Crypto influencers, The Fakefluencer, and the dirty underwear of capitalism
This week's episode is dedicated to the crypto influencers. For the first half I give a crash course on the history and some of the more well known influencers and for the second half I have an interview with Tom Gillespie (@TomPeterGill), former currency trader on the Perth stock exchange turned TV investigator and filmmaker for the upcoming documentary "The Fakefluencer" coming out in April 2021. The movie investigates a crypto influencer by the name of BitMan360 and creator of the ScooterC...
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Transcript
Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey.
Hey. Hey. Hey, everybody. My name is Carlos Matos, and I am coming from New York City, New York. Let me tell you guys that I am so excited. I am so happy. I am really so thrilled to be right now sharing this amazing, glorious, super, and exciting moment of my life with all of you guys. And let me tell you that we are really changing the world as we know it. The world is not anymore the way it used to be. No. No. No. No. Yeah. Be connected. Wow. Be connect. We are coming and we are coming in waves. We are starting and we are going to actually go all over the world. We are building the entire world. Let me tell you guys that I started one hundred and thirty seven days ago with only 25,610 And right now I am reaching $140,000 Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, what's up? And let me tell you that I am actually earning around 100, I mean around $1,400 on an everyday basis, seven days a week. What? I am right now independently, financially independently, I am saying to so many people who said that this was going to be a con artist game, that this was gonna be a scammer game. Hey, you gonna lose all your money? My wife still doesn't believe in me. I'm telling him, Bojani, listen. This is real. No. No. No. No. No. No. That's a scam. And I said, but wait. I'm gonna go to the bank. I'm gonna get my big cons. I'm going to actually put in $2, here, there, right on the table. No, that's money that you took from another account. I'll say, what am I gonna do? Then I said to myself, you know what, When I am starting to put $10,000 a day on her, right on her, you know, on her table, then she's gonna say, woah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, that's real. So guys, I want to tell you something. Faith and belief is the one thing that we all need to be able to change the world. And right now, I believe that in this room, we have the seed that's going to germinate, and that's going to explode into an amazing opportunity for us to change this entire world. I am so proud, I am so honored, I am so excited to be here right now. And then let me tell you something, that each and every one of you has the opportunity to become like those amazing people that we know here from Vietnam. Hey, hey. My book, Vietnam.
Thank you so much
So some of you may have recognized that clip and the infamous yelling of BitConnect and the Wassa Wassa Wassa Wassa of Carlos Matos. And if you didn't, it'll make sense in a bit. I have a special episode today for you all dedicated to influencers in the crypto space. So for the first half, I wanted to explain a bit about the history of crypto influencers, mention some of the names, mention some of the funnier stories, in that space. And then for the second half, I had an interview with Tom Gillespie, who is an Australian trader and currently finishing up a documentary about crypto influencers called Fakefluencer. So I hope you'll stick around for that. So BitConnect was a cryptocurrency project connected to a high yield investment program, which is a type of investment scam that promises unsustainably high return on investments by paying previous investors with the money invested by new investors. So as a user, you would purchase the BitConnect coin or BCC with Bitcoin on the BitConnect lending platform. So you could then lock your BitConnect coin to be used by what was a so called trading bot and you could accrue interest from the supposed profits of that trading bot that used some sort of algorithm that ended up not actually existing. The project itself lasted about two years starting from 2016, but in 2017, BitConnect had its first and last annual ceremony in Thailand, where among things like raining money from the ceiling and Lamborghini giveaways, Carlos gave his speech, which became a pretty big meme on the Internet. Carlos Matos has become sort of the face of the cringy crypto influencers with his infamous speech at the BitConnect conference. But not just because of the speech itself, but also because of the fact that he, like many others, lost a lot of money very soon after that event. In January 2018, regulators from Texas and North Carolina issued a cease and desist order which led to the platform administrators closing the platform on 01/16/2018 and distributed users funds in their BitConnect coin. Confidence was, of course, lost in the value of that coin plummeted from a high of 500 before and now to below $1, which was where it started in the very beginning of the project. But if we can for a moment look at this events with our Marxist lens, I think there is a very clear class issue with the events around Bitconnect that can be linked to other such projects. Carlos Matos gets a lot of flack for his speech, which lasted only a few minutes at most. But in it, you can tell a deeper story of someone whose native language is clearly not English despite being from NYC and likely is an immigrant of The US. Bitconnect's promise of very large returns on investment probably attracted a lot of working class people who'd been beaten by the extremely exploitative nature of American capitalism, one which does not provide many other options for financial independence beyond investing in risky markets. If Carlos was working a well paying union supported job, there is probably a higher chance that he would not have been enticed by investing into BitConnect for financial independence. So the euphoria of earning $1,400 per day, at least what the BitConnect, dashboard told him he was earning, was so strong that it led to his nearly religious love for the BitConnect community. And his lack of understanding for the underlying technology for his investment had to be hidden by faith and belief, which was the only thing they needed. And to be fair, that's probably all he had leading up to his supposed gains. So it's not really clear what he exactly meant by changing the entire world with the Big Connect community, but I bet that a big part of that was the belief that people like him could get out of poverty or wage slavery with this technology he had yet to understand. And if you were to ask me and likely many others, this is probably the thinking of potentially the majority of investors in crypto or blockchain projects. So while Carlos is a very salient example, maybe, of a crypto influencers, albeit for a very short period he was, there's a lot of different types of influencers, out there. But let's start maybe with the founders, and then we'll move from there. The first founder we need to talk about, of course, is Satoshi Nakamoto. Although nobody knows who he is, he is the crypto messiah and creator of Bitcoin. His posts are considered gospel by many interested in crypto, and which is why many people like to declare that they are Satoshi. Because if you can say that Satoshi gave their seal of approval on your project, well, you fit the jackpot, baby. But the irony is that this is mainly because of his mysterious persona and the fact that nobody has heard from him for around ten years. So if that were to change, it'd be like Jesus's second coming. And so because of this, many people have claimed to be Satoshi in order to profit from his name. And this brings us briefly to the man who is the most adamant about being Satoshi, Craig Wright. He is an Australian man who swears he's Satoshi. He's just lost his keys to his wallet with billions of dollars worth in Bitcoin in a hard drive that he threw out. He's tried relentlessly to prove that he is Satoshi with very little success as each attempt has been credibly disproven. He's also the founder of the project Bitcoin SV, SV standing for Satoshi Vision, which was a fork of Bitcoin Cash. Lately, his shenanigans have included registering a copyright of the Bitcoin white paper and filing defamation suits with people like Roger Ver, who is the founder of Bitcoin Cash, and the next figure I want to talk about, Vitalik B. Tarrant, the founder and benevolent dictator of Ethereum. His story is fascinating, although a somewhat typical Silicon Valley one. He's a Russian Canadian who dropped out of college while studying computer science after winning a Thiel fellowship in order to pursue creating the Ethereum blockchain, which was also the first blockchain that was able to do programmable smart contracts. He's a bit of the boy genius prodigy that people like to exploit the image of for Ethereum. So especially in the beginning stages of Ethereum, Vitalik was listed as an advisor for many of the early projects and then as well with the ICO craze. He was on the sites of nearly half of them as an advisor. But later, it turned out that many of them had never asked him formally to be listed as an advisor for their project, while a couple he had agreed to because having the boy genius founder of the blockchain your application is built on to endorse your project generally attracted more investors. So I think in the first case, it was likely a matter of sending a few messages to him or something or maybe even not so that they could add him, while the other may have been at least partially due to his age and maturity. He tends to be more likable than the other crypto bigwigs though, although I certainly would not call him a socialist by any means. The next class of crypto influencers are the celebrities. And when I mean celebrities, I'm talking about the movie actors, I'm talking about just the generally famous people, people famous for being famous, people who get invited to Hollywood events, and so on. I guess they form a great way to tap into the general audience beyond the, tech nerds and crypto nerds. But it's also interesting to note that actual research shows that on average, a celebrity endorsement only increases a company sales by 4% relative to its competitors. So I'm not sure exactly how successful these celebrities were, but it's interesting to note. But some of the some of the more funny ones, I think, include Mike Tyson, who had his first branded Bitcoin ATM in Las Vegas. You have Paris Hilton who was advertising, several ICOs, through her Twitter, and I think her father even sold a house that you could buy with Bitcoin. You have Gwyneth Paltrow, who shared articles which ended up being essentially advertisements for a particular Bitcoin startup called Abra. I just painted it in a very positive light, and she didn't disclose her, financial stake inside of the company. And then you have Steven Seagal, who was the ambassador of a company called Bitcoin two Gen, Bitcoin with two i's. I don't really know exactly what it was, but I don't really care. It's obviously pretty stupid. And then you have as well, more recently, Lindsay Lohan. She's been used by Justin Sun, the founder of Tron, to advertise their NFT capabilities on their blockchain, I believe. So it's pretty interesting to see. And while there may be something, like, especially annoying when crypto and celebrities are involved, This actually isn't anything new for tech companies considering, companies like Apple and Microsoft, have brought on celebrities for their advertising and product announcements before. So, I mean, this is sort of like a an extension of something that already had occurred. I mean, still occurring in the sense that, celebrities are used in Apple advertisements, for example, or something like that. Another big crypto celebrity is John McAfee, who is the founder of the McAfee Computer Security Software Company, previously a Libertarian Party presidential candidate and a known crypto liker. But throughout the ICO boom, he would tweet out a particular small cap altcoins, sort of just shilling them out to his followers advertising the coin. He's recently been held custody by the SEC after being on the run around the world for a while for tax evasion, and now for alleged pump and dump schemes, which he was using, doing during this ICO boom, where he would buy the coin that he would shield right before, tweet it out, and then sell it, quickly after. Or that's the, the usual accusation. But so he's currently being held by SSC for doing that, allegedly. The next class of crypto influencers are the YouTubers. So this is just a collection of hundreds, if not thousands, of different accounts that have the word crypto, bit, or bitcoin, fit into their name somehow. But, these are usually spaces which are just pump and dump galore, sort of filled with these types of scams, or like this type of fetishization of hodling, or stacking sats, or is sort of like a, a a project that, you know, does does its D and D due diligence of a particular project. Usually, that D and D is done in a very positive light and then they say, oh, you guys should all buy this coin. But then there is sort of sprinkled in, like, some people who are just earnestly interested in the crypto space, but in a very liberal sense, but who may have just, like, the intellectual curiosity. But there are, at least a couple of them, like Ivan on Tech. He's a really popular one. I think he's from Sweden. And Chico Crypto is another one. But those two, they've been accused of pump and dumping on their followers. So they would do similar to what, McAfee is being accused of, where they would purchase the coins, shill, the particular project, and then dump them, at the end or very quickly. Yeah. It's it's sort of, I guess, one of the maybe unintended consequences of the democratization of information under capitalism, which has led to these types of influencers. There's a whole lot more people that I can talk about. For example, Eric Voorhees, the founder of ShapeShift and one of the early, crypto adopters, very libertarian. I did a full episode about him if you want to check out. I'll add it into into the show notes where I go into some of the flaws in his, libertarian thinking around crypto. You got people like, Pump, who's really fucking annoying, and I'm planning to do an episode dedicated to him at some point. You got Roger Ver, another pretty right wing libertarian, really into Bitcoin as digital cash rather than as a store of value or digital gold. So he founded, Bitcoin Cash, which, is a fork of Bitcoin, which, has a much lower transaction fee generally. Although, there are lots of, debate about whether it's more secure and whatnot. Then you have Andreas Antonopoulos. He is not so bad. He's actually potentially one of the more left leaning of the early crypto influencers mostly because he tends to not join the, like, anti communist pylons on Twitter or wherever else and is openly skeptical of anyone calling anything communist generally from what I've seen. But the reason he's pretty well known is that he made a lot of educational material for free in the early days of Bitcoin, and Ethereum. And so for a long time, he would just sort of travel from conference to conference, talking about Bitcoin and sometimes to audiences that were very small, and he wasn't really paid for it. He sort of did it on his own as far as I understand. But then another one we have is the founder of Binance, is Changpeng Zhao. He's one the Binance is one of the largest and most successful centralized crypto exchanges, but he has definitely a lot of influence in the crypto space. And he actually well, Binance started their own, cryptocurrency network called Binance Chain. Not very creative, but there's been a lot of accusations that potentially, Binance is using their influence in the crypto space, to take advantage of, the transaction fees or the speed of an Ethereum network, by making it by clogging the network with transactions in order to make the Binance chain look better. Whether or not that's true, I don't really know. It doesn't really matter to me. But those are some of the the crypto influencers. Some special mentions that, I think some of you may know or may not know are Elon Musk, Dan Held, Saifedean Ammis, Tony Veys, hundreds of other YouTubers, the various cryptographers involved with Bitcoin in the beginning, various other tech billionaires. You could even include people like Jack Dorsey as a crypto influencer as well since, he's a founder of Twitter. And as you may know, he's a big supporter of Bitcoin, and he also recently sold his first tweet as an NFT for millions, not too long ago. But I think that's a pretty good crash course of the crypto influencer space for the moment. The last project I want to mention just because it's related to the interview coming up later is Scootercoin. So Scootercoin is a project started by a mysterious man named Bitman three sixty. Not to be confused with Bitmain, which is a company that produces Bitcoin mining equipment, but he started his project Scootercoin, which is a cryptocurrency that gives its coin to people for doing scooter tricks. Sound unbelievable? Well, I highly suggest you read the show notes to get in on the conspiracy. But Bitmain three sixty and its project is also the focus of the investigative documentary coming out soon in April called Fakefluencer. So I had the pleasure of interviewing the director, Tom Gillespie, which, I hope you guys enjoy in a little bit. But before we get to the interview, if you're enjoying this episode so far, be sure to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and join the crypto leftist communities on Discord or Reddit, which you can find links to in the show notes. If you want to be sure that more content like this that explores DLT, like blockchain, and the potential it has for the left could be created, you can donate to my efforts through Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist, you can donate starting at $3 a month or more to help me out and join the newest patrons like Blair and Mateo. At the moment, I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned, so any amount really helps. As a patron, you'll get a shout out on an episode like I just did and access to monthly Patreon exclusive q and a episodes where you can submit and vote on questions you'd like me to answer. On the latest Patreon exclusive q and a episode, I gave my thoughts on the relationship between the rise of blockchain and the evolution of capitalism. And, of course, I'll still be making free content like this episode. But I think that's enough for me. Let's get to the interview with Tom Gillespie, the director of The Fake Flouncer. Alright. And we're back. Hello, everyone. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. And for today's interview, I have Tom Gillespie. He is a former currency trader, on the Perth Stock Exchange, turned TV investigator and filmmaker for the upcoming movie called Fake Fluencer. So, hey, Tom. How are you doing? Hi. Very well. Thank you. Much appreciated for having me on the show. Yeah. Of course. You you have a very different background and likely a very different, maybe political views as I do, but I think it's important to keep to keep the door open to the other side and try to glean some learnings from from the work that you're doing. So I appreciate, what you're doing with the fake fluencer. But maybe to start off, could you give some background? Because there's there's a very interesting story behind, the movie that you're working on and the investigation that you're doing. You know, what made you so focused on wanting to discover the truth behind this crypto project called Scooter Coin and the man behind it, Bitman three sixty?
Yes. So, basically, I'll, I'll tell you a little bit about my background and then I'll tell you what brought me to this, this particular project. I was working in the Perth Stock Exchange for over twenty years. I was a pretty pretty big hotshot back in the nineties. I earned the name the dingo of Saint George there because I used to just I used to do trades that most people wouldn't touch, you know, a lot of fear fearful people back in the nineties, but I was out there with the big boys playing playing with the Wall Street fellas and I would just basically put put on anything. I just I I was that's how I earned my title the dingo of Saint George. Now Saint George is the street in which the Perth Stock Exchange is based so and I dabbled in Bitcoin $20.17. I think you'll probably recall when it hit nearly I think it hit nearly 20,000 US. And, you know, I got caught up in the fever around that and it it burned me pretty bad so at least it left a bad taste in my mouth. However, I didn't completely disregard the potential of cryptocurrencies and although it left a bit of a chip on my shoulder, I, was reintroduced to a project back in 2019 through my brother's son Tim little Timmy who was very big into scootering. I I imagine you've seen a lot of the kids are into scootering, these days. It's kind of overwhelming the the skate parks. You hear stories about, you know, busloads of them arriving and the skateboarders and what have you not being able to get an edge on the ramps. But, anyway this this, Timmy little Timmy my my brother's son got a connection to this scooter coin project which you know instantly you hear the name scooter coin you think that's bloody ridiculous I mean Scooter coin, what what possible value could there be? And then obviously, I, you know, I took the time. I put my team together. We did a bit of research. We had a look at the potential and there was a real potentially viable product called the buttercup device. Now you would have if you've seen any of bit man three sixty's videos, you would have seen, you know, he's now pushing the buttercup three so he's on the third iteration of this device but essentially it had a a real profound promise for all these millions of scooters around the world to earn Scooter coin by performing tricks at the skate park which, you know, I thought that was a pretty me and my team, you know, thought that that was rather innovative at the time. And so through through my brother, I, you know, me and him went in on that project. We put a healthy amount of, our our Australian dollars into that project. And late twenty nineteen, you know, I got that phone call. Like, many, many other investors in crypto projects would have had, you know, turns out it's a Ponzi. Now at that time, I I wasn't completely shocked, but I was looking to do a transition in my career into TV production specifically for sixty minutes Australia a show of which I love and many of my good friends work on that program and through some early preliminary research into the scooter coin project, bitman 3 sixty's name kept coming up. And so this is why I decided I would pursue this character, bit man three sixty and his buttercup device and the scooter coin project, of course. And this is what got me kick started into my investigation that I'm currently on.
Bit man three sixty is your nephew. Is that correct?
Exactly.
And and your nephew started this crypto project as a way to, I guess, remunerate all the different scooter scootering, kids out there so that they can be, so that they can monetize their scooter tricks in cryptocurrency?
Precisely. It's I mean, it's a it's not a bad product if it if it ever makes it to market. I mean, the idea that, you know, fulfilling young scooters fantasies of a going pro, if you like, earning whilst they ride, like, this is a no brainer. Most kids would love the idea that they could earn scooter coins or whatever by, you know, upping their game because it was also connected to the the trick. So, you know, harder tricks would be rewarded at a higher rate and it and it also would adjust algorithmically so that the the rider of the scooter, as they improved, they were rewarded in conjunction to their improvement. So the the device knew that this rider was getting better and encouraged them through the reward mechanism.
Yeah. I guess, why do you think you're the right person to investigate this potential crypto crypto scam and why so publicly,
especially considering it's a part of your family? Well, listen. I, you know, I took it I did take a bit of time to to consider if this was the right project, and I haven't put pushed my family into the production at all. I've I've left them in the on the peripheries. They're more of a sort of catalyst if you like for the for the investigation. But listen, I'm an outsider. Okay? I, you know, I've dabbled in crypto a little bit back in the day and it burnt me pretty bad, but I see myself as the perfect conduit for traveling from the old economy into this into this crypto economy world and in doing so I'm allowed to I'm able to bring some of my unique perspectives to that conversation but those kind of questions or pursuits of truth that might not be accessible to those that are already so deep into the crypto economy. I have a bit of it you know I have quite a bit of experience trading regular currencies globally with my twenty plus years at the Perth Stock Exchange so I can obviously see a fair bit of overlap there in how I can also start to I believe I can see patterns in the crypto projects in the economy that's evolving there that are similar to the to the regular economy world that and of course including my ambitions to to have my TV career get kick started. I think this is a great great material, for the television, especially the Australians. There's a lot of scooters and crypto people in Australia.
Yeah. It seems like those those two groups seem to intersect a lot, scooters and, and crypto people in Australia, it looks like. But I'm I'm really interested to hear about your experience in trading and the comparisons you make between the crypto economy and the real economy. But maybe before that, could you define what is fake influence since that is sort of the the title of of your upcoming documentary?
Yeah. So, you know, when you're trying to create something that people can find on the Internet, you wanna make some unique new words. So I, you know, bashed fake and influencer together, the fake fluencer. And now when you Google me or you Google the film, you know, we get the first hit, that was kind of, you know, that was a an SEO imperative if you like but fake influence I think can be summarized in a in a few ways. One would be saying one thing publicly for personal or political gain and not, you know, disclosing that fact Little like we saw with Trump the Trump administration like this guy was at the top of his game for fake influence in my opinion. Also, you know, talking up projects specifically their the price of their coins without disguising the personal, you know, personal connections, motivations in that regard. So this comes up, you know, over and over repeatedly in the crypto world. People are essentially talking about certain projects purely because they're paid in that project's, you know, unique currency or what have you so that to me is just, you know, that that kind of stuff is is is never disclosed by these YouTubers or very rarely or not in the right context at least. So they're taking money for producing videos about these products and services. You know, in addition, they're they're pumping up their numbers. You know, in my investigation, I've discovered upwards of 300 different services that provide, you know, for $10 you can get 5,000 followers on your Twitter account. So any any schmuck with a couple of $100 can drop, you know, 50,000 followers on their Instagram or whatever Like, that's part of the fake influence. And then they use these numbers, of course, to pitch pitch, products, service providers, you know, look at my community, they say. And a quick look at their posts, and they've got next to nothing in engagement. So I mean that's not hard to see through but essentially fake influence it boils down to being, you know, pretending you're bigger than you actually are and, you know, being remunerated in a way that's not fully made transparent.
Yeah. I I think those are those are really interesting points. Just, maybe we can transition a bit, in the comparison between what's sort of going on, these these worst parts of the crypto economy you've, you've outlined and the real economy. Maybe you can talk a bit how those two economies differ? Because I guess from from my perspective as a socialist, it seems that the crypto economy that you are describing is also very similar in the how the real economy works and how Wall Street works at certain times, and in in the financial industry. But you're the one with the experience, in those fields. So maybe you can tell me the similarities and differences between those two different types of economies.
Yeah. Of course. When I began this investigation, I was, you know, I was very, very much against what crypto economy standard for and what I believed it essentially boiled down to which was just, you know, organized Ponzi projects. As I've kind of continued my journey into this realm, I've realized that, you know, more often than not there are numerous similarities between how the how the crypto economy works and how your regular global economy works. Only one of the major major upgrades if you like is that the democratization to a certain extent the accessibility. Now that's not to say that the risks have increased in conjunction with that democratization though, you know, it's it's an absolute wild west out there in the crypto economy a little bit like you know, it has been with the booms and busts in the regular economy especially in certain parts of, the world which don't have a certain regulatory framework like more developed nations. But what I what I realize as well is that capitalism this, this engine in which we all feed it it basically encourages people to to to look after number one, so What you get with crypto economy is is basically this individual centric enrich oneself, you know but times 1,000 than the regular economy now a lot of crypto people will talk about community and building a tribe and what have you but at the end of the day they're all only about enriching themselves you know they use one another to organize pump groups and what have you they inflate prices together they come together to do that to do those actions but at the end of the day they all just want to get out before the other guy you know before this whole shit house burns down and we're gonna see that within the next I'd say within the next couple of weeks that's gonna happen with Bitcoin as well. There's no way $5,050,000 dollar Bitcoin should exist. It's just it's gone beyond the realm of, reality if you like. So, yeah, the there are a lot of similarities and, of course, a lot of the behaviors we're seeing in crypto, you know, because people can access these tools and organize themselves in such a way to to create projects that have the illusion of creating value but are only there to enrich those people, those early adopters. We see a lot of similarities in what has happened in the past in the regular economy. Only now we're gonna see it happen a hell of a lot faster and a hell of a lot more frequently.
Yeah. I mean, I guess to use your earlier example of of Trump, I mean, throughout his presidency, it was very interesting to see how much his tweets moved the stock market. The amount of fluctuation there was whenever he would tweet one thing versus another was quite extreme. And I I and that was something in the real economy, but it's something that now I mean, today, we're seeing every time that, Elon Musk tweets something about Dogecoin or Bitcoin. It causes huge fluctuations and similarly, things happen with with the Tesla stock as well and, you know, basically, whatever he tweets about.
Yeah. I mean, Dogecoin, actually, that's an apparently, that's an Australian guy who's created that coin. What I'm trying to wrap my head around is why would Elon Musk why would he be pumping a essentially a meme coin from what I understand dogecoin is pure pure comedy, right? What what's what's his angle? Is he just trying to like garner favor with the crypto community so that he can become like a crypto influencer himself, I guess because I don't see the payoff. Fair enough if he wants to sink $1,500,000,000 into Bitcoin because he believes it will be some kind of reserve in the future for the that makes some kind of sense not not for me. I mean I am I'm a Tesla stockholder myself so but of course I wasn't part of that conversation because that's not how it works out here in the real world.
From from the other side, it it sort of seems to me that I I it seems that the crypto people seem to be learning from actual events that already happened in the real economy, which I think is interesting. For example, just the latest things that have been happening around GameStop, although not it's been a couple of weeks since then. But I'm curious. What are your thoughts on the whole GameStop situation? Like, do you think there is merit in the criticism that Wall Street has received from this and how the different players, in the the whole situation, the institutional players have sort of enriched themselves, out of that situation?
Yeah. No. It's a it's a good question. The GameStop thing, honestly, I'm I feel like this like this is not a new story like I feel like why why is this being pushed into the headlines now often often when I hear new news, you know, I question why now and what happened with GameStop on the subreddit the Wall Street Bets you know that happens has happened repeatedly in crypto economy or always it's basically just the that's the you know, the default position is that's how it's done. Now that's not to say, that the regular economy is not guilty of the same things, it surely is, but typically it was done hidden away in private boardrooms smoky filled, you know, gentlemen's clubs and what have you and that that's where the organizing of a of a target stock would be done by a group of individuals that had the capacity to do so. So what we've what we've actually seen with this narrative entering the mainstream here is that you know on one on one side it's kind of shone a light on on something that we all knew was going on but was, you know, only discussed by some of the French conspiracy type people. And I mean, you know, as most of us know or don't know how the economy works often. So it gets easily shuffled into the realm of conspiracy by your regular, your regular Joe. So what this, story did was actually project, you know not only the fact that hey, you know, if you guys are gonna pump coins in private boardrooms and gentlemen's clubs we're gonna do it out in the public here and play this play the same game and it's kind of a it's kind of a wonderful evolution in a way to have it all out in the open now because I think going forward those tools or behaviors in which were previously hidden are now going to be done you you know, out in the open like the crypto people do. I mean, there's no shortage of pump groups on Telegram I've noticed. And so, yeah, we've we're seeing a sort of overlap here, I think, between those two worlds.
And what are your thoughts then? Because both under the traditional Wall Street economy, which, you know, I mean, like you said, had similar type of pump and dump schemes, except they were done through, you know, closed rooms with a bunch of men smoking cigars or something. Whereas now, we have Telegram and Discord groups for pump and dump schemes that are just out in public, in the open. Do you ever wonder if maybe this isn't a problem with specifically cryptocurrency world or specifically with the traditional economy and maybe a more systemic problem around capitalism?
I believe you have, yeah, you have a you have a point there. This this is showing the dirty sort of underwear of capitalism in the, you know, in the public eye here. Now, I think a bigger question is whether or not that will change anything because I am I'm of the opinion that this behavior although now it's being sort of done on the internet instead of you know shady gentlemen's clubs There's only one or two ways there's only two ways in which we can go forward here and that is it goes fully transparent like we've seen in the Wall Street Bets group, you know. They were basically like just they were just doing it out in the open. Stuff that other people would like I mean you saw the hedge funding you know people interviews and stuff and they were having a little cry and about what was happening even though you know they're all up to it. What we're gonna see is it's going to either be always done in the in the public realm and anybody can get involved and everybody's going to get rich in the process because it's that easy which is basically the democratization of this previously private wealthy people's behavior or you're going to see, the government turn around and try to regulate that behavior which would probably take some extremely powerful algorithms to determine individuals, you know, online and bring them to justice. I don't think that's gonna happen. And I don't think, honestly, I don't as with my previous comment about the crypto economy accelerating this rise of the individual enriching themselves. What we're going to see is, more of this behavior. It's going to compound and we're going to what with the likes of the DeFi and the DAOs the way people are going to they're going to take it to the next level and they're going to end up becoming bankers. You know, I've noticed in crypto there is also already ways for individuals to basically function exactly like banks given that they have a position in Ethereum typically. So, this idea of I like to think of it like the back in the what some twenty twenty years ago we had the rise of the citizen journalist and all the problems that that's brought with it. We're going to see a similar thing with the rise of the citizen banker in my opinion and historically people have tended to over time despise bankers. Now, whatever reasons that might be of course they change depending on the circumstances but bankers often end up becoming despised due to their own greed or, just callousness. And I think we're going to see what happens to a society when everybody has the same superpowers as a banker and fully unregulated, you know, unregulated to bull. That's of a concern to me because if we if we live amongst one another and we're all have the potential superpowers of a banker and the access to you know the tools of assistant journalists which today amounts to a bloody you having a bloody YouTube channel and a community on Discord. Well, then I think we're going to see a lot like our our troubles are going to compound first. I don't know how long this transition will last but it's you know, it's it's worry it is worrying.
It seems to me, there's sort of one camp sort of the it's sort of the crypto Wall Street Bets camp of corruption for everyone. Whereas on the other side, it's sort of like a mix of people who think we need to regulate as much as possible, but that may just end up being to where it is the, sort of, like, further institutionalized corruption that I think the Wall Street and the finance industry is sort of has been able to to enjoy for the past, century or so. Exactly. They're
going to have to shift, you know, some of the meaning behind what was previously considered corrupt, I think. And just purely because, again, like with many of these digital technologies, you can't turn them off and to regulate them is, you know, like playing whack a mole. As soon as you try to knock this platform offline, it'll just pop up in several lower locations almost immediately. A little bit like, you know, nobody talks about pirating movies anymore but, you know, that goes on, still goes on. There's, you know, hundreds of websites you can stream stream movies, new movies from and it's actually one of the concerns for me obviously trying to distribute my film. I've got obviously, I've got a connection with the Australian television, but I would like to do some self distribution as well. And, actually, I did look into the potential block a blockchain solution to such a conundrum.
I'm yet to find the right solution for that, though. Yeah. Thanks for for taking the time. I think this is a great time. Maybe you can let us know where can people find more information about the film and
When when is it coming out? Where can people watch it? All that good stuff. Yeah. So the premiere is this this April 2, which just happens to be International Fact Checking Day, by the way. And you can grab yourself a free ticket to the to that premiere at thefatefluencer.com and in addition, we're going to be offering a VIP premiere inside virtual reality which is very a new thing for me obviously but that that that will be at the fakefluencer.movie URL and yeah, follow me on socials. I'm on the Twitter's the Linkedin's and Instagram's and what have you so you can follow my mission there and I've obviously been been doing quite a few of these interviews to talk about my my journey because I think it is a unique journey and I I believe like you say like you said at the beginning of this call, it's important to speak to people that are not of the same inclination as yourself.
Yeah. That's it has been a really interesting conversation, and I'm really excited to to to watch the movie. And I'll I'll definitely be there at the premiere. I'll put all the different links into the show notes, so make sure to to read those notes, so that people can stay updated on the movie. But, yeah. Thanks, Tom. And, good luck.
Thanks, buddy.