Crypto Was a Scam, Crypto Is a Scam, and Crypto Will Always Be a Scam!

Hello and welcome to the Communisphere. I'm your host, TJ Walker and we are live. It's Friday afternoon. We're going to be doing some experimentation here, creating content, talking to you directly. My colleague Ben is posting in the comments section a link. If you want to, if you want to talk to me and even come on camera, debate, have a conversation, you can do so. And Ben, I'm seeing something on the screen that says we need something else for Twitter required. I'm hitting the button go live. Doesn't seem to be doing anything. Doing anything. I don't know if there's something you could do about that, but I'll let you worry about that. Anyway, we're going to dive right in. This first topic will be about the crypto clown show. You know who really loves cryptocurrency? Scammers, ransomware, hackers. And that guy in your group chat who thinks buying dogecoin is a retirement plan. Warren Buffett called Bitcoin rat poison squared. That's the right guy who made a hundred billion dollars by actually understanding value, not pretending that the JPEG of a monkey is going to pay your mortgage. And Paul Krugman, the Nobel prize winning economist, compared crypto to subprime mortgages, saying it's a Ponzi scheme that keeps reinventing itself. When economists are calling your investment strategy a cult with a wallet, it is time to log off. Crypto promised to replace banks, money and governments. So far it's replaced your savings account with regret and a very long term tax form. If you want to gamble, go to Vegas. At least there when you lose your shirt, someone hands you a cocktail. Okay, note to my editor, that will be the end of the short form there. Now I want to go a little deeper because, you know, crypto is something obviously a lot of people have strong feelings about. I'm no different. So I want to go over sort of the main messaging. We're told again and again, it's the next big thing, it's the next new thing, it's the next new thing. It's so important. But anytime I've ever asked somebody who owns cryptocurrency the following question, what value does it provide? I've never heard anyone give a good answer or even a real answer at any level. And that's really the problem. We know what the bad answers are. Bad answers. If you help scammers, criminals, people trying to ransom someone, we know about that. But typically if you ask someone who's a big believer in it, they believe in it because it goes up. Well, you could say the same thing about tulips. If someone keeps paying more for tulips, then tulips are great. And that happened in history. Just keep on buying tulips. Because if more suckers come along and start paying $10 for a $1 tulip or $1,000 for a $1 tulip, well, you'll just keep making money, right until the whole thing caves in. Now, we've seen a lot of ups and downs with bitcoin, and so many cryptocurrencies have just disappeared. Since this is the communiverse, I'm interested in how this idea is communicated. One of the ideas that is communicated about any cryptocurrency is it's the new thing. It's new technology. It's so sophisticated it's going to replace these outdated so called fiat currencies. But then you scratch a little, you look at the details. Cryptocurrency has been around since 2009. That's incredibly old from the standpoint of a new technology. I mean, that's basically ancient. Still, how often can you go to the local grocery store and pay with cryptocurrency? Can you go to your local convenience store, your local liquor store and pay for crypto in currency cryptocurrency? No, you can't. Now, there certainly was a time I noticed it in south Florida, especially in Miami, where you'd see all these signs, cryptocurrency accepted. Here we accept cryptocurrency. And it seems like, wow, this must be the new thing. It's accepted everywhere. Only one little problem. If you go to the store and say, hey, can I really pay with cryptocurrency? They're like, oh no, somebody just paid us a few bucks to put that bumper sticker in the wall and on the door. It was all a scam. So the biggest problem, as I see it with cryptocurrency is there's no clear use for it in payments or commerce. It's simply not a reliable use of commerce. Legitimate businesses simply do not need to use cryptocurrency. It's slow, it's inefficient, it's expensive, especially during peak network congestion. It's kind of a step backwards when it comes to financial evolution. The other problem is there's no intrinsic value. Now you could say, well, the US Dollar isn't backed by gold, it's fiat currency. But time out. The very same people who are saying the US dollar is so worthless because there's no Intrinsic value then want to turn around and say, well bitcoin is great even though it has no intrinsic value. Fiat currency is bad because somebody just established by fiat that it's worth something. Well that's essentially what's happening with bitcoin. So there's a lot of circular arguments going on here. It's really true speculation. No different from what I talked about with tulips. Now did some people make money on tulips? Yes. Have people made money with bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies? Well, yes, you can make money on anything. I mean I could make money saying this pen was used by Taylor Swift and I'll auction it off starting at $100 and maybe it goes to 200, 500, 1000, I could make money. But that's really just speculate. By the way, she's never seen this pen. It's just speculation and that's not real investment. So people talk about this being like a crypto gold and being a safe haven. Well, it fluctuates wildly. Now gold also fluctuates. I'm not a big fan of gold frankly. But the idea that it is countercyclical and it will be a great hedge during recessionary, there's simply not a single shred of evidence. It fluctuates wildly because it's speculation. Now the other a lot of big problems with crypto. Part of it is it's environmentally destructive. The amount of energy it takes to do this so called mining. Don't even get me into explaining it because it's so wildly complicated. You can say, well tj, you don't understand crypto. Here's the thing, I bet you don't either. And most people who invest in crypto, if you talk to them for more than five minutes and say, well explain to me again who created this, why, what the value is, who's monitoring it, how is it managed? They have no idea. And that's the problem. I see as a message that a currency currencies have messages. Believe in the United States dollar because at least until a few months ago it was backed by a stable government that kept its promises and made sound decisions. Often that was the argument behind the US dollar a safe haven. There's no real argument behind bitcoin except for one, which I'll get to in a moment. Other problems with crypto, it's used by sleazy skeezy characters because of lack of regulation and transparency in a lot of crypto markets. Now there is bitcoin and there are all the Others. I'm not saying bitcoin is great. All the others are garbage. I'm saying all of them are garbage. Doesn't mean people haven't made money, doesn't mean you can't make money on them. I'm saying that I essentially agree with Warren Buffett that it is rat poison squared. And I'm going to go over a few more reasons. I like Paul Krugman's phrase, that's techno optimism run amok. That as long as it's been around, all the hype, all the big shot, all the billionaires hyping it, no one has really figured out a real world use for this. And talking about banking the unbanked, they've either failed these solutions or they bring out new risk. They haven't really done much at all. In some ways this is very similar to the dot com boom which ended up as a bust. Similar to a lot of the deregulation that brought out the 2008 housing crisis. That certainly didn't work out well. And it involves a lot of magical thinking that once you scratch a little, it doesn't really pan out. It doesn't really work. That's the problem. Now there is one thing that crypto is good for. Paul Krugman doesn't give enough credit. A lot of other people don't give credit. But I'm going to spell it out for you right here. I think this is the real message that is communicated by cryptocurrency. It's a way for wealthy people, and I'm not anti wealthy people by some measures. It's a way for wealthy people to say F you to their own government. You can't dilute the value of my money. You can't devalue our currency and harm me with inflation. I've got this other currency here that's really the ultimate value of wealthy people being able to say F you to their government. And here I am in the United States. That obviously applies to the US Government and to the United States dollar. So if that's the main message you want to send, by all means continue to promote cryptocurrency. But if that's not what you think personally values you, I don't know why you would want to be involved with it. So those are my thoughts on cryptocurrency. This has been around since 2009. I get sick of hearing about it. I love, absolutely love when I see it plummet and people losing money from it. But it's not going to go away anytime soon. But just because Something doesn't go away doesn't mean it's not a horrible idea. A lot of cults have been around for thousands of years. They don't go away. Certain diseases have been around thousands of years. They don't go away. I put this in the same category special hello to my good friends on TikTok. I see so many of you have joined today. I'm TJ Walker, this is the Communiverse, that's the name of the show. We are live today. I will take your questions. I have a hard time reading it on my phone there. If you do want to join us live, you can actually join me right on screen. All you have to do is come on over to my YouTube channel, search for TJ Walker or Facebook or LinkedIn or basically any platform other than TikTok. As much as we love TikTok, it can't do the interface with Streamyard so it doesn't let me talk to you directly the way it does and share my screens. So Saitha writes in hi there tj. I'm a big fan of you man. Well Sativa, thank you so much for joining us. If you have any questions, thoughts on how crypto is communicated to the world, its value, feel free to share any other topics. We're going to be talking about a lot of topics today. Next in the news is Mr. Beast. I'll be talking about him just a moment and sharing with you some of my thoughts. Okay, so let me get note to editor. I'm gonna hop right in. We are gonna make some content for short form video. So we're trying to kill two birds with one stone here. We're going live from friends on TikTok and YouTube and everyplace else. I'm also making short form videos and long form videos to be edited down and posted later on social media. So occasionally I'll stop, we'll redo it. I'll make a mistake. Just as you saw right there. I am using a script for the first 60 seconds or so and then I'm sharing with you additional thoughts where there's no script involved. So that's what we're doing here today. So let me get this straight. Mexico gave Mr. B's accent? It's Friday folks. I think I'm stumbling even more. But say I thought I'm glad you're here. Others and to my friends on TikTok, if you have a question or want to join in, please feel free. There's a chance I'll see a question. If you do post it on TikTok. Okay, so note to editor, we're going to redo this. So let me get this straight. Mexico gave Mr. Beast access to ancient Mayan temples. They let him film a restricted pyramid. Watched him say, I can't believe the government's letting us do this. And now they're shocked. Shocked. He used the footage to plug his chocolate brand. Really? You've seen the thumbnails? You know the man turns every trip into a snack ad with explosions and money raining from the sky. Now the government's mad. He calls the bars Mayan approved and wants compensation and a public apology. Guys, this isn't a history documentary. It's a 60 million view marketing tornado with his name on it. If your permit didn't allow commercial branding, maybe don't let the world's biggest YouTuber and future $5 billion brand film at your most sacred site. Okay, you didn't get scammed. You got exactly what you signed up for. You didn't read the YouTube terms and conditions. Okay, note to editor, that's the end of my short form on Mr. B. Again, for those of you who didn't follow it, Mr. Beast went to Mexico somehow talked his way in, as he often does, into all sorts of restricted areas that you and I couldn't get into. Gave a tour of a Mayan temple, and in the middle of it said, hey, folks, look at my new Feastables chocolate bar. And maybe he was. I didn't see what else he was promoting, but that's how he pays the bills. He doesn't pay the bills with just ads from his YouTube channel. He has to do plugs within the segments. And he's a master at it. He's artful at it. He's great at it. And he's not exactly a secret. He's one of the most famous people in the entire world, on the entire planet. And the government of Mexico gave him credit and now they're trying to sue him. That just seems a bit rich to me. Maybe. And I don't know, I haven't talked to the government official. Maybe they're doing this hoping to manipulate people like me and others on the Internet to talk about this even more. If so, that's a brilliant strategy. There are certain people in public life, one of them in Washington, D.C. i won't mention his name. They understand the power of a lawsuit. Not to win court cases, but to generate publicity to get people talking. Just suing someone, if you never have a prayer of winning, if you have no hope of ever winning, can be a great strategy. I mean, maybe pay a lawyer 500 bucks to spend an hour using ChatGPT to put together a draft of a lawsuit. You file it, you tell the lawyer, that's it, we're not going to need you anymore. And then you put out press releases. Sometimes you can turn that $500 into $5,000, $50,000, $500,000, $5 million worth of publicity, which may be, in fact, what the government of Mexico is doing. And maybe I'm being played right now. What do you think? You can post your comments in the comments section. If you do it right here on the Streamyard function, I'll be able to see it and share it with the audience. We are live today. It is Friday, May 16, 2025. We're also creating short form, long form video that will be dispersed across social media over the next week, sometimes the next month. And parts of this will end up in my new podcast called the Communisphere, which I'm very excited about. We haven't officially launched the community sphere, but it is coming again. Special hello to our friends on TikTok, where TikTok does such a great job of instantly alerting so many people that you're live. You're seeing me at a different angle. If you want to see how people everywhere else on social media are seeing this and I'll be playing video clips that you won't be able to hear or see. If you're on TikTok, you can come on over to our other channels on YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, etc, because we are simulcasting live on all of those places today. So I do want to thank you for spending a little time with me today. And let's just do a little call out. I see Robin is with us, Wick is with us. It looks like Dale. I'm, I'm scrolling, I'm reaching across because my Alice is with us today and Cat has joined. So it is nice the way Tick Tock just instantly sends hundreds, sometimes thousands of people to a live stream. And if you do post a question, I will try to get to it before we end today. But it's harder to see it there if you post your questions right here in Streamyard. And I'll see it if you post it on YouTube or anyplace else. I will try to address it right away. So thanks so much for joining me. All right, next issue, I do want to talk about, and forgive me to those of you in India, in South Africa, other countries, we have people from all over the world joining US I am going to give a slightly US focused show today. More stories do relate to the US not all of them, but this next one is a US based story about a strike going on. Now. There are strikes. Unions put on strikes all over the world. I'm hoping there's some relevance to you with this as well, but it involves the New Jersey Transit engineer, so I'm going to hop right in. Note to editor, maybe I should do this to make it easier for when they edit and they can, they can see it. New Jersey Transit Engineers message delivered. The New Jersey Transit engineers just pulled a textbook media move and from a communication strategy standpoint, it is brilliant. They threatened to strike on a random Friday in May, not tied to a holiday, yet still managed to dominate headlines in the nation's largest media market. Why? Because they're not just moving bodies, they're transporting Wall Street, Madison Avenue and broadcast media executives who rake in seven and eight figure salaries while the engineers themselves average a little over six figures with overtime. The class contrast, that's the message. And they got it on the front page without lifting a picket sign. They didn't actually strike. They just made sure the threat was loud enough to get people's attention. That's leverage. That's smart communication. This wasn't about shutting down trains. It was about reframing who keeps New York and New Jersey running and how underappreciated they are. When your message makes the rich late and makes the news, you're doing media strategy, right? Okay, note to editor, that's the end of the short form video. Now a little more context. What's going on here? So the New Jersey transit and those of you who don't live in the United States, there's New York City, which obviously you've heard of, and then it's a small little island. Right next to it is this big state, New Jersey, and a huge percentage of Wall street executives, publishing executives, PR, advertising executives, people who make high six figures, seven figures, Wall street executives, some of them make eight figures a year. They still take the train in from New Jersey because even if you had a stretch limousine, your own driver, it takes too long in traffic. The train is generally the fastest way to go. Now I used to live in New Jersey. I used to take New Jersey Transit, the path from Hoboken to midtown Manhattan on a daily basis. So I'm very familiar with this train lines and the train station and by most people, people's standards across the world, the salaries these engineers are making seems high. 130. Some of the proposals, they would go up to $250,000 a year. So you may be thinking, my gosh, why are they complaining? Seems like they got it good, right? Well, this is New Jersey. So you have high state taxes and you have housing costs. I mean, a shack can cost you a million dollars in certain towns in New Jersey. So it's a very expensive place to live. And they look at the people using their service. So many of them have extraordinarily high incomes. They've decided, let's play our strike card or threaten to it for leverage to get more concessions out of the representatives on the government side. So am I saying they 100% deserve it? No. I'm looking at this through the lens of communication and how they're communicating. So far it seems to be good. They didn't shut down when there was a crisis in New York. They didn't shut down on 9 11. And people are fleeing for their lives. They're not risking people's lives. They're giving people notice. They haven't done it yet, but they are flexing their clout. And that can be a good thing to do in negotiations. Otherwise, why should someone pay you more? It's always going to be easy to say, hey, we like you. No pay rise. That's always going to be the safest thing, whether it's a private sector organization or a public sector organization. So I'll be monitoring that more. If you happen to live in New Jersey and are affected by this or feel that you are, please go ahead and let me know. I would love to hear from you. I'm TJ Walker. Thanks for joining me today. This is the Communiverse. It's a new show devoted to understanding, analyzing and exploring every aspect of communication in the world. My big belief is that your ultimate success in your career flows from how well you communicate. And your ultimate personal health and happiness comes from how well you receive communication, how well you analyze communication in a thoughtful way coming to you. So communication is about listening. It's not just speaking. You need both. So this show is about really trying to have a better understanding. Speaking, spoken communication, listening, receiving communication. My pledge to you is if you spend time with me in this show, in this time we have together, you will become a better communicator. Your life will be enhanced. And to help you with that a little, I do want to give you free access to my own communications coaching, which you can access by going to tjwalker AI. So check it out. Let me just show it to you right now. I Tried yesterday and it didn't work when I needed it. But we will try it right now. It's completely free the first few times you use it. And it's doing some pretty innovative things. It's coming up on a year old, although the video part is not quite a year old. So I want to show it to you, give you a little taste of it and I hope encourage you. And those of you watching on Tick Tock, you'll need to go to tjwalker AI because I can't show it to you with what we're doing. I can't pick up the phone, move it over here. So apologies for that, but those of you watching on Facebook, YouTube, anyplace else, you can see it. So we're going to take a look at the clone and see if we can talk to it. And this will give you a little bit of a taste of what it is, in fact, all about. So again, you just go to TJ Walker AI. You can text it a question. You can have like a phone call, an audio part, or you can do like a Skype video. I shouldn't say skype. Hi, I'm TJ's clone. How may I help you communicate more effectively? Hi, tj, for people who've never heard of an AI video clone, tell them what you're about and how you could possibly help them. Okay? And we're having technical difficulties again. So that is the, the nature of technology. I don't know why this has happened. I mean, it works pretty well the vast, vast majority of the time. And when I did this yesterday, as soon as I hung up our live feed, it worked perfectly. Try one more time. Tj, can you hear me? And now I'm going to have to be quiet for a minute. Well, that is stunningly unimpressive. I can't try to fool you there. There's no amount of marketing or spin that's going to make you like that. I, I do have to stress you don't get charged for anything like that. You can access the clone at any point, text, audio, video, and you don't get charged until you've used it a bunch. And we have all the kinks worked out. So I don't quite know what has happened there, but I'm going to try it, see if we can fix it as soon as we finish our show today. Also in the news, other communications issues. And this relates to funding of communication, funding of pbs, the Public Broadcasting System. And there are current funding battles going on in Washington, D.C. with lawmakers. So I want to give you my thoughts specifically on what's going on in some of the funding wars going on in Washington and weighing in on that. So hold on one minute. I'm going to get the the visuals ready. We can go ahead and and pull this up so you'll have a little context for that. So again, note to editor oh, Manus has stopped by. Manus, it's great to see you. Thanks so much for popping in. And Miles says love you to death man for holding your stand on crypto. Okay. Seriously, love you perspective. Did you know Mike, Michael Sailor has lost or has most bitcoin in world at average rate of 95.99.5000 US and they are leveraged. I'm not familiar with Michael Saylor, but Mattis certainly appreciate your perspective and thanks for stopping in if you want to come on screen and share. Happy to have you. We've posted the link right above. We can have contrarian opinions on crypto or anything else we're talking about here today. Again for reference, this is the communiverse. We're talking here about communication. How messages are communicated throughout our society, throughout media and one on one communication. That's really what we're looking at. And that's what is leading me to this story about PBS. So let's dive into this. Look, I like PBS. I grew up on Mr. Rogers and yes, I watched Curious George with my kid 100 times. But let's be real. It's time to end federal funding for pbs. These days, every highly educated professional on a PBS show like Curious George is a woman or a minority. The only clueless character, a well meaning but bumbling white guy. And you know what? That's fine. I'm okay with that. I'm not one of these people constantly complaining too woke. Too woke. That's not my position here. It's a choice. It's not a crime to have choice. But choices have cost. PBS only gets 15% of its budget from federal taxpayers and it's furloughing staff while asking for more money. During a time when Americans are struggling with inflation, housing and health care. It just doesn't seem to be the highest priority. We're not living in 1967 anymore. Rural America has Wi Fi, they have YouTube, they have Netflix and 10,000 content options. We don't have a national shortage of video. We have a shortage of common sense. Okay, so that's not the end of my short form commentary on PBS funding. And again, I want to be careful. I'm not bashing them but the way a lot of people do that, oh, they're too woke or they're too liberal. That's not the point. My point is just more broadly, there was a real need for PBS when it started. I mean, there was just nothing to watch. Certainly if you wanted your kid to learn something, there was nothing on TV. I mean, when I started watching public TV in the late 19, mid-1960s, Mr. Rogers was in his first year and he wasn't nationally syndicated. This was in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And I loved him. And there wasn't really anything else to watch other than Captain Kangaroo, which I also watched. But these days there are Thousands, millions of YouTube channels that any parent who wants to give their child educational programming can get. And it's not that PBS doesn't do good things, they do a lot of good things. But there's an infinite number of good things that a federal government can do and finite amounts of money. I simply think, especially when I see how refugees are being stranded around the world today. I'm not talking about the white Africaners. When I see all the refugees in war torn areas around the world starving to death, we're cutting money for them and potentially continuing funding pbs. I just think that sends the wrong message to the world and to US citizens. Let's get some other comments coming in here. Modest is talking about crypto again, bans. By that I mean Sailor buys bitcoin, uses leverages for bonds and uses bond. You started off with bond and uses bond money for more bitcoin. And so on. The greater fool theory, over and over again, lacking common sense. We got vintage tj. Okay, so yeah, the greater fool theory is that it doesn't matter if you're investing in a real business that has real value or not. As long as there's a greater fool coming around willing to pay a little bit more. Doesn't matter. You win. And it is true at some level. That's why tulip mania was such a big thing. Centuries ago. Someone was willing to pay more for your tulip than what you paid for it. You still made money. It always works right up until that moment when it doesn't work any longer. Now, many people have predicted that cryptocurrency will go bust once and for all, and that's it. They've all been wrong. So let me be honest and fair here. Those predicting that it's just going to go poof one day have also been wrong for the last 18 years. Essentially it came out 2009. So 16 years. Cryptocurrency has been around since 2009. So for 16 years, people predicting that it's going to implode and go to zero and everyone's going to lose everything, they've been wrong. But those who've contended it's going to take off, there's going to be mass adoption, it's going to replace so called fiat currency. The they've also been wrong. And I don't see them admitting it. I do. I have seen people who predicted it would go bust and they were wrong admit it. So I do see a bit of a difference there when it comes to the intellectual honesty of people. I want to switch over in a moment to a different topic. That, to me, does not get enough attention in our culture, because it's like talking about air. Air is everywhere. We breathe it in all day long. I'm talking specifically about diet, drinks.