Sixteenth Minute (of Fame) - hawk tuah bonus feat. ed zitron

Episode Date: February 6, 2025

You earned it, Sixteenth Minute listeners! As a little treat, Jamie talks with fellow Cool Zone Media host Ed Zitron of Better Offline about the nature of the Hawk Tuah crypto scam, and whether he thinks anything will come of the pending lawsuit.  Listen to Better Offline: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeart  Ed's Links: Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitronSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an IHeart podcast. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell. And the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught. And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha.

This technology is already solving so many cases. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're looking for another heavy podcast about trauma, the same it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The Unwanted Sorority is where black women, fims, and gender expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after.

And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leahy Trette. Listen to the Unwanted Sorority, New Everett. episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast. or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Sixteen minute of fame Sixteen minutes of face One more minute of fame I'm not so bad when you take me on my mind I'm trying to say so goodbye Welcome back to 16th Minute, the podcast where we take a look at the Internet's main characters and see what their moment says about us and the Internet. And I'm your little host, Jamie Loftus, taking a little bit of a bonus victory lap here

after we wrapped our recent series on Haley Welch, aka The Hawk to a Girl. And with these longer series, there usually ends up being a few interviews or sections that end up getting cut. for time, but there are some interviews that are simply too special to leave. And when it came to understanding the hawk-coin crypto scam, I needed all the help I could get. And thankfully, my pals who know about it were right there for me. So today, a little bonus. A conversation with CoolZone's own Ed Zittron. Hopefully you know who Ed is already.

He's the host of the wonderful tech podcast, Better Off, line, and the mind behind the popular Where's Your Ed at Newsletter? He's also one of the funniest people I know, and I delighted in torturing him into telling me what crypto scams mean. Here's my conversation with Ed. Well, I'm Ed Zittron. I'm the host of Better Offline, the Cool Zone Media Tech podcast. I have watched so many crypto scams happen. One time a friend of mine was working on a paper for law school about rugpoles and said to me, Ed, have you seen a rugpole recently? I said, I'm watching one right now.

Do you remember which one it was? It was called Apecoin, and it was on the Polygon blockchain. Molly and I were talking about it. She was like, this is a very straightforward rugpole. The only reason we're talking about it is because it's talk to a girl and everyone thinks she's funny. That and also it was fairly egregious, the market cap. And the term market cap, as I'm sure Molly's been over, is kind of a misnomer.

It just means the value of the coin times the amount of tokens that are available. So at one point, it was like half a billion dollars value and then, it crashed after the rugpole happened. But yeah, the only remarkable thing is that this person is famous. There is somebody that has now had to say to their wife, hey, honey, I've got some bad news, and it's about our 401k and about Hawk Tour. It's such a weird world we live in because there is some romanticization of someone like this, a regular person who was kind of vilified for just making a regular garden gross thing that people say all the time on the internet. Someone who would talk about a hawk-toeing on that thing, I believe.

As she once said once. Great hearing it in the accent. Yes, that's how you say it. I think someone made a really good comment on Twitter about it saying that if Ellen was still around, Ellen would have taken this woman down in 50. She had got 15 minutes of fame on the Ellen show and then done. For all of Ellen's crimes, she really did make sure that the fame remained contained. I think that the Hawke Tour thing is a wider phenomenon as well. You're seeing it

with the horrifying Costco children as well. We're just everything, everyone is so desperate. Like I have some empathy for these people as well. Everyone's so desperate to try and find any way in because just working a regular job is not sufficient enough to like rent a house, let alone buy one in many metros. So they, of course, will see this opportunity and they'll juice it as much as they can. But at some point, there are other people who would like to juice it, too, and I think that's how we got to hawk coin. Just Jesus Christ. I think what is kind of surprising me about not just this story, but a lot like it, is sort of the inherent cynicism that there is to these schemes of like, yes, you're obviously being grifted. But if you get it on the ground floor

of this grift, you can grift others just like you. Exactly. You can ride this grift, because I'm sure that's what most people thought. Her whole thing is that she is clearly doing a grift. We all know it's a grift, but by joining the grift, we too could grift with others, but then we become the griffee. And it's a sex society, but it really is a sign of a sick society. Because in a functional society, this would not be possible, but also this would be immediately, like, people would just be like, I'm not touching this. People knew and still did. It's rough. Where they're like, no, I'm fine with scams. I just didn't think I was going to be the victim of this one. And now I'm mad. You're like, okay. Yeah, exactly. Like, I thought I was smarter than the people that I was conning by

proxy. When did this style of Rift start? I mean, which kind? Because are you talking about the celebrity one or just the crypto rugpole one? Let's just start with the rugpole. So it goes back to like the mid-2010s when you had something called an ICO, an initial coin offering, which just means, hey, I am going to build a company. I'm going to start by selling a token. And there will be a certain amount of tokens that go out. And you can buy in at the pre-sale level and you will get the lowest price. And then when it hits exchanges, so a place you can sell or buy cryptocurrency, really referring to the big ones, Binance at the time, FDX at the time, and of course, Coinbase et al. The goal is that you get in early. It was initially sold as some sort of

noble thing, some part of decentralized software. There was a famous one called file coin, for example, where ostensibly you would be investing in the early token that would allow you to use a decentralized Dropbox. You may be thinking, I already have Dropbox. Why would I need this? And the answer is, I don't know. Now, the ICO craze was very big because it was an easy way of getting in low and selling high for the people that were inside of trading. However, this was the genus of the Rugpole. I'm sure that there are other ones before. it, but the ICO crazes one that was very big. And then the bottom fell out of the crypto market 2017-2018 and they kind of went away. Now, at that point, we'd seen the growth of decentralized

exchanges. So instead of it being, I am selling into a market controlled by a big party that's ostensibly trustworthy, I am now selling to another person. And there are all sorts of bots involved in this as well. So you started to get the classic rugpole, which would be, I have put together a white paper, which is just a very long document that claims that the token will work like this. And this is how these tokens will eventually operate within a company. And then you invest in this, much like an ICO. And then when we put it on an exchange, it will sell for lots of money and blah, blah, blah. The goal of these platforms is very rarely to build anything. It's to get a bunch of money and then the owners start selling off the

tokens. People became more aware of this. So people started watching the blockchain and saying, well, wait, you're selling all the tokens. So over time, Rugpals became a little less easy to pull off because there are really insanely clever people watching. It's a very simple system, which is we as an entity promise to sell you tokens at this low rate saying we will build this company that will grow value, and because of the company's growing value, token number will go up. And then you just never do the second part with the value creation.

And also, very rarely is there ever a connection? between a company and the token. These things don't really exist in concert, and indeed, combining them is borderline impossible. Because for a while, I was just like, why do people keep falling for this? But it seems like it's more that people keep falling for the idea that they could potentially get in on the ground floor of a grift like this.

Yes. And I also think that there is a lot of people out there who truly believe that this is like investing in the stock market. Yeah. And they're desperate. I don't think that people realize how desperate the average person is in America, in other countries too. You get a lot of people in the global south with this who are desperate to get in on this so that they can turn their

local currency into a US dollar or a tokenized version like Tether, which is heavily connected to money laundering, which is great, or other good things about this. I think it's really easy and fair, especially in the case of like Hawke Tour, to judge everyone who invests as kind of a knowing participant in a grift. When I think more realistically, you could say half of them were and half of them were just like, God damn, I just want a fucking chance to do something. I just want to, I can't, it's not like you can invest in the stock market and really make money. You can, but day trading is a hell art populated by goblins and it's very difficult to do. I believe it's all desperation.

I believe it's because most people cannot accumulate wealth. And so they see these things that grow in these arbitrary ways and perhaps they know deep down, this is broken somehow. this is kind of a scam, maybe, but you know what? Maybe I can get up, I can get on the board through this. I can pull the right levers and then some money will come out because tons of people have made money on things like this, though not specifically this. I will say the Hawke doer thing is such an egregious rugpole. Even ape chain took a day or two.

Usually this is the kind of rugpole you see someone do a couple of hours on a meme coin where everyone knows it's a scam. It would be like, it used to, a few years ago, you'd watch people like launch Elon Rocket coin and it go up and it'd go down. And no one would be really angry because everyone was basically playing Catch the Knife. In this case, it was marketed in such a way that I'm pretty sure she violated SEC rules. If they even slightly suggest, which they absolutely did, that this was a thing that you buy into to make money, they have violated securities law.

And honestly, I really hope they get done for it. Not just for the justice, but because it would be very funny. It'd be very, very funny. But they'll settle. We just have this carved out piece of the internet where people just get scammed all the time. A foot washed up a shoe with some bones in it. They had no idea who it was. Most everything was burned up pretty good from the fire that not a whole lot

salvageable. These are the coldest of cold cases, but everything is about to change. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA. Right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. A small lab in Texas is cracking the code on DNA. Using new scientific tools, they're finding clues in evidence so tiny you might just miss it. He never thought he was going to get caught.

And I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. Gotcha. On America's Crime Lab, we'll learn about victims and survivors, and you'll meet the team behind the scenes at Othrum, the Houston Lab that takes on the most hopeless cases, to finally solve the unsolvable. Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp, designed to be hell on earth. Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Shock incarceration, also known as boot camps, are short-term, highly regimented correctional programs that mimic military basic training.

These programs aim to provide a shock of prison life, emphasizing strict discipline, physical training, hard labor, and rehabilitation. programs. Mark had one chance to complete this program and had no idea of the hell awaiting him the next six months. The first night was so overwhelming and you don't know who's next to you. And we didn't know what to expect in the morning. Nobody tells you anything. Listen to shock incarceration on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out Behind the Flow, a podcast documentary series following the launch of San Diego football club. We go behind the scenes and explore the stories of those involved.

San Diego coming to MLS is going to be a game changer because this region has been hungry for a men's professional soccer team. We need veteran players and we need young players. Like you're building a team from scratch and so the succession plan of long-term success needs to be defined. We need to embrace this community. When I was 13, my uncle took me to a qualifier and we watched what I, against Chile, pouring rain, just watching the fans jumping up and down. I think that was definitely a watershed moment for me. Not only was that going to be my game,

but it was going to be my life. Listen to San Diego FC behind the flow. Now on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We all know, right? Genius is evenly distributed. Opportunity is not. It's Black Business Month and Black Tech Green Money is tapping in.

I'm Will Lucas spotlighting black founders, investors, and innovators, building the future, one idea at a time. Let's talk legacy, tech, and generational wealth. I don't think any person of any gender, race, ethnicity should alter who they are, especially on an intellectual level or a talent level to make someone else feel comfortable just because they are the majority in this situation and they need employment. So for me, I'm always going to be honest in saying that we, We need to be unapologetically ourselves. If that makes me a vocal CEO and people consider that rocking the boat,

so be it. To hear this and more on the power of black innovation and ownership, listen to Black Tech Green Money from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It seems like there is

very little legal repercussion. Why is that? Because it's quite tough to find the people, because it costs a lot of money to litigate these things, and because the law is fairly new. The actual Matt Levine of Bloomberg said a while ago that basically all crypto exchanges are illegal. They're all illegal, but it's such vague law, and the SEC is taking so long to kind of work out what it is they do. It's kind of hard to say what's illegal. legal or not, they still are dinging people and they're dinging them in this very arbitrary way that's kind of fueling these crypto people. And it pisses me off because I wish that they just have said something and now we're going into the Trump administration. So they'll probably just put

a goose in a hat as the head of the OCEP. And it's also very tough to legislate. And there's so much money from overseas intermingled with it as well. So many of these rugpoles come out of the global South. And again, it's a condition of desperation, a symptom of desperation even. It's just the sign that you talk about on this show, these magical moments and then the arbitrary and sometimes quite aggressive and harmful effects of the attention you get of being online, imagine a million little versions of that all the time with these little celebrities that get people's hopes up and steal money from them and then spend their lives trying to hide. And now there's other little micro wars that happen where people docks them and find

them. I wouldn't be surprised if someone was killed. But also it gets to the core of your show as well, where it's like, these people become microcelebrities. At a time when people feel lonely and isolated and insular, you can become famous and people can rely on you. And if you actually make these people money, they will love you forever. Like a petty king among them. I am curious about this lane of scam, I guess, the influencer to crypto scammer. When did that become common practice?

Because at this point, I'm like, I don't keep an eye on crypto at all. And I recognize this as common practice. So you had, like, Floyd Mayweather and a few other celebrities do it. That's what's kind of weird. Usually influences, like actual influences that regular people know, stayed out of this because they realized, oh, this is quasi-criminal. You had a few celebrities do it. I can't think of another podcaster who has done it like this, because again, you want to

avoid this because suddenly your whole podcast becomes less trustworthy. I was really surprised when I saw this was happening because it's like, Why? What year is this? This isn't 2021 or 2020 when this happened all the time and no one was watching because everyone was dying? No, it's like 2024 when you're really, well, she's probably already making a good amount of money on other stuff. I also, the weirdest thing is, usually these things have some sort of made up company attached, like, oh, this token will let you on bling bling, you'll be able to hire a plumber on bling bling, and this will give you cheaper. than dollars on blingblanc. But in this case, it's just buy hawk token. It's usually an NFT of a song or a thing. There's usually a thing. That's what's so weird here. Just being like, oh, I'm going to do a crypto currency. That is some 2017 shit. I think that the real red flag for me was all of a sudden the proximity to the Paul brothers who like are addicted to scans. Who have already done there. There's the crypto zoo and all that. But actually, that's a good

point. So Crypto Zoo, and I don't know it super well, even which one of those brothers did it, forgive me. Whichever one of the Paul's, two brothers, one name, they had like an animal, like a kind of a Pokemon situation, like you buy into this thing. That's how these things traditionally work. You promise a bunch of stuff that you never do. That is the key part. Because when people say, where's my money, honey? You say, well, I'm putting it into the Crypto Zoo. Oh, so it buys you time. Yeah, the grimbles, the grackles that you find in the Cryptozo. That's where it's going, I must feed them, or the developers that I have in a non-specific place, they are working on the grimbuses that will grow in your crypto zoo. And then you can kind of

lead them on and hope that they forget. The thing that people don't realize is the internet never forgets. These psychos will follow. You steal someone's money online. There are people who will follow you forever. Eventually, you piss off someone smart, someone animated, and someone board. And then they learn an entire kind of forensic accounting, and then they follow you through the blockchain. Just to explain a very basic blockchain thing, you have a crypto wallet where your money goes. These companies, when you invest in a rugpole, you send money to something called a smart contract that has rules coded into it that says, okay, this will give the person who sends me this much money, this many things out of it. So, very simple one would be one cent is

one hawk, I'm guessing here. So $5 will get you. you 500 Hawk. Or if it's an NFT, okay, you've given me one Ethereum. I will give you 10 NFTs. Now, these contracts are then spitting the money out to other wallets. Now, teams will always say, oh, and indeed they did in the Hawk, too, a thing. Well, the original team can't touch that. They can't touch that money. They obviously can touch the money. You can just do it. They claim that code is law. You can change code that this is a quicker and easier theory theoretically, way to make money. Money comes out of it way quicker and disappears even faster.

And people have made tons of money on crypto. When was the last time anyone really, like there was like stories about guy makes money honestly trading stock. Guy makes money honestly doing job. No. None of the stories in the media about people who have money are about them like, oh, yeah, and I worked really hard and then I got what I did. Boring.

Oh, yeah. No, not even. but I would love to hear that if it was true, but it really is. So you hear these stories about these very irksome-looking dickheads who have made millions off of crypto, and you're like, shit, I look more normal than this guy. Surely I could, except just like every scam in America, those people already made their money, and they made it in a dishonest fashion. Right, and they would never be transparent about how it happened. And they would also never make their money like this. They would never buy into someone else's scam.

They'd make their own, and they'd make a better one. Do you think that there will be any meaningful consequence for this case? I actually do. Interesting. Okay, tell me more. It's a piss poor rugpole. First of all, this is shit scam. It's just a dog shit scam.

In the event she ever mentioned this on the podcast, she is getting dinged by the SEC for sure. If she said anything about Hawk 2 or coin on a podcast, she has now said, hey, hey, look, SEC, I'm doing a illicit security. This is an unregistered security. Check it out. That alone will get her in trouble. I don't know how harsh the penalties will be. It really comes down to how much money she made. One of the numbers I've seen is $3.3 million. Oh, she may actually, she's getting class action suited. The reason, by the way, that everyone so onerously tries to make sure that they don't say this is a cryptocurrency, it's a token that will be used in the system, is by saying it's a cryptocurrency that's used like a currency, you enter into the Howie test, which as I mentioned previously,

is the test the SEC uses to say, is this a security? If you are selling unregistered securities, that's bad. That's illegal. And on top of it, if you are marketing them, which is different, then you are extra fucked because the SEC really doesn't like that. And also, the SEC very rarely gets open and shut cases. This is one of them. And just like every right-wing grifter, she's going to assume that the right-wing will protect her.

Oh, they won't. She was useful for now, talking about spitting on that thing, so to speak, to financial crimes. That's beautiful. It's why this show exists. But also, this isn't a complex one. She's so stupid. The fact it was just a coin is so dumb. She should have been like, this will let you into the Hawke Tourverse.

This will let you buy your own hawk tours, and it could have been a series of hawks. That feels like a very 2021 idea. But this is 2024 when all the magic and whimsy has been sucked out of the financial crimes. Most of these people will never see their money again. And if they do, it will take years and years. And there's not going to be the kind of media pressure that got FTX back. And also FDX was a very strange situation. So like many rug pulls, all of the victims will lose here.

Well, I feel amazing. I feel great. This has cheered me up. Thank you so much to Ed Zitron. You can follow him everywhere at Ed Zitron. And listen to his podcast right here, right now, on Cool Zone Media, Better Offline. Link in the description. And thank you, 16th Minute listener.

I hope you've enjoyed this series and that all things considered, you're doing all right. Extra huge love to my trans listeners. I love you so much. And we will be back next week. 16th Minute is a production of Cool Zone Media and I Hard Workout. It is written, hosted, and produced by me, Jamie Loftus. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichten and Robert Evans. The Amazing Ian Johnson is our supervising producer and our editor.

Our theme song is by Sad 13. Voice acting is from Grant Crater. And pet shoutouts to our dog producer Anderson, my cats flea and Casper, and my pet rock bird who will outlive us all. Bye! If you're looking for another heavy, podcast about trauma, the saying it. This is for the ones who had to survive and still show up as brilliant, loud, soft, and whole. The unwanted sorority is where black women, fims, and gender

expansive survivors of sexual violence rewrite the rules on healing, support, and what happens after. And I'm your host and co-president of this organization, Dr. Leitra Tate. Listen to the unwanted sorority, new episodes every Thursday on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Every case that is a cold case that has DNA right now in a backlog will be identified in our lifetime. On the new podcast, America's Crime Lab, every case has a story to tell, and the DNA holds the truth. He never thought he was going to get caught, and I just looked at my computer screen. I was just like, ah, gotcha. This technology's already solving so many cases.

Listen to America's Crime Lab on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What would you do if one bad decision forced you to choose between a maximum security prison or the most brutal boot camp designed to be hell on earth? Unfortunately for Mark Lombardo, this was the choice he faced. He said, you are a number, a New York State number, and we own you. Listen to shock incarceration on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's Black Business Month, and Money and Wealth podcast with John Hope Bryant is tapping in. I'm breaking down how to build wealth, create opportunities, and move from surviving to thriving.

It's time to talk about ownership, equity, and everything in between. Black and brown communities have historically been last in life. Let me just say this. AI is moving faster than civil rights legislation ever did. Listen to Money and Wealth from the Black Effect Podcast Network on IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This is an IHeart podcast.