Joel Comm: If you'd been paying attention to the guest on today's show,
Joel Comm: you may have gotten out of Luna or Celsius before
Joel Comm: they came crumbling down his take on Defi. Back on
Joel Comm: our April show got our attention. And with the aftershocks
Joel Comm: of tech still rumbling through the crypto and financial world,
Joel Comm: we thought we'd invite him back to go deeper down
Joel Comm: the rabbit hole. What's the next domino to fall and
Joel Comm: how can you avoid getting burnt? We'll discuss with Brad
Joel Comm: Mills today on our is all defi B.S. episode number 651.
Joel Comm: Of the bad crypto podcasts.
Travis Wright: Five, four, three. How are there all those workers whose bad? I.
Travis Wright: Is anything even real anymore? I don't know. It's hard
Travis Wright: to tell. You probably better listen to this podcast to
Travis Wright: see if what you think you know is even right
Travis Wright: at all. Is all defi doomed? Is it bullshit? What?
Travis Wright: How do we even know this guy in the past
Travis Wright: has called several of them pretty correctly called Luna. How
Travis Wright: you got there? He said he probably better get out Celsius. Hey,
Travis Wright: you probably after is looking like a bunch of bullshit. Hmm.
Travis Wright: We had to.
Joel Comm: Invite them back. Yeah, we had to bring him back again. He's.
Joel Comm: He's got a lot of content. Many words were excited
Joel Comm: to talk about him. And we've got a bonus segment
Joel Comm: that is not in the show where he's going to
Joel Comm: give his take on Nfts. We want to give that NFT.
Joel Comm: We want to give that clip to you in the
Joel Comm: form of an NFT for free. We'll tell you how
Joel Comm: you can get it here. After the interview, by the way.
Joel Comm: Welcome to the Bad Crypto podcast. I'm Joel Klein. Thank you.
Travis Wright: Thank you, Joel. I was excited to show up today.
Joel Comm: Yeah, it's good. It's good that you're here.
Travis Wright: I'm here. You're here. And if you don't have the
Travis Wright: nifty club right there, you need to go do it.
Travis Wright: You can go to bad crypto dot uncut dot FM
Travis Wright: and get one. It's like .002 if it's very low,
Travis Wright: because we want to just, you know, we didn't want
Travis Wright: the boss to grab a bunch because that's how they roll.
Travis Wright: And we're not trying to have fake our numbers in anything.
Travis Wright: We're going to do our drop with the drop in
Travis Wright: and we're going to start dropping even more cool things
Travis Wright: in there. So you guys.
Joel Comm: We've dropped three so far, and I guess we'll tell
Joel Comm: you about it now instead of after the interview. But
Joel Comm: you need this bad crypto nifty club membership. Go ahead
Joel Comm: and grab yours and you're going to need to have
Joel Comm: this one. Let's see the this episode is dropping on,
Joel Comm: I believe, Sunday the 20th. So you need to have
Joel Comm: one of these in your wallet by Thanksgiving Day. And
Joel Comm: then and then once you've got it, you're entitled to
Joel Comm: all the free drops that we give as well as
Joel Comm: other benefits. So far, there have been three drops. Exclusive Nfts.
Joel Comm: And we want to give you the Brad Mill's bonus NFT.
Joel Comm: His thoughts on NFT is it's a two minute video
Joel Comm: clip NFT exclusive for you guys. But let's find out
Joel Comm: what Brad thinks about everything. But NFT is now in
Joel Comm: this exclusive interview with him. This is a really rare moment.
Joel Comm: I think our guest today is the fastest repeat guest
Joel Comm: we've ever had on this show. Travis, it was May
Joel Comm: 15th of this year that we had. Brad Mill's on
Joel Comm: to talk about Stablecoin lunacy, which would have been episode number.
Joel Comm: Let me consult my notes here. Episode number 608. But
Joel Comm: there's been so much happening in the crypto world, and
Joel Comm: I'm going to owe Brad a personal thank you here
Joel Comm: in a moment. But first I want to welcome him
Joel Comm: back to Bat Crypto. How are you doing, man?
Brad Mills: I'm doing all right. Now, as you know, I've got
Brad Mills: heavy bags of Bitcoin that I'm carrying through the mountain
Brad Mills: in the storm, but I'm doing all right. Otherwise I
Brad Mills: expected this. So I'm not surprised by sudden drops in
Brad Mills: my net worth. I was. I was. I was waiting
Brad Mills: for it. Just never happy to see it happen, but
Brad Mills: sucks for all the other people that are, you know,
Brad Mills: not heeding warnings. And we're stuck in FDX and Celsius
Brad Mills: and stuff like that. But yeah, thanks for bringing me back.
Joel Comm: Well, let me start with the the. Thank you. It
Joel Comm: was having you on the show. I hardly lost anything
Joel Comm: with USD or low, and I just had little trace
Joel Comm: amounts in there. I know a lot of people really
Joel Comm: got hurt, but when you were on the show, we
Joel Comm: talked about Celsius and some other defi platforms and you
Joel Comm: raise the red flag over Celsius. And I was like,
Joel Comm: You know what? I'm going to listen to this guy.
Joel Comm: And I pulled a substantial amount of money out of
Joel Comm: stablecoin that I hand Celsius. I think now my account
Joel Comm: has maybe 25, $30 left in it, and it was
Joel Comm: two weeks before they locked it down. So. Dom All right.
Brad Mills: So that's good to hear. I'm glad I helped a
Brad Mills: couple of people, man. That's good to hear that. That
Brad Mills: you listen, that was a bunch of people were just
Brad Mills: kind of. Then you're just a maxy. You just don't
Brad Mills: like anything about Bitcoin and you're just flooding. So, I mean,
Brad Mills: that's what happens with tribalism. So people get kind of convinced,
Brad Mills: you know, that the guy that founded the project is
Brad Mills: good and they would never scam and but yeah, no,
Brad Mills: thanks for that. That means a lot that I helped
Brad Mills: you and I got a couple of texts from friends
Brad Mills: as well that, you know, one of my friends had
Brad Mills: a think it was he said he had put $1,000,000
Brad Mills: into Celsius. He's an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur friend of mine
Brad Mills: that it's sold his business. And I was like, Dude,
Brad Mills: get that out. Like it's not worth the risk. And
Brad Mills: he did. He took it out, thankfully. And another friend
Brad Mills: who's a a Bitcoin kind of like he's like a
Brad Mills: fund manager type of guy for $10 million in Celsius. And,
Brad Mills: and I mean, that's that's a significant amount of money, right?
Brad Mills: So he was initially skeptical to take it out. He
Brad Mills: was saying things like, well, the Ontario or the Quebec
Brad Mills: pension fund did due diligence on Celsius. They wouldn't have
Brad Mills: invested institutional money if this wasn't a safe platform. And
Brad Mills: I was just thinking, man, like, you know, Bernie Madoff
Brad Mills: was the chairman of Nasdaq for many years. He ran
Brad Mills: a successful Ponzi scheme. Institutional investors are just as dumb
Brad Mills: as the rest of us when it comes to FOMO.
Brad Mills: They just that the greed and the the the relationship
Brad Mills: kind of clout you want to be able to get
Brad Mills: to associate with somebody that's on fire and on a
Brad Mills: rocket ship. It clouds judgment. And thankfully, after a little
Brad Mills: bit of cajoling me and a couple of friends and
Brad Mills: convincing him he took his money off, too. So it's
Brad Mills: we've definitely heard stories of people that we've helped the
Brad Mills: Bitcoin Maxis have helped people get out. So I'm glad
Brad Mills: that you were able to get out. You weren't hurt
Brad Mills: by that.
Travis Wright: Look at all the millions that you have saved people.
Travis Wright: I mean, that's great, right in itself. So we know
Travis Wright: FCX is a big W what what FCX what just
Travis Wright: went on. We've talked about it. We saw that it happened.
Travis Wright: I don't know how deep we want to go in
Travis Wright: that right now. What do we want to do we
Travis Wright: want to go into and talk about or you know,
Travis Wright: I think we.
Joel Comm: Could talk a little bit about it. But you you
Joel Comm: warned about this as well, right? When when were you
Joel Comm: talking about FCX?
Brad Mills: And yeah, I mean.
Joel Comm: The red flag.
Brad Mills: Back back in January when I started first paying attention
Brad Mills: to the large growth in defi Ponzi schemes like Ohm Protocol,
Brad Mills: Wonderland Protocol, Terra Luna. I started to realize that this
Brad Mills: massive bubble was going to blow up the same as
Brad Mills: that as other bubbles and Ponzi in the traditional markets
Brad Mills: have before, because they've basically just rebuilt everything that was
Brad Mills: toxic and over leveraged nonsense from the traditional markets in crypto.
Brad Mills: And they called it innovation and they put it on
Brad Mills: a blockchain and called it Defi. Well, it doesn't take
Brad Mills: like a lot of digging to start to realize it's unsustainable,
Brad Mills: like to be able to get that kind of yield, ten, 20%
Brad Mills: yield when we're at like historically low interest rates in
Brad Mills: traditional markets, something risky, extremely risky is going on there.
Brad Mills: And every time that there was a huge hack like
Brad Mills: the Wormhole Bridge got hacked or there was a problem
Brad Mills: with the Luna, the Luna, you know, exit door, the
Brad Mills: protocol only had a certain amount of liquidity for you
Brad Mills: to get out to to burn the USD tokens and
Brad Mills: turn it back into Luna and then sell the Luna
Brad Mills: like there's only so much liquidity. And as these things
Brad Mills: grow so big, they just become unsustainable. And FTI actually
Brad Mills: Alameda through your capital jump, which is another one that
Brad Mills: still hasn't gone down yet, that's at risk of it.
Brad Mills: And a bunch of other big huge VC firms like
Brad Mills: Paradigm and A16z and all these like bellwether VC brands.
Brad Mills: I mean, they're all kind of doing all this to
Brad Mills: Jenner and stuff and bailing out all these hacks that
Brad Mills: always happen in Defi and trying to provide liquidity into
Brad Mills: the system like a central bank does. And we saw
Brad Mills: this at the turn of the century in the 1920s
Brad Mills: when the stock market sort of when the big panic happened,
Brad Mills: the stock market crash, there was a lot of risky
Brad Mills: overleverage nonsense happening and JPMorgan would go around and like
Brad Mills: actually give cash to pensions and insurance funds and banks
Brad Mills: to try to keep the wheels greased so that, you know,
Brad Mills: you don't see liquidity lock ups because when you see
Brad Mills: the liquidity lock up. That's when you run into big
Brad Mills: problems because people start to panic and they have fear
Brad Mills: and then they start to pull their money out and
Brad Mills: that's when you get a run on the bank. So
Brad Mills: you have this like huge growth of people just thinking
Brad Mills: they're so smart and they're investing all their money, they're
Brad Mills: making tons of money, and then a bunch of retail
Brad Mills: gets sucked in because they see their they see the
Brad Mills: FOMO of all these returns that everybody else are making.
Brad Mills: So the retail players come in, they're not as sophisticated.
Brad Mills: And then there's all this like reputation sort of osmosis
Brad Mills: that happens where somebody wants to invest in this superstar
Brad Mills: because they want to be associated with them and they
Brad Mills: don't necessarily do any due diligence. So they don't they
Brad Mills: don't they say like, oh, well, so-and-so is in, so
Brad Mills: I don't need to do my due diligence. You know,
Brad Mills: A16z is and I don't need to do my due diligence.
Brad Mills: They already did it. We're just going to we're just
Brad Mills: going to jump into this rocket ship. So then you
Brad Mills: get into this situation where it just grows too big
Brad Mills: and it's all unsustainable. So back in January, you started
Brad Mills: to see like these these guys that were really trying
Brad Mills: to act like the central bankers of all this defi
Brad Mills: and crypto lending and yield farming and all that stuff,
Brad Mills: bailing out to the tune of hundreds of millions of
Brad Mills: dollars of well, like every month Jump Capital had to
Brad Mills: bail out the wormhole bridge for 300 million FDX Alameda
Brad Mills: 3 hours capital like all these guys were each kind
Brad Mills: of doing these bailouts and it was hundreds of millions
Brad Mills: of dollars every time it was happening. And even in
Brad Mills: the case of Luna, it was to the tune of,
Brad Mills: I think, two or 3 billion, wasn't it, that they
Brad Mills: announced they were going to put up to. Yes. For
Brad Mills: the LFG.
Travis Wright: Yeah. So I got I got a question around that though.
Travis Wright: So would you say that pretty much all defi at
Travis Wright: this point is a scam? Because when I first saw Defi,
Travis Wright: I was like, do I just not understand this or
Travis Wright: does this kind of seem like a Ponzi? They're literally
Travis Wright: printing money from nowhere. And so I was always like,
Travis Wright: What the hell's the deal on that? I never fully
Travis Wright: got it. I didn't think unless it just seems like
Travis Wright: it's maybe a scam.
Brad Mills: Well, I do believe that it's built on unethical foundation,
Brad Mills: an unethical foundation, and like a sort of a Griffey
Brad Mills: insider game. Whale whale game that most of crypto is
Brad Mills: actually where they they see the reason why jump and
Brad Mills: a16z and all these folks will bail out defi and
Brad Mills: crypto companies and stuff because they own massive bags of
Brad Mills: tokens and they are also providing liquidity and making the
Brad Mills: markets and they can, they can use this meteoric success
Brad Mills: of the irrational idea that you can just print a
Brad Mills: token and then market make it on your exchange or
Brad Mills: put in a hundred or $200 million of liquidity in
Brad Mills: a defi protocol and say that that's valuable. I mean,
Brad Mills: SBF himself described this back in April, May as basically
Brad Mills: a black box Ponzi scam when he was talking to
Brad Mills: Joe Weisenthal on an odd lot. And I mean, they
Brad Mills: were very surprised that he acknowledged that like what they
Brad Mills: had built was basically Ponzi scams. And SBF at the
Brad Mills: time said something critical. He said, If the world decides
Brad Mills: that what we did was okay, then you guys are wrong,
Brad Mills: you know, by saying by judging that this is not
Brad Mills: ethical and it's not right and it's illegal and it's
Brad Mills: a Ponzi scheme, but if the world decides in a
Brad Mills: coordinated way that what we did was wrong, then we're
Brad Mills: going to be in trouble. So so they were all
Brad Mills: of these guys were clearly aware that what they were doing,
Brad Mills: this whole foundation of defi yield farming daos nft, like
Brad Mills: all this stuff that they use to pump coins and
Brad Mills: just call it web3, it's no different than the last
Brad Mills: cycle that we all saw happen, which is ICOs and
Brad Mills: master node coins giving you yield and all this stuff.
Brad Mills: It got disproven. The SEC came out and said that
Brad Mills: this is not in compliance, but the idea that you
Brad Mills: could just do it with smart contracts, you know, instead
Brad Mills: of people and companies issuing tokens, it's like, oh, a
Brad Mills: smart contract is issuing the tokens, but we're just going
Brad Mills: to preeminent with our huge billion dollars of liquidity that
Brad Mills: we just plop into the defi protocol. So the form
Brad Mills: of defi that got built on crypto is extremely risky,
Brad Mills: mostly unethical grift that just gets VCs and insiders rich
Brad Mills: because they're the ones that preeminent and they're the ones
Brad Mills: that have the massive pools of liquidity to put in
Brad Mills: to get all the tokens out. And then what does.
Joel Comm: This mean then too, to Ethereum? What do you you know,
Joel Comm: what what are your thoughts on Vitalik and Ethereum and
Joel Comm: the whole RC 20 and all of the protocols? I
Joel Comm: know what you think about NFT. She told us about
Joel Comm: that last time, but let's just go right to the,
Joel Comm: you know, the root of it.
Brad Mills: Well, so, so to, to kind of like answer the
Brad Mills: first question. I never fully got to the end of
Brad Mills: like it is all related and it's kind of confusing.
Brad Mills: You got to you got to draw one of those
Brad Mills: like conspiracy maps out on the board and like, put
Brad Mills: all the pins together to sort of connect this narrative
Brad Mills: in this logic. Summing it up, you asked, like, was
Brad Mills: it obvious that FDX was going to come down? And
Brad Mills: I described the the foundation that this whole thing was
Brad Mills: built on and how that enabled extreme risk taking and
Brad Mills: suspension of logic to be able to value something like
Brad Mills: an FTT token and in the multimillions tens of billions
Brad Mills: of of range. And there's lots of examples of that.
Brad Mills: It's not just FTT token, there's lots of tokens that
Brad Mills: are just. Michael Saylor's been calling them air tokens. You know,
Brad Mills: they're just, they're just full of hot air. And it
Brad Mills: really is kind of insidious because the VCs hold bags
Brad Mills: of it. The VCs are the liquidity pool providers, and
Brad Mills: the traders work with the VCs to do market making
Brad Mills: and mark the price up and keep the price as high.
Brad Mills: So they do that and then they borrow against the tokens.
Brad Mills: That's the worst part. They borrow against them and use
Brad Mills: them as collateral, borrow against them, and then go pump
Brad Mills: more stuff in Defi and crypto. They just go.
Joel Comm: I have to follow up to that because you're mentioning
Joel Comm: that there's you know, there's others. You know, let's go
Joel Comm: ahead issue the warning, in your opinion, as we look
Joel Comm: at Defi here in Coingecko, you know which of these
Joel Comm: coins have the biggest red flag for you.
Brad Mills: So. The way that I see that this contagion continuing
Brad Mills: to play out is not necessarily. A specific coin right
Brad Mills: now that's going to go down. I think if anybody
Brad Mills: lived through the bear market of 2018 and 2019 and
Brad Mills: maybe even participated in the soft market where people in 2017,
Brad Mills: the soft market was like super hot, like Telegram ICO,
Brad Mills: for example, was this really exclusive ICO that, you know,
Brad Mills: they had raised a couple billion dollars from private investors
Brad Mills: and a lot of the crypto funds and crypto traders
Brad Mills: were just really wanted to get a piece of the
Brad Mills: telegram ICO.
Travis Wright: I would also say this is that in that time
Travis Wright: there's not a lot you could do with your theory, right?
Travis Wright: If you had a theory of what you could do
Travis Wright: with it, why you could trade it and use it
Travis Wright: to buy some things, but it was mostly participate in ICOs.
Travis Wright: There wasn't a whole lot of stuff you could do
Travis Wright: with your theory. And yet in 2017, 18.
Brad Mills: Well, so. So we're back. We're in that we're in
Brad Mills: that cycle where Etherium was. Pumped from what was a
Brad Mills: $10 to 1400 dollars or something like that in 2017.
Brad Mills: January 2018 was the peak, and that's based on the
Brad Mills: back of the whole dapp. NFT CryptoKitties was the first one,
Brad Mills: but Dapps and Nfts and ICOs, that was really what
Brad Mills: drove a lot of FOMO into the Ethereum token because
Brad Mills: you had to go buy Ethereum to go buy an
Brad Mills: ICO or to use, you know, CryptoKitties. And that was
Brad Mills: really what drove the demand for Etherium along with just
Brad Mills: general crypto FOMO, because when Bitcoin goes up, you have this,
Brad Mills: this like rising tides thing because the regulators hadn't given
Brad Mills: clear guidance as to what these things all are. So
Brad Mills: in 2017, there was no clear guidance that like maybe
Brad Mills: a theory and was a security and there was risk there.
Brad Mills: Maybe Ripple's a security, maybe 90% of the stuff is
Brad Mills: securities and they shouldn't be traded on regulated exchanges. There
Brad Mills: was no clear guidance yet. So the thing went crazy.
Brad Mills: And then what happened through 2018 and 2019. People started
Brad Mills: to reel while the SEC started coming out with clear
Brad Mills: guidance that you couldn't do unregistered securities offerings. They announced
Brad Mills: that the Dow was a security, the original Dow was
Brad Mills: a security, and the original Ethereum ICO was the securities offering.
Brad Mills: They didn't make any specific concrete statements as to whether
Brad Mills: or not it was a security currently, but they clearly
Brad Mills: said that if you're doing an unregistered ICO thing, you're
Brad Mills: not in compliance with securities laws and that the original
Brad Mills: sale of Ethereum was a security and then Bitcoin was
Brad Mills: not because it wasn't sold to anybody. So bitcoin's the
Brad Mills: only sort of real decentralized property that exists in the
Brad Mills: crypto space. And so that's where you were in 2017
Brad Mills: and 2018 and 19 after the SEC came out with
Brad Mills: their statements. It took a good year for people to realize,
Brad Mills: wait a second, this market's done like Ethereum's going down
Brad Mills: for a long time. Crypto is just going to go cratered.
Brad Mills: It's either going to go -95% or to zero in
Brad Mills: most cases, because people that had all this FOMO to
Brad Mills: try to get SAFT that they had missed in the
Brad Mills: bull run. They were buying things still at about this time,
Brad Mills: say October, November 2018, which is about exactly where we
Brad Mills: are in the timeline of this bear market, where at
Brad Mills: October we're in November 2022, which is very much the
Brad Mills: same as November 2018. People started realizing, Wait a second,
Brad Mills: maybe I shouldn't be buying softs for these hot ICOs
Brad Mills: that I couldn't afford or couldn't get access to in
Brad Mills: 2017 at a at a 50% 60% discount. Maybe I'm
Brad Mills: actually burning my money. And what I should be doing
Brad Mills: is selling everything and going into Bitcoin or just taking
Brad Mills: my money back. If you're not convicted enough on Bitcoin
Brad Mills: to hold it like just, just go back into dollars
Brad Mills: and leave because everybody had the hope them and the
Brad Mills: fuel of all that excitement and all the money that
Brad Mills: they were making in the in the bubble. And they
Brad Mills: never reconciled it until probably mid, you know, like early 2019,
Brad Mills: people started realizing like the SEC is not backing down
Brad Mills: from all these non-compliant ICOs and all this stuff is way,
Brad Mills: way overvalued. So all these all these people that that
Brad Mills: used to buy ICOs and like, you know, there was
Brad Mills: Dexs back then. Ether Delta was a popular dex. Bancor
Brad Mills: was a popular dex. People were using ether. There was
Brad Mills: lots of pairs you could trade against. There was a
Brad Mills: kyber network and zero protocol. Like there was a whole
Brad Mills: bunch of defi stuff that was built back then and
Brad Mills: people were using these for it, but it still didn't
Brad Mills: prevent the absolute carnage in the markets. In 2019, as
Brad Mills: people started to realize that all this stuff was not
Brad Mills: in compliance and, you know, it was like a liquidity
Brad Mills: squeeze and everybody just wanted liquidity. That's what the story
Brad Mills: of 2009 was. Everybody just wanted liquidity. So the bid
Brad Mills: for SAFT just completely disappeared. There was a bunch of
Brad Mills: funds that went bankrupt and then a bunch of saft
Brad Mills: got dumped onto the market and people were just realizing, Wait,
Brad Mills: everybody's trying to get their money back. A bunch of
Brad Mills: these ICO projects were just selling their ease to get
Brad Mills: back the dollars because the price of ether's cratering. It
Brad Mills: was down like 60% or 70%. So it was a
Brad Mills: game of chicken where the ICOs that had raised hundreds
Brad Mills: of millions of dollars realized we were going to have
Brad Mills: to fund our projects. And if it keeps going down,
Brad Mills: we need to sell. At the beginning, in the in
Brad Mills: the rah raw bull market, everybody was thinking like, I
Brad Mills: won't sell if you won't sell, because if we all
Brad Mills: hold our ETH, it's going to go up in price
Brad Mills: and then we'll all be on the moon, right? But
Brad Mills: as the bear market grinded on slowly, it was just
Brad Mills: nothing but like negative negative pressures and contagion from people
Brad Mills: realizing they have to sell all that ETH treasury and
Brad Mills: there's really nothing you can do with ETHE in the
Brad Mills: ICO markets. And the SEC shut down ether Delta. They
Brad Mills: find the founder and they made them shut it down.
Brad Mills: So it was clear like they came out and stated
Brad Mills: like these decentralized exchanges are not in compliance because all
Brad Mills: they do is enable a run on registered securities trading.
Brad Mills: So we like we had a.
Travis Wright: Going to leave that we got to leave that for
Travis Wright: the for the real criminals in in capital at.
Brad Mills: Wall Street.
Travis Wright: Yeah yeah wild street on Capitol Hill. We got to
Travis Wright: leave that to them.
Brad Mills: Well, look, part of it is that they had you know,
Brad Mills: and this is not it's not bad to acknowledge this
Brad Mills: like they have a monopoly, a monopoly on money laundering
Brad Mills: and crime in the traditional banking system. I mean, so
Brad Mills: you think about it like they have such a stranglehold.
Brad Mills: They have law on their side. They have the guns. Right.
Brad Mills: They are not just going to sit by and allow
Brad Mills: token creators and VCs in Silicon Valley and, you know,
Brad Mills: quant devs over in the Bahamas to be able to
Brad Mills: just like take over the business and decentralize them and
Brad Mills: disintermediate Wall Street and Capitol Hill, they're not going to
Brad Mills: allow that. So obviously they're going to use the SEC,
Brad Mills: they're going to use the the DOJ and the FATF
Brad Mills: regulations and FinCEN and all these regulators that they already
Brad Mills: have put in place to to sort of keep their
Brad Mills: control of everything. They're going to use it and. So
Brad Mills: the way that, like, you know, all this was a
Brad Mills: nonsense bubble. In 2017, we realized it. We saw the
Brad Mills: flush out in 2018, 19. Everybody learned lessons. Well, what
Brad Mills: happens in 2020? You know, the Federal Reserve starts pumping
Brad Mills: trillions of dollars into the markets, keeps interest rates lower
Brad Mills: than they've ever been in history. And then and like
Brad Mills: the regulators just stand back and think that because they
Brad Mills: made all these statements before, they're not going to have
Brad Mills: to deal with crypto anymore because it's all dead. Andreessen
Brad Mills: Horowitz and all these big VC firm start just basically
Brad Mills: was trading and pumping money into into this new thing
Brad Mills: that they called liquidity mining or yield farming. They created
Brad Mills: this yield farming concept in 2020. And so they piled
Brad Mills: hundreds of millions of dollars. And this is where the
Brad Mills: Alameda team, like the FDX team, started to really shine
Brad Mills: because they were like first in that Ponzi. And they
Brad Mills: created their own like they created the Solana blockchain with
Brad Mills: serum Dex and FTT Token and a whole bunch of
Brad Mills: other ICO things that they launched, which were all defi
Brad Mills: sort of like related projects to compete with Ethereum and
Brad Mills: the Andreessen Horowitz paradigm, Coinbase, Ethereum, maximalist crowd. And then
Brad Mills: there was Binance at the same time doing they launch
Brad Mills: Binance Smart Chain. They decided, Well, we want to compete
Brad Mills: with Ethereum's broken any way. The fees are $1,000 to
Brad Mills: unwrap your bitcoin. If you wanted to put bitcoin on,
Brad Mills: wrap it on Ethereum and use it for Defi and
Brad Mills: then take it off, you'd be paying $1,000 in fees
Brad Mills: just to get it off. So Solana and Binance and
Brad Mills: all these other layer ones started to compete and they
Brad Mills: all started to doing the same like infrastructure funds where
Brad Mills: they would basically put up $1,000,000,000 of capital of, of
Brad Mills: like honeypot capital to get devs to come fork things
Brad Mills: over from Ethereum and build on Solana and build on Avalanche.
Brad Mills: And all you saw was really the rise of like
Brad Mills: legitimate nonsense Ponzi schemes like Ohm and Wonderland and stuff
Brad Mills: like that. Which, if anybody had got caught, knows I'm sorry,
Brad Mills: but they grew to multimillions as well. I know that's
Brad Mills: called rebasing.
Travis Wright: Come on.
Brad Mills: Yeah, the rebasing, the remake.
Travis Wright: We saw it. We were like, What the hell is this?
Travis Wright: I played around with this a little bit, you know,
Travis Wright: on it. And I was like, what.
Brad Mills: 50,000% a y told?
Travis Wright: How is this?
Brad Mills: Yeah, totally logical. All right. 50,000.
Travis Wright: Why so low? 50,000? AP And so so we're talking about.
Brad Mills: Some of them were millions. I remember Kim she was
Brad Mills: one that was in Defi summer 2020 and at one
Brad Mills: point was 1,000,000% API. But obviously there's a whole slew
Brad Mills: of like really risky nonsense stuff, but then there are
Brad Mills: some things that they actually built in Defi that were
Brad Mills: interesting from a technology perspective, like the concept of being
Brad Mills: able to do a decentralized exchange is, is a worthwhile
Brad Mills: thing to try to build the idea of uniswap. Actually,
Brad Mills: it was funny, the founder of Uniswap Hayden Adams, I
Brad Mills: think his name is, he was like pissed off that
Brad Mills: bank or raised so much money and did an ICO
Brad Mills: and launched a bank or token B and he was
Brad Mills: like this kind of Cypherpunk esque Ethereum dev. I don't
Brad Mills: think he had any perverse incentives or was a bad
Brad Mills: guy or anything like that. I kind of respected him.
Brad Mills: He was like pissed off that they had raised $100
Brad Mills: million in launched token. He's like, You don't need a
Brad Mills: token to do in a decentralized exchange. So he forked
Brad Mills: the code and he just ripped out the token and
Brad Mills: he just made uniswap And people started to use Uniswap
Brad Mills: because there was no need for a token. So that
Brad Mills: actually got people using it. Some people, I mean, and then.
Travis Wright: He created a token.
Brad Mills: And then more. Yeah, exactly. Then the VCs invested in
Brad Mills: them and they launched a token, made themselves $1,000,000,000 printing
Brad Mills: these defi tokens. It just clearly shows that there's like
Brad Mills: nothing but perverse incentives here. And like, there is some
Brad Mills: truth when people say like, Oh, well, you can use
Brad Mills: decentralized exchange, you can use all the liberal end protocols,
Brad Mills: there's there's some curve and yearn and compound and all
Brad Mills: these different like Lego blocks or whatever you want to
Brad Mills: call them, decentralized finance primitives. Yes, the technology in some
Brad Mills: cases is interesting, but that doesn't mean that it validates
Brad Mills: the idea that you can just launch a token based
Brad Mills: on that and a token has any value. And we've
Brad Mills: seen that because a year and a half ago I
Brad Mills: went on Kobe's podcast up only with Kobe Ledger, Peter
Brad Mills: McCormick and Udi Worth. WERTHEIMER And I pretty much was
Brad Mills: predicting the collapse of the defi tokens. They were all
Brad Mills: calling me like a boom or maxi saying, you know,
Brad Mills: you just don't understand it. You don't think anything but
Brad Mills: Bitcoin is valuable. And I'm saying like, no, like fundamentally,
Brad Mills: you guys are in a bubble logic. You're drinking Kool-Aid.
Brad Mills: Look at the valuation of these defi tokens. Even even
Brad Mills: if we suspend the the Bitcoin or logic and, you know,
Brad Mills: I'm just going to come at this neutral, right? And
Brad Mills: I'm going to say, okay, let's say that curve has
Brad Mills: its token and we treat curve like a decentralized stock
Brad Mills: and not in a bad way, not like it's a
Brad Mills: securities thing. The SEC has to shut it down, nothing
Brad Mills: like that. Just say that you value it like a stock. Well,
Brad Mills: like a company you value with something called the price
Brad Mills: to earnings ratio, the p e ratio. And you look
Brad Mills: at a lot of stocks in the in the in
Brad Mills: the public markets and they're way overvalued. A lot of
Brad Mills: tech stocks, a lot of tech stocks are like 20, 30,
Brad Mills: 40 x p e ratios, which is just crazy. But
Brad Mills: then you look at Defi and they were like 100 x,
Brad Mills: 200 x, 400 x p e ratios because these tokens,
Brad Mills: they kind of earn a like a an earn mechanic
Brad Mills: where if the protocol generates, say, $1,000,000 a day in
Brad Mills: swapping fees, then a portion of that is shared back
Brad Mills: to the curve token holders. So I mean, literally it's
Brad Mills: like a security, but it's decentralized, right? So you can't,
Brad Mills: you know, whatever. But let's just forget about that argument
Brad Mills: and say, okay, well, if you value this thing based
Brad Mills: on fundamental logic, then that chart you just showed me
Brad Mills: of all the coingecko defi index, everything is way overvalued.
Brad Mills: Even still, even though we've gone through this bear market
Brad Mills: so far a year in or whatever, things are still
Brad Mills: extremely overvalued because if you look at their p e
Brad Mills: ratios or how much, how many fees they generate and
Brad Mills: pay back to the token holders, it's insanely overvalued. So
Brad Mills: I don't want to say that like Curv token is
Brad Mills: a Ponzi scheme because I want to be correct in
Brad Mills: my criticism curve. Token is not a Ponzi scheme, okay?
Brad Mills: But what they did do was build a Ponzi scheme
Brad Mills: on top of curve token, they built this thing called
Brad Mills: convex and convex is like a bribery mechanism that only
Brad Mills: the only goal of the convex protocol is to buy
Brad Mills: up as many curve tokens as possible and then allow
Brad Mills: protocol owners to bribe the convex token holders to allow
Brad Mills: them to get on to curve. I mean, it's insane.
Brad Mills: It's like. Literally. It's just a protocol for for unethical behavior.
Brad Mills: Convex is just the most insane. It's a Ponzi nomics.
Brad Mills: It's a Ponzi Anomic mechanic on top.
Travis Wright: Horror nomics. I love.
Brad Mills: It is. It's not tokenomics. It's Ponzi nomics. Yeah.
Travis Wright: So let me ask you this then. So, you know,
Travis Wright: some people are saying, okay, you have the crypto market,
Travis Wright: $1,000,000,000,000 already. Like, what is it worth that much? I mean,
Travis Wright: I got up to 11. Remember the top top two
Travis Wright: something trillion. Here we are, way less than that.
Joel Comm: Three, three and a half. I want to say three.
Travis Wright: And a half trillion. Wow. Okay. Yeah. So I look
Travis Wright: at some of these. I was like, well, what exactly
Travis Wright: does this do to be worth several billion dollars right now? Like,
Travis Wright: that was my thing with one of the tokens that
Travis Wright: I hit on. And I was like, wait a second,
Travis Wright: there's no way that economy v v the where my
Travis Wright: token is worth $2.6 billion right now. I right as
Travis Wright: I do, this is the top. You got to sell it.
Travis Wright: At least that's what that's what I try to scream
Travis Wright: from the mountains selling and and people are you're an idiot.
Travis Wright: You don't even know. And I was like, well, I
Travis Wright: know that they don't do two and a half billion
Travis Wright: dollars worth of business right now.
Brad Mills: Right? Dude? Like it was nuts at the top of
Brad Mills: the bubble. And this is why we get to the
Brad Mills: place where people overlook fraud, like what's happening with Alameda
Brad Mills: and what's still happening in crypto markets with a lot
Brad Mills: of the people are just trying to deflect blame and say, Oh,
Brad Mills: Sam Bankman-fried was a fraud. He's scammed banks for fraud.
Brad Mills: He's not he's not us. We're that's not defi or
Brad Mills: crypto like don't blame us but really it's they are
Brad Mills: all in this incestuous like circlejerk of like token trading
Brad Mills: and liquidity mining like wash trading basically and pre mining
Brad Mills: and dumping on people and elevating this logic that like
Brad Mills: a JPEG monkey picture can be worth $1,000,000 or a
Brad Mills: curve token can have a 400 x p e ratio.
Brad Mills: And it makes any kind of sense sense or an.
Travis Wright: Occasional sense like, you know, a price to earnings ratio,
Travis Wright: here's the price, here's the earnings. Seriously, when you're talking
Travis Wright: about the stock market, maybe it's a ten x, maybe
Travis Wright: it's a there's a 1010 X price to earnings in crypto.
Travis Wright: It seems like something that doesn't even apply.
Brad Mills: Yeah, I mean, and this is me trying to be
Brad Mills: generous and not say like these are all scams and
Brad Mills: bitcoin's only thing you should pay attention to. I'm trying
Brad Mills: to like, take the, like, unbiased middle ground here as
Brad Mills: much as I possibly can, because I'm very much like
Brad Mills: moral and pugnacious. You know, I have this moral and
Brad Mills: pugnacious when I look at all this stuff because it's
Brad Mills: just like I know that there's some person, some VC
Brad Mills: taking advantage of retail people just printing all this money
Brad Mills: by selling people on the narrative that defies the future.
Brad Mills: And this is web3 and you're in control and blah blah,
Brad Mills: blah when it's them. The same people that ruined Web
Brad Mills: two are actually just coming in here pre mining everything
Brad Mills: and launching it out and then selling it to you saying, Oh,
Brad Mills: this is a read, write own, this is web3 you
Brad Mills: own it. And now it's the VCs that ruined the first,
Brad Mills: like the last version of the internet are pre mining
Brad Mills: and selling you dog shit and making you believe it's,
Brad Mills: you know, you know, drinking the Kool-Aid, believing it's the future.
Brad Mills: When I loved.
Travis Wright: I love dog shit. Dog shit is my favorite.
Joel Comm: He likes to coin. Which begs the question about the
Joel Comm: elephant in the living room. Or in this case, the donkey,
Joel Comm: even left leaning Axios, is bringing this story out right
Joel Comm: now that millions of dollars millions went from Bankman-fried. I
Joel Comm: think he was the second biggest donor to Democratic campaigns. And,
Joel Comm: you know, the midterms just happened. There are accusations out
Joel Comm: there that this was one of the biggest money laundering scandals,
Joel Comm: like this is the biggest thing since Enron to happen.
Joel Comm: You know, I don't know where you are at politically,
Joel Comm: but on its face, does it appear like there's some
Joel Comm: really shady stuff going on with with crypto, the Democratic Party, Ukraine,
Joel Comm: all of this, is it all mixed together?
Brad Mills: In some ways? I think it is. I think that
Brad Mills: there's there's two kind of. Ways to look at the
Brad Mills: way that Sam was donating money to the Democrats. There's. Let's.
Brad Mills: Assume just capitalist intent. Okay. Let's just assume he was
Brad Mills: a capitalist and he got overseas, you know, by stealing
Brad Mills: customers money and trying to trade with it. Let's just
Brad Mills: say he got overseas. Let's say he's not, you know, like, okay,
Brad Mills: let's just go on that logic path. So he's a capitalist.
Brad Mills: He's trying to make as much money as he can.
Brad Mills: He's trying to build the biggest exchange as he possibly can,
Brad Mills: and he's trying to get regulations passed for crypto so
Brad Mills: that he doesn't get regulated out of existence so that
Brad Mills: the world doesn't come together in a coordinated way to
Brad Mills: figure out this was all Ponzi scams and send them
Brad Mills: into jail. So let's say that's the path. Well, it
Brad Mills: would make sense because, you know, his his family, like
Brad Mills: he has political connections and he's you know, the thing is,
Brad Mills: his mom was at MIT or something like that, like
Brad Mills: his dad's a lawyer that worked, I think with SEC
Brad Mills: or something. There's there's there's definitely connections there. Government and
Brad Mills: and you know, the elite of the top universities of
Brad Mills: the United States. So he has pedigree so he's seasoned
Brad Mills: and he he can he can have doors open for
Brad Mills: him easier than somebody like Sisi who's, you know, like
Brad Mills: kind of playing fast and loose and shirking regulations. So
Brad Mills: so Sam starts to, like, want to engage with U.S. regulators.
Brad Mills: He sets up FDX U X U.S. I mean, he
Brad Mills: starts demonstrating to the Democratic Party. He starts to lobby
Brad Mills: lawmakers his. Carolyn, who is, you know, one of the
Brad Mills: people at Alameda, which is the sister company there who
Brad Mills: wasn't in charge until the the CEO, Sam Trabuco, stepped
Brad Mills: down back in August, which was a huge red flag
Brad Mills: to me. And I was tweeting about it that he
Brad Mills: stepped down. So she she kind of came in to
Brad Mills: lead Alameda and she has this connection in with Gary
Brad Mills: Gensler in this sort of like two degrees of separation
Brad Mills: and that there's a relationship between her father who worked
Brad Mills: with Gary at MIT and then some other like his boss.
Joel Comm: Okay, just say it. Yes, there's incestuous.
Brad Mills: There is.
Joel Comm: Happening here.
Brad Mills: There is. But there's two ways to look at it.
Brad Mills: Like for sure, no matter which way you look at it,
Brad Mills: there's definitely like he's greasing the wheels and trying to
Brad Mills: use money to influence regulators to, like, favorably give him
Brad Mills: better access and put him in a stronger position. So
Brad Mills: there's there's two ways to look at it. One is
Brad Mills: the conspiracy way and one is the capitalist sort of way.
Brad Mills: I'm like, in the middle. I kind of lean towards
Brad Mills: more of a conspiracy one on this one, because it
Brad Mills: sounds it's a little bit too, too crazy what happened
Brad Mills: with FDX.
Joel Comm: And this this adds fuel to it right here. The
Joel Comm: New York Times puts out a puff piece saying for years,
Joel Comm: we know New York Times is an extremely, you know,
Joel Comm: leftist Democrat leaning publication. It's not even up for debate.
Joel Comm: And they're getting called out on on this piece, of course,
Joel Comm: by their competition at The New York Post. But then
Joel Comm: you've got Brian Armstrong saying that Twitter is broke in
Joel Comm: just about every piece of New York Times is writing
Joel Comm: puff pieces on a criminal. For a criminal feels like
Joel Comm: a turning point for citizen journalism and loss of trust
Joel Comm: and MSM. Hello, Mr. Armstrong. Welcome to 2016 that this
Joel Comm: this is not new. This is more than six years old.
Joel Comm: But we saw it really begin to surface when Trump
Joel Comm: came down that escalator and all of a sudden journalism
Joel Comm: went out the window.
Brad Mills: I mean, it's been it's been a long it's it's
Brad Mills: been a long history of biased reporting that I don't
Brad Mills: think even started in 2016. I think it got worse
Brad Mills: as centralization happened more in the advertising and and social
Brad Mills: media news industry got worse and censorship.
Joel Comm: And they lost their minds when.
Brad Mills: Oh yeah, well.
Joel Comm: For sure that was it. That was like whatever wherever
Joel Comm: level of lunacy they were at, whatever trust they had,
Joel Comm: they're like, Screw it, We're going all in with our bias,
Joel Comm: whatever it means.
Brad Mills: Yeah, it's in. You can look at it like they
Brad Mills: the Democrats were kind of or Democratic Party received the
Brad Mills: most bonuses. You had Bill Clinton onstage at the FedEx
Brad Mills: conference there. It's it's obviously like they want to they
Brad Mills: want to kind of protect their own. They don't want
Brad Mills: to make it seem like they were complicit in this
Brad Mills: thing when when they really were. So they want to
Brad Mills: minimize the impact, of course. And it's super biased because,
Brad Mills: you know, they put this hit episode on Jesse Powell
Brad Mills: from crack and because he he was like kind of
Brad Mills: debating the the idea of cancel culture and things like that.
Brad Mills: And they were just like, offended morally that he would
Brad Mills: question the idea of like the the cancel culture thing.
Brad Mills: So they put out this scathing sort of hit piece
Brad Mills: on him. And then, yeah, once SBF comes out as
Brad Mills: a as an A massive fraud, they, they they don't
Brad Mills: want to like make it look like, oh that's the
Brad Mills: guy that was our guy. Right? That was, that was
Brad Mills: the guy that was the number one or number two
Brad Mills: donor to the Democratic Party. So, you know, 10 million
Brad Mills: or 11 million to Biden's campaign and was planning $1,000,000,000,
Brad Mills: you know, you saying is going to give $1,000,000,000 to
Brad Mills: Democratic politicians. But it's even it's even like less than
Brad Mills: the political thing. I think like on the capitalist sort
Brad Mills: of crypto side, the way that I look at it
Brad Mills: more is that, look, Sam was printing tens of billions
Brad Mills: of dollars just like Andreessen Horowitz, just like Coinbase Ventures,
Brad Mills: just like Binance, just like Three Arrows Capital was like
Brad Mills: all of these firms were doing the same degenerate like nonsense.
Brad Mills: In some ways it was fraud that they were just
Brad Mills: printing their own tokens and they were propping it up
Brad Mills: with this concept of web3 and defi and pumping it
Brad Mills: with billions of dollars of money and liquidity and like
Brad Mills: getting people like Katie Horne from A16 Crypto and like
Brad Mills: Balaji Srinivasan, who's a huge VC in the space to
Brad Mills: go on huge, influential podcast like the Tim Ferriss show
Brad Mills: and show this logic to people that you should, you
Brad Mills: should pay attention to Defi and put your money into it.
Brad Mills: And then obviously all the nonsense they did. But what
Brad Mills: the NFT is tying all that in to where they're
Brad Mills: literally paying celebrities to shill stuff, putting free stuff in
Brad Mills: their wallets and then putting them on the Jimmy Fallon show.
Brad Mills: I mean, there is a lot of nonsense going on.
Brad Mills: And when you think about it like Bitcoin. Is competing
Brad Mills: with every single other token on the planet. Every other
Brad Mills: cryptocurrency token is competing with Bitcoin. They're all trying to
Brad Mills: like suck away investor mindshare and dollars and store of value.
Brad Mills: People are people were treating JPEGs like store value. People
Brad Mills: were looking at other world or whatever the hell that
Brad Mills: thing was that the that the the ape people launched.
Brad Mills: As you know, if bitcoin's other side. Other side. Yeah.
Brad Mills: Bitcoin's too expensive for you, you know, by some, by
Brad Mills: some other side, by some ape coin. And it was
Brad Mills: being pushed by Coinbase and Robinhood and all these big
Brad Mills: retail exchanges. So from the top down, you had all these,
Brad Mills: all these people trying to push confusing bad logic out
Brad Mills: to investors and high net worth individuals like Mike Novogratz,
Brad Mills: who was literally shilling Ponzi scams like Luna to high
Brad Mills: net worth individuals, and Raul Paul from Real Vision, who
Brad Mills: was co-founder of Real Vision, was one of the biggest
Brad Mills: lunar shills there was and had all of his net
Brad Mills: worth and Luna there.
Travis Wright: Novogratz even got a Luna tattoo.
Brad Mills: Yeah. So like, look top down, you had all this
Brad Mills: dumb logic be pushed from from either VCs or celebrity
Brad Mills: influencers that had influence on high net worth individuals and
Brad Mills: retail traders to suck in tens of millions of people
Brad Mills: into like just suspending their logic and and going and
Brad Mills: gambling their money and all this crazy garbage. So SBF
Brad Mills: is just one pillar in that there's lots of other pillars.
Brad Mills: There's the whole, like I said, Silicon Valley, you know,
Brad Mills: there's the beautiful tattoo right there. I'm sure I like
Brad Mills: calling them. Mike No regrets instead of Mike.
Joel Comm: Mike Novogratz He he, of course, you know, has to
Joel Comm: make a call on it and basically say, well, now
Joel Comm: it's it's just a reminder, you know, to him. Yeah,
Joel Comm: I think that's the story right here. Luna Tattoo is
Joel Comm: a constant reminder that investing requires humility. Dude. Life requires humility.
Joel Comm: It's just, you know, if you get all proud about
Joel Comm: what you're doing, life will take you down a peg.
Joel Comm: Just it's how the world I think.
Brad Mills: I think. I think it's more insidious than that man.
Brad Mills: Like he was doing something highly unethical. He's either a
Brad Mills: complete jackass moron that doesn't see a Ponzi scam on it,
Brad Mills: scare him in the face enough that he tattoos it
Brad Mills: on himself, which shows me he's just a literal idiot.
Brad Mills: Like he. He's just an a moron. If he's a
Brad Mills: money manager with that much money in Luna, like tens
Brad Mills: of millions or more in Luna or he's a liar,
Brad Mills: and he knew what he was doing, and he knowingly
Brad Mills: sucked in millions of people to put their money in
Brad Mills: the Ponzi scheme. Because what he did was two or
Brad Mills: three nights before the whole thing blew up, he pulled
Brad Mills: hundreds of millions of dollars out of it. Yeah, that's right.
Brad Mills: That's criminal. I don't know. I don't know exactly if
Brad Mills: it was hundreds of millions. It was significant money, though,
Brad Mills: like it was either 30 million or 300 million, whatever. What?
Brad Mills: Doesn't matter, really. All the point is that he got
Brad Mills: people into the Ponzi scam. He got his money out,
Brad Mills: everybody else got wrecked, And then he says, Oh, yeah,
Brad Mills: I guess it's a reminder that you got to have humility,
Brad Mills: you know, like he's he's no different than the Wolf
Brad Mills: of Wall Street guy, like, sucker ing people into penny
Brad Mills: stocks and then dumping garbage on them.
Joel Comm: Who's getting a second chance like that, dude? Who's the
Joel Comm: wolf of Wall Street guy?
Travis Wright: What's Jordan Somebody's Jordan Belfort.
Joel Comm: Yeah. He like people. He still puts on events and
Joel Comm: people still come to him as a guru. And I'm like,
Joel Comm: you know, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me.
Travis Wright: Twice. Don't get fooled again. Shame on me. Oh.
Joel Comm: You sold him. Yeah. You saw this like SBF is
Joel Comm: now coming out. He did this whole long thread of
Joel Comm: cryptic tweets.
Travis Wright: And now this. He's going in the back end and
Travis Wright: deleting certain tweets. Somebody grabbed all of his tweets and
Travis Wright: saw that for every one new one that he would
Travis Wright: create a previous one got delete it.
Joel Comm: Oh, my gosh.
Travis Wright: I want to say this before we get into that.
Travis Wright: I want to say this because I want to jump in.
Travis Wright: So you say Novogratz, he basically pulled his money out,
Travis Wright: didn't say shit. Z, which I'm having more and more
Travis Wright: respect for all the time because he saw it go down.
Travis Wright: He said, Here's what we're going to do. We're going
Travis Wright: to liquidate this FTD because it looks like it's not
Travis Wright: good and we don't like how they're operating. And he
Travis Wright: was very public about it. So to me, I was like,
Travis Wright: Kudos to you, bro. I earned a little respect for you.
Brad Mills: I agree with that, man. I think that's true. I think. S.Z.
Brad Mills: I'm just more inclined to trust him, even though, like,
Brad Mills: I'm not recommending people use Binance or put their money
Brad Mills: on Binance. But of, of all of these crypto casino
Brad Mills: operators like S.Z. feels at least like he has reverence
Brad Mills: for Bitcoin and he respects Bitcoin and he doesn't FUD
Brad Mills: Bitcoin like that was the thing. SBF was doing that.
Brad Mills: Like I'm saying, I don't, I don't necessarily think it
Brad Mills: was so much a political cover up. Thing where it's
Brad Mills: like the the the powers that be in the traditional
Brad Mills: markets were actually just trying to prop him up. And then,
Brad Mills: you know, he's actually a CIA agent or something like that.
Brad Mills: And he's like, he's a spook. And he actually blew
Brad Mills: the whole thing up on purpose to give them an
Brad Mills: excuse to come in and heavily regulate. That's one of
Brad Mills: the conspiracy narratives going around. I mean, it's compelling because
Brad Mills: all of this shit that happened that blew up with
Brad Mills: FDX will cause a huge backlash from regulators. But I
Brad Mills: think more so What it was, was just he had
Brad Mills: this opportunity to grab a hold of a market lead
Brad Mills: against finance. If the world started to regulate crypto and
Brad Mills: if he was able to get regulations passed that gave
Brad Mills: his shit coin printing abilities a little run for their money.
Joel Comm: Well, they are definitely coming out now and saying that
Joel Comm: they scheduled a hearing to investigate what happened with FDX.
Joel Comm: And of course, it's just going to be an opportunity
Joel Comm: for them to all grandstand and show how smart they are,
Joel Comm: not listen to the actual people that are that are testifying.
Joel Comm: And maybe maybe your conspiracy theory is accurate. But, you know,
Joel Comm: let's look back here at Sam's tweets. He comes out
Joel Comm: with all these cryptic tweets, and now he's promising to
Joel Comm: try again to try to recover people's money. And here's
Joel Comm: the part that gets me the most when we get
Joel Comm: to the fool me once, Shame on you. Fool me twice,
Joel Comm: shame on me. Kevin O'Leary says that he is willing
Joel Comm: to give. He did invest in Sam Bankman-fried again, which
Joel Comm: causes like whatever respect I had for Mr. Wonderful to
Joel Comm: go your Mr. Stupid Mr. Idiot. What in the world
Joel Comm: are what do you know how many how influential that
Joel Comm: is to other people that have just lost a lot
Joel Comm: of money and you're talking that you would invest in
Joel Comm: this thief again.
Travis Wright: Well, he was talking about how, you know, he's looking
Travis Wright: for one of these big companies to crash, because that
Travis Wright: could be the moment that he could then go in.
Travis Wright: He's going to think that's near the bottom. And if
Travis Wright: we're talking on the theory that that Brad here had said, well,
Travis Wright: we're kind of like we were in November of 2018,
Travis Wright: 2018 was near the low of crypto like and then that.
Travis Wright: But 2018, there was not a big collapse of trust
Travis Wright: in the space. It was rebounding. People were taking their time.
Travis Wright: They were holding well.
Brad Mills: Actually it wasn't. It was 2019 when the real bear
Brad Mills: market happened. Like 2018 was like the slow unwind of
Brad Mills: the bubble. And then 2019 was really the capitulation phase.
Brad Mills: It was long and brutal and the price of ETHE
Brad Mills: went from 1400 to something like, I think 400 in 2018.
Travis Wright: Now I went down to 89 bucks down in this
Travis Wright: in November of 2018, 2019, was it 2019? And I
Travis Wright: was looking at the wrong leg. That's what I saw.
Travis Wright: It was like almost 90 bucks. The one point So
Travis Wright: maybe I was looking at to 2019.
Brad Mills: Maybe it was I'm just going by memory on this.
Brad Mills: I'm pretty sure, though, the 2019 was like the real
Brad Mills: capitulation where we saw the like soft liquidity go to zero,
Brad Mills: a lot of all coins that completely got delisted. So
Brad Mills: the prices went completely to zero and E just kept
Brad Mills: trending down, down, down, down to eventually got to $80
Brad Mills: or so. And that was that was you know, that's
Brad Mills: like what I think is in for the next year.
Brad Mills: That's that's what I believe is going to happen over
Brad Mills: the next year, maybe two years at this point, because
Brad Mills: what just what just transpired in the crypto markets is
Brad Mills: just insane. Like the fact that nobody saw this stuff.
Brad Mills: It's just going to give the regulators an excuse to
Brad Mills: come in and say, look, these people are all children
Brad Mills: and scammers. They can't be left alone in a room
Brad Mills: with each other. They're going to like, start cannibalizing each
Brad Mills: other and they're going to lose everybody's money. So we
Brad Mills: have to come in and regulate this. They're not responsible. And,
Brad Mills: you know, they got their push and Ponzi schemes and
Brad Mills: you can't see obvious fraud in front of their faces.
Brad Mills: And look at all this insane, like unregistered broker dealer
Brad Mills: stuff happening and celebrities acting like promoters of complete garbage.
Brad Mills: So we have to come in and regulate. And this
Brad Mills: is going to be good, actually, because it'll cause more
Brad Mills: people to finally be able to wake up and see
Brad Mills: the difference between Bitcoin and crypto. Because right now it's
Brad Mills: very confusing because they can go out there and say
Brad Mills: absolute trash, like people with millions of YouTube subscribers. They
Brad Mills: have no business telling people advice on how they should
Brad Mills: invest their money, have the respect in a bull market
Brad Mills: as if there's some kind of smart, you know, financial
Brad Mills: advisor that knows the difference between Bitcoin and a defi
Brad Mills: token or an NFT land coin or whatever, and comparing
Brad Mills: them almost the same. So you end up with a
Brad Mills: lot of people getting into things like Celsius because they
Brad Mills: want yield or a lot of people going into Defi
Brad Mills: and thinking that they're going to be doing yield farming
Brad Mills: and getting yield. So I think it's important that. They
Brad Mills: recognize that it's not just SBF was a fraudster. It's
Brad Mills: that like they got to have some introspection and realize
Brad Mills: that they are the ones that enabled this market to
Brad Mills: get to a place where it can be a complete
Brad Mills: fraudulent base and grow massively to a point where it's
Brad Mills: going to be literally Ponzi schemes blowing up and burning
Brad Mills: tens of billions of people's dollars because that's where it
Brad Mills: got to. And they're all trying to sidestep it right now.
Brad Mills: You can see if you go on Twitter spaces or
Brad Mills: listen any interviews like what you just said with Kevin
Brad Mills: O'Leary or like what The New York Times is doing,
Brad Mills: they're all trying to sidestep it and say like, oh,
Brad Mills: we couldn't see this coming or Oh, he's a good guy.
Brad Mills: We did our due diligence, we'd invest again. They're really
Brad Mills: trying to sidestep it and say things like they're out
Brad Mills: there doing that or they're saying things like, He was
Brad Mills: a fraud, It's a centralized exchange. That's the problem. You
Brad Mills: got to go into Defi or you got to hold
Brad Mills: your own keys with with the theory, Like they're trying
Brad Mills: to basically sidestep the whole entire rest of the picture.
Brad Mills: And dude, I came on this podcast back in May
Brad Mills: talking about Defi like Luno was Defi so so it
Brad Mills: started with Defi really. It was these centralized people that
Brad Mills: were propping up defi money printing games. And then it yeah,
Brad Mills: they made markets on centralized exchanges, They, they listed the
Brad Mills: defi coins on centralized exchanges and then that caused a
Brad Mills: whole bunch of crazy nonsense to grow even bigger. But
Brad Mills: this started from Defi like Defi is the problem here
Brad Mills: the Ethereum defi I like I like the idea like
Brad Mills: I said before, a decentralized lending, decentralized exchange. Obviously money
Brad Mills: is the biggest use case that you can ever have
Brad Mills: for decentralized finance. Like the money is the biggest use
Brad Mills: case of decentralized finance. Having a money that's sound and
Brad Mills: and fixed and trustworthy in terms of its monetary policy,
Brad Mills: something predictable for 100 years in the future. That's a
Brad Mills: ten x improvement over gold. And that's not going to
Brad Mills: just slowly be debased like the dollar. Bitcoin is perfect
Brad Mills: money and it's the building block of Defi. You got
Brad Mills: to start with a sound money and that's what Bitcoin is.
Brad Mills: And we're building out decentralized finance on Bitcoin. So it's
Brad Mills: just not done with all these token Ponzi scams attached
Brad Mills: to it. It's going to be just done like technology,
Brad Mills: like Bitcoin.
Joel Comm: Or do you expect, do you think that the government
Joel Comm: is going to come out and say, Hey, these are
Joel Comm: all unregistered securities and we're going to see thousands of
Joel Comm: coins just go to zero? Is that is that it's likely?
Brad Mills: It's likely at this point. I mean, it's pretty clear
Brad Mills: what the SEC's been signaling for the last little while
Brad Mills: and then recently with the with their library case, They
Brad Mills: you know, that's a weird one if you're not really
Brad Mills: paying too much attention because you're like, why would they
Brad Mills: go after library? That's like a 2016 ICO that raised
Brad Mills: like $500,000. It's like a peanut compared to EOS and
Brad Mills: and all this other stuff with FTT token in the
Brad Mills: billions and Solana and Ethereum and all these other things
Brad Mills: that raise, you know, either raised billions or became the
Brad Mills: pre mine bag of it was worth billions. So why
Brad Mills: would they go after library. Well it's actually in a
Brad Mills: game theory sort of scenario. Library gives them a precedent
Brad Mills: because it's a court ruling. To be able to have
Brad Mills: legal ground, that all of these things are securities. And
Brad Mills: library didn't even do a traditional ICOs. They didn't actually
Brad Mills: like do this big thing with an ICO. They actually
Brad Mills: just sold pre mined coins to people after the project launched.
Brad Mills: So it's an important case. It's an important ruling because
Brad Mills: it went to the courts. And, you know, obviously we've
Brad Mills: had tons of SEC settlements where they've said like, you know, hey,
Brad Mills: Kim Kardashian, you can't just go out and promote this thing.
Brad Mills: Here's a fine for $500,000 or a million or whatever
Brad Mills: it is, or, hey, like, you know, can you can't
Brad Mills: just launch this illegal security. You're going to have to
Brad Mills: send all the money back to all the investors. There's
Brad Mills: all kinds of things like that that happen. But this
Brad Mills: this one actually sets a precedent that the courts have
Brad Mills: decided in the SEC's favor. So now this spells a
Brad Mills: lot of problems for all the other cryptocurrencies that are
Brad Mills: most likely unregistered securities because. The shit that blew up
Brad Mills: in the last eight months in crypto is going to
Brad Mills: cause an extreme backlash from the regulators to come and
Brad Mills: look at these markets. And even with the OFAC sanctioning
Brad Mills: the tornado cache protocol and arresting the dev, you can
Brad Mills: see like it's clear they don't want to see decentralized
Brad Mills: finance on Ethereum. Succeed from multiple angles. They don't want
Brad Mills: to see it be able to be used for criminal
Brad Mills: money laundering and funding Russia and all blah, blah, blah.
Brad Mills: Like all the traditional rules that they have in the
Brad Mills: financial system, whether you agree with that or not. Like,
Brad Mills: it's not even a comment on that. It's just they
Brad Mills: have the guns, they have the regulations in place. It's
Brad Mills: clear they're enforcing the regulations on Defi. So people are
Brad Mills: just out there screaming in the wind saying, Yeah, but
Brad Mills: we want to be able to do it. Well, the
Brad Mills: SEC has rules and they have the authority. So you're
Brad Mills: either risking going to jail or getting a huge fine
Brad Mills: by just going against the SEC, going against old fact,
Brad Mills: going against fat if. And look, the only community that
Brad Mills: is decentralized enough to withstand a government regulatory clampdown is Bitcoin.
Brad Mills: There actually is nothing that the regulators can do to
Brad Mills: the Bitcoin protocol to change the Bitcoin protocol. We saw
Brad Mills: that play out with the SegWit two X sort of No.
Brad Mills: Two X movement. The Blocksize wars in 2017, the Bitcoiners
Brad Mills: like that were running their own nodes. It got like
Brad Mills: it proved out that the Bitcoin network and the consensus
Brad Mills: of Bitcoin is not controlled by corporations. It's not controlled
Brad Mills: by miners. It's controlled by users that run nodes. So
Brad Mills: doesn't matter what the government says to the mining companies
Brad Mills: or to the Bitcoin developers. It's the it's the it's
Brad Mills: the hundred thousand users that run their own nodes that
Brad Mills: actually enforce the rules of Bitcoin. And just like how
Brad Mills: in BitTorrent, it's illegal to download movies, but people still
Brad Mills: do it anyways because there's like too many people to
Brad Mills: enforce the rule. They can't stop bitcoin and they can't
Brad Mills: change bitcoin.
Joel Comm: Well, Karen on Capitol Hill has called and asked to
Joel Comm: speak to the manager of Bitcoin.
Travis Wright: And I want to talk to.
Travis Wright: The manager who's in charge here. Nobody says that that
Travis Wright: is true. So as we as we wrap this thing
Travis Wright: up here, you know, give a warning to people maybe
Travis Wright: around your thoughts around cbdcs, because as I'm looking at
Travis Wright: this thing and as we've told you all and I've
Travis Wright: talked about this, it seems that FDX was a Ponzi
Travis Wright: set up with the intention to eventually try to crash crypto.
Travis Wright: They're laundering money that they're given to Ukraine. It's going
Travis Wright: back to the politicians, not only on the Democrats side.
Travis Wright: Mitch McConnell got two and a half million dollars. They
Travis Wright: were showing it. And then right after that, boom, oh, hey,
Travis Wright: we're going to we're going to we're going to test
Travis Wright: a 12 week cbdc pilot program. You guys have nothing
Travis Wright: to do with FDX or any of that. So, I mean, seriously,
Travis Wright: this seems like the worst sort of dystopian kind of
Travis Wright: thing we could possibly have. Is this.
Brad Mills: Yeah, I'm not I'm not super worried about Cbdcs because
Brad Mills: I just don't think that we have a culture here
Brad Mills: where people would want to use them. And even if
Brad Mills: they did want to use them, let's say it's like
Brad Mills: a real sort of brainwashing scenario, like what happened with
Brad Mills: the COVID situation where people just politically aligned to to
Brad Mills: an opinion because of their their force fed opinions from
Brad Mills: top down from celebrities and and government officials, and you.
Joel Comm: Just want granny to die.
Brad Mills: That's yeah, yeah, that's all.
Joel Comm: Fred Mills You just want granny to die.
Brad Mills: So. So if they can figure out a way to
Brad Mills: get you to adopt the Cbdc based on that sort
Brad Mills: of like manipulation, like maybe they introduce a UBI $400
Brad Mills: a month, The only way you can get it is
Brad Mills: if you use the cbdc wallet or something like that.
Travis Wright: What if what if they just.
Joel Comm: Say, What if the government says we are extending the
Joel Comm: dollar in dollar for dollar?
Brad Mills: That's I'm saying like, you know, they won't be able
Brad Mills: to just do something like that in United States. It's
Brad Mills: not China. Like you guys have a much more. Yeah, but,
Brad Mills: but you guys have a much more like anti authoritarian
Brad Mills: freedom culture than China or even Canada where I live.
Brad Mills: So I don't think that they can actually force a
Brad Mills: change over to see because I think they'll have to
Brad Mills: entice people to do it through creative things like a UBI.
Brad Mills: You know, if you don't use it, you don't get
Brad Mills: the UBI. Here's $500 a month for everybody who uses
Brad Mills: our wallet. And if they do that, I mean, that's
Brad Mills: actually kind of good for Bitcoin, I believe, because it
Brad Mills: will it will you know, it doesn't matter if it's
Brad Mills: a dollar or a cbdc. It gets people more thinking
Brad Mills: digitally and it will show the need for Bitcoin. It'll
Brad Mills: further separate Bitcoin from everything else because Bitcoin will be
Brad Mills: then even more will be the only decentralized censorship resistant
Brad Mills: money that we have in the world. So I think
Brad Mills: it's good for bitcoin and bitcoin holders should definitely be
Brad Mills: wary of Cbdcs, but I actually think that the crypto
Brad Mills: thing is a more insidious threat to Bitcoin success because
Brad Mills: it's propped up by influencers that are not trying to
Brad Mills: like surveil you necessarily. They're just trying to get rich
Brad Mills: and they're, you know, they were effectively using celebrity influence
Brad Mills: to brainwash tens of millions of people into buying garbage
Brad Mills: and not paying attention to Bitcoin. And, you know, Saez
Brad Mills: was out there or Sam was SBF was out there
Brad Mills: lobbying against Bitcoin, saying things like Lightning Network is too slow.
Brad Mills: You know, you can't use that for money for the world.
Brad Mills: Salon is the solution. And his lobbying that he was
Brad Mills: doing was basically trying to put Bitcoin and Ethereum and
Brad Mills: Solana in the same category legally. So clearly there's objectives
Brad Mills: here from the Ethereum crowd, like COIN Center is funded
Brad Mills: by consensus and they benefited greatly at least 10 million
Brad Mills: or maybe maybe $4 million or something off the jet
Brad Mills: coin scam that got ran in 2021. Consensus airdropped like
Brad Mills: tons of get coin tokens to to to coin center
Brad Mills: and then coin center goes and lobbies and tries to
Brad Mills: convince the government that Ethereum is not a security. So
Brad Mills: you have like all of these COIN foundations and lobby
Brad Mills: groups fighting against Bitcoin, trying to lump Bitcoin in with
Brad Mills: all the pawns is a nonsense that happened in crypto.
Brad Mills: And honestly, it's like that's what I think is more
Brad Mills: at play here. I don't necessarily think it's so much
Brad Mills: like political conspiracies. It's just incentives. Like Ripple is literally
Brad Mills: funding Greenpeace to fund Bitcoin and say proof of work
Brad Mills: is evil and it's going to boil the oceans. Ethereum
Brad Mills: and consensus are out there trying to flood Bitcoin, saying, Oh,
Brad Mills: now we're proof of stake, we're green coin. Sam was
Brad Mills: doing the same thing. So literally this is a battle
Brad Mills: for money. And while there is some political component to it,
Brad Mills: people got to realize that like if we don't have
Brad Mills: bitcoin separated from crypto, we will get into a world
Brad Mills: of cbdcs and surveillance. Because they can co-opt Solana, they
Brad Mills: can co-opt Ethereum. Everything else is centralized. And if we
Brad Mills: really do want to have a sovereign form of money
Brad Mills: that we can use, that's censorship free, you got to
Brad Mills: choose Bitcoin and you got to start learning more about
Brad Mills: Bitcoin and think a little longer term instead of like,
Brad Mills: how do I get the next 100% API on my
Brad Mills: on my, my, my Stablecoins are like, what's the next
Brad Mills: NFT thing that's going to ten X?
Joel Comm: We will forever live in a Gordon Gekko. Greed is
Joel Comm: good world. Unfortunately, it seems like stories are coming up
Joel Comm: every day. So I got one last question before we
Joel Comm: let you go, Brad. Thank you for for your time
Joel Comm: and your opinions today. Now, Genesis Global is halting withdrawals.
Joel Comm: The question is this. Do you feel like we've seen
Joel Comm: the majority of the cascading effect of this or do
Joel Comm: you feel like we're still at the tip of the
Joel Comm: iceberg and and the you know, the markets are still
Joel Comm: really going to tumble, including Bitcoin because. Bitcoin is tied
Joel Comm: to crypto. Whether they'd like it or not.
Brad Mills: So I do think like in the analogy I set
Brad Mills: up at the beginning that we're at like the end
Brad Mills: of 2018. And if you look at the chart market
Brad Mills: or the coin markets and the charts for 2019, I
Brad Mills: think that's where we're going in 2023. It's not going
Brad Mills: to be good. It's going to be a long, brutal,
Brad Mills: painful capitulation. And there's so many overvalued coins like look
Brad Mills: at go through coin gecko's top 100 and just like
Brad Mills: try to rationalize the valuation of these coins for their
Brad Mills: market caps and just look at the chart at like
Brad Mills: let's say the Fed didn't print $10 trillion and reignite everything, right?
Brad Mills: Look at the trend of where most altcoins were going.
Brad Mills: They were going to zero. But because 20, 20, 2020,
Brad Mills: like the end of 2020 and, you know, beginning of
Brad Mills: 2021 bubble happened. Like, just click on, click on. Like
Brad Mills: not even Solana, because that was an ICO. Let's just
Brad Mills: let's just look at one of the.
Joel Comm: Pick.
Brad Mills: One, for instance, like Tron Coin. I'm not trying to
Brad Mills: pick on any specific Cardano's another perfect one.
Joel Comm: So let's look at Tron here. Here we go. It
Joel Comm: hit a zoom. I forget. Forget the ICO, but in
Joel Comm: its peak in 2021, it got up to, what, $0.16?
Joel Comm: And now it's sitting. Oh, no, no.
Travis Wright: Well, nine and a half billion dollars is.
Brad Mills: What it was. Nine and a half billion market cap.
Brad Mills: But look at the price. Say January 2020, what was
Brad Mills: the price of Tron in January 2020?
Joel Comm: That would have been about a penny and a half.
Brad Mills: You know, like 2 billion. Yeah. So? So a penny
Brad Mills: and a half for Tron is still overvalued, in my opinion,
Brad Mills: because we were we were kind of reconciling. We were
Brad Mills: going through a two year bear market where people were
Brad Mills: realizing that this stuff doesn't have a lot of value. Honestly,
Brad Mills: it's not really that valuable. They're more like, if you
Brad Mills: want to be, if you want to be generous, you
Brad Mills: can say that if Bitcoin is a commodity and so
Brad Mills: are some of these altcoins, you could say that like
Brad Mills: Bitcoin is gold and Tron is like bronze or something
Brad Mills: like that. Like maybe because a lot of people use
Brad Mills: Tron for Stablecoins overseas, maybe it has some utility value
Brad Mills: like aluminum has massive utility value in the world. And
Brad Mills: I'll tell this story and then we'll well, we can
Brad Mills: end it. But like this is the framework of thinking
Brad Mills: that I like to have, even if Ethereum is successful,
Brad Mills: because back in like I think it was the 1800s
Brad Mills: when they first discovered like aluminum, it was a lighter,
Brad Mills: stronger metal metal than gold, and it was like shinier.
Brad Mills: So they found aluminum. People had this crazy FOMO bubble
Brad Mills: over aluminum and they started buying it up and it
Brad Mills: went up, like in the value of aluminum went crazy.
Brad Mills: It got so bad. It got so bad. This bubble
Brad Mills: that Napoleon had a set of gold silverware and aluminum silverware.
Brad Mills: And when the esteemed guests would come over for dinner,
Brad Mills: they would be served on the aluminum silverware. And then
Brad Mills: the children would get the gold silverware to eat with.
Brad Mills: And people were just like, buying stakes in aluminum mines
Brad Mills: and all this stuff. Then what happened was the Industrial Revolution,
Brad Mills: they realized that aluminum could be manufactured in mind and like,
Brad Mills: you know, purified and stuff at a much cheaper cost.
Brad Mills: And the tons of it, they started being able to
Brad Mills: dig lower and they found more of it. So the
Brad Mills: price of aluminum cratered against gold because eventually people got
Brad Mills: back into the same reality that, like gold, has certain
Brad Mills: properties as a commodity, whatever a property, a metal that
Brad Mills: you can't replicate with other things. And even if the
Brad Mills: aluminum which ended up in the war in World War
Brad Mills: Two became the most used metal in World War Two,
Brad Mills: like it was used for tanks and weapons and buildings
Brad Mills: and everything, aluminum became extremely important as a useful thing.
Brad Mills: It had utility value, but that didn't mean that the
Brad Mills: price of aluminum skyrocketed. It was like the most used
Brad Mills: thing in terms of like a medal in history and
Brad Mills: during World War Two. But you don't invest in aluminum.
Brad Mills: So I like to think about Bitcoin as digital gold.
Brad Mills: And even if Etherium gets to like the promises of
Brad Mills: old Defi, you know, Defi becomes the number one way
Brad Mills: to settle on the world. And all the derivatives markets
Brad Mills: move from Wall Street and they go on and there's
Brad Mills: quadrillions of dollars of a volume happening on Ethereum Defi.
Brad Mills: That doesn't mean that the East token is a better
Brad Mills: version of Bitcoin. That means it's digital aluminum, so it
Brad Mills: can have massive use and still be like going down
Brad Mills: in price.
Joel Comm: And you can learn more about aluminum on Twitter at
Joel Comm: aluminum can, but you can learn more about bread mills
Joel Comm: at bread mills can on Twitter.
Travis Wright: How's that? And here's a can.
Joel Comm: Has a camera.
Travis Wright: That I want to.
Brad Mills: I got my bronze mug here.
Travis Wright: Oh, that's very nice. So how you know, I remember
Travis Wright: we were talking about this when crypto was at its
Travis Wright: all time highs and everything. Like, wasn't it like 130
Travis Wright: different projects were worth $1,000,000,000 or more? It was crazy.
Travis Wright: I don't even remember how many. Now it's 44 of
Travis Wright: them are. And I remember right, I was gauging that,
Travis Wright: you know, in the other markets, like, all right. Is
Travis Wright: coming back and look and see because they got down
Travis Wright: to I think well in the in the barest of
Travis Wright: the bears where there was only like maybe six that
Travis Wright: were $1,000,000,000 company in 2018 or something. 19.
Brad Mills: Well you think like who who propped those markets up.
Brad Mills: Who pumped those coins up that high.
Travis Wright: It was it was Trump.
Brad Mills: Trump.
Travis Wright: Every day. Trump did.
Brad Mills: It. Trump did it. Thanks.
Travis Wright: TRUMP Thank you.
Joel Comm: Trump just sent a missile into Poland. That was him
Joel Comm: as well. And he did everything.
Travis Wright: That did.
Brad Mills: Trump.
Travis Wright: After he actually crashed.
Brad Mills: So Trump did. FDX Yeah, well, that.
Travis Wright: Alone.
Joel Comm: Is to blame for everything. So, listen, you.
Brad Mills: Got to think, though, that like the people that pumped
Brad Mills: all these coins to the billion market cap, they're losing
Brad Mills: all their money right now. Yeah. And they're going to
Brad Mills: make the decision very soon, if not now, to pull
Brad Mills: out and to pull their liquidity and stop pumping all
Brad Mills: the real money into all this fake money. Michael Saylor
Brad Mills: calls them air tokens. He's been doing that lately. And
Brad Mills: it's kind of a fun analogy because literally they're just
Brad Mills: built on air and all these crypto traders and investors
Brad Mills: are off on the risk cliff. You know, it's not
Brad Mills: a risk curve. It's a risk Cliff, because you get
Brad Mills: off like Wiley Coyote, you're running off off the risk
Brad Mills: cliff and you're sitting on air grabbing all these tokens
Brad Mills: and thinking they're investments. You look down and there's nothing
Brad Mills: there and.
Joel Comm: You just somehow get them never dies. He plummets, he
Joel Comm: barely is wounded and he comes back and does it
Joel Comm: again and again and again, just.
Travis Wright: Like Brad Mills doing it again on the Bad Crypto podcast.
Joel Comm: Yeah. Brad, go ahead and pimp yourself for a moment
Joel Comm: and tell people what you're what you're into, where they
Joel Comm: can find you, share websites, whatever.
Brad Mills: Honestly, you know, like I think the number one thing
Brad Mills: for your listeners I would really like if anybody just
Brad Mills: got saved from Celsius or whatever from the last episode
Brad Mills: or whatever, like I would just really appreciate people take
Brad Mills: a serious look at like learning more about Bitcoin. And
Brad Mills: the best resource for that is actually Preston Pierce's podcast.
Brad Mills: He runs a podcast. He runs the Investor Network. It
Brad Mills: started off as a macro podcast talking about the the
Brad Mills: stock markets and value investing, things like that. And then
Brad Mills: he started getting into Bitcoin. He created the mayor multiple
Brad Mills: and he's been my favorite Bitcoin commentator since. So don't,
Brad Mills: you know, don't follow me or pay attention to me,
Brad Mills: just like start learning more about bitcoin and follow Preston
Brad Mills: Fisher's podcast. Follow him on. On Twitter and. That would
Brad Mills: that would make me feel good.
Joel Comm: There it is right there. That's very humble of you, sir.
Joel Comm: The investors podcast dot com. For those of you watching
Joel Comm: and Travis, I think that irony would dictate that we
Joel Comm: should commemorate this episode with an NFT, don't you?
Travis Wright: Hey, don't be a pitch. Tired of that.
Joel Comm: So we'll talk about that here. And Brad. There's the dollar.
Joel Comm: What about it?
Travis Wright: No leader.
Brad Mills: It's my energy.
Joel Comm: Related nodes of Bitcoin. That's nice.
Brad Mills: These are my big. These are Bitcoin. Nfts. They're. Their
Brad Mills: physical pieces of art. They're not really.
Joel Comm: Actors. I love the really cool Bitcoin, excellent and physical art.
Joel Comm: We appreciate you and I'm sure that we will have
Joel Comm: you back again.
Brad Mills: Thanks again, guys.
Travis Wright: Now, it's actually bad every time we talk to you,
Travis Wright: it's shitty news, so we don't ever want to talk
Travis Wright: to you again.
Joel Comm: So, Trav, you know, you just reminded me that Jimmy Song,
Joel Comm: who was a recent guest on this show, had a
Joel Comm: lot of negative things to say about an. He went
Joel Comm: on an epic rant. Do you remember that?
Travis Wright: Yeah, I was a it was a it was a
Travis Wright: legendary rant. And it was funny cause we're like, yeah,
Travis Wright: we can debate him. And I debated him on some
Travis Wright: staff and he just was just he just steamrolled on
Travis Wright: it is like, so bullshit. So bullshit is bullshit. So
Travis Wright: bitcoin goes God bullshit. Everything else is bullshit. Beautiful shithole. Joel,
Travis Wright: your Bushwick. You're not as much bullshit, but the bullshit too, right? Wow.
Joel Comm: So I found it. It was actually it was right
Joel Comm: around the time we interviewed Brad. This, you know, episode
Joel Comm: was Nfts or a scam. It was April 10th of 2022.
Joel Comm: So if you want to go back and it looks
Joel Comm: like we do have video of it as well, right?
Travis Wright: Okay. Wow, that's a big or.
Joel Comm: That could make a great little NFT as well of
Joel Comm: him ranting on NFT is.
Travis Wright: Oh yeah, it was funny. He went to town all right.
Travis Wright: Only Jimmy Song can do a Jimmy Song ran a
Travis Wright: train on a song. So.
Joel Comm: You know, Brad has a lot to say. Hopefully you
Joel Comm: guys follow him on Twitter at Brad Mills can. By
Joel Comm: the way this report Elon is starting to release the
Joel Comm: people who have been suspended. And it's it's a variety.
Joel Comm: He's like looking at them and deciding case by case.
Joel Comm: But Jordan Peterson is back. The Babylon bee is back.
Joel Comm: And although I'm not a fan of her, I don't
Joel Comm: think that she should be banned. Kathy Griffin is back.
Travis Wright: And so it's funny there is that it's crazy. But
Travis Wright: he's he's let go 99.6% of the workforce has left
Travis Wright: basically 50 of the top because you don't need that
Travis Wright: many employees. He's got the best of the best. I
Travis Wright: read this thread about how he's gone through and basically
Travis Wright: let people self-identify as who are the ones who kick
Travis Wright: ass and who are the ones who talk shit and
Travis Wright: who are the ones who don't do shit, and the
Travis Wright: ones that don't do shit and talk shit were the
Travis Wright: loudest and then the ones that do shit. He saw
Travis Wright: that he kept all of them. And so I think
Travis Wright: what we're going to see is those people are going
Travis Wright: to be all on them. Then he's going to start
Travis Wright: hiring good people. And because really when you have really good,
Travis Wright: productive people who know what the hell they're doing, these
Travis Wright: other people really slow them down, right? And so let
Travis Wright: them be part of the hiring and of great people
Travis Wright: later on, because I don't think you don't need 8000
Travis Wright: people around Twitter. You need 8000 people. If you're talking
Travis Wright: to every government and wheeling and dealing with every politician.
Travis Wright: But from what I've seen, I catch heard even retweeted it.
Travis Wright: He said 99, it was a Tim Poole tweeted it
Travis Wright: said 99.6% of Twitter people are gone. He's down to
Travis Wright: the 50 very best employees. And now he's going to
Travis Wright: build that from there. Can you imagine if all of
Travis Wright: them were just so shitty? I haven't noticed any decline
Travis Wright: in Twitter yet. No, it's got more funny, actually.
Joel Comm: Yeah. So. And somebody said, Bring back Alex Jones. And
Joel Comm: Ellen responded, No. Which look, I understand why, you know,
Joel Comm: he might not want to bring him back, but free
Joel Comm: speech is free speech. And if you don't let people
Joel Comm: come back, regardless of whether or not you like what
Joel Comm: they say is really free speech. So but he said.
Travis Wright: Cancel the Alex Jones. Now, what's interesting is I paid
Travis Wright: attention to Alex Jones. And, you know, Alex Jones has
Travis Wright: been wrong about a few things. Well, my God, how
Travis Wright: many things have the New York Times been wrong about?
Travis Wright: How many times is MSNBC's been wrong about some. It's
Travis Wright: the very first time I've ever seen somebody be wrong
Travis Wright: about something. And soon for $1,000,000,000. If every time MSNBC
Travis Wright: or Fox News or CNN or some of these guys
Travis Wright: were wrong about something or lying about something, they got
Travis Wright: sued for $1,000,000,000 and they got canceled. I the thing is,
Travis Wright: they go off on him about the thing that happened
Travis Wright: in Connecticut. Right. And the shooting. And because he was
Travis Wright: I remember what he basically said was, yeah, there's it's
Travis Wright: not exactly the story they're telling is not the correct one.
Travis Wright: I don't think he ever said people didn't die, but
Travis Wright: he said the FBI was going in with them. And
Travis Wright: and and now we all.
Joel Comm: Know he owes $1,000,000,000,000 or something ridiculous.
Travis Wright: It's so crazy. Wow.
Joel Comm: Whatever is a crazy times we live in. Thank you
Joel Comm: for joining us and letting us be your Sherpas. Or
Joel Comm: at least I'll being alongside you on this journey because
Joel Comm: that's what the show has always been from from the
Joel Comm: very first episode, it's Travis and Joel's exciting crypto adventure.
Joel Comm: We're still on this adventure five and a half years
Joel Comm: into it. We are the Splunk CRS of What's a
Joel Comm: good s word for.
Travis Wright: I would say this is that you're the Sherpa and
Travis Wright: the drop off of the surface.
Joel Comm: They're telling you to catch the next episode. And of course.
Travis Wright: Who's bad?
Joel Comm: The Bad Crypto podcast is a production of Bad Crypto LLC.
Joel Comm: The content of the show, the videos and the website
Joel Comm: is provided for educational, informational and entertainment purposes only. It's
Joel Comm: not intended to be and does not constitute financial investment
Joel Comm: or trading advice of any kind. You shouldn't make any
Joel Comm: decisions as to finances, investing, trading or anything else based
Joel Comm: on this information without undertaking independent due diligence in consultation
Joel Comm: with a professional financial advisor. Please understand that the trading
Joel Comm: of Bitcoins and alternative cryptocurrencies have potential risks involved. Anyone
Joel Comm: wishing to invest in any of the currencies or tokens
Joel Comm: mentioned on this podcast should first seek their own independent
Joel Comm: professional financial advisor.
Travis Wright: Share with our partner.
Travis Wright: I'm a bear finder bear.