Ben Settle

“I’m glad I won’t be alive to see it.” -Every “Christian” Boomer with children and grandchildren you’ll come across

My net worth peaked at $1.2 million. None of it was real. I don't mean that philosophically. I mean it was located on servers that have since been turned off. I own eleven properties in the metaverse. Three in Decentraland. Four in The Sandbox. Two in Voxels. One in Otherside. And a beachfront villa in Horizon Worlds that I bought for $214,000 because Mark Zuckerberg called it "the next frontier." The frontier closed last week. It's a mobile app now. Last year I mass DM'd 340 people the phrase "you don't understand how early we are." I have since stopped doing that. Not because I was wrong. Because most of them blocked me. I got into metaverse real estate in November 2021. Everyone was buying. Someone paid $450,000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor. In a video game. With no legs. The avatars didn't have legs. I thought that was bullish. "The legs are coming," I told my Discord. "Legs are a roadmap item." Three hundred people reacted with rocket emojis. I called myself a "digital land baron." I put it in my Twitter bio. I put it in my LinkedIn headline. I said it on a podcast that had eleven listeners. Three of them were bots. The rest were my alts. My virtual property has more square footage than my actual apartment. My actual apartment has furniture. Location, location, location. My most valuable asset was a plot next to a virtual Gucci store. Gucci left in 2023. The store is still there. Nobody's in it. It's like a mall in Ohio but with worse graphics and no food court. I held. Diamond hands. That's what we said. "Diamond hands." It means refusing to sell while your investment loses 94% of its value. We turned financial paralysis into a personality trait. A guy in my Discord paid $2.4 million for a 618-parcel estate in Decentraland. Prime district. High foot traffic. I asked him what "foot traffic" meant when the platform had 38 daily active users. He said I didn't understand the technology. I didn't. I still bought more. We had a DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization. That means we voted on decisions. There were nine of us. Three never showed up. Two voted on everything without reading it. The other four were me and my alts. We voted to "acquire strategic parcels." The vote passed unanimously. I voted four times. My portfolio peaked at $1.2 million. I told everyone. I made a spreadsheet. I projected 40x returns by 2025. I made a pitch deck. The pitch deck had a slide that said "WE ARE BUILDING THE DIGITAL ECONOMY." The slide had a rocket emoji. That was my entire financial model. In 2023 I bought a Bored Ape for $189,000. It's worth $14,000 now. I don't talk about the Ape. I still use it as my profile picture. People ask me about it. I say "I'm long-term bullish." Long-term bullish means I can't sell it without crying in a Panera. My mom asked me what a Bored Ape was. I said "digital art on the blockchain." She asked why it cost more than her car. I said "you don't understand Web3." She said "I understand you live in a studio apartment." She's not in my Discord. Justin Bieber bought one for $1.3 million. It's worth about $90,000 now. I felt better about mine after I heard that. That's community. WAGMI. We're All Gonna Make It. We said that every day. In the group chat. While the floor dropped. While the volume dried up. While 95% of all NFT collections went to zero. We're all gonna make it. None of us made it. But we said it with conviction and a laser-eye profile picture. That counts for something. It doesn't. But we said it did. That's decentralized consensus. Meta spent $84 billion on the metaverse. I need to say that again. $84 billion. More than the GDP of Luxembourg. More than the GDP of Iceland, Luxembourg, and Malta combined. They spent it on a platform where the avatars had no legs, the graphics looked like a 2006 Wii game, and the peak user count was lower than the lunch rush at a Chipotle in Des Moines. They just pulled Horizon Worlds from VR headsets. It lives on as a mobile app. My beachfront villa is now a mobile app. Location, location, location. Zuckerberg renamed the entire company for this. Facebook became Meta. A $900 billion company changed its legal name because the CEO watched Ready Player One and said "I want that." Reality Labs lost $10 billion in 2021. $14 billion in 2022. $16 billion in 2023. $18 billion in 2024. $19 billion in 2025. That's not a strategy. That's a speedrun. They laid off 1,500 Reality Labs employees this year. Shut down three VR studios. Killed Supernatural. Put the entire VR social vision in a casket and said "we're pivoting to AI and wearables." The pivot took four years and $84 billion. I pivoted too. I'm an AI real estate investor now. I bought a virtual plot in an AI-generated world that doesn't exist yet. The founder said it was "the intersection of spatial computing and large language models." I don't know what that means. I gave him $40,000. He has a whitepaper. It's 47 pages. I read the title and the tokenomics section. The tokenomics section is a pie chart. I love pie charts. They make everything look like a plan. The project has a roadmap. Q1: "Build community." Q2: "Launch beta." Q3: "Scale ecosystem." Q4 is blank. Q4 is always blank. That's where the exit scam goes. My accountant asked me to value my metaverse portfolio for tax purposes. I said $1.2 million. He said "current market value." I said $6,400. He stared at me for eleven seconds. I know because I counted. He asked if I had any other investments. I showed him my NFTs. He stared for longer. I told him they were "cultural artifacts with long-term provenance." He asked if I'd considered a 401k. I told him a 401k was "legacy finance." He told me to leave his office. The metaverse is dead. I don't accept that. I am a digital land baron. I own eleven properties across four platforms. I have a beachfront villa in a mobile app, a plot next to an empty Gucci store, and a cartoon monkey that cost me more than my actual car. Location, location, location. The location is nowhere. But I'm early. I'm always early. That's the same as being wrong except you get to say it with confidence.

The Afroman Trial. -Cops raid Afromans house for bullshit reasons. -Steal money, break his door, fuck his house up. -No criminality found whatsoever, no charges at all pressed on Afroman. -Afroman spends the next 3 years making songs that make fun of all the officers involved by name, even using footage of the raid from his own CCTV cameras. -Songs had titles like "Randy Walters is a son of a bitch" and "Lick Em Low Lisa" accusing one of the officers of being a lesbian and sleeping with the other officers wives. -During the raid one officer looked like he was about to eat some lemon pound cake sitting on Afromans counter, Afroman made a whole album calling the officer fat. -The cops get mad and file a lawsuit for defamation. -Afroman turns up to court in a whole American flag suit. -Officers performatively mald and cry while listening to the songs really trying to oversell how badly the songs upset them. -One officer was suing because Afroman made a whole song about him saying he was fucking the officers wife. When the officer was asked if Afroman was really fucking his wife, he said "I don't know". Nuking his own case and establishing that there is a non-zero chance that Afroman might actually be fucking his wife. -As his only witness for the trial, Afroman brought a deputies EX FUCKING WIFE. -The jury ruled completely in favour of Afroman. This entire thing has been a great win for free speech and absolutely fucking hilarious.

Portlanders expressing themselves🤦‍♀️ (sound on)

Netanyahu's latest video this time "Zombie Edition" 🧟‍♀️ 🧟‍♂

BREAKING: Claude can now install Hormozi's $5,998 offer creation & pricing system for free. Here are 7 prompts to build an irresistible high-ticket offer most agencies charge $6–15k to create:

Shocking

this isn't even a coherent thought. Strong AI will lower your value so get good at AI, which is sold as this autonomous thing that does whatever you can dream of, but also you need to get good at it, or else you'll fall behind, possibly, in some way? Eh

This might be the best argument I've seen for why differing politics *should* be a dealbreaker

🚨 WOMAN ASKS THE INTERNET: “WHY DOES NOBODY WANT TO LEAVE THE HOUSE ANYMORE?” — AND THE FLOODGATES BURST OPEN A mom posted a video asking something that’s been bothering her. Why does nobody want to go out anymore? Not for work. Not for fun. Not even for simple things. She says unless it’s a trip somewhere, she just doesn’t feel like leaving the house at all. Then the floodgates opened. People started admitting they feel the exact same way. Some of the replies: • “It costs $100 every time I leave the house.” • “I’d rather stay home than deal with people.” • “COVID turned me into a permanent homebody.” • “Nothing outside feels worth the effort anymore.” What started as one simple question suddenly turned into thousands of people realizing they aren’t the only ones feeling this way. Be honest… do you actually enjoy leaving the house anymore?

Mexican actress Lyn May, before and after a cheap beauty treatment that involved injecting harmful substances such as cooking oil, baby oil, and water into her face.