Andrew Schulz's Flagrant with Akaash Singh - Schulz Reacts: Will Bitcoin Go To ZERO?! w/ Anthony Pompliano
Episode Date: November 22, 2022Whats good people, last year we had Pomp on when crypto was peaking, and now we gotta have him on that it's falling. We answer what is FTX, why did it collapse, and why doesn't Andrew tip. INDULGE! T...IMECODES 00:00 - Pompliano in the house 01:54 - Pomp explains FTX, Alameda and SBF 17:49 - Did CZ want to destroy FTX? 26:58 - Is this 2008/Madoff all over again? 42:48 - Pompliano ain't leaving 52:05 - Bitcoin - early days, stability and future 01:01:05 - Tax loopholes and owning our wives 01:13:18 - Pomp interviewd SBF before 01:19:35 - Speculating on what got Larry David to do FTX ad 01:23:12 - Does Pomp want Crypto regulation? 01:27:17 - Biggest moments that made Bitcoin pop 01:38:01 - Andrew doesn't tip + Pomp can't afford Sweetgreens 01:44:12 - Alexx tips low for Xmas + Akaash lying about his 01:48:11 - Andrew's wife is a savage when it comes to tipping 01:52:44 - Trying to get Pomp to buy a Bitcoin, live!
Transcript
Discussion (0)
What's up, everybody? Welcome to Flagrant.
And today we're going to find out what the f*** FTX is.
Okay, what's an FTT?
Okay, we're going to find out how they convinced Tom Brady to give all of his money to them.
We're going to find out how they convinced Miami Heat to give them the damn arena to name.
And how they got Larry David to be in a Super Bowl commercial.
And then how they squandered $10 billion somehow,
and why a guy worth $26 billion would be having sex with a girl
that looks like she designs costumes for the Incredibles.
We're going to figure out all of this with the one and only,
maybe the guy who started it, to be honest with you.
The reason we're in, the reason we're invested,
not the pizza boy, the pizza man, Anthony Pumpkin!
Pumpkin!
Talk to us, Pumps.
Y'all got to get the fuck out of New York because it is freezing here.
This is right.
You are right about this.
You are right about this.
Is New York a term for crypto that you use?
I also think when people see me on the podcast, they should ask themselves,
is this the top or the bottom?
Because that's the only two times they come on.
We're going to mark tops and mark bottoms with my appearances.
I was telling you, I was like, I really admire it.
I admire that you came.
Your people could run away.
They could not be part of it.
Do you want to know why I came?
Talk to us.
Two reasons.
One, hey, listen, let's talk about it.
We got to do it.
We got to fucking talk about it. let's talk about it. We got to do it. We got to fucking talk about it.
Let's talk about it.
Whatever.
But the second thing was, my wife was like, oh, you're going to go for the day.
The whole thing, I said, listen.
I saw Andrew Schultz, when everyone was going at Rogan, he stood up and he said, yo, fuck
this.
I know this guy.
He's not a racist.
I'm cool with it.
And I said to myself, I said, oh, look, if he's going to go bat for people, I'll go fuck
it and let's go talk about whatever they want to talk about.
Hopefully, we don't talk about anything I don't want to talk about. Okay. I don't know what you just said, but I'm with myself, I said, oh, look, if he's going to go bat for people, I'll go fuck it and let's go talk about whatever they want to talk about. Hopefully we don't talk about anything I don't want to talk about.
Okay.
I don't know what you just said, but I'm with you, man.
And we can't promise you that one.
Okay, okay.
First of all, we have to understand what's going on.
Please explain to us what FTX was, what Alameda was, and Sam Bankman Freed, what he did with these companies.
So we're still learning everything, right?
So everything is based on what we know right now.
But basically, Sam used to work at Jane Street, which is a trading firm in Wall Street.
He was like, yo, I can make money in crypto.
He subscribes to this idea of effective altruism and basically like make as much money as you
can to do as much good in the world as you can.
Yeah, yeah.
That's, hey, hey.
Everyone's a liar.
Everyone's a liar.
I want to make $10 billion to help people.
What a fucking load of shit.
All right.
So that's what he said.
Yeah.
And so he starts out.
We bought into that.
Unbelievable.
Larry David, you fucking goofy.
Fucking idiot. So he starts out. He's basically trading back Unbelievable. Larry David, you fucking goofy. Fucking idiot.
So he starts out.
He's basically trading back and forth.
You could buy Bitcoin on one exchange in America.
You could go sell it in another country for a different price.
He would just profit.
So he found some arbitrage there.
Arbitrage.
I think it was in Japan.
Japan.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So he's just doing it over and over and over again.
That was the beginning of Alameda Research.
Just think of it as a trading firm, right?
A hedge fund for crypto?
Hedge fund, trading firm, whatever you want to call it.
Okay.
And at some point, they were like, hey, this is a good game,
but like the exchanges, that's an even better game.
And for people who don't know anything about these exchanges,
one of the key pieces is you have to have liquidity.
So if you start an exchange, you need people to trade there, right?
Because if people show up and they want to trade,
they're like, hey, I'll sell Bitcoin, but no one wants to buy it,
then you're screwed.
Because you have to hold the Bitcoin until someone else buys it as the exchange.
You just need buyers and sellers to meet. And so you could do that a lot of different ways. You
could be really good at marketing and getting people there. You could have some sort of
better economics for people, like an incentive or whatever. They had an exchange and then they
had the hedge funds. They could provide liquidity. So it was a very liquid market early on. So a lot
of people would show up. It also didn't. So a lot of people would show up.
It also didn't hurt that a lot of people, supposedly when they were showing up, were
making a lot of money.
So if you're a trader and you're like, hey, I can go trade in all these different exchanges,
but I always make money on this one.
Well, this one sounds like a good one.
It's kind of like a sports book, right?
If you're gambling all the time and you're like, oh, but I always went at this sports
book.
We're going back.
They get all your business, right?
Yeah.
So that started to happen.
And real quick, an exchange is a place where people can buy crypto, sell crypto, and also store crypto, right?
You're not supposed to leave it there, but yes, people do leave it on the exchanges.
Because think about it.
If you're trading, especially the traders, right?
If you're trading, you don't know if a couple hours from now you're going to want to buy, sell, do nothing, whatever.
So it's annoying to take it all the way off, put it back up, so you leave it up there.
So a lot of people leave it, right? Yeah, whatever. So it's annoying to take it all the way off, put it back up, so you leave it up there. So a lot of people leave it, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And so as this was building up, he built it into a $32 billion company, FTX,
raised a bunch of money, had not really that many employees,
a couple hundred employees, but for a $32 billion company, not that many.
And then it all fell apart over the last two weeks.
And now people are waking up, and they're like, oh, shit.
They took away the alcohol. No one's drunk anymore on all the profits. Like what the hell happened? And that's where we
are now. Okay. So what did happen? How did they go from $32 billion to absolutely nothing?
That's pretty tough. Yeah. So remember 32 billion is basically like a fake number, right? It's kind
of like if we all start a company together and we come to you and we're like, our company's worth
a hundred million and you give us a dollar and you say, yes, it's worth a hundred million dollars. Like now we're all like,
oh, we have a hundred million dollar company. But like, that's just because we convinced you that
it was worth a hundred million dollars. Got you. So it's the evaluation. So if it's worth a hundred
million dollars and I give you a million dollars, I own 1% of that company. Correct. At that
evaluation. Yeah. Somebody else may be like, it's not worth $100 million, it's worth $50 million.
Somebody else may be like, you guys are all morons, that's a worthless company.
This always happens on Shark Tank.
The guys come in and they say you get 10% for $1 million.
And you're like, you're giving yourself a $10 million valuation?
I don't agree.
Correct.
So $32 billion was the valuation of the company itself, which people were giving real money.
They invested billions of dollars, but the 32 number was just the valuation of the company.
which people were giving real money.
They invested billions of dollars,
but the 32 number was just the valuation of the company.
And so what basically occurred was people were giving them money on the exchange
to buy and sell crypto.
And in their terms of service,
it said, we don't touch the coins that you give us.
So if you have Bitcoin on our exchange, we leave it there.
If you have Ethereum, we leave it there.
If you have stable coins, we leave it there.
We don't touch it.
And so one of the things that does go on in crypto, it also goes on in traditional finance.
And we've talked about on past episodes, like if you put your dollars in the bank, what do they do?
They lend it back, right?
There are crypto companies that do the same thing.
But FTX said, we don't do that.
And so people believe them.
And so then it came out.
How are they making money?
How are they making money?
They take a spread.
So like I want to sell Bitcoin, you want to buy the Bitcoin,
they take like a fee or a spread, sometimes both.
And so it came out that at some point over the last couple of years,
Sam, the FTX team, whoever, allegedly was like,
oh, why don't we take the user funds and, like, bring it over here to the hedge fund.
Which is Alameda.
Correct.
And so it's unclear, like, was there legal documentation that it was a loan?
Did they just, like, move it?
The degree of intentionality versus they would describe it as a mistake, like,
you can imagine there's a big bankruptcy filing, so, like, now lawyers are involved.
Like, it's all going to come out.
Do we know if they moved the funds or if they took a loan on the creator funds?
What I think is clear is that, like, $8 billion, like, wasn't where it was supposed to be.
I think it's maybe the best way to say it.
Right.
And how it got to the wrong place, I think there's some debating going on right now.
Now, is it – I read something about them backing that, let's call it a loan or whatever it is, with their own token.
Is that true?
Because they had a token, right?
FTT is –
This is where it gets kind of crazy.
So imagine – again, go back to that example.
We have a $100 million company that we all created.
We got an investor to invest in that valuation.
And then he was like, all right, Cole, what are the assets of the business? And we're like, well, we have some computers,
we have some desks. And then like, we literally just have a stack of papers that we just like
ripped out of a notebook and they're just sitting here and like, that's an asset. And they're like,
well, what's it worth? Be like, well, we sold some of those pieces of paper to somebody else
for a hundred dollars a piece of paper. I'd be like, okay, like why do they think
it's worth $100? Well, that's what the market says it's worth. It's not paper. They just created
coins. Like they literally just like got coins that they created, FTT. Now there was an advantage
if you held it. So some of these exchanges do have coins. And what they'll say is things like,
if you have our coin, you may get lower fees on the exchange. And they try to create value.
So you trade in your Bitcoin for FTTs, and then they pay you to hold the FTTs. It's like a casino kind of thing.
A few different exchanges did this.
I think BlockFi might be one of them.
Yeah, so BlockFi.
Pompito!
You want to air out your problems no i'm just saying you got me into crypto so i have some idea of what you're saying yeah which is rare and i know different ways in which you fucked me
so i still believe long term but you've you know you fucked me gently blockfi doesn't have blockfi
doesn't have a token, but there are other actual
exchanges. So Binance has a token, FTX
has a token, etc.
What became kind of weird is
if you control the money
supply, essentially, of FTT, and you
give it to someone, and you say,
hey, I'll give you $500
million of this token.
Give me a loan, or give me some value.
I invest the token now i
own equity in your business like all these different things it's pretty brilliant actually
if the token is worth what you say it's worth okay it's crazy but like okay the problem what
eventually happened is cz the ceo of binance was just like i don't think that i'm gonna hold this
anymore and he tweeted it which like like... So Binance is another...
Exchange.
Exchange.
Yeah.
The biggest competitor of FTX.
Correct.
And it looks like he intentionally tried to affect FTX's bottom line or business or tank
the whole company.
It appears that way.
CZ doesn't seem to be a stupid guy.
Yeah.
And he basically had a kill shot, and I think he took it.
And why did he have a kill shot?
They helped seed FTX years ago.
So he was an investor.
And so he got bought out of his position
and he publicly said that they got paid
in stable coins and some of these other tokens,
these FTT tokens.
So he was sitting on like $500 million worth of the token.
And he realized. And what he was sitting on like $500 million worth of the token. And he realized.
And what he tweeted was just like,
due to recent information,
because there's an article that Coindesk published,
he goes, we're going to be selling our position.
We've got $500 million.
That's a big position.
You tell people you're going to sell it.
Well, everyone else goes,
maybe I'll sell before he sells.
Now, I heard SBF, Sam Bankman Freed, tried to buy the position at like $22 a coin from, what's his name, CZ?
CZ.
From CZ.
And then CZ said no because he didn't want to get purchased.
He wanted to flood the market.
There was a public tweet from the CEO of the hedge fund, which again, this is
where you start getting into a little bit of conspiracy land. Like why did she tweet $22 was
the price of the token at the time? Like, was that an important number? And so did they kind
of reveal or tip their hand? And so like the one thing in crypto is like, there are millions and
millions and millions of people around the world that are playing this game slash in this industry, trading, whatever.
These people are not dumb.
Yeah.
And so if they think that there's an opportunity to make money by arbitraging something or by like basically screwing somebody in terms of like the market, like they're going to at least try.
And so that's ultimately what happened.
It unraveled the whole thing.
And pretty much within a week, they filed for bankruptcy.
And wasn't there a leak that came through Coindesk
that basically kind of blew all of it up before the tweet?
And how did that leak come out?
I don't know who leaked it.
What was the leak?
It was the balance sheet of the hedge fund.
So basically saying like...
The hedge fund is Alameda.
Alameda, yeah.
Like, hey, they have all these assets, but a lot of them are in this token that is their token.
Like kind of like revealed more information.
There's a guy, Ian Allison at Coindesk, who in my opinion, like this is the story of for sure the year, if not probably the decade, when it comes to kind of this new like digital world.
And he's not going to get as much credit as he should,
but it wasn't like the mainstream media.
It wasn't a regulator.
It wasn't like somebody supposedly from the industry
leaked the balance sheet to a reporter in the industry.
He published it, and then the free market took over.
Interesting.
Right?
And then you have CZ.
He's got his coins.
Well, CZ kind of swayed it a little. Like, he kind of
started that run. He's a market
participant, right? It's kind of like free market
dynamics play. Now,
the sad part, I think we should call it, is like
a lot of people got hurt in this, right?
And there's a lot of people who lost money. There's a lot
of people who got duped. There's a lot of
people who thought this was one thing. It turns out it's
not. So, like, free market
is like this interesting dynamic. Because, like, technically I've said it's not. So free market is this interesting dynamic
because technically, I've said that the free market's
the judge, jury, and executioner,
but there's collateral damage as well.
And so this happens in finance to a degree,
but if in finance, let's say a stock goes down too fast.
Remember during COVID, the stocks would be falling.
They look like shit coins, right?
They have something called a circuit breaker
where if the stock falls, I think it's like 8%, they basically just say time out. And the stock
stops trading for 15 minutes. Everyone catch your breath. And then if it falls again, they stop it.
And then if I think it's like 20%, they shut off the trading of that for the day.
So it's not just this one day race to the bottom.
Yeah. So very rarely will you see it. Now, in aftermarket trading, there's all kinds of crazy stuff that can happen.
But there's controls around the trading of the assets because they've seen this stuff happen in the past where things can go from worth a lot to basically nothing in seconds.
Now, isn't that an argument for regulation?
I know one of the beautiful things about crypto, one of the things that was so exciting about it
was that it was not regulated.
It didn't have that central bank system
that we have here
and that freedom that people talk about.
I'm sure you spoke about many times.
But I feel like this experience right here
is a perfect example
of where regulation could have helped.
Yeah, well, there's two things.
So first, you can't confuse Bitcoin
with all this other stuff, right?
So Bitcoin is a decentralized, kind of electronic electronic peer-to-peer currency.
Because all this other stuff is finance.
Yeah, it's finance.
No, no, but it's, like, more similar to the dollar.
It's the dollar.
Like, 100%.
Like, what you were describing with FDT, I was thinking, how is that not fiat?
Yeah, basically, these people have become central banks.
And the thing about that is, like, if you are a central bank, you're going to need regulation
in place. So they were central banks without regulation. And what would somebody do if they
just had a printing press for money? Well, it's even, I think, worse than that. So like Bitcoin
is kind of in a league of its own. It is this decentralized thing. An asset isn't regulated,
right? Like the dollar doesn't get put in jail. The dollar isn't fined. It's the companies
and the organizations and the people who deal with dollars, they're regulated in the traditional
financial world. So the asset is just an inanimate object. Same with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is just a
system. You can't regulate it. There's nobody to put in jail. Well, there is a regulation, right?
There's an amount. I would call that a regulation. Oh, the code, yeah. The code basically says it'd
be 21 million Bitcoin. Yeah, and maybe that's all you need to create the value.
It's like a self-regulated system. The reason why it's the most valuable is because it has a regulator on it.
Yeah, it's decentralized.
It's the most secure.
And also, I think that there's the least amount of fuckery, which I think is a really key piece to this.
Because what we'll see on this other stuff is they just recreated finance.
And I don't go as far as
maybe some of the hardcore Bitcoin, like Maximals people will go. They'll be like, it's all worthless.
It's all stupid. It's all the stuff. I just look at it as like, people are going to create these
financial systems, whether we like it or not, right? They're going to do it. But what the
central bank idea of like just creating your own tokens to your point, like there's no disclosure
rules at the same level that there is in the legacy financial system. But FTX was regulated. They
had a regulated entity in the United States. They had a regulated entity in the Bahamas.
Now you could argue how good were the regulations in either place? Should they have been better?
Whatever. But there's details coming out now that like the auditors didn't know this was happening.
So you kind of have to ask yourself,
if you go to a company and you say,
send me your audited financials,
and they send them to you,
what else do you want people to do?
This is like if you're an athlete and you can beat USADA.
You know what I mean?
Every year they find a way to get the roids in the system
without being detected.
And they're like, here, I passed my drug test.
You passed?
So they were passing the drug test even though they were on the roids. They don't like right
before you run the 100 meter dash at the Olympics, they're not like, take a blood right now, right?
So like there's a little bit of that going on, which again, more details will come out. And I
think it's important that we find that out over time. But also like the regulations don't always
stop bad people. Like, if you remember,
Bernie Madoff was regulated, right? So, part of regulation, which is interesting, is like,
if people are just flat out lying, usually, almost 100% of the time, they get caught.
But what we find out is, like, they're able to trick the rules or the regulators for some period
of time. And so, you can't just say, oh, if it's
regulated, it's 100% all good. And what I think in this situation is that this grew so fast. There
were so many different types of organizations involved, from investors to the people they did
commercials with, all this stuff. People just were like, no one even asked the question of,
could the audited financials be wrong could this information be
wrong could they just be potentially misleading people so here's what i'm not making the connection
on it seems like we're kind of saying cz drove the value down intentionally by saying you know what
this 500 million i don't think it's worth that i'm backing out did he do that to potentially i
don't know fuck ftx over and just say it or did he see something and FTX was doing a lot of shady shit?
You see what I'm saying?
Like, it seems like there's a bit of a disconnect.
To me, it's probably all of the above.
Like, in these situations, I think people love to have
just like a black and white, like, good person, bad person.
They did this, and this is why, like, the end result happened.
But I think what ends up happening is, like,
CZ says, hey, I got a bunch of these tokens. I don't think
the token's really worth anything, so I'm going to sell
them. Okay, that like creates part
of the problem. Then it happens that
it exposes this other problem, which then
compounds and like, then you get this like cascading
effect and the whole thing falls apart.
So I read a little bit, and
correct me if I'm wrong on this, but
I read that the goal
for SDS... So also the internet connection is the most dangerous thing in the world.
Let me tell you something, bro.
Let me tell you something.
It was a lot of grammar and spelling mistakes in this article, and that made me believe it even more.
I was like, yo, this guy's excited to get this piece out.
Like, this piece needs to get printed today.
So basically he was saying that it was going over these donations.
A lot had been made about the donations that SBF and FTX and I guess Alameda had made,
not only to the Democratic Party, but also to the Republican Party.
And of course, any liberal outlet goes, he's just donating to the Republicans and already conservatives.
Like 50 million to the liberals.
Okay, doesn't matter. I have 70 million in total to people in political positions of power.
And verbally had committed that he was thinking about doing a billion in 2024.
Yeah.
I mean, he was second in donations to George Soros to the Democratic Party that year.
Yeah.
Five million to Biden, which is crazy.
Well, he didn't give to both parties.
One of his guys gave to the conservatives.
One of the big gave to the conservatives.
One of the big questions, and I'm not smart enough,
nor have I looked into it enough,
but I do wonder how many corporations,
if you went and you looked at them plus all their employees.
They all give to everybody.
And some of it's just like, hey, if you're the president and you're the CEO of a company,
you two just may have different politics.
So you just give to the party that you support.
Some of it maybe is more coordinated.
I don't know.
It's the politics that help the business, I assume. You know,
like if you're in the lumber business and one candidate is like, yo, we should chop down some
trees. You're like, I'd like to put some money in that guy's pocket. I've always thought that
politicians, they should have to disclose as they do who is the biggest donors. And then let's say
that you're a politician and you get in because the pharma industry like backs you. You shouldn't
be able to have a voice in creating regulation for the pharma industry backs you, you shouldn't be able to have a voice in creating regulation
for the pharma industry.
That's interesting.
Right?
Like, basically say, hey,
you can take money from whoever you want,
take as much as you want.
Your voice is gone.
But you have to abstain from the regulation
of the industry that paid you to get in there.
Yeah.
In the words of Chris Rock,
it ain't going to do nothing that fucking dumb.
No politician's going to pass that law
that's like, yeah, let me take the money out of my pocket.
Well, they can still day trade stocks.
Yeah, that's true.
It's crazy.
So basically what I was reading is that CZ saw that FTX had close connections
and was trying to become the first legal, regulated exchange
by the United States government.
And they would have a huge advantage in the space if they were that.
And he saw maybe it was a little bit closer than most people thought.
And, I mean, obviously there's, I think, a close connection
to one of the people that is on the SEC or the chairman of the SEC
through, I think, Caroline was the girl.
SBF has political family members or people who have, I think, raised money for Democrats in different parts.
So they had these connections.
You good?
All right.
And basically he thought that he was going to use those connections to regulate that one, and then he would be fucked.
So he's like, I have to go nuclear right now before they end up getting regulated.
The regulation is so crazy because we have publicly traded exchanges in America.
There's publicly traded exchanges in Canada and other places around the world.
And so, like, I think that when people look at this industry and they say there's no regulations, like, that's not an accurate statement in my opinion.
Then why are they in the Bahamas?
Well, there's regulation there, but I think there's a big difference between the regulation in America versus the regulatory environment there.
So what people basically do
is they go like regulation shopping.
And what they're doing is they're like,
hmm, who's got the ones that are best?
And now to the opposite side, right?
Because when you look at these situations,
it's easy to have the bombastic take of like,
everyone's bad or everyone's good.
But I always look at it as like,
if you're the country
and you're trying to create
a certain type of economic development or growth,
you have a carrot and a stick.
You have taxes, you have regulation.
So you can punish people
or you can incentivize them.
Puerto Rico in America,
we basically were like,
if you move to Puerto Rico,
you live there for a while,
you ain't got to pay taxes.
Why?
We want people to move there
so that they will invest in the country,
in the territory and do all this stuff.
So a lot of these other countries are like, well, shit, why don't we create regulation
that will incentivize these people to move?
So in that sense, you can understand the incentive side.
But I think the downside to it is if you're still using customer funds on the platforms
and it creates problems or it leads to these situations,
and then people are like, yo, that's not the ultimate goal. If you actually believe that doing the right thing by the customer, which I believe I think most people in the industry believe,
then you've got to believe that regulation has to meet some criteria in order to ensure people
are doing what they're saying they're doing. I'm curious, if the leak never came out or
CZ never made that tweet, could FTX have just kept on floating on like they were?
That's like the multi-trillion dollar question.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, if nothing stimulated the run, basically, they could have just continued to, like, take out, like, user funds with no cost to themselves, right?
It's impossible to know what would have happened, but I think what this goes back to is like,
so use the FTX situation, like put it in a box
and say like, all right, we kind of sort of understand
what's happening there, whether more details will come out.
But I think what this really shows,
and you've seen people talking about it online,
is like, take a system like Bitcoin compared to this.
In the FTX situation, people could take the user funds
and no one knew, right?
It was like hard to tell.
But with Bitcoin,
it's like very clear.
It's like very clear.
You can watch them shit
move on the fucking blockchain.
Yeah.
So can they create a circuit breaker
within their own exchange?
That's what I read.
Not a circuit breaker,
but I read that they created
a backdoor.
There was like SPF
and another dude
and they did the code as well.
And they created a backdoor
to like flow the
money over to Alameda. Oh yeah, well that makes sense.
But the crazy thing about this whole Bitcoin, not even
Bitcoin, like crypto thing is like for fucking
years everybody's been saying, hey, you can't
get away with anything. It's minted on the
blockchain. Where's this fucking blockchain
that shows exactly what SPF is doing
and, not SPF,
SPF and then the rest of them are doing
like, where is this proof? It should be there,
right? What happened to the 10 billion? That's the thing, because that money existed.
But like separated out, you have like the Bitcoin system, which is this decentralized thing that
everyone's really excited about. And like, in my mind is that is what we were promised, right?
Is a blockchain that is truly decentralized. It's this global system. There is no CEO,
there is no centralized control. And it's this global system there is no ceo there is
no centralized control uh and it's something that uh you can take control you take self custody of
the assets no one else has them like there's all these benefits to it and then like everything else
is basically just recreating finance and so just like there's bad people doing bad things in regular
finance there's gonna be bad people doing bad things in like crypto world and so i think just
like separating those and like one is a decentralized transparent system, which is like what everyone was promised. And then of course,
people were like, yo, we could just go recreate finance and do it like all around the world
with these coins. And so again, people are going to play that game, whether we like it or not.
But that's where the problems come in, right? Because now you just recreated finance. So
imagine if you had centralized entities that could create their own money.
Like, I bet you bad shit would happen.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
You said the $10 billion was actually there at one time.
I thought it was just the evaluation of the company. No, user funds.
They had $10 billion actual dollars.
$32 billion was the value of the company, and they had $10 billion of user funds.
Unclear what they still have left.
I've seen estimates that they're missing $1 billion, $2 billion. I saw one that said $8 billion. I had to read that three times to make
sure I was reading it right. They're missing $8 billion. It's unclear.
Weren't there DMs of the guy that they came out and he was like, oh, yeah, I just come up with
$6 billion or some shit like that? Yeah. But again, it even goes to down in the Bahamas,
now it's coming out that there was use use of amphetamines, right?
And they had like a doctor
who allegedly was prescribing medicine,
like all this stuff.
And it's like, okay,
if you went to Wall Street in like the 80s or 90s.
Yeah, there was some amphetamines.
They're just doing cocaine on the table, right?
And so like in some ways,
a lot of the like non-Bitcoin
part of this whole
industry
is just recreating
a lot of what
already happened
in finance
but now it's just like
20 to 35 year old
kids being like
basically I missed it
let's do it again
institutions
that's the thing
about humans
is like we will
the reason why
history is cyclical
is because we will
repeat the same things
over and over again
if there's an opportunity
to make money
without doing much we're going to find it and we're going to
exploit it by the same thing greed is greed it's great it's it and we were talking about this
before but like to me i'm reading this and i'm like holy shit is this the 2008 financial collapse
all over again made off in the exact oh you think this is made up see i think this is 2008 it's like
both or maybe it's both but like ingredients of both but the reason why i thought it was 2008
is because the subprime mortgages were FTT.
That token, which was a useless thing that was pegged to a valuable thing.
And then everybody believed it was valuable because it was making them money.
I believe these subprime mortgages are worth something.
You can't lose money owning a home.
And the second that dipped, now all of a sudden, well, I've got to come for that home.
There are no more homes?
As soon as there's a proxy between the thing that's actually valuable,
and I guess in 2008, it's like the CDOs,
those consolidated debt obligations.
It's like, yeah, we just dump all this shit in this little bin,
and then that's actually what you're buying.
Somebody's watching this right now being like,
what do these motherfuckers know about CDOs?
No, we don't know.
But here's the part is that you guys are way smarter than most people think.
But until you said that, nobody knew that we didn't know.
But now they all know.
We'll cut it out. Yeah, we can they all know. We'll cut it out.
Yeah, we'll cut that out.
We'll cut that part.
And we're back.
But real quick, just to say, and I guarantee that this has happened throughout history,
is the quickest way to make money is by creating value in something that is otherwise valueless.
I mean, like snake oil salesmen.
That's what they're doing, right?
They're going down the river, and they're selling some bullshit.
You think it's worth something to make a lick
and then you get the fuck out of here
because eventually
the bottom's going to fall out of it.
And, okay, it's sad at the same time.
It's sad that humans repeat
the same thing every time,
but it also kind of makes me happy
that it is a human flaw
in a weird way.
Like, there's not just like one,
you know what I mean?
Like, you hear about
like power dynamics, right? It's just like, it's you know what I mean? Like, you hear about, like, power dynamics, right?
It's just, like, it's a function of humanity.
Put any human next to the opportunity to make a bunch of money doing absolutely nothing, we're going to fucking do it.
PPP loans, we're going to do it.
Crypto, we're going to do it.
The percentages now that are coming out of, like, the PPP loan stuff is wild.
Oh, it's crazy.
But also, like, again, I always go back.
Like, if you were the government and you were told by the politicians and everything,
you've got to do this,
who could have designed a system that would prevent all the fraud in three weeks?
So it's like, again, it's stupid that they engaged in it.
It's stupid that they sent it and stuff.
But these are complex problems.
So I always remind myself, I don't want any of these people's jobs.
I don't want to be the guy.
Imagine being the dude who's like,
yo, you've got to run the PPP program and make sure there's no fraud.
Oh, fuck.
I quit that day.
Yo, is it possible?
Yeah.
I feel the same about COVID.
Like when they're trying to figure it out as the shit is happening and people are dying and just like the amount of pressure to make regulation at that time is crazy. And then we get mad at every mistake they made.
Yeah, exactly.
No, but my only issue with them is just not acknowledging that they made mistakes.
It's like you're almost, to use the lady term, gaslighting or whatever.
It's you're almost like gaslighting the public.
Like when we go, yo, that shit was a little funky.
Like what you just told me last week was a little funky.
All you got to say is, yeah, my bad, it was funky.
Yeah, when's the last time people in finance said, oh, we fucked up?
They don't.
That's what I'm saying.
Nobody wants to ever do that.
And then you just keep on moving along. Yeah. What were That's what I'm saying. Nobody wants to do that.
And then you just keep on moving along.
What were you saying?
So the people who had money
on FTX,
shitcoin and Bitcoin,
do they get it back?
What happens?
If it's Bitcoin,
based on what you're saying,
I assume they get it back.
I actually don't have money
on FTX for the record.
So they filed for bankruptcy,
but they filed not just FTX,
like everything that they touched.
I think it was like 130-something entities.
So you can imagine people are showing up being like, all right, what do we got?
And the guy who is the new CEO, he's the same guy who came in when Enron went through bankruptcy.
He's been around the block.
He's seen the most fucked up shit.
And there's a document that they have to submit pretty early.
I think it's within the first 30 or 45 days uh and they basically like give kind of
lay of the land here's where we're at and he wrote in the one for ftx he was like this is the single
worst like corporate situation i've ever seen in my career oh shit right so he's trying to figure
out like what are the entities who's involved how much money do we have where is the money uh was
there any funky business going on where was the funky Like, there's all this stuff going on.
So again, like, that's a guy,
I don't want his job, right?
But what I do think is a big question here
is how much money is left?
Because that will help determine
how much will people get back.
And remember, lawyers get paid too.
Oh, lawyers get paid,
but it will also determine
how much money we're going to have to ask back
from these politicians.
If you're Joe Biden,
you got five million million from sbf and you know that there's like some hard-working contractor
out there that saw a lot of people making money on crypto and he wasn't making money on crypto
and i think like all of us felt that fomo it was like yo i'm working really hard and my friends
are making money on this thing where they're not even working i want a piece of that and they dump
their fucking savings into that shit.
And then they get rents.
And you're Joe Biden.
You got $5 million.
You got to cough that up.
Can you recall political donations?
Is there a precedent for that?
So what's happening now, I think it was, I don't want to say which outlet it was,
but one of the mainstream outlets, they made a whole list of, hey,
here's everyone who got donations from the people they could identify that were involved.
And then when they asked them, and the politicians, they were like,
yo, you got this donation, what are you going to do?
Are you going to give it back or not?
It was like maybe a third of them said they were going to give it back,
and the rest didn't respond at the time that they published.
So, like, we'll see what happens.
But it's definitely not a good look.
Yeah, you got to give it back.
It's crazy.
Why would you not offer, why would you not refuse it initially?
Like, or once, not even initially, once this information has come out, like, immediately
refuse it.
I think they asked them, like, within 48 hours.
Like, it was, like, pretty quick.
So they didn't even know what the fuck was going on.
But with Bitcoin, wouldn't you be able to trace back through the blockchain who initially
bought it, and then they would be able to get it back?
Am I, this is very rudimentary understanding.
In the most general sense, usually in a bankruptcy, what will happen is people who have a claim.
You could have a claim because you lent them money.
You could have a claim because you're some sort of equity holder that has some extra claim on the business.
Or you could have assets in as a user.
They basically will say, okay, well, here's the pot of money we have.
What percentage should you get
and so let's just say
as an easy example
in the Mt. Gox situation
I think people are getting back 25%
Can you tell people Mt. Gox
I just heard about this
when someone was commenting
I haven't heard of that
Mt. Gox is an exchange
from back in like 2014
that basically failed
so similar
Apparently Bitcoin
back when it was like 600
fucking crashed and it
went to like ten dollars a shit like a coin it was it was the biggest exchange the one everyone used
yeah and uh they had a bunch of bitcoin in there and so they've gone through a similar process as
like bankruptcy stuff and so what happened is people basically got like an iou right which is
like again it goes uh counter to the bitcoin ethos of like you can do self custody you can hold on to
the asset but because you had it in the exchange, you get an IOU.
And those like, we'll get back to you
on how much you're going to get.
So let's just say that you had 10 Bitcoin sitting in there
at 600 bucks or whatever it was.
Now they're giving back 25%.
So you'll get two and a half Bitcoin.
Now for those people, you'd rather have the 10 Bitcoin
than the two and a half.
But the price of Bitcoin has gone up so much
in dollar terms, you're like up,
but you'd rather have 10 Bitcoin at $17,000 or whatever.
What happens to those Bitcoin?
If there's only 21 million ever made,
and there were 10, and now it's two and a half.
They could get spent.
That's where the question is.
Where did the $2 billion,
let's say the $2 billion is missing from FTX,
where did it go?
But even if you spend it,
you have to give it to someone else to spend it.
It doesn't disappear.
It never disappears. Someone who bought spend it, you have to give it to someone else to spend it. It doesn't disappear. It never disappears.
And then he sells it to someone who bought it.
So you got to start – this is what this guy is going to have to try to figure out.
Where did the money go?
Are you confident they'll be able to find it due to the confidence in the blockchain?
I think that the blockchain will be some of it, but just go through an easy example.
So Andrew has an account on an exchange that goes under,
uh, they ended up taking his money and, uh, they were trading with it and he had a hundred dollars
on their worth of, let's just say, um, I don't know, uh, FTT. And as they were trading, they
lost money. So now that they only have $20 of Andrew's original a hundred dollars, like technically
they didn't give it to anyone. They were just trading, and they were bad traders.
So there's $80 missing, and Andrew's like,
yo, yo, where's my $100?
And then the bankruptcy people show up,
and they're like, yo, there's only $20 left.
Like, here it is.
Right.
Right?
So, like, you can't, like, what are you going to go do?
Try to figure out, like, which one of his FTT tokens,
who did you trade with?
Like, they didn't, it's just different than, like,
if you took the money and you went and you bought like a piece of real estate
or you donated it that's very clear
like who has it and then
can you get it back will they give it back like
that becomes part of the process
I guess in that example I look at FTT
and I'm like oh that's like a proxy coin that they're making
but like with Bitcoin are they
they're not are they actually using the actual coins
so I read something I don't know
how accurate this is
but guess how many Bitcoin
they actually ended up having.
How many?
Zero.
What?
Supposedly, and again-
Well, isn't that convenient,
Pompliano?
It's very convenient.
But it goes back to the narrative
of like Bitcoin.
Like if you want to do this stuff-
I want to see where he takes it.
Yeah.
I want to see where he takes it.
Bitcoin wouldn't be at all connected
with the worst crypto scandal in history.
But this is the whole
thing, right? It's like, if you wanted to do
all the fuckery, right? Remember I said,
Bitcoin has the least amount of fuckery.
All the fuckery
goes on in the rest of this thing, and so
you don't want to use Bitcoin if you're doing
this, right? And why?
You can't control the production of Bitcoin,
so you can't play
central banker. So like, all right, that's less enticing. And then what they were doing is they
were creating what a lot of people in finance would call like paper Bitcoin or wrapped Bitcoin
is what the crypto world would call it. Oh, a coin that's pegged to it, but isn't it?
They like try to move it onto like a different blockchain. And now they have like an Ethereum
token that represents Bitcoin. But like, how do you know there's really a Bitcoin?
Maybe they could just create more of them.
So it's paper, like you get in this world
where like, if you're the average user,
you have no clue 99.9% of this is going on.
And so like, again, it's finance.
It's the same thing.
Like when you put your dollar in the bank,
like there's shit that they do
that when people hear about it,
they're like, yo, they could do that.
Like who was the person who was like drunk one night and figured that out, right?
That's what's going on in this whole other side. So I think, like, the Bitcoin world, in some ways,
the Bitcoiners are very, like, we told you so, like, keep your coins off of exchanges, like,
all this stuff, right? Which, like, I would say some Bitcoiners are very hardcore and, like,
don't put your stuff on exchanges. There's other people, right, more like me, who is like, look, people are going to maybe keep majority of it off exchanges, but they're still going to want to use the stuff.
They're still going to want to earn yield.
They're still going to want to participate in finance.
Whether we like it or not, they're going to want to do it.
And so it's more about like the responsibility.
Don't put everything somewhere, right?
If you're going to do it, do it with 1, 3, four, 5%. Don't do it with 100%. So I think that that's the world that like now people are
starting to realize like, okay, hold on a second. Bitcoin is different, which it's unfortunate we
have to go through this. It's not the first time it's happened, but usually what ends up happening
is the net gain of Bitcoiners through this whole process is like very obvious. Because now they're
not messing with these other tokens. I saw a guy wrote a whole thread. He's like a hardcore Bitcoiner now. And he was like,
yo, back in the day I got burnt, but I didn't learn my lesson. I had to touch the stove twice.
Interesting. Right? And he was like, and by the second time I got burnt, I was like, yo,
I'm just into Bitcoin. Because it's so fucking enticing, man. I'm telling you, like I would
see Akash making money through it and it would piss me off. And I ended up buying a bunch of
fucking Bitcoin strictly because Akash was making all this money
doing nothing and I was working my ass off for money.
It drove me fucking crazy.
Well, if it makes you feel any better,
this guy has some of my Bitcoin.
Akash and I are in the same boat.
We're waiting to see what happens.
All right, guys, we're going to take a break for a second
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Now, did you yank yours off and put it on a ledger?
No, I'm going down with the shit, man. Wait, really?
You just keep it on?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I've read the news.
And this is the thing.
There are a lot of people who are all upset about a whole bunch of different things.
No, when I said yank yours off, I meant put it on your own private.
No.
You keep your Bitcoin in there.
No, no, no, no, no.
The things that I had on the platforms, right?
Because you got to remember, like I've worked with,
we had advertising deals with some of these people
and like an advertising deal is no different
than you guys, you know, I don't know,
Athletic Greens, I think I've seen you guys advertise, right?
If all of a sudden it's something that was wrong
with the Athletic Greens product,
it's not like y'all are in the fucking science lab
being like, let me test this or this or whatever.
Yeah.
But you would still be like, damn, that is somebody who we worked with, right?
Now, in this case, it appears to be that it was misleading or fraudulent.
They tricked a lot of people that are way smarter than me.
But still, at the end of the day, it's like, yo, if people are going down, fuck it, right?
And so I left the shit on there.
I'm like, we'll see what happens.
No, no, no.
If the shit's going down, I'm getting the fuck off the shit.
Why are you playing music on the same thing?
Put down a cello, fam.
Yeah, but it's all...
Get that bitch off the wood and grab her.
I don't believe this for a second.
No, I left all of it on exchanges.
I'm the man of the people. I'm the Bitcoiner
of the people. I'm in solidarity with you.
This is a lot.
You said it yourself.
Real Bitcoiners are like, put your shit on a ledger.
Yeah, you've got to have some on a ledger.
No, no.
I think everybody in Bitcoin does self-custody.
What I'm saying is like the same thing that when people would ask me, I was doing as well, right?
It's like, yo, I don't want to just sit and hold the asset 100% of it. So what
I would do is I would take some and I would put on a platform to earn yield, or I would have it on,
like there's payment apps, right? I would have some sitting on the payment app so that I could
send it to people when I wanted to send it rather than have to go get it at a cold storage. Like
at the end of the day, security and convenience, there's a trade-off. And as much as we want to
live in a world where everyone takes security, the utmost responsibility, convenience. I believe that you had it all on there until
I noticed one thing. What? It's the ring on your finger right here. There's no way your wife would
let you leave all that shit on my plate. My wife is the biggest Bitcoin maximalist that I know.
She's like, all this other shit's bullshit's bullshit exactly why she's just throwing ledgers up in there what are they called ledgers ledgers yeah yeah yeah there's no way there's no way i mean she believes
in bitcoin i still have my bitcoin i haven't sold a single cold storage drive up your nose
i think we took it off man yeah but but i do think that it's really important to call out, like, I think what we just saw over the last really eight months or so, because it wasn't just this one.
There was other ones as well, is that there's a huge difference between decentralized systems and centralized systems.
And, you know, what you guys are hitting on is, like, the centralized systems are just recreating Wall Street.
And, like, just like people get fucked in wall street they're getting fucked here and like similar to what this guy said
online of like you have to touch the stove a couple times before people realize is that there's a lot
of people who uh they do some of the self-custody some of the ledger stuff whatever but they're
still playing around here i think that now this was a wake-up call to a lot of people and they're
like yo fuck this other crypto stuff all this this other stuff. I'm going to stick with Bitcoin, which
maybe that's the silver lining in this, but still, it sucks. The whole situation sucks.
Now, I'm curious, why wouldn't Binance or one other exchange try to buy or acquire FTX if this
is disrupting the entire market in general? Oh, shit. By letting it fail, it ends up hurting Binance as well.
Yeah, they should see it and be like,
because obviously if they go away,
then they can monopolize them.
They're aggregating more market share,
but you could just acquire them, keep everything hush.
I just assume the financials are so messy.
Binance did.
So when CZ tweeted and he was like,
yo, I'm going to dump the token,
FTX was kind of like, yeah, they were rocking.
They were a little unsteady.
And so they announced, it wasn't a definitive agreement,
but they announced that Binance had intentions to buy FTX.
And then within like 24 hours, CZ was like, nah, this shit's too messed up.
We're walking away.
And then they failed and filed for bankruptcy.
And that was why I thought he tweeted the 500 million FTT thing.
Because he was going to buy it, but he was like,
no. Yeah, I mean, you've got to remember, these people
are, you know, they're wealthy.
There's a lot of pride.
There's real businesses at stake here.
It's no different than, one of the greatest
CNBC clips of all time is
Bill Ackman calls in live
and Carl Icahn is on as well.
I don't know if y'all have ever seen this. You've got two
billionaires and they're screaming at each other on the phone.
And you can hear in the background the traders on the Wall Street stock exchange floor.
Whenever one of them says something crazy, they're like, yeah.
It's like, yo, this is like egos too, right?
Massive egos.
Yeah, now it's just like they don't call into a national media outlet.
They're like doing this shit on Twitter.
Yo, that's so true.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Another thing.
They used to do it
on fucking,
what was the,
not Jim Cramer's show,
but like MSNBC
or some shit.
They do them all.
And they just beef
with one another
and now it's done
on Twitter.
Way more eyeballs.
You guys are pioneering
like kind of a new type
of talk show
and like going direct
to the people and stuff.
But also,
during this entire saga,
there's a couple of people, there's like, there's an account called Autism Capital,
which is like a pseudonymous account. There's a kid, Dylan LeClaire. There's a couple of these
folks who like, they were breaking the news like by the minute. People were DMing them things.
They were like, I'm a former employee. Here's this. Here's this. Like, oh, I saw this piece of information. And so, like, in some way, Twitter became the, like, the show.
So you're watching it, and you're like, this isn't the mainstream media, like, writing up the article.
Do you think that there's a lack of empathy for people who have lost money in this because so many people weren't invested in crypto, and they kind of resented that a lot of people were making money out of it?
And the people who had crypto rubbed it in.
Oh, huge.
They acted like they were experts.
Yeah, you got your comeuppance.
Well, you got compounding things, right?
So, like, the price of all the assets fell before this happened.
It was already down.
So you already had the, like, critics, the anti-crypto people.
They were dancing on graves, right?
They loved it.
We told you it was worthless.
Whatever,
fuck them.
I saw you,
I saw you covering different shit.
You were talking about,
this guy was talking about
the Jets or something.
I was like,
oh,
Bitcoin down,
baby.
Giants,
the Giants.
It's a sports show now.
I thought that was Joe
that was doing that.
No,
his brother does.
He had you working for him
now because you're broke.
What does he say? What does he say? He had you working for him now because Your brother does. You're broke. My brother does. What does he have you working for him now?
I might need a job.
I don't know.
I don't know.
Stuff like, no, hey, check out Joe Pompliano's stuff.
He's legit.
He's amazing.
It's this amazing convergence between, like, money and sport, which is obviously there,
but, like, he does these great, like, minute-long videos on Twitter.
He's also on Instagram and stuff.
Yeah.
And TikTok.
You should be on all of it.
But it's great.
Like, the content is phenomenal.
I'll tell you this.
I knew that I was in trouble when he started
sending me screenshots of
the analytics comparing us, and he's like, I'm going to catch you.
That's why he's here.
Take that, Joe.
Don't go follow that.
I'm curious. Could FCX have just
disclosed and said, hey, we're using user funds?
Could they have just come out and said that?
So there's other platforms that did do that. That's my point. Why couldn't they have just disclosed and said, hey, we're using user funds? Could they have just come out and said that? So there's other platforms that did do that.
That's my point.
Why couldn't they have just done that and disclosed it?
And everybody's making money, so they're not going to ask questions.
I'm getting 15%.
Use away.
Yeah.
I think that people who were using that platform were using it to trade
and with the understanding that they weren't doing anything with the user funds,
so it was deemed safer.
Oh, shit.
How can I trade my shit if you're trading my shit?
Another good question, yeah.
So if you think about the reason why people were allowing companies to lend out their assets is because they were getting paid
really high rates of return.
So if they're going to say to you, hey, I'll pay you 10%, right?
I'll just make up a number, 10% yield.
Well, then you're like, ah, maybe it's worth it, maybe
it's not. But if they say, we're
not going to touch your stuff and we're not going to pay
you anything, there's a lot of people who are just like, I don't want to,
just don't touch my stuff, let me trade.
Just to clarify, 10% yield is basically
just leaving the coins on the exchange.
The exchange pays you so that they
can go trade their shit out. No different than a bank that
gives you, what is it, AYP or something like that?
APY, yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. But Mark's point is interesting, though. If they just
acknowledged it, then everybody would be taking on that risk. And if the money got flushed down
the toilet, that was the risk that you took. Yeah, but I guess that was their competitive
edge in the market space. Is that you were getting the yield without the risk. Yeah.
Well, now it was a risk, but they were marketing it as if there's none.
Right.
Yeah, like in terms of service, from what I understand,
just basically said, we don't touch it.
We don't invest it.
We don't touch it.
I guess that's where you pivot.
You do that for three years to eat up market share,
and then after a little bit you go, yeah, we're going to start using funds.
Add that into the user agreement.
Yeah, and then some people will start pulling it off.
But then you can now basically like fractionally reserve your own coins and shit.
I feel like I'm going to get home and there's going to be the flagrant crypto exchange launch.
I mean, Archon's wanted us to do this so badly.
We were in Miami.
You wanted a flagrant coin.
I did.
Flagrant coin?
I did, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I don't do that.
Why not?
Why not?
Just stick with Bitcoin.
Yeah.
Why hasn't anybody else just made Bitcoin?
Huh?
Why hasn't anybody else just made another version of Bitcoin?
Well, there's a lot of people who tried.
There's people who say that they created Bitcoin.
No, no, no, not like that.
I guess what I'm saying is just create a limited number of them.
No, they did.
And what, it just didn't take off the same way?
No, there are.
When you think of tech innovation, the true innovation is where all the value accrues, right?
So it's like a lot of times people use the terminology zero to one.
Like it's the actual innovation is where the value is.
And so that's what Bitcoin did.
And you have to remember too, like now if somebody launched a coin, there's like every degenerate in the world is like looking around on the internet.
Like, well, who got the coins?
Where are the coins?
Where's the new coin, right?
So you're attracting people who
are more mercenaries
than missionaries. In the early days of
Bitcoin, at first there was no price.
There was no exchange, there was no anything.
People who wanted it were super technical.
They believed in the technology.
They got it, they mined it.
They bought drugs on the internet with it.
Yeah.
That was the game. My sister bought mushrooms for like five Bitcoin back in like 2011.
Get the fuck out of here.
That's like a true story.
Get the fuck out of here.
She told me this recently.
She was like, yeah, I bought it on like-
It's like 100 grand.
On Silk Road, yeah.
It wasn't that many Bitcoin, but yeah, it was like half a Bitcoin or full Bitcoin or something.
There's that story about the guy buying a slice of pizza or something like that for 10 Bitcoin.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, no, no, no.
10,000 Bitcoin.
What?
He spent on two pizzas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like hundreds of millions
of dollars today.
We have zero compassion.
No, it is true.
People, I feel like...
It's the first transaction
in history
where somebody, like, used it to buy something.
He went online.
He was like, yo, if I send someone Bitcoin, will you get me a pizza?
And I think, if I remember correctly, they called a Domino's or whatever pizza place in his hometown
and was like, will you bring this dude a pizza?
I'll pay for it.
And then they sent him the 10,000 Bitcoin.
Wow.
Crazy.
Does that dude still have the Bitcoin?
Is he still a holder? I'm not sure.
He has a lot of Bitcoin.
I'm not sure what happened to Bitcoin.
They've asked the guy who spent the 10,000 Bitcoin.
He's like, no, I don't regret it at all.
Because he's like, Bitcoin probably wouldn't have become what it became unless we started to use it.
Which I think is what you have to tell yourself.
The guy that's not in the Beatles anymore is like, best thing that ever happened.
Love my life.
Love my fat kid and my fat wife.
Bitcoin's down.
Yeah.
Are you buying more?
I have been buying more.
I'm always going to buy more.
And it's just like nothing about Bitcoin has changed.
I didn't sound as confident as you were in my head.
Listen, I'm like,
I'm in the 11th round
of a 12-round fight. I've been getting punched
all year, right? And I'm like,
yo, man, I'm still here. All right, let's go.
Whatever. But if
you think about Bitcoin, all I keep looking
at is the underlying fundamentals are
exactly the same.
There's a lot of people who are like, oh, what does that mean?
Or whatever. It's just like, oh, what does that mean? Or whatever.
It's just like, think of a company who is doing the same or more in whether it was revenue or sales or whatever metric you want to look at, but the stock price went down. Some people would be
like, yo, stock price down, I'm out. Okay, that's fine. But the people who would look at the actual
company and say, hey, I like this. It's doing the things I want it to do. I just think that it's a
cheaper price for the same company. They'll buy. So that's where the market like this. It's doing the things I want it to do. I just think that it's a cheaper price for the same company.
They'll buy.
So like, that's where the market ends up.
Like, that's where people express their view.
There's a lot of people buying
because there's two stats that just blow my mind.
The amount of Bitcoin in the last 12 months
that hasn't moved is almost 70%.
So 70% of the Bitcoin people are holding,
even though the price went down 75%.
So people believe it's going back up.
They're not fucking selling, right?
They're not moving it.
So like, that's an interesting stat.
And then the second one is on chain,
like on the blockchain,
you can see the wallet addresses
with 0.1 or 0.01 Bitcoin.
So think a couple hundred dollars
to a couple thousand dollars.
The number of those wallets keep hitting all time highs,
meaning that it's not Wall Street guys buying.
It's like the small little people are saying,
hey, I buy 20 bucks every week.
Now I've got two, three, $500 worth of Bitcoin, right,
in this wallet.
And so like, I think that those are signals
that there is some portion of the kind of holder base
or the Bitcoiners that just, they're still buying.
It's just not, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars
like we saw with the Wall street guys were coming in and what is the ftx lesson for traders but also
for exchanges traders i think are just going to be traders like they should learn things i just
don't think they're going to they're going to keep trading what should they learn though it's just
don't keep your assets on the exchange right like get my shit shit off. Is Coinbase still around?
Is it?
The things I've heard is legit.
Yeah.
My friend who got me...
Tom Brady thought that shit was legit too.
FTX?
That's the clip. They got him.
They got him.
I'm getting my shit off today. The fact that you said that, I'm getting my shit off.
This motherfucker gave me spell coin for my birthday, bro.
Spell?
What's it called?
Spell token.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You made it?
He didn't even hear.
I should have.
I should have made it.
You heard it was legit, right?
Yeah.
You heard it was legit.
I got a broken man right now, bro.
I got most of mine on a cold storage.
Most of my Bitcoin on a cold storage.
But my friend was like,
don't worry about your Coinbase
because I have some on Coinbase.
Now BlockFi,
not doing so well.
Definitely lost some there.
And then Voyager,
that's on Mark Cuban
the list,
not on you.
You know what I mean?
Damn,
you just got a whole
fucking hit list.
It's two people.
It's good company though.
It's good company
for you to be in.
You and Cuban,
that's great.
I think that's the big lesson.
Take your stuff off the exchanges.
Learn about self-custody.
One of the pieces of advice I've given people for a long time,
we did a lot of work with Ledger,
and I used to say, just take $5 of Bitcoin
and move it into self-custody.
Move it into cold storage.
Learn how this stuff works.
I can't even move that shit to my new iPhone, bro.
My shit is on my old iPhone still.
But that's why you should start with $5
is because there are –
You didn't say that last fucking time when I put $60,000 in for a Bitcoin.
You didn't say start with $5.
Remember that?
Son of a bitch.
You're still down, right?
Say what?
You have to still be down.
What am I down?
Yeah.
She bought it at the day of the peak.
I think his button push was the downfall of the peak.
I literally hit it.
The podcast came out the next day, and the whole world was like,
ooh, Schultz, he's all in on something.
No!
Literally, that was the turning point.
I think the part in the conversation was when you confused 14% with 0.14% return.
That should look mad similar, bro.
I was reaping rewards.
You could say I got boomer stocks and all that shit.
I was feeling good about myself. I was like, 14, take that. And that was 0ing rewards. You could say I got boomer stocks and all that shit. I was feeling good about myself.
I was like, 14, take that.
And that was.14.
You were like, 14%?
Yeah, I crossed my legs and everything, bro.
How are your boomer stocks doing?
Yo, Warren Buffett's killing it, right?
Don't you want to have cash right now?
Isn't cash king?
I mean, to a degree, yeah, all the assets go down in value.
But also, it's a weird timing.
Cash has also kind of gone down if inflation's at 9%.
No, but the American dollar, it's buying power versus the other currencies in the world, right?
So our dollar right now, I think, is the strongest.
That's why it's complex, right?
It's like there's inflation.
So if you go back to two years ago.
Yo, say sorry to Warren.
Sorry to Warren.
Warren Buffett.
Sorry to Warren.
Where's that?
Yo, fuck fiat.
Fuck all that shit. Where's that? Yo, fuck Fiat. Fuck all that shit.
Where's that?
Yo, yo, yo.
Yo, what's going on, bro?
Fiat!
Dirty sneakers on.
What's going on right now, yo?
Listen, the stat that Warren needs to learn about is Warren is up like-
Tell Warren what he needs to learn about.
It's about 30%.
You tell Warren what he needs to learn about.
I think he's up like 30%.
30%!
That's pretty good.
Since the pandemic.
Bitcoin's up 2x.
So if Warren had just converted all his fucking money
to Bitcoin.
Who's Bitcoin's up 2x?
I'm going to start drinking out.
Give me some alcohol, bro.
Give me some goddamn alcohol.
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Oh, you off the hardback?
Yo, let's go.
2x.
I'm up 2x?
No, you're not. Every time? Yo, let's go. Two up, two X. I'm up two X.
No, you're not.
Every time I purchased, it went down.
And I tried to go. Well, tell me when you're going to purchase.
Bro, the last, I stopped listening to you.
I've lost less and less, but I bought that shit.
I remember it was in my hand.
Oh, you've lost less and less because it kept going down?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, but I bought it 60 like a fucking
baboon with you, and then
that shit hit like 35.
It was during a podcast, right? And I was
like, I called my wife. I was like, it's
never going this low again.
I tried to buy it. You know what I mean when I try
to buy it. It takes me about four or five times to actually get the shit
to go through. So I bought at $35.
By the end of the podcast, $28.
God damn.
Oh, my God.
No, I was fucked, but we drank it.
It is what it is.
You know what's better than making money with your friends?
Losing money.
Losing money is fire.
That shit is fun.
Whenever I was losing money together.
Can I tell you something that will make you feel a little bit better about losing money?
Sure.
You should talk to your accountant about this.
But you can sell your Bitcoin before the end of the year and book whatever the loss is.
So you take that off your taxes.
And then just buy it back.
And then just buy it back.
Now, they may change the rules at some point the future 30 days in in and you can only write off 3,000 a year
So you can carry that forward. There's things you should talk to them. I'm gonna throw up to
How long you known this information?
Couple weeks
This amazing that's. That's wild.
That's amazing that you're just sitting on that information while I'm sitting here bleeding out money.
But I haven't done it yet because I don't know if it's worth it yet.
I'm still trying to figure it out. Oh, well, it'd be nice if I could figure it out.
It'd be nice if I had that info.
I'm telling you about G-Wagons for fucking two years.
Son, I already knew about G-Wagons.
Well, fuck you for not telling me.
Why don't you tell me nothing, bro?
How do you know everything?
This guy don't tell me nothing.
What the fuck?
I told you about Bitcoin.
Can we just keep doing this?
We'll do it like once a year.
No, Pop.
No, listen.
And then we'll just count up who lost more money by the end.
Jesus Christ.
Can we invest in anything?
Is there another like like, sport?
The paddle?
Let's get a paddle team.
Did y'all look at the pickleball teams?
Yeah, or pickleball.
We could do pickleball.
I ain't doing nothing else Tom Brady endorsing.
Is this why Tom's still playing?
Somebody asked.
This motherfucker.
This motherfucker bought FTX and sold on Giselle?
You're the worst investor ever.
People, hopefully nobody gets mad about this,
but somebody offered us early on,
they were like, yo, y'all want to buy a pickleball team?
And so me and Joe, I got an in-house sports expert.
I was like, hey, is this good sport, bad sport?
He's like, it's growing fast, all this stuff.
Amazing content.
I said, if we buy the team, what do we have to do?
And at the time, you had to be the GM and the coach.
I was like, bro, come on.
Are we going to recruit players?
How do we call the plays?
Can we buy the Miami Arena naming rights, though?
Y'all probably could.
Bang Bros tried to buy for $10 million.
That's fine.
They're trying to scoot in on the fire sale.
So on these arena rights, we looked them up when I was doing KFC on Barstool.
It's like a couple million.
That's an investment.
You know what I mean?
Flagron 2 Stadium.
Flagron 11 million a year.
Flagron Stadium.
That's a 10% higher bid than Bang Bros. You know what I mean? Flagron 2 stadium. Flagron 11 million a year. That's a 10%
higher bid than Bang Bros.
Flagron stadium?
Fire. Flagron arena?
You perform there?
Fire. Flagron.
Tax write-off?
That's a marketing expense.
Hey, you know there's a tax write-off if you buy an arena?
Except for you don't own the arena, you just own the name.
Yeah, you know.
If you got the name, it's yours.
You own the arena.
That's mine.
That's daddy's arena.
Yeah, that's daddy.
Yeah.
You know what I mean?
Like, don't you own your wife?
Like, you know what I mean?
Like, shouts at Tate.
You know what I mean?
Like, you do technically, because it's got the name.
They got the name.
They do have the name, right?
Wait, guys, that's how it works?
You own your wife?
Yeah, technically.
Technically?
Oh, you all could be in the doghouse.
You own your wife, too?
If they own their wife, I'm not owning my wife.
I'm going to be the bitch not owning his wife?
That's not up to us.
That's up to God, bro.
Why would God make it like that?
That's good.
God's rule, bro.
Hey, do you own your girl?
Yeah.
Nope. Nope. Y'all should do a wife episode That's good. God's rule, bro. Hey. Do you own your girl? Yeah. Nope.
Nope.
Y'all should do a wife episode.
Your girl is looking for ownership, Alex.
No.
He buy a pickleball team first.
Hey, let's see who gets in trouble now.
Out out here working on his coat.
Lagrant has gone on a four-week hiatus.
We all in a doghouse.
It is what it is.
Sip it up.
Yo, you want some?
Are you buying more now?
Don't even worry about it, bro.
Am I buying more?
I thought about it, to be honest with you.
That's a no.
That's a definite no.
You see what a boy's like.
I thought.
That's what I said.
I told my wife and she won't let me buy more Bitcoin.
No, I thought about it.
I thought about it. And what was the thought? I thought about That's not it. I said I'd move my wife and she won't let me buy more Bitcoin. No, I thought about it. I thought about it.
And what was the thought?
I thought about buying it.
And then I thought against it.
G's up, dog.
G's up.
We're going down with this shit.
You didn't really buy more, bro.
I bought more, dog.
No, you didn't.
You didn't buy no more fucking Bitcoin.
Did you buy Bitcoin or did you buy Doge?
Bitcoin.
I bought Bitcoin.
All right.
Because I think last time.
I bought Bitcoin and then Voyager folded and froze my Bitcoin.
So let's figure out what happens here. Wait, you bought it on Voyager? I bought some on Voyager. Because I think last time. I bought Bitcoin and then Voyager folded and froze my Bitcoin. So let's figure out what happens here.
Wait, you bought it on Voyager?
I bought some on Voyager, some on Coinbase.
Why would you mix up the exchange?
Because this is how all in I was three weeks ago, is you could only put a certain amount per day in.
And I was like, I'm putting that much in Coinbase and I'm putting more in Voyager.
I love Akash.
My guy told you all this story.
He DM'd me the other day and he goes,
yo,
and I was like,
oh boy.
Then we started texting
and he was basically like,
hey man,
so I got a lot of
different accounts
and that was probably
a smart decision.
The only problem is that
every single account I got,
the company's faulted.
He went for like,
straight up like,
three for three.
G's up.
G's up.
Block five,
Voyager, Coinbase. These are my three. No, Coinbase is not Coinbase. It's up. G's up. Block five, Voyager, Coinbase.
These are my three.
No, Coinbase is not Coinbase.
It's fine.
You're still on Coinbase.
Two for three.
You're not even on Coinbase.
You're on iPhone 12
or whatever your shit is on.
I'm going to be honest with you.
I don't even know
if that phone got battery left.
We had Marquez,
I almost called him Marquez Houston.
Marquez Brownlee.
We had Marquez Brownlee.
Do you know who he is?
Yeah.
The tech guru on the fucking thing.
He's talking and he's-
He's got Bitcoin?
No, but he was telling us about how sometimes the phone battery starts to swell.
Yeah.
And I had the FBI agent who did the-
Cracked the code?
No, the Silk Road arrest.
And he said that at the thing.
What do you mean?
He said, I have the FBI.
He said, that cracked the code?
Like, what?
Like, what code?
Like, what?
So I'm your arrest. Apple wouldn't let the San Bernardino terrorists,
they wouldn't let them open a phone.
Remember, Apple wouldn't do that.
Like, shitty sitcom dialogue.
And then FBI came in, and one of them had to crack that code.
Maybe it was your boy.
Maybe it was your boy.
Sing. You got it, bro. to crack that code. Maybe it was your boy. Maybe it was your boy.
Singing.
You got it, bro.
That's literally what I thought it was.
Do you all remember this?
Do you all remember this from nine years ago, one time?
Do you all remember the big story?
Apple wouldn't do it.
What do you think the code was?
So listen, they go to arrest a guy for so gross. 9-11 or something?
Did they just try that?
Did they try doing that in the cook?
I love y'all, but one day you're going to call me and be like, we're done.
We're going to be like.
No, but they had a guy who was there, and his only job, this FBI guy said,
he said the only job was this guy's to keep the computer alive.
I was like, what do you mean?
He said when they took the computer from the Silk Road guy,
they slid it down the table, and this dude's job was to sit there.
And he had like a million battery packs.
He had all the adapters.
And he just kept hitting the space button like this because they didn't know if it would auto lock or whatever.
His job was just to keep the computer on.
So it's like it's not – yeah, maybe the battery's swell, but like it's a real thing.
I need – but what happens if that phone dies and that's where all my shit is?
Akash has your Bitcoin.
Did you really? What be more happy to be honest with you i'd be more happy if i knew someone who had it can it
be on a phone that's all i know where my phone is it's on the app i don't even know how to get
it on the phone like it's on like the photo they, they got Coinbase. They got Coinbase Pro. I don't know how to use that shit.
So I got some shit on Coinbase.
Some shit on Coinbase Pro.
It's on that phone?
Oh, OK.
Yeah, I don't know new passwords.
He hasn't been able to bring it to the new one.
And I don't want to do too many wrong passwords.
Yeah, and then he locks it out.
So I got to do my face.
Just promise me that you won't go to one of these experts that's like password recovery.
And then next thing you know, you can't find your Bitcoin because they have your password.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So like that. Here's another tip is if you're
going to do the ledger. I'm going to lose that shit. What do I do with the ledger? Hold on a
second. I'm going to lose it. Just when you buy it, make sure you buy it from the company. Don't
buy it off a reseller on Amazon. Oh, fuck. Because somebody could have bought it, put some malware on
it, and then resell it. And then now they've got a back door, so you want to buy it from the company.
That's another key thing.
This is so stressful.
I'm going to end up at the place that Biden's son went to.
Avoid that spot.
Oh, yeah, that's not good.
Avoid that one.
Is that confirmed now?
Is that like a real thing, or are they still saying that's not real?
You were friends with him.
With who?
You were friends with Hunter.
We know about this.
Good times.
Tell us the good times in Miami.
You and Hunter.
Good times.
Just smoking up thoughts.
Back in the day.
The old back in the day. Before the, you know, back in the day.
This is his attempt.
He's like, shit, I said I own my wife.
I got to remit.
That's what I was about to say while we got my phone to say.
I'm just saying.
God damn, this is stressful.
It is crazy, though, that the media is, they censor so much different things.
Wait, hold on.
But now that Elon owns Twitter, it won't happen.
Did you know SBF?
You ever meet him?
I interviewed him before.
All right, guys,
let me take a break for a second
because I got to make sure
that your peck is looking good
for the holidays.
Let's just be serious right here.
Let's just be serious.
You cannot have that bush
going crazy.
I don't care how cold it is.
I don't care what the climate
you're dealing with is right now.
Not for the holidays. Holiday dick got to be smooth, yo. Holiday dick got to be smooth.
And the way you make it smooth is with mass cape, okay? That lawnmower 4.0, that shit is
nip tucking, bro. It is getting those edges, trimming them pubes. Sometimes it comes down to the thigh
meat. You got to trim around there
as well. Maybe trim up by your belly button.
We don't know what you're working with, but it's got
to be nip-tuck. It's got to be
caesared up. It's got to be faded up.
The head got to look like mace.
You got to have a head that
looks like mace. Harlem world,
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Christmas candy cane. You're very welcome for that. Let's get back to the show. Listen, y'all need
tickets. Y'all needed tickets this past weekend. So Akash sold out shows at Caroline's. You know
what I mean? You couldn't get them.
Maybe if you were on SeatGeek, you could.
SeatGeek has got your back, okay?
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Not talking about the ones that Akash will show.
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Now get a seat in a little bit better section. Get a little bit closer to the action because
you support this show. Okay? Go out there, get them tickets, and enjoy your goddamn life.
Now let's get back to the show. Also, guys, I need to tell you about some dates I got.
December 1st, I'm going to be in Tempe, Arizona. And January 14th, super excited about this.
I'm going to be at the Wilbur Theater. We will sell these tickets out.
You need to get them now.
And January 21st and 22nd, I'm going to be in Vegas.
I'm not supposed to announce that, but I'm going to do it anyway.
Who cares?
Get your tickets at akashsingh.com.
Now let's get back to it.
Did you know SBF?
You ever meet him?
I interviewed him before.
And what did you think?
What was your takeaway?
Seriously, in the moment, what did you think of this guy?
My interaction with him was, I don't know, maybe two years ago, a year and a half ago, whatever, when I interviewed him before. And what did you think? What was your takeaway? Seriously, in the moment, what did you think of this guy? My interaction with him was, I don't know, maybe two years ago,
a year and a half ago, whatever, when I interviewed him.
And he was just like a normal dude.
I mean, I've interviewed a bunch of these people, right?
So like there was nothing at the time where it was like, oh, this is like crazy.
But I think also I saw somebody put up like a montage
where when he first started back in 2018, 2019,
then a couple of years later, a couple of years later,
like there's physical differences.
There's like, you could just tell, like he's kind of just like a little bit more agitated.
And so you got to remember that, like, if you take a snapshot of somebody at one point in time,
it's not the same person that they are, you know, a year, two years later, whatever.
And I think what's crazy is that, like, this dude was on stage at a conference with all kinds of
big names, celebrities and politicians, all that stuff. The media, I mean, you put them on the front cover of magazines
being like, he's the next Warren Buffett.
So it's like it isn't one single group that I think is responsible, right?
It's not the users who trusted him.
It's not the investors.
It's not just the regulators.
It's also the media that exalted him.
It's not the media, right?
And so, like, in some way, in hindsight, it's very obvious.
People are like, oh, shit, of course.
But to your point—
Did you pick up on it at all when you were interviewing him?
No.
Did he wear that stupid tech outfit where you act like you don't know how to dress?
Did he do that thing?
That's become hack.
You think that's on purpose?
Oh, I hate it.
It is hacky.
I'm in the network mood.
What is it called?
The social network.
You know how to dress.
You're not a fucking idiot.
I was just chest high on Zoom.
Oh, you Zoomed them.
Yeah, Zoomed them.
So I think the other thing that's kind of crazy about it, though, is like the reports that are coming out is this wasn't like the whole company knew this either.
So everyone rightfully so.
There was like 10 people working there.
And they were in like a polyamorous relationship.
No, but everyone is rightfully so focused on the users, right?
The users lost money.
That's bad.
That's not good. There's a lot of other people who got burnt that were kind focused on the users, right? The users lost money. That's bad. That's not good.
There's a lot of other people who got burnt that were kind of on the periphery.
But also you got to remember, there's a lot of employees, even if it's only 200 employers or whatever, that work at these companies and they're in shock.
Like there's reports that they're shocked.
They're ashamed.
They're like all this stuff.
And it's almost like they're let down as well.
Now, again, people aren't going to be sympathetic to them.
And your future, that's on your resume, FTX, so and so
and so and so. How do you get another job?
And many of them had funds on the
platform. You know what I mean? So, like, there's
just a lot of collateral damage for this stuff.
And I think that it's just, there's no
winners. There's no winners in any of this.
That's the thing, man. It's so tricky because nobody
has any empathy for people who lose money
in crypto. I don't know why we have
way more empathy for people who lose money in the stock market.
I guess we feel like there's more work that goes into that.
But yeah, when you lose money-
We've accepted the stock market as a thing.
We have accepted the stock market as a thing.
It seems like a real job with this other one.
We all have friends that were idiots and then made tons of money.
But meme stocks and crypto have been put in the same bucket.
And I think the narrative is just like, oh, it's young kids who are like stupid, who are like gambling.
Yes.
Right?
And so like if you're a professional or you're an adult, you're like, I don't feel bad if people lose money gambling.
So you never fucked with any of the other coins at all?
No, I started out mining Ethereum.
Right?
I didn't even know anything.
Nobody ever told me about Bitcoin or any of this stuff.
So like I don't think there's very many people who just learn about Bitcoin, never look
at anything else, learn about anything else, whatever. I think actually what happens is most
people, they're like, what's this crypto thing? They learn about a bunch of different stuff.
And at some point they're like, oh, Bitcoin is different than the other things, right? And then
they eventually kind of flow that way. And if you look, there's lots of
coins that went up in value. Three or four years later, they're gone. They're replaced by other
ones. But Bitcoin has just remained the number one for 15 years because, in my opinion, it's the one
that has the most kind of sustainable, resilient value over time. And you had said that, so Larry
David had endorsed them in like a Super Bowl commercial. Tom Brady had backed them financially.
And apparently, I think you had said that Larry David is getting, like, they're trying to sue him.
Class action lawsuit against the guys who supported FTX.
And Steph Curry, a bunch of them.
So why are they being prosecuted, and why are they being prosecuted faster than Bankman?
I don't think it's prosecution.
From what I understand, it's like lawyers, right?
Like kind of civil stuff.
Who's got money that I can sue?
They got you.
Will they get any money from that?
I don't know how that stuff works.
What's going to happen
with Bankman Freed
and the nerd girl?
Yeah, what are the charges
against him?
What could he get?
I don't know
because also,
they're not in the United States.
They're in the Bahamas.
You start getting into
this weird world of just like,
if you're an international legal person, you probably understand it. But also there's other people who have gotten
in trouble or accused of trouble through this whole downturn, like over the summer and stuff.
And like, they're not in the US. So like what happens to them? There's one guy who, I think
it's the country of Singapore, maybe, that keeps saying like, yo, we're looking for him.
He keeps tweeting.
He's like, no, you're not.
He's like, I'm not aware of that.
I'm going to go to this event.
If you're looking for me, I'll be here.
There's like crazy stuff, right?
With Mt. Gox, did anyone get in trouble with that situation?
That's a good question.
I don't think anyone necessarily got in trouble
because it wasn't a situation where,
from my understanding,
it's like there was like accusations of fraud
and stuff like that.
I could be wrong on that.
I think it was more of just like,
it was a poorly run business
and there was one guy who sold it to another guy
and then like that guy probably ran it even worse,
it sounds like.
And so it just kind of didn't work as a business,
went bankrupt.
And then it was like, okay, who has assets left?
But I don't think there's accusations like there are in other cases.
If he's in the States, though, what could his charges be, like fraud?
Oh, I mean, you kind of look at it as a spectrum, right?
Like the people who are most sympathetic to him would probably describe it
as like the guy made a mistake.
That's what he's saying.
Right.
The people who are the biggest critics are like, yo, you know,
a million-plus users is bigger than Madoff.
I don't think he had a million people.
Not even close.
Right?
Now, he may have had more AUM.
I think he had more than $10 billion or something.
I don't remember the exact details.
So it's like, I don't know how it's going to play out.
Right?
And then also, another piece of it, and I've been getting a lot of heat online, people are like, oh, you did an advertising deal with the media company and stuff. And we're like,
we had a framework. It was like, all right, we're going to work
with US-based regulated exchanges.
Seems pretty
simple framework to use, so you're not...
I don't criticize you for that. I mean, if Tom Brady
is putting his reputation on the line,
a guy who doesn't need to.
Tom Brady has more than enough money, more than enough success.
He's not doing it
for... We're all doing things for money.
With Larry David, you'd probably throw that guy so much fucking money.
How much did he get paid?
Do you know?
I don't know.
Five million?
It had to be even more than that.
It had to be like—
I'm thinking 10 at least.
30?
Yeah, I think he threw out a ridiculous number.
And they said fine.
Yeah.
Because Larry's so rich.
He has so much money.
Larry's got what?
Half a billion? A billion? 750? He's got to be touching a billion. He's got Seinfeld money plus Curb money. Plus they said fine. Yeah. Because Larry's so rich. He has so much money. Larry's got what? Half a billion?
A billion?
750?
Yeah, he's got to be
touching a billion.
He's got Seinfeld money
plus Curb money.
Plus Curb money.
So it's like,
to motivate him,
it's almost not even money.
He only seems to do
exactly what he wants to do
and that's it.
Let him play himself
and he got to roast it.
Yeah, I mean,
the schedule.
It's fine.
No one's getting 30 on that.
30.
But he got paid,
right?
He got paid.
Yeah.
So I think that,
again, it goes to
like if people are-
I hope you got some
of that Larry David
money, bro.
Were you asking
for crazy money?
Trust me, if they
were like, hey, you
want to be in a
Super Bowl commercial?
I think there's a lot
of people who would
have just been like,
sure.
Larry David's the
only one who's like,
that's another thing.
$10 million?
Still being in a
Super Bowl commercial.
Larry don't give a
fuck about that.
He definitely asked for money, though.
Yeah, no,
I know he got money,
but yeah,
I take my number down a little bit.
Yeah, but like Tom...
Maybe it's not 30.
I guess what I'm trying to say
is like these are people
that can't be bothered.
Like Tom, Larry,
can't be bothered.
You could be more bothered.
I could be very bothered.
Yeah, you go like this.
I could be very, very bothered.
I mean,
you texted me,
you texted me and I came.
So yeah, here I am.
No, but if you also think like,
Tom Brady's an interesting example
because a lot of these athletes want to be tech investors.
So now they start playing this game of like,
okay, cool, I'm well known in sports
or whatever my thing is.
I want to be an investor.
How about we do like a double deal?
I'll be a spokesperson.
Plus I get to invest.
Plus you get advisory shares.
There you go.
So these deals are now getting like somewhat convoluted.
And again, if you go back and you're like,
if the auditors, let's say that they did get tricked,
does anybody think that Tom Brady
was going to be able to like sniff it out, right?
No, of course not.
And he's just in a commercial.
He's like like this looks cool
I get it like
with a flamethrower
yeah yeah
is there any
is this like
a cautionary tale
to any of the other exchanges
because I refuse to believe
that none of the other exchanges
aren't doing anything
that's a little seedy
here and there
do they see this
and do they shape up
ooh
that's a good question
are they doing this shit
is the Binance guy
behind the scenes
doing this shit
so there's this idea
of one of my friends Nick Carter Nick Carter is like really pushed it's called proof of reserves this shit? Is the Binance guy behind the scenes doing this shit? There's this idea.
One of my friends, Nick Carter, is really pushed. It's called Proof of Reserves.
Nick Carter, like the Backstreet Boy?
Not him, but same name.
He's got a cool haircut like him too.
Nick Carter has this idea of
Proof of Reserves. I don't know if it's his idea, but he's popularized
it where because it's crypto
on an exchange, you could basically come out and be like,
yo, we say we got 100,000 Bitcoin.
Here's the wallet address.
Here's proof that we actually have the 100,000 Bitcoin.
It'd be like the bank saying, we got $2 billion of deposits, and then they could prove to
you it's actually sitting there.
And so that's one step.
There's also this proof of liabilities.
So it's not just what assets do you have, but if you have assets, and then you owe it
all, so you got to have both.
But that's one thing that they could do.
And then the second thing is I think that you're going to see a lot of people who are good actors being like, look, we don't want overreaching regulation.
There's an argument that's being made by the large crypto exchanges in the United States that's like, look, the rules weren't super, super clear here in the U.S.
And so people went outside the United States doing the regulatory shopping,
and that could have contributed to this happening.
Imagine if this business was here in the U.S.,
we have faith the U.S. would have uncovered it.
So would you like some regulation for crypto?
This is a big moment right here, Pop.
No, I think most people look at it the same way.
It's like Bitcoin already has, quote-unquote, regulation.
The CFTC say it's not a security. It's got this already has quote-unquote regulation. The CFTC say it's not a
security. It's got this kind of self-enforced rules. If you are a business that deals with
Bitcoin, you have rules that you have to adhere to. There's a lot of people who don't like the
rules. There's KYC, AML. Does that prevent crime? There's questions around that, privacy stuff,
like all that. So there are rules. I think what you're starting to see though is people are
saying, wait,
all this like recreation of finance,
why do they have different rules
than what's already the rules in traditional finance?
They're doing the same thing.
So like disclosure rules, right?
If you guys remember, there was a Luna,
one of the coins that blew up over the summer.
It like came out that there weren't really
as clear disclosures as maybe they would have liked.
And so that led to the collapse.
And so it's like, okay,
what if we just make people say what they're doing as a rule?
That could be a step in the right direction
to prevent problems.
Sounds like you want some regulation.
I don't think it's my opinion whether I want it or not.
I think it's coming because people are looking
and they're like, yo, we can't.
And it might make it a little better.
Well, politicians, imagine if you're anti this stuff
and you see this happen, you're like salivating.
Yeah. Well, regulation is an if you're anti this stuff and you see this happen, you're like salivating.
Regulation is an interesting thing, right?
Because regulation is great for the people who own the business and better for the people who are using the business, but horrible for the people that are trying to compete with the business, right?
Because it creates the moat.
In some cases. In some cases.
That was the accusation against FTX was they were trying to get regulatory capture,
like basically get it so that no one else could do what they were doing.
Right.
And then it was like free and clear, we're going to be the winner.
And then you could make the, sorry, go.
No, but you're not trying to regulate the coins.
You're trying to regulate the exchanges.
It goes back to like the dollar is not regulated.
It's the businesses.
How do you buy not on an exchange?
Yeah.
I truly don't know any other way.
So like you can get Bitcoin
a couple of different ways. You could mine it. You go get the
machines, right? You could mine it. Now, there's
a lot of people who like that just because they want to participate
in the network. There's a lot of people who like that
because it's non-KYC Bitcoin, right?
So there's a privacy element to it.
But you could mine it. Second thing is you could work
for it. Same way somebody pays you
dollars. There's websites
where you could go and say, hey, I'll do some design work or whatever, get paid, so you could earn it. Or you could buy it. Same way somebody pays you dollars. There's websites where you could go and say, hey, I'll do some design
work or whatever, get paid, so you could earn it.
Or you could buy it.
You could sell pizza.
What happened to the pizza place?
Bitcoin pizza, you go on Uber Eats.
Palm's been delivering for them for a long time.
I'm about to have to.
Wait, the last one just now,
you said you can buy it. How can you buy it?
So you could buy it on a regulated exchange.
They have KYC, all that stuff.
There's things like local Bitcoins,
which is more like peer-to-peer.
So you could meet up with people.
That's how a lot in the early days people would do it.
And then there are still unregulated exchanges.
They're not in the US usually.
They're elsewhere.
But I just tell people, look,
unless you've got some reason from a privacy standpoint and you understand what you're doing, majority of people, whether we like it or not, are just going to buy it on a regulated exchange.
But then take it off of the exchange.
If you have the coin that's unregulated, use a regulated exchange, put the coin on, trade it, pull all the funds off.
Into self-custody.
Then it's kind of reaching a compromise between, like, a compromised centralized exchange but then a decentralized currency.
Think of like the bank.
The best example I have is think of like a traditional bank.
If I put my dollars in there and the bank goes bankrupt, the FDIC, the government, will basically say we'll pay you up to $250,000 back, whatever was in the account, right?
So FDIC insurance is big.
But the reason why nobody is like, yo, let me take all my cash out and like keep it is because it's not very secure.
Somebody could come rob you, right?
And then two is, what am I going to do if I got to send you money?
I'm going to mail you cash in an envelope?
No, it doesn't make sense.
The promise of Bitcoin was that you could self-custody it, so you could basically pull
it out of the bank, and that then I could, with the press of a button, send it to you
instantaneously for near free, whatever.
And so Bitcoin is really trying to usher that in.
It's just that there's a lot of people
who are trying to cash in on the rise of Bitcoin
and they're doing it with a lot of this other stuff.
No.
Go.
Sorry.
No, you can go.
This is unrelated.
I have an unrelated question too.
What do you think the biggest moment
in the history of Bitcoin was
in terms of propelling the brand of it?
Is there a specific thing that happened?
I'm going to say there's two things.
One is for the brand.
One is the biggest moment.
The biggest moment in Bitcoin, in my opinion,
is when Satoshi walked away.
But we don't even know if that's a real guy.
That's why I think it's important.
If Bitcoin becomes what it already has,
but even what I think people believe it will become,
it's like one of the most selfless acts in the world.
You create this digital, decentralized, peer-to-peer software payment system.
It's like Ready Player One.
Yeah, and then you have 800,000 Bitcoin.
Yourself.
And you walk away, and you never touch them.
Oh, so he just still has them?
Yeah, they're sitting in a wallet.
You can see them.
They never moved.
800,000 Bitcoin.
I don't care if that price is $10 or it's $69,000.
It's a lot of money.
And so in some way, it's a system where there are rules but not rulers.
There's nobody who's going to change the code, right?
There's nobody who is the CEO.
It is a truly decentralized system.
And the fact that we don't know who Satoshi is
means that you can't attack it.
How do we not know who Satoshi is?
That's the crazy thing to me.
You can find anyone.
What about the lawsuit with the guy that was in Australia
that claimed it, that then got some money?
Like, what were the details with that?
He lost.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
What do you mean he lost?
I thought he won.
They got paid out.
Well, we may be talking about different suits.
He's got a couple of them going on, but he sued somebody who had said that he wasn't Satoshi.
And when that guy and him went to court, Craig Wright lost.
Oh, gotcha.
So this guy basically was like, you're not Satoshi.
He got sued, but he prevailed.
Interesting.
And I can't believe there's no idea of who this man is.
I feel like you know.
Just blink twice if you do.
No, I don't want to know.
That's the other thing.
Yeah, but I feel like you do.
It's like the, what do they call it?
My friend Marty Bent calls it the immaculate conception of Bitcoin,
of the fact that we don't know is actually a huge advantage.
You see Ethereum, Vitalik is one of the creators.
People like him, don't like him.
They think some of his views align with them or not.
Some people judge him on his views, right?
The fact we don't know Satoshi actually drastically reduces
the attack surface on Bitcoin.
That's true.
It's like Elon in Twitter.
Well, no, Elon, you have a guy.
You know what I mean?
Yeah, we can attack him because we know who.
The second big moment, I think, in Bitcoin was...
In terms of brand awareness,
was there a thing that happened that you remember going,
oh shit, it's different now?
Was there an act?
Did someone rap about it in a song?
Did a famous person buy it?
Did someone wear a t-shirt?
I think it was MicroStrategy, the public company,
putting it on their balance sheet and El Salvador buying it.
There's a country that's buying Bitcoin.
But I heard that's not working out for them right now because of this.
It's working out as well as for you and I.
Right.
When the price goes down.
But again, I think that one of the other things
about Bitcoin that's unique is it introduces
this long-term thinking.
When we all sit around all day long,
what do we think?
We think about tomorrow, the next day,
the next week, whatever.
But with Bitcoin, there's price volatility.
But did you sell?
No.
Did you sell?
No, I didn't sell.
Did you guys sell? I don't have any. You guys don't did you sell? No. Did you sell? No, I didn't sell. Did you guys sell, right?
I don't have any.
You guys don't have any Bitcoin?
Yeah.
Oh, you do have some.
Did you sell?
No.
Where do you have it?
Coinbase.
Yeah.
So like, think of all of us are sitting here.
I think a lot of people would look and be like,
yo, you guys are fucking crazy.
It's down 75%.
No, we all believe it's going to come back up,
which is very interesting.
There is a confidence that people have in Bitcoin. Because we've seen it happen. That's what convinced
a lot of the Wall Street guys. So Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller, two very well-known
finance guys, in 2020, they bought Bitcoin and then came out and said, we bought Bitcoin. Now,
part of it's like, if you already bought it and then you tell everyone, other people will buy it,
so it goes up, right? But the way they talked about it is like one of the numbers that convinced them was when bitcoin dropped from 20,000
to 3,000 85 percent of people who had held it at 20,000 didn't sell and so these guys were just
like yo these people are crazy the shit's gonna go back up we should buy some because it was lower
so it is like a little bit of like market dynamic stuff as well um but i think it's
just like if you can weather the storm if you can weather the volatility be all right is there any
issue now that ftx is out of the conversation for marketplace because it was the second largest
marketplace now that it's wiped away or is there an issue that binance now has too much control
within the exchange place it's a good question you. You've been reading. I like this. Come on, man.
Yeah, so like it's similar to mining.
65% of hash rate used to be in China.
They kicked everyone out.
Now America has like 30% to 35%.
And people are like, oh, that's healthy.
But if all of a sudden America had 50 plus percent,
even that would be bad
because you don't want concentration in any one country.
Same thing with the exchange.
I think you actually want multiple players because you don't want it in any one country. Same thing with the exchange. I think you actually want multiple players
because you don't want
it all centralized.
But if the number two
goes down,
yeah,
Binance definitely
got more market share
out of this.
I thought Coinbase
was the number one
in my world.
Me too.
In America.
They're the number one
brand,
and I think also
probably by volume.
It's like iPhone,
Binance is like Android.
The rest of the world
is using Binance.
That's WhatsApp.
We're on iMessage here.
So do you think there is,
can there be a regulatory push to create
or disrupt or break up exchanges to create more?
Is that something that the SEC can do?
So what they'll probably do is they'll just pull them
more into the regulatory environment.
And remember, they already are regulated.
Coinbase has licenses.
They've gone to different states, gotten approvals. Like, this is definitely not...
But like, let's say Coinbase goes down, heaven forbid. But like, now that there's just like,
this one exchange that's like, is there any other exchange that's even a big player in the space?
There's a number of exchanges, but none of them are as big as Binance. Like,
Binance is like the Goliath.
And then it would have like, disordered control over, like,
it would have probably, what, like, 90-95%
of all, like, crypto transactions.
And then at that point, it's like,
now it's like this decentralized currency,
all these decentralized currencies are all
centralized. Well, the trading would be centralized,
like, you could still use the Bitcoin network
to send Bitcoin to each other. Right.
But it's effectively centralized
if 90% of the transactions are going through the same exchange. Correct. Right. And that's trading. But it's effectively centralized if 90% of the transactions
are going through the same exchange.
Correct.
Right.
And that's where things are right now.
No, no, no.
But like if,
let's say what happened to FTX
happened to a bunch of other exchanges
and Binance was the last one.
But if people are keeping
most of their Bitcoin on storage
like they suggest,
then it doesn't matter that much.
Right.
If people are doing that.
I guess, I don't know.
Do you know if there's data
on how many people
are keeping them on exchanges
versus how many are taking it off?
So you can see many of the largest exchanges,
you can see their, what they call a balance,
like their Bitcoin balances.
And I forget the exact number,
but I think like 100 or 150,000 Bitcoin
came off exchanges during all this.
So this is people being like,
oh, fuck, give it to me,
which is the biggest week-long drop in history.
And so it's been going down over time.
I don't know what it is right now.
Does that help the price?
Yeah, it's illiquidity.
Right?
So why haven't we seen a little spike?
Well, if you really think about Bitcoin, yes, it's down 75%,
but it was pretty much between like $18,000 to $22,000.
This happens, it's like $16,000, $17,000. But if I had told you a year ago, hey, the number two
exchange in the world is going to go down, like you probably would think there'd be this massive
sell-off, like whatever. We really didn't get that. Now, it helps we're already down so much,
but like, okay, like actually it's showing a decent level of resilience.
It could go down more, which scares people.
But like I think it's kind of interesting.
What do you think the lowest it would go would be?
You think we're at single digits?
It's just hard to see.
Let me knock on wood.
But like it's hard to see another catalyst bigger than the number two exchange.
Like the number one exchange goes down.
Yeah.
But like other than the number two exchange going down, the government
could outlaw it or
something.
You know what I mean?
Like, you start getting
into kind of, like,
conspiracy land.
Yeah.
Other than the number
two exchange going down.
So, like, if that's the
price, like...
The last time he was on,
we were like, how much
is he going to go to?
We were like, 100,000
by the end of the year.
Now we're like, how low
is it going to go?
To be honest, how low?
You want to know
something hilarious?
In 2020, I wrote a piece publicly, and I was like, it was at, like, how low is it going to get? How low? You want to know something hilarious? In 2020, I wrote a piece publicly and I was like,
it was at like 10,000.
I was like, it's going to go up a lot.
I think it's going to go to 100K, 10X.
And the shit went up 7X.
People were so mad at me.
You said it was going to 100.
And by the way, yeah, you're correct.
I was wrong.
I came out, I'm wrong, right?
Yeah, I'm a moron, whatever.
But that's what you got to remember
is that all these young kids, they're like, I wanted to go up? Like, yeah, I'm a moron, whatever. But like, that's what you got to remember is that like all these young kids,
they're like, I wanted to go up 50x.
I wanted to like go up whatever.
And that's the other thing.
That's why they all go and buy all the other coins
is because they're like,
Bitcoin's not going to go up 50x.
That's what gets you a big reaction.
Yeah.
Treat it like the lotto.
Like literally.
Literally.
I thought about that.
When we were down there, I was like,
does it make more sense for me to just put $1,000
in 20 different fucking shit coins and hope one spikes?
Yeah.
Like, I'd be way more rich.
Yeah.
No, you wouldn't.
Well, in my mind.
Yeah.
In that moment.
You understand he's down now.
I'm down.
I know he's down, but he would be down more.
All those things are down even more.
Are they?
Yeah. Like, the other crazy part is there's stocks in the stock he would be down more. All those things are down even more. Are they? Yeah.
Like, the other crazy part is there's stocks in the stock market that are down more than Bitcoin.
Like, Shopify is down, like, 75%, 80%.
Really?
Yeah, it is.
Right?
So it's like, again, like, yes, it's bad that Bitcoin's down.
What did you say?
What?
No, I said, yeah, it is, because I have Shopify.
You got Shopify.
Mark?
Mark?
What?
No, I mean, there's definitely stocks in the stock market that are down more than Bitcoin.
Yeah, it's funny, right?
It's being like, yeah, I'm broke, but this other guy's broker.
No, it's just like the whole market is down.
Did you just do the, I have a black friend with stocks?
Yo, I told him, I said, when you had Huberman, he looked like a strawberry.
His face was so red.
You got him.
I was like, oh, they got that guy.
We got it
we got the cover
but now
yeah but like
real estate's down
stocks are down
right
everything's down
it's just like yeah
like of course
Bitcoin and crypto's down too
so are you going to buy more
damn no
if it goes up
he's been lying about
having Bitcoin
this whole time
if that shit goes up
you're going to buy more
are you going to buy more
if it starts to
if Akash
if I find out Akash
has significantly more Bitcoin than me I'll probably buy are you going to buy more yeah I you going to buy more? If it starts to... If I find out Akash has significantly more Bitcoin
than me, I'll probably buy more. Are you going to buy more?
Yeah, I'm going to buy more. I just need permission at this point.
Very
reasonable. Very reasonable.
I don't know,
man. I was unhinged.
Yeah, you were going crazy. You were
a wild boy. I was a wild one. Can we tell them the
wallet thing that happened with you? Oh, son, I
had money. I put money on a storage wallet
and then I made a hidden wallet
and I didn't even know how. And then I
forgot what the password was and I couldn't find it in my
phone notes. So I thought
about 60% of my Bitcoin was
just gone in the fucking ether
for months. I was just trying to rack my brain
to figure out what the password was. Found it
randomly. A lot of people lost crypto on FTX. He
lost it in his brain. Think about that.
Ain't that crazy? Just like in his own mind.
This is actually, alright, so
there's a limited amount of Bitcoin.
It's like customer service for Bitcoin.
There are
some people like Akash that
forget the password and then they just
never can get access to that. Yeah, what happens to that shit?
Where's the lost and found?
No, this is an important question.
Look, there should be a lost and found.
Yeah.
It's on the blockchain, right?
Fiat does not have lost and found.
Yeah, it does.
No, it does not.
If you drop $20 outside.
I gave a woman her purse once.
Full of cash.
How did you know there was cash?
Yeah.
Because I looked in that motherfucker.
I took about $200 out before I gave it back to her. Oh, has that cash? You stole the purse in the first place. That's the problem. I gave it back to her with all was cash in it? Yeah. I looked in that motherfucker. I took about $200 out before I gave it back to her.
Oh, that's that cash.
You stole the purse in the first place.
That's the problem.
I gave it back to her with all the cash in it.
Did you add any?
I added cash, yeah.
I added it back.
I gave it back, but then she gave me a little money.
And she gave my friend money who didn't even find the shit.
He just walked there with me.
And then he kept the goddamn money, son of a bitch.
What'd you do?
You looked in the purse, like got her address and then showed up to her house?
Yeah.
And like knocked on the door
and you were like,
here's your purse bag,
old lady.
I'm a good person, bro.
And I was a kid when I did this.
Middle school kid.
If only you started tipping.
Yeah.
I tipped her.
Why are we acting like I don't tip?
Y'all are putting this out there.
Is he not tipping?
I tip better than you.
Oh, you have a tip.
You have a tip better than me.
He's putting out a really bad tipper.
They found a thing.
They found a thing
that bothers me.
For a rich person? He's the worst tipper. He's crazy. bad tipper. They found a thing that bothers me.
The worst tipper.
It's crazy.
What bothers you?
He was a great tipper when he didn't have money.
And now that he's got money, all of a sudden,
this is very tight with him.
Wait, why?
Why?
Tight with him.
It's ineffective.
I can't say that I do tip because then the game doesn't work
because it looks like I'm being defensive.
The game.
The game.
That's the game.
That's the game. This is good. This is good. The game. The game. The game. This is good.
This is good.
The game doesn't work very good.
Can I tell you what my rule is with tipping?
Okay, tell me.
Please tell him.
In your head,
just come up with whatever the 20% is
and add a couple of dollars
and always just say to yourself,
it means more to the other person
than it does to me.
You should try that.
Stop doing that at some point.
I don't want it to happen.
That's a great thing.
If you found a purse on the train today,
what would you do with it?
Say again?
There's a purse on the train.
That's all we need to know.
He's like,
wait,
give me some more time
to think about that.
Before I tell you mine.
You said a person.
If I found a purse
on the train,
it would be too inconvenient
for me to go to their home.
I have things to do,
but I would make sure
it got to their home.
I'd put it into the mailbox.
Maybe in my place.
Oh, yeah.
Put it into the mailbox. You're going to. Oh, yeah. Put it into the mailbox.
You're going to put the purse into the mailbox
and you think that's how it gets back?
That's how you get back, bro. Really?
If you find someone's wallet, you put that shit in the mailbox
and they get it back to you. I feel like the type of person who would call Uber
and be like, hey, take this purse. Don't look in it to this person's
house. I mean, I know. I mean, they never get the
purse in your house. You feel good, but they're not going to do it.
That's not crazy. I've done that with many things
before. Yeah. Have you never sent an Uber package?
No, but like a purse?
Nah, not a purse yet.
But one day, maybe.
I trust Uber, bro.
I'd also look at the purse and like, do they need it?
Like if they had like credit cards or ID, if they had like a license in there, if they had like a Macy's gift card, I'm not going to do nothing.
You're proving our point.
Old Andrew returned the purse.
New Andrew.
This is too much for you to worry about, bro.
Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey.
Let this be a public service announcement.
For the service industry.
This is a public service announcement for the service industry.
I used to tip y'all good, but because of this incessant bullying, I have to live up to this reputation.
So I just want to let you know.
I just want to let you know.
Y'all knew how much I used to tip you.
You knew how much I used to tip you.
I was popping up 30%.
It's going down to 10.
It's dropping like Bitcoin.
That's what's happening.
FTA.
You call my tip FTX.
They ain't watching.
They can't afford internet with them shitty ass tips you be giving them.
You see this?
You see how they speak about you?
I would never speak about you like that.
Spit in his drink.
Spit in his food.
I'm ordering what Al's ordering.
I'm ordering what Al's ordering. I'm ordering what Al's ordering
and we mixing plates.
Okay, that's what's happening.
I'm ordering what Al's ordering
and we mixing drinks
and mixing plates.
You guys asked for this.
There's going to be
a lot of people out here
that make a lot less money
because of you guys.
How dare you?
Don't separate yourself from him.
You are.
Don't separate yourself from him.
All of y'all are the same.
No, this is what you did
to the same coin, bro.
You know, a lot of people need this money.
It's Christmas time.
They're not going to get their...
My whole building.
Hey, building.
Hey, Juan, Juan.
I was going to break you off
and you already know I was going to break you off.
This SPF right here, Juan.
Juan, I was going to break you off.
This SPF right here.
This motherfucker right here,
cheap motherfucker,
he doesn't think that you deserve it.
You're acting like you're going to Carbone you deserve it. Y'all acting like
you're going to
Carbone and 11 Madison.
Y'all just went
to Sweet Grains.
Yeah, how much
did y'all tip at Sweet Grains?
How much did y'all tip at?
The fuck are y'all talking about?
How much did y'all tip at Sweet Grains?
Hey, hey.
It was the saddest thing ever.
Y'all put on all your
winter coats
and went across the street.
Got your little
Sweet Grains came back
and sat down and said,
our life sucks.
How are bitcoins looking right now?
How are bitcoins looking right now, bro?
I didn't go to sweet greens and I got no money.
I can't even afford double chicken and sweet greens.
I know, bro.
I'm not here on single chicken.
I'm on single chicken now.
Sweet greens.
Sweet greens. God damn, bro. I'm a single chicken, dog. Sweet Green's going to have their shareholder
call and be like, the economy's down.
We're not seeing the double block no more.
We're not seeing double chicken.
But for real, though,
fuck you and fuck you.
Genuinely, if it bothers my heart,
you're going to make it fucked up in my building, man.
You're going to make it fucked up in my building.
We're going to do it.
No, no, for real. Hey, you know what we're going to make it fucked up in my building, man. You're going to make it fucked up in my building. We're going to do it. We're going to do it.
No, no, for real.
Hey, you know what we're going to do?
Hey, Juan, Juan, Juan, Juan. It's that responsibility
for your own actions.
Deadass Juan.
Don't try to put the accent on it.
I'm going to tell you.
Don't try to relate to Juan.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Don't try to relate to Juan.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
Don't try to relate to him.
Sorry, Juan, Juan, Juan, Juan.
I mean this sincerely, Juan.
I'm going to find out
the doormen from their buildings. Yeah. I'm going to find out the doormen from their buildings.
Yeah.
I'm going to tell you their building.
You find it out.
I know that y'all talk.
Listen.
Yeah, holler at them.
I need to know how much they tip.
I need to know how much they tip.
Right now, 100 each.
How much?
100 each.
For Christmas?
Yeah.
Oh, fuck that.
That's not good.
This guy.
That was bad. There's nothing. I thought that was bad.
There ain't nothing like someone saying it, son.
He thought he was balling.
He thought he was balling.
That's not good.
In this economy?
Oh, shit.
That's not good.
That's not good.
That's not good.
Damn, Al.
You have to pump this shit.
Yo, it's Matt Dorman, bro.
How many Dormans you got?
Son, it's Matt and his motherfuckers.
And then at holiday time, they put out a little fucking thing with their names on it and their
faces and shit.
They're like, yo, we all getting this.
Miles, hit me.
You see what was being projected?
You see what was being projected?
Service industry, you trusted these motherfuckers.
You guys all have doormen?
God damn it, bro.
No, wait, wait.
A hundred's not good?
Yo, how many doormen you got?
That's the blackest you've ever been on good? Yo, how many doorman you got?
That's the blackest you've ever been on this podcast.
How many doorman you got?
Seven.
Yo, Alkos all of a sudden acting like he's not the cheapest motherfucker on the goddamn
planet.
How much you give your doorman?
200.
How many doorman you got?
A lot, dog.
And you give them all 200?
Watch this.
Yeah.
Something to me.
He's lying.
He's lying. He's lying.
He's trying to be like extra serious.
How much you give the porter?
How much you give the guy who's cleaning up?
$200.
$200, $250.
Some people got $250.
Sorry.
Sorry.
I don't know about that.
I don't believe it.
I don't think this guy ever tipped more than $100 in his life.
You're out of your mind.
I don't think you ever tipped $100 in your life. You don't got it. I don't think this guy ever tipped more than $100 in his life. You're out of your mind. I don't think you ever tipped $100 in your life.
You don't got it in you, bro.
Wait, $100 is not customary, bro?
Everybody ain't doing $100.
Now you're going to make me feel bad.
I ain't going to lie.
I tipped about $100.
That's what I'm saying.
I'm like, wait a minute.
It's fucking idiot.
$250?
$250?
$250?
I don't give my kids that much presents.
Two and 50 for Christmas?
I'm a giving man, you know what I mean?
Yeah, you want to hear some funny-ass shit?
No, because he can't open doors when it's windy.
That's why.
You need a little help when that gust comes?
You don't think we got automatic doors in my building?
I love that.
He's crazy.
He's crazy.
I want no problems, bro.
I want no problems.
When I was in New York, I walked downstairs one time and I was like,
and I was like, hey man, I'm going to get coffee.
You want anything?
The dude was like, yeah, give me like a, what, an iced coffee.
I was like, all right, cool.
Came back.
Next day, I accidentally said it again.
And then it just became a thing.
And then after like a week, I was like, oh shit, I'm in a bad situation.
Like, am I an asshole if I walk by him and don't ask if he wants coffee and come right back?
You got to cut that shit off.
Nah, so then I just kept calling.
It happened to me.
Nah, I moved.
That's the only way out.
This shit went on for like three months.
I was like, bro, come on.
You got to get him fired.
You're like, he's stealing packages.
He's stealing packages.
It started out as a small
and then we started asking for larges.
Bro, that's crazy. That's a bill right there.
Yeah, that's a lot.
That's a lot.
250, you suckers.
For what?
I don't believe it. I don't believe it either.
That's cash.
What's your guy's name? Joel.
Holler. We're gonna audit his building. No, your guy's name? Joel, holler. Can we audit? We're going to audit his building, all right?
No, we're going to ask.
We're going to ask.
Right now.
Everybody in the building, get that.
Swear on your wife you give every single person $200.
I gave every single person $200.
No, swear on your wife.
That works in the building.
I swear on my life.
It works in the building.
I'm in the building.
I say life.
No, no, here it is.
Here it is.
It's coming out.
It's coming out.
Wait, wait, wait, wait.
What?
Not every person that works in that building.
Oh, really?
So you give your favorite guy $250. Wow. And then the rest of them what? So that's like two people. The rest of the doorman got, wait, wait, what? Not every person that works in that building. Oh, really? So you give your favorite guy $250,000
and then the rest of them what?
So that's like two people.
The doorman got $200,000, yeah.
Every person in the building
got paid by you?
The doorman, yes.
And the porter.
Who else works in the building?
Eight of them.
The late shift?
We got a cleaning staff
and shit like that.
Hmm.
You don't pay them at all?
You don't get like
the leasing office?
You don't hook them up?
No, no, no.
Y'all got me already, motherfucker.
Come on.
Yeah, I'm going to tip the leasing office?
Bro, I hate this because this guy would cry over the littlest shit when we were going out to eat.
I know, because I didn't have money at the time.
Yeah, so what?
You didn't have money.
And you still looked at that bill a little heavy.
You're a bill detective.
You were stressed.
Oh, he's a bill detective.
Oh, my God.
Oh, my God.
Yeah, yeah.
I'm still a bill detective.
You're not going to charge me some shit I didn't pay for.
Yo, you got it like that, bro.
Yeah, son.
You got it like that.
Why can't you give him a little extra?
Yo, I'll cuss at the bill.
When it's dark in the restaurant, you pull out the light.
I do that.
You pull the light out?
I bust the light out.
Yeah, yeah.
What's that mean?
What you looking for?
To look at the bill, bro.
It ain't for me.
It's for my wife.
Gotta see how much this shit costs.
You ever see like the old person
that put the glasses on,
they get the flashlight out?
That's what I got.
My dad would turn up
the fucking whole lights
in the restaurant
and turn the music down.
He'll ask for those things.
I'm like, I can't even talk.
And then boom, we're talking.
But for real,
I put the light on so my wife could see how much them appetizers cost because they think appetizers are free.
Why don't we order some apps?
Okay.
Well, let's see how much they cost.
Let's get one.
Yeah, let's just see how much it costs.
Yeah, exactly.
So she needs to see.
And then I sign.
And then let's get.
How much should I tip on that every time?
How much should I tip on that?
Oh, you ask other people.
No, I ask my wife.
How much you tip on 700?
So you're saying that she's cheap?
Say again?
So you're saying she's cheap?
She's not cheap.
She just needs to know.
How much?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You know what I mean?
That's smart.
See?
Everybody got to know.
No, they're accusing you of being cheap, but it sounds like now you're saying that she's
the one telling you what to write.
Wow.
I mean, yeah, she runs it.
You know what I mean?
My wife runs it.
That was a good one.
That was a good one. You don't move. My wife runs it. You know what I mean? My wife runs it. That was a little judo move.
My wife runs it.
You know what I mean?
Oh, y'all don't let your lady run the house?
You don't trust your ladies?
Oh.
Wait, wait.
You don't trust your ladies?
Wait.
So you say you're not the cheap tip,
but your wife's the cheap tip?
That cheap.
Let me tell you something.
Let me tell you something. Let me tell you something.
Let me tell you something about my wife.
My wife.
I knew I shouldn't have called.
Let me tell you something about my wife.
My wife not tipping none of y'all.
Coffee, she goes, for what?
My wife will slide three screens to get to no tip.
You know how that shit started off at like 18%, 20%, 25%.
She just be like,
whoop, 30, 35, 40,
whoop, no tip.
Boom, right in front of them.
Full eye contact,
not giving a fuck.
She don't believe
that they deserve to get tipped.
She's like,
they just made me a coffee.
What's the point?
Damn, son.
You stole your wife
out there,
but that is crazy.
Yes, yes, yes, yes.
She's out here.
She's out here
putting pressure on motherfuckers.
Calling the business managers.
Pressure.
None of this gets cut.
None of this gets cut, bro.
We're going to cut one word.
We're going to believe a word or two.
We'll believe a word.
We're going to believe a word or two.
But the rest, everybody need to know.
She comes correct.
She comes correct.
His holiday trip is going to be horrible.
It's okay.
It's going to be fine.
She's going to be like, so what's the tip?
It's going to be fine.
No, no, they're not charging us at the restaurant.
She's going to get coffee in front of you and put $100 on it and then just watch you.
She knows.
She knows.
She's proud of me.
In this moment, she's proud of me.
In this moment, she's proud of me.
In this moment, she's proud of me.
She said, thank you, Andrew, for standing up for me and what I do.
She'll never tip for coffee.
I had to bully her into tipping.
I was like, you got to leave something.
She said, right in front of barista.
I go, she goes, for what?
I go, well, they got the coffee.
And then she goes, that's their job.
Son.
She right, dog.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Hey, she right, honestly.
You know what I'm saying?
Thank you.
Yo, not tipping is the shit, bro. Yo, tipping is coffee. She right dog. Thank you! Thank you! She right dog. You know what I'm saying?
Thank you.
Yo, not tipping is the shit, bro.
Yo, tipping is communist.
Y'all are communist, bro.
You guys are communist.
You guys are communist.
You guys are communist.
Andrew shows the Andrew shows alone.
Y'all are communist.
Service industry people are fucking you.
Hey, Joel, you're gonna get less money this year.
Damn right, Joel.
And it's because of these guys right here.
Yeah, damn right, Joel.
Joel, you don't deserve it, your electric doors.
That's a good one.
He got electric doors.
He not even a doorman.
Yeah.
He not even a doorman. Yeah, that're electric doors. That's a good point. He got electric doors.
He's not even a doorman.
Yeah.
He's not even the doorman.
The doorman's AI.
That is true.
The doorman's got some business.
He didn't even open the door for you.
To say hello?
Okay, listen.
Listen, before we end all our friendships,
we have to end this podcast.
Pop, is there anything you'd like to tell us?
Is there anything you'd like to tell us? Is there anything you'd like to tell us?
Pomp, you want to wrap this up for us?
Yeah, why don't you wrap this up for us?
I'm fucking shook right now.
How much I'm getting back, Pomp?
You look like a teenage girl sitting on her bed listening to Britney Spears.
Tell me pretty things.
I'm still buying.
Still buying.
He's not fucking leaving.
Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Last time that we did a podcast here, at the end of the podcast, I had gonna say. Still buying. Still buying. He's not fucking leaving. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Last time that we did a podcast here,
at the end of the podcast,
I had to buy a whole Bitcoin.
Yeah, but you didn't do it that year.
Don't get it, puppy.
Don't get it, puppy.
I'll go home now if I win tonight.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Right now.
I can't do it on my phone.
Why not?
Because I don't put that shit on my phone
because you can't find the password.
You don't even know where your phone is.
Where do you do it?
On the computer.
We'll get you a computer.
Bullshit.
I'm calling bullshit.
You sounded like Akash right now.
That sounded like Akash, bro.
That sounded like Akash with those tips, bro.
I'll buy more than that.
Why don't you buy a whole point right now, bro?
Come on.
I'll buy way less than you.
You can sell it if you lose money.
You can get it back in taxes or something like that.
By the way, we're going to get done.
He's going to have a text from his accountant being like, yo, talk to me before you do anything.
I'm not buying nothing.
But seriously, come on.
Right now, the Pomp Army is listening.
They want to see it.
They want to see a whole coin.
They want to see a whole coin.
I'll do it when I get it from my computer.
I'll buy something right now, Pomp, if you buy something.
One full coin.
I'm not buying no full coin because I'm not allowed.
Buy two, send me one.
If you buy a full coin right now, then we're even.
But mine's way cheaper than yours.
See, if you were smart, you would tell me I got to buy like four.
No, but I know it's hurting you more right now.
Yeah.
I'll buy more tonight.
No, no, but'll buy one full one.
I'm looking at this again on Coinbase right now.
You know how to open that shit?
How you open that shit?
Help me.
Help me.
Oh, my God.
Last chance.
Last chance.
No, I think the big thing is obviously situation sucks.
You know, the two main things you have to think about in any economy.
Fiat, we up, baby.
Fiat, we up, baby.
Do you know how many people would just say to me in the street,
I know how many people won't buy a Bitcoin right now.
That's right.
Four of the five of us ain't buying shit right now.
You're misunderstanding.
They weren't screaming Fiat.
They were calling you something else.
ain't buying shit right now.
I'll buy. You're misunderstanding.
They weren't screaming Fiat.
They were calling you
something else.
For costing them
thousands of dollars
in Bitcoin.
Pop, pop.
We just need one buy, bro.
One buy.
You could spike it up.
Oh, boy.
I don't have anything
on my phone.
You seriously don't
put it on your phone?
Nah.
Why?
It's too big of a security thing.
Damn.
I gotta take this shit
off my phone.
You could lose your phone
and someone could hack it.
Is that your argument?
No, it's just like, you guys ever, you get all the text messages now?
Like people just text you random shit?
Yeah, Dad.
That one's real.
That one's real.
Forget that.
Right?
Like you get all these text messages.
I don't put anything on my phone.
Think about the risk-reward of putting it on your phone.
There's only a couple things I used to tell people.
It's like, you should do self-custom.
I'm going to listen intently so you could dig yourself out of this.
Don't put this shit on your phone.
Yeah, yeah.
Right?
And then the third thing is just don't trade.
Don't trade.
The trading shit's crazy to me.
I know so many people who were like, oh, I bought, you know, five Bitcoin.
It was 500 bucks each or whatever.
Now I got one Bitcoin.
I'm like, oh, damn, did you lose them?
They're like,
nah,
I was trading.
So it's like,
it's real
because it's denominated
in Bitcoin.
So just don't trade.
Take it off the exchanges,
self custody,
don't trade.
You bought it on your phone.
I bought it on my phone
with you.
Yeah,
and then you don't have
your phone now.
No,
no,
your other phone.
Damn it.
So like,
you're actually a great example.
Of what? You're a good example of how not to tip, but a good example also of what not to do with phone. Damn it. So you're actually a great example. Of what?
You're a good example of how not to tip, but a good example also of what not to do with Bitcoin.
Damn.
Man, what?
Did I get attacked twice right there?
Yeah, bang, bang.
Yeah, that was DP.
Fuck, bro.
That was DP.
Bang.
Okay.
Y'all should have never told me the tipping thing.
This motherfucker don't tip, bro.
Yo, you're a great example of something you put the tip in.
Fiat.
You're Fiat?
All I know is that the waiters and waitresses are going to be standing over there looking
around the corner and be like, I tip!
I tip!
Okay listen, yo, Pompliano, thank you so much for coming on.
We love you, brother.
I tip!
I'm here to send you.
I'm sending it right now. Listen, We love you, brother. I can't. I can't stand you.
That's what I'm saying right now.
Listen, we love you, man.
We appreciate you.
Thank you so much for coming up.
I appreciate you so much.
This has been Flagrant.
Peace.