Transcript of Ben McKenzie (on cryptocurrency) New

Welcome, welcome, welcome to Armchair Expert, Experts on Expert. I'm Dan Shepard. You're Lily Padman.

I am.

And we have an expert that will be confusing to people.

I was confused.

You were very confused.

Mm-hmm.

You saw Ben in the yard and you said, oh my God, it's that Ben.

Yeah. When I read that we were having Ben McKenzie on, I— and I knew it was an expert episode and I saw what the episode was about. I read the write-up. I was like, okay, so there's an expert with the same name and then walk in and it is— it is the actor.

It is. And I got to tell you, I say this in the fact-check, this is one of the smartest actors I've ever met in my life. He's so fucking smart. I had such a blast talking to him. And yes, he has done his homework. He has an incredible book about this topic called Easy Money, a New York Times bestseller, and a new documentary that's in theaters now called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money. And he's obsessed with cryptocurrencies. And are they really a currency? Can you use them to buy things? What are their value? Um, very entertaining. Uh, obviously you know him from the OC, Southland, Gotham. Great dude, so glad we had him. Please enjoy Ben McKenzie. I gotta tell you a one-second funny story that just overlapped with you.

Yeah.

So I see on the schedule, like, a few weeks out— this is a couple years ago— Brian Cox in the schedule. And I'm like, "Oh, cool, the guy from Succession. I can't wait to talk to him." And I keep saying to Rob and Monica, I'm like, "I'm gonna try to get him in the interview to say, 'Fuck off.'" You watch Succession? So day of, we're eating lunch about, like, an hour before he gets here. I say it again to them, and they're like, "Why do you keep saying 'fuck off'?" They go, you know, it's not the actor Brian Cox, it's the physicist Brian Cox. And I was like, oh, fuck, I need a lot more research to have a physicist on. Anyways, I just saw Monica in the yard and she goes, yeah, I was like, I didn't realize it was the actor.

I thought it was an expert separately, just with the same name.

I didn't know you also did this. That makes me so happy.

I was like, that was like the biggest compliment I had.

She's like, And they're like, "Really like your book.

I didn't know you were an actor." It's like, "Hell yeah!" "I didn't know you were an expert." I'm always trying to snatch another identity away from acting. First it was writing, then directing, and then, yeah, anything else. I'm like, "Yeah, please validate me in another way." I know, right?

Because I think it is hard. As an actor, you're so not in control, and people prejudge you based off the work you've done or whatever, and it's just like a very vulnerable place to be.

And I had made a career of playing idiots, particularly, so—

Yeah, you wanna show off.

Yeah, yeah, I had a little bit of a chip on my shoulder.

You should try teen idol, you know, it's a different—

I think all these things come with their trade-offs, don't they?

They do.

Pull that fucker a little closer to you. I wanna hear that—

Dulcet tone.

Dulcet tone, that's the word I couldn't remember. Feel free to— Oh, look at this, don't worry. Wow, guys. Fenn is mechanical, he's a man.

Oh my gosh. I don't have the longest legs for this. Couch, but that's okay.

It's not a great couch.

Okay, this is a great couch. I am just too short for couches today. All couches are too deep for me.

They really did go deep. They're fine for you.

You can do this.

Yeah, there was a paradigm shift about 18 years ago in couches, and they got deeper and deeper. These are not the couches we grew up sitting on.

No, no, they're not.

They're not. And they are more comfortable, except I just feel like such an old man saying this. My back is always like—

yeah, sure, feel free to take that pillow.

I'm going to do that.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you. It's super comfortable.

We're going to be here for 4 hours. Oh, it's gonna go deep.

My spiritual headquarters is Austin, and specifically my church is Barton Springs.

Yeah, buddy, it is glorious, isn't it?

Yeah. Did you as a little kid?

Yeah, it hasn't changed, right? They haven't like fucked with it, have they?

No, the concrete's 75 years old and it's a grass hill.

Great. Yeah, I mean, so much has changed in that town since I grew up there, and to be blunt, Elon kind of fucked it up in my opinion. Cybertrucks are not what I think of as the Austin vibe.

When you think of weird, that doesn't— I mean, it is weird. It's not the same brand weird.

Yeah, exactly.

But I would argue that transformation was already happening when I did Idiocracy there in 2004, because Dell was there and a couple big tech companies had already moved there.

By the way, Idiocracy— wow, talk about a movie that was ahead of its time.

I'm sure you've heard this a million times, but Jesus Christ, generally during elections people like to talk about it. Indeed, there's been screenings at times. But you're multi-generation Austin, right? Your grandfather He doesn't teach anymore. No more Brian Cox anymore. He taught at UT.

He founded the communications department, co-founded it, and started the public radio and television stations there.

And he passed the 1967 Public Broadcast Act. Yeah, yeah.

Wherever the hell it fell. Which now they're doing their best to rip apart. Yeah, he was a great man. He came through Ellis Island. Like, his parents were Dutch immigrants and first guy in his family to go to college. That generation where there were guys who came from nothing and did incredible work. And you're kind of aware of that at a very early age.

You gotta toe the line a little bit.

A little bit. He was such a sweet but formidable person. He loved to throw these dinner parties, and I remember the family gathering, and obviously when the grandfather's there, you had to behave. And I had just come from summer camp. Oh. Where, of course, you like—

Christ.

Curse of Blue Street. No, it was language. It was Curse of Blue Street. And I can't remember what I did. I dropped an F-bomb, or I did something totally inappropriate. Okay. And it was just record scratch, and I tried to retreat into the chair.

Was that your father's father? Father's father, yeah.

And then he became an attorney, or something?

Your father?

Yeah, my father's an attorney.

What type of law does he practice? He practices, uh, personal injury?

No, thank God. Regulatory litigation, which sounds as scintillating as it is, but he has been on the good side. He represented Planned Parenthood when they were being attacked, you know, trying to cut those clinics down, which unfortunately they succeeded in. He's done environmental law. He's an expert on workers' comp in Texas.

Okay.

Wow. I say all this because it makes a lot more sense, your turn into this, right, arena. You're kind of third generation civically minded. The grandfather's getting legislation passed, your father's working in that capacity.

Yeah.

That kind of makes sense. Was it an idyllic, fun— if I could have grown up anywhere, I think I would have picked Austin, Texas.

It was, yeah.

You're Drew Brees and you are like flag football teammates?

Yeah. And he's a great guy. I haven't kept up with him, but holy crap. As a kid, you would never have imagined that someone that you grew up with is going to be this— I guess he's probably going to be a Hall of Fame quarterback at some point. I remember the first day we went to the park to like throw.

He immediately was always great.

Yeah, you're just born with that.

A little bit.

His dad was a quarterback at Baylor, and so I think he just had great technique. Not a tall guy, probably 5'10", 5'11".

Yeah, I've only met him once. I did this bit for The Ellen Show at the Super Bowl in Minnesota, and we're trying to tackle each other with these remote control fucking punching bags, and I took him out on accident at the legs, and I was like, "Oh my God, what if I had fucked up his whole game in a couple days?" But he was such a rad dude.

The one he was playing in?

Yes!

Oh, fuck. Actually, so I went to a public middle school. We met at this private school. Private middle school that we both went to.

St. Anthony?

St. Andrew's. Yeah, didn't get it exactly right.

Pissed your ball.

The fact that you're not reading off of something and you've learned this is really— I am genuinely impressed. We had to apply to get in. You had to take some tests, and it was just me and him, and we were both nervous. And, you know, we're 10 or 11 or something like that, and he was just like a really nice guy. And I didn't know that he was an athlete like that. I mean, I could look at him even at 10 and be like, okay, he probably can play sports. But yeah, then we got in, and then it was flag football because it was private school. They didn't want us to play with home Well, thank God now. Yeah, I know. Now I'm so grateful. But I had already played tackle elementary. I loved it. And then in high school, I played for Austin High, and he went to Westlake, which was this incredible program. It's where they shot a lot of Friday Night Lights.

Westlake's the Beverly Hills of Austin.

Yes. And they had an artificial turf stadium in, like, 1997.

Wow.

Wow.

You know, they crushed us. Like, crushed us every year. But he really earned it. I think he started out as, like, third string. QB, because again, not the biggest guy, and height's important in your quarterback.

You want to be able to see over everything.

Yeah, he literally probably could not see over those linemen and was having to like drop a ball 30 yards down the field. How do you even do that? Spooky. Spooky. Yeah, spooky.

So yeah, you played high school football, you were a wide receiver.

Wide receiver, strong safety. Yeah.

And then you went to University of Virginia— or Virginia— I can do it, man.

Virginia.

Virginity. You went, uh, you went, you went to the University of Virginia.

Let's start that college. There would be a lot of applicants.

It's a little intense nowadays, I think.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, you went there, and again, now you're third generation going there, right?

Yeah, yeah. You say that, and it sounds— to me anyway, it's always sounded weird, like I was expected to go there, which was not the vibe. I was basically not that focused in high school on grades. I went to a regular public high school, Austin, Texas, which was wonderful, but I was playing football and drinking and chasing girls, and I was just not focused on the academic side of things.

Were you having the Friday Night Lights experience that I watched on TV? Like, you're on the football team in Texas. Yeah.

There was a little bit of that. I mean, not—

Riggins level?

Right. None of us looked like, uh—

Tim Riggins.

Yeah, Tim Riggins or any of those guys. And it was Austin. You're not like Odessa Permian. That's all there is. But yeah, no, it's intense. Texas high school football. People show up, you know? Friday Night Lights. People show up on a Friday.

Oh, I would have loved it. It's like your first taste of being famous.

Yeah, a little bit. Also your first taste of, like, what happens when you fail publicly. Because I remember we played Westlake, right? Drew's team. We made the playoffs. I think it was the playoff game. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was the regular season. But they were incredible, right? They went on to, I believe, win the state championship or at least get to the game. Anyway, we play them. We're at our home field. House Park is packed, both sides. They're already up in the first quarter, but they do a dive. The fullback takes the ball off center, and I'm strong safety, and they've just, like, obliterated the lineman, obliterated the linebacker, and it's me and this fullback in the hole. And I— try to hit him, he just trucks me. Like, trucks me to the point where I'm back on my ass in front of thousands of people. My memory anyway is that he laughed as he did it. Like, he trucked me and laughed. Taste of fame.

But University of Virginia is relevant in this because you got a degree in economics, and I guess my curiosity is why. What was the game plan?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there wasn't much of a game plan at age 18. I didn't go there knowing what I wanted to study. My dad as a lawyer, was talked about. So I was like, I'll just study things I'm interested in that could plausibly prepare me for law school.

Okay, so potentially you were in a law school.

Maybe. I also was like, I'll be an international businessman, you know. I don't know, I was an 18-year-old boy, I don't know what I was doing.

Am I right to guess— and we've interviewed a lot of economists, Monica and I were just talking about this 2 days ago— I was like, economists are far more interesting than meets the eye in that they came up with game theory, that most of social science, these psychological experiments, are on the backs of these economic principles. It's a very fascinating force in the world that I think people have very little understanding of. It's why we have revolutions. It's a bit mathematical and there's some predictive qualities to it. It's like a very fascinating domain that is applicable to lots of other areas. Yeah, but I can't imagine when you entered it, you knew that yet. You were maybe like, I'm good at math.

So that's the irony is I think a lot of people think of economics as this sort of dry mathematical science. It certainly has a mathematical side to it. But of course, if economics is the study of how people behave in an economy and interact with each other on an individual level and also on a collective level in group settings and societal settings. It is really in some senses the study of human behavior.

Darwinism in a sense is market forces.

Sure.

Everything's a market.

But also I was always interested in the behavioral economics, which is the study of how human beings actually interact, because there's a couple of schools of thought and there's a sort of a more traditional economics that basically takes this huge presumption that everyone is a rational actor. They are maximizing their utility, which is this wonderfully vague phrase. And then you ask, what's the utility? It's like, well, it's whatever they did that's rational.

It's sort of like a non-falsifiable—

Yeah, it sort of like circles back on itself. And behavioral economists poke holes in that all the time.

Yes.

Because we do all sorts of things that aren't quote unquote rational.

And against our self-interests.

Yes. And so I've always been fascinated by that, which maybe perhaps led me a little into acting in the sense of it's the study of human behavior as well. And also maybe into true crime too, because I'm also fascinated fascinated by that, which has led me to this weird place where I am now.

They have illuminated all these inherent biases we have that make us irrational in pursuit of these outcomes. So we have confirmation bias, we have loss bias. We can observe people acting in a way that's not good for them a lot through these experiments.

Yeah.

And we've been able to identify a lot of these different biases we kind of inherently have. And they're fascinating. They're permeating every single topic at a university.

And I think one of the things that it does that's sort of frustrating for these other economists, because they want to presume rationality so that they can model what's going to happen. Yeah, predict. But the unfortunate reality, in my opinion, in the opinion of a lot of behavioral economists, is you can't. You can try, but just like humans are fallible and irrational, the models are never going to be able to predict that.

All you can do, and it's misleading, is you can observe the outcome and make sense of it after the fact.

Correct.

And that leads you to believe that, okay, so now we know what led people this decision so we can pull these levers and we'll get a different outcome. But then you run that and then we learn another batch of things about people.

Exactly. Which maybe perhaps brings us to crypto because it's like, yeah, you can look back at financial manias of the past. And I was finding a lot of similarities between crypto and a lot of these other things in economics and through different lenses. But while you're in the middle of it, until it actually collapses, who's to say really, am I crazy? Are they crazy?

Only time's going to tell.

Right.

Even this debate. So I happen to be on your side.

It's okay if you're not. Like, I'm not. Yeah.

Some of my best friends right now, we debate this all the time.

It's a very guy thing.

It is a very guy thing. I want to get into the type of person that's really, really drawn to crypto that has evolved. But I've always danced around it because, to be honest, I know how fervent the community is and I don't need them as an enemy. Right. There's a lot of people sitting in front of computers like 12 hours a day.

Good point.

And I don't need them against me. So I've always just treaded lightly. So I love having you as the canary here. And I'll make you say a lot of the stuff that I've been thinking.

Love it.

But I have, from its first explanation, been like, hold on, it seems to be violating a lot of definitions of the words you're using. But we'll get to that. This is going to be the first interview you ever do where I'm not going to say a certain word. And I've watched your doc. And so that's going to be an offering. So suffice to say, you had a really successful acting career. Oh, I see what you did there.

Is it one word or two words that you're not going to—

or three words?

Well, no.

Everyone needs to know what the words are.

You know what the word is?

I refuse to do it!

He was on a show—

let's just say this: he was on his own for 4 years. Then he was on a show for 5 years that was hugely popular. Then he's on another show for 5 years that was hugely popular. And as he's gone to Congress into CNBC—

I'm always running out of time.

It's great. It's a fun part of the documentary. You run straight at that.

Yeah, that's That's funny.

So anyways, I'm like, I'll be the first person to not say this word to him out loud, or these 3 words, or this acronym. But at any rate, by all accounts, anyone who can end up on a TV show that goes multiple years, you're in the single-digit percentages.

Of course.

To have 3 shows that go a total of 14 seasons is almost impossible.

Yeah, it's pretty unlikely. I'm pretty lucky. I am talented. I'm not trying to be like a humble brag. There's also an incredible amount of luck that's involved there.

There is. I'll argue you doing Junebug right out of the gates— oh, what a blessing. Do you remember Junebug?

The movie?

Yeah.

I love that movie.

Yes.

Amy Adams' husband with the mustache.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

I haven't seen it since college, but I was obsessed with it for a minute. I watched it like over and over and over again.

So I had done the first season of The OC.

I don't know what that is, but go ahead.

Exactly. Whatever. Of the show that shall not be named. And, you know, it's all about finding the hiatus movie. And I don't have any idea of what I'm doing, right? I'm very young. Yeah.

You got it quick, man. I'm a little envious of how fucking quick you moved here in 2003 or something. 2002.

And got it.

Got it in 3.

Yeah, fuck you.

Yeah, no, totally, totally.

I feel the same way.

Happened really quick. It was a year and 7 days after I landed in LA where I got that gig on the show that won't be named, and it was just like a rocket ship, which can only really happen, I feel like, in this town and Silicon Valley, ironically. Right.

Sam Bankman-Fried.

Yeah, totally.

There's a lot of overlap. And then you start believing yourself a little more than you should.

But you also have severe imposter syndrome.

Yes.

Because I spend a lot of time in therapy talking about the show that will be named, so I'll just share some things with the folks, which I'm sure many guests have mentioned similar things. But imposter syndrome is ubiquitous, I feel like. Everyone has some of it. But it is particularly weird to get fame at an early age because nobody, in my opinion, deserves it, right? It's not a thing you deserve. It's like a thing that happens to you. And so you feel this weird tension between, "This is awesome. This is great." But also, Fraudulence. It could go away like that?

Yeah.

Like, what happens if people know who I actually am as opposed to the tough kid from the wrong side of the tracks that I'm playing, and I'm just like this econ dork guy? Dude, I had spent so little time on a set. I had done like a guest star, a co-star, maybe spent 3 days on a set prior to getting the lead of this pilot. It was so bad that I was shooting the first day. I think I was method because I didn't know what else to do.

Sure, sure, sure.

I was just so terrified that I was like, "I'm just gonna stay in this." I barely have my hands on it, so I can't leave it for a second. Exactly. For sure. Exactly. We rehearsed a scene, we break to light, and this guy comes up to me who kind of looks a lot like me, and he just sort of stands there awkwardly. And he's like—

Waiting for you to move over.

I had never had a stand-in before. As a guest star or a co-star, you do your own stand-in.

You do the standing, yeah.

Yeah. So it was that kind of level. Which was hilarious too, because then I got this reputation as this really intense actor.

Oh, oh.

That ain't funny. No, I just didn't know what I was doing.

Yeah, back to Junebug. So I remember loving it, but I didn't remember it enough. I watched the trailer again today, and yeah, what a movie. You're fucking great in that movie. Oh my God, she gives you that kiss on the cheek and you ask her if she's got a cigarette. So deadpan.

So I was trying to find a haters movie, and I think I literally got offered a script where the main character wore a white t-shirt and a choke chain and did fighting. It was literally like OC: The Movie.

Yes.

And probably a lot of money, and I was just like, I I can't. If I do that, what happens if I'm that guy forever? Thank God I had that—

That's a lot of—

—impressed.

—foresightedness.

Also fear too, of course, like double down on it. But then I read this script. It was a tiny little movie, less than a million dollars, and shot on film, less than a million dollars. And I just loved it. I understand this world. I'm from the South. I mean, Texas is sort of Southwest, but it has a lot of overlap. My parents are both from the South.

You'd gone to school in Virginia.

Gone to school in Virginia. Dad's from North Carolina. Mom's from Louisiana. And this was set in a world that I was very familiar with. I love the director, Phil Morrison, who's gone on to do some other great movies. So that was my first movie, and I don't think I've been able to top it since.

So heavy. Really quick, not to shine the light on her so much, but I am watching that, and that is her breakout. That's her kind of introduction to the world. Academy Award nominee. Yeah. She's impossibly good. Even in the trailer, I'm like, "Oh my God, the way she's talking so fast." And I tried it out for Cheerleader. "You ever been a cheerleader?" Blah, blah, blah. When you were observing that, you were pretty new still. But were you like, "Oh my goodness, something fucking wild's going on right now"?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think because I was hot at the moment, they were like, "Okay, we'll do him. But we don't know about the female lead, and we don't have the money to pay anybody who's already established." And so I read with a couple of people, and yeah, it was just like a different— You know what I mean? It was like night and day.

It's like playing with Drew Brees.

Yeah, a little bit. And to the point where you're like, "Oh crap, he's throwing the ball at me fast." You know what I mean?

Oh, fuck yeah.

Like, at least get your hands up so he doesn't hit you in the face because it's coming. And it's very sobering when— It's like, "Oh, it's just them." You know what I mean?

"Well, that's interesting." You hear me a lot, but you don't see me a ton. You see me deliver the line.

You see them reacting to me deliver the line.

Okay, so I guess Gotham is the last series you're on for an extended period of time. And what I admire and relate to is, I guess, season 3, you direct an episode. Yep. And then season 4, this is even better, you write an episode. It's fucking great. Every actor wants to direct. They're like the boss. Right. No one's offering to write. And I came from a family of writers.

My mom's a poet. My uncle Robert Shanken is a playwright and a screenwriter.

Pulitzer Prize winner.

Pulitzer Prize winner, Tony winner, Emmy winner. It's interesting how you sort of define yourself, but I had never thought of myself as a writer. And yet, I was fascinated by it. And I had also done so much TV, you know, a couple hundred hours of TV, that I was like, "I gotta try a new thing. Like, you gotta give me more stuff to do." Basically, I just kept asking them. You know, I got to go to the writers' room after the first year and sit with them and hang with them. I didn't get to write yet. And so you slowly build up that trust, and you basically slowly Break them down to the point where they sort of have to, like— it went bad for me.

I wrote an episode of Parenthood. I'm like, I'm gonna write an episode. I've already sold screenplays, I'm already like a writer. Yeah, I should have just asked, can I write? But instead I'm like, I'm gonna just spec an episode. And then when I gave it, I underestimated what that kind of looked like a little bit because that show was so serialized, it wasn't episodic. You couldn't just write a random spec episode. I didn't know the full arc of everyone. Sure. I don't know that it came across in the way that I was intending to, perhaps. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, shows are so interesting politically. There's all sorts of stuff that's going on.

Yeah, I did not do it right. I'll take all the blame. But I was just like, look at this thing I've written, I think this would be a great episode. It was a little bit like, you think that we just drop so into this?

Well, if it helps at all, I feel like I sort of have the opposite experience where you're assigned the episode that you're going to write because the season's already broken down. You've been in the room at least a little bit But I do remember doing a pass and like, there was a lot of red. There's a lot of suggestions. Yeah, there's suggestions slash we're just gonna change that. But it was fun, man. It was really good and it really did prepare me because it was a network show. There were commercials, so you're writing to commercial breaks like every single time. So there's a lot of story math. Yeah, a lot of stuff where I was like, okay, he needs to go up and then it goes down and it's very technical again. And yeah, yeah, and that's really helpful. It wasn't always the most fun as an actor to have to hit those beats every single time. It does get a little repetitive. And I love Gotham, super proud of it.

When you leave that show though, I think you Obviously you have an intention to do more directing and maybe writing. Yeah. Okay, so I guess now I want to know, how do you get to the point where you're going to write Easy Money and then also direct the doc? What's the order of events?

So Gotham ends in 2019. Done a lot of TV, and I kind of feel like I need to do something else. I get to do a play on Broadway, which I had never done before. I was super excited about that.

Got shut down immediately. So it didn't actually—

it actually was a limited run that closed on its own. Oh! March 2nd, 2020. Oh, okay. I had gotten a pilot. I was, like, about to go shoot this pilot, and the next week, New York shut down because COVID.

Oh, okay. I was wondering, 'cause it got nominated for a Tony.

What play was it? Grand Horizons, written by Bess Wohl, who I had known for, like, 20 years. We'd done summer stock theater together. It was a really cool— That is cool. —moment. But yeah, then Ben Emeketz. I don't know about you, but I was freaking out.

Well, you were in New York too, right?

We were in New York, yeah. And my wife has chronic asthma, and so given what we didn't know at the time, we were freaking out. And so we moved out of the city. Did you have new babies yet or not? Yeah, we did. Young kids.

We didn't have our kids yet.

Our third kid yet, but we had our first two. Yeah, it's a lot. It's a lot. So we ended up renting a place in western Connecticut. Beautiful area. It's sort of northwestern Connecticut. And it was so tranquil and lovely. There was some land. There was a pond on the land. I remember my stepson going out and, like, catching frogs every day. And my second kid was singing "The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow." Annie. On repeat. On repeat. Yeah, yeah. At that moment, tears. Endless tears, right? Because you're feeling at that moment, is it? Right. Is it? You know, I really hope it comes out tomorrow. It's, like, ominous. Fingers crossed.

Yeah.

So a lot of emotions, but I was like looking for the next thing. And I started looking at the financial markets because I never really paid attention to them. Even though I had an econ degree, I was really conservative with my money. Real estate, index funds. I know enough that I don't know that much. My buddy Dave comes to me, and I've known Dave since UVA, but Dave had been one exception to my conservative investing because he had come to me and said in the mid-aughts, he was like living in my guest house as I was shooting The OC. He was like, dude, You got to buy stock in this company, this like obscure company that I had never heard of.

He had found out from a dude at a wedding.

From a dude at a wedding. It's always the best source. Yeah, exactly. In retrospect, it's comically stupid, but he's like, they've produced synthetic blood. They're going to make a fortune. It's like a penny stock. You're like, yeah, okay. But I'm young and dumb and I was excited by his excitement and I was like, okay, I'll put a little money into it. It wasn't like a ton of money, but it was like $10,000 or something. And he put far less, but a little. And we both lost. I don't know if it was technically a fraud, but it definitely was overhyped.

Turns out synthetic blood's pretty bad.

Pretty hard, pretty difficult to do. It wasn't what's-her-name, Theranos.

Sounds like that, like a precursor. Yeah, right. So anyway, Dave came back to me in 2020.

He's like, dude, you gotta get Bitcoin. He's horny for Bitcoin. It's everywhere, right?

Like all of a sudden the celebrities are doing it. It's because the pandemic hits. The reason we call the book Easy Money is the Fed flooded the zone with money to keep the economy from crashing. Because you can imagine a global pandemic, obviously work is going to be hard for a lot of people. They're not going to be able to do it. So what happens if they don't work They don't earn money, they don't spend money, they hoard. And then the whole thing, it can just nosedive really, really fast. Yeah. So in the macro, they did the right thing in terms of keeping the economy from crashing. But the result, one of the weird spillover effects, is all these people, but particularly young dudes, had money to spend. Yeah, they're getting like $2,000 checks or whatever. Right. And they're sitting at home or in their apartments with their phones and they have nothing else to do. So why not gamble on crypto? And so crypto just goes nuts. And so Dave says, I'm going to buy Bitcoin. I'm like, Dave, I'm not gonna do that, but what is it? And he's like, "It's a cryptocurrency." This is in the doc.

How was that recorded, or was that reenacted? The movie's called Everyone Is Lying for Money.

Okay, okay, okay. I include myself. Yeah, we should talk about that at some point because I had a lot of fun. I fuck with the audience a lot.

Yeah, there's a docudrama element that you're gonna have to tell a story. Yes. A personal story, not just a story of crypto.

Exactly. So we did. We recreated it.

I was just like, how did he have the foresight to do that?

I know. I'm not that smart. I asked Dave, like, I'm not that tech savvy. I'm sure I'd heard the word cryptocurrency, but I had never spent 2 seconds thinking about it. He was like, it's cryptocurrency. I'm like, yeah, okay, what is that? I'm remembering my 20-year-old econ degree and I'm like, so currency is money. One of the things you can do with money is buy and sell stuff. Can you buy and sell stuff with this, Dave? And Dave is like, uh, well, I'm putting money in and I'm hoping that, you know, it's going to go up and then I'm going to sell it. So I'm like, it's an investment then. And he's like, well, it's kind of both. I'm like, mm, not sure.

Because you can't invest in currency other than trying to trade on the margin of the value of the US dollar versus the Swiss franc, right? Exactly.

You can't—

you can't just buy a currency and the currency goes through the roof because that's just inflation. Exactly. You're holding something that has the exact same value even though the numbers went up.

And if the inflation was as steep as it is in crypto, it would be World War III. Yeah, it would be insane, right? It would be the apocalypse.

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So I started looking into it and I couldn't stop.

Well, I think what would be helpful too is to lay out about the history that kind of leads— because there's another element involved that I think is really relevant and something I've been fascinated by for 18 years, which is the '08 meltdown. But before we go to that, there's the obvious explanation. It's just like, this gets pitched to you, you're like, I don't know, I want to learn more. As I'm learning more, this doesn't seem legit. But on a personal level, how much do you identify with— I personally have a really huge radar for getting fucked. I'm just a skeptic by nature. I'm very, very skeptical, and I could spin a story from my childhood of why I'm skeptical, but I don't know. But is it fair to say, are you skeptical? You've put a lot of energy into this.

Yeah, I would say I'm also a contrarian, or I'm always kind of that obnoxious guy who's going to take the devil's advocate position on a lot of stuff just to have the conversation, just intellectually.

If we were both at a dinner party and one of us has to pick a new instrument, that's my role too. Okay.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not always good when two meet because then it's— yeah, yeah. And I also have a hard time, like, I just go deep. I'm not really good at multitasking. I'm good at, I'm going to do this right now.

Do you have an explanation for this? Do you think you're just genetically that way?

I don't know. That's a good question. I knew at the time, or I can now understand at the time, that because I didn't have anything else going on, this, when it presented itself, there was no one saying, oh, you can't spend 10 hours a day reading economic history, but also studying the crypto markets, but also following the true crime of it all.

There was no competing project. There's no competing project.

Yeah, but the irony is that's what they were doing too. Exactly.

I was doing the same thing they were, right? Or effectively like a mirror image of what they were doing, just from the skeptic side. So I just kept looking at it more and more and more. And very quickly I was like, this shit really doesn't feel right. If it's not actually being used as currency, which it wasn't then, it isn't now, really. Bitcoin in particular. I couldn't go to my neighborhood deli in Brooklyn and buy a bagel with Bitcoin. Bitcoin, right? They look at me like I'm crazy. And I didn't know why originally, but as I looked into it, I found a lot of different reasons that we can go into. But whatever the reasons were, it wasn't being used that way. It was being used as an investment, and the retail public, a regular public, was being sold on this idea that everyone could get rich instantaneously for free off of this thing that very few people understood or used. And then the celebrities got in, and I was pretty sure the celebrities didn't know what they were talking about either. I don't want to talk trash about anyone. Yeah, probably almost everyone that got ensnared in it I like.

Totally. And I don't want to be a jerk. What I did know, or what I felt pretty confident about, was having been in Hollywood and having been in show business, like, I could have imagined how this went, which is like, all of a sudden, the crypto exchanges where all these cryptos are actually traded— and again, they're traded, you're going on these weird places to like buy and sell these speculative things— they're taking a cut of the action, they're taking a little transaction fee, they're making money hand over fist, they got a ton of money, and they want to keep marketing it. And so I just imagined a scenario where, insert crypto exchange, they go they have a $100 million marketing budget and they're going to the 3 agencies that are left or whatever it is, and they're like, hey, $10 million of a certain caliber actor, we will pay them $10 million for a 1-day shoot. So I get it.

It's perfect confluence of opportunity.

And there's nothing wrong with celebrities hawking consumer goods, to hawk soap or cars or whatever.

You call out your wife, she's in a commercial. Yeah, I made fun of my wife, right?

Because she did like a hair commercial. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, the reason celebrities are hired is because they have a relationship with the audience and people trust them. And if it sort of helps you separate your product, you know, You know, there's a lot of different hairsprays you could have, but this one has Miranda Baccarin in it, so, you know, buy it. That's totally legitimate and fine. But this was a financial product. This was an investment of some kind in something. I didn't know this until the doc.

So as you point out in the doc, it is illegal to give financial advice if you're not a licensed financial advisor, which is a very obscure rule and is never enforced.

And it's also sort of like, why do we even have that on some level?

Because you're telling your buddy about stock.

Yeah, it's not like you're committing a crime, you know, no one's going to come in and arrest you. But I think it is there, quite frankly, not that they could have anticipated this, but in a sense to deal with this issue. Yeah. Where someone with a lot of influence is kind of quasi giving you financial— like they're not telling you to invest in particular things, but they are particular cryptos, generally speaking. Some of them did. Like Kim Kardashian shilled this thing called Ethereum Max, which is not Ethereum, it's another one, and did a post about it and it went to all her followers and then it crashed fantastically. And the guy that I wrote the book with, Jacob Silverman, we wrote an article. Our first article was like criticizing celebrities and using this as an example. And she ultimately had to pay a fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Oh, wow. Because you're not allowed to sell a specific financial product. Like, I can't go on this podcast and pitch you on a specific stock that I think is great without disclosing how much do I own, what's my financial incentive, am I a paid spokesperson?

Right. So this was in that gray area. We're like, well, maybe what a lot of them are doing isn't illegal, but to me it was incredibly distasteful and dangerous. Dangerous for the public, of course. Course, but also even for the celebrities themselves. Also, look at—

let's be honest, all these actors are paying 10% of this money to a group of people that are advising them, that are supposed to flesh out things. I mean, what else are you paying for? So if your agent brings you this product from this company, you assume they've done some due diligence on the company. They're there to protect your career. There's a lot of also blame to spread around.

Oh, definitely. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was my kind of sarcastic advice to the celebrities after the, you know, the thing crashed and all these celebrities got a lot of egg on their face. I'm like, blame agent. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you got it right there.

They're there for— they're there to give you the advice, and then they give you the bad advice, and you just blame it.

That's what you've been giving them this money for.

Yeah, exactly. No, I love agents.

All good. I think we should do 5 minutes. I just want to first start by saying, and I only learned this through— I'm kind of obsessed with biographies from the end of the 1800s. So if you're reading the Cornelius Vanderbilt or any of these, banks were failing every couple months. Huge institutions would fail. There'd be run on banks. Everyone would be left holding the bag. We had a really, really shaky and untrustworthy banking system for 100 and some years until finally, again, this ugly word regulation. Regulation stopped that pandemic of bank collapses, which were happening all the time in like dominoes.

Also the creation of the central bank or the Fed. That was really the thing that helped because otherwise you're dealing with all of these different smaller banks that were actually— it has a direct relation to crypto. They were issuing their own currencies. During a thing called the Wildcat Banking Era, which was in the mid-19th century. We were trying to expand west and provide credit for people west, being like Michigan at this point, you know? And so the idea was a bank was allowed to issue its own notes, its own currency, if it held a certain amount of state bonds. You were allowed one chapter of your bank, one physical location. And so sometimes people would set them up as far away from their depositors as they could, where the wildcats roamed. And once they had your money and you had to get it back, get there by horseback or whatever, they could just run off with it. And so there was a lot of fraud as well as instability.

And then also, just what is the primary concept of a bank? Well, you're gonna deposit your money, and I'm gonna get— let's say I have $100 million of people's money they've deposited, and now I'm going to make loans with that money that you've entrusted me with. Now I'm going to charge a percentage on that, and that's how I'm going to make money. And part of the regulations that was like, well, how much money should they hold? Let's have a minimum amount percentage that the bank still has to withhold in case people want to withdraw their money. So this is where regulations come in. And then, yes, the central bank helps standardize all this stuff. Yeah, the federal bank. So that takes us up to '08, and it's pretty darn stable as far as world banking goes. The US has done a good job.

Yeah, since the Great Depression, because that's where securities laws come from, because there really weren't securities laws at the federal level prior to the 1930s. And securities laws are basically predicated on disclosure. Like, you need to know who you're giving your money to and what they're doing with it. The money. It's very broadly defined under American law because human beings are very inventive and we're always coming up with new investments. A lot of them are legitimate, right? The vast majority of them legitimate, even if they don't work, they're well-intentioned. But you need to have rules around it so that fraudsters can't exploit people. And that's what we realized, because in the '20s you could do anything. You could corner the market.

Yeah, well, insider trading wasn't even illegal. No, it wasn't legal. So '08, we get a new kind of version of it, right? So in '08, it's blamed on the subprime mortgage crisis. And then people remember they were encouraging people to remortgage their house. They were encouraging people to take these no-interest loans, and that was blamed on that. But that's not the real story of the '08 meltdown. I think the total of those toxic mortgages really amounted to like $68 billion or something. But what was more troubling and what caused the collapse is on top of the $68 billion, they built products that were anchored in those products that amounted to $1.2 trillion. Yeah. So we have these things, credit default swaps. So I don't own this stock, but I can insure it. So I'm going to insure Lehman Brothers. Say I have $10 million of value in there. I'm going to pay this little fee to insure that, and then in case it collapses, I'll get paid out $10 million on money I don't even have invested. And so Lehman Brothers, all these things, they were started on rumors, the collapse of them, and they were started on rumors by people who held enormous credit default swaps.

So then we went, oh wow, there's this other version of massive corruption that is just so high-tech. The people that sold the products didn't really understand them in a lot of cases when they were testifying. They're like, explain this. And like, one person at the firm understands this product they invented, but they sold to a bazillion people. So again, we're in a situation in '08 where the entire financial industry is going to collapse if the Fed doesn't step in and save these banks. We're not going to be able to come back from it. So it was the right decision. But the US American, the average citizen, they're the ones that had the loan on the house. Yes. And their credit got fucked and they got their house repossessed and the government didn't come and bail them out.

They bailed out the banks. Also, no one went to jail. To jail. One guy went to jail.

And people got huge bonuses in the same year. Exactly. So rightly so, Americans were disgusted by the financial system. So that's a really important piece of the story leading to crypto as well.

It's essential because in October of 2008, this thing called the Bitcoin White Paper is released on this cryptography mailing list, the small list of cryptographers that communicate with each other. And the white paper just lays out the sort of intellectual foundation of about Bitcoin, both the cryptography, but also the goals. What are we trying to do here? So it's the height of the subprime crisis. People are so angry at the banks, like even more than usual. And what the white paper proposes, wouldn't it be cool if we could avoid these fuckers who have screwed us and just transact directly? Why can't I just send something of value to DAX and he sends it back to me? And it sounds like a good idea.

And it's built on this new technology, blockchain.

Well, that's what's interesting is it's new-ish, but it's not really that new. Like, blockchain goes back back to 1991. There were these guys— we're gonna get real dorky here. We can do this, right? Let's go dorky. So blockchain, I would say, started with Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta at Bell Labs, building off the work of cryptographers like David Chaum, who I interviewed for the book. There had been this idea of trying to do encrypted money, money that would ultimately be very useful to be able to transact online. And so they were building off a thing called public key encryption, which basically allows us to buy stuff online without our credit cards being hacked, right? It sort of encrypts the data.

The data's gotta travel from me and my computer —computer to the bank.

To the bank and then to the merchant. There needs to be a record of this, but we also don't want it to be public so that people can rip you off. So public key encryption is actually vital to our modern economy. But blockchain had been around since 1991, and the Bitcoin white paper didn't come out till 2008. So it'd been sitting there for 17 years, and no one had really done that much with it. And even Bitcoin, when it came out, it was an obscure mailing list, very, very few people. These are like really hardcore— Cryptographers? Nerdy cryptographers or whatever. I guess all cryptographers are probably nerds in some way. I say that with love. So it was very obscure, and it really didn't have a use case. The The problem was it's sort of like Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I could give you a piece of paper that says it's a dollar, but why is it actually a dollar, right? Just because I say it is? What's giving it value? Which is sort of about what money is. But anyway, there was nothing that could be bought with this stuff called Bitcoin. There's a famous story of a guy buying 2 pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin.

Now it's worth $9 billion. Yeah, yeah, whatever.

And that shows you how worthless it was at the time. The first use case was crime. The first use case was buying drugs and other things that were illegal on the Silk Road, which was this dark a dark web drug marketplace where you could also order assassination attempts, or the guy that ran it tried to, to like an FBI agent or something. And anyway, it got shut down by the feds. But crypto proved— because what a blockchain is, is just a ledger of transactions. It's just a record. They call them wallets. This wallet sent something of value to this other wallet, but it's pseudonymous. It obscures the identity of who's sending what to whom. It's not anonymous. If you can figure out who owns what, then you have a record of every transaction they've ever made, potentially. But it is pseudonymous, and there's also other ways of obscuring it.

Yeah, I think we should attempt to make a really good faith argument for all the appeal of it when it first presented itself. And that was one of them. It was pitched as completely anonymous.

It was pitched as anonymous. But to me, the crypto story is quite simple in the sort of the broadest sense. It's two parts. The first is, do you hate our current system? Right. Every single person raises their hands. Right, right. We all have different reasons. And the second part is Bitcoin checks What the fuck is this? It's become a meme. It's a cure-all. Right. And then it gets more nuanced, obviously, as people sort of articulate different reasons why they believe in it. But that really is the essence of it to me.

It's essential to remind ourselves it was sold to us initially as a currency.

Yes, it was. And it did operate that way, but as a black market currency, right? As a currency for drugs. At the time, it was also like marijuana. And so just to be perfectly clear, I love marijuana. Sure. Like, I have a medical card. I'm not knocking drugs. You were also buying much harder drugs and doing stuff that was much worse than that, including child sexual abuse material and, like, all sorts of really gnarly stuff. But that was the use case. It was crime, facilitating transactions for criminal activity. And then it kind of languished, you know, like it was kind of just sitting there. Interestingly enough, we only found this out recently, but after the Silk Road crashed in 2015, Jeffrey Epstein stepped in and secretly funded what's called Bitcoin Core Development, which is the group of programmers that maintain Bitcoin's operating system. Yes, there are people behind this, like, supposedly computerized future. There's always people. And he was secretly funding it through a thing called the MIT Media Lab because he was already a registered sex offender, and they didn't want that to be public. So I don't think that anyone who's being intellectually honest can claim that the crime is just only a tiny piece of it, it's never been that important to it.

Like, I really don't think that's honest if you look at the history, and of varying degrees of illegality.

So another thing is taxes. So yes, child pornography, these are bad people. But then the person who's already paid income tax and state tax and they decide, I don't know why I have to pay another 50% tax to give this to my children. I'd like to get this money somewhere else without the US government. Sure. This could be a system by which I could do that and no one can see it or be involved in it.

Totally. And let me give you maybe even a more sort of morally compelling argument I was listening to. So what crypto can do is it can send something of value instantaneously instantaneously anywhere in the world and avoid the regulated system, including the banks. And so I was hearing the story of a woman in Afghanistan who cannot get banking under the Taliban because she's a woman. And so she's running a business and she's paying her employees in crypto. I don't personally know this person, so this was secondhand, but I have heard similar stories. Yeah. Yeah. So we can all agree that's a good thing. Like, we like that. Later we can critique, are those arguments true? And Bitcoin's so volatile that it's not stable. So does it actually work that way?

But in premise.

And so when I say crypto can only be used for speculation, which really is gambling because you're not really speculating on an asset of any value, in my opinion, it's just lines of code. Speculation, gambling, and crime. When I say crime, I mean that literally in the sense that technically, although we morally agree with this woman in Afghanistan, she is violating her country's laws. We just don't like those laws because we're in another country. We have different values. Right. But to accept that that is good, we also have to accept the bad. If we're being intellectually honest, we can't just hand wave away. I mean, to give you a sense of the amount of crime in crypto, last year a crypto company estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto. $154 billion is a lot. It's a massive amount of money.

It's the GDP of a lot of countries.

Yeah. And it says it's a trillions of dollar market, but I really don't think that's true in terms of the actual look liquidity backing these speculative assets. You know, it's a massive amount of crime. And to give you a sense of the kinds of crime, it's like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese in exchange for drones that they sent to Ukraine, right? It's like global criminal cartels. There's a Southeast Asian system of credit called hawala, I think is what it's called. And basically it's like, if people don't have banks, how do they get something of value to someone else? They go to this local community leader and that person has a ledger. They call their buddy in the neighborhood village and like, "Hey, mark this down. We have sent this to you." And it's basically like this system of trust, which is what money is. Money is this made-up thing that is essentially trust. You don't have to trust the individual if it's scaled. Like, I could give you, Dax, a dollar. You take it from me not because you trust me. You trust that you can use it.

You trust this government and that someone else will accept it.

Yeah, that it works. And so money does 3 things. It's a medium of exchange. You can use it to buy and sell stuff. It's a unit of account. You can run your books works with it, and it's a store of value, meaning its value stays relatively consistent over time. And crypto can't fulfill, or Bitcoin couldn't fulfill any of those three because you couldn't use it to buy and sell stuff really, unless it was crime, to pay for stuff that was illegal. It was so volatile that it really wasn't an effective unit of account and store of value. Now, all currencies are fallible, just like all social constructs, all humans. So none of these are perfect. Imagine a bagel costs $1 and then $0.10 and then $0.10. Yeah. You know, you just can't, if that were to to be a currency, it would be unusable. People would just freeze and hoard, which would sort of plunge the economy into recession, which is actually— well, whatever, we're getting a little far afield, but it's actually what contributed to the Great Depression. We were on the gold standard. The amount of money that the government and other governments in Europe could hold was predicated on how much physical gold they had.

Like, a dollar was equivalent to a certain amount of physical gold. And the idea was to give it tangibility.

It's linked to something real, real, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the problem The problem is that when there's a crisis, when there's a collapse like there was during the Great Depression, when the stock market collapsed and countries started raising tariffs against each other and the economies just started folding inward because you couldn't expand the money supply, because you couldn't do what we did during the pandemic and just print more money.

You can't print more gold. Exactly. It just crashed. It makes a finite economy in a sense. It can't grow beyond the value of the gold that it's backed by. So it's also a very limiting concept for money. It is.

And there's a great book called Lords of Finance Lakwat Ahmed, that talks about the central bankers of the 1930s and their adherence to the gold standard really did contribute significantly to how bad it got. It was going to be bad, but if they had known better at the time, they could have staved off the worst of it. And that was really one of the takeaways from economists like John Maynard Keynes. Why are we sticking to this thing? So Keynes and others critiqued this in the sense of like, I know we say we want it to be based on something, quote unquote, real. But let's think about that for a second. Why is gold Gold valuable. Yes. Mm-hmm. It's not the most scarce mineral. You can't eat it. It's pretty. And limited. Exactly. It is something that has been historically used as value for thousands of years. Mm-hmm. So, if money is trust, it's a social construct, just like government or religion. They're only as strong as the social consensus that underlies them. We have a playful sequence at the beginning of the film, this graphic sequence, just showing you very quickly all of the different things that have been used as money over the years.

Yeah. Feathers and different coins, things like that. Okay, now we have to go back to where we were before.

So this is how it was sold to us, and it is an appealing thing for these several reasons, I think. And I think we understand now the one last thing I think we need to explain before we get into your uncovering of a lot of things. I think people need to just know very basically, a stock is— so there's a company, I believe in it, I think they're going to do great and they're going to grow, and I buy a fraction of that company, that's a security in that company, right? And I buy it at $100, and for it to go up, someone has to buy it ultimately off of me for $110 or $120. And that's how the value of the stock's going up. But again, back to the trust thing, it's like it is anchored to some performance of that company, whether they're solvent or not. It's anchored to reality in some capacity. They're producing a good or providing a service. Yes, they're either growing or shrinking. And so the stock generally reflects that. There's been these anomalies like Enron, whatnot, but in general, that's just the concept. So if you want to invest in a speculative asset, be it a share in a company, in theory, that company's going to determine its performance, is going to determine the value of that stock.

It's important to understand that. And then it's also important to look at crypto and go, well, if you're investing, what are you investing in? Because it's just lines of code and lines of code could be valuable if they correlated with a real-world asset, right? Google's lines of code are very important. Important to run Google.

Yeah, because they're selling advertising on the back.

Exactly right. There's ways of monetizing it. But with crypto, because it's just the code, what are you investing in? I would argue that you're sort of investing in its utility as a criminal, as a vehicle for crime. Not purposely necessarily, but I'm just saying that's one of the things it's used for. And you're investing in the story of it. You're investing in the idea that other people give it value, which in economics is dangerously close to what we call greater Fool Theory. Greater Fool Theory is when a speculative asset rises so far beyond any real-world use it could have, any real-world value, that really its price is determined by your ability to buy it and sell it to a fool greater than yourself, right? Which is a really fun game until it tops out and you're the biggest idiot holding the bag. If it's an investment but there's no product really, or service, I don't even get how it works even in crime.

Why I, I don't get it.

Well, because I'm a cartel boss in Colombia, I'm getting all of this cash and I can't use this cash, but I can convert this cash into crypto. And then there is an apartment salesman in Russia who's willing to sell me a very nice apartment with this crypto exchange. So I have now just converted this cash that I can't use into an apartment.

You're scary good at this, Dax. This is exactly right.

Why would the apartment guy want it when he then can't use it to buy anything?

Yes, he does have to cash out on the other end, usually. Although if you follow that Southeast Asian hawala example, he could then send it somewhere else and get something else that he wants.

Drugs. At some point someone's like, I want money.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's the best part. Yes, yes.

The thing that it promised to do, it actually doesn't even do. Exactly. Did you watch that thing on Netflix? It was called like The Biggest Heist of All Time, and it was this very bizarre couple that had successfully stolen what in the current value of Bitcoin is in the like $30 billion, right? Right. The problem is they're sitting there with at the time $8 billion in Bitcoin. They can't do anything with it because ultimately in this country to convert it into an apartment or a car or anything else, you are going to have to go on record and break your anonymity and convert it to that thing. So they were sitting there with $8 billion that was completely fucking useless. Totally. They were not living like billionaires. Billionaires. No. So it's not even the thing that was promised to be.

Yeah, she was like financing the world's shittiest rap videos, right? Wasn't she? She was, uh, she was wild. What was the rap name?

I forget. Something with a cat, maybe.

She was a cat. It was so bad.

They were both something else.

But that's such a vivid illustration. The only place you can really convert this into real money is in some shady situation in some other country where you're dealing with the dirty bank. It's really this lawless system of like black market money that's circulating all over the globe, right?

Corrupt governments, corrupt politicians. Yeah. Okay, so back to your friend Dave, and then you getting really curious about Bitcoin and wanting to learn a lot about it. And so that's where the doc starts.

Well, it starts with a book. For some reason I thought I should write a book. I don't know why it didn't occur to me. It's kind of funny in retrospect, like why I didn't think to make a movie, but I thought I should write a book. I didn't know how to write a book. Taken an edible and I was like, oh, I'm going to write a book. A lot of people have had this experience. And I woke up the next morning, I was like, fuck, I don't know how to write a book. You know, I took another edible. I was like, oh, just like find someone else who knows how to write it together. A journalist, Jacob Silverman, had written an article for Slate that the headline is Even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin Is a Scam, because Donald Trump as recently as 2021 was calling Bitcoin a scam, which is interesting. Now we can talk about that later. But I thought that was funny. He was a tech sort of critic for Slate and other places, and don't even I just had a good way about him online anyway. Followed him on Twitter. He followed me back.

I invited him to drinks at a bar in Brooklyn, and I pitched him on this crazy idea of like, yes, crypto is going to the moon right now. This is like 2021, but I think it's going to crash. And I have all these reasons. Hit him with probably way too much of my opinion on it. He happened to be going on paternity leave, and so he had a window and he was like, okay, let's try it. So we started writing articles. The first one was criticizing celebrities in Slate, and we wrote different articles different places like the Washington Post and The Intercept and places like that. And we were doing it to do our research, but also to prove our bona fides to sell a book. We sold a book proposal, and we went out in 2022 to actually go into the real world again. We're getting out of the pandemic and back into IRL, and we were going to South by Southwest in Austin to give like a talk. And I was like, I should just turn a camera on. It's not that expensive. I'll just ask my agent, find me some guy with a camera and a sound pack.

The worst is I'm out $750. $50. And the first day we show up at South By, we're on the floor of the convention center and I see a booth for this company called Celsius, which was super sketchy already because it's like, give us your crypto, we'll give you this return on your crypto. This really high rate of return. It's like 15% or something. That's like literally the definition of a Ponzi scheme or one of the definitions of a Ponzi scheme or one of the tells of a Ponzi scheme. And yet they were operating, they were being sued by the Texas Securities Regulator at that time, but it hadn't been adjudicated yet, so they still could technically sell their customers on it. And I look at the booth and I'm just like— and then I look over the other side of the room and there's the CEO, just like sitting. What's his name? Alex Mashinsky. He's sitting with these other guys. And then I'm like, well, I got to do this, right?

These guys are just hanging on a couch in this convention. The whole thing looks like you've walked into a Boost Mobile store here in East LA or something.

The largest Boost Mobile store ever.

But yeah, so Celsius was presenting itself as a bank, even though it said explicitly on their website they were not a bank. Very small font. Yeah, give us your money like a bank, and we're gonna give you a 15% return. Which again, and you point blank ask the guy, so how are you making money?

And he can't answer me because he's like, we're the opposite of bank, we're about the community. He's a Ukrainian, he won't do his accent, but he's like, we're about the— I am going to do it. Apologies to any Ukrainian friends. I'm a big pro-Ukrainian. Yeah, we do, we do generally. But this guy was such a He's like, "We're a bank, but we're better than a bank because we give the money back." And I'm like, "Well, then how do you make money?" And he just wouldn't answer. It was a wild interview. That was our first day of filming. Like, he said stuff like— the camera cut out, but we have the audio. It's in the movie. I ask him, like, "How much real money is in crypto?" He's like, "10, 15%.

The rest is speculation." So I think you need to explain that part.

Yeah, that means that basically, because people are doing things like borrow money to bet on crypto, crypto. The crypto exchanges would give people like 125 to 1 leverage. So they would give you like $125 of poker chips to play with for every 1 actual dollar that you put, which sounds awesome, right? Like, oh wow, fantastic. Of course, it really means the poker chips aren't actually worth that much. And when it's going up, you're having a great time. But when it goes down, they just liquidate you. There's no margin call. Margin call is when your finances aren't looking that great on your investments or whatever, and the bank calls you or the investment firm is like, hey, you need to put more money in because otherwise you're going to be zeroed out. They don't even do that. They just— you're done. So it's really a vehicle for this crazy gambling. And the hardcore crypto people, or a segment of them, call themselves degens, which stands for degenerate gamblers.

They're owning it.

They're owning it. Yeah. Yeah. Ooh is right too, by the way.

Yeah. But I kind of admire it more.

I guess. Yeah. It's a very male thing, I will say. I'm a degen.

Okay. Sounds like Incel a little bit.

Yeah, a little bit. A little adjacent.

I'm sure there might be some crossover. Uh-huh. Uh-huh.

He said some crazy stuff. Like, he said things like, I asked him about all the fraud in crypto, and he goes, you leave money on the street, you expect it to be there when you get back? And I'm like, so it's their fault? So it's like the investor's fault for, like, just not— It's like, well, the marketing guy's, like, on the other side, and he's like, no, no, no, no, no, don't say that.

You're also asking him if he's being investigated for any criminal activity or there's any kind of legal cases. Legal proceedings. And he claims zero. And there were multiple at that time.

In fact, I think they'd already been shut out of New Jersey. I think the New Jersey Securities Regulator had already shut them down. Anyway, yeah, it was just nonsense. And so that's the first day. I'm like, well, I gotta keep going. Yeah. And it got weirder from there, actually. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

So the part that was a revelation to me, you interview this crypto skeptic. He remains anonymous throughout this. If I sell my share of Amazon, someone has bought the Amazon at a certain price, and then we all kind of know what the value of that stock is because someone just was willing to pay that amount. But then it was explained to you that some 95% of the trades in the crypto world world are someone with two accounts that's trading with themselves. Yeah. So they bought $100 worth of crypto, they buy it for themselves for $200, which they didn't lose any money because they gave themselves the $200. Now it has the appearance of being worth $200, and then they sell it for $400. That blew my mind, that 95% of the trades are these bullshit trades.

I don't know if the percentage—

that's his claim. I'm not making that claim. But just the notion that's even an option to do But it's a lot.

It's especially a lot, I would say, on the overseas exchanges. And we should talk about that for a minute. Okay. Because especially at the time before they collapsed, when you were buying crypto on an exchange like FTX, what you were actually doing is sending your money to the Bahamas because that's where FTX is based and banked.

And they told you you had X amount of Bitcoin, right?

The sort of trouble with that should be obvious, right? Like then you're sort of subject to Bahamian securities regulation, I guess, or Bahamian banking laws, which may not be quite as tight as American. But what's funny about it to me is that this has such a direct overlap with online poker. You were a similar age. Remember in the mid-aughts, all of a sudden you could gamble with real money online? Yeah, right, right. It was like Full Tilt and Ultimate Bet and things like that. And Dave was really into this. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Shocking. And I loved poker. I was living up in Nichols Canyon. I was single. I had an actual poker table in my house. I also was that guy, but I loved it. It was fun. And we'd hang with buddies, drink a beer, and take each other's money. But I never messed with online poker. And I remember asking Dave, so you're gambling with real money? Where are you sending the money? And he was like, it's the same places. They were based out of the same Caribbean countries that the crypto guys were running their companies out of, which is such a vivid illustration of what we're talking about to the retail public.

This is gambling. Sports betting now, too. Is it also those same places?

No, those are probably American companies, I would say. I think the difference with sports sports betting is they can't manipulate the outcome.

Well, I mean, I guess players could.

Well, that's one of the problems with making this gambling so ubiquitous, is like it just compromises everybody, including the leagues. I would say the leagues are in on it now. Yeah, it's a mess. It's all sponsored.

Yeah, we have Michael Lewis on to talk about his podcast on this. Interesting. This is another terrible— and again, this is where I get pretty sympathetic to these people. It's preying on a lot of young men that are increasingly not going to college. There's decreasing amount of jobs in their town. There are less and less options for young men. And they're just like, well, then what am I going to do? Oh, I guess I'm going to gamble. I'm going to get rich on crypto. It's filling a void of opportunity. Yeah.

And to give you a sense of like how strong it is in the young men, 42% of men 18 to 29 have dabbled in crypto, have traded crypto. 42%, almost half. That's a lot of young dudes, right? And look, most guys are just messing around. They're just messing around with a little bit of money. I never offer financial advice, but if you're messing around with money, you can you can afford to lose, that is a different story in terms of how I feel about you. I'm not worried about you if you can afford to lose. The thing I asked is like, just imagine you lost whatever you put in, like all of it, instantaneously. Would it affect your life? Right. I think it's worth considering the arguments about the criminal activity, because even though you aren't financing it, the real money you're putting into it is giving it value so that it has value for the criminals.

I'm more mad at the Wall Street dudes who have drank the Kool-Aid, the institution. Banks that have drank it. Me too. You're already this huge institution that's worth all this money and you got it.

You know, let's talk about that argument for a minute because the crypto guys are now like, oh, I guess you know more than all the big banks. And it's like, first of all, that's deeply ironic if you were set up in reaction to the banks and the subprime crisis and now you're crowing about how the banks are on your side. But it's also wrong because the banks aren't in it taking a directional bet on whether crypto is going up or down. They're just facilitating in the game. They're just the house in Vegas letting you gamble with your money and taking the rake, taking a tiny piece of the volume. There's this thing called ETFs, exchange-traded funds. They're sort of like mutual funds where, like, put money into it and whatever money you put in represents a fractional share of the Bitcoin. And so BlackRock, which has the biggest Bitcoin ETF, you put money into the BlackRock ETF, they just go to, like, Coinbase, this crypto exchange, and they're like, hey, hold this amount of Bitcoin for this customer.

BlackRock never even the Bitcoin. Also, do you think you know more than— we've had two guests with books on Bankman-Fried, uh, and I think it was Peter Thiel— don't sue me if it wasn't him— but I think it was him who said like, yeah, I sat with him and I funded FTX. I was an investor, and I'd do it again because the model of VC is like, yeah, I'm gonna lose on a bunch of these, but the payoff's gonna be so big. And his thing was so compelling. And guess what? It was just as compelling as the ones that work. We're also in this abstract system where there's a model where 95% of things are expected to fail, and that's tolerable. So it's like you could say, oh, you know more than that person. Well, it's like, in a sense, I'm playing a different game than that person, and so are you. So you can't think that way.

I am looking at it at a different level, or certainly a different angle, which is like, it's not just about who wins and loses in this thing, although we should talk about how many people win and how many people lose. So economically, if these things are more just gambling devices than actual investments and things that exist in the real world, what are they? They're zero some games, which is like poker, right? Like, let's say we all sit at a table in Vegas playing poker. You might win a hand, you might win a hand, I might win a hand. But if you win, it's coming out of our pockets. If you win, it's coming— you know, there's no value creation. We're playing a game where maybe it's entertainment. That's great. We get some free drinks. Meanwhile, as we play the game, the house is taking the rake. The house takes a tiny bit of money to allow the game to go so they can pay the dealer. And so can you win in Vegas? Of course. But if you play long long enough in Vegas, on average you're losing. Yes. Because how else do they keep the lights on the casino, right?

They build pyramids. Right.

And so crypto speculation is like Vegas without the drinks, the dinner, or the show. There's no entertainment value, I would argue personally. But also you're playing in an unlicensed, unregulated casino. Or maybe if it's an American exchange, maybe I guess it's loosely or somewhat regulated. But you can also do this thing where you win all these poker chips and you go to the teller to cash out. And the teller window is closed. They're not going to cash you out. Also, it's more like Vegas in the '50s when the mafia ran it. You win and then you end up in the desert, you know, 6 feet under.

You won too much. Exactly. Big time. There's another part I'll just add of my sympathy to it is like there's not only the lack of opportunity and just kind of this really troubled group of young men right now. Also, you're not acknowledging that it's an instant community for a lot of guys. Yeah. Because once you get into Bitcoin, you talk about it all the time and you go to chat rooms and you watch the videos of the people that are super into it. It is a turnkey community in a lot A lot of lonely dudes are in need of that desperately. So that's another sad aspect. It's an identity.

What's so sort of toxic about it is it's so easy to fake real communities online. I talked to the victims of Celsius and I bond with them, but I asked them, because Celsius said, we're like a community bank, but they weren't a bank. They existed only online. There were no physical chapters of Celsius. And they talked about, we do it for the people. You know, bank for the people or something like that. We do it for the community. That's what Alex Mashinsky kept talking about. Do it for the community. Do it for the community. But I asked them after they lost all this money. So Celsius collapsed. Alex Mashinsky went to jail. He had made tens of millions of dollars off of these people. I asked him now, do you think the Celsius community was like a real thing? They were all like, no. Oh, God, it was a lie. They still believed in crypto, interestingly enough. Yeah. When you're running a con, when you're running a fraud, it's way easier to do that online than it is in real life.

It's hard to lie to people's faces.

Well, you can't fake buildings and actual people. The difference between had I gone to Celsius's website back then and looked how professional it looked and smart versus when I saw you talking to that guy, my first thought was like, you wouldn't trust this guy to sell you a fucking watch. He's so obviously a fucking crook.

Exactly. He's a used car salesman all over the place. And I asked one of the guys who had lost money in it, he made that point. He's like, it's just easier to fake it online. If I had ever met this this dude, but he never did. And all they were doing is doing slickly produced videos talking about how everyone's going to make money and they were so great and they cared about the community. So that's just an observation about how frauds work, which I think is really fascinating and kind of dark.

Yeah, just preying on the vulnerable. Yeah.

I want you to talk about going to El Salvador. Just tell quickly the story of El Salvador because I think it's really heartbreaking. If you don't feel bad for tech bros, which I can understand.

Exactly. We went to El Salvador, and the reason we went to El Salvador, Jacob Silverman and I, and had a film crew down there, we went there because El Salvador was the only country in the world that was trying to use Bitcoin as real money. Huge marketing— I don't want to say stunt, but it was really a national experiment in, like, can Bitcoin work as money?

Almost as their national currency. Like, that's where it was going to be heading.

Parallel to the dollar. They were already dollarized. El Salvador is a very poor country. The average Salvadoran makes about $400 a month. And the foundation of El Salvador's economy, a quarter of the economy, is remittances, is the money that the 2 to 3 million people of Salvadoran descent who live here send home to their friends and family. That's really how the economy works. And so they would use things like Western Union and MoneyGram in order to send money home. The pitch from this guy Bukele, who now American audiences are familiar with for a different reason, but this guy Bukele came in, he was a former marketing guy, and he had the idea that, well, look, if we can build a system on top of Bitcoin, a national system, and people can use crypto to send money home and avoid the fees that Western Union and MoneyGram charge, because it could be like, you know, 5 or 10 or something like that, and we just take a tiny piece, like we take a much smaller percentage to facilitate it, then it's a win-win. The people win, we win, government raises a little money. So they did this big system, and you got a wacky president in the mix.

That's important. You know, charismatic, bizarre, a little Trumpy, son of a rich guy, tweeting all the time and saying like not what you would think of as a leader of a country.

Tweets bragging about buying Bitcoin while seated on the toilet. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like very videos of himself looking cool.

Yeah, referred to himself at one point on his Twitter handle as the world's coolest dictator.

That's who you want as your president. Yeah, it was very weird.

So anyway, with much fanfare, they announced that Bitcoin was going to be currency. They had this system called Chivo. Chivo means cool, which to me is so lame that they named their system—

just don't call something cool.

Don't just call something cool. Such a rookie government move. Bad move on a marketing guy. Anyway, they gave everybody like $30 of Bitcoin, every Salvadoran citizen. All you had to enter was your national ID number, which is sort of like your Social Security number. But the system was terrible. People had their ID numbers stolen and you had to take a picture to get the money and people would like put their pets up to the camera. So it was just a mess. So a lot of people didn't get that money. But not only that, on the day that it came into effect, the price of crypto crashed fantastically, like $50,000 to $40,000 in the span of a few minutes or a few hours or something like that. Which is really interesting because if you think of the whole thing as a lot of like insider trading, that might be front running. You see that this big publicity event is happening, people are expecting the price to go up, that's a really good time to sell. As it goes up, you sell, and you could be shorting at the same time and making a ton of money.

Anyway, I have no evidence that that's true, but it is weird that it crashed so quickly. That failed, but Bukele was undeterred. He was like, we're going to build a Bitcoin city in eastern El Salvador. We're going to mine Bitcoin from a volcano, and we're going to build a city off of the proceeds. And there was like a model of this golden 'cause it's a very green city, very Gaddafi-esque. And I'm like, "Okay, I gotta go check it out." So we drove 100 miles east, tiny little fishing village, super remote. San Salvador is a somewhat big city, but it's a very small country. They are also a net importer of electricity. Like, they don't produce enough electricity for their own country already. Yeah. So this was not financially feasible, but it was a marketing ploy. They're gonna build a city, they're gonna build an airport to service the city. So I go out there, there's nothing going on, but what they're doing is they're displacing community in order to build this airport for the city that's never going to exist. It still doesn't exist to this day in any form. But they wanted to build an airport, which I don't know what that's about exactly, because I already have an international airport 100 miles away.

I will say, I don't know that this is related, but there's a lot of drug smuggling and money laundering in Central and South America. Anyway, they displaced this whole community. So I'm talking to this fisherman named Wilfredo, who doesn't know Bitcoin. Like, the guy fishes for a living, and he's like, what is going on in this world. The government like bought up their land for a fraction of what it was worth. Bukele controls the judiciary, so there wasn't any real ability to appeal this thing. And it was just sad.

And what's really telling is you're moving around the city and you are trying to buy things actively with Bitcoin. Yeah. You're going to all these different vendors. That's the other thing. That's really telling. You're like, okay, if it's a currency, this country's actually adopted it. If there's any place you could use it as a currency, it would be this place. There's not one place you can find it.

Biggest market in San Salvador, the capital. And it's funny, I'm just going through the market asking to pay for things in Bitcoin. Everything is cash there. It was cash dollars. And they're just looking at me like I'm the stupidest gringo that ever has walked.

It's very obvious it's not Bitcoin. Oh, back to the Celsius thing. When you go to the 2022 expo put on by— I forget what company at that point. Bitcoin convention. You can't buy anything at the convention with Bitcoin.

Yeah, I'm trying to buy a beer in Bitcoin.

And then they all know it'll work. They got to process it. And he's like, How long? He's like, 20 minutes. So think of a currency where you got to wait 20 minutes to get a beer.

It's not a currency. No, it really isn't. And the remittance thing didn't come to fruition either. To finish that, the government's own figures said less than 2% of people were using it to send money overseas. It's now less than 1%. It's a failure. The government has actually abandoned the whole crypto project. To get a loan from the IMF, they basically had to say like, no, we're not actually even doing the Bitcoin thing anymore. The takeaway for me is, A, it's very sad that this whole community is displaced. There's also a funny aspect. The only person who was living in Bitcoin City was this gringo named Corbin, this white dude from Illinois who works construction, just moved down there. I want to be the first citizen of Bitcoin City, this imaginary city, living in a cinder block house on the beach. And it was interesting to talk to him because I asked him how much Bitcoin he had. He didn't want to tell me. I respect that. But I was like, clearly it was important to him. It was a meaningful amount of money. Otherwise, why would he have done this incredibly drastic thing? I was like, why don't you sell it?

Build a house that isn't made out of cinder blocks or buy a motorcycle or I don't know. And it was very clear he was never going to sell this.

Yeah, it takes kind of religious quality to it.

Exactly. So that really illustrated a lot. It was like both the cult of it, the marketing of it, the lack of substance of it in basically every level. So yeah, El Salvador is really important to the story. What's wild about it is it was always going to be a part of the movie because I was like, I love that country, and I was really sort of charmed by the people. And it's hard to make things tangible in crypto. It's like, well, this is a tangible thing that's happened. But I was like, no one's ever going to care about El Salvador. I couldn't have found it on a map beforehand. And then Trump sends illegal immigrants, or legal immigrants, sends people to that prison. True. Yeah, yeah, it's really wild to watch it now.

You also get a sit-down with Sam Bankman-Fried. I think he thinks he's coming to meet the dude from the aforementioned show. You start hitting him with some pretty hard questions. It's funny, this was the point where my 13-year-old, because he's so nervous and he's so that she's feeling bad for him. I can see her feeling more and more bad for this guy. And I said, oh honey, he stole billions from people. You don't need to feel bad for this guy.

Even I have felt that temptation, to be honest with you. I didn't know what exactly he was doing, but I had a sense that whatever he was doing was not good. You know, at the time he was the king of crypto. The market was crashing, but he was supposedly this boy genius who'd figured it all out, and he was supposedly going to bail all these companies out. He was called the JPMorgan of crypto. Of crypto, which is a reference to like when JP Morgan had to bail out all of these banks, get his rich friends to keep the economy from crashing prior to when we had a central bank. Anyway, he was like the king of the world. And then you sat with him and you'll see it in the film. I just ask him basic questions like, what does it do? What does it do that's good for the world? And he says remittances. And I just been to El Salvador. I'm like, bullshit. And then he goes, well, it's not working now, but in the future.

And you go, and it doesn't function as a currency. No. And he's like, yeah, well, now it doesn't. It will in the future.

One of the interesting things about Bitcoin is that it can't function as a currency because of the tech technology. So the technology, one reason why it doesn't work so well is it can only handle 5 to 7 transactions a second, whereas Visa can do 24,000. So it just can't scale as a payments method. Other blockchains are faster, but they're not limited in supply, right? Like Bitcoin is, the 21 million Bitcoin that ever can be mined. And also they're issued by individuals and companies, and there's a lot of fraud and things that can go wrong there. So really Bitcoin, even Sam, actually I asked Sam, like, can Bitcoin ever work as a payment Met that he's like, no. So I think that argument that Bitcoin even is a money in any scalable global way is kind of falling away. You don't see people arguing for that anymore. But I just thought that's worth mentioning because it's really important to understand the tech sucks.

I just want you to hit me with the real world consequences because all we ever hear is the person who bought it at $1,000 and 100x'd. That's the person screaming from the rooftops about it. Of course. Totally. What's the real fallout of it? Or are they like MLMs? Like what percentage makes money?

So a multi-level marketing scheme, a pyramid scheme. Imagine the top is the original investor, the original person who created it or whatever. And then as you go down, it's the next adopter, next adopter, next adopter. In an MLM, 99% of the people lose, 90+% of the people lose because it's really just about getting something for free or very cheap and then selling it to someone for more.

And it relies on new recruits. The second there's no more new recruits, the money can't flow up. And the entire thing collapses.

Exactly. And so one of the strongest psychological arguments that Bitcoiners have is you'll say like all these facts that we've been talking about and they go, I bet you wish you had bought in early. Yeah, they love that. And it's really effective because it's like, yes, of course. But if I'm describing it as a Ponzi scheme and a multilevel marketing scheme and your retort is, well, if you bought in early, if you're at the top, it's like, dude, that's literally how Ponzi schemes and multilevel marketing schemes work. That's not a refutation of my argument. Argument. That's just a psychological trick trying to give you FOMO, right? Trying to make you wish that you had bought in early.

And yes, I can wish I had that money. It doesn't mean I think the thing is real. Right, exactly.

Or good for the world. Or good for the world. Yes, exactly. I think the consequences are a lot. It's not only all the people that have lost money, which is tens of millions of people. A lot of them lost money they were just gambling with and they're fine. But some people lost everything, right? I mean, I talked to people in Celsius who were definitely affected materially by that loss.

Yeah, I feel terrible for that guy in the doc. Me too, man. His wife's like disappointed in him.

His daughter. You know, I'm a dad and he feels like he let her down. I'm like, ugh. But it's not just that. Now, because it's come back in such a big way and it's integrating itself into our banking system to a certain degree.

And we have a president who believes it should be incorporated in our own holdings as a country. Yes.

My worry is what if there's another downturn? Downturn and people try to sell off this crypto, they can't. There's too many sellers and not enough buyers, and it crashes. And it also infects the banking system, which it almost did in 2023, just months after I testified to the Senate. And I'm telling them, like, if we get this into our banks, it's going to be bad. 3 months later, 3 banks fail, and they're all tied to crypto.

And then the U.S. government—

and then we bail them out.

And the whole point was the fuck you to the government to not be regulated. Everyone just wants more regulation once they hold it, and we want to be able to cash out. And the only way it works is if you make it just what the US dollar was, right? And so it defeats the entire premise initially pitched. 3 banks collapse. Yeah, that's terrifying. And yeah, so if the subprime mortgage collapse was on the back of $78 billion or whatever that number was, somewhere in there, what is the total value right now of crypto?

Yeah, I mean, it's more than that, probably trillion. I don't know the actual actual liquidity. So there's sort of that side of it in terms of the speculative stuff, but there's also just these stablecoins. So these cryptocurrencies that are pegged one-to-one to real US dollars, and they're even scarier to me than the other stuff because the other stuff is gambling, but that is basically a black market dollar. So the price doesn't go up and down, it's always whatever the US dollar is. Exactly. But it's not backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. It's not issued by the government.

Yeah, You can't call the FBI if it disappears. Right.

And so it's used for all of this crime. The criminals don't want the volatility of the other cryptos, right? If they could avoid that, that would be way better. Sure, the price could go up, could also go down. You'd rather it just stayed stable. Most of that $154 billion I am talking about, most of that of criminal activity last year was stablecoins.

I want to say for anyone listening who's like, it might sound too technical, the doc Everyone Is Lying to You Your Money is super duper fun and very, very well and entertainingly directed. But I was curious, again, I said at the beginning, I have treaded lightly on it because I know it's a religion for some sect of people. I want to know how scared you feel about being the, like, most vocal and popular whistleblower.

Who's been on the unnamed show before.

Yeah, yeah. Like, what has been the fallout of you going on many many, many very big shows and sounding the alarm on this. What kind of reaction have you received? I mean, a lot of it's in the doc.

Yeah, I mean, you get a ton of online hate, obviously. I'm not on X anymore, which is really nice. I loved Twitter. I met Jacob Silverman on Twitter. It's such a good thing for a journalist, and you got all this news. But then Elon took it over, and all of a sudden I got hacked on Twitter, and I can't get into my accounts. My account sits there, but I haven't posted in years. I kept getting hacked into from is like Russia. Oh, just interesting. Okay. This is after I was outspoken in crypto, so— but I'm really grateful actually, because now that I'm not on it, I don't see that stuff. And it seems to have gotten worse over there in the last couple of years. And I'm on the other social medias, or at least some of them, and it's a way better experience. So it's been online vitriol. What's interesting is that in person, I've had very few really gnarly interactions. I've had a lot of like what you see in the movie, goofy interactions or people who are just kind of odd and/or scammers. But yeah, I mean, in terms of my security, I was really worried about it when I went down the rabbit hole before I started this because I saw how much criminal activity.

And if I'm a guy that has $100 million in holding in this, quote, asset, and I can point to a guy who made that asset depreciate like a rock.

Although I haven't exactly succeeded in that. So, you know, hopefully I'm I'm not singled out. I guess I'll say I've made friends and I know people now who I think if someone were foolish enough to do something to me, I think there would be hell to pay. I guess that's my hope.

So you're not too scared? It's a ballsy doc. Let's just say that. Thanks. Any number of docs you could have made. And to me, this one does seem pretty risk-heavy. Definitely.

I mean, I'm also feeling this thing as a middle-aged guy, father, of like, I'm not happy with a lot of stuff that's happening in the world. And I've been asked a lot, like, why are you speaking out on this? I feel like my answer now is, if I can't, who can? I'm a white, rich, college-educated man with status in public. Yeah, if I can't do it, isn't that setting a terrible example for everybody else? You know what I mean? I mean, not that people who aren't doing or doing anything wrong— I just feel like I have a responsibility.

Yeah, if you feel the pull, then you should.

And I feel like Weirdly, I'm way qualified for this.

Yeah, it's strange.

It's a weird thing to say, especially for people that only know me from The OC, but hopefully if they've been listening for this long, they'll be like, okay.

But also, a lot of people, I imagine, just be like, why do you care, right? Yeah, that's like a legit question. Like, why do you even care? Let these people gamble on the thing. But for me, I know why I kind of say out loud a lot about it or push back is like, I feel protective of the people that are getting hoodwinked. Like, I don't love that These dudes are getting sold a bill of goods, and I feel like I'm in a position to say, like, "Hey, man." I have that kind of calling to that. Totally.

And I mean, I'm on the side of the people that are investing. I'm trying to protect them. And I will point out, the industry is the one that is not protecting them. The industry is the one— They'll do the performative, like, "Oh, I'm so sorry you lost your money." They're not doing anything about it. They're not actually changing the system. What they're doing is watering down the regulations regulations to give special rules so that they don't have to operate like banks, which do have law. We don't like the banks, and they fail all the time, but they do have to adhere to laws and regulations. They can be held accountable. Right. And they really don't want to be regulated like securities because of the disclosure thing we talked about. So there's a bill that's trying to get through Congress called the Clarity Act, where it's going to put it under the CFTC, the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, which is the weaker, smaller regulatory agency, and they've long wanted this and they may get it. Sam Bankman-Fried wanted this too. That's why he was on Capitol Hill. And so it's like they're the ones that are screwing you guys.

I don't know if you can see it or not, you know, whether you want to admit it, but I'm on your side.

The retail customer has not got two accounts and driving up the price of it.

No. Who benefits in crypto is the insiders, right? Always. It's always the exchange owners, the guys that issue the coins. There are always people behind the coins other than Bitcoin, but even Bitcoin, there essentially are in the sense of Bitcoin was so cheap initially. The people at this top of this pyramid, the people that bought in really, really early, the whales, they call them, they can do a lot to affect the price, I feel like.

Right.

If it was a commodity, it would be like a commodity where they have cornered the market in a way.

And can sell to themselves. And that's crazy. Well, Ben, I just am delighted you made this movie. It's a highly, highly entertaining movie. It's out right now in New York and LA. Yep. Again, it's called Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, and it's a fucking just very well done doc, and it's insanely entertaining. All this technical stuff, it's just floating in there for you to grab. It's very character-driven.

If you've made it through this interview, uh, we have very smart listeners. You do have very smart listeners. You're gonna love the movie because it's a piece of entertainment. Yeah, if you're in LA, AMC Burbank and Linley Royal, New York IFC Center, and Alamo Drafthouse Brooklyn. And you know, this is a true indie. I financed it.

Uh-oh. Yep. Weren't you an econ major? Did Dave tell you to finance it? I financed it.

This is in my book. I financed it. I financed it partially off of a short bet that I made. Oh, really? I bet that crypto was going to crash. And I was betting against a bunch of frauds. So this film is partially finitely financed by me putting my money where my mouth is. Oh, interesting.

That's in the book. You already have a streamer deal or you'll have a— No, that's been weird.

I don't know. I think we'll get there.

Yeah, you will. Yeah, it's so good.

It's a weird environment, you know what I mean? But I think if people show up at the theater, especially these first couple weeks, it's gonna get written about a lot. It draws from an interesting crowd because I feel like everyone has heard about crypto. 80+ percent of the country's never bought any. They always say the same thing when I ask them. I'm like, what do you think about it? They go, I don't know, I guess it's me, I I'm stupid. Seems complicated but scammy. And I made the movie for them to say, it's not you.

Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, your intuition.

Yeah, trust yourself.

It's not you, it's them. There's no there there.

Yeah. And so go and have an hour and a half experience and have a few laughs. And then if you want a deep dive, you can read the book. But yeah, audiences are loving it.

Easy Money is the book. Easy Money. New York Times bestseller. So also look into that. Ben, this has been a blast.

You're so bright. So are you, man. Jeez. Very attractive. Impressive. And I really appreciate that. All right. Reference that show.

Hi there, this is Hermion Permion. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check with Miss Monica. Bless your heart.

Thank you. Allergies? I don't know. You don't know? If I'm getting another bug, I might as well just call it a day.

What's the name of the new virus?

Hantavirus or something. I know, I'm so worried I have it.

That sounds gross. I guess all of them sound gross, but hantavirus?

It sounds like Hannes. I'm sure that's part of it because it's like rats.

Wait, what? It comes from rats? Yeah. Were there rats on the ship?

Yeah. And there's like a whole thing happening. There's vermin everywhere.

Oh yeah, they've shut down a couple of institutions here in Beverly Hills. You see, they shut down the Peninsula's restaurant. Oh, I shouldn't say that. I'm not— I don't want to get sued. But I saw that it was— they had violations, rodent violations.

Yes. And it happened at San Vicente Bungalows too, and downtown. Dantana's.

Oh no. When I saw that, I immediately sent my friends who I go to Dantana's with, and I'm like, I'd go right now.

I'd go tonight. I want to go now.

More rats, the better. That's it. The more rats Lafayette Coney Island had in Detroit, the better.

Why are they everywhere right now?

Look, if you don't have rats at your restaurant, your food sucks because they'd be there. Think about it.

I guess it was maybe it was a really fun cruise and that's why the rats wanted to be on it.

Yeah, I mean, rats on a boat, boy, horrifying.

But like, there are rats places, and there are rats places? Yeah, like there are rats places, and hantavirus hasn't been a thing until now.

Well, it's all about how— what close proximity you're into the rats so that the fleas on those jump off and get on you. I mean, that's the bubonic plague story.

I know, but remember, I had— I had rats in my house.

Didn't you have a mouse in your house?

Well, we, we decided to call it a mouse because I couldn't handle the thought of it being a rat, but it had—

is there technically a— I know we've already beat this into the ground, but Is there any technical difference between a mouse and a rat? Yeah.

Their tails, their size. Actually, their poops are different. That's how you can tell.

Oh, holy smokes. You just brought back an immediate flashback of my dream last night. Oh, yeah. I was dealing with so much— like, it was deer poop. It was the pellet kind of poop. I picked up some crate and just poop started falling out of the bottom. Because there's a cute animal in there. But I was like, even though it's cute, there's too many poops. And then I was realizing there was fucking poops everywhere. I wonder why that is.

Oh yeah, that's weird.

I didn't step in poop yesterday.

Sometimes there's poop in your yard because dogs.

Yeah, there are pretty often there's poop.

Or maybe you read about this hantavirus.

Something infected my sleep and I— it was just full of poop and those pellets.

It was a Do you mean like rabbit ones?

Yeah, yeah. Ew! I realized I had been standing on them. I just, I don't wanna talk about it anymore. This wasn't a dream. I had a, I guess I should like this. I like when I have like a, I think I know how I feel about something, then I find out I didn't. I kinda like that. Okay. Counterintuitive things, you know? So I hate coyotes. They eat everyone's pets. They howl like crazy.

We know how I feel about them. I'm very scared and I've bought a lot of, deterrence.

Yeah. So anyways, I'm riding my bike, I guess 2 mornings ago or something. I took a long bike ride, and on my bike ride I saw a coyote that was crumpled in half.

Ew, what is this? Fact check! This fact check is horrible.

I hated it. I felt really bad for the coyote, and then I was like, they are cute. Oh well, and vulnerable. They're so good at dodging traffic because they're running back and forth in traffic all the time. You never see them hit. This one might have been drinking or something.

But also, Carly just told me a story that a coyote was hit.

Oh, I bet. Or one, or same one.

What did she say? No, this was— and she got involved and like, it was a story.

Would she rescue a coyote?

Like, kind of. Of course she helped. She helped. But I don't know if it died. I think it died. It did, right? What's the story, Rob?

It was like in the middle of the road and they had to stop. Well, I just asked you and you I don't know. Okay, right.

Well, no, I was just saying— okay, go on, Rob, go on.

It was in the middle of Los Feliz Boulevard and they had to stop traffic cuz other— it was dying. It was hit and then it had crawled into the front lawn area of her house and then died. And then they wouldn't come get it, so she had to—

she said she helped get it out of the road.

Yeah. And then she had to put in a garbage bin. Oh, I guess I do know. This was a bit ago.

This was a few weeks ago. A couple weeks ago. Yeah. So it wasn't the same one. Different one. Yeah, I do I do have— I'm worried about— because, you know, sometimes I have magical powers I can't control.

That's right.

I have talked about it on here, like how I— could you give me an example?

Yeah, of one? Yeah. Oh, the dogs in the yard?

No, like sometimes I have thoughts and then, and then things happen. Okay. And I don't mean— I don't want that to be the case. I just don't have control over my powers yet.

I think Drew Barrymore was a baby in a movie. She was like a fire starter, and it wasn't It's not her fault. She just had powers where she could start fires. She just didn't know.

She's just a baby. Yeah, like me. Yeah. So. Like little old me. So, you know, I tell this whole thing on here about the coyotes and then the—

Oh, and then two end up dead. I know. Yeah, if I were an investigator, I would certainly be asking you like, hey, where were you the other night? Were you on Los Feliz Boulevard?

Obviously I wouldn't be killing them 'cause I can't get close.

Well, this was killed with, both were killed with a car. I'm gonna inspect your Mercedes and see if there's a lot of fur everywhere. No, no, no.

I'm still too scared even in my car. I just stay until they run away. Oh wow. Yeah. Um, but my— so my body's scared, but my brain is powerful. It is interesting though that, that—

I wonder what's going on. I've lived in Los Feliz for 20 years. I've, I've only seen a few dead coyotes in the road. I know. And now we're talking about two in the of a month. CTE. Suspicious. Do you think they have CTE? What's going on? I think M. Night Shyamalan would make a whole movie about this.

What if they have hantavirus and it's slowing them down?

Yeah, or just making their vision blurry or something. Anyways, I found myself feeling very compassionate.

Yeah, of course. That's sad. No one wants to see dead animals.

I'm glad that happened to me in that I was like, look, they're just little guys too, man.

They are, but they do scare people. They do kill everyone's pets. Yeah, they eat people's pets and they like like, um, say hi, and then you turn around and they come back and they have 3 of them and they're ready to eat you. So like, I don't want them to die, but I do want them to go away from me, you know?

I wonder if they could just like— you know, one of the big issues I think with bear— I don't want them bears in, in the wild— is they get— they, they congregate around trash dumps, you know? I know. And that's supposed to be real bad for them. Oh, then they get accustomed to being around people. It's like big thing. But I am feeling like there's so much food in LA. This is the problem with the crows. I've been trying to get the crows to be my friends. Update: there is a crow that seems to be trying to make friends with me. He's in my backyard a lot and he's walking. He's on— he's terrestrial. I love— yeah, we also have two ducks that live in the pool now.

Yeah, you have a whole thing going.

I have like a bird sanctuary happening and I love it. I've got hummingbirds. I mean, I'm really— I should get binoculars and really start studying.

I hope you get an owl.

We have occasionally an owl that sits on this garage. Oh, I love when the owl's here.

Oh yeah, I love owls.

I love owls too.

Do I love them more than— man, they're great. I don't know how smart they are. They got to be smart for me to— they are.

They always have little spectacles on.

That's true. They're very— well, they're wise.

Yeah, that, that's the same.

Okay, so what was I saying?

Um, the crow. I know, I remember the crow.

Coyote finding food.

Coyote Oh no, bears.

Oh yeah, the reason that the crows aren't like— like when you feed a crow elsewhere in New York City, like yeah, they need the food. What the fuck are they gonna eat? But here there's fruit trees everywhere. Every single yard has fruit trees in it. Fig trees. Like they live in a salad bowl. Ding ding ding! Gorillas. Oh yeah, previous guest. Um, so I don't know why Coyotes got to eat all the ant— all the pets. Like, well, there's no leftovers.

No, they're not vegetarian.

I guess my point is, should people throw their leftovers in a— no, in an agreed upon spot?

No, this is what she said.

Okay, there's more to the story.

Yeah, there's more to the story about someone else on the street who puts out chickens and stuff for them. There's always a guilty party when—

when— yeah, when Carly witnesses something.

And that's the reason the coyotes are there, and that's the reason it got hit. And she yelled at and said, this is your fault.

Okay, well, that's okay.

So I think that we're not supposed to be doing that according to Carly.

Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

But if we're dumping it, like, we cordon off a little area in Griffith Park and it's just like, hey, when you get carryout and on the way home you're like, I bet we're not gonna eat this, just swing by there, chuck it out the window.

Who's gonna drive by there when it's full of bears and coyotes and dogs?

No bears, this is for the coyotes.

Well, the bears are going to come. It's also close to the zoo.

Yeah, they're going to break out of the zoo. There's a fucking prison break at the zoo. They go, yummy. There's such good leftovers here in LA. Like, such— there's so many good restaurants. They'd be like, fine cuisine. It's unlike these trash dumps in Yellowstone. It's like they're eating fucking 2-week-old hot dog buns that campers threw out. This is premium.

Well, don't tell them. Then they'll really start coming around. Coming around.

On here heading south.

I don't want that. I don't want that. I got nervous because, okay, so here you have to take, you take your trash out, the big bins on Wednesday, cuz trash comes on Thursday, the pickup. Mm-hmm. And when I lived in the apartment, I didn't have to do that. I didn't have my own bin, so I had to always walk around and go throw it in the big dumpster. But I didn't deal with getting the dumpster. Then your super would yell at you about not breaking down the the trash cans out to the street. Okay, so this is new to me, and I forgot twice in a row, two weeks in a row, I forgot to take it out. So then I got very nervous that I was like, bears are gonna come. I mean, this trash can's full of food, two-week-old rotting food. And then I was really nervous about the vermin, and then that are clearly all over the place. And then third and most of all, maggots. I'm so scared of them. I'm so scared.

We got a couple of those outbreaks.

I know, and I like, I can't handle it. Yeah, it's extreme. I will just light it all on fire. It's extreme.

You get a trash can. No, I don't want that to happen to you. Taking over.

Oh yeah, yeah, I get that. Remember there was a maggot Armchair Anonymous story that I'm forgetting, but I remember, I now remember the feeling?

It was like in the, in the vent above the oven or something. Oh yeah, they were cooking. They were cooking. Yep.

Good, good memory. Oh, and it fell into the food.

Yeah, we've also had, um, people whose— the wounds— we've had some nurses, I think, talk about that.

Um, okay, so are you guys gonna name the crow?

Well, before I talk about the crow, I want to talk about the monogamous pair of ducks. Okay, go ahead. It's so cute. I think she must have— well, although she would be sitting on the eggs. I don't know. There's something so sweet going on with these two ducks that are at the edge of our pool every morning, and then they take a little swim together in the hot tub. No, no. Well, sometimes because it's not hot, right? Sometimes in the hot tub, but more often in the pool. Oh, okay. And then they have to flap their wings to get up, back up on the thing. And he waits for her to do everything. And then he kind of follows her. Is he a mallard? Yeah, he's a mallard. He's beautiful and she's ugly. Uh, no, I'm just kidding. But they don't have any color, those, you know, they're just brown, the girls. The boys are so beautiful. Um, I think you're thinking of a goose, maybe a duck, you know, just a brown duck.

How come ducks— why do we teach kids that ducks are yellow?

You know what I mean? Yeah, like the cartoon version of a duck is always— or the Peeps version. I know, maybe it all stems from Peeps. Well, their babies are yellow. The babies are yellow. Are they? Yeah, they are. They're golden chicks. They're golden.

This is a white duck on the internet. This is an American Pekin. Uh, it's white. Yeah.

Okay, but that's a real quack duck, that white one you just showed me. I can hear the quacking.

Me too.

So anyways, okay, he's caring for her and looking out for her to the degree I was like, we're going to have chicks in the backyard here. Like, this all looks—

but they could be Grampy and Grandma. They— she could be in menopause.

I don't think that's how their life cycle works, but— well, I don't think they live much longer when they're not. But it's very tender what's happening with this monogamous pair of ducks.

How do you know they're monogamous?

Because ducks are monogamous. Well, so are people. Yeah, okay, point taken.

What are you gonna do if you see the male mallard with a new lady in the pool?

Well, the good news for him, I probably won't be able to discern the difference. Difference between his side piece and his main.

You will, because the side piece is white and pretty.

What would be more exciting is if I looked out the window and there was two mallards on the scene and she had a thing going. They're in a poly. Yeah, in a poly situation. Yeah. But anyways, yes, this, this, this, this crow is, is— I really think it's heading towards friendship. Okay, because we have lots of crows in the area. That's how I became obsessed with them. They live in a lot of our trees. Yeah. And, um, but they never walk around the yard. That's not what crows do. They're not terrestrial bipeds. But this one is. He's constantly strolling in the backyard and landing in different spots that he knows are very sacred to me. So he's been hanging out on the guard, on the railing leading into the attic. And I'm like, if you want to get interviewed, just say the word.

Just email us at armchairexpertbookings.com.

Stay on the railing when I go up the stairs and I'll know to let you in. Okay, get it going. And then, um, and then he landed on the railing of my balcony this morning while I was journaling, and I was like, oh fuck, and I was scrambling to get my camera out and I didn't succeed and he flew away.

Oh, he didn't want to be photographed.

He didn't. But I'm in love with him or her, and I really am like, I'm allowing myself— it's like I'm putting myself back out there, you know. I had the whole— for people don't remember, I tried my hardest to become friends.

I was trying to feed—

I was putting up food out everywhere. I learned their calls.

That you did? Yeah, I was doing everything.

And then finally I was like, yeah, they're not gonna be friends with me. Yeah. But this one's— I feel like he is like me. He's like, yeah, these people are interesting. I kind of want to know what's going on with them.

And do you think maybe he's like, um, an outcast? And so he's like, I'm gonna go explore.

Like, he's not in a murder. Exactly.

Yeah, probably because he prefers to walk. He loves walking. Murders like to fly.

This little fellow is walking all over the yard. Yeah, yeah, it's so cute.

Oh my God, what happened? I just like, maybe I'm just like, got worried about him and coyotes.

Can you even, for real though, imagine this evolved to a point where we were such good friends that during interviews the crow just sat right here in between us on that little stand stand or hung right here on the bookshelf.

Okay, that would be—

people tune in even if they hated us just to see this crow.

That maybe— I think it might be considered— well, we'd have to just show that the door was always open and that he could leave.

We'd get letters from PETA no matter what. I don't think you're not even allowed to interact with animals, right?

But we're not.

He just came in. I'm just leaving doors open.

Yeah, you said just now when I was sitting outside that he was trying to be friends with me.

You missed it. Yeah, I was inside eating oatmeal and I saw outside. I saw him come in the backyard and he was so close to you and he's just plotting— Do you think? No, no, no, no, no, no! He's not an attacker. He's like that guy.

You made a lot of it.

He's just a fun guy.

Okay. Yeah, I'm just nervous that like you've made a lot of, you know, it's like this is your version of the women having the tigers or like opposite. No, we don't know.

The crow cannot kill me.

It could like pluck one of our eyes out or something while sleeping.

If you were anesthetized with— and you went into a coma with your eyes wide open, perhaps it could do that. You're the one saying how smart they are.

If they're that smart, they can kill. Okay, okay, okay. And, and ground— now this isn't an M. Night Shyamalan movie. The crows, like, you know, they become your friends, and then, um, they start like killing people, but in weird ways. Like, you know, they, they somehow get like big boulders, and then they're flying, and they drop on your head, you know. Wow, they're But they're smart. You're the one who's saying they're so smart.

They would definitely have to use tools, I think.

But they know how to use tools, don't they?

Yeah, they do. Yeah, they've been seen.

So, or yeah, they go to the tool shed, they get like, you know, um, pliers.

No, I think for— they're going to need a come-along. I don't know if you know what that device is. No, it's a steel cable wrapped around a ratcheting device, and you can lift engines out with them. And, you know, okay, yeah, so that's what they're gonna need.

All right, well, I don't know, they're smarter than me, clearly, so they can figure out how to murder. And, um, you won't even see it, you know, because you're so blinded by love.

I'm gonna shift gears for a second and say, as much as I love the crow, that's all in the back of the house. I'm loving what's going on in the back of the house. There's also hummingbirds, you know, we have babies I told you about. Mom this year. So cute. And they were all in the yard. In the front of the house, I have a different situation, which is some birds made a nest by the front of the house, and they have fucking painted my house in shit.

Oh no, the fucking—

the driveway's covered in shit. Oh, the fence railing's covered in shit. The camera to the house was slathered in shit. So I had to get out there with the power washer this weekend. You know I love the power washer.

Yeah, why are you complaining?

You love it. I mean, I, I, I hated— what I hated is it was one of those things I was like, I got to power wash all that bird shit. That was in my head for like a month, you know? And it's like every time I take the trash out, like, oh fuck, now there's shit all over the trash can. Ew. Yeah. Anyways, I finally got around to doing it. And why I love it is like it's very instantly gratifying. You can clean up bird shit quite quick with a power washer.

I have a sense the crows are gonna— the crows are working in cahoots with them, okay? Because they're, they're pooping all over the cameras and stuff. That sounds so suspicious. So it sounds very Ocean's Eleven.

Yeah, exactly.

They're doing a heist murder together, and that's kind of fun.

They're gonna be bummed when they get inside to try to take the valuables because there's just really not— unless they can figure out how to get a TV be off the wall. And even those are— I don't think they want to steal it.

I think they're more, um, um, I want to live there. No, I think they want to kill.

Oh, they have a taste for— okay, they're homicidal.

Yeah, okay, exactly. Taste for human blood. Um, all right, well, let's do some facts. Let's do some facts.

I want to say, for the record, I feel obligated to say it, I think Ben's the smartest actor I've ever talked to. Wow. I cannot believe how smart Ben was. I mean, I can believe it. I was with him, right? He's so fucking impressive. I definitely felt like I was talking to an expert, period.

He is an expert in this.

Yeah. And historically, like, he just— he knows. He just is very fucking bright. I enjoyed talking to him so much. I think I told 10 different people how much I loved— to the point where I was like, oh, I don't even care about acting, but if I was stuck on a show with him, that'd be a blessing. Like, the amount of chitchat you could have that would be smart, would be so fun.

And we know we have friends of friends who worked with Ben and clearly like him because they're still doing favors. They, they really, um, speak very highly of him. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's awesome.

Straight up good guy. Austin, Texas, what else would you expect? That's true.

Uh, one of our friends who loved The OC was like, did you guys talk about it? And I was Honestly, no. Yeah, I refused to. Well, it was more just like, that's not—

that's not— also, if you saw the doc and you see what he goes through, I couldn't— I just couldn't do it to him. Yeah, it's every single fucking interview. The guy's been on two other hit shows. It's hard.

Sometimes that happens. I know.

And I know, but I'm like, I'm not doing that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But, uh, yeah, people will be mad. That's okay.

Whatever. Okay, I'm going to do some Fun facts. How long did each of his shows run for? The OC, '03 to '07, 4 seasons, 92 episodes.

Whoa, that's a lot. That's 5 seasons, isn't it?

3, it said 4 seasons. Okay. Southland, 2009 to 2013, 5 seasons, 43 episodes. Gotham, 2014-2019, 5 seasons, 100 episodes.

Well, so they were making a lot of episodes per season. For that show.

That's what I mean. Yeah. How much did Kim Kardashian have to pay in her fine for Ethereum Max? In 2022, Kim agreed to pay $1.26 million for promoting Ethereum Max and allegedly collaborating in a pump-and-dump scheme to inflate the price before selling to investors. She received $250,000 for advertising it. Other people who misleadingly promoted it were Floyd Mayweather Jr. and basketball player Paul Pierce. How much is the Bitcoin worth that the guy who bought pizza using Bitcoin in 2010— Laszlo Hanyás made the first real-world purchase using Bitcoin, paying 10,000 Bitcoin for 2 Papa John's pizzas. That was roughly $41 at the time but is now worth between— oh my God— $900 million to a billion.

Yeah, this is a billion dollar $1 pizza. That's why it's so memorable. I would have a very hard time recovering from that, if not impossible. Imagine just sitting around going, I could be a billionaire right now. Well, he could cash out right now.

Well, see, this is the thing I was kind of confused about when we were talking about it. Like, it's like fake, but it's real.

Well, you can sell it right now for whatever it's at now, $70 or whatever. That's what I mean.

So, but it does have value in that way.

And when it collapses, it'll be a collapse. It's not like Amazon, there's a run on it and then people go, oh, it doesn't have any assets or it doesn't generate any money. There's a floor to it because it has an intrinsic value of its assets, right? This is nothing.

But you can sell it now and make real money.

Now you can. Yeah, that's pretty good. Well, sure, if you still had the 10,000 Bitcoin. And you know that they— the British press has unveiled the man behind the— his fake name. No, no, no, the creator of Bitcoin who has been anonymous. Oh, for however many years and gave himself a Japanese name, but he's an English cryptographer, they think.

Yeah, it's creepy.

Well, you gotta wonder how much that guy's got. He invented Bitcoin.

Well, he has infinite, I guess. I'm sure he has a lot of it. Okay, what is the Southeast Asian current currency? Oh, oh, hawala. It's not a physical currency but an ancient informal method of money transfer in Southeast Asia. A trust-based network of brokers known as hawalaters are used. It is primarily used for remittances. Many countries like the US and India have laws against hawala due to regulatory and anti-money laundering concerns. Did Peter Thiel invest in FTX? Yes, his family trusts and venture arm held shares in FTX as well as through his investment in crypto lender BlockFi. And he said he would do it again. Cool. That's that. Those are the facts. Those be the facts.

Okay. Yeah, we trust Ben with many of those facts.

Yeah, he was knowledgeable.

All right, love you.

Love you.