Why AI Is Beating Crypto Right Now | Market Bubble #2

Welcome to Marketbubble, a show about investing in yourself. I'm here with my co-host Ansem. He's live on Twitter and I'm live on Twitch. And yeah, this is a show all about making money, commanding attention, and AI literacy. All you have to do is have a desire to be a successful young man. Women, women, too. Girls can watch the show, right, Z?

100%, 100%.

Cool. Yeah, we're live every Thursday at 1 PM PST on my Twitch, Twitch.tv/fazebanks, and on Ansem's Twitter. Yeah, we're here, Z. Episode 1 made quite the splash.

Splashed it, bro. Splashed it.

Fuck, man. How do you feel?

I feel good, bro. I feel like we're getting in the groove now. I'm hyped to talk more about everything that's going on. We launched it right at a pretty cool spot. The markets were like, “What? Ansem doesn't own any Bitcoin? We're just going to [__] rip the [__] this week.” So, yeah, pretty cool. I'm excited to talk about the markets, what I'm looking at, and go deeper.

Me too. Episode 1, I feel like, chalk it up as a wild success. The feedback was—let's call it controversial.

Let's call it mixed feedback. Yeah, we got mixed reviews.

Some people felt something about finding out that we had a show. We launched a show about markets, and obviously, the way the internet works, social media kind of just labeled it crypto. That's definitely not what the show is about entirely. We are absolutely going to discuss markets for a good chunk of it. That's a huge part of our overlap.

But it's about much more than that. Genuinely, the point of the show is to curate a community who wants to be positioned well over the next 5 to 10 years. You look on social media right now and everything is fried. I just went off for the first 30-minute pre-show about hate farms and drama, the way that [__] narratives fly around, and fake internet, dead internet.

Politics is fried. Everything's [__]. Everybody's addicted to [__], the internet, and porn, and dating's cooked. People are incels. People are not in a great spot. Over the next 5 to 10 years, shit's going to get flipped on its head with AI. How do we position ourselves? That's what we're talking about: how we're positioned and how we suggest that the audience positions themselves.

I know we're working on some commandments. We didn't get through that, but we want to share with you guys how we're navigating all this [__]. So, yeah, it's not just a show about crypto. Obviously, we knew one of the big hooks was going to be that Ansem owns no Bitcoin, right? People, by the way—

People—you own something, though. You've bought some crypto since the first show.

Yeah, I have. I have, for sure.

We'll definitely talk about that.

We'll definitely talk about that. Let's talk about numbers. I just want to say thank you guys for—where the [__] is it? I thought I had it somewhere. The analytics. I think we peaked at 66K on Twitch. What were you live at on Twitter?

I'm not sure. I know Twitter counts it kind of differently. I know it was over 25K in total.

That's insane. That's insane. So, yeah, nearing just about 100K. Obviously, there's a lot of FaZe [__] attached to it and streamer stuff, whatever, but people showed out nonetheless. A lot of people stuck around, and I got hit up by a lot of people who appreciate the fact that we're doing this show and see value in it.

I saw a couple of clips. There's a clip of Jonah. You want to bring up the clip of Jonah?

Maybe watch that one.

Which one?

Jonah. Jonah had a take on why he thinks this show could be valuable.

Yeah, I thought I had it in the prep. It's not in the prep. It's [__] annoying. We're going to have Mizkif on in 50 minutes, which is cool. You don't know much about him, but he's a big streamer, and he posted this video randomly on Twitter.

No, no context. He's never really talked about finance before.

Right. And now he's getting into finance and all that [__].

Yes. You can hear this audio.

Yeah.

All right.

My name is Mizkif. I've been streaming for 8 years now, and there's 1 thing that everyone is not talking about: streamers make way too much money.

You see, a quiet epidemic has been happening right under our footsteps. While streamers like Kai Cenat have been getting nonstop gifted subs for those homes in Africa, you, the viewer, have been in crippling debt. Gen Zers have an average of $35,000 in debt today, and millennials have over $132,000 in debt. At 30, their bank accounts have just a median of $3,000 in them.

Not only that, only 43% of Americans from 18 to 35 invest in the stock market. That's crazy. We are not learning finance. So, starting today, I'm going to be investing $300,000 of my own money into the stock market. If you guys watch, pay attention, and help me learn what I need to do, you guys will also be earning some cash.

We're going to be learning finance together every single day for 30 days, live on my stream. Whatever money we have at the end, I split it with the chat. The more you show up, the more you earn.

Yeah, no, it's cool. Mizkif's been a content creator forever. He started out as a cameraman and mod for Ice Poseidon. You know who that is?

Nope.

He's kind of one of the original OG streamers. I feel like Ice really popularized IRL live streaming. I feel like he was the first guy to do that. He started out on RuneScape. He's a legend in streaming, an absolute legend in streaming.

I actually have a bit of lore with Ice. I've been around for just as long as these guys, so there's obviously bound to be some overlap. But Miz knows streaming inside and out. He also co-founded an org, kind of the same way that I did, and over the last year he switched over from Twitch. He was a hardcore Twitch poster boy for a while. You could even call him the golden boy of Twitch for a minute, and he's fully done the 180 pivot into Kick.

I mean, he's had a falling-out with a lot of the old people that he used to work with, and I don't know, just a lot of weird [__] for us to talk about. It'll be interesting. I was surprised to see—I went on his stream yesterday, and I was surprised to see the direction he was taking it. I honestly planned on sitting down and him just asking, “What should we buy? What's the ticker?” Because that's typically what everybody wants to know, as you know.

Yeah.

But he was like, “No, that's not what we're doing.” He had all these slideshows and presentations about teaching his chat about compound interest. He wants to actually properly educate his audience on how to manage money and financial literacy.

Yeah, it was refreshing to see, and I think his head's in the right place as far as that goes.

There aren't really that many streamers doing that. It seems like, with a lot of the streamers who are popular on Twitch and Kick, the content isn't really about finance, investments, or any of that. That's a very new thing for streamers.

No, it is. It is. I saw Threadguy talk about this. Threadguy has an interesting take. He's been talking a lot about—let me bring it up. You see this clip?

Every person in the world pivots to trading and investing actively. No, this is bullish. The late stage of the late stage is everybody trades everything all the time. That means the last cohort of marginal buyers—which is the 25-and-under crowd, which has money—actively invests.

That means the moves, megachurch-style, all focused on 1 asset, whipsawing back and forth, with volatility going up forever. It all concentrates and it adds. The late stage of the late stage is that everybody has FOMO, nobody knows what to do, they all pivot to finance. Everybody pivots to finance, everybody trades, everybody invests, and everybody is actively managing money.

Do you agree?

I 100% agree. The reason that this is so accurate is because you've got 2 main cohorts. I think we'll take America and then look at the rest of the world.

In America, it's the people who are doing well at their jobs, like a lot of the software engineers who have high-paying jobs, high-paying lawyers, high-paying finance people, and high-paying doctors. All of these people have discretionary income.

Because of how much inflation has impacted the costs of everything in the States, houses are way more expensive, groceries are way more expensive, and basically everybody's expenses are a lot higher than they used to be. Wage inflation hasn't really kept up with those increases in prices. So the only real way to combat the inflation that people are experiencing is to invest. Everybody is aware of this now.

I saw somebody say that the AI boom is impacting the stock market more than it's impacting jobs so far. To be honest, because of how much stocks have appreciated, there are a ton of people who made a shit ton of money off NVIDIA going to a $5 trillion market cap.

Robinhood's a thing now, obviously. Even Polymarket lets people pretty much trade anything, right?

It's super accessible for everybody. Robinhood, Polymarket, everything. It's really easy for people to access these things. But yeah, people know that they need to invest to do well.

So that's the first cohort: the cohort that has a lot of discretionary income. Then the second cohort is people who don't have as much discretionary income, who aren't doing as well. For those people—the people who are trying to escape the underclass, quote-unquote—that's a lot of the reason crypto is so attractive, because it's the place where you can 1,000x your money, which is a lot faster than other areas, even though it's a lot riskier.

The reason it's so attractive is because there are a lot of people who are like, “Well, if I save $100 a week, I'm not going to be able to do a lot with that anyway. So I need to increase the amount that I have saved somehow.” I think that's why options have gotten really popular. The zero-day options are literally breaking records year over year.

Investing is just going to become a lot more popular because it's a way for people to leapfrog their current social status and social class. I think the more educated you are, the higher chance you have of doing that.

Clearly, interest is at an all-time high, but the content output is still so small.

It's weird and dumb, in my opinion, but I think it's because—

I don't know. It's also not easy to do, though. It's not easy to teach people how to trade. You put yourself in a really compromising position. Again, I have put myself in this position and kind of threw myself in front of all this crypto shit, and it was obviously massively risky and went very wrong in a lot of ways.

That was another thing I noticed on his stream, and I've kind of always known this. I'm sure you feel this and can relate to this, too, but the word “crypto”—we were talking about—

So negative.

We were talking about Zcash. Zcash came up in the conversation, Bitcoin, Hyperliquid. He asked me what I liked in crypto, and I brought up Hyperliquid. The chat was spamming, “Scam, scam, scam. Hyperliquid's a scam.” It's crypto, but I think something that the average person on CT and in crypto fails to realize is that the word “crypto” is synonymous with the word “scam,” unfortunately.

To the average person, the sentiment around it is incredibly negative, to the point where people could spam “scam” next to something like Hyperliquid or something like Zcash. It's such a silly thing. How do you even entertain something like that? How do you respond to something like that?

How do you combat that? That's a real shit problem. It really is.

Yeah. It's on people like us with platforms to explain the differences in the technologies, because when you have transformative technology that's really innovative, there are always going to be bad actors that come and use it for X, Y, and Z.

The same thing happened with the internet. There were certain things on the internet that weren't necessarily good things that people watched and consumed. But with the internet, obviously, there were a ton of great companies that came from it. Crypto is the same way.

Stablecoins are going to transform how people send money back and forth across the globe—much cheaper and much faster—and transform how businesses interact. There's literally an act in Congress right now, the CLARITY Act. They're focusing on how best to integrate stablecoins with our existing financial system. That's one of the biggest things that crypto has accomplished in the past decade or so.

Perps, which is what Hyperliquid offers, are going to be huge for how people speculate on all these assets. For anybody who's traded on Hyperliquid or traded on Fidelity, it's a way, way, way better experience trading on Hyperliquid. You can trade 24/7 with leverage on an asset. You don't have to wait for the stock market to open or close. You get access to everything, and you can also have margin with the rest of your portfolio.

It's super easy. If you want to trade something on another platform, or use a lending and borrowing platform, that's also on Hyperliquid. If you want to trade perps, you can do that. If you want to trade spot, you can do that. All these things in one place are some of the advantages of open blockchain technology and decentralized perp platforms over the existing platforms that people use.

I think the volumes in retail trading are only going to go up on these platforms. But yeah, it's hard to say crypto does not have scams, because it does have scams, and there are a lot of—

I said that on the stream, too. I said—

—coins that go down, but that's part of it. That's part of the process. There were things that existed in 2017, and it's not even like people were trying to scam anyone. They were just failed projects. A lot of startups fail, and if you're working in one of the newest industries, obviously there are going to be a lot of failures.

I remember in 2017 I thought, “Is venture capital a scam?”

Yeah, right. They miss 8 out of 10 times. People don't call VCs a scam.

Yeah, exactly.

In 2017, one example I had—

I don't know if you guys remember Monaco. Actually, Monaco is a decent one because they're now Crypto.com. But Patientory was this coin in 2017. You probably won't know it if you weren't on Bittrex back then, but it was a coin dedicated to trying to put medical records on-chain and do things around that.

1. Ansem on Crypto vs AI

The founder was a real founder in her field. I think she was a woman who was accomplished in her field, and she was trying to do something new. It just didn't work out. The same way that the Hyperliquid founder, Jeff, tried to make a prediction-market platform before prediction markets even blew up.

There are a lot of failures that happen in crypto, but that doesn't mean crypto is a scam in general. A lot of technology is going to underpin important applications going forward. I think Polymarket is a great representation of that, with how well they've done in areas outside of crypto.

You said this in the last episode. Let's just watch the clip. Thanks. Screen share. Yeah, right here. Let's watch this.

I try to cook for—

Me, bro. Like, 2025, I sold a lot of crypto early in 2025 and really took some time off from markets because I realized that when I do well and make some money in markets—

I always overtrade afterward if I don't step back and step away. So in 2025, I did step away from trading, and I missed a shit ton going on with the AI trade in stocks.

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

I mean, yeah, it has, though. It really has. Do you own—how do you feel about Bitcoin? How do you feel about crypto, Ansem?

Oh, no.

That's so fucking funny, 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.

But listen, don't give us the fucking PR answer right now. Do you own Bitcoin right now?

I don't own any Bitcoin.

That is—

I had to drag that out.

You did. I didn't want to say it, bro. I really was trying not to say it. I was trying not to say it.

I do think it's down a lot, and I do think it's not a great place to be selling if you do have some.

See, at least I said it’s not a great place to be selling. At least I said that. It was before. I mean, Ansem, you said you love crypto, whatever. Nothing that we said was wrong.

And listen, let me, on the record, say I do own crypto. I’m honestly way overinvested in crypto. I’m one of those salty fucks who watched stock prices skyrocket and outperform crypto by every metric over the last 2 years. I own a fucking ton of Bitcoin, a fucking ton of Hyperliquid, and a 7-figure CryptoPunks portfolio. I own 7 figures’ worth of NFTs in 2026. It’s fucking insane. I’m still bullish. I’m not selling them.

I love crypto, too. A part of me obviously loves crypto, too. But nothing that we said was wrong. Stocks have dramatically outperformed crypto, and sentiment is generally negative.

I mean, even when you do get calls right nowadays, they’ll find a way to discredit you or pull it from you.

2. The $1.50 SOL Trade

They said you lied. They said, “Ansem.”

Yeah, that was crazy, though.

You straight-up lied. You fucking lied about buying Solana at $150. I saw it all over my timeline. I saw a bunch of tweets about it. You lied about buying Solana at $150. What do you have to say for yourself?

I think it’s crazy because that’s literally what I’m known for on CT. That’s the only reason I got any followers at all on my account. I have the chart, and I have all the posts about it.

One of the things I was doing really well in 2020 and 2021 was saying, “Whenever I have a good trade idea and I’m confident in it, I’m going to share it and document it in real time.”

When I was thinking about investing in Solana, I was talking to Jeremy. Jeremy’s actually the reason I even invested in Solana in the first place. He was bullish on Serum, which, if you guys know, back then was like the decentralized version of FTX. He was like, “I’m super bullish on SBF. ETH is too slow. I think Serum is going to be the one that we invest in and go hard and go heavy in.”

He was shilling me on Serum, and we had a group chat on Telegram. It was Serum and something else. But I started looking into it more, and I was like, “Bro, I think the trade is SOL. I don’t think the trade is Serum. I think the trade is SOL.” That’s when I started looking more into Solana.

This post is literally from December 31, 2020. This was when I was still trading on FTX.

And this is what you responded to Beanie with. Beanie, for those watching who don’t know, is a big crypto guy.

Big NFT guy.

He’s a big NFT guy. Big NFT guy, big crypto guy, and he’s been around forever.

Beanie said, “Ansem’s supposed claim to fame is that he apparently bought Solana at $150. Surely he can provide some proof of it because I don’t remember him being in crypto in 2020, and it certainly wasn’t any public call to buy Solana at those prices. Furthermore, he had no following.”

Then you sent him a tweet from 2020.

I was like, “Bro, I have the tweet. I have the post. I have all of it.”

What was the price at this point, too?

It’s in the screenshot. If you click it, you’ll see it because it’s timestamped. I think it’s around $1.47.

That’s the BTC chart.

That’s BTC again. Yeah, $1.40.

Yeah, a dollar. So, a dollar. Quite literally a dollar.

My bad.

Lower than $150. My bad.

Lower than $150. But yeah, that trade is documented. If you can pull up the actual thread, there are a ton of posts in it. I go through the whole thing. I said when I was selling some, and I said when I took some off. The entire trade is documented.

I remember the one that got a lot of interactions was when it was around $4 and sitting right under its old all-time high.

Yeah, so it could go higher. Crazy.

The whole trade was documented, and people were like, “Bro, there’s no way you’re just going to keep updating this.” It was crazy because Solana did so well. It was one of the only coins that kept going up and kept outperforming while everything else wasn’t doing that well.

In DeFi, a lot of the DeFi coins topped out in February 2021. Solana just continued doing well that year. That was why I got followers in the first place. I didn’t have any followers—he’s right. When I posted it, I had around 1,000 followers.

Yeah, I mean, we kind of signaled the bottom.

We did. We definitely did.

Rothman literally live-tweeted the last show. He said, “Wouldn’t it be funny if we all bought Bitcoin right when Ansem said he doesn’t?” But that’s kind of low-key what happened.

All-time high, bro. Shit’s been ripping.

I know the markets took a hit today.

Yeah. Let me pull up the charts.

Because you officially do own some crypto now outside of Hyperliquid, since we did talk about Hyperliquid last time.

Yeah, I do. I do own some fucking crypto. I bought some new shit. This is just a chart of Bitcoin and the QQQ, which is the index of all the tech stocks.

If you look at how Bitcoin has performed since last April, that was when the tariff shit was going on. Trump rolled it back and was like, “We canceled whatever,” and then stocks ripped. Everything ripped after that.

So in April 2025, Bitcoin hit around $75,000. How has it done compared to just tech stocks?

This is the index. I mean, this isn’t even SanDisk, which is up 30x, or the top performers, which are up even more than the index. Crypto has lagged a ton, and it’s pretty clear that the best risk-on trade has been stocks adjacent to the AI buildout and the AI boom rather than crypto.

That’s fine. What I want to get across to people who are trading crypto is that it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be trading crypto. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be paying attention to crypto. It just means you have to be a lot more selective about which assets you’re buying and which assets you’re holding long-term.

It also means that you should be spending time looking at stocks and researching stocks. There’s no reason that if you’re trading Bitcoin, ETH, or Solana, you can’t trade Nvidia, Google, SanDisk, or any of those things.

Trade everything, baby.

The core message I wanted to get across is that you should be trading everything. You shouldn’t pigeonhole yourself into one asset class because you can miss out on a ton of opportunities.

Currently, there are some plays in crypto that I do like. I like Zcash a lot. I think Zcash is in a really good position for a few different reasons. One of the main reasons is that Bitcoin currently has an issue with the quantum situation.

Google’s super-smart engineers are projecting that quantum computing is going to impact things a lot sooner than they previously thought. I think they were estimating around 2030 now, based on a new paper they put out.

In the paper, they didn’t want to put all of the information out because they didn’t want nefarious parties to have access to it. Some of it is redacted and private even in the paper. Some of it is encrypted.

One of the reasons I think Zcash is a good trade right now is that it’s quantum-resistant. It’s also private. Another issue that Bitcoin has had, and does have currently, is that it’s so institutionalized now. It’s attached to Saylor, and I think it’s also attached to the U.S.

One of the core principles of crypto, and one of the core principles of a lot of the OG cypherpunks, was that they wanted money that could not be co-opted by any nation-state, any party, or any one person. I think Zcash is very reflective of that because it hasn’t been institutionalized in that way yet.

Over the past 10 years—I think it launched in 2016—you’ve had a lot of the OG, OG, OG crypto people accumulating. Nobody was concerned about Zcash until maybe last year. In all the past crypto cycles, Zcash was laughed at because it underperformed so aggressively.

What was your tweet yesterday? You said, “Zcash is Bitcoin if it was quantum-resistant and private.”

It’s a quantum-resistant and private complement to Bitcoin.

Do you genuinely like it better than Bitcoin as a trade right now?

100%. 100%.

You were pretty fucking bullish on that call 2 days ago, and it’s been up fucking—

I don’t even know. It’s up around 50% since then. We were talking about it when it was around $450. What’s it at right now?

It’s at—yeah, it’s at $560. I’m about to pull it up. I’m going to share my screen.

There you go. I did it.

Okay, cool.

Yeah, it’s at $562. It’s up quite a bit.

There you go. And I asked you straight up.

I said, “Should I fire on this?” You were like—

“Fire right now. I really think you should. I really think you should.”

I had this idea of doing it on stream, and we all liked the idea because it would make for good content. I was talking about firing 500 bands into it live.

Yeah.

After talking to a couple of other friends, I don’t think opening and closing positions live is a good idea. I just think it’s minus EV. I don’t think anything good could come from that. Especially for me, if I learned anything on the Adin Ross stream, it’s: don’t buy shit live.

We should talk about this with Mizkif because that’s what he’s doing. It’s not 300 bands, but he’s investing.

Does he do crypto stuff, or is he doing mostly stocks?

Yeah, he’s doing all stocks. I don’t think he’s doing any crypto.

Okay.

No, he’s doing no crypto. But I’m sure you have some sort of strategy, because obviously the way that you would invest to make money over the course of a month is much, much different than how you would invest normally, with no strings attached to it.

Super interesting. It’s cool. It’s funny because me and the boys—all the guys I used to live with, the finance guys I used to live with—talked about this. I remember I would walk into Frank’s room, and Thread and Malcolm and these guys were so plugged in on the comms as things were happening, as coins were getting deployed and tweets were happening.

It sounded like esports, like professional gamers. I couldn’t believe it. And then you would see all these old Fortnite pros, like—his history and roots in Fortnite—and Sceptic, I think, is an old Fortnite pro, right? I don’t know, there’s a direct parallel between professional gamers and good traders, at least Solana trench traders. There was something real to that, and I thought it would be really, really cool to watch something along those lines because it was really entertaining to watch, and there are clearly people who are good at it.

Bro—

It’s like the quick-twitch muscles. Honestly, bro, the youngins this cycle crushed it. All the FNF groups—

I don’t know, what does that stand for? FNF—friends and family, right? FNF family.

Yeah. So there are a lot of FNF groups that popped up this cycle. A lot of young kids came into crypto through Solana and memecoins and Pump.fun and all that, and they were like, “Bro, we’re going to get a core group of the best traders on-chain or on perps or whatever it is, and we’re just going to lock in 24/7. We’re literally going to no-life this shit 24/7. We’re not going to miss anything.”

The thing with crypto is there are so many coins that launch every day. There are so many narratives going on. There’s so much happening all the time that if you’re trading in a group, it’s a lot easier to catch things and be aware of what’s going on than if you’re just trading by yourself. I think a lot of the youngins realized that and did really well this cycle, capitalizing—

Comms. And again, that doesn’t surprise me because young people are the best professional gamers, too.

Yeah, the best pro Counter-Strike player is that one kid. What’s his name?

It’s Donk or whatever.

Donk. He’s one of the younger guys. Obviously, all the Fortnite pros are young. They’re really, really young and sharp. Their response time is so cracked. These kids grew up on screens and on the internet, so it’s just second nature to them. That’s all they know. It’s really interesting. The comms around it are crazy.

That’s going to be cool. That’s going to be cool. We’re going to have to follow along with that.

Yeah, it’s going to be sick. It’s cool because I don’t know how we timed it the way we timed it, but I feel like a lot of interesting shit just popped up in the last week out of nowhere that wasn’t really going on before.

3. 3 Crypto Plays

Also, something interesting—I think there are a few other interesting things that have happened that are tradable right now. Outside of Zcash, another really interesting project that’s been doing well is this project called Venice. So it’s Venice AI. I wish I would have caught the bottom on this and been long. VVV.

Let me pull it up. It’s a project by—oh, let me see.

But yeah, it’s—oh, this is something different. This is Crypto. This is cool, too, so I can talk about this. This is Collector Crypt.

Collector Crypt is like a TCG, a trading-card game or trading-card app. What they do is they’re buying the cards. As you know, trading cards have been doing really well. There are certain cards that are valued at whatever price, and they’re essentially an application on the Solana blockchain.

They have the gacha system where you unlock packs and get certain cards, and you can choose to either keep the cards or sell them back. But the way they’re set up, they’ve actually been doing really well revenue-wise. It’s one of the only applications on Solana that’s doing great and trending up and to the right. Blockworks has actually done a great job of covering them.

This chart basically shows their gross revenue. They’ve made close to, I think, 20 mil at their peak in 1 week in March. This guy basically wrote a post on it. I’m pulling everything up.

This on-chain project is a riskier one because it’s smaller market cap, but it’s one of the ones that does have users. I think it’s around $30 million market cap now.

Zcash is at $9B.

Zcash is $9B.

Yeah.

Not $30 million. I didn’t say billion. Yeah, meant million.

No, you said $30 million.

Venice AI is a platform by Erik Voorhees. What Venice AI is, essentially, is a private inference platform. You can access all of the top state-of-the-art models and all the best open-source models through Venice, but it doesn’t store any of your information with those actual models. So it’s private in that way, and that’s their main hook.

They’ve done really well. They have over 2 million users, and I think they have around 50,000 daily active users on their app. They’re making money from subscriptions. You subscribe to Venice just as you would subscribe to one of the other models, like Claude or ChatGPT, and then they use the models on the back end. They have different pro versions of the subscription where you get access to different things.

One of the cool features of Venice that I thought was interesting is that they have a second token called DM. If you have 1 DM, you get to use $1 of compute per day for that 1 DM that you have. The way you get access to DM is by staking VVV and then locking VVV.

For people who are spending a ton on compute every day, if you just hold DIEM, you can use the compute they’re giving you access to on the Venice platform. Instead of constantly hitting my limit on Claude, if you hold DIEM, you get access to that amount of compute in perpetuity. Every single day, you get access to that much compute.

It’s a really interesting model. I think it’s honestly attracted a lot of people to stake VVV. Right now, around 30% of the supply is staked, and the inflation for staking VVV is around 18% right now. They’re paying it out in the token.

It’s an interesting protocol at the intersection of crypto and AI. We don’t have a lot of real protocols in the crypto and AI space that aren’t vaporware and are actually doing well and accomplishing things. Erik Voorhees has been in crypto for a really long time. He’s a great founder.

The project has been around for, I think, a year. I want to say most of the token is on Base. I think it’s on Base.

So, there you go, ladies and gentlemen. You guys got your tickers.

Yeah, I gave 3 tickers. That’s 3 tickers.

It is Zcash, VVV, and DM.

And CARDS.

And CARDS. Yeah, yeah. That being said, there was a lot about crypto there. Do you still think AI outperforms crypto?

I do think AI outperforms the majors.

So, yeah, we talked last week about Anthropic over Bitcoin. Can we pull up the Polymarket?

We did talk about it. Was it around 20%?

Yeah, I think it was around 22%.

I still think that’s—I still think you bet it, by the way.

Production, pull it up. Pull up the updated one.

Oh, it’s at 50 now.

“Flip Bitcoin by December 31st.” Now it’s full. That’s more appropriate, by the way. 20% was [__] crazy.

Yeah. I mean, it’s trading over $1 trillion in whatever the secondaries are now.

$1.2 trillion. It’s creeping up quickly.

I think honestly the only thing with this is whether it’s going to IPO this year. I think it will IPO this year. They just have so much hype around them.

Even SemiAnalysis, which is the best research firm on the AI stuff, put out a report saying that their ARR is actually $44 billion now instead of $30 billion, as it was a month ago. So they’re still inflecting up. They’re doing a great job not just on the consumer side, but also on the enterprise side.

I think there are 2 ways that the labs are profiting right now. There’s the consumer side, which is people like us—retail—using the chatbots, using Claude Code, using Codex, whatever. For Anthropic, they’re also focusing a lot on providing systems to existing businesses.

When they recently had their new model, they said it found a lot of zero-days in software, so they had to release it to a lot of the biggest tech companies because they were afraid of just putting it out to the public. But they’re doing a really good job of focusing on the enterprise side and trying to help businesses optimize their workflows.

I think Anthropic is going to be a great launch. When you have Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI, if all of those were to IPO at the same time sometime this year, it’s hard for me not to see how that’s some kind of local top on everything. These companies went from zero to $1 trillion in about 5 years, which is unheard of. It’s the fastest route.

I do think the progress you’re seeing in all the models is definitely real. I’m not going to say it’s not real. It’s going to continue to be beneficial, but it’s hard for me to say that’s not going to be some kind of local top in the markets when that does happen.

4. Will AI Take Your Job?

You had an interesting take, a more social, optimistic take on AI. We talked about it in the prep for the show. It was something along the lines of you expecting AI to 10x human efficiency, and the result of that being, rather than job loss, an opportunity for people to be paid more for their jobs. Do you want to get into that?

Yeah, let me pull it up. I have a couple of clips I want to play. This is another one. Let’s turn it on.

What I was saying is that a lot of the discussion around AI so far has been that it’s going to take everybody’s jobs. I think the focus should not be on how people are going to get displaced. AI is going to make everybody 10x more efficient at whatever it is they’re doing.

If you’re one of those people who’s concerned about your job, whatever profession you’re in, you need to make sure that you’re getting up to speed and becoming an expert at using AI in your field as fast as possible. There are going to be some people who choose not to do that, and there are going to be some people who do choose to do that.

I think that in a few years, people are going to look at using AI in the same way as being adept at using the internet. Obviously, somebody who knows how to use the internet is a way better candidate for a job than somebody who doesn’t know how to use the internet. I think you’re going to look at AI the same way going forward.

Whenever you have these technological revolutions or innovations and huge breakthroughs happen, you actually create a lot more jobs that you couldn’t even foresee because you didn’t have the technology or the wherewithal to know what was coming. I think AI is going to do that more than it’s going to displace a lot of people.

The reason you’re seeing these conversations happen is, first, because it’s in their best interest to get people to believe that these models are life-changing and game-changing, and they’re trying to IPO soon. So, obviously, that’s important for them.

But it also gives teams a reason to cut bloated workforces. During COVID, there was a lot of overhiring at a lot of tech companies, and there were a lot of people in positions that didn’t necessarily need to be there even before AI came along. I’ll play this clip so we can see what he’s talking about.

The economy now—you’ve predicted AI will disrupt 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs over the next 1 to 5 years. What does that mean for the future of work? If you have a child who’s graduating high school and thinking about college or a trade school, what should the future of America be looking to right now to make sure they have a job down the line?

As you said about AI as a whole, I’m concerned and I’m also hopeful. I think the concern part of it is that we’ve seen technological disruptions before. People went from farming to factories, and from factories to knowledge work. The computer and the internet caused lots of disruption. That caused disruption for a time, and then people adapted.

My concern with AI is that it’s not different in kind, but the disruption is maybe deeper. It’s coming at us faster, right? AI can do a wider range of things. My concern, as well as my excitement, is that AI can do a wide variety of knowledge work.

It can do entry-level law work, entry-level finance, and entry-level consulting. My worry is exactly that if you’re someone coming up in the world and just starting your career, AI is coming at multiple points, and it will make people a lot more productive. But I think we can’t deny that it will also eliminate jobs, probably a large number of them.

What we need to do is adapt people as fast as possible to using AI and find ways to create jobs faster than we destroy them. I don’t think there’s a guarantee that we can do that, but the better we can do at that, the more we’ll reap the benefits and the less we’ll have to deal with the harms.

To get concrete, my advice would be: 1. Of course, learn to use AI.

Yeah, I mean, he kind of says it at the end.

Learn to use AI. That's really the gist.

Yeah, for sure. For sure. For sure.

5. Bullpen Trading Comp

All you should take away from that is, yeah, it's going to take your job. The only way to secure your job is to know how to direct it, know how to work with it, and know how to use it as a tool. Again, we use the law student in their last semester of law school as an example. Claude does your job better than you right now, today.

So you're fucking cooked, fried. You need to spend time with AI all day, every day. I read this thing about podcasts—I mean, content. It's coming for content, too. It's coming for everything. It's going to literally disrupt and change everything.

Let me share it.

Right here.

Yeah, there's a Bloomberg one, but there's a paywall on that, so we'll just use this. “Approaching half of new podcasts appear to be AI slop.” It's 39%—yeah, 39%—of all new podcasts are being dubbed AI slop and are fully AI-generated.

AI—like, fully AI-generated.

Yes, fully AI-generated.

Damn, people are still talking about AI slop, making 6 or 7 figures. Yeah, no, it's coming for everything, right? I think we're a pretty good example of 2 guys who spend a lot of time with AI. We go into a lot of the prep work. I'll even share this right here. I built this out with AI, and we share the notes. Here I have this—it’s me and you, but—

I think that's why it's definitely true. People are going to be using it to generate information, but the ones that do the best are going to be the ones that have original content, original takes, and original ideas.

For sure. For sure.

Well, that's what I think is interesting, and that's why I think there is a right and a wrong way to do it. I think the wrong way to do it is to just—

And I guess this might not be wrong. If you can farm ad revenue, if you can make money, if there's a market for it, and if there are people to consume it, then fucking go for it. Do it. Print.

But the way that I think about things is that doing it the right way would be the way that we've talked about doing our co-host. For everybody watching, we have this vision and this idea of there being almost a third co-host, and it being an offscreen, hyper-realistic AI woman who's ultra-smart and can kind of help with the integrity of the show live.

We could ask her, “Hey, Bubbles, what's the price of Solana?” and she'll drop it to us or come in with a quick quip, and build some sort of social relationship between us, this AI co-host, and the audience. That's what's most interesting to me: the relationship between human and AI as it relates to content. What does that look like? Performing that and articulating that through content.

I think there's a right and a wrong way to do it. Obviously, all the efficiency—helping with the integrity of the show, making it a better show, and producing the show with these tools—is the obvious no-brainer. But I do think there is a place for AI in content, and I think that, generally, the average person is most interested in that aspect of it. Look at how everyone uses AI: they talk to it.

Yep.

You can't ignore the way that we're wired. When you're talking to something, you're emotionally invested. You're socially invested. There's a reason why people say thank you and please to AI, even though it has absolutely no—

It's crucial, by the way.

There's literally no reason to do that. I think Sam Altman has come out and said that it costs us millions and millions of dollars when you guys say please and thank you. Please don't say please and thank you. It's a waste of compute. It's a waste of time. It's a waste of resources. But we can't help ourselves because we're fucking humans, right? Which leads me to my other thing: did you see this Brockman clip?

Yeah.

Did you?

Yeah.

Gary Brockman talking about AGI, right?

Yeah. Yeah, let me—yeah, this is it. Let's watch this. This is Greg Brockman. He's the president of OpenAI, one of the founders of OpenAI. He's still the president, right?

I think—I'm not sure.

“One thing I have learned is that everyone has their own intuitions about what AGI is. Maybe you can view it as—according to my view of where we are, I think we're about 80% of the way there, in that we have models that are smart. They are very capable. They are able to—”

Are they smarter than you?

“I mean, they're certainly more capable at writing software, right? If you give them all the context, then yes. I think that they are just so capable. It's really remarkable. Does anyone here feel better at writing software than GPT-5.4? There's one guy in the crowd.”

“All right. Writing kernels. Even there, we're seeing massive gains.”

Exactly.

“And for some of our internal results, we're really seeing that if you pour the right kinds of—if you have the right setup for your problem—then you're able to get really massive results out of very low-level tasks, even low-level tasks. One thing I have learned is that everyone has their own intuition.”

Again, all the responses are kind of about the 20%, because this last little bit—the last 20%—is being human at a keyboard. I kind of think that's the gist of everything that we're talking about here, right?

It's like the relationship that you have with this tool.

Because, again, we've got the president and one of the founders of OpenAI talking about being 80% of the way to AGI. AGI is going to be infinitely smarter and more capable than what we're used to and accustomed to now. Even with Claude and OpenAI, these tools are already massively capable, super smart, and smarter than every human being on the planet.

Yeah, which obviously always loops back to AI. It's coming. It's taking over. It's taking over everything. How do we make money on it? How are we feeling?

We've got Miz joining in 2 minutes, so maybe you can briefly talk about these next 2.

He's a what?

He hasn't hopped in the—

Okay. He said—

He's live. Tell him to hop in. Have him do it.

He said, “Hop in the—”

Tell him to hop in the—

Tell him to hop in the waiting room. Is that—

I can just call him.

Yeah, bro. But we should give him some stock picks—the AI stock picks.

Guys, go tell Miz we're calling him to join the stream.

It's a good name.

Miz.

Wait, so what's the difference between Kick and Twitch? Why do people switch over?

See, it's so funny. We're on a live stream.

Kick just asked that question.

You should ask Miz. You should ask Miz.

Yeah, I don't even fucking know. I like the suit. The suit's good.

Check your phone. Everybody's telling him to check his phone in the chat. Spam his chat, guys.

6. MizKif Joins

Check your phone. Let's—

Get him in here.

Spam “check your phone.”

He kind of looks like Rasmer [?].

Yeah, you're here.

What's good, baby? This is going to be a fucking crazy conversation. This is where I can have fun. I can snap back into myself. This is so funny. I love Mizkif's chat. I'm just going to look at Miz's chat. Miz, your chat's great, and I had so much fun yesterday.

Dude, I'm going to be real with you. My chat is probably the easiest chat to ever deal with. They're fun and they're good people. They know that not everyone's perfect, unlike other chats who have to act perfect. Fuck that.

No. Yeah, I was talking about just me.

Right. Right. Right.

You are perfect. You are perfect. But yeah, they were talking about me.

So, wow. This is a real hodgepodge mishmash of people. I can't believe this screen is real right now, to be honest with you: Ansem, Mizkif, Banks. I kind of already introduced what you're doing with your stream, Miz, with the $300K 30-day thing. You want to just introduce yourself to Ansem and his viewers, talk a little bit about yourself, your history, and content and media, why I felt it would be interesting to have you on the show, and then maybe get into the $300K 30-day thing?

Yeah. My name is Mizkif. I literally just started streaming a few months ago on Kick, and I've grown a big group of viewers that follow me for a bunch of stuff. I have some people follow me sometimes when I go to the grocery store, and right now I'm doing stock trading with my chat.

I personally believe that the finance area is littered with people who are just trying to constantly make money off their viewers. They're constantly trying to sell them courses, and usually why people sell courses is because they're not good at what they do. They have to sell courses because they're trying to make money from the course, right? If they were so good, they wouldn't need to do that.

So my plan and objective with this is to—

No, yeah, my bad. I just heard an echo now.

Yo, what? Yeah, Ansem, mute your thing. Mute your thing. He pulled up your stream. Sorry, go ahead.

No, you're good. You can keep that open. It helps me. My goal for my chat and my community is to teach them investing, to teach them just how compound interest works, how small investments over time can add up. Don't buy that Dutch Bros coffee. Don't buy that OnlyFans for the day. Don't buy things that are just small little things that you add up. Put it into the market, invest it over time, and in 20 or 30 years from now, you will have money and you will be able to relax a lot more.

When you actually need the money for your kids' college funds or whatever it may be, you can pay for it. Compound interest is something that I think a lot of people don't realize and see, and it's extremely valuable for kids and young adults to know and understand, and finance in general.

So I don't need money. I mean, I really don't. I make money. I've made money through Kick and other things, but I don't need more money.

Shut the fuck up.

No, I swear. I've made money through Kick and other things, but I don't need more money.

How much money have you made throughout the course of your career?

I'm sitting at close to $20 million.

But here's the thing: most of that, I would say 70%, is made through the stock market. It's not made through my streams. I've lost money on a lot of my streams because I have to pay for legal cases.

What's been your best investment to date? Not on your stream, not the $300K thing, but just in general.

Lexapro. No, I'm kidding. My best investment—

Yo, does his mic suck for us?

Can you change the output or whatever? Yeah, your mic.

That's so fucking funny. Yeah, make the mic better.

Oh, yeah. Sorry.

Damn.

You're good.

Better?

Yeah, this is much better.

No, that's fire, though. That's lit. How long have you been doing the investment thing with your chat?

I've been doing the thing with my chat now for—how long have I been doing this? I've been doing this for 8 years, but I started doing this finance thing 3 days ago.

Yeah, the finance is what I meant.

How's it going? What's it looking like?

Well, the whole Iran thing that happened today kind of hurt us a little bit. We're still positive, depending on the second, but we're buying a lot today. We spent over $100,000 today.

Oh, fuck.

To answer your other question, though, you said what was your best investment you ever had? NVIDIA. I invested in NVIDIA about 6 years ago. I've been investing in NVIDIA for a long time. Recently, about a year ago, I invested in AMD, and they just had their earnings, which were fantastic.

But there's one thing that I've invested in for almost a decade now that has made me almost 60% of the $10-plus million that I've made in the stock market, and that's VOO. What I do is a very simple thing that anyone can do. I'm not a financial adviser, and you guys know it. It's super easy.

VOO is the S&P 500 as an ETF. You buy it, and whenever the stock market drops 1%, I always put money in. Every time it drops 1%, while everyone else is panicking, I buy more. If it drops another percent the next day, I buy more. I did that since last year, and I do it every time.

My portfolio for VOO is up over 100% over the last year. It's just simple investment tricks like that, simple things that will make people rich. It can make people have money for their future. It can make viewers who are just sitting around watching most streamers, who are just picking their nose, doing tier lists, and crap that doesn't really matter, actually learn something and maybe use it and apply it to their life.

Well, this is kind of the entire point of this show that I'm trying to start and this community I'm trying to curate. I want a small, niche community of people who are interested in just being better, learning things, and having intelligent or productive conversations. Productive is really the word.

It's a show about just being as productive as you possibly can with each day, with each move, and with everything that you do. We are trapped in this weird streamer-media-content bubble. Brain rot is crazy. I don't know. It's fucking insane. We rely heavily on it. We talk privately a lot about it.

Yeah. There is such a brain-rotted community of crap. But what's interesting is that it's almost like the stock market over the last few years has been brain-rotted. Companies move so much more nowadays from just tweets, random emotions, dumb shit, and media attention.

That's why it's so important—

Those things have moved the market in such fun ways. Trump is literally a meme, and he's done insane things to the market based on just dumb shit he said. That's why there's a thing called TACO, which I'm sure you guys know is “Trump Always Chickens Out,” right? So you just buy whatever when he chickens out. You buy.

That's what I'm saying: the market is pretty fun to watch if you pay attention. It's not this boring thing. If you get involved, the chat can get you more involved in the world. You can talk to people better. It can also make you motivated if you're investing more, right? It's like, “Hey, look, if I just put this money away, I have a goal of $10,000 saved. That's awesome.”

I did this before. I own a gym. I literally bought a gym with one of my friends to see if I could do it. It was a brick-and-mortar, and the idea was, “Can a streamer make a business?” I bought a gym, which fails 90% of the time. We actually made it successful, and it's still running and it's profitable.

When I did that, I was learning business, my chat was learning business, and I was generating money through streaming. They were learning how to work out, learning how business works, and learning how to build a business. It's wins all around, you know, instead of just the daily stream crap where it's like, “Yeah, dude. Let's just watch a streamer hit on a girl and then—”

Farm it, have an opinion of it, right? It's like they've seen me do that for 7 years, right?

And I'm still fucking doing it.

You fucked me, man. You fucked me. The biggest clip from yesterday's stream, me and you, was you farming the rage thing, and I didn't even know it was happening. You're such a fucking sucker for that. You really fucked me on that.

Wait, what are we?

Bro, what rage thing? Do I have to pull it up? I'll pull it up.

What are you pulling up, her high school yearbook?

Dude, you're insane. We're on Twitch. Don't get me banned.

You're not going to get banned, dude.

Let's watch this. Let's watch.

Dan Clancy loves me. You're good here.

There are 3 million views, 10,000 likes, and a bunch of fucking quote tweets. How old are you?

I'm not underage.

She's 19.

Brutal, man. Get the fuck off the stream.

No, I think it's fine to hang out with 19-year-olds when you're 31.

Do you?

Yeah.

I bet you do.

I think it's fine.

You guys, come here. Sit on my lap.

Please. Please. I'm begging you. I'm begging you guys. Don't. I can't survive something like this. I can't.

Hey, he's talking to you.

I'm already on Facebook, asking you to look at the—look at the FaZe Banks uncomfortable, Mizkif shots fired, your rage streaming Jana, 19 years old. Half of this tweet I don't even understand. First of all, I don't care to understand. I don't want to understand, but you're such a fucking man.

Dude, you have to realize, though: You looked good in the clip. I looked bad, right? Because I'm the one filming it. You're the one who stayed out of it, so—

But then it gets quote-tweeted, and it's like, you're going to act like you weren't fucking on Charli D'Amelio when she was this and that. Then it fucking spirals out of control, and I'm just getting the fucking juices squeezed and sucked out of me. It's like, I can't—

She did suck the juices out of you.

You're an idiot. And this is why, by the way, you're very good at what you do. It's interesting, because you're a fucking streamer. You've been streaming for how long?

Seven or 8 years.

Yeah, like 8 years. And you started out as Ice Poseidon's mod.

No, dude. No. What?

How did you get into streaming? How did you start? What was the—

He was Ice Poseidon's—

I was Ice Poseidon's cameraman.

Who's Ice? I don't know who that is.

Huge difference. There's a huge difference, and you don't understand. This is why I understand streaming and you don't. This is a huge difference.

Who's iDubbbz? He's my—

So, basically, he's a streamer. He kind of was the creator of IRL. I would say, if you want to describe him in a serious way, he's the creator of IRL. He didn't create it, but he pioneered IRL to the point where it is today.

In my opinion—and I've always said this very bluntly—he had the best streams of all time in 2018. If you were there, you know. They weren't the kind of streams you could walk away from and still get the news. His streams were so good for that 1 or 2 years of content. You couldn't look away. It was better than television. It was better than anything on Netflix. It was the best content you could ever see. It will never be beaten. I say that every day. Ice's 2018 era will never be beaten in content. Speed, I don't care who you are. His—

A popular question that people ask streamers is, who's the fucking Mount Rushmore of streaming? I've always been confused as to why I never hear people say Ice. I never hear people say—

He's like Voldemort to a lot of people, right? Or people forgot about him.

Yeah, but you have to give credit where it's due, though. So, you were his cameraman, following him, and then you learned how to stream from him because he was the best at streaming. I know you said you made a lot from streaming, but you've invested that. Prior to me investing, I was a software engineer, but it would've been a lot easier if I had had more capital to start with. How did you make your money in streaming? I don't know much about stream culture. Is it from the subs? Is it from the sponsors? How does that work?

So, from Ice Poseidon and holding his camera, I was already popular. I was making YouTube videos about streamers. They were documentaries, but they were mockumentaries—they were jokes. They blew up, and then I flew out to do a video on him. Then he needed a cameraman, so I did it. That's how it started.

As for how I learned, I'm going to be real with you: I studied streaming for 5 years. I didn't really watch streams to enjoy them. I watched streams to learn what they were doing and how I could do it better, because I knew one day I wanted to be a streamer.

I was learning by sitting there and asking myself, why does he do this? How does this work? How does he form this? I learned how to be a streamer and how to grow before I even knew Ice.

As for the money, I didn't have any money when I started. When I actually flew to Ice, I went negative in my bank account. I had money in my stocks, but—

That's so awesome.

Yeah, because this is a crazy story.

I think it's a really important part of the come-up for anybody. Anybody's come-up arc story—it's really important to get really close to broke.

Yeah, I was sure I was broke. YouTube wasn't paying me, and I was basically broke. I could take money out of my stocks, but I didn't want to. I'll give you the whole story in 1 minute.

In 2012 or 2011, or whenever The Wolf of Wall Street came out, I started getting involved in investing. I had started investing about 2 years before that. I was investing under my dad's account, and when The Wolf of Wall Street came out, I knew that penny stocks would surge. So, I started investing in weed stocks. These were random companies in the weed industry, because weed was getting legalized back then.

I was riding the hype. There was a guy on Twitter named Wolf of Weed Street who I followed, and everything he said would work. He would literally say, "This stock is going to go to $0.60," and it would. "This stock's going to go to $0.20." He was never wrong, because he was just pumping the shit out of these stocks by buying them early, and it was illegal as fuck.

Sounds like crypto.

Yeah, it was literally crypto before crypto: penny stocks. I followed him in everything he did, and I got into his newsroom early. I would get the information early while everyone else had to wait to see what he was going to say. I had about—

Well, you did. You bought a course.

You joined a paid group.

No, no. I got in for free because I was there early.

He started charging $80. I was there early.

But you were still in a paid group.

Yeah, I was in a paid group. This was like a 4-month thing. I went from $2,500 to about $140,000.

So, the paid group worked.

Yeah, it worked. Then one day he said to short Tesla or something. He started getting out of the weed stocks and getting into real shit. So, I put about $30,000 into it before I got on a flight. By the time I got off the flight, it was at $0.

Basically, everyone was like, "All right, dude, this guy's done." He deleted his shit, everyone left the groups, and all of—

Exit scam. That's crazy.

There was this one guy who was there. He said, "I just put $80,000—all my retirement money—into this, and I just lost it."

So brutal. That's so brutal.

I'm like—

No. So, all said and done, the paid group was a—

Scam.

Scam.

Well, for me—

I guess for you.

I guess it—

So, what happened after that?

Then I had all this money, and I was investing it. I've been investing in the VOO for 10 years now because of that. My friends were giving me money in college to invest with. My friend Dave gave me some money, so I invested it for him. I started investing in things in general.

I was actually going to go work for Vanguard. I was in their Red Flag program. I don't remember what it was really called, but it was for people who were really— I had a 3.85 GPA, and I took their test and got almost 100. I was going to go into their best program to become a financial adviser.

But when that happened, I was in a pool with my friends, and I was trying to entertain them. I drank pool water and swallowed it. A day later, I got really fucking sick.

Yeah, I got really sick, and then I went to the hospital. I almost died because I got a heart virus.

I almost died from this heart virus.

I have a 4.0 GPA. I scored 100 on this crazy test. I went home and drank pool water.

Mhm.

Something's not adding up, brother.

I swear to God, this story is true. You can ask my chat. I have every reliable source in the world that this whole story is true. Everything I'm saying is factual. They've asked my parents.

I literally have a virus called viral myocarditis. Basically, I almost died, and I would've died.

You still have it?

You have it forever. I can randomly die.

My God.

Yeah. Viruses don't go away. I could randomly die.

I went to a doctor after all this, and the doctor traumatized me. It was the first time I ever felt trauma in my life. I went to the heart doctor, and he was doing his tests. He said, "You have myocarditis at such a young age." I said, "Yeah, it sucks." He said, "Man, my friend just died from that."

I started crying and left. My dad screamed at the guy and was about to fight him. He said, "Are you fucking kidding me? You're telling a kid that your friend just died from that, and you think that's okay?"

Doctors are so cold, so brutal, especially the longer they've been in there. I have a similar story. I was feeling lethargic and just tired in my day-to-day life when I lived at the original FaZe house in New York.

I went to the doctor and told him, "Yo, I don't have insurance, and I don't have a ton of money right now, but I feel these symptoms." This guy fucking convinced me within 20 minutes that I could possibly have a brain tumor.

He's like, “I want to test for this, for that, blood work, whatever.” He ran it up on me. All the tests and everything cost $8,000 or $9,000, which I did not have, but this guy was telling me, “This sounds like you might have a fucking tumor in your brain.” And I'm like, “What?” I went home for a week and panicked.

It was horrible. I was about to go to this Red Flag program at Vanguard, but I had just had this heart virus, and it was in about 2 months that I was going to start. I'm like, “You know what? I'm going to take a fucking risk and see,” because I've always loved entertaining. It's what I've always been good at.

But I took a lot of Adderall to be good at finance. I took a fucking ton of Adderall. I don't know if you guys are sponsored by Adderall. It's a great company.

Over here, sober 3 years.

I was heavy on Adderall, and that was also part of why I had a bad heart, because I took so much Adderall that it fucked up my heart. I'm like, “You know what? I'm going to take a fucking risk. I'm young. Why don't I try this whole entertainment thing? If it doesn't work, I'll go to the Vanguard program next year?”

So I called my guy, who was my manager for Vanguard, and I said, “Hey, look, I want to do this, but in a year, I'm going to try this shit.” He's like, “All right, go for it.”

I was like, “All right, I'm going to try streaming, YouTube, whatever it is.” I thought about it, and I'm like, “Being a streamer is impossible. Even back then, in 2018, you're never going to make it starting at 1 viewer. It wasn't going to happen. But what if I get a name by making YouTube videos of the streamers?”

So I made a name by making videos about Ice Poseidon. They would react to them, and then their communities would subscribe. I actually grew a YouTube channel pretty fast. I got up to about 1 million views per video, and that's how I started streaming.

It's a whole crazy story. Then I started growing. I grew and grew and grew, and then false allegations ruined me. Now I'm on a podcast with Banks, so it's really just—

But the thing is, I'm a very tough guy. I'm very strong mentally, and I know that—

Yeah, you're a very resilient fucking person, and that's another thing I really respect about you and appreciate about you.

I appreciate it. It's good. I'm the same way. I'll never give up. A lot of it is honestly my chat. They've been there, and they get it. They know that I didn't do what was said.

Regardless of that crap, I want to do stuff that—basically, I had this whole career, and how I made a lot of my money was through investing. You asked before about how you make money in streaming.

Yeah.

So, it's changed a lot over the years. The first 10 years of streaming, from about 2010 to 2020, it was all through donations. There was this guy named Reckful who basically started this, where you would get donations to your PayPal, and then an alert would pop up on your screen during the stream. It would say, “Hey, look, Brian donated $10.”

Brian would donate because he wanted to get his name on stream. He would also donate to get recognition and be like, “Hey, look, I like your content.” That was how it was done for a while.

Then subscriptions came into play. Now people get subscriptions, but even that's not as big anymore. The big thing people make money on in streaming is sponsors. They'll get a game sponsor. You can have a streamer who gets 20,000 viewers, and if they play a game, they'll get $20,000 an hour.

Oh, fuck.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. That's how a lot of streamers make their money.

A lot of girl streamers—I’m not trying to be sexist—make their money through OnlyFans and things like that. They'll stream and say, “Check out my socials.” You'll click it, go to their OnlyFans, and pay $500 to get down the rabbit hole. You keep asking if they're finally going to send you the nudes you asked for, and then it's just them in a bra.

Got you.

That happens a lot. That's really how a lot of content creators make money. There are also advertisements on Twitch. They run ads every hour.

I was running 8 minutes of ads an hour, and I was averaging about 15,000 viewers, so I was getting about $900 an hour, $800 an hour—

Yeah.

—just from those ads. There's a lot of money to be made. Streaming is very lucrative because you're keeping someone's attention for so long, which is so hard to do nowadays.

Yeah.

But the real blowup, and the real thing that was crazy money, was COVID. I mean, dude, I was getting $50,000 sponsors for an hour. It was—

That's crazy. In fact, there was a lot of wild shit going on during COVID, when that shit was popping off.

Well, the thing is, they had nowhere else to spend money. They had to spend money in the online market, so they were throwing it at streamers. That's when gambling companies blew up, right?

But that's a whole different ball game. So, the content in a lot of the streams—I know you've talked about gaming and lifestyle stuff. Are those the 2 main things that people stream? I know now you're doing the finance stuff, which is cool and very commendable, by the way, but I guess the content of a lot of the streams is mostly what Speed does, or—

I would say Speed's an anomaly. I think most streamers are lazy as hell. One in chat if you agree: most streamers are extremely lazy, and they don't want to innovate. Speed is an innovator.

Most streamers got popular in a game, whether they were good at it or they were friends with someone. They had a peak 4 years ago, and they're still just playing that game, right? Or they have a friend group they've had for 5 years, and they don't want to let it go.

Well, in my opinion, what defines a legacy creator—somebody who can exist for 10 or 15 years—is the pivot. A lot of people don't have the ability to pivot.

It's the risk, and they don't want to take risks.

Yeah, people are one-trick ponies. That's another huge contributor to it.

Yeah. For example, I started off playing World of Warcraft. Then I went to Call of Duty. From there, I started bringing on girls. Then from there, I started bringing on Asian women. I really learned my craft.

Brother, I walked into this motherfucker's crib yesterday, and I'm not kidding. I walk into that house you're looking at right now and ask where I can take a piss. He's somewhere over there, so I go over there. I start exploring this kid's crib, and every fucking door I open has another Asian girl in it.

There were about 6 Asian women camped out in his house. By the way, it was around 3 p.m., and half of them were sleeping. I think one of them was chained by her neck to the wall. It was a fucking—

It was a fucking weird situation. This fool was a weirdo.

Yeah. Well, different strokes for different folks, right? I mean—

You like what you like, bro.

I mean, yeah. This fool is a tier-one gooner. You really are. You love that shit.

Bro, he's talking about World of Warcraft. Of course he's a gooner.

Some people zap their dogs. I zap Asian women. What do you want me to do?

That one's going to fly right over Ansem's head. This is a Hasan joke. This is really deep.

I did. No, I have. I saw the shit that went viral, and people were upset at him for it, right? The dog was twitching and shit. They—

It was, to me, a little—

Let's just leave this one alone. Miz, let's not get too out of control on this stream, okay? It's a stream about money, attention, and AI literacy. Let's just—

I'm trying to learn, bro. I'm trying to learn the culture.

You don't want to. I promise you, brother, you're in the best spot you could possibly be in.

Oh, yeah. If you want to learn streaming culture, I'm your guy. I can teach you. I know it. I made the videos on the streamers for the culture.

I think you guys should talk way more over this next month.

I'm down. I'm definitely down. Bro, when you were playing World of Warcraft, I played World of Warcraft, too, by the way. I played it a lot, actually. I played with my dad. I played arena and all that shit.

Oh, fuck. Wait, what was your rating?

About 2,200.

Wait, what?

Yeah, that was good.

Yo, that's good.

Wait, wait, wait. I was young, though.

Did you see OnlyFangs?

OnlyFangs? No.

Hardcore WoW that blew up over the past 2 years?

Uh-huh.

What's that?

Basically, I started this whole meta called OnlyFangs, where I got a bunch of people together to start a guild. It was hardcore WoW. It blew up. It was the biggest thing on Twitch. It was everywhere, and we did it for 2 years.

Someone in my chat is saying I started it. I did start it. I literally gave the idea to Soda and said, “No, you need to be the leader. I don't want to be the leader, because you were the best leader for this and it makes the most sense.” I did start it, and you know I did.

Chance even admitted I did.

That’s legendary. Because you know what I do? I do innovative stuff. Does it always work? Yes. But—

Bro, no. I played hella WoW. I had twinks at every level: 19, 29, 39, 49, and 59. I had that the whole time. We played it nonstop, bro. A lot.

What was your main?

Hold on. I’m looking at my mod. My main was a resto druid, or a druid in general.

Oh, okay. Fire. I was an ice mage.

Oh shit, you’re a mage. So, yeah, you’re 2,200. That makes sense.

Yeah, no, I was a resto druid.

That’s fire. Yep. But, yeah, I started with WoW, then I went to other stuff. I’ve really been in Just Chatting for a lot of years, but I’ve done a lot of things.

I made this org called OTK, and it was the biggest org on Twitch.

I think I’ve heard of that.

Three.

Yeah, yeah. We were huge for like 3 years. We basically ran everything.

Dude, we have such a similar arc. It’s so weird.

Yeah, we do. We do.

It’s so weird, man. And, again, I might be the only person on the internet prepared to glaze you, but you deserve so much more than what you’ve been given as far as the credit stuff.

Just know I understand how that shit feels: to innovate things, to do things because you love to create things, to put things out, and just be misinterpreted and misconstrued. I don’t know. It’s crazy.

Even the OnlyFangs thing—I’ve seen that. I’ve never played WoW a day in my life, but I saw that with the Pirate Software guy and all that. I saw this resurgence of popularity around World of Warcraft, all the drama, and all that stuff. I had no fucking clue you were anywhere near that, let alone started it.

No, I fully had the idea. I fully started it. I’m the one who got people together, and then Chance was the leader. It was my idea.

People are like, “Dude, you’re a victim.” It’s like, “No, I have been given the worst and most unfair cards in streaming.”

Oh, we are very, very lucky. You can admit this, and I hope that you take the time, because even yesterday on the stream, you were like, “I fucking hate my life.” I hate hearing that from you.

We have—

No, no, I’m kidding.

Yeah, okay, okay, okay. We—

No, no, listen. Am I lucky? Yeah, I’m lucky. I would say that. But have I worked harder than basically every other streamer in this industry? Yes. Have I innovated a lot more than most people? Yes.

But the thing is, my time isn’t done. This is just part of my story, and I know that as my story continues and more chapters unfold, this is not my end. It’s not even damn close.

Now I’m pivoting into finance content, and people are loving it. They’re wanting more. We were just having—bro, I’ve had visions of more content and feeding the people more content like this in the world of finance, specifically crypto.

I came into crypto super passionate. I became this NFT evangelist, spent a ton of money and a ton of time, and bought into a bunch of projects for the culture, trying to establish some sort of rapport in that community because it was fun for me and because I saw something that other people didn’t see.

It worked out. I made a bunch of money in NFTs because I made some good trades. But I’ve been trying to pill Ansem on doing content like this since I met him. Literally since I met him.

ThreadGuy used to do spaces. That was the meta. They all used to do spaces on Twitter, and they would just go voice to voice. I’m like, “Yo, why don’t you get on Twitch? You should fucking stream. There’s nobody doing this shit, and there’s obviously a demand.”

Actually, there is one guy: The Stock Guy. He’s the GOAT. The Stock Guy is his name.

Yeah.

Yeah, dude. He’s a funny, creative, good guy. He’s very smart. You should definitely have him on the show. He’s a very—

I’ll do my research on him, and we’ll make it happen next week. Yeah, you can come on next week. The Stock Guy, if you’re watching this, I’d love to have you on.

It seems like streaming is getting a lot more popular outside of just streamers, though. There are athletes who want to stream now, and celebrities who want to stream. It seems like everybody is trending in that direction.

I saw a lot of people were mad at Jaylen Brown the other day because they lost to the Sixers in Game 7, and then the next day he was on Twitch doing a stream, looking at all the plays and everything. There were some people who reacted to it. Everybody is trying to stream now, I guess.

What are your thoughts on what’s next? What do you think is going to be innovative for streaming, and where is it going with GTA 6?

Yeah, I personally think that IRL is so overinflated and boring. The fact that you have content creators literally flying from state to state and no one cares is crazy, and it’s unrealistic to keep up this expectation.

I think the pendulum will swing, and it’ll go back to GTA 6. In my opinion, content creators are focusing so much on short clips nowadays that they’re not actually caring about the stream. It’s become fucking boring and vapid.

There are creators, though, who can do both. I will say this: Stable Ronaldo is one of them. He can actually entertain while also farming clips, and that’s—

The generational talent. He’s another person who’s pivoted very well, and he’s going to be around forever. That would be my pick to win it all as far as the FaZe core group of guys.

This might be a stupid question, and before I say it, I just want to say that I do see the value in streaming and exactly what you said about Jaylen Brown hopping on. I think streaming is a very good medium, platform, and way to distribute thoughts, honest thoughts, and responses to things—to sit down and just talk to the world.

But what I don’t necessarily agree with is the sentiment that streaming is getting more popular, because I just had this conversation yesterday. Even the biggest streamers in the world, who stream to 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, or 50,000 viewers, don’t have that many people watching, right? There aren’t a ton of people who will sit and watch an actual stream.

Answer it.

Yeah, yeah, please. I would love to know your opinion on that.

Well, the reason is that just because it’s popular doesn’t mean that it’s growing, right? Streaming is very popular. In fact, I completely agree: it’s growing faster than ever before, and it’s more popular than ever before.

You ask kids nowadays, “What do you want to be?” Ten years ago, they would say YouTubers, right? Nowadays, they all want to be streamers. Streaming is more popular due to clips, but that doesn’t mean people are watching streams.

The reason why they’re not watching streams is because it’s oversaturated and because streamers aren’t good streamers anymore. You’ll have streamers pop up nowadays who got popular on TikTok and get millions of views. They’ll start streaming, but they don’t know how to be a good streamer long-term, and they’ll phase out in 2 or 3 months and be irrelevant on Twitch.

Before all this clipping crap, streamers had to gradually grow on Twitch. They didn’t have these massive pop-offs randomly. Because of that, you had good streamers who understood the culture and were able to keep going. Nowadays, that’s not a thing. Streamers are just getting big on TikTok, they don’t know how to stream long-term, they get bored, and they leave.

Number 2, the reason why it’s popular but it’s not growing is that it’s everywhere. Since you can just see clips of streamers all day, there’s no point in watching streams. You don’t see clips of Netflix shows all the time on your Twitter feed, and you don’t see the endings of Netflix shows on your Twitter feed.

They'll DMCA the shit out of it, because if you do see that, you're not going to go to Netflix, and they know that, right? So they don't want that out there, and that's the reason why they do that. But streaming, that's not what it's like. I would never watch a stream because I could just go on Twitter and see the whole stream. What's the point of me watching 3 hours of fluff when you've given me the best content from it on my feed?

So clipping has destroyed the reason to go watch a streamer. And then not only that, it's destroyed the reason to watch their YouTube channels. It's destroyed the reason to care about any of their socials besides Instagram and TikTok.

Yeah. Jasontheween gets a billion views a month, probably—literally on clips—and gets just as many views as a 32-year-old playing boring-ass games, barely talking. Why? It's because people who watch clips don't give a fuck about the streamer, because why should they? I don't need to watch Core [?]. I could just get my news in 2 seconds. Silky ate something, Ron said a funny joke, and Marlon looked at the camera, right? I don't need to watch a 4-hour VOD to find out that information.

So that's hurt streaming in general. So, yes, it is more popular. It doesn't mean that people are watching it.

So you think it's basically—yeah, that makes a ton of sense, actually. That's great context. So you think it's 2 kind of disparate groups? There's 1 group who's watching the actual streams; if it's something with educational content or something interesting, they'll watch the entire thing, and those are the people, I guess, you're building the community with. And those are probably the people who last longer over time in streaming.

And there's people who are just like the TikTokers who are scrolling the timeline, and they consume all the clips and all of that.

Yeah. A lot of people come to Twitch who are streaming in general, and they're like, "Dude, I'm famous." Or, like, "I'm an NFL player. I'm a basketball player," but they only get 50 views—straight up, they only get 50 views—and no one cares, because we just don't care that you're a celebrity.

And I hope celebrities realize that about viewers on Twitch. We don't give a fuck that you're a celebrity. In fact, that makes you not relatable. Why streamers grow, why people love streamers, is because of the relatability. It's because they can see themselves in them. Parasocial.

That's why I've always really liked the friend-group model. That's why I feel like the friend-group model has always been so fucking strong.

What's the friend-group model?

You constructed it. I always liked what we had with the FaZe group—Jasontheween, Lacy, the fucking Max, Silky, Ron, Adapt. It's a very hodgepodge, mishmash group of people. I remember the biggest point of criticism right off the rip was, "This is never going to work. They're too different." But for me, that was by design. That was intentional: for them to be different, for everybody to play a certain role, appeal to a certain demographic, and be, you know, Lacy's the relatable one.

He's a slim, thin, trim-looking, handsome kid now, but he was the fat friend, the LOLcow, right? He would roll with that and play with that. Silky's from fucking New York, a tough guy who grew up whatever type of way. Max is the artist who wants to make music. Ron is just fucking goofy and funny, understands the internet, and is going to make you laugh. And Adapt's the OG fuck—he's playing the role that we used to play with him, which is big bro. And it worked really well.

It was very good synergy.

Why is Ron the most successful, in my opinion, in terms of being a streamer? It's because Ron's the most relatable. You see him and you're like, he's an average-looking dude who really just wants to fuck around and play games. He talks to his chat, he's very interactive, and he understands that.

What's happened a lot with streamers nowadays, and why they're not doing as well and need to bot like crazy, is that streamers have become unrelatable. They become unrelatable so fast that now a lot of people hate streamers. They're not relatable.

Back 5 years ago, we all were relatable because we didn't make millions of dollars a month. We didn't have these big paychecks. We weren't trying to buy Gucci bags and shit. And when people see that, they don't want to watch them do that all the time. They want to watch someone they feel like they can be friends with. We've lost that model very hard over the past few years.

Like Lacy, I'll give him as an example. Lacy was the fat guy, the funny guy. He was relatable. But now Lacy basically became like a Marlon 2.0. That relatability has dropped dramatically because he's trying to look really good and farm aura. It gets good clips, but it's not something that you want to watch someone stream for ages.

Yes, it's relatability while it happens, but not when it happens.

Okay, fair. That's a take. But I don't know. That's positive output, too. We're looking at the rise of Clavicular, looksmaxing, bone smashing, getting jerked off live on stream, and being [censored], you know, for a community of young, impressionable men, versus Lacy wanting to lose weight and feel better about himself and being honest about that process.

I don't know. I feel like it's all about how you do it.

Just because it's good for him doesn't mean it's good for the community—the parasocialism idea. I agree with you. It's healthy. What about the kid in the chat who's also overweight and feels like shit about himself? He goes with the flow, lets everybody laugh at him, and pokes fun at himself, but deep down there's a deep fucking sadness and insecurity.

Lacy goes and does it, and that kid looks at Lacy and says, "Oh, I can do it, too." The Hodge Twins, for example, changed my whole life. I watched a video probably 15 years ago that the Hodge Twins did about intermittent fasting and how it would work to lose weight. I went and lost 30 or 40 pounds, and it spiraled and snowballed into everything that I know today.

I'll say this: you're right that the fat kid wants to watch. But when Lacy becomes thin, good-looking, and all this stuff, and he's moved on, that new viewer who's fat has no relatability to Lacy. Just because Lacy was fat years ago, that's not going to make you relatable.

What's relatable is trying. What's relatable is the difficulty. What's relatable is that he isn't eating that piece of food. It's not relatable when you know he is not fat. It's relatable when he's trying not to be fat. And this has happened time and time again with streaming.

You could go as far as to say the most popular one of the core group is Marlon, as far as mainstream success goes and his social media—TikTok, Instagram, whatever. He's probably the least relatable person in the group. He's extremely fucking handsome, and it's unattainable. He's the least relatable, in my opinion. Why is he the most successful in a lot of metrics and in a lot of regards?

Well, because it's short-form content, right? It's more that quick, "I want to stare at you. You're beautiful. Aura." You don't need to farm parasocialism with that necessarily. You could farm any type of viewer.

But if you want a viewer to watch your stream, to be a part of your journey—because that's what streaming a lot is; it's your journey—if you're going for this IRL concept, they're not going to care about your journey because it's boring. You are hot. You are rich. You get with the best girls. You've done it all. You beat the game. You want to watch the journey; you don't care about the end. And Marlon feels like that.

Think of how crazy this is: Jason's that big everywhere. Everyone knows he streams. He gets a few thousand viewers. Dude, I used to get 20,000 viewers doing ads.

So my question is then, I was nothing like these kids. I personally like to watch content from people who are smarter than me, who have more money than me, who are better than me, who are in better shape than me, et cetera, because I find it to be productive. I find it to be an opportunity for me to learn, add to myself, and improve as a person.

That's the type of content that I like to consume. Obviously, we're talking about streaming specifically right now, and we're talking about the parasocial relationship and relatability with streaming.

My question, I guess, to you is: Do you think there is a place in the market of streaming for content like that? Like, you're doing the finance stream, this show, for example. Do people want to see that?

Do they want to improve their life? Do they want to improve their standing, their position?

Who's doing that the best?

Absolutely. There is a huge market that's untapped on the internet and in streaming, which is trying to do finance and this kind of content or productivity. There are a lot of things that you could do, but streamers are lazy, man. They just see what has worked, and they don't want to try to change it.

They see, “Do the tier list. Do the shit that me and Ludwig did for 5 years. Copy the models and paste, and then basically make your millions,” because they don't need to innovate. A lot of these younger kids don't. Why does Jason need to innovate? He doesn't. He has those parasocial viewers. He has those viewers that want to watch him grow. He has those viewers that are obsessed with him.

But these older viewers, these 30-year-olds, these people that have been around for a long time, they're losing that parasocialism with guys that are older. And they should. They're getting older. They're getting families. They don't care anymore. So what should they do? They should pivot.

But I think a lot of these older streamers have no talent, and they'd rather go down with the ship and try to make a couple extra bucks than actually try to innovate and possibly hurt their career. Now, I will say this: Is there room for finance content like you're doing or I'm doing? Absolutely, dude.

Viewers always want to do better, and viewers want to get something out of it. What's the reward of watching me go do an IRL and go buy food? There's no reward. You might get a laugh or two. Who gives a shit? You don't need to do that.

The reward is that now they can watch me make them money. They can watch and learn about finance. They can watch you and learn about finance. That's so important and such a value that, if you can make it entertaining—

You have such a big layup on everyone else because the Jason style, the FaZe Clan style, whatever it is, even the OTK style we had, does fade. As you get older, it gets cringier. As you get older, friends dissipate. They all want to do different stuff. We all—it's what happens.

But finance, politics, business, things that grow for the rest of your life, they stay forever. Grayson, what's going on, dude? I haven't seen you in a while.

I think what's interesting for me, with being on Twitter, is that parasocial relationship that you're talking about. People do care about that a lot. And it's weird in crypto because everybody's anonymous.

My account on Twitter wasn't anonymous, but it was just my regular Twitter that I was sharing with my friends from college and friends from everywhere else. When I started doing Twitter and started trading, I just started putting that content out there in the same place where I was going out on the weekends and tweeting about being out and all the other things that I was tweeting about.

So during the bear markets, when I was tweeting about stuff that wasn't crypto-specific, I had this whole community of people who were just following me and knew me as a person. Then, as my account started to blow up and blow up, there were a ton of situations where people would take things I did out of context or overindex on stuff I was wrong about when talking about trades. But then there was a core group of people who had been following me for—

One sec. By the way, I could see—I'm pulling up the Ninja thing, and you can see the images. I just went full cam. But, yeah, I don't know what I should watch on my stream.

What'd you say?

I could see the DM thing for a second.

What DM thing? What are you talking about?

On my screen. Yeah, I was looking at my Twitter.

Okay, yeah. I just want to let you know that I can see that.

Yeah.

I also could see a guy on the bottom who's hanging out. He's muted.

Oh, yeah. That's fine.

No, it's fine. I'm aware of that.

Okay, yeah. I just didn't want to leak anything.

No, no, you're good. I was saying, the community of people that I had following me would be a lot more responsive and a lot more defensive of me when they had seen my journey as a trader and my journey as being on CT.

I really was just a regular person tweeting, and then my account blew up. Now I'm this figure that people don't view as a person, and there are people who were there as the core group who do view me as a person.

So I definitely believe the parasocial effect is super important, and people trust you a lot more when they know what your intentions are. It's definitely a real thing with streaming and also just internet content. I've never done streaming. I've always just been the Twitter guy, but, yeah, it's interesting to see that the overlap there actually carries over the same way.

Yeah, no, it's huge. Parasocial is everything when it comes to streaming. Obviously, you're on the worse end of the parasocial dynamic right now, Miz. I obviously am too, as far as hardcore streaming culture goes.

In what way? I'm not even—

Just the narratives around it. Obviously, a lot of people have chalked it up and come to the conclusion that FaZe coming to an end was all my fault, right? There are a million things at play, whatever, whatever, but these are 5 or 6 very strong streaming communities that have come to that conclusion.

And, yeah, what comes with that obviously isn't fun. You get slammed, and whatever. Again, I'm not a victim, whatever. It's just the reality of the situation. I know Miz is in a similar situation. What is your plan and route out? Because, honestly, this is new for me. Not only is streaming new for me, I'm learning a lot. Even hearing you talk about it, it's a very interesting conversation.

But what are your plans? What's your plan for the next year, 5 years, 10 years? I know what your plans are for the next 30 days, but—

Dude, I really like finance and business. I want to keep going with it. I actually am working with Kick. I'm kind of growing Kick as a whole. I'm basically redoing everything on their side because I think their website UI is ass, and I think the developers could do a lot better.

So I'm literally rebuilding Kick and helping with a lot of stuff. We're going to be launching crates soon with Kick. We're going to be launching a lot of new things and interactive stuff to make the website interesting to stay on. It shouldn't feel like a website you went back to in a time machine in 2011.

I also want to get good at golf. I do want you to come out for golf. I've never played. I've never swung a golf club.

Actually, my PA, Pierce—shout out Pierce—is an actual class golfer, from what I hear. He golfs with a bunch of people. People know him to be a good golfer, and he's my guy. I'm with him every single day. He's basically my brother.

And I really just want to make people laugh. I'm telling you, I know this is going to sound so fucking cringe, but there's nothing more in this world that I love than entertaining. It's been what I love for 31 years of my life. I never want to stop. I know I have a gift at this shit. I love to entertain people, and I do like to make people happy.

I know people are like, “No, he doesn't. He's a fucking loser.” No. If you look at my Discord history, or whatever the fuck it is, of people I've made so many millionaires. I've helped so many people out. I've done so much good for so many people.

If you ask them, I'm going to say this and people are not going to believe me on your side, but my chat knows—they're all rats. I don't care. I just like to help people. I do. I always will, because I think everyone has a little bit of good in them.

I think we relate heavily on a lot of things, obviously, but when I see something or jump into something, I jump in with 2 feet. I go 100%. And I do like to innovate and develop things.

Like you're saying with Kick, you have no business wanting to make Kick's website better. That's not your responsibility. I assume, at least at this stage, you're not being paid for that. That's not your fucking job. But you can't help yourself. You see something that you're aware of because you've been streaming for 15 years, where the chat should be this way or we should incorporate this system because people will stick around longer. People will want to watch more. People will actually come to Kick for this.

You can't help yourself. You see potential, and you want to drag it to the surface. You do that with products. You do that with ideas and vision, things moving forward. Whether it's in the games you play or the people that you play with, right? You've done it with people.

You've platformed a bunch of people and made a ton of people successful, or at least helped in their success. Where do people like me and you go wrong? Because I share a very similar story. Here we are at this point where I'm not going to call the people I've helped rats again. I want to put my best foot forward, and honestly, more than anything, all I genuinely want to do is move on with my life.

I'm really grateful for the people who want to stick around and actually [__] learn and grow, and who are in line with the point of the show and what I've been on. I'm [__] sober. I'm healthier than I've ever been, and I just want to lock the [__] in, be successful, be happy, and have a—

I could tell you what the problem is, and I'm sure you know it. You give too much trust, and they take advantage of that. That's really all it is, dude. You trust people too much.

No, but surely we have things that we could be better at, right? Surely. I do think that I have way too much of an issue, even in business. I've been fried a million different ways, a million different times, on business stuff because of handshake deals or doing things in good faith, going and doing all the work, and then never being properly compensated or treated for it because I just trust people.

But it's also this: You and I have always been controversial figures, right? Because of that, and because we've always been content creators, you're always easy to throw to the dogs. It's hard to throw someone to the dogs who's loved and admired because you really have to show some crazy thing to get them thrown out. You and I are always easy to throw to the dogs because we've been controversial. We've [__] up.

Scumbag, drug addict, [__] that.

I'm a douchebag with a [__] mullet. You're an [__] with tattoos. Because of that, we're easy.

I'm really not an [__], though. I feel like I'm—I feel like—

You're a huge piece of [__], [__] dog, [__] human being. Because of that, people will take advantage of it, right? They'll say, “Hey, look, you could just throw him to the dogs and not have to worry about shit.” That's how it goes. You're also emotional. You're very emotional.

Super emotional. I am very, very emotional.

Yeah. I, too, have been emotional, and that's definitely messed me up a lot, too. But I'm not emotional anymore. I've lost that ability to be emotional. I don't—emotions are not part of my life anymore. Shout-out to antidepressants. They're great.

That's basically my whole gist. I want to make people money in my chat. I want to make my chat laugh because I know, for them, they know I'm their one-stop shop for actually funny people around. There's really not a lot of content creators. They also know I care about streaming and [__] more than, like, 99% of streamers. Most streamers have no passion for this [__]. They don't give a [__]. They know I care.

They'll say, “Cap,” and [__], but they know that if I weren't making any money on streaming, I would still do it because I love streaming. I love entertaining. I grew up—these viewers, these streamers, or viewers in general on streams, they're me. I was them. I was there. I was a dude who used to hate-watch streamers. That was my life.

I hated all of them in 2015. I would specifically watch Mitch Jones and hate-watch him because I was like, “This [__] loser is making $1,000 a day picking his nose and doing nothing but running around Dalaran in World of Warcraft. I can't stand him.” It made me hate him because I was like, “This dude has no degree, no job, no work ethic, and he's making millions of dollars.” It drove me nuts.

You said earlier that people hate streamers because—what was it? How exactly did you say it?

They hate streamers now because we're oversaturated. We're everywhere, and a lot of the time they're talentless. But also, it's because they're not relatable.

Not relatable. That's what you said. I think an even bigger reason why the average person might hate streamers is—I don't know. It's what it's kind of done to society. Streamers, obviously, the name of the game, and the people who climb the ranks the fastest and are the most successful are the people who are most successful at farming each other. That's all the game is at the end of the day. Is that accurate to say? Is that an appropriate thing to say?

You're right. But why do people have to farm each other so much? The reality is that content creators, especially streamers and YouTubers, don't really have to fight each other for the spotlight.

Well, you have to realize—

No, no, that's not—I can't. That's not true.

Drama has been a consistent through line and a common denominator in a lot of people's success on YouTube and just content in general.

But a YouTuber can upload, and another YouTuber can upload, and it doesn't affect them as much. With streaming, it's real time. If I'm live and xQc is live, you literally have 10,000 viewers who watch both of us, and some of them are going to go to me and some are going to go to him. It's instantaneous competition.

Because of that, it makes people scared, angry, jealous, or feel like they need to protect what they have. That almost puts you into a fight-or-flight mode, which makes content creators, and streamers especially, be very aggressive, fight each other, and want to attack. That's what's happened over the past few years: Streamers have become a cataclysm, and they fight each other.

How are you feeling about all this, Ansem? Probably really thick content for you to weave through.

It's interesting. I think what you guys are talking about with how you're received and how you get popular online is that you can't avoid the negative piece. When there are so many people watching you, there are always going to be some people who don't agree with your opinion, especially if you have strong opinions.

But I think the most important through line is that if you're doing good things, you're not doing them because you think you're going to get rewarded for them. You're doing good things because you think they're good things. That's the most important thing for anybody who's a public figure, because once you allow the public's response to determine what you're going to do going forward, that's when you stop doing the good things that you know are good and that align with your direction.

That's my main takeaway. It seems like it's a recurring thing for anybody who's in the public sphere. It's just how the internet works and operates.

Good take. That's why I think this show is so important, because that's your take from a million miles away, right? As you can see in this conversation, Miz and I are super, super deep in content, right? Like YouTube—

For sure.

Twitch—there are probably a lot of things we talk about that fly straight over your head. You don't even understand what the [__] we're saying to each other.

I'm learning a lot.

But the same is true in reverse for the finance and tech [__] with you, which is really cool. That's probably a good segue into Miz. You're on a 30-day mission to [__] invest $300,000 and make as much money as possible. What is it sitting at right now? You started with $300,000. Where are you at?

Just [__] say it, bro. The market's down today. It's the third day. It's fine. The market's down today. It's fine.

Yeah, let me check. I mean, my—

Semis are actually down today. Semis are surprisingly down, and software is up today, which I think is surprising. Semis have been ripping and outperforming [__] so hard.

So what's the total? What's the portfolio?

We're at $299,152, so you're basically back at square one.

Yeah, and just to let anyone who's listening know, basically what I do is stream with my chat on Kick. Every day, I'm doing this, and whatever money we have at the end—whether it's $360,000, $380,000, whatever it could be—if we can make money and hopefully the market keeps going well, based on how much they watch, chat, and interact, they keep the profit.

So if we make $80,000, my chat splits $80,000. We have a system that basically makes it so they can—we have a system, shout-out to this guy, Solutions, where we have it all divvied up. We know who's been watching what. It's timed and everything, and they get the profits. They're more involved. The more they're here, the more they get.

My goal with this, if it goes well—which it's been [__] going so well the past 3 days—is to do $1,000,000 next month.

And I'm just like, fuck it. Hey.

Listen, you're sponsored by Polymarket. Get me them as a sponsor and I'll make it $2 million. It'd be even crazier. Fuck it.

We can make it happen, bro. That's fucking sick, though. That's awesome.

Yeah. Again, I want them to make money, dude. I want to be able to see—dude, Miz, I actually learned a lot and I made a lot of money. I got that so much with the gym content. I had so many people say, “Dude, I changed my life.”

This one viewer I had, his name was Macy or something. He's like, “Dude, I lost a lot of weight watching your content. I lost, like, 3 pounds, and then I started taking Ozempic, and now I'm doing great.” I'm like, “All right, that's fine. Whatever.” But I had a lot of people saying—

Was that a Lacy joke?

I can't tell with you sometimes, man.

He's low-key. He's slick with it, bro. He's slick with it. I see the appeal.

Fuck it. He's a freak. He's a freak.

I want to start with Miz. You said you guys invested in a bunch of things today. What are the top 2 or 3 that you guys are most excited about—you and your chat? I want Ansem's feedback.

Well, let's ask my chat. I'm not a financial adviser. I can't say it's their portfolio at the end of the day. They're saying AMD. I think they're excited about it. They did AMD, which I think has been good.

AMD was a good spot recently, for sure.

They're actually up on AMD by 5% because they bought the calls and they were up. What's really hurting them right now is that we bought CoreWeave after hours, despite the fact that CoreWeave had a great financial report and everything, and they were doing great. CoreWeave is getting smacked right now. It's down 11%, and that's literally all of their losses. It's CoreWeave. I'm literally looking at it right now.

Yeah, they bought the rumor, sold the news, which is very famous, and they bought the news. It was really great news. CoreWeave should go up, but you know how it is. These stocks can be crazy.

Yeah.

Yeah, I—

It's just day 3. It's not really a big deal.

Yeah, for sure. That's cool. I wonder what happened with CoreWeave. It's maybe something in what they're saying is going to happen for the next year, because typically, when they beat the actual numbers but the stock goes down anyway, it's something in the details of what they were talking about—what's happening. I haven't followed it. I have to try to see what's happening.

Didn't Leopold Aschenbrenner—wasn't he part of his—

Yeah. The Leopold guy has been crushing. The guy who wrote “Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead”—his fund is up almost 10×. I think it started at $500 million and is now at, like, $5 billion. CoreWeave is one of his biggest positions.

I think it's the only one that hasn't performed in a disgusting manner, right? He had, like, 7 different positions, and they're all up thousands of percent except CoreWeave.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Yeah, it is. CoreWeave is one of the ones—

Do you know the story about this guy, Miz?

No.

Here, I'll bring it up for your chat.

This guy's a beast, bro.

He's insane. This is such an insane story. He's a 24-year-old guy who got fired, basically, from OpenAI when he was 22. He took, I think, $250 million and turned it into $5.5 billion in a year. He wrote a whole thing. What was the thing he wrote? What was it called?

“Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead.”

“Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead,” basically talking about predicting AGI by 2027 and where everybody's flying and flowing into these AI companies. He decided to invest in—what was it?

He invested in Bloom Energy, I think, which was his biggest one that he smashed.

Obviously SanDisk.

Yeah, he had a—I don't think he—so, what he did is he avoided the hyperscalers, the big names. He didn't do Google, Meta, or any of those. What he was looking at was, if there's going to be all this investment in this infrastructure, there are going to be some companies at different levels that benefit really specifically. Bloom Energy was the one that did really well for him.

Right here, Bloom Energy is up 1,400%. Crazy. Lumentum is up 1,300%, SanDisk is up 3,100%, and CoreWeave—see, it's the only one that isn't—I mean, it's up, but it's not. It's the only one that isn't performing in a fucking disgusting way.

Yeah. I mean, I'm surprised that CoreWeave is actually down after hours. I'm not going to lie. They did beat revenue. I guess the issue was probably that people are trying to take profits.

I know they have a lot of—

They do. Their guidance was missed a little bit, but it shouldn't have dropped the way it did. These stocks right now are so volatile, it's crazy.

I still believe in it. In my opinion, my chat bought one that I do like and I think is a good buy: Palantir. They're heavily involved in the military and hospitals.

Yeah, my bad. I was thinking of Plants vs. Zombies. Palantir is sick. I think Palantir has a lot of options for growth.

Of course.

The thing is, my chat is very invested in AI and databases because that's what they know, and it's smart to be involved in that stuff. But is there going to be more growth? Obviously, right? We all agree. The question is, over the next 3 days, will it tumble again?

They just had this crazy run, and they got in on Monday when it had a crazy run, so they were happy. Now they're having a little bit of a downside, but I truly believe this is nothing. It's not a big deal.

They're into CAT. I think CAT is an amazing buy long term. I think CAT is one of the best companies to buy. You're not buying AI; you're buying the company that makes the data centers that everyone is making around the country right now, and they're the monopoly of that shit. They're a fantastic buy right now.

I think my chat also bought—what else did they buy that they're very excited about? They actually bought Dutch Bros today. They put $10,000 into Dutch Bros.

What's that?

The coffee.

Oh, okay.

For this coffee, they went in. They put $20,000 in, on the opposite end of the spectrum from the AI shit—going as far away from screens and investing in real-life experiences, restaurants, things of that nature. That's always a good bet.

Culturally, too, coffee is always a good bet. Miz, you live in L.A. too. I feel like there's a new, like, cracking coffee spot popping off every fucking 2 days here.

Yes, there is. That is very—

You've noticed this, right? It's crazy. They all have these popping fucking TikToks. Shout out Community Goods. Shout out fucking Pedro. Shout out Maru. There's a bunch of good ones. La La Land just opened up a couple of new spots, and they're all cracking, bro. Lines everywhere.

I mean, it's the same thing with energy drinks, right? Energy drinks always come and go. When Logan Paul announced his energy drink, I was like, “Cool. This is going to be crazy branding and marketing, but how long will this last?” Energy drinks fade so fast.

C4 was so popular for so many years. It felt like everyone had it. Now I don't ever see it. Now I see Celsius everywhere. It changes every few years—the new brands, the new things. I think the same thing with coffee as well. But they're only in it for 30 days, so they're not here forever.

They also are in Google. They just put $20,000 into Google. Google is a great buy, in my opinion, because they're getting the exposure for the data centers. Cloud is especially important for AI. Anthropic just guaranteed they're going to be spending $200 million on their cloud services in the next 5 years. I think Google's great.

I'm very big on those. I think my chat has done a great job so far. The only one that's fucking them up is Palantir, but now here's CoreWeave. I do believe CoreWeave will pan out as time goes—

I mean, just based on Leopold Aschenbrenner being bullish on that, I'm like—

Do we slam it? I don't know. I don't know.

Yeah. My chat still has money to spend, by the way.

Have you guys bought Take-Two?

I brought up Take-Two on the fucking stream yesterday.

You were talking about GTA. Did you guys buy Take-Two?

I just don't know if Take-Two performs in the next 30 days. You know what I mean? He's doing that 30-day thing.

These are different questions. Thirty days does make it kind of hard because you could pick 10 winners in, like, small caps, and then they’d be down over the next 30 days. Then they’d be up infinitely over the next 6 months. That is kind of tricky.

Yeah.

Well, here’s the thing: If this thing goes well, I hope it does, and we’ll see what happens. But if it goes well, I’ll keep investing.

This is interesting, how the stars are sort of aligning, too. Ansem, I want you to really get through the Intel stuff and the Cerebras stuff and really go deep on that. Feel free to share your screen and your thoughts, because we cut that part short. We talked about how Ansem’s feeling about the crypto markets, but we wanted to save his thoughts on traditional markets for you being on the show because it just makes sense.

I do want to hear Ansem’s ideas around the 30-day challenge because he’s doing something similar, just randomly. He’s doing this competition, which Miz honestly low-key mentioned.

You should hop in, bro.

It’s going to be lit. It’s going to be fun. It’s 4 weeks, and everybody’s self-funded. You start with a $25,000 bankroll, and whoever makes the most money in the 30 days wins $100,000.

Gets $100,000.

Yeah.

We’re going to do that. But, Ansem, what is your strategy going to be going into that? Because, obviously, it’s—

I mean, yeah, it’s going to be over 4 weeks, and it’s going to be perps. I don’t know if you know what perpetual futures are.

Yeah.

Yeah. So it’s 24/7. We can trade anything. We’re doing it through Hyperliquid on my app, Bullpen, and it’ll be stocks. Stocks will be on there; a lot of the stocks are doing a lot of volume. Crypto will be on there, too.

My strategy is going to be shorter-time-frame stuff, optimizing for that instead of longer-term, multi-year holds. I’m going to be day trading a lot, like—

Can I just invest in a crypto, have my chat pump it up, and then sell it and win?

Well, it’s perps, so no, you can’t do that. You shouldn’t do that. But it is perps, so whatever tickers are available on perps, whatever is there, you can trade.

Listen, if you invite me, I’ll do it, bro. I love finance. I live for this shit. I literally love this kind of stuff.

Is that your advice to him—how he should invest with his channel over the next 30 days? Perps rather than spot buying? Everything you’re saying—and, by the way, I’m curious about your thoughts—does he pass the sniff test? Everything he’s saying, the CAT stuff. I saw you shaking your head and nodding your head through a lot of what he was saying. It sounds like Miz has—

A good grasp, for sure. A good grasp, for sure. I didn’t know what to expect when you said there’s a streamer who’s really popular and he’s doing an investing thing. I was like, “I don’t know what that really means,” but—

Yeah, he’s definitely on his game. We actually talked about Eaton last week for the same reasons that he’s talking about Caterpillar. They build a lot of the stuff for the data centers, so we’re kind of in the same ballpark. We align on a lot of the AI stuff.

Thirty days is tough because it’s so short-term that you can pick really good companies and still be down. It’s more day trading, I would say, if you want to be aggressive with it. In this competition, there are going to be a ton of people trying to make a lot in a shorter amount of time instead of having longer-term plans that you compound over years.

It’s just 2 different ways of investing, but—

Well, keep in mind, if the goal is—I think if we can make 10% to 15%, which I do think is very possible with just a good upswing in the market—

That’s $30,000 to $50,000, with my chat splitting it between the people who participated.

Legendary.

That’s insane.

Right. What if I could do $1,000,000 next month? They’re splitting $100,000 between the chat.

That’s crazy money, right? That’s fucking awesome. You’re learning finance, you’re being entertained by me, and there are a couple of Asian girls going in the background while, at the same time, you’re making money. That’s awesome, right?

The goal is to figure out how I can make my chat money while I get to entertain and be stupid, while I continue to grow my brand. It’s wins all around. I try to get wins all around for everybody.

Even if it’s a small loss for me, I don’t really care. If it’s $5,000, $10,000, whatever, I’ll figure it out. I just won’t pay my attorney that week. But I’m totally for doing more of this.

Yeah, if you guys win the competition, you have $100,000, so I can split $100,000.

It’s only a $25,000 entry.

But, yeah, to answer your question, Banks, on what to focus on for a 30-day challenge: You’re going to want to look at stocks that have catalysts coming up in the very short term. That’s what you would look at first, for sure.

Off the top of your head, Ansem, is there anything you think could work for the next 30 days?

I think MP Materials is an interesting one. I know you guys know Intel has crushed it and done really well over the past couple of months. One of the reasons they’ve done so well is because of the U.S.’s focus on building out all the different levels of chip manufacturing here.

Right now, everybody relies on TSMC, which is Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, for building these chips—for actually manufacturing the CPUs. What Intel is working on is building its own fabs here in the U.S., so that was one tailwind.

The U.S. government also owns 10% of Intel. But the U.S. government doesn’t only own Intel. There are a lot of other companies that they’ve invested in in a similar way, and I think they could have some good tailwinds over the next few weeks because people were like, “Oh, Trump invested in Intel, and he’s going to keep pumping Intel. What else did he invest in, and what else is he looking at?”

MP Materials is one of those companies. They’re a rare-earth—

MP Materials? You’re saying—

MP. The ticker is MP.

Yeah, MP Materials.

Yeah, it’s a mining company. They’re focused on sourcing and finding these rare-earth metals. I think it’s the Mountain Pass mine in California that they have access to. I think they also just did a deal with Apple, I’m pretty sure, for the future.

Right now, the U.S. relies on China for a lot of the rare-earth metals we source. They’re important for EVs, magnets, and all these electronics, and we have no real way of getting them except for these—

Very few.

Yeah, very few mining companies. MP is one of those. That’s what I think.

What do you think about Hims? Some people in my chat have been spamming my chat about it a little bit.

You know, we’ve talked about Hims in a few of the streams.

Yeah, we talked about Hims. I haven’t been able to find enough conviction on it myself yet to be like, “Yeah, I’m super, super, super bullish on it.” But I do think it’s in a really interesting area. It’s cheap enough that a narrative can push it a lot. Obviously, the peptide thing is super viral, and they’re right at that intersection. I can’t say I know enough to be like, “Yeah, I’m super bullish,” but it definitely is an interesting narrative.

Man, I’m sorry. Whoever’s the first to do the peptide shit or get that figured out legally—

Crushes.

Yeah, I will put every dime I have into their company, at least for a few months. I will put every dime in because they will blow—

They will blow everyone out of the water. Everyone will be buying if they can.

Are there any sleepers that are on anybody’s radar in terms of that?

I mean, I think Eli Lilly is the biggest one. They’re, I think, the ticker is LLY. They’re the biggest company. They also have—I think they were not Ozempic, but the other one. If it’s not Ozempic, it’s another one that they do.

They’re a pretty large biotech company, but they’re the front-runners right now to be the trillion-dollar company, the legal whatever to do a lot of the peptide stuff.

Yeah, that’s more long-term. My thing with this, too, is, look, I’m the financial adviser of my chat. I’m not really, but in this scenario, I am. My plan is basically that whatever we can make, they keep. If, for some reason, we have an issue, maybe I throw in a couple extra hundred grand and we try to figure it out, because I want them to be able to get out of this.

You don’t always win. Long-term investing is the play because they have their youth, which is so important.

Right?

The stock market’s down, and you’re not stressing out. No one cares. You should just be living your life. Every month, you put in a couple hundred bucks, and you compound interest over time.

You’re making money and you should be successful. Exactly. It will motivate you and grow you. The thing is, yes, this is tough in 30 days. I’ll make it work—whatever I have to do for my chat and for the people.

If you have any finance stuff that you want to share with the chat, or you ever want to come in and just talk, I know Banks knows where I live. If you ever want to come in or join the chat for anything, because they liked your mining idea. They were like, “Oh, mining.” They like that.

Cool.

They’re down to hear.

He has some really good ideas. He’s a really smart guy.

This is all I do, so I’m definitely down to keep track of it.

I actually don’t think we found out what your role is. What do you exactly do—

In life or just in general?

Like, in life. Wow.

Yeah. I used to be a software engineer. I went to Georgia Tech and studied computer science. I found out about crypto in 2016. I had a professor for an emerging technologies class who was really big on Bitcoin.

When I graduated in 2017, I was working as a software engineer. That’s when I started trading crypto. From 2017 to now, I’ve basically been trading crypto full-time since 2021. I’ve been full-time at Bullpen since early 2024, and I’m just a full-time trader, full-time investor, and a builder.

Cool.

He bought Solana at $1.50.

I did. My Solana trade was like your NVIDIA trade.

And he got a pet cat, and the chat social-engineered and doxxed him. They hit up every person in his family and found out what the cat’s name was.

They were [expletive] and ran the coin up to—what was it? Hundreds of millions of dollars.

$100 million, yeah.

$100 million.

Wait, wait, wait. What? The cat—what?

I don’t know if you know about Solana and memecoins in 2023 and 2024. Do you know what BONK is?

No.

You know Doge?

No. Yeah, yeah.

When Solana went crazy in 2023, it went from around $20 to $200. I was one of the people who was super bullish on Solana before that happened. I was also like, “Well, there aren’t that many coins to buy on-chain on Solana right now, so I think BONK is going to do really well.”

BONK is a memecoin, probably one of the most popular memecoins on Solana at the time. It was created by a lot of the core Solana evangelists, developers, builders, VCs, and a ton of people around it. They rallied around Solana when FTX happened and launched BONK.

In this cycle, I was like, “Well, if Solana comes back, BONK is definitely going to come back.” When BONK did really well, it went from around a $40 million market cap to $1.6 billion, or whatever it went to. After that happened, Solana memecoins went crazy, and I was the dude who was like, “You’re the Solana memecoin guy.”

Everything I talked about on-chain with Solana was just going crazy. At one point in 2024, it got so Black Mirror-esque that anything I posted became a coin. It didn’t matter if it was a word or a picture—it was a coin immediately.

Your cat.

I posted my cat, and people were like, “What’s the name of the cat?” I didn’t tell them the name. I went to sleep and took a nap. A few hours later, I woke up, and my mom was texting me, like, “Why are people on Facebook asking me for the cat’s name? What is going on? What’s happening?”

Eventually, I posted the cat.

No, I also rug-pulled my cat’s coin. Actually—

I didn’t rug— I didn’t—

I rug-pulled. I can tell you the story. So, I was buying crypto, and I was doing this challenge for a month. I was doing a similar thing a year ago, but for crypto. I couldn’t do it anymore for legal reasons.

The glasses. I love the glasses.

When I was doing it, I was pulling up a bunch of stuff, and someone in my chat was like, “Dude, buy this coin called Chompy.” I clicked on it, thinking, “I don’t know what the fuck this coin is.” I clicked on it, said, “This is stupid,” and clicked off.

Chompy. It’s my cat right here.

Oh, yeah.

When we first launched the FaZe thing, somebody sent Lacy a fucking ton of Ozempic coins, and they were worth whatever. He was like, “Can I sell this?” I said, “No, dude. Leave it all alone. Don’t touch it. Don’t sell it.”

What happened was, the guy who owns Chompy Coin sent one of my mods, OneTap, who’s a known scammer, a lot of the coin. Since I brought it on-screen for one second, some of my chats started buying it. I think bots started buying it because they saw that it was getting movement.

It literally got up to $25,000 in value. My mod was like, “Bro, I have $25,000 worth of these coins. What the fuck do I do?”

How do I know that?

For your chat, he did a subathon for about 8 hours once. You may have been there.

Definitely not. Did he play Among Us? A lot of Among Us?

Yes, he did. That’s crazy. You remember him from that? Wow. That is [expletive].

I played a lot of Among Us during that time. That was the one time I was ever in a ton of streams. I don’t know if anybody watching this remembers that, but when Train and everybody would play, it was xQc, Train—we played all day, every day. It was 5up and those kids, Harambe, and [expletive].

Oh, yeah. That was where OneTap was. It’s crazy to remember that.

Chompy Coin blew up, and I was like, “I don’t know what the fuck to do here.” Everyone was like, “Dude, Miz, you’re rug-pulling.” I got some views on Twitter, and OneTap gave me the coin, so I just fucking sold it for cash.

Obviously, I didn’t know what the fuck to do here. I don’t give a fuck. If you’re stupid enough to buy this shit and you really did this, you’re an idiot. There’s $25,000 of mine now that you’re an idiot for buying.

I don’t even think my viewers really bought it. I think it was bots that just saw the growth because it was so dumb. That’s basically it. I didn’t care about the money. I was like, “This is so dumb.” He made me $25,000 pretty quickly, so shout-out to Chompy.

So, you’re actually a fucking scammer, by the way.

Yeah, I—

I’ve never done anything even remotely close to this, and I’ve been labeled X, Y, and Z. I have been called everything at this point besides one thing. I’ve been called everything under the sun, and I also am a scammer. Yes.

What’s the one thing that you haven’t been called?

It begins with a P.

Oh, man. You’re really baiting them in.

I have never been called pretty, which sucks, because I actually take my finasteride every day.

Oh, you’re gorgeous. Show the eyebrows off real quick.

Get nice and close.

Does he low-key look like Rasmer[?] or am I tripping? Am I making that up?

He’s a lot more handsome than Rasmer[?]. Braz[?], I love you, but Miz has a good look. Miz is a good-looking kid. You’re a good-looking kid, bro. You are.

Thank you, man. It’s that trauma weight I lost. It’s the—give me numbers.

You’re in good shape. But are you becoming more unrelatable because of that?

I think my relatability now is—

Or is it just about finding and attracting a new audience?

Yes. But I think my relatability for sure is my failures. If I was successful as a streamer, if everyone loved me, and if I was doing really well, my relatability would be over. That era would be done. I’d be too rich. I’d have too much money. I wouldn’t look like shit anymore.

But the fact that I’ve tumbled so far down, the fact that I’ve had such hardships and things could not go my way, and I’ve been fucked over—that makes me relatable to the chat. I guess that’s the one good thing about all this. I’m very relatable to them. It’s like, “Damn, I’ve been thrown terrible bones and fucked over.”

Now that I’m resilient and I don’t give up, that motivates them. It’s like, “Yeah, dude, he’s not giving up.” This guy, despite literally being at a 20-v-1, is winning the 20-to-1 and hasn’t given up because he’s so resilient. I think that’s the relationship now.

You should never bet against a resilient motherfucker, especially one that’s been successful through as many market eras as you have. That’s how I feel about myself, too. If you were a fucking chart, I’d be buying low on you. I’d fucking slam myself, full-porting myself.

This has been a cool conversation. Z, I want you to get into the Cerebras stuff because it relates back to what I think Miz and I were talking about yesterday. What’s your whole thesis on Cerebras? Why do you think it’s such a—

It’s such a good, interesting play?

That’s the one I’m most excited about you talking about, like traditional markets.

Yeah.

So Cerebras is interesting. It’s one of the most popular private AI companies right now. Its ticker is CBRS, but it’s not live yet on that thing.

One reason it’s one of the most popular AI companies right now is that there’s training for AI, which is when you’re training new models, teaching them things, and actually building the models. Then there’s inference. Inference in AI is whenever we go to ChatGPT or Claude, ask it something, and try to get an answer or build something.

There are a lot of companies that focus on building chips specifically for inference and making them more performant for that kind of computing. Cerebras is one of the companies doing that. They’re reportedly 50× more performant than NVIDIA’s inference.

The way they do it is by having this huge chip. Instead of the smaller GPUs that a lot of other semiconductor companies have connected together, they have one really, really, really big chip. The way they designed it makes them the best company to go to for inference.

OpenAI is like, “Yeah, they’re really cool. Just look them up.” The TBPN guys did a great interview with the CEO last September, so I just watched that recently. It’s really good.

OpenAI is using them for all their inference right now, and their entire backlog is 90% OpenAI. I think it’s something crazy, like $20 billion in commitments that they have—basically, “Go build as many of these chips as possible. We will fill whatever you can build, up to $20 billion.” OpenAI is the one supporting that.

This is a really hyped IPO, and the reason it’s important is because Anthropic has, as we know, a $1 trillion valuation. OpenAI has a $1 trillion valuation. A lot of the other AI companies that are so pivotal to this bull market aren’t accessible, but Cerebras has decided they’re putting it on the market.

Yeah, so Cerebras is trying to IPO, and they want to IPO, I think, at around $40 billion.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, they’re trying to raise about $3.6 billion, but it’s obviously already oversubscribed.

Can you trade this anywhere right now? Can you trade this on Hyperliquid?

You can trade it on Bullpen.

Yeah, so you can trade Cerebras on Bullpen. What’s the market cap at?

I think it’s around $60 billion right now on Bullpen.

Is this next to NVIDIA or any of these multitrillion-dollar companies?

They’re calling it the “NVIDIA killer.” That’s literally the popular tagline for them.

What?

Yeah, so, I mean—

When are they going to IPO?

I believe definitely this year, probably over the next few months. I know people who are trying to get in position to buy the actual raise that they’re doing, and I know people who are buying through Bullpen on Hyperliquid.

You and your chat should really look at Hyperliquid, the platform, and the product.

Definitely. For sure. One hundred percent.

This will give you guys the option that, on Robinhood, you’re confined to what’s actually out there in the public markets. But on Hyperliquid, we could literally trade Anthropic right now. It’s trading at whatever—$1.2 trillion. And if you think, you know, that’s—

Yeah.

But it was a lot lower, too. You could have traded it when it was—

When did they open that market on Hyperliquid? What did it open at on Hyperliquid? Do you know?

I think I want to say it was around $500 billion.

Yeah, that’s crazy.

Hyperliquid is interesting because, as a decentralized protocol, they allow other people to build on top of them. There are other companies enabling trading of these pre-IPO companies, and they’re just using perps for them because, obviously, they don’t trade yet. They’re not on the public markets, but people generally know what they should be valued at.

The volume that the perp does kind of determines the price, and that’s why you can trade it now.

Interesting. Okay, yeah, I’ll look into CBRS and Hyperliquid. I’ll look into these things. I do like your mining one. I think we’re going to look into that literally right after the show—your mining idea—because I think mining is very big for all the metals that are needed.

I think that’s a good play. My chat did like that one, and we’ll get into it. For the sake of what we’re doing this content for on the stream, I’m really trying to stay away from crypto because I want my chat to understand that you don’t need to do crazy crypto plays to try to make a big play.

You could just invest slowly into the market. You can invest in the Googles. You don’t need to do wild and insane shit to really build up money over time.

Yes, crypto can make sense. Even Hyperliquid makes sense. But I want people to understand that stocks are very important and that they can make money through them as well.

It’s crazy to think that Ethereum is literally just flat. It’s had its highs and lows, but it’s nuts.

Yeah, I know. I agree with you. I think the way people should think about investing is that you have your high-risk plays. For some people, that’s crypto. For some people, that’s low-cap stocks. For some people, that’s options.

Then you have your core long-term plays, which, as you said, are Google, NVIDIA, Meta, Microsoft, and companies like that. I definitely agree. You have to separate your portfolio into different buckets, divvy up whatever extra income you have, and deploy it the proper way.

I agree with you. You definitely should be preaching what you’re preaching to them. It’s very accurate.

Yeah, because I think a lot of viewers who are in their early 20s or 30s have just been told crypto. They’ve been told gambling and stuff like that—really risky things to try to make money quickly.

They see social media and they’re like, “Holy shit, how do I become rich like this guy? How does this guy make so much money so fast?” A lot of times, it’s just lies, right? It’s pump-and-dumps. It’s lies. It’s shit that they don’t own.

A lot of times, I’ve seen these guys who have things like, “I have this crypto to get into. I have this thing. I make billions of dollars.” They rent an Airbnb for a day and pretend it’s their house. They lie. Because of that—

TikTok’s on fake jets and shit, too.

Yeah, exactly. Because of that, these viewers feel like they’re falling so far behind and that they need to do get-rich-quick shit. So they go to the crazy gambles that fail.

I want them to understand that you don’t need to do that. You can invest slowly over time.

This is so unfortunate, though, man. We talked about this earlier, Ansem. We even touched on this, Miz, and I think we could probably wrap on this because it kind of sums up the entire thing—the entire collaboration, the show, everything.

Unfortunately, in these mainstream communities—and I use “mainstream” loosely—in these streaming communities, people have come to the conclusion that crypto equals scam. These are people who live on the internet. They’re on the internet a lot longer than the average person, and even these people have come to that conclusion.

It’s unfortunate because there are great products in crypto, like Hyperliquid, and there are great opportunities. Yesterday, your chat brought up Hyperliquid and Zcash, and people spammed “scam.”

It’s our fault, though, man. It’s crypto people’s fault.

I agree. I agree. But it’s like the snake-eating-its-own-tail situation. It’s like, “Fuck, what is it? How do we fix it?” We’re sitting here trying to—

Yeah, sorry to cut you off, but you fix it by highlighting the important projects, highlighting what’s doing well, and highlighting what’s innovating. I think that’s the way, because it’s true. We said it earlier: 90% of startups fail. A lot of VCs make investments that aren’t great investments.

If you’re in one of the newest, most innovative spaces, you’re obviously going to see people try new things that don’t work, and you’re going to see bad actors come into the space. The thing about crypto is that it’s permissionless. When you have something that’s permissionless and decentralized, obviously you’re going to have people take advantage of that.

But the same thing that makes Hyperliquid such a great platform is the same thing that allows people to scam in that way. So it’s a double-edged sword.

Well, 99% of everything is a fucking scam, right? Like, 99% of the fucking tweets you read are a fucking lie and a fucking scam. It kind of goes hand in hand with everything.

The way that you, the viewer and the average person, should navigate the internet in general—or anything in general—is to be hyper-skeptical.

And do deep, deep, deep research and come to your own conclusion. Use all the tools that you can. That’s the fucking thing that bothers me.

It’s too much work for them. They don’t want to do that. They need other people to do it for them.

And people point and fucking blame us. I don’t know, dude. I’m still so passionate about crypto, and I feel like in a lot of ways the baby has been thrown out with the bathwater. This fucking scam-crypto narrative really bothers me, and I feel like it’s part of my fucking purpose and part of my job to correct that.

But then you have CT, which freaks out about X, Y, and Z. It’s all just fucking so weird, you know what I’m saying?

I think a big problem with crypto, too, is not necessarily just the scams. I think it’s the people behind the scams that have made people very annoyed, because crypto bros were a very popular thing, right? These guys with backwards hats act like douchebags, drink beer all day, and try to tell you how to make money. They made a billion dollars this year, and they’re trying to tell you how to do stuff.

They’re the ones who were successful, and they kind of ruined that feeling. These chud-like people—now you want professionalism, you know? You don’t see that a lot with crypto. Maybe it’s getting better now, but during those eras, during COVID and so on, it felt like these people really didn’t understand what they were saying. They felt like they were taking advantage of you, and that’s what caused that problem.

Nowadays, I think people love stocks. It’s more buttoned-up and more professional. It feels more professional. It doesn’t feel like you’re being conned into something. It doesn’t feel like you’re talking to a guy outside of high school, right? I think that’s why they feel that way about crypto. It has that same NFT feel, right? Where it’s like—

I think it’s much, much worse than anybody on CT wants to admit. I really think it’s so much worse. Here we are with somebody who’s chronically online, Mizkif. He understands the nuances of streaming, attention, his chat, whatever. He’s dedicated the next 30 days of his platform and his content to investing $300,000 into making as much money as possible for his chat.

Hyperliquid is obviously a tool that he and his chat could use for success in this effort. It’s absolutely something you should understand and be using. The fact that there’s any sort of resistance there, and the fact that the door is kind of shut immediately and it’s chalked up as, “We want to stay away from crypto”—and this is a chat of 6,000 people and a fucking streamer with an audience of a lot more than that—it’s really fucking bad. I don’t know.

Yeah, but just give it time, you know? If crypto’s really not going away for a while, give it a few more years and it’ll be okay. But the thing is, right now, crypto is seen like an ex-girlfriend who went crazy. Now you’re trying to get back together with her, and she’s like, “Oh, well, you were nuts.”

You’ve got to show over time that you’re not as crazy, you know? Then maybe—

That’s how I personally feel about my relationship with crypto. It’s crazy that you could say that, because it’s a really good metaphor.

Who do you think of when you think of crypto, Miz? I’m actually interested. Who’s your—

No, but actually, thought leaders and people—

If you think of crypto, who’s the most famous crypto person that you think of? Who do you think of?

I’m curious. I think of Andrew Tate, just that era.

Anthony, can we please pull up the fucking back-and-forth?

Okay. Another example of someone is Coffeezilla. I think Coffeezilla—and Logan Paul, really, the whole CryptoZoo thing—really fucked up crypto. That one was really big. Dang, he deleted them. Fuck.

Oh, he did. He deleted it. Share your screen, though. Share your screen.

It’s funny you say Andrew Tate, because there was a point last cycle when all the memecoin shit—

You broke me, LMAO. I’ve never seen this, bro. This is a legendary clapback, by the way. Yeah, you—

Yeah, this is me. It was me and him going back and forth. So, yeah, when the memecoin shit was popping off, Andrew Tate was obviously one of the people who was like, “Yo, I can make money doing this. I’m going to do this and get involved with this.” His team launched a bunch of coins. He supported a bunch of coins.

He was going back and forth with me because, at the time, I was the Solana memecoin whatever person. I was like, “Oh, I’m going to stir up shit with him. If I get attention from all his followers, I’m going to get more people to buy my coin,” X, Y, and Z.

I’ve never met this person, by the way. I didn’t know him at the time. I’d never talked to him before any of this, but we had a period where we were going back and forth, talking shit to each other online. I was basically telling him, “Your coin’s going to zero,” X, Y, and Z. He deleted the post. I wish I had what this fucker said, because it was really funny. I had to reply to it because we were just arguing.

At the time, he was getting on me for boxing because I did some celebrity boxing. I got my ass beat badly, publicly, in front of a lot of people, and he was saying I can’t fight and all this other shit. But, yeah, we’ve had our back-and-forth. So it’s funny that you say Andrew Tate.

At the time, CT was on my side, and they were like, “Fuck him. We don’t want anything to do with his coins.”

Ansem, for a while, was the fucking main character of crypto. He was the fucking connector and the point of contact, the bridge in for all these celebrities. Like—

I witnessed this live happen, by the way. Me and Z have been friends for years. Yeah.

Who’s the most famous person you know, then?

Way before the show. I mean, in CT, maybe. Maybe, maybe. For sure.

Wait, you say, “Who’s the most famous person I know?”

Most famous person. Yeah, yeah.

I know I’ve met—I mean, I have met Kanye. I did talk to Kanye.

I was just about to bring this up. I witnessed this live, Mizkif. We’re on Rodeo.

I think you were still dating the same girl at the time, right? This was the first day that you were ever with her. This was a fucking pivotal, crazy, weird day. We’re on Rodeo. We’re in one of the stores.

Everyone starts spamming our phones and stuff, and Twitter’s blowing up. CT’s blowing up, and it’s like, “Yo, Kanye just tweeted about you.” Kanye’s live-tweeting, like, “Yo, Ansem, hit me up. Yo, Ansem, pull up on me,” like that. Like—

And everyone’s like, “What the fuck?” And you did. You pulled up on him. You linked him.

Yeah, but that was when I was already out there. He was tweeting the video of us talking back and forth.

Oh, that’s what it was.

Yeah. He was texting me, like, “Yo, what should the caption be for this?” And then he tweeted the video because he had asked me to come out and talk to him about crypto—what he should do and what he shouldn’t do. That’s why I was actually in L.A. That’s why I was out there.

Yeah, that was a crazy week. That was a crazy week.

Unfortunately, he did not listen to the advice I gave him, but that’s another story. But, yeah, fucking 2024 was weird for me. Yeah—

I’m a big Kanye fan. Yeah, he’s great. He’s super talented, too. I think he’s one of the greatest artists of all time.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. The greatest artist of all time.

That’s crazy, dude. I mean, you sound like you’ve met—I think the most famous person I’ve met is Banks, probably. Honestly, I don’t really know famous people. I know—yeah, I don’t really have that kind of ability. I typed in N3on’s chat one time and he responded, so that was pretty cool.

Oh, no.

Yeah, I know, and I know Mark Zuckerberg. My favorite famous person is Saquon. Saquon's the GOAT—Saquon Barkley.

Saquon's the GOAT. He is. He's a good guy.

He's a good guy.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like you're—listen, I followed you on Twitter, too. If you ever want to come on stream and talk, like, if you have ideas, you guys should, bro. You guys really should.

I floated a couple other names at you, too. I would trust Ansem more with this, but he could put you in touch with people who would love to talk more to you about this shit, or accounts to follow, or whatever. There are a ton of—I don't want to say crypto has a bad reputation, but there are also a lot of really reputable people in crypto. They're just not as well-known as the people doing the bad things.

That's the fucked-up part about crypto. The people who are very good at marketing and very good at attracting attention to themselves are usually the worst people. There are a lot of good people who have the core tenets of crypto at heart and are great evangelists of the technology, but people don't really know about them or get to talk to them. If you ever want to talk to those people, I can put you in touch with them as well. There are a lot of really great people in crypto, for sure.

You can get me in touch with Kanye.

I don't know about that one, bro. I don't know how close we are.

Does he want to invest and see if he can beat my chat?

Maybe. I think, Miz, we're probably going to have to have a follow-up next week. I think we should.

I'm down to pull up, for sure, though. I'm down to come on more.

Miz, if you're down, I think you should pop in for at least a little 15-minute window for the rest of the month.

Next episode and the 2 following that, and we can kind of follow you on your journey—

—and follow up this conversation. It makes sense. It's totally in line with what we're doing and what we're about.

This is a really interesting conversation. I think it was—this was fucking sick.

It was cool to watch you guys go back and forth. It was cool to watch you kind of download all the information in real time around the streaming shit and the nuances of that. Best of luck to you and your chat as far as this fucking challenge goes. I think what you're doing is great. I think it's God's work.

We relate on a lot of things, and I appreciate you. I appreciate your resilience. Don't give up. Keep pushing forward. Just be the best you can be, and everything else will work out. Cream rises to the top, baby.

We have a very similar path, but one thing I know is that it's a path. It's not the end. We're resilient. We work hard. I think now I've got good people in my corner, which is basically just my cat. Now I'll be good to go.

6 Asian girls tied up in the closet.

Well—

Such a weird scene, bro. You're such a weird person.

I feel like you're making that up, bro. I don't see them. They're not on stream. I don't see them.

They were there yesterday. The maids might have come. I don't know.

Well, they are the maids. One sleeps on my couch. She's actually a very successful person in K-pop. We just met watching Grey's Anatomy with each other one day.

Behind—look.

Yeah, that's a Bulbasaur.

And then there was a girl in my bed who slept over. It's—you know—

They were all Asian. Definitely have a type.

Definitely have a type.

No, I don't. It's just how the road—it's just where the road takes you. I actually like Latinos the most, but we can talk about that next podcast.

Yeah, we'll talk about that next show.

Thank you, Miz's chat. You guys were good to me yesterday, and it was really fun. This is great. Thank you so much.

Thank you, bro.

Love, brother.

Love. Thank you for coming out.

No problem. Peace out, guys, and thank you for everything.

That was great.

That was cool.

Those are officially our first guests. I like him.

Yeah, yeah. Me too.

Me too. And the unfortunate truth is that a lot of people online—if you opened Twitter, you'd see that it doesn't feel like a lot of people are very fond of him because of the drama that he's been wrapped up in with other people.

That, along with him doing this finance challenge thing—

—feels very relevant.

It's a weird overlap, honestly.

It's weird as fuck, and I don't know. That's—

Miz also, something I haven't really talked a ton about publicly: when all the shit was going down with me and the FaZe guys, Christmas is kind of where everything came to a head and really exploded.

He came over on Christmas Day at night and was just like, “Yo, man, are you doing okay?” He kind of just sat with me and talked through the whole situation. It meant a lot. There were no strings attached to that. There was no opportunity to be farmed for content around that, and I'm not really used to that in terms of people who make content, distribute content, or stream.

That's very, very rare.

So, Miz, I'll always consider him a friend at this point. It's a very unlikely, random friendship that has formed over the last several months, but he has good ideas around GTA. We didn't even really get to talk about GTA with him, which—I know we could have gone a little deeper on that.

Should we just call him back? Should we have him pop back on?

We could. I kind of want to. We're already live.

We've got somebody in the waiting room to come on.

Oh, do we? Who?

Yeah, yeah. Easy.

Oh, sick. I said we should bring Easy on. Okay, cool. Let's do it.

Can we bring him up? Where's Easy at? Easy. Easy.

What's good, my friend?

What's good, brother? How are you?

I'm good, bro. I cannot complain. Life is good, man. The AI trades have been fun, man. They've been fruitful.

I've been seeing you crush it, bro. I feel like you've been pretty consistent.

Yeah, you've been consistent with the streaming. You've been sharing the trades on stream, posting your updates and everything, bro. How's that been? Put me on, bro. What am I missing?

The big thing for me, just like you, is that I was a very early Solana bull. You and I were so heavy early. You were obviously a little bit earlier. I got in in August of 2021, when the ETH NFT stuff was popping off, and I was like, “Dude, gas is crazy. I'm spending thousands of dollars to mint a picture.” Then STEPN minting started, and I was like, “Okay, this is a much better user experience.” So I was like, “This just makes sense.” Then STEPN happened, and I was like, “Oh shit, okay. This is the user experience people are going to want.”

So I went crazy hard on that. I did really, really well. I've been trading equities since I was 16 on a custodial account and all this stuff, so I've been reading 10-Ks and everything. I'm deep in the equity side, but I never really talked about it. Now we have this convergence of crypto and TradFi, and I'm like, “Okay, now I can have some fun.”

I'm really interested in the Russell 2000 right now—low caps versus the mid- and high-caps in the equity market—because the S&P is going crazy. But if you go down the risk curve, the Russell has outperformed the S&P year to date almost 2 times. The S&P is up 7% year to date.

Really?

Yeah, the Russell is up 15%.

Oh, fuck.

People overlook that. This morning I was like, “Let me figure out which tickers have the most upside in the Russell that are positive with their revenue and AI-adjacent.” This morning, me and the chat started a $1,000 account in equities that we were just running up with the chat. I found this ticker called Innodata.

So it's IN—

Okay, bro, wait till you see what it's looking like after-market. This shit is crazy. We won calls on this this morning.

Damn. You're up fat.

Up, up, up, up—stupid up. They beat earnings by 433%.

But I knew—I was wicked positive this thing would crush when I looked at the business model, bro. They label data. It’s a data-labeling company. When AI ingests data, it has to have labels for where to aggregate it, so that when the model actually takes that data, it knows where to put it. This company is a third party that just labels all that data. So, it’s a labeling company.

I was like, “Okay—” Not to get this highly intelligent finance conversation off track, but I heard you say “wicked.”

Yeah, bro.

Are you from Boston?

I lived there for 7 years.

Wow.

Yeah. I used to watch you and the guys when you had the house early—like, dumb early.

Way, way back. Your demographic is exactly the people who show me the most love. It makes me feel incredibly old. This is the type of conversation where I’m like, “Wait, you’re 40 years old? You’re pushing 40. I turned 33 this year.” CT calls me old, but I’m still trading memes and still in the trenches with some of these dudes. Listening to them, I’m like, “Okay, you guys are much younger than me.”

I appreciate you coming on the show, bro. Something that really sparked my interest in what you guys were just talking about is how TradFi and crypto are kind of merging. It’s all becoming one thing, which I think is really good for—oh, are you guys putting his name tag in? What the fuck is production doing? That threw me off.

Obviously, I’m an attention, media, and content-brained person. FaZe Banks. FaZe the fuck up. New York FaZe house, whatever—I’ve been doing that my entire life. I feel like the content vertical in finance, especially crypto and internet capital markets, has been super underwhelming and super lacking over the last couple of cycles, over the last few years, and even today. We have Threadguy doing his thing, and Raz has a stream, and they have these little, small, niche audiences.

We obviously see what TBPN does, but that’s more on the traditional tech side of things. How do you feel about the show? I know, obviously, us coming out with this show—there’s a good dynamic. I’ve seen a bunch of takes on CT about it, and it’s one extreme or the other. Some people are like, “I hate this,” and other people are like, “This makes sense.”

I think the two of you have such a unique dynamic because I’ve gone back and forth with Ansem forever—literally for years—just talking thesis and very publicly. We’ve done very similar things on the timeline where it’s like, just post your trade. I know people get pissed when you lose or don’t have a good trade, but at the same time, my thought is, if I’m not posting the trade, someone else will. For me, I would rather air it out, because when one person wins, it feels that much better. I know when I lose, they lose too. But it’s not like I’m not taking these trades, so if I’m taking them, why not share them?

Your guys’ dynamic is so interesting. Listening to that whole conversation with Mizkif, when he was talking about the whole content side of things, was really interesting. Then seeing him get into the finance side—I saw his video, obviously, and I was like, “Okay, this is all slowly clicking.” My bet on everything, and the whole core thesis for why I’m longing Robinhood—which is wicked funny—is that more people are going to spend time online, and more people are going to navigate to the things that kind of do everything in one place.

Streaming makes sense. I think modern-day media is going to move to the internet. I think shows like this are going to have people tuning in. I like that it’s only once a week because it’s way easier for people to tune in once a week and commit however long to that once a week, versus every day for multiple hours, which is where you see more of the clips.

I also think more people are going to spend more time online, and the younger generation coming up is going to find more of their information online. So, long-winded answer: I like the idea you guys have for this, and I’m excited to continue to see it grow. You guys are both so well-connected that you’re going to have awesome guests on.

It just makes sense, and you guys are both educating. Watching both of you learn about different topics helps the audience because Easy’s going to pull an audience of people from CT, and you’re going to pull an audience from the creator side and everything else. People who know you from your content are going to blend these 2 worlds that I think just make the most sense.

It’s cool that that’s what you’ve gathered from it, because that’s exactly what we’re going for. That’s exactly what we’re trying to accomplish with this. That’s exactly why I think he and I make perfect sense as far as being the hosts of the show.

It’s a perfect match, in my opinion. I think you guys are doing the right thing here. I’m excited just to see some of the tickers because I also heard you guys mention Eaton. I think Easy mentioned it.

Yeah, last week.

I was on TGA last week, and I mentioned PWR, Quanta Services.

Uh-huh.

Similar play. That thing went crazy. When I look at the AI stuff, I’m going layers deeper. I’d rather just bet on the data center than on which AI model is going to win, because they need the data center more than anything else.

And when you really get down to it, dude, you could just buy copper and uranium because—

I know. I saw they’re breaking out right now, both of them.

Uranium is going to go crazy, in my opinion, bro. Microsoft is rebuilding Three Mile Island.

Yeah, I know.

It went up. When you start to get really down into the granular level of this stuff, I’m like, “Oh, yeah, you could literally bet on copper for the wires that are needed for data centers and uranium to power them, and you don’t have to care about anything else outside of that.”

To me, you could get so granular with this trade, and there are so many levels that haven’t broken out. This data-labeling play is $1.4 billion. You mentioned WIF. WIF traded at 2 times the market cap of this public company.

It’s crazy.

What are you doing here—

Bro? I didn’t realize how low a lot of these stocks are. I honestly didn’t. I had no idea. If you go really deep in research, they’re companies that have been around for years and years and years.

This company has been around for 10-plus years, and I’m like, why is it trading at $1.4 billion when AI needs this? What are we talking about here? This is crazy to me.

I was going to ask you what the market cap of that shit was. That’s insane.

$1.45 billion. Now it’s probably like $1.7 billion because it’s up 25% after hours.

Yeah. What company is this? It’s Innodata, right?

Yeah. Innodata, INOD. I found it this morning and had never even looked into it before. I stream in the mornings, premarket open, and we live-trade with the audience because I do a $1,000 Hyperliquid portfolio and a $1,000 equity portfolio to make it relatable sizing-wise. A lot of people don’t have the capital that a lot of people who make content have.

I’m like, “All right, let’s make this wicked relatable, where you can buy a call option for $150.”

Yeah, right.

So, we buy calls. I’m like, “This feels severely undervalued.” They have earnings, and, bro, the earnings chart—it beat by 433%, and their guidance is like, “Yeah, we’re going to do 200% revenue this year.”

You have a pretty good understanding of content and stuff. Are you aiming to do that? Have you been doing more and more content?

Yeah. I’m streaming 5 days a week in the morning at 9:00 a.m.

Oh, sick. I was unaware. That’s cool. That’s awesome.

That’s the thing. I’ve been making YouTube videos and all this other stuff, but it’s much smaller. I’m way bigger on X. I blew up on X because I was so public with trades. When I got to—dude—

I hated the camera.

I did too. All the NFT stuff and all my earlier stuff, I just posted what I bought, and I would post when I sold. It was—

That’s a big thing. I took it even one step further, where I posted my exit targets on the NFTs I was buying. I tried to do it with MLG. I posted, “I’m going to start trimming profits at $100 million,” and I didn’t. I top-blasted instead, and I’m still in the shit.

You and me went band for band on MLG. Oh, did we?

Yeah, we got to $10,000. I’m familiar with your name, by the way. I’ve obviously seen you on CT, and we’ve gone back and forth. I recognize you for sure. I didn’t know you were as deep into the content stuff, but you were there. You saw how it started with MLG, bro.

I fucking bought that off the timeline at $3 million. Then I’m like, wait a second—my thesis starts to build. FaZe Banks just bought MLG. So now this is the gamer-culture coin. This is when all the culture-coin shit was going on. There were fucking 10 different coins with multibillion-dollar market caps. I’ve got fucking Kenny the Quant in the next room like, “This is the easiest fucking 20x in crypto.”

And I start buying it, and it's fun for me because it hits so close to home. Whatever. Then, obviously, Trump does his thing, Melania does her thing, I go on a raw stream, and now it's like—

Crazy. Yeah, it's crazy.

It happens, bro. I'm ready for it, too, because I'm going to post bad trades that people take and get pissed. But at the same time, my response is always, “Well, you're not posting your trades.”

But it's also—

Yeah. No, bro. Nobody's doing it. Literally nobody's doing it. Nobody.

It was a great trade.

It was objectively a good trade. Buy this at $3 million; it ran to $200 million. I made people rich with this call. I made people talk about this. You know what I'm saying? I don't know. It's crazy. It's crazy.

It's just part of the game, though, bro.

Yeah, I know. And that's why, even when people were trying to FUD Ansem over the $150 thing, I found the thread and just quoted it. I was like, “All right, chat, he did in fact buy it.” I just had the receipt. I was like, “It's literally right here.” I don't know why we're going crazy over this. He bought it.

So it loops all the way back to the point and purpose of the show: just worry about yourself and invest in yourself. You almost have to put the blinders on because it's like—

Something as silly as the Ansem thing, like the lying and larping about buying at $150—there's clear evidence on Twitter. You're 2 clicks away from finding it, and you're not bothering to get there because it's more fun for you or more favorable to farm the way that people do. It's—

People care more about impressions than their own bankroll, which is just a crazy thesis.

100% true. You care more about a couple of Elon bucks than actually making your money go up. There's so much good value on X, too, when you really start going down the rabbit holes. Some of the best accounts are 300 or 400 followers, and they just have straight alpha where they're like, “Here's all the data you need. Go look for yourself.” That's where I find a lot of good stuff that makes—

Understanding attention a lot is like—you're trying to command attention through making content on your own and streaming every day, which is the traditional way you would think about it. When we say attention—attention, command attention, attention is important—but even just understanding the way that it works, the way that attention is traded, the way that attention is accumulated, and how it's passed around is super, super important. It obviously relates heavily back to finance. I think it's just as important, if not more important, over the next 5 to 10 years. On attention, Threadguy has been killing it with the attention trades.

Like, he caught HIMS, which was a pure momentum trade, and you guys were talking about that before.

There's a couple of other tickers in there—publicly traded companies—where I'm like, if the peptide stuff pops, this will be interesting.

You can really go down some rabbit holes and find some interesting stuff. But you do also just have to understand some of the risks on medical trades and how clinical trials go and shit like that. It gets confusing because you're like, “Okay, this should have gone up, but they failed a clinical trial.” There's a bunch of that stuff, but—

If you're coming from CT, because you're so used to things happening so quickly, and a tweet could—

Yeah, yeah.

Like, a tweet could send a coin from $10 million to $100 million, and that's a 10x in crypto, especially right now when nothing's really moving.

Yeah. But it's been interesting, man. I think you guys have a really good conversation, a lot of it. I've been listening, obviously, to this stream and the last one you guys did, where you highlighted some really good stuff, especially on AI infra. You guys brought up Leopold Aschenbrenner. If you haven't, dude, Situational Awareness, the document he wrote, is so good.

It's crazy, bro. It's fire. I'm like—

165 pages. I nerded out one night and just read the whole thing, and I was like, “Oh, this dude gets it.”

Everybody watching right now, that's your homework from now until the next episode. Everyone, go read that. Go read Situational Awareness.

What do you think about the AI-versus-crypto conversation that we've been having back and forth? I mean, I pretty clearly see that there are so many opportunities right now with AI stocks and different parts of the stack, but I still obviously love crypto and still spend time on crypto. How are you splitting your time between both, or what are your thoughts on that?

I mean, bro, with Hyperliquid, you're kind of always watching crypto, right? I caught the TON trade. I was really happy about that because Pavel Durov was like, “We're going to make this the official Telegram coin.” And I'm like, “Yep, it's one of the most used apps in the world. This is going to go up.” But then it still makes me go into the layers. I'm like, “Okay, well, they have inflation and unlocks happening all summer. It's not going to go back to its all-time high, but it'll probably go 50% of that, right?”

Yeah.

So there are still pockets that I look at. The Zcash trade, I'm like, “Very tough to figure out,” because I get the quantum-proof privacy, and I've made some money on it, but I've never held it long enough.

Yeah.

But with HIP-3, I'm like, “Oh, I can trade earnings on a crypto product. I should also just buy HYPE with every profit I make because, bro, I have to—I'm using this product, and I don't have to buy calls and I don't get crushed by the Greeks.” For those who are unfamiliar with the Greeks, it's the math that goes into options.

I feel like that sounds tried and true. Again, this is my normie brain, but you just buy what you use. You buy what you like.

100%.

Yeah.

Yeah. I use Telegram every day. Why would I not buy a ton? I use Hyperliquid every day. Why would I not buy HYPE? Those are pretty straightforward trades to me. And then you can obviously go—I had never even heard of Innodata until today, and it just worked out.

How did you find that, bro?

Bro, I was literally doing research last night on the Russell 2000 and profitable AI companies that make up the Russell 2000. For those unfamiliar with the Russell 2000, it's the small-cap index, similar to the S&P, but small caps. It's lower market caps; it's not Google, Amazon, et cetera. It's very low caps. I think the number is something like 70% of the companies in the Russell 2000 basically go bankrupt every year, and they just backfill it. It's crazy.

But the ones that make it out send hard.

Oh, okay.

So I was going down the list, and I was actually using AI to do a bunch of the research on it because it'll research faster and find better context for me. It sourced this and said they do data labeling, and last quarter they said that they were signing major contracts in Q4 for the next year. So I was like, “Okay, if they do have major contracts, this thing should absolutely pump.”

And sure enough—

That's legendary, bro.

I thought it would go up to around $50; it tapped $60. I'm like, “Okay, yeah, these $50 calls I have are going to be nuts.” People were already hitting me up like, “Dude, great call. You're the shit, man. We appreciate you.” And I'm like, “Yeah, this one just worked out.” But there's a bunch of other stuff that we've done really, really well on in the AI stuff. IREN was one I've been really long on, and they just signed a letter of intent from Nvidia to buy shares at $70—$2.2 billion worth of shares.

So I'm like, okay, this makes sense: data-center play, infra play. It's similar to Bloom Energy, but just adjacent to it. So I'm like, okay—

Even hearing you talk about this right now, oftentimes when you start getting into your thesis and your thoughts on markets, it's very, very clear that you guys spend a lot of time doing this. You guys definitely know what you're talking about. For the average viewer at home, somebody who's closer to my side of the spectrum, somebody who has a full-time job or goes to school or can't spend 8 hours a day on this—maybe they can spend 30 minutes to an hour a day—what do they do? How do they invest? What is it?

You buy ETFs, the basket of it. There's one called DRAM—D-R-A-M. It's a memory ETF, and you're basically betting on Intel and these other memory producers, right? So it's a bigger basket, but you don't have to do all this research on individual tickers. Look for ETFs on topics that are interesting. I found DRIV probably 5 years ago when EVs and electric vehicles were popping off. It was just a basket of electric vehicles, and I was like, “Oh, more people are going to drive electric vehicles over the next 10 years.” It's a pretty straightforward bet where I can just bet on the industry versus tickers. So if you don't have a ton of time—

How'd that one work out for you?

Good. It did well. Yeah, it did very well. It went from around $16 to $40, and I was like, “Okay, yeah, this is great.” But your returns are obviously capped, and the size of your return is indicative of how much time you can spend.

Of course.

So, if you don't have a ton of time, you can find a ton of 2xs, but I think they're going to come from these baskets where you can bet on spaces and verticals.

Right now, it's like, okay, I can find an AI ETF, I can find the memory ETF, and I can find the mining ETF. Right there, you have basically the big 3 for AI that can cover your bases. If AI keeps going parabolic, you're good. When you look at memory and mining, if quantum becomes a huge trend in the next 10 years, those will also go up because of it. So, you kind of have this adjacent trade to the 2.

It's good advice. How much are you using AI these days?

I use it every day.

How? With everything that you do, it's—

Everything. Every morning I wake up, I have a prompt that sends me everything I missed overnight at around 7:30. It gives me a document to read, and then at 8:45, The Heartbeat gives me a show-prep document of the things to talk about that are relevant over the last 24 hours. It's basically a producer.

It sounds like you're quickly getting much, much better at this. It sounds like you're very, very good at it. I'm just curious how much you would attribute that to your relationship with AI and the tool that you use.

Yeah, see, ChatGPT—the more AI you use, the faster you can find stuff. The Innodata trade was sourced by AI, 100% sourced by AI. It made me start asking AI questions about it, and you don't have to do a lot of the legwork to get the information.

Dude, I don't use Google anymore. I've had it on my phone, but I just ask it the question. There aren't 60 ads, and there isn't a bunch of shit that's in the way.

You're obviously a natural first adopter of technology like this because you're in finance, you're in crypto, and you're chronically online. But everybody at home should be working along these same lines, whether you fucking own a gym, you're a student, or whatever.

Yeah, hours and hours and hours on that. That's interesting. Even for people who have no idea—if you started from zero with the AI trade, if you have ChatGPT or Claude, you can get there in a relatively short amount of time to understand everything. Like you were saying, Banks, what would you do if you don't have 8 hours a day? Even if you have an hour after work or a couple of hours on the weekend, if you know—

15 minutes on the toilet at your job. Fire another question. It'll answer before you're done, I promise you.

Yeah. What I've been doing, which I think has been helping a lot, is that you can actually ask it how to ask better questions. That's a crazy recursive loop that's going on. If you don't know exactly what questions to ask about a certain topic or field, you can say, "Okay, what's a good prompt for this? What do I want to know more about? I know this, so give me a better question to ask an LLM."

It will literally give you something to ask, and then you can use that and get more information. Then, from that information, you can say, "I want to get more information on this specific part." You can just keep recursively asking it questions. If you're really curious and interested in what you're trying to learn, you will figure it out pretty quickly. It's crazy how fast it accelerates.

What are you using? What's your stack?

I'm between Claude and ChatGPT. I use OpenClaw, but I then fall back to ChatGPT.

I kind of go the same exact way. I think it's the best setup.

Yeah, and I kind of go back and forth between the 2 because they're both competing for the better model, and that's only going to keep happening. I saw the Elon news where he's basically partnering with Anthropic, and it's so clear he's partnering with Anthropic to kill OpenAI.

I know, right? He's such a sicko.

He's such an absolute madman.

How does it deliver you this information in the morning? You said it gives you stuff at 7:00 a.m. What does it look like? Is it just a text?

It's a text file with—

You should ask it to make you a slideshow, like a deck.

I have that every morning. It delivers me a morning brief of the shit that I missed during the night or things that I have ahead of me during the day. It's obviously looped into all of my scheduling.

I feel like I have a unique relationship with AI. A big reason why I found myself falling down the rabbit hole is because of a question that I ask these models. When I first discovered Claude, one of my first questions was, "Hey, I'm FaZe Banks. There's a ton of information about me on the internet. I'm FaZe Banks, so scrape as much information as you possibly can on me, and then ask me questions to try to better understand me and maybe what the internet is missing."

It gave me a very human response, and Claude blew my mind with how it responded. I went back and forth with it on that, and I just took the red pill. That's when OpenClaw was popping off, so I set it all up. Now I'm kind of obsessed with it just being very honest with me and catching blind spots in my personal or professional life.

I record every fucking meeting that I do with my legal and finance teams as it relates to everything that I'm invested in or a part of, my day-to-day life, my workout routine, and what I'm eating every day. I'm trying to give it as much information about me as possible. I've been journaling every day, twice a day, for the last year and a half of my life. I took pictures of each page and gave them to it.

I'm like, "I want you to understand me better than fucking anyone possibly could, and I want you to be unbiased. I don't want you to be a yes-man. Don't be a fucking yes-man. Ask me better questions." Every morning, it asks me 10 questions, and at night, it asks me 10 questions. It's building the skill of understanding me and helping me become an optimal human. I think that—

That opportunity is for anybody. Anybody could go do that today and build that relationship with AI in that regard. Even if you're fucking jobless, you know what I mean? Even if you don't have something in the way that we're talking about, it's really interesting. I think everybody's using AI by replacing Google with it, but there's so much more there.

I think you said an hour, and you said 15 minutes. I would go as far as to say that everybody, especially if you're watching this, should have it be mandatory in your day-to-day to carve out an hour a day where you really learn this shit.

I agree with that. I think it's spot-on. As much time as you want to put into it is what you get out of it, which is a nice part of it, too. You figure out ways to ask it questions, and to Easy's point, you can have it start asking you questions back. That's such a fascinating concept because this thing can get better at understanding what you're trying to achieve.

Bro, it just catches everything. It sees you.

The more context it gets, the better and better it gets.

But it has all the context in real time, and it notices everything in real time. That's another thing that I've gone really deep on in my own head. We're having this conversation right now, and I'm focused on your guys' faces and your reactions to what I'm saying, but there are a million things around me—the floor, what the floor looks like, the temperature in the room, and everything else. When AI is seeing it and processing it, it's processing everything.

A good example from my own life is that I recently moved into a new place, and I went out and bought a bunch of plants. I'm taking pictures of each plant and asking, "How do I take care of these? What's the watering schedule?" I asked ChatGPT and Claude everything.

I was putting a book next to each plant to give it a size reference, and it was like, "Yo, I don't need that. I'm much smarter than you think. I don't need the book, but thank you." It noticed that I was putting the book there as a size reference. I didn't add that context; it noticed it.

Then, out of the corner of its eye, it saw that I have a mirror from this artist named Drought. It's this big, giant iPod mirror, and it added a little bar at the end and was like, "By the way, that's a really cool mirror, that iPod mirror." It's crazy and ironic that it's Drought and we're talking about plants. It caught that and made that connection, where I would never do that, but it noticed it. I don't know. It's a dumb story, but these things happen.

No, but it's fascinating because it picks up on the nuances that you don't even think of. It's kind of crazy that it's so contextually aware.

It’s socially aware. That’s very human. That’s something your friend would say, and you’re like, “Damn, you’re smart. You’re sharp.” That was cool. I was listening to Raoul Pal today, and he’s confident AGI will happen in the next 5 years. I’m like, that’s pretty nuts.

Gary Brockman, when we reacted to a clip, said we’re 80% of the way to AGI. And then the Leopold Aschenbrenner guy says 2027, right?

Yep.

Yeah.

It’s here. It’s happening.

I know, bro. What is it going to look like 5 years from now?

Bro, it’s unfathomable, brother. It’s like the internet. The internet created the possibility and opportunity for things like social media to exist. We never could have imagined that being a thing without the internet being a thing. You couldn’t conceive it. Nobody had the idea of this being a thing, because one has to come before the other.

Electricity made way for the internet. The internet made way for social media, which made way for AI, and that’s going to make way for some brand-new thing that everybody participates in, that controls the way we interact as people, that doesn’t exist yet. We can’t even fathom it yet. That’s the craziest part.

That’s why, obviously, AI is going to take over. It’s going to change everything. On the surface, it’s going to disrupt markets and replace jobs, whatever. But what’s that next [bleep] thing that everybody is glued to?

We’re all glued to our phones. We all have this other life on our phones, and it’s Instagram and Twitter and this. What’s going to follow AI? You know?

It’s tough to say, man. It’s just going to be fascinating to see. The metrics are crazy. Less than 10% of people are using AI today.

That can’t be true.

That’s true.

No, yeah, it’s true. I think I have the [bleep]—let me see if I can pull it up.

It’s the masses. It’s the people who said we don’t need the internet, or [bleep] the internet. There are also 8 billion people, so 10% is still a pretty substantial number. In the grand scheme of things, I bet those numbers are skewed, obviously. In the U.S., I’m sure that number is much greater. In Europe, I’m sure that number is much greater. But there are obviously countries where it’s much lower.

I actually had Claude build me this pyramid, like a pie chart, of how many people use AI at different levels. Obviously, an overwhelming majority of people who use AI use it at a very surface level: “How do I bake banana bread?” “How do I change my tire?” “What’s the UV index in Beverly Hills? I want to go for a walk?”

“What are some nice restaurants near me?”

“What’s the closest coffee shop?”

Yeah.

Yes. So, I found the actual chart. This is the chart. Each dot is 3 million people. All of the gray dots are people who have never used AI. All the green dots are people using the free version. Yellow is people paying $20 a month, and red is people using coding. This is everybody.

So, I get delivery every day. I mean, we just started, and you guys are talking about the clipping side of things. We just built an in-house clipping infrastructure that I built in 48 hours because I have a software-development background. A lot of people don’t even know that, but it’s only amplified my ability to spin stuff up.

I’ve got a software-development background, too. My GitHub has never been so active. I’ll just have an idea, and I can make it in a few hours, at a level of depth that I could never have achieved in 5 years.

It’s crazy, bro. People always ask, “How do I get to be in the top 10%? How do I get to be in the top 5%?” Just look at the chart. Right now, you have the opportunity to do something that a lot of people are not doing and improve yourself 10x, right now, today.

Literally this minute. The people watching who are currently unemployed—that might be the [bleep] best thing that could have ever happened for you, because you can quite literally commit all of your time, as you should. The window of time and opportunity is shrinking. Whether it’s 5 years out or 1 year out, we don’t have a ton of time.

I also have a crazy thesis that AI is going to become a rich person’s game at some point.

Please, let’s hear it.

If you look at the data right now, the amount of subsidized compute these companies are giving the average user is through the roof. For the average Claude user, every $200 subscriber is spending upwards of $20,000 per month on compute. The average $20 user is spending $2,000.

When you start to break that down, you’re going to reach a point where you can’t subsidize as much anymore, because these companies have to be more profitable. Whether it’s ChatGPT going to ads or Claude removing Claude Code from the $20 subscription, they ultimately have to figure out a way to make these services revenue-positive, right?

That’s the main thing I think about. At some point, the best models are only going to be accessible to people with the most money. You even look at this Mythos model, right? The Claude Mythos that’s got everyone scared.

That thing is where people have access to it and we don’t, but there are people with money who do.

Yeah, I was going to say the exact same thing. It’s already happening with the Opus model that Claude has. I agree. The optimistic part is how much cheaper each model is getting as time goes on. The cost to use the best model in 2022, or whenever it was, is way, way, way lower now than it was back then.

That’s the good thing. But I do think only certain people and certain corporations will be able to use the best models. I 100% agree with that. It’s 100% true.

Easy, you saw us talk about this—the haves and have-nots. It’s kind of in line with what you’re talking about.

Hold on. Everybody who owns all the [bleep] compute and AI—it’s a rich man’s game.

And it’s only going to get worse. That’s the reality. The best access to this stuff is going to be limited, so if you can get access to it now, use it, because that’s going to change.

Yeah, for sure.

You can’t tell me everyone is going to be able to have this level of access for $200 a month. It sounds like a lot, but what you can achieve for $200 a month significantly outweighs the cost.

People are struggling to invest in these opportunities because they’re not being made public until all the rich people get in. So, it’s already very much turning into a rich man’s game.

Absolutely. But even going down that rabbit hole and investing in the best AI model, I don’t need to invest in Claude or OpenAI. I don’t want to invest in them at a trillion-dollar market cap, because I think the equity top is when all these companies IPO near the same time.

There’s a race for these AI companies to IPO. That’s the current race that’s happening, because there’s not enough capital in the market to sustain SpaceX at a trillion, OpenAI at a trillion.

We saw that happen in crypto, even when markets were super bullish for a long time.

Coinbase’s IPO was the top in April 2021.

Yep.

But even tokens getting into presales—so many coin launches and project releases had all-time highs before the sale. That whole meta played out and everything else. I think the same thing will happen with equities. The P/E ratios are so nuts right now, and I’m just like, “Okay, there will be a top at some point.”

The big driving factor right now is midterms, too. You have midterm elections, and for those unfamiliar with the way the political system works, you need a good economy going into midterms, at least in the market, for people to want to bet on the incumbent. Republican control of the House and Senate is largely driven by a good economy, so you want the market to be at all-time highs going into midterms.

Yeah. Have you, with the prediction markets, been following the NBA playoffs or any of that at all?

Of course, dude. Yeah. I played basketball in college for a year.

Oh, really? Where did you play?

It was a very small D2 school.

Did you ever play with Thread?

Yeah. Thread and I played one-on-one. He cooked me, though. I was pissed. I was so out of shape from being chronically online in 2021 and 2022, and I was confident I could beat him.

We played, he cooked me, and I went on this crazy weight-loss journey right after, where I cut 30 pounds because I was like, “[Bleep] this. I’m so out of shape.” I got back to dunking and all this stuff, and then we ended up playing together.

6 feet, 1 inch?

And you can [bleep] yam it.

Yeah.

Wow.

For real?

That’s a video of it.

I still have videos of me, even recent ones. I still hoop 3 or 4 times a week right now.

Yeah, we have runs 3 or 4 times a week in L.A. If you're ever in L.A., seriously, hit me up.

I'd love to.

Luca came and played. Luca from Pudgy Penguins.

Bang. I used to play with him in Miami. We play every single Saturday and Sunday.

They're good runs. They're good runs.

That's my guy, so that's funny. But yeah, I've been watching the playoffs. I had a position on the Timberwolves to win the chip, so when they beat the Nuggets, I sold out of that because, dude, it was like seven cents.

But the prediction-market stuff—even the finance on prediction markets—is way more interesting. You can trade up-and-down daily markets for equities. Today, I bought “up” on Nvidia last night at 40 cents, right after they announced a deal, and they closed today up 3%. It was one of the few green tickers.

You can find these opportunities. It's almost like a same-day option on prediction markets, and there's decent enough liquidity that you can make a few thousand a day.

If you're good with equities, where they're so mispriced, you can watch the pre-market, watch the open, see what the directional bias is, and take a swing on it.

So I'm like, that's way more interesting versus options contracts and shares. You're either buying from a fund or selling to a fund. I'm trading against another human being who thinks Amazon's going to go down today, even if all the metrics are through the roof.

Yeah, I was going to say, trading those certain prediction markets is probably a lot easier than trading against the people who are constructing these options, because the people building the options don't really lose, bro. They never lose.

An option contract where you win is like a counter on a parlay. If someone takes a parlay, that's why the house—that's why casinos—crush, because parlays are so EV-negative. On prediction markets, I can go trade. Dude, I play earnings on there all the time because I don't have to buy options.

My dad was a bookie. My dad was a small-time bookie out of Boston, and I heard him on the phone constantly collecting money from people, talking about this and talking about that. That's how he made all his money: parlays. He always taught us not to do parlays because he was a degenerate gambler himself. He couldn't tell us not to gamble, but he was like, “Don't ever do parlays. Parlays are sucker bets. That's how I make money, and that's how everyone in this industry makes money.”

Bro, number one way.

Bro, the Sixers beat Boston in 7, bro, and we're playing next.

Go [__] yourself, buddy.

What are we trading?

So, the Sixers right now—I think I'm going to take them tomorrow. I think they're down 2.5 points.

They're favored. It's basically flat. I think I'm going to take the Sixers to win tomorrow because we're down, so we can't lose 3 in a row. That's crazy. It's impossible.

Is Embiid back?

I don't know if he's back. I know he was.

OG went down—OG Anunoby went down on the Knicks late in the game last night.

I think it was a knee injury, a small tweak. They haven't announced if he's injured or not, but I think that's pretty significant because if he's out, he was a big reason the Knicks came back in the fourth last night. I've seen some clips talking about you talking about Polymarket, trading on Polymarket.

Yeah, I've been doing pretty well there.

Yeah.

Dude, Polymarket is fun, man. The big thing for me is that the counterparty is the most interesting part. Who your opposite party is and who you're trading against is another person. I know funds are getting involved, but there are still so many mispriced markets.

Yeah.

Anthropic to flip BTC was at 20% last week. It's at 50% now, which is much more appropriate. I still think you [__] slam that, but 20% is ridiculous. That's ridiculous, obviously.

Yeah. It's pretty wild. That's the thing: there are so many opportunities on there for any market. I know people who are adamant about trading Netflix Top Show of the Week markets because they're just obsessed.

It's just cool to be able to trade what you know. I didn't even realize the barrier to entry. What's stopped a lot of people from investing their money into [__] is just a lack of understanding or a lack of interest in traditional finance, whatever.

But if you're a [__] person who sits around and watches Netflix all day, you probably know more than the average bear about what the top Netflix show is going to be. You might have a little bit of alpha, and you might be better equipped to trade that market. That's why I feel like Polymarket is a great product and needs to exist.

There's just a market for everything. No matter what you're interested in, there's something where you can find an opportunity.

There are people who crush Spotify top-artist markets. It's just finding the vertical you're interested in, becoming obsessed with it, and making money on it, which I think is awesome. It's just making money online.

I see rappers' new albums, who's going to be featured on them. If you're really deep in that and you're in the Discords and [__], and you find out 2 guys are [__] arguing and beefing with each other before everybody else, but they're expected to be on the album, you know they're not going to be. That's an opportunity as somebody who's in a niche community.

There are all types of opportunities like this. It's likely that no matter what kind of niche interest you have or community you're a part of, there's an opportunity to trade against that information and understanding somewhere on Polymarket.

So we've got the Sixers winning tomorrow. What else? What else is going on in the playoffs? Is Ant back on the Timberwolves?

Oh, I don't know.

Is Ant back?

Yeah, he is.

Oh, he's back. He's back. I low-key wanted to take them to beat the Spurs. I know it's a super-tough matchup for them, but I like the Timberwolves a lot. I like Ant a lot. I like Jaden McDaniels. I just really like the team.

The team's fun.

They're fun.

The team's a lot of fun. They've got a lot of the right pieces with Randle. Obviously, their team's good, and they match up really well. The tough part is Victor Wembanyama is a beast.

But the thing I'm trading tomorrow is Wendy's earnings. I think Wendy's beats tomorrow on Polymarket.

Wendy's?

Yeah, the fast food.

Wendy's nuts are in your mouth.

I was waiting for it. I was waiting for it. But I think they beat earnings tomorrow. It's at around 80%, and McDonald's absolutely shattered, so I'm like, yeah, they'll tail.

We've been talking a lot about the AI trade and tech and all these different things, but I feel like what's under the radar right now is a lot of the different consumer plays. We haven't really talked as much about them. I'm curious if you have any thoughts on those sectors.

Banks and I have talked a little bit about how we think IRL relationships are going to start to change and people are going to start investing in interesting things there. I just feel like the pendulum has swung so far to the online communities, and a lot of people are feeling that lack of companionship and lack of friendship in a lot of different ways.

We know something new or something more is going to pop up around how people come together in different ways.

Gary Vee had an interesting comment on it. I think he was either on TBPN or Modern Wisdom, and he commented on it. He wanted to make a restaurant or an experience where you go in, hand your phone over, and sit at a communal table.

I love it. I've talked about events and music festivals, like Unplugged, where you go, turn in your phone, and there are no phones allowed.

I don't know why they haven't done that. Comedy shows are adamant: no phones.

By the way, comedy shows—to this day, every time I go to a comedy show, I tell myself I need to do this biweekly. It's like when you get a massage. You're like, “Why the [__] don't I do this more often?”

I just saw Shane Gillis in Chicago, and it was awesome.

There's nothing better. It's one of the absolute best real-life experiences that you can have. It's not everyone holding their phone up like at a concert or a festival. Everyone's got their phone up, and you see the lights from the phones more than anything else. There's not a phone up in that entire place.

And these [__] are really funny. There's something about stand-up that really hits different when you're in person.

It’s a good time.

Yeah. No, I love that. I think along the same lines. I don’t know, 80% of all venture capital has gone straight into AI over the last year. I think it’s fucking insane. There has to be some sort of opportunity on the other end of the spectrum. Easy, you said you hoop.

Yeah.

I need to show you this clip. I have to, because we hooped last night, and there was something that happened. It stirred up a ton of controversy between me and the other guys.

I know. He told me, “Watch this.” You heard him. He called it a travel.

No, pivot foot’s down.

Thank you, brother. How the fuck is that travel? Are you crazy? It’s a travel, bro. You switched your pivot foot.

No, I did not. You switched your—

No, I fucking did not. You switched your pivot.

No, I did not.

Go slow-mo. Slow-mo it. Go slow-mo.

This one, you could debate. This first one is a travel because my back foot comes up.

I’m not talking about that, though.

Yeah, I know, and that’s not what I got called for traveling. So we’re going to focus and pay attention to what I actually got called for. How do I get rid of this fucking bar? Okay, we’re going to go frame by frame.

Okay, ready.

Dribble.

Okay, pick it up.

Planted. This left.

Left is the pivot.

I do not lift it.

You switch.

It’s still planted.

No. Travel. It’s a travel.

That’s—

I’m sorry, brother. I had to.

Because it’s crazy. I got it over on you originally, and people swiped up. I posted it on Instagram, and so many people swiped up and were like, “Nah, bro. That’s pivot. That’s not a travel,” this and that.

I watched it a few times. I was going to ask Tristan about it.

That’s so funny. It was close, though. It was close.

I swear to God. I fought tooth and nail against this being a travel up until this moment. It was a travel. I actually can’t believe it.

It might have been a travel.

Yeah, it was. It was a travel. That was a fucking travel.

It was close, though. I could see how you argue it’s not, for sure.

Yeah, for sure. Yes. No, it was great. Great defense, though.

It was close, though. It was close.

They collapsed. They collapsed.

It was collapsed.

If I got that other foot down before I brought the ball up—

Yeah, exactly. You just need one more dribble. Pick up four guys on you there.

I mean, him calling that travel, though, is fucking crazy. I was ready to fight him over it. I was like, “Are you fucking crazy? Check the fucking ball in pickup.” That’s a wild call in pickup.

It was insane. By the way, the kid recording goes, “It wasn’t a travel. I have it. Come watch it.” And the kid who called it was like, “Nah, fuck that. Just check the ball.” He didn’t even want to go watch it. It was a close call. It was a close call.

Fucking funny, bro.

Are we wrapped on the Polymarket basketball shit, or do you guys want to keep going on the playoffs? I think so. What else do we have today? Who’s playing today? Who’s playing right now?

Is there anything live going on?

Yeah.

Cavs-Pistons.

Cavs-Pistons.

Pistons up 8.

Cavs-Pistons. Pistons are up at the half.

Let’s see. Cleveland-Pistons. Who’s nice for Cleveland right now? That’s fucking—what’s his name? Donovan Mitchell.

Yeah. Donovan Mitchell.

Detroit was the 1-seed?

Yeah, they’re the 1-seed.

That’s crazy because Cade was hurt for the last 15 games, and he’s back now.

Yeah.

I think Detroit takes this, bro. This might be a freebie.

They struggled with the Magic, which was crazy, but the Magic were playing out of their mind.

Yeah, I know. That was like the first time in a while that they were playing so well. That shit was crazy.

Yeah, that’s a weird matchup, though: Pistons and the fucking Magic.

Yeah, it’s a tough matchup. They don’t see each other a lot during the regular season, bro.

I watch football way more than I watch basketball. Football, I watch every game. Basketball, when it comes to the playoffs, I watch that, but I don’t really watch a ton during the season.

Dude, I’m a sad Jets fan, so it’s tough to watch football, man.

Who’d y’all draft? Jets? That’s awful, by the way. I’m sorry.

Yeah, I know, bro. I got the Namath jersey literally right here. Like—

Oh, fuck, that’s hard, though.

Yeah. I don’t even know who we drafted, bro. I’ve been so—like, I watch every game, and I’m still just disappointed. I’m just like, man, we are terrible. We’ll see how it goes.

I thought when you guys got Rodgers, I was like, “Okay, their defense was decent for a little bit.” You got Rodgers.

And you had a receiver, too. G. Is it Garrett? That was decent.

Yeah. I was like, “Okay, that might be decent.” And then he got hurt immediately.

Yep.

Yep. It was ugly, man. It was ugly. It got ugly quick for us. It usually does.

Yeah.

It is what it is. It is what it is.

I’m hyped for football this year, bro. I think my Eagles are going to be good.

I think so, too.

I think they’re going to be good.

Yo, should we do the fucking Mog thing, bro?

Sure. Are we through everything else? We’re good on everything else.

I think so. I think we hit.

We could do that.

I think we hit.

Yeah, fuck it. Let’s do it. Let me see.

Bro, you know, Easy—like a video platform, right?

We’ll watch a clip. We’ll watch a clip. Not Omegle, bro. I used to—damn. Was it that fucking—what was that fucking thing called? Omegle back in the day. I used to be on Omegle. Omegle used to be fucking fun, actually. Way, way, way back. That’s a throwback. I forgot that was even a thing.

Here, let’s watch it. Let me pull it up.

Oh, this is a Mog thing.

Yeah.

Why is he making that kissy face at the camera?

Because they’re fucking good at what they do, man. Jason’s a really good streamer.

It’s lagging.

Yo, chat, what AI is he using?

xQc is the best. We need him on the show. We need him on the show for sure.

You’re a child.

They’re using AI. They’re using AI. We’ll get him.

This is it. They run it back into me. This is what I want. This is everything I need.

What the fuck is xQc doing? That’s funny.

That’s really funny.

What the fuck, bro?

So, do we do it? Is that how we’re going to wrap the show? We do that and then wrap.

I think you guys should do it. You guys should do it, too, for content. You guys do it against each other. I’ll answer.

Yeah. Me and Z will do it.

How the fuck—what? What’s it—Mog is the site, right?

Yeah.

Then we’ve got to send you the—hold on. I’m going to send it to you, Easy. All right.

Yeah, you guys do it first. I’m going to take a piss, and then me and Z will wrap it up on that. Z, just share your screen when you’re ready to do it with him.

All right, let’s see if I can—this shit is so funny, though. Who made this, bro? This is the most Zoomer shit ever.

One sec.

Blink. It says, “Blink eyes.” Okay, I think I’m locked in. Do I need to lower this fucking mic?

All right, it says I’m checked.

One-v-one arena. Okay.

Oh, private room. Here we go. Oh, wait. I think I went to the wrong thing.

No, I was about to do a fucking random with somebody. I just sent you a code. Join the private room.

Okay, hold on.

Okay, I got it. All right, let’s see. Oh, man, here we go. Bro, if I lose this, I’m going to be pissed. By the way, what do we do? Do we just look at the fucking screen? Dude, this is fucking hilarious. This is so stupid.

We’re really 40 years old.

No fucking way.

Wow.

It’s brutal. It’s a brutal hit right now.

That’s actually genius. Z, send me the same shit on—

Oh, yeah. Telegram.

I got you.

That’s so fucked up, bro. I’m sick right now.

That’s crazy. I got hyped up, boys.

I appreciate you coming on.

Absolutely.

Easy, seriously. You should be a regular guest on the show for sure. Pop in once a week. Pop in for 10 minutes. It’s going to be chill. We’ve been live now, Z, for like 4 hours, and I like this.

I'll catch you guys.

You know what I mean? I like it.

Yeah. Peace.

All right, bro.

Dude, he's awesome.

He's a GOAT, bro. He's solid. Super solid.

He knows what he's talking about, too.

Hold on. I'm trying to send you this. Okay.

You got it. I'll send it to you on Telegram. Yes, sir. And then I think what you do, by the way, Z, is you just screen-share full-screen. Or maybe I should do this and do it like this. Hold on. Maybe I should use this view, because then it's—you know what I mean?

I think—

For the clip. For the clip.

Well, they won't be able to see it if it's not in the middle, right?

No, no, because the actual website hosts our 2 faces.

Oh, true.

So I think it's better for the clip if we do it that way. Let me set it up.

Private room.

This site is so funny, though. I can't believe I just lost.

Hilarious.

That's so hilarious.

That is fucked up.

So—

That is really fucked up.

By the way, it doesn't account for height, body fat, things like that. I've obviously already considered all these things as obstacles and started coming up with excuses for losing and shit. Hilarious.

All right. Go.

Yeah. Waiting for opponent. You got the code.

Yeah, maybe. Get your shit ready, bro. Maybe take the headset off, too.

Get ready, brother. This is very important. It's very important, chat. Bro—

That's you.

Bro, that's fucked. Yo, we're running that shit back. We need to run that shit back. What the fuck? Am I chopped? Chat, be honest. I feel like I look all right. That's fucked. But I can't win. I have nothing. I can't win. I'm fucking choked.

I lost already, bro. I lost already.

But that means I would have lost to him.

That means I'm the most chopped one.

We have to get Mizkif back on here and run it on the stream today. That's crazy.

Oh, we should have done it earlier.

That was lit, though. We went 2 for 2 on guests. That was fire.

I can hear you twice. Why can't I hear him twice? Oh, maybe because I have this open. Maybe.

Talk.

Oh, I fucked that up.

Yeah, that was fun.

No, this is a great stream. I think we run every fucking stream and every show like this, to be honest. We just rip it. We're live for 3 or 4 hours, and we just call people in casually.

Yeah.

I mean, the second guest fell through and Easy came in. I feel like there'll always be somebody who's down to jump on the stream and talk shit.

We should bring on random CT people every once in a while.

Of course. Again, I feel like it's important that we're all aligned. You know what I mean? Because this shit is really down pretty bad as far as public sentiment.

Yeah.

It's worse off than AI. AI has a pretty bad reputation publicly and socially. People are really fucking anti-AI, but crypto takes it to a whole other level. At least people are willing to talk about AI. With crypto, it's like, “Oh, yeah, no.”

Yeah. The reason people are bearish on AI is that it's so disruptive that we're scared of it. People aren't like that with crypto right now.

Yeah.

It's not public.

It's just like, “Nah, fuck that.”

I experienced it with the kids, too. I was working on a couple of different deals with them—people sponsoring the house or other productions and stuff. A couple of them were interested in having bigger conversations, but the second the word crypto comes up, or if it's even close to the conversation, it's just like, “Nah, not risking it.”

Which I understand. From personal experience, I fully get why, and it's probably the right move. But how do we make it not be the right move? I don't know. That's a conversation that we're going to have over the course of the next several years.

Yeah.

But it's important, especially for people like us who are making an effort with a show like this, to put our best foot forward and do what we can—to the best of our own ability. We have a Discord for the show, the official Market Bubble Discord, where you guys can recommend what you want us to talk about and what you want to see for the week. It’s a place for this to live when we’re not live. It’s marketbubble.discord.gg/marketbubble. Follow the Twitter as well. We’ll be live every Thursday at 1 PM PST, with a 30-minute pre-show on Twitch and Ansem live on Twitter. We’re going to keep updating the journal there with all the trades, so you guys can follow along and see the success over the course of the show. We’ll see you guys next Thursday at 1 PM PST. Thank you guys so much for watching, tuning in, following, subscribing, and all that. Keep up with the show. I promise it’ll be worth it. Appreciate you guys so much. Love. Take care.