Coffeezilla exposes FTX’s $8B fraud, where Sam Bankman-Fried misused customer funds via Alameda Research and misleading FTT token claims, contrasting it with Binance’s resilience despite Elizabeth Warren’s scrutiny. He critiques Logan Paul’s unfulfilled $1.7M CryptoZoo refunds and influencer-driven crypto scams, comparing them to AI deepfakes exploiting loneliness amid a 63% drop in sex among young men. Both debate media’s profit-driven superficiality, YouTube’s retention-gated authenticity, and regulators’ failure to punish financial fraud—like Alex Mashinsky’s Ponzi scheme—calling for systemic accountability to protect victims. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
unidentified
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.