Ben McKenzie (on cryptocurrency)

Ben McKenzie (Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, Easy Money) is an actor, author, and outspoken cryptocurrency skeptic. Ben joins Armchair Expert to discuss growing up in a civically minded family in Austin, studying economics at the University of Virginia, and stumbling into acting success with early fame on an unnamed hit show. Ben and Dax talk about navigating imposter syndrome after overnight success, transitioning from acting into writing and directing, and what led him into investigating crypto markets during the pandemic. Ben explains why behavioral economics reveals how irrational people really are, how financial systems exploit trust and hype, and why the promise of “easy money” taps into something dangerously universal. Sign up now in the app or at grubhub.com/plus/golddays to unlock exclusive Gold Days deals. Check Allstate first for a quote that could save you hundreds: https://www.allstate.com/ See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dax Shepard?

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

• 0:05Speaker 01

  I am.

• 0:06Dax Shepard?

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

• 0:10Speaker 01

  I was confused.

• 0:11Dax Shepard?

  You were very confused.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 0:13Dax Shepard?

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

• 0:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, when I read that we were having

• 0:18Dax Shepard?

  Ben McKenzie.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  Ben McKenzie on, and I knew it was an expert episode and I saw what the episode was about. I read the write-up. I was like, oh, okay, so there's an expert with the same name. And then walk in and it is, it is the actor.

• 0:30Dax Shepard?

  It is. And I gotta tell you, I say this in the fact check, this is one of the smartest actors I've ever met in my life.

• 0:36Speaker 01

  Incredibly smart.

• 0:37Dax Shepard?

  He's so fucking smart. I had such a blast talking to him.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:41Dax Shepard?

  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?

• 1:06Dax Shepard?

  Very entertaining. Obviously, you know him from, oh, see, Southland, Gotham. Great dude. So glad we had him. Please enjoy Ben McKenzie. We get support from Quince.

• 1:19Speaker 01

  I have to say, I am so ready for fall. I want sweaters. I've been craving a true crisp morning where I actually need a jacket. I can't wait.

• 1:28Dax Shepard?

  I'm fully there. The second it dips below 70, I'm like, this is my season. Give me the layers, give me the boots, give me a reason to wear something other than a t-shirt. And honestly, that's why I love Quince, because fall is when your wardrobe actually has to show up. And everything at Quince is 50 to 80% less than similar brands. We're talking 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters, starting at $60.

• 1:50Speaker 01

  $60. $60 for cashmere that you'd expect from a luxury brand without the luxury price tag. It's amazing. Gets me every time. It really shouldn't be real, but it is because they go straight to the factories. They skip the middlemen and they just hand you the savings. The stuff isn't trendy. It's the kind of pieces you grab over and over because they work every time.

• 2:08Dax Shepard?

  The 100% Mongolian cashmere. Sweaters for me are it. When I look at Steve McQueen, this man owned a couple of sweaters. He wore all the time and he looks iconic.

• 2:17Speaker 01

  It's a uniform.

• 2:19Dax Shepard?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  And Quince isn't just about the clothes. They have hotel quality bedding, cookware, bath essentials, thoughtfully designed furniture. You can really go there and outfit your entire apartment or house. So if you're in need of any kind of fall refresh at home too, same quality, same attention to detail for every corner of your life.

• 2:37Dax Shepard?

  Find your next fall favorites at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Armchair Expert. It's the best way to support the show. We get support from AG1. Fall is that time when your body and mind are getting ready for the winter. You're settling in, bracing for the cold. Your body's already running a deficit from the shorter days and broken sleep patterns. You don't want a nutrient deficit stacked on top of that too.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  That's where your AG1 routine earns its spot. It's not fixing your sleep or your alarm time. It's giving your body what it needs. So the dark mornings don't tank you before you even start. One scoop cold water every morning before anything else.

• 3:25Dax Shepard?

  AG1 Next Gen has 75 plus ingredients, vitamins, minerals, pre and probiotics, superfoods, backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials. Key nutrient levels improved with three months of consistent use.

• 3:39Speaker 01

  That's the part people miss. It's not a one day fix. It's what happens when you stay consistent.

• 3:43Dax Shepard?

  It's an easy everyday thing. I've added it to my morning routine and I'm going to tell you, I actually love the taste of it. It's like Pavlovian. I drink it and I know I'm going to get that little vitamin buzz.

• 3:54Speaker 01

  Well, that's also the thing. When you do it first thing in the morning, you already feel kind of self-esteem because you're like, I already did something good for myself.

• 4:01Dax Shepard?

  Yes. Go to drinkag1.com/dax and for a limited time, get a free immunity bundle, including a bottle of omega three fish oil and a bottle of vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription order of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's drinkag1.com/dax. And after checkout, be sure to let them know that Armchair Expert sent you.

• 4:43Dax Shepard?

  I gotta tell you about one second funny story that just overlapped with you.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:47Dax Shepard?

  So, I see on the schedule, like, a few weeks out, this is a couple of 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, 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, "Oh my god."

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was like, I didn't realize it was the actor. I thought it was an expert separately, just with the same name.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  Are you sure?

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I didn't know you also did this!

• 5:37Speaker 02

  That makes me so happy!

• 5:39Speaker 01

  I was like, oh!

• 5:40Speaker 02

  That was like the biggest compliment I had, he's like...

• 5:42Dax Shepard?

  And they're like, "Really? Like, your book? I didn't know you were an actor." Yeah, yeah!

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I didn't know you were an expert!

• 5:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah! Oh, 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.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  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 in.

• 6:08Dax Shepard?

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

• 6:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, you wanna show up.

• 6:13Dax Shepard?

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

• 6:15Speaker 02

  Well, you should try Teen Idol, you know, it's a different...

• 6:18Dax Shepard?

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

• 6:21Speaker 02

  They do.

• 6:22Dax Shepard?

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

• 6:24Speaker 01

  Dulcet tone.

• 6:25Speaker 02

  Dulcet tone.

• 6:26Dax Shepard?

  Nice, that's the word I couldn't remember. Feel free to... Oh, look at this, don't worry. That is mechanical, he's a man.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 6:33Speaker 02

  I don't have the longest legs for this couch, but that's okay.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  It's not a great couch, okay?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  This is a great couch. I am just too short for couches today. All's couches are too deep for me.

• 6:43Dax Shepard?

  They really did go deep.

• 6:45Speaker 02

  They're fine for you, you can do this.

• 6:46Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, there was a paradigm shift about eighteen years ago in couches and they got deeper and deeper.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:51Dax Shepard?

  These are not the couches we grew up sitting on.

• 6:52Speaker 02

  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.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:00Dax Shepard?

  Feel free to take that pillow to Austin.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  I'm gonna do that.

• 7:03Dax Shepard?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes.

• 7:05Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 7:05Speaker 01

  I want you to be comfortable.

• 7:07Dax Shepard?

  We're gonna be here for four hours.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Oh, it's gonna go deep.

• 7:11Dax Shepard?

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

• 7:15Speaker 02

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

• 7:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, did you as a little kid?

• 7:18Speaker 02

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

• 7:21Dax Shepard?

  No, the concrete's seventy-five years old and it's a grass hill.

• 7:25Speaker 02

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

• 7:36Dax Shepard?

  When you think of weird, that doesn't, be it weird, it's not the same brand weird.

• 7:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 7:42Dax Shepard?

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

• 7:53Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:00Dax Shepard?

  Generally during elections, people like to talk about it.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Indeed.

• 8:04Dax Shepard?

  There's been screenings at times, but you're multi-generation, Austin, right? Your grandfather.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  He does research.

• 8:10Dax Shepard?

  No more Brian Cox anymore.

• 8:12Dax Shepard?

  He thought that you'd see.

• 8:13Speaker 02

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

• 8:17Dax Shepard?

  And he passed the nineteen sixty-seven Public Broadcast Act, whatever the hell it's called.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 8:41Dax Shepard?

  You gotta toe the line a little bit.

• 8:42Speaker 02

  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 said you had to behave. And I had just come from summer camp.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  Where, of course, you like curse a blue streak. No, it was language. It was curse a blue streak. And I can't remember what I did. I dropped an F-bomb or I did something totally inappropriate.

• 9:01Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  And it was a record scratch and I tried to retreat into the chair.

• 9:05Dax Shepard?

  Was that your father's father?

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Father's father, yeah.

• 9:08Dax Shepard?

  And then he became an attorney, your father?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, my father's an attorney.

• 9:11Dax Shepard?

  What type of law does he practice?

• 9:12Speaker 02

  He practices, uh.

• 9:15Dax Shepard?

  Personal injury?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 9:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay. I say all this because it makes a lot more sense your turn into this.

• 9:39Speaker 02

  Right.

• 9:39Dax Shepard?

  Arena. You're kind of third generation civically minded. The grandfather's getting legislation passed. Your father's working in that capacity.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:48Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:54Dax Shepard?

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

• 9:58Speaker 02

  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 gonna be this. I guess he's probably gonna be a Hall of Fame quarterback at some point. I remember the first day I went to the park to like throw.

• 10:10Dax Shepard?

  He immediately was, oh, he's great.

• 10:12Speaker 02

  Just like.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're just born with that.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  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".

• 10:21Dax Shepard?

  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 them out on accident at the legs and I was like, oh my God, what if I had fucked up his? His whole game in a couple of days, but he was such a rad dude.

• 10:39Speaker 02

  The one he was playing in?

• 10:40Dax Shepard?

  Yes!

• 10:41Speaker 02

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

• 10:46Dax Shepard?

  Saint Anthony?

• 10:47Speaker 02

  Saint Andrews, yeah. Didn't get it exactly right.

• 10:50Dax Shepard?

  Piscopo.

• 10:51Speaker 02

  The fact that you're not reading off of something and you've learned this is really, I'm 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 helmets.

• 11:16Dax Shepard?

  Well, thank God now.

• 11:17Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:29Dax Shepard?

  Westlake's the Beverly Hills of Austin.

• 11:31Speaker 02

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

• 11:36Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 11:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 11:47Dax Shepard?

  And height's important in your quarterback. You want to be able to see over everything.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  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?

• 11:57Dax Shepard?

  Spooky.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  Spooky.

• 11:58Dax Shepard?

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

• 12:02Speaker 02

  Wide receiver, strong safety, yeah.

• 12:04Dax Shepard?

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

• 12:08Speaker 01

  Virginia!

• 12:09Dax Shepard?

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

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Let's start that, let's start that college.

• 12:15Dax Shepard?

  There would be a lot of applicants nowadays, I think. Yeah, you went there and again, now you're a third generation going there, right?

• 12:22Speaker 02

  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.

• 12:42Dax Shepard?

  Were you having the Friday Night's Life experience that I watched on TV? Like you're on the football team in Texas. The girls love you.

• 12:49Speaker 02

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

• 12:51Dax Shepard?

  Riggins level.

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Right. None of us looked like.

• 12:54Dax Shepard?

  Tim Riggins.

• 12:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:05Dax Shepard?

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

• 13:08Speaker 02

  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.

• 13:53Dax Shepard?

  But University of Virginia is relevant in this because you got a degree in economics. And I guess my curiosity is.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Why?

• 13:59Dax Shepard?

  What was the game plan? Yeah, yeah.

• 14:01Speaker 02

  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 is a lawyer. It was talked about. So I was like, I'll just study things I'm interested in that could plausibly prepare me for law school.

• 14:12Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so potentially you were in a law school.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  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.

• 14:20Dax Shepard?

  Am I right to guess? And we've interviewed a lot of economists. Monica and I were just talking about this two 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.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:51Dax Shepard?

  But I can't imagine when you entered it, you knew that yet. You were maybe like, I'm good at math.

• 14:56Speaker 02

  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 and group settings and societal settings. It is really in some sense is the study of human behavior.

• 15:17Dax Shepard?

  Darwinism in a sense is market forces. Like, everything's a market.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  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 a, what's the utility? It's like, well, it's whatever they did, that's rational. It's sort of like a.

• 15:46Dax Shepard?

  Non falsifiable.

• 15:48Speaker 02

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

• 15:53Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 15:53Speaker 02

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

• 15:56Dax Shepard?

  And against our self-interests.

• 15:57Speaker 02

  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 by that, which has led me to this weird place where I'm now.

• 16:12Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:28Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 16:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 16:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, predict.

• 16:46Speaker 02

  But the unfortunate reality, in my opinion, and 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.

• 16:59Dax Shepard?

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

• 17:03Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 17:04Dax Shepard?

  And that leads you to believe that, okay, so now we know what led people to 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.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Exactly, which maybe perhaps brings us to crypto. Cause it's like, 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?

• 17:33Dax Shepard?

  Only time's gonna tell.

• 17:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 17:35Dax Shepard?

  Even this debate, so I happen to be on your side.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  It's okay if you're not like.

• 17:38Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, some of my best friends right now, we debate this all the time.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  It's a very guy thing.

• 17:43Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 18:01Speaker 02

  Good point.

• 18:01Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Love it.

• 18:10Dax Shepard?

  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 gonna be the first interview you ever do where I'm not gonna say a certain word. And I've watched your doc and so that's gonna be an offering. So suffice to say you had a really successful acting career.

• 18:30Speaker 02

  Oh, I see what you're saying. Is it one word or two words that you're not, or three words?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Well, now everyone needs to know what the words are.

• 18:36Dax Shepard?

  You know what the word is. I refuse to do it.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  He was on a show, let's just say this.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  I know what show he was on.

• 18:46Dax Shepard?

  He was on a show for four years, then he was on a show for five years. That was hugely popular. Then he's on another show for five years that was hugely popular. And as he's gone to Congress and to CNBC.

• 18:56Speaker 02

  I'm always running out.

• 18:57Dax Shepard?

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

• 19:01Speaker 01

  That's funny.

• 19:02Dax Shepard?

  So anyways, I'm like, I'll be the first person to not say this word to him. I'll utter these three 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.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Of course.

• 19:14Dax Shepard?

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

• 19:20Speaker 02

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

• 19:26Dax Shepard?

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

• 19:33Speaker 01

  The movie?

• 19:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  I love that movie.

• 19:36Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 19:37Speaker 02

  Amy Adams' husband with the mustache.

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Oh my god. 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.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  So I had done the first season of The O.C.

• 19:48Dax Shepard?

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

• 19:49Speaker 02

  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.

• 19:58Dax Shepard?

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

• 20:03Speaker 02

  2002 and got it in 3.

• 20:05Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, fuck you.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, totally. It happened really quick. It was a year and seven days after I landed in L.A. 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.

• 20:22Dax Shepard?

  In Silicon Valley, ironically.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Right.

• 20:24Dax Shepard?

  Sam Bankman-Fried, yeah.

• 20:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 20:26Dax Shepard?

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

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Uh huh, uh huh. But you also have severe imposter syndrome.

• 20:31Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 20:32Speaker 02

  Because I spent a lot of time in therapy talking about the show that won't be named. So I'll just, you know, 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...

• 21:01Dax Shepard?

  Fraudulence.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  It could go away like that?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:04Speaker 02

  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. I maybe spent three days on the 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.

• 21:27Dax Shepard?

  Sure, sure.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  I was just so terrified that I was like, I'm just gonna stay in this.

• 21:29Dax Shepard?

  I barely have my hands on it, so I can't leave it for any second.

• 21:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. We rehearsed the 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...

• 21:44Dax Shepard?

  Waiting for you to move over.

• 21:46Speaker 02

  I had never had a stand-in.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:48Speaker 02

  As a guest star, a co-star, you do your own stand-in.

• 21:51Dax Shepard?

  You do the standing, yeah.

• 21:52Speaker 02

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

• 21:58Speaker 01

  Oh, that's funny.

• 22:00Speaker 02

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

• 22:01Dax Shepard?

  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 she's got a cigarette so dead.

• 22:14Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we were trying to find the hate in this 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.

• 22:27Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 22:28Speaker 02

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

• 22:36Dax Shepard?

  That's a lot of foresightedness.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Also fear too, of course, like double down on it. But then I read this script, it was 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 and from the South, I mean, Texas is sort of Southwest, but it has a lot of overlap. My parents are both from the South.

• 22:54Dax Shepard?

  You've gone to school in Virginia.

• 22:55Speaker 02

  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.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  So I did.

• 23:10Dax Shepard?

  Really quick, not to shine the light on her so much, but I am watching that and that is her breakout.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 23:15Dax Shepard?

  That's her kind of introduction to the world.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  Academy Award nominee.

• 23:18Dax Shepard?

  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 there?

• 23:33Speaker 02

  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, it was like night and day.

• 23:50Dax Shepard?

  It was like playing with Drew Brees.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 23:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  And to the point where you're like, oh crap, he's throwing the ball at me fast. You know what I mean?

• 23:56Dax Shepard?

  Oh, fuck yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  Like, at least get your hands up so it doesn't hit you in the face because it's coming. And it's very sobering when in the edit, it's like, oh, it's just them.

• 24:03Dax Shepard?

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

• 24:07Speaker 02

  See me deliver the line. See them reacting to me deliver the line.

• 24:11Dax Shepard?

  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 three, you direct an episode.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 24:20Dax Shepard?

  And then season four, this is even better. You write an episode. It's fucking great. Every actor wants to direct. They're like the boss.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 24:27Dax Shepard?

  No one's offering to write.

• 24:28Speaker 02

  And I came from a family of writers. My mom's a poet. My uncle, Robert Shankin, is a playwright and a screenwriter.

• 24:34Dax Shepard?

  Hold your prize winner.

• 24:35Speaker 02

  Hold your 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, you try it.

• 25:02Dax Shepard?

  It was bad for me. I spec wrote an episode of Parenthood. I'm like, I'm gonna write an episode of this show. I've already sold screenplays. I'm already like a writer. 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 what the full arc of everyone.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 25:29Dax Shepard?

  I don't know that it came across in the way that I was intending to, perhaps.

• 25:34Speaker 02

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

• 25:39Dax Shepard?

  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 episodes into this?

• 25:49Speaker 02

  Well, if it helps at all, I feel like I sort of had the opposite experience where you're assigned the episode that you're gonna write because the season's already broken down. You've been in the room at least a A little bit. I do remember doing a pass and like, there was a lot of red.

• 26:02Dax Shepard?

  There was a lot of suggestions.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, no suggestion 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.

• 26:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  A lot of stuff where I was like, okay, he needs to go up and then it goes down and then.

• 26:18Dax Shepard?

  It's very technical.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:28Dax Shepard?

  When you leave that show though, I think you obviously you have an intention to do more directing and maybe writing.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:33Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so I guess now I want to know, how do you get to the point where you're gonna write Easy Money and then also direct The Doc? What's the order of events?

• 26:40Speaker 02

  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.

• 26:51Dax Shepard?

  Got shut down immediately.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  So it didn't actually, it actually was a limited run that closed on its own.

• 26:57Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  March 2nd of 2020.

• 27:00Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 27:00Speaker 02

  I had gotten a pilot. I was like about to go shoot this pilot and then next week, New York shut down.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay. I was wondering, because it got nominated for a Tony.

• 27:09Speaker 01

  What play was it?

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Grand Horizons, written by Bess Wool, who I had known for like 20 years. We'd done summer stock theater together. It was a really cool.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  That is cool.

• 27:18Speaker 02

  Moment. But yeah, then Ben McHats, I don't know about you, but I was freaking out.

• 27:22Dax Shepard?

  Well, you were in New York too, right?

• 27:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 27:30Dax Shepard?

  Did you have new babies yet or not?

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, we did. Young kids. We didn't have our third kid yet, but we had our first two.

• 27:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's a lot.

• 27:35Speaker 02

  It's a lot. So we ended up renting a place in western Connecticut, beautiful area, 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 like catching frogs every day. And my second kid was singing "The Sun Will Come Out Tomorrow."

• 27:54Speaker 01

  Annie.

• 27:54Dax Shepard?

  On repeat.

• 27:55Speaker 02

  On repeat.

• 27:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 27:56Speaker 02

  At that moment, tears. Endless tears, right? Because you're feeling it that moment.

• 28:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Is it? You know, I really hope it comes out tomorrow.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  It's ominous.

• 28:05Speaker 02

  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 gotta buy stock in this company. This like obscure company that I had never heard of.

• 28:35Dax Shepard?

  He had found out from a dude at a wedding.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  From dude at a wedding.

• 28:37Dax Shepard?

  He was always the best source.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  It's always that way, yeah.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  In retrospect, it's comically stupid. But he's like, they've produced synthetic blood. They're gonna 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 grand 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.

• 28:59Dax Shepard?

  Turns out synthetic blood's pretty hard.

• 29:02Speaker 02

  Pretty difficult to have.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  It wasn't what's-her-name.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Theranos.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  Theranos, it sounds like that.

• 29:07Speaker 02

  Like a precursor to that, right? So anyway, Dave came back to me in 2020. He's like, dude, you gotta bet Bitcoin.

• 29:12Dax Shepard?

  He's horny for Bitcoin.

• 29:13Speaker 02

  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 gonna be hard for a lot of people. They're not gonna 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 nose up really, really fast.

• 29:35Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  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.

• 29:48Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they're getting like $2,000 checks or whatever.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  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 gonna buy Bitcoin. I'm like, Dave, I'm not gonna do that. But what is it? And he's like, it's a cryptocurrency.

• 30:05Dax Shepard?

  This is in the doc. How was that recorded or was that reenacted?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  The movie is called Everyone is Lying for Money.

• 30:09Dax Shepard?

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 30:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 30:16Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, there's a docu-drama element that you're gonna have to tell a story.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:20Dax Shepard?

  A personal story, not just a story of cryptocurrency.

• 30:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. So we did. We recreated it.

• 30:23Dax Shepard?

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

• 30:25Speaker 02

  Uh, no, not that smart. I asked Dave, I'm like, what is it? I'm not that tech savvy. I'm sure I'd heard the word cryptocurrency, but I had never spent two 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 gonna go up and then I'm gonna sell it. So I'm like, it's an investment then. And he's like, well, it's kind of both. I'm like, hmm, not sure.

• 30:57Dax Shepard?

  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 mark, right?

• 31:05Speaker 02

  Exactly. You can trade currencies, of course.

• 31:07Dax Shepard?

  You can't just buy a currency and the currency goes through the roof because that's just inflation.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 31:11Dax Shepard?

  You're holding something that has the exact same value, even though the numbers went up.

• 31:14Speaker 02

  And if the inflation was as steep as it is in crypto.

• 31:17Dax Shepard?

  It'd be World War III.

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it would be insane, right? It would be the apocalypse.

• 31:22Dax Shepard?

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare. We are supported by Allstate. Checking Allstate first could save you hundreds on car insurance. Not checking what the warning light means before pulling out of your driveway. You absolutely convinced yourself it was probably just a sensor thing right up until you were standing on the side of the road waiting for a tow. Yeah, checking first is the right move. So check Allstate first for an auto quote. It could save you hundreds. And for fast, reliable help when you need it, add an Allstate roadside plan today. You're in good hands with Allstate. Potential savings vary. Insurance and roadside assistance plans are subject to terms, conditions, and availability. Insurance provided by Allstate North America Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois.

• 32:07Dax Shepard?

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• 32:50Dax Shepard?

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• 33:25Dax Shepard?

  This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. We've talked before about Rob building our website on Squarespace, and I bring it up again because it's a perfect example of what they do well. Rob had all the pieces, the content, the vision, the ideas, but he needed something to actually take all that and make it public facing. And Squarespace was that bridge. Maybe you're in the same spot. You've been developing something, a business, a skill set, a body of work, and it's been private. It's been yours, but at some point, you're ready to put it out there. And that transition from private to public can feel like a huge leap. Squarespace makes it feel like a step. Beautiful templates, built-in SEO, email campaigns, scheduling, analytics, everything you need to go from "I've been working on this" to "Here it is, come find me."

• 34:11Dax Shepard?

  All in one place, no code, no stitching together a bunch of different tools. So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be it. Head to Squarespace.com/dax for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code DAX to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. This episode is supported by Helix.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Dax, is there anything better than crawling into a perfect bed on a cold fall night? Candlelit, hoodie on, maybe even some rain outside. The dream.

• 34:45Dax Shepard?

  That's the dream. You just described one of my ideal fall nights.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  I know. And thanks to Helix, my bed actually lives up to the vibe. All I had to do was take the Helix Sleep Quiz and within two minutes, they matched me to a mattress built for exactly how I sleep. I have a midnight mattress. It also has cooling technology, which I really.

• 35:05Dax Shepard?

  Increasingly so.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  I need it. I have to have it. And I heard that you're supposed to sleep at a cold temp. For optimal sleep. It's very, very helpful.

• 35:16Dax Shepard?

  She is not wrong. I have one too, and it's been such a game changer for sleep. And I love that they make it so easy. Free shipping right to your door. And what they're happy with Helix Guarantee, you'll get a full 365 nights to try it. A whole year to live in that cozy. They've got over 20 mattress models, so no matter how you sleep, they've got one for you.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  And it's not just us saying it. Helix has been named the most awarded mattress brand by Forbes, Wired, and more. You gotta try it for yourself.

• 35:43Dax Shepard?

  Go to helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. That's helixsleep.com/armchair for 20% off site wide. Helixsleep.com/armchair.

• 36:02Speaker 02

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

• 36:05Dax Shepard?

  Well, I think what would be helpful too is to lay out the history that kind of leads. Cause 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 skeptic? You've put a lot of energy into this.

• 36:43Speaker 02

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

• 36:53Dax Shepard?

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

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not always good when two meet. 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 gonna do this right now.

• 37:07Dax Shepard?

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

• 37:10Speaker 02

  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 ten hours a day reading economic history, but also studying the crypto markets, but also following the true crime of it all.

• 37:27Dax Shepard?

  There's no competing project.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  There's no competing project.

• 37:30Speaker 01

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

• 37:32Speaker 02

  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's 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. It was 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. They'd 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, the 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.

• 38:14Dax Shepard?

  Or used.

• 38:15Speaker 02

  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 wanna talk trash about anyone specific person.

• 38:23Dax Shepard?

  Almost everyone that got ensnared in it, I liked.

• 38:25Speaker 02

  Totally. And I don't wanna 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 low transaction fee, they're making money hand over fist, they got a ton of money. And they wanna keep marketing it. And so I- Just imagined a scenario where insert crypto exchange, they go, they have a hundred million dollar marketing budget. And they're going to the three agencies that are left or whatever it is. And they're like, hey.

• 39:01Dax Shepard?

  We have ten million bucks.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Of a certain caliber actor, we will pay them ten million dollars.

• 39:05Dax Shepard?

  For a one day shoot.

• 39:06Speaker 02

  So I get it.

• 39:07Dax Shepard?

  It's perfect confluence of.

• 39:08Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 39:09Dax Shepard?

  Opportunity.

• 39:10Speaker 02

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

• 39:14Dax Shepard?

  You call out your wife, she's in a commercial.

• 39:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, for a Marant, 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 to the audience and people trust them. And if it sort of helps you separate your product, you know, there's a lot of different hairsprays you could have, but this one has Miranda Baccarat in it. So, you know, buy it. It's totally legitimate and fine, but this was a financial product. This was an investment of some kind in something.

• 39:36Dax Shepard?

  I didn't know this until the doc. So as you point out in the doc, it is illegal to give financial advice.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 39:48Dax Shepard?

  You're telling your buddy about stocks.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't 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 showed 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.

• 40:30Speaker 02

  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?

• 40:44Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  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, but also even for the celebrities themselves.

• 40:55Dax Shepard?

  Also, look, 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.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  Oh, definitely.

• 41:17Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 02

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

• 41:24Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you got it right there.

• 41:26Speaker 02

  That's what they're there for.

• 41:27Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 41:28Speaker 02

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

• 41:31Dax Shepard?

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

• 41:33Speaker 02

  Exactly. No, I love agents all good.

• 41:34Dax Shepard?

  I think we should do five 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 Cornelius Vanderbilt or any of these, banks were failing. Every couple of 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 a hundred and some years. Until finally, again, this ugly word, regulation. Regulations stopped that pandemic of bank collapses, which were happening all the time in like dominoes.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:53Speaker 02

  And once they had your money and you had to 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.

• 43:01Dax Shepard?

  And then also just what is the primary concept of a bank? Well, you're going to deposit your money and I'm going to get, let's say I have a hundred million dollars of people's money they've deposited. And now I'm going to make loans. Loans with that money that you've entrusted me with, then I'm gonna charge a percentage on that. And that's how I'm gonna 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 wanna withdraw their money. So this is where regulations come in. And then, yes, the central bank helps standardize all this stuff.

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 43:31Dax Shepard?

  The federal bank. So that takes us up to oh eight. And it's pretty darn stable as far as world banking goes. The US has done a good job.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, since the Great Depression, cause that's where securities laws come from. Cause there really weren't securities laws at the federal level prior to the nineteen thirties. 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 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 are 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. Cause in the twenties, you could do anything. You could corner the market.

• 44:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, well insider trading wasn't even illegal.

• 44:15Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't legal.

• 44:16Dax Shepard?

  So oh eight, we get a new kind of version of it, right? So in oh eight, it's all 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 oh eight meltdown. I think the total of those toxic mortgages really amounted to like sixty eight billion dollars or something. But what was more troubling and what caused the collapse is on top of the sixty eight billion dollars, they built products that were anchored in those products that amounted to one point trillion dollars.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 44:53Dax Shepard?

  So we had these things, credit default swaps. So I don't own this stock, but I can insure it. So I'm gonna insure Lehman Brothers. Say I have ten million dollars of value in there. I'm gonna pay this little fee to ensure that in case it collapses, I'll get paid out ten million dollars 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. 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.

• 45:30Dax Shepard?

  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 have the loan on the house.

• 45:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:49Dax Shepard?

  And their credit got fucked and they got their house repossessed and the government didn't come and bail them out.

• 45:54Speaker 02

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

• 45:57Dax Shepard?

  And people got huge bonuses in the same year.

• 45:59Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 46:00Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  It's essential because in October of 2008, this thing called the Bitcoin White Paper is released on the Cryptography Mailing List. The small list of cryptographers that communicate with each other. And the White Paper is just lays out the sort of intellectual foundation of Bitcoin. Both the cryptography, but also the goals. What are we trying to do here?

• 46:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  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?

• 46:38Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 02

  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?

• 46:45Dax Shepard?

  And it's built on this new technology blockchain.

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Well, that's what's interesting is it's new-ish, but it's not really that new. Like blockchain goes back to 1991. There were these guys, we're going to get real dorky here. We can do this, right?

• 46:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 46:58Speaker 02

  So blockchain, I would say, started with Stuart Haber and Scott Stornetta at Bell Labs, building off the work of cryptographers like David Chom, 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.

• 47:22Dax Shepard?

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

• 47:25Speaker 02

  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 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 had 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.

• 47:48Dax Shepard?

  Cryptographers?

• 47:49Speaker 02

  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 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 two pizzas with 10,000 Bitcoin.

• 48:14Dax Shepard?

  Now it's worth nine billion dollars.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  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 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 synonymous. 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 whole record of every transaction they've ever made potentially. But it is synonymous and there's also other ways of obscuring it.

• 48:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I think we should attempt to make a really good faith argument for all the appeal of it when it first presented itself.

• 49:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:03Dax Shepard?

  And that was one of them. It was pitched as completely anonymous.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  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?

• 49:14Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Every single person raises their hands, right? Right? And we have different reasons. And the second part is Bitcoin fixes this. It's become a meme.

• 49:22Dax Shepard?

  It's a cure all.

• 49:23Speaker 02

  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.

• 49:29Dax Shepard?

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

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Yes, it was. And it did operate that way, but as a black market currency, right? As a currency for drugs. The time was also like marijuana. And so just to be perfectly clear, I love marijuana.

• 49:45Dax Shepard?

  Sure.

• 49:45Speaker 02

  Like I have a medical card. I'm not knocking drugs. You're 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 Soko 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

• 50:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 50:44Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 51:04Dax Shepard?

  This could be a system by which I could do that and no one can see it or be involved in it.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  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 you can send something of value 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.

• 51:34Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  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?

• 51:43Dax Shepard?

  But in premise.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  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.

• 52:10Speaker 01

  We have different values.

• 52:11Speaker 02

  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 of money, right?

• 52:32Dax Shepard?

  It's a GDP of a lot of countries.

• 52:34Speaker 02

  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 liquidity backing these speculative assets. You know, it's an 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 send to Ukraine. Right, it's like global criminal cartels. There's a Southeast Asian system of credit called Hwala, 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 neighboring village and like, hey, mark this down, we have sent this to you. And it's basically the system of trust, which is what money is. Money is this made up thing that is essentially trust.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:27Dax Shepard?

  Government and that someone else will accept it, yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, that it works. And so money does three 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 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 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 10, and then 10 cents. You know, you just can't, if that were to be a currency, it would be unusable.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  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.

• 54:33Dax Shepard?

  It's linked to something real.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Real, right?

• 54:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 54:36Speaker 02

  But 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.

• 54:55Dax Shepard?

  You can't print more gold.

• 54:56Speaker 02

  Exactly. It just crashed.

• 54:57Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 55:06Speaker 02

  It is, and there's a great book called Lords of Finance by Lilaquad 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 gonna 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 critique 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 valuable?

• 55:37Dax Shepard?

  Yes.

• 55:38Speaker 02

  It's not the most scarce mineral. You can't eat it. It's pretty.

• 55:41Dax Shepard?

  And limited.

• 55:42Speaker 02

  Exactly. It is something that has been historically used as value for thousands of years. 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. You know, feathers and different coins, things like that. Okay, now we have to go back to where we were before.

• 56:07Dax Shepard?

  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 gonna do great and they're gonna 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-

• 56:47Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 56:57Speaker 02

  They're producing a good or providing a service.

• 56:59Dax Shepard?

  Yes, they're either growing or shrinking. And so the stock generally reflects that. There's been these anomalies like Enron and 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 gonna determine, its performance is gonna determine the value of that stock.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  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 to run Google's.

• 57:32Dax Shepard?

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

• 57:34Speaker 02

  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.

• 58:12Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  Which is a really fun game until tops out and you're the biggest idiot holding the bag. If it's an investment, but there's no product, really.

• 58:21Dax Shepard?

  Or service.

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Or service.

• 58:22Speaker 01

  I don't even get how it works even in crime. Why would I? I don't get it.

• 58:26Dax Shepard?

  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 is 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.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  You're scary good at this, Dex.

• 58:48Dax Shepard?

  That's exactly right.

• 58:49Speaker 01

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

• 58:56Speaker 02

  Yes, it does have to cash on the other end. Usually, although if you follow that Southeast Asian Hua La example, he could then send it somewhere else and get something else that he wants.

• 59:05Dax Shepard?

  Drugs.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  No, but like at some point, someone's like, I want money.

• 59:08Dax Shepard?

  Oh, well, yeah, yeah, that's the best part.

• 59:10Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 59:11Dax Shepard?

  The thing that it promised to do, it actually doesn't even do.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 59:14Dax Shepard?

  Did you watch that? I think on Netflix it was called like the biggest heist of all time. And it's this very bizarre couple that had successfully stolen what in the current value of Bitcoin is in the like thirty billion dollars.

• 59:25Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 59:26Dax Shepard?

  The problem is they're sitting there with at the time, eight billion dollars 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 eight billion dollars that was completely fucking useless.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 59:43Dax Shepard?

  They were not living like billionaires.

• 59:45Speaker 02

  No.

• 59:45Dax Shepard?

  So it's not even the thing that was promised to be.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, she was like financing the world's shittiest rap videos, right? Wasn't she?

• 59:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:53Dax Shepard?

  She was wild.

• 59:53Speaker 02

  What was the rap name?

• 59:55Speaker 01

  I forget.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Something with a cat, maybe? She was a cat.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Something so weird.

• 59:58Speaker 02

  It was so fantastic.

• 59:59Dax Shepard?

  They were both something else.

• 1:00:00Speaker 02

  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 a dirty bank. It's really this lawless system of like black market money that's circulating all over the globe, right?

• 1:00:16Dax Shepard?

  Corrupt governments, corrupt politicians.

• 1:00:18Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 1:00:19Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  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. I had taken an edible and I was like, oh, I'm going to write a book. There's a lot of people who have had this experience. And I woke up the next morning, I was like, fuck, I don't know how to write a book. Yeah, yeah. You know, I took another edible. I was like, ah, 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 firstly and other places and I just had a good way about him online, anyway. 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.

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  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, OK, let's try it. So we started writing articles. The first one was criticizing celebrities in Slate. And we wrote different articles for different places, like the Washington Post and 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 I R L. 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.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  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 is 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 is like 15% or something. That's like literally the definition of a Ponzi scheme or one of the definitions of a Ponzi scheme. 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.

• 1:02:36Dax Shepard?

  What's his name?

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Alex Mashinsky. He's sitting with these other guys. And then I'm like, well, I gotta do this, right?

• 1:02:41Dax Shepard?

  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 L A.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, the largest Boost Mobile store ever.

• 1:02:50Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Celsius was presenting itself as a bank, even though it said explicitly on their website, they were not a bank.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Very small font.

• 1:02:57Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, give us your money like a bank and we're going to give you a 15% return. Which again, and you point blank asked the guy, so how are you making money?

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  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. I can't do his accent, but he's like, we were about the. I am going to do it.

• 1:03:15Speaker 02

  Apologies to any Ukrainian friends. I'm a big pro Ukrainian.

• 1:03:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we do, we do.

• 1:03:19Speaker 02

  Generally, but this guy was such a character. 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. Ask him, like, how much real money is in crypto? It's like 10, 15%. The rest is speculation.

• 1:03:41Dax Shepard?

  So I think you need to explain that part.

• 1:03:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, that means that basically, because people are doing things like borrow money to bet on 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 one 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 gonna be zeroed out.

• 1:04:25Speaker 02

  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 D-gens, which stands for degenerate gamblers.

• 1:04:38Dax Shepard?

  They're owning it, yeah.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  They're owning it, yeah. Yeah, O is right, too.

• 1:04:42Dax Shepard?

  But I kind of admire it more.

• 1:04:43Speaker 02

  I guess. It's a very male thing, we'll say. I'm a D-gen. You're like, okay.

• 1:04:47Dax Shepard?

  Sounds like NSA a little bit.

• 1:04:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, a little bit.

• 1:04:49Dax Shepard?

  A little adjacent.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Sounds like there might be some crossover.

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  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 investors' 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, don't say that.

• 1:05:13Dax Shepard?

  You're also asking if he's being investigated for any criminal activity, or there's any kind of legal cases.

• 1:05:17Speaker 02

  Legal proceedings.

• 1:05:18Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, and he claims zero. And there were multiple at that time.

• 1:05:21Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:05:30Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 02

  And it got weirder from there, actually.

• 1:05:35Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert if you dare.

• 1:05:41Dax Shepard?

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• 1:07:27Speaker 01

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• 1:08:17Dax Shepard?

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• 1:08:28Dax Shepard?

  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 are someone with two accounts that's trading with themselves.

• 1:08:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:08:59Dax Shepard?

  So they bought a hundred dollars worth of crypto. They buy it for themselves for $200, which they didn't lose any money because they gave themselves the $200. And 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.

• 1:09:14Speaker 02

  I don't know if the percentage.

• 1:09:15Dax Shepard?

  That's his claim.

• 1:09:16Speaker 02

  I'm not making that claim.

• 1:09:17Dax Shepard?

  But just a notion that's even an option to do.

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:09:27Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  Because especially at the time before they collapsed, when you were buying crypto on an exchange like FTX, what you were actually doing is send your money to the Bahamas because that's where FTX is based and banked.

• 1:09:39Dax Shepard?

  And they told you you had X amount of Bitcoin.

• 1:09:41Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:10:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, right, right.

• 1:10:02Speaker 02

  It was like full tilt and ultimate bet and things like that. And Dave was really into this.

• 1:10:06Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 02

  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. It was that guy. But like, I loved it. It was fun. And we'd hang with buddies and drink a beer and take each other's money. But I never messed with online poker. And I remember asking Dave, like, "So you're gambling with real money. Where are you sending the money?" And he was like, "It's the same places." They're based at 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.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Sports betting now too? Is it also those same places?

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Uh, no, those are probably American companies, I would say. I think the difference with sports betting is they can't manipulate the outcome. Well, I mean, I guess the players could.

• 1:10:43Speaker 01

  That's starting to happen.

• 1:10:44Speaker 02

  You're finding out now. Well, that's one of the problems with making this gambling so ubiquitous. It's like, it just compromises everybody, including the leagues, I would say. The leagues are in on it now.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a mess.

• 1:10:54Speaker 02

  It's all sponsored by...

• 1:10:55Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, we have Michael Lewis on to talk about his podcast on this.

• 1:10:58Speaker 02

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:10:58Dax Shepard?

  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 gonna do? Oh, I guess I'm gonna gamble or I'm gonna get rich on crypto." It's filling a void of opportunity.

• 1:11:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, and to give you a sense of like how strong it is in the young men, forty-two percent of men eighteen to twenty-nine have dabbled in crypto, have traded crypto. Forty-two percent, 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. And I never go out for financial advice, but if you're messing around with money 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 ask is like, just imagine you lost whatever you put in, like all of it, instantaneously. Would it affect your life?

• 1:11:50Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:11:50Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:12:01Dax Shepard?

  I'm more mad at the Wall Street dudes who have drank the Kool-Aid, the institutional banks that have drank it.

• 1:12:06Speaker 02

  Me too.

• 1:12:07Dax Shepard?

  You're already this huge institution that's worth all this money and you got it, you know?

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  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 in 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 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 a 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.

• 1:12:55Speaker 02

  BlackRock never even touches the Bitcoin.

• 1:12:56Dax Shepard?

  Also, do you think you know more than? We've had two guests with books on Bankman. 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.

• 1:13:36Speaker 02

  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 sum 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 enough in Vegas, on average, you're losing. Yes.

• 1:14:20Speaker 02

  Because how else do they keep the lights on the casino, right?

• 1:14:23Dax Shepard?

  They build pyramids.

• 1:14:23Speaker 02

  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, six feet under.

• 1:14:51Dax Shepard?

  You won too much, so you lost big time. There's another part, I'll just add 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.

• 1:15:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:15:07Dax Shepard?

  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 and a lot of lonely dudes are in need of that desperately. So that's another sad aspect. It's an identity.

• 1:15:21Speaker 02

  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, a bank for the people or something like that. We do it for the community. That's what Alex Machenzi 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 Machenzi went to jail. He had made tens of millions of dollars off of these people. I asked them now, do you think the Celsius community was like a real thing? They were all like, no.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Oh god.

• 1:16:00Speaker 02

  It was a lie. They still believed in crypto, interestingly enough.

• 1:16:02Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:16:08Speaker 01

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

• 1:16:10Speaker 02

  Well, you can't fake buildings and actual people.

• 1:16:12Dax Shepard?

  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 still obviously a fucking crook.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's used car salesmen 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 dude, but he never did. And all they were doing is doing slickly produced videos, talking about how everyone's gonna 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 kinda dark.

• 1:16:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, just preying on the vulnerable.

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:16:50Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  Exactly. We went to El Salvador. The reason we went to El Salvador, Jacob Silverman and I 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 was gonna say stunt, but it was really, a national experiment in like, can Bitcoin work as money?

• 1:17:15Dax Shepard?

  Almost as their national currency. Looked like that's where it was gonna be heading.

• 1:17:18Speaker 02

  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. It's the money that the two to three 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 Boukale, who now American audiences are familiar with for a different reason, but this guy Boukale 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, five or 10% or something like that.

• 1:18:03Speaker 02

  And we just take a tiny piece, like we take a much smaller percentage to facilitate it, then it's a win-win. Do people win? We win, government raises a little money. So they did this big system.

• 1:18:13Dax Shepard?

  And you got a wacky president in the mix. That's important. You know, charismatic, bizarre.

• 1:18:17Speaker 02

  A little Trumpy, son of a rich guy.

• 1:18:20Dax Shepard?

  Tweeting all the time and saying like not what you would think of as a leader of a country tweets.

• 1:18:24Speaker 02

  Bragging about buying Bitcoin while seated on the toilet.

• 1:18:27Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, like very. Videos of himself looking cool.

• 1:18:30Speaker 02

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

• 1:18:34Dax Shepard?

  That's who you want as your president?

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was very weird. So anyway, they, with much fanfare, they announced that Bitcoin was gonna be currency. They had a system called Chivo. Chivo means cool, which to me is so lame that they named their system.

• 1:18:45Dax Shepard?

  You can't call something cool.

• 1:18:46Speaker 02

  Don't just call something cool. Such a rookie government move. Bad move on a marketing guy. Anyway, they gave everybody like thirty bucks 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 fifty thousand to forty thousand 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.

• 1:19:28Speaker 02

  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 gonna build a Bitcoin city in eastern El Salvador. We're gonna mine Bitcoin from a volcano and we're gonna build a city off of the proceeds. And there was like a model of this golden city, very Gaddafi-esque. And I'm like, okay, I gotta go check it out. So we drove a hundred 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.

• 1:20:11Speaker 02

  So this was not financially feasible, but it was a marketing play. 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 this whole 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. Cause 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 in 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. Lu Kelly controls the judiciary, so there wasn't any real ability to appeal this thing.

• 1:20:57Speaker 02

  And it was just sad.

• 1:20:58Dax Shepard?

  And what's really telling is you're moving around the city and you are trying to buy things actively with Bitcoin.

• 1:21:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Dax Shepard?

  You're going to all these different vendors.

• 1:21:07Speaker 02

  That's the other thing.

• 1:21:08Dax Shepard?

  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 that.

• 1:21:18Speaker 02

  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, every cash dollar. And they're just looking at me like, I'm the stupidest gringo like that ever has walked.

• 1:21:30Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Bitcoin convention.

• 1:21:39Dax Shepard?

  You can't buy anything at the convention with Bitcoin.

• 1:21:42Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:44Dax Shepard?

  And you're supposed to, and then they all know how to work. They got to process it and he's like, how long? He's like 20 minutes. So think of a currency where you gotta wait 20 minutes to get a beer. It's not a currency.

• 1:21:53Speaker 02

  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 not 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 from 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.

• 1:22:25Dax Shepard?

  Want to be the first citizen of?

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  Bitcoin City, this imaginary city, living in a center. Blockhouse 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 of cinder blocks or buy a motorcycle or I don't know. And it was very clear he was never gonna sell this.

• 1:22:47Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it takes on a religious quality to it.

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  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 gonna be a part of the movie. Cause 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 gonna care about El Salvador. I couldn't have found it on a map beforehand. And then Trump sends illegal immigrants or illegal immigrants sends people to that prison.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  True, yeah.

• 1:23:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really wild to watch it now.

• 1:23:22Dax Shepard?

  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, cause he's so nervous and he's so autistic, 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.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  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 gonna bail all these companies out. He was called the JP Morgan 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 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 spent it myself. Yeah. I'm like, bullshit. And then he goes, well, it's not working now, but in the future.

• 1:24:29Dax Shepard?

  And you go, and it doesn't function as a currency?

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:24:32Dax Shepard?

  And he's like, yeah, well, now it doesn't.

• 1:24:34Speaker 02

  It will in the future. Well, one of the interesting things about Bitcoin is that it can't function as a currency because of the technology. So the technology, one reason why it doesn't work so well is it can only handle five to seven 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 have come to 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 payments method? 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.

• 1:25:20Dax Shepard?

  I just want you to hit me with the real world consequences because all we ever hear is the person who bought it at a thousand dollars and 100x. That's the person screaming from the rooftops about it, of course.

• 1:25:32Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 1:25:32Dax Shepard?

  What's the real fallout of it? Or are they like MLMs? Like, what percentage makes money?

• 1:25:37Speaker 02

  So a multi-level marketing scheme, 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% plus 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.

• 1:26:00Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:26:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:26:14Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they love that.

• 1:26:15Speaker 02

  And it's really effective because it's like, yes, of course. But if I'm describing it as a Ponzi scheme and a multi-level marketing scheme and your retort is, well, if you bought in early.

• 1:26:23Dax Shepard?

  If you're at the top of it.

• 1:26:24Speaker 02

  It's like, dude, that's literally how Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing schemes work. That's not a refutation of my argument. That's just a psychological trick, trying to give you FOMO, right? Trying to make you wish that you had bought in.

• 1:26:35Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:26:40Speaker 02

  Right, exactly.

• 1:26:41Dax Shepard?

  Or good for the world.

• 1:26:42Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:26:59Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I feel terrible for that guy in the dock.

• 1:27:00Speaker 02

  Me too, man.

• 1:27:01Dax Shepard?

  Wife's like disappointed in him.

• 1:27:03Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:27:15Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:27:21Speaker 02

  Yes, my worry is what if there's another 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 gonna be bad. Three months later, three banks fail and they're all tied to crypto.

• 1:27:46Dax Shepard?

  And then the US government had to bail them out. And the whole point was to fuck you to the US 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.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:28:01Dax Shepard?

  And so it defeats the entire premise initially pitched. Three banks collapse. 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?

• 1:28:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's more than that, probably, right? I don't know the actual liquidity. So there's sort of that side of it in terms of the speculative stuff, but there's also just these stable coins. 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.

• 1:28:39Dax Shepard?

  Whatever the US dollar is.

• 1:28:41Speaker 02

  Exactly, but it's not backed by the full. And credit of the United States, it's not issued by the government.

• 1:28:45Dax Shepard?

  You can't call the FBI if it disappears.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  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 hundred and fifty-four billion dollars that I'm talking about, most of that of criminal activity last year was stable coins.

• 1:29:07Dax Shepard?

  I want to say for anyone listening who's like, it might sound too technical. The doc, everyone is lying to you for 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.

• 1:29:35Speaker 02

  Who's been on the unnamed show before.

• 1:29:36Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, like what has been the fallout of you going on 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.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  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 places like Russia.

• 1:30:07Dax Shepard?

  Oh.

• 1:30:08Speaker 02

  Which is interesting.

• 1:30:08Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:30:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:30:48Dax Shepard?

  And if I'm a guy that has a hundred million dollars in holding in this quote asset and I can point to a guy who made that asset depreciate.

• 1:30:57Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:30:58Dax Shepard?

  Like a rock.

• 1:30:58Speaker 02

  Although I haven't exactly succeeded in that.

• 1:31:00Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  You know, hopefully 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 is my hope.

• 1:31:11Dax Shepard?

  So you're not too scared? It's a ballsy doc, let's just say that.

• 1:31:14Speaker 02

  Thanks, man.

• 1:31:15Dax Shepard?

  There's any number of docs you could have made and to me this one does seem pretty risk heavy.

• 1:31:20Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:31:41Dax Shepard?

  With status in public from television.

• 1:31:43Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:31:52Speaker 01

  If you feel the need. If you feel the pull, then you should do it.

• 1:31:54Speaker 02

  And I feel like weirdly I'm way qualified for this.

• 1:31:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:31:57Speaker 02

  It's strange.

• 1:31:58Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:58Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:32:04Dax Shepard?

  But also a lot of people I imagine would just be like, why do you care? Right?

• 1:32:08Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:32:09Dax Shepard?

  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 am in a position to say like, hey, man, I have that kind of calling to that.

• 1:32:31Speaker 02

  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 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 their fail all the time, but they do have to adhere to laws and regulations.

• 1:33:04Dax Shepard?

  They can be held accountable.

• 1:33:05Speaker 02

  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 CFDC, the Commodities Future 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, and whether you want to admit it, but I'm on your side.

• 1:33:33Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:33:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:33:56Dax Shepard?

  Right.

• 1:33:57Speaker 02

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

• 1:34:02Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:34:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:34:14Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:34:27Speaker 02

  If you've made it through this interview.

• 1:34:30Dax Shepard?

  We have very smart listeners.

• 1:34:31Speaker 02

  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 Limly Royal, New York, IFC Center, and Almond Drafthouse Brooklyn. And you know, this is a true indie. I financed it.

• 1:34:46Dax Shepard?

  Uh oh.

• 1:34:47Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:34:49Dax Shepard?

  Weren't you an econ major? Did Dave tell you to finance it?

• 1:34:52Speaker 02

  I financed it. This is in my book. I financed it. I financed it partially off of a short bet that I made.

• 1:34:58Dax Shepard?

  Oh, really?

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  I bet that crypto was gonna crash.

• 1:35:00Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 1:35:01Speaker 02

  And I was betting against a bunch of frauds. So this film is partially financed by me putting my money where my mouth is and actually betting. That's in the book.

• 1:35:09Dax Shepard?

  You already have a streamer deal or you'll have a?

• 1:35:11Speaker 02

  No, that's been weird. I don't know. I think we'll get there.

• 1:35:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you will. It's so good.

• 1:35:16Speaker 02

  It's a weird environment, you know what I mean? But I think if people show up at the theater, especially these first couple of weeks.

• 1:35:22Dax Shepard?

  It's gonna get written about a lot.

• 1:35:23Speaker 02

  It draws from an interesting crowd because I feel like. Everyone has heard about crypto. Eighty plus 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 guess I'm stupid. Seems complicated, but scammy. And I made the movie for them to say, it's not you.

• 1:35:40Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:41Speaker 02

  You know what I mean?

• 1:35:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, you're intuition.

• 1:35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, trust yourself. It's not you, it's them.

• 1:35:45Dax Shepard?

  There's no they're there.

• 1:35:46Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:35:52Dax Shepard?

  Easy Money is the book.

• 1:35:54Speaker 02

  Easy Money.

• 1:35:54Dax Shepard?

  New York Times bestseller, so also look into that. Ben, this has been a blast. You're so bright.

• 1:35:59Speaker 02

  So are you, man.

• 1:36:01Dax Shepard?

  Very attractive, isn't it?

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  And I really appreciate that. Didn't reference that show.

• 1:36:09Dax Shepard?

  Hi there, this is Hermium Hermium. If you like that, you're gonna love the fact check with Miss Monica.

• 1:36:17Dax Shepard?

  Bless your heart.

• 1:36:18Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:36:19Dax Shepard?

  Allergies?

• 1:36:20Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 1:36:21Dax Shepard?

  You don't know.

• 1:36:21Speaker 01

  If I'm getting another bug, I might as well just call it a day.

• 1:36:24Dax Shepard?

  What's the name of the new virus?

• 1:36:26Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:28Dax Shepard?

  It sounds gross. I guess all of them sound gross, but hantavirus? It sounds like harness.

• 1:36:33Speaker 01

  Well, I think, I'm sure that's part of it, because it's like rats.

• 1:36:37Dax Shepard?

  Wait, what? Comes from rats?

• 1:36:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:36:39Dax Shepard?

  Were there rats on the ship?

• 1:36:41Speaker 01

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

• 1:36:45Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, they've shut down a couple of institutions here in Beverly Hills. You see, they shut down the Peninsula's restaurant.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  God.

• 1:36:51Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:36:55Speaker 01

  Yes, and it happened at San Vicente Bungalows, too.

• 1:36:59Dax Shepard?

  And Dantana's.

• 1:37:00Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:37:01Dax Shepard?

  When I saw that, I immediately sent my friends who I go to Dantana's with. I'm like, I'd go right now. I'd go tonight.

• 1:37:07Speaker 01

  I want to go now.

• 1:37:08Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:37:12Speaker 01

  Why are they everywhere right now?

• 1:37:14Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

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

• 1:37:23Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:37:26Speaker 01

  Horrifying, but like, there are rats places and...

• 1:37:30Dax Shepard?

  There are rats places?

• 1:37:31Speaker 01

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

• 1:37:36Dax Shepard?

  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, right?

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

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

• 1:37:47Dax Shepard?

  Didn't you have a mouse in your house?

• 1:37:48Speaker 01

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

• 1:37:55Dax Shepard?

  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?

• 1:38:01Speaker 01

  Yep, their tails, their size, actually their poops are different, that's how you can tell.

• 1:38:07Dax Shepard?

  Oh, holy smokes, you just brought back an immediate flashback in my dream last night.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:38:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, I was dealing with so much, like, it was deer poop, it was the pellet kind of poop.

• 1:38:20Speaker 01

  Ew.

• 1:38:20Dax Shepard?

  I picked up some crate and just the 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 happened.

• 1:38:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's weird.

• 1:38:32Dax Shepard?

  I didn't step in poop yesterday.

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  Sometimes there's poop in your yard because dogs.

• 1:38:37Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, there are. Pretty often there's poop.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  Or maybe you read about this hantavirus.

• 1:38:43Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  Ew.

• 1:38:50Dax Shepard?

  Was it deer?

• 1:38:50Speaker 01

  You mean like rabbit ones?

• 1:38:52Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:38:53Speaker 01

  Ew.

• 1:38:54Dax Shepard?

  I realized I had been standing on them, you know?

• 1:38:57Speaker 01

  I don't want to talk about it anymore.

• 1:38:59Dax Shepard?

  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 kind of like that.

• 1:39:08Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:39:09Dax Shepard?

  Counterintuitive things, you know? So I hate coyotes. They eat everyone's pets. They howl like crazy.

• 1:39:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:39:20Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:39:29Speaker 01

  Oh, ew, what is this? Fact check. This fact check is horrible.

• 1:39:34Dax Shepard?

  I hated it. I felt really bad for the coyote and then I was like, they are cute.

• 1:39:40Speaker 01

  Oh, well.

• 1:39:41Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  I, but also Carly just told me a story that. The coyote was hit.

• 1:39:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I bet, or one or same one. What did she say?

• 1:39:58Speaker 01

  No, this was in, she got involved and like it was a story.

• 1:40:01Dax Shepard?

  Did she rescue a coyote?

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  Kind of.

• 1:40:03Dax Shepard?

  Of course she did.

• 1:40:04Speaker 01

  She helped, she helped, but I don't know if it died. I think it died.

• 1:40:07Speaker 04

  It did die.

• 1:40:08Speaker 01

  It did, right?

• 1:40:08Dax Shepard?

  What's the story, Rob?

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  It was like in the middle of the road and they had to stop.

• 1:40:11Dax Shepard?

  Well, I just asked you and you said, I don't know. Right?

• 1:40:15Speaker 01

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

• 1:40:19Speaker 04

  It was in the middle of Los Feliz Boulevard and they had to stop traffic because other, it was dying, it was hit. And then it had crawled into the front lawn area.

• 1:40:29Dax Shepard?

  Of her house.

• 1:40:30Speaker 04

  And then died. And then they wouldn't come get it, so she had to put it in the.

• 1:40:34Speaker 01

  She helped get it out of the road.

• 1:40:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, and then she had to put it in a garbage bin.

• 1:40:37Dax Shepard?

  Oh, I guess I do know, this was a bit ago, this was a few weeks.

• 1:40:39Speaker 01

  Couple of weeks ago, yeah. So it wasn't the same one.

• 1:40:42Dax Shepard?

  Different one.

• 1:40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I do have, I'm worried.

• 1:40:46Dax Shepard?

  About?

• 1:40:46Speaker 01

  Because, you know, sometimes I have magical powers I can't control.

• 1:40:52Dax Shepard?

  I, that's right.

• 1:40:55Speaker 01

  I have talked about it on here, like, how I.

• 1:40:58Dax Shepard?

  Could you give me an example, you have one?

• 1:40:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:41:00Dax Shepard?

  Oh, the dogs in the yard?

• 1:41:01Speaker 01

  No, like, sometimes I have thoughts and then, and then things happen.

• 1:41:07Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:41:08Speaker 01

  And I don't, me, I don't want that to be the case. I just don't have control over my powers yet.

• 1:41:12Dax Shepard?

  I think Drew Barrymore was a baby in a movie. She was like a firestarter. And it wasn't her fault. She just had powers where she could start fires.

• 1:41:18Speaker 01

  She just didn't know.

• 1:41:19Dax Shepard?

  And she's just a baby.

• 1:41:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, like me.

• 1:41:21Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:41:22Dax Shepard?

  Little old me.

• 1:41:23Speaker 01

  So, you know, I tell this whole thing on here about the coyotes and then.

• 1:41:28Dax Shepard?

  Oh, and then two end up dead.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:41:31Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, if I were an investigator, I would certainly be asking you like, hey, where were you the other night?

• 1:41:36Speaker 01

  Well, obviously.

• 1:41:36Dax Shepard?

  Were you on Los Feliz Boulevard?

• 1:41:37Speaker 01

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

• 1:41:40Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:41:46Speaker 01

  No, no, no. I'm still too scared even in my car. I just stay until they run away.

• 1:41:52Dax Shepard?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:41:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, but my, so my body's scared, but my brain is powerful.

• 1:42:00Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:42:11Dax Shepard?

  And now we're talking about two in the matter of a month. CTE?

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Suspicious.

• 1:42:17Dax Shepard?

  Do you think they have CTE? What's going on?

• 1:42:19Speaker 01

  I think.

• 1:42:20Dax Shepard?

  M. Night Shyamalan make a whole movie about this.

• 1:42:23Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:27Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:42:33Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:35Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:42:40Speaker 01

  They are, but they do scare people.

• 1:42:42Dax Shepard?

  They do kill everyone's pets.

• 1:42:43Speaker 01

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

• 1:42:57Dax Shepard?

  I wonder if they could just like, you know, one of the big issues, I think with bear.

• 1:43:03Speaker 01

  I don't want them either.

• 1:43:04Dax Shepard?

  Bears in in the wild is they get they they congregate around trash dumps, you know?

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:43:09Dax Shepard?

  And that's supposed to be real bad for them.

• 1:43:11Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:43:11Dax Shepard?

  Then they get accustomed to being around people. It's like a 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, which I love.

• 1:43:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:30Dax Shepard?

  We also have two ducks that live in the pool now.

• 1:43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have a whole thing going.

• 1:43:33Dax Shepard?

  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 these birds.

• 1:43:41Speaker 01

  I hope you get an owl.

• 1:43:42Dax Shepard?

  We have occasionally an owl that sits on this garage.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:43:46Dax Shepard?

  I love when the owl's here.

• 1:43:48Speaker 01

  That's cool, yeah.

• 1:43:49Dax Shepard?

  Fuck, I love owls.

• 1:43:50Speaker 01

  I love owls too.

• 1:43:51Dax Shepard?

  Do I love them more than? Man, they're great. I don't know how smart they are. They gotta be smart for me to really fall in love with them.

• 1:43:57Speaker 01

  They always have little spectacles on.

• 1:43:58Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:44:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's that's the same.

• 1:44:02Dax Shepard?

  Okay, so what was I saying?

• 1:44:05Speaker 01

  Um, the crow.

• 1:44:06Dax Shepard?

  I know, I remember the crow.

• 1:44:08Speaker 04

  Coyote, funny food.

• 1:44:09Dax Shepard?

  Coyote.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  Oh, no bears.

• 1:44:12Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:44:32Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:44:32Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, previous guest. Um, so I don't know why the coyotes coyotes gotta eat all the ant, all the pets. Like, is there enough leftovers?

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  They're not vegetarians.

• 1:44:43Dax Shepard?

  I guess my point is, should people throw their leftovers in an agreed upon spot?

• 1:44:48Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:44:57Dax Shepard?

  There's always a guilty party when, when, uh, when Carly witnesses something.

• 1:45:00Speaker 01

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

• 1:45:06Dax Shepard?

  Okay. Well, that sounds, that sounds par for the course.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Think that we're not supposed to be doing that, according to Carly.

• 1:45:14Speaker 03

  Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

• 1:45:20Dax Shepard?

  We get support from our sponsor, Lilly. For adults with obesity or with excess weight and weight-related medical problems, it's time to find out about Foundo or for Glee Ron. Foundo is a once daily prescription GLP-1 medicine used with a reduced calorie diet and increased physical activity to help adults with obesity or some adults with overweight who also have weight-related medical problems to lose excess body weight and keep the weight off.

• 1:45:46Speaker 05

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• 1:46:31Speaker 05

  9 milligram, 14.5 milligram, and 17.2 milligram tablets. Learn more at foundo.lily.com or call 1-800-LILY-RX. Now is perfect to talk to your doctor about Foundo.

• 1:46:49Dax Shepard?

  But if we're dumping it, like we're cording off a little area in Griffith Park, and it's just like, hey, when you get carry out 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.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

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

• 1:47:02Dax Shepard?

  No bears, this is for the coyotes.

• 1:47:04Speaker 01

  Well, the bears are gonna come.

• 1:47:06Dax Shepard?

  It's also close to the zoo.

• 1:47:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're gonna break out of the zoo.

• 1:47:10Dax Shepard?

  There's a fucking prison break at the zoo. They go, there's 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 two-week-old hot dog buns that campers threw out. This is premium.

• 1:47:27Speaker 01

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

• 1:47:30Dax Shepard?

  Coming around here, heading south.

• 1:47:32Speaker 01

  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, because trash comes on Thursday to pick up. And when I lived in the apartment, I didn't have to do that. I didn't have my own bins. So I had to always walk around and go throw in the big dumpster, but I didn't deal with getting the dumpster.

• 1:47:51Dax Shepard?

  Then your super would yell at you about not breaking down the boxes.

• 1:47:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I didn't have to deal with getting 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.

• 1:48:29Dax Shepard?

  We got a couple of those outbreaks.

• 1:48:30Speaker 01

  I know, and I like, I can't handle it.

• 1:48:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, it's extreme.

• 1:48:34Speaker 01

  I will just light it all on fire.

• 1:48:36Dax Shepard?

  It's extreme.

• 1:48:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I can't, no, I don't want that to happen to me.

• 1:48:40Dax Shepard?

  Taken over, oh.

• 1:48:43Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:48:46Speaker 01

  Remember there was a Maga, Aren't You Anonymous story that I'm forgetting, but I remember, I now remember the feeling.

• 1:48:51Speaker 04

  It was like in the, in the vent above the oven or something?

• 1:48:55Dax Shepard?

  Oh, yeah, they're cooking, they're cooking. Yep, good, good memory.

• 1:48:59Speaker 01

  Oh, and it fell into the food!

• 1:49:01Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:49:13Speaker 01

  Okay, so are you guys gonna name the crow?

• 1:49:16Dax Shepard?

  Well, before I talk about the crow, I want to talk about the, the monogamous pair of ducks.

• 1:49:22Speaker 01

  Okay, go ahead.

• 1:49:23Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:49:34Speaker 01

  In the hot tub?

• 1:49:35Dax Shepard?

  No, no. Well, sometimes, because it's not hot.

• 1:49:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:49:39Dax Shepard?

  Um, sometimes in the hot tub, but more often in the pool.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 1:49:42Dax Shepard?

  And then, um, then I, 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.

• 1:49:49Speaker 01

  Is he a mallard?

• 1:49:51Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:50:06Speaker 01

  I thought, how come ducks, why do we teach kids that ducks are yellow? You know what I mean?

• 1:50:13Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, like the cartoon version of a duck is always, or the peeps version.

• 1:50:18Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:50:18Dax Shepard?

  Maybe it all stems from peeps.

• 1:50:20Speaker 04

  Well, their babies are yellow.

• 1:50:21Dax Shepard?

  The babies are yellow.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  But are they?

• 1:50:23Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they are. They're golden.

• 1:50:25Speaker 01

  The little chicks?

• 1:50:26Dax Shepard?

  They're golden.

• 1:50:26Speaker 01

  This is a white duck on the internet. This is an American peaking. It's white.

• 1:50:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Okay, but yours is brown.

• 1:50:36Dax Shepard?

  Quack duck, that white one you just showed me. I can hear the quacking.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 1:50:39Dax Shepard?

  Anyways, he's caring for her and looking out for her to the degree, I was like, we're gonna have chicks in the backyard here. Like, this all looks-

• 1:50:46Speaker 01

  But they could be grandpa and grandma. They, she could be in menopause.

• 1:50:49Dax Shepard?

  I don't think that's how their life cycle works, but 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.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  How do you know they're monogamous?

• 1:51:00Dax Shepard?

  Cause ducks are monogamous.

• 1:51:02Speaker 01

  Well, so are people.

• 1:51:03Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, okay. Point taken.

• 1:51:06Speaker 01

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

• 1:51:12Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:51:17Speaker 01

  You will because the side piece is white and pretty.

• 1:51:20Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:51:25Speaker 01

  They're in a poly.

• 1:51:26Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, in a poly situation. But anyways, yes, this, this, this, this crow is, is, I really think it's heading towards friendship.

• 1:51:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:51:36Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:51:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:41Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:51:54Dax Shepard?

  And landing in different spots that he knows are very, uh, 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.

• 1:52:07Speaker 01

  Just email us at armchairexpertbooking.com.

• 1:52:11Dax Shepard?

  Stay on the railing when I go up the stairs and I'll know to let you in and 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. He flew away.

• 1:52:28Speaker 01

  Oh, he didn't want to be photographed.

• 1:52:30Dax Shepard?

  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 to remember, I tried my hardest to become friends. And I was trying to feed, I was putting up food out everywhere. I learned their calls.

• 1:52:44Speaker 01

  That you did, yeah.

• 1:52:45Dax Shepard?

  I was doing everything. And then finally I was like, yeah, they're not gonna be friends with me.

• 1:52:48Speaker 01

  You gave up.

• 1:52:48Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:52:56Speaker 01

  And do you think maybe he's like, um, an outcast?

• 1:53:01Speaker 01

  And so he's like, I'm gonna go explore.

• 1:53:03Dax Shepard?

  Like he's not in a murder.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:53:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  Probably because he prefers to walk.

• 1:53:08Dax Shepard?

  He loves walking, Monica.

• 1:53:10Speaker 01

  And murderers like to fly.

• 1:53:11Dax Shepard?

  This little fellow is walking all over the yard.

• 1:53:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:15Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, so cute.

• 1:53:17Speaker 01

  Oh, my god.

• 1:53:19Dax Shepard?

  What happened?

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  I'm just like, maybe, I'm just like, I'm worried about him and coyotes.

• 1:53:25Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:53:35Speaker 01

  Next to.

• 1:53:36Dax Shepard?

  In between us, on that little stand, or hung right here on the bookshelf.

• 1:53:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:53:42Dax Shepard?

  That would be, people tune in even if they hated us, just to see this crow that.

• 1:53:46Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:53:54Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:53:59Speaker 01

  Right, but we're not. He just came in.

• 1:54:01Dax Shepard?

  I'm just leaving doors open.

• 1:54:03Speaker 01

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

• 1:54:07Dax Shepard?

  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 was just plotting.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Do you think he was trying to attack?

• 1:54:17Dax Shepard?

  No, no, no, no.

• 1:54:18Speaker 01

  No?

• 1:54:18Dax Shepard?

  No, he's not an attacker. He's like a, he's a guy.

• 1:54:21Speaker 01

  You made a lot of.

• 1:54:23Dax Shepard?

  He's just a fun guy.

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:54:25Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, fun crow guy.

• 1:54:27Speaker 01

  I'm just nervous that, like, you made a lot of, you know, it's like, this is your version of the women having the tigers.

• 1:54:35Dax Shepard?

  No, it's the opposite.

• 1:54:36Speaker 01

  No, we don't know.

• 1:54:37Dax Shepard?

  A crow cannot kill me.

• 1:54:39Speaker 01

  It could, like, pluck one of our eyes out or something while we're sleeping.

• 1:54:42Dax Shepard?

  If you were anesthetized with, and you went into a coma with your eyes wide open, perhaps it could do that.

• 1:54:49Speaker 01

  You're the one saying how smart they are. If they're that smart, they can kill.

• 1:54:52Dax Shepard?

  Okay.

• 1:54:53Speaker 01

  Okay? And.

• 1:54:55Dax Shepard?

  And ground.

• 1:54:56Speaker 01

  Now this is an M.I.A. Chama movie. The crows, like, you know, they become your friends, and then 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?

• 1:55:13Dax Shepard?

  Wow.

• 1:55:14Speaker 01

  But they're smart. You're the one who's saying, they're so smart.

• 1:55:17Dax Shepard?

  They would definitely have to use tools, I think.

• 1:55:18Speaker 01

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

• 1:55:22Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, they do.

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:23Dax Shepard?

  They've been seen.

• 1:55:24Speaker 01

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

• 1:55:29Dax Shepard?

  No, I think for, they're gonna need a come along. I don't know if you know what that device is.

• 1:55:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:55:35Dax Shepard?

  It's a steel cable wrapped around a ratcheting device and you can lift engines out with them and, you know.

• 1:55:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:55:42Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, that's what they're gonna need.

• 1:55:44Speaker 01

  All right, well, I don't know, they're smarter than me clearly, so they can figure out how to murder.

• 1:55:49Dax Shepard?

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  And you won't even see it, you know, because you're so blinded by love.

• 1:55:55Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:56:05Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:56:06Dax Shepard?

  Um, this year, so cute. And they are 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.

• 1:56:20Speaker 01

  Oh, no.

• 1:56:20Dax Shepard?

  The fucking, the driveway is covered in shit. All the fence railings covered in shit. The camera to the house was slathered in shit.

• 1:56:28Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:56:29Dax Shepard?

  So I had to get out there with the power washer this weekend. You know I love the power washer.

• 1:56:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, why are you complaining? You love it.

• 1:56:35Dax Shepard?

  I mean, I, I, I hated, what I hated is, it was one of those things I was like, I gotta 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, there's shit all over the trash can.

• 1:56:49Speaker 01

  Ew, yeah.

• 1:56:49Dax Shepard?

  Anyways, I finally got around to doing it. And why I love it is, is very instantly gratifying. You can clean up bird shit quite quick with a power washer.

• 1:56:57Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:57:11Dax Shepard?

  Sounds very Ocean's Eleven.

• 1:57:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. They're doing a heist murder together. And that's kind of fun.

• 1:57:18Dax Shepard?

  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 off the wall. And even those are valuable.

• 1:57:25Speaker 01

  I don't think they want to steal it. I think they're more, um, um.

• 1:57:28Dax Shepard?

  Want to live there?

• 1:57:29Speaker 01

  No, I think they want to kill.

• 1:57:31Dax Shepard?

  Oh, they have a taste for, okay.

• 1:57:33Speaker 01

  They taste for blood.

• 1:57:34Dax Shepard?

  They're homicidal.

• 1:57:34Speaker 01

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

• 1:57:41Dax Shepard?

  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.

• 1:57:49Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 1:57:50Dax Shepard?

  I cannot believe how smart Ben was. I mean, I can believe it. I was with him.

• 1:57:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:57:55Dax Shepard?

  He's so fucking impressive. I definitely felt like I was talking to an expert, period.

• 1:58:00Speaker 01

  He is an expert in this.

• 1:58:01Dax Shepard?

  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 chit chat you could have, that would be smart, would be so fun.

• 1:58:22Speaker 01

  And we know, we have friends of friends who worked with Ben.

• 1:58:28Dax Shepard?

  And clearly like him because they're still doing favors for him.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  They really speak very highly of him.

• 1:58:33Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:34Speaker 01

  So, that's awesome.

• 1:58:35Dax Shepard?

  Straight up good guy.

• 1:58:36Speaker 01

  I know.

• 1:58:37Dax Shepard?

  Lost in Texas. What else would you expect?

• 1:58:39Speaker 01

  That's true. Uh, one of our friends who loved those C was like, did you guys talk about it? And I was like, honestly, no.

• 1:58:45Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, refused to.

• 1:58:46Speaker 01

  Well, it was more just like, that's not, that's not what we're here to talk about.

• 1:58:50Dax Shepard?

  If you saw the doc and you see what he goes through, I couldn't, I just couldn't do it to him.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:58:55Dax Shepard?

  It's every single fucking interview. The guy's been on two other hit shows.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  It's hard. Sometimes that happens.

• 1:59:01Dax Shepard?

  I know.

• 1:59:02Speaker 01

  And I know.

• 1:59:02Dax Shepard?

  But I'm like, I'm not doing that.

• 1:59:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, that makes sense. But, uh.

• 1:59:06Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, people will be mad. But that's okay.

• 1:59:09Speaker 01

  Okay, I want to do some facts. How long did each of his shows run for? Those C, 03 to 07, four seasons, 92 episodes. Whoa, that's a lot for four seasons.

• 1:59:20Dax Shepard?

  That's five seasons, isn't it?

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  It said four seasons.

• 1:59:23Dax Shepard?

  Five, six, seven. Okay.

• 1:59:25Speaker 01

  Southland, 2009 to 2013, five seasons, 43 episodes. Gotham, 2014 to 2019, five seasons, 100 episodes.

• 1:59:35Dax Shepard?

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

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  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 it 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 Heneas made the first real world purchase using Bitcoin, paying 10,000 Bitcoin for two Papa John's pizzas.

• 2:00:21Speaker 01

  That was roughly $41 at the time, but is now worth between, oh my god, 900 million to a billion?

• 2:00:29Dax Shepard?

  Yeah, this is a billion dollar 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 like, I could be a billionaire right now.

• 2:00:42Speaker 01

  But not really.

• 2:00:42Dax Shepard?

  Well, he could cash out right now.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00:50Dax Shepard?

  Well, you can sell it right now for whatever it's at now, 70 or whatever it's at.

• 2:00:55Speaker 01

  That's what I mean, so it does have value in that way.

• 2:00:58Dax Shepard?

  If 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.

• 2:01:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:01:13Dax Shepard?

  This is nothing.

• 2:01:14Speaker 01

  But you can sell it now and make real money.

• 2:01:17Dax Shepard?

  Now you can.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 2:01:20Dax Shepard?

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

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 2:01:47Speaker 01

  Creepy.

• 2:01:48Dax Shepard?

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

• 2:01:51Speaker 01

  Well, he is infinite, I guess.

• 2:01:52Dax Shepard?

  I'm sure he has a lot of it.

• 2:01:54Speaker 01

  Okay, what is the Southeast Asian currency, Owala? Question mark, 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 Hawaladers 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 capital arm held shares in FTX as well as through his investment in crypto lender BlockFi.

• 2:02:31Dax Shepard?

  And he said he would do it again.

• 2:02:32Speaker 01

  Cool. That's that.

• 2:02:35Dax Shepard?

  Those are the facts.

• 2:02:37Speaker 01

  Those be the facts.

• 2:02:38Dax Shepard?

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

• 2:02:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was knowledgeable.

• 2:02:44Dax Shepard?

  I love you.

• 2:02:45Speaker 01

  Love you.