TRASHFUTURE - Brian’s Song feat. Srsly Wrong

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

The Srsly Wrong boys join Riley, Alice, and Hussein for a watch and review of Coinbase: A Founder’s Story - a movie where the ending title cards about crypto eating shit were definitely not hastily added moments before release. Watch the first episode of PAPA AND BOY on Youtube here! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcilVLtY7zk *AUSTRALIA ALERT* Brisbane and Melbourne are sold out, but there are tickets available for shows in Sydney: https://musicboozeco.oztix.com.au/outlet/event/3213de46-cef7-49c4-abcb-c9bdf4bcb61f and Canberra: https://au.patronbase.com/_StreetTheatre/Productions/TFLP/Performances *BRITAINOLOGY ALERT* We’ve added a live show in Melbourne on the 19th of November in which Nate and Milo will present Britainology! Get tickets here: https://tccinc.sales.ticketsearch.com/sales/salesevent/79853 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this free episode of TF. It is me, Riley, and I'm joined in studio by Hussain. Hussain, how's it going? I was made to do this. I'm very mad that you made me do this. I now have a day job, which means that I only get a certain period of time off, and I enjoy that time off. I go for a walk, I go see the birds. Today, I had to do this thing that we're going to talk about, and I'm still really pissed about it. You had to watch a good movie is what you mean. You had to watch a great movie that you loved. Well, that's...

No, you're a number two, Riley. I'm also very mad at you. I'm on Riley's side. I just want to thank you for making me watch this. I had a great time. It's Stockholm syndrome. What is it, Ted? Within the first minutes of the episode. Look, I know. I know when you go on other people's shows, you sort of have to give them politeness every time, but you don't have... In this particular instance, you really don't have to. Yeah, the thing is, Riley, he's on some dark triad shit, right? He loves to torment our guests with sadistically things he's found. He does this to Nish Kumar, too. In fact, we're going to do that again next episode we record. He just makes him read or be subjected to

the worst books he can find. He's just done it with a whole new medium now. That's right. It's myself. Trapped with me in the puzzle box are, as I said, Hussein, as you heard, Alice, and very excited for the first time ever. We are very excited to have Aaron and Sean from the Seriously Wrong podcast, and now the creators of Papa and Boy on Mainz TV. How's it going, guys? Doing well. Thanks for having us on. Yeah, it's going pretty good. I would say that I enjoyed watching the documentary, but in a twisted kind of way. Sean watched it twice. You come out of it thinking, like, crime is funny, you know?

There's something going on in this movie, though. There's something really going on here that needs to be unpacked through repeat viewings, I think. I don't agree with repeat viewings. To me, it's like radiation. I've had my lifetime dose of this movie, but it did end up being more important to talk about than I thought it would be. That's right. You may be wondering, if you haven't read the description or title of this episode, if it autoplayed in your ears, maybe you haven't looked at it, what movie are they talking about? The movie we're talking about is called Coin, a Founder's Story about the creation of Coinbase, the large cryptocurrency exchange. I remember them coming up in some of our news

segments for entirely positive reasons. Yeah, absolutely. A show, a company that we thought was great. It's like one of those promotional reels for a newly urban planned city that immediately decayed. It's like a city on the up, with a big thumbs up kind of thing. The movie actually came out after it decayed, and they just didn't mention that at all. Yeah. This is like the movie that they make in day two of Neon being a going concern. It gets released on day five of Neon being a going concern. I guess we should just say this up front. This movie ends with the funniest set of title cards I've ever seen, which is the whole point of the movie is like boundless optimism. Then it ends with, and then crypto crashed again, wiped

something like a billion dollars off the value of this company, and they had to lay off a bunch of their stuff. Yeah, but it's still being used by over 100 million people who definitely are still active on crypto, for sure. They are the modern day Mojahedin. And China banned it, and then we raised money using it for Ukraine. The end. Kind of coming around on China because of this. So, I mean, I have a lot to think about about this movie. I went into it being like, all right, this is going to be just like a puff piece made that like we're like, clearly the founder of this company must have hired a director who did, I don't know, just pulling some random stuff out of

the out of the air, a bunch of commercials, and then a puff piece for Google to do a puff piece about like how he's cool and regular. Basically, the first thing you should know about this guy who we're mostly following, his name is Brian Armstrong, and he looks like some kind of defective fuckbot. He looks like someone tried to like make an Android Agent 47 and then just got really bored and gave it anxiety as a joke. It's kind of like the midway, the midpoint of the Benjamin Buttoning. Yeah. Like when you sort of reach your sort of awkward 30s, 40s stages. For a man who is entirely bald, it's weird to call him alarmingly bald because you think all of the alarm has already happened, but you'd be wrong about that. It still feels precipitous. I just want to turn, I think,

to our guests. Just for a little bit of like a summary, how did you feel about this film? You said there was some stuff you had to unpack before we delve into pulling in a park, going scene by scene, thinking about the characters and motivations, making choices. That's right. What do you think needs to be, is the most interesting thing to pull out of it? Well, I think it's a heartwarming story of an easily persuaded dupe who became a multi-billionaire against all odds despite having no good ideas because he hit the ground floor with a speculative bubble. And from the start of the movie, it's sort of like, why am I watching this guy? It almost feels like a movie within a movie. It's like, who is this guy and why am I watching him? And it's sort of like

he's trying to be relatable, but he's also being put up on this pedestal as this incredible genius, but it's not clear what he did. And it's a movie, I guess, about economic freedom and money at the speed of email, which is something I think we can all get behind. He says the line money at the speed of email about 50 times in this movie. It's never been my issue with money. I think, besides all the Bitcoin propaganda, one of the main things I felt coming out of the end of this movie was just sad for all these people who seem like they genuinely want to make the world a better place. A lot of the people who are talking him up or talking up how awesome Bitcoin is going to be, and I don't know how serious they all are, but some of them felt serious to me. And it just feels

like all this wasted energy being put into this system that is clearly not better than the system we currently have, which is already not good. But I don't know. It makes me sad to see people who seem like they genuinely want to make the world a better place. I'm not necessarily talking about Brian, like maybe he does. I don't know. I have suspicion for tech CEOs on principle, but a lot of the more lower down kind of lower rung of people they're interviewing and stuff, there's this one group scene where they're all sitting around talking about how Bitcoin is going to make the financial system more equal for everyone in this. I'm like, ah, that energy could be put somewhere better. There's a bunch of people who are talking about international human rights,

and they're like, well, this would be better if we applied Bitcoin to it. You can fund a resistance movement with Bitcoin. And I'm just looking at this. I'm just putting my head in my hands, like, yeah, okay. Bitcoin is a human rights tool. Sure, it is. That's what really strikes me about the crypto thing. One of the reasons I keep coming back to it is that I think there is a kind of, it's sort of a trap for stem people who want to think that they can engineer a solution to social problems without considering anything social. The crux of this movie, I would say, is when they talk to one of the like 50 guys, they get to hype Bitcoin, who says, well, the thing about Bitcoin, the reason why it's so cool and why it's the future and why it's transformative

is because you don't have to trust anyone. And I'm immediately like, yeah, I see why all these sort of like isolated weird nerds like it. But the reason why you don't have to trust anyone is because it's just done on technology. And the technology doesn't have any motives other than checking that the numbers match. The technology is neutral. So therefore, you don't have any personal motives, you have any personal interactions in there whatsoever. And trust is a solved problem. And then the rest of the movie is about them eating shit because of people. Yeah, well, there's like this fundamental paradox. And like the reason that Brian and people like him are drawn to Bitcoin is because it's this, this, this trustless system

without the need for banks. And then so his solution is like, I'm going to make a bank of Bitcoin, a trustable third party to make sure that people can actually access it because currently, if your hard drive crashes, you might lose your Bitcoin. Whoops. So we're going to invent something that's like a trusted third party, almost like the regular financial system. So he's like, his whole premise, and then I'm going to go to Washington and get them to regulate it. Like the whole premise of his business, the whole thing that made him a billionaire, is directly undermining the exact argument for Bitcoin that people make. Well, it's like the whole thing, I think, to remember, right, the thing that made him a billionaire

is that you remember what Coinbase's business model, right, is that it just takes transaction fees whenever people are buying and selling cryptocurrency, which means that all it really done, all it really ever was, was it was just a very specific stock brokerage for one stupid kind of security for a company that doesn't exist and does nothing. Yeah, if you wanted to invest in something stupid, then Coinbase was where you went to do it and they made a lot of money off of that. Yeah, that's basically how he made his money. And how he made his money is that people kept them looking at the news, seeing how expensive Bitcoin was, putting two data points together and extrapolating that. Again, not because they were stupid, but because the way that Bitcoin

is talked about, not just in this movie, but every fucking time you see it written about in the mainstream media, it's talked about as though, wow, can nothing stop Bitcoin's meteoric rise? I sure would hate to be too late to this particular money party. I have to deploy a particular bit of financial jargon, which is quite morally loaded and I think reflects on the fact that finance people are all amoral pieces of shit, which is that like, yeah, people who invested in Bitcoin and used Coinbase and stuff weren't stupid, aren't stupid, but they are, in the financial sense, dumb money, right? They're not investors who are familiar with investing, typically, which was a thing that he touted all the time,

that this was going to democratize finance, that it was going to get like, the little guy who was being shut out by the banks and foreclosed on, was going to get him investing. And then the little guy, you know, lost whatever he had recouped after the bank took his house when crypto collapsed, so thanks. When you look at the history of like, there was this huge crypto exchange in Canada called Quadriga that went down and like all the other crypto scams and like little coins people have made for pump and dump schemes and stuff. The idea that crypto is this inherently trustless system just because it's decentralized and there's no like central point where you can interfere with the system or whatever is just like not actually true at all. You actually do have to

trust third party things and having a ruthless machine logic of the blockchain system set up actually isn't like good for everything because yeah, you can just like lose your wallet on your computer. Like sometimes it's actually good to have a way to interfere in systems too, but nevelently right wrongs or correct mistakes that like the machine logic of this perfectly engineered system is making because it doesn't have that like human ability to realize, oh, this is what happened. We need to like change this thing and like it's not actually a benefit of systems like that. It's a... The way I see it right is it's a beautiful and very well worked out technology that is a model of human behavior that like some people theoretically conform to

sometimes, that as soon as it gets put out into the world immediately just explodes into all of this madness and then it's... And as you say right, the pump and dump schemes, the little shit coins, the exchanges that were just theft, all of the like sort of insider dealing about NFTs as well. I mean, they talked to Vidal like Buterin as well, you know, all of that. Like it's all that model of human behavior when it crashes into reality sort of produces all of these strange outcomes. But this movie, what it really is about is it's the hero's story of the man whose job is to never notice that. Yes, yeah, because essentially it's his like rags to riches or at least, you know, sort of comfortable to riches story. And I really, I hate everyone in this movie who's on

screen for any length of time. Just inherently, I hate the stupid things they say to each other. I hate the way they think those things are profound. I just... Oh my god. But so, Brian Armstrong, right? He grows up in California and then he goes to college. He tries making some money, but he's like the payment processing system is inefficient and it makes him feel like a criminal because it's socialist. Hey, odds on that that's a real origin story. I was like, oh, the pay... If only it was more trustless. PayPal... Oh, I hate that there's no cryptography involved. But PayPal hasn't been invented yet. So he had to like report things to an actual bank and the actual bank made him feel bad. So... Yeah. Also, I think it's worth pointing out, right? That like,

yeah, all of these actual banks fucking suck. Yeah, but they have some actual sort of like regulatory compliance that they have to like, at least perform, right? They protect their users' account at a very basic level. Like you never put $20 into your bank account and then you come back and like, oh, it turns out this bank was a scam. The other $20 is gone. My temporary line balance protection. Or at least not anymore. Like we used to do that back when things were more like cryptocurrency. But, you know, there's this... I think there's this sense, right? Where the problem... And we've said this before about cryptocurrency, right? Is that the assumed problem about banks is that their institutions and institutions are human and therefore unpredictable. And so, you know,

if only... The fact that there is this third party intermediating between me and these other people to solve a social trust problem with spending money, right? Money's not at the speed of email. It's at the speed of mailing some bills to the mail or whatever. This movie makes some more developed argument, which is that banks are bad because they have architecture. Oh, we'll get to that. But as you say, right? This is this kid who's like, he's a shy kid, but with good ideas, but nobody listened to him, which is just being a kid. He also never seems that shy. At one point, he says, I probably have Asperger's or something. He displays like no visible signs of this whatsoever. He's actually kind of an extrovert

who made an entire movie about how he has anxiety, which is relatable in that sense. So, oh yeah. But as we're starting, right? He does like a couple of scenes where he's like, doing his takes about how he's presenting Coinbase, where he's like, Coinbase is a company with an ambitious vision. Where we want everyone with a smartphone to have access to financial services by building an open financial system for the world. It'll be like, wait, can I take that again? I'm regular. Oh boy. He has the affect of the klutzy female lead in a romantic comedy who has one thing where she's kind of clumsy. She falls over a lot. She's human. He's like, I will stumble over two sentences.

He's an half away with glasses in the princess. What was it called? The princess? I don't know what it was called. An half away glasses movie. You look it up. When they pivoted from that relatable speech to playing home movies of him as a kid, I actually gasped. I was like, oh my God, they're doing that. What did they do to you? They took this seemingly normal kid and they turned him into a fucking taxi. The first thing I had was like, he had so much hair. What happened? Fast like what I really was mad about watching the films. At no point did it explain how he got his head so shiny. He shined it up. But I want to ask actually, before we delve in one more thing,

which is I want to ask everyone here, who do you think this movie is for? I think it's for him. I think it's a vanity project for a man who insists that he has no vanity. Yeah, I read a thing saying that he was worried about how they made Mark Zuckerberg look bad in the social network and wanted to tell his own story. I can't imagine who would want. Even if you love crypto, how would this be that entertaining to you? I find this incredibly funny as well because I remember when the social network came out. For the computer science students I was living with at the time at uni. It was that classic thing of they watched the film and they didn't really understand what the message behind,

what was actually going on. It's not a subtle movie though. No, it's not. But they were very kind of like fascinated. They were just very enthralled by all the sort of like fincher aesthetics and they were just then they sort of use that as like the example of like, oh, this is why startups are so cool and why you should go work in tech because you can live in a house and like break the chimney or like do whatever. Yeah, just like all the kind of party scenes in that film. And I just found it very, because I was just thinking after watching this, he would have been better off like just getting someone to make a movie about him where he was the villain because at least

he would seem cooler, right? That's true. Absolutely right. That's 100% true. Right. It's like the same with like those other sort of like new limited series on all the like the tech CEOs that have all gone to jail. Like the Ferenose girl and there was like the Joseph Gordon Levitt one where he plays the guy who runs Uber and they both are sort of presented as like like liars and psychopaths and all that stuff. And like infinitely, he's like, okay, well, yeah, I sort of know about what they did was bad, but they looked and seemed a lot cooler and they seemed like they were having more fun. And like, this is the thing about film. He doesn't actually seem like he's having much fun. Like all the time. It's an incredibly protestant movie in that way.

Like, don't worry, I'm not enjoying any of this. This is a struggle for me. It's a fact. It's harder because I'm burdened with all of this money. But the thing with the crypto stuff is that like part of the reason, again, I wasn't really that interested in like most of the crypto stuff happening like over the past kind of year and a bit. But like the thing that people kept sort of saying about why you should get involved in it was that, oh, it's just like a really fun community to be in. And it's like such an exciting place to be, right? But that's kind of what they were arguing about like, oh, web-free and like over eight bullshit. Like, it's, you know, we're actually having a really great time in Miami. Right. And it's just like this guy is taking

himself so seriously that like, I'm just not convinced that even if, you know, even if Bitcoin was the future, I just don't want to be. He looks like he like gets home from the office and spends the rest of his night standing in front of the mirror waxing his own scalp. See, my, I'm sorry. Guys, what do you think the, who do you think this film is for? Imagine the main audience of this movie is like a thousand years down the road when the world is like a pockmarked apocalyptic wasteland and crypto manages every detail of our lives through like polluting systems that the main audience is like the huddled masses of that world, trying to understand their great founder and leader, the creator of Coinbase who got us all

started on this trajectory. I could imagine a crypto entrepreneur wannabe who looks up to Brian Armstrong who's been waiting for this documentary to come out. He read on the Coinbase blog that it was coming and he's just like, you know, I want to know what it takes to start my own company. And then finally that answer is here. It's in this coin documentary. Yeah. All it takes to start your own company is already work in the tech industry and have tech industry connected parents and also be in 2010. That's what it takes. And get a co-founder who worked for a bank before who I think Yeah. That guy's so regular.

We'll get into this because there is one other detail that I want to pull out here, which is after he graduates college and he like winds up his online business tutoring because he doesn't like that the bank makes him do paperwork. He goes to Buenos Aires and while he's there, he looks at the Argentinian economy with its hyperinflation and he goes, you know what this needs? It needs libertarianism. It is clearly too much government, he said, ignoring every other factor. The currency fluctuates so much that like menus can't even have printed prices. The solution for this therefore is going to have to be Bitcoin.

Who owned all of that like Argentine debt that was like made it basically impossible for them to rush? I wouldn't worry. I don't. I mean, it couldn't possibly have mostly been U.S.-based financial institutions that basically just like manipulated Argentina's debt for fucking decades. No, I couldn't even like the 10th worst thing American economic libertarians have done to Argentina. It starts in this anti-state stuff and then at the end of the movie, he's going to Washington to meet with Chuck Schumer to get what he calls regulatory clarity, which is him asking them to regulate Bitcoin. It's like there's this weird paradox. There's

all these paradoxes inherent to his whole vision that like this is why I rewatch the movie. I was there's something weird going on here. He's like this anti-state money thing and then by the end of the movie, he's like making phone calls with Chuck Schumer trying to get the whole industry regulated so he can have clarity and make more money. This movie did achieve something I thought would be impossible when it made me like Chuck Schumer a little bit because he's in this movie twice, both times off camera, one time on the phone, one time Brian gets out of a meeting with him and both times he says as little as possible to him and Brian is like sort of trying to save face to the camera like, oh, that was Senator Schumer. He said his doors always open, which is

a thing that people say when they want to talk to you more. Do you think he was not interested or was he just like quietly considering what I'm saying? He was definitely quietly considering what you had to say. He was very attentive. One of the seven people hired to like shield Brian Armstrong from the world and also make him look normal was like, yeah, Chuck Schumer loved you too. We'll talk about those people because I have a big theory about those people as a sort of cottage industry. One more thing about this movie, the context, something I found out is that the director brags in the press release in the trailer that he's a 10-time Emmy winner. I investigated this. Where did he get these Emmys? It turns out that they're all sports Emmys that he won in the

1980s as a producer for NFL TV. So personally, I don't find that to be an Emmy personally. A sports Emmy is not. Doesn't have enough concussions in it compared to the rest of his work. The ending point with the initial public offering where they're like bent over the computers and like, what's the price is going to be? It is kind of shot like a sports document. I got real sports vibes from that. So that tracks to me. Yeah. I mean, look, there's you don't know how much CTE is or is not in that movie. It's just not on screen. One of the things I noticed about Argentina, I actually copied down the line he says about Argentina, which is one of the things I noticed about Argentina is that they have an amazing culture. Great. Awesome. Thank you, Brian. Very

cool. Like he says, but I got to see what a poorly run monetary system was like again. Yep, absolutely. Nothing but monetary there, my friend. And one thing that stuck with me was that they didn't believe the future could be better. They needed the Sudoku money. Yes. Yes, they did because he is a heart and optimist. Fundamentally, yeah. And that's actually one of the things I wanted to sort of bring in as well, which is this is actually a theory that Alice, you and I worked out earlier today while talking about this movie. Yeah, and how much I hated it. Yeah, is how little power Brian Armstrong actually has, how unrelated his own vision of the world, his own optimism, is to anything that Coinbase actually did, anything he actually did. Yeah, this is something that I

had kind of like long suspected, but this movie more or less confirmed for me, which is that like you can be a CEO, you can have a multi-billion dollar net worth, but it can translate to absolutely no real influence. And that includes like popular fame. Like I don't really think that Mark Zuckerberg or even Elon Musk in a lot of ways have a lot more like market influence than Brian Armstrong does. What I came away from it with is that we have a centrally planned economy. It's just centrally planned in places like monetary policy committees and the finance ministry of Saudi Arabia, and like a bunch of other different places like that where there's sort of like functionaries and chancellories and stuff, and they make the actual decisions.

And meanwhile, the Brian Armstrong's of the world, their only real job is to sort of like live in this gilded cage and try and be normal. Because if you think about it, none of the visions of that were involved in crypto were anything other than incidental to its rise. It was the, if you were thinking about all the money flowing after 2008, but this huge period of balance sheet expansion, it found the lowest point, right? And it filled those low tide pools, which is where all these crypto people were, and then it lifted them to the top, and it sort of tricked them into thinking that like there's something to it. Yeah, well, he's powerful, but he's powerful in the way that an 18th century king is powerful,

which is to say, yeah, people have to suck you off a bit, but how much work do you actually see him do day to day? The people who actually make decisions have to sit in front of a computer or make phone calls or whatever. They have to actually do that. You need to have someone who does that full time. You need to have a like a fond meta, Nick. You need to have like a chancellery underneath you. And you need to have a guy just on top who's just going to walk around in a t-shirt and say, yeah, that's great. I'll give you some feedback on that. Yeah, well, he's busy meeting with like his coach guy who's like teaching him how to be a CEO because he specifically says that he's bad at it and he knows he's bad at it, but he wants to do it anyway. So in a site of where

the real sort of power lies, like the reason why Coinbase becomes biggest because it gets its VC funding, it gets a Series A funding, and that's the thing that allows it to become big. And then his VC's venture capitalists, they provide this army of PR guys and security guys and life coaches and therapists. We see like a parade of like five different therapists going in and out with this guy. And at one point he says to himself, it's like a hostage video, he says to himself, quite sadly, yeah, well, I don't I don't really code anymore. I haven't coded in like five years. And the fucking therapist guy is like, no, be a fucking chromagnon. Get mad at me. Get in my face. You need to develop an oppositional defiant disorder because that's what CEOs have. We don't

need you to code. We need you to bully people and you're going to fucking learn how to bully people. He just kind of like quite kind of like quite affably goes like, yeah, you're a piece of shit and I hate you. I blame you and myself. I blame myself for holding on to this thing I'm not great at. That's a direct quote. What does that what does that mean? I don't understand why he fought for it. So like there's this whole section where they're talking about him and the other co-founder both wanted to be the CEO and like only one of us could be the CEO, which also isn't true. Like you could technically have two CEOs. Some companies do it. Netflix has two CEOs. They could have been like, hey, we're breaking new ground. We're going to be co CEOs.

But no, someone has to be on top. Someone has to boss the other one around. That's how we run things here. But like, if you want to code and your thing is like making security software, you did security for Airbnb and now you've like prevented this website from being hacked too badly over the years. Like why does he want to be the CEO so badly? Because someone's told him to. There's no mention of their dispute. Right. Yeah. Like why did they argue in the first place? Why did the other guy get pushed out? They just don't mention that at all. They're just like, yeah, one of us had to be CEO. So I kicked him out and then later I paid him off so we could stay friends. We see the like the reason why he gets a guy in the first place, why he gets a co-founder

is he essentially goes to the VC guys who he's talking to and he's like, yeah, no, I'm badly in over my head. I don't know what I'm doing. You need to do something about this. And they go, we'll get you a second guy. And they find him a gamer. They find him this guy, Fred, Fred Ersem, who is like a sort of badly addicted world of Warcraft. World of Warcraft factors so huge in the development of crypto. It's so funny. Yes, genuinely true. I was talking about Vitalik Buterin is in Vitalik Vitalik Buterin. Yeah. Yeah. Vitalik Buterin is in this in this movie a couple of times. And I was talking earlier before you came on about the fact that the reason he got into cryptocurrency and this

is a direct quote from him was, I happily played World of Warcraft during 2007 to 2010, but one day Blizzard removed the damage component from my beloved warlock siphon life spell. I cried myself to sleep. And on that day, I realized what horrors centralized services can bring. And then basically I invented a theory in for JP Morgan. Yeah, they're all like this. But again, but the actual people profiting from it as ever, it's like, yeah, they're profiting from it hugely because they're like the figure heads. But a lot of the people profiting from it are the same banks that have been profiting from the same shit the whole time. Like the people who are profiting from it are the ones who get to

like continue to make decisions, right? That everyone involved here is insanely wealthy. But we see these guys sort of like wandering around their empty, beautiful kitchens, and they do nothing. Absolutely nothing. Like the guy has this therapist telling him to go Chromagnon. There's nothing for him to go Chromagnon on. What's he going to do? Chuck Schumer's going to pick up the phone to him be like, Hey, it was great seeing you. My door's always open. And he's going to be like, don't ever talk to me, you piece of shit. Like there's there's nothing for you for him to do. It's purely a gilded cage. Yeah. So we I have some quotes here. So number one, how did he get the name for Coinbase?

He read it on the Wikipedia page for Bitcoin, because he was just like, looking at the Wikipedia page for Bitcoin one night, just I imagine like, ah, I love you Bitcoin. He hired both their first employee and Fred, his co-founder, because they both posted together on the Bitcoin subreddit. It's quite funny because it's because how do you even looking at another part of the Bitcoin Wikipedia page? This could have been non-sfinance. That's true. Even specifically says he thinks it's a bad name. He's like, I saw Coinbase. I thought it was a bad name. It should have been called non-sfinance. It's like the one thing that you're supposed to do is the figurehead has come up with that kind of

shit. But this is the quote from Fred Ursham directly. He says, I grew up on the Internet and played way too many games. One time to try to stop me playing games, my mom shut down the circuit breaker for the whole house. So as you say, Alice, badly addicted to World of Warcraft. Yeah. And this is this is all under the sort of like inspirational epic music. And he kind of smiles at the camera and gives it like the Kubrick stare. And you're like, holy shit, this guy has what it takes to be a CEO. Instead of like, holy shit, this guy's pathetic. So what happens, right, is they create this product. It scales. They need to hire people. But it's also kind of difficult, right? Because I should also say about where Fred comes from,

which is, yeah, he was like in college, didn't really do much. He got a bachelor's in computer science and his dad gets him a job at Goldman Sachs. And then he just like quits because of a Reddit post to go and do this instead. They hire their first employee who's literally is a lumberjack who's trading crypto in his spare time because he emails them and is like, hey, do you have any jobs? And they need a third person to answer emails. Yeah. It's like, it's like, I don't know, you've seen the, the what this put all seen the I was, I was a lumberjack. Now I'm a billionaire scene reminds me very much of that scene in the big short, right? Where the, the, the hedge fund guys go down to Florida and they meet the mortgage

brokers. And one of them is like, oh yeah, we earned hundreds of thousand dollars a month. I was a bartender. Now I have a boat. It's kind of, it's kind of the same thing, except because, but that was the 2007 aesthetic where you could be big and flashy and brag about stuff. And now it's the same kind of thing, which is I happen to be in the right place at the right time where I was just carried up into the heavens by an asset bubble. And now, but you have to talk about the inspiration, the vision. It's a time of incredible fake sincerity, I think. Yes. And all of these fuckers say shit. They think sound sincere and none of it does. There's a bit, there's a bit at the end where Brian and Fred are like walking awkwardly, because again,

they all walk in incredibly fucked up ways. They walk like, they walk good. Feels good to be represented. They're walking around the fucking chap around like Southern California and just like looking at stuff and everything they say is like, what a dumb guy thinks a smart guy would say. So they're just like pointing at like an old abandoned gold mine and going, this is a pretty advanced technology for its time. What do you think that the pioneers thought about when they were out here? And it's just like, oh my god. Oh, probably never see gold. You never see lizard eggs. How come you never see lizard eggs? Yeah, why is that though?

It's a billionaire talk. This guy is like hundreds of thousands of times smarter than any of us by the market's logic. Well, you know what? He's asking the important questions about lizard eggs and how you don't see them that often. I've never asked that before. And that's why I'm not a billionaire. Yeah. Well, I'm going to go on Reddit and I'm going to ask why no one ever saw lizard eggs. And I'm going to get into the bottom ground floor of the next asset bubble. So, but sort of proceeding on through the, through the sort of plot, as you can call it, that of the film, right? They guys, you say they get their series, they find funding. It's not even really like a film. It's like a long promotional video.

Oh, absolutely. And every individual moment, it feels like a documentary. And the guys clearly got some experience like cutting together documentaries. But the overall arc of it is so bizarre. It's like he filmed two or three different Bitcoin movies and then tried to like put them all together instead of like making a clear through line. So it goes in this weird direction. It's like, now the movie is about our friendship. Oh, now we're talking to the Planet Money guy about what money is. Oh, now we're, we're talking about the getting the series A funding. And it's like, when, when they finally got to the point where they had their public offering, I was like, Oh, this is what the movie is about. Okay. Coinbase had a big public offering. And

like that's why this is all relevant. But that's like an hour and 10 minutes into the movie. And I legitimately had no idea why the movie existed until then. So I'll actually tell you my theory of why this movie exists and who I think it's for. And that is in the sort of set much of the second act, right, comes after the 2017 spike in value. When people start, when people start getting nervous about cryptocurrency, about whether or not to speculative bubble about how it can be lawmakers are you are concerned about how it can be used to like finance criminal activity or more like longer money. You've got the like Silk Road going on in the back of this and so on. So right. And, and then also, right, it then again, it's what is so jarring for me as well

is that because this is all in the context of what's going on at this one stupid company, when they say, you know, up to June 2020, and then like the footage of like the George Floyd protest is George Floyd is murdered in Minneapolis. That's to set up the the fucking Brian Armstrong being like, yeah, Coinbase isn't a woke company. Yeah, because like we see an earlier sequence where he's like, it's so stressful being CEO, because you can say the wrong thing. And if you say the wrong thing, then you get in trouble and everyone gets mad at you. And then we cut to him saying the wrong thing, which is he's doing an all hands meeting. And they ask him if he supports Black Lives Matter. And he fucking tech industries the shit out of that because he tries to say yes

in a way that sounds like no. Yeah, he's like, I kind of support like, but I don't think that our company should be there. And then like, he just is like, no politics at Coinbase, we're a neutral company. We don't get involved in these things. And like, I think by you can see how he would think that works. But obviously, it's completely like not how anything works. It's the kind of thing that you would think when you have been surrounded by CEO Wranglers for like the past five years. There's like the strangest interview with like someone who quit the company because of this, because of what he said about Black Lives Matter, where in one breath, she's like, I was angry at him, his position made me want to leave. But he did what he needed to do to shape his company the

way he best saw fit. So they're like playing him up as like, you know, he's coming into his own as a CEO by taking this stand against employees, taking stands about Black Lives Matter. It's bizarre. Yeah, it was such a like, I would like to work in this industry again, line. What I know with the tooth soap, they're also the other sort of person I liked, which was the other woman who said, you know, him saying that you had to censor all those used to work at Coinbase. That wasn't very Bitcoin of him. That's not very libertarian of you. That's not very Bitcoin, my friend. This is where it gets to who I think this movie is for. I think it's for prospective employees. I think that Coinbase is having trouble hiring.

I based that on nothing. They are now. Yeah. But I think that Coinbase is trying to appeal to the people it realizes it has been systematically alienating, which is people who went to college. Because they're like, oh yeah, Coinbase, it's like this kind of right-wing tech company. And so they're like, actually, that was a mistake. We have a lot of people who said, hey, he was wrong, but he's learned his lesson. Also, he's an introvert. Chuck Schumer said his door was open for him. Yeah. And there are three direct interactions with elected politicians in that movie. Two of them with Democrats. And then one of them, Trump saying he's bad. And then him saying,

I like the Trump said we're bad. This is absolutely aimed at people who he wants to employ. I think you're right. But the Trump thing is also really funny just on its own. This was when Trump was asked about crypto for the first time and just off the cuff was like, yeah, it's a scam, which is, it's a perfect Trump answer because you can't bullshit a bullshitter. You can't con a con artist. And he's been doing this shit for 50 years or whatever by this point. So of course he was like, yeah, no, it's a scam. Like you would know. It's perfect. Of course. And so this is where, this is my real theory of the movie, that it's a, please work at Coinbase. We're not so bad because they even, right? They even took pains

to say that after people started working from home from COVID, they took pains to show that like Brian Armstrong was like, I thought it was really easy to work at home after COVID. But maybe that's just because I'm a single guy living in a mansion in San Francisco. And I've realized that some employees actually say they work better from home. So you can kind of work from where you want. Please come work for Coinbase. It's great because as soon as he says, I think it's, I've actually been working better from home, one of the fucking CEO wranglers, one of the guys whose job it is to keep him normal, immediately interrupt on the call to be like, yeah, well, I mean, listen, you have,

you got it pretty good. And everybody else on the call has been calling in from a broom closet. It's very, I mean, it's very funny just to like, just, if this is, you know what it is also, I hate to always go back to the Simpsons, but this is Mr. Burns's movie for the Springfield film competition where he just gets dragged around by the horse and is like, well, we did 28 takes and this was the best one. This is as normal as we could get him boys. That's true. He just genuinely, he genuinely comes across as repulsive though is the thing, because he's like, he's weird and he's alienating, but not in a way that makes you sympathize with him instead in a way that like, like makes you have contempt for him.

This is the other thing too, because it's like, and again, going back to like social, the social network and how like the, like, Eisen, Jesse Eisenberg and Zuckerberg kind of exhibited like sort of similar traits in the sense of like, this is someone who is deeply unlikeable, someone who is like deeply like anti-social, someone who like, you know, and yeah, like, but you can kind of, I don't know if sympathize is the right word, but you can sort of understand the motivations in the sense that like, okay, this is a kid who like clearly just wants to be invited to parties and like, his whole life has kind of been just the other fact that he had to go to prom alone or something like that, which like, you know, you can sort of

empathize if you're a certain kind of guy who we don't endorse on this show, like very clearly, but like the problem with this film is that there isn't really, even when it comes to sort of like his awkwardness or his weirdness, like again, which is like very much like him trying to curate it to be more like, but more intense than it actually is. There's no sort of like understanding as to why he is the way he is. It's just like, yeah, here's this like weird kid who you're going to like spend an hour and a half of your time with, and you're going to have to figure out why you sympathize with him and why you kind of think that his world vision is good, because he surely isn't going to fucking articulate it. And he's going to change his mind a bunch

of times throughout this film, and throughout the entire process of him trying to figure out why he's doing this thing that he's doing, you're going to see a few people sort of get mad at him, but in ways that are like, yeah, he can be redeemed. But, and that was the thing, I was just like very, I was just kind of frustrated because I was like, there are lots of lines here where I could sort of like get on board a few, but you just don't see it through, right? You don't finish making your point. So even if it is a recruitment video, it's like, I genuinely think that like the social network was a better recruitment video to work in tech than this thing. Oh, 100%. Yeah, well, because it made it seem American Psycho was a better recruitment video to

work in tech. Yes, like all these films were like, they're genuine psychopaths. Like here's the thing about these types of films, they're always going to be misconstrued and misinterpreted anyway, right? By the people who you want to work with. Wolf of Wall Street was like that, The Big Short was like that, Margin Call was like that, like all these types of films have been this genre. So you have like a blueprint you can work with. And like to me, this just sort of, and when you asked like, before we sort of got on recording, like, who is this film for? I'm sort of now on board in the sense of like, okay, like it probably is, they're probably just looking for people to work for them after like the shit show.

But initially, I kind of thought, okay, is it for true believers of crypto or like people who were true believers of believers of crypto, who are now kind of wavering that like their kind of obsession over the past like decade is not what it kind of seemed it was. They keep sort of like reeling out excuses for crypto like every so often they're like, well, electricity took decades for the infrastructure to catch up. So like the messages that they sort of give is like, yeah, like the people who really benefited from like all the technological advances or ones who like stayed really, who stayed as true believers in spite of everything that happened and in spite of all the initial failures, they sort of knew

that like this technology was so revolutionary that it was going to, you know, if you may as well stay on board. Keep the faith, keep circulating the tapes. And because like for something like Coinbase, you really need true believers for this, like for this company to function, right? You absolutely need. So like, I wonder whether this was like an appeal or an attempt to re-energize the kind of like, or to kind of like re-reiterate like the origin story that crypto true believers tell themselves as to why like this is sort of like at the vanguard of the future. Well, and I think, I think that actually gets to like, we talked about this, like

why it's, and I think you guys brought this up as well, right? There's the optimism of it. That's why they can't make an actually appealing movie that appeals to like the full spectrum of human experience, including like the dark sides and why people sort of watch like Wolf of Wall Street and you're like, yeah, I actually want to do that because it's appealing to something basal in me, right? Because he has no dark side. He has no base. Because fundamentally, the crypto people are too committed to the idea that their whole cell, right, is that they are, they are inventing a future for everyone. And so it needs to be so eye-wateringly sincere. But I want to know what you guys sort of, what your guys take on

that as well. Why couldn't, why can't the crypto industry make its own Wolf of Wall Street or American Psycho? Well, I mean, like someone outside of the industry has to make, like if you're making it about yourself. Yeah, of course, that's not good. I feel like if we took this exact footage and we took this exact, you know, the exact footage made for this movie and we gave it to a competent editor and gave him the ability to do research and find things out, like for example, micro strategy is hyped up is investing all this money in Bitcoin. It's such a big deal. But then the movie doesn't mention that Bitcoin dropped by about a third since he invested and his company lost over a billion dollars on it. And like that's the

kind of thing that you want to put on one of the title cards or like they had a public offering at $380. It's now several years later down to $70, meaning that Brian started at like $13 billion. He's now down to $3 billion. And this all happened in between the time they filmed and when the movie came out. And they didn't reflect it at all because they want to have this utopian vision of like, it's this magical thing that makes everyone infinite money. And just around the corner, any day now it's going to democratize the world. It's going to help the development. We're going to send it to Africa somehow and that's going to make everyone there happy. Like it's always like next week, the utopian potential of Bitcoin is finally going to come. But until then,

a bunch of us early adopters become richer and richer. It's really funny. It's reminded me of one thing which was the one place where they grapple with Bitcoin crashing is they have a guy in to brief him on why Bitcoin keeps crashing. And the guy goes, yeah, it's like commerce. It's like commerce, I imagine, which I used to work in. And then you get to Mark when he draws on the wall and he's like, yeah, it crashes. And then it goes up and every time it crashes, it crashes to like a slightly higher level. So therefore this is like actually stably increasing. It just has a boom and a bust cycle inherent to it. It has a boom and a bust cycle is measured in like a month.

Yes, yes. It's actually more stable than some fiat currencies now. They fucking say that. Yeah. Which fiat currencies, I wonder, is one of them the Turkish Lero or the British Pal? There's two other moments that I really want to pull out because I think they're hysterical in this movie. One of them is related to this and it's that the product does not work. Like if you've ever tried to use cryptocurrency for anything, you will be familiar with the fact that it does not work very well. And so in an attempt to try and get it to work, they do this

thing where they have donut lunches at the cafeteria at Coinbase and they try and get people to pay for them using Coinbase. They try it much like a meta and the metaverse. They try and get people using their own product and pay for the donut, pay for the bagel, pay for whatever with the app. And it doesn't work. But though, did you guys catch what they called this process? Oh, yes. They call it dog-fooding because this nice non-hierarchical system that's going to democratize finance, like thinks of you as a dog. They call it money at the speed of email, but actually when you send the money over the blockchain,

you have to wait for a certain amount of the blockchain to verify the transactions so that you know that it can't be undone. It's out there far enough that it's going to work, and that is not the speed of email. It's actually much slower than email. It even happens in the movie, in the donut process. He's like, all right, now buy this donut and he's like, oh, it's taken a second. He's like, oh, yeah, it'll take a second. He's like, we've got to speed this up. And that's the key selling point of Bitcoin. That's your whole point. He's like, we need something that's fast, that has no fees. Of course, we're going to add fees. And of course, it's not actually fast. And it needs to be anonymous and also totally traceable,

and we're going to comply with law enforcement. The closest thing to work that we see him do in this whole movie is he tries to buy the donut, mutters to the dev team, oh, this is taking a while, takes two steps across the room away from them and then goes, yeah, I'll send you guys some feedback. And then he leaves. He actually doesn't leave. A very non-staged interaction happens where I believe a middle age black woman comes up to him and basically says, Mr. Armstrong, this is really going to change the world, isn't it? And he's like, yes, I think it will. I did some reading just before we started about Give Crypto, their initiative that Coinbase

launched, promising to give $1 billion to the developing world. And saying like this, in the movie they mentioned like they want to be able to like launch micro economies using crypto in different parts of the world and really like, you know, target places like Venezuela where there's a lot of hyperinflation and we'll be able to help them with our charitable organization. So they launched this thing with the promise of giving a billion dollars. And it seemed the best that anyone or the person writing this article could discover was that so far they've given about three and a half million dollars and that the way they did it was by going on to Upwork and offering to pay people $30 to go around and find someone who needs money

and then giving them crypto and then teaching them how to turn the crypto back into the money that they actually use so that they can use it to buy things in their economy like how to convert it back into boulevard so they can pay their rent or whatever. And then the one guy who got paid $30 to do this and to like take pictures of the people he gave the money to and write a little thing about it said that after he did it, he went back to give crypto and they were like, you did a really great job about this. We're doing this. We want you to do it again. But we can't pay you money this time. Like we can't give you the $30 again. Do you want to just do it for free? Yeah, so give crypto is run out of $30. I'm afraid. If you want to talk about this like

these people who, again, we've said billions potentially, billions of times as smart as we are. There's one other example that I want to pull out, which is so he pays off his co-founder, the guy, and we see them play video games together. And the guy says boom, headshot, even though they're playing Mario Kart. It's weird. But so we see that they're bros because we see them cooking together. And like Brian, who clearly has never cooked for himself his entire life, not in the last 10 years has he touched a fucking pan. I cannot work a pepper grinder. And it's not like a giant restaurant pepper grinder. It's like one of the plastic ones that you can get anywhere. And he's holding it upside down. And he's just cranking like loose peppercorns onto his own

hand. Just like, I can't. I don't know how to do this. Yeah. Again, we did 27 takes and that was the best one. And again, this guy is worth now $2.4 billion at peak, like $30 billion. Also, I want to bring up my other probably my other favorite part of this movie. Honestly, like a rose among roses, which is where they talk to the guy who's the architect, who's like, so you see the thing about banks is that a bank is an expression of trust. You trust that they'll take care of your cash. The idea of a bank's building is to look like it's protecting your money. I was like, I never thought that before. I thought they just grew that way. Yeah. It's just naturally occurring. But who would have thought that a building would try to

look like what it's doing? Anyway, how come the how come the you Coinbase have this like open tech office with fucking beanbag chairs all over it? What are you trying to look? Oh, nothing. Your ideal ideology list, huh? Only the banks, huh? Crazy. Anyway, thank you for your time. And so we've talked about this before, but they're like economic freedom, libertarians, but they also go to great pains to be like, yeah, you can't do any like Silk Road shit because we're tracking every transaction. We got this biker guy. He's in charge of security. Check him out. We're begging the Democrats to regulate us. That biker guy, he turns to the camera and he's like, imagine if the banks could watch every bill in circulation at all points. Like that's what we

do here. We like watch every Bitcoin in circulation, how much it moves around and we collaborate with law enforcement. So simultaneously, Bitcoin is anonymous and uncensurable, a way of getting around governments and they collaborate with law enforcement and watch every transaction on the blockchain and have a good relationship with law enforcement. There's like a direct paradox at the heart of their whole project. And that's one of multiple direct paradoxes at the heart of their whole project. Because they want to be the adults in the room. I can't believe they use that phrase that for British people is like, for people who live in Britain, adults in the room is like a kind of code phrase that just turns you into a foaming maniac. Like I cannot hear that phrase without

just being like a fucking, fucking starving, shitty shit. So yeah, they talk about and right, they also talk about how, you know, like they bring on fucking Ken Rogoff, the one of the, let's say, one of economics's many discredited morons. Yeah, they have a bunch of discredited economists and a couple of tame feds, which is even weirder. They have like this former US attorney who's there to say that like, actually, Bitcoin is good for the federal government. Yeah. Also, it's libertarian and good for the federal government. You know, and I think I actually know what, I have a theory as to what the solution is.

Libertarian US attorney. There is one other thing, though, that I want to pull out, which is that they interview the director of the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is very, very funny because mostly she says nothing, but there's a bit at the end where they're playing this like optimistic music under it. And incidentally, you could make this documentary about a letter grade better by changing all the music to a minor key. But she says, in the coming months, we're going to see like, we're really going to see crypto blossom. We're going to see the consequences of crypto. I really hope they're good. Anyway, bye forever. I'm departing this movie now.

I'm off to my home planet. But I think that that comes to like one of the paradoxes I think they have, right? Which they say, well, we're libertarian, but we also want to be regulated. And this is down to what Ken Rogoff says. She says, there's a balance between freedom and state control and cryptocurrency makes you think about that. And the challenge to regulators is that the bar is moving far pretty fast. And what that is, right? That's a problem statement. And then you're going to throw the problem statement to the people who you're sure are going to figure it out, right? It's like, wow, this libertarian thing is great because it's libertarian, but also it's completely traceable

and very controllable by state. Yeah, miss, miss, miss the shiny headband. What's your response? And then we cut to him and he's like, I don't know what he does. He's like, he's not even jogging. He's walking on like a jogging trail, like an absolute freak. Yeah, just like, yeah, just like, we asked this scientistian, what he's not, he's not walking. He's not power walking. He's like in pitch somewhere in between the two. He's a very ungainly sort of like troubling gates. The really an uncanny man. So what, as we, as we sort of come to the third act, right? When he spends most of his time in DC, just getting like, again, what kind of a fucking nerd do you have to be to get

mugged by Chuck Schumer? He's like walking. He's got us like fucking private security, like armored suburban. He's got people like holding the doors from him. He's like semi-power walking from private jet to car to hotel room. He spends most of his time like doing this disconcerting walking. And I'm just thinking, you know, like, if I saw this guy coming towards me on a hiking trail, I would kill him with a hammer. No jury would convict me. I really liked the guy who was like, I, you know, I was worried that he wasn't going to put on a suit and tie. If you go into these meetings wearing a turtleneck, you know, everyone's going to be so distracted by the turtleneck. But, you know, thankfully he did,

he put on a suit and tie. Like he, he was able to do it. And the main, the main thing is that like his main preoccupation is that people don't old senses old, which is true. And they don't understand what crypto is, which is sometimes true. And he's like, whenever we do any crypto shit, we have to like educate them about what crypto is and what it's like potential is. And then the footage that they use for this is Liz Warren saying some quite coherent shit about why crypto is bad, which he's just like, well, yeah, sure. The economy is pretty bad. I don't really trust Wall Street. You know who I also don't trust is a bald guy in California. You know why, right? Is number one, I have a line

that I captured from this. That's another, like this, this, this movie has generated a few things that are rattling around in my head for a while. Boom headshot while playing Mario Kart is certainly one of them. The other one is when he says, I'm coming to DC. So when in Rome, wear the suit. That's how the expression goes. You got it, man. I've been put at ease by how regular you are. It's also very funny that he's doing this sort of like man of the people act. We see him do this as he pulls his suit out from the suit carrier in the bathroom. And next to that is a $420 Prada like bathroom kit bag thing. Yeah. So he's, you know, a man of the people. A standout line here that's like, ever since I watched the, again, one of the reasons I wanted

to rewatch it is his parents saying, I can't remember if the guy died or not about like a piece of the building that they used to work in fell off and landed on someone. And it's just casually, it's like a joke. His dad's like, I can't remember if that guy died or not. And then they just like move on. So cool. What a cool bunch of people. That's meant to be like this sort of like ratio algae thing is like a man, their first office was so bad, it killed a guy possibly. Anyway, on with the rest of the movie. I also really like the meek will not inherit the Nasdaq. I really enjoyed it because the end of the climax of the movie that's then undercut by the title cards saying how it all went wrong was they do their IPO. They go public on

the Nasdaq and they have a very, very excitable MD from Goldman there who is coordinating all of this and fully in like Apollo 18 mode. He's got the like white vest on. It's got the Ed Harris crew cut. And then at the end, he kind of like weirdly like scream yells. There's nothing cryptic about this. Yeah. It's so awesome. And what's really funny is they then show the two guys, the two, the CEO and the guy he kicked out on the couch having gamed, I guess, watching this. And it's the one honest moment we get of them. They hear the guy do this and they both laugh at him. That's that's the only time we actually like get under the skin at all. Yeah. And then they they cook their they cook the first for the first time in, you know, 10 years,

they don't have like an army of slaves to it. He cooks like two polygons, like chicken breasts, I think those are the shapes really that they're seasoning them, I think just with pepper, which is upside down. So cool, which they almost weren't able to do. Yeah, it was a really close run thing there for all. And then and then they sit out on this on this beautiful patio in a house nicer than any of us will ever be allowed to like live in in our entire lives and just go, yeah, it's cool that we're still friends. And we've learned nothing. We've learned that the world still doesn't understand Bitcoin. Basically, anyway, can you buy a donut with it yet? No, no, you absolutely cannot. It takes 45 minutes for the transaction to populate the blockchain. So I actually I used

to go to this Bitcoin space here in Vancouver because I had friends there and they had a vending machine where you could buy beers with Bitcoin and it did legitimately take over 20 minutes sometimes for your Bitcoin transaction to get through. And actually, I'm a victim of a Bitcoin scam. I was trying to find the details. But in like 2015, I ran for MP here as like a hopeless candidate and got like the least votes of anyone in the riding. But one of the other guys who beat me was like a Bitcoin independent who is like doing all this like utopian kind of shit. And he said at the end of the campaign to me, you're the only candidate I talked to that actually disagreed with me. Everyone else all the mainstream parties are like, oh, that's interesting. Oh,

Bitcoin. He's like, but you told me that my ideas were bullshit. So I want to give you $20 in Bitcoin. And so he did that at the end of the campaign. I put it in this wallet and then it was one of the wallets that ended up being a scam and I lost it all. I'd probably be worth like $800 today. Yeah, you hate this thing. So here have some of it. It is the that's the weird patronizing attitude that Bitcoin people tend to have. It comes out in the fact that like they called there like the thing where they're trying to actually get people to use it, the dog food session. It's where or like when Bitcoin crypto people online will say like, I'll have fun being poor if you're contemptuous of cryptocurrency. Or even the fact that like the idea is, oh, well,

no one who is critical of this could possibly understand it. And if they understood it, they wouldn't be critical of it. It's this. And I think that that comes, it's just so fucking patronizing. And it's just, but it's being patronized to by these fucking lizards who run the thing is very irksome. The last thing to note is that what Coinbase, just to go back to the beginning, what Coinbase actually sells is it's selling lottery tickets for people who think that they're in early enough that they can unload this for more money onto a dupe down the line. Yeah, the dumb money machine. Yeah, it's the dumb money machine. And so like the, all of the money that it makes, it's, it's revenue or everything,

it's directly correlated to the Bitcoin price because it's just how much people are gambling on it. How's the Bitcoin price doing right now? The average Bitcoin purchase, right, was over $50,000 in terms of like individual people buying, which means that almost everyone who invested in cryptocurrency has lost money. Oh yeah. Yeah. Like, like an infinitesimally small number of people have made any, any, any money. We get to hear from one of the like Bitcoin hype men who's like, every time it crashes, I hear from people going, I lost, I've lost everything. My life isn't worth living, but bro, just stick with it. It gets higher again. Let me show you the graph. Yeah, it gets better. Yeah. The graph is so funny. I love the graph.

It reminds me, Noss is in the movie. Yeah, he is for like two minutes, phoning it in. Hip hop legend, Noss encourages everyone to put all of their savings into Bitcoin before the crash. Yeah. And that's right. It's, it comes back around to this thing, this, the idea that, yeah, this is at best, right? This is not a sort of God of the economy. He's kind of an Al Swarengin in a gold rush, right? He's, he's the guy who, he's an Al Swarengin made like a favorable vaudeville about himself and his like, you know, selling shit to the people in Deadwood. Yeah, but crucially also if Al Swarengin was a pussy. Yeah, he's a pussy version of Al Swarengin. I was, I was trying to think of a metaphor for like the comparison to what he is,

because yeah, he's just sitting there while the price is going up and he happens to get rich because the price got up because of this complex confidence game beyond him. And I was trying to think of like some financial metaphor and there, there, nothing is as useless as Bitcoin that I can compare it to. So it's like, this is actually the metaphor we're going to use in the future for future scams. We just have to wait for this to all play out. Well, I think it's that of like the, what I found so interesting about like looking at the crypto economy, sort of watching the entire crypto economy sort of come into being and then blossom, right? It's that all of the decentralized finance stuff, right? All of those tokenomics, whatever,

was just meant to create transactions to increase the value of Bitcoin, because all of that borrowing, right, the vast majority of it was done against Bitcoin holdings or like Bitcoin holdings that were used to anchor stable coins. And those stable coins that go into this financial system that we used to buy more Bitcoins and print more stable coins, whatever. It's that Bitcoin, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, Bitcoin was for this era of speculation, entirely enclosed in this cryptocurrency model, it was Florida real estate in 2007. That's the value of the thing they were pumping. And they, and they, and they cite that as an example of why Bitcoin is good is like, oh, I know a lot of people who like lost the house in 2008. And it's like,

therefore I decided to help people lose the house in 2022. Yeah. Well, what if they weren't accidentally housed for at least a little while? What if we could do the Florida mortgage bubble, but without all of that annoying housing that happened? What if the luckiest dozen of them all got infinity houses and then everyone else remained homeless? Yeah. Yeah. So this is, but it's just, it's such a strange film, but it's, I found it was, it was so weird to just like, watch all of these people trying to be regular, but they've just, whole lives have been about being completely insulated from everything else, where they can't see beyond their tidy little model. I hate them. I hate them. I really didn't

enjoy watching them. I just remembered the funniest thing about the movie is when something goes bad early on and he's like, I felt really depressed and there's like a picture of him at his computer and his pajamas that really cracked me up. But then later in the movie, he's like, it's the best day of my life. And it showed him his pajamas again. He's just like me for real. So cool. He's wearing his footsie pajamas on the best day of his life and the lowest day of his life, that duality. Again, why I had to rewatch it. You know, a coin has two sides. It's also like what makes the film really weird to watch in some ways, because it's like, I think you're completely right in sort of saying that this is kind of a

film about someone who's desperately trying to be relatable and desperately trying to like convince people and like for whatever reason about like, cryptocurrency is still kind of a viable economy and like it's worth sort of supporting and investing in and like whatever. But like most of the content that you sort of see that are doing this and you'll find, and this is the thing, like when I watched this film where initially I was like, this is kind of just like an extended YouTube video that kind of shows up in my feed every so often where you have these like finance guys, these crypto guys or whatever, who are basically kind of like making the same arguments and you know, they're able to sort of like game

like whatever platform they're on, because you know, they just use the money that they have to massively ramp up their production value and like make needlessly like cinematic content about why like, you know, Bitcoin is actually like the best long-term bet. Like this was really just an extended version of some of those YouTube videos. But like the difference between that and this film is that while they kind of like have full control over like the narrative and how it's structured and everything, it doesn't, to me, it doesn't sort of make sense why this guy let other people film him. Like I don't know if that's like a really basic critique, but it's like, if he's trying to make a recruitment video, then like, why don't you sort

of do that entirely in-house and actually make yourself look cool? Or hire like an advertising guy who can make you look somewhat like cool, right? I just think he's like resistant to coolness. We see his PR in Washington like try multiple times to get him to say something cool and he just refuses to do it. This guy doesn't understand. So he's like, and this is where I'm like, okay, I'm sold in the sense that he's trying to be relatable, but because he's so strange and because he's so insular and because he's been like embedded in the crypto community for so long, but he doesn't know what it's like to have a conversation with a normal person. Like his thinking about, oh, what defines relatability? It's like, well, it's if I never make a human

mistake, but I look like an oath every time like I walk or try to like use a kitchen appliance or like try, you know, even that conversation where he has with the employee where it's, I imagine man is still in there because like, oh, we want to like show that he's kind of like, you know, relatable to is like, he's nice to his employees and like, you know, everyone's like a team there and all that stuff. But the impression that I got when I watched that scene was like, he's sort of like looking down on her in some ways, or at least kind of like behind his body language is kind of suggests that he doesn't actually want to be there. And that this was sort of like an awkward conversation. Someone came up to him, he didn't really want to have it. And he's now

been forced to not only have this awkward conversation, but because he knows a camera's in front of him, he's like trying to actually show that he's really enthusiastic to talk to everyone at like, you know, everyone at whatever level in his company, which clearly he is not. And that sort of see, this is the thing is just like, okay, I like, it's just a really weird and kind of surprising decision to like, not just do what other crypto guys do and just do your own YouTube content. Well, you know what? That's what happens when you believe in yourself that much. Maybe, yeah. Yeah, I think that's it. He really thinks that he comes off well. He thinks that this is an inspiring and cool story that is going to make, you know, young kids are

going to look up to him and know they can be CEOs someday. And they're going to know that the blockchain is going to transform the future any day now, next week, first it's going to make us all wildly rich. And then in the future, it's all going to be utopian and perfect. And we're going to help the world. He really, really thinks that shit's true, which is why he allowed himself to be filmed and presented to the world. But again, the payoff is also never there. So if you think about like the other sort of films within the genre, like the social network ends with like Zuckerberg kind of like losing all his friends, but the girl that broke up with him at the beginning of the film like wants to add him on Facebook or something, right? Or like shows up in his Facebook

friendship requests in the Wolf of Wall Street. Jordan, I can't remember a second name, like Belfort gets out of prison and like is shown to still be the man and everyone kind of wants to like, you know, sell him pens and stuff like that. All like most of the films, it sort of shows that like however insane the person got and however over like over their head they got, ultimately not only were they fine, but they showed actually like, they ended up stronger because they are like special people. In this film, it ends with him fail. Is this like, yeah, the company fucking sucks. He had to like fire like nearly a quarter of his staff, but he still believes in the project. And this is kind of like, why, why, why add the, why add those? I don't know, man. This was like,

it was very, these are very confusing, confusing editorial decisions. Uh, guys, I notice he looks like a malfunctioning robot. I hate him so much. What, what, what any, any final thoughts from the wrong boys here? Every pitch he has for what makes Bitcoin good, regular money is better for or the Coinbase platform specifically precludes. That's like, I think a key observation about what's going on here. Yeah, I don't know. I think that the reason that they for this weird tension in the movie is that there's like a lot of things they wanted to acknowledge like the Black Lives Matter thing or like this hacking team thing where they acquired a company that had done some horrible

things. Uh, they want to show that like, yes, we understand that these were problems. These were issues, but like, it's like to, but, but at the same time, not really get to the root of any of these things. There's, there's this weird tension between like half acknowledging things or like talking about it, but then not really getting into it. It feels like they wanted this to be like a really, at least to look like it's a really honest portrayal of like the, the, the, the dirty underside, but still the like shining gleaming core of this optimistic future that they're reaching towards. But they just really didn't stick the balance of like getting all those different elements to, to play together nicely. And money at the speed of email isn't a very appealing pitch in general.

But it also, we already have that. Like I can send e-transfers from my bank faster than I can send a Bitcoin because I don't have to buy a Bitcoin first to wait for it to populate the block. The whole time they're, they're pitching sort of like, what if we decentralize this to make it more efficient? I'm like, I have a radical idea. What if we centralize it too much? What if we centralize it like a lot more than it's currently centralized? Like by this point, I came out of this movie thinking there should be one money. It should be one coin they keep in the central bank. You get to like fist fight over it and whoever has the coin has all of the money. Yeah. It's the big nickel in Sudbury. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Like think about it in like cybernetics

terms. That's a system with very little variety. And I think that's what we need right now. I mean, the other thing is, right? It's weird, right? Where in def, in looking at fake utopias, it's very easy to like be like, well, no, that's definitely, in fact, money is much better than this when actually what they're solving is they're solving a whole bunch of problems that just deepen what's bad about how money works. All right? It's only money is incredible. Money's not amazing. You know, it's useful as a store of value, but you know, hey, could there be other ways to communicate supply and demand in the economy? I mean, as you mentioned, right? Staff or beer, there certainly have been attempts to do that without the price signal. Sure. You can even

do it on a computer if you're feeling nerdy. Yeah. Right. And so, but to just look at the fake utopia, you can just understand like, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is just more disruption and shock to centralize more money, more power up in the already powerful. So it's always remembering. It's not that the system we have is good. It's that all of these utopias are just attempts to make it worse or all of these types of utopias, these fake ones, if you get my meaning. Yeah, absolutely. So anyway, we have gone pretty far over time, but fellas, I want to say thank you so much for calling in today from Sunny Vancouver. Yeah, our pleasure. This is a lot of fun. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. He's lost more money than I'll ever have in the last 12 months.

Hey, you know what? Invest in the next speculative asset bubble. It's only going to go up. It's going to go up again. Be patient. Remember the graph, right? Going down further just means going up further. And also to remind everyone, if you have Means TV or if you don't have Means TV, consider getting Means TV and checking out Papa and Boy, a fun series by YouTube. Yeah, and the first episode is free on YouTube too. So if you want to check it out, go to the Means TV YouTube channel, first episode up there, and you can decide whether you like it or not. There will be a link in the description of this episode. And by the time this comes out, this is going to be Tuesday, we are unlikely to have tickets in Brisbane, might have tickets in

Sydney, and definitely we'll still have tickets in Canberra because I'll explain. There was two venues in Canberra that are owned by the same company, a small one and a very big one. We have now sold more tickets than the small one, which has now put me in a blind panic that we've been upsized into the very big one indeed. So just show up, bring as many of your friends as you can, grab them off the street. I see you will have snakes, bring your snake. Yeah, bring your snake, bring your spider. Hustle people in off the street, tell them it's a Bitcoin education center. Who knows? So Australians, we will see you soon to my beloved co-hosts and our wonderful listeners. We'll see you all in a couple of days. And to remind you, of course,

we have a Patreon is $5 a month. You can get a second episode every week. You know the drill because this was a free episode. So all that being said, thank you. Let me just get this one out of the way right now. It's the free one. I really thought I'd get through a whole episode without that fucking nonsense. So just to say once again, wrong voice. Thank you so much. Listeners, thank you. Co-hosts, thank you. Australians, see you soon. And we'll catch you on the bonus. Bye. Bye. Bye.