February 24, 2025 • 64 mins
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.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Call the media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
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
(00:27):
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 (00:37):
Who is Molly White? And I'm trying to explain who
Bally White is.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
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
(01:02):
the world's best crypto journalist and writes the newsletter citation
needed also does Web three is going great, which is amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Everyone should go listen to it. And MOLLI, welcome to
the show.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
Thanks for having me. What an intro.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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 (01:27):
So God, we were talking about this before the show.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
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 (01:45):
But Jesus Christ, yeah, what a spectacle that was.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute wasn't even
the weirdest thing that happened there.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That was only like day one.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Well that's overdone now you know everyone's doing it. You
have to do something new.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
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
(02:28):
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
(02:50):
hours of sleep.
Speaker 5 (02:51):
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 (03:11):
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,
(03:33):
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
(03:57):
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
(04:18):
short cultural Revolutions nineteen seventies era China.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
So this is about to get so much more unhitched.
But a while back.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
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
(04:47):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:49):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:17):
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
(07:38):
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
(08:01):
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 (08:13):
So like everyone on like.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
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
(08:36):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:42):
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 (10:02):
Malai's election like a few years ago.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
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
(10:25):
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,
(10:45):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:28):
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.
(11:50):
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
(12:12):
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
(12:35):
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
(12:57):
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
(13:19):
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
(13:43):
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
(14:03):
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
(14:26):
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
(14:47):
what Mao wants.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
This is what Parona is doing.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
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 (15:12):
And okay, okay, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:55):
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 (16:04):
Yeah, we just have this sort of like boogeyman version
of it. They actually have hyperinflation.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
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 (16:29):
The previous like Parna's administration.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
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 (16:37):
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 (16:53):
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,
(17:16):
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
(17:37):
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 (17:43):
Because oh god, yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
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
(18:08):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:51):
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 (19:03):
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 (19:14):
Is just the Doge coin meme.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
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
(19:39):
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 (19:56):
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 (20:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
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
(20:34):
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
(20:55):
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 (21:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
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.
(21:31):
But now it's just I mean, they just do the
meme coin right, Like there's no.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
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.
(21:59):
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 (22:07):
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 (22:15):
Mean, I got one of the things I remember from
like the very first.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
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,
(22:38):
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 (22:55):
And it's like yeah, no, but it fits into.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
This sort of like nihilism of like, yeah, everyone trying
to grift each other.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
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
(23:25):
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 (23:39):
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 (23:55):
You could be the robbery.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
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.
(24:17):
So yeah, let's let's talk about this specific mean coin, Libra.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:02):
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 (25:16):
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 (25:30):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:17):
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 (26:30):
I forgot about that.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
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
(26:54):
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 (27:05):
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 (27:16):
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 (27:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
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
(27:48):
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 (28:05):
Of the cryptos scamp bullshit, which is just Oh god,
trans people getting our revenge.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
You love to see it.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
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
(28:35):
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 (28:49):
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.
(29:12):
There's a guy named doctor Tom and then his two sons,
Hayden and Gideon. I believe that everyone lady named.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Kitty Chees Rice like, oh no, they're making these guys
in a lab, and.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
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
(29:51):
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
(30:14):
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,
(30:35):
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 (30:47):
Explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
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 (31:10):
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 (31:14):
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
(31:36):
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 (31:50):
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 (32:10):
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
(32:30):
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
(32:53):
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
(33:15):
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
(33:37):
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
(33:58):
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
(34:19):
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
(34:39):
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 (34:54):
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 (35:00):
It's so funny.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
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.
(35:23):
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 (35:29):
But apparently not now, Like it is true it.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
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
(35:54):
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
(36:15):
was against Kim Kardashian of AOL.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, although that that shit's all gone now.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Yeah, and that was years ago before the sec was
bought by the crypto companies and so yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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 (36:34):
The the is it the SEC.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
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 (36:54):
Fraud.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Is also actually have the securities LA violation.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
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 (37:04):
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
(37:24):
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 (37:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
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 (37:51):
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 (38:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Good god, it's such a mess. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Oh god.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
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,
(38:32):
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,
(38:53):
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
(39:14):
human could reasonably be expected to go but hit the
buy button.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
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 (39:27):
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
(39:50):
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 (40:11):
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 (40:18):
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 (40:29):
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 (40:42):
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 (40:54):
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
(41:17):
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
(41:38):
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 (41:51):
Oh the pronus made me do it all.
Speaker 4 (41:53):
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 (42:14):
Well it also like these are professional liars, like their
job is to lie to people for a living.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
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 (42:41):
No, no, you know what I said.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
We had to do the scam to save you from
the other people who were trying to do the same scam.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
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
(43:10):
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,
(43:32):
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
(43:54):
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 (44:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:13):
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
(44:33):
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 (44:52):
Lay Oh my god, yeah, but what use the N word?
By the way, these two did yeh have to like give?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
These people are like this is this is this is
a white guy using the ED word like.
Speaker 4 (45:03):
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
(45:23):
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,
(45:48):
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
(46:09):
all gone very south, very quickly for him.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
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
(46:32):
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
(46:54):
head with.
Speaker 4 (46:55):
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
(47:17):
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,
(47:39):
you know, in a somewhat effective way to attack the
credibility of melee, which is you know, worth doing.
Speaker 2 (47:45):
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 (48:03):
But it's not.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
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 (48:11):
And that means that these wetherfuckers could.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
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 (48:31):
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
(48:53):
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,
(49:13):
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
(49:35):
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
(49:58):
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 (50:29):
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
(50:52):
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 (51:10):
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
(51:31):
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
(51:53):
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
(52:14):
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 (52:36):
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 (52:51):
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.
(53:15):
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,
(53:36):
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
(53:59):
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
(54:21):
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,
(54:41):
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 (54:53):
Yeah, and this gets me too. I think the thing
I want to close on.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
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 (55:04):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
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 (55:17):
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
(55:38):
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,
(55:58):
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
(56:22):
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
(56:45):
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
(57:08):
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,
(57:30):
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 (57:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
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
(58:14):
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
(58:35):
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
(58:55):
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
(59:15):
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
(59:36):
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 (59:54):
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
(01:00:18):
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
(01:00:39):
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,
(01:01:01):
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
(01:01:23):
prove it.
Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
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
(01:01:45):
and up theirs.
Speaker 4 (01:01:46):
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 (01:01:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Well, look, look, they might bring down the first of
arco capitalist president.
Speaker 4 (01:02:04):
So yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
Yeah, I don't know today Argentina tomorrow in the world.
Speaker 4 (01:02:10):
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
(01:02:31):
a little bit instructive.
Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
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 (01:02:46):
Yeah, like slingshotting but chainsaw.
Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
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 (01:03:01):
Them out of power already.
Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
That would be nice.
Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
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 (01:03:24):
I don't pretend I do to give in to the madness. Yeah, yeah, well,
thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Yeah, and where where can people find your work?
Speaker 4 (01:03:35):
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 (01:03:47):
Yeah, we will put links to all of this in
the description.
Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
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 (01:03:56):
I'll do my best.
Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
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 (01:04:13):
Listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
You can now find sources for it could Happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
Call the media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
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
(00:27):
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 (00:37):
Who is Molly White? And I'm trying to explain who
Bally White is.
Speaker 2 (00:41):
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
(01:02):
the world's best crypto journalist and writes the newsletter citation
needed also does Web three is going great, which is amazing.
Speaker 3 (01:10):
Everyone should go listen to it. And MOLLI, welcome to
the show.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
Thanks for having me. What an intro.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
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 (01:27):
So God, we were talking about this before the show.
Speaker 2 (01:30):
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 (01:45):
But Jesus Christ, yeah, what a spectacle that was.
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Oh my god.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
I like Steve Bannon doing the Nazi salute wasn't even
the weirdest thing that happened there.
Speaker 3 (01:59):
That was only like day one.
Speaker 4 (02:00):
Well that's overdone now you know everyone's doing it. You
have to do something new.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
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
(02:28):
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
(02:50):
hours of sleep.
Speaker 5 (02:51):
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 (03:11):
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,
(03:33):
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
(03:57):
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
(04:18):
short cultural Revolutions nineteen seventies era China.
Speaker 3 (04:23):
So this is about to get so much more unhitched.
But a while back.
Speaker 2 (04:26):
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
(04:47):
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
(05:07):
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
(05:28):
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
(05:49):
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
(06:13):
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
(06:35):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:17):
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
(07:38):
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
(08:01):
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 (08:13):
So like everyone on like.
Speaker 2 (08:14):
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
(08:36):
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
(08:59):
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
(09:21):
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
(09:42):
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 (10:02):
Malai's election like a few years ago.
Speaker 2 (10:04):
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
(10:25):
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,
(10:45):
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
(11:08):
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
(11:28):
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.
(11:50):
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
(12:12):
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
(12:35):
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
(12:57):
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
(13:19):
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
(13:43):
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
(14:03):
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
(14:26):
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
(14:47):
what Mao wants.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
This is what Parona is doing.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
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 (15:12):
And okay, okay, I'm so sorry.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
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
(15:35):
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
(15:55):
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 (16:04):
Yeah, we just have this sort of like boogeyman version
of it. They actually have hyperinflation.
Speaker 2 (16:11):
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 (16:29):
The previous like Parna's administration.
Speaker 2 (16:32):
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 (16:37):
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 (16:53):
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,
(17:16):
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
(17:37):
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 (17:43):
Because oh god, yeah.
Speaker 4 (17:47):
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
(18:08):
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
(18:29):
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
(18:51):
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 (19:03):
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 (19:14):
Is just the Doge coin meme.
Speaker 4 (19:15):
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
(19:39):
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 (19:56):
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 (20:12):
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (20:13):
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
(20:34):
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
(20:55):
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 (21:07):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (21:08):
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.
(21:31):
But now it's just I mean, they just do the
meme coin right, Like there's no.
Speaker 4 (21:36):
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.
(21:59):
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 (22:07):
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 (22:15):
Mean, I got one of the things I remember from
like the very first.
Speaker 2 (22:17):
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,
(22:38):
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 (22:55):
And it's like yeah, no, but it fits into.
Speaker 2 (22:59):
This sort of like nihilism of like, yeah, everyone trying
to grift each other.
Speaker 4 (23:03):
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
(23:25):
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 (23:39):
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 (23:55):
You could be the robbery.
Speaker 2 (23:56):
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.
(24:17):
So yeah, let's let's talk about this specific mean coin, Libra.
Speaker 4 (24:21):
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
(24:41):
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
(25:02):
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 (25:16):
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 (25:30):
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
(25:53):
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
(26:17):
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 (26:30):
I forgot about that.
Speaker 4 (26:31):
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
(26:54):
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 (27:05):
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 (27:16):
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 (27:25):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (27:26):
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
(27:48):
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 (28:05):
Of the cryptos scamp bullshit, which is just Oh god,
trans people getting our revenge.
Speaker 4 (28:13):
You love to see it.
Speaker 2 (28:15):
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
(28:35):
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 (28:49):
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.
(29:12):
There's a guy named doctor Tom and then his two sons,
Hayden and Gideon. I believe that everyone lady named.
Speaker 2 (29:19):
Kitty Chees Rice like, oh no, they're making these guys
in a lab, and.
Speaker 4 (29:29):
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
(29:51):
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
(30:14):
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,
(30:35):
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 (30:47):
Explain like what a liquidity platform is for listeners.
Speaker 4 (30:51):
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 (31:10):
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 (31:14):
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
(31:36):
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 (31:50):
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 (32:10):
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
(32:30):
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
(32:53):
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
(33:15):
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
(33:37):
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
(33:58):
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
(34:19):
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
(34:39):
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 (34:54):
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 (35:00):
It's so funny.
Speaker 4 (35:02):
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.
(35:23):
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 (35:29):
But apparently not now, Like it is true it.
Speaker 4 (35:33):
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
(35:54):
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
(36:15):
was against Kim Kardashian of AOL.
Speaker 3 (36:17):
Yeah, although that that shit's all gone now.
Speaker 4 (36:20):
Yeah, and that was years ago before the sec was
bought by the crypto companies and so yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:25):
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 (36:34):
The the is it the SEC.
Speaker 4 (36:36):
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 (36:54):
Fraud.
Speaker 4 (36:55):
Is also actually have the securities LA violation.
Speaker 5 (36:57):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:57):
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 (37:04):
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
(37:24):
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 (37:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (37:43):
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 (37:51):
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 (38:01):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (38:02):
Good god, it's such a mess. Yeah.
Speaker 4 (38:07):
Back to Argentina before we get lost in despair.
Speaker 3 (38:10):
Oh god.
Speaker 4 (38:12):
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,
(38:32):
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,
(38:53):
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
(39:14):
human could reasonably be expected to go but hit the
buy button.
Speaker 2 (39:18):
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 (39:27):
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
(39:50):
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 (40:11):
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 (40:18):
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 (40:29):
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 (40:42):
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 (40:54):
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
(41:17):
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
(41:38):
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 (41:51):
Oh the pronus made me do it all.
Speaker 4 (41:53):
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 (42:14):
Well it also like these are professional liars, like their
job is to lie to people for a living.
Speaker 4 (42:19):
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 (42:41):
No, no, you know what I said.
Speaker 2 (42:43):
We had to do the scam to save you from
the other people who were trying to do the same scam.
Speaker 4 (42:47):
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
(43:10):
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,
(43:32):
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
(43:54):
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 (44:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (44:13):
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
(44:33):
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 (44:52):
Lay Oh my god, yeah, but what use the N word?
By the way, these two did yeh have to like give?
Speaker 2 (44:59):
These people are like this is this is this is
a white guy using the ED word like.
Speaker 4 (45:03):
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
(45:23):
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,
(45:48):
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
(46:09):
all gone very south, very quickly for him.
Speaker 2 (46:11):
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
(46:32):
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
(46:54):
head with.
Speaker 4 (46:55):
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
(47:17):
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,
(47:39):
you know, in a somewhat effective way to attack the
credibility of melee, which is you know, worth doing.
Speaker 2 (47:45):
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 (48:03):
But it's not.
Speaker 2 (48:04):
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 (48:11):
And that means that these wetherfuckers could.
Speaker 2 (48:13):
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 (48:31):
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
(48:53):
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,
(49:13):
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
(49:35):
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
(49:58):
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 (50:29):
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
(50:52):
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 (51:10):
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
(51:31):
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
(51:53):
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
(52:14):
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 (52:36):
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 (52:51):
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.
(53:15):
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,
(53:36):
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
(53:59):
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
(54:21):
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,
(54:41):
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 (54:53):
Yeah, and this gets me too. I think the thing
I want to close on.
Speaker 2 (54:55):
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 (55:04):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (55:04):
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 (55:17):
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
(55:38):
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,
(55:58):
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
(56:22):
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
(56:45):
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
(57:08):
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,
(57:30):
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 (57:52):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
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
(58:14):
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
(58:35):
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
(58:55):
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
(59:15):
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
(59:36):
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 (59:54):
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
(01:00:18):
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
(01:00:39):
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,
(01:01:01):
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
(01:01:23):
prove it.
Speaker 2 (01:01:24):
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
(01:01:45):
and up theirs.
Speaker 4 (01:01:46):
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 (01:01:59):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:02:00):
Well, look, look, they might bring down the first of
arco capitalist president.
Speaker 4 (01:02:04):
So yeah, that's true.
Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
Yeah, I don't know today Argentina tomorrow in the world.
Speaker 4 (01:02:10):
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
(01:02:31):
a little bit instructive.
Speaker 2 (01:02:33):
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 (01:02:46):
Yeah, like slingshotting but chainsaw.
Speaker 2 (01:02:50):
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 (01:03:01):
Them out of power already.
Speaker 4 (01:03:03):
That would be nice.
Speaker 3 (01:03:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
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 (01:03:24):
I don't pretend I do to give in to the madness. Yeah, yeah, well,
thank you for having me.
Speaker 3 (01:03:32):
Yeah, and where where can people find your work?
Speaker 4 (01:03:35):
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 (01:03:47):
Yeah, we will put links to all of this in
the description.
Speaker 2 (01:03:49):
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 (01:03:56):
I'll do my best.
Speaker 1 (01:04:02):
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 (01:04:13):
Listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1 (01:04:14):
You can now find sources for it could Happen here
listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
Hosts And Creators
Robert Evans
Garrison Davis
James Stout
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