The Wolf Of All Streets - Winning the Bitcoin fight with UFC Champion Ben “Funky” Askren

Episode Date: March 4, 2021

 Ben Askren grew up on a wrestling mat where he discovered a unique style to defeat his opponent, called “The Funk.” It is this funky nature that eventually led Ben down a path to early Bitcoin adoption. Living up to his name, Ben has just recently agreed to return to the combat sports arena to defeat Jake Paul in a prizefight boxing match, reliving his championship days.   In this episode, Melker and Askren discuss a range of topics including: Training for Jake Paul Earning the nickname Ben “Funky” Askren Learning to take profits Diversifying out of crypto Emotionally trading altcoins Celebrity crypto boxing The Funky Crypto Podcast A potential 80% Bitcoin drop 10x in altcoin positions Defeating Jake Paul in April ---- MAKERSPLACE MakersPlace is the go-to premium marketplace for purchasing rare digital artworks from the world’s top creators (Ie. José Delbo, Trevor Jones, Pak, SSX3LAU, Shu Lea Cheang). New artworks are dropped twice a week, where they typically sell out within seconds of release and have been reselling several months later, upwards of 10x. Subscribe for exclusive drop notifications at https://makersplace.com/thewolf ---- Try Nexo’s full-suite, instant crypto banking service, featuring: Savings accounts with up to 12% interest on crypto, stablecoins & fiat Flexible crypto-backed credit lines at just 5.9% APR An exchange with 75+ crypto and fiat pairs and best-price guarantee All this and more wrapped up in a single Nexo Wallet. Start banking at nexo.io Or download the app on Google Play or the App Store.   ---- Legacy of Dead  This episode was brought to you by Bitcasino. The worlds leading Bitcoin-led online casino and crypto-centric gaming destination. Wager your way into a world of opportunity, with the ultimate Fun, Fast and Fair crypto-casino experience.  Deposit, wager, and withdraw in real-time with a host of top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), LiteCoin (LTC), Tether (USDT), TRON (TRX), Ripple (XRP), and more!  Use the promo link Bitcasino.io/Scott, to unlock your 200 FREE SPINS in the Legacy of Dead Promotion. ---- Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members ---- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co

What is up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Today's guest is an NCAA wrestling champion, Bellator champion, American Olympic wrestler, retired UFC fighter, and is now preparing to defeat Jake Paul in the boxing ring. More importantly than all that, at least to us, is that Ben is a Bitcoiner, podcaster, and thought leader in the crypto space. I wanted to have Ben on to discuss his thoughts on this Bitcoin cycle and some of the recent news events going on in the crypto space, and to see if he could offer some insight as to whether athletes are becoming increasingly interested in crypto. So without further ado, introducing our guest, fighting out of the red corner, Ben,

Funky Askren. What's up? I'm excited to be here. What's up, man? Thank you. So once again, you're listening to Wolf of Wall Street's podcast, which airs twice a week. And I talk to your favorite personalities from the world of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics. This podcast is powered by BlockWorks, the fastest growing media company in the digital asset space. BlockWorks has 20 Bitcoin and crypto podcasts.

I'm excited to be part of their network. Visit blockworks.co for access to the highest quality information in the space. And if you like the podcast and follow me on Twitter, check out my website, join my newsletter. You can do both of those things at thewolfofallstreets.io. Now to get into what's important. So your nickname is Funky. For the fans that don't know, why do people call you that? Yeah. Well, they actually started from wrestling uh when when the current style of wrestling was starting to happen in the late 90s they just called it funk and then i kind of reinvented and took it to a new level in the mid 2000s and you know that was kind of what i was being known for and then my buddy just made a shirt. Well, that's funny. I'm wearing a funky shirt right now. My buddy, actually this, this, this middle figure right

here, this guy, my buddy just, he was a kind of like artistic, I guess. And he just put it on a shirt and he put funky above it. And then he wore two NCAAs and it like caught on, you know, ESPN, put it on camera. And I could try, try to get rid of it a couple times but it stuck and then you know at that point there's no use in fighting it anymore and i just went with it and uh you know what the the longer i stick with it the more i enjoy it because it is especially in the mma space it's like different you know there's like yeah so many like assassins or killers or you know and so it's nice to be differentiated a little bit. What is the funk style of wrestling for those who don't know?

Yeah, well, I mean, this is funny because it kind of plays, I feel like it plays into my whole mindset and why I got into crypto, or I guess why crypto got into me so easily is it's an extension of everything that's already happening. And so, you know, not to get into, I don't want to get too technical, but say someone shoots a high crotch, right?

Well, the first basic defense is a down block. Second basic defense is a sprawl. And ideally we'd like to be perfect in those two at work, but at certain times they get in so deep that you, those two defenses are gone. So at that point you could say, okay, I guess he got this far. I'm giving up a takedown or you could try to kind of reinvent and think of a new way to defend it and that was kind of um where i went with a lot of positions and a lot of those things i went to are like i said in 2000 so i wrestled 2003 to 2007 in college

and when i was doing them back then people were just like what Oh, what the hell is he doing? He's rolling around weird shit. And you know, and now most people at least they have to have a pretty solid understanding to succeed at high level, higher level focused out wrestling. And then certain guys are even taking it far past what I did at that point in time. So it's, it's largely about improvisation and being able to react to a situation that gets basically out of

your controller is something that you don't expect kind of perfect for crypto markets being open to new ideas i think is the i think probably the bigger one is being open to new ideas and new ways to make things work um and that's you know that's kind of where i think it goes into crypto because i remember the the first time my buddy told me about it i was in a hotel room in shanghai my buddy actually wrestled me in college but he lives in australia now he told me about it, I was in a hotel room in Shanghai. My buddy actually wrestled me in college, but he lives in Australia now. He told me and I'm like, oh, shit, how do I buy some of that? Like, that's the thing. And I always laugh because when I first got on, well, for number one, it was really hard to buy stuff.

Yeah. What year was that? That was July of 2017, maybe. So probably, you know, not super, super early, but early compared to a lot of people. Relatively around when I got into it too, late 2016, early 2017, yeah. And so I remember the maximum you could buy in a week was, at least for me, was $4,000.

And it took me like, you know, six weeks to get that amount lifted and raised. So it was frustrating because like, yes, I see this and I that amount lifted and raised. So it was frustrating because like, yes, I see this and I see it going up and I get it. And I just couldn't get my money in fast enough. I wanted to get it in faster. And then the second thing that's funny and something you actually have been tweeting about a lot lately is I believe that it's so wholeheartedly and I still do. Like, I think it's the future. The first time my buddy talked through it, I'm like, oh, this is the future.

This is for sure the future. But I didn't take any money out. I took no profits. And now it's like, oh my God, I'm stupid. I probably should have taken a few profits. And to this day, I have sold a little bit of a few things. I still have sold zero Bitcoin. I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

And when I talk about taking profit, I was pretty clear. I view Bitcoin as a savings account. So largely, I'm not selling that. But when I see an altcoin go up 20, 30, 50, 100x, I'm going to take something off the top so that I don't experience that 2018 pain again, which I know we went through. But I think for most people still,

to just invest and hold and wait 10 years is probably the best way. It's just kind of painful when it's drawing down at those times. So what was it about Bitcoin when he told you about it that you got it so quickly and it resonated? Because I find that most people who came in in 2017 were just speculating. They didn't care about Bitcoin at all. They just saw something they could buy and everyone told them would go up. Yeah. So I think I already knew central banks were shit.

And they, you know, these are not good people. These are really bad people. And so I think it was, hey, this is something that's not controlled by anyone. It's decentralized. It's set up beyond the scope of control of any single

person or entity. I think that was the thing that really got me, you know, as we know, and America has had a largely successful central bank. And a lot of Americans don't look outside of America. And you see, you know, there's countries right now that are inflating at 20 plus percent per year. I mean, some of them are way past that. And so just the entire central bank system in the world is really sketchy. And that was, I think that's probably if I had to identify one thing, that was probably it. Yeah, I mean, that makes a lot of sense. So I have to imagine that your belief in it has only accelerated since especially with COVID and the global economic meltdown. Because if you already recognize how shitty central banks were in 2017, then imagine taking a look at them in 2020. For real. You know what the other thing that I guess

I was able to see so I traveled to I fought exclusively in Asia for a four year period 2014 to 17. When I retired for the first time. And I guess there's two other things that my eyes were already open to, in addition to the fact that I hated central banks. And I guess that was number one, the unbanked, people not having access to the banking system. People in America don't really, for the most part, understand that, but that's a thing in a lot of parts of the world. And then the other thing was the remittance payments um so for me that was like oh my god this is such an obvious use case of crypto is these remittance payments so literally if you're in singapore or hong kong and i've been to both these places

you will see like in singapore on sundays like there'll just be these mass gatherings of people and the first whole time like what what are all those freaking people doing over there you know i'm just hanging out walking around and it's like they they have to go to this very specific spot um right because the wealth inequality between america and mexico is you know say three to one ish somewhere like that but from singapore to um indo or singapore to philippines it's like 30 to 1 i mean it's crazy the wealth inequality is insane and so there's all these migrant workers who go to singapore and they work and then they want to send money home and they want to send money home they got to go to you know western union or whatever and it takes six days and they charge you 14% or something absurd.

And so the ability for me to have my phone and I can send you money and no one can stop it. It doesn't need a third party intermediary. I can send it from me to you in one to two minutes probably. Yeah, we could have been done by the time you even described that, which is really incredible. And then you talk about, you boil that down even further and sending a small amount of money to someone across the world is basically impossible, right? So if those people are only making 10, 15, 20 bucks or something in a day, right? I mean, how do you send that to somebody with a bank? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's

for real. It's a huge problem. And lot of people in america don't really see that um and that's something that yeah so again so i think it was like a whole bunch of things all at once that just were like as soon as you started describing it to me i'm like oh yeah let's freaking go how do i how do i put all my money in there and you know i could only get four thousand dollars a week but, I got in quite a bit and I watched it go up and I watched it go down. And now, you know, I've lasted all the way through the bear market without selling anything. And I, and now I'm here enjoying the fruits of my labors. That's a good lesson that if you hold long enough in a market that you end up doing well,

even though you have to suffer a lot of pain in between. I'm curious if living in Asia for four years, you had any like crazy tax stories. I was in Japan for six months. Obviously as an American citizen, no matter where you go in the world, you're going to pay your taxes, right? Because it's a citizenship tax. It's not like you need to be using the roads that you're paying for. Did you ever get like, have situations where you had to pay taxes in one of those countries and in the United States? Because I had to pay a small tax in Japan on top of the taxes I paid on my earnings in the United States. I didn't, I didn't live there. I fought there exclusively. So I would spend like two ish weeks every time, maybe three,

sometimes my family come over, we go on vacation. A couple, I think Singapore withheld taxes. I don't know that a lot of the other countries did man. There's really only one person I'm scared of in the world, and that's the IRS. So I always like double, triple check that and make sure they get their money. Because to your point, they will get their money. Yeah, it's funny thinking back to 2017, when the narrative was like, we can trade Bitcoin and there's no taxes. Like that's what everyone was talking about back then, 2016, 17.

And now it's like they came with the heavy hand and it's the worst market probably to trade for taxes because every time you trade in altcoin, every time you do anything, you're selling Bitcoin and it's a taxable transaction. It's crazy. So is that not the case? So I don't really trade stocks.

I have one investment account I set up when I was younger and then now since 2017, it's like, wow, why would I buy anything else? And my buddy's like, you're going to get 401k. Cause it's tax deductible. It's like, F that my Bitcoin went up by 800%. Why don't you get 401k? You suck at it. It's so hard to care. So hard to care. I don't give a damn. But so on stock trades, you would have to trade on, you would have to pay taxes on every trade correct also or

not right you pay on every trade but they're dollars to stocks so like it would almost be the equivalent of if you bought amazon stock and then you bought tesla stock with amazon stock and then viewing the amazon stock as a sale to get the tesla but the bigger issue being that they're viewing bitcoin as property or or but not as money? Because if you just spent money and bought coffee, you shouldn't have to pay taxes on your dollars. You're not taking profit to buy a cup of coffee. So I think that going that entire other direction has been very bad for Americans. So do you think they'll ever treat it as a currency? I hope so. I mean, it would make a lot more sense in my mind for it to be treated kind of like

Forex trading, where you're trading currencies, basically, like I enter this much, this many dollars into the market, I do whatever I do in the market, and I get taxed when I take my dollars out, it'll be so much more simple. And that's the actual profit that you've made in dollars. But who knows if they'll be sensible, I think that we'll see more sensible regulation moving forward. But I'm sort of a eternal optimist. Yeah. For what it's worth. I mean, so many people just didn't get it. Didn't understand even today there's, you know, I hear smart people say some things and I'm just like, I know I'm not as smart as you, but you sound like an idiot when you say that, you know, stuff like that.

Yeah, absolutely. So we know that you didn't sell at all, that you held through all of this. Is that still your plan? I mean, you have a long term belief in it. So for now, you think that we're in a long term bull market, even if we see corrections. I mean, nobody knows when we're recording, but Bitcoin's making a huge correction as we speak, dropping from 58,000 all the way down to like 45,000. So does that shake you at all? Or is it completely just become? Yeah. Like you, you know, I start, I've taken a little bit the last couple of months and not in Bitcoin, but in a few altcoins just kind of cashed out because they have went up. I don't know, exponentially, I guess.

So it was like, it became to the point where such a large portion of my net wealth was in crypto. And it's like, dude, as much as I believe in crypto, like, I don't think this is healthy. Like I need to cash out. So it's like, well, I don't want to keep it in cash. So it's funny because my bank account is really small. And so why not, you know, if I cash out a little bit, I'll pay my house down a little bit, right? Or we've got buildings for my business. So I put some money into that. Something to that effect. So I don't just like cash out and then just let it sit as cash in the bank. I think that's a bad idea. Can't do that. Can't do that.

I have been taking a little bit. I am very conflicted on whether I should cash some Bitcoin out at the top of this cycle just to buy more Bitcoin when it does drop down, because I think it has been cyclical in nature. I asked Michael Saylor that question. He made me feel like a terrible person. You can't ask him anything about taking profit. Yes. But man, I kind of feel like, say we get to October, November, and it's at some astronomical number, it's going to be so hard to not say like, hey, let me just take out 20% of my Bitcoin. I mean, last time it crashed by 80%, roughly. So if you would have sold at anywhere near the top, you could have bought, say, we'll just say for ease of math, five to one when it got to the bottom.

Yeah, get five times as much bitcoin yeah so like when it gets into some astronomical sum i'm not saying i'm gonna go sell all of my bitcoin but to think that hey maybe i should sell 20 and then when when i go back down i'm gonna you know maybe i'll pay off my house a little bit and then maybe i'll buy four times more bitcoin when it goes to the bottom because the cycles both the tops and the bottoms. And if you want to correct me if I'm wrong, but the top of the bottom and predictable that it's like relatively 18 months is the top. And then another 18 months is the bottom again. Right?

Right. Either way. And even if you don't time it, if you sell a bunch and then when it dips, you just kind of start dollar cost averaging in and don't even try to buy the bottom. You're still going to end up way on top. I mean, it's just sensible to take profit on something that you've made a ton of money on if it can change your life in any sort of meaningful way. I mean, people who make millions of dollars and start buying cars and stuff and then have to return them to the repo man a few months later, I don't want to be that guy. But I agree with you. I think that I talk about taking profits all the time, but I'm not taking profits so that dollars can sit in a bank account

to dollars. Like I do it to, like you said, pay off a house, buy some land, do something, put it into another hard asset. Yes. Yeah. And so that's where it's like, my wife wanted me to buy a rental property. And I said to her, like, well, I already have a, we have two buildings for my wrestling academy system and we own our house. It's like, so I already have those real estate. It's like, wait, you want me to cash out on crypto to buy a dog shit asset? Like, no, no, I'm not doing that. Like, why would I invest in anything else right now when I can invest in crypto? And if I'm going to pull something off the table, I'll pay off something I already have. And then I'll probably, when it goes to, you know, I'm anticipating quarter four, and that's from people smarter than me. I'm not predicting. I'm just listening to smart people. I will probably take some off the table and then hold some there.

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you've obviously been a competitor your whole life and how you approach trading or the market. So I don't know. I'm not really. So I guess, well, I'll say I learned my lesson the hard way. I bought a handful of alts that went to zero after the ICO bust and boom in 2017. So I have, I don't say Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, which are kind of three mainstays. And then I bought some Cardano just because I heard a couple of really smart people talking really well about it. And it was, I bought it at 8 cents. So I'm doing tremendous on that.

And then the other thing that I have a large portion of my, so my buddy, he started a company called Flow Sports and he was a CEO for about 10 years and he got pushed out. And I had kind of gotten him into crypto, right? Where he started thinking about it. And he's actually started this company called Rockfin. It's a media platform and they have a decentralized payment algorithm which pays in Ray token.

And because we're really good friends, I was one of the first creators on the network. And actually, I think his concept is genius. I think it's likely to go into other spaces, not just content creation, but the, the idea is that is that digitized networks. So this could be Uber. Um, this could be Airbnb. It could be right. Facebook, YouTube, whatever they, they take all the profit and the people who supply the network with value get none of the profit. Yeah. So, and then obviously as those networks get bigger,

they can actually squeeze the creators or the providers of service. And so what they do is every single day, there's a 10,000 token payout regardless of who's on the network. And then obviously as a network gains more subscribers and followers, the value of the token goes up. And so when I earned my token at, you know, a lot of more like 10 to 15 cents, and now it's, you know, $3 or whatever, I have seen my value grow with the network. And I always say like Uber, Uber had a first 10 drivers. How much did those guys get paid? Well, whatever the market rate was, how much value did those guys provide to

the network? Cause without them, Uber doesn't exist. And you can say that with the first hundred, first thousand. And so these early adopters provide so much value to the network. And I mean, it's kind of like Bitcoin, right? The first people bought into Bitcoin, they saw their value grow with the value of the network. That, that, that makes so much sense, incentivizing people to believe in you because those people are taking a huge risk, right? They could go to any platform, they could use some old legacy system where they know they're going to make money and they're rolling the dice on your idea. So they should definitely get paid. And it's

sad. And crypto does solve that in a lot of different projects. Really, really cool. I was more just thinking because I'm a very competitive person. So like as a trader and investor, the first, the biggest problem for me initially was that I just hated losing. So like I, if my balance was going down, it like emotionally affected me. I thought I was like not winning.

You know what I mean? More even than the dollar value dropping, I just hate losing. I know you've got to be that way. I mean, you're an Olympian. Oh, man. I don't know. I kind of see it as separate from me.

I guess maybe because it's not my main point of focus. And I don't actually trade a lot. I mostly just buy and sold a really small portion of what I've bought. No, I mean, I love partying on people when Bitcoin goes up. And, you know, so I lived through the entirety of the bear market. I didn't sell shit. I started my podcast, The Funky Crypto Show, with John in like the middle of the bear market.

We started in, I think it was October of 2019, right? So that was like dead smack in the middle of the bear market. Yeah, so I know I don't get too down. Um, maybe in the beginning when I lost, cause I probably went up three X from my initial investment, three to four X in the beginning. And then I went down by like, you know, 90% or 85%. I think a lot of people have been there. That's good though. It means, means you're, you're means you're stone cold emotionally. I mean, I've gotten over that long since. I find the same thing. Like, I get pissed off if I lose a fantasy football game, but I can like sit here and watch Bitcoin drop and it's fine, you know?

So it's kind of a strange phenomenon. So I'm curious, how did you meet John and why did you decide to start the podcast? I came on, it was like the most fun I've ever had in a 30 minute or 45 minute conversation. You guys are doing a great job yeah let's see so john just started reaching out to me i don't i don't even remember why at this point and i said something like hey bro uh there's ufc milwaukee if you want to stop by just hit me up when you come in town or something something that effect and sure enough this dude showed up and hit me up so i'm like okay let's go let's go to dinner um we'll have dinner we kind of you know he's friendly we hit it off and um that was kind of what started it and then you know kind of maintained a friendship for a while and then i like i love crypto and i believe in it

and i think it's going to help i think it has helped a lot of people it's going to help people so then i had been podcasting for wrestling a lot and i just said to him like hey why don't we start an mma podcast i'm sorry yeah but do my podcast why don't we start a crypto podcast i uh i know i'm not the biggest expert in the world i and you know he he's he's smarter than he lets on um but he also wouldn't be like an expert expert but i'm like dude i got a huge following and we can just talk like normal people about crypto because to that point most of the crypto podcasts i'd listen to it's like dude you got to kind of be deep to listen to this like you got to do shit otherwise you're not even going to start and that was kind of how we started. I think that's really, really smart and really important because like the number doesn't keep going up unless we get everyone in

on this. Right. Yeah. And you need every person to be interested and you need to speak to them in a language that, that they understand. I think you guys do a great job. So that said with this huge boom, have you guys noticed, you know, growth in the podcast or a lot more interest? Are people hitting you up about crypto a lot more than they were before? Yeah. So the podcast, I would say the numbers have went up pretty,

they've been kind of trending upwards. We get our best numbers on Twitter because we actually go live on there. Yeah, it's pretty. John was the one who set that all up. Like, I had no idea how to do anything. So, yeah. So, I guess, dude, you know,

right now we're sitting at 13,000 viewers for yesterday. That's just on Twitter. So, yeah, it's going really well. I always laugh, though. I told so many people to buy Bitcoin. Pretty much that. So I got in, let's see, August, July, August, 2017. You know, the run-up was relatively short.

It was only like three to four months. Yeah. And then it was started going down. And so from that peer went down, I still believed in it. I told so many people to get into it. And, you know, so we really had probably a, I know we had a little bump up in what 2018 i think or

20 i don't we'd bump up at some point in there but there's a long stretch where it's under ten thousand dollars like a really multi-year stretch yeah and i tried telling so many people to get in especially march 13th when it crashed and i think there was one person that I know that bought under $10,000 and I think I know about 20 people who've bought over 20 at over 20,000. Um, and it like they needed that for them to get into it. And now everyone I'm like, Oh, I bought it 24. I wish I would've listened to you when it was five or seven or whatever, you know, kind of goes back to what you were saying about being the one who's willing to commit to it early, right? People love to ride the train and come in later. I've had the

same, same kind of experience, people starting to come in super late buying over 50,000, even because they're starting to finally hear about it. But I mean, in general, you know, have you do you think that we have a much more public awareness and people interested in the space than the past previous few years when you've been here? Oh, yeah, for sure. I mean, there's just there's just there's more recognition. There's there's so many more resources now than there were. It's so much easier. I mean, buying buying Bitcoin in 2017 was maybe not all that tricky buying anything besides bitcoin in 2017 very tricky bro it was so good that what the first time i went on bittrex and

everything was like in sats and i was like what like is this some weird casino am i getting hacked what's happening right now yeah and then the other thing the the other thing in 2021 now is like, there's really not any more FUD. There's nothing else to say. I mean, the one thing that people have been going, oh, it produces a lot of carbon emissions. Like that's their best argument at this point. There's nothing else they can say anymore. And you know, in 2017, that was, there's all kinds of crazy stuff being said. And now 2021 2021 you're not hearing like almost anything yeah i mean you hear the opposite you hear big companies now totally supporting it and calling it a hedge i mean you talked to michael saylor what was that experience like because i

talked to him too and i was like couldn't sleep for three days yeah he he's brilliant um and just he's both brilliant and then also the way he kind of lays things out is so intelligent and so smooth. He's been kind of a godsend for the crypto community. I feel like he's been this guy leading the charge and he leads it so well. And now obviously what he did like, was it two or three years ago now with the CEO conference, you know, we saw, we saw publicly now they've brought in Tesla largely due to that conference. And I got to assume there's going to be a whole bunch more that are already buying that maybe haven't announced yet. But the notion that Tesla would be like the one and only out of 10,000 is, is so ridiculous. Yeah. I think there were at least 2,000 there.

I said this the other day, I was like, if 5% of them were convinced, then that's like 100 companies. And we've only seen like six or seven companies so far. And look what it's done to price. I mean, imagine if we see like Apple or Google or one of these, but even smaller companies, man, it really is kind of all happening. It's so crazy.

I never thought that we'd have a guy like michael saylor and mark cuban like out there talking about crypto as sort of like he's annoying because it was only like because he hated it he said he'd rather have a banana than a bitcoin and it's like i mean i guess maybe great you came to the light and i and i appreciate i always think the smartest people can change their minds right dumb people are the ones who get stuck in this thing and you know like michael saylor had that really famous old tweet where he was talking shit on bitcoin it's like 2013 of course really long time ago and smart people have the ability to change their mind when new information comes to light they read it they think about it and if it doesn't match with what they previously thought

they're willing to change their minds so uh i'm glad mark cubans finally came to the light but he was so annoying for so long he was but it's nice to see yeah but then you know to admit that you're wrong and go the other way like i definitely respect that but the point being i just i still didn't foresee that we would be like relying on guys like sailor and elon musk in 2021 like carrying bitcoin up it really is like a dream it's crazy musk is i mean he's one one of those ones that it makes so much sense yeah oh yeah like you had to figure it was going to happen but when it actually happened it was like yes this is tremendous so i'm curious like you're in it are you seeing in the sports scene specifically

in wrestling are you seeing more people care about this we obviously see stories like guys the nfl getting starting to get paid in bitcoin uh i mean we saw dinwiddie like tokenize his salary and stuff i do you think that it's getting fascinating actually yeah yeah do you think that we're gaining any traction with athletes um i mean there's definitely an awareness and there kind of has been for a long time in mixed martial arts and i think mixed martial arts kind of people are um okay they think outside the box a lot um and so we've seen that in mixed martial arts as far as other sports i i can't really say that i have a finger on right their pulse at all um but i think it's just everyone's going to be uh you know figuring this out that this is the way that this

is the future within maybe not you know if it's not this cycle it's the next one so what we're maximum probably five years away from that happening yeah i agree i mean i would say mma guys are inherently risk takers right yes risk takers and outside the box thinkers not willing to kind of are willing to kind of be on their own that's that's definitely the case do you think like you have to be a really program differently or wired differently to be a fighter? Oh man. I don't want to get my ass beat on a daily basis personally. So my one buddy always jokes that, that there's just such a little barrier to entry.

You get all kinds of people because, you know, to be a professional, say football player, you have to go through, you play high school football, play college football, you get drafted. There's like this really systematic process to going and and to be a professional MMA fighter all you have to be willing to do is take an ass whooping for 500 bucks you can call yourself a pro MMA fighter so you know I think we I think we just get all kinds all kinds of people in our sport uh so I mean you said that wait scott are you in on this celebrity celebrity crypto boxing no but i'm down i'm not trying to fight you i'm not trying to fight you jason williams said he wanted to fight peter mccormick and then it caught on because our guest yesterday bit boy

he said he wanted to fight this guy jason appleton the crypto crow um okay and so now we already got two matchups so now we just need like a promoter who do you want to fight i don't want to fight any i don't dislike anyone man i'll fight sailor for a billion dollars oh michael says i love the guy but like maybe oh okay i'll fight sailor then i love that guy um i'd fight cuban um yes there we go there we go i don't know honestly man i've got in my old age, I have a very Zen-like approach to life. I try to like, there's probably a thousand people hiding behind like Pepe and frog memes on Twitter that I wouldn't mind, you know, if they came out in the open.

But, you know, usually the people take shots at me are anonymous. Yeah, that's funny. But that's kind of the nature of this space is that you can sit behind your computer and uh act tough but uh speaking of which so you said you retired for the first time earlier right so uh then what was that like retiring and what made you come back yeah so when i when i retired i don't want to go through the whole saga of my career. I, I, I initially signed with Bellator MMA kind of in the, they were in season two. Um, so not, not right away, but, um, and I won that belt and I maintained that belt for roughly three years. Um, and when I was, when I finished my time there, um, I was, my plan was to go to DFC cause I just love competition.

I wanted to prove I was best in the world. It didn't work out between Dana and I, um, for some reasons. And so I ended up going to one championship. So I fought there from 2014 and 2017, uh, was also the champ for roughly three years. And then it was just like, uh, I didn't have any challenges left unless I could go fight the guys who ranked above me because that was all i really want to do i hadn't made enough money uh i want to move on with my life you know we have these wrestling academies and i and there's other things i like

to do and so i said i'm retired if i ever get the opportunity in whatever way it presents itself to come back and prove that i'm the best in the world i I will take that opportunity and I will do it, right? So then roughly a year later, I got a call about a trade from one championship to the UFC. And at that point, and I guess still to this point, that's the only trade that's ever happened in the history of mixed martial arts. It's never been done before then. It's never been done after then. So I got traded for Demetrius johnson to the ufc and so like okay let me come out of retirement because i'm gonna get this opportunity to fight

the best guys in the world um i fought three times i won my first one i got ranked as high as number four uh unfortunately i lost my second one and my third one and then i had to uh i so i i don't like saying it this way. I had to retire because I had to have hip surgery. Even without the hip surgery, my career my second retirement career wasn't going to last that long. I was coming back for a very specific purpose. If I couldn't

do that, I was going to be retired again. But I did have to have hip surgery so I got my hip fixed. I wish I would have known Corona would happen and I would have got done way earlier before Corona, but I got my hips fixed in September of last year. It's tremendous. It's so much better. Then that retirement, I said, I'm retired. If I have any just fun opportunities to come back, I will consider them. Then that's why this Jake Paul thing, I say this is not

becoming a retirement. This is like an old guy doing a hobby uh he doesn't view it that way i would imagine but uh it's like a celebrity boxing man yeah he thinks for some reason he's actually good at boxing um i'm i'm intending to prove that is not the case so how did it happen like uh you know there's he's a youtuber obviously he he had his one celebrity fight with nate and uh he won but i mean that was against a basketball player yes yeah and then he also fought against some other youtuber who was really really bad at um really really bad at boxing uh so he just like called me out and for what was really strange. He called me out and I said, okay, whatever. And I thought it was just like, you know,

a lot of hot air because I have a relatively big name. He probably thinks I'm not great at standup because my background is wrestling. And I, whatever. Okay. I said, tweet a couple of times, figured it would pass. Then like a couple of weeks later, they texted me a few times. Am I okay?

Yeah, whatever. If you guys want to fight, I, I like combat and you pay me good i'm in and uh then they come out with silent again and then you know they came back to the table and said here's our offer it was really good um and then i said okay i guess i'm gonna be a celebrity boxer so when is that fight happening and what does your training look like because i would imagine even any fight you sort of have to take seriously regardless right i mean yeah yeah i'm a pro so I'm going to train and I have been training. Um, but it was, it's funny because I was in retirement. I was living my regular life, doing my regular things. And now it's kind of like, it's tough cause you have to

kind of reset and figure out how to schedule all your workouts within, you know, within the day that within everything else I had going on, right. My crypto podcast, my wrestling practices and everything else. Um, it's April 17th. Uh, I'm feeling really good. I'm really like, I can't believe I hadn't punched anything in like 15 months, right. From the time I retired to, uh, when I, when I decided to do this hobby, I had not struck anything. And so so it was like it's funny how fast it comes back um and yeah i'm really excited for it and where are people gonna be able to watch the fight uh you know what i don't even know the uh i don't even know but we will we will

i will have an answer for you at some point in time i just don't know when so so what does that day look like now like what does your average day look like with all of these different things going on? Yeah, it's been, oh man, it's been crazy. Especially the first, it's starting to slow down now. This is, I think I'm only doing your podcast and maybe one other this week, but like the first couple of weeks it was like, shoot one, one day I think i did like five or six podcasts like it was like it was exhausting yeah crazy so um yeah i uh i train like about eight times a week you know so that means twice a day a couple times and once a day a lot of times i have uh i've brought in a couple by extra boxing coaches um just kind of that that's it it's simple's simple. You know, it's actually way more simple than MMA

because MMA, you have to have a jujitsu coach. You got to have your wrestling coach. You got to have your striking coach and kind of your strength conditioning coach and boxing is just like, well, I'm going to just punch stuff as much as possible. You know, I have a boxing coach and that's it. But like, are your days insanely long?

Do you get up insanely early? Like I'm not an early riser i'm way more productive at night yeah so yeah i always uh i'm probably like uh say 7 30 to 11 30 i try to get my eight hours of sleep every night but i would say i'm like i said like probably between 11 and midnight and then up between 7 and 8 somewhere around there um three mornings a week i have my wrestling podcast at 8 15 a.m so i you know i kind of get up hang out with my kids a little bit and then i come downstairs here do my podcast and then uh we have wrestling practice at night and i'm i'm gonna kind of wean myself off of that as we get closer to fight i'm gonna coach a few less

practices i'm traveling a few times to do some training. Um, so yeah, more and more folks on the fight. And then after April 17th, I get to go back to my real life again. So what's the Academy like? What do you, what are you guys doing there? Are you training future professionals? Is it kids? Is it, you know, is it college students? What, what is it like? Uh, so yeah, we're five through 18 year olds, only kids. We don't really coach any adults in any way, shape or form. Um, we're still, we have a ton of success. We've been, uh, really, really busy. Uh, we, we finished our state championships. We had 21 state champions. Um, there's only 42 in the state of Wisconsin

and we don't really have a lot of people in the smallest division. So, uh, in, in the biggest division, Wisconsin, the hot, most highly highly populated we had 12 of the 14 state champions so um yeah we're doing really well we were like we have a lot of guys in wrestling in college right now so i i guess our goal is just to teach them to love wrestling to teach them to be good at it and then ideally they go and wrestle in college i'm curious i was shocked that i saw with the jake paul thing that there was like some media that think he's favored yeah he's a betting favorite right now i I mean, listen, you find that like incredibly motivating. What does that feel like?

I mean, it just, to me it's, and I've, I've known this for a very long time. It's the ignorance of the public, right? The public is not always have the best idea of what's going on. You know, I really only wrestled in my fights. I didn't do a gigantic amount of standup. So yes, people do not think highly of my standup skills, but at the end of the day, it's kind of like, what, what has he ever been good at athletically? And the answer is to my knowledge is nothing. He's never been good at anything. And just because he beat up two guys who've never,

ever fought before, doesn't actually mean he's good at boxing. It means he just picked really, really weak opponents. I mean, do you think that he legitimately believes he's like a professional level boxer that he's gonna that this is his his future or is it like a lot of hype and steam because i just don't get it i think he knows he's not really that good is what i have to imagine although um you know there are certain cases where celebrities or people of high net worth convince themselves that they're good at something. And then people who are around them are like, yeah, enablers, they're enablers and they'll never put that person in a position to realize, Hey, your dog shit, um, in practice.

So they, this person keeps this belief going, um, because anyone who would tell them, and this is not just an athletics, right? This could be in other avenues. Yeah. Business a lot. Politics, my God, yeah. Exactly. You know, if they tell that person,

hey, you suck, then they're gone. And so that's kind of, you know, I think that's kind of probably what's happening to my guess. Yeah, I would imagine. It's like in a movie, you know, you got your like little hype man dude who runs around holding your towels and tells you how amazing you are all day and start to believe your

own hype. So back to Bitcoin. Now, what do you see as the, you were talking about the cycle, clearly you think we're going much higher, 80, 100,000, you were kind of talking about. Do you think that it's reasonable to start talking about those 300,000, $700,000 million targets? Or do you think that that's more euphoria? Oh, I mean, I think a million, I kind of think like a million, when I think about how big I think it's going to be sometime, a million feels like a little bit low actually. And I, you know, I don't know if that's gonna take three cycles. I don't know if it's going to take 20 years. I don't know how long it's going to take,

but when you think about all the money, if it really is the best money, which I think it is, I would say, hey, this is the best money that's ever been created by human beings. Everyone will want some and it's going to be worth way more than a million dollars. For this cycle, I always just say,

when people ask me, I say, listen, on the low end, likely six figures. On the high end, people are predicting three to 400,000. That's a gigantic window. It's going to be somewhere in there. I'm probably going to be right.

It's going to be- It's so funny. I try to get my head mentally wrapped around hitting 400,000 and then having a 75% drop and being sad that we're at 100. Yeah. I mean, I think, man, I feel like we're gonna see like not quite as steep of a drop i agree yeah i think we're gonna see something more like 50 to 60 you know which i think that seems like a lot but compared to 75 to 80 last time it's not yeah i mean i think that

institutions are providing a floor that wasn't there before. There's just much bigger money that doesn't want to lose and much more, I think, interest in buying. So I know we're up against it here with time. So where can everybody follow you after this? Keep up what you're doing and then we'll put out where they can watch the fight later. Awesome. Yeah. I just at Ben Askren on Twitter and Instagram. I'm way more active on Twitter. I think there's a much more intelligent community there. I do post to Instagram. I'm way more active on Twitter. I think there's a much more intelligent community there. I do post to Instagram. I don't really love using Instagram. The crypto Twitter community is tremendous.

So those two platforms are really where to find me. Yeah, and you guys check out the podcast as well. Well, thank you, man. I know that you're super busy training and everything. Good luck with the fight, and thank you so much for taking the time. All right, appreciate it, Scott. Have a good day.

All right, man, you too. See ya.