The Secret History of Sneaker Twitter - Nick Bruhman

Nick Bruhman, how are you, dude? How are you doing? Nice to see you.

Dude, it’s mutual. You are incredibly viral right now. How does it feel?

Bro, this is just incredible. I love popularity.

No, that’s madness. This is real madness. I think, as we speak, the number of views has exceeded 400,000, which is unreal. Four hundred thousand article views. Why did you write it?

Honestly, it’s just a hobby: writing about things that interest me or certain achievements, like on Sneaker Twitter. There were a few tweets that went viral even before this, mentioning “Sneaker Twitter,” and people were discussing how “Instant” had come out and attracted a valuation of $2.5 billion.

Everyone started talking, and someone retweeted it with the words, “Agents automate everything.” I saw it. This was tweeted by Signal, and Michael Notify [?] cited it.

Yes, it wasn’t even Michael at first. Maybe Michael was first. He retweeted a quote or screenshot of a tweet from “18 Percent Kid.” Essentially, he was saying that the average person is 5–10 years behind Sneaker Twitter.

That was the most apt example because we have always had agents. There just weren’t agents before that made life easier. They were more about making life much more profitable, purely for the sake of money.

I think it got 100,000 or 200,000 views, and everyone started saying, “This algorithm is bringing Sneaker Twitter back.” So it was obvious that someone had to write an article about it.

Of course, I didn’t have much time, so I told a bunch of people to write it. No one took it up, and I thought, “Okay, this is a guaranteed million views. Let’s do this.” So for 2 hours, I just wrote feverishly. Very typical of an iceberg, of course. I didn’t have much time. I published it, and here we are.

You slightly exaggerated the number of views by 60%, but okay. I want to introduce you and present you as I understand you. I know a little bit about your story, but not that much.

I consider myself a true old-school Sneaker Twitter fan. I was just a complete loser. I got into the sneaker community on Twitter sometime around 2015 or 2016. It’s not that early, but I just loved Twitter. It was the same thing you had with crypto in the beginning. I thought Twitter was a lot of fun, so I just hung around there.

This was exclusively my job. I rented a copy of the Dash bot or something. I had See U Preme [?], AIO was still awaited, and I had AIOmoji [?]. I don’t know what happened to those guys. It seems they have become Kryptonians.

But I was a very big loser, just hanging there. I liked it. I was in several groups. Then I got really hooked on cards. This was when Zenyum [?] made Card Brokers [?], and I joined. I still remember it.

There was a guy at Card Brokers around 2019, when things started to get hot. There was a Steed [?] there whom I didn’t really like in the end, but I wrote him a direct message on Twitter. He was the co-founder of Card Brokers.

I was in college, my freshman year. I wrote to him, “Yo, do you think $50 would be enough to start reselling cards? I’m going to buy a copy of Card Brokers, but I don’t have the money.”

He said, “You know what? To hell with it. Here’s a free month’s subscription for you.” I was like, “Oh my God, they’re going to get it.” So he gave me a free month.

I joined Card Brokers, and that was my first experience seeing this reflexive bubble market. I didn’t really understand what was going on, but it was like throwing darts with my eyes closed. Everything was just going up.

I was watching these providers at Card Brokers, and I thought, “Dude, these guys are idiots. I can do the same thing they do.” So I started doing my own TikTok reviews. Some of them went viral. I started working as a vendor. I didn’t know what I was doing in a couple of groups.

Card Brokers was the biggest, as far as I remember, and Poke Market [?] was huge. You guys were huge. At some point, I wrote to you, or you wrote to me, and I had 10% traffic. You wrote to me that you had started doing Pokémon too, maybe half a year after that, right around the same heyday.

I kind of stopped following it after Top Shot. You were a legend on Sneaker Twitter. Pokémon was incredibly popular. I want to ask how much you were making, but I don’t know if you’ll tell me.

Then I remember you left to start Malice [?], right? Things got a little quiet with the cards. You started Malice. I was totally focused on NFT Top Shot, and then I remember there were groups like Split the Difference or Hidden Society that were doing a little bit of that too—Yaz and the guys.

Then I kind of stopped following Sneaker Twitter. You had a cult period on Sneaker Twitter. I don’t know; tell me from your side how you started.

Yeah, yeah. I’ll start at the beginning. When I was at Roblox, I actually started reselling Roblox items on the secondary market.

What year?

It was 12 years ago, so 2014 or 2015. That was my first step into a kind of internet-entrepreneurial journey. I would buy items from other people and resell them, making 50–100% profit, because I was selling on a trusted site where people were willing to pay extra just to not throw them away.

I took advantage of that niche and bought from people at any price, even 100% of the market value, then resold the items for 150% the same day. It’s funny because I was so young. I was only 12 or 13, so I couldn’t have a bank account.

I changed 20 different PayPal accounts because they would let you hold a certain amount of money before freezing them. I was constantly creating new ones to keep making money.

That’s when crypto started to skyrocket. Bitcoin, Ethereum, and all these merchants on Roblox were using them as a new payment method because there were no chargebacks.

You could get a refund through PayPal. Man, these damn chargebacks were absurd.

Yeah. Crypto came along and solved that problem: “Listen, I’ll send you crypto, and you can’t get a refund because you already got the product.” A lot of these people were getting refunds because it was an industry full of scammers.

That’s how I learned about crypto and became a kind of shitcoin influencer, sincerely believing that these coins were the future. There was this coin called Tatcoin [?], and I remember making a video on YouTube where I said, “Look, this is the future. This is what it does, and it provides passive income.”

It wasn’t the future, and it completely failed. But I managed to take the few thousand dollars I made on Roblox and turn it into $10,000. I thought I was going to turn it into a Lamborghini, but it didn’t happen.

Then this guy from the Pac-Man community—his name is Rad Rad Rad Rad [?], which is his Twitter handle—introduced me to the sneakerhead community on Twitter. He got me there, and I owe a lot to him for that.

He got me into my first group. I forget what it was called, but it was a very niche thing. That’s how I learned about Sneaker Twitter and how you could make money just reselling random things like sneakers, collectibles, or whatever.

I also realized that I was terrible at reselling. I was the worst reseller who could ever have existed, and every drop I tried would end in complete failure. Plus, I was in school at the time, so it was really hard to juggle the two.

I realized that even though I was terrible at reselling, I was great at getting bots when they came out. For those who don’t know, bots were basically our version of agents in 2017 and 2018.

They were created by teenagers who had a ton of time to reverse-engineer the checkout process on a website, put it into their bot, and have it automatically buy within 1–3 seconds of the product going live, instead of someone doing it manually in 10–15 seconds.

So it completely outperformed manual labor. These bots were very rare. If everyone had a bot, they wouldn’t have any value. They might release 100 copies for 10,000 people hunting for them at the same time.

When they sold out, the retail price was $300, and they resold for $5,000 or $6,000. That was the best thing you could resell. Almost no sneakers or collectibles ever reached that markup—not even close.

I was actually in the top 500 in Overwatch, and I was blowing everyone away in Fortnite. I had a very fast reaction time. So when these bots came out, I always got them. I was always one of the lucky 100 out of 10,000 people who wanted them.

I would post successful results, and it got to the point where someone would ask, “How the hell do you do that?” Publishing the successes was my very first income statement. You publish the success, you don’t explain how you did it, and everyone around you just goes, “Yeah, of course.” Then everyone asks, “How the hell did you do that?”

So I created a group called Bot Cookers, which was the first group I ever ran. It was very simple—just me and my friends. We would sit in a Discord voice chat when the bot came out, and we would all “cook” the result because we had the advantage of a Twitter monitor and an automatic link opener.

The original Twitter monitor.

By the way, we were the ones who invented Twitter monitors.

Yeah, that’s an interesting fact. The Twitter sneaker community invented Twitter monitors.

Not even close.

No, that’s true. The person who provided Twitter monitors until recently, until the API changed in X—that all went away from there.

The advantage we had, even over people using TweetDeck—which was a faster version of Twitter back then—was direct access to the API. As soon as someone tweeted, it would instantly appear in the Discord channel.

So you saw it 800 milliseconds before someone else on TweetDeck, and then your browser had an autolink opener that would recognize any link in the tweet and instantly open it for you. If, for example, the password was in an image, the OCR would recognize it and copy it to your clipboard without your intervention. You would just paste it in and place the order.

You were 1–2 seconds ahead of the average consumer, and that was enough to make $5,000. Well, that’s actually what Bot Quickers was, and we were only making $3,000 a month. I think I was in 10th or 11th grade. Pretty rich, but not as rich as the developers at the time.

Then PokeMarket came along, and that’s how it happened. PokeMarket came along in either 2020 or 2021. I think 2020—most likely in 2020, right around the time COVID started. Because Pokémon gets everything from China, we had a huge supply problem directly into the US. All the Pokémon merchandise was getting harder and harder to get, but nobody on Sneaker Twitter knew about it.

I was scrolling through Reddit and saw a post that was like, “All these collectors are reselling. They’re not fans of the hobby at all.” I thought, “Okay, there’s clearly a supply-and-demand problem here.” Knowing what I knew from the sneaker world, I decided to start the first Pokémon reselling group.

I set up monitors for tier-one, tier-two, and tier-three wholesalers. That was Target, Walmart, and so on—anyone who had the merchandise. Because I was one of the first, you could actually buy this Pokémon merchandise manually. It could be in stock within 5 minutes.

The whole group that I had back then could basically buy everything, and then they would resell it. Everybody was in the black. You probably made a few hundred dollars on each product. If someone was taking 100 pieces, you can do the math. That was great—really great money.

Then, of course, after I got PokeMarket, it exploded in popularity. People were reselling memberships for $1,000.

That was crazy.

No, it was a renewable membership that was being resold for $1,000 on the secondary market. When I saw that, I thought, “Okay, I have some clout in this industry now. Let me keep making money off of this.”

After PokeMarket, I created Omnis, the first collectibles bot group. Dallas came after Omnis. Dallas was a big group—the second-largest group. But Omnis came along, and we basically targeted Pokémon sites, Best Buy, Target, and all these random sites.

Graphics cards were very limited at the time. I forgot about the resale of graphics cards.

We were doing great with PokeMarket, but when Amnezia came along, we basically—I forget what graphics card dropped at Best Buy, but we had an antibot bypass that we got for a few hundred thousand dollars. When they released it, before the queue had even run for 5 seconds, the entire stock was sold out. It all went to Amnezia.

We had a bunch of news articles written about this bot. It was crazy. Because of that, the bot was reselling for $6,000 or $7,000 on Amnezia.

Bot?

Yeah, Amnesia AIO.

Okay, I was just late. I was just gone by then.

Yeah, yeah. You would be surprised.

Interesting. So all the money was in the resale of keys?

Yes, exactly. The Bot Bible actually exists too. I don’t know if you remember that, but I did it to help people buy and resell stuff, because that’s what I was good at.

It was another agent that I had: a customizable autofill and autopay extension. You would say, “If you see a checkout button, click it immediately, fill in the details, and move on,” because most people were using Shopify. It literally knew everything by heart. You just opened the link, and it did it for you in 2–3 seconds. You were ahead of everyone who was trying to do it manually.

It was kind of a side job at the time.

Wow, “side job.” I haven’t heard that word in a while.

Here’s another funny story about Omnis. Pokémon Center in Japan released a series of Evolutions for their 50th anniversary, and we took 90–95% of the items. They changed their sales system from first come, first served to a lottery.

You see how this very small community of people who just found huge flaws in the markets they were working in actually changed these big public markets? A lot of people changed the way companies were producing products entirely through bots.

Then Malice came along, and we were the fastest to reach, I think, $2.4 million in annual revenue. The best thing about this business is that you hear those numbers and think the costs must be huge. But no, 95% of that revenue is pure profit.

You paid me about $50 a month.

I was getting—it was actually about $200. It was a little bit more. We were doing pretty well.

But it was market value. It was crazy. It was market value, because everyone was 15 or 17 years old. Nobody was getting high; everyone was just playing games, right? So what do you do when you’re playing? You make a few posts, make a couple hundred bucks, and spend it on whatever you want.

Yeah. Once they put it all in the lottery, that was it.

No, because then lottery bots came along.

Raffle bot? What is a raffle bot? A bot?

No, a bot—Hyped Raffle Bot.

Hyped Raffle Bot.

Yeah, yeah. Nothing was ever really done. Even now, bots still exist. That’s why my article is still trending, because a lot of people say that people like us are killing the sneaker business. But that’s not really the case. On the contrary, we’ve made the market much more efficient.

The average person has to understand that if you’re in a market where there are these inefficiencies, it only takes one person to come in and easily understand, “Okay, here’s what I can significantly optimize,” and they’ll make money from it.

About Sneaker Twitter, people don’t understand one thing: they just found every market. There was the card era, the sneaker era, the Funko era, the art era, the ticket era, the pool era, and probably the console era.

The sneaker kids ruined NFTs in the beginning. Come on. They were the ones who got the most inventory during NFT drops, right? That’s because NFTs didn’t really have any bot protection. They were the easiest to bot.

By the way, another interesting fact: at the height of Sneaker Twitter, Shopify’s CTO was literally chatting with the community. It was crazy. Sneaker Twitter let him in too. It was weird, because nobody in Sneaker Twitter realized that it was affecting people at such a high level at a company with a capitalization of over $100 billion. But it happened.

Companies like Akamai and all these bot-protection services knew about Sneaker Twitter. They knew the developers with whom they constantly played cat and mouse. The craziest thing is that a team of 100 people trying to stop a bot was defeated by one teenager who lived on the internet.

What’s also striking is the similarity with the crypto world. You think about ego, and this is where, in my opinion, your article was successful, because someone was getting rich at every level of this whole system.

There were people who ran bots with their own money. Then there were people who ran bots through slots. Then there were bot developers and proxy providers. Then there were those who resold bots, people who rented bots, people who managed groups, and people who provided information in those groups.

Then there were people who bought access to groups to use the information for their own drops. Finally, there was the end user who paid $2,000 for Travis Scott.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s like there were 1,000 people creating all these products, but there were also a few hundred thousand people constantly trying to get the product during the hype era. Everybody wanted to wear Yeezy. Everybody wanted to wear Supreme. How do you get it without paying retail price? You bought it, right?

But then you had to figure out the whole industry: proxies, Gmail, AYCD. The old ones—what were they called? Used Gmail? I forgot about Gmail.

Yeah, yeah. And then there was AYCD, which would warm up Google accounts so they looked normal at checkout and didn’t look suspicious. When you went through the CAPTCHA, it was a lot easier—just one click, instead of solving those nine squares where you had to look for traffic lights or something nearby.

Yeah. He was in crypto for a while. I don’t know if he’s still there. At least, I haven’t seen him in a while.

You know what? Actually, the craziest thing is that the most famous people in crypto came from Sneaker Twitter. Like Cocker, right? EQ, like 404, for example.

Was 404 a guy from Sneaker Twitter?

He was on the AMNotify staff.

Really? I didn’t know that. Do you think AMNotify was the most popular group?

They were the biggest.

What do you think their annual revenue was?

I don’t think they were the biggest, actually. GF and NF were doing $5 million in annual revenue.

But they were a little late, weren’t they? They were doing how much?

Yeah, $5 million in annual revenue.

Okay, $5 million.

Yeah, yeah.

So maybe AMNotify was doing that a few years ago. Was KSR a bot?

They had KSR as a bot.

How much did they make on that bot?

A lot. Millions. But I think the craziest thing is that the CEO of AMNotify literally tweeted, expressing gratitude to GF, NF, and KSR. That was cool.

The CEO of AMNotify was literally selling antibot bypasses 6 years ago, and now he’s the youngest billionaire in the world. How crazy is that? The youngest billionaire in the world came out of Sneaker Twitter.

Well, there you go. It’s crazy. Then there’s Jason from Wrath, who works at Slash, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Wrath was once a $10,000 dev team. Wrath was a $10,000 bot. Remember when someone de-anonymized Jason from Wrath because he was on his little brother’s football team? Remember that?

Yeah. He was like 14.

What do you mean, “he was 14”? He was selling bots for $10,000 when he was 14.

Yeah, and then VICE made a video about him.

Really?

Yeah, they interviewed him. They said this 13- or 14-year-old kid was making $600,000 a year selling this automation bot. He’s incredible. He talked to the CTO of Shopify when he was 14.

How big was the team of developers that built the bot? Explain the ecosystem. How many developers were writing code for these bots, and how many bots were there at their peak?

I think there were about 100 great bots at their peak.

A hundred?

Yeah. There were probably a few hundred in total, right? The problem was that there were tier-one, tier-two, and tier-three developers. The tier-three developer was the one who knew how to make the process fully automated on the backend but had no idea how to get around the anti-bot systems. If you had Akamai on the site, the bot would break, right?

But there were tier-one developers who could reverse-engineer the systems and actually do it themselves. They didn’t even buy the anti-bot bypass; they figured it out themselves. Then they rented it out to other bot developers.

A lot of people don’t realize that the best bot developers were constantly communicating with each other. They had a common chat.

Seriously? Like Lucas and all those people?

Yeah. They were kind of working together. They helped each other out enough to not get themselves in trouble, and they rented out the anti-bot bypass for $50,000 a drop.

That’s still a lot of money, because if you rent it out for 12 drops, you’ve made $1 million doing what? Selling the same thing you use for your own bot, which is already making hundreds of thousands of dollars, and now you have an extra million on top of that.

Explain this, because I was a complete loser. I’m probably going to surprise you, but I’ve never used bots. I’ve bought manually my whole life. I’ve never had a bot.

I’ve also used garbage. I was running the damn AIO Emoji on Supreme. I accidentally bought a $1,000 Supreme jacket when I was training and couldn’t sell it. It really ruined my budget. It was serious. Classic.

Explain this, because they always showed up—I remember Lucas showing up 5 minutes before the drop and writing, “Update, update, update.” They released the update 2 minutes before the start. How did that work? Why did they release the update a couple of minutes before? How did the developers prepare for the drop? And explain this sale of workarounds between bot developers.

If you have a workaround for a specific payment process, the last thing you want to do is implement it earlier than a few minutes before the drop. The security engineers of these payment systems literally used these same bots to figure out what was happening.

They used bots?

Yeah, they used bots to figure out exactly what vulnerability the bot was exploiting. They were releasing updates a minute before the start because Shopify security uses Cybers, and Cybers tries to bypass anti-cyber protection.

That’s right.

The thing is, all these people are completely anonymous, so it’s impossible to figure out who exactly is doing it. They’re probably on sneaker Twitter.

One hundred percent. Even now, a lot of people on sneaker Twitter work for these anti-bot companies.

Alchemy, damn Cloudflare, and all that.

Exactly.

That’s why they waited until the last 5 minutes. It was also because, having the experience of Silicon Valley, we’re in a race and everyone is working extremely fast—against GPT, Cursor, SpaceX, and everything else.

People were working much faster in sneaker Twitter because it was the most brutal market that ever existed. They were real predators. You could be set up in a second; the moment you had an opportunity, someone would take it. If your bot didn’t work on one drop, your value and hype would be gone instantly, and someone else would take advantage of it.

The drops were almost every other day, so you had to release updates every other day. You couldn’t sleep. That’s why so many bot developers were depressed.

Personally, I was running 6 businesses at once when I was in college, and I was really depressed. It was too much for one person, especially as a teenager. You couldn’t delegate to anyone.

Even at AI labs, you can delegate. You can delegate to people; you have hundreds of employees. There, you’re one person against a team of 1,000, every other day.

Wow.

It was crazy, because if you missed one—and there were a lot of drops, but there weren’t many really cool ones—and your bot was only for crappy sites like Foot Locker, which didn’t drop very often, that was the end.

Yeah. That was really the end.

It was crazy because you had a crappy bot, damn NSB.

Yeah, man.

Man, it was crazy because if the bot only worked on one site and it didn’t work for a week, and then you dropped Supreme, that was the end.

Yeah, that’s right.

People just moved on to the next one. It was such a game. That’s why there are so many of these people. Stable Ronaldo from sneaker Twitter.

Seriously?

There’s even a video where he talks about CyberSole. He literally used Cyber Sole and resold keys.

The Prime Hydration team has some really hidden key developers from sneaker Twitter.

What do you mean by key developers?

Logan and KSI are in the spotlight, but they’re not the ones doing most of the work behind the scenes. A lot of that work is done by people from sneaker Twitter.

Oh, so a key developer isn’t the same as a bot developer, right?

No. A key developer is very important. They’re extremely important to Prime Hydration and they’re part of its success. You have people who came from sneaker Twitter and are working at the highest level.

There are people at Palantir who worked in sneaker Twitter because Palantir hired people from sneaker Twitter. Stripe, Browserbase, and all these other companies looked at these guys because every one of them is, frankly, a little bit autistic. You have to be autistic to do what they did.

They are.

These are the employees that companies are willing to kill for. After working with corporate employees, I’ll say this: I haven’t met a single person in a corporation who could match the speed of the people in sneaker Twitter.

Can you try to explain the dominance of CyberSole during the reign of sneaker Twitter? Explain how crazy it was in numbers and during what period.

I think Cyber came out in 2017 or 2018. I forget. Before Cyber, bots weren’t that popular, and they weren’t reselling for thousands of dollars. They were reselling for maybe a few hundred dollars.

Then Cyber had this legendary period where Lucas released it, and it just started frying nonstop. Everyone was like, “What the hell?”

And AIO—for all sites.

Yeah. Lucas did a great job of creating incredible branding. Branding is a game of human psychology, and it still is. Lucas was great at maintaining his personal PR and branding the bot itself. He would release update after update until people were like, “Fuck it, I’ve got to get it.”

But there were only a few hundred copies on the market. People started buying them up, and the price went up from $300 retail. It went from a few hundred dollars resale to $5,000 in a week. That’s how fast the market changed.

Yeah.

At the height of Cyber’s popularity, they were reselling for $10,000. That was at a time when there were thousands of keys on the market. Imagine: there are 1,000 copies of your product, and each one is reselling for $10,000. If you put it up for $10,000 today, it would be gone in an hour. You wouldn’t need to wait a week or 2; it would be bought instantly.

How much is it worth now?

A few hundred dollars.

Of course.

Yes. Now the hype is completely gone. The COVID payments played a big role in prices skyrocketing, because everyone had money.

It’s an interesting phenomenon. When those payments came, they were supposed to help people with rent and basic survival expenses. The average consumer spent them on sneakers, clothes, and other things. All this money flowed into the sneaker world, and people had a lot of spending money. That’s why prices tripled as soon as the payments came in.

Cyber seemed to dominate for 4 years in a row.

Yes, and it still dominates. It still shows class. It’s still a really good bot.

Is it still being developed? What happened to it?

Yeah. I talked to him literally yesterday. He’s still great. He’s still.

Would he come on stream or not?

There’s a chance.

Can I contact him?

Yes.

Wow, he’s still working on it?

Yeah. Dude, come on. We’re doing an event in San Francisco. I hope he pulls up. If you want, you can come too. You’re going to meet a lot of these guys who ended up in startups. They’re all building hyper-fast startups right now.

Sean doesn’t work at Anthropic. He made at least mid-8 figures.

On Cyber? Seriously?

Yeah. There’s no reason to work at Anthropic.

You mean he did it on Cyber?

Yeah, sure. But honestly, the other thing is, if you work in an AI lab, you probably come from Sing, and you might even get depressed because things aren’t moving as fast as you’re used to.

And that's also why I'm so glad I joined a hyper-fast startup where there's a lot of room for personal responsibility. If that wasn't the case, I'd quit. No one at Sing [?] can survive in an environment that doesn't allow them to grow, where everything moves slower and there's middle management. At Sing [?], I don't talk to anyone. I'll just do it, because if I don't, I'll lose.

Do you think these guys were using bots too?

It's kind of the one thing that's always seemed strange to me about the bot game: it's not enough to have the best bot, because often one or two bots take all the stock, right?

Yeah.

So it's not enough to have the right bot, because you're competing with everyone else who has the same bot as you. Out of 10,000 people trying to get a drop, only 500 can make it because they use Cyber or something like that. But then, out of those 500, you have to beat everyone else.

Yeah.

It was really smart on the part of a lot of the bot developers, including me, that we were giving away keys for free to the best cooks, right? There were people who were getting thousands of pairs, and their mentions of us on Twitter really helped our secondary-market price. Because of that, I could say, "Look, I'm releasing 100 keys for 500 bucks apiece." They would go in 10 seconds, right? It was so much that you could just count how much money that was and do it. You could spam it almost every day because the drops were so frequent.

But the thing is, those who were successful at that level had to perfect everything. The equation was a long one. You needed the best proxies, the best server, the best Gmail accounts, and the best bot. And not just one bot. You had to keep 5 different bots open, because who knew which one had the right anti-bot bypass, right?

You didn't know which one had the update and which one didn't, because the bots could get it seconds before the drop. Sometimes, let's say Off-White would release something and say, "Look, it's dropping at 11:00 ET." They would actually wait until 11:15 because the bot was updating at that time.

Yeah, yeah.

They were intentionally delaying the drop, and no one knew that those delays were strategic. Their security team would completely reverse-engineer the bots, figure out what vulnerability they were exploiting, fix it, and then release the product and say, "Oh, sorry, we forgot to release the product." No, they didn't forget anything. It was a strategic move to set up all the bots.

But even then, there were bots that updated in the middle of the drop, because if you managed to do it, people would say, "Okay, this bot developer is incredibly cool. I'll buy his software." There were bot-resale groups that would say, "Look, this bot updated right during the drop. Now it's being resold for 2,000. Next week it's going to be worth 5 grand."

People were buying up these copies to treat them like assets. They weren't even using them. It was an asset that was going up in value. It was like real estate: you just held it and then sold it as soon as the drop went well.

Hell, I remember Dragon was the first bot that was worth 20 grand.

30. It was worth 30 grand. It was resold for 30 grand. That was the end, because it was only buying junk, right? Those were the last days.

Yeah. After Dragon, it all started kind of after Dragon.

Yeah, yeah. I don't think Dragon was supposed to be worth as much as it was either, but the reason was because it was the first bot like that. Explain Dragon and why it became so popular. Give me some context.

Okay. Dragon was a bot that came out with crazy methods of bypassing the protections on the site in late 2021, or maybe 2020?

Too late.

The best resellers on the market were using Dragon AIO. They were showing pictures where they literally had 5,000 pairs of shoes.

Like 10,000 blazers?

Yeah. And they were renting entire warehouses to store their inventory. So Dragon came along, and people in China were really into reselling. I don't know much about the Chinese market, but there were thousands of people from China who also worked in Sneaker Twitter.

The Chinese just had a lot of money. The way China is structured is that they try to invest in assets that are going up in value. That's why CS:GO skins were so popular in China: they held them like stocks. So they treated these sneaker bots like stocks. They bought a bunch of Dragon AIOs and just kept them.

They waited for Jay to post a picture of him using Dragon AIO, with 10,000 pairs.

Yeah, yeah.

And that was the peak, because after that it all started like—

That's it. After that, there were just bricks. We were reselling complete junk. Then it all ended.

Yeah, but that was the heyday of Sneaker Twitter. You could make a few hundred dollars a day just by buying one pair, right? So imagine if you were getting hundreds of pairs a day. People were running out of money. You can—

I was already retiring by then.

Can you tell me the story about reselling swimming pools?

Oh my. That was probably the most profitable moment in the history of Sneaker Twitter, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it was during COVID, right?

I guess. Basically, it all comes down to the same thing: supply is not keeping up with demand, and Sneaker Twitter learned very quickly to make money from it.

People on Reddit, Twitter, and even LinkedIn were saying, "I'm not going to have a pool for the summer. How am I going to spend my time at home?" They couldn't go to public or private pools because everything was completely closed off, and you couldn't get closer than 6 feet to anyone. So people started buying up pools in droves.

Was it Walmart, or who was selling them?

It was one particular pool.

Walmart?

I think it was Walmart. I think Target had them, and a lot of other big-box retailers had them.

They all had them.

It got to the point where people would go into stores and literally pay their friends to buy pools too. They would resell these pools for 10 times the price. It was disgusting—these pool-resale pools.

It went on for a long time.

Yeah, it went on for a long time. I remember there were even pool enthusiast groups.

Yeah, yeah.

This pool wasn't really anything special. It was just this crappy $100 pool. But these Sneaker Twitter communities realized that there was such a huge inefficiency, and they bought up all the stock, making them scarce everywhere.

There was no supply from China, where everything was coming from. There wasn't a single portable, paddling, or backyard pool in stock in any store in the United States for a year.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because we, as Sneaker Twitter, completely sold out. Even the local family stores—they were literally going door to door and doing the opposite of a salesman. They were asking, "Hey, do you have any pools in stock?"

A lot of people didn't really know what the prices were on eBay, so they would sell them at retail. Then the buyer would resell them on eBay for a few thousand dollars. Jared from JF, by the way, made so much money on that.

Legendary.

It was so easy, because all you had to do was find a site that had them. They didn't have a one-per-person limit. You could buy everything in your name, and they would ship it all. You didn't need a fake profile or fake cards. You could get all the merchandise yourself, and they'd be like, "Oh, thanks for taking everything from us," not even realizing that they could have made 100 times more than they got.

I think the funniest thing about Sneaker Twitter, when I realized it was serious, was when people had their own UPS truck because they were buying so much that it would come right to their house to drop off 350 units of product.

Here's another thing Sneaker Twitter was great at: they were incredibly good at finding insiders everywhere. Everyone had their own backdoor guy. It was so much fun.

Yeah. And not only that, the main guys had people from Foot Locker who would tell them the exact amount of product that was going to be released the next week. Money is everything. That's how the economy works.

These guys would find people who were willing to break the rules for money and use that to drive up prices on the secondary market.

Dude, Foot Locker employees make $15 an hour, and managers make $40. These groups would say to them, "Here's 100 grand. Can you help us with a drop?" And they're like, "Yeah, no problem. We'll make it."

Yeah, yeah, that's right.

It's actually really funny. The reason I didn't de-anonymize until I joined Slash is because I became the most hated person in the entire collecting community.

Pokémon. Don't miss this.

Yeah, I was getting death threats all the time. I really made it hard to—

Did you break Pokémon?

Not really. I made it really hard to get the packs that collectors wanted. Every time a release came out, I would tell people, "Look, this is going to resell for 2 or 3 hundred bucks." The average Pokémon collector probably doesn't make that much.

So I got called the "king of the overbuy" on Reddit, Twitter, and Discord. Every time I tried to join the community, I was immediately kicked out. They would write me these horrible death threats, like, "If we see you in person, we'll shoot you or stab you." And I'm like, "Oh, shit. My life is in danger."

I was very, very careful. My online name was always Nick Bruhman. I never risked exposing myself, because I went to college in New York, and who knows how many of these people lived near me?

I was too scared to give myself away because everyone knew me as the guy who ruined collecting forever, even though I didn't really ruin anything. I just took advantage of the marketing ploy.

What's even crazier is that the Pokémon you started with has become infinitely crazier.

Like, it’s a lot crazier now than it was back then.

Yeah, and people are still doing the same thing they were doing back then.

It’s even worse.

Yeah, that’s true.

It’s a lot harder now because when I discovered it, nobody on Twitter knew about it yet. To a certain extent, you’re right: Sneaker Twitter really is ruining the market for the average consumer.

But, okay, there was this—

Sorry, sorry.

No, go on, go on.

For me, there were 2 moments where I remember sneakers starting to die. The first one is when things got really, really bad inside. One of them is Marcus Jordan from Trophy Room. It’s a notorious case.

Yeah.

And then he sold everything out the back door.

Yeah, I want you to tell the story of the second case, but this one—Trophy Room—is a niche retailer that gets a cut of the supply. They had Trophy Room 5s, Jordan 5s. It was a really hot release. There were like 5,000 or 10,000 pairs, and they were all at Trophy Room.

The owner, I think, was Marcus Jordan, Michael Jordan’s son. He basically sold everything “left,” which means if the retail price is $250 and the resale price is $1,200, he’ll sell them for $800 a piece. He sold everything out the back door—every single pair.

People found out about it because he sold them to a complete idiot. He sold them to this guy Benjamin Kicks, and he posted a picture of himself with 800 pairs.

He took a picture with 800 pairs, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. There were only 12,000 pairs that were supposedly released in this so-called giveaway, and then this guy shows up, showing off 800 pairs. He did—there’s a picture of that, right? Ben with 800 pairs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don’t know where it is, but that’s how everyone understood, “Okay, this guy is the most corrupt,” because every wholesaler or every store that had access to these shoes was always doing backdoors, right?

But it wasn’t this horrible. It was ridiculous. If you’re going to do backdoors, you better do it smart, and of course, a lot of people didn’t.

Another thing that stuck in my mind—I was already off topic—was Nike’s VP leaking the product to her son, and then he flooded Twitter. He ran the group, too.

Yeah, he ran the group, too.

So that allowed him to—again, everyone takes whatever information they can get and then sells it to whoever they want on Sneaker Twitter.

Then word got out that he was the son of this VP. Management stepped in and literally fired her. She lost her job.

Yeah, yeah.

She completely lost her job. It was so ridiculous because the son only made about $100,000. It’s not worth it. She had a 7- or 8-figure salary.

Yeah, yeah.

A lot of people had access to great resources, but they were acting very foolishly. Even Yeezy Supply had its insiders. People knew exactly when the release was going to happen.

Yeah, and it’s funny that the developers of Yeezy Supply were always trying to figure out the anti-bot protection because they wanted the average hypebeast to be able to get sneakers.

But Yeezy Supply was carrying all of Sneaker Twitter for a while.

For me, the death of Sneaker Twitter was, first, the post-COVID explosion. Everyone had too much money. Second, everyone had so much money that everyone got greedy. Nike started releasing retro versions of every pair. Yeezy did 500 releases. All that money got stuck in Off-White, in The Ten.

Then these niche retailers started selling everything off the shelf, so prices started going up everywhere. There was a lot less money. Anti-bot got really good, and it got really hard to get ahold of anything.

Then this Shopify CTO became a huge figure in Sneaker Twitter.

Jean-Michel.

Jean-Michel Lemieux, I think.

Yeah, Jean-Michel Lemieux.

He became a key figure in Sneaker Twitter, and he cut everyone.

Yeah, he did a good job. He cut everyone, but it wasn’t really the anti-bot that killed the community, because there’s always a workaround. There’s always some way to get around it. There’s no such thing as a perfect anti-bot.

Maybe now, with these new LLM models, but there was always some kind of endpoint that you could exploit. If it wasn’t specifically an anti-bot, you could literally find another way to cut the checkout time by a few seconds and beat the average user who does it manually.

What really killed it was that the money ran out, and people who had also taken a lot of liquidity out of the market moved into crypto. NFTs are a whole other story.

But I’ll say this: I don’t think there’s any other community that has made as many people billionaires, hundred-millionaires, or ten-millionaires under the age of 25.

I think there are now 2 or 3 billionaires from Sneaker Twitter, all in their early 20s, and there are a dozen other people I know who are worth at least $100 million. There are others, too.

Steven was a Sneaker Twitter guy, right? From [?] Steven, Cameron, Victor from Sneaker Twitter. I’m from Sneaker Twitter. Lucas—all these guys, all these bot developers, basically came out with capital in the mid-8- or 9-figure range.

The people who went into crypto, streaming, or whatever have their net worth and portfolios now in the 8-figure range and above.

What happened to BotBoy Nova?

That’s a great question. I actually don’t know. The thing is, he really was a Sneaker Twitter guy on Twitter, and he was a sneaker YouTuber.

Yeah, a sneaker, like, a real sneakerhead community, right?

Yeah.

Oh, really?

He used the products from Sneaker Twitter, but he didn’t sell them on Sneaker Twitter. He was selling to the sneaker community, so he probably does well. Honestly, I don’t think he made more than a few hundred thousand.

Really?

The money was on Sneaker Twitter. That’s where all the money was. That’s where you could make it. I made my first million dollars.

Are we Pokémon scouts now?

Yeah. I went from making like $10,000 a year to $1 million in 1 year. That’s the year I found out how bad taxes are.

I was bedridden for 3 weeks. It was a horrible, horrible time because I paid almost $600,000 in taxes.

But there was no other community outside of the sneaker community that would allow that. You might work for an AI company, but in an AI company, your wealth is just numbers on paper, and you have to be able to sell it. Mine was as liquid as possible. It was in your bank account. It wasn’t stuck in stocks or paper capital. It was your real wealth.

Okay, I have a question for you. What do you think happened to Nike? I don’t know how closely you follow this, but Nike’s stock is down like 85%.

What do you think happened to Nike?

Honestly, working with corporate people, when a company is overinflated and there’s no one on the front lines who is actually working with the new generations who are mostly buying your product, you lose.

For example, Nike used to be the king of sneakers. Every single one of their products sold incredibly well. They had great classics, but they let Hoka come in. They let all these new shoe brands and new labels in.

Yeah, yeah.

The thing is, they probably didn’t think about it. In the short term, they probably thought, “Okay, let it be.” In the long term, I don’t think anyone thought about it at all.

A lot of the senior executives that I meet—and it doesn’t matter how old they are—hire people who can’t think globally. They only understand the market based on what they grew up with, but today’s markets are completely different.

If you can’t understand how the markets work for the younger generation, who are the ones getting most of the money now, you lose.

Nike loses because there’s Hoka. I’m wearing Hoka right now, for example. They do a great job of marketing and brand awareness among people of my generation and the generation older than me.

As the older people leave, new brands realize, “Okay, we just have to take advantage of this situation.” Brands that have been around for 50 to 100 years have never dealt with a generation like us, or with a generation that is able to think, “How do I sell to people who are 70-plus, and how do I sell to people who are 50 and under, 30 and under, and even 20 and under?”

Really?

Nike doesn’t think about that. Because of that, their stock just keeps falling, and the market, I think, adds 2 and 2 and realizes that they’re not going to be the main clothing brand of the future.

I think that’s a good point. What do you think was the most successful release of all time? The most legendary drop. Who had the best result on any drop in history?

I mean, what sneakers?

Yeah, I don’t know. What do you think was the best drop, or maybe someone you know had the best result in 1 day?

Okay, I’ll give the win for the best result, from what I’ve seen, to Jake from AYCD.

On what?

I forget what it was. I think it was Yeezy Mochas or Creams, but he got thousands of pairs. I could be wrong, but I remember him posting a photo of his success.

He had like 10 different servers, each with its own bots, and each bot performed thousands of tasks. He invested almost $300,000 in drop supplies, and he tested almost everything because every bot actually worked.

He was really lucky at that point, and he knew the right proxies to use and the right server with the lowest ping. He just ripped everyone off.

How much do you think he made on that drop?

Bro, a few million at least.

It’s crazy, because there was more than 1 drop like that.

There were so many drops, and they were happening every week or almost every day. Adidas was doing a great job with Yeezy before what happened with Ye.

It’s about understanding your market. Yeezy was incredible.

Damn, they should have brought Jake on stream.

He's a legend. He's so cute. Jake is a legend. Jake is one of the craziest legends on Sneaker Twitter. Is this the one—AYCD Jake himself? How is he?

I think so. Damn, I can't find that. I'll find it. And I think another thing is, when Off-White was actually dropping, there was this group called Express Notify, and they had the best Off-White monitor. I literally stayed up until 3 or 4 in the morning because that's when they were dropping Eastern time.

There was almost never a bot working there because the site would crash from the number of requests. You'd have to sit on the site for 3 hours, hoping to break through. I remember taking 4 pairs and making around $20,000 in one night, not sleeping until the morning.

But yeah, it was crazy. I've probably said this many times, but Sneaker Twitter is the most efficient market, and it still is. People who come from that industry and go into any other field immediately find any inefficiency and monetize it faster than the best AI researcher.

It's one thing to be textbook-smart, and it's another to have street smarts—and, frankly, “sneaker smarts.” If you combine all 3, you're better than anyone.

You're better than sneaker—

Shoes?

I'm wearing high-tops right now. I'm in Hoka. I prefer comfort. You have something like—like, you have some—

I have Off-White.

Well, I was afraid to wear them because I thought I was going to get mugged.

The thing is, I don't like carrying money around. I prefer not to have anything.

Well, other than that, yeah. Top 5 botters of all time.

Botters and developers, maybe.

Name the top 5 botters.

Top 5 botters?

Botters.

Developers or botters?

Botters. Give me botters.

Five of the cooks? Damn. I mean, AYCD Jake—number 1. There was also Watch Cop Chefs. I think that was his nickname. He was a real cook.

Damn, I'm trying to remember. Remember Frank? White Frank? Frank White—the killer. Amazing. He's actually number 3. Garrett's somewhere in there, number 4. I'm trying to remember who else.

It's hard, bro, because I never followed the top cooks. I followed the top developers and the most popular people. I'll name the top developers: Lucas, Hunter, Zero, Jason—

Wait, wait, go on.

Dashy.

Okay.

Oh my God. Dashy has been in the top for so long. Lucas from Cyber, Hunter from Dashy, Dashy—who else?

Yeah, Jason from Wrath, Zero from Ghost.

Who? I don't know that.

Ghost AIO. It was a bot for Nike. Remember when Nike used to do random drops, and you had to—

Oh, something else, right? Nike used to do this thing where you had to go to a specific location, scan something, and then you could buy the shoes. People who had spoofers would just fake it.

Oh, there was GPS spoofing, right?

Yeah, like that.

Oh, they did physical drops. I forgot about that.

Yeah, right.

I forgot who wrote Kodai. I think it was Sawyer, but that's also in the top. Kodai was with Pulsar, so I forget what it was called.

Pulsar.

Yeah, Kodai was just killer. I would say it was very—

Yeah. And what about Ganesh?

Oh, sorry, I forget myself. Ganesh was amazing, by the way. The thing is, Ganesh was part of the German community. German retailers were crazy. It was a very, very small community. There was actually a Russian community, which I was a part of, but the Germans knew how to cook. The Germans were so efficient. They were so impressive.

You said no to KSR?

KSR was not bad. I wouldn't put it in the top 5.

What about TKS?

A cult classic. It's in the top 5.

No.

Yeah. I'm like, it's a cult classic.

The Nike bot? Damn, that's—

I wouldn't put any of those in. That was a pretty massive release, too. It was Cybot.

Oh, you know, Polaris was pretty good.

Polaris literally had a full goddamn admin key. I forget if it was Yeezy Supply or something, but Polaris had something that nobody else had: real admin access that they implemented into their backend for Yeezy drops.

Yeah. Splashforce was amazing. I remember Splashforce. Valco[?]

It was an easy drop, right? Splashforce?

Yeah, yeah. That's okay. Top 5 is pretty cool.

What does Hunter do?

What does Hunter do right now?

Yeah.

He owns a casino.

Really?

Yeah, he owns a casino. It's called Jackpot Bet.

Oh, really?

And he's doing great. These guys, no matter what industry they go into, just tear it up.

I know. It's really—

It's a casino? Why does he need a casino? Do you know how much money is in there?

Yeah, I know, but—

An obscene amount.

Really.

What happened to SeeU? What did he create?

SeeU Prime.

I don't remember.

Oh, SeeU Prime. He's still in business.

Really?

He's in the shadows. He was a Supreme AIO pre-killer.

King C on the backdoor. What backdoor?

Backdoor was his brand. It was his brand, or it was his parent brand that owned all the backdoors.

Yeah, yeah. Wow. What about Niche?

That was my guy. Bro, he's still in business. He's not written off. I met him in person. He's not written off.

It's crazy, because I also meet these guys very casually, like at conferences that I go to. They're like, “Oh, man, I was from Sneaker Twitter and I bought your product.” I'm like, “Oh, fuck.”

Some guy literally said to me, “I met you last year and I didn't even know you made Malice and Omen.” And I'm like, “Yeah, surprise.”

Wow. Dude, hello from the past.

Rest in peace, Sneaker Twitter.

Rest in peace, bro.

I mean, I revived it. I brought it back to life in 5 minutes.

For a couple of hours.

But it's all over. It's over.

You're right.

Unless you come to San Francisco, then it's not over.

Maybe. We'll get you VIP tickets.

As soon as he posted the Pokémon clip, that was the end, bro.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's a shame.

It's a shame, but in a way, Sneaker Twitter still exists in many different parts: Volunteer, Strive, Record, whatever, Browser Base. It's a community that's always—

Dude, I want to ask about the .gov subreddit, but I don't want to.

Yeah, that's a different topic.

I'll skip it. Oh, what an era that was. I guess I don't have anything else for you. That was epic.

Yeah. Dude, that was cool.

What happened to the Nike plug? Remember that guy?

Bro, he's still tearing everyone up. I talked to him last week.

Yeah, bro. He's tearing everyone up. He's really cool. He was actually one of the best buyers, too.

Yeah, he was so good.

Yeah, that's cool. This is crazy. It was so amazing to see everyone rise from the dead, and everyone was quoting my posts with their memories of Sneaker Twitter. I'm like, “Fuck it.” They're so cool. Tears in my eyes.

Dude, you're a legend.

That's cool, man. You said, “Idol of icons.”

Finally, would you like to do a quick Slash PR? You could mention Slash for speed. What are you working on now? People are wondering.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I moved on from all that and switched to Slash. When I came in, we barely had any annual revenue, and now we're close to over half a million in annual revenue. We're the fastest growing neobank in the US and in the world. And honestly, the way we work is like our remote work is our team. Half of our team came from Sinker Twitter, and pretty much everyone here is working without a roadmap and is extremely proactive. So if you want the best neobank that also includes a lot of really high-end crypto products that you and everyone else has probably used, and you're... I can't say anything, but you're very close to what slash is already using.

No, I said it. We use slash.

No, not just you. I mean, there are some, well, so—

Oh, go to hell, right?

Hell, uh—No, no, I'm—yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's cool, dude. Go to hell, right? But, but no, if you want the best banking experience, just write to me, and I'll show you what it looks like when the Sinker Twitter team solves these banking inefficiencies. Movie.

Nick Bruhman, you're the best, man. Thanks again. Love you.

A real pleasure. Love you, bro.

Love you too, my brother. See you. Peace. Bye.

Bye.

Wow. Wait, I have to find this right now. That's the same picture. After that, the game was over. Ben, how's business?

Boom, man.

Ben, how's business?

Boom, man.

How's business?

Boom, man. What a mistake. That was it. After that, the game was over. This is such a fucking interview. It was so much fun. I had so much fun with it.