Why Gamers Make the Best Traders | Market Bubble #11
AnsemFaZe BanksJesse PollakLucasGoUp
- Ansem is standing by his “stone-cold bottom” call—Bitcoin around $58.7K and Solana around $69—arguing the Saylor overhang is largely priced in. He said MicroStrategy raised cash, has more than 20 months of runway, and sold about $200M of Bitcoin last week, with price higher afterward. His setup is a divergence between poor CT sentiment and rising institutional and on-chain activity; BTC above $80K or SOL above $100 would likely bring momentum traders back.
- The media thesis is trading as entertainment and education. Ansem argues finance streams can overtake entertainment streams because traders who turned $1K–$10K into millions can teach the process publicly. He names Cupsy, Orangey, Scented, Keiny, Sceptic, Nyro, and Devices as Fortnite pros who became successful traders. A live query cited 1.5–2B daily gamers versus 10–30M daily crypto traders.
- Jesse Pollak says Base’s builders bet was right, while the social bet “wasn’t there,” prompting a 2026 pivot toward trading, payments, and agents. The Base app moved back to Coinbase under Kobe Jordan, while Jesse refocused on the chain. He cited Base-powered lending, roughly $2B of Bitcoin moved into the product, about 7% USDC lending yield, and roughly 90% of x402 payments settling on Base.
- Ansem’s coin thesis combines memecoin speculation with creator influence. He described it as an attempt to let people speculate on a creator’s influence, with a mission of becoming a major on-chain onboarding event. The creator economy was discussed as potentially exceeding $2T by 2035. The show also announced a $10K Pump.fun art bounty and a separate Market Bubble commercial bounty.
- Buybacks are presented as signals of trust and social alignment rather than guaranteed mechanical price support. Ansem compared Hyperliquid’s roughly $800M annualized revenue and $65B FDV with Pump.fun’s roughly $440M and $1.4B FDV, attributing much of the gap to user trust and alignment. Pump.fun has bought and burned about $400M of its token while the chart remains down roughly 80%.
- The AI concern was a roughly $0.50-per-million-token Chinese open-source price versus about $56 from Anthropic. The hosts called this a non-consensus risk to AI valuations and said the models are not remotely 1,000 times better. They also argued Anthropic is losing cultural momentum after doomer-focused messaging, weaker perceived efficiency, and an ad they believed closely resembled a Polymarket campaign.
- Hyperliquid was framed as a venue for pre-IPO price discovery. CXMT, described as a Chinese counterpart to Micron, was discussed at a planned IPO valuation near $80B and $1.28 per share, while its Hyperliquid market traded around $6.92. The hosts argued that allowing ordinary traders to access such markets earlier is one of crypto’s advantages.
- Lucas described Jito’s path from Solana infrastructure to the JitoX consumer terminal. Jito once made more than $1M per day for a week during the January 2025 Trump/Melania memecoin activity, but Lucas said current revenue is only a few thousand dollars per week. He described the 2023 airdrop to roughly 90,000 wallets as deliberate retail stimulus and said, conditionally, that most new JitoX revenue could eventually support a JTO buy-and-burn.
1. Ansem’s coin thesis: speculate on influence, not just memes
- The article’s core claim, read aloud: memecoins attract retail through “deeply passionate communities, but have failed to produce sustained activity post peak attention,” while creators produce sustained revenue “around diehard communities of fans” with no way to speculate directly on their influence. Ansem’s coin is presented as “the first real attempt at combining these two distinctly different things,” with a mission to become the largest singular on-chain onboarding event in crypto history.
- The sizing that stuck with Banks: the creator economy could exceed $2T by 2035, roughly comparable to the crypto market’s current size. Ansem said MrBeast made about $900M last year from his businesses and has more than 50M followers; Banks said the YouTube figure may be closer to 500M. The point was that followers do not receive upside from a creator’s influence.
- Attached activation: Ansem proposed a $10K Pump.fun bounty, with $1K to each of ten winners, for IRL Ansem and Black Bull artwork. It was expected to run for about two weeks alongside the extended Market Bubble commercial contest.
2. The bottom call, mechanically defended
- Ansem’s structure case: Bitcoin retested its 2021 all-time-high zone around $58K–$60K plus a major 2024 consolidation—“a really crucial level and sentiment bottom”—after Saylor-related fear drove price from roughly $75K to $60K. He said MicroStrategy raised cash through share sales, had more than 20 months of runway, and had sold what he thought was about $200M of Bitcoin the prior week, with price higher afterward.
- The flow argument: he sees cash-heavy TradFi buyers allocating toward BTC, ETH, and SOL while Hyperliquid has outperformed the majors. Many on-chain metrics recently hit all-time highs, and Lighter and Robinhood announced a partnership in which Lighter would serve as the perp platform for Robinhood users outside the U.S. Ansem’s broader signal is poor CT sentiment alongside institutional focus.
3. Rhino’s pushback—and why Ansem is front-running confirmation
- Banks surfaces Rhino’s counter: “we all know we ain’t entering no damn crypto bull market right now.” Ansem agrees that many strong traders wait for price to confirm momentum, and says he has been predicting the bottom before it is clear that the bottom is in.
- His confirmation levels were roughly SOL above $100 and Bitcoin above $80K, at which point traders currently fading the call might flip for a momentum or swing trade.
- Ansem also said he had called the Micron top weeks earlier and that it was down around 30% from its highs. He sees memory-stock gains as possible fuel for crypto rotation, while four-year-cycle traders remain sidelined expecting a Q4 bottom. His conclusion: consensus that the market has not bottomed can create asymmetric positioning.
4. The McGregor fight: “debatably worse than FTX”
- The figures discussed were more than $500M wagered in total, with roughly 90% of the money on McGregor. Banks compared the retail exposure with Trump, Melania, Libra, and possibly FTX, saying FTX did not hit retail in the same way. At roughly 3-to-1 odds, the hosts estimated that sportsbooks could have lost about $1.2B if McGregor had won.
- An analyst identified as Josh on air alleged that McGregor’s team told Dana White earlier in the week about a knee injury, that White said “the show must go on, no refunds,” and that insiders became aware before the line moved. These were presented as allegations and speculation, not established facts.
- McGregor’s own post said he would receive scan results and that “the fight should be a no contest and all bets returned.” Banks viewed that as suggestive; Ansem said that if the injury and UFC-knowledge allegations were true, it would be a full-blown scam.
5. Trading streams are the onboarding funnel nobody has built
- Ansem’s media call: finance streams could overtake entertainment streams because a streamer who can entertain while teaching people to trade is unusual and difficult to replicate. He pointed to trench traders who turned $1K or $10K into millions on Solana.
- The Rowdy example was an undoxxed trader whose come-up was buried in tweets. Banks argued that a documented live arc from $10K to $10M could make someone one of the most popular creators on the planet.
- The unicorn framing is that content skill and trading skill usually do not overlap. Banks compared it with Tfue: elite game skill plus mainstream entertainment ability. His tweet read, in part, that there is “infinite zoomer brain-rot slop” but not enough streams from self-made millionaires who learned to trade with $1K, a phone, a laptop, and an internet connection. Banks called Market Bubble “the long,” with the show’s thesis summarized as “watch and earn.”
- A market-structure aside: there may be more products and sponsors than creators. Banks and Ansem said there are only roughly four or five people consistently making crypto content that reaches notable numbers.
6. Crypto versus gambling: the same dopamine, but scalable skill
- Banks’s contrast: casinos and gambling are negative-EV by design, and the longer someone gambles, the more likely they are to lose money.
- Ansem said crypto activates many of the same psychological mechanisms as gambling, but with a skill component that can scale and potentially create value. He emphasized that there are many losers and that turning $1K into $1M is rare, while arguing that the possibility is under-discussed.
7. Why social tokens failed, and what “investing in people” should look like
- Ansem’s post-mortem on FTE/Friend.tech-style social speculation: it allowed people to speculate on individuals through keys and a bonding curve, but a 5% buy-and-sell fee and increasingly aggressive curve made participation prohibitively expensive. A later expansion to rooms diluted the original idea.
- He said Zora made a related mistake by allowing speculation on every piece of content. His preferred structure is not many-to-many speculation, but one token attached to a larger entity with many ways to attribute value to that token—“one to many.”
- He also referenced an article by an unidentified writer, referred to in the conversation as “C,” arguing that trust and value associated with people may become tradable.
- Banks’s endgame framing: social speculation is “not really a matter of if but more a matter of who and when.” He said Polymarket may be closest to cracking it. The example was imagining LeBron James as a market at age 16 or 17 and later saying, “I invested in LeBron James when he was 16.”
8. Gamifying trading: the Dogecoin buyer who will never buy a stock
- Ansem’s Dogecoin observation: Dogecoin reached roughly $88B because some buyers who would never buy stocks could relate to the meme, find it funny, and invest with friends. He thinks the size of that cohort is discounted.
- His structural comparison: Instagram has roughly 3B users, while only about 30M people own Meta stock. The people generating value for the network usually do not participate in its financial upside.
- Ansem argued that giving users upside in the networks they make valuable could change the social-media model, with memes as one possible mechanism. He agreed heavily with a proposal for a new Solana social trading app or “Pump.fun drip.”
- The Duolingo-for-trading idea came from Banks. The Instagram concept—tagging products in posts and paying the person who drives a sale—came from Ansem. He described a user such as “Jose down the street” earning from a shovel recommendation in an Instagram post.
9. The gamer-to-trader pipeline, quantified
- Ansem named Cupsy, Orangey, Scented, Keiny, Sceptic, Nyro, and Devices as former Fortnite pros who later traded successfully at a high level. His conclusion was that trading is “by far the world’s greatest MMORPG”: it is skill-based, requires picking spots, and pits participants against one another.
- The live Venice AI query first cited 3.5B people who play video games and roughly 1.5–2B daily players. The final figures were 10–30M daily crypto traders versus 1.5–2B daily gamers—about 100 times as many regular gamers.
- Banks connected this to Robinhood, saying its roughly $100B value comes partly from making retail trading easy. The opportunity, in his view, is to make trading even easier and more fun.
10. Jesse Pollak: one right bet, one bet that wasn’t there, one pivot
- Jesse said that through 2024 and 2025 Base made two bets: one on builders and one on social, creators, content, messaging, and tokenization. He said the builders bet was “100% right,” with builders driving adoption through perpetuals, prediction markets, and stablecoins. The social bet “wasn’t there,” and he later described it as possibly a wrong or bad bet rather than something to abandon forever.
- At the beginning of 2026, Base refocused the app on trading and the chain on trading, payments, and agents—“upgrading the financial system.”
- The Base app moved back to Coinbase under Kobe Jordan, freeing Jesse to focus on the chain. Banks noted that CT’s reaction to Kobe’s appointment was unusually and overwhelmingly positive.
11. “When you’re just eating shit all day, you put your head down and build”
- Jesse said that spending two years on one good bet and one possibly bad bet made the pivot difficult. He described getting “punched in the face” by people who felt Base had let them down, then responding by writing code again and spending more time with customers and builders.
- His origin story is an argument against abandoning large bets: Coinbase shut down his team after a year of failure, but he asked for one more chance. He and others worked nights and weekends on Base while few people took it seriously.
- Jesse now describes Base as one of the world’s largest markets for spot Ethereum and Bitcoin, one of the largest stablecoin payment rails, and the biggest place for agentic transactions on-chain. His lesson: keep taking big bets, keep showing up, and keep building through the bad periods.
12. The DeFi mullet is quietly expanding Coinbase
- Coinbase’s 2021–23 in-app Web3 section confused customers because it felt like a separate product. The company shut it down in late 2023 or early 2024 and instead integrated Base-powered financial infrastructure directly into the Coinbase app—the “DeFi mullet.”
- Jesse’s example was borrowing dollars against Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, and other Coinbase-held crypto at rates lower than credit cards, payday loans, and many consumer loans. The product is built on Base with Morpho, USDC, and Coinbase-wrapped Bitcoin. He said roughly $2B of Bitcoin had moved into it over the previous year and a half.
- In response to claims that Base had failed, Jesse said Base had enabled Coinbase to build hundreds of millions of dollars of new business lines that would not otherwise exist. He also said Coinbase offered roughly 7% on a USDC lending product and that, behind Ethereum, Base had the largest borrow-and-lend markets in crypto.
13. Two front doors on purpose—and x402’s trajectory
- Jesse’s explanation for Coinbase and the Base app existing together: “the world deserves a self-custodial, no-KYC, globally available product for your money.” He said users can sign up with an email in about ten seconds and access borrowing, lending, payments, and trading from many countries.
- On agentic payments, Jesse said roughly 90% of x402 payments settle on Base and that the system had processed about $50M, while cautioning that some earlier volume came from memecoin creation and farming.
- His preferred read excludes that speculative early phase and looks at merchants exposing endpoints, actual spending, and total volume, which he said are “cranking up and to the right.” He also stressed that the total remains small.
14. Why Venice chose Base—and tokenized inference
- Jesse identified three reasons builders such as Eric Voorhees chose Base: a fast, scalable, low-cost EVM; an ecosystem of builders working on durable products; and the trust, legitimacy, and seriousness associated with Coinbase and Base.
- He praised Venice for continuing to build through post-token-launch FUD and called it the best brand in crypto for AI.
- Jesse said Venice lets users buy DIEM, a token that provides $1 of inference per day. Surplus lets users sell tokenized inference at a discount, while Proxy Studio—described as having a checkered past but being a real builder—was developing wrapped, staked DIEM that could be used to generate yield through the surplus market.
- Jesse called this an early intersection of AI, markets, and crypto.
15. Coinbase is not explicitly building an everything app—it is a bet factory
- Asked whether Coinbase’s end state resembles an everything app such as X or Robinhood, Jesse returned to Coinbase’s mission of increasing economic freedom globally.
- He described a culture in which Brian Armstrong makes room for people to take bets and iterate repeatedly. The Coinbase Developer Platform spent years struggling before becoming a significant stablecoin payments API business. Jesse contrasted that persistence with the social bet, where the company may have iterated too long without learning the lesson quickly enough.
- Jesse said he had never experienced the freedom and entrepreneurial energy he found in his role at Base.
16. “People are going to trade culture”—and Kobe’s authenticity edit
- Responding to jokes about Brian Armstrong being too old for memecoins, Jesse said memes are culture and that people will trade culture just as they trade Bitcoin, oil, and prediction markets. He acknowledged that it can be harder for older people to understand.
- On younger traders, Jesse admitted that many had told him he was wrong the previous year and had been right. He said he had been too locked into a vision that was too far out.
- During the Base firestorm, Jesse drafted several polished responses until Kobe Jordan told him to say what was authentic to him. Jesse wrote the eventual post around 10:30 p.m. Tuesday, had Kobe and one other person review it, and published it.
17. Creators’ raw deal: parked, not abandoned
- Jesse has not abandoned the social thesis. He said that, over the next decade, crypto could upgrade social in the same way it upgraded finance. Creators currently make the content while centralized platforms monetize it and return only a small cut.
- His position is that Base will focus on upgrading finance first and return to social afterward. He responded to Ansem’s creator-coin bet by asking whether Ansem was taking that bet at the bottom.
- Jesse’s broader framework is pathways: creating, using AI agents to build businesses, trading crypto and other assets, and founding companies. He said these pathways could give people who otherwise lacked one a way to make it.
- His closing role-model point was that building is usually difficult, mistakes are inevitable, and getting knocked down does not prevent someone from getting back up.
18. Lucas of Jito: from Tesla falcon-wing doors to Solana blockspace
- Lucas described studying computer engineering, working at startups, programming the Model X’s falcon-wing doors during a Tesla internship, and building self-driving construction equipment controlled initially with Xbox controllers.
- He entered crypto in 2017, built an Ethereum MEV bot, watched Flashbots gain traction, and concluded that high-frequency trading would be important if people traded on blockchains.
- He found Solana through SBF’s “sell me all the SOL you want at $3” tweet and started Jito in 2021. Jito builds blocks, manages transaction ordering, and runs staking infrastructure; JitoX is its newer consumer trading terminal.
- Lucas and Ansem met at Solana Breakpoint in 2022, right before the FTX collapse, and recalled trying to refresh Twitter over the middle of the ocean without Wi-Fi.
19. The Jito airdrop as deliberate retail stimulus
- Lucas said Jito had wanted a token from the beginning and began discussing the airdrop around mid-2023, while the FTX overhang still made Solana look like a “ghost chain” or “Samcoin.”
- The airdrop went to about 90,000 wallets, not 9,000. Lucas said the smallest allocation was in the mid-four figures, roughly $5K or $10K, and described it as a deliberate attempt to give smaller users capital and see what happened.
- He said the team debated waiting for the market to recover versus launching immediately, then chose to launch. He also said Sybil activity increased about a month beforehand and that later memecoin, Jupiter, and Pump.fun activity followed.
- Ansem said he had advocated for the airdrop throughout 2023 and believed Jito helped bring Solana’s on-chain volume back.
20. Backend economics: a million a day, then a few thousand a week
- During the January 2025 Trump and Melania memecoin activity, Lucas said Jito made more than $1M per day for a week by taking a percentage of the tips and priority fees paid for scarce blockspace.
- He said current revenue is much smaller—“a few thousand dollars a week”—but added, “if you did it once, you could do it again.”
- Lucas described a next-generation sequencer intended to make Solana more friendly to applications and market makers by enabling tighter quotes and more reliable transaction landing. He argued that Solana is already the cheapest place to trade Solana assets and that similar advantages exist for Ethereum and Bitcoin on their own chains.
21. JitoX: a curated front end that may buy and burn JTO
- Lucas said existing applications are not always suitable for bringing friends and family into crypto because users encounter assets such as “Testicle Coin” and “Butthole Coin.” JitoX is taking a more professional, curated approach and emphasizing execution quality.
- He said Jito is tied to Solana’s success but that infrastructure is mostly invisible and does not itself bring new users in. JitoX is intended to bring users in through a front-end product.
- Legacy revenue goes to validators running the new software. Lucas said that, if the new business succeeds, it could represent 99% of revenue and flow to the token. A buy-and-burn proposal had been put forward, and he assumed it would pass; this was not presented as completed.
- JitoX currently supports spot markets, with perps planned later through Phoenix. Lucas described on-chain equities and 24/7 stock trading as underexplored. He also discussed possible cross-collateral using SOL, JTO, the Ansem coin, or stocks, calling that a potential major unlock.
22. Degen war stories: full-port 3x SOL and a million into Otherside
- Ansem’s most degen moment was a late-2021 SOL long from roughly $40–$50 using 3x leverage and his entire net worth. He said he held until going to Vegas, when he closed because he was up too much.
- Lucas described buying a Punk for 14 ETH and trading it one-for-one for a bubblegum SubDuck. He then sold the SubDuck after it rose roughly five- or sixfold and used the proceeds to buy more Punks.
- Lucas also described minting three Bored Ape Yacht Clubs at roughly $200 each and said he thought the resulting gain was about $600K from $600.
- Banks described buying multiple KYC accounts with friends and investing $1M in Otherdeed land ahead of the sale. He said he had roughly 800 plots and considered the position a zero.
23. NFTs were not necessarily wrong—the utility meta was
- Banks’s diagnosis was that the only practical NFT utility at the time was using an asset as a Twitter PFP. He said the culture turned against NFTs and that even a seven-figure zombie CryptoPunk might not be used as a PFP.
- He still views CryptoPunks as the Picassos of digital art and said they could become million-dollar assets. The discussion suggested that NFTs need a meaningful display and interaction layer, such as a game or metaverse.
- The conversation placed digital collectibles as a small fraction of the broader trading-card and collectibles market. Banks argued that physical TCGs work because they have inherent demand and cultural associations, and that NFTs were not necessarily far off-target.
- Banks’s GTA 6 thesis is that Take-Two could benefit from an in-game creator economy. He expects Rockstar to give players tools to build businesses, content, and IP, though Ansem said Rockstar may use its own Roblox-style currency rather than embrace crypto.
- Banks imagined Polymarket buying a major streamer’s in-game skyscraper for $30M. He did not name a specific streamer. Banks and Ansem joked that such a purchase could mark the top.
24. GoUp’s World Cup book: emotional hedging and a Mbappé prop
- GoUp said he disliked Argentina, so he bet on Argentina to reach and win the final as an emotional hedge: even if Argentina won and he was unhappy as a fan, he would profit financially.
- He planned to let that position ride but favored Spain as a team. He called Spain a pre-tournament long shot—around 10th among the favorites—with only one goal conceded and Lamine Yamal still yet to produce his best tournament performance.
- His main third-place-game idea was Kylian Mbappé to score against England at roughly 54%, because one goal would give Mbappé the Golden Boot over Messi. He said Mbappé would still have motivation even in a consolation match.
- The final was described as Spain versus Argentina at MetLife Stadium, with the third-place game in Boston. The hosts compared the third-place game to trading an All-Star Game.
- GoUp said he had reached roughly half a million on TikTok after about a year of content creation and was still working a 9-to-5 while appearing on the show. Banks urged him to double down on content and invest in himself.
25. The LeBron market: a 20x on two people agreeing
- The odds discussed were Cleveland 39%, Golden State 33%, Philadelphia 16%, and the Knicks 5%.
- Banks relayed a Rasmr thesis that LeBron preferred New York entering the playoffs, with a Rich Paul interview suggesting that Jalen Brunson’s view mattered and that the Knicks did not want to disrupt a successful team.
- The line worth keeping was: “when only two people need to agree on something to hit a 20x, you take that all day.” Banks favored putting a small amount on the Knicks despite calling it a pipe dream.
- Banks also argued that LeBron’s remaining motivation is another championship, given the Jordan comparison, while acknowledging that viewership is not LeBron’s responsibility.
26. Dopamine is why time may feel faster
- The fitness clip argued that chasing new peptides, TRT, diets, and other fads traps people in a dopamine cycle and that dopamine is “ruling the world.” It connected this to the feeling that time is speeding up.
- Banks mapped the idea onto playing a sport versus gambling on it, reading a newspaper versus consuming clickbait, and eating a nutritious grass-fed meal versus fast food. His point was that short-term pleasure can carry long-term costs.
- Banks described his own social-media loop as intense, saying his posts can receive roughly 50K replies a day. He said the engagement can be useful professionally but that he has to be able to unplug.
- Jesse framed the split as consumers versus producers: social platforms can keep consumers scrolling without learning, while producers can use the same platforms productively. Banks pushed back that many users are less aware of the loop than people around him assume.
27. The 9-to-5 disagreement—genuine, and worth keeping
- Banks argued provocatively that the average American is broke, unhappy, and miserable, and said his own video-game-content bet succeeded despite parents, friends, and the internet telling him it was unrealistic.
- Ansem disagreed with treating a 9-to-5 as inherently bad. He said people can be content with work while focusing on family, relationships, and friendships, and that society needs people who are not entrepreneurs.
- They converged on the darker version of the loop: working, then spending all remaining time on games, Twitter, or TikTok without pursuing relationships or goals. They contrasted that with long-term dopamine from building, working out, family, and meaningful progress.
- The hosts proposed a Market Bubble book club and a Twitter vote on a list of ten books. Banks defended reading The 48 Laws of Power as possible defensive knowledge; Ansem called it dark and said the book had changed his life.
28. Robinhood chain: the new-chain thesis, not Vlad’s tweets
- Asked whether traders cared about Robinhood or Vlad Tenev’s posts, Ansem said traders primarily care about being early to a new venue with less capital. That is the same reason new-chain theses have worked in crypto.
- He said a meme moving from zero to roughly $200M–$250M in a week would naturally cool off, and that expecting an immediate Robinhood listing was unrealistic. Depending on Vlad tweeting about a meme is not a durable thesis because he is running a large company.
- Ansem still sees the corporate logic: Robinhood dominates retail stock and options trading, lacks perp access and 24/7 markets, and is addressing those gaps through Lighter and tokenized stocks. He believes Robinhood wants to own more of the stack.
- His conclusion was net positive for crypto, while acknowledging that Robinhood is not yet introducing a fundamentally new L2 innovation.
29. Buybacks do not work mechanically—trust does
- Ansem’s long-form thesis is that Hyperliquid’s buybacks matter as social alignment and trust more than as guaranteed dollar-for-dollar price support. The no-promises airdrop and the use of roughly 97% of revenue for buybacks signal that the token is central to the business and that users share in its success.
- He contrasted that with Pump.fun, whose users expected an airdrop after helping generate roughly $1B in revenue and after a roughly $1B ICO. The absence of that distribution weakened alignment and trust.
- The scoreboard discussed was roughly $800M in annual revenue and a $65B FDV for Hyperliquid versus roughly $440M and a $1.4B FDV for Pump.fun. Pump.fun had bought and burned about $400M of its token while remaining down roughly 80%.
- Ansem’s chart levels were approximately $0.0019 for the clearer reclaim and $0.0017 for a riskier entry; until then, he viewed the token as being in a downtrend. Thread Guy’s joke was that Pump.fun could do the airdrop tomorrow and half of CT would still think it was fake.
30. Anthropic is losing aura on several fronts
- Ansem said Anthropic had pushed its Mythos and catastrophic-risk messaging aggressively, which in his view made government officials more concerned about controlling model access and distribution. That could benefit model companies that secure government contracts but hurt the broader industry.
- He also cited reports that newer Anthropic models were less spend-efficient, while ChatGPT and Codex were perceived as more effective for building things.
- The hosts criticized Anthropic’s “There’s Hope and Hard Questions” ad as overly dystopian. They compared it with Polymarket’s June 23 Rick Rubin/Future campaign and alleged that the structure and “hard questions” framing were substantially similar. That was their accusation, not an independently established fact.
- Banks said the ad had roughly 7M views and about 15K likes. Sam Altman’s response—“I thought this was satire”—was said to have nearly as many likes as the ad itself.
31. $0.50 versus $56: the China open-source problem
- The chart that stopped both hosts compared roughly $0.50 per million AI tokens from a Chinese open-source model with roughly $56 from Anthropic.
- The hosts treated this as a non-consensus risk to AI valuations. Banks said the labs and the expected return on investment in them were responsible for a large share of stock-market enthusiasm, so a collapse in economics could matter broadly.
- Ansem said the spending only makes sense if the expensive models are dramatically better and asked whether they were 1,000 times better. His answer was clearly no.
- Banks emphasized that if this were consensus, technology stocks would already be down 40%–50%. He also raised the possibility that the U.S. government would spend heavily to prevent strategic defeat, but presented that as speculation.
- DeepSeek was referenced at about $74B after the hosts had previously discussed wanting exposure near a $10B valuation. The hosts also discussed SpaceX weakness as a possible warning for other large future IPOs, without establishing a specific post-listing event.
32. CXMT: Hyperliquid as a pre-IPO price-discovery venue
- CXMT was described as a Chinese counterpart to Micron and was trading on Hyperliquid ahead of a planned IPO. An analyst associated with Citrini was cited as estimating an IPO around an $80B market cap, or about $1.28 per share, with projected revenue of $50B–$60B this year.
- The hosts called that valuation estimate obviously wrong, noted that the offering was roughly 200 times oversubscribed, and said the Hyperliquid market was trading around $6.92 per share.
- Ansem argued that Hyperliquid has become a venue for price discovery before assets reach public markets, citing prior markets such as Cerebras and SpaceX. He said previous pre-IPO prices had ultimately settled closer to Hyperliquid’s prices than to early analyst estimates.
- Banks’s broader point was that ordinary investors should not have to wait until a company is worth $1T to gain exposure. The hosts framed early access as one of crypto’s advantages.
33. Closing frameworks: two ways to get paid, and the case for delusion
- Ansem’s trading taxonomy was: first, find a non-consensus fundamental thesis early and bet it with size; second, identify a confirmed momentum trend and trade the middle rather than trying to buy the exact bottom or sell the exact top.
- The closing risk clip showed Mark Zuckerberg discussing a Peter Thiel quote about the biggest risk in a rapidly changing world being failure to take risks. Banks noted that the video might be AI-generated and said he did not know its source.
- Banks also read a post about believing in an extraordinary outcome so intensely that reality runs out of ways to reject it. He and Ansem treated it as a statement of conviction, resilience, and willingness to keep taking risks.
- Banks then reconstructed an AI response he had heard to the question of what future generations might find strangest about the present: that people sold their lives one hour at a time and called it making a living. The source was not established in the conversation.
- Ansem pushed back on the idea that ordinary employment is inherently irrational, emphasizing that society needs non-entrepreneurs and that fulfillment comes from meaningful work, relationships, and happiness as well as money.
- The final crypto-specific point was Ansem’s claim that trading is unusually accessible: someone can learn charts and candlesticks without a particular credential or educational background. He presented that as one of crypto’s strongest features.
Full transcript
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 live on twitch.tv/fazebanks as well as Twitter on both mine and Anom's Twitter. And Anthem is also live on kick. Z talk to him, baby.
Last week, I think we broke 85K. We're going to be number one on X by the end of this, bro. I promise you.
I'm seeing the numbers. I'm seeing other people spark up and go live. I'm seeing other shows similar to this one, and they're not really coming anywhere near what we're doing. I know it's a superficial metric, and we shouldn't really care, but it is a direct representation of the show, its success, and people's interest in it. We really appreciate you guys. We have the chat aggregator, and you guys are [__] spamming it.
Bro, your Kick chat is so funny.
Bro, they're on crack. I keep telling them to stop spamming the [__] Solana addresses. Stop. Please stop spamming the Solana addresses. I'm giving SOL to people who are actually talking in chat. Stop spamming.
Facts. You're infinitely more likely—literally infinitely more likely—to get picked if you just say some cool [__] or some smart [__].
Yeah, 100%. I swear, bro. I'll have to start banning people. I need a [__] mod in the chat.
I don't know how you can, because you can mod it to where you do terms, whatever, but every wallet address is different. You can't—there's no way. Obviously, we would have already done this and moderated it, but you literally can't. We don't want to ban everybody.
1. Ansem's Coin Thesis Article
You just posted an article on your Twitter a couple of hours ago, and I got the pleasure of reading it last night when you were putting it together. Do you want to start there?
Yeah, we can. Let me see if I can pull this [__] up. I did an article on the thesis around the Ansem coin and why I think it's different from anything that's been done before. I'll read the intro.
Memecoins have proven to be successful in attracting retail speculation through deeply passionate communities, but have failed to produce sustained activity post-peak attention. Creators have proven to be successful in producing sustained revenues around diehard communities of fans. But to date, there has not been a way to speculate directly on a creator's influence and impact.
Ansem is the first real attempt at combining these 2 distinctly different things into 1 coin that aligns token holders around a unified mission and network. The mission is to be the largest singular on-chain onboarding event in crypto history while creating a network of people curious about trading markets, maintaining sovereignty around their finances, and contributing value back to the crypto ecosystem. I believe that tokenization can be uniquely effective here in combining these 2 novel primitives into a sustainable model that benefits creators, speculators, and fans.
That's the gist of it. As you guys know, memecoins have gone crazy the past few years. Last year on Solana, Bonk and WIF were the most well-known. Before that, in 2020 and 2021, Dogecoin went to $88 billion. The creator economy has been growing a [__] ton and is estimated to be a $2 trillion market over the next 10 years.
Nobody really has been able to tap into how to speculate on that market growing. It's really not been possible yet. MrBeast, for example, made like $900 million last year from his businesses, and he has 50 million-plus followers and a ton of followers on all these social platforms. None of them can get upside in his influence. The idea is to combine these 2 things into 1 coin.
I think he has 500 million followers, actually—or on YouTube.
It's [__] absolutely insane.
The most interesting piece of this article for me, from my perspective, was the creator economy. I think you reference 2035, if I'm right. It's estimated that the entire market cap of the creator economy is going to be north of $2 trillion, which is comparable, basically one-to-one, to the entire crypto market. Bitcoin—all the assets that fall under crypto—are worth about $2 trillion. That's [__] insane.
2. Venice AI New Sponsor
It's also really hard to quantify the value beyond just the numbers, beyond just the financial [__], because attention is a different beast. You know what I'm saying? It's a really good article. You guys should all go read that. We have a new partner, Venice AI. Let's welcome Venice AI. We had Eric on in episode seven, and it was one of our best interviews. Venice AI is an AI chat aggregator that focuses on privacy. It doesn't share your information or chat logs, including with its own internal systems. There are also no guardrails in regard to censorship. We're going to announce something for them at the end of the show, so stick around for that. W Venice. Michael Cat, pick somebody from the chat who said W Venice to drop a little something showing love.
OV to-do, you're winning $1,000. W Venice in the chat. You are our second winner of the airdrop today.
And speaking of airdrops and Ansem bounties, I know you wanted to announce a little something to kick this show off before we really get into it. You've been talking about getting your community more activated in the real world, having them create content around the mission and the token and everything we're doing here. Do you want to expand on that and let us know?
Yeah. I think the best marketing for Ansem, the coin and the network, is going to be not just me talking about it, but the community of people contributing to the network and building things around it. One of the really cool ways we can do that is with art.
I've seen some NFT communities build some cool things around Ansem, but what I want to do is encourage and sponsor some IRL artists to create Ansem and BlackBull artwork.
And so what I'm going to do is set up a Pump.fun bounty. I'm probably going to do $10,000—$1,000 to each of the top 10 submissions. I'm going to reward the art that I think is the best and gets the most exposure. I'm dropping that probably tomorrow, to be honest, and it'll probably run for about 2 weeks. Yeah, this is a cool one that somebody did.
This is sick as shit.
Yeah, I'm going to find this guy after we do the stream, but this is fucking fire. I feel like people doing shit like this all over the place would be fucking sick as shit.
It's really cool.
I think it could go super viral. People who aren't in crypto and don't know about it can find out about it through this.
Insane. So, you're going to run this one for 2 weeks, and we actually have one running right now in tandem, which we announced last episode. That's the commercial one, and that's only for 5 people.
Make a Market Bubble commercial. You can use AI, you can use your fucking iPhone, you can do whatever you want. We extended it by a week, so you have a week from today. We're going to pick 5 winners for that one next week. So, there are 2 bounties running right now. There's this graffiti street art bounty—Z's going to pick 10 winners—and then there's this Market Bubble commercial bounty, where 5 winners will be picked. The commercial bounty winners will be picked next week, and then the graffiti ones will be picked the week following that. By then, you'll have some sort of landing page for these bounties, right? Active bounties, closed bounties, winners and stuff. That'd be kind of cool.
That would be kind of cool. I should set up a site for it. I wanted this article to actually live on a site, and I'm building that out right now. But for the Pump.fun bounties, they'll be live on the app. You'll be able to see them in the same place you go to the main Ansem Pump.fun page. You'll see the bounties there.
Oh, so this is living on Pump.fun.
Yeah, Pump.fun is—
Oh, that's cool. That's cool. Yeah, the Pump.fun bounty shit, the Dare Market shit—that shit's all really cool. If it's done the right way, if we can break out of just the forehead tattoo meta.
Yeah, I know, bro. We got some cooler shit than the degenerate shit, bro. It's so dark, bro. It's so dark. It's so dark.
Yeah. All right. Well, that's pretty much it for the little pre-show stuff that we needed to get through. Let's get into the fucking show. Let's get into the meat of the show. You called the bottom. I think it was 3 weeks ago.
Yep.
You called the fucking stone-cold rock bottom of crypto.
3. Ansem Called the Bottom
Cold rock bottom, bro. You stole the bottom.
You really did. I saw people giving you your flowers for that. Deserved. I have seen some other counterpoints and people who aren't believing it, who aren't sipping the Kool-Aid. Just to be clear, why are we not going lower, Z?
Yeah, I mean, I think I spoke about this a few weeks ago. I think Bitcoin and Solana, particularly, are at really crucial support levels. Bitcoin retested its all-time highs from the 2021 cycle around $58K to $60K, which is also a main consolidation from 2024—a crucial support level.
4. LeBron's Next Team Odds
There was a lot of fear around the Saylor situation. People were concerned that Saylor has about $40 billion in Bitcoin, and they don't know how he's going to pay off these preferred shares that he got himself into. He spoke about maybe having to sell some, and when he spoke about that, Bitcoin sold off from around $75K down to $60K. But what happened was people front-ran the concern about him selling, and he was able to raise some cash by selling more MicroStrategy shares. Right now, they have more than 20 months of runway and won't have to sell a lot of Bitcoin anytime soon. They sold $200 million of Bitcoin, I think, last week, and the price is actually up from where they sold, which is indicative of the fear and everything already being priced in.
I think a lot of the selling has already happened. So, that's a really crucial level and sentiment bottom. I think what happened is you saw cash-heavy TradFi buyers step in and start to allocate toward crypto—Bitcoin, ETH and SOL. Honestly, HYPE has been outperforming on its own, but the majors really have been lagging behind. I think it's a really great spot where you could see some capital rotation happen.
I kind of spoke about how I thought Micron topped out a few weeks ago, and it's down around 30% from its all-time highs. The memory stocks have been dominating performance in risk assets for the past year or so, and so there's a lot of unrealized and realized gains happening there. I think crypto's in a really great place to see a rotation happen, especially if we can get some tailwinds around consumer breakout applications or some metrics that look great.
A lot of on-chain metrics recently hit all-time highs across the board last week. Hyperliquid is dominating and doing well. You have Lighter and Robinhood announcing their partnership. Robinhood's L2 and Lighter are going to be the perp platform for Robinhood users outside the U.S. So, there's a ton of institutional capital focused on crypto right now. At the same time, the CT sentiment is really poor, and typically, when you have a divergence like that, it's a great place for a bottom.
I think there's a lot of sidelined CT, crypto-native capital that's predicting we bottom in Q4 because of the crypto four-year cycle that everybody predicts has happened pretty consistently over the past decade.
We included Rhino in your top 25 CT accounts of all time, and he's a guy who I know we respect on the show.
Yeah, super-smart guy.
And he has a couple of tweets along these lines. We all know we ain't entering no damn crypto bull market right now.
Yeah, Rhino's a great trader. I think he's honestly one of the best traders on CT. There are a lot of great traders who wait for price to confirm momentum, and you haven't seen that momentum shift happen yet on any of the majors. I've been predicting the bottom is in before it's clear that the bottom is in.
But I think if you see Solana back over $100, if you see Bitcoin back over $80K, then a lot of those traders who are saying we're not going to start a bull market right now will probably flip back, at least for a momentum trade or swing trade.
Is that why you feel like we're kind of stuck in the middle almost? It's kind of the essence of this tweet also: we bet no further downside from majors, but we're—
Yeah. Yeah. I don't know where he's getting the “pump, MMs pumping dog alts” from. I feel like alts are crushed. But yeah, I do agree that a lot of the downside has happened. He's essentially saying that the bull market isn't starting right now, but a lot of the downside has happened, so I wouldn't short here, which is kind of what he's saying.
This is where you called it. Just got to give you your flowers, bro.
Bro, it's bottom tick, bro.
Yeah, literally. Your tweet was here.
Yeah, like the literal stone bottom.
Yeah.
I called Solana, I think, at around $69, and then Bitcoin at $58.7K or some shit like that. I think we're in a great spot, bro. I really like this spot because sentiment is consensus that we're not at the bottom, and that's typically when you get the best returns—when you're asymmetrically positioned on risk.
5. The McGregor Betting Scandal
Got it, bro. Well, we got to talk about this McGregor thing. This is one of the craziest stories of all time. I know the word “scam” is often, especially in mainstream culture, synonymous with the word “crypto,” unfortunately for guys like us, in shows like these and in industries like the ones we fucking care about so much.
Yeah.
Was this McGregor fight the biggest scam of all time? Have you looked into this?
There was a lot of fucking money on him, bro. That's all I'm going to say. There was a lot of fucking money on McGregor.
I saw a figure that quoted it at $500 million.
Was it $500 million?
Yes. It was basically wiped out.
Bet on him.
Yeah. Over $500 million was bet in total, and 90% of the money was bet on him. So, that would be—
Yeah.
North of $400 million, which is worse than fucking Trump. That's worse than fucking Melania. That's worse than Libra. That's worse than any scam we've seen in crypto. That's debatably worse than FTX, because FTX didn't really hit retail.
It's fucking crazy.
Did we have the fucking video of the fight? What happened? I saw a clip of it. He didn't even really fight, right? It was immediately over.
So, the conversation around this is basically that he was already injured. That's what the speculation is saying, and he's fully defending against this. He's saying that's not the case. We'll pull up a tweet from him. He actually tweeted something that's fucking crazy to me as well. His tweet today was nuts. But this is a clip of him—
His right leg.
Yeah.
Yeah. Why is he stretching like that?
He loses his balance and is obviously a little bit irritated.
I don’t know if it’s obvious. I don’t know if I’m being a fucking homer. I love McGregor, by the way. I’m from Boston. I’m Irish. I love it. I love the culture around it, and I love him as a personality.
I don’t know, brother. I don’t know. It’s fucking insane. There’s this whistleblower, Josh on air. He’s an analyst, a UFC analyst from Fox Sports—a reputable guy, an ESPN and UFC Fight Pass vet, whatever—and he says, “My UFC credentials have already been revoked, so I’ve got nothing else to lose.”
Here’s the truth: Conor and his team informed Dana earlier in the week that he had a knee injury. This is a direct accusation that he was injured. He told Dana White. He told the UFC that he was injured. Dana told him, “The show must go on. No refunds.” No refunds. We’ll get back to that in a second, because of the financial implications.
McGregor was forced to try. People inside became aware. That’s why the line moved prior to the walkout. At least 80% of the money was bet on McGregor. Like I said, 80% of $500 million. That’s insane. This is fucking crazy. If this is true, if this is the case, it’s a straight-up, full-blown scam. There’s no other way to call it.
I’m a huge fan of the UFC. I’m a huge fan of Dana White. I’m a huge fan of Conor McGregor.
Bro, isn’t that hella illegal?
Yes. Obviously. Yeah.
Extremely illegal, bro.
It’s insane.
Damn.
Here’s the tweet. Look at this tweet. This is from him.
He tweeted this, and he posted it on his Instagram. A few notes. He’s directly responding to all the criticism and the accusations.
“A few notes. One, I will have the results of my scan on my leg tomorrow. Two, the fight should be a no contest and all bets returned.”
Conor McGregor said that today.
Yeah. What the fuck?
Or yesterday. Last night at 11 p.m. This is fucking insane.
Which obviously—
That’s something you would say when you feel kind of guilty, bro.
Maybe. Right. I mean, now we’re definitely being speculative here, but, yeah—
He didn’t even respond this way to address all the fucking sexual-assault allegations. I don’t know if you remember, but he was found liable for something and had to pay a girl a bunch of money. This was a fucking mess. This is, up to this point, the worst thing that’s happened in his career.
My shit froze. Am I still live?
Yeah, you’re live. I’m watching the—
My screen froze.
Yeah, my shit froze, too. [laughter]
Yeah, okay. But we’re all live, chat. You guys can still see us?
Yeah, they can see us.
Damn, that scared me. That fucked up my train of thought.
I only know because I have the Kick up. I was like, “Yo, wait.”
Somebody said it froze.
All good. The stream is good. The stream is good. Cool. Thank you, chat. It bugged a little, but we’re good. Production, if you can make it so I can see it now, that’d be fucking fantastic. It just reloaded or whatever.
Sorry, guys. Production is a little wonky. Somebody said MSAD attack. That’s insane. [laughter] That’s the state of the internet right now, bro.
It’s so insane.
We good now. Don’t worry. All right, cool. Chat’s good. We can’t see ourselves, which is annoying, and I can’t see the Stream Deck, either. It has a whole bunch of red things. I’m hitting two-box. Is it switching back?
I see. We’re live on the fucking Kick. It looks the same as it was when you were talking.
Now we’re two-box. Is it two-box? Yeah. Am I full-screen now? They’re working, at least—the buttons.
“Stream failed to start.”
Yeah. Yeah, it is working.
Okay. Sorry. I’m just blind now, and it’s completely throwing me off.
Yeah, the McGregor shit is absolutely bananas. It’s crazy. It’ll be an interesting thing to follow and see how it develops.
But, yeah, it goes without saying: if he was injured, and the UFC knew he was injured, and he didn’t want to fight, and anything along the lines of “the show must go on” happened while $500 million was allowed to be bet—
Bro, that means the sportsbooks made so much money. I think the reason people are saying it’s possible is because if 90% of the money was on McGregor, then the sportsbook printed on this being the outcome.
Yeah, of course.
Like, a crazy amount.
Considering the odds were 30% as well, that’s insane. I don’t know.
Yeah, that’s fucked.
Yeah, they would have lost what? They would have lost, like, $1.2 billion if he won, if the odds were 3-to-1.
Yeah. Whoa. [laughter]
Couldn’t let that happen.
Yeah, that’s enough. That’s enough money to make anybody do anything. Maybe.
I don’t know.
Yeah. Somebody probably fucked up and walked into his locker room and hit him with—
That’s always the number. That’s always the number, too. It’s always the number. A billion dollars. “Would you do this for a billion dollars?” That’s always the number.
Yeah. I’d be like, “Ah, no.” He’d be like, “A billion dollars?” I’d be like, “Oh, well, maybe.” [laughter]
Yeah. I’d suck Elon Musk’s dick for a billion.
Bro, why do you always have to go gay? [laughter] Bro, why is that the first thing you think of? Although, first of all, the first thing you think of is always that. It’s never not that. It’s literally never not that.
Guys, stop. Stop. [laughter]
Chat, guys. That’s the classic debate. That’s the classic. How much money, chat?
That shit did not hit my brain at all. Not even for a second.
Chat, who’s right? I’m right here. I’m 100% right here. Anytime the conversation of—
No, it’s true.
Anytime the conversation is, “Would you do this for X amount of money?” it’s always, “Would you suck a dick?” Always. Zesty-ass caught in 4K. See, Banks is right. Somebody said Banks is right. A little bit sus, not going to lie.
“I’m blowing bubbles for 5 bands.” Design it. Design it. You don’t have to blow bubbles on it, but we’re going to give you $1,000 for that comment because that was good. [laughter] That just shows you watch the stream. That’s good.
Oh, fuck.
Design something. Design “black bubbles on it,” comment.
Yo, that’s fucking hilarious. Bro said, “I would swallow, too.” No, bro. [laughter]
That’s okay. Okay, yeah. This is too much. Too much. Too much.
Oh, fuck. [clears throat] All right. No more technical difficulties.
Yeah, we’re back. I can see myself again.
On to the next.
6. Trading Streams & Onboarding Retail
Yeah, this is obviously a stream about trading, finance, tech, improving yourself, improving your situation, and positioning yourself. We’re seeing a couple more people pop up. We’re seeing people like Incent just dox himself. He just did a stream. He went live to over 1,000 people. I thought that was super impressive and cool to see.
Because he’s just a hardcore trench trader, and he’s doxed himself recently. He’s handsome, well-spoken, and articulate, and he’s very young.
Yeah.
And he’s fucking super rich, all self-made through trading.
Are trading streams actually the best way to onboard people into finance and crypto?
Bro, I think the current meta that’s going on with streaming—the entertainment streams where people are just watching because they want to be entertained—I think the finance streams are going to flip them really, really heavily. You can’t learn a lot from the current most popular streamers, but a streamer who’s entertaining and can also teach you how to trade and how to make money? These trenchers, the fucking guys who made a lot of money on Solana on-chain this last cycle, started with $1,000 or $10,000 and flipped it into millions, bro.
There’s nobody else who’s doing that and can also stream and teach people how to do that. That’s not something easily replicable.
Just off the back of that, I’ll go ahead and say that story has happened many times. There are many instances of this happening. There’s not one single piece of media that appeals to a mass audience and articulates that.
Yeah, for sure.
There’s not one. There’s not one. [laughter]
It’s crazy. Crypto has such a bad reputation because there are so many coins that don’t do well. But what isn’t highlighted is that crypto is one of the only places in markets where you can turn such a small amount of capital into millions of dollars relatively quickly, just because of how risky it is and the skill level it takes to do that.
Obviously, there are a lot of losers, and not a lot of people are going to be able to turn $1,000 into $1 million, but the possibility that exists in crypto isn’t highlighted enough.
That actually reminds me: there is one other industry, market, and product where you can turn a very small amount of money into a very large amount of money, and that’s gambling.
Options, I guess.
No, no—gambling casinos. Crypto casinos. Gambling. Obviously, we know, as people who have studied these markets and understand the way they work, that’s negative EV. That’s the quickest way to kill bags.
No, absolutely.
Crypto—you can fucking print if you’re really good at it. Like Sandis, Micron, if you caught those words.
The only real way to get rich in gambling is buying a fucking lottery ticket and being astronomically lucky.
Lucky, lucky—being chosen by the fucking gods at random. I just don’t see enough people talking about that. This kind of triggers all the same things psychologically that gambling does, at least for me, when I’m trading. I get the same sort of dopamine, except there’s a way to scale it. There’s a way to scale the skill, and there’s a way to actually make money. It’s valuable, and it’s worth learning.
That’s why I think shows like this are so important. To bring it back to the initial question: Are trading streams the best way to onboard people? I think so. There has been close to zero content that’s actually entertaining, that can attract people, throw a wide-cast net out, and bring normal people into these conversations.
Again, the story of Rowdy, for example—he went live. Obviously, there’s some sort of interest in it because of X, Y, and Z reasons, but the entire come-up, the entire story, was articulated in tweets. It’s buried on Twitter. It’s in tweets. Twitter, bro.
Twitter and Twitter chats. Yeah.
Imagine, on some Kanye West shit, that shit documented the whole process from the day he started streaming to the day he made his first million, till the day his portfolio hit 8 figures. It’s like, what the fuck?
He would be the most popular—if not one of the most popular—
Easily. He’d have millions of followers. He’d be able to sell courses. He’d be able to do anything. Every fucking partner.
7. Outro
It’s funny—Malcolm and I talk about this a lot, and you and I talk about this, too. When it comes to sponsors or deals for the show, or products that we’d like to work with, we’re almost at a spot where there are more products than there are creators, which is true, bro.
Which is insane. Everyone offers some sort of trading terminal, everyone offers a prediction market, everyone offers everything. There are so many of them, and then there are really four or five guys who are consistently making content that reaches any sort of notable number of people.
That’s true. It’s interesting because a lot of the people who are really good traders don’t want to be public, and they don’t want to be public-facing personalities. The skill it takes to create good content and be a good marketer is usually not the same skill it takes to be a good trader, so there are very few people who have the overlap of those two things.
If you’re one of the people who has the overlap of those two things, you kind of have a responsibility to do it—especially if you’re teaching people the right way, actually know how to trade, and actually made your money.
I love the responsibility piece. It’s in your interest. You are a unicorn.
The person who comes to mind immediately for me is Tfue. What I saw so much in Tfue is one of the most renowned Fortnite pros of all time—most decorated, and definitely one of the most viewed Fortnite pros of all time. In the power rankings of the biggest Fortnite streamers of all time, I think Ninja gets the number-one spot by default, but I think Tfue is definitely number two.
Why I think that was ever possible for him is because, one, he was incredibly good at the game—skill-wise, phenomenal at the game—but he was also entertaining. Just like you said, these things are very, very rare even on their own. It’s astronomically rare. You’re truly a unicorn if you can hit both, and he hit both.
It’s very, very rare that you find a pro in any game, in any esport, who’s mainstream-entertaining and can hold an audience and engage with as many people as Stable Ronaldo, Adin Ross, or Kai Cenat.
And when you do, it’s a Tfue situation.
I know there are so many of these buried in this market, and it’s part of the reason why I’m so excited about producing content in it and around it—doing shows like this, Market Bubble, Chat, whatever. This doesn’t exist here. We’re kind of at the forefront of it, and Ansem just went straight dark and left me all by myself.
Yeah, I can hear you. Yeah, they can hear you. Aura.
What the fuck? What the fuck? What the fuck? That’s so good.
Someone said Black Bolt live.
Yo, bro literally just turned and morphed into Black Bolt live. You guys saw it, bro.
I got superpowers, bro. I’m like one of the X-Men, bro. I am.
All the videos, all the memes. That’s insane.
Holy shit.
That’s fucking—
You actually had a really cool tweet about this, and before we closed the conversation—
Oh yeah, bro. I watched their streams. I was watching Rasmer [?], and Rasmer was like, “Yo, we’re going to watch Rowdy’s first stream.” He put on Rowdy’s first stream, so I was watching it.
I had never watched or been in a chat with this kid before, but apparently a lot of people think he’s a really good trader and a really smart dude. So I watched it.
Who?
Rowdy.
Rowdy, yeah.
You never met Rowdy at my house?
I think—I don’t know. I’m not—
It’s funny because he wasn’t doxxed, and he wasn’t excited.
They didn’t tell me he was Rowdy. I probably met him, but he didn’t tell me he was Rowdy.
The only people who knew he was Rowdy were me and the guys we lived with.
That’s crazy.
But yeah, he crushed it. He was actually a really good streamer. He was giving people good information, and chat was fucking with him.
I said, “By far, we have infinite zoomer brain-rot slop, but not enough streams of the self-made millionaires who learned how to trade with $1,000 and a phone, laptop, and internet connection. If I can long any kind of media, it will be this exact thing.”
I’m telling you, the same way that people look up to celebrities, kids are going to idolize people who are able to turn $1,000 into millions of dollars in a short amount of time publicly while documenting the process, and then teach people how to do the exact same thing.
That is a unicorn. You’re going to be the most popular people on the planet. I promise you.
It’s why we’ve seen a meteoric rise in TJR and his platforms—straight up, exactly what you just described. That ultimately is his brand and the story he’s selling, and people are receptive to it. He’s young, and he relates to a lot of the audience and a lot of people who are scrolling on TikTok all day, Instagram Reels, people who are on streams and stuff. He’s—
Go ahead.
No, no, no. Go ahead. Go ahead.
I was going to say it’s even different than that. TJR is the GOAT at what he does—selling courses and marketing—and he does trade live, the S&P, and all these things.
Watching somebody hit a 1,000x or 100x trade and documenting it as it’s happening live—that’s crazy. Showing people how to trade and doing videos about day trading is cool, but showing, “My portfolio went from $10,000 to $10 million,” live—that’s crazy.
You said if you could long any kind of media, it would be this. I think Market Bubble is the long, bro. I think Market Bubble is the long.
We have plans to scale outside of just this show. I want to produce all kinds of content for all kinds of people, stay in my lane, and offer that to this market. We’ve talked about it many times, and yeah, brother, I think we’re onto something. I think we’re definitely onto something.
This is the thesis. This is literally the thesis, bro.
Yes, sir.
What do we say? What have we been saying?
Watch and earn.
Watch and earn.
Watch and earn. It’s so good.
Watch and earn—that’s so damn good. It’s awesome.
I have to take a piss. You want to just riff for a second about—
You can go off on that. Maybe go, because this is another thing about the article that you just posted.
It's very in line with this. You mentioned this, and I feel like the audience would really appreciate your POV because I can talk all day about attention and content stuff, but you always have a good, fresh take, and your perspective is very unique.
Yeah, no, I got you. Let me put on my [inaudible]. Here we go.
I've been speaking about this for a while. One of the things I talk about in this article is what didn't work in past case studies around social tokens, attention tokens, and all these things. I really think it's going to be clearly evident that betting on individuals and their influence, and on people who can teach and educate, is a market that's definitely going to exist.
I think the reasons why these past cases failed are important, too. They had some things that they did really well. FTE, for example—I don't know if you guys know FTE—was a social app on Base that essentially allowed you to speculate on individuals. You could buy keys to get into a chat room with somebody on a bonding curve.
The issue was that there was a 5% buy-and-sell fee on these keys. As the curve got more aggressive, it basically became prohibitively expensive to join the chat. So they did the speculation piece well, but it didn't scale. You can't scale the same way that tokens do, and they weren't able to innovate on V2 of their product. They actually diluted it by allowing people to speculate on rooms.
I think that's what a lot of social apps have fucked up on in crypto: diluting how many things you can speculate on. Zora did the exact same thing, where you could speculate on the individuals, but you could also speculate on every piece of content they created. I think the better model is to have one token attached to something larger than the person, and then have many different ways to attribute value to that one token. Instead of having many-to-many, it's one-to-many.
But I talked about this is actually a good article, but this was like C. I don't know if you guys know C. He wrote an article on fintech and why he thinks that value and trust is something that's going to be traded in the future. Friend.tech obviously wasn't the app that played this thesis out, but let's see the clip from this.
There have been a lot of different platforms that have tried the social-token and attention-token thing and failed for a few different reasons. But I think it's a really good idea at its core: investing in people—not people directly, but the trust value associated with people and the influence they can have on markets. People who are able to educate and innovate—as I said, the creator economy is growing to be huge, and it's going to grow even bigger, especially with creators you can learn from. I think that's a trend that's just going to keep getting stronger and more aggressive.
The social stuff has always been super interesting to me, even outside of that—all the Friend.tech stuff and platforms like that. People have attempted to do it a few different times, with some level of success. But I've always been under the impression that it's not really a matter of if, but more a matter of who and when.
Yeah. Polymarket kind of accomplishes that, and I think it's honestly the one coming closest to cracking that code. But I don't know—just the idea of, like—
Imagine you invested in Holland a month ago, you know?
That Norwegian soccer player. He's one of the most famous guys on the planet now. But imagine some little Norwegian kid who—like, that's his hero.
And it's this little niche thing that he enjoys and invests his money in. Or, like, LeBron James in high school. Imagine LeBron James was a market when he was 17 years old.
There'd be people with stories like Tesla and Apple with that. Literally.
Yeah, for sure.
Or, like, “Yeah, I invested. How'd you get rich, brother? I invested in LeBron James when he was 16.” That's sick. It sounds like it should be a thing.
8. Gamifying Trading
It's kind of a good segue into this next thing. There's been something I've been thinking a lot about, and I know we've had conversations about this, too. Even in line with the content stuff and how important it is, I feel like we need to gamify trading. I feel like the race to gamify trading is a really important one that I don't know a lot of people are talking about or focused on.
I saw you interact with a tweet, I think from Vivoo. It was something like this: “It's probably a good spot to build a viral social app on Solana. Wellspring of capital, retail participants, Base publicly seeded this category. Perfect conditions for a new Pump.fun drip, in my opinion.” You said, “Agree heavily.”
Mhm.
Want to expand?
I agree on the gamifying-trading piece. One of the reasons people shy away from trading is that they think it's too difficult to learn. They shy away from financial things in general, and there's only a small subset of people who think it's interesting to learn about. But if it were more attractive to the average person, anybody could learn how to trade. There's nothing preventing somebody with zero knowledge about trading from learning how to trade. It's one of the easiest things you can teach yourself on your own.
I think this is why memecoins are so successful.
Yeah, I agree.
I think memecoins make it like a game for people. It's entertaining.
Very easy to understand.
It's easy to understand. I said this the other day: one of the reasons Dogecoin went so high is that you have this set of buyers who were never going to buy stocks, didn't care about stocks, and didn't have any money invested in the stock market. But they'll invest in Dogecoin because they relate to the meme, they think the meme is funny, and it's fun to invest with their friends. Elon is attached to it, too. It's something they can understand easily and relate to.
I think it's discounted a lot how large that group of people is—people who will invest in or buy whatever meme, but won't invest in stocks. If you look at Instagram, for example, Instagram has around 3 billion users, but the holders of Meta are only around 30 million. There are only about 30 million people who own Meta stock.
The reason Meta has value is that all the people on Instagram are spending a ton of time on the app, contributing a lot of value to the network by using their time and attention. People pay for ads on Meta because there are 3 billion people in the app all the time. But the people determining the value of this network typically don't have a stake in the upside.
If you can figure out a way to flip the social-media model on its head, where the people who are actually the reason the network has value also have upside in the value of the network, there's a complete regime change in how all these things operate. I think one of the ways to do that is through memes. I guess it sounds crazy to say, but I do think that this Gen Z—
No, it's only a couple of layers different from the low-hanging-fruit ad-revenue stuff. People do get paid on Twitter, but it's per view and based on engagement. There's a way to go even deeper on that.
I talked about my idea for Instagram. I feel like you should be able to tag everything in a picture or a story, and if you convert a sale, you could be paid. You could be Jose down the street. If you're the guy shoveling dirt all day and somebody wants to buy a shovel, let me see what Jose uses. Click on his shovel in his little Instagram picture and buy one. Now Jose is eating, and he's aligned with the interests of the platform and the economy.
I don't know. The gamification of it—I just feel like—
The same way there's a Duolingo for learning languages, there should be something like that for trading, for learning how to trade. Seriously, though.
Or just mask it and paint it in a way, because it is a game. When you think about it, at the end of the day, what is a video game? A video game is lines and lines of code that are painted a certain way and presented a certain way.
If you stripped away all the funny colors and characters from Fortnite, it's just algorithms, code, numbers, reactions, and stuff. It's TA and stuff—charts, numbers, even the verbiage that people use. It's just hard for people to get themselves involved, figure out how to do it, or want to do it outside of just making money.
As we know, getting involved in trading for the sole sake of making money is the worst fucking thing you could do. If you come in and you're like, “I'm going to fucking just get rich off crypto,” I've heard a million examples of people getting rich from it. I don't know. I just feel like, between that and content, they're kind of one and the same. It's just entertainment is really what we're talking about. Engagement is what we're talking about. I feel like crypto is lacking engagement.
Yeah. People have to figure out how to make it more interesting for people, for sure. I think that is definitely key.
I asked Orangey, too, last week, because the correlation between how many people who were pros in Fortnite migrated over to successful trench trading boggles my mind. It's one-to-one. You can't really ignore it. It's very clear and obvious that it requires a similar skill set for both, which is insane. You would never imagine that trading crypto and playing Fortnite would have anything to do with each other. Why are people who are good at those things good at the other?
Cupsy, Orangey, Scented, Keiny, Sceptic, Nyro, and Devices. These are all guys who have traded at a very high level to great success, who were all actual Fortnite pros. So it already is a game. There's a way to do this, right? Again, what could the Fortnite of crypto be worth? The Fortnite of finance. What's Robinhood worth? $100 billion.
$100 billion. Yeah.
And why is Robinhood $100 billion? It's not fucking rocket science. It's because it appeals to retail and to the average person, and it's easy for the average person to trade.
Let's make it even easier. Let's make it even more fun. How many gamers are there versus how many people trade crypto? I wonder—a lot. A fucking lot more than there are people trading crypto. Before I was trading crypto, I was playing a hell of a lot of video games. I was playing World of Warcraft, fucking League of Legends, all that shit. I think trading is the world's greatest MMORPG by far. It's skill-based. You have to learn how to trade, and you have to pick your spots. You're competing against other people. If you're winning, somebody else is losing. If you're losing, somebody else is winning. I think trading is by far the world's greatest MMORPG.
I'm going to ask Venice real quick how many people play video games daily versus crypto. It's probably 100 times more. I'd be surprised if it wasn't.
Yeah, it might be fucking—
How many people play video games daily versus trade crypto? Sorry that we're doing this live, but honestly, it's a very interesting conversation, and it supports the idea.
Yeah, I always shout out Thread for his clips on his thesis that everybody's going to be a trader.
There's this evolution that's happening in the world.
He's been saying this on repeat for a minute.
Why can't I hear this? Can you guys hear this clip?
The meaning of a follower would have been commoditized.
I think we're going to enter a new era.
I did. I did. I didn't. Yeah. I said at the beginning of the stream—
I remember when—
LA needs to unmute the screen share in Discord. Let me know when it's ready.
Yeah. This was us talking about something else, but I got the figures back. Gaming has 3.5 billion people who play video games. Daily players are around 1.5 to 2 billion.
How much is it? Let me see.
No, I can't hear it anymore. I'm hearing production talk. I'm hearing fucking— I can't see myself anymore. This is fucking brutal.
Well, you look great, brother. You look great.
Thank you, bro. Thank you. I can see you.
If you guys could only see what I could see right now, your head would explode. I have three fingers on a Stream Deck, I'm on a fucking laptop, and I'm trying to listen to Thread's voice while hearing production in my ear.
Let me see. I wonder if I can just—
No, I have it here. I have it here. It's 1.5 to 2 billion mobile gamers alone. Damn, 1.5 to 2 billion. Can you see yourself? I can see—I can see any of you.
I can hear production just having a full-blown conversation.
Can you see? You can't? I can see you now again. Chat, I'm hearing fucking 35 people talk, and I promise you it's not because I used to do ketamine. It's because there's fucking five people talking in my headphones. Can you guys hear me?
Production rage-baiting is absolutely that.
Yeah, that's a good comment. That's a good comment. That's fucking hilarious, bro. High Ground.
Production rage-baiting.
Yeah. Let's put chat in the middle.
Yeah, we could do that.
Why is production doing this? Why are you guys switching to my laptop when I have 30 things open? I'll switch to my laptop. Just make the fucking audio work so we can watch this fucking clip.
All right, cool. Nope, I can't hear the video, unfortunately.
No, I didn't switch scenes. Where is it at? Let me see if I can play it.
Why is production doing this? Why are you guys switching to my laptop when I have 30 things open? I'll switch to my laptop. Just make the fucking audio work so we can watch this fucking clip.
Where is it at? It's at 14. Oh, is he—
Wait, by the way, now it's not even loading on my laptop. The internet just went out. You guys want me to blow this place up? This is insane.
Jesus fucking Christ. Oh, fucking Christ. I can't hear my mind either.
If you guys don't fix this in the next 10 minutes, I'm taking a shot of vodka and breaking my sobriety. Three years—three and a half years I've been sober—and it's all going to be on you guys. I'm going to rip a shot of vodka because it's the only way I'm going to make it through this. Oh my God.
Of course, it's the fucking Thread Guy clip, too. This is what I'm looking at. I'm just looking at Thread with his mouth wide open. How much to suck it, Thread Guy? Hey, TG, I got a billion dollars for you to suck it. So stupid, dude. This is so stupid.
Yo, bro, that's fucking hilarious.
Thread—Thread in the chat. Come on, bro. I see you, TG.
TG, we'll give you a little airdrop. Just kidding. You're fucking rich. You get nothing, bro.
That's fucking funny.
I love seeing Thread. Thread's in the chat, guys. W Thread Guy in the chat.
W Thread—
W Thread Guy in the chat.
Oh my God, that's—
The throat goat, Thread Guy. The throat goat.
That's what TG stands for.
Yes. Throat goat. That's so good. Holy shit, how did I never make that connection? That's insane. TG: the Thread Goat, the Throat Goat.
All right, guys. Seriously, what the fuck do I do?
Are we going to be able to hear Jesse? I think he's— is he ready?
He'll be ready. Are we going to be able to hear him?
Here are those final figures, by the way. It's 10 to 30 million daily traders versus 1.5 to 2 billion daily gamers. So, yeah, about 100 times more people are playing video games regularly than trading crypto.
Not to mention, we talked about creators and content in crypto. Compared to the biggest gaming channels—let's talk about MrBeast Gaming, PewDiePie, and FaZe Clan—there's nothing even remotely close to any of those in this niche. Not yet, at least. But I think they're kind of one and the same. One helps the other.
Give us content to make. You know what I'm saying? Give us these platforms and these products, because we'll use them. We'll talk about them. We'll—
Yeah. We need more experimentation, to be honest. That's what I think we're lacking in crypto right now: more experimentation.
Yeah. The experience.
Jesse's in the back room.
Jesse is in the waiting room. Do you want to give him a quick little rundown?
Chat, W Jesse in the chat real quick, one time.
9. Jesse Pollak (Base) Interview
Yeah, chat. We're going to have Jesse Pollak from Base on. He's been leading a lot of the direction of the Base app for the past year or couple of years, to be honest. He's a hugely important person in crypto, a great guy, and really passionate about onboarding people to the crypto economy. We're excited to have him on and excited to have him with us.
Chat loves you already, Jesse.
Jesse's the GOAT.
Production, I hope Jesse doesn't want to watch any Thread Guy clips, because it's not happening.
Yo, how are you?
Good, brother.
Yo, what up? Hey, how's it going?
Oh, well, man, cannot complain.
Can I tell you something? Never been better.
Yeah.
Thursday's the day, brother. Thursday's the fucking day. 1 p.m.
I thought it was Friday today. No, it's not Friday. No, it's Thursday.
Definitely wouldn't be live if it was Friday, brother. We would not be having this conversation if it was Friday.
But hey, Jesse Pollak from Base, thank you so much for coming on today.
I think it's appropriately timed. We saw you tweet about Kobe and his new role at Base, and everybody's all excited. CT very rarely comes together and responds in an overwhelmingly positive way, unanimously. That was kind of the experience yesterday.
Do you want to introduce yourself to the chat and our channels? Obviously, my background is in more traditional media and stuff, so it's likely that some people in my chat might not know who you are, what you do, Coinbase, Base, all that.
Yeah. Well, hey, everyone. I'm Jesse. I'm the creator of Base. I've been working in crypto for 13 years now. I dropped out of college and started a company that got acquired by Coinbase, then spent 5 years at Coinbase leading all of the consumer businesses on the engineering side. Five years ago, I started the journey to try and figure out what it meant to bring Coinbase onchain and what it meant to bring a billion people onchain.
That led to us launching Base in 2023, and I've been growing it ever since. For those who don't know, Base is the blockchain for global finance. The goal is to basically make it so trading, payments, and agents run on this incredibly powerful global platform for money that lets anyone, anywhere, do whatever they want with money in an incredibly new and exciting way. We've been working on that now for a few years.
The Base app has been a part of it. We shared some news on that yesterday, but overall, I'm just fired up to be here and fired up to keep bringing people onchain.
Amazing. Thank you, brother.
Appreciate you, bro. Appreciate you. So, I guess, could you speak a little bit about the direction that you guys are going with Base now? I know you talked a little bit about social and the direction with social. Can you talk a little bit about why you guys are shifting focus right now, what you thought could have gone better that didn't go as well as you planned, and what your intentions were before?
Yeah. Well, I wrote all this out, I think, in a post yesterday morning. I spent basically all of 2024 and 2025 making 2 bets. As we were thinking about bringing Base to the world, the first was a bet on builders. Basically, every innovation, whether it's in Silicon Valley or elsewhere in the world, has been created by builders. We think the same thing is going to happen with crypto: that the next wave of use cases and the next wave of adoption can be created by the people who are building the products that actually drive it.
The second bet was on social—creators, content, messaging, and tokenization of creators and content. I think as we came into 2026, we took a step back and saw that the bet on builders was 100% right. In fact, the builders had driven the next wave of adoption with crypto, with perpetuals, with prediction markets, and with stablecoins.
When you looked at the social bet, it wasn't there. So we basically made a pivot right at the beginning of 2026, refocused the Base app on trading, shifted the chain's focus to trading, payments, and agents, and basically focused on upgrading the financial system.
I said in the post yesterday that when you spend 2 years making 1 good bet, but 1 maybe bad bet or wrong bet, making a pivot like that is a hard thing to do. I feel like a lot of the first half of this year was starting to play catch-up, seeing where the gaps were, and getting punched in the face a little bit by people who we'd let down in the focus or who felt like we weren't serving them as well as we could have.
When you get punched in the face, you get back up. When you're just eating shit all day, you put your head down and build. At the end of the day, the only thing you can control is the impact you're making on a day-to-day basis with your customers and your team. That's what I've done for the last 6 months. I'm writing code again, and I'm spending a lot more time with customers and builders of all kinds.
We actually made the call about a month ago to let me fully focus on the chain and fully focus on this mission of building the blockchain for global finance. That meant taking the consumer product, the Base app, and shifting it back to the mothership, where Kobe Jordan—my friend Kobe—is now going to get to run it. That's awesome for the Base app, it's awesome for Base, and it's awesome for Coinbase, because Kobe's a beast. It's been awesome watching the impact he's had already in the 9 months he's been at the company, and I think he's going to do really big things for us.
He's going to crush it. You guys are going to crush it. It's awesome. And listen, bro, don't give these fucking people who are punching up at you too much credit. Honestly, as we all know and as we've all fallen victim to, this market has a funny way of always finding someone to blame besides themselves—a scapegoat.
Your attitude has always been super positive, and you've added so much to this industry and this market. You've dedicated your entire life to it, your entire company to it. Like you said, you were acquired by Coinbase. You're the fucking GOAT.
I feel like it's my job to just show up every single day, and there are always going to be haters. Sometimes you regret taking a big bet, but for me, there's a lot of stuff we could have done better, and there are a bunch of learnings from it. I don't want to get into a place where we're stopping taking big bets. That's how we lose.
Starting Base at Coinbase was a big bet. I spent a year failing and falling on my face, with people basically telling me, "You're not doing anything right." They shut down my team. Then, out of the ashes, I was like, "Give me one more go." That was what turned into Base.
At the time when we started it, no one really took us seriously. We had to pull together people and work nights and weekends on it. I don't think anyone thought it was going to be a thing, and now here we are a few years later.
Base is one of the most important blockchains in the world. It's the largest market for spot Ethereum and Bitcoin trading in the world. It's one of the biggest stablecoin payment rails in the world, and it's the biggest place for agentic transactions onchain in the world.
That started with no one taking us seriously, followed by 3 years of making mistakes and people hating on us. Again, the attitude is always: keep taking big bets, keep showing up, keep eating the shit even when it doesn't taste so good, and just keep trying to change the world.
It's cliché and it's been said a million times, but the biggest risk to take is not taking a risk, you know? We talk about that a lot on the show. It's really funny—pretty much unanimously, across every guest we've ever had a conversation with, this topic comes up as a paramount piece of their success and how they got there.
We had Luca Netz on the last episode of Pudgy Penguins, and the emphasis was just on taking risks and taking bets. That's what we're all here to do.
Yeah, honestly, the non-consensus bets that you make are the ones that pay off the most by far, especially in crypto. Like you said, even doing Base was a non-consensus bet. I align with that because I've taken my fair share of non-consensus bets in crypto. 2023 for Solana was a huge non-consensus bet. Everybody was like, "You're crazy. You're out of your mind."
Well, that was the beginning of Ansem. That's the lore.
I mean, you're taking a non-consensus bet right now. I said in my post yesterday, "Is Ansem a creator coin taking the creator coin bet at the bottom?"
So, on that, I think that over the next decade, just like finance has upgraded, social is going to get upgraded by crypto, too. I think tokenization is going to be a huge part of it. I'm not giving up on social.
When I launch something, I don't give up easily. It's not going to be the focus of Base for now. We're focused on upgrading finance, but I'm super excited to continue to watch you cook and hopefully learn some things from it.
Creators have a raw deal right now. They make all the content in the world, and it gets basically taken by big platforms that then monetize it and give a small cut back to creators. So there's definitely a lot of fixing that can come there. And we'll get to it after we upgrade finance.
You spoke a lot about onchaining, like onboarding people onchain. Do you think—I know Coinbase has like 100 million users, right? Have you ever thought about maybe it's not onboarding people onchain, but allowing people to use applications that are using crypto rails underneath without them knowing?
From my point of view, there's a ton of people on Coinbase trading in the centralized exchange, the mobile app. There's a ton of people on Robinhood trading on their mobile app, but it's typically a lot fewer of those people who go directly onchain or create wallets if it's not done for them under the hood.
I think you guys have done a good job of integrating Coinbase Wallet directly in the app, so people who have the app automatically have access to that. I'm curious about your thoughts on that—if you think it's going to look different from how you envisioned it before.
Yeah. We've been through a whole journey on this. I built a consumer product for 5 years and the Base app for a bunch of that as well, so I've gotten to see it in the Coinbase app.
We started with no products onchain, and then, from 2021 to 2023, we added this Web3 section of Coinbase where you could go and create a new wallet and do a bunch of things in there, like trade crypto assets, send and receive, buy NFTs, and so on.
What we found is that it was too confusing for customers. They were like, “Wait, I have this separate thing? What is this?” So we actually shut that down in late 2023 or early 2024 and basically refocused all of the onchain efforts in Coinbase on what we call the DeFi mullet, which is basically taking Base and this really powerful financial infrastructure that's built on Base and integrating it in super-seamless ways into the Coinbase app. That's been hugely successful.
I don't know if you've tried it or not, but there's a product that lets you borrow against Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP—basically any crypto that you hold in Coinbase. You can get dollars against it at super-low rates, which lets you keep your crypto and get access to capital at lower rates than a credit card, lower rates than a payday loan, and lower rates than pretty much any other kind of consumer loan that you can get on the market.
That product is entirely built on Base. It's built with Morpho, and it's powered by USDC and Coinbase-wrapped Bitcoin. I think it has like $2 billion of Bitcoin that has moved into it over the last year and a half, and it is one of Coinbase's new revenue lines that's growing really significantly.
I actually saw someone tweeting something about Base yesterday, saying, “Base has totally failed.” I'm like, bro, I have seen that Base has enabled Coinbase to build hundreds of millions of dollars of new business lines that would not exist without Base. That, to me, isn't a failure.
Putting aside the revenue that Base has generated for Coinbase, the fact that Base is serving as a platform that's enabling Coinbase to deliver product experiences that otherwise weren't possible, that's just a huge win.
One of the really exciting things that we're seeing is that we're taking all the learnings that we've gotten from doing this with Coinbase, and then we're basically able to sell it to everyone else in the world.
The Bitcoin-backed loans and the lending product, where you can earn, I think, 7% on Coinbase right now by lending out your USDC into a high-yield vault—all of that has meant that Base now has, behind Ethereum, the largest borrow-and-lend markets in crypto.
All of these other centralized exchanges, brokerages, and wallets are now coming to Base and basically saying, “We want to plug into this. We want to offer borrowing and lending against our product, our crypto, for our customers.” That's just created this really, really powerful flywheel.
I think all of it's making Base the home of finance. We're not there yet on purpose, but from a spot perspective, we're winning. From a financing perspective, we've got some room to catch up to Ethereum, but against other chains, we're winning.
I think we just have to keep building on that momentum, taking the learnings from what Coinbase is pioneering at the frontier of—the DeFi mullet—and shipping it to more customers globally.
I realize that's the focus, but I was going to say that's the Coinbase strategy. It's now the DeFi mullet: abstract the complexity. Then, on the other side, you have the Base app. Brian actually did a good tweet about this.
Some people are like, “Why do you have Coinbase and the Base app?” I think the thesis is simple. We believe that the world deserves a self-custodial, no-KYC, globally available product for your money.
That means that, yeah, it will look a little bit like Coinbase at times. There will be overlap, but it will give people more freedom because they'll have access to more products. It will give them more privacy because they're not going to have to share all their information with centralized companies that store it. Even when they store it to the best of their abilities, it's not always safe.
It will let more people in more countries access it because the really cool thing about the Base app is you can be in any country in the world. You can download it, create an account in 10 seconds, and then start borrowing, lending, paying, and trading as if you were on some bank that spent 20 years building out those services in traditional finance—but it's only available in the United States.
For the mission of Coinbase—increasing economic freedom globally—we believe that we need to do both. We need to have the centralized, regulated product, and we need to build the decentralized, no-KYC, globally available wallet that makes money just work for people.
There's always going to be a little bit of a higher technical bar there, but I think we're getting it simpler and simpler. Now you can sign up with an email; it takes 10 seconds. There are a bunch of rules that keep you safe, and I expect that actually might be the bigger product that reaches more people over the next decade.
It's the entire essence of crypto, right? It's right here.
Staying true to your roots. You mentioned earlier—and I don't want to get this wrong—but I think it was something along the lines of: You guys do the highest volume with agentic payments on Base.
Wow, I didn't know that. That's huge.
Yeah. If you've heard about x402, I think something like 90% of all x402 payments settle on Base today. I think it's done something like $50 million in the last little while.
There was a big chunk of that, kind of late last year, that was people using x402 to do memecoin creation and farming and a bunch of stuff there. So I might not say that's the run rate for it.
People show these charts where they're like, “Oh, it went up and down. x402 has failed.” I think if you take out the early-phase stuff that was driven by speculation, and then you actually look at the number of merchants that are now exposing endpoints via x402, the people who are actually spending with x402, and the total volume, it's just cranking up and to the right. Just cranking up to the right.
It's still small.
It's cranking up and to the right with AI. I mean, it's pretty clear.
It's pretty clear it's a big focus for Base. It's what I find most exciting. You guys are obviously attacking this crypto-AI sector, the cross between the two, and it's been proven that the winners are choosing Base—Venice AI, Virtuals, et cetera.
Why do you think that is? What's the team getting right there? Why are they going with you guys?
I don't feel like I can take that much credit for Venice. They're just an incredible team. I've known Erik for a long time, and when he told me he was thinking about starting Venice and said, “Hey, what do you think about us coming and building with you on Base?” I said, “Hell yeah. We want to build with you whenever we can.”
They picked you. Why do you think that is? What does Base offer to someone like Erik Voorhees? Someone who clearly knows what he's doing. Venice is an elite product.
I think the things that stood out to them—one is a really powerful developer platform. The EVM works really well, and it works even better on Base because it's superfast, super-scalable, and super-low-cost. We're increasingly innovating on it so that people can unlock things that might not be possible on other EVM chains.
I think the second thing is the builder ecosystem, where there's just a lot of people who really care about building serious products that are not going to just be a flash in the pan, but instead are going to actually be here for the next decade and are going to put their head down and grind, go through the good and the bad, and still keep grinding—never give up. And I think, to Venice's credit, you think about the day they launched their token. In the months afterward, there was a ton of FUD, and they just kept building. Now it's like, okay, Venice is the best brand in crypto for AI. To me, that's such a tell of when the going gets bad: you just tune it out and keep building. So I think that was the second thing: being around other builders.
And then I think the third thing—you have to credit Coinbase—is the brand that we've been able to build with Base, which in many ways we've inherited from Coinbase. I think it's trust, legitimacy, and seriousness. That's something that people want to feel like they're a part of, feel like they're contributing to, and feel like they're building somewhere where they can be taken seriously and where they can feel like they're going to be a part of upgrading the financial system. I'd have to ask Erik directly, but those are the ones that stood out to me, and I've tried at every point to figure out how we can support them.
I'm a subscriber to Venice. I stake my VVV. I use the product. There's this whole really cool tokenized inference market that Venice has really innovated, where they've taken inference and turned it into a token called DIEM, where you can buy it and then you get $1 of inference per day. That innovation—tokenizing inference—has now unlocked a ton of innovation around it, where people are using that tokenized inference to do things.
There's Surplus, which is letting people sell their tokenized inference at a discount, so that other people can get cheaper inference and the whole system can work more efficiently. I saw Proxy Studio, which has a little bit of a checkered past but is a real builder, building a wrapped, staked DIEM, which kind of lets you stake your DIEM. It then gets farmed out to these places where it's selling through Surplus, and then it gives you yield. I feel like that is the first time we're really seeing the intersection of AI, markets, and crypto. It's thanks to Venice, and it's happening on Base.
Let's fucking go, Ws all around.
Yeah, it's awesome. That's awesome. I know you've talked a little bit about how Coinbase is doing a lot of different things and Base is adding value to Coinbase. Do you see Coinbase as a company that's like an everything app? You guys do RWAs, you guys have perps, and I know you also partner with Hyperliquid. You guys have borrow and lend, all that stuff.
And you also have the social stuff on Base as well. But it seems like there are also a lot of other big companies trying to be the everything app. X is also, I feel like, trying to be the everything app.
Everyone's trying to be everything.
They also have AI; they have xAI. They just added X Money. Robinhood also has all these different verticals. It seems like everybody's trying to verticalize all the way down the stack. I'm curious if that's the grand vision for what Coinbase is going to be at the very, very end state, or—
I think Coinbase's mission is to increase economic freedom globally, and that's the thing that's guiding us. I will say, I've never met someone as mission-aligned as Brian Armstrong. That man will show up on the worst day, the best day, whatever it is, and he's just relentlessly focused on what we're doing right now to make it so that more people around the world have access to economic freedom.
Maybe that's delivering a new consumer product, like the borrow-and-lend product I talked about. Maybe it's expanding the Base app to new countries or offering new features there. Maybe it's advocating for literally 5 years to build the Coinbase Developer Platform, to keep it growing and iterating, and to turn it into a business that is now starting to be a little bit of a juggernaut. It's become one of the best payments API platforms in the world for stablecoins. It's kind of secretly become that over the last year and a half, and that was after 5 years of it not working—of people saying, “Do we need to do this? Is this important? Does Coinbase really need to be a developer company?”
Brian was just like, “We need to do this, because enabling developers is key to our mission of increasing economic freedom.” I don't think that Coinbase has the North Star of, “The most important thing to us is to build an everything app,” or to do everything. It's a culture of innovation that Brian Armstrong has created, where he makes space for different people across the company, whether it's me or others, to take bets. Once we make those bets, we iterate and iterate and iterate and iterate.
Sometimes, with the social stuff, we iterate a little bit too long and don't learn the lesson quickly enough. But sometimes, like with the Coinbase Developer Platform, you just keep iterating, and then it turns into something massive. I think that's where this comes from. You see how much Coinbase is doing, and it's not because we constantly think, “Oh, we have to do everything.” It's because we have a culture where there are people inside the business who are constantly lifted up into roles where they get the shot to do something. I think that's a pretty special thing.
I know for sure that I've never experienced anything like the freedom and entrepreneurial energy that I've gotten to embody in my role at Base, through the good and the bad. I'm just super grateful for that.
That's fucking sick. You can see literally how excited you are about all the stuff going on.
It's awesome to see. Awesome, Jesse. For real.
Oh, man. You guys are nice.
I love this stuff.
I love crypto.
You can tell. You can tell. Even—
You genuinely can.
Even you and Brian with the punk PFPs and stuff. I still own some Punks, and you just—
Brian's got to change out his budget PFP. I gotta—I'm sorry, Brian. I'm sorry.
Brian, you founded Coinbase. Go fire this fucking market back up and buy an alien, maybe.
Right. For real. Put the bottom in on the NFT market. That would be so sick.
We should get him to do that. He should buy a fucking alien.
Yeah, Brian's a little bit old. I said tweeting about memecoins was illegal for people over 40, but you've got to understand: Brian's kind of old. We love Brian. We love Brian. I love Brian.
I think that sometimes means that you look at the people who are trading memecoins and think, “You know what? This is Gen Z, this is young folks who are experiencing culture in real time on Twitter, on TikTok, wherever, and then they're trading trends around it.” I look at that and I'm like, I'm a little old too. I'm a millennial, in case people couldn't tell, and it took me a little while to get it. Then I spent enough time on the internet that I was like, “You can say memes are bad or whatever. This is culture.”
It's people trading culture. It's real. You can say it's bad, but it is a reality. Just like people are going to trade prediction markets, just like people are going to trade Bitcoin, and just like people are going to trade oil, people are going to trade culture. I think it's just a little bit harder for older people to get.
I think that means sometimes people are looking for something from Brian that they might just not get. Brian has so many other strengths. Look at what this guy has done for crypto in the legislature. Look at what he's done in building Coinbase.
Look at what he's done by being so steadfast in building this mission. We can love him for that, and then we can fucking joke about him being a little bit old on the other side.
Have you guys ever thought about—I don't know if you do this or don't do this—but there's a lot of traders in the trenches, that Gen Z and Gen Alpha cohort that you talk about. They're super active on crypto Twitter and super active trading. Have you guys ever reached out to them or talked to them about their opinions on some of the stuff Brian is doing, or their opinions on trading and stuff like that?
I talk with so many of those people all the time. I'm in people's DMs. We have trading groups where we do calls. A lot of those people, to be fair, told me I was wrong last year, and they were right and I was wrong. But it wasn't for lack of having an open channel. I think I was just a little bit locked in on the vision, and the vision was too far out, and I didn't—
Yeah.
—see that, and I fully own that. But I think there's always more we can do. I want to say that I care about traders. I trade memes myself. I don't trade them as much as I buy them and support them and engage with them, because it's a little complex to trade them in my role, but I'm here for it.
I will say one thing that I think has been a huge win for Coinbase: bringing Cobie into the business.
For sure. I mean, that guy gets crypto Twitter, he gets trading, and he gets the culture more than basically anyone. I think that doesn't just legitimize Coinbase; he actually makes Coinbase better.
10. CXMT Pre-IPO on Hyperliquid
Maybe, just to give an example of this, you guys saw the firestorm on Twitter around Base over the last week and a half. I knew I had to say something. I was like, “Okay, what am I going to say? How do I do this?” I wrote an initial version, and I actually wrote a couple of versions. Jordan—Cobie—called me, and he was like, “Jesse, just say what’s authentic to you.”
Yeah. They don't want to hear something that's polished. They just want to hear what's authentic to you. And—
Brother, we've been so genuine in this conversation, and it's definitely coming through. And—
He's like—I was like, “Okay, I'll do that.” And that's what this post is. This was just at 10:30 at night on Tuesday. I was like, “Okay, Jordan's saying, ‘You have to say what's authentic to you. I need to write this out.’” I wrote it, got him to review it, got one other person to review it, and then we sent it.
Amazing. And to me, it seems kind of obvious, but I do think that he has an uncanny ability to get it and then be unafraid to tell you like it is. I'm just grateful for him.
I think we all are. I think we all are. And he's a very important part, bro.
He's a very important part of the culture.
That's something I've always appreciated about Coinbase. Just touching on several things you've discussed, like Coinbase and Base, you guys have always embraced the culture, these subcultures, and these subcommunities. Don't sell yourself short. I think you guys definitely have your finger on the pulse and have had your finger on the pulse. I imagine it's probably not easy when you're experiencing the kinds of growing pains that a company and a product like Coinbase face. It's the biggest crypto product platform in the fucking world.
Yeah.
By far, right? It's—
It's not easy building a decentralized network inside a big public company, especially when the network is not the company and the company is all—
That sounds like it doesn't even make sense. It's oil and water, right? It's—
Crazy. So—
But speaking about Cobie—
Speaking about Cobie and the culture, you guys have always found a way to embrace the creators in it.
Where do you think creators fit in the global finance chain? How has your overall thesis on the creator economy evolved?
Curious about that. We talk about this a lot on the show. Z just put out an article that goes in depth on the total creator economy market cap in 2035. We're looking at north of $2 trillion.
You know, the total creator economy market cap in 2035—we're looking at north of $2 trillion. It's the biggest runway by far. I'm fired up. Like I said at the beginning of the call, I think the creator economy is growing incredibly fast. You see it in every metric.
I also think that the platforms don't work nearly as well as they could for creators. Creators take all of their content, creativity, and innovation and put it into these centralized platforms. I think that's kind of a raw deal. Regardless of whether crypto disintermediates that or upgrades the system in the next couple of years, I don't think that's going to slow down.
Shows like this, shows like Threadguy, and shows like TVPN[?] are showing that if you have something to say and you're good at saying it, and you're able to understand what's happening in the market and create insights that help people better understand the market, trade the market, or whatever it is, that's going to be valuable. I think the people who can do that are going to get platformed, whether they're platformed on X, Farcaster, the Base app, Instagram, or wherever. I think that's just going to keep accelerating.
The world is being financialized, for good and for bad, and I think there's a lot of good that's going to come from that. That's going to way, way, way outweigh the bad. It's going to give a lot of people who might not otherwise have had a path to make it a path to make it.
The world we've had, which has developed in this insular way over the last 5 to 10 years, isn't working for most people, and they need more pathways to make it.
And so I think creating is going to be a big one of them. I think AI, and people figuring out, “Holy crap, I can do so much now as an individual to build a business or build a brand. I can do it all by myself because I have this insane superpower in agents,” is going to be another big pathway.
I think trading, crypto, memes, stocks, and real-world assets—whatever it is—are going to be another pathway. I think building companies is going to continue to be one of the most important pathways. I'm here for it all. Base is here for it all. If you want to build something sick with trading, payments, and agents, we want to do everything we can to help you do it on Base.
Amen, brother. Amen.
And even building on the points of AI, starting companies, and trading, it's never been easier. We spoke earlier about taking risks. It's never been easier to take a risk than in 2026. There are so many tools and so much information available.
It is exciting stuff.
Even to flip it and end on this note, the importance of content in this market: I think products often develop their products with UX and UI in mind, focusing on the consumer and the person using the product. But I don't think enough thought and consideration is given to who's viewing the product—who is watching the product being used.
We talked earlier about gamifying crypto and making these products, and the way people think about trading and actually trade assets, more gamified, more palatable, and more entertaining in general. This is obviously thick, dense material that doesn't often land with the average person, versus Fortnite, which is very easy to pick up, play, and enjoy.
Love Fortnite.
Yeah, we love Fortnite. But we're wrapping up. We're coming in on your 30 minutes, Jesse. We really appreciate you coming on. Is there anything else you'd like to say to the audience or speak to about Base, Coinbase, Cobie, or anything else?
No, I mean, just riffing on your last point, I feel like what people need—or one of the ways we're going to help more people make it—is by giving them more great role models. Whether you're on a stream, listening to a podcast, or reading someone's post on X, people need people they can learn from and look up to.
When I think about what kind of role model I want to be, because I think that when you have a platform, you kind of have to think about that—you have a responsibility to be a good role model—I want to be someone who shows what it's like to actually build something. It's not always in public. It's not always easy. In fact, most of the time it's really freaking hard.
You don't always make the right decisions. Sometimes you make bad ones, and it feels really bad. People rag on you, and that's no fun.
But I don't know. I'm coming on the show. I do that tweet because I want people to see that even when you get punched, even when you get knocked down, you can get yourself back up again. And this moment—the intersection of crypto and AI, the whole crazy geopolitical stuff that's happening now, and the world starting to unify more through the internet—I just feel like there is so much opportunity for young people around the world, and for all people around the world, to make something of themselves.
And I think a big way is going to be people using crypto and AI to build products, to trade, to invest, to create, and to do it in this new global economy that's being built. And so, yeah, I hope that I get to play a small part in being a good role model for people doing that. And I hope that folks find it in themselves to pick themselves out of bed, even when it feels bad some days.
You're the best. You're the best. And you're playing—come on, guys.
You're playing a bigger role than a small one. And Jesse, take Cobie's advice and just be as authentic and candid as you can. Even with this show, we'd love to have you on anytime you want to come on. You should do this more often because it really lands—at least for me. I'm speaking for myself. You're fucking awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, bro.
Appreciate you, brother. Go.
Take care, dude.
He's such a great guy, man.
He's awesome, bro. He's such a great guy, and he's very genuine in what he speaks on. You can just tell he's super passionate about what he does.
W Jesse in the chat. We have another guest who is probably in the waiting room. Right before that, we want to do the Venice announcement.
Yeah, let's do that because we're off of that. That's a good segue. Chat's still fucking spamming CAs and spot addresses. Oh, they're never going to stop. Do you want to just talk to chat for a second so I can take my 18th piss of the episode?
Yeah, let's do it. What's good, chat?
11. Lucas (Jito Labs) Interview
Chat, what's good, chat? Give him the chat overlay on his full screen, guys. I think I have it. When I go, I have it. Yeah, give him this screen.
It's probably not immediate. Oh, it's over there on the left. WM in the chat.
No, but so chat can see the chat, if that makes sense. Yeah, yeah, there you go. Perfect. I'll be right back.
Bro, it's moving so fast. How the fuck am I going to read this shit, bro? I have to be able to read the chat before I throw some bands up. All right, let's see what people are talking about. Who said “L Jesse”? Why? I thought Jesse was great. He has great energy, and you can tell he's very committed to what he's trying to accomplish. I like him. Shout-out Sierra Leone.
12. SOL & Hyperliquid Charts
Shout-out Sierra Leone, yeah. Bro, it's moving so fast. How many messages a minute is it right now?
800.
What the fuck? Y'all are lit. Y'all are fucking lit. I appreciate you guys.
We can talk about charts if you want. I actually think Solana is in a really great place to long right now. It's retesting the bottom of the range and also the medium-time-frame range that it broke out from, around 75–76. Yeah, I think it's actually in a really good spot.
I feel like we've talked about this chart so many times now. I just keep talking about the same fucking levels. You have 80 to 83 as resistance, touch that resistance, pull back, and now you have this range here from around 75 to 60. Resistance here, resistance, resistance, breakout, and now it's retesting this area. You don't want to see this shit lose the Q3 open, which I talked about last week. I think trading back under 73 would be a bad sign. You want to see it show some strength here, which I think is what we're going to see. But, yeah, I like SOL here. I like SOL here.
I don't know why Hyperliquid sold off so hard today, though. Last time we were on stream, I gave this setup. I said, “I think we were around here. Pull back into 65.” This would have gotten stopped out if you took this long. This is actually one of the things that I'm concerned about right now, because Hyperliquid has been the leader for coins for the majority of this year and in this mini-cycle that we've been in, and it's been pretty weak here. So, yeah, this is a warning sign for me, Hyperliquid being weak here.
I don't know if it's because people are focusing less, or just people in general de-risking. The thing is, with Hyperliquid, it has been a lot more correlated to TradFi and equities. Equities have been going up, and Hyperliquid has been going up alongside equities. Equities have been pretty weak, though. They've been selling off. I talked about Micron being weak; it's down around 30%. Intel is pretty weak. Basically, all memory is down, so maybe it's just catching that de-risking across the board, which is definitely possible.
But, yeah, I think stocks are going to be pretty slow for the rest of the summer, to be honest. They've been pretty sideways, so that could be a reason, I guess, for Hyperliquid.
I'm back.
What's good, bro?
What's goody? Okay, we have—
ETH looks good. SOL looks good.
PUMP looks good, too, actually.
The black bull, baby.
We're going to talk about PUMP after this next guest. We have so much shit to talk about. We'll talk about the market stuff, Pump.fun, SpaceX, Anthropic, losing aura—all that shit.
13. Venice AI $100K Film Festival
We're going to add one extra little tidbit. We're going to be bringing on the winner of this festival as a guest if they want to come on. Maybe they'll tell us to fuck ourselves and won't want to come on as a guest, but we'll offer it to them and do a live screening of it. Venice AI and MoonPay are launching the Lumara Film Festival, the first ever mainstream AI film festival. The live screenings will happen in New York this October, and there will be a $100,000 cash prize to the winner. Submissions are open from July 23rd to September 14th. Use the Market Bubble code for 50% off the first 100 people.
I'm gonna get my girl to do it, bro. I'm gonna win.
I'm doing Fruit Party Love Island. [laughter]
You know those little brain-rot fruit videos of them, like—
Piping each other? Yeah, we're doing that. That's what I'm going with. I feel like that's a smash. I feel like that's viral.
But anyways, yes, we have our next guest. We have Lucas in the green room. Production, I think you guys can bring him on, and I'll let the other host introduce him.
What's good, brother? We have Lucas, CEO of GTO Labs. If you guys don't know what GTO Labs is, they're one of the most important infrastructure providers on Solana—one of the most OG teams on Solana. I've been on Sol for a very long time. I love Lucas. When did we meet? In 2022, I think, right?
It's been a while, man.
Yeah, it's been a minute, bro. Lucas and I met at Solana Breakpoint in 2022, right before all the FTX [laughter] shit happened. I remember the worst possible shit that happened to Solana was when we met for the first time.
What a crazy plane ride home, man. [laughter]
So fucked up.
It's like being over the middle of the ocean, trying to refresh Twitter: "What the fuck is happening?"
There was no Wi-Fi on the plane. People were like, "Yo, what the fuck is happening?" We were like, "Fuck."
But yo, thank you for coming on. Could you give us a little bit of background on you personally, and then a little bit of background on Jito and what you guys do on Solana?
Yeah. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Jito Labs. I studied computer engineering, moved to San Francisco straight out of school, and worked at a bunch of different startups in robotics and firmware. I was doing self-driving construction equipment, which was super sick. I got to basically hook Xbox controllers up to bulldozers, drive them, and make them fully self-driving.
Then I did a few other things after that and started falling down this crypto rabbit hole. I've always loved building shit and working on really cool shit, from bulldozers to discovering MEV and Ethereum. I went down this Solana rabbit hole, and we started Cheeto back in 2021.
We basically build blocks on the network, so we run how transactions are ordered and then run staking. Most recently, we launched JitoX, which is our consumer trading terminal that we're super excited about.
Very cool, very cool. I know you've seen the evolution of Solana from its very beginnings to now. How would you say the culture and community on Solana have changed over the years? How much easier is it now to build on Solana than it was back then?
It's definitely easier, man. When I started, there was nothing out there for how to code. There was no documentation or source code for anything. It was super hard. It was just a bunch of dudes in Discord nerding out and trying to figure this shit out.
Now, you have tons of code examples. I think the vibes are really good. It's definitely a super business-focused culture, and I'm sure you've seen that grow compared to other ecosystems. I think there's a ton of really good entrepreneurs on Solana.
Yeah, yeah. One of the biggest things last cycle, if you guys don't know, was the GTO airdrop, which happened, I believe, in 2023. It was one of the best stimulus packages for retail on Sol right before SOL really started moving and Solana on-chain activity started really moving.
Can you talk about your thought process around doing that airdrop and how you chose who to incentivize? I believe it was around GTO soul staking, right?
Yeah, yeah. There were 3 buckets, and we knew basically since starting Jito that we wanted to have a token at some point. It can really throw fuel on the fire. Of course, you can see the pain of it too. I'm sure your DMs are just wrecked right now, but there are a lot of pros to it too.
We always knew we wanted to do it. We started talking about it around mid-2023. The FTX overhang was still happening. Everyone was just shitting on Solana. You were around back then—it was the ghost chain, Samcoin, and all this shit.
From the inside, it's like there are just so many good people. We knew we wanted to help revive it, and we started thinking about doing an airdrop. Some people were saying, "You should wait until the market turns around," while others were saying, "You should just rip it." We kind of took it upon ourselves to just let it rip and get it out there.
There had been several instances of airdrops before Jito where you saw these massive wealth-creation events. Uniswap was the main one, and then there was some form of that during DeFi Summer, with all these yield farms and all that. We really took the approach of, "Let's give all these little guys a ton of money and see what happens."
There was no way you could pull it off after us. I think about a month before we started the airdrop, we started to see more Sybil activity come in, but the airdrop was only 90,000 wallets.
Yeah. [laughter]
I think the smallest amount was mid-4 figures. I think it was like 5,000 or 10,000. It was just a massive stimulus package. After that, there were crazy memes, Pump.fun and Jupiter, and all these different airdrops came. It just took off.
That could not have gone better. We really just wanted to see it kick off, and it happened.
Yeah, it was one of the best, bro. I remember I was banging the drum on it all through 2023. I thought you guys were going to do it, or somebody else was going to do it. Jupiter also did one right around the same time.
I was like, "Bro, there aren't even that many users on Sol right now who are doing things. You're competing with such a small pool of capital right now. If they do this airdrop, it's going to be really beneficial for you." I'm glad that you guys ended up doing it. One of the things I ended up being right about, and it was great for Solana on-chain. I think you guys contributed a lot to on-chain volumes coming back. I don't think you guys get enough credit for that, honestly.
I know a lot of the on-chain activity—people always talk about memecoins and people trading on-chain—but I think what people are unaware of is how much the backend infrastructure providers benefit from all this activity. You guys are one of those teams that benefit.
Can you talk a little bit about how all the activity on Solana adds directly to the revenue you guys are making, how much you guys are making, and then talk a little bit about BAM, the Block Assembly Marketplace?
Yeah. Those revenues—what was it, January 2025, when the Trump memecoin and Melania launched and shit was just going crazy? There was a period where we made over $1 million every day for a week just from the activity. [laughter]
That's crazy.
Yeah, it was insane. There's a ton of people trading, and there's only so much block space. The way that you ration it out is that whoever pays the most gets access to it. Our software helps do that and brings order to this chaos.
Back when shit was going really crazy, people were paying insane tips and priority fees and all this stuff. Our business model is just taking a percentage of the fee that people pay.
Right now, we're rolling out this next-generation sequencer. I don't want to go into the details too much because I think people's eyes just start to glaze over. [laughter] It's basically making the chain super friendly to applications and market makers.
We have a few features in this sequencer that are made for market makers so they can quote tighter and land transactions more reliably. We're seeing the success of that in the way assets are being traded on-chain.
The cheapest place to trade Solana is actually on the Solana blockchain. Same for Ethereum and Bitcoin. It's quick and easy—it's the best.
Yeah, it's like a traditional Twitter or Facebook interaction. It's super fast. There are a ton of super-legit, big-boy market makers on Solana, and it's just crazy to see.
Obviously, memes are still popping off. They're always going to be here, but we're also seeing some really legit activity—not only on crypto assets, but also stocks and other things.
I was going to say, you guys already kind of touched on this, but you're building this thing at the stone-cold Solana bottom, right? Everything that you're describing is super technical. Do you want to describe a little bit about your background and how you came to this point, and maybe even describe in detail the moment that you decided to do this? How did you even think to do this? What was the moment you decided, "Here's a problem"?
I've identified it. I'm going to build it on Solana at the bottom and get it to a point where you said a million dollars a week is what you said. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's much smaller now. It's a few thousand dollars a week right now. But my motto is, if you did it once, you could do it again, right?
Oh, yeah.
We're definitely doing it again.
Why did you guys decide to build this? What was the moment you decided, “I'm going to build this. This needs to be a thing”? Just walk us through that. It's interesting.
Yeah. I fell down the crypto rabbit hole in 2017, and I always really loved building cool things and working on really hard problems. In school, I did an internship at Tesla right before the Model X was released. I was programming the Falcon Wing doors and everything that moved or lit up on that car. Those were super-hard problems. Then I got into construction robots—super-hard stuff. I just love diving into that stuff.
“Fake it till you make it.” But, yeah, I got into crypto and discovered this MEV thing. It's kind of like high-frequency trading, this new era of high-frequency trading, and there are a ton of really hard problems there. I dove in and worked on an MEV bot on Ethereum, which was basically a high-frequency trading bot, and I thought, “This is the next big thing.” If you think people are going to trade on blockchains, then of course high-frequency trading is going to be a huge part of it.
I saw the success that this other company called Flashbots was having at the time. Their software was really picking up fast. Then I discovered Solana through SBF's $3 tweet: “Sell me all the SOL you want at $3 and go fuck yourself.” I really fell in love with the team, the Solana technology, and all this stuff. I wonder how many people got rich off that tweet.
How many people discovered Solana from that tweet and got rich? I mean, SBF has been very good at making people rich and making insanely good investments.
You should have just stuck to that.
Yeah. You shouldn't have committed crime.
You guys did a ton of the backend infrastructure stuff, and now you're focusing on the front-end consumer. Why are you focusing on the front-end consumer with JitoX, and what's your vision for JitoX as a product?
Yeah, I think it goes back to what Banks was saying: You can really feel how good Solana is. The transactions confirm super fast, and you get really tight quotes. But I think there's a lot of room for improvement at the application layer—the way that people interact with the applications.
The current applications aren't really something I would want to get my friends and family on board with. You open them up and it's Testicle Coin, Butthole Coin, and all this stuff. We're taking a more professional approach to it and trying to curate the assets a little more. We're focusing a lot on really good trade execution, which goes back to our high-frequency-trading DNA.
I think it ties back to the JTO airdrop, too. We're so tied to the success of Solana, and there's only so much we can do at the infra layer. I don't think you guys, when you send a transaction, really think about BAM or any of the infra work. Of course, it makes the transaction land fast and all that stuff, but it's not bringing new people in. We want to bring new people in, and we want to take a different approach to the way that people trade. That's the main reason why.
It's the most important thing. I'm not as deep into crypto as either of you—not even remotely close—but for some reason, I decide to trade and accept USDC on Solana. It's so easy, fast, cheap, simple, and smooth. I don't give a fuck about all the technical jargon, what Ethereum is doing, or why these gigabrain tech guys say Ethereum is the future. I don't give a fuck about that. All I know is Solana is fast, easy, and cheap. That's why I'm using it.
Yeah, I feel like that's often lacking in people's process of building these products and delivering these apps. Like you said, it's tougher now, more than ever—in 2026—to bring retail into crypto. That's all CT talks about.
Yeah. The infra stuff is super important, but it's behind the scenes. You're not interacting with it. With something like Bullpen, FOMO, JitoX, or Polymarket, you don't even realize you're using crypto. They're just really good experiences, and they're bringing in a ton of people. We want to take a different approach and see if we can get everyone trading on Solana.
You said you guys are going to be one of the only teams that owns part of the backend stack, owns part of the infra behind the scenes, and owns the front-end part of the stack. I believe you're directing a lot of your revenue from both things to the token, correct?
Yeah, we're kind of split. The old revenue streams were in growth mode, so those are going to the validators that run this new software.
Got it.
All the new stuff, which I think is going to be this massive pie—if we're successful, it could be 99% of the revenue—is going to the token. There was just a proposal put up to buy and burn JTO, so I'm assuming that's going to pass. Basically, all the revenue from Jito that the token gets will go to buying and burning JTO.
Got it. And you guys are going to be doing all spot markets, all perps—everything?
Yeah. You can trade everything on spot right now. We're going to have perps later this year. Actually, backtracking a little bit, I think equities on-chain are super underexplored right now. There's a lot of room for improvement in trading stocks 24/7, 365.
The way that people trade crypto is through Privy or Turnkey and these other systems. You just need an email address to sign up.
So it's frictionless, with no KYC. I think there's a lot of room for improvement with equities. Then we can move into perp markets, and we'll see what's coming after that. There's been a lot of good feedback. We're working through a lot of bugs, but things are definitely pointed in the right direction.
Are you partnering with or competing with the other perp platforms? Are you using one of them under the hood, like Bulk or Phoenix, or are you creating your own?
We're going to use Phoenix.
Okay, that makes sense.
Cool.
Yeah, Phoenix is really cool. It's a crack team, and they're listing more and more markets over time. I saw they just listed Anom yesterday with 3x leverage.
Yeah, I saw that. I saw that.
Cool. Go check that out.
I think it's interesting that Solana has dominated so much of the retail flow for on-chain trading but hasn't dominated a lot of the flow for perps yet. What people are discounting about Solana over the next few years is that if you have a chain that's faster and cheaper than centralized exchanges for spot assets across the board, depending on how deep some of these markets are, then it would obviously make sense that it could compete with the top perps platforms. Nobody has really hit it hard yet.
I think that's one of the discounted theses for SOL and for you guys. Obviously, you'll benefit a lot from that, but I think that's a good area for you to focus on and dominate.
Yeah, and the competition is really good, too. The Hyperliquid team is just insane. They're so good. The Trade.xyz team is really good. There's obviously Lighter and some of these new perps, so it's super competitive out there.
But I think there are going to be a lot of unique benefits you'll be able to get from running a perp stack on Solana that some of these other places won't get. Obviously, you have all the retail flow, and you'll be able to compose with all the other protocols without bridging and all this other shit. There's a lot of work to do, but I think we're going to pull it off.
But are you guys thinking you'll be able to use the same collateral you're using to trade memes, stocks, and spot markets to also trade perps—collateral across all 4 of those different things?
Yeah. Phoenix currently only accepts USDC.
Yeah.
But Jerry tweeted 2 days ago about enabling other types of collateral. You could have ANON, SOL, JTO, or maybe the S&P 500—or all these stocks—as collateral. I think that's going to be the huge unlock moment.
Huge unlock. That was one of my favorite things about FTX, actually.
FTX let you use whatever asset you had on the exchange as collateral. You could be degening—I remember at one point I was degening. I had SOL as collateral, and I was long SOL with SOL as my collateral. All types of crazy shit, bro.
What’s your most degen moment?
My most degen moment, bro, was at the end of 2021. After I thought we were going to break down—I thought Bitcoin was going to break down—and when I realized Bitcoin wasn’t going to break down, I started looking for longs. Obviously, I was looking for longs on Solana.
Solana was the dominant leading L1 that cycle. I remember—I actually have it on the chart—at the end of 2021, when Solana was at, like—
$150 or $250?
It wasn’t $150 or $250. It was right before the crazy run-up. It was around $40 or $50. Right before that, I was like, “I think this is going to break the previous all-time high and just run.”
I was long with 3x leverage, my entire net worth on it. [Laughter] At that point, everything—I was all in, 3x. I was like, “Bro, I’m not closing this. If I’m right and it’s going to break out, I’m just going to hold it till whatever price discovery happens.”
I remember I was long at the end of that summer in 2021, and I made a shit ton on that long. I think I closed it when I went to Vegas with some of my boys from high school. I was like, “Bro, I’m up too much. I need to fucking close this position.” [Clears throat] I think that was my most degen moment. It was fucking crazy.
What about you, Lucas?
Oh—
14. Degen NFT Stories
My most degen moment in crypto? I would say maybe not a moment, but a period, was just the NFT craze. [Laughter]
No, no, I was doing the dumbest shit.
I bought a Punk for 14 ETH. Do you remember SubDucks?
SubDucks? You remember SubDucks?
Yeah, SubDucks got minted. I minted a bunch of those. I tweeted about it, and it got fully minted. There were these 5 special ones—you guys remember the 1-of-1, holy-grail ones? Every project would have 5 or 10 of these things.
I sold a Punk to buy one of these SubDucks, and everyone on the timeline was fucking frying me. Or, no, I didn’t even sell it—I just traded it 1-to-1. I hit up the guy who had the bubblegum SubDuck, and I was like, “I’ll trade you a Punk for this.” He was like, “Fucking yeah.” I was like, “Fuck this SubDuck,” or whatever. “Give me that.”
Then SubDucks fucking mooned and went nuts for the next week. I sold that and flipped it for, like, 5 or 6x the floor, and then just bought 5 or 6 more Punks. It was a ridiculous—it was such a fucking thing. It was such a fucking thing.
Sup?
Such a dumb way—such a dumb way—to make a couple hundred bands.
Do you think NFTs are going to come back?
I think Punks are forever, brother. I think Punks are million-dollar assets. I think it’s—
Forever.
Yeah, it’s a whole separate thing. There are people you would never think are frequently on CT who trade them, who are secretly buying CryptoPunks or holding Punks. It’s always going to be a thing.
I think the metaverse is inevitable. Having an online identity and some sort of character display or skin display—we’ve seen it in every single video game. I don’t know. Punks are just the Picassos of digital art, digital collectibles, whatever.
What was the thing that Lucas said? Go ahead.
There were so many good ones that just completely screwed me up. I don’t know what happened. I think the first one I got—I was dabbling around before, but I remember my first moment was Hashmasks.
Yeah, I remember those.
Those were a really big one. I minted 3 Bored Ape Yacht Clubs.
I think it was, like, $200 a piece.
Epic. Yeah, I minted them. I ended up getting the Mutants and the dogs. I think I turned $600 into $600,000 or something. That was my best trade ever.
Yeah, I think right before Otherdeed—actually, this is easily the most degenerate thing I’ve ever done in crypto. Easily.
Other Side was about to go live and do its sale for the land—the metaverse land. I think the smallest amount of return was 9x on the dogs to that point, and then the Mutants were whatever. The Apes were obviously fucking thousands of Xs in multiples.
To that point, anything in the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs ecosystem—you were guaranteed at minimum a 9x. So me and my friends—they were trying to keep you out with KYC. You were only supposed to be able to mint 1 or 2 lands, whatever. I forget what it was.
But me and 5 or 6 of my friends went and bought a bunch of KYC accounts. We sat down, and I invested a fucking million dollars into Otherdeed. I think still to this day I’m one of the top 10 Otherdeed holders. I have, like, fucking 800 plots of land. I don’t know.
I don’t know what it’s worth. [Laughter]
You invested a million into Otherdeed land, bro?
Brother, did you just hear the thesis, though, Lucas? Lucas, you understand? You live next to Snoop Dogg. It’s insane, brother. It’s so insane.
The Kodas—I got fucking slimed on the Kodas, too. I got, like, no Kodas. I sold none of it. I still own it to this day. At the peak, I was the 11th-biggest landholder in Otherdeeds. So I’m probably fourth or fifth right now. I don’t even know. I haven’t checked it.
I consider it a zero. Just don’t—
[Laughter] No, don’t say that. Don’t say that.
World’s largest Otherdeed holder. It’s so—
That’s so fucking—
Nah, bro, we definitely have to get the fucking GTA 6 crew, bro. If you’re spending a million on Otherdeed land, bro, the GTA 6—
Brother, let us slip back into any sort of NFT meta, metaverse meta, gaming meta, and I’m there.
Trust.
It’s fucked, because I faded the metaverse shit for so long. I was like, “Listen, I’m not falling for this metaverse shit.” I faded it infinitely.
Whoever is the Facebook of this metaverse thing, there are going to be 1 or 2 giant winners. It’s not going to be discovered now. So I faded all of it. But BAYC—the thesis was clear. It’s like, Bored Ape Yacht Club: everything they’ve ever put out has a multiple return.
It just felt like a free money glitch. A lot of people felt that way. That was pretty much the general consensus, which is why we shouldn’t have traded it.
But also, FTX happened right after. I made most of the money back buying Solana at $8, though. I did do that. I should have made a lot more, but I—
NFTs, man. I miss them. I hope they come back.
They’re fun, bro. NFTs are fun, bro. They’re fun.
I think it’s crazy that we had that guy on—I think it was last week or 2 weeks ago. He’s been one of the only operators who did really well with his NFT project and his brand in the real world.
I think that was really the issue. It wasn’t that NFTs didn’t make sense. It was just that all the operators were trying to scam people—just mint, sell, classic crypto issue.
But we also heard so much about utility. There was this utility meta, and anybody who could sell you on, “Yes, this has more utility than the next one,” just had a better chance at selling out and getting whatever big returns.
The truth is, when you look back, there was no utility for any of this shit. The only actual utility was having it as a PFP for your account on Twitter. The minute NFTs flipped to cringe, that wasn’t even real utility anymore.
Now it’s like, “Brother, I own a 7-figure zombie CryptoPunk. It’s not my PFP. I won’t make it my PFP.” You know what I’m saying? That’s the problem. It’s the culture around it.
You need real utility. You need some sort of metaverse to exist. You need some way to display it and interact with it—
Or you need some design for the asset. Go ahead.
Do you think GTA 6 is going to be the first time that we see that?
I absolutely think GTA’s economy—I think Take-Two is a great fucking place to put money. I think GTA 6 and its economy—it’s a creator economy.
I think the tools they allow us to use to build full businesses in their game are going to be infinite. I think they’ve fully embraced this RP culture. In GTA 5, it wasn’t even initially built into the game. It’s all fan-made. It’s all jailbroken shit.
They’ve fully embraced it. You see what companies like Roblox have done by giving people the ability to create games, create skins, create digital products and IP.
Would it surprise anybody here to see some headline somewhere that Polymarket just bought the biggest skyscraper in a major streamer’s server for $30 million?
It wouldn't surprise me at all. I think it's more likely than not, off rip. I don't think we'll see them do any of that stuff until after the first year the game's out. I think they'll let the game come out and breathe, but I think they're going to give us all types of opportunities to build shit on their game.
Well, if you see Polymarket making that offer, let me know. I'm just going to sell everything at that point.
Right. That could be the top.
That could be the top.
That could be the top. But GTA is going to be massive, bro. It's going to be massive. I don't know that they're going to embrace crypto, so I'd be very surprised. They'll probably have their own sort of currency, like Roblox has its own currency. It's not on-chain or anything, but I think they're going to make it as open source as possible. I think they're going to just let people do whatever they want, like sandbox style, like—
Yeah.
Open-world—
Yeah. I mean, the TCGs have been crushing, bro. That's, in my head, basically NFTs. I mean, some of them actually are NFTs, but the actual TCG trading of all of them—the Pokémon cards and all this shit—they work because there's inherent demand and desire for these things, which are real assets that people have some association with. So, I really don't think NFTs were all that off-target, to be honest.
Oh, definitely. No, I actually think it was the closest thing, too. We talked about memecoins earlier and why memecoins are a thing and why they've existed. I think it's closer to the end of what this all looks like than even what we're kind of looking at now.
Lucas said something along the lines of the entire collector market—the TCG market combined—
Like, what, a hundredth?
Yeah, I think it's like 1% of it is NFTs—
Or digital collectibles—actually, even broader, just digital collectibles.
But yeah, I was buying XCOPYs, and I own a Bull. All that shit—I love that shit. It's cool.
Who owns the Black Bull, people? We should own that.
Yeah, we should own it.
It was an Everyday, right? We should—
You asked him to make it, and then he made it the next day.
I know, I know. I was like, “Bro, where's the Black Bull every day?”
How is he so plugged in with all these events? It's like—
Oh, yeah, we're in the trenches.
No, he knows what's going on. Yeah, but he'll do political stuff with Trump or whatever is going on, and then it's just some super-degenerate thing, and then it's Black Bull. He's just—
I think everything—
I think it's just his Twitter feed, day to day. He opens up Twitter: “What's going on on Twitter? What's the loudest conversation happening? Let me go make an NFT.” That's what it feels like.
Yeah.
Yeah. And that's what it should be. It's cool. People's the goat.
Yeah. We have GoUp, our soccer quant, for the World Cup football. I know I'm triggering people right now with every word that's coming out of my mouth, but Lucas, founder of JTX, thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything else you'd like to say to the audience?
Is JTX live now?
Yeah, we're rolling it out on the waitlist.
Epic.
Let's go.
Thank you for coming on, Lucas.
Thank you, bro. I appreciate you having me.
Thank you, brother.
See you guys later.
And then we have this GoUp segment. We'll talk about the World Cup, LeBron James, and what team he's going to. Honestly, brother, we only got through about half of our show. If you want to keep it going, I'm down to keep it going. There are a couple of things that we wanted to talk about.
Yeah, I want to talk about dopamine killing you, Robinhood stealing crypto, buybacks not working, Anthropic losing aura, China putting OpenAI out of business, OpenAI wanting to hear everything you're doing, and SpaceX down. We have some shit to talk about.
Fuck SpaceX.
Fuck SpaceX, bro.
Fuck SpaceX. Elon Musk, start tweeting, brother.
Oh, fuck.
Let's go, brother. It's probably not great for the other large, trillion-dollar IPOs, bro. If SpaceX isn't doing well on launch—
Yeah. If SpaceX isn't doing good, then what the fuck?
Not great for the other ones.
Honestly, brother, just stay private. Just stay private, man.
No, he needed more money. He needed the capital. He's going to fuckin' space, man.
I feel like everybody has money, bro. We have money. We'll keep it floating.
We don't got SpaceX funny money.
That's funny. Anthropic, bro.
Yeah, we're so stupid.
Us in the chat. Us in the chat, yeah, us in the chat, spamming addresses.
All right, let's bring GoUp in here.
15. World Cup & Polymarket w/ GoUp
Yo, yo, what's up?
What's good, GoUp? You handsome motherfucker. How you doing?
I'm chilling, man. What about you guys? You know what's crazy? It's kind of a full-circle moment for me, man. I grew up playing Modern Warfare 2, and obviously the FaZe boys were around. Banks, you're a legend, man. Then 2021 was one of the biggest come-ups in my life. It was actually the NFT wave. So, Ansem, bro, you're well-known in the community, man. I'm tapped in. I'm tapped in.
Let's go.
This is obviously our first conversation, our first time meeting. Our production selected you to come in and navigate our conversation around the World Cup and this Polymarket stuff. Why did they pick you? Why are you the guy?
You know, I don't know, man. I'm gonna be—no, I'm just kidding. I think this last month and a half, I was number 1 globally on TikTok for covering the World Cup and all that.
Oh, sick.
Yeah, man. This is my big-time come-up on social media. I just started content creation about a year ago.
Congrats, bro. That's awesome.
Thank you, bro. I just hit half a million—I want to say—5 days ago on TikTok, and now—
Damn. So, this is all super fresh. That's amazing. You're actually blowing up.
That's what I was just about to talk about, to be honest, and skip all the World Cup shit. That's sick.
Bro, thank you, man. Yeah, it's actually crazy, man. My whole life I always wanted to be a YouTuber and all that. Now I go out to H-E-B, which is a market out here in Texas. That's where I stay. I'm just getting noticed. People want to take pictures. It's so surreal, bro.
Amazing, brother. It's amazing, bro.
I never thought life would be like this, man. It's really cool. But yeah, I mean, now I'm on a podcast sponsored by Polymarket with Ansem and Banks. It's kind of crazy, man.
Well, brother, listen. If you can take any advice from the 40-year-old guy who's been in content and media for 15 years, I've done some things very, very right, but I've also dropped the ball and fumbled things as well. Me, RiceGum, and Alissa lived in the Clout House in 2017, and we had the fucking world by the balls. We were the biggest thing on the internet, and to be honest with you, I fumbled that bag. I avoided content. I didn't work as hard as I should have. I ripped nose beers and had threesomes with my girlfriend and did all the wrong things.
Nothing wrong with that, man.
No, but there is, especially for where you're at right now. Double down on yourself. Invest in yourself. We preach it all the time on the show. I want to see you with 5 million followers the next time I see you, bro. You got it.
Hopefully.
This is the most important part of your entire life right here. You begged the universe for it, and you have it now. It's fucking awesome, and it's honestly a pleasure to talk to you right now because it's fresh. That's cool.
Thank you, man. Yeah, I'm a huge Real Madrid fan. These last 2 seasons, they've been horrible, but hopefully this upcoming season things finally change. Our squad has the best players in—I want to say—the entire world, man. But let's talk about the World Cup, right? I don't know if you guys have seen the topic with Lionel Messi and Argentina. There's been a lot of controversy against Argentina and Lionel Messi, simply because they've been getting some favoritism from the referees. Next thing you know, people are looking at him kind of like the villain of the story, and now they're in the final against Spain, man, which is absolutely surreal. Spain weren't even looked at as one of the favorites.
I think they were about 10th favorites to win the competition. Now, next thing you know, they're in the final, and they're favorites to beat Argentina on Polymarket.
Insane. That's insane. Sick. I wonder who was trading Spain at the beginning of the tournament.
Oh man, whoever was trading Spain, they're up. But you know, I'm a hater. I hate Argentina, and I'm a huge Ronaldo head. So, this entire tournament, I dropped a bag on Argentina to make it to the finals and win it because I didn't want to see them win it. Next thing you know, they're in the finals, and I'm up crazy. Shout-out.
So wait, let me see if I'm understanding this correctly. You hate Argentina, so to hedge the emotional side of it, you bet on them?
Yes, brother. Listen, I do shit like that, too. We were just talking about degenerate trades with our guest before. I fucking love that, because even when you lose, you win. Even when you lose, you win. Dog, I'm telling you, I'm up right now, and it feels horrible that they're in the finals. I don't even care about the money that I'm up on.
By the way, more people should do this. Imagine if you were a San Antonio fan, live trading the Knicks to win that game, and you came out the other side.
It's like an emotional hedge, bro. It is emotional.
Emotional hedging—normalize that, because we're really on to something here. Atlanta, New England, that fucking game. I mean, it's valid. Congrats. That's what I'm saying.
So if they win it, I'm going to be mad and upset on my sports side, but financially, I'm up. So it doesn't even matter, bro.
Are you sticking with them for this last game?
I know they're looked at as a—look, the thing is, since I'm already deep in it, I'll probably ride it out. I'll let that shit ride, bro. But if I were to put a trade in for this game alone, I'm not going to lie, this Spain team is super slept on. Their best player, which I think is Lamino Maul. He's 18 or 19 years old right now, and he's taken the world by storm. That guy still hasn't even performed at this World Cup. If there's a time and place for him to finally do it, it's definitely got to be the World Cup final, bro.
You got Spain to take it?
Yeah, I got Spain to take it the entire way, bro. I'm not going to lie. That's also me with money on Argentina. That's part of me being a hater on Argentina and Messi, but I just think this Spain team, all around, is a lot better of a team—way more balanced, man. When it comes to Argentina, they just play with a lot more passion and grit. Sometimes that gets you across the finish line, but I think with a super-composed team like Spain, bro, that's not going to happen.
Damn.
I think this entire tournament, they've only conceded 1 goal.
Spain's only given up 1 goal.
That's fucking insane.
Yeah. And they beat the favorites, which, in my opinion, was the team I was rooting for, other than Portugal and Mexico, which is where my family's from: France. Bro, I really wanted to see France in the finals—Kylian Mbappé, Michael Olise, and Ousmane Dembélé.
But yeah, they got knocked out by Spain.
I made a fuck ton of money on a bet. I took Spain last World Cup.
Oh, for real?
I mean, I took France last World Cup. I forget what game it was.
Yeah, man. Last World Cup, they made it to the finals. Mbappé dropped the hat trick, and then Lionel Messi and his team ended up taking it through, bro. But yeah, I feel that, man.
It would've been cool to see a rematch.
Bro, that's what I wanted, man. Especially since I finally got invited to a World Cup final for the first time in my life.
And so, bro, it's such a crazy moment for me, but I get to see Spain versus Argentina, which were my 2 least favorite teams to watch. So now I'm just going to be ultimate hate-watching, bro.
So these are the last 4 teams, right? It's only these 2 games, and then the—
Yeah, yeah, yeah. France versus England is the third-place game, and then Spain versus Argentina is the final.
What do you have in France-England? I feel like a consolation game is weird.
Yeah, yeah. It's a consolation, like a third-place, loser-bracket type of thing. I don't even know why they do it, to be honest.
Yeah, what the fuck?
It's like trading the All-Star Game. I just don't know. Are you personally staying away from these?
Honestly, the only thing I'm going to go on is probably Kylian Mbappé to score, simply because he still has something to play for. If he scores 1 goal, he's going to take the Golden Boot away from Messi. Right now, they're currently tied.
Okay, I like this. I like this.
So if I were to choose something, it's definitely got to be a Kylian Mbappé goal. Regardless, this guy doesn't care if it's a third-place game. He's going to try to score 5 goals, you know what I mean? So I think he's probably the one to go for.
What's it trading at? Is he at 45%?
54%. Bro, he's a demon. I mean, he also plays for Real Madrid, so that's probably why I'm so big on him, to be honest.
Cool.
Fire. That's where these games are? Where are they?
Yeah. The third-place one, I think, is going to be in Boston, and then the first-place game is going to be in New York City, at MetLife Stadium.
Wow. Whoa.
Y'all gonna be there?
Dang. Spain-Argentina. That shit is going to be lit.
Z, you should go, bro.
We might have to rip that.
Bro, yeah. Slide, and we could link up, man. That'd be super cool.
Oh, you're going?
Yeah, man. I got invited, so I'm going to be there.
Oh, yeah. You did say that.
Fire. Congrats.
Fire. Fire.
Damn. Your life is a dream coming true in real time, brother. It's so cool.
Bro, all glory to God, man. I was just super blessed. Like I said, a year ago, I was just working a 9-to-5. I still work 9-to-5 today. I'm on the clock right now, I'm not going to lie. But I'm trying to grind my way out of it, bro, and I think this year—
Well, talk to me after the show. With the kind of shit you got going on, you definitely shouldn't be working a 9-to-5. So that's got to be—
A structural, managerial issue. I could maybe connect you with some people.
I for sure—
If you want to reach out, I got you, bro.
100%. I followed you on Instagram. I've been following you for a minute, bro, so—
I'll come find you. I'll text you.
I bet.
Is there any soccer at all? Like, football?
No, not really. That's kind of why you're on the show, to be honest.
Oh, for real?
Yeah.
Like American football? I got you. But football?
No, no, no.
Yo, if y'all have to choose a team, you have to go with Real Madrid over Barcelona. Honestly, the swag is out the roof—way better, bro. Everybody looks at us like the villains, and honestly, I love being the villain, bro. Being the villain is way cooler than being a hero, to be honest. So you have to go—
Agree. I agree. I agree. Darth Vader, bro.
Yeah, bro. Like a champion.
Exactly, bro. The Joker—he's him.
He's him.
And Argentina fucking won last year, so fuck them.
Yeah. Fuck Argentina, bro. Fuck Messi.
I love that. I love that. Do you have any opinions on LeBron? I know it's a hard pivot into basketball, but can we look at the LeBron markets around his next team?
Yo, LeBron James. If there's 1 last year I'd like to see him play, it's got to be with my boy Steph. I'm from Oakland originally, California, so I'm a huge Golden State Warriors fan. I have to see him with Golden State for 1 season, bro.
It says 33% to be with Golden State, 39% with Cleveland. Oh, people think he's going to return—
Oh, man—
To Cleveland. And then it's—
I think that's wishful thinking.
16% with the Sixers is kind of high, I feel like.
Yeah, that is high.
What's your guys' teams, man?
I'm a Sixers fan. Yeah, I'm—
I'm a Celtics fan. I'm from Boston, but Rasmer [?] just posted a video where he has this whole long thesis about LeBron going to the Knicks. There's an interview with Rich Paul where he's talking about it being Jalen Brunson's decision, and they don't want to mess up a good thing, whatever. Right?
And he articulates in some weird, funny way that, at the beginning of the playoffs, the team LeBron wanted to go to the most was the Knicks. So what it tells you is that's where LeBron would want to go. Ultimately, if that's where LeBron wants to play, they obviously just won a ring. I think he'd be hypercriticized—like, “You're ring-chasing,” whatever. But I don't think LeBron's ever given a fuck about that.
He's bounced around from team to team and chased rings his entire career. So he definitely doesn't give a [__] about that.
It's just about the odds. What are the odds of going to the Knicks right now?
5%.
That's what I'm saying. It's obviously a [__] pipe dream, but I feel like Only Two Rasmr said it best. He said, “When only 2 people need to [__] agree on something to hit a 20x, you take that all day.” You know what I mean?
I don't know.
I like taking those odds personally, bro.
Do we take them?
Do a little bit on it. You might as well put $100 on it. Put $100 on it. All right, but—
But I want GoUp's actual opinion as well, because I don't know [__].
Yo, I mean, if it's not with the Golden State Warriors, I would love to see him—everybody's going to hate on me because I feel like Wemby is the new figure they're trying to throw out there as a new LeBron or whatever. I'd like to see him on a superteam, bro. Give him another ring. Why not?
You know, I think the Spurs were clear favorites in the Finals, but something about the Knicks, bro—they just turn up. Jalen Brunson went absolutely crazy. You have to respect the man, bro. I mean, they said he wasn't even good enough for a playoff team, that he wasn't even a starter on any team, and then next thing you know, this guy carries them to a ring, man. So I think that's some story.
I like San Antonio. I like trading all the favorites to win next year, because where else would his priority be? In the GOAT conversation, with MJ and LeBron, what is always the shortcoming on the LeBron side? What is always going to be the big highlight of Michael Jordan's career? It's how many rings he's won. And I just like—what the [__] else is LeBron still in the league for?
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah. I feel like if LeBron leaves, though, don't you think the viewership would go down a bit? I feel like it'd take a huge hit, bro.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, he could be—but that's not his problem. He doesn't [__] own the NBA. You know what I mean? He's getting paid year to year, but LeBron's richer than [__] God, so it's like—I don't know.
That is true.
Yeah, man. Who's your GOAT? NBA GOAT.
Larry Bird, 33.
Okay.
Yeah, AI. AI before AI was AI. Wow.
Before AI was—
Back in the day, when AI was just a [__] fly [__] with a sleeve on, just crossing [__] up.
So—
He's pure as [__]. AI is pure.
Growing up, when I was a little kid, he was my favorite. AI is definitely in my top 5, dead or alive.
I like Kobe, too. Kobe, of course.
Kobe's my GOAT, bro. He and I were born on the same day—different years, but the same day, August 23rd, man.
That's—
Yeah, legendary.
Don't [__]—be careful, be careful.
What do you mean, bro? You're telling me not to get on dude? That's not what I said.
I was talking to production. Production was picking up—
What, you were [__] laughing? Production was walking away from airplanes. Bro, production was unplugging [__], and they've been [__] up all show. So I told them to be careful.
I told them to be careful because—
I don't know, man. I don't know. GoUp, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate you guys.
You're spitting some truth. I meant it. Hit me up on IG. I'll find you on IG, and I'll try to see what we can do just to help you keep the ball rolling. You're in a [__] super important spot in your life, brother. Don't let up on the gas. Full steam ahead, and [__] quit that 9-to-5 as quickly as possible. Invest in yourself and [__] double down, triple down, quadruple down. It's amazing, brother. You have great energy, and you have a [__] amazing future ahead of you. Congratulations, bro.
Let's get it, man. Thank you guys. You guys are both the GOATs. I'll catch y'all.
God bless you, bro.
Appreciate you.
Damn, man. I was so close to getting out of that Kobe helicopter thing, and you [__] me. You [__] me. The [__]—I couldn't let you out of that.
What—
No, that was crazy. What are you talking about?
I know. It was nuts. It was nuts. It was so stupid.
Oh, he's cool, though. I like him.
GoUp's awesome. GoUp's awesome.
You definitely have to set him up, bro. He's blowing up right now.
No, for sure.
Bro, what? 9-to-5? No, you can't be getting—
You can't be getting invited to the [__] world. Obviously, you have some kind of sauce, bro. You're on this show.
You have 500K on TikTok.
I mean, [__], we'll hire him. Let's put him on your TikTok. Let's put him on my TikTok. You know what I mean?
I'm sure we could pay more than his 9-to-5. You know what I'm saying?
No.
You definitely have an opportunity elsewhere. GoUp, thank you so much for coming on. W GoUps in the chat.
[__], [__], GoUp.
This would normally be when I would dip and let you do market talk, but you want to keep going through these topics.
What do we have left? We have Anthropic. We have—
16. Dopamine Is Killing You
Dopamine's killing you. There's a clip that I wanted to watch with the chat.
Yeah, do that. Oh, yeah.
That's a fun one. It's a fun one.
Keep ripping it. I'm down. Just keep ripping it.
This is interesting. The guy's got a little [__] chart above him. I just want you guys to listen to what he's saying.
A big reason why guys in their 40s, 50s, and 60s cannot figure out why they aren't seeing progress with their physique, with their body, with their body-fat percentage, is that you are simply stuck in the dopamine cycle of chasing new fads, new diets, and new ways of getting in better shape. Oh, look over there. There's a new peptide. Oh, no, there's a new peptide over there. Oh, now it's TRT and hormones and growth hormone. And, oh, there's that diet. There's this new carnivore thing. And it's all dopamine. Dopamine. Dopamine.
But this is not just with your fitness. This is in every single part of your life currently. Dopamine is ruling the world. It's why we don't appreciate things the way we used to. It's why I think time is really speeding up for a lot of us. We have so much stimulation and distraction because everyone's experiencing—
If dopamine is killing you, I'm dying. Facts.
No, facts. But I think we all are. I think everyone in this chat is. I think the way that all of this stuff is set up and levered against the human psyche, it's set up that way. It's like, how can we pump these people full of dopamine? Because that's where your brain naturally is going to sit. You're going to sit on the slot machine. You're going to sit on Twitter and scroll it. You're going to sit in a [__] Twitch chat, and it's [__].
But the bar that he spit that I thought was so interesting was—
I think it's the reason why time is speeding up. I feel like we all—I don't know, chat, you tell me. I feel like we're all experiencing this phenomenon where time is moving so incredibly fast. Maybe that's perspective for me because I'm getting older, so time is literally just—I don't know. Days are shorter, but it's—
I don't know, bro. It's playing a sport versus gambling on a sport, reading a newspaper versus [__] clickbait. It's that short-term dopamine. It's diet. Eating a McDonald's meal versus eating a [__] grass-fed, organic, good meal for you. The fast food tastes good in the moment. Ice cream and candy are nice in the moment, but long term, the effects are [__] detrimental. It literally will kill you.
Yeah, I struggle with this a lot because, obviously, my dopamine loop is so [__] because of how my X is. I get [__] 50K replies on X a day. Whatever I tweet, anything gets [__] instant, immediate, hella [__] engagement.
It does give you dopamine. It does, hell of a lot. But the thing is, I can positively use that in a way that's positive for people and positive for me. It obviously makes sense to do. The difficult part is unplugging when you're not doing that. You have to be able to unplug and be good, doing things when you're not hooked into the internet 24/7. But you also have to realize it's net beneficial for me as an individual. So it's definitely hard to know.
I think the most important part is exactly what you're saying. You're noticing it. You're paying it mind. You're aware that it's happening. I feel like so many people are unaware that it's happening. It's like, catch yourself and remind yourself, “Okay, this is my brain, chemicals are firing, and let me bring myself back to baseline,” you know? That's why it's so important. Rasmr posted this tweet.
Did you see Rasmr's tweet? “I crashed out.” He posted this big, long article.
Did you see this? I wasn't planning on bringing this up, but it's interesting. You didn't see this?
“Rasmr, crash out.”
Yeah, he said, “I crashed out.”
Somebody told me about this. I didn't see it, though. Somebody did tell me about it.
It's pretty good. He's talking about humility, what happened with him over the last couple of weeks on Twitter, emotions, and being in public—what changes now? It was a really good read. I followed up with something along the lines of, “The part that I want to share is...” Is it an article or is it—oh, it is an article.
Yeah, it's an article.
I'm going to look at it. I'm looking at it right now.
It's a good read. It's long, so I'll spare everybody in the chat. I said it's very important to lift yourself up and remain delusional and confident during lows, but it's also equally important—maybe even more so—to stay grounded and remain humble when you're high. Staying in that middle, baseline state and just being normal—I don't know. Catching yourself.
Don't get too low, don't get too high.
Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Exactly. Not too fast. Long-term dopamine—fucking working out, building a family, building a fucking product, building a career. These are the ways that we're supposed to interact with these fucking things. I don't know, but people are literally—the point is, it's crazy. Not enough people talk about it. People have cracked the code on this dopamine shit, and now everyone's just pumping themselves up with dopamine. What does the future look like? Is it going to get to a point where you literally have a fucking IV in your arm, or your brain's connected to a computer, and it's literally just euphorically pumping you with dopamine if that's what everybody's goal is—which the market is proving that it kind of is, right? I don't know.
Yeah, it's scary. We talk about it a lot. It's the difference between being a consumer and being a producer of content. There's definitely a trend where there are people contributing to how much money these social media platforms are making, and they're not learning anything from those platforms. The social media platforms are optimized to keep those people in the loop of not learning anything and just spending their time scrolling. Then there are the people creating the content, the producers of content, who are using the platforms in a beneficial way. But I think everybody spends some time on social media and knows that it's a dopamine loop. You just have to be conscious of how much time you're spending.
I think you're giving people too much credit. I think there are more people who don't know than you think. I feel like a lot of people are fucking bots—actual sheep who don't.
It's true. Maybe.
You and I—yes, the people that we hang out with day to day, anyone working for us or close enough for us to have these conversations with—those people likely understand it to that extent at least. But there are so many fucking people who are stuck in this hamster wheel. Imagine what it takes mentally for a person to even work a minimum-wage 9-to-5. I say that with all due respect. I just mean being stuck, being okay with that, and being satisfied with that. I think it's totally okay, and it's fucking commendable, to be working as much as you possibly can and making money any way that you can. That's the important first step. You need fucking capital any way you can get it. But someone who's just content in that life, who spends their entire life working at a fucking gas station, 9-to-5, minimum wage—that person is like, you know—
I don't think that's necessarily bad, though.
I don't think it's bad. I don't think it's bad. I don't think that's necessarily bad. What the fuck was I going to say? I think the key piece that you have to pay attention to is what these tech CEOs say when you ask them what the recommended screen time is for their kids. They'll say, “The minimum.” But that's kind of—
I don't know. I think I disagree, to be honest. I think people can be content with their 9-to-5, not have crazy high aspirations, and have goals and desires like having a family, finding relationships, and having fulfilling friendships. It doesn't have to be work-related. They're cool with what they're doing at work: “This is my job. I'm here for X amount of years.” But they're focused on their relationships.
I agree with that. I think it's the ultimate goal. I think a family is the ultimate goal, and having kids is the whole point that we're here. That's productive, though. That's positive. That's a positive effort. I just mean that there are so many fucking people—you see the incel rate, the marriage rate—who live in this programmed, bot-like—
Like hamster-wheel-type life, where they go, do their job, and then play video games all day, sit on Twitter all day, or sit on TikTok all day. That's true. I don't think that's a good life. I think that's a very unhealthy life. If you found yourself in that, and that description matches your life, that's something you should try to escape as quickly as possible.
That's real. I agree with that. If you're not focusing on the relationships piece, then that's dark. Again, it brings us full circle back to the conversation that you should be chasing long-term, sustainable dopamine. You should really love your life instead of convincing yourself that you love your life every day with these little hits of dopamine.
Yeah. One of the things that people have used AI for, honestly, that's been very useful is being honest and transparent about where they are mentally, emotionally, and physically, and tracking those things objectively. Some people can get off the rails. I've done this before. When I first started in software engineering, I got stuck in a loop where I wasn't really progressing as a person, progressing at work, or progressing emotionally. I was just in a loop of doing things. I think you can be comfortable working whatever job it is, as long as you're pursuing bettering yourself in—
Any sort of goals. Yeah, it's all about goals. You set a goal, set a time frame, whatever, and slowly but surely work toward that goal. I think you just said it perfectly. You can simplify it.
This is why goals are so important. This is why having any sort of goal is important.
Get better every week. Get better every month. Get better every year. Yes, you need to.
17. Market Bubble Book Club
The chat is telling me to tell people to read books.
Tell people to read books.
Do you read?
I do, but not as much as I should, to be honest.
We should read. We should read every day. We should do a little Market Bubble book club. Yeah, we should read every day. We should read every day. What was the last fucking book I got? What was the name of the last fucking book I got? Was it Fahrenheit 451?
451. Is that it? 451.
Fahrenheit 451. Yeah.
Have you ever read The Way of the Superior Man?
I have it. I have not read it.
Read that book. You could read it in 2 days. Read that book.
That's a good one. Everybody in the chat should read that, too. There's a book that Thread Guy was talking about recently. Have you read Nate Silver's On the Edge or something? I forget what the fucking book's called. I have it, but I haven't ever read it.
On the Edge?
I don't think so.
It's a finance book. Finance books are fucking miserable 99% of the time. It's On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything by Nate Silver. It's actually where he discovered Chris Camillo. He talked about him in this book.
That's like Chris Camillo has an—no, sorry, there's another book. I don't know. I'm fucking up. We should all be reading, though.
I think the last book I read was this book called Sourdough. Actually, I think that's what it was called.
Somebody said, “Banks, read the Bible.” I’m sorry.
I read the Bible a little bit this year, but I think the last book I read was this book called Sourdough. It was about this—I think she was a software engineer. Is she a software engineer?
Market Wizards. That is the one, chat. Thank you.
I think it was about a software engineer in Silicon Valley, or Cali, and she learned how to make her own sourdough bread. It put her on this weird journey.
We should start a Market Bubble book club.
I’m with that. I swear to God, I’m down. What’s the first book? Let’s just do it right now.
Let’s read a book. Have you ever read Market Wizards?
We should do Fahrenheit 451.
Yeah, I have read Market Wizards. Don’t you think we should do something that’s kind of in line with the show, something that falls somewhere in finance? Finance books are miserable.
The chat knows the Sourdough book. That’s funny.
Chat knows everything, by the way.
The chat goes, “Hot girl.”
I was just saying something along the lines—especially for the first one that we pick—like something that’s more in line with the show. I’ve read Fahrenheit 451. Is it 451?
451. Yeah.
And it’s like fantasy, right? Maybe something more along the lines of—
I think the book is actually about how they ban reading books. I think that’s actually what the book is about. They ban reading books, and then if you get caught with books, they try to kill you or something.
You know what we’ll do? We won’t half-ass this. We’ll put together a list of 10 books, and then we’ll have Twitter vote on it. That’s cool.
Yeah, I’m with this idea.
Let’s do that. Knowing me and being productive—please. Knowing me. Look at us reading and being productive. Wow.
Wow.
Wow. Look at these guys, man. Knowing us, too, by the way, this is either never going to happen, or—
It could happen. We’re going to go hard on it.
Chat, hold us accountable. Hold us accountable.
I’m not reading The 48 Laws of Power, bro. Fuck that book.
That book is dark, brother. It’s dark. I have never read it, but I feel like it can’t be good because too many people say it’s good. It cannot be a good book. It’s impossible. I refuse to believe it.
I feel like it’s a very important book to read, too, if nothing more than to be aware that these are things that are happening.
Why?
I don’t know—to play defense, brother. The book is all about—
What is it about? What are the things?
Power dynamics, manipulating people, Machiavelli. It’s dark.
It’s like the Illuminati, the invisible hand. They always bring it back to a point in history where somebody ultra-successful—some conqueror or some king—applied this. I don’t know. I couldn’t get through the book. It’s a very, very tough read because it’s brutal, bro. It’s dark, and it’s thick, but I think it’s an important one. I want to finish it at some point. I think I’m on, like, law 42 or something.
We’re going to read a book, then. That’s what we’re going to do. We keep talking about how the brain rot—“brain rot, stop scrolling.” The best counterbalance to that is reading books, by far.
100%.
I really fuck with this. We could be the new—who’s the old lady that has the show and does, like, an Oprah thing?
Dude, that’s so foul. What the fuck is wrong with you?
Oprah. Oprah Oprah has the show. Oprah—Oprah. I’m sorry, Oprah. I’m fried. I’m exhausted, guys, but we’re going to do a book club.
You’re so fried.
So stupid.
The 48 Laws of Power is very good. It’s goated. That book changed my life. I feel like I can manipulate Ansem. We’re in the same room. See, that’s how people talk when they read The 48 Laws of Power.
Yeah, it’s—
Dude, it’s—
No way.
How do we take $1,000 away from that guy?
Get out of here. I can manipulate.
But, by the way, that’s why you need to read it. That’s why you need to read it.
Maybe I do. Maybe I’ll add some tricks up my sleeve. I don’t know.
Someone said, “Ansem’s Oprah and Banks is Martha Stewart.” That’s crazy.
We need to send him $1,000—whoever said that.
Whoever made the Martha Stewart joke—
Whoever the Martha Stewart joke was.
Yeah, that’s—
Oh my God.
I think it was one of your guys, too, in Kick. That’s hilarious, bro.
That’s funny. How much have we dropped, chat? 1, 2, 3, 4—
5.
That’s hilarious.
5 or 6 bands. 6 or 7 bands.
18. Robinhood Chain
Yeah. You want to talk about some of the big dogs in the markets? Robinhood has obviously been a huge topic of conversation on CT. It’s pretty much the only thing I’ve seen on CT, thanks to you. It’s been Ansem and Robinhood. Ansem, our shit’s been completely cooked. It’s honestly made producing this show infinitely harder, by the way. We’ve been joking about it the last couple of weeks.
It just speaks to how crazy and active you guys are. We talked last week about—I think the question I asked you was, do people actually care about Robinhood, or do they just care about Vlad tweeting?
Yeah, I agree with your point. A lot of people were like, “Is it Vlad tweeting, or is it Robinhood?” I said earlier—damn, I probably have the tweet. I don’t know if I have the tweet.
You want to watch the clip? I have the clip.
The clip.
Yeah, let’s just watch it.
Robinhood, or do you think they care about Vlad posting about crypto?
See what I said? I don’t remember.
For traders, I don’t think they necessarily care about Robinhood. They care about an opportunity where there’s not as much capital, where they can be early to it. I think that’s why the new-chain thesis has always worked in crypto—the bridging to other L1s, bridging to L2s. That’s why it works: you’re early to being first there, and there’s capital that comes after you to bid these things.
I think that’s the main reason. Obviously, Vlad being directly bullish on the chain is super important and big, but he’s not going to—
Yeah, that was on target. Ansem, that was a good answer, bro.
Yeah, that was a good answer.
Yeah, I mean, right now it’s just CT-native capital moving around, and that’s the main thing driving these coins. If something goes from 0 to $250 million, $200 million in a week, it’s obviously going to cool off. I think people expecting a Robinhood listing immediately after that are kind of dreaming.
I do think it’ll happen down the line, but you’re going to have to see things sustain volume and stay around. Depending on Vlad tweeting about whatever meme it is is not a good thesis. If it is a good meme—and I do think it will continue to do well and will be the leader on Robinhood’s L2—you don’t need to rely on somebody tweeting about it nonstop. He’s the CEO of a big-ass company, bro. He’s not going to hard-shill something like that.
Yeah, of course.
Yeah, I think Robinhood is in an interesting spot for sure. I think the RWA thesis and the tokenized-stocks thesis makes a ton of sense. They obviously dominate retail stock trading and options trading on stocks. The only thing they don’t really have access to right now is the perpetuals market, which is why they’re partnering with Lighter, and 24/7 trading, which is why they’re doing the tokenized-stocks thing.
On-chain, the L2 could be a new source of revenue for them. I think they saw how well Dogecoin did for them in 2020 and 2021. They made a ton during that trading volume. All of that retail trading volume on-chain obviously originates on-chain first before it goes to a centralized exchange.
They’re saying, “We want to own the entire stack”—not just a centralized exchange, but also our own chain where people can trade whatever they want. It’ll also add value to their other business lines. I think that’s the general thesis for it. I do think Robinhood is going to be in a good spot.
It's a net-net positive, I would say, for crypto. But I don't think they're doing anything that other L2s haven't done, necessarily. I wouldn't say they're breaking any innovation in that way yet. I think Vlad being directly bullish on all the things happening on-chain is really good to see for traders.
Yeah. It's just distribution and users. It's how much volume they have, right?
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.
19. Do Buybacks Work?
Do buybacks work? I saw you tweet something, and it was long. It's long, but I want to get into this because I don't see a lot of people talking about this. You say here that they don't—
Yeah, buybacks don't work in the way that people think they do. I think people think that if a company is making X amount of revenue and they direct X portion of those revenues to buying back the token or buying back the stock, then it'll definitely go up, and it will 100% go up. That's not necessarily true.
I think more so what I was saying with this tweet is that what the buybacks for Hyperliquid signify to their user base is more of a social alignment and trust thing than it is the actual dollar value of how many tokens they're buying back on the market. Hyperliquid not promising anything with their airdrop and just giving it out to their core user base based on certain metrics that they predetermined, and then continuously buying the token back with whatever it is, 97% of their revenues, is more so aligning everybody around the idea that the token is the most important part of their business and that they're socially aligned with all their core users—not necessarily the dollar volume or dollar value of the revenue that they're buying back, which is also important, but there are other companies that do buybacks where it doesn't have as big of an impact.
I think the reason that it doesn't have as big of an impact is for 2 reasons. 1, they could be spending that money a lot more effectively than just buying back the token. They could be doing better hiring. They could be doing better marketing. They could be expanding their business lines to other things.
The second reason is that they don't have as high of a trust score as something like Hyperliquid does. I referenced Pump.fun specifically in this because Pump.fun promised that they were going to do an airdrop. They obviously have not done that airdrop, and their core user base kind of feels like they were slighted in that they weren't rewarded for helping the platform make $1 billion in revenue and then do a $1 billion ICO. If the platform's users are not aligned with the company, it's obviously a lot more difficult for people to be bullish on the token.
So that's essentially what I was saying: this trust score, this trust value, is more so what the buybacks are signifying rather than just the dollar volume amount. I think another thing that people were referencing in the post, which I also mentioned a bit, is how durable the revenues of whatever business it is are. Buybacks can vary depending on what people think the business is going to do in the future, how they're going to grow those revenues, and how consistent those revenues are. That's another piece of it. But I would say, more so than anything, it's the trust piece and the social alignment piece.
Good answer.
I don't know if that was kind of long.
Well, the short answer is just no. No, we don't think that they work.
Yeah, Thread Guy followed up with a funny reply to that. It was something along the lines of, “Pump.fun could do the airdrop tomorrow and half of CT would think it was fake.” They would find a way.
20. Is Anthropic Losing Aura?
That's funny as shit. That's the thing with trust, bro. Some people don't even think their buybacks are real, which is crazy. They're obviously real. It's on-chain.
What about Anthropic? We started this show—it's obviously episode 11—and we were talking about Anthropic a lot in the first few episodes, but that's kind of slowed down a bit. Is Anthropic losing aura? It kind of feels like they are.
Yeah.
And I don't know why. I don't know why it feels that way. It just feels that way to me.
Yeah, I think they are. I mean, people are kind of seeing Anthropic now as having shilled this Mythos thing super hard, right? That was the first kind of thing that was like, “Claude is going to break everything. If you don't have access to our model, you're at risk.” What that did kind of scare the government. The government's like, “Well, fuck, if Claude gets out, then XYZ could happen, and we're overly concerned about it.”
All the AI guys, like the really smart engineers, were like, “Bro, you don't need to fucking overly yell about these concerns and all these things, because now the government is overly concerned with having access to these models, and now they're going to want to take control of how these models are spread and disseminated.”
If that's the setup with the government, then obviously it's good for people who own the models because they get a deal with the government to do X, Y, and Z. But for the general industry, that's obviously not a good thing. I think that's part of why people are kind of negative or bearish on Anthropic.
But also, with the recent models, people have said that the spend is not as efficient as it was previously, and ChatGPT and Codex have been a lot more effective at building things. So I think those are the 2 main reasons.
Did you see this commercial they put out? To be honest with you guys, I want to say they ripped this directly from—
Polymarket. When you watch this—anybody watching, if you guys remember—Polymarket just put out a World Cup commercial with Rick Rubin—
—and Future. It was like—just tell me when you watch it. You've obviously seen that commercial.
Yeah.
The title of this is “There's hope and hard questions,” which is very reminiscent of what Polymarket just did. But let's watch this.
Can AI be trusted?
Who's going to hit the brakes if we need to?
How do we really ensure that what we're aiming to achieve really does benefit the majority of people?
If it ends up taking almost all the jobs, then what does it mean to work?
No way. This is an added question.
Wait a minute. Why do we have to have this stuff?
No way.
If a machine can pretend to care better than I can actually care, how do we draw the line there?
If we all had a voice in it, then I feel like it would be better.
Could AI help people stop feeling misunderstood?
Could AI help me build more connections in a community? Can AI help me be a better teacher, a better mom?
Maybe it'll cure some great things, you know—
—things that we're not even at the cusp of understanding yet.
Will it create a group of people that ask more questions?
Bro, what if we start to be more human again?
We don't want to lose the most beautiful parts of life.
Yeah. Yeah. See that? They're leaning too far on the dystopian shit, bro. They're leaning way, way, way too hard, and it's making people not want to fuck with them. That's what's literally happening.
They just missed the mark on it. Even the engagement with it—there are 7 million views and only 15,000 likes. I don't remember when they took a shot at OpenAI. I think it was a Super Bowl commercial, and it was my favorite one. Maybe it wasn't a Super Bowl commercial, but it was something like—
Like, “You guys aren't going to do ads. We don't do ads.”
Yeah, exactly. Your humanoid AI was spitting out ads and shit, or whatever.
Um—
But yeah, they fucking missed the mark on this, bro. This is fucking minus 20,000 aura. This is fucking ass.
That ad was ass. It looked like AI made it. I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but, yeah, man. I don't know. Sam Altman fucking fired some shots. He tweeted this. Look at this.
Tweeted back at them.
He quote-tweeted it, and it has almost more likes than the ad itself. So, by Twitter math, it seems that people agree more with him. I thought this was satire. I kept looking for the handle, spelled the way it was. The fact that he typed this out, bro—“Claude AI with the 1.”
That's good.
This is awesome. That's awesome.
That's high-quality shitposting right there. High-quality him talking shit. It's great. But, yeah, I don't know. Socially, it just feels a little bit—I don't know.
Definitely losing aura, but they can get it back. I mean, I don't know, though. That dude Dario's—what the fuck is the word for it? His—damn, what is the word for how you look? You know what I'm talking about? Physiology.
His physiognomy is off, bro.
It is.
All these—who? Sam Altman or Dario? I think Sam. I think Sam Altman's is even more off. He's like fucking—
Mark Zuckerberg levels of just, like, alien robot person. His soul has escaped his eyes. I don't know.
Yeah, I know. Yeah, it's tricky, bro.
You have to be a sick fuck to be in their position. You just have to be.
Yeah.
Where's that? “Are you building the Antichrist, or am I building God?” Like, that's what I'm doing right now.
Facts.
And you have to be a fucking psycho to think that either are possible. You need to believe that that's possible in order to do it. It's insane. [Laughter.]
It's crazy.
It's crazy, bro. I want to find this fucking Anthropic ad. Why can't I find it? Everyone posted it. I mean, we both definitely posted it. I just want to watch it because it actually is a fucking straight rip-off of the Polymarket ad. Whoever their creative team is, I'll let you guys be the ones to decide. I just want to watch it again. Where the fuck is this?
I just want to watch this Polymarket ad real quick. Here it is. Yeah, so this was June 23rd, almost a full month ago. Polymarket did this. You guys remember this? You obviously remember this, Z.
Yep. That was good. It was a good one. It's the same fucking ask.
If you could ask one question, like the hard questions, what would you ask?
It is. And they ripped it like that.
They ripped it like that.
Tell me they did not steal this from the Polymarket ad.
Polymarket ad.
100%.
Polymarket. Go get your bread, bro. Sue them.
Do it. Please.
And throw us a little bit of chicken on the side for helping shine a light on it. That's fucking crazy.
It's the exact same ad. Yeah, same ad company. No, chillin'. Polymarket produced this all in-house. I know all the creative guys behind this, and no, it's not the same ad company. That would be even worse if the same ad company were responsible for doing this.
Yeah, they just ran it back one-to-one. No change.
Yeah, we just hit a banger for Polymarket a month ago. No one's going to notice. It's crazy.
All right, cool.
Should we pull up that PUMP tweet? Actually, should we pull up that fucking—
Yeah, do it.
The PUMP. What the fuck? Where the fuck is it? What else do we have on the docket? Yeah, we did it. Yeah. I talked about this a little bit, but I think the differentiator here is pretty crazy. Hyperliquid is making $800 million a year right now. Pump.fun is making $440 million a year right now. HYPE trades at a $65 billion FDV, and PUMP trades at a $1.4 billion FDV. That's a huge difference for only double the revenue, clearly.
So, people either don't believe in the future of the Pump.fun business, or, like I said, it's the trust premium that Hyperliquid has over Pump.fun. But I think it's possible to shift this. I just think it's going to take a lot of work on the Pump.fun team side. I do think it's possible, for sure, and if you're betting on attention and volume coming back to Solana, then they obviously should be one of the main beneficiaries of that. Those are my thoughts on this, but they have a lot of work to do, for sure.
The chart is pretty bad. I think above this range low, if you can close through this cluster here, it probably runs. Probably the cleanest is to wait for a yearly-open reclaim. If you want to get risky, you probably could wait for 0.0017, but I think the clearest level is probably above 0.0019. Until then, it's kind of just in a downtrend. The chart is fucking crazy. It's down, what, like 80%?
Crypto, man.
80%.
It's one hell of a lot.
So, they've bought back $400 million of this token and burned it.
Crazy.
Is that crazy? [Laughter.]
It's insane.
That's nuts, bro.
They could have just airdropped it. They could have just airdropped it instead.
Yeah, that's fucking nuts.
I have one here, and I just want to ask you your opinion on this: Is China putting OpenAI out of business?
21. Is China Killing OpenAI?
I think they could, bro. All the open-source models that are coming out of China and the Chinese labs—if they get good enough to the point where using the main labs is too expensive and you can use an open-source model that comes out of China for 80% of the cost—
This right here is fucking nuts.
Oh my God, a thousand. Yeah, 1,000th.
Oh, wow.
It says a million AI tokens cost 50 cents from China versus $56 from Anthropic.
That's bad.
That's nuts.
That's really bad.
That's a little scary.
That's really bad, bro. You know why this is really bad? This is really bad because the labs and the return on investment in the labs is like 90% of what's driving the stock market return. When those investments don't make sense anymore, then what the fuck?
Yeah. When it becomes close to free—I mean, 50 cents is pretty close to free. It's a lot closer to free than it is to $56. It's crazy. It's insane.
Really bad.
It's bad. [Laughter.] It's really bad.
It's actually really, really bad. That's not good. That's not good. That's not good.
It's kind of in line with what we were just talking about with Anthropic losing aura, too. These fucking companies, like OpenAI and Anthropic, their entire business's success hinges on their own internal thing. Once this fucking— I don't know. China's made this effort to make all this shit open source and super cheap.
I don't know, man. I don't know.
This is definitely a non-consensus take. If this were the consensus take, tech stocks would be down 40% or 50%. Bad. Bad. Yeah, bad.
I think it always comes back to—even the pro-MicroStrategy, Saylor, Bitcoin thing—is that the U.S. government is just going to come bail this out. They're just going to come buy it all at a discounted rate. That's kind of the thing. I feel like maybe the same is true here. Anytime I find myself going too far down the rabbit hole of, “We're going to lose this to China,” it's like, well, we can't. We just can't. [Laughter.] Do we just infinitely print money and bail these companies out because we just can't lose? We cannot lose.
Yeah. I mean, they definitely want to outspend them. But that's the thing, though: You need the models to be so good that it's worth them being that much more expensive.
And are they 1,000 times better? Definitely not. There's no way.
Yeah, that's the thing. The spending makes sense if they're that much better. I think we're entering a point where, honestly, you're going to need to see the real material impacts. We've seen some of them. Obviously, the models for coding have gotten a lot better, but I think it's going to have to add significant changes to how much money a lot of these companies are making, relatively quickly. Probably about—I mean, I don't know.
Someone said, “China about to put OpenAI out of business with Temu GPT.” [Laughter.]
Temu GPT.
Temu GPT is good. Funny.
I like that. That's good.
That's scary, bro.
That's dark, bro. Yeah, I feel like I need to—I'm lacking on using them versus using the other main models, more like exactly what you can do with them and everything, because then I'll see it clearly. There's definitely a trade there. 1,000%.
Yeah, for sure.
1,000%.
We talked about it. What's DeepSeek worth now? I know it's private, and I know it's a Chinese company, but remember we were talking about DeepSeek versus Anthropic and the discrepancy—a trillion dollars versus, at the time, I think it was $400 billion versus $10 billion?
$74 billion.
Wow. Remember this? Wait, somebody go get the fucking clip. We were both trying to put our whole fucking lives into it at $10 billion. We were begging Hyperliquid to fucking list it. I'm not bugging. We said this.
No, you're not. You're not. We did say this.
That's a quick 7x, bro. We did. How do we trade this shit?
We can't trade DeepSeek, but we can trade CXMT. CXMT is live on Hyperliquid right now.
And that's what we just brought up.
CXMT is like the Chinese version of Micron, I believe. Micron is obviously one of the biggest memory suppliers in the U.S., and CXMT is like one of the Chinese versions of that company.
Are you trading that?
I haven't traded it yet. I need to, actually. We can pull it up, though. Let's see—perps, CXMT. Yeah, here we go. CXMT got listed on Hyperliquid, I think, yesterday. Yeah, yesterday. They're planning their IPO soon, and CXMT is, as I said, the Chinese—
What's the market cap versus Micron?
Of Micron? I don't know what it's expected to IPO at. I know that this market right now is trading 6x higher than what it's expected to IPO at. Wow. Actually, I need to look it up. Let me look it up. It's crazy because Hyperliquid, again, is the only place you can speculate on that market before it IPOs.
They did the same thing with Cerebras. They did the same thing with SpaceX, and now we're doing this again with CXMT. It's been a trend that Hyperliquid is kind of dominating the price discovery for all these assets. It's the only place where you can trade them before they IPO, which is pretty cool.
Yeah, it says this is 200 times oversubscribed, bro. Damn. What is the market cap it's trying to come out at, though? Dude—oh, here we go. I found it.
So, this dude, Zephyr, is one of the analysts for Citrini. If you guys don't know Citrini, it's one of the best stock newsletters. They write a ton on AI, and this guy works for them as an analyst. He's saying the CXMT IPO is coming out at an $80 billion market cap, and the revenue is going to be in the $50 billion to $60 billion range this year, which is—
That's insane.
Obviously fucking crazy and obviously wrong. So, on Hyperliquid, with TradeXYZ—which enables the trading of pre-IPOs—it's trading obviously a lot higher than that. I think the $80 billion market cap was around $1 to $1.50 per share. Let me see—yeah, $1.28.
So, the market is expected to IPO at $1.28 per share at around an $80 billion valuation, and on Hyperliquid it's trading at $6.92. So, obviously, way higher than where they're expected to trade. But that's because people are like, “Bro, they're making this much fucking money. Obviously that price doesn't make sense.”
I think this has been good for markets in general, for finding where these assets should actually be priced. A lot of the last IPOs that traded on Hyperliquid before they IPOed actually settled a lot closer to where they were trading on Hyperliquid than where the analysts predicted they were going to come out, because the IPO price changes as you get closer to the date, depending on a lot of different things.
This has actually been a good tool for a lot of people. It's the only place you can trade these kinds of markets, which is pretty cool. So, CXMT—
I mean, I think the race to deliver retail products where people can have exposure to these massive companies pre-IPO is super important and a huge winner, too.
It's like, if the average guy can't invest in something until it's worth $1 trillion, I think the whole system is broken.
Yeah, it's yet again been gamed for the ultra-wealthy to just win. That's why crypto is so sick. That conversation we had with Jesse was awesome. He's dope.
But I'll let you get into market stuff. Guys, if you're new to the show, I am going to dip off now. I'm going to hand it off to Ansem for some alpha. He's just going to riff and talk to chat about markets and stuff. I'm going to stay live on Twitch and on Twitter. Every Thursday, 1 PM PST, live on twitch.tv/fazebanks, live on my Twitter, live on Ansem's Twitter, and live on Ansem's Kick. I had a great show. This was great, bro.
22. Take Risks & Be Delusional
But that about wraps it up for the main show. I know we kind of bled after the whatever, but I just want to take us out on this. I have this clip. I don't know when this is from or when they had this conversation. It might be an AI video for all I know.
Have you seen this video? Mark Zuckerberg tells Sam Altman—the 2 lizard people, whatever. I know I was just shitting on the—
Two lizard people.
I know I was just shitting on them, but I want to watch this with you guys and take us out on a positive note. I know you're going to stick around and talk about market stuff for a little bit, but—
I think Peter was the person—
Peter Thiel, by the way.
—who told me this really pithy quote: In a world that's changing so quickly, the biggest risk you can take is not taking any risk. And I really think that's true, right?
A lot of people think that whenever you get yourself into a position where you have to make some big shift in direction or do something, people are always going to point to the downside risks of that decision. Locally, they may be right. For any given decision that you're going to make, there are upsides and downsides.
But in aggregate, if you are stagnant and you don't make those changes, then I think you're guaranteed to fail and not catch up. To some degree, I think it's really right that—
Take risks. Ladies and gentlemen, if you're watching the show right now, you and I have taken a hundred different life-altering risks in our lives. Whether we succeeded in those risks or failed in those risks, we gained something by taking them.
I feel like that's been the theme of the episode and the day, and I know I have to remind myself of this constantly.
I also saw you interact with this tweet. Such a good tweet. You retweeted this or quote-tweeted it or liked—
Responded to Barstool.
Yeah, Barstool. And it's so good.
You must believe you are special and then go so hard for so long with such violent refusal to accept any other ending that reality itself starts running out of ways to tell you no.
You must wage a war daily against the ordinary outcome until the belief you invented out of nothing in a room by yourself has been hammered into the world so many times that it stops being a claim and becomes reality.
It's one of the best tweets I've ever seen, by the way.
Seriously, I mean—
If you are here, to some degree, you subscribe to this thought and you believe in it. You have some sort of willingness to be better, learn more, and position yourself, and you're delusional like us.
I just feel like everybody should burn this into—print this out and tape it to your wall somewhere, because it really is that good of a tweet and that good of a message. Be delusional.
It's funny. We interview a lot of founders, CEOs, and hyper-successful people on the show. I go deep and watch all types of interviews, and I'm around the same conversations with the same types of people.
The one common denominator across the board with all of these fucking people who have changed the world—by the way, some of these people have changed the fucking world—we talked to Jesse. Coinbase has fucking changed the world, you know?
Every single last one of them was the first person to believe that it was possible. That's how they started their whole thing. They were the first ones. So, be delusional, be confident, and don't accept no for an answer. Be resilient and take the risk over and over and over. Fail a thousand times. You'll hit once. You will.
Yeah. If people don't call you crazy, your dreams aren't big enough. That's what I say.
100%. It's true. It's 100% true. In general, you trade away from these things a lot. I mean, you said it earlier in the show a couple different times, but—
Yeah. There are 2 ways that you make a lot of money in trading. The first way is by seeing around corners, finding a fundamental thesis that the market doesn't see yet, and betting on that early and betting on it with size.
That's much more difficult for the average person to do. But if you can do that, that's how you make supernormal returns. Once the market shifts from something being non-consensus to consensus, that's when you'll get everybody else who was not allocated to allocate toward that idea. You're obviously going to make a fucking ton of money because you were the first one—or one of the first people—to have conviction in that idea.
What's the second one?
The second one, I would say, is learning how to ride momentum and trade the consensus ideas before they top. When an idea in trading becomes consensus, you're not going to catch the bottom, but when it becomes consensus, it usually stays consensus for a certain amount of time.
A lot of traders who are really strong technical traders are able to identify when these trends are beginning and then get out before those trends are ending. Consensus can stay consensus for a really long time, but if you enter when it's just becoming consensus, don't try to buy the bottom and don't try to sell the top. Try to catch the meat in the middle.
I think those are 2 ways that people make a lot of money in trading.
You can apply these principles to your everyday life, by the way. You want to stay somewhere in the middle, but avoid—I don't know. The way I think about it is, and I've said this before on the show, but it's as simple as this: The average person is fucking broke, unhappy, and miserable.
Seriously, I feel like the average person today, in 2026, the average American is broke, fucking unhappy, and miserable. So just go the other way.
You can't say that.
I think it's true, bro. I think it's true. It's sad, but it's true. That's why Twitter's so angry. That's why everyone's so worried about you. I think that's true.
It's fucked, but I think it's fucking true.
See? Yeah, Banks is right. I appreciate that. Banks is spitting. I don't know. And listen, to expand on that—
The mindset you just described is me.
Well, welcome to the show, baby. That's exactly where you need to be.
I agree. Not going to lie. The point that I’m making isn’t to shit on the majority of people. If the average person is broke, miserable, and unhappy, then do the opposite of what the average person is doing, and you’ll likely wind up rich, happy, and at least looking smart. Normalize simplicity, though.
Normalize learning. I know I’m oversimplifying it, but it’s—
Not that simple, bro.
But sometimes it is. I know it’s an anecdote, but in my own personal life, I was playing video games in pursuit of doing this YouTube video-game thing professionally. Literally, my parents, my best friends—everyone I told this to—made me feel like shit about it and shit on me for it. The internet shit on me for it, and absolutely nobody believed it could be a thing.
I went the opposite way of literally everyone, and it made all of this happen in my life. It was literally the best decision I could have possibly made.
That’s true, though, but you’re also one in 10 million—
Outcome? No, but I was the one out of 10 million people who believed it was possible. That’s my point.
That’s true, but how many of you could there be? How many of you could there be?
Brother, I’m not that special, to be honest. I’m really not. I think, to be honest with you, anybody could have done this. I actually think about this all the time. I think about my friends who I used to play Call of Duty with. I think about how many people liked the early comments that I would get when I would start to amass fans.
Listen, this is in 2009, right?
So the bar was very, very low, but for some reason, people liked my voice and my voice commentaries, and people thought I was funny. I was like, “Fuck, I knew 25 kids who I played Call of Duty with who were way funnier than me,” and I hate listening to my own voice, so that never really resonated with me.
My point is, I don’t know. There were a lot of people I met and grew up with who I think could have been super successful at what I was doing. They just didn’t think it was possible, and they thought it was a much smarter route to go the average, traditional route and stay in the fucking hamster wheel. I know I’m shitting on the average, normal thing, but I don’t know. I just—
I think you’re selling yourself short. Honestly, I do think you’re selling yourself short. I don’t even think it’s that you’re shitting on the average thing. I think you’re selling yourself short by saying that anybody could have done what you did.
I’m not saying it’s not possible to do, but think about the timing of when you did that and the fact that you saw it before everybody else. That’s a very, very rare time and situation that you capitalized on.
Everyone has these intrusive dreamer thoughts. Again, to bring it kind of full circle on taking risks, my willingness to risk it all over and over and over on a vision that I’m the only one who sees is, I think, the only reason why I’m successful.
I genuinely think about it all the time. The consistent throughline of what I’ve been successful at and where I’ve been a miserable failure has just been the willingness to take risks. I’m all in. I’ll go all in over and over and—
But that’s true. I feel like you can have something that the average person would not do. The average person would tell you you’re fucking crazy.
Yeah, but you can have the willingness to take risks and not be scared of the outcome, and you can fail a lot also. You have to be willing to take risks, and then you also have to hit—you have to be right, too. That’s why I’m saying the timing of when you were taking a risk and what you were taking a risk on was crucially important.
Everybody’s different. Some people are inherently, biologically, fucking low-IQ. Maybe some things just are not for you. But I guess my general point is, I keep saying I’m not meaning to shit on the average, normal thing, but I kind of am, low-key.
Again, I feel like if you looked at all the statistics—the average household income, the average way marriage looks, the average way people feel about themselves and the world around them—I feel like the answers and data you would get back would be, “I don’t want to live in any one of these things.” I don’t like what average looks like.
Yeah, but the average is the average because it’s common. You can’t have everybody at the top. There are a lot more people in the middle than there are people at the top because of how wealth distribution works. You can’t have everybody at the top.
It’s not even just about wealth, by the way.
I think it’s more so—yeah, but you keep saying people are broke and don’t have money. You can’t say that, because the average person generally does not have money, and the average person is not going to be able to be a fucking millionaire or billionaire.
Being happy is the most important one. Let me finish. I—
I’ll say that the more important thing is doing something that you’re passionate about, doing something that fulfills you, and having fulfilling relationships. No matter how much money you have or don’t have, if you’re pursuing things that you care about—whether that’s in your job, your relationships, or your friendships—then you’ll be fulfilled regardless of whether you’re rich, broke, or average.
None of those things will matter as long as your mindset is positive and you’re not having a negative outlook on where you currently are. I think that’s the more important thing. It’s not how much money you have or how much money you don’t have.
I agree. Out of the 3 things—the happy, rich, and smart thing—I think happy is the one we have the most control over by far.
But also, it’s by far the most important. The happy thing.
Sure. I agree 100%. Again, I think people spend far too much time in their life doing shit that doesn’t make them happy. Whether it’s selling your house and going to live on the beach somewhere, that’s the same kind of thought process. I feel like that’s the same kind of energy that’ll take somebody to make that decision.
It’s risk. It’s being willing and tolerant of risk. I think that’s the common theme with people who are successful, however you want to measure that—whether it’s in happiness or whatever.
There was this thing—I think Fable 5 had a response to somebody who asked, “In 100 years, what will people look back on and see as the craziest thing that’s considered normal today?” I heard an AI respond to that question once. Let me see if I can recreate it.
I just want to reiterate—
Yeah, go ahead.
Go ahead.
The question was, “In 100 years, what will people look back on and see as the craziest thing that’s considered normal today?”
The answer was that people sold their lives 1 hour at a time and called it making a living.
For most of human history, we’ll say a person woke up, gave the best hours of their lives—the sharpest years—to someone else’s dream. Not out of passion, but out of permission. They needed permission to eat, to have a roof, to see a doctor.
The deal was: surrender your time, your energy, and your 1 nonrenewable resource, and in exchange, you’ll receive just enough to keep you coming back tomorrow. They spent 5 days serving the machine and were given 2 to remember who they were. They called that balance.
The part that will look truly insane isn’t the work. Humans have always worked. It’s that the price of time was set by everyone except its owner. A person’s hours were appraised like livestock in units: $15, $50, $200.
Almost nobody stopped to ask why the only thing you can ever get more of was the cheapest thing you could sell. That’s crazy.
Future generations will study it the way we study feudalism—not with anger, but with confusion. You had 1 life. You knew it was finite. And the normal thing, the responsible thing, the thing you taught your children, was to hand it over.
The strangest detail of all is that the ones who escaped were called lucky, reckless dreamers. The ones who stayed were called practical. History will reverse those labels.
I don’t know. That’s fucking bars. That’s some profound AI shit. That’s kind of along the lines of exactly what I was just saying.
Kind of. Yeah, kind of. I just—I don’t know. I disagree with you on this one, to be honest. I do disagree with you.
The only reason I say that is because the average person’s contribution to society is really important for the rest of society to function. You can’t have people—
Who are—if everybody’s an entrepreneur, then—
Society can’t run, because entrepreneurs need people who are working 9-to-5s. That’s a true thing. If everybody can’t be CEOs, CEOs need to have people who are working a 9-to-5.
Well, for efficiency’s sake, and to optimize systems and push humanity forward, yes. But for them as an individual—that’s my opinion of it. That’s why I think, long term, I’m optimistic about AI. We talked about this in earlier episodes, too.
Eventually, we feel like it’s going to make everything super cheap and free to the point where you’re not actually going to have to have a job, which is a fucking amazing, utopian-type future and vision. I think that’s what this is speaking to. I think in 100 years, it will look like that.
But the same way that we look back at fucking cavemen and people in medieval times, and just the way people used to live—that was just normal, but obviously isn’t fucking normal or healthy today. I don’t know. It’s an interesting conversation.
I just think: be happy. If you’re happy raking leaves or working at a fucking drive-thru, then that’s awesome. Congratulations, honestly. But if you’re unhappy every day, fight against that.
Sure. With your entire life force, every dollar that you have, every fucking breath that you take, fight against that. Just be happy.
I agree with that, and it’s definitely the reason I think trading is so cool: whatever job you currently have, whatever education you currently have, you can teach yourself how to trade. No matter where you start, you can teach yourself how to trade.
It’s something that doesn’t require any educational background or any skill. Whereas in other things, it just removes all that, removes all credentials. If you can read a chart, you can fucking trade. You figure out how candlesticks work, you can fucking trade. That’s all you need to do.
That’s the best part about crypto.
Yeah.
But I’ll let you get into market stuff. I’m going to dip off now. I’m going to hand it off to Ansem for some alpha. He’ll just riff and talk to chat about markets and stuff.