Weekly Skews - Weekly Skews – Crypto Realizes There’s No Such Things as Halfway Crooks

Episode Date: May 28, 2025

The unredacted JFK Files detail a shocking conspiracy (not that one). Trump hosts the world’s worst crypto party, but don’t worry, the people were hella cool. Then we get into the hot new legislation as crypto tries to go legit at the same time Bitcoin guys are getting their fingers cut off and robbed with chainsaws.Support the show

All right. What's up, everybody? Welcome back. Happy Scus Day to you and Memorial Day. Well, actually, you're watching this today after Memorial Day, Tuesday, May 27th, 2025. We're filming this on Memorial Day at what time is it? Mark 9.54 a.m. on the left coast, much earlier addition,

because I'm coming to you from my hometown, old stomping grounds of Clay County, Tentany. That's also the reason for the more lo-fi production quality. But I hope you can forgive me. It was either this or you just didn't get anything this week, and we don't want you guys to go without. But that's what I'm doing. How are you doing, Mark?

Doing good, man. I went to a barbecue, more a day of barbecue yesterday afternoon. And there's a woman from the UK there who was like, I don't even know what this holiday is about. And I was like, well, it's for the dead troops. And she's like, what is Veterans Day? That's for the living troops. And then July 4th and Flag Day are also, we make them about war, even though they're not technically about the troops.

Right. And then it's like, she's like, we don't have anything like that. Like they have remembrance day for, I guess, I think it's for World War I troops, but like they just like three minutes of silence don't even get off work. So yeah, just a specific cultural thing. Well, it's what it's like, I mean, it is weird how many things we have that's like just all about, you know, the troops and the flag and America rocks and all that. stuff were very nationalistic. It's like how you think about as an adult when you think back as a kid on getting up and doing the putting your hand on your heart and doing the Pledge of Allegiance every day or whatever. And as an adult, you're like, man, that's kind of fucking weird, actually. It's like out of 1984, but you don't think about that when you're a kid. And it's like a lot of these holidays you like that too. But also I kind of appreciate how most of them, Veterans Day, not really, but Memorial Day for sure. And definitely July 4th, really just end up serving as like most holidays in this country as an excuse to like, you know, get drunk or whatever like we're uh we're you know but i'm from i just said i'm back in my hometown i'm salina the only thing we got going for us here is a lake it's a lake town and

memorial day weekend is the start of the summer and so this that's what everybody treats it mostly as it's like memorial day weekend's like yep rest in peace also you know let's go get drunk on the boat for the first time this year is what most people do by the way it's raining every single day we're here so that kind of screwed all of our lake plans but what are you going to do yeah you get drunk on a boat or get a discount a good deal in a mattress. Right. So before we get to the show, we're talking about a lot of fun crypto-related stuff,

including like a new thing called ranch attacks and crypto trying to go legit, so they stopped getting robbed and started being thought of as banks. So before we get to that, I want to talk about, we make fun of conspiracy theories on the show a lot. I want to talk to you about a conspiracy fact that got for you, Trey. Love it. The JFK file has been, you know, the Trump administration dumped a bunch of a bunch of bunch of them out right and it's taking a long time for people to go through them and everybody seems kind of bored with them because they kind of they don't say who killed jfk right of

course of course they don't it's wild to be that people thought that they would just release something that did say that do you know what I mean like the idea that that was going to come out and it was just going to be written there this is what happened like a little like a little abstract at the top just sums it all up and everybody's going to be like wow that's crazy like yeah Of course it doesn't say that. And there's like, again, there is a bunch of conspiratorial shit going on around the assassination. Just none of it was about killing the president. Everyone finds it fucking boring.

But I did find, like, so I read a piece by this historian, a college professor by the name of Andrew McKevitt. I think he teaches at Louisiana Tech. He wrote a book about like the growth in gun consumerism after World War II because of cheap imports of excess European stock. There was like left in warehouses after the war. And a central figure in this story is a guy by the name is Samuel Cummings, who was the founder of a company. who was the founder of a company called Inter-Arms that imported a bunch of these guns. And McEvitt had heard a rumor that Cummings,

the company, Inter-Arms, was a CIA front, but he couldn't really document it. Now, that's what relates to these documents. Okay, so Cummings was openly a CIA agent before he started Inter-Arms. He never even did that. He basically joined the CIA in the early 50s as an arms analyst, and in 1952, they sent him to Europe for a year

on a clandestined mission to acquire war surplus arms to send behind the Iron Curtain and to South America and to nationalist Taiwan during which Cummings posed as a Hollywood producer in search of props for war films. So his CIA cover was, I'm a producer, I need 400 crates of guns for a movie, don't ask about it.

Yeah, based on that and the movie Argo, I assume that that's a well they go back to pretty frequently, I guess, as far as cover stories go. You know, the whole Hollywood production crew story apparently gets them every time, I guess. Yeah. So the public explanation for him founding into arms was like this mission gave him the idea because there were so many war surplus firearms that set unused in European warehouses that there was a tremendous supply that just needed someone to sell them. The same thing sort of happened after the Civil War where they would like, you know, they had all these extra guns sitting around.

They tried to figure out way to sell them to the public. So, like, they put classified ads and, you know, sell them in department stores next to wheat and flour and shit. So, but then these documents, there was a, the SAIG, you know, keeps track of media coverage. And there's an article in a magazine called Ramport, Ramparts is a left-leaning monthly publication. And the article mentions Cummings in passing for his connections to a figure

named Jay Garrett Underhill, a former military intelligence officer who claimed a CIA had engineered the Kennedy assassination. He turned up dead several months later. Don't worry about it. So basically, a formerly redacted email, sorry, this rejected portion of this memo had said on August 17th, 1954, Cummings became the principal agent of the redacted International Armments Corporation in Aramco. And the unredacted version, which was redacted was CIA owned companies known as International Armaments Corporation and Interarmico. So the stated reason for import. all these guns into America at a 1957 hearing was that the State Department testified,

a representative of the State Department testified that those guns might have falling into the hands of communist insurgencies overseas. It was instead better that they be sold to American consumers. Now, the background of all this is like, it's hard to count guns in America because they, you know, they don't decompose. So they're just around for hundreds of years, their hand-me-downs or whatever. But it's pretty well accepted that gun ownership starts. surge after World War II in the United States, a lot more guns floating around.

There was a 1968 law that banned the importation of these guns, basically because U.S.-based manufacturers were complaining about how they were undercutting their prices. So basically, the Remington Company was like, you're saying you're trying to destroy communism, but what you're destroying is capitalism, you morons. So here's the plot twist here. That 1957 hearing I mentioned, whereas the State Department testified that this was like this was importing these guns were necessary to defeat communism.

Right. It was a hearing about a bill sponsored by then Senator John F. Kennedy that would have banned the importation of these weapons. One such weapon was the very gun that would be used to kill Kennedy in 1960. Oh, okay. There it is.

There's the turn. So JFK was the one who put forth the bill that wanted to stop those weapons from being brought into the country. The bill failed. one of the and then because if we don't if we the bill failed because communism might happen that's why it failed and then one of those guns that came in as a result of that is the one that shot kennedy himself later yeah so the CIA did kill Kennedy just threw a Rube Goldberg machine of done that shit

so anyway do poll downstream of this uh 2017 poll by pew research center said that almost half of Americans know someone has been shot because you know because there's so many guns floating around. So if you want to get to the bottom of like, how did your cousin, pillhead cousin, end up getting shot to death trying to hold up a liquor store? You got to start the story. Well, in 1952, the CAA had a guy pretend to be a movie produced. Yeah, I never really knew that. I mean, obviously everybody knows it's like, that's one of the reasons I was always kind of, it's a defeatist position, but I was one the reasons I was always kind of skeptical about any sort of like real gun control in this

country is because it just felt like that was one of those can't get the genie back into the old type situations because this were just so lousy with fucking guns here there's just so many of them but i didn't i didn't i never really knew that that was a direct result of like guns being purposefully like shipped here for like anytime there's guns laying around in some other country they're like you know you know you could use those is america let's just send all those to america but i was just reading about how uh in vietnam war we bombed uh laos the country of Laos more than we bombed Germany in World War II. We weren't even at war with them or whatever.

And as a result now in Laos, there's a whole like cottage industry of like people repurposing old bombs into like other like bottle openers and shit that they sell at markets and stuff. Like most of the things you get that are metal there are made from unexploded U.S. ordinance because it's just all over the goddamn place. So, you know, a lot of worldwide implications for America. American's military history, it would say. Fun little button to Sto Cummings' role in gun violence.

His daughter ended up shooting a guy to death in their mansion. He became a billionaire. And she shot her Argentinian and polo player boyfriend to death. And she got 60 days in jail for it because she was rich and he was Argentinian. Yeah, that'll do it. All right. Well, we are going to continue. I haven't said this yet, but pretty big announcement here.

We're flying without producer Matt, this particular. week. He's still hung over from a Willie Nelson concert. He went to last night. No, it's not his fault. Like I said, we're recording this much earlier than usual because of my circumstances where I'm at, and Matt could not accommodate that, but again, that's all

me, not him. So what limited producing does happen this week will be at my fingertips. So excuse me for that. This is weekly skews before we get into it. I want to remind y'all if you want to see me do stand-up comedy live and in person, you go to Trey Crowder.com.

and check out my upcoming tour dates. I've got New York City coming up in that New York City in the middle of June. At the end of June, wine country, Napa, California, and then the sweetest of them all, Tulsa, Oklahoma, right after that. Followed up with a lot of other great places in the near future around the summer, through the summer. Go to Trag Crowder.com to check out. All those, you can also find a link to my most recent special Trash Daddy on there. It's completely different. If you watch that and come say me, it's 100% completely different.

so fret not on that front. So check all that out. Also, Matt has a new thing going on the audio feed of this show. So if you watch only, consider going and subscribing to the audio portion because there's an audio exclusive piece of bonus content that Matt is doing called Good Skews. So it's focused on. We bring the despair, the hopelessness. It's what me and Mark do week to week. We're your weekly source for that impending doom.

And then Matt, he has some good. news that he digs up somewhere. I don't know where the hell he finds it. But anyway, that's what that is. And then finally, you can support the show and get more of it in your life by signing up on Patreon on weekly skews.com slash more $5 a month to get two full link bonus episodes this show, but more of it. So you can get some extra episodes and support the show in the process. So we appreciate you watching.

As for the show this particular evening, as Mark said, it's all about crypto crooks and the world that they inhabit. We'll get to that a little later. But first, we begin as. always with the daily dumbass. Trey, graphic, please. Look at that. I did it.

All right. Now, for today's D.D., poor people for not knowing how normal it is to attend parties that are basically just the Met Gala for in sales. This is a guy walking into that big Trump coin dinner that they had. recently okay here we go hope this works is my face show your face show your face show your face show your face is that a dj is that what he's right yeah my first thought is like if you're it's like a daft punk is going

mega so right yeah it's like dead mouse or marshmallow but it's about the bunny rabbit version he's got wearing like a pixelated bunny rabbit head I think he's also wearing four inch lifts the perfect crypto guy thing to be doing like somebody people on the internet were like is he wearing platform shoes like I read through the Reddit thread people discussing this is like is he wearing platform shoes to try to make it harder to identify him because it throws off his height but there's other people with somebody is like I'm going to run gate analysis on this we'll get to the box like Reddit Reddit was on it buddy uh so yeah this is Trump's Minkoy dinner let me read here from a story from Wired about this. As U.S. President Donald Trump left the stage at his golf club

near Washington, D.C. on Thursday night, he pointed to the crowd, brought his index finger to his temple, as if to say, you know what's coming, then begin to dance. To the beat of YMCA by the votes people, Trump shimmy and gyrated and pumped his arms above his head. More than 200 people, more than 200 people attended this thing. They bought an average of $1.8 million each of Trump coin. Right. I saw, I saw some of the report. First of all, I saw the pictures of the menu offerings, and I saw people complaining about, you know, they felt disappointed and what they got out of it. I don't know what they're expecting to get out of it other than just like grifted, you know. I mean, the fact that they haven't got to come there at all, I would think, you know, I'm surprised even let them do that.

But yeah, it's still funny to me, people get blinds. Although, to be completely fair to these people, I guess I do understand if you're like, well, that's what you do. a lot of money and then he likes you right so if i gave millions of dollars to him in the form of this then maybe he'll like me now you know and i'll get something out of it uh and then but you know it doesn't work out that way for everybody yeah i mean like like over and over again people keep thinking they're on the inside of the con and they realize they're on the outside of the con right yeah exactly yeah and like so yeah one of the complaints was like like two like uh you know they just told you 200 people only spoke to like 20 of them all them were going to try to lobby

for different financial stuff, and they felt robbed. But yeah, you brought up the food. It looked like the flaminion was one of the offerings, but to me it looked like pot roast with like an ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes. Yeah. Let me quote here. To celebrate winning the place at the dinner, winning a place of the dinner,

TikTok prankster Nicholas Pinto had spray painted hold Trump coin or the chassis of his blue Mercedes G-Wagon. But hoping to win credit with the crypto heads, he wrote his Lamborghini Uris to D.C. instead. It was the worst food. have ever had a Trump golf course this pinto had he left hungry uh dude

he doesn't believe he knows this stuff makes him money but doesn't like like he was anti-crypto until like 15 minutes ago remember yeah i don't even i mean i bet he doesn't even know outside of like you said it makes him money by grifting off the robs or whatever i bet that's i bet that's pretty much all he even knows about it i mean to be fair i don't really know shit about it either but like you know he don't give a fuck about crypto he's not like i don't think trump is a crypto bro

He just knows Barron watches Twitch streams and say it's cool, right? So, quote, you believe in the whole crypto thing. A lot of people are starting to believe in it. This is really something that may be special. Who knows, right? Who knows, but it may be special. So as far as who was there, dude, Lamar Odom was there. The former NBA player Coke addict who got married on keeping up with the Kardashians.

Yeah, that's the last I heard about Lamar Odom. He married one of those Kardashians, and I'm assuming they've long since split up or whatever. But so, well, he tracks it in crypto now. Yeah, if I remember right, she broke up with, Chloe broke up with him after he like overdosed on cocaine at a barothel and lost in Nevada. That sounds right. Yeah. So Lamar is running a meme coin called Dollar Sign Odum, which of course he is, which he's supposedly clean now. It's good for him.

congratulations, but there's nothing more cocaine coded than getting really into crypto in your 40s. Yeah, also, all these like meme coins, like, I know that there's some big time examples. It's also, it seems like they're always, they're always accompanied by the follow-up coverage of how, you know, everyone who, uh, everyone who invested in them got screwed over in the end or it amounted to like losing tons of money, you know, like the Hawk toa thing or whatever. But it's like how many, like Lamar Odom has a, do you know, I didn't think Lamar Odom had the kind of like social capital left out there to like launch a meme coin and actually, you know, grift off of that.

No disrespect intended to Lamar. I'm just saying I thought you had to have a bit of a higher profile than he had been keeping up in recent years to pull that off. I agree. It's sort of like out of nowhere. He was really good at basketball, but he was like a bench player for the Lakers at his peak, you know? Right.

So also there was Justin Sun. Remember the guy that spent $6 million in the banana that made the Bangladeshi immigrant cry? Yeah. Yes. Yeah. How can I forget? Yeah. So if you're missing, if you forgot, I want to quote again who this guy is.

He's the prime minister of Labraland, a self-proclaimed micro-nation that claims to own but does not control a small region on the Danube, River floodplain border between Serbia and Croatia. I just have to say that every time. Libertarian paradise, right? There's the pitch for it. Yeah. So I guess it means we've extended diplomatic recognition to the micro-the-micronation of Liberland. I don't fucking know.

So Sun said at this thing, quote, I appreciate everything that Trump administration has done for our industry. So what have they done? Let's get into it. All right. So Trump's crypto czar, David Sachs was always. All in on passing this bill that the Senate just pushed forward called Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for U.S. Stable Coins Act, a.k.a. the Genius Act. Shoot me in the head.

I always wonder how long they spend on that part of it of coming up. They get a whole team of interns around the table and they can't leave or eat or use the bathroom until they come up with the perfect acronym for all these acts. Because it's like, they all got to have one. It's like, I know that, was it Cory Booker has that, the marshals act or whatever did you see that one which is like that would be a good thing it's like basically taking the u.s marshals uh whoever has like jurisdiction over them removing them from the executive agency so trump couldn't like weaponize them or whatever but i mean it's never in a million years going to pass but it's that's the purpose of it and it's literally called the marshals act and it that stands for like whatever making america re like you know they had to they back in to all these goofy acts

acronyms. But there's someone who worked for the U.S. government for a while. Like, I don't know what it is, but acronyms, man, they just,

they just get them all horny, but they just, they just love acronyms over there. That's one of the first things I give you when you start working for the government is a list of governmental acronyms. And it's a digital file that's like 150 pages long. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

Doge should have started with the acronyms, I think, but then they are an accurate, a stupid acronym. So there we go. Right. So as far as why they need to pass this, like, there's not that the bill's entirely bad, although focusing on it's kind of stupid, but Tim Scott went on TV to say this dumb bullshit if you got this video, Trey, which is like, a total opposite for what reality is. Here we go, right here.

Tim Scott, always speaking the truth, oh, Timmy is. Let's hope this works. President Trump simply said on the campaign trail, America will be the crypto capital of the world. This may be a major part of his legacy when we make it easier for the struggling Americans working paycheck to paycheck to have more access at a lower price point. Stable Coins in the Genius Act is the first step, historic step, towards making America more affordable for everyday Americans. It's another great reason. This is a good day in America. And it also feels like the banks are fine.

So it's going to be good for working class people to let them put their money in crypto. is that basically the pitch here. And the fact they throw up the prices when they announce all these regulatory moves that the prices of all the fucking different cryptocurrencies are going through the roof is a pretty big tail here. But if you're wondering,

no, in general, broke people don't hold crypto. Future broke people hold a lot of crypto. But in general, crypto holdings correlate to higher earnings. That's according to J.P. Morgan Chase, which makes it, like, when you look at the, like the pitch for crypto is it's going to be when the dollar drops, the crypto is going to

to be stable. But that's not really what happens because when the economy tanks, so does crypto because people have less money to play with frivolous stuff with, right? Yeah, it seems less stable. But also, you said JP Morgan says crypto holdings correlate to higher earnings, but that has to be on like a per crypto dollar or whatever basis, right? Meaning like all the, there's all these crypto whales who have hit the damn lottery, struck it rich or whatever with using crypto. And they have a ton of crypto and they have a lot of money but all but i'm saying there's i feel like isn't it like frat bros nationwide or like dicking around with crypto all the time but in like a very like like not really you know but they're losing like some of their dad's money on it every month or

whatever but it's like yeah that's what i think of when i think of crypto it's like coaked up rose in the back of a bar getting each other into it and stuff yeah there's a lot of that happening definitely but when i say correlates to higher earnings it don't mean people are making money off crypto i mean rich people are who are dabbling it like like a person a person makes $200,000 a year has money to play with, so they're playing with crypto. A single mom with two kids making $30,000 is not putting their money into fucking fart coin and shit. So this bill, the Genius Act, it's a federal effort to regulate stable coins.

And those are crypto coins that are with the values paid one to one with another currency or asset, usually the U.S. dollar. In a vacuum, the bill, I'm quoting here from a piece in slate, in a vacuum, the bill sets out several reasonable policy ideas. It would require crypto companies. that issue stable coins to hold liquid, safe reserves they could use to cash customers out. In the event of a crypto business going bust, it would give stable coin holders, quote, first priority over any other claim, end quote, to get repaid.

It also includes some money laundering rules. Nothing too objectionable here if crypto is going to exist. But the background here is that crypto has become a political powerhouse. They spent a ton of money the last election, and this is part of them getting what they paid for. And it also, like, part of the, this bill got 16 Democrat votes, okay? They tried to, even though this bill would, Trump's crypto ventures now include a stable coin. This is basically, this bill basically could also be called the Give Donald Trump Money Act. Right.

Democrats tried to insert Trump's specific prohibitions in the bill text, but they didn't succeed and they basically shrugged and they go, well, this is better than nothing. And so they decided to vote for it. maybe, but I suspect the crash is coming and I don't know why they want the blame for this to be bipartisan and people look up and all their fucking money's gone. So, you know, I'm always daylight and a dollar short with all this crypto stuff, but this, you named out some of the things the bill does, you know, you set in a vacuum and it's like it would require crypto companies that it's your stable coins to hold liquid safe reserves that they can use the cash customers out. like they seems like I don't know they seem like like regulatory like for like some sort of regulations but so what what about this is good for the what why do the crypto companies like want this to happen was it like legitimizes them or something or like yeah it basically it regulates them like their banks instead of like their like like it regulates them like their currency instead

like like like securities which is what they want because they one of their big fights the Biden administration was trying to regulate them as security. which they do not like. The business wants to shed its reputation basically as reckless and speculative, and it's a brand chip, basically. It makes the product look more thoughtful and consumer-focused. But also, like, the first thing you do when you're in established industry in America is try to increase regulation to make it more costly for competitors to get into the market with you.

Oh, yeah. I never thought about that way. If you all just hear about, like, you know, corporate capitalist tycoons pushing back against any kind of regulations or whatever. So you just think, and, you know, libertarian, big government, boo, boo, boo, boo, all that. So that's just what you always think of when you think of these guys. But that does, but you're right. That does make sense.

You want just enough to keep like the little guy for being able to, you know, play in the same playground. Like a, like a lobbying group that represents plumbers would love to increase the price of new plumbers licenses. Right. So Democrats are also just afraid of the money here. Crypto took out Shirale. They spent $40 million, I think, to take out Sherrod Brown in the Ohio Senate race. And they also spend a lot less money to take Katie Porter out of the California Senate primary. So Democrats apparently, I'm not sure what they think.

It's not like they're going to win over the crypto vote anyway by pretending to be kind of be okay with it and pass half-ass bills. But like they seem to think we have to win the votes of like Mark Andreessen and the Winklevoss twins. And being scared of the Winklefoss twins is one of the most embarrassed. 18-year-old Mark Zuckerberg was not afraid of the fucking Vinklevoss twins. What are, is that what that? Are they crypto tycoon now? Yeah. Okay.

I didn't even know. Which one are they like? I forget. I don't care enough to fucking figure out of the follow. That I do know they're big crypto guys now. So, but stable coins are also like a gateway drug into the rest of crypto. Because they, they present like they have a safe face. They do not have a safe face.

But like they appear like they do. So it's more likely to get people who are like sort of crypto skeptical, but like one to try. that's even the next stable coin so it's been like people i mean like me i think of crypto as like you know wildly unstable and all over the play and also kind of like you know a meme itself for almost like a joke form of money and they're you know it's like feels untrustworthy so this is them like trying to pivot into like um you know a legitimate currency money you can trust it's not like just uh right you know made up whimsical digital uh you know computer nerd stuff

it's like your grandma can have crypto if it's stable coin yeah i i have a hard time like this is sort of like it's hard to mentally categorize this because why would like if everyone's getting their money in crypto who's making who's earning the real money to backs it right too so like like how can this be, it feels to me that we've created like a secular sort of prosperity gospel, where like if you have the right grind set, then the digital God will just bestow you with wealth. And I have a hard time to like figuring out what, like how anybody thinks this is supposed to work. But like, so one of the things is stable coins kind of let the crypto exchanges pretend to be banks. Coinbase, for example, has a new program that allows users to take

out instant loans and dollar like stable coins. They can use those stable coins to go out and other forms of crypto. Basically, we're doing pay-to loans with crypto that I'm willing to bet you owe to pay back in fucking dollars. So, yeah, this is going great. The legislation's provision to get special treatment of stable coin holders when a company goes bankrupt is pretty telling because you could just keep your dollars and dollars, as long as they're in a bank, the FDIC will make sure you get it back.

But they're trying to ignore the fact that the FDIC exists and pretend they've created their own FDIC. Right. Yeah, that's what I was thinking when you said that one earlier about I was like, so that's just like crypto's FDIC. That's basically what that is. But like, yeah, why not just, I don't know, how is it different than just doing regular bank shit?

If they're trying to just turn it into regular bank shit or make it sound like that, you know, well, I don't get with the appeal. Also, so these stable coins, like you said, there are ones that are tied one to one with like an actual currency or the U.S. dollar or whatever. like but are like is bitcoin is that a stable coin or these like it's so these are all all right so it's not like the big ones that you've heard of they're not those are not stable coins it's stable coin is just a new branch of type of crypto that that you might have heard of tether i think tether's a stable coin okay um so uh so basically yeah they they've got instead of the real

fdic you have like a fake unstable fdic that's privatized they own themselves It's staffed by like Tomogacchi's and the people that live in Sim City or some shit. So, so, but it's, it's kind of funny because, like, what they've done is put a placebo bandaid on your fear of crypto bank runs. But, like, remember when tech used to offer solutions instead of inventing new versions of problems we'd already fucking solved? Yeah. Like, the FDA thing's just part of this, but, like, like, so let me, let me quote here. From the NBC story I was reading from earlier. New Zealand financial trader and amateur soccer player Dylan Stansfield was also photographed at the event.

When reached for comment, Stansfield said he was, quote, infuriated to have been identified and that, quote, doxing crypto people put their lives at risk. He is correct because another problem they've recreated, managed to recreate, is an old crime one that we had also managed to solve with banks. Which is that simple robberies used to not be able to net you life-changing wealth, right? uh-huh so which brings us good oh okay so all right i almost asked earlier when we started with the daily dumbass and showed the you know dj bunny rabbit walking in there like i was going to say it's like i didn't realize that they even acted this like i always got the impression like crypto bros are like real proud of it like they they like get on ticot with their new fleet of

Lamborghinis or whatever and they're like they false on people look what i did make on crypto they start a podcast with other crypto bros and they're very like ostentatious about their newfound and unearned wealth or whatever i didn't realize that they were like you know trying to live in the shadows but right and just now when you said that it's like all that puts our lives at risk i was like what is he talking but it's because of that like because they're like you know they're uh yeah talking about relearning old lessons right so like like they're starting to learn why old money people didn't flaunted so much right because these guys all want to be influenced as well it's probably how they make it most

money is by influencing not by doing crypto stuff, but they hop on and be like, yo dogs, we're taking, you know, ass coin to the moon. Right. While I live stream, I'm live streaming by my infinity pool at one, two, three fucking rob me street. Right. Yeah, no, I never thought about that. But yeah, no, that makes a ton of sense.

Yeah. So this, so on that note, there's, I wanted to talk about this piece in the Wall Street Journal had the other day, titled Severed Fingers and Wrench Attacks Rattle the Crypto Elite. basically To be fair to the crypto elite That would rattle me too Sacred fingers and wrench attacks That's pretty

Rattling series of words there But anyway So It's a quote here A wave of violent abductions around the world Including in the U.S. Targeting Crypto executives and their families

Victims have been pistol whip abducted And in two cases Have fingered severs And they're collecting Millions and dollars In like ransom money basically yeah this is kind of this part of this is kind of blowing my mind because this makes all the sense in the world but i had not thought of this you know part of it until now but it checks

out there's going to be a movie about this at some point some sort of like you know crypto home invasion thriller or something like that uh yeah i bet you're just probably 10 and already in development but yeah so authorities have dubbed these ranch attacks because they're very very simple it's just you you reflects pain on someone with a blunt object and then what did this totally unsophisticated. So basically, another problem we'd already solved that they're recreating is that

hitting someone with a wrench to get life change wealth is like, right. Yes. Like they were all, you know, they were like, they thought about them, we're worried about like,

you know, being hacked. You know what I mean? Like hackers like using computers to take all their money or whatever. They didn't think about some dude just breaking in their house and beating them with a wrench until they give it all to them. It's like the most,

the most classic form of that. hacking used to be the problem, but what they did was they took their digital wallets offline in favor of physical devices, like putting their Bitcoin like a thumb drive. That's how that guy, remember the guy we talked about? Yeah. Lost like hundreds of thousands of dollars in the landfill. In a landfill somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. So that real world crypto crime bypass is like, they made it simpler than hacking. So they basically kind of miss hacking. A story came out yesterday, I think, where this guy has happened in New York. A cryptocurrency investor from Kentucky tortured an Italian businessman with a chainsaw. in a sadistic weeks-long extortion attempt to gain the password for his accounts at his $74,000 a month Manhattan apartment.

The Italian guy managed to get away and call the cops. I saw the video they arrested the crypto-torture guy and a naked. He had a bathrobe open, buck naked with his dick flopping around. Everything about this whole environment is so farce. Also, it feels funny to call that guy a crypto investor. It's like, is this how I, you know. This is how his portfolio is formed. He just tortures people who have crypto accounts until they give them over to him,

and that's his version of investing. Al Capone was an alcohol investor, Trey. Yeah, right. Since being taken captive, the businessman had been bound with electric cord, tased while his feet were put in water, pistol whipped, forced to take cocaine, and threatened that his limbs cut off with an electric chainsaw. He's just this guy playing Huey Lewis in the news while he was doing all this stuff like a good lord that's an american psycho reference for anybody who doesn't get it i didn't

get the reference so but i just thought i just a big fan of who he lewis in the news a lot of it was funny oh yeah now that's patrick bainment he plays you know old like 80s pop solid and talks about it while he tortures people with a chainsaw and all these other implements so so like basically what we need what they need to occur to them next to reinvent is i guess safety deposit boxes they can put their thumb drives with their bitcoin in right because like I feel like what they're gradually coming to the realization of is why ATMs have cash withdrawal limits. Yeah. Because like if you kidnapped my wife and tell me to give me my money, I'm like, okay, it's going to take me like a month because I got to go get it in $300 increments.

Right. Yeah, they're like realizing the reason that a lot of these like, you know, financial institutions, the way they work the way that they do or how they came to be in the first place or why a lot of that shit was necessary to begin with. that they were trying to, like, break away from with crypto. They're, like, slowly starting to, like, circle back to because they're like, oh, man, I guess some of that shit was a good idea. It's like, somebody gave them smelling salts, and they woke up, I'm like, wait a minute, I live in a society. Yeah.

So let me quote here from a guy named James Jameson Lop. Jameson Lop, of course, he's the co-founder of a Bitcoin company called Kasa, Jameson Lop. Quote, a lot of people are getting to the Hyd Your Gold, under the mattress level of security. So, I, like, okay,

again, they're trying to figure out, they're learning why wealthy people keep their lives secret, why banks have withdrawal limits, why the FDIC exists, how to buy Congress. It's like,

we're doing a speed run of American late states capitalism all through the lens of this one industry. And they're all, these dudes are really fucking panicking and getting, let me describe another robbery here. All right, no, let me quote here from a guy named Killian Desnos,

who's an online gambling influencer under the name Tiforz, which is French for Partier. He's well known for his YouTube and Twitch streams when prosecutors say a person posing an Amazon delivery driver rang his father's doorbell on a small town in northwestern France in August 2023. That person and an accomplice forced the father into a vehicle and soon sent Desnose a ransom demand video of his father bound with a gun to his head.

Desnose, let me go out here, flexing on the internet wasn't a good idea i realize realize that now he wrote on x right now he's flexing his newfound wisdom about the the virtue of privacy but to be fair that's also completely on brand for them again i only i only ever every like i've heard people say about other topics like or like the Kardashians whatever everything i've ever learned about these people has been against my will but like uh like the crypto bro and their whole thing the influencers and stuff, flexing about their wisdom is like a huge part of it. Like they all act like because they got lucky and got in on the ground floor of fart corn

and got out the right time and walked away with a million dollars that they fucking, you know, pulled out of the ether like that. They act and talk like they fucking, you know, went and meditated with a shaman at the top of a fucking mountain, you know, surrounded by monks and shit for way. And that's like the way they, then they go and get in there. spray-painted g-wagon and fucking white smoke it out of the parking lot or whatever and act like they're you know they'll pray to Aaron rogers and that type of shit it's like um it all checks out but yeah no it's like I said I it never occurred to me I it always occurred to me how douchey and annoying and stupid that all was the all the flexing and all that and shallow and everything but I never really thought about how it could also get your fingers chopped off and your ball sack days so you know and all your money stole And so, you know. But, yeah, but the fact, I can't believe I'm just now finding out about these because

these cannabis and stuff have been going on for so long. Yeah, I didn't know either, yeah. Yeah. So the, but the crypto guys have all known about it for a while because it's in their world. So, like, I think they're trying to turn towards legitimacy is also part of this happening, right? So, like, at least five crypto-related abductions have taken place in France just in recent months, recent months. And there have been dozens of other recorded cases around the world in the last year.

An Australian crypto billionaire nearly escaped abduction in Estonia last July by fighting off attackers who posed as painters. In March, a Houston crypto influencer was assaulted before her husband got in a shootout with robbers who invaded her home in the middle of the night demanding her laptop. In September, a Florida man was sentenced to 47 years in prison for leading a ring that carried out a string of home invasions across multiple states in search of crypto riches. At one of the attacks, the man held a pink revolver to the head of a seven. 78-year-old Durham, North Carolina man and threatened to cut off his genitals. Jesus Christ. So how'd your papaw get his

dick cut off? Well, it all started when he put his pension from the power plant into something called Doge going. Right. This is the era we're living through. One guy got his finger cut... We talked about there were two finger severings that have happened in these kind of kidnappings, at least

that we know about. One guy got his finger cut off changed his screen name to fingers nine out of ten, which is a good bit. I want to hang out with this guy. Well, if you can't laugh at yourself, you know. Yeah. So here we're zeroing it on takeaway. I think we're going to finish up a little bit early, which is great because you've got to go get on a rainy lake. So one of these French guys involved the crypto company post on X this week to decry what he called, quote, the Mexicanization of the country. How many entrepreneurs, how many

talented individuals are seriously considering leaving a country that no longer protects its people he said let's ignore the racism of that for a second sure buddy you opted out of lawful society by getting into crypto that was the whole point of it wasn't it like wasn't that the whole idea was that so you're not like privy to the oppressive yoke of the fucking the system or whatever well there's another side of that too you know and you're giving up all of that to be a crypto lord that's supposed to be the the whole thing the whole thing the whole thing language, you're half a fucking criminal. What they're learning here, another thing they're learning is there ain't no such thing as halfway crooks, and the real crooks are teaching them, okay?

But like, you can't run around with this pirate money and also want the protection of the civil society and the law, right? Right. But like, to quote, speaking of the Mexicanization, to quote from the movie Benicio del Toro's character in Sicario, this is the land of wolves now. You've willingly relocated to the land of wolves and decided to use, a form of currency that's basically only useful to drug cartels,

terrorists, and fucking sex traffickers and you're sub-trized you're being robbed in a world where there's no contracts. Right. I can't even fucking wrap

my mind around it. Yeah, no, it's fucking... Well, they just, I don't know, people... I mean, to be fair, I've been sitting here saying the whole time, I didn't think about it either

because it just... I think for me, it's like these... I see these clips of these douchebags, with their, you know, their fleets of exotic cars and all this bullshit that they're putting on Instagram and stuff. And in my head, it's just like, of course, nothing bad ever happens to these people or whatever, you know what I mean? Just like, of course, of course, this is just what

happens when they do this type of shit or whatever, because that's how the fucking universe works. But either way, it hadn't really occurred to me. Again, this whole part of this episode has kind of blow my mind a little bit because it makes all the sense in the world, even though I hadn't thought about it. But clearly they hadn't thought about it either. But I think it's for a similar type reason where it's like they just think about how awesome all that shit will be, you know what I mean? And they don't think through like the implications of what comes with that. But you're right, like from the beginning it was meant.

I thought it was like meant for like drug deals, drug deals and dark net shit and sex workers and it's like, you know, everybody knows drug dealers get robbed and fucking cartel, you know, cartel leaders, torture people and all that shit. but they were willingly, you know, dipping their toes into those waters, but thinking they wouldn't have any of those, you know, that there wouldn't be any blood in that water. It seems to be sort of short-sighted on their part. I forget what my wife and I were watching recently,

but it made me bring up the old quote from Bob Dylan's song, to live outside the law, you must be honest. And Aaron, my wife did not understand. She was like, wait, I don't understand criminals are liars. I'm like, no. They're not. They can't call the cops. Their contracts are enforced by blood violence.

So their honesty is like, if you screw me over, I will kill you. Right. If you don't pay up, I will take your shit. That's the honesty involved in the system. It's a brutal form of honesty, but it is. It's honest because you can't lie in that world and not expect to walk away unscathed unless you're more, unless you're stronger than the next guy. And here are these people, they think they can live the lifestyle of a cartel boss

without having the moxie and the toughness that led a cartel boss to ride to the top in the first place. And like, so you chosen life, it's life outside the law, and now you're crying when you're getting robbed. And I'm thinking about like, you can't call the cops if you want to live in this world. You can't be a guy who calls the cops.

Like, you think a shot caller for the Southside Gremlin Crips calls 911 when someone steals his previously stolen rims? It takes a back. and goes to get the shit back. This is the world you chose to live in. Fucking live in it, man. Well, dude, I wouldn't be surprised if they started hiring their own, you know, crypto-saccarios before long and, you know,

taking each other out and shit. Some little like crypto gangland war crops up at some point. I mean, a lot of these guys are dorks and, you know, pussies and all that. But still, at some point, who the hell knows how far it could end up going. but I wanted to ask for a quick update before we go a little bit early on the, I know we talked about the big, beautiful bill. I don't know if you saw, but Maga Mike Johnson yesterday said that the Medicaid cuts that were part of that were not a big deal

because they were only going to affect people who don't deserve Medicaid anyway, that's what he said, the undeserving people. He said it's the people that are entwined with our efforts to rein in, waste, fraud, abuse so you know only poor lazy pieces of shit i guess and also immigrants will lose their medicaid so yeah so that's all these all these work requirements that are difficult to enforce and don't really do anything like what a work requirement basically means is like if you're if you like have a crippling formal muscular dystrophy that's physically observable like you can look at a person and tell they can't work or whatever once a month someone has to go to their house

and look at them and be like yep they're handicapped so they can continue to continue to get home care. So just like these these programs that don't costing more money to provide care to less people. And yeah, it's like, you know, the word in German was life undeserving of life. So probably should learn a few more German words. German's got all the best words, man. Anything you can pretty much come up with, they got a word for it. But like is there, is it like a foregone conclusion that that bill is going to become law or is it like still possible that, okay. The Senate's going to like, do its work on it.

Like Ron Johnson, who's tremendously, you know, rabble mega guy, was like, this is no chance of passing in the Senate. So they're going to, they're going to moderate it some probably, but like, it's still going to be awful. It's just made marginally less awful unless they completely falls apart. Because you've got to remember that the hardcore conservatives are against it because it still spends too much money. Right.

You've got the moderate Republicans who don't want to lose their jobs because all the constituents lose their health care. It doesn't it like it like and I'm sorry we talked about this but like it cuts all these programs and fucks a lot of people over to like cut spending but then it also it raises the deficit at the end of the day right like it cuts all this money but still ends up being we're further in the red as a direct result of it in spite of that we're going to spend way less on human beings but spend way more on you know defense immigration enforcement and tax cuts for rich people who don't need it. So, yeah, that's how a government ends up doing less, but spending more, costing more. Good old Republican efficiency, baby. All right. Well, we are going to close her down 10 minutes early this week. Hope that's right with everybody.

You can enjoy your Memorial Day Tuesday, as it were. And we'll be back next week. But reminder, go to Treycrowder.com, check out my tour dates and watch Trash Dad. If you haven't, check out Matt's new venture, the audio-only exclusive on the weekly skews. audio channel called Good Skews and consider supporting the show on Patreon, $5 a month to get two full-length bonus episodes of this very show. So I hope you'll mull that over. But in the meantime, we'll just see you right here next week.

Love you, bye. Scoo!