Logan Paul starts heavily promlting an NFT project. He claims that he's super passionate about it and has spent 1M of his own money into it, presumably to signal that it isn't a rug-pull scam like all his previous rug-pull scams. People put millions into it before it even launches, only for it to launch in a completely broken state and instantly lose value. Logan proceeds to never bring it up again and starts building hype for another project that totally won't be a scam. Rinse and repeat.

Maybe there’s some Darwinian forces at play here.

Afaik, Logan is just some internet moron. He has no credentials or life accomplishments, he’s just a pretty face with an attractive personality.

So if that’s who you’re going to trust to invest your money, maybe it’s good you don’t have as much money. Maybe that’s something that will actually improve our species.

Add in that these people who threw away all this money are happy to come in and laugh about it on camera (how did society get to this point where submitting your humiliation is normal?)… like what are we really upset about here? That losers are losers and they’re being taken advantage of?

That’s life. Maybe if people weren’t so insulated from their consequences they’d be raised to actually see these things from a mile away.

If you want to see it that way, doesn’t that mean “maybe it’s better” if fraudsters accumulate wealth with impunity?

Perhaps we should incentivize crime and fraud, since the victims are by definition less fit, and the attackers are by definition more fit?

I am not sure I care for this philosophy. It is timely though, I’ll give you that.

> doesn’t that mean “maybe it’s better” if fraudsters accumulate wealth with impunity?

It’s an argument against using public resources to pursue him. The victims could sue him for money damages, and in the process arrange the facts such that a prosecutor can jump off them versus launching an independent probe.

So, justice should be a privilege only to those who can afford lawyers?

The resources of the justice system are despairingly finite I assure you. People get away with worse crimes than financial scams.

Is anyone prosecuted for crimes less bad than these financial crimes? That seems like a better test than whether anyone gets away with worse.

So who becomes the arbiter of which victims are "worthwhile" to try to seek justice for and which get thrown to the wolves? Do you think going down this path is likely to end up in a good place?

Why would it be beneficial for society to filter out people who make poor business decisions? Many of the greatest generals, politicians, scientists, and artists in history were terrible at business and fell for scams many times.

> Afaik, Logan is just some internet moron. He has no credentials or life accomplishments, he’s just a pretty face with an attractive personality.

Yes, combined with what appears to be significant narcissism with malignant tendencies. He’s so shameless though that it somehow convinces people who want to love him that his malignancy isn’t that bad. In fact, maybe it’s funny! Maybe it’s cool. Just keep watching, I guess.

I don’t want him to profit off of other people, I don’t want people to be scammed by him, and I think the situation is awful. But it’s nothing new. People like him are uncommon, but not totally rare and their impact is broad. We should all practice far better awareness of this.

Having said that, I don’t agree that Darwinism and economics should necessarily be overlapped this way. The Venn diagram would seem to have some overlap, but people are worth much more than what they happen to accomplish financially. This is just a narrow aspect of what it is to be human, and largely mediated by nebulous things which arguably can’t determine one’s worth from a personal or evolutionary perspective.

Just want to say, thank you, for capturing so much wisdom and distilling it into a well written summary/reply.

That’s very kind of you to say. Thank you! I think of most of the words I dump onto the internet as incoherent rambling so it’s relieving and even gratifying if someone finds a signal in the noise.

> The Venn diagram would seem to have some overlap, but people are worth much more than what they happen to accomplish financially.

Beyond that, the money lost by those who were conned is being gained by a con artist who will presumably use it to create more and better cons.

Eventually one of them might be good enough to rope in someone you care about or big enough to cause widespread damage.

I watched the video the other day when it came out and he interviewed several people that invested between 10k and 500k into the project. Seems like all those folks got taken up by the hype but the part I just can't wrap my head around is even then, how do you just dump that much money into something without any due diligence.

All the "due dillegence" that these guys seemed to have done is: "well Logan is rich and famous so this must be legit". I would have a hard time investing $50 of my own money just based off that, I don't know how you can convince yourself that investing thousands into this one crypto project is a good idea.

I agree with all of this, my only guess as to how some of these people could dump that much money into something without any due diligence, is perhaps their source of the investment was other crypto gains so it didn’t seem like real money in the first place. (Ie was not money they actually work for/earned nor ever had in their “fiat bank account”, so it all seemed fake/like Monopoly money.

Did they invest that much, or are they conspirators saying that they invested that much in order to convince other people to invest that much?

Side effects of easy monetary policy and low education of the wealthiest population in the world.

> how do you just dump that much money into something without any due diligence.

They believe they are scammers too, not the victims?

> So if that’s who you’re going to trust to invest your money, maybe it’s good you don’t have as much money. Maybe that’s something that will actually improve our species.

That money doesn't just up and vanish though. It's now in the hands of an actively malicious person instead of someone who just makes poor decisions, and our society is structured such that that money gives the malicious person more legitimatcy and power, increasing the harm they can do. I can't see how society is better off that way.

Problem is they’re giving their money to someone who is equally stupid

That’s not a problem and it’s bizarre seeing all these comments repeating the same message.

Our economic systems were not designed nor ever intended to be a system where good or moral people prevail the most.

But in this age I’m not the least bit surprised that people will go to that great extent of mental gymnastics to for the satisfaction of “getting” someone they see as a villain.

People dropped millions on tokens based on a celebrity's promise of those tokens being useful in a future fun game that lets you earn money. I guess the game never materialized.

Oh, so securities fraud. Have complaints been filed with the states’ securities regulators?

I hope the SEC wakes up. The amount of scams I saw on Fintwit and Cryto Twitter in 2020-22 were absurd

This one is still only a year old roughly. SEC gears will probably start moving soon.

This one is pretty blatant and very public.

This is cool!

BTW for anyone else interested - you can hit "show transcript" on any YT vid (with CC I'm guessing) - and follow along with the video and/or CTRL + F to find mentions of things.

On most screens "show transcript" will probably be hidden behind the triple dot menu to the right of the like/dislike buttons.

TL;DW: Securities fraud.

TL;DR: promotes an NFT project.

The TL;DW is that people are stupid, and they do what “influencer” clowns tell them to do, with zero critical thought.

This was exactly my thought. I have no idea how adults are following Logan Paul and dropping tens of thousands of dollars on his obvious crypto grift. I cannot wrap my head around it, I thought his audience was young, impressionable zoomers.

It wasn't even his first crypto scam! He'd already run thru the same thing with "Dink Doink" (which iirc Coffee mentions in the video). It's incredible.

Highly likely that a substantial portion of the victims, maybe even the majority, knew it was a rug-pull scam but thought they could get in, make a profit and get out before everybody else got screwed.

There's an old line that you can't cheat an honest man. It's not always true, of course. But one of the most reliable source of marks is people who are looking to get something for nothing.

Many of the cons run on “Better Call Saul” rely on this premise.

Yeah i wonder about this too. I think the popular perception is that his followers are particularly young and impressionable, so if the actual investors in the scam tended to be older it lends weight to that idea. There is an old saying that "you can't con an honest man."

That's definitely a possibility. If so, very expensive lesson to learn.

I think this view is giving a free pass to the malicious psychological manipulation involved by the scammers, in other words, victim blaming.

Anyone can be a victim of a scam, and nobody is at fault for falling for a scam except the scammers and the lax law enforcement around it.

I agree, but there are different levels of scam, and this isn’t a particularly complex one. Very little was required from the conned to figure out it’s a scam; e.g., the involvement of the “NFT” concept.

You can watch at 1.5-2x speed and you really don't have to watch, just listen.

npm install <topic I want to be an expert at without any of the work to become knowledgeable>

Seriously these are things that cause projects like crypto and nft's to get any ground, no one does the research, everyone waits for someone else to tell them what the point is, how it works, why its valuable or not.

IMO it's a too long video that should instead focus on explaining why "play to earn" doesn't work and can't work sustainably, regardless of whether it's from Logan Paul or someone else. Then it'll remain just as fresh for debunking the next scam.

I read/skimmed it with https://youtubetranscript.com/