Doomed to Fail - Ep 33: Getting rich quick always works: The story of Charles Ponzi

Episode Date: July 24, 2023

We start off this week with the story of the man whose scam was so good they named it after him - the infamous Charles Ponzi. If it’s too good to be true, it’s probably not true unless you can get in and get out really quickly - then you might benefit! Farz also notes that the first “Ponzi Scheme” was actually committed by Sarah Howe in Boston in 1879 - but a Howe Scheme doesn’t have the same ring to it. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpodEmail: [e-mail] Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

In a matter of the people of the state of California, first is Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Okay, we are recording, and then we can carry on with the banter that we had before we were recording, but now it'll be official, and other people can hear the banter as well. That's what they're here for. That's what they're here for the banter. I know. Let me start us. Well, no, you know what?

Let's do banter before we kick things off. So you're in New York. Yes. With husband and children. Husband, children, niece, nephew, no, no nieces. Well, kind of like a cousin who's like a niece, nephews, husband's cousins, husband's aunt and uncle, a whole bunch of family. Super fun. We're having a great time.

That's awesome. Half the conversations are in Spanish. Try my best. It's a delight. What are y'all, what are y'all doing in New York? It's a Juan's mom's birthday, Lily, happy birthday, Lily, today. And we were going to come here anyway just to visit. And then the rest of the family was like, we're coming too.

So I found this awesome Airbnb. We're in Newburgh, New York. So we're actually very close to Hyde Park. Nice. And we're going to go one of these days. And I'm like over the moon excited. So we're close to Hyde Park. And then we got this awesome Airbnb.

And it's just like a big house. And there's an indoor pool, which is super nice. And a hot tub outside. And there's like a pool table and an air hockey table and a ping pong table and a movie room. with like Kleiner's and there's like a bunch of bedrooms and like so half of us are staying in a different house but this house is like the activity house and it's super fun it's awesome it's very cool and we're going to be on the same time zone shortly because i'm in dallas right now i'm leaving in about four hours or something to go to the airport to head to dc and i'll be there for the week

nice good for you well really i mean if you just listened to this you would think that we were like jet setters we've kind of been all over i'm really impressed with us We are jet-setters. Remember our marketing efforts? We're not going to quantify anything. We're just going to go with it. We're always doing cool shit. We're always on cool trips. So yeah. Maybe everybody else is too. That's true. That's true. It's true. It's the summer.

It is nice thing I'm special. I have been looking at a trip up to Massachusetts because for some reason I just have this sudden hankering to go to Nantucket. Okay. I don't know. I don't know. Did you listen to Essex on last podcast on the left? Mm-hmm. It just seems like a very romantic kind of like seafaring place. Is it still like that? I don't know, but I feel like they just like throw lobsters and you walk it down the street

and that sounds awesome. That part's true. I think that part's 100% and like clams. And clams, yeah. I like baked clams but not like themed. I can't do steamed. Yeah. One time my grandma used to make clam chowder and it was really good. And one time she made clam chowder and my dad got sick, so she was she was like, have some more clam chatter. And then he got sick again.

And then they were like, she needs more clam chatter. And they did it like six times where they realized that the clam chatter was making him sick. I'm like how persistent she was. But he was like, you're totally right. I mean more clam chattered if you feel better. She was like, totally.

And they just kept doing it until finally they were like, it could possibly be the clam chatter. That does also sound like a remedy that an Iranian grandmother would prescribe. So I feel that. So let's go ahead and kick things off. welcome to doom to fail. The podcast will recover two historical or one historical event slash true crime events about things that were doomed to fail. I'm Farr's joined here by Taylor.

How are you sleepy, sleepy Taylor? I'm good. I'm confused. It's like I don't even know it's it's 11. So like I would never be awake at seven no eight o'clock in the morning and in my own time but I'm up. I've been up for a while. So I'm good. Three hour three hour differences. You know what it is. It's that time zone difference between California and New York is actually pretty significant. But it's not so significant that people think it's significant. And so it's like, fuck up. But like it actually is a pretty dramatic change. I read a really compelling article one time.

I was an argument for America just having two time zones. Like just east and west, that's it, an hour apart. And I was like, that sounds awesome. But I am, obviously, I'm not in charge and no one will ever make you that. But it would be cool. One day, Taylor. One day, it'll happen. So today we are going to be starting off with the true crime side of the equation, right?

True. Correct. So why don't you tell us what you're drinking? So I have some coffee, and I only could find French vanilla coffee, which is weird. And I don't have any, I just have, so I'm drinking French vanilla coffee, but also a red stripe, which I haven't had in a really long time. Just because I'm on like this weird equilibrium where I had a lot of beers yesterday. So I'm like, beer is coffee, bread eye, time zone, whatever. But as it pertains to my story, I'm drinking to Manhattan.

Do you remember that one time that we went to that restaurant in Los Felas and I had dinner? And they went to that bar that was like the bottom of a pool. And we were like this is not for us. Like we walked in and it felt like you were in a pool that was empty. And Los Feliz. Yeah, because it was connected to that restaurant, the atrium. And it was connected to the atrium. Oh, yeah, yeah.

And we were like, this is way too cool for us. So we walked across the street and drank Manhattan's at the library. Yes. Yes, yes, I didn't remember that. Yeah, that's where Jeff Goldblum does his jazz nights, right? No, this is the thing like kind of next door that has terrible food. It's called something else. But the e-tream is good food.

Is it the place that I kept telling us that we have to go get prime ribs at? And it was never really that good, but it felt really old-school, Hollywoody. No, it's a different place. Let's feel this is the best. It has a bunch of cool restaurants and that's dream. Little Dom. A dream. Anyway, so, yeah, imagine I'm drinking.

in Manhattan because that's going to pertain to my story when I get to it sweet we'll get to yours here in a moment I am drinking a waterloo tropical fruit because I'm just tired I'm just tired I don't want to drink I'm just so exhausted it's just like constant traveling and this is my second time in Dallas and two weeks and it's far yeah it's you know what it's just like the fact that you feel kind of like this homeless person like living out of a suitcase and and it's just not your environment and now my dad's computer here sitting next to me is like constant dinging, so I need to figure out how to shut that off, so it stops interrupting this, which I don't know if I can. But anyways, I'm just going to shut the computer off.

Yeah, you're fine. I can hear you fine. Okay. So I'm just going to drink a waterloo because I want to hydrate. And yeah. I also have water somewhere. Good for you. You're actually drinking a red stripe. That's awesome. Right? How cute are these? They're very, very cute. Okay. So I'm going to get to my story first and foremost. And my story is going to touch on historical and true crime, the themes. So I'm kind of dabbling a little bit in Taylor territory here.

I can't wait for the day that we do the same one. It's going to be the most fun crossover episode because it'll be an unintentional crossover episode. I have no idea what your story is about. But the fact that you mentioned Manhattan and the fact that Oppenheimer's coming out, maybe you think that you're going to do something that has to do with the nuclear weapon. And I have been desperate to try and find a true crimey, component to atomic weapons and I was just having a really hard time with it. I was also thinking last night as I was going to sleep, I was like, we should have done

something about Oppenheimer and Barbie to be in the in the news as I was like drifting off to sleep in like my confusion and fever dream. I did not. It's not Manhattan project. Okay. Well, then we're not covering the same. Well, we'll get to a time and overlap with each other. You just go. So I started researching topics for today's episode and I somehow went down the pathway of thinking about the mafia and I was thinking like that's probably a doom to fell story on the true crime front where two guys maybe got together and then they really let's start a mafia and I thought that might be a good story so I started looking into the Sicilian mafia you know into the American mafia then I lateraled over to the Chicago outfit

thinking maybe Al Capone had a best friend who helped pull him into all this stuff and the problem was that i kept reading into is that none of this stuff was documented right so early mafia stuff is like tied to america and code of silence and so a lot of those old timers never talked so you never knew what their story was what their origination was and so like actually tracing down the roots of the mafia is like kind of impossible but somehow through a weird wormhole i entered into when it had to do with italians in america i ended up on falling to another Italian man who is a really good true prime story. He is the, not the inventor, but he is the person who is most commonly associated with a Ponzi scheme. Today I'm going to be covering

Charles Ponzi. You're, you're with this concept, right? Yeah, I think we talked about Ponzi schemes before. Like we mentioned it. Like someone was running a Ponzi scheme by self that we talked about in the past at some point. Yeah, that was the guy who killed his entire family in celebration where he would just take out loans pay his other loans yeah cool i'm excited i i didn't hear the word until made off yeah yeah exactly that's probably when a lot of us heard it so for those that are unfamiliar with how a Ponzi scheme works it's a classic rob peter to pay paul story where you tell someone that if they give you their money you can generate exorbitant returns through really shrewd investing but really what you're doing is you're taking the money of earlier

investors or later investors and paying off earlier investors and then the cycle continues basically today we know this have a fraud because the name derived from charles ponzi but he was not the originator of the concept so in a nod to feminists all all over the world the first documented ponzi scheme was started by a woman actually we did it ladies this is this is like a really touchy one i'm i'm going to go through it so so let's I'm actually really curious to get your feedback on this. So there's a woman in the 1800s named Sarah Howe living in Boston, Massachusetts. She came up with a concept in 1879 and her target was widowed or single women, usually

like older single women or widowed women. At that time, handling money was really considered like a man's thing. And so she focused on this demographic because she knew they were easy marks. They didn't want to go to the bank. They didn't want to like worry about investing their money. money. And she was like, well, this is an obvious place to go. And what she did was she created this investment vehicle. She coined the lady's deposit. And yeah, like these are ones were super happy to hand over the money. Basically, she was saying that I'm going to get you super high

interest rates on that money. And they didn't want to manage themselves anyways. By the time the fraud was exposed, which only lasted about a year after it started, she had swindled what would be the modern equivalent of $13 million out of these women. But yeah. I mean, yeah. But, but, You know, what I mean. That's sad, but also cool. So she was, so she was caught. She went to jail and we're going to kind of leave the story there. I read this story about Sarah Howe and a magazine called Mel Magazine. And the author is Isabella Cohn. Her title of the article is before Charles Ponzi. There was Sarah Howe, which is a great article to read. And her justification for why it's not called the How scheme now is basically twofold.

One, Sarah's story was actually only known locally. So back then, there was no national publications. And so as a result, it was basically small town news. So it was all within like where she, where, like her specific location, Charles Ponzi didn't come around until like 50 years after this. By that point, there was national syndicated news. And so the entire world, the entire country knew what was going on with Charles Ponzi. And the other thing, Isabel, the author of that Mel Magazine article notes is that there are no crimes that are named

after female perpetrators they're only named after female victims which is kind of interesting to think about back in this time nobody wanted to think a woman could do something so shitty and diabolical and so that's probably a part of it it's it's like i don't know if it's a good thing i'm so conflicted on like should have been the call the house scheme is it better than it wasn't i don't i don't know poundsy's a cooler word but yeah i feel like she should get the credit for it even if the credit's like it's not good credit you know is this sexism to not name it a house scheme possibly i don't know it's a good question so here's the thing here's the thing's interesting about the sarah house story so i didn't mention this earlier she didn't go to jail because she

stole money from investors what she went to jail for was because when she would ask for this investment from these these these investors she also purported that part of that the returns on those investments would be funneled into a nonprofit. She also runs that would help needy women. And that's what she was arrested for, for lying that part of the investment went to this nonprofit. That's fair. So none of these investors who were women who were like widowed women who like were living,

giving her their life savings really saw justice for any of this. Like it was this ancillary thing that is the reason why she went to, anyways, that's, that's the origination story of the concept we now know as a Ponzi scheme, but let's get back to the namesake because his story is kind of unique and interesting in terms of the scale of what he ended up doing. And look, I'm not going to go a lot into the detail of Charles Ponzi because it's kind of boring. Like he's just, he was just an Italian guy who came to America to make it big. And he just was like a small time shitty criminal for the entire time he stepped into this country until his eventual deportation. I'll touch on some highlights from his earlier days in the U.S.

specifically his relationship with a man named Luigi Zeprosi, because that's the most important part of the conversation here to help illustrate how he ended up becoming who he was. And that's really the doomed to fail part is this guy, Luigi, kind of taught him a really shitty lesson that he scaled magnificently. Do you say that with an Italian accent, please? Luigi, Zaporozzi. Oh, God, I'm going to get canceled. That was perfection. I'm ready for cancellation. So Luigi was also in a Italian immigrant. As though, yeah, like I need to say that.

He lived in Montreal and he lived in Montreal and he started a bank called Banko Zorozzi. Charles went to work at this bank as a teller and I think that's basically like under his time with Luigi, he kind of learned how to do things that were very lucrative and also criminal. At that time, Luigi's bank was the new kid on the block and his way of trying to grow the customer was by offering very, very high interest loans, or sorry, high interest rates on bank deposits. I think it was somewhere around 6%, which like that at the time, it was 3% was more typical. I mean, it's crazy now.

It's like you get 0.001%. I was like, that sounds great by money in his bank. That's the only when you think about like institution, like how like institutionally it's harder to make money in America now, like this is a part of it. Like it's like you can literally part of your money on it. That's a higher yield interest than you're getting on your 401k right now, which is like awesome. So Luigi had, was basically using this higher interest on bank deposits to draw more customers in. It was working incredibly, incredibly well.

But at the same time, his bank was also making out, putting out mortgages to people. And a lot of those mortgages were shitty, and they would default. And he was pretty close to insolvency while still continuing to pay a super high interest rate to his customers on their deposits. And the way he was doing this and the way Charles learned about how he was doing this was he was basically just taking money from the new depositors. paying out the old depositors. So he literally, he started the Ponzi scheme. Yeah, that's what that is. He like started the bonds. I'm not going to give him a credit for this because he didn't like do it in as an egregious way. Right. It wasn't as insidious. It was like, oh, I'm trying to get

my business afloat and like offering a deal that you can't refuse because it's not real. Yeah, like he was he was doing it in a way that could have been perceived as legitimate. You didn't have to like, if you paid attention to his business, you'd be like, this is still legitimate. You'd have to go super deep into the accounting. Long story short was like, that all failed. And like, there's a side story. This guy Luigi basically abandoned his entire family

in Montreal and like flood the country with like all of his bank deposits. And like, he just lived. It was like amazing. I really wish I was born in this time. I'd be so successful. And, but at this point, let's go into the concept of what the actual Ponzi scheme was supposed to be.

So I learned a lot about this, um, researching this, which is really interesting. I didn't know this was really a thing. There are things called international reply coupons or IRCs for sure. Of some reason, Taylor, I feel like you would know what these are because you're so crafty. I am crafty, but is it, how is it crafty? I feel like you mail a lot of stuff internationally more than I do. I mean, I have mailed things internationally. Keep going. There you go. So if you mail, if you mail something like a letter internationally and you expect to reply, it was considered to comment courtesy of the time to include an IRC in your letter. This way the recipient can exchange that IRC for stamp in their home country and reply to your letter without having to go buy a stamp themselves. Got it. So it's a redeemable coupon for the value of that stamp. In every country

sets their own price for IRCs and their own rates for international poster stamps. So Charles in 1919 was hit with this idea that there was a substantial drop in the cost of stamps in Italy after World War I. And the difference between an IRC purchased in Italy in the price of a postage stamp in the U.S. was somewhere around four to one. So you could get, so basically, think of it this way. There's, you could exchange four IRCs for one U.S. stamp. An IRC was way less valuable than a US stamp. So in theory, if you go to Italy, you buy a shitload of IRCs, then you bring them to the US. You can trade those in for US stamps, and you get four times a number of stamps that you paid for with the Italian IRC. Does that make sense? Kind of, I believe you. Okay. And so his idea

was to set up a company that goes out, buys all these IRCs, brings them to the US, then exchanges them. So he did a capital to do this because he had to buy a huge quantity of you to be able, I mean, the stamp's not that expensive individually. So you have to do this as a large scale to make it worth your while. And he does what Luigi did at the bank. He offers an insanely high return rates to convince investors to give them the capital he needs. He basically, it was something around like within 45 days of the investment, he would return 50% of that capital back and the process just repeat over and over and over again and this worked he was able to fundraise very very quickly and almost immediately started delivering on his promise on those high high

returns charles did some quick math on so he was just eager to get up and running he had actually worked out the nuances of how to execute on his plan he was just like i need capital how do i get the capital and he started doing this like he almost stumbled into the ponzi It wasn't like Sarah who like was, no, I will literally just go get your money and then just steal it from you and give it to the other. Like, that was not it. He actually thought he had something on his hands here. So he started doing some quick math. His initial pool of investors was about 18 investors.

And when he did the math on this, he realized that he needed 53,000 IRCs just to pay them back. Mm-hmm. At the time he did this in 1990, there was 27,000 IRCs in total in circulation. Right. so they had to like it was impossible yeah yeah it was absolutely because these are government issue you can't just go and tell the government to make more higher seats so the plan at scale was never going to work he realized this pretty early on and that was the 18,000 investors near the end of the scheme he had about 15,000 investors he was bringing about a million dollars

a day in investment capital so there was zero chance this ever could have turned legitimate yeah this at this point the momentum already built people were excited to invest with them early investors were psyched on their returns and everybody was winning and that's kind of the thing about a Ponzi scheme that's kind of fucked up is that it kind of works if you're the first investors right if you get out yeah you can get out but that's the point is like they have all the money to give you so if you're like keep giving me these returns you'll make your money back and you never lose it right I mean that's kind of the the sad thing about the stuff like this and The Madoff scheme is that a lot of those early people, like, they're not criminals. They, they just thought foolishly that they were able to get these returns. And they made out like bandits. Like if, so realistically, if you find yourself like with a chance to invest in a Ponzi scheme, just figure out how long. Yeah, just forgot how long. Dude, I would do it.

Taylor, you wouldn't, I would totally do that. I know. If I was like the, if I believe the guy was charismatic enough to keep swindling more people, I would definitely, you're part of a Ponzi. scheme, the first tranche or maybe the second tranche of it. But like, it's the ones at the end. That's when the house of card falls down and then you lose everything. Or if you're like, oh, I'm going to, or if you're like, I'm going to double down and like, keep my money in there because it's going so well, you know, then it's because it's

like worse and worse for you. And that's actually what ended up happening was a lot of these people, when they would get paid out, those returns would go back into the Ponzi scheme. What's interesting is it's worth noting that because these are securities being exchange there's there's track record of what is how the money is actually flowing and it was clear that Ponzi himself never invested despite making millions and millions and millions of dollars he never put his own money in there so like there's some clues that are popping up around here that like things weren't exactly as they seemed and by this point Charles is seemingly loaded and he wisely

uses some of this money to buy other businesses that he can divert profits back into his process and just slow down the news from tiny because that's the problem is like you'll eventually run out of money. Right. There's not an infinite pool of money. The money isn't real. It is real, but like you don't have all the money you think you say you have. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like it's in in the middle of all this, people are looking around, people are siffing around and there's some people who are freaking out and starting to do withdrawals. There was a story about at one point you ended up to do $2 million of withdrawals all in one sitting. It was, it was the facade, was cracking on the Ponzi scheme. Did you watch the Madoff documentary? Yes. It's so good.

You can talk about it later. I just want to talk about that one dude from Europe who got all the European monarchy people in it and like ended up dying by suicide in his office. Yeah, he like slid his wrist over a garbage can because he didn't want to bother anyone. Yeah. Yeah. That's terrible. It was so sad. I forgot who played him, but he was, if you watched the HBO master of, oh my God.

I forgot what it was, but Robert De Niro plays Bernie. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's so good. Like, that's one of those ones that I would, like, that's like Haifa, where I'll rewatch it, like on a regular basis. It's so good. I should watch it again. I don't know if I've seen it or watched it for the first time. Yeah.

So going back to Charles, his downfall basically started about a year after all this began. So it was a pretty quick turnaround time. It was all because journalists started kind of poking around and asking questions because all of these, you know, well-off people are like ramble to this guy. of like what's going on with this and how is it possibly able to generate returns that are so high. He's the one who did the math on how many IRCs are in circulation. He talked to the post office and was like, we don't, there's not like a run on RRCs. Like there's nothing has changed. Like in the past year or two years, like nothing changed. Yeah, exactly. Like there's no

mass rush to acquire them. Like it's all it's all still the same. This guy did a he's with the post. He He did calculations on how many IRCs would be required for this scheme to be working. And he did the calculation determining that it was going to be about 160 million had to be in circulation for this to work. And how many were they? You said like 27,000. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Like he would have had to, he would have had to have like steamerships filled with just

IRCs, moving across the Atlantic from Italy to the US. And also think about it, like these are not high cost items. like you're doing a one to one exchange the overhead so yeah there was a four to one ratio of value but to realize it would cost so much money just to get it over here exchange it then you got to turn around and fence that right he's not doing any of that like he's not doing any of that physical stuff yeah exactly exactly yeah so this article gets published and more and more state criminal and banking authorities started taking notice of charles and what he was doing it by at this point new investments were not coming in so by all accounts he had liquidated essentially

every asset he had to be able to kind of continue paying the returns so that so that people don't withdraw their cash the more you withdraw the further in the hole you are at that point right and by this point Charles was essentially ripping his hair I was like there is no way to continue this on at this point a little over a month after the this was set in motion through that publication Charles basically just surrenders to authorities and was like the jig is so up. It was about he was about $7 million in debt at this point. But all accounts, he took down a number of banks in the region because he was their primary depositor. Because he would take all these, all these investment sources and just shuffle them around so nobody could really trace where this deposit was going versus that deposit.

Then he goes to another bank and does a withdrawal for that to pay that investor off. And so he took down. Yeah. It's like before banks are regulated because you're like, you can just like have a bank, right? Basically. Yeah. He was actually a president of at least one, maybe other banks because he was the largest depositor in, in the region. Oh, my God.

So he surrenders himself to authority. He was like, the jig is up. I'm about to get jump beat to death by all these people who want their money back, which I can't give them. I'm actually safer in prison anyways. In total, about $207 million. dollars an investor money was lost that's in today's money so it was still substantial he would serve three and a half years in federal prison before being indicted on state criminal charges for which he would also be convicted in sentence to seven to nine years three years into his sentence he was

released because he was released on bail to go face charges elsewhere and then immediately jump bail and tried to flee back to italy he was caught like pretty much immediately and sent back to state prison for another nine years. That's kind of where his story would end. He'd get immediately deported after being released from state prison back to Italy. And then he would move on to work in Brazil as a translator and basically just died, broke and penniless in Rio de Janeiro in 1949. So like none of what he thought was going to happen was realized. I didn't mention this. He was also married. She was not part of the doom to fell part of the story because she thought he was Let's wait a bit.

Right. If he's able to convince, like, millionaires and like Harvard, MIT people in Boston, like, why would his wife think anything else, right? I don't know. I'm suspicious of what's, what's, what's, what he made off his wife's name? Ruth. Ruth. I don't know about Ruth.

I don't believe that Ruth didn't know what was going on. I do. I do. You do? I don't know. I think she did too good to be true. She should have thought a little farther, a little harder. I think it.

So you haven't, you have not seen the HBO thing. No, is it Michelle Pfeiffer? It is Michelle Pfeiffer. Okay. But like, but the reason I think when you look at it like, when you're like of that stature, you know, like, because he was like the head of the, what was he ahead of the Dow Jones or so? Like he was like. Yeah, it's crazy.

He was like like, like, NASA or something. Yeah. Yeah. Like he was like in it. And you look at the lives of the women who marry into, into people like that. and it seems like they're just like super far it's like their job is to socialize and look rich like their job is not to care about or taxes being paid or like i don't know it feels like it's almost sort of a career just your job is literally just to be rich that's it yeah

but bernie made office i think that was so this one is 207 million by today's money that was 68 billion by comparison holy shit yeah i mean it almost it it it was a very significant and bringing down the economy in 2008. So he was incredibly consensual. Is he still alive? I feel like I heard he died. No, he died. He died.

Yeah, wow, he died two years ago. But what a sad story, man. What a sad story. I mean... Both of his kids died, like, one died of cancer, one died by suicide, and like, it was awful. Because his sons were like, we didn't know, and you're like, I don't know.

I don't believe. Yeah, I think the sons... It was like dope sons. Like, what? Were they just dopes? I don't get it. And that's the thing, look at like, Ruth and you're like, man, like she, um, the Wizard of Lies, that's the

HBO special. It's incredible, but, um, but it's like, man, can you imagine that, like being that woman where it's like your kids are all dead, your husband's dead in the jail, like your names. It's just like, what a horrible way. You would assume the back half of life would be somewhat better than the front half. And in her case, it was just like, so not. Yeah. Hey, she has a shit, they had a home in Nantucket. Oh, you should go visit it dude that is crazy that that is a huge house there's multiple houses with a giant pool and it's literally like a stone's throw from the water that thing had to be like a 20 million dollar house oh yeah seven is seven well it says i'm at mark made off 700 million dollar summer home in

and tuck it maybe but they maybe they had another one you just said 700 million seven million oh seven million wow the made off bought it in two thousand 8 for 6.5 million it is red on the water that does seem nice god it's so bougie i love that ship i'll never be able to have it but you know i can admire it you can dream i can dream um so taylor that is my story uh so if you ever meet someone who is offering something that is too good to be true uh find out how long they've been doing it and if they're just getting started uh dive right in jump in yeah and then double your money and get out that's the problem because you're going to get excited and you're going to be like, oh, no, I'm getting

such for your returns on this and you're going to forget. You're going to forget. And it's fake. So don't let it, don't cloud your judgment when you get the first round of money and be like, oh, I can do it again. So you don't want to be on the news. From 1919 to 2008, so many Ponzi schemes and nobody learns that if it's too good to be true. It's not true. It's not true. It's like consistently. It is always the case. It'll happen again. It'll happen again. We just had NFTs.

I got into a debate with someone recently, Taylor. Yeah, go ahead. And it was, so I met somebody who was on the team that created ChatGBTGBT. And I sat there, like basically mansplaining to her how AI is just like NFTs and like blockchain. and how AI works as a concept, and she was like, so everything you said about the technical underpinnings of AI is wrong. She's actually how it works. And I was like, you know, man, this is why I should just like stop expressing my opinions to people. Not the person who's on the team of created chat chviti.

That makes no sense. That's so funny. I'm so glad that she told you you you were wrong. And I'm sure she's like telling someone right now. now. Like, some dude tried to mansplain and I created ShudgyPT. Did you at least subscribe her to our podcast on her phone? No, I was so humbled by the conversation and I was like, I lost all

confidence. Oh, she's my hero. That's amazing. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that. That's awesome. One's cousin yesterday, she has an Android phone when she listens to a podcast on Spotify, so I did subscribe her to our podcast. And then she had to listen to an episode before I let her rate it. So we put it on silent and the ones that played

all the way through that her rate is five stars. So that's exactly how you do it. She did a great job. I noticed the bump. I noticed the bump in our stats. Love it. I love it. Well, that's awesome. That is a crazy. It's a crazy story that both the Ponzi and the Madoff and the Howe, like just people at some point you're like, they have to just like, I think, well, one thing from the Madoff documentary that I watched, like you're like, did he have good intentions ever, you know? Like, it sounds like how did not because she was stealing from widows yeah yeah that was bad have good intentions like not he had a he had a plan it just wasn't a right it was executable it's like when we came up with

our plan of selling mummoos and making the fashion concepts i mean we had a plan so we started collecting investor capital we weren't being like totally nefarious we just had no way to execute on it because i don't know where you get moos from yeah i don't know where we get anything from. Yeah. Amazon. Sell them for more money. That's what I've seen. I mean, also, this is not related to any of this, but for everyone's knowledge, I've like found these dresses on Instagram and they were like $100. So I took a picture of them, like a screenshot them, and then reverse image search them on Google. And I found them on Amazon for like 20 bucks. People are just like buying them and selling them at like other stores, which obviously they're doing

that, but you can now do that to find where things are coming from. So, so yeah, that's what this was. It's arbitrage. That's the term for it. It's like you just take something and then turn it around, flip it, and then collect the margin or the profit off of it. I do have good ideas. I was like, you want to get involved in this dress selling business that I'm about to get into? I mean, how much is the initial investment?

A million dollars. Well, if you give me 50% of my money within the first 45 days around then. Uh-huh. Okay, I'll work on it. I'll work on my business plan. I'll keep you posted. Cool. Well, thank you Fars. That was super fun. I have a listener mail for today or for this one and the next one. So wait, well quick, before you go into that, if folks think that it's, if folks have opinions on whether it's sexist or not sexist to not name crimes after women, I would love to hear that feedback at doomed to feldpod at gmail.com.

I like it. Well, what? After women who are the victims. right oh right but not after the after the perpetrators yeah got it let us know let us know okay me i mean that's got a lot of emails yeah yeah nice okay nice you've gotten some great emails with some great suggestions for things um but for this episode um our friend henry emailed us to tell us about a hitchhiking story um i think i got another hitchhiking story too but i will share that one later but henry he said um he is from the UK and he who i And he lives in Puerto Rale, and I told you he listened, which is super fun. What did he say?

I can't get mad it. He went hitchhiking 20 years ago from France to Morocco, which is amazing. He didn't get murdered. His first ride was a ferry captain who took him all the way from Sherborg to Bordeaux, seven hours, and only once on his whole trip did a monk try to touch his leg. So only one near assault, but he survived and had a great time. He did say that he would not hitchhike in the UK or the U.S. Because there's too many weirdos.

Wait, Johnny. Or Australia. I'm going to add that in there. Oh, your call. Yeah. But thank you, Henry. Super fun to hear from you. I saw Henry when I was in Lisbon last year and he came down with COVID right when I got there.

And so we would just like hang out together, but he was wearing a mask and we'd have to stand like 10 feet away. And I got COVID the day I landed in the US. So I'm pretty sure I gave everybody on the plane COVID and it probably originated from Henry. So we still wear masks on planes, but the only ones, but I don't want to get like the flu or the cold from me. the flu or the colds from these weirdos either. I mean, it kind of makes sense to wear masks like in Asian countries, like where they wear masks like everywhere. It's like, yeah, but also, well, you know what?

I actually talk myself out of that because it's probably better for your immune system to get mass exposure to shit and then learn how to overcome it. But remember before COVID, you would be like, oh, I'm going to fly for Thanksgiving, but I'm definitely going to get sick because I always do. You could just not do that by wearing a mask. I don't know. I never got sick. I'm very strong. You just told me you had COVID. You were the first person I knew who had COVID.

Do you remember you? Yeah, you remember you were like, I feel fucking terrible and you were like dying your apartment on the floor and I was like you need to call the doctor and I tried to get you the online appointment So we don't know so we don't know if I was patient zero We don't know if I was patient zero, but I was probably like seven Yeah, because like I got it in I got it so early so early, but you were so sick. Yeah, that was one that was the worst sick I've ever rid of my life for sure. Yeah Yeah, yeah So we'll go ahead and cut this off and through the magic and power of editing

Y'all will not know that we are going to restart the conversation in two seconds. Find us a dood. Yeah. Give yourself a pod. All the socials. Thanks all. Thanks. Thanks.