04 The Skeptic
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Hi, I'm PJ Vogt. This is the Crypto Island miniseries. In this episode, we meet a professional skeptic and learn the story of how his life came to be dominated by something he doesn't believe in. That's after some ads. Search Engine is brought to you by AutoTrader. If you're driving right now, look around. See all those cars?

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It sounds like the beginning of a truly terrible country song, but it's true. Bernie Ebbers was the CEO who was famous for coming to work in a Stetson hat and cowboy boots. A former gym teacher, he'd started a small phone company in Mississippi called Long Distance Discount Services. Bernie's company followed an aggressive playbook. They'd buy up a competitor, which would raise their stock, which would give them money to buy up another competitor. Over and over again, it worked. Before long, they were the second largest telecom in the United States.

The minnow that ate the whale. That's what the papers called them when they managed to buy MCI. Eventually, they gave themselves a name that truly reflected their ambitions. WorldCom. WorldCom stock went up every year, minting millionaires. This was during the dot-com boom, and if you wanted to bet on the internet, you bet on WorldCom. WorldCom was going to own the pipes that carried everything. But then, the dot-com bubble burst, and a funny thing happened. The WorldCom stock didn't go down.

The earnings report stayed healthy. Took a few years and the work of a very brave auditor at the company for anyone to learn why. Cynthia Cooper, a WorldCom accountant, discovered that her bosses were cooking the books. They'd overstated their assets by $11 billion. Cynthia blew the whistle. WorldCom, the stock and the company came tumbling down. People Cynthia had worked with, people she knew well, they went to prison. The telecom cowboy himself got a 25-year sentence.

In the aftermath, Cynthia was hailed as a hero, Time magazine made her Person of the Year, but she found little to celebrate. This is her talking about what happened in 2008. I mean, I watched as thousands and thousands of my coworkers were laid off in wave after wave, and, you know, they carted the last of their belongings out of the building in small brown cardboard boxes. You know, when you read about a fraud in the paper, and you don't really know the people involved,

It doesn't have the same impact. But behind all of these frauds, there are so many stories, just heartbreaking stories of people who lost everything. Cynthia Cooper wrote a book about all this called Extraordinary Circumstances. It's the tale of how a fraud gets built, written by a deeply compassionate observer. She opens the book with a scene at a baby shower for her coworkers. That's where the story begins, with her memory of being in the home of the spouses of the people who will be in jail soon because of her testimony.

I don't normally read memoirs by heroic accountants from the 1990s, but I was reading this one because someone I'd interviewed recommended it. A funny thing about reporting on crypto is that here, more than anywhere else I've been, everyone you meet seems to recommend a book, and it's almost never a book I've heard of before. I try to read these books. I read them because I'm looking for clues. Not necessarily about crypto, but really just clues about the person who recommended it. Who is this person? What did they see in this story?

Today's episode is about the person who recommended Cynthia Cooper's memoir to me. He wanted me to read the story of a massive fraud and of the person who called it out. That's after the break. Search Engine is brought to you by Greenlight. A new school year is starting soon. My partner has two young kids, both of whom use Greenlight. And honestly, it's been kind of great. Greenlight is a debit card and money app for families where kids learn how to save, invest, and spend wisely. And parents can keep an eye on kids' new money habits.

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Welcome back to the show.

Okay, so first things first, will you just introduce yourself, say your name? Sure. Excuse me. Warm up your vocal situation. Okay.

My name is Cass Pianci. I am co-host with Bennett Tomlin of Crypto Critics Corner, a skeptical, critical look at the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Cass Pianci is a professional crypto skeptic. He spends his time identifying and calling out the people he thinks are bad actors in the space. He finds enough of them to fill a twice weekly podcast as well as a robust Twitter presence.

I should tell you, Cass Pianci, not his real name. It's a pseudonym. Cass Pianci. Like, the body of water. I want to kind of, like, trace your path in this stuff. Like, where... How old are you now? I am 34. What was the year where, like, the idea of cryptocurrency began to influence your life? Yeah, I was, uh... I was...

29 at the time. So five years ago is when I really started learning more about it. But I was not a cryptocurrency skeptic or critic at that point. I was more like, this is really cool and I love it versus now where I'm like, okay, let me tell everybody what's wrong with it. The story of how Cass fell in love with crypto, fell out of it, how he eventually met his version of Cynthia Cooper, the whistleblower,

It's a long one, but I'm going to tell it long with many of its tangents, because I think in those tangents, you'll see the many layers of how Cass came to believe the things that he does. Cass's journey started, as so many do, with a soul crushing job. He worked in television. He won't say where, but it involved celebrity gossip. I found the television industry to be particularly the television industry that I was involved in to be particularly revolting. And it made me really sad to go to work every day.

The stuff we were doing there, it's like it's honestly something I try not to reflect on. And so I left. You just felt like every day you were going to work and making the world just like a little bit less good. I started getting as and this is I worked there from the time I was 21 until I was 24, I want to say.

Maybe 25 even. I started getting, I don't know if people are familiar, there's something called TMJ. Your jaw starts to lock up, right? Yeah. Yeah. So what happens is you start grinding your teeth so hard at night that your jaw starts to lock up during the day and you get a pounding headache daily. Okay.

And so I went to the doctor. The doctor said, oh, there's nothing wrong with you. It might be like a jaw issue. Went to the dentist. They're like, oh, my God. Yeah, you're grinding your teeth like hell. The only thing we can recommend for you is two things. You need to get a mouth guard, which I'd never had. And you need to like take a baby aspirin before you go to bed every day. Keep in mind, I was 23 years old. Like it was eating you alive. Yeah, it was killing me. I mean, it was genuinely killing me. Right. So I that job ended.

And I went to... And would you consider yourself like... I know this is like a weird question for someone to answer about themselves, but I just wonder if you've considered it. Like, do you consider yourself an especially moral person? See, here's the funny thing. At that point in my life, as a young kid, I was making for what I considered for myself to be really good money.

And nowadays, probably people would laugh about the numbers that I would give. So I'm not even going to name the numbers that I was making back then. But to me, they felt significant. And I felt like I was really pursuing a goal that I wanted to write. Like I wanted to be an editor like my parents. There were no moral qualms for me when I started that path. And as I spent years at this company that I will not name doing things that I felt were bad for humanity to reach my goal.

At a certain point, it does. It starts to like literally affect your health if you care about it, if you actually reflect on it and care and go, wow, I think we just ruined someone's life for no good reason. Yeah, it it killed me on the inside a little bit. Like, really, it just it did. And was there a sorry, this is like such an interviewer question, but yeah.

We are bound to the roles we assign ourselves. Was there a moment like was there like a specific thing that happened at work that made you walk out? It wasn't a single singular moment. Right. It was I can I can recall right now, like if I close my eyes, I can recall getting into my old Mazda 626. It was like a purple Mazda 626 from 1999 or something.

And I had to get to work early. So I want to say I would wake up at like 4.30, 5 in the morning, you know, hop up, take a shower, brush my teeth, get ready, jump in the car. And I would have to drive about 30 minutes north of town. And I had to go to an area called North Hollywood. And I would go there. And on my drive on the freeway, as I would be on the freeway on my way to work,

I would just look at the exits and watch them and go, maybe I shouldn't get off the freeway today. Like, maybe I should just keep going. It's like the classic, you know, I'm just going to run away with forever. I'm done. And every day it was more and more and more of that until it was just like, I have to quit. And so I left. I quit forever.

A friend of mine was working for a raw food kitchen, which raw food is not necessarily my thing, but it was just so different from what I had been doing for so long. And it was not about money. It was not about people congratulating you on the great work that you've done or whatever. It was it was about like making something and satisfying people with what you make. And it was very simple. And the gratification was fast and satisfying.

I wasn't hurting anyone with what I was doing. Cass worked at the raw food place for about a year. From there, he got a job as a baker, which he loved. Hard, honest work that didn't make him feel terrible about himself. It's funny, you're not the first person I've known in life who had a job they felt morally conflicted about and quit to become a baker. It's like I have to say that even today, I feel great about what I do.

But I was I said I woke up early for that other job. I was waking up at like three thirty or four in the morning to do my baking job because I had to be there by four thirty or five at the very latest. And it is crazy.

hard work. It's so hard. And I would be in front of a scorching hot oven for two and a half hours, sweating my balls off with gloves on and burning my arms all over the place and lifting 50 pound bags of flour constantly and getting yelled at by my supervisor for being too slow or whatever. And at the end of the day, after eight

to 10 hours of just hard, horrible labor, I could go home and sleep and my jaw wouldn't hurt. I could go home and just be like, well, that was hard. I feel good. You know, that was it. Because you felt like at the end of the day, you were like making croissants for people instead of like ruining someone's life for entertainment. Yeah. And I think even if you boil it down to the very basic, basic, I would think about like, what if everything went south in the world right now? Like,

I have a job. And not only do I have a job, but like people will want to come. They need bread. They need food. They need to eat. It's so funny. I have that conversation with myself sometimes too where I'm like, what will you contribute to the apocalypse? It's like, well, I was in a band of straggling survivors. I'm not that. I have no sense of direction. I need my glasses. Yeah.

But I would keep the mood light. That would probably keep me there for a little bit. Entertainers have always existed, and they've been a very important part of keeping people sane, I think. So there's something to be said for that, for sure. So you're a baker. Money is not pouring out of your pockets at the point that Bitcoin crossed your radar, Ethereum crossed your radar. Not at all. Not at all.

But then, unfortunately, right around then, my father passed away. And my partner of, I want to say, four or five years, we split up at the same time, which is, it's just a lot to happen at once. Was your dad, like, he was young? Like, it was a surprise? Not necessarily. He was...

He was 68, 69 when he died. Pretty young. And and yeah, it he was a heavy drinker. But the issue was that he was like a very, very functional alcoholic his whole life. And and that just started to unravel really quickly right there at the end.

And I had now I had a little bit of cash, right? I had enough cash to not work for six months to be like, OK, I'm going to take a break from work and just focus on myself and try to figure out what the hell I'm doing with my life. And during that time is when I started just falling deep into cryptocurrency because I had the time. Yeah, I have found sometimes in my life when things are bad.

It's like there's a weird solace in just finding a number to check every day. I was listening to this interview with a guy who was like somehow ended up in the Iranian hostage crisis. He was in prison and the American diplomats on the other side managed to send the people who were in prison sports scores. They got a sports magazine and they would just read about

the batting averages of like the baseball team. And it was just like a thing to look at. That's not the noise in your head. That's so bad. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, it wasn't even just that, right? Like the idea of, I was learning about Bitcoin for the first time. I was learning about these concepts that I had really just zero clue about. And, and while I'm sort of politically versed, while I do understand things about American politics, I'm certainly not

focused on it. And I think a lot of the Bitcoin space, they focus a lot on current government and politics and Federal Reserve and the Treasury and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So I found myself kind of in over my head when it came to like all of the topics that I was focused on, not just number go up or number go down. It was like, wow, what

What does it mean to have a currency that isn't controlled by a nation? What is a blockchain? What is a hashing function? What are these things? I don't understand it. And I'm going to need to spend hours and hours and hours and hours learning. And so that is a good distraction when you're in a lot of pain. And I think a lot of people thought I was crazy, like a lot of like my my family and friends. I mean, to this day, they still think I'm crazy for for following this stuff so much. But I think that.

At the time, they really were... It was like a cop between a rock and a hard place where they were like, well, I'm glad he's found something, but also that is not paying the bills and he needs to get a job and he needs to think about his future. I'm spending a lot of time on Reddit and Twitter and on this and I'm reading stuff on Medium and people would just be like, yeah, I know. You're spending like 12 hours a day doing that and you just only talk about that. And I'm like, I know, it's cool, right? And they're like, no, no.

God, I relate so much though where it's just like, yeah, I don't know. Other people meditate. But where you're like, when my brain gets stuck on something, I just got to feed it something else. Because otherwise, yeah. Yeah. I feel like I've been enjoying trying to understand crypto not as like a personal investment, but as like a concept in a world filled with people in a similar way where I'm just like, it's just a very fun puzzle to Rubik's round on. Yeah. How much money did you plug in when you plugged your money in? Was it like...

1%, 10%, everything you have? No, no, no, no, no, no. I would argue that at peak for me, the amount of money that I had in crypto was probably around $2,000 to $2,500. So you invest some money. You're enjoying it. It's becoming not your identity, but maybe your obsession. And then what happened?

Then Bitfinext, an anonymous cryptocurrency Twitter account and medium writer, had to fuck it all up for me. Kaz's encounter with an anonymous, life-changing Twitter account after the break. Surge Engine is brought to you by Rosetta Stone.

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Welcome back to the show. Here's where we left off.

So you invest some money. You're like enjoying it. It's becoming like not your identity, but maybe like your obsession. And then what happened? Then Bitfinext, a anonymous cryptocurrency Twitter account and medium writer, had to fuck it all up for me. That thing that fucked it all up for Cass is complicated. It concerns a cryptocurrency called Tether.

Tether, like a lot of things in crypto, is somewhat hard to explain. But here's what you need to know in order for this story to make sense. Most people buy their cryptocurrency from exchanges, places that buy, sell, and store currency. And there's a huge Bitcoin exchange called Bitfinex that was very publicly hacked in 2016. At the time, it seemed possible that people would lose confidence in this exchange. But they didn't. And part of the reason why is that the exchange found a new store of money.

They said they had a large supply of another cryptocurrency called Tether. Tether is a stable coin, meaning its value holds stable, not volatile like Bitcoin, because each Tether is backed by one US dollar. So these Tethers were a reason to feel confident about this exchange, Bitfinex. That was the claim. But Cass found a Twitter account from an anonymous person who claimed to be a whistleblower, who was saying, these guys are not being honest. They don't really have dollars backing up their Tethers. They're basically just making money out of thin air.

This critic of Bitfinex, confusingly, tragically, goes by the name Bitfinexed. Like, ends with an E-D. I'm sorry. I wish it weren't so, but it is. Anyway, Cass sees Bitfinexed, the critic, making these claims. He sees him demanding that Bitfinex, the exchange, release audits to prove they're on the up-and-up. And he sees that these audits just aren't materializing.

And by late 2017, Bitfinext, with an E-D at the end, is making a lot of noise because this promised audit is nowhere to be found.

And a lot of people assume he's just a conspiracy theorist and a nut job. And they got really, really mad. Their reaction to him doing that was to threaten to sue him, was to someone put a hit on him. I'm not going to name the guy's name, but he's a well-known dude and he's on Twitter. When Cass says someone put a hit on this critic, he doesn't mean like to physically hurt them. He means someone was offering a lot of money to dox their identity.

When these attacks came to light, what really bothered Cass was just how other crypto people reacted. Instead of trying to be like,

We apologize. Actually, these these are good questions. Let us work on answering them. The response was, hey, fuck this guy. Let's ruin his life. Yeah. And I was not into that at all. And my knee jerk reaction was to be like, well, I'm on this guy's side and I am not on their side. And oh, if you guys are going to treat people with questions this way and I clearly don't understand what I'm invested in. Fuck this.

So this is the moment that turned Cass, the moment he went from being a crypto fan to a full-blown skeptic. Early 2018, he sells his crypto and starts trying to warn other people that not everything is what it seems. And so where were you? What was your forum for your skepticism and criticism? It was simply Twitter. I would go on Twitter. At first, I was pretending to be... I was a...

satire account, essentially. I would pretend to be the CFO of Tether and Bitfinex, and I would go on there and- Very niche comedic work. Oh, way too niche. Way too niche. And as soon as I became this satire account for a CFO of a cryptocurrency company, I was getting real traction. And

I think there is something to be said about the dopamine hit that you get from likes and retweets and all of that stuff. One of the cleanest, strongest drugs. Yeah.

Totally, totally. And so I got into it that way. Right. So I started getting those likes. I started getting those retweets. I was writing little papers where I was saying like, oh, Tether audited for 10 billion dollars. Check it out. And just would sign my own name or something and and post it. And, you know, people were enjoying it. But at some point I decided to take it a little bit more seriously. By this point, Bitfinext, the critic, had actually disappeared. He was laying low because of legal threats.

and Cass decided to pick up the mantle. He wrote his first two articles on Medium. One was an interview with the at-the-moment reclusive Bitfinext. The other was almost a piece of allegory. It was this little essay about the WorldCom scandal. He wrote about that memoir from the auditor who'd uncovered everything, Cynthia Cooper.

The woman whose book starts at the baby shower. I basically wrote a book report. It's like a 26 year old, 27 year old man. I wrote a book report about about this book. And again, this is one of those moments where you you have a reckoning. That article got shared immensely and.

Also got featured in a little snippet from the Financial Times, which I hold in high regard. WorldCom, similar to like Enron, which everyone remembers Enron. It's not as niche. But I remembered WorldCom because they famously had these advertisements on TV with Michael Jordan. And Michael Jordan would be with like Taz, the Tasmanian devil. And they'd be talking about the great rates for WorldCom and like...

I literally remembered this and just went, damn, that was a massive fraud and no one remembers it. And when I started reviewing it, there were all these there were all these analysts and people from the 1990s saying, like, these numbers are great. And then anyone that would question it, anyone that would be like, well, they seem kind of like fudged. People would just be like, oh.

What's wrong with you? You seem like you hate innovation, you know, like the same kind of responses that you have now. And I wanted cryptocurrency people who I know are much younger than me to take heed of this idea, because one of the responses that I would get when it came to Tether or Bitfinex, when I would talk about, well, we don't really know anything that's going on there. There's no audits. There's no we have no idea what's going on behind closed doors.

A lot of people would respond to me and just say, like, they're these multibillion dollar businesses. They're the most successful cryptocurrency businesses around. Why would they commit fraud? Why did Enron commit fraud? It was the number one gas company in America. That seems silly, doesn't it? Like it people don't reflect on like it doesn't matter if you're rich. You can totally commit fraud. That has nothing to do with it. And.

My idea with WorldCom was to be like, look, this was what was perceived as a hyper successful business by everybody. And for a decade straight, you could have made massive amounts of money just buying their stock. But in the end, even if you walked away a multimillionaire from WorldCom, the reality is that it was a fraud. The reality is that these people were lying to investors and doing it.

To benefit themselves. And this is a lesson that people in this in finance and I don't not cryptocurrency in finance forget over and over and over again. Every bubble, they seem to forget that, like when cash is cheap and moving quickly, people just make stuff up.

And one of the things I'm just never, ever, ever going to forget is that Cynthia Cooper writes in that book. The auditor. She's the auditor. Sorry. She's the internal auditor for WorldCom. And she was, you know, she was having to call out her bosses. She's having to call out the CEO, the executives of this company. And her takeaway at the end, which still like it's so remarkable to me because it just it couldn't be me as much as I wish it could. She she says that.

These these frauds and these scams like it never starts out that way. Nobody like goes into a business like this and goes, I'm going to rip off the whole world. It's not how anyone operates. You take one step in the wrong direction and then it just snowballs after that. And she like held no animosity for these people. You know, we're all God's children and like just so forgiving and.

And and I wish I wish I could be like that. I wish I could be a little bit more forgiving for those kind of sins. But, you know, I think about I think about the people who get the death penalty in our country. And there's a lot of bad people in America and a lot of bad people in the world. And I don't I'm not a pro death penalty person, but.

I reflect on like Bernie Madoff and how many lives he ruined, how many people probably committed suicide because of the things that he did. Yeah. And people think like finance is a nonviolent crime or something like that, that you can do this Ponzi scheme of 30 billion. And who knows? Who knows how many scams and schemes and people will get hurt from from all the different garbage that's floating around cryptocurrency right now. Yeah.

So what you see your role as this thing's going to happen. My job is to try to like push people away from the bad stuff and make them understand what they're getting involved in. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah, I want I want I want I want people who feel like they need this this tool to feel empowered to use it and not feel ashamed to use it. But at the same time.

I want to make sure that people who are like, oh, I should just buy some baby doge coin or whatever. It's a lottery ticket. I want them to be like pausing and stopping and thinking about this stuff before they just do it. The thing I've noticed that sometimes puts me off with the skeptics a little bit is there's like there's no I'm not thinking of like a particular person, but there's been like a couple of times where I've seen people.

It's like I imagine what motivates them. They're like starting motivation has been like, I'm worried about people losing a lot of money. But then they'll talk about something financially horrible that happened in the space that probably destroyed some people. And they'll be like, you fucking idiots. And it's like, wait, those are the people you're supposed to be on the side of. It's funny that it's good that you bring that up, because I do want to say that, like,

In 2018, when I started trying to pick up the mantle when Bitfinex couldn't be around, that is how I saw myself. I saw myself as being some savior to all these people who wanted to not lose money. And I just want to say, first of all, what a naive perspective. Why do you say that? Because it should have been very obvious to me from the very beginning that Bitfinex

Imagine imagine doing this in any situation you walk into let's say we won't say any specific casino but you walk into a Las Vegas casino the biggest casino in Las Vegas you go in there you walk up to the guy at the slots machine who you just you see him just going like like that you know pulling the handle over and over again and you go hey man I just want to let you know slots are a scam.

He's like, thank you, Cass. Yeah, exactly. Leave me the fuck alone, bro. Go away. I don't give a fuck. Yeah. But but instead of going into the casino, I just like am doing a weekly show that is presented on Las Vegas public television saying, like, here's how casinos really get you.

There's actually like hope in that, right? Yeah. The idea is that I can maybe try to talk some sense into people who aren't already neck deep in the thing, because I think what you're talking about is true. You hit this. Not only are you being hypocritical because I definitely laugh at people when they lose a fuck ton of money on a total obvious scam, but you are being this weird like you're trying to be an angel. And that's just not reality, man. Like,

You're not going to save anyone who doesn't want to save themselves. It's such a cliche, but it's so obvious that if someone wants to go gamble their life away and that feels fulfilling to them, you can't take it away from them. A very personal experience, and this is getting back to my parents, I tried to get my mom and dad, both of them, to stop drinking and stop smoking. Oh, wow. How old were you?

Oh, God. When I first started getting my mom to try to stop smoking, I was probably 16 years old. And full disclosure, I smoke now. So it's like, great. But I tried desperately to tell her not to smoke. Don't smoke. It's so bad for you. It's the worst thing. You're going to die young. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. At the end, when my mom was dying and not from lung cancer or whatever, but like when my mom was dying, she was like,

I would never take that away from her. If she wanted to have a cigarette or a drink, you know, have a cigarette or a drink for God's sakes. If that's what's going to make you happy, do it. So my hope is that by this point, 30 minutes and as many tangents into this conversation, you understand why all those tangents hopefully add up to something. Like a more complete portrait of this person, Kaz Pianci. I want to explain to you why Kaz was a person I chose to listen to,

and to trust. Because the challenge that crypto really presents to a reporter, to any outsider, is just who to listen to. Because the skeptics, the true believers, all of them are making big claims about a future that no one can actually see. And so who you take seriously, it often tells you as much about your own biases as anything else. So why did I gravitate towards this person? Talking to Cass, I remembered something a writer I really admire had said, this guy who'd covered crypto for years.

He told me that there is something about crypto in particular that seems to drive its critics slowly crazy. Which totally makes sense. I mean, it would drive me crazy. Scammers pull off the straightforward heists and then show back up asking for money again months later and sometimes get it. Questionable business practices are pointed out and the market hardly seems to blink. Or even just consider this. At the time Cass divested his crypto holdings, the price of Bitcoin was like 3000 something per coin.

As he assiduously called out problems in the space for the next few years, the price rose up to a high of $65,000 last year. That would drive me crazy. But Cass, well, I asked him if he'd been driven crazy. He said he was crazy before he got here. A nice enough line. But I think the real answer for why he's okay, and the answer for why I gravitate towards him, might be the same. Cass is at heart a curious person.

I don't mean curious like he loves mysteries. I mean curious as in open-minded. He tolerates complexity, he finds most things funny, and he's empathetic in a way that honestly is not all that fashionable right now. I really like those kinds of people. My bias is towards curious people. Cass has opinions that surprise me, that don't follow directly and obviously from his other ones. He has friends I would not expect him to.

Like here he is talking about some of the people he's met online who invest in crypto. I mean, to be fair, I've met a lot of people in this space who were opposite end of my spectrum, who are just some of the best people I've ever met in my life, who 100 percent are in like all of their net worth almost or something that have earned multi millions of dollars from this. And and we get along great.

Easy, easy peasy. I mean, my hot sauce guy is one of my great friends on on cryptocurrency Twitter. So it's like your hot sauce. What do you mean when you say your hot sauce guy? I like this. One of my great, great friends on cryptocurrency Twitter is.

We met and we bonded not over coins or arguing about Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever. We met because we both love food. We both love, love, love food. And he just was making all this hot sauce. And I was like, that looks awesome. And he's like, oh, I'll send you a bottle. Right. And so then you enter like there's these different levels of trust. You're like, oh, OK, so I have to give you my address and my real name. And then, OK, I hope you're not going to share it. And then you get you. Then I get it.

a not poisoned hot sauce from my good buddy on cryptocurrency Twitter. And, and since then, you know, we've, we've hung out. He's an awesome dude. He has kids and a wife and a family. And he like real things that he cares about way, way more than cryptocurrency. Um,

And those are the people that I don't have any issue with people speculating, gambling, betting on the future. None of that bothers me. I just when people become profit maximalists, whether you're an oil magnet or a cryptocurrency bro, I don't that's disgusting to me. Cass is bothered by extremists, by the crypto investors who seem to take the movie American Psycho as lifestyle advice.

But he'll tell you he disagrees with the extremists on his side, too. Both sides are so extreme. There's people who I love. There's people who I follow and think are hilarious. I'm not going to name names, but there's people who I love and I think are hilarious who say it's all a scam. It's all totally a scam. It's horrible. It's the worst thing ever. And I, like in many ways, disagree with them. I think that Bitcoin is horrible.

Really cool. Is it as useful as, say, email? Probably not. Like, do I think DAOs are going to be a new social labor movement? I do not think so. No. Do I think that the technology of the blockchain will change human psychology? Absolutely not. No other. Nothing else. No other. Yeah, exactly. No other technology has. Why would this? Yeah.

Do I think it's useless and a Ponzi scheme? Like, it's hard to it's hard to convince me of that. And the reason I say that is just from having gone and seen whether it's useful for criminals or governments or individuals or refugees or journalists in countries where they're being censored.

it can be a useful tool for a lot of different people. And the same way that like a knife can be useful for a chef or a murderer that doesn't take away from the fact that like knives are important tools that people need. Um, so I, like, I don't hate Bitcoin and I don't hate cryptocurrency. And I, I know that it's a pretty bad cliche to say like the juniors out of the bottle. Um,

But yeah, none of this is going to go away. It's not going to just disappear. Crypto is not going away and neither is Cass. He's made it this far as a skeptic probably because he just finds so much of it very funny. He told me about one thing a Tether defender said to him online that he found hilarious. Someone told me and all of the critics and skeptics that Tether has done more for charity and humanity than any of us will ever do with our lives.

I love that shit. I love it. Like, there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. It doesn't drive me crazy. I think it's hilarious. And not only do I think it's hilarious, not only do I love when people tell me, like, you're so fucking wrong, you idiot. I love it. Bennett put it a really good way today, my co-host, my co-host on the podcast. He put it a really good way today. A fun thing that a lot of finance people say is...

Do you want to be right or do you want to be rich? As though this is a binary option. You cannot have a choice in one or the other, which already I have issues with, but okay. But accept it. Yeah, let's accept this as like a weird hypothetical. But okay, I guess it's pretty clear which one I would prefer to be. And it ain't super rich because I reflect on all of the major...

moments like that where people would tell other people how fucking dumb they were. Oh, Bernie Madoff. Bernie, you think Bernie Madoff is doing a Ponzi scheme, Harry Markopoulos? You idiot. You fucking moron. And for 20 years, he just took it. He just took it like a man. And then he just rubbed it in everyone's face and said, yeah, remember for 20 years when I said you guys...

were wrong and I was right. I look at companies like Tesla. I look at companies like just these massive things where people go, there's no way this business could ever fail or do anything wrong. And I go,

Just you wait. Just you wait until the next correction. I've lived through two of them. I've lived through two major corrections. I remember what happened to companies and commodities and things that people thought could never go down. Property? Property could never go down, said everyone in 2006. Everyone. Yeah. Right? So I just think it's cool. I'm cool with being wrong and wrong and wrong and not rich until I'm right. I'm fine with that.

It's funny because what you're describing basically is an investment. It's like you've invested in skepticism and you're like really sure it's going to pay off one day. And then that way you're like everyone else. It's it is that PJ. It is that though. For me, this is the path of least resistance and and not just like, is it comfortable, but it feels right.

Cass Pianci. He'd rather be right than rich. And he's super long on his bet that all of this shit might just come tumbling down. I don't need to, I don't need to be a billionaire. You can find him on his podcast with his co-host Bennett Tomlin, the Crypto Critics Corner. Also, since I recorded this interview last week, Cass actually got doxxed. He now operates under his real name, Orson Neustadt. Like I said, everything changes. That's all for Crypto Island this week. Next time, a whole other bet on the future.

One that shakes out in an unintended way. A story from the very beginning of cryptocurrency that begins with the short piece of paper that launched all of this. This episode of Crypto Island was edited by Shruthi Pinamaneni. Fact-checking in this episode by Elizabeth Moss. Sound design and mixing from Phil Demahovsky and Steven Jackson at The Audio Non-Visual Company. Theme music by Christine Andrews.

You can find new episodes of the show, subscribe to our free newsletter, and support our weird project if you'd like at pjvote.com. Also, you can email me there. I read everything. Thank you so much for listening. See you soon.