Search Engine - 04 The Skeptic

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

The strange journeys of Cas Piancey, a baker turned crypto skeptic. (For notes & further reading on this episode, check out my newsletter at pjvogt.com). To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm PJ Vote. This is the Crypto Island miniseries. In this episode, we meet a professional skeptic and learn the story of how his life came to be dominated by something he doesn't believe in. That's after some ads. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Serval AI. If you ever worked with an IT team, you know how quickly their day gets eaten up by repetitive tickets, password resets, access requests, onboarding. It all adds up. And as your company grows, those requests just keep piling higher, pulling your team away from the work that actually moves the business forward. That's where Serval comes in.

Serval can cut up to 80% of your help desk tickets, and it's not just another tool layering on AI as an afterthought. While Legacy Platforms bolt AI on, Serval was built for AI agents from the ground up. Here's what that looks like. Instead of a new hire onboarding taking hours or even days, a manager just drops a request in Slack, and Serval handles everything instantly.

No back and forth, no bottlenecks. Serval even writes automations in seconds. Serval powers the latest growing companies in the world, like perplexity, Mercor, Verkata, and Clay. Get your team out of the help desk and back to the work they enjoy. Book your free pilot at serval.com slash search. That's S-E-R-V-A-L-com slash search. They called him the telecom cowboy.

It sounds like the beginning of a truly terrible country song, but it's true. Bernie Ebers was the CEO who was famous for coming to work in a Stetson hat and cowboy boots. A former gym teacher, he'd started a small phone company in Mississippi called Long Distance Discount Services. Bernie's company followed an aggressive playbook. They'd buy up a competitor, which would raise their stock, which would give them money to buy up another competitor. Over and over again, it worked. Before long, they were the second largest telecom in the United States. The Minow That ate the whale.

That's what the papers called them when they managed to buy MCI. Eventually, they gave themselves a name that truly reflected their ambitions. WorldCom. Worldcom stock went up every year, minting millionaires. This was during the dot-com boom, and if you wanted to bet on the internet, you bet on Worldcom. Worldcom was going to own the pipes that carried everything. But then, the dot-com bubble burst, and a funny thing happened. The Worldcom stock didn't go down. The earnings report stayed healthy. Took a few years, and the work of a very brave auditor at the company for anyone to learn why. Cynthia Cooper, a WorldCom accountant, discovered that her bosses were cooking the books.

They'd overstated their assets by $11 billion. Cynthia blew the whistle. WorldCom, the stock and the company, came tumbling down. People Cynthia had worked with, people she knew well. They went to prison. The telecom cowboy himself got a 25-year sentence. In the aftermath, Cynthia was hailed as a hero, Time magazine made her person the year, but she found little to celebrate.

This is her talking about what happened in 2008. I mean, I watched as thousands and thousands of my coworkers were laid off and wave after wave, and, you know, they carted the last of their belongings out of the building in small brown cardboard boxes. You know, when you read about a fraud in the paper and you don't really know the people, it doesn't have the same impact. But behind all of these frauds, there are so many stories. Just heartbreaking stories of people who lost everything. Cynthia Cooper wrote a book about all this called Extraordinary Circumstances.

It's the tale of how a fraud gets built, written by a deeply compassionate observer. She opens the book with a scene at a baby shower for her coworkers. That's where the story begins, with her memory of being in the home of the spouses of the people who will be in jail soon because of her testimony. I don't normally read memoirs by heroic accountants from the 1990s, but I was reading this one because someone I'd interviewed recommended it. A funny thing about reporting on crypto is that here, more than anywhere else I've been, everyone you meet seems to recommend a book, and it's almost never a book I've heard of before. I tried to read these books.

I read them because I'm looking for clues. Not necessarily about crypto, but really just clues about the person who recommended it. Who is this person? What did they see in this story? Today's episode is about the person who recommended Cynthia Cooper's memoir to me. He wanted me to read the story of a massive fraud and of the person who called it out. That's after the break. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Instacart.

Instacart is more than a grocery technology platform. It's really about giving you back time and making everyday tasks feel a whole lot easier. It connects you to thousands of stores across the country so you can get what you need without having to plan your whole day around it. lately I've been using it a ton when I'm trying to just stay on track with meals during the week. I'll sit down, map out a few recipes, and just build my cart with the things I'll need. Specific ingredients, brands I like, even the little things that I would normally forget. Really feels like everything is being chosen thoughtfully, which makes a huge difference if you care about quality. Plus, there's the convenience factor, which is what honestly just keeps me coming back.

Whether I'm planning ahead or just realizing last minute that I'm out of basics, I can order through the app and get what I need on my schedule. Instacart brings convenience, quality, and ease right to your door so you can focus on what matters most. Download the Instacart app now and get groceries just how you like. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vanguard. To all the financial advisors out there whose job is to help your clients keep more of what they earn, Vanguard is here to help you with that.

Vanguard is slashing fees again, this time for more than 50 of its funds. That's on top of big fee cuts they gave last year to investors in 87 of their funds. In an increasingly high-priced world, Vanguard is staying true to excellence without expense. With Vanguard, your clients get access to sophisticated, active, and index bond funds at industry-leading low costs, backed by a fixed-income team that's truly obsessed with consistent outperformance. Lower fees don't just mean savings. They give Vanguard's skilled bond managers more freedom to maneuver as they pursue strong results. And they give you more flexibility to deliver measurable value to your clients,

because top performance shouldn't come at higher cost. Go see the record for yourself at vanguard.com slash impact. That's vanguard.com slash impact. All investing is subject to risk, Vanguard Marketing Corporation distributor. Welcome back to the show. Okay, so first things, first will you just introduce yourself to say your name? Sure. Excuse me.

Warm up your vocal situation. My name is Cass Piancy. I am co-host with Bennett Tomlin of Crypto Critics Corner, a skeptic. critical look at the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Cass Piancy is a professional crypto skeptic. He spends his time identifying and calling out the people he thinks are bad actors in the space. He finds enough of them to fill a twice-weekly podcast as well as a robust Twitter presence. I should tell you, Cass Piancy, not his real name.

It's a pseudonym. Cass PNC. Like the body of water. I want to kind of trace your path in this stuff. like where, how old are you now? I am 34. What was a year where like the idea of cryptocurrency began to influence your life? Yeah, I was, uh, I was, um, 29 at the time.

So five years ago is when I like really started learning more about it. But I was not a, I was not a cryptocurrency skeptic or critic at that point. I was more like, this is really cool and I love it versus now where I'm like, okay, let me tell everybody what's wrong with it? The story of how Cass fell in love with crypto fell out of it, how he eventually met his version of Cynthia Cooper, the whistleblower. It's a long one. But I'm going to tell it long, with many of its tangents. Because I think in those tangents, you'll see the many layers of how Cass came to believe the things that he does. Cass's journey started, as so many do, with a soul-crushing job. He worked in television. He won't say

where, but it involved celebrity gossip. I found the television industry. to be, particularly the television industry that I was involved in, to be particularly revolting. And it made me really sad to go to work every day. The stuff we were doing there, it's like, it's honestly something I try not to reflect on. And so I left. You just felt like every day you were going to work

and making the world just like a little bit less good. I started getting as, and this is, I worked there from the time I was 21 until I was 24, I want to say. maybe 25 even. I started getting, I don't know if people are familiar, there's something called TMJ. And this is, your jaw starts to lock up, right?

Yeah. Yeah. So what happens is you start grinding your teeth so hard at night that your jaw starts to lock up during the day and you get like a pounding headache daily. And so I went to the doctor. The doctor said, oh, there's nothing wrong with you. It might be like a jaw issue.

Went to the dentist. They're like, oh, my God. Yeah, you're grinding your teeth like hell. The only thing we can recognize. recommend for you is two things. You need to get a mouth guard, which I'd never had. And you need to, like, take a baby aspirin before you go to bed every day. Keep in mind, I was 23 years old. Like, it was eating you alive. Yeah, it was killing me. I mean, it was genuinely killing me, right? So I, I, that job ended. And I went to... And would you consider yourself, like, I know this is, like, a weird question or someone to answer about themselves, but I just wonder if you've considered it. Like, Do you consider yourself an especially moral person? Hmm.

See, here's the funny thing. At that point in my life, as a young kid, I was making, for what I considered for myself, to be really good money. And nowadays, probably people would laugh about the numbers that I would give. So I'm not even going to name the numbers that I was making back then. But to me, they felt significant. And I felt like I was really pursuing a goal that I wanted to, right? Like, I wanted to be an editor like my parents. there were no moral qualms for me when I started that path.

And as I spent years at this company that I will not name, doing things that I felt were bad for humanity to reach my goal, at a certain point, it does. It starts to like literally affect your health if you care about it. If you actually reflect on it and care and go, wow, I think we just ruined someone's life for no good reason. Um, yeah, it, it killed me on the inside a little bit. Like, really, it just, it did. And was there a, sorry, this is like such an interviewer question, but, uh, we are bound to the roles we assign ourselves. Was there a moment? Like, was there, like, a specific thing that happened at work that made you walk out? Um, it, it wasn't a singular moment, right? It was, I can, I can recall right now, like, if I close my eyes, I can recall getting into my old,

Mazda 626. It was like a purple Mazda 626 from 1999 or something. And I had to get to work early. So I want to say I would wake up at like 4.30, 5 in the morning, you know, hop up, take a shower, brush my teeth, get ready, jump in the car. And I would have to drive about 30 minutes north of town. And I had to go to an area called North Hollywood. And I would go there. And I would go there. and on my drive on the freeway, as I would be on the freeway on my way to work, I would just look at the exits and watch them and go, maybe I shouldn't get off the freeway today. Like, maybe I should just keep going. It's like the classic, you know, I'm just going to run away with forever.

I'm done. And every day, it was more and more and more of that until it was just like, I have to quit. And so I left. I quit. A friend of mine was working for a raw food kitchen, which raw food is not necessarily my thing. But it was just so different from what I had been doing for so long. Yeah.

And it was not about money. It was not about people congratulating you on the great work that you've done or whatever. It was it was about like making something and satisfying people with what you make. And it was very simple and the gratification was fast and I wasn't hurting anyone with what I was doing. Cass worked at the raw food place for about a year. From there, he got a job as a baker, which he loved. Hard, honest work that didn't make him feel terrible about himself. It's funny, you're not the first person I've known in life who had a job they felt morally conflicted about and quit to become a baker.

It's like I have to say that even today I feel great about what I do. But I said I woke up early for that other job. I was waking up at like 3.30 or 4 in the morning to do my baking job because I had to be there by 4.30 or 5 at the very latest. And it is hard work. It's so hard. And I would be in front of a scorching hot oven for two and a half hours, sweating my balls off with gloves on and burning my arms all over the place and lifting 50-pound bags of flour constantly and getting yelled at by my supervisor for being too slow or whatever. And at the end of the day, after eight to ten hours of just hard, horrible labor, I could go home and sleep and my jaw-werewereau. wouldn't hurt. I could go home and just be like, well, that was hard. I feel good. You know, that was it.

Because you felt like at the end of the day, you were like making croissants for people instead of like ruining someone's life for entertainment. Yeah. And I think even if you boil it down to the very basic, basic, I would think about like, what if everything went south in the world right now? Like, I have a job. And not only do I have a job, but like people will want to come. They need. red. They need food. They need to eat. It's so funny. I have that conversation with myself sometimes, too, where I'm like, what will you contribute to the apocalypse? It's like, well, I was in a band of straggling survivors. I'm not that. I have no sense of direction. I need my glasses. But I'm, I would, I would keep the mood light. That would probably keep me there for a little. I entertainers have always existed and they've been a very important part of

keeping people sane I think so so there's something to be said for that for sure so you're a baker like you're not over money is not pouring out of your pockets at the point that like bitcoin crossed your radar ethereum crossed your radar not at all not at all but then unfortunately right around then my father passed away and my my partner of I want to say four or five years uh we split it up at the same time, and which is, it's just a lot to, to happen at once. Was your dad, he, like, he was young, like it was a surprise. It was not necessarily.

He was, he was 68, 69 when he died, pretty young. And, and yeah, it, he was a heavy drinker, but the issue was that he was like a very, very functional alcohol. holic his whole life. And that just started to unravel really quickly right there at the end. And I had now I had a little bit of cash, right? I had enough cash to not work for six months to be like, okay, I'm going to take a break from work and just focus on myself and try to figure out what the hell I'm doing with my

life. And during that time is when I started just falling down. deep into cryptocurrency because I had the time. Yeah, I have found sometimes in my life when things are bad, it's like there's a weird solace just finding a number to check every day. I was listening to this interview with a guy who was like somehow ended up in the Iranian like hostage crisis. He was, he was in prison and the American diplomats on the other side managed to send the people

who were in prison sports scores. Like they got like a sports magazine and they were just like, read about the batting averages of like the baseball team. And it was just like a thing to look at that's not the noise in your head that's so bad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I it wasn't even just that, right? Like the idea of I was learning about Bitcoin for the first time. I was learning about these concepts that I had really just zero clue about. And while I'm sort of politically versed, while I do understand things about American politics, I'm certainly not focused. I'm certainly not focused on it. And I think a lot of the Bitcoin space, they focus a lot on current government

and politics and Federal Reserve and the Treasury and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I found myself kind of in over my head when it came to like all of the topics that I was focused on, not just number go up or number go down. It was like, wow, what does it mean to have a currency that isn't controlled by a nation? What is a blockchain? What is a hashing function? What are these things? I don't understand it. And I'm going to need to spend hours and hours and hours and hours learning. And so that is a good distraction when you're in a lot of pain. And I think a lot of people thought I was crazy.

Like a lot of like my family and friends, I mean to this day, they still think I'm crazy for following this stuff so much. But I think that at the time they really were, it was like a cop between a rock and a hard place where they were like, well, I'm glad he's found something, but also that is not paying the bills and he needs to get a job and he needs to think about his future. I'm spending a lot of time on Reddit and Twitter and on this and I'm reading stuff on medium and people would just be like, yeah, I know. You're spending like 12 hours a day doing that and you just only talk about that. And I'm like, I know, it's cool, right?

And they're like, no. God, I relate so much that where it's just like, yeah, I don't know, other people meditate. But where you're like, when my brain gets stuck on something, I just. just got to feed it something else because otherwise yeah yeah I feel like I've been enjoying trying to understand crypto not as like a personal investment but as like a concept in a world filled with people in a similar way where I'm just like it's just a very fun puzzle to rubyx around on yeah how much money did you plug in when you plug your money in was it like 1% 10% everything you have no no no no no no um I would argue that at peak from my

me, the amount of money that I had in crypto was probably around $2,000 to $2,500. So you invest some money. You're like enjoying it. It's becoming like not your identity, but maybe like your obsession. And then what happened? Then BitFenext a anonymous cryptocurrency Twitter account and medium writer had to fuck it all up for me. Kaz's encounter with an anonymous, life-changing Twitter account after the break. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Spring calls for a wardrobe refresh, and Nordstrom has the best styles of the season. From dresses and denim to stand-out tops and accessories, find the trends and essentials that feel right for you.

Discover new arrivals from brands you love, like Wave, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas, and free people. Plus, free shipping and returns, and freestyling appointments make everything. Everything's so easy. Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Hi, Diva. It's Rachel. And Jordan, yeah, hi. Quick question. Why are you not spending your Venmo balance?

Yeah, we're concerned. You can, like, buy stuff with it. Oh, you love buying stuff. And on cashback on eligible purchases. You love purchasing eligible things. So the money your friend sent you yesterday, that's today's Raman or ridechair or eyepatches. The skincare kind, not the pyrokind.

Spend with Venmo. And you can earn cashback with Venmo staff. Vimmo's dash bundle terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cashback per month. See terms at Vimmo.com. ID verification required to use a Vimob balance. Welcome back to the show. Here's where we left off.

So you invest some money. You're like enjoying it. It's becoming like not your identity, but maybe like your obsession. And then what happened? Then BitFinext, a anonymous cryptocurrency Twitter account and medium writer had to fuck it all up for me. That thing that fucked it all up for Cass It's complicated It concerns a cryptocurrency called tether

Tether like a lot of things in crypto is somewhat hard to explain But here's what you need to know In order for this story to make sense Most people buy their cryptocurrency From exchanges Places that buy, sell, and store currency And there's a huge Bitcoin exchange

called BitFinex That's very publicly hacked in 2016 At the time, it seemed possible that people would lose confidence in this exchange But they didn't. And part of the reason why is that the exchange found a new store of money. They said they had a large supply of another cryptocurrency called tether. Tether is a stable coin, meaning its value holds stable, not volatile like Bitcoin,

because each tether is backed by one U.S. dollar. So these tethers were a reason to feel confident about this exchange, Bitfinex. That was the claim. But Cass found a Twitter account from an anonymous person who couldn't to be a whistleblower who was saying, these guys are not being honest. They don't really have dollars backing up their tethers. They're basically just making money out of thin air. This critic of BitFinex, confusingly, tragically, goes by the name BitFinext, like ends with an ED. I'm sorry. I wish it weren't so, but it is. Anyway, Cass sees Bitfinext, the critic making these claims.

He sees him demanding that BitFinex, the exchange, release audits to prove they're on the up and up. And he sees that these audits just aren't materializing. And by late 2017, bitfinext with an ED at the end is making a lot of noise because this promised audit is nowhere to be found. And a lot of people assume he's just a conspiracy theorist and a nut job. And they got really, really mad. Their reaction to him doing that was to threaten to sue him was to someone put a hit on him. I'm not going to name the guy's name, but he's a well-known dude and he's on Twitter.

When Cass says someone put a hit on this critic, he doesn't mean, like, to physically hurt them. He means someone was offering a lot of money to docks their identity. When these attacks came to light, what really bothered Cass was just how other crypto people reacted. Instead of trying to be like, we apologize. Actually, these are good questions. Let us work on answering them. The response was, hey, fuck this guy. Let's ruin his life.

And I was not into that at all. And my knee-jerk reaction was to be like, well, I'm on this guy's side and I am not on their side. And, oh, if you guys are going to treat people with questions this way and I clearly don't understand what I'm invested in, fuck this. So this is the moment the turn to Cass, the moment he went from being a crypto fan to a full-blown skeptic. Early 2018, he sells his crypto and starts trying to warn other people that not everything is what it seems. And so where were you, what was your forum for your skepticism and criticism? It was simply Twitter. I would go on Twitter.

At first, I was pretending to be, I was a satire account, essentially. I would pretend to be the CFO of Tether and BitFenex. And I would go on there and very niche comedic work. Oh, way too niche. Way too niche. And as soon as I became this. a satire account for a CFO of a cryptocurrency company, I was getting real traction. And I think there is something to be said about the dopamine hit that you get from likes and

retweets and all of that stuff. One of the cleanest, strongest drugs. Totally, totally. And so I got into it that way, right? So I started getting those likes. I started getting those retweets. I was writing little papers where I was saying like, oh, Tether audited for $10 billion, check it out. and just would sign my own name or something and post it.

And, you know, people were enjoying it. But at some point, I decided to take it a little bit more seriously. By this point, Bitfinext, the critic, had actually disappeared. He was laying low because of legal threats. And Cass decided to pick up the mantle. He wrote his first two articles on Medium. One was an interview with the at the moment reclusive Bitfinext. The other was almost a piece of allegory.

It was this little essay about the world concept. scandal. He wrote about that memoir from the auditor who'd uncovered everything, Cynthia Cooper, the woman whose book starts at the baby shower. I basically wrote a book report. It's like a 26-year-old, 27-year-old man. I wrote a book report about this book. And again, this is one of those moments where you have a reckoning. That article got shared immensely and also got featured in a little snippet from the financial times, which I hold in high regard. WorldCom, similar to Enron, which everyone remembers Enron. It's not as niche.

But I remembered WorldCom because they famously had these advertisements on TV with Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan would be with like Tas, the Tasmanian devil. And they'd be talking about the great rates for WorldCom. And like I literally remembered this and just went, damn. That was a massive fraud and no one remembers it. And when I started reviewing it, there were all these, there were all these analysts and people from the 1990s saying like, these numbers are great.

And then anyone that would question it, anyone that would be like, well, they seem kind of like fudged. People would just be like, what's wrong with you? Don't you seem like you hate innovation? You know, like the same kind of responses that you have now. and I wanted cryptocurrency people who I know are much younger than me to take heed of this idea. Because one of the responses that I would get when it came to Tether or BitFinex, when I would talk about, well, we don't really know anything that's going on there. There's no audits.

There's no, we have no idea what's going on behind closed doors. A lot of people would respond to me and just say, like, they're these multi-billion dollar businesses. They're the most successful cryptocurrency businesses around. why would they commit fraud? Why did Enron commit fraud? It was the number one gas company in America. That seems silly, doesn't it? People don't reflect on, like, it doesn't matter if you're rich.

You can totally commit fraud. That is nothing to do with it. And my idea with WorldCom was to be like, look, this was what was perceived as a hyper successful business by everybody. And for a decade straight, you could have made massive amounts of money just, buying their stock. But in the end, even if you walked away a multimillionaire from WorldCom, the reality is that it was a fraud.

The reality is that these people were lying to investors and doing it to benefit themselves. And this is a lesson that people in this in finance, and I don't, not cryptocurrency, in finance, forget over and over and over again. Every bubble they seem to forget that like when cash is cheap and moving quickly, people just make stuff up. And one of the things I'm just never, ever, ever going to forget is that Cynthia Cooper writes in that book, The Auditor. She's the auditor.

Sorry. She's the internal auditor for WorldCom. And she was, you know, she was having to call out her bosses. She's having to call out the CEO, the executives of this company. And her takeaway at the end, which still, like, it's so remarkable to me because it just, it couldn't be me as much as I wish it could. She says that these frauds and these scams, like, it never starts out that way. Nobody, like, goes into a business like this and goes, I'm going to rip off the whole world.

It's not how anyone operates. You take one step in the wrong direction, and then it just snowballs after that. And she, like, held no animosity for these people. You know, we're all God's children and, like, just so forgiving. And I wish I could be like that. I wish I could be a little bit more forgiving for those kind of sins. But, you know, I think about the people who get the. death penalty in our country and there's a lot of bad people in America and a lot of bad people

in the world. And I don't, I'm not a pro death penalty person, but I reflect on like Bernie Madoff and how many lives he ruined, how many people probably committed suicide because of the things that he did. Yeah. And people think like finance is a nonviolent crime or something, like that you can do this Ponzi scheme of 30 billion. And who knows, who knows how many, scams and schemes and people will get hurt from from all the different garbage that's floating around cryptocurrency right now. Yeah. So what you see your role as this thing's going to happen, my job is to try to like push

people away from the bad stuff and make them understand what they're getting involved in. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I want I want I want people who feel like they need this, this tool to feel empowered to use and not feel ashamed to use it. But at the same time, I want to make sure that people who are like, oh, I should just buy some baby doge coin or whatever.

It's a lottery ticket. I want them to be like pausing and stopping and thinking about this stuff before they just do it. The thing I've noticed that sometimes puts me off with the skeptics a little bit is there's like, I'm not thinking of like a particular person, but there's been like a couple times where I've seen people, it's like I imagine what most. motivates them.

They're like starting motivation has been like, I'm worried about people losing a lot of money. But then they'll talk about something financially horrible that happened in the space that probably destroyed some people and they'll be like, you fucking idiots. And it's like, wait, those are the people you're supposed to be on the side of. It's funny. It's good that you bring that up because I do want to say that like in 2018

when I started like trying to pick up the mantle when BitFinex couldn't be around. That is how I saw myself. I saw myself as being some savior to all these people who wanted to not lose money. And I just want to say, first of all, like, what a naive perspective. Why do you say that? Because it should have been very obvious to me from the very beginning that imagine, imagine doing this in any situation. You walk into, let's say, we won't say any specific casino,

But you walk into a Las Vegas casino, the biggest casino in Las Vegas. You go in there, you walk up to the guy at the slots machine who you just, you see him just going like that, you know, just pulling the handle over and over again. And you go, hey, man, I just want to let you know. Slots are a scam. He's like, thank you, gas. Yeah, exactly. Leave me the fuck alone, bro. Go away.

I don't give a fuck. Yeah. But instead of going into the casino, I just like, am doing a weekly show that is presented on Las Vegas public television saying like, here's how casinos really get you. There's actually like hope in that, right? Yeah. The idea is that I can maybe try to talk some sense into people who aren't already neck deep in the thing.

Because I think what you're talking about is true. You hit this, not only are you being hypocritical because I definitely laugh at people when they lose a fuck ton of money on a total obvious. scam, but you are being this weird, like you're trying to be an angel and that's just not reality, man. Like, you're not going to save anyone who doesn't want to save themselves. It's such a cliche, but it's so obvious that if someone wants to go gamble their life away and that feels fulfilling to them, you can't take it away from them. A very personal experience, and this is getting back to my parents, I tried to get my mom and

dad both of them to stop drinking and stop smoking. Oh, wow. How old were you? Oh, God. When I first started getting my mom to try to stop smoking, I was probably 16 years old. And full disclosure, I smoke now. So it's like, great. But I tried desperately to tell her not to smoke.

Don't smoke. It's so bad for you. It's the worst thing. You're going to die young. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At the end, when my mom was dying, and not from lung cancer or whatever, But like when my mom was dying, I would never take that away from her. If she wanted to have a cigarette or a drink, you know, have a cigarette or a drink.

For God's sakes, if that's what's going to make you happy, do it. So my hope is that by this point, 30 minutes and as many tangents into this conversation, you understand why all those tangents hopefully add up to something. Like a more complete portrait of this person, Kaz Piancy. I want to explain to you why Cass was a person I chose to listen to and to trust. Because the challenge that crypto really presents to a reporter, to any outsider, is just who to listen to. Because the skeptics, the true believers, all of them are making big claims about a future

that no one can actually see. And so who you take seriously, it often tells you as much about your own biases as anything else. So why did I gravitate towards this person? Talking to Cass, I remembered something a writer I really admire had said, this guy who'd covered crypto for years. He told me that there is something about crypto in particular that seems to drive its critics slowly crazy. Which totally makes sense. I mean, it would drive me crazy. Scammers pull off the straightforward heists and then show back up asking for money again months later and sometimes get it. Questionable business practices are pointed out and the market hardly seems to blink.

Or even just consider this. At the time, Cass divested his crypto holdings, the price of Bitcoin was like 3,000 something per coin. As he assiduously called out problems in the space for the next few years, the price rose up to a high of $65,000 last year. That would drive me crazy. But Cass, well, I asked him if he'd been driven crazy. He said he was crazy before he got here.

A nice enough line. But I think the real answer for why he's okay, And the answer for why I gravitate towards him might be the same. Cass is at heart a curious person. I don't mean curious like he loves mysteries. I mean curious as in open-minded. He tolerates complexity. He finds most things funny.

And he's empathetic in a way that honestly is not all that fashionable right now. I really like those kinds of people. My bias is towards curious people. Cass has opinions that surprise me, that don't follow directly and obviously from his other ones. He has friends I would not expect him to. Like, here he is talking about some of the people he's met online who invest in crypto. I mean, to be fair, I've met a lot of people in this space who were opposite end of my

spectrum, who are just some of the best people I've ever met in my life who 100% are in, like all of their net worth almost or something, that have earned multi-millions of dollars from this. And we get along easy, easy-peasy. I mean, my hot sauce guy is one of my great friends on cryptocurrency Twitter. So it's like... What do you mean when you say you're hot sauce guy? Like this one of my great friends on cryptocurrency Twitter, we met and we bonded not over coins or arguing about Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever.

We met because we both love food. We both love, love, love food. And he just was making all this hot sauce. And I was like, that looks awesome. And he's like, oh, I'll send you a bottle. Right. And so then you enter, like, there's these different levels of trust. You're like, oh, okay, so I have to give you my address and my real name.

And then, okay, I hope you're not going to share it. And then I get a not poisoned hot sauce from my good buddy on cryptocurrency Twitter. And since then, you know, we've hung out. He's a awesome dude. He has kids and a wife and a family. And he, like, real things that he cares about way more than cryptocurrency. and those are the people that I don't have any issue with people speculating, gambling, betting on the future.

None of that bothers me. I just, when people become profit maximalists, whether you're an oil magnet or a cryptocurrency, bro, that's disgusting to me. Cass is bothered by extremists, by the crypto investors who seem to take the movie American Psycho as lifestyle advice. But he'll tell you he disagrees with the extremists on his side too. both sides are so extreme.

There's people who I love. There's people who I follow and think are hilarious. I'm not going to name names. But there's people who I love and I think are hilarious who say it's all a scam. It's all totally a scam. It's horrible. It's the worst thing ever. And I, like in many ways disagree with them.

I think that Bitcoin is really cool. Is it as useful as, say, email? Probably not. Like are, do I think Dow's are going to be a new social labor movement? I do not think so. No. Do I think that the technology of the blockchain will change human psychology? Absolutely not.

No other. Nothing else has. No other, yeah, exactly. No other technology has. Why would this? Do I think it's useless and a Ponzi scheme? Like, it's hard to, it's hard to convince me of that. And the reason I say that is just from having gone and seen, whether it's useful for criminals or governments or individuals or refugees or journalists in countries where they're being censored, it can be a useful tool for a lot of different people.

And the same way that a knife can be useful for a chef or a murderer, that doesn't take away from the fact that knives are important tools that people need. So I don't hate Bitcoin and I don't hate cryptocurrency And I know that it's a pretty bad cliche To say like the juniors out of the bottle But yeah, none of this is going to go away It's not going to just disappear Crypto is not going away and neither is Cass He's made it this far as a skeptic probably

Because he just finds so much of it very funny He told me about one thing A tether defender said to him online That he found hilarious Someone told me and all of the critics and skeptics that Tether has done more for charity and humanity than any of us will ever do with our lives. I love that shit. I love it. Like there's no, there is no ifs, ands or butts about it.

It doesn't drive me crazy. I think it's hilarious. And not only do I think it's hilarious, not only do I love when people tell me like, you're so fucking wrong, you idiot. it. I love it. Bennett put it a really good way today, my co-host, my my co-host on the podcast. He put it a really good way today. A fun thing that a lot of finance people say is, do you want to be right or do you want to be rich? As though this is a binary option. You cannot have a choice in one or the other, which already I have issues with, but okay. But accept it. Yeah, let's accept this as like a weird hypothetical. But okay. I guess it's pretty clear which one I would prefer to be.

And it ain't super rich because I reflect on all of the major moments like that where people would tell other people how fucking dumb they were. Oh, Bernie Madoff? You think Bernie Madoff is doing a Ponzi scheme, Harry Markopoulos? You idiot. You fucking moron. And for 20 years, he just took it. He just took it like a man.

And then he just rubbed it in everyone's face and said, yeah, remember for 20 years when I said you guys were wrong and I was right? I look at companies like Tesla. I look at companies like just these massive things where people go, there's no way this business could ever fail or do anything wrong. And I go, just you wait. Just you wait until the next correction. I've lived through two of them. I've lived through two major corrections. I remember what happened to companies and commodities and things that people thought could never go down.

Property? Property could never go down, said everyone in 2006. Everyone. Yeah. Right? So I just think it's cool. I'm cool with being wrong and wrong and wrong and not rich until I'm right. I'm fine with that.

It's funny because what you're describing basically is an investment. It's like you've invested in skepticism and you're like really sure it's going to pay off one day. And in that way you're like everyone else. It's, it is that. PJ, it is that though. For me, this is the path of least resistance and and not just like is it comfortable, but it feels right. Cass Piancy. He'd rather be right than rich.

And he's super long on his bet that all of this shit might just come tumbling down. I don't need to be a billionaire. You can find him on his podcast with his co-host, Bennett Tomlin, the Crypto Critics Corner. Also, since I recorded this interview last week, Kazz actually got doxed. He now operates under his real name, Orson Newstat. Like I said, everything changes. That's all for Crypto Island this week. Next time, a whole other bet on the future.

One that shakes out in an unintended way. A story from the very beginning of cryptocurrency that begins. with a short piece of paper that launched all of this. This episode of Crypto Island was edited by Shruthy Pinnaminani, fact-checking in this episode by Elizabeth Moss, sound design and mixing from Phil Demahofsky and Stephen Jackson at the Audio Non-Vigual Company. The music by Christine Andrews.

You can find new episodes of the show, subscribe to our free newsletter, and support our weird project if you like at p.jvote.com. Also, you can email me there and read everything. Thank you so much for listening. See you soon.