The Wolf Of All Streets - Crypto Is Doomed | How Mario Nawfal & Elon Musk Are Trying To Save it

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Mario Nawfal became a sensation in crypto after doing Twitter Spaces with Sam Bankman-Fried in the midst of the FTX collapse. Elon Musk attended his spaces, adding to his popularity and bringing thousands of new followers. Now Mario is competing with the biggest mainstream media companies and trying to bring truth to the crypto space. Will he succeed? Mario Nawfal: https://twitter.com/MarioNawfal ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER https://thewolfden.substack.com/  ►►NORD VPN  An essential crypto product to protect your privacy and keep your crypto safe!  Sign up on my link below & enjoy the benefits of NORD VPN from just $4 a month.  👉https://nordvpn.com/WolfOfAllStreets  GET UP TO A $8,000 BONUS IN USDT AND TRADE ALL SPOT PAIRS ON BITGET FOR ZERO FEES! ►► https://thewolfofallstreets.info/bitget   Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets   Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io  Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe  Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c  #Bitcoin #Crypto #Trading The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Trust in mainstream media outlets has been declining rapidly over the past few years. But what is there to replace it? The answer is independent journalists on platforms like YouTube and Twitter spaces. And Mario Noffel is dominating Twitter spaces, breaking news and sharing all of the facts on emerging stories in real time. We talked about how he grew that, how he made a relationship with Elon Musk, how he's now a leading source of information in the market. And we also had a very extensive, extensive conversation about my meetings with Three Arrows Capital. You guys do not want to Listen, you started Twitter spaces about crypto. And that was 100% the content, what it was based on.

And then correct me if I'm wrong, but when FTX went down, the SPF thing, you had this marathon spaces that lasted like 47 years. Elon Musk showed up, everybody else showed up. And then all of a sudden you became the most reliable source of news on Twitter. Is that correct? I'll tell you who we can blame. We can blame Poland. Why Poland?

Well, while I was covering FTX in the second marathon, we're doing it for 15 hours and I was going to wrap it up. I'm like, guys, we did one for 30 hours. This one's gone on for 15, whatever hours. And I need to go to sleep. The hack was already finished, FTX hack, and I'm done for the day. And then my co-host, no joke, like, man, I don't want any more breaking news. No joke goes, Mario, two minutes later, he's like like breaking news. And this one's very serious, guys. A missile just landed in Poland. That was during the G20 summit. A Russian missile just landed in Poland. Everyone flooded to my space wanting to learn about the missile. And I got a bunch of military guys. And we started covering what we called the missile crisis back then, trying to analyze what the hell is happening. Is that just an accident or is it Russia and attacking a NATO country?

And then that was the beginning of where I am today. And that's covering global events, which I'm a big fan of politics. I've been a fan of politics since I was a kid, but now covering global events, politics, and pretty much everything. We've got doctors coming on today. We have a space about Andrew Tate

was meant to be yesterday, but Twitter crashed. So we're doing it in a few days. days yesterday we covered the hearing on twitter censorship live so it's it's this every day is a different topic whatever's you know whatever is gaining traction at the time or whatever i find interesting so you basically found an opportunity to expand massively and to grow a huge audience and to become a legitimate news source as opposed to just focusing on the crypto market. And you did it in a matter of weeks. I mean, that's absolutely incredible. Yeah, so we still have the,

so we've got two Twitter accounts now. We've got the crypto round table, the round table one. That one does three crypto shows a week. And I think it's the biggest space on crypto right now. And then we have, and I co-host it. So I come in as a co-host to try to get my audience to come in. And then we have the main ones on my account, which are world news, et cetera. So it's both of these.

And we're doing an AI roundtable now because I find that topic fascinating. And obviously it's getting all the hype now. So we'll be doing, you got a bit of a, you know, you got a sample of our AI capabilities earlier. So we'll be doing an AI roundtable starting next week. Okay, so being a little more serious, I guess. Do you think that this success that you've had, the growth of Twitter spaces, the growth of Twitter as a news source has somewhat continued this trend of mainstream media dying and becoming less trusted and less reliable. I mean, you could argue that you have more traffic, more listeners, more eyeballs than your average primetime mainstream media TV show?

Yeah, so we've beaten some of the biggest, you know, the investors like to always compare me to CNN and compare the numbers to CNN. Our numbers are insane. And obviously, when Elon joins, it's a different discussion. But without Elon, the numbers are still pretty high. The problem there is now, and that exists everywhere, including in crypto, and we saw that with, I think it was the Block and the money they received from FTX. Was it the Block? Was that the name? Yeah, the Block. The Block's CEO is effectively 10 million from Sam Bateman. Exactly. So that's a perfect example of media bias, but social media is not really the solution. Social media is full of just a bunch of echo chambers.

So there's just no – with the amount of misinformation and disinformation there is today, it's just really difficult to get the facts. And I've always obsessed with facts since I was a kid because I've seen the damage that misinformation could do and it's done to my family as a kid. It's a whole different discussion. And it led to my obsession with facts since I was a kid and always being fact-based. And that led me to this today. And what started as crypto and trying to get good, healthy debates, even in crypto, I try to always balance it out. When we talk about a certain protocol, whether it's Solana versus Ethereum, for example, we get a bunch of Solana guys, we get a bunch of Ethereum guys. We've done

a few Bitcoin maxi debates. We've got a bunch of Bitcoin maxis and NFT maxis, two different worlds. And then the same thing is happening in politics. If we're covering anything political, we get Democrats, Republicans. We've had two senators debate on stage and the list goes on. Preston Pyshko And so how do you then make sure that you're actually presenting factual information when we obviously know that mainstream media has a right or left bias generally? Yeah.

So when we cover breaking news, we had a fact checker. His name was Chet. He was my co-host at the time as well. And he was also obsessed with facts. So he can only fact check so much, but he'll always reference the source as well. That's number one. We're hiring a new fact checker now. The only job will be on the space correcting any false information. So we always stick to facts because I've seen the damage that misinformation could do when i get things wrong

i got one thing wrong when i first started my space and it wasn't good for the for the for the project that we got the information wrong on even though it was only for a few minutes and we corrected it after like three four minutes and the person that was feeding us information fed us misinformation um so that's that's number one but number two is what we try to do is keep it balanced so fact is one thing but facts are also you know don't always apply a lot of times it's a battle of opinions so when i did the gender pronouns you know there's all that hype now about gender pronouns um yeah exactly you're you're in florida so you know what i'm talking about so so i did a space on this there's an insane space uh there's it's just hard to get facts oh you know again i don't want to sit

debating this but it's it's not a discussion of facts a discussion of of free speech versus um you know minorities etc and and the way to get these debates going is to get people that you know are supporting pronouns and people that are vehemently against it and i even sent a tweet a screenshot a while ago, a person on stage had 70% of my other speakers blocked, or they were blocking her. I can't remember which one's which. And it was in the gender pronouns debate. And she tweeted the screenshot. Yeah, she tweeted the screenshot. And it happens all the time. I have people on my stage that have each other blocked, but they're sitting on my stage debating or chatting. So I just enjoy that. I see the change. I see the impact we're having. And I'm just in it

for the ride. And I've got a team with me now. So when I do, I did a 15 hour space four days ago. I only spoke for two, three hours. So there's a team that I've trained, other moderators, hosts that are also following the same process of making sure we're fact-based and keeping every panel balanced. If I have a panel that's getting too imbalanced, like 80% people are conservative and only 30, 20, 30% liberal, I end the space because I'm like, this is not balanced. And either we try to balance it, we try to get speakers or we just end it. That's how obsessed I am with that. How did you end up getting Elon Musk on the space? Was it completely luck? He just showed up and you were like, holy shit, I can't believe this just happened. Or was there actually some

sort of planning and communication there? And then I guess the second question is, how in touch with him are you now? Do you invite him to your spaces? Does he just randomly show up? How does that work? He doesn't randomly show up anymore. And he was actually taking a break from spaces. Now, you know, he's having headaches with the sec, um, anything, any, anytime he jumps in now, like the time he came in with the, with the interview we're doing with Mark Andreessen, uh, it's an invite. So I just shoot him a DM saying, Hey, you know, you're free now. And he came in or not. Uh, yeah, I don't know if he's following me, but we have, so he DM me so I can DM him back, but I'm not know if he's following me but we have so he dm'd me so i can

dm him back but i'm not sure if he's following me i haven't checked if that changed but a few weeks ago he wasn't and um yeah so we just dm each other and he's doing a strategic like it's not that he likes me or i like him it's nothing it's just a pure strategy and i understand that it's a value exchange the value he brings me is just a massive audience and the value value I bring him, and I'm helping build Twitter Spaces. And we're in communication with the Twitter Spaces team. And I love what he's standing up for. Like the fight against censorship is something I respect. And I think it's something the world needs, no matter what your ideology is.

So yeah, so that's the value exchange that we have. The first time he came on was during the FTX saga. So we were doing a space. And we commented in one of his tweets to jump on and he just walks up and we bring him up as a speaker. And the first thing he says on my space was Doge to the moon and then Doge just pumps. But the problem is this is recorded and not everyone's listening live, Scott. So that means Doge pumped only a bit. I can't remember, like 7% or something when that came out. But then when the recording finished, it was a 20-hour space.

And when we ended the recording, people were listening to the recording. And that's where Doge started pumping more because people were like, shit. And the media started covering it. And that's where it started pumping a lot more. Another good one. Do you know the Hunter Biden story? Were you there? I mean, I know that you had him on there, but I unfortunately missed that spaces, but yes, I remember the fact

that you had a Hunter Biden spaces. Yeah, he doesn't do any interviews at all, and he did ours, so I'm grateful for that. But it was a shit show, man, because he blew up. Yeah, but whether you like him or not, the interview went so bad because he wanted to come and talk about NFTs. And that's before FTX, before I blew up, when I was still a purely crypto show.

And he gave us a list of questions that we can only ask. Like, this is it. These are the questions you can ask. That's it. And we're like, hey, you're Hunter Biden. Fuck it. No problem. We'll just ask those questions because they'll just bring more awareness to the nft space like having hunter biden come talk about nfts and poor guy he delayed the interview because the elections were then and and then when he delayed it ftx

blew up and now i'm in everything space and everyone's coming to listen to my space you know such a big audience so when he comes on everyone expected me to grill him like we grilled sam bankman freed and others but we couldn't because we had questions otherwise he'll just jump off it doesn't do the interview and then you know we're asking questions this glitches out he jumps off and i do a rant about how i couldn't ask him questions and i'll never do that again and fox news was in the audience i know they're usually in the audience but that that time they had a lot of people in the audience. And then a few hours later, I'm on the front page of Fox News on their website, and I was on their TV as well. They made a whole story about Hunter Biden and the NFT project and how they didn't let me ask questions.

So that was a fascinating experiment. And again, man, this is days, like what, two weeks since my show, less than two weeks since my show blew up. A week and a half before that, I was just a guy talking about NFTs and different protocols and SUI versus Aptos. Now here I am dealing with Fox News calling me trying to get some dirt on Hunter Biden. It's interesting because it's like inception. You're a news source that's become so big and so scrutinized that the news is covering you as the news. Which I respect. And I, funny enough, Scott, a lot of people in my audience love to hate on mainstream media. And it's in my best interest to hate on them as well. But I tell people, I'm like, look, mainstream media. And it's in my best interest to hate on them as well. But I tell people,

I'm like, look, mainstream media is not all in one bucket. You can't compare Fox and CNN to Reuters, for example. Some are more biased than others. And having that approach to it, the news doesn't feel too alienated to cover me. They're like, because I'm not sitting there shitting on them every day. Otherwise, they would never cover me. And the fact that I'm very objective about them, you know, I criticize them when they should be criticized. I criticize their incentive models, their heavily misaligned incentive models. But at the same time, like I give them, I help them cover a story because it just gets

more eyes to the story. When we did the Moon, do you remember the story of Moonstone Bank and FTX? Yes. Yeah. So we were the first to cover it, and we were the first to bring Moonstone Bank and their executives on our space. And then my co-host at the time, who's ex-intelligence, he was grilling the executive from Moonstone. And then we got the media and invited them, briefed them, gave them the recording, told them where to go and what segments are important. That's what made it easy for them to create a story out of it. And we do this to this day. Now the media reaches out to me about Andrew Tate because now suddenly I'm the Andrew Tate expert because we covered it once. And then what we do is we try to make it

easy for them by... The BBC is coming on my show on Tuesday because they did a documentary on Andrew that came out two days ago. And then we just try to facilitate it for them. And when it goes to crypto, it's kind of focused a bit more on crypto. And what we did as well, not only worked with the media to try to explain to them that, hey, FTX is not crypto. FTX is centralization. It goes against the whole ethos of crypto. We tried to educate regulators as well. I would see premiers and senators in my audience while I was covering the FTX story because they were interested. And whenever I see them, I kind of interrupt the space, not to give them a shout out

because they don't want people to know they're there. But just to kind of remind the audience, I do it on purpose. I'm like, okay, I see a bunch of senators there. Just want to remind everyone that FTX is not crypto. FTX is an example of why we need crypto and why we need DeFi. So I start trying to twist the story so then they get the right message instead of getting the wrong message of like, hey, crypto is a scam. And it worked well. We had the chief, what was it, the ex-Trump, not advisor, he's like chief of staff, I think it was. I can't remember his name. And he was on the show. And what was cool is that when he came on, Scott, he came on and started talking about DeFi. Now, we love to hate on regulators.

I thought I'll have to explain to him the basics of crypto. He came on and started telling me, and I'm not talking about Anthony Scaramucci, which we all know understands crypto. This is the ex-chief of staff for the Donald Trump administration coming on and telling me, I'm not talking about Anthony Scaramucci, which we all know understands crypto. This is the ex-chief of staff for the Donald Trump administration coming on and telling me about the importance of DeFi. Right. And so you're actually influencing the people who have influence, not just the media, but these people as well. Have you had any other experiences where you've been surprised at the level of knowledge that someone's come on has had about crypto, a regulator, a legislator, something like that? Or do you still feel like we're wildly, you know, largely flying under the radar? No, man, look, I have senators and politicians, lawmakers, mainly from the US, but from other countries as well. You know,

I had Andrew Yang, you remember Andrew Yang? Of course. Exactly. Yeah. So he was on my show two days ago, I think, or two or three days ago. And you'd be surprised. He's an advisor to a bunch of DAOs. Obviously, we're talking about Andrew Yang here. But even you get into the older lawmakers and they still understand. They're not stupid. Again, we love to hate on them, but to become a senator is not easy. Obviously, some of them are not smart. Many of them are not smart. They're very good at raising money and marketing now. Yeah, they're good at raising money. They're good at marketing. Look, they understand more than they... When you interview them, when you see them on TV, I was covering the hearing yesterday when they're talking about censorship. They say

one thing behind the scenes and they say something else completely different on camera. And that's because again, misaligned incentive. Their incentive is to attract and impress voters. So if saying crypto is a scam gets voters excited and agreeing with them, they'll say that instead of saying, hey, crypto is not a scam, but centralization is the problem when they're a government lawmaker saying that. It just doesn't add up. So while they may seem stupid when they talk on camera and they're trying to impress voters, they know more than we think. And they understand more than we think. That's not everybody. I'm just talking about at least the ones I've interacted with. I know there's a bunch of stupid ones that don't know anything. Yeah, there are a bunch of stupid ones who don't know anything, but there's always going

to be stupid ones that don't know anything about Yeah, there are a bunch of stupid ones who don't know anything, but there's always going to be stupid ones that don't know anything about this industry or any other industry. But I do think that we've seen at least them taking an interest, probably a forced interest, right? Their constituents demand an opinion on Bitcoin or crypto, or they start to hear about it from the people in their district. But even, I hate to bring up SBF, but even when we saw him initially going into congressional and Senate hearings, it would usually be a bunch of senators in Congress, people like shooting out these anti-crypto talking points, environment, climate, ESG, China. And then through time with him, unfortunately, it seemed like they started to listen and ask more intelligent questions and actually engage with our community. Maybe that's now blown up since he blew up.

I'm not sure, but it did seem like we were actually getting somewhere. Man, we can't make this shit up, Scott. We spoke a bit during the implosion. Who would have thought SPF, the guy that was kind of leading the charge with regulators, educating them on crypto, explaining to them why crypto is the future and crypto is not a scam and how to regulate crypto, turned out to be the biggest crook of the space. You can't blame them. The guy screwed the hell out of them. A lot of them, there's a lot of money you can't blame them like the guy screwed the hell out of them a lot of them there's a lot of money that was i think they're clawing back donations to a lot of politicians yeah i saw that a few days ago that's the rumor

man they they like we deserve a few punches i'm just gonna tell you that we deserve a few punches um i know that we again we can't put everyone in the same basket, but there's just the amount of shady stuff done during the bull market, the amount of crazy stuff done. And we saw that in 2017. Without any regard for the law, I remember in 2017, because I launched IBC in 2017, everyone was launching an ICO. And me and one of my executives were talking with a lawyer and they're like, hey, man, everyone's doing an ICO. They're all going to get sued by the SEC. I'm like, there's no way. All these people, reputable people, business people, one after another, every day, we talk to 10, 20 projects a day that want to launch an ICO. There's no way they're all going to get caught by the SEC.

And then what happens two, three, four years later, SEC sending out letter after letter. So this time around, I kind of understood that regulators eventually catch on and nothing lasts forever. But we kind of saw the same exuberance again in that bull market where projects were pumping 10X one after the other, people launching NFT project, projects rugging. We had a lot of projects we invest in, they rug and they disappear. And I'm sure you had the same thing. the nft projects were like the same thing on steroids it was is this so like i was not involved in ft's at all in the bull market it was just so dirty so nasty um so i just i just don't think it's fair to complain when regulators come in and and put

out a few laws that may not make sense and may need a bit of polishing, and that will take time. But there is a lot of crooks that are still – we were talking about you being in Dubai a few days ago. A lot of them are here in Dubai. There's still a lot of crooks in the space, and I think a cleanup is needed. What was it? Draining the swamp is the term that is being used now. So the swamp does need to be drained. And I think it just needs more time.

And I understand when regulators want to come in heavy handed, like there's no better story to give them to come in heavy handed. But again, their incentive is to impress voters. And if the American public is involved in crypto, the American public is not getting screwed by NFT project after NFT project, then the American public will then vote for regulators that support crypto. But if the American public just lost money with FTX, lost money getting rug pulled one time after another, then the voters are pretty, they've got a sour taste in their mouth. I still have my CryptoPunk as my profile pic, despite me doing political spaces. And it

feels awkward as hell when I'm getting all these different politicians and stuff. And I got that little stupid goofy CryptoPunk with that smile. But I'm doing it just kind of, I just can't get myself to remove it. But there is a stigma now. I'm not talking about regulators anymore. Just talking about just your average Joe. There's a stigma about crypto I'm not talking about regulators anymore. Just talking about your average Joe. There's a stigma about crypto, and it's back to people calling it a scam, which I never thought we'll have again. I thought we're past that stage. But then again, events and stuff like the community, not the community, crypto as an ecosystem is not even comparable to what we saw in 2018. 2018 was there's nothing. It was 2018. 2018 was, there's nothing.

It was dead. It was like an ice age. Now there's still projects raising a lot of money. We had, didn't we have the Three Arrows Capital guys just raised $25 million? Or was that a rumor, it was false? Yeah, that was 100% true. And that's the one time I left the resort during Dubai

was to crash a meeting that I wasn't invited to with Kyle from Three Arrows Capital. And I listened to their entire pitch, all their excuses, everything. I basically sat there in disbelief and asked him a lot of very hard questions and told them how mean I had been to them on Twitter and that my opinion hadn't really changed. But yes, I can tell you that they actively have raised money. It took less than a couple of days for them to get the $25 million for their new exchange. And they're actively selling a related coin, OTC, over the counter to all the huge whales, Flex token from the old exchange, CoinFlex. And they're having the time of their lives, think that they're completely off the hook and that life is great and they're making millions and millions and millions

of dollars again. So what does that tell you about this space? Can you tell me more about that meeting? So you crashed a meeting? So I can't divulge who the meeting was with, but it wasn't with me. It was Kyle and Sue were meeting with a very well-known venture capitalist, another institutional guy, both of who were going very critically, not with any interest in actually doing business with them. But you get the opportunity to go ask

these guys questions and you take it. And I just showed up. The other two were my friends. They said, just come because I'm a Voyager creditor and I wanted some answers on what happened with Voyager and Three Arrows Capital. And these guys are actively meeting with everyone. They're basically on a roadshow and doing their PR campaign. And their pitch effectively right now is that they did nothing wrong. They took institutional money. They never took retail money. It's the fault of the people who gave them the money that they simply blew up. They lost themselves. Everybody else who was invested in them lost. Hedge funds blow up all the time and they should be able to move on with their lives. I obviously disagree, but that's basically the narrative. And that I will say that they believe

that because of their dealings with Genesis, that the bigger criminal in crypto will prove to be Barry Silbert and that DCG will have a lot of major problems because they're registered in the United States, unlike Sam Bankman Freed. And so for them, it's violations of securities law. This is all, I'm telling you what they said. I'm not telling you that it's fact, but I'm quite sure that you're there and you could get a meeting with them right now if you want to go ask them these questions. That's crazy, man. It's crazy.

It's crazy. Is this so disheartening? It's like I go through the cycle every time. In 2017, I went through it because when you're doing the right thing I'm just talking in general but when you're doing the right thing you've never done an ICO have you? No. Okay neither have I.

So when you see person after person doing it and raising money like crazy it's a bad feeling even if you're financially well off it's a bad feeling I can do the same thing. I had the second biggest consulting agency back in 2017. And they just, one after the other does it.

And then when the market crashes, obviously they're still sitting on a lot of money, but when you see regulators take action, you get that warm feeling. I'm like, I don't talk about it publicly because it's not nice when someone else gets arrested to be happy about it. But still, I'm like, okay, maybe I did the right thing. I launched an ICO. Here I am, sleeping happy, did the right thing. I didn't launch an ICO. Here I am, sleeping happy, did the right thing, and they're potentially going to jail. And then you see it again happen in the NFT market. I'm sure you never launched an NFT project.

I was just totally disinterested in that whole space and didn't understand it. So I kind of missed it like you did. Yeah. So I was very interested. I adored the space and I have a crypto punk, but I, I, I, it's just way the, the amount of rock pools and the way everything was pumping is just worth, worth, worse than the 2017 era. And I go into the same field, I can launch an NFT project so easily. And then they're all pumping and everyone's just making a lot of money. People come to me every day. Why are you launching an NFT project?

I'm sure you had the same thing, especially with your reach. Um, and, and, and, and, and again, now I'm, I'm sure you had the same thing, especially with your reach. And then again, now I was hoping to have regulators take action, like I did the right thing. But when you see someone like Three Arrows Capital, which I thought they were in hiding, I genuinely thought, everything you read about them, everything you see about them, like these guys, there's no way of getting rumors or where they're hiding, et cetera? And to have them just sitting, walking around Dubai and meeting people and raising money from reputable VCs. I don't know who their investors are. I haven't had time to look at it. I've been a bit out of the loop.

There's a crypto gossip. But it's a bummer. Yeah, we're back at it. We need regulators to take action. Who do you want to hate? Regulators who are just trying to impress voters and don't understand things? Or people that are just literally scamming others or making decisions that are hurting others financially? And in this case, I'm referring to obviously 3L's capital. And then back to you, Barry Silbert. We were the, I don't know, one of the very early guys to blow the whistle on Genesis.

And I got a lot of hate for it. We had an insider that worked at Genesis. It's a space. It's recorded. They come in and he broke the story about how much money the DCG owed Genesis and the loans they had. And that's before it was public. And when I tweeted it out as part of a thread and mentioned the source,

as we were covering it in the space, I got a lot of backlash. Why are you spreading FUD, et cetera? Because it's a thin line. You don't want to spread FUD. It's not good for the ecosystem. But at the same time, everyone that criticized FTX before it imploded was FUD. And when we did that thread, we got a lot of hate. I thought that FTX was FUD initially.

I saw the Coindesk article. Everybody said FTX is going to blow up. I said, I haven't seen any evidence that they're insolvent. Show it to me. And then they were gone like two days later. I wasn't saying they weren't. I just said, show me the proof. But yeah, almost everyone thought ftx was solvent

and now the the two that are that were under our radar back then was obviously dcg very heavily and even then even after ftx i had simon uh it was mainly simon dixon and uh me and he's on all my space and we just he's been on all and i'm telling him yeah yeah he's on all my spaces. He's been on all my shows. And I'm telling him. Yeah. Yeah, he's incredible. And he's telling me, I'm asking him like, man, are you concerned about DCG? And we still couldn't say yes. That was back when Genesis,

when the first, the FUD started spreading around Genesis before anything was official. And then later in that day, we found out about the loans that we were talking about our spaces. Barry sends out the letter. Bloomberg covers it within hours. That was really quick. I'm not saying it's because of us, just maybe the timing. But even then, we couldn't criticize DCG. And even today, there's a lot of reasons to criticize

Binance, a lot of reasons, a lot of concerns. I'm a fan of Binance, just FYI. And I think they did some wrong things in the early days. Who didn't? They're much better now. But then again, what the hell do I know? But even today, if I get – and obviously a lot of people send me information because they see us as the people that break, that kind of call out fraud and stuff. But I get all this stuff. And even today, it's just really difficult to criticize the incumbent big players. And I just don't think, I think in a few years time, unfortunately, are you seeing a move to decentralization? Because I'm seeing money flow back into exchanges very heavily as exchanges being treated as banks.

Yeah, I think that the one thing that I learned from that meeting was that nobody learns from their mistakes and we will just repeat a different, slightly version of the exact same. Scott, Scott, three-hour scapula imploded in 2022, yeah? Yeah. Do you know we're not in 2028? We're not even 2025. We're in 2023 right now, man.

Six months ago. It's six months ago. And to your point, I think that, first of all, crypto Twitter gets everything wrong, right? So the assumption that they were going to jail or the regulators after them, who knows? But I can tell you factually that they're walking around in the mall in Dubai, taking meetings in cafes at the mall with no security while their wives are going shopping and going about their lives. And nobody's chasing them. That was actually the point that Kyle made, his first point to try to convince us that everything was okay. He's like, why are there no lawsuits against me? Why is no regulator come after me? Why am I not arrested if Sam was arrested after one month?

He's like, if I did something wrong, why are all those things? I said, because sometimes it takes longer than seven months. That was my response. But that's how at least they're playing it and how they're living. They're just living. Have you done an episode on your interaction with him? I have not. So I kind of puked out some details on accident the other day because I was just sort of disillusioned. But I mean, I have the option to have him, I think, on my podcast. I'm just weighing it. 100% do so.

I think... That's a good... I want to ask you about that. How much concern do you have for platforming people that you think could be damaging? Because you know that they're going to come on and speak their narrative. And some of it, the facts aren't out yet.

So it's hard to dispute. I would do it as a... No, you don't need others. You're enough. You know a lot. You know your shit. You're pretty good at this. So you don't need anyone else.

You're going to challenge the hell out of them by yourself and you got all the information and you understand things pretty well um i think if you're if you're if you're going to platform someone like the way sam was platformed in the interview he did on the new york times just before our space the day before our space if you're going to do one of those um then no but if if you tell them hey i'm gonna i don't want any limitations on what questions I can ask, then 100%. 100% because what will happen is that investors they're meeting will see that. So it's not only the first for your show, it's a good thing, man. It's the first interview. Have they done any interviews since they came back? I kyle's been around a bit i saw him on cnbc or something but listen they're good like they're gonna start

doing stuff just like spf came out of the woodwork for that few days because i think he thought he could help his case before he got arrested i think they're just on there i mean i'll tell you something funny so i don't know if you saw saw, but they're starting a new exchange. And part of the core of that exchange is that you're going to be able to trade your claims on FTX, Voyager, Celsius actively and use that as liquidity for your other trading. And the initial press release called it GTX, which is obviously one letter away from FTX and also one letter away from Gox, right? I said to him, I sat there. I was not nice, particularly kind. I said, are you guys trolling? This is a joke, right? You're Damien GTX? He says, yes. He said, we did that to get attention and immediately

changed the name after it got the hype to Open Exchange or whatever they're calling it. So they're literally, not only are they out there and fine, but they're running a PR campaign and trolling the industry in the process. Why do we... You know, there's a lot of rumors around what three Aros capitals, the capital did with the funds and the falsified statements, et cetera, to get more loans. Have you addressed any of those with him when you met them? That's literally the first question that I asked him was, what lie did you tell Steve Ehrlich at Voyager to get him to give you $700 million? In verbatim, exact words I said. And he laughed and he said to me, Steve was so desperate

to continue to give yield to his customers that he had $700 million sitting that was not earning yield and said he had to find a way to do it. He called us. He said, can I give you $700 million? Asked for no collateral, which is a fact, and asked for nothing but a statement of their AUM, didn't ask about their trades, where the money was going, and handed them a check. So who does that make the criminal? I'm not saying it's true or it's not. A lot of that did come out in the investigation, but that means that it's the... That was Kyle's point. He was like, we're just taking the money from the institutions. Listen, that's colorblind to not pretend you don't know that's customer's

money and real people are being hurt. That's nonsense. But his point was someone offered me $700 million for free. I think I'm a God tier trader. Of course, I'm going to take the money. And he openly admitted that they had just blown up, right? I asked, what'd you do with the money? He was like, we bought a bunch of shit coins at a discount over the counter and we blew up on leverage longs and we blew up on Luna and that blew everything else up. He's like, we blew up. We thought that the bull market would ever end. We lost all our money. And that's that. That's what he was saying. He's saying they never falsified. I asked him specifically, but I can't prove that.

That's my point. I can't take his word for it. But he said all he ever showed anyone was an AUM statement. They never had to show any of the people that they were taking loans from any of the things that we think they must have falsified. I don't believe that, personally. I can't. I'm not surprised.

I don't know if it's true or not, obviously. No, but these people were so greedy and so hungry for yield. I do believe that they pushed the risk that far. Yeah, I'm not surprised that Steve just wanted to throw money at them. Every project was saying no. Investors, we were chasing projects, begging them to take our money. Remember the projects that had all that, any project backed by Animoca back then when Animoca were the gods

before they started their shotgun strategy. And as a VC, you had to convince them, you had to offer them free services to take your money. In what industry do VCs with the liquidity beg projects to take their money? And on a regular basis, that was on a daily basis for multiple projects a week. These things don't happen.

There was just a lot of money. And I'd just be very surprised. I'd just be very surprised from all the things we've seen. And obviously, we don't share most of it because we can't verify it. So we don't know what to share, what not to share, what's fact, what's not. But I'd be very surprised if they don't get into trouble. But then again, if they know they did, they're not stupid. If they know they did something wrong, like what makes me question this now is that they're walking around in Dubai.

They're not walking around in Vietnam. But SBF also came out and tried to do his narrative as well against the advice of his lawyers. So sometimes, I mean, I'm not speaking about them specifically, but I think that people can be so narcissistic that they actually believe what he's saying. He may not in his own mind even be lying, even if he did commit a crime. I mean, there's a part of me that believes that SPF truly thinks he did nothing wrong. Like in his own mind that he's convinced himself that he just made some bad business decisions and wasn't a fraud. We all know he's a fraud.

That's not my point. But I think that at a certain point, cognitive dissonance sets in for these people. But regardless, there's still people throwing money at Three Arrows Capital in large amounts, willingly and knowingly with all of the things that are out there from the past. That scares me. Because they know nothing will change. They know these guys managed to make money in the last bull run and they'll do it again. I just don't know how their exchange will work.

Like at the end of the day for their exchange to work, it needs adoption. I'd be... You know what he said to me? You know what he said to me? He said, we just want to, he was like, FTX, for all their problems, they were the best product. Their engine

was amazing. He's like, we just want to be like the next FTX, but better. Can you imagine being Kyle from Three Arrows Capital and saying to people right to their face that you want to be the next FTX? I mean, he was saying like technologically and adoption, but...

Look, logically, it makes sense. And if you look at it objectively, it makes sense. Okay, FTX had a lot of pros, a lot of good things if it was run properly. But how ignorant, how distant from reality, how they're like living in their own bubble.

And I'm sure they'll watch this or someone will tell them to watch this if you publish all this. How distant are they from reality to say something like this? Like they played a role in causing the crash. They lost people's money. And then they create an exchange

calling it gtx intentionally purely to get attention and then they that he refers to ftx as wanting to copy them removing the the the logic from it it just shows it's just depressing to him and it's depressing to hear what you just told me. I had no idea of any of this. Remember, I've been in my own world trying to keep up with the show and just running the business IBC. I didn't know this. I didn't know they were just walking around. I didn't know they would raise the money that quickly.

I did see the announcement they raised the money. I sent it to, you wouldn't know, I sent it to a big investor, a traditional investor, a private equity guy that got into crypto about a year and a half ago, about two years ago. And man, the guy was fuming, but also just depressed, just disheartened. He's like, Mario, I really don't get it. I don't get you guys. Yeah. I mean, it's like, you know, listen, like guys that blew up in the 80s and 90s in the United States or even in the 2008 crisis, a lot of them had a redemption tour. But like you said earlier, it was eight or 10 years later.

Not while the entire thing was ongoing. I mean, they're raising money while people, at least publicly... And listen, I can't... It left me with a lot more questions than answers, speaking with them, you know, doubting things on both ends. But you would think there would at least be a cool off period where rationally people would say, you guys need to like go away for five years. I know you get a lot of information because you have the show. I don't know if you can share anything, but have you had anyone reach out to you on whether any regulators are looking at taking action, whether there's any investigations, any cases? I've only seen what everybody's seen, which is the conjecture that the Singapore regulator is after them and went to their offices and there was nothing there and all those things.

But there seems to be very little real information. And Kyle was using that fact when we were speaking. He continued to say, nobody's really after us. Nothing's happening here. He's like, I haven't been arrested. Interpol is after Do Kwon, yeah? Do Kwon. So, yeah, so that's, Do Kwon is in trouble.

And that's official. Do Kwon's in trouble with South Korea, which has become a larger thing because he's from South Korea. But that, you know, I think that's more, that they're a more serious regulator. But that's pretty serious. Quite serious.

And obviously Sam is in big trouble. Celsius, Mashinsky, likely going to be in trouble, according to the people I'm speaking to. So there's not many big guys left other than Three Hours Capital left standing. Yeah. The BlockFi people, I haven't seen any intel

that the BlockFi people will get in any trouble. You're speaking of Mashinsky. I don't have any idea, but I'd be surprised if something doesn't come along there. And I think it remains to be seen with Genesis and DCG. But these things, as you said, these things do take time. I'm just extremely surprised that they're walking around in Dubai so comfortable. And I'm extremely surprised VCs would do their DD, I guess now in the midst of a bear market where liquidity,

it's a massive liquidity crunch in crypto and outside of crypto. I'd be very surprised. Are you sure they raised the money or is it just somewhat- I mean, yeah, it's been reported. He sat there and giggled about it, said it took a very short period of time. And they have this token that's related, the Flex token that a lot of big names and people we're familiar with, I don't share people's names. There's people that's openly supporting them that are buying over the counter. And the coin's gone from, I can't quote it, but five cents to over a dollar or something in a matter of weeks.

And you have to remember, they're the ones selling it directly. So they don't even need to pump it to dump it. They're literally getting liquidity in real time, selling it to people who then, I guess, can trade it on the open market eventually when there's a market. Pretty wild. We need someone like yourself interviewing them. And again, I pride myself on always being objective.

Maybe I'm missing something. Maybe they didn't do anything wrong. Maybe we put them in the same basket as FTS, Sam and Doquan and others, and they shouldn't be. And if that's the case, if they didn't do anything wrong. Maybe we put them in the same basket as FTS, Sam and Doquan and others, and they shouldn't be. And if that's the case, if they didn't do anything wrong, which I'd be surprised if they didn't, then they have every right to launch a new project. And they're both very intelligent and they, you know, Flex token could be killing it and they might do the right thing by their investors next time around. They might've learned their lesson. So objectively,

I'd love to see that interview. It's all possible. I just wish that there was somebody I could put on the other side and I haven't figured out quite who that is. I'm not talking, I know I can ask the questions, but I wish that there was someone who had facts on the other side that could actually refute certain things they say in real time if they're not factually true. I just don't want them to be able to present things as facts that are not fact because nobody has the information. Simon could help a lot in this. Simon Dixon, he's usually my guy and he's one of the main guys I would go to in crypto. I obsess over this as well.

I'm always worried to have someone on stage or cover a certain story without having the other side there to keep it balanced. Or if we're making allegations to have both sides, including someone with the facts. So yeah, have a chat to Simon. And there's a few other names that I'll tell you offline. But yeah, try to make it happen and do so fast, Scott. Yeah, I will. Maybe we'll do it on Twitter spaces so everybody can listen. It's got a bigger audience, right?

Yeah. And so I guess then just circling back before I let you go, now that you've built this and it's snowballing in real time, A, well, A, what's the business model? I guess that's a good question. B... That's a really good question. Yeah.

Like you're obviously staffing up. You're hiring all kinds of people. You're never sleeping. I mean, I know because we were trying to link up when I was in Dubai. I mean, I know that you literally keep US hours living nine hours ahead. You're in the future. What's the end game here? Is the end game, is it a noble quest to provide better information than existing media stories? You're a capitalist. What is the end game here? Yeah. So I'm an entrepreneur. Even though I love doing what

I'm doing, I love calling out bullshit and squashing misinformation. And I've loved it even before I got into business. The goal is obviously I'm building a business and it's owned by IBC, which is my incubator, accelerator, and now moving more to a media company. So we're partnering with other media companies. We've acquired a few media assets. So what I'm doing in the bear market is not only acquiring digital assets, but acquiring attention. And again, you've been doing your show for how many years? Well, I mean, I've been doing my podcast for three years,

basically three years. And the YouTube came much later. Yeah. Yeah. And you've been in the space even longer. And you've seen, you remember how CoinDesk and Cointelegraph, where I was talking to Cointelegraph in Davos, you know how tiny they were when they launched. And they were just humming along in the bear market, grabbing attention, building out their credibility and look at them today. So it's a similar approach. The monetization model is really easy. We have an incubator accelerator. We get a lot of deal flow.

We'll be able to offer our projects exposure on the show. The conversion rate on the show, telling them to sign up to a newsletter, et cetera, is really high. And then we'll use the show to kind of obviously support our projects, but also build out other media assets, build out a newsletter from the audience in the show. So monetization is not difficult. When you have attention, monetizing that attention is not hard at all. And then what I'm trying to do is expand into other niches. So we talked about AI round table. So I'll just use my main show to promote the AI one. So anyone that likes AI can go there. So that's the monetization structure for the crypto show that we have that's run by my partner, Fidgetal. Obviously, that's the same monetization model we had prior to my show going outside of

crypto. And yeah, and IBC is still the business side of things in the background. Stig Brodersen I lost a lot of money when the show blew up, by the way, because I couldn't accept sponsors. I can't have senators coming on my show and then talking about this NFT project and those PFPs or that DEX that we're back supporting or decentralized. And I can't talk, you know,

I'm invested heavily in decentralized social. I can't talk, you know, I'm invested heavily in decentralized social. I can't have Elon on my show and then be talking about decentralized competitors to Twitter while Elon supports the space. I have a similar situation. I obviously do have a sponsorship model, but for example, every Thursday morning,

I do a round table, which is three random guests, which becomes a podcast. And I don't accept sponsorship on that one because eventually one of the guests is going to conflict with the sponsor. Yeah, exactly. That's the problem.

I think that's the first time I was on your show was one of those roundtables. I'm just talking about FTX. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it makes it tricky. But sponsorships is one way to monetize. It's not really the best way. Adding a show, because we're acquiring a lot of shows that don't really know how to monetize um obviously

some shows don't need to monetize some people are pretty well off and they're doing the podcast just for fun but if they're building out the podcast or a youtube show or um another twitter space or a newsletter and their goal is to make money a lot of them just don't know how to do it because they all they rely just purely on sponsorship. I think it's just a boring way to build a business. When you've got a whole business model on the back end, it's just much easier to monetize it. You could do it even without having sponsors.

Just the amount of deal flow and the amount of connections I got from the show is insane, is insane, the caliber of the guests we get um and that's a better way to monetize the show versus sponsors which is still great and we do sponsorships as well well at least we're doing them again now after taking a break for i don't know how many months well i love what you're building man i can't wait to see how big it can become in the future as long of course as twitter doesn't just disappear and go offline now we're streaming on youtube we're streaming on rumble he's been doing well there as well so we're hedging our risk but i owe it to elon like you know he supported me a lot and and i'm trying to do my part so uh i'll go down with the ship yeah me too if twitter goes down

i'll be the last man tweeting. No question. You and I are going to be that string band on the Titanic. Everybody's jumping off and Mario and Scott are playing the cello and the violin. That happened on a platform called Deeso. Remember BitClout? Yeah. Yeah, it's the same thing. What happened to BitClout? I forgot about that.

Oh, man. It's still humming along, but we'll do it off the record. But it's the same thing. It was blowing up and then you just had, I remember checking up and it's like literally before it was like, everyone was there. And I was like five, five names. I recognize still tweeting, not even five, like three still tweeting say, Hey, one day he's got to be back. One day we say, you know, we're laughing at them now. And then imagine it blows up. I laughed at everyone on Tik Tok in in the first month too and look where they got yeah exactly exactly all right man where can everybody follow you and check out your spaces

i mean you're literally seemingly on every day right yeah exactly we're meant to do a space today did one yesterday we were meant to do two yesterday so almost every day i'm trying to reduce it um it's mainly when there's breaking news. So whenever, whenever, whenever shit hits the fan in the world, I'll be there. Like I have three phones that people, my team can call me on 24 seven if there's something major. Um, but generally there's not much breaking news, maybe twice a week, max. Um, and, uh, yeah. So, so just check it out on Twitter and, and enjoy the show. All right. Well, I'll be looking for the next Chinese spy balloon. I was laughing with my team. I'm like, guys, here we are.

I'm like, I was talking to my team. I'm like, guys, so we're going to do the balloon space. I'm like, hold on, hold on. Are we just talking about a balloon now? Are we all hands on deck getting all these big guests and all these politicians to come talk about a balloon? Is that where we're at? Yeah, sometimes I feel that way on my show too, trust me. Media prostitute, I feel. I'm crazy, man. All right, man. I know you have better things to do

than talk about Chinese spy balloons. So I'm going to let you go, man. Everybody, follow Mario. Thank you so much. And offline, I'm going to talk to you about, well, let's make some plans.