The President of Argentina's Meme Coin Scandal - podcast episode cover

The President of Argentina's Meme Coin Scandal

Feb 24, 20251 hr 4 min
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Episode description

Mia and crypto journalist Molly White take a vacation from the horror of American politics to discuss Argentina's president Javier Milei promoting a pump and dump meme coin as Mia attempts to explain Peronism.

https://bsky.app/profile/molly.wiki

Sources:

https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-77/

https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-main-stock-index-falls-after-milei-crypto-scandal-2025-02-17/

https://crimethinc.com/2024/06/17/six-months-in-a-neoliberal-dystopia-social-cannibalism-versus-mutual-aid-and-resistance-in-argentina

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Call the media.

Speaker 2

Welcome to Jay Kadappen Here, a podcast that has been really, really fucking bleak basically since Trump took office. So instead instead of doing another episode about how doomed the US is, we are taking a I don't know a field trip

to Argentina to talk about something extremely funny. And that extremely funny thing is the Argentinian President Javier Malay promoting a meme coin and maybe going down for it and with me to talk about this is really the only person I could I could have on to talk about a crypto thing.

Speaker 3

Who is Molly White? And I'm trying to explain who Bally White is.

Speaker 2

My explanation of this is in the same way that the great twentieth century marksis theorist C. L. R. James's book Beyond a Boundary is both universally considered to be the best book ever written about cricket and also literally calling it the thing that it is the best book ever written about cricket is like a damning insult to

how good the actual book is. Molly is like probably the world's best crypto journalist and writes the newsletter citation needed also does Web three is going great, which is amazing.

Speaker 3

Everyone should go listen to it. And MOLLI, welcome to the show.

Speaker 4

Thanks for having me. What an intro.

Speaker 2

I've been waiting for an opportunity to use that one for such a long time. A great book, by the way, which everyone should both go subscribe to citation needed and also go read Beyond the Boundary because it's great.

Speaker 3

So God, we were talking about this before the show.

Speaker 2

I had planned this episode out before Elon Musk showed up at Sea Pac with Javier Malay, like with Malay's signature chainsaw, like doing an even weirder version of Malay's thinking about like cutting regulation with a chainsaw.

Speaker 4

But Jesus Christ, yeah, what a spectacle that was.

Speaker 3

Oh my god.

Speaker 2

I like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute wasn't even the weirdest thing that happened there.

Speaker 3

That was only like day one.

Speaker 4

Well that's overdone now you know everyone's doing it. You have to do something new.

Speaker 2

Yeah, you have to get to wander around the stage with a chainsaw like he didn't even do the Malay thing, which is you have you have like a book of regulations or whatever you cut up with a chance even Oh God, so I am very excited to talk about the crypto scandal that might finally bring this administration down. However, and I am deeply sorry. I already I apologize before

this recording started. I am deeply sorry. In order to explain who Hoavier Malay is, I have to do the single most difficult thing I've ever attempted in my like, not just in my like my history as a podcaster, like that's obviously trivially trube like by my entire history doing theoretical work in general, which is I'm about to attempt to explain parodeism in under ten minutes on four hours of sleep.

Speaker 5

Let's see it here, we fucking go, because because I guess that's why, you know why we have to do this, right, Like, Malay is able to take power like basically because he he's like one of the first candidates in a long time to in Argentina to run as an anti paronist.

Speaker 2

And that may seem weird because hold on, wait, shouldn't there always be like, Okay, if you have an ideology, shouldn't it shouldn't that the person from like either the left right side of the political spectrum, you know, be running against an ideology and no, no. Up until basically now, both the left and the right in ge Argentina were both Paronists. So to get an understanding of what paronism is, we need to go back not just to who Juan Parone is, and we'll we'll we'll get to who Juan Parone,

who's like the guy this ideology is named after. And you know, the ideology is based on like this guy returning from exile from the military coups. But we have to go back to one of the sort of foundational parts of the modern Argentinian state, and that element is the fact that Argentina has one of the most militant workers movements in the entire world, and has had it for about a century. I was on Margaret's show, it could happen here, and Jesus Christ not it could happen here.

Good Lord, you tell them on four hours you're doing great, Thank you, thank you. I haven't even gotten we have not gotten to my final analysis of parnasm, where that the closest thing I can compare it to is post short cultural Revolutions nineteen seventies era China.

Speaker 3

So this is about to get so much more unhitched. But a while back.

Speaker 2

I was on Margaret show Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff to talk about the second Argentinian giant and narcosentic glost uprising in about a span of four years, which was the giant anarchist rebellion in Patagonia nineteen twenty one nineteen twenty two. And this is the second one because the first one was the nineteen nineteen general strike, which ends in an event called the Tragic Week where everyone

sort of gets killed by the military. But you know, the fact that there's there's two in different parts of the country, enormous and arcosentdic glist uprisings in a span of about four years. It's a demonstration of the fact that this is one of the most billietant working classes in the world, and any political movement that is trying to hold power in this country is going to have to deal with the fact that the Argentinian working class

at any moment. Can you know, if you're a factory owner, you can wake up one day and there's a black flag flying over your factories because your workers have seized it. And the sort of culmination of this and the reason this is even still relevant today is that like the last of what you would I guess you could call

like the classical twentieth century revolutions. So a line of uprising started with like the original formation of the workers councils in Russia in nineteen oh five, you know, and that continues to like the occupation of the factories and italllys you the two Red Years, and like nineteen eighteen, nineteen nineteen, like the anarchist parts of the Spanish Revolution, with the revolutions in Hungaria and Algeria, like you know, all like through sixty eight, like the factor occupations in

France and Italy, and like all this whole this whole lineage of like the thing that happens when you do your revolution is workers occupy the factories and try to seize control of the country. The last one of those,

ever was an Argentina in two tho one. Like everywhere else in the world, this ship was gone, and then randomly in Argentina in two thousand and one, like there's a there's a giant one of these uprisings that is, you know, only really put down by a sort of left Parona's government agreeing to like tell I am a have to fuck off, which was like you know, a

sort of seismic change in the political landscape. But all of this is to say that, Okay, if you are a capitalist in Argentina and you have to deal with this, like what do you do? And the answer is to create the most unhinged ideology the world has ever seen by uniting socialism and fascism under the single banner of Argentinian nationalists class collaboration, which the thing that makes no sense, but you have to understand, like paranism is, oh god,

protoism is simply the weirdest ideology ever. I promise we are going to get to the fun crypto stuff, but we have to unfortunately do this, We have to do our whole work first. And part of this is so Juan Perone, the actual guy who who is ideology is based off. This is an enormously popular president in like the late forties and fifties until he gets overthrown by military coup and to get a sense of again like

how weird this guy is. Like, this is a guy who when he comes into power, a bunch of the most famous Nazi war criminals and like not just you know, obviously like the famous Nazis flee Argentina. There's the whole meme about that, right, But I mean we're talking like guys who do U stat si, like guys guys who literally did the Holocaust by hand, like flee to Argentina a Drena's administration, and when a military coup overthrows him,

they flee the country. So again, like the US beck military junta is less pro Nazi than this guy is. He is also personal friends with Schae Guavara and considers like the Cuban revolution to be like part of his like revolutionary project. So a deeply deeply weird, deeply weird guy. And the result of this is that, Okay, so you have a military dictatorship through like the fifties and the sixties, right,

and like the entire time there's a tatorship. Not the entire night, but most of the time this dictatorship is happening, right, the entire political spectrum sort of project all of their political energy onto We want Parone back because Paronas remembered it as like the guy who like brought workers rights to the country and also like gave women the right to vote. And also as you remember it as like a stable nationalist, right wing government by the right.

Speaker 3

So like everyone on like.

Speaker 2

Both sides the political spectrum project all of their political aspirations into the single figure of parn which works because he's not in the country, is not not there, so you know, and because he's gone, you can project anything

you want onto him. And this is to a large extent the origin of modern populism, right, like the you know, my modern populism is the projection of all grievances onto one guy and then having that guy come in take power, do constant sort of semi political mobilization to like fix

your issues. And one of the interesting threads here is that like the theoretical origin of left populism is very specifically Parnism, because one of the theoreticians of like modern left populism, one of the most famous ones, is my old nemesis, the Argentinian political philosopher and Nesto Leclou and his wife chintill moof who were like they were like, you know, these are these people were like the the theoretical forces behind a bunch of like the European left

in this sort of euroc communism era, and even up until like like pot Daemos in Spain, twenty eleven, Like these are the people who are the theoretical force behind so much like left electoral stuff in the last like

fifty years. And it's all from leclou who was who was a left Paronist, so all all of all the dots are going on the pin board and while he's gone, he's this guy that like from an American perspective, it's like imagine that like Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump from twenty sixteen were both the same guy, and both sides were just trying to get this one guy to come back to Argentina and like fix everything. So this creates

like the left and right Paronists. And when Paron comes back in the seventies and like immediately gets elected president again, the right Paronis just I mean you should literally starts slaughtering to left Paronis in the streets and Parone like backs the right Paronists against the left, and you would think this would destroy left Paranism, but no, no left paron It was in power in Argentina until like.

Speaker 3

Malai's election like a few years ago.

Speaker 2

It's so okay, So like why would you still be a left Peronis after Parone like had all your boys machine guns in the seventies. Part of the reason this works also is that he dies and his wife takes power and there's like another military coup. So you know, he isn't he's not like in power long enough kind of for like the disenchantment to really set in. He's just he's in power just long enough for people to

remember it as like the break between the dictatorships. And at this point I could finally attempt to go what is Paronis? They're like how many minutes of like, oh god, I think I've got over my ten minute limit of what is But okay, Paron's deal is this right? Like so okay, Like, if you're a pronus right in Perona's state, everyone is supposed to be equal before the power of the Argentinian state, And so if you're a leftist, you focus on the everyone is going to be equal part.

And this means on the one hand, you know, there are there are real substantive gains for the Argentinian working class that they did get under the you know, the sort of previous administrations, and under the junta, right, you know, you have like massive expansions of workers' rights and nationalizations of a bunch of sectors of the economy. You have this like strategy of national development through like import substitution.

There's there's like a long strain of like feminist perhism from you know, his like like human being the administration where women got the right to vote. On the other hand, if you're a fascist, you focus on the like before the power of the Argentinian state part, which means like

permanent class collaboration. And this this is the part of the deal that brings the right in, is like the deal is that, okay, So you give the workers all this stuff, and you set up these really complicated patriots networks, and you know, people have jobs and like they have a social safety net at least in theory. And the trade off is you will never ever again attempt to like occupy a factory or like and like drive these parasites.

You run your entire life out of power. And the second part of that is this like this hardline, unhinged right wing like Argentinian nationalism, which is wielded against for example,

like Argentinian indigenous groups. And so I promise the comparison to the to the Long Culture seventies, long Culture Revolution, we've reached that point of it, so to understand like really what this is, Right, it's an active counterinsurgency that is sort of that is waged by the state and waged by a bunch of like parts of the social sector to unfold this really dynamic and militant workers movement into the state in such a way that there can still be politics kind of but it won't actually be

a threat to the ruling class. And my, my sort of like closest thing to this is this very very weird period in Chinese history between like the end of the short Culture Revolution in like nineteen sixty nine and the death of Mao in seventy six, where like the most unhinged parts of the Culture Revolution are sort of over because Mao has set off, you know, so nineteen sixty seven, like Mao sets off this uprising in Shanghai. He does this deliberately as part of his strategy to

like game power of the party. The problem is that control of Shanghai is no longer in the hands of his communist party, like, like, the workers take the city, and this is a disaster because they've all been reading about the Paris community. I think of the Paris communis

that they had like direct elections of people. And there's a moment I actually like I found this this moment of this transcript where Mao is talking to Joe and Laie, and Joe and Lai is like, if we let these people do direct elections, like it's going to lead to anarchism, and Mao is like, oh shit, we have to stop this.

So what happens is that he wheels together this baffling coalition of like student Red Guards and these somebody some like loyal like rebel workers factions, along with a bunch of like the remaining party bureaucracy and the military, which is a coalition comprised of everyone on every side of the cultural revolution, right, Like normally the culture Revolution is broken down into very roughly, there are rebel factions and there are like government factions, right and He's he's pulled

together a coalition of a bunch of elements of both of them with the explicit thing of we are going to end the revolution. And in the short run, what this does is it leads the back aft of the culture Revolution that people don't talk about very much, which is instead of like everyone dying because there are rebels running around. Everyone's dying because the state is killing everyone to like bring everyone back under control. And that's what like most of the people die in the Culture Revolution

are killed, putting the whole thing down. If you wan't trying to understand like what Paranaism is, right, it's his ideology of bringing together all of the different sort of

disparate political factions in a moment. Right, You're bringing together everyone from like the fascist on the right to like the socialist on the left, and you're bringing them into the banner of this one guy and the same And the reason Mao is able to do this is because, like he's Mao, right, every single faction on every side of the Culture Revolution, whatever they're trying to do, is justifying it in the name of like, oh, this is what Mao wants.

Speaker 3

This is what Parona is doing.

Speaker 2

Right, He's drawing together the entire political spectrum in a way that he can sort of stabilize power, take it away from like the junta, and forge this permanent political collition. And this result in like the sort of total dominance. This ideology has a Roger tim politics means that like basically every election in Argentina until like Malai takes power is an election between the left and the right paronists.

Speaker 3

And okay, okay, I'm so sorry.

Speaker 2

This finally is the end divide attempt to explain Baronis. But we're gonna go to ads when we come back. I'm gonna actually do this interview that I've been promising. I'm so sorry. Okay, we are back. Thank you so much for surviving this. This sort of brings us to like how he kind of takes power and how you know, there's an economic crisis, there's like all this inflation, and so he comes in on like I don't know, we were talking about this beforehands and we're gonna talk to

you about this. Like there's all these really weird parallels between this and the American election, where it's like except the inflation in Argentina is like real.

Speaker 4

Yeah, we just have this sort of like boogeyman version of it. They actually have hyperinflation.

Speaker 2

Yeah yeah, I mean really checked the current inflation rate. Yeah, I think, I mean it's like several hundred percent right now. I think I think it's like three hundred something percent, which is actually Lay's entire thing was that he was going to stop inflation it's actually it's way worse under him than it was.

Speaker 3

The previous like Parna's administration.

Speaker 2

Oh there's one other thing I forgot about it, which is like you know, why if you're on the left would you take this deal?

Speaker 3

And this also ties into like how this politics? How is politics? I took over the state, which is that like you know, there were people in Argentina like under these Prona's governments got things that are like unimaginable here, Like there's one that's important to me, and like obviously like it's still you're still living under capitalism. A lot of it still sucks.

Speaker 2

But like one of the things that people won under these governments was this mandate that one percent of all government employees had to be trans, which is like unimaginable here, like like even at the height of like you know like sort of transacceptance or whatever, like that's there's what like that's that's not that's not a thing that's even like no one even like thinks to ask about that, and like yeah, like I don't know, like yeah, like I I might sell my soul to Juan Peron if

it meant that like none of my trans friends ever had to sleep in an alley again like I you know, but the wheels fall off of this and they put the self described and narco capitalists in power, which is this is great and oh god, okay, and this finally gets us to the fun part of this. I said the top of this episode that like, he did a meme coin, right, can you explain what that is?

Speaker 3

Because oh god, yeah.

Speaker 4

So meme coins are a particularly weird part of the cryptocurrency world where they basically go out and say that this is a token that has no inherent value, which I mean, you know, skeptics would argue that that's all cryptocurrency, but meme coins very actively embrace that fact, and they're often themed around a meme. So, you know, a lot of people know of dogecoin, which is themed about the

you know, around the she but you new dog. They're also sometimes just themed around sort of an idea or a person or you know, just sort of whatever is capturing the public attention at any given moment, and the ideas that you buy in and all of the attention causes more people to buy in, and if you're really good at it or really lucky, you're one of the first people to buy in. And so you buy in at a low price and then you sell after everyone else's bought in and pump the price up higher. That's

the idea. In reality, it doesn't really work that way. It's full of insider trading and market manipulation, and it's not sort of a fair game where anyone has a chance to be one of those early people. But that's sort of the shape of it at least. And so I guess that brings us to Libra, which is the end coin that Mila was uh convinced I guess to endorse.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I mean, I think this is interesting thing here too, where it's like our government is just like a fucking meme coin. Now, Like the thing that is it control of the American state is Doge the barber of government eficiency, which.

Speaker 3

Is just the Doge coin meme.

Speaker 4

Like, yeah, we're in sort of a post ironic world at this point where crypto and the US government are

somehow completely intertwined. And I guess we should probably mention that just before Trump took office, he launched his own meme coin, which was the Trump Token, followed very shortly after by his wife launching the Malania token, and they did what all good meme coins do, which is that they spiked in price based on the original interest and then they lost everyone a bunch of money once the price came back down because with meme coins, people lose

interest and move on to the next one. And you know, the Trump token shockingly does not have enduring value.

Speaker 2

So yeah, like and that's just interesting thing about it, which is like, Okay, this this is just a pup them dump scheme. Yes, Like it's just securities fraud, Like I we have an entire economy based on security. Everyone doing securities fraud and everyone knows that securities fu.

Speaker 3

I don't know.

Speaker 4

I mean, it's it's really cynical. Like if you actually talk to people who are deep into meme coins, either creating them or trading them, there's this broad acceptance that like, oh yeah, yeah, it's totally a scam. People are trying to run off with the money after they launch these tokens. Like there's all of this mark manipulation happening averaged everyday. People who are you know, seeing these stories about people buying in super early and then making a million dollars

out of thin air, like that never happens. Those aren't average people. Those are like deeply sophisticated trading bots or people with insider knowledge, like everyone knows this and openly discusses it, and yet there's still this active participation in it because the idea is that like, Okay, sure it's a scam, but if you get in on the scam early enough, you can be the scammer and you can be the one who profits and you know, screw everybody else.

So it's like this really deeply like cynical world.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

I remember you talked about this on Jamie's show about like how just deeply nihilistic it all is. Yeah, and I think you know, I mean it's not even it used to be you had to do metaphors to draw a dirrect line between this sort of like the nihilism of this shit and like the nihilism of putting like ma Lie or like putting Trump and Elon like in office. But now it's just I mean, they just do the meme coin right, Like there's no.

Speaker 4

Yeah, the mask is like fully off of crypto in the memecoin era. I think, like, yeah, it's kind of amazing how during the previous crypto boom in like twenty twenty and twenty twenty one, there was this phrase that everyone was saying, which was wag me, which was like we're all gonna make it, and the idea is like we're all gonna get rich together, everyone's gonna succeed. And now it's like they've totally you never hear that anymore.

And now it's like, so I will punch you in the face and steal your wallet if I get the moment opportunity, and that is like broadly accepted throughout the crypto world.

Speaker 2

Yeah, you know, and like that that is also like what Malai has been doing to like everyone in Argentina, right like his his things he came in is he I.

Speaker 3

Mean, I got one of the things I remember from like the very first.

Speaker 2

Days he was in office, and he was talking about all this stuff about how they were going to take away well for benefits from anyone who was arrestive at protest yeap, and like that didn't. There's been massive protests like basically since the moment you took power. But you know, like it's just this really deeply cynical, very explicit thing of like pitting like everyone in society against each other, like you know, like making this argument too, is like

a crime thic article about this word. It's like they, you know, like he's very explicitly making this argument. They're like, well, okay, if if you're like a private sector worker and you're making no money, the reason you're making no money is because wages are too high. In the public sector, it's because taxes are too high, and if taxes and corporations were lower, they would pay you more.

Speaker 3

And it's like yeah, no, but it fits into.

Speaker 2

This sort of like nihilism of like, yeah, everyone trying to grift each other.

Speaker 4

And it's i mean, it's really recognizable here in the United States too, where it's the same story of like, oh, you're not making enough money because you know, people are stealing your tax money and it's going to you know, people who don't deserve it, or it's going to these programs to fund foreign aid instead of people in the United States, or you know, it's like very much trying to pit everyone against one another so that you don't notice that the person who's actually taking the money is

the guy who launched the meme coin or the people who have the insider information. You know. It's like this very direct mirror of what is happening in society, and yet it's like so obvious.

Speaker 2

The problem that we have is like I think people do probably recognize that, like everyone who's rich got rich by fucking robbing people. But instead of trying to do anything about that, the solution that's being positive by these people is, well, instead of you just being scammed all the time, like you could be the scam artist.

Speaker 4

You could be the robbery.

Speaker 2

Yeah, Like that's like the new scam instead of like, you know, because like organizing is fun looking hard, right, and like attempting to fight these people is really hard. They have all the money, they have all the power, they have the police, they have the military, and so you get like this shit on the other hand, sometimes in backfires because these people like are like all in enough on this fucking meme cooin shit to like run it.

So yeah, let's let's talk about this specific mean coin, Libra.

Speaker 4

Yeah. So it's kind of a weird example of a meme coin, because you know, most meme coins, the idea is like this has no intrinsic value, this has no purpose. You just gamble on the token price and hope for the best. Libra was ostensibly supposed to actually have some sort of point to it, making it much unlike most of the meme coins, but it was still you know,

basically a meme coin under the hood. But the idea was that like somehow some of the profits from this Libra token were going to be put towards supporting Argentine entrepreneurs or something like that. There is a sort of like social benefit side to it, where which was all very vague and like they're very little detail, like you know, you never really know what these things what is actually

supposed to happen. But that was the story, is that like this is going to support Argentine entrepreneurs and it's going to funnel money to their projects and all this.

Speaker 2

It almost feels like an older kind of scam, Like it reminds you of like an NFT scam. We're like, yeah, they'll they'll be like, ah, so we're in the future. We're going to make a game and you're all gonna play. It's like that thing, but they brought it back for one last ride.

Speaker 4

Right. It's like the historical like twenty twenty era crypto scam where it was like, look, we have this beautiful roadmap of all these things we're going to do and we're going to give you gifts and rewards and then it's like okay, but how is it going to work? And they're like, Oh, don't worry about it, we'll tell you later. Just give us your money now. And that

was kind of the idea with the libri coin. But basically the team behind it had some folks who were involved in something called tech Forum Argentina, which was like a group of tech entrepreneurs this sort of like blockchain angle to it, who had access to Malay via this sort of project that was happening in Argentina where you could like pay to come to this conference and Malay was going to be there and all this, and so they joined forces with some meme coin guys who had

a lot of experience launching other meme coin projects, including the Milania token, including the en Run token, which was literally launched by someone who purchased the trademark rights to the Enron company.

Speaker 3

I forgot about that.

Speaker 4

Oh yeah, yeah, that came back to haunt us. And so they all joined forces and launched this meme coin and they were able to get President Melay to promote the meme coin on his Twitter account by saying like, here's this Libra project. It's going to support Argentinine entrepreneurs.

Here's the contract address, buy in, And so everyone got super excited because a president had just endorsed a meme coin, and he unfortunately was too slow to be the first president to do such a thing, with Trump beating him to that particular record.

Speaker 2

But I actually, I actually can't believe I blanking on his name. The guy in Al Salvador hadn't pulled one yet. Oh yeah, Bi Kelly, I'm like stunned he hadn't done it yet.

Speaker 4

Yeah, it's probably because he's a real bitcoiner and bitcoin maximalists are not a huge fan of any other cryptocurrencies. That would be my guess. But yeah, it is a little surprising.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 1

Oh.

Speaker 2

Also, okay, there's another run hinged angle here which I want to briefly mention because it's extremely funny. The one of my good friends Julie pointed to me too, which is part of the thing that's like originally that originally maybe want to do this is that so one of the people who was like involved in like this hookup process with like the crypto people was this guy named Augustine Lahay, who's like this very very famous conservative writer and he's the guy who like introduced the concept of

gender ideology to Argentina. So he's like one of one of what lays like big things, is like being a turf all the time, right, And the guy who like got all of these people into turf shit is like the guy who introduced him to this fucking crypto scamp, and he might have to sell him out in order to get out.

Speaker 3

Of the cryptos scamp bullshit, which is just Oh god, trans people getting our revenge.

Speaker 4

You love to see it.

Speaker 2

Speaking of crypto scams, we should take one more ad break before we get into all of the rest of this bullshit. We are back to the main story of the really unprecedented access to this administration has given the crypto people. Can you talk a bit about like who the like who the people involved in this are, because it's a lot of very very large like players in this world.

Speaker 4

Yeah, so, I mean it's still sort of coming out like who exactly was involved and to what degree they were involved, But it's really starting to look like the creation of this meme coin was spearheaded by a bunch of guys at a group called Kelsey or ventures that has been involved in, like I said, launching a bunch of these tokens, and that's sort of a family run operation. There's a guy named doctor Tom and then his two sons, Hayden and Gideon. I believe that everyone lady named.

Speaker 2

Kitty Chees Rice like, oh no, they're making these guys in a lab, and.

Speaker 4

You know they're they're kind of young guys, like Hayden is like twenty eight or something like that, which is you know, typical for the crypto world, I guess, but yeah, and so Hayden Davis is the mastermind behind much of the launch, but they're working very closely with a bunch of other people in the crypto world. And that's something that they sort of have to do with these big,

splashy token launches. You know, the Trump token had to do this as well, where you can't just show up as like a president and launch a meme coin and expect everything will just work. Because when that many people I'll try to buy a token at once, you know, you need someone on the other end to actually be

selling the tokens. And you know, there's all of this infrastructure behind it that goes into these launches and so you need people to do the market making, and there's the liquidity providers, and there's all these you know, projects under the hood that are that are involved, and it's beginning to look like a lot of those people were deeply involved in these token launches in ways that was

perhaps not entirely proper. Yeah, I know, propriety around me coin launches is maybe a lot to expect, but you know, we're there sort of talks about how one of the co founders of a project called Mediora, which is one of these huge liquidity platforms and also a place where people are actually buying these tokens, can you.

Speaker 3

Explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners.

Speaker 4

Yeah. Yeah, so it's it's basically sort of what I what I suggested, which is that like if you go out and launch a token and you don't do any press up, when someone goes to buy that token, there's or sell that token, there's there's no one on the other side of that trade. You need some amount of liquidity in the markets when you start off.

Speaker 2

Yeah, so they're like there there have to be like there have to be like actual tokens that you can sell to people.

Speaker 4

Just yeah, and if someone, you know, if someone buys one of your tokens, they want to be able to sell it to someone as well, and so you need to be able to sort of absorb that kind of trading without just assuming that, you know, out of thin air. These people will exist on both sides of the trade, and so there are these projects called liquidity providers where you know, sometimes it's like big firms will provide liquidity and they'll step in in that role, and that's sort

of the market maker end of things. Metiora is a little bit unusual in that they do like decentralized liquidity provision, which I'm not going to go into too much detail about because it's very mind numbing.

Speaker 2

But it's also so funny that like the terms that have taken hold for these things like are financial terms, and it's like, yeah, it's like like this is not liquidity in the sense of like does the US government have cash on hand to pay something? This is like are there these like stupid little weird program things to like move other programs around.

Speaker 4

Yeah, and it's not even dollars, you know, We're we're not talking about real dollars here. We're talking about like people providing you one fake token in exchange for another fake token. But I think they very much intentionally use the traditional financial terms to sort of lend a degree of legitimacy to it and cover up the fact that, like, oh, and if you're a liquidity provider and you just like siphon all the liquidity out of there, you've just made

a ton of money in a total scam. But it sounds legit because it's a liquidity provider and it's something that exists in like traditional finance. But yeah, so so there's this Mediora project where that liquidity operation all happens, and you know, Mediora was deeply sort of involved in some of these big token launches, like trump token was

starting out on Mediora. Milania started out there, this Libra token started out there, and it seems like the co founder was like very closely connected to this Hayden guy. He even supposedly introduced the Milania team to Hayden Davis,

the Kelseier guy. Sounds like, you know, according to some of the allegations out there, he was personally involved in a lot of this early insider trading that I'm sure we'll get into when it comes to libertoken and why everything went so wrong, And it seems like there is this sort of network of people throughout this meme coin world who are running these big platforms and who are making connections and all of that, who are personally insider trading a lot of these big token launches, so that

when those people who are buying it up early and making all this money, it's like, oh, yeah, that's the guy who runs Metiora. This happens so much in the crypto world, and I should stop being surprised every time

it happens. But what happened is when the co founder of Metiora stepped down, the other co founder who was like previously not really known, stepped up and was like, hey, I'm the other co founder, and he released this whole statement about how Ben Chow, the co founder who stepped down, was, you know, he thought he was totally innocent of all this and nothing shady was happening at media or et cetera. The other co founder who just like came out of

the woodwork. He runs Jupiter, which is the other it's like the ostensible media or a competitor. It's like, oh yeah, it's all just the same people, you know behind the scenes, and you know, some of the insiders who were sort of whistleblowing on this were saying, oh yeah, the Jupiter guys were all insider trading too. The Metiora guys are

insider trading, like, they're all trading against you. So it's really exposed a lot of the rot in this sort of meme coin world, in all of this infrastructure and the fact that like, oh yeah, yeah, when you're buying meme coins like you are playing in a rigged casino, which has certainly not done any favors to the meme coin reputation, but certainly also to Malays as well.

Speaker 2

Yes, well, let's let's get into like Malay's involvement in this. Can you give you lamps to the timeline of this because it's.

Speaker 3

It's so funny.

Speaker 4

Yeah, it's a little whild So unlike the Trump token, Mila did not launch this token. He was not the mastermind behind it. It's not clear how much he really knew about the team behind it or what they were doing, but he was certainly convinced to endorse this token and you know, pump it up on Twitter and all of this. And again, this is not an unusual thing for meme coins to do. I mean, it's unusual for them to find a president.

Speaker 3

But apparently not now, Like it is true it.

Speaker 4

Was unusual for them to find a present. But you know, there's this whole process with meme coins where they try to find influential people to talk about them to drive the interest in the token. And so they will hire celebrities or people who are influential in the crypto world or you know, anyone with some degree of a platform to promote a token, and ostensibly they're supposed to disclose that they are being paid to promote the token. They

rarely do. Yeah, it is technically illegal, but like rarely rarely enforced for for someone to promote a token without disclosure. One of the very few cases where it was enforced was against Kim Kardashian of AOL.

Speaker 3

Yeah, although that that shit's all gone now.

Speaker 4

Yeah, and that was years ago before the sec was bought by the crypto companies and so yeah.

Speaker 2

And like I mean they literally like I think, like yesterday it was that this? Yeah, was it yesterday? As we're recording this, recording this on Friday? Was it yesterday? That?

Speaker 3

The the is it the SEC.

Speaker 4

The SEC that dropped the k c ins Coinbase SEC and that was today, Yeah, this morning day, Oh my god. Yeah yeah, And I mean we're seeing this everywhere. But the SEC has paused a case against Finance which had involved allegations of actual fraud, not just the sort of like minor securities love violation.

Speaker 3

Fraud.

Speaker 4

Is also actually have the securities LA violation.

Speaker 5

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Those those are all, by the way, a bunch of like very very like like bys and like coinbas like the biggest players in like the regular crypto market.

Speaker 4

Yeah, Finance is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. Coinbase is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States. Coinbase spent over seventy five million dollars on the most recent political cycle in the US and now is reaping the rewards by having the SEC case against them dropped. So I would not expect much in the way of SEC enforcement against crypto founders or companies, especially given that they have also installed crypto friendly people at the SEC.

At the CFTC, the CFTC nominee for chair is an Andresen Horowitz guy who is advising them on crypto policy. Like it's totally rotten now.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Well, and also, like the actual guy running the government right now is Elon Musk, who is you know, like, what are their fucking boys?

Speaker 4

Yeah, and the guy who's ostensibly running the project has his own meme coin projects, so I suspect he's not going to be super keen on anyone enforcing laws against meme coin operations either.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 3

Good god, it's such a mess. Yeah.

Speaker 4

Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair.

Speaker 3

Oh god.

Speaker 4

Yeah. So, so basically, you know, the coin launches, Melais, you know, fires off a tweet about how this is such a great meme coin, and you know, he gives the token address so you can all go buy it, and then very early on it becomes clear that there is some degree of insider trading happening. So, you know, the beauty and the horror of crypto is that it's

all recorded on a public blockchain. People can look at who is doing the early trades and these tokens, and it fairly quickly becomes apparent that the wallets that are that were involved in launching the token, and so the ones that are being controlled by the people who you know, actually created this token and are promoting it are also

involved in this early sniping of the token. And sniping is when you use crypto trading bots, you know, like automated programs to buy up the tokens very early on at low, low, low prices, you know, earlier than any human could reasonably be expected to go but hit the buy button.

Speaker 2

Yeah, it's the thing that like fucking ticket scalpers do, or like, like the reason why you can't buy a PS five is that all these trading bots get in like immediately exactly.

Speaker 4

It's one hundred percent analogous to that. But in the case of these trading bots, you know, often they have insider information, they have the contract address before it's public, so that they can be like split second on it to buy these tokens early, and then they usually dump

them really early too. So you know, if if Melea tweets about a meme coin, the price shoots up within minutes of this thing launching, and within minutes these snipers sell off and they make millions of dollars, often in profits. And it is that selling that often causes the price to crash right back down and again causing those average people who thought that they were early to be the ones basically subsidizing the folks who make millions of dollars off these launches, like it's puppin up.

Speaker 3

It's it's literally just a pupp and up, Like it's just fraud. Like I just right, I don't know, like I just.

Speaker 2

This is my my like old like twenty ten sense of ethics emerging here, which apparently doesn't exist in the sort of bold new world of like nihilism, Like this is just fraud.

Speaker 4

Yeah no, and like people talk about, you know, we need cryptoregulations, like you don't need any new regulations. Fraud is still fraud, Like stealing from people is illegal. But that's like a whole cider point this entire thing.

Speaker 2

When everyone was doing this on Wall Street, it like crashed the economy a bunch of times. We were like, holy shit, maybe you shouldn't be allowed to do this, but I don't know. Capitalism is such that you could just buy the governments and now all your filure like fraud schemes are legal.

Speaker 4

Right if you do it on the blackchain, crime is legal apparently, yeah. But yeah, so you know there's this there's this really early scandal where it's like, oh, you know, insiders are trading this token. Everyone's calling it a rug pull, because that's like the cloak wheal term for when someone launches a project and then steals all the money. And it certainly looks like that's what's happening, and so Melay

very quickly distances himself from the project. He deletes the tweet that he made and he sends out a new tweet saying, basically, I didn't know anything about these guys. I don't really know what their project is. I just thought it was this, you know, cool thing that was

gonna support Argentinian businesses. I you know, I renounced all affiliation with it, basically, and then he of course like blames his political opponents for trying to weaponize this against him, and you know, he goes very much shout swinging on people, being like, I can't believe you're taking advantage of this scam to come after my reputation.

Speaker 3

Oh the pronus made me do it all.

Speaker 4

Yeah, right, He's like, this is all your fault somehow. So anyway, you know, that all happens, and it sort of launches the project into chaos because the way that the people on the inside are talking about it a huge grain of salt here, because you know, these are people who are potentially admitting to their crimes.

Speaker 2

Well it also like these are professional liars, like their job is to lie to people for a living.

Speaker 4

Like it's and yeah, and several of the things that they've said have already been proven to be untrue. So like a huge, huge, huge grain of salt here. But their story is that, oh, we were sniping the token yes, but it's not bad because we were doing it to try to protect people from the other token snipers who show up on launches like this, like we didn't.

Speaker 3

No, no, you know what I said.

Speaker 2

We had to do the scam to save you from the other people who were trying to do the same scam.

Speaker 4

You're not even exaggerating. That's literally what they said. That's so good. And so they come up with this like hair brain theory where they're like, Okay, if we snipe the tokens early, we can stop up other token snipers from accumulating these huge piles of the tokens and then

dumping them and causing the whole thing to crash. And so you know, they will be limited to sniping smaller quantities that won't totally wreck the whole you know, chart basically and cause it to go to zero, and then will take our accumulated pile of tokens and like slowly seed it back in to try to stabilize the chart. I mean, it's like blatant manipulating market manipulation that they're describing, like in defending themselves against allegations that they're committing crimes,

they're admitting to new crimes. It's like this whole thing. But that's the story is that they were like, we had to do this to protect the chart. And the idea was that, like Malay was going to make this video promoting the token even more, and at that point they were going to put all this money that they had taken back into the project. But of course that video never came because Meula had already cut his losses and was like, I don't want anything to do with this.

And so now the guys who launched this token are sitting on like ostensibly one hundred million dollars worth of tokens. I use the word ostensibly because it's crypto and the numbers aren't real, and you know, there's really not one hundred million dollars floating around in there.

Speaker 2

Yeah.

Speaker 4

People again people talk about how this is like a four point five billion dollar crypto scam. There was never four point five billion dollars in this. It's all fake money. But like the it is true that there were people

who put real money into this. They got totally scammed, basically taken for a ride because they thought that they might be able to make money on it, because the President endorsed it, because they thought there was this, you know, somewhat legitimate scheme behind it to go to Argentinian businesses. They lost their money and it all went to this guy, Hayden Williams, who is you know, connected to Mela, who has some degree of influence with Malay, who claimed in text messages that he controls me.

Speaker 3

Lay Oh my god, yeah, but what use the N word? By the way, these two did yeh have to like give?

Speaker 2

These people are like this is this is this is a white guy using the ED word like.

Speaker 4

Ica is like whiter than I am and using the word to say that not great. He said in this text message that was leaked that he was sending money to Melay's sister, who is very influential and who sort of is Mela's right hand sister, you know, sent money to her, and that as a result of that, Melee will do anything that I want. He'll say what I want, He'll tweet what I want, He'll you know, he's my

puppet basically. Of course, Mela was very unhappy about this characterization, but it seems like there's money trading hims behind the scenes, even though Meulay was not, you know, behind the token directly. And you know, this has all resulted in somewhat of a political scandal for Mela, which is both surprising that like, of all things that could have caused a political scandal for Meula, there are so many things to choose from,

and this is what it was. But you know, he's now facing these these allegations that he was complicit in the fraud, that he should be impeached, even you know, there's some rumblings among the opposition party about trying to start some sort of impeachment proceedings against him, and it's all gone very south, very quickly for him.

Speaker 2

I think, God, it really would be so incredibly funny

if this is the thing that brings him down. I don't know if it will, But also, like I don't know, this is one of these, Like it e an even bigger way than like the Trump plane crashes are like a political fucking godsend like handed down to the opposition, and the Democrats aren't don't use it right because you know they're the Democrats, right, instead of just like doing instead of doing a thing I would do, which is starting literally every speech with fucking no cops, no kings,

no crashes, They're like, they're like nore atiunity. Like this is like if you were like a Catholic opponent of this administration, Like this is like fucking God like reaching a giant hand down and going, hey, have this thing to be like have this stick to beat over the head with.

Speaker 4

Yeah, And you know, to their credit, I feel like Argentinian politicians start taking better advantage of this than US politicians have taken of their many opportunities because they are calling for you know, impeachment. There have been you know, many lawsuits filed against Mela, and you know, there is a judge looking into his degree of connections here. Obviously there is you know, some amount of corruption over in the Argentinian government, and so you know, the degree to

which they will adequately investigate themselves is somewhat questionable. Let's just say yeah, and you know, the likelihood of an impeachment proceeding actually you know, getting the votes to go to trial is is certainly questionable. But this has been used, you know, in a somewhat effective way to attack the credibility of melee, which is you know, worth doing.

Speaker 2

And you know, I'll say this about paranism, right, like the thing that the thing about paranism is that it's like the engine that devours social movements, right like anytime social movement comes in the paro to sort of like consume it from the inside. But the thing, the thing about the way that like proto's and function is just like, okay, so they've they've eaten all these social movements.

Speaker 3

But it's not.

Speaker 2

Quite like the US where you can just like disband it and make it go away, like you actually have to still have have the thing the social movement does.

Speaker 3

And that means that these wetherfuckers could.

Speaker 2

Throw a protest, like whatever else is it about the paranas like aren't capable of putting an unbelievable number of people into the streets. And I'm really interested to see what's going to happen, like this weekend and over the coming weeks to see if we see another seventeenth giant round of protests, like also specifically about this.

Speaker 4

Yeah, yeah, I'll be curious too. It's really interesting to me, like to what degree this resonates with everyday people, I guess in Argentina, because you know, there's a lot to complain about with the melee government and so you know, it's sort of fascinating to me that people are latching onto this, and you know, it's sort of interesting just to compare with the United States, where there's a lot to complain about with the Trump administration, and you know,

people were complaining about the meme coin, but by the time that was, you know, partly because it was pre inauguration and so Trump hadn't started signing all the executive orders, and so it was very quickly overshadowed by the other sort of blatantly illegal things happening within the Trump administration, and so it didn't get that much traction in sort

of the longer term. So it's interesting to me to watch this play out in a different country where you know, Milat has been in office for some time now, and you know, this has gained at least some degree of a foothold, and I'll be curious to see, you know, if that endures or not. He's he's sort of trying to play it off as like, you know, oh, everyone

knows crypto is risky. He said something he tried to do this like damage control interview on TV where he said that basically, like the people who bought this token knew they were playing Russian roulette and they got the bullet, which is a wild thing to say. Crist Yeah, that's just a nutty thing to say, but also very in character for him. And you know, he said something in then an interview to the effective like, you know, only a couple thousand people lost money, what's the chances that

those people were even Argentinian? Like we shouldn't even care if they were, you know, not Argentinian. And so, you know, it's it's sort of interesting to watch him try to downplay this. It's like, well, yeah, of course people lost money. It's a scam, you know, Like, yeah, I guess.

Speaker 2

I think part of the reason this is like a real issue for him is that like he really truly you know, and this is something that like Trump is also doing this, like but he he like really truly went out to like his main base of supporters, yeah, and was like I'm just going to take you up behind a woods end and shoot you and like take

the money out of your pocket. And like the way he's like systematically fucking all of the people who are supposed to be his political base, and like like Trump is also doing this, but like people sort of like haven't set in that this is what's happening. Whereas this rug pull thing, it's like this is like the only thing that the fucking unhinge right when crypto brote people care about, Like this is like the one thing you could possibly do to like this the wall.

Speaker 4

Yeah, it's really interesting to see like what causes crypto people to turn on you, because it did happen in a much more limited way with Trump, where you know, the US crypto movement, I guess that's not the right word for it, but the industry or the crypto world had really supported Trump very heavily, and you know, they had donated to him. But there was also this widespread belief among people who traded crypto that Trump was going to be good for crypto. He was going to cause

crypto prices to go up. He was gonna fix all these regulations that they thought were holding the industry back

and all this stuff. And then when Trump came out and launched a meme coin, some of his most devoted fans among the crypto community were horrified by it, and they really responded in a way that I think a lot of people didn't expect, which is like, I can't believe he's doing this grifty meme coin he's supposed to believe in crypto, just use it to steal money from its supporters, and so like, there was actually this degree of shock that very briefly rattled the crypto world in

the US as well. And so I think that's, you know, sort of interesting to see, is that like, Okay, you're allowed to do scams and you know, run your government in a way that personally benefits you, as long as it's not reflecting poorly on us and it's not taking money from us. But as soon as it starts to make people, you know, look at scants, at meme coins or the crypto world in general, or it starts to affect crypto prices, then things turn bad somewhat quickly.

Speaker 2

Yeah, I wonder, I don't know, I'm interested in your take on this, like how much of that is people who are in less meme cony things who are worried about like their assets because they at some point like have to be able to cash out.

Speaker 4

Yeah. I think that's a big part of it. Like there are factions in crypto where I sort of referred to this earlier when we were talking about Achiley, But you know, there are bitcoiners who believe that Bitcoin is the one true cryptocurrency and that everything else is a total scam, and so they are really upset when these meme coins come out because they feel like it reflects poorly on Bitcoin because people just sort of lump everything together.

There's sort of a step down from that, which is people who think that there are more legitimate cryptocurrencies besides Bitcoin, but meme coins are not them. And so there's been all this talk recently where they're like, look at all these meme coin scams that are getting in the news. You know that there was like the Hawktua meme coin that totally like stole a news cycle for a minute there, and they're terrified that. You know, people are starting to

think of crypto as meme coins. You know, it's just one and the same, and they're like, people are not going to think of all these wonderful, legitimate cryptocurrencies and all of their use cases if they're thinking about hawktua coin and how they ripped off a bunch of people, which, like, personally, I think that the reputation is perhaps somewhat deserved, but you know, there is this belief among some people that like, oh, this is not real crypto and it's giving the rest

of crypto a bad reputation. And we're actually starting to see talk of that in some of the higher places where you know, I've been seeing reporting that people are talking about the hawktua coin on Capitol Hill, you know, like when they're talking about shredding regulations to prevent people from running securities frauds. The opposition is like, well, do we want hawktua coin everywhere? Like is this really what

we want? And so it is, you know, affecting the public perception and the perception in you know, Congress to some extent, which I think is what's really scaring people because they've just made these huge inroads with you know, all of these now crypto friendly politicians and friendly regulators, and now crypto is out here making a fool of itself right as you know, new legislation or regulation might be installed.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and this gets me too. I think the thing I want to close on.

Speaker 2

Which is, you know, like we actually did successfully as a society kill the NFT. Yeah, Like we took that all the fucker out back at standard to death.

Speaker 4

Yep.

Speaker 2

And I'm wondering whether you think that like this is this is a moment where we can like use this as a wedge thing to try to like fucking kill this entire industry, and how how vulnerable they are to like the negative pr rattlings from all of this.

Speaker 4

Yeah, I mean I think that's a really good point that, like the NFT, even as crypto has had a resurgence, you know, Bitcoin cross one hundred thousand dollars, NFTs are like nowhere to be found, you know, Like the NFT platforms are struggling. A couple of them just went out

of business. And I think it is largely thanks to the fact that NFTs became really cringe, you know, like everyone was like, oh, those stupid monkey pictures, and that had like a really devastating impact on this entire industry that was supposed to be like the future of art or whatever, and so I think there is that potential

throughout other portions of the crypto world. I would not be shocked to see that happen to these meme coin platforms, where they sort of lose their novelty value and people just see them as big scams and there's really no point.

But unfortunately, I don't think that, you know, all of crypto can be undermined by the cringe factor or you know, the sort of societal distaste for it, because I mean, there are people who have bought bitcoin early, who have billions of dollars in crypto in bitcoin, they are now

working in the US government. You know, they have like very strong control over very powerful institutions, and so there is this countervailing force to keep crypto alive at basically any cost, and I think we're seeing them somewhat desperate to do that, as we're seeing calls for say a bitcoin strategic reserve, which is something that keeps coming up, the idea that like the US government should personally stockpile bitcoin, which you know, they make a couple of arguments as

to why they should do that, which are not very convincing even to some of the people in the crypto world. But the sort of underlying thread through it is that if the US government holds a substantial amount of bitcoin, they won't be able to afford to let the bitcoin price collapse or to do anything that might threaten the cryptocurrency industry. And so I think that's why we're seeing the attempts to you know, sort of work crypto into

government checkbooks, into the banking system, into traditional finance. You know, people trying to get bitcoin e ETFs into you know, your pension plans and your retirement funds and things like that is really to make it so endemic and so contagious. I guess to the rest of the financial world that it's almost like, you know, this this threat that they're holding against the government, which is like, all right, if you kill us, we'll kill you.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

And I think it's this interesting thing of like, sorry, I know, so we were going to close up, Like no,

this is fun. There's just interesting way in which like this seems like the endgame for the entire like tech bubble economy is like, you know, like none of these fucking companies have every been able to make money, right, None of these fucking companies but they all they all every like fucking like everything from like like fucking Uber to like fucking like Google and Amazon like hemorrhaged money.

Uber will hemorrhage money until it eventually the bubble pops and it dies, right, But like Amazon only really started making money, you know, Google was kind of making money. Like Amazon only started making money when they started getting

government contracts for like their cloud computing shit. Yeah, and like that like looks like the endgame, Like you know, this is this is the thing with like Elon's like fucking electric armored vehicle contract is like the only thing that can keep the bubble going is just pure stay intervention.

But that also gives me a little bit of hope because I think the thing that's kept this giant bubble economy going for like over like a decade and a half now has been really really even under the original Trump administration, I mean, and the original Talub adminstration kind of got bailed out by COVID to some extent, Like you know, I mean, like the original Argentinian economic crisis was this there's there's a huge wave of currency collapses

in twenty eighteen where it was sort of contained like the IMF did a bailout in while I was trying to do a bailout in Argentina, and that like it kind of got contained, but it set off a black

wave uprisings. But like there's been this like really it's just taken this really careful financial management and like all of these like like like a trillion dollars of like overnight repo purchases like every day from the Treasury to like make sure there's enough liquidity in the banking industry to prevent like the kind of like two thousand and eight style collapses. And I think it it takes it's taken a really delicate hand, and you know, like I

don't think it's a good thing. But on their hand, like these guys just fire the nuke police, like while they were moving a nuke, and I wonder if they can actually keep the dance going or if they're just gonna or if they're gonna fuck up their bubble economy just blow it all up, which might yeah, maybe nuke all of these people in the process.

Speaker 4

Maybe. I also think that, you know, if we're talking like accelerationism, I think that one of the most interesting things that we're going to be seeing now is that the crypto industry is long argued that they have all this potential. You know, they are just around the corner from reinventing the financial system to be wonderful and spectacular.

And the only reason that they haven't you know, actually made true on that is because of those pesky regulators that are stopping them from doing all the stuff that they want. And so they've spent years now vilifying the regulators, claiming that the industry would be so wonderful if these regulators would just let them innovate. And now they've got the regulators, they're in a world where you know, they

basically own the regulators. They're all of the enforcement cases against them are going to go away, you know, the friendliest possible regulations are going to be introduced. And now crypto doesn't have that excuse anymore, right, they can't just say that the reason we don't do anything useful is because these stupid regulators won't let us lend you bitcoin

or whatever. And so I think, you know, there is going to be this moment where people are like, okay, so do it now, you know, like do the innovation now, and it's going to expose a lot of the popsicle sticks and bubble gum that's holding up this crypto industry because they don't have that excuse anymore, which I think will be interesting. I just hope it doesn't take, like, you know, the economic collapse of an entire country to prove it.

Speaker 2

Well, my line on this is that like accelerationism as an ideology doesn't exist anymore because there's not there's nothing you can do to do the acceleration. Yeah right, like or so like left accelerationism, like Trump and Elon Musk like just have their fucking foot hammering the pedal all the way down. We are accelerating as fast as we could possibly go, and all we have left is to like make sure that the fucking acceleration goes our way and up theirs.

Speaker 4

Yeah yeah, but I yeah, I guess, like you know, it's me trying to find a light in the darkness, you know, it's like, all right, well, I guess at least we might see the crypto industry fall apart.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Well, look, look, they might bring down the first of arco capitalist president.

Speaker 4

So yeah, that's true.

Speaker 3

Yeah, I don't know today Argentina tomorrow in the world.

Speaker 4

Yeah, well, and I think also just like you know, it's interesting to see this uprising and and sort of broad distaste formula and everything that he's doing when everything that he's doing is so clearly modeled after Donald Trump and his fashion for Elon Musk, and so you know, to see people sort of turn on that is perhaps a little bit instructive.

Speaker 2

Yeah, And I think it's this is interesting kind of like bounce back thing too, because he's like, you know, he's somebody say he's modeling himself on Trump one, like the first trumpministration, but he got even weirder with it than like Trump wanted and now Trump like model yourself back.

Speaker 3

Yeah, like slingshotting but chainsaw.

Speaker 2

Yeah, and and and and and I don't know, hope hope hopefully the fucking rebound hits them too, and they also get the backlash to it, and we yeah, we don't all die when they actually said a nukelf because we've driven.

Speaker 3

Them out of power already.

Speaker 4

That would be nice.

Speaker 3

Yeah.

Speaker 2

Well, Mollie, thank you so much for coming on the show and for talking talking with us about this unhinged bullshit, and also just genuinely thank you, thank you for reporting on all of this shit, because oh my god, it is not easy. I don't know how you stay sane.

Speaker 4

I don't pretend I do to give in to the madness. Yeah, yeah, well, thank you for having me.

Speaker 3

Yeah, and where where can people find your work?

Speaker 4

You can find me at Citation needed dot news. I also run web three is going just great, which is web three is Going great dot com. And then I'm on social media everywhere. You'll find me from either of those websites.

Speaker 3

Yeah, we will put links to all of this in the description.

Speaker 2

Thank you again, And yeah, I don't know, Go go make crypto so uncool that these people have a terrible day in panic.

Speaker 4

I'll do my best.

Speaker 1

It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonmedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you.

Speaker 3

Listen to podcasts.

Speaker 1

You can now find sources for it could Happen here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.

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