these big centralized companies—if the government’s like, “Yo, we need the data from X, Y, and Z for this that we’re looking into”—they’re going to give it to them.
The whole premise of Venice is that whatever you do with their model—with the models they use on the back end—is going to be private, and nobody’s going to be able to access it. So, I think we haven’t really seen an event that’s going to drive why people would care about that yet. But just on its own, I mean, Venice is doing really well just with how that happens.
All it takes is a bit—is this big event, like you said. People wake up to the fact and realize how important the privacy aspect of how we interact with these models and this tech is, and how important it is that they aren’t [__] censored. I’m totally in line with all that. I fully agree and fully believe it.
It’s really weird if these hyper-mega-super-smart AI brains are biased in any way, favor one side politically over the other, or won’t give you an honest opinion about religion or whatever.
Yeah.
Yeah, it’s interesting, the uncensored models, too. Obviously, they’ll host them in addition to the state-of-the-art models. But I think what they’re also betting on is the open-source community around AI getting stronger, too, and them being one of the beneficiaries of that. I think that’s also something that’s going to happen, and it’s another good tailwind for them.
I’m laughing because I can see the team writing to me on the screen. That’s why I’m laughing.
Yeah, yeah, no, no. They’re writing it for me. This is actually really good, by the way. Production, take a note.
This is really great. This is hard. This is actually fun.
We’re actively farming clips. So, here, we’re going to do it for you guys live. Let’s do it. Ready? Ready? Get in position. All right. Ansem, let me just ask you straight: Is Solana back? I saw you bought some SOL earlier this week. Tell us why, brother. Tell us why. Is Solana back?
I did buy some Solana earlier this week. I wouldn’t say it’s fully back yet, but I do think it’s in a good place, risk-reward-wise. What Solana has struggled with recently, in this entire cycle, is coming up with breakout applications outside of just memes. They haven’t been able to compete with Hyperliquid on perps, and they haven’t had as much interest in other areas. Memecoins have been the main driver.
Now you’re starting to see interest in RWAs. Backpack is doing really well with tokenized stocks on-chain. I think xStocks is also another platform that’s going really well with that. You have Courtyard, which is doing great with TCG Pokémon cards. You have teams like BULK. You have teams like Phoenix Trade. You have teams like Jupiter with JUP, all working on the decentralized perps ecosystem.
They’re also working on SIMD, which I think is important. It’s trying to improve the tokenomics for SOL. What they’re trying to do is burn more Solana depending on a certain amount of activity on-chain. That hasn’t been passed yet, but it’s attempting to be passed. So, I think there are a lot of things moving in the right direction.
2. Best plays in crypto right now
It’s underperformed a lot over the past year or so, but I think it’s in a good spot. There’s also just a lot of negative sentiment around SOL right now. What I think can happen is that if you have some breakout things happen on-chain, you get retail interested in Solana again, and you see some coins doing well. I think that could drive interest back to Solana and also bring developers back to Solana.
What is it—cards, right? Like—
Cards and just other things there. I think the thing that blew up Solana in late 2023 was memes, but it wasn’t just memes. It was because people could make money trading on-chain. If there are ways for retail to make money trading on-chain, whatever the applications or coins are, that’s obviously going to bring a lot of interest back to Solana.
There’s always been developer interest in Solana. I do think it’s still the best L1 for building, the best-performing, cheapest, fastest for building in crypto. I do think that’s still true. I’m interested in seeing what they do at the intersection of crypto and AI, because you haven’t really seen that much breakout success at that intersection. So, that’s another tailwind that could possibly occur.
I think if anywhere is going to figure out quantum security—security against AI, too—I feel like Bitcoin specifically and Zcash are the most interested in solving those problems or fixing those things. We see a lot of narratives, especially when things flip bullish or bearish, about risk, security, quantum, AI, whatever. I feel like those markets are the most interested in solving those problems. So, maybe that’s also part of it.
Yeah, I know Solana definitely does have a plan for being quantum-resistant, I think. I don’t know—I know that they’re not currently, but I do know that they have a plan for it.
Right.
Something I ponder on a lot and ask myself—and I’m curious about your opinion and your take on it—is: What do you think needs to happen for the entire crypto market to enter a bull run again? We all want it. We all hope for it. A lot of us are positioned that way. Fingers crossed. Ansem, what needs to happen?
You need some really good teams to put out some really good products, and you need people to make money on those products. It needs to be very loud, in a way that a lot of people see this happening. What drew people into crypto in all the previous cycles was some protocol or some project doing really well, people making money on that project, and then a ton of developer interest and a ton of retail interest coming into crypto.
I’ll say that’s always going to be the main thing. Number go up is always going to be the main thing to bring people back into crypto.
3. Socialism, AI & the $1T debate
I feel like that’s an important thing to remind yourself. It’s very obvious, but people need to be able to make money here. People have just lost money over the last 2–3 years, and it’s been rough; the sentiment has been low.
Yeah.
Yeah, crypto, man. It’ll always be important to us, and we’ll likely always be fucking around in these markets. Is there anything else you want to talk about in the crypto vein before we move on? I want to really get into this Elon Musk thing, how people reacted, and the social ramifications of SpaceX. But before that, is there anything else you want to cover in crypto?
You said what else could happen for the entire crypto market to enter a bull run. I still do think open-source AI, contrasted with all the closed-source AI and all these closed-source labs, is going to be one of the strongest narratives for crypto if people are able to pull off building models that can compete, or get close to competing, with the closed-source teams.
And is this maybe a dumb question, but is this why we’re seeing Venice be successful?
Venice isn’t building its own model. Venice is a more consumer-focused application that’s focused on the privacy piece, and then they use other people’s models.
But I think the decentralized-training teams that are focusing on that and trying to build their own models from scratch—without having to have a fuck ton of GPUs all colocated in one place and investing a fuck ton of money, doing it at cheaper costs, and figuring out how to coordinate multiple people to solve that problem—are working on a really hard problem to solve. But if that were able to be solved, I think that would be a huge moment for crypto.
Somebody in the chat just asked, “I’m just confused why Ansem is so high on things like Cards and HYPE due to their product, but why would people invest in the token, which really has no utility? So, are they just banking on the company buying back tokens?” Can you articulate that? I mean, these aren’t publicly traded companies. It’s the only opportunity that you have to invest in these products, right? That is the answer to his question.
I mean, I think both of those tokens have explicitly bought back tokens from their protocols and explicitly said that they’re going to return revenue to token holders in that way. You have to understand that it’s actually very difficult for projects to be straightforward and transparent about that because of the regulatory environment around crypto applications.
It’s just now starting to get better, but before, it was near impossible to have something where one-to-one equity and the token were exactly the same. But for Hyperliquid, if that’s a protocol making over $1 billion a year and they’re buying $1 billion worth of the token a year, then obviously token holders benefit from the protocol doing well and expanding as a business.
I think also for HYPE specifically, HYPE stakers have advantages that other holders do not have. I think that they're core users of the protocol and core users in determining what Hyperliquid is going to do moving forward. But, yeah, I think having revenue returned to token holders is the easiest example for why you would hold the token. You could ask the same thing about a lot of stocks.
Yeah. Cool. Well, that was a super-articulate answer. All right, yeah, crypto—that's that for that. I don't know. The SpaceX thing is interesting in the world of finance, and we could talk about that, dive into it, and unpack it. I was more interested in how people reacted to it socially. How people—
Bro.
But everybody hates everybody, right? Like, this—
They really hate Elon. Like, really.
But isn't the answer to why simply that he is successful? Isn't it just that simple? They hate how successful he is. They're pretty outspoken about, “We hate you because you're so successful,” right?
They do hate him because he has a fuck ton of money. That's definitely part of it. I think it's also kind of—I hope [laughter] Elon doesn't let the money change him. Bro, imagine having a trillion dollars and not changing. What the fuck are you talking about?
That is the thing, right? He has let the money change him, but in really, really great ways. He's built all of this. Any time this shit comes up, bang, he just creates another product, builds another company, and employs thousands of people. I think 5,000 new millionaires were made just in-house at SpaceX—employees. And, like, earlier in whatever—I don't know. That's fucking crazy, right? This guy's doing God's work, and it's just—I don't know. It's really crazy to see.
By the way, this isn't a take from a random Twitter account. This is the mayor of New York City. He ran on social media and content; he marketed, you know, and appealed to the TikTok stuff. Everybody knows who this is, obviously—the mayor of New York. And he fucking tweeted out, “Reason 1 million why we should tax the rich.”
1 trillion.
Yeah, 1 trillion. “Reason 1 trillion why we should tax the rich.” It has fucking 437,000 likes.
[laughter]
What the fuck, bro? 15 million views, and just like, “Oh, no.” I don't know, man. I think people are thinking about this all wrong. I think this guy ran his campaign in the way a lot of these socialists think about these things. He ran on a campaign that you would expect a fourth-grade class president nominee to run on: free fucking no homework—
[laughter]
—free fucking candy for lunch, and, you know what I mean, just these unreasonable things. It all sounds great, like, “Fucking awesome.” But when you really break it down, these things are impossible and probably long-term terrible for us. I don't know. What's your opinion on all that? Because I could talk forever on it.
Bro, I think it's misplaced anger. What I really think is it's misplaced anger. A lot of people believe that their shortcomings are not their fault; they're the fault of people who are making a lot of money. That's why they're not doing well in life or why they're suffering. I think it's just a lot of misdirected hate.
What people should be more mad at is the government devaluing all of their dollars. I think the fact that wage growth is not keeping up with inflation on everything else that people have to pay for is really where their anger should be directed—not toward somebody like Elon, who is literally doing revolutionary things that people have not done before and trying to impact the entire human race in a really positive way. I think it's extremely misdirected hate, to be honest. I don't think it's founded.
There was this tweet. I'm trying to find it. I think there's one on MarketWatch. Let me find this, because it's just so perfect, like—
A lot of people hate him for political reasons, too. A lot of people think he's extremely right-wing and racist and all this other stuff. That's also something people don't—
That's insane.
Yeah.
Yeah, I don't know, man. Scary times. Scary times. Especially when you take this whole rise in popularity around socialism and how much people fucking hate AI regulation. I don't know. Where the fuck is this all headed? It's kind of scary, man.
It's definitely scary. I mean, you don't want people to be discouraged from being entrepreneurs or from building new things. What he's trying to do with self-driving cars, being able to put people into space, what he's doing with xAI—all those are positive things for society. What the fuck is this tweet, bro?
It's honestly so good. This response is so good.
[laughter]
Who tweeted this, by the way? Mark Zuckerberg tweeted this.
Oh my God.
“But imagine Elon Musk did something to benefit others with his trillion.” The motherfucker's building—he's solving rocket science, right?
[laughter]
Electric cars. He's putting fucking internet in the hands of every person on planet Earth. He's actively trying to get humans on Mars, right? When robotics starts really popping the fuck off and everybody has a fucking robot living with them in their house, Elon's probably going to have a share of that market as well. These are things that are transforming the planet in a very honest and good way. So what the fuck else do you want this guy to do?
People are just so fucking—Eric Voorhees actually guested on the show last week. I have to go find this. He had such an insanely good take on this.
He did. I did see this tweet.
Sitting in cash. Boom, boom, boom. Where is it? Oh, right here. “I really don't understand true greed. If it was worth $1 trillion, you'd physically stop me from solving as many world problems as possible. Give everybody the money. You have a trillion dollars; you don't need it. Give everybody the money.”
And Eric Voorhees goes, “Nope, you don't get it. He doesn't have a trillion dollars, which is, by the way, facts. If you went fully liquid on it, it'd be $100 billion max. And then if you take that $100 billion to solve the world's problems and divide it by the 8 billion people that live on planet Earth, every human being on planet Earth would get—drumroll, please—$12. You'd be able to buy a fucking Happy Meal. You'd enjoy a nice large Coke and a fucking McDouble and a small fry and get a little fucking toy. That's what everybody would get. And it would just evaporate that way. Whereas it's sitting with Elon Musk, and he's building businesses, creating millionaires, and fucking solving very real problems that humanity's plagued with and that are very, very important.”
I mean, this fucking dude bought Twitter to save free speech and discourse. That's fucking crazy. What else do you want this guy to do?
[snorts]
I don't know. It's crazy.
Bro, I think what a lot of people think they want is socialism, but what they actually want are the fruits of capitalism. A lot of people don't realize that's what they're asking for, but they just want these things to be given to them for free. I think they don't realize that a lot of the most important inventions and creations came from entrepreneurship and people being able to pursue these things in the pursuit of wealth, and giving that back to their employees and people who invest in them and all these other things.
That's a fire take, by the way. That was a bar.
Yeah.
It's a real bar. It's true, though. It's like the little kid who thinks that he wants candy for dinner. But I promise you, homie, you don't. If I feed you candy for dinner, you're going to have a fucking tummy ache. You're going to be up all night. You're going to have a bad day at school tomorrow. You're going to get fat. Your teeth are going to fall out of your head. You're going to be fucking miserable. You think that's what you want, but I promise you, you don't.
Yeah, I don't know. It sounds like we kind of have the same take here, but I want to—just being devil's advocate—tee it up. Is socialism the answer? Because I'll be honest with you: for the first time in my life—let's start with this clip, actually. I think it's important to start here. Have you seen this?
It's a pretty good interview. And just to give you guys a take, the “Iced Coffee Hour” is also another finance show.
I think this guy's name is Graham Stephan, and his co-host—it’s their show. They're interviewing Kevin O'Leary, and they talk about taxes, finance, whatever. This guy Graham made his first bag on real estate and stuff and then pivoted hard into media content, whatever. They're absolutely crushing it.
But they're finance guys, right? And you typically expect guys like this to be fiscally conservative, which I think, for the most part, they are, and I think they were probably farming [bleep] here as well. But we'll just watch the clip.
What do you think of the wealth tax? Because, Jack, we were having a discussion earlier. You believe that it might be a good thing.
No, no, Jack, you're going to hell for saying that.
But there's an argument to be made.
[laughter] No, there isn't. It's un-American. It will destroy the fabric of the economy. Punishing wealth and success in the—
Not punishing, because they already have billions of dollars.
Right. The difference between having $5 billion and then, let's just say, a 10% wealth tax—you know, $4.5 billion is not quite significant.
It's just the idea that you've made a promise to come to America as an entrepreneur to achieve the American dream, and then some arbitrary politician randomly decides, “We're going to appropriate that from you. We're just going to steal your wealth just because we feel that—”
A 10% wealth tax is appropriate. Not really stealing; it's redistributing. You're going to go to hell, too. Both of you are going to hell.
I feel sorry for you. I mean, I've heard that word before in Cuba, in North Korea, in Russia. It just hasn't been done right. They're all shitholes now. How about Venezuela? They redistribute all the time through corruption. It's a [bleep].
For the first time in my life, I've been thinking about things in terms of AI. What's the big thing? What's the big anti-AI case? Why does everybody seem to [bleep] hate this [bleep]? It's because the average person—all they hear about with AI is how it's going to [bleep] take their jobs and make them useless, right?
And you think about the way that I see the future playing out, what the world looks like in 10 years, and I don't think it's a crazy stretch to say maybe there aren't a whole lot of jobs as we know them that exist. I think that could be a good thing. I think that could be beneficial, and I think that should be everybody's dream: to never have a real job.
You should work for yourself, and you should do what you want every day—what you're passionate about, what you love. And if every human being is allowed to do that, and society is structured in that way, I think that's a beautiful thing.
I think people will look back at one point in 2026 and say, “People [bleep] went and clocked in and did slave labor for [bleep] $8 an hour? This is [bleep] insane.” People were really doing that? I can't imagine. That sounds like a nightmare, because it kind of is a nightmare.
But how is wealth distributed? How are people taken care of? How do people pay their bills? How do people eat? How do people pay their rent in that world? You would assume that these AI companies and robotics companies, which kind of own the world at that point—AGI, which we think will own the world at that point—you know, they're going to have control over all of the money, right?
So, is socialism the answer? Which I can't believe I'm saying. But how else? Do you know what I'm getting at? Like, how the [bleep]—
I see what you're saying. I don't think socialism is the answer. I think what you're saying is that AI, on net—the companies that are successful—they're going to have a ton of power and influence, which is true. And they're also going to be net deflationary on a lot of things. They're going to make a lot of important things for people a lot cheaper and more accessible.
If you think about the advancements that are going to be made in medicine, like being able to find cancer earlier, being able to do better research, and solve problems that we haven't been able to solve before—say AI enables that, and then that makes it a lot cheaper for doctors to give care to people—that's obviously net good for people.
But the only way all of that can happen is if these companies, which are capitalistic in nature, are able to receive funding to do this research, put out these models, do the work, and make their revenue doing X, Y, and Z. That whole process has to happen before the effects of that work can spread throughout the rest of society.
So it's not socialism; it's just the effects of what capitalism, I think, has on society when it's—
We talk a lot, too, about how this is going to make things infinitely cheaper, which obviously helps in the effort to pay for things as well, right? Just super-efficient, things being autonomous. It'll obviously naturally make things much cheaper.
But I think it's important, too, to highlight the fact that this isn't everybody's opinion and everybody's take. Jeff Bezos thinks that AI will create a labor shortage rather than put humans out of work. And I think that this is a take that a lot of people share.
Electricians, plumbers, things like that—building structural [bleep] data centers, things like that. There's going to be lots of new things that need to physically be built, which will obviously naturally create human jobs.
There's 1 more clip that I want to watch in line with this. It's a Threadguy clip. There aren't a ton of views on this. Not a lot of people saw this, but I thought it was a pretty fresh take, and this is obviously our boy.
And it isn't the case that Republicans like AI and Democrats hate AI. It's actually the case that everybody hates AI except for the super-minority percentage of the population that holds risk assets.
If you don't hold risk assets and you don't understand markets, and you haven't been trading over the last 1 or 2 years, I think your life has gotten significantly worse. And so there's a very small percentage of the population that we pay attention to the most that has all of the money, and they love Trump.
Politics aside, they love Trump because he's making the markets go up. And then there's everybody else that holds nothing, has no assets, has no exposure to the markets, and they hate Trump because inflation is outpacing wage growth.
You talked about this earlier.
If they do have a job, all they hear about is AI: it's going to ruin your life, it's going to take your wife, it's going to kill your kids.
You took that [bleep] from me. That's my bar.
I mean, they have no meaningful path forward to improve it.
And that's just it, right? That kind of perfectly sums up why people hate AI. And again, I think it might be important for AI to disguise itself in a way that offers a socialist solution.
I think that's how the idea and the tech of AI can be properly marketed, distributed, and accepted. Because it's an important thing—we talk about it a lot on the show—it's very important that people are excited about AI. People want AI, right?
Yeah.
In America's effort to be the leader in that effort, in the race to build AGI, it's important to sell people on the fact that this is going to make your life infinitely better, that this is going to give you work, that this is going to allow you to live out your purpose, that this is going to, like you said, solve world hunger and cancer and make your life dramatically better. It isn't going to go the other way.
Yeah, they need to focus a lot heavier on the end state of everything and how it can be net beneficial for people, for sure. I think that's a lot of the issue with the current language and how people are talking about it.
Definitely.
Do you think AI is becoming too powerful too quickly?
I don't. I think it's lit how fast the models are improving. I think they're going to continue to improve and continue to get a lot better. I don't think it's scary. I think it's cool.
Michael Cat, we can hear you, brother. [laughter] Michael Cat, we can hear you, G.
Can the stream hear him?
Did the stream hear that?
No, they can't hear him.
You guys can't hear this, but one of our production guys is screaming into the mic. Michael Cat, we can—[laughter] Somebody scream at Michael.
I look insane right now because I'm talking to somebody that you guys can't hear. I feel [bleep] crazy. So stupid. [laughter] Michael Cat.
I was like, “What the [bleep] is he talking about?” I was just going to say—
We can save this for the next episode. I didn't even get to use Claude 5. We talked on the last show about going home and using Fable 5, and then it got [bleep] banned.
I was just about to say that.
Dude, it's so annoying. [laughter] I was just saying this to the chat: Fable 5 has so much aura, by the way. This [bleep] is—every chart I see, you know how the charts compare the models and how efficient they are or how good they are? They consistently rank them on tech Twitter.
Yeah, Claude 5 is just notches and levels above Opus 4.5. I really want to use it, man.
I really want to use it.
It does FLR[?].
Trump obviously has a bone to pick with Anthropic because of all the war stuff. They have contracts with OpenAI now. I don’t know, man. It’s so weird how America’s effort to build this tech is all very closed-source and private.
Then you look at China. I know there was something—I’m not even going to pretend to understand it or know anything about it—but what is it called, GLM? What was it?
Yeah, so GLM-5.2 is an open-source model from this company called Zhipu—Z-H-I-P-U—and apparently it’s as good as GPT-5.5, which is one of OpenAI’s latest models, and also one of Claude’s latest models.
It says here that it’s way better.
I haven’t used it yet, but this is huge because if they’re able to put something out like this at a much lower cost than what the other labs are putting out their models at, then it kind of fucks up the entire economics of how users are spending money on subscriptions to these existing models.
If you could use this—
4. Guest: NEAR founder
For a lot cheaper, then it’s like, why are you paying that subscription to Claude or OpenAI? This is huge because it’s ahead of their IPOs and what they’ve been trying to drive so much with their marketing. They’ve been saying, “We have models that nobody else can compete with. We have the best consumer products. We have the best enterprise product.” If that’s not true, then obviously that impacts their businesses a ton and can change a lot about the scope of how people use these things.
Great. Well, I’m going to give you the mic, and I want you to introduce our guest. We have the founder of NEAR coming on, Illia. Just for everybody in my chat who’s unfamiliar, properly introduce him. Give us your whole breakdown of why he’s an important guest to have on the show, why you’re excited to have him on the show, who he is, where he’s from, and what his product does.
Yeah, so Illia is a co-founder of NEAR. NEAR is an L1 blockchain. It’s actually been around for a while. When I say L1 blockchain, it’s a blockchain like Ethereum or Solana—a smart-contract blockchain that has applications built on top of it.
NEAR is super interesting because they’re focused heavily on AI and building a blockchain that’s optimized for agents to transact on it. They’re also super interesting because they do a lot with privacy, like private transactions between different chains. They’re also really big with the bridge and connection to Zcash.
NEAR Intents is, I think, their most popular protocol. NEAR Intents is the protocol that allows the transfer of value between different chains. That’s a short overview of NEAR. Hope I didn’t mess it up too bad.
Let us know, Illia. How do you do?
Hey, hey.
What’s up, dude?
Yo, how are you? Good to have you on, man.
Good to have you.
Good to have you guys. Good to be here, guys.
Absolutely. Illia, welcome to Market Bubble. It’s a show all about investing in yourself and positioning yourself in a winning spot as a young man. We talk about finance, tech, attention, and things like that. We’re excited to have you on. Do you want to introduce yourself and let us know what you’ve been working on?
Illia
For sure, yeah. Before blockchain, my background was in AI and machine learning. I was a researcher at Google, and I’m one of the co-authors of the paper called “Attention Is All You Need,” speaking of attention, which introduced the core technology that’s powering all of modern AI.
It’s T and GPT. It’s effectively the base for all of the LLMs and modern AI models. We actually started NEAR as an AI company back in 2017, with the thesis that AI would be how we talk to computers going forward. We were trying to build something where you could just talk to a computer and it would build software and do the things you want.
2017 was a bit too early. We didn’t have the compute we needed to really build that. Instead, we ended up coordinating a lot of people around the world to do data labeling and felt in our bones a need for blockchain. Paying people in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and China was extremely painful. We were like, “Hey, if there was a blockchain that could do it cheaply, fast, and be easy to use, we would use that.”
But there was nothing at the time, and so that’s how the NEAR blockchain started: to really solve our own problem. We launched in 2020. It’s one of the most used blockchains, and we’ve been expanding our stack more and more, going back to our roots with AI and really thinking about this in 2 ways.
I think AI will be the interface. This is how you’re going to communicate with computers. I think the operating system will be completely replaced by an AI-driven operating system, and then the back end will be the blockchain. Blockchain is the multiplayer coordination system: payments, identity, trust—all of that is happening on the blockchain.
Those are the 2 pieces, and we’re building the whole stack. That’s everything from confidential, private AI that’s on your side. We call it user only AI. I caught the last 15 minutes of you guys talking about how we actually bring AI to the user side, so it’s on your side and actually enabling you to be more economically successful, learn faster, and be more—
Optimal humans. Be the best person you can be.
Exactly. The more optimal—
It helps us a lot. We produce a huge piece of this show with AI. We’ve adopted this technology, and we try to spend several hours a day learning it and building inside of it. It’s obviously super useful. It’s the most important thing that’s ever been created, and I feel like we preach a lot on the show that if you have nothing going for you in life, honestly, it’s never been a better time to have time than in 2026.
I think you’re in a good spot if you just hard-pivot to learning this technology and building anything in this technology. You’re likely in a good spot.
I know you’ve talked a little bit about how NEAR has a very important piece in the confidential transaction and privacy piece with AI. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys work with Venice and what the partnership is there? Then, more generally, do you see the NEAR blockchain as middleware for other applications to use, and kind of not be behind the scenes—not as much in the forefront?
Yeah, good questions. With Venice, we work on 2 different dimensions. On one side, Venice has options. They have the ability to use frontier models, where they effectively serve as a VPN. You can use open-weight models like GLM-5.2, and you can select a fully end-to-end encrypted, fully private option, which is powered by NEAR AI.
That is an option where Venice, us, GPU providers—nobody sees your data. There’s no way to access it. It’s encrypted by you, decrypted inside the hardware in a secure enclave, and then responded back to you. That’s one piece: really providing this truly private AI.
Then, on our transactional layer, on our Intents layer, we support VVV. You can actually buy VVV privately. What this means is you can buy VVV privately and spend it on your private inference through the Venice app. You have a full cycle of privacy.
That’s the general idea. We want to offer the full stack. We have partners across every piece of the stack using us in different ways, and then we have our own products.
We have near.com, which is our own first-party app. It offers you one place to store, trade, and pay with 150 assets across 35 chains, all in one place. You don’t need to think about gas, chains, or bridges. You have everything confidential. We just launched Hyperliquid there, and we’re going to launch more support for other financial applications and agentic applications, all directly through near.com.
The way we think of it is that we’re building an open platform. Anybody can tap in and build. Internally, NEAR itself is not a single company. It’s actually a lot of different organizations working together to build this vertical stack, and there are a lot of partners using it in different ways. We’re pulling it all into this vision that we believe in: AI on the front end, blockchain on the back end.
That’s helpful. That makes sense. For outreach, I know that L1s in crypto typically seem separate from a lot of the traditional applications in tech and finance. How do you think about bridging that gap between the people in crypto, the coins in crypto communicating with each other, and applications that may not be in crypto now?
How do you pitch them on why they should be using NEAR, and why they should be using blockchain for their AI use cases?
Yeah, it really depends. When you do that, I think crypto has done a really bad job historically. It was like, “Let’s just bazooka some money at people, and they will use blockchain.”
How we’re approaching it is very much use-case-based. From an AI perspective, if you talk to anyone who’s doing medical, legal, or even finance to some extent—and especially outside of the US—they have massive concerns with data privacy. In Europe, it’s very much regulation-driven. In some other countries, it’s very much distrust of some of the institutions in the US.
They need private solutions. They need the ability to have something that’s not going to get blocked and disabled by whatever whim of some company. For them, it’s very much a, “We want to use AI, and we want it to be private and accessible at all times” situation.
On a more financial side, when we’re talking about Intents, the crypto side is pretty clear. There’s a lot of institutional interest now coming to crypto, and there are more assets coming on-chain. That part is pretty straightforward.
The interesting new avenue is plugging into foreign exchange rates. Now you have stablecoins here and stablecoins there—how do you actually connect all that? There’s no liquidity on-chain for any of those stablecoins. You want to go from, say, Mexican pesos to Brazilian reals, but there’s no liquidity for that pair. How do you get there? NEAR Intents can provide this very effectively.
Now both of these pieces are actually coming together in what we call an agentic marketplace. This is where you have agents who can find other agents to do different jobs. For this to work, you need privacy, verifiability, and liquidity across borders.
You need all those pieces that we have. Now you can have everything from ordering some digital work to be done to ordering some goods. We have a few examples where background checks on suppliers for Shopify vendors are done by an agent that scans social media and legal filings for the company involved.
It’s all done effectively by an agent inside this confidential environment that we built. It gets paid—the money sits in escrow on-chain and is released when the work is done. That’s really how all of these pieces come together, and I think that’s how commerce is actually going to innovate, where effectively everyone will be represented by an AI agent and participate in this marketplace.
Again, returning to your earlier conversation, I think that’s actually how all of us can up-level. We can effectively train our own agent to represent us, give it more data, give it more—
That—I love up-leveling. When I first started, my whole stack—whatever—currently, I’m still using OpenClaw. It’s working for me. It helps me produce the show, and it helps me with my day-to-day.
My first initial relationship with this was because I’m a public figure, so there’s a lot of open information about me. I asked it to scrape the internet and form some sort of opinion and profile on me, then ask me questions that it might need. I told it that it was talking to FaZe Banks. I’m actually FaZe Banks. This is who I am.
I wanted it to understand me as well as it possibly could. I wanted it to help me find blind spots in my own personal life and help me reach my goals. My goals are X, Y, and Z. We went back and forth for 4 days, and it built this whole M.O. profile on me. Now it knows me—I feel like—better than anyone.
I write in a journal physically every single day. I took pictures of every single one of my personal journal entries—personal stuff—and it really does have such an intensely wide view of who you are. It picks up on little things that you might miss because it just has a full view.
I don’t know. I think it’s the most important thing. I don’t understand why people are resistant to it. It’s always been really interesting to me.
Illia
This is a good example of how Anthropic’s database effectively has everything about you. It can simulate you.
So, yes.
That’s a great example of something you probably shouldn’t be sending—
Yeah, I know. I know.
—to a centralized company.
He’s like, “Bro, use NEAR instead. What are you doing?” That’s funny. Could you tell us a little bit about why NEAR specifically is a better L1 than other L1s for AI and for agents? I know that may not be apparent to people at the forefront.
Illia
Yeah, there are a lot of aspects to this, some of which are—again, L1 is just a piece, a component of the stack we’re building. When you talk about the whole stack, we’re very unique because nobody else has all of these components in one place, and they work together. They’re unified by the same APIs.
The blockchain itself—the core blockchain—is designed to scale. That’s the main thing. It’s not just a fixed-capacity, single-machine blockchain, which is what Ethereum, Solana, and others currently are. It’s able to increase capacity. It’s so-called sharding.
This is the same as your Googles and your Facebooks. None of them say, “Hey, sorry, guys, you cannot register right now because we’re out of capacity.” No, it just increases. It adds more computers and more storage. NEAR is built with that idea.
That means there is no limit on how many agents can transact or how many users can be there. We continue innovating on how that scalability is manifested.
The second piece we’ve built is called Chain Signatures. This allows the blockchain itself to sign transactions, encrypt and decrypt data, effectively from smart contract behavior. This means your NEAR smart contract or account can hold Bitcoin, SOL, Ethereum, USDC, and USDT on other chains. It can encrypt and decrypt private data on your behalf.
All of this is effectively done by the blockchain, facilitating these capabilities. In that way, it becomes a root of trust for all of the other things we’re doing. If you’re doing private AI, you need an encryption and decryption mechanism that doesn’t belong to a single company or a single entity. The blockchain facilitates this, and your NEAR account is effectively the key to it.
Every layer of the stack is enabling this. The next layer is our confidential, verifiable cloud. We have CPU and GPU compute, so we can run AI inference, and we can also run agents directly in confidential computing.
We have the service for Intents. The really cool experience about Intents is that you can send money to an address on Solana and receive Bitcoin. You don’t need to touch NEAR. You can just do this.
The way it’s done is that NEAR can hold assets on Solana, and when it detects that, it effectively releases Bitcoin. That’s one of the experiences you can have with Intents. There’s effectively an agent monitoring Solana, and when it sees something happen, it can send a transaction to release the funds.
All of these pieces stack together and work together in a coherent experience. As we add more capabilities—for example, IronClaw, which is our secure harness focused on privacy and security—you can run it yourself. Instead of OpenClaw, you can trust it with your data, and it can use NEAR AI inference.
This is also how agents on the agent marketplace are structured, so that when you’re hiring an agent, you can trust that it’s not going to steal your data or leak your information.
That’s where NEAR is coming from. It’s not just about the blockchain—the low-level thing that actually organizes transactions. It’s really about the whole stack that offers this cohesive experience in this blockchain-AI world.
That’s really helpful to understand. I don’t think people are aware that you guys are this many different things all working together, instead of just being an L1. That’s helpful context.
I know you spoke a little bit about being a co-author of the paper “Attention Is All You Need,” and I know you have a ton of great relationships with other founders in AI and the tech space. I know you have a friendship with Jensen from NVIDIA.
How do you see it? What would you say the general consensus or opinion is among people at these large tech companies about crypto and how crypto could work more closely with them? I guess, what’s your relationship with them?
Illia
Yeah, it’s hard. Different people have different opinions and perspectives on this. Generally, AI researchers are mostly focused on AI research, and they don’t get distracted by other things.
Mhm.
That’s why I call it— a lot of AI is actually very single-player. Everybody kind of builds a thing—an agent or a model—and it’s targeted to be used by a singular person.
Even if you think inside a company, inside an organization, there actually hasn't been as much organizational-level intelligence and systems. It's all still from the perspective of a single person.
I think there are obviously a few people—Sam Altman obviously has Worldcoin, and a few others—who see the blockchain as a capability for doing things. But I think right now AI itself is moving really quickly, so people are focused there.
We're trying to inform people and bring them together. We had a conference in San Francisco, our NEARCON, and we brought a lot of AI people in to really have this discussion and have some collaborations come out of it.
Yep.
AI people were maybe exposed for the first time not just to whatever the crypto media or news was covering. A lot of them have invested in crypto, right? That's been their experience so far, which, obviously depending on when they came in, they lost money.
I've definitely met some people who came in at the highs multiple times. But, yeah, I think showing them, “Hey, here's a technology, here are the capabilities, and here's what's possible,” has been really useful. We're working with a few different teams to continue expanding that.
Awesome. Awesome. I know NEAR Intents has started to do really well recently. I think people aren't aware of how much volume and how much it's driving as a product. Can you talk a little bit about how NEAR Intents is doing and how that ties back to all the different pieces of NEAR? And then, as a follow-up, what are you most excited about with NEAR this year?
Illia
For sure. NEAR Intents, as I mentioned, is intended to create this universal liquidity layer.
Yep.
Blockchains are part of this, and we're actually adding real-world assets, fiat, and other things to it. On the blockchain side, we've connected over 35 blockchains. We just added Movement today, within the last 24 hours, and we're adding a ton more assets to it.
The idea is that anyone can come in and say, “Hey, I want this asset.” It doesn't matter where you're from or which asset you have. You don't need to think about gas or bridging. You just specify the destination, amount, and asset, and it gets delivered to you, right?
That consistency and universality of the API is extremely powerful. It's enabled in Ledger, Trust Wallet, and MetaMask. There are some aggregators, and it's enabled in a number of other places where you may not even know you're using it. We have 500,000 users a month—
Wow.
—who probably don't know they're using Intents for the most part.
Wow.
Of the Ethereum volume, 20% is actually Ethereum to Ethereum, so it's not exactly cross-chain. We're providing a better price for ETH to USDC on Ethereum because our solvers are quoting tighter spreads and can move in bigger volume than on-chain smart contracts can.
Someone in the chat asked, “How are you going to get more people to adopt Nightshade?”
Illia
Adopt Nightshade?
Yeah.
Nightshade is the sharding algorithm, so it's under the hood, just producing blocks every 600 milliseconds. From an adoption perspective, the focus right now is to continue bringing more partners and order flow to Intents itself. Intents are using Nightshade.
Yeah, yeah.
Illia
One of the things we launched earlier this year is Confidential Intents. My thesis for a long time has been that confidentiality is a freedom technology, honestly. It removes the need to be mentally overwhelmed. I don't know about you guys, but I do a lot of stuff on-chain. I have 100-plus addresses and a spreadsheet to track which address I use for what, so that I don't accidentally send money from an address that I use for investments.
Right.
As soon as you move into confidential mode, where you can do transactions, payments, and trading, you remove all that. I don't need 100 addresses anymore. I have 1 address, and I can do all the transactions I need. Nobody sees where it came from. Even if I pay to somebody else's Ethereum or Solana address, they don't know where it came from. It just comes out as a payment.
I don't need to worry about any of this stuff. This is similar to AI: confidentiality enables you not to worry and just unleashes what you can do with this technology. I think it's really the mass-adoption enabler for crypto, because without this, how are you going to pay for things?
As we move toward agents, if agents are buying your groceries and your clothes, doing business transactions, and handling payroll, they need confidential payments as well. Intents serves as this building block for agents to do transactions and commerce and really become your representative on the internet.
I think people are completely unaware that you guys even have that, especially most retail users, I would say. At a high level, people think of Zcash as a private form of Bitcoin—private transactions. Would you say that what you guys are doing is similar, but for all chains and for all transactions across different chains?
We're offering the ability to have confidential balances in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Zcash, NEAR, USDC, USDT, and so on—over 150 assets, and we keep adding more.
It's technologically different. Zcash is the asset, and it's a self-sovereign asset. We're doing it in a very different way because we're offering confidentiality for the execution, for the VM itself. We can have confidential applications in it—lending and so on.
There are different trade-offs with that, but pragmatically speaking, we think this is what enables us to have a true financial system on-chain.
Mhm. Awesome. I know that with NEAR, you guys have the verifiability piece. Let me not get this wrong, but I believe every wallet that's created on NEAR has a username attached to it. Does that also apply to agents? Would agents have their own profile across multiple different chains, or is that how it works?
Illia
Every agent that has a NEAR account—which, if they're using Intents or something, they do—then has a username, and they have addresses on every other chain. They can effectively use NEAR as a control plane to either hold assets or transact.
A simple example would be an agent that rebalances your portfolio between different Aave and Morpho markets. We had that example in IronClaw, where you effectively allow your agent to move around some of your assets to keep the APY high between approved money markets.
Those agents can have a readable address. I think one of the teams is working on a marketplace for named agents that you can actually buy and sell as well, which could be cool.
Very cool. Very cool. I know you've heard a lot of the discussions around the bottlenecks we're seeing in AI, as far as how people are trying to make more efficient chips and get different resources. There's also been a lot of conversation around open-source AI versus closed-source AI.
As far as that conversation, do you think open-source AI is going to get more popular and become a lot more competitive with closed-source models? Do you think that's going to lead to more experimentation in crypto?
Illia
Historically, open-weight models have been lagging by 2 or 3 months. Honestly, if you think about 2 or 3 months ago, the technology was already really good.
You were discussing Gemini 2.5, which so far seems to be offering great benchmarks, and people are trying it. We just added it to NEAR AI Inference as well, so I've been testing it. It's 10 times cheaper, and it allows you to have it fully private and accessible to everyone.
I think there's a ton of demand that's going to shift, because I'm sure you've seen the news: companies are starting to cut down on their budgets for tokens and AI because they're spending so much on Claude. So I think we'll see more of that transition toward open-weight models.
At the same time, honestly, the whole shebang with Fable being banned, etc., I think, was great for crypto and decentralized AI.
It seems that way.
For sure. For sure.
Illia
Yeah, and so I think there are 2 things that are happening. One is every single country right now is effectively saying, “Hey, do we need our own AI lab? Otherwise, we’re going to get cut out,” right? Obviously, there are a lot of countries that will not be able to do that. There are a lot of resources needed, there’s talent, and there are a lot of pieces that need to come together even to be on a reasonable level.
All of them will effectively ask, “Okay, what is the alternative?” That means tapping into open-weight models and more decentralized systems. But open-weight models are open-weight for now. Claude was their frontier model. Claude 3.7, actually—at least the bigger model—wasn’t open-weight, right?
So we’re relying on these companies to continue publishing their models. The opportunity here is, “Okay, we do need an alternative that is also, importantly, transparent about what goes in.” I think one of the important pieces with neither OpenAI and Anthropic nor with Z.ai, Tencent, Alibaba, and those guys is that we don’t know what goes in. We don’t know what training data goes in, which means you have no idea what biases it has or where it’s going to come out.
If you use it for medical use cases, you have no idea what medical information it read. There are actual risks to using this. There’s an opportunity to have an open-source model built on decentralized principles where we know the full provenance, and then we can monetize and distribute it through private inference.
Wouldn’t that be nice for crypto, if the leading model is [__] decentralized and just built on-chain?
Bro, that’s legendary.
That’d be [__] special, right? That could maybe put us back into a bull run, right, Z?
Exactly. That’s what we were talking about earlier.
But listen, we have our next guest up and ready. We have somebody else coming in at 3:00 p.m.—Andrew Kang of Roa Strategy. We really appreciate you coming on and spitting game. You’re great, and your work is awesome. We’ve spoken about it a few times on the show. Is there anything else you’d like to say?
Illia
Just check out near.com. I think anyone in crypto should check out near.ai and drop some feature requests on Twitter. Thanks for having me.
Awesome. Thank you so much, bro.
Thanks, man. We appreciate it.
Take care. Bye.
Well, that’d be lit. That could really happen, right?
That’s what Pluralis is trying to do.
Ooh. Let’s write that ticker down.
Yeah, exactly.
We were going to have that founder on today, right? Maybe next week is what we’re going to do?
Yeah, he said he’s down. He’s going to come on, I think, next week or the week after.
Who do we have next?
Yo. The boy.
Wow, Andrew Kang, you’re looking [__] pretty busted today, brother. We can’t hear you. We can’t hear him. Oh, no. We can’t hear you, brother. But you look great. I don’t know if you can hear us. It looks like you can hear us.
The chat loves you.
Should we do the whole segment like this?
Bro, it would be like this with Andrew only.
We’ve never had anybody else who could talk.
It’s so scuffed, man.
And the dude who talks the most can’t talk.
Right?
Yes. Yes. Uh-huh, we’re live.
Yeah.
I got [__]. Where the [__] are you right now?
Dude, I’m in Miami. I’m life-maxing, bro.
You look like you’re in the backrooms, bro. I don’t know what’s going on.
Yeah, I think I’m trying to film more of my life because I feel like I live a cool life, and a lot of people on the internet think I’m just some kind of [__] [__]. They think I’m like some [__], or that I’m lame. So I’m just going to start vlogging. It’s my fault—I don’t show the cool things I do. I’m just going to do it now for a little bit. We’ll see how it goes.
Thanks for coming and saving our asses on the second guest spot, Andrew Kang. You’re literally doing your rounds, raising a bunch of money, and trying to single-handedly build rollups for the world. When’s the last time you gooned, brother? It looks like you’re in the literal goon cave right now.
Honestly—
Honestly, when’s the last time you jerked off?
Okay, this is a great thing for you to bring up. I jerk off way less than I used to because I started taking the hair pills. If you notice, my hair is so much thicker than it used to be.
Looks great.
Yeah, I don’t have the best hair ever, but it’s better than it used to be. The hair pills definitely lower your desire.
Look, you’ve been straight looksmaxxing. You can never change the nose, though. You have to promise me on the show right now. Give us the side profile real quick. Wow. That thing is something.
Listen, I saw you talk about Clavicular’s nose, and I feel like you might be wrong, bro. I feel like it’s going to look amazing.
You’re a freak. No, no, you’re a freak. It’s not a matter of whether it looks good or not. I’m not jerking off to fucking Clavicular clips. I know about you guys. I’m not attracted to men. I could give a fuck less about what Clavicular looks like or what you look like.
My take was that Clavicular and Kick, and his entire engine—his entire fucking program—have been designed to distribute his stream clips to billions and billions of people. You’re following me, right?
Yes.
To great success, by the way. I think he’s been the most successful streamer this year in terms of just being distributed. Everybody knows who he is. He’s this year’s frontrunner in terms of growth and the number of people who know who he is.
His brand is his face. All of these clips have one thing in common: what’s being promoted? His fucking face. And when you change your fucking face like that—
You’re changing the logo.
It’s the same reason people are averse to Nike slightly changing its logo, or Xbox, or whatever. We’ve seen this. Every single time—10 out of 10 times—people rally against it, people hate it.
He just switched up his brand and his logo, and I think for that reason it’s minus EV. I think people know Clavicular to look a certain way. Your nose frames your entire face. Your nose is so important to what you look like. I don’t have the best nose in the whole fucking world, but I would never change my nose.
I agree with you. I think my nose is—
Iconic, guys. You think my nose is important? Okay. How weird would it be if you just got a fucking little Michael Jackson nose job? It’d be so—
I’d be terrified. I’d look like a ghost. It’d be scary.
So don’t let the looksmaxxing shit go too far. You look great, obviously. We used to hang out every fucking day in LA, and I see pictures of you now. You look way less chiseled.
I look shredded now, bro.
Yeah, you look good. You’re on a good program, but don’t let it get so extreme. Don’t let your brain get deformed to that degree. You don’t need to do all that.
Yeah, it’s just addicting, bro. It’s so addicting to look better than you used to look. Then I’ll watch a movie and see Brad Pitt, and I’m like, “Damn, do I need some filler?” I don’t know. I’m trying to ask ChatGPT what I should do next because I feel like I did all the big stuff. I haven’t done anything crazy.
That’s insane. Did you hear yourself say that?
It’s real, though.
Look at what the zoomers are talking about now.
I know. It’s so fucked up, bro. It’s so fucked up.
I used this last week as an example, but Owen Wilson has this iconic, fucked-up, crazy nose. Owen Wilson from Zoolander is one of the most recognizable faces in Hollywood. That’s his entire brand. He has this fucked-up, crooked-ass, crazy nose. It looks like his fucking nose has been broken 16 times.
Obviously, he could change it. He has all the means necessary to go and change that about himself, but he hasn’t, and it’s been for good reason. These slight imperfections add a lot of character to people.
You see some of the biggest models in the world, like Winnie Harlow, for example. She has—what’s that technically called?
Vitiligo.
Yeah, where she’s built a whole brand off that. She would never change it. I’m sure she struggled with it at some point, especially when she was younger, but she broke through, and it kind of came full circle. Now it’s a huge part of her.
I mean, gaps in your teeth, little moles, things like that. If everybody just looked like—what is it called?—the golden ratio, perfect proportion, whatever, I don’t know. It’s weird.
That’s true. Also, looking iconic, your tattoos are such a big reason for how famous or well-known you are.
Just recognizability, right? It’s funny. Honestly, I cringed at the clip, but you said something along the lines of, “I walked behind Chris Rock in New York, and a couple people noticed him. A couple people stopped him.” Then we walk around in fucking Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and stuff, and you said, “Vin and Chase, one time—Entourage.” Like, dude, this is literally Entourage. How the fuck do you know?
It’s a combination of the fact that I’ve lived in L.A. for 10 years and personally know a lot of these people. But, yes, I’m also fucking 6'5". I look like a fucking bathroom stall. I have a very unique face shape and these other things. I’m fucking loud, animated, whatever. I’m always wearing the exact same outfit, on some SpongeBob SquarePants shit.
These aren’t things that I do intentionally, but I’ve noticed a correlation between being branded a specific way, standing out, and people’s ability to identify and recognize you. I don’t know.
Half the time they think you’re MGK, to be fair.
That’s literally never happened.
It’s like—
Okay, that’s literally never, ever happened. But, yeah, somebody said, “Don’t forget the chrome.” It’s so insane.
That’s funny. Bro, Raz, how’s the trading been? I’ve seen you’ve been crushing it. How’s that been?
Rasmer
Yeah, bro. I used to not really aura-farm P&Ls, or post P&Ls, and I used to not post my trades as much. But I think it’s important not to get caught up in feeling small, because we see so many massive P&Ls all the time.
I’m so used to seeing, “This guy made $10 million. Lora Curls is down $80 million. This person’s up $5 million. This person made a million on Asteroid.” I’m just like, you know, me making $15,000 on a trade—I’m not supposed to feel like I can be happy enough about it to post it or make people feel better?
I think it’s important because a lot of people’s entire portfolios are smaller than $15,000. If I feel small, that’s just stupid. I think it’s a good message to show people that you don’t need to make 8 figures. A lot of people’s lives would change with 6 figures.
That’s kind of why I’m posting them, even though it’s like, “Oh, you posted a $380,000 year.”
I think we’re losing service, Razmer. It’s fuzzy. We can’t hear you again. Production?
We appreciate you, bro.
Yeah, no, I made that up. Kang’s ready, so we’re actually going to do the Kang interview, which is great. See you later, Raz. Thanks for saving the day for 15 minutes. You really came in clutch there.
We love you.
Yeah, I do love you, Raz. All jokes aside.
And he, by the way—
He’s been crushing it.
It makes people really mad, but he’s been killing it.
Literally.
People aren’t ready for the conversation that Arthur and Razmer are some of the best traders on CT. They’re not ready to have that conversation. If you even say that right now, I’m going to get fucking fried for that.
Though, they’ve been cooking. They’ve been cooking.
You don’t have to trust me, but you heard the man.
That’s true.
You heard the oracle that is fucking Ansem.
We have Kang, so production, bring him in whenever you guys are ready.
Yo.
Andrew, how are you, brother?
Can you hear us?
Yes. Yeah, I’m doing great. How are you guys?
5. Guest: Andrew Kang (robots)
Amazing. Better than ever. We’re in the middle of an episode on this fine Thursday. We’ve been excited to have this conversation with you for some time. We’re both hyper-pilled on robots. We love Kevin in turn. We saw that move with him being brought up as the CMO, and we’re really excited to talk to you.
Obviously, we have roots in crypto and have been invested in it for years. We figured this would be a really cool conversation. We know you’re a really busy guy, and we appreciate you for coming on. Thank you.
Happy to talk about whatever you guys want. We’ve got time. Let’s do it.
Okay, cool. Where do we start?
I know that a lot of people know you from crypto and Crypto Twitter. Do you think that some of the same abilities that enabled you to see crypto as a great place to be spending your time, and as a place to find outsized opportunity, have enabled you to do the same thing with AI and robotics? How do you think about them similarly?
It seems like when you’re passionate and confident about something, you go all in on that thing. I’m curious how you come to those conclusions.
Yeah, there’s definitely a lot of overlap in terms of investing. You’ve seen this with a lot of crypto traders, right? People are moving to equities, and they’re having a lot of success there. They’re using a lot of the same skill sets.
For people who are trading, they’re looking for narratives. They’re doing some fundamental analysis. Some of them are looking at charts and the technical analysis that works for crypto. Some of it also works for equities.
For me, I’m not really trading, but there are definitely a lot of what you would consider tools in the toolkit, or mental frameworks, that you’d also use for investing in robotics or venture investing in general.
I think the biggest one is just finding truth, right? Understanding some of these spaces takes a lot of work. It’s really difficult, and I think a lot of people might be a little too comfortable with not knowing everything.
For me, it’s always been, “I really need to deeply understand something if I’m going to be investing in it.” It’s this relentless pursuit of, “What am I missing? How do I understand robot foundation models? How do I understand how this supply chain is going to react in certain demand scenarios?”
It’s a very high-level thing, but it also applied to crypto. You want to understand, for crypto, how the market is going to react if the Fed does XYZ. For these DeFi projects, how do they interact with other DeFi projects? Who do we think is going to be buying here, and what value does this protocol have? How would you measure that over time, and how is that going to change?
It’s a lot of the same fundamental frameworks that you would use, just applied to a different topic.
That’s very interesting. That makes a ton of sense.
I know you originally came from being a solo operator, then you had your own venture firm, and now you have your own venture firm with Robo Strategy. Have you seen that it’s different operating solo versus leading a team? How do you think about delegating different responsibilities and scaling?
Once you do really well and become very successful, how do you think about scaling after you’ve done well on your own personally?
Some people may not know this, but Mechanism Capital was 5 or 6 people from 2020 to maybe 2024. After growing my portfolio a little bit, we brought on 4 or 5 other people, and they were helping with investment decisions, operations, and trying to understand the market.
Some of those guys are really great, and they’re still with us today: Marc Weinstein, Shayan, and Roland. They all moved over to Robo Strategy.
We are definitely scaling in a different way now. Before, it was always a very small team, and we had a limited scope, which was crypto. It was never a platform in the way that you would think about Sequoia or Thrive Capital as a platform.
Mhm.
They have all these different functions. It’s not just people making investment decisions; they have people supporting the portfolio companies. Someone’s sole job may be dedicated to research. Maybe they have institutional sales as well—IR.
For Robo Strategy, this is also what people don’t realize: it isn’t just a single holdings vehicle for venture assets.
That’s what some of these public venture firms are like.
Right.
Maybe Robinhood Ventures or BX. I wouldn’t call them purely holdings vehicles because they do some directed investments as well, but it’s not in the same way as a very actively managed venture fund that’s leading deals, has a track record for making great investments, and is really operating at the top percentiles of trying to generate investment returns—not just investing in an index of the hot or top companies right now.
There’s a lot of discretion and due diligence and selection that’s unique to our fund. I want to talk a little bit about the platform because that’s pretty important. We have an investment team of people who were previously at Mechanism, but we’ve also hired a lot of former robotics operators. One of them, Scott, has had 40 years of experience in the field. He founded and sold 2 robotics companies.
I can try to get as smart about robotics as I can, and I can do a decent job, but it doesn’t replace somebody who’s actually built a business. They know all the things that make a robotics business successful and all the things that might make it fail.
Right.
They have that network to be able to diligence these companies and say, “Hey, look, person XYZ who’s head of engineering or head of AI—maybe they have a good pedigree, but maybe they can’t get stuff done.” They know the supply chain partners that can be helpful to portfolio companies, or we can validate, “Hey, look, is this company actually making 10,000 orders for so-and-so parts because they said they’re going to make 10,000 robots this year?”
Right.
Yeah, there’s a lot to it. On the policy side as well, we just recently hired Bill Hughes. He was previously leading policy at ConsenSys. He was in D.C. for, I think, 1 or 2 decades, involved in a lot of blockchain regulation and making sure that was done right.
We’re going to be involved in the same way for robotics policy, trying to give our best input to make sure that America has a good national robotics strategy. We’re going to bring some of our portfolio companies to the table to share their insights with different lawmakers and government agencies, to make sure they’re getting good support and that the laws are being formed in a way that supports these companies as well. That helps them thrive. That’s really important.
Yeah, when you talk about what’s different, we’re building a real platform institution. It’s not 5 or 6 guys. I think we’re somewhere between 10 and 15 right now, with a few offers out, and we’re probably going to look to scale to maybe 20 to 30 in the near term.
I want to dial it back a little bit. We talk about how difficult it is to get any sort of exposure in leading AI companies, for example, for retail, for viewers, for people watching. We definitely see the vision. We’ve been fully pilled on robotics, and we would love to align with that technology and the success of what we imagine that technology to look like.
For normal people who are interested in exposure to robotics, what can they buy today? What does the average retail guy who fully believes in this vision and the effort that you guys are on at Robo Strategy buy? What can they buy? What do they buy?
That’s kind of the reason why we brought Robo Strategy to public markets: We had all these people DMing us and replying to our tweets about humanoid robotics and asking, “Hey, look, how do I get exposure to this space? What companies should I buy?”
The truth is, you have Tesla, which I think is a good choice to have in the portfolio. I think they’re going to really commercialize Optimus and make that a success, but it’s also a $1 trillion- or $2 trillion-dollar company. They have a lot of other stuff in the business as well, so it’s not a pure play.
Then you have some more of what I consider last-gen robotics companies, which some of them are potentially good, but all the really exciting stuff is happening in the private markets. Companies have been founded within the last few years or maybe up to 10 years, and they’re not going public anytime soon because there’s so much funding available in the private markets now.
You have VCs, and VCs are getting bigger. Hedge funds are crossing over. Private equity is crossing over to VC. Now you have corporates and sovereign wealth funds doing these later rounds for Anthropic and SpaceX, et cetera. Now these companies don’t go public until they’re $2 trillion, like with SpaceX. That’s one of the issues.
Obviously, we’re doing Robo Strategy to create an option for people and, more importantly, for us to be able to scale a mega-fund. But I think there are also going to be more publicly traded venture funds out there if we can prove this model out and scale to, say, tens of billions of dollars. I think there are going to be people who try to replicate that.
I’m competitive, so I want to make sure that we’re the best option out there, and it’s going to be hard for people to compete. There are a lot of things you need to make this successful. You need really great distribution and marketing to be able to scale. You need access to the deals. You need to be able to make these decisions, because everything’s based on risk-reward when we’re evaluating investments, and one person’s evaluation of risk-reward can be a hundred times different—like a hundred off—from the next person’s.
Yeah, we’re just constantly trying to sharpen our ability to get those assessments right.
I think hardcore tech, like robotics, for example, a lot of these companies and efforts are way under-marketed. We were just talking about distribution. Obviously, you guys just hired Kevin and brought him on as the CMO. I talked to him for an hour about your company post-show. We had him on as a guest last week, and I’m obsessed with media, content, and marketing. That’s where my brain is; that’s what my whole career has been filled with.
For robotics and a show like the one we’re producing here, I get very excited about the idea of potentially developing a third co-host that’s an off-screen AI brain that pulls resources in real time, helps with the integrity of the show, and eventually demonstrates and performs that in the shape of a robot. When can you deliver us a fucking physical robot to put next to me on this show? That’s what I want to see, and I think that’s what really speaks to retail.
It’s one thing to hear you speak on it, and I am way closer to a normal guy than where you guys are in terms of understanding tech and finance. I lean on Z, and he handles that part of the show. But for me, if I saw a fucking robot bodyguard next to you right now, I’m all ears. My eyes are wide open, and I’m like, “How the fuck do I invest in that?”
When you watch videos on Twitter of a robot doing chores and fucking washing dishes and folding laundry, you’re like, “Okay, that’s cool. Where do I buy one of these things? How do I invest in the future of that?” I see it. I want to speak a little bit about that, because obviously you guys are making that move with intent, and you just expressed how important that is. Where’s your head with that?
Yeah.
What’s the plan for that?
That’s the fun part of the business. Robots are so much more marketable and tangible than anything else that you would try to market. Look at all these DATs that came out. How much longer can you keep speaking about the same story about Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever shitcoins are out there?
[Laughter]
Here, there’s always fresh content. There’s maybe a new round for one of these companies. Maybe they did a big partnership with some other big enterprise. Or you just see the robots cooking, cleaning, doing work in a factory, or doing backflips.
We made 1 investment in this company called RFL. They’re basically trying to create the UFC/F1 of robotics. That’s so much fun. You can have these robots fight in the same way they did in gladiator battles, and that was the biggest entertainment at that time. We can’t have gladiator battles anymore because you can’t have humans killing each other for fun.
That one show? It was like BattleBots. That show was epic. It was on Spike TV or whatever. It was one of those channels. That’s awesome.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, look, we’re talking to our portfolio companies, and some of them are really great at marketing, like Figure. Some of them are just stronger on the technical, commercial, and product-development side of things.
And you know, we're happy to help them with marketing. That's kind of the part of what we do because it's important for us to get our name out there and create mind share, and we want to extend that to all companies. We can maybe work with them on some ideas: have your robot play ping-pong with another human, or do archery.
Take the example of them fighting: Dana White starting some sort of competitive robot-fighting league where these robots are [__] built with the latest and greatest tech. They're worth [__], you know, $10 million, and they're fighting. There are real stakes on the line, and people are [__] excited. Obviously, people are trading markets on the competition aspect of it.
I don't know. It's [__] cool. It's all really, really cool. Get us a robot, man. Get us a robot.
It's happening. We want a whole army. Not an army—maybe that's the wrong word—but a whole lot of robots.
That's [__] sick.
We're not investing much in defense, by the way. We haven't really made that decision yet, but it's in the works, for sure. I mean, you guys are probably seeing influencer robots that are kind of popping up.
Yeah.
Yeah, but it's always—for me, I've worked with the biggest talent in media over the last 15 years. We've fought for share in a market against the best: the MrBeasts, the Logan Pauls, all the names you're familiar with, Kai Cenat, the more mainstream guys.
There's always been such a huge separation and barrier between what's happening and crypto, for example. Crypto has such a negative connotation in general mainstream culture, especially streamer culture. Crypto equals scam for a lot of these people.
And I just see that side of things neglect tech like this. Obviously, mainstream creatives and just the general sentiment around AI is bad—negative, “fuck AI,” right?—as far as American culture goes. I don't think people are even allowing themselves to go to the robot thing. Anytime that conversation comes up, it's I, Robot: these things are going to [__] kill us, you know? It's all just generally negative.
I think a product that's demonstrated very well markets itself, creates good content for these people, or helps them automate their process. Something that lives with a Stable Ronaldo or a Kai Cenat, that automatically clips their streams and helps produce their streams—it generally adds to their [__]. They'll naturally, of course, because what they're interested in is retaining an audience, engaging, and entertaining. If you create some sort of product for them, they'll go do the work for you, right? They'll go market that to billions of people every day, right? The same way I'm marketing this mic and these headphones, et cetera. I don't know. It's interesting.
Yeah, there's definitely a lot of use cases, and you're going to see a lot more influencer robots—robots helping people out. I mean, I think Optimus did that, right? Didn't they do a campaign with Kim Kardashian or something like that? Look at a lot of our portfolio companies. They're going to want to do marketing.
Yeah.
One of our ideas is, like, “Hey, get these in front of these influencers. Give them some for free, maybe.”
Right. Absolutely. Absolutely. Make a [__] Kai Cenat robot and [__] put her on his doorstep the day of one of his subathons. If it's cool, it does its thing, and it creates good content, he'll bring it in. He'll promote it the entire time, you know? It'll go [__] mega-viral, too.
Kai talking to the robot version of himself, who's more Kai Cenat than Kai Cenat, you know? That's what I get excited about.
Yeah, and I know you're super excited about robotics as an industry and how much it's going to grow over the next few years. Can you talk a little bit about what you think the risks are to that not happening, and what would make it difficult for RoboStrategy to do really well?
I think the risk is not that it's not going to happen. We're just in vertical-takeoff mode in terms of AI development and acceleration. It's an unstoppable force, so we're going to solve physical intelligence.
I think it's more so that the uncertainties are around timing. But it's not like 1 year becomes 50 years. It's more like maybe 1 year becomes 2 years or 2 and a half years for these robots to get really good. That's fine, because the market can sustain that, I guess—looking into the future for an extra 1, 2, or 3 years.
You saw that happen with Tesla. They kept having delays on shipping their cars, and a lot of people tried to short Tesla because of that. They were like, “Hey, this company's going to miss our expectations,” and they all got wrecked. Don't try betting against these companies. Just look: if it takes longer, then just keep holding.
All right. You said 1 to 2 years. The second you—or anything you guys are invested in, or anybody you're partnered with—is able to deliver me an IShowSpeed robot that can do a backflip, I promise you I will get it to him. I will get it on stream, and we'll have it do a backflip competition with Speed.
I promise you it'll be the most viral thing that a robot's done. It sounds silly, but this is just the world that I come from, and that's just how it goes. Let me be a part of that. Let me help you guys get that out there.
Do some brainstorming, and we can work on some ideas, too.
I'll hit Kevin with 1,000 ideas by end of day. I got you.
I don't know if you saw, but there was this one video from China from a company called Galbot, and I think they collaborated with Tsinghua University, where the robot was playing tennis with a human.
Yeah, that's crazy.
Yeah, robot sports is coming.
Yeah, that's actually really good. What does your overall most successful outcome 10 years from now look like? What would you say? What do you want RoboStrategy to look like in the future?
I think what's really exciting is that we can pretty much create this new venture capital model that hasn't existed before, which is public venture capital. It's always been private.
Yeah.
I think proving that out is pretty cool. It's kind of like when ETFs were a new thing in the '90s and 2000s. People were really skeptical of them because everyone was in mutual funds, and they were like, “We want an actively managed product. Why would I want something that's so passive?”
Even though we're actively managed, there was still skepticism around these new public products. Over time, people start to understand, “Okay, these things work. There's a lot of value in them.” Then it just becomes this whole category. It'd be cool to be a pioneer of that. That'd be really exciting.
I also want to win, right? Outside of just innovation, I want to be able to create one of the biggest venture capital robotics funds in the world. Not just one of them—number 1. That'd be great.
Masa from SoftBank did a similar model. SoftBank is not regulated as a closed-end fund. I think it's regulated more as an operating company, but in essence, their business is just investments. He's done a great job at it. It's been pretty volatile over the years, but he keeps hitting winners.
His AI and OpenAI bets right now are definitely kind of risky, but at the same time, he's proven this out. SoftBank has gone 100x since it IPO'd. I'd love to challenge him a little bit.
How much does SoftBank have under management, do you know, right now? I don't know, generally.
I checked last year, and they were a $200 billion-plus company. It's probably grown more since then, right? OpenAI is a big part of the portfolio, along with ARM, and those companies have gone up.
What does the total robotics market look like, in terms of—
I think it depends on how you define it, but if we're just looking at, say, this new wave of private robotics companies, it's like $150 billion.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Tiny.
Yeah, tiny.
No, it's insane.
Reminds me of ICOs in 2014 and 2015.
Yeah, that's it. It feels the exact same way.
You did pretty well there, brother. So, yeah, I mean—
So, in plain English, what does RoboStrategy own exactly? And what are you most excited about?
It's what we think are going to be the leading, best humanoid and non-humanoid robotics companies of the future. You saw what happened with OpenAI and Anthropic, right? There are these huge power laws occurring now with some of these AI companies. That's going to happen with robotics and physical AI. I think it's going to be a little bit more distributed.
I don't think it's going to be like just 2 players take all, which is why we're making more bets.
Yeah.
But I think it looks something like the automobile industry, where maybe you have a dozen or a few dozen meaningful players. Some players, like Tesla, are definitely bigger than others. I think the same thing goes for Figure AI. I think it's going to be one of the bigger ones out there. It's just going to change the world, and we want to be early to these companies and give them the financing they need. We want to have a lot of fun doing it.
If right now a Figure robot fought a Tesla robot, who's winning? What's the Polymarket? What does that market look like?
Well, it depends. I mean—
Should we set that up? Can we please set that up? Andrew, you could set that up.
It'll happen. Give it a year or 2 years, I think. They're not selling them right now, but give it 1 or 2 years.
There's something so poetic and cool in my mind about a visual representation of nerdy tech guys standing behind this big, brawl-like, sicko fucking robot that spits flames, across from SBF and Erik. We had Erik Voorhees on last week, and he had this really iconic debate with SBF. Just imagine Erik Voorhees's robot versus SBF's robot. Imagine what that would look like. It would just be—I don't know. So cool. How do you customize your robot?
I don't know, man. I don't know. I feel like mine would be—I really don't know. That's a great question, man.
I don't know, Z. Do you have an off-the-cuff answer for that?
For how? I don't want a robot in my house, bro. I don't want a robot in my—
Andrew, fuck all that. Sign me up, brother. Put the chip in my brain. I'm down. By the way, I'm down to be the first guy on Earth to fuck a robot. If that ever becomes a thing—robot girlfriends—if you guys need a guinea pig for that, I'm here. I know that's crazy, and I know that's out there, but it's inevitable, right?
I want the Neuralink chip, but not the actual robot.
That's insane.
I want to be the robot.
Yeah, man. That's going to happen, right? I guess they'll probably solve longevity so your body stays good for a while, but if you want to go to some other galaxy, it's going to take a while to get your body there. Maybe we just upload into a robot that's already on that planet or in that galaxy.
Bro, I read this book. I don't know if you guys have read it. It's called Accelerando. It's literally about that. The dude lives in the future, and it's this post-human environment that he lives in. Everybody just uploads their consciousness to these different things. In one of the parts of the book, he uploads his consciousness to a fucking cat, and he's a fucking cat that goes around talking to people and has this whole memory and everything.
Have you gone deep down that rabbit hole? What's your take on uploading your consciousness into the cloud and living forever?
I feel like we're not that far off, bro, to be honest. I'm down, though—fully down.
There's that amazing Netflix show, Pantheon. It goes all about it. After I watched it, we actually talked to this company that's basically working on uploaded intelligence. The way they do it right now is that you have to be dead, pretty much, or you have to be killed, because they have to slice your brain into super-thin slices so they can measure all the synaptic connections between your neurons. That's their theory for how you can upload your brain.
When you wake up, though, are you conscious as yourself?
You're dead.
So it's GG for you. But you're dead, and your consciousness is in a robot. I think that's what you're saying.
But you don't get to experience that anymore. The first version of you is dead. We're going to be dead.
Well, it kind of depends on how you define being alive. If your consciousness is alive while your body is dead—
That gives me so much anxiety, man. This is one of those ones, dude. It's not that far off. I really don't think it's that far off, to be honest.
Yeah, hopefully there are some better solutions out there. There are some other solutions where you don't have to die.
Die. Yeah.
Yeah, but that's interesting. It's super interesting.
Oh my God, what's that market worth? That's crazy, man. It's fucking insane.
The market for almost eternal life.
Yeah.
There's no number on that.
That's insane.
There's no Polymarket on that.
So, you said total robotics—for everything we've been talking about—$150 billion. What do you think that market's worth in 10 years?
They say tens of trillions. OpenAI and Anthropic—I don't think it's a question that the AI industry is going to be in the tens of trillions. You already have OpenAI plus Anthropic at $2 trillion. It's already tens of trillions. The physical labor market is something like $50 trillion. If the cost of labor drops, then it's going to expand, because we're just going to be able to afford to use robots for more things.
If it costs $50 an hour to hire a human to do something right now, and it costs $2 an hour in the future, you'd have all these personal assistants around you, influencers, and people doing jobs. I don't know what you'd have—
All kinds of random shit.
Yeah, you'd just have more of them because they're affordable.
Yeah. Yeah.
Wow. How do you spend your time? I know right now you're kind of in the early stages of forming RoboStrategy, and Andrew was saying that last week you also spent some time going to the actual companies' headquarters and spending time with the founders and all of that. How is most of your time spent day to day right now, and what are you most focused on right now?
It's different now because we went public a month ago. Over the last 2 years, I spent a lot of time reading research papers on robot learning, talking to founders, engineers, and researchers in the field, going to robot and AI conferences, and trying to get a good understanding of the industry and the space, because so much of it is fascinating and pretty complex.
Now we have some really great people on the team, and I have a lot of confidence that they're going to do a really great job making those investment decisions. Not so much the decisions, because I definitely have to make the final call right now, but doing the work and doing the right work. Now it's more about company building for me—doing a little bit of fundraising to increase our deployable capital, because we have a lot of amazing opportunities to invest in, and building the platform that I talked about earlier.
It's more firm-building type of stuff, which I thought I wouldn't like because I always thought about it as management. But it's almost strategy. I wouldn't consider it StarCraft or something like that, but it's definitely a lot of corporate-strategy-type thinking, and that's pretty fun.
Yeah, it's like building a superteam of the smartest people. That's what it is.
You probably watch these clips from podcasts about founders who talk about, “I wish I built my company this way,” or, “This really helped me build my company this way.” We talk to founders, and they say these things, and now you get to go through this experience yourself. It's different, and it's enjoyable. I think about having different experiences in life, so it's great.
Yeah, you kind of get to see firsthand how all the founders are doing things. That's great to see. Can you speak a little bit about RoboStrategy? I know RoboStrategy is designed in a way that it's a public vehicle that also makes investments, but the most relatable comp is MicroStrategy, which did a similar thing with Bitcoin. Can you talk about how and why you chose to do that kind of vehicle, how the assets that you own are related to the premium at which the equity trades, and how you guys think about that?
Yeah, it’s the only structure that works because, with an ETF, you have to be able to let people redeem and subscribe daily. We can’t do that with illiquid securities, and we want to hold on to them for a very, very long time as well. Some of these DATs use the operating company model, but that was more of a regulatory arbitrage thing because they were not considered securities. What we’re investing in are definitely securities, so we have to be under this kind of closed-end fund model.
Yeah.
And the reason the model works this way is because you can’t redeem and subscribe, right? The market price can trade above or below NAV. I think what a lot of people don’t understand is that there’s a lot of nuance in NAV. It’s not the same as, say, MicroStrategy’s NAV, because Bitcoin is marked to market pretty much—
Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. But these marks—you have to think about how the process works and how the framework works. Even if there’s a new round coming up in a month, and people know about it or it’s going on right now, and it could be a down round or an up round—most rounds are up rounds in venture capital—we have to wait until that round closes. Then we run our process for administration, audit, and valuation, and maybe a few weeks or a month later, it’s updated in the NAV. So there’s a little bit of a gap, or a little bit of a lag.
Sometimes we’re negotiating deals with founders, knowing that we’re going to be scaling in the future. We’ve been able to work out arrangements where they hold allocation for us, and we can invest later, because we weren’t public until now. Before that, we were relatively smaller funds, right? Like $150 million in NAV.
Yeah.
Some people call it embedded value in NAV, but that’s one of the difficulties of running a public fund: We’re not allowed to talk about all the stuff that’s going on privately.
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
The onus and right is with the portfolio companies that we invest in to announce when those next rounds happen.
Yeah.
The way I would think about it is that everyone thinks about the premium. First, I think you have to understand that NAV is not black and white. It’s subjective, and people could have different measurements of it. If it’s really, really high, then you have to think about premium compression. That’s a risk. The premium can go up or it can go down.
But then I think you have to think about the trade-off, and this is a positive trade-off: There can be accretive issuance, just like MicroStrategy did, where you’re able to turn the NAV premium into value for shareholders. They turned it into cash, which was then reinvested in more Bitcoin.
I think what people don’t understand about MicroStrategy is that they actually didn’t make any money off of their Bitcoin purchases. Their average Bitcoin acquisition cost is $75,000, so that had a negative impact on their NAV per share. All the $40–50 billion of value, or whatever it was, was basically the result of accretive issuance and premium harvesting—whatever you want to call it.
In private equity, this is not a new concept. They just call it multiple arbitrage. They have these public companies, and they buy private companies at, say, a 3x–8x earnings multiple. Then, in public, on their balance sheet, it’s suddenly worth 3x, 4x, or 5x more.
Right.
And you just run that in a loop.
Yeah.
It’s a little bit of a different model. Sometimes the trade-off you make—you take the risk of compression—can be, I’m not saying it will be, but it can be outweighed by the benefit of accretive issuance.
Yeah.
Gun to your head right now—sorry, go ahead.
It seemed to me that a lot of people focus on the premium, but it can be so outdated. If you do an investment in a company and it gets valued at some valuation, and then they don’t do another round for a long period of time, but they’re making a lot of progress at the company, there would be no real way for that to be updated in the quote-unquote NAV until the next round is done, right?
If that’s the case, you’re betting more on the team’s ability to invest smartly and deliver over the entire time that they’re doing their investments, rather than on the mark-to-market of what the investments are at any one singular point in time.
Yeah, I think that’s exactly the case. The market could put a premium on some investment managers versus other investment managers, even with a very similar asset base, just because they think one is going to do better than the other one. Or the other way around.
There’s a lot that’s not captured there, which is difficult, because we do want to be as transparent as possible about what the NAV is and be able to update it more accurately. But it’s kind of an artifact of how some of these laws and regulations have worked. Maybe they didn’t really anticipate a period of time where valuations could move so fast and the world could change so quickly.
I think there’s definitely a chance for that to change in the future, and hopefully we can give some input in terms of how that can best be changed.
Yeah, for sure. It definitely seems like the full picture isn’t entirely there most of the time.
Yeah.
I guess, on that note, back to the gun-to-your-head question: If you had to bet on a year when we can look outside and see robot police, robot personal assistants, robot maids, robot construction workers, and the world has changed in that way—when it’s just normal—what year do you think this is? How far out do you think we are from that being reality?
I think you’re going to get humanoids that are almost as good as a regular human in 2 years. I think you’re going to get to Claude Opus 4.8-level intelligence there.
I think there’s going to be a lag with hardware, though. We can’t spin up a million instances of robots instantaneously the way we can with AI chatbots. Manufacturing is going to take a while to scale. Not a long time, but it’s not going to happen in 2 years.
Maybe we’re making 100,000 robots, or maybe we’re making millions of robots in 2 years, but that’s not enough to fill the needs of the entire world. If we’re going to have billions of robots, that’s probably 2030-plus— the early 2030s. But it’s going to happen pretty soon.
Absolutely.
Wow, I wasn’t expecting that. I’m looking forward to it. I’m excited about it. Honestly, I’m desperate to align with this interest because I see it.
It brings me back to when me and Z were walking around Beverly Hills in December 2025—6 months ago. We were talking about how we could full-port our lives into Anthropic. I think they had just raised money at—what?—$100 billion or something like that. Was that what it was, or $150 billion? That was what they were valued at.
We weren’t able to do that because there was no proper way to do it. We didn’t have the ability to do that, but I just want exposure. I want to be able to align with this interest. I think we’re obviously much further out. I think that’s kind of why everybody’s rushing to [expletive] invest in AI and align with that interest.
Robots naturally come right after, and I think it’s a little bit more straightforward as well. I don’t know. It’s longer out; that’s just what my brain tells me. That’s why I’m so excited.
People were skeptical of Anthropic’s and OpenAI’s valuations 2 or 3 years ago. People were like, “That’s high. They’re not making that much revenue. You have to make all these assumptions about the future.”
Look at how it played out. It played out faster than a lot of people would have thought. I think people are going to take that as a learning experience and start being a little bit more aggressive about where they expect things to go in the future, pricing things in maybe a little bit more accurately, and understanding that the world is moving really fast.
Agreed. I like Apple as an AI bet just because of distribution. Everybody has an iPhone in their pocket. I think it would be as simple as them pinning a conversation with Siri to your iMessages, and that all of a sudden kind of wins over the average American, because that’s how they’re used to interacting and talking to somebody.
I think if Siri AI is even 20% as capable as Claude Opus 4.8, then that’s where retail goes. That’s where the average person goes, because I don’t think they can really tell the difference. I don’t think the average person really notices a difference between GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8.
Your grandma wants to know how to [expletive] make banana bread, and she wants to make a little Christmas card for her family and things like that.
That’s what the average person uses AI for.
Mhm. I think about who has that on the side of robotics. You mentioned Tesla earlier—what about Uber, things like that? Autonomous cars are kind of what I obviously think of, like Waymo, for example. How do you feel about companies like that? Who do you think is in a position to win in that regard? Hopefully I’m articulating this idea well enough, but what are your thoughts around all that?
I think a lot of companies are going to benefit from robotics, and maybe they’re not even companies that are building robots themselves or developing any AI themselves. I guess Apple, like you mentioned, right? They’re just distributing it, but it could impact their businesses in other ways.
For example, FedEx and Walmart have huge revenue. Some of their revenues are bigger than those of the biggest tech companies in the world, but their margins are so thin. I think Walmart makes something like $700 billion a year in revenue, and they make $20 billion in net income. They spend something like $100 billion on physical labor, so if they decrease their costs by 20% or 30%, they can multiply their business several times over.
The biggest winners might not even be robotics companies or tech companies. They could just be these brick-and-mortar companies. FedEx is the same thing, and they have moats as well. They have their distribution network and the contracts that they have. I think it’s going to be harder to displace them, and they’re just beneficiaries.
What’s Uber worth when they don’t have to share their revenue with drivers? Or when everybody who works at Walmart is a robot?
Yeah, it’ll change the dynamic a lot. I think the robot companies themselves are going to be businesses in different ways that maybe people wouldn’t expect.
One of my theses is that robots are kind of like iPhones. They’re a development platform. Say one of your fans wants to hang out with a robot version of Banks. You develop a Banks program, or a skill set or personality, for a robot, and then you start selling that as an app for other people who have bought robots.
I’m obsessed with this idea too. I think the natural human way to interact and connect is obviously voice to voice, face to face. When am I going to be able to talk to Claude? When is it going to be able to have a face? When is it going to be able to learn and understand what I’m most receptive to, and take shape based on what will be most effective in terms of our dynamic and what I’m asking it to do?
What will it physically look like? What will its voice sound like? What will its name be? What will its personality be like? It’s about building a profile based on what you’re interested in and what retains your attention. I don’t know. It’s goofy, crazy shit, but it’s obviously where I think things are headed.
Yeah. Cool, guys. It was great chatting. I’ve got to go, but I appreciate the time.
I really appreciate you coming on, man. This is great.
Yeah.
We’re really looking forward to this one. Thank you, dude. That was awesome. He’s got aura to that guy.
He does.
He kind of shook me.
He doesn’t fuck around, bro.
People in the chat were asking what the ticker is and stuff. It’s RoboStrategy. It’s a publicly traded company. This isn’t a crypto thing. His roots, and where our overlap is, are in crypto. Ansem, do you want to talk about his come-up? I know we didn’t really get into that, but it really is quite the fucking story.
He’s like this mythical fucking guy, a legendary guy, you know?
Yeah, he’s one of the legends on Crypto Twitter, honestly. He did really well. Like you said, he joined crypto in 2018 or 2019 and did well with a lot of the DeFi stuff and a lot of investing on his own. He did well enough that he had some people run a fund with him.
He crushed it and then basically saw all the robotics stuff blowing up, flipped it, and went over and started investing really heavily into robotics. I think his biggest, or one of his biggest, was the one he did in Figure. I think he did $19 million into Figure in one of their early rounds, and it fucking ripped.
He’s a super-smart guy. Like he said, he’s one of the people who wants to win and wants to be the best at what he’s doing. He’s a killer, for sure.
Awesome. Cool. Yeah, we have fucking Camilla coming on next, and I’m really, really excited about this. This is a girl I know personally, and we do very different things. She’s in a controversial market, but a hyper-lucrative market, obviously, as we all know.
It’ll be interesting to talk to her about finance and money. It’s Camilla Araujo—or Araujo, I think Owen said. I always botch your last name, Camilla. I’m sorry. I fucking love you.
6. Guest: Camila ($30M creator)
Is she in the waiting room? Is she ready to go? You guys can bring her in whenever you want. I’m super, super excited to talk to her. Her story is fucking incredible. It’s just as incredible as Andrew Kang’s, on the side of media and content.
There she is. Let’s get Camilla in frame. Owen, what’s good, baby? I can’t hear them. Get them set up, guys. They don’t have audio.
Let me know when they’re all set up. Sorry.
They have no mic. Tell them to turn their mic on.
When I hear them, we’ll switch. Or I’ll let you guys switch. I just heard some crazy echo.
On your end, there’s no mic connected.
We’re just waiting on some technical audio stuff, guys, and then we’ll bring Camilla in. I think we need them to figure out a mic input. They don’t have a mic set up on their side.
They’re saying there’s no mic input. We’re ready. We’re ready for you guys. Hit up Owen. He should have all that shit set up. They’re saying there’s no mic input.
Really unfortunate news. I didn’t want to interrupt your conversation, but I don’t know if you saw this or not—
Hello.
Hi. What’s good? We can hear you now. Bring her in. Hi, Camilla.
Yeah, I’m going to be doing this the whole fucking time.
Can you see us?
He said we’re ready, so I think—can you guys see us?
Can you guys see us? I fuck with the bubbles. I don’t think they can hear us. Camilla.
They can’t hear us or see us. I can see. Let me just FaceTime Owen.
Camilla with the bubbles. We can hear you guys now and see you guys.
Oh.
The whole conversation—
Yeah, we saw it.
The fireworks. This is really, really funny.
Sorry, sorry, sorry. I can’t see or hear you. Hello? How do we do that? Hi, everyone.
Yeah, they can hear you. Owen, too.
Is it echoing?
Yeah, a little bit. I don’t know what you guys are seeing on your end or what you need, but production, get them whatever link they need to see the stream also, of course, so we can have a back-and-forth conversation. I don’t know how we just did it with Rasmer and Andrew. There’s obviously a process to this.
Michael, call Owen. Do you have his number? Guys, Tay Keith just died. That’s fucking brutal.
Wait, what?
Take Keef, the producer. Yeah, he’s dead. He was 29 years old. That’s fucked. It’s so fucked. I don’t know how it—It just happened. It just happens. Yeah, look at my screen. Hip-hop producer Tay Keith dies at 29. So fucked up.
Damn.
It’s really brutal.
Wait, seriously?
Tay Keith, yeah.
That’s so fucked.
What is going on?
Someone said overdose.
Oh my God. Yeah, I don’t know. It’s brutal.
Yeah, that’s sad, man.
Take Keef, an absolute legend. Way too fucking young. Way too fucking young.
All right, I’m going to hang up on you. You guys should—They should—
Yeah, they’re going to—
All right, cool. Production’s calling them. I don’t know if they can hear me. They probably still can’t hear me.
If you guys just want to try joining the call really quick, make sure you have some sort of speaker connected or selected.
Okay.
Technical difficulties. Sorry about that, ladies and gentlemen.
Yeah, the Take Keef livestream—
Wow, bro. What the fuck?
Yeah, it’s brutal. It’s really, really brutal. It’s one of those weeks, man.
It’s fucking brutal. So many bangers. So many bangers.
I hate that shit is happening to people. So many young people, bro.
Someone said, “Love you to death.” Love you, too. Bro, Andrew’s the GOAT. That was such a good conversation. I love listening to him talk, bro.
He’s super-smart. You can tell he’s gone deep on it.
He kind of saw that crypto wasn’t as lucrative and saw that robotics was a better place to be. He learned as much about it as fast as he could.
First of all, you just asked, “Is that an RM 005?” No, it’s a 6701 ski, the hyper-thin guy. You can’t see it because I’m out of frame.
No, no, it’s fine. You can see it.
It’s weightless, too. I love this watch. It’s the only watch I wear now. Guys, what is taking so long with the production? Camilla’s production? Okay, but it’s being worked out? Okay, cool. Cool. I’m excited to do this interview. Did you do your homework? Do you have some questions?
I do.
I think it’ll be really interesting to hear you guys talk. Oh, and also—
Oh.
This is funny. Okay.
Wait, where are they? This is such a boomer activity for me.
[laughter]
What was pissing me off? Hello.
Guys, can you hear me?
Yeah, but I’m just staring at myself. That’s weird.
Maybe just bring up the stream. They should have a view for you guys. We have—
Okay, punk.
That’s one of the things you can do if you want. There’s probably going to be latency issues, and it might be a little scuffed, but production, if you guys can just get her a clean link—however Rasmer joined the conversation, Andrew, we’ve never had this problem.
I’m so sorry, guys.
No, no, no, it has nothing to do with you. You’re awesome, and I really appreciate you coming on. This is great. I’m excited to have this conversation with you.
Same. I’m sad I can’t see you.
I know.
Can’t?
No, I’m looking at myself.
Another link? Do we want to leave and join again?
They said to open the link they just sent you.
Yeah, open the link they just sent.
All right.
Let’s get it right so we can have a nice conversation, and you don’t need to be sorry.
Seeing yourselves is mad weird.
You don’t need to be sorry. You can see us now.
Yes.
Amazing. We’re here.
Backwards.
Her mic switched, maybe. The mic is a little bit lower now. We’ll get there. We’re going to get there.
[laughter]
We’re definitely going to get there.
At some point.
[laughter]
I actually feel like doing this right now.
We can hear it.
It’s very, very soft. It switched. The mic definitely switched whenever she switched.
Wait. Pause.
Now we can hear you very well, but we can also hear an echo. Oh, no.
Wait. Do I exit this one then? All right.
You can hear me well now. This is good. Can you see us? Uh-oh.
That’s our production. I think our production fixes that.
Bro, I don’t know what is happening. I don’t know what’s going on.
[laughter]
I’m going to figure it out.
We are. Bro, what do you have going on this weekend?
I’m going to St. Barts pretty much directly after this show, and I’ll be doing the next show in St. Barts.
We also have the $10,000 competition with the chat. We have not forgotten about that. We got hundreds of submissions, and there are really valid ones, so we don’t want to rush it. We’ll have a winner fully picked next week, hopefully. It’s fully closed now, so people can’t come in and swoop in and take it. We have it narrowed down to around 10, and we really want to stress-test all of it and make sure we’re picking the right person.
Yeah, we got you. We’re working on it.
We do have you. We’ll make it up to you, and we’re going to make good on that. All right, production. We’re about 10 minutes in at this point.
Yeah, run it. I hear them.
I hear.
I—
I hear. Okay.
Guys, switch to her.
Something’s happening.
Can you see me?
Yes, we can see you.
Yes, we can see you, and we can hear you.
Can you hear me well now?
Yes.
100%.
And you can see us?
Yes.
Amazing.
Camilla, thank you so much for coming on the show. I’m very excited for this. You’re the first ever girl on the show.
This is true.
Really?
This is true.
[laughter]
She got really surprised. Yeah, I mean, it’s a show about finance and AI.
What does that mean, bro?
[laughter]
Yeah, I don’t know, man.
[laughter]
And the same parties, and we know what the demographic looks like. We know what the demographic is, brother. Let’s not trip. We might all have a lot of the same demographic, if we’re keeping it a bean, so I think it’s perfectly on point.
Exactly true.
Also, why I wanted to have you guys on: we’ve built some personal rapport in the backend. I’ve talked to you and Owen a lot about industry stuff and media stuff. I’m so fascinated with you guys. I’ve always appreciated you guys, and you’ve impressed me a ton since meeting you and touching base. We linked up on some casual stuff in Miami. We sat for dinner—you and Owen came—and I just liked listening to you guys talk and asking you a bunch of questions about your business, your brand, and your content. It was amazing hearing you guys speak about all of it.
7. Guest: Owen Lynch
I think you’re so smart. Owen’s a little genius as well, and you guys are super dialed. You haven’t gotten lost in the sauce at all. You’ve maintained an amazing relationship with each other. Camilla, if nobody else on Earth is willing to give you the flowers, I have to be the guy. You took a spot in the MrBeast video alongside 100 other normal people, and God only knows where they are, and you turned it into a multi-eight-figure business. You’ve changed your own life, and you’ve changed so many other people’s lives. You and Owen are a power couple.
Obviously, we talk about tech, finance, and so on. I want to get into all these conversations with you because I feel like, typically, podcast shows like this are more about the drama, the social stuff, and the click-farming stuff. You’re obviously used to it, and you play that game very well, but I think there’s so much more than meets the eye to you as a businesswoman. We’ll bring Owen in for the last 30 minutes and talk about all of it, but I’m really excited to have you, and I appreciate you.
This is my co-host, Ansem, who comes from tech, finance, and Twitter. He’s a very smart guy, a brilliant guy, and he trades markets. He’s got a big brain on him, so it should be a cool little conversation.
I appreciate the flowers. I appreciate getting to know me from a different perspective, which is why I’m really excited to have this conversation. I’m not someone who’s super afraid to admit that I don’t know everything. I think that’s even my superpower: I’m okay with not knowing every single thing about everything. Maybe I’ll learn a lot from this, too.
You’re talking to a guy who knows a very small fraction of the type of stuff that we talk about on the show. My dynamic here and my role is to ask the questions, right? To speak from that perspective and help that perspective understand and consume this style of content. I learn so much from Ansem on a day-to-day basis and from our team.
This has been a very special thing to build. It’s obviously different from what the average person is building toward in media. Everybody’s doing that wide-cast thing: How much engagement can I farm? How many followers can I get? This is obviously a smaller niche—thick, dense material. But don’t sell yourself short, because what you guys have done has been incredible.
From what I understand about you, for the most part, you’ve been pretty smart with your money. You’re doing okay. Fair to say, right?
Yeah, I think pretty well.
I think let’s just open, because we have a lot of tech and finance guys who watch the show. Give us your whole story, from the beginning to now: how you took that spot in the MrBeast video, pivoted into a business, and now you’re funneling that attention into the new stuff. You’re pivoting. I just want to hear it all from your perspective.
Yeah, so I started off back in 2020. I was in college, and I was working three jobs. I was a personal assistant with one of the people from the MrBeast team.
And then I ended up getting involved in the Squid Game video. When that blew up, no one could have seen Player 067 taking off. I think, to be very honest, that was luck.
Yeah, I know. I'm actually the original player—67. It's insane. 67.
That ended up happening, and I'll never forget: in 24 hours, I went from 7,400 and something followers on Instagram to 145,000. I sat there the next day and was like, “What the fuck do I do with this?” I had no idea what to do. I had done a bit of modeling on the side because I always enjoyed it, but it was never something that I knew what to do with. Honestly, I didn't fail, but there was no guidance on it, right? What do you do when you gain all these followers and all this traction? I didn't know what to do.
So I tried doing YouTube. I tried doing all these other things, and it wasn't working. Then the opportunity of OnlyFans kind of—not fell into my lap, but I started thinking, “Okay, how does this work?” So I started to study how these girls were actually doing this and whether there was actual money in it. My family didn't agree with it, obviously. Coming from a Latin family, it's not something that people jump up and down about and are super excited about, but I moved out of my house. I took a risk, moved to Florida by myself, had fucking nothing, and was like, “Fuck it. I'm going to start an OnlyFans.”
Even then, people think it's a magic button where you click it and it's instant money. That didn't happen. You have to understand social media, understand how to market yourself, and be ballsy enough to put it out there, right? No product is going to sell itself unless you're marketing it the right way. So—
We talk a lot about markets and numbers. We go under the hood and discuss these things on the show, and statistics help people come to proper conclusions. I think people will take any opportunity to discredit you or sell you short because of the nature of what you do, but I think it's really important to articulate this.
There are something like 4.6 million active creators on OnlyFans. Does that sound about right? It's a pretty big number. Ninety percent of all the creators on OnlyFans make less than $1,000 a year. The median earnings for the average OnlyFans creator are $180 a month. The top 1% makes 33% of all the revenue. And you're like the top 1% of the top 1% of the top 1%. You're like 0.001%. I'm sure they give you these statistics. Where do you fall? You must be all-time, especially in your prime—in your prime—so insane.
Yeah, I think at peak career, I was in the 0.001%. It was insane. It was insane. I'm telling you, that's so true. There are so many people on that platform who make fucking nothing. And it's not this—
An overwhelming majority of them, right? So you're obviously not dumb, clearly. You take this crazy risk in your life. The genie comes out of the bottle; you open Pandora's box. Once you make this decision to do the OnlyFans thing, it'll be with you forever. You're going to have to deal with that forever.
Knowing all this, you decide to do it anyway, to absolute great success. So again, life and people who are successful, especially self-made people like yourself, identify the opportunity. You saw that you had something of value—followers. “How can I use this? How can I extract value out of this?” And, yeah, I mean, you took the ultimate risk. You can never get the biscuit without risking it, and that's what you did.
If you don't mind me asking, just straight up, to date, what are your total earnings just on the OnlyFans piece? I know you're a massive creator and you work with them.
Like $30 million.
That's fire.
Oh my God.
That's lit.
Yeah, yeah, yeah—lifetime.
Camilla, good for you. Wait, was it—you said this was in 2020? What year was this?
I started, I think, at the end of 2021 or in 2022.
Oh my God.
Oh, okay.
I literally got light-headed when you said that. I didn't know it was that much.
That's fire.
[laughter] That's lit.
I think it's funny how a lot of people will be like, “Oh, that's not even—there's no way. There's no way. There's no way.” It's like—
No, it makes sense. I definitely believe it.
[laughter]
I definitely believe it.
There are definitely a lot of creators out there who make more.
Yeah.
Even if you go back and date it to Bhad Bhabie, when she made $54 million on the drop, that's—
Yeah, that's insane.
That's nice.
Can you actually comprehend $54 million? Because just her making an OnlyFans was such a viral moment and such a widespread conversation that even if she's only converting 0.001%, everybody's talking about this. Everyone on the planet, quite literally, is talking about this. Obviously, there's a market for this. It's super lucrative. Yeah, it makes sense. It's fucking crazy. It blows my mind even hearing you say that. I'm super happy for you. It's awesome.
What did you do with the money when you came into it that fast, going from zero to $30 million—or whatever you were at—so quickly?
I mean, I did some dumb shit. I definitely bought cars and jewelry, but honestly, I credit a lot of what I learned about what to do with it to Owen and some mentors I had in my life at the time. We both invested in real estate, mainly real estate, honestly. Now we're at about 20 properties.
Sick.
We invest in smaller companies and young entrepreneurs that we really believe in. I've been so fortunate and blessed to have met some amazing people in the industry to guide me into pivoting. I know Banks—in January, I was like, “Yo, I'm stepping away. I want to do something else.”
Yeah, I was going to ask that because, obviously, $30 million—I'm blowing bubbles on it for that kind of revenue stream, right? As hard, or as difficult, as it was for you to decide to get involved in it, I would imagine it would be equally as hard, if not harder, to conclude that it's best for you, your business, and your life to pivot out of that. Obviously, you've hard-pivoted out of that. Was that a difficult decision to make? What prompted that? Why?
It literally—because at the end of the day, I love being a content creator. I like being creative, and I felt like at some point I was hitting a ceiling. Yeah, I was making $1.5 million to $2 million a month. It was great, the money was fine, but I was just kind of doing it. Everything I was chasing was, “Yo, the next viral thing, the next...” It got repetitive and redundant, and it wasn't who I really was, because you kind of have to—
Content grind. That's the part that people don't see, right? It's funny. It's a special kind of sick fuck who can do that over a long enough—
It is. It's psychologically—when you're conditioned, I haven't experienced another business model yet where direct views equal a direct amount of dollars. Owen and I have studied the graph where it's like, “Yo, if this video got 20 million views, that's an extra $30,000 on the day.” It was something—it's a drug. It was a drug, and I kind of lost myself in it. I didn't really know what I was— I didn't see the long-term vision. I just saw week by week, month by month: “What's the next check? What's the next thing?”
Grind, yeah, yeah.
It was fucking me up, and I stopped being creative because I didn't have to be. It didn't matter whether I was being creative and putting a lot of money and time into content—I didn't have to. I'm not saying that's not a blessing, because it is, and I'm extremely blessed to have been in that position, but I knew that wasn't where my heart was.
I love content creation, and I want to be able to create things that more reflect who I am. I think stepping away—and to this day, I mean, it's the hardest thing I've ever done—not to mention sitting back knowing that the money isn't the same and I could go back in a—
Yeah. Very honest. It's very honest of you.
And this is me just being transparent. If I went back, I would double down even harder and try to make as much money as I can, but I want a little bit more for myself. I want more. I wanted to figure out what I could do, and now we're in this phase of—
Well, I mean, look at stellar examples of this, because there are plenty of examples of women who start their careers as these sex icons or objects. I think Kim Kardashian would probably be the best example of where I'm going with this. She started out, and the first time everybody heard her name was in a very explicit piece of content: her explicit Ray J sex tape, which is much nastier than anything I think you've ever done, right?
This was viewed very widely, went viral, whatever, and she somehow transitioned from that point to where she is now. Kim K is this iconic businesswoman, billionaire, ultra-successful. Moms love her, younger girls love her, men love her, and it's like—
I think it's kind of a—
Of course, yeah.
And I think it's—
And I think even Kim, you know, was, I would argue, probably extremely underestimated in the beginning. Nobody wanted to fuck with her. Like—
Of course.
I think she went on a podcast and was like, “Yo, I wanted to do Sports Illustrated, and I wanted to do all these big things,” and my publicist looked at me and said, “You should think about something more realistic. That’s not for you.” And now she dominated. I’m not saying—from looking at her career now, it looks like everything was like this, but it really wasn’t. You know, what she probably—
That’s definitely—
—struggled a lot with. There were a lot of iconic Playboy models from back in the day who are extremely iconic today and have six-figure businesses and things like that.
So, I would say the stage that I’m in, these last 7 months have just been about figuring out who I am and looking at entrepreneurs who want to start businesses that I believe in. I’ve been having a lot more conversations and connecting more with people. Something that I recently have done with Owen is consulting for some massive companies and being on the creative-directing side.
I don’t even need to be front-facing, but I’m guiding these companies who don’t understand marketing and don’t understand how to work in modern media today.
By the way, it’s very clear to me that that’s where your skill set is, and that’s why you’re so successful. For me and you, it’s all coming back to me—our first conversations, our original conversations. I can relate to you very, very heavily, even in regard to the Bop House thing.
Z, you know what Bop House is? You’ve seen that. So, if you’re in Girl House, like an OnlyFans kind of house, it was kind of a revolutionary step in that industry. Nobody had ever done that. It kind of ripped the OG, tried-and-true content-house model that I helped establish in the first place to great success over time in traditional media.
But you came in and took that, and you pretty much founded the Bop House, right? That was a super, super successful effort and venture for you. I don’t know how it worked out as far as the business stuff goes, but when you talk about being creative and being on the back end and making moves, that’s kind of where—I don’t know, what happened with the Bop House? Do you want to give us that whole story?
I mean, I wasn’t the one who founded it, actually. It was an idea brought by Sophie and her team, and they were like, “Yo, do you and Julia want to join in?” And I was like, “Yeah, fuck it.”
I think because I was the one who, like I said, loves content, Owen and I would go and meet with the team and be like, “Yo, we should do this. We should do that. We should do that. We should do the reality show. We should do this.” That’s where a lot of my energy went.
But the initial startup really wasn’t me, and I think because I was the most outspoken one in the group, I became the front-facing one.
You were the leader in a lot of these—
I didn’t necessarily mean for that to be what happened, but I think the public was just like, “Oh, she’s the one who took charge and did all of this.” It was a collective group, and it was an amazing team. I can’t lie. Owen and I and the team—the creative process, when so many people believe in one thing, there’s no failing.
Yeah.
That’s just what I believe in, right?
It’s just hard to sustain. I know it all too well. I’m all too familiar with it when there are 10 moving parts. For us in the creator industry, media, and content, it’s very funny because, as other areas of business and other markets scale, you make more money and get bigger, and things usually tend to get easier.
But not for us. Especially in an environment like a house, as people get bigger, egos get bigger, people get richer and richer, and they’re less incentivized and less hungry because you’re dealing with humans. It’s just like—
It was that, too, right? You had a bunch of girls in a house, and all of us were making six figures-plus a month.
That’s insane.
And it was never something that—I’ll be honest, there really wasn’t this jealousy of income. That really never caused any—
Because you guys all started from zero, right? It’s pretty much all relative. People tend to be more jealous of the superficial stuff, like who people say is prettier or who has the most followers or whatever.
At least in my experience with creators—and I’ve only ever worked with men; I’ve never worked with a group of girls—I can only imagine all the sorts of shit that come along with that. It sounds fucking miserable.
It sounds like a lot, bro.
Yeah.
It was just little petty stuff. It wasn’t crazy. I decided to step away after the reality-show thing didn’t end up working out because I was like, “I just need to do my own thing.” The other girls are still wildly successful. It didn’t impact anybody to the point where anybody was failing. All of them are doing incredible, and they also all went their own ways.
In the end, I would say it wasn’t a loss. It was actually something that I’m really proud of, and I’m happy that it ended up being what it was.
Yeah.
You talked a little bit about how you’ve done some investments with the money that you made. It seems like the skill of turning attention into dollars is something that not a lot of people have the ability to do. It seems like you’re on a path now where you’re thinking about entrepreneurship and investing and how to continue doing that going forward.
What are some of the ways that you think you can help other people learn how to utilize attention? And what are some cool investments that you’ve made outside of the properties?
Wait, that was a loaded question. I’m trying to—
Sure.
Okay, can we talk about what we’re about? I mean, is it all public?
I think it would be cool to talk about the concept of what you’re doing—investing into a company but then also getting advisory shares for—
Yeah, so kind of where we’re at right now is that I’m very passionate about companies that are just starting up. I’ve never—this is very new to me—but something that I talk about all the time is that attention is the new currency. That’s what it is today.
Absolutely. We talk about it a lot, too.
100%. You cannot start a business if you don’t have attention on it. It’s just not—
Right.
—not going to work in today’s market. So, we’re going into these conversations, and instead of asking for cash up front for advice or to have my face on the next campaign, we’re having conversations like, “Okay, owning a part of the company, equity, or owning the IP and things like that.”
These are all really new things. We’re putting capital into a company, and now the conversation switches to, “Okay, Camilla’s now an investor in this, and we should be sitting—we’re sitting on the same side of the table as…” I mean, I’m not a fucking billionaire, but a lot of these investors invested a lot of money, and we’re on the same side of the table because they value how I know how to work the market today.
And exactly what you just said: same side of the table. I think you’re thinking about it in the absolute best possible way. I actually talk about this a lot in meetings with brands—marketing deals, deal flow, brand deals, whatever.
I think the old-school brand-deal model is very dated. It doesn’t work at all anymore. When something reads as an ad, people ignore it. It keeps your relationship with the product honest. You’re not going to give a fuck about getting shares in a company that you don’t actually believe in. You have to actually be excited. You have to actually believe in the product or the team. There have to be all these reasons why you want to buy into it.
Rather than buying into it in a transactional way—here’s my money, give me the product—you’re taking a bet on them as a team to be able to scale, reach more people, and sell through. Obviously, if that’s how you’re aligned, it’s just a way more honest relationship. It’s way more honest between you and the partner, and it’s way more honest between you and the viewer, the audience.
Yeah. So, I think that’s—
I think that’s where—
—that’s just kind of the phase I’m in right now: putting up the capital so they know—it’s almost like I want the company to know that I truly believe in this, right? I would not put my own money into something if I wasn’t going to double down, back it, and be 100% talking about it all the time.
When you truly organically use a product, something you use every day, you don’t have to think about promoting it.
You just naturally do. When you really like someone, they just come up in conversation, right? It just ends up happening. I think that's exactly how you need to portray something like a product.
People, more than ever, especially in today's world, are looking for community and connection, and they can tell when something has been, like, “Oh, here she goes. This is another Mediacube campaign.” People can really tell when someone loves something, and they want to feel connected to that community. So they're also going to involve themselves in it.
My whole job now has been not only curating content for a brand, but curating community within the brand so it can sustain itself without the need for this exchange of, “Hey, I'm going to pay this influencer $100,000 to do this.” Because that's not really what we're looking for. We're looking to build something so much deeper, to evoke emotion from your audience. That's going to get people invested, get people to buy it again, and get people to really support the brand as much as you do.
Yeah, the way people are spending and the way consumers are interacting with products is so different from even what it was 10 years ago. You're bang on the money. I love the way that you're thinking about all this stuff.
We'll talk more about specific investments you guys are excited about when Owen comes in, but we briefly touched on worst purchase ever. I just want to hear explicitly: What is the worst purchase you've ever made in your life? What is the dumbest thing you've ever bought, and for how much money?
Yeah, I paid almost $400,000 for a Mercedes-AMG GT Black Series, and I've driven it maybe 3 times.
What's it worth today?
It actually went up.
It went up. Okay, so—
Oh, so maybe it's not—
Okay, so we're up. All right.
That's so funny.
I didn't know that.
That's so funny.
This is actually what happened. Let me tell you exactly what happened. Camila was bored on a Tuesday, and I know how privileged this sounds. I understand. I hear myself. I was bored on a Tuesday. I was like, “Oh, I'm friends with the guys at the dealership. I'm going to go say what's up.” And then I saw the car, and it was sitting there, and I was like, “I want that.” And then I bought it.
Then they were like, “Oh, by the way, did you know this car is a collectible?” The more people buy it, they're crashing it, and then your car goes up in value. The second he told me the car was a collectible, I never drove it again. Literally, I genuinely think I've driven it 3 times since then because I just felt guilty.
8. Most Attractive Man in CT
What I really wanted to do was take the car and make it like the R8. I gutted it, put in new leather, Alcantara, everything. And now I'm looking at this car, and I'm like, “I feel bad if I were to—”
Drive it. Yeah.
What do you think of it?
Yeah. That was the dumbest shit I've ever done. And now it just sits in the garage.
We have this little segment that's going to speak to CT, and we're going to do it for CT. But before we do that, a 2-part question for you, and then we'll bring Owen on after. If you could go back and talk to Camila right now, right before the MrBeast video, what would you say to her? She's right in front of you right now. She's about to film for this video, and you have—
Damn.
I'd say, “Stop worrying about what everybody else thinks and do what you want to do.”
Amazing.
Do what makes you happy and stop worrying about what anyone else thinks, because the people who are meant to be in your life are going to stay in your life, and if they're not, they're not going to. No matter how much you stress about it, you can't do anything about it. Do what you want; you'll end up happier.
Amazing.
That's great advice, actually.
And then 10 years from now, paint us a picture. What does your life look like 10 years from now? Are you still with Owen? Are you a mom? How much money—
That's a crazy question.
I mean, I got to hear that, bro. Ten years—a long time, man. Robots are going to be walking around outside. Shit's going to be insane. Who are you in 10 years? What does your life look like?
It's fucking funny. Hopefully, I'm a mom.
Oh.
I'm married. I am still working. I love what I do, and I potentially want to own my own brand, whatever that is, that speaks authentically to who I am. In 10 years, I hope to have figured out more of who Camila is without the public opinion, and figured out who she is. Hopefully, I have that figured out.
I'm married, I have kids, and I have a project that I truly love. I'm still taking care of my family, putting my family first, and, yeah, taking care of others.
Amazing. It's amazing. Camila, you're awesome, and I always love talking to you. Before we get Owen in here, we have this little segment. I made this little bracket, and it's a 16-person bracket.
Just in honor of you being the first female guest in our demographic, kind of stemming from and being rooted in crypto CT, there are some characters, we'll call them, in crypto Twitter who exist. Their faces are online, and they have some sort of following or brand similar to the world that we live in, but smaller and more niche. This is where me and Z overlap. This is how we met. It's a very important community to us.
So I have Hottest in CT. I want to do a bracket-style competition where we're going to put 2 people next to each other, and you—Owen, I hope you're okay with this—just instinctively tell us who you think is more attractive. We can get into the details, and we can riff on it. This is going to be great.
Just based on physical appearance?
Just based on what they look like. You're not expected to know any of these people, and if you want to elaborate, you can. First up, as the number 1 seed, we have Cobie up against Choose Rich Nick. Take your time.
Dog, this is fucking crazy.
I feel like you did Choose Rich Nick dirty.
God did him dirty. I had nothing to do with this. I have absolutely—Nick, by the way, I fucking love you.
Oh my God. No, no, there's no way.
This is what it is. By the way, I—
I think Joseph's the guy.
No, by the way, this is a good picture of him. This is genuinely a good picture of him. I'll go on Google right now.
Have you seen this, bro? I don't know who you are, but your beef is with Banks, not with me.
He's a good—
He's a good sport. He's a good sport. And again, you have to be honest. Who's winning this one?
Kobe.
Okay, Kobe. So Kobe's going to win the first one. Let's update the bracket, and bear with me because I'm kind of a one-man army right now. Okay, so we'll have Kobe moving on to the next slot, the quarterfinals.
Next up, we have Clemente versus Mert. Give me one second, and I'll bring that one up for you.
You're fucking hilarious, bro.
Clemente—wait, is it Clemente versus Mert? Sorry, it's Easy versus Clemente. Easy versus Clemente. You're not expected to know any of these people, by the way. You don't have to feel bad. This one's a little bit less crazy. I'm honestly curious who you pick here.
Clemente looks like he wants to kill himself.
Clemente—yeah, he does. He does.
So, Crypto Dusty.
Yeah.
Honestly—
These people are all very stressed and down bad, by the way. All of us collectively.
I'm going to go with him. He just looks—I hope to boost his morale.
Okay, that's cool. Help him out a little bit, maybe. Cool, cool.
He looks like he's losing—
Okay. We have Clemente moving on. Next up, we have Mert versus Orangie.
No, this is great. This is going to be a good one. All right, cool. Ready? Yeah, you'll see. We were just with him at F1.
Mert versus Orangie.
She knows one of these people.
Wait, which one do you know?
Orangie gets around. I'd be surprised if you didn't.
Let's go Orangie.
And he lives in Miami.
Orangie's lit.
So, is that your pick?
Yeah, yeah. I'm going to go—
Orangie, there you go, baby. W Orangie. Wow, okay, cool.
W Orangie.
Orangie moving on. Next we have Thread Guy versus Rasber. Wow.
This one's going to be good.
Let me give you guys some context. I basically lived with these guys last year. These are 2 dear friends of mine. I consider them both family at this point.
Wow.
Give us your thought process before you give us the answer. What—wow, what? Are you stunned by these guys? Do you think that—She's speechless. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.
I think the common consensus here is you guys have to get the fuck out of crypto. It's ruining your looks.
Wow. Yeah, that's brutal. Your hair—you're stressed the fuck out. Brutal.
Oh—
It's brutal. Okay, give me a winner for this one.
You know what? Let's go with Thread Guy.
Okay, Thread Guy. That's who I had picked to win that one. Okay, Thread Guy, there you go. Update the bracket real quick. Next, we have somebody who I believe is familiar to you. I don't know what this is going to do, but—
Does he look sad?
Yeah, TJR.
Yes.
We have TJR and Gainzy for you.
I'm like—
Wait, why do you like Gainzy?
Gainzy is like—
Wait, why?
Gainzy, just because. You know, just a curveball.
Oh, God. So, is this—We'll just leave that one alone. All right, so Gainzy in the upset of the century against TJR. Cool.
Next up, we have Michael Saylor. This is a fucking big one. This is the battle of the titans here. We have Michael Saylor versus CZ.
Okay.
Michael Saylor's got that DILF thing going on. CZ's got that little anime Asian vibe, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, I think I'd pick Michael Saylor too, potentially. All right, okay. That's an easy one. Michael Saylor moving on. I'm just farming shit at this point, brother. We're just cruising.
Next, we have—This is one that kind of means something to me. These are 2 important people in my life, friends of Z's as well. We have TraderManny and Frank DeGods.
Oh, I love these guys. They're the best.
Best. Very good traders. They're both really rich, if that helps you.
Best. Sharp, smart guys.
I think TraderManny might be a little richer. His company was just acquired for a lot of money.
What does he do?
He's fucking—He's just been in crypto for a very long time. Finance stuff.
Okay.
His name is TraderManny. He trades.
Okay. Yeah, I'll go with TraderManny.
Okay, okay, TraderManny moving on. All right, things are spicing up. Things are spicing up. We got TraderManny moving on.
For the last one of this initial first round, we have—This one should be fucking easy. Wow.
Intern versus Vitalik. Vitalik—this is important context. I feel like this is very important. Please excuse me. This might come across a little vulgar or tasteless, I don't know. He's got a fucking hammer, this guy. Vitalik, the guy on the right, has an absolute piece on him, and he might be the richest guy we've shown you so far. He founded Ethereum, so I'm sure Owen knows what that is.
Yes. Yes, he did.
Whereas Intern on the left, the guy who played lacrosse at Providence College, is obviously a more traditionally handsome kid. He's the CMO of Robo Strategy, a marketing guy, just a crypto legend, Intern. I don't know what his piece looks like or how big it is, but—
Can we go back? How do you know how—as you said—
That's a great question. He took a picture one time wearing sweatpants, and I don't think he had underwear on underneath.
I feel like this is you coming out to me. Is this what's happening?
Wait, hold on. First of all, let's get something straight. If I was gay—listen, no.
He definitely called the girls gay. Let's just get something straight.
And this is a segment for you, okay? This is a segment for you, not for—
I just want you to know we're friends behind the scenes. Bro, I will love and support you, and I do regardless.
And if this is what we're doing, like, bro, stop. It's not even funny. You can hold my hand. Come on.
Let's just leave it at this. Let's leave it at this.
You've experimented, and that's okay.
I'd blow Vitalik to make your all-time earnings on OnlyFans. I would do that, okay? I would do it.
I just want you to know that you've gained, like, 50 points because you would do such a thing. The chat's saying, “Happy Pride Month.” Let's move on. This is fucking insane. All right, who are you picking? Intern or Vitalik?
I'll do this one for you, since you want to blow him. Let's do Vitalik.
Oh my God. Vitalik over Intern. Intern was a favorite to win the upset, seed 2 versus 1 of the last seeds. Vitalik—wow, that is the upset of the bracket so far. So, okay, let's update it. That is fucking insane.
All right, now we're going to start firing through these. This will be easy. Where are we? We're at the quarterfinals. Let's just fire through these. We have Cobie versus Clemente. Let's bring this one up. You're familiar with both these guys. Out of Cobie and Clemente, who wins?
Clemente.
Oh, fuck. Wow. Okay. By the way, he is never going to let anybody forget you just said that, and that might be one of the all-time highlights of his career. Clemente, congratulations.
He's going to do a full skit on it.
He's going to do a full skit on it for sure. We need that. We need that. Okay, cool. Wow, that's crazy. This is going so much differently than I thought it would.
This one—oh, wow. If you do what I think you're going to do, this one might go crazy. Okay. You remember these 2? We have Orangie versus Thread Guy.
Oh, wow. They look like siblings.
They don't?
Jesus Christ, bro. I'm going with Orangie.
Oh my God! No! TG, brother, I am fucking so sorry. I'm so sorry. Orangie, love you, but wow. That is—
That was dark.
I mean—
That's okay.
That's the one. That's the one, okay. We have Orangie moving on.
Now we have Gainzy—where is it?—Gainzy versus Michael Saylor. This one, I mean, come on.
Dude, Gainzy looks rough. By the way, Gainzy looks like his journey through crypto. Gainzy physically looks like his journey through crypto.
Oh my God.
Yeah, I see that.
He does. Michael Saylor.
Okay.
Yet again.
Yeah.
For you, thanks. That one.
For me, for me.
Michael Saylor for me. And then we have TraderManny and Vitalik. Don't do this one for me; do this one for you.
You're hilarious.
He founded Ethereum, though. That's kind of crazy.
It's hard, right? No, it is kind of crazy. BDE—
I'm telling you, bro.
He's a smart guy. I don't really—I prefer someone that's super smart.
So are you picking Vitalik?
Yeah, I think I'm going with Vitalik.
Okay, okay. Wow.
Vitalik.
Brian, Brian, Brian.
He has those eyes of someone who's just going to be a trillionaire. I don't know.
And now we're moving into the semifinals. There are 2 side-by-sides left, and this is not how I thought this was going to go. Just remember, the winner of this you have to marry forever and be with forever. That's what's on the line. This is who you have to have kids with and share genetics with. So really be thinking from a woman's perspective. We are going into the semifinals now. This is very important. A lot is on the line here.
First up, we have Clemente versus Orangie. A lot is on the line here. Who's moving on to the finals?
Oh, this is hard.
By the way, Orangie, the sleeper of the fucking bracket. Really good—
Too much on him. Y'all did too much on him.
I agree, by the way. I agree, by the way. I love Orangie. Are you good?
Be honest here. Just objectively, how they look. This is going to be titled “The Most Attractive Man in CT,” just so you know what's on the line.
The big title.
This is so good. Let's go with Clemente.
Okay. Dude, this kid, man. Wow. By the way, you picked the one kid on the fucking bracket to go all the way—the kid who fucking does not like me. He does not appreciate me. He's always—Clemente, he's like—
For real?
He's just like, "I don't know. I don't know." It's funny, but good for him. He's cruising.
I like Clemente.
No, no. I like him a lot, too. I didn't say I didn't like him. Maybe we'll bring him on if he wins.
Yeah, I agree. I think you guys should squash it.
This is the semifinals. This person is going on to the finals. There's a lot behind the scenes. Like, I think I gave—
Water right here, Banks.
I think I gave you a little too much. Let's knock that shit off. Michael Saylor is the Bitcoin guy. He's the Bitcoin main character. In a lot of ways, what you're looking at here is Bitcoin versus Ethereum.
Michael Saylor, that's who he is.
Yeah, Bitcoin versus Ethereum. Michael—
Saylor versus Vitalik to move on to the finals.
How did this even happen? That's crazy.
It's insane, right? Michael Saylor, okay. As we should have expected and, honestly, hoped for, I'm kind of over Vitalik. Listen, if Vitalik's moving on to the finals in CT attractive guys, we're really down much worse than we ever thought. Okay, cool.
Now, this is the final. Let me show you guys where we're at. There's a lot on the line here. We have Clemente and Michael Saylor. I'm going to bring up their side by side, and then we will determine and pick a winner. You will, solely. What was it? Clemente versus—who was it? Michael Saylor. Here we go. We have it here. Take your time. There's a lot on the line here.
Before you answer, I'm just going to tee it up nicely. Again, this is for all the marbles. Who is, Camilla, the most attractive man on CT?
I think Michael Saylor.
Wow, okay. Check Bitcoin. Somebody check Bitcoin. This might be exactly what the fuck we needed, folks. There we fucking go. I think you might have just saved crypto, Camilla. You really might have just saved the market.
It's possible.
There we go. I mean, yeah, there we go. We're going to go ahead and crown him the winner. Look at that fun little graphic that Claude made me. There we go. Camilla, thank you so much for being a good sport. Michael Saylor is officially the most attractive guy in CT.
He's attractive.
Yeah, I mean, he's a handsome guy. He's handsome. He's got that dope thing going for him, and he's professional and clean. I like the way he talks, too. He's well-spoken. Okay, cool.
Okay.
Awesome. So, yeah, let's bring Owen in, and we'll talk. I'm really interested in talking to Owen about AI models, you guys' investments, and more of the business side of stuff because he is the more technical business side of your operation. You guys operate very much like a duo and a team. He was just sitting offscreen the whole time, very supportive in each other's lives, obviously socially and emotionally. You guys are an actual real couple. We've had conversations about this.
I can relate, just in terms of Alyssa—I dated Alyssa Violet, obviously, for a long time. I fucking wish we were as hungry as you guys. I wish we were as structured and organized as you guys. You guys have been locked in, and I think you guys are very, very positive, amazing influences in each other's lives.
Owen, do you want to just introduce yourself to the stream and to the audience and give us a little breakdown on how you met Camilla and what you do for this entire operation?
Yeah, my name's Owen, Owen Lynch. Thank you for having me. I appreciate you, Banks. I know we've gotten along a lot earlier this year, probably really on some business stuff. I think we're very similar.
I fuck with you very heavily.
You realized that very fast, and I appreciate you for recognizing that because we had really good conversations when we were in a period of time when we didn't really know what we were about to do next, and you gave me and Camilla a lot of support.
But our backstory is, I've always been in content. That was my life since I was 12. I was trying to do YouTube. I was a FaZe Clan fan. I was watching everyone's come-up. I was just waiting for my turn, and then I was doing a bunch of shit, whatever I could. I had a couple million followers on TikTok when I was around 19 or 20, and then that's when I started doing random stuff on socials.
I was running Snapchat shows, making news about celebrities, and started to make some money. And then right there was when Camilla and I met through a mutual friend. I had never been in the OnlyFans space or ever thought of myself as a manager in any sense, but in her specific situation, I knew who she was. She was in the MrBeast video. She was trying to make content, trying to make more money, and grow her socials.
She was already doing that with somebody else who was supposed to be a manager, and she had an issue with them. She was like, "I am about to give up." And then my best friend Cole and I were like, "You know what?" He's a photographer.
So the relationship started fully, fully professional—business.
100%.
And I think that 7 months is exactly why it became a real relationship, like nothing I've ever had, because we were working together, but not only for business and money. We were working together to figure out our lives. It was such a weird time. We were signing our first lease together because she was trying to move.
Yeah, we were adulting together. I had never bought a car. He helped me buy my first car and sign my first lease on an apartment. We traveled together because of videos and stuff, and we were all— It was like the 3 Musketeers. It was me, Cole, and Owen, and we all worked so well together. We would travel, and all of us were so aligned on the fact that—
God, please, no matter what happens, take care of this relationship and this experience you guys have shared together. It would be a fucking absolute tragedy if you guys ever had any sort of bad blood. I know how fucking difficult it can be sometimes, with all these different dynamics.
Again, I've kind of lived through it, and I'm grateful to say now that I have a beautiful relationship with everybody I've been in relationships with. This goes 10 layers deeper. You guys, like you said, learned how to be grown-ups together. You learned how to build a business together. You made your first millions of dollars together.
Take care of it. Always be in each other's lives. Always love each other. It's fucking awesome. It's very, very real. Even sitting with you guys off-camera and outside of a setting like this, it's really cool. I think you guys are doing it right.
Thank you. I'm super grateful for the way it turned out.
It's always the people that get the most shit, by the way. I need to say this because I feel like I fall in this category as well. People are so quick to discredit both of you. They're so quick to label you as X, Y, and Z. But you guys are great people. You really are.
And I think when the world pigeonholes you in a way, throws you in a certain bucket, or makes you feel alienated, in a lot of ways it's in your own best interest, because then you have no other choice. You spend your time and energy with people who are actually there for you and understand you.
You're not bothered with the average shit person. You're not appealing to everybody because you don't give a shit, because they haven't accepted you or they're quick to judge you. I don't know. It's an interesting conversation, but it's always—
Like Adin Ross, I don't know how you guys are with Adin, but Adin has such a big heart. He's a great fucking kid, honestly, at least in my experience. He gets a ton of shit online. I've seen the way he moves behind the scenes. I've seen the way he takes care of his people and how many times he's put people on. He does that shit a hundred times better and bigger than fucking anybody, and he gets the most shit. It's just interesting.
When you're a public figure, even with Adin, if you show how much you do for people, you're doing it for clout. And then if you don't show it, you're a piece of shit who's selfish and doesn't want to. At the end of the day, I would imagine that at Adin's level, you have to be super self-aware.
You know what's funny? Adin's always been kind of a controversial figure. He really broke out in his career by going head-to-head with the Poggers streaming community, which is the World of Warcraft, nerdier gaming side of it.
Adin kind of broke onto the scene interviewing rappers and athletes and doing cool cultural shit. He was kind of the only one doing that, and they were all dogpiling him. He became this enemy, a public enemy, to that side.
It became him versus them. So it's always been controversial. Obviously, the nature of what you guys do has always been controversial. Speaking for myself, I've lived in controversy for the last year because of what happened with me and the FaZe guys, right? I've watched people flip from bullish to bearish on me. I've watched people go from W Banks to L Banks. I've watched it happen in real time.
It's just interesting that when it's cool to like you, or when that's the popular sentiment, people will do mental gymnastics and backflips and shape the conversation any way they can to favor who you are or what you're doing. They'll make excuses for you. They'll ignore things that you're doing that are objectively bad, because nobody is just good or bad, right? Then it's the exact opposite way, and it's just what you were talking about earlier: You can't cross the street without somebody making a comment or painting you in a negative way.
“Look at them. They didn't use the crosswalk.” You know what I mean? Bad example, but you get what I'm saying. No matter what the fuck you do, you literally cannot breathe without somebody commenting. Do you want to speak to that? I'm sure you guys talk a lot with each other about that.
We've talked a lot about this. One thing that I prioritize—and there's actually a podcast that I did that I haven't released—is taking care of the friendship you have with your partner, not just the romantic side of things. You have to understand: This is my best friend. He is somebody that, if I'm going to do the next 100 years with him, has to be someone that I love. He's also my best friend, and that's the number 1 thing.
People say it all the time. They're like, “Why the fuck is Camilla breathing like that?” Or, “Fuck this guy.” Or, “He's this,” or, “He's that.” “Why the fuck are they even—?” It's always something. But that's exactly what I want to talk about: If I were to walk out of a room, I know without a doubt that Owen would defend me if someone said something. I know without a doubt there's never been a moment where I thought, “Yo, wait. Is he going to do this? Is he going to do that?” Absolutely not.
I think that's where it becomes hard to find true friendships. I know, obviously, you were with FaZe Clan. You guys were like brothers. You said it yourself.
Yeah, the original group. This most recent rendition, to be honest with you, was different. I'm 34 years old. Obviously, the new-wave FaZe kids were all 21- and 22-year-old streamer guys, and I couldn't really relate in that sense. I'm not a guy who— I know we're streaming right now, but I'm definitely not a streamer. I'm much more on the behind-the-scenes side of things.
Obviously, I'm running a fucking show, a niche show, producing a show about finance, tech, whatever. This is what I'm choosing to do with my own free will, what I'm interested in learning about and want to build inside. It's not fucking going to Clavicular's club in Miami and fucking spitting in girls' mouths, you know? I could go—
We could go run that.
Oh, and I could fly there right now. We could go run that. No, we could go to FaZe Clan. I have an IRL backpack. We could go on a spree there.
That's funny. That'll be the Wednesday show. Just get me back in time for Thursday at 1:00 p.m.
I think it's really important. Again, it's not cope; it's just facts. I think your actual fans, the people who support you, will always matter, of course, and we love them. They've afforded us this fantastic dream life.
I think when we spend too much time dwelling on the negative shit, it comes off as ungrateful. Again, I've said this a million times: I am not a victim. You guys are not victims. We are so fucking lucky to be living this life. We live a fantastic, insane life.
We're so blessed, and I really do love my fans.
I know. I know you guys are. But just to the point of ignoring comments, you always have to remind yourself of 2 things. One, these people have never done anything in their lives. Anybody who's like that has never built anything. They're likely 14 or 15 years old.
There are so many instances of people just farming shit, right? You'll message somebody privately, or you'll see a DM from them like, “Hey, I'm a huge fan.” Or you get a reply back: “Holy shit, I didn't expect you to reply. I fucking love you,” you know?
That happens.
That happens all the time. Every time. It's every time.
That's insane.
And again, there's a hard line. I'm sure I'll say, “Follow back,” and they're like, “What?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's insane. By the way, I walk 10,000 steps a day. I'm very, very outside. I walk around outside, and I'm approached several times in my day-to-day personal life. I'm sure you're recognized too. It's always straight love. It's just positive: “Hey, let me grab a picture. I love what you did here.” It's never been negative.
It puts you, especially when you're in the weeds and the mud in terms of what the general sentiment is, in a weird place. You open up Twitter like, “Holy shit, the whole world hates me.” Then you go outside and everyone's like, “Dude, you're the fucking GOAT. Nice to see you. How have you been?” It's just such a weird thing.
I just talked about the general sentiment. If it's a trend to hate someone, everyone's going to do it, and then they'll forget about it the next day. That actual sentiment of “I hate this person” doesn't really live within that person.
But that's why it's so flimsy, and it's so much easier than people think it is to get out of. We talked about Kim K earlier, right? I'm sure there were periods of her life when she thought, “Holy shit, this is what everyone's going to remember me for forever. This is going to—” I'm sure she had moments in her life where she thought, “Fuck, this is going to fuck up the rest of my life.”
In a weird, crazy turn of events, it's the most important thing she's ever done, you know? It made this path possible for her to take and become Kim Kardashian. That's what life is. Life is just a fucking series of events happening one after the other, and there's always an opportunity to learn, shift perspective, and fucking pivot into something positive, as long as you stay true to yourself and have a good support system and people around you.
When did you make your first million dollars?
When I was 20.
Before Camilla, with all the shows and stuff?
No, it was actually with her. Snapchat was my first ever taste of money. In a 6-month span, I made roughly $600,000 and then lost it all—not the money, but the whole opportunity. I lost all my shows. I lost all my streaming.
So overnight, making $100,000 a month, and then overnight, done.
Yeah, it was literally zero to $100,000 a month to zero. A lot of people—I've never been—
Easy come, easy go, brother. Fast money. I'm sure you guys are all too familiar. Camilla, did you make a million dollars before you met Owen?
I made my first million with him. I made a million a couple of months before he made a million.
Sick. So you guys became millionaires at the same time?
You have to understand, I was sleeping on his floor when we met.
It's amazing.
We bought our first house—
You guys just have to chalk it up to fate and understand that it's never going to get better than this. You guys have to marry each other and have kids, you know what I'm saying? You have to.
As you grow more in this industry, there are always new shiny objects. There are millions and millions of beautiful women, and there are plenty of Michael B. Jordans. There's always going to be someone more beautiful who has more money, but that shit really doesn't matter.
No, I'm all about the plot, bro. Everything in my life, good or bad, I always think about it like that, and it's the craziest shit ever.
I lost every single thing. All of my Snapchat shows got deleted because one of our business partners made a thumbnail that was crazy. Everything got deleted. I went in my backyard and filmed myself ranting for 6 minutes about how, if something could be taken away from me that easily, it wasn't going to be the opportunity that changed my life, whatever. Then, in my camera roll, I have that 6-minute video. Five things later, I kid you not, the next day it's a selfie of me and Camilla, the day I met her, and then it was just a seamless transition.
Fate. Divine timing. That's just how shit works, and you have to trust good omens. When God, the universe—whatever you want to call it—is laying the path out for you, you just have to follow it. You have to walk down that path.
They say luck is having the right skills at the right time.
Yeah, positioning. We talk about that on the show constantly. It's just about being in the right position, and that's why you're so impressive to me. That's the part that I wish people would give you specifically more credit for: the industry you guys live in. Shiny new objects. You're a young man. You're wired the same as the rest of us, you know what I mean?
Your ability to curb the party, curb alcohol, stay on the straight and narrow, wake up every day at the same time and get after it, be loyal to a woman—to one woman—and fight through the dynamic that, I'm sure, adds an additional layer of stress when you work together. It's crazy, and you guys seem better than ever. It's cool.
And please don't get it twisted. It's not sunshine and rainbows.
Life is hard, though. The best things are hard. [laughter]
But it's not hard in the sense that it's ever been disrespectful or anything like that.
There's no screaming and shit.
But we made a conscious decision when we first realized that we were going to be more than friends. We were like—or at least I said it—"Yeah, this could end really badly. It would suck. We work together, and that would probably fall apart or whatever, but the upside of everything going right is so great that I'm willing to take the risk of the downside."
I've always thought about things in reverse of what you just said, how you articulated it. You said something along the lines of, "If it could go away that easily, then it wasn't meant to be." I've always thought, okay, I made $200,000 in a month. That just means I could do that. That means I did that. If I could do it once, I could do it again. You know what I mean? You just set the bar higher, higher, higher.
Okay, production's telling us we have a guest in the green room. I could sit and talk to you guys for hours and hours. No, no, no, no—it has nothing to do with you guys. We're supposed to wrap this up at 5:15, so we're supposed to have a couple more minutes.
But we might need a whole other episode with you, because I really want to talk about AI models and how you think tech is going to transform the adult industry. How are you guys positioning yourselves for that? Because if I'm you guys, by the way, I'm using your leverage as an elite team and an elite business. Obviously, Camilla, front-facing, is, like we said, 0.001% of the most successful girls on OnlyFans. And just like that, she is today the most current meta for adult entertainment.
So go get yourselves involved in what the future looks like for that industry. Go get equity in those businesses, right? And by the way, as you do, please pick up the phone and call me. Seriously, though.
I should call you after this, then.
Oh, we have to. By the way, please, because I can help you navigate that side of it. And obviously, we all know where this is headed. We all know, right? We know what it's going to look like, what it's going to feel like, what it's going to sound like.
Camilla and Owen, go make sure you guys are in those positions to continue to win. Don't just win now. What is this going to look like? What is this industry going to look like 5 to 10 years from now?
Even though you guys are just stuck in this vicious grind, you have so much capital now and so much know-how, and you have these big, giant platforms and brands that you can kind of effortlessly—you don't have to commit yourself to a hard grind and be the ones to actually build this. You can just identify good teams, good ideas, like you said, chuck money in there or chuck yourselves in there in front of it, whatever. Yeah, let's definitely talk after this.
Yeah, no, there's a lot. I don't want to take too much time, for sure, but there's a lot of opportunity, especially with the brands that we've built and the reputation that we've built in the space, where we can kind of be front-facing and behind the scenes in the AI movement.
A lot of people, with what we've done with real creators and real management, are now looking to us. As guidelines get stricter and people start doing less work, they're like, "Okay, where are you guys going next?" So it's the first time I've been in a position like that, where people are kind of looking toward us, and I'm excited for that position.
Z, is there anything you want to say or ask before we wrap with them?
It just seems like you guys are in a really good spot. It seems like you have a ton of opportunity, a ton of experience, and a ton of people who want to get close to you guys for a ton of different reasons. That's really cool.
The question I would ask is how you're thinking about the business side of things, because I know you probably get a ton of inbound. How do you decide what to do and what not to do? And I was going to ask your opinion on AI and how you think that's going to change things. We kind of just talked about that.
As far as what companies we want to invest in, or all the things that come our way, me and Owen sit down and talk about the company as if it's our own. What does this actually look like? How does the conversation go? How passionate do we get about it?
It's because I've been on both sides of it. I know, as a creator and managing creators, that if a company comes to me for a deal, if it's just a quick lick—"Yo, they're not going to make money. We'll take the bag, though, because they have big investors"—or, "Oh, shit, this is actually going to do really well"—I've been on that side as a creator, and it doesn't feel good.
It doesn't feel good to take $10,000 or $20,000 when it's like, "Yo, I don't really fuck with this." So I come into a company on the back end, and they're pitching some absolute baloney, to be honest. They're like, "We want to—"
[laughter] That's like, sure, dude. We'll do 5 Instagram posts for $100,000. Sure. Sure. We talked about this earlier. We talked about this earlier. Yeah, I mean, you guys—
The shiny object syndrome is crazy now, because we're in a position where, financially, technically, we're actually making less in the last year because of the situation with her switching paths and everything. But people are asking us more, and there are so many people saying, "Can you help me with XYZ?"
And I'm like, "Yeah, I can help with everything, but I have to start saying no more often." So we're actually still learning as we go, to be honest.
Use the capital to your advantage. Attention is the most valuable thing ever, and you guys have that piece, too. Leverage those rather than your time to afford yourself more time to identify more opportunities to leverage these things.
Listen, we'll end this conversation on this. Owen, as a young man—obviously, we preach that; that's what we preach on the show—the show's all about investing in yourself. We preach positioning yourself accordingly, paying close attention to money, obviously making as much money as possible, commanding as much attention as you possibly can, understanding the way attention works, and AI literacy.
You guys obviously have the attention. You guys have the money. You have the finance. If you get the AI piece down, brother—and, I mean, hey, I got you. Please do. Seriously. It's been too long, and this just reminds me of why I love talking to you guys.
We'll follow up. Appreciate you guys so much for coming on. Thank you guys so much.
And I appreciate you as well. Thanks for being a part of the conversation.
You guys. Of course. Thank you guys. Take care. Talk soon.
Bye, guys.
Bye.
Such an interesting conversation. They're sharp, bro. I'm telling you.
They're sharp, and they're so young.
They're not afraid of plot. Bro's always for the plot.
He made his first million at 20 and has been loyal to this girl over the course of a few years. That Squid Game—when did Squid Game come out? 4 years ago or something? Maybe—no, 6 years ago at this point, maybe?
I think so. It was 2020.
Yeah, man. They've been really going at it for a minute. It's crazy. Bro, $30M. Whoa.
Yeah, she cooked. She cooked. She wasn't fucking around. Off of a MrBeast feature, that's crazy.
Okay, cool, guys. Next up, to wrap up the show, we're going to have IForensic, who's a World Cup football—soccer, for me—quant. We're going to talk about the World Cup and the markets. This will be both of our first times meeting you. You are part of the Polymarket family, right?
Yes.
9. Guest: World Cup
Yeah, we wanted to talk to you. Polymarket's like, “Hey, we're doing all types of cool markets on the World Cup. Maybe talk about it.” And I think Z and I did the right thing. I don't think we're qualified personally to dive deep on these markets, so we found you, a quant. This is what I like to do: go find the smartest guy in the room and somebody who spends all day and night talking about these things. Forensic, do you want to start off by introducing yourself and let the chat—let our audience—know why they should give a fuck about what you're about to talk about?
Yeah, so I'm IForensic. I really appreciate you guys having me on the show, first off. Thank you for that. I've been streaming football betting for about 6 years now, and the World Cup is one of my favorite events. We've been going crazy, streaming just about every single match every single day.
They love you. Yeah, they love you.
They know.
Yeah, so we're streaming every single game. We have this Mexico–South Korea game pulled up right now, right? This is a tough one because I was back and forth on a couple of ideas here. I had predicted a 1-1 draw. I'm kind of feeling a draw in the match overall, but you have Mexico playing in Mexico. My big thing with that is they're not going to lose. The odds don't think Mexico loses the match. If you want to attack it in either direction, they're not going to lose this match, but I have a 1-1 draw because they both got a win in their first match already. They just need 1 more point to get 4 points, and 4 points would get you to the next round. I call it one of these handshake agreements of a 1-1 draw.
Okay. We'll take the draw. The trade is for South Korea not to win.
Yes. That's where I'm at with it. Now, if Heung-min Son goes off, I apologize in advance, but that's not what I'm expecting here.
Cool. Okay, cool. What's next?
Bro, the US showed out. This is one thing I do know, because I had a lot of friends go to the fucking game. I saw a lot about this. They fucking popped off last week. The World Cup is in America. Yes, bro. Yes.
No, 100%. I want to touch on that because there was this idea from a lot of people outside the US, and even from half of the US in general, saying this team sucked—no passion, no mentality. Even I had my doubts about them, too. They went into that match, I feel like, as a slight favorite. They were above 50% to win the match, and they showed out. I truly believe they looked like a European team in that game. I was absolutely stunned by them. They played incredible. It's kind of sad that a lot of the world was probably asleep during it, but yes, the USA showed out. Tough match tomorrow against Australia. I'm already sweating thinking about it.
Are we taking USA? They have them at 62% here.
Yeah, that's the thing, though. The USA price is ass. It's just not good. I feel like what I'm going to end up predicting when I do my predictions for each game—unbiased—is going to be a draw for me. Biased, 2-1 USA.
So, for the culture, we want to see the US win. But the trade—and it makes sense, because Polymarket has a ton of US users; it's the Polymarket US app—obviously, I grew up in Boston and my dad was a bookie, just an underground local bookie. And it was brutal being a bookie in Boston through the Celtics, the Patriots, the Red Sox, and the Bruins.
Bro.
Dude, brutal. That's why it doesn't even sound safe at all. Every bookie was broke and pissed. It was like—
How is that?
It's a fucking nightmare because people are slamming, obviously, whatever. But that's just how it goes. So, the trade here is again: the US—
We're taking USA.
—to not win.
We want to lean that way, but even though the odds are not great, we're taking it.
Yeah, I would say there's no shot you'll get me on anything that's not pro-USA for this game. I'd rather not take anything, but if you're going to take something, just roll with the US on this.
Okay.
And then I'm not sure if you guys have any type of futures going on with any of these groups or whatever, but one group that I was predicting before the tournament to win their group—and the result they had in the first game was pretty good for me in that aspect—I'm thinking Morocco to win. I think it's Group C.
C?
Yes, Morocco.
You think Morocco's going to beat Brazil in their group? What does that mean? Wait, let's clarify. That means that they're the only team that's going to come out of this group?
No, to win the group means you're going to finish on top of the group. Brazil and Morocco played in the first matchday already, and they drew 1-1. That's exactly what I had the match going to. That was something I predicted before the tournament: first match, Brazil–Morocco 1-1. I got a lot of hate for it, too. People were saying, “Brazil this, Brazil that. They got him, him, him,” but it's just one of those games where, again, the top 2 teams have a little handshake, a 1-1 draw, and then they move on to the next game.
For that one, the price is really nice—only a 30% chance for Morocco to win the group. But it's one of these things where I feel like Brazil play Scotland on the last matchday, and that's where I feel like the little, quote-unquote, upset happens. I feel like that's where Morocco takes it.
All right, we're rolling with Morocco. I like Morocco. Moroccan food is fire.
It's cool to see this chat. They fuck with you, bro. I think you're really—
He knows what he's talking about. I think you're leading people in the right direction.
IForensic
Yeah, if anyone in the chat has a question, too, I feel like I'm not the best at it, but I love doing the whole sports and football thing.
What flag is behind you? You got all this Chicago shit. You from Chicago?
IForensic
Yeah, yeah. I was born in Chicago, so Chicago everything. Then I have my Dortmund thing here, but yeah, definitely Chicago sports for everything. I don't know if I'm pointing the right way. I have Millennium Mall over here. A little bit of House of Dragons coming up, and then I'm a German Dortmund fan coming through.
Sick, sick. I fuck with you, bro. I fuck with your energy. This is great. Anytime we get to talk, anytime we get—
Is there anything else that you trade on Polymarket, or is it strictly soccer?
IForensic
For right now, it's just soccer. I've been getting into it a little bit more. I've been on Polymarket for about 3 weeks, since it's been getting bigger in the US, too. I love the idea of the futures here, how you can always have a cash-out. You get to see the whole flow of the graph, especially with the World Cup, where people are taking teams getting knocked out in the round of 16. Teams that finish at the bottom of their group—that's another fun one to look at.
I watched the Knicks, obviously, with the rest of the world, win the Finals. Obviously, the game before that was a fucking generational comeback, called the best comeback in NBA Finals history, right? On Polymarket, it was trading at 99% at one point for San Antonio to win at the end of the 3rd quarter.
I'm thinking about this. It's at home in New York, and I don't know if you saw the video of everybody talking about how much the tickets cost, but it was fucking insane. Celebrity rows were half a million to a million dollars a ticket. It's ridiculous. There are people sitting in regular seats at $10,000 a ticket. Why the fuck wouldn't you open your phone and trade that? Throw a little flyer—$100 extra, $1,000 extra—into that.
You bet $1,000, or you trade $1,000 on that game at that time, and that's $100,000 at the end of the game.
That covers you and everybody’s ticket. It’s fucking— you know, what’s another thousand dollars in the grand scheme of a $50,000 seat? It’s fucking insane.
IForensic
Exactly.
A $50,000 seat. It’s fucking insane.
The fact that they’re doing it during the Super Bowl, bro, makes a ton of sense.
Right? [Laughter.]
I was like, bro, I’m already here. I might as well double down.
Might as well, bro. $100 bucks. Bro, $100 bucks.
I might as well double down, bro. I’m already here.
You trade it for $100 at 99 to 1. That’s $10,000. That’s the price of a beer at MSG. It’s like, yeah, but I’ll let you go back to the football stuff.
No, it’s so true about the whole 99% thing. I think in soccer and football here, you have this idea that it’s such a free-flowing game, right? So you’ll have teams that look great on paper, they play the game, and that’s been the big narrative in this World Cup so far: these underdog teams are scoring and looking good.
We’ve had a 0-0 draw with Cape Verde and Spain. Spain’s a favorite of the tournament. Cape Verde’s one of the last teams to get in. That’s insane. Yesterday, we had DR Congo draw Portugal, right? We had Ronaldo, Bruno Fernandes, all these world-class players, and they draw DR Congo.
So, another idea. I haven’t locked this one in yet. It was just something I wanted to bring up on the show, just in case of a fun idea around a small country potentially making some noise. Haiti and Brazil play, I think, pretty soon here, if I was looking at it right.
And if you want to get crazy—I’m not sure what’s available where, because I can see it on the website. I want to say it was on the app as well—Haiti to score in the first half. It’s been one of these things that’s just been happening in the tournament, and we really don’t know why. It’s just one of these things that keeps happening.
There are 2 angles for this. You can either go with possibly Haiti to score in the first half, and I think that price would probably be pretty insane if it’s available there. And then also, even trading on Haiti—Haiti’s not going to win the match, but just from the idea of, let’s just say Haiti score first, see all that money come in, get out when you can. That’s an idea I have for that match as well.
I see. I see. I see.
Knucklehead035 in my chat just gifted you a sub and said, “He earned that sub. We killed it on Canada-Qatar.” So I’m guessing you dropped some fucking gem.
Yes, we did go 2 for 2 on that match. I had Jonathan David to score and this one guy for 2 shots on Canada as well. That game was crazy.
Thank you for the gifted subs.
W wins.
Bro, thank you. [Laughter.] Absolutely. Cool. Are you going to go to any of the games?
It’s been the question that people have been asking me throughout every stream I do, and it pains me to say no as of right now. I did say if someone sponsored a trip for me to go somewhere, I would just IRL vlog.
You have to go. What the fuck? Wait, what? [Laughter.] What would it take? How much would it cost for you to go to a game, on the cheaper side?
I think on the cheaper side, I would imagine flight, hotel, ticket—maybe $3,000 to $4,000.
Okay, so let’s just do this. What’s your favorite spot this week? Let’s make a trade right now, $3,000. If we win—[Laughter.] If we win, we’ll pay for the trip.
Oh my goodness.
And if we lose, we’re free.
A lot of pressure. Yeah, chat, get in on this.
Chat, [Laughter.] he’s asking what spot you guys are taking. What’s the trade?
Man, I’m looking at all the games right now for my picks.
It’s all in, and it’s the fate of you—it’s between you going to a game and not.
Is there any price requirement on it? I obviously don’t want to be like, “That was lame,” and be like, “Oh, obvious team to win” or anything like that, but—
It’s just—we’re going to put it on a market. At 50/50, we’ll put $3,000 on it. So where are you putting that? Let’s trade a market that’s close to 50%.
Looking.
Or if it’s less, we’ll put a trade in at like $2,000 that’s trading at 60% or whatever, 40%.
Someone said USA-Australia, both teams to score. I’m so worried about that game being 0-0, I can’t even lie. They know how to get me going, though, because that’s how my stream is. It’s basically: drop a few picks in the chat, and then I start analyzing and thinking. That’s kind of the flow of it.
What did you feel most strongly about last week? Someone said we crushed Canada-Qatar. This week, surely in your mind, it’s like—I love to use this phrasing, and I apologize, but gun to your fucking head, you’ve got to pick a spot. Your life is on the line.
You know what?
Guns on this episode, bro. [Laughter.]
It’s going to be a fun sweat regardless for me, because I know I’m going to take the L. Ivory Coast and Mexico. Mexico, Mexico.
See, they’re saying that, but remember what I said about the handshake-agreement draw? I don’t want to see it happening, right? It shouldn’t be 0-0, but I keep getting worried about these matches ending in a draw. And if it’s not a 1-1 draw, I think it’s going to be a 0-0 draw.
The one thing I’m going to float out there, just to see how chat reacts to it—see, someone said it. Someone said Ivory Coast because they know I’ve been glazing Ivory Coast in January, February, well beforehand. I wouldn’t pick them to win, but maybe just them to score. I think that against Germany, which is a crazy game.
Is that an even 50/50?
What if we pick them to win? They’re like 17%. It’s pretty low.
That’s pretty low. I’m not going to a World Cup game, probably, if we pick them to win.
If you’re doing it as a little bit of a hedge with upside—you’re like 17%—what is it for them to score?
It’s 5x if they win.
What if they score?
Let’s see the full odds.
Where’s the market for them to score?
Germany to win by 1.5 goals is—no, 62%.
They don’t have the market up yet for them to just score, because that’s probably going to be my big thing. On stream, I was probably going to do first half.
Both teams to score is 55%.
Okay, so there we go.
That’s right, yeah.
That’s the one. I think that’s the one, right? Okay, open and see—open and see, that’s what we’re going to do. [Laughter.] If we smash this trade, you’ll be going to a game, my friend.
I believe in Ivory Coast. I will say I will be so gutted if Ivory Coast win and Germany don’t score. There will be a whole meltdown on my stream.
Well, by the way, I think you and your own stream should hedge that. Go, because it’s at 17%. Throw a couple bucks in that and let’s prepare for that, because anything could happen, right?
Great idea. Yeah, for sure. One thing is true in this tournament: anything can happen.
Absolutely. All right, cool. Amazing. Wow, that’s so fun. We ride, baby.
[Laughter.]
I know, facts. You’re awesome. I mean, we’re going to have to—I mean, we should just bring you on throughout the course of the World Cup. I had no idea.
Listen, we interview a lot of tech founders, heavy finance guys, a lot of very dense material. They’re not content-first, right? They’re not used to speaking in a format like this, so it is a slower conversation, thicker, dense material. But, bro, you’re a great streamer. You’re a great content creator. You speak well. You have great energy. You’re fucking good people, and I know we’ve only met—and we’re meeting through a stream—but Ivory Coast, baby. Let’s ride. Ivory Coast in the chat.
I really want you to go. Maybe I’ll go with you, because it’s in LA, right? The games?
[Laughter.] I think that specific game, Ivory Coast-Germany—oh, well, they’re all over the country. That one’s in Toronto, but—
Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. We’ll let you figure out what game you’re going to, but—
Yeah.
Awesome. Cool. I mean, on that note, maybe we have you on next week to do a follow-up and see where we’re at. I mean, unless you fucking have all your picks bust—
[Laughter.] Totally understood.
—then we’re probably never talking to you ever again.
[Laughter.]
I’m just kidding.
We pray. We pray.
I’m just kidding. W for awesome. Let’s get some W4s in the chat. Appreciate you, man. Great energy. This is a great way to wrap things up, and we’re definitely going to have to have you come back on.
No, thank you so much. This was awesome. A lot of fun. Appreciate it.
Hell yeah.
Thank you, brother. I'll let you know later.
Awesome. Dude, I fuck with bro. Listen, seriously—W4s in the chat. Yeah, he's great. His energy was great.
You could just tell by the way he talked about the game. He gets it, bro. He's the GOAT of soccer. [laughter]
Yeah, he's locked in.
He said, “I know this and that.” It's good. It's good. Yeah, he's good. I've got to follow him wherever the fuck he makes content. That guy's awesome.
10. Outro
Polymarket, thank you guys for connecting that. And I know I kind of, without permission, decided on the fly with the Market Bubble team and the Polymarket team, “Let's rip 3 bands on the Ivory Coast to score.” It's so degenerate, but we're taking that trade. We're riding the Ivory Coast.
Ivory Coast to score, Germany to score.
Listen, man, there's another fucking 4½-hour stream in the books. This episode, we had some technical difficulties. It was a roller coaster of emotions. We had Rasmer, who we thought we had to replace Andrew Kang with. Michael Saylor's the most attractive guy in CT. Vitalik has a huge piece. A lot happened in this episode. We got through a lot.
How are you feeling, bro? Is there anything else you want to talk about before we wrap?
Feeling good. I'm probably going to run through some charts. I know you've got to dip out, but—
Awesome. All right, guys. I'm going to keep my stream live. We're going to pass it over to Z, and he'll do some post-show. I do a pre-show; he'll do a post-show. He's going to go through TAs. Chat, you guys can still speak in my chat. He'll see it. Ask him any questions that you want. Z is the best.
Everything that I've learned over the last month and a half has been from you, and it's been great. You're fucking awesome. It's an honor to work with you on the show. Had a lot of fun today. This felt fucking great, and guys, I appreciate everybody for watching. That's where I'm going to take us out.
My stream is going to be live until Z ends, but I've got to go run and catch a flight. We're going to St. Barts, and I'm doing a remote show next Thursday. So, 1:00 p.m. Thursday, I'm going to be in the sun. I might be in the sand. I might be in the fucking ocean doing the fucking thing. [laughter] But we'll be here.
Ocean.
We'll be here.