《机器人是一个60万亿美元的市场》| Market Bubble 第6期

Welcome back to Market Bubble, a show all about investing in yourself, where we feel like an overwhelming majority of young men today are in a losing position. How are we positioned? Find out today and every Thursday live on twitch.tv/fazebanks. Also on my Twitter, also on Ansem's Twitter, and Ansem, you're on Kick as well, right? Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Ski, we're live everywhere, folks. This is a show all about AI, attention, and finance. We're episode 6. We have Intern coming on, who's a CT legend and a personal friend of ours, and Jesse, MTV Jesse, founder of NELK. Before we get into all that, I just talked to the chat about the $10,000 competition. Any thoughts on that? You want to talk about that a little bit?

Yeah, we got some good inbound. I had some people hit me up across different channels and build out some pretty cool-looking websites that combine all the chats from the different places. Pretty dope.

It’s $10,000 to the winner. We’re looking at these closely now and going to pick out the one we like the most. We appreciate you guys getting back to us so quickly. These guys are going to help us a lot during the stream.

Again, we’re going to build off of this, right? It starts as a chat aggregator, and there are all types of things we’re talking about on the backend—how we can really activate our community and curate a community of people who are engaged and benefiting from helping us build this show and helping us build this community. That’s where our heads are at.

Obviously, AI is a huge topic of conversation on the show. We were just talking about how we need to tap in with Fable 5. Neither of us has tried it yet, which is honestly sad to admit, but we’re going to go in the tank and spend a few hours doing that tomorrow in our own private time. We’re really walking the walk that we talk.

There are over 100 legitimate entries, so it’s going to take a minute. We’re going to take this whole next week to really sift through them. We want to pick the right winner, somebody who really deserves it, and we’ll announce that at the top of the next show. Hopefully, we’ll be able to use it on the next show. I think that’s the plan, right?

Yep.

All right, cool.

We want it in action.

Yes, sir. Let’s get into it. Big week, long week. Should we talk about the freshest thing on everybody’s mind?

1. The Knicks' historic comeback

We start with the Knicks, bro.

Yeah, we should start with the Knicks, bro. That [__] was [__] crazy. I’ve really never seen [__] like that. The closest sporting event I watched where it was that crazy of a comeback was the Patriots-Falcons Super Bowl. The Patriots were down 28–3 at the end of the third quarter. All the Falcons literally had to do was run the ball. The game was over, and they came all the way back.

That’s a Tom Brady tattoo, brother.

I’m from Lawrence, Massachusetts. That game means the [__] world to me, and I’m not going to entertain for one single second the fact that that’s a better comeback than this one. It’s just not. You’re [__] [__] if you think that.

I don’t know how you can even begin to label something as the best comeback of all time when you’re ahead in the series. They’re not coming back from anything; they’re just maintaining the lead. We’re not going to get into it, and we’re not going to be rage-baited into that part of the conversation.

It was a [__] crazy, monumental event. It was a really, really sick game to watch. I was actually in the car. I was out with some friends watching the game, and obviously, as you know, they were down [__] 30 points.

Down 30 and a half.

Yeah, going into the fourth quarter, pretty much. Everybody thought it was all but over. I think Polymarket had it at 99% at one point.

99%.

That’s one of the advantages Polymarket has over a lot of other venues where people are trading this kind of stuff: In real time, you can see the odds change. I think somebody hit a 15x trading it at halftime. The odds went down so much that they literally made well over 10x. It’s insane. There’s somebody out there who got generationally wealthy just [laughter] slamming them at 99%.

Imagine slamming $100,000 at halftime. You make, like, $15 million. That’s [__] disgusting.

How big was the market? I wonder how big the market was. I wonder if that’s even actually possible.

Yeah, no, it was [__] insane. Obviously, they came back down 29. Greatest comeback in [__] NBA Finals history. We’ve heard it a million times.

They almost blew it, though. Did you see the end? They almost blew it. Hart missed the layup when they were attacking—was it De’Aaron Fox? All he did was hold onto the ball.

I mean, the end—with all respect, again, besides what happened physically on paper—it was pretty [__] ugly. The end game.

Yeah, on both sides.

Turnovers. It was insane. Even a blown shot—Brunson with a blown shot, then the put-back. I don’t know. It didn’t end in this crazy, glorious [__] fashion.

They grind it out.

No, they could have, bro. That [__] did $400 million in volume. Somebody easily could have hit big on that.

That’s insane.

$220,000.

$220,000 for how many tickets?

Two.

You bought them, actually, all in New York City?

Not that much. Probably $20,000.

Only $20,000? What do you do for a living?

Just Google me.

Google you. What do you do?

Google me. Picture of me and Google me.

By the way, who the [__] is that guy?

I don’t [__] know.

Does anybody in chat know this guy?

How haven’t I seen a follow-up? Can somebody let me know?

I’m Googling him, by the way. I’m not—

Who the [__] is this guy? Somebody in the chat, please let me know.

That’s so [__] funny, bro. “Google me.”

I paid $18,000, and I could have sold them for $44,000. If I said there’s no better way to spend money, I’m going to die poor.

Section 117. I could sell them for, like, $50,000 a ticket.

This game needs a lot more than $50,000. I’ve been waiting 53 years for this.

I actually got a ticket, so the answer is $0.

You know how much it would have cost?

I think I’m at about $70,000. What do you do for a living?

I’m an attorney.

$200,000.

Where are you sitting?

Courtside next to Donald Trump.

About $10,000 a ticket. How do you feel about your dad spending $10,000 on your ticket?

It’s pretty good.

Even though you won’t go to college, it’s okay.

Yeah, it’s okay.

I’d say, like, $16,000.

So how are you able to afford $16,000?

This isn’t, like, a few thousand. It’s not like the median answer is three bands or four bands.

These [__] are spending 50 racks on two tickets. That’s—

I’m not going to lie, though. You have to think about it like they only go to that once every 10 years or something. It is that rare. If you’ve been a fan your entire life, that dude said he’s been a fan for 53 years. That’s only about $1,000 a year. That’s not that bad, bro. If you’ve been—

The last time—

1999, I think it was against—wait, no. They lost. They lost—

1973. 1973 was the last time they won.

That’s insane.

50 years.

Just divide the cost by 50. It makes sense. Then it makes sense.

It’s still egregious, in my opinion.

I’m not going to lie, bro. I did spend a lot on the [__] Super Bowl when the Eagles went and we beat the Chiefs. I bet on it, too.

Yeah. But didn’t you tell me the whole entire box was $1 million?

Yeah.

I had a portion of it. You see the Adin Ross clip of him talking about bidding against Michael Rubin and Robert Kraft?

Yeah. This motherfucker's talking about a million. Just watch this.

2. Wrap up

By the way, a million dollars. Can I tell you guys something actually insane? I'm not joking. I called my ticket guy. “Yo, Adin, do you want to go to Game 3? Trump's going. I'm Donnie. You know, a lot of New York legends.” He said, “Sure.” They told me Jeter was coming, and—cool. “All right, you're in a bidding war right now.” I don't really want to ask names. It's probably some high-level people.

Robert Kraft and Michael Rubin.

So I'm sitting there, and I'm like, “Okay, big money. Let me—what do I have to pay?”

Yeah, that's serious.

What's the price of the ticket?

This is not little comps.

I think it—

A million dollars.

It's insane. And it's a 7-game series, too. It's not even 1 game. It's 7 games. That's $7 million for the total Finals. That's crazy.

So you're telling me watching the NBA Finals as 1 individual in Celebrity Row, courtside at MSG, is a $7 million value? That's absolutely insane.

Yeah, that's insane. I agree.

That's enough to retire with a family of 8 forever and just fuck off, never working a day in your life ever again. I don't know.

18 college funds.

I don't know. I feel like you're seeing the market tell us that the value of sitting courtside in Celebrity Row is increasing. It speaks to how obsessed everybody is with attention, because that's the only way to explain it in my mind. You're seeing a lot of traditional entertainment media really dying and falling off—the movie theater shit, people doing less and less real-life shit.

3. The attention economy

It begs the question: Why are people still so interested in doing something like that? It's because they want to be seen on TV—the airtime, whatever the fuck the social meaning is. I don't know, bro. You know who had a really good take on this? a16z. I'm trying to figure out which article it was. This one, I think.

I think it was this one, bro.

Bring it. I'm about to bring it up. Let me see. He essentially was talking about—

Big game TV show.

This is the article. It's a short article, but we should actually just read the whole thing. Essentially, he was talking about the same thing you're saying with attention. Everybody's trying to go to the same events at the same time. Everybody who's in a certain wealth bracket or tier of money has only so many events they're supposed to be at, and everybody tries to go to the same events. He was like, “Everybody's trying to be on the same TV show at the same time.”

I'm going to read this. It says, “I did not know that St. Barts was a country until age 20, when some friends at my mid-tier Ivy League school flew to St. Martin to kill time during college. I joined one trip and learned about adjacent geographies. This year, I'm here in St. Barts because some friends are here, because I say yes too easily, and because I wanted to see what the fuss is about. The fuss seems to be increasing.”

I think this is his point. Specifically, a video of Jeff Bezos looking bored at Nikki Beach was the Twitter topic du jour yesterday. I remember that video. It's unclear why he wasn't at least there for a few hours on Monday. At least he got caught on camera at a fun club. Maybe Bezos just doesn't enjoy being on TV. I bumped into them Monday evening walking out of Eden Rock, and Jeff looked equally ready to get the fuck out. But Lauren Sánchez was having a great time, reciprocating my fraternity-arm-waving dance moves and saying hi for 1.5 seconds.

I have no connection.

Before resuming a brisk dance-walk to the exit, flanked by 3 white ex-military security guards, [they?] were on bottle service in a viral video, which speaks to the meta experience of a big show. This is like a TV show. In a culture obsessed with Kardashian dupe purchases, Succession and White Lotus episodes, and Elon Musk pay packages, the elites are taking out their phone cameras. They want to be on TV.

St. Barts is certainly the scene in the way I came to understand it in college. Show face at 4 parties a day and say hi to the same 40 people you saw in Saint-Tropez at the other 4 parties. Everyone cares where Leonardo DiCaprio is for some reason, despite also allegedly having some vague connection to him. And yet the scene feels ubiquitous and mediated in a way that, as an online and low-profile person, it didn't used to. Or maybe I was just too poor to notice.

I don't remember yacht trackers going viral every 5 minutes, even 5 years ago.

At the same time, my billionaire friends have more diverse New Year's plans than they did 5 years ago. The monoculture is eating itself through the phone screen, bordering on self-parody. The campy aesthetic of the Capitol in The Hunger Games feels analogous. If you're always on TV, or annoyed that you're not on TV for the current episode, values, topics, and characters converge to the same place. Lauren Sánchez is watching the world through a phone camera and Instagramverse, and the main stages are in St. Barts this week, so she must go.

There's more to write. The next sentence is, “Instagram and female status games.” Yep. “Eat the rich.” Yep. Someone commented that posts I write in shorter time spans may lack depth of analysis, but I wrote this after leaving the club early. There's great weather tomorrow, and I think we're going to surf.

It's an insane article.

It's a really good article. Listen, there's a lot to unpack there, but we talk a lot about how monoculture is dying, and “performative leisure” is such a fucking bar.

Everything feels so incredibly performative today, in 2026. Somebody in the chat said, “Attention's the new drug.” I can't agree more.

It's so bizarre to watch even the richest and most famous people do this. I was in St. Barts on New Year's as well.

Right? Same place as him.

To be honest with you, it was way too expensive. The only reason why you would be there on New Year's is to be around other rich, powerful, and famous people. That's it. You could go to Antigua, St. Martin, or another one of those islands for 1/100th of the fucking price. I don't know. It's insane. It's insane. “Performative leisure” is a fucking bar. It's funny you bring up a16z, because I have a tweet from him here.

Smart dude, bro.

I don't know how smart, to be honest. This motherfucker said Timothée Chalamet was a paid Chrome Hearts shill, by the way.

I mean, he's clearly joking.

I don't think he is, bro.

He's 100% joking.

“Get paid by Chrome.” He actually fucks with it. He said “100% paid” and pulled up this picture of him. He's joking because he's right behind him. That's why he's saying that.

Are you sure?

I promise you, bro. I think that's a diss on Chrome. I think that's what it was.

But of course, if there's even 1% of your brain that thinks that's the case, you're fucking stupid. You don't understand what it is. Chrome doesn't pay anybody. That's why people are so fucking desperate for it. That's why the market is the way it is. I know for a fact—I see them in real time talking to Timothée Chalamet and how that process goes—and nothing is free, never mind paid. Paid is fucking crazy. I just had to say something on their behalf because I noticed that it was funny. But yeah, man.

The Knicks game. It's funny because we brought up this topic and spent all of 20 seconds talking about the game. The bulk of this topic has been the social part of it, the attention piece, and the money piece. It's just interesting.

It's definitely a game that people are playing, but I think the reason people play the attention game is because it does pay out if you do it correctly. If you're in the right spaces, talking to the right people, the connections you make by networking the right way—especially if you're doing well in whatever field you're in—that does pay out.

That does have value. So, I think there's a reason there's a premium on stuff like that. It's just really excessive at this point.

Attention, that's it. That's it.

Yeah, I mean, there's obviously a tremendous amount of value, but there's—I don't know. The line is getting more and more blurred. I feel like performative leisure. It's like, at what point? It's like the conversation we had with TJR. It's in line with, “Brother, you live in Puerto Rico. But for what, at the end of the day?” Like, what are you really trying to get rich for?

You know, to go live in Puerto Rico, secluded on an island by yourself. For him, it works, but it's just—I don't know. Reminds me—

I mean, especially with New York, I think—I'm not going to say it's not worth it to go to the game. For people who have been lifelong fans, I think it's worth spending the money if you do have the money to spend. But I also say, just being in New York, feeling the atmosphere, and being outside—there are a lot of places you can watch the game outside on big screens in New York with everybody who can't afford to pay $50K to watch the game at the Garden.

Those are great spaces to watch the game. I think a lot of people are realizing that it's the IRL aspect of community and going to these events. There are some events where people go just to be seen at them, and they're recording themselves for Instagram and XYZ. And there are some events where people are there in person to be with the people who are there, also trying to be at whatever event it is that they're consuming or contesting. So, the games where people are all watching together and are diehard Knicks fans, those are great places to be.

I think it's going to be on fire this—

I saw all the boys. Rasmer said he did his first vlog, his first-ever vlog. You see, obviously, all the streamers out there.

Yeah, he hit me. I missed it. I was watching—

I saw all the boys. Malcolm and Thread Guy and stuff all went to the game. Frank did some watch party somewhere. Obviously, the energy is fucking insane.

It's nuts, bro.

Spurs fans getting their asses beat on the fucking random side.

Yeah. No—it's so fucked up.

It's so fucked up.

4. Is CT dead?

New York, the greatest city on the planet, though.

Yeah. What's next, man? Is CT dead? I have here: CT is dead.

I'm seeing a lot of tweets. I'm seeing a lot of tweets.

If you're still in crypto in 2026, there's something mentally fucking wrong with you. Which, it's hard to argue that for X, Y, and Z reasons. We're going to get into it, but I don't know. How do you feel about that?

I mean, I can see why people are saying that. I would say, if you are a trader and are just focused on making money, there's absolutely no reason you should spend 100% of your time in crypto. You definitely should be spending your time in all markets. Stocks are going crazy. Different sectors—do the research there. Always look at commodities, look at crypto. Look at everything. I would say, if you're a trader, it doesn't make sense to just be looking at crypto.

I want to watch this with you real quick.

You see this video from Gainzy?

I haven't seen it. I haven't watched it.

Let's watch this.

Crypto is literally dead. Everybody's literally dead. Everybody's gone. Quite literally, everybody is gone. And it's for a good reason. We've underperformed everything for way too long. And we memory-holed everybody who leaves. There are so many people who have left that, if we ever actually clicked on our old following to see who we followed through the years, there would be so many names of people where we would be like, “Oh, holy fuck, I remember who—what is this person up to now?”

And odds are, they crashed out, left crypto, and they're doing some other shit. It's not that crypto was a failed experiment. It's that when we joined in 2017 or whatever, we thought all of us would get rich off of it. We really thought, “We're all early to this shit. We're all going to crush it. We're in the right place at the right time to cash in on the right thing.”

Had anybody told us that the vast majority of everybody was going to somehow get wiped out and leave with mental illness, it wouldn't have been that believable, especially in 2017 with everything running up. And then, even when we had the—

Which—what part?

He was saying, if everybody told us—

People would have been like—it would have been hard mentally. In 2017, that's also the same time I joined crypto. The people I was following were very loud about “stack Bitcoin, use alts to get more Bitcoin, all alts are going to zero.” That was the theme that was said a lot by all the OGs on CT at the time. They were like, “It's super volatile. You're going to have to survive minus 80% to minus 90% downswings.”

I think they were very transparent about how difficult it was to make money in crypto, but it was always “stack Bitcoin.” That was the theme back then. So, I disagree with that point that, if we would have known— I think if you were paying attention, you definitely should have done well from 2017.

But yeah, had anybody told us that the vast majority of everybody was going to somehow get wiped out and leave with mental illness, it wouldn't have been that believable, especially in 2017 with everything running up. And then, even when we lost everything in 2017, we had the DeFi cycle. Then we thought we were all made. And even when the DeFi cycle wiped a lot of people out, we had the fucking meme cycle.

And then somehow, throughout the last 10 years, everybody got wrecked in one way or another. There are only a handful of people—

Not everybody, bro.

I mean, I joined crypto in 2020–2021.

Yeah.

And I'm—

I've lost a lot of money in the last couple of years, but I ran my shit up from—I think I spent $200,000 USD to initially fund my initial portfolio in crypto. And I ran that shit up to almost 8 figures.

And it's definitely not 8 figures anymore, but it's way more than $200K, you know?

Yeah, so, I mean, I'm—

Yeah, I mean, there's no industry where everything is going to be a super-successful project. I think in crypto, it's obviously one of the riskiest industries. It's new. It was just maturing. But if you were able to take advantage of the new innovations in crypto that were happening, like DeFi—if you hit Aave when it was ETHLend, so it was ETHLend and then it turned into Aave, and were one of the first people using it, and even took a little bit of profit as it was running up, you're minted. Super-minted.

Even ETH is still up fucking—what was ETH in 2017, $14 or something insane like that? It's $1,600 or $1,700, whatever it is right now.

Compound that with all the DeFi stuff I did. There was a lot of opportunity to make money and do well, even over the past few years. Yes, crypto—ETH is flat since 2021. Bitcoin is basically flat since 2021, but you have to think about how much shit was up from the years before that.

I think that's why the past few years have been difficult, because the parabolic advances just happened in the prior years. And even these most recent cycles—Solana went from like $1 to $200 last cycle. Hyperliquid, that airdrop was great for people, and even after the airdrop it went from $4 to what is it at now, like $60 or whatever.

There have definitely been a lot of projects in crypto that did well, and you could have capitalized on that. I wouldn't say that—I would say that the positivity around CT is definitely a lot lower.

Yeah, I mean, that's basically his entire point: CT is dead. Look at this, too. You obviously saw this—the fucking Indian dude getting, you know—

A fucking forehead tattoo.

It's really dark.

It's really fucking dark, bro. This is really, really dark. And I don't know, Nikita's response is pretty much everybody's general thoughts and consensus around crypto at the moment, which is: it's sad to see all the smart, rich people left, and now it's just fucking degenerate, stream-culture brain-rot teenagers.

Yeah.

And is that facts? Is that facts? And if it's facts, how do we fix it?

I'll say it's two-pronged. AI definitely took a lot of the interest out of crypto for people who are traders and also builders. Since 2022, it's been the dominant trade by far. If you were focusing your energy on AI and the tech stocks that were building in that area, you made a lot more money and did a lot better than people who were solely looking at crypto. So that's true.

But the second part is that crypto's been kind of handicapped regulatorily for—since its existence, honestly, to be honest. It's been very hard to build real products in crypto that you can tie the revenue back to these tokens in the right way, because it literally hasn't been legal to do so.

Like, it literally has not been legal for founders to do so. And I think right now we're seeing the first time where the regulatory environment is going to be a lot more positive for crypto. We're seeing real products that are breaking out.

Polymarket has obviously done a great job breaking into mainstream audiences with prediction markets on everything: sports, politics, finance, all those things. Hyperliquid has done great as well. I think there are going to continue to be startups that utilize crypto in ways that make sense, but you're not going to see them as crypto apps. I think that's going to continue to be an ongoing trend.

So why? Again, we highlighted Polymarket and Hyperliquid, 2 very crypto-centric apps, tools, and platforms that are doing very, very well. Why are they doing so well? And is their success helping crypto culture, or reforming the culture around crypto, or improving general sentiment, do you think?

I think it definitely is. I think there's a lot of positive mindshare around both of these products, Polymarket for sure. When the election popped off, there were a lot of people—even now to this day—that reference Polymarket and how useful it was for predicting what was going on with all the different elections.

I think people still use Polymarket for a ton of different things now. They're still getting a lot more popular, and that's seen as one of the most successful startups. Shayne Coplan went on a tour with a ton of people doing interviews because people looked up to him for how great of a founder he is and how well he's done over the past few years.

It was a product that could only exist in crypto. That's a very crypto-native product. You couldn't have done that anywhere else. I think what crypto has achieved, and what has come from crypto, is heavily discounted.

Stablecoins are obviously going to revolutionize how people transmit money globally. We're going to see a lot more startups there, and we're going to see a lot more businesses use stablecoins. Perps are another thing that's specific to crypto. Prediction markets are another thing that's specific to crypto.

I think the issue is that people are realizing some of these success stories may not tie back directly to Bitcoin and Ethereum. A lot of people are holding just Bitcoin and Ethereum, so when that's not the case, and that's not where the value is accretive to, that's where people have issues.

Somebody just said, “Ansem, I saw you say you bought a few coins the other day. I thought SOL was cooked. What changed?” Want to bring that tweet up and talk about that a little bit?

Which?

You tweeted, “I'm buying coins today.”

Buy—I'm buying memes on Solana for the first time in a while. That went crazy.

I'm still majorly bearish. I'm still high-time-frame bearish on Bitcoin, ETH, and SOL. What changed? I think there are periods where attention is low in crypto and there are some things on-chain that can do really well.

During the last bear market, I don't know if you guys know GMX, but GMX was a DeFi decentralized perp protocol. They're not doing well now, but GMX did really well during the bear market. There are products on-chain that can have smaller market caps and still do well even if the majors aren't doing well.

One of the games I played toward the end of—not this past cycle, but the cycle before last, in 2021 and 2022—was DeFi Kingdoms. DeFi Kingdoms did really well while I was literally in cash with the rest of my portfolio.

You never know when something's going to pop up on-chain that may be new, innovative, and able to get a lot of attention when not a lot of people are risk-on. That's the general reason why. I've seen some cool stuff pop up, but, yeah, I guess that's a good question.

So, back to Hyperliquid and Polymarket, really, it's just trading literally everything. That's kind of what we're seeing with CT, right? I guess you could make an argument that CT is dead. Maybe it's dead for good reason, and maybe it needs to be. Maybe this all does need to form and blend its way into just one broader conversation around finance, trading, and investing.

Yeah, I think that is the thesis. The thesis is that you should be able to trade anything at any point in time very easily—any market. That's one of the reasons Hyperliquid has been able to do so well even with crypto volumes down: They also have perps on stocks, commodities, and pre-IPO markets. All these things that people are looking to trade can be done on the same platform.

People keep asking why we don't have an alt season and why alts aren't doing well. It's because there are better risk-adjusted plays that people are taking in stocks, and you can also trade leverage on them. This is, I would say, the closest to what we saw in past cycles, where you would see alts do 10x or 100x across the board. You're seeing that now with stocks and with perps.

I think that's one of the reasons Hyperliquid is going to continue to do well as a platform, and one of the reasons we're focusing so much on this area, because we think it's going to continue to grow. Even SpaceX is a really cool market. There was nowhere else to trade SpaceX before the IPO happened.

They did $100 million in 24-hour volume, with $176 million in open interest. This is really the only place you can trade it. This is something that crypto has uniquely enabled for retail speculators, and I think the pool of retail traders is going to continue to grow for people looking to trade stuff like this.

We're talking generally about trading. I was looking at the markets for stocks, perp markets for crypto, commodities, the pre-IPO stuff, and even indices. The thesis about being able to trade everything is going to continue to be the theme. Everybody wants to trade.

5. SpaceX IPO

While we're on the subject, SpaceX's IPO is happening tomorrow, June 12th, right? It's the biggest IPO in history. Everything I'm seeing on Twitter—the general consensus around this IPO—is don't touch it. Do not buy the SpaceX IPO.

I saw a tweet that articulates it like this: “Here's the problem. No one else can solve it. There's no chart. Never buy a day-one IPO,” and so on. This is the general content I've seen. Basically, it's saying there will be an IPO pop, obviously referencing other big IPOs and why to stay away from it. I know you have a contrarian take.

How are you feeling personally about this SpaceX IPO? This is all I'm seeing.

Yeah, bro. I actually think SpaceX might be a long. I haven't touched it yet, and I've been looking at the SpaceX market. I'm probably going to trade this, actually. I might position on this tonight, to be honest.

Are you baiting clips right now, or is this—

I'm deadass not. No, I'm really not. I'm not baiting clips. I think the reason I think it might be a long is that Elon is really good at getting people to buy into narratives before they get popular.

SpaceX is launching at a super-high valuation. I think it's $1.5 trillion—or what is it? $1.6 trillion? Yeah, $1.6 trillion. It's launching around $1.6 trillion.

But the reason I think it could still do well is that a lot of the float—the total float of the shares that are trading—is going to be about 4%. It's not like the entire float is going to be tradable on the first day, and Elon owns about 50% of it or something crazy.

So I think what you're actually going to see is that a lot of people are going to try to fade this because, as you said, the standard consensus around how IPOs are going to do is that they're not going to do well. But I think it's going to rip a lot of people, to be honest. I think it's going to go up.

I have to do it to you. This is coming from a guy who literally asked Twitter, “When is the SpaceX IPO?”

This was a farm. I was farming with this.

Okay, okay. Twitter like Google. Bro, somebody said you use Twitter like Google, and it was like, “How do you have so many followers when you use Twitter like Google?” I'm like, “Bro, I have this many followers because I do use Twitter like Google.”

It's actually true, though. I go back and forth with people all the time on Twitter about things I may have an opinion on and want to see what other people are thinking about, or stuff I think may be controversial. I'll just put out the opinion and get people to push back on it. A lot of the time, I get new information that I hadn't thought about before when I'm talking about new projects and new things. So I use Twitter to put out a lot of my thoughts. They just go direct to fucking Twitter, bro. I tweet; that's why I tweet so much. How many tweets do I fucking have? Look at this tweet: “SpaceX's IPO expected to create 4,000 new millionaires, including some cafeteria workers whose compensation packages include employee stock options,” per Bloomberg.

So, some lunch ladies getting rich tomorrow or what?

That's crazy.

On par.

I do think the downside pressures are going to come. What I need to actually do research on tonight, which I haven't done a lot of research on, is what the vesting schedule is for all the employees and when they're going to be able to sell, because that obviously is going to be the huge overhang.

Usually, typically—

I don't even know, to be honest. I don't know what the standard is. It really varies a lot.

Case by case. Yeah.

Let's see. I wonder if I can find this.

Are you legitimately going to trade this, or is this just something that you think could go the other way?

No, I think I am going to trade it. Actually, pull it up. I might trade it now. Where's my—let's see.

Why is this everybody's—?

No, it's cool. It's cool. I was going to ask you why this is “day-one retail buys, retail sell-off down here.” This is where you should buy 12 months in, 10 months in.

This is literally every single post about SpaceX. It's this exact same post every single time.

Why?

Because it is. It's the typical trend with IPOs. If you pull up the—dang, can we pull up the Coinbase chart? I want to pull up the Coinbase chart. Let me pull up TradingView real quick. Coinbase is a pretty good example. Coinbase did this. Twitter did this. I think even Facebook might have done the same pattern, but it's a very common pattern. I think CoreWeave did the same thing.

Everybody's spamming in the chat: “Check every IPO. It's clockwork. This is every IPO.” It's like, what makes this different? Because of the 4% thing you were talking about, Elon Musk being the GOAT?

Yeah.

Oh, here we go. This is my thing. Look at my old chart. This is kind of sick. I haven't pulled this up in a really long time. I had my old markups on the Coinbase chart. I smashed this trade. This is one of the trades I smashed when I smashed Solana the second time.

Coinbase IPOed at fucking whatever, $400 on the first day—around $300. It bottomed at $325 on the first day, went down, came up a little bit, and this is typically the pattern. It'll trade down and then go sideways for a bit, accumulating to find its actual low. Then it'll actually have its breakout and go higher. It's a very common pattern. I think CoreWeave did the same thing. Well, I guess CoreWeave ripped.

So, what is the stark difference? That's what I'm asking. Just as a fucking reference, and for fellow laymen in the chat or anybody watching, what makes SpaceX different? We're all reading and seeing, “Do not buy SpaceX. Do not buy SpaceX day one.” You're talking about longing it, which is fucking crazy. You're actually legitimately the first person I've heard say that.

If you smash this—if this is another fucking never-fade moment, and we're 2 weeks in the future and you were right, a month in the future and you were right, 100 days in the future and you're right—I don't know what to say. But I will know to at least give you the credit that you're the fucking only person who said this.

Well, I think it's a combination of things. The 2 main reasons that I've seen people be bearish on SpaceX are, one, they're not making a lot of revenue. Their revenue numbers are not reflective of something that should trade at—

$18 billion versus Walmart's $600 billion. I saw a tweet about that as well. Do we have that? We should pull that if we have it. I'll pull it up.

Yeah. There are 2 main reasons that people are bearish on SpaceX right now. One is that they don't really make any real revenue. They make $20 billion; Walmart makes $700 billion. SpaceX's valuation is $1.75 trillion—whatever it is, $1.6 trillion. Walmart's valuation is $1 trillion.

But the thing with SpaceX is that it's not valued based on its current revenues. The thesis around whether SpaceX is going to do well is way, way into the future, if Elon can do all the crazy shit in space that he's actually talking about. Their revenues now—that's why it's been priced like that. It's not priced off its revenues now.

I feel like Elon Musk and Tesla kind of helped popularize narrative trading, or really shine a light on that being a viable thing. I just feel like a lot of—

The first—Elon's the GOAT. I mean—

But Thiel did a really good interview with Scott Alexander a few days ago, I think. He was essentially talking about how Elon fucking crushed Tesla, and it was more about the thesis of what he could do in the future than the actual existing product and what they were building. But he's usually right on a long enough time frame that it makes sense.

I think the similar thing with SpaceX—I was going to say that the first thing is the concerns about the revenue. The second thing is the valuation that it's launching at. It's coming out of the gate at fucking $1.75 trillion, whatever it is, $1.6 trillion. But if a lot of the supply is not actually tradable on the first day and people aren't selling on the first day, then obviously it's the same thing as the low-float, high-FDV altcoin situation. It's a super-high FDV, but there's only so much of the float trading, and it's very easy to manipulate.

There are also a lot of people who are very incentivized for SpaceX to do well. There are a lot of huge IPOs coming down the pipe this year. OpenAI might be this year, and Anthropic might also be this year. The entire stock market right now is like—

Kind of hinging on SpaceX doing good or doing bad. There's a lot of people who want this SpaceX IPO to do really well. SpaceX, I think, is like—yeah, if this is going to pop, the stock bubble is this—

Because everybody's saying these big IPOs are coming. If they sell off, where's—obviously, we're at a lack of liquidity. Where's everything going to come from? So I think if SpaceX does well, that's another reason people have to be like, “Oh, we should still be bullish on the rest of stocks.” How exactly do you think tomorrow plays out?

Let's see. Let me pull up the fucking chart. I might actually use the long right now. All my positions are in this. I'm fucking short ETH, and I'm short XRP right now. So, yeah, just based off the chart, to be honest—

I'm short ETH. XRP is so funny. I'm short ETH. I'm short XRP. (laughter)

I am. But if I was going to trade this, I would trade SpaceX, to be honest. I would probably take this right now. It's traded sideways and down pretty much since the launch on Hyperliquid. This low here at 160 broke beneath it, and then it reclaimed this low. This is typically what you see in bottoming patterns on the lower time frame. If I was going to try to long this, my stop would be underneath this low right here, around 158.

We're just up front for that backend. If you go to More, click Markets.

I love you, by the way. I love you. You just keep gifting people in the chat. You don't have to do that, Giddy. I love you.

You're the best.

But, yeah, if you go to More, click Markets, and then click Pre-IPO. In this tab, you'll see SpaceX as the first market that comes up. That's how you navigate to this page.

They said we need KYC for Bullpen.

No, you do not.

No. Again, you don't need KYC for Hyperliquid, and it's the same shit.

Yeah, you don't need to. You can make an account in less than 15 minutes. I should time it and see if I'm wrong on that.

If I was going to trade, let's see if I can just get some, just for the shit of it. It's currently trading on Hyperliquid below what it's going to open at.

Well, I think it's actually estimated to come out at around $135, and this is a slight premium to that. We'll see, depending on what it comes out at tomorrow.

You can also short this on Hyperliquid, correct?

You can short it.

I'm not advising anybody to do that. I don't think shorting SpaceX is a great idea, either.

I just think it's crowded, bro. I do think it's really crowded. I think a lot of people are going to try to short it on the open. I'm curious to see how it does tomorrow, but I do think that, regardless of what happens, it's going to be a good indicator of people's confidence in the rest of the market. If this thing nukes tomorrow, if SpaceX does really poorly on launch, then I think that's bad for markets, whether you have a position in this or don't have a position in this. I think it's an indicator of what you should be doing. Spiritually, let's avoid shorting SpaceX because it's just really, really bad.

We don't love making money where everybody else is getting fucking fried. That's horrible.

Yeah, it's pretty dark. That's why I honestly hate making money shorting crypto. I honestly feel bad because I know a lot of people are always holding shit. Stocks are different because it's like, eh, I don't really care that much about stocks, but crypto feels slightly different. You need people to short for things to be priced correctly. We'll see how SpaceX does tomorrow. I'm actually excited for this. It should be good information about how the rest of the market is going.

It's good content. It's a fucking movie. It's a movie happening in real time. They're talking about putting people on Mars and shit. We'll see how it goes. A lot of people are speculating about Elon merging all of his companies. What do you think about that? Just calling everything X—Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter, all of it. Ticker X.

Damn, that would be fire. I mean, I don't know how—he did that with some of his other companies. He combined X and X AI into SpaceX.

It makes sense because X has the distribution to people. That makes sense.

Yeah, I think people actually expected xAI to do a lot better over the past year or so than it has, because they have so much real-time data happening all the time that a lot of other people don't have. People also expected Google Gemini to be a lot better than Claude and ChatGPT.

That's interesting, right? Anthropic came out of fucking nowhere, and they're kind of—

Crushing it.

Crushing it. That is crazy. While Google and Apple—

I want to shout out this guy who I feel like I find every once in a while. These accounts are really smart but aren't followed by a lot of people. They're just putting all their thoughts out there. Eventually, they're going to get followers if they want followers. I found one account that I think is really good, and I'm pretty sure he's a developer. I don't know who this is. He doesn't follow me. I just found him by being on the internet 24/7 right now.

This guy calls himself Roy. I don't know what his actual name is, but he writes a lot about AI and LLMs. You can clearly tell that he uses these things every single day, all the time. He's got a lot of interesting takes that I've been reading. I like to find subject-matter experts on X, literally follow them, and learn from them. I think this is one of those guys.

Smart.

He's a developer. He goes through this post he made about the biggest misconception people have, by far, about LLMs. I'm not going to read this whole thing because it's pretty deep, but he's talking about the different ways LLMs work, the different types, the most popular LLMs, and his opinions on them. He was essentially saying that Anthropic is better at marketing than they are product-wise compared with ChatGPT because they don't have as much compute.

My favorite marketing campaign—really the only thing I've seen that I've enjoyed from an AI company—

In regard to marketing, commercials, or ads, it was—I forget where they did it. Was it the Super Bowl, where they basically shit on ChatGPT? They made the user experience with ChatGPT look really robotic and—

Not authentic.

I don't know. That one stuck out to me, and I was like, "Oh, shit. Anthropic kind of cooked with this."

They're really good at marketing, bro.

Ever since then, by the way, ever since that ad, it's been up only. I feel like that was really the beginning of their sweep and takeover.

Yeah, I definitely agree. But I just like this dude's takes that he's put out so far.

Listen, I'm 34 years old, but I'm just going to go ahead and say this: This motherfucker's profile has aura. Real aura, doesn't it?

Yes, bro. It does. Mom's basement. First of all, Mom's basement.

Bro, I like this. I don't know who he is. I like this.

Roy G. Biv is the entire color spectrum. It's the rainbow.

Red, orange—that's how you remember the shit: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, whatever.

His username is Roy G. Biv, and then his bio is like—

Who the fuck is this guy, bro?

I don't know, bro.

And then he's followed by Ansem. It's just—

Yeah, it's fucking lit. He's lit, bro.

6. Fable 5 & one-prompt video games

What else? Fable 5. I talked a little bit at the beginning about how we haven't tapped in yet.

Yeah, we're behind. We're not—we're behind, bro.

Is it Hermes? Hermes? What the fuck is it? How do you pronounce it?

Hermes, I think. Hermes.

Is it Hermes? That's quickly becoming the 1-2 stack that people are using: Hermes and Fable 5. We haven't tapped into it yet. We're going to fucking do a big session tomorrow.

I thought Anthropic was putting out a specific tool to build video games because that's all I've seen in regard to Fable 5. Maybe that's just my algorithm, my For You page. I don't know, people in the chat. I don't know if you guys have seen Claude and Mizkif, for example. There's a clip of Mizkif. Let me try to find this right here. Look at this shit. It came from one thing. I just said, "Make me a Minecraft clone."

He one-shotted this.

He just said, "Make me a Minecraft clone." It branded it the way that it wanted to. It's insane. Right here: "Make a Minecraft clone."

Five minutes.

Not even 2 minutes.

And it spat that out in 2 minutes. That's fucking insane.

That's crazy.

Gaming studios are cooked. What the fuck is this not coming for? I don't know. This is why everybody fucking hates AI, because people look at this and the immediate knee-jerk reaction is, "Oh, my God, you're just fucking taking everything away from people and giving it to AI."

It's insane. I saw some really fucking cool ones, too.

You know what's interesting? It seems like the software cost is going down a ton. You're going to be able to build these apps a lot easier than you're building them now.

I just saw something about ChatGPT putting their cost way down. I think it was a Polymarket tweet.

Yeah, I saw it, too. But I wonder how people are thinking about the fact that you still have to solve the distribution problem. That's something AI can't do for you. It can build you the greatest app in the world, but then you have to get people to use it.

I'll say this, too: Why does that seem like a moat? Why are OpenAI and Anthropic calling all these things different things? I thought about Steve Jobs and what he would do in these scenarios.

It’s just weird, right? It’s like Fable 5 and Opus 4.7. It’s very nerdy, developer-oriented, hardcore-internet-user-coded. It’s not really friendly or user-friendly for the average person. Which one do I use? Do I use Opus or Fable? Do I use this or that? Do I use ChatGPT?

I think that’s where a lot of these leading models are behind, as you said, in how they’re being distributed. But I don’t know, it’s [__] like this, though. Everybody in the chat has likely played video games at some point in their life, if you know me. It’s a huge part of my lore, my career, and my come-up.

For a lot of people, it’s the stereotypical archetype of an 18-year-old kid who’s unemployed and [__] plays video games all day. This obviously appeals to a person like that, right? This is an opportunity for someone like that to [__] capitalize, find a lane for themselves, find a career for themselves, and build on top of this [__].

Did you watch this video? I was saving it for this. I wanted to watch how they—You haven’t seen this. Let’s watch this together as a family, as a chat. 53 million views because Anthropic’s got it like that. Let’s see what the [__] this is saying.

100,000 likes, which is nice to see, because we don’t want people to hate AI. AI is good. It’s not bad. Yeah, let’s see what this is saying.

I mean, I don’t know what to say about that.

Yeah, I did not think—[laughter] It feels very light. It feels very not serious.

Not a ton of content in there. I don’t know how people are supposed to understand that you could take this tech and this tool and build a full-on GTA clone with it. I feel like people should know that, right?

Yeah.

That’s been the most appealing, interesting thing for me. I’m like, “What? I can go build a full-on video game tomorrow in like 20 minutes?” That sounds incredible. That’s cool.

Yeah, I wonder what more marketing they’re doing around how they’re selling it. I know they did a huge push on Mythos. Mythos was like, “Oh, Mythos can break all these different companies, software, and all these other different things. We can’t release it yet because we have to put safeguards on it.” They put safeguards on it and released Fable. But I think a lot of the Mythos marketing was—

Mythos has the most aura. The most—

For sure. I think a lot of the marketing was for the corpo side, for selling to corporates. I think that was for them.

Somebody said, “Make Skyrim,” and it made this.

Bro, there’s no shot it made that in 1 shot.

It did.

There’s no way, bro. What the fuck?

This is insane.

That’s crazy.

Guys, you can make this shit right now at home. You can make this shit with Fable 5. This is insane. That actually is crazy.

Next, I’ll use Fable.

That’s what I thought they were going to say. I thought it was going to be Fable. Did you play that game?

Fable?

Yeah. That game’s amazing. That game’s way ahead of its time in terms of being able to change the trajectory of your character’s life and create different outcomes and shit. That game was fire. That was one of the only games that—what would you classify that as, an MMO?

MMORPG?

Yeah, like a solo. I think that’s the only one of those I’ve ever played.

Yeah, it wasn’t an MMO. I’m tripping. It was solo, like a large RPG.

Yeah.

Yeah, I like RPGs. I like Diablo, bro. Diablo was my MMO-kind-of-RPG game. I love Diablo. What was that?

Is this one fake?

Look at this. Claude, Fable 5 is unbelievable. Prompt: “Make a realistic open-world RPG about running for mayor in LA. Side quest so unhinged, even more addicting than fentanyl.” This has to be great. [laughter]

Look at this. Look at this.

“Vote for Nikki. There’s $3 in it for you.”

Giving the homeless guy $3 to vote.

Is this real, chat? Somebody said it’s fake. That’s an AI video. It has to be, right? Throw fentanyl. This is crazy.

“Throw fentanyl” is so fucked up.

I don’t know, man. Listen. I think this is incredible. I’m excited about a tool and tech like this. I think this almost, in a way, decentralizes and allows any person on the planet to enter this medium in terms of it being an art form.

The way I think about it is, up to this point—up to 2026—all of our favorite games, we’ll use GTA as an example because I talk about GTA a lot, have had Rockstar celebrated as the people or studio that produced the game. Who makes GTA 5 or GTA 6? Rockstar. Who makes amazing video games? Rockstar, right?

But you look at other mediums of art, like music or traditional painting, and it’s 1 person, right? In music, sometimes you have somebody who does the singing and somebody who produces it, like a Kanye West, for example. This is 1 guy who produces music in real time, and he’s the one who’s celebrated for it.

I think it’s going to be cool to see individuals building games by themselves, having their own swag and aesthetic, building their own world—you know what I’m saying? In 5 or 10 years, there’s going to be a Kanye West of gaming, not in regard to them being good at the game, but in regard to them being good at building games. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that does make sense. I feel like it opens up the creative world so much for what you can do if you’re a young person. It’s kind of awesome.

It’s incredible. Everybody watching this right now could go into the trenches, and use Fable 5 every day for a few hours a day and be one of those guys. Why can’t you be the Kanye West of gaming? Why can’t you make the next GTA 6? You can. You can.

It doesn’t even have to be gaming. It literally could be anything. You always hear about the kids who are god-tier software developers now, and they started building apps when they were really young, just messing around with computers.

Think about what those kids would be able to do at that age now with what AI can do. I feel like the kids who are learning software now are going to dominate. They’re going to have so much knowledge that you wouldn’t have been able to get quickly before.

It’s insane. There’s no excuse, right? There’s absolutely no excuse.

Yeah. No excuse at all. I have here: you want to talk about Google admitting AI needs new money.

Yeah. Google, I think it was either last week or the week before last, did an $80 billion equity raise. They’re going to use the proceeds to continue their investments in AI.

People are talking about it because that raise is bigger than any of the current IPOs—bigger than the SpaceX IPO, however much they raised for that—

80 Bs.

Yeah. People are asking, “Why are they selling their equity?” Their equity is up a lot right now. But what people are saying is that other tech companies might also go down that path, where they start selling equity instead of just using debt to finance all their AI spending.

If all these big companies are selling their equity, does that shake confidence among investors who are obviously holding the equity in these companies? Does that mean it’s harder for them to get the necessary cash they need for all their capex over the next year or so?

Is this good or bad for AI? Is this good or bad for Google?

I think in the short term, people are going to be spooked by it. I think markets are going to be spooked by it. But what people continue to discount with all these big tech companies’ spending is that they’re actually spending very smartly, and that the spending they’re doing is adding to their bottom-line revenue.

If you’re Google, you have the smartest people in the world working for that company. They think it’s worth spending that much money right now because they think AI is going to be exponentially better over the next few years. You have to spend, because if you don’t spend the money, somebody else is going to spend the money. If somebody else spends the money, they’re going to have a leg up on you in this area.

I think they’re thinking that it’s going to make sense. I think it’s also going to make sense over a longer time frame. I think it could spook markets a bit in the short term.

We have an intern coming on in about 10 minutes. Before we do that, I have here that you want to talk about Pluralis, and I want to talk a little bit about that too and ask you some questions about it.

But you want to kind of open that conversation.

7. Decentralized AI training

We want to touch on Pluralis, Venice, and Venice AI. You had a bar—you were talking about how, if anything is going to be the next Bitcoin, it's going to be something like Pluralis. You didn't explicitly say Pluralis, but yeah. What the fuck even is Pluralis? Because before today, I didn't know. [Laughter.]

Yeah. The reason for this thought is that Kell did a great write-up on Pluralis. Essentially, right now, the way the AI economy is working is that there are a lot of closed-source labs, like OpenAI, Anthropic, and a few other ones. They're spending a fucking ton of money on training all these models, and the reason they need to spend a ton of money on training all these models is because they're getting all the best GPUs, co-locating these GPUs all in the same place, and then spending a lot on the training and on the inference with these models.

Pluralis takes this and says, “Okay, how can we do this at a much cheaper cost?” Instead of using a ton of the best GPUs in one place, it uses a diverse set of GPUs from all these different places. It's essentially trying to solve the decentralized-training problem, which people have said isn't able to be solved. You can't compete with the way these labs are currently doing it, so it's a very difficult problem to solve.

But if they're able to solve this problem, then it kind of disrupts the entire AI economy and how it's working right now. If they're able to do it in a way that uses a good coordination mechanism, such that people benefit from contributing to this protocol, then the upside is huge. The reason crypto did so well early on with Bitcoin is that you had all these people in different places around the world who could contribute to this globally decentralized network, and they were incentivized to contribute to this network by receiving Bitcoin for upholding it.

If you have something like Pluralis, where you're not just receiving coins for doing this random work—like solving these provably hard math problems—but you're actually doing decentralized training that is necessary to build these revolutionary models that people are using every day, then that's huge. We've seen Claude and ChatGPT have a ton of users.

It's basically giving the general public more access to be able to go and build things like Claude and ChatGPT.

Not necessarily to build the models—giving the public access to the process of training these models and then incentivizing them. But yeah. If you think about it, if they were able to create a model that's as good as what ChatGPT and Claude have right now, that would be crazy. Nobody currently thinks that's possible.

AI training made cheap and much easier to access. This is kind of in line with Venice and my thoughts around that, and just kind of solving the problem of privacy. I don't know. More and more every single day, especially hearing you talk about crypto in the markets, it's hard not to come to the conclusion that AI is crypto's only hope at this point. That's what it feels like, at least today, June 11, 2026.

Yeah. I think if crypto is able to solve the problems that the current AI economy hasn't been able to solve, and it uniquely does that, then crypto is—

Someone said in the chat, “It's also its biggest threat,” which, low-key, is poetic almost. Crypto is AI's biggest threat—or AI is crypto's biggest threat.

Yeah. No, it is. It is for sure.

I don't know about crypto being AI's biggest threat. I feel like crypto is single men under 30's biggest threat. [Laughter.]

Bro.

That's about it. That's the only thing crypto's threatening at this point. [Laughter.]

I think it's true, though. Both things can be true. I do think AI is obviously a huge threat to crypto because you have all of these decentralized protocols where, if you're able to hack them, you can take the money and it's immediately yours. That is something that's uniquely specific to crypto that you kind of don't have the same issues with if your money is—

Crypto is crypto's biggest threat. That's just—

But I will say that I think crypto can be uniquely positioned to solve some of those problems. We talked about this with Kashio, but if open-source AI can compete with closed-source AI—

Huge, huge risk to Gio in the chat. You just said, “Just got into crypto. Now I'm being boxed out.”

Who's being boxed out?

He's just saying he's being boxed out. He feels like he's being boxed out. The move is, you just take the floor. I feel like there's no opportunities in crypto. I feel like that's how people feel: “I just got into crypto. I don't know.”

8. How Ansem is positioned

Historically, a guy could just invest in Bitcoin, right? We saw a clip from Lacy last episode where he's talking about full-porting his entire life and net worth into Bitcoin, and then it fucking falls off a cliff. That's not even a viable strategy anymore. You're short Bitcoin, right? Long-term, I think what he's asking—what he's getting at—is, where does he go? That's what we're talking about now. Pluralis, Venice AI—I mean, follow that trend. Those are spots that look good.

How are you positioned in crypto right now? I'm just going to ask you directly: what do your longs look like? You're short Ethereum and XRP? I think those are good bets to take, but—

I mean, yeah, it's kind of the same positions I've been talking about. I still think HYPE is going to continue to do well. I still think Venice is going to continue to do well.

Zcash, after the exploit—technicals-wise, I do think there are levels it needs to reclaim before it starts trending again. I'm kind of expecting it to go into a longer sideways period. But I actually think that, after they solve the exploit that they found, it's going to be hardened, and I think the thesis around Zcash is going to be stronger after that. So that's my current take on that.

Outside of that, there isn't a ton of stuff that I'm bullish on holding right now. Actually, I do like Courtyard. I think Courtyard is doing well. I think the TCG area is one that's going to continue to see increased volumes, and they have a unique business model that other people aren't really replicating yet. So I do think that's an interesting spot.

At this current juncture in crypto, when a lot of people have a negative perception of crypto, that's usually when the best opportunities arise and when you should be doing the most research. That's just how things work. When a lot of people aren't expecting things to do really well, the smart people are building these products before the marketing of these products happens. Once the marketing happens is when the average person ends up finding out about them, but there are people who have been working on and building these things for years.

Even with AI, there were people working at OpenAI for years before ChatGPT had a breakout moment. As an average person, you didn't know that people were working on solving these problems. I think there are similar things happening right now in crypto, where people are working on problems that crypto uniquely solves that you're not really going to see get popular until after the fact.

Those are my current thoughts on crypto and how to be bullish on it. But yeah, there are always opportunities that pop up. Do we have that graphic from the chat?

The old man had to take a piss. Somebody said, “What is after AI and crypto?” Robotics, low-key—

Which is high-key.

High-key. That's a pretty good segue into the intern. Do we have—

I mean, software has gone insane. The current AI trade has been around software, but none of it has been around hardware. I think that's one of the reasons we have to bring an intern on to talk about robo strategy. That's a trade that has not happened yet, and it's really, really hard for retail to put on that trade. How do you get long robotics if you think that's going to be a game-changing innovation over the next few years?

Tesla is probably the easiest way right now, but generally, it's a very hard trade to put on. So that's why we're thinking about that.

I feel like I'm out of focus a little bit. If you guys want to fix that before the intern gets in here. He'll be ready in 2 minutes. Cool. This should be good.

If you want to get really ahead of something, the AI trade hasn't even really happened yet, and robotics for sure hasn't happened yet, right? So it's like—

Where is it at? Is it—throw it up in the middle of the screen?

Yeah.

Yeah, this past week we talked about the last challenge that we had at Bullpen. We did $25K to sign up, and the number-one P&L gets $100K. I’m currently in first. Hopefully, I’ll be in first in a week and win.

Pull up your shit. Pull up the leaderboard on your laptop.

Yeah, I’ll pull it up—the current one. Yeah, see, I also did want to say: you talked about Pluralis Research. I think we should try to get that guy on.

Yeah, we should. We should. We should. He actually follows me.

Yeah, I’m still up. I’m still in first. I had a much higher P&L the last time I was on this show. I was wrong about the breakdown on Bitcoin breaking beneath $60K and gave back some of the P&L that I had, but I’m currently in first.

We’ve done a ton of volume on this market and had some really good ups and downs and swings. I know this leaderboard has looked different every few days, so it’s really fun to see how much people have gone up and down. This guy Drew is actually a good trader. I’m pretty sure he’s long—he’s probably long HYPE right now. It’s super bullish—

TJ. [Laughter] I don’t know. He was really loud that first week. He was like, “Yo, I’m number one on the leaderboard. Just joined last week.” [Laughter] I don’t know where he’s at right now.

That’s funny.

But yeah, we need to get him in here. I wish he would have been on the call here.

You being in first place is way too funny. Way too funny.

It is funny because people were talking mad shit about me, bro. They were—

Pluralis Research. Who’s the guy? Who’s the founder of this? Who’s the man to talk to?

Alex. Alex Long, I think is his name.

With a last name like Long?

Long.

That’s aura.

It’s good.

Wow. Alex, if you’re watching this, come on the show, brother. We’d love to talk about the product.

Yeah, I’m going to hit him up after this. Let us know.

All these machine-learning PhD guys, bro, they just are not—CT doesn’t even know who these people are. No idea. No idea.

And by the way, the general person doesn’t even know what the fuck CT is, right? So it’s so far deep down the rabbit hole, and I don’t know. It’s very, very niche. That’s where the best opportunities are, right?

They’re in these very slim, razor-thin, tiny little spots.

I’m telling you, when I first found Solana in, like, whatever, 2021—the very beginning of 2021—Solana was not popular. Nobody was talking about Solana. Nobody even knew what Solana was. Then it got really popular after the fact.

There are a lot of investments that tend to be like that, where if you’re early and do the research before other people know what they are, that’s where you get your asymmetric returns from. Like talking about ETH when ETH was $10 and then it went to $5K.

That’s what I respect so much about you and identified as far as your talent. At the end of the day, it’s all just identifying potential, right? It’s being able to see potential before other people see it.

I was born with the ability to see potential in YouTubers and streamers and kids who make shitty videos on the internet. You were born with an innate gift for doing that for markets, specifically crypto. I wish we could trade, even for a week.

Trade, bro. I don’t want to be talking to people, bro. I don’t even like talking to people like that.

Even for a week, man. Even for a week.

But no, it definitely is the same skill set. It’s a very, very, very similar skill set. I’ve found that even on Twitter—I was just talking about that guy Roy—but there have been a lot of traders that I found on CT when I was starting out, and even after I started blowing up. There are some really talented traders who just had no followers. They didn’t have a following, and I was like, “Yo, this dude’s smart as shit. He’s doing his research.”

You find them, then boost them and bring more attention their way, because I feel like there are a lot of situations like that where they just need a spark of attention, and then they blow up after that. It’s like that with a lot of smart people, I feel like.

I mean, we’re about to talk to Intern. His entire story is basically rooted in that, right? He started the Intern meta—that whole thing that’s become a CT-wide, I mean, even just a Twitter-wide, thing at this point.

He’s looking like the king of attention.

He’s here. Okay, can they hear production?

Yeah, I do read chat. Kilo Manny, I do read chat. Yes, sir.

So they cannot hear us now.

They can hear us. Different fonts. Talent. Talent-manager brain in different fonts.

Yes, sir.

Airbag 900, I really appreciate you, brother. Appreciate that a lot. Somebody said you get neck tonight.

Probably. Probably. Probably.

One thing that I definitely got on most of these streamers—[sighs] I’ll take the Ws where I can get them at this point. Somebody said, “Gross.” I mean, you fucking asked. [Laughter]

King Julia said, “Bubbles on it.” That’s really, really funny. Blowing bubbles on it. That’s the fucking phrase, bro.

Not only does he read chat, he pays $10K to have the best way to read it. Mo Polo, my man. You see it. You see the vision. You see where our heads are at.

9. Intern joins — Robo Strategy CMO

All right. Jesse’s here. Intern. He is our first guest of the day. He was just announced as Robo Strategies’ CMO. He’s a friend of Ansem and me. We’ve spent some time in person, IRL, and we have a little bit of lore with this guy, Intern, on Twitter. Kevin, man, how are you, brother?

Kevin

Yo, how you doing? Well, are we live? I feel like I can only see myself here.

Yeah, we are live. Can’t see us? We’re live. We are live. Pull up Twitch.

I’ll pull up the stream. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One second. One second.

Or Twitter. Yeah, Michael’s going to send you a link so you can see what we’re seeing.

Got you, dude. Michael’s a GOAT. Michael, I’m very sorry for moving stuff around today. I was literally at a robot factory and was trying to get back to New York. Traffic was crazy.

But this one is like—dude, have you guys ever seen Spider-Man 2, with Doctor Octopus and those arms that come out of his back?

This company literally builds those things and moves them around.

I said I was at a robot factory.

What the— [Laughter]

I swear.

Hey, hey, Jesse, let me know. Put me on, brother, because I’m in desperate need of some robots. I’ve got to keep up. I’m in the market for some bots, brother. Let me know.

Kevin

I know, dude. I think people can actually buy this. It’s called Standard Bots. That’s the name of the company. We just announced—or they just announced—their fundraise on Tuesday, with Robo Strategies as the lead.

These guys are really cool. Evan Beard, the founder, is an absolute hidden gem. I think he got to around 2,000 followers on the fundraise day, but he deserves way more love. He will get way more love in the future, for sure.

They’re not the humanoid robots that I think everyone’s excited about. These ones are for American manufacturing. You put them in a factory; they’re enormous and super strong. It’s literally like if you pull up Doc Ock, the Spider-Man guy from the second movie with Tobey Maguire. It’s pretty cool.

Well, obviously, it goes without saying, but a lot of these robots are going to be designed from the perspective of AI, right? They’re just designed to be optimal at what they do.

I think that people, just because of culture and movies and things like that, are married to the idea of a robot that looks like a person. Outside of explicitly being a familiar design for people to engage with, it’s likely not to be the most optimal design for what a robot looks like.

Your household robot—a Jetsons-style robot that’s in your crib and helps you with day-to-day tasks—probably doesn’t look like a person, right?

Kevin

Yeah. Funny enough, early CT is where people would get into hotly debated arguments. SegWit and the Bitcoin forking comes to mind: “We need small blocks. Big blocks.”

It's like a hotly contested or hotly debated thing in the space, and humanoids being a good form factor or not is like that for really deep robot nerds. People lose sleep over this; they yell about it. It's crazy.

Both will absolutely be huge. Humanoids—the form factor—you think about all of the labor jobs that people do in real life. Those jobs are set up for humans, right? So if you have a human robot that can do all the same things, clearly that's going to be a good form factor to be able to just drag and drop a robot in place and have it be effective.

But then there are a lot of tasks that humans aren't that good for, right? The large industrial arm robots have existed for a long time. They just haven't really been supplemented by AI or as cost-effective as general-purpose robots. So both will be really important, but Standard Bots are definitely one to watch for the manufacturing side.

I want to back you up just a little bit because it's amazing to hear you speak on this. You're a really sharp fucking guy, and obviously I know you in the context of crypto, and a lot of people probably watching this right now know you in that context as well, @intern, et cetera. I know we have a personal relationship to some degree outside of that—you and Z as well, kind of by way of Monad.

I just wanted to hear you talk a little bit about yourself: how you got involved in crypto, how you met guys like me and Ansem, and me and Z as well, and how you found a path from that to now being the CMO at Robo Strategies, right underneath fucking Andrew Kang, who was also supposed to be on today and who's one of the most goated fucking CT trader guys of all time. His story is fucking biblical.

Biblical.

We got to get him on next week. He's got to come up and jump in next week.

I know he will, dude. He actually just had business there; he was there with me. We will absolutely get Kang on here.

Yeah. From my side, I got really into crypto in 2017. I'm 28 now, so I was 19 at the time, a freshman in college. I studied physics. I was definitely a math guy, so emerging technology and science were always what I was interested in. Crypto seemed like a really cool path. DeFi—I got Bitcoin-pilled, and then DeFi happened the year after that, and it just seemed like there was so much innovation possible, so I fell down that rabbit hole.

It was really exciting because there was such fast growth, and I think a truism for an industry is that when there's really fast growth, fast growth creates all opportunity. It seemed like an attractive industry to work in. It solved a lot of the problems that I honestly was passionate about, right? I think Bitcoin is a really good thing for society.

And then it's also directly monetizable, right? There's a whole trading industry getting built out, and there weren't really any experts either, right? Because it's new—nobody was doing crypto for 20 years. As you go into finance or something, there are people doing finance for 20 years, right? You have to really climb up a ladder.

Equal playing field. Yeah.

Kevin

Right. Yeah. The outcome is more driven by your aptitude and raw intuition instead of—

This is what we preach on the show too, and that's exactly one-to-one how AI is today. That's why we urge and push people who watch the show to jump on that, because it's the same for everybody. Everybody's starting at square 1, all the same, right?

Kevin

Yeah, 100%. That was cool. There are a lot of reasons that it was attractive to me. So I got really into crypto with my own capital. I started working at CMS Holdings, where Dan is the man. He runs the CMS Holdings account. I literally joined as an intern when I was still in college, and so that's where the intern namesake came from.

How'd you get that? Somebody in the chat asked.

Kevin

I actually met the guy who had it coincidentally.

It's called fame. That's called fame. [Laughter.] What are the odds of that happening?

I don't know if the guy is doxxed for this, but he has a crazy amount of handles. I'll give you guys the background at a different time.

He's a typical com kid, like a hacker-com guy with a bunch of handles.

He's 45 years old, dude.

Well, hey, hey, hey, let's not. [Laughter.]

No, but I'm just saying, he was on Twitter and just got a bunch of handles, and he's kept them. I'm like, “I promise you I'm the only person who will ever have use for the @intern handle. There's no one else in the entire world who would ever need this.”

That's true.

And he's like, “I'm doing nothing with any of these anyway.” He helped transfer it over.

Free. It was a freebie.

Yeah.

Oh, wow. That's fucking crazy, dude.

He was fun. He was a good guy.

But you might have to spin the block and buy that fool a watch or something at some point. I mean—

For sure. Yeah. I got really into crypto. I was doing venture investing. Monad came across my desk, and I got super excited about it. It's hard to put yourself back in the state of 2022 crypto because it feels like today is so different.

Yeah.

Kevin

2022 crypto was like, “Solana is going to flip Ethereum next year because it's so much faster and it has all these really good fundamental traits to it.” It's EVM-compatible. The tech side was still pretty highly debated, whereas I feel like today people just don't even really talk about it or care.

But Monad had all the stuff that I thought was important. The founders were super cracked, and so I joined the team. I was kind of the first non-engineer to work on the team. My background was in venture, so I more or less helped or did all of our fundraising, all the marketing, kind of community growth—everything that now, when you see Monad online, I started from scratch and just built that out.

Ansem and Banks got involved in the fundraise, which was really cool. That's kind of how Ansem and I had hung out before. I remember playing basketball. But Banks—that's how we got introduced the first time. That's kind of the backstory.

I answered a cold DM about Monad, and thank God, by the way, because I passed that off to Cross, who was helping me manage my positions and stuff at that point. I'm like, “Hey, do you know anything about this?” And he's like, “Fuck yeah.”

Like you said, it's hard to put yourself back in the mindset of 2022. But this is right after we saw ETH do what it did, right, from fucking 2017 to 2020. And then we saw Solana do that also. So everybody's looking for the next L1. What's the next Solana?

There was a lot of conversation and narrative around Monad being that. That was kind of the through line between all 3 of us. I know Z—we talked a lot about that as well. I know Threadguy, too; it was a big thing.

I feel like it's the story of the guy who traded a paper clip up and ended up with a house or something. I got the @intern handle and just traded it up.

No, the robot side is interesting. I was talking to somebody who I think is probably the smartest person that I know and who I consider an actual friend. They were talking about robots in early 2023, and it kind of planted the seed in my head. Then, a little over a year ago, I got super-pilled on robots—the market size for them, the fact that there's going to be this insane amount of demand, and there's really only a few companies that understand this and are building toward it. Valuations weren't crazy whatsoever.

So I started tweeting about it. Andrew Kang reached out when he saw me ripping tweets about robots being the future and said, “Hey, I'm raising for this fund.” I got involved as an investor in Robo Strategy. That kind of accelerated it and made me dig deeper and deeper.

I'm like, “This is a career-level bet size. My conviction is super high. I think Andrew is the right guy to do it. I think the vehicle is a perfect way to express this bet on the future.” If you wanted to join a fund for robotics, there's not much you can do besides be an investor or provide portfolio support. Whereas Robo Strategy also has a marketing component.

I'm like, “I can take the go-to-market stuff I had done a lot in crypto, apply it to the fund, and actually add value in a meaningful way.” That just seemed like the perfect fit. So, yeah, I talked to Andrew and Mark about it. Initially, I was just sending them ideas as an investor. I was like, “Guys, you got to do this. This is going to be so smart. This is what's going to happen.” I think at a certain point they were like, “You should really just come and do this.”

That’s fucking awesome, dude. It’s awesome.

Yeah, man. As somebody who exists primarily on the media and content side of things, that’s what I’m most excited about: how things evolve and manifest into the physical world, and what human beings’ relationships look like with robots. When I think about how we scale the show, for example, I have visions and dreams of having a third co-host that’s AI, eventually building her own body, producing the show that way, and having that brain and system produce the entire show—automating everything from clipping to all of that. I really do believe that. It’s cool, and I share that same passion and vision.

I feel like all these AI and robotics companies are really far behind in terms of the marketing piece. Am I right in feeling like that?

Dude, 100%. Why is that? We preach on the show that attention is everything.

That’s what it is, right? It’s the same thing crypto Twitter suffered from for so long. During NFTs, whenever anything was slightly cool, it would fucking go crazy because we’re so unaccustomed to that. We’re not used to content like this show, for example. Media like this doesn’t exist where we come from or where we spend our time. What are your thoughts on that?

Yeah. After having talked to a bunch of the portfolio companies and robotics companies, what you just said—why these companies aren’t good at marketing—hit me in the face like a brick wall. I haven’t been able to unsee it.

My theory is that crypto monetized attention so directly that people actually got really good at it. There was a really big arms race in crypto over who could get attention because it was directly monetized. Even within crypto, people like to shit on it and say, “It’s this scam industry,” or “This NFT barely…” But there really was an arms race over who could get attention, because if you could get twice as much attention as the next guy, your project might be worth $500 million more. It’s just a crazy premium.

I think people take for granted that the arms race produced a lot of people who are really good at capturing attention because there was a high premium on doing it. They spent a lot of time understanding it. Robotics is shocking to me when I talk to a company about its go-to-market plan.

There have been a number of times when I’m talking to a company and I’m thinking, if crypto is an 8 out of 10 at capturing attention, these robotics companies—maybe aside from Figure, because Brett Adcock is a legend—are a 1.5 out of 10. They don’t understand the fundamentals whatsoever. They have no idea. There was a company that posted its raise announcement, and it was an enormous block of text. It didn’t even say how much money they raised, and then it had a screenshot of an article.

Opportunity.

I do think that creates an opportunity if you know how to do it.

The opportunity—the demand for it, right?

It’s just nuts. I think we’re early to seeing that. It’s not going to exist forever. As these companies grow and valuations get big, and people realize there’s actually a lot of opportunity in robotics, it’s going to attract talent, and that opportunity is going to get captured.

Right. Media content, all these things—all things marketing—is what feeds my soul day to day. This is what I’m most passionate about. If anything ever pops up that’s relevant to that subject specifically, as it pertains to any of these robotics companies or brands that you think show promise—especially as it relates to what we do, or the content, media, streaming, or YouTube world—please let us know, because I fucking love that. I’d love to help or get involved any way that I can.

The show also, too, of course.

For sure.

Yeah, we have—

Go ahead.

No, I was just going to say, dude, it’s incredible to me how little talent there is and also how much benefit these companies would get from doing even a little bit. I would imagine there actually will be a ton of opportunities.

I’ll take you up on that.

I imagine there actually will be a ton of opportunities.

Go ahead.

The most common comp, I think, for Robo Strategy is obviously MicroStrategy, where I think the name comes from. Can you talk a little bit about why Robo Strategy is structured the way it’s structured, and the advantages of doing it that way?

People have their opinions on Saylor, whether they like him or dislike him, but he was a master marketer at what MicroStrategy did and did a really good job of accumulating value for MicroStrategy shareholders. I think a lot of people don’t give him enough credit because they don’t understand what exactly he was doing. I’m curious if you could give a general overview of why Robo Strategy exists the way it does and the advantage of doing it that way.

Yeah, for sure. My worst nightmare ever is going on a livestream with Ansem and Banks and then saying something that gets me in trouble, so I’ll give the high-level overview.

Think about MicroStrategy, right? Michael Saylor is running MicroStrategy, people are buying the stock, and he’s essentially leveraging that to purchase more Bitcoin. That’s the high-level overview of how the vehicle works.

Yep.

This was before most companies could actually purchase Bitcoin, so he was initially closing a market-access problem. People could buy MicroStrategy, but they couldn’t buy Bitcoin for whatever legal or access reasons they had. That was their way to get proxy exposure to Bitcoin when people wanted it.

Now, literally anyone in the world can get access to Bitcoin. It’s very easy. The access problem is what he went after first. You saw a bunch of DATs and things like that, and they don’t really make a lot of sense in my opinion because there’s no access problem. You can buy Ethereum fairly easily, so they aren’t closing that gap.

Initially, when Michael Saylor did this, it was hard to get access to Bitcoin. Robo Strategy is trying to solve that access problem for robotics. Instead of there not being a way for you to purchase Bitcoin, so you buy MicroStrategy instead, robotics is different: only a certain number of firms or individuals can actually get access to these deals.

We think the robotics industry is going to see a ton of growth in the future, and people will want access and exposure to these companies. They think these companies will grow a lot, and they want to be able to express that financially. Since they can’t actually get access to these deals, Robo Strategy is a good proxy way to get exposure to the underlying companies.

That makes a ton of sense. The access problem for this seems much, much harder than it was for people just buying Bitcoin. It’s a lot more difficult for the average person to invest in these companies. That makes a ton of sense.

You see it right now with AI, brother. All we can read about is how crazy these companies are being valued and how much money is being thrown around, and the average person can’t find a way to invest in them or align with their interests. It’s fucked up.

For sure, dude. The thing about robotics that’s different from Bitcoin—and this is what gets me fired up to do a good job marketing Robo Strategy so people understand what the future of robotics could look like—is that if Bitcoin is very successful, it’s a different monetary system, but everyday people still use cash.

If robotics is extremely successful, these companies are building robots that will replace people who do labor work. Imagine the most evil situation: a big private corporation worth trillions of dollars is building these robots and taking everyone’s jobs, and there’s no way to hedge against that or get exposure to the company. At least if you can invest in that future, you can protect yourself from that happening.

If it’s just this huge Goliath private company, it would certainly create a lot of social unrest. I think allowing people to get access to this thesis actually does a lot of good for people as well.

Yeah. We’ve talked about how crazy Anthropic and OpenAI’s valuations are—close to $1 trillion now in private markets. But the robotics market is a lot smaller than the software AI market right now, right? You talk a lot about the TAM for robotics and how much it can impact different jobs globally.

10. Robotics is a $60 trillion market

Can you talk a little bit about how people think about the total addressable market for robotics and how big the current market is right now? Where are we? When do you think robotics will have a ChatGPT kind of moment?

Yeah. In terms of market sizing, this is one that I actually had to listen to 3 times before it made sense, and then it clicked: “Oh my God.” If you want to speak literally about it, if you’re automating labor, the total addressable market is kind of the size of the labor market, right? If global GDP is around $120 trillion—

Labor is about half of it, right?

So that makes the labor market about $60 trillion, which is just nuts, right? It sounds like a number so big that you’re like, “That’s not real, right? Tell me a real number,” because with that, you’re like, “Half the economy,” right?

Right.

But if you reason from the ground up and come up with a number from there, I think it’s a lot easier to understand. If you take, for example, Walmart and Amazon, they both have over 1 million labor workers each at their companies. They pay them somewhere between $40,000 and $70,000 per year.

Say you had a humanoid robot that could just directly replace the labor. It’s a one-time purchase of $50,000, and you own it, right? It just does labor indefinitely for you into the future. This is hypothetical, but imagine this case. If you think about a $50,000 one-time purchase versus somebody who you pay $50,000 year over year over year, there are benefits.

They work 8 hours per day. This robot can work 3 human shifts, it doesn’t mess up, and you don’t have to pay it in the future. It’s a one-time upfront cost—

And no liability. They can’t get hurt. They can’t fucking go off the deep end. They can’t fucking fuck up. They’re going to be perfect at their jobs.

Yeah. Super efficient, much cheaper. Labor is actually an enormous cost to these companies. If they can reduce that, they’re going to, right? If they don’t, somebody else is going to, and they’re going to make the product much better.

Is it fair to say we’ve already kind of seen this come to life in the shape of Tesla? I feel like that’s going to be the first example of the average task and job that a human being has historically had—which is to drive a vehicle—becoming autonomous, infinitely safer, and infinitely more efficient. What do highways and traffic look like in that world? Do they even exist at that point? If a car can go 500 miles an hour because every other car on the road is autonomous, then it’s just infinitely better, right?

100%. That actually has some parallels to the humanoid argument as well. Even if you had built for autonomous cars in the beginning, roads would probably look different, but you didn’t, right? You built out all these roads, so having a car that can drive on those is probably the best way to do it, at least in the beginning.

Just to finish the example for market sizing, we already know that there’s over 1 million robots in demand at these companies just to replace the current labor. They cost $50,000, and you sell 1 million of them—that’s $50 billion in revenue, right? A tech company that does $50 billion in revenue—what is Anthropic’s number right now? It’s around there, right?

The valuation of that is like $1 trillion.

And that’s just for Walmart and Amazon, right? There are billions of labor workers, right? If you just run through it logically and scale this out, you go, “Okay, there are billions.” Elon Musk constantly says there are going to be billions of robots. There are going to be more robots than humans.

The market for selling these things is just enormous, right? You can quickly get into the scale of trillions or tens of trillions. That’s not a promise; this takes into account some assumptions. But that is the demand for automated labor, and if we know anything about really good technology profit-seeking companies, when there is that enormous demand, they will find a way to fill the gap. They’re going to create and manufacture these robots.

Elon Musk, who’s going head-on at these things, shut down 2 separate car lines just to start building Optimus. The really smart people see this, and they’re going as fast as they can to try to build it first because the winner is in a market that is enormous, right? You’ve never seen a market that size before. So, yeah, the race that is just now starting to kick off, I think, will actually look a lot like AI, but potentially with even quicker acceleration.

So you think that the value of the entire labor market isn’t priced in?

I mean, look, the rough size of the private robotics industry is like $200 billion.

Bro, wait a minute. The total value of the entire robotics industry is worth less than Ethereum right now? You’re—

That might be the fucking trade, folks. It might just be the trade.

That’s insane.

That’s insane.

Yeah. Like, I think—

The last paper I found that cited it had it at $90 billion at the end of 2025.

Damn.

So it’s roughly $200 billion. Pokémon cards’ total market cap is $50 billion.

What are we talking about?

And that gap—$200 billion in private robotics today versus—

Someone in the chat asked, “How do we long the robotics market?” That’s what we’re here discussing. Robot strategy is the way to do it.

It’s a viable, proper way to do it today.

$200 billion actually blows my mind. That’s crazy.

It’s crazy how—

What’s AI at right now?

Combined, Anthropic and OpenAI—

Like $2 trillion?

Yeah, $2 trillion. You’d have to break out what Gemini is in Google.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

But, yeah, easily trillions.

Trillions and trillions. Yeah.

OpenAI just said, either last week or the week before, that they are now going to try to build a robotics division. They’re launching a robotics division. It’s really an arms race that has started to heat up within the last year. The growth is just starting to come into the market.

I know that, on the marketing angle, it seems like a lot of the things that the labs have messed up on is the angle of marketing around displacing jobs for people and how some people may take that negatively. I know Kang has talked about how it’s also going to be important how you frame it within the context of the U.S., and the partnerships that these robotics companies are going to have with the U.S., and then the discussions with what labor is going to look like for people if it’s not these specific jobs and how those people are going to be incentivized.

11. US vs China robot arms race

I don’t know how much you can answer on this, but how are you guys thinking about the marketing angle of these robotics companies—how people will view them? And how are you thinking about how to align with the U.S. government to be a positive influence in the market for people?

Yeah. There are kind of 2 questions, right? There’s society at large—how do they view these things?—and then governments.

Yeah.

I’ll answer them in reverse order. I would be shocked if this is not a national priority by, even call it, the end of next year, right? The race right now is very much a U.S.-China-style race. Those are the 2 countries that are far and away in the lead for robotics.

One way you can think about it is, how do you think Donald Trump thinks about AI? Genuinely, in his head, he’s like, “It’s these tech guys. It’s like Google but a lot better, and they can build really good military applications.” It’s kind of this abstract thing, and he’s like, “People tell me it’s really important, it’s really powerful, so we want to win at it.”

If you put a physical robot in front of him that was faster than any human in the world, was simultaneously the best surgeon that has ever existed, and could beat Roger Federer at tennis, and you just watched it, he’s going to be like, “This is ridiculous. This is the single best piece of technology I’ve ever seen.” The fact that a robot is so visceral does a lot on the marketing front and is going to shape what people in general think about this.

Imagine Trump sees that. He’s like, “Do I really want 100,000 Chinese robots running around the United States or in the factories?” There’s a surveillance side. There are literal military applications that you would be afraid of if a different country owned all your robots.

That side, I think, will be important in helping to shape how people think about them. They really don’t know what to think about robots, right? I mentioned Standard Bots. That was the factory I came from before the call. Evan Beard is going and testifying in front of Congress to help inform how they should think about robotics.

I really do think the market is small right now. Like we said, it’s around—call it—$200 billion in the private robotics market. The people leading these companies now, a year from now, 2 years from now, are going to be the people the government is calling on to help inform policy, right? The same way Elon, Sam Altman, or Dario goes to the White House to talk to them about how they should think about AI.

I think there’s something visceral about this giant—or not giant, but a robot—in front of you that can do superhuman things. So I think that will become a national priority. You’ll kind of see the country race and that heat up a lot. In terms of society, the marketing and messaging around it can only go so far. Once you sit on the subway and there are 3 robots next to you—

Yeah.

Again, we saw it with Tesla. For a very long time, people thought it was going to happen.

Yeah. For a very long time, people thought the idea of autonomous cars—cars driving themselves—was just fantasy and science fiction, until it happened. Obviously, Elon Musk is one of the great marketers and storytellers of our time, and we kind of saw it play out in real time with that.

We have you on for 4 more minutes. I know this is a normie-coded question, but I really want to ask it. Movies like I, Robot and Ex Machina depict robots, especially humanoid robots, in ways where it’s a possibility that they turn on people, enslave people, kill people, and all this doomer, crazy shit. Is that actually possible, and what’s your opinion on that?

I mean, “Is it possible?” is a loaded question, right? Anything’s possible.

We talked about Pokémon cards. My Pokémon cards aren’t going to turn on me, and Pikachu isn’t going to fry my ass through the card, right? That’s not possible. I think the only way this will actually work is if they’re very tightly regulated and, in the build of the robot, they build in things that make it impossible for it to do bad things.

The thing that sticks out to me isn’t even a robot movie, but I think of Star Wars: Episode III, when Palpatine says, “Execute Order 66,” and all of a sudden everyone you thought were your friends just turns and goes evil.

Yeah.

You can introduce kill switches. There will have to be almost like a UN around how these robots should be governed, because anyone will be uncomfortable if there are 100 million robots in the US and, generally, they make your Chipotle burrito, deliver medicine, or take care of your parents in the old home. That’s fine. But if you’re like, “Oh, yeah, if this thing gets a software update, it can come and kick my ass,” that makes me uncomfortable. Even the fact that it can makes me uncomfortable.

I don’t know. It will need to be treated like a weapon. But I do think the economic incentive to build this out is so strong that they will be built. Similar to AI alignment, I think this is just physical AI. It’s embodied AI that goes and does things, so I think it’ll probably see similar oversight to that.

It is a very fair question. Once I got robot-pilled, that became the thing I was worried about. I’m trying to be on the front lines to help inform it and make sure the future actually looks really good, the way I think that it will and that it should.

Before you head out, if there’s anything you’d like to say, just speaking to the audience directly—

Maybe try to keep it more in layman’s terms. You spoke several times in this conversation about being pilled on robotics. If you had to summarize it in a couple of minutes, what is the deep robot pill? What would you like to say to the audience? How do you think they should be thinking about not only opportunities to invest in robotics and the future of robotics, but just socially? How should they be thinking about this?

I don’t have any investment advice to state plainly and clearly.

I think you should imagine a future where you can actually build robots that can do anything humans can do, and you can mass-produce them. Then understand the economic incentives of companies. If it’s 95% cheaper—if you can cut your costs by 20 times by using robots instead of humans—do you think companies like Walmart and Amazon will do that? Clearly, the answer is yes.

If there is this enormous market, and AI just got good enough to allow these robots to exist, then they just became possible to build. There are trillions of dollars of economic incentive to do it, and now we’re seeing an arms race, with all of the top tech companies in the world trying to build these out to capture this market.

Just take all of those thoughts in your head and think: Do you think this is going to happen? If so, what do you think some of the impacts are going to be?

I mean, the other side of it is, look, the private market is $200 billion right now, and we just established that the market size for this is potentially the labor market of $40 trillion to $60 trillion.

I don’t know, dude. You do the math. I’m not going to do that.

I think what’s unlikely to have been priced in at this point, too, is the sex market. Somebody in the chat said, “I want robot sex.”

No, but this is a real thing.

I don’t want robot sex. I do not want robot sex.

Inevitable, though, brother. It’s inevitable.

I’m definitely smashing a robot at some point.

You have to for the culture, bro. You have to. Come on.

You’re not going to fuck a robot when the time comes?

I’m not.

I’m not.

Please stop.

Oh, my God.

Let’s be real. That’s another trillion-dollar market, right? Sex work, porn, OnlyFans, all that stuff.

I do agree. I agree, though. Anything’s possible.

It’s going to happen, bro. The incel rates are going fucking bananas. People are spending all their time online, especially these fucking kids who play video games all day and are the ones building this fucking weird AI robot mania.

I don’t know. Robot sex doesn’t sound horrible. They’re going to be better than real girls, right? In theory, that’s the thesis. They’re going to be better at all things.

Banks is like, “They’re better at tennis than Roger Federer. They’re better surgeons.”

You do the math.

I don’t know.

12. Robotics companies to watch

I don’t know how much time we’ve got. I have a quick question. Are there any companies that you guys have invested in at Robo Strategy that you’re really excited about, that people may not know about, or that you think people should do more research into—companies that are doing cool stuff?

I’ll give you 2 areas of depth, because if this is the first time you’re hearing about robots, I’m not going to tell you to go look at some hidden gem.

If you don’t know any robotics companies, go check out Figure AI. Their handle is @Figure_robot, I think, or Brett Adcock, their founder. They did a 9-day straight livestream of this robot—literally 9 days straight—just doing packages as fast as a human.

That, to me, honestly might have been the ChatGPT moment. They got 10 million views on this. It was huge, and people were like, “Oh, shit. This is real. They could hire that robot right now.”

Figure—

Figure Robot, I think. Let me double-check.

Cool.

So, yeah, if there’s any robotics company to know in the world right now, it’s Figure. They’re leading the charge in a bunch of different ways.

And then I would say, if you’re bullish on robotics and you’re thinking, “Okay, I want to find a cool company that most people don’t know about and do some research,” I honestly would check out Standard Bots. I mentioned earlier that we led their fundraise, which was announced 2 days ago.

There are a lot of humanoid companies out there doing really cool things for American manufacturing. Their team is really cool. Like I said, I just came from their factory. If you’re looking for gems, I think Standard Bots is sick. But Figure AI is definitely the one to know if you’re just starting to get into the space.

Cool. Cool. Appreciate you, brother.

Isn’t Figure the one that Bezos made a big investment in, too?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Fire. They were the first—the shot heard around the world—when they did a fundraise at—I’m going to misquote it—but somewhere around $2 billion, and then, a short period after, were valued at around $40 billion.

I think that caught the eyes of a lot of people in tech and venture and made them go, “Something is going on here that I’m not understanding.” That was the first wave, and I think we’re living through the second wave of realization of what these robots can do.

Right now, there’ll be multiple waves, dude. It’s like ChatGPT-2 right now in robotics.

Chat, guys listening to this, this is the one that you might not be late to. Robotics—I feel like people are all in on this AI tip. Robots realistically aren’t going to take over the world in the next year or 2 years. We’re talking about a decade out, 2 decades out. You think a little bit earlier than that? [laughter] We’ll save that for Andrew Kang next week.

Kevin, our intern, thank you so much. We have Jesse, MTV Jesse, in the queue. He just got to the studio. He’s actually here in real life with me in Los Angeles. I really appreciate you coming on, brother.

Appreciate it. I know we’re rescheduling Andrew Kang for next week, and we appreciate you, brother. Congrats on everything. It’s been fucking awesome to watch. Keep trading that paperclip, brother. Keep trading that paperclip all the way up to the fucking tip top. All the way to the top. We’ll do it. Thanks for having me on, guys. It was a blast.

Love, brother.

Take care.

He’s the best, huh? He’s a handsome son of a bitch, too. [laughter] He’s sharp, man. He’s sharp.

Yeah, we have Jesse here. I’m going to take my 18th piss of the episode, and then we’ll—

Bro, you gotta get your bladder checked.

No, stop. [laughter] It’s because I’m talking and I’m slamming water down. My fucking cortisol spiked. I’m fucking nervous. You know what I mean? [laughter]

I don’t know.

I feel—MTV Jesse. What a name. It’s a good name.

He’s the best.

Yeah, take it away for a second. Let us get set up, and then we’ll introduce him.

Oh, our SpaceX is moving, bros. What do you guys want to hear me talk about right quick? Let’s see. The asset I talk about the most: Ethereum.

Yeah, I still don’t think it looks great, bro. In markets, you have 4 things that are always happening at some point. You have accumulation, which is when something is trading sideways and then demand outweighs supply. Usually, there are bottoming formations where stuff is trading in a tight range and then breaks out.

You have distribution, which is when price is trading in a tight range, supply outweighs demand, and price ends up selling off and breaking down from that range afterward. Then you have either trending up or trending down—the literally 4 things all markets do. It doesn’t matter what asset; every single market does this.

The reason I’m currently bearish on ETH is that we’re at a key support level, but we just had this range from all of February until June. Now it’s probably 4 months or so—whatever it is. Yeah, about 4 months. We recently broke down from this range, so we’ve closed beneath the range lows: the lowest weekly close in the past 4 months.

This is a really important level that I think we’re going to need to reclaim for me to be bullish again. But yeah, we’re starting a trend down. So, if this level, which is the main weekly close of this entire range, isn’t reclaimed, I think we’re going to be talking about dog shit.

Sorry to cut you off. Ladies and gentlemen, here’s our guest, our headline guest of the show today, Episode 6 of Market Bubble. Jesse, what’s good, dude?

How you doing, baby?

I’m good, man. Scooch in there. Get comfortable. I like the red. What are you sipping on right now? I thought you were sober.

You guys gave me this. Got a little Modelo in here. No, no, I’m back on. I have a couple light beers.

I did not know this. There’s a lot for us to talk about, a lot for us to catch up on, guys. W’s in the chat for Jesse. I’m so excited for this.

Oh, this is live. Sick.

Yeah, we’re streaming. We’re streaming on Twitch, we’re streaming on my Twitter, on Ansem’s Twitter. It’s all over the fucking place.

Oh, sick. What’s up, dude?

What’s good, brother? How are you? Good to meet you.

Good to meet you, too. I’m good, man. Having a Modelo. Got a little Lucy in the lip. Feeling good.

You look good, man. Wait, let me see those glasses.

Yeah.

I have the same ones.

Oh, I’ve got like 5. These are the best.

These are the best.

Those are the best.

Yeah, the Oakleys. The vintage Oakleys. They’re not expensive, either. They’re, like, what, $50 on eBay.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah. Best.

Listen, Jesse, Ansem—obviously, this is a meshing and blending of the worlds. I would assume this is probably the first finance podcast you’ve been on. This is a podcast all about finance.

This is the fifth.

Oh, really?

No, I’m kidding. [laughter] It’s the first one.

Cool. Cool. He’s fucking with us.

So, for Ansem, my co-host, who might be unfamiliar, anybody who’s been following me for a long enough time knows how deep it goes with you—all the lore, the Cloud House stuff, the early NELK stuff. But for everybody at home who might not know, the fintech bros, the finance bros—Jesse, do you want to give yourself a nice little intro? Introduce yourself and let us know.

Yeah, I’m Jesse. You probably know me from the NELK Boys. That was kind of the big thing we did for about 8 years. I exited that about 3 years ago, ish, and now I’m starting Sunday Studios. We’re a couple of years into that, pretty much building streetwear brands, but also doing the studio model of everything we do from A to Z for our own shit and for other people that we select. That’s where I’m at.

I think something that isn’t talked about enough, and you don’t get enough flowers for, is how incredibly ahead you and Kyle were—and NELK and Full Send were—in terms of turning a wildly successful platform, fan base, and YouTube channel into an exceptionally successful business.

I watched you guys do $30 million in a day in merchandise in my fucking living room—in our living room at the Cloud House in Los Angeles. What year was that?

2020.

13. 30M merch day & Happy Dad origins

And yeah, I’m in meetings all day long about product IP and content IP, et cetera, et cetera. Every single one of these new-wave influencers and content creators are all focused hard on how to capitalize on their success, their media success, and all the attention that they have.

You guys were doing that before anybody—how you turned that natural, genuine Rona-with-the-boys culture, beers-with-your-homies culture, into Happy Dad and launched your own fucking adult beverage. Again, very, very ahead of the market in terms of those steps, worlds, and years.

I just wanted to say how impressive it was for me to see that happen in real time. A lot of these deals are big deals. You want to take us through that day that you guys dropped the merch and did those numbers? What did that look like?

It’s crazy. It’s pretty much up there with—I don’t know about peak, but pretty close to some Supreme-drop-style numbers, from what I heard from the industry. It was like making $1 million a minute when we would drop this shit.

Now that I’m out of it and looking back at it, I really do think that I learned so much about marketing. It’s just a fucking story. I think that that is a majority of the success of what we had.

Yeah, whether it was small shit—we still shoot videos, but we have no AdSense. We’re too R-rated for YouTube.

Like, all this shit was, “Hey, we rep Rona season,” but they don’t want to fuck with us because we’re not brand-friendly, so we create Happy Dad. Everything was always about just being transparent and not stopping. If you can make your audience want you to win, that’s when you really win.

Absolutely. And set group goals, you know? I feel like you guys represented this huge market of the frat-bro college kid, which can identify with the whole struggle—eating ramen, living in your car, that type of energy that you guys had and embodied. It was very authentic.

The way I always tell the story is, I met you guys and you were living in your car because you really were. You guys were traveling around.

I remember the Twitter DM from you.

Yes. You guys were—when was that? What date? What day was that?

I’m so bad with dates.

Yeah, horrible with—

I just remember we were living in—

2017 era.

Yeah, like a studio with 4 dudes. We were broke as shit.

And literally, in real time, in YouTube videos, asking, “Hey, we’re coming to Minnesota in 2 weeks. Who can we stay with? Where can we go? Because we don’t have money.”

Because, like you said, you were swearing in every video, drinking in every video, being fucking insane, being ridiculous, fucking with people, being a nuisance. YouTube didn’t like it.

I remember you guys showing me how much money you would make in a month. You guys were doing pretty well in terms of views. I think your average median views were in the multiples of hundreds of thousands.

And you guys had a couple of banger videos at this point, with millions of views. You guys were a legitimate channel with legitimate viewership, and you were making about $600 a month.

Yeah. Have you ever seen old interviews of Steve-O talking about the first and second Jackass, when they were very well known? Everyone’s going to buy you a drink, but they’re broke as fuck. I feel like we had a couple of years of that, where we were very successful in that people knew who the fuck we were—we had like a million subscribers—but we literally didn’t know where we were, like, “Okay, we’ve got to buy budget chicken and cook it on the grill to make sure we get some protein today.” We were very broke. And then I remember being in Miami.

And it was the first time you dropped these crewnecks that you marketed correctly.

And we made like $700,000 the first time we ever did it.

Crazy.

And it was like, you’ve got to understand, I’m going back home to bartend and figure shit out. I remember just calling my mom, being like, “What the fuck? We figured it out.” You can see all the ripples that are going to happen. You’re like, “Oh, we cracked the code. We’re actually okay. This is going to be okay.”

We cracked the code.

We cracked the code. We’re actually okay. This is going to be okay.

And, by the way, wisely and smartly, I also saw you guys go the correct way with this newfound success. I feel like a lot of people now, in flex culture, when a streamer makes half a million dollars during a subathon, they go out and buy a car and a watch. They start dressing differently, acting differently, and doing different shit. You guys stayed true to that, and you knew that was your special secret sauce.

People were rooting for you and being able to say with confidence, as a matter of fact, “We make no money on YouTube. They’re fucking holding us down. No brands want to work with us. Nobody fucks with us. We need you guys to activate. We need you guys to buy this fucking drop. We put our blood, sweat, and tears into it.” I think it would have tipped over if we had gone the route that a lot of people do.

I think it’s like small-time marketing success when people do that. I think that even with hiccups after leaving—and this is not taking any shots—but at NELK, the second you start showing that you’re benefiting from this life with private planes and all this shit, people start to feel something.

I don’t think it’s a shot, and I don’t think it’s anything Kyle would disagree with, or anybody would disagree with. It’s just a matter of fact. I think NELK, or Full Send culture, is way past its prime. At its peak, it was all genuine, authentic, and organic. The tip of the iceberg was just you guys making it and doing it.

And sharing that success with your audience. When it stopped being about the boys running around having fun and fucking with people, that’s obviously where the sauce started to evaporate.

Yeah.

One hundred percent.

Yeah, man. That’s fucking crazy—to see $30 million in a day selling T-shirts and fucking tables and weird little knickknacks to college kids.

But also, FaZe Banks, you fucking put us on, my dude.

I love you.

You know I love you for life for that.

I know you do. You never miss a moment to give me flowers or say that. You have no idea, especially at this point in my career and my life, how much it means to me, brother. I’m glad it couldn’t have happened to better guys.

There are ups and downs and peaks and valleys, and it’s complicated. It’s not easy to navigate success. It’s not easy to come up on millions and millions of dollars, build a wildly successful brand and platform with your friend, and maintain the integrity of that or stay on course. Things happen. You grow up. We’re growing up in real time in front of an audience.

I’m fucking 34 now, but I grew up in real time in front of an audience. I’ve been doing this since I was fucking 18 years old.

I know.

But you’re known for that. You don’t make anyone sign a fucking contract to come help them out, put them in a house, or put them on. That’s my biggest issue.

Yeah, but long term it works, dude.

Long term, it fucking works. I’m telling you.

I’m going to bite my tongue on this one. This most recent venture that I found myself in didn’t set things up properly and didn’t keep myself safe. Maybe it’ll work out long term. I think the universe has a funny way of putting us where we need to be and teaching us lessons, and I’m banking on that. I don’t know whether it’s cope or not, but I don’t know, man. It is important to keep yourself safe. It’s stressful.

I remember—and we don’t need to talk about any of this stuff, and I know that you and Kyle are now on great terms, right? I saw you guys recently doing your tour with Netflix and stuff. You went and spoke to Netflix. How’s that going?

It’s good. I just found out that hopefully I’m sure I can talk about it, but there’s an offer next week from Paramount and Netflix.

Amazing. Amazing. That’s obviously media-based and content-based, talking about doing a show with them and stuff.

Yeah.

Cool. Cool.

Hopefully we bring back Punk’d. If it’s through Paramount, that’ll be the perfect-timing shit.

I say it all the time, especially in regards to livestreaming, content, and IP: We’ve seen all the most wildly successful shows thrive in the television format. You don’t have to fix what isn’t broken, brother. There are so many opportunities to recreate the magic, repackage it, and present it in a way that Gen Z can fucking interact with, engage with, and watch.

That’s exciting.

Yeah. I know you were one of the earliest groups to do really well with content. It seems like content is different now than what it was back then. I’ve been seeing a lot of the theaters focusing more on YouTubers and pulling talent from there. How did you specifically get into content? How did you end up linking with FaZe Banks?

For me, content in general came from skateboarding. I just wanted to film a sponsor tape when I was a kid, and then that led to stunts. That led to an MTV show when I was young, which led to meeting Kyle and getting into pranks, and then it all came full circle. I’ve always loved brand building and shit.

When I look at it now, the end goal—the dream goal, what I want to do that I can do until I’m 80—is movies: writing, directing, acting, all that stuff. That’s the next pivot I want to make. I honestly think, when you look at what Baker’s doing, there are so many examples of these YouTubers selling things like Obsession and shit.

Yeah, they’re going crazy.

But it’s also created the market because I’m in these rooms talking to these guys, and they want to catch the next creative fucking guy who’s sitting on ideas and give him a shot. Give him $2 million and see what he can do with it. As long as there’s some kind of example of it, I think it’s never been a better time for a creator to try to pivot and jump into that.

That’s kind of what I’m hoping for, because I’ve been building that out for the last 4 or 5 years in the background. I hope it might just be perfect timing to bring it out.

14. AI is the new camera

We talk about it a lot on the show, but I feel like it’s never been a better time to be creative. I feel like there’s never been more of a premium on being creative. With the rise in AI—and I know you’re not a super-deep tech guy—but media creation is your bread and butter. That’s how we’ve always connected. That’s typically the topic of our conversations in private and on camera.

I share that.

AI is making it possible. We were just talking about Claude. You know what Claude is, from Anthropic and stuff?

Dude, I’m deep in AI.

Oh, are you? Oh, yeah.

Oh, sick.

I’m like 3 years in.

Oh, sick. Legendary.

So I’m the fucking idiot on the panel today. From my point of view, in the streetwear world of running companies and using AI properly as a tool, not as a finished product, it’s—

Dude, everyone’s hate on AI is so fucking dumb. It’s the same people who hated Photoshop because they were painters. There’s a new tool.

The tools, brother.

Use watercolor now because you’re an acrylic. What do you like? It’s—dude, you’re so right. The creatives have the best stories.

Every type of art form is storytelling. You're creating an even playing field for everyone who has a thought in their head and wants to bring it to life. If I had an idea for a claymation short, I would need $150,000, the right connections, and the right people, and then I might find out the short isn't that great. Now I need 24 hours and an understanding of these tools to see whether this idea is actually something I want to put all my energy into. I have to, because I can see a visual of it.

You know what I mean?

Yes.

No, no, no, no, no. Us too, by the way. I love listening to you talk about it, and it echoes a lot of the things that we talk about on the show. To use the claymation example, even if you're married to the art form and want to do it the good old-fashioned, traditional way—

How do you prove your concept? How do you prove your value?

Yeah.

Come up with the idea.

Yeah. Go with the idea and the pilot. Exactly. That's the moat.

The whole moat is creativity and distribution, because no matter how good the AI tools get, you still have to be the person to come up with the idea and make whatever it is that you want to build. AI is not going to come up with the idea.

Exactly.

Yeah.

The other thing is, how much shit got green-lit and how much money got wasted because the idea was shit? They had one shot at it: go create it. I think now the gold is going to float to the surface.

The cream always rises to the top. 100%.

Yeah.

That is one thing where the general consensus is that the creative element is sacred and safe with people. It's creating something brand-new out of your own mind.

And that's where it comes into play: using these things as they're designed and intended to be used as tools, directing them toward your vision and what you want to produce.

I don't know, brother. Anthropic just dropped Fable 5. We went through it on the main show, but there are kids making full video games with one-sentence prompts, like, "Make me a Skyrim clone."

So, is this software all video-game-based?

No, it's not. But that's the way it's being distributed and marketed now—not by Anthropic, but by general people—because it's new. Nobody's ever seen that before. Mstiff went on his stream and said, "Make me a Minecraft clone," and in 2 minutes it made him a playable Minecraft game.

Everyone can use it.

Yes. It's crazy that we're not very far out from seeing people creating games the same way Kanye West creates music, the same way he creates clothing, or the same way Michael Bay creates movies. That's interesting, because historically, that's never been how it's gone. There are a couple of indie game developers who have some clout and are known, but it's not really like that, right? I think it'll be cool to see that. Who's the Kanye West of gaming? Who's that person who's going to come out?

What team is going to drop GTA 6 before GTA 6?

It's like—

GTA 6 before GTA 6.

Once they find out about all this—

And think about it training itself to think about things the way that you think about them and not miss anything. As people, we forget things so quickly and so easily. You could be like, "I love this color palette, I love this font, and I love this aesthetic, this vibe." You could literally forget about that and never think about it again the next morning.

Yeah.

But if AI is logging these conversations, it has a full view of what you're thinking about in real time, how you feel, and can relate that back to scenarios and examples that are relevant to it. It can say, "Hey, don't forget you felt like this the last time we talked about this."

Yeah, you're right. A lot of the things—

It does do that, too.

It does. I use it a lot.

Yes.

Bro, remember last time?

Then you're like, "You're the GOAT. Thank you." It's like—

I have to tell it to stop that shit, though. Whenever it hypes me up, it's like, "This is a god-tier idea." Don't be biased.

Yeah. It's not that great, dude. Tell me when I suck. Tell me when it's lame.

I do that, too. I constantly train my models to catch my blind spots. I use that wording: "Let me know what I'm not seeing. Be honest with me. Be supercritical of me and how I'm thinking about things."

Do you have the fully built-out computer thing?

Yeah, I have it on here right now. Mr. Bubbles is on Telegram. Ansem and I are actually going to set up Hermes tomorrow, but I'm using OpenClaw currently. I'm using Claude Opus 4.7. We produce a lot of the show with AI, like these decks that I have made. What would you say? Is the show produced 20% or 30% of the way with AI currently?

30%.

In what way? What tools?

All of our prep. All of our prep. We'll have ideas for topics that we want to talk about on the show, and then we'll generate the deck so it's easy for us to reference, along with questions and everything else. We also use it for research: "I want to talk about this. Can you find me some stuff related to this topic, or something going on, or what's popping this week that I might have missed?" Just general stuff like that. He'll do prep on his side and come up with 4, 5, or 6 topics he wants to talk about. Then I will, too. When we build the run of the show, we feed both of those things into the robot, and it blends everything together. It gives us work back and forth on hooks to use.

I'm in real time. My process is that I'll be on Twitter and bookmark shit that I want to talk about or that relates to a subject I want to talk about. The day before, I'm feeding that to Claude Opus 4.7, and I'm like, "Let's make a skeleton of the show tomorrow. Here's this, here's that, whatever." Today, I used an image of me, you, and Kyle in an old thumbnail. It's my "I'm going live" thing, and I linked it.

The one on the staircase?

No, it's when we did Calling in Sick to Random Places. That video is legendary, and it's fucking 9 years old. I sent it the link and said, "Give me a couple of frames. Give me 10 good frames from this." It went and did that. I said, "I'm making a thumbnail. Give me 10 good frames."

It fired me back 10 JPEGs. That would have taken me 10 minutes to do, but it took me 2 seconds. It's still the same thing.

I have something I want your opinion on. My whole take on this is that people are saying, "AI is taking my job. What should I get into? Should I get into prompt writing? Should I get into this or that?" I spent 2 weeks with ChatGPT just playing around with it, trying to figure out the future. I don't know. It's all shit, maybe, but it came down to what I actually believe in. I think the biggest talent, the biggest currency, is going to be the tastemakers, because that's all we are.

Creatives. Yes, the creative lane.

It's the fact that you're even saying, "I'm giving it 6 ideas for the next podcast I want to do," and then it's giving input on them. But you're feeding it.

Absolutely.

You're giving it the taste. You're saying, "You're wrong here. You're right here. That's a good idea. That idea just made my brain fire and think of this idea." You have to think about it in the same terms as you think about a camera. A camera is a tool at the end of the day to capture content, right? A camera in the hands of Michael Bay produces the fucking Transformers movies.

A camera in the hands of Sophie Rain produces—

Softcore porn. Yeah, right.

A camera in the hands of FaZe Banks creates fucking 20-minute vlogs that somehow people want to watch.

You kind of will.

Yeah.

Okay.

I don't know. The point being is that people are thinking about it all wrong. I think AI hate is way overblown. I think it's fully at the point now where people are farming it. I had that one thing. By the way, do you like the Backrooms?

I didn't finish it. I had a panic attack in it.

That's crazy.

I don't know. I think I wore too thick of pants. I kind of overheated and literally liked Obsession, though.

I loved Obsession. Obsession was a much better movie if I'm comparing the two.

Much better. Backrooms was like a fucking weird fever dream. Ironically enough, it felt like AI slop to me. Even the monster—that monster wasn't scary. It was just fucking bizarre and weird.

Well, they used that basketball player who was the tallest.

Yeah, I saw that.

And then they CGIed his face. When I found that out, it bothered me. I was like, “He's already crazy-looking and crazy tall. Put makeup on him.” Monsters that are CGI are never scary to me.

Yeah. I always—it's like, I think—

And this fucking kid is in interviews farming, like, “Fuck AI,” and all this. “I would never fucking use AI to make a movie.” If you're willing to do whatever, dude—

Yes.

And I'm like, brother, honestly, your fucking movie looks like it was made with AI, first of all.

That's a great topic.

15. MTV Jesse joins

Yeah. Sorry to cut you off. My bad. This is your show, brother. This is about people who also create. If you say, “Hey, I took the time, made the little claymation figures, filmed every frame, and did all that,” that's cool as fuck. If that's your marketing angle, great. But if you make something that I watch and go—

“I could figure out how to create this with AI in 24 hours.”

Then you fucked up. You're not using it as marketing that you created it. The biggest currency is going to be if you're doing it like, “I hand-painted this. I used acrylic. This came from my brain to paper.” You're not using that as marketing.

Ready? This is—

Why the fuck are you doing that?

This is the way to do it.

Somebody needs to make, when the tech allows for it, a fucking movie from start to finish—a really fucking good movie—from start to finish with AI. Do not market it as AI.

Let it go out. Breathe. It fucking slaps. It creates noise and waves, like Obsession. Everyone's celebrating it. Everyone loves it. Then you tell people—

“By the way—”

No one's doing that.

“This movie that you guys love? Yeah—”

“It's all AI.”

That's how you do it. Then people freak. That's where people start glitching out, and shit starts getting crazy. People start changing their minds.

But I think that's a good take, though. If you're able to use AI to be 10 times more efficient and 10 times better at your job, and you're not doing that, you're doing yourself a disservice and your customer a disservice. Seriously, though.

Or they're in their comment section trying to convince everyone that it's not AI, and you're like, “Well, then you did the job wrong.” There's always going to be people willing to pay tons of money for a real painting. There's tons of people who want the authentic thing. That's not going anywhere.

It's just—

Even when I go work with a certain artist who does watercolor or something like that and do a collection with him, hell yeah, I'm making that the fucking marketing of it.

Yeah, of course.

It's silly. But everyone—I think there hasn't been a good AI film yet because everyone making a film wants it to feel like AI. Name a fucking trailer you haven't seen that's got a dragon and a fucking blue lady. They're trying to make Avatar 5.

Just literally make a film that's not trying to be AI. Make it whatever you actually want to create, which would be real.

It's all so weird. How do you think AI affects this? We're talking about a more positive thing, but I'll come in with a counterpoint. We've talked about this on the show, but I'm really, really worried about the future of content, the internet, and the way people consume content because, at the moment, as you know, it's changed a lot since our fucking heyday. Now it's all about streaming to a smaller niche audience, and then that stream is broken up into 1,000 clips that get distributed that way. That's kind of how you hit people and are mass-distributed.

And it's all relying on algorithms and forcing yourself into the algorithm, the For You page, et cetera.

People are just swiping and doomscrolling—brain-rot shit—with zero intention, which I don't think is necessarily a good thing. But regardless of how I feel about it, or anyone feels about it, it's inevitable. It's what's happening. It's showing no signs of slowing down.

I don't know. What do you think the future looks like in that regard? Because I think it's only going to get worse. I think your For You timeline is eventually literally going to be just for you. Content is going to be generated in real time. You're going to be watching full-length, 10-minute videos that have 1 view on them, and it's from you.

Yeah. Personally—

Have you thought deeply on this?

I think it's horrible.

It is bad.

But I'm not trying to be the old guy who's like, “This is lame,” and then doesn't play ball. I think it is 100% quantity over quality, which is always a bad thing. Your feed feeds you what you want, and my feed feeds me what I want.

When we were kids, a Jersey Shore episode would come out, and we'd go to school and all talk about it. Monoculture. Monoculture is so important.

And just like the way Obsession comes out and blows up and we all talk about it, right? If 5 years from now we lose that fully, I think it gets a little scary. We're all just hooked into the system and being fed what we want.

But now we're already divided. We're not even—it's almost like sports are maybe the last thing keeping us all on the same timeline. There are a couple of things now that we all talk about. The Knicks yesterday, like you said, sports, the occasional movie.

It's fucking—

I don't know.

What's the last time the timeline talked about a movie the way it talked about Sinners? I actually cannot remember. Marty Supreme, I guess. But that's 2 movies in a year. That's insane. Ten new movies come out per week. There's an infinite amount of media being pumped out, and the fact that—

Think about when Borat came out. Every kid said, “Fucking—”

Superbad.

Superbad. It was like that. We can't lose that. The first Avatar movie, too.

Yeah, that's the problem. Everything's so fragmented. It's hard for monoculture to exist. That's why there are fucking 13-year-old kids who think Nettspend is the biggest rapper in the world and think Fortnite is bigger than the World Cup, because that's what their algorithm tells them. That's what their For You page tells them. I think it only gets worse.

It's fucking—

But I don't know.

What do you see 10 years from now? What's it like?

Andy Warhol said—in 1969, he said, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” When everyone's famous, nobody's famous.

Now people are just fighting for attention in real time, and it's fleeting. You and I, for example, have these staple brands and images. People know who we are. But it's so weird to see—I’ve walked around with some of these streamers who are the biggest streamers in the world. They stream to 20,000, 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 people live, and we'll walk down the street—

And not very many people know who the fuck they are.

Yeah. You know what I'm saying? It's so weird. If people do know who they are, it's often surface-level: “Hey, aren't you that guy? I saw you in a clip one time.” That kind of energy. “I'm not sure. I don't remember your name. I know that you're, like—”

Sounds like clip culture.

No, I've seen your face. I've seen your face, but I'm not a Jackass fan. I'm not.

That's the other thing, too. The way culture has lent itself is that caring about stuff isn't cool anymore. People don't care about stuff. Being a fan of stuff is like glazing. It's not cool to show that you're a fan of somebody.

The way being a fan of somebody takes shape is by being parasocial and obsessed with everything they do—from who their girlfriend is to what they wear. If you don't fall into that or play into that, you're kind of rejected by these audiences, by this fan base. They activate in just the most bizarre ways. It's fucking crazy.

That's true.

It's crazy. It's changed a lot since we were doing our thing.

I think—who said it? Maybe it was Gary Vee. Someone said it would be the death of the follower, and that came true.

Yeah, that is true.

The playing field's never been more fair for everyone to become famous.

I literally think…

That's what I think is nice. I think that's nice.

It is nice. So, like you said, it's kind of like what we were saying with the AI—

Someone in the chat said being a human being isn't cool anymore. I agree. I disagree. I don't know. I'm down to get chipped. I want to be a robot. I'm down. [laughs]

Because there's also a part of me that thinks there's no better authentic marketing than being human now. That is kind of the coolest thing. I don't know. You have to go talk to it. It all comes down to high school. Whatever's cool there translates to everything.

And that's what I'm saying. I think it's never been less cool. I don't know. You really disagree with that? I'm thinking about things in terms of, bro, you're going to tell me people in 2026 are cooler than they were in the 70s or the 80s, or even in the 1600s? People were battling with axes and swords. That's fire. Okay, now kids are buying Solana meme coins in the trenches and playing Fortnite and not [__] and not [__] girls.

I just feel like the pendulum is swinging from that back toward this way. I think, like you said, it's been cool to not care. I think the reason it became cool to not care is because, with all the social media popping off, everybody was getting recorded at the same time. People were scared to be seen and worried about how they were going to be portrayed online, and then people got a lot more reclusive and introverted.

I think it's kind of swinging back in the other direction. Now people aren't caring as much about how they're perceived, or they want to be really passionate about certain things. That's actually one of the reasons I really like the movie Marty Supreme, and I really like Timothée Chalamet becoming popular because he's very passionate about being very good at what he does, and he's also very passionate about sports. He's a diehard Knicks fan, and people see that he's a diehard Knicks fan.

I think the pendulum is swinging back in that direction. Especially with AI, anybody can become an expert at anything they want to become an expert in extremely quickly, without a lot of obstacles in their way. If you're like, "I want to be really good at this," you can go be really good at that. "I want to get a shit ton of followers for being good at this." You literally can go do that right now. It's never been easier for anybody to do that.

It reminds you of the YouTube boom. It's the—

Yeah. I got in young enough that, if I had an idea, I had to sell it to a network like MTV. I remember when it shifted, and I was like, "Whoa, I can literally just edit these and upload them on YouTube, and people could fuck with it, and I could create my own lane." That was a huge shift that took the power away.

Anyone can shoot any idea or any photo, or create—dude, they could create a T-shirt that blows up and [__].

I have to put you on to a couple of these AI artists. I haven't embraced them or really promoted them a ton yet, or highlighted them, because I don't want to direct hate toward them. People fucking hate that shit.

But a couple of these kids, you can just see the way their brains work, and it's fucking unreal. You're kind of looking at it like, "Oh, this is going to be the future." Spielberg, this'll be the future, too. Shout out Jurassic Smoothie. Check that guy out. I've been—

He helped me out with a lot of shit.

Was he on Instagram?

Yeah.

And also, the coolest name I've ever heard. It just sounds fucking sick. Like—

He—

Yeah.

Maybe I should put him on blast. Yeah, it's—

At Bloody Sunday, how do you guys think about finding— I know you do a ton of content. How do you guys think about finding new talent or coming up with new ideas and then producing those ideas?

Honestly, when it comes to social media content, it's the thing I lack the most and have the least interest in. I hate playing the [__] game. Turning 33, I'm like, "Dude, I don't want to play this game." I would love to just—

I would love to humbly sit on some of my wealth to be able to pay the bills and create things that I'm like, "Yo, I'm working on a film for the next year and a half." Long-term projects make me happy. That's where I'm at.

But I do what I've got to do. Like I said, I play ball, I run 3 brands, I make [__]. At the end of the day, my biggest issue is that I'm 90% of the marketing for all the brands. I've never run a legitimate brand where you're going, "Hey, we have $30,000 this month to spend on X, Y, Z, to be in these photo shoots and to promote this—"

It's a blessing and a curse, right?

It is. Yeah.

Because it's exhausting, and sometimes, like you said, playing ball and showing up—

It's this constant tug and pull, this internal struggle, this battle. It's the same with me, brother. I'm making content for the first time in a decade, and I decided to do a [__] niche show about finance and tech and AI and attention with Ansem. It's because this is what I want to learn. This is what I want to do. I see this as, like, a—

That should be the reason.

Yes, 100%. And again, like you said, power to you. Thank fucking God we're in a position where I feel like that's what fuck-you money is, right? Would you say it's safe—it's safe to say you have fuck-you money?

Yeah.

Because you can just tell anybody to fuck themselves at any point. You don't have to do anything that you don't want to do.

And I think if I were doing anything else that made me unhappy but made me more money, I would be the biggest idiot in the world. That's the way I see it.

Yeah.

Because there were years in my life where I did shit I didn't want to fucking do. You have a home, you have food, you have this, your parents are good. It's like, what the fuck am I?

Yeah. Facts.

You know what I mean? What am I?

Because the scariest part about it is I think people's brains are starting to form and shape in a way where they're not even able to differentiate the fact that they're playing a game. They just become this person that is playing a game, which is fucking weird. What does it mean to be a human? That's why I don't know. That's why my knee-jerk reaction is, like, it's fucking lame to be a human in 2026.

Because—

Bro, people are farming each other in real time. We're not talking about just the annoying influencer creator like it was before. Yeah, it's annoying to be a [__]. You're an annoying person. You're a vlogger with a big, giant camera running around Target. We were [__], and we were annoying. But at least it was a really— that's a small number of people.

Now everyone's a [__]. Now everyone, in real time, is farming each other, and it's—

It's fucking weird, bro.

I know. Physically, whenever I go comment on something, I can't hate on some videos I see because everyone will be like, "Bro, you did this for 8 years." But I see somebody that's, like, Meta Glass-type, and I'm like, "Dude, this isn't a prank. This isn't comedy. This is just—"

You're just being fucking rude.

You're just swinging [__] with some dude. It's—

Chad the Builder. We're seeing very extreme examples of this pop up in real time. By the way, back in the day, you'd see a big YouTuber pop off out of nowhere—a handful of them year to year—and it was cool to see. I remember when IShowSpeed first popped off. I remember when Adin first popped off, whatever.

Now the [__] popping off are guys like Clavicular and Chad the Builder, who are just being super polarizing for a lot of the wrong, really bad reasons, right? And it's—

I don't know.

I know you've done a ton of content, a ton of prank content. Can you tell me more about the Coca-Cola video that you guys did and how that happened?

That's the one, dude. That's a cool story because when we first moved to L.A., we were super young. Most people's story is they come to L.A., bartend for 3 years, and then finally get an acting gig. We were 3 weeks in, and we hit the most viral video—

Still to this date, it was the most viral video we ever did.

Well, this is insane. I didn't know it was this big. 51 million in 3 weeks is crazy.

51 million views is fucking insane.

A quarter of a billion if you count Facebook and all that shit. Yeah.

What the fuck? Do you get asked about this video every single day?

Definitely used to be. Yeah, it’s chilled out now. I don’t think I look like any of the videos now, so it helped. [Laughter]

Did you see that video? The Coke prank?

I haven’t seen it. I’ve not seen it.

I’ve seen it. It got to a point where, if someone didn’t know who we were, I would just say, “Coke prank on cops,” and they’d be like, “Oh, yeah, yeah. You’re that dude.”

But look at this, man. Trip down nostalgia memory lane. This is so crazy. Look at these old videos. This is the one I pulled the thumbnail from—“Calling In.”

Do you remember what made you DM us? What video?

Yes, I do remember what made me DM you guys. Here’s a little lesson in giving credit where it’s due and giving people their flowers: FaZe Adapt 100% put me on to you guys. He sent me your channel, and I’ll never forget it.

I’m in bed with Alissa and our dog, and he’s like, “Yo, you have to look at these guys. You have to take a look at these guys for Clout House, because I’m building a content house. I watch you guys, and I know Alex knows what the fuck he’s talking about.” He knew me, too.

I binge-watched you guys for the next 2 days, and I was like, “Oh, yeah, these guys are fucking awesome. Come live with me in L.A. I see it. I would love to help you guys.”

Another thing I always remember—and it’ll never leave my brain—is that we were in line at Chipotle, and I heard you and Kyle stressing the fuck out about this manager who was trying to literally swindle you guys.

Oh my God, I remember this. Yeah.

He put the trademark in for Full Send and was trying to hold it over you guys. He was like—

“50%.”

Yeah, 50/50. You guys were talking about potentially letting this guy do this, and, brother, I fucking 180’d. My neck could have broken from how quickly I turned around. I was like, “Listen, this is none of my business, but fuck this guy. You guys need to go get a real man.”

This was especially crazy at that time in L.A.—a 30-something-year-old manager who was really just preying on you guys.

He wasn’t even a manager. I mean, now that I’m in the game, dude, he wasn’t even a manufacturer.

Insane. Just a random rogue guy off the street.

He was getting printables made at a factory. He took us to the factory, got printables made, and was like, “This is my spot. 100,000 square feet.”

That’s one of those moments that felt divine for me. I’m so glad I was there at that time, because holy fuck, that could have gotten bad.

By the way, that’s what caught me up. That’s why, to this day, it’s been so impossible to get FaZe back to a point where it works: very early on, we had people come in and fucking steal it from us. When that happens, it’s like—

Could you imagine what your guys’ story would have looked like if that were the case? If it was just half?

That guy would have been rich as fuck, dude.

[Laughter] Holy fuck, that guy would have been rich. Wait, so who was he trying to take half of Full Send from at the very beginning?

It was right when we had just moved to the Clout House. Views were going up, collaborations were going up, and the brand was starting to make millions. He would have gotten in at the perfect time. It would have been fucked.

It was insane, and I really went all in on these guys, too. You know me—I’m the first one who’s like, “Yo, go check this shit out.” I’ve always been like that, especially at my peak.

I would do FaZe Banks Sundays. My vlog day was Sunday. These guys, smart as fuck, did their shit on Monday, and they would consistently be featured in all my videos because I was vlogging. You guys and I lived together. We literally lived together for 2 years.

Dude, Banks deserved 50% more than this guy, for sure.

Definitely, bro. If that guy deserved 50%, I deserve fucking 90%. You know what I’m saying? It’s insane.

These guys—it was such an insane thing, man. Such an insane thing. But to bring it back to your question, FaZe Adapt 100% put me on to you guys. Without him, this whole L.A. thing, as far as it relates to us, wouldn’t have happened.

I always say that every talent I’ve ever worked with—I think Tfue is Tfue no matter what. I think Adin is Adin no matter what. I think all the core FaZe guys are themselves no matter what. I think you guys are you no matter what.

I’ve just always been really good at pouring gasoline on the fire and expediting the process. My dream scenario with talent is those early conversations where it’s like, “Yo, dude, you guys are getting finessed,” and helping you guys not make the same mistakes I made. That’s what I’m passionate about. That’s where I’m fulfilled.

Again, it’s not about owning 50% or making any money from it. It really does mean so much that you, Kyle, Steve—all of you guys—never miss an opportunity to give me respect and my flowers. It means a lot to me.

Yeah, I mean, dude, you’re not hurting. You’ve got money.

No, yeah, we’re good. You’ve got food.

I see you as always being a legend, a tastemaker—predicting the future and understanding how this shit works.

Look at how happy we were, bro. Look at the Loose Change logo in the background. Fucking Loose Change, dude. Look how fat I was. Lack of beard, infinitely fewer tattoos. Look at us, bro. This is crazy.

Fat? I wouldn’t say fat.

Bro, I’m a fat chud in this video, brother.

I honestly thought I was going to look fatter.

16. Jesse's transformation & sobriety

I thought it was a skinny day.

Do you have your before-and-after ready? Your peak?

Oh, it was crazy. Can you pull it up?

Yeah.

AirDrop it to this laptop. [Laughter] It’s brutal.

This is—by the way—

Wait, can I show the after, too?

Yeah, of course. Show the before and after.

That’s not where I’m at right now.

No, of course. I’m going to do the same. We’ll do it. I don’t think I’ve ever tweeted out or shown my before and after.

You look good right now, man.

I appreciate it. I’m trying.

This is another thing. I watched this clip from you where—you and your boys. Matt Kish, actually my partner with the FaZe shit at Hard Scope. Hold on, let me—

Number?

Yeah, 969,009. How funny is that?

What are the odds that that’s the number?

969,009. I want to watch this with you, too. You can hear it, right?

Are you still close with Banks?

We talk every once in a while—a dumb DM or something, or a text—because he’s restarting. He’s getting a new group in there.

They’re memeing him online, though.

[Snorts] Oh, yeah. I just did this pod.

Wait, where did that open? Oh, you only sent one.

Yeah, I’m trying to find the other one.

Okay, got it. Sorry, people watching. Why did the audio cut out? Why can’t we hear this video? Can I search “fat”? Will that work in Photos?

It will soon. Siri AI will definitely be able to do this for you.

How would I find it? Actually, you know what? I might as well just go to Instagram.

Are you still close with Banks?

We talk every once in a while—a dumb DM or something, or a text—because he’s restarting. He’s getting a new group in there.

They’re memeing him online, though. Everyone’s calling him—

He definitely lives a younger guy’s lifestyle, for sure. I love Banks. I owe a lot of where I’m at in life to him because he put us on.

I saw a clip of him saying he owned Chrome Hearts or some shit. I don’t know what the fuck that is.

He said that’s one of his only investments. He—

I don’t own Chrome Hearts. By the way, I got this tattoo that’s on the screen because Cage and Marcelo hired my brother. My brother works—or worked—at Chrome Hearts.

I was like, “I know you’re tight.”

No, they’re just family friends. People think I get Chrome Hearts for free or at a discount. None of that’s true. They’ll make me special shit, like one-off pieces, which is really cool and special to me.

Maybe they started around you, and you were like, “Fuck, yeah.”

No, it’s all privately owned. That’s why it’s so cool. It’s family-owned, privately owned, and it’s “fuck everyone.” They don’t give a fuck about anyone. I saw a tweet about Timothée Chalamet being a paid Chrome Hearts shill sitting there. No, he’s just a fan, like everybody else. They don’t do any of that shit.

They don't need to.

No, it's the best. They are S-tier, 10 out of 10. Why the market continues to fucking skyrocket makes no fucking sense. These Punks are being valued like Hermès, like Birkins are valued. That's the way the market is, and it's at all-time highs. It's absolutely ridiculous.

But why I wanted to bring up that clip with you is the dumb conversations we have back and forth. It's always about something creative, an idea around content, or something like that in the arts. But we talk about health a lot.

Yeah. We go back and forth just giving each other ups, like, “Hey, man. Fucking good shit.”

Did you find your before?

Let me get it.

AirDrop it. We'll do mine first. Z, have you ever seen my before and after?

I don't think so, bro.

I'm kind of nervous, to be honest with you, to share it because—

What year are we talking about?

You're going to fry me. This was about 3 years ago, right around the time I got sober. This is the 3-year mark.

It's a pain to get the Wi-Fi.

Oh, fuck.

No, it's not a pain to get the Wi-Fi. Production, come help him.

Connect to Wi-Fi.

Oh, my bad. The password is—

That's funny.

Dog.

Thank you. All right, so—

What was your heaviest?

This is the before.

What was the weight?

What?

Are you pushing?

What the fuck? This is—

Crazy. Yeah, it is fucking—

That's fried.

This is me at 245, I think. Yeah, pushing 250.

Those briefs are just insane.

Trying to stay alive.

No, insane. Absolutely insane.

I always say I was a fat drug addict because I really, really was.

How does that work? Being a fat drug addict? It's supposed to be the opposite.

No, because I'm not doing fucking crack and fucking blow all day. I was doing the good shit. I was doing ketamine and drinking a lot.

Crushing, smoking M&M's.

A line of M&M's.

That's insane. I was doing ketamine and boozing a lot, you know? McDonald's—like, that was my whippets. Like the booze, the fat-people drugs, you know?

Whippets.

Whippets.

Whippets and whipped cream.

Whippets and whipped cream. Yeah, that's really funny. I finished with the whipped cream and I just—

This is the best I could find.

How do I do this?

It's not like a face photo, but it's pretty brutal.

I'll AirDrop this.

Oh, dude. And this is me now. This is me now.

What a G. Thank you.

Look at this one.

I've come a long way, man.

You have 10% body fat, bro.

What are you now, like—

Around 200, 205, huh?

A lot of walking.

A ton of walking. All I do—

All I do is push-ups. That's all you need.

Push-ups. I do 100 push-ups a day, religiously. I do a little scoop of creatine, and I walk 10 miles.

10 miles a day? Not 10 miles. Ten miles a day is like 20,000 steps. I get a minimum of 10,000 a day, though.

Do you take calls and do work while you're walking?

Yeah. My routine, day to day: I wake up at 8:30. I try not to touch my phone. I've been really bad about that lately, but I try not to touch my phone for the first 30 minutes. I try to get outside immediately, out on my balcony, and just let the fucking sun hit me real quick. Then I'll do my little checklist, look at my calendar, and write a little fucking page in this physical journal.

When you're done with that—

I'll look through my phone for 10 minutes, catch up there, and then I'll walk a mile to my coffee spot and a mile home. In that 2-mile walk, I'll try to fill it with productive shit.

You don't ever do this on a treadmill?

No, I do have a little walking treadmill next to my desk in case of emergencies. I'll use it at 11 p.m. because I'm so OCD. I still have a drug-addict brain, where I'm like, “Oh, fuck. I'm at 8,000 steps. I need to hit 10K or I'm going to fucking spiral and freak out and eat McDonald's.”

The same way. Yeah.

Yeah, we're the same with that.

I hate myself. I don't—

And it's the same in reverse, though. If you start your day the way I'm talking about—wake up, make your bed, journal, walk a mile there and a mile back—it's actually impossible to have a bad day.

Yeah, dude. The whole idea of earning your day and then putting yourself through misery every morning so you can enjoy the rest of the day—I don't know who got that in my head. I watch Jocko Willink or some shit. I can't remember a day when I haven't done that in years.

It's a real thing, brother.

It's fucking changed. I used to be a depressed fucking loser, dude. It's like—

One more.

Look at that, buddy.

Fuck him.

All of a sudden, the tats fucking look a little sicker. You notice everything in your closet looks sick once you get in shape.

Can we hang out after this? Can you come see my new place?

Oh, we're doing that. That's fucking awesome.

Yo, the AirDrop's not working on my laptop.

I don't know if you have to set it up.

Do you live by here?

Yeah, I live close enough.

What's the address?

You're awesome.

Say it, dude.

You're awesome.

I really want to show them yours because yours is insane.

Yeah. Look at you, man. We're just glazing each other. This is like the—

Yeah, I wish I had shown you mine first, but you're lacking on it. Maybe you can just pull it up on your phone. I could show them.

Yeah, bro. You look fucking phenomenal.

It's the only thing I could find, but—

There's a fresh shit in the toilet. Imagine.

Look at that.

That's fucking insane.

That is fucking insane.

Fuck.

What even is that?

It goes both ways with you because you're obviously a little bit shorter than I am. Not to fucking put you on blast, dude, but 215 for 5'5" is insane. That's why I was 6'5", 245.

Yeah.

So, yeah. But for you, it goes both ways. Gaining 10 pounds, you can fucking see that. You lose 10 pounds, and you can see that, you know?

Dude, that's why I just went through it again because I got down to 142. I was shredded, and then I got crazy-long withdrawals because I was addicted to kratom.

I didn't know that.

Yeah.

I didn't know it got that bad.

I found out when I went to China and I couldn't buy it. I had no idea. I thought I was on a nootropic, bro.

We'll talk about this off-stream, but there's somebody who's very relevant to you and me that we go way back with—a girl who I have to put you in contact with. You know who she is, obviously. It's going to blow your mind when we talk about this. I can't talk about it on-stream, but I definitely have to reconnect you with her. You guys have to talk about it because—

That is fucking insane. I did not know that.

Guys, by the way, for those at home who aren't complete fucking degenerates, kratom is like synthetic heroin.

100%.

That you can buy at a gas station.

Yes, bro. Yes. The withdrawals are just as intense. I've never experienced anything like it. Picture being stuck in China and going through withdrawals.

It's insane, brother.

And it's like black clouds, and they will not fucking go away. You're like—

It's fucking gnarly.

It's brutal.

And it's at a 7-Eleven. It's like a fucking energy drink.

I know. It's really gnarly.

Fuck.

Just wait. Give it another year. There's going to be a big documentary that drops about this shit, because I know—they hit me up to try to get me on it. I was like, “I'm not, dude. I'm already the sober dude. I'm not going to be the kratom king or anti-kratom guy.”

You're using it to work out and shit? You said it's like a workout-drink type of shit?

Dude, every forum I used it for, or every forum I read about it when I was going through withdrawals—you want to learn, right? Anyone who gets off something knows about Reddit forums, but—

Yeah. No one really—I don't know why I used it to get shredded and work out. No one else really had that. They were all like, “To feel happy and get over my divorce,” and I'm like, “No, I would just go to the gym for 10 hours and be cracked out and shit.”

Gas-station crack.

Yeah. I mean, you could buy fucking whippets at gas stations and shit, too. It’s insane. Yeah, bro. What?

Like in a little tank?

Yes. Yes.

Galaxy Gas. You haven’t seen Galaxy Gas? Like the fucking Galaxy Gas meme? Yeah, but I always thought that was just—

No, brother. We can go get some right now. We can go get some right now—

—and just buy it.

Yeah, we can buy enough. We can buy enough to be fucking fried for the next week. You and I could just post up, relapse, go fucking nuts, [laughter] and get a little gay with it.

Now we know what me and Banks are doing tonight.

That’s funny. We spent the entire fucking interview just sucking each other’s dicks off. You guys can’t blame us.

This is genuinely one of those things I think about when it comes to my friends and people who fall into that family bucket for me—people who come from the internet, who are going to be at my wedding and whom I’m going to know for the rest of my life. This really is one of them. You know how life goes: you don’t keep consistent contact, especially as you get older. You’re 33, I’m 34, and especially where we’re at in our lives—

We haven’t been able to—

People like us don’t—

Yeah. No, I know. I’m trying to fix that, though.

Me, by the way. Me, too. And not to get even gayer with it on this show, but I just had a conversation with another one of my friends who’s a huge fucking celebrity, and they recently got sober. We were talking back and forth about how incredible it is, and he was like, “Yeah, when I get back to L.A., I want to do a lot of hikes. I want to go fishing and do daytime shit.”

Brother, that type of vibe, I’m there. Anytime you want to do something productive or healthy, I’m there. I’ve created a network where all my friends and people in my social circles connect through—

—partying—

—and fucking hoes and—

—the worst fucking possible—

—gambling, drugs, things like that. A lot of them are still my friends because I love these people, right? But it’s like, what do we do now? You know what I mean? That was my problem. I ended up being very friendless because all my friends came from that. But, dude, I—

Do you live alone?

Yeah.

Yeah, me too. It’s the first time ever.

I got a dog.

I just got a dog. Yeah. Penny Lane, the Great Dane.

Sick.

I do. I have pictures. These are little cute dogs.

She’s the best. I just got her a whole fucking chrome setup.

It’s funny that I have to mention that I have a dog, but it is different. If you live alone, you have a dog.

She’s a Great Dane.

Whoa.

She has one blue eye and one brown eye.

Wait, like a Dalmatian?

No, she’s a harlequin Great Dane. She has no Dalmatian in her. It’s just one of the patterns.

I love that toy—

—monster.

She’s so fucking cute, bro. She’s going to get diesel—200 pounds. She’s going to weigh more than you.

Pretty girl.

Really?

Yes, bro. Yes. I think I have a picture of her—

—next to a bigger dog.

I need to get better at this viewer shit. [laughter]

Oh, right here. That’s her next to a full-grown one—her next to her mama.

That’s insane.

What a beautiful dog.

No, dude. She’s going to be—

What’s the puppy vibe right now?

Yeah, she’s a puppy. She’s three months old—just inside 3 months old. I have her right now. She’s with a trainer, and I’m getting her super dialed. This woman helped me source her and find her, and she trains and breeds prize-winning Great Danes. They’re all super well-trained—militant, like, fucking stay—very well-mannered, well-trained dogs. They win fucking shows and compete in shows to be the perfect dog.

She’s going to be with her for as long as she needs to be. She’ll spend 5 or 6 days a week with her, and then slowly but surely spend more and more time with me so I can grow up with her, form a relationship early with her, and eventually, when she’s ready—

They give you the formula. Do you have to keep up with some of it?

Yeah. Yeah. Just like I know how to take care of Paris and London. Remember the fucking puppies I had? I moved to L.A. with a puppy. I know how to train a puppy. It’s just a fucking full-time job. It’s a lot, as you know, by the way, with Chewy.

Yeah. I mean, I got Chewy at your place.

Yes, as a puppy. And kudos to you, by the way, for sticking through it. A lot of these influencer and content-creator people get dogs to take pictures with them, and then they don’t realize how much of a fucking thing it is. For her quality of life and my quality of life, I want to get her dialed.

Yeah. I was saying yesterday, I said, “Dude, if you’re in a rut, if you feel like your life’s missing something,” it’s like, go adopt a dog.

Or if you feel lonely. Being lonely is a good thing, low-key, because a lot of people suck things out of you. You know what I mean? Most people—99.999% of the people you meet—are only going to love you as long as they need you, as long as you benefit them in some way. The second it benefits them to flip on you or abandon you, they’re going to do that.

It’s a sad conclusion to come to and realize, but it’s very sobering. It just is what it is, and everybody has to deal with that. It’s not just you.

But you can get addicted to that, though.

Yeah. Yeah, which—

I’m on the other side of it right now.

Where I was, I was everything you just said. I swear I believed it in my brain, and now I’m like, I think friendships are the biggest currency in my life.

And I’m trying, but the real ones, right?

Yeah. The way that I frame it in my mind is like, okay, so what does that lead me to? Am I going to fucking cry about it and be sad about it for the rest of my life and dwell on it in a negative way, like I’m sure you have, too, with what you were just speaking to?

It’s like, no. Everybody’s playing a game. In regards to you and 99.999% of the people, just understand that, be aware of it, and play the game. Not in a nefarious, bad, weird, negative way, but go play the game. Then share all the rewards that you reap with the 0.001% of people who love you unconditionally and are actually there for you—who are actually your friends. That’s the fucking meta. That’s the move.

If you have 2 or 3 really good friends who you know you can count on through thick and thin, you’re fucking—

You don’t need a lot.

Wealthy. No, no, no.

That’s our problem.

I think I had hundreds of friends, and then when shit hits the fan—

Shit hits the fan—

—I’ve had days where I’ve been like, “Who do I fucking call?” Even when there’s good news, you’re like, “Who do I call?” You need those relationships, but I had to learn. I went through the whole “Every person in L.A. is just using you” thing, and then I had to come to terms with the fact that I have to put some of the blame on myself, too. I wasn’t putting any energy into these relationships to even see if someone was using me. If someone does something that’s fucked up or they’re using you, then you cut them off. But I wasn’t even getting to that point with people.

I was just like, “It’s me, my dog, and my fucking projects.”

It’s genuinely not possible to have hundreds of friends. You just can’t maintain that many deep relationships. You can have thousands of acquaintances, but your core group—the people you can actually go to and talk to, and whose day-to-day lives you know—that’s not possible.

I used to look at DMs from everyone in the industry that I knew, and I’d be like, “I’ve got to keep up with making sure I respond to everyone.” Then I’d think, “When was the last time I called my mom? What am I doing?” It really hits me hard.

Right. It’s like, “Oh, but I’ve got to make sure this leads somewhere. I might need this person for this, and I might need this person for that.” You’re just playing the fucking game, too.

I don’t know.

You can burn yourself out doing it if you’re not careful. For sure. It is important, in a way, to maintain certain relationships, but you don’t want to burn yourself out mentally.

It’s exhausting. It’s fucking exhausting. Jesse, you’ve always been really good at protecting your energy. I feel like you always have these optimistic takes. You’re very friendly and very generous. This is something I know about you, and I’ve seen up close how people come in and fucking try to benefit from—or even profit off of—a relationship with you. You can obviously resonate heavily with that.

Yeah, it was new to me. I blew up out of nowhere, really. I was never trying to get a lot of followers or have a lot of people know who I was. I've always been friendly with people when I meet them.

But I can do that because people can't really contact me like that. It's really hard for people to reach me if they really, really need to, unless I know you and you're my boy or somebody who's really important to me. So, I can expend the energy to be friendly with people when I first meet them because I know I'm not going to have to expend that energy consistently with every single person that I do that with. I can still kind of do both things.

But, yeah, if you take to heart what everybody says and you have a lot of people who know who you are, you're going to get sucked into that negative cycle of things. You just have to be aware that it's a numbers game. If 1 million people know who you are, there's probably going to be 10,000 people who are like, “Fuck you. You're the worst person on the planet.”

It's just a numbers game. Even though that's 1% of 1 million, that's still 10,000 people that you may have to hear that from. That's why it's easier to remain optimistic if you think about it that way. It's like, yeah, 10,000 people hate you, but there are 990,000 people who love you, and they probably don't even have a way to tell you.

That's the thing with social media. It's really weird. The people who really fuck with you don't even have a real way of telling you that they fuck with you like that because you're not going to see their messages most of the time anyway, and they're not that active on social media. Somebody who has 3 followers on social media may be your number-one fan and have been following you for 10 years, but you're never going to be able to have that conversation with that person.

So, when I do see people outside who are like, “Yo, I followed this trade, and I did this, and you helped me with this, and I learned how to trade from this pod,” that's why it's important to be friendly to those people. I know there are a lot more of them than there are negative people.

It's an energy thing at the end of the day. I was going to say that I think anyone who's dealt with social media fame also looks for the negative. It's weird—you'll bypass everything positive about you. It's like, “Okay, I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm okay,” and then you see something negative, and you're looking for it.

I'm speaking from a place where I personally dealt with the internet years ago and let it fuck with me. You start looking for the negatives and thinking, “Does this affect me? Is this right? Is there any truth in this?” It's fucking weird.

It's a human thing, bro. It's a human thing. I think, yeah.

I definitely don't know if you guys can relate to this, but I was a people pleaser for a long time. I wasn't good with people not liking me. Who knows what fucked-up childhood shit that came from, but someone threw a porn cop at me or something when I was a kid, or—

I found out a way to time travel and went back and touched you. That's all my fault.

Thanks. You gave me a handy in fucking high school, boys.

It's all my fault, bro.

Can I, real quick?

Yeah, please go.

Is that cool?

Yeah, yeah, you're good.

Also, so I don't forget: this is not on here.

Oh, wait, wait, wait. No, I—but I do, though. I will. I will.

You will? Okay. Yeah.

Wow.

I love you.

Jesse's taking a piss, but he just gave me this.

Oh, wow. This is fucking sick.

What is this? Who made this? This is beautiful. Conker's Bad Fur Day.

Bad.

Bad Fur Day.

Yeah, it's a legendary Nintendo 64 game. I used to rock this guy as my PFP on Discord, and it says “Banks” on it.

He said, “I brought you this because I have to get the whole story of where—”

It looks like Lola Bunny.

Yeah, it was like a spoof game. Conker's Bad Fur Day is rated like M, and he runs around and fucks hoes, drinks alcohol, does drugs, and stuff. But he's a cute little squirrel, so it's a platform game with a sunshine-and-rainbows, Bugs Bunny aesthetic.

He's fucking insane and unhinged. It has crazy shit, swearing, girls, hookers, and stuff.

What the fuck?

It's like this crazy, mature Bugs Bunny–Mario-style platform game.

Like Happy Tree Friends type shit.

Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Happy Tree Friends was crazy.

Insane. Insane.

When he comes back, I'm going to switch places with him. I want you guys to go one-on-one, and I want you to ask him about the business stuff. He's got Sunday going on right now, so maybe ask about Happy Dad and that deal, his NELK exit, things like that. I'm just curious to hear you and him go back and forth on that. I'm sure the chat's interested too. It's an interesting conversation.

I'll take a piss, and then we'll wrap it up.

Gotcha.

We've been going, man. How long have we been streaming?

What time is it right now? It's—

3 hours.

No, almost 4. At 5 o'clock, it'll be 4 hours.

Yeah.

Here, Jesse. I'm going to take a piss, and let's trade spots real quick. Just sit here. Sit in my seat for now. I need to—yeah, they said “W gift” in the chat.

Oh, really?

Yeah. I need to ask you about this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yo.

What's up, G?

What's good, brother?

I feel like you and me have to get to know each other. What's up? What's your story?

My story? I used to be a software engineer. I went to Georgia Tech, studied computer science there, and graduated in 2017. I had a computer science degree and a business minor. I was a software engineer in New York, and I got into crypto that year.

I found out about crypto in a class at school in 2016. It was like, “Yo, this is what Bitcoin is. This shit's going to be important for X, Y, and Z reasons.” I thought, “All right, cool. Sounds cool.” I didn't buy any.

In 2017, when I was working as a software engineer, I had a mentor who was like, “Yo, no, you're smart. I trade crypto all the time when I'm not doing this coding shit. You should do this shit too.” I thought, “All right, cool.” So, I started trading crypto in 2017 and joined Crypto Twitter. I had no followers, but I was always super active online.

I would tweet a ton even when I wasn't tweeting about crypto. My high school and college friends—everything—were on there. I made some money and lost some money that first cycle. Then, in 2020, COVID came, and I was like, “Okay, I made some money and lost some money last cycle. This cycle, I'm actually going to make some money, and I'm going to journal it.”

So, I journaled all my trades that cycle during COVID. I did really well, and I did well publicly. Everybody was like, “Yo, this dude is not missing. He's doing really well with these trades. Who the fuck is this guy?”

Did you journal them publicly? Were you publicly journaling them?

I was like, “Yo, I'm buying this this week. This is my invalidation. This is the fundamental reason why I'm buying this coin. I'm looking at this for the future. This is my month-to-month. This is my biggest position this month. Next month I'm looking—” I was sharing everything, and it was all public.

That's how I got a lot of followers on Twitter. I think I was at around 100K followers going into 2021. The same thing happened in 2023. I had a similar type of situation.

Yeah, keep going.

All right, yeah, yeah. In 2023, I had a similar type of situation where I was like, “Yo, I'm calling these trades and doing well.” People started following me again. I went from around 100K to whatever I'm at now—900-something, 900K or something.

It was all just Twitter. I left my software engineering job in 2021 to do full-time trading. Now I have my own business, Bullpen, which is a front end for trading anything on-chain: stocks, crypto, and prediction markets.

I was just a full-time trader, and now I have that.

I feel like I've heard of that. Is that massive? Bullpen.

Bullpen. Not massive. I hope it'll be massive soon. That's the plan.

It looks like it. It's branded really well. I love the logo, and I love the name.

Yeah, it's great. It is a really great trading tool. It breaks down the barriers to trading markets like Hyperliquid, for example, and makes it very user-friendly. Polymarket is there as well, so it's kind of a one-stop shop. It allows you to trade everything there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Damn, that's—

Yeah.

Before we go—well, first of all, what's the deal with this? What is the story behind this? This is awesome, by the way.

And I appreciate you.

Of course. Five years ago, I was in New York. I went to Inked Mag and got a couple of tattoos on my leg, and the person who was tattooing me had artwork on their wall. I was like, “Dude, your artwork is sick.” They had this crazy micro-cassette-type cartridge artwork, and I was like, “Dude, can I commission a piece?” I was going to make one for myself, and then I thought of you at the time because it was about video games.

I'm pretty sure I DM'd you and was like, “Yo, what was your favorite Nintendo 64?”

You might have, because I would have said that for sure.

You would have said that 100%, because I got GoldenEye 007 for mine.

100%. And I had Conker with the dollar-sign eyes—an iconic framing of him—as my Discord picture for a long time. I figured it was a fan who did it, or somebody who knew that about me. My burner Twitter account had that for a while, too. But you're the goat. I love you. That's awesome.

That was sick. Before you and I get out of here and go do whippets at my crib, is there anything else we want to talk about? Jesse, I want to ask you a couple things—just to get them out of the way, because I have them written down. When's the last time you talked to Steve?

A decent amount of time ago. I think the last time I saw him in person was at some NELK thing they did with—was it a game show? I don't even remember. It was one of the first things they were streaming, and it was like, “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?”

Yes. This was obviously when Kyle and Steve were still good.

Yeah.

Where is that at right now? What's your opinion on the whole thing between Steve and Kyle?

Yeah, I mean, the whole thing makes me feel a little weird, to be honest, because of some other shit that went down, too. Aiden's always hit me up for Brand Risk and all that, and I don't know if it came from Steve, but he was trying to fight Kyle. Then he was like, “Kyle doesn't want to do that.” Someone told me that Steve's down to fight you, and I haven't talked to him in so long.

Yeah, and it kind of bothered me because we haven't really talked. It would be very hard for me to believe that. I would have to hear Steve say it.

That's why I don't want to—I mean, it could just be someone trying to—

No, you're getting farmed for sure. There's just no way. Why? Especially with all the stuff that Kyle and Steve are beefing over, it literally has nothing to do with you.

I know. I guess I thought it was like, “Well, he's not down, so this is the next closest thing,” or something.

I have no hate for any of them.

No, I wasn't necessarily asking you that from your point of view. What's your opinion on Kyle and Steve? For me, it makes me sad.

When everything was going on with you and the NELK exit—when was that? That was before COVID, right? Or right when COVID started?

2020.

It was a long process.

It was a long, exhausting process.

I can relate, because I've had my fair share of behind-the-scenes things and deals. I remember we talked a bit about that, too. On a personal level, I have a relationship with you guys, so I've never watched clips or interviews. If I have a question, I just ask you guys. Is there anything you want to speak to as far as that?

I personally don't know anything, really, but if I can just be honest, I don't give a shit.

Yeah, please do.

I honestly just think there's truth on both sides. Straight up, there's truth on both sides.

As there typically is, right?

Yeah. The whole thing is whacked. All 3 of us, and other people, still own a retirement plan with Happy Dad. It's kind of silly that we're creating drama and all this. I don't understand it. But I also have to remember that I'm older and I've been through some shit. How old is Steve right now? He's younger than us.

He's young. He's not even 30 yet, right?

Yeah. He's 27. Steve's a baby. When Nelk split and all that—I said it was a long thing. If I had been the person who went online and tried starting shit, I could have done that 100%. I'm grateful that it never came to that, because I saw things behind the scenes, and it's obviously naturally an emotional thing.

Just like me, we can relate on this. FaZe and Nelk, to some degree, came out of our minds, and we built them from scratch. Our hearts will be tethered to these experiences and these brands forever. I know this has been a total glaze fest—a glaze Banks fest—but I always refer to Nelk as one of the Mount Rushmore internet brands, next to FaZe, Lyrical Lemonade, and the Sidemen. These are brands that came exclusively from the internet and then took a share of traditional markets, merchandise, and so on.

And had a cultural moment.

Yeah. Big time.

That's the difference.

Big time.

For what you guys did in college—college culture and frat-boy culture—it's what we did for gamers. It was pretty much one-to-one. That's why it was very special for me to watch. I almost got to right some wrongs in my own story and rewrite history in that regard, in the spaces where you guys gave me the opportunity to help.

But yeah, man, do you regret anything? Is there anything that you regret in terms of how that shit went down? How do you feel about it today? How do you feel about your Nelk exit? I know you got paid. I don't know if you've ever talked about that, but how do you feel today? It's 2026. There's been some space. It's been a good 5 or 6 years.

Personally, it feels—I don't know if “unfair” is the word—but it feels insane how well-timed it ended up being for me. That's what it feels like. I think it's just because I was reading what I needed to do right now, what I wanted to do, and what I needed. It's hard to explain. It all worked out almost too perfectly for me.

I'm happy. I feel very grounded. I feel like I'm doing what I want to do. I have security through financial gain. I left when it was awesome.

Yeah, facts. For what it's worth, your energy feels very soothing, zen, and calm. You seem like you're in a great spot, just as somebody who's known every version of you since you basically started this shit.

Yeah. It doesn't sound dumb at all. I have to remind myself of this on a day-to-day basis, and I kind of have imposter syndrome around it because I went through a traumatic transition in the last year. But it's hard to look around, have this fantastic come-up in life, still have so much access and opportunity, and know what you know. They can never take that from you.

They can never take what you did from you. They'll try to discredit it. They'll try to bury it, whatever, but they can't take that from you.

Yeah.

And your relationship with how everything went down.

I'm looking forward to finding the same peace. I know it's inevitable, but it doesn't sound dumb at all, bro. It's very important to remind yourself on a day-to-day basis: I have lights, I have a home, I have food, I have my health. I have millions of dollars. I'm not a victim. I'm living a fantasy dream life.

If you told me on my worst day at 34 years old that this would be my everyday life when I was 13, 14, 15, 18, or 22, I would collapse in tears of joy and beg for that to be the case. I'd beg for that to be real.

I think it's really important for that person. Yesterday, I was feeling uneasy about something and hung up on it. I had a little bit of anxiety, and I try so hard to push that out of my consciousness because I don't want that to become my reality. I feel like that manifesting shit and becoming what your brain is thinking is a real thing. I don't know. It's a day-to-day battle.

Well, anytime I've noticed that something goes bad or falls apart, or any of this shit happens, it's never let me down to just give things time. People like you and me are never going to not create great shit. We're going to—it's in our blood. We're not happy unless we're doing something, man. I think once you start believing in that, you start caring less about a leaderboard or any of this shit. I don't know. We're going to keep creating cool shit.

17. Marriage, kids & dating in LA

Someone in the chat says, “Pushing 40, man. Wrap it up. Get a family.” He's obviously talking to me, by the way. But you're also a fellow. You're 33. I'm 34. What's that look like for you right now—dating, family?

I was very close to that about a year and a half ago.

Really?

Yeah. It fell apart pretty badly. But I was pretty open to being ready for that, just being like, “I'm just going to be excited about being a dad and having a family.” But it fell apart, and it was a whole other learning lesson that I think I needed to go through then.

I kind of just feel like, personally, maybe there's a reason for everything. There's a whole other world and things and peaks that I haven't explored. Maybe if I was just excited about being a dad every day, I wouldn't have explored them.

So, like—

Yeah. I'm trying to go with the flow. You just have to follow life's plan and be the best version of yourself that you possibly can.

Do you want that?

Yeah, of course I do. I wanted it yesterday, but I'm also not going to settle. I'm at a point in my life where I feel like I'm the best version of myself.

And there's a million girls in L.A., by the way. You know me.

You knew me back then. Today I live a much more private life, and I'm much more intentional about what I'm doing and who I'm doing it with. My life in that regard—my social life, my day-to-day, Ricky's life—has never been better. I've never felt like I had more options in terms of who I could start a family with.

But the criteria for me are so specific. I want a woman who's going to be an amazing mother. I want an intelligent woman. I want to have smart-shit kids. She obviously has to be pretty. That's almost been the easiest part of it. They're all fucking pretty. Girls in L.A.—every single one of them is pretty. The problem is—

It's like 15% of the equation.

Yeah. Yeah, no, facts. Facts. That's been the easiest part. And that's the first thing you see, too, right? So you're like, “Yeah, you're hot. I want to fuck you, you know?” But then you start to peel back the layers of the onion. You're like, “Oh, wait. You're fucking stupid.” Or, “Oh, wait, you can't even tie your shoes. You're not going to—”

Have you ever found that the fact that there are so many candidates is the problem?

I don't know. Yeah, you're never going to pick—

That's fair. That's not true. You had a relationship with Tyson. You knew Tyson, correct?

She was the best. She is the best. That girl's great. She checks all the boxes. She's a great person, she's sober, she's intelligent, she's beautiful—all that stuff.

This is a girl, by the way, who I dated. We never really had a public-facing relationship, but we have an amazing relationship now. We haven't had an intimate or sexual relationship in years, and for good reason. This girl's kind of assumed a role in my life as my family. She helped me get sober.

Our relationship is exactly what it's supposed to be and what it will likely be forever. It's not something I dwell on or miss in that regard, but they do exist. You know what I'm saying? To a degree, I'm trying to let life happen. I just know that when I'm ready and I find a woman who's ready, and we're going to be good mom and dad together in that combination, then I'll pull the trigger and do it. But I'll find her.

Where would you go search for her?

I'm not really searching. That's the thing. Honestly, for the first time in years, this is the longest I've been single. I've been single for 3½ years. Before that, I dated Tyson for a while. Then I dated Alissa on and off for 3 years.

Single 3½ years?

Yeah. I haven't had a girlfriend since I've been sober. I'm seeing this girl right now pretty consistently. She's a little bit younger—she's 22—and she's really smart and intellectually matches me, which is why I've been able to hang out with her for so long.

She's gorgeous, a beautiful girl. She's mad cool, easy to hang out with, but she's just not ready to be a mom. That's not our relationship together, you know what I'm saying? Which is totally fine.

So, yeah, it's not a matter of—I don't know, man. I don't know where I find her. I don't know if I'm going to find her. I found Tyson on a party bus during COVID with Tav. Tav's my manager; he's here right now. He invited her out. She's sitting on a party bus, and she witnessed me spit in a girl's mouth. She's coming off a fucking breakup, and she's like, “I gotta fuck this guy. This looks like some fun.” And that's how we started.

I think you can meet the perfect girl in any scenario.

Yeah. There's no perfect recipe.

By the way, there was something about that that was beautiful because it helped me fall in love with her early. I'm like, “Holy shit, here's a girl who just gets it.”

She's down. She watches me bite a piece of chewed-up gum off my jacket, spit it in another girl's mouth, bounce to the other side of the bus, kiss some other girl, and this girl's like, “What the fuck? Why are all these girls cool with this?”

We're all just being fucking weird and having fun. COVID in L.A. was fucking nuts. It was nuts.

She's just perfect—right place, right time. I'm like, “Oh, this girl kind of sees through to the intent behind it,” rather than, “Who the fuck is this dirtbag scumbag being a piece of shit?” She's like, “Oh, this is sweet.” Because it was—it was kind of sweet. It is kind of sweet.

How was it sweet, bro? How was it sweet?

I don't know. You talk about what you just described.

Jesse is literally somebody who had seen what I'm describing happen in real time, in real life.

Was it sweet?

No. But was it dramatic or negative? Were there people running around crying and shit?

There's another word before “sweet.”

Yeah, it's not that. Like, fun.

Somebody said chewed bubble gum generally does taste sweet, so I don't know.

That's a flavor, my boy. No, it was fun. Obviously, it was all rooted in fun, but lighthearted fun and just keeping things transparent and honest. I don't know, dude.

When I got back into the dating scene, that was my whole definition. I was so anti—say a second date, a girl's like, “What do you want? Do you want marriage?” Blah, blah, blah. That would be a turnoff. I'd be like, “Really?”

I was in that world. It turned me back after that, where I was like, “Dude, can we just have—not even in a sexual way—I'm just looking for fun, friendships, and someone to go get dinner with and have fun and go do stuff.”

A common misconception about me—even when I have these conversations with girls in a one-on-one setting—is that that's what I'm looking for. I'm kind of playing speed chess. I'm speed-dating, almost. I know almost immediately, “Okay, you're not going to be the mother of my kids.” So immediately, this is capped.

If we have good chemistry, we can hold conversations, and we have good sex and all this shit, then this can be a thing that lasts for a while. We bounce in and out of each other's lives. That's the relationship that I have to this day with a bunch of different girls.

But that is what I'm looking for. That's the first thing that I'm thinking about. Would this woman be a good mom? Is this the mother of my kids? I'm kind of—I don't know. I am searching for that, I guess.

Shouldn't that be the definition before you get married, though?

You shouldn't. If you're in the mindset of, “I need to find the person to get married to,” you're going to make mistakes and do the wrong thing. Have fun, meet people, have good times. There'll be a girl that you can't get enough of.

I have a take on this. Yes, but sometimes there's a girl that you can't get enough of for the wrong reasons. They're not wrong reasons—it's not bad. But, for example, this girl that I'm seeing right now, our chemistry in terms of our conversation is 10 out of 10.

Our chemistry as far as sex goes, 10 out of 10. But these aren't qualities that necessarily make for a good woman to have children with and procreate with, just because you guys have fire sex. That's crazy. That energy and that “I can't get enough of” feeling is more rooted in a drug-addict mindset of, “I want to consume this.” It's lustful, fiery, and intense, and that's often how relationships start.

Then it goes from that to now we're together, and we kind of settle into this partnership. Then we get married, and then we're supposed to talk about having kids. I think it's backwards. I think if you get involved with somebody with the intent of creating life and a family with them, then I'm looking at these qualities. All the superficial shit is gone, too, because you have to be naive to think that you're going to stay with the same woman forever. You can't control that—there are 2 people involved, and we also change so dramatically throughout the course of our lives.

Yeah. If you 2 are perfect right now, are you perfect in 5 years or 10 years?

Exactly. Science and math show you, with divorce rates and stuff, that that's not likely. So if you get involved for superficial reasons—because I'm attracted to you, because our energy is this way—then when it falls apart, it's going to be a [__] mess.

Whereas if it's like, “Okay, I want to build an amazing, healthy family with you, regardless of what our outcome is. I want to be able to sit with you at Christmas dinner with your new husband and actually be okay with that,” because our business together, first and foremost, is that you're a good mom and I'm a good dad. We need to keep a good relationship with each other for the sake of the kids. I'm ranting and rambling.

No, dude. I think what you're describing is my opinion of what actual marriage is. I come from divorced parents. I'm a [__] kid who didn't care about marriage. Now I'm seeing that marriage is literally what you're saying: at a certain point, with a certain person, you feel like that's what marriage is. You look at the person and you're like, “Ride or die.” What does it say? “For richer or poorer, till death do us part.”

Do they go through a bad year? You go through a bad year. You're literally like, “No, I'm signing a piece of paper that says I got you and you got me.” I think that's what marriage is, and if I don't [__] want that or find that with someone, then I don't want to be married. But if I do, it sounds—

I'm not talking about marriage. I could never be married and could give a [__] less. I think marriage is, to some degree, a scam. I'm talking about family. I think it's important to have kids.

Yeah, I'm saying the same thing, just calling it marriage. I kind of agree. Why do we need a contract, bro? You know what I mean?

Well, listen, man. I feel like, at this point, we're probably holding Ansem hostage, talking about [__].

Dude, my bad if—

No, it's okay. You're the best, bro. You're the best. And I could talk to you for [__] 10 hours.

It's a problem because we're catching up, too. I didn't anticipate this, but hopefully it was entertaining for some. And, yeah, I really appreciate you coming on, brother. Is there anything else you want to talk about, Z?

The [__] World Cup [__] popping off in the States.

Let them know.

Yeah, we got World Cup [__]—

Let them know. We have, obviously, a lot of overlap between the NBA Finals and the World Cup. Obviously, there's a ton of markets. Z, you want to pull up some World Cup markets on Polymarket?

I think this summer, honestly, is going to be lit because there's a lot of events happening. Right after the finals, we have the World Cup. I think there are even some games close to here, I'm pretty sure.

Is that the same as what Togepi and Steve will do—just bet like $3 million?

Yeah. Steve just won a [__] $4 million bet on PSG. I watched the video on the treadmill. It was [__] actually entertaining.

What a sick [__].

Good for him.

All the different groups and [__]—

He said he went—he put everything in.

He drained the bank account.

Yeah, he's a nut, dude.

What? [laughter]

He's sick.

That's insane, bro. TJR—what was his money-glitch hack? Is that panning out? Remember we talked about this?

Well, I think—let's see. What do we have? The futures are on a lot of these different teams. We have Spain, France, England, the Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal, Argentina, and Germany. They're all currently down, so [laughter] I'm not sure if the TJR trade is panning out.

It's panning out.

It's panning. But—

It's time to buy the dip, though, and trade the dip.

So what are you buying? You're buying—so—

Is it odds, or—

Yeah, you're trading Polymarket. They have futures, which are the probabilities of whichever team wins the entire World Cup—all the teams listed here. During live games, Polymarket's odds will change as the game is going live. The craziest one was yesterday with the Knicks. At one point, they were at 5% to win when they were down 30. If you had traded that market, you could have 20×ed your capital. Instead of trading the games in other places, it's a lot harder to do it live and get the odds as they're changing. Yeah. I think—should we just take USA? They play tomorrow.

[__] it. Do it. And it's in the U.S. And who?

I said, and it's in the U.S.—the World Cup.

Oh, yeah. No, yeah, it's here. I don't even know what other soccer teams are—oh, Brazil. No, we're definitely taking Brazil.

Sports betting.

We're taking Brazil.

This isn't exactly that. I trade—for example, I hit my group chat with the Polymarket odds. The market was 30% for the Knicks and 40% for the Spurs. I instinctively screenshotted this, and the market was, like, $50,000—real capital in the market.

Yeah. And I posted in my friends' group chat, my basketball group chat. I'll show you. I said, “This is a promise. This is a free-money glitch. Polymarket had the Knicks at 40%, and that just felt like that's never going to happen.”

Mhm.

Trading at 30%—actually unreal. Obviously, they didn't 4–0 them because the series is at, you know—

Yeah.

Is it 3–1 now, right?

Yeah.

That was just [__] free money. I don't know. There are a ton of secret, weird little opportunities all over Polymarket. Polymarket popped off during the election because it was showing real-time—

Yeah.

—odds for who was going to win the presidency. You had CNN talking about [__], “Trump has no shot to win the presidency,” but Polymarket was telling you a different thing, right? It's showing you real odds because that's what the market is saying. Money is being traded on these odds, so you're going to get the most genuine, real odds.

People betting their money.

Yes.

Yeah.

Do you think Polymarket and these companies are going to get—is it all 100% fine legally and stuff? Like, the whole insider-trading thing—is that an issue, or is that—

It's definitely an issue in any market. It's something that they track closely. They don't want to bring—it's very hard to track because everything is on-chain. It's a difficult process that they're going through. It's obviously one of the reasons Polymarket has done so well: they've gone through the process of doing everything correctly, the legal way, regulatory-wise.

But, yeah, it's definitely a new area, and they're coming up with all the correct rules and regulations to abide by with prediction markets because it's just so new.

But as much value as they're providing and giving you the ability to trade markets on all things—like what team LeBron James is going to go to, who's dating who, who's going to win the presidency, or what color T-shirt Adin Ross is going to wear in his stream, in his whatever—I think it provides even more value in terms of those raw analytics, just showing—

You're never going to get better odds anywhere. It's because people are putting up real capital on these things, so it's going to get the real source of—

It's PvP. It's money versus real, real money, so—

Yeah, you just did a poll. People just click it.

Exactly.

If you got, “Hey, this can affect my—”

Or if the media is a [__] biased news network that wants you to think that Trump has no shot, so you don't vote for him, it's like—

And someone's paying them to—

When money gets involved, you see real [__] quick how people actually feel. It's one thing to say, “I think the Knicks are going to win.” Are you willing to [__] trade that?

Yeah.

Yeah, man.

Jesse, do you want to take a second to let them know where they can find you and everything you're working on, for anybody who's interested in following what you're doing or keeping up with you?

My Instagram is MTV Jesse. My brands are Bloody Sunday and Sunday. We try to do at least 1 collection every month. Bloodyson.com is pretty much everything.

Slide in. I love you to death, my boy. I fucking love you. Thank you so much for coming on.

This is cool.

It's fun, right? Yeah, dude.

Yeah, it's great. It's great. I love it.

That's been it. Hang around because I actually want to show you my new spot, and I want to catch up. I want to properly—

Bro, I don't think I can drive.

Yeah, I got you. I got you. That's funny. It's really, really good. Bro's wasted. We didn't even get into any of that. We didn't get into the fucking Steve story. We didn't talk about any of that shit. Me and this kid lived together for 2 years. We could have done fucking 10 hours of this shit, but I'll spare everybody the fucking Unk glaze Banks fest.

It was nice meeting you, too, man.

Yeah, great meeting you, brother. For sure.

Where are you located?

I'm in New York.

Oh, fuck.

Jesse wants to keep talking. That's cute. Yo, you guys are all like, “Fuck, fuck.”

Yeah, pull up, bro. Whenever you're in New York, hit me.

Z, is there anything else you want to touch on or talk about before I take us out?

I don't think so. Let me double-check real quick. What's your favorite cereal?

I know what you're saying.

Cap'n Crunch.

Oh, that is not what I was going to say. Like, the regular Cap'n Crunch? Not even Crunchberries? No.

I go to Reese's Puffs, whatever those are.

Dude, you're wasted.

You're wasted and crazy. I had a roadie on the way here, too.

You're sick. You're a sick fuck. Appreciate you, Giddy. Appreciate you. W episode, guys. I think that's going to about wrap it up. Next week, we're going to try to have Andrew Kang pull up and get that episode in. There are a couple of other people we're talking to. We may talk about Pluralis or whatever the fuck. What was it?

Pluralis.

Pluralis, and that founder potentially. We'll reach out to him, and maybe I just replace me with you and we just have you on every episode. This was my favorite episode that we've recorded to date. I know it was a glaze fest, and it was just me and my boy.

I'm like 25 minutes from here. I'll come pop in anytime you guys want. I'll come kick it.

Awesome. We should have this chat aggregator's $10,000 competition wrapped up by next week, and hopefully we have the aggregator working and live for you guys—a demo or finished product, whatever. We have 100-plus legitimate entries to look through, so we're going to refine that and get through all that. But yeah, that's been the episode, the comment stream, and everything.

Yeah, yeah, all of it. We're building an aggregator. It's going to be cool, dude.

I want AI to build this whole fucking thing. I want AI to do all of it, guys.

They've got fancy cameras. They've got fucking screens.

Put real effort into this, man. I believe that. I really do.

All right, guys. Thank you guys so much. On that note, love you.

Later.

W's in the chat. Thank you guys so much. Catch us next week, Thursday. Every Thursday, 1 PM PST on all platforms. Love you so much. Peace.