Thanks, Josh. Yeah. Exciting to be here. I I really love your project, and so I'm I'm really happy to to be involved, and we'll get into the, I think, politics, at some point. But as far as, like, me getting into crypto, so I, I I think somewhat like you have a a sort of a philosophical academic background and and interests. I have a PhD in social science focused on the history of technology that I earned in 2011. And, you know, it has gotten even worse since then. But even at the time, the situation for, you know, people who are trying to have a professional life in academia was looking pretty bad. And so I I finished my PhD, and did a few postdocs after that, which, you know, was was super great. I, shout out to University of South Florida and Tokyo gauges to Daigaku where I spent, about three years total. And but but, you know, after that, I kinda got the sense that there were some limited opportunities in in academia, especially as somebody who really cared about writing like I do. So I decided to get into journalism, made contact with a a a former academic colleague who had made their way to Fortune magazine. And I, started off as a and, you know, I I I got very lucky and started off in journalism very high up the rungs as a as a contract freelancer for Fortune. And one of the very first things I well, the very first thing I wrote for them actually this was in 2013. So, you know, the people my age, will remember that during the financial crisis of two thousand eight, gold was a huge, huge point of interest for, particularly people who are sort of more right wing, and interested in hard money, what we you know, people in in crypto are very familiar with, like, Hayek and the, the, that school of Austrian economics. And so I wrote about the gold standard and and gold bugs. And from there, I, actually was exposed. I think I maybe had already heard of Bitcoin, but that was how I I got the connection between Bitcoin and and sort of political ideology, and that started to deepen the interest for me. Although what really happened was after that, I I, like, got familiar with the technology, and and it was really ultimately, which I think speaks to the value of your project. For me, it was ultimately the the central promise of the technology itself that got me to really commit to, pursuing and and and keeping an eye on things. So I, you know, I wrote for Fortune Freelance for quite a while, but also during that time, I wrote a couple of articles for The Atlantic, Slate, some other outside, outlets. And then from there, I I I I gained a, you know, a reputation as somebody who, covered crypto well, and and had a few jobs in there, including going on staff at Fortune for a little while, and then wound up at CoinDesk, which, you know, I I I we're not only, I think, the largest, well, I I'm actually not sure how whether we're the largest outlet or what that metric might be, but, we're we are, I think it's safe to say, the leading, professional publication covering crypto. We were, we our our reporters won, reporters won two Polk Awards this year, which was in recognition of, our coverage of FTX, which people might be familiar with as this huge scam. And and and we were basically the people who who uncovered that and and brought down, the the biggest fraudster probably of his generation. So, that's I it's a very it's a place that I'm very proud to be, and I I don't think there's any other crypto focused publication that matches it in terms of the the quality and and scale of the work that we're doing.

what were your politics at that point? Was it like because you were also maybe a libertarian looking into gold or just because you wanted to write about it? No, it was very much from the outside. So So for anybody who's curious, I still think this is a pretty good article that I wrote at the time. Frankly, I wrote it as and it turned out to be pretty good as a bit of a freak show piece, frankly. You know, I I went to this essentially survivalist conference that was taking place in Florida, which is where I was living at the time. And, you know, I met people who were very much, like, fed conspiracy theorists and, other, you know, some some good people for sure. But it was a a strange venue in many ways and and particularly on the, like, financial conspiracy theory front. You know, the gold people, I think they have, you know, maybe some, like, a lot of, I think, social impulses on the right. They're rooted in a really healthy and and well founded skepticism. It's just the conclusions that they reach tend to be and and the reactions that they have to to that skepticism tend to be, you know, maybe not as coherent, because it's not founded in a real, analysis that confronts the way society actually works. You know? These these old people really are committed to, conspiracy theories that posit these, like, small cabals of people making self interested decisions rather than this much more complex system whereby these things happen because of, you know, to to to use a word that we'll hear again, these, like, decentralized forces of, you know, capital, basically. These anonymous, channels of influence that that accomplish things in ways that are depersonalized and strange and and require a real theory of history that that, you know, is not in the the gold thesis, I think. So so that's my perspective when I was coming into gold and, frankly, when I was coming into Bitcoin. And, you know, as I said, it's the technology itself that seemed so revolutionary to me on its face when I started out. And so I've really spent you know? And this was in 2013 was when I was writing about this stuff. So I've spent, you know, almost a decade now really, like, wrestling with, how to reconcile my politics, which are, you know, not communist, but definitely Marxist, and people will know what that distinction means, hopefully. And and with this, this technology that, on the one hand, has, I think, some real transformative implications on its face, but also has become really tied to a completely different set of politics than mine. And and for a while, it really was. So, you know, for example, later on, I got very intrigued by Ethereum very early on, because it was clear that, you know, I wouldn't necessarily call it a political project that was embedded in Ethereum, but certainly a different mindset, a different world view, and a different community.

Yeah. People were thinking about Bitcoin? Well, I should say I've actually written a book about this already, although it was just kind of a quick self published project, and I would encourage people to look it up, because it it it it's called Bitcoin is Magic. And, you know, maybe we can add a link to, the show notes here. Sure. But, one of the things that I have a chapter about in there is Marshall McLuhan. And I think McLuhan for me became, like, the most useful framework for understanding the stakes of well, and and McLuhan via, his teacher, Walter Ong. And and they sort of, as part of this Canadian school of media theory, had an idea about the functions of media on two axes. Right? So McLuhan and and his predecessors talked about media that is time binding on the one hand and media that is space binding on the other. And an example of time binding media and one that we might not think about as media is the Pyramids in Egypt. So monuments are communications medium. Right? They're sending a message. The the Washington Monument would be another example, at least in theory. Because they don't communicate very far, they only communicate directly to the people who are standing in front of them. But they're intended to communicate over time. They're intended to last forever. And and in contrast to that, on the other hand, you have space finding media that usually are very fast and can travel long distances, but are ephemeral and don't last long. So even if you think about, like, a written letter on a piece of paper, maybe that will last, like, a hundred years if it's in the right circumstances, but a lot of the time, it's just trash. It's gone after somebody reads it, throws it away. And and so the purpose of that kind of media is to travel over a long time long distance very fast. And for me, looking at a blockchain and thinking about the the way that it was maintained, it it seemed to be something that combined these two features in somewhat of a novel way. It is time binding. I I talk about it as a digital obelisk. It it has features that make it extremely durable under certain circumstances. I mean, we can talk about, you know, the blockchain does rely on market structure, basically, because you have to pay maintainers. But assuming that underlying thing where there are people who want to make money, which I guess it's hard to think of, you know, a future scenario where that stops being the case unless we have complete societal breakdown. But under the circumstances where there are people who want to make money, a blockchain becomes this very long term enduring thing, because you it just maintains itself. It's paying for people to maintain it. And that becomes this way to keep something lasting a long time. And at the same time, it's space binding because it communicates very fast. A a blockchain signal propagates around the world, you know, depending on how you define it in, like, ten minutes max, which is pretty good, especially for a a multiple confirmation financial transaction, which is a whole other aspect to this. So so to me, that immediately seemed revolutionary in at the sort of very high theoretical level that, like, this is a novel media structure. And then what that actually meant on the ground also, struck me right from the very beginning as totally novel because, you know, it it it can seem like just propaganda that is being sent out by by crypto scammers, but it's very true that crypto does transcend these national boundaries, these institutions that have, you know, interchange fees and various barriers and are controlled essentially by governments. I mean, all of that is completely true. And this is where, you know, there's a common ground with gold because gold in the colonial era allowed for trade with countries or societies I mean and, you know, trade in big giant scare quotes because these were not necessarily honest deals, obviously. But, it allowed for a certain degree of trade with societies that had not been brought into the then emerging markets for, like, you know, debt, joint stock companies, global credit markets, things like that, in, you know, the fifteenth, sixteenth century. So gold at the time had this capacity to transcend the boundaries of the system as it existed, and and I think crypto has that capacity now and Bitcoin specifically. You know? I'm very open to ideas about other blockchains, but I I I should emphasize that I think that, like, Bitcoin remains pretty singular in my view, in terms of the the way that it emerged and its its ability to act as kind of a gold like commodity because it doesn't have, these, like, founders and etcetera. So so, you know, that's that's where I'm coming from on on, assets specifically. So that's, I think I might be trailing off a bit here, but that's my, thought on on the gold front.

Right. Yeah. I I I think that there is a point there, right, in the sense that, it's more complicated than just I sent Bitcoin to somebody in another country. The person in that country in the present day does have to, for example, probably cash that Bitcoin out to be to a local currency to allow them to perform daily financial tasks. Right? Like, we do have a serious technical barrier in terms of using Bitcoin on a transactional basis. So, you know, like, there there is a point to be made that, no. This isn't actually, like, you know, this isn't actually just point to point. There is, like, an extra step. There is some extra risk. But, you know, I would say that, a, there are some solutions on the table even for that. And and, you know, I'm not even talking about, like, Lightning Network. You can imagine a future, a not too distant future, where there are all kinds of different branching systems that come off of a Bitcoin basis and don't necessarily require base chain transactions to work, like, in a local jurisdiction. Like, maybe somebody prints, like, trustworthy secondary Bitcoin paper money of some sort that, like, only works in Ghana or whatever. So so there are all of these things that that are possible to imagine. The underlying stuff still holds.

I I I my relationship to land is very similar to like, I'm also, like, I've written a few scholarly pieces about HP Lovecraft, who is another, like, horrendous right winger who's also utterly fascinating to me, because, you know, he, Nick Land, you know, you could maybe say Carl Schmidt are people who, like, actually go all the way, and that makes them very, very useful to read. And, yeah, like, the like, let's just immerse ourselves in the end times and become that is is a, like, you know, yeah, fascinating. And I yeah. I mean, that's very interesting.

And there is you know? I mean, it it's worth in that context noting that, like, depending on the level of your analysis, there is a nihilism baked into Bitcoin. Right? Like, there's a huge segment of people who, support this stuff that, you know, you can take it from an is to an ought if you push too far. We're worried about the breakdown of these international systems, and we want to build this robust monetary layer that can withstand all of these disruptions. Right? So, for example, like, you can look at what's going on with Russia right now where, you know, right or wrong, you have these two big global entities that are, like, cutting each other off from their various systems, and it's creating this crazy disruption that, you know, we we dodged it, but Europe was very worried about energy supplies and stuff like that. And and Bitcoin is one example of how we kind of grow a more genuinely global interconnected network. At the same time, people who like Bitcoin are often like, yay. The end of the world is coming. It's great for my back. And so you have to, like, be intellectually able to, like, cut that knot and say, like, you might not like it, but this is what peak end times performance looks like, I guess. Like, our society is collapsing some or it's like always society is always collapsing. Right?

I mean, genuinely. You know? And and, I mean, to be to to be clear on another point, I'm actually, like, quite a a a social optimist. Like, I think things are going pretty okay if you take a step back. But, also, like, the, the Bitcoin position is really that, like, Bitcoin is kind of a backstop and a disciplining force for governments, and and just like the global system. It becomes an outlet that people can use if, for example, their leaders get really, really irresponsible with local banking systems and things like that. So so there's kind of like it's a worst case scenario option, but it's also a check against the worst case scenario. And and that can be complicated to think through, if you're coming at it from, like, an ideological rather than practical perspective.

Yes. Materialist, I think, is the right word. Yeah. And and, you know, since I said it earlier and I don't wanna leave people, like, I don't know, eager to wave a finger, that's what I mean when I say that I'm a Marxist but not a communist. And and, you you know, the Marxist analysis of history, right, is essentially, like, to a large degree, technology drives history, which is kind of the premise on which I got very interested in in crypto in the first place. On a deeper level, obviously, it's like capital or social structures drive history. And and I think that is what is basically missing from a lot of both on the right and left, a lot of thinking about Bitcoin is just to say, like, okay. What is this thing? What are the actual material implications? And so people, there's just very few people who who write about this stuff as like, this exists, what's actually happening and what will happen based on what we know about the world. And that's what I try and do.

I would say 2014 to be cautious. That was when my first piece came out. Doctor. Robert Leonard (twenty-three thirty three): Okay. 2014.

Man, the change is, like, mind boggling. It's a it's a very weird sensation because, you know, when when I looked at this stuff and started writing about it in in 2014, I think the first, the first or maybe the second piece that I wrote for Fortune, the title was something like Bitcoin is Napster for finance. And it was clear from that point that, like I mean, Napster had already had explosive impact at that point, and now we've seen, you know, in in its descendants of streaming services and things like that, we've seen it's had, like, just completely ground clearing, absolutely transformative impacts from, like, how the music industry works to how we on a day to day basis consume the media. I am disgusted, frankly, by what has happened to music, and I wish, Napster and streaming had never existed. I hope the outcome of Bitcoin is a little bit better, but, it's it's because it's not our I think we're a little bit safer. And and so, you know, these just huge changes do happen for for material reasons. And, you you can't get caught up in what you think should happen. You have to look at, like, what actually really is going on.

like Bitcoin, you're really never gonna be able to get rid of. And as long as somebody can run, like, one server somewhere without the police knocking their door down, BitTorrent is going to be, like, a feature of human life or some version of it is gonna be a feature of human life going forward. Right? And and even though it's like, you know, you can't go to, like, bittorrent.com and download, an album or whatever. It's, like, complicated. There are some barriers. There's some technical barriers sort of similar to the barriers to using crypto, but it still has, like, some serious impacts. Right? At the very least, it lets people who are willing to put in work get access to things that would not be accessible at all without that. And by the same token, you know, crypto for people who are willing to put in some work opens up doors that simply, like, absolutely would not exist without it. It's a step change, and that's how you have to think about the scale of the impact.

the the point that I actually forgot to pursue about, you know, what has changed so much over the last ten years. And and the, like, UX and adoption conversation is part of, I think, you know, the obviously fairly toxic thing that has happened, which is you get to a certain point, crypto goes from being, frankly, early on like, the there's a there's a book that I recommend immensely, by a scholar named Finn Brunton. And, actually, let me, do you know the title? I'm forgetting it off top of my head. It's called Digital Cash. Right. Digital Cash, the unknown history of, boy, I'm I'm still hurt hunting here because the full title is important. The unknown history of the anarchists, utopians, and technologies who technologists who created cryptocurrency. So this is super important to keep in mind in terms of the arc of crypto history. Right? It was there was, like, you know, ten to twenty years of groundwork that took place before Bitcoin was launched in in, 2009. And a lot of that was by, like, true political radicals, speaking of your book. Right? And and they're not necessarily radicals who, like, you and I would agree with. A lot of them would, you know, definitely qualify as, like, libertarian cranks or at best and people closer to sort of where I come from, anarchists as as Brunton has in his title. And that from, like, 2009 with the launch of Bitcoin until, you know, basically about 2018, I would say, that, like, anarchist spirit or some descendant of it, that, like, very radical perspective was still an extremely powerful part of the entire crypto ecosystem. I mean, one of the biggest and most the biggest causes among crypto advocates until, like, 2018 and and still to this day very powerful, is trying to get the dread pirate Roberts out of jail. Ross, god. I'm forgetting his middle name. Ross Ulbricht. Right. So so everybody in crypto, not necessarily including myself, but a lot of people in crypto really want Ross Ulbricht released from prison. They think he's been unjustly imprisoned for for running an online drug market that accepted Bitcoin early on, and that really was like a catalyst for the growth of adoption of the technology. And, you know, there are other things. I mean, I got to interview, and this is a little bit, a little bit less radical, but, I got to interview Edward Snowden at our annual consensus conference, last or or just, like, a couple months ago. He's a regular on the on the crypto circuit, because people really do have that perspective that he represents of, like, we want total transparency. We don't want governments to keep any secrets. And that's kind of part of the package of the kind of original crypto ethos. But, you know, when you hear people talk about things like UX, that's when you to quote another, insightful right winger, that's when I reach for my revolver, because that's when you are dealing with venture capitalists. And when you're dealing with people who are primarily concerned with crypto as a financial asset that is going to grow in value, versus the US dollar. And and that has always been part of the game, part of the crypto community, but especially, you know, especially starting in 2020, but even going back to 2017 with the, ICO, initial coin offering craze. That was a huge part of, that has become an increasingly huge part of what, what crypto is about or where attention goes in crypto. And and, you know, it has led to complete disasters like FTX, and, the TerraForm Labs, which were primarily promoted by and cosigned by venture capitalists who, you know, didn't really understand anything that was going on at the end of the day. Yeah. And that, I think, has been the biggest change is is that, you know, we we all saw the institutions coming, and then they came, and they kinda fucked it all up. And we're we're still trying to see how that looks afterwards, and and it will obviously still involve venture capitalists. And they do have a role, but I think that that's a that's a huge dividing line in the history of crypto is up to a certain point, it was just us. You know? There was, like, an inside group of people who were working on this, who were focused on it, who were committed to growing it. And and, then the finance pros came. And and, you know, I'm I'm pitching a book right now, about that specific point, which is that once finance gets involved with kind of anything, there's, you know, some generally grim implications. And, obviously, crypto is money from the start, so it makes it even easier, to to financialize it and, and and with, you know, predictable boom bust effects that were amplified by the the lack of regulatory safeguards around it, which venture capitalists were were as happy to exploit as any criminal, I have to say.

yeah, that Hyperledger, there were various corporate, I mean, IBM went big on blockchain in 2017. I don't think that's still really a going concern. And these are all examples of, you know, maybe there I mean, there there there is value for, for enterprises in blockchain in some sense. But the thing that they rarely seem to get and that the venture capitalists don't seem to get either is that, you know, the value comes from the fact that these are public entities or public just you know, it's open source. The you know, we talk about VC chains, layer one blockchains that are are backed by specific people and have these, like, very tight cores of entrepreneurial lock. I mean, SWE is one that just came out of the Facebook, code base recently as a venture capital backed chain. I mean, there's no future in in these efforts. Like or at best, very marginal. There are a few exceptions, something like, there are some blockchains that are specifically built for, NFTs, and, you know, there are a few little niche cases like that where they do come out of the ecosystem. And so maybe, you know, having your own layer one makes sense. But, ultimately, at the end of the day, there's gonna be very few layer ones. And the fact that VCs are chasing these layer ones is really just because they have liquidity events that venture capitalists can can can leverage, not because they're actually gonna be viable long term. And and I think that's, again, speaks to this divide between, you know, there's, like, real crypto and VC crypto, and that's, an oversimplification, but it's one that can be usefully applied in a lot of situations.

Yeah. It was almost like an there's something to be learned there. I think I don't know what it is, but the fact that it's, like, sort of inverse that that, like, yeah, IBM and Hyperledger and Ethereum Alliance, those came along first, and then there was, like I mean, there was VC in early days. Right? Like, but but it was basically like individuals. I mean, the earliest blockchain VC, I don't know how many people know this story, is a guy named Roger Ver who, was a, an entrepreneur who had a, you know, relatively modest online computer hardware retail operation. So he had, you know, income of his own, and then he funded a variety of very early start ups. But it's just genuinely one guy, and and that was VC and crypto for a long time where that was, like, a representation of what VC and crypto looked like. And so, yeah, the the, like, large scale, the, like, big push by entries in Horowitz over the last couple of years, that's all new, and and does, I think, represent a different a different perspective.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's complicated. And and, frankly, it's morally complicated for me because, you know Yeah. Like, there's no denying that the the VC entrance, like, elevated the entire space and the amount of money in the entire space and and not just on a temporary basis. Right? Like, obviously, we've had this huge crash, but, I mean, we're still if if we wanna talk, like, market numbers, which are, you know, vulgar, of course, but proxies for certain other things. You know, Bitcoin people forget this. Bitcoin in, like, 2018, 2019 was at $3,000 a token. It was just absolutely in the trash relative to where it had been even in, like, I think early twenty eighteen is when it was still around, like, $20,000 a token. Crashed down to 3,000, went up to 70 because of basically a lot of this hype, and then, you know, crashed when it was when it turned out that a lot of the hype was fake. But we're still trading at, right now, 10 times the price of Bitcoin as that was seen in 2019. And a lot of that has to be credited to the involvement of of VCs. And, and, you know, that's not some measure of, like, we've got adoption that's wider, but it's it it does suggest that there is some wider adoption, especially on the Bitcoin front because, like, we don't have you know, there's not, like, a Bitcoin ETF now that didn't exist five years ago. There's still, like, essentially no, or very few direct public channels for, investors to to bet on Bitcoin, without actually buying Bitcoin. So, like, there this still reflects, like, people who actually own Bitcoin. But but the point I was gonna make, further is that, you know, there is this expansion of the monetary base that's in crypto. But at the same time, I think some of the VCs were so misguided and said so many foolish things that misled people that it's hard to say, you know, whether that money, like, represents honest increases in interest in the space. The example that I always cite and that will all that I will always cite and that I think leads into another set of stuff he wanted to talk about, is Mike Novogratz, the head of a a a firm called Galaxy Digital. And he became you know, he for for a couple years, he was actually a fairly early crypto VC. I think he got involved maybe as early as 2015 or 2016, and for a while had a really solid reputation. But then in the last cycle, became a huge fan and booster of this thing called Muna Anterra, which was, it turns out, a giant scam. And not just a giant scam, but, like, a scam that was pretending to be something that wouldn't work even if it had been honest, if that makes sense, which is an algorithmic stablecoin. And it's a great example of, you know, people who had been paying attention to crypto knew that people had tried to build this algorithmic stablecoin, which I won't even go into what it is. It doesn't matter. It's it's it's just a bad idea. People had tried to do it before. People had tried to do it as long ago as 2014, and every single time, it crashed. And then you have a VC like Mike Novogratz coming in and saying, this is brilliant. This is amazing. This is innovative. It was exactly the same thing that, like, 10 other people had tried and failed before. Novogratz just, like, ignored that and and blundered through and said incredibly dumb and embarrassing things on stage, which, by the way, if you wanna hear I mean, I'm from Texas. I don't know if I have any if you have any listeners who might be fans of, screwed and chopped hip hop music like I am. But in our, Crypto Crooks podcast, we we took some of Mike Novogratz's dumbest statements and turned them into, an audio collage of of, Scruton Chop remix that I am really a huge fan of. So check that out.

Oh, okay. Cool. So so yeah. I mean and that's just one example, but you have VCs out there saying really dumb things you had. You know, Suzu of Three Arrows Capital, which not a VC, but a hedge fund, same difference, saying that Bitcoin now was going to go up forever, which Yeah. I mean, that's essentially what they were saying. It's incredibly ridiculous. And and so all of the people who listen to that kind of nonsense and then, like, lost probably a lot of money because, right, if you bought the top if you bought Bitcoin at 70,000, you're still way down and really unhappy, even if you didn't sell, which, you know, hopefully, you did because, like, you you you gotta get into this stuff for the right reasons. What Warren Buffett always says is don't invest anything you don't understand, and I wish people took that advice when it came to crypto. I wish this had grown a lot more slowly. But this is where we get into, you know, it's not about crypto. It's about capitalism. And capitalism is about, like, leveraged financial growth. It's about bringing that future growth into the present, which is another thing that I write about pretty extensively that, you know, finances form time travel. And the the VCs and hedge funds who got involved in crypto wanted to take this stuff that is gonna take, like, decades to grow to its full potential. They wanted to then, like, reach into the future, grab those future profits, and have them for themselves right now. And to do that, you basically have to lie, and that's what they did. And, so I I think that the the impact of this huge VC on Rush And there are a lot of legitimate VCs out there who really know what they're doing, and and, are are honest actors and are involved for the same reasons that that others are. But there are also a lot of VCs who just wanna take the money and run. And I think they had dominance in this last cycle, and, ultimately, a lot of the, you know, scams and fraud can be laid at their feet for for not being responsible, for not really looking at what they're selling people and, you know, just just eating off hype,

Yeah. He's doing a couple months in Montenegro for having a fake passport, and then he'll get extradited either to Korea or The US. I don't know, where where he's gonna wind up, where the chances are. Before we get into the current state of things, though, I actually do want to make another point about about Luna to your listeners who I think I I would assume are, you know, more likely to be people who are serious thinkers. Maybe you're into history. Maybe you're into literature, whatever, if you're listening to this podcast or or or obviously into politics. Right? You're thinking about maculons. The the takeaway that I had from the Luna chain of events was, you know, I'm I'm a humanities PhD. I'm not, like, trained in finance per se, like, academically. And yet I saw that this structure was bullshit while a lot of these supposed finance professionals were still out there saying it was brilliant and genius. And so I think I wanna just really try and drive home to your listeners who who are these, like, more critically minded. Right? Like, you're doing analysis. And you may think that you're just, like, over here in the humanities examining stuff that's soft, but you're also getting, like, training that will let you see things that people who pretend to know what they're talking about can't. And that applies even to, like, hard finance. And and so, like, keep that in mind. There are no barriers, and a lot of the people who pretend to be experts are not as smart as you are. If you're the one who has been reading history, you're gonna walk away with more than the guy who has an MBA, and you should go in there throwing punches because you're probably gonna knock him out. So so I want people to have that takeaway. But, as far as Do Kwon, yeah, like, the the comparison I always make is to, Elizabeth Holmes, right, who had a bad idea and then lied about it. That's the amazing thing about about Do Kwon is that, like, even the thing that he was saying out front was was really bad and stupid, but then he also was, like, committing vast fraud on the back end, to to make it seem like it was working. And we've learned a lot about that since, last last year when the system actually collapsed. So we know that he was, like, directly ordering people to, fabricate, blockchain records to make it look like there were payments being processed on Terra that there weren't actually the biggest thing that we know is that, in fact, a US based trading firm, that our reporting indicates was Chicago based Jump Trading, was actually bailing out Terra USD, the stablecoin, as early as, I believe, June 2021. That was not disclosed to the public, which means that after June 2021, every representation of Terra USD as, quote, unquote, stable by either Do Kwon or anybody else who knew about this bailout was active fraud. We, still haven't seen, you know, criminal charges against Jump, possibly because they collaborated with the SEC and others in putting together the charges. In other words, they they informed on their business partner, or perhaps somebody within Jump did. All of this, by the way, is detailed in Crypto Crooks, the podcast that, we spent four long episodes diving into Do Kwon and Luna. So, if you're curious, check that out. But, yeah, after he gets out of Montenegrin jail, which I'm sure is just a barrel of laughs, he will be extradited to Korea or The US. If it's Korea, hard to say because, you know, he is politically and economically connected there. He's part of the South Korean elite. He went to a preparatory school that sends more people to Western Ivy League schools than Horace Mann in New York City, to to give some sense of the level of his privilege, which, you know, side issue that we we can pursue if you like, but I think between him and Sam Bankman Fried, and, you know, you can look at other examples like like Elizabeth Holmes, I think we also are seeing this pattern of elite fraud. These are not people who are coming from, like, desperate circumstances of poverty to to run scams. These are people who under who have every opportunity to be successful in legitimate businesses, and instead, they're fraudsters on a massive scale. And and, you know, with with SBF, we get to talk about a whole other set of things where, like, his parents were these ideological champions, these Stanford professors putting forth the the groundwork for what then became their kids' active scam. And, you know, at least in the in the case of the, the father, god. I'm blank I'm blanking on his name. But, anyway, SBF's dad also seems to have maybe had a hand directly in what was going on. So so we have all these elite people who are who are now just giving up on even running businesses with their privilege and just leveraging it to run scams, which is another part of of what's going on here that's interesting. So, anyway, if he gets extradited to The US, I think that there's a really good chance Do Kwon does, like, what I call an Enron sentence, which is 10 to 20, gets out when he's, you know, 45 or 50 years old. So, so that's life.

Yeah. I mean, that's one read for sure, and I'm, like, endlessly fascinated by these people as characters. I think there's the, like, you know, boredom or ennui of, like, you know, I I have to commit a crime because I'm I'm, you know, spoiled. But I think it's also you know, I think Elizabeth Holmes is very illustrative here because, well, I mean, sort of. Her her, father was also kind of involved in some shady stuff. But, generally, she was, like, part of this Silicon Valley bubble where you have to be successful. Right? Like, maybe that's as much of an issue as anything. It's just the assumption that she seems to have been born with, that she was gonna be a billionaire no matter what. And and then you get caught up in fraud because you have to prove that, and you have to actually, like, you know, like, failure is not an option. Failure is such a, like, terminal situation that you just start lying to people. And, and I think you can also make maybe an extended argument from there that, when you look at just, like, the macro trend of declining real returns on investment across the entire US economy, you know, you have the middle class of people who are kind of educated elites who no longer can find jobs that fit their training. I think you also have the hyper elite where as declining real returns continue to compound, like, not everybody can run a billion dollar startup even if your dad did. Right? And so you have people who are, doing the fake version of that.

Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean and and I can empathize with that as, like, a basic kind of American thing. Right? Like, I, you know, my my I was brought up kind of middle class to upper middle class, and I mean, like, actually upper middle class, not upper middle class as code for stupid rich. Like, I grew up in the in the regular ass suburbs. But, you know, I certainly, like, you know, went through college being like a you know, even though I'm choosing this weird path of, like, being a scholar and writer, I would really like to be as successful as my as my as my my dad who was the primary breadwinner of my family. So, I mean, I can empathize with that. But, yeah, I think it's also you know, it really it's hard to make these generalizations. Right? And and it's irresponsible too, but you do have to also start looking at just, like, the certain strain of winking and omnipresent criminality that underpins the capitalist class. You know? Sure. Yeah. And and I'm right up against it. You know? These days, I I, you know, I see it. I move in those circles. Not, I mean, not, like, as a member of them, but, like, I'm in the room. And, and and there is something to that. Not to say and and, I mean, again, like, a lot of people who are involved in finance and certainly business more generally are good people who are, like, fascinating. And and and, you know, the flip side is that, like, people like me who actually do the work in finance, I find to be some of the most interesting and, like, creative and and fun people in the world because, like, you have to think like a complete crazy person to really understand how this stuff works in the first place. So everybody's got a beautiful mind when when you're on the financial side of things. But, like, the people who control the money, like, you know, every every every great fortune is built on a great crime. Right?

Well, yeah. I mean, it it it's it's definitely, like, depressing and kind of, demoralizing that. I mean, I I consider it my mission. Like, probably 50% of my overall mission is just to, like, push back against these bad actors enough to preserve some little sliver of what I believe to be the real promise of crypto. But it's impossible. Right? Like, there's this constant stream of of scams where like, it's impossible to target the actual individual actors with very few exceptions. Like, sometimes they'll get big, and I was very proud that, like, this whole Do Kwon Luna thing, like, you know, I saw it coming. I knew what was happening pretty much exactly, and I wrote about the way it was gonna unwind before it did. And so in that case, I was able to specifically save some people's money. But more generally, the way I make myself feel better about it and and this also gets into sort of more of my anarchist, sensibilities, which is people are going through the ringer on this stuff, but but there's no better teacher than failure. And so when you get ripped off, there are gonna be some people we know who are always just gonna keep going back and doing the same thing again and again, and they'll never learn. But, there are also people involved in this market. And if you're, you know, if you're self aware, you're, like, speculating in crypto in a way that is not going to, like, destroy your life if you get something wrong. Not everybody is doing that, but I'm, like, out there sending that message and also trying to, like, teach people basics of how to evaluate whether it's individual character or the financial details of something or how to do the research to, like, get a sense of whether something is legit and kind of providing examples of, like, hey. Here, this is legit. This is a real application that makes sense from a technological perspective, and here's not. So people who are going through the, like, speculative process of whether you're, like, betting on an ICO, and there's nobody there to tell you, like, okay. Like, the SEC, this has been filed. This is, like, quote, unquote, regulated or, quote, unquote, unregulated, which you know? Okay. I'm gonna unleash the real anarchist thesis here, which is financial regulation is kind of fake. And, I mean, if you look at the charts of like, Peloton is one of my favorites. Right? This is a publicly traded stock, for a, stationary bike manufacturer that for, like, a hot second in 2021, like, three months after the start of the pandemic, was worth, like, $8,000,000,000. In fact, I'm gonna look it up right now. And, you know, if if you talk to, like, Gary Gensler or whatever, they would say, oh, this is like, you know, this is a a regulated market. Right? But that doesn't help anybody because you have to look at Peloton and be like, oh, this is some weird distorting effect of, like, one freaky historical event, that has driven this stock up to a market cap of or a the stock peaked at, like, a $160 in, December 2020, or January 2021. And then it went down, down, down, down, down. Right now it trades at $10. So that's a stock that a publicly listed stock that has lost more than 90% of its value over the course of two years. And no regulator is gonna be able to tell you that that's what's gonna happen. You have to use your own judgment. And so my case for ICO markets and other totally unregulated decentralized markets and crypto, quote, unquote, equities is that when this stuff is out there and people who have the right evaluation of their own risk are experimenting and are, you know, investing, they learn to pick stuff and to evaluate things way better than people who are participating in public markets that are regulated and have these guardrails that make it look like it's legitimate, when in fact, you're just about to lose 90% of your money. And this does actually hold up if you look back at, like, the ICO market. There are certain ICOs that were unregulated illegal securities offerings, let's just say it, But that were good investments that have had amazing returns since then because they were issued by real teams who were honest and actually you know, they were honest in the sense that they actually intended to do the thing that they said, and then they did it even if they were, quote, unquote, breaking the law. Right? And the same goes for, you know, something that, I I'm gonna oversimplify my views because there are some good aspects to it. But if you look at accredited investor rules, right, these are basically rules that if you don't have a million dollars or I don't know exactly what the number is right now. But if you're not already rich, you can't invest in certain kinds of assets. That is like richness is a proxy here for an intelligence test. And there's it's hard to think of anything less economically democratic on its face than that. Now I think intelligent or, accredited investor rules do really protect people from scams. So I'm not saying that they're, like, completely a bad thing that I wanna trash. I think that that gets oversimplified. But the broader point is that if you don't let people participate in markets, they're never gonna learn how to participate in markets. And I think that there is a a a legitimate case there if you, you know, if you believe that there should be such a thing as a security that represents a stake in a collective enterprise, then there might be better levels of threshold for letting people speculate in those instruments. And, you know, globally, whatever The US does, there are going to continue to be these ICOs, and people are going to learn to distinguish between what's good and what's bad in them. And over time, my thesis as you know, this is the anarchist thesis that, like, if you have an unregulated financial market, over time, you do have scams kind of squeezed out simply because you have an educated investor base that has been just pummeled into learning what's going on because they've lost so much to scams over time. And, you know, that's an oversimplified and, frankly, not entirely sustainable argument because, again, there is always gonna be some base of people who are getting tricked into participating in these markets without have any kind of even the most basic knowledge. And so they're gonna continually get robbed, and so you have to have some kind of protection for those people. But I think it's an example of how crypto forces us to ask these really basic questions about the way things work right now and at least, like, question them and say, like, there could be another way. Right? And and I think that there's something very productive to that in the long term too.

For sure. And it requires complex systems thinking. And I think that

socialist finance or however you want to call it. Yeah. And there are different ways that you can envision that future. And certainly, one is, like, some more direct democracy. I mean, we we that's that's sort of a separate or a slightly distinct discussion. Like, I I don't necessarily I I am I guess this is worth laying out for people who might, listen to this because I'm on it and not be too familiar with the nuances. But, you know, I'm a I'm a, like, European style democratic socialist in terms of my my actual, substantive political agenda. I'm sort of a sentimental anarchist, but I think that, you know, that that's a slightly more theoretical stance. And and so, yes, like, in this in, like, my vision of this sort of very moderate Euro socialism, there are still financial markets for sure. But, you know, you start to have to think about, like, how do these financial markets work in a globalized setting, for example. And, you know, like, right now, you have things like I mean, I'm I I I don't know if this is specifically true, but, you know, there is, like, an Argentinian stock market. There is for for, like, Argentine companies, there's a Brazilian stock market for Brazilian companies. There's a Canadian stock market for Canadian companies. That does not make sense anymore. You know? Like, obviously, there are regulatory regimes in those separate countries that have, you know, the ability to structure the markets. But, like, just those borders are already distorting in terms of our, like, collective societal investment motivations. So, you know, you think about, like, skewed incentives in finance in The United States because of the way the Fed manages monetary base. That's a real thing. I mean, you get bankers doing things that actually are not good for society long term because there are kind of, like, local distortions in the way the market works. And the same goes for, I don't know, like, a company that gets a lot of money from a certain set of government contracts or or something like that. Like, we have to think about and this is where crypto really unleashes its superpower, is if you can then and I know you're interested in DAOs, so this kind of aligns with that. I mean, if you can basically just, like, harness the wisdom of everybody. Right? Like, it changes the way risk works globally, and you will have people who are getting washed out because their judgment is not good and the crowd goes the other direction. But, you know, you can have, like, a kind of democratically economically democratic sort of ish. I don't wanna overstate my claim here. But, like, for people who have capital, who are participating in, you know, a theoretical global investment market, that seems to point towards smarter allocation of human resources than we have in this very fractured local set of markets, for, you know, Argentinian and Brazilian stocks. Right? So if you have, like, a truly frictionless global system for guiding investment that doesn't have these barriers that are impossible for small investors in particular to bypass, then, you know, I'm I'm pitching, like, the hyper capitalist, layer in the socialist cake, I guess. But I think there's something there that, like, if you're looking to truly coordinate humanity I mean, you know, I don't know where you stand on this particular thing, but I think it's another distinction when talking about socialism is that, like, I could not be more anti communist on just a purely technocratic level that you cannot have a managed economy. Like, it does not work, at least in a modern setting. And and so I think that, you know, some kind of, like, you know, this distributed wisdom of the crowd, a collective direction of social resources towards things that we, like, altogether, not just because the Politburo says so, but that we altogether genuinely support. I think, you know, in theory is is promising. I think, you know, we have to, like, take a step back and say, like, the reality involves a lot of scams, a lot of waste, a lot of bullshit. Maybe they're that's not, like, actually a workable thing. But, like, at a theory level, I find it very interesting and appealing.

the mechanism design of proof of work mining incentivized the creation of this global platform as you're saying. Right? Like, the the the mechanism and the game theory behind it to get everybody participating to get everybody participating is maybe the most important and interesting thing to me because, you know, it just opens up this design space for borderless anything and global anything that, like, if you if you write it if you design it right over the Internet, you can get people engaged in this stuff. And and and, you know, at a very, very broad level, that I think is the most exciting thing because you can then, like, build on top of Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever. A a lot of different kinds of tools or spaces or whatever. And and and I think that, again, falls into that bucket of, like, it's a step change. Right? Like, there's never been anything Right. That is as globally interoperable and accessible as the Bitcoin network. I mean, literally, like, maybe somebody could come up with some example, but global systems are always patchworks up until this point. Right? You have, like, even a global postal system involves a series of handoffs between, between national systems and, you know, there are discontinuities and and breaks and costs and things like that. And and so just you know, if you envision Bitcoin as this, like, network encircling the globe, it it's the first thing of its kind. And and I think that in and of itself, is is radical to, you know, quote your your title.

you sharing your wisdom and, your thoughts. Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves.

Yeah. So, I I I it's actually kind of a long list. I'm on Twitter at at david z morris. I have an intermittent Substack, that, it might appeal to listeners of this show because it's more theoretical and in-depth than my day to day writing. And that's at david z morris dot substack dot com. I also obviously do a lot of stuff at CoinDesk, including Crypto Crooks, which is, I would make a big pitch. It's a it's a narrative produced podcast. I narrated and wrote the whole thing. A friend of mine did, some really great music for it. It's scored like a movie. So it's a very entertaining show that also gets into the weeds of of the crypto stuff. And then, finally, as I mentioned, I have a book called, Bitcoin is Magic that you can just find on Amazon. Unfortunately, I haven't really worked to get it published through any other outlet. It's just a self published thing. But, it goes into a lot of weird little sort of historical comparisons, including the the McLuhan essay, and also, a big essay about, a guy named Johannes Tryphemius, who was one of the pioneers of, cryptography in fifteenth century Europe, and wrote a book called the Steganographia, which is one of the foundational, tomes of, of cryptography, but who was also a priest. And and so I talk a a bit about, you know, the sort of overlap between religion and code and politics, and, and that, you know, that's in that book, and and might be of interest to people. So those are the four, I would say. Nice. Thanks. And I'll have those in the,