#Who the hell is getting payed WHAT for this man to acquire his five billion children?

[jackdaw-and-hattrick]

You know who I would like to meet? The Wayne’s social worker.

[xxisxxisxxis]

Gateway Drug | Part Twenty-Seven

Table of Content or Part Twenty-Six

Pairing: Douglas Booth!Nikki Sixx x OC

Word Count: 2.3k

Warning(s): Language, Hints at drug use

A/N: This wasn't the entire chapter, however tumblr's being weird and won't even let me create a new draft right now let alone let me upload a 4,044 worded text post so I'll upload the second part of this asap (probably tomorrow of they get their shit fixed on here) and there will be another update Friday. Have a good night:)

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I smooth my wavey hair down, taking the last giant velcrow roller out before putting my lipstick on and leaving the bathroom, looking for the car keys, unable to find them.

"Nikki, babe, where are the keys?" I call to him, looking in the kitchen and living room, heading to our bedroom.

He's passed out from a night of partying, Robbin still asleep on the floor.

"Baby." I lightly pat Nikki's face, not having the time to patiently shake him awake.

He groans, scrunching his face and rubbing his eyes.

"What is it?" He asks me, exhausted.

"Where are the car keys?"

"Mine or your's?" He questions, blinking at me to clear the sleep from his eyes.

"Your's. I can't drive mine until we get the driver's side window fixed, remember?"

"What? What happened to it?" He sits up and I raise my brows.

"Uh, well, you put your fist through it?" I remind him and he exhales.

"Oh...yeah." He replies. "They're in my pants pocket."

I don't give him time to reach for them himself.

My hand is in his pants pocket, grabbing his keys and pulling them out.

"Bye, love y-love, I'll see you when I get back." I stutter to cover my slip up, cutting myself off immediately before I can say, "love you", even though I've never called Nikki "love" before.

He doesn't notice it.

"See you when you get back." He mumbles once he's laying back down.

I slip my kitten heels on and head out.

"I love you" was one of the biggest Elephants in the room between Nikki and I.

We should have said it and we knew that, but we just didn't say it.

At first I was waiting for him to say it, then he never did...so I just decided it was something we wouldn't do.

Love's an action instead of an emotion, anyway, so I didn't think it was a big deal that neither of us had heard it from the other because we showed each other we loved each other in other ways...until we didn't anymore...and started keeping score, measuring who was winning by who was hurting who more, instead of trying to be better to each other.

I had to face that ugly reality when we were both screaming "I hate you" with Fred and Doc trying to break up one of our argument-turned-near-fist fights backstage at the last North American show of "Girls, Girls, Girls."

That was the night I got pregnant with my first son, Monroe, and the man barking about how much he hated me, isn't the father.

It's safe to say I won.

My heels click down the concrete stairs of the church as I walk to Nikki's black corvette after service is over, furrowing my brows the closer I get, seeing a white slip of paper tucked under the windsheild wiper.

I pluck the paper off and see it's a ticket for $350.00 with "BROKEN TAIL LIGHT" marked on it.

"My tail light isn't broken." I argue to myself, stepping around the back.

The entire left side set of lights are busted with signs of swapped paint where someone hit the car with their's and I open my mouth to speak but no words come out.

I stand and stare at the paper, then the busted light, tears oncoming the more I look at it.

Nikki is going to kill me.

I hear a car pull up behind me and park on the curb of the street but I don't pay any attention, too busy figuring out how to explain this.

"Hey, uh, Vivian?"

I turn to see Duff, wiping my eyes quickly.

"Duff?" I'm caught off guard by my recently new friend. "I've told you just call me 'Viv'." I tell him, sniffling and he furrows his brows, stopping in front of me where I'm now standing by the driver's door of the corvette.

"You alright?"

"Yeah." It's an obvious lie, a pathetic squeak leaving me.

"What's up?" He asks me and I lick my lips and sigh out.

"It's stupid." I mumble, rolling my eyes.

"What happened?"

I just hand him the ticket and he takes in a sharp breath, his brows shooting up.

"Jeezus." He lets out. "You just got this?"

"Yes." My voice cracks and he looks at me with sympathetic eyes.

"Viv, c'mon, it's not that bad. It'll be alright." He tries to reassure me.

"Oh, no, no, no...that's not all." I say, walking to the back and he follows me, not hiding the gasp that leaves his lips. Nikki is going to kill me."

There's a silent pause as I rest against the back of the corevette, crossing my arms, trying to figure out how I'm going to present the $350.00 ticket to my husband.

Duff leans against it beside me, avoiding the broken bits, thinking for a second, too, before reaching into his jacket pocket.

"Here." He grabs my hand, putting a wad of cash into it and I look at him, confused. "For the ticket." He explains and I shake my head.

"N-No. I can't take this from you, you need it." I argue, wiping more tears.

He goes to say something but I cut him short. "If you say that you don't need it, I'm going to hit you. You live in your car, Duff. You've been talking about getting a new place and this is part of the rent for an apartment." I point out, handing the cash back to him.

"Whatever you say." He shrugs, putting it back in his jacket.

We sit for a moment longer before he nudges me with his elbow.

"You hungry?" He asks and I tuck a strand of hair behind my ear.

"Stop offering to spend your money on me." I chuckle and he smiles.

"Actually, I know a place the both of us can eat and it would only cost the price of one beer." He tells me and I raise my brows.

It was the first of many Sunday lunches at this hotel a few blocks away that offered an "all you can eat" buffet if you just buy a bottle of beer.

I listen as Duff goes on about possible members of the potential band he wants to be a part of.

A drummer named Steven, who has a lot of extra drums in his kit than what's needed but he's a hell of a drummer.

A Johnny Thunders look alike-that isn't that great on a guitar but makes it sound cool anyway-that goes by the name Izzy.

And a kind of weird kid that apparantly has massive hair and is super shy but speaks a billion words a minute through his guitar: Slash.

"And Slash and Steven are buddies, but I don't know if they've ever met Izzy or not." He tells me, sipping the beer neither of us were carded for, even though we're only twenty.

"What style of singer do you have in mind?" I ask, taking a bite out of my mozerella stick.

"Someone who gets the punk scene, but not necessarily a punk singer." He tells me and I wrinkle my nose. "Don't do that." He points at me, knowing exactly what I'm about to say.

"Punk?"

"Don't say it like that." He laughs. "You don't like it because you don't understand it."

"I understand it and I respect it, I just don't..." I try to choose my words. "...I like some of it, but most of it I don't really care for."

"How the hell do you survive not liking punk? It's the biggest 'fuck you' to societal standards." He defends the genre.

"I like the Ramones, The Stooges, the New York Dolls." I tell him, even though they were all acquired tastes because I have to listen to them so much due to Nikki.

"What about The Sex Pistols?" Duff suggests.

"I did, until Sid killed Nancy." I shrug.

"Oh, c'mon, Viv, you really believe that propaganda bullshit made up by the conservative media to further their anti-punk/rock agenda and get a good check? He did not kill her." He argues.

"They'd been binging on all kinds of drugs for weeks. I'm not saying he meant to, maybe he was hallucinating and genuinely didn't realize it was her until it was too late, but he did it." I state.

"Nope."

"Oh, okay, so it was the body guard?"

"I think it was a double suicide attempt." He explains and I lean back. "His just didn't work."

"If it was a double suicide, why didn't he just use the knife she used and bleed to death like she did?" I question.

"Maybe he didn't want to be stabbed."

"If he was going to die, what would it matter?" I ask and he shakes his head a little with a small grin pulling at his lips.

"Hi, my name is Vivian Estine Sixx and I can argue with a brick wall for five hours straight." He mocks me and I cut my eyes at him.

We just stare at each other, and he attempts to take another drink of his beer while we have our staring contest, and the both of us crack up simultaneously, and he sprays beer through his lips and nose, further egging my laughter on.

I get home around four in the afternoon after spending three hours talking to Duff, and my stomach's sore from laughing so much.

"Viv?" Nikki calls from the bathroom and I walk in to see him teasing his hair.

He's shirtless, his black jeans are unbuttoned and unzipped, exposing some of his pubic hair and I lick my lips.

"Did you have fun?" He asks in a teasing tone, referring to the oh-so-wild church service I attend as much as I can, and I roll my eyes and lean against the sink beside him, crossing my arms.

"Yes, I did." I reply, not able to meet his eyes because I'm too focused on his exposed skin.

"What took you so long to get back?" He asks next.

I know, I know, "if it was innocent then there should be nothing to hide and you should be able to tell him you were with another man."

It wasn't Tommy, Mick, Robbin or Vince, and he never met Duff.

He didn't trust men he'd never met around me.

So if I would have told him, I would have never heard the end of it.

"Long sermon." I lie, and he looks at me and furrows his brows.

"Have you been crying? Your mascara's smudged." He tells me, his thumb swiping right under my bottom lash line to wipe away dried mascara and I'm suddenly hit with the realization that I have a $350.00 ticket.

"It was a good sermon." I say.

He finishes his hair, turning to look at me.

"Me and the guys are going to the Rainbow tonight." He tells me. "You're comin', right?"

"Yes." I nod, grinning.

"Good. I gotta go get the oil changed and I'll be back to pick you up." He steps out of the bathroom to go get dressed and I follow him.

Once he's got his t-shirt that has "FUCK" written across the front, he's pulling his jacket and boots on.

When he's gotten his boots on, he stands up from the matress of our bed, and I grab at the top of his jeans, pulling him closer to me, standing on my tip toes to press my lips to his.

He kisses me, his hands holding at either side of my jaw.

When we pull away, he smiles, kissing my cheek before grabbing his keys and leaving.

The second he's gone I'm darting to my purse, attempting to find the ticket, praying I didn't leave it in the car.

Once I see it's not in my purse, I let out a deep breath and worry that I've lost it.

"Damnit." I mumble, trying to remember the last place I had it. "The church parkinglot with Duff but..." I trail off, thinking of the possibility of it being left in the parkinglot and I groan out.

There's no way it's still there if that's where it got left.

I decide to figure it out later and go wash away my worn off makeup before reapplying it and changing clothes, waiting for Nikki to get back.

I'm finishing putting on ruby red lipstick when I hear the front door slam and I tense up and put the cap back on the tube before peeking my head out the door and seeing Nikki put his keys and a piece of paper on the counter, frustration taking a stance in his movements.

Pretending nothing's wrong, I walk out of the bathroom and across the floor to our bedroom to grab my purse and put my heels on.

Once they're on, I walk back into the kitchen smile at him.

"C'mon, babe." I nudge him as I walk past him to get to the door.

He grabs my arm, though, causing me to stop and he pulls me back, pushing me against the counter, trapping me when he puts his hands on the counter on either side of me and his face is centimeters from mine.

"You wouldn't know anything about the completely shattered tail light on my car, would you?" He asks me calmly.

"No?" I lie, trying to seem confused, but it's clear he's not buying it.

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

He just stares at me and I slide my hands up and down his arms, smiling nervously.

"Can we go, now?" I ask, kissing his cheek.

"I spent $100.00 to get it fixed today." He explains. "Did you back into something or did someone hit the car?"

"I told you I didn't even know about it, babe." I argue calmly. "Can we leave and just go back and forth about this later? We're gonna be late."

He gives me one last stare before sighing out, letting me go and I make sure to beat him to the car by several strides, frantically searching for the ticket when I get in, not finding it, before he gets in beside me.

[patriotsnet]

Did Trump Ever Say Republicans Are Stupid

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/did-trump-ever-say-republicans-are-stupid/

Did Trump Ever Say Republicans Are Stupid

Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

Donald Trump Tells Oprah in 1988 What He Would Do as President

Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.

One day in 2015, Donald Trump beckoned Michael Cohen, his longtime confidant and personal attorney, into his office. Trump was brandishing a printout of an article about an Atlanta-based megachurch pastor trying to raise $60 million from his flock to buy a private jet. Trump knew the preacher personallyCreflo Dollar had been among a group of evangelical figures who visited him in 2011 while he was first exploring a presidential bid. During the meeting, Trump had reverently bowed his head in prayer while the pastors laid hands on him. Now he was gleefully reciting the impious details of Dollars quest for a Gulfstream G650.

Trump seemed delighted by the scam, Cohen recalled to me, and eager to highlight that the pastor was full of shit. Theyre all hustlers, Trump said.

The presidents alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion. My administration will never stop fighting for Americans of faith, he declared at a rally for evangelicals earlier this year. Its a message his campaign will seek to amplify in the coming weeks as Republicans work to confirm Amy Coney Barretta devout, conservative Catholicto the Supreme Court.

The People Whom President Trump Has Called Stupid

Since he declared his candidacy for the presidency, no group has been deemed stupid by Donald Trump more frequently than Americas leaders. There are stupid people running the country, he said over and over and over again on the campaign trail; making stupid deals with Iran and stupid deals on trade. Everyone in charge was dumb and he wasnt except that he was stupid for self-funding his campaign. That, in broad strokes, was Trumps rhetoric in 2015 and 2016.

But that wasnt the full extent of it. When Trump tweeted disparagement of LeBron James and CNNs Don Lemon Friday night, it was a reminder that Trump often divides the world into two groups: those who are stupid and those who arent. It was also a reminder that, of late, Trump has often chosen to describe as stupid people who are not white.

That wasnt always the case. Before the presidential election, Trump mostly disparaged white people as stupid.

Of course, back then, his political opponents were mostly white people: those running against him in the Republican primary and the conservative establishment broadly opposed to his candidacy. He called Karl Rove, former George W. Bush adviser, stupid five times, including in interviews. Bloombergs Tim OBrien, whom Trump once sued unsuccessfully for alleged libel, earned the description three times, as did television host Glenn Beck.

Since President Trumps inauguration, though, that has changed.

It wasnt Obama.

The Dumbest Stuff Donald Trump Has Ever Said

Paul J Richards/AFP/Getty

Americas favorite faux-political shock jock came back with a vengeance two weeks ago when, during a press conference to announce his candidacy for the presidency, he characterized all Mexican immigrants as drug-peddling rapists.

The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody elses problems, he said. When Mexico sends its people, theyre not sending their best. Theyre not sending you. Theyre sending people that have lots of problems, and theyre bringing those problems with us. Theyre bringing drugs. Theyre bringing crime. Theyre rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

The comments ended up getting both him and his television programs booted from NBC. After a public pressure campaign that racked up more than 200,000 petition signatures, the network decried his words as derogatory. Trump, as to be expected, railed against NBC. Instead of apologizing for his words, he later asserted that his stance on immigration is correct.

Its not the first time Trump has insulted Americas southern neighbor. This past February, when Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu took home an Oscar for his film Birdman, Trump offered dubious congratulations. Well it was a great night for Mexico, as usual in this country It was a great night for Mexico. This guy kept getting up and up and up. I said, you know, whats he doing? Hes walking away with all the gold.

On African-Americans:

Laziness is a trait in blacks.

On women:

On religion:

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Trump ‘knows Republicans Are Stupid’ Jared Kushner Allegedly Said To Former Editor

Greg Price U.S.Jared KushnerDonald TrumpRepublicans

One of the strategies Donald Trump employed as he began putting his name on the U.S. political map years ago was championing “birtherism,” the long-held conspiracy theory that President Barack Obama was born outside of the U.S. and hence should never have been elected. He often chastised Obama and demanded the president produce his birth certificate, revving up an anti-Obama base that eventually helped put Trump in the White House.

Evidently, Trump may have been using the so-called birthers only as a means to an end.

His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is also a senior adviser to the president, allegedly told a former editor of the newspaper he once owned that the billionaire real-estate mogul didn’t believe his own “birtherism” claims, and only made them to charge up Republicans because they are “stupid,” GQ reported.

During a discussion on how to cover Trump, the former New York Observer editor, Elizabeth Spiers, claimed she told Kushner that she had serious problems with Trump’s repeated claims that Obama was not born in the U.S., to which Kushner allegedly told her: “He doesn’t really believe it, Elizabeth. He just knows Republicans are stupid and they’ll buy it.”

Spiers told her Kushner anecdote in response to a question from a conservative blogger on Facebook, and then screenshotted the response and put it up on Twitter.

In 1988 Oprah Asked Donald Trump If He’d Ever Run For President Here’s How He Replied

Donald Trump;wasn’t always so sure he wanted to run for president.

Long before The Donald officially kicked off his;polarizing2016run and became;the Republican frontrunner, Oprah asked the business tycoon about his political aspirations on a 1988 episode of “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” ;Trump had originally appeared on the show to promote a new book and discuss his life as a businessman, but the conversation soon turned toward foreign policy and how Trump would take a tougher stance with America’s allies.

“I’d make our allies pay their fair share. We’re a debtor nation; something’s going to happen over the next number of years in this country, because you can’t keep going on losing $200 billion,” he said on “The Oprah Show” back then. “We let Japan come in and dump everything right into our markets… They come over here, they sell their cars, their VCRs. They knock the hell out of our companies. And, hey, I have tremendous respect for the Japanese people. I mean, you can respect somebody that’s beating the hell out of you, but they are beating the hell out of this country. Kuwait, they live like kings and yet, they’re not paying. We make it possible for them to sell their oil. Why aren’t they paying us 25 percent of what they’re making? It’s a joke.”

The rant prompted Oprah to ask the question that people would ask for the next few decades.

Of course, he couldn’t help but hedge.

“I think I’d win,” Trump said. “I’ll tell you what: I wouldn’t go in to lose.”

Also On HuffPost:

Don’t Miss: What Republicans Voted Against Tax Bill

Trumps 10 Most Hilariously Stupid Things He Said In 2019

President Donald Trump has a long history of saying some of the most bizarre things in politics. This year was one for the books as the president flailed, searching for excuses for his July 25 phone call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Here are some of the most hilariously stupid things the president has said this year:

1. Windmills cause ear cancer

If you have a windmill anywhere near your house, congratulations, your house just went down 75 percent in value, Trump told Republicans in April. And they say the noise causes cancer. You tell me that one. He then made a whirring noise mimicking a turbine.

2. He wants to buy Greenland

In meetings, at dinners and in passing conversations, Mr. Trump has asked advisers whether the U.S. can acquire Greenland, listened with interest when they discuss its abundant resources and geopolitical importance and, according to two of the people, has asked his White House counsel to look into the idea, the Wall Street Journal reported in August.

Denmark essentially owns it, Trump told reporters in the days that followed. Were very good allies with Denmark. We protect Denmark like we protect large portions of the world. Strategically its interesting.

Trump then got into a fight with Danish leaders and had to cancel a trip hed planned to the country.

3. Trump is the chosen one.

4. Why dont they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.

Im Getting The Word Out: Inside The Feverish Mind Of Donald Trump Two Months After Leaving The White House

I Alone Can Fix It

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Seventy days had passed since Donald Trump left Washington against his will. On March 31, 2021, we ventured to Mar-a-Lago, where he still reigned as king of Republican politics. We arrived late that afternoon for our audience with the man who used to be president and were ushered into an ornate sixty-foot-long room that functioned as a kind of lobby leading to the clubs patio. A model of Air Force One painted in Trumps proposed redesigna flat red stripe across the middle, a navy belly, a white top, and a giant American flag on the tailwas proudly displayed on the coffee table facing the entrance. It was a prop disconnected from reality.; Trumps vision never came to be; the fleet now in use by President Biden still bears the iconic baby blue-and-white livery designed by Jacqueline Kennedy.

Trump had invited us to Mar-a-Lago to interview him for this book. He had declined an interview for our first book about his presidency, and when A Very Stable Genius was published in January 2020, attacked us personally and branded our reporting a work of fiction. But Trump was quick to agree to our request this time. He sought to curate history.

But future elections were not front and center in his mind. A past election was. Trump was fixated on his loss in 2020, returning to this wound repeatedly throughout the interview.;

Also Check: How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare In The Senate

Trump Told A Reporter His Biggest Secret: That He Is A Danger To The American People

Trump is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart. Perhaps this lies at the root of his monumentally dumb decision to grant Bob Woodward 18 interviews

The Inuit are supposed to have dozens of words to describe snow. The Brits have endless ways to talk about rain. Now its time for Americans to delineate all the many ways that Donald Trump is dumb.

If Bob Woodwards new blockbuster teaches us anything new about the character of the 45th president, its that we dont yet have the words to describe the multiple variants of the vacuum inside his head.

Theres the stupidity of arrogance, the stupidity of ignorance and his old friend: the stupidity of blatant duplicity. Theres his homicidal stupidity, his traitorous stupidity, his criminally corrupt stupidity and his plain old infantile stupidity.

Lets start with the top of this taxonomy: the domain of Donalds dumbness. At his core, the former reality TV star is a particularly stupid man who thinks he is very smart. Or as he prefers to call his own character, a very stable genius.

Perhaps, just maybe, this lies at the root of his monumentally dumb decision to grant Woodward 18 interviews, on the record and on tape.

Instead, our very stupid genius vomited up all manner of secrets that collectively prove beyond all reasonable doubt that he represents the greatest single danger to the fate of both the American people and to himself.

Fact Check: Did Trump Say In ’98 Republicans Are Dumb

Donald Trump: I didnt say that. (He did.)

Did Donald Trump tell People magazine in 1998 that if he ever ran for president, hed do it as a Republican because theyre the dumbest group of voters in the country and that he could lie and theyd still eat it up?A:;No, thats a bogus meme.

FULL ANSWER

The meme purports to be a quote from Trump in;People;magazine in 1998 saying, If I were to run, Id run as a Republican. Theyre the dumbest group of voters in the country. They believe;anything on Fox News. I could lie and theyd still eat it up. I bet my numbers would be terrific.

We were alerted to the meme by a reader, A. Douglas Thomas of Freeport, N.Y., among others, who saw it in his Facebook feed, along with a message from someone who said, I just fact-checked this. Google Donald Trump, People magazine and 1998. This is an actual quote by Trump.

Well save you the effort. It is;not;an actual quote by Trump.

We scoured the;Peoplemagazine archives and found nothing like this quote in 1998 or any other year.

And a public relations representative with;People;told us that the magazine couldnt find anything like that quote in its archives, either.;Peoples Julie Farin said in an email: Peoplelooked into this exhaustively when it first surfaced back in Oct.;We combed through every Trump story in our archive.;We couldnt find anything remotely like this quote and no interview at all in 1998.

There were several stories in the late 1990s about Trumps flirtation with a presidential run.

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Trump Is Right: Republicans Are Stupid

Donald Trump, master of the deal, is right. The Republicans are stupid, not only as politicians but also as political psychologists. He criticized Paul Ryan for bringing up the subject of Medicare reform that the Democrats could use to turn the elderly against the Republicans. Their video of grandma being shoved over the cliff by Republicans is a stark indication of how the Dems will fight to win four more years for Obama.

As the discussions over increasing the debt limit go on, the Democrats are portraying themselves as the more flexible party in the negotiations. They are willing to cut cherished programs such as Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, provided Republicans agree to some increases in revenue. They want the Republicans to agree to raise taxes and cut spending on programs that the elderly hold sacred. A perfect recipe for Republican defeat in November 2012. Thursdays meeting was supposed to focus on spending cuts in the two health care programs and on new revenue. And only stupid Republicans would attend such a meeting.

From the very beginning, by focusing on cutting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, the Republicans have trapped themselves into a no-win situation. Why havent they offered a list of real cuts in federal spending? Who told them that cutting programs that the elderly are dependent on is the way to win votes in 2012?

Here Are The Top 10 Stupidest Things Trump Did As President

We’re tentatively starting to emerge from the four year-long national nightmare of Donald Trump’s presidency, but the reckoning of what the nation endured will take years to really understand. Trump was terrible in so many ways that it’s hard to catalog them all: His sociopathic lack of regard for others. His towering narcissism. His utter ease with lying. His cruelty and sadism. The glee he took in cheating and stomping on anything good and decent. His misogyny and racism. His love of encouraging violence, only equaled by his personal cowardice.

But of all the repulsive character traits in a man so wholly lacking in any redeemable qualities, perhaps the most perplexing to his opponents was Trump’s incredible stupidity. On one hand, it was maddening that a man so painfully dumb, a man who clearly could barely read even on those rare occasions when he deigned to wear glasses still had the low cunning necessary to take over the Republican Party and then the White House.

On the other hand, it was the one aspect of Trump’s personality that kept hope alive. Surely a man so stupid, his opponents believed, will one day blunder so badly he can’t be saved, even by his most powerful sycophants. That has proved to be the case as Trump fumbles his way through a failed coup, unable and unwilling to see that stealing the election from Joe Biden is a lost cause.

He then pointed at his head, and said, “I’m, like, a person who has a good you-know-what.”

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Top 10 Actual Things Donald Trump Said At His 2016 Presidential Campaign Kickoff

Top 10 Actual Things Donald Trump Said At His 2016 Presidential Campaign Announcement

— On Tuesday, real estate mogul-turned reality show star, Donald Trump, became the latest Republican to jump into the 2016 presidential race.

If hes elected in 2016, the GOP hopeful predicated that he would be the most successful president for U.S. jobs that God ever created, used the recent sale of a multi-million dollar apartment he owned to someone from China as an example of his friendly ties with the country, voiced concern that people from the Middle East are probably sneaking into the country through the border, and revealed that rich Islamic terrorists are his competition within the hotel market in Syria.

This is all real, and its trademark Trump. Here are the quotes from Trumps presidential announcement that you will never hear another presidential candidate say — ever.

[teshknowledgenotes]

The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger - Notes

“Spend each day trying to be a little wiser than you were when you woke up. Discharge your duties faithfully and well. Systematically you get ahead, but not necessarily in fast spurts. Nevertheless, you build discipline by preparing for fast spurts. Slug it out one inch at a time day by day. At the end of the day – if you live long enough – most people get what they deserve”

Munger has drawn heavily from the study of psychology, economics, physics, biology and history, among other disciplines, in developing his system of “multiple mental models” to cut through difficult problems in complex social systems. It is a system like no other.

As a result his insights on business and life are unique, rare, and correct with unusual consistency. Adopting the “Munger” approach to thinking is difficult, as is imitating any genius. When asked his secret to success, Munger once answered simply “I’m rational.”

The Revised Psychology of Human Misjudgment, by Charlie Munger

This talk features Charlie’s original concept of “behavioural finance”.

Charlie addresses the importance of recognizing patterns to determine how humans behave, both rationally and irrationally. He shares with us his checklist of twenty-five standard causes of human misjudgment, which contains observations that are ingenious, counter intuitive and important. He also emphasizes the “lollapalooza” power of psychological misjudgments in combination.

I have long been very interested in standard thinking errors. However I was educated in an era wherein the contributions of non-patient-treating psychology to any understanding of misjudgment met little approval from members of the mainstream elite. Instead, interest in psychology was pretty well confined to a group of professors who talked and publish mostly for themselves.

Right after my time at Caltech and Harvard Law School, I possessed a vast ignorance of psychology. Those institutions failed to require knowledge of the subject. And of course they couldn’t integrate psychology with their other subject matter when they didn’t know psychology. The institutions were proud of their wilful avoidance of “fuzzy” psychology and “fuzzy” psychology professors. Soon after leaving Harvard, I began a long struggle to get rid of the most dysfunctional part of my psychological ignorance.

When I started law practice, I had respect for the power of genetic evolution and appreciation of man’s many evolution-based resemblances to less cognitively-gifted animals and insects. I was aware that man was a “social animal”, greatly and automatically influence by behaviour he observed in men around him. I also knew that man lived, like barnyard animals and monkeys, in limited-size dominance hierarchies, wherein he tended to respect authority and to like and cooperate with his own hierarchy members while displaying considerable distrust and dislike for competing men not in his own hierarchy.

But this generalized, evolution-based theory structure was inadequate to enable me to cope properly with the cognition I encountered. I was soon surrounded by much extreme irrationality, displayed in patters and sub patterns. So surround, I could see that I was not going to cope as well as I wished with life unless I could acquire a better theory structure on which to hang my observations and experiences. By then my craving for more theory had a long history. Partly, I had always loved theory as an aid in puzzle solving and as a means of satisfying my monkey-like curiosity.

I also got curious about social insects. It fascinated me that both the fertile female honeybee and the fertile female harvester ant could multiply their quite different normal life expectancy by exactly twenty by engaging in one gangbang in the sky. The extreme success of the ants also fascinated me, how a few behavioural algorithms caused such extreme evolutionary success grounded in extremes of cooperation within the breeding colony and almost always extremes of lethal hostility toward ants outside the breeding colony, even ants of the same species.

I will start my summary with a general observation that helps explain what follows. This observation is grounded in what we know about social insects. The limitations inherent in evolution’s development of the nervous-system cells that control behaviour are beautifully demonstrated by these insects, which often have a mere 100,000 or so cells in their entire nervous systems, compared to man’s multiple billions of cells in his brain alone.

Each ant, like each human, is composed of a living physical structure plus behavioural algorithms in its nerve cells. In the ant’s case, the behavioural algorithms are few in number and almost entirely genetic in origin. The an learns a little behaviour from experiences, but mostly it merely responds to ten or so stimuli with a few simple responses programmed into its nervous system by its genes.

Naturally the simple ant behaviour system has extreme limitations because of its limited nerve system repertoire. For instance, one type of ant, when it smells a pheromone give off by a dead ant’s body in the hive, immediately responds by cooperating with other ants in carrying the dead body out of the hive. And Harvard’s great E.O. Wilson performed on of the best psychology experiments ever done when he painted dead-ant pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally, the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the give even though it kicked and otherwise pheromone on a live ant. Quite naturally, the other ants dragged this useful live ant out of the hive even though it kicked and otherwise protested throughout the entire process. Such is the brain of the ant. It has a simple program of responses that generally work out all right, but which are imprudently used by rote in many cases.

Man is often wrong but generally useful, psychological tendencies are quite numerous and quite different. The natural consequence of this profusion of tendencies is the grand general principle of social psychology: cognition is ordinarily situation-dependent so that different situations often cause different conclusions, even when the same person is thinking in the same general subject area.

“Of what use is a philosopher who never offends anybody? - Diogenes

These are a list of psychology based tendencies that while generally useful often mislead.

1)Reward and Punishment Superresponse Tendency

One of my favourite cases about the power of incentives is the Federal Express case. The integrity of the Federal Express system requires that all packages be shifted rapidly among airplanes in one central airport each night. And the system has no integrity for the customers if the night work shift can’t accomplish its assignment fast. And Federal Express had one hell of a time getting the night shift to do the right thing. They tried moral suasion. They tried everything in the world without luck. And finally somebody got the happy thought that it was foolish to pay the night shift by the hour when what the employer wanted was not maximized billable hours of employee service but fault-free, rapid performance of a particular task. Maybe this person though if they paid the employees per and shift and let all night shift employees go home when all the planes were loaded, the system would work better. And behold that situation worked.

Money is the main incentive/reward that drives habits. A monkey can be trained to seek and work for an intrinsically worthless token, as if it were a banana, if the token is routinely exchangeable for a banana. So it is also with humans working for money only more so, because human money i exchangeable for many desired things in addition to food, and on ordinarily gains status from either holding or spending it. Moreover, a rich person will often through habit, work on connive energetically for money money long after he has almost no real need for more. Averaged out, money is a mainspring of modern civilization, having little precedent in the behaviour of nonhuman animals. Money rewards are also intertwined with other forms of reward. For instance, some people use money to buy status and others use status to get money, while still others sort of do both things at the same time.

Although money is the main driver among rewards, it is not the only reward that works. People also change their behaviour and cognition for sex, friendship, companionship, advancement in status and other non-monetary items.

2)Liking/Loving Tendency

A newly hatched baby goose is programmed, through the economy of its genetic program, to “love” and follow the first creature that is nice to it, which is almost always its mother. But, if the mother goose is not present right after the hatching, and a man is there instead, the gosling will “love” and follow the man, who becomes a sort of substitute mother.

Somewhat similarly a newly arrived human is “born to like and love” under the normal and abnormal triggering outcomes for its kind. Perhaps the strongest inborn tendency to love, ready to be triggered is that the human mother for its child. On the other hand, the similar “child-loving” behaviour of a mouse can be eliminated by the deletion of a single gene, which suggests that there is some sort of triggering gene in a mother mouse as well as in a gosling.

Each child like a gosling, will almost surely come to like and love, not only as driven by its sexual nature, but also in social groups not limited to its genetic or adoptive “family”. Current extremes of romantic love almost surely did not occur in man’s remote past. Our early human ancestors were surely more like apes triggered into mating in a pretty mundane fashion.

And what will a man naturally come to like and love, apart from his parent, spouse and child? Well he will like and love being liked and loved. And so many a courtship competition will be won by a person displaying exceptional devotion, and man will generally strive, lifelong, for the affection and approval of many people not related to him.

The phenomenon of liking and loving causing admiration also works in reverse. Admiration also causes or intensifies liking or love. With this “feedback mode” in place, the consequences are often extreme, sometimes even causing deliberate self-destruction to help what is loved.

Liking or love, intertwined with admiration in a feedback mode, often has vast practical consequences in areas far removed from sexual attachments. For instance, a man who is so constructed that he loves admirable persons and ideas with a special intensity has a huge advantage in life. This blessing came to both Buffett and myself in large measure, sometimes from the same persons and ideas. One common, beneficial example for us both was Warren’s uncle Fred Buffett, who cheerfully did the endless grocery store work that Warren and I ended up admiring from a safe distance. Even now, after I have known so many other people. I doubt if it is possible to be a nicer man than Fred Buffett was, and he changed me for the better.

There are large social policy implications in the amazingly good consequences that ordinarily come from people likely to trigger extremes of love and admiration boosting each other in a feedback mode. For instance, it is obviously desirable to attract a lot of lovable, admirable people into the teaching profession.

3)Disliking/Hating Tendency

In a pattern obverse to Liking/Loving Tendency, the newly arrived human is also “born to dislike and hate” as triggered by normal and abnormal triggering forces in it’s life. It is the same with most apes and monkeys.

As a result the long history of man contains almost continuous war. For instance, most American Indian tribes warred incessantly and some tribes would occasionally bring captives home to women so that all could join in the fun of torturing captives to death. Even with the spread of religion, and the advent of advanced civilization much modern war remains pretty savage. But we also get what we observe in present day Switzerland and the United States, wherein the clever political arrangements of man “channel” the hatreds and disliking of individuals and groups into nonlethal patterns including elections.  

Disliking/Hating Tendency also acts as a conditioning device that makes the disliker/hater tend to 1) ignore virtues in the object of dislike, 2) dislike people, products, and actions merely associated with the object of his dislike, and 3) distort the other facts to facilitate hatred.

Distortion of that kind is often so extreme that miscongnition is shockingly large. When the World Trade Centre was destroyed, many Pakistanis immediately concluded that the Hindus did it, while many Muslims concluded that the Jews did it. Such factual distortions often make mediation between opponents locked in hatred either difficult or impossible.  

4)Doubt-Avoidance Tendency

The brain of a man is programmed with a tendency to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision.

It is easy to see how evolution would make animals, over the eons, drift toward such quick elimination of doubt. After all, the one thing that is surely counterproductive for a prey animal that is threatened by a predator is to take a long time in deciding what to do. And so man’s doubt-avoidance tendency is quite consistent with the history of his ancient, nonhuman ancestors.

So pronounced is the tendency in man to quickly remove doubt by reaching some decision that behaviour to counter the tendency is required from judges and jurors. Here, delay before decision making is forced. And one is required to so comfort himself, prior to conclusion time, so that he is wearing a “mask” of objectivity. And the “mask” works to help real objectivity along.

Of course, once one has recognized that man has a string doubt-avoidance tendency, it is logical to believe that at least some leaps of religious faith are greatly boosted by this tendency. Even if one is satisfied that his own faith comes from revelation, one still must account for the inconsistent faiths of others.

What triggers doubt-avoidance tendency? Well an unthreatened man, thinking of nothing in particular, is not being prompted to remove doubt through rushing to some decision. Doubt-Avoidance tendency is some combination of 1) puzzlement and 2) stress. And both of these factors naturally occur in facing religious issues.

Thus, the natural state of most men is in some form of religion. And this is what we observe.

5) Inconsistency-Avoidance Tendency

The brain of a man conserves programming space by being reluctant to change, which is a form of inconsistency avoidance. We see this in all human habits, constructive and destructive. Few people can list a lot of bad habits that they have eliminated, and some people cannot identify even one of these. Instead, practically everyone has a great many bad habits he has long maintained despite their being known as bad. Given this situation, it is not too much in many cases to appraise early-formed habits as destiny. When Marley’s miserable ghost says, “I wear the chains I forged in life”, he is taking about chains of habit that were too light to be felt before they became too strong to be broken.

It is easy to see that a quickly reached conclusion, triggered by doubt-avoidance, when combined with a tendency to resists any change in that conclusion, will naturally cause a lot of errors in cognition for modern man. And so it observably works out. We all deal much with others whom we correctly diagnose as imprisoned in poor conclusions that are maintained by mental habits they formed early and will carry to their graves.

So great is the bad decision problem caused by inconsistency avoidance tendency that our courts have adopted important strategies against it. For instance before making decisions, judges and juries are required to hear long and skillful presentations of evidence and argument from the side they will not naturally favour, given their ideas in place. And this helps prevent considerable bad thinking from “first conclusion bias”. Similarly other modern decision makers will often force groups to consider skillful counterarguments before making decisions. So people tend to accumulate large mental holdings of fixed conclusions and attitudes that are not often reexamined or changed, even though there is plenty of good evidence that they are wrong.

Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency has many good effects in civilization. For instance, rather than act inconsistently with public commitments, new or old public identities etc. Most people are more loyal in their roles in life as priests, physicians, citizens, soldiers, spouses, teachers, employees, etc.

One corollary of Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency is that a person making big sacrifices in the course of assuming a new identity will intensify his devotion to the new identity. After all, it would be quite inconsistent behaviour to make a large sacrifice for something that was no good. And thus civilization has invented many tough and solemn initiation ceremonies, often public in nature, that intensify new commitments made.

Tough initiation ceremonies can intensify bad contact as well as good. The loyalty of the new “made-man” mafia member, or of the military officer making the required “blood oath” of loyalty to Hitler, was boosted through the triggering of inconsistency-avoidance tendency.

Moreover, the tendency will often make a man a “patsy” of manipulative “compliance-practitioners” who gain advantage from triggering his subconscious Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency.

For instance modern education often does much damage when young students are taught dubious political notions and then enthusiastically push these notions on the rest of us. The pushing seldom convinces others. But as students pound into their mental habits what they are pushing out, the students are often permanently damaged. Educational Institutions that create a climate where much of this goes on are, I think irresponsible. It is important not to thus put one’s brain in chains before on has come anywhere near his full potentiality as a rational person.

6) Curiosity Tendency

There is a lot of innate curiosity in mammals, but its nonhuman version is highest among apes and monkeys. Man’s curiosity, in turn, is much stronger than that of his simian relatives. In advanced human civilization, culture greatly increases the effectiveness of curiosity in advancing knowledge. For instance, Athens developed much math and science out of pure curiosity while the Romans made almost no contribution to either math or science. They instead concentrated their attention on the ‘practical’ engineering of mines, roads, aqueducts, etc. Curiosity enhanced by the best of modern education much helps man to prevent or reduce bad consequences arising from other psychological tendencies. The curious are also provided with much fun and wisdom long after formal education has ended.

7) Kantian Fairness Tendency

Kant was famous for his “categorical imperative”, a sort of a “golden rule” that required humans to follow those behaviour patterns that, if followed by all others, would make the surrounding human system work best for everybody. And it is not too much to say that modern acculturated many displays, and expects from others, a lot of fairness as thus defined by Kant.

In a small community having a one-way bridge or tunnel for autos, it is the norm in the United States to see a lot of reciprocal courtesy, despite the absence of signs or signals. And many freeway drivers, including myself, will often let other drivers come on front of them, in lane changes or the like, because that is the courtesy they desire when roles are reversed. Moreover there is in modern human culture a lot of courteous lining up by strangers so that all are served on a “first-come-first-served” basis.

Also, strangers often voluntarily share equally in unexpected, unearned good and bad fortune. And, as an obverse consequence of such “fair-sharing” conduct, much reactive hostility occurs when fair-sharing is expected yet not provided.

8) Envy/Jealously Tendency

A member of a species designed through evolutionary process to want often-scarce food is going to be driven strongly toward getting food when it first sees food. And this is going to occur often and tend to create some conflict when the food is seen in the possession of another member of the same species. This is probably the evolutionary origin of the envy/jealousy tendency that lies so deep in human nature.

Envy/jealousy is extreme in myth, religion and literature wherein, in account after account, it triggers hatred and injury. It was regarded as so pernicious by the Jews of the civilization that preceded Christ that it was forbidden, by phrase after phrase, in the laws of Moses. You were even warned by the Prophet not to covet your neighbour’s donkey.

And envy/jealousy is also extreme in modern life. For instance, university communities often go bananas when some university employee in money management, or some professor in surgery, gets annual compensation in multiples of the standard professional salary and in modern investment banks, law firms etc. The envy/jealousy effects are usually more extreme than they are in university faculties. Many big law firms, fearing disorder from envy/jealousy have long treated all senior partners alike in compensation, no matter how different their contributions to firm welfare. As I have shared the observation of life with Warren Buffet over decades, I have heard him wisely say on several occasions: “It is not greed that drives the world, but envy”

9) Reciprocation Tendency

The automatic tendency of humans to reciprocate both favours and disfavours has long been noticed as extreme, as it is in apes, monkeys, dogs, and many less cognitively gifted animals. The tendency clearly facilitates group cooperation for the benefit of members. In this respect, it mimics such genetic programming of the social insects.

We see the extreme power of the tendency to reciprocate disfavours in some wars, wherein it increases hatred to a level causing very brutal conduct. For long stretches in many wars, no prisoners were take, the only acceptable enemy being a dead one. And sometimes that was not enough, as in the case of Genghis Khan, who was not satisfied with corpses. He insisted on their being hacked into pieces.

Reciprocation tendency does cause good results, doesn’t join forces only with the superpower of incentives. It also joins Inconsistency-Avoidance tendency in helping cause 1) The fulfillment of promises made as part of a bargain, including loyalty promises in marriage ceremonies and 2) correct behaviour expected from persons serving as priests, shoemakers, physicians and all else.

And the very best part of human life probably lies in relationships of affection wherein parties are more interested in pleasing than being pleased a not uncommon outcome in display of reciprocate tendency.

The final phenomenon we will consider is wide spread human misery from feelings of guilt. To the extent the feeling of guilt has an evolutionary base, I believe the most plausible cause is the mental conflict triggered in one direction by reciprocate favour tendency and in the opposite direction by reward super response tendency pushing one to enjoy one hundred percent some good thing. Of course, human culture has often greatly boosted the genetic tendency to suffer from feelings of guilt. Most especially religious culture has imposed hard to follow ethical and devotional demands on people. There is a charming Irish Catholic priest in my neighbourhood who, with rough accuracy, often says “The old Jews may have invented guilt, with but we Catholics perfected it” And if you like me and this priest, believe that averaged out, feelings of guild do more good than harm, you may join in my special gratitude for reciprocate favour tendency, no matter how unpleasant you find feelings of guilt.

10) Influence-from-Mere-Association Tendency

In the standard conditioned reflexes studied by Skinner and most common in the world, responsive behaviour, creating a new habit, is directly triggered by rewards previously bestowed. For instance, a man buys a can of branded shoe polish, has a good experience with it when shining his shoes, and because of this “reward,” buys the same shoe polish when he needs another can.

But there is another type of conditioned reflex wherein mere association triggers a response. For instance, consider the case of many men who have been trained by their previous experience in life to believe that when several similar items are presented for purchase, the one with the highest price will have the highest quality. Knowing this, some seller of an ordinary industrial product will often change his product’s trade dress and raise its price significantly hoping that quality seeking buyers hoping that quality seeking buyers will be tricked into becoming purchasers by mere association of his product and its high price. This industrial practice frequently is effective in driving up sales and even more so in driving up profits. For instance, it worked wonderfully with high-priced power tools for a long time. And it would work better yet with high-priced pumps at the bottom of oil wells. With luxury goods, the process works with a special boost because buyers who pay high prices often gain extra status from thus demonstration both their good taste and their ability to pay.

Even association that appears to be trivial, if carefully planned, can have extreme and peculiar effects on purchasers of products. The target purchaser of shoe polish may like pretty girls. And so he chooses the polish with the pretty girl on the can or the one with the pretty girl in the last ad for shoe polish that he saw.

Advertisers know about the power of mere association. You won’t see coke advertised alongside some account of the death of a child. Instead Coke ads picture life as happier than reality.

Similarly it is not from mere chance that military bands play such impressive music. That kind of music appearing in mere association with military service, helps to attract soldiers and keep them in the army. Most armies have learned to use mere association in this successful way.

However the most damaging miscalculations from mere association do not ordinarily come from advertisers and music providers.

Some of the most important miscalculations come from what is accidentally associated with one’s past success or one’s liking and loving or one’s disliking and hating, which includes a natural hatred for bad news.

To avoid being misled by the mere association of some fact with past success, use this memory clue. Think of Napolean and Hitler when they invaded Russia after using their armies with much success elsewhere. And there are plenty of mundane examples of results like those of Napoleon and Hitler. For instance a man foolishly gambles the in a casino and yet wins. This unlikely correlation causes him to try the casino again, or again and again, to his horrid detriment. Or a man gets lucky in an odds against venture headed by an untalented friend. So influenced he tries again what worked before with terrible results.

The proper antidotes to being made such a patsy by past success are 1) to carefully examine each past success, looking for accidental, non-causative factors associated with such success that will tend to mislead as one appraises odds implicit in a proposed new undertaking and 2) to look for dangerous aspects of the new undertaking that were not present when past success occurred.

11) Simple, Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial

This phenomenon first me had in World War II when the super athlete, super student son of a family friend flew off over the Atlantic Ocean and never came back. His mother, who was a very sane woman, then refused to believe he was dead. That’s simple pain-avoiding psychological denial. The reality is too painful to bear, so one distorts the facts until they become bearable. We all do that to some extent, often causing terrible problems. The tendency’s most extreme outcomes are usually mixed up with love, death, and chemical dependency.

Where denial is used to make dying easier, the conduct meets almost no criticism. Who would begrudge a fellow man such help at such a time? But some people hope to leave life hewing to the iron prescription, “It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere” And there is something admirable in anyone able to do this.

12)Excessive Self-Regard Tendency

We all commonly observe the excessive self-regard of man. He mostly misappraises himself on the high side, like the ninety percent of Swedish drivers that judge themselves to be above average.

Man’s excess of self-regard typically makes him strongly prefer people like himself.

Excesses of self-regard often cause bad hiring decisions because employers grossly over appraise the worth of their own conclusions that rely on imporessions in face to face contact. The correct antidote to this sort of folly is to underweight face to face impressions and over weigh the applicant’s past record.

13) Overoptimism Tendency

About three centuries before the birth of Christ, Demosthenes, the most famous Greek orator, said “What a man wish, that also will he believe”. Demosthenes parsed out, was thus saying that man displays an excess of optimism even when he is already doing well.

14) Deprival-Superreaction Tendency

The quantity of man’s pleasure from a ten dollar gain does not exactly match the quantity of displeasure from a ten dollar loss. That is, the loss seems to hurt much more than the gain seems to help. If a man almost gets something he greatly wants and has it jerked away from him at the last moment, he will react much as if he had long owned the reward and had it jerked away. I include the natural human reactions to both kinds of loss experience, the loss of the possessed reward and the loss of the almost possessed reward. Man frequently incurs disadvantage by misframing his problems. He will often compare what is near instead of what really matters. For instance, a man with $10 million in his brokerage account will often be extremely irritated by the accidental loss of $100 out of the $300 in his wallet.

A man ordinarily reacts with irrational intensity to even a small loss or threatened loss of property, love, friendship, dominated territory, opportunity, status, or any other valued thing.

15) Social-Proof Tendency

The otherwise complex behaviour of man is much simplified when he automatically thinks and does what he observes to be thought and done around him. Such following often works fine. For instance, what simpler way could there be to find out how to walk to a big football game in a strange city than by following the flow of the crowd. For some such reason, man’s evolution left him with Social-Proof tendency to think and act as he sees others around him thinking and acting.

In social proof, it is not only action by others that misleads but also their inaction. In the presence of doubt, inaction by others becomes social proof that inaction is the right course.

16) Contrast-Misreaction Tendency

Because the nervous system of a man does not naturally measure in absolute scientific units, it must instead rely on something simpler. The eyes have a solution that limits their programming needs, the contrast in what is seen is registered. And as in sight, so does it go largely, in other senses. As a perception goes so goes cognition.

Contrast misreaction tendency is routinely used to cause disadvantage for customers buying merchandise and services. To make an ordinary price seem low, the vendor will very frequently create a highly artificial price that is much higher than the price always sought, then advertise his standard price as a big reduction from his phony price. Even when people know that this sort of customer manipulation is being attempted, it will often work to trigger buying. This phenomenon  accounts in part for much advertising in newspapers. It also demonstrates that being aware of psychological ploys is not a perfect defence.

17) Stress-Influence Tendency

Everyone recognizes that sudden stress for instance from a threat, will cause a rush of adrenaline in the human body, prompting faster and more extreme reaction. In a phenomenon less well recognized but still widely known, light stress can lightly improve performance say, in examinations whereas heavy stress causes dysfunction.

18) Availability-Misweighing Tendency

This mental tendency echoes the words of the song: “When I’m not near the girl I love, I love the girl I’m near” Man’s imperfect, limited-capacity brain easily drifts into working with what’s easily available to it. And the brain can’t use what it can’ remember or what it is blocked from recognizing because it is heavily influenced by one or more psychological tendencies bearing strongly on it, as the fellow is influenced by the nearby girl in the song. And so the mind overweighs what is easily available.

Still, the special strength of extra-vivid images in influencing the mind can be constructively used 1) in persuading someone else to reach a correct conclusion or 2) as a device for improving one’s own memory by attaching vivid images, on after the other, to many items one doesn’t want to forget. Indeed such use of vivid images as memory boosters is what enabled the great orators of classical Greece and Rome to give such long, organized speeches without using notes.

The great algorithm to remember in dealing with this tendency is simple: An idea or a fact is not worth more merely because it is easily available to you.

19) Use-It-or-Lose-It Tendency

All skills attenuate with disuse. I was a whiz at calculus until age twenty, after which the skill was soon obliterated by total non use. The right antidote to such a loss is to make use of the functional equivalent of the aircraft simulator employed in pilot training. This allows a pilot to continuously practice all of the rarely used skills that he can’t afford to lose.

Throughout his life, a wise man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as a sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and therefore the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps, in the latticework of theory he needs a framework for understanding new experience. It is also man engages in practice of all his useful, rarely used skills, many of them outside his discipline, as sort of duty to his better self. If he reduces the number of skills he practices and therefore the number of skills he retains, he will naturally drift into error from man with a hammer tendency. His learning capacity will also shrink as he creates gaps in the latticework of theory he needs as a framework for understanding new experience. It is also essential for a thinking man to assemble his skills into a checklist that he routinely uses. Any other mode of operation will cause him to miss much that is important.

Skills for a very high order can be maintained only with daily practice. The pianist Paderewski once said that if he failed to practice for a single day, he could notice his performance deterioration and that, after a week’s gap in practice, the audience could notice it as well.

If a skills is raised to fluency, instead of merely being crammed in briefly to enable one to pass some test, then the skill 1) will be lost more slowly and 2) will come back faster when refreshed with new learning. These are not minor advantages, and a wise man engaged in learning some important skill will not stop until he is really fluent in it.

20) Drug-Misinfluence Tendency

This tendency’s destructive power is so widely known to be intense, with frequent tragic consequences for cognition and the outcome of life, that it needs no discussion here to supplement.

21) Senescence-Misinfluence Tendency

With advanced age there comes a natural cognitive decay, differing among individuals in the earliness of its arrival and the speed of its progression. Practically no one is good at learning complex new skills when very old. But some people remain pretty good in maintaining intensely practice old skills until late in life. Old people like me get pretty skilled without working at it, at disguising age related deterioration because social convention, like clothing, hides much decline.

Continuous thinking and learning, done with joy, can somewhat help delay what is inevitable.

22) Authority-Misinfluence Tendency

Living in dominance hierarchies as he does, like all his ancestors before him, man was born mostly to follow leaders, with only a few people doing the leading. And so, human society is formally organized into dominance hierarchies with their culture augmenting the natural follow the leader tendency of a man.

But automatic as most human reactions are, with the tendency to follow leaders being no exception, man is often destine to suffer greatly when the leader is wrong or when his leader’s ideas don’t get through properly in the bustle of life and are misunderstood.

Other versions of confused instructions from authority figures are tragic. In World War II, a new pilot for a general, who sat beside him in the co-pilot’s seat, was so anxious to please his boss that he misinterpreted some minor shift in the general’s position as a direction to do some foolish thing. The pilot crashed the plane and became a paraplegic.

When I once finished in the Rio Colorado in Costa Rica, my guide in a state of shock told me a story about an angler who’d earlier come to the river without ever having fished for a tarpon. A fishing guide like the one I had runs the boat and gives fishing advice, establishing himself in this context as the ultimate authority figure. In the case of this guide, his native language was Spanish, while the angler’s native language was English. The angler got a big tarpon on and began submitting to many directions from this authority figure called a guide: tip up, tip down, reel in, etc. Finally when it was necessary to put more pressure on the fish by causing more bending of the angler’s rod, the guide said in English: “Give him the rod, give him the rod”.

Well, the angler threw his expensive rod at the fist, and when last seen, it was going down the Rio Colorado toward the ocean. This example shows how power is the tendency to go along with an authority figure and how it can turn one’s brain into mush.

So strong is undue respect for authority that this CEO, and many even worse examples, have actually been allowed to remain in control of important business institutions for long periods after it was clear they should be removed. The obvious implication: Be careful whom you appoint to power because a dominant authority figure will often be hard to remove.

23) Twaddle Tendency

Man as a social animal who has the gift of language, is born to prattle and to pour out twaddle that does much damage when serious work is being attempted. Some people produce copious amounts of twaddle and others very little.

24) Reason-Respecting Tendency

There is in man, particularly one in an advanced culture, a natural love of accurate cognition and a joy in its exercise. This accounts for the widespread popularity of crossword puzzles, other puzzles, and bridge and chess columns, as well as all games requiring mental skill.

This tendency has an obvious implication. It makes man especially prone to learn well when a would be teacher gives correct reasons for what is taught, instead of simply laying out the desired belief ex cathedra with no reasons given. Few practices, there are wiser than not only thinking through reasons before giving orders but also communicating these reasons to the recipient of the order.

No one knew this better than Carl Braun, who designed oil refineries with spectacular skill and integrity. He had a very simple rule, one of many in his large, Teutonic company. You had to tell Who was to do What, Where, When, and Why. And if you wrote a communication leaving out your explanation of why the addressee was to do what was ordered, Braun was likely to fire you because Braun well knew that ideas got through best when reasons for the ideas were meticulously laid out.

In general, learning is most easily assimilated and used when, life long, people consistently hang their experience actually and vicarious, on a lattice work of theory answering their questions: Why? Indeed, the question “Why?” is a sort of Rosetta stone opening up the major potentiality of mental life.

Unfortunately Reason-Respecting tendency is so strong that even a person’s giving of meaningless or incorrect reasons will increase compliance with his orders and requests. This has been demonstrated in psychology experiments wherein “compliance practitioners” successfully jump to the head of the lines in front of copying machines by explaining their reason: “I have to make some copies” This sort of unfortunate by product of Reason-Respecting tendency is a conditioned reflex, based on a widespread appreciation of the importance of reasons. And, naturally the practice of laying out various claptrap reasons is much used by commercial and cult “compliance practitioners” to help them get what they don’t deserve.

25) Lollapalooza Tendency—The Tendency to Get Extreme Consequences from Confluences of Psychology Tendencies Acting in Favor of a Particular Outcome

This tendency was not in any of the psychology texts I once examined, at least in any coherent fashion, yet it dominates life. It accounts for the extreme result in the Milgram experiment and the extreme success of some cults that have stumbled through practice evolution into bringing pressure from many psychological tendencies to bear at the same time on conversion targets. The targets vary in susceptibility, like the dogs Pavlov worked with in his old age, but some of the minds that are targeted simply snap into zombie mode under cult pressure. Indeed that is one cult’s name for the conversion phenomenon: snapping.

[otisdyke]

Top Tips From The Horses Mouth

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Daniel Ramot

The cofounder and CEO of Via Transportation, a carpooling service that has raised almost £300 million in funding, reveals what he has learnt…

“I think who you spend your time with can be more important than what you’re working on. When launching Via, I had a network of the smartest people [from university] I could hire to build our algorithm and technology.”

It’s never too late to change track

“I realised in my third year that academia wasn’t for me. I was reverse engineering when really I wanted to build things. I still finished my degree and my experience working with data has proved very useful.”

Don’t rush

“I didn’t rush to start a business, because, as a graduate student, I was financially unstable, but also none of my ideas were good enough – and I didn’t have the right partner.”

Prove your product

“We thought we could build the technology and that every city in the world and every public transportation authority would want to use it. We soon realised we had to build the product to show them it actually worked.”

Stop talking about it

“We took six months to convince ourselves that our idea would work. But we should have launched right away. You think you’re reducing your risk by doing diligence around your idea, but actually the risk of someone else launching your idea increases.”

Nothing is above your pay grade

“I’ve started to hear the phrase ‘above your pay grade’, which I dislike. I expect people at Via to try to engage with every problem. If you’re ambitious, then your goal should be to engage with problems one or two levels higher than you.”

David Hieatt

The cofounder of Hiut Denim Co, the jeans label worn by everyone from the Arctic Monkeys to Meghan Markle and now with a three-month waiting list for orders, reveals what he has learned…

Put yourself in a corner

“I quit my A-levels and started a sports clothing business. The petrol gauge in my car didn’t work, so I never knew if there was any petrol – the only sure-fire way to make sure I got home was to sell like hell.”

Read up

“I was unemployed for over a year until I read Ogilvy On Advertising, which said you don’t need any qualifications to work in the creative department of an advertising agency.”

It’s about your boss, not your pay packet

“My boss Paul Arden was the Steve Jobs of advertising. He taught me never to compromise for financial reasons. Who cares about your job title? The real question is: who’s your teacher?”

Make a splash

“I wanted to exhibit our T-shirts at a show, but it was £5,000 for a stand. So I just painted two models as if they were wearing the T-shirts. We were banned within 30 minutes, but every single magazine – and the event – ran images of the stunt.”

Tell a story

“A great brand is a great story. For Hiut Denim, our small town in Wales used to make jeans, so we wanted to give 400 people their jobs back. That’s a great story.”

Don’t rush to sell

“Sell your company once you don’t love it any more. If you sell what you love and someone else messes it up, you’re going to feel it. If you’re enjoying the ride, stay on the horse.”

Ryan Prince

The founder and CEO of hotel-style apartment rental chain Uncle, which owns more than 1,200 properties with £500 million worth of assets, reveals what he has learnt…

Beware the shortcut

“I realised I could cram my entire university schedule into two days, leaving a five-day weekend. I ended up regretting never taking advantage of all the great things I could have done. Now I’ve gone 180 degrees the other way.”

Embrace your anxieties

“My father arrived in Canada after the Second World War with his parents, who were Holocaust survivors. He was born in a displaced persons camp. I grew up mindful that I had nothing to fall back on and you never know what’s around the corner. I had to look after myself financially.”

Trust your mid-life crisis

“I had a mid-life crisis at 25. I realised I was much too much of a control freak to passively invest in business and just hope they did well. I needed a more reliable career.”

Reconsider the norm

“You judge hotels according to their brands and reviews, but when renting you have no idea what you’re signing up for. That’s backwards. So I thought, why isn’t there a hotel brand for living? Uncle was born out of that question.”

Track consumer trends

“I realised affordability in cities was going down, renting was growing and its stigma decreasing. It was once a badge of honour to own your car, now people will say why waste money doing that?”

Guy Ivesha

Meet the man behind London’s £40 million co-working members’ club Mortimer House

Delegate to busy people

“I learnt in the army that if you want something done, give it to someone busy. I found that if I gave it to someone with all the time in the world on their hands, they didn’t do it quickly.”

Keep abreast of industry news

“I subscribed to all the hospitality publications and one day learnt an Israeli billionaire [Yitzhak Tshuva] had acquired the Plaza Hotel in New York. Seven months later I managed to get a meeting with him through a mutual friend and he gave me a job.”

Get to the table

“For six months I wasn’t invited to meetings, until one day I saw an empty seat and sat down. I came every week until, months later, I found I was the closest person to the CEO.”

Can not can’t

“My father taught me never to admit you couldn’t do something. You can always find a way, even if you don’t know the answer yet.”

Opposites attract

“It’s wise if each partner brings a different set of competencies and qualities. My business partner doesn’t understand the hospitality world from the inside, but he very much understands property and finance.”

Staffing is a balancing act

“If you bring people onto the payroll too early, it can be heavy on working capital. But if you bring them in too late, then you can’t run the place.”

Will Dean

The cofounder and CEO of Tough Mudder – which hosts endurance events in eleven countries and now turns over more than $100 million a year – on mentors, marketing and the power of a Harvard MBA

Status matters

“Being able to go into a meeting with ‘I’m a Harvard MBA’ means people give you the benefit of the doubt and in certain situations that’s very helpful.”

Punch above your weight

“Aged 16, my schoolfriend Guy Livingstone and I made £20,000 from selling colour-changing nail varnish via Young Enterprise. To seem authoritative to distributors, I’d make them wait on the phone, saying, ‘Please hold while I put you through to Mr Dean.’”

Learn the basics

“I didn’t understand how marketing and advertising were different, so the Mirror helped me articulate a value proposition, keep customers happy and measure customer sentiment.”

Find a mentor

“The CEO of Take-Two [publisher of Grand Theft Auto], Strauss Zelnick, is good at giving me a prescriptive answer.”

Don’t be monomaniacal

“If you bring intense focus to everything you do then you burn through things quite quickly and your ideas won’t seem as exciting. I try to be more balanced now.”

It’s not going to calm down

“Young entrepreneurs think that in six months it calms down. But in six months it will have gone from 10/10 intensity to 9.8. If you do a good job, in two years it’ll be 8/10.”

Ben Silbermann

The CEO and co-founder of Pinterest, the £8.6 billion visual discovery app that ‘pins’ a trillion lifestyle recommendations a year, reveals what he has learnt…

Don’t over-research

“If you can build the product almost as quickly as you can research it, then you should just build the product. It’s better to get it into somebody’s hands.”

Listen and learn

“I learnt to listen very carefully to clients when I was consulting, which meant that at Pinterest our customer service was highly personal. I even gave my email and mobile number to customers.”

Sell and anti-sell

“We’d say to investors, ‘This is what Pinterest could be, but these are the risks.’ People that opt in knowing the risks are the partners you want.”

Don’t separate work and play

“You need to integrate your work and personal life. I don’t think it’s practical any more for people to have this really clean split. You need to develop patterns that work for your family as well as your job. You don’t want to be half on, half off all the time. It’s not a good way to live your life.”

Think laterally

“It was difficult to raise funds for Pinterest because of the financial crisis. So I entered a college business plan contest and the prize was meeting with venture capitalists First Market Capital in New York, which gave us half our money.”

Fabien Riggall

The founder of Secret Cinema – the immersive cinematic experience that has sold more than half a million tickets since 2012 – reveals what he has learned.

Break the rules

“After watching Dead Poets Society, I escaped from school with £5 to start a life in London. I was inspired by the idea of romantic adventure. There was a huge search party and I was found.”

Look up the ladder

“I wanted to direct and produce, but I could see unhappy 50-year-old second-assistant directors with no hope of producing because the climb was so hard. So I started making short films.”

Blag it

“The confidence I got from telephone sales helped me as a producer. I’d get through to CEOs by pretending to be my own assistant and creating an illusion that I was successful.”

Manners maketh man

“We grew the Future Shorts community by sending the audience notes saying, ‘Thank you for coming. We look forward to seeing you again.’ We asked them to let us know their thoughts on the films.”

Dust yourself off

“Our Back To The Future screening was our biggest to date, selling 80,000 tickets. Next year, we went bigger with Star Wars and sold 100,000 tickets.”

Change your scene

“Last week I felt down so I went to Paris, walked around, sat in cafés and wrote. I immediately felt better. Similarly, when I moved to New York, it gave me a sense of optimism and the feeling that anything could happen.”

Ayman Hariri, Vero

Ayman Hariri, founder of the ad-free media-sharing platform Vero, which currently operates across 100 countries, reveals what he has learnt…

Learn from the masters

“I’ve used every single product that Apple has released in the last 15 years. The team and I try to apply Apple’s pursuit of simplicity and usefulness in everything we do with Vero.”

Have the last word

“We had to close Epok because we didn’t design things the right way. We should have taken out more of the decision makers and created something far more centralised.”

Nail the snowball effect

“When we hit one million users, we will start charging membership of the equivalent of a couple of cups of coffee. A million is a good starter for the snowball effect; after that point, the snowball accumulates and rolls down the hill.”

Emails aren’t real work

“Working with massive teams on huge construction projects, I learnt that there’s no replacement for human communication. Saying, ‘I sent them an email’ doesn’t mean you did your job.”

Work remotely

“If you find someone you want to recruit somewhere else in the world, why make them relocate? They are probably amazing because of the culture they live in. Vero has no office, we all work remotely using [team messaging app] Slack.”

Start what you finish

“I don’t understand companies who start their marketing push and say they’ll figure out their monetisation strategy later. Very few businesses have been able to be successful on the advertising model.”

Follow us on Vero for exclusive music content and commentary, all the latest music lifestyle news and insider access into the GQ world, from behind the scenes insight to recommendations from our Editors and high-profile talent.

James Park, Fitbit

The cofounder and CEO of the £6 billion activity tracker company Fitbit, which now has more than 23.6 million active users worldwide, reveals what he has learned.

Don’t rush

“Epesi was not successful – so many things went wrong. I was only 22 at the time, very inexperienced, and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I realised I had some more growing up to do. I needed more time and to meet more people.”

Hire up

“We started Fitbit with only two employees: a monumental task. You don’t want to over-hire before you’ve nailed your product, but a few more hands would have helped.”

Go public or go home

“Going public is good for investors and employees. Ours was the largest consumer electronics IPO in US history.”

Trust your gut

“I dropped out just before finals because I got an internship at Morgan Stanley. As an entrepreneur, you have to take risks. But as an engineer, there’s always a backup.”

Watch and learn (and copy)

“When the Nintendo Wii came out, I was interested in its sensors, as well as how it turned gaming into something friendly and active. This was technology with positive impacts. I wanted to put this magic into something more portable.”

Get enough capital

“In software you can make mistakes and learn from them cheaply; in hardware every mistake is expensive to fix and takes much longer. If I could go back, I’d make sure we were better capitalised to cushion our mistakes and sleep sounder at night!”

Kris Thykier, Archery Pictures and PeaPie Films

The producer responsible for Harry Brown, Riviera and Kick-Ass – and founder of Archery Pictures and PeaPie Films – reveals what he has learned…

Degrees aren’t everything

“I asked to defer because I got a job as a film runner. Then I deferred another year and, two years later, I was already starting to hire people who had degrees. I thought, ‘Well this doesn’t seem to be an issue.’ I never took up my place.”

“Partnering with Matthew Vaughn on MARV Films was interesting. He’s incredibly tough in his deal-making, very involved in the detail. That was a side of producing I hadn’t understood yet. We were a good balancing act. I think I tempered him.”

Move with the times

“I began watching a lot more TV and realised it was as exciting a medium for original storytelling as film. So I raised some money to build a new business, focusing on both.”

Turn your passion into your career

“My aunt was a cineaste and took me to inappropriate films such as Alien when I was very young. If questioned, she said it was incredibly rude to mention my dwarfism.”

Keep your ego in check

“At MARV, we made four films in 18 months and I thought I was born to be a producer and that I was a genius. But then, when I set up PeaPie, nothing worked [initially] and all my projects fell apart. It was a valuable lesson in hubris.”

Taavet Hinrikus, TransferWise

The CEO of money-sending service TransferWise – a unicorn startup on track for revenues of £100 million this year – reveals what he has learned…

Weigh up your options

“I dropped out of university to become the first employee of Skype, because I knew I would learn so much more there. If Skype had gone bust, I could always have returned to university, and I’d still have been a little smarter than before.”

Don’t rush into a job

“I did an MBA because when I left Skype I didn’t have a clear idea of whether I wanted to create or join a company. But you don’t need an MBA to become an entrepreneur.”

You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig

“No amount of PR works if you’ve got a bad product. It has to be better than the competition and that comes down to making sure you do one thing really well.”

Pace yourself

“Building a business is a marathon, not a sprint. I don’t believe it when people tell me they’ve been working 80-hour weeks for five years in a row. I just don’t think that’s possible.”

Look beyond the money

“Doing something that empowers people makes you realise how boring it would be to work for a place where the goal is just to make more money. It’s much easier to get out of bed and look forward to 12 hours of work if you’re making the world a better place.”

Get your pitch right

“A good pitch for funding requires clarity. You need to understand the problem you’re solving, why you’re in a good place to do it and your solution needs to be ten times better than the existing one. It also has to be a big problem.”

Mark Wogan, Homeslice

The co-founder and Creative Director of Homeslice (along with his Executive Chef Ry Jessup and his brother and Homeslice Managing Director Alan Wogan) a former street-food pizza stall that now turns over £4.5 million a year across three permanent London sites, reveals what he has learned.

Don’t underspend

“We thought we’d saved a lot of money when we opened the restaurant for only £200,000, but then we had to shut it three years later to install a new kitchen. What you think is important, like the light switches, isn’t. Instead, ask yourself: does your fridge work?”

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

“I was working 16-hour days, six days a week and it nearly killed me. I had no personal life. But if you want to work in the hospitality industry, it’s vocational, not something you do on the side.”

Academia isn’t everything

“I was moved on after my headmaster found an empty bottle of vodka and two of his crystal tumblers in my bedside cabinet. I only got three GCSEs. We all make mistakes; the point is not to be defined by them.”

The best part of a pitch is passion

“We did a very poor pitch to our first landlord: a four-page PowerPoint presentation and some pizza. An experienced restaurateur would have said, ‘They don’t have a clue.’ But we were passionate. Starting out, to win a pitch you need to get your passion across.”

Don’t look like a chain (even if you are)

“Aside from the wood-fired oven (hand-built by Ry), the décor in each Homeslice is completely different. Never hand over the creative reins to somebody else. We say exactly what themes, colour and furniture we want.”

Brian Chesky, Airbnb

The CEO and cofounder of Airbnb – the $31 billion home-sharing company that operates across 191 different countries with more than 150 million users – reveals what he has learned…

“At school, my teachers would say, ‘You’re a designer. You could design the world you live in.’ That was very inspiring. But, at 3DID I was designing products that would end up in landfill. I quit my joband left LA with $1,000 in my bank.”

Stop fretting about copycats

“I remember when I started Airbnb, somebody told me, ‘Don’t worry about someone stealing your idea. They will only dismiss it.'”

Go direct to source

“By picking the right source, you can fast-forward learning something new. I’m pretty shameless when asking for help, including from Mark Zuckerberg and Warren Buffett. The circumstances might be different, but you can learn the outlying principles and see if they apply to you.”

Choose failure over regret

“Jeff Bezos’ ‘Regret Minimisation Framework’, advises choosing fewer regrets over fewer failures. Each year, it’s harder to do something new – you have one less year of your life to do it.”

Live with your cofounders

“The turning point for Airbnb was when my two cofounders and I lived and worked together seven days a week. Bouncing ideas around late at night formed some magical moments and that close bond is what builds your company.”

Grip any crises

“We had a PR nightmare after renters trashed a home in San Francisco. I was advised to increase the guarantee for hosts ten-fold. In a crisis, if you move in one direction, you’re usually OK.”

Blaise Belville, Boiler Room

Founder and CEO of Boiler Room, the live club music platform that has streamed over 3.5 billion minutes since launch and made £6.5 million last year, reveals what he has learned…

Get out of your comfort zone

“I started selling makeover vouchers at Oxford Circus for £400 a day. After I gave one to my girlfriend, I realised it was a scam, but it was interesting because I had to go up to people and put myself out there like some awful kind of salesman.”

Don’t get stuck making easy money

“Running a club night was making me £2,000 a week in cash, but upon turning 20 I met a 30-year-old club promoter and thought, ‘I do not want to be that guy.'”

Don’t be so sure of yourself

“Everyone told me not to do it, that it made no sense to refurbish a building I didn’t own. It was, indeed, a disaster. After five years of work, getting vitiligo and tuberculosis from stress, I almost bankrupted myself and those involved. It was a good lesson to be less arrogant.”

Start young

“My parents went bankrupt, so I started a CD-burning business and sold them at school. This developed my confidence that there were ways outside the traditional system to make money.”

Follow your itchy feet

“The magazine became pretty popular and Vice saw us as a competitor. But two and a half years in, I realised it wasn’t really going anywhere. I was 26 and bored of doing all this work and not having enough cash, so I moved on.”

Put the vision first

“When you first go into something creative, it’s a mistake to focus on the money. Do it for the right reasons and it’s more likely to turn into a business than if you try and force it.”

William Shu, Deliveroo

The co-founder and CEO of Deliveroo, the largest UK-based ‘restaurant-to-home’ delivery service, which operates across 12 countries and is now valued at $1 billion, tells us what he’s learned…

Embrace your (stranger) quirks

“When I started, the bank gave me $25 a night for dinner. On the first night I was so excited I ordered 25 burgers to the office from Burger King, as they were 99 cents each. It sounds odd to be so passionate about food delivery, but I never get bored talking about my [current] job.”

Ignore baffled friends

“I’d identified this huge gap in the market [for Deliveroo], but the average Londoner thought it made no sense. No one outside New York understood either, but I went ahead anyway.”

Do it yourself

“I was the first Deliveroo rider, seven days a week for eight months. My flatmate thought I’d lost my mind. I still do it now, once or twice a week. It allows me to see what’s going on.”

Don’t shy away from small jobs

“I was a waiter at a restaurant called Frank’s near campus for three years and it taught me how to be professional towards people. It’s not something you learn at school.”

Right idea, wrong time? Hold fire

“Smartphones and tablets didn’t exist and riders needed them. It wasn’t practical until the tech took off, which coincided with my tenure at business school. I was confident my idea would work eventually – things always change.”

Avoid business for business’ sake

“I met this super-smart guy from business school who was about to launch an online marketplace for handmade pet accessories. When I saw him a year later, he said he’d dropped it. Why? He realised he didn’t like dogs. If your start-up has no emotional resonance, it’s problematic. You’re going to get bored.”

Kayvon Beykpour, Periscope

The CEO and founder of live-streaming app Periscope, which has just celebrated it’s second-year anniversary, reveals what he has learned…

Have some gumption

“I got my biggest break by relentlessly hanging out in the photo studio. Eventually, one of the main photographers was out for lunch when he was meant to be on a shoot, and I got to take his place.”

Life’s too short not to travel

“‘F*** it, go travel'” was a colleague’s advice as I was debating whether to take time off. Travelling helped me build empathy with others.”

Keep your ambition sky high

“When we see Periscope being used in places like Ferguson or the House Of Representatives, in Nepal after the earthquake, or in the Middle East during the migrant crisis… it validates our vision.”

Know when to let go

“At Goodby, and then at Terriblyclever, we moved from project to project very quickly, working for several different big companies without being able to sink our teeth into anything. I didn’t find it satisfying.”

Never idle

“My work ethic was inspired by a scolding I received when I was 12, getting lunch money by cleaning fire extinguishers for hospitals. I was twiddling my thumbs having finished my work and my boss said, ‘If you have nothing to do, sweep the floor. Don’t just sit around.'”

Trust your gut

“We didn’t know if Periscope would work, but we didn’t care. We thought it should exist – that the world deserved a teleportation device.”

Carter Cleveland, Artsy

Carter Cleveland, the founder and CEO of Artsy, which allows buyers to choose from over 500,000 works held by galleries and auction houses, reveals what he has learned…

Listen to your quirks

“I knew my idea for Artsy was an uncontainable passion when during job interviews I would start pitching the idea to employers. It was a completely irrational interview technique.”

Torture thyself

“I joined Princeton’s dance company and before our first big performance, I was vomiting with nerves. Without that experience, it would’ve been harder for me to take the risk of starting my own company.”

Strike while the iron is hot

“Timing was the main reason why Artsy succeeded. A year earlier it would have been too hard a sell for galleries; a year later and we would have been followers, not leaders.”

Don’t adopt your father’s workweek

“We have as few rules as possible. We don’t have mandated vacation, and we don’t have specific working hours. It’s impossible to know what the ‘best way’ is to achieve goals. It’s up to the individual.”

Relinquish control

“Our head of product suggested purple as our brand colour. I hated purple, so drafted an email arguing against it. Then I realised that you don’t hire the best person just to overrule them. I never sent the email.”

Be strict about your bedtime

“I began Artsy working 120 hours a week and staying in the office until 4am. I worked weekends and felt guilty getting more than four hours sleep. In the end, my body shut down and I was unable to type.”

The post Top Tips From The Horses Mouth appeared first on Otis Dyke.

from The Otis Dyke Lifestyle Blog https://www.otisdyke.co.uk/top-tips-from-the-horses-mouth/

[kartiavelino]

Wrestling’s Painful Darkish Aspect: Inside a Pile-Up of Tragedies

Getty Pictures; Shutterstock/E! Illustration The recognition {of professional} wrestling is simple. Hundreds of thousands of followers stay up for annual extravaganzas like WrestleMania and pack arenas to see their favourite heroes and villains go at it within the ring. Since its debut in 1985, Wrestlemania has featured appearances by everybody from Aretha Franklin and Muhammad Ali to Pamela Anderson, Child Rock and the present president of the USA, who’s a long-time good friend of World Wrestling Leisure proprietor Vince McMahon. Fox signed a $1 billion, five-year take care of the WWE for rights to air Smackdown beginning this fall. The WWE (beforehand the WWF) has additionally proved a powerful launchpad for stardom outdoors the ringt, too, with WWE icon Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson now one of many highest-paid actors in Hollywood, Dave Bautista a beloved member of the Marvel Universe and John Cena proving he is a comic book heavyweight, too, in motion pictures like Trainwreck and Blockers. On the flip aspect, after retiring from UFC, Ronda Rousey is now having fun with a second chapter as a WWE star. But in addition deniable is the truth that wrestlers, irrespective of how staged or fastidiously choreographed the motion is, put their our bodies in danger each time they enter the ring—as many athletes do, solely with the assure that they’re going to be doing outrageous stunts. Owen Hart was 33 when he died after an tools malfunction brought on him to fall 78 toes throughout his ring entrance throughout WWF’s Over the Edge pay-per-view occasion in 1999. The WWF settled a lawsuit filed by the household for a reported $18 million in 2000. In the meantime, the present had continued, and when it was re-aired for the primary time 15 years afterward the WWE Community, Owen was fully edited out of the published. The Denver Submit through Getty Pictures To make certain, Hart’s deadly accident throughout a dwell present was a freak incidence, however accidents are a given. Final 12 months, talking as a part of the Lakers Genius Talks sequence, the place the L.A. Lakers have superstars from totally different industries come communicate, Johnson recalled powering via essentially the most heinous harm of his profession whereas battling Cena throughout WrestleMania 29 in 2013. “On the 15-minute mark, ‘bang!’ I really feel one thing pop and I am like ‘What the f–k?'” the Hobbs & Shaw star recalled. “I am laying there and each of us are out. I stated ‘Oh f–k, one thing is occurring.’ 85,000 folks and I form of roll over and stick my hand down in my trunks as a result of I needed to verify no bone was protruding.” With no bone protruding and having a split-second to resolve, Johnson in fact stored going. Ron Elkman/Sports activities Imagery/Getty Pictures “On this planet of wrestling, when you will have a giant present like this, a giant important occasion that your complete present is predicated round,” he defined. “The wrestlers will come as much as the 2 folks in the primary occasion, in some unspecified time in the future, all all through the evening within the locker room and be like, ‘Hey, thanks for the home.’ What meaning is thanks for drawing—serving to draw 85,000 folks—and placing a whole lot of f–king cash in my paycheck. We acquired a whole lot of ‘Thanks for the homes’ that evening.” The Rock is clearly one of many greatest success tales in Hollywood. However the ache that many wrestlers undergo via over the course of their careers, and the issues they do to take care of the ache, can not help however overflow into their lives outdoors the ring.    When Mickey Rourke performed Randy “The Ram” Robinson, a broken-down onetime star with a private life in shambles, in Darren Aronofsky‘s 2008 movie The Wrestler, he stated on the time that he did not base the entire of his character on a real-life wrestler, however there was a persistent rumor that The Ram was impressed by Jake “The Snake” Roberts, who battled substance abuse throughout and after his ’80s-’90s heyday and ended up estranged from his youngsters. Saturn/Kobal/Shutterstock “That’s type of a fable that the film is predicated on Jake Roberts,” producer Evan Ginzburg informed Wrestle Zone in 2018. “What occurred was I took Darren Aronofsky and the manager producer, the cash man, and the display author to a conference. On the conference there have been in all probability 20 wrestlers: Albano, Moolah, Mae Younger, Iron Sheik, Nikolai Volkoff and so forth and… there was no one there. It was unhappy. There was like, actually, a dozen or two dozen folks there. There was in all probability extra wrestlers than followers. Iron Sheik’s head was down on the desk sleeping, actually sleeping in the course of all of it. We simply noticed some very unhappy issues alongside the way in which.” “It is unhappy to say what has occurred to Jake is just not that authentic a narrative for professional wrestling,” Aronofsky stated on NPR’s Day to Day in 2009. “We met so many guys who had comparable journeys, who have been large stars and simply did not maintain themselves and ended up in actually, actually horrible conditions.” In the end, Randy the Ram “was a composite,” Ginzburg informed Wrestle Zone. “Darren revered them as performers, artists and athletes,” he continued, “however he needed to inform the true story about how these guys generated hundreds of thousands however they do not have hundreds of thousands for essentially the most half. It is the identical in [the wrestling documentary] 350 Days. The promoter will get the lion’s share.” On March 31, Final Week Tonight With John Oliver featured a section lambasting the WWE, and Vince McMahon notably, for exploiting the expertise, bodily and financially. “Many followers legitimately hate him as a result of whereas the WWE has made him a billionaire, many wrestlers say he is handled him terribly,” Oliver stated. In 2015, a mean contract paid $500,000 a 12 months, with high offers going into the seven figures. The wrestlers are thought of impartial contractors versus full-time workers and, whereas the WWE will cowl 100 p.c of the price of any work-related harm and subsequent rehabilitation, wrestlers are liable for getting their very own insurance coverage. “Anybody who makes the type of cash that they make can simply afford their very own healthcare,” McMahon informed the Connecticut Submit in 2010. “Most impartial contractors have their very own healthcare.” Featured within the Final Week Tonight piece was WWE Corridor of Famer Bret “Hit Man” Hart (who, by the way, Evan Ginzburg referred to final 12 months as one of many wrestlers “who did do properly” financially, versus some), who stated, “All these wrestlers which have broke their backs making this dwelling for years find yourself with nothing when it is over, after which they form of take you out again they usually put a slug at the back of your head and dump you out within the—,” he paused. “However that is the lifetime of an expert wrestler.” MediaPunch/Shutterstock Bret, 61, and Owen Hart have been among the many 11 kids of late skilled wrestler Stu Hart and his spouse, Helen. (Stu, by the way, lived till he was 88.) All the seven brothers both wrestled or have been concerned backstage, and their 4 sisters married professional wrestlers. Bret’s 2007 autobiography Hit Man: My Actual Life within the Cartoon World of Wrestling utilized hours upon hours’ price of audio diaries he stored throughout his professional profession, which began within the late ’70s. He labored on it for years, getting waylaid by a stroke he suffered in 2002 following a bicycling accident. Hart’s had a tumultuous relationship with the WWE, which he left in 1997 (when it was nonetheless WWF) for the rival World Championship Wrestling. Hart formally retired in late 2000 however returned to be inducted into the WWE Corridor of Fame in 2006, after which once more this 12 months along with his crew, The Hart Basis. (WCW folded in 2001 and McMahon finally purchased the rights to its archive.) Hart told A.V. Club in 2009 that he did not miss the bodily act of wrestling within the least, however he missed the camaraderie and the followers. Requested about what was then the latest film The Wrestler, he stated he thought the appearing was nice, however it selected to deal with one specific perspective. “Once I watched it, nearly as good because the appearing and story was, I assumed that individuals would suppose there was no excessive finish or reward,” Hart stated. “There’s a whole lot of higher tales. Wrestling was a great life for me. I had some dangerous issues occur, however the fact is, I had a good time.” Rmv/Shutterstock In the meantime, the WWE slammed Oliver’s report as inaccurate and invited him to WrestleMania 35 the next weekend to see for himself what kind of operation they have been operating. He did not attend, however on the finish of his personal present he ran a clip of an outdated wrestling business spliced with a voice encouraging whoever gathered at 82,500-seat MetLife Stadium subsequent Sunday to chant in favor of the expertise’s entry to retirement accounts, employee’s comp and household and medical go away. “I am not saying the followers ought to do this, or make indicators, or make heaps of indicators. I am simply saying, I actually hope they make their voices heard on this,” Oliver urged. Whereas the Final Week Tonight section was wildly applauded by some, particularly by those that have little interest in wrestling in anyway, the response was combined locally, with a lot of outrage coming from on-line pundits however the stars themselves sounding extra measured. “All people’s entitled to their very own opinion,” Paul Wight, the WWE star referred to as Huge Present, told TMZ Sports after Oliver’s piece aired. “All people’s acquired their very own experiences and the way they really feel. I’ve had a hell of a profession. I’ve had a whole lot of accidents. I knew from day one, stepping via the ropes, that it was not a straightforward job, it was a job that I used to be going to place myself in danger. And, you recognize, I took the paychecks, I took the celebrity, I took the fortune, and people are the dangers that occur. “That is simply a part of the business, and the business’s modified,” he added. “It is achieved all the things it could possibly to guard the athlete and create longevity for the athlete. I am 47! I am nonetheless rockin’ and rollin’. They’re doing one thing proper!” “Previous to airing, WWE responded to his producers refuting each level in his one-sided presentation,” the WWE additionally acknowledged. “John Oliver merely ignored the info. The well being and wellness of our performers is the only most essential side of our enterprise, and we’ve a complete, longstanding Expertise Wellness program.” The WWE applied its wellness program in February 2006, a number of months after star Eddie Guerrero died out of the blue of coronary heart failure at 38 after years of drug abuse. It consists of cardiovascular and mind perform testing, as properly well being care referrals and drug testing (for leisure substances) to make sure that wrestlers are in compliance with a Wellness Coverage. But there stays an eerily lengthy—and rising—record of former wrestlers who did not make it out of their 30s and 40s, not to mention their 50s and 60s, and never together with unhappy accidents resembling what occurred to Owen Hart. George Napolitano/FilmMagic In 2007, Chris Benoit, a world champion in WWE and the competing WCW, killed his spouse, Nancy, and 7-year-old son earlier than hanging himself at their Georgia dwelling, a stomach-churning tragedy that unfolded over what authorities decided was a three-day interval. He had been scheduled to compete for a 3rd world championship on June 25, the day their our bodies have been found, on Uncooked; the occasion was canceled and a three-hour retrospective on Benoit’s life and profession ran instead. As soon as extra particulars in regards to the murder-suicide began to return out, nonetheless, the WWE clamped down on official mentions of Benoit at occasions and began to erase him from their archives. Benoit’s demise prompted a renewed dialogue in regards to the long-term results of steroid use and repeated head accidents; it was later reported that the 40-year-old’s mind resembled the mind of an 85-year-old with dementia. He was additionally stated to have been devastated by Guerrero’s demise in November 2005 and had been appearing erratically, not only for weeks or months, however for the final couple of years of his storied profession. On the identical time, a few of Benoit’s fellow wrestlers refused to consider he killed himself or anybody else, that he had been simply effective the final time they noticed him, and conspiracy theories that he had been murdered alongside along with his household linger. Chyna, as soon as the largest feminine star in wrestling and dubbed the “Ninth Surprise of the World” earlier than the WWE launched her in 2001, died of an accidental overdose of pharmaceuticals and alcohol in 2016. She was 45. Within the final decade of her life she was nonetheless a well-liked determine within the wrestling world, and followers went nuts when she made her debut for Complete Nonstop Motion Wrestling on Influence! in 2011. However she additionally grew to become recognized for releasing a few intercourse tapes and doing porn, saying that she discovered her adult-entertainment household extra welcoming than the ladies round her in her wrestling days. Although she all the time denied having an dependancy drawback, she admittedly used medicine and appeared on Superstar Rehab With Dr. Drew in 2008. In 2015 she revealed on Opie and Jim that she had tried suicide earlier than and been hospitalized for psychological well being points. John Shearer/WireImage for BWR Public Relations Unintended prescription drug overdoses additionally brought on the deaths of 43-year-old Brian “Crush” Adams, whose 7-year-old son discovered him unconscious in mattress in 2007; 33-year-old Andrew “Check” Martin, who OD’d on oxycodone in 2009 and was later discovered to have extreme continual traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is linked to repetitive head trauma; and 29-year-old Lance McNaught, who died of coronary heart failure triggered by combined drug intoxication, in August 2010. McNaught, who wrestled as Lance Cade, had been fired from the WWE a minimum of twice for substance abuse-related points, first in 2008 after 5 years beneath contract and once more in April 2010. The WWE paid for his first journey to rehab, based on Deadspin, however he was let go the second time after admitting to drug use and returning to remedy. Months earlier than he died he referred to as the WWE’s Wellness Coverage a PR transfer, fairly than an try to actually assist the expertise. “Vince’s stance [is] they do all this as a result of they care in regards to the expertise,” McNaught told manager Kenny Bolin, host of The Bolin Alley podcast, in April 2010. “Bulls–t. They care in regards to the picture of the WWE and also you care about the truth that Congress was having…hearings about this. That is what this comes all the way down to.” Lance’s father Harley McNaught told Connecticut’s The Day that his son had began abusing painkillers after struggling a knee harm and receiving a prescription in 2004. He had undergone surgical procedure on a busted shoulder in 2008 as properly. “It damage me to see him wrestling in ache,” Harley McNaught stated, “however you discuss to any considered one of them, when you attempt to climb the ladder and get a spot, you shut it down [due to an injury] and also you lose your spot and go proper again to the underside. So it is, ‘Right here, take just a few painkillers, make the world go away.'” Speaking to the Fee on Oversight and Authorities Reform as a part of a 2008 congressional investigation into drug use in skilled wrestling within the wake of what occurred with Chris Benoit, when requested why the WWE had began providing to assist present and former expertise receive remedy, McMahan said, “Two phrases. Public relations. That is it. I don’t really feel any sense of accountability for anybody of no matter their age is who has handed alongside and has dangerous habits and overdoses for medicine. Sorry, I do not really feel any accountability for that.” Jim Spellman/WireImage “I may need met him as soon as,” Vince’s spouse, Linda McMahon, who had beforehand been WWE CEO and on the time was a Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut, informed the Connecticut Submit when requested about McNaught’s demise. She stated that the WWE may no extra be held accountable for what occurred to McNaught “than a studio may have prevented Heath Ledger‘s demise.” (Mrs. McMahon misplaced to Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal; extra lately she served as head of the Small Enterprise Administration beneath President Trump earlier than stepping down in April.) Earlier than McNaught’s demise, Eddie “Umaga” Fatu, 36, was launched from his WWE contract in June 2009 for violating the Wellness Coverage for not the primary time and refusing to go to rehab; he died that December from a mixture of acute toxicity (from painkiller hydrocodone, muscle relaxer carisoprodol and anti-anxiety drug diazepam), coronary heart illness and liver failure. Chris Kanyon had threatened suicide within the weeks previous to his brother discovering him lifeless in his New York residence on April 2, 2010, subsequent to an empty bottle of antidepressants. He was 40. “All people already is aware of that in the event you get damage, you recognize, work via it since you’ll lose your spot,” Lance McNaught informed wrestling e-newsletter PWInsider. “…You understand, guys do not set out to do that, they do not got down to be problem-makers, most of them a minimum of. You understand, and I do not wish to be part of an organization that claims one factor after which does one other, particularly at that degree with, you recognize, the media consideration that this has gotten since Eddie and Chris has handed away. That is rubbish to me.” With renewed scrutiny on the McMahons because of Linda’s Senate marketing campaign on the time, through which she was highlighting her expertise as a profitable businesswoman, naturally publications have been digging into simply what kind of a enterprise the WWE actually was. A money-maker, for certain. However what else? “It’s a very financially profitable firm,” Wrestling Observer Determine 4 editor Dave Meltzer told the New York Times in July 2010. “However, boy, there have been a whole lot of our bodies discarded within the constructing of that firm.” Paul Hawthorne/Getty Pictures On one hand there are the bodily accidents and the harmful lengths many wrestlers have gone to with the intention to powerful them out, with some falling into addictive spirals that they did not survive. In recent times, there was a concerted effort to speak extra about psychological well being by itself, despair not being a situation that discriminates between the profitable and the struggling, although it could possibly actually be exacerbated by bodily ache. Hulk Hogan opened up in 2009 about sinking into despair after his marriage imploded—and that one evening, numbed from mixing rum and Xanax, he put a gun to his head, solely to get a cellphone name proper then from boxer Laila Ali, who he starred with on a revival of American Gladiators. “She referred to as with no agenda, simply to say hello and test on me,” Hogan recalled on Today. “It snapped me out of it. At that second I switched gears. I acquired sick and uninterested in being sick and drained. Her voice saved my life, it actually did.” “Battle and ache is actual. I used to be devastated and depressed,” Dwayne Jonson told the U.K.’s Daily Express in 2018. “I reached a degree the place I did not wish to do a factor or go anyplace. I used to be crying always.” His mom had been suicidal too and he recalled watching her attempt to stroll into oncoming site visitors when he was 15. His worst time, he recalled, got here earlier than he conquered the wrestling world, however it opened his eyes to the struggles of others, in all arenas. “We each healed however we have all the time acquired to do our greatest to concentrate when different individuals are in ache,” he stated. “We have now to assist them via it and remind them they don’t seem to be alone.” Mediapunch/REX/Shutterstock “It is Could. It is Psychological Well being Month … in the event you’re depressed and issues aren’t going your manner, there is not any motive to really feel alone,” wrestler and MMA fighter CM Punk stated on Atlantic Metropolis’s WMGM-FM whereas speaking about Ashley Massaro, a former WWE star who died in an apparent suicide final week. “Simply attain out to someone. Textual content a good friend. Name someone. There’s hotlines. There’s methods you may get assist.” The WWE honored Massaro throughout its Could 19 Cash within the Financial institution PPV occasion. She had gained the 2005 Diva Search and was with the WWE till 2008. She additionally competed on Survivor: China in 2007. Sources told TMZ Sports that she hanged herself in her dwelling in New York’s Suffolk County and was pronounced lifeless at a close-by hospital. She’s survived by an 18-year-old daughter. Massaro was considered one of 60 former professional wrestlers who sued the WWE in 2016, alleging the group failed to guard them from concussions and different repetitive head trauma, expenses the WWE denied. Per NBC News, a federal choose dismissed the swimsuit final September, calling among the claims frivolous and saying others have been filed past the statute of limitations; she additionally ordered the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Konstantine Kyros, to pay the WWE’s authorized charges. The record of plaintiffs additionally included Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka, Joseph “Street Warrior Animal” Laurinaitis, Paul “Mr. Fantastic” Orndorff, Chris “King Kong Bundy” Pallies and Harry Masayoshi Fujiwara, referred to as “Mr. Fuji.” Fujiwara died in 2016 at 82. Snuka died in 2017 at 73. Each have been later discovered to have had CTE. Snuka had been indicted on third-degree homicide and manslaughter expenses in 2015 for the 1983 demise of his girlfriend however was discovered unfit to face trial after being identified with dementia. Bundy died in March at 61. “I stand for skilled wrestlers who face the prospect of dropping their id and consciousness to the consequences of a latent occupational illness that robs them of their sanity, consolation of their households and recollections of all the things they achieved entertaining the hundreds of thousands of people that love them,” Kyros, who has additionally represented NFL gamers in comparable lawsuits, wrote to the Related Press on the time. Kyros additionally launched an affidavit after she died that exposed a declare that Massaro had alleged she was sexually assaulted throughout a goodwill journey to Kuwait and was informed by higher-ups on the WWE to not report it. The WWE fired again that Kyros was exploiting her demise—and that Massaro had later apologized for being concerned with the lawsuit. “WWE is saddened by the demise of Ashley Massaro, and we reiterate our condolences to her household,” learn the assertion obtained by Wrestling Observer Figure Four. “Nevertheless, we remorse that her lawyer Konstantine Kyros, who filed a number of instances towards WWE, misplaced all of them, and was sanctioned a number of instances by the Court docket for repeated misconduct and false allegations, is utilizing Ashley’s demise to additional his malicious marketing campaign towards WWE by releasing an affidavit that she submitted to the Court docket and later apologized to WWE for being concerned with, so we want to make sure issues crystal clear.” If Massaro had ever informed them she had been assaulted, “we’d have reported it instantly to the Base Commander. At no time was there ever a gathering with Vince McMahon, Kevin Dunn, John Laurinatitis or different firm executives through which she informed them of such a declare and was instructed to maintain it quiet.” Matt Roberts/ZUMA Wire/ZUMAPRESS.com In the meantime, all the fashionable wellness initiatives on the planet could not have come round in time to assist a few of wrestling’s elder statesmen, guys whose primes got here within the days of much less oversight and fewer consciousness, resembling James “Final Warrior” Hellwig, who died of a coronary heart assault at 54 in 2014 simply three days after being inducted into the WWE Corridor of Fame. He had additionally signed a multiyear deal to be a WWE ambassador after an nearly two-decade estrangement from the corporate. “No WWE expertise turns into a legend on their very own,” Hellwig informed a Monday Night time Uncooked crowd on April 7, the evening earlier than he died. “Each man’s coronary heart at some point beats its closing beat. His lungs breathe their closing breath. And if what that man did in his life makes the blood pulse via the physique of others and makes them consider deeper in one thing that is bigger than life, then his essence, his spirit, might be immortalized by the storytellers—by the loyalty, by the reminiscence of those that honor him, and make the operating the person did dwell without end.” The wrestling world and past was quickly devastated by the 2015 death of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, whose star had transcended outdoors the ring due to quite a few TV and film cameos. On HBO’s Real Sports in 2003, Piper name-checked an assortment of medicine he’d abused all through his profession, prescription and unlawful. “You get this going and then you definately begin consuming alcohol,” he stated. “Lethal mixture. You convey cocaine into the image.” He sniffed. “‘Does a line, it is time to battle, no downers there. You understand, let’s go—however it might be good to have a little bit painkiller in you as you go in, or rather a lot. And whoom, so now you come out of the ring, it is 10:30 and also you’re excessive! How are ya?!'” Piper had soured on the enterprise of wrestling by then, however he returned to it simply the identical. Todd Williamson/WireImage “What would you will have me do at 49?” he requested rhetorically. When my pension plan I am unable to take out until I am 65? I am not going to make 65.  Let’s simply face info, guys.” He was 61 when he died in his sleep because of cardiopulmonary arrest cacsued by hypertension. His demise certificates listed a pulmonary embolism as a contributing issue. “I truly acquired an opportunity to take a seat down and discuss to him for a pair hours earlier than this battle,” Ronda Rousey, who used the nickname “Rowdy” with Piper’s blessing, said on Fox Sports 1 after UFC 190, recalling how she visited Piper at dwelling just a few weeks earlier than he died. “I did not have time for something, however I used to be like, ‘No, I’ve to go see Roddy. I’ve to go to Piper’s Pit.’ We talked for hours. I even informed him, I promised I am gonna do the identify proud, ‘I am gonna do you proud, I am gonna go beat this chick.’ I informed him that. And she or he did. Additionally among the many family names that wrestling has produced was Randy “Macho Man” Savage, who died in 2011 after crashing his automotive right into a tree. It turned out that the 58-year-old had suffered a coronary heart assault behind the wheel and misplaced management of the car. Official reason for demise was artherosclerotic coronary heart illness. Russell Turiak/Getty Pictures “He had a lot life in his eyes & in his spirit, I simply pray that he is comfortable and in a greater place and we miss him,” Hulk Hogan tweeted after listening to the information, considered one of numerous members of the wrestling group to pay respects. “I am fully devastated, after over 10 years of not speaking with Randy, we have lastly began to speak and talk.” Savage (actual identify Randall Mario Poffo), affected by the lingering ache brought on by slamming right into a mat hundreds of instances, had retreated from the wrestling world within the final years of his life, however was stated to be taking advantage of retirement. “He labored on his home, he was busy along with his animals, he married once more, and he took us to our physician’s appointments—issues he missed all these years when he was wrestling,” Randy’s mom, Judy, told Bleacher Report after he died. He too had adopted his father, Angelo Poffo, into the wrestling enterprise. Savage’s first spouse was famed wrestling supervisor “Miss Elizabeth” Hulette, they usually have been a celebrity couple however cut up bitterly in 1992. Elizabeth died of a poisonous mixture of painkillers and vodka in 2003; she was 42. (She and Hogan’s spouse have been pricey mates, which factored into Savage and Hogan’s eventual estrangement.) 2018 noticed the deaths of a number of older members of the wrestling group. Leon Allen White, referred to as “Vader,” had stop consuming after being alcoholism for years however was affected by well being troubles. He stated in 2017, after being identified with congestive coronary heart failure, that he needed to die within the ring. He underwent two coronary heart surgical procedures in 2018 after which died on June 18 after spending a month within the hospital with pneumonia. He was 63. On Aug. 13, Jim “The Anvil” Neidhart, 63, suffered what seemed to be a seizure and fell, fatally  injuring himself. He had been identified with early onset Alzheimer’s. Thomas Billington, the “Dynamite Child,” misplaced using his left leg 20 years in the past, had suffered a stroke in 2013 and had coronary heart hassle; he was 60 when he died in December. Additionally final 12 months, Brian Christopher Lawler—who as soon as shaped the champion WWF tag crew “Too Cool” with Scotty 2 Hotty and Rikishi—hanged himself in a small-town Tennessee jail cell on July 28. He had been arrested for DUI on July 7—his third DUI total—and evading arrest, and his father, professional wrestler Jerry Lawler, had been engaged on getting him into rehab. Brian was airlifted to a trauma middle in Memphis and placed on life help, however was declared mind lifeless on July 29. “That is from the final time that the three of us have been within the ring collectively,” Scott Garland (Scotty 2 Hotty) wrote on Instagram in tribute. “Brian and I have been totally different folks outdoors of the ring. We by no means traveled collectively, by no means roomed collectively, and by no means actually frolicked collectively. However, EVERY single time that we went via that curtain, we made magic collectively. Magic that can by no means get replaced. We have been TOO COOL. I’ll miss ya BC.” Solofa Fatu Jr. (Rikishi) wrote, “Brian’s dwelling spirit was all the time his ardour for journey and love for the wrestling enterprise!! What I’ll carry with me most is the Grandmasta’s infectious smile and depraved snort however most of all is his ardour to entertain every & each individual he ever got here in touch with.My condolences and respect goes out to King @realjerrylawler brother Kevin Lawler and your complete household. I am sry for our loss ??” Kevin C. Cox/Getty Pictures Every week later, Jerry Lawler stated on his and Glenn Moore’s podcast, Dinner With the King, that he was dwelling a nightmare—and was nonetheless processing what went fallacious. The Hardeman County sheriff had informed him, “‘He stated, ‘Jerry, my jail goes to be one of the best place for Brian for the subsequent few weeks. He stated, ‘I am going to personally keep watch over him and he’ll be protected right here.'” However it doesn’t matter what occurred, it did not change the truth that his son was gone. “You understand in the event you acquired a child, inform them you like them, as a result of I did not do this sufficient with Brian,” Jerry stated. Jeff Jarrett, who gained quite a few titles and was inducted into the WWE Corridor of Fame final 12 months, paid tribute to Lawler’s ability and charisma and wrote on Instagram that, in the course of the three years they labored collectively, Lawler had made him a greater wrestler. Jarrett, who spent time in rehab in 2017, additionally acknowledged the very actual drawback his fellow wrestler had suffered from. “Through the years the Brian I, and so many extra, knew grew to become lined up in ‘life’…The illness of dependancy is actual, it’s totally darkish, and it is deadly if left untreated. Brian, love ya and I’ll miss you my good friend.” A happier ending is not inconceivable, although. Jake “The Snake” Roberts beat most cancers in 2014 and fellow wrestler Diamond Dallas Web page arrange an Indiegogo page to crowdfund his former mentor’s $9,000 shoulder surgical procedure. “I had life, however I poisoned it,” Roberts stated in 2016’s The Resurrection of Jake the Snake, which chronicled his journey with Web page. (He had referred to as the 1999 documentary Past the Mat, which centered on him, Mick Foley and Terry Funk, a hurtful pack of lies, however apparently the behind-the-scenes have a look at him was solely the tip of the iceberg.)   Scott Cunningham/Getty Pictures, Jason Kempin/Getty Pictures Three journeys to rehab on the behest of the WWE hadn’t helped and he had misplaced his household. However then Web page, who had helped handle his personal continual ache from wrestling with yoga, stepped in to assist—with Roberts’ sobriety, his weight, his mind-set, all the things. “Everybody thought I used to be nuts,” Web page told Bleacher Report. After an interminable sequence of progress beset by relapses, it was the compassion (and cash) that poured in when Web page arrange the Indiegogo fund that lastly helped get Roberts over the hump, when he realized how a lot folks within the wrestling group nonetheless cared about him. Asking for $9,000, they raised nearly $30,000. There have been relapses after the 2016 movie’s comfortable ending, which confirmed Roberts being inducted into the WWE Corridor of Fame in 2014. However Roberts had re-emerged into his group and was not dwelling as if he not cared about dwelling. “I am simply on the market now making an attempt to take pleasure in myself,” the now 63-year-old star told the Asbury Park Press final 12 months forward of 80s Wrestling Con, the place he was a visitor of honor. “I’ve had these exhibits and I discuss to folks, go to with them, take some photos, and discover out the place they have been at throughout that point of their life, who they have been going to see wrestling. I like listening to these tales, man. It makes me really feel fairly good, makes me really feel like I did not waste all that point again within the day.” https://www.eonline.com/information/1044009/wrestling-s-painful-dark-side-inside-a-pile-up-of-tragedies?cmpid=rss-000000-rssfeed-365-topstories&utm_source=eonline&utm_medium=rssfeeds&utm_campaign=rss_topstories The post Wrestling’s Painful Darkish Aspect: Inside a Pile-Up of Tragedies appeared first on Kartia Velino. https://kartiavelino.com/wrestlings-painful-dark-side-inside-a-pile-up-of-tragedies/

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The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

It was the Lehman Brothers of blockchain. 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared when cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox imploded in 2014 after a series of hacks. The incident cemented the industry’s reputation as frighteningly insecure. Now a controversial crypto celebrity named Brock Pierce is trying to get the Mt. Gox flameout’s 24,000 victims their money back and build a new company from the ashes.

Pierce spoke to TechCrunch for the first interview about Gox Rising — his plan to reboot the Mt. Gox brand and challenge Coinbase and Binance for the title of top cryptocurrency exchange. He claims there’s around $630 million and 150,000 Bitcoin are waiting in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trust, and Pierce wants to solve the legal and technical barriers to getting those assets distributed back to their rightful owners.

The consensus from several blockchain startup CEOs I spoke with was that the plot is “crazy”, but that it also has the potential to right one of the biggest wrongs marring the history of Bitcoin.

The Fall Of Mt. Gox

The story starts with Magic: The Gathering. Mt. Gox launched in 2006 as a place for players of the fantasy card game to trade monsters and spells before cryptocurrency came of age. The Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange wasn’t designed to safeguard huge quantities of Bitcoin from legions of hackers, but founder Jed McCaleb pivoted the site to do that in 2010. Seeking to focus on other projects, he gave 88 percent of the company to French software engineer Mark Karpeles, and kept 12 percent. By 2013, the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox had become the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, handling 70 percent of all Bitcoin trades. But security breaches, technology problems, and regulations were already plaguing the service.

Then everything fell apart. In February 2014, Mt. Gox halted withdrawls due to what it called a bug in Bitcoin, trapping assets in user accounts. Mt. Gox discovered that it had lost over 700,000 Bitcoins due to theft over the past few years. By the end of the month, it had suspended all trading and filed for bankruptcy protection, which would contribute to a 36 percent decline in Bitcoin’s price. It admitted that 100,000 of its own Bitcoin atop 750,000 owned by customers had been stolen.

Mt. Gox is now undergoing bankruptcy rehabilitation in Japan overseen by court-appointed trustee and veteran bankruptcy lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi to establish a process for compensating the 24,000 victims who filed claims. There’s now 137,892 Bitcoin, 162,106 Bitcoin Cash, and some other forked coins in Mt. Gox’s holdings, along with $630 million cash from the sale of 25 percent of the Bitcoin that Kobayashi handled at a precient price point above where it is today. But five years later, creditors still haven’t been paid back. 

A Rescue Attempt

Brock Pierce, the eccentric crypto celebrity

Pierce had actually tried to acquire Mt. Gox in 2013. The child actor known from The Mighty Ducks had gone on to work with a talent management company called Digital Entertainment Network. But accusations of sex crimes led Pierce and some team members to flee the US to Spain until they were extradited back. Pierce wasn’t charged and paid roughly $21,000 to settle civil suits, but his cohorts were convicted of child molestation and child pornography.

The situation still haunts Pierce’s reputation and makes some in the industry apprehensive to be associated with him. But he managed to break into the virtual currency business, setting up World Of Warcraft gold mining farms in China. He claims to have eventually run the world’s largest exchanges for WOW Gold and Second Life Linden Dollars.

Soon Pierce was becoming a central figure in the blockchain scene. He co-founded Blockchain Capital, and eventually the EOS Alliance as well as a much-derided “crypto utopia” in Puerto Rico called Sol. His eccentric, Burning Man-influenced fashion made him easy to spot at the industry’s many conferences.

As Bitcoin and Mt. Gox rose in late 2012, Pierce tried to buy it, but “my biggest investor was Goldman Sachs. Goldman was not a fan of me buying the biggest Bitcoin exchange” due to the regulatory issues, Pierce tells me. But he also suspected the exchange was built on a shaky technical foundation that led him to stop pursuing the deal. “I thought there was a big risk factor in the Mt. Gox back-end. That was my intuition and I’m glad it was because my intuition was dead right.”

After Mt. Gox imploded, Pierce claims his investment group Sunlot Holdings successfully bought founder McCaleb’s 12 percent stake for 1 Bitcoin, though McCaleb says he didn’t receive the Bitcoin and it’s not clear if the deal went through. Pierce also claims he had a binding deal with Karpeles to buy the other 88 percent of Mt. Gox, but that Karpeles tried to pull out of the deal that remains in legal limbo.

The Supposed Villain

Sunlot has since been trying to take over the rehabilitation proceedings, but that arrangement was derailed by a lawsuit from CoinLab. That company had partnered with Mt. Gox in 2012 to run its North American operations but claimed it never received the necessary assets, and sued Mt. Gox for $75 million. Mt. Gox countersued, saying CoinLab wasn’t legally certified to run the exchange in the US and that it hadn’t returned $5.3 million in customer deposits. For a detailed account the tangle of lawsuits, check out Reuters’ deep-dive into the Mt. Gox fiasco.

CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes

This week, CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes increased the claim and is now seeking $16 billion. Pierce alleges “this is a frivolous lawsuit. He’s claiming if [the partnership with Mt. Gox] hadn’t been cancelled, CoinLab would have been Coinbase and is suing for all the value. He believes Coinbase is worth $16 billion so he should be paid $16 billion. He embezzled money from Mt. Gox, he committed a crime, and he’s trying to extort the creditors. He’s holding up the entire process hoping he’ll get a payday.” Later, Pierce reiterated that “Coinlab is the villain trying to take all the money and see creditors get nothing.” Industry sources I spoke to agreed with that characterization

Mt. Gox customers worried that they might only receive the cash equivalent of their Bitcoin according to the currency’s $483 value when Gox closed in 2014. That’s despite the rise in Bitcoin’s value rising to around 7X that today, and as high as 40X at the currency’s peak. Luckily, in June 2018 a Japanese District Court halted bankruptcy proceedings and sent Mt. Gox into civil rehabilitation which means the company’s assets would be distributed to its creditors (the users) instead of liquidated. It also declared that users would be paid back their lost Bitcoin rather than the old cash value.

The Plan For Gox Rising

Now Pierce and Sunlot are attempting another rescue of Mt. Gox’s  $1.2 billion assets. He wants to track down the remaining cryptocurrency that’s missing, have it all fairly valued, and then distribute the maximum amount to the robbed users with Mt. Gox equity shareholders including himself receiving nothing.

That’s a much better deal for creditors than if Mt. Gox paid out the undervalued sum, and then shareholders like Pierce got to keep the remaining Bitcoins or proceeds of their sale at today’s true value. “I‘ve been very blessed in my life. I did commit to giving my first billion away” Pierce notes, joking that this plan could account for the first $700 million he plans to ‘donate’.

“Like Game Of Thrones, the last season of Mt. Gox hasn’t been written” Pierce tells me, speaking in terms HBO’s Silicon Valley would be quick to parody. “What kind of ending do we want to make for it? I’m a Joseph Campbell fan so I’m obviously going to go with a hero’s journey, with a rise and a fall, and then a rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”

But to make this happen, Sunlot needs at least half of those Mt. Gox users seeking compensation, or roughly 12,000 that represent the majority of assets, to sign up to join a creditors committee. That’s where GoxRising.com comes in. The plan is to have users join the committee there so they can present a united voice to Kobayashi about how they want Mt. Gox’s assets distributed. “I think that would allow the process to move faster than it would otherise” Pierce says. “Things are on track to be resolved in the next three to five years. If [a majority of creditors sign on] this could be resolved in maybe 1 year.”

Beyond providing whatever the Mt. Gox estate pays out, Pierce wants to create a Gox Coin that gives original Mt. Gox creditors a stake in the new company. He plans to have all of Mt. Gox’s equity wiped out, including his own. Then he’ll arrange to finance and tokenize an independent foundation governed by the creditors that will seek to recover additional lost Mt. Gox assets and then distribute them pro rata to the Gox Coin holders. There are plenty of unanswered questions about the regulatory status of a Gox Coin and what holders would be entitled to, Pierce admits.

Meanwhile, Pierce is bidding to buy the intangibles of Mt. Gox, aka the brand and domain. He wants to then relaunch it as a Gox or Mt. Gox exchange that doesn’t provide custody itself for higher security. Despite the recent crypto recession with prices at multi-year lows, he believes there’s room for another exchange with a brand tied to the early heyday of Bitcoin.

“We want to offer [creditors] more than the bankruptcy trustee can do on its own” Pierce tells me. He concedes that the venture isn’t purely altruistic. “If the exchange is very successful I stand to benefit sometime down the road.” Even if the revived Mt. Gox never rises to legitimately challenge Binance, Coinbase, and other leading exchanges, Piece believes it’s all worth the effort. He concludes, “Whether we’re successful or not, I want to see the creditors made whole.” Those creditors will have to decide for themselves who to trust.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Gd4W2f

[bobbynolanios88]

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

It was the Lehman Brothers of blockchain. 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared when cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox imploded in 2014 after a series of hacks. The incident cemented the industry’s reputation as frighteningly insecure. Now a controversial crypto celebrity named Brock Pierce is trying to get the Mt. Gox flameout’s 24,000 victims their money back and build a new company from the ashes.

Pierce spoke to TechCrunch for the first interview about Gox Rising — his plan to reboot the Mt. Gox brand and challenge Coinbase and Binance for the title of top cryptocurrency exchange. He claims there’s around $630 million and 150,000 Bitcoin are waiting in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trust, and Pierce wants to solve the legal and technical barriers to getting those assets distributed back to their rightful owners.

The consensus from several blockchain startup CEOs I spoke with was that the plot is “crazy”, but that it also has the potential to right one of the biggest wrongs marring the history of Bitcoin.

The Fall Of Mt. Gox

The story starts with Magic: The Gathering. Mt. Gox launched in 2006 as a place for players of the fantasy card game to trade monsters and spells before cryptocurrency came of age. The Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange wasn’t designed to safeguard huge quantities of Bitcoin from legions of hackers, but founder Jed McCaleb pivoted the site to do that in 2010. Seeking to focus on other projects, he gave 88 percent of the company to French software engineer Mark Karpeles, and kept 12 percent. By 2013, the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox had become the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, handling 70 percent of all Bitcoin trades. But security breaches, technology problems, and regulations were already plaguing the service.

Then everything fell apart. In February 2014, Mt. Gox halted withdrawls due to what it called a bug in Bitcoin, trapping assets in user accounts. Mt. Gox discovered that it had lost over 700,000 Bitcoins due to theft over the past few years. By the end of the month, it had suspended all trading and filed for bankruptcy protection, which would contribute to a 36 percent decline in Bitcoin’s price. It admitted that 100,000 of its own Bitcoin atop 750,000 owned by customers had been stolen.

Mt. Gox is now undergoing bankruptcy rehabilitation in Japan overseen by court-appointed trustee and veteran bankruptcy lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi to establish a process for compensating the 24,000 victims who filed claims. There’s now 137,892 Bitcoin, 162,106 Bitcoin Cash, and some other forked coins in Mt. Gox’s holdings, along with $630 million cash from the sale of 25 percent of the Bitcoin that Kobayashi handled at a precient price point above where it is today. But five years later, creditors still haven’t been paid back. 

A Rescue Attempt

Brock Pierce, the eccentric crypto celebrity

Pierce had actually tried to acquire Mt. Gox in 2013. The child actor known from The Mighty Ducks had gone on to work with a talent management company called Digital Entertainment Network. But accusations of sex crimes led Pierce and some team members to flee the US to Spain until they were extradited back. Pierce wasn’t charged and paid roughly $21,000 to settle civil suits, but his cohorts were convicted of child molestation and child pornography.

The situation still haunts Pierce’s reputation and makes some in the industry apprehensive to be associated with him. But he managed to break into the virtual currency business, setting up World Of Warcraft gold mining farms in China. He claims to have eventually run the world’s largest exchanges for WOW Gold and Second Life Linden Dollars.

Soon Pierce was becoming a central figure in the blockchain scene. He co-founded Blockchain Capital, and eventually the EOS Alliance as well as a much-derided “crypto utopia” in Puerto Rico called Sol. His eccentric, Burning Man-influenced fashion made him easy to spot at the industry’s many conferences.

As Bitcoin and Mt. Gox rose in late 2012, Pierce tried to buy it, but “my biggest investor was Goldman Sachs. Goldman was not a fan of me buying the biggest Bitcoin exchange” due to the regulatory issues, Pierce tells me. But he also suspected the exchange was built on a shaky technical foundation that led him to stop pursuing the deal. “I thought there was a big risk factor in the Mt. Gox back-end. That was my intuition and I’m glad it was because my intuition was dead right.”

After Mt. Gox imploded, Pierce claims his investment group Sunlot Holdings successfully bought founder McCaleb’s 12 percent stake for 1 Bitcoin, though McCaleb says he didn’t receive the Bitcoin and it’s not clear if the deal went through. Pierce also claims he had a binding deal with Karpeles to buy the other 88 percent of Mt. Gox, but that Karpeles tried to pull out of the deal that remains in legal limbo.

The Supposed Villain

Sunlot has since been trying to take over the rehabilitation proceedings, but that arrangement was derailed by a lawsuit from CoinLab. That company had partnered with Mt. Gox in 2012 to run its North American operations but claimed it never received the necessary assets, and sued Mt. Gox for $75 million. Mt. Gox countersued, saying CoinLab wasn’t legally certified to run the exchange in the US and that it hadn’t returned $5.3 million in customer deposits. For a detailed account the tangle of lawsuits, check out Reuters’ deep-dive into the Mt. Gox fiasco.

CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes

This week, CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes increased the claim and is now seeking $16 billion. Pierce alleges “this is a frivolous lawsuit. He’s claiming if [the partnership with Mt. Gox] hadn’t been cancelled, CoinLab would have been Coinbase and is suing for all the value. He believes Coinbase is worth $16 billion so he should be paid $16 billion. He embezzled money from Mt. Gox, he committed a crime, and he’s trying to extort the creditors. He’s holding up the entire process hoping he’ll get a payday.” Later, Pierce reiterated that “Coinlab is the villain trying to take all the money and see creditors get nothing.” Industry sources I spoke to agreed with that characterization

Mt. Gox customers worried that they might only receive the cash equivalent of their Bitcoin according to the currency’s $483 value when Gox closed in 2014. That’s despite the rise in Bitcoin’s value rising to around 7X that today, and as high as 40X at the currency’s peak. Luckily, in June 2018 a Japanese District Court halted bankruptcy proceedings and sent Mt. Gox into civil rehabilitation which means the company’s assets would be distributed to its creditors (the users) instead of liquidated. It also declared that users would be paid back their lost Bitcoin rather than the old cash value.

The Plan For Gox Rising

Now Pierce and Sunlot are attempting another rescue of Mt. Gox’s  $1.2 billion assets. He wants to track down the remaining cryptocurrency that’s missing, have it all fairly valued, and then distribute the maximum amount to the robbed users with Mt. Gox equity shareholders including himself receiving nothing.

That’s a much better deal for creditors than if Mt. Gox paid out the undervalued sum, and then shareholders like Pierce got to keep the remaining Bitcoins or proceeds of their sale at today’s true value. “I‘ve been very blessed in my life. I did commit to giving my first billion away” Pierce notes, joking that this plan could account for the first $700 million he plans to ‘donate’.

“Like Game Of Thrones, the last season of Mt. Gox hasn’t been written” Pierce tells me, speaking in terms HBO’s Silicon Valley would be quick to parody. “What kind of ending do we want to make for it? I’m a Joseph Campbell fan so I’m obviously going to go with a hero’s journey, with a rise and a fall, and then a rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”

But to make this happen, Sunlot needs at least half of those Mt. Gox users seeking compensation, or roughly 12,000 that represent the majority of assets, to sign up to join a creditors committee. That’s where GoxRising.com comes in. The plan is to have users join the committee there so they can present a united voice to Kobayashi about how they want Mt. Gox’s assets distributed. “I think that would allow the process to move faster than it would otherise” Pierce says. “Things are on track to be resolved in the next three to five years. If [a majority of creditors sign on] this could be resolved in maybe 1 year.”

Beyond providing whatever the Mt. Gox estate pays out, Pierce wants to create a Gox Coin that gives original Mt. Gox creditors a stake in the new company. He plans to have all of Mt. Gox’s equity wiped out, including his own. Then he’ll arrange to finance and tokenize an independent foundation governed by the creditors that will seek to recover additional lost Mt. Gox assets and then distribute them pro rata to the Gox Coin holders. There are plenty of unanswered questions about the regulatory status of a Gox Coin and what holders would be entitled to, Pierce admits.

Meanwhile, Pierce is bidding to buy the intangibles of Mt. Gox, aka the brand and domain. He wants to then relaunch it as a Gox or Mt. Gox exchange that doesn’t provide custody itself for higher security. Despite the recent crypto recession with prices at multi-year lows, he believes there’s room for another exchange with a brand tied to the early heyday of Bitcoin.

“We want to offer [creditors] more than the bankruptcy trustee can do on its own” Pierce tells me. He concedes that the venture isn’t purely altruistic. “If the exchange is very successful I stand to benefit sometime down the road.” Even if the revived Mt. Gox never rises to legitimately challenge Binance, Coinbase, and other leading exchanges, Piece believes it’s all worth the effort. He concludes, “Whether we’re successful or not, I want to see the creditors made whole.” Those creditors will have to decide for themselves who to trust.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Gd4W2f

[mccartneynathxzw83]

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

It was the Lehman Brothers of blockchain. 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared when cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox imploded in 2014 after a series of hacks. The incident cemented the industry’s reputation as frighteningly insecure. Now a controversial crypto celebrity named Brock Pierce is trying to get the Mt. Gox flameout’s 24,000 victims their money back and build a new company from the ashes.

Pierce spoke to TechCrunch for the first interview about Gox Rising — his plan to reboot the Mt. Gox brand and challenge Coinbase and Binance for the title of top cryptocurrency exchange. He claims there’s around $630 million and 150,000 Bitcoin are waiting in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trust, and Pierce wants to solve the legal and technical barriers to getting those assets distributed back to their rightful owners.

The consensus from several blockchain startup CEOs I spoke with was that the plot is “crazy”, but that it also has the potential to right one of the biggest wrongs marring the history of Bitcoin.

The Fall Of Mt. Gox

The story starts with Magic: The Gathering. Mt. Gox launched in 2006 as a place for players of the fantasy card game to trade monsters and spells before cryptocurrency came of age. The Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange wasn’t designed to safeguard huge quantities of Bitcoin from legions of hackers, but founder Jed McCaleb pivoted the site to do that in 2010. Seeking to focus on other projects, he gave 88 percent of the company to French software engineer Mark Karpeles, and kept 12 percent. By 2013, the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox had become the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, handling 70 percent of all Bitcoin trades. But security breaches, technology problems, and regulations were already plaguing the service.

Then everything fell apart. In February 2014, Mt. Gox halted withdrawls due to what it called a bug in Bitcoin, trapping assets in user accounts. Mt. Gox discovered that it had lost over 700,000 Bitcoins due to theft over the past few years. By the end of the month, it had suspended all trading and filed for bankruptcy protection, which would contribute to a 36 percent decline in Bitcoin’s price. It admitted that 100,000 of its own Bitcoin atop 750,000 owned by customers had been stolen.

Mt. Gox is now undergoing bankruptcy rehabilitation in Japan overseen by court-appointed trustee and veteran bankruptcy lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi to establish a process for compensating the 24,000 victims who filed claims. There’s now 137,892 Bitcoin, 162,106 Bitcoin Cash, and some other forked coins in Mt. Gox’s holdings, along with $630 million cash from the sale of 25 percent of the Bitcoin that Kobayashi handled at a precient price point above where it is today. But five years later, creditors still haven’t been paid back. 

A Rescue Attempt

Brock Pierce, the eccentric crypto celebrity

Pierce had actually tried to acquire Mt. Gox in 2013. The child actor known from The Mighty Ducks had gone on to work with a talent management company called Digital Entertainment Network. But accusations of sex crimes led Pierce and some team members to flee the US to Spain until they were extradited back. Pierce wasn’t charged and paid roughly $21,000 to settle civil suits, but his cohorts were convicted of child molestation and child pornography.

The situation still haunts Pierce’s reputation and makes some in the industry apprehensive to be associated with him. But he managed to break into the virtual currency business, setting up World Of Warcraft gold mining farms in China. He claims to have eventually run the world’s largest exchanges for WOW Gold and Second Life Linden Dollars.

Soon Pierce was becoming a central figure in the blockchain scene. He co-founded Blockchain Capital, and eventually the EOS Alliance as well as a much-derided “crypto utopia” in Puerto Rico called Sol. His eccentric, Burning Man-influenced fashion made him easy to spot at the industry’s many conferences.

As Bitcoin and Mt. Gox rose in late 2012, Pierce tried to buy it, but “my biggest investor was Goldman Sachs. Goldman was not a fan of me buying the biggest Bitcoin exchange” due to the regulatory issues, Pierce tells me. But he also suspected the exchange was built on a shaky technical foundation that led him to stop pursuing the deal. “I thought there was a big risk factor in the Mt. Gox back-end. That was my intuition and I’m glad it was because my intuition was dead right.”

After Mt. Gox imploded, Pierce claims his investment group Sunlot Holdings successfully bought founder McCaleb’s 12 percent stake for 1 Bitcoin, though McCaleb says he didn’t receive the Bitcoin and it’s not clear if the deal went through. Pierce also claims he had a binding deal with Karpeles to buy the other 88 percent of Mt. Gox, but that Karpeles tried to pull out of the deal that remains in legal limbo.

The Supposed Villain

Sunlot has since been trying to take over the rehabilitation proceedings, but that arrangement was derailed by a lawsuit from CoinLab. That company had partnered with Mt. Gox in 2012 to run its North American operations but claimed it never received the necessary assets, and sued Mt. Gox for $75 million. Mt. Gox countersued, saying CoinLab wasn’t legally certified to run the exchange in the US and that it hadn’t returned $5.3 million in customer deposits. For a detailed account the tangle of lawsuits, check out Reuters’ deep-dive into the Mt. Gox fiasco.

CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes

This week, CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes increased the claim and is now seeking $16 billion. Pierce alleges “this is a frivolous lawsuit. He’s claiming if [the partnership with Mt. Gox] hadn’t been cancelled, CoinLab would have been Coinbase and is suing for all the value. He believes Coinbase is worth $16 billion so he should be paid $16 billion. He embezzled money from Mt. Gox, he committed a crime, and he’s trying to extort the creditors. He’s holding up the entire process hoping he’ll get a payday.” Later, Pierce reiterated that “Coinlab is the villain trying to take all the money and see creditors get nothing.” Industry sources I spoke to agreed with that characterization

Mt. Gox customers worried that they might only receive the cash equivalent of their Bitcoin according to the currency’s $483 value when Gox closed in 2014. That’s despite the rise in Bitcoin’s value rising to around 7X that today, and as high as 40X at the currency’s peak. Luckily, in June 2018 a Japanese District Court halted bankruptcy proceedings and sent Mt. Gox into civil rehabilitation which means the company’s assets would be distributed to its creditors (the users) instead of liquidated. It also declared that users would be paid back their lost Bitcoin rather than the old cash value.

The Plan For Gox Rising

Now Pierce and Sunlot are attempting another rescue of Mt. Gox’s  $1.2 billion assets. He wants to track down the remaining cryptocurrency that’s missing, have it all fairly valued, and then distribute the maximum amount to the robbed users with Mt. Gox equity shareholders including himself receiving nothing.

That’s a much better deal for creditors than if Mt. Gox paid out the undervalued sum, and then shareholders like Pierce got to keep the remaining Bitcoins or proceeds of their sale at today’s true value. “I‘ve been very blessed in my life. I did commit to giving my first billion away” Pierce notes, joking that this plan could account for the first $700 million he plans to ‘donate’.

“Like Game Of Thrones, the last season of Mt. Gox hasn’t been written” Pierce tells me, speaking in terms HBO’s Silicon Valley would be quick to parody. “What kind of ending do we want to make for it? I’m a Joseph Campbell fan so I’m obviously going to go with a hero’s journey, with a rise and a fall, and then a rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”

But to make this happen, Sunlot needs at least half of those Mt. Gox users seeking compensation, or roughly 12,000 that represent the majority of assets, to sign up to join a creditors committee. That’s where GoxRising.com comes in. The plan is to have users join the committee there so they can present a united voice to Kobayashi about how they want Mt. Gox’s assets distributed. “I think that would allow the process to move faster than it would otherise” Pierce says. “Things are on track to be resolved in the next three to five years. If [a majority of creditors sign on] this could be resolved in maybe 1 year.”

Beyond providing whatever the Mt. Gox estate pays out, Pierce wants to create a Gox Coin that gives original Mt. Gox creditors a stake in the new company. He plans to have all of Mt. Gox’s equity wiped out, including his own. Then he’ll arrange to finance and tokenize an independent foundation governed by the creditors that will seek to recover additional lost Mt. Gox assets and then distribute them pro rata to the Gox Coin holders. There are plenty of unanswered questions about the regulatory status of a Gox Coin and what holders would be entitled to, Pierce admits.

Meanwhile, Pierce is bidding to buy the intangibles of Mt. Gox, aka the brand and domain. He wants to then relaunch it as a Gox or Mt. Gox exchange that doesn’t provide custody itself for higher security. Despite the recent crypto recession with prices at multi-year lows, he believes there’s room for another exchange with a brand tied to the early heyday of Bitcoin.

“We want to offer [creditors] more than the bankruptcy trustee can do on its own” Pierce tells me. He concedes that the venture isn’t purely altruistic. “If the exchange is very successful I stand to benefit sometime down the road.” Even if the revived Mt. Gox never rises to legitimately challenge Binance, Coinbase, and other leading exchanges, Piece believes it’s all worth the effort. He concludes, “Whether we’re successful or not, I want to see the creditors made whole.” Those creditors will have to decide for themselves who to trust.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Gd4W2f

[vanessawestwcrtr5]

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

It was the Lehman Brothers of blockchain. 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared when cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox imploded in 2014 after a series of hacks. The incident cemented the industry’s reputation as frighteningly insecure. Now a controversial crypto celebrity named Brock Pierce is trying to get the Mt. Gox flameout’s 24,000 victims their money back and build a new company from the ashes.

Pierce spoke to TechCrunch for the first interview about Gox Rising — his plan to reboot the Mt. Gox brand and challenge Coinbase and Binance for the title of top cryptocurrency exchange. He claims there’s around $630 million and 150,000 Bitcoin are waiting in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trust, and Pierce wants to solve the legal and technical barriers to getting those assets distributed back to their rightful owners.

The consensus from several blockchain startup CEOs I spoke with was that the plot is “crazy”, but that it also has the potential to right one of the biggest wrongs marring the history of Bitcoin.

The Fall Of Mt. Gox

The story starts with Magic: The Gathering. Mt. Gox launched in 2006 as a place for players of the fantasy card game to trade monsters and spells before cryptocurrency came of age. The Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange wasn’t designed to safeguard huge quantities of Bitcoin from legions of hackers, but founder Jed McCaleb pivoted the site to do that in 2010. Seeking to focus on other projects, he gave 88 percent of the company to French software engineer Mark Karpeles, and kept 12 percent. By 2013, the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox had become the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, handling 70 percent of all Bitcoin trades. But security breaches, technology problems, and regulations were already plaguing the service.

Then everything fell apart. In February 2014, Mt. Gox halted withdrawls due to what it called a bug in Bitcoin, trapping assets in user accounts. Mt. Gox discovered that it had lost over 700,000 Bitcoins due to theft over the past few years. By the end of the month, it had suspended all trading and filed for bankruptcy protection, which would contribute to a 36 percent decline in Bitcoin’s price. It admitted that 100,000 of its own Bitcoin atop 750,000 owned by customers had been stolen.

Mt. Gox is now undergoing bankruptcy rehabilitation in Japan overseen by court-appointed trustee and veteran bankruptcy lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi to establish a process for compensating the 24,000 victims who filed claims. There’s now 137,892 Bitcoin, 162,106 Bitcoin Cash, and some other forked coins in Mt. Gox’s holdings, along with $630 million cash from the sale of 25 percent of the Bitcoin that Kobayashi handled at a precient price point above where it is today. But five years later, creditors still haven’t been paid back. 

A Rescue Attempt

Brock Pierce, the eccentric crypto celebrity

Pierce had actually tried to acquire Mt. Gox in 2013. The child actor known from The Mighty Ducks had gone on to work with a talent management company called Digital Entertainment Network. But accusations of sex crimes led Pierce and some team members to flee the US to Spain until they were extradited back. Pierce wasn’t charged and paid roughly $21,000 to settle civil suits, but his cohorts were convicted of child molestation and child pornography.

The situation still haunts Pierce’s reputation and makes some in the industry apprehensive to be associated with him. But he managed to break into the virtual currency business, setting up World Of Warcraft gold mining farms in China. He claims to have eventually run the world’s largest exchanges for WOW Gold and Second Life Linden Dollars.

Soon Pierce was becoming a central figure in the blockchain scene. He co-founded Blockchain Capital, and eventually the EOS Alliance as well as a much-derided “crypto utopia” in Puerto Rico called Sol. His eccentric, Burning Man-influenced fashion made him easy to spot at the industry’s many conferences.

As Bitcoin and Mt. Gox rose in late 2012, Pierce tried to buy it, but “my biggest investor was Goldman Sachs. Goldman was not a fan of me buying the biggest Bitcoin exchange” due to the regulatory issues, Pierce tells me. But he also suspected the exchange was built on a shaky technical foundation that led him to stop pursuing the deal. “I thought there was a big risk factor in the Mt. Gox back-end. That was my intuition and I’m glad it was because my intuition was dead right.”

After Mt. Gox imploded, Pierce claims his investment group Sunlot Holdings successfully bought founder McCaleb’s 12 percent stake for 1 Bitcoin, though McCaleb says he didn’t receive the Bitcoin and it’s not clear if the deal went through. Pierce also claims he had a binding deal with Karpeles to buy the other 88 percent of Mt. Gox, but that Karpeles tried to pull out of the deal that remains in legal limbo.

The Supposed Villain

Sunlot has since been trying to take over the rehabilitation proceedings, but that arrangement was derailed by a lawsuit from CoinLab. That company had partnered with Mt. Gox in 2012 to run its North American operations but claimed it never received the necessary assets, and sued Mt. Gox for $75 million. Mt. Gox countersued, saying CoinLab wasn’t legally certified to run the exchange in the US and that it hadn’t returned $5.3 million in customer deposits. For a detailed account the tangle of lawsuits, check out Reuters’ deep-dive into the Mt. Gox fiasco.

CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes

This week, CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes increased the claim and is now seeking $16 billion. Pierce alleges “this is a frivolous lawsuit. He’s claiming if [the partnership with Mt. Gox] hadn’t been cancelled, CoinLab would have been Coinbase and is suing for all the value. He believes Coinbase is worth $16 billion so he should be paid $16 billion. He embezzled money from Mt. Gox, he committed a crime, and he’s trying to extort the creditors. He’s holding up the entire process hoping he’ll get a payday.” Later, Pierce reiterated that “Coinlab is the villain trying to take all the money and see creditors get nothing.” Industry sources I spoke to agreed with that characterization

Mt. Gox customers worried that they might only receive the cash equivalent of their Bitcoin according to the currency’s $483 value when Gox closed in 2014. That’s despite the rise in Bitcoin’s value rising to around 7X that today, and as high as 40X at the currency’s peak. Luckily, in June 2018 a Japanese District Court halted bankruptcy proceedings and sent Mt. Gox into civil rehabilitation which means the company’s assets would be distributed to its creditors (the users) instead of liquidated. It also declared that users would be paid back their lost Bitcoin rather than the old cash value.

The Plan For Gox Rising

Now Pierce and Sunlot are attempting another rescue of Mt. Gox’s  $1.2 billion assets. He wants to track down the remaining cryptocurrency that’s missing, have it all fairly valued, and then distribute the maximum amount to the robbed users with Mt. Gox equity shareholders including himself receiving nothing.

That’s a much better deal for creditors than if Mt. Gox paid out the undervalued sum, and then shareholders like Pierce got to keep the remaining Bitcoins or proceeds of their sale at today’s true value. “I‘ve been very blessed in my life. I did commit to giving my first billion away” Pierce notes, joking that this plan could account for the first $700 million he plans to ‘donate’.

“Like Game Of Thrones, the last season of Mt. Gox hasn’t been written” Pierce tells me, speaking in terms HBO’s Silicon Valley would be quick to parody. “What kind of ending do we want to make for it? I’m a Joseph Campbell fan so I’m obviously going to go with a hero’s journey, with a rise and a fall, and then a rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”

But to make this happen, Sunlot needs at least half of those Mt. Gox users seeking compensation, or roughly 12,000 that represent the majority of assets, to sign up to join a creditors committee. That’s where GoxRising.com comes in. The plan is to have users join the committee there so they can present a united voice to Kobayashi about how they want Mt. Gox’s assets distributed. “I think that would allow the process to move faster than it would otherise” Pierce says. “Things are on track to be resolved in the next three to five years. If [a majority of creditors sign on] this could be resolved in maybe 1 year.”

Beyond providing whatever the Mt. Gox estate pays out, Pierce wants to create a Gox Coin that gives original Mt. Gox creditors a stake in the new company. He plans to have all of Mt. Gox’s equity wiped out, including his own. Then he’ll arrange to finance and tokenize an independent foundation governed by the creditors that will seek to recover additional lost Mt. Gox assets and then distribute them pro rata to the Gox Coin holders. There are plenty of unanswered questions about the regulatory status of a Gox Coin and what holders would be entitled to, Pierce admits.

Meanwhile, Pierce is bidding to buy the intangibles of Mt. Gox, aka the brand and domain. He wants to then relaunch it as a Gox or Mt. Gox exchange that doesn’t provide custody itself for higher security. Despite the recent crypto recession with prices at multi-year lows, he believes there’s room for another exchange with a brand tied to the early heyday of Bitcoin.

“We want to offer [creditors] more than the bankruptcy trustee can do on its own” Pierce tells me. He concedes that the venture isn’t purely altruistic. “If the exchange is very successful I stand to benefit sometime down the road.” Even if the revived Mt. Gox never rises to legitimately challenge Binance, Coinbase, and other leading exchanges, Piece believes it’s all worth the effort. He concludes, “Whether we’re successful or not, I want to see the creditors made whole.” Those creditors will have to decide for themselves who to trust.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Gd4W2f

[courtneyvbrooks87]

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

The plot to revive Mt. Gox and repay victims’ Bitcoin – TechCrunch

It was the Lehman Brothers of blockchain. 850,000 Bitcoin disappeared when cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox imploded in 2014 after a series of hacks. The incident cemented the industry’s reputation as frighteningly insecure. Now a controversial crypto celebrity named Brock Pierce is trying to get the Mt. Gox flameout’s 24,000 victims their money back and build a new company from the ashes.

Pierce spoke to TechCrunch for the first interview about Gox Rising — his plan to reboot the Mt. Gox brand and challenge Coinbase and Binance for the title of top cryptocurrency exchange. He claims there’s around $630 million and 150,000 Bitcoin are waiting in the Mt. Gox bankruptcy trust, and Pierce wants to solve the legal and technical barriers to getting those assets distributed back to their rightful owners.

The consensus from several blockchain startup CEOs I spoke with was that the plot is “crazy”, but that it also has the potential to right one of the biggest wrongs marring the history of Bitcoin.

The Fall Of Mt. Gox

The story starts with Magic: The Gathering. Mt. Gox launched in 2006 as a place for players of the fantasy card game to trade monsters and spells before cryptocurrency came of age. The Magic: The Gathering Online eXchange wasn’t designed to safeguard huge quantities of Bitcoin from legions of hackers, but founder Jed McCaleb pivoted the site to do that in 2010. Seeking to focus on other projects, he gave 88 percent of the company to French software engineer Mark Karpeles, and kept 12 percent. By 2013, the Tokyo-based Mt. Gox had become the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchange, handling 70 percent of all Bitcoin trades. But security breaches, technology problems, and regulations were already plaguing the service.

Then everything fell apart. In February 2014, Mt. Gox halted withdrawls due to what it called a bug in Bitcoin, trapping assets in user accounts. Mt. Gox discovered that it had lost over 700,000 Bitcoins due to theft over the past few years. By the end of the month, it had suspended all trading and filed for bankruptcy protection, which would contribute to a 36 percent decline in Bitcoin’s price. It admitted that 100,000 of its own Bitcoin atop 750,000 owned by customers had been stolen.

Mt. Gox is now undergoing bankruptcy rehabilitation in Japan overseen by court-appointed trustee and veteran bankruptcy lawyer Nobuaki Kobayashi to establish a process for compensating the 24,000 victims who filed claims. There’s now 137,892 Bitcoin, 162,106 Bitcoin Cash, and some other forked coins in Mt. Gox’s holdings, along with $630 million cash from the sale of 25 percent of the Bitcoin that Kobayashi handled at a precient price point above where it is today. But five years later, creditors still haven’t been paid back. 

A Rescue Attempt

Brock Pierce, the eccentric crypto celebrity

Pierce had actually tried to acquire Mt. Gox in 2013. The child actor known from The Mighty Ducks had gone on to work with a talent management company called Digital Entertainment Network. But accusations of sex crimes led Pierce and some team members to flee the US to Spain until they were extradited back. Pierce wasn’t charged and paid roughly $21,000 to settle civil suits, but his cohorts were convicted of child molestation and child pornography.

The situation still haunts Pierce’s reputation and makes some in the industry apprehensive to be associated with him. But he managed to break into the virtual currency business, setting up World Of Warcraft gold mining farms in China. He claims to have eventually run the world’s largest exchanges for WOW Gold and Second Life Linden Dollars.

Soon Pierce was becoming a central figure in the blockchain scene. He co-founded Blockchain Capital, and eventually the EOS Alliance as well as a much-derided “crypto utopia” in Puerto Rico called Sol. His eccentric, Burning Man-influenced fashion made him easy to spot at the industry’s many conferences.

As Bitcoin and Mt. Gox rose in late 2012, Pierce tried to buy it, but “my biggest investor was Goldman Sachs. Goldman was not a fan of me buying the biggest Bitcoin exchange” due to the regulatory issues, Pierce tells me. But he also suspected the exchange was built on a shaky technical foundation that led him to stop pursuing the deal. “I thought there was a big risk factor in the Mt. Gox back-end. That was my intuition and I’m glad it was because my intuition was dead right.”

After Mt. Gox imploded, Pierce claims his investment group Sunlot Holdings successfully bought founder McCaleb’s 12 percent stake for 1 Bitcoin, though McCaleb says he didn’t receive the Bitcoin and it’s not clear if the deal went through. Pierce also claims he had a binding deal with Karpeles to buy the other 88 percent of Mt. Gox, but that Karpeles tried to pull out of the deal that remains in legal limbo.

The Supposed Villain

Sunlot has since been trying to take over the rehabilitation proceedings, but that arrangement was derailed by a lawsuit from CoinLab. That company had partnered with Mt. Gox in 2012 to run its North American operations but claimed it never received the necessary assets, and sued Mt. Gox for $75 million. Mt. Gox countersued, saying CoinLab wasn’t legally certified to run the exchange in the US and that it hadn’t returned $5.3 million in customer deposits. For a detailed account the tangle of lawsuits, check out Reuters’ deep-dive into the Mt. Gox fiasco.

CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes

This week, CoinLab co-founder Peter Vessenes increased the claim and is now seeking $16 billion. Pierce alleges “this is a frivolous lawsuit. He’s claiming if [the partnership with Mt. Gox] hadn’t been cancelled, CoinLab would have been Coinbase and is suing for all the value. He believes Coinbase is worth $16 billion so he should be paid $16 billion. He embezzled money from Mt. Gox, he committed a crime, and he’s trying to extort the creditors. He’s holding up the entire process hoping he’ll get a payday.” Later, Pierce reiterated that “Coinlab is the villain trying to take all the money and see creditors get nothing.” Industry sources I spoke to agreed with that characterization

Mt. Gox customers worried that they might only receive the cash equivalent of their Bitcoin according to the currency’s $483 value when Gox closed in 2014. That’s despite the rise in Bitcoin’s value rising to around 7X that today, and as high as 40X at the currency’s peak. Luckily, in June 2018 a Japanese District Court halted bankruptcy proceedings and sent Mt. Gox into civil rehabilitation which means the company’s assets would be distributed to its creditors (the users) instead of liquidated. It also declared that users would be paid back their lost Bitcoin rather than the old cash value.

The Plan For Gox Rising

Now Pierce and Sunlot are attempting another rescue of Mt. Gox’s  $1.2 billion assets. He wants to track down the remaining cryptocurrency that’s missing, have it all fairly valued, and then distribute the maximum amount to the robbed users with Mt. Gox equity shareholders including himself receiving nothing.

That’s a much better deal for creditors than if Mt. Gox paid out the undervalued sum, and then shareholders like Pierce got to keep the remaining Bitcoins or proceeds of their sale at today’s true value. “I‘ve been very blessed in my life. I did commit to giving my first billion away” Pierce notes, joking that this plan could account for the first $700 million he plans to ‘donate’.

“Like Game Of Thrones, the last season of Mt. Gox hasn’t been written” Pierce tells me, speaking in terms HBO’s Silicon Valley would be quick to parody. “What kind of ending do we want to make for it? I’m a Joseph Campbell fan so I’m obviously going to go with a hero’s journey, with a rise and a fall, and then a rise from the ashes like a phoenix.”

But to make this happen, Sunlot needs at least half of those Mt. Gox users seeking compensation, or roughly 12,000 that represent the majority of assets, to sign up to join a creditors committee. That’s where GoxRising.com comes in. The plan is to have users join the committee there so they can present a united voice to Kobayashi about how they want Mt. Gox’s assets distributed. “I think that would allow the process to move faster than it would otherise” Pierce says. “Things are on track to be resolved in the next three to five years. If [a majority of creditors sign on] this could be resolved in maybe 1 year.”

Beyond providing whatever the Mt. Gox estate pays out, Pierce wants to create a Gox Coin that gives original Mt. Gox creditors a stake in the new company. He plans to have all of Mt. Gox’s equity wiped out, including his own. Then he’ll arrange to finance and tokenize an independent foundation governed by the creditors that will seek to recover additional lost Mt. Gox assets and then distribute them pro rata to the Gox Coin holders. There are plenty of unanswered questions about the regulatory status of a Gox Coin and what holders would be entitled to, Pierce admits.

Meanwhile, Pierce is bidding to buy the intangibles of Mt. Gox, aka the brand and domain. He wants to then relaunch it as a Gox or Mt. Gox exchange that doesn’t provide custody itself for higher security. Despite the recent crypto recession with prices at multi-year lows, he believes there’s room for another exchange with a brand tied to the early heyday of Bitcoin.

“We want to offer [creditors] more than the bankruptcy trustee can do on its own” Pierce tells me. He concedes that the venture isn’t purely altruistic. “If the exchange is very successful I stand to benefit sometime down the road.” Even if the revived Mt. Gox never rises to legitimately challenge Binance, Coinbase, and other leading exchanges, Piece believes it’s all worth the effort. He concludes, “Whether we’re successful or not, I want to see the creditors made whole.” Those creditors will have to decide for themselves who to trust.

Original Source http://bit.ly/2Gd4W2f