Amit Kukreja——如何跑赢股市..

Yo, yo, yo. What’s up, man? How are you?

What’s up, man? How are you, bro? I’m good, man. I’m excited to be on the show. I mentioned I was going to be on an hour ago, and everyone was like, “Do you know the red guy?” I was like, “Well, I guess I do now.”

Look, I was telling our chat—you don’t know yet, but we have a lot of crossover. I told everyone I wasn’t going to glaze, but I’ve got to be completely honest. I’m a daily morning watcher. I started at 3:30 in the afternoon, so my morning tweet dump—I’m on “Wake Your Ass Up with the…” I hate to be that guy, but I—

I love it. I love—

I’ve got the barrel, but I’ll give you some quick context on us, because you’re probably talking to a very similar audience. I run a daily livestream, and we’re mostly U.S.-based traders. It was heavily crypto-focused, but post-10/10, the markets got boring. I still love crypto and love Bitcoin, but the market is slow, so we started talking about a lot of equities, stocks, and AI.

For the last 45–60 days, all we’ve been talking about is the Iran conflict, the Middle East, and the oil trade. I’ve got the barrel in the back, which you can see. Is that a real barrel for the oil?

There’s nothing in it. Maybe one day, but it’s getting a little expensive to keep oil in the house.

We cover a lot of similar things, and I’m a fan of yours. Welcome, man. I appreciate you coming.

Hey, man. I’m happy to be on. I know there’s some overlap. I think crypto is kind of your bread and butter, right? That’s your core community, and obviously crypto has been a little dicey. The stock market has been dicey over the past couple of months, but there are so many different stocks to talk about that it provides content and updates.

There are also narratives that affect the stock market, with Jay Powell, the Fed, the war, and all of it. Technology, crypto, stocks—it all comes together. It’s a super fun time to be covering it.

One of the things about crypto—we’ll talk about it—is that I like that you like crypto, at least enough to give it a shout-out every day on the Robinhood BTC price. We do a ton of narrative trading. You know how crypto is: a lack of fundamentals and a lot of other things. You do some of that momentum trading, but you’re also going really deep into the fundamentals of a lot of these companies, earnings reports, filings, and things like that.

I’ll skip a lot of your background, but I was watching an interview you did with the Wolf guys this morning. You gave a lot of your lore and a pretty sick come-up story. I’m curious about the early Palantir content that you were making. Was there a specific video, tweet, thread, or article you put out that led to your pop? Was there a blow-off-the-top moment? I mean, you have 10K live every morning. It’s kind of insane.

I think with Palantir, I made an investment of around $25,000 in late November, and I made one video. I’d been trying YouTube for a long time—tech, business, just random stuff. You’re a kid, you’re putting it out there, seeing what happens. You don’t know anything about the algorithm or how to build a community.

I’ve always loved the stock market. COVID obviously got me into learning about stocks, and I graduated college in 2020. The video was called “I Bought $25,000 of Palantir.” That was the title. I thought, “Maybe that’s a clickable title. Maybe people are interested in this PLTR thing.”

I bought it without really understanding what I had bought because I was young and dumb, but I had somewhat of a thesis—a very immature thesis, but there was a thesis. I laid out my thesis, and that video did about 7,000 views in a day. I had never had 7,000 people click on something of mine in a day.

So I tried to analyze why people clicked on it. Was it a Dogecoin that went from 10 cents to 80 cents, and people were just in it for the moment? No, because it was actually down, or getting ready to go down, at the time. Was it just a meme stock? Palantir wasn’t really a meme stock, although maybe people thought of it that way in those early days. There was a real company working with the U.S. Department of Defense. There was something there.

I think one of the greatest moments of my life—and I say this with zero level of hesitancy in my voice—was recognizing that there was a subset of people on the planet who, for some reason, maybe a supernatural reason, cared about this company called Palantir. Whether it was the name, the CEO with the hair, the aura of it, or the spooky, mysterious vibe, there was something that got people to care about it. It got me to care. It got me to invest in it.

I decided at that moment that I was going to double down and try to figure out as much as I could about the company. I said I was going to use my communication skills from my debate background, which we can talk about, and my natural creativity around how to build and structure arguments. That’s essentially what debate was: making an argument.

I was going to turn those two skills into YouTube videos and analyze this company in every way that I could. I wasn’t prepared for a 90% drawdown, but that drawdown led me to make more videos because I was down half my net worth at that point. I figured I might as well learn even more about it, and it led to a community forming because all I did was make videos about it. Now we’re here today.

It’s a sick story, and it obviously was a crazy trade for you. I don’t mean to start the stream this way, but you binked Palantir and you binked Robinhood. What’s your worst trade that you’ve been publicly super excited about?

I don’t know if it was super public because, at the time, I didn’t have a YouTube brand, but there was a ticker called PPBT, Purple Biotech. I was 21 years old. I thought this company was going to cure every disease possible, and I put my whole net worth into it, which at the time was $25,000.

I invested in Palantir 2 years later, with roughly the same $25,000, because I had lost the original $25,000 when this thing blew up. They had about 5 reverse splits. I was like, “What’s a reverse split? My 30,000 shares went to 3,000. What just happened?” I was like, “Is that good? Is that bad?” It felt kind of bad.

In terms of public stuff, I lost some money on PayPal back in December 2023. Grab has been the next big play I’ve been saying can do very well. I think that stock should be closer to 7.50. I called it at 4.50, and right now it’s at 3.90. It hasn’t really had the move I expected, but it’s also only been a year and a half, and I tend to give these theses 2–3 years to play out.

We’re so enamored by the bull market having stocks go up 300% in a day, like Old Birds, but sometimes a thesis like Palantir and Robinhood takes 2½ years to play out. Those are some of my losses.

This is something I struggle with, especially with some of the crypto stuff. For a lot of things I trade, I’m not buying for 2 or 3 years. I’ll trade it. I’m long Hims right now, and it’s totally momentum trading. We’ll talk about Hims a little bit. I take finasteride, so I have a vested interest in it doing well and being legitimate.

Something I always struggle with, and think a lot about on the contrarian side, is what I’m comfortable posting as far as positioning and what I’m not comfortable posting. When you bank Palantir and Robinhood, you have a lot of emotion, a lot of attention, and people are hyped about your next call.

How do you navigate what you want to share as far as “I’m in this” and “I’m not,” or “I like this stock” and “I don’t like this stock”? How do you split the difference?

That’s a hell of a question, and I think it’s a very important, relevant question that gets to the heart of what we’re doing here. You’re right: Palantir and Robinhood worked. The next big call I had was Grab. Grab hasn’t worked yet, and that creates a psychological component. You get 2 in a row, and you’re going for the hat trick. The hat trick isn’t working, and now you’re afraid to really call the next one.

I bought Oracle at 130, and it’s at 170. That’s great, and it feels good, but you’re not having a “I’m pounding the table on Oracle” moment because it’s a $350 billion company. It’s not unknown that Oracle is here. Same with Nvidia—I bought Nvidia at 90, but a lot of people bought Nvidia at 90 during the AMC craze.

You get credit for the names that are unknown and that you find. It’s very hard to find them. I tell myself, “Look, you got 2. It’s really hard to get 2 that went from 7 to 150 in 2½ years, but you got those. You need to take those skills and try to find the next one.”

Then, if the next one doesn’t do that in 2½ years, we have to recognize that’s not normal.

That is normal for a stock—not to 20X in 2 years—even if the expectation is that you'll find it. I think a lot of people who find multiple winners in a row are finding very, very small companies. Those companies are sub-$1 billion in market cap, and as you said, there are a lot of people watching every morning.

If I say I like something that's worth $100 million, and I have 100,000 shares, a lot of people who trust me and trust my approach to the market might say, “If Amit likes it, I would like it.” That thing pumps, or it could pump if I were to do that. I've actively chosen not to do that because I think that's a really shitty way of being a market participant. First of all, it's illegal—pumping and dumping. This shit is just not the brand that I want to build.

Messy. It's very messy. You know, in the crypto world, we've already seen the pump-and-dumps with the meme coins, so it's scary for me to do that. That means I spend a lot of time doing due diligence.

To your question, Zeta was another name that I called at, I think, $18. I put out my due diligence, did a whole deep dive, bought it, and liked it. It went to $25, went down to $14 in the SAS sell-off, and now it's back to around $18, kind of where I called it.

I'm trying to balance the level of influence I have with the level of conviction I have on a name. I don't think I've had a name since Palantir, Robinhood, and Grab—Grab being the one that hasn't really worked out yet—where I'm pounding the table.

It got to the point where, on Sunday night, I mentioned a software stock that I was interested in. I hadn't even really started due diligence; I had read a couple of articles. Then I'm getting messages today from people saying, “Did you buy it yet? Did you buy it yet? I'm in.” I'm like, “I didn't even put out a thesis. There's not even a one-pager.”

The very fact that I say a name, given that there are so many people watching, can influence people to get into it. I really hate it if someone's into it and I'm not even into it, but I just mentioned it because I mention a lot of stocks and they take a position. So I take the responsibility very seriously.

I'm the same way about this. We don't have to mention any names, but there are definitely some popular TradFi accounts on Twitter recently that have had some four-figure and five-figure percentage P&Ls over the last couple of months on some very low-cap names.

A lot of respect to them, because the research these people are doing is very difficult. It's not easy. One hundred percent.

The level of companies they're choosing—OTC, all this stuff—if there's only a couple thousand people trading it and only a couple million shares outstanding, it's going to go up if people buy it.

Before we get into some individual names, I want to talk about the general markets right now. I know you love Robinhood—no hoodie on—but the pattern day trader requirement was just axed, which I think is part of the reason Robinhood is trading around $87 or $88. It traded really well.

You mentioned that when you started getting into stocks, it was right around 2020. I graduated high school in 2020, so I'm basically from the same era. I started paying attention to the markets then. You don't have a ton of history predating 2020, but I'm curious about your general thought process on how the rise of retail traders and zero-day options—and we'll talk about crypto perps in a little bit as well—has evolved the way these markets and individual names move, trade, carry momentum, and evolve in general.

It's a whole new world. It really is. This is a fascinating topic, and there is a lot of science and art to how this is playing out.

There have always been cults around stocks. The problem is that there have never been tens and tens and tens of millions of people caring about stocks. They care about pop culture, they care about sports—you've got many cult sports—but COVID created the foundation for everyone to say, “I have stimulus money and I'm bored.” Then you saw GameStop and AMC, and that set the foundation for people to care about the stock market.

Tesla was the first original cult in terms of retail momentum. I think the next big one, quite frankly, after Tesla was Palantir. To have a stock do what it did as a boring B2B enterprise SaaS company—you don't get that type of multiple. Elon gets an Elon premium because he's freaking Elon. You don't get that type of multiple on a B2B SaaS AI company unless there's something about you that's interesting.

What's really interesting about Palantir is that retail loaded up under $20. Once the company started showing its growth, institutions had to buy in. Then you had S&P inclusion, Nasdaq inclusion, and all these TradFi things that happen in the stock market when a stock gets included in an index.

All these retail guys are like, “I bought this at $6, and now the guy who runs a $10 billion fund is being forced to buy it at $40. Why would I sell?” That's pretty funny. That guy has to buy my shares at these levels, or he has to buy someone else's shares, which just pumps up the price even more.

It's been absolutely crazy, and I think the democratization of information has really catalyzed it. I think I'm a case study of it. I was a 22-year-old kid who had posted 3,000 videos and—I don't want to count how many tweets—dedicated to Palantir. A lot of people saw those videos and tweets, and they took a chance on it. Thankfully, I bet my reputation on it, and it ended up being right.

A lot of people have taken that route over the past couple of years. I have friends who called Rocket Lab at $4 and SoFi at $5. What's the other big one that has exploded recently? Navitas—people called it at $10 or $20. You're just seeing a lot of retail. ASTS was at $2, and now it's at $80. I think retail is a big force.

Do you think you'll ever be able to repeat the Palantir trade?

In terms of the actual movement of the stock, or in terms of the community and the sort of journey it created?

I sort of meant it in terms of the movement, but being able to be that early to a cultural movement again—whether it happened accidentally, whether people stumbled into it, or whether it happened intentionally. It has been transformative. I mean, hot girls are rocking the Palantir merch. It's become a cult; you've got to sign the back of it. It's become a cultural “hot girls for Palantir” force, if you will.

I will say this: Palantir was just unbelievable. I didn't expect Robinhood to do what it did. We can talk about the origin stories of that, but with Palantir, I think it was me and a couple of people who really led the cult and led the movement of the content.

With Robinhood, it was me and 3 other people. There really wasn't anyone else, because everyone hated Robinhood after GameStop. You really had to look past that to see what was happening.

I will say it is a high that I cannot describe to be on an island, say that you like a stock, and watch the stock go up and up and up and up. People who are buying at levels that are already double, triple, or quadruple the level you bought at are making money because the stock is still going up, and they're attributing all of that momentum and all of those gains to you.

You don't deserve it, but you're the guy on the island who called it when no one else did, and everyone wants to give you that praise. I'm looking for that feeling again. To answer your question, I hope I can find it again one day. I don't know if I can, but it has been one of the greatest feelings of my entire life, and I don't take it for granted. It's also freaking hard to find that name and be that movement.

I love this retail-trading topic. Your 10/10 happens, and it's basically the crypto 9/11. I'm sitting here thinking, “All right, what are we going to do now?” I'm like, “Fuck it. Stocks are trading well. Let's pay attention to some stocks.”

I start posting a lot on Twitter that I'm looking at stocks. We're covering tickers in the morning or during market close, and a lot of the veteran crypto guys come out and say, “You crypto kids can never understand financials. You can't trade stocks.”

I'm starting to think to myself, “I actually think we can in some categories,” because the thing crypto traders are innately best at is understanding memetics, understanding narrative, and understanding attention. Palantir trades at a 150 P/E—something ridiculous. Not to say they don't have these massive government contracts, but what are a lot of these movements? They're movements.

There's an article—I glaze this kid all the time—but there's a guy on Twitter called Base 16Z, and he wrote an article called “Megachurch Time.” In a footnote, he wrote this little excerpt:

“Not just American Eagle, which is the Sydney Sweeney trade”—that's when I realized I thought we could do the stock thing—“but all my best trades this year. I believe an underexploited edge in today's memetic financial markets is growth investing in some narrative that will become the note of the internet that day.”

100%. The mistake I've made this year—I have made a mistake in terms of my portfolio—is not realizing you need to be in the themes that are going to move no matter if Iran launches a nuke. These are themes that are going to move. Memory was one of those themes, and data centers was one of those themes.

I thought I'd add exposure to it through Nvidia, which I do, and it's done well, but Nvidia's $5 trillion. It's hard for it to go to $10 trillion. But you have stocks that are $60 billion; they can get to $120 billion. It's possible. That's the mistake I made, and hopefully I can try to see it and identify more of these names.

A lot of them have run already, but if this AI thing is unlimited, then they're probably going to keep running. So, to your point, yeah, the cool thing about crypto guys is you can spot momentum. If you saw momentum in quantum, nuclear, space, data centers, memory, or AI in general, you were able to play the theme.

The Magnificent Seven back in 2023 were deeply undervalued, but ChatGPT changed the world, and you got to see that Gemini was going to happen and Meta was going to start using this stuff. Playing the theme is how you win, and it's very hard for people to find the theme.

One of my favorite times watching you was during the silver and gold just-parabolic-everything-trades-like-crypto period. Silver trades like a meme coin; oil trades like a meme coin. You were beating your head against the wall, and you were like, “Man, I just don't think oil or silver is a hedge against anything.” Silver was trading like risk.

Do you think this trend also continues, where every commodity, every metal, everything has this crypto-like, blow-off-the-top, parabolic momentum? It feels like fundamentals or real-life use cases go out the window when people are like, “We're running silver now. We're doing silver now.” All of a sudden, it's the trade of the week. Does it make a new all-time high? Does it not? That's unclear, but it definitely became the trade of the week, of the month.

So I think if you're long commodities like gold and silver, you can own them and not worry about it for the next 20 years, right? Because they will be relevant. But to your point, I got out of the commodities. I made about 10% on a copper trade, and I got out the day that silver had its 30% decline.

I was still somewhat up on my options, and I was just like, “I'm done with this.” The reason I'm done is I saw the copper chart, and it was following silver. I was like, “Wait a second. I thought there was a fundamental thesis—the data centers.” Then I was like, “It's just following. It's just being the altcoin to Bitcoin or Ethereum.” I was like, “I'm not in this for an altcoin. I thought there was a thesis here.”

The thesis is being plagued by the algos that are trading it. So, yeah, it is incredible to see the amount of people, because we were starting to get bearish around January and February, and still you had people trading silver and gold like it was a meme stock.

I just think this goes to a deeper question, which I'm sure you've read some of this literature around: financial nihilism. The idea is that people feel like they can't make it in life because their job doesn't pay enough, the cost of living is going up, and inflation is going up.

Men feel like they need to really impress women, and they need to make a lot of money. There's a lot of depression if they're not making enough money because women have so many options. So it's like, “[Expletive] it. I'm going to go gamble on the Knicks tonight. I'm going to go buy this meme coin. Trump just said he's launching me. I hope Trump's right. I'm going to bet on MAGA here.”

You're taking more and more risk as a society, and I don't know if it's good or bad, but it is leading to a lot more [expletive], like silver going up or down 30% in a day. It's a very thematic part of the decade, the post-COVID era.

Something we talk about all the time—and I believe that one of the ways out is to figure out how to trade and how to make money in these markets. You are, at least in my head, very pointed toward retail traders, right? You have a lot of experienced people who watch you, and you have a lot of new people who find you, learn how to trade through you, discover what options are, and discover what stocks are through you.

In this nihilism era, do you think new traders can actually have an edge in these markets and outperform the S&P? If someone new finds Amit investing on YouTube streams, do you actually think it's a good idea for them to be like, “I'm going to learn. He did it with Palantir. He did it with HOOD. I think learning how to trade will be a beneficial skill to my future. Maybe not my full-time occupation. I'll still keep my job, but I should be stock-picking or trading individual names rather than just buying indexes.”

Yeah, absolutely. Someone who discovers finance media online—and not just me either; there are so many great accounts out there doing their due diligence—absolutely can change their financial future by seriously taking a look at that due diligence, trying to keep up with the markets, and either actively trading or picking stocks.

More people don't actively trade; more people pick a stock, and stock-picking is a very difficult skill. The S&P is really hard to beat, but a lot of people beat the S&P last year.

Yeah, in retail. Doing it consistently is tough because it does require active monitoring of a portfolio. You have to monitor the situation of your portfolio.

To your point, it's difficult, but I think it is possible. I don't think you're selling a fake dream, like, “Oh, you can become rich.” It's like, “No, no. You can legitimately buy Rocket Lab at $20, and then it goes to $70, and you can fund your child's tuition.”

However, it does require a level of individual autonomy and agency around believing you have control over your financial future, and then actively, every day, paying attention to see what the opportunities are. That's why I think people join the market open, right? Because it's entertainment to an extent, but it's also a sport: How can I listen to what this guy is talking about, and hopefully he's talking about it in a way that conglomerates a lot of information that I can then digest, make my own decisions based on that analysis, and make more money?

I think it's possible. I think it's entertaining for people to try. It's better than them watching sports all day, even if it is just a sport of investing. But it is hard to beat the S&P.

Trading is a sport is my favorite framing. It's the modern-day spectacle. I think the biggest trade has already happened, at least on X, on Twitter. I spend all day on Twitter. The best traders are the biggest celebrities. Those are the people you care the most about.

Look at why people show up to your stream every day. It is absolutely a spectacle. We can pivot into some individual names here as a bridge question on retail trading. How responsible is Robinhood specifically for this retail boom?

I would say Robinhood is probably 99.3% responsible for it. When you've used the product and you get your friends to use the product—and all my family uses the product—it's not easy to get someone to open a Schwab or Fidelity account and actively enjoy trading.

Has Robinhood gamified it? Yeah, but that's the point. It needs to feel exciting for people to care about financial markets. Financial markets are not that interesting unless you make them interesting. So I have zero problem with what Robinhood has done. They've obviously gotten a lot of flak for it, but more money in the market, more liquidity—that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

I think Robinhood is pretty much the number one reason for that.

It was funny. You see Robinhood get flak for confetti and gamifying the experience, and then you look at—first of all, you pull up an online casino, which is being pushed in every single commercial break: FanDuel, PrizePicks, whatever. It's gamified gambling everywhere in the world. Robinhood gets [expletive] for it.

I know Robinhood has some prior issues with the GME stuff. It's not even really worth going into all that, but it is an incredible product.

The thing that's interesting about Robinhood is that it feels like every platform right now is going in a similar direction. Everybody wants to be a bank. Everybody wants to offer financial services. Everybody wants to be an exchange—a way for you to trade, store your money, and earn yield on your money.

Everyone is converging on this similar idea that maybe Robinhood was first to, or popularized, in the 2020s. Every wallet is an exchange. Every exchange is a wallet. Both of them offer yield for keeping your money there. How does Robinhood win in the 10-year, 20-year, decade thesis from here?

I think what Robinhood is going to have to do is capture every part of your financial experience, not just trading. The reason the stock got hit so badly over the past couple of weeks is because trading volumes went down. There was a reason for that, which is this war. But the point is, if people aren't trading, they don't make money.

And I think Vlad knows that is the liability that they have, which is why they're getting into banking and tokenization, and they're trying to do more stuff with crypto as an infrastructure play versus just the trading play. So, yeah, they've got to be able to figure out your credit card, your loan, your mortgage. How do we provide that to you as Robinhood? And then how does that continue to get you to trade as well?

And I think they're doing a pretty good job at it. It just takes time. They have a massive TAM. I do think they will be a trillion-dollar company. I know that's crazy. I really do think the level of innovation that I've spoken to Vlad enough and spoken to the employees enough where I can confidently say, “These people work 12 to 15 hours a day.”

Like, it's gross. I would never want to work there because of how intense the work culture is. If I work there, I can't talk about the stock anymore. But the level of intensity that Vlad has—I mean, I'll tell you a story.

Vlad, I was in his office after their Q1 of last year. We were doing a little interview with him, and he gave me a gavel as a gift. I gave him a little cowbell; he gave me a gavel. The point of the gavel was that in meetings, he will slam the gavel when he's talking to a product manager, an engineer, or another C-suite executive if he thinks that people aren't hitting their goals.

So, if you're responsible for the Robinhood Gold subscriber count—like, I guess you're the GM of Robinhood Gold—and you're responsible for subscribers going up, if they needed to add 100,000 subscribers that quarter and you're in the meeting and you added 95,000, he will slam the gavel and be like, “Get your shit together. Do better.”

And so, when I heard that story and he gave me the gavel, TSA took it from me.

Did he give it to you afterward?

He gave it to me, and then TSA took it when I was coming back from California because they thought I was going to kill the pilot with the gavel—this plastic shit gavel. And I tried to tell the guy, “I met the CEO of a special company. He gave it to me.” The TSA guy was like, “Who's the company?” I was like, “Robinhood.” The guy was like, “Robinhood? Fuck them. They didn't let me sell my GameStop.” And I was like, “Oh my goodness, bro. I can't believe this is happening.”

That is—I cannot make that story up. That's what happened, and I lost the gavel. I had to tell Vlad, and I didn't tell him about the GameStop part. I just told him about TSA. I didn't want to—

Yeah, I think it was probably beating Warren, too. Game Warren.

By the way, I couldn't believe that you weren't sponsored by Robinhood or Palantir. I think it's common knowledge—you talk about it a lot. I'm happy you brought this up.

I've never been sponsored by a single company, ever. I've never taken money from a single company. Palantir doesn't even pay for my flights when I go to AIPCon or my hotel. Everything is on my dime.

They pay for that merch, though.

No, I did. That $120? No, I paid for it. I ordered everything myself.

I ordered that thing I unboxed. It was $150. I paid for that shit.

I got a couple of hats for free and stuff like that. But every merch drop, I put in my credit card and I buy that shit outright. I also want to support it because Ilia knows, you know, my guy.

But they don't pay me. They've never paid me. And I've kept a very strict line behind my integrity. I know people perceive it as being paid, but I'm being paid if the stock goes up and I'm promoting the stock. I'm promoting the company, but the company's doing well enough for me to then talk about the stock. That's how the thesis plays out.

Now, some of these other people out there—and I've heard some stories about the amount of money they've been given or shares they've been given under the table to pump this—it is really ugly and shady out there.

Yeah, I never want to be associated with that. I've had a C-suite executive call my personal phone and say, “Amit, we're ready to give you a lot of shares. Can you do for us what you did for Palantir?” And I was like, “No.” Palantir was this organic journey. I'm not going to manufacture my excitement over your stock when there's nothing to be excited about.

It's a dirty game, and I kind of pride myself on being able to say I've never taken a penny from any company.

That's awesome. Also, it's funny to hear you say “shares.” I'm used to coins under the table, like shares under the table.

It's funny to hear that.

On Robinhood to a trillion, they make more money if more people are trading, and they make less money if fewer people are trading. So, to get to a trillion dollars, they need substantially more people trading. Where does the next marginal trader come from?

Well, you know, these Trump Accounts, I think, are really important. I think they're setting the foundation for traders going into the next 2 decades because each kid that's born in America now gets $1,000 tracking the S&P in their account. Robinhood is going to get a lot of those accounts. That's another big catalyst for growing their AUM.

I think they get more traders by more people wanting to be interested in the financial markets. It's just that simple. If you get into finance, you have a couple thousand bucks, you're new, you care about becoming an entrepreneur, becoming—taking control of your financial destiny—you eventually find Robinhood.

There are competitors, but Robinhood is the one that ends up finding your attention. It's like if you try to build a startup, you are going to find tech VCs on Twitter because that's where all the information is if you want to get inundated on how to—

Yeah, if you care about crypto, you're going to find Ansem, right? You will find him. Or you're going to find Thread Guy. You find these people that care because you're curious, and Robinhood is one of those platforms.

So, I think they just need to make sure capitalism does not collapse, and they need to make sure that AI does not demolish the incentive that people have, sociologically, to feel bullish about the idea of progressing inside of an economically mobile society. Because then people will find stocks.

But if people have that sentiment taken away, they're not going to find stocks, crypto, real estate, any of this.

How much do you doom and gloom over that? Late-stage capitalism, the game is rigged, you can't actually hit the upper-K-shape in the economy, why even trade when everyone is against me—sort of nihilistic doom and gloom?

I just don't spend enough time on it because I work a lot every day. And I think that answer's emblematic of the only way to not worry about it: you've got to fucking work. That's it. You just have to, right?

You do your stream every day for 3 hours. You're there. You're doing it. You don't care what anyone thinks. You're just doing it because you know this is what's necessary to grow and build a brand and gain momentum.

I used to stream when there were 10 people there, and I would be as excited as I am with 10,000. You just have to go.

I think there is a lack of accountability, but also a lack of optimism—not because the world is against you, which in many cases it feels like the world is definitely against you, but also because sometimes people just don't have the natural inclination to try.

And when I was making YouTube videos and no one was watching, at least I was trying. I've always tried. I've always fucking tried. My mom gave me my creativity; my dad gave me my work ethic. My dad is not creative, but he gave me the work ethic. My mom is really creative.

I work hard.

No, she works hard, but she doesn't know anything about business. She knows nothing about signing contracts and NDAs and all this. My dad knows a lot about that.

So, I got a lot of creative energy from her. My dad ran a liquor store for 20 years. He was basically gone for 15 hours a day. I got that work ethic from him.

And then I put it together to say, “I want to do something different in my life. I don't want to go corporate.” A lot of my friends went to JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, and I just really rejected that mindset. And so I ended up buying YouTube.

The other thing that's really important about this is recognizing your mortality. I don't talk about it too much, but the idea of death is a very big motivator for me.

I can't explain why. I've always been fascinated with the concept that we will all be dead one day. It's very morbid to bring up, but that is one thing that really gets me off my ass every morning and says, “The clock's running out. You have to go for it.”

Then my 3 hours a day feel so lousy now compared to—

Well, you're doing something. We're working. You're working. That's what matters.

That was beautiful. I'm going to hit you with the 180 pivot, but back to the Robinhood topic. And also on the topic of Robinhood having a ton of competition, crypto's had a tough year—a really tough couple of years.

I think it got really overshadowed with the meme-ification of everything. And instead of talking about DeFi or these innovative protocols, people were talking about Far Coin, which I know you're a big advocate—not advocate. It gets referenced in your stream.

Indeed. It does indeed.

I think the golden child of crypto in 2024 has been the perpetual futures market, and Hyperliquid's 24/7 perps have been a really interesting one. I don't know how familiar you are with it, but I think, really, over the silver boom, over the Middle East conflict, right? It was February 28th, I think—a Friday night or really early Saturday morning—when the U.S. and Israel struck Iran.

Markets are closed. Oil goes absolutely parabolic, and about $2 billion of price discovery happened on Hyperliquid, which was pretty wild to see. I think it had sort of been a little gimmicky crypto product—the perp, whatever—up until the silver move, up until this oil moment. I'm curious if you've thought at all, talked about, or learned at all about Hyperliquid and the idea of 24/7 on-chain perps.

So, I have tried to understand this market over the past couple of months, and it is incredibly fascinating. The idea that you could get exposure to an asset class via these crypto derivative contracts without being able to trade the asset is fascinating. I think I saw a tweet today from some guy who made a ton of money on Anthropic perps, which, to my understanding, don't actually hold Anthropic stock, but are pegged via the derivative contract to Anthropic. I don't know how they're deriving the price, but they're doing it in some way, which allows you to, at the end of the day, if the price goes up or down, trade it. That's what allows you to make money.

And there's liquidity in that market via the innovations of Hyperliquid. So, I think it's very exciting. I think it's very important. I think Robinhood, with tokenization, is trying to attack that perpetual futures market, but they're still custodying the shares one-to-one by actually having an equity stake. They just did Robinhood Ventures, which is like the TradFi version of getting a stake in that stuff.

The problem with the crypto perp stuff is the reason the 9/11 happened on 10/10 is over-leverage, right? I have a friend personally who lost a lot of money—like, a lot of money—there.

Yeah, likewise. And it's very scary when the leverage gets that high. So, I think the innovation is incredible, and you're probably going to get something like that in the stock market. We already have 24/7 trading, where you're buying a stock at 9:00 p.m. and it goes through a middleman that gets you a version of a share of that stock, but it's not really T+1 settled yet. So, there are versions of that in TradFi, but the leverage is what scares me in perps.

Also, the pre-market perps—I don't know too much about those. The pre-IPO markets—Eventuals is a company that does it through Hyperliquid. It's very interesting. I don't know too much about the pre-market stuff, but perps are an interesting vehicle because people want leverage, right? What percentage of options trading is zero-DTE? It's really high, right? 60%, 70%, or something like that. People want leverage, and it gives you a very simple way to go long or short and hold for an undecided amount of time, versus options contracts, which are very complex.

I would wonder how many people who trade options actually understand the Greeks and theta, and exactly what the convexity of what they're trading underneath is. And so, I think that you're right: everything is going to go 24/5. Everything is probably going to go 24/7 at some point in the near future. It's sick to hear that you're pretty tapped in, at least at a high level, to the Hyperliquid perps. I think it's cool, bro. Crypto's awesome.

In 2022 and 2023, I didn't understand why crypto was a thing, and then I spent, I think, 5 months watching every Michael Saylor interview I could just to get orange-pilled, just to understand why Bitcoin matters. It really converted me to thinking, you know, we're going to inflate ourselves and debase our currency for the next—forget 100 years—thousands of years. There is no—if Elon and DOGE couldn't fix the problem, there's no way we're going to cut off welfare. There has to be a solution to infinite money printing.

I hope the solution just is the perception of money still being valuable because of the military and the mighty strength of the U.S. is what keeps us going. But eventually, if it doesn't, you need a countercyclical hedge, and that ends up being Bitcoin. The annoying thing is that crypto got wrecked when we printed the most money in the past year. So, I'm curious about your take: why didn't crypto end up getting the bid, and why did it go to gold and silver? Do you think the bid actually ends up coming back?

I think crypto has really struggled to evolve itself into an investable asset outside of a couple spots. And I think altcoins generally have this weird overhang problem: what are you buying? Is it equity? Is it a meme coin? Is it something in between? Hyperliquid solved this one by making $1 billion a year and putting all of its revenue back into buying the coin. So, you're not technically buying equity, but you're buying an asset that they have more of than anyone and that goes up only. I think the rest of crypto outside of BTC has found itself stuck in this middle ground.

People kind of want meme coins, but we know what meme coins are. We have the same thing in stocks. Basically, people kind of want alts, but then you run into this fragmentation problem. Is it equity? Is it not? Who owns the assets—the labs, the entity? You sort of get this weird middle ground with an overlying meta of, I think, nihilism. And so, I think people got very frustrated with crypto.

The market was basically at—Bitcoin was at $126K, all-time highs, right before 10/10. Altcoins were in the gutter. And then you get this mass wipeout liquidation across the board. I think it's actually left crypto in a unique spot, right? On the run-up, you get all these wannabe Michael Saylors, right? These dots that are overleveraging with money they don't have, buying the pico, pico, pico top. And the whole thing is just inflated on air through a lot of the run-up. And so, you sort of pull forward future buyers to buy right now.

Then when things go in that direction, they're not there to sort of plunge-protect, and you get this cascading liquidation effect. But I actually think crypto right now stands in an interesting spot. There's been a sentiment wipeout. There's been a price wipeout. And all things considered, BTC has traded decently since February 28th, when the war started.

Now we are stuck with a Michael Saylor situation. He owns, like, 4.34% of BTC. The whole discussion is, when's he buying and how is it going to end? We're pumping because he's buying. We're not pumping because we hate him. And what is he going to do with it? It's stuck somewhere between those ideas.

But I think there's been a couple spots: BTC, obviously; Hyperliquid with perps; and then I think the privacy narrative. Monero, XMR, is popular. Zcash is another one that's popular, where privacy is probably obviously going to be increasingly important in the future, and crypto is uniquely positioned to offer a private-by-nature asset. And so, despite the carnage, crypto has carved out a couple of real use cases.

That's awesome. That's awesome. Bitcoin rocks. People will always trade meme coins. The casino never closes. It's carved out, I think, a real use case. And then, obviously, tokenization, right? Everyone is pushing this tokenization narrative really, really hard. So, it's definitely carved out and made itself, I think, a real, sustainable player despite the most brutal wipeout you could have offered.

Do you think morale in the overall industry has really been wrecked, or is there a catalyst or a rate-cutting cycle? What do you think brings it back to life?

I honestly don't think it's been worse. FTX was pretty bad.

Wait, then this is the worst it's ever been is what you're saying?

You would make a pretty good argument, I think. It's very much a narrative-follows-price thing, right? And so, the difference between the FTX 2023 collapse and now is that at least there was a catalyst through FTX. The thing people will say is, “No one stopped believing in Bitcoin in 2023. They just ran out of money.” The biggest exchange blows up, everyone goes insolvent, no one can afford to get anything, mass liquidations.

The 2025 one was a little bit unique because there wasn't necessarily this FTX-level catalyst to destroy everything. There was sort of a spiritual capitulation. A lot of, “I wasted 5 years of my life. Meme coins suck. Fuck this thing,” because you have to imagine, right? You have 2 years of a bull market—really the back half of ’23 and then all of ’24—and the assets that are going the craziest are our meme coins, scam coins.

And so, your blow-off top is the president of the free world, basically day one in office, coming in and launching not one but two meme coins. Right? And so, you have to understand, too: before Trump comes into office, before Gary Gensler is out, the best talent in crypto is leaving the United States of America. Not because crypto is legal or illegal, but because it's this gray area. What's legal, what's not? They just—clarity, pun intended—refused to provide clarity. And so, the best talent in the world is like, “I don't even know if I can legally do this here. I'm out.”

Trump comes into office, Gensler's out, and on day one he launches a meme coin. Fuck it, anything goes. And so, there definitely was this spiritual anger built up, I think, toward crypto from some of the diehards, that it's the opposite of where you would want to see it go. But in my opinion, a lot of it's gotten wiped out. And then there are a couple of narratives to cling to that are very interesting.

One of the silver linings of Hyperliquid with 24/7 perps is that they offer tradable assets on everything. And so, a lot of crypto people are now like, “Okay, I have all this balance on-chain. I'm going to trade oil. I'm going to trade silver. I'm going to trade gold. I'm going to trade stocks.”

I’m going to buy Robinhood. I’m going to buy Tesla. So, I think more than anything, we’re not going to see stocks versus crypto, but more so just modern finance. These things interweave and trade similarly. People who have crypto can trade stocks, and people who have stocks can trade crypto.

That’s really good because the crypto infrastructure gets people into trading other assets, but it’s built on crypto, which was the entire point of the blockchain, right? So, there’s sort of a convergence, if you will, across all markets, which is very interesting to watch.

Speaking of markets, how have you been able to navigate the last 2 months, give or take, post-war? Where does trading or covering this market rank among the other unique time periods you’ve covered? Comparing this era of trading, I guess.

Yeah, just in the last 2 months, what just happened? We’re back at all-time highs. The difference here is retail. I did a poll yesterday in my chat, and it was 33%, 33%, 33%: 33% of people said they bought heavily, 33% said they bought but didn’t buy heavily, and 33% said they didn’t buy.

This was a very difficult 2 months for me to navigate in terms of my audience because it was very political. People hate Trump, and people love Trump. You have people saying, “We’ve got to bomb Iran,” and you have people saying, “What the fuck are we doing with Iran?”

I’m trying to be as apolitical as possible because I don’t think people come to me for politics, and I don’t want to be the politics guy. But with my money, I also had to kind of vibe back and forth. There is pressure when I’m like, “Oh, I’m buying,” and you have 1,000 people saying, “You’re a fucking idiot. Why are you buying? This is crazy. How can you trust it?”

Then you have other moments where I’m a little bearish, I’m selling some stuff, and I’m maybe hedging, and people are like, “You don’t believe in America? This is the greatest economy.” It’s just crazy trying to actively trade. That’s why I’m not an active trader. I’m a content creator who’s trying to make some money with trading as well.

What I did was stay in the middle bucket. I bought, but I didn’t buy heavily. When Palantir collapsed, that was my main conviction, so I bought more. I really tried to buy as much as I could. I bought Rocket Lab and Oracle, but there were still moments where I could have bought more.

I liquidated the $35,000 I had in cash in my retirement account—not at the bottom, but the day after the bottom, the day after March 30, when the ceasefire was announced. I think it was Wednesday, 2 weeks ago. So, I got some bottoms, but I didn’t go crazy.

The most important thing about this is that last year, everyone went in during March and April because no one fucking believed the Trump tariff. I was buying the dip, and you were probably buying the dip. Everyone in retail was like, “Institutions are stupid. They think we’re actually going to tariff Zimbabwe by 100%? That’s not going to happen.”

So, we got handsomely rewarded after that 30% drawdown. This time, people legitimately thought this was not only going to be World War III, but that Trump had ruined the U.S. economy forever. So, a lot of people stayed on the sidelines.

Again, I was in the middle. I definitely deployed some because some things felt cheap, and that’s where conviction comes in, but it wasn’t like, “Oh my goodness, retail is undergoing a structural transition of wealth from institutions to retail.” Given the data over the past couple of days, retail is coming back now, and I hope this isn’t the top because that would suck. It’s just buying into momentum.

But if it’s buying into momentum and we’re going a lot higher, a lot of people didn’t get the bottom, but it’s still going to be a really good year for people.

Yeah, you can't taco atoms, right? You can’t print oil, which made it very—I don’t know. It’s insane that we’re at all-time highs today. It felt like nothing really happened. We’re at all-time highs, there’s no ceasefire, and that’s wild. I stopped trading oil because it drove me crazy.

One of the last topics I want to ask you about is your due diligence strategy, which I think you have interesting insight into. It’s not something I’m the most familiar with—doing due diligence on the financials of companies.

What is your general thought process when you’re underwriting a stock or looking at what you want to invest in? You’re interested in a name—what do you do? I know it’s a packed question.

I’m actually going to be doing a 5-hour stream just doing due diligence.

Do this.

Yeah, just doing due diligence. I’m not even really going to be talking to the chat. I’m literally just going to be in my zone, and people can observe how I’m doing it.

It involves becoming very intimate with a company. For me, that means getting my hands on as much information as possible and, quite frankly, becoming obsessed with it.

I’ll reference Robinhood. It was trading at $8, with a $6 billion market cap. Sorry, $6 billion in cash and a $2 billion enterprise value. The $2 billion was the market cap outside of cash, and $8 billion was the overall market cap. They had $6 billion in cash, so they had a $2 billion enterprise value.

Got it.

A little company was doing $1 billion in revenue, but it was trading at a $2 billion enterprise value. It didn’t make sense. So, that’s what got me into it.

Then I began the process: Who is Vlad? Why does he matter? All of his interviews—why does everyone hate this guy? What actually happened during GameStop? How does Robinhood make money?

I felt like I knew their SEC filings better than the CFO. I’m being hyperbolic, but I legitimately did because I put a lot of money into it. I wanted this to work. They were options, not even stocks. So, I was like, they better hit $25. When it’s at $8 and you’re hoping it goes to $25, that’s really scary. Will it actually happen?

It involves becoming incredibly diligent about what’s happening. I would break it up into 3 pillars.

Number 1: What’s the TAM? I spend a lot of time thinking about how big this company can become.

Number 2: Is the company profitable, or does it have a path to profitability? Particularly around operating margins, because I think if you can increase margins, you can increase your cash flow. If you increase your cash flow, you increase net income. Net income is where you get your multiple as a high-growth tech stock, and those are the ones I tend to like.

You really have to see where that path is going. Grab doesn’t have good margins, but I see that margin profile getting there, which is why I’m like, “Okay, I’m early, but I’m going to be right, hopefully.”

That sums up the financial element of it. Robinhood has $7 billion in cash relative to a $14 billion market cap, so it’s kind of similar to Hood from that perspective.

Then I look at the management team. I spend a lot of time trying to understand whether, if I’m making a big bet—not just a trade, not just “Oracle’s cheap, I’m buying it here”—I’m going to trust Vlad or Alex Karp with a lot of my money. Ultimately, they’re responsible for figuring it out. So, I spend time on that, and it’s obviously paid off.

Yeah, I love the strategy as well. You have to take a different mindset. One of the things I had to educate myself on is what my time horizon is for a trade.

Am I in this because momentum is hot and I want to be in for a week? Am I trading the chart? Am I trading the company? Am I trading the ticker, or trading the coin, whatever it is?

With the Hyperliquid trade, it’s like, “Okay, cool. I think it perhaps can be worth X% of all trading volume.” You’re in this thing for the long haul. Or Hims just had a sick announcement from RFK, and whatever’s happening there, I’m in this for the next 48 hours. It’s a completely different process.

I think you covered it very well. What about your portfolio, and maybe more specifically, your current portfolio strategy? How often, when you’re buying a ticker, are you doing that versus, “Oracle looks cheap. I’m just going to take a stab at it”? Not to say you did this with Oracle, but I know you mentioned it. “I’m going to take a stab at Oracle because the chart looks good right here.”

I’ve been trying to get better at technical analysis because I do think it’s a vital tool for being able to trade these assets.

I have cornerstones in my portfolio, which are the things you never sell—the things that should be the basis of multigenerational levels of wealth because you got them early and you’re holding them. Maybe you sell calls against them, maybe you hedge a little bit here and there, but with Robinhood, I have a massive Robinhood position.

I sold covered calls, which is a strategy for generating a lot of premium before the stock gets to a certain level. Robinhood was at $120, and I sold covered calls a year out at $100, so they were in the money. Robinhood went down to $60, and I was able to close those covered calls without feeling a lot of pain. If I didn’t have those, it would have decimated me.

That was just the responsible thing to do, but it ended up working out. Palantir, Robinhood, and Nvidia are kind of the cornerstones of the portfolio. Recently, over the past year, Amazon has entered the portfolio.

Meta has entered into the portfolio. Zeta has entered in. Oracle, which is a trade now, is kind of a thing that should be an investment. Nebius is in there. Amcor is in there. Grab is in there.

I've got some of these names where I'm just like, all right, I'm holding them. If they're not doing anything, I might sell some calls, trying to generate some premium off them. But the goal is for these names to compound.

And what I really want to do is start to find my next Hood, my next Palantir. But it requires a lot of due diligence to find undervalued and undiscovered gems. The problem is, in a bear market—which we didn't have, but things were pretty bad—why do I need to go find the next Palantir when Nvidia is at 160, trading at 18 times, when Microsoft is at 350? So I've doubled down on doing due diligence on the companies that we all pay attention to every day because they're cheap, and paying attention to the macro versus trying to find that hidden gem. That's what I'm doing right now.

Your Nvidia trade was sick, by the way. I also know you added more relatively recently, but I heard you talk about the DeepSeek trade.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I bought the first time at 139, and 2 days later, quite frankly, the DeepSeek thing happened. That's when I had to ask myself, okay, I don't know what I just bought. I really was new to Nvidia, but I was like, oh, no. I doubled down. Doubled down. Doubled down.

And then this year, I thought I was going to stop buying Nvidia. But then the earnings we just got—where you would think the stock should be almost $300, and they take it down to 170—I was like, okay, the Street's just wrong. The Street's just being emotional here. They're wrong.

So, yeah, it's been a good trade.

I was streaming you streaming the earnings that day. It was sick.

Really?

Yeah, it was sick.

The last thing I want to ask you, topically, is where does this finance-media thing go? I mean, bro, you have emotion. You have 10,000 people watching you live. I wonder how many people at a normal time on CNBC Business are watching, and then the quality of those people compared to the quality of who's watching yours. I don't have any math in front of me, but I think it's extremely competitive. If not, I would heavily lean on your pull, your emotion.

Where does this go? How does this evolve? Where do you see it playing out as an industry or a niche? And then for you specifically?

Okay, so high-level, and then I'll get to me specifically. Industry-wide, I think it's going to keep growing. I think the TAM will accelerate for more and more people who care about this type of content. I'm seeing it in my numbers. I'm seeing it in the general zeitgeist of people who care about the stock market.

Even during the kind of pseudo-bear market we had, people are tuning into the stream because they care about what's happening. And then people want a community. The meetups that I've been doing across the country get 200 or 300 people. We come together and just talk stocks.

It's something where I realized people desperately are trying to find other people who care about investing as a niche, and it's very hard to do that. So they're using my stream and my community and my content as that go-to hub to connect with people.

In terms of the actual following from a media perspective, I think the reason I've grown is because I've stayed very humble and very grateful to the audience. Every day, I thank people for showing up. I never really try to get stuff out of people because I'm just so freaking grateful that someone's spending their time being with me.

I have people who send me videos of their kids ringing a bell, and it's so unbelievably gratifying to know that people are coming and enjoying being there—not because they're paying $50 a month for my exclusive picks. To me, I'm a creator before I am an entrepreneur.

I genuinely love creating. I think that's the reason it's working, because I love doing this every day. I love taking a chance on that cringe joke. I love using my debate skills to communicate this obscure idea about the equity markets that I can distill and make interesting. I love it so much.

I always wanted to be a musician and a performer. That didn't work out because I don't have the talent to sing or dance. So I think that dream is being manifested in this stock-market personality. Because I love the markets, that passion matches with the communication skills, and then it's able to manifest here.

So, I think for me, I'm going to keep doing it. I want to see how big it can get, and where the industry ultimately starts to go over the long term as more people care about the markets and more people want a person who's actually grateful for their time and attention—which I just think so many times creators aren't grateful for. You could be watching Netflix, but you're watching me, which means the world.

In terms of my goals specifically in the future—and I haven't even said this on my channel yet—I'm working on something. It's actually a pretty big freaking deal. I have not told anyone. I've not even told my mom or dad. I'm not going to say it here because I really don't believe in saying it before you do. It needs to become official official.

But for the past year or so, I've been working on something really important, and I am very excited. A lot of people ask me, “You've been doing media for 5 years. You have all these people. What is the point of it?” Everyone I meet wants to know, “What's the why?” And I'm like, it's built up to something.

Not taking sponsors, churning it out myself every day—it's built up to something. I'm very confident about the new thing that eventually will be launched, and hopefully it'll succeed. But time will tell.

I've been keeping the virginity of my brand in terms of it not being hurt by a call sheet logo in the bottom of my screen. They've offered a lot of money. I don't want to be a so I just want to be me. And one day, when I do release the big thing that I'm working on, hopefully it will be accepted by people, and hopefully it'll make a lot of money, too.

Damn, good luck. I'm excited. We made the right person famous.

As a personal sign-off, it's the last question, and I'll let you go. At the top of the hour, I had basically 2 minutes over. I got to ask you for personal advice.

We do a similar thing. You've been streaming for longer than I have, but you've made an incredible name for yourself. I love the show, the community, the way you've curated it, the way you approach it. Very professional. I try to do the same thing—very intentional. I think intentional is a better word than professional.

Personal advice: how do you turn it from 300 or 400 people watching into 10,000 every day the way that you do it? How do you also maintain it for 5 years? That's a very underrated aspect, because you do it twice a day every single day. I stream once a day for 3 hours, so I know how the grind is, especially when markets are slow.

It could be a little more broad-stroke, for however familiar you are with me, but what do you think?

I love that you have Polymarket in the back. So, fuck all of you.

We love Polymarket, man. We love Polymarket. Shout-out to Jake Copeland, man.

Well, you know, the important thing about this is that—and it's very important for people to understand—it is not sustainable to be a full-time content creator unless you have some support. And there is nothing wrong with having a brand or a sponsor or something, you know? There's no shade to any of these companies that sponsor people.

CNBC is freaking big in the billions of dollars from JPMorgan and J&J, selling you crazy cancer drugs in the middle of their business talk, right? So all of media is subsidized by advertising. That's inevitable. But if you don't want to go that route, then the question is just how do you survive on your own? And it's not easy, right?

It's something that all of us have to be able to get used to and be able to continue to grow. In terms of advice to you, I would say just keep doing what you're doing. Because the more and more you grow, first of all, the more your check size is going to get bigger from the sponsors, right? The more attention and reach you have, and the ability for you to have those viral moments and actually be able to tap into the zeitgeist of crypto, the more you're going to win.

Did you see the TBP acquisition by OpenAI?

Of course, bro. Of course.

You get more live viewers than TBPN. They don't get 70,000 live viewers. That was misreported. They get 70,000 impressions on their clips. X live viewers aren't real. When you have a live viewer, it's an impression that X turns into a live viewer. It is fake. I've done it.

I don't stream on X because I don't like seeing bots. It's all bots. So OpenAI obviously didn't buy them for their metrics. They bought them for essentially controlling the AI narrative, in my opinion. Those guys are awesome, but OpenAI bought them for a particular reason.

But for independent streamers like us that are growing and have a real community that's built, the only thing we can do to keep growing is nurture that community and make sure that community continues to grow.

So, to TBP’s point, they’ve made their clips go viral. The clips essentially are the product. For you, what you’ve already been doing is this, right? The clips. Getting into that zeitgeist and getting those clips to hit more and more people by having good moments in the stream, by just being yourself—that’s super, super important.

I think on the next bull run for crypto, your ability to potentially find the WIFs of the world— a lot of you guys didn’t think I knew about that one, right?

I have a friend who turned $2,000 into $1 million. I’m not even kidding. I couldn’t believe it when he showed me.

He sold it at $1 million. He got too greedy. But, yeah, your ability to do that—and my ability, if I don’t find the next stock that’s undercovered, it’s hard for me to grow. You grow by getting people interested in a new asset, and hopefully that asset does well.

It’s hard. It’s a fucking hard thing, which is why you need the sponsors. You need the brands to be able to subsidize you in the process of doing all that research, being entertaining, and getting there. That’ll be my advice: keep working hard. I’m taking the same advice.

Amit, man, I’m so happy you came on because I think that a lot of the narratives and things that you talk about, and things you’re excited about that cross over into retail trading—anyone can trade—are just very tight. You’re the man, dude. I don’t know how you do it twice a day, every day, but I’m a fucking huge fan. I think you’re crushing it. Anything else you want to say before you leave?

No, I think it’s super cool. Your community is awesome. I see everyone in the chat. It’s crazy, right? We’re interacting with a chat. Twitch is the best.

I love it. I fucking love it, dude. Anonymous faces that you just think, “Oh, Shem Pasta—I know that’s one of my OGs.” He’s right here. He was at one of the meetups; I saw him. He’s a cool dude.

It is such a special thing that you’re doing. I don’t take it for granted. I don’t think you take it for granted. Hopefully, we can just keep growing together. Can’t wait for part two, man. You’re the GOAT. Pounds are all time high—part two. Let’s do it.

Thank you, man. Appreciate it.

Much love. Peace.

Later.

Hey, we made the right person famous, man. Shout-out to Amitt.