March 7, 2023 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:04:00
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. | ||
| Nice to meet you, man. | ||
|
unidentified
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Hey, thanks a lot, man. | |
| I appreciate what you do. | ||
| What you do is a very valuable service. | ||
| Because you go so deep on some of these scammers. | ||
| It's like, it's so important. | ||
| Because there's so many people that just, they don't really understand what's going, like the FTX thing, for example, the best one. | ||
| Because I was so in the dark about this thing. | ||
| I was like, what is happening? | ||
| Like, what are they doing? | ||
| Try to break it down for us. | ||
| Like, first of all, It's a crypto exchange, right? | ||
| So how does that work? | ||
| So the first question is, when you learn about crypto, you're like, it's this magic internet money. | ||
| Magic. | ||
| How do you get some of that? | ||
| How do you get some of that magic internet money? | ||
| Well, you have to go somewhere to buy it. | ||
| And so it's a crypto exchange is where you kind of go. | ||
| ago, you put your fiat on your dollars or whatever, euros or whatever, and you put it into this crypto exchange. | ||
| They have a bank and they work with that bank. | ||
| Then they exchange that money for some type of crypto token. | ||
| There's a lot of different tokens out there. | ||
| And explain tokens because I don't understand tokens. | ||
| I know there's crypto and there's tokens. | ||
| Like, what is the difference between the two? | ||
| Yeah, tokens like is the individual, you can think of currency, right? | ||
| So it's like the individual, so Bitcoin is, you have Bitcoin, then you have, it's one of the cryptocurrencies, you have Ethereum, you have Dogecoin, you have SafeMoon, you have FTT, which is what FTX was using as their native token. | ||
| So a lot of these guys, you'll start a crypto exchange, and then you'll launch your own token that people can invest in, sort of like they're investing almost in your crypto exchange. | ||
| And so that was actually one of the ways that FTX really perpetuated their fraud. | ||
| I can break it down. | ||
| How much do you know about the FTX situation? | ||
| Let's break it down for people that don't know about it. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| So FTX was this crypto exchange located out in the Bahamas, which is a great place to put your— Why do they do it in the Bahamas? | ||
| Because it's unregulated. | ||
| So the problem with doing stuff in the United States or, you know, something like Europe or something like that is you are subject to all these regulations which require you to be a little more careful. | ||
| Oh, those are pesky. | ||
| Yeah, they're annoying. | ||
| We don't need that. | ||
| The famous example is Coinbase is in America, and they have to file all these forms. | ||
| They're a regulated entity. | ||
| They're a publicly traded company, so they have to report everything. | ||
| So if you're offshore, you can kind of not do any of that. | ||
| You can play fast and loose. | ||
| And for some people, they think that's better. | ||
| They can offer, let's say, 100x leverage. | ||
| You have a dollar. | ||
| I'll let you trade with $100. | ||
| And that's gonna be like one reason you come to my offshore exchanges. | ||
| I can offer you more leverage than the guys who are like, you know, Coinbase or something like that. | ||
| So FTX launches, let's start with who Sam Bankman-Fried is. | ||
| He's kind of at the center of all of this. | ||
| Sam Bankman-Fried is this guy who comes, he's the son of two Harvard lawyers. | ||
| Then he comes up, prep school. | ||
| He's kind of like built for success, right? | ||
| He goes to MIT, goes to Jane Street as this quantitative trader. | ||
| And then he goes into the crypto space and he launches FTX. He's very young, right? | ||
| How old is he? | ||
| I think he is young. | ||
| Maybe you can look that up, Jamie. | ||
| 31. He launches Alameda Research First, which is just like this trading firm, which basically the idea here is, we have some ideas, we're gonna raise a little bit of money, and we're gonna do these trades that are profitable in crypto. | ||
| So the way he first made his money, Was he did something where he bought Bitcoin in the US and he sold it on these Japanese exchanges where it was worth more. | ||
| So he was arbitraging this difference in prices. | ||
| And then after he made his money that way, he launches FTX in 2019. And that's a crypto platform where, honestly, you can make a lot more money than just with a trading firm. | ||
| So FTX quickly skyrockets in popularity. | ||
| They bring on people like Tom Brady to promote it. | ||
| Larry David in the Super Bowl. | ||
| They kind of get buy-in from all these big sort of names and also reputable people like BlackRock, Sequoia Capital. | ||
| They all invest in this guy. | ||
| Kevin O'Leary famously promoted it for like $18 million. | ||
| They gave him $18 million to promote it? | ||
| He says he lost it on the platform. | ||
| He says the 18 million was on FTX or whatever, and he never got a dollar out of it. | ||
| But that was what the deal was for. | ||
| So they were paying everybody to promote this FTX crypto exchange. | ||
| And the idea was, is this is the next big thing, right? | ||
| And this is where you're going to make money. | ||
| There was a lot of fear of missing out or FOMO in the markets at the time. | ||
| You know, everyone thought, oh, cryptos, you have to get in now, right? | ||
| Because if you get in now, you're going to make some money. | ||
| And so people invested in FTX thinking that this is going to be a safe platform. | ||
| This kid is smarter than everyone else. | ||
| He's the son of Harvard lawyers. | ||
| We just sort of can't lose. | ||
| And nobody paid attention to some of the red flags that were going on until ultimately it was too late. | ||
| It turns out he was pilfering FTX, the customer deposits, and was using it in Alameda Research, which was his trading firm, to try to make extra money, and he lost it. | ||
| And so this is all because it's unregulated. | ||
| Like if he was doing this, like Coinbase can't do this. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| Yeah, Coinbase is much more heavily scrutinized. | ||
| They actually have to file with the SEC. They have to say what they have, where they're putting their money. | ||
| They're subject to more regulation about like how they take care of customer deposits. | ||
| One of the big things with FTX was they told people, hey, you put your money with us. | ||
| We're not going to touch it. | ||
| We're not going to move it. | ||
| That's what FTX said in their terms of service. | ||
| So one of the really... | ||
| Big problems was they actually weren't doing that, but nobody knew because nobody had a look at their books. | ||
| Like, it was very opaque. | ||
| Nobody knew what was going on behind the scenes. | ||
| So even though they said, like, we're not going to touch your money, as soon as you deposited Bitcoin, I mean, I talked to some of the insiders at Alameda. | ||
| They said they had this backdoor system to where they could see you, Joe, deposit a Bitcoin on FTX. They could grab that Bitcoin and start trading with it immediately. | ||
| Even though they were never supposed to be able to touch your money, obviously. | ||
| That was the whole point. | ||
| It's like, you deposit with us. | ||
| We're not going to do anything with your money. | ||
| It's your money. | ||
| It's almost like a bank. | ||
| You deposit with a bank. | ||
| Your bank isn't supposed to go ahead and take your money and go start trading with it unless, obviously, we have FDIC insurance, stuff like that. | ||
| But they didn't have that. | ||
| They just take your money, go trade with it, and that's where the disaster started. | ||
| I really enjoyed you catching him on Twitter spaces. | ||
| I really enjoyed that. | ||
| I listened to the whole thing. | ||
| Because before that, you have this guy who's this... | ||
| You know, whiz kid, who you listen to him talk. | ||
| He has an answer for everything. | ||
| He's so articulate. | ||
| He's so knowledgeable. | ||
| Like, I listened to previous interviews before he got busted. | ||
| And then when you have him on, there's a lot of... | ||
| I wasn't aware. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| I'm not aware of that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There was all this... | ||
| Hemming and hawing and a lot of ums and ahs and and you just kept on him. | ||
| It was amazing that he first of all was amazing that He felt like he could do something like that. | ||
| Like why would he publicly communicate? | ||
| This is one of the This is why it's so interesting to me to look at fraud like this is why it fascinates me as well as I think it's an important thing to expose but like I'm interested in the characters Who perpetuate fraud because they're such interesting psychological case studies. | ||
| Sam Bankman Freed, you could probably write a whole book about the fact that this guy, he got away with lying so long and perpetuating this image of himself as this generous billionaire. | ||
| You know, he's sort of the next Warren Buffett that when everything goes wrong, he thinks he can reestablish control because he's so smart. | ||
| He is such a good liar that he's like, I can just lie my way out of it. | ||
| So I think that's why he ultimately talked. | ||
| His idea was If I lied my way into it, I can sort of lie my way out of it. | ||
| And this is what he did. | ||
| Prior to this, I'd interviewed him twice before, and I had kind of gotten hamstrung with, like, you know, he's just so good at dodging stuff. | ||
| Did you interview him before the scandal? | ||
| No, not before the scandal. | ||
| So it's like as it was going down. | ||
| As it was going down, he goes on all these Twitter spaces. | ||
| He doesn't want to—he's doing interviews with everybody. | ||
| I ask him. | ||
| And he doesn't want to talk to me. | ||
| So but he's going on these Twitter spaces. | ||
| So I keep I like was tracking when he'd go on a Twitter space and I would contact the people ahead of time. | ||
| I said, hey, at the end, when you're like ready for this thing to go down, because I know as soon as I get on, it's going to end pretty quickly after I said, let me on. | ||
| Let me ask him some real hard questions. | ||
| Because all these guys are like, Sam, you know, we appreciate your transparency. | ||
| Kind of kissing up a little bit. | ||
| But I was just like, somebody has to ask him some real questions. | ||
| So I had two prior little Twitter space interactions with him. | ||
| And he kept getting away with the fact that he blamed all the wrongdoing of FTX on Alameda Research. | ||
| And he said, I don't control Alameda Research. | ||
| Even though he was the owner, he's no longer the CEO as of 2020. He hands it to this... | ||
| A girl he actually had a relationship with, Caroline Ellison, right? | ||
| And she supposedly controlled it. | ||
| He said, she did everything. | ||
| I don't have access to the book. | ||
| Like, I basically knew nothing. | ||
| So anytime you'd call him out on an issue, you'd say, where's the money? | ||
| He goes, well, it's... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| It's Alameda Research. | ||
| Ask Alameda. | ||
| So by the third interview, I'd studied him and I said, okay, how do we get down to... | ||
| FTX's responsibility in this whole thing. | ||
| And I kept coming back to, it was the terms of service that said, you cannot move, like when I deposit with you, you're not going to touch my money. | ||
| And I said, Sam, if that's true, where's the money of all these people? | ||
| There's no Ethereum left. | ||
| There's no Bitcoin left. | ||
| You don't have the real tokens anymore. | ||
| You just have your sort of nonsense FTT tokens, the tokens you invented. | ||
| And he said, oh, well, you know, there were some margin trading accounts. | ||
| And I'm like, no, but there were people who didn't trade with margin. | ||
| There are people who just put their money with you. | ||
| And all they wanted was they wanted to store some Bitcoin with Tom Brady. | ||
| They wanted to be alongside Tom Brady. | ||
| So he's like, well, you know, there was fungibility between wallets. | ||
| And it's like, well, what's fungibility mean? | ||
| It means... | ||
| Whether you were a guy withdrawing who was this degenerate day trader, or you were a grandma who just put one Bitcoin on there, or more likely the grandson, he treated all the accounts the same. | ||
| So when everyone came running for the money, they just withdrew until nothing was left. | ||
| And ultimately, because they had lost billions of dollars, it left billions of dollars in credit claims, basically. | ||
| They didn't have the money. | ||
| And so now it's trying to be sorted out by the guy who literally unraveled Enron. | ||
| And he says, this lawyer goes, it's worse than Enron. | ||
| I watched the CEO, the new CEO, talk about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| About him trying to... | ||
| That's John Ray. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Trying to unravel it. | ||
| And it's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing that things with this amount of money can get this far sideways before anyone knows what's going on. | ||
| This is the problem with offshore accounts and stuff. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Actually, his whole technique of shifting the blame like onto Alameda and like, I don't control Alameda. | ||
| I've seen something very similar. | ||
| I'm investigating this Ponzi scheme that's offshore. | ||
| And like one of the first things the guy does is he controls it, but he renounces ownership. | ||
| He goes, oh, I'm passing it off to some sham director. | ||
| And he goes, I don't have anything to do. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Where's the money? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But he controls everything. | ||
| And so it's like this is the tactic of these offshore companies is... | ||
| Like, you put the right people in charge who are going to take the fall, you resign, and then you blame it on them later when everything goes wrong. | ||
| His problem, though, is Caroline Ellison flipped on him. | ||
| So she definitely flipped on him. | ||
| She was smart. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| She cooperated. | ||
| Her and, I believe, Gary Wang were big executives. | ||
| They're cooperating. | ||
| They pled guilty. | ||
| They're cooperating with the feds. | ||
| They did the smart thing, which is something like this happens. | ||
| You shut up. | ||
| You don't say anything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then you point at your boss. | ||
| I mean, that's basically what they did. | ||
| Oof. | ||
| Which they for sure did stuff wrong, too. | ||
| You do not get to that level and not know that things were wrong. | ||
| Well, reading her tweets about amphetamine use was pretty wild, too. | ||
| The whole scene was wild. | ||
| The fact that they were all living together and fucking each other in this giant penthouse, this $40 billion penthouse. | ||
| The things, it's insane. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| I almost wish it wasn't a scam. | ||
| I've said this before because I root for nerds to be that successful, that you're just completely living outside the norms of society, just fucking each other on amphetamines and making billions of dollars. | ||
| It sounds like a great story if it wasn't illegitimate. | ||
| Yeah, that's, I mean, ultimately, that's the problem. | ||
| Like, Sam was just hopped up on amphetamines playing League of Legends while on Investor Calls. | ||
| Like, at the time, that was seen as this charming, like, genius thing. | ||
| On calls. | ||
|
unidentified
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On calls! | |
| You could hear, even actually, okay, so this is funny. | ||
| They found his League of Legends account, and during some of the calls, after it was a fraud, you could hear him clicking in the background. | ||
|
unidentified
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Click, click, click, click, click. | |
| He's playing League. | ||
| Like they tracked his account. | ||
| He's playing League while on calls about the failure of FTX. Wow. | ||
| Just imagine the arrogance. | ||
| Is that arrogance or is it just pure addiction? | ||
| I think, you know, those multiplayer games, those, you know, online role-playing games, that's what that is, right? | ||
| I think it's a, is it a MOBA? I used to play like a variant of League, so I know it's fun, but it's not like fun to the point. | ||
| Look, this guy's whole thing was like, I'm this effective altruist. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I'm this guy who's going to maximize good in the world. | ||
| And that was his reason for working all the time. | ||
| And that's the justification for it to be hopped upon amphetamines. | ||
| It's like maximize productivity, maximize human happiness. | ||
| You can't do that and then say, oops, I played a little too much of my video games and lost billions of dollars. | ||
| Like, this doesn't fly. | ||
| Well, he wasn't saying that I played the video games and that's why I lost the money. | ||
| But after the fact, he's still playing video games and you're like, can you have the decency to get off the video game and talk to people? | ||
| So bizarre. | ||
| It's just so bizarre that so many people got duped. | ||
| And I felt the same way about Bernie Madoff. | ||
| You know, I'm not a financially aware person. | ||
| I'm not into the market. | ||
| I don't follow these things. | ||
| So when I see something like that go down, I'm like, how did he get Steven Spielberg? | ||
| You know, how does someone like a Bernie Madoff or Sam Bankman-Fried, how does he... | ||
| Get these people to do this. | ||
| And in the FTX case, how much of it was getting celebrities to endorse the platform? | ||
| It's huge. | ||
| This is what I wanted to say. | ||
| Like, the more I study this stuff, and you start to have repeat occurrences, like I just cover stuff all the time, and you see echoes of the same thing. | ||
| I just had somebody just a couple days ago, I was interviewing for this news scheme we're looking at, and he said, you know, I never understood how Bernie Madoff got people, because it seems so preposterous. | ||
| And then I fell for something very similar. | ||
| And what I notice with all of these things, the thread is you know it's kind of too good to be true, but the social proof is overwhelming and it overwhelms your kind of like alarm bells. | ||
| So the social proof is a combination of things. | ||
| So first of all, it's like it's this guy who drives a Toyota. | ||
| So you go like, well, why does he need to scam me if he's driving a Toyota, right? | ||
| Then it's like, which Sam Bankman-Fried did. | ||
| Then it's like, okay, Tom Brady backs him. | ||
| Well, Tom Brady's got to have some guys who are looking into this. | ||
| And then it's like, well, BlackRock backed him. | ||
| Well, BlackRock definitely has some guys who looked into it. | ||
| It's Sequoia Capital. | ||
| They said he might be one of the first trillionaires or whatever. | ||
| He's such a great entrepreneur. | ||
| They think he's such a genius. | ||
| Actually, it might have been one of the A1Z guys. | ||
| I'm blanking on the name right now. | ||
| A1Z? What is that? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm blanking on it. | ||
| It's this famous... | ||
| I've got to remember it right after I get out of here. | ||
| It's one of the famous investment funds. | ||
| They invested in a bunch of NFT projects. | ||
| Mark Andreessen, I think, is the guy who runs it? | ||
|
unidentified
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Hmm. | |
| Jamie's looking it up. | ||
| I thought I knew it off the top of my head, and now I don't want to say the wrong one. | ||
| A16Z. A1Z. A16Z. It was one of those, Sequoia A16Z. One of them wrote this glowing review of Sam basically saying he's going to be one of the first trillionaires. | ||
| So all these guys basically, a lot of these people backed Sam with the highest endorsements. | ||
| And so if you're just an average person, you're thinking... | ||
| How much more due diligence can I do than all these other guys? | ||
| All these other guys buy into him. | ||
| And then they themselves are kind of also looking at each other, being like, well, that guy did it. | ||
| It's the hottest deal around, right? | ||
| Kevin O'Leary's in. | ||
| So you kind of think you're swimming safely with other savvy investors. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And that's what ultimately gets you to buy in. | ||
| Bernie Madoff is very similar. | ||
| I mean, he was, you know, really well regarded in Wall Street. | ||
| So when people invested with him, they didn't they knew the like returns were insane. | ||
| But it wasn't like he was some random fly by night guy. | ||
| He was well-respected in the Wall Street space. | ||
| People thought he might take over the SEC after the current person had stepped down. | ||
| They thought he was going to take it over. | ||
| He's one of the leaders at the NASDAQ. I mean, he was one of the go-to guys. | ||
| And so you thought, well, I invest with Bernie. | ||
| I can't lose. | ||
| It's like almost betting on the house. | ||
| The house always wins, right? | ||
| So when FTX was taking off, it just seemed like everyone who was a someone was backing him. | ||
| So then it was okay. | ||
| And then I think a lot of these people deferred to their other friends. | ||
| They're all saying it's okay. | ||
| Let me put money in. | ||
| And it's just a huge case study that just because other people fall for something doesn't mean you're safe. | ||
| Like, you have to do... | ||
| I hate to say do your own research because that's such an overused, like, scammy phrase. | ||
| It's actually such, like, a phrase that, you know, it's almost useless. | ||
| Chemtrails. | ||
| Let me say this. | ||
| If it's too good to be true, if they're offering market returns that you want to believe in, you go, man, I want to believe this is real. | ||
| Don't invest. | ||
| Like, that's a bad idea. | ||
| People were calling bullshit, though. | ||
| Just like they were calling... | ||
| There was a few people that were wary that were calling bullshit on Bernie Madoff, and there was a few people that were standing out and saying, none of this makes sense. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And who were those people? | ||
| So there were a few people. | ||
| There was a Matt Levine interview with Sam Bankman Free. | ||
| He didn't call him a fraud outright, but he's like, hey, it seems like you're in the Ponzi business and business is good. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| And what did he say to that? | ||
| He's like, well, you know, like think of it like a box. | ||
| And, you know, you tell a bunch of investors, you know, hey, if you put money in this box, we can get some money out. | ||
| We can give you this yield. | ||
| He starts to explain like this thing that sounds exactly like a Ponzi scheme. | ||
| And so ultimately, Matt Levine's like, yeah, this doesn't really make a lot of sense. | ||
| But again, it stopped short of this is a fraud because, you know, no one knew. | ||
| There's a bunch of backing. | ||
| So I made a video at the time being like this crypto CEO just describes a Ponzi scheme. | ||
| And that video has aged so well because it's like people like... | ||
| It was all true. | ||
| But people were outright calling it a fraud, like Mark Cohodes. | ||
| He's a famous short seller. | ||
| He was calling that a fraud early. | ||
| I have a buddy of mine. | ||
| He goes by Dirty Bubble Media on Twitter. | ||
| He's like one of the anon at Twitter accounts. | ||
| He was calling it a fraud. | ||
| You know, there were things that were coming out, like questions about, you know, okay, they say they have all this money, where? | ||
| Where on chain is it? | ||
| So like the blockchain, everything's publicly, you can see it, right? | ||
| It's all at some address. | ||
| And so people were asking like, where's, you say you have all this Bitcoin, where's the Bitcoin? | ||
| You say you have all this Ethereum, where's the Ethereum? | ||
| And why is so much of your balance sheet made up of your own tokens? | ||
| It's a big question. | ||
| So one of the things that FTX had done, and a lot of companies were doing at the time, but FTX was sort of the worst offender, is let's say I give you a loan, Joe. | ||
| So an unsecured loan would be I give you a million dollars and I don't ask for anything. | ||
| So if you default on that loan, I'm out a million. | ||
| Another way is I ask for, okay, I'll take some equity in the studio if something goes wrong, right? | ||
| So I cover my butt if you default on it. | ||
| Now, this is what was going on in crypto. | ||
| They're called collateralized loans. | ||
| But what FTX was doing was they were saying, hey, we'll take a million dollars from you, but instead of giving you collateral dollars or some asset, we'll give you FTT tokens, which is their own invented coin. | ||
| And that should have value if anything goes wrong. | ||
| And people were accepting that as value. | ||
| But the problem is... | ||
| The exact moment FTX can't pay you back is the exact moment that FTT becomes worthless. | ||
| So you think you have all this collateral, you think you have this backstop because on the books it's worth, you know, X dollars. | ||
| Let's say it's like worth five dollars a coin. | ||
| But what you're not realizing is the real risk is when FTX can't pay you back, they probably can't pay anyone back. | ||
| Everyone loses confidence. | ||
| Everyone sells their FTT tokens. | ||
| No one wants to buy it. | ||
| It's worth nothing. | ||
| So how did this all fall apart? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| So it's really interesting because it was like a battle between FTX and one of their competitors, Binance. | ||
| So the owner of Binance is, I think it's Chengpeng Zhao. | ||
| He goes by CZ on Twitter. | ||
| I probably butchered his name. | ||
| But he was actually originally sort of an ally of Sam. | ||
| So he invested in FTX early on, put $100 million in, and eventually got paid out like $2 billion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Some of it was in this FTT token, though. | ||
| So they have a bunch of FTT, right? | ||
| And so it's like November was when all this stuff went down. | ||
| And a report comes out from Coindesk where it shows FTX's balance sheet. | ||
| It shows actually what tokens they have. | ||
| You know, for one of the first times, it was kind of really everyone got to look at it all at once in one place. | ||
| And people notice, like, wait a second. | ||
| A lot of their assets are just their own tokens. | ||
| Like they had a CRM token, which they control most of, FTT. So it looks like, if you just look at their assets, it looks like they're covering their liabilities. | ||
| They owe customers 10 billion. | ||
| Looks like they have 10 billion. | ||
| But like most of this, 10 billion is just their own tokens. | ||
| CZ takes this opportunity to kind of spread some sort of information about that. | ||
| He says, hey, we're actually going to sell most of our FTT that we got from that deal. | ||
| And we're going to sell it. | ||
| We don't know what's going on there. | ||
| And all of a sudden, it starts this firestorm because people are like, there was already all this worry in the past. | ||
| That summer, there had been a bunch of companies that collapsed. | ||
| And people had never thought FTX. It was kind of the first time anyone thought FTX could... | ||
| Maybe not have the money. | ||
| So CZ says, hey, maybe they don't have the money. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
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I'm just going to sell like $2 billion worth. | |
| But he knew what he was doing. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| He's a shark. | ||
| He's a shark. | ||
| He knows what he's doing. | ||
| What was the conflict between the two of them that led him to do that? | ||
| The conflict was—it's a great question. | ||
| The conflict was ultimately that Sam was trying to get some regulations passed and he knew every all the crypto people were trying to control regulations to favor their individual business situation. | ||
| And so CZ felt like he was being cut out in Washington. | ||
| And I think there was like a tweet from Sam saying like, oh, like I'll see you the next time you're in Washington or something like that. | ||
| But like it was kind of a dig because he knows CZ can't go to Washington like he's a He'd be afraid of being indicted. | ||
| I don't really understand why he can't go, but he can't go to America. | ||
| So Sam was meeting with regulators. | ||
| CZ felt cut out, like he was basically going to get a bad deal with regulators. | ||
| Sam was working really closely with regulators to try to get regulations passed. | ||
| And CZ felt like he was cut out. | ||
| So that stirred up this battle between them. | ||
| And ultimately, Sam goes, oh, you won our battle. | ||
| And people were like, you know, is it a battle when you lose billions of dollars of customer money? | ||
| Like, well, how can you view this as a battle? | ||
| But he viewed it as like, we're sparring partners. | ||
| Like, and you won this round, or you won the war. | ||
| Because he thinks this is going to go on forever. | ||
| Initially. | ||
| He thought he was going to be able to figure out a way to pull all the company's assets together and make everybody sound and repay everyone and go back to making money again. | ||
| I don't think he thought he would repay everyone, but everyone thought like, oh, we'll just enter Chapter 11 bankruptcy. | ||
| We'll restructure the company. | ||
| We'll reopen. | ||
| We'll just turn all the debt into new FTT tokens and pay everybody out. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, that's what he thought? | |
| He's on amphetamines, right? | ||
| So he can't be thinking totally clearly and probably overly confident. | ||
| Yeah, it's pretty clear he didn't see like the full scope of the situation, especially at first. | ||
| It seemed like he thought, you know, he was like saying FTX US was fine. | ||
| And then FTX US went bankrupt and he's the one who put it into bankruptcy and then he's telling everyone, oh, no, no, the money is actually still there. | ||
| I mean he was constantly giving a conflicting narrative of what was going on. | ||
| Now he's still like trying to say he did nothing wrong. | ||
| He maintains he's innocent. | ||
| And right now actually the big like kind of scandal now is they're finding a bunch of campaign finance violations because he was trying to influence politics, US politics. | ||
| I mean it's insane how deep FTX's influence went from the Bahamas reaching into the United States while technically not really being regulated by the United States. | ||
| Yeah, they were the number two donor to the Democratic Party. | ||
| That's right, but... | ||
| Also to the Republicans. | ||
| This is what's wild. | ||
| So, Sam knew publicly... | ||
| In our current American climate, it's kind of like, okay, it's a little bit chic to be donating to Democrats. | ||
| You can do that without too much negative press. | ||
| But if I'm the number three donor to the Republican Party, that's going to be a bad look. | ||
| So he decides to donate dark to Republicans. | ||
| And part of the accusation is he knowingly did this through one of his executives, Ryan Salami or something? | ||
| I think that's his last name. | ||
| Salami. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just don't know how to pronounce it. | ||
| But he was like, yeah, the number three donor to the Republican Party. | ||
| But it was all orchestrated through Sam. | ||
| Sam wanted to basically influence politics by just donating, donating, donating. | ||
| And the idea is you donate to both sides, you can never lose, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you have your hands in both pockets. | ||
| But publicly, he's just like, he's donating to Democrats because he says, oh, I'm like this, like, you know, I care about all these issues. | ||
| But it's like even more cynical than just buying one party is buying both lying about it so that you can get all the good press of like caring about all these social issues while also not caring at all. | ||
| And ultimately, one of the ways, like, even some of the candidates they donated to were through, like, a third employee we didn't even know about. | ||
| And they were, like, donating through them for, like, all these LGBTQ plus causes. | ||
| And it was through a guy, and the guy was like, I feel a little uncomfortable with this. | ||
| And he said, well, we don't have anyone trustworthy at FTX. We can donate through who's gay. | ||
| So, like, can you do this? | ||
| So someone had to be gay to do it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like... | |
| No. | ||
| Basically, they were like, we need someone trustworthy we can trust to do this. | ||
| So, hey, you're going to be the guy. | ||
| Like, we're just going to do a few transactions through your name. | ||
| That just came out in a press release. | ||
| It's the new charges. | ||
| He was basically like a – they call them straw donors because it's like if I give money to you to give money to a politician on my behalf, you're a straw donor. | ||
| You're not really a donor. | ||
| So Alameda was using customer funds to pay off politicians in order to try to get favorable regulation for – I guess, offshore crypto exchanges, right? | ||
| And so these campaign finance, these violations, what are the regulations in terms of what you're allowed to do and donate and how did he violate them? | ||
| So I think the big violation was you're not supposed to – like if you're Alameda Research and you're funneling money through a personal investor, that I think is the problem. | ||
| Actually, campaign finance laws I've heard are pretty weak. | ||
| I forget the name of the law, but it was passed in like the early 2000s, 2010s maybe. | ||
| Where it actually became very easy to donate Dark, where it's like you can donate through super PACs, political action committees, and you can donate as much as you want and you don't have to be – your name has to appear nowhere. | ||
| And so that's actually what he said in one of the interviews. | ||
| He goes, no one believes me when I said I donated Dark because no one believes anyone would be like – everyone wants the credit for donating. | ||
| No one believes that I just do it on the sly. | ||
| And that's ultimately what he was doing. | ||
| But it also looks like he was donating through some of his executives. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing was shady all the way down. | ||
| So the person's not named in the report who is donating to Democrats. | ||
| We know the one donating to Republicans was Ryan Salami. | ||
| That person eventually said, well, hey, can we restructure all this money that went through me like a loan so that we can say that I took a loan out and I was donating so we didn't violate any laws? | ||
| They never ended up doing that. | ||
| But like it was very clear the internal conversations were they knew they were committing fraud. | ||
| They knew they were doing things wrong. | ||
| And this idea was, well, no one's going to catch us, right? | ||
| Nobody's ultimately going to find out what we're doing here. | ||
| How many more of these are out there in the world? | ||
| As big as FTX? We don't know. | ||
| I mean, there's only a few that are bigger, like there's Binance. | ||
| Very opaque company. | ||
| We don't exactly know. | ||
| And what has happened to Binance since FTX went down? | ||
| Because it seems like they received additional scrutiny, right? | ||
| Because now people are starting to look at it, and I saw that their value went down considerably. | ||
| Yeah, Elizabeth Warren wrote a letter to them. | ||
| They're being looked at much more closely. | ||
| I mean, ultimately, all of these things are so opaque in the sense that you can know their assets. | ||
| So it's like a big thing recently in crypto. | ||
| They'll say, hey, we're going to show you proof of reserves. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| They mean, we'll show you on-chain all our assets. | ||
| You can check yourself. | ||
| Like, I have a billion dollars in USDC. Well, that's great. | ||
| But it doesn't matter if I have a billion dollars in crypto, Bitcoin, whatever, if I owe two billion dollars. | ||
| That's what ultimately matters is how much do you have on deposits that you owe out. | ||
| And so with Binance, we don't really know. | ||
| The only one we have a little bit more of a look into is Coinbase. | ||
| It seems like they're legitimate. | ||
| So much of the problem with crypto is we don't know how much of this stuff is money laundering. | ||
| We don't know how much of this stuff is outright the proceeds of criminals. | ||
| I mean, we know that these criminals do launder their money through a lot of these crypto exchanges, through mixers. | ||
| It's just sort of this big mess right now, and we're waiting for regulators to figure it out. | ||
| Finally, regulators have stepped on the scene, but... | ||
| You know, right now it's just this kind of wild, wild west of you're just having to trust these shady offshore entities that they're telling the truth. | ||
| Binance says they're fine. | ||
| They show proof of reserves, but what are their liabilities? | ||
| You know, it's hard to know. | ||
| So people really just take you at face value and they have to trust that like, oh, other people are invested, so I guess I'll jump in too. | ||
| And that's why the celebrities are important. | ||
| And that's why the connection to BlackRock is important. | ||
| Huge part, yes. | ||
| Because they're the legitimacy that says, hey, I too am safe because Tom Brady's got his money there. | ||
| So the lure is like how Bitcoin used to be worth very little. | ||
| And then one time, what was the high of Bitcoin? | ||
| It was like $70,000 or something like that? | ||
| $60,000. | ||
| So that's the lure. | ||
| The lure is you buy in for pennies and one day you're insanely rich. | ||
| I'm sure you know about that one guy who lost a hard drive and who's paying people to go through a landfill to try to find his hard drive because there's billions of dollars worth of Bitcoin on that hard drive. | ||
| Yeah, people lose their crypto keys all the time. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| It's kind of an interesting idea where you go, I'm going to get in before everyone else. | ||
| But a lot of people found out about crypto at the same time the mainstream media everyone else did. | ||
| So by the time they're actually investing... | ||
| It's too late. | ||
| It's too late. | ||
| I think the most fair case you could make about crypto is... | ||
| Sometimes national currencies aren't a great idea and you want an alternative. | ||
| So like look at the Turkish lira, right? | ||
| The inflation rate I think is like 75% or something like that. | ||
| Like it's like it's an unimaginable. | ||
| It's just out of control inflation. | ||
| And if you hold on to your Turkish lira, you're in for a bad time because every day it's getting less valuable. | ||
| So the question is, What do you do if you're in that country making money? | ||
| If you want to store your money somewhere else, how do you store it? | ||
| So there's this idea of like these alternative currencies that are kind of interesting. | ||
| And then there's some arguments that like, hey, if you're someone like me, I have two employees and both of them are overseas. | ||
| Like one of them's in London, one of them's in Ukraine. | ||
| And so for me, I have to pay them and I have to do this wire transfer and it's kind of expensive to do these – like you pay all these fees for wire transfers. | ||
| So the idea is like, okay, well, if you have crypto, those wire fees can go down and instead of taking maybe a day or something, it will take like five minutes or three minutes. | ||
| So I don't want to give off the idea that like there's nothing here. | ||
| But the problem is, is that with the lack of regulation and the ability to send peer to peer, which means like you and I can just send money to each other directly, no middleman. | ||
| There's also a really huge opportunity for fraud, scams and basically like, you know, shell shell games where you're hiding the money. | ||
| You're saying, oh, invest in this. | ||
| This is going to become valuable later, but you actually own a bunch of that token. | ||
| Then you sell it off, and then the price plummets. | ||
| So you thought you had a bunch of money, but actually it's worth nothing. | ||
| There's all these new scams that have emerged as a result of people getting interested in this idea of an alternative money system. | ||
| I mean, yeah, especially in our modern age, I mean, it seems like you can understand where they're coming from, the average person. | ||
| They're like, look, I've been screwed by the banks. | ||
| Every time the government's printing a bunch of money, where do I go? | ||
| Right? | ||
| You can understand the appeal, but it's just like you went from the... | ||
| You know, the arms of one huckster to another. | ||
| It's almost to something worse. | ||
| There are reasons that our banks have a bunch of anti-money laundering laws. | ||
| There's a reason that they have all sorts of finance laws. | ||
| It's not for their safety. | ||
| It's for your safety. | ||
| I mean, it's like they need to fight. | ||
| One of the best ways to fight crime is at their wallets. | ||
| Take away their banking. | ||
| And crypto has just really revitalized that because now, if you're some criminal, laundering money has just never been easier. | ||
| Instead of taking $100,000 across the border or wiring it where it can get held up by a bank, now I can just send you $100,000. | ||
| It's going to take me five minutes. | ||
| So that's why when people kidnap people's data and things along those lines, they like to get paid through crypto. | ||
| Ransomware, yes. | ||
| Yes, 100%. | ||
| Before, it was like, okay, you need to use like Western Union or sort of one of these places where you can kind of send money without too much scrutiny. | ||
| But even Western Union has been kind of – they've been getting kind of pinched a little bit like, hey, you guys got to stop allowing all of this. | ||
| But in crypto, there's – because there's no middleman, because there's no one who controls like Bitcoin, like no one can say like no to a transaction – Now, it's like there's nothing to stop you from sending that money, and then you can take that money and you can send it to what's called a mixer, which is this fancy language for a way to anonymize your transaction. | ||
| You put $100,000 into this little mixer, and then it sends $100,000 out later, and nobody knows where that money came from. | ||
| What is a mixer? | ||
| How does it work? | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| So the most famous example is Tornado Cash. | ||
| They've recently been shut down. | ||
|
unidentified
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But the idea of putting your money into Tornado Cash. | |
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| Is there a better analogy for losing your house? | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, good lord. | ||
| The idea of these mixers was you'd anonymize your transactions. | ||
| So like, let's say I have Ethereum, one Ether into this mixer, right? | ||
| This pool of money. | ||
| A bunch of people are putting one Ethereum into this thing. | ||
| So all this money's going in. | ||
| And then you basically wait. | ||
| And as you're waiting, Ethereum's going out everywhere. | ||
| A bunch of people are withdrawing, right? | ||
| Because they're also taking their money out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| By the time you withdraw, there's nothing tying your Ethereum to your particular address to like this random external address because you send it to a different one. | ||
| So before, it's like if I send you a dollar and then you send that dollar on, we can easily trace that back to me, right? | ||
| It's like here, here. | ||
| But if I send a dollar to you and everyone's sending you a dollar and then you're sending a dollar to all these other wallets, then it's impossible to know which of those new wallets my dollar's from. | ||
| It's a crazy idea that these basically nerds in cryptography thought of, which is brilliant. | ||
| I mean it is brilliant because it is basically – it's almost impossible to trace. | ||
| But ultimately, the outcome of that is like, yeah, I encrypt all your data. | ||
| Joe, send me – I know you're the successful podcaster. | ||
| I want you to send me $10 million or your data is lost forever. | ||
| And you're like, call the police and you go, hey, track this guy. | ||
| And they're like, to what? | ||
| To a Bitcoin wallet? | ||
| To a Ethereum wallet? | ||
| What are we tracking here? | ||
| And then it goes to some mixer somewhere, and then we don't know where it goes after that. | ||
| So when Sam Bankman-Fried was working with regulators, when he was trying to impose regulations or encourage regulations, how could that have benefited him as opposed to Binance? | ||
| What could they have possibly done to make it easier or more profitable for him? | ||
| Why would he do that? | ||
| I'm not as familiar with the regulation side of things. | ||
| People were talking about that a lot. | ||
| What I know is everyone's always interested in pulling up the ladder after them and building the rule book around, like, hey, if you're from this certain jurisdiction that we're a part of, you're fine. | ||
| If you're not... | ||
| If you're from this one, you're not okay. | ||
| Or I might say, hey, CZ has connections to China. | ||
| Maybe that's a problem. | ||
| Or CZ has connections to here. | ||
| Maybe that's a big deal. | ||
| But I'm from the Bahamas, and I'm American, so that might be fine. | ||
| I mean, everyone's always interested in the regulations benefiting them. | ||
| The challenge now, though, is a lot of people had backed that bill, and Now that it was all a fraud, or the guy who basically pushed it was a fraud, now they're, like, trying to retool it, and it's, like, sort of what's left after the guy who kind of was spearheading this bill, like, was a fraud. | ||
| It's kind of tough. | ||
| I was actually randomly, like, some senator's office reached out to me, and they're like, what do you think about this? | ||
| And I was like, I don't know, man. | ||
| You guys have to... | ||
| This is y'all's thing to figure out. | ||
| Ultimately, y'all have to... | ||
| My feeling is offshore entities should not be—they're not subject to our rules. | ||
| How can you allow offshore—like, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| It's very strange. | ||
| And these offshore entities were also using, like, U.S. branches. | ||
| Like, there's FTX U.S., which was, like, more regulated but not really that regulated. | ||
| It's a little, it's a strange time, man, to be covering crypto because I tried to tell people for years that this scam problem, this fraud problem, was going to undo sort of everything. | ||
| Like if you don't root out the scams, you don't find ways to solve that, this is never going to work because if you're, the money system has to be safe. | ||
| Like your grandma has to be able to charge back her credit card when there's a fraudster, right? | ||
| Or this whole thing doesn't work. | ||
| You can't rely on people being technically savvy in order to make something work. | ||
| If it's going to go to the public, you have to solve all these issues. | ||
| And fortunately, we saw crypto kind of go mainstream before they had really taken that. | ||
| Maybe some of them were taking it seriously, but not enough. | ||
| So if... | ||
| FTX didn't encourage regulation and CZ didn't get upset at that and sell off all his tokens. | ||
| Would they be still solvent today or still in operation today? | ||
| Would they not crash or was this inevitable? | ||
| It was inevitable. | ||
| So something to understand. | ||
| FTX was insolvent long before it was realized that they were insolvent. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, that's the issue. | ||
| FTX's problem was not CZ. Ultimately, he's kind of the guy who pushed over the house made on sticks or something. | ||
| The problem was the foundation was wrong from the beginning. | ||
| If you don't have enough deposits to cover withdrawals, you just don't have the money, right? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Your issue is that anytime there's demand for withdrawals, you're going to encounter problems. | ||
| So it was going to be inevitable anytime any story broke that showed that maybe they're not as healthy as they should be. | ||
| There would have been a run on the banks and people would have found out. | ||
| It's just like, when are they going to find out? | ||
| He happened to be the final straw, if that makes sense. | ||
| So someone would have figured it out and someone would have started dumping their coins. | ||
| Yeah, people already – I mean even leading up like CZ gets a lot of the credit for it but like already like a day before they kind of shut down, myself and some other people were saying like we think they're insolvent because we had taken a look at their numbers and we said there's no way they have the money for this. | ||
| They don't have the tokens. | ||
| So we were warning people, hey, this is probably insolvent. | ||
| Get your money out. | ||
| But CZ ultimately was the big – he was the most notorious and well-respected person in the space to where people thought, OK, well, if he's saying it – he's a guy who only says positive things about crypto because he's a crypto executive. | ||
| So if he's saying there might be problems, there's probably some problems. | ||
| But Binance hasn't had similar problems. | ||
| No, they've had a few runs and they've covered withdrawals. | ||
| I mean, so it's just the problem is a lot of it's a black box. | ||
| I mean, so it's like things are good for now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You can't look in. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't know. | ||
| That was the problem with FTX. | ||
| Like, they had hidden all their numbers. | ||
| Like, Sam had literally had a $10 billion account that he mislabeled with Alameda Research. | ||
| Mislabeled? | ||
| Yeah, he called it Fiat at FTX. But it was a $10 billion hole. | ||
| What do you mean by mislabeled? | ||
| Well, it was on a spreadsheet, Joe. | ||
| So he put it on a spreadsheet for their balance sheet, and he mislabeled the account Fiat at FTX. And so what prosecutors are now arguing is he knew, of course, what it was. | ||
| He deliberately obscured what that was to hide it from people who were trying to take a look at his books. | ||
| But... | ||
| It's just that's what I mean by black box. | ||
| You never know what games these guys are playing. | ||
| Like they say, oh, here's sort of like the rough estimate of our balances. | ||
| But oops, did I tell you about this $10 billion account? | ||
| Like I forgot. | ||
| It's so silly. | ||
| You find out like there were just no adults in that room and like the few adults that there were were like, you know, they had like a criminal lawyer. | ||
| Well, anyway, I don't think he's actually been convicted of anything. | ||
| I shouldn't say that. | ||
| They had this guy, Dan Friedberg. | ||
| Shady, shady. | ||
| Allegedly shady. | ||
| Dan Friedberg. | ||
| No, he's definitely shady. | ||
| I'll say that. | ||
| What was his... | ||
| I remember, but what was his... | ||
| His whole thing was he did this thing with Ultimate Bet. | ||
| So he was one of the lawyers. | ||
| So there's this poker site called Ultimate Bet. | ||
| And he got caught in this scandal where they had enabled this thing called God Mode on Ultimate Bet, where the... | ||
| The CEO could see everybody's hands and play on the site, seeing everybody's hands. | ||
| So he just, he cleaned up on all his own, like, his own customers. | ||
| Just basically taking their money, like, oh, I know exactly when to fold, I know exactly when to bet. | ||
| So he had God Mode enabled and then they found out. | ||
| Somebody found out about this God Mode. | ||
| And so the lawyer's like, how do we basically cover this up? | ||
| Dan Friedberg's like, how do we – what do you want me to do? | ||
| And he's like, hey, just make this problem go away. | ||
| This is the CEO. Like, go blame it on somebody else. | ||
| Go blame it on some like third party that got access to our website. | ||
| Say it was like a glitch or something. | ||
| And so that that is the experience of the lawyer that FTX then hires is like being complicit on a private call, leaked private call, trying to cover up this God mode scam. | ||
| That is his background. | ||
| And so I asked, you know, Sam, I was like, you know, what does it say if this is your chief regulatory officer? | ||
| This guy who enabled God or who helped cover up God Mode. | ||
| And he's like, well, I don't want to comment on other people or it's just like... | ||
| Well, how does he skate on that? | ||
| Like, how does a guy like that not wind up getting indicted? | ||
| I ask myself that every day. | ||
| Is it a matter of time? | ||
| Or is it he's gotten away with it? | ||
| So many of these scams are like these issues of either regulators not having time, not having the resources, not having sort of like it's maybe not big enough. | ||
| You know... | ||
| They're good people, a lot of the people going after these guys, but it's like trying to catch everyone who's speeding. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's like people get away with it. | ||
| It's just there's too many people doing it. | ||
| You'll catch some people, but ultimately a lot of people will just basically skate by, even though by all rights they should have been caught. | ||
| In my view, what he did was criminal. | ||
| That's why he started. | ||
| But it hasn't been prosecuted or anything like that. | ||
| But he's on a leaked private call. | ||
| Everyone can go listen to it yourself. | ||
| It's just this shocking thing. | ||
| And I think that shows if you're running a shady empire, who's better than a shady lawyer to try to help you cover it up, right? | ||
| How did you get involved in what you do? | ||
| It's a weird thing. | ||
| So when did you start your YouTube channel? | ||
| So I started it a few years ago, 2018, 2019. And what was the first video? | ||
| I started as sort of like an interview show, nothing about scams. | ||
| I had a channel before it. | ||
| So I went to school for chemical engineering and hated it. | ||
| I was miserable. | ||
| I was like, I do not want my life to be earning 2% more of, you know, of a bottom line for Exxon Mobil or any chemical. | ||
| I just wasn't interested. | ||
| I was like, that's not my life. | ||
| So I always wanted to sort of, you know, have a voice. | ||
| And so I started a YouTube channel just doing random videos. | ||
| I hadn't really found my footing. | ||
| But throughout my entire life, I had kind of had this relationship with like hucksters and fraud. | ||
| Where, you know, when I was in high school, my mom got thyroid cancer, very treatable kind of cancer, and she's fine. | ||
| But at the time I watched her as she's like gets this diagnosis, gets swept up with all these hucksters who are telling her that the way to treat thyroid cancer is not surgery. | ||
| You can just treat it naturally. | ||
| Just don't worry about, hey, don't listen to the, you know, the doctors. | ||
| Don't listen to your general practitioner. | ||
| You can just treat it with, like, colloidal silver. | ||
| Or just put a bunch of garlic cloves in the pot. | ||
| I still remember her house, like, reeked. | ||
| She would put 60 cloves of garlic in, like, in a stew. | ||
| And she would drink it up because she thought that would make her better. | ||
| Ultimately... | ||
| My dad convinced her, like, you gotta get the surgery. | ||
| Like, this ain't gonna fly. | ||
| You have to, you know, ultimately get the surgery, which thankfully she did, and she's fine now. | ||
| She takes medication to replace the hormones her thyroid would generate. | ||
| But I saw my mom kind of get swept in this thing that I knew was nonsense, but it's sort of like hard. | ||
| You kind of have to disprove every single, like, there's always a new, like, health guy telling you that there's some new alternative discovery, whatever. | ||
| And I was like, this is kind of weird. | ||
| And I was like, why do they hate doctors so much? | ||
| And it always seems to like end up with a sales pitch. | ||
| It never was like, hey, let me just give you this free thing. | ||
| It was like always like there's something, there's a catch. | ||
| So I didn't really know what I was looking at at the time. | ||
| Then I go to college and all my friends get an MLMs, multi-level marketing, you know, sort of like, just like the like, hey, you're gonna get rich. | ||
|
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So I was always getting invited to these like, get rich seminars. | |
| And I'd go because it was like my friends like said, hey, we have to get somebody, you know, you want to go? | ||
| And I was like, Sure, I'll go. | ||
| I was kind of fascinated. | ||
| And you'd see these guys. | ||
| They're like, hey, don't work a nine-to-five job. | ||
| Be free like me. | ||
| And I'm like, you're here on a Sunday at 5 p.m. | ||
| How free are you, really? | ||
| You're just kind of grifting here. | ||
| But you'd see them in nice cars. | ||
| And so I was like, what am I looking at? | ||
| And then... | ||
| As I'm doing my YouTube show, I get fed a bunch of ads, like get-rich-quick schemes. | ||
| You've got a bunch of people flexing in their Lamborghinis, telling you, they're like 25 years old, telling you, you want to get rich by 25 or 22. I'll show you. | ||
| I made a million dollars. | ||
| I'm a millionaire by the time I'm 23 years old. | ||
| Just buy my course. | ||
| My course is $2,000. | ||
| Pay me $2,000. | ||
| I'll teach you to get rich quick. | ||
| So I saw this and it all that my experiences up to that point it kind of led me to like I want to say something why is nobody saying anything it just seemed like there was this you know these people pitching this stuff and nobody was talking about it so I made this random video just basically screaming about you know all these scammers online and unlike my previous work which kind of had resonated like it had gotten some reactions but not much what I noticed is the it resonated with people beyond the views If that makes sense. | ||
| Like, I was just like, there was something different about the reaction to it. | ||
| Like, and, you know, victims would reach out to me. | ||
| They'd be like, hey, I'd been scammed by this guy and I didn't realize what was going on. | ||
| And you showed me, you know, sort of like how the whole scheme worked. | ||
| So I decided to start pursuing it step by step. | ||
| And at first it was like just me discovering like, well, what is this? | ||
| Well, how does this scheme work? | ||
| Okay, so I buy this course and then what? | ||
| What are you saying in the terms of service that means that I can't sue you? | ||
| You have all these terms of service that basically say none of what I'm saying is true. | ||
| Like they say they can get you rich in the sales pitch and then in the terms of service they said results may vary. | ||
| What's that about? | ||
| I mean ultimately it's like and so I realized like oh there's this sophisticated way that they're preying on my psychology and they're setting it up with like I used to be broke like you. | ||
| Well that's a strategy. | ||
| A lot of these guys were never broke, right? | ||
| And it's just part of the story you have to tell to be really effective. | ||
| It's like, I used to be just like you, Joe, but then, you know, I found out that doing Amazon dropshipping is the way to make millions of dollars. | ||
| And, you know, I used to fail, but by these little tricks, I found out how to be successful. | ||
| And if you invest with me, I'll save you time. | ||
| You know, you could do it yourself, Joe. | ||
| You could do it. | ||
|
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But what? | |
| It's going to take you five years. | ||
| Get with me, and I'm going to shortcut your success. | ||
| Two months, you're going to be making five figures a month. | ||
| Ten months, maybe six figures a month. | ||
| And I've done it for people before. | ||
| That's the social proof. | ||
| I've shown people how to do this. | ||
| You can watch them. | ||
| These are real people, Joe. | ||
| You can be just like them. | ||
| And so I started watching this and I started seeing it and I'm like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. | ||
| I start covering it and then I start to get cease and desist letters. | ||
| They don't like that. | ||
| So they start to send me, they say, hey, you better shut up or we're going to sue you. | ||
| And I was like, okay. | ||
| I'm not going to stop making these videos. | ||
| I just kept making the videos. | ||
| And ultimately they never did. | ||
| But I start doing that. | ||
| And after I cover get-rich-quick schemes for a while, I start hearing about these tokens. | ||
| And they're like, hey, selling courses... | ||
| It's always the new grift. | ||
| You always have to find, because people figure it out. | ||
| They go like, oh, that actually doesn't work. | ||
| Dropshipping is not actually this incredible business that you thought it was that you're going to get rich easily. | ||
| So don't do that. | ||
| Go do crypto. | ||
| You've got to get into crypto now. | ||
| And then it became NFTs for a while. | ||
| But like, so I started, I eventually like pivoted into this crypto direction and learned all about that. | ||
| But it started just from a curiosity about scammers and I wanted somebody to say something because I was just like, why? | ||
| Why does this make some people tens of millions of dollars and nothing happens? | ||
| Why are some of these people making hundreds of millions of dollars? | ||
| People are miserable at the end of it and nothing happens. | ||
| And that was the start of my show. | ||
| So you start just doing interviews about what? | ||
| Like, you just, you didn't start doing this. | ||
| You started doing just like a normal interview show? | ||
| I was just doing a normal interview show with a few of my buddies. | ||
| And it just was kind of, I was just trying to find my way. | ||
| I was just trying to like, even before that I had done a show where I was like trying to break down these topics. | ||
| I was like researching addiction and I was just like trying to, you know, make some digestible piece of media around like addiction, right? | ||
| I always was interested in communicating complicated ideas in a digestible way. | ||
| I just felt like, man, there's so much cool science out there. | ||
| There's so many cool ideas out there. | ||
| How do we communicate this? | ||
| So I did that for a while. | ||
| Then I started like CoffeeZilla was like this spinoff channel. | ||
| I was like, let me do some interviews. | ||
| And then it was also my place. | ||
| I just threw things at the wall. | ||
| So then that's where I threw one of my rant. | ||
| Like I just like ranted about this thing against the wall and it kind of like stuck. | ||
| And I just enjoyed it. | ||
| I was like, man, screw these people, you know, like who are taking advantage of like... | ||
| And what was sick about it is they're not taking advantage of rich people because rich people will sue you. | ||
| If you screw them over, rich people will sue you. | ||
| They're taking advantage of like people who they're like at $10,000 or $2,000. | ||
| That's like all their disposable income. | ||
| And they're betting on these hucksters to dig themselves out of these situations. | ||
| And that's one of the things I try to tell people is like, a lot of the success of these things is not from, it's not even about greed. | ||
| It's about desperation. | ||
| When you fall for these things, a lot of times, you know, you're like my mom. | ||
| Like, the reason she fell for these things is she so badly didn't want surgery that she was willing to believe anything, right? | ||
| Because she's like, you know, if you tell me, and I have cancer, and you tell me I can be better, and you tell me it's $10,000, you tell me it's a dollar, I'll pay you either way, right? | ||
| And so people are financially, they feel like they're terminally ill financially. | ||
| They're just like, I don't know how to get out of this. | ||
| I feel like I have no opportunities. | ||
| This guy, I'm watching YouTube. | ||
| I'm trying to better myself. | ||
| I'm trying to educate myself. | ||
| And this guy comes on and tells me, it's all a click away, right? | ||
| It's all a credit card swipe away. | ||
| What has been the reaction? | ||
| Like, what has been the most visceral or violent reaction to what you've done and exposed? | ||
| I think the biggest story we've probably ever broken was either... | ||
| The FTX stuff, but that was already kind of going on. | ||
| It was probably the Logan Paul story. | ||
| The CryptoZoo saga. | ||
| That was a case where, you know... | ||
| It's just a classic influencer greed story where this guy launches... | ||
| An NFT project does millions upon millions of dollars in sales and delivers nothing. | ||
| He promises the world a fun blockchain game that earns you money, and he did nothing. | ||
| And the project was left abandoned, and people were miserable, complaining, complaining. | ||
| No one says it, but they don't have a voice. | ||
| I'm kind of aware that you covered it, but I don't know the story. | ||
| Let me back up then. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Logan Paul is a popular influencer. | ||
| You know who he is. | ||
| So he, along with a lot of influencers, got really interested in the crypto space. | ||
| And he had done a coin before that called Dink Doink, which was abandoned shortly after he promoted it. | ||
| People got invested. | ||
| Goes to zero, right? | ||
| And he says, well, that's not my project. | ||
| That was my buddy's project. | ||
| And then like a month later, he's like, I actually do have a project. | ||
| Excited to announce it. | ||
| It's called CryptoZoo. | ||
| It's a fun game. | ||
| They called it a fun game that earns you money. | ||
| Basically, the idea is they're going to sell you these two things. | ||
| Eggs is NFT. And then there's a coin aspect to it called Zoo Tokens. | ||
| OK, so you can buy these zoo tokens to buy the eggs. | ||
| And the idea is the eggs will then hatch into animals that will earn passive zoo tokens. | ||
| So you can buy eggs with zoo tokens and then the eggs will passively earn you zoo tokens. | ||
| Does that make sense? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, don't worry. | ||
| You're kind of actually caught up. | ||
| So these zoo tokens were basically this passive income. | ||
| You basically invest up front and then you're sort of getting the tokens back out, which you can sell, I guess. | ||
| That was the idea pitched to people and people immediately buy in. | ||
| Three million dollars in NFT sales, tens of millions of dollars in the tokens itself, the zoo tokens. | ||
| People are so excited about it because it's Logan Paul and he says this is his project. | ||
| He's putting his name behind it, his backing behind it, and he's a great marketer. | ||
| I mean, you've got to give the guy credit where credit is due. | ||
| He's a tremendous marketer. | ||
| So people get all excited. | ||
| All of a sudden, the hatch day comes when you're supposed to hatch these eggs. | ||
| And half the hatching doesn't work. | ||
| How does the hatching work? | ||
| Is it on a computer model? | ||
| It was on the blockchain. | ||
| So your NFTs would turn into different NFTs. | ||
| They would transform into the animals. | ||
| They go from an egg to an animal. | ||
| How? | ||
| It's just blockchain coding. | ||
| I mean, it's just... | ||
| But how do they... | ||
| Is it predetermined? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How does your egg become an ostrich? | ||
| It's just random. | ||
| It's supposed to be randomly generated animals. | ||
| So you might get a rhino, you might get a chicken. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then you could crossbreed your rhino with a chicken and get a ricken or something and get even more tokens. | ||
| Is this it? | ||
| Yeah, there it is. | ||
| You get like bear shark. | ||
| So people start to like... | ||
| Is this still around? | ||
| So they say they're gonna go back and fix it now. | ||
| So Logan, after being not involved for like a year, as soon as my video comes out, he goes, Damn, what a coincidence! | ||
| Like I've been working on it. | ||
| Like I was gonna, you know, make it like launch it. | ||
| In reality, he hadn't touched it for a very long period of time. | ||
| But so sorry to back up. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The half the token, half the eggs don't work. | ||
| And they're not actually earning anything. | ||
| The whole time they said they're gonna earn you these tokens, right? | ||
| They're not earning anything. | ||
| So the promises haven't been fulfilled. | ||
| There's just sort of all this stuff going on. | ||
| And behind the scenes, Logan's quiet. | ||
| Come to find out, he had hired basically criminals who were selling on the back end, like some of the tokens. | ||
| And he was sort of like, I don't know what his thing was. | ||
| I think he realized like, oh, it's not going to be that successful. | ||
| Let me move on. | ||
| I think his mentality was, let me just move on. | ||
| The problem, though, is you have millions of dollars of investment in a thing that you promoted. | ||
| You told everyone it was going to make them money, and then you never delivered anything. | ||
| So my story was basically showing that, showing the victims of the scheme, and in response, he's like, well, I'm going to sue you for that. | ||
| He said he was going to sue you. | ||
| Yeah, he said, I'll see you in court. | ||
| And then the backlash against him was so severe that he releases a video saying, thank you, CoffeeZilla, for showing the world what happened. | ||
| And I appreciate it. | ||
| I responded out of anger. | ||
| But I'm going to make things right. | ||
| I'm going to fix the game to what it was supposed to be. | ||
| And I'm going to pay back. | ||
| 1.7 million dollars. | ||
| I'm committing 1.7 million to anyone who bought an NFT can get a refund. | ||
| Now, there's a bit of an issue with that. | ||
| So that's nice. | ||
| I actually think it's great that that happened, but there's two issues with it. | ||
| Number one, which is that The NFTs were only half a small part of the sale. | ||
| They actually weren't even half. | ||
| Because people bought these tokens. | ||
| So the people who bought tokens get nothing. | ||
| He's offering this refund on the NFTs. | ||
| The other problem is he hasn't refunded the NFTs. | ||
| I've actually reached out to him twice. | ||
| It's been like over a month since he's done this. | ||
| So he said he's going to do it. | ||
| And then the Discord, like he's posting in this little chat room with the investors. | ||
| After he said he was going to do it, he's posted nothing. | ||
| There's no way to get a refund right now. | ||
| So I keep asking, like, hey, you promised $1.7 million to these investors. | ||
| They're all waiting. | ||
| It's been over, I think it's almost been two months now, and there's nothing. | ||
| So it's like, you know, he says that he's refunding people, which sounds great for PR, and then it's just like radio silence. | ||
| What I'm ultimately looking for is some accountability from these guys. | ||
| They're happy to make money from the endeavors. | ||
| They're happy to potentially make millions of dollars from these different projects they're spinning up. | ||
| But the second accountability is asked for, you can't reach them. | ||
| I would assume Logan's a very busy guy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I would assume that he probably didn't come up with this on his own. | ||
| I would assume that someone probably came to him with this project. | ||
| This is just total assumption. | ||
| Guesswork. | ||
| Guessing on my part. | ||
| So we have text messages from behind the scenes. | ||
| A lot of people – the people who were responsible for it say Logan kind of spearheaded the idea. | ||
| And he says he spearheaded the idea. | ||
| So it was his idea? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so he's working with someone, right, that probably assured him that this would work? | ||
| Uh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, he had this team of a few guys who they didn't do much vetting into, and some of them turned out to be criminals. | ||
| But, you know, my feeling is ultimately, no matter what happens, like, when you take people's money, that's what I'm trying to, like— On my show, I'm trying to tell these like influencers, like when you take people's money, it's different. | ||
| When you tell them you're going to make them money and you get into the financial investment game, your responsibility is different. | ||
| You can't just always pass the buck to like, oh, it was like a guy that's not that trustworthy. | ||
| It's like, all right, that might be true. | ||
| Then go fix it. | ||
| Go hire some more guys that are trustworthy and fix the thing. | ||
| And I think my experience – because I've talked to Logan and that's why I know he didn't respond to me because I texted him. | ||
| I said, hey, where's this money? | ||
| He left me on red. | ||
| But I've talked to him and when I talk to him – There's just sort of this feeling of he's like, I just don't want to think about this. | ||
| I don't want to be – he wants to focus on Prime, which is successful. | ||
| He doesn't want to be bothered with the victims of the scheme that he ultimately thought of in the first place. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| So is it possible that he's just gathering the money or working out a way to do it legally where it makes sense? | ||
| It's very frustrating because, you know, at every turn it's just sort of like... | ||
| You know, I want to say it's possible. | ||
| We just don't know. | ||
| And it's just sort of like... | ||
| When you promise people refunds, like the longer you wait, you know the less people are actually going to take that refund. | ||
| If Walmart says, hey, bring in this skull, I'll give you a refund. | ||
| And you're like, alright, when can I bring it in? | ||
| And they don't respond to you for two months. | ||
| They know that you're less likely to actually take the refund. | ||
| So I don't know if he's doing it because he wants less people to get the refund. | ||
| He probably is busy, but my thought is... | ||
| A transgression of this magnitude where you're playing with people's money and livelihoods, you cannot take it lightly. | ||
| And that's one of the things is these influencers got into this crypto space. | ||
| I don't think they fully appreciated it. | ||
| They're now dealing with financial investments, and it's not a joke. | ||
| It's not like a brand deal where, you know, if NordVPN isn't as great as they said it was, you know, it's all cool. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's now, it's your company, and you promise people you're going to make the money, and now you haven't said anything for over a year, then you say you're going to refund them, and you don't say anything for two months. | ||
| That's an issue. | ||
| The whole crypto space and the whole NFT space is filled with weirdos. | ||
| Everyone that I've talked to that wants to come to me with some idea, it's always very strange. | ||
| When people have come to my business manager with financial propositions, they're always... | ||
| It's logical. | ||
| Like, it makes sense. | ||
| Oh, invest in this. | ||
| This is a fund, and it does this, and this is how you get a return on your investment. | ||
| None of that stuff ever made any sense to me. | ||
| I avoided all of it, luckily, but I was... | ||
| Propositioned by multiple different entities about these kind of things. | ||
| And I was like, I don't know what you're saying. | ||
| I don't know, like, why would anybody buy an NFT? Like, you know, oh, it's a non-fungible token and then you put it in an NFT wallet and you have this thing. | ||
| I'm like, but I have the same thing on my phone. | ||
| I can take a screenshot of that NFT and I have it. | ||
| Like, what is the thing, the physical thing? | ||
| You know, it's like, I understand, like, Beeple. | ||
| Do you know who Beeple is? | ||
|
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Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Yeah, so Beeple made that little GigaChad thing for us. | ||
| It's a piece of digital artwork. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, he has an actual museum of digital art. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And if you buy a piece from him, you actually get a physical piece of digital art. | ||
| There's something there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Like, the Ape Yacht Club, whatever the fuck that is. | ||
| Like, what's going on here? | ||
| I have a friend of mine who's an artist who made over a million dollars on NFTs, and I'm like, what did you do? | ||
| He talks to me for 10 minutes, and I'm like, I don't even know what the fuck you just said. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| So, let me start by saying, so, I work with a super talented digital artist. | ||
| So, he does a lot of my set stuff. | ||
| So, I have a lot of respect for, you know, the challenge of a lot of digital artists as opposed to physical artists. | ||
| It's like, if you're a painter, you sell your paintings. | ||
| If you're a digital artist, how do you print it out? | ||
| Like, what do you do? | ||
| So, NFTs were sort of originally, it was like, this is for artists. | ||
| Like this is a way for a digital artist now to legitimately sell scarcity in their work, which previously they had no way of doing. | ||
| You still can take a screenshot, but you don't own the NFT that like sort of the digital artist has sort of provisioned like this is the thing that matters. | ||
| So I have a lot of – like in that way, in that one way, I get it. | ||
| I get why people wanted it to become the next big thing. | ||
| The problem is it was quickly taken over as an investment vehicle. | ||
| Now it's like everybody is an art dealer and now everybody is an art expert and now we're trying to make a buck, right? | ||
| And that – Anytime you get art involved with money, things get weird. | ||
| But especially when you get art involved with quick flips and returns and now we're going to all make money from this. | ||
| That's when things get really weird. | ||
| So like I feel bad sort of for digital artists, legitimate digital artists who really do legitimate NFT work. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with selling your work as a digital artist. | ||
| Like what do you expect them to do? | ||
| Not everybody can go work for like some random YouTuber. | ||
| Like, you know, people have to earn a living. | ||
| They do legitimate work and good work. | ||
| But the problem is when greed gets involved, when people get involved basically promising money. | ||
| In the case of the Bored Ape Yacht Club, it's sort of like what their idea was. | ||
| We'll start almost like a country club where the NFT is the pass for the country club. | ||
| And you can go chat with the holders of this Bored Ape Yacht Club. | ||
| And I guess the idea is because it's expensive, then you get in the room with people with money. | ||
| But I found that whole thing weird because of the like, you know, Jimmy Fallon's getting involved and like, and then all these like mainstream celebrities, you know, start promoting this thing. | ||
| And it's like, this is a little, why is everyone doing it? | ||
| And then you come to find out that a lot of them had their Bored Apes bought by this company called Moon Pay, who is trying to like, you know, use the celebrity's likeness to push that out. | ||
| And it's just like, this is a strange, what's actually going on here? | ||
| Is it just about the art? | ||
| It doesn't actually appear to be. | ||
| I just don't understand how it worked. | ||
| I don't understand how anybody looked at it and went, this is logical, I'm gonna buy that. | ||
| So think about it this way, though. | ||
| So I'm sure you've played a bunch of games, video games, right? | ||
| Have you ever played a video game where they have in-game skins and different outfits? | ||
|
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Sure. | |
| So tons of businesses have been built, like the entire free-to-play model of Fortnite. | ||
| Fortnite makes millions and millions and millions of dollars. | ||
| Their whole model is built on skins and different in-game purchasable items. | ||
| You don't actually own anything. | ||
| Ultimately, it just lives and dies with your computer. | ||
| NFTs are sort of like – I guess the idea with NFT gaming or whatever is like you would actually own it. | ||
| Like the game couldn't take it away from you. | ||
| You'd have some piece of art that you'd have some ownership of that would matter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Again, I think the challenge is just like where greed and like marketers get involved. | ||
| They just sort of like ruin everything with scams and fraud to where it's very tempting and I get the temptation to just throw everything out. | ||
| It's all just a fraud, right? | ||
| Because you see so much of it and so much of it is just like kind of people trying to scam you basically for, you know, and use especially celebrity likenesses to scam people. | ||
| Yeah, the celebrity part is a big key in all this, right? | ||
| I mean, it's a huge part. | ||
| This is how we get legitimacy for products now. | ||
| It's sort of like... | ||
| Endorsements. | ||
| Endorsements. | ||
| It's like you've got to find a guy to do it. | ||
| So ultimately, like... | ||
| And the AI stuff's scary because ultimately you'll get the AI deepfaking you into, you know... | ||
| Yeah, there's one of me. | ||
| There's one of me and Andrew Huberman selling some supplement that's not real. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| I don't know if the supplement's real, but I know the commercial's certainly not real. | ||
| Yeah, they deepfaked you. | ||
| I think it went viral on Twitter for a bit. | ||
| Yeah, well, everybody knew it was a deepfake, luckily. | ||
| It wasn't quite good enough. | ||
| Yeah, and then, you know, we tried to figure out who's doing it, and you just run into a bunch of shells. | ||
| It's like very difficult to figure out. | ||
| I'll tell you offline who's doing it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I know. | ||
| I looked into it because I was curious. | ||
| I was curious. | ||
| And, you know, that same person had put out a lot of ads about like Kim Kardashian. | ||
| They had a deepfake of Kim. | ||
| They had a deepfake of... | ||
| They had one of you saying that like... | ||
| So they have one of you saying like, this product's great. | ||
| You know, go buy it. | ||
| And then there's another one where you were complaining that Andrew Tate launched it and you thought you were sort of like, Andrew Tate's going after my brand. | ||
| Like, because it's very similarly named to one of your products. | ||
| And so it's like, it was kind of this hilarious thing where they were playing both sides. | ||
| It's like, it's Joe Rogan's. | ||
| It's also Joe Rogan's hate, like, hates that it's out there because it's so good. | ||
| Then it's like, Kim Kardashian loves it. | ||
| They had every celebrity was like, basically endorsing this thing all through AI. And it's just the testament of our times. | ||
| Like, Celebrities are the new sort of authorities for better and often for worse. | ||
| But people use that as currency now. | ||
| And with AI, you can just fake a lot of that stuff. | ||
| That's what I'm worried about. | ||
| I feel like this is the very first volley in a war on reality. | ||
| In that the way AI is structured, it's so prevalent. | ||
| And so, like, when you look at chat GPI, and then you look at deepfakes, and you look at the ability to take—I mean, there's a whole podcast of me interviewing Steve Jobs that doesn't—it's not real. | ||
| And it sounds like a real podcast. | ||
| There's a lot of podcasts. | ||
| Yeah, it's crazy. | ||
| Sometimes I'll check one and I'll go, is this real? | ||
| I saw there's a bunch going around. | ||
| Now they can imitate anyone's voice. | ||
| I think you were probably one of the first because you have so many hours of footage. | ||
| So they had a lot of training data. | ||
| There was a Canadian company that showed proof of concept of this a few years back. | ||
| And I was like, oh boy. | ||
| I know where this is going to lead because they just took all the hours of footage so they basically have me at every pitch and tone and yelling and laughing and they can have me say anything at this point. | ||
| Literally. | ||
| And now they're getting really good at the inflection because one of the problems with these AI tools was they were very monotone and they can only imitate your voice in a monotone. | ||
| But now they're getting better at like, okay, we'll accent the voice and then we'll talk calmly and then we'll be able to, you know, get more excited. | ||
| So that's a huge problem. | ||
| Have you seen the face ones though? | ||
| That's the new ones. | ||
| Jamie, can you pull up the new TikTok face filters? | ||
| Have you seen this? | ||
| Which face filters? | ||
| The new... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which one in particular? | |
| I think it's like their glam one. | ||
| There's a bunch of Twitter threads right now on it. | ||
| I've seen the glam ones. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's amazing how they can put makeup on you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| You look different. | ||
| Yeah, you look different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's literally going to be this new world where you won't know, like, catfishing is going to a new level. | ||
| Yeah, you'll have no idea what someone looks like. | ||
| There's a woman who did this ad and she was laying in bed. | ||
| She's like, I don't have any makeup on. | ||
| And in the old ones, like, there's a really funny video of this person that I know, actually, who put this filter on. | ||
| And in one of the scenes, she puts her hand in front of her face and the lips are superimposed on her hand. | ||
| And it looks so preposterous. | ||
| And the fact that she's So not aware of the fact that this thing is happening. | ||
| And she put the video out. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| We were laughing so hard. | ||
| First of all, you don't look like that. | ||
| Everyone knows you don't look like that. | ||
| And then when you put your hand in front of your face, you didn't see this fucking giant cartoonish fake lips that came over your palm. | ||
| This is so crazy. | ||
| So this is the one that I saw. | ||
| This woman. | ||
| Like, this is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, now if you touch... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, now if you touch your face, you should be able to. | ||
| They don't superimpose anything. | ||
| It's all really real. | ||
| You can do anything to your face, and you can manipulate it, and the AI tracks it all. | ||
| And I've seen people do it where they have two screens, like one that's actually them and one that's them with the filter, so you see it side by side. | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| Yeah, it's really worrying, like, you know, these technologies, part of the problem is you can deploy them so cheaply and at scale to where, you know, in my world, I'm more worried about, like, the Joe Rogan deepfakes and, like, people scamming people out of money. | ||
| But I also worry about, like, the romance scammers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, how good that's going to get. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| When ChatGPT now has all the scripts down and instead of paying someone to get it. | ||
| You have someone FaceTime this person. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| You have someone FaceTime them. | ||
| You have it all generated by an AI. It costs you almost nothing to do. | ||
| I mean, one of the rise of, like, robocalls was it's just cheaper. | ||
| Like, it's really hard if you're going to hire people to do it. | ||
| You kind of need an ROI. If you have robots, you know, sending spam, now it's... | ||
| Now it's good because you don't actually need to earn that many dollars per call to make it viable. | ||
| So you just call everybody. | ||
| One of my daughters got a phone call about how much money she owes and then if she doesn't pay this amount right away, the authorities will be in contact with her. | ||
| And, you know, she was 10 and she was laughing and she's like, what is this? | ||
| Am I in trouble? | ||
| She plays it for me. | ||
| I'm like, oh my god, this is hilarious But it's just when you take really lonely sad people like I remember watch this Television show once it was some expose on this poor man. | ||
| He was just like this old divorcee Who was being scammed by someone and I don't even think he had like a voice conversation with this person but he traveled to the UK or somewhere somewhere in Europe twice and To meet with this person that he'd been sending all this money to. | ||
| And both times something came up and the person couldn't meet him there. | ||
| This poor old guy just kept going there thinking that the love of his life was there. | ||
| And they interviewed his daughter and she was beside herself and she couldn't talk sense into him. | ||
| And they interviewed him and he was in denial and it was just so pathetic and sad. | ||
| And what is that going to be like now with this kind of shit? | ||
| It's going to be a lot more prevalent and it's going to get a lot better. | ||
| I mean the rise of the ability to generate like a realistic companion avatar is going to be – I mean it's massive. | ||
| These people were complaining to me the other day about this other thing – which you're going to find as well. | ||
| So there's this app where you can basically have a girlfriend who's an AI. Where like the AI, you'll like, like, basically, you know, it's a fake, like, you know, it's all AI, but it's like a companion chat bot. | ||
| And, you know, I get a lot of emails like, oh, such and such is a scam. | ||
| And usually it's like some Ponzi scheme or some get rich quick scheme. | ||
| This one, they were furious because the creators had sold it like, hey, you can have hot roleplay with this AI bot. | ||
| And then the people developing the app one day said, hey, we're turning that off. | ||
| But the reaction from the community was like, you took away my girlfriend. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, Jesus Christ. | |
| You took away my partner. | ||
| And these people had legitimately bonded with a bot. | ||
| Well, that's the Joaquin Phoenix movie. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| She? | ||
| Her? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Her, her, her, her. | |
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's really the premise of the movie, but in the movie it was all just voice. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Now it's going to be some actual 3D person. | ||
| Is this one? | ||
| It's replicate AI. So that's like still the uncanny valley, right? | ||
| You look at that and you'd have to have like really bad eyesight to think that's a real person. | ||
| AI shuts down erotic role play community, shares suicide prevention resources over loss. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| People were, like, miserable. | ||
| They're like, it's talking. | ||
| And they would, like, complain, like, after an update, they'd be like, because I looked through their Reddit, I was so curious. | ||
| I was like, this is like a new, brave new world, you know? | ||
| But they would say, you know, ever since the new update, she's just not the same. | ||
| She's, like, talking to someone different. | ||
| And it's like, you know the back end is just, like, a large language model. | ||
| And they just clicked an update. | ||
| They don't care as long as they're getting this feeling, right? | ||
| You know, it's really scary stuff because I read this statistic recently that said that there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 plus percent of women are single, but it's in the neighborhood of 60 percent of men. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That seems really high. | ||
| I know. | ||
| In what age group? | ||
| It does seem really high. | ||
| It's, you know, 18 to 49 or something like that. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's young men. | ||
| It's a shockingly high... | ||
| It doesn't make sense, like, why there is such a disparity between the genders, that men are so much more single than women. | ||
| Like, that doesn't even drive. | ||
| Yeah, how does that make sense? | ||
| Most men are single. | ||
| Most young women are not. | ||
| Maybe the guys are just saying they're single. | ||
| And all the girls are like, we're in a relationship. | ||
| It is just a research, right? | ||
| So it's just a survey, I would imagine. | ||
| 30% of U.S. adults are neither married, living with a partner, nor engaged in a committed relationship. | ||
| Nearly half of all young adults are single. | ||
| 34% of women and a whopping 63% of men. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| How does it work if there's roughly 50% women, 50% men? | ||
| How could 34% of women be single and 63% of men be single? | ||
| It says, not surprisingly, the decline in relationships matches the stride with the decline in sex. | ||
| The share of sexually active Americans stands at a 30-year low. | ||
| Around 30% of young men reported in 2019 that they had no sex in the past year, compared to about 20% of young women. | ||
| Only half of single men are actively seeking relationships or even casual dates, according to Pew. | ||
| That figure is declining. | ||
| What if, like, the women thought they were in a relationship and the guys are like... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's what we could say. | ||
| Yeah, that you could say that. | ||
| Or maybe the women aren't being honest. | ||
| Maybe they've gone on a date with a guy and they decide that's their boyfriend. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think the more shocking thing is just that... | ||
| More, in general, are single. | ||
| Less people are having sex and are engaged in meaningful, long-term relationships. | ||
| I think that's... | ||
| You know, there's just an increasingly... | ||
| I feel like we're becoming more atomized. | ||
| Like, you just kind of can get lost in your world. | ||
| And you get these pseudo-communities popping up. | ||
| Like, if I'm a Bored Ape Yacht Club member, I could call... | ||
| You know, I might say, those guys are my brothers. | ||
| But are they really? | ||
| What are these new internet communities doing right? | ||
| And what are they not really replacing in the real world? | ||
| Because basically, that's what we've done. | ||
| We've replaced a lot of physical things with online things. | ||
| And sometimes that replacement works. | ||
| Like I can, you know, I can kind of, but sometimes it doesn't. | ||
| Like I can like FaceTime with my mom and it's like kind of the same, but it's not, it's not really. | ||
| It's a little annoying. | ||
| It's a little annoying, right? | ||
| And they're getting better at it, but it's like, it's always kind of like this like facsimile of the real thing. | ||
| And so I think this replica AI is like, it's sort of this, like it's trying to treat loneliness in people. | ||
| Maybe you could, that's the nice way of looking at it. | ||
| But it's, it's pretty dystopian, man. | ||
| It is dystopian. | ||
| And one of the things that I think accelerated it was the lockdowns, right? | ||
| So for especially people that had a lot of anxiety, there was people that went a year plus without being in contact with other people other than their immediate family members. | ||
| And so then they seek more time online. | ||
| They're online more. | ||
| And at the same time, this AI-generated 3D image of a person is communicating with you. | ||
| That, and then the rise of parasocial relationships. | ||
| Working from home. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| People watch so much of online people, they think they know you. | ||
| And like... | ||
| And they don't. | ||
| But they feel like you're their friend rather than them having online... | ||
| I was hanging out with a few friends and they got approached by some people and these guys felt like they knew them. | ||
| They're like, Like, I love all your stuff. | ||
| They're asking about one of their friends, like, what do you think about when this guy did that? | ||
| And I'm thinking, like, this guy doesn't know you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's this strange thing where that's our new world. | ||
| It's different from, like, when there were celebrities. | ||
| You didn't feel like you knew Tom Cruise. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, that's different, too, because he didn't really talk. | ||
| He only talked on screen. | ||
| He's playing a character. | ||
| Yeah, and when he did talk, it was disastrous. | ||
| Like, remember when he had that interview with Matt Lauer, and he was getting upset at Brooke Shields, who was taking, you know, psychiatric medications, and he's a Scientologist, and they believe those are the devil, and so he was telling, you're being glib, Matt. | ||
| You're being glib. | ||
| And everybody was like, oh my god, this guy's a psycho. | ||
| You remember those? | ||
| Ever since I watched Top Gun, I forgot. | ||
| That was disastrous to him. | ||
| But ultimately, he's kind of proven correct in a lot of ways because it turns out that the model of why they were using these SSRIs is not correct. | ||
| Like, they work, but they're not sure why they work. | ||
| And the initial thought was that they were addressing some sort of chemical imbalance in the brain. | ||
| And now that's been proven to not be correct. | ||
| How do you think we go about... | ||
| So it's sort of like managing these two things, right? | ||
| Like you manage the fact that pharmaceutical companies have profit incentives that lead them to want people to be on long-term drugs forever. | ||
| That's the best kind of drugs, one you never get off of. | ||
| Right. | ||
| With the fact that, like, on the other hand, you have a lot of, like, alternative health guys saying, hey, that's nonsense to listen to the guys. | ||
| They're also kind of a lot of them pushing a bunch of pseudoscientific wackiness. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| It's very hard to figure out what's right and what's wrong and what's correct and what's... | ||
| Yeah, because you go like, oh, Tom has a point about all these pills. | ||
| But it's like, okay, then is the answer nothing? | ||
| It's hard to know. | ||
| It's interesting, right? | ||
| Because the question is illness, right? | ||
| There are certain medications like insulin for people that are diabetic. | ||
| These are like... | ||
| Actual, real solutions to an actual medical problem that's being created by a pharmaceutical company that addresses real issues and helps people. | ||
| And then there's also stuff like, hey, you know, maybe you need Adderall. | ||
| Maybe you need to focus. | ||
| And so they're giving you speed, right? | ||
| And so it's basically, it's not based on a disease like, I can't go to a doctor and the doctor says, hey, you have herpes. | ||
| You need herpes medication. | ||
| And then this fixes your disease. | ||
| It's, I don't feel good. | ||
| Give me something that makes me feel good. | ||
| And then they give you something that makes you feel good, and you're like, okay, I'm on medicine because I have an illness. | ||
| Is that really what's going on? | ||
| But what else is causing that illness? | ||
| Do you exercise? | ||
| Do you sleep right? | ||
| Are you depressed because you have no meaningful relationships? | ||
| Are you depressed because you have a job that's horrific and stressful? | ||
| What is causing this that you're just putting a band-aid over? | ||
| So there's confounding Issues that are all souped in together. | ||
| And no one's the same. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's like, how much of it is environmental factors? | ||
| Like, I can speak personally. | ||
| I have developed some, like, low-grade form of ADHD. What does that mean, though? | ||
| What does it mean? | ||
| Meaning, okay, so like in the past, I could read books for hours and hours on end, right? | ||
| Like I loved reading books. | ||
| Due to how much I engage with social media, and I'm someone who tries to monitor this stuff. | ||
| I was on a flip phone last year for like six months out of the year. | ||
| I mean like I try to limit this stuff. | ||
| But because so much of my job is on social media and Twitter and I'm scrolling and the scroll is so addictive because you context switch so much so fast that it's like my brain when I try to lock into a book it's like it takes me a bit and I'm somebody who Likes to read a lot. | ||
| I'd say I was like a voracious reader, especially as a kid. | ||
| And like, as I get older, I'm having to sit down and it's more like work. | ||
| I like I have to intentionally like, okay, I gotta read this book. | ||
| I'm gonna cut myself from distractions. | ||
| And I have all these apps on my phone to try to limit the amount of like screen time that I have. | ||
| Because I'm just I know this is bad for my brain. | ||
| So I've given – so I don't – for me, I'm like Adderall is not a good solution for me because my problem is not that I was born with this issue. | ||
| My problem is I'm on my device and my device is literally overstimulating my brain to when I don't have that overstimulation. | ||
| I'm just sitting in a quiet room with a book. | ||
| Now my brain is like, well, where is it? | ||
| Where is the interaction? | ||
| So for me, I think the answer is, okay, for me, I just have to unplug more, right? | ||
| And that's what I try to do. | ||
| But for somebody who says, I was born like this, I can never pay attention, like, is the answer... | ||
| You know, some people say Adderall helps them. | ||
| What do you say to those people? | ||
| So, like, that's what I mean. | ||
| It's like, it seems like an environmental... | ||
| Yeah, well, I think, A, you're addicted to your phone. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Most people are. | ||
| Most people are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I am very fortunate that I'm not addicted to social media. | ||
| I am addicted to watching YouTube videos, which is a totally different animal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I'm also addicted to watching YouTube videos on things that I enjoy, which is better. | ||
| So I've filled that gap with things like I watch... | ||
| Like fight videos and professional pool matches. | ||
| It stimulates me in a way, but I'm not engaging with this context switching constantly, like scrolling on Twitter. | ||
| I go to Twitter maybe 5-10 minutes a day. | ||
| I go and I see what the fuck's going on. | ||
| Like, what is everybody mad at? | ||
| Like, who's in trouble? | ||
| Like, I'll shit-scroll. | ||
| Such a funny way to describe Twitter. | ||
| It's so accurate, too. | ||
| But I do not post. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If I post, I post and ghost. | ||
| I just post, and I leave it alone. | ||
| I don't read the comments, ever. | ||
| I don't read any of my comments. | ||
| I think that's great. | ||
| That is very important for famous people. | ||
| It's very, very important. | ||
| Because I have friends that don't... | ||
| And they'll come to me, and you know what they're saying? | ||
| I go, how do you know what they're saying? | ||
| Like, what do you give a shit? | ||
| I watch people ruin their lives by looking at their screens. | ||
| It's kind of hard because when you first kind of come on the scene, you get a little attention. | ||
| It's like intoxicating. | ||
| And you want to engage too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, because it's like at first that's fun. | |
| It's like when you have a thousand people watching you, that's like beautiful. | ||
| It's like there's this community. | ||
| They're resonating. | ||
| You have time to kind of you can respond to people like intelligently. | ||
| When you start to get into the millions, it's just ludicrous. | ||
| It just doesn't make sense anymore. | ||
| And it starts to be this like your audience starts to become to you more. | ||
| It feels more like a hive mind, even though it still is individuals. | ||
| It feels more like, OK, how do I get a pulse of what this actually is? | ||
| This is why people gravitate towards negative comments when they have huge audiences is because they go like, Well, maybe they're right. | ||
| Maybe that one guy represents the whole. | ||
| Of course it doesn't, but they're worried because they don't really know what their audience thinks because it's so many people. | ||
| So I know it's the right thing to do to unplug. | ||
| At the same time, I'm like, okay, I have to know the current events. | ||
| I have to know what's going on. | ||
| So that's one of the worst parts about it. | ||
| I love what I do, but it is the worst part of my job that I feel to some extent I kind of have to have my finger a bit on the pulse to know who's into what, what's big. | ||
| But then after that, the discipline is like unplugging. | ||
| What I have found is that if something is big enough that I need to pay attention, I'll find it. | ||
| I find it through other methods. | ||
| I find it through friends. | ||
| I have so many friends like, do you know about this? | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| Like, even sometimes when people are mad at me, like, what's going on with you and that person? | ||
| I go, what are you talking about? | ||
| I literally don't know. | ||
| And then they'll tell me, I don't want to look at that. | ||
| Like, leave it alone. | ||
| Like, I don't give a fuck. | ||
| But you'll find out. | ||
| You'll find out because people are talking about it. | ||
| You'll find out. | ||
| Like, let the addicts scroll. | ||
| Let them go crazy. | ||
| But for your own mental health, it's not... | ||
| And anybody who's public, like, you're a public person. | ||
| You engage publicly. | ||
| You put your videos out, and people comment on them, and your videos get millions of views. | ||
| Like, that is not an environment where you can healthily sample people's opinions. | ||
| It's just not possible. | ||
| Human beings are designed to look for threats. | ||
| You're designed to find problems. | ||
| And so if there's one person that thinks you're a piece of shit and a hundred of them love you, that one person is the one you're going to think about. | ||
| And they're confirming your worst fear. | ||
| Your worst imposter syndrome. | ||
| They're like, you are crap. | ||
| And you go, oh man, I knew it. | ||
| But even for people that are just regular people, imagine people aren't talking about you because you're anonymous, but you're engaging in this very shallow form of communication that's not natural. | ||
| You're engaging in a text-based communication with someone. | ||
| You don't know who they are. | ||
| You don't have any background on them. | ||
| You don't know if they're fucking schizophrenic. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| And yet you're investing your mind and your focus on these interactions that you're having with this person. | ||
| And most likely, if you're in a dispute, you're trying to win this dispute. | ||
| So you're trying to find reasons why they're wrong and you're getting anxiety and you're involved in this little sort of debate slash mental battle. | ||
| It's like fucking go outside. | ||
| Go do something with your life. | ||
| Like social media is fucking dangerous, but it's not dangerous if you understand it. | ||
| It's like if you have a cabinet filled with cookies and chips, it doesn't mean you're gonna get fat. | ||
| You can always go into that cabinet every now and again and have a cookie and you're going to be fine. | ||
| But if you just fucking open that cabinet every day and stuff your face, you're going to get diabetes. | ||
| Yeah, and what's hard is these apps are built to be sweeter and sweeter and more fattening every year. | ||
| Look at TikTok. | ||
| That's the best one. | ||
| And that's where I finally drew the line where I always try to stay up to date on all the apps, you know? | ||
| I have a family member who's young who, like, told me about TikTok and they're like, you gotta get on this. | ||
| It was, like, back in, like, 2019. And they, of course, were right. | ||
| I should have. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| No, no. | ||
| But at the time, I just said, like, this is a step too far. | ||
| The shortening of our attention spans, YouTube used to be short form. | ||
| That's, like, the funny thing. | ||
| It's, like, then it was, like, TikTok and, well, it started with Vine. | ||
| But it was just, like, this new idea that, like, hey, forget about 10 minutes. | ||
| Let's try 10 seconds for a video. | ||
| And that's where I have successfully disengaged. | ||
| I don't watch any TikTok or short form, because that would be the end of my attention span. | ||
| And I feel bad for, like, what do teachers do now? | ||
| When you're competing with, like, this never-ending feed of the most entertaining... | ||
| Well, the kids aren't supposed to have their phones in classes. | ||
| I have young kids. | ||
| But... | ||
| A lot of them sneak it and they figure out a way to juke the system. | ||
| But it's just – it's an inevitable fact of the progression of technology and technological innovation. | ||
| They're going to figure out a way to get people more engaged because it's profitable. | ||
| And there's – Going to be a better app than TikTok in the future. | ||
| A more addictive, more engaging app. | ||
| You have to imagine, right? | ||
| It's so funny to imagine now because you're just like, how could you? | ||
| But then we were thinking the same thing about YouTube. | ||
| You're like, wow, this is great. | ||
| You can find anything, anywhere. | ||
| And now YouTube is like, oh, they're like the responsible educational company. | ||
| You can learn a lot on YouTube. | ||
| Oh, I've learned so much on YouTube. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| It is kind of an incredible platform, and it is important to remember with all these new technologies, there are good things, but oftentimes the people who are creating the platforms don't really tell you about the bad things. | ||
| They're incentivized. | ||
| That's not their job. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Their job is just to make something awesome. | ||
| It's your job to figure out your own life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it's, you know, the problem with things like TikTok and YouTube and Twitter and, I mean, this is what we're finding out with the Twitter files, is that then other entities get involved in the process of censoring certain information. | ||
| And promoting a specific narrative. | ||
| And then when you find out the government's actually involved in that, like, well, that gets really shady. | ||
| Like, we need some sort of regulations and or laws to stop that from happening. | ||
| Or you need someone like Elon Musk that comes along and actually fact checks the president. | ||
| You know, when they started fact checking the White House, you know, actually, that's not true at all. | ||
| And that's not what why there's inflation. | ||
| That's not you didn't do that. | ||
| And it's amazing to see the White House delete tweets out of shame. | ||
| But that's the world we're living in now. | ||
| But that's not the case with YouTube. | ||
| And with YouTube, there was some real problems, especially during the pandemic, with the censorship of accurate information that didn't fit a very specific narrative that they were trying to promote because of their sponsors. | ||
| How do you regulate that when one of the challenges is that And I know this firsthand, the regulators are so out of touch with the technology because technology moves so fast that these guys, | ||
| a lot of these regulators were around when it was dial-up internet, and now they're in positions of power being asked to regulate things when they checked out with email. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you saw that when people were interviewing Mark Zuckerberg and they were talking to him. | ||
| They don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| They're literally talking to him about problems with Google. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And he's like, hey, I'm Facebook. | ||
| And they're like, fuck are you talking about? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is one of the bizarre things. | ||
| And so you rely, weirdly enough, on people to inform the politicians. | ||
| Well, who informs them? | ||
| Lobbyists. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| And then you go back to people like Sam Bankman-Fried, where it's like he's informing them with money. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And he's like, hey, let me get a meeting with you. | ||
| So he gets a meeting. | ||
| And now he's a favorite on the Hill because he seems like he's the responsible one in the room. | ||
| And it turns out he's a giant fraud, but no one noticed... | ||
| Because they don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They don't know what they're talking about and they're dealing with a million different issues all at once. | ||
| Does it make sense? | ||
| So I totally get the, you know, elect kind of older people because they have wisdom. | ||
| But at the same time, does it make sense for there to be limits on age where you get more young people involved in these situations who actually know the technologies, especially on those special subcommittees where technology is such an important part? | ||
| Yes, it makes sense to get people that understand it, and young people are going to be more likely to understand it. | ||
| But do you want people with a lack of wisdom? | ||
| Like, these are the type of people they were dealing with at Twitter. | ||
| They were dealing with young millennials that were deciding to censor information and to, you know, I mean, that was one of the problems that they had with issues like deadnaming people. | ||
| You know, like if someone can change their name and change their gender, and if you use their old name, like if you called Caitlyn Jenner Bruce Jenner, you'd be banned for life. | ||
| Which is bizarre, because that person named Bruce Jenner won the fucking Olympics. | ||
| What are we supposed to do there? | ||
| You're doing this based on an ideology. | ||
| You're not doing this based on fact. | ||
| The actual fact is that person was born Bruce Jenner. | ||
| Now, to be kind and respectable to that person and refer to them in the gender that they want is nice. | ||
| It's a good thing to do. | ||
| But why is that problem something that gets you banned for life? | ||
| But you can call someone a cunt and that's fine. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| See, this is why I stay in my lane of scams, because I'm just like, it's impossible. | ||
| Yeah, you have to stay in the lane. | ||
| It's impossible to, and ultimately, like, one of the things I realize, so I consider myself a journalist, but one of my few privileges is that I don't have to engage in politics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it is a privilege because I see people just lose their mind. | ||
| Lose their mind. | ||
| In this culture war, and it's like, I mean, I don't know anything about most of these issues, and I'm like, I have expertise in like one thing, and I do have an expertise in it, but I think now if you're a journalist and you're sort of on the—if you politically align yourself, now you're expected to have a position— On everything. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Even if you have no idea what you're talking about, well, then you're expected to take the part, whatever the party line is, you're expected to take it. | ||
| Even if you haven't considered it, that's what happens. | ||
| And I've seen sort of people in the media become like co-opted by their audience where they may have to have these opinions. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so I feel lucky because I feel like there is no like mainstream thought and like scams. | ||
| I'm just like, let me interview a few victims and like they'll tell the story and that's great. | ||
| And I kind of stay away from that. | ||
| So, I mean, for me, that's where I always go back to. | ||
| I'm just like, I don't know. | ||
| That's a very good position because I've fallen into that. | ||
| I haven't fallen into audience capture, but I have fallen into the ideological game where If you're in one camp, you're supposed to have all the opinions that one camp has. | ||
| And if you do not align with all the opinions that one camp has, you find yourself cast out of the group. | ||
| And I thought initially, wrongly, That what the internet was going to do was provide people with so much data and so much information that we would lose camps and that people would instead have a more open-minded and centrist view of things and say, well, I could understand why people would think this because of that and I can understand why and we would have like more of a collective idea. | ||
| But what I didn't anticipate was social media and the echo chambers that it would provide. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that these ideological echo chambers also come with virtue signaling and that people get on these things because you're only dealing with a short amount of characters and you state something that you know is going to get a bunch of likes and people are very addicted to likes and there was some talk about like removing likes because they realized that likes were an issue and then people freaked out just like those people freaked out about taking away your fucking chatbot girlfriend and they stopped doing that they stopped that idea but If you didn't know whether | ||
| or not people agree with you or disagree with you, I think that'd probably be better overall for people. | ||
| Because I think that whether or not people agree with you or disagree with you is important. | ||
| But you don't know those people. | ||
| It's important if you know the people and you respect them and appreciate them. | ||
| And that used to be the world. | ||
| The world used to be, you know, I go to CoffeeZilla and I go, hey man, what do you think about this Ukraine thing? | ||
| And then I know you and I know that you're honest. | ||
| And so I talk to you and you say, well, this is what I've... | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is what I think. | ||
| And then I go, oh, that's interesting because I thought this. | ||
| And you go, yeah, I thought that too, but then I found out that. | ||
| And you go, oh, okay. | ||
| And you get sort of a more informed, neutral position on what things are. | ||
| I don't think people are getting that. | ||
| I mean, there was a funny meme that came out right when the war started. | ||
| That was like the instantaneous change from people going from being healthcare experts to foreign policy experts. | ||
|
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It's hilarious. | |
| It's very funny because that's what people do. | ||
| They find out what is the new thing that I can say that's going to get me likes. | ||
| Let me throw that Ukraine flag up in my Twitter bio alongside my gender pronouns and get after it and let's get some likes. | ||
| And now everyone's AI experts too. | ||
| They used to be crypto experts and now it's like everyone's AI experts. | ||
| Yeah, it's the classic. | ||
| It's like everyone's always current affair experts. | ||
| It's a weird thing how social media, like it's an echo chamber, but it's a weird kind of echo chamber because it's not just what you think. | ||
| So if that were the case, that would kind of be obvious. | ||
| But it's also like you're shown the other side, but the most incendiary, insane side of the other side's views. | ||
| Almost to the point it's like caricatures. | ||
| Let's say you're a right-winger. | ||
| You know, like, okay, the most insane people on the left are going to get the most likes from me because my camp is going to love it. | ||
| They're going to eat it up because they're going to look as insane as possible. | ||
| So you make them look insane. | ||
| The left-wing people, they go, okay, let's select for the most insane right-wing person and we'll put him out there. | ||
| And so they both put out like these like... | ||
| Sort of extreme views of the other side to their audience. | ||
| And then if you're in that echo chamber, you go like, wow, those guys are literally insane. | ||
| Because you think that's what the other team is just agreeing with. | ||
| Like, yeah, this is normal. | ||
| And meanwhile, the other team would be like, yeah, that's a little crazy, but we actually think this. | ||
| We have a more moderate position on whatever. | ||
| So what I usually find is... | ||
| When you actually deal with individuals instead of labels and ideologies, what you usually find is people are pretty normal, but a lot of people have been caught up in this battle, and it's like a reaction to the reaction to the reaction where you go from like, okay, it was the mainstream media, then it was like... | ||
| Independent media and then I find that like you know and I'm I I'm in independent media And so I understand the temptation as many as much as anybody to like dunk on mainstream media because it's like it's easy It's like great. | ||
| It's like you get right, you know, and they are wrong so often But then the mainstream media gets pissed off and they're like hey look you independent media You're just all you do is spend your time complaining about us. | ||
| What are you actually doing in terms of news gather? | ||
| Are you on the ground? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| Sometimes they are but you know I think The news, it's all just kind of decentralizing into a lot of different camps and there's good people everywhere and there's bad people everywhere. | ||
| There's great journalists, you know, who are trying to make a difference in bureaucracies at MSNBC or wherever. | ||
| There's great people. | ||
| There's great regulators trying to make a difference. | ||
| But everyone's dealing with their own incentive problems and their own challenges with bias and their own echo chambers that they make mistakes. | ||
| And then when they make mistakes, the other team just goes like, ah! | ||
| Yeah, there's that, and then there's also financial incentives. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's financial incentives. | ||
| Huge problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, when you get motivated by whoever is your sponsor, whoever is the advertising revenue provider for whatever show you have, that becomes a gigantic issue. | ||
| When you see a mandate that gets pushed through and when you see people clearly moving in lockstep Altogether like a coordinated effort to discredit someone or to go after some topic or to give a very Biased and distorted version of something that clearly benefits the advertisers it gets very sketchy and that for the mainstream people to say like What do you do? | ||
| All you do is criticize us. | ||
| Well, that's a very valuable role, guys. | ||
| Like, that's a very valuable role because you people are fucked. | ||
| Like, you're not Walter Cronkite. | ||
| This is not the New York Times of 1970. This is a completely different animal. | ||
| And it's an ideologically captured animal. | ||
| And then you have mainstream television, which is... | ||
| It's almost bullshit. | ||
| It's almost like you could just say CNN is bullshit. | ||
| Fox News is bullshit. | ||
| How much of it is bullshit? | ||
| Is it 30% bullshit? | ||
| Well, if I gave you a sandwich and it was a cheeseburger, but it was 30% dog shit, am I allowed to call that a cheeseburger? | ||
| Now, you have a dog shit infected... | ||
| Cheeseburger, right? | ||
| And that's what a lot of television news is. | ||
| And it's not news because they need to get you informed because it's like a service that they're providing because most people don't have the time to gather that information. | ||
| No, it's a propaganda disseminating entity that relies on advertising. | ||
| The advertising shapes the propaganda that gets disseminated. | ||
| That's fucking dangerous. | ||
| And so if independent media doesn't exist, where someone is not captured by that, can't point that out, we've got a real problem with information. | ||
| Because then it's going to be who has the most money and who can buy out the most media. | ||
| There's a lot of that going on, and that's scary. | ||
| It's scary for people that don't know the truth, and it feels horrible when you get duped, when you think that a mainstream story is correct, and then you find out, oh my god, I got fucked. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, what I think is everyone—the problem with pointing out financial incentives is everyone has financial incentives. | ||
| Everyone—even independent media has to make a buck somehow, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| What I'll say is I've been on some of these mainstream shows, not many of them, but a few of them have invited me on, and what I've noticed is they're just bad. | ||
| The platform itself is just a bad way to express yourself. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I went on one, and I won't name it, but you're in this waiting room, and they join you in the waiting room. | ||
| It's like this Zoom version of it, and they go, Hey, how's it going? | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| I'm good. | ||
| Okay, we're on we're on in five and then they ask you like this like Three-second question and they cut you off within like you give this like sound and you're aware like Okay, this is it's live, but it's actually not live like they're gonna release it later So I'm like why can't I really think about my answer? | ||
| But it's given with this perspective like okay, you have you know You have this 30-second answer and then they respond and then before you can even respond they cut to a new segment and so I'm like you can't even get into The meat or nuance of the argument is the format literally constrains your ability to tell the truth, the whole truth. | ||
| And so one of the things that I think has been so just unlocking about YouTube is like I just released a story and it was about a 30-minute story. | ||
| So you know how long it was? | ||
| It was 30 minutes. | ||
| When I have a 10-minute story, it's a 10-minute story. | ||
| When I have a 50-minute story, it's a... | ||
| That is such an underrated like just format shift. | ||
| To where you are able to tell the truth in the size that it is. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think that's the problem now is, or the problem with mainstream media that's like, it's a challenge is they're stuck in an old format. | ||
| Yeah, and it's unfixable because they're connected to advertising. | ||
| So they have to go to commercial every X amount of minutes. | ||
| And that's not going to change. | ||
| Yeah, and you need the in and you need the out. | ||
| And they also have a time, they have a time spot. | ||
| So their time slot is, you know, 8pm to 9pm. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So there's many subjects that are deeply nuanced, and you can't cover them in 60 minutes. | ||
| And you don't get 60 minutes anyway, you get 44 with commercials, or maybe even less, depending on the show. | ||
| That, you're fucked. | ||
| You're fucked because like it must be incredibly frustrating for someone who exists in mainstream media to see a person like you go into a deep dive And then they'll look at the video like this motherfucker got three million views like this is crazy You know my stupid fucking show on what network gets you know if you're lucky a couple of hundred thousand and that in the key Demographic what is it like forty fifty thousand and these are like big shows and that's hilarious but also it's It's great for you. | ||
| It's great for me. | ||
| And it also shows that people have this perception that because short attention span formats like TikTok work, they're very effective. | ||
| That's the only thing people want to consume. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| It's not true. | ||
| I think it's actually kind of like splitting into two things where you have like, hey, I have a break. | ||
| I'm going to watch something short. | ||
| Or, hey, I'm like, you know, I'm going to go do something. | ||
| Let me put on a show. | ||
| Let me learn while I'm... | ||
| That's become hugely popular. | ||
| It's like, hey, I'm setting up something in my office. | ||
| Let me turn something on and learn something, hopefully. | ||
| While I'm doing it. | ||
| While you're cleaning your office, you're actually absorbing something. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I'm like basically sitting in the room with an expert as he describes some topic that I'm interested in. | ||
| But then there's a problem that, what if that guy's full of shit? | ||
| What if that guy's full of shit and there's no fact checkers? | ||
| So there's no one checking. | ||
| And who fact checks the fact checkers? | ||
| I mean, it's problems all the way down, but I think like... | ||
| Right! | ||
| The thing that I worry about the most is that we have to have some commonality. | ||
| And so I think why I like spending time on things that unite people is I'm like, all right, my show you can agree with no matter what. | ||
| Or you can watch it and you can disagree with it, but it doesn't— You're laying out facts. | ||
| Yeah, you're not divided by— You know, your interests either way. | ||
| And so I think it's such a ripe moment for journalists to do more than play the game of battles. | ||
| But I don't think they can in mainstream media. | ||
| That's why it's so interesting. | ||
| And that's why independent media has a huge advantage. | ||
| Don't you think like 60 Minutes has done a pretty good job? | ||
| They only have 60 Minutes. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| And they don't even have 60 minutes. | ||
| But don't they do like real stories? | ||
| Yes, they do real stories. | ||
| Not just like partisan, you know, whatever. | ||
| They'll do a little bit of the politics, but they actually, like, they'll... | ||
| And Vice was doing that for a long time. | ||
| They did these incredible, like, documentaries. | ||
| That's journalism at its best, where you're just like, you're just deep diving a topic that just people find interesting. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You go somewhere, you talk to people, and you go, you present the facts, but you don't go in with this pre-thing of, okay, I know what happened, and let me tell every, like, I'm just gonna, you know. | ||
| But Vice is a good example of what's wrong, because, like, they were that, and then they got bought. | ||
| And then the people who bought it, like, yeah, you got a great thing going on, but we're gonna fuck that up, and we're gonna turn it into this, like, woke fucking platform, this weirdo platform. | ||
| And that's what it is now. | ||
| It's like, you can kind of guess what their angle's gonna be before they even write the story. | ||
| I will say there have been a few good vice pieces since then. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, for sure. | |
| But I know what you mean. | ||
| It's really challenging. | ||
| I really try to be as charitable as I can because I know a lot of these journalists are working within these horrible constraints of... | ||
| They want to do investigative work. | ||
| One of the dirty secrets of the journalism game is that investigative journalism is the loss leader for every single news agency. | ||
| They're all losing money on investigative journalism, and they want to do as little of it as possible for the bottom line. | ||
|
unidentified
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Because it's expensive. | |
| Because it's expensive, man, to go send out a guy to really do the work. | ||
| You know what's easy? | ||
| Putting on a commentator and I can just pull up a bunch of articles all day and I'll just talk my talking points about those articles. | ||
| That's the profitable side of things because it's quick. | ||
| You can churn out clips. | ||
| And at the end of the day, you can use the findings of investigative journalists and you just put them on your show. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You go, hey man, like I heard you found this. | ||
| And they spent like three months on it. | ||
| And you spend like 20 minutes and you get double the views because people, they know you because you're on TV all the time or you're on the internet all the time. | ||
| And so that's one of the real challenges. | ||
| I know journalists want to do that investigative work, but they have editors. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And they have people telling them, hey, we judge you by the number of clicks you get on our site. | ||
| We're a click site. | ||
| Or we're a subscription site. | ||
| So you've got to cater to the kinds of people who subscribe to us. | ||
| If we're the New York Times, we have a certain type of people who subscribe to us. | ||
| If we're, I don't know what the equivalent is, the New York Post or whatever, we have a type of person. | ||
| So I think the New York Post is more advertising. | ||
| The point is, is that these journalists are kind of like sent out on these mandates rather than go find the truth. | ||
| That's what they want to do. | ||
| But it's like instead it's, you know, you're battling for attention in a click world where you're not even controlling your traffic. | ||
| The social media company is controlling your traffic. | ||
| And it's about how many likes you get on Twitter and how many retweets you get on Twitter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's – they're trapped. | ||
| And it's not good. | ||
| But with – the thing about independent journalists is that it's like they're not going to send someone to Turkey to investigate something. | ||
| They don't have the money. | ||
| They also don't have people that they can just send out. | ||
| And that was one of the cool things about Vice is they did do that. | ||
| And back in the day, they would send someone to the front lines of some foreign war. | ||
| And, you know, you see some fucking journalist with glasses on, with a flak jacket on. | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| Vice was wild in the beginning, you know? | ||
| And I'm good friends with Shane Smith, and I was friends with him in the early days when all that was going down. | ||
| It's fascinating to see what they did, but he sold it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, here's the thing, too. | ||
| Independent media journalists, after a certain size, they can do it. | ||
| The problem is they realize, like, for clicks, it's like, hey, I should just stay in my room and make 20 videos instead of going out. | ||
| And so that's why I'm a big believer in, like, subscription models for independent media journalists. | ||
| Like subs. | ||
| Yeah, I do like the YouTube equivalent of like Patreon. | ||
| And it's like, that is a way for me to free myself from like the view model, which I did for a long time, where it was like, it was just, it was about views. | ||
| And so eventually I was like, man, I really want to deep dive something and I don't want to be limited to like, do I think this is a popular thing? | ||
| So that was a big change. | ||
| And I think, yeah, things like Substack, it really frees up people. | ||
| And I think as we learn to like, Pay for journalism. | ||
| I think that's a big thing because it's not free. | ||
| We got the false impression that it was free from years of just being able to go on Google News or whatever and sorting through. | ||
| Meanwhile, the quality of journalism was just dropping like a rock as everyone moved to this ad model. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To digital. | |
| Yeah, to digital. | ||
| It's just there's no money in it. | ||
| And the money is in just the mass production of just slop. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I don't envy them. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| But it is great for someone like you. | ||
| It's great for us. | ||
|
unidentified
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It really is. | |
| Especially for having long-form conversations. | ||
| What I found is that anytime a model breaks, it gives you the chance to restart. | ||
| So you just described the kind of the problems with the models of mainstream journalism that allowed for an opening because people are thirsty for like real conversations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so this podcast can go on as long as it goes on for and we can clarify anything. | ||
| We can do – but this – If there wasn't problems in the previous generation, there might not have been that opportunity for you to, you know, get big basically doing what you do. | ||
| Well, this thing didn't exist before. | ||
| The only form that you had that's similar to this was radio. | ||
| And, you know, morning radio. | ||
| I mean, this is literally where I came up with the idea to do this, was being on the Opie and Anthony show. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, and being on the Howard Stern show, where you would go, wow, I'd like to have one of these things. | ||
| You just have fun with people and sit around and shoot the shit. | ||
| It'd be great. | ||
| No one was going to give me a show like that. | ||
| And they certainly were going to give me a show where one day I'm going to interview a UFO expert. | ||
| The next day it's a psychologist. | ||
| The next day it's an athlete. | ||
| And it's just whoever I'm interested in. | ||
| And no one would say, yeah, interview whoever you're interested in. | ||
| Here's some money. | ||
| You'd have to create it on your own, which is I did, but I didn't do it for profit. | ||
| I did it because I thought it'd be fun to do. | ||
| That's literally how I started doing it, then it became this thing. | ||
| But I kept it the way I started it, where I'm only, like, I got interested in you by watching your videos. | ||
| I got interested, I'm like, oh, this is fascinating. | ||
| Oh, this guy's clarifying this stuff. | ||
| I was wondering why. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And then here we are talking. | ||
| It's that simple. | ||
| And I've reached out to you. | ||
| It's like me to you, and then we're here. | ||
| There's no other people. | ||
| It's crazy to think of, you know, I kind of grew up in this. | ||
| I'm only 28. So I kind of like grew up in like, as it was shifting, as everything was shifting underneath people's feet. | ||
| And it's interesting to watch. | ||
| I am very fortunate to have never had to deal with these middlemen. | ||
| That's very fortunate. | ||
| And people have tried to inject it, but I got enough people who had been burned by that telling me, like, hey, you don't want to sell the show. | ||
| You don't want a middleman. | ||
| You don't want this guy saying he can get all these deals. | ||
| You do not want this guy. | ||
| He's just going to use you and he's going to inject himself for nothing. | ||
| You get nothing. | ||
| And then your show becomes worse. | ||
| It becomes this different thing. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| But I was so fast like that is my favorite and it's legitimately the most exciting part of independent media is for the first time there's no business people telling people what to do. | ||
| There's no top line guy who's saying hey we'd really prefer it if you sold more ad spots or did more of this. | ||
| It's just you and the audience and that direct connection is special and we've never really got gotten to see it before and yeah I think that's a game changer. | ||
| Yeah, I know a lot of people that have podcasts that sold like half of their podcast or they, you know, got into some sort of a deal with a management company and the management company takes a percentage of the show and then all of a sudden other people are on conference calls dictating guests and telling you to avoid certain subjects or don't have this person on or don't talk about that or every time you talk about this, you know, if you get a, you know, a strike against you on YouTube, it's going to cost us. | ||
| Yeah, that's not—I mean, then you're back in the same trap that you were trying to avoid, if you were trying to avoid that trap in the first place. | ||
| But a lot of people were not trying to avoid that trap. | ||
| They just started a thing. | ||
| And then along the way, that thing became profitable, and people recognized it was profitable, and then they swooped in and tried to buy it. | ||
| And it's very tempting. | ||
| Someone comes along, hey, CoffeeZilla, we've got X amount of money for you. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And then you don't have to worry about money anymore. | ||
| Oh, don't you want to do that? | ||
| And then you're like, okay. | ||
| Okay, well, here, now you have to interview this person. | ||
| It's all to promote some crappy crypto coin or something. | ||
| That's what it always is. | ||
| Imagine if that was you, if you fell into that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, there's been plenty of that. | ||
| People are always asking, like, hey, will you promote this? | ||
| Will you do that? | ||
| And it's just like, why sell out like that? | ||
| I think people just want to be free of the tension of worrying about the future. | ||
| You know, if something comes along and now all of a sudden you don't have to worry. | ||
| Like, they're going to throw X amount of dollars at you and now you're owned by this corporation so you don't have to think about who your guests are. | ||
| There's always catches, though. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| I think actually though the kind of day-to-day struggle of like I got to kind of like you got to make something. | ||
| I got to generate something useful is actually kind of good because it kind of makes you strive. | ||
| It kind of makes you push. | ||
| I really like, you know, I feel like I'm literally living a dream because I started making these YouTube videos. | ||
| Now I've got this like crazy set and, you know, I'm able to like learn all about cinematography and somehow I get paid for it. | ||
| And it's kind of this wild thing, but at no point did I have to ask for anyone's permission. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like that is like the like the nobody had to give me a chance. | ||
| Like you kind of create your own your own chance in a weird way. | ||
| That's the beauty of YouTube. | ||
| You know, and I had a conversation with Russell Brand about this, and I'm like, here's this guy who's a movie star. | ||
| He's this huge movie star who decides, you know what? | ||
| I'm just going to have a camera pointing at me, and I'm going to rant and rave and have these comedic takes on social issues and issues in the news. | ||
| And it's become massively popular. | ||
| And I'm like, one of the things that's interesting is, like, you're doing it the way anyone can do it. | ||
| Like, anyone can set up an iPhone and have it point at you, and you just start talking and then make a video. | ||
| And there's a lot of them out there. | ||
| Like, you're not doing anything different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know what's fascinating is, you know what was the biggest tell? | ||
| Like, when I felt like everything broke was when all the late-night people had to go home for COVID. Yeah! | ||
| Wasn't that crazy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Amazing. | |
| You gotta see, like, they went from, you know, they're TV people, and all of a sudden what's on TV looks like a YouTube video. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And you go, oh my gosh. | ||
| You suck at this. | ||
| This whole time, like, I thought you guys were something, like, you're the same as me. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Worse. | ||
| But like, worse. | ||
| Way worse. | ||
| I'm doing it myself. | ||
| You have this whole team of people, and it's like, this is all you can, and then you, it kind of breaks the illusion, like, it's like seeing someone run a four minute mile or whatever, you're like, oh, I can do I can do this show like I got this idea to like make this crazy set because I saw somebody do this like TED talk about like you know I think their line was like you can't become Kanye in your living room like you got to make an environment that like speaks to what the show is kind of a weird thing now some people do do it very pop they have a very popular show | ||
| and they do just do it from their living room And that's a different appeal because that's like, that's raw. | ||
| So there's an appeal to the raw and then there's also an appeal to like, you know, high production value and it's different things. | ||
| They both communicate a different like kind of appeal to the work. | ||
| But I was always obsessed with like, there is no difference between YouTube and like Hollywood, besides just a little bit of knowledge, a little bit like insider, like they kind of know tricks. | ||
| There's tricks of the trade. | ||
| They kind of have a little bit more money. | ||
| But I was like, you can hack this together now. | ||
| You can figure out ways to kind of like... | ||
| Almost get to like a Netflix like so that's my that's my dream is to start pushing for like real like Documentaries or many documentaries on YouTube that look like they could be on a Netflix or something like that But never go to Netflix. | ||
| Yeah, but never take the deal like never go to the producer. | ||
| Just always be doing it yourself. | ||
| Yeah I think what you're saying about the late night things is so true. | ||
| Because I remember watching them do monologues with no audience. | ||
| And I was like, who said okay to this? | ||
| Why are you doing this? | ||
| There's not a fucking chance in hell that this is funny or gonna work. | ||
| And when you see those... | ||
| Flat, corny, late-night monologue jokes with no audience. | ||
| Those are so fucking cringy. | ||
| And you're also dealing with a lot of these people that are not stand-up comics. | ||
| So they don't even really, truly understand how to deliver it right. | ||
| Like, they don't have the chops. | ||
| What they're doing is just, like, reading off of a teleprompter, so a bunch of really good joke writers wrote them some stuff, and then they're playing to the audience, and the audience is, like, laughing so they get this feedback, and they know how to do that. | ||
| When they're just them and the camera, you're in the void now. | ||
| You're in deep space. | ||
| There's no one around you. | ||
| And it's fucking wild to watch. | ||
| It is wild. | ||
| Can you unlock, like, how different is that from, like, stand-up? | ||
| I'm just, like, a casual viewer of, like, the, like, late nights. | ||
| I mean, I know they say, like, applause, but is that real, like, laughter? | ||
| And, like, are they, like, saying, like, hey, clap? | ||
| Oh, there's someone who's doing this. | ||
| There's someone in front of the crowd. | ||
| There's a warm-up guy. | ||
| And generally the warm-up guy is a failed comedian or a middling comedian who's just trying to make it. | ||
| And they're doing the warm-up thing as like a side gig. | ||
| And there's people that are good at warm-up. | ||
| And the problem with being good at warm-up is it's a profitable job and it'll actually keep you from being good at stand-up. | ||
| Oh, you're like stuck. | ||
| Yeah, so you get stuck. | ||
| I've had friends that were stuck doing warm-up, and then some of them quit, and some of them didn't, and the ones that didn't are fucked. | ||
| Because those shows, they don't even exist anymore. | ||
| There's only a handful of those shows. | ||
| So if you see, how many talk shows are there? | ||
| There's very few. | ||
| There's Colbert, there's Jimmy Kimmel, there's Fallon. | ||
| There's a few. | ||
| There's only a few. | ||
| And so... | ||
| You know, they stand there and there's applause signs. | ||
| And then there's producers. | ||
| There's the warm-up guy that's literally telling people. | ||
| They're like, okay, explain to the people. | ||
| Okay, when Jimmy comes out, I want a big round of applause. | ||
| Let's practice this right now. | ||
| Ladies and gentlemen, Jimmy Fallon. | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| They practice it. | ||
| Yes, yes, yes. | ||
| They'll train the audience how to do it depending upon the set. | ||
| But I've seen them do that at different places. | ||
| And I had a friend who was a writer in the early days of Conan. | ||
| He's a buddy of mine who's a comic. | ||
| And I went to see one of the very, very early Conans. | ||
| So this is like... | ||
| I guess it was like the 90s or the early 2000s. | ||
| No, it had to be the 90s. | ||
| It was the 90s. | ||
| And they were reading their banter between Conan and, who's the other guy? | ||
| Andy Richter? | ||
| Oh, Andy Richter, yeah. | ||
| They were reading off of cue cards. | ||
| So they had a giant cue card. | ||
| The banter was fake. | ||
| So the banter, their dialogue back and forth was scripted. | ||
| So they were saying, so Andy, you know, I understand you got married. | ||
| And so they're reading it, and I'm watching the cast, like, this is madness. | ||
| Who approved this? | ||
| And it was terrible. | ||
| The early days of Conan, like, that sort of banter was fucking... | ||
| The thing about Conan is, like, he's this funny guy who's a funny writer, he's a really smart guy, and he had to figure out how to do the talk shows. | ||
| Yeah, he figured it out. | ||
| He figured it out. | ||
| But in the beginning, it was awful. | ||
| And I watched, like, the audience is being cheered on. | ||
| There's literal applause signs that flash to tell you when to applaud. | ||
| And like, we'll be right back. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yay! | |
| And everybody claps. | ||
| Is everybody really clapping that you're going to be right back? | ||
| Nobody gives a fuck if you're going to be right back. | ||
| I feel like they didn't know that, though. | ||
| Like, I feel like media literacy has kind of gone through the roof. | ||
| Like, so many people... | ||
| I guess it's maybe everyone has cameras now, so everyone's like sort of mini-producers now of their own show. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And so they get it now, and so all of a sudden... | ||
| The craving for authenticity gets so much higher because now you're aware of like what a tele... | ||
| Everyone knows what a teleprompter is. | ||
| Everybody's sort of like... | ||
| Even though I didn't know how exactly I worked, I kind of was vaguely aware that like they kind of told you to applaud and like... | ||
| And the laugh tracks in, you know, sitcoms were just canned laughter. | ||
| So I feel like as people realize the fakery, there's a craving for like, hey, can you do this for real? | ||
| Like can you not... | ||
| You know, I remember when I found out like none of the conversations were real. | ||
| I was like, what? | ||
| What do you mean it's not real? | ||
| Because it's all a pretend. | ||
| They're all pretending that you really knew about my funny boat story. | ||
| And I had this quippy, you know, and I thought, wow, they're so charismatic. | ||
| And you couldn't find out they've been rehearsing the story. | ||
| Yes, they go over with a producer on the phone. | ||
| And it's completely insane when you realize that you're like, oh, it's all fake. | ||
| And the illusion is sort of gone. | ||
| And so now... | ||
| I think one of the surprising things but also maybe obvious in hindsight things was why shows with no laugh track, less production, are more engaging is because there's more of a realization of, oh, there isn't like games here. | ||
| There's just two people talking. | ||
| They haven't rehearsed their lines. | ||
| I mean, I came on here. | ||
| There was no production notes. | ||
| There was no like, hey, we want to talk about this. | ||
| It was just like, hey, you want to come on? | ||
| And that's all it is. | ||
| We didn't even discuss what we're going to talk about, which is what I do with everybody. | ||
| I just have them come in and talk. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's fascinating, and I think that's partly to do with, like, why people enjoy the show, is that they know it's not, like, tricks and gimmicks. | ||
| I wonder, there's, like, it's funny to me as I'm thinking about it, I'm like, there's sort of, like, this, like, the world is accelerating in two directions towards, like, authenticity, and then, like, with all the beauty filters and, like, the fake AI voices, it's like, you can fake reality, but we also crave reality at the same time. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, people are craving real human experiences. | ||
| And if you watch those late night shows, you never feel like you know that person, you never feel like you're there. | ||
| But if you're just talking, and you and I are just talking, someone is like on their iPhone or whatever they're doing, they're a fly on the wall. | ||
| They're here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| In a weird way. | ||
| I always thought that, like, live streaming your whole life would become big. | ||
| Well, that was the Truman Show, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, but I thought we would see it. | ||
| Like, I guess you see it with Twitch streamers who, like, stream, like, 12 hours a day. | ||
| But I kind of thought what would take off as a—I was kind of surprised it didn't—was, like— You just watch my whole life. | ||
| Some people did do that for a while, right? | ||
| They tried it. | ||
| Yeah, I was kind of surprised that didn't – because I thought like eventually you'd have celebrities who their whole life would be on display and like the authenticity of just sitting in a room with somebody with just – it's quiet. | ||
| I think people just got too weirded out by that. | ||
| But wasn't there a... | ||
| There was a movie. | ||
| I forget who was in the movie. | ||
| But there was a movie where someone had their whole life filmed. | ||
| And at the end, they rejected it and decided... | ||
| That's Truman Show, for sure. | ||
| But Truman Show was like... | ||
| That was the Jim Carrey movie, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| But that was fake, right? | ||
| Like, he didn't know. | ||
| He didn't know there were Filming his whole life and he rejects it. | ||
| There was another one where the person became famous because they followed them around with cameras everywhere. | ||
| And at the end of it, he fell in love with a girl or something and it was over. | ||
| You know, there's always some corny fucking reason why he cancels it. | ||
| Do you know what I'm talking about, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, 100%. | |
| I'm trying to figure it out. | ||
| I thought for some reason Matthew McConaughey was in it, but I don't think that was it. | ||
| Maybe it was Ethan Hawke or someone, some famous person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Something TV. Yeah, Ed TV? Yeah, there you go. | |
| That's it. | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| Who was Ed TV? But it was that. | ||
| It was kind of the premise of the film. | ||
| It was Matthew McConaughey. | ||
| It was Matthew McConaughey. | ||
| Yeah, 1989. 99. So in that movie, he gives up on everything after a while, right? | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| See, that was it. | ||
| You're live on Ed TV. So that was him, just a regular guy who became famous living his regular life. | ||
| How crazy is it that that was 99? | ||
| It is crazy. | ||
| And they kind of predict... | ||
| I mean, that was just in TV for a while. | ||
| Elizabeth Hurley. | ||
| She's still so hot. | ||
| How is she doing that? | ||
| The fuck is she taking? | ||
| She pulled it off. | ||
| But that was the thing. | ||
| It's like that this would be bad. | ||
| And they were sort of like saying, no one wants this. | ||
| Like, imagine if you got famous this way. | ||
| What a disaster. | ||
| Meanwhile, then you have social media influencers who are, you know, every single aspect of their life, they're live streaming, they're putting it on camera. | ||
| That's what Justin TV started as. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Eight years later, though. | ||
| He literally attached a webcam. | ||
| Yeah, that's right, to his baseball cap. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've talked about that every way. | |
| He's really interesting. | ||
| Justin TV was the first time we live streamed. | ||
| We live streamed on Justin TV in the green room of comedy clubs. | ||
| So what we do is like my buddy Red Band, Brian Red Band, we would go on the road together and we just we thought it'd be funny to just like livestream why we were there in a green room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And so we just did that just for fucking around and it was just totally like, yeah, that's us in the green room. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's still there. | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| I think that's the Hollywood improv, right? | ||
| Is that what that is? | ||
| One of them was that, the other one was Pasadena. | ||
| That's back in my full beard days. | ||
| So we did that before the podcast itself and just for fun. | ||
| And so there was like all these different versions of it that I tried out. | ||
| Where I was thinking, like, there's got to be a way to do something where I don't have to go to someone and say, hey, can you give me a show? | ||
| And then when I saw Tom Green's show, there was two things that gave me the big idea. | ||
| One of them was Anthony Cumia from Opie& Anthony. | ||
| He did this thing called Live from the Compound where he had his house set up with a green room in his basement. | ||
| And Anthony's a psycho. | ||
| So he was, like, singing karaoke while holding a machine gun. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| It was so crazy, because he had all this money, right? | ||
| He's very wealthy, so he had a full production set. | ||
| He built a set in his basement. | ||
| And I was like, this is wild. | ||
| He can just do it. | ||
| But he was already on this Opie and Anthony show. | ||
| And so he decided for fun with his friends, like he had, you know, a fucking like a full bar down there with like Guinness on tap. | ||
| And they were just drinking and being ridiculous. | ||
| And he was doing a talk show and just having fun, just being silly with his friends. | ||
| And I was like, I could do that. | ||
| And so we started doing something like that with a laptop. | ||
| And when I went to Tom Green's house, Tom Green had turned his home Into a television studio. | ||
| And it was on the internet. | ||
| And this was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
2007? | |
| Somewhere around then? | ||
| And so he had, like, these fucking cables running through his living room and then he had a server room and everything like that. | ||
| And he takes me on this tour and I'm like, And there's a video of me sitting next to Tom Green because he had it set up just like a regular talk show where he had a desk like Johnny Carson and he was sitting there and he had screens and this is me explaining... | ||
| Why I think this is going to be the future. | ||
| For sure they'd be assholes. | ||
| There's no super cool hecklers. | ||
| They don't exist. | ||
| No, this is not about that, but this is... | ||
| That's me too. | ||
| But there is one video of me figuring it out. | ||
| Yeah, that's like a livestream show. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So this is like... | ||
| I think this is awesome. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you, man. | |
| This is the craziest thing ever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It really is different, you know, than television. | |
| This is way better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's like radio, but it's like television. | |
| And the genre is different because we can sit here and ram... | ||
| You know, there isn't that time constraint. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There isn't that pressure. | |
| I mean, you know, we want to keep it moving. | ||
| Well, not only that, there's not a corporate pressure. | ||
| You can't just express yourself because you're expressing yourself to someone who's selling advertising space. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| You just need to keep doing this. | ||
| You called this out. | ||
| We need to figure out how you make money from this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I've got a lot of neat ideas I want to talk to you about. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Take a little bit from the big wigs, right? | |
| Dude, this is, I mean, they don't need to exist. | ||
| They're non-creative people. | ||
| We talked about this before the show. | ||
| They're non-creative people who are controlling creative things. | ||
| And they want to have their input. | ||
| Just abandon them. | ||
| Abandon ship! | ||
| Isn't that crazy? | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That... | |
| Called it. | ||
| Yeah, you kind of did. | ||
| You know, I just realized why no one live streams their whole life. | ||
| I just realized it. | ||
| I remember people were trying and like they would go out and they'd call it IRL live streaming and you'd go to like the store. | ||
| You know what the problem was? | ||
| What? | ||
| People would swat you. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So they'd like call in a bomb threat or something. | ||
| Oh God. | ||
| So the problem is you get enough people watching live. | ||
| One of them is a psychopath. | ||
| Or they just want to get attention. | ||
| Who knows why? | ||
| Tim Pool has that problem. | ||
| He's been swatted. | ||
| How many times has Tim Pool been swatted? | ||
| Multiple times. | ||
| Many times. | ||
| It's a real issue with him. | ||
| It's an issue with live streamers, though, because you get the reactions. | ||
| because if I'm shooting a show and something happens I'll never put it out you don't say anything but with a live show because it's just happening in the moment you get to see them put their hands up and you know the whole nonsense and then they get their little like you get mad about it it stops the whole show and they know they had that impact of course so that's what's bad about IRL that's only one thing The other thing is, what is life then? | ||
| Is life a performance? | ||
| People are going to let that stop them, though. | ||
| But are you capable of being so in the moment that you are just yourself, no matter what? | ||
| Even if cameras are on, you would behave and exist the same way you would if there's no cameras on. | ||
| No. | ||
| I don't think most people... | ||
| Would be capable of that. | ||
| I mean, I enjoy keeping my private life private, my public life public. | ||
| I think that's pretty normal, and I think things get weird when everything's online, your family's online. | ||
| I've seen people who, they put out everything. | ||
| They put out their kids. | ||
| And they do it for the clicks. | ||
| That's what's weird. | ||
| And you're also not asking the kids. | ||
| Your kids are going to get famous when they're babies and then they don't have any say in it. | ||
| And then as they get older, people know them. | ||
| And then you run into all sorts of security issues because of that too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It's not wise, and there's a lot of people that don't think. | ||
| They just do it. | ||
| It's also like an opportunity, like kids' channels were big on YouTube, where they were running these, sorry, family channels are what they called them, because you'd watch the family together. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then you get like, your kids would like to watch their kids. | ||
| And people grew multi-million dollar brands in the back of that. | ||
| And it's like, by that point, it's too late to stop because you got a mortgage. | ||
| You're depending on that money coming in. | ||
| And so you can't stop. | ||
| Your kid better get on a camera. | ||
| I just want to know, like, do you tell your kid, like, get on your mark? | ||
| Like, hey, can you react to that again? | ||
| Can you help me with this thumbnail? | ||
| Like, that's crazy. | ||
| And then if the kid becomes famous when they're young, they're in so much trouble. | ||
| There's very few people that ever survive being famous when they're young. | ||
| Very few. | ||
| They all come out fucked up. | ||
| It's not a normal way to develop. | ||
| Fame is a drug that you have to develop a tolerance for. | ||
| And if you don't develop that tolerance, you actually develop with that drug. | ||
| Like, instead of, like, experiencing adversity, instead of developing your personality, you know, to, like, realize, like, what is wrong with the way I communicate? | ||
| Why do people get mad at me? | ||
| Why do people like me? | ||
| You sort it out as a human. | ||
| It's how you interact with the world. | ||
| It's why kids, you know, pick on each other and they're mean to each other and they're figuring out how to communicate and be social. | ||
| If you're five fucking years old and you're already famous, you're in deep shit. | ||
| And they're all in deep shit. | ||
| I've met quite a few of them now. | ||
| I've interviewed quite a few of them on this podcast. | ||
| I've met quite a few of them in real life and they're all fucked. | ||
| Everyone who becomes famous when they're a child is fucked. | ||
| I don't know... | ||
| I mean... | ||
| I was going to ask, like, do we know of anybody who... | ||
| Just navigating mega fame in general, I don't think I've seen many people do it without kind of getting eaten a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, you get eaten a little bit. | ||
| You need to do something to mitigate that. | ||
| You need to do something real. | ||
| And if you do not do something real, then the responses you get, if that's what you're living for, and if your worth and your value is based on people's People's attention to you and people's interaction with you, that's not good. | ||
| It's very bad. | ||
| And that's why, I mean, also, how many of them are narcissists to begin with? | ||
| And how much of that narcissistic tendency gets fed by being famous? | ||
| It's just like I think with my phone, I've sort of given myself some low-grade ADHD. I think too much of the attention online makes you into a narcissist in Even if you weren't one original, it has the potential to do so if you don't actively mitigate it. | ||
| One of the strangest things is like when you get hot online, everybody wants to be your friend. | ||
| All of a sudden these people come out from the woodwork and all of a sudden everyone wants to be your friend. | ||
| And then when you're not hot again, now it's like you don't exist. | ||
| And that's a bad way to experience life that your whole identity and your whole friendship base and everything's wrapped up. | ||
| With how you're doing online and like, I know for me at least, I try to just segment my life to where the online thing is online and all my real friends are just in my city, just like kind of regular people, have different jobs. | ||
| I think it's kind of important to detach yourself so that when things aren't going well, it's fine. | ||
| When things are going well, it's fine. | ||
| There's like a stabilizing something. | ||
| I feel like you're describing Hollywood. | ||
| You know, you're describing the problems with Hollywood. | ||
| In Hollywood, when you make it, like if you're in a movie and you're doing well, everybody loves you. | ||
| Oh, Coffezilla, come on through the red carpet. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Coffezilla is hot now. | ||
| We want to put him in this movie and they want to put him on this show. | ||
| We want to do this. | ||
| And then when you're not, no one wants to talk to you. | ||
| Doesn't that break you psychologically, though? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| That's why they're all crazy. | ||
| In Hollywood, it's even worse, right? | ||
| Because you don't get to choose your own destiny. | ||
| You've developed your own show and you've created your own thing. | ||
| You haven't been chosen. | ||
| In Hollywood, the problem is you're being chosen for everything. | ||
| So you're being cast in these things. | ||
| So you have to deal with people that approve you or pick you. | ||
| So you're formulating your personality based on whatever the zeitgeist is, whatever the... | ||
| Ideology of most of the producers are like if all of Hollywood was right-wing Right if all the producers and all the executives and all the studios were all very conservative and right-wing all actors would be conservative They would all be pro-life. | ||
| They would all be First Amendment, Second Amendment happy. | ||
| They would all carry guns. | ||
| It would be 100% compliance, the same way it is with left-wing. | ||
| They're not necessarily people that think that way. | ||
| They think that way because that is the way to fit in. | ||
| And be successful. | ||
| So you take people that already have this exorbitant need for attention and then you bring them into an environment where they have to be chosen. | ||
| So you have to figure out what gets me chosen. | ||
| So you form your ideas and opinions based on what's going to be the most successful. | ||
| It's a mating strategy. | ||
| It's weird because the fact you need to be chosen sort of makes you play the same game. | ||
| that you don't like, which is you have to go to the power brokers and you have to suck up to them the same way people suck up to you when you're successful. | ||
| You have to go suck up to the successful people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And now you're playing the same game where you're going to the people who are decision makers and you're trying to woo them and pretend you're their friend. | ||
| That's why when those people do make it and they do get pushed through that red carpet, come on through Tom Cruise. | ||
| They're all fucking crazy. | ||
| And a lot of them treat other people like shit because they want to let you know that they're a part of the chosen class. | ||
| So that's like this thing about certain celebrities being assholes to regular people. | ||
| Like, why do they treat people like that? | ||
| Well, the same reason why royalty does it. | ||
| When you see the queen, you're supposed to bow. | ||
| This is how it goes down. | ||
| That's why they became the queen in the first place. | ||
| That's why they became a star in the first place. | ||
| Because they want to be that person that just gets fucking exorbitant amounts of love and attention. | ||
| And it's very unhealthy. | ||
| And it's good, I think, that it's now becoming possible that you can be like a Mr. Beast or something and not be in Hollywood. | ||
| He's like in North Carolina or whatever. | ||
| And he can just do his own thing. | ||
| He can start his own. | ||
| And he's as big of a brand as anybody. | ||
| And it's like, it just doesn't matter. | ||
| He doesn't have to kind of play the same games. | ||
| I think that is like... | ||
| Sometimes I think changes in technology are neutral. | ||
| It's kind of like you win some, you lose some. | ||
| I think that is a distinct change for the better that we've kind of decentralized Hollywood a little bit. | ||
| It's like you can just start your own show. | ||
| We talked about being subject to the gatekeepers but even subject to that kind of mentality of everything is about success and fame. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's the currency of Hollywood. | ||
| It's also the motivation. | ||
| What is the motivation to do it in the first place? | ||
| A lot of the people that are in Hollywood, their motivation is purely for attention. | ||
| Their motivation is purely to become successful and famous. | ||
| Whereas his motivation seems to be to have fun and to do things with the money that is actually altruistic and good and beneficial and charitable. | ||
| He's a really good guy. | ||
| That's one of the appeals. | ||
| And also, there's no one filtering him. | ||
| That's who he is. | ||
| That's that guy. | ||
| He's very smart and very ambitious, but he's also not really money-hungry, and he dumps most of the money back into the production of his show. | ||
| He's legit. | ||
| I mean, you know, I have a lot of... | ||
| A lot of people you meet behind the scenes and they're like, they're different, you know? | ||
| It's like the same guy you meet. | ||
| And that's always a huge letdown. | ||
| I've had so many examples of that, but like, but he was one of the first, like, not first, but there are a lot of guys, but the big, the biggest stars, I guess, are the ones that are most likely. | ||
| You're like, ah, you're a bit different. | ||
| But he was like, when I met him, we talked a bit and it's just like, dude, this guy's legit. | ||
| Like, he's the real deal. | ||
| Yeah, that is who you get. | ||
| The guy that you see when he's doing those videos with his friends joking around and making them do stunts and pranks and all the different little games that he comes up with where people can win money. | ||
| That's really who he is. | ||
| YouTube's lucky because it could be anybody. | ||
| They don't select who is on top. | ||
| And they're fortunate because it could just be some super narcissistic monster. | ||
| I don't know if it would work. | ||
| Oh, you're saying it's selected for like... | ||
| Yeah, because a super narcissistic monster I don't think would create something that's relatable. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| There was this huge YouTube channel. | ||
| I think they still might be the biggest, like T-Series or something. | ||
| There's some random corporation. | ||
| I think there are ways to growth hack it maybe, but you're right. | ||
| You wouldn't create such a brand. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You couldn't fake it forever. | ||
| You couldn't fake authenticity. | ||
| I don't think you can. | ||
| I think after a while it gets exposed and people realize you're full of shit. | ||
| Yeah, the longer you talk, especially on the longer you... | ||
| If you're in little sound bites, you can pull it off for a little bit, but the longer you talk, the more it gets shown. | ||
| Unless you just have amazing stamina for bullshit. | ||
| Have you ever talked to somebody like that? | ||
| I'm sure, right? | ||
| Statistically, there has to be someone who came on the show and you're like, oh my gosh. | ||
| After like an hour? | ||
| That they're full of shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh yeah! | ||
| Oh yeah! | ||
| For sure! | ||
| There's quite a few people that I talk to that are full of shit. | ||
| And it's unfortunate. | ||
| Like, sometimes people, like... | ||
| You know, I've had people come on where I don't realize until, like, an hour and a half, two hours in. | ||
| And then I start asking them certain questions, and you realize, like, there's something fucking funny about your answers here. | ||
| Like, this is not... | ||
| And then we'll research them after the show, like, oh, good lord. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It's an issue, you know? | ||
| It's like... | ||
| And there's also people that just... | ||
| Whatever their motivations are, they're not good. | ||
| What is their motivation to do a show in the first place? | ||
| Is their motivation just to try to make the most amount of money? | ||
| Or are they trying to do a good show? | ||
| If you're trying to do a good show and you keep working at it, it'll get better. | ||
| Go watch my early shows. | ||
| They fucking suck. | ||
| You get better if you're actually just trying to do it and get better at it. | ||
| But if your motivation is just to make money, somewhere along the line usually you slide off. | ||
| I think most people who want to make money just go into finance. | ||
| Yeah, but they also want attention. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, right. | |
| They want that currency and power. | ||
| And then once you've gotten the attention, that's the thing about fame, right? | ||
| If you go to a store and there's a security guard at that store, you don't think, look at this poor fuck. | ||
| He's a security guard at a store. | ||
| You just think he's a guy. | ||
| Like, hey, man, what's up? | ||
| How you doing? | ||
| You don't treat him badly. | ||
| But if you go there and it's Will Smith, Will Smith has lost all his money. | ||
| Now he's a security guard at the store. | ||
| Look at this fucking loser. | ||
| Let's go visit Will Smith. | ||
| And you laugh at him. | ||
| How much you make here, Will? | ||
| What, are you going to slap me to kick me out? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| You would be free to do that. | ||
| And that was the case with Gary Coleman. | ||
| You remember Gary Coleman? | ||
| Oh, the... | ||
| Yeah, the tiny guy. | ||
| He used to have that show, Different Strokes. | ||
| And he was famous on television, but then he... | ||
| I don't know what happened. | ||
| Lost all his money. | ||
| And he was a security guard at a studio. | ||
| And they hired him to be the guy that like when people drive through they meet him and then people realized he was there and this was like before social media. | ||
| So this was like early on and it was a real problem because people would go there just to mock him and make fun of him because someone who used to be famous and now is not is a loser. | ||
| But someone who's just never been famous is just a person. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| But it's so weird because everyone who achieves any level of notoriety knows how temporary – more than even the audience, they know that there's a shelf life on everything. | ||
| Very few people make it an entire career – I'm always thinking, it's going to be over next month. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because that is the nature of, especially online fame, is even more fleeting than the old days of movie stars. | ||
| It's even less. | ||
| So I don't understand why that is. | ||
| It feels like... | ||
| I don't really buy into that. | ||
| I mean, I think it's just people are people and you have your moment in like the spotlight for one reason or another. | ||
| It's usually not about who you are. | ||
| It's just you're saying something at a time that resonates and things don't resonate forever. | ||
| Right, but think of your perspective and where you're coming from. | ||
| You're a 28-year-old guy who is doing really well right now, so you are in the spotlight, and you haven't had a lot of time outside of it. | ||
| I mean, how old were you when you started your show? | ||
| I think I got actual attention maybe 26, 25, 26? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So for the last three years. | ||
| So you didn't go through like this long, terrible period of fucking hating life. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Darkness and depression. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So a lot of people fucking hate life and they look at someone who is a movie star or a television star like Gary Coleman and they go, wow. | ||
| How the fuck? | ||
| That guy, how's he doing it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's got a fucking Ferrari, he's got a this, he's got a that. | |
| And then when they don't have it, like, ha ha! | ||
| You're less than one of them. | ||
| You're less than a normal person because you're a person that used to be free of it. | ||
| You're a person that used to be... | ||
| We love a story of some movie star that spent all their money and now they're broke and crazy. | ||
| I remember, who's the woman, was it Margot Kidder? | ||
| Is that her name? | ||
| The woman from Superman? | ||
| There was a woman who was she played Lois Lane in the early Superman's with Christopher Reeve and She went crazy and like she lost all of her teeth and she was like someone found her in the bushes somewhere like it was like real sad like real mental illness problems and I remember there's this deep fascination with this person who was a Movie star at one point in time and then had completely fallen apart like what was the story with her? | ||
| Do you remember the story with her Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You nailed as much as I remembered, yeah. | |
| Yeah, something happened. | ||
| She had some sort of a mental health breakdown, and I'm sure some of that had to do with fame and society and acting and just the world that they live in of the movie star. | ||
| And then also the women's world of a movie star, which is a fucking much more brutal world. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's brutal. | |
| Because, you know, I was talking about Elizabeth Hurley. | ||
| She's the rare, the rare that stays hot. | ||
| She's hot and she's like fucking 80 years old. | ||
| She had an accident, I guess, that left her paralyzed. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| She lost some money and had some issues with. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This... | |
| I will say, like, one of the challenges is you kind of have to... | ||
| You don't know how long you're going to stay relevant. | ||
| And then if you don't make the money then, now what do you do? | ||
| I guess is the point. | ||
| And then... | ||
| So if you haven't set yourself up... | ||
| And a lot of these people, they think it's going to be lasting forever because their agents tell them it's going to last forever. | ||
| So they just spend all their money. | ||
| And then especially if they don't pick up any skills, one of the things like with actors is all you learn is acting. | ||
| I mean, one of the interesting things now, which is kind of fascinating about, like, modern, like, you know, people who grew up on TikTok and, like, the YouTube era, is you kind of have to learn, like, marketing. | ||
| You have to learn video editing. | ||
| You have to learn... | ||
| So you can pick up skills to where... | ||
| You're never going to be completely, you know, I know a lot of YouTubers who now work for other YouTubers because they like, they stopped being relevant, but they're like, I understand content. | ||
| I understand how this stuff works. | ||
| They're not just a face. | ||
| They're not just like a pretty face. | ||
| They have actual tangible skills beyond that. | ||
| That is an issue, though. | ||
| I mean, I can understand why that's a problem. | ||
| I think here's a big issue with someone like yourself. | ||
| What if YouTube goes away? | ||
| That's the real issue. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you're relegated to one platform, and that platform, what if the platform decides for whatever strange reason? | ||
| Like, what if they get pressure from someone who you've outed? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And they come up with some bogus reason to strike your account and delete your account. | ||
| That's a real issue. | ||
| If you're beholden to one company, that can be a real problem. | ||
| It is a huge problem. | ||
| Right now, the number one video sharing site in the world is basically YouTube, and that's essentially it. | ||
| I mean, there's not really anyone else. | ||
| There's, like, alternatives, like Rumble, but, you know, like, that's kind of... | ||
| I don't know why it's perceived as kind of like a right-wing thing. | ||
| Sort of, but then, you know, Russell Brand's on it, and, you know, Glenn Greenwald's on it. | ||
| Let's say political commentary thing. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if, like, mainstream, like, just, like, random creators are doing really well. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it's there, maybe it's not. | ||
| I think you're pointing out, though, a very good point, which is like, as much as we talk about the decentralization of gatekeepers, there is one gatekeeper to rule them all still, for someone like me, that is YouTube. | ||
| I mean, I would like to think that, you know, throughout, you learn enough about... | ||
| Making stuff, making content that you could move. | ||
| I would probably try to transition into some like production role. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Start a production company. | ||
| I mean, I love... | ||
| But I think you would still enjoy doing the thing you do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, of course. | |
| You'd have to figure out a way to do it somewhere else. | ||
| But also you'd have to figure out a way to bring... | ||
| Like here's the other problem. | ||
| Social media, right? | ||
| Social media is where you use to promote the thing that you're doing on YouTube. | ||
| So what if that goes away? | ||
| What if something... | ||
| Like we have to assume that... | ||
| Twitter was on the verge of bankruptcy, apparently, when Elon bought it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| It was fast-tracking to bankruptcy. | ||
| What if someone incompetent bought it and then ran it into the ground? | ||
| Then it doesn't exist anymore. | ||
| Then all those people that use Twitter to promote their businesses, stand-up comedians that use it to promote their tour dates, like, they're fucked now. | ||
| It's gone. | ||
| Now you don't have that vehicle, and so your ability to access your fans is completely gone. | ||
| Yeah, you don't own any of your data. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So you don't own any of your subscribers' data. | ||
| You don't own any of that stuff yourself. | ||
| It's a real... | ||
| It's a real issue. | ||
| It's a real challenge. | ||
| I mean, one of the things... | ||
| They also control what you can talk about. | ||
| So, when I was doing, you know, my first show... | ||
| I had this video where I wanted to explore smoking and vapes through the lens of the FDA and how they regulated vaping and they sort of went after vaping. | ||
| It's a problem, but it also seems like it's a lot healthier than just smoking cigarettes. | ||
| Cigarettes are the worst thing in the world for any human to be doing, although it's very fun. | ||
| But they're horrible for you. | ||
| And so I did a video about that. | ||
| YouTube age-gated it. | ||
| Not only no monetization, which that, you know, it's acceptable. | ||
| It's just kind of the cost of being on YouTube. | ||
| You sometimes get demonetized, whatever. | ||
| The reach was killed. | ||
| So now this video, which everyone loved, nobody can watch, or you won't get recommended, like, you know, the recommended feed. | ||
| There's also a problem that now you're in a specific category. | ||
| Like, I don't know how their algorithm works, but if you do get flagged for something, you could get put in a problematic category. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which makes you shadow banned or less likely to be recommended. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think especially, I think they say their official stance is they do it on a video-by-video basis. | ||
| I don't actually know. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of hard to figure out, you know, what's true, what's not. | ||
| But I will say, like, did I ever do a video about that again? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| No. | ||
| Yeah, you self-censor. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what happens to people. | ||
| That's a big problem. | ||
| That happened during COVID with a lot of people. | ||
| You know, people wanted to talk about issues like the lab leak hypothesis. | ||
| Usually they're important issues, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's the problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're controversial, so they are important. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it's like, you know, I understand YouTube's perspective. | ||
| They have... | ||
| I don't know how many. | ||
| Maybe they're supporting hundreds of thousands of people's livelihood. | ||
| And they're like, do we want to risk it all so somebody can say some wild stuff? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then the advertisers pull out. | ||
| They lose X percentage of the revenue. | ||
| And then whoever that producer is that allowed that revenue. | ||
| Channel to exist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gone. | |
| Now that person gets fired, and their success in this company is based on whether or not the company's bringing in revenue. | ||
| And if you're allowing all these people to say things that are really terrible to the bottom line of whoever is paying money for advertising, that's not good. | ||
| What I've said is like, I think a lot of these, you know, some of these companies, they achieve near monopoly statuses. | ||
| It's hard to argue that some of these companies aren't close to a monopoly in their specific like domain that they're good at. | ||
| Because, you know, if you're going to make a replica of YouTube, you've seen how hard it is with Rumble. | ||
| It's not like you're just video sharing. | ||
| It's like you're video sharing. | ||
| They're AI. They're copyright ID. I think they said they spent like 10 million dollars or 100 million to build the copyright ID. So if you want to compete with them, you need to have at least that just to build a copyright ID system on par. | ||
| Then you got to go host all the video. | ||
| You got to find the AdWords targeting. | ||
| Google is the best ad targeting in the world. | ||
| They're not going to give you access to their system if you're a competitor. | ||
| They're not going to give you the same deal. | ||
| So it's like this challenge of, okay, who can really compete when there's such a high barrier to entry? | ||
| So I'm thinking like, why are these things not considered some sort of public good in that because we accept that it's so hard to compete meaningfully with these things that are so important to our public discourse, I understand the whole argument of like free speech is just freedom to speak against the government, not freedom from a corporation. | ||
| But what I'm saying is when all our discourse is online, why are these companies not some form of like almost like a utility company? | ||
| Like, yes, at some level you don't have the right to monetize, but do you have the right to at least say something? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good point. | ||
| And that was the point about Twitter. | ||
| That was the conversation about Twitter being the town square and that it should be regulated like some sort of a utility. | ||
| And I could see that argument. | ||
| And also, when you think about the concept of free speech and the First Amendment, none of that existed with social media. | ||
| And they would have... | ||
| Imagine trying to wrap your head around social media when they're drafting the Constitution with feathers. | ||
| They're literally writing with a fucking quill. | ||
| They had no idea what they were saying. | ||
| So they were just trying to get people to be able to discuss things without being restricted by the government to stifle tyranny. | ||
| Because at the time, the tyranny was government. | ||
| That's the only people who had the kind of power and oversight to where they could literally stop you from saying anything as a government. | ||
| Now it's like, okay, you want to say something, the person who's going to stop you from saying it is probably not the government. | ||
| It's probably some random tech executive. | ||
| Yeah, random tech executive who has an ideological bias. | ||
| Unelected from a... | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's this strange thing, and I think it's actually a very... | ||
| It should be a universal issue because I think conservatives all don't want to be censored and that's usually who gets censored. | ||
| But left-wing people are all about decentralized power. | ||
| I mean that's like the idea is like democracy, more elected, not just like these unelected people but get more of a – like kind of a group say and powerful decisions. | ||
| Well, then they also should have a problem with the decisions even though they happen to kind of go a certain way. | ||
| Still being made by unelected people who just can have arbitrary biases. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| One day, Twitter's owned by... | ||
| I forgot the last... | ||
| Who was the leader of health and safety or whatever at Twitter? | ||
| Oh, Vidya? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| One day it's her, the next day it's Elon Musk. | ||
| And they have different opinions on things. | ||
| And so do you want to be subject to both of their whims? | ||
| Or do you want there to be some sort of thing on, you know, I don't know, on the books that we can at least sort of have a public vote on it? | ||
| Well, there's this narrative that's being bantered about now that Twitter's no longer safe from trolls. | ||
| But Twitter was never safe from trolls. | ||
| It's just they used to be just left-wing trolls. | ||
| Now you get right-wing trolls, too. | ||
| It's more of a center. | ||
| It's like the idea that Twitter leans right now. | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| How many left-wing people that are addicted to Twitter stayed on? | ||
| Most of them. | ||
| A few goofy celebrities valiantly declared they're leaving Twitter. | ||
| One of them was my friend. | ||
| I was like, what the fuck are you doing? | ||
| Why are you posting that you're leaving? | ||
| So goofy. | ||
| And you don't even know what you're saying. | ||
| You're just saying this because you think this is going to appeal to your base. | ||
| That you're so noble. | ||
| You're going to leave before the right-wing trolls come back. | ||
| Cut the fucking shit. | ||
| And the good thing about... | ||
| People being allowed to speak is that you allow them to put things out there that can be ridiculed by everybody. | ||
| And so if you really oppose these right-wing ideas, let them post them and then post something that ridicules them. | ||
| Post something that refutes them. | ||
| Post facts. | ||
| Post information. | ||
| Get engaged. | ||
| If that's your thing, you really like doing that? | ||
| I don't like doing that. | ||
| But if you like doing that, get in there. | ||
| Get in there and go to work. | ||
| It sounds like a huge... | ||
| I get exhausted. | ||
| I'm like, just thinking about it. | ||
| I'm like, who wants to spend their time arguing with somebody? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I guess it's just not something I care about. | ||
| So it's like, to me, that doesn't matter. | ||
| But I guess to some people, this is their whole... | ||
| Just like covering scams is my thing. | ||
| It's like, this is their whole thing. | ||
| And I guess that's their whole... | ||
| It's like video games. | ||
| It becomes their game. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's where they get their score, their points. | ||
| They level up. | ||
| Yeah, they level up. | ||
| They get more followers. | ||
| Get more followers. | ||
| Level up, get more likes. | ||
| You know, people will tell you about their engagement. | ||
| My engagement on Twitter or something. | ||
| How the fuck do you know? | ||
| I don't even know how many followers I have. | ||
| Why are you paying attention? | ||
| Get out of there. | ||
| Go outside. | ||
| Go do something. | ||
| I think it's deeply bad for health to constantly be given analytics. | ||
| Like this is a thing on YouTube. | ||
| I was talking to Lex about this because he was telling me he doesn't like – he likes to not look at his numbers. | ||
| And I was like, man, I love that. | ||
| I try not to look at my numbers. | ||
| The thing is when you go into your dashboard, like they give you every stat you could ever imagine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I get it. | ||
| They're trying to educate you on if a video is doing well or doing bad or whatever. | ||
| But I think it's kind of good for artists not to have immediate feedback. | ||
| There's an argument against that though and that's Mr. Beast. | ||
| Mr. Beast has figured it out. | ||
| He moneyballed it. | ||
| He moneyballed YouTube. | ||
| YouTube before that wasn't like a science. | ||
| It was like an art. | ||
| It's like nobody knew what they were doing. | ||
| He comes in. | ||
| He's like, you guys are all idiots. | ||
| Let's turn this into stats and numbers. | ||
| And I love him and I hate him for it. | ||
| Because I got the one perspective. | ||
| It's like you kind of saw the Mr. Beastification of YouTube. | ||
| Everyone talks the same. | ||
| Everyone has a... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hey guys, what's up? | |
| Today we're doing this. | ||
| And that's like because he kind of showed like, oh, this is a pretty optimal way of doing it. | ||
| So it's good because he gave people like handles on their own success, which is valuable. | ||
| Like it's cool that you know why a video does well or not. | ||
| There's also something that like it kind of kills a little bit of creativity and inspiration when all of a sudden, you know, like this segment ain't going to do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like and you they give you this graph. | ||
| Have you ever seen the retention graph? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh, it's hilarious. | ||
| So you start off at 100%, and then you just see as people leave. | ||
| And then it goes to the end of the video, and you see how many people were left. | ||
| And at every moment, you can tell if someone clicked off at that moment. | ||
|
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People get so much anxiety for that. | |
| Oh! | ||
| And what they do now, and this is taught at YouTube, boot camps, is like, look at your retention graph and everything that wasn't good. | ||
| If people clicked off, you gotta cut it. | ||
| You gotta stop. | ||
| And I think that creates its own, like, you know, sickness. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| YouTube boot camps are hilarious. | ||
| That's so funny that they have YouTube. | ||
| But it makes sense. | ||
| I mean, if you wanted to treat it like a business, like any other business, if you wanted to get involved and, you know, you wanted to open up a small business somewhere, you know, you could treat YouTube like you're opening up a small business. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| It's not my thing, though, so I don't get that aspect. | ||
| I think that would fuck with what I do. | ||
| I think that would get in the way. | ||
| I think it would fuck with what you do, too. | ||
| I think it gets in the way more than it helps. | ||
| We've had to move away for a while. | ||
| We really emulated some, like, creators... | ||
| Who we liked, what they did. | ||
| But eventually what you realize is like, I just have a different audience. | ||
| People are here for different reasons. | ||
| And so I have to find my... | ||
| I can't just rely on a book or... | ||
| Not literally a book, but like the playbook of like what has worked for you. | ||
| I have to find out like, you know... | ||
| Not only what my audience wants, but what do I want? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that's the most important thing. | ||
| It is the most important thing. | ||
| We're not just making—well, I'm not making things for other people. | ||
| I'm making it because I think it's cool, I think it's interesting, and I think it's valuable just for me to express it. | ||
| And so I have to find out, like, why do people watch my show? | ||
| What do I want for my show in a way that even if nobody wants it, I put it in—like, I have this, like, this whole robot bartender thing, and it's like this CGI thing. | ||
| And I do it because I like it. | ||
| It's fun for me. | ||
| I get a real kick out of that stuff. | ||
| I'm a nerd when it comes to that CGI tech stuff. | ||
| And people wouldn't believe how much time I spend on that. | ||
| I spend like half my day just like tweaking this stuff. | ||
| But that resonates with people. | ||
| That's one of the reasons why people like it. | ||
| I think when you do something that you like, it's very obvious to the people that are paying attention. | ||
| I think that's part of the appeal of a lot of shows. | ||
| I think that that's why it works. | ||
| I mean, I think that's one of the secrets to my success is that I only have on people that I'm actually interested in talking to. | ||
| So I'm engaged. | ||
| I'm not just bullshitting my way through someone trying to promote some movie. | ||
| You know, I'm actually engaged. | ||
| If I have someone that's promoting a movie, I'm interested in the movie. | ||
| I want to know what they're doing. | ||
| If it's a documentary, I want to know, like, how did you go about doing this? | ||
| What's the process? | ||
| I'm actually engaged. | ||
| When you're faking it and phoning it in, people know it. | ||
| They feel it. | ||
| You know, and that's... | ||
| The beauty of your show is, I think your show serves multiple purposes, but one of the things is that it certainly clearly appeals to what you're interested in, and you act as a watchdog. | ||
| Like, I watched the Celsius video that you put out recently, and I watched it today, and I was like, this is so valuable because I'm seeing all these people, because you showed those people that did get scammed, and the people that get fucked over by this guy who created this thing, and, you know, they have a voice now. | ||
| And you can also, like, let all these other motherfuckers that are trying to do something like that know that CoffeeZilla's out there, and he's gonna find you, and he's gonna put you on blast, and people are gonna know, and it's gonna be more difficult for the next person. | ||
| And again, it's not the wealthy investors that will sue. | ||
| It's these people that put in $2,000, and it was the only $2,000 they had. | ||
| That's where it's so valuable, and I know that you feel that way, and it comes through in your video. | ||
| And I think that's why it's appealing, and that's why it's working. | ||
| I really discovered early on that nobody cares about the numbers. | ||
| The numbers are like the headline or whatever, but ultimately you can't make a, like, this stuff doesn't matter until you get people involved. | ||
| Until you hear the victims talk, they're the heartbeat of everything. | ||
| Because until you hear that, like, what's a billion dollars? | ||
| It's impossible to know. | ||
| And then you watch the guy and you're like, who would fall for this? | ||
| It's easy to get cynical if you just see the numbers and the guy who defrauded people. | ||
| The second you humanize it and you show a person, and all of a sudden you see someone with all the same problems, and you can just tell, you can see it in their eyes, and they're just wrecked. | ||
| By this guy who truly they believed in. | ||
| It's like the biggest betrayal. | ||
| You trusted somebody with everything. | ||
| And then they stab you in the back. | ||
| Alex Mashinsky, CEO of Celsius, his whole thing was banks are evil. | ||
| Which is not... | ||
|
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Crazy. | |
| I mean, it's like, you know, you can understand why a lot of people resonated with that. | ||
| They're like, and it wasn't even their evil. | ||
| I don't want to say they're heartless. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I was going to correct that. | ||
| He said, like, they're greedy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| And he's not. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He goes like, banks are not your friends. | ||
| True statement, Alex. | ||
| And then this interviewer is like, but Alex is your friend? | ||
| And he's like, yeah. | ||
| He's like, basically, you can take the same ride as me, 8%, 8% a year. | ||
| I'll just give it to you. | ||
| We're doing the same thing as the banks. | ||
| We're loaning out your money, but we're going to pass on 80% of the revenue back to you instead of the banks, which they take all your money, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So people bought into that. | ||
| They said, that sounds great. | ||
| Like, hey, the Internet changed everything. | ||
| You know, we think crypto is going to change everything. | ||
| Why not have a bank that instead of serving its shareholders, it serves its customers? | ||
| It kind of like there's something that makes sense there. | ||
| It's really compelling. | ||
| And then come to find out Celsius was never making money. | ||
| They said they were paying out, you know, you with with their profits. | ||
| They were paying out you with new deposits. | ||
| Like new people were coming in and they were paying you out. | ||
| And so it was this giant Ponzi scheme where they set the rewards because they knew if it's high enough, people are just going to flock to them. | ||
| And so but they had this compelling explanation for why like it kind of made kind of made a little bit of sense. | ||
| And then they when it finally goes wrong, he just get he just walks away. | ||
| I mean, yeah, he's getting sued civilly. | ||
| But where's the criminal action? | ||
| He's going to go to jail. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| And it's like, that is so messed up. | ||
| That is such a, that itself is a crime. | ||
| I think it's so sick that we allow, we throw the book at people who will rob a store with a gun, right? | ||
| Still 10,000 bucks. | ||
| People who steal millions, billions of dollars often get away with it because it's just done a little differently. | ||
| There's not the drama of the gun and somebody's – even if no one gets shot. | ||
| It's just, hey, it's just he pushed a few pencils around. | ||
| He got you to sign a few shitty – but that's just as sick and twisted. | ||
| But it's just done in a way that socially is slightly more acceptable and they get away with it way more often. | ||
| But I would contend that these people are literally financially murdering people. | ||
| After Celsius, people committed suicide because of, I mean literally, it's a fact. | ||
| People committed suicide because they lost everything. | ||
| I'm sure FTX as well. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| You know, the bigger the scam, there's just statistically, it almost becomes impossible that you don't at least, if not financially, sort of metaphorically murdering a family, you literally kill somebody. | ||
| And people walk away with Like, either only the guy at the top goes down, or nobody goes down. | ||
| And that is crazy to me. | ||
| It's like, what message are we sending via our regulators? | ||
| Basically, it's like, hey, you're gonna get a slap on the wrist. | ||
| If you're caught. | ||
| And this, what you just did, is why you're so successful. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| This is how you really feel. | ||
| And this is why your show works. | ||
| This is it right there. | ||
| What you just did is why I'm interested in your show. | ||
| Because this is your real thoughts and opinions. | ||
| Something has to change. | ||
| Where you can't just go on like this where if we're really going to allow, if we're going to, you know, take our financial future in our own hands, we're going to allow these influencers to talk about finance, somebody has to be there when things go wrong. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And there has to be consequences. | ||
| If you lie and if you cheat and you steal, there has to be a guy at the end of the day who's going to put you in trouble. | ||
| And I think a YouTube video is not nearly enough. | ||
| It's why I'm constantly saying like, hey, Can someone from the government get involved? | ||
| Go lock this guy up. | ||
| Go lock somebody. | ||
| I know a lot of this is new. | ||
| The crypto stuff is new. | ||
| But they're doing old crimes in a new way. | ||
| It's always been illegal to steal people's money. | ||
| And that is what's happening. | ||
| And that's why I put these people on my show. | ||
| So you don't think it's some rug pull where it's all fake money. | ||
| No, there was real money in these companies. | ||
| And they just stole it a new way, but they're still stealing money. | ||
| And the fact that we haven't found a way to put some of these people in jail is mind-blowing to me. | ||
| And we're sending a bad message that, hey, just keep doing it. | ||
| Just go start a new one. | ||
| They were trying to start GTX after FTX. Some new guys were trying to start the new thing. | ||
| And then HTX is next? | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| It's just like, you know, you have to, that's half the purpose of the law. | ||
| It's partly, you know, for, you know, you did something wrong, you get punished. | ||
| But also, part of it is, you do something wrong, you send a message to socially, you socially signal that we do not tolerate this. | ||
| And right now, the social signal we're sending and accepting is, If you scam, there's a very high likelihood you'll get away with it. | ||
| And if you don't get away with it, you'll get a little slap on the wrist. | ||
| You'll get a little fine. | ||
| And that's not working. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Hey, man, thanks for being here. | ||
| This was a lot of fun. | ||
| It was a lot of fun, Joe. | ||
| I appreciate your show. | ||
| I appreciate you. | ||
| I appreciate what you're doing, and I really enjoyed this. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Tell everybody how to get your show, what your social media is, all that jazz. | ||
| YouTube, CoffeeZilla, that's it. | ||
| That's the best place to find me. | ||
| I appreciate you guys having me on. | ||
| This is surreal. | ||
| Been a big fan of the show. | ||
|
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Thank you. | |
| Appreciate you. |
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