The Gargle - Cryptocurrency Collector's Edition! (Part 1)

Episode Date: October 14, 2021

Josh Gondelman and Alison Spittle join host Alice Fraser for part 1 of a special cryptocurrency-themed episode of The Gargle, the weekly topical comedy podcast from The Bugle - with no politics!🤔 What even is cryptocurrency?💰 History of money🤑 Current cryptocurrency storiesCome back next week for part 2 for Josh and Alison's reviews, crypto utopias and crypto scams!This is a show from The Bugle. Follow us on Twitter.This episode was produced by Ped Hunter and Chris Skinner. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's producer Chris from The Bugle here. Did you know that I have a new series of my podcast, Richie Firth Travel Hacker, out now? It's the show where Richie Firth and I talk about how to make travel better in our very special way. In this series, we discuss line bikes, Teslas, the London overground, and a whole bunch of other random stuff that possibly involves wheels

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Everywhere. Acast.com. This is a podcast from The Bugle. La la la la la la. Uh, uh, uh. Okay, cool. Sorry. Oi, good.

Yeah, don't cut that bit off. Can I have that, please? Yeah, you can have it if you want. A wise man once said, a wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart. And that person was then subsequently arrested for stuffing money into people's heads. Welcome to The Gargle, the sonic glossy magazine to the Bugle's audio newspaper for a visual world.

I am your host, Alice Fraser, and your guest editors for this week's special edition of The Gargle are Josh Gondelman. Hello. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming and allison spittle welcome back hello hello hello it is a pleasure to be here with this combination of people lovely we're going to have a look at our front cover which this week is just a pile of money with a pair of feet coming out of it but we're not sure who's just dived in Scrooge McDuck style. The mystery is on the inside. And the satirical cartoon this week is Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg

and Elon Musk walking into a bar. And then there's a speech bubble from the bartender that says, oh my, the average net wealth of all 300 other people in this bar has suddenly become $800,000 each. This week's Special Collectors edition is a cryptocurrency edition. It's all about money and mainly

imaginary money. We'll start with a history of money as we flip into the magazine. The Mesopotamian shekel is the first known form of currency other than dick. I'm pretty sure dick picks for the first form of currency because only consistent inflation for the last 5 000 years would explain how ubiquitous and how worthless they are now literally the more

dick pics you bring to the table the less you can buy with them i mean think about it how many dick pics would it take to buy a loaf of bread from you your bread shop imagine it someone shows up with a wheelbarrow full of dick pics. How much bread do you give them? Something, something, self-raising flour. I was genuinely trying to visualize being a baker, and I was like, seven. I think seven. At that point, it ceases to be currency and is almost a threat, right?

It's just like, all right, take your dick and go home. Have the bread. Well, this is the problem the inherent problem of so much cryptocurrency right now is that there's not much you can spend these imaginary coins on other than black market drugs and russian hitmen so i'm interested to see uh what the future of of money holds so this is our cryptocurrency edition and i just want to get from our two wonderful guest editors. Alison Spittel, what do you define cryptocurrency as? What do I define cryptocurrency as? It's a type of currency that a man would talk to me about, and then I would walk away from it. Sorry. Cryptocurrency is...

Cryptocurrency, I think i've said this before in this podcast but it is like the live laugh love uh for men you know uh cryptocurrency i feel it's a i feel it's a very like a masculine male vibe off it and therefore i've ignored it for a long time but uh yeah that's how I would describe cryptocurrency yeah something that men talk about and I glaze over when I think about it but it's imaginary money yeah isn't it yeah Josh Donovan how do you define cryptocurrency so this has changed over time for me because cryptocurrency is kind of like a unique money that only some people can access and that others can't access right like it's specific identity so until i was like 31

to me that was any money yeah but it is it's kind it's kind of a technologically encoded currency that you just kind of have and it gains or loses value based on whims and you don't spend it. To me, it's like the stock market, if like the Matrix had its own stock market, is what I feel like. For me, I think cryptocurrency is the idea that money, real money nowadays, is so integrated with like corruptible systems of control and regulation that are within the fist of an untitled few who own it all and won't share it out.

And crypto converts are people who want that, but they're the ones in charge. Right. It's like, what if we replicated our current financial system, but on your phone and with 11 guys from reddit at the top i feel kind of bad about how i described cryptocurrency earlier and i was just

is this when i don't know enough about a subject i just attack men en masse and that's that's my you're not wrong allison spittle the problem is really the fact that Bitcoin has worked so well and has now accrued this kind of value was always a gamble. So while some of the people who have been made wealthy by Bitcoin were smart, forward thinking tech heads who are really interested in the ways in which the technology could have potential for the future, most other people who bought Bitcoin were just people who'd been carpet bagged by some tech bro podcaster high on hair growth supplements into throwing their money into a badly understood black hole that just happened to work out for them. And now they think they're smart. What we need is gender parity, right? We need to promote gender parity in cryptocurrency.

So we need kind of like a lean in girl boss women can be as horrible as men uh so i propose and this might not be popular politically correct we have bitch coin the cryptocurrency for sheos amazing amazing it's just like for people who are like, I think women should be able to destroy the economy at the same level men do. That's what we need. So we need to kind of rebrand our cryptocurrency. Yes, the queen. I am a girl boss, but the two last S's in boss are both dollar signs. Yeah.

That's exactly right. It's like when you see those AK-47s that are like in pink camouflage and you're like good for them who did they make that for you know yes yes yes yes very nfl breast cancer awareness pink uniforms it's like okay but what about a traumatic brain injury awareness no you know recently jake paul came forward as a champion of uh female pay parity in boxing and uh i just want to know if i see women punching each other in the face that they're getting paid as much as men who punch each other in the face i mean that does sound like it's the first step on his long game to getting to fight a woman right that's like we're just like hey

equal pay and then it's like well if we're getting paid the same we're doing the same job let me hit a woman i'm not saying that that's always true in athletics i'm just saying that's jake paul's vibe well yeah look at least uh he's not like flo Floyd Mayweather who wants them to do it for free. Sure, recreationally, yeah. That's true. At least equal pay. That's so bleak, Alice.

Well, I'm about to launch my cryptocurrency, which is called Punchcard, and it's every time you get punched in the face, you accrue value. Thank you. in the face you accrue value. ACAST powers the world's best podcasts. Here's a show that we recommend. Every sport has

their big, juicy controversy. Boxing has the Mike Tyson ear bite. Cycling has Lance Armstrong. Baseball has its steroid era. Curling has Broomgate. It's a story of broken relationships, houses divided, corporate rivalry, and a performance enhancing broom. It was a year I'd like to forget. Broomgate, available now. Broomgate. Available now. Now it's time for your second section, which is the historic money story.

Josh Gondelman, you know about money and history. Can you tell us a bit more? Of course. So the best thing about money is getting stuff on sale. But the second best thing about money is obviously heists. Like if you steal $50 from a random person on the street, I'm going to go, that's not very nice. They probably wanted that for pizza or an extra phone charger or something. But if you steal $500,000 from a bank, I'm like, that rules and you should get to keep it. I think that's the rule. That's the rule now.

The biggest bank heist of all time was called the Dunbar Armored Robbery. Robbers stole $18.9 million from a bank in Los Angeles in 1997. And if you want to put that in today's terms, $18.9 million is enough to fund all 600 movies Nicolas Cage has made since 1997. The criminals got caught because one of them paid a real estate broker with a stack of cash bound with one of the original currency straps that traced them back to the scene of the crime. Although the broker's suspicion was probably aroused when they paid for a home in a stack of cash. That's like the third most suspicious way to pay for something. Number two, pulling the money out of a briefcase handcuffed to your wrist. And number one, loose fistful of bills

caked with blood and cocaine. And I do think moving into the present, crypto solves this problem because it's a currency you can't really use to pay for anything. So you'll never get caught spending the money from a crypto heist. Honestly, it's ingenious.

That's a beautiful story and one that i very much enjoy allison have you got an equally excellent historical piece of crypto slash money history well this is this is a piece of irish history there's a guy called sean quinn who once was one of ireland's richest men. And due to the financial downturn in the late 2010s, he brought down a whole bank, Alice, right? But he brought down a whole bank. But they say, right, around where he is from, his village, they say that his whole downfall was due to a fairy's revenge, right? He built, and I believe it, he built a hotel

in his local town, and he had to, there was a megalithic tomb in the middle of this field that he was going to build this hotel on, and the locals warned him, do not move that, do not touch that, Sean. You know, you may be able to bring a whole cement factory and a whole economy to this town, but

you can't mess with the fairies. So he moved the megalithic tomb to make way for his luxury hotel. And it's like the plot of a Disney film, right? And then people are convinced that the whole late 2000s financial downturn is due to Sean Quinn pissing off those fairies. And I believe them. I believe them because I once tried to film a documentary around a fairy fort and all of the equipment turned off. Like, I do believe in that stuff.

You know, once my friend pissed on a fairy fort by accident and she was, like, bereft. Like, she just thought it was a field. But a fairy fort is like, it's a normal irish field but it has like uh stones in like a circle so if it looks like it's too nice to piss in don't piss in it that's my number one rule of going to ireland that's my rule most places i mean what's the mythology then if you piss in a fairy fort does your piss come back like a hundred years later but it hasn't aged a day but it comes back a day later and it has aged a hundred years like which way around

i i think i think that the the mythology is that the fairies the fairies are quite like um you know you know there's been like some trouble in ireland generally and there's been a few wars the first big war between was between humans and fairies and they decided that they were gonna split Ireland in two and the humans thought they were being clever by saying we'll have above ground and you can have below ground and then the fairies got pissed that they had got into this deal and now they are getting revenge by destroying whole economies in Ireland. Especially, I think like 4.7 billion for moving a megalithic tomb is a bad deal.

And the Brits thought they were so original with their idea of splitting Ireland in two. I know! This is such an, I don't mean this offensively, I'm dazzled by this story. It's such like a wonderful, mythic Irish story. Like, I wish in the States we had stuff like that where our financial collapses are just like a bunch of banks gave out subprime mortgage loans. Like, I wish it were fairies. mortgage loans like i wish it were fairies yeah it's like it's kind of funny because like i get weirdly offended by when murder she wrote does an irish special and i'm like that's not our country

at all and then i'm going fairies brought the financial crisis you know i can You deserve it both ways. I know. It's like, I do. That is all the time we have for our history of money section. Because time is money. And now it's time for your ads. Your ad section now because open brackets, insert your own joke about capitalism here or email me for premium access to this punchline. Close brackets. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by cryptocurrency investment advice.

For those of you planning to use your imaginary money to buy a super yacht, remember, as of the time of this broadcast, 14.9 super yachts will buy you one Bitcoin or 8,400 Dogecoins, which is the equivalent of one whole episode of The Gargle. Earlier this year, Sotheby's has decided to sell some NFTs, lending them legitimacy just as everyone else decided they were garbage. They teamed up with an anonymous artist called Pack. Buyers were able to purchase as many copies as they wanted of a Pack work,

which featured a single silvery geometric cube for $500 each. Now, on sale, the tears each purchaser spent on realising they had just wasted $500 on an imaginary piece of boring art. Like it could have been anything. Literally, it's imaginary. The sky's the limit. The limit is your imagination and you imagined a f***ing cube. All of those tears add up to about half a glass of water.

Hey! I didn't think we'd get it for a second time, but I was like, yes. This is our current money section. Things people are doing with cryptocurrency right now. Alison Spittel, what are people doing with cryptocurrency right now that is spinning your dial? What I want to talk to you about is now, you know, the way we watched the Olympics earlier this year, and there was a 12 year old girl that could skateboard and it made us reassess our life. And like what we've done. There is a kid who's made way there until I check because I want to get the way there. There's a kid, he's a 12 year old from London. His name's name's benjamin ahmed he's made 290 000 pounds during his school holidays uh of nfts so he's made these uh things called weird whales which is like uh he's made these little pictures

and there's whales in different situations they're very pixelated i'll be honest with you alice i've seen them they're not they're not worth 290 000 quid i'm sorry benjamin like i'm happy for you uh but also no i don't understand uh who is buying these weird whales but yeah he's made 290 000 quid uh in his school holidays i when i was a kid genuinely this was my it was my it was my first business i was told by my mom that i was very good at massages and i had a massage business when i was 11 years old i used to massage my friend's dad like it was perfectly fine it was over the t-shirt and like it was in a room with about 600 people so i you know there's, there's a lot of stuff that I have to go to a psychiatrist about, but not that. That is perfectly fine.

But yeah, so this kid is making NFTs. I used to massage people. You know, we all got to hustle in our own way. And I love it because as well, I think he's like, he's aware. He's very self-aware as a kid. He's going, you know, not everyone could do NFTs.

And of course, my father has been teaching me how to code since i was a young kid so i've and i've got a lot of advice off other people that are involved in nfts so i believe this kid like has fully kind of got seen what's happened before and uh it's deciding not to get burned with it it's a yeah it's a great story good luck for you, Benjamin. Benjamin. And Josh Gondelman, what are people doing with cryptocurrency that's making you excited right now? Oh, gosh. Well, first of all,

I think that's a wonderful story. I think I would pay 200, whatever, $1,000 for a child's art just because it comes in a way you don't have to put on your refrigerator, right? Like an NFT, you can't just display like that and it's worth the money because it's like yeah oh yeah your ugly whales are uh they're

they're on the blockchain why of course that's why we're not putting them up on the wall oh my god josh this is genius i am going to do this to my child when they bring home a piece of art i'll say this is so good i'm gonna buy an nft i'm it. I'm going to make an NFT of it, yep. Stick it in the bin and keep the NFT forever. That's the new wave of parenting. Don't get me wrong. I love the idea of NFTs. It's potentially incredible technology with implications for copyright and for the future

and for the economy. But so many of the uses of it are so f***ing dumb. It is genuinely beyond the capacity of the human mind to encompass how dumb they are. Well, that is a perfect transition into the story that I'd like to talk about. Because the original Doge meme, right? The Shiba Inu that looks kind of confused and there's text around it. That meme, an NFT of that meme sold for $4 million. But the good news is you don't have to care. The other good news is that you can buy a fraction of a stake in the original meme for less than a dollar. So finally, for less than $1, you can get nothing.

We've now figured out how to divide by zero. This is a mathematical blockbuster is what this is. And you don't even have to buy NFTs. That's what's great about them, right? They exist and people are spending all this money, but you don't have to buy them. I just tell people I own NFTs and it's not impressive, but it does end a lot of awkward conversations where people go, what have you been doing? I've been getting really into spending all my money on blockchain art and they go no further questions paying for nfts is such rich person shit that's what gets me it's like hey i spent four million dollars on the idea of a thing that isn't good but was already free.

I'm all in. Well, I desperately want to break into the abstract NFT market and find out if the look on his face really was priceless. Well, abstract NFTs are perfect because I think the concept isn't just abstract art made as an NFT. It's just abstract coding, right? So just lines of code that don't actually make sense. But it's about the feeling and the impression they give you.

I would want that as an NFT. How much would you pay to imagine that you own the idea of hope? How much would I pay for hope? I don't know. How much do antidepressants cost? How many dick pics can I pay for hope I don't know like how much do antidepressants cost how many dick pics can I get with hope like that's what I want to know similarly every

dick pic you see that you don't ask for you lose a little hope ah ha ha ha yeah so sorry to cut things short but Josh and Allison brought so much crypto goodness to this recording that we've had to split it in two. And of course, splitting it in two makes it even stronger, like homeopathy. So come back and join us next week for reviews, crypto utopias and crypto scams. Thank you for listening to part one of this Cryptocurrency Collector's Edition of The Gurgle.

I'm Alice Fraser. Find me online at at alliterative on Twitter and Instagram. That's A-L-I-T-E-R-A-T-I-V-E. Or support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. That's a one-stop shop for all of my stand-up specials, podcasts, blogs, and my weekly Tea with Alice salons. This is a Bugle podcast, an Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner.

And I'll talk to you again next week. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle, including The Bugle, The Last Post, Tiny Revolutions, and The Gargle, wherever you find your podcasts.