《一周从0做到1亿美元》— Ansem｜Market Bubble #9

Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show all about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday at 1 p.m. PST live on twitch.tv/fazebanks. I'm also live on my Twitter. We're joined, of course, by my big, tall, handsome, beautiful Black Bull co-host, Ansem. He is also live. Where are you live, Z?

I'm live on Kick, kick.com.

What a week. Oh my God, bro. I'm speechless, but I shouldn't be, and I can't be, because we have a fucking show to run. You are on a fucking generational run right now, Z, and it's all coming full circle. Time is a flat circle, and we're going to get into it.

1. Turning Gamblers Into Traders

We've reserved this episode to be the Ansem episode. We're going to go back and forth, answer all the chat's questions, answer your followers' questions, and get into it. It's exciting. We've been talking all week, and from my point of view, this is as crazy as anything I've ever seen in crypto, or even in content and the attention game. It's unprecedented. There's a ton of really cool, unique opportunities.

You just hit 1 million followers this past week. How do you feel about that?

It feels good, man. The momentum is picking up. I thought it was going to slow down, but it's been speeding up. This usually happens as retail starts getting interested in crypto again, which is really cool to see. It's happened the past few cycles.

At the beginning of the last cycle, I was around 100,000. Before that, the cycle before that, I was around 10,000. I just hit 1 million, so shit is wild, bro. It's lit.

Before we get into all the numbers, stats, and crypto shit, I just want to formally say congratulations for hitting 1 million.

Thank you, bro.

You're the fucking GOAT. You deserve it. You've been working really fucking hard for years, and we have a little something planned for you. The production team has something planned.

You guys are so sweet.

They have something a little planned.

Thank you, bro. Thank God. Damn. Look at my fucking cake.

That's awesome. The whole set—the whole set lights on fire, bro.

Yo, you've got to wait. You've got to blow the fucking candles out, bro. Wait, who the fuck did Michael Cat[?] just blow those fucking candles out? Bro, that's—

Bro, what the fuck?

My laptop is covered in kind of fucking—what the fuck? Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Cancel the fucking show. It's over.

What does it say? What does the cake say?

Just, “Congrats for a million.”

“Congratulations, million followers.” Congratulations.

Fuck, it looks like a good cake, though. Good cake.

That's awesome.

Of course it's chocolate.

By the way, that's the sixth time Michael Cat[?] has made that joke, just so you know. He called me and said, “Hey, man”—guys, this is our head of production at Market Bubble. He does 80 different jobs.

He works his fucking balls off. He works a lot harder on the show than you or I do. He puts 200 hours a week into the show. He called me and said, “Hey, man, we have 2 options for the cake: vanilla or chocolate.” He said, “I was thinking chocolate,” and he was just waiting for me to laugh.

What the fuck, bro?

2. Picking the $10K Chat Winner

Listen, we have 1 thing to address quickly: the chat aggregator. We owe somebody $10,000 for the chat aggregator. It's been fucking hectic, and we do not have it picked yet. That will be next week, 100%. Mark my words: if we don't have the winner picked next week, the winner of the vibe-coding, chat-aggregating competition will get $20,000 instead of $10,000.

We will have it done next week. I apologize. We had way too many submissions, and quite frankly, there has just been way too much shit going on. Before we let this get out of control, let's pick this winner, Z, before we get into it.

Yeah, I did this little—wait, let me do the—Is it Banks's laptop? Okay. Bam. All right, cool. $10,000 goes to a person who follows Market Bubble.

That shit is blasting right now.

That shit is moving.

Yes. Yes. We need to hit 100K by next episode. And guys, listen. This is just the beginning. We're going to get into all of it, but watch and earn. We're going to create a whole fucking new meta around this attention content media thing. We're going to change the game. We're going to revolutionize it. I think meeting Z on a show like this is stars aligning and fucking fate. But we have a bunch of people spamming the chat. I'm going to try to lock in on 1 of them. It's going too fucking fast, man. It's going too fast.

Fucking pause this shit.

Yo, guys, slow the chat down real quick. GenZ75. Let's check GenZ75. If this looks like a fake or weird account, I'm sorry, but—okay, I'm going to puke. What a surprise. It's a decent amount of tweets. This guy looks like somebody who's maybe new to crypto.

Yeah, they look like they're a fucking football fan.

GenZ75. Trump and football.

I clicked it, guys. What do you think, Z? You think this is a good one?

GenZ75? They're not followed by anybody.

Are they following Market Bubble?

Let me check. Right, let me see if they're following. Yeah, they're following Market Bubble.

And they follow me.

And they follow you.

Doesn't fucking follow me, though. No, this is a burner that I'm on.

GenZ75, congratulations. You have won $10,000. Chat, mods, production—go grab his information from the chat. You won $10,000.

Z, you've given away how much money just today?

Around $100,000, somewhere around there.

What timeline are we in, brother? What the fuck? A lot of shit is happening this week, bro. Shit is going on. How much money have you airdropped to people and given away in the last week?

In the past week, we ran a coin from around $200,000 to about $190 million. I've given away around $1 million of that in airdrops to people. In 4 or 5 days, something like that. Not too crazy. Nothing too crazy.

Nothing too crazy, dude. You're a fucking animal. You're a psycho. You've given away a real $11 million in the last week, and there's a lot to unpack here. We have the whole hour for you, so without further ado, let's get into it.

3. Ansem's Trading Origin Story

Let's start at the beginning of Ansem, at the beginning of his journey. You've been trading since 2017 and have navigated the last 2 market cycles very, very well, to say the least. Last week, you said Solana had bottomed and was going to $600. Why, sir?

I feel like I learn more about how crypto cycles work every single time I trade them. In 2017, that's when I first got into crypto. I bought Bitcoin around $3,000 during that summer, after I graduated from Georgia Tech. I was trading on Bittrex and BitMEX. I lost a fucking ton of money on altcoins and gave a lot back to the market.

During that cycle, I followed a lot of really important people on Crypto Twitter, like Cobie, Trader Mayne, Loomdart, and a lot of guys on there who I learned how to trade from. I learned a lot of different strategies. What they always said was, “You're supposed to trade altcoins to stack Bitcoin.” You're not supposed to be fully down the risk curve, all in altcoins. You're supposed to have some stack of safe stuff and some stack of riskier stuff. Your goal is to acquire more of the safer assets that you have.

The next cycle was the Solana cycle for me, in 2020 and 2021. I was actually late to DeFi Summer. I missed a lot of DeFi Summer and started getting active trading again toward the back half of 2020.

My big trade that cycle was Solana, which we've talked about on the show. Luna and AVAX also did well. DeFi Kingdoms was another cool one, and Axie Infinity was another cool one.

That's when my account blew up, because I was sharing all those trades in real time. At the end of that cycle, I actually went on Cobie's show.

You were sharing the trades, and you were right a lot more often than not.

Yeah, I was right. I was right a lot of the time. Luckily, I sold a good bit toward the end of that cycle. I gave a lot back in 2022, to be honest—more than I should have. But then 2023 was another cycle where I did well with Solana. I called that from the bottom along with Coinbase Prime and a couple of other plays.

During that cycle, Solana was very non-consensus. People did not think Solana was going to do well. The on-chain volumes were very low after FTX blew up, and SBF was in jail or going to jail. People didn’t think Solana was going to come back at all. But I thought, if crypto was going to come back, then it made sense for the fastest, cheapest transaction on-chain—the one that was best for retail—to do well. That ended up being right.

Solana did very well, but what really drove a lot of the attention to my account during that cycle was on-chain coins on Solana. Bonk did really well. Bonk went from around $30 million to around $4.5 billion in market cap, something crazy. WIF went from around $100,000 in market cap to around $4 billion, and nobody was betting on on-chain coins on Solana doing well. It was very unexpected for these coins to do that well, even though in the previous cycle we had Doge go to $80 billion. Memecoins on Solana did really well in 2023.

The reason I had that thesis was that people were going to buy Solana and be active on-chain, and there weren’t that many active protocols that had tokens yet. Jito hadn’t dropped its token yet. Jupiter hadn’t dropped its token yet. Kamino hadn’t dropped its token yet. A lot of the core protocols hadn’t dropped tokens, so Bonk was the main coin that people could buy on-chain. I knew people were going to go down the risk curve and buy all these different things. That’s why my account blew up during the past cycle.

And 2023 and 2024 were a fucking Black Mirror episode for you. People were like, “How did you find these coins? How were you so correct on them from so low?”

Yeah, that was a Black Mirror episode. People were like, “How did you find this coin or these coins? How were you so correct on that from so low?” It really was crazy.

Kanye West calling you, every celebrity under the sun calling you.

Fuck.

Yeah, insane. It really was a Black Mirror episode.

Yeah, it was crazy. In 2025, I didn’t really trade all that much. I missed the AI trade. I missed a lot of it. Now we’re in 2026, and we’re kind of at that point in the cycle where Bitcoin is down 50% from its all-time highs and is retesting its previous all-time high from the past cycle. Solana is down around 75%, and stuff has been going sideways, consolidating in a range for a bit.

It’s flipped. It’s flipped a little bit this week, though.

This week.

A little vibe shift this week for sure.

I think there are a lot of positive things going on in Solana right now. I talked about it last week. I think the concerns with Saylor are overblown. He shored up his balance sheet, so he has 25 months of runway now. People thought he was going to be selling billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin. He’s not going to be selling billions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin anytime soon, so that’s not a concern anymore.

Crypto is not the consensus trade right now. There are a lot of profits that people are going to be realizing from stocks. Memory has been down—Micron is down a good bit, and SanDisk is down a good bit. I think crypto is in a really good spot to catch attention from other areas where people are diversifying. I think Solana is in a really good place because tokenized stocks are popping off right now with Backpack and Sunrise, and stuff like Nest.

4. 0 to $100 Million in One Week

And listen, man, again, numbers don’t lie. You called it a week ago. This is the weekly chart, and as you guys can see, it’s up 21% since you made that crazy call. It was around $69, I think, last week. That was kind of the clip that made its rounds and went nuts. You guys were talking about Solana going from $60 to $600, and everybody had something to say about that.

Then, just a couple of short days later, without absolutely any of us knowing that you were going to do this, you kind of soft-launched this ANOM thing—the Black Bull. Yeah, the wallet, guys. This thing was at $0 a week ago. It’s at over $100 million now. This is fucking absurd, dude. It is crazy. This is a real thing. This is in your pocket right now. This is your cell phone, dude. What the fuck am I looking at?

Yeah. Well, it’s a watch of the wallet. It’s not my actual cell phone. It’s somebody watching the wallet. But, yeah, it’s crazy.

Your coin has over 100,000 holders. You’ve airdropped and given away $11 million in the last week. Just give us the story. What got us to this point—from calling Solana to $600, from literally last week’s episode on Thursday or Friday, and then I believe Saturday is when all this went down?

Yeah, Saturday. People kept claiming that this random wallet was mine. There’s a lot of on-chain activity on Solana, and people think a lot of wallets are mine that aren’t actually mine. I’m bullish on Solana. I’m saying I started buying memes again on SOL. I think memecoins are going to do well. I think certain on-chain coins are going to do well. I think certain protocols on Solana are going to do well. I’m going to get active on-chain again.

When I tweeted that and said that, people thought some wallet that was not mine was doing things that I was doing. On Pump.fun, you can assign creator fees to certain wallets instead of the developer getting the creator fees. They were assigning fees to this wallet that they thought was mine, and that wallet was claiming the fees. They were like, “Oh, Ansem’s going to talk about this. This is his wallet.”

I just wanted to make it clear that wasn’t my wallet, so that wasn’t me doing that. I made a Pump.fun account and said, “No, this is my wallet. This is my account. If you guys want to direct stuff to me, you can direct it to me here.” After I did that, I got sent a ton of coins and a ton of fees to the account on Saturday, when I hit 1 million followers.

I thought, well, Pump.fun hasn’t given its airdrop to anybody, and a lot of protocols haven’t given their airdrop to anybody. One of the drivers of on-chain activity during the last cycle in 2023 was Jito doing its airdrop before it dropped its token. That incentivized a lot of retail to trade on-chain.

I thought, well, I’m going to give back some of the $200,000 in creator fees that I’ve made on my Pump.fun account to people who actually need money to trade right now. A lot of people are at zero or down a lot, but they want to be active and trade on-chain. I said I was going to give away some of those creator fees on Saturday.

I posted the Pump.fun wallet. I went away for a few minutes or an hour, came back to check what the fuck was going on with the Pump.fun wallet, and there was this coin—

Dude.

There were a few coins that people sent me, but one of them was doing really well. It was at around an $8 million market cap. I thought, well, I can’t just ignore this coin. It’s called ANOM, the Black Bull. It had some decent art to it. People were trading it, and people were asking if I was going to associate myself with it.

I thought about it for a few hours. What am I going to say? Am I going to claim it? Am I going to say I’m going to talk about it? What am I going to do? I have 65% of this coin’s supply. What am I going to do with it?

I decided I was going to talk about this coin and address it. I was going to talk about this coin that people made and sent to me. Okay, cool. Last cycle, Bonk did a great job launching at the lows of Solana. I don’t know the developer who launched this coin, but the Bonk team was a group of around 20 people on Solana—important developers, important founders, and important traders. They launched Bonk at the pico lows when the FTX shit was happening and sent an airdrop to a ton of the most important people on Solana. That was one of the things that kept sentiment strong and positive on Solana during that time period.

Bonk did really well from the lows. It went to around a $5 billion market cap. I thought, “Okay, this makes sense. I know there’s going to be some coin that does well on-chain. This is attached to me. I’ve talked about these types of coins in the past. It has a good narrative, and I can connect a lot more things that I’m connected to now that I didn’t have back then.”

I have 10 times more followers now. I have 65% of the supply, so I can airdrop it to people. It’s easy for me to talk about because it’s my name. It made sense to talk about it. I decided I was going to pick it up and talk about the coin.

The issue was that there was another coin with the same name that had launched before, and I airdropped some of the supply of the current one to those people. So I was like—

I literally asked you last episode if you had the keys to Pump.fun and, if you ran Pump.fun, what would you do? And, bro, literally—

I’m like, “Bro, they’re not doing it, so I’m just going to do it.” I don’t understand.

They just took it upon themselves. They raised $1 billion. They made $1 billion in fees. They haven't airdropped any of it—anything—to people, and they said they were going to airdrop it a year ago.

All these people are sending me fees, saying, “Want to talk about this, talk about this, talk about this.” So I'm like, I have all this attention; I'm getting all this money from the fees toward my account. I might as well give it back to people. Then this coin launched, and I'm like, “Okay, I got 65% of the supply. I'm going to give that to people, too.” So I just started giving that out all this week.

And you have—I mean, we have the stats right here: 120,000 wallets. I think this is a pretty up-to-date representation.

It looks like 95% of traders are in profit, which is fucking amazing. W's in the fucking chat.

There's a guy who turned $8 into $500,000.

It's unbelievable.

We really might be back. It's crazy. It's unreal. Yeah, 22,000 wallets are up over $100, 8,000 are up over $1,000, and 1,800 are up over $10,000. Then this one: 200 people have made six figures in the last week trading this, which is life-changing. That's real. That's real life-changing money.

I'm seeing somebody in the chat say, “Promote, like, bag working, like, reward people properly,” and I—

Yeah. So, the issue with the trenches is that I've been working on this longer article I want to put out about what the current issues are with the trenches. Pump.fun obviously incentivizes launches, which is fine, which is good. I think they're net positive for the activity on-chain, but what's been happening is everybody's been trading these $10,000 market-cap coins.

They're not holding anything. The hold time has been 30 seconds, like, some crazy shit. They don't hold shit for long. The way you actually make money during bull markets is by holding things for an extended period of time. If Solana goes from $60 to $600, it 10x's. What are the coins on-chain that are beta to Solana going to do? They're going to 100x at minimum, or higher depending on when you catch them.

You want to buy the coins that are gaining momentum and trending, not the ones that just launched and don't have confirmed momentum yet. What I've been trying to say is, bros, there are coins on-chain that are going to do really well. There are protocols that are launching and new features that are doing really well. There are coins attached to memes that are doing really well.

There are new protocols launching and doing really well connected to the tokenized-stock stuff. There's a ton of coins on-chain that are going to do well in this bull market if Solana recovers and does well. You don't need to be in and out of coins every 30 seconds. That's what I've been trying to say to people.

The reason coins did well in the past is because all of the holders were very deliberate and very aggressive about sharing their thesis on the coin and why they thought it was going to do well, and they were kind of aligned on that. It was more PvE than it was PvP. That's what I've been trying to get everybody back to.

One of the advantages of crypto, and why retail likes trading crypto, is that you're able to make a lot of money off a little bit of money. But that only works if people are aligned around some of the same thesis.

Black bull. The black bull, ladies and gentlemen. The black bull. That's what they call me now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. So, listen. Like I said, this wallet had exactly $0 in it one week ago. Exactly. I was in St. Barts. We were talking about this shit running. It's at over $100 million. I can't believe it's real. It's so fucking insane.

Can you—because I'm seeing somebody in the chat say, “Promote, like, bag working, like, reward people properly.” Did that play a factor in what you did here? And you did it on Pump.fun—why?

Pump.fun has all the liquidity and volume for degen launches. I think they've built a great business there, and they're doing really well. I think it makes sense for that product to be where retail is going for the newest and lowest-cap stuff. That was the reason for that.

People always want my attention for things. People are like, “Yo, Z, talk about this coin. Yo, Z, talk about this coin. Yo, Z, do this. Yo, Z, do that.” And, “We think it's whales buying this. We're going to buy that.” I know that the attention I have, and the reputation I've developed being on Crypto Twitter for the past decade, means people trust me when I'm talking about coins, when I'm talking about what I think is going to do well in the market, and when I talk about what I think is going to go up.

But I'm never really in control of where that attention is getting directed. There have been a lot of times when people have used my attention for negative things, and I've lost money and had other people lose money because I've been wrong, thinking that other people have the right intentions when they actually don't.

Especially with on-chain stuff, where the market caps are lower, it's very risky to talk about something if you don't know who's behind the project. A lot of the time, I talk about coins where I don't know who the dev is. I don't know who has X% of the supply. I don't know what their intentions are.

I realized it would be a lot better if I'm the one who has most of the supply of whatever it is that I'm talking about. That was actually one of the main reasons I thought this was a safer thing for me to do than the stuff I've been doing before.

And you've been fucking going nuts on Twitter. I feel like you've been tweeting—

People are cooking me, bro. People have been trying to cook me all week, and they were saying some shit, bro. So I had to go back and forth. I've put out a lot of long tweets, though. A lot of them.

A lot of them. I think my favorite one was the one I replied to—the dude—

It's the one I retweeted. Yeah, it was the one where I was like, “I've made mistakes with certain things in the past.” That one?

Yeah, I retweeted it. I think—which one was it? It was fucking—

Let me try to find it. I think I still have it up. The reason I reply to so much of this stuff is because I feel like a lot of the complaints are valid, and there's been a lot of stuff that I've done wrong in crypto and that I feel like I fucked up on.

But that doesn't mean I'm not aware of the shit I fucked up on. I think that's what people get confused about. They think I'm not aware of the shit I've done wrong in the past. I know what I've fucked up on or what I don't do well. Whenever I'm aware of that, I counter it.

Yeah, I think you've done a fucking fantastic job articulating shit via tweets. I think you have a crazy advantage and opportunity here, obviously, with a show like this, and now that you're getting more used to doing content, being a talking head, and putting your face and your voice to shit.

You've always been very articulate. I think the important thing to highlight here for someone like you—the thing I've always appreciated most about you—is that your intentions are very clear and obvious, at least to somebody like me.

You're very well-intentioned, and I see you time and time again, over and over, go out of your way to help people, give people the right information, and try to educate people. Obviously, right now, with the success of what's happened, you've been fucking grinding for the last week, not sleeping, just airdropping people this money. You know what I'm saying?

Manually sitting here with this wallet. I had a fucking snapshot of the older holders. I have people's addresses that they've sent to me on Twitter.

Like the thing I posted earlier today, I got about 30,000 replies when I asked for people's addresses. I've just been manually sitting it out. We're going to talk a little later in the show about what we've been building to do it programmatically and get people's data in a better way. I've literally not been sleeping; I've just been sending out millions of dollars to people.

And on that note, what I've appreciated most about you is that you have quite literally, brother, made so many people millionaires over the years. I don't think there's ever been a clear way for you to know them or connect with them.

Yeah, maybe you want to break down for me how you want to better connect with these people, how this can be used as an instrument and a tool to do that, and what that could mean for the holders and how that's played a factor into this.

Yeah. I think the best way I can describe it is that I've had a lot of people come up to me in public at conferences and events and be like, “Yo, Ansem, I made money off this because you talked about being bullish on SOL, or you were bullish on Bonk or whatever.” People will say, “I made this much,” and show me that they've made that much. They'll thank me and be overwhelmed and excited to see me, but I never know who these people are, and there's never any way for me to talk directly to them.

I have followers on Twitter, but most of them are anonymous, and there's no way for me to directly go back and interface with all these people.

One of the cool things that MrBeast does really well is philanthropy. He gives back to a lot of his community. One of the reasons he's able to continuously garner so much attention and create so much entertainment is because he gives away a lot of money to people.

He has 500 million subscribers. You have 120,000 holders, just to put the discrepancy in perspective. I think that's really important.

Yeah, he has 570 million subscribers. I looked up how much he's given away, and he said he's given away about $200 million in total through all the stuff that he's done. I think that's one of the reasons he does so well with his content: philanthropy is cool to people if it's done in an engaging way.

I also think it's really cool to be able to give away money to people who especially need it. But it's even better with trading markets, because if you have capital and you're also learning how to trade at the same time, you don't just get that capital—you can multiply it in the markets right after you get it. That's why airdrops in crypto are so huge for people: you don't just get that lump sum of cash and spend it on whatever you need to spend it on; you can trade it and multiply it.

What I'm trying to do is connect all these things together. I have the education piece, where we talk about things on Market Bubble and what trades I'm looking at. I have Bullpen, where people can trade. Whether you want to trade perps, Solana coins, or prediction markets, everything is there.

I have all these different pieces now that I can direct people to while educating them. With this coin, I can also do the philanthropy piece and the entertainment piece. I just feel like I have a good way of doing everything together.

It seems like you've figured out a way to tokenize attention. That's really what this feels like, looks like, and is behaving like.

Yeah.

5. What Is the Black Bull?

Do you want to walk me and the audience through your thought process and explain exactly what this coin is? Is it a brand coin? What is the coin?

The coin is the Black Bull. I think it's a really cool meme in itself. The Black Bull is a Chinese moniker that represents diligence, trustworthiness, and all these different things. In a bull market, I think it's great for the main meme to be a bull. That makes a ton of sense to me.

The other piece of it is Ansem, which is my name. My name, Ansem, comes from the game Kingdom Hearts. I was a nerd; Kingdom Hearts 2 was my favorite game growing up. There's Ansem the Wise, the dude who taught everybody in the game. Then there's Ansem, Seeker of Darkness, which is the DJ. That's the DJ side of me that does all the crazy stuff on the timeline.

Those combinations of things are where the name Ansem comes from. As far as it being a brand coin, I think it's a superset of all the things that I'm already doing.

I have Bullpen, which is my trading app, and people trade on Bullpen. I have Market Bubble, which is this podcast. We have people who watch this podcast and learn about trading through it. I also trade; I make money through trading.

We did a competition a few weeks ago where I was going to give away $100,000 to whoever beat me in a trading competition. Nobody could beat me. I have another one going on right now: we're doing a $1,000-to-$100,000 challenge, and I'm giving away another $100,000 in that one.

I have the ad sponsorship revenue, the revenue from the Pump.fun wallet creator fees, and a lot of protocols that want to do partnerships with me. If I have a list of people who are connected to this attention that everybody else wants from me anyway, I can direct all the attention I'm getting from protocols and other businesses toward having these people use applications in crypto or elsewhere, and take portions of what I get back to those people.

I don't have any real way to give back to people other than the education piece. I feel like we, with the show and you specifically, have a unique opportunity to build—

Almost revolutionary tools and systems to automate the process of rewarding people who are engaging in a positive or productive way: people who are sharing good ideas, helping people, shining more attention on the token, engaging with the chat, or sharing good information.

I had the Manlets Telegram in 2023, and that chat had about 10 different sections for different things. I had one on microcaps, one on stocks, one on L1s, and all these different things. People would contribute information there, and everybody would learn from each other. There were 20,000 people in the chat, and everybody was going back and forth with information.

What I want to create is a community of people that's not only trading on-chain but also learning from each other and doing all these other things.

Just imagine having an allocated pool for our community. People watch a clip—clipping is the meta, as we know. We talk about it a lot, and obviously we spend time on the show farming clips. We're playing the game; we're playing the current content-attention game.

Imagine having an allocated pool of funds for people to tap into and clip themselves, with it happening automatically. People can engage with what you're doing and with what the show is doing. This whole watch-and-earn effort is such an interesting thing to me.

It's never been done before, bro. It's literally never been done before.

It hasn't, and I'll tell you something else that I'm kind of in an infinite thought loop on. Average streamers' communities and fan bases operate as fan bases. They're die-hard fans, spamming “W”s in the chat and moving with whatever their streamer is saying.

This is a much different dynamic from what we have with the audience. We don't have the 40-year-old guy in the chat with his newspaper and coffee trying to get Ansem's alpha. He isn't a fan; he's not bugging out, buying an Ansem hoodie, or spamming “W”s in the chat.

I don't know. We have such a unique and different relationship with the audience, and you especially. There are all kinds of unique opportunities to build something really revolutionary on that front. With you on the finance-tech side and me on the content side, you're already building tools.

I agree. I agree. It's the most exciting thing that I've worked on or been a part of in a very long time.

I know you guys are already building automated systems, and you'll get into that later in the show. You've started to develop a process for automating the airdrop system. People are going to be able to plug in their Twitters and their Twitch accounts. It's scalable, too—it's something we can build week to week, and it can become better and better and better.

Crack.

He's not going to stop, bro. Stay engaged with that. Stay engaged with the Market Bubble Twitter, everything that we do. This show is obviously a very important platform, and we're taking it super seriously. We've worked so fucking hard on it, and it's kind of all coming full circle. It's really cool.

6. Who Gets the Airdrop?

Yeah. I think what people miss is the tokenized-attention piece and how a lot of people say it's valueless. I think that's really untrue. If you look at what Bonk did for Solana last cycle, I don't know if people remember, but Solana was trying to sell the first round of its Saga phones, and they weren't doing a great job selling them. Bonk airdropped tokens to people who were holding these phones, and when the token started going up, it went up so much that the airdrop people got for buying the phone was worth more than the actual phone cost. When that happened, we were like, "Well, we're just going to buy the phone. The phone has this amount of money on it from the airdrop," and the phones sold out immediately. The only reason that happened was because Bonk launched and did a great job of generating attention from people, and it was the community coin on Solana at that point in time. A lot of people miss how attention is very intangible, but tokens are one of the only ways that you can ascribe value to attention in markets.

Right. Up to this point, we've just talked about automating, building systems, and so on. Over the last week, I've seen you do a lot of it manually. How have you gone about deciding who to airdrop to? $11 million has been given out to—I don't know how many people. How many people?

I think close to 1,000. Somewhere near 1,000, I think.

It's insane.

Somewhere around there, yeah.

Congrats to anybody who received one of those. Nice little stimmy. How have you gone about deciding to do that? Has it been random? Has it been intentional? A combination of both?

It's been kind of random and kind of intentional. The main things I've wanted and been focused on are people who are holding the coin. You can buy a penny's worth of the coin, or you can buy a dollar's worth of the coin. That's one piece of it: the holders. It's very easy to buy the coin, so I want to give stimmies to people who are invested in the coin doing well. Also, people who are posting—people who are posting theses on the coin and doing marketing for the coin. I actually talked to this company called Shills a few days ago. They do campaigns where you can allocate a certain amount of the supply to people who post on social media and get a certain amount of engagement from those posts. That creates a flywheel where the more I post about the coin, the more people find out about the coin, and then I also get more from the airdrop. People are incentivized to keep doing that. Those are the 2 main things: people who are holders and people who are back working and bull posting the coin and engaged with the community. But it's also been random because I've been like, "What's your Solana address on the timeline?" and everybody's been sending me a ton of fucking Solana addresses.

You see MEW and Phantom and every fucking Solana wallet. Yeah.

Bro, I had a dude—this is the craziest shit. I had a dude post a—I was like, "I want to see the cool shit y'all do with the Anom ticker, the Anom tag on Twitter." I had a guy who doesn't have arms. He has 1 leg and 1 foot. He drew with his 1 foot—

A picture of Anom and the fucking black bull.

And was like, "Yo, look at this." The shit got 1,000 likes, and people were pinging me all day like, "Yo, Z, you have to see this. You have to see this." I eventually found it, and he's one of the people I airdrop stuff to. There's been a whole bunch of wild shit like that—people from all over the world doing cool shit like that. I think that's really cool: I'm here in New York, but there are people in fucking Nigeria, people in fucking China, and people in all these random places seeing this shit online and saying, "Yo, I want to be a part of this movement. I want to be a part of this community. I want to know about markets."

For me, from my perspective, that's probably the best way to get noticed: go out and create content, create original content around this movement. That's what's likely going to get you noticed the most, obviously. Just posting your address doesn't work, because I can't even read my DMs. People are just like, "Bro, I need money. Send me money. Here's my address. Send me money. I need money. Send me money." I can't even—how am I going to choose between all the people doing that? There are hundreds of thousands of posts like that, and I can't choose. But people who are doing engaging things, helping with the art, or helping with the marketing—like Never Goon, who said today, "Yo, dude, if you give me 30,000 in Anom tokens, I'm going to go give them away to a ton of people in L.A. and people who don't hold any crypto. I'm going to go give it out." I'm like, "Yo, cool. I'll send it to you right now." Go do marketing for it. That's awesome. Stuff like that—airdrops, marketing, content, or design work—those are the people I want to give tokens to because they're empowering the community more.

To go a little bit deeper, we've talked about 2 different ideas behind the scenes that I like a lot. One is giving people actual goals and missions, almost like battles.

Yeah, quests.

Exactly. Go do this and receive this—some GTA mission-type shit. Missions. Building that out and doing cool shit around that is going to be interesting. That's something we could easily do. We also talked about maybe bringing in people who are in your immediate circle, or people who have their own individual communities, and figuring out ways and systems where they might be allocated part of the funds that they can control in terms of airdropping to their communities or rewarding people who they think would be valuable holders. There are all kinds of possibilities. That's the beautiful thing about crypto, right? There are so many opportunities to build these automated, checked systems. It all just lives on-chain. It's right there.

All the data is right there. That's the really cool thing about crypto: you get access to all the data. I know every single token holder. I know how long they've held the token. I know when they sold it. All that shit is very easily accessible. I can direct people to those people and say, "Give something to these wallets. Do something for these wallets. You want to give me coins? Give them to these people who are holding the token." I can do a lot of stuff with that in crypto, and I only think it's going to go up as more people get involved on-chain.

7. Banks Holds Zero

I think it's a really good time for me to just state that you couldn't have done this in a more fair way. By the way, ladies and gentlemen, I host a fucking show with this fool—a podcast with this guy. I talk to him every fucking day, and I was completely blindsided. I opened up Twitter and saw "Anom the Black Bull, $80 million," and I was like, "Oh, I must have fucking bumped my head last night. This can't be right." I triple-checked, double-checked, and nope, sure is. I want to state this very, very clearly, right here, right now: I own none of the token. I have been sidelined. I'm going to continue to stay on the sidelines and just be your fucking cheerleader, glaze you, and blow bubbles on it, like the chat likes to say. I hope you don't take any offense to that. I think it's the absolute cleanest way for me to interact with what's happening right now. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think that's the right move?

I mean.

Yeah. I mean, I think the things that you helped me with—when I did this show, I got pushback from some people in crypto. They were like, "Why are you doing this with Banks? What does Banks know about finance? You're the finance guy. You're the charts guy. What is Banks going to contribute to this?" I think what a lot of people miss in the dynamic between me and you is that you're great at content, great at media, and great at connecting with other people. Those are all valuable things that I don't have, and we can feed off each other. I do agree with you that it makes a ton of sense for you to help me with those things—thinking about how, if we're going to do pop-ups and content and shit, who am I going to get? Who do I need to—

Peanut butter and jelly, baby. Peanut butter and jelly.

The shit with TJR. People were like, "Why did you get TJR on the show? Why did you give TJR a spot on the show? Why did you get TJR on the show?" TJR being on the show and me having that direct line to him helped me a lot, because when he was going to do whatever he was trying to do, I was like, "Bro, it makes a ton more sense for everybody if we align on 1 thing and we're all focusing our attention on this 1 thing." All right, cool, bro.

I'll help you with whatever socials you need help with. I'll help you with this, and I'll help you with that. He ended up buying some publicly with his own money. Having connections to other people is very important. I do agree that what you're saying makes a ton of sense.

So, I'm just going to stay in my lane and focus on the content and media. I'm going to help continue to guide you the best way that I can through content. We've already talked about some cool ideas to do outside of just the show. We've talked to other people outside of you and me about building inside this bubble. We have a lot of cool plans with that.

I feel like it's fair for me to say that in this market—crypto, finance, tech—I'm way overqualified in terms of building content IP and commanding attention. I have fought with the best of the best—MrBeast, Logan Paul, Jake Paul, and Kai Cenat—and I have always kind of taken a good chunk of the market's share and brought that over here. You and me coming together: peanut butter and jelly, baby.

I'm going to stay in my lane, and we're just going to keep doing what we're doing. We're going to keep building the show. I'm excited. Yeah, cool. What are the odds that the Black Bull flips Pump.fun? I feel like a huge part of this—again, I prompted you, and you said you loved the question. I said, "Listen, you have the keys to Pump.fun. What are you doing?" Then you literally took the liberty of going on and doing exactly what you said you'd do with Pump.fun, but with this.

Let me ask you directly: what do you think the odds are that the Black Bull flips Pump.fun?

At what time?

They're high.

I think Polymarket offers it—

Oh my God. This is free, bro. This is a brand-new market. I think this is a brand-new market.

Well, it's not even a 10x to flip. It's like a 3x to flip right now, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah. So, this is just mispriced based on mathematics.

I think it's just like—yeah. It's just like—yeah, I guess. I don't know. I guess they don't have faith in me, but it seems like Crypto Twitter doesn't have faith in me.

Don't sell yourself short. I think this is a new market. I don't think there's a ton of volume in this yet.

We'll see.

Yeah. Chat, go take advantage of this because this is obviously mispriced. What's Pump trading at right now?

It trades at around $600M in circulating market cap and a $1.1B FDV.

Hey, man, all I'm going to say is WIF went to $5B on its own last cycle. That's it—on its own. If Solana makes a new all-time high past where it was last cycle, I think the on-chain coins are going to go higher than they did last cycle.

What makes this different, too, is that this is one of those rare occurrences where, obviously, whether or not you're in crypto, you want to see Bitcoin go up, because if Bitcoin goes up, it's good for crypto, whether you hold the coin or don't. I feel like this is very, very similar. Whether you're inside of it or not, whether you're actively trading it or not, this is just objectively good for the ecosystem if this does well and all goes well. I think people have kind of seen that and rallied around it.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, some people have been pretty negative on it.

Look at it now, Z. Look at it now: 17%.

Like, bro, they're tripping. You're bugging. Y'all are bugging. I'm telling you, they're bugging.

Yeah, exactly. They're bugging.

Stupid. So stupid.

But I think when you have a positive-EV event on-chain like that, where a lot of people make money, that always flows down to everything else. It always flows down to everything else. If you look at what the Uniswap airdrop did for everybody on-chain back then, that was a huge influx of capital, and on-chain activity spiked after that. The JTO airdrop spiked a ton of activity. The Jupiter airdrop spiked a ton of activity.

When coins go up in crypto, it also brings a lot more attention to crypto. Right now, there's not a lot of attention in crypto. People don't really give a damn about crypto. They've been trading. Micron's up 50%. SanDisk is up 100%. All these other—

And they get the attention, bro. Anytime I hear anybody talking about crypto in the real world, it's fucking negative. It's so bad.

Which means that if there is some good, positive energy that comes out of crypto, people are like, "Oh, crypto has a lot of fundamentally good things going on right now." Then coins start going up, and there are people making money on-chain. That's just an influx of new capital and new attention that's going to come into the market. That's what I'm betting on happening. That's what I was betting on happening in 2023. That's what I think is going to happen again.

8. The Long-Term Vision

Again, you said it last week: $60 to $600. Solana made a violent move up—20% in the last week.

Yeah, I mean, I guess that just leaves us with—I think I covered just about everything that I wanted to ask you. Where does the long-term vision go? You're talking about hires, infrastructure, scaling this—an entire ecosystem to support the coin. What are you actually building around this? We're basically at day 0 right now.

I know it's been like 5 days. I'm figuring it out as I go, to be honest. But my high-level main goal is that I want it to be an onboarding funnel to crypto and a lot of other applications.

I'm at 100,000 holders right now, which is awesome. Shout-out to all you guys. You guys are the goats. If I can get that even higher—I have 1 million followers on Twitter, and I can have 1 million holders of this coin that I can direct to real things on-chain—I can teach them how to trade better, how to control their money better, about crypto, why Bitcoin is important, and about stablecoins and how to use them in their businesses.

If I can do all those things, what I really want to use this as is a funnel to onboard people into important things. That's my high-level view of it. But like I said before, it's a superset of all the things that I'm doing.

I have Bullpen, the trading app, that I can instruct users to use and trade on-chain, trade Solana, trade Hyperliquid perps, and trade Polymarket prediction markets. I also have this podcast, Market Bubble. We can direct coins to people in the chat. We can do giveaways. We can do cool IRL stuff. There's just a ton of stuff that I can do and connect it to other—

I'm most excited for you about the visual, live voice tweets that we've kind of discovered in the last couple of videos.

Yeah.

I haven't done one yet. I need to do one. No, no, what I'm referring to is that we found, kind of in real time, this meta for the show where you're just live-tweeting clips.

Oh, right now. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because you tweet that way anyway. Usually, again, it's text on a screen. You're giving people an opportunity to discover you, because a lot of people just doom-scroll on Twitter. If you're just typing text to tweet all day, you're not going to be discoverable by these people. You need to have some sort of video content.

It gives you a much clearer way to articulate what you're saying in real time. It's proven that a lot of people are interested in it. The clips do very, very well, and it's a great opportunity for you not to be misunderstood or misconstrued. It's a platform. You have a mouthpiece—a proper one. It's all timestamped.

Again, last week, you guys called Solana to $600. If that happens, brother, that show and that clip will be generational. By the way, you've done this multiple times, bro. You've done this multiple times. If you do it once, you can do it again.

Before we bring in Sal and start bringing in people for this Q&A segment and the handful of guests that we have, I'm just going to wrap with this question. Listen, brother, you could have retired years ago. You could have sailed off into the sunset, with your feet up on the beach. Many traders do this. Many accounts on Crypto Twitter evaporate and vanish when they've made their wealth and their millions.

At this point, are you just doing it for the love of the game? Why, brother? Why are you still here?

I do like helping people, to be honest. I've said it last cycle too: when I first joined Crypto Twitter, there were a lot of people there who also could have fucked off and done whatever they wanted to, but they stayed there and taught people how to trade crypto and how to learn about markets and all these things.

I feel like I'm kind of in that place now, where I have the ability to share the knowledge that I've already gained in markets and share how to help people out. That's honestly the main reason—the simplest reason. But also, I love trading.

I'm not going to stop trading. So if I'm already trading in this stuff anyway, why would I not be talking about the markets that I'm trading, too? I think it's really cool going to the conferences and having people say, “I retired my mom because I bought this,” or, “I bought a house because I did this.” That's cool to me. That's really cool to see. To have a positive impact on people, I don't think there's really anything that can replicate that.

It's real, genuine fulfillment. It's something that feels more rewarding and just more fulfilling than making any amount of money. You know what I mean? Hitting any sort of trade—they're completely different feelings, right? Hitting a trade is almost that—yeah.

It's very self-serving. Trading is very PvP. Trading is very self-serving. Teaching other people how to trade and helping people with markets, I feel like, is kind of a counterbalance to that.

Cool. Without further ado, that's all the questions that I had for you. I have to take a piss. I'm going to piss my fucking pants. I'm going to give you full screen.

Yeah, I'm going to give you full screen. We're going to set up Sal to come on with you, Z. Just riff for the next several minutes, talk to the chat, and talk about whatever you want to talk about. I'm going to take a piss. They're obviously going to get Sal set up. He's live with you, right? He's in person with you?

He's right here next to me.

Yeah, cool. Then we'll have a bunch of guests in the waiting rooms and stuff, and then we'll get to the Q&A portion.

Yo, what's good, chat? How we doing?

9. Sal (Bullpen Co-Founder) Joins

All right, yeah. Let's come on in.

My co-founder is joining me on set.

First time.

Say what's up, Sal, bro.

Okay, this is the chat. What the fuck is GM? GM. What the fuck is Trader U? Can you stop spamming Eli? Eli, what the fuck is this? Look at him. I'm just putting him in timeout for 5 minutes because he keeps spamming.

Yeah. Bring up the new livestream.

Oh, well. Can I look at it right now on the thing?

Yeah, look on our—on the Market Bubble page.

Yeah, yeah. Wait, what do you mean?

Oh, you were talking about the announcement tweet.

On the Market Bubble page or on Nikita's page?

Market Bubble.

Am I tripping?

That one. That one. Yeah, he's talking about that.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, Live Studio. I wonder if I can pull it up on here.

You can go—let's see. Is it the same thing? Yeah, there it is. That's cool.

Yeah, it looks cool.

I don't want to—don't make me do that. What's good, guys? How we living? Should we show them this thing?

I think we can get into that probably right before the end of the show. What I wanted to get into with you, first of all, is congratulations on the million.

Thank you, brother. Crazy milestone. I remember when we first met. Was it 4 years ago? Breakpoint 2022.

Yeah.

You had 30,000, and I'd been following you for maybe a year or so.

Yeah.

I remember sitting down with you at dinner with a couple of our friends. I was like, “Oh, wow. This is Ansem—30,000 followers. I've been looking at his content for so long.” Here we are 4 years later, and you've crossed into some massive milestones. 7 figures is very hard to do on X.

Yeah, and it's a testament to the grind. It's really hard to post as much as you do. I don't know how you do it. I don't know how you do that while you're also available on Slack within 10 seconds of me trying to huddle you. It's quite a balance you've struck.

Yeah.

I love posting. I love Twitter. I fucking love it.

I feel like it's part of your magic and what makes you great, to be honest. You stay in this flow state and you just don't leave it. You're inside of it all day, every day.

Yeah, the flow state of being chronically online.

Yeah, it's the new meta. How many posts have you done?

I think 250,000 or 260,000, somewhere around there. A fucking lot of posts, bro. A lot, a lot.

The velocity.

10. Building vs. Trading

I live on the internet, bro. I literally am a DJ on the internet, if nothing else. I think one thing that was always interesting—you don't see this too often with, you know, I think Banks, obviously, you're a creator. Z is a great trader. The builder side of you, and what got you into our journey here, co-founding Bullpen—what was the spark that brought that to the front of your mind?

Yeah, it's kind of the same thing I talked about earlier when Banks was asking me, “Why are you still here? What are you doing here?” Trading is very PvP. In trading, if you're making money, there's somebody else on the other side of your trade losing money. But in building, it's a net-positive thing for a lot of people. If you build a product that helps people in trading, facilitates their trading, and helps them make money in markets, then I feel like that's something I can give back to the community, which is very different from trading. Building is a lot of work, but it is a very different kind of work from trading. The main purpose is to have something I'm giving back to people.

Yeah. I feel like when we first started—I can't believe it's been over 2 years. Early 2024.

Crazy.

I felt like a lot of the mission—and I would describe our mission as unlocking economic opportunity for everyone. But what does that actually mean, right? That's just a few words. It sounds like a great mission statement. To me, it feels like the best opportunities to make money in the world are on-chain. Maybe it's trading a meme like Anom. Maybe it's trading a prediction on Polymarket. Maybe it's trading a perpetual future on Hyperliquid. But those are the platforms that are permissionless and let people explore and exploit opportunities as quickly as possible in a world that has so much friction for people, especially in other markets. How would you describe that, though? Does that gel with how you made your account originally and why you made it—the journey that your followers have been on?

Yeah, there's a lot of friction in crypto and getting up to speed with how to trade these markets. In 2020 and 2021, a lot of the trades I made that did well were the L1 trades, where I was bridging back and forth between different trading things on-chain. For me, because I'd spent a lot of time in crypto, it wasn't that hard to pick up on. But for somebody who's completely new to crypto, it's hard to get them even to figure out what making a wallet is and saving the seed phrase somewhere. Then I've got to go in this wallet, connect to this app, and do all these different things.

What we want to—or what we have done—is simplify that. With one click, you can deposit money, deposit crypto, and immediately have access to everything that you want to trade in one place, with a unified account balance across all the different things. If you want to trade predictions, Solana, perps, or stocks, everything you can trade is right there. I think that's been a lot of the friction for new people: how difficult it is to just get started. If you have that out of the way, then you can take the time to learn how to trade and learn about markets instead of dealing with all the other extra stuff.

But what's that been like for you? You're obviously a great trader. You've done 250,000 X posts, which is, again, an insane number.

And now he's a content creator, brother.

Now he's a fucking streamer.

Wow. Talk about the final Infinity Stone, baby.

Yeah, we're going crazy.

What's been the biggest insight from your perspective? I can share mine as well, but just on the builder side, I think it's a completely different world. It's one that probably doesn't get talked about as much, but it's also fairly impactful. It has the biggest opportunity, I think, to impact people when you actually just give them the tools—teach a man to fish, that kind of thing. So far, in the 2-plus years we've been together, what's been your takeaway from that side of things?

Yeah, for me, I have to unplug the trader brain a lot of the time to plug into the builder brain, because a lot of it is very nitty-gritty product stuff that I have to look at and interfacing with other people on the team. Whereas in trading, it's just me and the computer. It's just me and the charts. I don't need to talk to other people. I don't need to go back and forth in meetings and all that stuff. It's a very different situation.

For building, it's the same way that when you hit a big trade, it makes a ton of sense to take a break from markets and go do other things. When you're building something, you kind of have to be very locked in on building that and focusing on what the inconsistencies are and what you, as a trader, would want to see in the product.

But you can't be locked in on the 5-minute chart at the same time that you're doing that. So it's really a time-spending kind of thing.

I have a question for both of you guys. For my chat and the people who know me who might not know Sal, Sal's a very, very important part of the Market Bubble equation. When we started this show, he was one of the first people in the room. He's a founding member of the show, and we've been working on building this thing for, I don't know—when did we start? It's been 7 months? 8 months? November? Okay, so yeah, 7 months.

Obviously, the show's actually been live for 8 or 9 episodes. What have you guys learned in terms of building? How has it shaped your perception of what's important and what's not important? How has building Market Bubble—building the show with me, with us, over the last 7 months—changed your opinion on things? What have you guys learned?

I can kick it off. I think there are aspects of it that seem intimidating to people, but when you just go through the process, it's not really that crazy or hard. The same lesson applies to product building, great content, and building a system for content. It's actually not that hard, but counterintuitively, that's what makes it so hard, because we almost want to overcomplicate what the solution is, whether it's a feature or a segment we think people will like.

For this show, we just want to think from the perspective of a viewer: What are they actually going to resonate with in a few seconds and then latch on to? That's really content. But a lot of people overthink it or overcomplicate it, and maybe that's why they don't create things, whether it's a product or content, that's good.

You should never ignore what the market actually wants, right? With what we're building here, it just is what it is. The clipping meta is king, and we need to focus on that. Maybe that's something we didn't spend a ton of time or effort focusing on in the beginning, but now we understand, and now we're getting into a rhythm. We're getting into a little bit of a flow state again.

Listen, TBPN is 300 or 400 episodes in. Iced Coffee Hour is the same thing. We've done 9 [__] episodes, bro. We've done 9 episodes, and we're not slowing down. We're not stopping anytime soon.

But yeah, same question to you. What have you learned about content? How do you think about yourself in terms of how big of a role it's going to play in your future, your career, and everything that you work on, whether it be Bullpen, whether it be this token, or the show? What's the biggest lesson you've learned in building the show over the last 6 or 7 months?

I think I've definitely learned how to be a better conversationalist, for sure. I have the stuff that I talk about on my own. If you ask me to talk about markets, I can talk about markets for an extremely long period of time without anybody going back and forth with me.

But for a lot of other things, a lot of topics that I don't pay as close attention to, I have to figure out, “Oh, I need to learn about this,” or know what questions I'm going to ask this person, know how to respond to this topic, or have more depth to the things that I'm thinking about on a week-to-week basis.

I've also become more intentional about finding relevant things to share with people, because a lot of the stuff I keep is in my head. I can easily pull tweets from almost anything that I've read or looked at throughout the week when I'm trying to learn about something, but it's different on a podcast when you're talking about something and sharing the visual attached to it.

That's what I've gotten a lot better at: having the attached forms of media that aren't just me talking about something. I realized that for people who aren't as deep on whatever it is we may be talking about, the associated media may help them more easily understand the content. Those are a lot of the things I've realized. But yeah—

I think you're muted. He's muted.

Thanks. Yeah, you're back. You're back.

I unplugged my mic because I'm [__] [__]. What I was going to ask is, what has building the show done for you guys in terms of where you mentally rank the importance of attention? What has it done in terms of how you've emphasized or shifted your focus toward that?

It's always been super high for me. I don't think it's gotten any higher. I've always seen attention as a different way of valuing things and adding value to things. I've always thought of it as highly important, so it hasn't really changed.

I guess for you, obviously, you've tweeted 250,000 times. You understand the value of content and building a platform. I guess the video-form stuff and the streaming stuff for you—did you expect it to add as much value to you, your brand, and your platform? Did you expect it to be as important a tool and as important an attention machine as it's become?

No, I didn't. I actually didn't. I did not expect it to have that much impact. People being able to hear your thoughts in a longer-form video format is so much different from tweets, because especially in trading, I can tweet something yesterday that's completely different from where my mind is right now. That can just be how the market moves. I'm looking at charts on the 15-minute time frame. [__] can change very quickly.

But tweets can be pulled out of context. Someone can say, “He said this thing a week ago, and now he's saying this thing. He's a hypocrite.” The thing with trading is that you have to have strong opinions loosely held. If you don't have strong opinions loosely held, you're going to lose a lot of money, because you need to be able to change your bias really quickly.

When you're streaming, you can give the full context: “Yes, I'm bullish here, but if this happens, I'm not bullish anymore. If this happens, I'm exiting this position here. If this happens, I'm wrong because of this reason. If this happens, I'm right because of this.” You can give everybody the full picture of what the trading opportunity is or isn't, and what you're thinking about.

But with tweets, it's just 80 characters—or however many, 280 characters—and somebody's going to quote-tweet you, dunking on you the next week if that exact thing didn't happen. It's a very different form of media. But I've always seen that people who watch me do podcasts or interviews say, “Oh, he's not trying to [__] with me over.” That's the thing, right?

Yes, exactly. It's also quite hard sometimes to articulate your emotion or express your actual emotion, or the way that you're saying something. Obviously, we run into people every day and get a weird feeling about them—the way they're delivering what they're saying. It comes across as disingenuous, or you feel like they don't actually mean what they say.

There are all these microexpressions and human cues that we exhibit in real life when we speak with our faces and our mouths. It adds a lot to it.

It's a lot of depth, bro.

I think it's about time, because you are and always have read as very, very genuine. When you speak, when you really get into that [__] flow state, I think you're more articulate with your voice, to be honest with you. It's way easier for me to follow your ideas and what you're saying than a tweet. You've been [__] doing these 10-paragraph essay tweets on Twitter, bro.

They keep trying to cook me. I have to. I don't have a choice. I really don't have a choice. They're saying all this crazy [__] to me, bro. You don't know what you're talking about.

It's good, though. It's good. I mean, you're [__] doing a great job, to be honest.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, I think that's the power of the ecosystem we're all building together across Market Bubble, Bullpen, and your guys' accounts—vertically integrating all of these pieces of the puzzle.

I think the biggest, most important, impactful companies in the world are almost like this MrBeast model that you guys touched on.

Yes.

That is actually the future. It's not going to be traditional channels anymore. People don't really find those voices authentic. They find people like you and people like FaZe Banks authentic. Adding the rest of that stack—helping people turn a trade idea, which might be a tweet on your profile, into a product and go end to end—I think that is 1,000%.

Or helping us scale the show by engaging, commenting, tweeting, and getting literally paid to be a part of this. You work from that ground level all the way up to where, all of a sudden, you have permission to speak in these chats or in these communities.

Then it just goes up and up, to the point where it's like watching anime.

Damn.

11. Personal Brands Are the Future

Which one? I'm [__] up.

It’s right there. This one. Yeah. I was like, “What the fuck is—I didn’t open that. What the fuck is that?” Hold on. Yeah, this is what I was trying to show.

Okay, so what I was trying to show was this tab. Imran from Alliance—they’ve done a great job at Alliance. They’re crushing it, by the way. They’re also in New York. He was saying, “I have a thesis on personal brands that will become the most valuable assets over the next decade.”

And I agree. I think this is where media is going. I think this is a huge trend that’s currently occurring, and it’s going to continue down this path. What he said is, “50 creators generated nearly $1 billion in annual revenue last year,” including the top 5: MrBeast, $300 million; Dhar Mann, $65 million; Steven Bartlett, $52 million; Markiplier, $38 million; and Rhett and Link, $37 million.

They must have forgotten me.

Banks. Banks, $1 billion. When you think about where that revenue comes from, it’s largely brand sponsorships, ad revenue, owned brands, subscriptions, merchandise, and equity ownership in companies.

I believe a large portion of that is already eating into the roughly $1.2 trillion global advertising market—budgets that historically would have gone to TV, digital ads, YouTube ads, celebrity endorsements, agencies, retail brands, CPG brands, and other acquisition channels.

I think the way we discover products will change over the next decade. Two important distribution layers are emerging: AI agents and trusted personal brands. AI agents will understand your preferences and recommend or make personal decisions on your behalf. Creators will shape demand by influencing what people want via content.

If that happens, I think the $1.2 trillion advertising industry will get reallocated based on the above. Budgets are already moving away from traditional media agencies, celebrity endorsements, and parts of search and display advertising toward whoever owns trust and distribution.

If that’s the case, I believe personal brands will start to behave more like companies, similar to the early days of Beast Industries. The best creators will own products, sell to their own audience, and own the entire sales cycle end to end. We’ll start to see creator-branded neobanks, debit cards, AI products, apps, games, consumer brands, and anything else that can be easily built using AI. The next billion-dollar companies will look less like traditional companies and more like creators with businesses built around them.

And I agree with this heavily. I think this is a great, great tweet. But that’s what I was trying to say—the superset of all the other things underneath. MrBeast has a ton of different companies that he owns. He has a neobank-type company that he owns. He has a ton of other stuff that he owns, and they’re all under the MrBeast umbrella. I think that is going to be a continuing trend, for sure.

The trust piece is huge, though, because when you have all this AI-generated media online and all these AI agents online, trust is the one thing that AI cannot replicate. The only way you can gain trust is by being consistent online and developing your personal brand over a long period of years.

And human attention, too. It’s going to hit different, you know what I mean? I saw a Chris Camillo clip of him talking about investing in Beast Industries. He was one of the early investors in his chocolate company, which just got rolled into Beast Industries.

It was valued at like $2 billion, and he was like, “What the fuck is this? I’m never going to make any money, whatever.” Then he said he talked to MrBeast for like 3 hours, and he was like, “This shit’s going to be worth $200 billion.” You know what I mean? Attention is just one of those things—you can’t quantify it. It’s hard to really measure how valuable it is when it reaches escape velocity, like Elon Musk.

Look at SpaceX. Look at SpaceX’s fucking—I don’t know. You talked a little bit before the show about how a lot of SpaceX, Tesla, X, and Elon Musk’s success obviously comes from his ability to tell stories and people taking bets on him as a founder. That’s all just attention. At the end of the day, it’s the same shit.

Yeah. It’s the trust in him as an operator. That holds so much weight—an immense amount of weight. SpaceX has negative net income right now. The company is valued at like $2 trillion or something crazy like that, but it’s because people believe he’s going to be able to deliver on what he’s saying in the future for the company.

There’s definitely value in markets in attention and the mimetic value of things, and it’s kind of hard to determine. People always go back to The Intelligent Investor, which values companies based on these very clearly defined metrics. I think in today’s world of the internet, and with how much influence individuals have, that doesn’t capture the entire scope of what makes assets important.

Yep, absolutely. We have Thread coming on in a minute. We’re going to do this rapid-fire, kind of rotating-door format. It’s going to be Thread Guy’s first appearance on the show. He’s obviously a dear friend of both of ours, and he runs a daily show on markets as well. Look at him looking all fly and shit.

Dude, this is epic. This is actually epic.

12. Thread Guy Joins

We’re going to move Ansem’s camera, and then we’re going to get Thread Guy in here. Thread, he looks sharp. He looks good. No, I can’t hear you, bro. It’s a good suit color. It’s a great suit color.

Yo. Huh?

We’ve got the modern-day Gordon Gekko in the fucking building, baby.

Wait, can you all hear me?

We can. Bring him in. Bring him in. Bring him in. Wow. What’s good?

Wow. I can’t see you. I wish I could see you. How are you? Why can’t you see us?

Get him the full screen so he can—

No, we need the full experience. We can’t have it any other way.

Give me, man. Tap me in.

They said, “Check chat.” You’ve got to click a link or something, I think.

Wait, wait, wait.

I need to watch his real reaction to the frame because this is a legendary frame. This is a real legendary frame.

I’m dying. How do I see it?

Wait, let me switch links real quick. Hold on.

Counterparty. Counterpart.

He said “Counterparty.”

Counterparty Market Bubble chat.

Counterparty Market Bubble. Oh, you can see us. You can see us, sir.

Yo, what’s good, brother? How are you?

Longtime listener, first-time caller. It’s a pleasure. Ansem, 1 million followers, man. Congratulations.

Thank you, bro. Thank you, brother.

This frame makes my heart so happy. This is a legendary three. This is legendary.

I want to go ahead and say that I think next week, for the mainstream content guest, we have Andrew Tate coming on. I think it only makes sense, full circle, for you to maybe be our finance guest. If you want to come on for a full Thread Guy segment next week, maybe—

I might have another guest question for Mr. Tate, so I’d like to know.

All right, cool.

Congratulations, though, guys. I’m a big fan. What you’re doing is awesome. The last week has been insane. I know there’s a lineup, so I have a question that I think is pretty relevant to the market—honestly, for both of you. It’s really for Ansem, but it’s kind of for both of you, and it’s a topic I’ve been talking about a lot.

There’s this basic understanding that everyone in our generation is comfortable with the idea of taking risks and making money on the internet. It’s sort of the gambling generation, if you will. I used to have this thought that every sports bettor—every 20-year-old kid who’s ripping $20 parlays on the Lakers and the Mets—is a marginal trader in the future. I always believed that this kid would eventually start trading stocks, start trading crypto, and get on Hyperliquid.

I’ve had this realization fairly recently that a large amount of the people making these low-volume, low-size sports bets, and doing this low-size gambling—pulling slots at the casinos—are really doing it for entertainment more than they are for hunting for an edge and trying to make a lifestyle out of it.

It kind of cuts out a huge market that I thought might become traders, so they’re doing it recreationally. I think memecoins sit at this really interesting intersection where it’s stuck between being a full-time trader and doing it recreationally.

Like, I would imagine that from the 2024 memecoin cycle that happened with Pump.fun, and then what's happening right now with Banks, with Market Bubble, and people like TJR and Brez, there's a lot of people who got onboarded for the first time—or for the second time—who maybe threw $100 in, bought Anom coin, bought a couple of things on Phantom, and don't really know what to do. They made that first step, but they're stuck in the middle between doing this casually and being a full-time trader.

They're hunting edge, finding inefficiencies in the markets, and turning that into six figures or seven figures. So my question for you, Ansem, is: What do you think these people should do? I think the word I would use is “convert.” How do you convert someone who just put $250 in a Phantom wallet and bought Ansem coin into watching this stream and figuring out, “The meme trade looks interesting. I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to watch Micron earnings,” or, “Solana looks interesting. I'm going to go deeper. I'm going to try to hunt some edge”?

How do you really transition someone into a full-time trader? I think you have a lot of people stuck in that middle ground right now. I'm trying to figure out the answer, the solution to the same problem.

Yeah. I think it's a Trojan horse. Honestly, I really do. It's very hard to get somebody to watch long-form finance content from zero, but if they already have a Solana wallet, have started trading, or are already kind of in these things and are joining a community of people—say Ansem has 100,000 holders, right?—and we have all these people in the same chat somewhere, there are some people among those holders who are very adept traders. They trade all types of stocks, trade crypto, and have great opinions on the markets.

There are also some people who just discovered it on Twitter, bought some, and have never traded anything else before. But if you're in that community of people, you're also learning from the other people who are smart traders and doing all these things. You kind of have a community around you, and you're more incentivized and more likely to watch more content around, “Okay, how should my long-term portfolio look? What are the safer plays? What are the stocks I should be buying in addition to crypto?”

I think that's kind of how it happens. It's a Trojan horse in that way. It's really easy to get people's attention with the 10,000x stuff, but you can use that and funnel it into, “Okay, what is everything else as well?”

Something I think about a lot, too, is the people who came for 2024 Pump.fun and stayed. Why did they stay? What did they do well that allowed them to stay and make it? A lot of them are—

They love paying, you said, at what time?

Like, the 2024 crowd, because there was the memecoin cycle round one. The ones who stayed from that cycle—I'm curious. What did they do well that allowed them to make it this far, something the next cohort could recreate? You know what I mean? I'm always wondering how we keep these people, because it feels like, in a lot of short crypto excitement, they come in and then they're out like locusts.

You asked a couple of questions, and I actually have a take on why so many people are addicted to this type of gambling. Why do people interact with the internet and markets in this way? Where is this coming from?

I think it's as simple as hard work no longer pays in a lot of ways. It's very unnatural to get such an intimate look at other people's lifestyles, how much other people are making, and what they're doing. It's hard to go and be a landscaper making $10 an hour in the hot, beating sun, slave away all day, every day, and feel proud or excited about doing that when you see these people hitting crazy licks on-chain.

It just feels like it's deformed people's view of work and where they should be spending their attention. I think the real answer is what should these people do? We preach it a lot on the show: People should train themselves to search rather than scroll. It's something we talk about a lot on the show. Just be more intentional about what you're consuming on the internet.

With AI, Twitter, and everything else, there's every bit of information you could ever need to make an informed, articulate decision, drastically improve your positioning in life, make good trades, and win in the markets. Shows like this and consuming valuable content—searching for it as opposed to just doom-scrolling your way through Twitter or TikTok—is the answer.

I'll make one point, too, because I want to give Ansem flowers on this, and then I'll dip because I know a line. I saw TJR in the waiting room and I was like, “Oh, shit.”

A lot of people come into crypto or memecoins because they see the Ansem screenshot with $100 million on the phone, and they're like, “How do I turn $5 into $500,000?” But I actually think the best framing for how to make it over a longer period of time is to expand your time horizon a little bit. Malcolm said this to me the other night.

I thought Ansem had a really good post on this when he started bull-posting SOL at around $67 or $68. “Don't do it. $68, $69, whatever.” And you were willing to hold it for 6, 8, or 9 months, it's going to be a good trade. I had someone come to my chat today asking, “What would be your number-one piece of advice for trading crypto?” I was like, “If you're going to do it right now, back up the time horizon a little bit.”

You made that post, Ansem, a couple of weeks ago, and I think it was one of your better ones in this whole Solana crusade. It's crazy: It goes down $1 and people are freaking out. The time frame is different from the way people think about it in stocks a lot of the time.

Don't do it.

And you know, it went down to around $65, and people were freaking out in the comments, like, “Oh, you missed.” You made this one really good, long post. You should resurface it. You were basically saying, “I can't get caught up too much in the low-timeframe back-and-forth and every incremental dollar move.”

But my thesis is that if you like Solana and believe what I believe—that the apps are happening on Solana, and real-world-asset activity, memecoin volume, users, metrics, and all these things are up and to the right—and you're willing to hold it for 6, 8, or 9 months, it's going to be a good trade. I had someone come to my chat today asking what my number-one piece of advice would be for trading crypto. I said, “If you're going to do it right now, back up the time horizon a little bit.”

You made that post, Ansem, a couple of weeks ago, and I think it was one of your better ones in this whole Solana crusade. It's crazy: It goes down $1 and people are freaking out. The time frame is different from the way people think about it in stocks a lot of the time.

Yeah, this is the tweet. I was like, “A lot of attempted dunking on low time frames because they were on my ass.” It went down like $3, bro. I'm like, “Bro, it's down 3%—down $3.”

But yeah, I was like, “A lot of dunking on low time frames,” so I tried to give a clearer, extended view. If you dollar-cost-average buys on Solana weekly from here until the end of the year, even if I'm wrong and it goes 20% lower, I think you'll be up by this time 12 months from now.

That's what I'm trying to explain: Crypto is so volatile that if you get too caught up in the day-to-day price action and don't have a strong thesis on why this actually matters long term, you're going to get fucked over. You're never really going to make money in these markets. It's way too hard to trade them. They're too volatile.

If you have an extended picture, you can zoom out and DCA. That also makes sense. It's why you should be able to sell on the way up, at the top, because you know how volatile this shit gets. Maybe in 5 to 7 years it's going to be up infinitely, but this year it may go down 70%. So maybe I'll take some profits and buy—

And that criticism—moving down $3—you found a way to reply with substance and value. People can learn from your response. But I feel like us—Thread, me especially—I have, over the course of the last 15 years in my career in media, had to consistently remind myself to pause and stop and ask, “Is this worth the reply? Is this worth the oxygen?”

The reality is that these are the same people who are quiet when you make a good call. These are the same people accusing you of being paid by Solana. When it moves up, it's like, “This fucking Solana cabal.” You know what I'm saying? These people are just hate-farming and engagement-farming. It's part of the fucking game that we're playing, and a lot of it isn't real.

But, TG, you are one of the very few other people in this niche finance-tech content space, and it's been amazing to watch. We lived together for a couple of years. When I found you, you were doing Twitter Spaces. I'm like, “Brother, you have to get on Twitch.” “No, man.”

Crypto Twitter spaces, man. Twitter.

It was, bro. That it was. But why isn't it now? Because you fucking came in and made it different, bro. That's amazing. You're fucking goated for that, and it's been beautiful to watch. Ladies and gentlemen, people watch Thread's streams pretty much every fucking day. Monday through Friday, they're great. The clips are great.

Go let his clips infect your timeline, because he spits venom sometimes. This kid, he's a demon. Again, like I said, 5'6", venom, bro. Sneaky.

But he's a sharp kid.

Hey, thank you. I appreciate what you guys are doing. It's awesome. Last thing before I walk out on this, Banks: I was listening to how you started the stream, and I was up Saturday morning or Sunday morning, whatever, at like 6:00 or 7:00 a.m. I keep doing it, and I look at my phone and I'm like, "Surely—" Then I'm like, "Damn, Ansem got hacked, and they got this thing to $90 million."

Fuck, man. I can't. They hacked a fake Ansem.

Nobody knew it was coming, brother. Nobody knew it was coming.

Degens might really be back. But no, I think that long-time-horizon framing was so fire, and what you guys are doing is special. It's sick to see a crypto stream and do a TA on the chart with 2,000 people live. It's a movie. I'll pop out here and let you guys do your thing, but I'm looking forward to next week.

Yes, let's do it.

Congratulations to both of you. I love you both.

God bless. Love you.

Love you too, brother. Peace.

He's just the best, isn't he?

He is the best, bro. I love TG.

He's the best. TG.

Yo, he could have gone to the league. If he were, like, 6'6" or 6'7"—

A couple more inches.

Bro would be in the league. He's a real hooper, too. We have Rasmr coming on next. So, obviously, a dramatic falloff in quality of guest.

13. Rasmr Joins

Yeah, I guess. Nonetheless, he'll come on. He'll come on. I'm just kidding. Honestly, I think I might be the biggest Rasmr fan of all time, and I'll get into it with him. Look at his reaction. Bring him in here, guys. Bring him in here.

Bring him on. Yo, we can't hear you.

Hey, can you guys hear me?

Yes, we can. We can.

Yes. And I said I might be the biggest Rasmr fan because I have a picture of him in the background. That's fucking hilarious, bro.

He knows what he's doing.

His setup is so good. Look at his setup. It's my favorite setup. Look at it with the curtain.

Bro, he looks like he's from another age of time. What the fuck is going on?

Extremely elevated.

Fire? It's fire. It's fire.

Thanks. Thanks, guys.

I know you're having a moment, bro. Your coin is at, like, $180 million, you're calling every trade, and you've got all this aura. But I think everybody really wants to know: What the fuck happened when you WIF'd on The Sphere? That's what I actually want to know.

14. The WIF Sphere Story

Oh, fuck. Okay, I'll tell you what happened. WIF on The Sphere. When WIF was going crazy—I think this was in February 2024, I want to say—I was in Vegas for the Super Bowl. I'm looking out the window like, "Yo, The Sphere is actually kind of fire. This shit is kind of sick. It would be dope as fuck if we could put WIF on The Sphere." I think WIF was at, like, $2 billion or something. It was crazy. It was high. It was doing well.

I was like, "That would be fire if we could do that. I wonder if we could figure out how to do that." I think I was with Dean Banks. I think I was with Dean at the time. I asked him, "Yo, do you think we can do that? Would we be able to do it?" He's like, "Yeah, but it's, like, $400,000 to $500,000." I'm like, "That's not that crazy. I'm pretty sure we could probably raise funds to do that. Crypto has done some cool shit like that before. Let's just try and do it."

So I tweeted it. I don't know exactly how I phrased it, but I was like, "Yo, we're going to put WIF on The Sphere," or something like that. A ton of the WIF guys hit me up and were like, "Yo, I think we could actually do that. We can build you a site where people can donate, and then we'll figure out how to do it." They built me a site, and over the next few days, I posted it. I think it was, like, $650,000 or whatever you needed to put it on The Sphere. We raised it in, like, a week. This shit filled up immediately.

Okay, cool. They're going to put WIF on The Sphere. That's fucking fire. Little did we know, it's actually very hard to put something on The Sphere. The Sphere has rules against what you can put on it, and you're technically not supposed to put crypto on The Sphere. What we were trying to do to get around it was, "No, it's just a dog. It's just a dog with a hat. It's not a coin. It's not a coin. It's just a dog."

We tried a bunch of things to work around it. At one point, we were really close. We were going to partner with this clothing brand and have it be part of one of the drops they were doing, with the dog as part of one of the clothing drops.

You guys should have just turned the fucking Sphere into the hat.

We thought about doing a bunch of things. We tried to do it, but what kept fucking happening was, first of all, the back-and-forth with them was really difficult. They weren't responsive when we were trying to get the shit done in the first place.

When we were close to the end, we kept getting blown up by crypto people saying, "Yo, they scammed. They're trying to steal the money. They're not going to give it back." The whole time, we couldn't say exactly what we were trying to do, because if we said exactly what we were trying to do, they would know it was the coin attached to it, and then we wouldn't be able to do it. We were in this weird in-between where we couldn't tell people exactly what we were trying to do with it.

Eventually, somebody put out a news article saying they weren't going to be able to do it. Then eventually, we just sent all the money back. We sent the money back to everybody. But everybody thinks you stole the money, bro. Everybody thinks you kept the money.

You can check the wallets. It's all public. It was me and, like, 3 other—

I have to step in here. The whole "everybody thinks" thing—just because something gets engagement and a lot of likes and shit doesn't mean that that's actual consensus. No, seriously. It's like, "Everybody thinks this, brother."

If everybody thought the opinions about me that went viral over the last year, I'd be getting fucking tomatoes thrown at me in the street. That's not what it is. News flash: it's just fucking engagement. If you actually believe that, you're fucking stupid. You know what I mean?

I mean, it was a long time, though. To be fair, it was a long time. We said it in February, and a long time passed between when we gave up. But it was because we were trying so hard to get the shit done. We tried to do that shit so many different fucking ways, bro. We were convinced we were going to make it happen, and we just couldn't make it happen. But we sent the money back, though. We did send the money back.

I didn't pocket the money.

Can I ask you one more half-thing? I feel like the story of your token and how much you're holding in your wallet is such a big story. It's something that could go mainstream viral. You have $100 million in your wallet, and you're trying to airdrop it to people. How do we get people to think this is cool on Instagram and TikTok and shit? I feel like it's kind of crazy that people don't know about this. Crazy things happen all the time in crypto, but nobody knows about it.

Yeah, I think I just have to post on the other socials, bro. I don't really post on TikTok. I don't really post on Instagram, but I'm going to start doing that.

Like we were talking about earlier, MrBeast has so much attention because he gives so much money away. If somebody knew that I took a wallet from $0 to $100 million in a week and then gave away $11 million of it, that would be a crazy story for people to know about. That should just be existing on X. But as you've seen on X, X is going fucking crazy. On all the other socials, it hasn't been, but that's just because I haven't been posting on the other ones. So that's what I'm going to start doing.

You're a tweeter, brother. But we're turning you into a content creator in real time, shaping you piece by piece, brick by brick.

Yes, sir.

Is there anything else you'd like to say, Rasmr, before you get booted off the show?

I think people are waiting for me right now, IRL.

You know, I got a lot of motion and a lot of things that I’m doing. I’m kind of an in-demand individual, you know what I mean? So I’m kind of like you, Banks.

Yeah, you’re just like me, except a full foot shorter and a lot less rich. We could go on and on, but listen, I want to give you some flowers. By the way, I’ve been seeing you talk your shit, and don’t let it drive you crazy, but I like it. You’re standing on business. You’re sticking up for yourself. I like your back-and-forth.

Also, the clip went kind of crazy. You were talking about Kai Cenat’s subs being fake and him getting whatever, whatever. I don’t know how real that is or where you got that information, but, brother, this is the art of the clip farm. Just learn from that. Anywhere you can engage with these mainstream streamers, do it, bro. Anywhere you can garner attention where you’re at, where you’re— you know what I mean? Just keep doing your thing. You’re crushing it.

Love that. Thank you. I don’t know if the Kai thing was real either, but I didn’t see anyone disproving me, so I think I just figured some shit out.

Yeah, just farming hate—farming.

All right, thank you guys.

Later, bro. Peace.

Peace.

This is great.

He’s the best, bro.

Best.

There aren’t many streamers, bro, in this niche, in this market. He’s one of them. He’s one of, like, 5.

He’s been consistent, and I like Rasmr a lot because he’s also learned the trading piece of it. I feel like he wasn’t as good on the trading piece before, but now he’s actually taking trades in real time and responding to real information.

15. TJR Joins

Trades. Speaking of the few and far-between streamers that trade and fuck with markets, we have TJR in the waiting room. You guys want to bring him up? You are officially, by the way, the most recurring guest on the show. You might as well be the third co-host at this point.

Yeah, bro. Yo, toss me some equity while you’re at it.

We got you. We got you. Yeah, man, thank you for coming on the show. A lot has happened. Bro, me and you were just insane in St. Barts.

Before we get into your question, I have to just say: people love when I talk about Chrome Hearts. They try to bait me into talking about it all the time. Here’s a fun story. I watched this 24-year-old kid walk into Chrome Hearts in St. Barts and drop half a ticket. I watched him drop half a million dollars in Chrome Hearts in, like, 20 minutes on jewelry. She’s like, “Yeah, give me that. Give me that.” It was one of the most foul, fucked-up things I’ve ever seen.

I’m like, “Okay.” And then I saw him hit a $100,000 honey-bun lick on the beach.

I saw it live with my own eyes. I’m like, “I don’t know. This kid’s crazy.”

He’s locked in, bro. Crazy.

Thank you.

You have a question for us, though?

Yeah. What do you think, bro? I mean, I low-key wish I had more time, but we’ll keep it short and sweet because there’s a lot of shit that I want to talk about.

Obviously, the screenshot of our text message went a little bit viral. Do you still think that I made the right decision in trying to absolutely nuke all of the other influencer coins that were going around and focus on the main one? Obviously, it wasn’t my intention to have the people who were in those other coins lose money, but do you think that was the right decision?

Before we do this, I think we should watch the clip. All of us should watch the clip.

What clip?

I’ll show you. There we go. Okay, let’s watch this.

“W rug pull.” Bro, it’s not a rug pull. I didn’t sell any of the coins that were given to me in my wallet. That’s not my fault. That’s all of you guys selling. I think the main focus for all of us should be focusing on just the main coin and sending that to $1 billion. That should be the main focus: sending the main coin to a billion dollars in market cap.

That’s the clip, obviously. Yeah, streams and tokens.

Yeah, I watched most of the stream. I do think it was the right decision. It made a ton of sense. It’s tricky with coins like that because you didn’t launch it. You got sent it by other people, and there’s no real contract for how that’s supposed to work. You didn’t agree to talk about this for an infinite amount of time. If something is attached directly to you, that’s really the only way something like that is going to work: if you integrate it fully with everything else and continue talking about it.

A lot of the issues that have been happening in the trenches, which we talked about earlier, are that a lot of launches will get vamped by newer things that pick up. Whenever that happens, it kills things entirely. But when you have one coin that does really well, it raises the ceiling for everything else that’s going on in the market later. It’s also a huge wealth effect for everybody that was in it if everybody’s aligned on the same thing. On-chain is very much so that way.

I had a lot of crypto CT people reach out to me. There were 2 halves of it. One was like, “Yo, Z, you’ve onboarded all these people that scammed us before. You’re doing it again. Why is this happening?” They were expecting you to keep talking about it and rug people and sell on their heads, which you didn’t do at all.

The other half of CT was very surprised that you did what you did and then commended you for it because it’s honestly a very difficult thing to do in your position. You have all this free money in your wallet. You could obviously take it and sell it on their heads.

I saw what Togi did. Togi was like, “Yo, y’all sent me free money.” So crazy. I did the absolute opposite of that. I fucked with Togi, but it’s so interesting to me that he objectively just took the money, whatever, and I saw people celebrating it. You know what I mean? It’s just so interesting.

Bro, you cannot listen to the trenchers because their opinions are only based on whether they made you money or lost you money. They don’t take any accountability for themselves or the trades that they’re taking. Expecting somebody to do X, Y, and Z without even telling them is just crazy. If somebody told you they were going to do something, then it would be a different kind of thing. But you launched something, sent it to them, and now you want them to talk about it nonstop forever. It doesn’t make sense.

It’s a difficult situation because it’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t, right?

Trading is just a zero-sum game. No matter what, not everybody can be a winner. When somebody’s buying, there’s someone selling. Every single time, there are going to be people who are pissed off.

Obviously, I pray that this doesn’t happen to you, but eventually, over a long period of time, these coins are going to come down. Who’s going to look like the bad guy then? It’s this never-ending hamster wheel of people getting butt-hurt over and over again because they lost money when they were the ones who pressed the buy button. They take no accountability for pressing the fucking buy button or for the risk that they’re putting on the table.

Also, we all know what we’re getting ourselves into with crypto, right? It’s so hypervolatile, and there’s so much at play. There are so many things that we have absolutely zero control over. Bitcoin could go to zero tomorrow. What does that do to everyone?

No, but I’m just saying. I’m just saying. You know what I mean? You’re pretty close, but you’re not God, and you can’t fucking foresee or predict that.

Trump dropping a fucking token and then, the day after—

Fucking crazy.

—and sucking everything dry quite literally dropped a nuke in the middle of the fucking trenches and put an end to this memecoin meta. So many people—Morad, for example—were attached to so many different markets and so many different coins. What does that do for his position and his situation? It’s a brutal L, but he didn’t— you know what I mean? He didn’t make Trump do that, obviously.

I have one last thing that I want to talk to Ansem about. Rasmr was talking about this before I hopped on. He was like, “I’m wondering how we can get all of this craziness that’s happening on X broadcast to Instagram and TikTok.”

Well, this guy right here averages around 150 million views per month just from his personal Instagram page.

Per month.

Damn.

From my Instagram, and then TikTok is even more. I could do you guys a favor, but I’m a little bit upset because I tried to do you guys a favor, which ended up getting completely turned around, with people actually getting super pissed off at me.

16. I Got Swatted

And not to mention that people got so pissed off at me that my house got swatted that same exact day, and I had ARs pointed straight at my head.

Every single one of you trenchers on CT—I should have sold on your guys’ heads. I should have said, “Fuck all of these coins,” and just made my bag, but I didn’t.

That’s insane. What? Where, in Puerto Rico?

So I replied to a TJR tweet and said something along these lines. I was watching the stream too, and I witnessed in real time you trying to make your best effort to do something. Your response was, “We’re fixing the shit, bro, piece by piece. I promise.”

Because the thing is, if everybody has that perception of crypto people, nobody’s going to want to do anything in crypto ever. If that’s the average person in crypto, it’s like, “Fuck you,” and doing shit like that. That’s crazy. Getting his house swatted is fucked.

It’s fucked up.

It comes with the territory by default. It’s fucked up, but it shouldn’t be the default. I think that’s a culture thing that needs to change in crypto, and I think that’s what’s currently changing right now. If I have anything to do with it, it’s fucking changing.

What I would like to say is that I would love to help you get a lot of people onboarded to crypto. I know TikTok and Instagram like the back of my hand. I’m by far the largest day-trading creator—just trading creator—on TikTok. Try to find anybody who’s close to me. It’s impossible.

It’s the same thing on Instagram, and the same thing on YouTube. I would love to help you out on that. I’ll call you out a little bit, though: I told you to post 2 or 3 times, and you never showed up.

You did. You did. You got me there. I haven’t posted yet.

Now, what’s the deal?

Content, man. The content cabal. The content.

Bro, I was locked in on the fucking markets and Twitter, bro. I’m going to get on it. I’m going to get on it. I’m tweeting nonstop. As I’m tweeting, I’m going to just start recording TikToks.

Everybody’s starting to realize the importance of this attention piece, content, and media—distributing your fucking ideas and stuff that way. It’s second to none. You’re a generational content creator, brother. I think you’re goated.

I literally saw how you move in real life and how the TJR persona online differs from how you move in person. I just think that you’re a great kid and your intentions are pure. People see it.

It sucks that you got swatted. That’s whack. But fix it, bro.

You’re rich, you’re young, and you have the world by the balls.

Bro, we still never linked. We have to link.

Yo, we should go. Let’s ask Polymarket right now. We should go to the Spain–US game.

Where’s that?

It’s at SoFi in LA. If the US wins its next game and Spain wins its next game, it’s going to be at SoFi.

Respectfully to the US, I don’t think the US is beating Belgium.

Yeah, but we have to go watch it, bro. We have to go watch that—Belgium, because they have to beat Belgium.

Oh, yeah. Aren’t the odds—what are the odds?

By the way, that’s a natural segue into the Polymarket odds on that game. It was not planned at all, but that’s why Polymarket’s the best, because it’s—

Speaking of Polymarket, it was devastating that I was at the Portugal game. Devastating. I lost $100,000, but I’m still going to try and find a way to send that dude to the finals somehow.

Because you’re a great kid. You’re a fucking great kid, honestly.

It’s true.

Yeah, the USA is at 36%, I think, to win that.

Oh, wow. Well, that’s not that bad, though. Thirty-six percent.

Fuck it, bro. We ride. We ride.

Trade that shit right now, TJR. Right now.

Bro, you have $100 million sitting in your wallet. Just sell some. Sell some real quick, bro. Rotate it into Polymarket. That’s just life.

This is why the TJR coin was a bad idea. Imagine, genuinely, what do you think would happen if you sold even 1 coin? That shit wouldn’t be good.

It wouldn’t be good, bro. It wouldn’t be good, man. It’s crazy that people trust me this much because they literally know I won’t do that. That’s how much people trust me.

I don’t think it’s crazy at all. Anybody who’s been following you for long enough knows you’re the guy. If there’s a guy, you’re the guy.

Yeah, that is true. It is. I think I’ve proven my trustworthiness for sure.

But, yo, I do think TikTok and Instagram need to know what’s going on with this. Maybe we can talk on the side after the show is done. We can get a little YouTube video appearance, maybe a little TikTok going, maybe an Instagram going, because I can even make that content.

By the way, TJR, what did I tell you on the phone yesterday? I said, “Listen, you going out and trying to make 30 TikToks—you’re better off just jumping into some TJR shit. Go spend a weekend with TJR and just let him do it. He has it dialed.”

Then you can share it on your platforms and build up some sort of platform elsewhere—TikTok, whatever. But yeah, TJR, thank you, bro.

Appreciate you, bro. For real. Appreciate you.

Appreciate you guys for having me on.

Yes, sir.

Later, man.

I think we have Mert coming on next. I have to take my 18th piss of the day because I’m an old man. I’m probably dying.

Something’s wrong with your bladder, bro.

Yeah, bro. Something would be wrong with your bladder, too, if you were sticking your dick in Bonnie Blue and Lily Phillips, brother. It’s the name of the game.

It’s the name of the game. You play silly games, you win silly prizes, brother.

17. Mert Joins

I see Mert’s beautiful face in the waiting room, so he’s here. We can bring him on in.

Wow.

Yo, Solana’s up 20% since the last episode.

Let’s go.

Run it back.

Bottom call.

The dynamic duo.

Bottom dick. Yes, sir.

What’s good, bro? I’ll take your piss, man.

I’ll try. Let’s just give you a little—

Nice.

Ah, this fucking thing flips my reflection, so I look gay.

It’s fine. Whatever.

No worries. All right, there we go.

Bro, now you’re upside down on my screen. What the fuck? What’s good, bro? How are you doing, man? How are the shenanigans going?

It’s going well. I did not plan any of this. I’m kind of surprised that all this shit has happened, but it’s cool. It’s lit.

It’s lit, bro. I always love the Solana and on-chain stuff, so it’s not anything new for me, for sure. What’s been really cool is seeing how much the volumes and shit are up, though—an all-time high in transactions, an all-time high in activity, an all-time high on Pump.fun. All that shit has been really cool to see.

Yeah. I was asleep, and then I woke up and there were just a bunch of black bulls and shit. Then they were like, “Mert, would you say you’re a privacy bull?” All these other questions, and I was like, “What the fuck happened while I was sleeping?” Crazy, bro.

Crazy. What did happen? Tell me the story.

I’ll give you the short story. Like I said, I was buying memes on Solana a few weeks ago, and people were like, “Okay, cool. Mert’s buying memes again.” So memes started moving.

Then there were a few wallets on Solana that people thought were mine, but they aren’t actually my wallets. People kept sending them coins and creator fees from Pump.fun launches and all these other things. That wallet was claiming things, buying and selling things, and I wanted to tell people, “That’s not me. I’m random, and that’s not me. Whatever he’s doing, don’t think, ‘Mert’s going to talk about this. He’s going to claim this,’” because I didn’t want people to buy something thinking I was going to talk about it and then lose money.

So I thought, “I’m going to make my own Pump.fun account and attach a wallet to it.” I did that, and when I made a Pump.fun account, I got sent a ton of coins and creator fees. Then, when I posted it the second time, people started buying some of the coins that were on the wallet. One of them went crazy, and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to claim this one.” That was the Black Bull coin.

So that's how that happened.

So you didn't release it?

No, I didn't launch it. I don't even know who the dev was. I didn't launch it. He sent me like 65% of the supply. I've given away like 7% so far. But yeah, I didn't—it wasn't me, bro. It just kind of happened.

And everybody the next day is like, “Z, what the fuck, bro? Why did you not tell us you were doing X, Y, and Z? Why did you not let us know? Because the shit went from like $200K to $200 million, or close to whatever it is right now. And everybody's like, why would you not tell us that?” But it's because I didn't plan any of it. I didn't even expect this shit to happen. So yeah, that's why.

That's fucking crazy.

Yeah.

So what's the plan with it?

I think the plan is kind of an in-between of what Bonk and WIF were. I think I have a large community on Twitter that I can rally people around, and I have a ton of products that I can direct people to. I can direct people to the pod and to Bullpen.

What I want it to be is an onboarding funnel for Solana and crypto. All these people that find out about this coin through whatever channel it is—after they buy the coin, I can also use that to direct them to other protocols and all the companies that want to send me sponsorship revenue or marketing things. I can attach that community of people to me.

So I was like, if you want to talk to me, you have to go through all of these people because I have a ton of attention in crypto specifically. On Pump.fun, that wallet that I made has made $800K in creator fees over the past 7 days. All those creator fees are going to my wallet, but I can do whatever I want with those fucking creator fees. All the people who are launching coins can give whatever supply of those coins to whoever. So I have this list of token holders that I can use however I want to use.

Yeah, that's the general idea. Bonk and WIF, I think, were great tools last cycle. Solana on-chain, especially the Bonk guys—that was a really good team. I think they did a good job of having a net positive effect on the ecosystem, and that's also what I want to do.

Nice, man. That's awesome.

I want to bounce it back to you. If you're in this position—you're stuck in this position, gun to your head—

It's like that.

What are you doing?

It's like, fuck—

You have any ideas?

Pulling the trigger.

The gun.

That's awesome. I mean, I don't know, man. It depends what stage I'm coming in at, I guess. Are we talking when it was just released?

Right now. Right now, yeah.

Oh. I mean, what's the situation? You have some percentage of the supply, you have some creator fees, and then I saw your wallet. You have near a million dollars in creator fees, and you have a token at $200 million. I saw you were optimizing for number of holders, so you got a bunch of people in. How many holders, approximately?

Like 90K right now. Close to 100K.

Holy shit.

I thought it was 120.

Uh—

It's somewhere around 100K, I think. Yeah.

What would I do? I mean, I think there have really only been a few that have pulled it off. I like that you mentioned Bonk. I think they did it well. So I think I would probably just do what you're doing and try to go along those routes, where it's not just a liquidity-rotation game, but we're using this capital to grow the ecosystem, help solve some problems, and get new people on board.

But if it were me, I would just pull the trigger. I would bridge the Zcash and fuck off forever.

Bro, there's over $100 million in this Phantom wallet, and it's sick to look at. It's insane.

We're good. This shit's going to go super viral. I'm going to tell you that. That's what I am going to tell you. Shit's going to go super viral.

If Solana starts going viral, bro—

If Solana starts ripping the way that you guys said it would last episode—which it's done, taking a violent fucking spike up 20% since you guys had that episode—legendary, by the way. Legendary call from both of you.

Sick.

I don't know. Shit could get fucked.

I mean, bro, if Solana bottoms and Bitcoin bottoms here and they both start ripping and go up, I'm telling you, the on-chain coins that are doing the most volume are also going to be paired to SOL and are going to do really well. It's very—

It's just like Bonk last year.

Yeah, it's very simple in that way in my head.

Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of upcoming catalysts too, right? Assuming there's no macro blowup, or some Trump tweet or some other fucking war just pops out.

One thing to understand is we're heading into Solana Breakpoint. Generally speaking, in the few months heading up to it, a lot of BD deals, subsidies, sponsorships, and all these different things start happening. Deals start getting moving, and people are in this all-out sprint to get all their work done before this week or two weeks of celebrating.

From my past experience of the 3 or 4 past Breakpoints, that's when a lot of action happens leading up to it, which should be right around early fall—even though it's in London this year for some reason. I think that's a pretty big catalyst. I haven't actually heard anybody talk about it as a catalyst.

Then the inflation-reduction proposal is now for sure going live. We just have to get the validators to vote on it.

Oh, nice.

I'm pretty sure everybody's aligned on it, so I don't see any problems. I would say there's a 100% chance that one passes.

And there are quite a few other things. You guys just saw that World release, which is the on-chain prediction-market stuff. I don't think people quite got what it was. It's not Kalshi, it's not Polymarket, and it's not a wrapper on those. It's on-chain via the perp AMM structure on Solana, where you get the tightest spot fills, except for prediction markets.

You can have all sorts of companies coming up and composing with that to do prediction markets for tail assets like memecoins, or any type of different market that they want. So I don't think that's talked about too much either.

That is pretty cool. When is Breakpoint again? When did you say it was?

I think it's in November, something like that. There's a bunch of events before then as well. They're smaller, but generally speaking, the months heading up to it are when a lot of action happens.

Yeah, that's true. That is true. Dang, Breakpoint is coming up. Breakpoint is always sick. That's fire.

By the way, I put my name as Raj on the entry thing, but it's showing me merch, so I got rugged by Jamie.

Yeah, true.

Yo, we should do a live show there at Breakpoint.

We should. We should, actually. I think—

I think somebody might have to—

Wear a bulletproof vest.

Fuck.

That's funny.

Are you going? Are you going to be there?

Maybe.

You don't know?

I might. Yeah, I probably should go. I haven't decided yet, but if I go, it'll be—I’ll wear a hat so people don't recognize me or something.

Yeah, I heard London is not great. I have heard that.

Yeah, but they don't have guns like they do in the U.S. It's knives. They have knives, bro. That's crazier.

Would you rather be shot or stabbed?

For sure stabbed.

I don't know, bro. What if you get stabbed a lot?

Ask Venice AI. I feel like it'll give us a real answer.

What's a more painful death, being shot or being—

No, that's not what you asked. A more painful death is obviously being stabbed to death. Obviously.

You think they're just going to stab you once? What, are they just going to poke you? No. But I have an opportunity to fight back or to get the fuck out of the way. You can't really get the fuck out of the way of a gun, and somebody can hit you from 100 yards away.

For someone to come up and kill you with a knife, you need to fucking beat me. You know what I mean? I'm 6'5", blue eyes, fucking hammer. Good luck, bro. You know what I mean? I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. That isn't an invitation or a challenge, by the way. I'm just being fucking—

There's going to be so many fucking knife coins right now.

No. Oh my God, there are, bro. Guy with a knife in London.

Dude, you know there's a coin right now called Guy with a Knife in London running right now, ripping. That's so annoying.

What time? What time are we?

Oh, fuck. Z's wallet is at $200 million now. He's got 99% of the supply. Let's go. We're going good.

Oh man, I think we have Brez at 3:35, so he's on in 4 more minutes. We gave Mert the biggest time slot, naturally.

You're the most important, Raj.

Thank you. I prefer to go by my actual name.

Where does that come from? I feel like Solana has been doing a lot of the stealth launches. World was a stealth launch, and Per was a stealth launch. Is that a new marketing technique the foundation is using? I’ve seen a few of those. It seems new to me that they’re all aligning on products like that.

To some extent, yeah. One of the good things about Solana is that, since it’s all just one giant L1 and you don’t have competing L2s that are all trying to maximize their own shit, it’s kind of in the interest of the entire ecosystem to help each other succeed.

Yeah, it’s kind of in the interest of the entire ecosystem to help each other succeed, right?

I just do RPCs, but it’s in my best interest to help people on Solana succeed. It’s in the best interest of the DEXes that they work with to do so, too. You have all these teams working together to give you extra distribution. Then, generally, sometimes it’ll go viral.

Per isn’t even live yet, which I thought was the interesting part when they were doing that massive Per campaign, but it was gated by an invite code. So, that’s not even live yet. I’m really curious to see what happens when it actually goes fully live.

Yeah, that is interesting. That makes sense. Makes sense.

Yeah. Mert comes from—Mert is actually my actual name. Some people think it stands for Mer Hamemed or Merdmus or some shit, but it’s just Turkish. It’s just the 4 letters.

That’s cool. Mert.

I actually like Turkey a lot. Turkey is one of my favorite places I’ve been to. Crossroads is the conference—a big conference they do out there. It’s actually one of my favorite conferences.

Oh, yeah. You went to that. That must have been fascinating.

Good food, though.

Mhm. Good food. Very walkable city. People were nice. It was cool.

How do you feel about the show post coming on, seeing the clips and stuff? What are your honest thoughts?

You guys have really good clip people, man. When I went back, I was tagging like 20 clips. I was like, “Holy shit, these guys are just systematically going through everything.” I think I did good numbers for the Solana official account.

Yep, that was cool. That was really cool.

Distribute a few of them. I mean, especially because you guys are relatively early still, I would say, with this format of just chatting with people like the TVPN guys[?], but obviously more focused on crypto. I think it’s pretty sweet.

It has been focused more on crypto over the last couple of weeks because of the way the market’s been, and obviously because of what the fuck you just did.

But, yeah, it’s early. We have so much—there are so many opportunities here for us to really do the tech and fintech shit, right?

18. Solana to $600

Yeah. What’s your price target for SOL?

This cycle, I said $600, but my real price target is Ethereum’s all-time-high market cap. I think that was around $600 billion, which would be close to $990 on SOL. I don’t know the exact number off the top of my head, but I said $600 because I think what’s mispriced on Solana right now is that people don’t realize how much the infrastructure upgrades compound with SOL.

So many other L1s don’t do a good job of consistently improving cycle to cycle, and Solana is one of those coins that does a great job of improving cycle to cycle. That compounds so aggressively with the builders on the chain.

Last cycle, as you talked about, there were a lot of new billion-dollar startups. But Solana is relatively new as a chain, and now it’s a lot more performant than it was then. What are the new startups that are going to be the next billion-dollar startups that we didn’t see last cycle?

What if it’s not just Pump.fun and those, but billion-dollar startups in other industries that are diversified? What if it’s an L1 that actually has a ton of really successful startups on-chain? That’s when I think it would make a new all-time high.

As that is happening, the consensus that it’s going to do that would make a lot more sense. But right now, the sentiment is so low. I think momentum is going to shift really fast in the other direction.

Yeah. Yeah, man. Yeah, that’s my point.

Yes, I got you.

Got you. All right, Mert. Thank you for coming on. We have Brez in the waiting room at 3:35. Do you want to take us out here and let them know where to find you and what you’re doing?

You can find me at Mert on Twitter. Solana is also about to get 2 times faster, going from 400-millisecond block times to 200 milliseconds. So, RBRL[?], IBRL[?], improved BAM with reduced latency, for y’all who don’t know what that means.

Yes, sir. All right. Take it easy. Thanks for having me. Bye-bye.

Thanks, brother. We love you.

I have to buy Solana after this episode, obviously, right?

I mean, I have to. You didn’t buy last episode, bro. You probably haven’t been buying some of the shit I’ve been talking about.

Brother, I’m not buying. I’m not buying any of it, man. It’s just like—

You’re like, “Dude, I think this is going to do well this week.” Yeah, maybe. What about now? Now you’re like, “I don’t know.”

So, shit—

What do you mean, bro? I’m looking you in your face. I’m taking the trade. You’re watching me take it.

It’s so shit.

But, I mean, SOL does make sense because SOL is in a good spot right now. If the weekly closes above the high from June, which is around $83 or $84, it’s a really high-conviction spot for it to keep trending up. Right now, it’s kind of at a pretty big level, so once it closes through this spot, it’s honestly a higher-conviction setup.

19. Brez Joins

Somebody in the chat said, “Banks, sidelined on everything, laughing my ass off,” in all caps. “Suck my dick.” Number 1: I shorted Hyperliquid at $30. Fuck off. We have Brez here. Brez, bring him in. He’s in the waiting room. We have him, brother. Your hair is looking really fantastic. Fabulous. Hims him.

You look good, bro. You look good.

Yeah, we can hear you.

Can you see us?

Oh, shit. Okay. No, I can’t. I just see myself.

He can’t see us. You guys obviously have to give these fools a step-by-step: click this link, do this.

You have to click a link in whatever chat they gave you. There’s a link you have to click to pull up the full—

Okay. I thought that was just for prior to joining, so I’d know when I was being brought on.

My instructions have to be slow as shit.

It’s loading.

All right. I got it now. All right, cool, cool, cool. Brez, thank you for coming on. Let the audience know what you do, why you’re here, why we would find it valuable to bring you up, and then fire off some questions.

Yeah, for sure. I’m Brez. I’m 21 years old. I live in Miami, Florida. I’m not in the crypto space; I’m more in the e-commerce space. I run an agency where we run ads for brands, and I recently launched my own e-commerce product as well. I do YouTube and stuff, too, so personal brand pretty—

Content’s a huge thing for you: TikTok, TikTok, Instagram Reels.

Yeah.

How long have you been doing content for?

I guess I’ve been doing it for 4-plus years now.

Oh, okay. Cool. That’s fire.

That’s dope. Awesome. Do you have a question for Z? I know you guys kind of—

Can you hear us?

Yeah, it’s cutting out really bad.

Is it lagging a little bit? Are we good now?

Yeah. Can you hear us?

Yes and no. It cuts in, then it cuts out, and my shit’s frozen. Can you guys hear me?

Yeah, we can hear you perfectly. We can hear you perfectly. You’re crisp.

I don’t know if this is a connection error or a production error, but y’all are cutting out pretty bad.

Huh?

Let us know when it’s fixed.

They think it’s the internet, bro.

Something’s telling us—I don’t know what it is. Somebody’s DDoSing. Somebody’s DDoSing. Somebody’s DDoSing Brez. Damn, you look like you’re going in and out. Can you hear us now?

Close the link that you joined. Maybe just hear us instead of seeing it. Brez—

Wait, what?

He said try closing the link, because it might be eating up some of your internet connection.

Oh, brother. This shit is cooked.

He looks so lost.

Fuck it, bro. Fuck it. All right. Are you back? Maybe.

Yeah, we can hear you. We can hear you. We can hear you. Can you hear us?

Bro—

Dude, this is too funny. This is too funny.

Should I leave and rejoin?

No, no, fuck it. Just listen to my voice and respond to the question that I’m about to ask you. You and TJR kind of came out of nowhere and started talking about the Z coin. Why? And then also give us a question for Z as it relates to the token and just markets—whatever the fuck you want.

Oh, great. Awesome. So, I'll just go fucking kill myself. Then, in GTA 6, the day it comes out, I'm going to find the tallest building and jump off of it. Two years later, Polymarket is going to buy that same building and Adin Ross's server for fucking $20 million. It's going to fucking shake the market. I'm going to be a janitor in that same server, and Bonnie Blue is going to be my girlfriend. And that's the story of FaZe Banks.

Are we just saying Brez at this?

Yeah, I know. Brez lost his connection. He's not with us today.

Miami Internet, brother. That Miami Internet. I don't know how TJR got it working in Puerto Rico, but Miami can't figure it out.

TJR should be Chris. He probably got the title.

Thank you. Brez in the chat. It's a tough day for the kid. He looks good, though. He looks great.

Oh, we hear him. He's back.

Oh, can you hear us?

He's back.

Yeah, yeah, I can hear you now.

All right. Hit us with some questions. Hit Z with a question.

I didn't come prepared. I thought y'all were asking me that question.

Dude, our production, brother. Our production.

That's so funny. That's so fucking funny.

I do have a question for you, though. Actually, I do have a question.

Yeah, yeah.

20. Crypto's Marketing Problem

You said you don't do crypto, but you do do content. From your point of view, what's your perception of crypto? What's the first thing you think of when you think of crypto, and who do you think of?

Yeah, bro. I've been trying to get into online business since I was 15, and crypto was one of the first things I tried to get into. I know a little bit, and over the past year I've kind of touched the crypto space and played around with it, so I know the basic shit.

My perception is that there's potential for a lot of money to be made, but I think for the majority of beginners, there's no real skill set that you're actually acquiring from getting into crypto. I see crypto as an opportunity to make a lot of money if you're in the bull market and surrounded by the right ecosystem, however you want to frame it.

Yeah, yeah.

But I've always been an advocate for building a real skill set, because I remember when I tried to get into crypto a long time ago, when I was young with no money, I was just getting burned.

I didn't know what I was doing, you know?

A lot of people have that experience.

Now it's completely different, now that I have capital and can go into something like crypto and know what I'm doing a little bit more.

That makes sense.

Yeah, that's fair. I feel like, honestly, bro, you're really good at advertising and marketing. That's what you help brands with, right? That's what you do.

Bro, you probably could crush it without even trading crypto—helping crypto brands with marketing and scaling. There are a lot of crypto brands that have super-smart tech people but are fucking terrible at marketing and don't know how content works on social media. They don't know how shit works outside of crypto. That's actually interesting.

Yeah, as you know—and I was going to say too—

Go ahead. Go ahead.

I was just going to say, the way I look at it is that a lot of the companies in crypto are marketing to such a niche audience. If they just opened their eyes to what's possible outside of CT, there's so much opportunity. I think you should take that piece of advice to Ansem, too: If you think outside of just CT, what's possible?

For Ansem specifically, I know you and TJR talked about that, too, as I was kind of texting.

Well, to be fair, he is. He's posting a lot of clips, obviously. He's in the fucking clip game now. We're 9 episodes in. We talked earlier in the show about how he's starting to wake up and see the value in it.

My career is rooted in more traditional media stuff. I've been doing fucking media and content for 15 years. I'm pushing 40 years old, and I'm from the mainstream. I started in Call of Duty, vlogs, streaming, whatever. There's a reason why I'm here. There's a reason why I'm focusing so much effort and attention on this and leveraging everything that I have to build something inside here.

Obviously, the overlap between us and you is that we all exist in this niche finance-content thing, and there aren't many people. The quality of the product is very underwhelming, to be honest with you. The very few people who even do it halfway right are wildly successful in it.

The premium that this attention specifically commands is crazy. TBPN just sold to OpenAI for $300 million. Any other show or podcast with that viewership and reach isn't worth a fraction of that, but they are. The value is real because of the audience that's following them and watching them. All of Silicon Valley watches this show. This is the type of reach they have. This is the type of influence they have.

I don't know. I'm super passionate about that, and we see how far behind this market has been. That's what I'm most excited about. That's what I've basically dedicated my entire—

Yeah, sorry to cut you off. I was just going to say, I think if the crypto community opens its eyes to what's possible outside of just marketing to the crypto space, the sky is the limit.

Even if you look at certain creators—what's the name, Khaby Lame or whatever, who sold for almost a billion dollars? He sold his likeness to somebody. The power of a personal brand is fucking insane, especially in a space like crypto. I mean, look at Ansem, bro.

Attention is priceless. Attention is priceless.

Yeah.

Bro, yeah. I think it was TJR who made a quote like, “Digital attention is the new currency,” or some shit. It's so true, bro. Think of how much power you hold within the crypto space and how much influence you have within just a micro-niche of crypto. Imagine you go mainstream, to every platform where you can onboard people into the crypto space. The sky's the limit.

It's an interesting time because I feel like these worlds are blending. You see crypto-native products like Polymarket—that's a mainstream product. Normal people use that and engage with it every day. I just feel like it's all becoming one thing and blending into one thing.

Yeah.

It's interesting. It's an interesting time.

For me, I honestly never planned on doing content. It kind of just happened as I was trading and posting all my ideas online. Then I realized that most of the people who are good traders and can educate people in a useful way don't want to do that. They don't want to sit in front of a camera, create content, and teach people. They're good at trading, so they don't want to do the extra work.

But I feel like if nobody's going to step into that role and teach people and be that person who's public on social media, then the industry isn't going to grow or get much bigger. I kind of feel like I'm one of the few people who can do that, and I have a responsibility to go and do it. So I'm on board with it. I'm getting up to speed with the other socials.

I think people need to realize, though—not only do a lot of crypto creators think, “I don't want to dox myself and be the one who has to onboard retail,” but people also need to realize the opportunity that comes with building a personal brand that can benefit them personally.

I would have never imagined being in some of the rooms or getting some of the opportunities I've gotten throughout my career if it weren't for the fact that I built a personal brand. There's a lot of benefit that comes with building a personal brand and having a social presence. I think it's literally one of the most valuable things you can have in today's day and age: a powerful brand on the internet.

I'll say something else, too. It's a lot rarer and further between than money is. There are a lot of people who are rich, who can foot the bill, and who can write checks. There aren't many people with a personal brand. There aren't many people with an audience.

The nuances of building a personal brand, and the nuances of building a community and an audience—everyone is different, and everyone caters to something different. Everyone's demographic is different. Everyone speaks about things differently.

Everybody's ability to kind of move their audience or convert sales or whatever the fuck—that's all different. So, I don't know. It's fucking crazy times, bro. It's crazy. I think, more than ever, commanding attention is very, very important. Understanding attention is debatably even more important.

Yeah. And, like, bro, I mean, Banks, even if you think about it, you've made a lot of money in your career, and a lot of that money would have never came to you if you didn't pick up the camera 15 years ago.

Oh, zero, brother. I grew up broke. I grew up broke. I grew up with absolutely nothing. The only reason why I have anything that I have is because somebody, somewhere, gave a fuck about what I was talking about or doing. I still don't fully understand it. I still don't fully understand it, and I dedicated my entire adult life—I'm fucking 40 years old. The internet never lets me forget it—and I've dedicated all of that time to understanding this shit.

I still feel like I know 2% of what there is to know.

Right?

But it's cool seeing you, bro. You're 21. You said you got into this shit four years ago. You're a fucking young, young rich kid in Miami. It's fucking sick, bro. It's awesome. Let us know what the fuck you're working on and what you're up to.

Anytime there's overlap or an opportunity for us to—I think I added you to a group chat with TJR. I'm like, “When content cabal?” I'm just so bullish on that. I think there are a lot of opportunities for us to share resources, build certain tools together, and scale this shit on a fucking gnarly level. There's a lot of shit that we're all kind of doing separately, you know what I mean? Pooling resources and just sharing alpha and information—there's more than enough to eat. Nobody's doing this shit.

100%. Hey, I'll be out in L.A. in, like, a week, so we'll—

Yeah, pull up.

Pull up. We'll kick it for sure.

All right, cool. Awesome. We have Cented in the waiting room. Thank you so much, bro. We'll have to have you on for an episode. Peace, bro.

Peace.

Damn, man. I fucking lived with my parents while I was 22. I didn't have two fucking dimes to rub together when I was his age. It's crazy, bro. It's crazy.

That's fire, bro. It's the fucking internet, bro. The online-native, bro. This shit's crazy.

Yeah, these fucking iPad kids. Who would have thought?

Fucking—it’s the fucking generation.

The goon generation. The ultimate gooner generation.

The fucking goon generation.

21. Cented Joins

We have Cented. He's outside. That's probably a rare occurrence for this kid.

I'm just kidding. He's back. Bring him up here.

I just started following Cented based on TJR. TJR was like, “You got to follow this kid on Instagram,” or whatever. I just found him, and he's taking a crack at this content thing as well. I thought it'd be cool to have him on. Obviously, he's a notorious, I guess, trader, trencher, whatever. I won't speak for you. I'll let you introduce yourself.

What's up? It's my first time talking to you guys. What's up, Ansem? What's up, Banks? Yeah, I trade the trenches. I've been getting into stocks, but mainly just crypto. I recently started creating content, as of two and a half months ago, three months ago. The content stuff is still very new to me, but, yeah, I'm new to all of this.

I think that's why it was cool to have you come on, because it's a different perspective. You're brand new to it.

Yeah, exactly. That kind of plays into the whole Anom coin, too. I don't want to go on—I’ll let you guys talk about that.

22. Follow the Attention

I was doing content for two and a half months, and, you know, you saw the Asteroid coin I was talking about—the Asteroid coin. I was new to content. I was getting no views because I'm just a new crypto creator, new to content, whatever. I was just going through the motions, still creating content, and some coin comes out. I started making content about it, and I get 100,000 views. I'm not even in the coin. I'm like, “All right, this is very interesting, right?” It's at 20 million. I make another TikTok about it—another 50,000 views. I make another TikTok, so I just literally follow the attention. Even though I bought the top—I bought at—it wasn't the top, but, like—

“Follow the attention” is a hard bar, by the way. That's a fucking bar.

And it worked in real time, because when I was posting Asteroid, I was getting zero views, but it was okay. Then I'm posting Ansem and I'm not even in the coin, and I'm getting 100,000 views. It put into perspective for me that this coin was kind of lagging behind the new attention I was bringing to the space.

Instantly, after seeing that video get 100,000 views, I was like, “You know what? I'm putting 100,000 into Ansem.” Boom. 100,000.

How insane is that? That's such a crazy process. That's sick as fuck.

That's like what Chris Camillo talks about with being on social media and picking up on stuff. That's—

Narrative trading. Narrative trading.

Attention trading.

It's real, because if I didn't make that TikTok, I probably would have just been sidelined on the coin. I'm going to be honest, because I had no way to grasp the attention that you were bringing to the space.

But seeing it with my own eyes—I’m making TikToks every day for two months, getting under 1,000 views, and then I started talking about Ansem coin. I'm already getting 10,000, 100,000, 50,000 views. I'm like, “All right, I need to follow the attention. I need to follow the liquidity.” I literally am up over 100,000.

That's how shit gets out of control. The shit's really exponential, because other people wake up to how much attention this shit brings in, and people will make content around that. That's what the content game is. The attention game is all about just being involved in the conversation, right? So, it's like—

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, that's crazy. I didn't know that was how you got involved in it.

Yeah, that's actually lit. They kept sending me the TikTok edits. People were doing TikTok edits of the Dubai video I did, the Singapore video I did, and some of the interviews. It was my first time seeing a mashup of shit like that. I was like, “What is happening, bro?”

Literally, I tweet about Ansem and I get, like, 500 likes, and I'm like, “All right, you know what? This all makes sense.”

I think even right now—what is it at, 180 million?

I think it's still lagging behind, you know? I don't want to rant too much and just bull-post your coin, because I don't want people to think I'm bag-holder biased, which I don't even think I'm that bag-holder biased because I bought super late.

Yeah.

By the way, I've been blowing this dude on the fucking stream all day. I own zero of it. I'm fully sidelined. I own none of it.

No, literally. If there's anyone out there who's new to trading—or who's been in trading—you guys have said it a ton of times: attention is the most important currency. If you see the attention, just follow it. Sneak in the bundle, just hop in, and it's as easy as that.

I will tell you for sure, if I'm looking at what the attention on my account was in 2023 versus the attention on my account right now, it's 10 times what it was in 2023. I mean, way, way, way, way more.

But I wonder what your Twitter engagement and all the statistics look like compared to the biggest people on Twitter, or just mainstream creators and stuff.

Yeah, I wanted to find that out. We tried to—

We need to, bro, because you have to be up there, bro. You have to be up there. You're definitely the biggest, most-engaged-with crypto account, for sure.

Probably by a lot as well. That includes all these fucking Pump.funs, the MoonPays, the Phantoms, everybody, right?

No, I think so, bro. I've been very chill and pumping every time they tweet, bro.

Yeah. Press the button, bro. Press the button.

And that's kind of a question I have for you as well, because I've been following you for years in the space, right? I'm a Solana trader. You're kind of the king of the shit. I always believed you were never launching a coin, right? You were always very adamant about that. You were scared to even name your cat. You were careful about what you tweeted.

Is there another reason besides the Pump.fun airdrop? Besides trying to get people their money back? Because obviously, I'm sure you've been in the space for three years. I'm sure you're well established, and you don't even need to be doing this or talking about a coin or anything.

Is there another reason other than fighting for an airdrop?

Yeah.

Do you know why you launched or went into a coin?

There are a few reasons. There are 2 main reasons, though. The first reason is that I'm talking about these on-chain coins anyway, right? I'm talking about memes. I'm talking about protocols that are low caps. I'm talking about stuff that I'm interested in.

What has happened before is, whenever I would talk about something that I'm interested in, there's always a risk that I don't know who launched it. I don't know who the team is. I don't know who bundled it. I don't know who has how much of the supply. I don't know what's going to happen after I talk about it, because I usually don't know the team associated with whatever coin. One thing that de-risks this for me is that I have more supply than anybody.

I know I'm not going to nuke on anybody's head. I know I'm not going to get [expletive] over by somebody who has more supply than me. I know if I start talking about this, there isn't going to be somebody who got in at 0 market cap and is going to be selling on my head in the next 5 minutes. I know that is completely de-risked because it just can't happen.

The second main reason, I would say, is that there has been so much bad press on people doing coins that are attached to their likeness or attached to their brand, because they've all been scammers. Everybody who does it is a [expletive] scammer. Literally every single person who does it is a [expletive] scammer.

They do it with a dev who bundles the coin for them. They put 1 tweet out. Everybody who's in the bundle sells, they delete the tweets, and everybody who bought it loses money. But I've always thought—we talked about it earlier—if you believe that personal brands on the internet are going to become 10 times more popular, and you believe that people who have multiple businesses under them can direct a lot of attention, and have businesses that want to reach out to them and do ad spend with them, those are going to be important people.

Tokenizing that attention in a way that benefits the people they're directing this attention to makes a [expletive] ton of sense. Nobody's done it the right way yet. If memes on Solana and these on-chain coins on Solana are going to do well, and I think Solana's going up, there's an opportunity to show how that can be done the right way, because nobody [expletive] does it and everybody's a [expletive] scammer.

I know I'm not a scammer. I'm not going to [expletive] scam people. I don't think it's been done properly, and I think it can be done properly. Those are the 2 main reasons, I would say. But I have been very averse to doing it because I just don't launch coins, bro. I still don't. I don't want to.

You still haven't launched a coin?

Yeah, I don't. Those are the main reasons. I don't know if that makes sense, but yeah.

No, it does. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I'm bullish on that. Every time I talk about a project or anything, 1 thing I always say is that there are 3 things that are so important: attention, narrative, and the person. You're investing in the person, so people are investing in you. The narrative is there.

People are fighting for fees on Pump.fun. Whether we get the fees or not, people are going to snowball the money into Ansem. If we don't—

You think so?

Yeah. Because I looked at this trade as more of a hero-versus-villain situation. If they—I'm not saying Pump.fun's bad. I'm not hating on Pump.fun. I'm just saying, from a narrative perspective, if the hero, if Robin Hood, gets the poor their money back, people are going to respect and praise Robin Hood.

Of course, maybe if it's even 5% of the fees, someone gets $1,000 back in their wallet. What's stopping them from putting $50 on Ansem just because Ansem fought for the fees back? You know what I'm saying? I always looked at it from that perspective.

Then, let's say Pump.fun's never giving these fees. Well, there's the rally behind Ansem on that. I feel like it was a win-win when I looked at this trade.

Sharp take. Yeah.

That's good analysis. Yeah, I was thinking about that. That's solid.

I mean, Pump.fun has the opportunity to flip the narrative today or tomorrow, right? Which would be good. You do this airdrop and give people what you said you were going to give them—do you know how crazy their numbers would go?

Yeah, of course.

Oh, yeah. Insane, bro. They're already going crazy. It would go even more crazy if they airdropped 250 million to people, or whatever it was. It would be insane. It would be insane.

You're fighting for it, brother. You're fighting for it. It's a huge reason why this ever even became a thing. Those 3—the 3-pronged thing—that's what you need to see. I think he's crushing it on all 3, to be honest.

Trying my best, man.

Have you seen the back-and-forth on the timeline? What do you think about the people who have been calling me out and [expletive]? Have you seen that [expletive]?

Yeah, I've seen people say, “But Ansem isn't a meme, so why would people buy it?” Those are mainly just normies, you know what I mean?

Sometimes it's a good meme. I feel like the black bull is a meme, right?

That's what I'm saying. It is a meme, but people think a coin has to go up if it's something that makes you laugh, which I don't think is the case. It goes back to the personal-brand thing, where you're kind of investing in the person.

Trumpcoin wasn't a meme. People were just investing in the coin. That's the only bad thing I've seen about Ansem on the timeline—people saying, “Why would I buy this? It's not even a coin.”

By the way, even on that point, what you're doing with this and your vision for it is what people expected Trump to be, what people hoped Trump would be, which is not what it wound up being. It wound up being him sucking out $600 million. It's insane, dude. It's [expletive] crazy.

And again, here we have you with $100 million in a [expletive] wallet, and you gave away $11 million in the last week. What kind of timeline are we in? It's absolutely [expletive] bonkers.

We have Forensic in the waiting room, and it would be a pleasure to formally meet you anytime you're in L.A. or whatever.

Yeah. [Expletive] with you. [Expletive] with what you're doing. Keep doing the content, [expletive], brother. I really appreciate you. Thanks for having me.

Yo, great talking.

Peace.

Forensic might be my favorite guy ever, by the way.

23. Forensic Joins

This next kid coming in—I know he had a hard week last week. I know he had a hard week last week, but get his sexy ass in here, bro. Get him in here.

Hey.

What's going on? How are you feeling, brother? How are you feeling?

Grinding, getting through the World Cup. Still disappointed, like you said, from last week. It happens, you know. You win some, you draw 0–0 sometimes. It happens.

So [expletive], bro. I feel like the draws in soccer are the worst for trading them, because that [expletive] is boring as [expletive]. Nobody scores, or it's a tie. How can they end like that, bro?

I don't even understand how it can end like that. They don't do penalty kicks or something? I thought penalty kicks—

It's something I always think about, too. It just sucks to end a game in a draw.

I mean—

Yeah. The big idea usually is that underdog teams that are just way worse deserve something out of a game like that. That's the idea behind the draw: you get something out of it. It's kind of like in hockey, where you can get a point if you go to overtime.

But yeah, it was just terrible that they looked bad, too. That's what made me upset. I was like, “They looked not good.” Everything happened the way I thought it would, where Colombia would attack them, but Portugal just—I mean, you have Ronaldo trying to wheelchair his way up there afterward. It's just not good. It didn't look good.

Brutal. Brutal. But listen, we had TJR on the show, and he said he's still going to try to find a way to send you to the finals. He's not the kind of guy to say some [expletive] like that and not follow through, by the way. I think you could probably still count on the fact that you're going to the finals.

That's crazy. Is that a possibility?

You're a fan favorite, too. Everybody loves you, bro. Dude, you're the GOAT. You really are the GOAT.

You guys are awesome. I appreciate that.

And you have sharp, good takes. Good analysis. Solid analysis across the board, honestly. Even when we were talking about that game, I remember you were like, “Colombia is going to be like a home game for them. I'm not sure they're going to attack them, and Portugal hasn't been responding well to getting attacked.” You said those things. I remember that.

No, I mean, they looked crazy in that game. That game made me want to back Colombia even more moving forward in the tournament. I was so impressed by how they didn't give a [__]; they didn't care at all that they were playing Portugal. They were like, “We're going for it.”

Yeah, that's fire. It's [__] Miami, bro.

How are you feeling this week? Do you like USA at 33%? Because I kind of like it, and I don't know why. It probably has something to do with the fact that I'm the most American.

It's 53% on here. That's going to be the advance line. I think you're probably talking about them to win in 90 minutes. It's probably 30-something percent.

Yep. Yep. Yeah.

This game was one of the games I really didn't have on my short list because I'm as American as it gets. I love this team. I'm obsessed with this team. My big narrative when I go into these games is, “Guys, I don't even want to bet on it, really. I'm just hoping the U.S. wins.”

So, we'll take some bets or make some trades on the game every once in a while, but I'm thinking to myself, “I don't even care. They just have to get through.” I will say that I'm hoping the U.S. can go through here. The big issue is their red card with their main striker.

Yeah, I saw Twitter freaking out about it, saying it was [__], that it's rigged.

Their main striker got a red card. He got kicked out of the game or something.

Yeah.

He can't play in the next game.

Oh, wow.

The red card depends on who you ask. If you're pro-USA or anti-USA, it really changes your judgment of it. It didn't seem like he was really trying to challenge for the ball. They were both looking away.

I saw the clip of what happened. I know absolutely nothing about soccer or football, whatever, so sue me. I don't know much about it, but I saw a clip of that. Then I saw a clip of Messi [__] rocking somebody with his spikes and not getting a red card for it, and it was a lot more egregious. Obviously, it probably takes a lot to give someone like Messi a red card, but—

There has to be some [__].

I don't know.

It looks like even in the chat they're talking about the red card. They're like, “This dude says USA lost one of their best players from a red card.”

Everyone says it was a red card. Yeah, it wasn't a red card.

If you're an American, you're definitely not going to see it as a red card. They could have given the red card; I could see why. But VAR called it in. It wasn't even like the ref gave the red card. The play was over, the guy was on the ground crying and rolling around, and then out of nowhere you see, “Possible red card check.” We were like, “What are we talking about?” Then you see the ref put his hand to his ear, and we're like, “Oh, here we [__] go.”

24. World Cup Locks

Not to cut you off, but how are you feeling about the markets this week, brother? What are your locks? What are you excited about? What are you looking at here that feels mispriced?

Okay, so I would say the things I'm excited about—I mean, all the games are exciting. The first one I had here was Australia–Egypt. That game is tomorrow.

Yeah.

I looked at this game for a while, and I was trying to decide whether I liked Australia more or Egypt more. I kept looking at it and telling myself it was a tight, close game, so I decided—probably for the first time in the tournament—that I was thinking about the under 2.5 in this match, Australia–Egypt.

It doesn't seem like either team is going to want to overly attack at first. Even an early goal, I don't think either team would overreact to it. I'm not 100% sure what the price is now, but I think it was about 1.6 or 1.7 when I checked. I had the under 2.5, just—

Total goals under 2.5.

I'm trying to find it. I see “over” for the first-half full-game total goals.

Yeah, on total goals. If you see the under spot next to it—

Am I slow? Where do you see it? I see over. I don't see under.

Let me see again.

I see over, and I can change the number. I see over first-half team total goals.

Can you click on over and then it's—

No, but you can say no to the over. Like, yes, over and no over.

Oh, then, yeah, that's fine. 2.5 and no. Yeah, 2.5 and then no on the over for team total goals on both? Or who—

Not team total. Doesn't it have the full-game total, total goals over or under 2.5?

I don't know on this.

Yeah.

2.5.

Okay, got it. Let's see what the chat is talking about and whether they align with any of the stuff you were saying. I checked the chat the other day, and there are people sharing the trades they're taking and giving alpha on why they're taking them, which is pretty interesting. It seems like there's good back-and-forth here with the people who are most active on Polymarket, so that's pretty cool.

The chat's really funny, too. For certain markets, you get people just freaking out at each other.

Yeah. When USA was playing, one of the sides was like, “[__] the other team,” and “[__] USA.” That's entertaining.

Just watching them talk [__] to each other in real time.

Yeah. So, that under was one I was feeling.

The other stuff that I liked—going back to Colombia, I was serious. I like Colombia to score 2 goals against—I think it's Ghana they play.

Oh, wow.

The line is surprisingly good to me, which always worries me. I never look at something and go, “Oh, free money. It looks like this.” It's always, “What do they know?” But sometimes the 1.9x is coming in. I'm thinking Colombia should be able to score a goal, and I feel like at some point, when Ghana attack back, they're going to score again. That's kind of the logic there.

Makes sense. No, it makes sense. Has Ghana been playing well? They're good. What are your top 3 teams right now?

Top 3 teams right now, I'd say France, Argentina, and then, after those 2 teams—man, this is crazy to say, but it's hard to ignore them—Mexico.

Mexico is moving differently right now.

Okay. Who's in Mexico's division or bracket?

They play England next.

Oh, it's going to be good. When and where is that?

I think that one is Monday, and they play in Mexico, which is the big issue. That's why the odds reflect that, too. Since they're playing in Mexico, Mexico do not lose in Mexico. They haven't even conceded a goal yet in the tournament in 4 games.

Wow. Yeah, it looks like it's 50-50, though. But England apparently is good too. I know, right?

Yeah. I will say this game is lower down on my list. It's funny—I just said Mexico is one of the better teams in the tournament, but I still kind of like England here to advance.

That was an idea I had as well: England to advance in this game. I'm probably going to be going back and forth on it like every other market in the game. But seeing that price for England, do I really think they're getting knocked out by Mexico in the round of 16? No. That price is pretty nice.

It's probably going to be a game that's so tight—1-1, 0-0, maybe it goes to penalties, one of those situations. But for the entire game, I just don't want to deal with anything other than England advancing.

Got you. That makes sense. Makes sense. Makes sense. It sounds like this World Cup has been exciting. There have been some teams that are surprisingly good. It's not just the standard. I know France and Argentina were obviously expected to be great, but—

Yeah. No, there are a lot of crazy narratives. The big thing right now is that African teams are showing out.

There was this idea that Japan, South Korea, and the Asian teams were pretty good, but right now it's the African teams. They came to play. Even DR Congo got bounced by England, but they scored first and held on for a long time. England scored 2 goals at the end, which looked rough.

Ivory Coast played well this tournament. Morocco is going deep right now. Then you have Egypt playing Australia, so we'll see how they do. But, yeah, I would say the African teams have shown up.

That's fire.

That’s dope. Appreciate you, man. Appreciate the insights, bro. Bro, we might need to hit one of these games. Forensic, I just told you—give me your thoughts on what you actually think the odds are of this happening.

Correct me if I’m wrong: if the U.S. advances—

—and Spain advances, then they both play at SoFi.

Yeah, dude. USA versus Spain at SoFi would be insane.

We have to go. It’d be a dream game because I’m also obsessed with some of Spain’s play. I mean, Yamal. Maybe, low-key, that’s the one we all go to.

When is that, or when would that be?

Not this week but next week, right? I don’t even know specifically. Yeah, it would probably be sometime later next week. We should look into that. Production, look into that. Polymarket, please look into that. That’d be insane.

Please send us the USA.

We’ll do a live, bro. We’ll do a live show. If it’s on Thursday, we’ll do a live show at—

Whatever you want.

Yeah, that would be insane. If you guys are cool—if you guys actually went to USA—

We’ll see.

We’ll see. A lot has to go right for it all to fall into place. But yeah, we’ll have you on next week again, brother. You’re becoming this recurring guy on the show, and everybody’s grown to love you. You’re awesome, bro. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Of course. Cool. Later, brother.

Cool.

25. Ansem Takes Over

Yeah, guys, we’re going to be passing off the show now to Ansem for some Ansem Alpha. We’re just going to let him riff, talk to the chat, engage with the chat, engage with Twitter, and do what Ansem does best. This is the part of the show a lot of you guys have been waiting for: “When’s the airdrop? What’s happening? How do I go do that?” He’s going to articulate all that. He’s looking at the chat. Are you seeing this chat aggregator, by the way?

I’m in it right now.

So good.

That’s what I’m looking at.

Can we pull it up in the middle, guys?

We can’t do that yet?

No, not in the middle. Yeah. Is this one of the things somebody built for us?

Bro, this is good.

It’s loaded, though. I was literally sitting and watching. You see all the Kick logos?

All the—

You guys can’t see it. The chat, unfortunately, can’t see right now, but the chat that we’re seeing is all Twitter and Kick. I can see Ansem’s Kick chat in the same place I can see my Twitter chat or my Twitch chat, and then all the X logos.

Dude, it’s been on fire all day. It’s been insane, bro. You have 50,000 viewers on Twitter right now.

The Twitter? Yeah, the Twitter. I took a peek at it while I was taking a piss.

I have 52,000. I’m at 13,000. Market Bubble’s at 4,400.

God damn.

I think my Twitch stream has been at around 1,500. I haven’t seen your Kick. Let me go check your Kick. We’re closing in at 100,000 across all platforms, which is pretty ridiculous. I know it’s a special occasion, but you’re at 400 or 500 on Kick, which is sick. It’s sick to see people on Kick. This is dope.

But yeah, guys, chats, we really appreciate it. Obviously, this was an important show. It was really Ansem’s show. All the guests who came on—Thread Guy, Rasmr, TJR, Brez, Mert—obviously, all you guys, thank you so much for coming on.

Without further ado, this is kind of what everybody’s been waiting for. I’m just going to pass it off to Ansem for some Ansem Alpha, and he’s going to engage with chat and Twitter and do whatever he wants. I’m going to stay live on Twitch. He’s looking at you guys, so my Twitch chat, he sees you guys. He’s seeing all of it. There’s no specific place that you need to be. You can be anywhere, and that’s the beauty of what we’re building. Watch and earn, baby. Let’s reward these fine viewers for riding with us and being here.

Episode 9, four hours deep—however long the show’s been going, three and a half hours deep. Bro, congratulations on everything. Seriously, bro, it’s been an honor building this with you. You have improved an insane amount from the dry runs till now. It’s amazing, bro.

I say it in our own production chats. I just like to consistently remind you and the teams and everybody who’s been involved in this—the chat, the viewers, the community that we’re building—that we’re on Episode 9, bro. We are so early here. I can’t imagine, at the rate we’re going, what Episode 20 looks like, what 50 looks like, what 100 looks like. What does it look like when we’re 2 or 3 years into this?

What does this show look like, by the way, when markets turn bullish?

We’re bullish, bro. We’re in a bear market.

We’re in a bear market, and you’re giving people generational trades.

It’s actually insane, bro. This is on expert mode, hard mode. What happens when it flips bullish and it’s on easy mode?

I’m very, very excited. Like I said, it’s been a pleasure, and I’ve been—

Yeah, I’m excited to do this. This was great. Thank you for having me.

And yeah, without further ado, we’re just going to pass it off to Ansem. Love you guys. I’ll see you guys next Thursday. Ansem, do your thing.