Ben Mezrich recounts his journey from techno thrillers to chronicling the MIT Blackjack team and Facebook's turbulent origins, detailing how a leaked proposal led to Eduardo Saverin's $5 billion settlement. He explores the Winklevoss twins' Bitcoin strategy involving dice-generated codes hidden in Midwest safety deposit boxes and contrasts their views with libertarian investor Roger Ver. Mezrich then investigates UFOs along the 37th Parallel, linking cattle mutilations to Cold War espionage cover-ups orchestrated by Robert Bigelow, while reflecting on his dangerous encounters with Russian oligarchs who installed Vladimir Putin. Ultimately, the episode highlights Mezrich's evolution into a multimedia storyteller navigating high-stakes finance, geopolitical intrigue, and unexplained phenomena. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
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Selling Movie Rights in Vegas00:14:51
Hello, world.
Today's guest is Ben Meserich.
Ben is a major international New York Times bestselling author.
He likes to write books about young prodigies who make tons of money.
Many of his projects have been turned into feature films such as The Social Network and 21.
One of his latest projects is called Bitcoin Billionaires, which is about the Winklevoss twins, the two brothers who founded the Harvard Connection website that Mark Zuckerberg stole and eventually turned into Facebook.
Anyways, this podcast is eye opening and gives a unique perspective on Zuckerberg.
And the way he does business.
That's my sales pitch for this podcast.
Please welcome Ben Meserick.
So cool, man.
I mean, let's just jump right into it.
So, you've authored many super interesting books, lots of which have been turned into feature movies, like the movie 21, The Social Network.
And didn't you write for The X Files at one point?
Yeah.
So, early, early, early in my career, I worked for The X Files.
I wrote a book for them.
So, it was like a standalone thriller starring Mulder and Scully.
So, this was a long time ago.
But yeah, I started off my career writing techno thrillers, medical thrillers, you know, I wanted to be Michael Crichton.
That was kind of my goal.
And nobody read those.
So, they didn't do very well.
And it wasn't until I started writing nonfiction that my career kind of took off.
But yeah, The X Files was one of the first things that I worked for.
Yeah.
Awesome, mate.
So, did you ever work with Vince Gilligan?
I mean, phone wise, you know, they were up in Vancouver shooting the show.
So, I went up there.
But I wasn't, you know, on set or anything like that for anything.
You get pitched a lot of stories, I assume, every day, every week from different people.
Out of all the different stories and ideas that get thrown across your desk all the time, how do you choose which ones to pursue?
Yeah, I mean, it's tricky.
So basically, ever since I wrote Bringing Down the House about the MIT Blackjack team, And that book kind of exploded among college kids.
And so after that book came out and then the movie came out, people would just email me or send things to my Twitter.
I would get pitched two stories a week.
And usually, you know, it's somebody in prison trying to make their case, or it's some story that isn't going to be, you know, it's something personal, someone wronged them, or something like that.
So most of the stories you just know aren't going to be the right story.
But for me, I'm always looking for something that's like, Big enough that everyone in the world will recognize it in like one sentence, but not already so well known that you've already seen it a million times.
And so it's that tricky kind of sweet spot between something you don't really have to explain to something that you don't already know.
And it also has to be a movie.
Like I won't write a project or even start a book if I don't think it can be a major movie.
And in fact, for the past, I would say, 15 books, I've sold the movie before I've sold the book.
So, I write a proposal, sell the movie rights, and then sell the book rights and write the book.
So, I won't even go into it if I don't think there's something big enough to be a big Hollywood movie.
Wow.
And was the first book that you wrote or the first book that you authored that turned into a movie, was it the movie 21?
You know, I had a TV movie way back in my crappy techno thriller days.
I wrote a book called Reaper, which was about a computer virus that makes the jump to the biological world and people start getting sick from there.
TVs and from their phones.
And yeah, I wrote that a long time ago.
And that was made into a TBS's premiere movie back in 2000, I think it was, starring Antonio Sabato Jr. and Robert Wagner.
I think you can find it somewhere on eBay.
But my first feature film was 21, which was Bringing Down the House.
And it came out, I think the movie was like 2007.
The book was 2002.
Yeah.
So could you give me sort of the backstory on that, how that all came about and how you?
Got into that story or how that story came across your path.
Yeah, so I was writing, you know, thrillers.
I was trying to be a thriller writer and they weren't going well.
Nobody was reading.
I had gotten myself hugely into debt, hugely into debt, like a million and a half dollars in debt.
I had IRS agents calling me.
I was in a messy situation.
I had something like $70,000 in credit card debt.
And I basically had a stack of business school applications that I was filling in because I was thinking there's only one way I'm ever going to get out of this hole I've dug, and that's to go to business school and go to Wall Street.
Get some more student loans.
I was in a troubled situation.
And then there was this group of MIT college kids.
I was introduced to them by the girl on the team who was a friend of mine from college.
I went to Harvard down the street.
And they used to hang out in this local bar called Crossroads in Boston.
And I would go in there and hang out with these MIT kids.
And they were telling me these crazy stories.
The main character's name was Jeff Ma in real life.
And Jeff would tell me these amazing stories about him and his buddies going to Vegas every weekend and using math to beat the game of blackjack.
And I went to his house, and he had like a quarter million dollars in $100 bills just jammed in his laundry.
And I was like, this is really cool.
I got to start going to Vegas.
And so I started going to Vegas with them.
And I thought this was better than all the crap I've been writing.
So I wrote it up.
I sent it to my agent, and he said, well, nobody really cares about cards because this was right before Chris Moneymaker won the World Series of Poker.
So cards in Vegas were not yet hot.
This was like 2000 or even the late 90s when I started writing it.
And so I sold the book for a tiny amount of money and it exploded.
I mean, when it came out, it was just a huge book.
It was on the New York Times list for 63 weeks.
And it was just one of those things that life changing moments.
And around the same time, I had written an article for Wired Magazine about this MIT blackjack team, and Kevin Spacey read it.
And back then, getting a phone call from Kevin Spacey was like a good thing.
And so.
You know, Kevin called on the phone.
And I remember getting the phone call, and I didn't really believe it was Kevin Spacey.
You know, I ended up hanging up on him.
I thought it was a prank phone call.
But it really was Spacey.
And he invited me out to LA and said, I want to make this into a movie.
And that became the movie 21.
And so it was kind of this, you know, life changing story.
And suddenly I was a nonfiction writer, not really by choice, but that was the book that did well.
And suddenly, you know, everyone started pitching me stories, and that's where my career really started.
So, he didn't have any ulterior motives when he flew you out to LA, right?
You know, Kevin was always great with me.
I don't know why.
I guess I wasn't his type.
Kevin was always wonderful.
He was a phenomenal actor.
Oh, yeah.
You know, he was odd.
Kevin's odd.
I mean, you knew stuff was going on.
I mean, you thought you didn't know what was really going on, but you knew he was living a different lifestyle than maybe you might guess.
But no, I never really, you know, Saw anything that was, you know, what came later.
At the time, he really was helpful.
He set up this movie, said he wanted to star in it, and that's pretty much the only way to get a movie made, you know, is to have a major actor or a director or someone at an A level involved in it.
And it took years, though.
It took five years to get that movie made.
It wasn't like an overnight kind of situation.
But the book was on the list for a couple of years, which was amazing and started off my career in a really great way.
Yeah, that's interesting.
He called you directly?
Yeah, so his assistant at the time was a guy named Dana Bernetti.
Dana actually is now a very big producer, and we worked together on a lot of projects.
He went on and helped me do the social network.
And then he did Fifty Shades of Gray and made a pile of money.
And now it's like a prepper living in Northern California.
But Dana was his assistant and basically found my phone number and just called with Kevin on the line and said, you know, we want to make this project.
And, you know, it was a crazy time in my life.
I was massively in debt, I had no money.
I flew out to LA and met with them.
And I remember their pitch.
You know, they took me to the Playboy Mansion.
I landed and basically they drove me straight to the Playboy Mansion to, To woo me into signing the deal with them.
So it was a kind of a wild sort of Hollywood moment.
And at the time, I was in mass, you know, I had no money.
And Kevin and Dana said, We want to make a movie.
And I said, Great.
How much are you going to pay me?
And they said, Nothing.
And I was like, What do you mean?
They're like, We're not going to give you anything.
But, you know, we'll make this movie.
And around the same time, another group of producers offered me $750,000 for the rights.
And so I went back to Kevin and Dana and said, Let's, these other people are offering me three quarters of a million dollars.
I'm majorly in debt.
You have to give me something.
And Dana said to me, If I gave you a big check right now, what would you do with it?
And I said, Well, you know, I'd probably spend it because that's what I was living this crazy lifestyle.
I was blowing through all my money.
That's just the way I was living.
So he said, We're going to give you something better.
You can use our name.
You can use Kevin's name.
You can go out there and promote the book.
And we're definitely going to make this movie and it's going to be worth way more in the long run.
And so I ended up turning down the three quarters of a million dollars and taking zero.
To make the movie with Kevin.
And it ended up being the right choice because I booked the Today Show, went on the Today Show and talked about it.
And the book just skyrocketed and everything kind of worked out and the movie got made.
So who knows what would have happened if I had gone the other route.
But it was one of those sort of wild Hollywood moments.
Wow, that is super interesting.
What a weird moment going straight to the Playboy mansion with Kevin Spacey.
You know, it's funny.
Now that sounds very different than it did then.
Yeah, right.
Back then it was, you know, I was a kid living in Boston.
You know, it was.
It was a long time ago, and you walk in there, and it's like, wow, at the time, it was the greatest place to be in the world, and it was amazing and wild.
And it was neat.
I've always sort of looked at Hollywood as this place that I can jump in and out of.
I never wanted to live in LA, I never wanted to be in Hollywood, but I love the idea of being a Boston guy, living in Boston, and being able to sort of go there when I need to for a couple days and then get back out.
Yeah, I'm with you on that.
Hollywood's a weird place.
I'm not a fan of that area for more than.
To 24 hours to 48 hours.
I want to get out.
Just like Vegas, the best days when you get there, or the best two days, the day you get there and the day you leave.
Yeah, nothing ever good happens after 48 hours in Vegas.
It's pretty much all you really need in that.
And yeah, I used to go with a group of people who wouldn't even get hotel rooms.
We would just go and do 48 straight hours and get back on the plane and go back.
So it's that kind of town.
How much time did you have to spend in Vegas when you were doing the work, like researching for the story?
Yeah, so for bringing out the house, I spent about six months going back and forth with the MIT Black Check team.
Learning how they did it, carrying money on my body, watching them in action.
And then to write the book, I actually wrote it in Vegas, staying in a different hotel room every night.
So it was actually, I wrote the book in about 16 days.
So it was a very quick book, but I wrote it, I stayed everywhere.
I stayed at the worst hotels and the best hotels because I wanted to get the feel of what it's like to sort of be a part of the card counting team.
So then when we made the movie, we shot for over a month, maybe two months in Vegas.
So I was on set for that as well.
So I spent a fair amount of time in Vegas.
And over the years, I've always been there four or five times a year, I would say.
You know, back pre pandemic, speaking gigs and that sort of thing brings me to Vegas a lot.
But back when I was writing that book, I would say I spent a lot of time in Vegas.
Yeah.
So, what did you contribute during the filming of the movie?
And what do they like ask from you creatively?
Yeah, so the author of the book is like the lowest man on the totem pole.
They don't even really want you there.
You're like, they tell you to go hang out at the bar, basically.
I've always said a producer's favorite author is a dead author because you give them the book and then they can go make the movie.
But 21 was actually a really fun movie to be a part of because it was a whole all young cast.
Everybody involved was really young.
You know, it was Kate Bosworth and Jim Sturgis, who was amazing, and Aaron Yu.
And, you know, it became very concerned that Josh Gadd, who went on to play Olaf and is just this incredible actor.
And so they were all like hanging out.
We shot for a couple months in Boston.
So they were all just hanging out in my apartment.
And we were playing video games and going out to bars.
And then we were in Vegas and we were hitting casinos with a whole movie crew and card counters.
So it was this kind of wild traveling circus where the security didn't want the card counters near the blackjack tables, but the actors they did want at the blackjack tables.
So we were kind of mixing in card counting and actors, and it was just really fun.
I would say, in terms of what I contributed, you know, once they've got a script and a director, the author contributes very, very little.
You're basically hanging out until We ended up getting some of us kicked off the set because the actors were getting too drunk with the card counters.
But it was, you know, in the end, I had a blast.
It was Robert Luketic, the director who had done Legally Blonde.
So everything looks beautiful.
It's one of those movies you can watch 21 just for sort of, it just feels like you're in Vegas.
I think it's a very good movie.
It's not Rounders, it's a very different movie.
You know, people who love cards understand what Rounders is and understand what 21 is, and there's a C between those two movies.
But 21 is that movie you watch on the plane on your way to Vegas for the first time.
And I think it's kind of perfect for that.
Yeah, it is an amazing movie.
Eduardo's Lawsuit and Mark Zuckerberg00:10:37
I think the first time I saw it, I was probably close to 10 years ago, right?
When did it come out?
2010, something like that?
I think, no, it was 2007, I believe.
2007, okay.
Yeah.
And so, what about the social network?
Yeah.
How did that come about?
And who did you originally meet that introduced you to that story?
I believe somebody emailed you out of the blue.
Yeah, yeah.
So, it was basically.
21 was about to have its premiere.
And at 2 in the morning, I got a random email from a Harvard senior.
And he said, My best friend founded Facebook, and no one's ever heard of him.
And I'd heard of Mark Zuckerberg, and never heard of anyone else.
And this was, you got to remember, 2007, around that period.
So Facebook was not a big thing, it was little.
It was college kids, it was a little bigger than that.
But not everyone was on Facebook.
Yeah, it was MySpace.
Yeah, MySpace was bigger, you know.
Friendster was still kicking, I think.
I went out for a drink and in walked Eduardo.
And Eduardo Saverin at that point had never spoken to anyone.
No one had ever met Eduardo.
No one had ever heard of Eduardo.
His name had been taken off the masthead.
And he started the conversation by saying, Mark Zuckerberg fucked me.
And so at that point, I was a journalist.
So I said, Tell me more.
And he proceeded to tell me this great story about him and Mark meeting in this underground Jewish fraternity and how.
Mark had almost gotten kicked out of school for making that website where you could vote on who the hottest girl at Harvard was.
And then he met the Winklevoss twins.
And it was just an incredible story.
I mean, everyone knows the story, but it was this wild, never heard before story, you know, and I was blown away.
And so I basically hung out with Eduardo for a few months.
He talked to me and talked to me and talked to me.
It turns out, and I found out much later, that he was attempting to use me.
It was this Machiavellian idea that he could talk to me for a little while and then scare Facebook into settling with him.
He was in the midst of this massive lawsuit suing Facebook, demanding, you know, to get his percentage for having co founded it.
But I didn't know this at the time.
I thought this was a great book idea.
So I wrote a 14 page book proposal.
And I sent the book proposal to my agent, and it leaked online.
It was actually Gawker.
You remember the Gawker website?
Yeah.
They published my entire book proposal, which I'd never seen them do before.
And everything exploded at once.
That day, Facebook settled with Eduardo for $5 billion.
And if you look at the settlement agreement, it says you may never speak to Ben Mesrick again because they were trying to stop this from happening.
They thought, That they could stop him from talking to me and there wouldn't be a book and there wouldn't be a movie.
So, Eduardo cut off all contact with me.
He got a legal restraining order and sent it to me.
He broke up with his girlfriend because he was dating my wife's best friend at the time.
And then he moved to Singapore, never to be heard from again.
So, I've never spoken to Eduardo since then.
I ended up getting him $5 billion and he never even called to send me a little gift basket, maybe a couple hundred million dollars.
I don't know.
He never reached out again, which I understand because.
He had to run away from me based on the settlement agreement.
That same day, Aaron Sorkin saw it online and said, I want to write this as my next movie.
And David Fincher saw it online and said, I want to direct this as my next movie.
David Fincher, he did Fight Club, right?
Fight Club, Seven, Zodiac, so many incredible movies.
Fight Club really was my favorite of his at the time, but really brilliant director.
Had done the West Wing, but had written so many incredible movies.
And it's just one of the greatest writers, I think, around.
And the two of them reached out and said, I want to make this, which was great.
Yeah, I hadn't written the book, though.
So it was one of these things where you're like, I sold the book to these people and then locked myself in a hotel room and just started writing.
So they were reaching out to you just based off the 14 page synopsis.
Yeah, so all of my projects have been sold on 14 page treatments, all of them.
Wow.
You know, there's a magic art to writing these things, these treatments.
And in a lot of ways, they're an easier thing to sell than a full book.
But, anyways, yeah, they came running into Boston, and I sat in a hotel room and I was handing chapters to Sorkin as I went.
And when I finished the book, I wrote the book in about 12 weeks, I would say.
And then he wrote the screenplay in the next three, four weeks, and it was brilliant.
I mean, the guy is a genius.
And the movie was made within a year, which was incredible.
I mean, that never happens.
And so it was just this kind of crazy, wild experience.
So, yeah, it was just a lucky random email reaching out to me, and it was just one of those moments.
And then the movie, you know, was an incredible hit.
Through it, I became close to the Winklevoss twins.
And they were actually my main, one of my real major sources for the movie, in that when Eduardo came to me, the first people I reached out to were the Winklevoss twins.
I just found them on Facebook and I wrote a message saying, hey, you know, I want to talk to you guys.
And we became close, and they started handing me, you know, Interesting things and all the legal stuff, which we were able to then build into the social network.
So that's how I got to know the Winklevoss twins.
I got to know Sean Parker as well.
Sean became a really big source.
Sean was trying to broker an interview between me and Mark Zuckerberg.
Mark was not happy I was writing this book.
He was very unhappy.
He knew that Eduardo was involved.
He knew the Winklevoss twins were involved.
He did not want that story being told.
He wanted to tell his own story.
And so he kept turning me down, kept turning me down.
Sean and I would hang out, and Sean would send him questions that I wrote, and then Mark would refuse to answer them.
And it was kind of this back and forth for a good year.
And in the end, I ended up having to write it without Mark's input.
But yeah, I had Sean, I had the Winklevoss twins.
I had Eduardo, and I had.
So, you know, I feel like it's a very true telling from all these points of view, other than Mark's.
Mark would tell a very different story, but I think that it's a pretty accurate story.
So, going back, who exactly was Eduardo?
So, Eduardo Saverin, you know, was basically in the rooming group with Zuckerberg.
He was his friend.
Eduardo came from a wealthy Brazilian family and had actually come to America.
And his family moved to Miami because of kidnapping threats.
Down in Brazil, they kidnap rich kids.
And so his family had moved him there.
So he had some money.
And so when, you know, him and Mark were both very socially awkward, geeky guys.
Spend any amount of time with those guys.
I promise you, those are socially awkward, geeky guys.
It's not hard to see.
Eduardo, you know, became a member of a finals club.
He had wealth and connections.
So he made it into the Phoenix Club.
Mark couldn't get into the Phoenix Club, which is one of those old fraternities, basically.
They're finals clubs, they go back hundreds of years.
And they're basically the social life at Harvard, although that's changed since then.
But, anyways, Mark got upset, went out, got drunk one night, and made this website, Face Mash, where you could vote on who the hottest girl at Harvard was.
He'd hacked into computer servers, he'd pulled up pictures of all these girls, and it leaked out all over the college campus.
Got him in huge trouble.
He almost got kicked out of school.
Wasn't he comparing pictures of girls to farm animals?
Yeah, so in his blog, which he kept along with the thing, and we have his blog, so we know what he was doing, he was writing, you know, we should compare them to farm animals, all this kind of stuff.
And even when he got in trouble, you know, his argument was, well, the girls were beating the farm animals, so he shouldn't be mad.
He doesn't really understand, or at the time did not understand, why it was such a bad thing to be doing.
But he caught the attention of the Winklevoss twins.
Because they were working on their own website, theharvardconnection.com, which was kind of a dating website with some social interaction in it.
And so it had some of the things that did end up, I think, in Facebook, but it was more oriented towards dating and socializing.
But they hired Mark.
They wanted someone to work for them who knew computers.
He was in the newspaper for almost getting in trouble for a computer program that went viral.
So he went to work for them, blew them off, and went to Eduardo.
So Eduardo had some money, and Mark went to Eduardo and said, I've got an idea for a website.
People will put their own pictures up so we won't get in trouble.
If you put up the money, you can be the CFO and you can have 30%.
And so Eduardo put up $1,000, which ends up being the greatest investment in the history of the world because it turns into $5 billion.
But, anyways, he puts up the money and Mark writes the code for Facebook.
And basically, it launches all over Harvard.
It spreads, it spreads, it spreads, and it was just huge.
And the Winklevoss twins realized.
That they're cut out, that they're not involved, that Mark had been lying to them and leading them on.
So they sued him.
And Eduardo, you know, eventually what happens is when Facebook starts to take off, Mark moves to California, meets up with Sean Parker.
And Sean was like the cool kid of Silicon Valley.
Sean had started Napster when he was in high school, which ended up getting sued out of existence.
And then he founded something called Plaxo, which he got fired from when he was caught with cocaine.
And then he became the first president of Harvard until he got caught with cocaine.
So, allegedly, I guess.
But, anyways, Sean is a wild guy, fascinating, a genius, a true genius, I think.
But Eduardo did not like Sean, did not want Sean to be involved.
And when Mark and Sean got together, they essentially cut Eduardo out.
They left.
He stayed behind in Boston to finish college.
He got so upset that he froze all the bank accounts of Facebook at the time, which was all his money at the time.
It was $18,000 when he froze the accounts.
So they went to Peter Thiel, and that's when Peter Thiel invested half a million dollars, but said, Who is this guy listed as your CFO?
He's not even in California.
He's not part of Facebook.
So they cut Eduardo out.
So Eduardo ended up suing as well, and that's where I came into the picture.
The Dark Side of Genius00:03:01
That's when they settled for $5 billion and he moved away.
Yeah, it's worth $9 billion now.
He's living in Singapore.
Well, he came back through COVID.
I don't know where he is right now.
But yes, I have not seen or heard from him since.
So if anyone out there, give Eduardo a call and he can send me a little gift basket.
It would be very nice.
Yeah, that movie was beautifully shot.
The cinematography in that movie was amazing, all on super tight lenses, super low light.
Like it was just a beautiful movie.
Were you involved in that and the shooting of that at all?
Yeah, so I was on set for a lot of it.
I would say that wasn't a fun set.
It was not a party.
David Fincher, Scott Rudin, who was a producer, Aaron Sorkin, and Kevin Spacey, who was a producer as well.
It was a very big personality on a very dark, kind of intense set.
And David Fincher is absolutely incredible.
And that movie, shot for shot, is beautiful.
But the way he does things is very intense.
I remember one scene where a busload of girls pulls up to a finals club and these girls get out of the bus.
And that's all the scene is it's like a five second scene.
And he shot it from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., just over and over and over again for 12 hours.
And, like, I don't even know what he's looking for.
I don't know what it is he's seeing.
But when it's on screen, it's perfect.
But he really, I mean, that's how he shoots a movie.
So it was really intense.
But I was there.
Yeah, it was wild.
It was incredible.
And I remember, you know, the first time you read the script, it was like, wow, that's an amazing script.
And then the first time you sit in the movie and the movie opens, And it's a conversation and it goes on for 10 minutes and it's brilliant, it's intense, and it's incredible.
As you say, it's dark, and you wouldn't expect a movie about Facebook to be that.
I remember when they came to me with the title, they were like, We're going to call it the social network.
And I was like, That doesn't sound like a good title.
I mean, that doesn't even say anything.
But now when you watch the movie, it's actually a perfect title because the idea was it wasn't really about Facebook, it was something much bigger than that.
And it was really a character study between Mark and all of these other people.
And also about this massive change in all of our lives with dark undertones.
And I feel like what's happened since then has only made that movie more and more true.
You know, Mark has become more and more the character from the social network, and Facebook has become more and more what he created then.
And so I feel like Fincher and Sorkin really captured something very true that, you know, 10 years later feels very real to me.
Yeah, it's creepy how accurate that turned out, huh?
Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, Mark, everything Mark's done since then.
You can see the underpinnings of how he dealt with his friends and how he dealt with people who were involved with the project, or you know, and what his goal is all the time, and sort of this kind of darkness in a way that hopefully will slowly recede.
Bitcoin Billionaires Origins00:14:58
Yeah, a lot of people think he's an alien.
I mean, I don't think he's an alien, I think he's a genius for absolutely brilliant guy, but I do think he thinks of the world differently than we do.
I think he really, really thinks if we were all on Facebook all the time, sharing everything with no walls between us, it would be a better world.
And that if data were free, if we were living in this Facebook village, you know, but at the same time, there's a little bit of control issues.
You know, he knows that he's right and everyone else is wrong.
And whenever Facebook does something and everyone is angry about it, he wades through it.
And then in the end, we all give up.
So maybe he is right.
But, you know, over and over again, they've done things to upset people and just push through.
And I think that speaks to Mark's character, he believes what he's doing is correct.
And that's why he's retained total control.
And that, you know, even when it's pointed out that what he's doing may not be correct for everyone, he sticks with it until he really, really needs it.
So I don't know how much better anything will ever get in that world.
So, how did you eventually come to meet the Winklevoss?
The Winklevoss.
The Winklevoss.
Yeah.
So I reached out after Eduardo came to me and I was looking for sources.
I found them on Facebook.
I'd seen an article somewhere that they were suing, but I didn't really know much about why or what was really going on.
So I reached out and I met with them in New York.
And, you know, they walk into the room and it's like something out of Greek mythology.
You know, it doesn't look real.
They look like they were invented on a Hollywood set because, you know, they're six foot five identical twin Olympic rowers.
At the time, they were still in training.
So they ate the same, they worked out the same, they were the same.
And they're physically intimidating guys and they come from a privileged background of immense wealth and, you know, that sort of thing.
So, you immediately think there's got to be the bad guys in the story.
Because, you know, I grew up in the 80s, and every 80s movie, they were the bad guys.
You know, they were the ones dressed up in skeleton costumes chasing the karate kid around the gym.
And so, immediately, you think Mark's the good guy and they're the bad guys.
But you kind of know Mark's not the good guy because you also know how people have reacted to him, how he's dealt with people around him.
There's this kind of angry nerd thing going on there.
And so, it was a nuanced story.
But originally, when I met the Winklevoss twins, I was definitely in awe of them.
Just because of what, you know, who they were.
But they were the guys who were suing Mark for stealing their idea.
And that's all they were at that time.
They were angry, very angry.
They had, even though they had settled with Mark, they wanted to throw out the settlement because it was never about money for them.
They didn't care about money.
That's one of the cool things about the whole social network story.
Nobody cared about money in that story.
Mark never cared about money, money was meaningless to him.
He became one of the richest men in the world, but never cared about money.
When he was in high school, he came up with an idea.
Microsoft had offered him a million dollars for it and he turned it down because he just didn't care.
He said, I'll give it away for free.
And that's the guy who created Facebook.
Eduardo didn't really care about making money because he came from a wealthy family.
He just wanted to prove something to his family.
The Winklevoss twins didn't care about making money because they came from a wealthy family.
Only Sean Parker really cared about making money.
So that's kind of cool about that story.
But, anyways, the Winklevoss twins.
He was kind of like the snake oil salesman of the story, right?
Well, that's how Eduardo described him.
I mean, Eduardo did not like Sean.
Really thought he was just trying to sell something.
And Sean, you know, Justin Timberlake captured the character perfectly.
And I think Sean became more and more like Justin Timberlake after the movie came out.
But he wasn't really a villain.
I think Aaron Sorkin made Sean Parker more into a villain than in my book, Accident of Billionaires.
In my book, I think Sean really has his eyes on the prize, wants to create a billion dollar company, wants to make a unicorn, and he's got this vision.
He sees Facebook and says, This is it.
But he's not really evil.
But when you watch the movie, he certainly comes off as the bad guy, tearing at the relationship between Mark and Eduardo.
So, I think that's a little bit more what Aaron Sorkin did than what I did.
But yeah, I find Sean very compelling.
I think he's a really smart guy.
And I would write about Sean again if given the opportunity.
But, anyways, the Winklevoss twins, at first to me, I liked them always, and I respected them because they never lie.
These are guys who were very much this sort of 1950s ideal of right and wrong.
You don't cheat, you don't lie, you don't steal.
That's all real, this whole men of Harvard thing.
They really, the thing about Mark that upset them the most was that he lied.
That he was duplicitous, that he pretended to work for them and then didn't, that he created this company behind their noses when he could have simply come to them because they were working together and they had money.
So he basically cheated them.
And that to them is the ultimate sin.
So for them, as long as you're honest and you're telling the truth, they respect you.
And I respect them for that.
But in the story of the social network, they definitely were the guys who were, you know, the bad guys in a way because they were the guys who were the big.
Jocks who had this dating website that Mark built Facebook, maybe after seeing their code or whatever, but they were suing him and you couldn't tell whether it was right or wrong.
It wasn't until much later that I kind of changed my view of the Winkle Boss twins.
Interesting.
And speaking to that as well, wasn't there some sort of a settlement meeting at a lawyer's office where Mark was freaked out that those guys were going to beat the shit out of them or something?
Yeah, this is in my book, Bitcoin Billionaires, and this was not in the social network.
Basically, they had been involved in this negotiation for a long time.
And finally, the Winklevoss twins said, You know what?
Let's just sit down with Mark, just one on one.
We're a bunch of college kids.
We used to hang out.
Let's just all get into a room and talk this out.
No more lawyers.
And so they sent this request over to Mark's lawyers.
Mark's lawyers come back and say, Well, he agrees in concept, but he has a concern.
And it turns out he was concerned they were going to beat him up.
So Mark made this rule that only one of them could come into the meeting.
So, the meeting took place in this glass office with all the lawyers sitting in a circle around it.
And Mark met with one Winkle Boss twin.
As if he could take one of them, right?
Right.
He's going to fight a six foot five rower.
But, anyways, they sat across from each other and they kind of attempted to work it out.
After that meeting, Mark settled with them for what was originally $65 million.
The twins were not happy with this agreement.
So, the only way they accepted it was to accept it in stock.
They didn't want any cash.
Their lawyers argued with them, and they ended up getting into a massive argument with their own lawyers because their lawyers wanted to take the $65 million in cash.
But the twins wanted to be a part of Facebook because they really felt that they had helped invent it.
So they took their portion in stock, and that ended up being worth half a billion dollars after the IPO.
So, how did they originally only get $65 million, but Eduardo got $5 billion, $6 billion?
Yeah, so Eduardo.
Eduardo had, you know, Mark had agreed to Eduardo in the very beginning to give him 30% of Facebook.
Okay.
That was the agreement between two college kids in a dorm room.
You know, there's no lawyers, there's no contracts.
And so the question always becomes if you and your buddy come up with some idea, and then he goes and makes the company and he builds it into this billion dollar company, what are you, what do you deserve?
And when I ask entrepreneurs that question, they always say, you know, well, he doesn't really deserve that much.
But if you ask venture capitalists that question, they say, oh, he deserves half because he was there at the beginning, he put up the money, he should get his percentage.
So the settlement was not.
You know, it was based on that, was based on what he was supposed to get from the very beginning.
So, Mark sort of did honor his verbal agreement with him.
He didn't want to.
I think the book made him.
I think they really thought they could stop this book and this movie from happening.
So, I really think the book was the reason he settled.
So, the twins, after they took their 65 million in shares with Facebook, this is where everything sort of goes to your story on the Bitcoin billionaires.
Yeah.
How did these guys become Bitcoin billionaires?
Yeah, so basically, the Winklevoss twins get this settlement and they decide they're going to become venture capitalists.
So they're going to go out to California and start seeding companies.
And they go out there and find out no one will take their money because everyone's end game in Silicon Valley is to sell to Facebook.
And if you have the Winklevoss twins on your ledger, Mark won't buy your company.
And so the Winklevoss twins are upset.
And so they went to Ibiza to party, which is what you do when you're upset.
And so they were on the beach in Ibiza and somebody came up to them and said, Have you guys ever heard of Bitcoin?
And they had not at the time.
They didn't really know anything about it.
Bitcoin at the time was a few dollars, you know, five, $10.
It was a brand new thing.
And they looked into it and were kind of blown away by it and thinking either this is total bullshit or it's the next big thing.
And they became convinced it was the next big thing.
And then they bought in hugely.
They bought 200,000 Bitcoin at around $7 a coin.
So their goal was to own 1% of all Bitcoin.
And part of that story as well is the person who would come to them.
Was an associate of Charlie Schrem.
Charlie was one of the first, you know, initial Bitcoin entrepreneurs.
He was an 18 year old kid living in his parents' basement who basically fell into Bitcoin online, as a lot of people at that time did, thought it was cool, and started a website, something called BitInstant, where you could buy and sell Bitcoin.
That was the idea.
Because at the time, to buy Bitcoin, it was very hard.
You had to go through this weird Japanese website called Mt. Gox.
Which was very corrupt, which ended up going out of business after it was looted.
And there was no good way to buy Bitcoin.
So, Charlie started a company where you could give him money and he would give you Bitcoin.
It was like a middleman Bitcoin company.
And the Winklevoss twins were one of his first, they gave him $1.5 million in financing.
Roger Ver was his other financier.
Roger, if you know who he is, anarchistic, libertarian, he was one of the first.
Bitcoin investors, they used to call him Bitcoin Jesus because he had funded so many of these companies.
He's a billionaire as well.
But he believed that Bitcoin would bring down governments, that Bitcoin would bring down taxes.
He does not believe in the military.
He does not believe that taxes should happen.
He really is a true revolutionary in a way.
And so he and the Winklevoss twins are complete opposites in how they approach this world.
And there was a lot of tension between them and ended up being the core of my book, Bitcoin Billionaires.
Charlie was in the middle.
Charlie was a kid who was caught up in this world of Bitcoin.
He has the Winklevoss twins on one hand who are the men of Harvard.
They believe in right and wrong.
They believe that Bitcoin should be a financial instrument, part of all the different financial instruments that it should eventually be on the stock exchange as a commodity, basically.
And you have Roger Ver who thinks Bitcoin should take down governments.
You should be able to buy drugs if you want, total freedom, anarchy, and libertarianism.
And so Charlie gets pulled in both directions.
Meaning that it should be completely autonomous of banks or anything like that?
Well, they both believe that.
So the cool thing about Bitcoin is there's no middleman, there's no need.
For a bank, there's no need for a government, there's no need for anybody in between me and you.
I can buy and sell Bitcoin to you without anybody being in between us, the same way I send a text or an email.
They all like that.
But what Roger Ver believes is that there should be no regulations.
It should be basically Silk Road all the time.
You want to go buy drugs on Silk Road, go buy drugs on Silk Road.
You don't want to pay taxes, keep your money in Bitcoin, no one pay taxes.
And that's not the way the Winklevoss twins see it.
They see it as something that should have some level of regulation so that it's safe, that Bitcoin will never be popular unless.
My mother can use Bitcoin without worrying that it's going to get stolen or that she's going to get attacked by the IRS or something like that.
So they believe that Bitcoin needs to get away from the sort of cowboy past, the idea that it's just for criminals and things like that, as opposed to someone like Roger Ver, who believes that Bitcoin was made to be anonymous because it gives you the powers that anonymity gives you, the ability to sort of not be involved in the real world and to not have a government looking over your shoulder.
To not pay taxes, for instance.
And that's a very different way of looking at it.
So, what are the Winkle Voss twins doing today in regards to?
So, the Winkle Voss twins are billionaires because of this investment.
They have launched something called Gemini, which is an exchange where you can buy and sell Bitcoin.
It's regulated, it's part of the New York financial sort of network over there.
It's guaranteed, so you don't have to worry about your money.
So, Gemini is their main project.
And they're also proselytizers, they travel the world.
Promoting Bitcoin, explaining why it's the money of the future.
There's a big question of whether it's a commodity or whether it's a currency.
Is it going to be like gold, something you grab and hold onto and increases in value?
Or is it going to be something that you use to buy and sell things?
Right now, for the most part, it's like gold, but better because you can carry it around on your phone.
It's not something you bought somewhere.
And it's instantly transferable.
So I can send you a Bitcoin.
I can't send you a piece of gold.
It's not something you can touch.
Right.
It's not, but it exists.
So it's kind of this weird thing where it's both virtual and physical.
Because you actually carry it around with you, but it doesn't really exist anywhere.
So, yes, it's an interesting sort of phenomenon.
What do you mean you can carry it around with you?
Meaning that it's stored just like a file on your computer?
Except for it's not in your computer.
So, you get a hash, you get a specific address where your Bitcoin is, and you have a code to get your Bitcoin.
And that's all you have.
So, that code is your Bitcoin.
Your Bitcoin isn't held anywhere.
There's something called the blockchain.
So when you exchange Bitcoin, that is logged onto this thing called the blockchain, which is like this virtual brick wall.
Understanding Blockchain Security00:03:18
And each brick is connected to the other brick, connected to the other brick.
So that's how your exchange happens.
But the reality is that code you carry around or have in your brain, but you can't really remember that many numbers.
Some people get tattoos of their Bitcoin.
Some people put it on a ring.
The Winklevoss twins is a great scene in Bitcoin Billionaires.
What they actually do for security reasons is they print out.
First of all, they used dice.
They used, you know, those dice you used in Dungeons and Dragons, which had like 20 sides on them.
I don't know if you're as dorky as I am, but.
I've never played that.
I've never seen that dice before.
You're probably too young.
Dungeons and Dragons used to have these dice that have like 20 sides on them.
So the Winklevoss twins made their code by rolling the dice so they get a random, a truly random thing.
Because it turns out if you just pick numbers off your head, it's not truly random because your mind usually settles on things.
So this is a truly random number.
Then they printed it out and they cut it up into little pieces of paper.
Then they put it in a backpack and they traveled all around the country depositing these little pieces of paper in safety deposit boxes in little banks all across the Midwest.
Then, when they got home, they destroyed all the computers that they had printed it out on.
They destroyed the printers.
They even destroyed the wireless routers so that all of their fortune is hidden in these deposit boxes all across America.
And unless you know where they are and put the pieces of paper back together, you can never find their code.
And so, it's a really interesting way to keep.
Their Bitcoin secure.
But it's really neat.
So that hash is your Bitcoin.
And if anyone ever got it, they would have your Bitcoin.
But it's as secure, it's unhackable, it's incredibly secure.
And it's the future of money in a way.
Yeah, it's also very confusing.
It's hard to figure out.
Yeah, I never wanted to write about Bitcoin.
It's interesting.
And had it not been the Winklevoss twins, I never would have.
Over the years, people have pitched me stories about Bitcoin.
You should write about Bitcoin.
I was like, I'm not interested in that.
The word blockchain is like the worst word ever invented.
It's like math, it's horrible.
But then you see these two giant twins, billionaires out of the blue, and they were the bad guys in the social network.
Well, suddenly you've got a great story.
And that's the whole reason I ended up writing it.
And are those guys still in Silicon Valley?
They're based in New York.
So after no one would take their money in Silicon Valley, they headed back to New York, which is where they're from originally.
Their father was part of Wall Street and that's where he made his money.
So they ended up being a part of that whole thing.
And so their offices are in New York City and they're doing very well.
They have tons of employees and they're worth many billions of dollars.
What did you say the company was called again?
Gemini.
Gemini.
Didn't Zuckerberg try to make another company that competed with Gemini?
Yeah, it's really funny.
The Winklevoss twins launched Gemini and then a couple of years later, I guess a year ago, Zuckerberg announces that he's going to launch his own cryptocurrency and he's calling it Libra.
And so to me, It seems like way too much of a coincidence that the twins would have Gemini and Zuckerberg would have Libra.
And so I envision that as much as the Winklevoss twins wake up every morning with their hatred of Zuckerberg, Zuckerberg wakes up every morning with his hatred of the Winklevoss twins.
UFOs and Government Secrets00:15:15
I feel like there's this connection of anger between them that is never going away.
Libra ended up not happening yet.
We'll see what happens with that.
I think Facebook is not trustworthy.
People don't trust it enough to have it hold our money.
You know, it's already got our data and our photos and our lives.
Do we really want them to be our wallet?
And I think people got very nervous about that.
Yeah, definitely.
And did you guys make the movie for Bitcoin Billionaires?
So, Bitcoin Billionaires is going to be a movie.
It's basically set up.
Greg Silverman, who used to run Warner's, is producing it.
And it's going to be really, really cool.
Hollywood is frozen right now.
So, when things reopen, I think we'll get moving on it.
But we have set up the movie, yes.
This brings me to the most fascinating topic that.
I want to talk about with you, which is aliens and UFOs.
I love UFOs.
Can we talk about that stuff?
Of course.
Your book's called The 37th Parallel.
What is the 37th Parallel?
Can you explain what the significance of that is?
Yes.
The 37th parallel is.
Let me go back a little bit, okay?
The reason I got into the story about UFOs, and I'm from a family of scientists.
My dad is a scientist.
My brothers are both scientists.
I never really believed in UFOs.
I'm as skeptical as one can be.
I got a call from a Hollywood producer who said, There's this guy in Colorado, he's a sheriff.
His name is Chuck Zukowski, and he was just fired from his job because he'd gone to investigate a cattle mutilation.
So, cattle mutilations is this really strange phenomenon that happens all over the Midwest where cows are found lying on their left side, missing their organs.
Usually, they have cuts on them that are circular and look like they were cut by a laser.
The cows are completely drained of blood.
There's no footsteps, there's no footprints, there's no evidence.
And this is a phenomenon that goes all the way back to the 50s.
It was such a big deal in the 70s.
So many cows were being found like this that three governors got together and demanded an investigation.
There was an investigation by 100 FBI agents and they found nothing, not a single shred of evidence.
So Chuck Zukowski was a cop.
He was a sheriff's deputy investigating one of these weird cattle mutilations.
He was looking at this cow and he started to think UFOs.
So he went.
To the police station, you know, and he said, he started to say, I think this is related to UFOs, which sounds crazy, right?
He was immediately fired.
And he became obsessed with the idea of UFOs, and he started studying all of these UFO sightings.
And he put them all down on a graph, and he discovered that the majority of UFO sightings occur along the 37th parallel of the United States, which is a line that runs across the United States, a longitudinal line.
He also discovered that almost all cattle mutilations are along the 37th parallel.
It also turns out that almost all of America's military bases, secret underground ones, are on the 37th parallel of the United States, from Cheyenne Valley all the way across to the Pentagon.
That's also where, yeah.
I think historically, that's also where a lot of nuclear testing has been done, right?
A lot of nuclear testing has been done along there.
It also turns out there's somewhat an underground cavern system around there.
There's lots of strangeness around the 37th parallel.
So, Chuck Zukowski called it the UFO highway or the UFO superhighway.
I went out and started hanging out with him to write this book, 37th parallel.
In the process of writing it, what I discovered was that there's a lot of weirdness going on in the world of UFOs.
Not the people who know about UFOs, who are usually pretty weird, but the US government has been studying UFOs for a long time.
And this just recently came out.
So, it turns out what I wrote in the 37th parallel many years ago is now actually coming out in the New York Times.
The US government never stopped investigating UFOs.
They pretended to stop after Project Bluebell in the 1950s, after Roswell and that whole story.
But what happened is they ended up outsourcing it to a company called Bigelow Aeronautics, a guy named Robert Bigelow, and this is all true.
He's a billionaire who lives out in Nevada, who runs a major aerospace company that has deals with NASA.
They make the inflatable gaskets that are used by the International Space Station.
Well, it turns out Robert Bigelow has been studying UFOs for many, many years.
In conjunction with the US government.
And in fact, if you look at an FAA manual of what US pilots are supposed to do if they see a UFO or something they can't understand, they don't report it to their airline because they would be fired.
They don't report it to the US government because the government is not officially investigating UFOs.
They report it to Robert Bigelow.
This is right in the FBA manual.
And so it's this really weird situation where a private billionaire who makes things for spacecraft has been secretly and privately investigating UFOs for 30 to 40 years.
Now, who?
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
I just wanted to go a little bit more on Bigelow.
How did Bigelow come from?
Where did he get his money?
And how did he start?
Bigelow was a kid in Nevada who had begun to believe in UFOs when he was a little kid.
And his mom had, he was in a car with his mom, and there was some weird sighting on the road.
So as a kid, he'd seen bright lights, he'd seen aliens, you know, whatever.
As he got older, he made his fortune in hotels.
He was a real estate guy.
It was a, I believe it was travels, budget suites of America was his.
Once he made his money, he decided to pour half a billion dollars.
Into essentially UFO studies.
He created something where he hired all of these actual scientists, put them together, and said, We're going to study UFOs.
Because the weird thing about UFOs is, no one's allowed to study it.
If a real scientist starts to look into it, everyone calls him crazy.
If a journalist decides to write about it, everyone calls him crazy.
And what's interesting is, this dates back to the 50s when the Pentagon and the US Air Force decided, and there are memos about this, that the best way to cover up Their own research into this phenomenon is to ridicule anyone who attempts to do it.
So, back then, when there was a conference about UFOs, the US Air Force would actually send someone to the conference to essentially make it a big joke and to mock it, to get up on their phone, yeah, or these are little green men.
That whole thing was a double speak mission to make it hard to investigate.
Because they were actually investigating it for a different reason.
They believed it was the Russians.
So, the US government back in the 50s believed that Roswell was the Russians.
They believed that any of these sightings you saw was black ops, either by their own division or by Russian spies.
And so they had reason to cover this up that had nothing to do with aliens.
But that carried forward.
And so every time a Navy pilot sees something, it immediately gets covered up.
Not because they are hiding aliens from us, but because it dates back to the 50s when we were hiding Russians from us.
And so it's an interesting phenomenon.
Very recently, the Pentagon is now releasing these files saying that there are things we don't understand, that there might be vehicles that we're now saying are not necessarily of this earth.
You know, that's really weird.
But if you read 37th parallel, I get much more into detail into all of this.
And it's quite fascinating.
Yeah, it's super fun.
It's a super fun subject.
And it's a crazy subject just because there's.
I'm going to move rooms.
Is that okay for a second?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, no, what I was going to say was.
It's such a fun subject and it's such a weird subject to navigate just because there are so many crazy people that are super into UFOs and studying and looking into aliens, and so many of them are full of shit.
It's hard to sift through all of these people.
Yeah, I mean, that's an interesting thing.
So 99% of UFO sightings are not UFOs, 99% is a flare, a drone.
Some sort of military thing, or nothing at all.
And there's a lot of people who see something, and their entire life changes, and they go down this route because it's easy to go down.
We want to believe.
We want to believe in conspiracies so badly.
Everybody wants to believe it.
You can see it happening today all the time with what's going on with COVID.
Conspiracies are our bread and butter.
Our minds are made to look for these patterns, right?
That's how we got out of the jungle in the first place.
But the reality is there are some real conspiracies dating back to the atomic bomb.
And this I get into in the book.
The development of the atomic bomb was one of the biggest conspiracies in history.
100,000 people were involved, and only about 12 actually knew what they were doing.
The rest of them were doing something they had no idea.
There were even fake cities made full of all of these engineers who had no idea what they were actually working on.
Cities that then vanished afterwards.
There were efforts to take the word nuclear out of all newspapers.
They even took it out of cartoons.
Even the Buck Rogers comic book was censored because they wanted to take the words nuclear and anything having to do with nuclear weapons out of it so that people wouldn't even think in that realm.
So there have been massive conspiracies in history.
And looking at the UFO world, there's no question that the Roswell investigation and what happened afterwards was covered up.
There was a cover up.
And so that's what it feeds this whole thing.
If they had been more open about it earlier, perhaps less people would believe in UFOs.
That's the interesting thing hiding it is what's made it into the sort of crazy world it is.
Yeah, and it's such a fun subject, such a fun thing to get freaked out about.
Yeah.
I mean, listen, you know, I think it's coming out now that pretty clearly.
Pilots have seen things that we still don't understand.
I think it's pretty clear that there is in the possession of the Air Force or Bigelow some objects that we still don't understand.
And so, you know, we'll see what happens.
Yeah, the guy who was in the U.S. Air Force in San Diego, Captain Fravor, I believe his name was, who shows that he, which originally came out with that video of his radar tracking that object, that guy was, you can hear that guy's voice on the video.
He's freaked out.
Oh, yeah.
This guy's a rock solid.
Military man.
I mean, he's not a conspiracy theorist.
This guy has no interest in UFOs or aliens.
No, there's absolutely been things that radar operators and Navy pilots have seen that cannot be explained yet.
Whether they are some sort of weird technology that somebody has figured out here that we can't conceptualize yet, okay, that's a possibility.
But you can't throw out the extraterrestrial thing.
And that's part of the whole point of my book, 37th Parallel, is that 20 years ago, maybe even 10 years ago, you could throw it out.
Because we didn't know that there were so many Earth like planets out there.
We didn't know that some of these planets aren't really that far away.
And we used to think that it was impossible to traverse these vast distances because we didn't have the technology.
But that's actually changing.
We're at a point right now where we find new planets every day that could support life, right?
And we also are at a point where our technology has advanced to the point where getting to one fifth the speed of light is not technically impossible anymore.
One fifth the speed of light, you can use solar sails to get there.
It's been theorized that you could, and there's something called the Starshot program, where they're going to make postcard sized probes attached to massive solar sails, that you could actually get these things up to one fifth the speed of light.
If that's the case, you can get to the next Earth like planet in about 20 to 40 years.
And that's not that long.
So the idea that these vast regions of space are just too far is not really true anymore.
And so the reasons to not believe in UFOs has definitely changed.
Have you ever heard of a guy named Robert Hastings?
I've heard the name, yeah.
Yeah, he wrote that book, UFOs and Nukes.
Yeah, I have that book.
Fascinating.
So, yes, a lot of UFO sightings are around.
But that could be evidence of Russians as well.
Yeah, that's the scary thing.
That's what the government's freaked out about, is that this isn't some extraterrestrial thing.
This could be China or Russia.
Right.
And there's a great book.
I just lost the name of it.
This woman wrote, what was it called?
Shoot, about Roswell and what her belief was, what Roswell was, was actually Stalin had sent over a.
A fake UFO to try and scare the Midwest.
It was a brilliant book.
I can't remember what it was.
I think it was called Area 51.
Was that what it was?
But yeah, I mean, there's lots of different theories that don't involve extraterrestrials that could explain it as well.
But because of the policy of keeping it as secret as possible or outsourcing it to Robert Bigelow, who keeps it as secret as possible, it makes it very hard for anyone to know what's really going on.
So, did Bigelow do the initial archaeological dig in Roswell near Area 51?
So, Chuck Zukowski was involved in that.
It was actually a television show that did the original one that I wrote about in my book.
But what happened was, Chuck found something.
He found a weird piece of metal during this archaeological dig.
And he basically went online and said, Is there anyone out there who can help me analyze this piece of metal?
And he was approached by Bigelow's people.
They said, Yeah, we'll analyze it.
This is what we do.
So, he sent them the metal and then they never sent it back to them.
So, he actually ends up going and trying to get it back.
It's a really interesting story.
Bigelow's people were involved at the time with basically investigating any UFO sighting or anything that could have any legitimate connection to UFOs or Roswell or something like that.
He was well funded.
His team had the funds, real laboratories, and they would go out and research this stuff.
Roswell has been investigated numerous, numerous times, many, many times.
What happened at Roswell is still completely masked in mystery, I guess.
Something was found there, whatever that thing was that was found.
Still exists, but nobody knows what it is.
Skinwalker Ranch Mysteries00:04:05
The reason I have trouble with the cow mutilations, especially relating to Skinwalker Ranch, like, yeah, it's super weird.
There's no blood, there's these surgical incisions.
There's no hard evidence, really, of anything ever happening there.
No, there's no evidence.
So, Skinwalker Ranch and Cadmillade are two separate things, but take the cattle mutilations.
I mean, cattle mutilations are a weird phenomenon, it's gone for a very long time.
There's no good theory of what they are.
The FBI at first thought it was a cult ritual.
Then they thought it was a motorcycle gang that was doing this for some reason as some sort of ritual to join the motorcycle gang.
But in the end, they concluded that we don't have any evidence of either of those things.
So nobody really knows what that is.
Why it would be related to UFOs, I could not tell you.
The only reason that people related to UFOs is a lot of times people see lights in the sky or hear weird noises or.
Or things like that, if you talk to these ranchers.
So that's the connection, but there's no evidence that a UFO would have any reason to do that.
So, yes, that's just one of the weird phenomena that seems to happen along the 37th parallel.
Skinwalker Ranch was this weird, crazy ranch in Utah where lots of things were seen anecdotally weird, you know, changes in time and monsters appearing, mutilated cattle, and then Bigelow.
Bought it.
Bigelow's people actually bought Skinwalker Ranch, set up a bunch of scientists to work there for years and put down what they saw.
But again, no evidence ever came out.
That doesn't mean there isn't evidence.
And so the question is what's going on at Bigelow?
You know, he's got lots and lots of files, which he's never spoken about, never shown to anyone.
And he's moved into a legitimate, you know, aeronautics business, which, you know, makes pieces for the International Space Station and just sort of brushes over that whole UFO thing, which he was involved with for many, many years.
So the question becomes are there files there?
Is there info there?
Are there objects there?
What does he have?
And we don't have the answer to that.
What is.
The most unexplainable or questionable thing to you about your book, about everything that you studied and everyone you talked to making the 37th parallel?
So, I think number one, and this has come out recently, I had seen files talking about unexplained materials and objects that were not old files.
So, I knew that at this point in time, there are still things that the Air Force has that they can't figure out what they are.
So, I knew that before this recent release.
So, I think that was the number one thing that spurred me on.
With the idea that people at very high levels in the Air Force have, you know, are talking about internally materials that they can't understand.
And that's weird because if these were things found in the 50s, by now we should know what they are.
You know, our technology is advanced to the point that we should be ahead of anything that could have been made in the 50s.
So that means it must not be by us.
That, the Bigelow stuff is very intriguing to me.
But in general, it's just sort of fascinating to me.
I loved Close Encounters as a movie.
And so I always kind of wanted to write something in that realm.
So I'm on the fence.
I'm not someone who's just a true UFO believer.
I believe in everything.
I am a believer, though, that there is evidence that has not come to light and there's information that still hasn't been explained.
And so I guess that's where I land on this.
I would love to see everything that the Air Force has on this subject.
I would love to know all of their sort of details about these objects.
And I would love to know what Bigelow has in his own possession.
Those are the things that are most intriguing to me.
But yeah, I guess that's it.
Stories Beyond Book Pages00:07:00
So, what else are you working on?
Do you have any projects that are coming up in the near future?
Yeah, sure.
What are you working on presently?
Recently, I wrote a serialized novel for the Boston Globe, which appeared one chapter a day for 20 days.
It was a thriller, like a Da Vinci Code style thriller called The Mechanic, which ended up being very popular in the region.
And I sold it to Spielberg, and I'm writing the movie now.
So, I'm writing the screenplay.
And it's going to be a big book next fall.
And then a sequel the following fall.
So that's kind of the main project.
So it's like a Da Vinci Code style thriller about a mystery going all the way back to the American Revolution.
It's really cool stuff based in real facts, and I think you'll like it a lot.
We're working on the movie for 37th Parallel, working on the movie for Bitcoin Billionaires.
And I have a couple other projects in the works in film and television.
I recently wrote for the show Billions on Showtime.
I was a producer and writer for season five of Billions.
Which was really, really fun.
And so those are kind of the main projects right now.
But I'm always looking for that next big nonfiction story.
So you said you mentioned you're writing the screenplay for the movie you sold to Spielberg?
Yes.
Is this the first time you've written a screenplay?
This will be my first screenplay for a major studio.
I've written an independent film here or there that hasn't been made.
So I've written some scripts before.
I tried to adapt one of my earlier books once.
So I've done some screenwriting and I wrote for Billions, which was.
Television, you know, but this will be my first major feature film.
Yeah.
What's the biggest change for you writing a screenplay versus writing a book?
Well, you know, you don't realize when you're writing a book how much of the story is just taking place in the characters' heads because an awful lot of it is.
You know, every sort of time they see something and think about it, there's got to be a way to show that.
Nothing appears in the screenplay that doesn't appear on screen.
So, there can't ever be any interior thought.
There can't be any explanation.
There can't be description really beyond something that you would visually see.
So, that's a big transformation for a writer.
You know, most book writers aren't as cinematic.
Now, I've always written for movies in a way.
So, all of my books are somewhat like that, which critics sometimes don't like.
They often review my books saying this should be a movie and not a book.
But for me, it's probably an easier transition than some authors.
But yeah, it's a learning curve.
I mean, it's a process to learn the format and And how to make sure everything you put in there appears on the screen.
I love being a book writer and I've always wanted to write books, but I've always seen the book as a platform for telling the story.
I've always wanted my books to be bigger and live beyond just the bookstore.
My goal is to be Michael Crichton.
And what I always was fascinated and loved about him was he would tell a story and it would be almost seamless, and how it became this huge movie like Jurassic Park or a television show or something like that or Westworld.
I mean, it's just the idea.
Is I'm a storyteller.
I don't care how you devour that story.
I don't care if someone tells you that story.
I don't care if I'm on YouTube or do something like that.
I only care that you are hearing the story and enjoy it.
And so my goal is to tell these stories in as big a way as I can.
For me, it's been movies, it's been writing a book that can become a movie.
If you write a book that can't become a movie, it has a shelf life.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like doing it in a much smaller way than it could be done.
And you're only going to reach a certain number of people.
There has to be that bigger dream.
In a lot of ways, you have to delude yourself when you sit down to do a project that everyone in the world is going to read it, or everyone in the world is going to see it, or everyone in the world is going to hear it.
That's the only way I can do it.
I can't sit down and write a book because it would be a few people would like it.
It's just never been me.
There are writers who do that, who write wonderful stories, and they do it because there's a great story there.
For me, it needs to be bigger than that.
And it needs to be entertainment for a lot of people.
I guess I've always kind of been driven that way.
I never want to just write a book.
That was never my goal.
My goal was always to be a storyteller in as big a way as possible to write 20 books, to have 10 movies, to have 10 television shows.
I want that.
And so I think that's always what's driven me.
So I won't sit down to start that process if I don't already think it's got that life beyond the pages.
That's a really cool way of looking at it.
Like you can see potential way beyond just.
Pages of a book.
That's really what's one of my favorite things about you is that you do so many of these talks online, like on YouTube or whatnot, so many podcasts, so many whatever it is, TV shows, movies.
It's a really cool way of, you know, you are all about the story, not about the medium itself.
Absolutely, 100%.
And what I've seen gone on, you know, listen, when I started my career, there was none of this, none of this existed, right?
And now the world you were in, the podcast world, or what's happening on the internet, it's, and then the streamers, you look at what's going on in the streaming world.
It's wonderful.
We're at such a golden age of storytelling because there's so many ways to tell a story, and there's not as many sort of walls as there were.
Anybody with a great story can find a way to tell it, which is also bad because anyone with a great story can find a way to tell it.
But the goal is that if you can live in this new world, if you can figure out ways to tell your story in as big a way as you can, you can be very successful now.
And so I love it.
I was able to transition because I've always looked at it that way.
I was always looking at it as just not books because, to be honest, books are not doing that well.
The book business is a very different business than it was in the 90s because people still read, but there's so many ways to read now.
And there's so much competition in terms of what you want to do with your day.
You just look at Netflix and Hulu and all of this kind of stuff, and where's their time to sit down and read a book?
And so, audiobooks are huge.
Audiobooks are huge.
And I love it.
Listen, I love it.
I think it's fantastic because I can tell the story that someone can listen to in an audiobook or someone else can watch as a movie or someone else sees on a streamer, someone else hears a podcast about, or someone else sees my TED talk about.
There's a million ways for you to get.
You know, the 37th parallel is a perfect example where that's a story which has reached so many people.
It's not a book that sold so many copies, but I know the story has reached so many people.
And I think to me, that's great.
And so that's always been my goal.
And it's just to reach as many people as I can with my stories.
And so, yeah, I won't sit down to do a project unless I see it having that life.
And so, yeah, it's fun.
That's awesome.
I don't know how much time you have.
Russian Oligarchs and Putin00:11:40
Is it cool if we talk about the Russian story or?
Yeah, we can do a little bit.
I don't have that much time left, but we can get into the Russia story a little bit.
Okay.
Yeah.
I eventually, by the way, one day I want to get you here in the studio to talk because it's so much of a different vibe we're getting one on one, and I find you so fascinating, man.
Thank you.
Yeah, no, when this all ends, I'll be down there because my parents are right down the street.
So I'll let them know.
That's perfect.
I'm going to hold you to it.
So, yeah, so tell me about the Once Upon a Time in Russia.
How did that story come about?
Tell me a brief background on that.
Yeah.
So I never.
Intended to write about Russian oligarchs.
Let's just put that on the table right now.
I don't think it's wise to write about Russian oligarchs.
I think that's something most writers should stay away from.
Basically, I got a call from a director, a big Hollywood director, who was always pitching me stories that were really dangerous.
He'd continually pitch me stories that were about like gun runners in Miami or drug dealers and wherever.
And I'd say, How dangerous on a scale of one to ten?
He'd be like, Oh, they're an eight.
I'm like, I'm not going to do an eight.
I want to do a two.
So one day he calls me up and he's like, I got this incredible story.
I want you to come to London and meet these guys, but I'm not going to tell you what it's about.
I was like, well, why won't you tell me?
Because if I tell you, you won't come.
I was like, well, that doesn't sound great.
But I decided to go.
So I flew to London.
Who is this guy, by the way?
Brett Ratner, the director, Brett.
Okay.
Did he do Once Upon Once the Gunrunner with Jonah Hill?
I believe he was involved in the production of that story.
Brett did Hercules.
He did the Rush Hour movies.
Okay.
And then he got Me Tooed out of existence.
But, anyways, premiere.
Yeah, no.
So, I go to London and there's this bar.
I'm supposed to meet him at this bar.
And when I get to the bar, there's all the security outside.
There's all these armored limousines and these guys with earpieces on.
It was just a crazy scene.
So, I go in the bar, and sitting at the bar is a very famous Russian oligarch, billionaire, dangerous person, as these Russian lawyers often ask.
And I immediately think, oh, God, there's no way I'm.
I'm going to be involved in this story.
But I sit down and they proceed to tell me this incredible story of how these oligarchs basically put Putin in power, how these guys made billions and billions of dollars essentially looting Russia.
And then Putin, once they put him in power, chased them all out of Russia.
That everyone who stood up to Putin is either dead or in exile.
And the oligarchs who stuck with Putin are still oligarchs today.
And it was this incredible story.
It's about Boris Berezovsky, who was one of the wealthiest men in Russia until he went against Putin and then was eventually found hanging in his bathroom from a scarf.
Roman Abramovich, who was a young orphan from Siberia making children's dolls, who then became the biggest oil magnate in Russia in his 20s.
Was partnered with Berezovsky and then ended up staying on Putin's good side and basically paying off Berezovsky to go away.
And then Berezovsky was found hanging.
So it's an incredible story, intense people.
I spent a year going back and forth to London to meet with these people, having terrifying conversations.
I remember one conversation.
There's a scene in the book where Roman Abramovich and Boris Berezovsky and a couple of other Russians need to get this.
Guy called a red director who runs a Siberian oil plant to sign off on their deal.
So they fly to Siberia and meet with this guy, and he says, No, I'm not going to sign this deal.
So they fly back to Moscow, and that night, that man goes swimming in the Irkutsk River and drowns.
His bodyguard, who was the only witness, gets into a bar fight and dies.
So I write this scene, and then I call up the oligarchs, and I'm like, You know, the scene, it seems like you guys had this guy killed.
And they go, well, it seems that way, yes.
And I was like, well, is it okay that I write the scene like this?
And they said, oh, yeah, that's totally fine.
And I was like, well, how, why is it fine to write a scene in which you guys obviously had somebody murdered?
And they said, well, you have to look at 1990s Russia, not like 1990s America.
Look at 1990s Russia like 1890s America.
In the 1890s, if someone refused you, you killed him.
And it wasn't a big deal.
That's how business was done in the 1890s.
And so, in the 1990s in Russia, that's how business was done.
And they were very matter of fact about it.
And these are really intense dudes, but it's just an incredible story.
And it tells you more about Putin than I think anything else has.
If you read my book, Once Upon a Time in Russia, you will understand Putin in a way that I don't think our government understands Putin, that I don't think most politicians have ever understood Putin.
Putin has been underestimated from day one.
When the oligarchs found him, He was a low level KGB agent who was working for the mayor of St. Petersburg.
Boris Berezovsky and this group of oligarchs were looking for someone to replace Yeltsin.
Yeltsin was old, he was drunk, he was dying, and they needed a new president of Russia, but they wanted someone they could control.
Boris Berezovsky knew Putin because once he'd set up a car dealership in St. Petersburg, and Putin had greased the wheels for him.
So he flew to St. Petersburg, he got Putin, he said, We're going to install you.
So they installed Putin as president.
The first thing Putin did was he invited all the oligarchs to Stalin's old house.
This is a house where there are bullet holes in the walls because Stalin used to line people up there and shoot them.
So he invites all the oligarchs there and he sits down with them and he says, You've all made an enormous amount of money.
You're all incredibly wealthy.
You can all keep your money, but from here on out, you stay out of my way.
And on that day, everything in Russia changed.
Any of the oligarchs who stayed out of Putin's way are still oligarchs today, worth billions of dollars.
Any of the oligarchs who stood up to Putin.
Are either dead or in exile or in jail.
And there was no middle ground.
Putin was one of these people that, like, he knew from the very minute it's all about Russia.
His greatest regret was that Russia was no longer the Soviet Union.
He really and truly believed that it should be what it was under Stalin and that he would be the leader for life.
And from the very beginning, he was set out.
Now, he's beloved in Russia.
Often people ask me, Are the oligarchs going to band together and get rid of Putin?
It's the other way around.
Is Putin going to get rid of the oligarchs?
They love Putin because Putin is a very strong leader who truly believes in Russia first, Soviet Union first, really feels like they should be the dominant country in the world.
And is fine with corruption, is fine with breaking eggs on the way to an omelet, as long as it's done for the right reasons.
So he allowed every oligarch who made his money, no matter how they made their money, to keep their money as long as they stuck to the plan.
And so guys like Roman Abramovich are still very powerful and wealthy, and they're considered Putin's cash register.
When he needs money, he asks them and they give him money.
And that's the way it works.
And as long as they maintain that and support him, They'll stay in power.
Holy shit, man.
That is.
But I will say, I was terrified the whole time writing that book.
I remember another meeting where I'm at with all these oligarchs and there's all these security guards and like bodyguards around.
And this guy comes up behind me, he's in London, and he just sticks something in my back pocket.
And I'm like, holy shit, because this is like where people were polonium poisoned.
You know, you hear all the stories.
And he goes, don't look, don't look, don't look.
I'm like, all right.
So I get back to the hotel room and I'm finally, I pull this thing out and it's a computer key card.
And I put it in my computer and it has on it, Thousands of pages of legal documents from Russia with depositions of Putin's head of state, all going all the way back telling the whole oligarch story.
And I'm like, holy shit.
So they wanted me to have all the information.
And now I'm like, I got to fly back to the United States with this.
I have no idea whether this is legal, whether I'm supposed to have this.
So I made sure there was a lawyer waiting in the airport in Logan Air from Boston.
And I flew back, and it ended up being the information that I ended up using to write my book.
So crazy stories like that.
I remember another time I'm walking down the street in New York City with this Russian.
Strong man, this is the guy who has definitely hurt some people, but he's very nice.
Like, I get along very well with him.
I've been interviewing for weeks, and we're walking.
There's these NYU kids walking behind us, really loud, drunk NYU kids.
It's a Saturday night, and he's getting more and more annoyed.
And this is a burly, scary guy.
He turns to me, he's like, These people are very annoying.
I was like, That's college kids, or and he goes, Should I do something?
I was like, What?
He's like, Should I do something?
I was like, No, don't do anything.
Should I whack them?
I know, and I was like, This guy is gonna kill these guys, like, literally.
He's a scary guy.
I mean, some of these people were terrifying.
But it was a fascinating story.
I would never write it again, I don't think, just because, you know, I have not been back to London.
I have not been back to Europe since writing that book.
In America, I feel, you know, it's very unlikely.
And in the end, by the way, the oligarchs liked my book.
And I had word that Putin has actually read it and did like it.
Really?
Because in the story, Putin's not the bad guy.
It's very different than Red Notice, which is another great book about, you know, Russian oligarchs or some of the other books.
In the scope of my book, Once Upon a Time in Russia, Putin is the good guy.
Because even though he's vicious and murderous, he is doing it to chase the people who are anti his world.
He chases the oligarchs out of Moscow, the ones who are corrupt.
He changes the corruption so that it aids the people of Russia.
Previous to Putin, the oligarchs were looting Russia.
They were taking the resources, they were stealing the money, and then taking it to France with them or England or whatever.
Once Putin came into power, every penny the oligarchs made went back into Russia.
If you wanted to maintain your status as an oligarch, you needed to become Putin's cash register.
And he used that money for the betterment of his country, as he saw it.
So, in a lot of ways, he was the cop who came in and scared all the bad guys away.
You know, he's the ultimate mobster.
But in the same way, you know, the godfather takes care of his people, Putin really does believe he's taking care of his country.
And so, in the scope of Once Upon a Time in Russia, I don't think Putin is the bad guy.
Wow, man, that is fascinating.
I have to say, that is, I couldn't imagine there wasn't many times where you weren't scared for your life doing that.
Yeah, I definitely had some questions.
You know, I'm not.
A risk taker.
I'm not one of those journalists who's going to dive into like some scary jungle somewhere to write a story.
I would never have written the story had I not sort of been tricked into hearing it and then realizing what a great story it was.
And to be frank, it was a very hard story to promote in a weird way because it did very well as a book, but the movie we just couldn't get made.
We still might, and it's still a big movie possibility, but we were very close.
Warner's studio was about to make the movie, and then North Korea hacked Sony, if you remember the hack.
Where North Korea, and after that, the movie studio just backed away, too scared.
And so, you know, one day it will get made, hopefully, but it wasn't the easiest story to promote or sell or anything like that.
Where to Find Ben's Books00:01:08
And I was afraid to go back to London afterwards until I knew.
I feel now very strongly that all of the oligarchs who are in the book liked it.
But every now and then I read about one of them hanging, you know, getting hung or falling out of a helicopter, and you're like, oh shit, I know that guy.
So, you know.
It's a little creepy.
I know that guy.
Jesus Christ, man.
Well, hey, thank you so much.
I really appreciate you doing this.
Your stories are so great.
Thank you.
Let me know when it's going to be up.
The paperback of Bitcoin Billionaires is out now.
So anytime it can go up soon would be great, but whatever.
Okay.
Yeah.
So tell people that are listening or watching where they can find your books, follow you on social media, et cetera.
Sure.
So Bitcoin Billionaires is out in paperback.
So you can find it pretty much.
Everywhere.
You come follow me on Twitter, it's probably the best.
It's just Ben Mesrick on Twitter because I respond, and that's where people send me stories, and it's a great way to keep up with people.
But the books are available everywhere, and the social network and 21 are both on Netflix, I think.