Full transcript: Ben Armstrong (AKA BitBoy Crypto) on London Real
2:27 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Ben Armstrong, the broadcaster, investor and cryptocurrency influencer.
2:46 You are the founder of the BitBoy Crypto YouTube channel, where you post daily market updates, addressing all the latest news to a massive community of crypto enthusiasts. Your aim is to provide education and entertainment in equal measure and amassed the largest following of any crypto platform with over 5 million total subscribers. You have spent the last month in the Bahamas on the trail of Sam Bankman-Fried, having previously warned all of us about the impending collapse of FTX.
3:13 Following his arrest, you said SBF deserves to go to jail for a very long time, and that you are concerned that extradition to the U.S. will make it too easy and make him, quote unquote, just another white-collar criminal. You believe the fallout from this controversy will continue to have a deep impact on the crypto industry and individual investors alike. Ben, welcome back to London Real. Yeah, thank you. Definitely glad to be on.
3:36 Always enjoyed chatting with you, Brian, and I’m sure we’re going to get into some good stuff today. Oh my gosh, we’ve got a lot to talk about. I just want to say that you were here on September 21st on this show, talking all about Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX, warning us what was going to happen. I interviewed you on stage in Dubai at the GITEX conference, and you were screaming out that this was going to happen in earshot of the FTX booth. Right.
3:59 And, you know, I do what I always do. I sit and listen and we listened, and then we watched it all unravel. You were just down to the Bahamas. You were in the courtroom where Sam walks in, says to his lawyer that’s “big boy crypto,” and you said, quote, “he looked me dead in the eyes.” And we had the moment.
4:16 Ben, what has your life been like the last couple weeks? Explain it. Has been absolutely insane. I mean, we’ve been front running this story obviously for a while now. When I say fun run the story, I knew he was bad news when I figured out what he was doing, regulation.
4:32 And we started figuring out what they were doing as business practices at FTX. We never dreamed when we got into this, the insolvency was as big as it was. All right, so, you know, do when I say that, like, it’s not like when I was on your show, I was saying it’s definitely insulting. We were telling, we were explaining that there are so many bad business practices that they were creating fake markets. Well, I guess the next step of that was obviously, well, they’re creating fake markets, then that’s going to have an effect on insolvency.
4:57 And the way that that worked is when they were creating these fake markets with synthetic assets, people would withdraw the real assets, and that’s what was leaving the insolvency hole, and they would counterfeit more coins to cover it. But, you know, my life has been really crazy ever since I was a child, I guess, but it didn’t. It’s been a little bit crazier here the last few months. We’ve been tracking Sam down through the Bahamas. We’re the first people to go down there and get inside of the Albany and try to get him to talk.
5:22 His parents called the security on us. It wouldn’t let us I mean, you know, what is E12? You know, parents called security on us, and they ended up kicking us out. But we went down there to get answers. And what people are going to understand when there’s a full documentary that’s going to be coming out about all this that we’ve been working on.
5:39 Along with another with the documentary film group, they filmed one of the GameStop shows on HBO Go. Bill are going to find we’re down there to get answers. We were not down there for clicks. I mean, did I know that when I went down there it was going to break Twitter and people were gonna go insane? Yeah, obviously.
5:55 Is that why we did it? No, we went down there because I want answers to what is happening down there. We still don’t have answers, but we’ve uncovered… we don’t have answers from Sam, but we’ve uncovered so much stuff, including we’re the only people in the United States that are sitting on evidence of the 300 million dollars’ worth of properties that they funnel customer funds to. And we know that because we’ve talked to Congress. Nobody else has it for us.
6:20 They’re waiting for us to give that to them, to be able to nail down some stuff that they’re hiding from the bankruptcy. They think it could be up to one billion dollars’ worth of property down there that FTX is hiding. We know John Ray, the CEO of FTX now, the bankruptcy lawyer, he just came out and said, oh yeah, actually now we found almost a billion dollars’ worth of cash. Yeah, well, there’s a lot more than that down there in the Bahamas, and we’re at a very pivotal time right now.
6:43 As he’s been extradited this morning, the Bahamian government is trying to steal all those assets. They’re trying to steal all those assets for themselves, keep them out of the bankruptcy so they don’t go to customer funds. The Bahamian government’s wrapped all up into this as well, and that’s what people on the ground don’t know. So, the thing I’m the most proud of over the last couple months has been, we actually know what is happening down in the Bahamas with the government and their relationship with FTX, and nobody else has this information.
7:11 I mean, we went to the trial on Monday. Got to man as soon as I walked in the court, he saw me over his lawyer’s shoulder. He turned around and whispered to his lawyer, somebody that I know that was there, actually heard him say, “Oh my gosh, big boy is here.” And so there was definitely a moment where he sat down on the left side of me, and I turned and I waved right at him. We stared me dead in the face.
7:33 Had the moment that’s what I had really been waiting for. Everybody knows he wasn’t going to answer the questions that I have. He was absolutely not going to ever answer the questions I have, because they’re too hard. If he can’t answer the softball questions they were asking him on Twitter Spaces and from The New York Times and on Good Morning America, my god, he has no chance against me, and he knows I’d shred him like a piece of paper in a shredding machine.
7:54 Is that the first time that you two were together in the same room in that corner? Yeah, yeah. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen him in person. We’ve ever guessed that would have happened in a Bahamian courtroom, as your first meeting, not at some conference or, you know, some investor dinner or something. No, I wouldn’t ever imagine.
8:11 I mean, I go back to 2019. I remember, I cannot remember exactly what it was, but it was the first time that he really came across my feed. He was in a big argument with somebody over D5, and it was turned into a big thing. It was, I guess, in November of 2019. I was like, who is this guy?
8:26 I really started looking into him. And then, you know, I know Wendy. Wendy considered him to be a friend at one point. I love Crypto India. I mean, we’ve been together creating content since the very beginning, and when we started our accounts, and, you know, for a long time she had like a pretty good relationship with him, and so, you know, it’s kind of a thing where I’ve kind of watched it at a distance.
8:44 I have friends that have been close to him, but I had never spoken to him before now. I did speak to him when I was in the Bahamas the first time, a couple weeks ago. We did text back and forth. He told me what he liked on his pizza. Very bizarre.
8:56 Did you ever see those screenshots of that conversation? I saw that because you posted, because he had just unblocked you, right? And you guys were DMing, and yeah, well, he unblocked me as a result of our text message. Right, okay, gotcha. Yeah, and so one of the things, the most bizarre thing, he asked me if I was the CEO of FTX, in charge of everything, global, all the assets.
9:19 What would I do? And I was just like, what a bizarre question to ask a YouTuber. Is the CEO of the second biggest crypto empire that exists, what would I do? Yeah, and it’s just, it just showed the delusion of him. I saw that, and it struck me as weird, although his behavior across that whole two-week period seemed very weird.
9:39 I want to take it back to a couple points, but the big one you mentioned was you went down to the Albany, which was that kind of penthouse place he was living, and I watched you go down there again. I just hung out with you in Dubai, and you’ve been on the show many times, and so it was just really… it was like a weird reality show, watching you go down there. Everyone’s watching you kind of live on YouTube. What struck me as odd is that you’re like, “we’re the first ones down here trying to get an interview,” and this is like a 10, 20, 30 billion dollar, you know, company that’s gone to zero, and no other media had gone down there.
10:10 And then, of course, after you went down there, everyone came in with their interviews. But that it was just strangely odd. The New York Times continued to go ahead and have him remotely into their DealBook thing, which was again extremely odd, and not when you know the relationship between Andrew Sorkin and SBF, which is a whole other story. But, right, okay, and we can I want to get into that. But, like, when you go down there and you’re there, at that was, did you find it odd when you were down there and nobody else was there?
10:37 What was the vibe? Because when you get on the ground, you start picking up lots of little details. I would say it surprised me zero percent. Okay. I had people that mess.
10:46 That’s why we went down there, because I was so sick and tired of hearing people say things like, “He’s being protected by the military.” Down there, had somebody literally tell me, “Well, be prepared at the airport, you’re gonna get stopped by the military.” No, I’m not. This guy doesn’t have friends. You’ve seen, his parents are the ones protecting him.
11:04 His parents are the ones, well, they’re actually allowing him to incriminate himself so they don’t go to jail. But you saw them on the balcony walking around, pacing on the phone. There’s no security there. Funny story, actually. When I was down there this last week, we had a full security team.
11:20 Do you know who my full security team was? Who’s that? His personal bodyguard for years. So we had the entire FTX real security team that was in charge of Sam, helping us down in the Bahamas this week. They were protecting us, which was a very interesting twist of fate to say, because they don’t have a job now.
11:41 Obviously, yeah. There’s nobody down there that you know, there was nobody down there protecting him. He didn’t, he couldn’t afford security there. Sam’s out of money. The government is taking all his assets.
11:52 He doesn’t have anything, and I knew that was the case. You could just tell from the fact that he was walking in a grocery store by himself, the fact that they’ve got footage of him running, running away from someone in the Albany, which I hear really was him. If people have seen that clip, I knew there was nobody down there. All I wanted to do was go down there and show everybody, and that’s what we did. So we had managed, basically within a couple hours of landing at the airport in the Bahamas, on Saturday, I had a full team there 36 hours before me scouting, trying to figure out what we were going to do.
12:23 Two hours after I landed, we were in the Albany. It’s not hard. It’s not hard to get in there. We went, we ate dinner. We had dinner at one of the restaurants before we went.
12:31 We really started doing stuff. We went and took the famous picture of the penthouse up there that just said, like, “You know, Sam, where you at?” Like, “We’re out here.” I can’t remember exactly what it said, but that was what really got people going and people tweeting, and then we went, we had dinner, you know, we had some wings, and, you know, had a little steak and chatted with all the people at the restaurant where we were. I can’t remember the name of the restaurant in the Albany.
12:52 The Albany is a big place. It’s huge. It’s a compound. It’s like, and then, good, but the Bahamas is like an hour away from Miami, and yet no other media had bothered to go there for what anybody could tell was probably going to be the biggest story of the year. Yeah, why?
13:07 Because they’re scared. Because people are scared out there. I don’t know why my fear receptor is broken, and people haven’t been able to figure that out yet. Like, what we did, he was so safe and he was so comfortable in that penthouse, and there’s a reason why that media tour started right after we were there. We did the equivalent of, through a digital sledgehammer, through his window, as soon as people realized that there was no protection and there was nobody down there.
13:33 Everybody felt like, we can go in and we can go after this guy, and we can ask questions, and we can kind of get interviews. We destroyed a safety blanket. That’s all that ever needed to happen. Somebody just needed to go down there and do that. And You know, I think there was, we had actually talked about going down there about a week and a half earlier, but I said, well, he’s going to get arrested any day now.
13:51 Any day, he’s going to get arrested. Well, it goes a week and a half later, we’re like, he ain’t getting arrested. He’s comfortable down there. And one of the best things we did while we were down there in the Bahamas is connect with Lincoln Bain. We did a panel with him on Saturday night.
14:05 Lincoln Bain, he ran for prime minister. He lost. I believe 100%, the next election, he’s going to win. We’re going to help him win, because this guy is a, he’s a lot like me. He’s a cleanup corruption guy.
14:16 He does not stand for what’s happening in the government there, and the Bahamian people are awesome. Like, we never met one person from the Bahamas that was rude or disrespectful. They’re all such great people, and they don’t deserve what the government does to them. And then you look at what the United States has done to absolutely rate their resources. The Bahamas gets a fraction.
14:37 They have like over a trillion dollars’ worth of exports a year, and the United States takes almost all of it. And so we really want… like, I’ve grown to really love the Bahamas, and really loved, you know, grown to love the people that are down there as well. And so working with Lincoln on the ground has given us insight that other people just don’t have. Like, you don’t get the inside of a person that not only has a law degree, he’s got another degree here in the United States, got a law degree from London.
15:01 He’s ran for prime minister. This is about his boots on the ground, as you can get in the Bahamas. And he’s really been helping us and guiding us, and we got a lot of next steps. We’re filing a lawsuit. It’s either being filed today or tomorrow.
15:13 Against Sam and against FTX. I’ll tell you, tell people this: if we win this lawsuit, it’s going to happen. Massive repercussions. Unfortunately, obviously, as it is a lawsuit, I don’t want to get into the details, because I want to show our hand, but there’s a way that we’re going to help people get money back. And it’s, it’s going to be the kind of thing that people are going to really, really love to see that we’re doing and we’re fighting for.
15:33 Nobody else has, fighting for people. The media doesn’t care. The ABC News does not care. Good Morning America does not care. YouTubers don’t care.
15:44 All they want to do is they want to sit and they want to report on the stories, and they want to take a 30,000-foot view. We’re the only people that are kicking indoors and trying to get answers and trying to fight for the people. What comes next? Now, Sam is still in the Bahamas. We think, oh, you got an extra ride this morning?
15:58 I believe he’s in route right now to New York. Okay, where is he going? New York. Is he going to that Southern District of New York prison, the same one Epstein was in? What, what?
16:06 That’s where he’s going. That’s where he’s going, which isn’t, which is not a nice place to be, right? It’s like Lower Manhattan or Rikers Island. Well, it’s not Rikers. It’s not Rikers, because he’s, he’s gonna be federal.
16:17 Okay, so they’re gonna, it’s gonna be a white-collar federal prison that he, or that he’s going to. But he’s actually worked out bail, supposedly, that was part of the extradition. Is he, we believe he’s actually going to be out on bail. I don’t think he’s actually going to go to prison. He’s got to do a hearing, which will probably be tomorrow, I would guess, Or later this week, maybe next week.
16:37 I mean, it is Christmas, so I’m not sure. Maybe it’ll change the schedule a little bit, but he’s not going to sit in there long. He’s going to get the Elizabeth Holtzman, man. He’s going to get out, which I’m really shocked at, and it’s not happened yet, but he doesn’t have any friends. That’s what people have to understand about Sam.
16:51 He doesn’t have friends in the government. He is crap over every politician he gave money to. They’re not friends of his. He doesn’t have money, so it’s not like he’s paying people off. His parents are on the outs.
17:02 People want to stay away from his parents. They’re toxic. They’re the ones who are really behind this whole scam. So they’re not going to help him. They’re, they’re almost out of money.
17:08 Their assets in the Bahamas have been stolen, so I, I’m really confused on what kind of leverage he’s using to be able to get this preferential treatment. It’s really interesting, because everybody knows in the world of politics, you’re only as good as how much money you have. When you don’t have money to support politicians anymore, then why would they help you? You’re of no use to them. You’re only an albatross around their neck, and that’s what he is to a lot of people.
17:32 So, it is a little disappointing that he, he was extradited. We wanted to see him punished more in the Bahamian jail. Once you get here, he’s just another criminal. He’s going to get out on bail as well. And, you know, that kind of sucks, because he’s going to be free.
17:46 You have the man who literally has screwed over more people financially than anybody else in history, and he’s gonna be free, even if it’s only for a couple years. But at the end of the day, this guy’s getting serious time. He, he’s not going to… there’s no way to flip. He’s already, Caroline’s already flipped on him. There’s not bigger fish here.
18:04 There’s not bigger players. The only people above him in this scam are his parents, Dan Friedberg, and Gary Wang as well, but Gary Wang’s TCP. He’s already back in China, will never see Gary Wang again. He’s a ghost. Never expected to see anything from Gary Wang again.
18:17 He’ll probably disappear forever. Sam Trabucco, former CEO of Alameda, he’ll probably be in some trouble, but I mean, he’s still under SBF, so I’m just not sure what leverage he has here, unless he rats out his parents. If he rats out his parents, then that could be some serious stuff. But I don’t think he’s going to do that. I think they brainwashed him and kept him doped up since he was a child.
18:39 And then again, governments, the government, do they really want his parents, or are they happy just with him? You mentioned Caroline. She was spotted getting coffee in New York a couple weeks ago. Are we pretty sure that she’s there? And do you… did she cut a deal?
18:50 And also there’s the Ryan Salame guy, which I think is now reported that he has cooperated with fed officials. He’s a whistleblower. Okay. Yeah, he’s the whistleblower. He’s the one that outed the entire thing to the Bahamas.
19:00 He did. Okay, but once he saw there was problems, oh, he told the whole Bahamian government that it was all Alameda was taking customer funds, and he was shocked. So Ryan Salame comes out as a, there’s a couple people that come out looking like they’re good actors here, and then we’ll get to Caroline, of course. But when it comes to good actors, yeah, Brett Harrison looks like he was a good actor, Who’s the CEO of FTX US. Then you look at Ryan Miller, who is the attorney for, and for the bankruptcy, he was in some of those meetings with Gary Gensler and FTX.
19:34 So I’ll be very interested. I think he’s going to talk one day. I’m going to explain what happened in those. So he looks like he’s a good character, and good character, and then Ryan Salame, he’s the one that initially blew the whistle on the entire thing. Now, come to Caroline.
19:48 So you mentioned she was in New York, that was what they call, and I’ve talked to lawyers about this who know what’s going on in this case. that’s called the “Queen of the Day Tour.” That’s where basically you show up and you do a photo op that was not a mistake, that she was at that place. She knew 100% sure when she walked into that coffee shop she was going to be photoed and put on Twitter. She didn’t try to hide it.
20:13 She had the dog with her, which we heard the dog died actually this week due to negligence, what we heard, unfortunately. But it was the FTX Pat. She had the dog with her in New York. She got the pictures taken. This was a message to Sam, right?
20:24 A message to Sam that I have flipped. Now, why would she flip? Well, I said on November 9th, when all this stuff went down with Binance, I made a video, and in that video I literally say, “Caroline, you’re gonna have to flip. It’s gonna be the only way to save yourself.” And sure enough, she has.
20:39 The reason was the CEO of Alameda, or ahead of, us, CEO of Alameda, right? So that, and that was the trading the on kind of Adventure Capital, yeah, the Venture Capital arm that they ran, kind of on the side with all the capital from FTX whenever they wanted, right? Yeah. Well, the thing about Caroline, I really want to say here, though, is that there’s a reason why the timing of that photo was very important. That was at the very end of that week, where Sam had been doing interviews that entire week long, right?
21:08 Sam was trying to do two things in these interviews. Well, three things, really. He was trying to look like he was dumb and didn’t know anything. Nobody buys that. Number two, he was trying to reposition what he did as not a crime but a mismanagement of funds, because there’s a difference.
21:24 A mismanagement of funds and fraud are two totally different things. Number three, he was trying to blame everything on Caroline. If you listen to everything he said, it was, “Oh, Alameda did that. Alameda did that. Alameda did that.”
21:37 When he was saying Alameda, you can basically substitute that with You can basically substitute that to say Caroline. Every time he says Caroline or Alameda, he was saying Caroline. So her reaction to that was to flip and to basically realize she needed to get an attorney. And the attorney she got is very famous for plea deals, and she’s going to get a really good plea deal. It’s not really advantageous for us to go into all the wrongdoing that Caroline did, because why?
22:03 She’s going to get off scot-free, most likely, maybe a small sentence. It’s really to focus on the people that she flipped on, and obviously SBF is the top of that list. The question will be, will she also be flipping on Dan Friedberg, and will she also be flipping on the parents? Okay. Now, the parents, these are his dad’s, the Stanford professor, his mom maybe is too.
22:24 They’re both, they’re both Stanford professors. Again, big, involved in the charities, and now nobody wants to even be seen with them. In the university charities, big involvement in charities. That’s not actually true, but you want to just take two minutes and lay down the parents for me. What’s the steal?
22:39 What’s the story? What’s BitBoy’s version of how the parents are involved in this whole thing? We we call the parents the puppet masters. That’s what we call them. They were directing the show the entire time.
22:48 Dan Friedberg, we call the architect. He is the guy that was a general counsel from FTX, who was from Ultimate Bet previously. He’s the one that built the whole scam. Right? Well, when you look at Joe Bankman- Fried, first of all, people may not know this, Joe Bankman-Fried actually helped Elizabeth Warren directly with tax regulation in 2016.
23:06 So we have a direct connection between Elizabeth Warren and Sam Bankman-Fried. Elizabeth Warren’s daughter entered for Gary Gensler, of course. Gary Gensler met with SBF. Also, Gary Gensler’s direct boss at MIT was Caroline Ellison’s dad, so you start to see the twisty, tumbly overlap of all the sloppiness in these families. And this is a very sloppy organization, by the way.
23:29 People are going to be shocked, like when it comes out, all the evidence we have of the video and audio recordings of people admitting wrongdoing at FTX. It’s unbelievable how sloppy they all were. The parents, the mom had a pact, a Democratic Party pact to support Democrats. Her other son, Sam’s older brother Gabe, also has a very similar pact that supports Democratic candidates. This was all about, from the beginning, figuring out a way to make money to support the Democratic Party, to be able to drive regulation the way that they wanted it to continue.
24:02 That scam, over and over again, just pumping money into FTX, pumping it into Democratic candidates, and rinsing and repeating over and over again. I say rinse and repeat. There’s a lot of money laundering going on as well, there. but the parents, from the very beginning, have been directing the show. It’s my opinion that they have basically kept Sam doped up on Adderall, brainwashed politically from the very beginning, since he was a kid.
24:27 Now, I’m not saying they were setting this up since he was a kid, but this was the perfect thing for them to usher in once they had him, brainwashed, doped up. And when you look at, when you look at Joe Bankman-Fried, okay, Joe Bankman-Fried was in charge of all their philanthropic efforts. Well, I actually met with a lady in Florida who had a charity that had several meetings with Joe Bankman-Fried about supporting through FTX. it was a very, like, I don’t want to say it because I don’t want to dox who she is, but it was a very noble charity that, like, anybody, most people in America would want to support.
25:04 It wasn’t anything political. It wasn’t anything you know, it’s something that everybody loves. You know, I think pets, dogs, children, right? Like everybody likes poor children. Everybody likes sports, pets, something in that area.
25:15 And she had 10 meetings with him, or whatever it was, a lot of meetings, and it didn’t get approved. Go look at all the philanthropic things that they did. It was only supporting the pandemic or preventing another pandemic, which, once again, go to Caroline’s dad and find out he was integral of writing a report on how to, prepare for pandemics. And then also, number two, political candidates. That was it.
25:38 This was not philanthropy, right? This is what, you know, Sam talks about all the time, like, oh, it’s philanthropy, I don’t care about my money, which Andrew Tate says, like, I don’t trust anybody that’s a billionaire who says they don’t care about money. That’s stupid. I, I agree 100%. But if you look at their efforts, you know who they gave money to?
25:53 The Bahamian police station. They gave them iPads so they could conduct their business better, and they could buy them off so they wouldn’t come arrest him. If you look at everything they did, it was all targeted, and it was all appointed at how they individually could Benefit. And so that was the scam of the parents. They set the whole thing up, and Sam went along with it.
26:13 Now, Sam knew about the wrongdoing. He’s definitely a criminal, don’t get me wrong here, but the parents are really the puppet masters behind the entire thing. Somebody said that, based on the amount of money he funneled into the Biden campaign, you could make an argument that Biden would have lost without it. Is that an overstatement? Is that possible?
26:29 Yeah, of course. I mean, when you look at the overall, now individually, he gave Joe Biden five million dollars, right? So that’s not that massive amount, but what here’s the really interesting thing, to get around political maximum contributions, they would break down their contributions into many, many, many other people’s names, so we don’t even have the full picture yet of how much went into the Democratic Party. And look, there was money that went to the to the Republican Party as well, but it dwarfs in comparison.
26:58 I mean, look, money buys elections. People know that, right? Like, obviously, I think, if you go back to your history, it’s almost the number one, whoever raised the most money won the election. Every time there’s some stats to back that up. I definitely believe that without FTX’s help, and without, you know, Joe Biden receiving all this money from Sam Bankman-Fried, that it definitely would have been a much closer election.
27:21 And if you look at the midterm elections as well, there’s a lot of questionable stuff that happened on the Republican and the Democratic side. When it came to FTX. I mean, literally, a line on the FTX balance sheet said “Trump lose,” that was one of their items, and there was millions of dollars dedicated to that. So I definitely believe that that happened. And when you look at, you know, SBF’s tentacles and how far they went into, let’s say, Twitter, we don’t know that yet.
27:50 You know, we’re not, we’re not sure how far all this went. but yeah, I think that is definitely a fair assessment. I think raising less money, especially millions and millions of dollars, could have had a definite effect on the election. And with all the split contributions, this could be 50,100 million or plus dollars going into the Democratic Party. I think he was quick to say, “I gave Republicans money through other vehicles,” but we don’t know if that was a knee-jerk reaction.
28:13 So he didn’t just get said, “Oh yeah, I’m with the leftist media,” so we still can’t confirm that. Right. Well, you definitely did give money to the Republicans. Ryan Salame actually was the main person that they were giving money to the Republicans through. Right.
28:26 Which is quite interesting. But Sam literally said he didn’t want to give money to Republicans publicly, because the left would have, would have criticized him for it. Right? It’s like, you’ve got to be kidding me. Fascinating.
28:36 I think when, when you look at the Republican side of things, they really did give money to Republicans, and it makes sense, because look, they were trying to buy political favor. It wasn’t as much about one party winning or the other. They just felt like the Democratic Party, I believe they did want them to win, but they wanted to have both sides covered. They wanted to hedge both sides in case the other side won, that they have their claws into Republicans as well.
29:03 Because when you look at what they did with the DCCPA, which now is most likely not going to get passed because Sam touched it. You know, we had sent our bill, our bill, which would be public later this month, to FTX for funding. That’s kind of how this whole thing started between me and Sam, and they sat on it for three weeks, and during that three-week period, that’s when he went behind our back, tried to sabotage our bill, tried to steal our political backers, and then tried to go to all the senators and get on the DCCPA.
29:28 That’s the time frame when all this happened. This was six months ago, roughly. No, it’s been September. This would have been August, the end of August through the middle of September, is when all this happened. So that’s when you really started having beef with Sam.
29:40 Three months ago. Absolutely. Well, he tried to still. I can’t wait till I say who the person is. I can’t say the person is quite yet, but he tried to steal one of our main political backers from us, right?
29:47 And this person came and told us everything they were doing, and thank God that there’s a loyal person to us. And that’s how everything started between me and Sam, because, like, you don’t freaking steal from me. You know, like, I’m, I’m doing this at my good… you know, sending you this, thinking you’re a good actor and you want to help us with fair crypto regulation, and you slap back, try to steal people from me, and then you go try to create your own regulation through the DCCPA, stealing senators that we’re gonna back.
30:14 What we were doing. It really, really felt very personal at that point, and that’s why I wanted that personal moment with him. I want him to all I want him to have nightmares about me, when he’s in prison, right? Because you wanted crypto legislation that was fair and would promote peer-to-peer use of crypto, and he was busy working on legislation that was going to be very favorable to exchanges like his, basically. And it was basically giving money to both parties to push that whole bill and agenda through, and he probably would have been successful if he had kept going at that rate.
30:45 Yeah, I mean, if everything did not unravel. But you know what? I don’t think it would have been successful. Let me say this. And I thought Charles Hoskinson.
30:55 So Charles Hoskinson said someone who we also sent our bill to, funding, We sent our bill to him for funding. He declined to fund it, and there were some reasons, and we talked about those reasons. And I actually told him what Sam was doing, and before I even told anybody publicly, I told him what Sam was doing, and he confirmed behind the scenes that Sam was doing all the stuff I said he was. And I thought that was, you know, very interesting. Charles has a lot of good ties into politics, as well, but when people found out that he was pushing a federal BitLicense, the worst piece of legislation in the history of crypto is the New York BitLicense.
31:30 There’s no way the crypto community was going to let that go. There’s no way that bill was going to end up passing in its current form or in its previous form, because people were just not going to be okay with that. They were not going to be good with, you know, that kind of legislation. There was going to be a huge outcry, and you saw it once he put out his manifesto before it even was uncovered that they were insolvent. He was already having to back away from a lot of the language that he was using, because crypto community was never going to allow the fact that he thought he could just slide this through, and people would be like, “Oh sure, let’s only favor centralized exchanges.”
32:04 It’s really asinine to me, and it really showed his misunderstanding of, you know, the environment that he was in. He was never a crypto guy. Same thing, Sam Bankman-Fried was never a crypto guy. If you ask him about this, he’ll say, “I always saw it as a good opportunity.” That’s all.
32:17 He’ll say yeah, and that I’ve said this recently on one of my shows. If you look at, Sam, he was a risk arb guy. He started doing it to make money, right? Risk arb, and he could make money with this spread, and it was all about making money. And I’m not saying we’ll talk about CZ in a bit, but like there’s other actors in the crypto community that got into crypto because they love crypto.
32:37 They love the concepts of crypto, the transparency, the trustless, the peer-to-peer value. And if you do look back, and I know Hindenburg’s 2020… you’re right, this was a guy that got into it to make a lot of money, as opposed to for all the altruistic reasons that crypto exists. Gary Gensler. Let’s talk about that. We know Sam met with him.
32:55 You were calling out Gary just as loud as Sam when you were talking to me on the 21st of October when we were in Dubai as well, or in October in Dubai. How is Gary mixed up in all of this? this tangled web. Well, I want people to understand, you have the world’s top regulator, right? The SEC dwarfs the CFTC in comparison.
33:18 The world’s top regulator meeting regularly with the largest fraud in history for a six-month period and couldn’t sniff it out. To me, at best, Gary Gensler is incompetent. That’s the best, at the very bottom floor here, that we can say about Gary Gensler is he is completely incompetent at his job. Okay. At worst, he’s one of the most corrupt people we’ve ever seen in the history of the government.
33:52 The truth lies somewhere in between those two poles, but there’s no scenario where Gary Gensler comes out of this unscathed. I think by the end of January, Gary Gensler is out. How could he survive this? How can you, as a government, look at a man whose entire job is to regulate and keep investors safe? How can you look at that and look at him meeting with the biggest fraud in history for six months, and say “Oh, we’re confident in the job that he does.”
34:22 You can’t possibly do that. And I got news regarding Gensler, his days are coming to a close, guys. When this House, oversight, know, oversight and reform committee commences from the Republicans next year. It’s going to be very bad for Gary. These Senate banking hearings, as they continue, they’re going to be very bad for Gary.
34:41 The House committee, the Maxine Waters committee, that will be moving, most likely, to Kevin McCarthy. very bad for Gary Gensler. You have Tom Emmer calling Gary Gensler out, one of the top, you know, known politicians of Washington right now. I don’t see any way he can possibly survive this. There’s no way he can have an explanation.
34:59 It was very funny. As soon as the U.S. filed charges against Sam, you know, right after that, you got, like, the SEC filing charges against Sam. Yeah, why did it take so long? I know why it takes. We all knew everyone knew this was happening.
35:11 Why did it take so long for the SEC to make those charges. It was almost like they were trying to hold out as long as possible, and then when you look at the gear, when you look at the Caroline Ellison, the Glenn Ellison, her father being the direct report for Gary Gensler at MIT, and you know that they all hand in hand. We’re working on these pandemic papers there’s just so much corruption there. It’s not even funny, and it’s so easy to spot, and they can’t hide it.
35:40 The internet’s loose today. Are so good that if there are connections, they will find them, and thank God for them that they found all these connections and were able to show all the corruption. You know, one thing about Gary is that he’s not incompetent. I took his whole class, 24 hours long, on YouTube. It’s blockchain course at MIT.
35:58 We know he was Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, so he’s deep into the Democratic Party. He’s basically a politician. He, no one understands crypto really well, but, you know, he regulates with a blunt instrument. I mean, what do you think is going on there? He’s paid off by the banks.
36:17 There’s no question about it, and especially look at his next movement. What’s he trying to do? Which I think he’s laughable. If this happens, we should all riot. If he becomes treasury secretary, what a joke that would be.
36:28 He’s trying to take over for, as I call her, the Tweety Bird Monster, Janet Yellen, and yelling. He’s trying to take over for her in the next election cycle. Well, you know, people might be surprised. You know, before I, I talk out of turn here, let me, let me look up, Janet Yellen’s, net worth here. Her net worth is, 20 million dollars, okay.
36:52 She made in 2020, okay. In 2020 and 2021 she made 40% of her net worth in one year. 40% of that 20 million. Japan, in one year, seven million dollars, whichever could be its highest, 12 million dollars, doing what? Making speeches on Zoom to banks, seven million dollars to make speeches on Zoom to banks, and then she becomes the treasury secretary.
37:23 Open your eyes, people. The banks are driving all of this. Gary Gensler, Goldman Sachs. What is Goldman Sachs, essentially? It’s a bank, okay.
37:34 They’re paying him off, and he knows the big money payoff that comes with that treasury secretary job. It’s all about money for him. It’s all about power, and it’s all about control. Every time he makes these enforcement actions, you can read this as the banks are trying to enforce crypto. It’s not Gary Gensler trying to enforce crypto.
37:55 He’s a paid puppet. Janet Yellen also a paid puppet. Guys, who in the world thinks you can make seven million dollars giving speeches to banks on Zoom? Does anybody think that that’s legit? Absolutely no one.
38:07 They were paying her off because they knew she was going to be the treasury secretary. Yeah, this is an important point you make. Sounds like a few documentary films to explain all this. But yeah, Gary is following his career path, which, as since he left Goldman and all the banks, is now in government, and that government ladder only goes so far. I thought one day he might run for president, but why bother doing that when you can be treasury secretary or head of the Fed and just continue doing what you’re doing?
38:31 It’s all complicit. There’s a whole river of money there, whether you’re at Goldman or outside of Goldman. Like you said, you still get paid one way or the other, and it’s all this very similar agenda. Everyone’s looking out for their own, their own party, their own path. There’s a lot of parallels here.
38:45 Don’t get me started with other branches of government and Fauci and all that other stuff, or the Twitter powers. We’ll get to that. A couple of the people I want you to talk about. Kevin O’Leary, he’s going in your sights. I mean, Jesus, I don’t know how you have any time to sleep.
38:57 Ben, you got SBF over here. You got Gensler over here. You’re getting swatted. I’ll talk about that later. And now you got Kevin O’Leary.
39:06 What’s the beef with Kevin O’Leary? Yeah, well, look, have you seen the documentary The Tinder Swindler? I have it. I’ve watched like a minute and then I just have better. You should watch it.
39:17 It’s really good. I watched it with my wife last year. You know, he’s always talking about, like, you don’t understand, my enemies are after me. And I’m like, that’s how I feel. You know, like, I’m making, I’m making new enemies every day.
39:26 But you know what, it’s okay. Kevin O’Leary, he smarted off to me on Twitter, and it pissed me off. You’ll find a lot of these people, they personally offend me, and then that’s the worst thing they ever did, because I never, I’m like a bulldog. I never let go of them. We’ve destroyed Kevin O’Leary’s image.
39:39 I mean, there’s no doubt about that. Once I started in on Kevin O’Leary, it’s become very clear who he is. You know, you could go, as you know, I, I don’t really like bringing up the, the deaths in Toronto, and, the Muskoka Lake, I believe it is, or Muskogee, can’t remember exactly what it is right now. He was involved in two deaths, People can look into all that and find out the cover-up that occurred there. Everybody in Toronto knows there was a cover-up there.
40:04 The people close to that story, no. So I’m not gonna get too much of the details, but this is a bad guy. He, he covered up, a lawsuit into 2019 against them for these ICOs that he promoted. He tried to cover that up as well. He’s a cover-up guy.
40:20 He does a lot of actions. He does anything to make money. He, if you pay him money, he will talk about anything. He, he does not care what it is. Obviously, look, FTX gave him 15 million dollars.
40:29 We got this guy saying, “I lost all of my own money in FTX.” But yet, Sam paid you 15 million dollars, and when you add up the money you lost, it’s 10 million. So was that your own money, or was that the money that he gave you, and then you lost some of it, or did you lose that money plus he gave you 15 million dollars? It’s hard to really say this guy’s a fraud. Kevin O’Leary is as big of a fraud as you can get.
40:56 He’s very involved in Washington, DC, by the way, guys. I’ve been learning this from some politicians. He’s behind the scenes doing a lot of stuff in Washington, which is why he got invited to go to the Senate hearing, to where he, “I’m the champion of crypto,” that’s what he’s trying to build himself as, because we’ve destroyed his image so much that that’s the only message he can kind of go with at this point. If you look at the, the crossover between his WonderFi, fund and Alameda, it’s also a very dark, dirty path.
41:22 If you look at the comparison between FTX and his exchange in Canada that he bought the majority of Bit Fury, also very bad. He’s involved with Immutable X. He’s also involved with NFT.com. Both of those companies reached out through someone to me directly and said, “Hey, they want you to go easy on Kevin O’Leary.” Let me tell you, the dumbest thing you can do is tell me to go easy on somebody.
41:48 I’m not paid. I don’t get paid off. I’m not, I’m not in this because I’m trying to handle my image. Like, I’m in this because I’m tired of this freaking corruption in crypto. I’m tired of it.
41:58 I’m done with it. I’m done with stock market 2.0. I’m done with the people that come into this space that want to turn it into traditional finance, and I think this is what people need to see about people like Kevin O’Leary. That’s what they’re trying to do. They want to turn it.
42:14 Do you really think Kevin O’Leary gives a rip if a retail investor makes money or not? No. His entire life, he’s been trained to be an assassin and take out retail investors. That’s what he’s trying to do in crypto, and we just don’t stand for it anymore, and we’re kicking him out. He’s gone.
42:28 He’s not a crypto person any longer. I promise you that. So he first picked, started beef with you. You took it personally, but the more you look into it, you don’t like what he stands for. He’s out for himself.
42:37 He’s out for the old stock market version of crypto. You don’t think it’s consistent with anything you stand for, or anything that we all stand for in the crypto industry. So you just marked them, and you took the gloves off. You hit below the belts, like, and you don’t, and you’re just like, “Yeah, that’s the way I go, and that’s the way you roll.” “Yeah, there’s no rules in a fair fight.”
42:55 Yeah, I don’t believe in that. Well, you know, I mean, look, so next, tell me what you saw in these hearings, because I thought, to some of the most fascinating theater for me, anything live on Capitol Hill is fascinating theater. When that Supreme Court Justice got hurt a couple years ago, I thought that was fascinating. And watching the Congressional hearing and the Senate hearing, what did you see? Obviously Kevin was rolled out.
43:17 I mean, they really rolled out some randoms for that thing. I mean, Jesus Christ, two people that were so anti-crypto. I don’t even know if they knew anything about crypto. Then you had Kevin there. I mean, look, to his credit, he was the only guy making a convincing and plausible argument for crypto.
43:34 That was good. Obviously he was invited there because, yeah, he spends a lot of time in on the Hill. Well, he’s making that argument because he’s trying to change his image in crypto. That’s the only reason he was doing it, and he believes it. No, to a certain extent.
43:45 Oh, you don’t think so? No, no, he doesn’t believe. Look, I mean, he knows crypto’s coming. He knows crypto’s the future. There’s no doubt about that, but he, he took all of his time to try to throw Binance under the bus.
43:54 Yeah, that’s what he was. That’s what he was doing. So let’s talk about that. So there he is, and he takes time out. He only got about three minutes, and he decides to just overtly stand up, walk over, pick CZ up, and throw him underneath a bus that he had like hired, and he threw his easy under the bus, and he basically said, “It wasn’t Sam’s fault.
44:16 It was CZ’s fault, because he was preventing Sam from getting regulation.” And so then he had to force him to sell. What did you make of that? Most people were completely surprised. Did he have a point?
44:27 What’s he talking about with CZ? Alameda has got one of the most spectacular propaganda arms we’ve ever seen. If you look at the amount of bots that they used, if you look at the amount of mid-level crypto publications that they owned, if you look at the amount of money that they paid influencers, which I never received a dime from FTX, by the way, if you look at the 27 million dollars that they paid to the CEO of The Block, okay, one of the largest crypto publications, one of the top five crypto publications that exists, to control the narrative at all times.
45:05 I still want to go back and cross-check, you know, articles about Sam and FTX on there versus other places during the same time period. So I haven’t had time to do yet. Their propaganda is amazing. That’s how they made all this happen. That’s how they got all the trust.
45:21 The community was strictly through propaganda, which I believe, using paid engagement, buying followers. It doesn’t only need to be against terms of service. This needs to be illegal. There needs to be a law against this kind of thing, because the manipulation that occurs, the amount of money that people lost due to this propaganda, is outrageous. Kevin O’Leary is a large piece of that propaganda army.
45:45 Look at the stuff he was saying about Celsius before Celsius fell. He was involved in bringing down Celsius. There’s no doubt about it. Kevin O’Leary was a week before it went down. They’ve all, chapter 11.
45:55 He was talking about Celsius, is going to be sacrificed to the gods. Nobody knew that was going to happen at that point, right? And so the point is, the propaganda machine is feeding into this narrative that FTX is at fault. FTX is not at fault. Finance is at fault, which is the craziest argument I’ve ever heard.
46:15 The insolvency hole has been there some people say since about 2020. Some people say from the very beginning there was an insolvency hole. So the fact that now Binance selling 500 million FTT, that that was the thing that did them in, is outrageous. They already had a bank run of two or three billion, whatever it was, billions of dollars, that it made it to where they could no longer leverage. Right?
46:38 So Kevin O’Leary is strictly pushing this narrative. And then you have other people on Twitter That really don’t like Binance, that they’re legitimate, like, they don’t like Binance. They’re Bitcoin maximalists, or, you know, other types of people that have always talked bad stuff about Binance. And so what happens is this propaganda arm gives this idea of Binance being insolvent, Binance being bad, and then you get all these other people that already don’t like it jumping on the wave, and it continues it.
47:03 So what you’ve got is you’ve got to mix between paid propaganda and organic responses to that, and it makes it really hard to unwind and untwist exactly, what is going on there. But made no doubt about it. Finance is not insolvent. Now, look, the message, take your money off Finance, sure, I’m down with it. If you’re not an active trader, you should not set any money and leave it on any exchange.
47:26 Fair. I’m good with that. Yeah, but the idea that Binance is insolvent is insane. They just agreed to pot to acquire Voyager during a time when they’re being heavily criticized and scrutinized. That should show people they’re ready to open those books at some point, and they’ve got the money that they say they have.
47:44 I believe, buddy, it says way more money than they’re supposed to have, and that’s why they don’t want to share the books. Yeah, I agree with you on that. I can’t prove it. But I agree with you also, if you, you know, if you make a run on anything at any point in time fast enough, anything can become insolvent, even if they’re back one to one. I mean, again, so, you know, if you push something hard enough, yeah, it will fail.
48:04 But I agree with you. I don’t think they’re insolvent. I think they’re, they’re, you know, they’re one of the, the better actors out there. I had Anthony Scaramucci on the show last Friday, who I’ve known for many years, and I asked him what happened, because, you know, he sold 30% of his company to Sam. He took Sam out to the Middle East and introduced him to all of his contacts and proceeded to make the Mooch look like a complete idiot.
48:28 And he was, he was upset, and he said, “Look, Brian, I think I might have actually started this beef, because apparently in one of the meetings out in the Middle East, Sam was saying things about CZ, and that got back to CZ, and that’s pretty much when CZ came out and said, guess what, we’re just going to liquidate this position.” You know, that did kind of, was the straw that broke the bank. camel’s back, though, was CZ coming out and saying I’m gonna get rid of this 2 billion up position. I mean, yeah, that did do it.
48:56 And again, P you know, it was probably a smart business move for CZ, whether it was planned or Machiavellian or sinister. But also, I worked on Wall Street for 15 years. If you got a two billion dollar position that you’re going to liquidate, and you want to get the money back, you don’t exactly announce it to the market. What do you make of all those details, including Scaramucci? Yeah, well, I’ll tell you what I was told about Scaramucci.
49:18 I was, I don’t know exactly how. I don’t have the details on this, but he was forced to sell 30% of his company at FTX, basically. Somehow he was strong-armed into doing that. He didn’t necessarily want to do it in the beginning. Of course that’s not something he’s probably going to come out and say, because it makes him probably look weak.
49:34 But that’s what I was told from someone that knows him, pretty well. Now, in terms of thought, this was going to be the exchange of the future, et cetera, et cetera. I know the details there. I am a fan of the Mooch. But yeah, anyways, continue, continue.
49:47 I’m mutual. Okay, I’m neutral. For you, that means you love them. It’s basically. Yeah, I don’t, I don’t have a strong opinion about it.
49:57 I was actually, the funny thing is, the week that all this went down, I was scheduled to have a conversation with him, we, we were working with through some third parties to, have a talk and see about him coming on my show, or what, whatever our relationship will grow as and then obviously all this stuff happened, and then it kind of fell, you know, it fell to the wayside. But what I’ll say about CZ, making his, here is what’s funny. This was going to happen anyways.
50:22 Now here, here is so on October 29th we were telling everybody to get their money off FTX. We did a tweet where we told everybody, if you don’t get your money off FTX, you’re low IQ. This was because we were working on the front end of this. We knew that there was a big problem with the markets, and we knew this was going to come back to cost them. Logically, we should have known there was insolvency, but we didn’t know there was insolvency at the time.
50:46 We were so focused on the project side that we weren’t really looking at the retail investor side. So there was like a couple days later, after the CoinDesk came out, I did come out and say I do not believe that FTX was insolvent. I, I didn’t believe it was insolvent at the time. However, we were already working on this story for a week in advance before CoinDesk dropped that article about these fake markets, and we were gonna, we were working with Gretchen Morgenson on NBC.
51:12 She came out with a report on it About these predatory business practices that they were doing. This was always going to happen once we figured out what was going on. The missing piece, the missing piece that we did not realize, I could already mentioned it earlier, but the missing piece for us was not having the common sense to think, like, oh, if these are fake markets and then people are withdrawing real assets as profit, that’s going to leave an insolvency hole.
51:41 So it was kind of common sense once it all happened. Like, oh yeah, we were working on the same story, we just didn’t really see that side of it yet. So CZ doing this thing, like, it really sped out the timeline. We were probably, we were probably days away from discovering the insolvency hole before he tweeted, and he sold his FTT that sped everything up tremendously. I never saw that coming.
52:05 Like, that was like when we, we thought we were working in stealth. You know, we, we had alluded to, we were working on some stuff against FTX, but we thought, like, we had the whole month, you know, and eventually what happens is you realize, like, okay, once they acquired Voyager, they were going to be able to cover up the hole. So it became about making sure that we stopped them, before they bought Voyager, but it became a moot point once CZ did what he did, and then everything became kind of, you know, everything unraveled.
52:32 I knew from the very beginning, though, that CZ was not going to buy, I was not going to buy FTX. You know, that was never going to happen. We had too many lawsuits on the back end that we knew were going on against him for his business practices, and we sent those to CZ. You know, the, the morning that they announced they were considering acquiring, so we knew there was no way they were going to acquire FTX. It was just too much drama going on, but this was always going to happen, and unless the only thing they were going to be able to do was, if they bought Voyager, if they bought Celsius, if they added all those real assets to their balance sheet, they could have kept it going for a little bit longer, and then tried to keep that same process of acquiring companies to have real assets to cover their insolvency.
53:13 His insolvency holes were gigantic. That’s why they did all these, that’s why they collapsed. Here, Luna, they could make a couple hundred million dollars to try to fill the insolvency hole. It was already billions. People say the total is always probably 50 billion dollars across all the companies, because The Block values solvency, that’s when FTX as well, you know.
53:29 So when you really look at all of the Alameda investments and how much money was out there, it’s over twice as big as Enron. Look, I know we have just a little time left. How does this play out? We didn’t really finish with Washington, but, like, I mean, it was comical watching these hearings, because, like, the Congressional hearing, they’re grilling John Ray, and they’re basically, they’re all basically campaigning. Each politician in there is campaigning.
53:51 They’re taking shots at each other, taking shots at Gensler. Elizabeth Warren is pushing her bill, right in the middle of a hearing. It was, I mean, it was comical if it wasn’t so sad. What plays out in Washington going forward, what plays out in the crypto market going forward, and what plays out in, you know, the bankruptcy of FTX going forward? In your opinion?
54:11 Yeah, bankruptcy of FTX is a long-winding story. It’s gonna take a long time to figure out. I believe Celsius and Voyager users will get the majority of their money back well ahead of FTX people, unless we’re successful in what we’re trying to do, which I think is possible. It’s gonna be a long time before you see any money, if, if any. Some people say 10-20% is the best you can hope for with FTX.
54:33 In terms of the market, I tend to believe, now, don’t hold me to this, but I tend to believe we’ve already bottomed in the crypto markets. If we were to fall further, we’re looking at breaking the four-year cycle, and I always believe in the four-year cycle until it does break. So we, we tend to believe 15,000 was probably the bottom of the market. Bitcoin is going to be resilient. Stocks are probably still going to have a long ways to follow.
54:56 We believe that Bitcoin is probably going to be slowly heading back up. Next year is going to be an accumulation year. Don’t expect massive Bitcoin prices next year, 2024, as we move to the halving, which I can’t wait until it’s like two weeks from now. We can say next year is the halving. Like, that’ll be a lot more fun than saying two years from now.
55:13 But once that occurs, we do believe Bitcoin will be fine and reach all-time highs in between September and December of 2025. Now, when you look at, or excuse me, in between to reach new all-time highs, December of 2024, and then 2025 will be the year where things go crazy. When you look at Washington, I think that our bill is the answer. I can’t wait until I can talk about and tell everybody publicly what it is. I believe our bill is going to fix crypto regulation.
55:39 We’ve talked to many big politicians in the last few weeks, and they tell us the only area that you’re going to get bipartisan support over in the next two years and probably get stuff done is in the crypto industry. So I definitely believe we’ve got a great shot to change things forever, and to lay the groundwork for crypto regulations. It’s going to be smart. It’s going to make sense, and it’s going to be able to move forward. I also think that here’s the big thing: the House Reform and Oversight Committee, watch for FTX hearings to go all year next year, and maybe even for two years as they follow the money trail of the Ukrainian money laundering and the Democratic fundraising.
56:18 There’s already been, I think, four million dollar, four or five million dollars given back. All this money is going to get caught back from these politicians. Gonna have a massive effect on politics in the next two years as well. So, I, in a lot of ways, I think that this FTX is kind of a great reset for politics, if you will. And I hope that that’s what we’re going to see, and we’re going to see some change come out of this.
56:36 Man, it sure would be great if we could see a third party rise up. John Ray said they’re clawing back all the political contributions. They’re going to pull them all back. That’s going to be interesting. I think that’s, I think important point.
56:48 I think that’s how they push Joe Biden out. I’ve been told from people deep inside the Democratic Party, Gavin Newsom is going to be the nominee in the next go-round. It will not be Joe Biden. So just something to pay attention to and keep up with. This could be how that happens.
57:02 Gonna be fascinating. Is Sam Bankman-Fried gonna live to testify? Because when that all unravels and he testifies, I can just imagine there’s a lot of people that would rather he not talk. I don’t think so. I don’t think so.
57:15 And I think this is, you look at the Epstein narrative and you say, oh, there’s precedent for this, or McAfee, or whatever the case is. This is much different. Sam Bankman-Fried does not know a lot about what happens on the inside of politics. The politicians, that’s how you know. It’s like people like say, oh, it’s the Clintons.
57:30 You know, that’s how you know it’s not the Clintons. This was not a well-oiled machine, and it blew up overnight. That would never happen with sophisticated political actors. And so none of these politicians that they were giving money to knew that FTX was insolvent. They didn’t know FTX was a scam.
57:45 They just thought they were getting money from some crypto guy that wanted control regulation. They knew that. I don’t think Sam Bankman-Fried knows nearly enough to be able to cause serious damage to anybody outside of his parents, Dan Friedberg, and the Bahamian government. And I don’t think any of those three actors, unless his parents, often have the, have the, the motivation to, you know, pull an Epstein, as we say. All right, it’s a good thing.
58:11 Lastly, I just want to talk about you. I know you got swatted, and, well, that’s when the whole, you know, special weapons and tactics team comes to your house. You got your four kids upstairs. Your wife is there. I appreciate you coming public about that, of course, after it happens.
58:23 That must have happened before you went to Dubai, and I saw you it. It did. It was October 1st. I don’t know how you keep your cool sometimes. So how are you doing?
58:30 I mean, you seem really good right now. Yeah, but I mean, how do you, how do you manage all of this? The drama behind the scenes. How do you try not to, you know? They say vengeance is a dish best served cold.
58:41 Ben, you know, that can be just as hard or bad on you if you get too angry or obsessed with someone getting punished. How do you handle all this? Yeah, well, things are great. I mean, things have never been better for me. To be honest with you, I feel like for the first time in a long time, people see who I am and they see what I’m about, and I feel like for the last couple years, like, who I am has really been misconstrued in the media and in crypto circles and on Twitter, and I feel like now people finally see what we’re about.
59:09 We’re not just about money. We’re not about, you know, doing things for clicks. We’re about real change in the world, and that’s what we want. We don’t want a great reset. We want to prevent these types of things from happening, and so from that perspective, it’s been really good.
59:22 The swatting incident, I mean, it humanized me to a lot of people that don’t like me. They understand, like, okay, I may not like him, but, like, yeah, we don’t want guns pointed at kids. You know, it’s been hard on my family. There’s no question about that. there was definitely some PTSD involved, but the difference is now we know, if we hear sirens, it’s a family.
59:38 We know it could be coming to us. We need to come, and, you know, you might hear a siren. You may think, oh, somebody’s in trouble. We hear a siren and we say, are they coming here? Let’s prepare in case this happens.
59:49 So I think knowing that and having that advanced knowledge has really helped us out. I would say we have our book coming out, Catching Up with Crypto, tomorrow. Actually, we have a 24-hour flash sale on Books-A-Million, where you can get our book, Catching Up with Crypto, over 50% off. This is the big exciting thing we have going on right now. So, you know, we’re, we’re doing a book tour end of January, beginning of February, and then resuming the last week of February.
1:00:13 We’ll be in London, I believe, on the 27th or 28th of February, as well, for the book tour. So you know we’ve got so much good stuff going on. I just try not to focus on the negative. And like people, like I said in the beginning, people haven’t figured out, like, my fear receptor is gone at this point. I’m just moving and operating the way I want to move and operate, and can’t anybody stop me.
1:00:30 And you’re getting a lot more pressed globally, but then also you get a lot more haters, and then the people that hate you come out, and they start saying, yeah, he did the rate card, he promoted this, he promoted that. I saw you on stage, and you’re like, yeah, guys, we know this. I talked about this. Yeah, like, how do you deal with that side of the hate, but with also getting that people understand who you are? Well, I mean, the hate is what it is.
1:00:52 I, I tell people a lot, that because a lot of, if you’re in social media and you get a lot of hate, I’m probably a person you want to reach out to for help, because I’ve been through it more than anybody. I have probably more haters, and I feel like anybody outside of maybe Kim Kardashian or something like that. So, you know, the fact is it’s kind of like the five stages of grief. You know, like, five stages of grief. I don’t have them pulled up exactly, but like, you start with, you know, admitting, or you start with denial, right?
1:01:19 They’re not like, oh, well, you know, people hate me, but like, oh, they just don’t understand, or, you know, it’ll go away, whatever. Then you move on to anger, where you like want to fire arrows at everybody. And then you move into negotiating, where it’s like, okay, well, if I change this and this and this about my content, then people won’t hate me. And then you change all those things and they still hate you, and you just end up with, you know, just admission that there are people out there that don’t like you.
1:01:41 And that’s just what it is. Acceptance. And so I’ve really moved through to this acceptance stage. I was talking about with my barber this morning. You know, she was like, I don’t know how you deal with all this hate on the air.
1:01:49 It doesn’t face me. Like, people can say whatever they want about me, and I know I’m an emotional guy, like, people understand that, like, I do get angry from time to time, but you can’t hurt me through a tweet. Like, I understand that, especially dealing with, like, real-life repercussions of some of that hate. You know, it is what it is. You know, the reason the guy swatted me is because he emailed me trying to extort me.
1:02:08 I said, come at me, Big Boy. You know, like, I don’t, you want to say you’re going to threaten to kill my family? Come on to my driveway. We’ll see who leaves in the body bag, and people know I’m not scared, and that is a big thing that I have, other people don’t have. Death threat me all you want.
1:02:22 It means absolutely nothing to me, and it will continue to mean nothing to me, because I can protect myself, and I’m fortunate to live in a place where I have that ability. So overall, you just have to accept that there’s people out there that don’t like you. You cannot let that way into your, to your self-esteem, and you have to move forward. And every time I just think of Kobe, like, I love Kobe so much. You know, like, so sad that he passed, and I just think he said there was nothing he liked more than going to a visiting arena and getting those boos.
1:02:49 They energized it, and that’s how I feel. The more haters we have, the more I feel like we’re doing right. Yeah, as Grant Cardone says, if people don’t hate you, they don’t know you. You know, Ben, just want to thank you. You know, we’re, we’re making a documentary movie about what happened to us in 2020, and I had guests on my show then that were saying things that I was uncomfortable with, and I didn’t know if I agreed with them, but I let them say it, and I sat there and I just tried to absorb their opinion and then try to evaluate it, as opposed to just try to talk over them or disagree.
1:03:21 And that’s when we think, we always try to provide here as a forum for people to tell their views. And when you were on stage in Dubai, literally I could see the FTX booth across the thing, and you’re like, freeze this, and this, and I was just like, it was making me uncomfortable, but I was just like, man, let the men speak. And then to see it all come full circle, it’s just a beautiful thing, and it’s a beautiful Argument of why we have freedom of speech.
1:03:42 You know, why there’s, we allow people like you to say these things, because, God, guess what, sometimes they’re true. And, just want to thank you for being vocal, keep in the good fight for still staying out there, and it’s just been incredible to watch, and like, godspeed to you. Thank you so much. Appreciate you having me on the show. All right, man, come see us when you’re in London in February.
1:04:00 All right, all right. Good stuff, follow this man, Big Boy Crypto, find out what’s going on. We’ll see you all next time on London Real. Take care, bye.
