AI in the Classroom, Chatbot Crime Warnings & Crypto Crash | MrBeast Insider Scandal

Ultimize. More than half of American teenagers are now using AI chatbots for school, and most think cheating with them is normal. When someone uses ChatGPT to plan violence, does the company have a duty to warn? Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value even with maximum political support in the last year. A Mr. Beast employee gets caught making suspiciously perfect bets on his own show, and the Epstein file release meant to bring transparency instead left key FBI records missing. All that and more today on Filtered. Welcome to Filtered with TJ Walker. Hi and welcome. Thanks so much for joining our program today. Let's dive right in. Big, big news today. And I'm here with you every day Monday through Friday, typically analyzing the top business stories of the week, top cultural economic stories, and then looking at them through the lens of personal development skills. Let's dive right in. Teens Using Chatbots in School A new Pew Research center Survey found that 54% of American teenagers now use AI chatbots for schoolwork. Nearly 60% say cheating with AI has become a regular feature of student life. Usage has doubled in just two years. Students report using chatbots for research, math help, editing, writing, and even emotional support. Critics warn that heavy reliance on AI may weaken reading comprehension and critical thinking skills. Supporters argue students must learn to use these tools responsibly because workplaces increasingly demand it. The classroom is quietly becoming ground zero for the AI revolution. So what are we to make of this? I'm of two thoughts. First of all, people have got to stop panicking over this idea that kids are going to use AI. It would be kind of weird if they didn't use the latest technology that helps them learn stuff. It'd be kind of odd if no student ever used a calculator. Doesn't mean we don't want to teach math. Doesn't mean we don't want to have math tests without calculators. But the idea that somehow using a calculator to find out what the square root of 109 is is cheating in the real world as opposed to being on a test is kind of absurd if you needed to know the square root of 109. So we got to put things into the appropriate groupings. And students shouldn't cheat. However cheating is defined in their classroom and in their school. However, students do need to learn how to use AI intelligently. So this across the board ban saying students are not allowed to use AI in any way. That makes absolute new sense. Let's dive into some more of the facts again, 54% of teens are using AI for school work. It was only 13% as recently as 2023. Not really surprising, because AI was so new. Or at least the OpenAI chatbot, the ChatGPT that kind of revolutionized AI for the public had only come out the end of 2022. This survey looked at 1458 teens and parents. 10% use AI for most schoolwork, 44% use AI some or a little. 47 use chatbots for fun. I don't see anything wrong for that. As long as you're not falling in love with your chatbot. Full disclosure, tjwalker AI is a chatbot that has audio in it and some video components. To my knowledge, no one's fallen in love with tjwalker AI anytime since its inception. Okay, so where do we go with this? We need some ground. Anytime there's new technology, people have to figure out new rules. When people were making nuclear weapons, the first focus was how do we use it to end World War II. Only after that could people come up with the nuclear test ban, treating and other rules. Regulations, international law. We're kind of in that phase of discovery right now. But let's look at some bigger picture issues. Every single technology sparks moral panic in education. So in a sense, this isn't new. As I mentioned, using a calculator was considered cheating. Now it's still considered cheating to use a calculator during a math test. You have to learn how to do it yourself. Part of what's going here with ChatGPT is teachers have to learn new stuff. Now, I was fortunate enough to have a lot of great teachers, and I went to public schools from first grade all the way to 12th grade through my education. So I don't say this in some condescending manner suggesting all public school teachers are bad or people don't get good education in public schools. But public school teachers are going to have to really use AI. They're going to have to use chatbots regularly to A understand how to do it themselves, B know how to be better teachers, C know how their students are using it, and D know how to guide students using AI to not just cheat the system and save time, but to actually help students learn how to be more productive in life and in academia using AI. So they're going to have to do all of those things. That's what's really crucial. So other things we need to think about. Let's not forget Internet search used to be considered cheating because that wasn't the normal way of researching. I mean, when I was a kid, you had to Go to the library. You had to go to a card catalog and you had to go through these cards, and then you had to walk over here and spend half an hour in musty, dusty stacks of books. Or maybe you had to fill out a slip of paper and give to the research lab. No one's lamenting the fact that Google has made most of that irrelevant. So a part of what schools are supposed to do is teach people how to learn, teach people how to be good citizens, teach people how to think, teach students how to think critically. All of those things still apply. And schools need to teach people the skills they need to be a productive member of society. And there's simply no doubt that if not all, most people in the modern world are going to need to know how to use AI in order to be effective members of society. Certainly to be paid members of society, to be someone who can support a family, support children, to earn a salary. You're going to have to use AI. So rather than fighting this, I think schools are going to have to take a very proactive approach in figuring out how do we dive in quickly, deeply, and incorporate AI into everything we do. Because guess what? That's what businesses are doing. I'm a small business owner. Every single day, I use AI for everything I do. Every email, every video, every labeling of a video, every titling of a video, the distribution of every email, content, ideas. I'm still having to use my brain. What I'm saying right now is not coming from AI. The first 30 seconds of this show was generated with the help of AI after I curated the stories I wanted to talk about and asked it to simplify it and to write a quick, easy script. But AI is not telling me what to say right now. That's coming from me. There has to be a symbiosis. There has to be a symbiotic relationship between humans and AI in order for us to all advance. And the sooner schools realize that, the better part of this may mean, I hate to say it, because many teachers are overworked, some not all, some are underpaid. It's going to mean things like students are going to have to do written essays in class. Because if little Jimmy turns in an absolute Pulitzer Prize winning essay every week that he did at home, and then all of a sudden he's writing an essay in class and he can't string two sentences together and he doesn't know what a capital letter or a comma or a period is, then we have a problem. Then we know little Jimmy is relying Too much on AI to write his essays, and it's pretty easy to detect. There's a lot of research technology invested in trying to figure out if someone's used AI to write their essay. The problem with that is there's some false positives. A close family member of mine was accused of having used AI to write an essay in high school. Almost derailed his academic career. He's now in an Ivy League college and doing well. But there was a touchy moment there where he really had to prove something that's kind of hard to prove. But he swears he did not use AI to write his essay. He ultimately persuaded the teacher. But what if the teacher had not liked him? What if the teacher had a bias? Again, he didn't. It worked out. So I worry about the use of AI, but not just in kids teaching, but in teachers using it to punish students sometimes unfairly. I'm not saying that happens majority of the time. I don't know what percentage of the time, but it surely is happening some of the time. Schools are not supposed to be training laboratories where all you're doing is teaching kids how to put a rivet on a machine and they've got one scale and off you go. That's not the purpose of a school. It is to give a student a young mind, a grounding in a wide variety of areas. Math, sciences, social sciences, civics. So that they can do several things. A, they can be citizens of their community, their state, their country, their world. B, they can be a productive member of society and circumstances. They can have a lifelong experience of learning, improving themselves, growing, reaching, to use a phrase that sounds a little too woo woo for some to reach self actualization. This is all a part of the mission that schools have. And it's a big mission, there's no doubt about it. But you can't simply bury your head in the sand and pretend AI doesn't exist any more than schools could pretend that electricity didn't exist. I mean, there was a time when we had the little red schoolhouse and you had sunlight. There was no electricity, there were no computers, there was no typing. And there was change, what with electricity. There was change with the Internet, there was change with Google, there is change with AI and it's going to have to continue. Tj. I'm TJ Walker. This is filtered where we look at top technology, economic, social stories of the day and filter it through the lens of personal development. What's my real message to you? If you're a parent, don't scold your child for using AI, but I would monitor it. I would ask them how they're using it and more important, ask them what they're learning in school. Now some kids don't like to talk about it. My daughter's not fond of going through her day and what she learned. But try to engage your kids in what they're actually learning. And maybe they've learned how to use AI in ways that genuinely add value. It saves time. It adds value. I'm constantly amazed at how much better AI is getting every single month, if not every single week. There are things I ask and I'm not shilling for anyone. I'm not an affiliate. I'm not a paid spokesman for any AI program. I did sign on early with OpenAI with Chat GPT, just their 20amonth program. I'm not claiming it's better than Claude or any of the anthropic any other program. It just happened to be the one I picked for a couple of reasons. One, they were kind of first out of the gate to really market something like this. Two, I didn't want to give yet more money to big incumbents like Google. So I like the idea that it was the little guy. It's not necessarily the little guy anymore, but that's why I'm in it. But I'm constantly amazed at how when I'm trying to plan new businesses, new aspects of my business by asking the right questions and by giving the right challenges to ChatGPT, I feel like I'm getting the value of an Accenture, a major consulting firm that might charge me $100,000 for a six month research project and I'm getting it in 10 minutes. And it has fundamentally changed the way I do business. Chances are it's changing your business. It's definitely changing what's happening in education. We cannot just bury our heads and just say, well, I don't like it, so it's unethical. It's not that simple. We'll be right back after this break. Want to advertise here?

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You'll wonder how you ever did without it. Chatbots and the Duty to Warn After a man detonated explosives in a cybertruck outside a Las Vegas hotel, investigators later discovered he'd asked ChatGPT detailed questions about explosive materials days earlier. That discovery has triggered a difficult ethical debate. Therapists have a legal duty to warn if a patient poses a credible threat to other human beings. Tech companies do not. Yet chatbots increasingly function as confidants with users sharing deeply personal and sometimes alarming information. OpenAI says it monitors suspicious activity among hundreds of millions of users. Determining whether to alert enforcement remains a judgment call. So this is again another tricky issue. All of these issues with AI typically don't come with a very simple off ramble. Obviously this is the only way to do it. At some level, people do expect anonymity and sometimes people may want to use a chatbot for research on a novel they're writing and they want to come up with some apocalyptic story. Do we want every fiction writer or science fiction writer to get knocks on the door from the FBI three times a day? I don't know. But it does seem as though someone where it's pretty obvious to ChatGPT and to Google and to, you know, they know everything about us. Let's not kid ourselves. Someone's not a novelist and they're writing about doing physical harm to people or buildings. It does seem like that would be something that could be automated. As a quick notification to law enforcement officials, let's look at some more of the facts. 800 million weekly ChatGPT users. This is around the world. 54% of teens use AI for schoolwork. The Cybertruck bombing happened January 1, 2025. Seven bystanders were injured in the Vegas explosion. The driver had consulted ChatGPT five days prior. So that's a lot of time. I don't think anyone expects chat, GPT or any big tech company to monitor things in real time and say, oh, this guy just chatted or just asked how to commit this crime. They're on the way now to do it and they're going to be doing something horrible in a half an hour and we're going to go through all of our checks, balances, internal checks, legal, and send that to law enforcement. But this was five days. Five days is plenty of time for AI, which does so many things instantly to figure out this could be a problem or society. Maybe some of these $500 billion we're raising could be spent on safety and security like this and notification with actual real human beings looking at some of this stuff. So the driver asked about tannerite and gun calipers. I don't even know what those are, but obviously it resulted in a lot of people being injured. Seven people being injured. OpenAI created auto investigator monitoring channel. Canadian suspect was flagged in June. Eight were killed in a British Columbia attack. An accountant was banned before the attack occurred. Okay, but if someone is using ChatGPT to figure out how to, you know, end the world and to come up with weapons for that, having their account banned probably isn't something that's really going to motivate them. Probably not something with, ooh, I better not do this. I could get my account. They're planning extremist things quite often at the end of their own life as well. So there's got to be something a little more punitive than just losing your account. According to Sean Zadig, this is the chief Information Security Officer at Yahoo. I didn't know Yahoo still existed, but it does. This is what Sean told the New York Times. Generally, if we become aware of the content in question, we have an obligation to act. Maybe not a legal one, but an ethical one. So one of the questions is, should we turn it into a legal one? That's a very fair question. Ryan Callow points out, this is a law professor at the University of Washington. If you're a therapist and you know someone will get hurt, you have an obligation to warn the people who are being targeted. Now, ChatGPT is not your therapist, but should they really get off the hook if they are essentially aiding and abetting criminal activity? I mean, that's what's happening if you're giving people information on how to cause harm. Build tools of destruction. Tim Marple, a former OpenAI investigations team member, told the Times. It forces them to share information about how their product is potentially exacerbating the threat environment. Talking about calls for AI to share its information with law enforcement. So these platforms are always battling between safety and privacy. Openness for everyone versus public safety. These are not always easy things. But at some point, if someone is talking about actions that could result in physical harm and death, it appears to me that would cross the line. All sorts of red lines have been crossed at that point. And at some point, you give up your right to privacy. I realize there are privacy absolutists and there are those in the tech world who think any regulation of technology, you're somehow a luddite. You're somehow anti capitalism. No, my friends, every industry is regulated. The automobile industry is regulated. The airline industry is regulated. You don't even hear airline executives say, well, yeah, we need a free market system. If we don't want to provide safety belts for our customers, we shouldn't. No one bothers doing that anymore because it has become an accepted part of our society, our fabric. It's a part of our capitalistic system that in order for there to be free enterprise, there has to be rules, there has to be competition. There can't be competition unless there are rules that are fairly applied to everyone. That's why you can't just sell a car that has no headlights. You can't say, oh, we're saving 50 bucks. Some customers might want to save 50 bucks, so let's just sell them cars without headlights. You can't do that. Why? Because people would die. It would be a deadly, deadly decision. So the market simply doesn't solve all problems. Libertarians in their fantasy like to think it does, but it doesn't. If you really think that the best government is zero government, my friends, then go vacation in Libya. See how that works. Go buy a slave in the public marketplace, which you can do in Libya, and see how that makes you feel. If you really think government is always bad. So look, I'm not a socialist, I'm not a communist. I want the vast, vast majority of human interactions, of economic exchange of businesses to be conducted in the private sector, through the private sector. But we do need government from time to time for things like this. Regulating big tech companies, saying, look, if someone is doing something and it sounds like they're really trying to cause physical harm to people, then by all means, it is not just the ethical thing to do, it needs to become the legal thing to do. Notifying law enforcement, then perhaps it's a false alarm, in which case, not a lot of harm, but perhaps the person is caught before they can cause massive death and destruction. I'm TJ Walker. This is filtered. There's lots more to come.

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not just smart, it's personal. Want to support the show? Skip the ads and buy me a coffee. That's buymeacoffee.com tjwalker Crypto slumps Despite political support, Bitcoin has fallen nearly 50% from its recent peak and roughly $2 trillion in crypto market value has gone poof. It has evaporated. That decline is unfolding during what most, or many at least describe as the most crypto friendly political environment the industry has ever seen. Despite supportive rhetoric and legislative backing, adoption appears stalled at around 30% of Americans. And by adoption, I don't mean they're using it to buy their groceries. I mean they just, they own some of it. Even strong political support has not translated into deeper integration into the real economy. For critics, this moment serves as a stress test of crypto's long term viability. Now, I'm referencing a New York Times op ed piece today by the economist Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein. Full disclosure, they work for government quite often. Jared Bernstein in his case was a top advisor to the Biden administration. So if you want to discount them for that, you can. But you can't discount every single fact and the point they're making. So let's look at some of the facts here. Bitcoin, as I mentioned, down 50% in last fall's peak. Roughly $2 trillion have been erased. Since October, Bitcoin has dipped below $70,000. Most people don't either believe me in this or they just discount. Most people who've ever bought bitcoin have lost money. I know somebody who bought it for $5 and now they're billionaires. That's not what I said. I didn't say some people didn't make money. I'm saying most people who actually purchased bitcoin have bought high and sold lower. What happens when you buy high and sell low? You lose money. What? TJ people do that in the stock market? Yes, the stock market does other things as well. Back to crypto. So authors cite the FTX collapse as a fraud driven turning point. Now the crypto industry is now very politically active. They spent more than $100 million in 2024 politics campaigns. And let's face it, they bought off a lot of politicians. A lot of politicians who said this crypto stuff sure seems Scammy. The crypto industry went to them and said here, here's a thousand, here's another thousand, here's another, here's 10, here's 20, here's 100,000. Now how do you feel about us? And a lot of politicians of both parties all of a sudden said one of two things. They said I'd like this crypto stuff. You know what, I've had a change of heart. I like crypto or and this is frankly the worst of the two situations. They just stopped talking about it. They no longer talked about protecting their constituents from fraud and Ponzi and pyramid schemes. They just stopped talking about it. They took their names off of legislation that would regulate or call for the regulation of bitcoin more strenuously. They were both and this happened in both parties. My friends, it's not just one party. Now it is true bitcoin rose about 20% after the 2025 inauguration because their guy got sworn in. But it's going the way down since then and it's simply not going up in terms of overall percentages of the population investing in it. In some cases the mining hardware to mine these bitcoins is shifting to AI data centers. People are like eh, minerally they were going to make more money from this bitcoin thing. So the underlying resources are shifting. I want to share with you some of the most important points from the column. Again it's by two economists, Ryan Cummings and Jared Bernstein in a New York op ed piece today. Quote, outside of crimes and scams the technology is useless and its economics are even worse. Now I'm going to get hate mail for this. But you know what? Anyone who's ever tried to shut down any Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme gets hate mail. Because people who got in early in any fraudulent Ponzi scheme or pyramid scheme always think that their case is wonderful and anyone of the government is evil. I well remember this 40 years ago I worked for the Department of Banking and Finance in the state of Florida and we would shut down boiler room operations. Just absolute, patently provable Ponzi schemes where their money wasn't going anywhere. It was just money coming in to pay off new investors or old investors. Classic Ponzi schemes. And when we shut them down people would always scream bloody murder that the politician I worked for was doing this to get headlines and was a part of a scam. Well no, these were real frauds. It's happening again. I'm going to get hate mail as I do anytime I talk about crypto because the people who are in on the grift, knowingly or unknowingly, always think they're right and any regulation is bad. Some more points to be shared. The share of Americans holding crypto has been stuck at about 30% for the past four years. This is the most recent data provided by Cummings and Bernstein. Here's the bigger problem, when you really boil it down. Crypto is essentially a very, very expensive and not particularly efficient database. What do I mean by it doesn't really solve any problems? That's the real problem with Bitcoin and all cryptocurrencies. The only value is dependent on you finding a bigger fool to pay more for it than you did. Or if you want to commit crime or you want to extort someone or you want to kidnap someone and you want to be paid, in crypto, there's value there. Let's look at some bigger picture ideas. Speculative booms often peak when legitimacy finally arrives. But legitimacy doesn't seem to have arrived, ever. For crypto, it's legitimate in the sense that you have someone in the White House talking about how great it is because he's personally in on the grift. But it's not legitimate in the sense that people are using it to buy and sell products and services, which is the role of money. Financial manias don't need usefulness. They need new buyers. Whether it's a tulip bubble, whether it's any bubble, if it's a Ponzi scheme, if it's a pyramid scheme, and those things are often related and overlapping, but they're different. You can be a Ponzi scheme without being a pyramid scheme. But what you do need are new buyers in any kind of a pyramid scheme. And at some point you run out. That's the big problem right now for Bitcoin is It seems like 70% of the public, and I'm one of them, says, this is garbage, I don't want it. And when you run out of new suckers, new marks, new investors, that's when these things tend to go poof. They simply collapse under their own weight. Now, I'm not here giving you financial advice. You may have a huge port, a huge portion of your entire net worth in Bitcoin, or some cryptocurrency. I'm not telling you to sell it. You may have $500,000 worth today, and it could be worth $5 million next week, maybe. I can tell you that. I think ultimately it will be worth zero. I can tell you I hope it becomes worth Zero. Not because I wish ill on you, but because I think the whole thing is a scam and it's a wildly unproductive use of investment dollars. Here's a radical idea. Why don't you do what Warren Buffett says and Charlie Munger said when he was alive? And that is civilized people invest in real businesses that create real products and real services. That's also why he didn't speculate in gold and silver. He wants to put his money in real businesses run by real people. You can call me conservative, you can call me too pro capitalist, but I happen to believe and agree with Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. Civilized people invest in real businesses that create real products and services. Other points to consider. This is essentially private money. Private money experiments historically and in runs and ruin. Regulatory capture can be a business model, not a policy accident. At this particular moment, there does appear to be regulatory capture. That's just a fancy way of saying the bad guys have bought off and bribed the regulators to get whatever they want. So in fact some governments have tried and done it. The government could simply outlaw this tomorrow. I would argue not a single bad thing would happen to the real economy. That overall our economy would be much better off. They're not going to do that, certainly in this administration. But at some point it can happen. Now, when adoption stalls for something new like this, that's when the lobbying starts. And it's a bit comical because so many of the people behind bitcoin in particular and cryptocurrency in general, they're always beating their chest about their strong libertarian values, how independent they are. They're John Gal, they're right out of an Ayn Rand novel. And yet what are they doing now? They are lobbying governments and to take positions in bitcoin and cryptocurrency to essentially serve as a backstop, to essentially prop up the value they're looking for legitimacy from big government. In fact, the exact opposite of libertarian values. And that's what's happening right now. Because they can't find more suckers who want to buy this stuff. It's stalled. And that's always a big, big problem, whether it's a Ponzi scheme or a pyramid scheme, is when you run out of new suckers. So here's the bailout fear. It socializes losses and it privatizes gains. I do not want to see any more Bitcoin Bros. Bailed out, as we saw with Silicon Valley bank, where the Marc Andreessen's of the world, the big libertarian investors who have put so much money in crypto ventures, they still wanted to keep their money in a real bank. And when it went belly up, they went crying boo hoo hoo to the federal government and asked for you and me, if you're an American citizen, to bail them out. And like suckers, we did tech hype cycles, punish projects that can't show utility. We're in that phase right now where a lot of technologists, if they haven't put their whole portfolio in bitcoin and cryptocurrency, are starting to say, yeah, this isn't working out, this isn't really making us money. And that is becoming a part of our zeitgeist. Stablecoin regulation is a gateway to systemic risk. Some of this is so complicated I'd have to spend three hours talking about it. But that is when you tie some currency to a cryptocurrency and the cryptocurrency is tied to the currency again, which sort of negates the whole purpose of something like a bitcoin because it's supposed to be not dependent in any way on the battle fiat currency. But they're doing this to help themselves. But it could create risk for our entire economy. And that's the problem. When interest rates rise, the weak narratives can crack first. And that's what many people suspect is happening with these cryptocurrencies in a current relatively high interest rate environment. It's not looking good. Okay, I've talked about this a lot. Every time I do I get 99% or I won't say 99, 95%. Criticism. TJ, you're too stupid, maybe. TJ, you don't get it. True. TJ why do you like fiat currency? It's not backed by anything. Actually not true. So called fiat currency, that is the United States dollar is backed by something. It's backed by the full support and usage of the federal government, which is a pretty big deal. It's backed by the power of the United States military, which is a pretty big deal. It's backed by tradition and the last 90 years or so. So there are many, many things that are backed up by so called fiat currency that cryptocurrency doesn't have. It's backed up by all sorts of anti fraud laws, banking laws. If you have all your money in a bank and someone steals your password, guess what? The bank's got to give you more money, you have some protection. Someone steals your cryptocurrency key or you just forget it one day. Sorry, you are out of luck. Again, I'm not giving you financial advice. Buyer beware. I'm not telling you to, certainly not telling you to buy cryptocurrency. I'm not trying to tell you to sell. I do think not all the time, but most the time really bad businesses that aren't solving a real problem eventually go poof. But whether that happens next week, next month, six months, six years or 60 years, I can't tell you when it's going to happen. But I do predict that it will happen. And on that day, I will be in the streets if I'm alive, doing a little dance.

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success your direct line to everything I do. Couple more points I wanted to add on this. This whole cryptocurrency, I would argue nonsense, but it is a big deal to a lot of people and it's increasingly a large part of our economy. So a couple other things I do want to point out that legitimacy is the oxygen. So every time someone endorses this, it helps prolong it, it doesn't necessarily make it real. Complexity can be camouflaged. So once someone starts questioning bitcoin, people say, well, you don't understand it. And then you ask them to explain it. They never can. I've asked a lot of my friends who do invest in bitcoin to explain to me how does it actually work. If I ask you how does Tesla work? I could say, okay, they build this car and it's electric and people like driving it, so they pay it money. I can explain to you in some rudimentary fashion how Tesla makes money. People cannot actually explain how cryptocurrency creates value. So the complexity is the camouflage. So there's so many commonalities between what's going on with bitcoin and what other traditional scams, multi level marketing scams in particular. To me, not enough attention has been given to the fact that so much of what happens in cryptocurrency is really similar to multi level marketing scams. Recruitment beats retail and so many network businesses, they're not making their money off of creating something of value, not creating a product people really want. They're creating a dream, they're selling a dream. You're going to be rich. Buy in, buy in. That's been the case with so many multi level marketing companies and it's been proven again and again and again. So many of them make their money from their so called sales force. Their sales force isn't selling. They're making their money by tricking people into thinking they're going to get rich. That's essentially what is happening with bitcoin as well. There are all these regulatory gray zones that create long runways for questionable schemes. Whether it is door to door sales for multi level marketing, some get shut down right away. But others exist for decade after decade after decade. But when you talk to people who invested in them, they're like, yeah, I got a whole garage full of this product. I got all excited, I spent $10,000 and after five years we just threw it all away. When we moved, it was a complete loss. But I'm embarrassed about it, so let's not talk about it. That's what happens in so many multi level marketing scams. In this case, you don't have a garage full of bitcoin, but you may end up with something equally worthless as a garage full of old shoe polish or makeup that nobody wanted that had higher prices. Similar to a lot of multi level marketing. We could easily end up with just a few winners with bitcoin and cryptocurrency and they become the marketing proof of life. Here's Jim. He was a janitor making $5 a day and today he's a billionaire because he bought bitcoin early. So you should too. The whole Horatio Alger story is a part of almost every multi level marketing scam of the last hundred years in the United States. And it's very, very similar to how bitcoin is marketed today. There's all this lifestyle branding, there's the bitcoin Bro, the 25 year old getting into his private jet with the hot babe next to him with the bitcoin eyes. And they're selling a lifestyle. And I get it, the lifestyle can be attractive to people. But it can also be exactly how scams are created. There's the risk of what happens in a downturn. Now the last really big downTurn we had 2008. That's when all this was created. So there's an old saying the best time to start a new business is at the bottom, at the trough of an economic cycle. Well, it turns out that can be true for scams too. So bitcoin has never really lived through a major recession. Let's not forget downturns kill Ponzi schemes. That's essentially what happened to Madoff in 2008. When the overall market is going down so low, people try to take their money out to pay off other debts and that's when Ponzi schemes are exposed. So if we do have a recession or certainly a depression, it may be that everyone tries to get their money out of bitcoin quickly to pay off their other debts, and that could easily send the value to zero. I'm not hoping for a depression that puts millions or tens of millions of people around the world out of work. But if it did in fact end once and for all cryptocurrency, that would be a side benefit. Again, I'm not rooting for that, but it would be a side benefit. So I'm going to continue monitoring this. And just because 95% of you watching this criticize me for criticizing bitcoin and cryptocurrency, I'm not going to shut up about it because I'm here trying to help you discern the truth so that you improve your own financial state and that you don't get tricked by people financially. Hey, I'd be much better off saying this is the greatest thing ever and buy the TJ coin. That's when you should be suspicious of me, not suspicious of anyone criticizing it. Okay, I could talk about this all day long, but I don't want to. I really do not want to. So we're going to move on to our next issue. Kalshi and the Mr. Beast Insider trading case Prediction market platform Kalshi says it detected statistically anomalous trading tied to upcoming MrBeast video outcomes. After investigating, the company concluded the trader was an editor on the show with likely access to non public information. And that is a no no on these trading platforms. The employee was suspended for two years, fined $20,000 and reported to federal regulators. Beast Industries says it launched an independent investigation and reiterated zero tolerance for misuse of proprietary information. As prediction markets grow into billion dollar platforms, insider trading risks are becoming more visible. So this is another of many scams proliferating throughout our economy that just. It's like kudzu in the south when I was a kid in the 70s. You look at it, it'd be this little vine covering three Feet of a tree. You come back tomorrow, it covered the whole tree. You come back two days later and it's covered the whole neighborhood. That's kind of where we are when it comes to gambling everywhere. And yes, prediction markets is just a fancy way of saying gambling. If you are betting on your soccer team beating another soccer team at a game tomorrow or your favorite football team winning a game tomorrow, tomorrow hasn't happened yet. You don't really know the outcome. You're guessing, you're betting, you're gambling. And now we have a situation where some clever entrepreneurs said, hey, people like to gamble. They're too stupid to realize they're going to lose in the long run. So let's make it even easier. Easier for them to gamble on absolutely everything in the world. How many times the White House press secretary says the word the in a press conference. You can gamble on that. Will the person win or lose $500,000 at the end of the Mr. Beast video? Apparently you could place a wager on that. So let's take a look at this issue and specifically talk about how Mr. Beast handled it. I thought they did a class act. First of all, they were responsive to the media. They didn't just say no comment. That's what a lot of people do once there is a crisis. Oh, we don't want to be associated with, let's not talk about it. So Mr. Beast did make themselves available, which is it's now a 500 person company. This is not the kid in his bedroom the way Mr. B started when he was 12 years old. This is a huge company. It's basically taken over an entire town in eastern North Carolina and they have investors and they're a big deal. So they can't afford to be tied up in some sort of scandal that deals with fraud, especially financial fraud when they're out trying to raise money, perhaps become a publicly traded company. So let's look at some of the facts again. The employee was a 22 year old Artem Captur. Now he was suspended from the Kalshi platform for two years. Beast Industries, I think they've said they've just, they fired him. Here's what they said. Beast Industries has no tolerance for this behavior, whether by contestants or, or our own employees. We have long standing policy in place against employees using proprietary company information. We're doing everything we can, quote, to ensure the integrity of our workplace and trust with global audiences. So I give credit to Mr. Beast and his company. They were faced with a crisis just by refusing to answer questions or Being late, getting back to a reporter. They could have looked like they were in on it, but instead they come out smelling like a rose. They're cooperating with authorities, they're cooperating with Kalshi, and they are cooperating with the media. They're answering questions and all of their messages are exactly on point. From a crisis communication standpoint, they're saying this is a problem and we're doing everything we can to solve the problem. We are 100% on the side of people trying to root out this problem. They didn't get into all this nuance of, well, we didn't really know. And the employee is sometimes a good guy and hey, everybody does it. There was all sorts of messages where they could have been quoted and they didn't. All of their quotes are 100% on mess. I think they were smart in this case not to have Jimmy Donaldson, aka Mr. Beast go on the record and do an interview. They, they're a big company now. They have a CEO, they have a public information office. They put it out in a timely way. They gave quotes and soundbites to the media that they knew the New York Times and others could use in the story. Therefore, you did not see in this story and a lot of other stories, reporters running. And we reached out to Mr. Beast repeatedly and he refused to call us back and he refused to come back. You didn't see that because they did respond to reporters questions. I think we're going to see a lot more of this now. In this case, apparently where the, the employee screwed up is he made a whole bunch of bets. And I don't know if it was 10 or 20, but when you guess 10 or 20 times, right. On things where they are very low odds, you set off algorithms at Kalshi and they're like, eh, this is suspicious. We're going to investigate. And then they found out the guy worked at the organization. You can't do that. The problem of course is what if you're subtle about it? What if you only place one bet and what if you only do it once every three months and you go to different betting markets? It's couchy one day, it's another one another day or another month. Certainly possible that you wouldn't be detected. This is especially a problem with sports where if you're the pitcher and you tell your buddy, hey, my third pitch in the third inning is going to be a curveball and you have your buddy place a bet and you just do it once, maybe you can get away with it. This is Corrupting sports. And you don't have to give up the whole game. You don't have to throw the game, which presumably most professional athletes really would not want to do for a whole variety of reasons. But, hey, I know this person I'll be pitching against. I know that statistically speaking, they do worse with curveballs, and I'm going to be throwing some anyway. What's the harm in just letting my buddy know, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. My third pitch is going to be a curveball when I'm pitching against this one player. That's already happening. It's going to happen more and more and more. And I think it's a big problem. It's a big problem for our society because gambling is taking over everything. As mentioned in this program earlier, bitcoin is nothing but a gamble. It's a gambler that some sucker's going to come along and pay a higher price than today than what I paid for it. And Cauchy and these other prediction markets are essentially ways of just gambling, thinking, you know the future. Here's the problem. You don't know the future. I don't know the future. You can guess. Sometimes you can guess correctly. It doesn't mean you knew the future. It means you got lucky. It means you guessed correct correctly. So that is the real problem. Now, in this particular case, the guy made a total of $4,000 in trades and made $5,400 back. But that's when they froze the accounts before he could withdraw. So he didn't get to spend this money. Because here's the thing, Kalshe, whether it's Kalshee, whether it's Caesar's conflict of Interest Report. I have done media training for the Caesars company before. All of these gambling companies don't build their big offices. They don't build big casinos. They don't pay their executives huge salaries because they give out more money than they take in. That's not how they do it. They build big, gigantic, beautiful casinos. They pay their top executives high salaries because they take most of the money that comes to them and they give back little slivers of it from time to time to give you that intermittent reward so you come back and keep betting more. That is how it works. Kalshi Daily trading volume top $1 billion on Super Bowl Sunday. Oh, I'm not gambling. That would be a degenerate activity. I am participating in a prediction market. Talk about Orwellian speak. Changing words to make people feel better, to make something that should make you feel Slimy gambling into feeling smart and sophisticated. Oh, I'm doing prediction marketing. Absolute nonsense. $100 million had been traded on Bad Bunny during the halftime market. Whether they were betting on what he would wear or the playlist apparently was a big deal. People are betting on absolutely everything. Why do I want to talk about this? Is it because I'm paternalistic and I want to tell everyone you got to get up every day and do jumping jacks or you get fined? No. But I do care about you and I care about societal harms, especially when they are superpowered with billions of dollars of advertising and algorithms designed, all with the goal of getting you to do things that are not in your best interest. It is not in your best interest to bet, to gamble away. Children go hungry, houses are lost, divorces are accelerated because people think they're so smart and they know the future. You don't know the future. If you knew the future, if you could read the future, you would already be three times richer than Elon Musk. And I'm going to take a wild guess that you are not three times richer than Elon Musk. You cannot see the future. Now, we can all have hunches and we can act on hunches. In fact, it's impossible to be an entrepreneur, to start a new business without making a prediction on the future. In 1998, I did make a prediction that training and the type of training I do, media training, public speaking training, would go into the online world. And I started my first online course. Guess what? I was wrong in 1998, I was wrong in 1999, I was wrong. And I was wrong for 15 years. I was too early. So if I had made some prediction on Cauchy or anything else, I would have been absolutely, absolutely out of luck. Fortunately for me, I had staying power and I stayed around long enough for it to really take off. And they have 12 million student enrollments from 190 plus countries. But it's not because I was so smart to see the future of when it would happen. I just connected the dots and thinking, okay, people like training. The Internet's getting bigger. At some point this is going to come together. Having a hunch on a trend and then trying to create a real business around it is one thing, but betting that you know in advance exactly what's going to happen tomorrow, that is a surefire way to end up in the poorhouse. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me. I'm off tomorrow. We'll be having a best of. I am taking a trip and a little vacation and attending a political fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. But I will be back with you live on Monday. Thanks. Have a great weekend.