Ben McKenzie (on cryptocurrency)

Summary

---

Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard

Episode: Ben McKenzie (on Cryptocurrency)

Release Date: May 13, 2026
Guests: Ben McKenzie
Hosts: Dax Shepard & Lily Padman

---

Overview

This episode features actor-turned-crypto-critic Ben McKenzie, who discusses his surprising journey from Hollywood stardom to becoming a leading voice against the hype and hazards of cryptocurrency. Drawing on his economics background, investigative reporting, and documentary filmmaking, McKenzie candidly unpacks the origins, promises, and significant pitfalls of the crypto market. The discussion ranges from personal stories of fame and imposter syndrome to systemic financial critique and the widespread consequences of crypto speculation. The episode maintains a conversational, skeptical, and occasionally humorous tone as Dax and Ben dig into the messy truths of financial manias, human behavior, and the modern quest for “easy money.”

---

Key Discussion Topics & Insights

1. Ben McKenzie's Unlikely Path: From Teen Idol to Crypto Critic

[04:12–14:10]

• Roots in Academia: Ben reflects on his upbringing in a civically engaged, academically accomplished family and how this influenced his later interest in economics and social issues.
  • “You’re kind of third generation, civically minded, the grandfathers getting legislation passed. Your father is working in that capacity. That kind of makes sense.” – Dax Shepard [07:47]
• Transition from Fame: Ben reveals his early struggles with imposter syndrome and the strangeness of sudden celebrity.
  • “Imposter syndrome is ubiquitous … it is particularly weird to get fame at an early age because nobody, in my opinion, deserves it. It’s like a thing that happens to you.” – Ben McKenzie [18:45]
• Life Beyond Acting: Details on Ben’s journey into writing, directing, and eventually investigative journalism.

2. Academic Foundations & Skeptical Instincts

[12:06–16:23]

• Economics as the Study of Human Behavior: Ben breaks down the difference between classical economics and behavioral economics, emphasizing the fallacy of purely “rational actors.”
  • “The unfortunate reality … is you can’t [predict behavior]. Just like humans are fallible and irrational, the models are never going to be able to predict that.” – Ben [14:59]
• Connection to Crypto: Ben’s skepticism and deep-diving nature led him to question the legitimacy of the crypto landscape.

3. The Genesis of Ben’s Crypto Investigation

[24:46–34:56]

• Pandemic-Born Curiosity: Tracing Ben’s post-Gotham trajectory, moving from Broadway to quarantine, and the fateful moment his friend Dave pitched him on Bitcoin.
• Initial Red Flags: The inability to use crypto as currency in daily life and the overwhelming sense that average investors were being misled.
  • “If it’s not actually being used as currency … what is it being used for?” – Ben [35:19]

4. Crypto’s Rise: Marketing, Mania, and Misuse

[36:11–44:34]

• Celebrity Endorsement and Danger: Ben unpacks how actors and celebrities (often unwittingly) fueled the speculative mania, and the legal gray area of financial advice.
  • “There’s nothing wrong with celebrities hawking consumer goods ... but this was a financial product. This was an investment of some kind.” – Ben [36:58]
  • “You are not allowed to sell a specific financial product … without disclosing how much do I own? What’s my financial incentive?” – Ben [38:33]
• Crypto as a Financial Wild West: How crypto mirrors the wildcat banking era, historical precedents for financial fraud, and banking regulation’s protective role.

5. Bitcoin’s Ideals vs. Reality

[44:34–56:11]

• Post-2008 Distrust: The Bitcoin white paper emerged as a reaction to the 2008 crisis and the anger at traditional banks.
  • “What the white paper proposes: wouldn’t it be cool if we could avoid these fuckers who have screwed us and just transact directly?” – Ben [44:34]
• Blockchain Explained: Debunking the myth that blockchain was brand new and crypto was truly decentralized.
• Early Use Case: Crime: Notably, Bitcoin’s initial real-world adoption was largely for illegal transactions (Silk Road, tax evasion, money laundering), not mainstream commerce.
  • “The first use case was crime … buying drugs, other things illegal on the Silk Road.” – Ben [46:04]

6. The Speculative Game & “Greater Fool Theory”

[54:46–62:34]

• Investment vs. Utility: Ben draws clear lines between stocks (anchored in business performance) and crypto (anchored in nothing tangible).
  • “You’re investing in the story of it … dangerously close to what we call ‘greater fool theory’.” – Ben [55:23]
• Gambling, Not Currency: The core activity on exchanges is leveraged gambling, not exchange of real currency.
  • “You’d get $125 of poker chips for every $1 you put in … The hardcore crypto people, or a segment, call themselves ‘degens’—degenerate gamblers.” – Ben [62:26]

7. The Community Mirage and Real-World Harms

[67:04–72:46]

• Crypto as Instant Identity: Dax and Ben discuss how crypto provides a sense of belonging for many young men lacking opportunities.
  • “Once you get into Bitcoin, you talk about it all the time … It is a turnkey community and a lot of lonely dudes are in need of that desperately.” – Dax [71:03]
• Ponzi Structure: The multi-level marketing structure ensures that new entrants lose money while early adopters and insiders profit.

8. El Salvador’s Bitcoin Experiment

[72:46–78:44]

• Case Study: The heartbreaking fallout from El Salvador's attempt to implement Bitcoin as legal tender, leading to technical failures, currency crashes, social disruption, and broken promises.
  • “The only person who was living in Bitcoin City was this gringo named Corbin from Illinois who works construction, just moved down there … It was a tangible thing that happened.” – Ben [78:22]

9. Interview with Sam Bankman-Fried and Industry Accountability

[79:19–81:17]

• Direct Confrontation: Ben’s face-to-face with FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried—revealing evasive answers and the indeterminate nature of crypto’s societal benefit.
  • “What does it do that’s good for the world? Remittances.” – Ben on SBF [79:46]
• Systemic Risk: The growing entanglement of crypto with the legitimate banking system and the threat of future market crashes.

10. Personal Stakes & Motivations

[85:29–89:29]

• Backlash and Security Risks: Ben describes the vitriol and hacking attempts he’s faced, but explains why he feels compelled to speak out.
  • “If I can’t, who can? I’m a white, rich, college-educated man with status in public … If I can’t do it, isn’t that setting a terrible example for everybody else?” – Ben [87:16]
• The Predatory Nature of Crypto: Urges listeners to “trust your gut” and recognize that the confusion and skepticism many feel about crypto isn’t a personal failing—it's by design.

11. The Documentary and Book

[90:10–91:51]

• New Work: Ben’s new documentary, Everyone Is Lying to You for Money, and his bestselling book, Easy Money.
• Financed by Betting Against Crypto: Ben partially financed the doc with short bets against the crypto market.
  • “I bet that crypto was going to crash and I was betting against a bunch of frauds. So this film is partially financed by me putting my money where my mouth is.” – Ben [90:55]

---

Notable Quotes

On Crypto’s Value Proposition:

• “If it’s not actually being used as currency, which it wasn’t then, it isn’t now really … Then what is it being used for?” – Ben McKenzie [35:19]

On Celebrity Endorsements:

• “There’s nothing wrong with celebrities hawking consumer goods … but this was a financial product. This was an investment of some kind.” – Ben McKenzie [36:58]

On Crypto’s Purpose:

• “When I say crypto can only be used for speculation, which really is gambling … and crime. When I say crime, I mean that literally.” – Ben McKenzie [49:33]

On the Pyramid Structure:

• “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’ … that’s literally how Ponzi schemes and multi-level marketing schemes work.” – Ben McKenzie [82:11]

On Taking a Stand:

• “If I can’t, who can? I’m a white, rich, college-educated man with status in public from time to time … If I can’t do it, isn’t that setting a terrible example for everybody else?” – Ben McKenzie [87:16]

On the General Public's Instincts:

• “I made the movie for them to say, it's not you. … Trust yourself. It’s not you, it’s them.” – Ben McKenzie [91:37]

---

Timestamps for Important Segments

| Timestamp | Segment/Theme | |------------|------------------------------------------------| | 04:12–14:10| Ben’s background, transition from acting | | 14:50–16:23| Economics, irrationality, and crypto curiosity | | 24:46–34:56| How lockdown led to crypto investigation | | 36:11–44:34| Celebrity hype and financial dangers | | 44:34–46:03| Bitcoin’s history and post-2008 context | | 54:46–62:34| “Greater fool theory” and “degen” culture | | 67:04–72:46| Community, MLM structure, emotional fallout | | 72:46–78:44| El Salvador’s failed Bitcoin experiment | | 79:19–81:17| Interview with Sam Bankman-Fried | | 85:29–89:29| Backlash, personal risk, why whistleblow | | 90:10–91:51| Documentary/book details, betting against crypto|

---

Further Highlights & Context

• The OC and Identity: Dax and Ben joke throughout about refusing to name Ben’s most iconic show, underscoring the showbiz baggage Ben brings into his new identity as a critic and investigator.
• Human Behavior & Ponzi Psychology: The discussion repeatedly returns to how the psychological trickery at the heart of crypto (FOMO, identity, community belonging) mirrors both classic financial bubbles and multi-level marketing scams.
• Sympathy & Social Impact: Both host and guest emphasize concern for ordinary people—especially young men—who get caught up in speculative fervor, as well as the larger social and regulatory risks of intertwining crypto with mainstream finance.

---

Final Takeaway

Ben McKenzie’s journey offers an outsider’s authoritative, accessible, and compassionate critique of crypto—grounded in economics, investigative work, and a moral calling to stand up for those being sold “easy money.” The episode’s core message: trust your skepticism, beware narratives promising quick wealth with no substance, and remember—if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

---

For more, check out:

• Documentary: Everyone Is Lying to You for Money (in theaters)
• Book: Easy Money (NYT Bestseller by Ben McKenzie)

Transcript

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

I am.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

I was confused.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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.

[Lily Padman]

Incredible.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax 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? Very entertaining. Obviously you know I'm from the OC Southland, Gotham. Great dude. So glad we had him. Please enjoy Ben McKenzie. This message is brought to you by Apple Pay. Checking out online Apple Pay makes it simple. Apple Pay is accepted on millions of websites and apps and counting. Just look for the Apple Pay button almost anywhere you do your online shopping. When you tap the Apple Pay button to check out, you don't have to worry about filling out any forms with your shipping address or payment method, or for me, my billing address. Instead, use your pre saved information and checkout in seconds. What a joy. Need to make a change? You can easily review and change your card information and shipping details right in the payment sheet. Once you are ready, just double click the side button, authenticate your purchase with face ID and you're done. Whether you're shopping online for everyday needs or treating yourself, skip the hassle. Shop with Apple Pay terms apply. Thank you to our presenting sponsor. Grubhub. Gold Days is here, which feels like a dangerous time to be ordering food because suddenly everyone in your life is very interested in what you're eating. Grubhub plus members are getting nonstop savings all month long and if you're not a member yet, you can join for just 99 cents a month for six months. That's a 90% discount off of the usual price. Grubhub plus membership auto renews and terms apply. Sign up now in the app or at grubhub. Do. I gotta tell you one second? Funny story that you just overlapped with you. Yeah, so. So I see on the schedule, like a few weeks out, this is a couple years ago, Brian Cox in the schedule. And I'm like, oh, cool. The guy from Succession. I can't wait to talk to him. And I keep saying to Rob and Monica, I'm like, I'm gonna try to get him in the interview to say, fuck off. You watch Succession. So day of, we're eating lunch about like an hour before he gets here. I say it again to them and they're like, why do you keep saying you fuck off? They go, you know, it's not the actor Brian Cox, it's the physicist Brian Cox. And I was like, oh, fuck, I need a lot more research to have a physicist on. Anyways, I just saw Monica in the yard and she goes, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I was like, if it was the actor, I thought it was an expert. Separately, just with the same name.

[Ben McKenzie]

Are you serious? Financial advice. I didn't know you also did this. Oh, my God. When we're recording, that makes me so happy. That was like the biggest compliment I had to like. And they're like, I really like your book. I didn't know you were an actor.

[Lily Padman]

I didn't know you were an expert.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, I'm always trying to snatch another identity away from acting. First it was writing and directing, and then, yeah, anything else? I'm like, yeah, please validate me in another way.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. You want to show?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

They do.

[Dax Shepard]

Pull that a little closer to you.

[Lily Padman]

I want to hear that dulcet tone.

[Ben McKenzie]

Dulcet tone.

[Dax Shepard]

That's the word I can't remember. Feel free to. Oh, look at this. Don't worry. Wow. Mechanical. He's a man.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Ben McKenzie]

Have the longest legs for this couch. But that's okay.

[Lily Padman]

It's not a great couch. Okay.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

They really did Go deep.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

No, they're not. They're not. And they are more comfortable. Except I just feel like such an old man saying this. My back is always like, yeah, sure,

[Dax Shepard]

feel free to take that pillow.

[Ben McKenzie]

I'm pillow.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes, yes, thank you.

[Lily Padman]

We want you to be comfortable.

[Dax Shepard]

We're going to. For four hours.

[Ben McKenzie]

Oh, it's going to go deep.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Did you as a little kid?

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

When you think of weird, that doesn't.

[Lily Padman]

I mean, it is weird.

[Dax Shepard]

It's not the same brand weird.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Generally, during elections, people like to talk about it. Indeed, there's been screenings at times, but you're multi generation Austin, right? Your grandfather, he does no more Brian Cox anymore.

[Ben McKenzie]

He taught at ut, he founded the communications department, co founded it and started the public radio and television stations there.

[Dax Shepard]

And he passed the 1967 Public Broadcast

[Ben McKenzie]

act, wherever the hell passed it, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

You gotta toe the line a little bit.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 grandfathers did, you had to behave. And I had just come from summer camp. Oh, where of course you like curse a blue streak. No, it was language. It was curse of blue streak. And I can't remember what I did. I dropped an F bomber. I did something totally inappropriate.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Was that your father's father?

[Ben McKenzie]

Father's father, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then he became an attorney.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, my father's an attorney.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

I say all this because it makes a lot more sense. Your turn into this arena. You're kind of third gener generation, civically minded, the grandfathers getting legislation passed. Your father's working in that capacity. That kind of makes sense. Was it an idyllic fun? If I could have grown up anywhere, I think I would have picked Austin.

[Ben McKenzie]

It was.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

He immediately was always great.

[Lily Padman]

Just like, yeah, you're just born with

[Dax Shepard]

that a little bit.

[Ben McKenzie]

His dad was a quarterback at Baylor, and so I think he just had great technique. Not a tall guy, probably five' ten, five' eleven.

[Dax 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 him 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 days? But he was such a rad dude.

[Ben McKenzie]

The one he was playing in.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

St. Anthony.

[Ben McKenzie]

Saint Andrews. Yeah. Didn't get it exactly right.

[Dax Shepard]

Episcopal.

[Ben McKenzie]

The fact that you're not reading off of something and you've learned this is really. I am genuinely impressed. We had to apply to get in. You had to take some tests. And it was just me and him, and we were both nervous and, you know, we're 10 or 11 or something like that. And he was just like a really nice guy. And I didn't know that he was an athlete like that. I mean, I could look at him even at 10 and be like, okay, he's probably competing, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, thank God now.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Westlake's the Beverly Hills of Austin.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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?

[Dax Shepard]

Spooky.

[Ben McKenzie]

Spooky. Super spooky.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Wide receiver. Strong safety. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And then you went to University of Virginity or Virginie. I can do it, man.

[Lily Padman]

Virginia virginity.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Let's start that. Let's start that college.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Were you having the Friday night's life experience that I watched on tv? Like, you're on the football team in Texas.

[Ben McKenzie]

Do girls love you? There was a little bit of that.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, not Riggins level.

[Ben McKenzie]

Right. None of us looked like Tim Riggins. Yeah, Tim Riggins or any of those guys. And it was Austin. You're not like Odessa Permian. That's all there is. But yeah, no, it's intense. Texas high school football. People show up, you know, Friday Night Lights. People show up on a Friday.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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 a 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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, talked about. So I was like, I'll just studies things I'm interested in that could plausibly prepare me for law school.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so potentially you were in a law school? Maybe.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax 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. Yeah, but I can't imagine when you entered it, you knew that, yet you were maybe like, I'm good at math.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Darwinism, in a sense, is market forces. Everything's a market.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

It's sort of like a non falsifiable.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ben McKenzie]

Because we do all sorts of things

[Dax Shepard]

that aren't quote, unquote rational and against our self interests.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 am now.

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, predict.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Correct.

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly. Which maybe Perhaps bring us to crypto, because 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?

[Dax Shepard]

Only time's going to tell you, right? Even this debate. So I happen to be on your side.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

It's a very guy thing.

[Dax 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, 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 stuff that I've been thinking.

[Ben McKenzie]

Love it.

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Oh, I see what she would do. Is it one word or two words that you're not gonna. Or three words.

[Lily Padman]

Everyone needs to know what the words are.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

He was on a show.

[Dax Shepard]

Let's just say this. He's on a show.

[Lily Padman]

For what show? He was on.

[Dax Shepard]

He was on his show for four years. Then he was on his show for five years that was hugely popular. Then he was on another show for five years that was hugely popular. And as he's gone to Congress and to cnbc, I'm always running out. It's great. It's a fun part of the documentary. You run straight at that.

[Lily Padman]

That's funny.

[Dax Shepard]

So anyways, I'm like, I'll be the first person to not say this word to him or 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. Of course, to have three shows that go a total of 14 seasons is almost impossible.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, I love that movie.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ben McKenzie]

Amy Adams, husband with the mustache.

[Lily Padman]

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.

[Ben McKenzie]

So I had done the first season

[Dax Shepard]

of the oc I don't know what that is, but go exactly whatever of

[Ben McKenzie]

the show that she'll not be in. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

2002 and got it it in three.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, no, totally, totally. I feel the same way. Happened really quick. It was a year and seven days after I landed in la, where I got that gig on the show that won't be named. And it was just like a rocket ship, which can only really happen, I feel like in this town in Silicon Valley, ironically. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Sam Bankman, Freedom.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, totally.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

But you also have severe imposter syndrome.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

But also fraudulence.

[Ben McKenzie]

It could go away like that.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Sure, sure.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly. We rehearse a scene, we break to light, and this guy comes up to me who kind of looks a lot like me, and he just sort of stands there awkwardly, and he's like, waiting

[Dax Shepard]

for you to move over.

[Ben McKenzie]

I had never had a stand in before.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Ben McKenzie]

As a guest star, a co star. You do your own standing.

[Dax Shepard]

You do the standing.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, yeah. So it was that kind of level, which was hilarious too, because then I got this reputation as a really intense actor. Oh. Oh, no. I just didn't know what I was doing.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

So I was trying to find the haters movie, and I think I literally got offered a script where the main character wore a white T shirt and a choke chain and did fighting. It was literally like, O.C. the movie. Yes. And probably a lot of money. And I was just like, I can't. I can't. If I do that, what happens if I'm that guy forever? Thank God I had.

[Dax Shepard]

That's a lot of impressed foresightedness.

[Ben McKenzie]

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. I'm from the South. I mean, Texas is sort of southwest, but it has a lot of overlap. My parents are both from South.

[Dax Shepard]

You'd gone to school in Virginia.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

So, I mean, really quick not to shine the light on her so much, but I am watching that. And that is her breakout. Yes. That's her kind of introduction to the world.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Ben McKenzie]

Academy Award nominee.

[Dax 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. Have you ever been a cheerleader?

[Ben McKenzie]

Blah, blah, blah.

[Dax Shepard]

When you were observing that, you were pretty new still, but were you like, oh, my goodness, something fucking wild's going on right now?

[Ben McKenzie]

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, and it was like night and day.

[Dax Shepard]

It's like playing with Drew Brees.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah. A little bit. And to the point where you're like, oh, crap, he's throwing the ball at me fast.

[Lily Padman]

You know what I mean?

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, fuck, yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

Like, at least get your hands up so he doesn't hit you in the face, because it's coming, and it's very sobering. When in the act, it. It's like, oh, it's just that.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

And then season four is even better. You write an episode. It's great. Every actor wants to direct. They're like, the boss, right? No one's offering to write.

[Ben McKenzie]

And I came from a family of writers. My mom's a poet. My uncle Robert Schenken is a playwright and a screenwriter. Pulitzer Prize winner, Pulitzer Prize winner, Tony winner, Emmy winner. It's interesting how you sort of define yourself, but I had never thought of myself as a writer, and yet I was fascinated by it. And I had also done so much tv, you know, a couple hundred hours of tv, that I was like, I gotta try new things. You gotta give me more stuff to do. Basically, I just kept asking them, you know, I got to go to the writer's 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, use it.

[Dax Shepard]

It went bad for me. I wrote an episode of Parenthood. I'm like, I'm gonna write an episode. I've already sold screenplays. I'm already like, a writer. 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. The full arc of everyone.

[Ben McKenzie]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

There's a lot of suggestions.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, suggestions. Slash. We're just gonna change that. But it was fun, man. It was really good. And it really did prepare me. Cause 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.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay. So I guess now I want to know, how do you get to the point where you're going to write Easy money and then also direct the doc? What's the order of events?

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Got shut down immediately.

[Ben McKenzie]

So it didn't actually. It actually Was a limited run that closed on its own. Oh, March 2nd of 2020. I had gotten a pilot. I was, like, about to go shoot this pilot. And the next week, New York shut

[Dax Shepard]

down because of COVID I was wondering, because it got nominated for a Tony.

[Lily Padman]

What play was it?

[Ben McKenzie]

Grand Horizons, written by Bess Woll, who I had known for, like, 20 years. We'd done summer stock theater together. It was a really cool moment. But, yeah, then Ben Emekitz. I don't know about you, but I was freaking out.

[Dax Shepard]

Well, you were in New York too, right?

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you have new babies yet or not?

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it's a lot.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 and, like, catching frogs every day. And my second kid was singing the sun will come out Tomorrow, Annie on repeat. On repeat.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

At that moment went tears. Endless tears. Right? Because you're feeling at that moment. Is it.

[Lily Padman]

Is it?

[Ben McKenzie]

You know, I really hope it comes.

[Lily Padman]

Like, ominous.

[Dax Shepard]

Fingers crossed.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 O.C. he was like, dude, you got to buy stock in this company. This, like, obscure company that I had never heard of.

[Dax Shepard]

He had found out from a dude at a wedding.

[Ben McKenzie]

From dude at a wedding.

[Dax Shepard]

He's always the best source.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, exactly. In retrospect, it's comically stupid. But he's like, they've produced synthetic blood. They're going to make a fortune. It's like a penny stock. You're like, yeah, okay, but I'm young and dumb. And I was excited by his excitement. And I was like, okay, I'll put a little money into. It wasn't. It's like a ton of money, but it was like 10 grand or something.

[Dax Shepard]

Something.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Turns out synthetic blood's pretty hard.

[Ben McKenzie]

Pretty difficult to.

[Lily Padman]

It wasn't. What's her name?

[Ben McKenzie]

Theranos.

[Lily Padman]

Theranos. Sounds like that.

[Ben McKenzie]

Like a precursor to that.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Ben McKenzie]

So anyway, Dave came back to me in 2020. He's like, dude, you got to bitcoin.

[Dax Shepard]

He's horny for bitcoin.

[Ben McKenzie]

It's everywhere, right. Like, all of a sudden, the celebrities are doing it because the pandemic hits. The reason we call the book Easy Money is the Fed flooded the Zone with money to keep the economy from crashing. Because you can imagine a global pandemic. Obviously, work is going to be hard for a lot of people. They're not going to be able to do it. So what happens if they don't work? They don't earn money, they don't spend money, they hoard. And then the whole thing, it can just nosedive really, really fast.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Right. And they're sitting at home or in their apartments with their phones and they have not else to do. So why not gamble on crypto? And so crypto just goes nuts. And so Dave says, I'm going to buy bitcoin. I'm like, dave, I am not. I'm not going to do that. But what is it? And he's like, it's a cryptocurrency.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

The movie is called Everyone Is Lying for Money.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, okay, okay.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. There's a docudrama element that you're going to have to tell a story. Yes. A personal story. Not just a story of Christmas.

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly. So we did. We recreated it.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Okay. Not that smart.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ben McKenzie]

I asked Dave, 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's money. One of the things you can do with money is buy and sell stuff. Can you buy and sell stuff with us, Dave? And Dave is like, well, I'm putting money in and I'm hoping that, you know, it's going to go up and then I'm going to sell it. So I'm like, it's an investment then. And he's like, well, it's kind of both. I'm like, sure.

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly. You can trade currencies, of course.

[Dax Shepard]

Buy a currency and the currency goes through the roof. Because that's just inflation.

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

And if the inflation was as steep as it is in crypto, it'd be World War Three. Yeah. It would be insane. Right? It would be the apocalypse. Stay tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

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 convince 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, 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 American Insurance Company, Northbrook, Illinois. Roadside assistance plans provided by Allstate Motor Club Incorporated in Allstate affiliates. This podcast is brought to you by Squarespace. I feel like spring always does this thing where you realize you've been thinking about something for a long time and suddenly it feels like, okay, maybe I actually do something with it.

[Lily Padman]

Totally. It's less pressure, but more like readiness.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like you've been sitting on an idea or a project or even just a perspective you care about, and now you're like, maybe this deserves to exist somewhere outside of my own head.

[Lily Padman]

In May being Mental health Awareness Month, there's already this broader conversation happening. People are more open, more curious, more willing to engage.

[Dax Shepard]

Which is worse. Something like Squarespace comes in, it makes that jump from idea to actual thing feel way less overwhelming. You can build a site that looks good, works well, and actually reflects what you're trying to put out there.

[Lily Padman]

And it's not just hypothetical. Wabi Wob literally used Squarespace to build our site.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, and Wabiwab is not trying to spend 40 hours figuring out web design. It just worked.

[Lily Padman]

Which is kind of the point.

[Dax Shepard]

So if you've been sitting on something and waiting for the right moment, this might be head to squarespace.comdax 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 brought to you by SoFi, the all in one finance app where you can bank, borrow and invest all in one place.

[Lily Padman]

Let's talk bank accounts for a second. The average bank Savings rate is 0.39% in interest. You're earning pennies on your savings, but it does not have to be that

[Dax Shepard]

way with SoFi high yield checking and Savings, the money barely making moves sitting in your savings account can earn over eight times the national average savings rate. With eligible direct deposit, no account or

[Lily Padman]

overdraft fees, which feels rare these days, you can get your paycheck up to two days early, perfect for getting ahead of a bill or grabbing what you need right when you need it.

[Dax Shepard]

Plus get up to a 300 welcome bonus when you sign up with eligible direct deposit. Sign up for SoFi Checking and Savings at sofi.com armchair SoFi Checking and Savings is offered through SoFi Bank NA Member FDIC terms apply. We are supported by Nordic Naturals. Okay, here's something that surprises me. More than 80% of Americans don't get enough omega 3s in their diet. And omega 3s? They're vital for your heart, brain, eyes, skin, joints, and the list goes on. That's where Nordic Naturals, the number one selling Omega 3 brand in the US comes in. Their Omega 3s are made from the purest ingredients, exceptionally fresh purified fish oil with a clean lemon taste. No fishy taste, no fishy burps. I take these every night. I do three right before bed. I've never had any kind of issue with a burp. They're pleasant to consume. Tens of thousands of studies link EPA and DHA to significant health benefits including heart, brain, immune, eye, mood, prenatal health and more. And every Nordic Natural supplement is carefully crafted to meet or exceed the strictest international Quality standards and third party tested to ensure exceptional purity and freshness. Use promo code DAX for 15 off your next [e-mail] and discover the power of Omega 3 with Nordic Naturals, the number one selling Omega 3 brand in the U.S. these statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

[Ben McKenzie]

So I started looking into it and I could stop.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not always good when 2 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you have an explanation for this? You think you're just genetically that way? I don't know.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

There was no competing project.

[Ben McKenzie]

There's no competing project.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Almost everyone that got ins snared in it.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

million bucks of a certain caliber actor.

[Ben McKenzie]

We will pay them $10 million for

[Dax Shepard]

a one day shoot.

[Ben McKenzie]

So I get it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's perfect confluence of opportunity.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, it made fun of Maria because she did like a hair commercial. There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, the reason celebrities are hired is because they have a relationship with the audience and people trust them. And if it sort of helps you separate your. There's a lot of different hairsprays you could have. But this one has ran a background in it, so, you know, buy it. That's totally legitimate and fine. But this was a financial product. This was an investment of some kind in something.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

advice if you're not a licensed financial advisor, which is a very obscure rule and is never enforced. And it's also sort of like, why do we even have that? On some level, because you're telling your buddy about stock. Yeah. It's not like you're committing a crime. You know, no one's going to come in and arrest you. But I think it is there, quite frankly. Not that they could have anticipated this, but in a sense, to deal with this issue where someone with a lot of influence is kind of quasi giving you financial. Like, they're not telling you to invest in particular things, but they are particular cryptos, generally speaking. Some of them did, like Kim Kardashian shilled this thing called Ethereum Max, which is not Ethereum, it's another one, and did a post about it and it went to all her followers and then it crashed fantastically. And the guy that I wrote the book with, Jacob Silverman, we wrote an article. Our first article was like, criticizing celebrity celebrities and using this as an example. And she ultimately had to pay a fine to the securities and Exchange Commission 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?

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Oh, definitely. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you got what they're there for.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

That's what you've been giving them this money for, right?

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly. No, I love agents. All good.

[Dax 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 months, huge institutions would fail. There'd be run on banks. Everyone would be left holding the bag. We had a really, really shaky and untrustworthy banking system for 100 and some years until finally, again, this ugly word, regulation. Regulation stopped that pandemic of bank collapses, which were happening all the time in, like, dominoes.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 currency currencies during a thing called the wildcat banking era, which was in the mid19th century. We were trying to expand west and provide credit for people, west being like Michigan at this point. And so the idea was a bank was allowed to issue its own notes, its own currency, if it held a certain amount of state bonds. You were allowed one chapter of your bank, one physical location. And so sometimes people would set them up as far away from their depositors as they could, where the wildcats roamed. And once they had your money and you had to get there by horseback or whatever, they could just run off with it. And so there was a lot of fraud as well as instability.

[Dax 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 $100 million of people's money they've deposited, and now I'm going to make loans with that money that you've entrusted me with. Then I'm going to charge a percentage on that, and that's how I'm going to make money. And part of the regulations, though, it's like, well, how much money should they hold? Let's have a minimum amount percentage that the bank still has to withhold in case people want to withdraw their money. So this is where regulations come in. And then, yes, the central bank helps standardize all this stuff, the Federal Bank. So that takes us up to 08 and it's pretty darn stable as far as world banking goes. The US has done a good job. Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, well, insider trading wasn't ill. No, it wasn't legal. So 08 we get a new kind of version of it. Right. So in 08 it's all, 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 08 meltdown. I think the total of those toxic mortgages really amounted to like $68 billion or something. But what was more troubling and what caused the collapse is on top of the $68 billion, they built products that were anchored in those products that amounted to $1,000,000,000. So we have these things, credit default swaps. So I don't own this stock, but I can insure it. So I'm going to insure Lehman Brothers, say I have $10 million of value in there. I'm going to pay this little fee to ensure that in case it collapses, I'll get paid out $10 million on money I don't even have invested. And so Lehman Brothers, all these things, they were started on rumors, the collapse of them. And they were started on rumors by people who held enormous credit default swaps. So then we went, oh wow, there's this other version of massive corruption that is just so high tech. The people that sold the products didn't really understand them. In a lot of cases were testifying, they're like, explain this. And like one person at the firm understands this product they invented, but they sold to a bazillion people. So again, we're in a situation in 08 where the entire financial industry is going to collapse. If the Fed doesn't step in and save these banks, we're not going to be able to come back from it. So it was the right decision. But the us, American, the average citizen, they're the ones that had the loan on the house and their credit got fucked and they got their house repossessed and the government didn't come and bail

[Ben McKenzie]

them out, they bailed out the banks also. No one was to jail. One guy went to jail.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Ben McKenzie]

It sort of encrypts the data.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

and then to the merchant. There needs to be a record of this. But we also don't want it to be public so that people can rip you off so public key encryption is actually vital to our modern economy. But blockchain had been around since 1991, and the Bitcoin white paper didn't come out till 2008. So it'd been sitting there for 17 years, and no one had really done that much with it. And even bitcoin, when it came out, it was the obscure mailing list. Very, very few people. These are like really hardcore cryptographers, nerdy cryptographers or whatever. I guess all cryptographers are probably nerds in some way. I'd say that with love. So it's 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Now it's worth $9 billion.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax 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, and that was one of them, it was absolutely pitched as completely anonymous.

[Ben McKenzie]

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?

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Ben McKenzie]

Every single person raises their hands. Right, right. We all have different reasons. And the second part is bitcoin checks is this. It's become A meme.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a cure. All right.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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 U.S. government.

[Ben McKenzie]

Sure.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Totally. And let me give you maybe even a more sort of morally compelling argument I was listening to. So what crypto can do is it can send something of value instantaneously 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

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?

[Dax Shepard]

But it's premise.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 and different values. Right. But to accept that, that is good, we also have to accept the bad. If we're being intellectually honest, we can't just hand wave away. I mean, to give you a sense of the amount of crime in crypto, last year a crypto company, estimated $154 billion of criminal activity was facilitated via crypto. 154 billion is a lot.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a massive, massive amount of money.

[Ben McKenzie]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

It's a GDP of a lot of countries.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 a massive amount of crime. And to give you a sense of the kinds of crime, it's like Russian oligarchs selling sanctioned oil to the Chinese in exchange for drones that they send to Ukraine. Right. It's like global criminal cartels. There's a Southeast Asian system of credit called hawala I think is what it's called. And basically it's like, if people don't have banks, how do they get something of value to someone else? They go to this local community leader and that person has a ledger. They call their buddy in the 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. You don't have to trust the individual. If it's scaled like I could give you tax a dollar, you take it from me. Not because you trust me, you trust

[Dax Shepard]

that you use it, you trust government and that some of the government.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 book, 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. People would just freeze and hoard, which would sort of plunge the economy into a 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.

[Dax Shepard]

It's linked to something real.

[Ben McKenzie]

Real, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't print more gold.

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly. It just crashed.

[Dax Shepard]

It makes a finite economy in a sense. It can' beyond the value of the gold that it's backed by. So it's also a very limiting concept for money.

[Ben McKenzie]

It is. And there's a great book called Lords of Finance by Loquat Ahmed that talks about the central bankers of the 1930s and their adherence to the gold standard really did contribute significantly to how bad it got. It was going to be bad, but if they had known better the time, they could have staved off the worst of it. And that was really one of the takeaways from economists like John Maynard Keynes. Why are we sticking to this thing? So Keynes and others critiqued this in the sense of, like, I know we say we want it to be based on something quote, unquote real, but let's think about that for a second. Why is Gold, valuable? Yes. It's not the most scarce mineral. You can't eat it.

[Dax Shepard]

It's pretty and limited.

[Ben McKenzie]

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. 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.

[Dax 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 going to do great and they're going to grow. And I buy a fraction of that company. That's a security in that company. Right. And I buy it at $100. And for it to go up, someone has to buy it ultimately off of me for $110 or $120. And that's how the value of the stock's going up. But again, back to the trust thing. It's like it is anchored to some performance of that company, whether they're solvent or not. It's anchored to some capacity.

[Ben McKenzie]

They're producing a good or providing a service.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. They're either growing or shrinking. And so the stock generally reflects that. There's been these anomalies like Enron, whatnot, but in general, that's just the concept. So if you want to invest in a speculative asset, be it a share in a company, in theory, that company's going to determine its performance, is going to determine the value of that stock.

[Ben McKenzie]

It's important to understand that. And then it's also important to look at crypto and go, well, if you're investing, what is 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 Search.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

There's ways of monetizing it, but with crypto, because it's just the code, what are you investing? And I would argue that you're sort of investing in its utility as a criminal, as a vehicle for a 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 can 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, 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,

[Dax Shepard]

or service or service other than.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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's willing to sell me a very nice apartment with this crypto exchange. So I have now just converted this cash that I can't use into an apartment.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

He wants drugs.

[Lily Padman]

Comes at some point someone's like, I want money.

[Dax Shepard]

Yes. That's the best part.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Did you watch that thing on Netflix? It was called like the biggest heist of all time. And it was this very bizarre couple that had successfully stolen what in the current value of bitcoin is in. And they're like $30 billion.

[Ben McKenzie]

Right, right.

[Dax Shepard]

The problem is they're sitting there with at the time, $8 billion in Bitcoin. They can't do anything with it because ultimately in this country, to convert it into an apartment or a car or anything else, you are going to have to go on record and break your anonymity and convert it to that thing. So they were sitting there with $8 billion. It was completely fucking useless.

[Ben McKenzie]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

They were not living like billionaires. No. So it's not even the thing that was promised to be.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah. She was like financing the world's Shittiest rap videos.

[Dax Shepard]

Right?

[Ben McKenzie]

Wasn't she? Yeah, she was.

[Dax Shepard]

She was wild.

[Lily Padman]

What was I forget?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

So weird.

[Ben McKenzie]

It was so fantastic.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they were both something else.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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 gonna write a book. There's a lot of people who 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, oh, just like, find someone else who knows.

[Lily Padman]

Together.

[Ben McKenzie]

A journalist, Jacob Silverman, had written an article for Slate that the headline is, even Donald Trump Knows Bitcoin is a Scam. Because Donald Trump, as recently as 2021, was calling Bitcoin a scam. Which is interesting now. We can talk about that later. But I thought that was funny. He was a tech sort of critic for Slate and other places. And I just had a good way about him online. Anyway, followed him on Twitter. He followed me back. I invited him to drinks at a bar in Brooklyn, and I pitched him on this crazy idea of like, yes, crypto is going to the moon right now. This is like 2020, but I think it's going to crash. And I have all these reasons. Hit him with probably way too much of my opinion on it. He happened to be going on paternity leave, and so he had a window, and he was like, okay, let's try it. So we started writing articles. The first one was criticizing celebrities and Slate, and we wrote different articles for different places, like the Washington Post and the Intercept and places like that. And we were doing it to do our research, but also to prove our bonafides to sell a book. We sold A book proposal. And we went out in 2022 to actually, actually go into the real world again. We're getting out of the pandemic and back into irl. And we were going to south by Southwest in. 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. 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 with, 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. It's like 15% or something. That's like literally the definition of a Ponzi scheme or one of the definitions of a Ponzi scheme or one of the tells of a Ponzi scheme. And yet they were operating. They were being sued by the Texas securities regulator at that time, but it hadn't been adjudicated yet, so they still could technically sell their customers on it. And I look at the booth and I'm just like. And then I look over the other side of the room and there's the CEO just like, what's his name? Alex Machinsky. He's sitting with these other guys. And then I'm like, well, I got to do this.

[Dax 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 LA or something.

[Ben McKenzie]

You have the largest Boost Mobile store ever. But yes.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Very small font.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

And he can't answer me because he's like, we're the opposite of bank. We're about the community. He's a Ukrainian. He won't do his accent, but he's like, we were about the. I am going to do it. Apologies to any Ukrainian friends. I'm a big pro Ukrainian.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, me too. Me too, generally.

[Ben McKenzie]

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. He's like 10, 15%. The rest is speculation.

[Dax Shepard]

So I think you need to explain that part.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 one lesson 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 calls. When your finances aren't looking that great on your investments or whatever, and the bank calls you or the investment firm call is like, hey, you need to put more money in because otherwise you're going to be zeroed out. They don't even do that. They just, you're done. So it's really a vehicle for this crazy gambling. And the hardcore crypto people, or a segment of them call themselves degens, which stands for degenerate gamblers.

[Dax Shepard]

They're owning it.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, they're owning it. Yeah. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Ooh.

[Ben McKenzie]

Is right too, by the way.

[Dax Shepard]

But I kind of admire it more.

[Ben McKenzie]

I guess it's a very male thing.

[Dax Shepard]

I will say.

[Ben McKenzie]

I'm a dj, you know, like, okay,

[Dax Shepard]

sounds like incel a little bit.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, a little bit.

[Lily Padman]

Might be some crossover.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

You also ask him if he's being investigated for any criminal activity or there's any kind of legal cases.

[Ben McKenzie]

Legal pro.

[Dax Shepard]

He claims zero. And there were multiple at that time.

[Ben McKenzie]

In fact, I think they'd already been shut out of New Jersey. I think the New Jersey securities regular had already shut him down anyway. Yeah, it was just nonsense. And so that's the first day I'm like, well, I gotta keep going.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

And it got weirder from there, actually. Stay tuned for more Armchair Expert, if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

This episode is brought to you by Service Feedback. Now, look, I have my dream job. I get to talk to folks I admire like crazy and ask them virtually any question that I want to. I can't imagine a better way to spend my time. But even dream jobs have some not so dreamy parts. The stuff that gets in the way of the actual work. Now that's where ServiceNow's AI specialists come in. They don't just tell you what you should do about your busy work, they actually do it. Start to finish, cases closed, requests handled, no extra work for you. So you and your team can focus on what matters most, which for me is, are they obsessed with male bodies on the same level as I am?

[Lily Padman]

They never are.

[Dax Shepard]

To learn how to put AI to work for people, visit servicenow.com. 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So they bought $100 worth of crypto, they buy it for themselves for $200, which they didn't lose any money because they gave themselves the $200. Now it has the appear worth $200 and then they sell it for $400. That blew my mind. That 95% of the trades are these bullshit trades.

[Ben McKenzie]

I don't know if the percentage that's his claim, I'm not making that claim,

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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 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.

[Dax Shepard]

And they told you you had X amount of Bitcoin.

[Ben McKenzie]

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, you remember, in the mid aughts, all of a sudden you could gamble with real money online.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, right, right.

[Ben McKenzie]

It was like Full Tilt and Ultimate Bet and things like that. And Dave was really into this.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

Shocking. And I loved poker. I was living up in Nichol. I was single. I had an actual poker table in my house, was that guy. But, like, I loved it. It was fun. And we'd hang out with buddies, drink a beer and take each other's money. But I never messed with online poker. And I remember asking Dave, so you're gambling with real money, where are you sending the money? And he was like, it's the same places. They were based on 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.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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 players could. Well, that's one of the problems with making this gambling so ubiquitous is like, it just compromises everybody, including the leagues. I would say the leagues are in on it now.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, it's a mess.

[Ben McKenzie]

It's all sponsored. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

We have Michael Lewis on to talk about his podcast on this. 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, well, then what am I going to do? Oh, I guess I'm going to gamble or I'm going to get rich on crypto. It's filling a void of opportunity.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

You know, let's talk about that argument for a minute because the crypto guy's are now like, oh, I guess you know, more than all the big banks. And it's like, first of all, that's deeply ironic if you were set up in reaction to the banks and the subprime crisis and now you're crowing about how the banks are on your side. But it's also wrong because the banks aren't in it taking a directional bet on whether crypto is going up or down. They're just facilitating 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 things called ETFs, exchange traded funds, they're sort of like mutual fund funds were 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 BlackRock ETF, they just go to like coinbase this crypto exchange and like, hey, hold this amount of bitcoin for this customer. BlackRock never even touches the bitcoin.

[Dax 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 VCs, yeah, I'm going to lose on a bunch of these, but the payoff's going to 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. It's like, in a sense, I'm playing a different game than that person and so are you. You. So you can't think that way.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Right. They build pyramids.

[Ben McKenzie]

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, 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's 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.

[Dax Shepard]

You won too much, big time. There's another part I will just add of my sympathy to. It is like there's not only the lack of opportunity and just kind of this really troubled group of young men right now. Also, you're not acknowledging that it's an instant community for a lot of guys.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax 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 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

What's so sort of toxic about it is it's so easy to feel fake. Real communities online. I talk to the victims of Celsius and I bond with them. But I asked them because Celsius said, we're like a community bank. But they weren't a bank. They existed only online. There were no physical chapters of Celsius. And they talked about, we do it for the people. You know, bank for the people or something like that. We do it for the community. That's what Alex was 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 Mazenshi went to jail. He had made tens of millions of dollars off of the these people. I asked him now, do you think the Celsius community was like a real thing? They were all like, no.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, God.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax 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. Sell you a watch. He's so obviously a crook.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly.

[Ben McKenzie]

He's a used car salesman all over the place. And I asked one of the guys who had lost money in it, he made that point. He's like, it's just easier to fake it online. If I had ever met this 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 kind of dark.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Just preying on the vulnerable.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax 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 exactly.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Almost as their national currency? Look like that's where it was going

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

you got a wacky president in the mix. That's important. You're charismatic, bizarre, a little trumpy son of a rich guy tweeting all the time and saying, like, not what you would think of as a leader of the country.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Like, very videos of himself looking cool.

[Ben McKenzie]

Refer to himself at one point as Twitter handle. Is the world's coolest dictator.

[Dax Shepard]

That's who you want as your president.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, that was very weird. So anyway, with much fanfare, they announced that bitcoin was going to be currency. They had this system called chivo. Chivo means cool, which to me is so lame that they named their system Call something cool. Don't call something Cool. Such a rookie government move. Bad move on a marketing guy. Anyway, they gave everybody, like 30 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 number strike stolen, and you had to take a picture to get the money. And people would, like, put their pets up to the camera. So it was just a mess. So a lot of people didn't get that money. But not only that, on the day that it came into effect, the price of crypto crashed fantastically. Like 50,000 to 40,000 in the span of a few minutes or a few hours or something like that. Which is really interesting because if you think of the whole thing as a lot of like insider trading that might be front running. You see that this big publicity event is happening. People are expecting the price to come go up. That's a really good time to sell. As it goes up, you sell. And you could be shorting at the same time and making a ton of money anyway. I have no evidence that that's true. But it is weird that it crashed so quickly that failed. But Bukele was undeterred. He was like, we're going to build a bitcoin city in eastern El Salvador. We're going to mine bitcoin from a volcano and we're going to build a city off of the proceeds. And there was like a model of this golden, very Gaddafi esque. And I'm like, okay, I gotta go check it out. So we drove 100 miles east, tiny little fishing village, super remote. San Salvador's 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. So this was not financially feasible, but it was a marketing ploy. They're gonna build a city, they're gonna build an airport to service the city. So I go out there, there's nothing going on. But what they're doing is they're displacing this whole community. Community in order to build this airport for the city that's never going to exist. It still doesn't exist to this day in any form. But they wanted to build an airport, which I don't know what that's about exactly because I already have an International Airport 100 miles away. I will say I don't know if this is related, but there's a lot of drug smuggling and money laundering in Central and South America. Anyway, they displaced this whole community. So I'm talking to this fisherman named Wilfredo who doesn't know bitcoin. Like the guy fishes for a living and he's like, what is going on in the this world? The government like bought up their land for a fraction of what it was worth. Bukele controls the judiciary, so there wasn't any real ability to appeal this thing. And it was just sad.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

You're going to all these different vendors. That's the other 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 biggest market

[Ben McKenzie]

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 is a cash dollars. And they're just looking at me like I'm the stupidest gringo like that ever has walked.

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Bitcoin convention.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, I'm trying to buy a beer in bitcoin. And you're supposed to.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

No, it really isn't. And the remittance thing didn't come to fruition either. To finish that, the government's own figures said less than 2% of people were using it to send money overseas. It's now less than 1%. It's a failure. The government has actually abandoned the whole crypto project to get a loan from the imf. They basically had to say like, no, we're not actually even doing the bitcoin thing anymore. The takeaway from me is a. It's very sad that this whole community is displaced. There's also a few 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Want to be the first citizen of bitcoin city?

[Ben McKenzie]

This imaginary city living in a cinder block house on the beach. And it was interesting to talk to him because I asked him how much bitcoin he had. He didn't want to tell me. I respect that. But I was like, clearly it was important to him. It was a meaningful amount of money. Otherwise why would he have done this incredibly drastic thing? I was like, why don't you sell it? Build a house that isn't made out of cinder blocks or buy a motorcycle or I don't know. And it was very clear he was never going to sell this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, it takes of religious quality to it.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Lily Padman]

True. Yeah, yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

It's really wild to watch it.

[Dax Shepard]

Now you also get a sit down with Sam Bankman Fried. I think he thinks he's coming to meet the dude from the aforementioned show at some. You start hitting him with some pretty hard questions. It's funny, this was the point where my 13 year old cuz he's so nervous and he's so autistic. 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Even I have felt that temptation. To be honest with you, I didn't know what exactly he was doing, but I had a sense that whatever he was doing was not good. You know, at the time he was the king of crypto. The market was crashing, but he was supposedly this boy genius who'd figured it all out. And he was supposedly going to bail all these companies out. It 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. You'll see it in the film. I just ask him basic questions like what does it do? What does it do that's good for the world? And he says remittances. And I just been to El Salvador. I'm like, bullshit. And then he goes, well it's not working now, but in the future.

[Dax Shepard]

And you go and it doesn't function as a Currency. And he's like, yeah, well now it doesn't.

[Ben McKenzie]

It will in the future. 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 ever can be mined. And also they're issued by individuals and companies and there's a lot of fraud and things that can go wrong there. So really bitcoin, even Sam, actually I asked Sam, like, can bitcoin ever work as a payment 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.

[Dax 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 $1,000 and 100x. That's the person screaming from the rooftops about it, of course.

[Ben McKenzie]

Totally.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

So 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 percent 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.

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they love that.

[Ben McKenzie]

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, if you're at the top, 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 satisfaction psychological trick. Trying to give you fomo. Right. Trying to make you wish that you had bought in early.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Right, Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Or good for the world.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I feel terrible for that guy in the dock.

[Ben McKenzie]

Me too.

[Dax Shepard]

His wife's, like, disappointed in him.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

And then the US government had to

[Ben McKenzie]

bail out and we bail them out.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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?

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah, I mean, it's more than that, probably trillion. 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 stablecoins. So these cryptocurrencies that are pegged one to one to real US Dollars. And they're even scarier to me than the other stuff because the other stuff is gambling. But that is basically a black market dollar. So the price doesn't go up and down.

[Dax Shepard]

It's always whatever the US Dollar is.

[Ben McKenzie]

Exactly. But it's not backed by the full faith and credit of the United States. It's not issued by the government.

[Dax Shepard]

You can't call the FBI if it disappears.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Sure.

[Ben McKenzie]

The price of could go up, could also go down. You'd rather it just stayed stable. Most of that $154 billion that I'm talking about, most of that of criminal activity last year was stablecoins.

[Dax 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

[Ben McKenzie]

and popular whistleblower who's been on the unnamed show before.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. Like what. 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 dock.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 was 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 account. So my account sits there. But I haven't posted in years. I kept getting hacked into from places like Russia.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh.

[Ben McKenzie]

Which is interesting.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ben McKenzie]

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 years of of years. And I'm on the other social medias or at least some of them, and it's a way better experience. So it's been online vitriol. What's interesting is that in person, I've had very few really gnarly Interactions I've had a lot of like what you see in the movie, goofy interactions or people who are just kind of odd and or scammers. But yeah, I mean in terms of my security, I was really worried about it when I went down the rabbit hole before I started this because I saw how much criminal activity and if

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Although I haven't exactly succeeded in that. So 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.

[Dax Shepard]

So you're not too scared? It's a ballsy doc. Let's just say that there's any number of docs you could have made and to me that this one does seem pretty risk heavy.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

with status in public from time to time.

[Ben McKenzie]

If I can, 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

[Lily Padman]

feel like I feel the need. If you feel the pull then you should do.

[Ben McKenzie]

And I feel like weirdly I'm way qualified for this. Like it's strange, it's a weird thing to say especially for people that only know me from the OC but hopefully if they've been listening for this long, they'll be like, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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 inside 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 they fail all the time. But they do have to adhere to laws and regulations.

[Dax Shepard]

They can be held accountable.

[Ben McKenzie]

Right. And they really don't want to be regulated like, like securities because the disclosure thing we talked about. So there's a bill that's trying to get through Congress called the Clarity act where it's going to put it under the cftc, the Commodities 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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

No. Who benefits in crypto's? The insider.

[Dax Shepard]

I always.

[Ben McKenzie]

It's always the exchange owners or 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yep.

[Dax Shepard]

Again, it's called Everyone is lying to you for Money and it's a 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, it's very character driven if you've

[Ben McKenzie]

made it through this interview.

[Dax Shepard]

We have very smart listeners.

[Ben McKenzie]

You do have very smart listeners. You're going to Love the movie because it's a piece of information. Entertainment. Yeah. If you're in LA. AMC Burbank and Lindley Royal, N.Y. iFC center and Alamo Drafthouse, Brooklyn. And you know, this is a true indie. I financed it.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, really?

[Ben McKenzie]

I bet that crypto was going to crash and I was betting against a bunch of frauds. So this film is partially financed by me putting my money where my mouth is. Actually betting. That's in the books.

[Dax Shepard]

You already have a streamer deal. Or you'll have a streamer.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, you will. It's so good.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

weeks, it's going to get written about a lot.

[Ben McKenzie]

It draws from an interesting crowd because I feel like everyone has heard about. About crypto. 80 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.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

You know what I mean?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. You're intuition.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

There's no. They're there.

[Ben McKenzie]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

Easy money is the book.

[Ben McKenzie]

Easy money.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

So are you, man.

[Dax Shepard]

Very attractive. Impressive.

[Ben McKenzie]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Hi there. This is hermium. Permium. If you like that, you're going to love the fact check. Ms. Monica. Bless your heart.

[Lily Padman]

Thank you.

[Dax Shepard]

Allergies?

[Lily Padman]

I don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

You don't?

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

What's the name of the new virus?

[Lily Padman]

Antivirus. Or something. I know. I'm so worried. I have.

[Dax Shepard]

It sounds gross. I guess all of them sound gross. But hantavirus. It sounds like hanas.

[Lily Padman]

Well, I Think. I'm sure that's part of it. Because it's like, rats.

[Dax Shepard]

Wait, what comes from rats?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Were there rats on the ship?

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yes. And it happened at San Vicente Bungalows, too, and Dantana's. Oh, no.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

I want to go now.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

The dogs.

[Lily Padman]

Why are they everywhere right now?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

But, like, there are rats places and

[Dax Shepard]

there are rats places.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Didn't you have a mouse in your house?

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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?

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, holy smokes. You just brought back immediate flashback of my dream last night.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

I was dealing with so much. So much. Like, it was a deer poop. It was the pellet kind of poop.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax 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 those poops everywhere. I wonder why that.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, yeah, that's weird.

[Dax Shepard]

I didn't step in Poop yesterday.

[Lily Padman]

Sometimes there's poop in your yard. Because dogs.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Or maybe you read about this hant of virus.

[Dax Shepard]

Something infected my sleep and I. It was just full of poop. And those pellets was a deer.

[Lily Padman]

You mean like rabbit ones?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Yeah. I. I realized I had been standing on them. You know, I just.

[Lily Padman]

I don't want to talk about it anymore.

[Dax 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. I kind of like that.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Ew. What is this? Fact check? This fact check is horrible.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Oh, well.

[Dax Shepard]

Invulnerable. 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.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, a bed or one or same one. What did she say?

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Would she rescue a coyote?

[Lily Padman]

Like, kind of. Of course she helped. She helped, but I don't know if it died. I think it died. It did die. It did. Right.

[Dax Shepard]

What's the story, Rob? It was like in the middle of the road and they had to stop. Well, I just asked you and you said, I don't know.

[Ben McKenzie]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Right.

[Lily Padman]

Well, no, I was just saying. Okay, go on, Rob. Go on.

[Dax Shepard]

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 of her house and then died. And then they wouldn't come get it, so she had to.

[Lily Padman]

She said she helped get it out of the road.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

A couple weeks ago, yeah. So it wasn't the same one.

[Dax Shepard]

Different one, Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

I do have. I'm worried about. Cuz, you know, sometimes I have magical powers I can't control.

[Dax Shepard]

That's right.

[Lily Padman]

And I've talked about it on here. Like how I.

[Dax Shepard]

Could you give me an example? You have one?

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Of the dogs in the yard.

[Lily Padman]

No. Like sometimes I have thoughts and then. And then things happen.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Like me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. So little old me.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, and then two end up dead.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

If I were an investigator, I would sort certainly be asking you, like, hey, where were you the other night? Well, were you on Los Feliz Boulevard?

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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.

[Ben McKenzie]

No, no, no.

[Lily Padman]

I'm still too scared. Even in my car. I just stay until they run away.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, wow.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Powerful. It is interesting though, that. That I wonder what's going on. I've lived in los Feliz for 20 years. I've. I've only seen a few dead coyotes in the road.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

CTE suspicious.

[Dax Shepard]

Do you think they have cte? What's going on? I think M. Night Shyamalan make a whole movie about this.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, of course. That's sad. No one.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

They are. But they do scare people.

[Dax Shepard]

Kill everyone.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

I don't want them either.

[Dax Shepard]

Bears in. In the wild is. They get. They. They congregate around trash dumps, you know.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

And that's supposed to be real bad for them. Oh, 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. He's walking. He's on. He's terrestrial. Love.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

You have a whole thing going.

[Dax Shepard]

I have a. 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.

[Lily Padman]

I hope you get an owl.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

I love owls.

[Lily Padman]

I love owls.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

They are. They always have little spectacles on.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, that. That's the same.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, so what was I saying?

[Lily Padman]

The crow.

[Ben McKenzie]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

I remember the crow.

[Ben McKenzie]

Coyote.

[Dax Shepard]

Funny food. Coyote.

[Ben McKenzie]

Coyote.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, no. Bears.

[Ben McKenzie]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. The reason that the crows aren't like. Like when you feed a crow. Else elsewhere in New York City, like, yeah, they need the food. What the 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.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

Previous guest. So I don't know why the coyote. Coyotes gotta eat all the ant. All the pets, like.

[Lily Padman]

Well, there's leftovers. No, they're not vegetarian.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

There's always a guilty party when. When.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Okay, well, that's not par for the course.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Stay Tuned for more armchair expert if you dare.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

No bears.

[Dax Shepard]

This is for the cigarettes.

[Ben McKenzie]

Coyotes.

[Lily Padman]

Well the bears are going to come.

[Dax Shepard]

It's also close to the zoo.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, they're going to break out of the zoo.

[Dax Shepard]

There's a prison break at the zoo to go. Yummy. There's such good leftovers here in la. Like such. There's so many good restaurants. They be like fine cuisine. Something like these trash dumps in, in Yellowstone. It's like they're eating two week old hot dog buns that campers threw out. This is premium.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

around here, heading south.

[Lily Padman]

I don't want that. I don't to want, 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. The pickup 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 it in the big dumpster. But I didn't deal with getting.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. But I didn't have to deal with getting the trash cans out to the street. Okay, so this is new to me and I, 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.

[Dax Shepard]

We got a couple of those outbreaks.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

That's extreme.

[Lily Padman]

I will just light it all on fire.

[Dax Shepard]

It's extreme.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So I trash can.

[Lily Padman]

I don't want that to happen over.

[Ben McKenzie]

Oh yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

So remember there was a maggot armchair anonymous story that I'm forgetting but I remember. I now remember the feeling.

[Ben McKenzie]

It was like in the, in the

[Dax Shepard]

vent above the oven or something.

[Ben McKenzie]

Oh, yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

They were cooking. They were cooking. Yep. Good. Good memory.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, and it fell into the food.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, we've also. Who's. The wounds. We've had some nurses, I think, talk about that.

[Lily Padman]

Okay. So are you guys going to name the crow?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Okay, go ahead.

[Dax 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. Ducks that are at the edge of our pool every morning. And then they take a little swim together.

[Lily Padman]

In the hot tub?

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

Sometimes in the hot tub, but more often in the pool.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

And then. Then they have to flap their wings to get up. Back up on the thing. And he waits for her to do everything, and then he kind of follows her.

[Lily Padman]

Is he a mallard?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, he's a mallard. He's beautiful. And she's ugly. 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. I think you're thinking of a goose, Maybe a duck. You know, just a brown duck.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Like the cartoon version of a duck is always. Or the peeps version.

[Lily Padman]

I know.

[Dax Shepard]

Maybe it all stems from peeps. Well, their babies are yellow. The babies are yellow.

[Lily Padman]

Are they?

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they are. They're gold.

[Lily Padman]

Golden chicks.

[Dax Shepard]

They're golden.

[Lily Padman]

This is a white duck on the Internet. This is an American pekin. It's white.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, okay.

[Ben McKenzie]

But yours.

[Dax Shepard]

Quack duck. That white one you just showed me, I can hear the quack.

[Lily Padman]

Me, too. So, anyways, okay.

[Dax Shepard]

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.

[Lily Padman]

But they could be Grampy and Grandma, she could be in menopause.

[Dax 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?

[Lily Padman]

How do you know they're monogamous?

[Dax Shepard]

Because ducks are monogamous.

[Lily Padman]

Well, so are people.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, okay, point taken.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

male will because the side piece is white and pretty.

[Dax 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.

[Lily Padman]

They're in a poly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. Nepali stitch.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

But anyways.

[Lily Padman]

Yes.

[Dax Shepard]

This.

[Ben McKenzie]

This.

[Dax Shepard]

This. This crow is. Is. I really think it's heading towards friendship.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax 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.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And. But they never walk around the yard. That's not what crows do. Do. They're not terrestrial bipeds. But this one is. He's constantly strolling in the backyard.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

And landing in different spots that he knows are very sacred to me. So he's been hanging out on the guard on the railing, leaning into the attic. And I'm like, if you want to get interviewed, just say the word.

[Lily Padman]

Just email us@armchair expertbooking.com Stay on the

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Oh. He didn't want to be photographed.

[Dax 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 hope for People don't remember. I tried my hardest to become friends. I was trying to feed. I was putting up food out everywhere. I learned their calls that you did.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

And do you think maybe he's like an outcast and so he's like, I'm going to go explore.

[Dax Shepard]

Like, he's not in a murder.

[Lily Padman]

Exactly.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah.

[Lily Padman]

Probably because he prefers to walk.

[Dax Shepard]

He loves walking.

[Lily Padman]

The murders like to fly.

[Dax Shepard]

This little fellow is walking all over the yard.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

So cute.

[Lily Padman]

Oh, my God.

[Dax Shepard]

What happened?

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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 next to in between us on that little stand or hung right here on the bookshelf.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, that would be.

[Dax Shepard]

People tune in, even if they hated us, just to see this crow that maybe.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I'm just leaving doors open.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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's just plotting.

[Lily Padman]

Do you think he's going to attack?

[Dax Shepard]

No, no, no, no, no, no. He's not an attacker. He's like a.

[Lily Padman]

So see, you made a lot of a.

[Dax Shepard]

He's just a fun guy.

[Lily Padman]

Okay.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, Fun cr.

[Lily Padman]

I'm just. I. 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.

[Dax Shepard]

No, it's the opposite.

[Lily Padman]

No, we don't know.

[Dax Shepard]

A crow cannot kill me.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

And ground.

[Lily Padman]

Now, this isn't M. Night Shaman movie. The crowd grows 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. But they're smart. You're the one who's saying they're so

[Dax Shepard]

smart they would definitely have to use tools, I think.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, they do.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

They've been seen, so.

[Lily Padman]

Or yeah, they go to the tool shed. They get like, you know, plug pliers.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Ben McKenzie]

Uhhuh.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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 this year. So cute. Then they were all in the yard in the front of the house. I have a different situation, which is some birds made a nest by the front of the house, and they have painted my house.

[Ben McKenzie]

And.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, no, the, The. The driveway is covered in. All the fence railings covered in. Of the house was slathered, and so I had to get out there with the power washer this weekend. You know, I love the power washer.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. Why are you complaining? You love it.

[Dax Shepard]

I mean, I, I, I hated. What I hated is it was one of those things I was like, I got to power wash all that bird that was in my head for, like a month, you know? And it's like every time I take the trash out, like, oh, now there's all over the trash can.

[Lily Padman]

Ew. Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

I have a sense the crows are gonna. The crows are working in cahoots with them. Okay. Because they're. They're pooping all over the cameras and stuff. That sounds so suspicious. So.

[Dax Shepard]

Sounds very Ocean's Eleven.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

They're gonna be bummed when they get inside to try to take the valuables. Cause there's just really not unless they can figure out how to get a TV off the wall. And even those are.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

I want to live there.

[Lily Padman]

No, I think they want to kill.

[Dax Shepard]

Oh, they have a taste for. Okay. They're homicidal.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, okay. Exactly. Taste for human blood. All right, well, let's do some facts.

[Dax 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.

[Lily Padman]

Wow.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

He is an expert in this.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah. And historically, like, he just. He knows. He just is very bright. I. 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. I don't even care about acting. But if I was stuck on a show with him, that'd be a blessing. Like, the amount of chitchat you could have, that would be smart, would be so fun.

[Lily Padman]

And we know we have friends of friends who worked with Ben and clearly

[Dax Shepard]

like him because they're still doing favors.

[Lily Padman]

They. They really speak very highly of me.

[Dax Shepard]

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Lily Padman]

So that's awesome.

[Dax Shepard]

Straight up, good guy. Austin, Texas. What. What else would you expect?

[Lily Padman]

That's true. One of our friends who loved the OC Was like, did you guys talk about it? And I was like, honestly, no.

[Dax Shepard]

I refuse to.

[Lily Padman]

Well, it was more just like. That's not also.

[Dax Shepard]

If you saw the doc and you see what he goes through. I couldn't. I just couldn't do it to him. Yeah, it's every single interview. The guy's been on two other hit shows.

[Lily Padman]

It's hard sometimes that happens. I know, and I know, but I'm

[Dax Shepard]

like, I'm not doing that.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, that makes sense.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

Whatever. Okay, I want to do some facts. How long did each of his shoes shows run for the OC? 03 to 07. Four seasons, 92 episodes. Whoa. That's a lot for four.

[Dax Shepard]

Five seasons, isn't it? Three.

[Lily Padman]

It said four seasons.

[Dax Shepard]

Five, six.

[Ben McKenzie]

Okay.

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

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

[Dax 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. Well, he could cash out right now.

[Lily Padman]

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.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

That's what I mean. So. But it does have value in that way.

[Dax Shepard]

If and when it collapses, it'll be a collapse. It's not like amazing 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 a. An intrinsic value of its assets.

[Lily Padman]

Right.

[Dax Shepard]

This is nothing.

[Lily Padman]

But you can sell it now and make real money now.

[Dax Shepard]

You can.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah. That's pretty good.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

creepy.

[Dax Shepard]

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

[Lily Padman]

It. I guess.

[Dax Shepard]

I'm sure he has a lot of it.

[Lily Padman]

Okay, what is the Southeast Asian currency? 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 Hawaliders 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 in venture capital capital arm held shares in FTX as well as through his investment in crypto lender Block Fi.

[Dax Shepard]

And he said he would do it again.

[Lily Padman]

Cool. That's that.

[Dax Shepard]

Those are the facts?

[Lily Padman]

Those be the facts.

[Dax Shepard]

Okay.

[Ben McKenzie]

Yeah.

[Dax Shepard]

We trust Ben with many of those facts.

[Lily Padman]

Yeah, he was knowledgeable.

[Dax Shepard]

All right. Love you.

[Lily Padman]

Love you,

[Dax Shepard]

Sam.