Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision and global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the SYSE and at ICE's 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. And now welcome Inside the ICE House, here's your host, Josh King of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
We're taping the show on a Monday morning. A funny thing happened on Friday before. I was minding my own business, occasionally toggling my mouse over the Bakkt Bitcoin monthly futures update button, the screen that shows me how many physically delivered Bitcoin futures were changing hands during the trading day. Seeing the number settle at the end of the day at 1,179 contracts was kind of a holy shit moment, a record for Bakkt, which boasted another record only two weeks before of, wait for it, 212 contracts. So, this six X multiple on the daily record for the platform KMO only as the platform has been open for trading since September 23rd. Now, big things, network effects start from such small multipliers. It's like that something that attracts the interest of underclassmen at Kirkland House at Harvard, and eventually enraptures one out of every five people on earth. Early days, we'll see.
Josh King:
If you've listened to this show regularly, you have an inkling of what I'm talking about. You heard Jeff Sprecher, the founder and chairman and CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, tell us about Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper published now 11 years ago, entitled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. You've also heard Adam Back, one of the original cipher punks, the inventor of the Hashcash proof-of-work system, tell us about the speed with which Bitcoin was eclipsing the internet. And you've heard Barry Silbert, the founder and CEO of Digital Coin Group, tell us why crypto is the new gold.
Josh King:
Well, if that doesn't make perfect sense to you, join the club. I was that way too until I got to ICE. I was working at one of those big payments companies, the businesses that make and maintain the rails upon which money mostly flows with detours to banks, credit card companies, and other players in the legacy ecosystem, all siphoning off their vig as cash plots from point A to point B, taking its sweet time doing it. We thought then that if Bitcoin took 10 more years to go mainstream, enabling frictionless peer-to-peer payments, that'd be fine. The system worked quite well, thank you, for the well-entrenched players.
Josh King:
Well, then I got here to ICE and a new world opened up. Kelly Loeffler, the CEO of Bakkt, which is majority-owned by ICE, helped raise $182.5 million from shrewd names in the investing world like Galaxy Digital, Pantera Capital, Horizons Ventures, Eagle Seven, CMT Digital, and Microsoft's M12. The idea that you could buy, sell, store and spend Bitcoin, moving the tiniest fraction of your holdings within a secure warehouse to buy that cup of latte from Starbucks, well, that was the dream I saw being realized. But again, not that many people were into that story. We had enough trouble grasping how Russia might have influenced the outcome of the 2016 election by infiltrating Facebook with fake news.
Josh King:
Facebook, the brainchild of Mark Zuckerberg and his mates, which now vies to enter the crypto space with Libra, that story we knew thanks in no small part to Ben Mezrich, who in 2009 published The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal, which became ultimately The Social Network, the 2010 Columbia release directed by David Fincher and written by Aaron Sorkin, starring Jesse Eisenberg as Zuck. That movie did about $224 million in domestic box office and also, well, sort of portrayed Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the twins who had enlisted Zuckerberg to help them build what they called Harvard Connection, as cartoonish characters left at the altar as Facebook goes on to change the world, the darling of everyone until we woke up after the last presidential election to see the world had changed.
Josh King:
Well, who gets the last laugh? Those Bakkt Bitcoin futures I was telling you about? As I checked this morning, they were trading at $9,480 a Bitcoin, and Ben Mezrich is going to tell us how much Tyler and Cameron got theirs for, how much they got, and whose money they used to buy it. That's right after this.
Speaker 1:
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Josh King:
I heard Ben Mezrich on Brian Koppelman's podcast a few weeks ago. He's written over 20 books either under his own name or a pseudonym. Ben told Brian, who was another guest on this show, that these days he doesn't write a book unless he also sees it as a motion picture. Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption, Ben's newest book unfolds like a script, a sequel to be more precise, of where The Social Network left off. It's even got a three act structure to make the studio or Aaron Sorkin know where to put in the breaks. At the entre to the third act, he quotes The Count of Monte Cristo written by Alexander Dumas saying, "All human wisdom is contained in these two words, wait and hope." Well, we've been waiting and hoping you'd come inside the ICE House to share how you boned up on Bitcoin and shared it with the world. So, Ben Mezrich, welcome to the New York Stock Exchange.
Ben Mezrich:
Thank you very much. I'm happy to be here.
Josh King:
I saw you on CNN from the floor of the NYC a few weeks ago. Was that your first time here?
Ben Mezrich:
I'm trying to remember. It was my first time in a while, so maybe. I think I've been here once or twice in the past, but that was a lot of fun. Yeah, it's a fun place. It's exciting. I've always wanted to be out there.
Josh King:
You mentioned it in Bitcoin Billionaires, and I found the whole story amazing, and finding what you use as the subtitle, Ben, A True Story of Genius, Betrayal and Redemption, every author looks for it in whatever milieu. They're trying to find it. How do you hone your radar to find the stories you want to tell?
Ben Mezrich:
There's a formula. I'm looking for a story about usually young people who are very smart, who do something on the edge of right and wrong, and there has to be that Shakespearean drama in there. It can't just be a great story. There needs to be some level of betrayal. Sex and money are great too, but you're always looking for something that will make a movie. I mean, I've always set out not just to write a book, but for it to be a platform for something else. I grew up loving movies and television, and so I wouldn't sit down to write a book unless I saw that movie playing out as I wrote it.
Josh King:
Are you scanning journalism, looking for hints, getting feedback from friends?
Ben Mezrich:
I'm not-
Josh King:
Where do you find the stuff if it's not already a known character like Cameron and Tyler?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. For the most part, I don't do that. I don't just throw my hat in the ring with all the other journalists out there. I'm not really a journalist. I'm more of a storyteller, so usually people are pitching me stories. The majority of my stories just come as random tweets or emails. Someone contacts me and says, "I have a story," and 90% of those are not something you'd write about. Half of them are from prison. But every now and then, someone will reach out to me and it'll be something incredible. That's how the social network started. It was a random email, 2:00 in the morning, from a Harvard senior who said, "My best friend founded Facebook and no one's ever heard of him." I went out for a drink and in walked Eduardo Saverin. No one had ever spoken to Eduardo before, no one had heard of Eduardo before, and he proceeded to get drunk and tell me this crazy story, and that's how that book and movie started. So, most of my stories have started that way.
Josh King:
Your processing tools when you are late night in a bar with Eduardo, are you recording? Are you scribbling? Are you just saying, "This is good enough. I'm going to follow up"?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. As I said, I'm not really a journalist. I'm the guy who shows up at 3:00 in the morning and gets on the plane to Vegas with them. I'm that guy. That's how I get them to talk to me, is I don't have a notepad, I don't have a recording device. Now afterwards, you have to do the hard work and you have to sit down with them once you've won them over and spend hours and hours and hours just writing as they talk, and so that's when that comes out. But initially, no, I just want to be a part of the story, and so I join it. When I wrote the story about the MIT blackjack team, which became the movie 21 about the kids who beat Vegas, I joined the blackjack team. I spent six months going to and from Vegas every weekend with these guys and that was the only way to really tell that story. Similarly, with The Social Network, and again with Cameron and Tyler, I just sort of become a part of their life because I want to learn and know it as if I'm part of it.
Josh King:
How does that work in the independent author business? Have you already got a fund from your publisher to say, "It's a research fund. Ben can go to Vegas if he wants to"? Or do you have to sell the idea before you get an advance that you're then going to, from an accounting standpoint, bill against?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I've had a crazy life and there's a lot of different stories along the way. But when I first started out, no, I was dead broke. It was credit cards and I was in debt for two million dollars at 26, which I don't recommend to anybody. I was just living this crazy lifestyle and I would follow these characters around. Now it's different. Obviously, I'm basically a corporation at this point. When I want to do a story, I have the means to follow the people around for a little bit. But this all happens very quickly, it's usually within a week I know whether or not this is my next project. The first thing I do is I get enough information to write a treatment or a book proposal, and this is usually 10 pages long, and I sell the movie first.
Ben Mezrich:
For the past 18 books, I've sold the movie first. That gives you leeway to then go ahead and sell the book in a good way and enough to do the research you need to do. But it's always been... Listen, writing is not a career to make money. You can make money at it, but you don't go into it for that. There's been ups and downs and ups and downs. I've been very fortunate to tell some very big stories, but you never know. You never know where a story is going to lead when you start out.
Josh King:
This book, like its predecessor, Ben, is full of dialogue. When one of your books gets optioned and ultimately is headed for the screen and put in the hands of another writer like Aaron Sorkin, how much does his imagination take over and leave the page that you turned into your publisher?
Ben Mezrich:
Well, again, I've been very fortunate. The two movies I've had made, 21 and The Social Network, I loved both movies. And both times, the writers were able to capture what I wrote, but take it that next step. I mean, Aaron Sorkin is a genius. I had written this book proposal, it had landed on the internet, not on purpose, it had leaked out. And that day, Aaron Sorkin had seen it on the internet and said, "I want to write it." You get that phone call and you're like, "Oh my God, Aaron Sorkin." And then that day, David Fincher called and said, "I want to direct it."
Josh King:
Wow.
Ben Mezrich:
And so you knew at that moment, I was going to step back and these guys were going to do what they do, but I got to be very involved. I do think that what Sorkin did was he took what I wrote and so most of the scenes that are in The Social Network were in my book. But he's able to do this magic between the characters where his dialogue, it just comes to life in such an incredible way. I've been lucky. I will say sooner or later, one of my books will be adapted by someone and I won't like it. Every author runs into that, I think, but the key, I think, is give it to the right people.
Ben Mezrich:
The only power an author really has is in the very beginning and at that moment, you do have some choice about who you want to adapt it. If you choose the person who you really like their work and they're brilliant, then you're hopefully going to end up with something you like. You're not just selling it willy nilly to random people. You're trying to set it up in a way that it'll come out good. Now, listen, I'm not a literary guy, so it's not like I need this to be a great piece of literature. I love all forms of movies, so for me, there's a wide variety of people who I'd love to see adapt my work.
Josh King:
You say you're not a literary guy. A lot of reviewers of your book have come out and said it straight out. This book among other things is the Bitcoin primer. It's the Bitcoin movie. This isn't an easy topic to translate into plain English. How did you go about getting conversant and then fluent in the language of crypto?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. Let me just start out by saying I never intended to write a book about Bitcoin. Over the years, people have been pitching me Bitcoin stories and I just wasn't interested. The word blockchain was the most horrible word ever invented, in my opinion. I mean, it's a hard concept for someone like me. I'm not a math guy for the most part and I'm not even a business guy although I've written a lot about business. The only reason I really got into this story was because it was the Winklevoss twins. I had written about these guys, and to me, they were the dumb jocks. They were the bad guys. They were the guys chasing the karate kid around the gym in the skeleton costumes because when I first met them in a hotel room, they reminded me of every guy who used to beat me up in high school. These were those guys, these giant, blond Olympiads. And so in The Social Network, they are caricatures. They're somewhat made fun of, Aaron Sorkin took it to a whole nother level.
Ben Mezrich:
But then I was reading The New York Times and I see this headline, the Winklevoss twins are the... It was the first Bitcoin billionaires, and that blew my mind. I mean, these were not the guys that I thought they were. And so that's the reason I wrote about Bitcoin. Yes, I had to go through a whole learning curve. I had heard of Bitcoin. I hadn't bought any, but I'd had friends who were computer guys. When Bitcoin first started, it was all computer guys. It was libertarians, anarchists, druggies, and guys who were on the internet all the time. I mean, it wasn't anybody else because no one else had even heard of it. But seeing someone like the twins involved with something very different... Because they're not those guys, they're the opposite of those guys. Those are the guys in suits.
Josh King:
Neither are the people who work in this building who are getting into this as well.
Ben Mezrich:
Exactly. Right. Where we are now is in large part, in my opinion, because of people like the Winklevoss twins, is people who weren't getting Bitcoin to go on Silk Road, but we're looking at Bitcoin as the next step in finance, as seeing it this is the future of money. And so that's what really turned me on to it. Yes, I had to learn about it. For me, it was very basic, the idea of money that I could send from me to you using my phone the same way I send an email or a text and there's nobody in between us. There's no government, there's no bank, there's know borders. That seemed very simple to me and that's where I started. It gets more complex as you get into it, the whole mining operations, how Bitcoin enters the system. But the idea that it could be digital gold, the idea that it is limited to 21 million coins, all of that made a lot of sense, and that's where I got intrigued and interested.
Ben Mezrich:
When I sat down to write the book, my goal was to avoid the word blockchain. Of course, it's in there because it can't not be, but that wasn't what was important to me. What was important to me was the concept, the ease, the things that turned the Winklevoss twins on to it, were similar to what turned me on to it.
Josh King:
Let's just do a little math for our listeners. Reconstruct how much Bitcoin Cameron and Tyler bought, how much they paid for it at the time, and what the math says it's worth today at say $10,000 of Bitcoin.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. The Winklevoss twins decided to buy 1% of all Bitcoin right after they heard about it and the price was around $7. It went up and down a little bit. They spent about $14 million or a little bit more, got about 200,000 coins. Then it went up. It's at 9,000 today, so you can do the math, and they have close to $2 billion in Bitcoin from a very small, considerably smaller investment. It's an incredible story. What's incredible to me about it, and people are always like, "Oh, I wish I had done that," but if I had bought Bitcoin at $7, I would've sold it at 15 or I would've sold it at a 100 or a 1000 or 10,000 or 20,000. They've held it all the way up to 20,000 and back to 9,000.
Ben Mezrich:
So, that's something else going on. It's not luck. You don't get lucky buy at $7 and hold it all the way through. It's because they believe and they were trying to build a business around it. But from what I understand, and I speak to them a lot, they still hold their Bitcoin. Whether it's all of it, the majority of it, I don't know the numbers and no one really knows, but they really set out to buy 1% of it and I believe that's what they have.
Josh King:
One group that passed up the opportunity at $7 of Bitcoin were the lawyers at Quinn Emanuel who represented the Winklevoss twins when they did their arbitration with Mark Zuckerberg.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah, they don't love that story.
Josh King:
They wanted to take their cut of the settlement in cash and keep it that way.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. This is a great story that I didn't know when I wrote the book that became The Social Network and found out afterwards. Mark Zuckerberg was in negotiations with the twins. The twins had sued him, they were trying to get some sort of settlement out him. They were very angry. They felt that Mark stole their idea and created Facebook, and they were getting nowhere. And so finally Cameron said, "You know what? We're just a bunch of college kids. We were all friends together. Let's just get in a room and sit down with Mark and just talk it through." They gave their lawyer that request. Their lawyer went to Mark's lawyer, and Mark's lawyer came back and said, "He says he has some concerns." It turns out he was afraid they were going to beat him up. He said, "I'll meet, but just with one of you," like one Winklevoss twin couldn't beat up Mark Zuckerberg.
Ben Mezrich:
One twin, Cameron, went into the room and they held this meeting in a glass box, in a glass room, in the middle of a law firm. All the lawyers sat around it, and Cameron and Mark had this conversation, and it ended with a settlement. Mark paid them $65 million, but they were unhappy. They didn't want it. Instead, they took it in stock because they wanted to still be a part of Facebook. Their lawyers didn't like that idea, wanted the cash, and so they got into a battle with their own law firm which ended up in a lawsuit. But they ended up paying their lawyers their cut in cash, they took their own in stock. After Facebook IPOed, the twins ended up with close to $500 million. So, it was a great decision by them and a very poor decision by the law firm.
Ben Mezrich:
The twins had all this money and their plan was to become Silicon Valley investors. They went out to Silicon Valley with their huge pot of gold and nobody wanted to touch their money because everyone's end game in Silicon Valley is to sell your company to Facebook. And if you have the Winklevoss twins on your spreadsheet, Facebook isn't going to buy your company. So, the twins had all this money but couldn't invest it, and so that's when they went to Ibiza, it's a party, as one does. That's what you do when you're a Winklevoss twin and you have half a billion dollars, and so they were on the beach in Ibiza.
Josh King:
I'm going to get us to Ibiza very shortly. I want to-
Ben Mezrich:
I hope you get us to Ibiza.
Josh King:
Definitely, we won't miss the foam. But because it's so topical... I mean, you, like Robert Frost, have came back to this story and took a different road than the original one. The story you hatched in The Accidental Billionaires seems to want to come back along for the ride with you. I want to listen to a little of CBS Evening News from Wednesday, October 23rd.
Speaker 4:
Facebook CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, found himself on the hot seat today. He went to Capitol Hill to talk about the social media giant's cryptocurrency plans, but as Ed O'Keefe reports, Zuckerberg ended up getting grilled on a range of controversial issues.
Speaker 5:
Fair or not fair, you're here today to answer for the digital age.
Ed O'Keefe:
Mark Zuckerberg wanted to talk about the new digital currency Facebook is pitching, but lawmakers said he had other issues he had to deal with first.
Speaker 8:
You've proven that we cannot trust you with our emails, with our phone numbers. So, why should we trust you with our hard-earned money?
Josh King:
You know him, Ben. Why should we trust him with our hard-earned money? I mean, he keeps wanting to be part of this frame again.
Ben Mezrich:
I feel like the Congress people were reading right from my book. We shouldn't. I've said this from the very beginning. Look, I don't have anything against Libra. I think it's moving crypto forward. I think the idea of a stable coin is okay. I think that Mark Zuckerberg doing it is the problem. We don't trust him and we probably shouldn't. What Facebook has done with our data is upsetting, and the way they've managed not just our data, but our expectations or who they really are, they've been duplicitous about it. And so it's troubling when you think about them now reaching into your wallet, having say, or at least having a view of what you're spending your money on and how you're spending your money. It's a little bit terrifying.
Ben Mezrich:
I've always felt that if Amazon were launching Libra, we would probably be okay with it. We give them our credit card every single day. Nobody seems to have a problem with that. There's plenty of companies that could pull this off. Facebook is probably the worst company to attempt this although they have a reach into all of our lives. Everyone's on Facebook all the time, so it does make sense. But the problem is, is right now is a horrible time for them to be doing this. Now, I always say that this is a personal thing. I really and truly have problem believing it is a coincidence that the Winklevoss twins launch Gemini and Mark Zuckerberg launches Libra. It just seems a little bit too close, right?
Josh King:
I mean, you retweeted Duncan McLeod last week, who's the editor of TechCentral, who wrote, "Reading Ben's book, I did wonder how much Zuckerberg's Libra project is about ego and sticking it to the twins." You think there's some truth to that?
Ben Mezrich:
I mean, I really, really think so. I actually got into it on Twitter with David Marcus, is that his name, the guy running Libra, because I said, "Come on." And he said, "No, no. I came up with that name," and I was like, "Well, but when you pitched it to Zuckerberg, didn't he sort of just say something about the fact that his rivals on earth have Gemini?" It's too much. They've been doing Bitcoin for so long that they know so much more about this world than I feel... Zuckerberg had a learning curve and I think he's made a lot of mistakes. I think he doesn't see himself correctly. I think he's got too many yes men around him. I don't think he understands how he's perceived.
Ben Mezrich:
I mean, listen, when I wrote Accidental Billionaires, he was the revolutionary. We liked him. Facebook was something exciting that we all loved. You fast forward to today and the Winklevoss twins are the revolutionaries and Zuckerberg is the establishment, and he's done a lot of things that upset us and it's a difficult time for them. And so the moment is wrong and he doesn't read it right. He probably went there and thought he was going to be heralded, and instead they're attacking him about things that don't really have that much to do with Libra, but it's all-encompassing.
Josh King:
I mean, just because we have this image of Jesse Eisenberg playing the part, let's go back up to Capitol Hill for a second last week because there was this exchange between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the chairman and CEO of Facebook that you just want to put on endless loop. Let's hear it. Listen.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Mr. Zuckerberg, what year and month did you personally first become aware of Cambridge Analytica?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I'm not sure of the exact time, but it was probably around the time when it became public. I think it was around March of 2018. I could be wrong though.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). When did Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg become aware of Cambridge Analytica?
Mark Zuckerberg:
I don't know off the top of my head.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez:
You don't know? Did anyone on your leadership team know about Cambridge Analytica prior to the initial report by the Guardian on December 11th, 2015?
Mark Zuckerberg:
Congresswoman, I believe so in that some folks were tracking it internally.
Josh King:
Some folks were tracking it internally. I mean, you wrote on Twitter, "Instead of having Zuckerberg testify, they should have just aired The Social Network. You can learn everything you need to know about Facebook from that movie." Ben, this very day in the New York Stock Exchange, Richard Branson is in the building. He always seemed like a billionaire who has fun being a billionaire. In their way, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, you Amazon earlier, Warren Buffet, they do too. Elon Musk has his passions. Zuckerberg, where's the joy in what he's built?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I mean, it doesn't seem like he's a happy guy and it seems like... But from the very beginning, he's sort of been that way. It was never about money for him and it was never about the fun of sort of this. It was he's an odd guy who essentially was changing the world to fit him. He always had these very large dreams to get us all on Facebook, that we would all live on Facebook. It's funny, that exchange, it's straight out of a Sorkin script. I mean, you could just see him just turning and saying, "I don't have... Do you have my attention?" That whole scene could have run that way. It's fascinating.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah, I don't see him in a happy place right now, but I think he really believes that he's right and we're all wrong. I think he's always believed that and I think he runs Facebook that way. I like Sheryl Sandberg. I've known her since college. Sheryl and I went to school together. I think she's very smart, but she got herself caught up in this situation and has to sort of try and quietly extricate herself from the negativeness of Facebook right now.
Josh King:
We're on our way to Ibiza. Let's do a quick little painting of a picture of Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, these two who were somewhat caricatured in The Social Network movie. Here, they are really much more in their comfort zone. Talking about the performance features of their Quantum Four in the tale of the Charles Regatta in the fall of 2003. Let's take a listen.
Winklevoss:
We were in the second boat and we had spent a lot of time actually trying in [inaudible 00:27:08] earlier that week and Harry indicated that he wanted us to give this Quantum a try. And so we decided to race in that boat, and the conditions were incredibly rough that day, but we ended up actually winning the race by something like 20 plus seconds.
Josh King:
In one way, you report some of the Instant Messages that have come out from Zuckerberg since the publication of your first book, in which he says, "You can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life." These twins, their great-great-grandfather was August Winklevoss, a coal miner who transplanted from Hanover, Germany, died of black lung. Their great-grandfather was also a coal miner, and Howard Winklevoss is this beacon pillar of decency and values that steers them in this direction, these two boys that are in the boathouse talking about the performance of a scull.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I mean, these are guys with real 1950 sensibilities of right and wrong. From the very beginning when I first met them, that was very, very clear. There's no gray area with them. It's black and white. You do right you do wrong. You get knocked down, you get back up. I mean, famous quote from Theodore Roosevelt. They live their life by this whole idea that you have to be men of honor. And when Zuckerberg worked for them and then launched Facebook without telling them, and as to in their mind, took ideas from them, the worst part of that was that he lied to them, that he was duplicitous, that he led them along. If he had just been upfront about what he had intended to do, it would not have been the betrayal that they saw it as.
Ben Mezrich:
I've always sort of been intrigued by them and had a lot of respect for that. In the course of writing The Social Network and in this one, I don't believe they've ever told a lie. Sometimes you talk to characters and they play around with the facts. These are guys who really believe in the truth and right and wrong for better or worse, and I think that that comes out. It's intriguing guys like that being involved in Bitcoin, which is a world that comes from a shady place and is full of characters who... There are some real shady characters in the beginnings of Bitcoin, and these are guys who really believe in this right and wrong. And so, yeah, that's where we sort of start with them.
Josh King:
Were you aware of the August Winklevoss and the Howard Winklevoss origin stories in the first book? Because you really flesh it out beautifully in this one.
Ben Mezrich:
No, not really. I mean, I saw them as everyone sees them, as people of privilege. You look at them and you think, "These are sons of billionaires from Greenwich, Connecticut. They've had an easy life." That's what you think when you look at them and so I didn't know their background at all when I wrote the first book
Josh King:
Was your own investigative process and finding that these guys are real men of substance or at least men of character?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I got them to open up in a way that I haven't ever seen them open up before. I mean, I haven't seen any articles about their lives and where their background was and they trusted me with that, which was great, but I really wanted to know who they were going back because them coming from coal mining beginnings. They had a sister who passed away. It's a very sort of sad story and it's something they'd never spoken about before, and I really wanted to get to them. The hardest sell with the Winklevoss twins, of course, is in the world we live in today, their privilege is something that comes up right away. Average people look at them and think, "These are not underdogs. There's no way these guys are ever underdogs," but they see themselves as underdogs.
Ben Mezrich:
They've had issues in their life that they've had to deal with, they've had to get back up. They've been ridiculed. They've had a, what they believe, a company stolen from them. They went through tragedy as youngsters and so I wanted to bring that stuff out because to me, I feel it's too bad that we judge people so quickly now, and especially the way people look or where you come from. It's easy to judge people like them just as much as you judge people elsewhere. You judge them because they're wearing suits and they come from Harvard, but you want to get to know them a little more than that. The quote in the book I really do say is, "They start on third base and it's still really hard to make it home." I understand why some people will never get behind them. I mean, they did start farther than most of us, so it's hard for the average person to look at these guys and think of them of having troubles, but I did want to bring it out from their point of view.
Josh King:
Well, they certainly continue to have their troubles, even with $500 million in their pocket, becoming Silicon Valley venture capitalists. No one really wants to take their money and they end up packing their bags basically to take some time off, I think, to fly to Spain, to follow the action to Ibiza in 2012. They can't even get their money over to Ibiza to rent their villa.
Ben Mezrich:
Right. I mean, that's what really turned them on to Bitcoin, is they had flown there and beaten their money. They were trying to rent this villa there, and in the old days, you couldn't send money very quickly, especially on a weekend internationally, which is foolish. The idea that carrying a bag of cash is the quickest way to get more money to Ibiza is kind of insane. Right? And so when someone walked up to them on the beach and said, "Have you guys heard of Bitcoin?" that was on their mind. When they looked at this, the idea of money you could send like that was intriguing to them. Of course, there was already PayPal, there were already possibilities in this world. I don't think Venmo was around yet, but the idea of money sent via your phone... You could use credit cards and things like that, but why does there need to be someone in between? I think that really intrigued them.
Josh King:
I mean, they actually get told that they're... They're in the middle of this Blue Marlin bar, "We need to tell you Winklevi twins about the oldest social network on earth."
Ben Mezrich:
Right. Money. I mean, the idea that money is something that connects us all in a way that previous to having the internet or previous... And it goes all the way back, of course, a long, long way. But that's the pitch essentially, is the idea that this really is a social network in that it's connecting us all and it should be seamless.
Josh King:
That's the pitch. When we come back, more with Ben Mezrich on the Winklevoss twins as they take the plunge into Bitcoin. We meet the crazy characters they met along the way and we watch with the boys as the world changes before their and our eyes. That's right after this.
Speaker 1:
And now a word from John Berger, president and CEO of Sunnova, NYSE ticker N-O-V-A.
John Berger:
We're a solar company. We're out there to bring solar to every home in the country.
John Berger:
We have such a vast market that remains untapped. I think it's less than 3% of the market of homes in the United States and so there's just so much potential. New York Stock Exchange is the home of capitalism. It's just where the action happens. No matter where you are in the world, all eyes are on the New York Stock Exchange. Sunnova now listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
From Ibiza back to New York, go Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss. We are back in New York now with Ben Mezrich, author of Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption. Before the break, Ben was unfolding for us this Count of Monte Cristo revenge story as Cameron and Tyler found their own social network, one as old as the first known currency created by King Alyattes of Lydia, now part of Turkey, in 600 BC. Now, Ben, you just can't write about science or technology or finance. There has to be human craziness to make these pages turn, doesn't there?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I mean, absolutely. That's what we're are looking for. When I write, I'm really looking for the dramatic characters, the crazy characters, something that really pushes it from just being something you might read in The New York Times to being something you would watch on a screen.
Josh King:
Picking up where we left off at the Blue Marlin in Ibiza, it's around the time that we meet another major character in Bitcoin Billionaires Billionaires, Charlie Shrem. Let's hear a little bit from him in his own words.
Charlie Shrem:
There are interviews where I say that I could very well end up in jail and my prophecy came true. I did. I am a pioneer on the forefront of this thing, one of the first 10 people who even knew what Bitcoin was. I'm a capitalist. I wanted to make money. That's what we did. We just built a company to make us money. I had this Bitcoin celebrity status. I had a party lifestyle. I've also made the mistakes and I've seen the red flags.
Speaker 14:
What this all means for Bitcoin?
Charlie Shrem:
No comment. We are the reasons that Bitcoin is where it is today, and that's something that'll be my legacy.
Josh King:
Ben, when you introduce Charlie Shrem to us, he's in his man cave, but it's not a billionaire's man cave. It's his mother's cinder block basement in the Syrian Orthodox Jewish neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. Charlie is a really fascinating character. He was 18 years old. I mean, he was a kid living in his mother's basement. The Syrian Jewish community in Brooklyn is a very insular, very difficult upbringing, especially for a kid like Charlie. They have this edict where you're not allowed to date outside the religion or outside the community, and they take very seriously and that comes into play later. But Charlie's way out was on the internet, was hacking, was doing all of the stuff that people like him who are brilliant in computers do, and he discovered Bitcoin. He was one of the first people to really see it way back when Satoshi Nakamoto wrote the white paper, and very early on, Charlie and another guy, his partner who was an autistic Welshman, who was never met by anybody, so pretty much vanished during and after the story.
Ben Mezrich:
But basically him and his partner had this idea to create a company called Bitinstant. At the time, buying Bitcoin was very difficult. To buy Bitcoin, you had to go through these very shady exchanges. Mt. Gox was the most famous one. Mt. Gox, named after Magic: The Gathering because it was a Magic: The Gathering card trading site which then became a Bitcoin trading site. So, regular people couldn't buy Bitcoin. Charlie created the company where you could. Bitinstant was a place you could put money in and get Bitcoin. It was basically a reseller. He would buy up the Bitcoin and sell it to you, which was fine. His first investors were the Winklevoss twins. Well, second investor. His first investor was Roger Ver.
Josh King:
After Roger Ver.
Ben Mezrich:
Now, there's an interesting story in itself. Roger is... I describe him as an anarchist. He's a libertarian. If you read his tweets, they're completely insane. He was one of the first people into Bitcoin. He was known as Bitcoin Jesus because as a true believer, he invested in all these Bitcoin companies, and he was really a champion for Bitcoin in a very respectable way. You have to like that about Roger, but he was also a little bit crazy. And so Charlie's first person was Roger and his second people really are the Winklevoss twins, and these are very different views of Bitcoin.
Josh King:
I mean, we're going to get into some of these different personalities between Roger and Erik and Charlie and the twins. But when the twins come to see Charlie the first time, I think in addition to all the computers and cables and screens they see in the basement, they count at least three bongs.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. Charlie was a... He'll say it himself. I spent some time with Charlie. I love Charlie, by the way. But Charlie liked marijuana, he thinks it's great. And so the twins and him, when they first met, the twins are the guys in suits and Charlie is the guy with bongs all over the house. I do think that Charlie is an incredibly complex individual. He's very, very smart. When you see him, he's moving a mile a minute. The kid never stops moving.
Ben Mezrich:
He also was very pliable. He was a guy who was looking for heroes. He was looking for people to guide him. The twins were one angle, but there were people guiding him another way. As you know, as you heard in that quote, he definitely went in the wrong direction. But from the very beginning, yeah, Charlie is a fun-loving guy. He was excommunicated from his community because he fell in love with a girl who was not in the Syrian Jewish community. He ended up living above a club. He bought a club with a bunch of friends in New York, and it was a club that took Bitcoin, and he ended up living upstairs from it and living a party lifestyle.
Josh King:
The twins are giving something to Charlie in terms of credibility and that role model that he has for them. Roger Ver is another. But Charlie is continuing to, in some ways, mentor and tutor Tyler and Cameron, and also people like David Azar, who they met in Ibiza, and the twins are getting this essential truth. The only physical money anyone really has, what was in his or her wallet. The rest had already been turned into data by the middle men who took a fee. So, this learning process is fascinating for those-
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I think this is a great concept that a lot of people just don't seem to realize. Some people say to me, "Oh, digital money. I don't know." And I say them, "Your money's already digital. All the money you really have, physical money, is in your wallet. When you go to the bank and you make a deposit, there's not some vault full of all of that money. It immediately turns into ones and zeros and enters the electronic hyperspace." So, everything's already digital for the most part. It was that one extra step, the idea that cash doesn't really make sense and that there doesn't need to be a bank. There doesn't need to be a government. It could be something that... Why, when I send you something, does there have to be someone in between us? And so that's the concept that really turned them on.
Ben Mezrich:
You're right, Charlie was teaching the twins about Bitcoin and the twins were these respectable men of Harvard. They were supposed to be the ambassadors to bring Bitcoin to that next place, to get it out of Silk Road, to get it... Although Charlie, at the same time, was being pulled by the guys who believe that Silk Road should be legal, that you should be allowed to buy drugs, that there shouldn't be taxation, and these are the libertarian founders of Bitcoin. It's an interesting sort of dichotomy and it's that battle which is what's at the core of the book to me.
Josh King:
Talk about the libertarian view, that streak, that kind of goes throughout the supporting characters of Bitcoin Billionaires. Another of the twins' mentors is Erik Voorhees. Let's hear from him last year talking about government regulation of digital assets.
Erik Voorhees:
I generally think that most regulation is superfluous at best and a lot of it is quite harmful generally, especially in the realm of finance. I think money itself is really in need of being let loose and freed from government control. It is in a market-based economy. Having the primary good, which is money, be centrally planned, I think is very problematic. No one would tolerate a monopoly in the manufacturing of shoes or cars or cell phones, and yet they do tolerate it in the realm of money. And so people in crypto basically want to offer alternatives.
Josh King:
When we meet Erik in the book, Cameron is trying to boil this complex topic down as simple as he can, and ultimately he elevates Satoshi Nakamoto to that most exalted status, the Willy Wonka of Bitcoin. Who is Nakamoto and does he look anything like the late Gene Wilder?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah, Satoshi Nakamoto is a really cool story. I mean, this is something that he appeared on the internet with this white paper launching Bitcoin. His name probably isn't Satoshi Nakamoto. It's probably a fake name. He's probably not Japanese. It may not even be one person, it's probably multiple people. There's been a lot of back and forth, "Who is this person?" Every newspaper has tried to figure out who this person is. Whoever this person is, they set Bitcoin into motion and they probably have one million Bitcoin, so they're one of the wealthiest people in the world. But what's interesting about it is, Bitcoin works without an authority, right? So, the idea that this person appeared and then vanished, never to be heard from again, is part of what Bitcoin is all about.
Ben Mezrich:
I think the twins calling him Willy Wonka, they're trying to describe the mining process. The idea is earning your Bitcoin is like finding that golden ticket. Your computer is running all of these calculations and someone wins that award and that's how Bitcoin enters the system. Satoshi is the one who set it all into motion in 2009, 2010, in this sort of weird way, and I love that. That's sort of the background of this form of money that has made all these billionaires, is just this invisible person who may or may not have ever really existed. The twins have some idea who they think it is, but nobody really knows the answer yet.
Josh King:
This invisible person creates this infrastructure that, until Tyler and Cameron come along, until people like Intercontinental Exchange and Bakkt come along, CME comes along, other sort of mainstream participants, regulators, you still have this unregulated Wild West. And some people are using Bitcoin to transact for stuff, but it's not the kind of stuff you and I would ever buy, Ben, at least I don't hope so. Let's hear a clip from the Australian version of 60 minutes.
Speaker 16:
Show me how you'd go about buying your drugs.
Speaker 17:
Okay. So, to start with, let's see, maybe go for stimulants.
Speaker 16:
I'm about to take you into a world I didn't know existed. Okay, so we have quite a selection. What you're seeing is the new way to buy drugs. And for 22-year-old Sarah, buying her drugs of choice, ecstasy and LSD, has never been easier.
Speaker 17:
Yeah. This is the stuff that the kids are buying.
Speaker 16:
Okay. To buy her drugs, Sarah doesn't even have to leave the house because they're all here on websites like this one called Silk Road.
Josh King:
Then you relay a story of how a Florida programmer paid 10,000 Bitcoins for two Papa John's pizzas. But this stuff is what separates Satoshi's version from a regulated reality.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I mean, so when Bitcoin first started, it was not regulated and people were buying drugs. Silk Road exploded into this billion dollar business. It was an online bazaar, like an Amazon for drugs, not just drugs, but apparently you could hire people to kill people. Anything illegal was available there. And this, in a lot of ways, was the libertarian dream, was the idea that no one should regulate what you buy, that drugs shouldn't be illegal, and that you should be able to do it without anybody seeing you're doing it. Bitcoin was the perfect vehicle for that, but that was the beginnings of this whole thing. When Silk Road went down, there was a big sting operation. The FBI took it down. Bitcoin had to survive that, and in fact, flourished after that. Bitcoin ended up going up very quickly from there, which proved that Bitcoin was much more than that.
Ben Mezrich:
A lot of people feared that Silk Road going down would destroy Bitcoin and the opposite happened. Freeing it from this sort of dark past allowed real people to start getting involved. And the companies you listed, the real people, were not going to be involved in something that was being used for something like that. So, that's kind of an interesting point. When I talk about this, people are always pointing out, "Well, listen, people use the $100 bill to buy cocaine. That's the majority of drug dealing." It's not. With Bitcoin, it's with cash, and that's true too. Bitcoin definitely has a dark past, but where it's come today, it's shedding that and it's slowly shedding it more and more. Although at the same time, Chinese billionaires, Russian oligarchs, when they need to get their money out, they use Bitcoin, and so Bitcoin still have as a use like that. But the majority of Bitcoin, I don't think is being used for things like that anymore.
Josh King:
I mean, you can tell me where we are in the story and where Bitcoin's price is at the point of where our conversation is now, but you mentioned that Bitcoin's value only went up from there after Silk Road begins to depart from the scene. I mentioned Act Three of Bitcoin Billionaires in my introduction. Act Two begins 5,400 miles away from New York. Let's listen.
Speaker 18:
Global war re-stemming from that financial crisis in the Mediterranean nation of Cyprus.
Speaker 19:
Now, that's stocks sliding across Asia this morning and it was a major reason for the Dow's 90 point skid yesterday. ABC's Nick Schifrin is in Cypress where worry and anger is rampant.
Nick Schifrin:
Cypress is nearly broke and the social fabric is beginning to tear. Bank workers worried about their future blocked access to parliament. Lawmakers had to be lifted over the barricades. Outside the banks, the lines are long, customers worried.
Speaker 21:
You don't have cash now. Can't do anything.
Nick Schifrin:
The banks haven't opened for seven days, so Cypress is becoming a cash society, and yet it's hard to get cash.
Josh King:
Then why was a bank run in a tiny Mediterranean island the equivalent of the first shots at Lexington Green?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. What happened in Cypress is what launched Bitcoin. Cypress, this small island nation, went bankrupt. They ran out of money and the EU decided not to bail them out. So, what Cypress did to solve their problem is they just went to everyone's bank accounts, they froze all the banks, and then they took as much as 50% of everyone's account over a 100,000 euro. And so you would wake up the next morning and half of your money was just taken, and it was completely legal. A lot of the money in Cypress at the time was Russian oligarch money. There was a lot of wealthy businessmen who had their money hidden there essentially and they realized at that moment that they could not trust a bank and they couldn't trust a government because the reality is this could happen anywhere. Every country is allowed to do this in a time of crisis.
Ben Mezrich:
Tomorrow, you could wake up in the United States, it seems unlikely, but you could wake up in the United States, the country going bankrupt for some reason, and the money you have in your bank, which insured by the government, suddenly becomes something that you're not so sure about any more. But Bitcoin is different, Bitcoin doesn't have any middle men. All of these people, these oligarchs mostly, but a lot of other people, started to buy Bitcoin. And the price of Bitcoin, that's when it went from the tens of dollars to the hundreds of dollars. That was that first moment when people realized there needs to be a form of money that is really safe. Now, gold is an example as well, but you can't walk around with your vault of gold. Someone has to store your gold and thus there's a middle man. And so the idea of a form of gold that you could walk around with, it was very exciting to people who felt like they were afraid of banks and governments, and so that's where it really took off.
Josh King:
You've got great scenes that follow from there. You've got Pitch Aboard, Ron Burkle's jet, and I know a little bit about Burkle from the time in the Clinton years. You've got the meetings with Naval Ravikant at the Bitcoin 2013 Conference in San Jose. And you really make a huge moment, I think, in Act Three of the presentation that Cameron and Tyler make in front of Bitcoin 2013. I want to hear the beginning of their talk at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, 2013.
Winklevoss:
We're super excited to be here with you guys, Bitcoin 2013. We love Bitcoin. I'm sure most of you guys do as well. If you don't, hopefully we'll convince you by the end of our talk that you'll love it as much as we do. We felt like we would start with a quote to frame our talk and sort of the way we feel about Bitcoin, its history, where it's been, where it is, and where it's going. So, we'll start with this quote right here, and this is not working. There we go. Okay. Basically, "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." This is Gandhi. I hope everybody here knows who Gandhi is.
Josh King:
I mean, I think I heard something similar from the mouth of Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, but how does that speech go over?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. These guys, previous to that, had always been ridiculed. They'd never been invited to the party basically. And suddenly because of their belief in Bitcoin and what they'd been doing, they'd been spending the year just running around the country telling everyone who would listen, they were invited to keynote the 2013 Bitcoin Conference. And so they gave their big speech and I think it was... People loved them. They were ambassadors. They were the guys you didn't see normally at these Bitcoin conferences. These were not computer nerds. These were not guys who discovered Bitcoin late one night on some bulletin board for hackers. These were the Winklevoss twins. And so I do think this was a big moment for them and for Bitcoin. Yeah, I think the speech went over well.
Josh King:
I mean, this is also a moment when I think sort of the philosophical divide between the twins and Charlie and Roger Ver really begins to materialize and these guys are headed in their separate way.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. What happened was basically around this time, the twins were starting to have problems with Charlie. Charlie, as the CEO of their company, they had invested in it, was not really working out because Charlie was crazy and because Charlie was listening to Roger and Erik. And Erik Voorhees, he's a genius by the way, but he's a true libertarian who believes that there shouldn't be any of these rules. What was happening was someone was using Bitinstant to buy drugs. They were buying Bitcoin from Charlie and then buying drugs with it, which is okay, except that Charlie knew about it, and the know your customer thing is very important.
Josh King:
KYC.
Ben Mezrich:
Right. He's not just CEO, but he was also his own compliance officer, which was a big mistake. There was an email between one of the other people at Bitinstant saying to Charlie, "I think he's buying drugs with this," and Charlie's response was, "Good," and this does not go over well. The FBI... And so Charlie was arrested and ended up going to jail. He was the first person really put in jail for Bitcoin, spent two years in prison, and that was a big moment.
Ben Mezrich:
That was sort of the moment when the twins realized to do this, there has to be regulation. They felt very strongly that regulation was going to be part of Bitcoin story, that they wanted to build a company and exchange, and they ended up building Gemini, that is part of the New York financial system and not against it. This leads to everyone else is now moving in that direction. I think the large point, the Bitcoin community is understanding that there needs to be some form of regulation. There needs to be a way that big banks can get involved, that regular people on the street can feel safe, and I think the twins were the first people to look in that direction.
Josh King:
The book really seems to come for a landing, not at some of these exotic places that you've written about in Ibiza or San Jose or Miami or 40,000 feet up in the air in Ron Burkle's jet, but a couple blocks north of here in the hearing room of Superintendent of Financial Services in the New York State, Ben Lawsky. You've got all these people who are part of the more Wild, Wild West days of Bitcoin, but also sort of these transitional figures. Andreessen and Horowitz are there, Barry Silbert is there, and the Winklevoss twins are there. Is this the moment where basically the suits win?
Ben Mezrich:
I mean, I think in some way it is. I think the twins quote, and I can't remember the exact words, but something about how there needs to be a sheriff. I think that to an extent, yes, I do think that the only way Bitcoin survives, it continues, is that the suits have to win to some degree. You can't just let it be this free for all or my mother and father will never be into Bitcoin. It's this generational thing. There needs to be a way that the adults in the room have to also accept Bitcoin. I do think that was the big moment. That was the moment when they said, "At least we can work together and there's a way for this to work." Yeah, I think we've seen what happened. I mean, look at Bitcoin today, it closed at 10,000 a coin from pennies, right? It's an incredible transformation in such a short period of time.
Josh King:
You write so much in Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption, about sort of three of the key questions about Bitcoin, buying it, selling it, and storing it. That fourth verb a of spending it is one that is being wrestled with now. As you're continuing to follow the story, we know what Bakkt is trying to do, but what are you hearing about ways in which people are going to spend it in aboveboard and legitimate ways?
Ben Mezrich:
I mean, that's a great question and you probably know a lot more about this than I do because my book really is the origin story, and where it ends, it's really in that storing it thing because Bitcoin really did become gold to some extent. The price fluctuations being so insane and the way the news seems to affect it every day makes it hard to spend. Guys like the twins originally saw it as a form of currency you would use every day and I think now they see a little bit more as something you store the same way you would buy gold, just better. But, yeah, I do think that the future has to find some way of using crypto on a daily basis whether it's a stable coin or... And I'm intrigued by the idea of these stable coins.
Ben Mezrich:
I really do think if Amazon launched tomorrow, it would be a wild success because everyone uses Amazon every day to buy things. Different than Facebook... We don't use Facebook every day to buy things. So, I do think everyone would have no problem having their Amazon electronic wallet and having their Amazon dollar. If I was spending it on Amazon, that would be great. And if I wanted to give you one of them, I would just send it to you from my phone. Suddenly, everyone would be using this form of crypto. So, I do think it could happen overnight with some company like Amazon.
Josh King:
I'm intrigued where else all this knowledge, Ben, that you've amassed about digital assets, cryptocurrency, will show its head. Certainly looking forward to the news of its option and where it'll show up and who might collaborate with you on the writing, but you're becoming a bit of a screenwriter yourself this season. We've had Brian Koppelman, David Levine, on this show. They've been here to ring the opening bell. We've saw Bitcoin find its way slightly into prior episodes of Billions, but now you are in the writers room.
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. Brian and David asked me to come in as a producer, a consulting producer, and a writer in the staff writing room. So, I've been in the writers room at Billions for season five, which was an incredible experience, never been in TV before. When I got the call from Brian, he said, "Would you be interested?" I said, "I don't really wear pants on a daily basis. I sit in a room and write books." But if I was going to do any show, I just love that show so much. I've had a blast. I got to write an episode, which was really cool, and now I get to be... We shoot and I get to be on set and watch it all happen. It was great. It was a great experience. Those guys that are the smartest guys in the business. I really find that that show captures something about New York and about the financial world that no other show does and has now for years, and I think season five's going to be awesome. So, it's been a great experience.
Josh King:
I mean, we have this image of show writers rooms as, I don't know, five or six day a week processes, mostly on studio lots in Los Angeles. This is a different one, New York City, and maybe somewhat for you, the ability to be more of a virtual one. How has the experience actually played itself out in the collaborative process?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. I live in Boston, but I came in here three, four days a week and I was sitting in a writers room with all these people and had to figure out whether you had to raise your hand to go to the bathroom. I never worked with people before. It's like a seminar. I mean, it's a learning experience. I know billionaires. My whole career has been, I like to say, billionaire-adjacent. So, I've been writing about this world for a long time. I know what it's like being in a Gulfstream jet. I know what these yachts are like in St. Bart. I think that helps for me to get into this world of Billions because I'm kind of the real world liaison to these people that are on the show. I know real life Axes, as you do too, I'm sure, so it was really cool to be able to take that knowledge and sort of put it to use in a television format.
Ben Mezrich:
Listen, TV's the future of writing. That is very clear to me and to everyone in writing right now. Books, I love writing books and I'll always write books. I'll try and do a book a year for the rest of my life. But to tell a big story right now, television is the format where people are doing it in such an incredible way, even more so than features anymore. So, for me, it's been a great learning experience. I want my own show at some point and so this is why I'm doing it.
Josh King:
Well, I was going to say, I mean, has tooling around on final draft made you more facile in sort of the story creation? The way it looks on an actual page of screenplay versus a page of Microsoft Word?
Ben Mezrich:
Yeah. Listen, no one's ever accused me of being so literary I'm not writing for features anyways. I mean, all of my books read like Hollywood. I've always written very visually. So, I think the transformation hasn't been that difficult, but I've enjoyed it a lot, just learning the new formats and stuff like that. I really think that the idea of writing 10 episodes of something is a great way to tell a story because you could fit a whole book in a season and I think that's going to be my future.
Josh King:
So, on that, maybe I will make a pitch that Bakkt might make for an Act Four of Bitcoin Billionaires as we look at how Bitcoin actually gets spent. Thank you, Ben Mezrich, author of Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption, for coming to the New York Stock Exchange, spending some time with us here inside the ICE House.
Ben Mezrich:
Oh, thanks. This was awesome. I had a great time.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Ben Mezrich, author of Bitcoin Billionaires: A True Story of Genius, Betrayal, and Redemption. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a comment or question you'd like one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet us at IcehousePodcast. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Theresa DeLuca with production assistance from Steven Romanchik and Ken Abel. I'm Josh King, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor its affiliates make any representations or warranties, express or implied, as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the preceding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of clarity.
