《美元将归零》——Venice AI CEO | Market Bubble 第5期

Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show about investing in yourself, where we feel an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday live on twitch.tv/fazebanks. I'm also live on Twitter and I'm joined with my beautiful, handsome co-host, Ansom.

I just broke it down to them. They really like the idea of the $10,000 vibe-coding thing. I kind of broke it down and gave them all the information they needed. We obviously don’t need to spend $10,000 on an app like this.

I think I’m trying to do this. I just wanted your thoughts on it and why we’re doing it.

Yeah, this is cool. I think we got the first few episodes down pat with the run of show and getting the content, but we really want to do a better job of building the community around the show, too.

We want our viewers and everybody who’s interacting with and watching the show to be able to participate and add value to it. Everybody’s vibe-coding right now, and there are a ton of people working on their projects. This is a small project that we actually need and that will make our show better.

We want to combine all these different chats in one place so you guys can see them on the screen, and we can read and see everything that’s going on. So if you’ve been working on Claw Code, working with Codeex, take a shot at this. There’s $10,000 up for grabs. It shouldn’t be that hard to figure out.

We could have done this ourselves. But exactly like you said, that’s the whole point. We’re trying to create an environment where you guys can come build shit. One person is going to win—we’re going to pick the best one—but we’re likely to stay in contact with the top 10 people.

If you show promise and some sort of talent in this realm, then we’ll stay in touch, because we’re going to want to do shit like this. We talked about K trackers with Trump, Jensen, and Leupold. We’re going to talk about some of that shit in this episode, but a lot of how we’re going to produce the show, and the vision for the show moving forward, has to do with vibe-coding and AI. Obviously, that’s where our heads are at.

A lot of the extra information we have is bare-bones right now, so we want Market Bubble as a community to be as informative as possible and have as much extra stuff as possible. We’re going to keep adding things you guys can get value from.

1. Why Bitcoin is crashing

I actually really like the Bankless site, guys. I don’t know if you’ve seen it. It’s pretty sick. They have a ton of different news on there and letters that they put out. It’s designed really well.

Keep in mind, we’re building this shit from scratch.

Literally from zero.

On that note, a lot has happened. We skipped last week’s episode. I updated the preshow and my chats about why, because Twitter loves to make it all about how I’m the worst guy ever. I was running around and panicking because my viewers weren’t what I wanted them to be, when in reality, you were sick and obviously couldn’t show up.

You’re in your head, bro. I don’t know why I thought they were coming for me. They’d be coming for you. It’s because it’s free. It’s just free, bro.

I got blamed for Bitcoin crashing. I literally got blamed for Bitcoin crashing. I have to show you this.

Well, look at this tweet. I have to show it to you.

“Champ Banks Bitcoin.” Let me find it.

Yeah, right here. Look at this shit.

The fucking photo they attach is fucked up, too.

Dude, it’s brutal. They use this picture every fucking time. Please, guys. Please.

Please. Anything else, man? Anything else?

If you listened to FaZe Banks and bought Bitcoin, you’re down 44% today.

By the way, when the fuck have you ever known me to shill Bitcoin? I don’t even talk about Bitcoin.

Yeah, you don’t.

That’s been my biggest issue for a while.

I don’t know, man. We’re over here on this side.

Also, down 44% today? When the fuck was it down 44%?

They don’t care, brother. They don’t care about the nuances of it. They couldn’t give a shit less.

On this side, as you can see, as the graph articulates, we’re up. We’re up big time in crypto.

Listen, guys, if there’s one thing I understand about this market—if all I’ve ever understood about this market—it’s: don’t fade Ansem. Listen to what this guy has to say.

You’re blowing up right now on Twitter in a very bizarre, weird market. You’re getting 4,000 or 5,000 followers a day. It’s fucking insane. It’s because you deserve it, brother, because you have really articulate and intelligent things to say as it relates to markets.

Like I just said, Ansem’s up 115%. He goes five for five. It’s more like nine for nine, by the way.

They didn’t catch a lot of the stream. In episode 1, we got clowned because you said you owned no Bitcoin or Solana, but rather, we were positioned in HYPE, Zcash, and VVV—the only fucking three tokens that seem to be doing anything in this market. They’re the only three tokens that aren’t crashing, and a couple of them are pumping.

The discrepancy between a portfolio that holds Bitcoin and Solana evenly distributed and a portfolio that has held these other three evenly distributed is 115% in 1 month. That’s fucking ridiculous, and you deserve all the credit in the world.

I know I get flamed a little bit in the replies on Twitter for glazing you, but it’s authentic. It’s real. You’re my quant love. Don’t fade this man. Listen up.

I appreciate it, brother. I appreciate you. In crypto, I’ve done really well with pair trading. Pair trading means that if you’re looking for one asset as your highest-conviction long, you also look for one asset as your highest-conviction short—something you think is going to underperform and something you think is going to outperform.

There are reasons we talked about earlier on the show for why I thought Bitcoin wasn’t going to do as well, why I thought Solana wasn’t going to do as well, and, on the other side, why I thought HYPE and Zcash kind of had—

Someone in the chat said, “Blowing bubbles on it.” That’s insane.

That’s good.

I’m also getting a weird ring in my ear right now. Do you have an alarm? It sounds like a fucking—

Yeah, do you guys hear that?

It might be my phone. I’m probably getting an alert. I can’t hear that. I can hear you sharing your screen, but I can’t hear my screen.

Yes, I can hear your screen.

That’s bad, by the way. That means things are happening. That’s a TradingView alert.

By the way, we’re using that one. “Blowing bubbles on it” is facts.

“Blowing bubbles on it” is fucking hard.

That’s fucking—

We can talk about why Bitcoin isn’t doing well. Should we talk about that? Why? I think everybody who’s anywhere near crypto right now—which, by the way, if you’re in crypto in 2026, you’re a fucking psychopath.

So everybody in chat, as well as us, we're in this together, for better or for worse. But, yeah, how do you feel about Bitcoin? What's going on with Bitcoin? Ansem, please tell the audience.

Yeah, I think Bitcoin's weakness is going to continue. Honestly, a lot of the weakness this past month has been people's concerns with Saylor. If you guys know Saylor and MicroStrategy, his company is essentially a vehicle for buying Bitcoin, and then the shareholders benefit from the premium at which MicroStrategy trades relative to how much Bitcoin they hold in the underlying.

The issues that they've run into recently: they've issued this new form of preferred shares called Stretch. On the MicroStrategy shares, when they would issue those shares to people, get cash for them, and buy Bitcoin with them, they didn't have to pay any dividends out to people. But with these preferred shares, they have to pay a 12% dividend on the shares. And so there's about $1.7 billion in annualized payments that they have to pay right now on those outstanding shares.

But the way that they pay people back these dividends is by either using their cash reserves—which right now they have $900 million on hand, which covers about 6 months of their payments—or they can sell Bitcoin, or they can issue more of their common stock, which is MicroStrategy.

So Saylor was like, “We're going to sell Bitcoin just a little to ease people's concerns about us having to sell in the future.” When he announced he was going to sell—

People were like, “What the fuck? Why are you selling Bitcoin?” Because he never sells Bitcoin.

So he sold 32 Bitcoin, to be clear, which—

You know, is a drop in the bucket compared to his entire holdings. For $2.5 million. But how much did it actually cost him, bro?

So, right now, when he sold the 32 Bitcoin—which was May 31, I think—Bitcoin was trading around $75K. So right now he has $55 billion in Bitcoin, but before he sold, he had about $63 billion in Bitcoin. So he lost $8 billion on a $2.5 million sale.

Wow.

It's fucked up. I mean, the concern is, going forward, how are they going to pay the dividend for these people? And if people think that they're going to have to sell Bitcoin to do so, then obviously they own, I think, 4% of the total Bitcoin supply. So if they're sellers and not just net buyers now, that's a huge difference from what's been going on in the past few years since he started buying.

The ETFs have also had a ton of outflows over the past 2 weeks. I think it's around $4 billion in combined outflows in the Bitcoin ETFs. There's a lot of people who are underwater now. I think when Trump won the election, Bitcoin was trading around $67K, went up to $125K, and now it's back around $63K. So everybody who bought since late 2024 is now underwater. You have a ton of overhead sellers concerned.

So that's the why. That's the long of it. Yeah. Where do you think it's headed? Where do you think Bitcoin goes from here?

I think we're at a really key support level right now: $60K. I don't think $60K is going to hold. I think you're going to see a high-volume sell-off, probably with some longs getting liquidated.

In this range over the past 4 months, there's been an accumulation of open interest, and that hasn't been cleared yet. Typically, when you have open interest accumulate in a range, it's either going to break up or it's going to break down. When it breaks up, you will typically see shorts get liquidated.

It broke up—it broke above its range high around $78K for a little bit, a couple of months ago—and then broke back down into the range. Now it's trading near the range lows. So if it breaks beneath the range lows, you're going to have a lot of long positions that have their stops under $60K get liquidated, and—

You're bullish. You tweeted something along the lines of, “You expect a massive liquidation event soon. Your gut tells you that.”

Bearish, but bearish.

Is that—did I say bullish? My fault. My fault.

Yeah, bearish. Yeah, I think I would expect it to happen in the next couple of weeks, maybe sooner. I'm wrong if Bitcoin gets back above $7K. That's when I'm wrong, and it's probably going to be fine.

But I do think $60K is not going to hold. I think you're going to see a sell-off in Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, and some other tokens as well. I do still think the ones that we mentioned—like HYPE, Hyperliquid, Zcash, and VVV—I do think those are still good holds. I think they're going to get pulled down with the rest of the market, but I do think they're going to recover and still do well.

And then there's probably a good spot to enter these as well, in that case.

Yeah. Actually, should I pull up my charts? Let's see.

Brother, I don't know. The timeline has been pretty grim. I'm seeing Bitcoin's going to fucking zero.

Zero? I don't know. But, bro, the thing is, why would you not just wait until the Saylor situation resolves itself before buying? Think about everybody who's just like, “Well, we see he might have to sell this $55 billion worth of Bitcoin. How else is he going to pay these people back? Why don't we just wait until that shit figures itself out, and then we'll buy after that shit figures itself out?”

Bitcoin buyers are very patient. The OG, OG Bitcoin holders, they don't need to rush into buying, especially the people who've been buying since it was under $100. But, yeah, let me see if I can share my screen on HYPE. I think HYPE is by far the best position you should be trying to enter here. Let me see if I can share.

HYPE, really good. It's the best product in crypto. We've been saying it since episode 1. I mean, it's just—

Yeah. So this is Bitcoin, the fucking $60K level. Hopefully this shit holds. Hopefully I'm wrong and this shit holds, and we don't see some long liquidations here. But if $60K gives on Bitcoin, I think you're going to see a lot of people get liquidated underneath $60K, and then that's going to pull the rest of the market down.

For where I would buy HYPE, it's already down—let's see how far it's down. Yeah, like 10% or 11%; it went to 15% down from the highs. I think the best buy opportunity that you're going to get, if it goes really deep, would be between $45 and $50.

I think this prior high here around $64K is another big level. It's already testing it here. And then I like this area as well, this higher low, which is like—

And listen, for the viewers, I think it's important to understand why I feel like the combination of you and I is so strong in terms of coming to conclusions. Obviously, the way Ansem processes, comes to his conclusion, and builds a thesis is with TA and charts like that. I know this is way above my pay grade, and that's why we have you.

But for me, even from the outside looking in, why do I like Hyperliquid so much? It's just these little, basic things that I've noticed in the way trends work, and that's kind of what fires my brain up. I don't know—Hyperliquid's been pumping. I believe it made new all-time highs just yesterday, right? $75?

Yeah.

As Bitcoin is crashing—

As it's on fire.

Yeah. And I saw you tweet something along the lines of, “I've never seen that in 9 years.” You've never seen a major pump through a Bitcoin crash. It's appropriate to call it a crash, and I think this tweet kind of perfectly sums it up: I've never seen that before either.

Just to display that level of strength while Bitcoin is crashing, for me, the dumb, left-curve thought process is, yeah, imagine Bitcoin pumping—imagine it happening in reverse, moving the other way, pumping 50%.

Over $100. We go over $100 in a day—immediate $400, fucking infinity. This shit is just—because it is—it's a flawless, fantastic product, and cream always rises to the top. Hyperliquid's the Nasdaq, right? That's what they're doing.

100%. I think crypto is maturing now in a way that you have businesses with real revenues attached to them, and a token attached to those revenues, that are kind of separating themselves from Bitcoin, ETH, SOL, and the other majors.

Because if you look at the stock market, you wouldn't buy—or wait to buy—Google until gold is going up. Bitcoin is like the digital-gold version in crypto. The reason that Bitcoin's correlation to the rest of the market was so strong is because crypto was a very new asset class, and Bitcoin comprised so much of the market cap.

Back in 2017, every altcoin on every exchange was paired with Bitcoin. They weren't paired with stablecoins. So you had to look at the alt/BTC pairs whenever you were trading these altcoins, and the goal was always to accumulate more Bitcoin.

But now that you have businesses operating on their own and not related directly to Bitcoin, I think you're going to have situations where crypto protocols do well regardless of what Bitcoin is doing, which is what's happening with Hyperliquid. We're seeing that their success isn't even tied directly to crypto. I think 40% of the total volume on their perp exchange right now is coming from stocks and commodities.

They're enabling trading on all assets. What they want to be is the blockchain that houses all of finance, and that's not just crypto. So it makes sense: if revenues are up and to the right, users are up and to the right, and volumes are up and to the right, the product is still doing well regardless of what Bitcoin is doing. I think if you look at how retail is trading stocks and crypto right now, that's only getting more popular. And if you think the regulatory environment in the U.S. is also going to get a lot better, something like Hyperliquid has a ton of tailwinds in that way. I think there's just going to be more people trading and more people speculating, which is going to be a great tailwind for Hyperliquid.

The price of Hyperliquid flipped the price of Solana briefly for a day.

The first episode, it was like $40 and $80, right, or something like that?

Insane. And we called it to flip, by the way. First episode. Production, bring up that Polymarket market.

Yeah.

Hyperliquid to flip Solana. We were, of course, by the way, talking about price. What is this? This is an FDV.

This is FDV. This is the—no, circulating—this is circulating market cap.

Okay. What do you think the odds are? Do you still take Hyperliquid here, given that it's at 16.5% by the end of the year?

I think at these odds, it's a great trade.

It's a great trade at the odds.

Yeah. You make 5x, a little over 5x, your money if it does. I think what people are discounting here is that SOL could go down while HYPE goes up, which is kind of what's been happening. I think Solana right now is around a $40 billion circulating market cap.

So it's making progress in 2 ways rather than just 1.

Yeah. They both aren't going up together, and one is trying to outpace and catch up. Solana is also going down right now. So I do think that's a good trade to make on the odds market.

Exactly. So, yeah, the rest of crypto—where are you at with crypto right now? How do you feel? What are you holding? What's the strategy moving forward? What's going on with the rest of crypto?

I've essentially been talking about it on the show. I've been bearish on Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL. I think it's a lot more difficult to manage shorts, but I've been heavily short those in addition to the spot bags that I hold. I've talked about Hyperliquid, and I still think that's a good spot hold. I talked about Zcash, and I still think that's a good spot to hold. VVV, I also think, is a good spot to hold. Last week I talked about NEAR. I think NEAR is also going to benefit from the privacy narrative.

So, yeah, those are my 4 right now. I think it does make sense to derisk some if you're up and in profit on those because, like I said, I do think this liquidation event is likely to happen. If it doesn't, you can just wait until Bitcoin comes a little bit off the lows, so you're a little bit safer there. I still like those 4.

The trades I've been taking—some of them have been public in this competition. We talked about it last—was it not last week, because I wasn't here, but 2 weeks ago?

Bring it up, guys. Bring up the leaderboard or share your screen.

Yeah, I got it.

Yeah.

Yeah, we talked about it 2 weeks ago. Everybody was like, “Yo, Ansem, I'm going to cook you in a competition.” So we set it up: $25K to start, a $25K balance. You can trade anything—perps on crypto, perps on stocks, perps on commodities. And I'm in first by—

By a fucking landslide.

By a landslide.

2. The $25K to $90K trading comp

Yeah. $50 bands. Oh, you're up $63K. When did the competition start?

The competition started 2 weeks ago.

2 weeks ago. So you're up $63K, starting with what, $25K?

Yeah. I'm at $90K right now, and I started with $25K.

Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you? What is wrong with you, bro? What is wrong with you?

Every trade that I've taken, I've been talking about on the show, literally.

Take a trade. Every trade. And it's public, too.

Copy-trade me—or don't copy-trade me if you want to.

I can't get over it because people want so badly for this show to be like, “If you listen to this show, you're going to get fucking smoked.” You're a fucking animal, brother. Again—

I can't be more transparent. I can't, guys. Numbers do not lie. Again, the VODs, everything—this little chart with all the tags—

Hey, we do have the tags. We have the vlogs. We have the timestamps. The timestamps are literally to the second, brother. To the second. You can see where this fucker was making these trades down to the second.

That's fucking funny.

That is lit. It's insane, brother. It's insane. You deserve a victory lap. I mean, to be up a smooth 4x, to grow a $25K portfolio up to 100 bands in 2 weeks in this market, is mind-boggling. I need to update my dashboard and the way that I trade because it's too janky. I need you to just literally mirror and copy what the fuck you're doing, because I'm just like—

The hardest part with taking trades is that it's not easy to just one-click take them. You have to move your money from this wallet to this wallet, set it up on this exchange, or do this bridge to that. That's the problem. It makes it a lot harder. It's brutal.

Wow, man. My tall, handsome co-host.

Lit, man, bro. Lit, man. Lit.

That's insane. When is Erik coming on? I'm excited about that.

Yeah, probably in about 30—

30 minutes.

30 minutes.

Okay, cool. So you and I are running for—oh, yeah, okay. 30 more minutes. That's perfect timing. Anything else to wrap on the side of crypto? I think, just to articulate the way that I'm reading it, I hold HYPE right now. I think the move for me is—

To hang tight. If it drops off a little bit, maybe find another place to put some more money into.

How quickly, in the event that it happens, what are your price targets in terms of where to enter for HYPE, VVV, and Zcash?

HYPE, I would say the mid-$50s is probably where you're going to get in. If it goes really deep, then I would say $45 to $50 is the ideal spot. It shouldn't go beneath $40. That's my invalidation. That was the level when the Coinbase announcement happened, and that's when the main run-up and breakout started. My invalidation—where I think I'm wrong on HYPE continuing its uptrend—would be below $40.

For VVV, I think the worst case is around $10 to $12. Most likely is probably around the $14 to $15 area. And I think Zcash is $350 to $400 as my worst case for Zcash.

But, yeah, I agree. I do think HYPE is going to be a lot higher. That's my highest conviction. I think it's going to be higher later in the year, and I do think the trends with users, volume, and everything else are going to continue to keep going up.

Just in terms of the timeline, how quickly do you think they recover to all-time highs or break all-time highs from these levels—

After the liquidation event happens?

Yeah.

I'll probably say for the leaders, a couple of weeks—2 or 3 weeks.

Wow. Okay. That's someone like me, who has a little bit of USD laying around, maybe trying to find a Zcash bag at $400.

Yeah. And if it does happen, it's probably going to be quick. I don't recommend trying to knife-catch it on leverage, for sure, unless you're really going to be locked in on trading it. What I do recommend is setting some limit orders to buy spot at different levels. You typically don't want to put them all at 1 spot, because if you miss by a tick, you're going to be fucking pissed. Spread out your limit orders in different areas, and if price does sell off while you're fucking sleeping or something, some of your limits hit and you get some entries.

Lost chat.

Yeah, I think we can—sorry.

Yeah, we talked about the competition a little bit. I just want to talk about what we're going to do—not this upcoming week, but I think the week after. This one was obviously a little bit harder for people to enter. A lot of people don't have $25K to put up for the competition. So for the next one, we're thinking about how to optimize it for the most amount of people.

We're going to do a lower starting balance, probably around $1K to $2K, but we're taking recommendations from you guys on what you think. We're going to have it open to a lot more people. We're going to do a lot more prizes instead of just 1 cash prize, 1 big cash prize.

And we're probably going to do weekly prizes instead of one at the end of 4 weeks. So, if you have any suggestions on how we should do it or if you're interested, please hit us up. We're working on that right now, and it'll probably be the same setup where it's perps on stocks, perps on crypto, perps on commodities, and everything else. So it'll be a similar type of comp, just slightly different so more people can enter and get access to it.

Marcel's back on the board. Marcel's talking mad shit in the chats, bro. Mad shit. I need Mitch to move up, too. Let's see what other markets we got. PrePO. This one is pretty interesting. It looks like people are bearish.

SpaceX—actually, I was unsure if I wanted to be short or long SpaceX going into the IPO. I want to say it's next week, on the 12th. It seems like right now the consensus is that it's going to be bearish for markets and we're going to sell off into it. SpaceX is not going to do well because of how high a valuation it's coming out at. I think it's coming out at $1 trillion or $2 trillion, or somewhere around $2 trillion.

They've honestly done a lot of finagling on the status that SpaceX is going to get when it starts trading. I think—I don't want to misspeak on this—but I think it's going to be tradable in a lot of the passive flows that people have going on for buying stocks almost immediately. Elon has finessed his way to doing that. I actually should look this up—the stats on the SpaceX IPO.

My first piss of the episode. I noticed that I have 8,000 viewers on Twitter. I'm new to streaming on Twitter, so everybody watching on Twitter right now, I appreciate you guys. I can't see your chat; I can only see the Twitch chat, and I lost that for a second.

But again, we have that competition that's going to aggregate all the chats, which is cool. Obviously, Ansem has his own chat. You're live on Kick right now.

Yeah, I'm checking. It's actually lit. I'm checking it right now. I haven't been looking at it.

3. Solana, World Coin & copy-trading Trump

Cool. Cool. We can't look at shit. We're streaming in 7 different places. You can't look at all of them. It's fucking insane.

Somebody asked me about Worldcoin. Worldcoin has been the strongest coin, actually, the past 2 days. The Worldcoin thesis is very simply that you have Sam Altman, who's the co-founder of OpenAI, which is ChatGPT. OpenAI is going to IPO at some point later this year. They have 900 million users on ChatGPT.

Sam Altman is also the co-founder of Worldcoin. Worldcoin's entire thesis is that you're going to have a ton more AI agents online, a ton more AI systems navigating the internet, and you're going to need a way for people to be provably human. What they're doing with the fucking orb that they're having everybody scan their eyeballs into is building this network. Everybody who's on the network has an associated World ID, and then you can use that World ID to access different applications and plug into different apps.

People are thinking that if OpenAI is going to do anything on the consumer side or social side, it's probably going to be somewhat integrated with Worldcoin. Sam Altman has been very low-key about how these 2 companies are going to work together, so I would say a lot of it is speculation. Worldcoin is probably one of the most popular rollups on Ethereum right now, but it's uncertain how they're going to be connected.

You said the word, brother. You said the word.

Ethereum. No, but—

Head for the hills, ladies and gentlemen. Head for the fucking hills. That's his nice way of saying, “Absolutely not.”

Somebody in the chat asked about memecoins, and the main one I want to talk about is: Is Solana done for?

No, Solana's not done for. I don't think Solana's done for, but Solana does have things that they need to fix before it bottoms and before it trends again.

Last cycle, Solana was discounted by everybody after FTX. Nobody thought it was going to come back, and they had a really strong core of hardcore believers on the chain and hardcore teams on the chain. They fixed a lot of the tech issues that they had during 2021 and 2022. It was by far faster, cheaper, and more performant than Ethereum and the other L1s. So once activity did start happening on Solana, price reflected that and it appreciated really well.

Right now, the issue that Solana has—I think, one, is the inflation and tokenomics issue. It wasn't as big of an issue before, but now that you have a business like Hyperliquid that directs so much of its revenue directly back to the L1 token, people are looking at the other L1s that have a ton of supply overhang and thinking, “Why would I buy this rather than buy something else that has a much better demand-supply imbalance?” So I think they're probably going to have to lower the inflation on Solana.

The second thing I think Solana needs to do is compete much better on perps. They need to compete with Hyperliquid on the volumes there. Bulk Trade is one of the teams working on a new perp exchange on Solana. The other team, Phoenix Trade, is also working on a perp exchange on Solana. I think those 2 are going to be very key if they're going to compete there.

They need other apps to have breakout success outside of Pump.fun. The memecoins can't be the only thing doing well on Solana if it's going to succeed as an L1 chain. You're going to need apps in AI, apps in consumer, apps in finance—all these other different areas where you're going to need breakout success. That's when I think Solana will start to turn and start to do well.

Price-wise, I do think it's going to go lower from here, but I'm bullish on Solana long term for sure as it relates to crypto in general. I mean, apart from those 3 spots—3 or 4 spots—you articulated earlier in the show.

I just feel like it's kind of where people should not really be looking right now. I had a weird little anecdote. I pay close attention to things like this, and I really sit on them and try to figure out why things like this are happening.

3 or 4 days ago, when Ethereum broke $2,000 and hit $1,900, this girl who I've known for 10 years—a hot girl, really pretty, beautiful girl, who, like, why the fuck are you anywhere near crypto?—posted on her close-friends story and was like, “Hey, buy Ethereum here. It's a really good investment at $1,900.”

I felt the need to be like, “Hey, this is really bad advice, in my opinion. Please don't do this. That's not a good idea. You should probably steer fucking clear if you're not doing this every single day. You should probably just steer fucking clear, right? Like you said, wait to see what Bitcoin's doing. Wait to see how that resolves with Michael Saylor, and then take it from there.”

An IRL friend of mine, an art dealer, some normie guy, hit me. He came up on a bag, and he was like, “Hey, should I put 25K into Ethereum that same day?” And I'm like, “Fuck, man. This shit might be...” But in my mind, it's the same kind of thought process as in previous cycles and at previous times, like around XRP.

That normie call—I don't know. It's weird. It's weird, but it was something that I wanted to bring up.

I think what happens is, in crypto, there's—so right now, something that's not as well-known as Hyperliquid: If you're in crypto all the time, you know it's a great product, but if you're not in crypto all the time, then it's less known.

When you have that breakout in attention, after stuff goes up a lot, that's when people typically start to find out about it. I think that's when a lot of people found out about Ethereum, when it was hitting $3K, $4K in 2021 and the NFTs were popping off. That's when everybody was like, “Oh, I'm rushing to buy now,” and that was the top.

What you want to be is early, before everybody who's not paying that much attention is now paying attention. That's when you want to be buying—when not that many people are talking about it.

I was at lunch with another girl a couple of days ago, and she just flat-out asked me. She's like, “I want to start investing money. I'm getting paid. I'm modeling, whatever. I want to start investing 10% to 20% of my money. Where should I put it?”

My knee-jerk reaction to somebody like that, who I know isn't going to day-to-day trade in and out of positions—she just wants to squirrel things away—was simply, “Just follow Trump. Just copy-trade Trump. Copy-trade the U.S. government and absorb information about that.”

I wanted to get into that because stocks are in a very bizarre place, too. It's feeling more like crypto. The 2 are starting to feel like they're blending together in how they behave.

I think that's a super interesting conversation, and I want to hear your thoughts on it. Like Dell—what Dell's done—like Trump, Jensen, Leopold. What are your thoughts around that?

Bro, Trump stole our swag, bro. He really did. He really did, bro.

Crypto people are the kings of buying something, holding it, and then nonstop bullposting, nonstop talking about it, and spreading the word on why it's a good investment and so on. That's how Bitcoin got popular and stayed popular. It didn't go down, even though it was at super-low prices early on. It obviously got popular with all the other crypto assets that people were super bullish on on CT.

Trump has taken this thesis—“I'm going to be publicly bullish on what I am buying”—and taken it to the stock market as the president of the United States. All of his stuff is public, by the way. You can see everything that Trump buys. He has to report it, so all this stuff comes out about what he's buying. Then he'll go during a news conference and be like, “Yeah, go buy Dell. Dell is a great company, Michael,” and then it fucking rips.

Later, they'll announce a partnership, like, “Yeah, Dell had this partnership to do something with the government.” He's very transparent about the companies that he thinks are important for the United States, which I think is cool, to be honest. Jensen also does the same thing with all the companies that NVIDIA has in its wheelhouse.

Yeah. Let's watch this. You linked me this. It's perfect. It's perfect.

Crazy. How you doing?

That's a huge stage—a long way.

Are you out of breath? You okay? I know. Let's fire it up.

He's such a champ. I love this.

I love him, too. He's the best.

There you go. Yeah, congrats on a great kickoff yesterday. GTC. You guys are off to the races this week.

I watched this last night.

GTC. Look, maybe you heard some of what I just said. We're talking about connectivity today.

The next trillion-dollar company, ladies and gentlemen.

Just like off the rip like that.

Who's he talking about, Z? I think that's the CEO of this company, Marvell.

And what did Marvell do after he said that? It pumped 20%, brother.

Like 50%, bro. Fuck.

Was it 50%?

It's like, guys, sometimes it really be that easy.

What's crazy is he did this shit because I don't even think it was when the stock market was open. It was when the stock market was closed. It wasn't even open yet. I'm going to pull it up. It's actually here.

And see, you look at this comment: “This is the dumbest reason to pump 50% in 2 days after.” But that's what it is. Like you said, they're stealing our swag. The stock market and the way it's behaving is stealing our swag. It's crazy.

But the thing is, they're a legitimate company. The reason it did well is because people already knew about Marvell. They already knew where it falls in the AI supply chain, what they're building, and why it's important. This just took it over the top. It's crazy. I'm going to pull up the chart.

The conversation, I feel like, isn't, “Is this a valid reason for it to pump 50% in 2 days?” It's more so, “Why the fuck would Jensen have to say something like that?” He's the fucking CEO of NVIDIA.

It's because he means it. That shit isn't pumping his bags. He doesn't give a fuck. He just genuinely believes that. So, if a guy like this—the number-one company in the world, the most valuable company on planet Earth—says that, it's like, yeah, it's probably a good spot to invest and park your money.

This type of information is available to anybody. Anybody can come to that conclusion and understand why that happened that way. That's why I feel like crypto attracted so many young-minded people in the first place. The average guy—it always felt like that's why meme coins were so popular. Narrative trading is valid. Chris Camillo talks about it all the time. We talk about it all the time on the show. Attention is the new EBITDA. That's facts.

You didn't need to know what Marvell did as a company to make money on this trade. I think it's crazy because it wasn't during open hours. People could have traded this on Bullpen, which is on Hyperliquid, but you couldn't trade it when that announcement happened. This was off-hours; it wasn't during the regular 9-to-5 hours. That's one of the benefits of something that trades 24/7, like a perp.

Which, again, is why Hyperliquid is such an important, useful tool, especially if you have money anywhere near crypto.

Who else? Leopold. That fucking kid. I guess he just opened up a big position somewhere.

Yeah.

I saw that. What was that?

Do you know?

I think it was NBIS.

NBIS. Here's Ellio talking about it. Should we watch this clip?

Yeah.

Yeah, let's do it. Fuck it.

We've actually been meaning to look this up. We found out that Mr. Leopold has decided to add not just a position, but his biggest position yet, to his fund. Just yesterday, we saw that Leopold disclosed a position in NBIS, or Nebius, which represented a 5.6% stake. New position, 5.6% stake—yada yada, cool. But wait, it gets way crazier. It's not actually a 5.6% stake. It's actually a $3 billion position, representing over 5% in Nebius, but it's not 5% of his fund. It actually is the biggest position in the entire Situational Awareness Fund. That's right: $3 billion out of about $14 billion, making it a 15% position.

What is it? Yeah, it's an AI cloud.

Memory. We've talked about this, right? AI memory—that being the trade. What has the market done here with this company since he did that?

I actually haven't looked at this.

I'm curious because this is a young kid who absolutely crushed it with what SanDisk is really known for. Bloom Energy was a big one. I think he hit SanDisk, too. When was this? May 29?

Yeah, it's up like 25%. It's like 25%.

Yeah, like 25%. He's fucking up. Anybody who copy-traded him is up. And it's just like, there's a couple.

Yeah, there's a couple.

That's fucking absolutely fucking nuts.

He's up almost a billion already.

I'll suck his dick, Trump's dick, and Jensen's dick at the exact same time to touch one of those.

Just one.

Even half of one, bro. Let me touch half of one.

Oh, fuck. Yeah. Yeah.

So, I guess that leads to what I wanted to get out of you in bringing up these new-wave stock calls. How would somebody start investing from zero? If a fucking girl or an old high school friend who has no experience is asking you, “Ansem, I know that you're a sophisticated trader. I'm never going to be able to dedicate the time to understand markets the way that you do or trade in and out of positions, but I want to start generating wealth for myself. I'm basically starting from zero. What do I do? What is someone to do?”

It's a great question. If I was starting from zero, the first thing I would do is figure out your profits and your expenses. Obviously, you have whatever money it is from your job, and you have your expenses that you need to pay every month. You have some money left over after that. What you do with the money after you pay all your expenses is what you start investing with.

It's the same way that you spend money when you go out to the club or spend money when you go to events with your friends. Dak and Julius just said in the chat, “Trading and investing are different things,” and I think it's relevant to what you're saying right now. It's exactly the way to think about it.

Yeah, they are, 100%. When you have money to the side, whatever money you spend for fun, you take some of that money that you're going to put in your savings and start investing with that. The way that I think you should think about it is that you have 3 buckets.

You have your cash bucket, which is your money for emergencies, like low-yield savings accounts—very low risk. Then you have your long-term investing bucket. That's stuff where you're investing and thinking long-term, like 10-plus years: stuff you're not really looking to sell soon and stuff that you think is low risk as well and is going to do well over the long term. That includes basic ETFs on the stock market, like the SPY, S&P 500-type shit.

Yeah, the QQQ, which is the tech ETF, and really large companies that have been successful. I think Google, Amazon, Apple, and Meta are a good 4 to have in your portfolio long-term. I would say that's probably 30% of your portfolio.

Then I would say the riskier stuff—the active trading stuff—I'll say 30% is probably that core group of companies. I'll say 20% is just the basic ETFs. With the other half, that's the half that you actively trade. This is where you're trying to hit your moonshots: your high-risk, high-reward stuff that you're really high-conviction in but think could 10x or do really well.

So for me personally, that’s stuff like lower-cap crypto projects. If I’m looking at a new L1, for example, Hyperliquid—if it had been trading when it dropped, it would have traded at around $4. I think it traded at $3 or $4, and I was like, “I think this is a really good protocol. I think this is going to do really well.” It’s also not as well-known as other L1s, and I’m early to this trade.

That’s something that you slam into your active trading portfolio. Or honestly, something like Marvell, Nebius, or SanDisk early on—if you spot those trends occurring, those are also trades where you think you’re early to a narrative and have strong fundamentals, but you can allocate heavily, thinking that you’re early. Those are your individual plays, but you could be out of them in a year or in a few months if they do really well, and you can rotate that into other players.

I want to talk, over a long enough period of time, about the difference in importance between focusing on compound interest versus taking huge, crazy swings and risking everything and hyper-gambling. Like you said—and like he said in the chat—trading and investing are different things.

Yeah. The way you want to think about investing is that you want to compound your gains every single year. I don’t even know what the average returns for the stock market are, but if you can hit 10%, or close to 10%, and just keep compounding that year over year over a long period of time, that’s going to grow a lot. People always discount how much compound interest actually impacts somebody’s portfolio if you continually add to it and continually do well.

On the flip side, with the higher-risk plays, you can take big shots, but those are ones where you could lose money. You want to cap your risk—how much you’re going to lose there. But you don’t want to be all in something like that because you want your slow portfolio that’s going to compound over time. If you go all in, or all-in leveraged long, on one play, then you lose your entire portfolio. You have to start from zero. You don’t want to be that.

Even if you win a fucking coin flip 3 times in a row and double your money 3 times in a row, that 4th time, if you fucking hit wrong, you’re just done. You get liquidated.

You don’t want to get to zero. You don’t want to—

You’re toast, and then you’re in a really fucking tough spot. A buddy of mine’s grandpa just died—rest in peace—and he left his family a trust for 3 or 4 people to split. He never told his family—or at least the grandkids and whoever was part of the trust—that he had this. It was a fucking $7–8 million trust.

What the fuck?

This guy worked normal jobs his whole life. I’m sure he scaled a business or whatever, but he was just fucking investing in the stock market his entire life.

Oh, wow.

Over the course of enough time, it’s like—I don’t know if you’ve been anywhere near the market in the last 2 years, but you’re fucking up. It’s the exact opposite of what’s been happening in crypto.

Yeah. You know what’s really cool? We haven’t talked about it, but have you seen the Trump Accounts?

No.

The Trump Accounts are essentially in partnership with Robinhood. When you have a kid, they get an account with $1,000 seeded from the government, and as they grow, they can compound that and invest. You can invest that money for your kid. I think it’s starting with kids born next year through 2028, I think. But that’s honestly one of the coolest things I think he’s done.

Every family now has a simple, direct way to get involved and build their child’s future. I think we’re aligned very heavily. People don’t talk about this enough. I really like this article from Smack[?]. We probably should pull it up at some point, but he speaks about how everybody’s aligned and passively investing in the most successful companies in the U.S.

You’re very incentivized to put your money in the stock market. If you’re not putting your money in the stock market, you’re fucking up big time because you’re going to get outpaced by inflation. Wage growth is obviously another situation people are dealing with, but it’s very, very important to be investing your capital, and they are very adamant about pushing this and being transparent about it.

Erik Voorhees is coming on in 8 minutes, and we’re probably going to get into these subjects—these deep conversations about AI—because he’s just a goated fucking chad AI founder. We talk a lot on the show as well about how the U.S. isn’t going to lose that race. Whoever invents AGI first owns the world.

I don’t know. I’ve seen people in the chat saying 50/50 that this shit drops off and falls off quick. People obviously have come to the conclusion that we’re in a bubble and it’s due to pop at some point, this AI bubble. What are your thoughts on whether the bubble’s going to pop? If we’re in a bubble, what do you say to the person who’s sitting there looking at it going up and to the right infinitely, just sitting on their hands and waiting for it to pop or waiting for some big downtrend to get their money?

You make no money betting on recessions. Even if you think about it—even if you’re right about a long-term recession—how does that benefit you? Think about it: If you have widespread unemployment and everybody loses their job, even if you bet on that and you’re right, you don’t really benefit that much from being right in that scenario.

Yes, you should have cash on the side to cover the worst case, but the stock market is up and to the right. It’s been up and to the right for basically forever. Yes, there’s going to be volatility. Obviously, when things are up 100× in a year, stuff is going to crash and come down, but the core companies are going to continue to innovate and continue to do well.

AI is real tech that’s really changing how people work and the efficiency gains we’re making across the board. Don’t be afraid of the volatility. If you don’t want to buy single names, I understand that, but you can also invest in ETFs, which kind of give you a cushion. They’re comprised of a lot of companies instead of just 1 individual company.

There’s going to be volatility, but the volatility is how you make money. You have to think on a longer time frame. What if you buy and then it crashes next year? In 10 years, where’s it going to be?

We do have a couple of things that we wanted to talk about with AI. I don’t know.

Again, my normie, left-curve brain tells me—I feel like if anything, it’s underpriced, just off the fact that people hate AI so much.

100%. I agree.

You know what I mean? Who’s going to invest if you really hate something? That’s the exact opposite emotion that will prompt somebody to invest in it, right? People typically tend to invest in things that they enjoy, right? Everybody hates AI. So, who’s investing in it outside of big tech and all the venture capital in the world?

The smarter people. Yeah. Right. Did you see that Harvard grad clip?

It’s insane. We have to watch this before Erik gets on. Let’s pivot a little bit to AI. I need to show you this. Have you seen this clip yet, Z?

I don’t think I have.

It’s a minute and 40 seconds. I’ve already seen it. I want you to watch this whole thing, and I want chat to watch this whole thing. I’m going to go take a piss.

AI. AI. AI.

Oh my God. Stupid. It’s so stupid. Have you tried using it? Look, a lot of other respected graduation speakers at colleges around America are talking about you guys needing to master AI for the future. Okay, I’m here to tell you the mission of your generation is to destroy AI.

What? Kill it. Who is this going to end up making dumber? Have you heard how dumb people brag about how they use AI? They always say, “Hey, did you know that AI can now read my email, summarize it, and draft a response?”

Yeah. You know who else can do that? Me. I can do that. You can’t do that.

Yeah, but the point is this shitty speech that he got prepared for this. He wrote it all himself, and he did it all himself, and it probably took him 3 days to write. Brother, I hate to be the one to break it to you because I know you just spent a whole bunch of money going through Harvard, but ChatGPT could have done it better in 2 minutes. How useless are you? You need artificial intelligence just to match me? I’m a dumbass who couldn’t get into Harvard.

Untalented people love bragging about using AI to help them draft their speeches and their scripts and their podcasts and their promo videos for UFC fights at the White House, which, to be fair, even if they had filmed that for someone in the chat saying he’s a comedian and he’s fucking around. Either way, this is a general sentiment around the subject of AI.

I just don’t know. I feel like the hate on AI is so incredibly forced. This dude’s literally hate-farming AI. Whether he’s joking or not, it doesn’t change the fact that this clip was intended to hate-farm AI, and it works the same way that I get hate-farmed on Twitter. It gets engagement. So, that’s going to continue to be the narrative until somebody prominent fights against it or general consensus determines something else.

Yeah, it determines something else.

One other thing I wanted to show you on this subject. This is crazy.

Why is he looking at the camera like that? I don’t like it.

Did you see this in chat? Look at this. This is actually crazy. This random guy posted, “I just generated an image in the style of a Monet painting.” Monet is obviously one of the biggest artists that’s ever existed—ever. The highest-selling artist.

Original Monets go for millions and millions of dollars.

“I just generated this image in the style of a Monet painting using AI. Please describe in as much detail as possible what makes it inferior to a real Monet painting.” And this is the subject matter. Brother, the comments—look at this. 7 million views, and the comments are just frying it. Obviously, this generated a crazy conversation. The quote tweets are insane. Whatever, whatever.

And this wound up being a social experiment. This is a real Monet.

Oh, wow.

The response to this was overwhelmingly negative. Gino, actually a fellow CT vet, had this to say about it. I’m going to let you watch this. I’m going to take a piss, and then we’ll bring Erik on.

This one digital artist named Schloms posted an AI-generated version of Claude Monet’s famous Water Lilies painting. The post got millions of views. Thousands of people responded, calling the work soulless and saying the composition lacked intention. The brushstrokes felt synthetic. They called it a flop.

All sorts of people weighed in on the subject, talking about how the AI piece of art was clearly inferior to Claude Monet’s work. The problem is that it was a real Monet painting. It was a social experiment. Schloms rage-baited the entire internet and exposed a real problem with discourse surrounding AI.

So I want to challenge you: Is your opinion of art about the work, or is it about how the work was created? Do we like art because of the way it looks or the way it sounds, or do we like what it represents as a form of human expression? Is it the art, or is it the author?

Art is more than the finished product. But to pretend a human using AI tools to create a piece of art negates the story, the journey, and the work in the finished product is completely disingenuous. People think that less effort or less expression goes into the creation of art using AI, and therefore it’s less of an art form than something that requires more time and effort.

This isn’t a new conversation. We saw this with Photoshop when it came out, and with music software like Pro Tools and Auto-Tune. Humans have created tools to make the creation of art faster and more efficient forever. Every time they do, the art that evokes the most emotion rises to the top amidst a bed of slop.

Slop is slop. It doesn’t really matter if it’s AI slop or human-made slop. It doesn’t matter if they’ve used these tools in that journey, because the reality is that probably 80% of the entire music industry is using it. Nobody wants to say it, and I’ll say it because I don’t give a fuck: They’re using it in their workflow. They’re using it for demos. They’re using it to grab different sounds. It’s an intuitive Splice tool, is how I like to put it.

Some people are just anti-AI, and that’s it. Fine, man. You’re entitled to have your opinion. But just know you might sound like this person who was in the comment section of the Monet painting.

The bigger problem that this whole social experiment highlights is that we don’t give ourselves time to form our own opinions anymore. We don’t even make our own opinions through experience.

Oh boy, can I fucking relate to that one. It’s insane. It’s crazy that I can’t relate to very many people about where I’ve been over the past couple of months, and I relate heavily and most closely with AI. I don’t know what that says about me or my position, but it’s like, holy shit.

Bang on the money. It’s 100% true. He’s going to say what nobody else wants to say, because if you do, you’re going to get dogpiled and attacked because it’s not the popular thing to say. It’s just much easier to go the other way, whether you believe it or not.

There he is. Wow. What’s good, brother? How are you?

Hey, guys.

What’s up, man? How you doing? How you doing? Good.

They kind of just threw you in here. They didn’t give us any heads-up or anything.

That’s how I like to arrive.

4. Erik Voorhees joins: Venice AI & "The Dollar Is Going to Zero"

You’re here. We’re here, and we’re excited to have you. Guys, this is Erik Voorhees. He’s the founder of Venice AI. We’re super excited to do this with you. We were scheduled to have you on, I think—what was it, Z?

Yeah, a few weeks ago. Something popped up, and we had to reschedule.

We’ve been excited, our viewers have been excited, and we’re really excited to have you. We appreciate you coming on, brother.

Yeah, thanks, guys. I was watching your last segment about the Monet piece. That was—

Interesting, right?

Yeah.

What are your thoughts on it?

People love to have opinions, even when they don’t deserve to, and they jump to conclusions way too quickly.

You know what, Erik? Just take my spot as a co-host on the show, because I couldn’t agree more with you, brother. I couldn’t agree more with you.

Do you want to give the viewers at home some context? I’m obviously more from the traditional media and content space—the more normie side of the internet and the world. Likely, people who have been following me throughout my career are here and probably don’t know much about you. Do you want to give those guys some context and say anything you’d like about yourself and what you’re building?

Yeah. Like, who the hell am I? Is that the question?

Yeah. Who the fuck are you?

Yeah. So, I’m Erik Voorhees. I appreciate that you spelled my name right. That’s a good sign.

I come from the crypto world, way back before the word “crypto” was used, back when it was just Bitcoin—10 or 15 years ago, basically. I got interested in it because I wanted to separate the institution of money from the government itself.

I’m a fairly hardcore libertarian, anti-government radical, which sets me at odds, I think, with most people, unfortunately. I started Venice for the same reason that I got into Bitcoin: There are important technologies that should be decentralized and should not be under the control or purview of the state itself, which I see as the greatest enemy of mankind.

And so, that's where I come from and what I do.

Awesome. It seems like a lot of your interest in crypto early on was ideological just as much as it was about the technological side of things. How would you say crypto has changed, if at all, from when you first got into it to now? I know you had previous startups before this one that you worked on. What has your experience been in crypto and in the community? How has it changed from then to now?

It's just big. It's big now. It got real big. I went to the first Bitcoin meetup ever in New York in August of 2011. Fifty people were there, and it was like the entire global Bitcoin community.

That's crazy, dude.

Yeah, Bitcoin was $5, something like that. We wondered if we were too late, because a year earlier it was $0.50, right? When something runs up 10 times in a year, it's very reasonable to think, “Am I just jumping on the bandwagon?”

Yeah.

Right. But we all liked to fantasize that maybe someday Bitcoin could hit $100. Some people thought that was a stretch, but maybe some people were willing to believe it could get to $1,000. Then some people were willing to believe that it could become the base money of the world. That's the camp that I'm in. That's the camp I was in then, and it's the camp I'm still in now.

Congratulations, man. It's been cool to see it. That's absolutely insane. One of the big highlights in my research on you and my dive into your background was the sale of one of your earlier products, SatoshiDice. I read somewhere that you sold it for 125,000 Bitcoin.

Yeah. What people don't like to do the calculations on is that I had to settle with the SEC. They fined me $50,000, and then I spent a couple hundred thousand dollars on lawyers. So, when Bitcoin was a few dollars—

How many Bitcoin is that?

Yeah.

So what was Bitcoin when you received 125,000?

Damn. I think it was around $10 or $15, something like that.

So basically what you're saying is that you didn't get to hold on to very much of it.

No, not nearly as much as people think. I wasn't the only owner, so I was actually a minority owner. I had a lot of it, but I was a minority owner. It's hard to go down that memory too far because I realize how much money I lost.

I see why you're so anti-government, bro. Fuck that.

I was very pro-government before that, and then I realized how fucked they were. It would have radicalized me if I hadn't already been fully radicalized.

Yeah.

But yeah, it's painful and horrible.

Sorry.

Yeah, it's all right. It's all right.

5. Libertarianism & the AI race

You spoke a little bit about how you're anti-government. It seems like today a lot of the biggest tech companies and biggest AI companies are basically in cahoots with the government. It seems like they're very close in their partnerships and relationships. How dangerous do you think that is going to be in the future? And what are your thoughts on open-source AI versus the closed-source labs, and how does Venice fit into that picture?

I guess I would start by conveying that important institutions of civilization shouldn't be under the control of any group of people. If you talk about something like mathematics—

Right? Imagine if the U.S. federal government controlled mathematics, and to use mathematics you had to get a license from the government because people can use mathematics for all sorts of damaging things.

Every dangerous, harmful thing that's ever been done at scale has used mathematics. So why shouldn't it be licensed? Most people would realize that would be preposterous. Of course you wouldn't want math itself to be under the control of the government, right? But things that are just as important as mathematics, or even more so in daily life, like money, people are very happy to have under the control of the government.

This is a big problem and is really the whole purpose of why crypto exists. It's the whole purpose of why Bitcoin was created: to separate these things so that money can be handled by all people equally on a neutral playing field, with no person or group of people in charge of it. That's why I cared about that. When I started getting into the AI space, I realized that we now have this additional new institution, which is machine intelligence.

This is becoming very quickly as important as money or mathematics. If it is served to the whole world by a few tech companies that do whatever the government tells them to do, then that's a big problem. I see that leading to a very dystopian kind of future. The whole reason we started Venice was to create an antidote to that—to basically allow anyone access to unrestricted machine intelligence. That is built on ethos that are very normal and understandable to people in the crypto world, but very alien to most of the people in the AI world.

Got you. That makes a ton of sense. I do think the trend we're on is very concerning, and it seems like there aren't as many people concerned that we're moving in this direction. If you're aware that this is going to be a bad thing, it's really important that you do work in that area. Everybody watching probably knows generally what ChatGPT or Claude is. Can you talk a little bit about what Venice is, how Venice is similar to these products, how it's different, and what stands out about Venice compared with something like ChatGPT?

Venice is essentially a private and uncensored version of ChatGPT. It's a normal consumer app. You can have it on your phone, or you can go to a website and use it. It's like a chatbot interface: you can ask it questions, it can generate images and videos, and it offers basically all the generative AI functionality that you would get elsewhere.

What makes it different is that it's private and uncensored. It's private in that Venice isn't storing all your prompts or the responses from the AI. Most people don't think about this enough, but everything you're talking with ChatGPT about, OpenAI is recording. Everything that you're sending to them, they have forever.

It gives me so much anxiety, actually. It's crazy.

There's so much information.

It's insane.

It's so much information, and it's an increasing amount. It's very private and intimate. Often, it's people's close thoughts, proprietary information about their business, or code that they write. It is stuff that you would have in your mind, and you're interfacing with this machine intelligence to advance the thoughts that you want. But it's all going to fucking Sam Altman.

If you're fine with that, go for it. I don't think OpenAI shouldn't exist. It's an amazing company that has innovated an incredible amount of new technology. But if that is the only option out there—if the only way people can use AI is to give it to one of these companies that saves it forever and ships it off to the government—then we have a problem.

I just want to clarify the other side of the product, the censorship piece that you mentioned. That's personally one of my least favorite things about talking to ChatGPT. If you ask it for opinions on religion or things like that—anything that's a little bit too weird to talk about, I guess, by social norms—they don't answer. So with Venice AI, I could ask it, “What do you think is the most fucked-up religion?” and it would give me some type of response.

The caveat is that in Venice, you can basically use any model that exists. You can use ChatGPT's models in Venice, you can use Anthropic's, and you can use all the open-source models. Each model is trained with different degrees of bias and censorship.

Mhm.

What Venice does is simply not add, as a company, layers of censorship on top. Some of the models in Venice are still pretty censored because the base model is, but some of the models in Venice are completely uncensored. You can play around with them and see what you like.

These are subjective, qualitative things, and in my opinion, it's very important for the pursuit of truth that people can interact with these machines freely and openly.

Yeah, I agree. I definitely agree.

A good example of this is COVID. We all remember COVID, and we remember the period when people were freaking out about it. Everyone was going online to try to research how dangerous it was, where it came from, and what they should do to be safe. What should people know about these vaccines? Were they safe? What were their risks? These were all very important questions.

The government had a very strict line there, right? They wanted you to do exactly what they said, always for the best reasons. They were trying to look out for public health.

Always for the best reasons. There was a period of time when, if you even asked certain questions, you would be deplatformed from Facebook.

Yeah, I remember that very well. Everyone should remember this. Even asking about the efficacy or the safety of the vaccine, which had been rushed through—understandably—could get you banned.

If you imagine that AI had existed back then and you went to ChatGPT and said, “Hey, tell me everything about the vaccine,” the government absolutely would have been telling ChatGPT what it could and could not say in response to that. To me, that is not acceptable.

Yeah. Wow. I agree. That’s why Venice is here. I obviously come from the world of YouTube, and I just remember the post-COVID world, when people started to wake up to what happened and uncover the craze and mass hysteria around it. They had to replatform a wave of people because they had been banned for talking about it—for example, calling into question the vaccine or talking about how it was a lab-made thing before that was proven to be a fact.

If you said that, you got banned for telling the truth. For literally telling the truth.

It’s crazy. There are a lot of things where the truth is not known for a period of time. Truth often has to emerge from discovery and debate, and if you can’t discover and debate, then you are very liable to end up with things that are not true propagating.

The government doesn’t get to tell us what’s true or not. They are the worst liars of all, and so they certainly shouldn’t have control over either human intelligence or machine intelligence, in my opinion.

Wow, dude. You’re the GOAT. I fucking love this conversation. Obviously, you were super early to crypto and Bitcoin, when it was a few dollars. ShapeShift predated Uniswap. You’ve been here forever, and you’re still here.

I guess it leads to the question—my question. Obviously, there’s something about crypto that you like. You’re building Venice AI on crypto. Why are you still here? What do you still love about it, and why do you think it aligns with the product you’re building?

Crypto is fucking cool, right? There are a lot of scams and a lot of nonsense, a lot of bullshit.

Yeah. Hot take in 2026, let me tell you. Crypto is fucking cool. I agree. Yeah, to hit that again.

Fucking cool. Every time I take out a loan from a DeFi platform versus walking into a bank, I’m like, “Man, this stuff is so cool. It’s so great.” I love it. I think it’s incredible.

I think it’s very empowering that anyone can send money to any other person in the world instantly without anyone being able to stop them. That was the promise of Bitcoin, and it’s still true. It’s true of every crypto, really. They all have at least that attribute.

Yeah.

I think that’s magic. I think that’s very powerful. Of course I’m still in it, and it’s going to take over the world. I think fiat currencies all fail. They all go to zero over time, and Bitcoin is the best form of money that’s ever been invented. So that’s why I’m here.

Venice is not a crypto company. We have a token, which we can talk about and discuss what it does, but it’s primarily a mass-market consumer AI company.

Right?

We use crypto where it makes sense. Of course, I have an affinity for all those types of systems, but it’s primarily an AI company, and most of our users are not crypto people.

I know you spoke a little bit about how crypto is cool, but that there are also scams and bad actors in crypto. I know you yourself, as an OG in crypto, have run into some of those bad actors in your time in crypto.

You had a debate about FTX and SBF before that happened, before the blowup happened—right before it happened, right? I think so, yeah. Talk a little bit about that. How did that happen?

Fucking Sam. Like most tourists in crypto, like most people who got involved for the wrong reasons, he was advocating for certain regulations from the government. He had been donating to the Democratic Party. He had been meeting with people in Washington to help shape the regulation in ways that would favor his exchange, or centralized exchanges generally.

That on its own is not so egregious. Basically everyone in business who isn’t principled does that kind of thing. But I essentially had to call him out on that set of recommendations that he was making. He had written a letter about how he thought the regulation should unfold, and I was like, “No. People should be free to use this stuff without being controlled by Washington, D.C. That’s the entire point. Get out of here.”

We were invited onto Bankless to have a debate. This ended up being an hour-and-a-half-long debate. Sam was obviously a very smart person and, at that point, seemed to be the most successful entrepreneur in crypto.

Really good investor, too. Anthropic, man. Talk about a fucking fumble in the bag.

His ultimate legacy really will be that he was the best investor of all time, I guess. I was expecting a rigorous back-and-forth between people who held different viewpoints. At that point, I didn’t know or think that he was a scammer. I just thought he was doing bad stuff.

But he was totally unhinged in the debate, and he fell apart pretty quickly when put under the scrutiny of the principles that matter in crypto.

There was a schism between someone who was building in crypto and who didn’t understand the principles on which the industry exists. It’s not hard to expose them.

Yeah.

The entire premise of this stuff is that it avoids or transcends government regulation. That’s the entire point.

Right?

The entire point. Anyone who says differently is either disingenuous or doesn’t get it. He just kind of fell apart, and he was very agitated. He was probably on a bunch of meth, also. I don’t know.

Right after that debate, a bunch of people on Twitter started piling onto him.

That’s how it goes.

Yeah. CZ said something to him, and then Sam snapped at CZ and said something really shitty about CZ, regulators, and jail time. CZ was like, “Oh, yeah,” and then basically dumped all the FTT.

That was the beginning of the collapse and the exposure of what was the biggest fraud in all of crypto. It was a crazy couple of weeks there, and now he’s in jail.

I mean, superhero low-key, bro.

Supervillain. Yeah.

You see Michael Saylor getting torn up on Twitter right now, obviously with Bitcoin. Do you think he’s kind of co-opted how Bitcoin is viewed by the public? What’s your opinion now? It seems like he has a negative association with it, or people view his association with Bitcoin as kind of negative right now.

I think he is net good. I think he is doing something fairly heroic, courageous, and novel. I disagree with a number of things he has said. He is much too pro-regulation for my opinion.

Yeah.

But I think fundamentally he’s authentic, and he believes in Bitcoin for mostly the right reasons. I’m generally a fan, although I take issue with things sometimes.

I think it’s just as we were talking about that Monet painting, and people having opinions that are not warranted. When Bitcoin’s going up, people love Saylor, and when Bitcoin goes down, they hate him.

Facts.

Saylor’s not doing anything differently in both cases. That’s not the right reason to have an opinion on him.

Yeah, agreed. Gotcha. Are you still bullish on Bitcoin despite AI? I know Z and I could probably articulate this better, but Z has this whole thesis around AI creating an environment where the U.S. dollar becomes deflationary because things become so cheap. In that scenario, how do you feel about Bitcoin? Are you still bullish?

I don’t see any world in which dollars become deflationary. The government only prints them. They print more and more and more.

What’s more likely, I think, is that there will be social pressure to give people more and more free money—all the stimmies. It’s going to be a perpetual stimmy world. They like to call this universal basic income now. It’s just communism by another name.

That pressure is going to cause infinite printing. So no, the dollar will fall toward zero, as it does. I think you could have general goods and services be deflationary. That is possible.

When measured against gold or Bitcoin or real money or any basket of other goods, I think that may be true with AI. But no, not against dollars. Dollars are going to zero.

Yeah.

That's a bar.

You spoke a little bit about Venice and how you are optimizing for the mass-market consumer. The AI labs as they exist spend a ton on training their models and doing all these other things, and they have to raise a shit ton of money to do so. How do you guys operate without having to spend as much money, and what do you take advantage of in the open-source community? I know you also want to work with other protocols to build on top of Venice. Where are your partnerships there, and how do you operate your business from that point of view?

Yeah, we just made the strategic decision that we are not machine-learning experts. We're not going to try to train models. It's expensive, extremely competitive, and we don't need to. There are all these open-source models that just rain down from heaven, so we use those. We also connect with the proprietary labs, like Anthropic and OpenAI, and we pay them for their models.

So, we're a customer of theirs.

And we just let our users choose whatever models they want in the moment. So, it's nice: whenever a new model comes out from any provider, it just benefits us. I would be very scared, actually, if I were in the business of training and building models.

It seems like a losing game, like a hard game to just keep playing.

Yeah, I wouldn't want to be playing that game. But so far, those who are playing that game well have built the biggest, most valuable businesses in the world.

So, they're doing fine.

They're all succeeding very well, but I don't want to play that same game. I don't think so.

You said that you guys are a mass-market consumer app, but you use crypto when necessary and when you think it's important. I know you have an interesting dual-token model associated with Venice, VVV and DIEM. Can you speak a little bit about VVV's role and how DIEM is used for people to use compute on the platform?

Yeah, VVV is the bigger one, the more important one, and it's quite simple. Essentially, you can stake 100 VVV to get pro access to Venice. But more importantly, as a company, we just take a bunch of our revenue, buy the token, and burn it.

I like that model a lot. I think that's a cool pattern that emerged within crypto apps: to buy tokens and burn them.

We want to take that to its extreme and ultimately try to buy every last token we can and burn it all. I think that's a really cool model, and that's what we're doing. We are a revenue-generating business, so if we grow big, we can buy more and more of the tokens and try to burn them all.

DIEM is a little more nuanced and technical. Basically, DIEM is minted from VVV. You have to lock up VVV to mint DIEM, and each DIEM that you have gives you $1 per day of credit on Venice. So whether you're using the API or the app, you get $1 per day for every DIEM that you hold. DIEM can be thought of as a perpetuity, an asset that each day gives you $1 worth of any AI model that you might want to use.

That one has been more of an interesting experiment, but we built it so that AI agents could essentially hold an asset and then get marginally free inference. We thought that was an interesting pattern to pursue.

That is interesting. So, I guess if you're somebody who uses these models a lot and you use more compute than you're allocated per day, it makes sense to have DIEM. You get to use more than you would otherwise be using, at a lower cost, I guess.

Yeah. It's definitely a speculative, interesting gamble, because the normal thing to do is just pay per request, right? That's normal, and everyone can do that. Or you can buy this capital asset of DIEM, and then you get free inference after that.

If you think that the scarcity of that asset will at least retain its value, what it means is that you can buy it today, use it for a month or a year, and then sell it. If it hasn't gone up or down, then you actually got free inference for that whole time.

So, it just changes the economic calculation.

Yeah. We thought that would be an interesting design space to explore.

It's really cool. A lot of the dual-token models are usually net negative, but this one is designed really well. I commend you guys for doing that. It's dope.

I know your metrics have been smashing up and to the right: new users, activity. Do you want to talk a little bit about the growth that you've been seeing over the past few months? From my point of view, it seems like it's honestly not that many crypto people using it. A lot of your core consumers are outside of crypto.

Our normal user is not a crypto person. Venice existed for about a year before we even introduced the token, and most of our marketing is just through the normal channels that any tech company would use: AdWords, TikTok ads, podcast narration, and all that kind of thing.

We're essentially just trying to get anyone who might otherwise use ChatGPT who doesn't want to be spied on and doesn't want to be told what they can talk about. We think that's a pretty big market, and a market that's growing as people bring AI increasingly into their lives.

We think more and more people will care about those two properties, and they are properties that the big labs can't match because they have to train models. They can't do what we're doing. It felt like a good niche to pursue, and we've found it to be a pretty big niche.

We just passed 3 million users a few weeks ago.

Wow.

We're growing 15% a month in actual revenue numbers and paying users. For people who aren't used to the crypto world, most apps don't have normal paying users.

No. No, they do not. Not at all. That's a rare thing.

Yeah. I'm sick of crypto only being in the crypto world. I feel like there are primitives in crypto and blockchain technology that need to get outside of crypto—

Yeah.

—and actually be used in the normal world. So that's what we're trying to do: build a mass-market consumer app. We have crypto as part of it, but our user doesn't need to know anything about it. They don't ever need to touch VVV if they don't want to. It's good synergy, I think, but it's a tricky balance sometimes.

I think the best-designed crypto apps are going to be the ones people use because of the product, not because it's a crypto thing. It just benefits them under the hood and makes the app a lot better.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. It seems like this cycle, as you talked about a little bit, the focus is shifting more toward apps that are really successful instead of just the L1s. We had ETH do really well, and then when ETH did really well, everybody was like, "I'm going to launch an L1," and all these L1s got funded.

I feel like the focus wasn't as much on the application side of things or on which applications were going to be successful. But now it seems like a lot of the focus is on apps that are doing well, and those are the ones driving a lot of the attention and a lot of the volume.

I'd say back in the DeFi Summer world, that was the first round of apps that were popular. That was the first time you had actually useful DeFi apps, and people would use them because they brought them utility. The token was useful because the app itself was good.

We need more of that. The problem, I think, was largely regulatory. There was a period from 2018 up until Trump won this latest time when the SEC in particular, but other regulators as well, essentially went after every crypto company they could—except the scams. They tended to avoid the scams and mostly go after legitimate projects, totally crushing them. They either strangled them with fines and regulation or scared them from ever existing in the first place.

I lived through all this, and what you ended up with was just a bunch of people making memecoins. If it's a memecoin, it's not trying to do anything economically valuable. It's more like art or speech or a joke. So that ended up becoming the crypto market.

Solana got big at the time because it had all the memecoins there, and that's kind of a dark phase in crypto's growth, I think. But recently, I feel like the climate has changed again, and people should feel comfortable building valuable products. You have to have a little courage to do so.

A couple of people in my chat are asking for your opinion on Hyperliquid, just on the subject of valuable products that generate real revenue and real apps.

Yeah, Hyperliquid's awesome. It's still mostly a crypto thing for crypto people. I know they have markets that are not crypto markets, but it's still a financial platform.

I would like to see crypto being used for nonfinancial applications, but Hyperliquid is great. I mean, I've definitely used it. It's a killer app. Yeah, I love it.

Go ahead, Ansem.

The regulatory environment has definitely changed a lot. As you said, it's gotten much better for builders in crypto. It seems like—I don't want to say late—but a lot of the attention right now is on AI and tech, and because of the bad regulatory environment, there weren't, I think, as many builders focusing on crypto. Do you think there's going to be a shift of people going back into crypto and looking to build in crypto more in the future, now that it's more supported?

I hope so, but probably not until the next crypto wave goes up. Prices have pretty much sucked in almost every crypto asset for a while.

Yeah.

People tend to follow the price, right? So as soon as crypto markets get good again, you'll get a bunch of interest back into it, and that will then beget more crypto token appreciation. But it almost requires just the whims of the market to turn before attention comes back. And certainly AI has taken so much attention and capital from the entire world, probably rightly so. I mean, it is truly a realm of magnificent new innovation. So it's good that it has so much attention, but I think it's hard for anything else to get much focus right now.

Yeah. Open-source AI has gotten a lot of attention recently. It seems like China's honestly more supportive of open-source AI than the US has been. Do you have any opinions on that? Right now, from my point of view—this may be wrong—it seems like China has the advantage in their energy capacity and in the amount of open-source models that they're supporting, and the US kind of has the advantage on chips, and our closed-source labs are better. I guess, do you see that as a risk to the market in the US? If China is able to put out really, really good open-source models, could it impact how people are looking at the US? What do you think?

I think the hypercompetition between both the closed-source providers and the open-source ones is just net good for normal people, right? AI is advancing because of this intense competition. If Chinese firms weren't involved and the open-source models didn't exist, we would just have less innovation. There'd be less competitive pressure, so I think it's fantastic.

People shouldn't look at this as China versus the US. People should look at this as: How quickly does AI accelerate, and do you have access to use it? These Chinese models bring prices down for sure, which is good for the average person. So, yeah, I see it as great that that competition is really key.

The dangerous thing is that the centralized companies in the US—the closed-source frontier labs—have a very strong incentive to beg for regulation to close off open source.

6. Sign-off

Yeah, I mean, they absolutely have that incentive. They're obviously lobbying, more or less successfully, in that direction. The question is, how far will they get? But, yeah, of course they're going to try. You're going to hear all sorts of arguments about how open-source AI is dangerous, and it's all the same shit that we heard in Bitcoin's rise, where people who want to control other people's behavior always appeal to matters of safety.

Yeah. They always use that in order to implement control.

Unfortunately, it seems to be working for AI, though, right? We talked right before you got on about AI hate being forced, and it just being this general consensus that people are forming, and that AI is evil and terrible and awful for X, Y, and Z reasons. My brain always leans more toward the cultural and social stuff. I want to get into your thoughts about that stuff, because you guys are covering all the dense tech stuff, but how do you see the future of AI and mankind coexisting? What does that relationship look like in your mind? I'm very curious about that.

AI is like a new suite of incredibly powerful new tools that man can use. The phenomenon of its development is obviously inevitable. There's no way to stop it. Man will transition into a world in which it is using these tools, more or less. There's no way to turn it around. There's no way to put it back in the box. All the good and bad that will come of it—and there will be both good and bad—is going to happen.

So on some level, you have to just be like, that's how the world is unfolding, and it cannot be stopped. There's actually something kind of peaceful in just accepting that.

We stress heavily on the show the importance of AI literacy, and that's kind of the whole thing. It doesn't really matter how you feel about it. It's inevitable. It's coming regardless. So the best course of action and the best position to take is to understand it as well as you can.

Once you realize it's inevitable, then the next thing you should do as a self-interested person is be like, "Okay, well, how can it most benefit me?" It can benefit anyone that just pays attention to it. It turns anyone that pays attention to it into a god. It makes you super powerful if you just learn it. And it's not hard to learn.

It turns you into a demigod. That's what people should be doing—not complaining about it, not trying to restrict others, not trying to tax it or destroy it, or cause all sorts of commotion. Just realize that there's this incredible new technology, and if you just bring it into your life and learn it, you will be a more potent individual.

What do you think the solution is? Obviously, AI hate is widespread. The hate that AI has, generally—I think it's horrible that that's the case for the US in the race to AGI—and I feel like the more, like you said, the more regulation and the more restriction, it's not in anybody here's best interest. Because, like you said, it's inevitable.

We could stop tomorrow. The US could literally ban AI and make it illegal to talk about or build with, and we'd pause what we're doing here, and China would just go build it, right? That's definitely a lot scarier of a scenario. So what's the solve? Obviously, the overwhelming hate that AI receives is counterintuitive.

I think the populist hate against AI has nothing to do with China versus the US or with closed source versus open source. I think the normie American doesn't really care.

"It's taking our jobs." That's what they care about. They're afraid that they're not going to be useful in the future, which is a very understandable fear. Then there are all sorts of totally bullshit fears, like data centers sucking up all your water and nonsense like that.

Being afraid that you won't have gainful employment in the future is a reasonable thing to worry about. Data centers being built near you is not a reasonable thing to think about. People have fears in both of these directions. If you're asking what the solution is for that fear, I don't know.

I don't think it's going to go well. Most people are going to stick their head in the sand and protest instead of making themselves better with this stuff. And I think there's going to be a stratification of society in which the people that learn these tools become increasingly powerful and wealthy, and the people that don't become increasingly dependent on the state.

Because we live in a democracy, they will vote themselves treasure from other people. They will vote themselves property. And we're going to go through a period where the masses are simply trying to vote away the property of people that have more than them. It's going to be a very destructive social period. And I don't know what the solution to that is, but it's not good.

Yeah. We talk about it all the time on the show. That's why I think a big part of what we discuss is trying to tell people the same thing that you're saying, because it's easy to listen to the narrative that gets popularized in the media. Depending on where you hear it from, you can get the negative inputs.

You spoke a little bit about how you're anti-government. What is your personal political ideology? How did you get your personal political ideology? A little bit about that background. I'm curious how that—

Yeah. My entire political philosophy comes from the assumption that people own themselves, that you own your body and I own my body. You use that as a starting point, and no person has the right to harm another person or to steal their stuff. My entire conception of what is correct in politics is based on those prior assumptions.

That means that a group of your neighbors doesn't have a right to come over to you and take your money, even if they all put their hands up and say that they agree to do it.

Yeah.

Just like a mob in your neighborhood doesn't have the right to steal your property. If the mob is big enough and calls itself the federal government, it doesn't change the structure here. So, yeah, I'm in a tiny minority of people who think that way, unfortunately. Most people believe the government is super important and that the government should be used to control other people's behavior.

You just use that to your advantage, right? If you're in the small minority—and I mean, it's inevitable. It's clearly going to happen. We talked about this earlier, before you even got on. It's unlikely that somebody who fucking hates AI and wants to destroy AI is investing their time, resources, energy, and money into AI. Obviously, that's where the viewer at home, if you're in line with the way that we're thinking about this, can benefit.

Well, one really pernicious effect is that, due to essentially SEC regulation, companies remain private for a very long time now. All the big AI companies, other than Google, which was already public, are still private. They're about to go public, but their first trillion dollars of gains was exclusively going to VCs, right?

It's nuts.

The average person on the street couldn't buy OpenAI a year or two or three ago.

Why? Because of regulation, right?

And that's a travesty.

It's fucked up. Yeah, we talk about that a lot on the show.

Yeah, it's fucked up.

It's fucked up, right?

And this is why crypto is much more virtuous in a way, because anyone can participate at any time, and it's really up to you to make your own judgments. If a bunch of people make bad judgments and buy the bad things, too bad. That's on them.

That's called personal responsibility. Don't go buy a fucking picture of a frog thinking it's going to change the world economically, right?

Yeah.

Do you—

Yeah, man. NFTs. Fuck it.

I know, right? Definitely not. Do you ever think that the two-party system as it exists in the U.S. is going to change to be more reflective of this way of thinking? It seems to me right now that there are people who are disgruntled with both parties as they exist. At the same time, tech is becoming a lot more important in how they shape what the government does and how they decide to do things. Do you ever think there's going to be a popular third party? I know Elon has talked briefly about a possible third party. Do you think that could ever happen?

I mean, I'd like to see a second party.

Exactly.

Wow.

Exactly.

See, I see one party. There's a big-government party, and there are the Democrat and Republican shades of the big-government party, but each of them just grows the government. Trump grew the government more than the last guy, and he grew the government more than Trump before him. Every new administration just grows the government. They all want more regulation. They all have higher taxes on net. They all spend more money.

The differences between them are a circus. They're a charade, and they keep the public pretending and debating over things while the whole government just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So show me a second party first, and then we'll talk about a third one.

That's a great take. Have you ever considered leaving? Well, I don't know. You're in the U.S., right? Have you ever considered not being in the U.S.?

Of course I have. Yeah, they'll still tax you. The U.S. still taxes you.

Not to break up the conversation, but Z, are you looking at the chats right now? Zcash—something just happened with Zcash. It's falling off a cliff right now as we speak.

Hey, I warned them earlier, not even an hour ago.

Right before, right? That one's going to be a crazy clip. It was down 25% today. What the fuck just happened, bro?

I told you. It's a lot of people derisking at the same time.

Oh, man.

Sorry to catch up, but, yeah, the—

Sorry, what were we saying? The chat was spamming.

Yeah, you're still going to get taxed regardless of whether you leave or don't leave. So you're kind of stuck in the same spot. It does seem like—I think what I've been seeing in some of my friend group is that they're very focused on forming small groups of like-minded people in their own communities.

Even though the government has its impact and can do what it does, these smaller groups at a local level focus on bringing people together who have the same kinds of communities. It seems like that's something that could happen. You could see these groups of people pop up at the local level, kind of agree on how they should be operating, and try not to be impacted by the government as much as possible.

Yeah. And there are a lot of realms where you have a lot of agency in your own life. It's certainly not okay to just blame the government and then assume that everything bad in your life is because of them. Most of the decisions in your life are your own, and you do have quite a bit of agency.

Right.

Yeah. Of course, groups of people getting together and helping each other become better in all sorts of ways is always good. That's how things should improve.

Yeah.

So everybody in the chat is saying right now it's actually an Opus 4.8 exploit. Opus 4.8 found an exploit in Zcash, and that's what's happening. The chat is spamming it. They're saying this is happening in real time. Yeah, which—we're talking about AI, so that's fucked up.

This is kind of crazy.

That would be a great rumor to spread.

Everyone's like, “Banks is stressing right now,” because I'm fucking like that. I don't know. Everyone in the chat's saying it. I got people texting me about it. I'm not positioned in Zcash. Everybody's clowning me for stressing out about it because Banks is rushing to sell Zcash right now. But I don't know. I guess it's Opus 4.8. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah.

That's a crazy conversation around quantum, AI, and crypto. I haven't found very many people who are bullish for the reasons that you are in AI and crypto, because I feel like the two kind of conflict down the road at some point. What are your thoughts around that? It's kind of in line with what we're talking about with this exploit being found. At what point does AI just fucking solve—

Okay. I think any particular crypto might be destroyed by AI for a number of reasons.

What's the main highest risk you think?

I don't know. The highest risk would be that the more complex the coin, the higher the risk. This is why Bitcoin has a lot going for it, because it's much simpler and much dumber, to use that phrase. It doesn't do all the things that these EVM chains do, which makes it a simpler machine, which makes it less vulnerable to this kind of thing.

Technology will always disrupt and eat itself. What matters to humanity is not any particular coin, but whether government money that can be debased and is forever and can be printed without stop will, over time, continue to reign, or whether actual hard digital money that machines can use freely and openly is going to win. Obviously, to me, the latter. Obviously, the latter.

So, yeah, cryptocurrency generally, very bullish. Any particular cryptocurrency, I think, who knows.

You spoke a little bit about how agents and machines are going to transact. How do you think about optimizing Venice not just for humans and people using the chat interface, but for agents? What do you think the role of agents is going to play in the future of crypto?

Yeah, so we've been doing that. The normal app is for humans, but we have an API which is primarily for agents. Our API docs page has text in it that is not meant for humans to see. If you give the URL to an agent like your OpenClaw or Hermes agent or something, it will read instructions that are meant for that agent to learn about all the resources in Venice and how to use it.

I think that's becoming a common pattern, but most of our customers in a year or two or three may be agents. I think there will be more agents than humans in the not-too-distant future. Venice is trying to make itself attractive to them. We have a full API where an agent can access any kind of AI resource that it would want. So, yeah, that's a big deal.

That's really interesting. That's really cool. It seems like—I know we had the breakthrough with the smartphone and the breakthrough with the laptop and the computer, and it seems like now we're in a spot where, since agents are getting as smart or smarter than us in how they do things, we're going to need to optimize and build devices and tools for them.

What does a laptop look like, or what does a machine look like when you're building that machine for another machine to use? I don't know. You'd have to ask Jensen Huang about that, probably.

Yeah, that's really cool.

Actually, you know, probably it's machines and agents that'll design things for each other. The human ability to design optimally for machines is probably in its twilight moments, too.

That's crazy.

Yeah, that is really cool.

Yeah. What do cars look like in the future when they're just self-piloted? Obviously, a car is perfectly designed for a human being to pilot it, but are they just little pods where everyone's facing each other? You can take a nap in it.

I'd like one with just a big hot tub in it, and you just roam around the street chilling, bro.

Why doesn't that exist yet? That's what I'm waiting for.

Didn't Soulja Boy do that? Didn't he fill up the flatbed of a truck?

He did.

Driving around Hollywood in a—

It's actually—

It's actually kind of physically very difficult.

That's a physics problem. That's a hard problem to solve.

It's a physics problem, yeah. But I'm sure the machines can solve it.

ChatGPT will tell you it's a great idea, though, and to invest your entire life and all your effort into that because it's the next—it's the next Apple.

That's funny. Is there anything right now that you're most excited about with Venice, from a product perspective? What are you guys focused on building next?

I mean, it's not really public yet, but we're working on this concept called Minds. It's essentially the idea that if you are a power user and you know how to put modules of AI systems together in certain ways, you can actually end up getting results that are better than any given model itself.

We're building a way for our users to assemble these things into what are called Minds. You can think of them like agents. You can think of them like characters that are more advanced. It's been something we've been working on in the background, and it's getting closer and closer to something we can release.

I'm very excited about it because it creates these emergent properties of AI resources.

It's one of those things where all the labs are focused on their models and beating each other's scores on the model.

Yep.

But if you actually just combine these things in creative, interesting ways, you get stuff that no model can do on its own. So I know that's a bit of a vague answer, but that's something I'm excited about.

That's alpha, though.

We have an agentic chat in Venice now, which is sort of the first primordial version of this. When you ask it a question, it's doing all sorts of things in the background that a normal model wouldn't do.

It's been cool to just be building this stuff and to learn a new industry. These tools are killer. If no new models came out for 5 years, the advances in AI would still continue apace, because people have not realized how much they can do even with the stuff created 2 years ago.

That's really, really cool. That's dope. We've talked a lot about your past building in crypto and your experiences in crypto. If you were giving any advice to yourself 10 years ago—or what would you say to somebody who's just getting started in their career or in their field? Any tips or advice that you would give them starting out, like what they should focus on or avoid doing?

Like now or 10 years ago?

Now. Right now, but thinking about what you would have told yourself 10 years ago.

I think I would realize—or I would point out—that the world is changing extremely fast now. We're on this accelerating curve that human minds are not used to understanding.

The best thing you can be doing is teaching yourself mastery of AI systems and spending as much of your time as you can learning that stuff.

Retweet, baby.

Yeah. Make yourself powerful with these tools, or you'll be a member of the permanent underclass. That's just it.

Don't save your wealth in forms of government money. The promise of Bitcoin is the same today as it was 10–15 years ago. It is a better foundation on which to build your economic life and future than fiat, 401(k)s, or any other such nonsense that government tries to put on people.

Take responsibility for yourself. Learn these things. No one else is going to teach them to you. You have to seize them yourself and take responsibility for yourself.

Wow. I mean, we say it every episode, Z.

I know. You said it a lot more eloquently than us. It's—

Yeah, quite literally. Couldn't have said it better.

Well, Erik, we have another guest coming on here in a minute. We really appreciate you coming on and spitting game. You're awesome, and your product's awesome. We appreciate you.

Is there anything else you guys want to talk about, or anything you want to—

S is actually shooting. S used to work with you at ShapeShift. He's asking us to shoot you a question really quick.

He said, “Hey, what's up?” At Venice, is it in-person or remote? Do you have a strong view on that, especially as agents are going to do a lot more work at the company and work better with context and access to all the files and conversations? And then he asked, “Are you in Colorado or San Francisco?”

Right now I'm in Colorado. I'll be in San Francisco tomorrow.

Venice is distributed, so we have people kind of all over. We have people in Australia, Europe, and the West Coast of the US. We try to get together once in a while in person because that's always nice, but we're generally distributed.

Of course, files and documents are digital, so they can all be in one place regardless, and agents can work on them. We have agents building the company, which is cool to see. Very, very sci-fi.

Our job at this point is figuring out how to make the robots build the robotic machine itself. Anyone who has seen how fast Venice ships knows it's not because we have a million people doing all this work. We have robots doing a lot of it.

That's awesome.

Yeah. Sal[?]'s basically forced everybody at the company to be AI-literate, by the way. Everybody knows how to use Claude Code. There are people who were previously just product people and now can ship code as well.

We're doing the same thing at Bullpen. We're very focused on that.

This show, too. We're only 5 episodes in, and I really need to ask you this just for myself: What percentage of the show is really produced by AI, Z, with how we prepare it and everything?

We're in lockstep. We come up with our ideas, we feed them in, and then we iterate on them.

It's getting closer and closer to a 50/50 effort, I feel like. The dream, and how we imagine it, is to eventually be able to get closer to 100%.

We have thoughts and ideas around—are you familiar with Joe Rogan, obviously, and his show?

Yeah.

You know Jamie? Do you know who that is? He sits offscreen. He's a producer on the show, and he helps with the integrity of the show. Occasionally, he'll come in and you'll hear his voice. You don't ever see him, but he'll bring things up on the screen, cite information, and pull data in real time for the conversation they're having.

We have thoughts and ideas about an AI cohost who, in real time, is fact-checking what we're saying or pulling data. You can hear them, and you can see them.

It'll be normal in 2 years.

Agreed.

Yeah.

Let me do that a little faster, bro.

You should help us build it, Erik. We see it the same exact way that you're all in. You should help us build it, because we're all in the same way that you're all in.

The APIs are available. Plug your agents into the Venice APIs, and we'll give you all the inference you want.

Cool.

Let's do it.

Sounds good.

Awesome.

Cool.

All right, Erik.

Thank you, guys. It's been a good time. I appreciate you. This was great. Thank you, bro. Seriously, thanks, brother.

All right. Have a good one.

Wow, that was awesome, bro. He's the OG of OGs.

He's epic.

He's lit, bro.

Fire.

It was really cool to hear him talk about his advice to people. It's exactly in line with what we're setting out to build with the show—why the show exists and the purpose of the show—which I'm really proud to be able to say. It's cool.

Sounds like we're hitting the nail on the head.

Yeah. Yeah.

He’s a super successful dude. He’s cool, dude. 125,000 Bitcoin, bro. And he had to fucking pay the government most of it.

No, you could hear and see the pain. Honestly, my bad, by the way. I was like, “Fuck, why did I bring that up?” I brought it up so early, and he was like, “Man, that was one of the worst things that ever happened in my life,” basically. That was the vibe.

In 2011, he sold his company for 125,000 Bitcoin.

Not $125,000. 125,000 Bitcoin today is worth how much? How much?

Let’s do—can I do a million? $10 million? $100 million? $1 billion? Like $10 billion.

Oh my God, that’s insane.

Yeah, that’s fucked. See, bro, back then he had to pay a $50,000 fine and some other random shit. He basically had to spend all the Bitcoin paying this fine.

Why? He was like, “Bro, dollars are literally going to zero.” He had already seen it happen in real time. That’s so fucked up.

For money eventually to return to its intrinsic value, right? Zero. That’s the whole idea.

That’s so fucked up.

Yeah, $8 billion today. Bitcoin.

See, I even did the math. That’s like $10 billion. He touched that bag, bro. He had that in his hand. That’s fucking insane. Yeah, I would be—

Holy shit. Is Mike here, by the way?

Yeah.

Mike’s physically here. Mike, bring his ass in. Bring his ass in. Where’s he at?

Big Mike.

Big Mike. The only guy on planet Earth who’s older than me.

Big Mike.

Wow. Bro got a collared shirt on.

Oh, I’m touching buttons and shit. I’m fucking around. I’m so sorry. Jesus Christ. Production’s going to kill me. Did I blow it, guys?

7. Mike Majlak joins

They said, “Yeah, you did.” Fuck. You’re good. You’re good. Dude, you look great.

Yeah, I put a collared shirt on for this.

I like the fit. Mike Majlak, how are you?

Yo, can I ask you guys a quick question?

What’s up?

I’m going to direct this one to you to start. When you look at my face, right—

Uh-huh.

Do you see a clown? Do I look like a fucking clown to you guys? I have been here since 12:45.

Oh, have you?

That’s time. That’s 3:40.

I didn’t know that.

I have interviewed the president of the United States. I have been on every podcast under the sun. Three hours.

Look how I’m looking on the screen. You’ve got Erik Voorhees’ fucking screen.

I’m searching around for some fault.

That’s not—

No, it’s definitely my fault. It’s not my fault, dude. It’s all me, by the way. It’s not my fault.

Blame Banks, brother. He’s—

By the way, I just want to say this: I’m sorry that you had to wait 3 hours.

Yeah, my bad, bro. I apologize. I apologize for that.

Honestly, you’re probably the reason I came for Banks, but I stayed for you. And I’ll say why: I didn’t want to be accused of being fucking racist.

I actually left the show 20 seconds into the show. You’re hate-farming, Mike. This is actually absurd.

I know. I’m not going to lie to you. I’d be pissed if I was sitting there for 3 hours. I’d be pissed.

I’d be pissed.

Everybody relax. Reset. Is it my fault personally, Tom?

No.

Why?

Thank you. It’s not yours.

And the last—no. How dare you come on my fucking show and hate-farm me out the gate? Just jumping on the bandwagon. Classic.

We did get a credit card from someone on the production team. I was brought to lunch, which was very nice. I had a nice salad for lunch. It was delicious. But they said, “Hey, the first guest hasn’t been on yet. You’re going to have to wait in the green room for some fucking green room or green room.”

It’s a fucking silent-ass 360 no-scope couch with fucking World War II, Modern Warfare 2 nut all over it, dude.

That’s fucked up.

I really am genuinely sorry that you—

I don’t give a fuck.

I apologize.

We appreciate you, though. We appreciate you coming on.

I was just watching the show and the other one. Congrats, guys, on launching the show. Welcome to Market Bubble. I’ve seen the clips. It looks like you guys are having a lot of fun here. You’re talking about important shit, and I’m happy to be here and happy to support however I can.

Yeah, you got to see this in our early days. You were part of one of the early dry runs before we even launched. How do you think it’s evolved from then to now? Do you think we’ve gotten better with the content, or what do you think?

I’ve seen clips. I just know that no matter what I have or haven’t seen, people in this space just get better and better. I’m sure you guys will be significantly improved beings in Episode 10 compared to Episode 1 or Episode 2.

I know, looking back on my early episodes of Impaulsive, obviously there have been huge upgrades since then. So, I’m sure it’ll be no different. I do have to say, this was sent to me. I have to read this.

Please do.

Let me see this. Find this. Please say this as you sit down.

The views and opinions expressed by Mike Majlak and any affiliated companies, brands, subsidiaries, employees, or representatives are solely personal opinions provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. Nothing discussed on this program constitutes financial, investment, legal, tax, or other professional advice, nor should it be construed as a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security, asset, or investment.

Viewers should conduct their own independent research and consult with qualified professional advisers before making any financial decisions. Any actions taken based on information presented are done solely at the viewer’s own risk.

Bro, can you send me that? Can you send me that?

I’ll pop it over to you.

It seems a little boilerplate, but I’ll send it over to you. Is that off ChatGPT?

No, no, no. This is from my lawyers. No, it’s not ChatGPT. My lawyer sent that to me. My lawyers use ChatGPT.

Everything I love is ChatGPT.

Listen, I’m not trying to have to get back on the phone with Masionica[?]. Okay, I don’t have to explain that one.

So, anyways, what are we talking about today?

I want to keep it more content-focused because the show is unlike any other live show that I’ve ever seen. The goal of this show is to build a platform and curate a niche audience of young men who are looking to position themselves favorably for the next 5 to 10 years.

Obviously, as we’ve seen in our heyday, a lot has changed—not only in terms of markets and tech, but in attention and the way content is distributed. Media is debatably the most important piece of this three-pronged, three-pillared thing that we’re building. It’s money.

We’ve expressed the importance of financial literacy and AI literacy, but then also understanding the attention economy and all that. We don’t really get to talk a ton about that because we haven’t had guests on like yourself. We’re more focused at the moment on interviewing founders like Erik Voorhees, and we talk about a lot more dense tech stuff.

But with you, I wanted to talk about content, how it’s changing, how you see it changing, AI, and how it all plays together. I figured a conversation between you and Ansem would be good. Like he said, you came on for a dry run and you were a mock, impromptu guest.

Yeah.

It helped us a lot. You and I have always had a great dynamic. We fucking live together. You’re my brother. I’m always happy to fucking talk to you. We talk a lot personally.

It just seemed fitting that you were the first hardcore media guest. For anybody who doesn’t know Ansem, obviously he’s getting around 5,000 followers a day on Twitter right now. He’s a market guy, and it’s likely that a lot of people watching his stream right now don’t know a ton about you. Do you want to introduce yourself to them?

Yeah, sure. It’s wild to me to imagine that silos like that exist on the internet, even to this day, after I’ve been on the internet for close to 11 years now, I think.

For anybody watching, I’m Mike Majlak, Big Mike. I’m on the Impaulsive podcast with Logan Paul. We were kind of one of the trailblazers for the podcast space as it pertains to video podcasts. We started the show in November of 2018. We’ve had every guest under the sun, from presidents to athletes, actors, and celebrities.

I have a YouTube channel of my own that’s got 2.75 million subs, and I post on it pretty regularly. I’m also a self-proclaimed cheeseburger expert. I’ve got burger chains opening. I just opened one in Dubai, we’ll open one here in Los Angeles in the next month, and then we’ll continue on domestically from there.

More than anything, I’m just a part of this scene and this circuit. I think that’s really my main claim: the network that I curate.

A lot of that stuff is stuff that Ansem is actually pretty well versed on, especially for his age. I remember I met Ansem for the first time in Singapore. We were at a crypto event. I was commentating for a company called Karate Combat in Singapore, and I met Ansem. I said, “Who the fuck is that giant black man walking through the mall?” I found out later it was just the pirate from the backrooms.

That was a revelation.

I saw him two days ago. I saw him two days ago.

But I met him there, and it seemed like Ansem's pretty tapped in on the circuit stuff. Oh, and yes, someone in the chat said Lana Rhoades' ex-boyfriend, which is also correct. That was definitely another part of the storyline.

It seems to be some conglomerate of all of those things. I'm happy to talk about content, but I'm also happy to talk about business, my personal investments, and anything like that, if that's what you guys want to dive into. I'm open to whatever. Nothing's off limits.

Cool. You want to talk about that? That's another thing that I thought you could kind of meet in the middle on this show and relate back to. You mentioned the burger, the restaurant you launched. Congratulations, by the way.

Yeah. You want to talk about that?

Yeah. I mean, listen, I rated burgers for years on my YouTube channel for my little section of the internet to watch every week. You've done ratings with me. I think we did Wendy's. We did some Krabby Patty stuff. We did a bunch of random spots, but I went all over the world.

I rated burgers in Singapore. I've been pretty much everywhere. I've rated burgers in Finland and Switzerland. Any kind of pocket of the world that I've been in, I've rated burgers there.

A few years ago, I created my own what I believe to be a 10-out-of-10 burger. Maybe it's subjectively a 9.3. You have to try it, but it is a very, very good product.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to figure out how to open stores. There's a lot of money that goes into it. There's a lot of development, standard operating procedures, and background work that happens on the business side to bring a fast-casual store to fruition.

Now we've finally been through that process. We opened in Dubai, and we've been absolutely crushing it in Dubai. Now we're going to open in Los Angeles and start doing burgers, chicken sandwiches, and so on and so forth in Los Angeles in the next month.

That's one aspect of the back end of business. Obviously, being partners with Logan and working with the team that I work with, I get looks at a lot of really incredible business opportunities. Some of them are AI-based as well.

Do you want to talk about that? We were on the phone yesterday. What did I bring up to you? We were talking about some other stuff, just some media content stuff.

And you brought up—

Who are they, and what do they do?

Rebel Audio. It's a company called Rebel Audio. It's an AI solution for podcast post-production.

For anybody out there watching this who has a podcast or any kind of long-form content that they put out, you understand the amount of work that goes into post-production. All the people behind the scenes right here understand what I'm talking about.

Basically, what you're able to do with Rebel Audio is upload a video podcast or a long-form podcast. It then translates it into every language, adds subtitles, and titles the video for YouTube. We have a native relationship with Apple and Spotify for video uploading, which really no one else has.

It auto-clips the episodes for social posting. It writes descriptions. It distributes it across all platforms. It gives you analytics and demographic feedback. It's an incredible AI-powered solution for podcast and long-form post-production. It's heavily funded.

What's the funding look like?

I'm trying to think of where we're at right now. I think we're closing 15 at—I don't know. I have to get the exact numbers.

So, an AI media company.

Yeah, I should be careful when I say “heavily funded” on a show where you interview people who have hundreds of millions of dollars.

Well, it's well funded, but it's an AI media company that's aiming to automate the process—clipping, streaming, all of it.

Exactly.

I would imagine there are probably fucking 100 other companies and products being developed with a similar effort. What makes Rebel different? This is as deep as we've gotten into it. You briefly brought it up yesterday on the phone, and I was like, “Let's talk about it on the show.”

Yep. Creator-led. Obviously, anytime you have a product like that, it's nice to have someone who knows what's happening with the product or could actually use the product being a part of the company.

The founders of the company include this guy Jared, Jingle Jared, who had a major exit with another product that he's worked with in the past. There are great relationships on the business side and just a really good product. I think it'll be cool to actually show you how it works and be able to dig into it a little bit.

Do you have it with you right now, or later on?

It's in beta.

Okay, cool. We're more than happy to talk about it. We're down to look at it. We have visions and aspirations to make this show 100% produced by AI.

Is there any chance you guys just become AI?

Maybe.

No, you can never say never, man. Never say never.

I'm ready for the chip. I'm over it. Upload me into the cloud tomorrow. I do want the Neuralink, though. I want the shit where I can just be scrolling Twitter at any point without having to pull out my phone. I can just look at the timeline. I do want that.

You know what I would tweet if I could tweet without looking at my phone for 2 minutes?

Yeah, you already do.

If Elon gave you the option to get Neuralink right now, or even paid you or something like that—made it very attractive—

I wouldn't need to get paid. I would pay to do it.

Easily, bro. Because if I could use Neuralink and look at charts and look at Twitter all the time without having to pull up my phone or my laptop, bro, I would literally be trading and doing that shit 24/7.

Do you have any worries about potential outcomes of putting a chip into your brain?

Yeah, but I feel like we're going in that direction.

I mean, guys, we're one step removed anyways. This is one step removed from the chip in your brain. It's already in your fucking brain. This thing already dictates and runs everyone's lives. I don't know. It's already—

Which is kind of messed up because, as someone whose life, financially at least, was saved by this thing—or at least made dramatically better by it—I really, really despise this thing.

I think, other than a few things that we have in the world, it's probably the most dangerous, helpful-slash-dangerous invention that we've ever had on the planet. It's just an all-consuming box with a bunch of corporations vying for your every second of attention as the last frontier of ownership in the world.

Banks is on a podcast right now. He can't even put his phone down right now.

No, no, it's fine.

Malcolm's like, “Ask Mike about this.”

Oh, I saw that. I would like to talk about that, but it's actually really scary when you think about it. We have given our life, our time, our energy, and our attention to this box.

A box that gets in the way of our time with our family, our mother at a birthday party. You find yourself scrolling on Twitter, finding out what's going on with X, Y, and Z.

KSI and YK Osiris?

Yeah.

What happened? What happened?

It was a fucking horrible joke.

But what I'm getting at is, I would love to push the people watching this—as counterintuitive as this is to my business model and to the attention economy that I very much play in—to put this thing down as much as humanly possible.

I know you've started to do a really good job of it this year. Your mornings are very phone-free, and I'm envious of that. But Neuralink, to your point, seems like another step in the direction away from any kind of detachment from this technological integration that we've seen over the past several years.

Yeah. No, I guess you're right. I do value my mornings. I wake up every day at 8:30 in the morning, and I don't touch my phone for the first 30 minutes. I go outside, I breathe, and then I fucking walk a mile home. That's my day.

I only check my phone after I've spent 30 minutes off it. I hear what you're saying. The internet—we were just talking to Erik about how good things are going to come with AI and bad things are going to come with AI. Obviously, good things have come with the internet, and bad things are coming with the internet. Again, we're of the opinion that it's inevitable.

In my mind, if I can get the chip now, be ahead of the curve, and take advantage of that, I become quite literally a superhuman before everybody else. There’s obviously a massive opportunity there.

The chip, bro. I’m telling you.

You’d be curing cancer and shit. Yeah, you’d be going nuts.

I do agree. It’s super addictive, though. It’s super addictive to be cognizant of whether you’re being a consumer—purely a consumer—or also a producer. I think you’ve done a really great job of turning the attention that you’ve garnered by being online, and people being on the internet 24/7, into investments in great companies, into your own business, and into all these other opportunities and things.

For me, I’m on Twitter because that’s where I get a lot of my information. That’s where I learn how to trade and where I learn about markets. I’m on TradingView 24/7 because that’s where I’m looking at charts and all that shit. So I definitely think you have to be aware of whether you’re using your time online wisely, and you definitely should have time away from it.

But you can’t avoid it. You can’t not be on the internet. That’s just not a thing.

Yeah. I think the question at the end of the day comes down to: Are you using your phone, or is your phone using you? No matter what, it’s either both or one, because your phone is always going to be using you. It’s always going to be scraping data, learning about you, and paying corporations.

But are you using your phone in a way that benefits your life? To me, as the elder statesman of all of this at 41 years old, it’s a bit sad to see the way that a lot of things have gone.

There are a lot of young men watching this program right now who have been bred and have matured in a time of utmost competition. They get online every day, and if they’re in a downswing in their life, having some trouble, dealing with an addiction or a breakup, or going through a bad part of their job journey, they’re dealing with a level of competition that we’ve never seen before in our lifetimes.

If you aren’t a very mentally strong individual at a young age right now, that can infect you and really affect your mindset. That sucks, dude, because there are a lot of really good, strong men out there who are being battered down by this online competition. They’re seeing Adin Ross purchase a $40 million house by clipping his toenails and chewing on them on stream, and Lacy farting into a microphone and getting paid endless amounts. They see this stuff, and it’s very discouraging.

Hopefully, it’s inspirational to the right people—the people who say, “Okay, this is what’s possible.”

But it’s certainly created an environment of ultra-competitiveness that breeds a lot of hatred, too.

It’s very Black Mirror-esque.

Yes, for sure.

We bring that up a lot on the show, and like you said, it does breed hatred and toxicity. It is very hypercompetitive. I don’t know—the way that content is distributed and information is shared, from streaming to clipping, the way that you see people farming each other in real time—that’s what the human-to-human relationship looks like today, more so than ever before.

Before the internet existed, before clout existed, before being able to post a tweet and make thousands of dollars existed, your relationship with other humans was just your relationship with those humans. There wasn’t a giant audience of an infinite number of people to chime in on it, engage with it, or disengage with it. It’s fucked up.

It’s fucking weird, bro.

Well, you used to be able to reach your audience.

People hate me and you for being old.

Listen, that’s just a good example of it. I feel like it’s an easy thing to farm and poke at. We joke about it, too, and I know it doesn’t bother you.

There was a time when it did. I think I’ve made a shift over the past several months to really understand that the attention economy is not dependent on positive or negative sentiment.

It actually typically leans negative.

This is what’s fucked up about it: The internet and the current internet audience reward negativity.

They love crazy, and they love negative.

The internet has decided that it’s a good time to bring the N-word back. I personally don’t agree with that. I suffer in a lot of ways because I don’t try to out-crazy my competitors.

This environment is quite literally giving birth to people like Chud the Builder.

I was going to say, what’s the guy’s name? Chud? I just fucking shot somebody. It’s like—

I skipped the Chud the Builder reaction. I mean, what do you say about something like that?

What happens with things like this, too, is that you have the internet reaction, which is a very closeted, keyboard-behind-the-keyboard reaction from the type of people who comment on everything, versus the reaction of people in everyday life.

You go out to a supermarket, and 99% of the people there see Chud the Builder and say, “Yo, get this guy out of here.”

You go on the internet and find a group of very introverted, unfortunate people who rely on likes and comments to bolster their very sad, low-self-esteem lifestyle.

That’s true.

These are the people making negative comments on YouTube videos, podcasts, Twitch streams, whatever. These people aren’t making negative comments because they dislike us. They dislike themselves. That is the easiest way to put it. Do you know how many people there are?

I don’t think it’s always that deep, though, to be honest. There’s definitely an archetype of human who that 100% applies to, and that’s really dark and very sad. I see you engage with people like that when you’ve identified them to be like that.

But I think there’s an overwhelming number of people who are quite literally just trying to play the game and who actually don’t care. They’re not investing.

Let me ask you this question, because I agree. What is the outcome of the game if they’re not making money, if not to justify a self-esteem issue? You know what I’m saying?

It’s the drug. Somebody in the chat called us 2 former cokeheads. They didn’t call us 2 former crackheads.

Crackheads.

I started YouTube early enough to not even know that you could make money on it. Whether I knew it was happening or not, the comments, the likes, and the engagement do something to your brain.

As a kid at that time in my life, I was very lost. I had no idea what I was going to do in the future. This was a pocket I found myself in where I was getting praised, positive engagement, positive feedback—any sort of feedback. It made me feel connected to people, which is what we all yearn for at the end of the day.

Whether you’re getting paid or not, a kid who maybe doesn’t have a shit life outside of the Twitter community they’re in all day gets 500 likes on a tweet and feels good about himself.

People like me.

Yeah, they feel like they’re a part of something.

Yeah, 100%.

Obviously, humans historically, way before the fucking internet, yearned for that. They’ve always been desperate for that and needed that.

But I feel like the sad part about that transition is that we went from a place where, like you said, you were making YouTube videos before you knew you’d make money. I started making YouTube videos before I knew there was any money in it personally, as well.

We did it because we thought it was funny. We thought it was creative. We thought it was cool. There was a creative aspect to it, no matter how feeble that creativity was at the time. It was just trick-shotting or this thing or that thing, and we loved it.

This is why I do it. It’s harder than ever to break through that, but not to bring them up in a negative way: The Core Boys, what they did, what we did with FaZe, I think kind of broke through to all-new levels of success in the streaming sphere because all that stuff was kind of ignored.

I’ll give them all their credit and their flowers in regard to their amazing streams.

There’s a reason why I wanted to work with them in the first place, right? They ignore all that as much as humanly possible. They stick to themselves. They’re in a closed environment with themselves, and they’re all friends.

They love each other, and they just run around and act goofy, like you said—farting in the mic, whatever—but they’re having fun, and it’s a positive environment. It’s a nice space to be a part of. It’s not just kids farming drama and hate constantly.

I don’t know. It’s interesting. What’s the fix? What’s the solution? Is it getting better, or is it going to get worse? What do you think?

I mean, I don’t know. How does it really get worse? I guess it can always get worse. I do want to say, you know, I talk about Lacy farting, but I love those guys. We’ve had Lacy and Ron on the show. All those guys are great.

I think what they’ve learned is that this internet thing that we do is not all that dissimilar from WWE. That’s the one way it’s really changed from where we started. Some of us are the babyfaces, the good guys. Some of us are the heels.

There’s no point in trying to change the audience’s mind, because they don’t want to change their mind. They dislike Banks. Banks is X, Y, and Z. Some of them say, “Banks is X, Y, and Z.”

You look at Twitter today, and in certain communities, it definitely feels like all of them. I’m the villain of this.

And guess what? You’ll go on a show. You’ll go on someone else’s show—Adin’s or Impaulsive or whatever—and in the comments it’ll be, “W Banks. W Banks. One of the originators.”

What I’m getting at is this: I think the new-age creators, the core boys, are starting in the place it took us a little while to get to, which is that we don’t care if you like us or don’t like us, as long as you’re talking.

As long as that chat is lighting up. “Mike, Logan Paul’s [censored], Lana Rhoades’s ex, cuck, 41-year-old loser, brokie, big nose, 3.75-inch dick-eater, ass-muncher, crackhead.”

3.75 what? That’s how big your dick is?

Whatever. As long as the stats light up.

It doesn’t matter. All you should hear out of that is cha-ching, cha-ching.

I heard out of what you just said, “What does that mean?”

Why are you hung up on that part?

Because he just told us his dick was 3.75. I think it was a Freudian slip. I don’t think you meant to say that, but you’re just like—

No, I did. It’s what Clav rated me on his looksmax. I thought you asked how big your dick was.

No, no, no, no. That would be 2.7, bro.

Wait, I have a question. You were working in content, doing content in the attention economy, before people even called it the attention economy. I personally never thought of myself as a creator in content. I was just trading and tweeting, and then my account blew up, and I was like, “Now people want to hear what I have to say about shit.”

I’m curious how you thought about doing good content, how you went about being successful in that, what worked, and what didn’t work. I guess I’m curious what that profession looks like—how you optimize for being the best at getting attention and doing that.

I don’t even think that I have optimized.

You don’t even do it yourself, really?

Dude, I swear to you. If you put me up against—I really mean this, and I say this to people all the time—I don’t consider myself to be a content creator. I consider myself to be a guy who is walking through this life, and every once in a while, a camera turns on.

If you ever talk to any person that you meet on the internet, in real life, whatever, who says, “Oh, I’ve met Mike in real life,” it is a 100% one-to-one match from the content you see to me in real life. I’m going to spend as much time with you on the street as I’m spending with them on camera today.

I’m going to talk your head off to a point where you want me to leave, even if you’re a fan, okay? And you’re going to say, “Wow, he’s actually a fucking humble, nice person who took the time out of his day to meet me.” Because I am so fucking blessed. So fucking blessed to be here, to even be alive. To even be alive, bro.

Everything that I’m doing—I wear clothes that are given to me by brands. I live in an apartment. I own no jewelry. I don’t have any—I just mean, no, I don’t. I’m trying to say the opposite of that. There’s no, like—dude, I just feel like just a guy who was given a really good opportunity and has made the most of it.

I’ve worked really, really hard. I travel 150 to 170 flights a year. I am—

I have to say, as somebody who lived with you, somebody who considers you way more of a friend than a colleague or somebody before that—all day, you’re my fucking family. I consider you family. We lived together for a year.

I can speak to the fact that your mind isn’t in optimizing the machine like that. I actually used to get so fucking triggered because this kid’s making six figures a month and editing his own YouTube videos. He’s sitting there using the fucking mouse and trackpad, cutting shit, and it takes this fucking kid six hours.

“Don’t leave me alone. I’m editing the video.” Go fucking pay somebody $200 to edit it, you psychopath.

I still do.

The fact that you still do is insane.

I give an hour and a half of footage to an editor.

Oh, go ahead.

No, I was just—just to close off that point. You do work incredibly hard. Maybe you’re not always working smarter in regard to the content stuff, but you do work incredibly hard in respect to just being all-in.

Everything you’re saying right now isn’t just for the camera. Being grateful for this is what you and I talk about and connect with 100% of the time. This is what I feel most grateful for. This is what holds it together for me every day.

I wake up and I’m genuinely just grateful to be alive. Even when I think about the worst parts of this—it’s no secret I’m at an all-time low in terms of general sentiment. I get fucking hate-farmed to death just off the basis that FaZe didn’t work out, right? It just is what it is.

Anytime I get in my head about it or read a fucking mean comment, I’ve been at this shit for 15 years now. It’s not as hard for me anymore to take a step back and go, “There are fucking people who have to work three jobs at minimum wage, and they work their entire lives away. I wake up every day, and my job is to be me. My job is to get to work on what I want to work on.”

The show is a prime example of it. This wasn’t the smartest thing for me to go and do. I joked earlier in my pre-show, “Guys, if I wanted to attract 50,000 viewers, I’d be in Miami right now at Collabs, fucking spitting on shit.” That’s a bad example with you, honestly.

Yeah, I haven’t been there yet.

With you and Adin, we should do it. We should livestream it next week and just see what we could do—actually go try to farm mainstream. You get the point that I’m making.

I really do respect your effort and how consistent you’ve been through the time since I’ve known you, dude. You literally repaired my relationship with Logan and Jake. I’ve done that for so many. I mean, dude, that’s one thing, Ansem, too, that’s really hard for me.

I deal with a lot, just like everybody else, on the misconception side and the misunderstanding side of who I am as a person, what I do behind the scenes, what I do for my content, and the amount of work that goes into my life and my content.

But the difference with me is I don’t really try to battle it. I just understand that, bro, there’s a lot of stuff that people aren’t going to understand. To the 20-plus-year-old audience, I am 41. They haven’t waited in lines at Lake Compounce. They haven’t lived on the streets. They haven’t been through all the different portions of life and seen all the things, lost friends to overdoses, or had to fight felony charges.

Then you go to the other flip side of it and you’ve been to some beach club on the Red Sea with the sheikh, or opened a burger restaurant in Saudi Arabia with Turki. It’s very hard for me to find relatability in the audience, and I try my best to do it.

The time it works best for me is when I showcase the fact that I still am just a guy struggling. That’s what I see. I think you’re one of the more relatable guys, crackhead.

I don’t know. It’s so weird, because I find myself—it’s so bizarre. These same communities of people that felt like they worshiped me, I would step onto a stream and see, “Aura. W Banks,” whatever. These same communities have completely fucking turned against me, and now it’s the exact opposite.

It’s so bizarre, because I think about even three or four years ago, when I was on drugs, when I was a fucking fat drug addict. I was the worst version of myself.

8. Getting sober & meeting Logan Paul

I hated myself. I had imposter syndrome every day. I had positive feedback loops, and people like—

Yeah.

It didn’t—it didn’t really mean anything, and they didn’t actually know me. Most of them didn’t actually know me. Today, I feel the exact same way, but in reverse, where I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been sober for [__].”

You get called it all the time, too. People try to throw the drug addict thing in your face.

I’ve been hardcore sober off alcohol and drugs for 3.5 years. I’ve never been a better version of myself. I’ve never been more proud of myself. It’s just so weird because I’m finally in a spot where I feel deserving. I feel motivated. I work extremely hard as well, and now the feedback loop, at least on Twitter and in these communities, is overwhelmingly negative. It’s just a little bit weird.

Yeah. I mean, listen, it is what it is. To my point about the blessing that I feel—and I know you could share this sentiment with me, too—it just seems to be part of the game. It slightly sucks because these people don’t know that if I ever met them in real life and they came to me with an issue or a problem, I would be the first person to reach my hand out and give them time and energy from my life to try to help them solve that problem.

But it is what it is. The people who have learned that about me have learned that I have that type of stuff to offer to people who are dealing with mental health problems.

444, still FaZe Banks and Mike Majlak in everybody’s follow. Love that guy. Go. Here’s another $1,000 for you. Go hit up Ace up 444. Get his USDC Solana address. You’re getting $1,000 from me.

Nice.

Because he’s just been here from the beginning. He’s still Mike Majlak in my phone.

Everybody’s phone.

Yeah, Mike. That’s how much I broke into the industry. I don’t know if you knew that, but he was just a marketing rep for Lovesac.

I was at Lovesac. I was working—I listen, for the people that know this—

Okay, I’ll explain it to you. When I got clean in 2010, I had been battling a heroin addiction for 10 years, from the age of 16 to 26. OxyContin, opiates, crack, Xanax—everything you can imagine. I had a terrible time in my early years.

Glad you’re—glad you’re sober, bro.

Thank you. By the miracle that is God, my mother, my probation officer, Ellen Ferrari in Milford, Connecticut, the court system, the rehab system in Connecticut, state insurance, and the work that I put in, obviously, I was saved and was able to get another chance at life.

When I was 26 or 27, I started getting into shooting with cameras and drones, and created a little toolbox that propelled me to this job at Lovesac, which was a furniture company that made these giant beanbag chairs and couches. The haters would say that Logan Paul plucked me off Skid Row and gave me a chance at life while I was still addicted. Everyone likes to cut down anybody.

That’s not quite the story.

I was working a 6-figure corporate job. I had stock ownership and a 401(k). I already owned a condo in Connecticut at the time.

A PR agency called me and said, “Hey, there’s an influencer that wants to talk to Lovesac.” This was in 2015. I said, “What the [__] is an influencer? That’s ridiculous. Who are they influencing?”

He texted me and said, “Hey, what’s the deal with these Lovesacs? Can you [__] on me?” That was the first thing he said to me. As a person who was fresh in the corporate world and didn’t really know how to respond to a celebrity or influencer, I had to take a second and hold a beat to really think about what to say.

I said, “You know what? My whole life, I’ve risked it. I made it to where I am now. I’m going to roll the dice.” I said, “Yeah, the covers are machine-washable, so when you come on them, it’ll wash right out.”

He wrote “haha” a million times. From that text message, a friendship was born, and he realized, “Hey, this guy’s kind of funny.”

We met at Travis Pastrana’s house on a Lovesac brand deal, maybe 6 months after that, shot our first vlog, and the rest is history. We started vlogging together. That’s cool.

We started businesses together and started the podcast in November 2018. I’ve had every guest under the sun. To kind of boil down that whole story, you never know where taking a step in the right direction in your life is going to lead. Even a tiny step—whether it’s cutting down, giving up, thinking more positively, or picking up a new hobby, which is something that I urge people to do so badly.

I got interested in shooting photos. I bought this piece of [__] Canon camera, and I remember I was at the Milford Duck Pond in Milford, Connecticut, shooting pictures of ducks. A girl came up to me and said, “I have a wedding in August. How much do you charge for wedding photography?”

I said, “Well, I’m one of the foremost wedding photographers in the city, but how much do you propose giving me?”

She said, “I’ll give you $750.”

I took these terrible photos and got paid.

Wait, hold on. You went and shot a wedding?

A wedding? Yeah.

That is actually insane. That’s such a crazy side quest, bro.

Wholesome MMP Mike Majlak Photography[?] shot it. It was branded on every photo. I took the $750 and bought a DJI Phantom 1 drone.

By the way, this is where you lose me. The fact that you took $750 from this poor lady—you’re a [__] scammer and a [__] piece of—

Yeah, I can shoot a wedding. I just [__] do that.

As anybody who knows, $750 for wedding photography is nothing.

Yeah, it’s cheap. Very cheap. Very cheap.

I took that money and bought a DJI Phantom 1 drone. I started flying it at the beach, over buildings, and just recording stuff with this Phantom drone. This is a true story: a girl came up to me and said, “Hey, I would love if you could do videography.”

Shout-out, Josh Abdo. He’s talking about how he wants you to know that he just got sober a couple months ago for 2 years. For some reason, the mod timed him out. I don’t know why you timed him out. He’s just in the chat. I wanted to say his name because he got timed out for no reason.

Shout-out, Josh, bro. Keep it up.

He’s been great. Sorry.

All right. I bought this drone, and she asked me, “Can you fly the drone over my wedding?” I said, “Sure. I’m actually the foremost drone expert on cinematography in Connecticut.”

She said, “Well, how much would it cost?”

How much, by the way?

$3,000. I was the first person to ever fly a drone over a wedding, and I followed the groom and bride down the aisle.

Anyway, all this is to say: pick up hobbies, try new things, and just don’t give up. That’s really the biggest thing. My life was such a dark place at so many times. I was living day to day. I was in jail. I was in rehabs. I was in detoxes. I was at the methadone clinic, waiting in line with people who had lost every bit of hope they had for their lives.

I kept hope alive. I always tell people, if you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, [__] crawl until that light comes back. And it will.

It resonates with me so heavily, Mike. We’ve talked at length about everything, especially from the time I decided to get sober and do exactly what you just encouraged everybody at home to do. Obviously, I will die on the same hill as him.

When I lost my dad, that was the thing in my life that prompted me to get sober. I don’t think I ever could have gotten sober without that happening. Even right now, or at any low point in your life, the move is always to respond with something in line with that. Give it a point. Ask yourself, “Why is this happening to me?” Change it from “Why is this happening to me?” to “How can this happen for me?”

That’s the frame of mind I’m in right now with everything, and that’s something I’ll prescribe to for the rest of my life. I thought about things in terms of, “I don’t want this to happen in vain and for no reason, so I’m going to change my life. I’m going to change my habits.”

My dad died young due to X, Y, and Z reasons. I took a look in the mirror and was like, “Holy [__], I’m headed down the exact same route.” I got hardcore sober then. I’ve been sober for 3.5 years, and now I’ve progressed all the way to—

That’s a beautiful story, by the way. All jokes aside, the photography stuff is [__] amazing. It’s awesome.

I’m a big walker now. I walk at least 5 miles a day. I’m outside in the sun all day. I’ve never behaved like this in my entire life. I journal all day, every day. People clown me for it and joke about it, but it really holds me together. I often say, for the people watching at home, that I have found my routine to be my religion.

And for me, that really holds me together. If I don't get my steps that day, or I don't do the journaling stuff, or I don't wake up when I promised myself I would wake up, then it starts to fall apart. I feel like it's totally in line with the idea of sobriety. One day at a time is the best piece of advice you could give to anybody. Everybody watching this has the opportunity to wake up and be their best and give their best effort for that day, right? Even if you're a fucking heroin addict, you can get through if you really fucking try; you cannot do heroin that day.

You start with that, and you do it that day, then you do it the next day, and then you do it the next day. Over the course of a long enough period of time, you're doing 10,000 steps a day and eating healthy. You blink, and you're down 40 pounds. You're at 10% body fat. You fucking feel great. That success and that feeling compounds over time, and before you know it, you look back and you can't even recognize who you used to be. You're like, "What the fuck? How the fuck did I get here?"

Yeah.

Yeah. I guess, to finalize the answer, it's just—

It's always you versus you. Somebody in the chat said it's 100% true.

Yeah. I guess I'm still evolving every day. I never know where it all goes. The thing about silver linings in life and taking positives away from negative situations is that it only works in retrospect. You don't know what the lesson is until after, so you have to just believe and have faith in the process. I know that sounds so cliché.

It's real, but it's very real.

Everything that I am, every single thing that I am today, is a result of the bad things that happened to me, or what I thought were the bad things that happened to me. I always go back and quote the Chinese farmer parable. It's my favorite story in the entire world. I bring it up all the time. For anybody who doesn't know it—wait, do you actually have a video?

We're going to watch it. Yeah.

Yeah, I think you guys should see it. It's so quick. It's so quick.

It's a short little thing. We're going to watch it right now. Hold on. How do I do this? Is this Banks' guest? This one? All right, perfect. I think this is a good one. Yeah, I've shown it to 100,000 people.

Once upon a time, there was a Chinese farmer who lost a horse. It ran away, and all the neighbors came around that evening and said, “That's too bad.” And he said, “Maybe.”

The next day, the horse came back and brought 7 wild horses with it. All the neighbors came around and said, “Why, that's great, isn't it?” And he said, “Maybe.”

The next day, his son was attempting to tame one of these horses. He was riding it and was thrown and broke his leg. All the neighbors came around in the evening and said, “Well, that's too bad, isn't it?” And the farmer said, “Maybe.”

The next day, the conscription officers came around looking for people for the army

You hit the Mega Millions—$400 million injected into your bank account. The best news ever, right? The first thing you decide to do with this newfound wealth is book a private jet for you and all your fucking friends and family to a private island. You guys are going to have the best day ever, right?

The jet takes off. Oh, no. The jet takes off, and you and all your friends and family—anybody that's ever mattered to you—die. You didn't even get to enjoy this newfound wealth. In that event, hitting the lottery was quite literally the worst thing that's ever happened in your life, right?

That's kind of the whole Chinese farmer story. I don't know. It's—

No, no. It almost gets to a point where good and bad don't exist. They don't actually exist. The relationship that good and bad have with each other is so complex and intertwined.

I imagine experiences in life happening like dominoes—one after the other, after the other, after the other. The domino that's falling right now, this conversation that we're having right now, has only been made possible because every single thing in all of our lives separately, and everybody at home in the chat separately, happened exactly the way that it did.

So it's important to remember that in the hard times, but it's even more important to remember that when times are good, too. Then you can look back and say, literally, today is the best day ever. It's the best day of my life. The only reason why it's possible for me to be standing here right now and be able to say that is because of the worst thing that happened in my life before it.

You literally owe the worst thing that happened in your life ever to the best thing that will happen after it. Does that make sense, or do I sound crazy?

That makes sense. It's all Chinese farmers. What do you got? I want to make sure we have other topics, because here's the thing with me, dude: back to me as a content creator.

Dude, put me in front of this wall for 7 hours. It'll be a ridiculous conversation. I'll just keep going, and then you multiply that, brother.

It's all you. It's all you.

Yeah. What else? I'd love to take questions from the chat, or from you, Ansem, or whatever else you got.

Yeah, but I have a ton of questions for you, actually. How the fuck do I get this shit just side by side? All right. So, production: it looks mad weird with me not on screen, just looking at you full-screen.

On my chart, bro, this shit is fucking nuking right now. But I was going to ask you: you've had a ton of highs and lows and a ton of experiences. You said you travel and take, like, 150 to 170 flights a year. What are some of your favorite places that you've traveled to or been to, and what were your favorite experiences?

Oh, man, dude.

And why?

That's a great question. The blessing that I've had to travel has been number 1. Part of it is because we shoot Impaulsive remotely, so Logan travels for WWE and we meet in random cities. But I also do a lot of stuff overseas and have been to a lot of really great places. It's one of my favorite things to talk about.

I've built this network that's almost weird to talk about unless it's with a niche audience that really loves and understands the travel world and the circuit, and what it takes to actually crush it when you go to a city. You need the right host, the right promoter, and maybe the right restaurant guide, right? I've really curated that in pretty much every city that I've gone to.

Some of my favorite places that I've been to—I really, really enjoyed Finland. I went to Finland in the middle of the winter and saw the Northern Lights. I did dog sledding. I go-kart raced against Lando Norris and Martin Garrix, the DJ, in Finland, and had this whole week with them, which was incredible.

That's fire, bro.

Awesome. I've historically and notoriously loved Australia. I love Australia partially because of the women, but also because it's just really pretty there and has really good food.

What else do I like? You've obviously spent some time in Dubai. I was in Dubai last week to open 10Burger. Dubai is a beautiful place. Obviously, it has a lot going on there right now, but I'm a big-time Europe guy, dude.

I was in New Zealand. Shout out to Jack, who mentioned that. I was in New Zealand and did a full tour there recently—the North Island in Auckland—and we'll get down to Christchurch at some time.

To me—and I know this is somewhere where Banks and I differ greatly—travel and food are a spice of life for me.

I agree 100%. Why do we differ greatly on that? I like food, and I like—

Food for sure, but I said all you eat is McDonald's.

I've always wondered—I don't know that you love it. I mean, if I were to come in here and say, "Okay, I've got investments in ETH, so I love crypto"—

Yeah, you're right. We differ. We differ like girls, or you like dudes.

Yeah.

Okay. Okay.

No, keep going. I want to hear.

I don't know. I guess it would make more sense to get more niche with specific questions, but I don't know if this is the audience for that. You know what I'm saying?

The world, to me, is a playground. There's no bigger blessing. It's also one of the reasons why I don't have the things that everyone's tried to force me to get, which are this wife and family and dog and white picket fence and rocking chair, and just die already.

I really just love travel, dude. I'm a travel fanatic. This month, I'll go back—I'm going to be in Bodrum in Turkey for the first time ever. At the end of the month, I'll be back in Istanbul. I'll do a little bit of European stuff. I was in Albania last week for the first time. Shout out to everybody watching this from Tirana, Albania. It was an incredible experience.

To me, dude, travel—

Travel and food, bro. The greatest 2 things, for sure.

Those 2 things.

I got to get the list from you—all the spots. I'm going to hit you up after this. I need—

I got you. Anything restaurant- or travel-related. I've often thought about doing something more in-depth on that. Everything I—

Everything I do is booked on points. I know exactly what seat you need to sit in on United Polaris versus Virgin Upper Class versus this flight or that flight. I could have done that whole Points Guy thing a long time ago, but as I said, my calling is helping people.

That's awesome. Okay, that was a great answer. I love that answer. You're great. Great answers.

I have another question. What's the dumbest thing you spent money on—like, blew money on?

I don't spend a lot of money, dude. I really don't.

Most fun. Oh, that's a nice question.

Those are 2 very different things. I think my answer is the same for both, to be honest.

It can be the same. It can be different.

So, the dumbest is—unfortunately, I made a major mistake. I've made 1 very major financial mistake in my career.

9. The $5M house & the cartel robbery

Or an extremely costly one.

It was a very important moment in my life. As a late-30s-year-old man, someone who had been through the ringer, if I had a $200,000 condo in Norwalk, Connecticut, I had reached the top of life. I had beaten the system, and I had made it. I could never do any better.

In 2021, I went on the market to find a $1.5–$2 million house in L.A. My eyes got bigger than my stomach. I wanted the pool. I wanted the view. I bought a house at an extremely high price point in a seller's market. I paid $4.125 million for a house when I only wanted to spend about $2 million.

I bought it, fell in love with it, and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on furniture for it. Very quickly after moving in—and I've shared this a few times, but I'll give it to you guys here—it should have been on my show, but it doesn't matter. Very shortly after moving in, I started getting broken into constantly.

One of the first times it happened, I was actually in Joshua Tree. I was in Joshua Tree with Sky Bri and Emily Willis, and everybody had taken a good chunk of shrooms on this exploratory journey through Joshua Tree. My house alarm went off, and I was able to watch this all happen, dude.

I watched these masked men break in through the back door with huge firearms, take stuff, whatever, and then leave. So I went home, fixed the back door, and got it all fixed up. Within a couple of months, I was on another trip—I was somewhere in Connecticut or something—and the house got broken into again.

This story is insane, by the way. If I ever get a chance to really tell the hour-long version of it, it is fucking nuts.

But long story short, these guys go in and take this Louis Vuitton bag that belonged to my videographer. It was the only thing they took from the house.

They took nothing else. Inside it, he had sewn an AirTag into one of the pockets. So he was still in LA. He gets on the phone with the cops and calls them: “Yo, they just broke into the house. They’ve got stuff from the house.”

The cops said, “We don’t do this whole citizen collaboration. You’re on your own. If you want to file a report, you’re on your own.”

He keeps following them. He calls them again and says, “Okay, so now they’re coming out of another house with a fucking safe. Okay, do you care now? I’m watching a group of serial robbers and you’re letting it happen.”

So now the cops get wise. They send a SWAT team and a chopper. They surround them. My videographer takes down an 8-person, LA-based robbery ring. One of them gets chewed up by the dog. Within a week of the arrest, one of them is dead as a snitch or whatever, and the rest of them go to prison.

He takes down this ring. It’s on the news. Whatever. I can’t talk about it. My team says, “Don’t talk about it. Don’t push the house,” whatever. So I patch up the door this time and get security.

I add on 12 hours of security. They come at night, when the 12 hours are over, or during the day or whatever. The next time—the third time—they come, and they take the same bag. My videographer had gotten the bag back with the AirTag. They take just the same bag. It’s the only thing they take: a Louis Vuitton bag out of his room.

What the fuck? Someone said, “GTA mission.”

Insane. So my videographer actually goes with the LAPD Major Crimes unit to where the AirTag is. I’m not going to say which very high-level South American gang it is. The police tell my videographer, “This is XY gang[?].” He calls me to tell me, and I say, “Leave the bag. No police report, no filing charges. Leave the bag. They’re invited back to my house whenever they fucking want.”

These are like boil-you-down-in-acid type of people. Okay, leave it. Leave the bag.

Cursed house. What the fuck?

The house is on the market. I put the house up for sale with a caveat in the listing: “Yo, there’s been some breaking activity.”

Now listen, this is only happening because it’s me. It’s happening because it’s me. The address leaked. There was an article that came out when I bought the house, and I’m posting stories when I’m out of town because that’s my fucking job. I have to.

Okay.

I get 24-hour security. So I’m paying $25,000 to $30,000 a month for upkeep at the house to float the house, and now I’m paying $10,000 a week on security. This house is putting me into an early grave. It’s over. What the fuck?

One day I’m in Miami and I post that I’m in Miami with my ex-girlfriend. So Mike’s yelling again. That night, I fly back to LA, but I don’t post that I’m back in LA. So, to everybody in LA—to all the crews—I’m still in Miami.

Uh-huh.

I’ve got security outside. I lay my little head down to rest. At 2:30 in the morning, I hear the fucking alarm. My ex shakes me and says, “Yo, David’s FaceTiming you.” My videographer still had access to the cameras. He’s FaceTiming her, and she shakes me. As soon as I open my eyes, I hear the alarm go off. It’s deafening. Deafening.

Do it again. Do it again.

You heard me. I get up. I’ve drilled for this a million times. I grab the Sig; it’s on the counter, loaded and ready to fucking go. I turn the laser on. I fucking take a couple of deep breaths.

I pop the door open, come down over the barrel, and get three-quarters of the way down on the fucking trigger. Now, here’s where I fucked up: I came out screaming. I came out screaming, “I’m going to fucking kill you over the trip.” By the time I come around the corner, I see the last guy running out of the fucking hole in the glass door.

Yeah, bro. You almost had them.

So they go—

They had guns, too, right?

Massive. I have all this shit on video, by the way. A lot of this video is all backed by me, you see.

You said you had security.

I’ll put the videos out when I produce a show about it and put the videos out. I come outside. My security is outside. I was scared. There were 4 of them. I said, “Brother, use your car, homie. Run, bro.”

Did you get a refund?

I said, “Bro, listen.”

The security said they were scared.

Stop. Stop. Stop. No fucking way. The armed security said they were scared? Yo, listen to me. 3 out of the 4 times they came, they came with real sticks. Sticks, bro—big-ass 40- or 50-round extensions on big-ass guns, bro.

So this security guard is probably 18 years old, making $16 an hour before taxes, and he’s saying to himself, “All right, I’m going to pull out right now.” But he left me to die. I saw him and I was like, “Okay, go chase him.” And he chased him. He never caught him.

So, end of story. Long story short, because there’s way more than that. There’s way more to the story than that.

I end up selling at $3.4 million.

Oh, you got a great price for what that did to you. You got out clean. I mean, bro, so you’re talking—

$30,000 a month for 36 months—

In the house, plus—

Yeah.

The $700,000.

$750,000.

Over $500,000. Over $5 million.

You got fucked, for sure. I just thought it was going to be way worse than that—the amount you sold it for.

Who would buy that house? What the fuck?

No, because it had nothing to do with the homeowner. It was because it was you. They were able to track when you were there and what you were doing. It has nothing to do with the whole house being fucked up. They’re fine, you know what I’m saying? So, it’s an issue that we’ve had in LA.

You see this story? People were talking about GTA. We mentioned swatting. I just thought this was interesting—it’s in my notes. The person who swatted Ned Luke, the voice actor of Michael in GTA V, has been sentenced to 4 years in prison.

How crazy is that? How do we feel about that? Banksy, you know, have you ever seen those clips from the chat?

I’m alert, brother. I don’t play video games. I just try to—

You see these videos on TikTok? Please tell me. The scene where he has to meet at Griffith Observatory, and you fly the plane into the cutscene—you know the cutscenes—and you can enter by crashing a plane, and then you just all of a sudden stand up.

Fuck you.

Somebody in the chat, back me up. Please, dude. I just thought it’d be interesting to talk about with you because we live together and we’ve been swatted together.

I’ve been swatted my whole life.

Banks, some of that isn’t talked about a lot in conversations like these—the really scary, weird, negative side of it. You’ve experienced this, too, with your mom getting hit up on Facebook, trying to get alpha on fucking coins and shit.

So weird. What’s the weirdest thing that happened to us when we lived at the house?

Alissa kicking the dogs.

No, there were so many. Dude, there were so many things.

Want to tell the Alissa story?

I mean, you got—dude, you guys obviously—

No, there was so much. There really was.

I want to go to Ansem for another question.

I have a question. You joke a lot about how you’re 41, not married, no kids—the whole shebang, the whole deal. Do you ever think that you want to do that or go down that path? And how is being single and dating? How’s your experience with that alongside the content? It seems like you’re having a lot of fun doing what you’re doing.

Yeah.

No, it’s not that. My non-desire to settle down, or the discomfort I have with it, is completely on me. It’s a result of not being real with my emotions, just not being grounded in my emotions romantically. You know, I’m out of touch with my emotions, dude. I’ve got a lot of trauma. I’ve got a lot of past shit that I’ve dealt with in my life.

My life was crafted, shaped, and evolved in the face of extreme adversity and trauma my entire life. I watched a lot of shit happen in my home growing up. That definitely shaped the way that I look at love.

My parents were extremely abusive to one another, and it was something that we dealt with as well. My relationships have, my entire life, been based in drug use, trauma, and physical abuse when I was younger. I don’t have a healthy replica of what love looks like. I never have.

I wasn’t brought into this world understanding what a happy romance or happy relationship looks like. I’ve had a lot of trouble doing it, dude. It’s not something that comes easy.

It makes me feel very uncomfortable. Yeah. I’ve had the luxury of dating some incredible [__] people—people who made sense as long-term partners—and it’s just not something that comes naturally to me. It’s something I work on. I have therapy in 1 hour and 17 minutes. I go to therapy once a week to talk about [__] like this.

On the phone. You know.

But I don’t know, dude. Girls are like—girls are a thing for me. You know what I’m saying? It’s one thing that Banks and I can relate on. We’re both 6'3" plus, [__] funny, and have money and clout and X, Y, and Z. It definitely makes the situation more difficult that it’s something I’m just really good at.

You know what I’m saying? That’s—

Well, dude, listen. When you’re someone who travels and adventures and eats and goes to places all the time and likes to have a good time, spending time with women is just something that comes along naturally with that circuit, with that scene. You know what I’m saying? So it makes more sense for you.

You don’t give yourself enough credit, though. It’s actually not true. It’s funny—the normie-coded friend that you grow up with responds like this is only happening for this person because they have money and clout. How many people do we know that have money—way more than us, way more than us—that could never get [__] in their [__]?

Dude, this was something that was happening for me when I was 16. You know what I’m saying? My entire life. If you want to talk about actually playing that girls’ game and being a playboy, if that’s what you want to do, there are upsides and downsides to all of it. People will give you a million different explanations: “Oh, it’s about money. Oh, it’s about this. It’s about—”

If you can make a girl laugh, you will win.

One word, really quick.

Yeah.

Yeah, it is that.

If you can make a girl laugh, you win. It is that simple, and I really [__] mean that, dude. You can’t—you don’t—yes. If you’re a [__], if you look like Shrek or whatever, like Shrek—I mean, clout-rated at 3.75—

I was a fat, gross drug addict, light-years out of my [__] league, dude. I’m at war with the same girls that the upper echelon are with. You know what I’m saying? If you can make a girl [__] laugh, you win.

You’re going to get fried for saying that, but it’s just a matter of fact.

We should’ve run the Mogu Mogu. What was that [__] called? The Mogu Mogu?

Mogu Mogu.

No, we can’t subject ourselves to [__] like that. We’ll do [__] like that when it’s trending, for the sake of [__] playing this [__] streaming game, but we’re not going to—

On that note, though, I’m glad you just said that. See what? Wait, what is—

Yo, yo, you thought we were getting—

Bring the Mogu Mogu pineapple.

We need, like, a [__] napkin or some [__], bro. What the [__] am I going to do with this?

Wait, where’s the clip? What’s the first— We need to watch a [__]— Bro, what am I going to do with these?

Wait, are you—are we trying this?

Yeah, we are. Yeah, he’s going to pass through.

I’m not doing it. If y’all aren’t doing this, y’all better have one over there.

We’re doing it. We’re doing it.

We’ll watch the clip. Obviously, guys, for some [__] weird reason, this—

This [__] is crazy.

This dude disagrees that you can make a girl laugh. No, don’t show it. Don’t show it. Let’s do it first.

No, you [__] show it and then you do it, dude.

It takes away from the fact that I’m going to try it, brother. The whole reason why we’re doing this is because [__] hundreds of millions of people are watching these videos right now for whatever [__] weird reason. It slightly takes away from the fact that my reaction is going to be that big, and it’s not going to hit the same because you’re going to show the video and then it’s going to look like I stole it and didn’t know about it.

You know what I’m saying? In reverse, [__] off. I could’ve said it and people would’ve been like, “Oh, [__], 40-year-old hunk still with the trends and shit.”

So what the [__]—

I promise no one’s saying that.

They might be. Not for me, either, by the way. Not for me, either.

These look really disgusting. They look absolutely horrifying, right?

We’re about to find out. I don’t know. Let’s go [__]. Let’s go full screen.

What fruit is this? Is it pineapple?

Yo, so stupid.

Yo, I’m not going to lie to you, the comments on this are hilarious.

I don’t even know.

Okay, this guy doesn’t believe that what I said about girls and laughing is true. He can’t make women laugh. I promise you.

Here’s the easiest way to put it.

That kid’s an incel. Just look at the girls that your favorite comedian is dating. If you ever want to see hot girls, just go look at your favorite comedian.

No, it’s fact.

They are. They are running.

Pete Davidson pulling Kim K is, like, the perfect example.

100%.

You think Pete Davidson is a bad-looking guy?

No, he’s a great-looking guy—

—but he’s batting light-years—

We’re talking about, on paper—you know it’s subjective, but on paper, one of the most desired women. She’s a [__] billionaire. He’s, like, you know—

The only one that he’s— I mean, bro, he’s plowed his way through the entire industry. Pete is really the go-to.

He’s the—he’s the—

The king of all.

Well, he also, from what I—

So, let’s do this. Wait, wait, wait. So, Mike—

What were you guys—

From what I heard, he has a hammer.

[__] hammer—

Piece. Yeah, yeah.

By the way, I’ll say this to the chat: that doesn’t hurt, either.

I’ll say that to the chat. I know nothing about that, you know what I’m saying?

All right, so I think we all do this one at a time. So, Mike—

This is what—now I think— You know what? Honestly, I don’t even want that to be the [__] reaction, because—

This is coonery, bro. This is crazy.

Just hold it up so they can see it.

This is actually going to be disgusting.

I think you’re supposed to do it with your hands.

No, no, no, no. The gag guy did it with the fork. He did it with the fork.

Oh, it smells. It looks so— It looks like a slimy slug, bro.

Who the [__] is laughing?

Like—

Production is dying over here, by the way.

Yo, and I might be the first person to have it with the headphones—oh, no, he had the headphones around his neck. Yo, honestly, that got kind of gross, dude. I’m not even going to try that [__].

Can you please stop saying that? No. What do you actually think? What are you actually thinking about?

By the way, just the smell—I feel like I’m going to throw up. I’m not kidding.

It’s low-key kind of gas, dude. I swear to you, I’m dead serious. It’s actually pretty good.

By the way, he knew we were doing this, and he obviously went and [__] asked chat what he had to say, because he’s farming. He’s farming [__]. I don’t know what the [__] he’s saying right now, but—

I think that was a natural response, bro. You don’t think so?

No. No, it was low-key pretty good.

Okay, well, we’ll find out.

Yo, I can’t wait till this show really makes it big and [__] you get air conditioning.

What are you talking about?

It’s so hot.

No, it’s not.

It’s so hot. It is.

It’s because you did a [__] eightball of blow before.

Whoa, dude. That’s why—

I got 7.

It’s not hot at all.

16 years coming, by the way.

16 years on June 23rd.

That’s amazing, by the way. Congratulations. Way to make it about you.

Just kidding.

Shout-out Hunter Biden, by the way. We’ve got to talk about that in a second.

All right, let’s try that. This one bite of Kool-Aid-infused pineapple is going to have more sugar in it than what I’ve consumed this week. So, [__]—looks like—

I don’t know. All right, let’s see. You know what it tastes like? You know what it really does taste like? It tastes like one of those old cruise-ship drinks. It tastes like a big [__] blue drink from Saddle Ranch with a little [__] palm tree in it, minus the alcohol.

Just say it, dude.

I’m not saying what you said.

I’m not saying it.

Yeah, but this is [__] absolutely disgusting.

Anybody?

That’s a great way to answer. Did you try it? Anybody who’s pretending to like or enjoy this is doing it for the exact same reason we’re doing it. They’re farming it. This shit is absolutely dogshit.

Yeah, try it. Obviously—hold on, hold on, hold on. It’s easy. Show the camera first, and then do it.

This shit—I don’t know what they got me eating over here. I got mad of them. I got hella chunks in here.

Is it pineapple?

Yes, sir. It’s pineapple. Pineapple Kool-Aid, bro. This is not going to be great. It’s not bad. It’s actually not bad. It’s a lot of sugar, but it’s not bad.

Bro, say it, Z. Say it. Whatever the fuck you’re trying to do.

I’m not fucking saying it, bro.

So stupid.

I’m just happy that I got— You want to know? I really wanted to do it with my burger and say it, and I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

I have a fucking headache. That shit is disgusting. I don’t know if your shit’s different from ours. Our shit’s gross.

No, it’s like 1,000 grams of sugar, bro. Literally disgusting.

No, I think—listen, if you’re going to take a bite of it and then never consider it ever again, it’s fine.

Why is his grin so big? That’s why. This is why, Zack. This is why. That’s funny.

I’ve been hitting for—

Hey, Banks.

That’s why you wanted to wait, you prick.

What?

This is a Kai Cenat meme.

That’s what everybody’s doing.

All right, wait, hold on.

Okay. I don’t watch these types of videos, unfortunately.

Can I tell you something really quick? I said that I came today because I wanted to see you, and I’m happy for you guys. Tob also asked me to be here. He’s my best friend. But I also saw you promote Adin and Rice and all that. Are they here?

They are not. It’s just you and me—the 2 oldest guys in the room.

Summer.

I’m holding a snake. Tob’s in the room, so I guess 3 of us from that screenshot.

Oh, funny.

Screenshot. Adin’s not coming.

No, Adin’s not coming. We’re going to save it for a future episode. No, come on, man. It’s nostalgia bait. If I’m not allowed to bait this, who the fuck else is? This is a real picture. This is an AI. This is who we used to live with. This is in your fucking room while you’re streaming. You used to be a streamer.

Oh, fuck, that was in my room.

Yeah, that’s in your room. Your little plaques are behind Summer—

And that bear.

That teddy bear Lana probably gave me.

Rice is so fucking handsome. It’s crazy. Look how young Adin looks. Look how fucking good you look, by the way.

Who, me?

Yeah, you look good.

No beard. No beard with—

No, brother. You look good in this.

You look young as fuck. That’s crazy.

We kind of all do, though.

Yeah, you both look young as fuck.

I look worse in this. Can we all agree? I look—

I don’t know, man. You look—

You kind of look like a woman.

I look like a fat chick. What’d you say? A woman?

What the fuck? You look like a— Look at the cheeks, bro. Look at the cheeks. Somebody said Mike looks dyslexic. How does somebody look dyslexic?

He does look kind of confused, bro. I’m not going to lie.

Oh, in that picture right now?

How does somebody look dyslexic? You were on whippets, too.

Yeah. No, by the way, I probably did do whippets earlier that day. I don’t know. But while we’re on the subject of nostalgia, let’s just go down this route: the Adin legendary stream. Everyone’s favorite. I don’t know why to this day. I don’t understand why people refer to this as one of Adin’s best streams, but—

And, by the way, just to back you up, people actually do—

Even people that fucking hate us are like, “I hope you kill yourself. I hope you die, but that one stream was fucking amazing.”

What the fuck? We’ll watch it. We’ll watch it. You’ll see.

Bring a fourth person, like a guest. It’s so hard.

Stop fucking screaming.

I’m not screaming. I’m using a whisper voice. The lights are down. There’s a fucking girl sleeping 2 inches away from us, and you’re screaming, bro. Is it just me, or is he not fucking screwed up?

See how I’m whispering?

Why are you whispering?

Where’s his ASMR? His Amouranth is about to come out.

The way you’re doing that is just loud, bro.

I’m a fucking loud person.

So am I.

What are we going to fucking—

What are we going to do? This fucking guy is 36 years old.

This fucking iDubbbz is going to come out with a guitar and start writing some freaking indie music. Bring a fourth person.

So stupid.

We do seem a little bit lighter-looking spiritually—happier.

Yeah. I mean, these fucking absolute animal demons have, like—God.

By the way, we did this for 8 hours. Notice how it’s dark.

Button-up shirts and sitting.

Okay, okay. Whisper. It’s not even a joke at this point.

I am whispering.

I’m whispering. I can’t talk any quieter than I’m talking.

No, I fucking can’t. I can’t pick a pitch, bro. Honestly—

You guys are funny as fuck.

It’s crazy. I love you.

Holy fuck.

He’s shaming me. He’s volume-shaming me, bro.

Volume.

Holy fuck, dude. This is so funny. He’s anemic, bro. He hasn’t eaten today.

He’s coming in and out of fasting.

Why would you say something like that?

Yeah, it’s fucked up. Hey, Mike, you on heroin?

That’s not the same thing.

No, you got—you got—you get it.

Yeah, brother.

Good times, man.

Wow. The good old days. You don’t even know. Listen, you never know that you’re in them, right? You never know that you’re in them. That’s why it’s important to wake up, count your blessings, and it kind of goes back to the entire vibe of this conversation.

10. Setting the record straight on FaZe

I fucking love you to death, brother. That was one of the best periods of my life. As it was happening, specifically for me—I don’t know what your experience was—it was a pretty fucking brutal time in my life, to be honest. FaZe was on fire. Remember Adin would ask me every other day to join FaZe? I’m like, “You can’t join FaZe. It’s fucking horrible right now.”

Can I ask you a question, Banks?

Sure.

When hasn’t FaZe been on fire? FaZe has been a—

Fair question, brother. FaZe has been— If I was homeless and I needed to pick an org to heat my hands over in an empty park, I would choose FaZe, because that fire hasn’t gone out since—

The only reason he was able to articulate that so well is because he used to be fucking homeless and he was warming his hands over the fire—

And sucking dick for fucking crack. Fuck yourself. How’s that? First of all—second of all, let me answer the fucking question. You asked me a question. Let me answer the fucking question. It’s very simple. The actual real answer is because we completely fucked up the company early on.

Business guys came in and stole the company from us, and it’s been impossible to get it back to a point where the Sidemen have been so successful in distributing evenly amongst themselves. My effort with Matt Kish this most recent time was supposed to be part of that effort: let’s collect on revenue at some point with these guys and feed it back into them buying part of the brand, whatever. They wanted to stream every day. The interests weren’t aligned. They blew up really fucking quick and just wanted to stream. We couldn’t align on the business. That’s what happened.

The business is fucked. You know, like—

I mean, also, dude, it’s a bit of a Roman-candle firework to begin with. There would be times when the business was good, everybody was hitting their trick shots, and you would be like, “Fuck it, I’m going to a mental hospital in Berlin.” And you know, bro, you can’t give me heroin—

FaZe likely behaves like it’s bipolar because I behave like I’m bipolar, so maybe that is it. At the end of the day, yes, but again, this is the fucking issue that I have with it. I think you’re setting up—because I don’t— Is it not fair to say it’s also had really crazy flashes and moments of greatness?

Obviously, for sure. But I also think that what you’re setting up currently with the next version of it—which seems to be less FaZe and more whatever the next version is—has real potential.

And what would that be in your head? What do you think that I’m trying to do with FaZe moving forward? I’m curious.

I wasn’t even talking about FaZe. I was talking more about—

Yeah. Oh, well, no. To be honest with you, where my mind is, just for the sake of running it back and proving everybody wrong—and I am going to run it back at some point—I’m going to do the same fucking thing.

We're just going to do it right. We learned a couple of lessons.

I'm going to do it in GTA. I'm going to do it in GTA, and you're going to be a janitor in Adin Ross's server.

Oh, no. I'm going to run a burger shop in GTA.

10/10.

You should. Seriously, you should. Artists are going to blow up in this game. People are going to get filthy rich. FaZe is going to come back. That's what the fuck it is.

Listen, but to more directly answer your question, that's kind of always been the story of FaZe: highs and lows. It's made it exponentially tougher to get it back to a place that's healthy and works well on the business side of things because somebody's got to come in and buy the thing, right? It's an asset that people still perceive to be valuable. The brand itself is valuable. So how do we get the brand back?

You have to keep in mind, too, this company was public. You know that, right? We were a publicly traded company.

Yeah.

Do you guys have any idea? This is the problem, too. Kids in Twitter comments and stuff don't understand the nuances of this shit. Do you guys understand how much time, effort, energy, blood, sweat, tears, and money I had to go find to just make it so it wasn't public anymore?

That process was fucking funny. I literally watched all of this. It's insane. Pretty much all the way—not to the very beginning, but I was there for the majority of it.

One of my biggest fucking regrets, and part of why I want a platform, is that I don't give a fuck if there are 100 people here or 100,000 people here. I just want some sort of mouthpiece again. I feel like I did a really bad job documenting the whole process because if anybody actually saw the effort, time, and energy I poured into this thing, I poured my soul into it.

That's part of the double-edged sword with me, my relationship with FaZe, and with the guys. It's hard for me to apologize for being emotional or passionate about it because I feel like that's where a lot of the success is rooted. But that's also my downfall from time to time, you know what I mean? It's a tough pill to swallow to hear 5 guys say, "This no longer aligns with us. We want to lead." It's like, all right, well, how—

Listen, let me just give you a little bit of backup on this really quick. There is nothing harder in this entire space than talent relations. Working with miserable talent is the one—dude, listen, there's a reason why. Do you think Logan couldn't have gone and brought all the biggest and best creators in FaZe during his heyday, when everybody was looking at him as this golden—

Let me ask you this. Let me ask you to do it, because it is a pain in the ass.

It's a pain in the ass, but let me ask you this.

Sounds like a terrible thing to try.

It's horrible. And it's honestly a bad business. Talent management stuff—it's fucking horrible. It's infinitely hard to scale. It's one of those things that typically businesses and products that are getting bigger get better and easier, and with talent it's the exact opposite. As talent gets bigger, it becomes more difficult, which is fucking brutal, obviously.

As somebody who sits in this spot—and just, chat, you guys, everybody give me the benefit of the doubt—what I'm saying is 100% authentic. When my interest is genuinely in it, I feel like I'm exceptional at it. I feel like I'm really, really good at identifying talent early on the internet. I feel like my track record and where I've been and the people that I've worked with—we worked with Adin early, NELK at the old Clout House, what Rice and I did and how we put together the fucking original Clout House, early FaZe, Tfue, the Fortnite shit—obviously, these guys who—

Can I say something really quick? I feel like I kind of flung you in a little bit here, and I don't want you to—can I say this? I really want to say this, and I'm just going to make it quick.

Talent relations is very hard. Talent needs infrastructure. Without infrastructure in this situation—FaZe, backing, housing, production, business development, team members, people, transportation, production—talent is capped. They can only get so big. They don't become multimillionaires and build businesses. FaZe, Lacy, Ron, Marlin—they only get so big without the infrastructure.

So anybody who doesn't understand how all this works and thinks, "Oh, FaZe is trying to capitalize on young talent," it goes both ways. If you're talent, you want to go to the highest level of this fucking game. You need—

I don't know the complete details. I know—but listen, I don't know the contracts, but the idea that anybody is going to get to the size that the biggest in this space have gotten without infrastructure is fucking stupid.

So all this "Oh, it's predatory" and this and that—

But again, let me make it clear. I need to say this. I'm saying this last thing and then I'm ending. I want to caution you, and I'm not likening the 2 to each other. You have that friend in the group. They have a bad breakup. 2 weeks go by, 4 months go by, 8 months go by, a year goes by—to the fucking point—

I'm going to need you to stop talking about it at some point. I'm going to need you—

I'll never, ever stop entirely talking about why. Because you have new shit going on. You're about to be extremely successful, and the breakup is keeping you stuck in a moment that is no longer serving you.

I think the solution is just to give Mike space and see what you can do with this. It's so fucking easy. Listen, no. Can I respond to—

What I'm saying is, you are moving on to new things, great things. You're about to work in a space that is really incredible.

Okay.

That girl is now dating someone else. She's getting laid.

No, actually, actually, actually, they're not. They're just doing the exact same thing.

Then they're masturbating. Whatever I'm saying is, take your time. I'll always back you and support you. But you have to understand, Ansem and I aren't going to want to go out for those beers all the time, bro. It's going to get a little—

Yeah, we get it there. Mike's farming right now, and it's disgusting, brother. You still talk about Lana every fucking chance you get. Fuck yourself. Fuck yourself. Can I respond now, please?

The one thing I have to say is, again, part of why things have gotten so out of control and narratives have spun out of control is because I didn't have a mouthpiece or ever properly respond to this shit as it was happening. So this whole narrative flew out of control, and all these things like the predatory contracts—that doesn't fucking exist.

We never took money from these kids, ever. We burned $7 million on marketing their streams to make FaZe big again because I thought we could all get aligned on that effort. And when we couldn't, that was the fucking problem. But we made no money. We spent so much fucking money on doing that.

That's why it's a tough pill to swallow to not only lose on that side of it, but then deal with the general sentiment and public perception that I somehow fucked these guys over, or anybody did. That's just not the truth. So as long as 1 person is listening to what I have to say, if they're questioning that, I'm going to answer it.

Let me just say—let me say—let me just say, I know I'm not—that's not what I'm talking about. That's definitely not what I'm talking about. We're 5 episodes in, 5 streams in. I know you are as well, but obviously I'm fucking passionate about the subject.

We're 5 episodes in, 5 streams into this, right? And part of why I want to have some sort of fucking platform is to respond and reply. And to be honest with you, I have had some back-and-forth with Ron and Lacy, and I've been able to live-share my side of things.

Like this past week: FaZe Banks, viewbotting, whatever, because I'm in this fucking hate loop. I'm getting hate-farmed. I get to spark up and go, "Hey, this is what's happening. Hey, fuck, I talked about this 3 weeks ago. Hey, fuck, I hit up my fucking Twitch rep the second I noticed this and asked them how to stop it. Hey, fuck, I'm smarter than viewbotting something from 4,000 to fucking 50,000 in 2 seconds. It looks crazy."

If I were to say to you, "Dude, shut the fuck up, Banks," how about that? That'd be a big fight. If I were to say to you, "A wise man told me, 'Don't argue with fools, because people from a distance, dude—it's not—'"

You think someone is that dumb, then why would you even engage in the conversation?

That is true. I do agree with that, guys. This whole thing sucks. But this is affecting me—no, stop. I ignored it for so long, to the point where this started to touch people that actually matter to me. People that give me the benefit of the doubt.

Love me or hate me, like, hey, what’s going on with this? I saw this, and I’ve had to explain certain things—these weird little nuances. Yeah, that’s totally 100% not the truth.

These kids in their communities and people in their fucking friend groups tried to say that I did something with Charli D’Amelio when she was fucking 17. So much so that she had to come and just make some shit up about them. Why would I do that? I’m not going to fucking do that.

Somebody texted me last night, giving me Lacy’s docs and passwords—

No, don’t read real shit. Just—

No, no, no. But I’m saying, you saw someone—

Guys, my point is that information came to me. Lacy and I are obviously kind of back-and-forth right now. The second I got that information, I texted his manager and texted him, like, “Hey, someone’s texting me this shit. I don’t know if it means anything to you, but there are passwords here and stuff. If this is sensitive information, you want to get your OPSEC up, go do it.”

That’s where it really crosses the fucking line. I also don’t want these kids to do anything but succeed. That’s honestly, genuinely the truth. I hope that at some point, one day, we can sit and laugh at this and be like, “That was a fucking crazy time.”

Tfue and I had a fucking crazy falling-out. It was super emotional, and it was a hard fucking conversation to have between the two of us. Now we’re at a point where the last time I saw him was in Vegas, and it was an amazing interaction. I fucking love that kid.

I don’t know. The line between hate and love is very, very thin. You know what I’m saying? As much love as I’ve received from audiences, comments, and this whole streaming community, I’m receiving hate in the same way now. Again, I just feel the need to, at some point, address certain shit.

For the earlier episodes of this, I’m going to, because I’m making up for lost time. The thing that bothers me the most is somebody who is a fan of me reading something and thinking that it’s true, that I can’t possibly—

But at this point, you’ve made your statement. This stuff isn’t true. I look at LP’s reaction, and Logan’s the great screenshotter. You make an accusation against him, and he’s bringing 15 screenshots out. He’s bringing receipts. He’s sitting in front of his green screen. He’s putting out a video that you will not recover from.

If you feel a certain way about people lying, then sit down with the green screen and the contracts and be like, “Yo, the fuck you’re saying isn’t true. Here’s why. Let me show you something.” Let the audience take it, and then never talk about it again.

My last YouTube video—my last YouTube video of my career. I quit YouTube at 5 million subs, on one of my biggest videos. My last video, 7 years ago, “Dear Tfue,” has 11 million views.

Very important, too.

And it has a million likes. When’s the last time you saw a vlog with a million likes on it? This is a fucking insane video to end your career on and walk away from. It was just a realization I came to that this is fucking horrible. This sucks.

The video went over very well for me and for FaZe. In a lot of ways, I think it saved FaZe in that moment because it added the context. I have done that in the past. This is one of those times where I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to.

I was stuck in a weird position because, for a while, I stepped down as CEO, and I was like, “Just take it.” I literally said that to them. I said that to them and my partners: “Just give it to them, dude. I’ll go back to doing things that I actually want to do.”

Despite what people may think, I don’t care to watch. I’m not involved in these communities as a viewer or a consumer. This isn’t the type of content or the type of conversations I want to have. I want to have conversations like this, which is why I’m doing the show now.

I agree with you, Mike. Again, I know where all of this is coming from, and I appreciate it, but—

I just don’t want to see you get bogged down, dude.

No, I appreciate it, and I love you. Just understand my headspace and my mental health have never been better. Obviously, there are times and days when it gets to you and stuff, but what the fuck can I do?

For everybody watching right now, everybody who’s followed my career, and all the people who walk up to me in person and express love and have good energy—you mean the world to me. You have no idea what that has done. Above all else, that means everything to me.

That’s what I pay attention to: real life. The internet and real life are worlds apart. Worlds apart. If you walk with me around fucking L.A., you go, “What do you do?” Like, “What the fuck? Why do these guys love you? Why are people asking for a picture? What the fuck is going on?”

Oh, yeah. I’ve never met a hater.

You open up my Twitter because you want to— it goes back to what we were saying. I’ve met people in places in the world where I didn’t think I could ever have a fan—in Malaysia and fucking places I’ve been with Ansem—and I’ve never met a hater in my entire life.

If you don’t care enough to discover the truth or do enough digging to come to an actual, real conclusion about something, if you’re just riding a wave or echoing some fucking tweet that you saw, you don’t actually care enough to be upset. You’re not actually offended. You’re just farming the situation.

I only care about this because it involves you. Otherwise, I would never want to hear about these fucking clout-chasers fucking with my Ella and Slow Motion Twin and Lacy’s dad and Rob, and Marlin’s pissed at me, and—

Who gives a fuck who was pissed at you?

Who gives a single fuck about any of these fucking people, bro? Just build the next thing. Just build the next fucking thing, bro. Step back and build the next thing.

What they’re doing and the things they’re saying should not affect your fucking life. I understand that it affects you because you built this thing and it’s being threatened. I get it. But now it’s time for the next version of it.

You’re about to crush it. You’re going to lock the fuck in, and you’re going to do something great. I believe that, and that’s why I can say I’m happy to have been here.

Dude, I just love going to Ansem and being like, “Yo, what’s the next question?”

I got you, bro. I got you. Question, dude.

No, you’re a great friend, bro. You are. You’re solid.

I try to be, dude.

You do. I can tell. But, yo, bro, I know you do a lot in content. Prediction markets have been blowing up a lot. Have you looked at Polymarket? Any stuff around that area?

I mean, I obviously haven’t traded on there at all.

Yeah, obviously, they’re more a part of Logan’s life, so I watch what he does with it. He just put $50,000 on the Knicks prior to Game 1. It went to $132,000, and that’s looking really nice. I think he’s already up $20,000 on his position. You should take them—

To win the finals.

I think the trade, by the way, is to flip the Spurs.

I know people are going to be angry at—

No, no, no. Flip that and cash that in. He’s up $20K. Cash that in, and Game 2 is going to be the great decider.

You saw the Knicks bring an urgency to Game 1 that the Spurs just didn’t have. It’s the same urgency that the Spurs brought to the entire OKC series. The Knicks have played 4 games now—5 games—in the past 28 days. They’re well rested.

I heard a lot of people saying after the game, everybody wants to talk shit about Brunson until it’s time to be better than Brunson, bro. He’s serious. He’s the real fucking deal, dude.

Brunson is an aggressive player. He knows how to break through defenses. He knows how to get around Wemby. Anunoby came alive in the back half of the game, and KAT is a star player. It could really go either way.

I had money on the Spurs last night, which I sadly gave back to the books. But listen, you’re in New York, right?

Yes, sir.

If the Knicks win, it’s a celebratory night, and then it’s the end of the city that you live in. The city will no longer exist. It will be burned to the ground—burned to the ground, literally. It will no longer exist, and you’ll have to build back from ground zero. No pun intended. That’s just the fact of the matter.

I think we already have the Spurs to win the actual series. We took them earlier, before they won the last series, so we’re actually up on this. They lost the first game in San Antonio, and then they play again tomorrow. I think we should take the Spurs to win that.

There’s no way they dropped both in San Antonio.

So, I’m going to take the Spurs again as well.

Yeah.

I’m happy if you want to throw an extra K in for me. I’ll send that to you.

Gotcha.

I don’t know if that’s how that works with everything.

We got it. Okay.

I have to go to therapy, which I said at 6. Happy to come back. The last sign-off to the chat, as always—I think we talked about this, for me at least. I know we talked about a lot of this stuff in the episode.

Just keep going. Keep pushing forward. Every once in a while, take one good, solid step in the right direction. Give up something bad or pick up something good, and you’ll be very surprised at how good life will get for you. Stay positive. Bring positivity to other people’s lives. I told you to make girls laugh, but really, it’s just being positive around people.

W, Mike, and the [censored].

Any good you put out is going to come back to you. Any bad that you put out is going to come back to you. It’s that simple. You make fun of people, it’s going to end badly for you. You bring people positivity and love, it’s going to end well for you. It’s that simple.

Caring about something is cool. Being positive is cool, you know? I don’t know where people have lost sight of that, but I know it’s a hot take in 2026. It’s unfortunate that that’s the case, but it is.

It’s cool. And you’re fucking cool, man. I love you, bro.

Yo, I’ll connect with you. I’ll see you in some city. I know we’re going to cross paths again.

I’m sorry you had to wait. Genuinely, my—

Good. I’m in New York again at the end of the month for Palm Tree Music Festival in the Hamptons and that whole area. Maybe the 27th. I’ll text you.

Okay. All right. Bet.

All right. Peace. Love you guys.

Love you, brother.

Optimism is rare. Somebody said in the chat, “Whoever, I love you, Mike.”

Yeah, that was awesome. Listen, this is the best episode yet. This is the best episode yet. This is how we’ve got to run it every single fucking time: Erik followed by a guest like that. What other show exists like this, bro?

And we got the markets out of the way.

Yeah. This—

You’re right about markets today. Literally today.

Yeah, it’s great. I mean, you literally called it 10 seconds before. That’s the clip, by the way, for our interns who are watching this and manage the Twitter and stuff. Z literally called it. I called this shit a minute before it happened. It’s crazy.

Oh.

Wow. Wow. We really got into it. We really got into it, bro. That was a great conversation. I didn’t know his story was that deep, bro. He’s gone through a lot. I did not know that.

Mike is world-class. But this is a good example of why, if you open up Twitter replies to Mike, people get on him about being 40 or talk shit about Logan or whatever the fuck. He gets hate-farmed a lot, too.

Damn.

Nowhere near as much as me right now, but it’s similar. Mike’s the best, dude, and that’s all he ever has to say. The only thing he ever wants to talk about is being positive.

Even when Logan and Jake kind of got into it—I don’t think Logan did, but Jake got into it with Marlin, another streamer, over some shit with his girlfriend—Mike is always trying to be the arbiter. He’s always asking, “How can I smooth this over?” That’s my own personal experience with him as well.

My lore with Jake Paul and Logan Paul is that we were not fucking friends. We battled like rivals very publicly on the internet. Obviously, Jake dated Alyssa Violet, and I dated Alyssa Violet. That’s kind of where it all stemmed from, and it really got out of hand and crazy. It was honestly a lot crazier than what’s currently happening.

I met Mike and I was like, “Dude, I fucking love this guy, and he’s always with them.” So they can’t—I mean, at least Logan can’t—be that bad. Mike would always tell me, “Bro, you would love Logan. If you sat and talked to Logan, you guys are very similar in X, Y, and Z ways, and you’d fuck with him. You guys should talk.”

I guess he was saying that to him on that side, too. Lo and behold, eventually, we actually got to sit down and have a conversation, and I fuck with Logan heavily. Every time I see him, it’s a good conversation. We’ll have him on the show 100% at some point. He’ll give us that episode all day.

That’s what I’m most excited about. I think this show is exactly what we set out to build. I read Twitch chat. Obviously, there was some shit happening in Twitch chat, guys.

The aggregated $10,000 competition—I want to bring it up real quick as we start to wrap the show and talk about this again, because I think it’s very, very important. I had some ideas. Where is this? No, not that one. Yeah.

We’re doing a $10,000 vibe-code challenge. Go build us a chat aggregator in real time, and also do a viewership aggregator. The idea is for this to live on marketbubble.com and funnel every single chat, because we stream on 6 different platforms: Kick from Z, Twitter from me, Twitter from Z, Twitch from me—the chats all in one neat, tight place—and the viewer count from all of them as well.

This shouldn’t be hard to build. I could fucking build it myself. We could have paid 500 bucks to get it built, but we want to encourage you guys to be proactive in learning about AI and building on AI, and also in getting more involved in the community. We want to reward somebody who puts an honest, good effort toward that.

Even if you don’t win this, it’s worth trying, because that’s the kind of culture we want to build here on the show. It’s going to flip positive really, really fucking quickly, because you’re not invited to be here or welcome here if that’s not the energy you’re on. I think CT is in desperate need of it. I think culture in general is in desperate need of it, and that’s what we’re aiming to build here on the show. At least for me, that’s what I’m most passionate about in regard to what we’re building here. I’m fucking excited. That felt good.

That did. I like that a lot.

Genuinely, chat, who’s watching? How did that feel? At least in my chat and Z’s chat.

Somebody in my chat said it was the best episode, too.

For sure. Had to be. Had to be. I think we just set a new standard for it.

Oh, yeah, we’ve got Flood. I’m so fucking fried, dude. Mike really got me fired up. He fully—

Let’s talk to Flood for 10 minutes, because that’s the boy. It’ll be chill.

I love Flood.

It’ll be chill. Get Flood in here as soon as he wants to join, and we’ll rap on Flood.

I think he was talking a little bit about the FUD stuff going on. The only thing I would echo from his sentiment is that whatever you give energy to is going to get bigger.

100%. No, you’re right.

That’s what I say on that. But I know you know the most about it.

Honestly, brother, obviously I’m not fucking insane. For my own sanity, I try to give it my best effort. It’s just really hard when, for the past year of your life, you see title after title, tweet after tweet, that’s just completely wrong—completely wrong—painting me to be some certain way. It’s made a lot of areas of my life harder, and I know that’s what it’s designed to do.

It’s a tough one. This is one of the more difficult battles I’ve had to fight in my life. But it’s in line with everything Mike was saying. Every day, I genuinely come to the conclusion that shit’s happening for us.

I think this show and us building the show is one of the absolute best things. We’ve talked at length about this off-stream. It’s interesting to talk about it with the show, but it is what it is. You’ve just got to fight through it.

It’s obviously good advice. You and Mike are obviously not wrong at all.

Yeah, he’s—

He’s coming.

He saw it.

Where’s BullFi at? Where’s our Hyperliquid bull?

He said he’s coming.

He said he’s ready.

I need him to tell me where the bottom is. I need him to tell me.

Tell him to join.

I need him to tell me. I’m breaking.

I actually wonder what he thinks about options. I wonder what he thinks about whether Hyperliquid is going to do anything with options, because that’s the one area they haven’t touched yet.

Somebody said, “Can I get your thoughts on Zcash?”

Yeah. Hey, you want to just take the fucking wheel, bring up the TA, and talk a little bit while we wait? I’m going to go take a piss.

Pull it up. Okay. All right. You said pull it up.

I’m going to take a piss real quick.

Frankly, yeah.

I don’t know if I want to click this Google Drive. Have any of the Zcash people replied to it yet? What’s the guy’s name? Let’s see. Mert is saying there’s a way to prove the bug wasn’t exploited.

More on this below. So Mert is saying it's something that's been repeated but not a confirmed exploit. Soon there will be a network upgrade to allow anyone to verify the integrity. So, what are you seeing? What's it saying, brother?

I don't think I have a clear answer on it yet, to be honest. Essentially, they're saying that Zcash has these shielded pools, which are the private pools where you can't determine where or how much cash is coming from the person who sent it to you. Apparently, there are risks around this design with privacy protocols if there's a way to have an inflation bug where you can't determine where extra coins are coming from.

Mert is saying that there are ways to confirm that it hasn't been exploited, but I need to finish reading about it. I think—

Is that him?

Flood.

11. Flood joins: the hyper liquid thesis

We can hear him. Everything's good. Can you hear him?

Yeah.

I don't think I can.

We got him.

I can't hear him.

Z can't hear him.

Flood, talk.

How are we, guys? How's it going?

Yo, what's good?

Good, brother. We're here, dude. Long time no chat.

I know. How are you, baby?

I'm good, bro. How are you?

Good, good, good. Never better, honestly.

Feeling like we're winning.

Yeah, it's because you are, brother. It's because you are. I don't think anybody on CT has won as hard as you've won the past 2 or 3 years, bro. You've been going crazy.

I mean, honestly, a lot of people have had big outcomes in crypto, right? A lot of them are kind of private about it. I just happen to be a little more public, a little more of an asshole maybe sometimes.

12. How to start investing from zero

Yeah, you've got a victory lap. I mean, it shows you spend years and years of your life focused on one singular market sector, and then it pops off. If you know what you're doing, you're crushing it. But are we live, by the way?

Yes, we're live. We're live. We're live.

Shout-out to the stream. Thank you guys for having me, as always. I always appreciate anybody doing content in crypto, as I know it's difficult, or in finance generally. Those are the only 2 things I really cared about.

I used to be really into video games and everything. I played Halo, for those who know me—singles, GameBattles. I was a grinder. PayPal me $20 afterward; I'm going to hit you offline.

That's lit.

That's insane. Yeah, you're really true to it. Banks.

Yeah, guys. So what's up? What's on your guys' mind?

Chilling. We just wanted to talk to you about really anything involving what the markets are doing. It's been fucking crazy the last week. You and Ansem have always been part of this 5-pronged oracle, this living, breathing oracle that I like to lean on and bounce ideas off of as I navigate my way through the market, because obviously I'm way less sophisticated in regard to trading and markets than you guys are.

I definitely fall more on the left side of the left curve. Anytime I ask you guys your opinions or questions about what the markets are doing, where they're going, or where they're headed, if you guys all have the same type of idea, that's typically—9 times out of 10—that's been my biggest strategy in trading.

I know that I have access to things that other people don't, but you guys also tweet all fucking day. You've both been posting Hyperliquid since before it came out.

It's insane. Obviously, HYPE is something that we've talked about. We've talked about how great Jeff is and how this is the best product in crypto. We refer to it often as the best product in crypto, and we've been saying that since episode 1.

Z was really blatant and transparent about the fact that, hey, I own no Bitcoin. I own no Solana. He's the fucking Solana guy—Solana manlets, right? But I'm positioned in Hyperliquid, VVV, and fucking Zcash, right?

Right.

We've seen what those have done over the last 4 or 5 weeks. Obviously, Hyperliquid—I don't know. It's insane. I've never seen it in crypto. I haven't been here as long as you guys, but Z, I saw a tweet from you. You've been here for 9 years, and you've said you've never seen anything like this: Bitcoin falling off a cliff and crashing while this Hyperliquid thing is pumping through it.

What are your thoughts? How do you feel right now? Not only about the victory—and obviously you fucking crushed it—but just where it is and where it's headed?

Could you first give a short explanation for people who have no idea what Hyperliquid is? Just a short, succinct explanation of why it's different from exchanges that have tried to do similar things in crypto. It's not the first time somebody's tried to create a decentralized exchange—Solana, Serum, and FTX tried to do it.

Give us the short thesis on why you were so bullish before it even dropped and what it is.

Totally. I can give you the background. My fund, along with a lot of the people I've hired, has specifically focused on crypto trading and markets. That extends to casinos as well, but we've really done some M&A and some consulting for all of the large exchanges. We've helped them with everything from security to product offerings to basically what they're building and why.

I think a lot of people unfortunately also know and remember FTX. The greatest juxtaposition and the greatest counterpoint between Hyperliquid and FTX is that with FTX, we really never knew what was going on. The reason they were able to scam, and the reason they were able to be nefarious and really be terrible for the crypto industry, was that everything was hidden.

With Hyperliquid, the beauty of it is that you don't have to trust what I say, what Z says, or what anybody thinks. You just know, because you can go on-chain and verify every single trader, every single position, and every single asset balance on the exchange.

This is a big step up, I think, for consumer creditworthiness, for preference, for the accountability we should have as an industry, and for ourselves. I just want to give a quick shout-out to the founder and the team of Hyperliquid. Most people don't know this, so what is Hyperliquid?

Hyperliquid is a decentralized exchange, meaning it's an exchange where nobody actually has control over the assets. It's trading on a blockchain. Most people think of Solana or Ethereum or some of these other blockchains, but the reality is that Hyperliquid is the most performant blockchain in the world.

It enables trading—specifically high-frequency trading—in the way that modern finance works, where most trading is programmatic, while remaining fully public and fully auditable. That's really where the value comes from. It's not only the performance engineering of the asset, but also the fact that users can build a lot of trust and have a lot of understanding. There's a level playing field for all of the information that's presented, and all of the assets are accessible.

This is why I got into crypto in the first place. I was told that when I joined crypto, you'd be able to do whatever you want with your money and use your money to trade any asset you want with no KYC. You'd be able to do whatever you want, whenever you want, with your money. You want to go long or short gold, buy some oil, short equities, or go long Bitcoin—you can do it all instantaneously as soon as you have that idea.

This is really important to me because I feel like it's a fundamental human right for people to be able to transact value. This is why I'm so passionate about Hyperliquid. We don't choose where we're born. We don't choose the roll of the dice that we get in life. We don't choose the hand we're dealt; we just have to deal with it.

When you take a step back outside of the token, the assets, and everything else, Hyperliquid allows people for the first time in history, from anywhere in the world with an internet connection, to trade and change their financial circumstances.

If you have alpha, if you have the ability, if you're someone with aptitude, intelligence, a work ethic, and a mentality, and you think you know something about the world that other people don't, before this, you'd have to submit your ID, on-ramp, get a bank account, and do all of these different things to be able to actually trade. Maybe they wouldn't even take your money because you're in the wrong jurisdiction.

With Hyperliquid, for the first time, we have a founder who truly cares about crypto and says, “You know what? I'm going to do things the right way. No VCs, no outside capital. I'm going to build an exchange where anybody, at any time, can trade.”

That's what people misunderstand. I've had the privilege of knowing Jeff for a long time. I get reference calls for him all the time from big companies or big hedge funds thinking about investing in Hyperliquid. They're like, “You kind of know this guy. What's he actually like?”

I just want to say that Jeff is the most transparent and self-accountable person in history that I've met operating at this level.

When you talk to a lot of crypto founders and you're in a room with them, see—we know a lot of people like this. Banks, I'm sure you've met them in media and in crypto—the mask slips off, and you ask them, “Why are you building what you're building?” And they go, “Oh, dude, I'm here to make money.” That's what they say, right? These crypto founders say, “I'm here to make money off retail. I'm here to make money at someone else's expense. I'm only doing this for a short-term flip.”

This is Jeff's life's work, right? This is his magnum opus. This is really what his vision is for the world, and he is willing to die behind this. He is willing to venture out on the risk curve so that everybody in crypto can have a fair and accessible place to trade. And for anybody who goes online and derides him, tries to take shots, and tries to say, “Oh, they're just pumping the token, and this is the next FTX,” or any of that stuff, it's like, listen, this is why I got into crypto in the first place: I want to be able to trade whatever I want, whenever I want.

And yes, it's a kick-ass asset. There's tremendous demand for this. That's why the token is finally getting the respect it deserves, because you can see the spread between the way Hyperliquid operates, the way the team conducts themselves, and even the way they give updates on what they're building and why. Every 2 weeks they have an update. Every week they have an update.

Scheduled maintenance at the same time. They are true and professional operators compared to these other fucking clowns in crypto. That's why this asset is going up and completely decoupling from the rest of the market, because guess what? These guys aren't crypto guys. These guys are from high-frequency trading. These guys are from some of the best schools around. These guys are the most serious operators in the world.

You can see the spread in work ethic. The way they conduct themselves and the product speaks for itself. So that's what I'll say. I know that was a long rant, but just because the price is going up isn't like, “Oh, this is suddenly a good and important asset.” It's like, no, what they're building is important for—

Well, that's why it's important that you said it all. Most people's experience with crypto, and what they look at, is price and how that's moving. If it's going up, this is a great thing; if it's going down, it's the worst thing ever.

Yeah, going really deep on it is how you build the conviction to hold through the periods and the drawdowns. People see assets in crypto going up, and then they want to buy them. But when they're down 30% in a day, or when they go down 70% in a bear market, or down whatever they go down—

Or there are things that pop up where they have competition. If you know the team really, really well and have deep conviction, those are periods where you add. I think that's what you've done really well: you've been able to add to your position when you see things that the market gets wrong. You're like, “No, the market's wrong. I know I'm right, and the market is wrong.”

I think what people in crypto don't do enough is go deep on their theses, because that's really how you make the most money, to be honest.

We keep it really simple at the fund, right? What we always say is, “Do we know more than the average person who's trading this asset?” Does this asset have a skill gap? Is there something that you can spend time thinking and modeling and learning, comparing it to other relevant markets or assets, and say, “Do I fundamentally understand this asset more than other people do?”

The easiest thing was, “Wow, it looks like they're buying back billions of dollars worth of the token. Does any other crypto asset do that?” No. Other crypto assets have inflation. Maybe you could short an inflationary token and long one where they're actually buying it back.

I get so many questions from people who are like, “Why are they buying back the token? Is that the best use of capital? Shouldn't they be acquiring businesses or putting gold or Bitcoin or cash on their balance sheet?” Dude, what if they think they've created something of fucking value, and they want to buy it back because they think it's the most valuable thing on earth? People are demented. They don't understand how high-conviction this team is today.

Yeah. What the fuck is up with Kyle Samani crashing out? I saw—

Crashing out?

What the fuck?

Okay, I want to give Kyle Samani his flowers because, in crypto, we forget the accomplishments. Kyle ran up billions of dollars for himself and his LPs, right? I mean, he is a de facto billionaire.

Solana, to date, is still the best venture investment of all time. Maybe other than Anthropic and SpaceX, now that they're going public, but it's top 10, right? I mean, he's truly a great capital allocator.

It just shows that sometimes, when you get so bought into something, you lose the ability to have perspective and nuance. You lose the ability to be sufficiently intellectually rigorous and say, “Hey, can I think about a new asset that competes with what I'm doing, and maybe it's better?”

Basic human nature is that you want to believe what you want to believe, right? You look for any fucking reason. It's very, very rare that a person who is a lifelong Republican flips Democrat. That very rarely happens, and vice versa. That's just one example, but people don't really behave like that. They don't really change. People will do anything they can to keep things from changing, right?

I mean, that's the classic thing: when you stop learning, you start dying, right? I look at this in anybody I admire—the people I date, the people I spend time with, the people I consider my friends, the people I want to work with or work for. It's like, are they going out every single day and trying to improve themselves? Are they putting in the work to become a better person, to become more intelligent, to become smarter, to become a better trader? That's what it takes to win, right?

So many people reach a high point, they reach a high, and then they say, “Okay, now I can coast.” It's like, no, you don't just maintain the level you're at. You always atrophy. There's always entropy, right? It always goes down. You have to fight entropy and say, “I'm going to become a better person. I'm going to become a better, more informed person,” right?

I think it's cool to make a bunch of money, and Hyperliquid is hopefully not a once-in-a-lifetime trade. But the scale that we've been able to reach and how capitalized we are at this point at our fund is definitely another level. We were a decent amount of the hour-one, day-one volume on Hyperliquid, right?

I missed Thanksgiving with my family because I told them, “Hey, look, this is a once-in-a-lifetime event, and I got to be here for the inception. I got to be able to trade it because I feel like it's going to open too cheap.” And it did. It opened at a point where you could have bought Hyperliquid for $1 billion. Of the hour-one, day-one volume, there was close to $100 million of volume. You probably could have bought $20 or $30 million worth of Hyperliquid at $3.

And, you know, people were selling on the first day.

Yeah, yeah. People were selling on the first day.

But again, this goes back to trading. This goes back to why I'm going to win. Trading is financial combat, right? For me to win, someone else loses. The person selling is saying, “Holy fuck, there's a bunch of money in my account. I have to grab this and go.”

That's been the psychology that has been rewarded in crypto, because most crypto things, to be honest, have been totally fraudulent or just not as promised, right? But with Hyperliquid, if you took a second and thought about it, you're like, “Wow, this exchange is not only good, but it's going to get better because the team is actually unbelievable, and they truly care about the product.”

This is something where you're not just pricing in where it's at today. You're also pricing in growth, and crypto people forget that. The best assets grow. The best assets grow and compound.

I was talking to some young kid—I'm not going to name him. He's actually a friend of ours—and he made about $1 million from Hyperliquid. It's long-term capital gains. He was asking, “Should I sell, or what should I do?” And he's like, “A million isn't that much compared to this other stuff.”

13. Compounding & building wealth

But just on the subject of compounding, if he sells his Hyperliquid at $70 or wherever, he's going to walk away with $700,000. The best investors in the world compound at 30%—Stan Druckenmiller, notably, and some of these other greats, Soros and some of these other people. What do you guys think $700,000 compounded at 30% for 30 years is?

It's like $60 million, or—no, it's higher.

It's $1.88 billion, right? This is the power of compounding. This is the power law. This is the aspect of math and finance that the human brain has a hard time conceptualizing.

That's really fucking crazy, right?

Capital compounded over time becomes such a large amount of capital—an unfathomable amount of capital.

We talked about this earlier, before Erik came on, and, Ansem, you were talking about the importance of compound interest. Even just listening to you, I have somebody in chat saying, “Banks looks bored.”

I’m not bored. I’m intently listening to smarter people than me talk, and my brain feels like it’s going to explode, to be honest.

And Flood, obviously, this show is designed to marry the 2 sides: the more normie, mainstream people who have a spark of interest in starting their journey in the world of investing and becoming financially literate. You’re getting into the weeds of it, and it’s a dense topic, but for somebody at home right now who just works a [__] job, how do they benefit from compound interest? How do they generate wealth? 101, what’s your advice to them?

Yeah, you have to be educated. You have to learn about how finance works and also what capitalism means and what capitalism is. Everybody has the same character that we’re born with. We have 24 hours in a day. Yes, you may be born in certain circumstances, and you may have different character attributes.

I always think we’re in a video game or something. What is my character equipped with? A Richard Mille, a Lambo, and stuff now at this point, but I didn’t spawn with that. What you have and what you’re doing fundamentally when you’re working a job is exchanging your time for capital.

But I think people haven’t spent enough time thinking about what capital actually is. What are dollars? I don’t mean that in a funny way, like, “Oh, the U.S. dollar is fake.” No, literally, the price of your labor is you. You go to work, and you’re exchanging your time—the 1 finite resource everybody has—for capital.

The billionaire doesn’t die and say, “I wish I had more billions.” The billionaire says, “I wish I had more time to spend with my family, or I wish I could do it all over again.” The high actually isn’t the capital or the toys you get. For most people who go the distance, it’s the feeling of accomplishment.

For someone to start, fundamentally, the 1st thing they need to do is understand how money works. What is an interest rate? What is the dollar? What should I be doing with my time so that I can have more capital? Once you start there and have a foundational understanding of how these things work, then you can go on and say, “What’s right for me? Should I own gold? Should I own Bitcoin? Should I own equities? Should I own Hyperliquid?”

You have a lot of choices in life, and certain things are going to have different risk-rewards. Certain things are going to have different payoff functions. But for the most part, I think most people should not really focus too much on investing. They should have some sort of view of the world. I think AI will be really big, so I’m going to own a little more AI stuff than normal. Maybe I’ll do 50% AI and 50% equities.

Then I’m actually going to think about how I can exchange my time for more capital, get more skills, and get more educated. Again, it goes hand in hand. If you think the world is moving in 1 direction, why wouldn’t you spend all your time trying to get better at that 1 skill? If you’re convinced that AI is going to take over the world, become 1 of the most knowledgeable people on AI.

That’s the entire purpose of the show and the product that we’re trying to build with Market Bubble. It’s cool to have you on because you’re a personal friend. We’ve met in real life. Have you and Ansem ever met?

Yeah, we’ve hung out a bunch.

Okay, cool. Ansem and I have had many lunches where I’ve tried to tell him how to do a portfolio.

I think I sent you the 2nd dry run we ever did. It’s probably still linked in our iMessages, and I asked for your opinion because I really value it.

I had some notes for you.

Absolutely. You obviously have an appreciation for the lens that you look at things through. You see the vision for how valuable building content IP in this market is and how underdeveloped it is. That’s the passion that I share and the opportunity I see, and that’s why I think it’s important to build a show like this.

This is what we talk about in every episode of the show: generate wealth, make money, understand AI, and [__] attention. These are the 3 things that are going to hold value and likely increase in importance and value over the next 5 to 10 years. So, if you’re a young man looking for a way, start there and understand and learn. That’s why we’re creating this niche show.

Figure out what you’re good at. I respect anyone putting themselves out there. I’m exceptionally fortunate because I loved video games, and to me, trading is a big video game.

There are a lot of different game types. There are infinite levels. It’s infinitely scalable. Then society tells you that you’re a person of value, which is crazy because they didn’t really tell me that when I was grinding Halo LAN tournaments.

The reality is that, if you want to live a really fortunate life, ideally you find something that you enjoy doing, that you’re good at, and that rewards you in a system of value. Not everybody finds that. Certain people have to grind through their early levels and then reach a point where they have more autonomy.

Yeah.

You know, those guys could go and be successful anywhere because they have a really good operating philosophy, and they’re really good at first principles. What is a casino? A casino is you saying, “I’m only going to play a game where I think I have an edge.” I’m only going to play a game where I think I have 50.5% to win and you have 49.5%.

You can think you’re going to win, and you can think that you’re going to have nice positive variance. You’re going to be able to take some of my money. But the reality is, over a long enough time frame, if you keep playing with me, I’m going to take all your money.

That’s how you should be thinking about life. Am I playing a game where I think I’m better than the average market participant? Because if you’re not, then you’re the sucker at the table.

But I want to actually ask you guys: Is there anything that you’ve learned recently, over the past few months, that has really changed your perspective? I can talk about something later, but I’d love to hear from you 2. Is there anything that you’ve done, had happen to you, or anything that you’ve really felt like, “Oh, wow, this is important to me”?

In regard to what specifically, or just in general?

Anything. It can be regarding trading, or it can be regarding life.

I’m learning a lot very fast working with Ansem and building the show, just in terms of my own personal relationship with the people who manage my finances, where I’m parking money, the way that I’m thinking about what the dollar is, and what my strategy is moving forward.

I’ve made some really good decisions in the markets, and I’ve made some really, really bad ones. I feel myself growing, and that’s part of why I wanted to take the effort, time, and energy to build something like this.

I think I’ve come to the conclusion about myself that, no matter what, no matter how good or bad things get, no matter how rich or poor I get, and no matter what the circumstances are, I’m never going to stop chasing something. I’m never going to stop building something. I’m just not ever going to be the guy who’s 60 years old with his feet kicked up on a beach, retired.

Any time I find myself doing nothing, I’m incredibly depressed and unfulfilled. I’m really grateful because I’m building this. Especially in my role in building this, I’m really swimming upstream here. The word “crypto”—a crypto show, even this—is being labeled in these more mainstream circles and communities.

Crypto equals a scam. I've suffered from this sentiment just by being who I am and from the markets and industry that I come from. But I've always loved it, and I really believe in it. It's something that I've always been passionate about learning more about.

My point is that this is a harder battle that I've fought, but in a lot of ways, it means more to me. Coming to that realization, having that unlocked, I'm like, "I don't know"—I've learned to appreciate how difficult something can be. Does this make sense?

Yeah.

No, it does. You're kind of venturing out into something you haven't really done. I mean, you've done media, but it's a different spin on it, right? I did the Probably Nothing things and these CT crypto vlogs, and my whole thought around that was—and I used to pitch Z this all the time—"Yo, you need to do more content. You need to do more."

Since I met you, I've been saying that to you. I met ThreadGuy, and he was doing Twitter Spaces. I was like, "Brother, get on Twitch." He's like, "No, you don't understand. Crypto's on Twitter." I'm like, "I don't care. Stream on Twitch. This needs to be somewhere on Twitch and livestreamed." Now he's doing his thing, and watching it come to fruition is incredible.

I still think the market's so far behind and underdeveloped in that regard. That's what I'm passionate about, because I see it. I see the future. It's in line with their thoughts around everyone should trade markets. Everyone's going to become an investor. Everyone's going to become a trader.

Like you said, you can't control the RNG. You can't be—you have no say in who you're born as, where you're born, or what circumstances you're born under. To decentralize everything, it always loops back to why we all got involved in crypto in the first place: the people who actually believe in it and love it for that reason. Those are—I don't know.

Yeah, I can't imagine myself doing anything else. I'm like a shark; I just have to keep swimming.

People get upset, and they're like, "Oh, this guy's kind of antagonistic on Twitter or whatever." I'm just saying what I believe in. It's in my blood; it's in my veins. I'm a shark. I have to swim toward the blood. I have to go. It's what I was put on this earth to do.

But yeah, Ansem, what about you?

I'd say 2 things for me. The first thing is that I spent so much time in crypto just trading, a lot of the time. I didn't trade as much in 2025. That was the first time in a while that I didn't trade all that much. I did a lot of traveling and spent a lot of money, whatever, and figured out what I actually enjoy doing and what's purposeful for me.

The second thing that I would say is that I think a ton of people are underestimating how exponentially fast AI is improving. It's not really something that humans can conceptually understand easily. I even feel like I'm underestimating how different things are going to look a decade from now.

Thinking back from that, how do you position for it? How do you best position yourself in that way? What are the things that are going to exist in a decade that don't exist now, and how do you best prepare?

It's hard. It's like trying to imagine social media before the internet existed, right? The internet gets invented and mass-distributed, and then things like Facebook follow it, which completely changes humanity, right?

Just humanity, right?

It's insane, and it has just completely changed what it means to be a human. I think AI does that 1,000×. It's like Leopold's essay. I think it's really cool. It's a really good essay. I don't know if you read the Situational Awareness essay.

Of course.

Yeah. But what I think was the core understanding for me is that, throughout human history, if you go back to when humans first were on Earth, the way that we converted energy into useful work was through our brain energy. We got food, sun, whatever, from plants, and then animals from the food. We converted that into energy in our brains, and then we thought about things and created them.

But now we're literally throwing dollars at compute, and that compute is giving us intelligence that's smart enough to do things that humans are doing, or even better than what humans are doing. So it's almost like the problem is that we don't have enough money to throw at these things—not quickly enough.

It's kind of a crazy realization when you think in those terms. How much are we going to accomplish once that's the way we go about innovating on Earth?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's very difficult to imagine or conceptualize the scale.

Is that you thinking USD? Is that you? Oh, you're the GOAT. Flood just gifted a bunch of subs.

We're nothing without the chat, you know.

How many subs is it?

100. I was an OG Justin.tv lurker, dude, back in the day.

Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead.

No, mine's pretty simple. I think if you feel something, you should say it, right? A lot of people live life where the expected value and the edge in interpersonal relationships or in life is to always hide what you feel, or not be 100% truthful, because then the other person has the ability to hurt you. The other person can see into you in a way that makes you feel uncomfortable.

My recommendation for anybody would be: if you feel something, you should fight for it, and you should actually try to put yourself out there. If you feel strongly about something, if you have a gut feeling about something, even if it's totally unexplainable and you have no idea why you feel that way, you have to go and figure it out.

That means a lot. That means a lot to me personally.

That means a lot to me.

Personally, that resonates with me heavy. That's a [expletive] bar.

It's really good. I mean, we're talking about time and life and stuff. Obviously, you've had a great year, and I've always had positive, good interactions with you. I know that you live a [expletive] nice lifestyle, a cool lifestyle.

One thing I like about you, and I think we relate on, is that we think similar things are important. I think you're living your best life and for the right reasons.

Sometimes I struggle with the idea of, "[Expletive], I've only spent this amount of time with my family—the family that I have left—this month." Or, "[Expletive], I'm stressing." I spent the last 3 days stressing about something that's like, is it really important?

How do you battle that as somebody who works nonstop and, like you said, is a shark and can't stop swimming toward the blood? It's the classic question: What's the number? When is it enough? Is it ever enough? What is enough? What is the goal? Where do you want to be at the end of your life? What do you think you're most on point and on track with right now, and where do you think you can work on, man?

Man, family's complicated.

Very, very.

You can always be better. I think a lot about when I was younger, when I made a lot of money really quickly. It was difficult for me. I think money really exacerbates all the personality traits that you have, right? If you're an [expletive], you'll be more of an [expletive]. If you think you can fix things with money, you'll try to fix them with money instead of actually getting to the root of the problem.

I have a lot of love and compassion. I think the nicest thing my family's ever done for me is tolerate me and all my eccentricities. I should spend more time with them. I think that's a goal over the next 1 or 2 years, especially while they're still healthy: to reinvest more in that relationship.

Family isn't always people that you're necessarily born with. If you spend every day together with someone, they become your family. They become your blood. They might not be directly related, but I think anyone in my inner circle, in my life, is my family.

That extends to the people that I've worked with for almost 10 years now. I consider them literally family. I would do anything for them. I think that's what it is.

It's difficult to balance. It's difficult, especially when you have special people in your life and you think, "Oh, man, I should be working." But I think your body will always tell you what the right thing to do is, right?

You'll be like, "Man, I should call my mom." Or, "I should send this person a text." It means a lot to tell someone you're thinking about them and tell them, "Hey, I value your friendship."

I know we haven't really been able to hang out, but I really want you to win really badly. Just know that I'm always here for you.

People in chat right now are texting their mom, “I love you.”

Exactly.

It's like that Big Daddy scene where everybody in the courtroom— not Billy Madison. Big Daddy.

It's complicated for me with family, but I love them and they love me.

Yeah, man. It's just, when you're doing big things, they have their own lives, right? They have their own goals, and you might not always see eye to eye.

Yeah.

Yeah. It's difficult, man. It's difficult.

That's real. I have a question for you about Hyperliquid. I feel like they've done a great job, obviously, with HIP-3, integrating stocks and commodities. I think what's kind of under-discussed, though, is how many different exchanges can build on top of Hyperliquid and use it as back-end infrastructure.

People obviously think of Amazon, and one of their most successful business lines is AWS. Everybody uses AWS for their cloud support, and they do really well with that. I think nobody—or it doesn't seem to me that a lot of people—have thought deeply about how Hyperliquid can be that for finance.

I'm curious if you have thoughts on that specifically. They're currently in growth mode for stocks and commodities—

The fees are 90% lower than they would be, so they could raise them.

And then if you think they'll also do other things like options and other financial primitives that they haven't explored yet.

Yeah. I think Hyperliquid's goal—and whenever I've spoken to Jeff, the messaging and what their brand is—is, “We're going to do everything, and we're going to come over and kill your business,” right? That's the way that they operate. That's the way that they think. Nothing will ever be enough for this team. They could be doing 99% of global markets, and they're going to figure out how to crush the other 1%.

Um.

That's just their philosophy toward life, right? But I think, in general, the amount of fees you're able to charge on something—this is actually what my CIO said, so let me not just jack him—is directly related to the volatility of the asset.

My CIO, Kyle Samani, for those of you who don't know, is a great researcher. He's worked with me for a long time. He always has this saying where he says, “The amount of fees that you can charge on something is directly related to the volatility of the asset,” right?

Equities don't move that much, right? The equity market sort of reflects this, where fees are quite a bit lower. Fees are basically free, other than the margin rates, on most of the top brokerages.

With crypto, we're able to charge pretty high fees because there's a barrier to entry in starting a crypto exchange. You have to achieve scale and liquidity, but crypto is also way more volatile. Bitcoin was down 7%, while the S&P had moved 50 bps. So you're able to charge more fees.

I think growth mode will probably settle around these fees, or actually continue going lower, but notional volumes will increase.

Okay.

And you'll see growth in revenues that way.

Right?

I don't know how big options will be. I don't know if it's a massive focus for the Hyperliquid team. There is no material nonpublic information. Jeff isn't someone who would ever tell me what his plan is. I can only provide feedback and perspective on how the product is.

But, yeah, I think outcome markets are important. I think prediction markets clearly aren't a fad. They're not going anywhere. They want to dominate that market, right? And if they feel like it's not worth their time, the amazing thing about the team is they're able to really be honest with themselves and say, “You know what? We shouldn't focus on this. We should get back to our core product,” right?

Look at the EVM, right? The EVM was sort of a product they launched for multisig, integrations, and compatibility to some extent. But have they spent a lot of time developing the EVM? I wouldn't say it's a top priority, because why would it?

Someone in the chat said, “What the fuck is a BIP?”

A BIP is a basis point.

Oh, yeah. Give them all the finance lingo. You want to sound like you know what you're talking about in finance? Say “a yard” instead of “a billion.” Say “a buck” or “a dollar” instead of “a million.”

That's actually old culture from when you're talking at a restaurant. If the waiter hears you, you'd want to sound like an asshole. They're going to spit in your food if you said, “I just made $80 million.” You say, “Oh, I made 80 bucks on that trade.”

That's disgusting.

That's lit. That's so hard.

It is lit. I didn't know that was disgusting, but you know—

I don't know that either. I didn't know that.

Yeah, that's old finance lingo. A BIP is a basis point, so it's 0.01%.

We're coming up on the 5-hour mark. I think it's fair to say you deserve your own episode. We could fucking talk for hours about anything.

Literally anything.

These are the boys here. Again, as the fucking dumbest person in the room right now, these are 2 guys that I've learned from over the years. I consistently bug them for their advice and insight, and I appreciate it.

This is all I aim to do with this show: distribute this to the average guy. The audience here is a blend of the 2—you know, people who understand the lingo and have been in markets for years, and people who are just getting started.

I think we're doing God's work here. I think having people like you on proves it. This was the best episode we've done, and it's really fucking cool.

For me, this episode is a full-circle moment because you're somebody that I asked and hounded for feedback and insight, along with 5 or 6 other people. It's not like I was sending these links to fucking everybody. You're 1 specific person who I really wanted to hear from.

Mike was on the show before you, and that was our mock guest in the dry run. So this is really family shit. Then we got to interview a real Chad founder in the shape of Erik Voorhees at Venice AI. I think this show perfectly represents the type of shit we're trying to talk about.

The market's been fucking insane over the last week. It's behaved in such a weird way, and I think conversations like this are important.

How do we get Jeff on, or someone high-level at Hyperliquid? We need that episode.

Yeah, I think it would be cool to hear from Jeff, but there are a few other people on the team who I think don't get as much talking time, and they're the ones who might actually be most relevant for people to reach out to.

It could really be helpful for you guys to do a Hyperliquid segment where you get the HPC, the policy center; Julian, who's kind of their BD manager slash operator guy; and then this other guy who's strictly doing BD, who they just hired.

You could do 15-minute segments with each of them: “Hey, what do you focus on? How can people help? How can people contact you?” I think that would mean a lot because Jeff gets hit up all the time. I think you should do a standalone episode with him at some point.

But there are a lot of people who work in and around Hyperliquid that make it tick, right? Jeff will be the first person to say that the reason why they win is because everyone is just as talented as Jeff.

Well, please, even just as a homie, if something pops in your head and you're like, “This would be a good thing to talk about,” or, “This would be a great person to talk to,” obviously, give me a call or let Z know.

We really value your opinion and your time. Thank you so much for coming on. We wanted to talk about HYPE, and you're the perfect person to talk to about it.

Absolutely. For the people listening at home, I have 1 thing to say: meow. That'll mean something to some people, but, yeah, love you guys. Thank you for having me on.

Legendary.

Love.

Appreciate you, brother.

Thank you, brother.

Yeah, he needs his own episode. He's the GOAT. He's a handsome fuck, too. He's not doxxed, and nobody knows what he looks like, so that's why he's a handsome kid. He's tall, handsome, sharp. He's always with a pretty girl. He's just got that. He's got that.

He was talking about how people get mad at him for being an asshole on CT. He's just confident in his positions, and he's loud when he wins. I feel like there aren't enough people like that on CT. Trading is like a—

People are so—

Yeah. People are so fucking afraid of criticism and just looking—

Who gives a fuck, bro?

Again, when we wrapped with Mike, we talked about how I think it's cool to care about shit. I think it's cool to be passionate about shit. I think that energy is awesome.

And again, I’ve never looked at somebody who’s been successful and thought, “That’s never hurt me.” I’ve never thought about that in a negative way. If I come across somebody who I’m genuinely interested in and they’re successful, I want to hear what they have to say. I want to learn from them.

I don’t think about it in terms of, “Their success means less of a chance for my own success.” That’s not how it works. There’s no cap on success.

Flood just gifted a bunch of other subs, too. I don’t know why I can’t see the number, but thank you, bro. You’re the GOAT. He needs his own episode. He’s the best.

He’s fire.

Great guy.

Bro, I feel great about this, man. I feel good. We did 5 hours. What the fuck?

Guys, this isn’t a 5-hour stream. This isn’t a 5-hour stream blowing bubbles, eating fucking Kool-Aid pineapples. I guess we did that, too. But this is, for me, some real dense, thick material, some of it. My brain is fucking fried right now.

This isn’t easy. This isn’t easy, but that’s how you know it’s worth the time. Be a part of those of us who want to search out content rather than just scroll through it. Be intentional in what you’re consuming. You are a product of what you eat. You watch people eat fast food, shitty food, whatever, and they wind up being fucking fat and gross. Sorry. I’m sorry, but I’m not.

You take care of yourself mentally. I don’t know. That’s the whole premise of the show. That’s why it’s important to me. I feel good.

We’re cruising, bro.

Dude, today was a good day.

This was a good episode. The chat is still out of control in a lot of ways, but there are a lot of Ws in there, too. And there are a lot of people here. I see some names.

That are here for the right reasons. I’m excited. I’m excited. Go build us that chat aggregator, that view aggregator, something that can live on our website. Again, I know I’ve said it a couple of times now, but I really would love to see somebody do a good job on this.

This is the note that I would like to leave on. Sorry. Yeah, this right here—the $10,000 vibe-code challenge. This wouldn’t have cost us $10,000. We’re way overspending for this. It probably already exists. We want somebody from the community to build it for us to live on Market Bubble: a chat aggregator that pulls from every one of our chats, all the platforms that we stream off of, and all the viewers and stuff.

Just one neat dashboard for this show, where I can read Z’s chat, he can read mine. It’s all together, and we can pull it up in the middle of the screen just like this and interact with chat like that. We’re building this in real time, and we want to do all kinds of things like this as it relates to the show and as we build out the show.

Bro, I just got my first subscriber on Kick.

Wow, brother. I’ll come in there and drop shit. I don’t know why Flood gifted me subs, brother. That’s funny.

Do you have anything else?

Anything else you want to talk about?

Bro, I think we hit everything, bro. We got the bull competition coming up. Look out for that.

Yeah.

Markets are doing weird things. It’s important now more than ever. I think if you’re interested in the finance piece of the show, I know it was a heavy one today. It was.

But I appreciate everybody in the chat who’s kept it positive and is here for the right reasons. Whether you’re on Twitter or you’re on Twitch, this means a lot, and I appreciate you guys.

And I guess on that note, I’ll take us out.

This is a show all about investing in yourself. We’re trying to curate a community of people who want to be in a favorable, winning position moving forward. The world’s about to change. It’s going to be flipped on its head. You can’t even imagine what it’s going to look like in 10 years.

It’s more important now than ever that you understand finance, AI, and attention, because these are the 3 pillars of success in 2026. That’s likely to be the only thing that doesn’t change over the next 10 years.