00:00How did you get here? It's just a great question. I have a degree in economics as an undergraduate.
00:05The pandemic hit. The showbiz really wasn't functioning, especially for actors. And so I was
00:09bored out of my mind. And a buddy of mine came to me and he said, I should buy Bitcoin.
00:13It was,
00:13you know, in the news. The celebrities were hawking it. And I love my buddy, but he's given
00:18me terrible financial advice before. As many friends do. As many friends do. And in my 20s,
00:25he'd encouraged me to invest in some random company that had supposedly produced synthetic
00:28blood. This was in Theranos. It was some precursor scam. Anyway, I put money in. He put money in.
00:34We both lost it. He came back to me and said, I should buy Bitcoin. And I'm like, Dave, I
00:37am not
00:38going to buy Bitcoin. What is it? You know? And he did that thing where he's like, it's a cryptocurrency.
00:44And I'm like, so it's money. You can buy stuff with it. Oh, yeah. You know, and I was like,
00:50Dave,
00:51are you sure you know what you're getting into? Anyway, that led me down a rabbit hole.
00:54Somebody with whom you talk is an historian of fraud. And he talks about sort of what goes through
00:58the mind of a fraudster, how a fraud is executed. What did you learn about kind of the way that
01:03those
01:03who are perpetrating frauds, be they financial or otherwise, are thinking about what they're doing
01:06in real time? Yeah, I found that fascinating. This guy, Dan Davis, wrote a book called Lying for
01:11Money, which I highly recommend if you're into true crime and how true crime and financial crime and
01:15how frauds work. And one of the things he told me that I thought was fascinating is that
01:20fraudsters are not like other criminals. They're not, they don't generally commit violent crimes.
01:24And they often start out as legitimate businessmen. And then sometimes they enter into fraud through
01:30a mistake. Sometimes it's intentional. But the lie gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But they have
01:36to conceive of themselves as legitimate businessmen. They're sort of the ultimate method actors,
01:41right? Like they have to believe their own story, which I think explains perhaps why Sam
01:46Beckman-Fried was willing to talk to me on camera, even though in our Twitter profile, it said writing
01:52a book on crypto and fraud. So like, I couldn't understand that. But I think he felt, I think he
01:57still feels that he's a legitimate businessman. You sit down with him in New York. Yeah. I think we
02:02have a clip of that. I had a conversation with Alex Mashensky, Celsius. Yeah. Yep.
02:09But I asked him how much real money is in crypto. And he said 10 to 15%. He said the
02:17rest is
02:18speculation. Thanks. So as of today, I think the number of dollars in crypto have not changed
02:22massively between then and now. One when perhaps they've lessened. They certainly have not increased.
02:28I don't think they've decreased massively though, which I think lines up with some of your thought
02:32that like a lot of this was leverage leaving this system. Well, part of the problem if they haven't
02:36left is that people can't get their money out. Imagine this is a regular regulated bank. Oh,
02:40yeah. This would be a big problem. That would be a big problem. This does not seem like the
02:45decentralized, democratized future of money that we were promised. I think we've seen all the major
02:50carnage in the crypto industry already. Throughout that interview, he's kind of making a claim that
02:55all the fraud, all the bad actors have been felled. Yeah. And that crypto is wide open and a clearer
03:01slate than perhaps we all expected. Right. And then like five months later, he's arrested.
03:05Yeah. I mean, this is the constant, this is a repetitive theme in crypto is no, no, okay.
03:10That was the bad guy. Oh no, actually that was the bad guy. Well, no, this money, you know,
03:15at a certain point, the way I understand it is this, look, there's the retail trading public and
03:19those people are not bad people. They're trying to make some money. Um, I mean, maybe some of them
03:23are, but they represent normal retail investors. Um, and I am not, I am not doing this against them.
03:30I'm trying to protect them from an industry that I don't, I think doesn't care about them.
03:34You know what I mean? I don't, I don't see the crypto companies really doing anything to protect
03:39their customers. In fact, what they're doing is trying to change the rules, get special legislation
03:44so that they aren't treated like banks or securities or, or whatever. And, um, so yeah,
03:51I would say that like, that's my motivation. I find the, the sort of, um, constant deflection of
03:56like, it's just that one bad apple and that one, but it doesn't make any sense. I mean,
04:00there's so much crime in crypto. A crypto company last year estimated that $154 billion
04:07of criminal activity was facilitated via cryptocurrency in 2025 alone. And that's from a crypto company.
04:13So it might be on the low end of the estimation. That is an enormous, staggering amount of criminal
04:18activity. And, and, and, and it's everything from like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil
04:23to the Chinese in exchange for drones they're sending to Ukraine. It's ISIS. It's, it's a lot
04:28of money laundering, right? North Koreans are very involved in it. Um, you know, trying to steal it,
04:31trying to use it, getting around sanctions. Half the hackers, the North Korean hackers,
04:36half of the North Korean nuclear weapons program was funded via the crypto hacking teams.
04:40Why hasn't there been any kind of pushback? Because these people have gone to jail and these scams
04:44have been revealed and there seems to be no consequences. That's a great, that's a great question.
04:47I would, let's see. There's, I would say there's a couple of parts. The first is, so in 2022,
04:51we were on our way in 2023, we're on our way to like some sort of reckoning. Sam was in
04:56jail,
04:56Shang-Peng Zhao, Binance pled guilty to money laundering. Um, a bunch of other people went to jail.
05:01Alex Mashensky, who I interview in the movie is in jail. Um, and then Trump, uh, turned to suddenly
05:11loving cryptocurrency in the summer of spring, summer of 2024, the election, he had called
05:18Bitcoin a scam as recently as 2021. But whether he saw there was money to be made for himself or,
05:24or whether he saw a constituency that he needed to woo young men that might've been as well,
05:30he's all of a sudden love, love crypto. Then people quite frankly, rationally did the calculation
05:36of, well, if he's a, it's a 50, 50 shot of him getting reelected. And if he gets elected,
05:41he can do a lot and has done a lot. I'll talk about that in a second. So they started
05:45betting
05:45on it and the price went up and it went crazy. It was like $120,000 by the time he
05:49was in office.
05:50Um, and now he's done, he's delivered on that. They've disbanded the DOJ, uh, crypto crime, uh,
05:56task force. The sec has been gutted. They passed this bill called the genius act,
06:02which if you know this Congress, and it's called the genius act, it's gotta be stupid. And, uh,
06:08and what it does is allow amongst other things, allow corporations to issue their own money
06:12in the form of stable coins. So literal corporate money is what we're talking about.
06:16I want to ask you lastly, just about what really seems to animate the movie you talked about just
06:20a moment ago. That is people who have done this and lost a ton of money. So Celsius, which built
06:24itself as this kind of anti bank, people put a ton of money into and lost all of it. And
06:29a sobering
06:29moment in the movie is you're talking to many of these folks around the country, maybe around the
06:33world who, um, have lost their fortunes in some cases, and are having to reckon with, with all of
06:37that. I think about that in the context of the conversation you had with Alex Wyshynski, who started
06:41that company, who I think you later described as kind of a carnival barker and seems that way when
06:44you're at a conference, kind of sitting around with him on couches like these, what is it that's
06:49so persuasive about this industry to people that maybe they let their guard down or they don't have
06:53any inhibitions about going into this nascent financial product.
06:57Yeah. I mean, it's it's it's partially get rich quick scheme, which is the oldest scheme in the books.
07:03But to be to be sympathetic, and I am sympathetic to the people that have lost a lot of money.
07:08I think if crypto serves any function, it's to to to redirect us back to the regulated system and the
07:13failures of the regulated
07:14system to convince people that they are to give people a shot at actually getting ahead. You know, I think
07:20the thing that's really
07:21pernicious about it is that, you know, you mentioned the interviews I did with the Celsius victims. I bonded with
07:27by bond with
07:27him at the beginning of the movie. And at the end of the movie, I come back to them and
07:30ask them the same question, which is,
07:31do you still believe in it, having lost all the money? And they all say yes. So amongst the hardcore
07:37group, you're really talking
07:38about I describe the movie as a it's a projection of the hopes and dreams of all of those investors.
07:44And as long as the crypto
07:45industry, as long as the crypto industry will keep selling the story as long as they're buying it. Well, that's
07:51disappointing. Highly accurate.
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