#1839 - Duncan Trussell

**Joe Rogan** (0:16)
Great to see you.

**Duncan Trussell** (0:19)
Mmm.

**Joe Rogan** (0:20)
Not bad.

**Duncan Trussell** (0:20)
On this day, Trussell, not Buffalo Trace, this is actually older than America.
This is from 1773, the company. I don't think that bottle is, the bottle is only eight years old.

**Joe Rogan** (0:30)
Holy fuck, we're drinking some very, very old alcohol.

**Duncan Trussell** (0:35)
Do you know the whole movie Sour Grapes? You aware of that?

**Joe Rogan** (0:38)
No.

**Duncan Trussell** (0:39)
Sour Grapes was a documentary about this guy who was a scammer, who tricked all these dudes into thinking he had all this really expensive wine, like very rare wine, but it was really fake. He manufactured the old labels, rubbed them with dirt and shit, and did the whole thing, and mixed wines to make them taste similar to very, very expensive wines.
But he had sold one of the Koch brothers a bunch of bottles of fake wine, and some of it, figure out who it was. I want to say it was like Thomas Jefferson's wine. It was that ridiculous.

**Joe Rogan** (1:09)
Get out of here.

**Duncan Trussell** (1:10)
I'm not kidding.

**Joe Rogan** (1:11)
They were like, oh wow, you got some of his wine?

**Duncan Trussell** (1:14)
Yeah, they had a bottle that had Thomas Jefferson's sign hit with a Sharpie.
This guy must have paid like a million dollars for this wine. He was in the hole to this scammer. Millions of dollars in fake wine. Those guys, they collect wine.

**Joe Rogan** (1:35)
Like Thomas Jefferson would sign his wine? Like that's, who would do that?

**SPEAKER_3** (1:40)
I mean, maybe?

**SPEAKER_4** (1:41)
I don't know.

**Duncan Trussell** (1:44)
Maybe they just labeled it? I don't know. I don't know what the deal was. But he had had this bottle that this dude had sold him.
So who was it supposed to be from? Yeah, it was Jefferson. I was right.
Yeah. So he decided to include a photo of one of his prized Jefferson bottles in an exhibition of his collection. Coke asked Brad Goldstein, his private investigator, when you're a billionaire, you have one to reach out to historians at Thomas Jefferson's house in Monticello, to reach out to historians at Thomas Jefferson's home in Monticello. He said, this is one of those phone calls I'd always never forget. What happened?
Oh, so this is just like a transcript of it. He said, I have some bad news for you. These bottles have nothing to do with Thomas Jefferson.

**Joe Rogan** (2:37)
A hundred thousand.

**Duncan Trussell** (2:39)
Yeah.
He purchased four bottles. He paid a hundred thousand dollars per bottle. Wow. So four hundred thousand dollars for fake bottles of wine. Now here's the question.
Terrible that he got scammed, right? Terrible. But if that guy just stopped, never did it again. Just quit. Just got to that level where you could sell a guy. He would feel better. He would feel like he's got Thomas Jefferson's wine. He could read Thomas Jefferson's work and imagine what it would be like to be in his presence back then.

**Joe Rogan** (3:14)
Yeah.

**Duncan Trussell** (3:15)
I mean, instead, it feels terrible.

**Joe Rogan** (3:18)
It feels terrible. Terrible. Well, fuck, man. I guess rich people, we assume that they're smart because they're rich.
No one would ever fall for a scam if you've been able to become that powerful. But wow.

**Duncan Trussell** (3:37)
This one's complicated, though. It's not like he, I think, got roped in because this guy was legitimate.
The guy who was, what was his name, Rudy, is that what his name? The guy who was the scammer was a legitimate wine expert who purchased very legitimate bottles of wine that were very expensive. So he was a guy at the auction that knew everything about every vineyard, about every company, about all regions of the world, and he was bidding all the time on these really expensive bottles of wine, and then he would sell them to other people.
He would buy them and sell them, but he was real. So he was spending a shit ton of money. So no one suspected anything. They thought of him as one of them. I mean, he's a super successful wine connoisseur, and he's a very gregarious guy. Everybody loves him.

**Joe Rogan** (4:31)
I saw a great documentary about the same thing, but with Mormonism. Like somebody counterfeited some kind of like, something about like a demonic frog that, it was the same thing, counterfeited it, made it seem completely real.
What's the founder? Who founded?

**Duncan Trussell** (4:53)
Joseph Smith.

**Joe Rogan** (4:54)
Joseph Smith. Supposedly Joseph Smith had written this thing about demonic frogs or entities. It was really weird.