Why Ansem Thinks Ethereum Is Done.. | Market Bubble #4

Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. PST live on twitch.tv/FaZe Banks.

Bro, I’m getting good at this. What the fuck? That was smooth off the tongue.

Listen, I’m joined by my tall, dark, handsome co-host, Ansem.

Yo, yo, what’s good, fellas?

Ansem is live at the same exact time on Twitter. Not the same time—he’s on the East Coast, so technically it’s 3 hours different. Whatever.

But listen, ladies and gentlemen, you open up Twitter today and everything is fucking smoked. They’re lying to you. Politicians, politics—cooked. Everyone’s fucking worried, everyone has anxiety, everyone’s fighting. It’s all so negative. Everything’s fake. And AI? AI’s taking your jobs, it’s fucking your wives, and it’s killing your kids. You’re fucked, brother.

While we’re long-term optimistic on AI on this show, we think that, over the course of enough time, this shit’s going to make everything free, cure cancer, and solve world hunger. The short term could get dark. Over the next 5 to 10 years, it’s very important that you, the viewer, lock the fuck in and understand where your attention needs to be.

1. Bullpen walkthrough: perps, pairs & predictions

We think there are 3 things on this show that are very important for you to learn, understand, and accumulate over the course of the next 5 years. We think these things will hold their value and likely increase in value over that time, and that is money—make money, duh—attention, understanding and commanding attention, and AI literacy. These 3 things are important. That’s what the whole show is about. And all you’ve got to do to watch and join this community is have some sort of desire to be the optimal version of yourself, the best version of yourself.

2. The Top 25 Crypto Twitter list

Today’s going to be a fucking good one, baby. Today’s going to be a good one. So, how are you feeling?

Feeling good, man. Feeling good. Good to be back.

Yes, sir. I was just going over that. Did you see that Twitch Top 25 thing?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I saw it. I saw it. That shit got a lot of engagement. It seems like it.

Yeah, no, it went fucking crazy. I was just going over how genius they were. They had people organically funnel into Complex’s platforms, obviously, and vote on how they felt about the rankings. They had around 212,000 votes. I didn’t see any call to action to funnel those people there, but it just goes to show how big of a conversation that was.

Mhm.

Did we tweet, or have we tweeted? Okay, so we have tweeted. Wow, okay.

Official Top 25 Crypto Twitter.

What is Banks’ screen share? Is this the one? Here we go. All right.

Yeah, I’m fucked. What else is new?

We just dropped an official Top 25, the best-of-CT rankings, and it goes as follows. You guys can see it. There are a couple of hot takes here. I’m going to go ahead and say Z is responsible for, we’ll say, 90% of this list.

And as you can tell, he didn’t rank himself.

I don’t belong in the Top 25, bro. I’m not in the Top 25. I’m like 27 or something.

I don’t know, bro. After today, after what we’re about to get into, you might be number 1, bro. You’re my GOAT. I don’t give a fuck. You’re top 2, dead or alive, in my opinion, but we’ll get into that.

We’re going to have Trader Mayne, a CT legend, and Flood. They’re ranked 6th and 7th on the list. I can’t believe I just did that. This is—bro, I am 40 years old, bro.

Oh, for real. It’s okay for DGR to do that, I feel like. It’s not okay for you to do that.

Because what is he, like? He’s slightly—he’s like 19?

Yeah.

Slightly, yeah. He’s slightly younger.

But now, yeah.

I could physically be his dad, by the way.

That’s crazy.

I was fucking hoes when he was being born, so I did.

What the fuck? Bro, I’m exhausted. I need a nap. I didn’t really sleep last night. This is going to be a fun episode.

Let us know how you feel about this. We’re going to be reacting live to all this shit. We’re going to talk to Mayne and Flood at some point. Hyperliquid’s going crazy, so we kind of last-minute-slotted Flood at the end, and we have Mayne on. I’m super excited. I love those guys on a personal level. I’ve spent personal time with those guys. Have you met them both?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Both great people.

They’re awesome, and they’re fucking gigabrain, incredible traders. It’s going to be a good conversation. We’ll talk more specifically about this. Is there anything you want to say about the list?

I would say definitely follow everybody on this list. I know some people who are newer to Crypto Twitter, or newer to following people in finance, and it’s kind of hard to find all the most trustworthy accounts sometimes. It takes a while. I remember it took me a long-ass time to build my Twitter following exactly to where I wanted to get my algo at, and to build the information diet that I have every single day.

So I’ll say, for sure, follow all the people on this list. Actually, my low-key favorite on this list, who most people probably don’t know about, is InnerDab Crypto.

He’s very transparent with his trades, but he doesn’t really focus on trading. He focuses more on the mental and mindfulness aspects of trading, because in crypto specifically, there was a lot of fast money that people made, and a lot of people kind of lost their purpose and how to deal with making so much money so fast. People also deal with losing a lot of money really fast, like in the FTX situation. His whole thing is focusing on your mental health, meditation, and all types of shit like that. He’s actually one of the most interesting people on here, I think. Most people don’t really know him as well.

Who do you think people are going to be most upset about?

Upset about?

Yeah.

Who do I have on here that people are going to be upset about?

We played it safe with Cobie at number 1.

We did it. We can’t fuck up number 1.

That is the CT equivalent, for all the normies watching, to who the go-to streamers are—Kai Cenat, IShowSpeed. That’s the equivalent.

Maybe RAZ. People might be mad at RAZ, but I feel like RAZ’s street cred is up a lot over the past few years.

Brother, if you’re making any sort of honest, tangible effort toward creating content around this niche, around this market, then I think there are maybe 5 people who are doing what RAZ is doing. I think it’s super important—super, super important.

Honestly, bro, RAZ has some good takes. You’ve seen him—physiognomy, you know what that is?

Yeah, like how you look at shit?

How you—bro, I—he tweeted something. He was flexing his Hyperliquid call.

I said this when HYPE was at $20, whatever. I don’t know—I don’t have the tweets in front of me—but he looked good. I know he’s taking Hims pills and dick pills and looksmaxing, and he’s fucking—he’s a freak, this kid. But I don’t know. I think he’s crushing it.

I love RAZ, bro.

I think he’s grown a lot, too, and he’s gotten better as a trader. Before, I think it was purely slop content, but he’s actually gotten better at trading. I like him.

Well, how could you not? You spend enough time, and you get this intuitive notion.

Yeah.

He tweeted something earlier about, “I can’t believe Banksy full-ported HYPE 3 months ago.”

Yeah.

Which is just like—

You did that shit, too. I remember. Like, “Bro, should I swap this shit?”

I full-swapped, which is half true. I full-swapped my ETH and SOL positions, which was around 80% of my portfolio, into Bitcoin and HYPE down the middle, pretty much.

3. Z's victory lap: hype & Zcash up 83

Obviously, you didn’t rank yourself here.

I don’t know, man. If I’m doing this ranking, I might have to safely slot you at number 2, especially after this week and especially after what’s going on in the markets right now.

Let’s talk our shit, bro.

Let’s not even dance around this. I don’t want to dance around it. I’ll be the annoying douchebag in the room and flex this.

Oh, yo, this tweet’s banging. For Market Bubble, 800 likes. This is fucking sick. People are seeing it.

Ladies and gentlemen, everyone faded Ansem when he shared his crypto portfolio. You guys saw it in episode 1. He said, “I hold no Bitcoin. I hold no Solana.” You guys laughed. You mocked him. You fucking ran him down.

At me, bro.

Old LUNAtics, strong Cartoons. Everybody had something to say about it.

Oh, man.

He went on, in that episode and the last 2 episodes, to talk about Hyperliquid, Zcash, VVV, and how he’s positioned in those things. This is just a matter of fact, brother. This is how Hyperliquid, Zcash, and VVV have performed next to Bitcoin and SOL.

If you split $100,000 between Solana and Bitcoin, 3 weeks later, they’d be at $102,000. Up 3%. If you split that evenly across the 3—HYPE, Zcash, and VVV—you’re up a whopping 83%, folks.

You don’t have to trust us right now. Everything’s there; all the VODs exist. There’s a nice thread of clips here, timestamped, and it’s all there for you. You can go listen. Take your victory laps, Z. You deserve it, honestly.

4. The Indian quant & "be nicer on Twitter"

Yeah, man. I’m happy with how things have done. I really was hesitant about being bullish because, like I said, Bitcoin, Solana, and ETH have not moved at all. But what typically happens in crypto when you’re at bottoms is that market leaders emerge.

It was really clear that the Hyperliquid thesis is not at all related to Bitcoin or ETH. It’s an application that is a real business, and it’s doing well, growing its revenue, growing its users, and actually making strides in a way that no other crypto project has done with implementing TradFi assets—real-world assets, stocks, perps on stocks, and perps on commodities—right alongside all the crypto perps.

They were easy theses to make, but it was harder to be super bullish on them. I even said last episode that I think HYPE and Zcash are going to go to all-time highs over the next few months. It’s literally been a week, and HYPE has already hit all-time highs. I literally said it last episode. So, yeah, I’m happy about that. I think—

It’s crazy, bro, to be up 80% strictly in crypto in less than a month—in 3 weeks—is a fucking miracle. We’re in a bear market, brother. Only you. Again, only you.

I think I responded to this tweet with something along the lines of, “Let me try to find it. I wonder what the naysayers will say, what straws they’ll grasp at in the face of objective fact.” Again, go watch the VODs. It’s all there for you, bro. You did it. You said it.

You’re calling VVV at $9. What’s it at right now, $30?

I think it’s like $18.

You were talking about Hyperliquid at $30 or $40, in that range. Zcash was at $350 or $400. These are pretty much the 3 exclusive coins that are performing right now in crypto. It’s crazy, man.

So, yeah, guys, maybe watch the show and listen to what we have to say. We’re 3 weeks in, and I don’t know. I don’t have anything left to say. This is all Z. This is all Z.

I’ve been high on Hyperliquid for the entirety of 2026, but the VVV-Zcash thing—I just wish I would have slammed $500,000 into Zcash when we were on that call.

Bro, you would have been up nuts, bro. You would have been—

Up nuts.

$300,000 or something.

Yeah, I’m going to pull it up so people can see what I’ve been talking about.

Please do.

Let me see.

I’m going to let you do this. I’m going to take my first piss of the day. Get into it, baby.

Take, like, 5 pisses every second.

Yo, what’s good, guys? How’s everybody doing? Hope everybody’s doing well.

If you can see, Bitcoin has been pretty flat. I think on one of the episodes I was saying that this range high around $79,000 is really important. It hasn’t held, which is kind of bad. I want to see it get back above this level for it to be bullish. So, I’m really not bullish on Bitcoin or ETH right now. They both have been underperforming.

While that has been happening, you’ve seen HYPE just rip. It’s literally at all-time highs today. This is off the back of a ton of stuff that’s been happening in TradFi.

I talked about the Coinbase partnership, which I think was last week or 2 weeks ago, where they added around $150 million in annualized revenue through Coinbase providing USDC as the main stablecoin on their platform. They earn 3% to 3.5%, I think, on all those stables.

They’ve also done a great job with the equity perps. We talked about Cerebras doing really well with that IPO. Now they also have SpaceX. That IPO or pre-IPO market is live, too. Let me see if I can pull it up.

Yeah, SpaceX is live now, too. This is crazy because, for all the TradFi people who don’t know that much about crypto, there’s only really one liquid venue to trade SpaceX right now. This IPO, I think, is going live in the next month or month and a half or so.

I think Hyperliquid is going to be right at the front lines of what all those channels are talking about and what people who are looking into crypto are thinking: “Oh, this is a real business. It’s making money.” I think they’re also going to look at how many employees they have. They have 12 employees, and they’re making close to a $1 billion annualized run rate, which is insane.

So, people who aren’t even bullish on crypto specifically, but are just bullish on startups that are doing well, they’ll all be bullish on Hyperliquid, I think, for sure.

I know—I thought—I don’t have the—Which tweet is it? Yeah, so this is also happening right now. The HYPE ETF recently launched, and it’s been doing a lot more volume than people expected. This is another sink for HYPE that’s been doing well. They’re close to $100 million in volume today between both of them.

So, yeah, HYPE’s been crushing it. Zcash has also been crushing it. It’s close to all-time highs. It’s consolidating right around its highs from last year.

I’ve talked about this narrative a ton: private Bitcoin, quantum-resistant Bitcoin as a complement to Bitcoin. It’s super small, so at around a $10 billion market cap, it just has a lot of room to grow. On the high side, I think you can target 10% of Bitcoin’s market cap, and maybe on the lower side, 3% to 5%.

So, yeah, I think both of these are going to continue to do well. I think Zcash and HYPE are going to continue to be good trades. As they do well, you’re going to start to see more interest come back into crypto.

So, yeah, I’m actually excited right now. It’s been a while since you’ve seen some good trades and momentum in crypto. It’s cool.

Still no Bitcoin, still no Solana?

Still no Bitcoin, still no Solana. I mean, I do like what Solana is doing right now with the marketing of their current perps project, Phoenix Trade. Those guys are actually super cracked. Jerry Zhao and that team are a really good team.

It’s just a really hard area to compete with Hyperliquid because they’re so entrenched and have so much liquidity and volume already.

I don’t know if this is going to mean anything to you or the viewer, but I love the way Solana feels. Does this make sense?

What do you mean?

It just feels smooth. I like using it.

Like the UX, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I like using it.

I do, too. I’ve always loved Solana. I’ve loved Solana since 2021. That was when we were doing the early DeFi farming. That was when we had Sollet as the web wallet. I don’t know if you ever used Sollet. We had Sollet as the main wallet. It was so fucking ugly, bro. Then Phantom was the big one that came later.

Phantom feels great. It’s cool because it’s come a long way. Before, it wasn’t as great UX-wise. It was just fast. But now they have a ton of good teams and products around it. I do like Solana.

I just think they need a new narrative that’s going to drive the flows that drove what happened last cycle. In 2023, it was really easy to come back from being down so much after FTX. A lot of people didn’t expect any volume to happen on-chain, so when that did start happening, it was when memecoin volumes popped off and did really well.

The on-chain activity was a really good indicator of what was going on with Solana.

How are we—not to force calls or tickers or anything—but other than Hyperliquid, Zcash, VVV—

Mm-hmm.

—and how you feel about Bitcoin and Solana, is there anything new popping up?

Actually, let me pull up a decent thesis. I just bought this. Let me see if I can—Yeah, let me see.

The Cups R Us competition, Bullpen Cup, started today. It’s a $25,000 sign-up, and it’s going to be $100,000 to the winner. It’s going to go over 4 weeks. That literally started at 3:00 p.m.

Let me pull up the leaderboard and see what’s going on here, where people are. I want to see. Yeah, somebody’s already up $3,000. How the fuck is Smokey already up $3,000?

You’re up, too. You’re up $1,200. What the fuck? How’d that happen?

I’m up $1,200. I just bought NEAR, bro. That’s literally what I did just before we started.

That’s good.

I’m excited about it. It’s going to be cool to see everybody’s positions over the next month or so. This one is a lot longer than the first one we did. The first Ansem Invitational was only, I think, a week or 2 weeks.

A week, yeah. It was a week.

This one's going to be 4 weeks, so you're going to be seeing a lot of content and information around this. We got some good people involved, too, so I'm hyped.

But yeah, where was that? Okay, let me see. I was reading this on NEAR. I do have a position in NEAR, so this isn't to impact that, but a lot of the areas of interest in crypto right now are AI and privacy.

With AI, we've talked about Venice. The private chat can use all the open-source models—Claude and ChatGPT—but it hides all the information that you put through the chat, so it's private instead of giving your information to the labs. They keep that private, and that's Venice's main value proposition.

People don't actually know, or haven't looked that deeply into it, but NEAR is actually what they're using for the highest level of privacy in Venice. There's a partnership, or collaboration, between Venice and NEAR.

Then there's also Zcash. When Zcash started doing really well in late 2025, part of how they implemented bridging between different chains involved NEAR Intents. NEAR Intents is a protocol that allows you to bridge between different blockchains, and they also have a partnership with Zcash.

That's an interesting spot. This guy wrote a really long article on NEAR and the AI piece. One of the founders, Illia, was one of the original writers of the first transformer paper in 2017. I think it was a Google paper, but essentially, transformers—that's the paper that underpins ChatGPT, Claude, and a lot of the research and innovation that has happened since.

The guy Illia is cracked. NEAR was at the NVIDIA conference this year, and they focus a lot on AI and how to coordinate—to be a coordination layer for agents. This is a piece on that. It's pretty long, if you guys want to check it out. This guy, Nick Shap[?], shout-out to him, is essentially describing how NEAR is a platform for agents.

Can we take the camera off and show him?

Z's waving—emergency.

What's up? Show him. Show him what I just did.

Oh.

Bro.

Yeah. What the fuck, bro? I'm getting excited, bro. You're talking about tickers and markets. I'm fucking blowing my load all over the place. This is insane. My fault, bro.

Is that coffee?

I can't get it right. It's coffee. It's iced coffee. It's everywhere. It's all over my desk. It's crazy. I apologize.

[laughter] Continue. Okay, that's fucking funny.

But yeah, NEAR is focusing on 2 areas in crypto that are getting attention: privacy and AI. The guy Illia, as I said, is cracked in AI. He was involved in core AI research even before he was involved with this.

The core thesis around NEAR is that it can be a platform for agents to transact on. One of the reasons it's so important is because, as we know, KYC, or know-your-customer laws, make it really difficult for AI agents to transact on traditional rails. All the banking laws that exist are tailored for humans.

As we're rewriting the systems for how we're going to transact on a day-to-day basis, crypto is obviously one of the platforms that will be able to benefit agents, because you don't need KYC to transact on blockchains.

This is a really long article. I do recommend reading it. It's pretty good. I'll pull it up.

I'm noting a consistent trend and through line with all these takes, tickers, and positions: privacy and AI. That seems to be the common theme throughout.

It's a really good through line. It's one of the things that crypto is uniquely at the intersection of. I think it's definitely going to be a trend over the next few years.

But yeah, let me pull up the chart.

What else?

Let me pull up the chart. I want to pull up the chart.

Run it.

Let me pull up the chart. Yeah, it's decent. Let me see. Yes, this is the chart for NEAR.

It actually retested its lows from 2023 and held. The October 10th sell-off went even lower than that. It's down a ton from its all-time high. I want to say 90—I don't even know how much. Let's see. It's down 91% from its all-time high. It went down 95%, and it's just now starting to trend again.

If you look at how I would trade this, the open for this year is around here. Let's see. Here's the yearly open. It just reclaimed its yearly open. A lot of crypto has been down this year and went sideways. Obviously, it didn't break this low. It's been consolidating in a range between $1.50 and $1.

It recently reclaimed its yearly open and is now breaking out from this range. The way I would trade this, if I was trying to have a clear invalidation, is that I think my spot is a decent place here. I probably would get out if it goes back beneath $1.45, because it shouldn't trade back beneath here if it's going to start trending.

If this was the sideways consolidation and now it's breaking out, it shouldn't go back beneath here. That would be my invalidation, around $1.45. As far as different areas, I think around $3.20 is a pretty clear spot because it's reclaiming the current range it was in before. Let me do some math. It looks decent.

This thesis analysis is way above my pay grade. If you're in, I'm in, brother. [laughter]

Yeah, I think it's decent. It's pretty small, too. It's only around a $2.5 billion market cap. They're fully vested, so the issue with a lot of altcoins when they originally launch is that they have VCs with tokens that need to unlock. When all the unlocks happen, obviously VCs are selling at a huge profit from the seed rounds or lower rounds.

NEAR is fully vested, so the current circulating market cap is the fully diluted valuation. The NEAR Intents protocol is actually making money now. They're making around $30 million a year from that, I think, which is kind of offsetting the inflation they have.

Real revenue, brother. Real products. Crypto isn't all just Cool Cats and Dickbutts. [laughter]

It's not all fugazi bullshit. But yeah, I like NEAR. I've been looking at this as a decent spot, I think.

5. Why Ansem thinks Ethereum will never recover

What else? Whatever we want to talk about. Ethereum—how do we feel about Ethereum, Ansem, today? [laughter]

Well, bro, I said it in the first episode. I said it this year, I said it last year, and I said it the year before that: Ethereum is going to fucking zero, bro. I promise—I'm not exaggerating.

I really do think it's going to continue to underperform. I think it was crucial in the emergence of smart-contract platforms in crypto, but I think they really shot themselves in the foot when they outsourced a lot of the execution to all these rollups.

Before you had all the rollups happening—not all the rollups, all of the execution happening on the L1—you had issues with fees spiking. I think the focus should have been on trying to fix that at the base layer instead of pushing execution off to these rollups, because now all the rollups—

6. Chart breakdown: Bitcoin, hype, Zcash, Solana

What are you saying? Let me catch up. I'm trying to figure out if you're being hyperbolic or farming a clip here. You said Ethereum is going to zero. Do you literally believe that it's going to zero?

Like zero to actual zero-zero, or less than $500?

Less than $500 bucks.

I think it's going to go to $1,000. In the next year or so, I do think it's going to go to $1,000. Actually.

Who's that guy who just sold his entire Ethereum position? He was an ETH maxi who sold. Who was it?

Just David Hoffman.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, David Hoffman. He said he's never buying any ETH. He doesn't care how low it goes.

It's funny because these guys were arguing me down for years, bro. Every time I would say something—both of them. They're the Bankless guys. Every time I would say anything negative on ETH, they would argue with me about it.

It's just funny to see them capitulating now. I've been saying that. I literally have been saying that.

You were the first one to talk to—

Me, bro. They literally hated me because I said it at the end of 2021.

They still do. They definitely still do.

I said it at the end of 2021. I actually was wrong about my reasoning, though. A lot of my reasoning was that if the rollup thesis was going to make sense, I thought it would be around individual, specialized platforms for each part of the rollup thesis, and that didn't play out either.

But yeah, I just think they really fucked up their tokenomics. They fucked up the fee situation. Let me pull up the chart.

Oh, ETH is cheaper in 2026 than it was in 2021.

Well, it peaked in activity in 2021. It’s not even that crazy because that’s when the most activity was happening on-chain for ETH. They dominated that cycle. They dominated 2020 and 2021, but they just got outcompeted by newer protocols, I think. Here, I’m going to pull this up. I can’t see my screen.

Yeah, so if you look at Ethereum in 2021, 2022, and 2023, there’s literally nobody else that they’re competing with.

Holy shit, this graph’s network revenue is insane. This graph is insane.

They crushed it. They really crushed it. So, in November 2021, they made $2 billion—

[Laughter]

—in fees and network revenue. $2 billion in 1 month. No blockchain has even come close to that ever at all.

So when people say, “How the fuck did ETH go so high?” it went so high because it was dominating. It really was. Everything was happening on ETH. The NFT market was popping off, all the trading activity was popping off, and it was just so prohibitive cost-wise. That’s why the fees were so high.

Once alternatives existed with lower fees, activity, DeFi, and all these other things, that’s when it became a lot more difficult for them to compete. It’s not even like they did a ton wrong. It’s just—

Ethereum’s obviously the blue in this. Fast-forward up until today, and look how small that is compared to that. It’s fucking insane.

It’s crazy. I think this is the weekly chart. Yeah, and this is right now. The dark green is Hyperliquid, the light green is Solana, and the blue is Ethereum.

This shit’s going to zero. It really is.

Bro, I’m telling you. They really fucked themselves over, I think. I really do think they fucked themselves over with the roll-up roadmap. Even Vitalik himself has said that the thesis around having roll-ups for generalized things makes less sense than having specialized roll-ups.

I do think MegaETH is one of the most interesting things building on Ethereum right now. Their focus on taking advantage of the roll-up architecture is interesting. They should be able to be faster and cheaper than Solana and other L1s because they’re an L2, and they can make optimizations that L1s can’t.

I do think that’s interesting, but I’m not sure how that ties back to ETH itself as a token. MegaETH has its own token. There are applications on MegaETH that have their own revenue. I think what’s interesting with MegaETH is that they do want to create an economy around their token, which is interesting.

I think they’re thinking about it the right way because blockchains make the most sense when the most successful applications on top are directing their revenue to the native token of that blockchain, which is why HYPE does so well.

So, is it fair to say that if you had to get put in a hyperbolic time chamber or go to sleep for the next 10 years—in a coma for the next 10 years—you’re putting your money in just about anything over Ethereum over the next 10 years?

Bro, literally anything. Anything.

You’re obviously holding USD over ETH, right?

Yes, anything.

7. Inflation, grocery prices & the cost of living

You’re holding dirt over ETH. You’re holding—

Bro, anything. Literally anything. Anything.

Literally buying dirt. Cow manure over ETH. That’s crazy. You’re buying eggs and groceries over ETH for sure.

I saw this crazy tweet. This blew the fuck up. This is fucking insane. I even showed you—we talked about this a little bit. Look at how crazy this tweet went: “Found my mom’s grocery receipt from 2006.”

Damn.

And I just fell to my knees. It got 12 million views and 280,000 likes, so quite clearly people resonate with this.

Look at this thing. This is obviously a week’s worth of groceries for a family. Look how long it is. Salt—

[Laughter]

—and sugar, cookies and cupcakes, salad dressing, mustard, sweet peas. This is literally a family’s grocery list.

Yeah, cupcakes.

I want you to guess how much this cost off the top of your head.

The whole thing? Go back to the top? Bro, like $500.

It’s $160.

It’s—

[Laughter]

No fucking way, bro.

Subtotal, $125, and then all this extra shit—$161.

Damn. This is—

Fucking insane.

Wow.

Eggs on here are $1.25, or whatever the fuck it is. It’s crazy.

Well, my eggs are like $5 or $6 right now.

Look at the title on the stream: “Groceries are up 300% since 2006.” It’s sad but true.

It’s fucked up, bro. Inflation has had such a sneaky impact on people in ways that I don’t even think they realize. People are just angry. They don’t even know why they’re angry. They’re just mad.

But if groceries are 4 times more expensive now than they were 20 years ago, then obviously, if wages haven’t gone up that same amount in that same time frame, why else would everybody be upset? People are fucking pissed.

Well, people are definitely mad. Have you seen this clip of Kevin O’Leary? This shit’s going viral, too. Look at this—185,000 likes. Let’s watch this.

“70 grand a year, spending $28 for lunch. I mean, that’s just stupid. Think about that in the context of that being put into an index and making 8% to 10% a year for the next 50 years.”

And, bro, it’s fucking like this.

Wait, wait, wait. He said instead of buying lunch, put it in stock? Don’t even buy lunch at all?

[Laughter]

Just put it directly in stock, bro.

People are up in arms about this, by the way. The original tweet isn’t the one that banged like this. This isn’t the one that has 190,000 likes. It’s this: “Your generation is so poor you spend money buying food.”

[Laughter]

That’s what it costs, bro. That’s what lunch costs in 2026. We talked about this before, too. Every time I open up Postmates, I spend over $100.

Yeah, even if it’s just me. Even if it’s for lunch.

I was about to say, if you have a girl, it’s over. It’s over.

GG. Two or three hundred bucks. I date strictly fat [__].

[Laughter]

So you should definitely be looking at $300 for sure.

Two or three hundred bones.

But yeah, people are definitely going to look at this and say, “What if we cooked and ate this guy?” This shit went crazy, too.

God.

It’s quite literally building this eat-the-rich narrative. It’s not good, man. It’s not good.

Yeah.

That is—

Yeah, man. It’s an interesting conversation. What is the solve here? What are your thoughts?

I mean, yeah, the only way to combat this is literally through investing. That is the one thing he was right about when he was saying it. He was wrong when he was saying you shouldn’t be spending $28 on lunch.

He’s also saying it the wrong way, too.

It’s condescending.

It was like talking down to people. That’s why I think they didn’t fuck with it. But I will say, with the discretionary income that you have, you have to be investing. It’s really the only way to keep up with inflation and the lack of wage growth across the board is to be investing.

8. Why everyone hates AI (and why that's wrong)

I think that’s why the Three Guys have done a great job of talking about this. Everybody’s going to be a trader. Everybody’s going to learn how to trade. Everybody’s going to put their money into markets. It’s really how you secure wealth over generations and how you combat inflation.

Just another note to add: this is MoistCr1TiKaL. He’s one of the biggest commentary channels on YouTube. He might be the biggest commentary YouTube channel. He makes a video, sometimes multiple videos a day.

MoistCr1TiKaL?

YouTube legend. YouTube legend. He used to—I think he still currently streams. He’s a guy I’ve known and known of for quite some time. Absolute YouTube Mount Rushmore-type GOAT.

He’ll just do live commentary, kind of on the fly, at his desktop.

Yeah.

He made one about Kevin O’Leary and how he can’t stand him and how he’s quickly becoming one of his least favorite people. It’s all kind of in line with what we’re talking about.

Yeah.

Something else that I think is loosely related to this and that I found interesting is his disdain and general disdain for AI. They’re kind of one and the same, if you know what I mean. People don’t trust rich people, and there’s a clip in this where Kevin O’Leary is pitching this data-center build-out and trying to convince people why they need AI and why AI is important.

Again, similar to the clip we just watched, he’s saying it the wrong way, and people aren’t happy with it. They’re not having it.

Mhm.

Yeah, look. Have you seen this clip?

Mhm.

Have you seen this guy? You haven’t seen this?

This is another MoistCr1TiKaL video. Boo this man. The whole video, this entire video, is just shitting on AI and why we shouldn’t use it. Where the fuck is it? Hold on. I’m kind of jumping all around, but while we’re on the subject—

Yeah.

Because it’s kind of in line with what we’re talking about. You haven’t seen this?

I’ve seen this one.

It’s the same fucking clip I just showed you. Let’s watch it.

Last December, Time magazine selected its Person of the Year for 2025. And this time, it was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting.

[Cheering]

It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have. I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear.

Wow. Bro, that’s insane.

We do not know—

[Cheering]

We do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like. Choose a diversity of perspectives, including—let me add, and if you’d let me make this point, please.

[Cheering]

Damn. Bro, they do not give a fuck what he’s talking about. They do not give a fuck.

AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done. If you have a problem in the world you want to solve—

Bro, it’s really, really bad.

I did not know it was that bad, bro. I saw a tweet the other day where somebody was like, “I think, actually, people hate AI more than they hate crypto.” And I was like, “Nah, there’s no way.”

Bro, by a lot. By a fucking landslide. I think most people don’t care for crypto or care about crypto, but people are passionately avid against AI—anti-AI, fuck AI. And, I mean, surprise, surprise. All anybody hears about every day is how it’s taking their jobs and replacing them, and that they’re worthless and useless. People are getting laid off.

Yeah. I’m not surprised, you know what I mean? Groceries are fucking expensive. Everything’s more and more expensive. Jobs are more and more sparse. It’s fucked up, but this is not good, obviously.

No, it’s—

I think that this is really—if you find yourself at home watching, and you find yourself in this bucket where you have a disdain for AI, I think you’re thinking about things all wrong. I think you need to start reframing it in your mind. There are many reasons to love AI, and I know that’s a hot take, but the main reason, I guess, in my mind is there’s just no advantage to going against it. It’s inevitable, right? You would agree?

Yeah, for sure.

This tech is inevitable, right? Another really important thing to note is that we’re not the only ones building it or working toward it, right? You have China on the opposite side of the planet, pretty much putting all its effort and resources into the race to build AGI. We talked about this last episode, but whoever builds AGI first owns the fucking world. There’s a lot at stake here, you know what I mean? It’s pretty important that, even for your own individual life, we preach a lot here on the show about AI literacy, understanding this tech, and using this tech.

But we don’t want to lose this race, obviously. If over 50% of Americans hate this shit, laws and bills are going to be passed, restrictions are going to be put in place. It’s not going to go well, and it’s not going to work out in anyone’s favor. It’s just one of those things where, regardless of how you feel, we can’t avoid it. It is what it is.

The best course of action moving forward is just to understand it, learn it, position yourself alongside it, align with its inevitable growth and takeover, and fucking move accordingly.

Yeah, I mean, the same thing happened with the internet, bro. There were a lot of people who were speaking badly about the internet when it first popped off. They thought, like, “Oh, we don’t need this. What do we need this for?” They were afraid of new things happening. Obviously, right now, it would be crazy for anybody to be like, “I don’t like the internet. I don’t want to do things on the internet.”

I think AI is going to be the exact same thing a few years from now. But it’s a really crucial moment right now, specifically because if you’re one of those people who feels anxiety about AI or how it’s going to disrupt the world moving forward, you’ve got to think that’s what everybody else is feeling, too. The people who do the work to figure out how they can work with it better, and how it can make whatever job they’re currently working on better, are going to be in a much better position than people who don’t do that.

I know you saw—did you have the video of the kid who was running multiple channels at once?

I do have that somewhere. I think it’s in another tab. Let me grab that.

Yeah. But, yeah, there are just so many ways that things are going to get a lot more efficient. The reason these tech CEOs can see it—like Eric Schmidt, who was CEO of—what was he CEO of at one point?—is that they’re at the forefront of this research, and they see how it’s going to change things down the line.

If you don’t see that, then it’s kind of hard to see how it can make things better for you individually. So I think that’s the piece that requires work for everybody to do. But it’s interesting that AI has such a negative reception.

I think crypto actually has a really good opportunity to get into better favor with people, because crypto should be: you don’t give away your data, self-sovereign money, access for everybody. I think a lot of the innovation in the open-source AI space is going to happen on crypto rails. If that does happen, and in crypto those projects also allow retail users to get access early, I think crypto could honestly become much more favorably regarded than some of these closed AI lab companies.

Oh, well, it’s impossible to get into them, right?

Yeah.

Then I guess the moral of the story here, again, is that for your own individual sake, don’t hate AI. At least tolerate it and accept it at minimum, for your own sake. Again, this is totally in line with our intro to the show, how we tee up the show, and why we created the show in the first place.

Right here: “Google CEO reveals why the period between 2026 and 2030 is the last opportunity for regular people to build wealth.”

Damn, what the fuck? Why do you have to say it like that?

I know. It’s fucked. It’s fucked. And then they wonder why people hate AI, right?

It is so matter-of-fact with it, bro.

It’s because they’re all these autistic tech guys who are just matter-of-fact. It’s like how doctors deliver bad news: “Hey, man, by the way, you have a brain tumor. You have 3 months to live.”

I know. It’s literally like—

How about the Spurs, bro? You catch the—how about Wemby? That guy’s a fucking freak. It’s like, “Bro, what?”

[Laughter]

You can’t just skip over shit like that.

But it’s kind of matter-of-fact. I don’t know. At least that’s the way that I see it. That’s the way that I’d be positioning myself, too. It’s like, I don’t know. It sucks. It’s scary, but—

It’s very real. It is very real. Like you said, it’s a race that nobody can afford to lose. That’s why all these tech companies are spending so much money this year on AI research and on building out these models. There’s $700 billion in capex just this year that all the largest tech companies are spending.

The reason they’re doing that is because it’s literally adding to their bottom-line revenue. We’ve talked about it a lot on the show, but being invested in the market is really important. I think the safest ones are probably Google, Nvidia, Apple, and Amazon. I would say those are the safest ones.

9. Elon on AI, GDP & the optimistic case

Having exposure to those with your discretionary income, I think, is important. Then you can do higher-risk stuff with the rest of your investment portfolio. They’re going to capture so much of the growth over the next few years, I think. It’s really hard to foresee what parabolic advances look like, especially in software and robotics. You just can’t predict what the next decade is going to look like, but you need to be able to capitalize on those changes professionally and in terms of investing.

I want to end the AI conversation on this note, on a more positive note. This was helpful for me to watch, and maybe it’ll help you guys reframe the way you think about this stuff. This is an Elon Musk tweet, and he just tweeted “true” with this clip.

That has the potential to automate many aspects of human labor very soon, and I’m curious about the degree to which you feel a responsibility for making that transition go well.

What AI will do is make tasks that we do in our job more efficient.

Our job is not to wrangle a spreadsheet. Our job is not to type into a keyboard. Our job is generally more meaningful than that. I'm fairly confident that AI will drive productivity, revenue growth, and therefore more hiring.

There's a belief that the world's GDP is somehow limited at $100 trillion. What's likely to happen is that AI is going to cause that $100 trillion to become $200 trillion, $300 trillion, $500 trillion. There's no fundamental limit to the size of a GDP.

The number of people in the world who participate in this $100 trillion GDP is actually quite small. What if we brought the rest of the world, the rest of society, the rest of the world's population, and empowered them with AI? Give them the opportunity to participate in the GDP and cause this GDP to quintuple. I think that's a very likely outcome.

It's very likely that companies will become more prosperous. But it's for certain—

This is the other one.

Everybody's jobs will change.

Yeah.

As a result of AI. Some jobs.

That's why Nvidia is the number-one company, bro.

100%. That's the Nvidia CEO, and it's the most valuable company on planet Earth. Obviously, their success is perfectly in line with AI. He's obviously interested in it, and I guess you could call it bias or write it off, but I think this is an incredible way to look at things.

Again, we're long-term optimistic. You just heard him say it. The global GDP isn't capped at $100 trillion, right?

$200 trillion, $300 trillion, $400 trillion, $500 trillion. That's more money for everybody.

Yeah. I mean, I think that's the take, right? Nobody wants to work a job. When you think about working a job, you think about having to clock in and clock out, work for somebody else, punch in and punch out, do hard labor, or work on something that you don't necessarily want to do.

I don't feel like I have a job. I know you don't feel like you have a job either, because your job is just to be you, right?

Yeah.

And my job is to be me. I think that's the dream for everybody. Everybody wants to have purpose and feel fulfilled, but I think AI, over a long enough course of time, is going to empower everybody to do that.

You don't want a fucking job. You want to do you. Again, everything is going to wind up being fucking free, and it's going to solve all these issues. It's going to allow for—I think about it in these terms: You look back at medieval times and look at how people behaved and how they lived their lives, and you think, “Oh my God, I couldn't even imagine,” right? It's unfathomable.

You look back at them like, “Holy shit, how could you guys do that?” I might just fucking call it quits. GG. I don't know if I want to live that life. Cavemen—how the fuck did people live this way?

I think it's likely that people will look back 100 years from now and say, “I can't believe people worked jobs. What the fuck? That's fucking crazy.” You know what I mean? That's insane. It's so unfortunate. People worked away fucking 60% of their lives on a job they could care less about.

Again, that's why it's important to align with it. Think about it in those terms. There's light at the end of the tunnel, so just put your fucking head down, lock the fuck in, and align interests. I don't know.

That's the way that I'm thinking about it.

I think what people really want from their jobs is for their jobs to have meaning and for them to feel like they have a purpose in whatever it is that they're pursuing.

I do think it's going to be interesting if a lot of the white-collar jobs change. What new jobs are going to emerge? That's where I'm most interested, because there are a lot of jobs that emerge after every technological revolution that we don't really know what they're going to look like, and I think that's definitely going to happen.

The only way to be closest to the ground on what those are going to look like is by using AI every day and being as hip to it as possible. I've actually spent a lot of time—the Jensen dude is obviously a beast, but there's so much content out there to learn from if you spend the time and listen to the experts on all this stuff.

I think it's really worth doing that if you have the time, which everybody does have. For every hour you spend on TikTok, spend an hour learning about AI. That's what I'll say.

Agreed. I think the scary part is that people don't want to hear it, right? People write it off. Anytime you find yourself entering that frame of thought—“I don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear the other side”—you're just looking for reasons to be upset, be angry, and build on top of your already existing convictions and biases.

That's dangerous. If you fucking hate AI, it's all the more reason to go dive deep on the other side and really see what's good.

But you know what's crazy?

Talk to me.

My mom uses AI literally every day. Every single day.

What does she use it for, mainly?

She uses it for a ton of stuff, but she also does some graphic design and art with it. There are some companies that are just so bad at their design internally and how they put out content around events and all that.

One of her friends was asking her for help with something, and she completely redid everything internally. It's pretty crazy. She uses it literally every day. She sends me all her stuff and talks to ChatGPT about it. It's cool.

I couldn't find the clip of the kid who fucking runs 36 YouTube channels—

Yeah, that shit's fire.

—and makes $100,000 a month.

Yeah.

It's literally 2 people, bro. That kid has 36 different YouTube channels, and he makes money from all the ads on those YouTube channels. He uses AI to coordinate all of them and the content he's putting out on all of them.

There's that dude who's spending the time doing that. Then there are the people who are just consuming random content, and it's not really learning, not doing the—

—and kicking and screaming and bitching about why—

AI is flooding the earth and the data centers are going to end people. It's fucking crazy, bro. I really do think it's a separation. There are really 2 different groups.

10. Andrew Kang's Robo Strategy & physical AI robots

Not to be a doomer, but we need to just win this. We need to be first to it, and we can't leave our destiny or our fate to fucking China. Not to sound like a doomer about it, but it's completely minus EV to be anti-AI. That's the reason, ultimately, whether you like it or not.

Have you seen Kang's RoboStrategy?

No.

Bro, it's fucking fire. I'm going to pull this up. Is it this one? Yeah, here. I'm going to show it.

Okay, here we go. I don't know if you guys know who Andrew Kang is. He's a legend on Crypto Twitter, did really well the past few cycles in crypto.

He had his own VC firm, Mechanism Capital, and he's been really into robotics and investing in AI. He recently announced the new thing he's working on, which is RoboStrategy. He's going to be the CEO of that.

In the same way that MicroStrategy is an accumulation vehicle for Bitcoin, RoboStrategy is an accumulation vehicle for investments in robotics. I think this is really interesting. They're already public. They just launched—the ticker is BOTS on the Nasdaq, I believe.

His whole idea around RoboStrategy is that there are a lot of people who want to invest in robotics companies, but they aren't accredited investors, don't have access to the deals, or don't know which companies to invest in. There are a ton of people who want access to these private companies, but they have no way to get access to them.

We've seen it with OpenAI and Anthropic. I don't know if you guys saw the SPV tweets blowing up about Anthropic. Anthropic had to put out a post saying that if you bought shares through an SPV from somebody who already had shares in an official round, they weren't valid.

The reason those SPVs are so popular is that everybody wants access to these private companies that are dominating in their fields, but they aren't able to get access to them. What RoboStrategy is attempting to do is give people access through a public vehicle—RoboStrategy—and then make private investments in these robotics companies.

The underlying assets they own are reflected in the NAV of their investments in these different companies. I think it's really interesting. It's one of the cooler things I've seen recently.

I think it just launched last week. He talks about the structure of the fund and what their plan is. It’s a closed-end fund, so permanent capital and super-long-term alignment. He thinks—and I agree with him—that robotics has not impacted the job market as much yet, but in the next couple of decades, it’s going to be a huge shift, a huge change.

If you think about just humans and the physical labor that we do, robots can work 24/7, can be very specialized in certain tasks, and are really just better than humans at a lot of different physical-labor things. So this is an interesting spot. It just launched. It’s cool.

Again, so you stand no chance. Just get in line and figure it out. Figure out how to be buddy-buddy with the robots, right?

Hey, man, learn how to best work with AI, then learn where to invest your money. Those are the 2 things, for sure.

I should link something about Atoms here. I should pull up something he did. He was on TBPN the other day. We probably should pull up a few clips from that TBPN appearance.

By the way, they can hear Sal, right?

No?

No.

Yeah, they can’t.

Oh, okay.

Fire.

We have a guy in our ear who’s helping us.

I want them to hear him. It’s like a little voice in our head.

Yeah.

He was talking about Travis Kalanick, one of the founders of Uber. He left Uber in 2017, and his new venture is a company called Atoms. Atoms builds specialized robots for food delivery, I’m pretty sure.

Those little square robots, like Uber Eats does this.

It might be them, but I think this company is specific to that.

CloudKitchens.

Yeah, CloudKitchens. Oh, Atoms is his, and that’s CloudKitchens. So it’s both of them? That’s interesting. We’ve seen how AI has impacted software a ton. That’s what we’re seeing now with Claude Code and Codex: I can build apps with AI agents and all this now. But we haven’t seen—

Physical AI. Physical AI is a fucking interesting conversation around that. Are there any—aside from Uber, Tesla—Sal, you’re breathing super heavily into the mic.

Oh, who is that?

I don’t fucking know. Someone’s trolling us. You know, production’s playing games, guys. I know it sounds like—

That’s fucking funny.

But yeah, you’re saying which company is losing at the moment.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so Tesla is likely to be the most likely to win the physical AI effort and race, right?

Let me see.

It’s going to be so cool to see how this physically manifests. That’s obviously where my head always goes. Even on the subject of Tesla, Uber, autonomous vehicles, physical AI, and physical robots—

Yeah.

Obviously, the way the car is designed is for it to be piloted by a human being, but in the future, when a human doesn’t need to pilot a car, what does a car look like?

Right. It’s going to change a lot. It’s going to change a lot.

It’s going to be like a cabin with no windows, a TV, and a fucking couch, right?

It’s going to be like a little black pod that just zooms back and forth.

Yes. There are going to be luxury ones. What does a Rolls-Royce pod look like in 2050?

They’re going to drive 300 miles an hour, too. There are going to be no car accidents. It’s going to be insane.

Yeah, they should be able to hear it.

Turn it up. You have it muted.

I don’t have it muted.

Maybe try on your side.

Yeah, I can do that.

I don’t know.

I have—

I don’t have it. Hold on.

And we have Greg coming on in a minute, right?

Yes, sir. Yo, Greg, what’s good, bro? How you doing?

I’m great, man. It’s warm and nice in California.

Nice, bro. I finally got some good weather over here in New York. We had our first 90-degree day a few days ago. It was a brutal winter for us this year. It was bad.

Yeah, it’s really bad.

Really bad, bro.

Gorgeous in the East Bay, San Francisco. Mediterranean weather.

I wish I could port that weather here and have it 24/7. It’d be amazing.

Just move.

I love New York too much, bro. I can’t. But, yo, great to have you on. I’m psyched about this conversation. I think a lot of people have either heard about Akash in the past or don’t know what you guys have been up to.

11. Guest: Greg (Akash) — what a "super cloud" is

I recently checked in, and I was really deep in the Cosmos ecosystem. So I followed a lot of the early Cosmos projects, and you guys were one of the first Cosmos projects that I checked when I was looking. That was probably back in 2021 or 2022. I know you guys have been around for a while. Can you tell us a little bit about your background, what Akash is, and how you guys have grown over the years?

My background is that I’ve been an open-source developer for most of my life, focused heavily on distributed systems and working mostly for startup companies and high-growth companies here in Silicon Valley. Before Akash, I founded a company called AngelHack, which defined the modern-day hackathon. At its peak, we had 200,000 developers in 50 cities around the world. It was largely responsible for the Web2 acceleration in San Francisco because we founded that company at its peak in 2012.

What’s happening now in San Francisco reminds me of those golden days of the Web2 era, but with 10 times more intensity because of AI. I would say this is my second big San Francisco boom that I’ve been part of.

I’ve been in the cloud for a very long time. In 2006, I designed Kaiser Permanente’s cloud architecture before cloud was a thing. That’s when I discovered Amazon, and I fell in love with AWS. I’ve been a big proponent and advocate for cloud, only to realize all the problems cloud has.

That led me to embark on an open-source initiative to build a supercloud, essentially minimizing cloud providers to just resource providers and building a cloud of clouds. That eventually led to what Akash is.

So, you see Akash as kind of like a decentralized version of AWS, or in what way are they comparable?

Akash is the first supercloud. To go back a little bit in the history of cloud, when the internet began, every company was running its own data center or colocation facility or whatever—you owned your own hardware. And owning hardware isn’t the easiest thing to do. You can’t just deploy hardware easily; it takes a long time.

Then cloud came and gave this amazing comfort solution where you don’t need to own the hardware, but just lease it. Instead of owning a house, you rent the house. That’s their model. It’s phenomenal; it’s great for scaling. They really proved that you can scale very fast, and Web2 is all about meeting demand just in time—scaling when you have scale, that kind of thing. It worked great for Web2.

The problem with cloud is that, if you take the TCO, the total cost-of-ownership model, it’s actually way more expensive than running your own hardware because they nickel-and-dime you for every little thing. On top of that, the world was moving more toward an open-source-first model, whereas cloud was taking open-source software, closing it down, and reselling the model. So there are a lot of problems with the cloud.

We also noticed a massive increase in data consumption. The rate at which it was increasing was, I think, doubling or quadrupling every year or something. We laid out a model and predicted that there’s no way in hell that, in 10 years, the cloud would be capable of handling the demand.

Another big trend we noticed was that there’s a lot of compute out there, just everywhere. It’s not in a central place. That led us to an idea—it wasn’t us; it was the whole industry altogether—of a supercloud. Can we build a cloud provider that’s not a single provider, but can connect to all cloud providers and become a layer on top of them?

That idea was proposed by Cornell in 2015, I believe. We liked that idea and implemented the first-ever supercloud. Akash is not a cloud provider, but a cloud of clouds. Akash in Sanskrit means “sky.” The sky is where the clouds live. It’s what we call a supercloud. That means AWS, for example, could be part of the Akash network as an offering. What Akash gives you that the other traditional cloud providers don’t is freedom.

Freedom in terms of choosing what provider you want based on whatever metric you want to base it on—cost, reliability, efficiency, speed, and so on. It gives you this incredible choice of moving between different cloud providers or even distributing your workloads across different providers. It could be a cloud provider; it may not be a cloud provider—it could be compute. Now, with a home node, it could be home compute.

The idea is to bring all the compute that's available and offer a single place for the user to shop. Think of Akash like a mall: instead of going to a single store, you go to a mall and can get a lot of variety. That's the whole thing.

Interesting. That makes a ton of sense. That's a great explanation. I used to be a software engineer. I actually went to school for computer science and was a software engineer after I graduated, so I know a little bit about that.

If people were to deploy an application, they would deploy it across different AWS instances, and there's a UI for doing all of that and going back and forth. Could people do that the same way through Akash, and then you guys route them to wherever else?

Yeah, so compute in Akash is not on AWS. I mean, I said AWS could be—

Okay.

There was an initiative to bring AWS onto Akash. Yeah, I see. But it's going to continue. Right now, we have about 70-odd providers, and most of them are independent data centers or independent companies that have this compute.

I think the big advantage right now for Akash is cost and access. If you're on Amazon, you're not going to see a cost difference. Although, there is an initiative to bring Amazon reserved compute. Reserved compute is compute that's purchased by people ahead of time for much cheaper than what you would otherwise pay on demand, and most of the time this compute is sitting dormant.

So, it's AWS compute, but it's not being used. There's a case to be made to put that compute on Akash and offer that exact same Amazon compute for significantly cheaper. So, arbitrage is actually—

Got it. Got it. Greg, hello. I'm Banks. We're having a little bit of technical difficulties. I'm the resident [__] here at Market Bubble, so I represent the average layman. A lot of people in my chat and a lot of people who follow the show aren't well equipped enough to follow the type of conversation that you guys are having. To those types of people, what would you say? How would you describe your product and what you're building? How does it relate to them? How does it affect them? Why should they care?

The simplest analogy, which I absolutely hate, but I'm going to do it anyway, is Airbnb for compute.

Okay, so you can rent out your compute. Everybody has compute; you can rent it out.

Yes, if you have dormant compute, you can rent it out.

Why do you hate that analogy? I think that's really strong. I like that.

I hate analogies in general. They're oversimplified. This particular one is very simplified, and it's being abused by so many other people. Whatever.

You've talked about the demand side a lot—how demand has gone up a lot and is going to continue to go up a lot. Where is a lot of the revenue that you're currently seeing with Akash coming from? What are the use cases that people are using it for? I know AI inference has been a big one, with people using their spare GPUs. How do you feel like you fit in with the open-source AI community, OpenRouter, and those platforms?

The biggest use we're seeing—I mean, Akash is a decentralized compute network, so we don't exactly know what people are running because we have no access to the compute.

Right.

We only know what people tell us. The biggest use is inference, any day. I think over 95% is inference, especially now that you have so many of these open-source models. There's a lot of effort going into using smaller models, mixture-of-experts models, and so on.

There are a lot of small, large, and all kinds of inference models doing inference on Akash. From a customer standpoint, Venice actually started on Akash.

Oh, wow.

12. Airbnb for compute: how Akash works

They went to a different model, but now I think they're coming back. I think they're using some Akash now, but I think they diversified their supply quite a lot. We have a lot of Venice-like people that use Akash quite a lot today.

There are a lot of inference players and a lot of AI products, actually. One of my favorite use cases involves imaging, so there's quite a lot of image-generation and video-generation activity happening on Akash.

Yeah.

I would say 87% of usage on Akash comes from non-wallet users. Akash has 2 ways to pay. You can pay using a credit card, which converts into crypto in the background, or you can pay directly with crypto.

We're seeing 87% of usage coming from non-crypto payments, and that's mostly AI. So, we're retooling a lot of our tools to be more mainstream and less crypto-friendly.

That's impressive. That's cool. If people have spare GPUs and wanted to rent them out through you guys, what do the economics on that look like? What does it look like to do that? Can I still use one? Can I use the GPU? How long do I have to give it to you guys for? What is the—

It depends on the GPU, obviously. If you're talking about H100s, which are really in high demand right now, and you bought H100s about a year ago, putting those on Akash right now will amortize them within 9 months.

Oh, wow. What?

The economics are nuts.

That's crazy.

It's not. Because I can—

That's insane.

That was not the case all the time. For some reason, H100s are sold out. No one has H100s right now. They're in super-high demand, and it is crazy how these economics are turning out. I don't even know what to make of it because you have your depreciation cycles, right?

Yeah.

You have 5-year depreciation; you go to near zero after 5 years. H100s are the reverse. The value is actually going up. They're like Rolex watches right now.

How?

It's crazy, I know. I remember buying H100s about a year ago for $210,000 for an 8x node. Now, the minimum used node is going for $275,000.

What the—

I saw a quote for around $300,000. It's just nuts.

How and why? Why?

I have no idea. I have some assumptions, but I have no idea why there's been a sudden drop in H100 supply in the last 2 weeks, maybe 3 weeks.

So, I know that you spoke about how the depreciation cycles of GPUs work. They're always building the next newest, next-best, and more efficient one. I know there's a lack of availability to do that; it's very difficult to make as many as they need. With all the investment that's happening there, do you think the depreciation cycles are going to be less aggressive, or—

No. Let me put some numbers to you, okay? There are 2 ways to use AI. There's vanilla, which is using ChatGPT: you ask questions and get answers.

Uh-huh.

13. The H100 shortage & GPU economics

The second way is agentic.

Right.

Agents running Claude Code, Hermes, Claude, and OpenClaw are agentic. Agentic usage is exponentially greater in terms of token usage and the charges on the models—an order of magnitude greater.

I think I burned through my weekly limits in 2 days. Claude gives you limits as to how much you can use; there are daily and weekly limits. My wife is visiting her mom.

That's how it be, bro.

Yeah. I'm in goblin mode right now, so I'm by myself in the garage at home and just coding a lot.

That's [__] funny.

Agents are just significantly different. You can do so many things you can't really do with regular AI. I can't imagine doing things without agents now.

It turns out that globally, there are about 1 billion AI users, including ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI itself, which most people don't know they're actually using. Out of that, only 2.4 million people use agents. I don't know—do you guys use agents to do anything?

Of course. Of course. Yeah, we use them to do everything. We have this show prep. I'll share my screen with you.

There you go. Yeah, that looks like Claude Code.

Yeah, we do a whole run-of-show. We have imaginations and dreams of eventually building an AI co-host that joins us on the show in real time.

Examples and content. We can ask it in real time what markets are doing and have it build a personality. Are you familiar with Joe Rogan's show, obviously?

Of course, yeah. Yeah.

14. Agents vs. chatbots & the compute crunch

He has an off-screen co-host, and his name is Jamie. You never see him, and occasionally you'll hear him chime in when it's appropriate. Yeah, Jamie agent. Jamie agent. Bubbles. We're going to make ours like a hot girl, I think. Eventually, we want to build it to the point where the entire show is produced by these agents.

So you can understand the benefits of agents. It's incredible. 2.4 million people are using agents, and that is causing the crunch. I had to pay 4 times more for my memory—the same memory I paid for about a year ago.

No, I'm getting [__] whacked, too. Claude flipped it, and I don't know why. It was super affordable at first, and now I'm spending [__] $3,000–$4,000 a month on AI. But it's well worth it for me, even just for the sake of tuition—learning it.

Exactly.

You mentioned all the options. Obviously, there's an endless amount of options, and it feels that way for the average consumer and user of AI and agents. There's really no discernible difference for the average person. Z was talking about how his mom uses AI, and the average Joe who's looking up [__] recipes for banana bread, how to get to his favorite coffee shop, what the UV is outside, or what the price of Solana is isn't going to notice a real difference.

Obviously, for somebody like you who's building in it—and, as you said, you can't even imagine not using it—which one do you prefer? Which is your favorite?

It depends on what I'm doing. It really depends.

Gun to your [__] head: Anthropic or OpenAI. Which one?

Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.7. I mean, Anthropic over OpenAI.

With the quickness, by the way.

That was fast.

It's Anthropic on this side, baby. You already know.

Codex is amazing. Codex is really good, too, for coding. It really depends on what I'm doing, right? There's no one model that fits all, right?

For example, when I'm brainstorming and coming up with ideas, I use Opus 4.7. When I'm actually coding, I use a different model, because once you plan out and actually execute the plan to write the code, you don't need Opus. Opus is extremely intelligent—overkill for just writing coding tasks, right? I use a cheaper model. I actually use AkashML for actual coding.

Oh, cool.

It's our own service, because it's significantly cheaper than using Opus, right? Overall, I think general-purpose Opus 4.7 would be my—

Is it Hermes or Hermes? Do you use that over OpenClaw? What's the deal?

Hermes all the way, baby. I mean, I love Nous. Disclosure: I'm an early investor in Nous as well. Nous was a big user of Akash, at least in the early days. Nous Research built Hermes. A lot of the Hermes training was done on Akash, too, in the early days, so I love Hermes. It's just night and day for me, and they ship really well. The team is incredible.

It's interesting. Obviously, you're a power user of AI. I have a more normie friend, and some of the audience may or may not know him. It's honestly irrelevant to the topic, but he exists in traditional music. He's a music executive, and he manages artists—that's the field he's in.

I originally put him on to OpenClaw. I'm like, "You can automate so much [__]." Even just the way that I use it in meetings—sharing transcripts, documents, emails, and all that [__]—the bare-bones stuff. I put him on it early, and we went for a walk 2 days ago and caught up on things. He was pilling me hard on—

Hermes?

Yeah, Hermes. Hermes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hermes has got a great memory. I also use Hermes with my Obsidian vaults.

Obsidian's [__] goated.

It is. I take my phone into the shower now because I have random thoughts and just want to talk to it.

[Laughter.]

You're locked in, bro.

You're locked in.

Seriously, I'm locked in.

Yeah, we know. We know what kind of random thoughts are going through your head in the shower.

[Laughter.]

Hey, Grok, suck me, baby.

Because the shower is my best time to think, right? But you want to take it down. I'm working on 5 or 6 projects at the same time, right? I'm always talking. I'm talking so much now that I don't type anymore, right? Because typing is like—

Yeah, slow.

—for cavemen at this point.

Frank DeGods hit me with a [__] bar when he was pilling me and onboarding me into OpenClaw and all this [__]. He said, "English is the new coding language." I may have botched that, but it's a bar.

It is.

Yeah, it's—

It is.

Yeah.

I have a hierarchy system for my agents because it can get extremely chaotic managing all these systems. So I developed my own system. I think everybody is developing their own system. I think there's a new abstraction stack being built on top of agents that's kind of forming. We're not seeing that yet as products, but I can totally see where that's going. It's incredible.

So, coming back to my 2.4 million, only 2.4 million people have experienced agents. Imagine if that number is 10 times larger. What other kind of magic are you going to see?

Yeah.

2.4 million is leading to the current crisis, where we have no H100s available at all.

Right.

What is 24 million going to look like? I don't know. I think we're in uncharted territory.

If you look at the supply chain, you obviously have compute, inference, chips, and then energy, which is where I'm focused quite a lot. I testified before Congress on energy about a year ago. I called it out. I said energy was going to be a big challenge, and it turns out energy is a big challenge.

People like Elon aren't thinking from first principles. They're going to space to solve the energy crisis. I think there's a lot more we can do on Earth to solve the power crisis.

I've made some early bets on distributed training and distributed inference systems that can leverage a distributed grid to share energy. Home Node, for example, we launched with the intention of actually tapping into a distributed grid, right? It's just going to get worse.

If you look at the energy situation, most new data centers are using LNG, which is liquefied natural gas, because you can't really have any other way to power these systems. That led to another crisis with turbines and transformers. Now we have a 4-year lead time to get a transformer and a 14-year lead time to get a turbine.

That's [__] nuts, bro.

It's nuts. If you look at the entire supply chain, every part of the supply chain is constrained right now. I've never seen anything like this before.

Yeah, you've talked a lot about energy. We've been talking a lot about energy and how the U.S. is so slow at building it out. Do you think China is in a better place energy-wise as far as building out its capacity? I know Jensen Huang—did you watch Jensen Huang's interview?

He's talking about how Nvidia should be selling to China. It seems like there might be some way for us to work together. We have the chips, and they have the energy capacity. Do you think anything could happen there? What do you think about it?

15. Energy: why China is ahead

Well, theoretically, yeah, but I think it's mostly geopolitical. Trump did approve selling H200s and 5090s, but China didn't want them because they want their own stack now.

Oh.

Wow.

It was an action under the CHIPS Act—sorry, under the Biden administration, we started export controls on chips. That led to a local chip industry led by Huawei. Huawei, I think, is doing 7-nanometer chips, and they're going to catch up to 3-nanometer really soon.

Yeah.

China is aggressively building its local stack. That's a risk and a challenge, because now you're going to have a China stack and a Western stack.

China makes 4 times more energy than the U.S. They have 8 terawatts of installed capacity; the U.S. has about 2 terawatts of installed capacity. Four times.

Yeah.

China adds about 1 gigawatt of solar capacity every 36 hours. A gigawatt is what a nuclear power plant produces, and a gigawatt can house—

Every 36 hours?

Every 36 hours.

Oh, [__] nuts.

They have the energy. When we're talking about energy infrastructure, they have the battery infrastructure, they have the rare earths, they have—

They have the entire supply chain to build batteries and solar panels, and we lost control of the supply chain a long time ago. I don't know if that's ever going to come back, right?

We can't produce batteries in America anymore, and you need batteries for solar. I think we're starting to onshore the panels now, but you need rare-earth minerals. Rare-earth minerals are controlled by China, so there's another bottleneck there. I don't know; it's kind of a crazy place right now.

Yeah.

There's a massive reindustrialization effort by the current administration to bring back the rare-earth minerals. The reason why we want to invade Greenland is for rare-earth minerals. There's a new deal with Ukraine for rare-earth minerals. All this is classified information. We don't exactly know how much these countries have, but yes, there's a big push. Any geopolitical issue you see really comes down to rare earth for America.

Right, for America.

Yeah. We talked a little bit about MP Materials. I don't know if you know that company. They're—what?

MP?

MP. They're one of the companies in the US that is trying to fix that problem—the mining of the rare-earth metals that we do have here. It's the Mountain Pass mine in California, I think. Trump invested in them because of the situation that you're talking about.

Yeah.

It seems like the biggest risk for tech in the US stock market is that dynamic that we have. China has an advantage in energy and an advantage in other areas. Don't you think they're ahead on the open-source side, or do you not agree with that?

They are. They are leading in open source. All the open-source models are from China.

Yeah, so—

They're leading in so many different things.

Yeah. So where is the US leading, then?

Well, I think our tech companies in the closed-source models are much better. However, let me ask you this: How do you think the gap exists right now between the closed-source models from US tech companies, like Anthropic and OpenAI, and the open-source models? I think it's Alibaba that's releasing Qwen.

Qwen. There is MiniMax 2.6. There's a bunch of these. So, Qwen 2.6—my apologies. How far behind? They're not very far behind. Qwen 2.6, the open-source model from China, is better at coding than Opus 4.6, the previous generation of Opus. Opus 4.7 is still number one for agentic use cases. I think it can run 3,000 parallel sessions; I can't remember the stats.

But anyway, the point is, for me, a software-coding model—which is what most agentic agents want—they're just one more version behind. Anthropic can launch a new closed model, and the open models are just going to steal from the closed models. There's nothing you can do to stop distillation, right?

Because once they're out, it's easier to make the open-source version, right?

Yeah. Once you have a really good closed model, you can distill from that closed model to an open one.

Yeah.

16. Open source vs. closed models — who wins

So open source is going to win, right? There's no way in hell. There are lots of conversations about banning open source now. During the Biden administration, that was a thing, and then Trump said he wasn't going to do it. Now there's another conversation in the White House to regulate open-source AI quite a lot because of this problem.

I want to go back to the 2.4 million figure because it seems obviously quite low for what this technology is offering in terms of helping people be productive, optimizing their lives, and changing the way they do things day to day. There are a couple of interesting angles to this for me, in line with what you were just saying. The first is: Why is that number so low? I guess OpenClaw and Hermes feel like how I would imagine computers and the internet felt in the ’70s and ’80s. The barrier to entry is quite high.

What's your opinion on that? Who do you think has the best chance to win in that regard, in terms of mass distribution and mass adoption—really onboarding the average person to whatever the iPhone equivalent is, what Apple did for traditional computers? Who is in the leading position to do that and put AI truly in the hands of everybody?

That's the first piece. I want to talk about the general sentiment around AI after that and how negative people, specifically Americans, are around it. How do you think that'll affect legislation moving forward, and how that's a really bad thing, obviously, for the US and this race to AGI? All that—there's just a lot to unpack there.

Mhm.

Yeah, yeah. This is a very fast-moving space; the space moves very fast, right? Who's in the best position to succeed? I'm going to take a contrarian take here. I think it's Apple.

I think it's Apple, too. I said that. [laughter] Yes, you're clearly a fucking genius. You guys hear that? Look at that one. I think it's Apple also. Why? Because they're already—

Why? Because their UI is exceptional. They know how to—

The distribution, right? They're already in everyone's pocket. Yes, dude. Yes.

But along with the distribution of the—

One, put it next to this one, too. Put it next to this one. I'm a fucking genius. I'm just kidding. I fucking knew it.

I don't know if you use Apple Intelligence. It has horrible models, but the experience is phenomenal, right? If you use Siri, it's terrible in terms of quality, but the experience is great. Apple Intelligence, where you can proofread and whatnot, I use that quite a lot on my phone. The experience is great—terrible model, right? But if you can replace the model—

Yeah.

You're going to get an excellent—and there's another—

What is this thing? Yeah.

I feel like if Apple tomorrow released Siri AI and it was even 20% as capable as Opus 4.7 or ChatGPT—what's the most up-to-date, 5.5 or whatever?—I think if it's even 20% as capable, your grandma could do her birthday cards, and it would tell you what the price of Bitcoin is and all that good shit. They just pin it to the top of your iMessage, and you could talk to Siri the way that you talk to your friends and type that way. You could give it access to your phone, and it could help you organize that. It could reply to people for you, and it just became an extension of iOS and iMessage. I think they just win on the spot, at least in the US.

And the ecosystem power they have—they have every Apple TV—

Literally.

You wake up, your phone updates one day, and ChatGPT or their cloud is just pinned right there in your messages.

17. Why Apple has the best shot at AI distribution

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's already here. It's just a terrible model. I don't know what they did. Whatever. I think they fired the guy who did it. [laughter] Now they have a new CEO and all that, right? So they have the best chance to succeed, and they're also pretty good. They've been doing AI for a long time. The MLX machine-learning libraries they have at Apple are really good. The Mac Studios—the M5s—come with 141 gigabytes of unified memory, which is actually really powerful for running local models.

And the Mac mini—that's where I have all my shit.

The mini, the Studio—the bigger machine that they sell.

Yeah. So that's the shit that you're on. You're fucking taking over the world with AI. I'm talking to it about shit.

Minis are small, right? The Studio is the bigger one, and they're very powerful. You can run local models really well. Imagine clustering these Studios. A lot of people are buying Studios because I have a Studio, too. In my home, when I'm using AI, I try to use local AI more than cloud AI because of privacy. I do a lot with my AI. My AI is connected to my camera feeds and my microphone feeds. It has access to my entire life, and I don't want that on the cloud. No way in hell, right?

I use a lot of local models. Imagine everybody having Mac minis and Mac Studios. They can connect those local models or connect those computers using Akash or something, where you can sell. Imagine the power Apple has to create an incredible network of these local machines and use that for AI. There's a lot of opportunity Apple has. If they don't fuck it up, I think they're going to be massively successful.

And you said you think open source is going to win. I think that's a really interesting take. If you do think open source is going to win the race in AI, I guess what areas do you think are currently underexplored that are going to become more popular in the future? I know you talked a little bit about distributed training and distributed inference.

And then also, how do you feel that crypto is going to fit into that realm of open-source AI? Because it seems like crypto should benefit from open-source AI a lot.

Yeah, I have a thesis on that. The biggest underinvested and underexplored area is distributed training. I think it's such a big opportunity, and there are a lot of companies that I'm really excited about. Pluralis is one. They haven't launched yet, but I'm really excited about Pluralis.

Yep.

Nous Research was working on something. I don't know how far—I haven't caught up with them on the distributed-training piece. And Gensyn, which is another—I think it's a crypto token—but they're very, very good. They've been working on distributed training as well.

No one has quite figured out the incentive structure, which I think is going to be a big unlock once we figure out the technology. The technology is very hard. Pluralis is able to achieve something called heterogeneity in training.

So, what that means is—I don't want to go too technical—but right now, the big limitation for training is that you have to have the same chips, no matter what. If you're training on H100s, you have to have H100s.

Yep.

H200s. You can't mix and match them. That's a big challenge for a lot of companies because you're going to have different chips. But if you can do heterogeneity, you can unlock distributed training from homes where you have different types of chips. I might have a 4090, someone will have a 5090, and someone will have H100s. You can combine all of that to actually train.

The efficiency difference is only 1.6× compared to your centralized model, which is not a bad thing. It's not as great as a centrally trained model, but it's really good for a model.

Yep.

I think that's one area. The second area is being talked about by big labs. Anthropic talks about it quite a lot. The Anthropic co-founder—I talked to the head of research for Anthropic, who's been at the company since the beginning—they are also looking very deeply into distributed training. They don't talk about it publicly.

I know, from talking to labs and talking to people on the frontier who are developing these frontier models, that distributed training is going to be a big deal. They're already seeing challenges in compute, right? They have to.

18. Distributed training & crypto token design

The second area that is underexplored is provenance. As you get a lot of fake AI-generated content, there's an enormous need for provenance to verify that the goods that are created are legitimate and not created by AI.

Yeah.

The value will be placed, I believe, just like if you compare two paintings that look exactly the same: one is AI-generated and one is human-generated. If you try to sell them, which do you think is going to sell? The human-generated one, obviously.

There's value in human-generated stuff. It's not the quality or the outcome of the product, but the effort that people value. I value things that are handmade versus things that are machine-made because there's effort and talent that go into it.

I think provenance is another area that's underexplored. Privacy is underexplored, too. We're looking at TEEs and all that stuff, but there are a lot of challenges with trusted execution environments, like side channels and whatnot. I'd love to see ZK. I'd love to see FHE—fully homomorphic encryption—in AI. That, I think, is severely underexplored.

I don't know. There are a lot of deep technical problems that I can think of, but these 3 are at the top of my head.

Awesome. That's interesting. That's really helpful context. I've heard of Pluralis. Kel, actually—I don't know if you know Kel on Twitter, Kel XYZ. He talks—

Kel. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. He's smart. Super-smart dude.

Pluralis is amazing. Really good team. They've been silent. I mean, they're a research team, right? They've been silent, but I know they're coming up with something amazing in a few weeks.

Mhm.

And they're going to be using a lot of compute from Akash, so I'm excited for Pluralis.

God.

For Pluralis.

Yes, I guess I'll ask questions specifically about Akash. I know you guys partnered with Venice. Venice seems like they've gotten a lot of the attention over the past few weeks. It seems like they have a really cool integration of their token and the platform. So, how do you think about the integration between the two and the advantages of being a crypto platform?

Right now with AI, I wouldn't call it an advantage. I think—

Or disadvantage. I was going to say, or disadvantage.

Also, the token has serious good things and bad things. The good thing is that the token gives us a lot of leverage in terms of subsidies and behavioral engineering, or whatever you want to call it. There are incredible ways you can use tokens to bootstrap networks, and there are a lot of good things.

But the bad thing is that the user experience is terrible, right? Initially, Akash was just a token. If you go to the console, you have to have AKT in order to use compute.

Yeah.

And that severely limited us. We would have conversion rates of less than 1% from the people who wanted to use Akash to the people who actually ended up using it. It was terrible, and we lost so many big deals.

We lost a big deal with NVIDIA because nobody wants to touch tokens. NVIDIA was using Akash in the beginning through an acquisition. Then the CFOs and finance teams basically blew up, saying that they didn't want to use anything with crypto because they couldn't hold AKT on a balance sheet.

Just as far as general sentiment to the average person, the average layman, you're fighting 2 battles, right? Obviously, the overwhelming feedback from the average person is anti-AI. And while most people are unbothered, unconcerned, and uninterested in crypto, crypto is, for the average person—at least where I come from, in my corner of the internet—synonymous with scams. These words are synonymous.

It is.

And it's unfortunate because you're fighting both battles. As you said, you see the tech stuff and obviously there's a ton of benefit there, but if nobody's coming through the front door, it's like—

Yeah.

It's night and day.

We have another product called AkashML, where we removed crypto completely. It still has the brand name, and it's hitting all-time-high usage. I think even today we hit an all-time high in usage there.

Is AkashML—

AkashML is the inference-as-a-service product from Akash.

It basically gives you access to all the good models. You can use AkashML with your Claude Code or your OpenCode. You can switch your backend model to use AkashML.

I use AkashML quite a lot for my coding. I use Opus 4.6 or 4.7 for thinking and writing a plan for what I want to do. Once I have a solid plan, I switch to AkashML. I save a lot of money and a lot of tokens, so it's very, very good.

It's an infrastructure service, and we get a lot of usage there, especially if you don't want to go through all the pain of setting up a model. Running a model is very expensive, right? If you're running a big model, it costs you thousands of dollars a month just to run it for yourself.

But if you use a shared model like AkashML, where you can use a model that's shared with other people, it's significantly cheaper. AkashML is designed for AI developers and non-crypto people, and that's our biggest-growing product.

Yeah.

And that directly translates to the hosts on Akash and drives usage to Akash.

From a token-model standpoint, I think the advantage is that the way the Akash token is tied to usage is through burns. Every time you use compute on Akash, a portion gets burned using a BME model. So there's a usage-based economic model, and we have more burns than mints now because usage is going up and up.

If this continues, I think it'll be an incredible thing from an economic standpoint. But it also gives us the ability to create incentives, right? There's a big challenge in onboarding providers. Using token economics, we can create attractive incentives for providers to be competitive and whatnot.

There are a lot of things you can do really well with tokens. Especially if you're doing distributed training, I'm very excited about tokens.

Yeah.

You can see a world where, say, Pluralis—good example—if I contribute my computer to a model, right? If there's a model somebody wants to try—

Say Ansem wants to train a model. You don't have compute, but you have an idea. You have the code and the data, but you need millions of dollars to compute, right? You can go to Pluralis and say, “Hey, look, I'm willing to pay. I need X dollars' worth of compute. I don't have the compute right now, but I'm willing to share my future profits with the people who provide compute.”

Oh.

So, Pluralis is running nodes or whatnot. I'm a node runner; I have a node, and I have 5090s at home. I can then participate in this model training, get some token that represents my ownership or my contribution, and when the model goes into inference—when you're making money hosting an Akash model or whatever—you can get a portion of that revenue directly for participating. I see that as an—

It's really cool.

—extremely disruptive model. No one has done this so far, and I think people are starting to look into it. We call this an open-source, closed-weights model, where the model itself is open-source, but the weights are closed, accessible only to people who are doing inference. There's a lot of opportunity for this incredible token mechanism design that's going to come with distributed training. I'm really excited about it, and that's going to be very disruptive.

Second, VVV—Venice—has done a phenomenal job with the DePIN model, right? They really understood that you can give out free inference and get really good inference. You can actually use Opus directly through Venice. Not too many people know this, but using your VVV, you can actually get free inference that you would otherwise have to pay a cloud provider for.

I sometimes use Venice when I want to use it. I have some VVV that was airdropped to me super early, and it's worth a lot of money now.

Yeah.

So I use that for staking, and I get my DMs and do all kinds of cool things. Venice is a very good product. If you haven't used it, I was a big user. I used Venice quite a lot. I used to talk about Venice quite a lot three years ago, before all this hype. For anything medical-related, I used Venice quite a lot. Anything that I want privacy for, I use Venice. I don't really trust Claude.

If you use Claude, it will use your data to train, so be very careful what you give it. Don't give it anything you don't want to become part of a training set. They'll report things that they find suspicious. It doesn't have to be suspicious to you, but if they think it's suspicious, they'll report it.

I mean, well, that's concerning. I've literally sent Claude pictures of my penis.

Yeah, that's part of your training set.

For medical reasons. It's like my best friend. He's my accountant, my lawyer, my doctor—all of it.

Be very careful. He's going to snitch on you.

Yeah, he's going to leak.

So, be careful with whatever you give Claude. But Venice is going to be great because Venice doesn't retain data. Privacy is a big challenge with AI, and I love Venice. It's a great tool.

It seems to me that if you believe 2 things—that open-source AI is going to dominate in the future and continue to become more popular, and that AI demand and the demand for agentic AI are going to continue to go up—it seems like there's a lane for really cool token mechanism design, which is what you were just talking about.

19. Privacy, Venice & what AI does with your data

A lot of the issues that crypto projects have had in the past were that there weren't a lot of revenues tied to these tokens. It was a future growth story that you were betting on—something happening in the future. But now the demand is real, and it seems like you can tie tokens to that demand in a really clear way. That's awesome to hear. I think that's really dope.

And you said basic token economics models are going to be the winners, right? Helium did a phenomenal job with BME. We kind of adopted a similar model with the demand that's going crazy now. I think tying that back to token economics is going to be beneficial.

I'm actually very excited now that things are slowing down a little bit. There's a lot of capitulation, market correction, protocols dying, and whatnot. I think real economics are going to matter. No longer are you going to have just speculation, just, “Hey, I have a token for governance.” I don't think that's going to fly much.

It's not going to work anymore.

You've got to tie it down. You have to have some metric that you can optimize for and pay attention to. I'm very excited for this new wave of token economic design. We see this quite a lot, right? Every time there's a boom and a bust, you see the fundamentals go up.

I only hope that this time—because it looks like the market is recovering quite a bit now, and at least the fundamental projects are gaining some attention—I really hope that we don't diverge into pure gambling like we always do. We had NFTs first and then meme coins. I have no idea what this is going to be. I really, really pray that the gambling won't return.

Yeah, I would also prefer the real projects. It's interesting for me because, as a trader, I kind of identify with the areas I think are going to get a lot more attention. At one point that was NFTs, and at one point that was meme coins.

But I think it's really important—that's why I really enjoy having you on and having other people on the pod—to talk about the projects that are really doing well and have real fundamentals behind them. I do think the market's turning. Stocks are at all-time highs, bro. Everything else is ripping. Crypto is down, everything else is ripping, and we're just now starting to see the few really solid crypto protocols start to do well.

HYPE hit all-time highs today. Zcash has been doing well. I do think there are a lot of projects that weren't solid, and now we're seeing the quality ones do well, which I think is going to continue for sure.

Yeah.

Another point about how crypto and AI are going to win together is that crypto stuff is very hard to use, right? If you remove the credit card stuff, it's very hard to use, generally speaking. There are things you get with traditional applications that you don't get with crypto. Agents don't have a problem with that. Agents can use it very easily.

I was surprised by how well agents were using Akash. It's remarkably different. I use Akash with agents—not only with agents. I don't deal with the command line directly, but we're able to build so much now, so fast. It's unbelievable.

Six months ago, or even three months ago, our mode was, “Focus, focus, focus.” Even though we had a million really good ideas, you had to stay focused on doing one thing, one thing only. But that has flipped now because the cost of failure is low. You can have an idea, prototype it quickly, go to market very quickly, and fail or succeed—you'll know very quickly.

The failure cost has gone down, but the opportunity cost has gone up. If you don't do it, someone else is going to do it.

Somebody else is.

Right, because you can produce this thing. The world has flipped now. What is that going to look like in terms of businesses and how they're exploring opportunities? For us, if you have an idea, we want to go to market as quickly as possible. Whether we fail, succeed, or proceed our way, instead of rejecting ideas, we're now a lot more open-minded to a lot more ideas. Incredible things are happening across the team.

All our engineers now use token-maxing, basically, and we measure their performance based on how many tokens they use.

Really?

You see the outcomes, but everybody's producing outcomes. There's a lot of outcomes, and that's very impressive. But if you're not using tokens efficiently, you no longer have a place in the company. We're very, very hardline on it.

If you ask me a question that you didn't ask Claude or AI before, that's another red flag on your thing.

That's hardcore.

Yeah, because I don't know how much you use it. You can connect using MCPs; you can connect every data source. We use Linear for our management. Connect that. We use HubSpot for our CRM, Google Analytics, a Postgres database, Metabase—we have so many tools that we use. You can connect all of them to Claude and just ask it questions.

What is our conversion rate? How is the conversion rate affecting our revenues? These are all business questions that you normally have to ask your data person to build your dashboard or whatever. That's no longer the case. You literally go and ask.

If you're a marketing person and you have a question about data, you go to Claude and ask Claude before you approach an engineer to pull the report for you. The amount of friction is so low in terms of getting data, and the amount of asymmetry is so little in terms of information.

There’s no excuse for you not to get the information that you need if you haven’t tried. Our bar has increased a lot now. For anybody who comes and works for us, you have to learn how to use these systems.

We’re also evolving our systems in a way that’s going to sound a little technical, but I think it’s important. What Brian at Coinbase allegedly is doing—having non-developers develop production code. Did you see that thing?

Yeah.

They fired a whole bunch of people. That’s highly dangerous because I don’t think AI is there yet in terms of having a non-developer just push production code. Non-developers can build apps easily now with AI, but to build a production-quality app takes a lot of effort.

I started asking the question: Why does it matter? Does it matter if you have good code quality? It turns out it does matter if your systems are built in a way that makes them brittle. But what if you rebuild this—

On them.

Yeah.

No, so what if you build your internal architectures to be more modular—

Yeah.

More fault-tolerant, in the sense of, “How do you build a gigantic application, like the ERP system we’re building, to connect all your diverse data sources and visualize all that stuff?” If you made individual modules independent, then even if they fail, they can fail independently without taking down the whole system.

Yeah.

So, if you modularize and box your applications, and you make them small applications, you can actually have non-engineers build your applications. You can. You just need to understand the failure surface. If you reduce the failure surface—because AI is really good for starting new projects and shipping them quickly, but it’s not so good at retrofitting into old projects.

Especially if an old project has more than 2,000 lines of code, AI goes really dumb. The bigger the context, right? So, what if you can create a system where you have very small contexts, smaller code bases, a small failure surface, very strong validation criteria, and very strong hypermodularity?

I think new architectures for software engineering are emerging, with these agents as the first users or first builders. Agent-first building. We’ve been developing all these things, and I’m just enjoying it because all this knowledge you gain over time—25 years of writing software—is coming back now.

All this modularity, all these service-oriented architectures, all these architectures that were lost a long time ago are coming back with these agents. It’s a lot of fun to be an engineer.

Microservices architecture.

Microservices. Remember that stuff? That thing is gone, but—

That’s what I used to do, bro. That’s what I did.

Right, right. There was a big hype about it, but now they went to monoliths because microservices are too hard to maintain. But you need microservices now because you want an individual service to fail instead of the whole system.

That’s so cool.

Exactly. So, it’s kind of fun to go back to those old concepts.

Well, yeah. We talked about a lot, man. Banks and I kind of align with you on what you said about non-developers being able to build things. We talk about it all the time—the way that changes your work professionally.

But we’ve got Mayne waiting in the back. He’s going to hop on with us in a second. Appreciate you coming on. This has been great.

Great. Seriously, you know what I’m saying? This has been great. It’s been awesome talking to you.

We’ve got to bring you back on in a couple of months and see how much stuff has changed.

Let’s do it.

Cool, bro.

Thanks, guys.

Yo, later.

Love, Greg. Take care.

That was sick. Oh, he’s back, baby.

What?

That was good. That was sick, bro. I learned a lot.

He’s smart.

What about Apple? He talked about the—did you see the genuine excitement and glee in my face when he said Apple?

Oh.

How do you get him to— You were surprised.

It’s like, “Holy [__], that was my answer. You stole my answer, bro.”

Yeah.

I mean, it’s a good take, though, bro. Apple has spent zero on building out all the models. They spent zero. They’re just like, “Nah, we’re good at this. We have distribution here. Somebody’s going to figure out that model [__]. Whenever they figure that [__] out, we’re just going to take the best one and pop that [__] in.”

Makes a lot of sense.

Crazy, bro. I agree. It’s a good spot.

Apple hasn’t caught as much attention with the AI trade. They’re at all-time highs, too, bro. All the stocks are at [__] all-time highs. Apple’s at all-time highs, Google’s at all-time highs, and Nvidia’s at [__] all-time highs. What is that feedback we’re getting? Is that his mic still? Production, can we swap Greg to Mayne?

What’s up? What’s up?

Mr. Number 6.

Yeah, you guys are crazy. That’s way too generous.

Man.

Too generous, bro.

No, you should be top 5.

Bro, and that picture you guys used—

Yo, see? You should be top 5. You made the [__] list, bro.

The picture you guys used for me for announcing the stream as well is a violation. I don’t know where you got that from. I think I only sent that picture to my wife. I’m like, “Where did these guys get this, bro?”

Wait, I want to see. I haven’t even seen the [__].

Look at my screen. I have it pulled up.

What the [__], bro?

Dude, the only thing I understood from that last segment is that Claude is reporting all of my [__] searches I’ve ever done.

That was a given, though, now.

Greg’s a gigabrain, bro. He’s a gigabrain.

That’s so over, dude. Oh my God.

Bro, that was enough thick, dense content for my [__] pathetic little mind to get through for the next segment.

Number 6 here is here to dumb it down. Don’t worry.

We love it. We love it. So, first things first, we didn’t really get into the list. How do you feel about the list? I want you and Z to really go back and forth on this and take our audience through it step by step, 1 through 25. Let’s run that.

I’d just like to clarify that I definitely should have made the top 5, by the way.

Z, pull up the [__].

I appreciate you, bro.

20. Guest: Mayne — a CT legend joins

Z, pull up the tweet on your thing so you can share your content with him, and you guys can go through it.

The tweet? Oh, yeah, I got you.

Yeah.

Let’s see. I’m going to take my 16th piss of the episode, and then we’ll—

Bro, you might need to go to the doctor, bro. It’s like 5 times every single episode.

Pure liquid coming out, just clear as ever. No, it’s actually thick, cloudy, dense, like yellow.

Did you say thick? You should type into Claude and see what’s wrong with you.

Bro, every time I take a piss, I’m in agonizing pain.

Oh my God. No, no, no.

They did say chlamydia is on the rise in Europe, bro. Have you been in Europe recently?

He got some [__], bro. We don’t know.

Oh my God.

Gonorrhea is at an all-time high in L.A.

All right, I’ll leave it to you guys. But, yeah, we did a top 25 of the CT general list. It was off the heels of the top 25 streamers list that’s been going around and popping off.

I think we did okay. I don’t think we did too bad on it. I know, Mayne, you’ve been on CT for a long time. Can you give the viewer just a little bit about you—how you got started with crypto and how you started on Crypto Twitter?

So, what’s crazy is the only person on this list who I think was on CT when I first got on was Cobie. I think Cobie is obviously the consensus No. 1. I know he doesn’t post as much as he used to. He’s just had so many legendary calls, and he’s been such a big part of the culture and just been the guy for such a long time.

But, yeah, I got on Crypto Twitter in April of 2014.

Damn.

I used to be CryptoMayne, and I thought I was pigeonholing myself to crypto, so I changed to TraderMayne.

I really like Gucci Mane. That’s why I made my name—TraderMayne, CryptoMayne at the time. I got into crypto as many people do. I had a friend who was telling me about it. He was like, “Yo, this is the thing.” This is back in 2012 or 2011. He was like, “This is the future of money.”

And I’m like, “Yeah, but you also bring me to multi-level marketing meetings every other week, so I’m not sure I trust your judgment.” But, sure enough, I was aware of it, and then I started buying some, using it to go on Silk Road, [__] like that, and gamble with.

And then it had that bull run to—I think it was $1,167. So, $1,167 was the all-time high in the 2013–14 cycle. I just remember being like, “Okay, this thing was dollars when he told me about it. Now it’s $1,000. Maybe there’s something here.”

And so, I caught the very tail end of that market and lost all of my money. I made a little bit very briefly, then gave it all back, and from there it’s like you’re bitten, you know what I mean? It’s like, “Okay, there’s got to be a way that this works.” And that’s what got me on my trading journey.

21. Mayne's origin story: crypto Twitter since 2014

I started with forex and paying for mentorships on how to do technical analysis and all this stuff. I had had that Twitter account the entire time, and I didn’t really use it. Then 2016–17 rolled around, and I’d been trading FX actively outside of my job. I’m just like, “I’m wondering if some of this shit I’m doing in these currency pairs will work in crypto.”

Yeah.

And it did. You can go find charts for me from 2014 to 2017 with order blocks and shit, all this shit that everyone’s using now, charting coins that don’t even exist anymore.

The rest is kind of history, man. You know how it goes, right? You just post. I don’t think anyone—I mean, maybe Banks aside, a little more intentional. I had no thought of growing a social media audience or—

Bro, me neither.

Nothing.

No, what do you mean? I arguably couldn’t have had the least expectation of what was to come. I made a YouTube video in 2008 before I even knew that you could make a single dollar on social media. Before anybody knew you could make money. Before clout was a thing. Before Instagram existed, you know?

It just kind of happens, you know? You’re just posting, and then after a while it’s like, “Oh, shit, I have a few thousand followers,” and then 10,000, and then it just kind of snowballed like crazy. And so the rest is history, man.

I’ve been known by many things online—the neck and all these different things. But really, I think I was one of the early TA guys for crypto, where it was like, “Hey, this stuff that works in traditional markets works in crypto as well.”

I had a huge Discord back in the day with many of the huge, massive accounts. If Hsaka was still active, he would be on this list. Loma’s on this list. Loma was in my Discord back in the day. These guys became beasts in their own right. It’s crazy to see what’s become of this industry and all that stuff since then.

Hsaka was number one on Friend.Tech, right? For a minute?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. I don’t know. He just disappeared, bro. Some people just—I’m sure you get this too all the time, Z—you’ll think of someone and you’re like, “What happened to that guy?” And then you’ll go to their page, and they haven’t tweeted in 5 years, and you’re like, “Damn.” Either they made it or—

Or they went bust and then jumped off a building, right?

Yeah, God forbid. In Minecraft.

In GTA. In GTA. In GTA.

There are a few people like that. A lot of the people that I learned from—there was this one guy, his name is SFS Crypto. He made a lot of indicators on TradingView. He has some of the best custom indicators on TradingView, and a lot of them are still up.

He was around in 2017, and he just stopped posting one day. But his indicators—I still use them, so it’s still kind of cool.

Just like, yeah, but I think the list is good, dude. I think Cobie consensus—

Yeah.

I think Threadguy is the rookie of the year, or the MIP—most improved. He’s the new up-and-coming guy. He’s the guy. So I love Threadguy. I think Flood is above me. The conviction on the HYPE trade—

Little recency bias still, maybe, and you’re being humble because you’re the fucking GOAT.

Flood’s been doing the thing for a long time, man. I used to be in the BitMEX trollbox with Flood, and someone would be talking shit and he’d be like, “Show me your fucking position, bro.”

Position.

Show me your money, bro. And you would just—

Flood’s easily in my top 3. I love the kid to death, and honestly, I love him on a personal level, too. We spent some time in St. Barts, and he’s 100% the reason—I’ll give him 80% of the reason—why I pretty much bought HYPE at the beginning of the year, which I asked both of you guys about.

Yeah, you know, I always ask Mayne, and I’ll always ask Z. I find myself pulling the trigger when you guys are all generally aligned.

The HYPE trade seemed obvious, right? But to do it with the size and level of conviction—and doubling down—that Flood did is something I think is beyond what most people think.

A lot of people are like, “Oh, dude, I have a bunch of spot HYPE.” This guy was like—he’s got a family office, he’s 80% HYPE, he’s got an options play on HYPE, he’s farming the airdrop on HYPE. He was on every possible avenue and way to be bullish on this asset class like I’ve never seen before.

I think it will go down as one of the greatest trades in crypto for a very long time. It’s just unbelievable.

Dude, this bro was already filthy fucking rich.

That’s why he’s 6.

It’s fucked up.

It’s disgusting, dude. It’s disgusting. But I think the list is good. At the end of the day, this kind of stuff is subjective.

Yeah.

But I’m not complaining about number 6. I’m not complaining at all.

22. Breaking down the list & the hype trade

If you had to make any changes, remove 3 people from this list and add 3.

Well, first of all, Z’s got to be in there.

Where’s Z going?

You. I got you in my top 5, for sure. For a couple of reasons: the Solana trade is equally epic, right? The meme-coin supercycle was somewhat of a supercycle, but the memes moved, man. We had a meme-coin cycle, and you were early to it.

Also, just being someone who has a large audience on Twitter—I’ve had a fraction of what you’ve experienced on the negative side this cycle—and it’s got to be like a Black Mirror episode for you, I’m sure, being like, “What the hell is going on, dude?”

We reference Black Mirror at least 3 times an episode, by the way.

Yeah, and I get it a little bit. I get the occasional death threat, and whatever. They’re like, “You’re a bald, fat piece of shit.” And I’m like, “Fat? Really? The other 2 things are probably true.”

But you were getting assaulted, and you just kept showing up, bro, and doing your thing. I’ve got a lot of respect for that. And I know you’re a good trader. That’s what I think got lost in the sauce a little bit with, “Oh, I just want Z to shill my ticker.”

I’m like, “Bro, this guy used to write these threads on CoinZempic, right? Not even on the main.” He went deep, with thoughtful thesis analysis, TA blended with FA. This guy cares, and he’s clearly smart.

And listen, I’m going to take an additional victory lap for my boy, because he’s incredibly well-mannered and humble, but I am not. Look at this tweet. We posted this tweet before the episode with all the clips attached.

I mean, brother, I guess this is a general question for you two: How do you feel about the show? But Z still got it, bro. You saw the timeline after episode 1. It was all, “No Bitcoin, no Solana, shit, whatever, whatever,” from the naysayers. Z went on to go in depth about his positions in Hyperliquid, VVV, and Zcash. I mean, bro, what’s even better than—

I think it might have been after episode 1, because you asked Z, “When did you get in?” You asked him when he got into SOL and when he got out. He’s like, “I bought it at a buck 50, and I sold it at $200-plus.” And I was like, “No, you fucking didn’t.” And he’s like, “Timestamp, timestamp.” There you go, bro. I posted it on the main channel, too.

And Beanie’s like, “Oh, my fault. My bad.” I’m going to keep the proof up.

Yeah. But that’s crypto Twitter, bro. You can just say things on the internet. You can make up anything about anyone at any time.

Black Mirror-esque. People will always err to the side of what’s going to engage the most with the audience, what’s going to farm the most likes and the most engagement. It’s this dopamine-shit thing that you see.

Have you ever seen an average person, like a mom or dad, go slightly viral on the internet? Have you ever seen that happen?

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

The way they react to it is always the same, and it’s very odd. It is very Black Mirror-esque. You’ll see them almost get a little bit manic about it.

They'll start tweeting more, and they'll start shitposting, you know what I mean? It's really weird.

It's like trying to hold on to sand, you know what I mean? It's fleeting. You get your 15 minutes, and to stay relevant for as long as Z has, there's more there than just meme coins and stuff. But there's more there.

Yeah, Crypto Twitter is, I think, probably the most toxic of the social media platforms.

I mean, without question. Yeah.

And then you combine that with crypto—

[Laughter]

It's just like—

We've created this fucking monster.

On top of it, we're stacking AI, too. It's fucking insane.

It's my cesspool, so I don't give a fuck, man. I'm fucking out of the sewer from here anyway. I'm not leaving.

Yeah, same way, bro. I know you talked a little bit about how, when you first started on Crypto Twitter, there was a lot more of a focus on TA and charts and all that. I feel like when I started out—I started in crypto around 2017, which is when I hopped on CT—the general vibe on crypto and Crypto Twitter was a lot more positive than it is now.

Even the people who had no idea about anything were like, “I know I don't know anything about anything. How can I learn? Who do I learn from? What do I look at?” Everybody was very free with sharing information and sharing their ideas. It didn't matter as much if you were wrong about stuff, because there were so many coins people were wrong on that went to fucking zero.

The first altcoin I bought was DigiByte and some other random shit like Patientory. Some other shit—

Sounds like it's going to zero.

DigiByte, bro. DigiByte on Bittrex was the first altcoin I ever bought.

23. Crypto Twitter then vs. now: the toxicity shift

I feel like now the general sentiment on Crypto Twitter is a lot more negative. I do take some of the responsibility for that. A lot of the meme-coin stuff was like, “Yeah, I knew Solana was going to do well.” Because I knew Solana was going to do well, I knew there were going to be things on-chain that did well. Given that those went to $80 billion the cycle before, I knew there were going to be some meme coins that did well.

But generally, I feel like meme coins did detract from the overall culture. It might have lowered the IQ of CT, because people are just like—

I think it's fair to say, also, misery loves company. Like we said, the stock market has outperformed crypto over the last 2 years. Crypto hasn't been—

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

Exactly. It hasn't been the most fun place to be.

It also became a little more mainstream, too, right? There are more people who felt like CT was a community back in the day. It felt like we were the homies. It was like, “Okay, I'm going to go, and I know this guy posts good stuff, and I'm going to do my research.”

There was scamming going on and shit, but it wasn't like everything got institutionalized. Even the grifting got institutionalized. You have VCs who are effectively ICO shillers from back in the day. They're going to scam you on this meme coin that they have a better entry on than you, and they're just going to sell it into oblivion. But now they're doing it in a suit behind the name of a fund.

I miss it, dude, because I used to learn a lot on Twitter. Now I'm just kind of like, I post, and I don't really look at anyone else's shit, to be honest with you, which is a little bit sad. I don't even post like I used to. I used to do infographics and all this other stuff. I do that stuff on YouTube now, because the YouTube audience is like, “Dude, we love these videos. Please don't stop. A 100% like-to-dislike ratio.”

Fix it? How?

Meanwhile, on Twitter, I post something and they're just like, “You're fucking bald, ugly, gay.” I'm like, “What?” [Laughter] “Oh, dude, you posted this trade 6 months ago, and I lost my ass on it. Fuck you. I'm going to kill you.” [Laughter] It's like, “Whoa, dude.”

It's just lost a bit of that. It's unfortunate. I don't know how we get back or if it's possible, but I agree it was different. It was better. I think a lot of the people—you know, we're also to blame. Not you and me necessarily, but we're part of it. The culture became more like, “You're only as good as your last trade.”

Yeah.

This guy was bearish, and it went up. Let's fucking nuke this guy. It's like, “Oh, this is an awesome dude who's contributed a lot of great stuff to the site, and he was short Bitcoin. God forbid it went up.” [Laughter] It's like, “That guy sucks.”

The average person is also really quick to forget who helped them with a good trade or helped them make money. No, neither am I, but the average person hits a good trade, they're a fucking genius. They miss a trade, and it's all your fault.

Any time someone talks shit to me, the first thing I do is click on our DMs and see if they've been in my DMs groveling, asking me for stuff, or if I've helped them.

Sometimes it's like, “Dude, I have a 50-message back-and-forth DM with you where you're asking me what an order block is. I have half a million followers, and I answered you. I took the time to do it, and now I post something you don't like and you're yelling at me.” It doesn't make any sense, but it is unfortunate.

I do think that on other platforms there's a little more of a, “If you don't like it, don't follow,” attitude. But on Twitter, anyone can say anything, right? Anyone can have a voice. The comment section on YouTube doesn't really work the same way.

Yeah. No, it's interesting. I'm grateful for it, bro. I learned a lot from you, and I learned a lot from the other people on CT in the early days. That's honestly how I taught myself how to trade, so I feel like we just have to brute-force it.

If you're putting out good content consistently, like you do—you put out great content all the time—the people who have a ton of followers are pretty consistent and transparent with the information they're putting out. I feel like it'll shift back in that direction. At least I hope so.

I think what Banks said is super accurate, too. We've kind of been the ugly stepchild for a minute now—basically a year. We've been getting our asses kicked by everything, bro. Everything is kicking our ass, man. It's really sad.

But that's why I think content like this, what you're doing and what we're trying to do, is so important. You guys know I'm no stranger to this sentiment or to pushing the agenda of more people creating content in this type of format. I've pilled both of you guys separately on doing more shit like this several different times over the course of meeting you guys.

I feel like I have such a unique relationship with crypto. Even the way that I came in—I came long after you guys—and what dragged me to the center of CT was NFTs. That clicked for me because of my history with gaming and Counter-Strike skins, and CryptoPunks really connected with me because of the history of it.

I got super pilled on it. Gary Vee called me, Logan Paul, MrBeast—you guys have all heard the story a million times. If I could sum up that NFT meta wave, that period of time, it was WAGMI. Remember? It was just WAGMI. We're all going to make it.

I remember being celebrated and championed, feeling super welcomed and embraced. I would make all these culture plays, go fucking ape into these mints, join these Discords, and get my own little dopamine high off all of it. But I don't know—I would never do that now. I would never go support anything. I'm just not doing shit for the culture, because the culture is so shitty.

Someone like you has a unique problem, and there are a few things. First of all, the WAGMI thing—I think Pump.fun is partly to blame. Shout-out to Elon. Was he number 25?

[Laughter]

He just barely made it on there.

Trenches, PvP, drilling charts—fuck it, slitting people's throats.

That, I think, has affected the “we're all going to make it” mentality. The trenches is such an appropriate name. Everyone fucking died in the trenches, bro. If you study the war, the trenches were the worst place to be. Barely anyone fucking survived.

But for you specifically, because you're mainstream coming to crypto, much like the other celebrities we've had come to crypto, they usually end up launching a coin and it's like, “Fuck you.” Initially, your intentions are good. The problem that everyone makes, in my opinion, from the celebrity side coming to crypto, is that if you attach yourself to a coin, you're going to get fucked, because the moment that coin doesn't go up, they're blaming you.

That’s just how it is. No matter what you did, you could never sell. It does not matter. It’s your fault.

You could take a six-figure loss on it.

Yeah, it’s your fault no matter what.

Yeah, you get attached to your money. You should just never attach your name to something so volatile and something that you have so little control over, bro.

Control over, bro.

Control over, yeah.

You have no control over the price of the token, and so—

Trump came in, dropped TRUMP, dropped MELANIA, and every fucking culture coin. That entire meta got sucked out and swept.

Yeah, it’s—yeah, what have you done for me lately? There are people who say, “Well, if FaZe Banks talks about my bags, that’s good for me. I’ll make money.” The moment my bags aren’t going up, it’s his fucking fault.

Yeah.

But that’s part of society in general, and that’s this victimhood mentality. No one can take responsibility for their own shit. Like, back in the day—

A negative hate farm will always be more likely to bang, just because of the way engagement works on Twitter. Twitter, obviously, is a naturally very negative place.

24. Pump.fun & the death of "WAGMI" culture

Look at this Oracle guy, bro. Everyone’s shitting on this guy because he’s down $30 million. I’m thinking, he has the ability to be down $30 million.

Bro—

[Laughter]

Yeah. His lifetime P&L is like $100 million or something. It’s crazy.

I’m like, wait a minute. We’re bagging this guy for probably taking profit on eight-figure positions? He’s up nine figures.

It’s just—

Yeah, but he’s at an all-time high and he’s short, dude. Fuck this guy.

It’s so detached, too. It really is very “Black Mirror”-esque. What kind of sick fucking human could look at somebody in person, to their face, who just lost $30 million and laugh at them or berate them?

That would be—but in real life, it wouldn’t happen. If somebody told me that face-to-face, I’d be like, “Oh my God, are you serious?”

In the same room as that guy, bro. That’s the beauty of Twitter. I try to tell these people, you have the ability to tweet at billionaires. There are anons with hundreds of millions of dollars that you could be getting information from. Instead, you’re shitting on people because you’re negative and you’re just butthurt. That’s why guys like Kobe and GCR—I think they don’t post anymore, because what’s the fucking point?

“Oh, GCR said ETH was going to $10,000.” It’s like, okay, maybe he was wrong on that call. The 90 other ones that he laid out for you were all bang-on, but he was bullish on ETH and it didn’t go up, so fuck him—he’s washed.

Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about markets right now? Do you have a strong opinion on crypto, or crypto versus stocks in general?

I look at the stock market and I don’t understand what’s going on at all. I’ll be completely frank with you. I shorted that move we had a few months ago down to around 6,300, or whatever it was, on the S&P. I thought I’d caught the top because it looked very similar to the prior top in 2022. I was like, “All right, this is finally it. The economy is now catching up, or the stock market is now going to catch up, to what the economy is actually doing,” which is fuck all.

Yeah.

I did not expect this V-bottom full reversal. I know that this is massively overweighted to a few companies, and it just seems like this incestuous clusterfuck of AI, data centers, chips, and blah, blah, blah. But as a trader, it’s in an uptrend. Anytime there’s a bullish opportunity, you just have to take it, and you do that until you’re wrong. You might get 5 trades in a row right, and then you long the top. It’s like, who cares? So that’s kind of where I’m at with equities: long and strong until I’m proven wrong. There are no signs of this slowing down yet.

Yeah.

Do I think that this is sustainable and so on? No. But I’m smart enough to know that I’m not smart enough to make that call. You know what I mean? I’m not trying to be Michael Burry, calling the top an infinite amount of times. You hear guys like Paul Tudor Jones being like, “This is the music slowing down. Whether it’s stopped or not, we’re in a scary place.” Buffett’s in more cash than ever before.

But who knows? We could go to 10,000 before that actual correction happens. Then let’s say we correct 40%, we’re at 6,000. We’re where we were a month ago. So I don’t really know.

As for crypto, I think we’re through the lion’s share of the downside, both in time and price. I think there’s going to be a bottom sometime in Q3 or Q4 of this year, assuming everything remains the same with the four-year cycle. It’s just a question of whether or not that’s a lower low to $50,000, or it’s a higher low. We go up to 90 here, and that higher low is in the 70s. So I want to be deployed in Bitcoin by the end of this year, 100%.

25. Markets: stocks make no sense, long & strong

Got you. Got you, got you, got you. Word. Yeah, bro, stocks are crazy. [Laughter]

Bro, I told my brother—my brother’s a dentist, so he’s just putting money in his retirement account every month, right? He’s been playing with it a little bit, and he’s watching guys on YouTube who are like, “Just buy these semiconductor companies.” I told him, “Dude, this thing’s getting overheated.” He’s up a lot on his retirement portfolio. I’m like, “Take some profit.”

I tell him to take profit, and we rip another 30%. He’s like, “What the fuck, dude?” I’m like, “Dude—

[Laughter]

—I can’t win. I don’t know what to say.”

Bro, it’s crazy.

It doesn’t make any sense to me. So I guess you just hold forever.

Yeah. This is fucking insane, this chart that I have up.

Oh, it’s not—this is fucking crazy.

The interesting thing that’s happening right now, which has never happened before, is how much AI is changing how people work and how much more efficient it has made things, at least on the software side, over the past year or so. That’s the interesting piece: there are revenues attached to it.

Honestly, what I think could possibly top stocks in the AI trade—we talked about it a little bit with the last guest, Greg. He was saying he thinks open-source AI is going to win. If you think open-source AI is going to win, which means the models that are much cheaper for everybody to access are as good as the closed-source models that Anthropic and OpenAI are putting out, then it’s like, okay, OpenAI and Anthropic are at $1 trillion valuations. They’re going to IPO, and they may IPO at around $2 trillion. SpaceX is going to IPO at around $2-something trillion.

If those IPOs happen at the same time as open-source AI is getting really, really good, and China starts ramping up its investments on the energy side, and all those things are happening, then it’s like, okay, are the tech companies as strong, or are their revenues as durable in that situation? That’s the one thing I can think of that could top the market.

I also think that how much the tech companies are spending on investment in AI is inflationary at the time. That’s affecting other inputs for other people.

Sure.

So that’s an interesting piece. But yeah, I don’t know. Like I said, if you’re a TA trader, you don’t really care. It’s an uptrend. You keep ripping it.

Just long, just long—

[Laughter]

It is kind of crazy. I never would have thought I would be longing the S&P 500 at 7,400—or 7,400 here—but I am. I remember COVID. I remember those numbers. It didn’t seem like that long ago.

But I mean, I think you’re also seeing America reindustrialize on the fly and become this AI superpower because it has to. Otherwise, you have no other choice. China wins. As a Canadian, bro, I’m still bullish on America.

I know a lot of people are like, “It’s the fall of the American Empire.” It’s like the fall of ancient Rome. I’m like, you know, the fall of ancient Rome took 200 years. Even if America’s done and topped, you’re going to be dead before it even matters.

So I’m still bullish on America, and I’m bullish on the most bullish chart of all time, which is the S&P 500 just going up and to the right over my lifetime. What else do you do?

Yeah. You talked a little about Canada versus the U.S. Have you been watching any of the NHL playoffs?

Of course, man. We’ve got 1 team left. You know, a Canadian team has not won the Stanley Cup since 1993.

Wait, for real? Since 1993?

1993.

Wait, isn’t it half and half between U.S. teams and Canadian teams? Or how does it—

But it’s like basketball. Back in the day, the Celtics and Lakers won all the championships. Back in the day, the Montreal Canadiens won all the fucking Stanley Cups. The Montreal Canadiens, which are the last team still in for Canada, last won a Cup in 1993. That’s the last Canadian team. Vancouver went to the Final in ’94, lost, and we rioted.

Calgary or Edmonton went to the final in 2006, and Vancouver went in 2011. We lost, we rioted. And then Edmonton lost the last 2 years to Florida, bro. Imagine losing to a place where it doesn’t even snow.

Wait, they lost back-to-back to Florida?

To Florida back-to-back, yeah.

Florida’s hockey team?

Florida has 2 hockey teams, bro: the Tampa Bay Lightning and the Florida Panthers.

Tampa Bay Lightning. I didn’t know about the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Yeah, and the Florida Panthers are out of Fort Lauderdale. But yeah, I’m cheering for the Canadiens, bro, because, you know, please. Yeah, we got the Polymarket Ls, dude. We’ve been taking Ls. We lost the World Series.

Yeah.

We’re losing in the NHL.

Yeah.

We lost the gold medal game in hockey. We’re not the 51st state, like all the boomers won’t allow it.

That game—

That was nasty, though. But yeah, I’m on Montreal. I’m on Montreal heavy. Carolina is a better team, but Montreal is scrappy.

They actually play tonight, right? We got the—

They play, I think, in 2 hours or something like that.

So we’re going to ride with Mayne and trade Montreal, yeah?

26. Sports: NHL, Wembanyama & Polymarket strategy

At 8, Montreal is good value. Again, my favorite part about Polymarket is the market part of it. I bet on the Spurs early on in the playoffs because everyone had OKC winning. When the Spurs went up 1–0 in the Western Conference Final, I cashed out some of my position. So even though I had the Spurs to win the championship, I’m able to make money because I’m basically in profit on that trade.

Can we talk to you? We have that, too. We have the same one. We took the Spurs to win because when Tristan was on, he was like, “Yo, it’s either going to be the Spurs or it’s going to be OKC. It’s not going to be the East. It’s going to be one of those 2.” So we actually also have the Spurs—

From 17.

Yeah, we’re in the Spurs from 22%, and now it’s at 31%.

Bro, let’s just ride with Wemby, bro.

Yeah, I was about to say, so we just added—so you doubled down? He’s a freak.

Well, yeah, they lost last night, bro, and he had an off game.

Yeah, I mean, he’s been playing out of his mind. He’s playing like he has a chip on his shoulder, too. He’s actually mad.

No, no, what is it?

They played in a U18 kind of international tournament, and Wemby and Chet are both 7-footers, so they get compared. Wemby fouled out of the championship game that they lost to America, and Chet won the MVP with 11 points. Meanwhile, Wemby fouled out with around 25, 10, and 10. You can just see it—he’s been angry. Chet won the chip last year, and everyone’s hyping him up. Wemby was training with Shaolin monks, going all sorts of crazy shit, bro. I don’t know. I like Wemby a lot. I think he’s going to be the next—

I’ve seen some crazy takes, like “best basketball player of all time” and shit.

Let’s not disrespect my GOAT, LeBron. LeBron Raymone James is here, but he’s out there. I think he could be an all-time great, which is crazy to say about a guy who’s 20.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s been a great series. I think it’s a great series, honestly.

How about your Knicks, bro?

Bro, I’m Sixers, bro.

Why does everybody think that?

Because they live in New York.

We’re a New York show.

That game was insane, by the way. That was—

That was an unbelievable comeback. It was basically just Brunson cooking James Harden one-on-one for 10 minutes straight.

Yeah, I think—

I think they’re going to take the chip. The CEO of Polymarket was courtside, and I was, in real time, swiping up. That had to have been one of the best games to—

So, you know, we would be at Miami Heat games. The Heat are down, and we’re like, “Now’s the time to ape.” That’s when it’s the most fun, you know what I mean? The game’s happening, the other team goes on a 10–0 run, and they’re like, “Okay.”

I do think it’s an advantage of Polymarket versus the traditional ways to trade because you can get in and out of positions a lot easier live. That is the one differentiator, which I think is cool.

We talked about a FaZe deal with Polymarket a year and a half ago with the guys. One of the running concepts that I had was live trading courtside.

Yeah, it’s going to be a good show.

It’s also just viral content.

If you’re listening, I’m down to start that idea again.

Yes, sir.

With these 3 guys right here. Just let me know where to go.

Let’s go.

Shayne, get us tickets courtside. We’ll sit down with laptops and trade all the fun. What’s the new house called? Whatever they’re called.

We’ll rig it and take both sides.

So, we went to—

See, this guy’s a natural for CT, man. You long and short, and then you only post the winner.

Exactly.

Wow.

Exactly.

Wow.

101, man.

Yeah.

But look, I know we talked about the growth of CT a lot. I know you started on CT as a trader, but now you’re a builder as well. I know you’re a founder. Can you talk a little about your business, Breakout, and how that’s been—trading and building, and your insights there? I know you work with Kraken, right?

Yeah, Kraken acquired us in September.

Yeah.

And, dude, honestly, it’s so much more fun—

Really?

—than trading, or at least trading lately, I guess. I used to find trading very exciting because I was learning, there was a lot going on, and I felt like we were in this cool new space that was growing. I feel like lately my trading’s very boring. I don’t know if you get that vibe, but the trades that I take that do well are not exciting, crazy, sexy trades. It’s just bread and butter: “This is what’s going to happen.” I took a trade on HYPE last week, and I’m like, “Yeah, this is my bread-and-butter setup. Take the trade.”

Yeah.

Obviously, it’s nice when it works out, but good trading—legit trading—is quite boring. It’s systematic, it’s process-oriented, and after you do it for so many years, you kind of lose the luster a little bit. You know what I mean? I used to trade a lot more. Now I’m much more high-time-frame, way fewer assets. So when the opportunity came for Breakout, I approached my business partner, Alex, who you know, and I saw this proliferation of prop firms going on. To me, it was like, “Okay, this is a tool that exists for traders that should exist for crypto.” It was as simple as that. This is not reinventing the wheel; it’s bringing this wheel over to our industry.

Yeah.

We launched it, and we couldn’t have timed it better. We launched the business when Bitcoin was at $25,000, and we sold it when it hit $125,000.

Nice.

So we kind of caught the entire bull run—

[laughter]

27. Building Breakout & selling to Kraken

—and all the things in between. It’s just a different experience. I know you’re dealing with Bullpen Finance, but having employees and having your day not determined or driven by your P&L—it’s just different. Different things are motivating you, different challenges, different problems. Getting to work with awesome people like CryptoCred and Abe Trades—my whole founding team is cracked. They’re all awesome people, and they’re my friends.

It was just sick. Getting acquired by Kraken is funny. I wrote down in my little diary, my little gay journal, that I was going to sell this business to a centralized exchange because I was like, “This is the perfect add-on business for a centralized exchange. You have spot, perps, options, prop.” It just kind of worked out that way.

Shout-out to the Alchemist, my boy, for helping me get that connection with Kraken. We went there, we pitched, and they offered to buy the company basically the same day. It was crazy.

Nice.

But we’re still involved. That’s what I like about it, too. They didn’t want to change what we were doing and say, “Hey, now we own this, we’re going to blow it up and make it ours.” We’re still Breakout. I’m still working on the business every day. We just launched our new terminal, and we have some other really exciting stuff I can’t leak quite yet that we’re going to be coming with in the next couple of weeks here. It’s just been a fun new challenge.

The idea that this came from me making a random Twitter account, and all the stuff that’s happened since then—the ultimate thing being that I sold a company for a crazy sum of money to a soon-to-be publicly traded company—is fully nuts.

Sick. Brother, you deserve it. If there’s anybody that I’ve met in CT and through this whole experience that I feel deserves it, it’s you.

You put in the time, you put in the effort. You provided a ton of value, and you're a great guy.

Thank you, bro. I appreciate that.

Appreciate you coming on. I feel like this needs to be a regular occurrence, right?

Anytime, man. I'd love to come on here and chop up some charts sometime. Next time you have me on with many heavy guests, we could do a chart half-hour or something and just rip through the big ones. That'd be fun.

The last time I hopped in you guys' chat, I told you guys to buy Zcash. [laughter]

Dude, one guest real quick before I go. I'm going to get you guys on here. I have a friend. This is my Indian quant, and I say this with the utmost level of respect. This is one of those guys who's been on every leaderboard. You don't know who he is, but he's making ungodly sums of money. FTX, every exchange, every trading—he's on the leaderboard, okay?

This guy was on Solana from pennies. He's god-tier behind the scenes, and he's cooking up something cool that I think will be very interesting to talk about when it goes live. The company's called Rails, if you want to look into it already, but when it's ready with the next thing that they're doing, he would be a very fun person to interview.

First of all, he's a god-tier, GCR-level trader, in my opinion. He'll just message me. He'll be like, “Zcash.” That's it. And it's at, like, 100. I'm like, “What do you mean? Where are you wrong? Stop sizing.” And he's like, “I bought a gross eight-figure amount.” Then it triples. I'm like, “It must be topping here.” He's like, “Doubling down.” Then he's like, “Closing here,” and it's the peak of the top.

He would be a fun guy to chat with because he's a killer on the trading side, and he's doing some really cool stuff on the infrastructure side behind a lot of the companies you see in TradFi coming to crypto. He's literally building the rails for these companies to work with crypto now. He would be super fun to talk to.

Fire. No, definitely want to have him on. He sounds like a chat. There are so many of those low-key people that you would never know about who are just crushing it out of nowhere.

Bro, I met this guy in person and I'm just like— [laughter]

I have no idea what you're—

What? He's like, “Dude, I'm a big fan of you.” I was like, “Dude, I'm a fan of you. What are you talking about? What's your Twitter?” He's like, “I don't have one.” [laughter]

He's got an egg Twitter with 3 followers, and he follows me, you, and Flood. It's insane, dude. It's insane. But gigachad, there are so many of them. Be nicer to the people on Twitter. You never know who has 9 figures and could be giving you some actually good intel.

It's true. It's definitely true, bro.

It's true. Good piece of advice.

28. Bullpen trading comp + the NEAR / AI thesis

But, man, we talked a little bit about Bullpen. We're actually doing a competition around trading. I don't know how much free time you have, but we'd love to have you involved with it. We just started it today, but you can still join. We still have an open spot. We'd love to have you on if you want to hop in.

Is it one of those where I join, take 0 trades, and end up winning? [laughter]

Because everyone blows—

No, I'm not going to be negative, so you're not going to win if I'm in it.

Let's go. Okay, I'll finish top 6. I have to rank well.

Okay, cool.

Oh, yeah. I'm winning or coming in dead last. I'm going to keep it a buck.

Yeah, Banks is also joining.

Bro, it's the only way to do it. The only way to do it. The prize pool is 100 Gs, bro.

Yeah, exactly. 100 Gs.

That's some money. That's some money. I always hear people say, “I don't want to do these trading competitions.” Dude, these are like airdrops, bro. It's money on the floor. You can get lucky, hit 1 trade, and end up winning the thing.

Exactly. Exactly.

That's what I'm banking on, baby. [laughter]

Hell yeah.

Let's see. Let's see. Cool, man. Appreciate you coming on. We definitely want to have you on again.

Anytime, boys.

We need to link up soon, bro. We still need to hit a hockey game. We need to go to a hockey game. I know we said it multiple times, but we need to go to one. How many games are left in the Montreal series? Is it best of 7?

Where is Game 7? Where is Game 7? Let's be real. When are we—

It'll be in Carolina, but a game in Montreal's barn, in their arena, will be absolutely nuts. The French Canadians are insane, bro.

Bro, we need to do that. That'd be live. That would actually be sick.

Is there a game by chance on a Thursday? It'd be kind of sick if we did a live show with me on ice.

There probably is. Game 3 or 4 is next Thursday, I wouldn't be surprised.

That'd be crazy. That'd be crazy. We'll see if it lines up. I wouldn't be opposed to it. That'd be cool.

I'll catch a flight. You let me know.

Cool.

All right, fellas. Appreciate the time, y'all.

Man, you're the GOAT, brother.

Later, brother.

Later.

The 6. Love.

The 6.

Dude, he's the GOAT, man. He's the best. He's the best.

Flood dropped out. He hates us. [laughter]

Bro, he hypes us up too much, bro. He doesn't care about us.

Yeah, he's too rich.

He's too rich, bro.

He's too rich. He's too busy eating caviar and sleeping with women on gold sheets.

Literally, he's doing anything right now. Literally anything.

Bro doesn't even have a whip anymore. He just has 10 people who carry him everywhere he goes. [laughter]

Like a king with the chairs.

King Flood.

We'll bring him on next week. Yeah, he had to drop out. We were going to bring Flood on and chop it up for 20 or 30 minutes about Hyperliquid—kind of celebrate that and do a final victory lap. I don't know, man. I feel like we got through most of what we wanted to talk about.

Yeah, we covered a lot of stuff. We had some good guests, too. That was good.

Bro, I'm feeling good about this show, man. And I'm feeling love, too. Even the CT list—we expected a mixed response on that. [laughter] No, the replies were good. It's engaging. I think CT could use more of this.

I don't know. I think they'll appreciate it once they see that it's actually genuine, which I don't think they believed at the beginning. But the more times we do it, the more they're believing, “Oh, they're actually serious. They're actually trying to—”

But I know, by the way, we talked a lot about this, and this is interesting behind the scenes. We've been building and working on this since 2025, right?

Yep.

5, 6, 7 months, almost.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

I know a huge part of why we ultimately both, for our own separate reasons, took the leap and decided to hard-commit—we've committed so much time, effort, energy, resources, and money to this and to this vision. And we've done real, honest work on it.

I know a huge part of it was the constant effort to be represented properly, not be misconstrued or misrepresented. I feel like it's so much easier for people to see what your intentions are and what you actually believe as it leaves your mouth, as opposed to words on a screen. It does a better job of, 1, humanizing us, but I also think, 2, if you spend enough time talking to me—or at least in my experience, talking to you—it's really clear and obvious that you guys are here for the right reasons, whatever that means.

29. Wrap-up: building the community & what's next

Yeah, trying to have a positive impact. But, yeah, I think it's good, bro. I think it's good. I always see, with the people who have followed me for a longer period of time, that you can see the difference between those people and the people who are more recently following.

I mean, I’m really proud of this. Again, this is you, but I think it’s such a good omen for things to come. I feel like there are going to be many more moments like this. And again, it’s just a matter of fact. I’ll say it one more time: if you’ve been following and actually listening, especially to what my man Z has been talking about, you know, they used the old logo. What did Michael say? [laughter] I knew he was going to say that because I’m OCD, and I’m like—

They thought they were going to sneak it by you. No, sir.

By the way, they also tried to hoe you with the first graphic. It said 20%. They actually went live.

Right? I looked at that twice. I was like, “Wait, bro, there’s no way. It’s literally impossible. I can do mental math. There’s no way.”

By the way, outperforming the general consensus—20% in 3 weeks is great. That’s an absolute home run, but 83% is 83%.

Yeah, that shit’s hard.

In crypto?

That’s hard.

We’re not going anywhere. We’re super proud of what we’re building here. It’s really up only, honestly, as far as the show’s concerned. I woke up really excited for this today. I’m enjoying this. It feels good. We should figure out where we could curate a chat. Should we make a Telegram around this, or—

I think we have that Discord. We just got to post more in the Discord, because we have the Market Bubble Discord.

But let’s be honest: are we going to sit in a Discord, or are we going to train ourselves to be active in a Discord? We’re on Telegram. I don’t know. We’ll talk about this off-camera, maybe. Even people who are interested in the show and having direct access and lines to us—we could do some sort of Telegram channel. I don’t know. But I want to talk to you guys. I want to have these conversations throughout the course of the week.

Mm-hmm.

And Sal has an agent sitting in there that’s reading everything. Even on busy days, we can pop in and ask the agent, “Yo, what are the most interesting things that were talked about in this chat?” We want to build this show with you guys. We want to start bringing some of you guys up to speak and engage that way. We have a ton of interesting ideas on how to engage with the community and really make this a communal thing that we’re building with you guys.

We talked a little bit about the AI co-host. There are an infinite number of things that we can do with this show, with this IP, with us as hosts, with the resources that we have personally and have been afforded to us because of things like this. We’re open. This is brand new. Episode 4, bro.

Episode 4.

What’s 40 going to look like? What’s 400 going to look like?

I’m excited, bro.

I think we hit everything we wanted to talk about.

We did it today, brother. We did it today. No, that’s it. I feel good. I feel great. I’m looking forward to next Thursday. Let’s get some banger guests. Let’s get the community more involved. Let’s start to really—

Bro, we have to get War on, bro. We have to.

Yeah, I know we do. We do. Was he ready to go next week, or is it the following?

They said the 1st week of June he’s down.

So, 2 more shows.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we—

We need the smart AI guys to come on, bro. I learned a lot from Greg. That’s cool.

A couple of the boys I lived with last year were texting the group chat while we were live, saying that that was their favorite guest. That was their favorite segment of the show, and they’ve been religiously watching the show.

Nice. Nice. That’s good input. That’s good feedback.

Yeah, it’s cool. I feel like we talked about production and the dense, thick material you guys were talking about initially. It was obviously a little bit hard for me to find a place to speak on all that, but I feel like by the middle and the end, it was pretty cool.

I mean, I think even just letting him talk and listening to him talk is good, because a lot of the time he could go on and talk about certain things. I think when we have guests who are experts in certain fields, we don’t really have to say that much.

We just got to lay them up with questions and let them talk.

Facts.

I think it was good. Yeah.

All right, cool. I’ll be talking to him after. Without further ado, I just want to say thank you guys so much. When in doubt, invest in yourself, and we are live every Thursday at 1:00 p.m. PST on twitch.tv/faze banks as well as live on Twitter. What the fuck was that? Z’s live, Z’s live on Twitter. Obviously, on his Twitter, we’re live on the Market Bubble Twitter, and yeah, we’ll see you guys next week.