“The Holiday Movie Edition”

Hosts and Guests

Hosts: Jason Henrichs · J.P. Nichols
Guests: Amber Frye · Pam Kaur · Samer Saab

Why Do So Many Holiday Movies Involve Finance?

HOST (Jason Henrichs):
In this special holiday conversation, the Breaking Banks team sets aside their usual deep-dive into fintech regulations to ask a lighter but insightful question:
Why are so many holiday movies rooted in money, markets, and morality?

From Die Hard’s $600 million in bearer bonds to Home Alone’s free-flowing credit cards, the hosts find that most festive films hinge on some kind of financial tension, theft, greed, redemption, or redistribution.

QUOTE:

“Die Hard is obvious, terrorists stealing bearer bonds, the crypto of the ’90s.”

They joke about whether Nakatomi Plaza’s compliance team ever filed a suspicious activity report, turning a pop-culture staple into a crash course on anti-money-laundering blind spots.

What Can Harry Potter Teach Us About Wealth and Banking?

PAM KAUR:
Her pick: Harry Potter. Behind the magic is a cautionary tale about inheritance, spending, and unregulated finance.

• Harry’s windfall lacks any financial education component.
  
• Gringotts Bank operates without KYC, audits, or transparency.
  
• Vaults equal cold storage; dragons equal risk custodians.
  

QUOTE:

“Gringotts is the sketchiest bank ever, they have vaults, no balance sheet, and zero governance.”

The team likens wizarding banking to decentralized finance, a trust-based system running purely on myth and magic.

Fraud, Identity Theft and Contract Law in Holiday Classics

AMBER FRYE:
Calls The Santa Clause the ultimate fraud-tech movie.

• Santa’s identity theft goes unchecked across continents.
  
• One microscopic clause becomes a binding lifetime contract.
  
• No regulator ever audits the North Pole.
  

QUOTE:

“No one checks Santa’s ID, the regulators would never let that clause fly.”

The crew adds Home Alone to the list, where Kevin McCallister commits near-perfect card fraud, proving merchant controls and chargeback systems were still in their infancy.

Trading Places and the Ethics of Market Manipulation

Jason Henrichs and SAMER SAAB:
They revisit Trading Places (1983), which brilliantly exposes the social hierarchy of Wall Street.

• Commodities trading reveals privilege in price access.
  
• The $1 bet that ruins lives mirrors modern wealth inequality.
  
• It’s a timeless case of insider trading and moral arbitrage.
  

QUOTE:

“It’s the original ESG lesson, rich white dudes ruin Christmas over a one-dollar wager.”

This story’s decades-old satire still parallels fintech’s current fight for inclusion and ethical markets.

The Economics of Whoville, From the Grinch to Stablecoins

Jason Henrichs and PAM KAUR:
Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch becomes a study in consumer behavior and emotional economics.

• Whoville runs on debt-fueled spending and social credit.
  
• The Grinch hoards wealth, a symbol of inequality and isolation.
  
• Happiness becomes the currency of last resort.
  

QUOTE:

“Whoville’s a socialist-consumerist economy, somehow both at once.”

They riff on what a Whoville stablecoin might look like, perhaps backed by roast beast futures or community joy metrics.

A Christmas Carol and the Evolution of Value

J.P. NICHOLS and PAM KAUR:
Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol reflects impact investing before its time.

• Scrooge represents liquidity obsession and the cost of capital.
  
• His transformation mirrors the shift from profit maximization to purpose alignment.
  
• “Generosity ROI” replaces dividend payouts.
  

QUOTE:

“Scrooge goes from hard assets to soft values, the ultimate pivot.”

Pam notes that gold, still viewed as “the universal Indian currency,” now competes with digital gold (Bitcoin) as a store of trust.

Loyalty Points, Digital Assets and the New Currency of Trust

The conversation drifts into the economics of loyalty.

• Jason suggests miles-backed mortgages and reward-point credit lines.
  
• Amber warns that rewards devalue faster than fiat.
  
• Brett imagines “GrinchCoin”, a stablecoin collateralized by good deeds.
  

QUOTE:

“Our Amex points are basically lowering corporate cost of capital, they’re the new stablecoin.”

It’s a humorous yet sharp commentary on how brand ecosystems are building their own micro-currencies and fintech loops.

Love, Trust and Financial Transparency

AMBER FRYE:
Pulls Love Actually into the mix, questioning financial intimacy in relationships.

• When should couples merge accounts?
  
• Can shared-budget apps replace trust?
  
• Should there be a “dating fintech” that tracks relational ROI?
  

QUOTE:

“At what point in a relationship do you merge finances? No one teaches that.”

The team compares The Holiday’s home swap to peer-to-peer lending, trust, collateral, and platform reputation all rolled into one.

The Final Lesson, Internal Controls Matter

Jason Henrichs (Closing):

“The true meaning of Christmas isn’t family or gifts, it’s internal controls.”

The hosts toast to the unsung heroes of finance, compliance officers, risk analysts, and technologists keeping markets honest while the rest of us watch holiday reruns.

Key Takeaways

• Finance is embedded in storytelling because money equals motivation.
  
• Every movie is a metaphor for trust, value, and risk.
  
• Behind the humor lies a truth about why fintech ethics and governance matter year-round.
  

Final Quote:

“Happy holidays to all, and remember: always check the ID before you swipe.”

Raw Transcript:

Welcome to Breaking Banks, the number one global fintech radio show and podcast. I’m Brett King. And I’m Jason Henricks.

Every week since 2013, we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services. From incumbents to unicorns, and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative, inclusive, and healthy financial future. I’m J.P. Nichols, and this is Breaking Banks.

With everything going on in the world, you may have missed that it’s actually a very important time of year. That’s right. This is when Kia and I argue that Die Hard is in fact the greatest Christmas movie ever made.

And Kia wrongly continues to argue that just because a might be filmed coincident with the holidays, that does not in fact make it a holiday movie. So rather than having a serious conversation about the serious things going on in the world of regulatory reform, stable coins, and banking, we thought we’d just hit record on the Ally Labs holiday party. And these are the things we talk about when we’re not chatting with you, our banker and fintech friends.

We talk about really nerdy subjects like why do most holiday movies somehow tie into the world of banking and fintech? And I mean, Die Hard is obvious, right? Like you have the terrorists coming in to steal bear bonds, the crypto of the 1990s, anonymous currency to be stolen. Now, I have a whole lot of issues that I want to talk about, like why there are $600 million of bear bonds in the vault of the Nakatomi Plaza. Like, how did they not have an SEC regulator come in and say, you know, what are your controls around this? Because I don’t think the seven locks on the safe are going to be sufficient, as we’ll talk about.

Well, they weren’t. But come on, that was a hell of a safe. Hell of a safe.

But come on, the FBI turning off the power and that’s what’s going to do it. Come on. All right.

Let’s kick it off. And I want to start with my fellow patriot in headgear, Pam, newest member to the Alloy Labs team and rocking the great Mickey Tinsel Top. Talk to us about what is your favorite holiday movie banking tie-in? I’m going to go kind of off the rails and go with Harry Potter.

I feel like it gives big Christmas vibes for me every year. I think growing up every year there was a Harry Potter Christmas marathon, big magical lights, snow, family, all of those. I feel like it classifies as a Christmas movie.

For a few reasons, I’m going to tie it back into banking and financial industry. One, Harry ends up going through the great wealth transfer in the very beginning of the movie. He has no idea how to deal with this.

He spends way above his means. He has no idea how to manage his wealth. We’ll get to that a little bit more later.

And then second, there’s literally a bank in the movie, Gringotts, which is the most sketchiest bank we’ve ever seen. They call themselves a bank. They supposedly have a bank charter.

But really, they’re just vaults with no real balance sheet. They don’t do lending. They have no VSAML controls, clearly, considering what kind of sketchy stuff is in the vaults.

And then we can also tie it back to the crypto world. They’re literally just rails. You go across the rail to get to your vault.

So we cannot tie it any better to what’s going on right now and on all the things that we’re seeing in banking today. Well, if that were remade today, the Gringotts teller lobby would be cut down by about 75%. What are those people called, those creatures that work at Gringotts? Goblins? Yeah.

They’re goblins. Yeah, some sort of goblins. Come on.

Know your mythical creatures. I thought they had an actual name. Well, anyway, whatever they are, one would be a universal goblin working the whole thing.

They’re also very grumpy. I would be if I was working at a bank during Christmas time. Yeah.

Could you have done this transaction digitally? Can we introduce you to our goblin pay system? Yeah. Pay by goblet. Download our app.

Also, how are they letting an 11-year-old inherit all this money with no, like, here’s how you can manage it. Here’s how you should spend it. It kind of goes immediately off the rails and buys all this candy and buys all this expensive stuff or tries to buy all this expensive stuff.

How do we know he’s not being scammed, right? This could be a wizard butchering scheme where, you know, they’ve convinced him that he’ll get his parents back if he just, you know, goes and buys a bunch of gift cards with his newfound gold. It’s probably Lord Voldemort sending him emails like I get from New Jason saying, hey, do you want to meet up and have this battle? Come with 20 gift cards. Oh, man.

Amber, how about you? I’m interested if it’s going to be, you know, an Amber and Jeremy or is it going to skew towards a kid’s movie? Favorite Christmas movie of all time. Original Santa Claus with Tim Allen. We tie this to banking, obvious fraud, identity theft.

I mean… Deep fake, baby. Absolutely. The ultimate deep fake.

The ultimate deep fake. And then this man is just, like, rapidly changing. Is no one checking his ID anywhere he goes? Like, you are obviously not the same person, but we’re all just rolling with it and pretending like, oh, this is totally normal and okay.

And then also, to Pam’s point, Home Alone. We have a child with a credit card going on a spending spree. No one is batting an eye.

No one. I mean, at the plaza. Yeah.

At the plaza. Ordering pizza. Yeah.

Did anyone think to check the signature on that card? Right. Flip that over. Okay.

How many of you guys even sign your cards anymore? I’ve never had anybody check the signature on my card in, like, the last 15 years. Yeah. Never.

But I’m also not a little… Most of the time I pay with my card. I don’t have my card anywhere near me. Well, it’s funny you should say that, Samer.

I accidentally shredded my card in August. I thought, well, we got the new card, and I thought I was shredding my old card, and I shredded the new card, and I have the old expired card, but I’d already entered it in Apple Wallet, and I’ve rolled with it since August, and I’ve had one problem. Yeah.

Listen, Amber, I have to get angry at you because this was where I was going to go, but don’t worry. I have a backup one. As a child of the 90s that grew up in a household with two brothers in the great state of Michigan, we absolutely were big Tim Allen fans growing up, and so this movie absolutely sticks out.

But you have to go back to the entire premise of the movie. It’s in the title. This is a legal contracts movie.

It is all about some obscure line in their contract that is a hidden element of it that no one is paying attention to. No one is reading. No one’s reading the terms and conditions that are at the bottom of the website.

We don’t know who is underpinning this banking app. No one’s looking into their FDIC status. This is a legal question from the start, and it’s dubious terms, and so I don’t think the regulators would stand for this.

Yeah. If any of these movie scripts had been reviewed by the regulators, none of them would have been ever made. Well, the regulators were hands-off in so many of these things, right? I already called out the SEC with Nakatomo Trading.

They have $600 million in bear bonds that no one’s calling out looking at this. No one’s going through the KYC AML of the plaza, right, like asleep at the wheel in New York of all places. Come on now.

Yeah. Let’s go back to some of the originals. If we go back to Miracle on 34th Street, should they have actually just adjusted the loan? Should they have started a workout? Speaking of no, where’s the SEC? Gringotts literally had Horcruxes and other random dark artifacts.

The Death Eaters were storing all their money and stuff there. Where is the KYC? There is none. It’s just, we’re going to close our eyes and you can use our facilities however you wish.

Pam, are you suggesting they should have debanked? They should have debanked. That’s not very Christmas-like. We’re going to get into corruption.

Safe deposit boxes. I mean, I’m going to tell you not to put weapons in there, but do I really know what you’re doing in there? How much do I care? I don’t know. Debatable on the day.

If we’re going to get into corruption, we have to talk about the greatest Christmas finance crossover, and that, of course, is Trading Places. Yes. I was hoping you were going to go there.

I don’t know how it actually even slipped my mind, but it is. It’s a top movie of all time, let alone a top finance movie, let alone a top Christmas movie. What do we have? Give it a quick recap, Samer, because you realize there’s a generation that might not know how amazing this film is.

What was that, the 1983 film? Yeah. Before I was born, even. This is going to go right at the top of our most watched list for the team.

Trading Places, featuring Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy. Dan Aykroyd is a is he a broker or he leads an investment? It’s a commodities firm. It’s a commodities firm.

That’s right. Yeah. Remember, they’re trying to corner the orange juice market.

That’s right. The concentrated frozen orange juice. And it’s owned by the Dukes, who are themselves a family and an institution that has not just owned or has been part of the stock market, but they’ve really owned the stock market for generations.

And Dan Aykroyd is the main operator of their business. And so he is this man of Harvard. He has gone to all the private schools.

And he is this respected individual that they trust their money to. And Mortimer and Randolph, they make a bet. They won.

One says, we’re lucky to have. Oh, what is the one stands name? I see. I need to go watch it again.

I need to go watch it again. I’m going to set it. I’m going to set an agenda item for this weekend to go watch it.

They say we’re lucky to have him in position running our company, watching over our money. And one brother goes, he is a product of environment. And I bet if we put someone else in this position under our say, we put them in the close, they could fill that role and do just as well.

And so they go and they find Eddie Murphy, who is living on the street, switch places, put Dan Aykroyd in jail, put Eddie Murphy into that role. And he is now running the firm. The movie ends when Dan and Eddie come onto the plot.

They discover that they have been played by these two guys and they decide to take these two who are already going to commit many SEC violations by getting early access to crop reports, which will then determine how the frozen orange juice they’re going to trade after the new year. They intercept that corner of the market themselves and send the Dukes into poverty. Yeah, it’s who begins.

Well, so Dan Aykroyd’s character, he’s the up and coming young partner is Lewis Winthrop the third. Yes. And Eddie Murphy is Billy Valentine, Billy Ray Valentine.

And the whole premise of the movie is because two rich old white guys got bored and the bet was $1. They bet that anyone could do this. It’s kind of the equivalent.

So now you have, now you have betting as well. So we can talk about prediction markets. Oh, it’s a total.

No, it’s not a bet. They’re predicting the future, Sam, or they’re buying a contract of a future outcome. Totally not betting.

Yeah. Well, I was going to say that there’s no margin requirements. There’s, there’s no hedging, right? It’s just, we’re going to corner the orange juice future market, which of course, very similar to what the Hunt brothers did.

Yeah. Well, I mean, as long as we’re going to talk about rich old white dudes ruining Christmas for people naturally leads to one of the other Epics. Yeah.

National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation. And if the holidays even really kicked off until for me, it’s watched diehard first, let national Lampoon Christmas vacation right afterwards. But you talk about kicking things off when instead of getting your bonus, poor Clark just gets, you know, a cheap ass loyalty program.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I suppose, I suppose that’s legal, but it’s aggressive.

It was indicative of the LA labs bonuses there. You’re going to love the jelly pants. Yeah.

I mean, I think everybody knows that I am Clark Griswold. And I was going to say that secretly, I’m also Fred Gailey, the lawyer from Miracle on 34th street. But the more we talked about, I realized I might just be the Grinch because I actually haven’t seen that many Christmas movies.

So, so far we’re like five for five, but like the original Santa Claus, I barely remember that one, but I’m old enough to remember trading places in the theaters. Santa Claus came back in rotation for us the last few years. I think last year we, we picked it back up and we’re like, oh wow, this movie is pretty great.

Now, as long as you brought up the Grinch, you know, we’ve got to talk about which version of the Grinch are we talking about and which one for those of us who have kids of that age, you know, do they change up which Grinch they want, which they all, by the way, have different lessons. Amber, like what is the preference in your household? So the preference has been the cartoon version of the Grinch until this week, my daughter came home saying someone at school told her that there’s a person version of the, a real life person version is what she called it. But she said, it might be too scary for five-year-olds, but can we try it? So we tried it.

We tried it. And now she is proclaiming that the real life person Grinch is her preference over the cartoon. Well, and when you say cartoon, do you mean the modern era cartoon or like the, what would that be? Not the one from 95.

There’s one from before that too, I think. That’s what I was about to say, JP. I remember when the one from 95 one came out and it was still too newfangled for me.

And there’s even a newer one than that that came out just a few years ago. Yeah, the franchise that just keeps stealing. Well, I think that also, again, ties back into like financial security and the Grinch has this like mindset that he has, there’s scarcity in his life and the whole movie is just about overconsumption.

And I think he’s trying to remove that from the world. And then I guess kind of in the end realized, no, overconsumption is fine. It’s Christmas.

What’s the local economy in Whoville? How much can they actually support? Cause we know for sure without as much as people are spending on Christmas, they are definitely going in debt for the rest of the year. This is, this is just not, this is not smart. And what is it? Do they do Sam or like, are they exporting goods? What is their cross-border payment scheme, right? Like, how are we actually doing this? Are they, do they have a kind of stable coin? If so much of Whoville revolves around, you know, note, they were handing out the Christmas trees and snowballs and other things for free, right? So is this actually, you know, has universal basic income attached? You just hand out all the Christmas goods.

Yeah. And there’s that one store in the Jim Carrey version that goes next five minutes, 99% off everything. How, what’s the business model there? How are they going to make that work? Yeah.

Money laundering. That’s exactly right. Yeah.

Yeah. Whoville is a socialist communist economy. Yeah.

Clearly it doesn’t work well for them. With excessive consumerism. With excessive consumerism.

Somehow those two are in alignment. Also, I think the Grinch does not have any financial literacy either. Like he feels like getting all this stuff is going to fill this, fill his little heart with joy.

But you know, at the end of the day, he realizes it’s really the community, you know, community banking. Which is, which is interesting because you could see in another story that the Grinch being the hero gets the who’s to escape their consumerism and they follow him on the path to socialism or communism, depending on which Marx is writing that book. I was going to say he’s bringing him back to capitalism.

Yeah. Grinch is the ultimate capitalist. I’m going to take everything.

Well, the original one was 1966. And I think as successive versions went on, he just get more woke. Hey, maybe he had went through therapy or something.

I’m wondering if Whoville in the more current versions is a utopian techno bro, cryptocurrency fueled smart city, right? The Grinch Peter Thiel. Is that what you’re saying? Yes. I’m trying to think through it right now, JP.

Were there self-driving who cars in this? Nope. The bus was still being driven. Take it back.

Yeah. Okay. That fits.

Right. We don’t have to have the things. We just promised the things.

The Grinch does have this whole system of like how he gets ready in the morning. But it’s very that is that is very techno advanced. Yeah.

That’s definitely cryptocurrency wealth. Well, I mean, along those lines, I’ve been trying to get the girls into more classics. And so also watching several different variants of A Christmas Carol right now.

It’s interesting, Amber, you brought up. We lost one night of sleep to the real live person Grinch for Stella last year when she was five. But Harper has serious questions about being visited by ghosts now when she does things wrong.

Right. And you think about it as like, was rewatching, you know, a cartoon version that I don’t think I’d ever seen before. But watching the progression of Scrooge and the need for he’s taking the higher paying job.

And at one point, even, you know, talks about the fact that he cares about, you know, this the security and the liquidity. Right. That’s why he’s into gold.

Right. It’s all that I hear. I hear Scrooge have stable assets.

Yeah. When Pam and I pre are joining alloy labs, we’ll be on stage together and we’d be talking about payments. One of my favorite questions to ask was always around, you know, what do you use as currency that isn’t actually currency? Pam, why don’t you give your answer? It is gold.

That is the universal Indian currency. You know, we’ve held it. We hold it for generations.

The value is usually consistently pretty high. I’m pretty sure the stuff that my parents had bought 50 years ago is worth much more now. And that’s really like their great wealth transfer to us is like, here’s all our assets.

We don’t have cash to give you, but we have these things that you may or may not ever actually sell and gain anything out of that. It is a stable asset in case of emergency. So I, this is not solid gold.

Unfortunately, if anybody wants to buy me a, what is it? That is solid gold. It’s a fidget. It’s the golden Harry Potter, the golden snitch.

I’m going for Harry Potter. Disney. All right.

All my, all my favorite Christmas things. How does Macy’s handle that? When you, you bring in your bullying. I have yet to do that, but one of my personal favorite answers to that was from our dear friend, Barb McLean, who up in Canada would take the rewards points from Horton’s right.

And get her 10 bit points. And for things that she would purchase that she didn’t want her husband to know about, like getting snacks and candy and other things. She basically was using the rewards on her gas purchases to launder the money and, you know, do some untracked spending on the side.

Personal money laundering. I love the creativity. Well, and listen, I’m going to cast no stones.

You would be shocked. The number of Menards points that I’m able to use for those purchases that I don’t want my wife going, you needed another tool for what again? I’m like, oh no, it was free, honey. I think Delta miles are my only non-cash currency.

And like, I have very limited ways to spend them. I guess I could convert them to something else. Yeah.

You got to credit card points are the easiest ones. Yeah. Yeah.

The problem is those are all, they’re, they’re depreciating probably even faster than your, your us currency. Let’s say about no value in hoarding them. Also, are they, cause they expire? I feel like this is like the, this is the next gen assets, but they’re not considered in our assets as like a saving.

If we’re going to go apply for a loan. So like, how do we then, how do we actually see how much money somebody has in all the places? Like there’s no way it’s again, you could have it across 30 different loyalty programs. You might have 20 grand across loyalty programs.

I know Amex is a dear friend of mine with all the Amex points that I use to buy things. So that doesn’t count towards like my wealth, but should it, can it? Yeah. But, but even worse, like if you don’t actually use them that often, like I do, you just sit there and accumulate them and eventually hope to unwrap that gift and remember that it’s there and go use it.

By the time I’ve done that, I probably lost 30, 50% of the value that I actually, uh, accrued just by not spending it sooner. It’s like having your money in a zero interest rate bank account or a negative interest rate environment to your point of it. Is it depreciating the time? And really all we’re doing exactly.

All we’re doing is, uh, lowering the cost of capital for these, for these corporations. You know, forget about the crypto backed mortgages that we’ve been pitched all summer on the ventures team stammer. I want one that takes into account all of my rewards files, right? Almost in on the million miles on Delta million miles on American, all the Amex points across different platforms.

All of my, you know, star would become Marriott points. Give me a mortgage that looks at that as my asset and says, oh yeah, you know, he’s got quite a bit here. Can I pay for my mortgage with Marriott points? Can I use my mortgage? Can I use my Marriott points to pay towards my mortgage? Listen, I mean, I, I know of people that have been trying to build exchanges for these non, I don’t know, normal currencies, right? And it’s really hard to do, but can we put a price on a liquid price on what a thousand chase points are or 10,000 Amex points? I have a 50,000, uh, Delta sky miles.

So what are we going to call it? That feels like a 20, 26 LO labs project because I have lots of points everywhere. And I’m like, how do I actually do anything with this? Well, I mean, the biggest issue, the biggest issue is when you only have a little bit of points everywhere, because now you’re talking about hundreds of dollars scattered in, in hundreds of different, different accounts. You’re not going to, you can’t do anything with that.

When your flight is going to cost $500. Yeah. This is the case where diversification hurts you.

Yeah. You actually want concentration. Well, and this becomes an interesting analogy to the stable coin market is if there are multiple different issuers of coins and you know, the problems in the points world is in the jelly club for Clark, right? Is there’s no clear source of liquidity in a market for buying and selling.

Therefore, every transaction is super expensive to do a conversion, right? Like the old days in Vegas, when they wouldn’t cash each other’s chips in, right. And so you, you walk around, this could be people in the future with pockets full of different coins in different places. And because the conversion fees are so high because you know, until we reach the standard, yeah, you’re just stuck.

What you’re talking about is a rewards point back stable coin that just create that you’re, we’re, we’re just going to offer liquidity for anyone that has all these stable coins. Here’s the conversion, right? That’s floating. You’re floating price to get into our stable coin.

I’d like to call it Grinch coin. I feel like we’re accumulating all these points from all these various sources, and we’re going to be the owner in our Grinch coin. And which of our, which of our Allah labs member banks wants to help build the rails for this.

And they can be the acceptor of all these rich coin. And then once, once we control, once we corner the market of Delta sky miles, and we’ve got a trillion that we, we controlled and we can go back to Delta and really get them. Well, we have minority ownership in Delta.

Yeah. There you go. This sounds like something cousin Eddie is pitching the Clark after a few too many spiced eggnogs.

Oh man. Is that a problem? So I think this is, this is how the Dukes take over the airline. It was the Dukes.

If we’re going to do this, do we need to at least set it is like Amber’s returning from the big city to the hometown and meets the local tree farmer hallmark style. Yeah. Yeah.

Amber, you watch those Amber Lee is her, her, her poor husband in the city. Who’s working as is a really intense investment banking job to bring home multiple millions of dollars a year for them. Wow.

Amber. Yeah. But but, but the new guy who she dated for three weeks in high school and it has his business model.

It’s a Christmas tree farm, which, which is great stable year round cashflow. Okay. But that’s yeah.

Amber, you’re a fan, right? You watch the Hallmark movies. You know, I love a predictable movie sequence. I am a rom-com girly at heart, but Hallmark is not really my jam.

Yeah. It it’s a little too. Yeah.

My family loves them because what you just said, right? Pretty, they, they know we’re going to but it’s, yeah, we all have our own version of where we will suspend belief and sense of reality and the ones that other people do are stupid and eye rolling. Right. So for me, I’m, I’m a spy fi guy, right? So give me Jason Bourne, give me James Bond.

I know they’re really ridiculous. I saw one. I don’t know what it was called.

It was way, way off the chain. It was Michael Bay with no restrictions. So we’ll leave it there.

But yeah, some people are the Hallmark movies, Pam’s in the Harry Potter universe. And Disney, clearly. And Disney.

Sam, we were talking the other day about the house, how ignorant I am on the MC or the DC universe and, and yeah, see how to get the right initials. DC. I do remember DC comics and all of that.

So yeah, at the end of the day, it’s all about suspending a certain amount of reality and maybe the most realistic movie of all or holiday special again, showing my age, the 1966 classic, classic, the Charlie Brown Christmas, right? It’s the most maybe reasonable because the lesson is we all just need to lower expectations a little bit, right? You don’t need a fancy tree. You’re going to, you can wrap a blanket around your head to be the shepherd, right? It all works. Well, let that be a lesson for everyone.

Before we have conversations about urine bonuses, just lower your expectations. Jelly club. Here we come.

Jelly club. Here we come. We didn’t touch on though, that I think we have to love actually where’s the finance angle there? Again, Grinch speaking here.

I’m aware of it. I’m not sure I’ve seen the whole thing. It might, it might be on in passing on cable, but I don’t know.

What’s the rundown on that one? It’s Hugh Grant, right? I got a financial take. I got a financial take on love actually. Go for it.

Merging finances in a relationship and how that should be balanced and how there’s like no guidance from anybody or anything other than you just kind of figure it out as you go. Like do you join accounts? Who pays more if one is a higher earner? Who pays what bill? At what point in your relationship do you start to merge finances? And are there banking applications or, you know, FinTechs that help you kind of do that? Like as you’re still dating other than like Venmo or like one of these things where you can just help pay each other. But is there like a, we’re not married, so we can’t have a joint bank account, but can you help us manage our finances and our payments? Is that, maybe I should start that.

There were a lot of relationships that started very fast. Who knows if they had any of those conversations. Yeah, you can see the lens I bring.

Or the holiday, right? Where they swap houses. I’ve forgotten about that. That is an oldie, but also one of those you’ll find for daytime TV when everyone’s stuck with their children.

Yeah, two different countries, no escrows, no background checks. So sure, come stay at my house for a week. You know, in real life, she comes home and the house is emptied.

I mean, Alex Johnson’s Maker Summit, someone was sharing with me, like there’s the new equivalent of the original couch surfer before, right? Remember back when Airbnb was literally, you’d be staying at other people’s houses or in rooms and couch surfer is like the Craigslist version of that. This is a marketplace that allows you to, when you basically share your home for someone else on vacation, and it’s got this own little community feel to it, like couch surfing, but you, instead of like being just a house swap, like, hey, Samer, I’m going to be in Chicago. Would you like to bring your family up to Minneapolis for that long weekend? Because it’s only going to be negative 30 this weekend.

Very festive, but you accrue points that you can use in other places, right? And I agree. Yeah. We finally found a non-cross-border application for stable coins.

Boom. Well, I thought a lot of business plans after this session. I thought we were going to get into, you know, wife swap, reality TV land here.

And I don’t remember any holiday specials from those. JP, like HR is calling right now. Like this is not the holiday party where anything goes.

Well, Amber, bail me out here. Yeah. Jason may not be aware of what I’m talking about.

It’s not rated R. Yeah. What was it? That’s not what the title was. I can’t remember right now, but that was not the title.

Life Swap? Was it Life Swap? I feel like it was Wife Swap. Yeah. Yeah.

But bail me out. Trading Spouses? Yeah. Trading Spouses.

Well, there were two versions. One of them was the imitation of the other one. But yeah, basically the original one was the Chappelle skit.

Yeah. Well, it is, you know, me being unaware of all of this going, wait, that sounds so bad. And there’s an even, there’s a knockoff version of the so bad.

Yeah. It was G rated. The idea was though that somebody goes, it was a Jerry Springer version of a Hallmark movie of, or of the holiday that we just talked about.

So one, you know, a farmer goes to live in New York city and the New Yorker investment banker goes to run a farm with livestock, right? So they experienced the other person’s life. It’s always the mom. Yeah, it was always, right? Always.

You get a new mom and a new wife for two weeks. And the first week they have to abide by the existing household rules. Their fee.

And then week two, they switch it up and put their rules into the household. And then at the end, obviously the moms switch back and everyone is much more appreciative of their mother and partner after the experiment. Yeah.

I don’t know how we got on that trail, but I don’t know, but we are definitely at the point that I’m going to hear from HR after this. So we should probably cut it and go back to the eggnog, but you know, for all of our listeners, remember the true meaning of Christmas is not gifts. It’s not family.

It’s really understanding internal controls. Fraud is prevalent everywhere. Never, ever just, you know, accept a credit card without doing the proper check of the ID, especially if they appear to be a minor.

And I think that’s the most important takeaways here is regulators play a very important role, and they were absent in all of these films. That’s why we have our Baham bugs. In all seriousness, happy holidays to all who do celebrate.

We look forward to chatting with you next year. And if you think this is fun, wait until you see our St. Patrick’s Day party. That’s it for another week of the world’s number one fintech podcast and radio show breaking banks.

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