00:00:48.120We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook.
00:00:50.140Each week, we talk to someone in show business and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us.
00:00:55.340Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show.
00:00:59.320We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, Adam Scott, Danny McBride, Ben Stiller, and a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us.
00:01:07.580Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
00:01:12.940On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman.
00:01:19.500I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle.
00:07:26.600Like, can I take this stuff and go to the, can I go to the deli in Brooklyn here where I live
00:07:32.040and buy a bagel with Bitcoin? He's like, well, you know, not really. Anyway, I became fascinated
00:07:39.300by it. I think the tipping point for me was probably the celebrities selling it. You know,
00:07:45.720the most famous people in the world selling this thing, which looked an awful lot like a financial
00:07:50.540product, not a consumer good. You know, people put money into the crypto thing. They hope it goes up
00:07:56.200in price and then they sell it and they make money. That sounds like an investment to me,
00:07:59.800pretty obvious. And yet there were not the investor protections around it. The celebrities
00:08:06.580didn't know what the hell they were selling in my humble estimation. That sounded like a recipe
00:08:12.660for disaster because there were so many people flooding into it and it was surging in price so
00:08:19.220fast. It felt like a bubble that was ready to pop. So I decided I'd write a book about it first. I
00:08:25.480I don't know why I decided a book instead of a movie, kind of ironic or something.
00:08:30.460But I reached out to a journalist named Jacob Silverman, great tech journalist.
00:08:34.220And he and I started collaborating on articles, sold the book proposal, and then went out into the real world in 2022 and started reporting for the book.
00:08:42.780And I just turned a camera on and figured I'd document all these colorful characters in crypto.
00:08:47.460And sure enough, they turned out to be quite colorful.
00:08:50.140So, you know, it's a reminder. And I, you know, the more I travel through my life and reflect on where we are today and all the challenges and the trend lines that define the headlines of the day, so many have come from COVID.
00:09:05.060It explains more things and more ways on more days about where we are as a society, a nation, our politics, et cetera.
00:09:12.020But it's interesting, just the crypto phenomenon in the context of Bitcoin in particular.
00:11:33.700And it's interesting because that's gotten so much attention and there's so many viral
00:11:37.300clips that have come out of that interview because of just the jaw-dropping nature of
00:11:42.040simplicity of your questions in some respects. I mean, you knew what the hell you were talking
00:11:45.400about, but you weren't asking hard-hitting questions. And he couldn't answer a damn thing,0.98
00:11:49.960basic stuff. What does it do? Give me one good thing that it does. And he said,0.92
00:11:55.660oh, it's good for sending money crypto. What does crypto do? He says, you can send money overseas,
00:12:01.460remittances. You can send money overseas and avoid the money-changing services like
00:12:06.240Western Union money grant, which was a big talking point. But I had just come from El
00:12:13.340Salvador, the only country in the world that was trying at the time to use crypto as real money.
00:12:18.060This foundation of the Salvadoran economy is remittances. 25% of the economy is the money
00:12:22.480that the two to three million people of Salvadoran descent who live here in America primarily
00:12:26.980send home. That's really how the economy functions. And I went down there and there's a bit in a
00:12:32.480movie where I go through a market trying to pay for things in Bitcoin. They just look at me like,
00:12:36.240the stupidest gringo they've ever seen. I mean, nobody was using it. It was less than 2% of1.00
00:12:42.720remittances were using the system at the time. Now it's less than 1%. Now they've just continued
00:12:47.380the program. So I told Sam politely, bullshit. I said, bullshit. That's not true. I'm not seeing1.00
00:12:54.020it. And he says, well, in the future, in the future, in the future. That's what these guys
00:12:59.220often say. Sure, it's not working now, but in the future, it'll work. But yeah, it was one of the
00:13:02.960those bizarre hours of my life, because like you said, I wasn't asking him questions that should
00:13:07.380have been rocket science. If he is the head of this supposedly innovative multi-trillion dollar
00:13:12.180industry, he should be able to answer basic questions like, what does it do? It's pretty
00:13:17.220telling that he couldn't. Yeah. And pretty telling it could. And just for people that are not tuned
00:13:22.220in and, you know, or, or even tuned up may vaguely remember this 25 years, uh, he was sentenced.
00:13:28.560Uh, and he was basically, I mean, you know, there's many different things was conspiracy
00:13:31.960of fraud, but he was basically shifted, changed code so that he can start to borrow against the
00:13:39.280assets of his investors. That's right. And when you borrow something from someone that doesn't
00:13:43.760know they're lending it to you, that's called stealing. That's still against the law. You can't
00:13:48.640borrow something from, he wanted to call it borrowing. Yeah, yeah. No, that's, you're exactly
00:13:52.440right though. That's what he was doing. And that actually speaks to the sort of, one of the core
00:14:00.320intellectual fallacies of of of cryptocurrency the crypto advocates say you can just trust the code
00:14:07.080that we don't need this messy human trust which is what money is this made-up thing
00:14:12.900that's taken many different forms over the years we don't need that stuff you can just trust the
00:14:16.880computer code but code doesn't fall from the sky people write code and sam ran the scheme by
00:14:25.320instructing one of his employees to change a single line of code in the source code of FTX.
00:14:30.980And they borrowed, quote unquote, borrowed all of the money from their customers' assets to pay
00:14:36.140off his debts from his trading firm that was actually losing money hand over fist. He wasn't
00:14:40.020a very good trader. I just think that lays bare what's really going on here. I understand that
00:14:48.520people have a frustration with the current financial system, that they feel like it is
00:14:53.860an insider's game, that it's rigged, that they have a hard time getting ahead. They're right
00:14:59.400about all those things. And we need to address all those things. So that part of the Bitcoin
00:15:03.220story is true. What's not true is that Bitcoin fixes this. Bitcoin is worse because you're
00:15:08.980shifting the trust from the public sphere, from publicly issued money to private money,
00:15:14.220to privatized money. It's a bad idea. Where does the money come from in crypto? It comes from
00:15:20.260corporations and individuals, whether it's Donald Trump or World Liberty Financial or any of the
00:15:24.660other ones. There's a history of this. We tried private money before in the 19th century in
00:15:32.260America during what was called the free banking era, when banks were allowed to issue their own
00:15:37.320notes, their own currencies. And it was also called the wildcat banking era because you were
00:15:43.620allowed one physical location of your bank. And so if you were a little inscrupulous, you would set
00:15:48.080your location as far away from your depositors as possible, where the wildcats roamed. And once
00:15:53.160you had their real money, what's to stop you from taking off with it? So there was a lot of fraud.
00:15:58.300And ultimately, we scrapped the system and replaced it with a central bank. So crypto is not only not
00:16:03.360the future of money, it's the past of money. It's something we've tried before, and it's failed.
00:16:09.220And let's talk about the origin story. It goes back to, I mean, I really appreciate this notion
00:16:15.060of institutional or lack of institutional trust, the issue that the foundational issue around just
00:16:21.280people hating banks with a legitimate reason. Yes. There's at least plenty of evidence in that
00:16:26.040respect. You're not defending the current financial institution by any stretch of the imagination. So
00:16:30.680the idea was we're going to break this up. And again, it was code, not people. And, you know,
00:16:35.380the sort of purity of that you've pierced in the context of, well, people are the ones writing the
00:16:40.760code, which is a foundational point, which is an important one. I'm glad you shared that.
00:16:44.980But it goes back to what? It goes back to this guy by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto.
00:16:53.980Okay. So real, fictitious. We're in what, 2008, the financial crisis. Perfect time to come out
00:17:02.160with, what, a nine-page paper saying the system is broken and we have something more pure, better.
00:17:11.760Yeah. And wouldn't it be cool if we could avoid all these terrible banks that were even more
00:17:17.400unliked at the time than they usually are? Because they did contribute to this massive
00:17:21.240economic near collapse that we had. And so many people lost their homes and the banks paid hardly
00:17:27.380any price you know nobody went to jail really and they got their bonuses at the end of the year
00:17:33.540with our money with the money for the taxpayers bailed them out with so it was infuriating um
00:17:38.280and like you said this white paper gets dropped online bitcoin white paper some person or people
00:17:43.900using a pseudonym satoshi nakamoto uh and it says wouldn't it be cool if we could have a form of
00:17:49.360money where we don't need the banks we could send directly i could send something to you gab and you
00:17:53.780could send it back to me, some form of digital money. This has been an idea that had been floating
00:17:58.980around for a while and a bunch of cryptographers have been trying to figure it out. And the Bitcoin
00:18:03.480quote does have some elegance to it. I don't know that I need to go into the specifics, but it has
00:18:07.940a capped number of Bitcoin that can ever exist. The rest of these cryptos really don't. And so
00:18:14.640advocates will tell you that means that it has value because it's scarce. There's only so much
00:18:19.600of it. We can talk about whether that's true or not. But the idea was interesting, but it didn't
00:18:24.620really take off for several years because what's to give this? It's just lines of code stored on
00:18:31.720ledgers called blockchains. That's all crypto is. It's just computer code. So why do you assign it
00:18:36.920value? What value does it have in the world? What can I use it for? Well, the first thing you could
00:18:41.840use it for was criminal activity. It was the Silk Road, the dark web drug marketplace that
00:18:48.600eventually was shut down by the feds, but you could buy drugs online. You could
00:18:52.920order assassination attempts. Ross Ulbricht, the guy that was running it,
00:18:59.160you know, the guy was convicted. Trump, of course, has just pardoned him.
00:19:03.680But that really, you know, crime really is at the heart of the crypto story because there's sort of
00:19:11.980two parts to it, as I see. There's the criminal activity that you can use crypto for because
00:19:17.340crypto is a synonymous blockchain. You don't know who is sending what where. It obscures the identity
00:19:23.480of the people transacting. Who would that appeal to? I mean, sure, like people who value their1.00
00:19:29.780quote unquote privacy, but also criminals, right? So there's a criminal activity. And then the other
00:19:34.000side is the retail side for the regular people. That's gambling to me, basically. You're just
00:19:38.460putting money into a crypto. You hope it goes up. You can sell it. I'm not against gambling, but
00:19:43.680you know you're gambling in an unregistered unlicensed casino so you're probably gonna lose
00:19:48.900um and uh we should probably have some rules around it but um but yeah that's kind of how i
00:19:55.620see it now what there's been some fascinating stuff about this guy satoshi so the new york
00:20:00.840times did this whole profile on satoshi in the this spring and uh great investigative reporter
00:20:07.680to carry you, who was instrumental in breaking the Theranos story. And he thinks it's this guy,
00:20:14.660Adam Back, this British cryptographer. It may be, it may not be, I don't know.
00:20:19.800But one thing that's important for people to understand is that we found out in the Epstein
00:20:24.460files that Adam Back, his business got investment from Jeffrey Epstein. And Jeffrey Epstein,
00:20:31.120surprise, surprise, loves cryptocurrency, loved cryptocurrency. So you're supposed
00:20:36.220satoshi you're supposed to like uh you know he's kind of like this cult-like figure in crypto the
00:20:40.840satoshi guy he could just be this weird british cryptographer who was running a business with
00:20:46.340jeffrey epstein um crypto advocates have to grapple with these facts they can't just hand wave them
00:20:52.060away you know and that and remind me that came out just recently in those the february uh dump of
00:20:59.140the DOJ papers on Epstein showing a couple of investments. There was about a $3 million
00:21:06.700investment in Coinbase around 2014, and then a half a million dollar investment that I guess
00:21:12.740is connected potentially to Satoshi or whatever the student, what Blockstream or something.
00:21:19.200Blockstream was his company. Yeah, yeah. And we also learned that Epstein was secretly funding
00:21:25.680a thing called Bitcoin Core Development, which is the group of programmers that maintain Bitcoin's
00:21:30.220operating system. Yes, there are people behind this supposedly decentralized thing. He was
00:21:35.440secretly funding it through the MIT Media Lab because he was already a registered sex offender.
00:21:41.540And so they didn't want to, you know, announce that. So, you know, to be into crypto in 2015,
00:21:47.600that crypto was much, much smaller back then, you know, like it's less than 1% the size of what it
00:21:53.900is now. So it's pretty ironic, but Jeffrey Epstein was into Bitcoin before 99% of the
00:22:00.880crypto pros even knew it existed. You kind of have to grapple with that. And he came in at a
00:22:06.120very pivotal time when Bitcoin's story wasn't really working. It wasn't growing that fast.
00:22:10.840It needed investment. And his investment really helped resuscitate it. The story is more bizarre
00:22:18.980than I ever could have imagined when I first set foot on this journey.
00:22:22.240And Ben, are people pulling that thread in any more meaningful ways? I mean, it's interesting. You're one highlighting that Epstein connection to some of the earlier investments, but it doesn't seem that threads necessarily have been pulled or at least explored or mined more deeply.
00:22:37.300Yeah, there are people who are working on it. I know a number of journalists who are, I'm sort of stepping back from my investigative journalism dalliance or whatever. I've got a lot of other things going on. I've got a movie to sell.
00:22:48.920But there are people out there who are doing that. There's a whole nexus around this guy, Adam Back, who's closely connected to this company, Tether. Tether is the company that Howard Lutnick, our commerce secretary, Cantor Fitzgerald is their broker.
00:23:08.200And Cantor also owns a piece of this company, Tether, that is headquartered in El Salvador.
00:23:16.160There's a lot good there to be explored, but I'm not the one exploring it.
00:23:22.300I'm going to let other people with security teams to do that.
00:23:26.600And at peril of zigging and zagging, I want to sort of close the loop a little bit on El Salvador because I remember those early days as well.
00:23:32.320And a lot of the remittance, you know, we have so many El Salvadorians in California and I've spent time.
00:23:37.340In fact, I was with Bukele, who was president-elect.
00:23:41.000I was down there visiting the old president, and all of a sudden, I was there just days after the election.
00:23:48.100There was president-elect, a young charismatic leader, his wife with connections to California.
00:23:53.920And they were talking about remittances and how connected they are to the state of California in the context of the economy,
00:24:00.240learning more about what you obviously are illuminating.
00:24:03.340And, of course, he infamously said he was going to turn El Salvador and sort of base their entire economic construct and architecture on cryptocurrency.
00:25:05.360They can't afford to like, you know, they need the hundred bucks they get in every week from their family.
00:25:11.260All of it. They can't afford to lose it.
00:25:13.420So nobody was using it. It's actually a dollar based economy.
00:25:16.860They dollarized a while ago. So everything is just, you know, good old Benjamin Franklin's.
00:25:22.200When I went down there, though, so the first thing was a flop.
00:25:25.280the second part of the pitch was, we'll build this magical Bitcoin city. They literally built
00:25:30.440a model of it. And it was all gold. It was like sort of Gaddafi-esque. Or Trump-esque.
00:25:37.120Trump before Trump. Yes, exactly. And the idea was they were going to mine Bitcoin from a volcano
00:25:45.540that was out there that was going to produce. And then they're going to build a city. So I got to
00:25:52.840go, you say you're going to do it. I got to go see it. So I go to the middle of fucking nowhere
00:25:57.320and there's nothing going on. It's a fishing village. And there's nothing happening. There's0.98
00:26:03.200no city being built. There's no Bitcoin being buying. El Salvador is a net importer of electricity.
00:26:09.360They don't have enough electricity to support themselves. So they're not going to waste
00:26:12.660volcanic energy on this stupid Bitcoin stuff. Anyway, what was sad about it was that even0.99
00:26:19.100though nothing was happening with the quote unquote city uh they wanted to build another
00:26:24.180airport there which is sort of weird but they wanted to build an international airport um even
00:26:29.420though they have one only like 100 miles away in the capital city and they displaced this whole
00:26:34.680community that was living there just i was talking to this guy wilfredo who's just a fisherman um
00:26:39.660living a very simple life right he he has some crops he fishes he's happy and these guys come
00:26:48.740in and they go, you got to move. We're going to give you like 10 cents on the dollar in terms of
00:26:53.460what your land is worth. And it's take it or leave it because Bucalli replaced a lot of the
00:26:58.460judiciary. So he really controls the legal process there. You're not going to appeal to the courts,
00:27:02.940not that Wilfredo could afford a lawyer anyway. And so the guy had to uproot his family. And
00:27:08.780for what? Nothing was happening. The city still isn't happening. I don't know why they're so
00:27:15.240Montana building this airport. But I will just mention, totally unrelated, there's a lot of
00:27:19.540money laundering and drug smuggling that happens in Central and South America. I don't know if
00:27:22.440you're aware of this. I'll look it up. I'll look it up, Ben. And no history, by the way. I'm here
00:27:30.740at Ronald Reagan's old governor's mansion. So there's no connection to anything that's happening
00:27:35.060in El Salvador, drug running and anything nefarious. That country, I did a lot of research
00:27:40.940on the country. I fell in love with the country, by the way. The country's fantastic. People are
00:27:44.200like some the kindest people and uh and i i was when you were talking about the fishing village
00:27:48.840i was thinking about how beautiful the coast is there and you know and then the people to your
00:27:53.000point and i think that's important to underscore you know if you want to go in the history of us
00:27:56.120however we've been on the wrong side of the salvadoran people for a long long time supported
00:28:02.440the bad guys um and repressed democracy for many many years so um it's pretty frustrating you know
00:28:08.920You know, MS-13, the gang that, you know this better than me, but MS-13, the gang that Trump was so obsessed with, that's an American creation.
00:28:18.260You know, all the Salvadorans that had to flee their country during the Civil War landed a lot in California and L.A., had to go to the public schools, didn't know the language, banded together to protect themselves.
00:28:31.380And we were funding the bad guys that funded that Civil War.
00:28:34.440So it's pretty ironic. But of course, Trump doesn't know any of the history, doesn't give a shit anyway.0.99
00:28:40.280But for those of us that actually know, it's pretty ironic.0.99
00:28:43.320Well, we're going to get back to Trump and don't think for a second.
00:28:46.780I'm going to we're not going to talk about Cantor and or, you know, what's going on with with Lutnick and the Wyckoff's and everybody else in a moment.
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00:29:15.540On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman.
00:29:21.280I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle.
00:36:17.320So it was just appealing to, quite frankly, a lot of gambling instincts of young men.
00:36:23.860And the most hardcore group of crypto guys actually refer to themselves as degens, degenerate gamblers.
00:36:29.960And so, ironically enough, crypto, which started off as this pure response to the excesses of the financial system, basically recreated that same financial system with all of its over leveraged products and volatility and all that stuff.
00:36:47.760It's crashed repeatedly over its history, but the bill really came due in 2022, as I document in the movie, when it crashed massively.
00:36:56.080You know, the celebrities had flooded in in 21.
00:36:58.160We had the Crypto Super Bowl in January, February of 22, and it was already going down from its high and it crashed even more as these companies all went bankrupt or a lot of them went bankrupt.
00:37:12.840They were, you know, shockingly enough, not actually decentralized.
00:37:20.260And and once the dominoes started to fall, it was pretty hard for them to stop.
00:37:25.500Um, it was, it was surprising even to me though, that Sam Bankman Freed went down as quickly as he did because he really was everywhere. Like you said, he was, um, you know, BFFs with Tom Brady for a quick second. Um, and one of the most painful, uh, commercial sponsorship, like supposed friendships I've ever seen in my life.
00:37:47.720um like really tom brady and this guy um i don't think so uh and but he was spending so much money
00:37:54.800um both on on political campaigns and politicians but also on advertising um that people were buying
00:38:03.080the story um and then when you see it in the movie um his inability to answer basic questions
00:38:09.400just kind of shows how far they'd strayed from the original idea you know that this had just kind of
00:38:14.780become a massive bubble waiting to pop. The stories that at least the reviewers are highlighting
00:38:23.720are not, it's not the celebrities. It's obviously, you know, you interviewed a number of these guys,
00:38:29.100sort of legendary characters, a number of them that are in jail, not just Sam. But it's the
00:38:34.360individual. It's the small, you know, the guy who had, you know, everything to lose and yeah,
00:38:40.660lost everything, but still believes in it. And so this notion of belief, this lack of distrust
00:38:48.900to the status quo, this need to belong to something, that to me is this notion of identity.
00:38:56.720I'm just trying to unpack. I don't have the right words for it. I don't have the right language.
00:39:00.640But it's, to me, the most intriguing part of what I'm reading about this documentary.
00:39:07.180Talk to me a little bit more about those stories and what you were trying to communicate and
00:39:11.920what you learned from those interviews.
00:39:30.780And I had interviewed the CEO, Alex Mashinsky, earlier in the movie, and he just sounded like a used car salesman. Like he just he just gave me used car salesman vibes. No offense to those guys. And and it collapses. And, you know, these these investors are left out to dry. Right. They're unsecured creditors. So they're at the bottom of the stack. They're going to have a hard time getting their money back.
00:39:55.240um but i wanted to talk to them and understand their stories why did they invest what do they
00:39:59.520feel now and like you said it was really um it was quite moving at times you know i'm from texas
00:40:07.720i grew up in austin and i was talking to this guy named joe from fort worth and um good dude
00:40:14.220regular dude was just trying to save a little extra money so he could spend time with his daughter
00:40:19.600um and he lost it and he feels like he let her down and you know he's crying i'm crying everybody's
00:40:25.880crying i i felt like we've done these guys a disservice that they feel like they need to
00:40:32.840gamble in order to get ahead you know i'm not against gambling it's fine but you shouldn't
00:40:37.480stake your life savings on it and they had been so oversold that this was going to solve all their
00:40:44.160problems and just that the get rich quick scheme on steroids that they a lot of them put too much
00:40:49.400in and then once they put too much in they were really exposed when it all blew up so my heart
00:40:54.320went out to hit joe and and that dozen other guys that i interviewed but at the same time i asked
00:41:00.740them the same question at the end of the interview do you still believe in bitcoin some of these guys
00:41:05.140have life lost their life savings they all believe all believed in it um i think that's about like
00:41:12.340you said um wanting to be a part of something bigger than yourself wanting to be free emancipated
00:41:21.640from the difficulties of our current financial system that is hard for a lot of people to
00:41:26.580navigate um and i think it's also about it's hard to admit when you're wrong you know um
00:41:33.560there's a great sociological paper called um when prophecy fails about what happens to members of a
00:41:39.920cult when the cult leader's prophecy doesn't come true. The world doesn't end. Do they renounce the
00:41:45.620faith? No, they double down mostly because it's too painful to grapple with the fact that you've
00:41:53.400been, the cognitive dissonance that you've been lied to. So I think that's what it's about. I do
00:41:58.920think there is, look, crypto appeals to all sorts of people. So it's obviously not just folks that
00:42:04.320on the libertarian right. But there is a pretty significant overlap with the sort of MAGA
00:42:09.860libertarian-esque guys who, look, personally, I know a lot of these guys in the sense that I grew
00:42:19.620up in Texas. So, you know, went to a public high school, like played football. Like I know,
00:42:23.580I know these dudes, I grew up with these dudes, good guys, a lot of them, but
00:42:27.600they've been lied to so much that I think, you know, the lie gets kind of internalized and they
00:42:33.920really believe that somehow, you know, not only is Bitcoin going to save them, but that if you
00:42:40.660criticize it, somehow you're a bad guy. Like I get attacked online all the time. And it's such a
00:42:46.040strange thing for something, if it's a good investment, if it's just an investment we're
00:42:50.000talking about, why are the feelings so intense? I think it really does speak to how we're not
00:42:56.480serving these young guys very well. You know, we're kind of, guys are always going to like to
00:43:01.580gamble especially young guys we don't we don't i was a young guy once you were a young guy once
00:43:05.620no offense uh we we remember we like to i like to play poker things like that but um but now we're
00:43:11.640marketing to them all the time you know you watch sports and it's like sports gambling prediction
00:43:15.520it's crypto and we're saying you know what are you a wimp buy crypto it's it's it's too much you
00:43:21.660know we got to pull back because gambling is fine but it's a it's a zero-sum game most of these guys
00:43:26.580are going to lose. So, you know, I think we should rethink how it's advertised to guys
00:43:31.160so that they, so they're a little more protected in their investments.
00:43:36.040But the issue of gender plays a huge, doesn't it? I mean, you're, you're, you're reinforcing that.
00:43:41.060I mean, this notion that, that this overwhelmingly disproportionately, you know, it targets itself
00:43:46.960for all the natural reasons. It doesn't even have to assert itself in terms of its marketing
00:43:51.260strategies to naturally connect to young men to this sort of prefrontal. I mean, all the
00:43:57.700psychological reasons that young men are naturally attracted to risk, et cetera. But I mean, it really
00:44:03.840is a gendered story as well. Yes. And men make better marks for the industry because of the
00:44:13.420gambling, but also because we've been taught, many of us from a young age, that you shouldn't
00:44:19.780talk about when you lose money, that it's shameful, that you should hide that. Hide that from
00:44:24.340everyone, from your friends, from your family. I talked to a lot of guys who have hid their wife,
00:44:30.340their wives, their girlfriends didn't know what they were doing. And they find out when it's too
00:44:33.680late. And it can have devastating consequences, not just for the couple, but for the entire
00:44:40.060generation or generations of families. And I really think that's the most pernicious part
00:44:46.280about it is wrapping this story in financial liberation and independence, but really most
00:44:54.040guys are going to lose and some are going to lose everything. And the neatest trick is to turn the
00:44:58.920mark's attention that should otherwise be directed to people that scam them, defrauded them, turn it
00:45:03.420back on themselves, blame themselves for being scammed. In crypto, it's called DYLR, do your
00:45:08.660own research. Meaning if you make a mistake, if you lose your money, that's your fault. It's not
00:45:14.520responsibility. Bitcoin cannot fail. You can only fail Bitcoin. And I think that's when you're
00:45:21.020getting into kind of cult-like dynamics amongst a certain persuadable set of guys who are already
00:45:27.360kind of being radicalized online to a degree. Yeah. I mean, and you soberly write and obviously
00:45:34.120discussed, and I document literally, not figuratively, people not only losing life
00:45:38.800savings, but losing their lives as well. I mean, people have quite literally taken their own lives
00:45:43.500the context of this yeah i ended the book with a story of a episcopal priest in north carolina
00:45:52.580whose dad fell down a crypto rabbit hole and ended up taking his own life and and his dad
00:46:00.760was a salesman his whole life at least my memory of the story all he was he didn't have a lot of
00:46:06.140savings he was trying to get a little extra money to give to his grandkids and he got you know
00:46:11.840suckered into this crypto scam and he lost everything and took his own life so yeah it
00:46:15.200you know these these things have consequences right like it's it's easy for us you know for
00:46:21.700many of us the 80 plus percent of us who have never invested in crypto it's easy for us to
00:46:26.300judge others i think it's tempting i get that i understand that it's hard for you not to
00:46:29.860but you know there before the grace of god go we like we need to understand that that we need to
00:46:37.160create a better system. So the odds of you getting suckered are way, way lower because the costs are
00:46:43.980enormous and it rips the fabric of our society apart. It turns us into competitors. You know,
00:46:50.140if it's a zero sum game for me to win, you have to lose. And we're kind of dealing with that
00:46:55.180dynamic a lot. You know, that's Trump's dynamic. That's the dynamic of crypto prediction markets,
00:47:00.800of sports gambling. These are not positive sum games. Positive sum games like the regular stock
00:47:09.080market where stocks are issued, the companies take the money from the issuance of the stock,
00:47:15.380invest it in their companies, at least ideally produce more goods and services. Stock prices
00:47:20.080rises. The consumers get more goods and services to choose from. That's a positive sum game that
00:47:26.000benefits everybody, at least aspirationally, ideally, and often does. Crypto doesn't have
00:47:31.540any of that. It can't by its very nature. And nor does it have a regulatory structure.
00:47:37.720And let's get to that because everything you just said begs the question, where the hell are people
00:47:41.480like me? Where the hell is Congress? And you referenced the Clarity Act a few moments back.
00:47:47.240And this is obviously very ripe. It's very alive, this dynamic. And I think it's reflected,
00:54:42.800But that's already been the foundation of that's already been laid to some degree.
00:54:48.200So what the Clarity Act was and is, because it's still ongoing, is an attempt for the crypto companies to avoid being securities and be regulated as commodities.
00:55:02.560And they want this in part because the CFTC, Commodities Future Trading Commission that regulates commodities, is a much smaller, weaker regulatory agency.
00:55:12.640There's maybe like 500 people that work there.
00:55:14.680There's 4,000 people that work at the SEC.
00:55:17.160It's not like the SEC hasn't had its problems over the years.
00:55:19.460I mean, it's sort of a joke amongst a lot of financial people that it's been toothless
00:57:56.460What do you make of JP Morgan? What do you make of Jamie Dimon, who was like Trump? He was more forceful, dare I even say, than you in opposition and condemnation in this space. And here he is now, Jamie, embracing stablecoin.
00:58:13.240Well, yeah, because they can make money at it. I mean, I think Jamie, and I haven't talked to him, so I'm guessing here, but why is Wall Street suddenly interested in crypto? Because they can make money.
00:58:25.340BlackRock as well. I mean, they had they had a peak of what over 100 billion dollars in crypto assets. I think it's cut in half now. But yeah, they're doing it because they can make money on it. Like the real stuff, not the fake crypto stuff.
00:58:39.440These exchange traded funds where you put in some money and basically BlackRock takes your money, goes to Coinbase or some crypto exchanges.
00:58:48.040Hey, this guy wants this amount of Bitcoin, you know, hold it for us.
00:58:52.700Coinbase holds it for you, for the investor.
00:58:56.140And BlackRock, all BlackRock's doing is facilitating the transaction.
00:59:26.680I think that what worries me is as crypto gets further into our regulated system, it could cause real problems if crypto collapses again.
00:59:38.940You know, in 2022, when I testified to the Senate Banking Committee in December, I was asked by one of the senators, what do you think about crypto getting onto our banking system?
01:17:45.060i made a 90-minute comedy about how stupid this stuff is and it stars me from tv and wife who's0.99
01:17:50.500you know a movie star and it's about a topic since then the news like i fuck the algorithm like just0.98
01:17:56.620try it give it a shot by the way i'm not asking for a lot of money you know relative to you guys0.99
01:18:00.860it's like you know you're giving me a million dollars i'll be i'll be uh you know a pig and0.97
01:18:06.160a pig and shit um so i don't know what it's about but i do think this thing that you've seen over0.98
01:18:12.400the years, this vertical integration, meaning that the companies that are streamers make the0.99
01:18:21.400stuff primarily that they put on their platform, right? They want to own it as well. They don't
01:18:25.940want to have to buy it from outside and license it. This has been a fight that's been going on
01:18:30.280in showbiz for decades, and we lost it, quite frankly, a long time ago, even before the streamers
01:18:37.020were around. But now what you have is a handful of companies vertically integrated, so they don't
01:18:42.760need to buy any movies outside of what they make. It's not like anyone's going to notice if
01:18:48.920Netflix or Amazon or Peacock doesn't have my documentary. And the consolidation has made it
01:18:57.040so there's very few of them. And then, of course, the few that do exist, many of them are tech
01:19:01.140companies with entertainment subsidiaries. So Apple probably doesn't give a shit really about0.97
01:19:09.060how well Apple TV is doing, as long as they're selling iPhones and computers and stuff, right?0.96
01:19:15.040That's where most of their money is made. And so if Trump is going to be threatening you based off
01:19:18.840of releasing this documentary that makes him look, in my opinion, like the fool that he is,0.99
01:19:24.620you know, and he gets mad at you, it's not worth it, right? I mean, that's the only conclusion0.98
01:19:29.160i can come to i i don't know what's in their heads that you know everyone's lying to you for
01:19:34.140your money uh you rolling it out you're gonna so you'll be on the road you're gonna be doing
01:19:38.880public what are you doing you're doing little mini town halls a little what how do you how the hell
01:19:44.740do you how do you what do you do in the absence then of some of the big guys what do you just
01:19:49.220gotta hustle a lot of grit you just gotta hustle yeah yeah i did it i did it in the flesh for
01:19:53.500theaters what we're doing with this is we're putting on a platform called eventive um which
01:19:58.120offers a much better split for the filmmakers where the money will actually go to us the people
01:20:02.860that made the movie into the distributor rather than to the entertainment conglomerate that you
01:20:07.840know they'll let you put your movie on there but they want to take like 50 percent of money
01:20:11.700for the in exchange for putting it on their website and then you need to advertise on it
01:20:16.060in order to give them more money in order to to sell tickets uh it's not a good system for
01:20:20.780indie films in particular so we're putting it on a thing called eventive august 22nd of september
01:20:25.3406th. Anyone, anywhere in the world can watch this movie. Not only will you be able to see the movie,
01:20:30.240there'll be a little intro by me and a Q&A afterwards with my wife, Marina, who's phenomenal
01:20:37.360and phenomenal in the movie. Basically her giving me shit for about 30 minutes. And we're going to0.99
01:20:43.080be taking questions live from the audience. We're trying to create a vibe of like, you know,
01:20:49.980we're in this together. This is a communal experience. Let's start this conversation.
01:20:54.100because most people, 80 plus percent of the country's never bought cryptocurrency.
01:20:59.380They've all heard the word. And when I ask them what they think about it, they usually say some
01:21:03.880version of, I don't know, it seems complicated, but kind of scammy. Maybe I'm not smart enough
01:21:08.900to understand it. And I made the movie to say, no, no, you're smart enough. You're smart enough
01:21:13.600to understand it. You're right. It's scammy. Let me show you how in the form of a 90 minute comedy.
01:21:19.360And then let's start a conversation, more adult conversation, the conversation we're having here
01:21:22.880about all right what's reasonable we're not squashing innovation we're not trying to you
01:21:28.940know limit ourselves we're just trying to protect people and give them buy-in so they trust that
01:21:35.600that this great country that we that we love uh is worth fighting for and uh um you know we are
01:21:42.820all in this together whether we like it or not so uh i hope we can uh foster that sentiment with
01:21:49.580the movie and you can go to everyone is line.com to, uh, to watch the movie and hopefully people
01:21:54.380show up. Well, I'll tell you if, and I, uh, I'll repeat what I said earlier. Uh, if you can watch
01:22:00.920that trailer and not want to see the documentary, I'd be actually shocked. I challenge you to go
01:22:08.200on to that website, watch the trailer. Uh, and I challenge you not to download the movie, Ben,
01:22:15.600Thanks for being on, and thanks for this opportunity to illuminate us on a topic we all need to get educated on, I think understand more fully, and a topic that is shaping a lot of our politics and increasingly in our financial institutions and our pocketbook in this country.