The Truth About Crypto in 2026 | Market Bubble #1

Welcome to MarketBubble, a show about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. PST live on twitch.tv/FazeBanks, baby. We’re also live on Twitter. I’m here with my co-host right now, Z. We’re streaming from his Twitter as well. Well, we’re global. That is Zion or handsome, my tall 6'6", tall, dark, handsome, 10% body fat, gigabrain, genius finance-tech guru. He’s big brain. I’m little brain. I’m the content, creative, media guy, attention 50 years old, and he’s a little bit younger, a little bit taller, a little bit slimmer, and a little bit richer. He’s going to make sure that we make a [bleep] ton of money, and I’m going to make sure that we keep our finger on the pulse of culture and media. Listen, you open up Twitter now, and everything’s [bleep]. Politics is cooked, crypto’s dead, dating’s fried, everyone’s an incel, and everyone’s a virgin. It’s all [bleep]. And AI? AI is coming for your jobs, your wives, your kids, and your [bleep]. You’re fried. You’re cooked.

You need 3 things: money, dirt, and attention—or, at minimum, you need to understand attention, the attention economy, and how that [bleep] works. And 3, the 3rd thing is AI literacy. These 3 things are going to hold value and likely increase in value over the next 5 to 10 years, because, let’s face it, the future is bleak.

While we’re long-term optimistic on AI—we think this thing’s going to cure cancer and [bleep] solve world hunger and dramatically increase the quality of life for the average person in the next 5 to 10 years—[bleep] could get dark. If you’re a [bleep] paralegal in your last semester of law school, you owe $400,000 in college debt, and Claude does your job better than you, and ChatGPT does your job better than you are, my brother.

Money, attention, and AI—that’s what the show is about. That’s what the show means to me. That is the whole point. It’s important to have a point, and that’s our point. That’s who the show is for. All you need to do to watch and listen and be a part of this is join us as we’re curating a community of winners and people who desire to be great. That’s exactly it: a willingness to be the most optimal, best version of yourself. Go follow the Twitter, whatever, whatever. Thursdays at 1:00 p.m. That’s my intro.

What does the show mean to you? Properly introduce yourself. Let them know who you are and why the [bleep] you’re the GOAT.

What’s popping? What’s good? I’m Ansem. I’m a trader, an engineer, and an entrepreneur. Honestly, man, I love markets and I love the internet. I’ve made nearly all of my money by being early to trends and predicting them before they happen.

That’s the main thing I want to do on the show. I want to look at where the internet is going, look at where markets are going, look at what I’m researching and what I’m looking at, and be able to share that information.

It’s really important to me because you guys probably know me from [bleep] Crypto Twitter. The only reason I was on Crypto Twitter and was able to learn how to trade online is because there were a ton of people who were really important in my learning process, like Trader Mayne and all the YouTube videos he was putting out early, and all the information he was putting out on Twitter. Cobie was putting out a lot of information, too. I don’t know if y’all know the pyramid he had way back in the day, with Bitcoin and ETH at the top, altcoins in the middle, and the Cryptopia crazy altcoins underneath that.

There were people online that I gravitated toward who had their own domain knowledge and were willing to put themselves out there and share that knowledge with people. That’s how I taught myself to trade, and that’s how I taught myself to make money. So it’s really, really, really important for me to have this platform and be able to do that for other people and share that.

Go ahead.

Go—no, go ahead. Go ahead. I was saying my origin story might not be as interesting as yours, but, bro, I was also constantly online. I was a [bleep] nerd, and I was a gamer, too—World of Warcraft, Age of Mythology, League of Legends.

You’re the GOAT. You’ve existed on Crypto Twitter, kind of at the peak of Crypto Twitter, and you’ve been a main character on there for quite some time. Obviously, you have a strong interest in media. You’ve gone live a few times, you’re live on Twitter right now, and you have a massive Twitter following. Anybody in tech, finance, and especially crypto follows you and keeps up with you regularly.

The truth is, if you’ve listened to Ansem and read all of his tweets, if you didn’t ignore the important parts and really did listen to what he said over the last several years, you’ve likely made a lot of money. That’s just what it is. I guess that begs the question, though: We’re here, we’re live, and we’re starting a new news program about markets. You’re live, and your cohost is FaZe Banks. Why? Why now? Why this? Why are you in front of a camera?

1. How Ansem Got Into Crypto

Bro, I’ll tell you why. In 2016, that’s when I first learned about crypto. I was at Georgia Tech studying computer science, and my minor was in business. I had an emerging-technologies class for my minor, and my professor was a super-smart guy. One of the core focuses of that class was Bitcoin.

This was back in 2016, so Bitcoin was trading at around $200.

Bitcoin was $200 in 2016?

Yes, bro.

And I had a ton of friends in that class, but none of us bought Bitcoin at the time. I graduated in 2017 and was working in New York as a software engineer. I had another mentor, and the mentor was like, “Yo, you’re smart. You’re a good engineer.”

Yes. What are we doing? [bleep] I was moving to L.A. with RiceGum and [bleep] Sommer Ray and Alissa Violet. I spent a lot of money on that house. I know you guys remember that house.

Bro, I’m telling you. There are so many opportunities I look back on and think, “We should have just put some money in some [bleep], bro.”

But, yeah, 2017 is when I started buying Bitcoin. It was really important that I had mentors who were pushing me in that direction, but I could never get any of my friends really interested in it. I could never get my friends to buy early. My friends didn’t start buying until recent cycles. I got some into Solana and some into HYPE, thankfully.

There was no real way to communicate what I was doing because I was spending 24 hours online, but I couldn’t really communicate that.

Because you’re limited and constrained to text on a screen. You’re tweeting all day, and you’ll do a whole big, long, 20-tweet thesis on something, but people will just focus on the ticker and ignore everything else.

I feel like you’re very misunderstood. I feel like we have that in common, and I really respect and appreciate your resilience—just standing on business, remaining ethical, and being a really great guy. You already know how it is. You give somebody advice or mention something, they go off and win with it and make money with it, and they’re a genius. It was all them, whatever. And if it goes wrong, it’s all your fault.

2. AI Is the New Crypto

It’s [bleep] brutal. It’s miserable, right? But since I’ve known you, I’ve been pilling you on media and getting in front of a camera. I think it’s super, super important. We’ve talked a little bit about who this show is for, and I gave my take on AI and the future of AI. We can get into the middle-class stuff. I see you pulling it up right now. This is good.

Yeah. Right now, I think AI is in a similar spot to where crypto was in 2017.

His screen is full-screen now. Yeah, there you go. Open the tweet bigger, too.

AI right now, I think, is in a similar spot to where crypto was in 2017. ChatGPT didn’t even exist in 2021. They had 0 users, and now they have 900 million monthly active users.

Even those 900 million monthly active users are mostly people on the free plan. They aren’t people who are using it to its fullest potential—using the paid plan, using it to code, or doing all these other things.

I feel like right now we’re in a position in human history where, if you’re an innovator, active, and really diligent about where you’re spending your time, you can leapfrog and be so far ahead of where your peers are going to be.

This tweet is talking about a rough timeline of the elites versus the lower class. Historically, power was centralized at the top. If you go way, way, way back to around 100,000 B.C., what it’s essentially talking about is when it was just man killing an animal and then eating that for food, while the woman had a baby and protected the house. People didn’t have all this other [bleep]. There weren’t different levels of wealth. People were just surviving and providing for themselves.

Then, as technological changes happened, people got more advanced. There were different forms of wealth and different forms of innovation.

Once we had armies with kings and people taking over other nations, it was like, if you aren't as strong or don't have as much power as we do, we're literally going to kill you, and we're going to take your women, your land, and everything else. That was obviously the beginning of levels of wealth and power disparity.

He talks about World War II: after the Industrial Revolution, there were these specialized labor unions, which obviously had a ton of power. That was probably the peak of the middle class and lower class. In a lot of ways, it was the birth of it, right? That was really the birth of the middle class.

For sure.

3. How Banks Got Into Content

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. He was saying that was the peak of how we were all on a similar playing field, but now, with AI, robotics, advanced social media, all of that is basically making it so wealth is getting concentrated in the hands of a few. I think it's a very accurate take.

The optimistic side of it is that the baseline should be a lot higher. But what we should really take from this is that you need to figure out how to get into that higher level.

You need to align with it.

Yes, exactly. What this autist-ass graph means to me as a normie. Bro, CL is a fucking genius, but it's an autist-ass graph. As you can see, elite power-level robotics are blowing past the type of power held by kings and people who ruled entire countries.

Yeah, it's insane. This is what scares me, and this is what I feel like should definitely scare you guys, too. Again, like you said, long-term optimistic, but, man, I don't know. It looks like there's a good chance of the middle class being phased out entirely.

I think it's already happening.

That's what I'm saying.

We've only existed and been alive for what? Again, 50 years for me. How old are you?

Thirty minus a little bit—31.

We've been on the planet for a very short amount of time, and all we know is the middle class. All we know is how society and the structure of society work. It's hard for me to imagine a world and a reality where it doesn't exist, but the truth is that, for the overwhelming majority of human history, it didn't exist.

In that very specific case, the Industrial Revolution and World War II lent themselves to being able to create one. But now, with AI, bro, you mentioned that ChatGPT didn't exist in 2021. Anthropic was founded in 2021. It's been 5 years, and they're worth over $1 trillion.

Yeah. Pre-IPO, right?

And that's another thing. It's kind of a perfect example of what we're talking about because nobody got access.

That's the question. How the fuck do you get access? How do we align with this? Because it should be easy. Again, anybody could have bought Bitcoin in 2016 or 2017. But how do you buy AI? How do you align your interests when, clearly, the elites are taking all the value? Anthropic is worth $1 trillion pre-IPO. How the fuck is anybody supposed to align with that or make money? You're supposed to wait for it to go public at $1.5 trillion, then invest and hope it fucking 2x's? It's crazy. I don't know. It's insane.

For AI, understanding it is definitely important. You guys should all do as much of that as possible. But the money piece—how do we make money with it?

Yeah, I mean, it's tough with the labs being so private. Like you said, OpenAI is fully private, and Anthropic is fully private. But I think the best way to capitalize is by doing research and looking at all the different companies that are part of the AI supply chain.

At a high level, you have the labs, like Anthropic and OpenAI. Beneath the labs, you have these hyperscalers, which are the ones investing in the labs and investing in the chips and infrastructure to supply these labs with the models. That's Google, Microsoft, and Amazon. I think Meta is the other one. Those are the main ones.

Underneath them, you have power, which is really important, and then the manufacturing of the chips, which is really important. At all these different levels, there are companies that are important and that you can invest in that are public. There are a few of them.

I've been doing a ton of research on this. For me, in 2025, I sold a lot of crypto early in the year and really took some time off from the markets because I realized that when I do well and make some money in the markets, I always overtrade afterward if I don't step back and distance myself.

In 2025, I did step away from trading, and I missed a fucking ton going on with AI trading stocks.

4. Why Crypto Has Been Dead the Last 2 Years

Well, yeah, stocks have dramatically outperformed crypto in the last 2 years. Crypto is the worst thing you could be in for the last 2 years. Crypto is fucking cooked. It's dead. It's been miserable.

I mean, it's crazy. Do you own—how do you feel about Bitcoin? How do you feel about crypto, Ansem?

Oh, no.

Bro, it's tough.

It's tough for me because I have loved and do love crypto so much. It's been such a core part of my personal life and my professional life.

Well, listen, don't give us the PR answer.

I'm not. I'm not. Do you own Bitcoin right now?

I don't own any Bitcoin right now.

That is insane.

I own zero Bitcoin. I do think it's down a lot, and I do think it's not a great place to sell if you do have some. But, like you said, the AI trade has been a much better trade over the past couple of years compared to crypto.

If you look at crypto since 2021, most of the all-time highs that crypto hit then—we haven't really eclipsed a lot of the all-time highs we hit last cycle. I consider this cycle to be 2023 and 2024, and the cycle before that to be 2020 and 2021.

In 2020 and 2021, that was the emergence of DeFi. That's why Ethereum blew up and did really well. It was the first time you had billions of dollars of capital on-chain. But a lot of the market caps we hit then were based on people projecting a ton of growth and a ton of new applications with revenue coming on-chain, and we really didn't see as much of that this cycle as we expected.

When you have something like OpenAI, which has 900 million monthly active users, and Anthropic, which is doing around $30 billion in annual run rate right now, it's really hard to compare.

They actually make money. They're making money, and they have a fuckton of money.

Yeah, investing in them has been a great trade for people.

What's Anthropic's market cap right now? What is it trading for?

The last round, I think, was around $380 billion.

Private, though. What are people—

I know it's on Hyperliquid. It's trading at over $1 trillion right now, with people speculating on what it's going to go public at. They said they're considering doing a round, I think, at $900 billion.

Bitcoin's market cap? Around $1.25 trillion?

Yeah, around there.

Oh, so close. They're close.

There's a Polymarket odds for this: Anthropic to flip Bitcoin by 2027. Can we pull that up?

Wait, 22%?

Is this real? Is this this year or is this 2027?

Is this year?

December 31 of this year? Damn. Does it have to IPO and be live, or what's the qualification? Because I don't think they need to IPO by the end of the year.

I think they will. I think they will.

You slam this, no? At 22%, I think you do.

For sure.

Can we take this right now?

Yeah, we should.

Wow, that's crazy. Anthropic to flip Bitcoin—you heard it here first. Ansem: AI over crypto. Crypto's dead.

I don't like the current backdrop of Bitcoin right now. Bitcoin has concerns around quantum. The reason quantum is a concern is because there are a lot of coins that haven't moved in a long time, and if you break how the cryptography works on some of these coins, they'll be able to move those. If those people are dead—

Like loopholes and jailbreaking shit that's existed for fucking 28 years? It's fucking insane. It's absolutely insane.

I mean, again, where my brain goes with this is: how do you make money in AI? I'll say it here first, too—crypto has been fucking miserable for me the last several years, specifically the last 2 years, and I don't really own much of it.

I'm positioned in Bitcoin. I own Bitcoin, I own some Hyperliquid, and I own CryptoPunks. Malcolm calls it the rich-guy portfolio, and that's just it. I like those 3 things, so I own those 3 things.

It’s pretty simple. But outside of that, I don’t know. It feels smoked.

As far as how I look at things—and for the people watching—obviously, Ansem’s brain is always going to go to what we can position ourselves in and what we can invest in ourselves. In line with investing in yourself, I feel like there are going to be so many opportunities for people to become AI-literate, become very well acquainted with AI and the technology, and apply that to existing markets.

I’m in media and content, obviously, right? We see how dramatically it’s already been affected by AI. All the AI-generated little fruits getting gangbanged by other fruits in the weird, crazy AI shit.

It’s crazy, bro. It’s insane. It’s only going to get crazier. AI is cooking everything, but when something disrupts a market and shifts it in such a dramatic fashion, that’s always an opportunity to shift with it and win with it, right?

There are all kinds of kids right now who are popping up little AI YouTube channels that are making a ton of money, just finding ways in their market and in their area of interest to apply that. Whether you own a mom-and-pop flower shop, there’s a way, right? We don’t want to be what our parents were when the internet popped off. You know what I’m saying? So many people missed so many opportunities, and that was the place to be.

This is kind of exactly the same way. I know I’ve been a little bit pessimistic—an “it’s all cooked” kind of vibe—but at the same time, I know you feel this way: We are so incredibly lucky to be alive right now and to be having this conversation. We’re living in the greatest time in human history right now, by far. By far.

What we have access to, the amount of information we have access to, is absolutely insane. It’s unparalleled, to be honest. I think that’s one of the reasons I’m so excited to be doing this: I want to be learning in real time and researching in real time as we look at things and better ourselves. All that is going to be happening on the show, and I want to work on that with people.

My whole fucking life, bro. Forever, bro.

What are some things that you’ve seen about how content was back then, how content is now, how AI has impacted things, and how you think about being influential in today’s society?

So, yeah, I have been doing content forever. I started in 2008. I made my first YouTube video in 2008, and it was titled “How to Hack Xbox 360 Gamerscore.”

Why I created this video was because YouTube at the time was relatively undiscovered. People weren’t really on YouTube like that. Again, it was 2008, and I was a sophomore in high school. The biggest videos on YouTube at the time were all how-tos: how to cook an egg, how to change a tire, how to do this, how to do that.

I saw that, realized it, and I was super into Xbox and Call of Duty at the time. I discovered this hack forum that articulated the steps you needed to take to jailbreak your Xbox and unlock Gamerscore. I’m like, “Niche, nerdy gamer shit.” That’s fire. But it didn’t exist on YouTube. I read this, and it seemed complicated, so I’m like, “Let me go find a tutorial on YouTube.” It didn’t exist.

Yeah.

So I’m like, “That should exist.” I went to RadioShack, bought a $15 mic, and used HyperCam. Remember HyperCam in the bottom right?

I made a tutorial voice-over for it, and it worked. My first YouTube video ever got around 700,000 or 800,000 views. If you account for new users—

Yes. Yes. What the fuck?

It was one of the biggest videos—I think it was the biggest video—that was uploaded that day. I got all types of messages, and I was getting subscribers. Again, this is where the dopamine kicked in. I didn’t even know the mechanics of social media. I didn’t know why I loved this or why I was becoming addicted to it. We do now, and we see how it affects every human being, which is crazy.

I was like, “Holy shit.” I also got paid. I got an email—I didn’t even know you could get paid—from Google saying, “Set up your AdSense,” and I made around $500. I grew up really, really broke. $500 to me was more money than I ever thought I would touch in my life. It really did feel that way, especially as a kid in high school.

In natural broke-boy fashion, I spent every last dollar on clothes. I found a website that took PayPal and just bought clothes. A big box showed up at my house, and my dad was like, “What the fuck are you doing?” I’m like, “Internet shit.” He thought I was stealing credit cards and doing weird shit.

Bro, you know what you should have done? You should have bought Bitcoin. You said that was in 2008, bro? In 2009? You should have bought $50 worth. Even $10, bro, to be honest.

Ten dollars’ worth of Bitcoin—I’d be a fucking trillionaire. It’s so fucked up.

That’s why it’s so important that you and I are together, because that’s the content opportunity that I see. And then that’s the investment opportunity. You know what I mean? It’s crazy.

I went to school to be an accountant for a semester. I dropped out halfway through my first semester because, by that point, I had been doing content for 2 years. It was all I could think about and all I wanted to do. That obviously snowballed into me joining FaZe, moving into the house in New York, and helping found the first-ever content house, which is still a very valid meta and strategy for creating content today.

Content has always been fueled by collaboration. When you throw the right people together, like you and I, for example, 1 + 1 = 11. We said that in a lot of these pitches and meetings, and I really do believe that as far as you and I are concerned.

That’s really the game. The FaZe house was the first to do it. We wrote the blueprint on that. We were also ahead of the vlog meta, and that’s really where shit blew up. That’s where I kind of fell off, did my own thing for a little while, and then moved to LA and did that whole thing with RiceGum. I became one of the biggest vloggers on the planet and ran that for a little bit.

My last YouTube video sits at 11 million views and 1 million likes, and that wasn’t super far off from the average video. I was uploading vlogs every week, getting 5, 6, 7 million views per video. I was a huge vlogger, and I quit at my peak because, as I’ve said—and as people who really know me know—I’m not a big fan of being in front of a camera and making content.

This is much different because this is for me. I’ve never made content for myself. This show is for me, by me. These are topics and conversations that I want to learn about. These are the conversations that I have in my personal life every single day, and I’m married to the idea of becoming the optimal version of myself.

I want to be successful by every metric. That’s not a dollar amount. I just want to be the best me that I can be.

During that time, I remember doing vlogs and saying to myself, “Guys, wow. Here I am with a G7X and a kid who was my editor at the time. It’s a 2-person team, and we’re making episodic, documentary-style episodes of my life. There are millions of people watching, and they’re 20 or 30 minutes long. In 10 years, people are going to be making movies. Kids are going to be using their phones to make Avatar-style, full-length movies by themselves, and it’s going to be so incredible.”

Here we are, 10 years later, and it’s mindless swipe-retardio shit. It’s insane, bro. Production is at an all-time low. All these streams are super easy, and it’s crazy. It’s so wild to me.

I refer to this world we exist in as the fast-food meta—the fast-food swiping culture, the For You culture. What kids are doing right now is just mindlessly swiping. It’s fast, it tastes good, we know it’s not good for us, but we do it anyway. It’s very cheap, and it’s unhealthy.

That’s the way I think about content today, and it is what it is. That’s how markets work, right? People want that, so that’s what they’re being given. You talk about this a lot: The best engineers in the world work for these companies and create these algorithms, and it’s all become For You content.

Fast. Literally For You—individually, singular.

It’s becoming more and more like that. I’ll get to that in a second. Right now, monoculture almost doesn’t exist. Ten years ago, something would happen and it was communal. Everyone would talk about it the whole time. Everyone had a take, and it was like this big, giant group chat.

That's what Twitter really was in the beginning: this big global group chat. Now it's all these little bubbles and niche communities, and it's so fragmented and separated. It's like antisocial media, almost. It's meant to keep you in your little lane, and it's so Black Mirror-esque. It's crazy, and I think it only gets worse.

The way I see it, it's showing no signs of slowing down or trending down. In the future, like you just said, “for you” evolves to a point—especially with AI-generated content—where it's quite literally just for you. You're scrolling, and in real time, a video pops up. Imagine this: an AI-generated video that's hyper-specific. Let's say you're into Asian girls with big tits.

In real time, a video pops up on your feed of an Asian girl with huge tits, just talking to you and addressing you by name: “Hey, handsome. I know you like the Lakers; they're on tonight. This is what we're thinking.” It knows you like to gamble, so you click this little button, stake, boom, whatever. It's a 20-minute-long, high-production, high-quality video that's literally just for you. It has 1 view on it, it was made just for you, and it was generated in real time. It's insane. That's what it looks like; that's where I feel like we're going.

That begs the question: in that future, when we're all just in our own little world, do content creators exist? What does that look like? What does creator culture look like? It's like that Andy Warhol quote. I'll bring it up. Here it is: Andy Warhol, in 1968—one of the most profound artists of all time—said, “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes.” That's a bar.

And when everyone's famous, nobody's famous. You know what I'm saying? We've seen that trend in culture for 100 years. Michael Jackson, for example—the Michael Jackson movie that just came out. Michael Jackson: nobody will ever be as famous as Michael Jackson.

Never, bro. Michael Jackson was crazy, though. It's because it's so easy to get access to people now. It's way, way, way different.

And it's also fragmented. It's really hard to discover people. Clavicular is the biggest thing online right now, right? It's all I see; it's all people are talking about, at least in my little corner of the internet. He has 100,000 followers on Twitter. How does that make sense?

It doesn't make sense to me as somebody who comes from 2010 to 2017, where if you popped off on the internet, you had millions of followers overnight across all platforms, and that's just how it worked. It's wild, bro. It's wild.

Yeah, I mean, there's definitely going to be a very stark segmentation between people who are passively consuming content. Like you said, we have the smartest people in the world working on these algorithms for all these tech companies. What I would say is that you're either going to be a passive consumer, or you're going to be an active and diligent consumer of all the things you can access online.

If you're one of the people who spends hours scrolling on your phone and isn't really productive after work, or isn't really researching other things, I would say that, at least for those people, you should be investing in the companies that are enabling you to do that. Meta is hugely important. They dominate distribution through Instagram and WhatsApp, and they make a shit ton of ads. The reason they make so many ads is because they have a stranglehold on capturing this generation's attention and keeping them scrolling. They know that if you respond to certain things on your phone or in your app, you're going to get recommended certain products, and you're more likely to click those products if they're relevant to what you're looking at or doing.

Also, regarding Meta, I personally don't think people are giving them enough credit for how successful I think they'll inevitably be in AI, based on what you just said about WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Distribution-wise, they're already with everybody. The average person we know doesn't give a fuck about mythos or opus 4.7 or 5.5. They just want to make a little birthday card for their grandma, cheat on their homework, or search for a banana-bread recipe.

In that world—which is exactly where we're at—if Meta can create a model that's even comparable to ChatGPT or Claude, then everybody's going to go there because everybody's already there. The same goes for Apple. If Apple drops Siri AI tomorrow and pins it to your messages or iMessage, and it's as simple as talking to your girlfriend, switching over to Siri, asking her to do something on your phone, and giving her access to your phone, then you just have ChatGPT integrated into your phone. That's what I'm probably using. It's so convenient.

There are opportunities all over the place, man, really and truly. But content is smoked right now. That's why we really do believe those 3 things are the only things that make sense to focus time on: money, attention—these are the strongest currencies on Earth—and AI, which is going to disrupt everything, so you need to understand it.

The internet is also—I don't know. Another big way content has changed, I just want to articulate this better, is that the fake internet and dead internet theory are real. It's not just a theory anymore; it's a real thing. We see it in real time.

Very, very real thing, for sure. All the botting, all the fake narratives, and the way it works right now—this clipping meta—it's completely fried. It's crazy, and with AI, it's only going to get worse, bro. In the future, there are going to be conversations…

Like this, with the same overlay as the conversations that you and I are having. I'm not ready for that, bro—where we're shilling scam tickers, and it looks like this. It's indistinguishable from reality. In that world, where the fuck are we?

The truth is, the consumer doesn't give a fuck about the truth. We see that in the data. It's clear that there's no real demand for the truth. The average person is going to see some shit on the internet, take it for what it is, see a crazy headline, and go, “Oh, that happened.”

For the people watching, it's really important: if you see something that triggers any sort of emotion in you, or is relevant to you, your career, or something you care about, do the fucking work. Do the research. Dive deep. You might just be getting rage-baited.

That pairs really poorly with the “For You” feed, right? The classic example is a hyper-liberal feminist on Twitter. She sees all day how horrible and evil Donald Trump is. It doesn't matter how you feel about it, but she sees this all day long. It's all she sees because that's what she wants to see.

Then she goes out in the real world, sees some guy wearing a MAGA hat, and looks at him with disgust: “How could you? You're fucking horrible. You're terrible.” He sees a completely different thing. He sees all the reasons why she's fucking horrible. That's terrible, you know what I'm saying? It all gets worse, brother.

The parasocial relationships that develop from people interacting way too much online, with their algorithms feeding them the same sentiment and beliefs they already have, are really damaging, honestly. I don't even think there's a good way to talk at length about how we're going to look back a couple of decades in the future and see how this has impacted people mentally.

Brother, it's been the story of my fucking life. This is a very light, funny example—a fun example of this. This goes live on Twitter: “Damn, bro, were you Kendall Jenner?” The tweet goes viral. It looks like I am, right?

The tweet gets 4 million views. There are 4 million people who saw this who could potentially think this is real. You guys give me way too much credit. I got phone calls and texts from people I've known my whole life saying, “Bro, what the fuck? This is lit.” I'm like, “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Tana Mongeau quote-tweets it: “Somebody please tell me this is AI.” I thought this was a perfect example because she literally mentions AI in the tweet. This is a girl who knows me personally. She could call me or text me, but she saw this on Twitter, and it elicited this emotion that led her to perpetuate the narrative and ask this question. You know what I mean? It's crazy.

Another cool example—not a cool example, but I feel like this is a really good example of this—is…

This is a post that went super dumb viral. Look at this: 40 million views. The caption is, “Tobey Maguire, 50, is currently dating Mishka Silva, 20.” Forty million people saw this. This is especially interesting to me because I personally know both people in this photo.

Mhm.

They both live in L.A., and I know them much better than the average person. I’m not going to say I know Tobey—he’s my best friend—but Tobey was good friends with my ex-girlfriend’s dad. I know him well enough, and I see him from time to time. Mishka is a friend. I know her. She’s out in L.A. Great girl.

It’s funny because people ran with this narrative in this post as if it were fact, and the conversation wasn’t about whether this was true or not. That was never part of the conversation. It just became two sides: the typical feminist take, like, “He’s way too old. This is whack. This is weird.” And then the other side, where young men are like, “Bro, he’s so lit. Spider-Man’s lit for this. She’s so hot. Goals.”

That’s why they faked it, bro, because it was going to be polarizing like that. That’s why they faked it.

Exactly. And this is a light example. This didn’t negatively affect either of their lives. Honestly, it likely really helped Mishka in whatever the fuck she’s doing, because it’s lit. And Tobey doesn’t give a fuck, bro. He doesn’t have social media. He’s fucking Spider-Man. He could give a fuck less, right?

But my entire point is: What happens when this is really damning? What happens when people are incentivized to create fake information and they get literally paid to create fake information? They will every single time if it caters to engagement. If it’s more engaging, they just will.

That’s where we’re stuck, and I don’t know. I ask myself a lot because I’m constantly—I’m not going to say I’m a victim of it, but it’s constantly happening to me. How do we combat it? Or, even a better question, how do we align with it? How do we make money investing in that, or find something to remedy or fix that? I don’t know. I don’t know what the answers to those are.

But yeah, it’s fake, bro. The internet’s fucked, right?

5. How Internet Fame Can Spiral Out of Control

Bro, I’ve experienced it a ton. I mean, 2024 was basically a Black Mirror episode for me. That was when I was super bullish on SOL. That’s when SOL went from around $20 in 2023 to around $200 in 2024. WIF went from literally zero market cap to a $5 billion market cap in 2024.

There was a moment in time when anything that I was talking about relating to crypto, things on-chain, or coins, people would make a coin about it and be like, “Oh, it’s going to go to a fucking billion-dollar market cap because Ansem is talking about it.” And so—

It got so bad that they fucking made you—you were getting doxxed and spammed about your cat’s name, and your cat’s name went crazy. What did it run to?

I posted a picture of my cat. When was this? What year? No, 2024—probably April 2024. I posted a picture of my cat, and nobody knew my cat’s name. Nobody could make a coin about it because nobody knew which one was the actual name. There were all these coins popping up, but nobody knew the actual name of the cat.

So I’m like, “All right, Hops.” I tweeted it, went to sleep, took a nap, and woke back up. I wake up, and my mom is texting me like, “Yo, why are people messaging me on Facebook asking for the cat’s name? What’s going on? What’s happening?” Hops.

He’s an orange cat. Hops. He’s a good cat. I love him. So when I told people that, a ton of people made coins, and it went to around a $100 million market cap the next day. What the fuck? It was honestly an insane situation.

I actually met somebody at a conference. This dude came up to me and showed me his Phantom—or whatever it was. I think it was one of the trading terminals. He was like, “Bro, I’m down $100,000 on your cat.” Literally, when your cat—

So annoying. Down $100,000 on your cat.

He bought $100,000 worth, but he literally top-ticked it—the very top tick.

Brutal.

I said it was fucking crazy.

Did you say you’re a fucking—

I did. I didn’t have the heart to tell him.

Should have.

I said, “Bro, why did you put that much on my cat?” But luckily, he had made some money on some other shit, so it wasn’t that bad. But yeah.

There is somebody on planet Earth who is rich because your cat’s name is Hops, and they bought it.

One hundred percent. They messaged me—no, they DM’d me—like, “Bro, thank you.”

By the way, that’s what we love about crypto, right? This is what we have in common and where we share. There’s nothing better than that. I’ve been approached many times in public like, “Bro, thank you for this. You’ve helped me pay off student loans.”

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It’s my favorite thing about CT, for sure. It’s the best thing by far. Nothing compares to it.

During the L.A. fires, I stayed with a girlfriend at the beach, away from everything in L.A., and she wanted to take me to her favorite coffee shop. We’re walking, and she’s hyping this coffee shop up the entire time.

We walk in, and the second we walk in—she’s a regular; she goes there all the time—the 2 guys who own the coffee shop, 2 brothers, freak the fuck out. They go, “Banks, what the fuck?” They jump across the fucking counter and start pulling their phones out. They’re like, “Dude, you helped me make money on this, that, whatever. We’ve been following you since this, whatever.”

They came up in NFTs, made a couple right moves, and they’re like, “Bro, you’re literally the reason why we were able to buy this coffee shop.” And I’m like, “You’re fucking kidding me.” They’re like, “No, for real, bro.” They’re like, “We have a third brother. You’ve got to wait. He’s coming down.” We took pictures.

That was the best example for me because, obviously, I was flexing to a girl. This girl was like, “Bro, who the fuck are you?” She had no idea who I was before this. She was like, “What?” And it was like, “Wow.”

Yeah, obviously, that’s the most fulfilling part of crypto for me as well.

Yeah, I don’t know. On that note, though, do you own any crypto? Did we talk about that? You said no—

I own some HYPE—Hyperliquid. I think Hyperliquid is one of the most important applications, not just in crypto but also globally, right now. It’s a decentralized perpetual-futures exchange: perpetual futures, or perps, for trading any asset 24/7. They’ve done well.

I own a ton of HYPE too. It’s great. The GOAT, the GOAT, the GOAT.

The epitome of working hard and seeing the fruits of your labor play out, for sure. They’ve done a great job. They first started with just crypto assets—Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, HYPE, and some other smaller altcoins. But now they have what’s called HIP-3. It’s essentially an extension of the Hyperliquid platform, and they’ve done a great job of enabling other assets that aren’t just crypto assets, like stocks. They have the S&P 500 on there. They have Amazon on there. They have Intel on there.

They need to put Take-Two on there, and they need to put DeepSeek on there.

For sure. GTA 6 coming up.

Yes, yes, sir.

A lot of their volume right now—I think, out of the top 10, a lot of it is from stocks and other assets. But it’s just a much better way for retail to speculate on assets other than options. I think perps are a way, way better product than options, and in the future we’ll see that play out.

At the end of the day, Hyperliquid makes money, and it’s solving a real problem. It’s a really good product, right? It really all boils down to that.

You own no Solana?

No Solana.

So Ansem owns absolutely no Solana. The king of Solana, ladies and gentlemen—you don’t understand, by the way. Ansem, you were buying Solana at what? A dollar? Two dollars?

$1.50.

$1.50. Must be nice. Congratulations. And when did you sell your last position?

This last time, I sold right after the Trump shit. It was around $260.

So, the top. Nice. Great. Must be nice to be the GOAT.

That’s insane, bro. He’s literally—listen, Ansem is literally the king of Solana. You can tell your Solana story in a second, but that blows my mind.

Yeah, it is pretty crazy.

Wow. So that makes it—what’s the market cap of HYPE? What’s the market cap of Solana? Check real quick.

I think HYPE’s circulating market cap is around $10 billion, but the FDV is probably around $40 billion—$39 billion, I think.

$40 billion? And what’s Solana?

I think around $50 billion, I want to say.

Oh, so they’re close. They’re really close.

Yeah, they’re relatively close.

Are we putting up the Polymarket odds? HYPE to flip Solana? Do we have that? Is that a lot? There’s no way it’s 12.5%. That’s 12%. No, no, no, no, no. That’s not real. That can’t be real. Do we have the—

I’ll put every dollar I’ve ever made in my life in it. That’s not financial advice, by the way. Damn. That 12% is insane, bro.

I mean, if it’s 40 and 50, shouldn’t it be closer to 50/50, or 40% to 45%?

Yeah, I mean, I guess maybe if they’re doing the circulating market cap, then it’s probably closer to around there. But even then, I don’t know.

Anthropic to flip Bitcoin was 22%. This is 12.5%. I feel like this is even more likely than that.

For sure. No, it’s way more likely. We’re slamming Anthropic. We’re obviously slamming HYPE here—HYPE over SOL. Yeah, definitely. So you heard it here first from Ansem, the king of Solana, the godfather of Solana: HYPE to flip Solana by December 31st at 12%.

Especially, bro, I’m slamming this at 40% to 50%. I mean, bro, I don’t understand why it’s so low. I don’t understand why it’s so low. I’ve got to check the odds on this. It’s insane, man.

Polymarket is such a great product. It really is. My content and media brain loves it because their Twitter performs so well. They’re obviously a partner in the show, and I want to say thank you to Polymarket for investing in Ansem and me and investing in this show. Shane has been a friend for a long time, and he’s the [bleep] GOAT. Their product, platform, and entire team kill it. What I love so much about it is that it creates amazing content. The content is great: the first song of the Super Bowl, HYPE to flip Solana, Cardi to drop an album before GTA 6, or when Drake is going to drop his album. It’s super cool that there are markets for this.

Speaking of Twitter, I do want to promote our Twitter real quick. We rebranded Probably Nothing to Market Bubble, so the channels and the coms are all Market Bubble-branded now. A lot of you guys are already probably following this. Go follow this. This is where we’re going to be. This is the biggest, most important piece to follow. Dremo also, you [bleep] up the bio. It’s supposed to be hosted about—actually, I don’t know if you are. I have to look at it. Dremo, let me get a [bleep] Dremo in the chat real quick one time. We love a good [bleep] Dremo. But follow the socials and all that. It’s really important.

Yeah, is there anything else you want to talk about? I want to talk about some of the stocks, bro. Some of the stocks.

Let’s really get deep on it. I’m down. I’m down, because that’s what everybody wants from you. Everybody wants the ticker. Everybody wants to know. I’m going to pull up my phone. Pull up TradingView and take the wheel, baby. Take the wheel, my beautiful tall unicorn prince.

Bro, you glaze me hard as fuck, bro. I appreciate you.

Have to always, man. I’m an evangelist. I’m the epitome of that word—the definition. If I love you, I love you.

Yeah, so, like I said, I was bearish on Bitcoin. I don’t own any Bitcoin right now. I do think that there are a lot of different trades that you can take. I do love Hyperliquid. I’m bullish on crypto in a few areas.

I think perps are going to do really well. I think stablecoins are going to do really well. I honestly think that a lot of the smaller startups also have an opportunity to do really well. What crypto does a better job at than any other industry is enabling speculation and finding new, great ways for retail to speculate on new things.

Hold on a second. I’m really sorry. What are we doing? I broke my own rule. I broke my own rule, and I just looked at the viewer count. Is this real? Twitch—41,000 people are watching this? There’s absolutely no shot. There’s no shot this is a real number. I’m seeing hearts in the chat, bro. I’ll freak out. I’ll destroy this set right now. There’s no way. Are you guys serious? There’s no way.

I was terrified to do this. I clicked it, and in my mind, if it’s over 1,000, I’m happy. Honestly, I don’t care about the viewer count. I really don’t, but this is insane to me. This is insane.

Honestly, thank you guys so much. This is crazy. What the fuck? You guys are sick. This is insane, dude. Holy shit. Are you guys serious? Is this a dream? I’m sorry. I know I’m being super annoying right now.

Is that a lot? Is that 40k a lot of viewers?

Brothers, what? 42,000 viewers? This isn’t botted either. Everyone on Twitch bots; there are no bots happening here. This is just me raw on Twitch. I’m not a [bleep] streamer, bro. I have no followers. I’ve never streamed before in my life. I’ve streamed a couple times with Ainars. This is [bleep] crazy. These are numbers. I knew the FaZe [bleep] people would be interested, of course, but we’re an hour into our show and there are this many people watching. That’s unbelievable. The chat’s lit.

What the fuck? You guys didn’t tell me? I told them not to tell me. This is crazy. Holy shit.

I clicked on Twitch, and this is ridiculous. That’s so ridiculous. Holy shit, guys. I promise you’re in the right place, by the way. As a young man watching this—which I’m assuming you guys are—this show is very important. It’s going to prove to be very important.

Obviously, the boys and what most people are doing on Twitch is IRL livestream content, and there’s an infinite amount of that. There aren’t a lot of shows or platforms today in streaming and clipping culture that are trying to offer genuine, good content and substance.

The point of this is that we want to be successful men, and we want to be healthy. We want to have intelligent conversations. We want to build a community of people who desire to do the same. We’re going to be building a lot of shit in real time, live.

We’re really ambitious about this AI co-host. We want to do interviews with founders and community members, and if you have a cool idea or a project you’re working on, if you’re looking for funding, or you just want to get an idea off, you want to have a conversation, there will be processes to do that, and we’ll be lifting people up from this community.

I know we’re going to hire, too. I’m looking to hire really smart, sharp internet kids always, especially now. There’s going to be a lot of work to do and a lot of shit moving forward. I can’t believe this is how many people are watching this. I’m genuinely mind-blown, and thank you.

It’s crazy. I can’t believe this. I genuinely cannot believe this. I’ll never be able to express how thankful I am. Genuinely. Holy shit, that’s crazy. That completely threw me off the topics and the flow of the show, and I’m so sorry.

No, you’re good.

Holy shit. You’re good. And while we’re on this emotional tip, I do want to say thank you, Ansem, as well, because you’re a very respected, serious guy in tech and finance. I know I’ve been a controversial figure, and there’s a lot of baggage that comes with FaZe Banks, but you’ve always been a great person and a great friend to me.

We started working on the show before everything happened with FaZe Banks and before all the drama really exploded. When it did, you didn’t skip a beat—not 1 second. There wasn’t any doubt in your head. You were actually more bullish. You were like, “Man, that’s—”

Let’s do it. Now we really have to rip this shit. It’s because I know you, bro. It’s because I know you.

I love you, bro, and I really appreciate it. You guys are very lucky to be with Ansem as well. He’s a very sharp guy, and he’s a really good person.

This is amazing. Wow. Man. All right, let’s dip back into it.

6. What Ansem Is Investing In Right Now

So, what I was saying about crypto: I am bullish on certain areas of crypto. I think Hyperliquid is a great hold. I don’t own any Bitcoin right now. I’m super bearish on ETH, but I think that—

Fuck you. Eat the food.

But yeah, there are a lot of opportunities in public markets.

What I want to say to a lot of people who have been trading crypto or stocks or whatever is that you should never pigeonhole yourself into looking at 1 thing or 1 sector. And I did that. I've done it a lot. I've missed a lot in macro land that kind of hurt me in 2022.

In 2022, I had a very terrible understanding of how rates worked and how other geopolitical forces would affect markets and crypto. Crypto is the riskiest asset class by far compared to other ones, like commodities, stocks, and all these other things. I didn't know how rates were going to affect crypto back then. It affected us a lot.

That's just to say, I think you should have an open mind about what you're trading and what you're looking at. It's all the same thing, especially if you trade mostly using technical analysis. It's just as easy to trade these stocks as it is to trade crypto. They move a lot slower, but it's honestly to your benefit.

So, yeah, that's what I was saying. The current supply chain in AI has power, chips—which are GPUs and CPUs—and then there's designing the chips and manufacturing the chips. Then there are the tech giants, as I said—Google, Microsoft, and Amazon—who are investing in these data centers and supplying this compute to these models.

Then you have the models and the labs: Anthropic and OpenAI. Even though you can't invest in Anthropic, as you said, it's probably going to come out with around a $1T IPO. You can invest in a lot of the companies that facilitate all of this demand that's currently happening.

Right now, the estimated CapEx out of those 4 or 5 tech companies is around $700B for this year alone. Obviously, there are companies that are going to benefit from that. I want to pull up this stock: Eaton, Eaton Corporation.

It's a stock that benefits from all this data center build-out. They provide a lot of the electrical equipment to all these data centers, and they're backlogged a ton because so many people are invested in and using them right now.

I've been doing a lot of research on ChatGPT and Claude. I can share—I'm probably going to share in later shows—the process I have for looking stuff up and researching things. Really, all the information you want is out there right now for you to get. It's really just about how you prompt these models and how you ask them questions.

So, yeah, this is Eaton. This is the weekly chart, and it's at its all-time high. It consolidated a lot for a couple of years, from 2024 to 2026, and now it's breaking out. I think it's a great buy, and I think it's going to continue to benefit a ton over the next 2 years.

I don't think the CapEx is going to slow down. This is a company that isn't dependent on the consumer side, like a lot of the model labs are. If they don't get great returns from consumers subscribing to their products—me and you buying the paid version of ChatGPT or the paid version of Claude—that can hurt their prospects.

Something like Eaton, which is lower on the totem pole as far as where they benefit, is de-risked a ton because of how little power we have in the US to supply these models and how little compute we have. So, I like Eaton a lot.

I was going to ask you: the market value of Eaton is what?

It's like $150B, I think. $160B.

Cool. So, not $8T. Nice. [Laughter] I was going to ask you because it's crazy. It's crazy because it's like, what do we invest in? It's Intel, Apple, and Meta, and these are the biggest companies already on planet Earth. So, I'm glad you touched on that.

Yeah.

Yeah, man. Wow. What a hell of a show. Is there anything before I get into this FaZe? I want to talk a little bit about that.

No, yeah, you're good. Go ahead. Go ahead, shoot.

Tell me about FaZe. I don't know shit about the stream culture. I don't know what's going on. Put me on. What's happening? Just like you got me on the finance section, I got you on this shit.

Yeah, so—

I just saw this on Twitter. This is crazy. The boys just launched a group, and they have 34,000 followers. They launched it, and they're rebranding themselves as the Core Boys. They just moved into a new house. This is happening live in real time. This is breaking news, everybody.

It stands for Create, Own, Run, Everything, which is cute, and it's in line with FaZe, whatever. It's ironic, though, because this picture—and you guys have to keep it a bean—is a recreated FaZe picture. Maybe somebody responded with it. No, this is the picture that we had as our YouTube avatar for a while.

I constructed this picture on set. I told them all to crowd in, and we took a picture. I directed this picture to be how we branded ourselves on socials because I didn't think a FaZe logo made sense. I wanted to brand it with these guys. It's just funny because this was my direction, my vision.

And honestly, listen: you guys are the last guys—yeah, yeah, besides Marlon. He was kind of affiliated. There are a couple missing, too. Max isn't in here, and neither is Rage. It doesn't seem like they're part of this, but these guys look happy, man.

To be honest with you, Alex is massive. It looks like he's been working his balls off. He looks exhausted, maybe a little stressed. Jason looks super happy. Lacy looks trim. Silky looks like Silky. Marlon's handsome, and Ron's honestly a generational talent.

It was a good run. Again, I'm seeing this in real time, and I wish them nothing but the best, genuinely. What a good day all around. That leads me into what's next for FaZe.

My vision for FaZe and the future of FaZe is the same thing that it's always been. It's no secret and no surprise. I currently don't have the power or say-so to make this happen, but I've been preaching it and pitching it.

I think FaZe should be a group of creators who are performing the internet in real time. I'm super passionate about GTA. You were just talking about investments, and I genuinely think Take-Two is an amazing, incredible investment. I'll pull it up right now: Take-Two. Take-Two market cap.

Yeah, Take-Two is a good stock.

You like it as well. I know you like it as well.

I like the chart. I like the spot it's at.

$40B, brother? Are you kidding me? Anthropic's a $1T company. $40B? And this point on the chart is right before they dropped GTA V. Look at where it's been since GTA V. GTA VI is going to create generational wealth.

Bring up that tweet that you sent me in Telegram—the GTA one. Bring that up for sure. GTA's at the end of the year, and I'm really passionate. I've been on record many times talking about how I think GTA is going to give us all types of generational wealth opportunities.

I would love to leverage FaZe's brand in that ecosystem and that market, and drop a group of kids who are Vanoss-style in the game.

I think that it's okay and safe for me to say that out loud because I don't think anybody could do it to the effect that FaZe and I could do it. Wait, you have on the screen right now the Polymarket—there are Polymarket odds for a FaZe member before GTA 6. Okay, now it's at 95%.

Listen, I wouldn't take yes at 95%. I'll be honest. I can get hit by a bus tomorrow, or people could tell me to fuck myself and absolutely not. You know what I mean?

Do we know when that fuck is going to drop? I'm probably slamming no, to be honest. To be real.

While I want it to happen, just so everybody's clear, I would like there to be a new FaZe roster or FaZe member before GTA 6. And obviously, this bars all the esports stuff. So don't think you're a fucking genius: “Oh, there's a fucking new guy in Counter-Strike.” No, obviously, it's a content-creator roster.

Yeah, we're hoping for yes, but at 95%, I'm slamming no. And I know I'm biased, and I know I have way too much information on the subject, but this is really for you guys. This is just playful and fun—a cool thing for you guys to engage with as far as Polymarket goes, relevant to this. But yeah, those are my plans and what I hope to do with FaZe.

Again, while everyone's telling me I'm fucking crazy and telling me that I can't do it, telling me that it won't work, that FaZe is dead, that it's over, and to hang it up, I wouldn't bet against me, bro. I really wouldn't, because I've done it too many times.

And just to give myself flowers, I'm really good at identifying talent early. I'm really good at putting the pieces together. And as far as the vision—fuck, the content—fuck, I've been doing it my whole life. It's all I know. It's all I love.

I just want to be on the record again as the first person to let you guys know: I am going to do it again, and we are going to be successful. And that's that. That's the fucking show, baby. Do you have anything else you want to talk about, Ansem?

It's been fun, bro. Transitioning from trading to building has been pretty cool.

7. Final Thoughts & See You Next Thursday

Incredible. And again, one last time, I'm grateful for you. I'm grateful for everybody in production, all the teams—Michael Cat, big shout-out. Tav, I love you.

Everybody who's watching—the ex-FaZe boys, the future FaZe boys, everybody that's ever given a single fuck about me or anything that I've ever done, or FaZe has done, or any of us has ever done—you guys changed my life. I'm very, very excited. I'm really happy with how this went, and I'm just excited to be doing something again. I'm excited to be building something.

One thing that I've definitely learned about myself over the last 6 months is I'm just not the guy who's ever going to have his feet kicked up on the beach and be retired. It's not who I am. It's not in my DNA. I'm going to work until the day that I die.

I'm going to want to find the next thing, the next guy. I'm going to want to exist in the future a couple of steps ahead of the rest for the rest of my entire life, and you can count on that.

The only difference now is I'm sober, and I'm the best version of myself I've ever been. Ever. Shout-out being sober.

And, you know, a nice reset and a rock bottom—there's nothing like a good rock bottom. There's something freeing about it. You're kind of free in a lot of regards.