Three two one we are rolling welcome, welcome. I truly truly appreciate your time, mr ben mesrick man. You are so uniquely qualified to talk to exactly this audience right here. What's been going on with the apes, what's going on right now with geopolitical, i guess situations tensions boiling over and, as i was researching you i was, i was lining it up.

There were you're, so so well qualified, and we could talk about that uh. Your litany of success recognized as being a top level author, your general overall, just like kind of kicking ass in life, but i'm here to ask what i think the audience really has as a question when i was diving into this and i need to know it's True in the year 2000, did you represent massachusetts in the sexiest bachelor in america pageant yeah? I know it's hard to believe right. Well, i think it gets even more interesting from there after that. I think people's magazine when they were doing the sexiest man alive did they put you down as sexy as awful.

So i was much sexier 20 years ago, but basically yeah i was on a on a reality, show it was made by the guys who made um uh, who wants to marry a millionaire. If you remember that long time ago, forerunner of of all of the shows now and yeah, i represented massachusetts, they wanted someone like with glasses. I think they wanted someone geeky right early from boston. So that's i did not do well in the competition as you can.

Imagine i was, i did not do well in the bathing suit portion of the competition but um, but then i did end up in people magazine. The author category is kind of the easiest category to get into because it's like don't tell yourself, you know john grisham. It's not it's not like brad pitt right. You don't have to compete with actors but anyways.

This is this was years ago. But yes, yes, well, i guess not to scrape my first question. I was gon na ask the audience. I'm sure the honest wants to know like what your skin care routine is, but i guess we'll save that for another interview, but very legitimately folks.

This is the author of bringing down the house, which was eventually turned into 21 and then also the accidental billionaire, which was turned into the social network, and this is just two examples of really a myriad of books and movies that you already know, and some of The more recent ones are going to be perfect, a perfect, perfect conversation for today. Now i want to share a little story about me, ben just to kind of like even explain to the audience of how this came to be uh. I myself, i was working as a software engineer and then, when i saw i was kind of trying to make some youtube content and i started streaming because i was awful at speaking. I did not like public speaking, i wasn't good at it and i was trying to refine my skills to be better in my videos and i started december 31st of 2020.

A month later, i just happened to be streaming when gamestop went crazy and i kind of already knew it because i'm a big big fan of wall street bet, so that became my life. It blew up and like it just it's been a wild wild ride. Well, throughout it, someone pointed out to me an nft collection where it was centered around wall street bets and apes and diamond hands. So i bought one and in fact it's currently my twitter profile picture, and then i realized it's your project and then from there.

I got into the fact that you've been writing a book about this. Well, the book's already out and right here it is called the anti-social network. So i really want to just talk about your experience of writing this book. What drew you to it? Some of the crazy things you've learned and really just give an audience a little bit of a preview of what this book's even about yeah sure.

So basically i was sitting at home just like everyone else. In the middle of the pandemic, when gamestop went crazy, um i had sort of followed roaring kitty a little bit. You know to go back a little bit so when i wrote the social network book um, i had really gotten deep into the power of what facebook was. You know what zuckerberg had created this monster.

You know at the time it was this revolution that we were all excited about. We loved zuckerberg. He was the you know the the the geek kind of uh guy, going up against the winklevi twins, who were like the evil. You know athletic bad guys and then i wrote bitcoin billionaires, which was a book about the twins and crypto um, so i already was sort of in the area of like the power of crowds.

The power of you know the change in what is valuable and what's not valuable and and then i was sitting at home watching this happen and i started getting all these tweets. Um saying you should be writing about this, because it's the kind of thing that i write about and then my agent called me. It's like you know everyone's telling me that ben metric should be writing about gamestop, and so literally, while it was going on. I started to think well how many of these people can i get to how hard would it be to write? Could i get someone inside melvin capital like i, i want to tell this story.

How could i do it and - and i dove in and by the end of the week um, i had a movie auction going on for the project um and it ended up going to mgm the people who did the social network uh mike deluca, who runs the Studio and aaron ryder is the producer who did arrival and um memento, so we had this incredible team. So basically i dove into the book already knowing it's gon na, be this big movie and and it's such a dramatic story, it's an incredible story. Right, i mean you were there, but millions of people sitting at home, stuck in a pandemic gathered together on wall street bets um became obsessed with a couple things beating this wall street bank, that was shorting a company that everyone loved and also uh uh uh, basically Making a fortune you know of creating this short squeeze situation, um, because they saw value there that maybe wall street was missing. So there was all these levels to it that i became obsessed with and that that's how i got involved man.

I was watching one of your interviews about this subject and the interviewer asked you of like, oh, like they were leaning towards the side of like it's a flash in the pan of like retail, like whatever it happened once and what's funny. This was actually relatively early on in this saga and you're like i. I don't really think about that, and what's crazy is it's it's still here. The retail trading community is obviously here to stay and, like that's easy for someone like me to say, because i'm doing this day in and day out, but even quantifiably, we know it was reported by bloomberg that wall street hedge funds banks, pension funds now 80 to 85 of them are using tools in one way or another to track social sentiment like that.

Just shows the strength of retail, because no one wants to be the next melvin. And it's interesting that you had the foresight to see this populist movement and really, i always thought of it as a cultural wildfire and to be a bit more specific. I was wondering if this would happen to you, because when i first saw that i've been on wall street beds, really since college i love reading, it was just funny. It's the same thing, the way when i'm i'm talking to people about it, i'm it's akin to.

If you're at a casino and you've spent some decent time in casinos, if you see someone throw down serious money on green on the roulette wheel, you're gon na stay and watch it, how could you not watch you're like wait? What did they just bet and what's crazy, is that's what happened here and everyone was watching roaring, kitty, keith, gill and all it hit. That was everyone lost their mind, but then it got a little bit more weird when they took away the buy button. It was as if the pit boss came up and just knocked the wheel over almost like a child when they lose the game and like i'm, not playing this game anymore, but that was the casino i know it was so crazy when you realize that robinhood is Connected to citadel and is connected to melvin capital - and it's like this dirty little game going on that came in everyone's face, but i i do have to say like it was. It was incredibly obvious to me um that this was a revolutionary moment.

I really and truly believe, like you that this was not this little flash in the pan. I would not have written it um if it was just a story, i'm not a news guy. I don't do like a article for something i only want to write origin stories, something that's, i think it's a shift in the landscape and so you're absolutely right. I think that this was a moment when, when the retail trader, but also the power of the community, to create value um in such a way that we've never seen before and wall street bets was a big part of it.

Read it social media - you couldn't have done this before that um, but it really is a shift, and i think that if you ran a fund now you'd be crazy not to be scouring all of social media. To understand that your positions are, are it's more important? What people think um than than the fundamentals of a company anymore um? If a million people hate you know something, that's a powerful force. Um and people have to take that into account. I think that's one of the common things that we're always hearing about this is it's fundamentally overvalued and really value is deeply philosophical like if you have a painting, someone might think it's worth 10 million dollars.

Another person might be like. I don't know that it's worth 10 bucks, it's barely worth the paint in the canvas that it's on and i don't see why the stock world's any different. Obviously, fundamentals are part of the equation, but so much of mainstream media when they're talking to retail, with all their fancy pedigrees and showing how good they are like superior to us. It's like value equals fundamental value, and my simple argument is: it's: a bit more complex value equals fundamental value, but now we're seeing the rise of community value and we're seeing that like in so many different things, obviously with gamestop and now people are talking about it.

With amc you're seeing it in crypto, i mean doge ran to 72 cents or whatever it was out of nowhere like that, it's all community, driven and now for any of these professionals to say nah. It's just exclusively fundamentals. It's like what that doesn't make sense to me. I would argue anymore, i mean you could look at so many different areas where this is changing.

Everything art is a great example of it. Nft the nft world is entirely based on community right. That's the value for the most part of these things um, but you look at look at gme is no longer tethered to gamestop. Gme is a separate entity that has a connection to gamestop, but really it's much more than that, and what we've seen happen in a really interesting way is that everybody value gme to the point that the company itself could make changes based on that right.

So now it's working the other way where the power of the community is actually changing the fundamentals of that company, as they move into different spaces to try and take advantage of where they are now um but yeah. The whole ape thing is is much more powerful than i think people realize um and, and it's all a matter of the sentiment staying in a direction. I think what was really unique about the gamestop story was that they rallied together in such a way. I mean it was totally organic um and it wasn't you know top down.

It was the whole. You know web 3 idea of bottom up where all these people were watching roaring, kitty and and making fun of him at first i mean he was when he was first posting, i'm i'm in love with this stock. People were like ridiculing him and then, as it exploded, everybody realized that there was something here and that they could do something and make him make a move and change the market um. So yeah, it's it's a great moment.

I think it's just so incredibly impressive to see that populist movement come together and make the ripples that we're honestly still feeling today um. It might be hard to answer, but out of it like when you were researching, it obviously you're very familiar with gambling and you don't under other things, related to like the markets and wall street and all that was there a special like takeaway from this. That you're, just like that's just wild, like something that you learned about this, that, like it's just like still to today, like dumb found you almost um yeah a couple things, one of the things that you know, one of the main characters in my book is this College kid who put a few thousand dollars into gamestop and he was he wrote it all the way to 250 000, and you know he wanted to sell. But the power of the peer pressure of the community was so intense that he really felt he would be betraying the moment if he sold and i think that's something that you don't learn in business school right.

The idea that the rational move and we can talk about where gamestop should be and whatever, but this guy had turned two thousand dollars into 250 000. There is no businessman in the world who would say you shouldn't sell that at that point right take some of it off the table, but he felt he would be betraying wall street vets. These people he'd never met. He will never meet any of these people um and the memes.

It all meant something really truly emotional to him. So that to me was stunning to watch like it's. He almost had a mental breakdown over selling a stock um and and that's something that i don't think you you learn, that's something that's really unique. I think to this sort of value coming from the community, oh for sure, and i would almost take it a step further and say without that type of sentiment it would have never got to where it did.

You had to have so many people who were on that exact same page and that's what really brought it to life yeah, it's just it's just nuts and i think at first i really looked at it like okay, it was a social internet. Culture thing of like are you in on the joke or like hey we're sitting around as the pandemic, we're all on our couch, we're not going outside, so we're consuming more technology, we're consuming more of like internet culture, so they're in on the joke. But then the more i got into it, it was humor that was wrapped around a very serious disgust and almost distaste for wall street like so it was the joke and then all of a sudden i started seeing people more of like, especially when uh those government Panels and senate hearings and that stuff they were happening they're like trying to pin it on keith and everyone's like whoa whoa whoa in 2008. No one in wall street got in trouble.

Why are they talking about like one retail and then like? I you could almost feel a bit of anger and, like i said it was mask and humor and internet culture, but when you were doing your research, did you kind of see that thing like? The underlying thing was a big big anger towards wall street and, let's say the quote-unquote uh cronyism of elites. Yeah i mean this is this is really a movement uh. That starts all the way back with occupy wall street in the 2008 crash. There is this real sentiment.

Everyone i interviewed, who had bought gamestop that was part of their thinking, was that wall street is not going to screw us this time like they have screwed us over and over again, it's a completely rigged game. It's completely unfair. These people, in their suits and ties um, are shorting this company in the middle of a pandemic they're all working together. I mean there was this real feeling of of a battle.

You know that we were fighting or people who thought k-stop were fighting against. You know and melvin capital was stuck in the middle. I will say that listen, shorting gamestop from their position was not a unique trade. It wasn't something that you would say.

Oh you should never do that. I mean they shorted a lot of companies, but they became the target because it came out that they had done this and when you sort of weigh who they were versus, who the reddit crowd was. It really does feel like an elite uh. You know wall street fund run by a billionaire who has his penthouse in miami and his penthouse in new york versus people sitting on their couch trapped at home in the middle of a pandemic, who can't even go to starbucks right um? So it was it was.

There was a real feeling of anger that drove this to the degree that it drove it. People would not sell because they wanted to see melvin get destroyed right. That was really the anger and the chernobyl video um was really just a centerpiece um in my book, but as well as of the movement, the idea that it was going to erupt, it was going to explode um and you know what they. It really did.

That's the kind of crazy thing had they not been bailed out, although they'll never call it a bailout um. You know, and i should couch this and they say that it was absolutely not a bailout. It was a fine investment and a fine company, but had they not received an infusion of cash from you know their friends um, you know who knows what could have happened to them, so i do think it was a really interesting, interesting moment where all this anger's Been boiling for a while, but what did occupy wall street really do nothing right. It did nothing um.

This really actually did something um. This actually, for this moment, really really changed wall street, and i think, going forward will continue to change the way the game is played. It showed the power of the crowd for sure you bring up such a good point that i don't know if i've really internalized like at first it was game, stop and i would argue a little bit later, because amc kind of went crazy. Also in june, they became symbolic of that fight against wall street, the fight for market transparency.

Well, there was probably many many hedge funds that were shorting both of these, but melvin became the symbol. There were many market like market makers that were dealing with this, but through the connection with robin hood and citadel citadel became the symbol robin and there were many brokerages that stopped people from buying, but yet robin hood became the symbol. So it's interesting from a crowd. Psychology point to see how we have these individual symbols that to today, when you bring up robin hood to the like kind of average retail person like i'm not using like they're, it's a pr nightmare and they're like i hate them and probably for good reason like At the time that it happened, i don't think they handled it, the best they could have but symbols, and that just shows how incredibly strong that is right now yeah and that's the whole meme stock phenomenon, it's like memes and have so much power and imagery and Symbols: it's like.

We rally around things like that, and we always have i mean you can look at any industry in our any war or anything like that at all. One little symbol can be more powerful than anything else, and these you know these became targets right. Robin hood is a perfect target and it is all about. You know the whole meme, the meme right.

That's what we're talking about here and when i launched our nft line. That's why we wanted to use all this imagery, because it was these symbols that really galvanized this community forward for sure. Well, i have to admit uh. I really like mine, like the imagery on it, like whoever your artist name was.

It's definitely super super impressive. Now i don't know if you can um share any of this, but i know with the anti-social network, particularly there are talks of it becoming a movie and i believe mgm had bought the rights. Can you give us like updates on that? Like is the movie a production? Is there a time frame or we're actually going to shoot uh this summer, it's actually moving very quickly um. The script is done.

It was written by these two wonderful women who actually wrote orange is the new black and they are writing. They end picture with ryan gosling um. We have a fantastic director soon to be announced which uh, which will as soon as we do that we'll start the casting process. But the goal is to have this potentially out at the end of the year um.

It's it's moved quickly because there were, you know, other projects developing, but we're the one that's going to be in the movie theaters and it is the team you know behind the social network um, and so it's going to be. You know somewhat of a dark comedy. I think in the vein of a big short or a social network, um there's a lot of funny elements to this story for sure um. But it's attempting to capture a movement um on screen so uh.

I can't wait to see it and i think it's going to be a blast, so um yeah we're moving forward on that very quickly. Well, i can't wait to watch that one in an amc theater. Well, i appreciate it but another. I'm super excited for that.

That's going to be so awesome, but we can't also acknowledge like well, there's, obviously always crazy stuff going on in the world and in the markets. But right now there's an exceptionally high amount of tensions with the whole putin's invasion of ukraine and not only with the whole gamestop ape saga. But you also wrote another book called once upon a time in russia, and you really are perfectly positioned to almost share with the audience. You've spent a lot of time with oligarchs.

You've spent a lot of time researching what's going on and this was a handful of years ago and that's obviously how you created this book. But what i want to ask you is right now: what do you think americans maybe are getting wrong, and maybe we just don't understand culturally of what's going on, because the main thing we're seeing is hang on, there's putin, he invaded it seems like a bad situation. I'm reading stories of like yachts and jets getting tracked but like beyond that. What would you think that the average american is currently getting wrong? Well, i don't think people realize who these russian oligarchs are.

First of all, we're sanctioning these multi-billionaire russians and - and it's not just that they own yachts and planes and soccer teams. This group of oligarchs put putin in power, so these guys were a group of of men in the 1990s. When the soviet union collapsed, they were handed uh, the resources of russia, so a group of men, one was handed the aluminum business. One was handed the oil business, one was handed, you know, media, and these guys ran russia.

This was when yeltsin was president, so yeltsin was sick and he was drunk all the time and they decided they needed to replace him. So they went off to the middle of russia and they found this low-level kgb agent who worked for the mayor of saint petersburg and the only reason they knew him is they'd help the oligarchs set up a car dealership in saint petersburg. He was that low level and it was vladimir putin and they thought this was in control - he's a nobody, we're going to bring him to moscow. So the oligarchs that we're talking about today, plucked him out of saint petersburg, moved him to moscow, set him up and eventually, as president um and he turned the tables on them, he invited all the oligarchs to stalin's old house.

This is a place where there's like bullet holes in the walls where they used to line people up, and he sat the oligarchs down at a table and he said you've all made a lot of money. You can keep all of your money, but from here on out you stay out of my way and any of the oligarchs who resisted died. They were either found hanging in their bathroom or they fell down an elevator shaft or one fell out of a helicopter. Um are the oligarchs when that happens, when you just fall into the helicopter yeah.

So now all of the oligarchs who didn't resist are the ones that are around today and they're, essentially putin's cash register when he wants something they give it to him. If he needs a billion dollars to build his palace, they send him a billion dollars, and so they basically made a deal with the devil. They had put putin into power, but putin became the biggest oligarch of all. So the situation we're in right now, whereas this group of men who once ran russia, are now running around in yachts and planes um, but we're sanctioning them we're taking away their yachts, we're taking away their planes we're grabbing their bank accounts as much as we can.

We're ruining their lives to some extent um and the question is: can they now do what they once did and change the leadership in russia um two weeks ago? I would have said absolutely not i mean these guys are terrified of putin. They they die if they stand up to him, but we're starting to see cracks for him. We're starting to see them speak out um. You know they have nothing to gain from the war in ukraine, the oligarchs, don't they don't want a return to the old soviet union.

They hated the soviet union. They only came to power and wealth when the soviet union fell, but putin wants to return to the soviet union so there's they have nothing to gain from this situation and everything to lose. So i do think the sanctions on the oligarchs is actually a very powerful way of of sticking it to putin, um and we'll see what happens with it. But i think you know if people read my book, i went very in depth.

I spent you know six months hanging out with these guys in clubs and bars and soccer. You know, owners, boxes of soccer teams and and then doing some fairly dangerous things to write this story. Um, so you'll get a real feel of who these guys are um. If you can find the book it actually is not that easy to find anymore um because it came out a while ago and then it just kind of disappeared, everybody bought it out.

So hopefully there will be a copy here and there i'm sure there there might be a resurgence like after this, like recent debacle, uh, like you were with these old, like i guess, as a human being like, were they scary in the way that hollywood they have? A lot of stories about you know these guys, um, i don't know which one you want me to tell i i i was once walking in new york with this oligarch and we were walking through columbus circle, new york and there were a bunch of college kids. Like just being very loud behind us and the oligarch turned to me, this is a very powerful man who, i know had been involved in some serious things in the past and he's like this is very annoying. You know the kids were being really loud and i was like well yeah. It's new york everyone's having a good time and he's like, shall i do something, and there was this moment in his eyes he was a hundred percent serious.

It was like the scene in jaws where the eyes turn into like white, so you're, like oh, my god and and i was like no no everything's fine everything's on he like he calmed down, but i knew in that moment we were inches away from something horrible Happening um and there were moments like this all the time i was at a meeting and uh. This very large bodyguard, came up behind me and just shoved something into my back pocket and he's like. Don't look, don't look, and this was right when people were getting polonium poison. You know, i'm like oh crap, i'm gon na die now and i didn't look.

I get back to the hotel room and i take it out and it was a computer like key card. A memory card - and i'm like i don't know what this is no way - i'm not going to stick it in my computer right. So i had to fly back to boston. I made sure there was a lawyer waiting for me in the airport um because i didn't know if i was going to be grabbed by the state department.

I had no idea what was on this thing and i fly back and it ends up being and when i used it, it had thousands of pages of depositions from this trial, all the way up to putin and the kremlin. Like all of this crazy information that ended up in the book, um that somebody wanted me to have um - and it was like thing aft like that. But then i guess the biggest story was there's a scene in the book, and this oligarch tells me this story. Where roman abramovich and boris berezovsky, two very big oligarchs, wanted to buy an oil refinery in siberia, so they flew to siberia and they met with this russian general who controlled it and they said.

Will you sell it to us and he laughed at them he's like? I'm not going to sell it to you, so they flew back to moscow and that night that old man went swimming in the irkus river and drowned his bodyguard, who was the only witness, got into a bar fight and died. So i write this scene and i call up the oligarch and i'm, like you know, reading the scene back it. It makes it seem like you guys, had this man killed and he's like. Yes, it does seem that way and i was like well, you know.

Do you want me to change it? Is that okay? Is that what you wanted me to say and they're like? Oh, it's fine, i was like well, how is it fine? It seems like you had this man and he's like well when you think about russia in the 1990s. Don't think about america in the 1990s think about america in the 1890s and in the 1890s, if a rival businessman disrespected you you shot him, and so he he says that you know that's how that's the world we lived in right um, so it was story after Story like that, where you're just kind of in this really weird world, these are hard men who grew up in a very difficult place. They were outsiders, they were bandits, they were black marketeers who took enormous power and they they had no problem with dealing with their enemies. That way, um and that's who we're talking about you know.

So we see them now in yachts and airplanes and living this life. But but these are tough men um, and so you know we'll see what happens going forwards with these guys wow now i i have to ask just because it happened recently. Have you been privy to elon musk, officially calling out to fly, and then he tagged the kremlin? If anything confirmed we're in a simulation, it was hilarious that was so wild elon musk is not. I love elon musk.

Listen! I i there's a chapter in the anti-social network where i have him underground using a flamethrower fighting ai like the terminator, i think, he's just such an over-the-top individual. I think he seriously would fight putin um, i don't think he's kidding. Adelia putin is a judo expert. The guy won like international judo champions as a young man, so i don't know how well that fight would go to be honest with you, but um, but yeah.

It was pretty intense. I think uh they followed up, because obviously this is just a master of social media and a master of trolling and he's like fine i'll give you ten percent more pay-per-view. I'm like this is the most insane thing: he's taunting, a guy who invaded this sovereign, independent country and he's challenging him too. That's so wild.

I love it yeah, but even connecting that back to your story of when you were walking on the streets of new york, this doesn't seem to be something that they would just take as a joke of like. Oh, that, like this seems like something that uh they would almost like hold like a hot coal and like piss them off for the remainder of their life, like that, doesn't seem like it's something they would just laugh off. You mean which part the like of elon, calling them out on the internet like because, like i mean i i think putin is a is a very intense individual and we really don't know what his mental state is right now um, you know, there's lots of theories Back and forth about what is going on with him, but he certainly has a vision of the world that does not work for the rest of us. He wants to recreate the soviet empire and given the opportunity he would take back every territory, he thinks should be part of that empire, which is part of europe um, so it can get very ugly, very fast, yeah, um yeah.

These are. These are intense people. I think the terminology that i i read about this, like he's attempting to expand the iron curtain, obviously like a call back to uh soviet russia. So you think that's his ultimate goal right now, because, like even more recently we're hearing about deals with china and like attempting to get off the usd and all that do, you think he's a guy.

That's like myopically focused on bringing russia back to like what he would perceive to be the soviet greatness yeah. So i do believe that that's been his vision. All along he's said before that. The worst mistake of the last century was the fall of the soviet empire.

Um, so he really does want that. However uh, i don't think he calculated that this would happen. I really think he he thought he would walk right into the ukraine. They would collapse in a couple of days the world the world might get mad, but we'd get over it really fast.

I don't think he saw it becoming this cause of the entire rest of the world uh. He thought it would be just like when he took you know chechnya when he took uh. You know whatever country he's already done this a couple times and nobody seems to have really cared so this was unexpected for him and he miscalculated and now he's in a position that i i don't think he wants to be in. But it's scary, because this is an old man who probably has an illness of some sort um, so we're getting towards his end game and i don't believe a guy, like putin, you know, rides off into the sunset with his 200 billion dollars and he knows that Too, so how does it end for putin um? That's where it gets scary, because he really dreams of recreating the soviet empire and he spent 20 years getting rid of anyone underneath him who's, not totally loyal.

So he has this loyal apparatus running all the way down through the military and he wants to take half the world so you're in a very odd situation where, where you don't really know, if he's rational or not, he has been rational in the past. We hope he's rational, going forwards, man that uh that insight - that's awesome, uh moving on just to like a little thing i want to shout out here is obviously we're a part of why we're talking is. Actually, you have a new book that came out the midnight ride, uh to my understanding, it's about one of the biggest museum heists, i believe in america. Could you give us a little bit more of a high-level view just because i don't know, i think, a lot of people watching this? This sounds like a super interesting story.

Thank you. Yeah. The midnight ride is my new book and it is a da vinci code style, thriller um. It revolves around the largest art heist in history, um, basically exactly uh.

You know on almost on the date that you know uh on on. It was uh the 18th of march um in 1990, when two men dressed as cops, broke into the gardner museum in boston and made away with 11 paintings worth over a billion dollars. Um it's never been solved. The art is still missing.

It's still out there there's a 10 million dollar reward for the art um and it's a crazy story, and i actually got involved in this story from a late night phone call about 15 years ago. I got a call in the middle of the night. People pitch me stories all the time and this guy called and claimed that he was one of the people who robbed the gardner museum and he proceeded to tell me some things that i'd never seen before. In the press he had just gotten out of prison for a very similar art crime, and he made me think that perhaps he really was one of the people and then he wanted to meet with me at two in the morning, in the middle of south boston.

In front of a warehouse i had to come alone and i started to get really nervous. You know the guy was like i'm gon na break my parole, you and, and so i started to try and you know head to where we were gon na meet. You know and he got agitated, he hung up on me and i never heard from him again so for the past 15 years. I've always wondered.

Could i have solved the gardener and found these paintings, which are worth 10 million dollars um, or was i just such a coward that i missed out on like the biggest story of all time, so i wrote this thriller um and in it opens with how i Believe the actual crime went down based on talking to this guy, who may or may not have been one of the robbers. So it does have some cool stuff in it. But it's really a thriller that ties that heist to a secret going back in history. All the way to the revolutionary war um and it's a fun ride.

It all takes place in and around new england and boston um for people who who are into the da vinci code or that sort of thing steven spielberg bought the movie right. So we're making a big spielberg movie out of it, which is really really cool, um and i've never really written a book like this before um. The main character is a card counter which i've written a lot about before um and it takes place. You know, starting at the the casino, the encore casino in in boston and goes from there.

So you know if you're at all into card, counting or or art heists or that sort of thing i think you'll, like the midnight ride man. This sounds like a novel. That's definitely gon na be right up my alley. That sounds awesome.

I mean overall. I i truly appreciate the time this has been a privilege to talk to you about everything going on with the eight movement what's going on with really ideally potentially in putin's head, and i wish you the most success with your newest book there um overall, just for Anyone who's interested, what's the best way to reach out to you if people have questions or comments. Anything like twitter is the easiest. It's just ben mezwick at twitter, if you're interested in the nft project.

Basically, i i'm dropping three lines of nfts and you own all. Three, you get to own a part of a movie, i'm writing about the nft space. So it's a way of the community interested in my stories to to own a piece of my next movie um. You can go to benmetric nft.com also, and then it links you to our discord.

Where i'll answer any questions you have about anything, you want um and yeah. The twitter is always the easiest. That's where people find me and pitch me stories sounds good to me overall. Once again, thank you and to all the listeners, i hope you really enjoyed what mr mesrick was able to offer us today have a good one.

Thank you so much you.