TRASHFUTURE - Chasing Hero ft. Zeke Faux

Episode Date: September 17, 2024

Bloomberg’s resident cryptocurrency anthropologist Zeke Faux rejoins the gang to discuss the VERY easy marriage of the Crypto and MAGA worlds, with a special focus on some of the freaks and weirdos who made it happen.   Check out Zeke’s work here! https://zekefaux.com/   If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s UK Tour Here: https://miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hello everybody, welcome to this free episode of TF, and an important record has been broken today. An important record has been broken today. A number of shots missed in Donald Trump's direction. Kennedy, Lincoln, Ford, Reagan, Roosevelt, one attempt each. Just one. Trump has fucking doubled them. Yeah.

I mean, listen, obviously the state of the game has changed, you know, advances in nutrition, stuff like that, training, you know, it's not the same game that it was. You put Lee Harvey Oswald in today's game. You know, I know how much people like him, but it wouldn't be the same, right? Yeah, absolutely. And the fact also that he was, the new guy suspected to be Ryan Routh,

he was drafted from NAFA. He didn't even come from the actual theater schools at the CIA. No, I know. Listen, I guess the lesson here is always believe in yourself and just if you have that determination, if you have that focus, you too can fuck up and get arrested or killed by the secret service. It would be funny. It would be NAFO's first confirmed kill.

It's also this further proof of like everyone having ADD now where it's like, I feel like back in the day before phones, like, you know, someone would have landed a hit, like a proper one, right? The sort of missing of it. Yeah. I feel there's something to do with the phone. But you think that they're all too busy. Like they're, they could only concentrate on an assassination attempt that they're also playing subway surfer. Well, I mean, this, this guy being a NAFO guy, this is one of the like most posting Americans and therefore, you know, most likely to get distracted by something he sees on his phone. Before we go any further, I want to introduce our guest who might be wondering if he has

to run his appearance on this podcast by Bloomberg again. It is Zeke Foxx, returning champion. One of the crypto gurus, but like our kind of crypto guru that we've spoken to before and we will again. Zeke's just written a couple of great articles in Bloomberg our kind of crypto guru that we've spoken to before and we will again. Zeke's just written a couple of great articles in Bloomberg about kind of the greater cryptosphere coalescing not just implicitly as it has for a long time, but now very explicitly alongside Trump world. Zeke, welcome back to the show. It's great to have you. Hey, thanks for having me back.

It's a pleasure. Also, just so you know, UK listeners, there's a lot of UK news that's been happening from Keir Starmer, from some labor donor playing a Newgrounds dress up Keir Starmer game. God damn it. We'll get there. We will talk about Keir Starmer again. We'll talk about this awful country. Yes, yes, yes. We're going to talk about Keir Starmer again. We're also going to talk about the sort of implosion of the Jewish Chronicle magazine. We're also going to talk about the implosion of the Jewish Chronicle magazine. We're going to be talking about all that. We're going to be talking about

it on this week's bonus episode alongside some Eric Adams stuff. If you want to hear some British opinions, you're going to have to pay is the thing. So that's all coming. But I figure it might be worth bringing this one little bit of Britishness up while we have Zeke on as a certified financial journalist, which is that yes, the Lord Ali donating a bunch of designer clothes to Keir Starber and his wife so they can quote, look their best for the nation, which is a really funny reason. What's more interesting, and this was pointed out to me by Ethan Schoen, who's been on this show and who I think is like, if you're interested in the Kremlin ology of what's making this current government tick, I think he's probably-

Bounding ology. Yeah. I think he's probably... Boundingology. Yeah. I think he's kind of got the best read on it in general. So Ethan noted, he was like, one of the things that really matters is donations like those from Quadrature Capital, which donate like... Oh, that sounds more evil than anything you could possibly dress Keir Starmer in. Short of KKK uniform. You give me something that sounds sort of like a word or sort of like a place. And I'm like, that is some asset stripping investment fund name right there.

Quadrature, quadrature capital, not a word. What's what's the quadrature of the shape? Not a thing deranged. Yeah, I think it's like if you wanted to name a hedge fund, quadrature is it's a word, but it's a very, very, very specific, high level geometry word. It does say. Okay. But I think if you wanted to name a hedge fund, you could do worse than going into chat GBT and be like, come up with something that for me sounds a bit like a word. But here's

what I think is interesting. And this is where I think the financial journalism elements of this are interesting, which is that they have the largest climate foundation that's focused on geoengineering in the financial sector. And Labour is now announcing that they intend to spend huge amounts of money as part of PFI too. So you wonder things like, okay, well, is the Quadrature Climate Foundation that's led by someone by the way, with a hilarious name. Oh yeah, I'm bracing myself. Greg de Temmerman. Okay.

Let's see if they become, for example, a co-investor with the UK government in a bunch of green energy plans next year. Yeah. Well, I mean, there's no way that Starmer's Labour Party would do a bunch of private finance initiatives with Greg de Temmerman merely because he bought Keir Starmer a bunch of suits or whatever. But look, I want to get to talking to Zeke about crypto. I don't want to spend too much time talking about UK stuff. We're going to do more of that on Thursday. Zeke, let's talk a little bit about how the crypto world changed since we last spoke about it.

And since we last spoke about it was the trial and conviction of Sam Beckman Fried. It looks to me like it's become much more party political, at least in the US. Can you tell me a little more about that? Yeah, it's pretty wild. Price wise, crypto is totally back. Bitcoin is up at $60,000, something like that. And the price of all the other coins are up too. But you don't hear anybody talking about Web 3, blockchain. There's not really any excitement. And crypto always needs a narrative. And the narrative right now is that Trump is going to pass friendly regulations. He's even said he's going to start a national Bitcoin stockpile. And that's going to be like the catalyst that sets off the next bull run or whatever. But it's pretty

wild. I mean, these crypto companies, whether or not they're doing anything profitable, they're sitting on huge amounts of money. So they've got plenty to throw around in this US election. One of the things I've seen that's really funny is I guess there's some standard chartered. They put out a research note saying that if Trump wins, crypto rips to 125K for a bit for Bitcoin, Bitcoin, excuse me, rips to 125K. However, it will only rip to 75K on a Kamala win. This is yeah, there's no such thing as bad news. It's all good. Yeah. It's Bitcoin. The price can only go up, apparently. What I think is interesting

as well is that one of the things that these people are doing is, with the lack of a narrative about adoption or usability, there's not really a vision. You can see this in Trump's speech to the Bitcoin conference in Nashville. You can also see it in how people in the sector are talking about crypto. As you say, Zeke, the whole idea of Web3 is gone. The NFT is gone. All we have left is Bitcoin is digital gold and then memes, basically. Yeah. If you're not paying attention, they're great at creating this narrative that mainstream adoption is right around the corner. There's like really cool stuff happening that like maybe you just haven't heard of. But the truth of what's going on is like if you remember Dogecoin, they started one called

dog with hat. It's like now the dog has a hat on it. And that's like a blue chip crypto. Like they're all most of them are dumber than that, you know, dumber or offensive. Like you cannot overestimate how dumb the crypto has gotten. And I was just looking at one called Make America Great Again Again. Just like people are trying to like glom onto anything that can get attention. Iggy Azalea has a coin, which is actually like doing pretty well as far as celebrity coins go.

Is it just like stealing the crypto business? Does it have a purported use case? It's called Mother. I do not. I'm honestly I'm already feeling guilty that we're talking about it. Like this is just like pump mother right now. I think she's out in Singapore. Do not pump mother.

Please do not pump mother. If you buy enough of the Iggy Azalea coin, the special gift you get is like the most unique Australian accent you can imagine. One of the things that's interesting about this, right, as well, and you could see this at the Bitcoin Nashville conference, which is like another, I think, sort of sea change moment in the crypto space, is that everyone who's a crypto millionaire, with some exceptions, is pretty much deciding that the Republicans generally and Trump specifically are the way to go who they're completely aligned on.

Yeah, those are their guys. And we always knew, right? We always knew that crypto was like... A lot of it is the same kind of right wing tax protest stuff that's been happening for ages and ages and ages. It's that gold bug and the Fed, like John Bercherism that again, it's been happening for ages and ages. But for a long time, it could maintain a kind of veneer of neutrality. Like, oh, it's just a fancy new thing. We're not sort of party political in any way. And again, now that the era of trying to sell crypto as a thing that normal people will use to do normal things, but with more freedom is sort of over, I think that that veneer

is gone. I mean, that does hasn't stopped like some people on the democratic side from trying to like farm crypto donations. Jonathan Padilla launched a group called Crypto for Harris. His company is called Snickerdoodle Labs. That's the second most alarming thing for a company to be named. Like after something that's either like very esoterically mathematical or just flat out not a word is the kind of like whimsy corporate. Yeah. All of it's got this sort of guy stroking the cat, you know, but like the democratic crypto lobbyists are basically like, yeah, we're basically fucked.

No one wants to give any money to us. Crypto for Harris is trying to like support, you know, Kamala Harris. But again, the guy who's behind it, again, his company is, as far as I can tell, Snickerdoodle Labs, a kind of affiliate marketing web 3 startup. It's one of the most bullshit things I've ever seen. It says it's using blockchain technology to build a data economy that distributes value to all stakeholders, including data owners, building the infrastructure for people to own their data and monetize it in a secure way. Which is just to me, that just sounds

like affiliate marketing. But I don't know. It's crazy to me when you hear people in Washington talk about crypto, they're talking about it like ways like they still believe in the blockchain and that there's going to be some mainstream use case. Meanwhile, the actual crypto people, like you're saying have totally moved on. But in DC, they're debating crypto like, oh, this could be this American innovation. We don't want to drive it offshore. It's pretty bizarre to me. Yeah.

Don't they understand that the whole point of it is that it's difficult to contain within a national locality? Yeah, but what if it wasn't though? The SEC has filed these lawsuits against Coinbase and a bunch of the other big exchanges. And that's really like what's at the center of this. Those lawsuits would more or less say that doing crypto, the way people do it in the US, is illegal. Like you can't go trade random coins.

These are all securities. They have to be regulated like stocks. And the crypto industry is basically hoping that through lobbying, they can get those rules changed, get Gary Gensler fired, the head of the SEC. And Trump has promised he'll do it if he's elected. I mean, although of course he would, you fire all the agency heads. So like basically it's what it's one of the reasons I suspect it's very difficult for the Democrats to get support from the crypto industry because they're basically saying,

hey, we're going to make it more or less impossible to do what you're doing or will they your very stupid game is over possibly Yeah, I guess that that's the question right will they actually continue doing will they kill mother? Yes, will the Democrats kill mother Zeke? I mean, I think they're they're out to get her It's a matter of time and I have not seen Azalea wait on the election, but if she knows what's good for mother, she knows what to do. Maybe she needs to get like specific exceptions carved out for mother if the Democrats win. Oh, I mean, there's a way that if your coin is stupid enough, it is legal.

Like if you don't make any promises, you never say that it's going to do anything. That's like a way that you can maybe get away with it. But if you start to say that like this is sort of like a company, you're going to do things that make money. That's where you get into trouble with the SEC. They're going to say it's a security. So maybe mother could fall into that like stupidity exemption. It's really funny that the SEC considers mother potentially to be beneath them on the basis that it doesn't stand for the like stupid bullshit and exchange

commission. Yeah, that's what we need. Also, ever since you've mentioned mother, I've had an image in my head of Trump stand for the like stupid bullshit and exchange commission. Yeah, that's what we need. Also ever since you've mentioned mother, I've had an image in my head of Trump shuffling through the halls towards the Oval Office doing when you're good to mama from Chicago. One North Carolina Democrat who is trying to connect the Harris campaign with crypto industry players says anyone who cares about the future of crypto should want this issue to stay in the bipartisan lane said representative Wiley Nickel.

That Wiley old nickel. That's actually a pretty decent name for a coin to be fair. Yeah, that's true. Wiley Nickel. It's a stable coin that's pegged to the nickel. Yeah. Wiley Nickel at the commemorative coin dispute. Yeah.

So anything less would poison the well for a decade. So I suspect if I ever think about this, what's going on here is the crypto people aligned with crypto for Harris are like, look, the Democrats have been pretty unfriendly to all the stuff we're having fun and playing games with here. We need to try and get them onside. Whereas the others are like, no, we have to go all in for Trump because Trump is going to bring us to utopia, basically. That seems to be what it is. But you recently also wrote about the crypto conference in Nashville that Trump headlined. And this is one that we talked about his speech a while back, but we didn't talk about the conference that much. And it seemed as though many pundits were looking

at this and were like, okay, well, he's looking for crypto voters as a kind of block, which Coinbase Global, which definitely, definitely has no incentive at all to inflate this number, said, yeah, we think that the crypto voter represents 20% of the US electorate. number said, yeah, we think that the crypto voter represents 20% of the US electorate. Like 20% of the US electorate are like, I hate Gary Gensler. That fucker. The Fed has a study that... So the Coinbase study rests on the assumption that anyone who's ever traded crypto is a potential crypto voter. Now, the Fed has a study that says only 7%, I believe, of people have traded crypto in the US. But I think this assumption is flawed. What percentage, half the people who traded crypto have lost money.

They may be pro crypto regulation and more people just don't care. The percentage of people that really care about crypto I think is quite small. And at this conference, I was with those people, people who are obsessed with Bitcoin, who are willing to put their lives on hold to go talk about Bitcoin with a bunch of other Bitcoin people. And even in this crowd, I had trouble finding anyone who said Trump's flip flop, because he'd called Bitcoin a scam before, was changing their vote. A lot of these people were like, I like RFK before and I still like RFK. So they'd probably come around to Trump now.

I love Trump's sort of unerring ability to identify a scam just because he himself is a practiced scammer You know It's it's like anytime he goes to the evangelicals and my waves of Bible around and goes like you guys love this shit Right in the same in the same breath, you know to go to crypto people and be like, oh the other guy you weren't fired Yeah, he's gone. Totally, you know, I'm gonna revalue all of your like Iraqi Dean archive coin. It's getting revalued They want yeah, do you want me to make mother the new dollar? I'll make mother the new dollar. I was pretty amazed by what the Bitcoiners pulled off,

because I thought when I heard rumblings about this, I thought, all right, maybe Trump sends a video of himself waving like, hey, Bitcoiners. I mean, he actually came and he said he was going to have the US government have a stockpile of bitcoins. I mean, that was far beyond what I expected. Like, Gary Fire, Gary Gensler is kind of like an easy ask. He's saying he'll pardon Ross Albright, which is a big favorite of issue of Bitcoiners because they think that Silk Road was key to like the early adoption of Bitcoin. And they think Albright has been punished too much for running this online drug market.

And if you remember, he also tried to maybe order a couple of assassinations, although maybe he was talking to an undercover agent. But Trump really took their side on all of their pet issues. Though at the end of his speech, he did say with a little ad lib, have a good time with your Bitcoin and your crypto and everything else that you're playing with which like These people are so fucking funny. Yeah, I was he was pretty good talking to this crowd and I mean he had compliments for everyone He's like Winklevoss twins like they're so sexy and smart male models with a big beautiful brain Yeah, that's what it was but he's like all of you in the crowd are geniuses, just like my uncle who taught at MIT. They say he graduated the best in history, right?

He was like some really deep Trump lore there apart from anything else. Yeah. Can you say that my uncle, he you'd all love him. He's a smart guy as well. He was the he graduated the best from MIT ever. Graduated tremendously. I loved that he was the he was one of the most from MIT ever. Graduated tremendously. I loved that. He was one of the most ever at MIT. Oh, I mean, just a couple of years ago,

the Bitcoiners were going crazy because they got this videotaped address from Naib Boukele, the president of El Salvador, saying that he would adopt Bitcoin. Now you've got, this is a big upgrade. You've got like the potential next president of the United States signing on. I really thought they'd be more excited.

Like the crowd should be going wild and instead they're like the national Bitcoin stockpile should be bigger. It's not, he's not buying enough Bitcoin. That's how you organize as a constituency is you demand the impossible, you know, and you keep pressuring them, moving Trump right on Bitcoin. Are they doing like purity tests just to be like, Oh, does he like, well, I mean, I'm not even sort of joking because I do feel at this stage, it's like, well, I think as you, as you sort of mentioned that, like now that we've sort of gone past the phase of

people pretending that this had any kind of like real sort of utility and like the sort of crypto boosters are not really sort of kind of making the case that this is like an alternative currency for the everyday person at this stage. Then it's like, well, yeah, how you differentiate who's on your side and who isn't is like who is a true believer. And the thing about all of that basically cult stuff is that, you know, the goalposts constantly change. And I guess I didn't know whether they've seen Bukele as someone who actually has sort of like engaged more with the actual process of Bitcoin than Trump has or seemingly is willing to do. So I wonder

whether like this is type of a purity test measure of which Trump is failing very not tremendously. For these Bitcoiners, I mean, these guys, they actually don't like other cryptocurrencies. Like you're not allowed to talk about Ethereum on stage at the Bitcoin conference. So even that Trump was using the word crypto is like a failure of their purity test. And then once he's what Trump has done since then, no Bitcoiner is going to like. Is everyone becoming like a Bitcoin maximalist or like is the constituency all like Bitcoin maximalists who just like kind of are just distrust worthy of everything and think for

anyone who's like trading Dogecoin is actually like undermining the project? Yeah, like those are the guys at this conference and those that group, they got together and were able to raise what they said was $25 million for Trump. So I think it was the Bitcoin maximalists that really got Trump to come on board. But Trump's always been like a kind of suspect Bitcoin maximalist because he already sold his Trump card NFT collection, which are like these $99 trading cards with pictures of Trump looking like real jacked as like an astronaut or a hunter or something. So he is like a, his commitment to the maximalist cause is, is questionable. And now he's called it, he's definitely strayed from that because he's introduced a new cryptocurrency company that

he's promoting called World Liberty Financial, which which the maxis have to be mad about. World Liberty Financial is really interesting to me because ever since JD Vance was picked as vice president, it's like you've seen the fingerprints of his sons on his campaign. Yeah, it's a little bit, you know what it reminds me of is the sort of early career of Muhammad bin Salman, when his dad was still like, you know, sentient and was therefore capable of getting pitched whatever dumb bullshit his kid could come up with, like, hey, we should like, you know, assassinate the current king with like this poison ring I got from the FSB or whatever, but instead it's Trump's kid. So it's like, what about Bitcoin? You know?

Yeah. Or more specifically, it's weirdly, and this is why I think Bitcoin Maxis might have a, like they need Trump in because he's like, okay, well look, we seized all this money from RazzleCon. We're just going to, and that's like most of our Bitcoin reserve is money we seized from one like terrible rapper. We're going to, then we're going to just keep buying more Bitcoin. In the same way that after Nicolas Cage got done for taxes, the federal government had a Lamborghini stockpile. You know? Yeah. That they were like, okay, well, I guess we can just buy more Bitcoin, but he's at the same time promoting a company that's going to have its token on the AAVE network. This is a World Liberty

Financial has Baron Trump as the chief DeFi visionary with- What the fuck? What? Yeah. It's got his son. The World Liberty Financial has Barron Trump as the chief DeFi visionary with- What the fuck? What? Yeah, it's got his son. I mean, what the fuck is Barron gonna be? Isn't he going to NYU at the moment? Like-

Well look, everyone can have a job while they're at university. Okay, sure, yeah. But like, that's a lot of like, visionary to be doing in amongst like, first year of college I think. There have been these rumors that Barron was into crypto. Like Martin Shkreli, the farmer bro, he had said that he was talking to Baron about doing a meme coin. And like that's looking a little bit more credible to me now that Baron has come out

as a potential chief visionary. I mean, some people would probably have another name for that type of interaction that begins with a G. Yeah, yeah, yeah. have another name for that type of interaction that begins with a G. So let's talk a little bit more about the conference before though we talk about World Liberty Financial. When you say like getting Trump at the conference was a big victory for the Bitcoiners, most of the person who was behind this was this guy David Bailey, whose goal essentially was to get the US government buying Bitcoin like big companies do stock buybacks to basically keep the price high. One of the things that we've seen in this show over and over again is that the brass ring for anyone who has a kind of huckster thing to promote,

whether it's Greensill or whether it's this or anything else, is to get your thing hooked up to the government money machine. And so if you can get the federal government buying Bitcoin, you're basically getting the federal government giving you money for Bitcoin. And how he seemed to do this was he said, if we want China, it was basically to try and start a Bitcoin bidding war between the US and China by playing on Trump's economic nationalism. Can you speak a little more about this David Bailey character? Yeah. So he's 34 years old. He's the publisher of Bitcoin magazine, which is like basically what it sounds like. And he's not like a huge player in the industry other than putting on this conference every

year. But he seemed to really seize this moment and rally the Bitcoiners around Trump. And he told the story on a podcast a little before the conference. And what he said was that basically you would be surprised how much you can do if you have 10 people who are willing to donate the maximum, which is like a combined eight hundred and forty five thousand dollars to Trump and these campaign committees. And he's like, there's a lot of money, but kind of nothing also. And that can have a lot of sway over a candidate's positions.

Now, and he wouldn't say, like, I'm doing this to pump Bitcoin. These Bitcoiners would say, hey, Bitcoin is going to save America. It's going to protect the US dollar and inflation. And, you know, side benefit. We all become billionaires and are like the new kings of the world. But they talk a lot more about the about the first part. And like you were saying, it was funny because China has banned crypto. There's some debate over how effective that ban is, but they've shown no signs of wanting

to win crypto. And what Bailey said was, we got to tell Trump, you know, we need to stop China from getting all the bitcoins and that's going to get him excited about this. And then in his speech, Trump did say stuff like that. So it seemed like these Bitcoin or talking points like definitely made their way to Trump. And I mean, Bailey said something that stuck with me, too. He was like, as our religion spreads, our financial resources expand equally. How do you beat that? And I mean, no one's done that since Mormonism.

But it's true. In many ways, Mormonism also one of these like edge cases on like sort of policy of the day. Right? Yeah. I mean, we got to get Bitcoiners just doing entryism into the CIA. It says, give it a minute. It's what David Bailey said was if we want to get China to yolo into Bitcoin, all we have to do is get a certain person to say that they're going to stop them from yoloing into

Bitcoin. I like the idea that it's like, oh yes, all of the trillions of Redmond fee that we have, we're investing it all in Bitcoin. We're going all in. US, China, everyone. No more other currencies. But the conference environment that you talk about also was kind of mad. I'm going to read from your article.

Ernest hobbyist peddled Bitcoin children's books in Bitcoin quilts and Bitcoin art featuring orange bees and burned, pulped or shredded government currency. A Bitcoin quilt is great because you could do an almost literal rug pull with it. A model, thank you very much November, that was great. A model in a bikini sprayed herself with water heated by Bitcoin mining computers. Ugh. Why is she like being sprayed with like sort of warm water, just this like being wasted from this like data center?

They had a plan, which was that you would run your own Bitcoin mining computers inside your home hot water heater and then save money on your home hot water through Bitcoin mining. And they were trying to show it could generate enough hot water heater, and then save money on your home hot water through Bitcoin mining. And they were trying to show it could generate enough hot water to keep this model kind of warm. Although she kept grabbing her towel, so like, questionable if it was generating a lot of heat. Was it a Bitcoin towel?

This just seems really alienating and sad. You spotted Hayley Welch of Hawtooa viral fame, also wandering around. The conference environment itself just struck me as a kind of conference of just people who are grasping for attention for their thing. One woman says, the vibe was less tech hackathon and more multi-level marketing convention designed to fire up the sales force where they returned home to pitch friends. A woman from Jersey city who is dressed up in orange scrubs, embroidered with quote, Bitcoin orthodontist on them said, we orange filled our entire office. So tell me, I don't want to go to the Bitcoin orthodontist before I like go under. I don't want

them to be like, oh yeah, by the way, this thing we're using to clean your teeth, it's powered by a Bitcoin mining rig. Okay, goodbye. See you on the other side. Yeah, you may notice that this water is kind of warm. I mean, can you imagine the poor receptionist who has to, in addition to working at their job, now has to also pretend like they love Bitcoin and be like, oh yes, please pay me in Bitcoin. Yes, that's exactly what I want. I want my salary to bump up and down by 10% a week. Grim. Trump also, as you say, called for the government to invest in Bitcoin. And like I said, this is his main offer. That and undoing regulation that's come in since 2020,

this is his other main offer. He says, for too long, our government has violated the cardinal rule that every Bitcoiner knows by heart. Never sell your Bitcoin. Saying that the current US supply of Bitcoin, which is all confiscated by law enforcement, 1% of the total supply of Bitcoin in the world, which is fucking mental to me. 1% of the total supply of Bitcoin in the world is held by the US government as the proceeds of crime. He said that he would always order the government to hold them or hodl them forever. This will serve, in effect, as the core of our strategic national Bitcoin stockpile. I also like how because like he's Trump and he can never learn one new thing without understanding it in the context of things he knows already. He even went on Fox Business to then say, who knows, maybe we'll pay off our 35 trillion,

hand him a little crypto check. We'll hand him a little Bitcoin and wipe out our national debt of $35 trillion. I think I think they should just do this for like everything the U S government sees as proceeds of crime. I think I should have like a national Glock stockpile or Glock pile national like cocaine stockpile, you name it. Yeah. I want a fun federal warehouse full of all of the stuff that they've taken off of criminals. I call it crime economy. Yeah. The national crime museum. And it's just like like how if you get a state gift, you can't really keep it for yourself. You have to like hang it up in Downing street or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. This was a souped up Audi TT from 2004. We have 90,000 of them.

I don't know how seriously we should take this plan, but like, if you really get into it, there's some issues. Like these bitcoins were stolen by RazzleCon's boyfriend from Bitfinex. Like those are Bitfinex's bitcoins. I don't think you can just take them and stick them in the stockpile without some sort of legal fight. It's a real shame that like every Bitcoin is extremely attributable back to that, you know? Yeah. I was thrilled to see Razzlecon at the conference. It was my first time meeting her.

I was I don't know if she was there to like lobby Trump about his plan for taking her bitcoins, but she made maybe she was I think she was maybe looking for a job in crypto. That was what I heard. Isn't it that someone tried to induce her to do a rap battle with Lil Pump? Yeah. Yeah. So I was at this party for something called Taproot Wizards. Basically they put NFTs on Bitcoin now. It's called ordinals. It's the same idea, but now it's on Bitcoin so we can pump it again.

And Taproot Wizards are kind of scribbles of wizards. And they got Lil Pump, who has his own meme coin, to come to the party. And very, I mean, I felt like this the party. I don't know much about Little Pump, but he seems famous. So it seemed pretty insulting that one of the wizards was trying to get Little Pump to battle Razzlecon right there at the party. But Little Pump would not do it. But Little Pump knew that she might trick him into wrapping his wallet seed phrase. So let's go on to World Liberty Financial though, because this is not just a company.

It's also the story of a guy. And we love guys here on this show. I love when things are the story of a guy in particular. So broadly speaking, right? The Trump side of it, weirdly, is like the least interesting bit, because this is just a very standard DeFi platform. The whole idea is, oh, you're going to be able to like lend this coin. you're going to have yield farming. And then they just added some of the Trump flavor to it, which is like, oh yeah, banks are crooked. They're not giving you good interest rates. They shut people out, deny them loans, drown them in paperwork and kill them with processing

fees said Trump Jr. And it's like, yes, that is true. It's true that they do that. But the solution isn't like, Trump coin or whatever. They say these banks and the elites who run them want absolute control, but that ends now. But we have seen that kind of company so many times on this show. A DeFi stablecoin, basically. We saw it again and again and again, that it doesn't bear mentioning the mechanics of how the company works generally. However, what does Bayer talking about is the guy who came up with the idea for World Liberty Financial kind of sold it to Donald Jr. and Eric, who then somehow, somehow got their dad who hates them

to buy into it. What can you tell me Zeke about Chase Harrow? I think it's Hero actually. So Chase Hero, he is kind of a well-known figure in the world of affiliate marketing, which I investigated like years ago. So I knew the name and I was shocked to see him turn up as involved in this Trump project. His resume is impressive to me. He started out selling weed. He went to prison for that. And when he got out, he was in affiliate marketing. The only thing I could find that he was selling, it's hard to find evidence about people's affiliate marketing deals, but it was a weight loss colon cleanse. And then more recently, after affiliate marketing got kind of that business got pretty tough.

He started selling a hundred and forty nine dollar a month, get rich, quick class. And through the son of a real estate developer friend of Trump's, he was able to pitch his new crypto thing to them. And at World Liberty. The sons, I told you, it's sons. It's all about the sons. So yeah, I guess like if you're I've seen this a lot. You got some like billionaire and then the son is a crypto guy.

I think isn't Steve Cohen's son a crypto guy, the hedge fund manager? I'm pretty sure they're all they're all crypto guys. But Hiro and his longtime business partner, Zach Volkman, who himself is a former pickup artist, like from the book The Game. He's not in the game, but that same idea, like teaching these like he was like a bit player in the game. Yes. Teaching like charisma classes these two guys They did have like a DeFi thing called dough finance And you know if you don't know much about crypto like let's say you're like a older

billionaire type these people can say a lot of stuff about like DeFi and it might sound kind of impressive but dough finance It's so small that a lot of the like data trackers don't have any info on it. As best I can tell, according to DeFi Llama, which is like actually a reputable source, it only ever attracted like three or $4 million. Then it got hacked for $2 million. Now they did offer to repay users in the Doe token,

which is worthless. I don't know how that works. It's basically say, look, all your real money was stolen from us, but we've written money on this piece of paper and we're willing to pay you back with it. If you don't know about crypto, like it sounds pretty cool, but talking to crypto guys, they're like, it's really this is just like a copycat project. It doesn't take any like real skill to launch one of these. There's tons of them and they nearly never work out.

So like I talked to a bunch of crypto investors for this story, like people who run crypto funds and look like in the crypto world, like their standards for what's legit are very low. It's not like you need to be like curing cancer here. Like that, like, you know, you put a hat on the Dogecoin dog and like, now we're talking, but they're like this. Let's get some Groucho glasses on there and really make some money. Yeah, but yeah, this is this is like not mother standard here, you know?

Right. And a lot of these guys are like, we like Trump. We want him to win and we wish he was not doing this. And to ruin Chitra, who's like a crypto venture capitalist, one of the smarter guys that I've met in the industry. He told me fly by night trying to make a quick buck kind of thing, really doesn't seem earnest. And that was pretty much the consensus. But Trump's pushing on. Let's talk a little bit more though, of course, about Hero because he's a fascinating character. Also, I know that you note this in your article that the crypto project he did that suffered

a devastating hack, he promoted on, he went on Logan Paul's podcast, again, another friend of the Trump sons and introduced to Trump. Really, really difficult interview, I'm sure. Like really searching questions. And then the token wouldn't, you know, it dropped 96% afterwards. He was promoting one on Logan Paul's podcast, a different one called Omi, which I had never heard of. And there's a scam investigating YouTuber called Coffeezilla, who actually has a feud with Logan Paul and posted a video about this. He somehow got a leaked on. So on the podcast, Chase Hero and Logan Paul, Chase Hero was like, have you heard about this coin called Omi?

And Logan Paul's like, no way, Omi, you like Omi too? Oh, my God. But Coffeezilla had found this video of them. I don't know how he got it before the podcast, talking with somebody and like planning this all out. At least that's how it seemed. So it seemed like a pretty, pretty fishy promotion. You mentioned like Logan Paul. I mean, he's had Trump on his podcast, too.

Like so far, there's no word that Paul's involved in World Liberty, but I really wouldn't be surprised given his connections to all the people involved. Well, essentially I think what we're talking about is a different kind of Trump world than we would have seen last time. It's a different kind of Trump world that is much more online and much younger as well. Much more prone to shoot at him as well. So it's either like one of two camps here, it's crypto or stalking towards the golf course with an AR.

Essentially. So it seems right, like it's especially looking at like their, the world liberty financial or all of the sneakers or products that he's making. It seems like the campaign is like half marketing campaign for the smallest time bullshit you've ever heard. Like he's one step above Sarah Palin selling tummy tea on Instagram Reels. To me, it's really weird because Trump actually is pretty rich. Like this guy's a billionaire and like how much does he stand to make off promoting world liberty financial? Like you would really think that he's got an election coming up. Like it's a big deal. Like how is this worth his time?

It's bizarre to me. And even if you're being really cynical, he has a stock called Trump Media and Technology Group. And right now, that company is worth like billions of dollars on paper. And the lockup period is about to expire, which will allow Trump to sell his stock. He says he's not going to. But like, his credibility and the value of his stock. He says he's not going to, but his credibility and the value of that stock is so much more important to his wealth. Even if you say,

all right, whatever about the election, his wealth depends much more on that stock than whatever this world liberty thing is going to be. So it seems like mystifying that he would just start this other venture with these strange business partners. It's another venture with strange business partners who like, again, are instead of sort of saying the next thing, I'll just read another of your paragraphs on Chase Hero. In a lawsuit filed in 2014, he'd marketed a colon cleanser called Regula RX on Facebook and wasn't paid for the sales he generated. Carl Ruderman, the owner of Regula RX, didn't

immediately respond to the letter sent to him at a federal prison in Miami, where he's serving a five-year sentence for an unrelated Ponzi scheme. Amazing. What a great ecosystem. Yeah. Right? Like we always know that these are the people who he gets in bed with because these are the people who he always gets in bed with. But usually he doesn't get in bed with other people who are like running Ponzi schemes or dodgy coins or whatever. Colon cleanses. Literally full of shit. Yeah. It's like the Trump playbook is to get in bed with people who are going to perform actual useful work

for him that he can then not pay. That you can cheat. Exactly. This seems like a relatively different thing for him. What I also think is interesting about Hero is that he said, this is again from your article, that he left online advertising for crypto because online advertising became too difficult. It became too saturated with people who had too many automated ways of doing it. It was too difficult with generative AI or whatever. So he's like, fuck it. We're going to pivot to crypto.

And then you say he ran a membership group called The Watchers that claimed to teach people the secrets of crypto trading and making money online. He also appeared with Jordan Belfort on stage. Again, this is someone who is himself a, I will choose our words carefully, a wheeler dealer. This is not the kind of like Trump usually associates with like either the mob or people he can scam. This just seems new to me. What makes it make a little more sense is if you actually look at that stock, like the that's the owner of Truth Social, his like proprietary social network, which has that whole company has a revenue of one like McDonald's, something like that. And it's worth billions on paper. And he was pitched that idea by like some ex contestants from The Apprentice. And even though like Truth Social didn't take off, it is, it now accounts for more of his money

than like buildings, I think. Now it's hard to like sell that stock and monetize it, but that might make him think, hey, I don't know this crypto thing, maybe it could take off. And I interviewed for the story, Michael Cohen, his old lawyer who testified against him. And he reminded me, this is a guy who like,

will take money to put his name on things. His number one concern is, am I going to get money up front? Is there risk to me? You've got Trump Stakes, Trump vodka, Trump University. None of these things made him huge amounts of money or came from super credible partners. So it is kind of his MO. Though to me, it seems like he's really sticking his neck out with this crypto thing. Oh, perhaps he doesn't understand the extent to which he is sticking his neck out. This is that that's that's sort of what I thought. Or perhaps, you know, he understands, right? Okay, well, truth social is, it's a huge number on paper, but the market for it is, you know, as thin as a puddle. It's not like you can actually sell any of it. The moment you sell it,

presumably its value crashes. And so unless he can like get the government to have a, and maybe this would be a good idea for him. So Trump, if you're listening, the government, the US government has to have a national truth, social stockpile just in case China tries to buy it. I mean, so long as that's part of an official duty, it's not illegal for him to do that. Yeah, that's right. It's like so basic, but this is why it's like a conflict of interest. Like Trump is talking about how should crypto be regulated, and now he's promoting world liberty and like the very legality. We don't know the details of like

what world liberty is going to do exactly, but it's pretty clear that like the legality of this crypto project will be decided by, you know, what policies the SEC pursues, what new laws, progress passes. Like this is why it's a conflict of interest for a potential president to have a private company. I guess we're sort of asking, why is he doing it given that it does seem to have some risk attached for him, is that he's saying, okay, well, if I win, I can do this. I also know that even if it is like technically a conflict of interest, no one cares and no one this. I also know that even if it is technically a conflict of interest, no one cares and no one's gonna say anything. And even if they do, I can just

be like, okay, well, I'm just gonna ignore you. And then by introducing crypto-friendly legislation, I will become incredibly rich. If anything, the possibility is that he has bought the hype of the crypto maxis who are around him suggesting if only you're in government, this thing could create a gigantic amount of value for whoever owns it. Right. I mean, I think before he gave that speech at the Bitcoin conference, he had like a private meeting with some top people and he met with... Actually, I don't know if he was there, but quite possibly Michael Saylor was there, the micro strategy guy who has

made invested all his company's money into Bitcoin and it's made him like billions of dollars. And he, Michael Saylor has predicted that putting those standard, like those rookie numbers, those standard charter predictions you were talking about before, he says Bitcoin is going to $13 million a coin. So like if you buy into that, like you better, you better get yourself some Bitcoins now. Yeah. Or if getting a Bitcoin is sort of too expensive and you're the guy who's like, well,

I guess I'll start Trump Stakes and Trump neckties and Trump University. Just like, OK, well, what's the cheaper version of that? What's the cheaper and easier version of that? I know I'll get together with this like weight loss, colon, cleanse guy who used to sell weed and then we'll make up our own money and then I'll just make a law that it's worth a huge amount of cash. I should note that. So I got like a white paper for this World Liberty project. That's how I have some of the details.

And it says that this isn't Trump's project. He doesn't own it, manage it or operate it. But the Trumps may receive some kind of compensation. But it's clear that like without Trump's endorsement, nobody would be talking about this. Like he's offering something of great value to these World Liberty guys. And you know, I'm curious to see what what's in it for him. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that that's something that we'll see, I suppose. Like that's one

of the things about reading about crypto and talking about crypto and trying to make sense of crypto. There's so much because it's so opaque. It's so weird. So many things have to end with, well, I guess we'll see. And so many things that you say, okay, well, I guess we'll see. There's almost no way to know what he was planning because if he doesn't get elected or this doesn't go big, then everyone involved is going to forget about it because it's got zero setup costs. Really, all of this is some people making agreements and putting out press releases and then hoping that people just dump money into their gambling infrastructure,

essentially. That's the whole crypto market is like that. The only reason we talk about it is that it largely worked for that for a while. It goes through cycles of working for that function for a while. When we talk about the decentralized finance, when we talk about the crypto ecosystem, I always say, you have to understand that Bitcoin is Florida real estate and everything else around it is the financial services sector before 2006. The whole thing just exists to move money around to make the value of this one thing very large. And on a macro level or on a micro level, it just keeps repeating that again and again. And because it's got so minimal costs involved in doing this, then it's so hard to tell what

happens when one goes wrong unless it fails in a spectacular and expensive way. Chase Hero himself kind of expressed a similar cynical attitude, but put in a different way. He was talking in 2018 in a speech I watched on YouTube. He's actually recording as he drives in his Rolls-Royce and he says, in crypto, you can literally sell shit in a can wrapped in piss covered in human skin for a billion dollars if the story is right, because people will buy it. He was on that earnings call with the VC guy we talked about. And I mean that ultimately like I guess that's what attracts like that particular political tendency to crypto because it's the huckster mindset political tendency. However, I'm sorry we have to cut short a little bit early today. But Zeke, I wanted to thank you very much for coming back on the podcast. It's always a delight to talk

to you. Thanks a lot, you guys. And check out the updated version of Number Go Up with a new chapter which is out in a couple of weeks. That's right. So do buy that wherever books are sold. Otherwise, remember, we have a Patreon. It's $5 a month. You can listen to it. And once you do that, you'll hear us talking a little bit more about Mayor Eric Adams and some British politics this week. All right. Bye everybody. Bye. Thanks for watching!