“It's not that Bitcoin has no marketing department. It's that crypto is only marketing. That's all it is, is marketing, really.”

didn't dream big enough, you know, like synthetic blood. That would, that would really change things, you know? Um, uh, so anyway, when Dave came back to me in 2020 and said you should buy Bitcoin, I was like, Dave, I'm not going to do that. Um, but tell me about it, like explain this to me because I really hadn't paid any attention to it. And I have an undergraduate degree in economics from the University of Virginia. Um, I hadn't used him much in 20 years of show bus, but um, you know, one thing that I remembered in my middle-aged fog of a brain that from Econ 101 is, you know, currencies, monies, you can usually buy stuff with them. One of the things you can do with them is buy things and sell things. And so, Dave, can I buy stuff with this crypto stuff? He's like, uh, you know, you could buy drugs online, probably. Um, I, you know, hey, that's a use case. Uh, but he really just couldn't, he couldn't give me even the most basic of answers as to what this thing was. And so, I, my curiosity was piqued and I fell down a rabbit hole pretty hard where I was sort of fascinated by the, I guess I would say myriad intellectual fallacies of the crypto believers in terms of their misunderstandings of money and of how private money works versus public money and things like that. Uh, but I was also uh fascinated by the true crime of it all. I love true crime and um I particularly like a subgenre of true crime I call stupid crime, sort of Cohen brothers-esque crime where the criminals are like obviously committing crimes sometimes via tweet. And, you know, and then they turn on each other when the feds come because as much as they say they're a community, like, you know, when the shit hits the fan, they all turn on each other and start, you know, trying to flip in order to save their skin. So, crypto had a lot of that stuff. And I'm couldn't give

up. This, this brings me to, I mean, there's two, there's two elements here. The first is that what's interesting about you getting into this during the pandemic is I think the pandemic basically produced the opposite effect on so many people to dive into crypto, right? Like in this moment where people are tethered, you know, to their computers, they can't go anywhere. This idea of digital money, the hype around like the NFTs and things like that shifted it. I don't know if you could ever say it became cool, but it certainly became like it had a cultural cachet. And I'm curious what you think the pandemic's effect was on this industry.

You know, that's so interesting, that piece about when the world shut down, there was nothing to gamble on, like at all, like not just sports, right? There was just like nothing. Like no one was doing anything. The only thing I guess you have is like the stock market, which is in, you know, at that moment in the pandemic, especially really early on, was in like this free fall. And it's like, oh, I don't want to put all my money into that type of thing. Like, I hadn't thought about the fact that the pandemic provided like a chance for them to kind of corner the market in speculative assets. That's, that's like, uh, so fast. Yeah.

And it's also, it was gambling, but better because it was also like the quote unquote future of money, which is really funny to an amateur economist like myself, because actually crypto is the past of money. And we could talk about private money, but like we've actually tried this before and it didn't work. But they're talking about it's the future of money and like you're going to be really smart. If you invest, you're going to be, you're sort of ahead of the curve, right? You're a part of the future. You're, this dynamic is very much emperor's new clothes, right? Like only the smartest people, only the people of highest station can perceive these imaginary clothes that the tailors weave. And so adult after adult is tricked into not believing their own eyes because they don't want to appear foolish. And I think that dynamic was really happening because the celebrities were out there selling it. And once something gets so big and it's on your TV all the time, you start to doubt yourself. You start to say, well, maybe there is something there, right? I mean, how can all of these incredibly famous, powerful people believe in this thing if it's not true? The economist who influenced me the most was Robert Schiller, behavioral economist. And he talks about naturally occurring Ponzi schemes, which are the price of a speculative asset rises far beyond what it could really be worth. But people see the price rising, which draws them in to invest, which sends the price higher, which draws more people in. So these things kind of like take on a life of their own.

I am interested, though, in a point you made just a minute ago where you said, we've tried this before. When did we try this before? We