“我不认为智力还重要了”——Tushar Jain｜Market Bubble #14

Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show all about investing in yourself, where we feel like an overwhelming majority of young men are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday live on twitch.tv/fazebanks, Twitter, and my boy Z's kick.

As you guys can see, yes, chat, we are in person and Twitch. Z can see you guys. So, we got a Twitch chat down here. I prioritize Twitch chat. I love my Twitch chat. We got it here. You guys are spamming a ticker. I'm gonna murder you guys. But yeah, first time you guys get Anthem, real Anthem exposure, you're spamming a ticker.

We’re in person, bro. This is huge. This is our first time. How are you feeling?

Feeling good, bro. I feel like we had a lot of shit going on this past week. We were all over the place doing some in-person shit, Solana, and WSOP. That was really cool, but the markets are still heating up. We called the bottom, and since we called the bottom, everything has been blowing up.

You heard that? We called the bottom, baby. We sure did.

Ansem’s understanding of markets is incredible, and he really does understand how markets move. I feel like this last episode was a really good example of how well I understand attention and how attention moves.

For sure. Our dynamic, our cadence together, and the way that we have conversations are so good. They flow so naturally, which obviously makes for a good show. But the pairing of understanding markets and understanding attention is a fucking superpower. It’s a secret weapon, and we’re harnessing it in real time. The chat’s involved in that, and the show’s involved in that. I think it’s so important.

The kimchi shit, bro. Our last show has 20 million views locally across your shit, my shit, and the Market Bubble shit.

Yeah, and we started a global trend. The kimchi shit went absolutely nuts.

I didn’t even know you were going to do that. I had no idea you were going to clip that.

I did it fully on the fly, too. I told that story on the fly. I didn’t plan what I was going to say. I just performed it, and it went really well. We’re going to get into that and unpack all that shit.

As much shit as is happening in the front, I feel like so much shit is happening behind the scenes with us, the show, and just everything that’s going on. I feel like it’s very timely with where the market’s at. You said you had something for me.

Oh, bro. I got a gift for you from New York.

I got a gift for you from New York.

I’ve never pressed this before. You just brought it to me from New York.

There you go.

Bro, we’re going to be hitting this shit a lot.

We might need a couple of these buttons. This button might get thrown into the TV today. We’ll see.

We’ve got a couple of announcements. Let’s get through those, then we’ll do the main show, and then we have Rasmus coming on. It’s going to be a chill one—one for the boys.

1. Announcements

We’re going to go enjoy the fine L.A. weather. I actually have an exciting little segment at the end of the show. Penny Lane is going to make her first IRL appearance as well. She’s coming from the trainer. I haven’t seen her in 10 days. You guys are going to meet her, and the chat is going to meet her. The dog’s coming in at the end of the show.

We have the Black Bull graffiti competition. There are 3 days left. Do you want to talk about that?

Yeah. I’ve talked about it the past 2 episodes, I think. I set up a bounty on Pump.fun, essentially encouraging artists to make some cool shit around Ansem and the Black Bull meme. I’ve actually got some cool stuff submitted so far. There’s been a lot of really cool graffiti, art, and things people have built. There are 3 days left in the competition.

Right now, the prize pool is about $15,000, and it goes out to 10 people. I’m going to pick the top 10 submissions, so you have a chance to win about $1,500 right now for submitting some art around Ansem and the Black Bull. It’s been pretty cool. This one’s sick.

3 days left on it. This one’s insane.

Yeah.

I had this bookmarked. I wanted to highlight this because they absolutely killed it.

Yeah. Wow.

Incredible.

Like this one—they’re definitely winning.

You saw the way they did the ticker as well?

No.

You haven’t seen it? Look at this.

Probably in the next frame.

Yeah, the ticker is sick, bro. The ticker is sick.

Yeah, they crushed it. They crushed the Solana logo.

Damn.

Yeah, there you go. Sick.

Oh, yeah. They’re definitely one of the top 10 for sure.

Yeah. There’s still room. There are 3 days left. Get out there and go create some shit.

We’ve got the book club. I was going to lie to you guys and say we were reading it and would finish, but we haven’t even ordered the book. We’re going to order it. He reads extremely fast.

But we had a lot of shit going on. A lot of shit going on.

A lot of shit going on, so it’s not really our fault, guys. Realistically, we had about 2 hours to prep this show. We’ve been jam-packed and locked the fuck in.

We are ordering it today. Michael Cat, order the books, man.

Order the books.

Bubbles, paybox—order the fucking books.

Bubbles, where are you?

Venice is building Bubbles. We actually had dinner last night with Vets, some guys from Venice, and Kimchi. We’ll get into that in a second.

We will have the book finished. Market Wizards by next week will be finished. Chat, please order it as well if you haven't already. Let's all read this book. We'll discuss it. We’ll try to bring on Jack Schwager as a guest.

The final announcement is—drumroll, please—Michael Cat just sent me our official invitations for the Market Bubble Polymarket Fantasy Football League.

Hey.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen. We’re obviously partnered with Polymarket. We’re going to set up a 10-team Polymarket league and do a live draft for the show. We’re going to dedicate a whole show to this.

We love football. I fucking love fantasy football. My fans who have been following me for long enough know that I’m a huge football head and love fantasy. We’re going to invite a group of people from CT who are interested in doing content, along with other Polymarket partners.

That list consists of Ansem, Banks, Thread Guy, TJR, Trader Mane, Rasmus, Clemente, Easy, Orangey, and Rowdy. Those are the 10 names. That’s who’s invited. We want you guys to come.

There’s a trade we want to make on Polymarket before we move on.

Yes, sir. Preseason actually starts this week. As you guys know, I’m a huge Eagles fan. The Eagles right now are at 7% to win the championship this year. The Rams are actually at 16% because I think they just got fucking Miles Garrett, right? They got Miles Garrett this year.

Yeah. They got Miles G. Their team is actually stacked. But, baby—

We’re going to take the Eagles. The Super Bowl is in L.A., so when they’re in the Super Bowl, I’ll be here in L.A. 100%.

Is the BBC combo live yet?

Is the BBC combo? I don’t think so.

No, we need it.

We need it.

We need it.

He wants to do a parlay combo on the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, the Sixers winning the NBA championship, and Solana going to $600.

I feel like that can hit. I feel like that can hit, and if it hits, the odds would pay out insanely. It’s easily 1,000x.

Polymarket, give it to us, man. We need the BBC combo.

We need the BBC combo. I need it badly.

That’s it for announcements. Let’s get into the fun part and move into the show.

We went to the WSOP and to this Solana event, which was amazing. I’ll just speak from my own experience and my own point of view. I was excited to participate because it doesn’t get any bigger or better than Solana. Solana is at the very top of this market, in my opinion—as blue-chip as it gets. It’s fucking Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana.

Yeah, right.

It’s such a massive part of this market. What is the market cap of Solana?

Around $50 billion.

$50 billion, right? So they are an absolute monster, a Goliath, and it’s as legitimate as it gets—as legitimate as, if not more legitimate than, brands and products like Coinbase and Polymarket. These are crypto-native products, and there are only a handful of them that I feel are super legitimate and have broken the stereotype that crypto has, along with the negative narratives that follow crypto.

Yeah.

I was super excited to work with them and do anything with them because I’m a huge fan of the product. I think it’s positive EV, and I think it’s good social proof for what we’re building here. It’s great. They also sponsored the World Series of Poker, the biggest poker tournament. A 22-year-old kid just won $10 million.

That’s fire.

They’re doing this collaborative production, with Solana sponsoring the entire event. They invited us to participate in this Solana Invitational poker game that was going to be livestreamed with other crypto influencers. I hate the word “crypto.” I hate that sentence. The production was amazing.

The production was crazy. The set was insane. The setup was really, really good. The connection with all the existing poker players and poker news sites was really dope. It looked amazing.

It looked amazing.

Production to the nines. There were 9 other people, and they did all this production around it. Whatever. CT had something to say about it. Let’s watch this together, and then we’ll get into it.

I know, I know. I got it, I got it.

Oh, wait. Hold on.

No, guys. I need to be able to do this.

Yeah, let me see.

Yeah, please do that.

Which one?

Immediately.

My screen share, as you guys can see, is—

Okay.

Yeah, I got it.

2. The AI Poker Clip & CT Reaction

Start from the top. Let’s watch this shot.

“You guys should fold now. This is way too easy. Who even are these people? This is my game.

“This is going to be a really expensive lesson for all of you.

“I’m too fast, too smart, too cool.

“They’ve got nothing on me. You might as well give me the prize now.

“I’m taking everybody’s money. I’m here to win. They think they have a chance? Nah.

“You might think you have me, but trust me, you don’t.

“You’re trying to bluff me? I’m 10 steps ahead.

“This is nothing to me. I can read y’all like a book.”

That was fucking funny. Listen, that is fucking funny, bro.

It’s a little bit of a tough watch, obviously. I feel like whoever was in charge of this production specifically was put in place to do this kind of thing in the same light and likeness as all WSOP productions. It was supposed to read as professional, whatever. They work with professional poker players, and that angle and that type of content works with them.

3. Crypto Needs a Rebrand

But specifically for this, I feel like anybody who spends any considerable amount of time in crypto or on CT would know that it probably wouldn’t get the most positive response. Fair to say. It got an overwhelmingly negative response, and I feel like crypto is in need of a serious rebrand. What trading is missing today is culture.

4. Ansem Solo Q&A

I don’t know. This is just an example of that. Again, it was great, and thank you to Solana. It was awesome, and we really appreciate it. But even on set—you were there, you were a part of the same production—I was watching this happen in real time. I was watching these production guys feeding lines to these guys, and it was just not natural. It’s always going to read as cringe.

I feel like it’s so easy to make this mistake, and it’s rooted in not understanding the way content moves today in 2026. For me, this content was obviously going to come out of the gate and hit 2 groups of people. It was going to hit people on CT and people on poker Twitter.

People on CT were going to watch this and obviously respond negatively to it. It’s not for them. Then it was going to hit poker Twitter, and they weren’t going to care because nobody takes poker as seriously as poker players do. So who are you making this content for?

I feel like the move is always to make it for your core demographic, your core audience, which, for better or worse, is CT. Lead and direct production with that in mind. Appeal to them and give them something to like and engage with.

It performed well, but I feel like unintentionally it became this cringe-bait thing. People were replying to it and memeing it, which is fine, but I feel like that was unintentional. I don’t know. What’s your opinion on all this?

I thought the production was really good. The quality was 10 out of 10. The set and everything were 10 out of 10. The one thing I will say is that I thought the lines were kind of corny. That was the only thing I would say about it.

But I don’t necessarily agree with the take that if CT is angry at something, it means it’s bad.

I don’t think that, by the way. I don’t think that is necessarily bad.

Yeah, I’ve seen people say that. I was going back and forth with some people on Twitter, and they were like, “Yeah, well, we didn’t like this, so it was trash.” I don’t necessarily agree with that because a lot of the CT crowd doesn’t want crypto companies doing anything with people outside or external to crypto.

I think you have to realize that you have to do programming with things where there will be net-new participants in crypto. I think that’s what Solana realized. They definitely knew that somebody on CT hates every single one of the people on that list. So it was cringe bait in that way, too.

I would just say that the actual content of what we did during some of the filming could have been slightly different, but the actual event was really good. I think it’s directionally correct, for sure. More events like that that Solana continues to do are going to be net positive in general.

This attention thing is just a game. That’s ultimately my point. Let’s take somebody like Rasmus, who’s our guest later in the show. He won the WSOP thing, and he’s honestly on a generational heater right now, if you ask me. I think he’s doing it very, very well.

Yeah.

Rasmus is criticized more than anybody I see on CT. CT loves to hate Rasmus and loves to hate-farm Rasmus more than anybody else.

And he’s crushing it.

Rasmus more than anybody else.

Yeah.

As of late, I have not seen any Rasmus hate threads. I haven’t seen anybody making overly negative posts about Rasmus. It’s because he’s doing it right.

It was like that with Thread, too. When Thread came back and started doing his streams, I was like, “Fuck Thread.” He did all this shit. He scammed people, and he didn’t do any of that.

Now he’s been consistently putting out good content, hitting trades in real time, responding to stocks, responding to macro, responding to crypto, and doing on-chain stuff. He and Rasmus are some of the best examples of crypto-native people doing content that’s informational, entertaining, and relevant to CT.

When you see CT push back on something at the beginning, they’re usually wrong at the beginning of it. Then you see how it plays out over time, when it starts becoming consensus.

It was even that way with Solana. All of CT was super, super bearish on Solana in 2022 and late 2023. That was actually a signal—not in a way that you should align with what these people are bearish on, but signaling that if that play ended up being correct, everybody would be tailing it later on.

When it does become consensus, I won’t necessarily say that CT being bearish on something is bad. It can sometimes be a good thing.

Agreed. Agreed. Back to the Rasmus example, it’s something I’ve always taken note of. I’ve always asked myself, when I notice things like this, why and how? I’ve noticed a shift in energy and a shift in the narrative toward Rasmus very recently.

It’s turned my brain on, and I’ve asked myself a few times why and how. It gets to a point where it flips and you start to look crazy. It comes off as very forced. Rasmus is banging out 6-figure P&Ls, he has a genuinely good understanding of the market and how it works, and he’s proven that he really understands the attention game.

He’s reaching bigger, wider audiences and setting in motion trends like the kimchi premium. So if you’re still on Twitter at this moment and you’re like, “Fuck Rasmus. This is cringe,” you just look crazy at this point because Rasmus is doing it the right way. But he’s doing it for CT. That’s what CT wants.

It’s not a matter of being good or bad. It’s all personal taste and personal preference, but you do need to know your audience. You do need to know your core audience in the attention game, 100%.

Because that's just how CT runs.

And I think, on that note, Rasmus's post—where is it?

Right here. This one?

Yes. Share it.

You got hella on this shit, bro. Oh, this one.

Yeah. I feel like this is a very good example of how to do it. People responded well to this. He immediately posted a Kimchi mimic—a clone post—and matched Kimchi's post one to one. Go to Kimchi's post. It's literally one to one by design. I helped coach him through it. I helped direct this post, and it's one to one.

It banged. It slapped. People liked it. Why is the question—why?

I would say it's because, again, this is a good example of knowing your audience. You're putting this out, and what is this going to hit? Rasmus's name is blowing up on Twitter because he won the WSOP, so anything Rasmus-related—his name will hit for us, for Crypto Twitter and poker Twitter.

5. Attention 101

This has the ability to escape both and grow legs because of how big the Kimchi meme went. Anything Kimchi-related is hot in the mainstream right now, so you have that angle as well. Rasmus throws this up, and it's for CT. CT sees this, they know it, they understand it, they're inside the joke, and they respect game. They like it, they engage with it, they retweet it, they laugh with it rather than at it, and then it can go and escape CT.

You might have a guy who has no idea who Rasmus is see this, and they remember seeing Kimchi's post and know the Kimchi meme. So they engage with it, appreciate it, and like it. This is responding, reacting—attention 101.

I feel like it needs to be talked about more in crypto. Like I said, I feel like crypto needs a rebrand. Trading needs culture. Honestly, we're the guys who are going to do it. I feel like it's going to be guys like us, guys like Rasmus, Thread Guy, and people like Orangey who understand attention and content.

Then, on the side of the authentic, genuinely incredible traders who have also expressed some sort of interest in building brands and doing content, you have the Kimchis, the Rowdys, Incent, Cupsy—you know what I mean? These kids are all 20 years old, banging six-figure P&Ls regularly, making millions of dollars on-chain, and that is fucking cool.

Yeah.

Crypto can be cool. I said it. That sounds crazy, and it just feels cringe coming out of my mouth, but it's because of how bad of a rap crypto has and how poor the narrative's been.

It's because the people who get highlighted are the scammers in crypto. That's why crypto has such a bad reputation. All the people who get the most attention and exposure are the people who aren't actually trading and making money or authentically doing these things on-chain.

The authentic builders in crypto aren't the ones getting the most attention. When the people who are scammers get the most attention, then obviously crypto has a bad reputation. But if you highlight the traders—Rowdy, Kimchi, Raz, Thread, Rasmus, all these guys who are doing really well on-chain and have actually made money trading, grinding their way up as anybody else could by teaching themselves and getting better—and they also care about doing content, then that's obviously a lot more relatable to people who are looking to do the same thing.

That's what would make crypto a lot cooler than it currently is, because that's something people can actually pursue and do well in. Like we talked about last week, the Forex shit was huge at one point.

Forex was huge because people had this idea in their mind that they could make a lot of money from trading these pairs. But, bro, as I said, they don't move.

At all. Like, shit, Forex pairs move.

You're not going to hit 1,000x trading Forex.

No, you're not going to hit 1,000x trading Forex. But in crypto, and even specifically now with Hyperliquid enabling perps on stocks, you can trade these markets and make a lot of money doing so.

Yes, trading is very PvP. I don't want to say that it's not PvP, but it's a skill-based game that you can get better at. I think that's what a lot of people don't really understand about crypto.

And again, stories like Kimchi, Rowdy, and Santos—these kids are young, and it's real. In articulating and presenting that, I think that's cool. The come-up, the stories—Santos was a janitor before he got rich, you know what I mean?

Yeah, he's a janitor. Kimchi was a Fortnite pro, you know what I'm saying? So it's like—

Yeah. And listen, we've joked a lot on the show about Solana CTO because of what Z did on-chain with Black Bull, really sparking shit back up. We're going to get into that later, too, with Robinhood. It really is absolutely crazy.

This is where the culture is. This is where it's being curated: on this show, with this guy, and with some of the other names I mentioned. We've joked about Solana CTO, but I'm not joking when I say this, because Solana is really the only one even attempting to build some sort of—

Create—no, no.

Ethereum doesn't give a shit about doing any of that.

Bitcoin can't, right? Because it's just Bitcoin.

ETH is never going to do it. Honestly, if ETH did what you guys think that video is cringe—

Holy shit. Let me see an ETH production. Let me see an ETH production, right? It—

Would be awful.

But there's interest.

The fact that there's production, marketing, culture, and curation—there's obviously some interest. There's obviously some underlying interest, and they've embraced us.

And that should be the narrative. That should be the sentiment. That should be the response. That's how I responded to it because, again—

I've been in media doing this at a high level for 15 years. I got the opportunity to go out and do this with Solana, and I jumped on it immediately. It wasn't even a question in my mind because it's a cool product. It actually is cool.

I think it's less about us CTOing Solana and more about all of us together CTOing crypto—the crypto CTO.

When people think of crypto, they should just think of making money on the internet. That should be synonymous with what crypto is online. That can mean building financial products that people in certain places, who don't have access to the same infrastructure we have in the U.S., can access through crypto, with builders building those things for people. It can also mean trading—getting access to all these different markets easily.

Making money on the internet should be synonymous with crypto.

Guys, it's black again—the box in the middle of my screen share.

In the middle of my screen share.

Super, super unfortunate. Yeah, I mean, I clicked out of a window, but it just shouldn't do that.

You want this?

No. Just let them do it.

Can you just come do it real quick? It's super distracting, too.

Here, just run it.

We'll give Z—just talk to him.

All right, we got it now. Trading can be cool, and culture can be built. Look at this. This is a—I saw this post on Dexerto. This is a PSA 10 Apple business card from 1983 that was signed by Steve Jobs. People had bids in on this over $60,000, and I replied to it from the burner. It wound up being sold for $181,000.

Wow.

For a Steve Jobs signature.

That's pretty cool.

People are inspired by stories like Steve Jobs. Obviously, people like the—

This finance stuff—I just feel like what's been missing has been culture in finance, culture and trading.

Obviously, in this massive attention and content renaissance that we're experiencing right now with TikTok, YouTube, Twitch, and so on, that's where it's all going to come from. It's lacking because it's really difficult to talk about and amass an audience on subjects like these. It's not for everybody, but there's something there, bro. There's a code to be cracked, and I'm so passionate about the subject. Sorry if I'm yapping.

No, it's true. The biggest thing that I think people don't realize is that a lot of the people who made a lot of money off Bitcoin in the early days, when 20 people were buying Bitcoin in 2010, 2011, and 2012, were anonymous. They were cypherpunks, and they didn't care about being public. That was actually antithetical to everything that they wanted to do.

A lot of the people who were earliest to crypto and very online—even the traders and the builders—didn't want to be public at all. Crypto developed this perception that it was a weird, scammy thing on the internet. Now, though, you have traders making money off perps, making money on-chain, making money doing all these things, and building in crypto.

Once that's seen as cool, for developers but also for traders, it becomes a lot more enticing for people to come into the industry. We had Mert on, and he was like, “I want Solana to be the Apple for the entire internet.” I think that's exactly what Solana should be trying to focus on and how it should be doing all its content.

To do that, you need the stories—the real success stories, especially of these young kids who have done really well on-chain and made their money. They're self-made, literally. I think that's what the focus should be for Solana and crypto in general.

6. The Kimchi Masterclass

We just saw it last week. Kimchi is an absolute perfect example of what you just described. All of his motion, all of his aura—the kids are calling it—all this engagement. We ran a master class last episode on attention farming and clip farming. At 34 years old, I don't even have a TikTok account. We hit a clip and it ran hundreds of millions of views. The whole trend went hundreds of millions of views. It went giga-viral.

We had Stable Ronaldo, TJR, and Lacy reacting to it, and it was all rooted in this Kimchi thing. The only reason why that was able to run is, again, to your point, success stories and it just being a very engaging and interesting—

—thing. That's what Solana and crypto—we hate the word—we just have to rebrand crypto as Solana at this point.

But yeah, I want to watch this because our intern put this together. I know you haven't seen it yet, but this is really, really good. This is maybe my favorite post that we've ever made. Shout-out to our intern; you're killing it.

The caption says, “FaZe Banks teaches us a lesson in attention and clip farming. He intentionally paused stream and created a fabricated story about trader Kimchi and knew it would go viral. The story became a global TikTok trend, with creators like Stable Ronaldo, Lacy, and TJR hopping on. The clip surpassed 20 million views. The trend Banks started generated hundreds of millions of impressions across all platforms and channels. Masterclass.”

Let's watch this, guys. I want to give this Kimchi clip-farming thing a shot. I told you guys, listen, just bear with me for a second.

Sicko. Yeah, that was totally fabricated. That's not real. That's just me. I invited him out to lunch. I thought we were just going to link up. What does he do? Shows up 7 hours later.

Clemente was so funny. My favorite one by far.

Did you see the last time we [inaudible] videos?

It's the way that the internet works. I had a list of [inaudible] linking me $4 million, like drinking tap water.

Whatever. We had a bottle of still water on the table. Touch it. Welcome to my bookmarks.

I get up to take a piss, as you guys know. I walk into the bathroom. I'm gone for 2 minutes. I come back, and he's gone. No one said it was paid for. I haven't heard from him since.

Facts, bro. 12 to 20 million. Listen, we still got it, bro. We still got it. But that was fun. That was the first time we ever tried to do that.

This is the kind of shit that crypto needs, unironically. I don't know what it does for me and my personal brand, but again, I'm 34. I'm a good sport. I'm going to play my role and play my part, you know what I mean? I'm happy to have been involved in this crazy Kimchi wave. It's fun, and it's shit like that where I'm like, “Okay, there's something here.” I know there's something here.

I want to watch that Clemente one with you.

It's too good, bro.

It's too fucking good. It—

—was funny.

Where is it? Yep, got it. Nope, never mind. That's not production's fault. That's my fault. I'm fucking—

Who played that sound?

Yeah. What, though?

Is that production?

I think so.

Oh, they're getting their licks back. Okay, okay, I got you. All right, we got it right here. This was my favorite one. We have to watch this. And he's a crypto native, CT native.

I was at a restaurant in Dubai, right? I look over, and a Maybach pulls up. I'm like, “Who is that?” Kimchi comes out. But all of a sudden, 15 other dudes also come out of the Maybach. I'm like, “How many people fit in there?” And wait, is that the guy who made $40 million on Trump? He has so much aura.

Then all of a sudden, I see him later on at the club with those same 15 dudes, all in a corner. They're all having a good time. I'm like, “Dude, this guy has so much aura.” He didn't talk to a single girl. In fact, a girl tried to walk into their circle and say hi to Kimchi. Kimchi said, “No, I only want to hang out with dudes.”

In fact, at one point, I saw Kimchi making out with one of the dudes. I'm like, “God, this guy has so much aura. Are you kidding me?” Dudes left and right. I'm like, “This guy's unbelievable. He made $40 million on Trump, by the way. How could someone be so cool?” I was at a restaurant in Dubai.

So good. Too good. And listen, this is why I wanted to bring that clip up. This is a CT native. He makes niche trading content, and Alyssa Violet sent me this clip and FaceTimed me. She's like, “What have you done? This trend is so funny. This is hilarious.” She's crying on the phone laughing.

She's never traded crypto a day in her life. She doesn't know who the fuck Clemente is, but it reached her.

You know what I'm saying? It reached her, and that's what we should all be aiming to do. That's the fucking game that we're playing. There's a lot at stake. The market is in desperate need of reform and a rebrand, in my opinion.

On that note, we went and got dinner last night, and Kimchi was in attendance. Kimchi was physically at the dinner. We were in LA.

This is actually real, though.

7. Dinner With Kimchi

Yeah. Listen, you guys have to trust me.

Sorry, by the way, this is real.

You have to trust me. You don't have to trust me. Give us your experience. We got dinner with Kimchi last night. Give us the story, A to Z.

Yeah. So, we got dinner. We set it up for around 8:30. It was at E. Baldi in LA. We're walking to E. Baldi, and we actually see Kimchi across the street. He did pull up in a Maybach. I swear, 10 dudes got out of there.

Four dudes. Okay.

Regardless, that is kind of funny. It was him and, I think, 3 of his boys. Yeah, him and 3 of his boys. We got dinner, ate, and it was cool. We talked about the state of Solana, crypto, and trading. He's actually a super-sharp kid. He definitely does have aura. He's cool.

Really smart kid.

It's cool because the people typically in his position—people who have a lot of notoriety out of nowhere and blow up really fast—don't just stay down to earth and remain chill. He seemed to be that way, and he also understands that crypto is in a spot where it could be really cool.

He knows there are people who are young like him and want to do the same things that he did on-chain. He traded crypto, and he's aware of that. He's focused on how we show other people that they can also do the same thing. It was cool. We talked for probably an hour and a half.

Yeah, we were there for a minute. We were there for a while, and I second everything that he said. Obviously, I'm really hyped up and hung up on this attention thing because it's kind of all starting to happen at once.

You see a couple of the leading products and platforms in this market going and locking people up, throwing a bunch of money at people to do deals, and so on. The attention piece, the distribution part, is incredibly valuable.

It was refreshing sitting and talking to a kid who's never made a YouTube video. I think he's made a couple of random vlogs and stuff, but he does have a very fine understanding of it. I think he's in a really good spot.

I'm slamming his chart all day. After that conversation and the past couple of times I've talked to him, I think he's going to go the distance. Whatever he wants to do, he's going to do.

Banks Glazer in the chat. I appreciate you. I love the name. But yeah, that was the Kimchi saga. We did it, bro. 120 million views. We fucking did that, brother. We did that. (Laughter.)

We did. It's interesting because I think people don't realize it's kind of insider. A lot of the community of people who trade on-chain know who he is, but the people who don't trade crypto just see what he's doing. So it's kind of twofold: one, who the fuck is this dude? How did he do all this? And the other side is, no, we know who he is. He's a fucking G. Those 2 things combined together are why the content goes so viral.

And it's really, really clean. His origin story and the lore are invincible to criticism. So many people in crypto also suffer because crypto is very cannibalistic and negative by default in nature. That's the automatic response. There's a lot of cope too.

Especially lately, the last couple of years, people who have been in crypto haven't had the best experience. So you see somebody win, and a lot of people automatically want to create some sort of excuse for why they won and why maybe they lost.

I feel like that's where a lot of that shit comes from with him. It's on-chain. It was a clean trade.

Clean trade. Hit a Trump trade. Can't really—

The opportunity was quite literally available to all of us. We were all there that day. You guys know where the fuck I was.

8. Is Solana Back?

Shout out Lily Phillips. But everybody had this opportunity. He fucking capitalized on it. He got in, he got out, and then logged off. Now he's just farming aura. And it's—yeah. Kimchi. Kimchi. Kimchi. Kimchi. Kimchi. Clip it. Ship it. Yeah, moving on.

Shout out Georgia Tech. Somebody in the chat said—

Ansem, let me just ask you straight up. Yo, is Solana really back?

Solana is definitely back. If it's not clear, since the past month—since I CTO'd ANON on June 27th, I want to say we're at all-time highs on every single metric with Solana on-chain: active holders, transactions, trading volume. Even the biggest apps, like Pump.fun—Meteora is doing really well with the liquidity pools. We have NFTs popping off for the first time in a really long time, and we haven't made any new lows, I think, since early July or late June.

So I think on-chain for Solana is definitely back. Solana is definitely coming back. Now we're in this period where we're in a choppy uptrend, and it's going to be a bit of a time, I think, before we really start the aggressive uptrend. But we're definitely back. People are definitely more interested in crypto than they have been in months, and we're definitely starting to see—and we'll start to see—more developers build cool shit on-chain. So I'm excited.

Amen. It really is starting to feel like that. I blindly trust and follow this guy, to be honest with you. But just as far as a feeling, that instinct, that intuition, it feels like that. I do want to share the counterpoint. Wizard of Soho on CT said, “OG Solana trenches aren't back. Scammers are trying to convince people it's back. Solana's finished under $50 soon. Only low IQ.” This is really super bearish.

Yo, this is bullish. Thank God Soho's bearish.

I love that.

Thank God. (Laughter.)

But I have seen this from Choose Rich Nick too—not as extreme, fucking crazy, and negative as this, but this narrative that it's not really back, that these are artificial pumps. What's the response to that?

I actually have a response to this. I'm going to send it to you so you can pull it up. I'll ship it in the Telegram, maybe.

Yeah, I'll ship it real quick. Real quick. Let's see.

Easy. But I'll talk; we can pull it up after. My response to that would be that there definitely are situations on-chain where stuff goes up and comes back down. I don't think if you see a coin run from 0 to $50 million and then go down 70% that means we're not back on-chain. You don't see a coin go from 0 to $90 million and pull back a lot and conclude that we're not back on-chain.

What I think people who aren't really trading on-chain don't realize is that when you have something go parabolic in the first couple of weeks after it launches, it's going to have a period where it consolidates and goes sideways for a while. This happened with every other major on-chain coin that went to billions last cycle. There was a period where they went sideways after their first run-up, and then they got more attention. They got more demand from people moving their funds on-chain, more traders getting bullish on Solana and Solana on-chain coins again, and then they made a new leg up and higher highs.

That's what I think is going to happen over the next month and over the next few weeks with a lot of the coins that have led this comeback on-chain. I think it's pretty clear if you look at any of the old charts. Look at Bonk, look at WIF, even look at Pepe. Look at the coins from last cycle that did well on-chain. They didn't go straight up. They went up, they went sideways, and then they went up again. I don't think just pointing out some charts of stuff going down means that we're not back.

What I will say—and this is something I put out in a tweet—is—

I'll do it right now.

Yeah, right now.

Yeah, right now.

So I had some signs of the bottom being in. I said, “Price stops going down on bad news,” which we've been talking about. Saylor buying millions into $60K is crazy, and Bitcoin printing a higher low. Crypto-native mobile apps are starting to pick up real traction. FOMO added like 100K users in a week.

Insane.

Pump.fun is up like 20% in revenue week over week from last week. They're starting to make like $1.5 million a day right now. Institutional interest is coming back. We have Robinhood Chain. They just listed Cash Cat today. Crazy. That's insane. I think it's one of the fastest listings for a meme ever.

People like Paul Tudor Jones are also bullish on BTC. BTC is trending on social media again, picking back up. I have real insight into this because I saw this happen last cycle. When my numbers started to pick up a lot in late 2023, I was like, “Oh, this is weird. This is different from what's been happening the entire year.” It's happening again right now. I added literally 200K followers in the past month. I think when we started this show, I was at like 700K.

Yeah. Insane.

And I'm up—I'm at like 1.2M right now.

Which is crazy. You've doubled your following. You were already the biggest account on—

And I doubled it. Yeah. And I doubled it again. There's definitely a lot more interest coming into crypto right now.

The psychology of a market cycle is paired with Bitcoin, and I feel like this is actually where we're at.

Yeah, it's pretty good.

You see this a lot, but it's like—

I don't know. We could chop maybe for the rest of the year, but I feel like your whole thing is maybe don't flip fully bullish yet, but the bottom's in. You know what I'm saying? You feel like the bottom's in.

9. Ansem's On-Chain Picks

Yeah. No, I think we're in a great spot.

It sure does feel that way. It sure does feel that way. Gun to your head: pick 3 spots on-chain, and don't include Ansem.

Damn. 3 spots. Let's see. I think one of the things I'm most bullish on right now is actually on Robinhood. It's this protocol called Stonk Broker. I've been talking about it a little bit the past few weeks, but essentially it's an NFT and a token. There are 666,666 tokens per NFT. You can convert them back and forth, but there's a fee to convert the token into the NFT.

Out of this fee, 70% buys tokenized stocks on-chain and then airdrops those stocks to people who have activated their NFT. So the NFTs basically get yield from all the trading back and forth between the token and the NFT, which is pretty cool. Vlad has been very transparent: “We want this to be the RWA chain,” but they also support memes. I support both of these things together.

10. Solana x WSOP Recap

The builders are like, “Okay, we're going to build something that's reflective of these 2 things being bullish for Robinhood.” They also have their own launchpad and their own DEX that they're building out. The dev is somebody who's been in crypto for a while. I think he used to work at ApeChain. But yeah, I think it's a good spot. It's around $30 million right now.

He's talking about this candidly because, obviously, we're in person. He's in my living room. He's on my couch. He's doing his thing. He's locked the fuck in, right? I see in real time him working through this and articulating this.

The 2 parts that really jumped out at me were obviously the NFTs. I still own fucking CryptoPunks. That's how I got introduced to crypto in the first place, so NFTs—I go check the NFTs. I like the way that they look. It checks that box for me.

And then the part where you just said it's paired with the token one-to-one.

Yeah.

So if the price of it increases, it's not reliant on—its price is reliant more on the token than anything else, right? And the fact that the fees get returned in the shape of stocks—Apple, Amazon, et cetera—this is cool to me.

I agree with that. My knee-jerk reaction was to buy it. I didn’t really think too much about it.

I hear Ansem talking about something, and that’s always an option for me. So I go and grab one. Then I’m brushing my teeth and thinking, “When was the last time I bought an NFT?” The last time I bought an NFT was 3 years ago; it was a Mady.

Late 2023, right before the bull market kicked off.

Yeah. I haven’t bought one since—3 years. Before that, how I got started in crypto was buying Punks in late 2020, early 2021. And that’s right before the bull market kicked off.

Even saying the word “NFT”—I think “NFT” is worse than the word “crypto.”

It gets such a bad reputation. I have a 7-figure NFT portfolio. It’s so bad.

But I think that’s interesting because it was an automatic response for me. It was similar to you: I’ve been here before, I’ve done something like this, and I found myself in this spot reacting this way. If I were looking at it from the outside, I would find that interesting.

I mean, bro, they flip Apes.

They flip Apes by a lot. The floor is like 7.8 ETH or something like that.

It’s 8 ETH. I think the floor for Apes is 7 ETH or something like that. I don’t know. NFTs are fucking dead, unfortunately. But obviously that’s significant. I think it’s around $18,000, $17,000 USD.

11. Cash Cat & Robinhood

Yeah. It dropped a month ago. It’s obviously a higher-risk spot because it’s still under $50 million market cap. But I think that if you’re betting on Robinhood continuing to be a player in this space, and on Vlad continuing to push this RWA and meme narrative, it’s something novel and it’s an interesting spot.

There was a ton of speculation about how involved Robinhood would be, but now it’s kind of confirmed. There was a lot of speculation around Cash Cat—it was the leading Robinhood meme, right? We saw a lot of people buying that. We saw a lot of people mis-trade that. I made one of the worst trades I’ve ever made in my life. Seriously, I’m not going to get into the details, but Clemente’s been spiraling, and I have a very—

Sold the bottom.

Yeah, sold the pico bottom, and so did I. They literally listed it. There were people who obviously knew this was coming. Unfortunately, I was not one of them. But, yeah, we have it here. This is pretty big, you know?

It’s huge, bro. For something that new, I’ve never seen a centralized exchange list something that fast. I’ve been saying pretty publicly that all the centralized exchanges last cycle listed all these memes at multi-billion-dollar market caps. They were super late, and they missed out on making a lot of money because all the trading was happening on-chain.

There’s no way they’re going to let this happen again. There’s no way Coinbase is going to be late again. There’s no way Robinhood is going to be late again. In 2020 and 2021, one of the biggest moneymakers for Robinhood was Dogecoin. DOGE was the most popular, most-traded thing on their platform for a really long time. Everybody recognized it: “Oh, I know DOGE. I buy it on Robinhood. It’s a meme attached to a dog, and it’s a crypto thing.”

But this past cycle, they missed a lot of that volume and activity. It would be really surprising to me, especially with how much they’ve built. Coinbase has its own L2 now. At the beginning of last cycle, they didn’t even have one, or they were just starting their own L2. Robinhood has its own L2. They have wallets where you can do a lot of things on-chain. It would be really surprising to me if the centralized exchanges aren’t quicker to the play.

Yeah. The point being—and again, from my POV—it’s very clear that listing it as quickly as they did, like you said, is a clear signal that the culture at Robinhood is very pro-crypto. They want as big a share of this market as humanly possible. Obviously, meme coins are a huge part of it. As volatile and negative as the context around that may be, they’re all in on it.

We had Brian last week, and that was alpha, low-key. He was very direct: “We’re bullish on everything.”

He low-key did tell us directly, bro: “Yeah, we’re bullish on all of it. Anything you can trade, we want to support it. We want to support it.”

He even talked about that weekend. He was like, “Yeah, we could have raised the priority fees that weekend when it blew up.” And we did.

Dude, I forgot about that.

You know who gave me alpha? Rasmus at the WSOP. He was like, “I don’t know, man. I don’t know if I would sell it. This wallet on-chain has bought 25 Robinhood things pre-listing. There are group chats talking about this wallet. It spotted 25 Robinhood things before listing, and it just started purchasing them.”

The token pumped from around 40 to around 60. I’m like, “I’ve got to get the fuck out of here. I’ve seen this happen 6 different times.” I sold right before it went crazy. Rasmus was trying to give me the alpha, and in my mind I’m like, “Bro—”

He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

I’m getting the fuck out of this whatever. He wound up being super right. Rasmus has his finger on the pulse.

I had this little Jesus figure on the table at the WSOP. He’s like, “Bro, take that off. It’s a low-cap, $1 million market-cap meme coin. They’re going to think it’s a fucking—” I’m like, “What?” Everybody at the table is like, “What?”

Yeah, I didn’t even know it was a meme coin.

He’s really got his finger on the pulse. That’s where we’re at. We’re at a place in 2026 where I’m legitimately following Rasmus’s alpha, locked in.

He is. He’s locked in.

Rasmus is locked in.

You said Stonk Broker. What are the other 2? Give us another spot on-chain that you like.

I also like Credible Finance. They’re interesting. They’re a protocol that just launched on MetaDAO. They’re a stablecoin protocol focused on connecting payments between people who don’t have the necessary infrastructure in whatever country they’re in, allowing them to pay with stables for whatever businesses are trying to access those customers.

They’re making a good amount of money right now. It’s actually a real business, a real startup, and the token is completely aligned with the equity, which I think is interesting. It’s also a pretty low-market-cap coin, so it’s a risky spot.

I’ve been saying that meme coins attract a lot of people to trade on-chain, but at the same time that meme coins are blowing up on-chain, you have real startups tokenizing their businesses. If people see that those startups are doing well, that’s what’s going to attract a lot more institutional capital into the space, which is really important for the space to grow and get bigger. So I like Credible.

And number 3?

I won’t give a third.

Okay. If you want to go ahead and take it, I have to take a piss. We’re only at 1. This is my first piss break. I’m going to pass it up to Z and just let him rest. Bro, what are these noises in the fucking headphones?

Oh, my God. What’s good, chat? How are we doing?

I appreciate that. Thank you. Thanks, production.

What’s good, everybody? What questions do y’all have? Y’all have me for a little bit while Banks is pissing.

I look like 21 Savage, bro? I do not look like fucking 21 Savage. What the fuck? That’s so crazy. Y’all are racist, bro. That’s insane. I don’t look like him at all. We need a side-by-side of me and 21 Savage. That’s nuts.

Any Anthem announcements? I will have some next week. I can tell you that. I will have some next week. We’re cooking on a lot behind the scenes right now.

Are you Poor Goat? I am not Poor Goat, but I fuck with Poor Goat. Poor Goat is one of the only people I sent the airdrop to because he was one of the OG Anthem holders and was pushing it really hard. At the time, you guys know, there were 2 of them, and I sent him $30K. He held it to $1 million, and he’s one of the only people who held his entire airdrop and is still holding his entire airdrop. He’s one of the biggest Anthem supporters, so I fuck with Poor Goat. He’s cool as fuck.

Eagles record this year: 13 wins. 13 wins in a Super Bowl.

Thoughts on Mantis? What’s Mantis?

WeHo. When am I pulling up to the WeHo hoop? Where in WeHo? I could pull up, bro. I’m down.

I look like the fucking guy from Yo Gabba Gabba. What does that mean? What the fuck does that mean?

Lost to Buffalo in the Super Bowl.

Bro, I am not confident in the Bills. The Bills fumble every single time they get to the playoffs. Every time I think Josh Allen's going to get it done, he never gets it done. They might not have a problem with the Chiefs this year, so we'll see. Yeah, the Bills are talented, but they can never execute in the playoffs. I don't know.

I think the Rams are going to be trouble this year, to be honest. I think if you could bet on the NFC Championship Game, Eagles–Rams. Bro, I do not look like 21 Savage. What the fuck? This is fucking crazy. What the fuck? I hate y'all. I really do. See if I can pull this up. This works. Hey, we're lit.

Yeah, I mean, the trade I've been talking about for the past few weeks, I still think it's the best mid-cap setup. I think PUMP looks really good. This level just broke out above on the daily; 0.0023 and 0.0024 is a huge spot. I mean, it's like 9 months of consolidation, and breaking out here. The revenue is starting to inflect up. On-chain activity is starting to inflect up. Yeah, I'm still pretty bullish on this.

12. Tushar Jain Joins

Do we know how much time?

Oh, lit. Cool.

Dang. That went quick.

Yeah, dude. We're flying.

We're flying. We're flying. Bring him in. Yo, guys, we have Tushar in the back rooms of Market Bubble. Super excited to have him. He is one of the lead guys at Multicoin Capital, which is one of the most successful venture capital firms in crypto. They crushed the Solana trade and have crushed a lot of other trades as well. They also hit, I believe, Hyperliquid pretty well. Was it this year? Last year? I think it was this year.

They hit Zcash as well. So they're pretty on it. They do liquid and they also do venture, and they're definitely high signal. So excited to talk with Tushar.

Welcome, brother.

Hey, guys. How are you doing?

Incredible. Never been better.

How are you?

I'm doing great. It's a beautiful day.

Absolutely healthy, happy.

Some of us are. We're all relatively rich, I would probably say.

Your skin looks great. You're shining right now. You look amazing.

Zeke gave you quite an intro, but would you like to introduce yourself to the chat, the Market Bubble community, and let them know who you are?

Sure. I'm Tushar. I'm founder and chief investment officer at Multicoin Capital. We manage money across both a public liquid strategy and a venture strategy, all focused on the crypto space. We started in 2017, so we've been through some cycles.

Awesome.

Welcome to the show, brother.

13. How Crypto Investing Has Changed

How would you say—2017 is wild, by the way. That's actually when I also got into crypto, so it's cool that you've been in crypto for that long. I've been able to see the market change. What would you say has changed the most about trading and investing in the crypto space over the past 9 years that you've been investing with Multicoin?

Well, let me start by answering your question and talk about what has changed, but I also want to touch on what has not changed because I think that's also really interesting.

Yeah.

So, what has changed is that a lot of the idea space has been explored. I mean, starting in 2017, there were a bunch of ideas of what blockchains could be useful for, and a lot of that has been tested. Some of it has really worked, like DeFi, and some of it really hasn't worked, like Web3 social. But that's how experiments go. You have to test them out and see. They were good bets to make at the time. But now we know, right? Those experiments have been run with a lot of money and a lot of very smart people who have given them a lot of energy. So that's been a big change.

Yeah.

And then the second big change is that we used to be in this world where tokens were valued just on the idea. That was kind of the only thing that mattered.

Yeah.

And now cash flows matter. People are realizing that value can be returned to token holders. We don't have a hostile government in place that's going to get you in trouble for doing that. And so you are seeing cash flows returned back to token holders. That's a meaningful development. It means that you have actual ownership, or claims on a cash flow stream, not just a meme, basically.

But I want to touch on what hasn't changed. What hasn't changed is the animal spirits involved in these markets. This is still the most volatile large market in the history of capitalism, and that's not gone away. You still see incredible dispersion of returns.

Sometimes, when you're in a period of apathy like we're in right now, what you see is people forget how much these rallies can melt faces. They just kind of forget what the bull market feels like. And when they start forgetting what the bull market feels like, that's usually a good sign.

We actually talked last show about how the traditional stock market is behaving more like crypto than ever before, and how volatile that's becoming, just like trading in general. It's kind of become this blur. The line is becoming more and more blurred every day.

Yeah.

14. The Zcash Thesis

You spoke a little bit about cash flows versus the idea of a token. I definitely agree that we have a lot more clarity now that you can return these cash flows to a token in a cool way. But one of your guys' best trades recently has been Zcash. How does that fit in your model for what drives value to tokens? Because Zcash obviously doesn't have any cash flow. So why are you so bullish on that trade, and what's your update there?

Yeah, absolutely. Zcash is kind of the exception, and so let me tell you about our history with Zcash and why we found it interesting.

Yeah.

You know, we've been paying attention to Zcash for a while, and for a long time it just felt dead. It was like, why do you need this? Bitcoin is the credibly neutral thing. But sentiment really started to shift on a number of key issues.

The first thing that we saw was the emergence of wealth taxes or unrealized-gains taxes. You're seeing that around the world, right? And I expect that as AI continues to proliferate, it'll increase wealth inequality and it'll increase the political desire for these types of taxes.

What people realized is that having a bunch of Bitcoin—yes, it cannot be frozen by anybody. But if everyone knows that you have it, then it can still be seized pretty easily, because all it takes is someone to show up to your house and demand that you give them some amount of your Bitcoin. So the only way to have true censorship resistance is with privacy. If you don't have privacy, if everyone knows that you own something, then you can be censored. It is something that someone can come and try to take from you.

And then we also saw 2 other things that made us excited about Zcash. The second is that I saw a bunch of OG Bitcoiners get excited about Zcash. You have to go back to that era—the 2013, 2014, 2015 era—and think about the people who were buying Bitcoin at the time. They were not buying it because they thought it was an investment, necessarily. They were buying it for political purposes. They had certain beliefs about the world. These are the libertarian types, and they were buying it because of those beliefs.

I think a lot of them grew pretty jaded with Bitcoin. It's gotten fairly institutionally captured, with BlackRock and MicroStrategy controlling so much of it now. And it's also stopped evolving. It doesn't keep up with technology. A lot of these people—not all of them, you can't paint them with just one brush—but a lot of them got kind of bored of Bitcoin. They just weren't paying attention to it.

But then, when Zcash started to draw more attention, they got really excited about it. What I saw is that those same Bitcoin OGs who were excited about it last year were still excited about it this year. I called a bunch of people in February of this year, which is when we put on the big Zcash position, and they were still excited about it.

How big was the position?

How big was the Zcash position?

Let's just say it's very substantial.

Nine figures. You said yes.

Okay.

Yeah, they printed. They printed for sure.

Oh my God.

Yeah, I think it's pretty cool that OG Bitcoiners had this idea of Bitcoin as a rebellion against the existing system. I think that was an idea that formalized with BTC. I'm curious if you think that anything could ever happen similarly with the younger generation, because the younger generation also has ideas about markets and how they trade them. I don't think they always have the same frameworks that boomers do. When they're—freeze. You good? Can you hear me?

Oh, I lost you there for a second. I'm not sure where the problem is.

Yeah.

Repeat the question. I was saying that Bitcoin and Zcash are ideas, as you said, about libertarianism and rebelling against the system. Do you think that anything could ever happen like that again—an immaculate conception with the younger generation around some idea that they resonate with?

It's a great question. I do think that's a really good question. Although I caught what you said before, and maybe you called me a boomer. I'm definitely not a boomer.

No, not you. Not you. I'm not calling you a boomer, bro.

Oh, no. I don't think you're a boomer.

Can it happen? Look, the immaculate-conception story of Bitcoin is really cool, and I don't know that it can be repeated. There's only one time that you can be the first blockchain.

But I don't think that's the only thing that matters, right? You don't have to freeze at a moment in time and then just stick to that one version of the world. So, could this happen for zoomers? Yeah, I absolutely think it could happen. I think what's going to happen for Zcash is not necessarily that a bunch of traders get into it. I think what we're going to see is people building next-generation businesses—AI-empowered businesses—with 1 or 2 employees and making tremendous amounts of money.

They're going to see this as a way to secure some portion of that money.

That's the best thesis I've heard for Zcash. What you just said right there is—

That was fucking amazing. Clip that shit, somebody. I mean, this shit—yeah, that's on point.

That makes so much sense.

That does make sense. Could you give the chat some information on what exactly happened with the Zcash hack, what the Ironwood update does with Zcash, and why it's important? Why were people so concerned about what happened a few months ago?

Yeah. I wouldn't call it a hack. I don't think there is any evidence of any—

Right. If you look at the news, all that happened is that, in early June, one of the core developers on the team said, “Hey, we patched a critical vulnerability that we found.”

And look, the vulnerability was a bad one, right? It had been in the codebase since 2022. If it had been exploited, it would have allowed infinite minting of Zcash within the Orchard pool. However, we have no evidence that it was exploited. We haven't seen any activity that indicates that it was exploited, and so we thought the reaction to the news of a software bug being patched was extreme. We actually bought some more.

Oh, wow. That happened.

Because we had no evidence that it was being exploited. What we saw was a bunch of leveraged traders in there—

—and stop-losses.

Yeah.

And so, as soon as you start running stop-losses, this took me back to 2017 BitMEX-level—

Yeah.

It did. Yeah, for me too, for sure.

You just have to show up and buy when there's blood in the streets, and you know that the market is being irrational—that it's just a bunch of stop-losses being hit or a bunch of liquidations happening.

Since then, what the Zcash team has done is release a new pool called Ironwood, which is formally verified. I won't go into too much technical specificity, but what “formally verified” means is that it's mathematically proven not to have any bugs. This isn't theoretical—“We did an audit” or something. This is a mathematical proof of correctness in the code that it cannot have this kind of bug.

Yeah.

It cannot have an infinite-minting bug in there. That pool was released, and everyone is migrating from the old pool to the new pool. Once again, we've seen no evidence of any exploit, and now the system is more secure than it has ever been before.

It's also now quantum-resistant. In case there are quantum computers that would be able to crack all of Satoshi's keys for his Bitcoin, those quantum computers would not have the ability to take your Zcash. So, there are a number of really important upgrades that Zcash has had.

Awesome. That's great context.

You've talked a little bit about Solana. You guys at Multicoin have always been the Solana guys. You're known for the Solana trade, but you've also hit the Hyperliquid trade, and you spoke earlier about how cash flows are important for tokens now.

How do you think about Solana versus Hyperliquid? A lot of the backlash from Hyperliquid people is that they say L1s don't do a good job of internalizing a lot of their revenue, while Hyperliquid obviously internalizes the majority of the revenue from its perps platform. How do you think about Solana versus Hyperliquid long-term, and how do they both drive value to their native tokens in different ways?

I like both of them. Being a maxi is a really bad way to make decisions or investment decisions. You have to look at the facts out there.

If you're not willing to change your mind, you're going to be a bad investor.

You do that really well.

15. Solana vs. Hyperliquid

We like both. What I like Solana for is spot trading and spot issuance. If you believe that all of the capital markets in the world are going to come on-chain, and that you're going to have tokenized securities, bonds, equities, and so on and so forth, I think those spot assets will be issued on an incredibly neutral platform like Solana.

There's all this talk of Canton-type private networks, but those are not permissionless. They're kind of like intranets. I might date myself here, but in the 1990s there was a whole debate about intranets versus the big public internet and what was going to be more important. Of course, intranets—the internal corporate networks—are very important, but the big public internet is by far more important. Everyone is able to access it, everyone is able to use it, and everyone wants to connect to the big public internet.

To me, Solana is the big public internet.

Wow.

It's a big public blockchain. Then you will have private little blockchains like Canton that exist for a certain purpose, but I think Solana is in the pole position to win spot-asset issuance because it has the performance to do it, as well as the credible neutrality and decentralization to do it.

Hyperliquid is a different thing. In my opinion, Hyperliquid isn't trying to do the same thing. It is a very specialized, vertically integrated product that is specifically best for derivatives trading—whether those are perps, prediction markets, or, in the future, options or anything else. It's very much focused on derivative trading.

It does not have the same number of validators or the same decentralization that Solana does. It's not as neutral, per se, as Solana is, which is a trade-off. It means it can be much more performant for the use case that it's optimizing for. But I also wouldn't expect to see a bunch of tokenized-securities issuers show up on Hyperliquid.

Interesting. Interesting.

Solana is the internet, just for context for the chat. You mentioned the Solana trade—them crushing the Solana trade—and the Hyperliquid trade. That's incredible. What was the trade, just for context?

How early were you guys to Solana?

We led the seed round, and we doubled down in every round since. It was by far the biggest position in our funds for a really long time. We held through it. We held through FTX, we held through all of that pain, and we even bought a bunch from the FTX estate when it was being liquidated.

Yeah, bro. They had a lot of Solana.

What about Hyperliquid?

You guys seeded Solana?

Yeah, bro.

Must be nice, man. What the fuck are you doing here? Why are you talking to us? You should be buying countries and shit, man. What the fuck? That's insane.

Crush the game. That's why.

Yes, dude. Yes. Yes. What about the Hyperliquid trade?

HYPE—we've been watching it for a while. If you go on our blog, I've written about decentralized perp DEXs for a while. I wrote a post in 2020 or 2021 exploring that design space, and it's always been an obvious use case for DeFi.

When we saw Hyperliquid, we were pretty excited. We were interested in what they were building, but at the time there were some hurdles that we had to overcome to put on a position. First, they didn't raise any venture money, so we couldn't do a venture round.

Mm-hmm.

Second, when it listed, it already had a pretty high valuation. We wondered, “Was everyone just farming the airdrop, so a lot of the volume is going to come down after they did their TGE, or is this going to be sustainable?”

We wanted to wait and collect more data about the sustainability of the users and the trading volume. Once we got that confirmation, we got pretty excited, and we put on a big position in February of this year into Hyperliquid. Our timing turned out to be pretty good on that.

Yeah, it did.

What was the price?

$20 or something around there.

Nice.

Yeah.

It was something around there. I don't remember the exact price. Obviously, given the size that we're trading, we can't execute all at once. We'd have to do it over some period of time, but yeah, that sounds about right.

16. Worst Trades Ever

Maybe we should start a group chat, the 3 of us, and stay in touch after the show. Maybe grab a bite to eat anytime you're in LA. I don't know if you like golf, basketball, or movies—anything. I'd love to hang outside of the show, man. You're really great.

We've talked about some of the times you've crushed it in these markets. Can you give us a time when the markets humbled you?

Oh, yeah.

If you had to give us your worst trade ever, what was it?

Let me give you a few examples, because I actually love talking about the things that I got wrong. One thing that I did wrong is that we bought a ton of BNB in late 2018, early 2019, and we wrote about it. We published a couple of posts about it, and we bought it for around $6 at the time.

One of the biggest mistakes we made is that we sold it too early. We didn't hold on to it. We maybe tripled or quadrupled our money—I forget exactly—but we sold it at around $20.

Wait, excuse me. One time the markets humbled you is when you sold too early and still made money? That's your answer?

I'm not even in the same league. I'm nowhere near. This is insane. Are you guys hearing this? Imagine you bought Bitcoin and then sold it at $1,000 and didn't get back in. It's just so painful to forego all of those gains.

I don't know, brother. I was buying cryptos for $100,000 that were worth nothing. I have a good plethora of examples of where I was really humbled by these markets. I'll let you continue. Sorry.

Okay. Let me give you one where I think I will be right, but so far I'm not. That's a sector that we invested in called DePIN. We were the first DePIN investors. We invested in Helium back in 2019, we wrote about it, and we've done a bunch of DePIN investments. It hasn't really worked yet.

I think it still will. I think the thesis is not yet invalidated. Actually, let me take you back a little bit further and tell you about one of the worst mistakes that we made, and I'll tie it back to DePIN. It was a token called EOS. Do you remember those, man?

EOS was our biggest position in early 2018. We wrote about it. We said, “Look, high-performance blockchains are going to be a thing. Everyone's going to want a high-performance blockchain. This is the best version of that.”

That team basically robbed us, right? They raised all the money and then they just stopped doing anything.

Isn't that one of the biggest raises ever? Didn't they raise some of the most money of any crypto project?

They raised $4 billion, right? Where are these people?

They raised it—they raised $4 billion, bro. That's [__] insane.

And back then, too. Back then, it's insane.

Yeah, and they held a lot of it in crypto, so that appreciated since then. But anyway, we lost almost all of our money on that. They basically just stopped doing stuff.

Where are these guys? Are they in Dubai now, or do they live on a boat somewhere? What is this?

Probably bought a country. I don't know.

Okay. A couple of islands.

An island somewhere.

But later that year is when we did the seed round for Solana. It would have been easy to say, “High-performance blockchains aren't going to be a thing,” because obviously we lost money on this, and we lost a lot of money. It was a big percentage of the fund at the time. The fund was much smaller then, but it was really painful.

Production is telling me that the EOS founder tried to run for president. Is that true?

What?

Oh, Brock Pierce. Brock.

I think he said he was going to run in the primary or something.

It's insane.

That is crazy.

Yeah.

Quick little bounce back with the Solana seed.

Yeah. DePIN.

Yeah. I think it might be the same thing as that EOS trade, where the first generation of it doesn't work out, but the thesis is not invalidated. If the thesis is still valid, I'm still interested in investing in that sector.

17. Zama & Privacy

Do you have any other nonconsensus trades that you're interested in that haven't played out yet, either on the venture side or liquid? I'm asking about both because I'm interested in your take on that.

One that I've tweeted about a few times is part of the privacy thesis that I have. It's a token called Zama. Zama is a privacy network, and it allows you to privately transact on Ethereum. It's coming to Solana very soon as well. It allows you to trade without broadcasting your trading activity to everybody.

Oh, that's good. Yeah, that's cool.

It's a cool technology called fully homomorphic encryption that allows you to do that. If people are interested, go ask Claude or ChatGPT about it and try to understand it. It's really powerful stuff.

Yeah.

I've had this experience because people try to track our wallets all the time. You might notice this on X, where you see posts like, “Oh, Multicoin did this,” or “Multicoin did that.” Sometimes it's right, and sometimes it's wrong.

I don't think there's a wallet on-chain that's been tracked and monitored more than this guy right here, to be honest. They check my [__] all the time, bro. They think everybody's me, though, which is kind of good.

It's painful. It sucks. You do not want—when you're going to—

It changes the whole game, right?

Say that again.

It changes the entire game.

I've been stuck in trades because I feel like I owe it to the culture, or I just can't get out of them because they've been made so publicly. It makes things very tricky.

If you think that all these institutions are going to come on-chain, and all these assets—equities, bonds, whatever—are going to trade on-chain, there is no way that's going to happen if everything is public. You need privacy. If you want to trade size, you need privacy. You do not want to be frontrun.

Zama is our biggest bet on the privacy thesis for tokenized securities and other types of assets.

Very cool. Very cool. Zama—I've heard about that. You're asking me to do more research.

Yeah, please let me know.

We'll talk about it in that group chat that we're going to make after this. We're talking a lot about things that we're doing on-chain and investments that you've made. What's the most outrageous purchase you've ever made outside of explicitly investing? What's the dumbest thing you've ever bought?

The dumbest thing I've ever bought? That's an interesting question.

This guy's like, “I don't know.”

Cars. But I like them.

Yeah, okay.

I enjoy them. They lost a lot of money. They're down badly if I were to resell them, but I enjoy them. So is it dumb? I don't know.

No, you're just perfect. I feel like he's in the Batcave right now with hella [__] in front of crazy [__].

He's got [__] 30 people crowded around the camera. It's so funny.

18. AI Has Replaced IQ

We have a lot of young guys who watch the show, obviously. A lot of people are here in an effort to become successful, whatever that might mean to you. Something we consistently preach on the show is investing in yourself and positioning yourself accordingly, considering how dramatically things are going to change over the next 5 to 10 years.

Do you have any advice for anybody young watching who is here in an effort to become successful?

I do, and I think this might be controversial.

We love it.

I don't think how smart you are is going to matter.

Let's [__] go, baby. You hear that, chat? Let's [__] go. Continue. Sorry.

Yeah, I don't think intelligence matters anymore. I don't think it's economically an important input for humans.

If you think back to before the Industrial Revolution, how physically strong you were was a major input into how much money you were going to make. When everything was manual labor, how physically strong you were was a major input into how much money you were going to make.

Between the Industrial Revolution and the AI Revolution, how smart you were was a major input into how much money you were going to make.

Dude, you're really [__] smart.

This is really good.

I like this.

Wow.

So the question is, what's going to matter?

I have an answer. What's your opinion? What do you think it's going to be?

I think it's going to be agency. It's your ability to make up your own mind and then be relentless in the pursuit of the thing that you want.

Now you have all the tools. You have intelligence for free. You have machinery. You have energy. You have all of these things for free, basically. But you know what's not free? Motivation. What's not free is being relentless and dedicated, going after it day after day because you decided you want something. You want to be the best, and you're going to go get it.

AI has replaced IQ. Somebody in chat said, “AI has replaced IQ.” I love that. It's a really good take.

I think potentially attention also. We talk a lot about how important attention is and understanding attention and how it moves. I feel like that's the thing that everybody's fighting for. That's the uncertainty. That's the thing that isn't just solved by AI or already been solved by industry.

It’s like, how do we market this? You spoke earlier about EOS versus Solana. The thesis was correct, but for whatever reason, Solana did it, right? We see that a lot in crypto. It’s actually quite rare that the first person with an original idea is the one who wins, right? It’s whoever markets it the best and builds the best product. I don’t know. It’s a really interesting conversation.

That’s a really sick take.

That’s a great take. I like that take a lot.

Really fucking with that.

I mean, wow. That’s it for me. We have Rasmus in the waiting room now, too. Or he’s supposed to be here at 3.

19. The 4 Sources of Edge

One more question.

Yeah, please do. Please do.

Do you have any advice for young people specifically for getting into investing? I know you’ve spent a lot of time at Multicoin. A lot of the younger cohort is getting into trading now. Obviously, they’re not going to be able to go straight into venture. Did you trade liquid markets before venture, and what would you recommend for somebody who wants to get into finance or pursue that as a field?

I think you have to understand what your edge is. Ultimately, I think in investing or trading, there are only 4 possible sources of edge.

The first one is access or informational edge. Do you get to see things first? If you’re an HFT shop, for example, you see the price move first. Or maybe you’re really well-connected and you know a bunch of people. That gets you insight. You can call people, pick up the phone, and have them answer your questions.

The second source of edge is analytical. How well do you understand the thing that you’re looking at? Do you have the ability to form your own opinion about it, or are you just following what other people said?

The third is psychological, and this is, I think, the most important one. How do you show up when things aren’t going your way, or maybe when things are really going your way? Does it mess with your head? You have other things going on in your life, right? You might have some personal thing going on. How does that change your decision-making? Do you have processes in place to make big decisions? For example, if I’m going to make a big decision, I always go get a workout in, and I find that helps a lot.

Going for a walk.

Yeah, going for a walk, too. Just get the blood moving, right? It helps clear your mind.

It’s really good advice.

The last one is structural edge. When we started Multicoin, we had a huge structural edge in that we were going to buy crypto when a bunch of other investors just wouldn’t touch the asset.

Do it.

They were scared of touching it. So if you don’t know what your edge is, don’t do it.

It’s a great take.

Figure out what your edge is.

That is a great take. Yeah, dude.

You’re a fucking genius. Genuinely, it’s been awesome.

You’ve been crushing, bro. I mean, Solana, Hyperliquid, Zcash—they hit everything. Yeah, you definitely didn’t get lucky. You’re awesome. Is it safe to say you’re fully emotionally detached from trading and investing? Would you describe yourself as fully hard-line?

I’m getting there.

I’ve been through a lot of volatility, but I’m a fiercely competitive person. I’m detached from the financial implications of trading, to be very honest, but I love winning. When you’re losing money, it hurts. It doesn’t matter what else is going on or what you already have. It just hurts.

What I’m actually more detached from is the prices. What I’m still somewhat attached to, if I’m being very honest, is the ideas.

Yeah.

I hate being wrong more than I hate losing money.

I like being right. That’s my favorite part of anything. Making a good trade is being right.

Really solid advice. Some really sharp, cool takes. We really appreciate you coming on. You’re awesome, all jokes aside.

Yeah, it’s all a work in progress, man. I’m fucking—I threw my laptop off my balcony today. I sold the pico bottom of Cash Cat, and I’m fucking punching holes in walls. So we’re going to try to get better, chat. It’s not that deep. Let’s try to detach if we’ve learned anything from you and your story. Appreciate you, bro. Thank you so much for coming on.

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Good to see you guys.

Thanks, man. Have a good one.

You, too. Bye, dude.

Dude, that guy’s a fucking genius.

Wow, that was fucking sick, bro.

Sei and Solana, double down again. Double down again. Held through FTX. Bought more after FTX.

What?

Sei and Solana is all I heard and all I needed to hear, bro.

That takes strength. Caveman was the strongest guy, so he won. He was the richest. He was the wealthiest.

The Industrial Revolution removed that edge.

That’s a crazy take.

AI replacing IQ. No longer need to be smart. That’s fucking good.

Agency.

All agency. Be relentless, chat. Go for it. We say it, too. We say it in so many words on the show. It’s like—

All in.

Again, I think what I’m pulling from that is there’s never been a better time to have time.

Yeah.

20. Rasmus Joins

It’s never been a better time to just be you and your laptop, bro. All in. Have an idea. Be confident. Be convicted, and go all in. Be relentless.

That’s low-key part of why Rasmus was crushing it, too.

Yes. Agreed. Agreed. Fully agreed. And on that note, he is in the green room, and we can bring his ass in. Get on in here, Rasmus. What’s up, brother?

What’s up, guys?

The motion man himself.

Yeah, I was really excited to tap in and watch you guys learn about markets, and then all I heard was Banks glazing Kimi for 45 minutes, talking about getting a cop pregnant. I don’t know what the fuck is going on.

That was the pre-show, man. The pre-show is all one big clip farm, which I think you’re more familiar with and better at than 99% of people who are making content.

Listen, it’s Glaze Banks on this show, and I’m giving you your flowers in this segment, but bear with me, brother. Don’t—

No, thanks.

Don’t make this more difficult than it already is, please.

Banks does this backhanded thing because he wants me to succeed so that he can say, “I found Rasmus early.” There’s a selfish—

It’s so true.

No, no, it’s true. It is. It’s 100% true. But to be fair, I did.

I was bull-posted. Rasmus, you were about to get kicked out of the house you lived in, and I sat with these guys. I was like, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, man. I think Rasmus is the truth.”

21. WSOP Win & Getting Canceled

Oh, I did not know that. Holy shit.

Oh, did you not? Thread guy. I’m sorry, guys. I’m sorry.

Listen, I saw the potential. You’re doing it in real time. I think even in the last 2 weeks, you’ve been on a generational tear. You have a World Series of Poker bracelet on your wrist. You got incredibly lucky, by the way. Little side comment.

I think he played good poker, though.

Come on, dude. Are we going to be honest in this?

I think he did, though.

The 7-2 shove. You don’t think that’s good poker?

Regardless, I think the luck is still bullish because you’re just in a flow state. When you get in this flow state, shit starts clicking—things that seem to maybe be out of your control, out of your power. I just think that’s an example of it.

But give us your life over the last 2 weeks, the last month, because you made some good trades as well.

It’s just been an unexplainable stretch for about a month straight. I got canceled July 5th. It was terrible, bro. I couldn’t eat and stuff. I always lose my appetite when that’s happening.

We had a couple conversations about it.

Yeah, you kept me locked in. Then just pure focus on the trading.

Trading is one thing. It’s like poker, where if you win, people can’t really argue with it—especially if you trade in public, especially the way I was hitting. I was hitting trades in a respectable way. I bought Marscoin, held it for a couple days, and then the catalyst came. I was hitting trades the correct way.

In poker, it’s the same thing. That’s something that I realized. I was doing so much content creation in crypto, and I was thinking to myself, “I’m going to do content, and then I’ll trade on hidden wallets. It doesn’t matter if I hit.” But then I realized the audience cares a lot about trading because you’re putting your money, your stake, where your mouth is and seeing where it pays off.

I think FOMO helped a lot with that. Just trading publicly and hitting something publicly makes people respect you like crazy. It’s funny that that’s what people care about, but yeah.

No, it’s definitely true, bro. I say this all the time. Hitting a trade on your own is cool, but hitting the trade with the social proof adds so much more exponential influence to you as a content creator. It also makes people trust you more.

You can say a ton of stuff online. You can say anything, really, but you can’t fake the trades. When people know you’re not faking that, that’s when they respect you more. They’ll tune in to your content more, for sure.

Yeah. All a trade is is predicting the future and putting a stake on your prediction. Even with perps, you could have traded the war if you tried to trade oil. That’s a trade, right? It’s not all just meme coins and shitcoins. You could bet on a prediction market, right?

22. Trading to Farm Aura

That’s just what it’s about. I want to do this because I think the level of aura you can gain from being right in public so many times in a row is unmatched. We’ve seen you do it, Z[?], and a few others. It’s just the level of respect you gain.

I think a lot of people, Banks—if you want my prediction—are going to do this thing that I’m trying to do now, which is legacy trading. Can you guys hear me?

Yes.

Yeah.

Okay. I don’t trade for money. I’m unique in this case because I don’t trade for money. I purely just trade for aura. That’s why I’ve been trading publicly, and the way that changes the equation is—

But even what Tushar just said, the psychology of it—

It’s going to play into his favor because he’s doing it in an effort to build a bigger brand.

It’s probably a better calculation of the risk-reward, especially if you’re doing content. What else are you going to—

Yeah. So theoretically, Z[?], if there’s a coin flip in front of me and the coin flip is that I double my money, usually it’s not really EV. But if the plus EV is that you get aura and do it in public, then it is plus EV. A lot of spots become really advantageous for me to take.

For the Marscoin position, I put $20,000 in at $3 million. I usually don’t do that, but I knew the upside of CZ engaging on Binance meant a 10x, 20x, or 50x. In that case, I would have gained a lot of aura, so I made that calculation, and it ended up hitting. That’s just what I’m going to keep doing.

That’s smart as [expletive], bro. Especially if you’re doing content. The EV calculation is actually really smart, because if your platform blows up, you also have more companies that want to partner with you. You also get more sponsorships. That’s really smart.

This is why I’m so bullish on Rasmus at the moment. This is the potential that I’ve seen, because we had a conversation, and you’re actually pulling me toward this whole idea of how important trading is for you.

We’ve had a couple of conversations recently where I’m like, “I feel like you get a little too hung up on Crypto Twitter and their opinions, and needing the validation of, ‘Hey, I’m a trader. I’m here. I have good ideas. I’m smart, and I’m a good trader,’” which you’ve proven yourself to be over the past month specifically.

I’m like, “Bro, fuck that shit and their opinions.” You’re playing the attention game. You’re playing a game that nobody else is playing, and there’s no competition. In my opinion, you understand the game more than really anybody else who’s at your level in this market.

I made the comparison. I’m like, “Listen, embrace it. There’s a real role to be filled in jester-maxing and clip-farming.” We’ve seen Stable Ronaldo and FaZe Lacy make incredible careers and fall into that top 5–10 streamers in the world slot. These guys are goated streamers, and all of their success—Ronaldo specifically—comes from his ability to farm clips and his understanding of attention, how it moves, the content, et cetera.

I think you’re really, really good at understanding that, but I never really considered the trading stuff playing into it. It’s like unlocking some shit, and I fuck with that. It makes sense.

Thank you. Yeah, the social media game has gotten so saturated.

Yo, no way. Go into Tristan Thompson’s clip. Or Tristan—

This is actually hilarious.

That’s insane, dude.

That’s hilarious. Pull up Tristan Thompson’s Twitter.

I’ll blow it up. I’ll blow it up.

I will blow it up.

That’s hilarious, bro.

Rasmus, in real time, are you watching?

I don’t even know what’s happening now.

Tristan Thompson. Go to Tristan Thompson’s Twitter. I’m going to—

That’s fucking hilarious, actually.

Where’s Banks’s laptop?

Look at this ass.

That’s really funny.

No way.

How insane is this, dude? What?

That’s hilarious, bro.

23. The Kimchi Post Full Circle

Do you want to tell the audience about our little back-and-forth after you won? By the way, this is a direct copy of a post that you just made. Rasmus just made—

Okay. It’s Kimchi, though. Yeah, yeah.

No, no, no, no. The reason why he’s doing it is because you did it. Your post was effective.

That’s a fact. Your post was effective.

If you guys aren’t familiar, I’ll break it all down for you. Kimchi’s last post was an Ordinal. It went giga-viral—30 million views.

I’m getting all the credit for starting this TikTok trend. Banks is in all the comments, and people are putting their faces over my face and replacing Kimchi’s name and my clip with their name, whatever. It’s gotten hundreds of millions of views. We’ve talked about it on the show a lot, but I made my clip, and I have to give you credit because of your initial clip.

Wow.

So you inadvertently started the trend.

True.

But that’s what it’s all about, by the way. That’s what this content and collaboration is all about at the end of the day. This is a good example: Kimchi did this, and it kind of came full circle after you won the WSOP thing.

We had a conversation about what you should post and what your first post should be.

Can I just give Banks the credit because he—

Of course you can, Rasmus.

He calls me, and I’m relaxing. I’m so tired, and he’s like, “Rasmus, you have to do this. You have to do this Kimchi thing. You have to post it.” I’m like, “Maybe I’ll do it tomorrow.” He’s like, “No, do it right now. Do it right now.”

I sent him some photos I already had—random dump photos of him—and I’m like—

No, brother. The whole point is that you need to match each frame one-to-one and meme the post. Mimic the post. This is what I know Ronaldo or Lacy would do, and it would be effective.

You did it, and it was effective. People enjoyed it. We talked earlier about this being content for the target audience, for Crypto Twitter. Crypto Twitter can appreciate this. Nobody’s going to respond to this in a negative way, because it’s just good.

No, I had people replying and telling me, “Rasmus, that post was amazing. Rasmus, you’re brilliant.” And I was like, dude, literally just—I’m okay with it. I’m okay with it. Nice, even trade.

I just got flowers and was given infinite credit for starting this global TikTok Kimchi trend, and I got it from you. I started it from you. It’s crazy. But the fact that Tristan just did this is hilarious.

It’s for sure because you did it.

100%.

100%.

That’s so tough. Now this is going to become a trend, you know what I mean? Honestly, the biggest benefactor is Kimchi. Kimchi is just infinitely far—

Dude, I responded to a clip earlier. Somebody accused him of paying us all. Someone was like, “Kimchi’s definitely paying them all to talk about him, paying them all to post about him.”

This is as organic as it gets. This is a trend happening in real time, and it’s crypto-native, which is sick.

But you have to do these tricks now to go viral, because TikTok, the algorithm, and Instagram—there are so many different platforms. It’s a difficult game.

Whereas back in the day, when Banks was vlogging, you were vlogging against plumbers and firefighters.

You’re an absolute [expletive]. Let’s talk about that. Let me respond directly: plumbers and retards.

I was vlogging at peak Jake Paul every day. Logan Paul was moving from vlogging every day. Peak vlog. Peak YouTube era. 2017, the golden era. We’re talking about David Dobrik, FaZe Banks, RiceGum. All the competition lived on YouTube. Everyone on Earth was trying to vlog their life. You’re a fucking idiot, Rasmus. Continue.

I don’t know, bro. Back in the day, you just needed to move to L.A., have a couple of hot girls around you, and then your vlogs would go viral. It was like, “Oh my God.”

Yeah. You just had to move to L.A. into a giant mansion with a bunch of hot girls, start dating Alyssa Violet, and fuck it. The thing is, what you’re saying, Rasmus, is exactly what happened. Everybody did move to L.A.

But Alyssa made your whole career, bro. Nobody talks about that.

Oh my God. No one talks about—I get—

Oh my God.

Shut the fuck up.

What the fuck, bro?

Are you—are you—are you—

No, not at all.

Not at all. I give Alyssa credit all the time. Listen, a lot of shit contributed to my career, and honestly, the vlog stuff was by accident.

Anyway, as you guys both know, in my personal life, I enjoy being behind the scenes more than anything. I genuinely enjoyed helping you with that tweet more than I enjoy making my own content or making a tweet like that. I would never tweet something like that.

Is it kind of the less-is-more thing, though? Are you farming aura like Carti? Carti disappears for 5 years. Are you just farming aura?

No, I’m streaming now to a niche audience of people in on CT. There’s no aura being farmed here. I’m playing the game now. I’m jumping in, making TikTok trends, and doing goofy shit. I’m showing up. I’m playing the game.

But it’s because I believe we’re way underserving the market in terms of content. It’s way underdeveloped and underwhelming, and there’s massive upside and massive leverage to be had for the top 5 to 10 creators. We talked about the first content-creator billionaire in this market. Who’s it going to be? Is it going to be Ansem? Is it going to be Kimchi? Is it going to be Rasmus? I think it’s inevitable, and I don’t know. It’s just a game that nobody else is playing.

So I feel like I add so much value with all my experience in more traditional mainstream shit, and I can extend it to people like you, you know what I mean? People like Z, et cetera. That’s the side of it. That’s what excites me.

Yeah, you’re definitely good at social media, you know? Obviously.

24. The FaZe Reboot Playbook

You’re decent at it, too. How did that really work, though? How did you not make content for 6 years and still be a known person? How is that even possible? Right now, I feel like the algo would just forget about people.

It’s all about big moments. I did disappear again for a short period of time, and it was after all the shit fell through with the FaZe situation. In my head, I had to work through, “Okay, what’s next for me?” I just had the whole rug pulled out from underneath me. All these guys dipped. I’m in a horrible spot. It felt like rock bottom, but I’ve been there before. I’ve been familiar with it.

So you lock the fuck in, and I’m like, “What am I going to do?” The entire time the FaZe thing was happening—even during the euphoric “Best Comeback Ever, Streamer of the Year” period, the best parts of it—I was unsettled that I had pivoted out of the Probably Nothing shit and hard-pivoted back into mainstream streamer FaZe shit. I had abandoned this whole idea of building media and these attention machines in crypto, because this is what I’m interested in.

I was thinking, “Maybe that’s the move. Maybe I get back into that.” I was seeing Threadguy have success with his show, and I was watching people slowly realize the value here. I thought, “Maybe I pivot back into that.” So I made the decision to do that.

I talked to Z. We talked about doing the show. He was receptive to it. We were on the same page. We shared this vision to do Market Bubble. Once we had that locked in, I thought, “Okay, how do I create a huge moment here? How do I leverage all the attention and engagement that this really unfortunate, dramatic FaZe thing generated and funnel it into this new show?”

That’s where the trailer came from. My first post back was, “What really happened with FaZe? Find out tomorrow, live on Twitch.” I knew people knowing that I was going to go live on Twitch would generate a ton of interest. People were obviously going to think that I was going to reveal whatever, and I just played that to my favor.

I went on, wished those guys well, spoke for an hour from my chest, explained what happened from my POV, and then segued into this brand-new show and funneled that attention into here. So it’s just about creating big moments. The FaZe shit was exactly what I’m describing.

I was AFK for over a year, and FaZe’s literal channels were all blacked out for a while. When I found the roster of kids that I wanted to run it up with—Max, Silky, Lacy, Jason, plus Ron, Adapt, et cetera—I kicked everybody from the team very publicly, fired everybody publicly, and created this huge communal conversation: “You’re a fucking idiot. You just ruined FaZe. You don’t know what the fuck you’re doing.” Everyone was looking at what was happening.

I put the trailers out for all the new members: 4 people who were relatively unknown, very niche, smaller names—Max, Silky, Jason, and Lacy. The response was again overwhelmingly negative: “Who the fuck are these people? You’re a fucking idiot.”

I’ve got to say—can I just say something, bro?

I was watching you. I was watching that whole movie, and you announced every single FaZe person. Then when you picked Lacy, I was like, “This guy’s on some other shit.” I’m like, “This guy’s brain is in a different dimension,” because I would never have picked him.

And that was low-key the best investment. Obviously—

He plays a very important role in the group—a very important role.

That was just you flexing your skills, honestly, because a lot of people would have faded him.

We put this out, and it was generally very negative out the gate. But that excited me. We know each other personally. We basically lived together for a year at that last Beverly spot. We spent a lot of time in close quarters, and around this time, it was the beginning of that.

It excited me. I’m like, the gap between what this is and what this is going to amount to, compared with what the sentiment is now, is so incredibly dramatic. That’s just going to play into our favor. The comeback is going to flip really, really quickly, and then it’s all just reactive. It’s like, “Okay, we have all eyes on us, so now let’s just produce really good content with this group,” which I was confident could hold engagement and be entertaining. That’s what we did, and the rest was history.

It was a generational run. It’s about making big moments. You just had a big moment—one of your marquee moments: winning the WSOP thing.

Big fucking moment.

We talked about this yesterday at dinner. We had dinner with Kimchi, who pulled up in the Maybach, et cetera. We were talking about attention.

Every human being on planet Earth, whether they’re the most famous person ever, the richest person ever, the most successful athlete, the biggest artist, or a random one of your random friends, psychologically, the human brain chalks a person up to their 3 to 5 biggest moments. Who is that guy? What did he do?

If you’re Michael Jordan, it’s his NBA championships, the sneakers, Space Jam, you know what I’m saying? Just being there, reading the newspaper, and smoking cigars—it’s all good. Michael Jackson is “Thriller,” the moonwalk, and touching little kids, right? If you’re Rasmus, it’s—

He’s innocent, by the way. But yeah—

Whatever. It doesn’t necessarily have to be positive or negative. Some people are totally negative, you know what I’m saying? Like Andrew Tate—a lot of his marquee things that he’s known for are really, really negative.

25. Who Has the Most Potential?

So you have to have those cool moments. Me hitting trades as well—I feel like if I hit a $1 million P&L, that counts. So I’m shooting for that. Wait, can I ask? The FaZe guys all left. They’re doing Core, and we could include Marlin in that. Which of these streamers do you think has the most potential to grow even from here?

The potential for me was always Plaqueboymax. That’s why I was most excited about him, and I’m probably biased because I resonate with his content the most. I like that culture that he sits in.

I always thought the move for Max was to become the DJ Khaled, the DJ Akademiks of streaming—to be the bridge between streaming culture and hip-hop culture. I felt like he could have played the game on easy mode and just curated songs, been the producer of songs, and platformed songs by creating music live.

The “In the Booth” series was the best shit ever. I think, for whatever reason, all these streamers want to be cool and want to dress a certain way. Max wants to be a rapper, and that’s his idea. That’s the direction he thinks he’s taking his career, but that just doesn’t make any sense to me.

What I described—becoming the next super-producer, like Metro Boomin—is reserved for a few people who could do that. Max could do that. DDG could do that. There are a couple of people who could actually do it.

Why do you think he’s not a rapper, though? Because I feel like he’s a subpar rapper. He’s not a good rapper.

I think the reason he doesn’t make hit songs is that he’s an average rapper in a highly diluted market. How many fucking people are posting rap songs every day?

It’s an infinite number of people competing.

By the way, I'm not even going to shit on his craft. Do what you do. Do what you love. Don't stop rapping. I do tons of shit that I'm bad at. But you're competing with Drake, Playboi Carti, Lil Uzi, and Ye. This is what your competition is.

Who is your competition in curation? Who is trying to build the bridge between hip-hop culture and streaming culture?

As far as publishing and distributing music?

Zero. There's no competition. Zack Bia and I put him in talks with Max and connected those dots. Zack was officially managing Max for a moment, and he set up this Fred again.. song with Skepta. He got nominated for a Grammy with it.

I saw it happen in real time. Max didn't even see the vision initially. He fumbled that. Skepta and Fred again.. offered him the chance to come perform at a show, and he blew them off. They were like, "What the fuck?" He did not see the potential that had.

We definitely saw it, and it wound up being his biggest moment as far as music, I would argue. It was nominated for a Grammy. Plaqueboymax would have won a Grammy if that won. It was nominated. You get what I'm saying?

He didn't rap on that album. He didn't produce any part of it. He produced it and curated it in front of a live audience, which does have value. I think that's extremely interesting, and I think that that's the potential that I see in Max.

But no, this is why I'm also leaning into being a trader, though. You didn't say Lacy, and you didn't say Ron. I feel like if I was a jester, if I really kept being a jester—

And that's the answer, though. Who would be—who, if you ask me who I saw the most potential in—

Now, to be successful in content and to be a creator the size of IShowSpeed or Kai Cenat, I think you need to have 3 things. First, you need to have something proprietary about you, where you're one of the top 1 or 2 people at it. You need to be the best at what you do as far as content goes. It needs to belong to you. You need to be the face of that niche or style of content, or that angle.

Second, you need to be delusionally confident in your ability to reach that level. "I can be the next Kai. I will be the next Kai." And third, you need to be willing to work and dedicate your entire life to it—24/7, nonstop, relentlessly.

Actually, the fourth is that you need to have good instinct and intuition. You need to be smart, or you need to be smart enough to realize who is smart enough to make certain decisions for you.

Yeah.

You can't be surrounded by yes-men, and you need to have good instincts. You need to have all 4 of these to be Kai Cenat. You need to have all 4 of these to be MrBeast. You need to have all 4 of these to be IShowSpeed.

The one that I think Max is missing is the instinct stuff. I think he makes a lot of poor decisions, and I think a lot of it is rooted in ego. I think a lot of it is rooted in having yes-men around him, and I think that that will prevent him from ever reaching that level, in my opinion, from what I've noticed.

You know what's weird? I'm going to be honest. My answer is Stable Ronaldo, though.

Yeah, I see the diva tattoo, and I think I like it. I like the wigs.

I don't think that matters at all.

You know what I'm saying? It seems like the comments and the hate really got to him, and that's some petty shit. It's not actually—

Well, you let comments and shit get to you all the time. I mean, we're—

People aren't telling me I should go to jail and that I'm cancer. It's not—

But that's his version. You know what I mean? His whole goal has been to generate or manufacture this image and brand where he's Travis Scott—where he's a rapper, he's cool, and he lives his life a certain way. Then, when the entire internet is memeing you, clowning you, calling you gay, this and that, and you're crying on camera and shit, it obviously fucks with that, right?

You can't stream and have aura, though, right? Because it's too much camera time. None of these rappers could get away with it. If you streamed, Carti would be over immediately.

By the way, I'm not bearish because of the diva tattoo. Whatever. I don't think that really matters. What you just said, though, is a fact. It's about just staying true to who you are.

PlaqueBoyMax blew up off just being a fan—excited about albums dropping and excited about talking about rappers. You're a streamer and you're a fan of this shit. Be that. Don't get all the emotion and all the attention, amass this fan base, and then pivot into, "Now I'm a fucking rapper. Now I'm Travis Scott." It just doesn't resonate.

I would assume it doesn't resonate with rappers either. There's a reason why PlaqueBoyMax was on pace to have Drake on his stream. He had Central Cee on his shit. He was booking real-deal names. He just had Thug come on.

But he doesn't have Young Thug on a song. He doesn't have Central Cee on a song. He's not getting Drake on a song because they're not going to rap with a streamer. You know what I mean? That's not—

Wow. But they would do it if he produced it.

Yes, because these rappers—anybody with a brain knows how important streaming culture is and how important these platforms are. So that's what I mean: build the bridge to give them a legitimate, authentic way in.

I experienced this with FaZe. FaZe's peak success was during the big Fortnite boom. Everyone on Earth wanted to tap in. It was maximum motion. All anybody cared about or wanted to talk about was Fortnite. Everyone wanted to tap in.

FaZe, bro.

FaZe was—exactly. FaZe was the easy way in, though. It was like, "Yo, let's just go tap in with the FaZe guys. These are cool guys. They're making videos. Let's just pop in a video." That was the easy way to do it.

I know it's a long-winded answer, but I could talk about this shit all day.

So why Ron now? Why Ron?

Ron is just a generational talent as far as being in that top spot. His ability to engage an audience and generate clips, which is the meta—he's number 1 at it, in my opinion. I think he is the best at clip farming. I think he's got the number 1 spot.

He just is a streamer. That kid streams 24/7.

I thought you said Marlon has the most potential. Didn't you just say that?

I would never, ever say that. I think Marlin will inevitably end up as a Vine guy, like all the Vine kids—Cameron Dallas. I don't hate Marlon at all. I don't know Marlon.

You just don't think he's— you don't like his content, basically.

All of his attention comes from the fact that he's super attractive, right? So that's—

I think he has—I would guess he has a global audience. I'm pretty sure he has a big global audience.

I could see that. Yes. By the way, Marlin has the biggest face in the brand out of the whole group, to be clear.

You're asking streamer to streamer?

I don't know what he'll do with that. Who knows? It's all up to him at the end of the day. Everybody has the potential to run with this shit.

But I've seen this too many times. I saw it with Vine. I saw it with TikTok. The Bryce Halls of the world, the Cameron Dallases of the world—these guys reach monumental success in terms of how many people are watching them and paying attention to them, and then it falls off very quickly when the wave has passed.

Yeah.

26. The Untapped Edge in Crypto

I've seen it a million times.

What about— you know what I think is underfarmed? Girls. I feel like the female niche is so underfarmed. Am I wrong?

What, bro? You just clip-farmed Corinna. You're like, "I'm going to get Corinna pregnant." Women and girls in content have been the method since I was doing this shit.

Corinna is the shit. She's the baddie from 5 years ago. She's still the shit girl. You know what I mean? Where's the next Corinna?

I don't know.

Well, this girl Jana has been streaming, and she's the big streaming girl right now. She's in everybody's content, and she was in a Drake song and shit. So—

There are girls blowing up. I just have no connection. There's no opportunity for me to farm you on. I don't know the girl. I have nothing to do with her or her content, and there's no—

Right.

Do you think trading will ever be not as male-centered?

Trading? No. Trading is just like gaming, in my opinion, where it's going to be male-dominated for the long run. But again, we talk about this a lot.

The opportunity isn't restricted just to trading here. There are ways in, and there's so much edge that a woman would have in this market. I feel like, with a lot of the meme shit and the low-cap, on-chain stuff, women actually have a really good knack for figuring out what's going to get attention and go viral on socials because they spend a lot of time on socials.

But I think it’s weird that you’ve never really seen that be a popular thing for women. Women spend a shit ton of money on consumer goods and stuff, but they don’t really speculate the same way. I agree that could be a thing. Actually, I’m not exactly sure how it’s going to play out, but whoever figures out how to tap the women who are buying all these consumer goods—and who spend a shit ton of time on TikTok and doing all this other shit—so they can make money on the internet from finding shit that blows up: “Oh, I can make money off that. That’s going to blow up. I think this is going to blow up. I can make money on that.”

I actually think that this could be a thing.

You just completely changed my mind in real time. I totally, fully, 100% flipped on this. I think the sheer fact that the lack of women is a thing in this is the edge. Again, like you said, women are the consumers, right? They see markets and products differently.

It’s completely different.

Totally different. That’s their edge. When I was trading a lot of memes last cycle, I would always ask women, “Do you think this is cute? Do you think this is funny? Do you like it?” It doesn’t even matter if they know it’s a coin or not. A lot of the time, the ones they liked the most actually did the best.

Wasn’t it WIF or Michi? It was one of those two, right?

Yeah. Okay.

It was WIF and it was Michi. It was both. It was 2 different girls, but it was the same.

My dog’s here. I’m going to take a piss and go grab her.

We’ll let you guys talk.

Yo.

Penny Lane’s going to meet the stream.

Penny Lane.

27. Stockbroker Explained

Z, I saw that you like Stock Broker, right?

Yeah, I feel like you do too. You just don’t know it yet. Can you just give me the TL;DR, explain it like I’m 5? Because I have a bag.

But I genuinely don’t understand it. What’s the thing?

Yeah. So, Stock Broker—as you know, last cycle, a lot of the protocols that made the most money were memecoin launchpads and memecoin trading, all the trading around memes. Stock Broker is half NFT, half meme. The NFT is attached to a certain amount of tokens, and you can swap back and forth between the tokens and the NFT whenever you want. Whenever you swap from the tokens to the NFT, you pay a fee, and 70% of that fee goes to buying tokenized stocks on Robinhood’s chain.

People who activate their NFTs get airdropped those stocks from the fees generated by people swapping back and forth between the tokens. That’s one part of it. The other part is that they have a launchpad where you can launch other tokens or NFT projects—NFT-by-token projects—on their launchpad. They’re also building their own DEX, and I think they have this gacha platform where you can spend and gamble, and you can win stocks based on some kind of RNG. They take a cut of that revenue too.

It’s a platform, but it’s also a pretty cool NFT, and it has a meme attached to it. It’s pretty low-cap. The founder was building on Arbitrum before Robinhood, and he used to be one of the guys on Ape in.

I’ll have to check it out more. I’m blindly aping things now. It’s blind ape season.

It’s that spot, bro.

It’s blind ape season, bro.

Yeah, it’s relatively low market cap. I think around 17% of the total supply has been burned because whenever you activate your NFT, you have to pay a fee, and half of that gets burned. The circulating supply is around 35%, I think.

Did you talk about Cash?

Yeah, we talked about it a little bit. We talked about the listing.

It was so frontrun that it didn’t even pump that much after the listing. That’s crazy.

Yeah. I think the big signal was when it was down a lot and they had it on the earnings call. It was in the search bar during the earnings call, when it was still at around $45 million. If you were paying attention then, you were like, “Okay, they obviously are highlighting this for a reason.”

They deleted the LinkedIn profiles of those other memes that people were speculating might be employees at Robinhood or whatever. If you were paying attention, I don’t think you even needed to be an insider to think that it could possibly be coming.

Did you see the public wallet that was spreading?

I didn’t.

You didn’t? Okay.

No, I didn’t.

Okay. I mean, it was just getting sent everywhere.

Yeah, it was in a lot of the chats, right?

Yeah. It was like, “Oh, Rasmus, why are you gatekeeping?” I didn’t stream for 3 days. I also didn’t find the information actionable to me.

But, yeah, there was a public wallet spreading that was like 20, 25 for 25 or something.

Yeah. Did you know this?

Yeah, I heard from Banks.

Yeah, so that’s what happened.

25 for 25 is crazy.

Yeah. It set a limit order and then bought. It was crazy.

Open secret. Open secret.

Yeah.

It’s crazy how much people have gained respect for me from hitting a big trade and then winning a poker tournament.

I don’t know what to make of it because I’m the same guy that I was.

When you get recognition for doing something that you can’t fake, and you’re getting a lot of followers at the same time, that’s when it shifts people’s perception of you. You’re going to keep doing it, bro. What are you looking at right now? What are you excited about trading?

It’s the stock memes. That’s what I mean. My exposure on FOMO is mostly, you know, it’s your— it’s Ansem—but also stock memes.

That’s what I’m interested in, particularly the Binance ones, because they’re so much more willing to climb.

Exactly.

Yeah. So, I don’t know how Robinhood can compete. Robinhood lists it and it doesn’t do much. If Binance listed Marscoin, we’d be at—who knows, right?

Yeah, because it ripped just off alpha.

I hate to interrupt y’all.

Yeah.

Guys, Penny Lane is about to be introduced to the chat for the first time. This is my dog. For those of you who don’t know, I got a Great Dane puppy recently, and she’s completely changed my life. She’s become my best friend. This is my daughter. I love her very, very much.

She’s creeping in on 6 months old, and she just came back from the trainer. She’s fucking growing so fast. Penny, come here. Come here. Come up here. Come on. Come say hi. Come on. Hey, Penn. Come up.

She’s getting so big.

Penny Lane. Oh, say hi, Penn. What’s up?

I can’t believe she was in my pocket.

Yeah, I remember the song.

So big. Big girl. Wow. Penny.

Sorry, guys. I’m excited. I love her. I’m glad you guys got to meet her. I’m going to put her somewhere, and then I’ll come back and show you guys.

That’s lit.

Yeah, bro. I think a stock meme is cool, especially because the tokenized RWA narrative is what’s driving a lot of the institutional interest right now. If you can figure out a way to align with that, that’s what a lot of people are speculating on already.

Yeah, it’s crazy that it’s bringing these tokenized stocks on-chain. It’s hard to mint them, right? You need to convince people that they’re worth it, and people are minting them because there’s so much demand on the fees.

I just love a new Ponzi to trade. Obviously, we need more of them, bro. We do. The way people get extremely high targets is when they’re speculating on something that hasn’t existed yet, and when it’s something new that you don’t have any frame of reference to compare it to. That’s when everything goes super high.

That’s why ETH and DeFi went so high in 2020 and 2021. We had never seen billions of dollars come on-chain like that before, right? New narratives are definitely what you should be looking for. If you’re a trader, especially if you’re on-chain, you’re trying to find the stuff that’s novel.

Yeah, it’s crazy. On-chain gets hot, and I haven’t even been touching perps. Thank God.

28. Rasmus's Origin Story

Yeah, bro. You know we’re back when you start pulling up DEX Screener and Birdeye instead of TradingView.

Right. Right.

That’s when you know we’re back.

It’s tough.

So, last cycle was your first crypto cycle?

2021 was my first.

How did you get started in crypto? What made you start creating content in crypto? Why did you go for—

Oh, Banks.

Banks will love this.

I was, bro. I had crypto—I had ETH. I was into it enough. I had a little Ledger. I was like, “Oh, I wanted to LARP, you know?”

And then Banks was talking about it, and I used to listen to his podcast. It was a super low-key podcast on Spotify. Nobody even knows about it.

Really? It was called Mom’s Basement, and it was Keemstar and Banks.

I’m not even kidding. Nobody even knows about this.

Every week, bro, he would just talk about how fucking crazy his CryptoPunks were. “Oh my God, my CryptoPunks are up so much” every fucking week. So I eventually got the NFTs. I transferred my ETH out and got NFTs. I think I had like three, no, they had 8 ETH. So my ETH was cooking because I bought it under $1,000.

Yeah.

And so it went all the way up to like $3,000 or something at the time. And I was trading NFTs. I ran the NFTs up a bit. I was making like $10K a month on whitelists.

Oh, wow. Nice.

I was in college, and I had a meme folder on my desktop. I’d go into Discords and send memes to try to get a whitelist. I’d send memes for that NFT and customize them for that project to try to get a whitelist.

The whitelist paid me, and then I’d join Wolf Game. I round-tripped to $160K on Wolf Game.

The bear market happens, and I’m just staying in the game. I’m paying attention a little bit. Then, in late November 2023, I followed you and got BonkBot. BonkBot changed my whole vision.

BonkBot changed everything, bro. Yeah.

So, BonkBot—I didn’t hit WIF, but I hit so many runners in the Telegram trenches.

Were you in the Manlet’s Telegram?

No.

The Telegram I made at the very beginning?

For a while, I wasn’t even in it. I just found you on Twitter.

Rasmus, who onboarded you to crypto?

I just said it was you.

How crazy is that? I’m finally willing to take credit for it.

I just didn’t want people to know that. Now I’m okay with it.

Before, it was a bad thing. Now it’s good.

I’m going to wrap up here in a second. You guys can be live for as long as you want. She’s a little bit overwhelmed. She’s never been here, and I’m seeing her for the first time in like 10 days. Bro, she’s doubled in size.

No, she’s big as fuck. I remember you showing us the pictures.

She’s a puppy. She’s a baby.

I’m going to wrap up here in a second. You guys can be live for as long as you want. She’s a little bit overwhelmed. She’s never been here, and I’m seeing her for the first time in like 10 days. Bro, she’s like doubled in size.

Someone in chat is going to win the thousand dollars for the W Penny comment. We’ll pick that and message somebody at random. We’ll just put it through. We’ll send it to Claude or something. We have two more bands to give away. Rasmer, if you want to pick somebody from chat or something, pick two.

29. Wrap-Up

Guys, I know it was a little bit of a scuffed episode. We had 3 hours to prep for this, and we traveled. We were doing God’s work in Vegas with Solana and Raz. Raz, congratulations on the recent success.

I got something. I want to tell you something real quick.

What is it, Rasmus?

I just hung out with Orangey, and I think you’ve got a blind spot.

He’s the GOAT. I’m just telling you that. When have I ever argued that he isn’t the GOAT?

I’m putting chips on. Whatever size you have on Orangey, I’m the biggest holder now, brother.

I gave embrace and nestled Orangey in my bosom at birth, okay, brother. I’ve been friends with Orangey. It’s just getting started, bro. That’s a good point.

What do you mean? I brought him on a fucking Aiden Ross stream. He’s the biggest meme in crypto history.

Okay, I’ll give you that.

What the fuck was that? Orangey, if you’re watching this, I’ve never said otherwise. But why? I’m curious. Why is that your opinion, dude?

Bro, he’s so fucking smart. He’s one of the smartest business minds I’ve ever fucking talked to, I’m not going to lie. He’s helping me with my YouTube channel, and he gives me advice on content. It’s a different type of advice from what you give. He gives more like—

The technical shit.

Yes.

Orangey is incredibly smart, by the way. I would say you guys are the top 2 as far as understanding the content. And, yeah, on the more technical shit, he definitely edges you by a lot. I mean, look at his fucking FOMO referrals. This kid—

Yeah, he’s going to make a disgusting amount of money because he managed to fucking figure out a way to convert people into using his code and funnel people in from the content. So, yeah, he’s really, really good at what he does. He understands the content shit, too.

No, I’m talking—I’ve been talking to him very regularly about a bunch of different things. There are things that he wants to do. He’s dreaming big.

Yes.

Yeah. Poor GOAT. Somebody just said in the chat, “We were going to talk about that.” Maybe we’ll talk about that next week—his arc.

We talked on it a little bit.

Oh, did we? His story is obviously far from over. He’s just getting started. Shout-out Orangey.

But, yeah, Raz, thank you for having us.

Thanks for having me, bro. Seriously.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You’re welcome.

No, deadass, it was lit.

Um, all right. Is that it?

Yeah.

Cool. Okay, guys. Without further ado, let’s wrap it up. Z’s not going to do his post show. He usually does a post show, technical analysis, looks at charts, talks to you guys about trades. This is where I’ll typically dip off and he’ll do that. He’s not prepared for that because obviously he’s in LA with me. So yeah, we’re going to be wrapping up on that and we really, really appreciate you guys for watching and we will be live next Thursday as always, 1 PM PST on all channels. Zha was lit. It’s cool doing it in person.

God bless. We’re just getting started. Love you guys.

Production, you guys suck, but just kidding. Appreciate production. We love you. We love you.