r/JoeBuddenPodcasts

Most people don’t care about this, which is understandable given who it’s about and how online you have be to even know what’s going on but, I only care about this because I’ve been writing about the dangers of digital blackface and the political impact social media has had on the black community in the past few years and it’s led me down the same rabbithole Charlamagne seemingly stumbled into.

I thought Charlamagne exposing George Nguyen (AkademiksTV / GrandWizardChatNigga) would be a bigger deal to people but specifically Joe considering he’s had issues with the page in the past. I’m not sure what his play is or what he’s getting out of downplaying the back and forth, (though I have my suspicions) maybe he just really finds the story boring but, if anyone cares I’ve been investigating this topic for a little over a year and I see the Charlamagne / Ak thing as mostly theater and the truth beneath it is far more nefarious, far more political and far more dangerous and I think we as a community and Joe as the only one truly capable of holding Akademiks accountable by way of being his friend are making a categorical error by choosing to sweep this under the rug and allowing this cabal of conservative internet weirdos to COINTELPRO black people instead of asking tough questions, rolling heads and holding feet to fire.

I’ll try to make this as simple as I possibly can but there are many layers to this story and it can get confusing, here’s what’s going on:

Stake is a crypto casino. 

Stake used to pay Twitch streamers to promote their gambling services until a few prominent Twitch streamers spoke out against Stake for promoting gambling to Twitch’s mostly young male audience.

Twitch decided to ban Stake-sponsored streams and this prompted Stake to launch their own website called Kick. 

Kick is a front for Stake. Kick on the surface is yet another streaming platform but at its core it’s really a gambling marketing machine that uses bots and clippers to flood social media with Stake-sponsored clips & streams to promote more gambling.

The gambling world is just like the drug world. It relies on people’s addiction. The more addicted the person, the more Stake profits. That’s their ultimate goal and in pursuit of that goal they do a substantial amount of harm to people, especially young people and especially young black people but I digress.

The connection Drake and Akademiks have with Stake/Kick is pretty straight forward: Drake has a massive Stake promotional deal and DJ Akademiks is signed to Kick.

There’s however another layer Drake adds to the story that almost never gets discussed because it gets buried by the company at the center of it.

Drake is a major long-term client of a PR firm called TAG (The Agency Group) TAG basically specializes in the modern smear campaign using the internet, bots and targeted clips to promote narratives of whoever their clients, Drake in this case, wish to tarnish.

I know this might seem unrelated but stay with me for a second, do you remember the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni lawsuit? It was very much white people’s business but if you don’t know or remember.

Basically Blake Lively, an actress, accused Justin Baldoni, a director, of sexual harassment and creating a hostile work environment during the filming of the movie It Ends With Us. So, Baldoni hired TAG who proceeded to launch a smear campaign to damage Lively’s reputation.

Lively went on to sue Baldoni and TAG for orchestrating a malicious, coordinated online smear machine to tank her career and protect Baldoni. 

The lawsuit unsealed texts like, “you know we can bury anyone,” and forensic investigators traced TAG to and as the creators of a $175,000 social media manipulation blueprint, which detailed plans for deploying bot networks and fake internet threads to make backlash look more organic. 
Lively won her motion against Baldoni and TAG but anyways…

Like Baldoni, Drake is a TAG client and their most successful campaign on behalf of Drake (that we know about) is the “UMG used bots to boost Kendrick Lamar’s Not Like Us streams” narrative. 

We know this was a narrative curated by TAG because of this:  TAG intentionally used the bot angle for Drake against UMG/Kendrick because TAG was concurrently being sued for deploying bots for Justin Baldoni against Blake Lively. It’s a calculated and multi-layered crisis management strategy used in high stakes celebrity PR.

Publicists don’t avoid a tactic because they’re accused of it, they weaponize it to shift narratives through several distinct legal and public relations maneuvers. It's an elaborate version of “I know you are but what am I?” 

Ultimately, they successfully redefined the narrative of bot usage by using Drake’s situation with UMG secondhandedly against Blake Lively from a unique moral failing on their part  to a normalization of what they did.

The take away from the Drake UMG/Kendrick botting allegations were, “well…everybody does it,” despite the fact that in this instance we only have documented evidence of one group actually doing it.

You following? Okay.

George Nguyen. (AkademiksTV / GrandWizardChatNigga)

George is a large asian man who is currently being investigated in Australia for his role in these series of lawsuits. George is not solid whatsoever. 

While Akademiks is still playing it cool and Drake refuses to respond publicly to any of the allegations, Grand Wizard throws both of them under the bus every time he feels pressure.  

He has had investigators come to his house and speak to him and his parents. He told them explicitly that he works on behalf of DJ Akademiks and Drake. He’s in messages saying Akademiks told him that Charlamagne is just mad that he no longer controls narratives anymore and that that’s why he’s working with Roc Nation to harass them with fraudulent lawsuits. He’s saying Akademiks told him to “take the gloves off” with Charlamage because Ak suspects Charlamagne is working with Roc Nation not because Charlamagne posted pictures of George like is being reported. He said he only runs AkademiksTV (X/Twitter) and GrandWizardChatNigga (IG) and he hires “hundreds of interns” (bot vendors) to run the other pages. George fears that if they look into the crypto accounts, his house might get raided.

If you know anything about this type of thing, it’s obvious that George Nguyen is a clip broker. Drake and Akademiks pay him and he pays the bot and clip farmers to act on their behalf. George isn’t the grand conspirator of all of this, he’s just the middleman and Akademiks & Drake are letting him face the brunt of the allegations.

In 2025, Drake got into with Stake after claiming Stake blocked his affiliate links and blocked his ability to withdraw funds.  Drake deactivated his Kick account and called the Stake co-founder a snake and a goof. 

They quietly resolved the issue, maintaining their deal, and Drake’s promotional obligations pivoted from live Kick streams to only X & Instagram posts.

One of the allegations alleged in the on-going RICO against Drake, Akademiks and Stake alleges that Drake, Adin Ross, George Nguyen and DJ Akademiks have been using Stake’s unmonitored tipping feature to discreetly transfer massive sums of cryptocurrency back and forth to evade financial regulation. That crypto is converted into cash to pay digital vendors who deploy automated bots, streaming farms, political endorsements and targeted campaigns against their adversaries. These crypto accounts have apparently been flagged by investigators. 

The two legal entities and individuals responsible for the current lawsuits against Stake, Drake and Akademiks are very public:   1. The Impresa Legal Group, a law-firm who specializes in uncovering digital and financial trails, and 2.  A bunch of private everyday people who feel defrauded by Stake’s deceptive marketing. 

That’s it. 

It’s hard for me to believe that Akademiks actually believes Roc Nation and now Charlamagne are what influenced the sweep of class-action lawsuits against them because there is literally no evidence of that being the case in regards to the current lawsuits. 

Instead, I believe Akademiks is using the Roc Nation angle as a shield to claim that the legal scrutiny they are facing is just “an industry hit job” by Jay-Z’s camp and Charlamagne is being used by Akademiks as a the scapegoat / his “proof” that Roc Nation is targeting him with fraudulent lawsuits. 

Here’s why I think that… Akademiks has had to know about these lawsuits since 2025 at least and everything that Charlamagne revealed on his podcast about George is from an investigative article in Australia that came out in January.

All of this information is public and has been for a while now but when one of the largest voices in the culture speaks on it they launch an attack on him about his own Casino dealings that conveniently frames him in a similar way they’re being framed with their Stake Casino Dealings… Remember the PR tactics, “I know you are but what am I?”

Just so we’re clear. While I find Charlamagne (and Jay-Z’s) Casino ordeal to be problematic for socioeconomic reasons. It is not at all the same thing that Drake & Akademiks are being accused of. 

First of all, Charlamagne’s deal was public. It wasn’t a big secret in the way Akademiks is trying to frame it. Second of all, that Casino deal, while problematic, operated entirely within the traditional, legally vetted corporate structure. Akademiks is trying to blur the line between a traditional corporate partnership and the unregulated cryptocurrency casino deal that he signed with Stake.

I think Charlamagne warning Akademiks about the investigation was a sincere attempt to distance someone he considers a friend or colleague from a clipping operation that people are onto and pursuing legal action against, and Akademiks’ response to the warning being defensiveness privately and acting clueless publicly but immediately deploying as many Charlamagne hitpieces they could dig up is extremely telling.

I know this was long. Just two more questions to answer, and we’re done. Who is actually responsible for the lawsuits and why should “we the people” care about this?

There are tons of clipping operations happening all around the world spanning from reasons as innocent as “promo” to as sinister as “inciting violence.” George’s operation funded by Drake and Akademiks is not unique or the worst of them. What makes them unique is there’s a massive celebrity at the helm of it, it's a relatively successful operation and it’s tied to Stake.

Top Dawg and Roc Nation have both independently hired private investigators to investigate them, but neither of them have filed or are at all tied to the current lawsuits. While I don’t doubt either entity would cooperate if called upon to do so. The actual main force behind these lawsuits are these three:

The first one is government officials. The Los Angeles City Attorney filed a massive historic lawsuit against Stake and there have been multiple elected city and state attorneys across America who have been aggressively cracking down on crypto-gambling platforms for political gain.

The second one is multi-billion dollar class action law firms operating on behalf of people scammed by Stake. They’re reason is simple, with all the political attacks they smell blood in the water, and they’re looking for huge payouts from Stake’s massive cash reserves.

And three is a lesser known culprit, The American Gaming Association / the traditional Casinos. Established casinos in Las Vegas & Atlantic City and platforms like DraftKings & FanDuel HATE Stake because Stake operates as a “sweepstakes casino,” makes billions of dollars bypassing all of the strict regulations and massive taxes that all the traditional casinos and US gambling institutions have to pay and abide by. So traditional casinos are using their lobbying power to pressure ambitious politicians to shut Stake down. 

Drake being a massive celebrity, DJ Akademiks and Adin Ross being huge Stake streamers and George Nguyen being from Australia and Australia having strict gambling laws (& a total ban on the main offshore version of Stake) makes it the perfect operation to attack, given the amount of money and high-profile participants involved.

That’s who is responsible for the lawsuits. Not Roc Nation. Not Charlamagne. That is all a distraction and PR tactics to save face if they suffer further losses.

Why should we care about this?

Regardless of how you feel about Drake or DJ Akademiks, these digital syndicates are dangerous. I don’t believe their use of them went any further than making money and PR but in their reckless attempt to make money and PR they caused a lot of harm to the people they attacked and inadvertently to the general public by manufacturing false realities and brainwashing people to gamble their life savings away on unlicensed platforms, but 
The most chilling reason to care is that the infrastructure is entirely interchangeable.

The exact same network structure George Nguyen is accused of running (using anonymous money to hire a broker, who commands an army of clip-creators, backed by a bot farm to manipulate what millions of people see on their feeds) is a blueprint.
Today, this digital muscle is being used to make Drake look popular and all his enemies look bad and compromised and to steer kids toward a crypto casino. 
Tomorrow, the exact same bot infrastructure and clipping farms can and will be bought by political campaigns, foreign governments, or corporate entities to rig elections, spread dangerous medical misinformation, or ruin reputations overnight. In fact, that’s one of the accusations levied against Drake and Akademiks in one of the lawsuits — that they’ve been paid by Trump and Republicans for endorsement. Guys.
These operations are dangerous because they prove that human perception can be completely manufactured for the right price. 
The Stake lawsuits are the first major line in the sand where the legal system is trying to hold people accountable before these digital syndicates completely break our ability to tell what is real and what is fake online. 
Stake is largely responsible for the cruelty we see online, for the normalization of far right conservatism, the emergence of explicit racism amongst young people, the rise in gambling addiction, the constant promotion of s-x work/pimping/hypersexuality to young people and so much more.
This Akademiks situation is not okay and it’s not benign. It’s deeper than who you like and who you don’t like. I'm not attacking Drake or Akademiks, I’m attacking these systems that they’re taking advantage of and harming people withz
If anybody has any questions about this I will answer them to the best of my ability. 

Listening to this pod discussion of about India arie( thanks spelling police) and her opinion on spend that, I agree with her opinion like mark and Mona hearing ice parks and Joe defend this song and types of songs they sound ignorant but let me give more context…

I’m 37 been listening to the pod for over 10 years I too used to feel just like them 10 years ago but now I’m older maturing and can see the effects of parts of the culture and it’s not to deny or boycott the music as much as just being real about the effects and ease up on the promotion of certain songs… i do believe my time with the pod is winding down because of the ignorance and bubble the strip club bros try to pretend is normal make common the degeneracy cool but with joes take on Pooh shiesty it’s just surprising to hear him act like music plays no part in the culture….maybe I’m becoming sensitive but I would like to think it’s growing not to boycott just acknowledging a song like this does have influence in the youth

Ice you could’ve spiced up that beach story a lil bit while still being honest. I feel like Joe was testing you by pressing the issue, he knew he gave you the easy alley and ya blew it. Bruh no Ish there, this is when you’re supposed to shine and show you belong and not stealing money.

I saw a video (wish I had saved it so I could give dude credit) and the guy was talking about post Malone and Sabrina carpenter having to cancel shows that weren’t selling..his point was “they make music for nobody” or something like..basically their music plays all day and night at planet fitness and target…so their streaming numbers going crazy..but people aren’t choosing to listen to them so their actual fandom doesn’t match their streaming..combine that with inflation and their shows not selling..it’s not exactly the same but I think lizzo kind of fits into that category too