Number Go Up: A Conversation with Author Zeke Faux
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Yeah, it was pretty weird. Our guest this episode, Zeke Fox, recently had a pretty weird experience when a book that he wrote featuring a real person was read aloud in a criminal trial against that person, by that person, who was Sam Bankman Freed.

After FTX had failed, I flew down to the Bahamas and I interviewed Sam for like a full day, going up until the middle of the night at his $30 million penthouse. And we talked about why FTX failed. And he gave me his version of the story.

ill-advised given that he it was clear to both of us that he was likely be in big trouble soon and in fact the cops did show up like a couple weeks later for anyone that doesn't know or could use a refresher sam bankman freed is an american entrepreneur who was convicted of fraud and related crimes in november 2023

Prior to this, Bankman Freed was the co-founder of the FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange and the poster boy for crypto. His company's name was on arenas. At the height of his wealth and influence, Forbes listed him as the 41st richest American. I won't get into the details of exactly what he said, but he was, some of these statements he made to me, he changed his story when he testified in his own defense at trial. And so the prosecutor brought

brought in the book to say to Sam, well, you said this now, but like, look what you said before. Why is your story different? He is currently serving a 25-year sentence for his role in orchestrating a years-long scheme that diverted $8 billion from customer accounts to fund venture capital investments, political donations, and real estate acquisitions.

As emblematic of the early 2020s crypto crash as Sam Bankman-Fried has become, I would say that Zeke Fox's book, the same one read in that courtroom, has emerged as an essential record of that period of time. Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall is a globetrotting journey of one journalist just trying to understand crypto. Not just the tech, but the people, the psychology, and some of the human costs.

It's a really great piece of reporting. It's a fun read. And it's a book that you first told me about, Scott. Yeah. Yeah, it was my favorite book of 2023. 2024, 2023, 2024. It came out in September 2023. And I think I started listening to it over the Christmas break. So it's my favorite book of last year that I started last year, but I finished it this year, if that makes sense. Yeah.

Yeah, yours and Wired, Washington Post, LA Times, Financial Times. It made a lot of best book lists. Yeah, it's a great...

Great read. And I actually didn't know about the book until I had finished Michael Lewis's book, Going Infinite, which I know a lot of people have asked me for my take on. So that book, Going Infinite, led me to this book. And I loved this book and respected this book and appreciate the story here. And I think it's a must read for anybody that lives in our space. And... And...

It comes out on paperback on October 1st, which is probably the day that this episode will launch. So it's out on paperback today with new content from its original release date to now. Yeah, really good new chapters. There's some pretty cool new content following the follow-up of all this because Zeke was writing this, I think kind of right after

Right as things were crescendoing and then crashing and a lot of stuff has happened since. So the paperback is a welcome addition to the book. Christmas 2023. I knew that I was going to be doing a bunch of driving, a bunch of ski trips, a bunch of traveling about. So I picked up Going Infinite as an audio book and I was listening to it as an audio book.

And I'd heard the criticisms and the biases towards Sam Bankman Freed and all this stuff. So, you know, I'm halfway through it and people are asking me what I think. And I'm like, ah, it just seems like a book. You know, I'm a huge Michael Lewis fan. I've read literally every book he's ever made that's been published. And I was excited for this one because I'd heard that he was actually in the Bahamas when FTX kind of imploded. Yeah.

So I was really excited to like hear his recounting and, you know, get that, get that. I don't know. He just has a really great way of taking like a technical financial kind of subject and turning it into like a great narrative. And yeah, so I finished this book on the road, driving somewhere.

And the last chapter of it literally made my blood pressure go up. I got furious about it because he essentially tries to wash away all of the, like...

illegality of taking other people's money to buy things by saying like, you know what? The people that lost money will be made true because his investments in anthropic will like pay out, you know, all of these things. He starts recounting all this stuff being like, people will be made whole again. So it's not that bad what he did. And I was like, at least that's the tone of it. If you haven't read the book, the book's okay. Just okay. And that chapter made me furious. Yeah.

So I literally pulled the car over out of anger and immediately open audible and start whipping through other books being like, I need to read something else. I need a palate cleanser from this to like bring my blood pressure down, put me back in a vacation mood. Now I'm off to the mountains to go skiing. Like just let me enjoy myself. And bang right in front of me is this book number go up by Zeke Fox inside the wild ride. And I was like, you know what? Can't be worse than that.

And I buy it and immediately I'm like sucked in. I crush it in a few days. Loved it. Love the chapter. I love the story and the narrative and the travel and all of the experiences that he goes through. And it was just well-written, great content. And he,

truthfully, he shares a similar perspective as I do to the entire crypto world, which landed with me. So, you know, a little bit of bias there, obviously, but... Sure. We talk about this at the start of the conversation with Zeke that we're about to go listen to. But I think that Zeke figured out that this isn't just a tech story. It's this global story. And he turns it into what I think some of the best...

a kind of journalism book I really love, which is the Globetrotting Investigation. It took Fox to Cambodia and El Salvador. It had him mingling with crypto elites and unexpected victims of the shadow economy that has emerged because of this tech. I think he got what the story really means. We wanted to talk to him about it. He was kind enough to join us. This is our conversation with investigative reporter at Bloomberg and the author of Number Go Up, Zeke Foxx,

here on Hacked.

Thanks for joining us and thanks for coming on. I love the book and it was one of my favorite books of last year and I'm glad you could make the time to come on and give us your time to chat about it. Thank you so much for having me on, Scott. I feel like lucky that I was there for the weirdness of this crypto boom and bust and I've actually been trying to move on but it just keeps sucking me in.

It seems like you're not the only one that's got that problem. Yeah, your book is kind of a wild ride for like a journalistic piece. You know, you're jetting off, going to different places, going to these weird conferences and crypto elite parties, and you're buying monkey NFTs to get into certain parties. So I think before we get into the nuts and bolts talking about the book, you know, how fun was it to make? Because it seems like it would have been a ton of fun for a project. Oh.

It was awesome. I mean, this is my first book, but I grew up reading books like Bringing Down the House. That's like the MIT blackjack book by Ben Mesrich or Into Thin Air by John Krakauer. And I always loved these adventurous nonfiction books. But I mean, I've been an investigative reporter now for...

like 15 years and I just like the right story wasn't, wasn't coming along. And I started digging into crypto kind of reluctantly. And once I got into crypto, I was like, Oh my God, this is the story I've been waiting for. And I'm the one who can go on this adventure. Like I can dive into this world. And once I,

I pitched the book in November 2021 when Bitcoin was trading for $69,000 and people were really talking about like Web3 is the future. And my pitch was that this was all going to collapse soon and I would be there to chronicle it.

And I had to act very confident in order to give this pitch. But I actually wasn't really so sure it would all play out the way that it did. And I can't claim that I knew exactly what would happen. But I was just like, these coins don't do anything. There's no way that they can be worth $3 trillion. And once I got approved to write this book, I decided that

This was my shot, and I was going to... Anything that I thought, like, teenage me as a reader would have wanted to read, like, I'm going to go do that, and I'm going to investigate it. So when El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as an official currency, of course, like, I had to go. Or I...

A lot of the book is about this mysterious company called Tether and the former Italian plastic surgeon who is its boss, Giancarlo De Vecini. He was avoiding me. And, you know, in my normal job, I don't know, we'd have to have a lot of meetings. Like, does it make sense to go try to interview him?

with the book, I'm the boss. I'm going to go to Switzerland to go to his girlfriend's art show to see if I could surprise him. And then when he didn't show up, I went back again. And I did finally get to confront him. So it was really fun. And yeah, highlight of my career. And I'm really proud of... I feel like I had this great opportunity to chronicle what was going on. And I'm

I'm proud that I tried my best to do it and went all over the world to try to bring people stories of what crypto is really doing. Thanks for doing it because I thought the book was hugely entertaining. Your investigation was obviously very deep. I do find it ironic how you opened the book talking about how

All your friends are making crypto money and they're taking their families to like Disney World and stuff. And then here you are being like the cynical reporter of it. And then you get this global, like insane...

trip out of it and like have this wild like couple years of your life making this book. Yeah, I hadn't really thought about it that way but you're right because I opened by explaining how I was kind of jealous of my friend Jay making money on what he called DoggyCoin and then going to Disney and I guess like this is sort of my revenge that I went to like way cooler places than Disney with and I made money on crypto by writing a book about it. Exactly. So

Yeah, I didn't think about it that way, but I guess you're right. The other thing too is like, and if frequent listeners of our podcast will know that I'm pretty cynical about crypto, and I often argue that it has no utility to society. And to me, it just like it does nothing. But your book actually highlights that people have found that utility in largely criminal circles. And

Do you think that crypto has a future where given enough regulatory control, maybe some industry morality, do you think it can turn a corner and maybe be something useful at some point? Or do you just think it's a lost cause at this point? So much effort by so many smart people has gone into crypto that it would almost be surprising if they couldn't come up with anything useful to do with it. But at this point, I mean, it's been...

15 years since Bitcoin was invented. It's now as old as WhatsApp. It's as old as Uber. And, like, ask yourself, have you ever used crypto for anything? Do you know people that use crypto for anything? Like, other than gambling. And, like, it's pretty rare. Illegally, sometimes. So I'm...

I'm pretty pessimistic, but I mean, I did, I titled my book inside cryptos, wild rides and staggering fall. So clearly I didn't expect like Bitcoin to come right back up to 60,000. So people's interest in gambling on made up coins has, uh, surpassed my expectations. There's a, there's an old investment saying, and I'm going to try and get it right. Cause I'm pulling it out deep in my memory, but it's, uh,

the market can stay insane longer than your money can stay liquid or something. It's something like that. But essentially that you're that, that even if the market is acting irrationally, it'll stay irrational longer than your money can hold you in the market to catch the recovery. And I feel like that applies to, to crypto largely. Yes. Like I've never been one to say, Oh, like let's bet against crypto. I've even though I felt like I've, I feel like any sort of investment is,

An investment's value is based on it producing profits or some sort of utility. And so I think in the long run, if there's no utility, there will be no value. And so when I see things like for Axie Infinity, which was like this gambling game that became...

phone, kind of a Pokemon-ish game you played on your phone, but you had to buy the Pokemon for real money, and then you would use the Poke... When you battled, you'd earn this crypto called Smooth Love Potions.

And when I saw that worth billions of dollars, I'm like, okay, this doesn't make any sense. No value is being generated. It's bound to go down. But I would never be the one to say it's going to go down tomorrow. It could easily double before it goes down. And I guess crypto is a little like that. And you never know what's happening behind the scenes. There's so much manipulation and...

insiders who are working together to control the price of different tokens. So yet another reason to stay clear. Not bet against anything in particular.

The part of the book about the smooth love potions, I actually kind of forgot about it because I read this book at Christmas. It's been nine months since I read it. And I forgot about that chapter where you talk about how people had started forming businesses where they were employing people to play this insane game. And I remember being like, oh my God, it's worse than I ever thought. I mean, it was so embarrassing. The promoters of this Axie Infinity game

So the price of the Axies, the Pokemon, got so high that regular people could not afford to buy them. So they started renting them from other people and they would get paid to play this phone game all day. And just to be clear, this makes no sense. Smooth love potions don't do anything. There's no reason for them to have value. The only thing you do with them is buy more Axies. And the only reason you want Axies is

is to earn smooth love potions. So it's completely circular. But for a while, there were more than a million people in the Philippines playing this. And yeah, when I went there, I met people who had taxi drivers who'd mortgaged their car to buy these axes. Or I interviewed one woman who had borrowed money, I think, from relatives. And when it didn't work out, she now was making plans to...

leave her children with her parents and move to Dubai to earn some money back. And these crypto guys, they didn't plan all this out. But they just sort of put this mechanism out into the world. And they certainly didn't give people any refunds when it collapsed. It's just like they don't feel any responsibility for what's happening. The kind of pretty predictable things that happened when they created this

with these economics that were set up this way. That was something that I was struck by in reading your book is my sense of crypto for a long time was this is...

Silicon Valley funny money. This is tech bros gambling with cryptography wired into it. And so much your book is spent saying, like kind of communicating that this was a global project and that people all around the world that you would never have thought would have interacted with this suddenly are. And sometimes with catastrophic outcomes, were you surprised by how global a reach this had by the time you like started investigating it? I mean, definitely. I,

I mean, the crypto people are really good at creating this impression that the industry is going mainstream and that major players in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street are sort of in the process of adopting crypto and using it to speed transactions or track people's identities. And...

I feel like that narrative has sort of been there from when I started looking into it a few years ago till now. It's always on the verge of adoption. And so what I found when I looked into it was that was not true at all. The startups that I was being pitched when I would meet with crypto guys were way more far-fetched. And many of them turned out to be total frauds on crypto.

And, yeah, they were marketing these to regular people all over the world who were putting in money that they couldn't afford to lose. One of the first crypto guys that I met was Alex Mashinsky of Celsius. And we were at Bitcoin 2021, which was this big gathering, one of the first conferences of any type since Bitcoin.

covid restrictions lifted uh there were like 10 000 bitcoin bros in miami mishinsky was everywhere and he had this pitch that you could uh deposit your crypto at celsius and earn up to 19 a year but if you wanted a loan from celsius

the rates were very low. So it's sort of like backwards banking. Like the bank has to like... Yeah, the spreads. And so this is kind of funny, but these crypto guys mostly were very promotional. So they were eager to meet with the reporter. It was not hard to set up meetings with most of them. And so sometimes I wouldn't even know very much about them before I met them. So I was sitting down with Mashinsky and he gave me this pitch. And...

I actually just wanted to ask him about whether he had any intel about something else. But I was just sort of hearing his pitch to be polite. And he told me this. I'm like, wow, that sounds... I don't say these things out loud. But to myself, I'm thinking, this sounds like...

Totally backwards. This is the worst business idea I've ever heard. This guy's not legit. But I'm like, okay, so how much money have you raised for this Celsius thing you're telling me about? And he's like, oh, people have deposited, you know, $15 billion. And I'm like... This is one of the ones where in the moment I did call it right. Like, I thought to myself, am I sitting with, like...

Like the next Bernie Madoff? Like, this is pretty cool. And I will say he was later arrested for fraud. Turns out the backwards business plan did not work. There's a lot of sketchy stuff going on behind the scenes. Shocker. He has pleaded not guilty. His trial is scheduled for a few months from now. So it could be that he presents some new evidence and it's not actually fraudulent, but not looking very good. Hmm.

Turns out the backwards business plan didn't work. I love that. Just to hang on this concept of wasted utility, because it seems like a conversation that Jordan and I have more frequently on this podcast. You know, given that lots of these crypto companies base themselves in offshore regulatory havens and things like this, evading scrutiny or trying to evade it at all costs, you know,

As an investigative reporter that works on Wall Street, do you have any insight as to why the central banks and the treasury secretaries, and do you have any idea why they let this stuff happen and the creation of a shadow currency? It just seems like something they should have stopped. Well, you mean like... Okay, so if you're talking about crypto as a whole, I feel like at first it seems sort of like...

harmless and like a nerdy hobby, like ham radio or something. And so I think they... That's why they let it go. Now, when you're looking at this most recent bubble, when there were tons of companies that were raising billions of dollars, many of them are getting in trouble now. And I ask myself, for example, the...

the SEC filed this big lawsuit against Coinbase. And it was saying, hey, a lot of the coins you trade on Coinbase are securities. You are not properly licensed to do that. Therefore, what you do, like basically your app is illegal. And Coinbase denies it. They're fighting it. But my question is, I mean, you could just open the app and see this. So why didn't the SEC bring the case a couple of years earlier?

And it's kind of... Maybe this is cynical of me, but I think that they didn't want to be the ones to pop the crypto bubble. I think that they didn't want to sue everybody while...

It was going great because the cases are hard to make if there's no investor losses. And you'd have a lot of people who are upset that you're, you know, ending the fund. Now, it could be it's just I mean, these cases do take a long time to investigate and to bring. So it's not so unusual that someone gets sued immediately.

a few years later. I told the crypto guys while the boom was on, when people would say, oh, SEC hasn't done anything, it must be legal. I would say, no. They take several years. I would not read it that way. And it just actually, there was a teenager I interviewed for the book who didn't make the cut. And just a couple days ago,

his company got sued by the SEC and the SEC said that they had raised a billion dollars and hadn't followed the rules. They got off with like a slap on the wrist. And these kids were literally in high school when they got the billion dollars. And that didn't make the cut for the book. That's how crazy this crypto boom was.

The teen billionaire didn't make it in. You had bigger things to talk about. The crypto project that like kind of seemed like it kicked off things for you, these questions. And I think emblematic of what we're talking about here was Tether. It's very crucial to the ecosystem. There's a lot of red flags. Can you just walk us through what Tether is, how it kind of became so important and how it turned you on to this story? I had had this...

argument with my friend Jay. I was sort of primed to want to prove I was right about crypto. My editor at Businessweek, Joel Weber, came by my desk and said, what do you know about stablecoins? And I might have said, oh, I don't want to learn about crypto. It's too annoying. But I was ready for it. So

Tether is the biggest stablecoin. And what a stablecoin means is that each Tether token is supposed to be worth a dollar. Its value on exchanges usually stays very close to that because each Tether token is supposed to be backed by one real dollar in the bank somewhere. And at the time that I got the assignment, there were 55 billion Tether tokens out there, which meant that

Tether was supposed to have $55 billion in the bank somewhere. That's an amount that would make it one of the top 50 banks in the U.S. if it was a bank. And this company, over the years... I mean, the amount of information out there about it was laughable. Like, it was...

It played a key role in crypto. Like on most days, more Tether changed hands than any other cryptocurrency. And I found that like big traders relied on it to move money from one exchange to the next. Essentially, especially in the early days, a lot of crypto exchanges had trouble with banking. Like it wasn't that...

opening a bank account for a crypto exchange was illegal, but some of the banks were worried that the exchanges might be engaged in fraud. So they thought, too much trouble, let's not deal with them. And so what do you do if you are a crypto exchange that doesn't have banking? It's like a casino that can't sell the poker chips. So a lot of the exchanges were like,

We're going to outsource that to Tether. So people could acquire Tethers and then send those to the exchange, do all their trading there. And then when they wanted to cash out, they trade their crypto back for Tether. And the Tether could be like redeemed for dollars. And I mean, and to be clear, the crypto guys complain a lot about these bankers who didn't want to bank them. It's like,

Well, there's a pretty good broad percentage among those like the big crypto companies a couple of years ago. Maybe not such a terrible idea. But basically, like if you think of crypto as one giant casino, which I think is pretty fair, Tether is like the chips for the whole casino. It's like the cage where people can cash in. That's become less true recently as more and more, there become more and more ways to cash

trade real money for cryptocurrencies. But in the early years, without Tether, this whole last bubble might not have gotten going the way that it did. But from the beginning, there were real questions about whether Tether actually had the real money. And it was totally bizarre. I went to this first crypto conference and everyone was telling me, yes, I trade tons of Tether. And then people would say things to me like,

But yeah, it would be totally unsurprising if it blew up. Or I think maybe it's like some sort of honeypot run by the CIA. Or I mean, no conspiracy theory was too far-fetched. So I was like, this is at the center of crypto, but even the people who use it every day don't really believe in it. The...

CEO and the CFO at that time had never given an interview. The CEO was seen in public so little that some people thought he was a fake person. And one of my favorite weird tidbits about the company was one of its founders was Brock Pierce, who was a former child actor who played a small role in The Mighty Ducks. He's a young Gordon Bombay in the flashbacks. Misses the penalty shot. So...

I mean, I could go on, but the company's based nowhere. They said at one point that they were regulated by the Virgin Islands, but when I contacted the regulator, they were like, no. And I just thought, this is like a big mystery that's hiding in plain sight. It's not... On Wall Street, if you expose this many red flags about a company, regulators would be all over it, and...

Maybe people who used it would think twice. And in crypto, it just seemed like this wasn't happening. So I set out at first to figure out, well, do they really have this money? And that proved to be a lot trickier to understand.

investigate than I had imagined. There's a line in the book where you say, some argued that Tether was creating tokens out of thin air. If they were right and Tether really was a Ponzi scheme backed by nothing, it would be one of the biggest frauds in history. Tether is what got you onto this investigation. How did it all kind of shake out? Tether is what brought me to each place in the crypto world. So Sam Bankman Freed and his exchange FTX were...

one of the biggest users of Tether. So when I went to go meet him, I got sort of sidetracked because he was such an interesting character and it was hard not to follow what he was doing in the Bahamas. But one of my goals was to try and find out from him if there was something up with Tether. And as crypto collapsed, Tether actually stayed strong.

Totally the opposite of what I would have predicted. I was able to find out that of this stockpile of money that they had, at least some of it was... Several billion was loaned to Alex Mashinsky's Celsius at a high interest rate to try and earn some profits on the user reserves. And I also found out that to earn extra interest, they'd invested some of the reserves in...

Chinese commercial paper, which pays a slightly higher interest rate than American commercial paper, but is generally avoided by U.S. money market funds. So that made me a little bit more suspicious. But come the summer of 2022, when crypto prices started dropping and a lot of crypto companies failed, a lot of users went to go

cash in their Tether. And you can see this on the blockchain, that people went to go redeem more than $10 billion of Tether. And look, if Tether didn't send them the $10 billion, they would complain. So that made it seem, made me more confident that Tether did have the money. And then most recently, so during the period that I was investigating it, Tether's main bank,

was in the Bahamas and it was called Deltech and its chairman, Jean Chalapin, was actually the, one of the guys who created the cartoon Inspector Gadget. That is what had made him rich. Banking was sort of like a late in life career change. And he had been, when, so he was one of the

My early interviews, and I'd gone to ask him, like, do you vouch for Tether? You're their main banker. And he'd said he only had some of their money, but so he couldn't be sure about the rest of it, which made me want to investigate more. But more recently, Tether has shifted the bulk of their reserves to a U.S. investment bank called Cantor Fitzgerald.

And it's Chairman Howard Lutnick, who's a pretty mainstream Wall Street guy, has gone on TV, he's been at conferences, and he said, we hold Tether's reserves now, and they've got the money. So I think that the...

doubters at first, it looks like they're wrong and that Tether, if they did at one point have some sort of hole, they could have earned their way out of it and now are backed. Because something happened for Tether that was really advantageous. Before, interest rates were near zero. So Tether couldn't earn any money on its reserves easily. The business wasn't very good. But now with interest rates at 5%, Tether's actually grown to $100 billion. And

So they can just park that money in something really safe, like treasuries held by Kenneth Fitzgerald, and they can collect $5 billion a year in interest payments with basically no risk. And they're doing that. They're also still making some riskier investments, but they're earning so much money that they could, if there were any problems earlier on, they could have papered them over by now. But the flip side,

weird thing about tether now is that it appears to have become like essentially paypal for pirates like this is the the payment processing network that is favored by criminals around the world um and i write about some of that in the book but more and more examples keep coming up like um

gray market Russian military imports, Chinese fentanyl manufacturers, Venezuelan, Venezuela's national oil company has said they're going to use Tether to evade sanctions. So my interest at first was more on, is the money there? And then by the end of the book and up till now, I've become more interested in,

what kind of illicit activities is Tether enabling? Yeah, yeah. I love where that part of the book goes when you end up in Southeast Asia and mucking about seeing how people are using it. The same thing I think we see is how much crypto is facilitating negative parts and negative utility, I guess we could call it, like human trafficking,

ransomware and other kinds of you know cyber crimes it seems to be everywhere i did just read an article about what you just mentioned about uh oil companies using it to avoid sanctions as a form of payment to to transfer resources avoiding you know currency and banking regulations so yeah fascinating um like ransomware would not exist without cryptocurrency like it

It enables this. I mean, think of all the movies like Die Hard or something where you've got like the bad guy, but the bad guy needs to receive the sack of cash. And like the plot is set to catch the bad guy when you give him the sack of cash. I mean, now the guy could just say like, here's my wallet address. Send me the crypto. And like they do, you know, there was just a...

Someone paid some company paid 75 million dollars to Over ransomware the other day when I hear about a big international company using this stuff to circumvent international sanctions and the will of a bunch of different states and

And then I think back to the sort of like libertarian ethos of the whole project that starts to feel like a feature, not a buck. Like that almost feels like something you'd point to be like, exactly. That's what we were trying to do all along. That's a good point. But it's kind of weird that the cryptocurrency that actually does seem to be enabling this is one that is US dollar based. Sure. And

Totally centralized. Tether's move on different blockchains, like the Ethereum blockchain or Tron, but this one company in the center of it holds the dollars and actually has the ability to block transactions or to freeze people's accounts. So Tether can't really claim...

This is just code. There's no stopping us. It's like, no, this is actually just sort of a company in an amorphous location that's facilitating all this stuff. And if you ask Tether, they will say, we...

comply with law enforcement orders, we will block sanctioned addresses. They don't claim to be, they don't want to be seen as an outlaw operator, but they also don't want to come under

a particular country's strict regulations. I think if I was making $5 billion a year strictly based on treasury interests, I probably wouldn't want to be on anybody's hit list either. Good point. So it starts with Tether. Tether ends up surviving, but you bump into Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX kind of in your investigation of Tether, and they don't end up surviving.

So how do you feel like the whole rise and fall of FTX has kind of affected the broader crypto market and crypto industry? So I think that for the mainstream, like you ask an average person in the US, what do you think about crypto?

I think one of their main thoughts is like, isn't that the way the curly hair guy stole people's money? So I think that it actually has discredited crypto in a lot of people's minds. But that said, the failure of FTX, prices were at their nadir and they've totally recovered since then. Not just Bitcoin, but a lot of other weird currencies.

But weirdly, it's all happened without any of the buzz about crypto being the future. It's almost as if just like enough people have embraced crypto gambling that it's brought the prices back. So in the crypto industry, I said, hey, Sam Bankman Freed was a bad apple. Now, you know, crypto is safe again. You know, place your bets. Let's go. And in...

in Washington where the crypto industry is spending lots of money lobbying,

You'd think that politicians would be really put off by the fact that the last crypto guy who was popular down there was telling them all sorts of lies and running a giant fraud. But actually, you still hear there's quite a few politicians on both sides of the aisle who are saying, yeah, we want to protect this innovation. We don't want them to move offshore. We need friendlier rules. But I think that's because the crypto industry is...

is spending so much money and donating so much money. Yeah, there's a different conversation for a different day there about the American political system and the power of financial lobbying, but maybe we avoid that one today. Yeah, I mean, Sam Bigman-Fried did tell me at one point, he was like, people say there's too much money in politics. I actually think there's not enough, you know? And meaning that,

You don't have to spend that much money to get a lot of influence. And he was surprised that more corporations didn't give more. In the epilogue of your new paperback version of your book that's coming out in October, I think it was in there where you made reference to Sam Bankman Freed believing that in the future expected value of his life, there was a 5% expected value that he'd become the president of the United States.

And it just like, it makes me laugh. You know, the child prodigy, you know, one of the largest Ponzi fraudsters, financial criminals of like a long time. And there was a strong chance that he was so juiced in with the political parties that he might perceive that he would become the president at some point. Well, I have to say, so people, there was this other reporter who was actually working on commission from

one of Sam's venture capital backers who wrote this article that people made fun of a lot. And he said, when I was sitting with Sam, I felt like he could be the world's first trillionaire. And people joked about that. But I have to say that during the boom, when I was at FTX's offices...

These types of things did not seem that improbable or impossible, at least. I was really skeptical about crypto as a whole, but it seemed to just be going up and up and up. And it felt like Sam had it all figured out. Like if crypto was going to survive in any way, this was the guy who was going to be the big winner. And it was just, it was kind of wild to see. Like I'm, I...

Most CEOs are really cautious and stage managed. And if you get 10 minutes with them, they've got like three people sitting right next to them making sure they don't say anything weird. Sam was just like, pull up a chair. And I'm sitting there with him while he's messaging with CEOs and politicians. He gets offered looking over his shoulder as someone asks him if he wants to buy something.

Money Graham, the money transfer company. He's like, nah, people are begging for his time. After I see him, he's on his way to Georgia to meet with the country, Georgia, to meet with its president. And it just seemed like anything was possible for him. So I could certainly see that for him caught up in that.

He could imagine, oh yeah, maybe I'll be president. He's already got more influence than some of the presidents. When it comes to the merger between the traditional finance world and the crypto finance world, it didn't seem like crypto...

had any kind of movement except for illegal circles where people need to circumvent regulations and sanctions and things like that. But like people don't use crypto in their daily life. And I think that they don't seem to anyway, I don't know of any way that does. Um, but you know, there's people like Jamie diamond, the CEO of JP Morgan chase, who's very cynical. And, and I've, I've tuned into CNBC before and watched him get into a fight with

with some of the other panelists about the value of crypto and Jamie holds a very low perception of that value. And it seems like more and more of the financial community holds or perceives some kind of value. Do you, do you see that as a reporter for Bloomberg or? Yes. Like I still don't think it's most people or that, um, this is kind of funny, but as I keep learning, um,

writing about Wall Street, there's just a ton of money in the world. There's so much money. The money that's going into crypto, even if it's a lot by crypto standards, is a tiny amount by money standards. Sure, there's a lot of billionaires out there, and some of them are getting more interested in Bitcoin, but I would still say that the mainstream opinion is...

is against it. But I do think it's a little bit like... This isn't the most original observation, but it's a little bit like The Emperor's New Clothes, where...

you know, everybody's saying it's so cool and people just don't want to be the one to say, oh no, like this is, this is, uh, there's nothing there. Um, it's a little bit easier to say like, oh yeah, like I've, I've, I hold a little Ethereum or, you know, I'm buying a little Bitcoin. And I also think that,

People underestimate the power of FOMO. That was what drove me to be jealous of my friend Jay. But it also drives these hedge fund managers who see, they're like, hey, my friend put 10% of his fund in crypto and it went up a lot. Maybe I should do it. Or...

I think more common on Wall Street is that they see that people are gambling on crypto and they're like, this probably will continue. How do we get a cut of that? Not like how do we gamble on crypto, but just like how do we become the house and earn the profits from that? Whether that's by like facilitating it directly or providing financing to crypto companies. Wall Street is just set up to like profit from whatever other financial activities people want to do.

I feel like if we'd written a segue to talking about Bitcoin ETFs, we could have done it that well. One of the things that I was most shocked about, and we talked about on the show, was that they approved and allowed, that the SEC allowed Bitcoin and other crypto ETFs to come to market. And I know you kind of talk about it a little bit in the paperback version of your book. What are your thoughts on this? So I was less surprised. I felt like

There are just so many ways to bet on Bitcoin that are legal that it's like, what's one more? And I felt like it was hard for them to keep holding the line on that and saying no Bitcoin ETFs. I was actually surprised by the popularity of the Bitcoin ETFs. I thought that if you wanted Bitcoin, you'd probably already have it. But they attracted quite a lot of...

new money. And the hype over the coming of the Bitcoin ETFs led to a huge rise in all crypto prices. But what I keep... I don't... Some people will point to the Bitcoin ETF as like a use case for crypto or an example of crypto going mainstream. And I would say, no. This is just a way for you to bet on the price of Bitcoin. It's not...

It's actually kind of like antithetical to the mission of Bitcoin. One of the things I found most interesting is that like, because I think one of the big reasons or one of the big motivations was if they can put it in ETFs, then people can use it in their retirement accounts, their IRAs and things like that. And Vanguard, one of the largest financial institutions of retirement funds,

you know, investmenting investment management, like refused to allow their clients to buy into them, which wasn't a big surprise. But the thing that I was most surprised about was the discussion that society had after that, like an institution as large as Vanguard putting up their hand being like, no, we're doing this as a protection for our clientele kind of caused this massive conversation, which I thought was healthier than most conversations around crypto. Yeah. And I'm,

I mean, I just saw, I happened to see like some marketing material that BlackRock had put together around Bitcoin. And I've seen Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, do interviews about their Bitcoin ETF. And I feel like they've certainly moved beyond just sort of

You could imagine someone who made ETFs just saying like, hey, we don't recommend any of these. We're just offering you the cheap way to bet on whatever kind of sectors you want. But that's not what they're doing. And they've actually been really recommending this Bitcoin ETF, which I thought was somewhat surprising. Well, given that it is the new gold in the anti-inflationary matrix, then...

Anyway, that's a joke. Yes. Well, yes, I know. And given, I mean, given, I don't know if you, MicroStrategy's CEO, Michael Saylor, who's like the Bitcoin intellectual, he says it's going to $13 million. So you'd be a fool not to get in now. Number go up, am I right? Number go up. Yeah. It's been funny to see. So number go up comes from,

something I heard at this first Bitcoin conference and this Bitcoin guy said he actually called it number go up technology and he explained like when the price goes up that gets people excited and more people want to buy and when they buy the price goes up more and then more people get excited and he called it number go up technology and I'm like this sounds like a pyramid scheme not technology. What are you talking about? But

At least for a time, it can definitely work. And I've actually seen since the... I feel like since the book came out, people have been saying number go up more and talking about it, but in a positive way. I think there's more of an embrace of number go up thinking. And it's almost, even within the crypto world, it's seen as kind of cringe to talk about...

you know web3 or nfts or stuff like that now like i can think of a lot of a lot of counter examples as i say it but i do feel like there's been a move in the number go up direction i mean look at like uh have you followed these meme coins on solana which has been a lot of talk in crypto in the last like year or so no it's just like

People just keep launching like ever stupider coins, like one of the most legit ones right now or one that's generating the most hype is it's called Mother. It's made by Iggy Azalea, the kind of a little bit washed up, I think, singer. And, you know, there's no claims that it does anything.

And nor will it ever. No, it felt like before the fall, it was, this isn't a digital casino. This is the money of the future. This is the future of all technology. And post fall, it's just like this digital casino rips. Like it, it has been a total shift. Yeah. I mean, cause I've, I've had, I think it was my colleague, Matt Levine was saying to me at one point, if let's say something is like the money of the future, right?

I mean, that's very, very valuable. So even if there's a tiny chance that it's the money of the future, that tiny chance is very valuable. And so you could almost justify a lot of the prices that way. But...

If we're going to totally abandon the money of the future idea and just be like, oh, let's buy Iggy Azalea's coin because other people might. I heard her party in Singapore last night was cool. All the crypto guys are in Singapore right now for a big conference. And I hear there's great parties. I bet. Are you sad you're not there? Um...

No, it's too... Actually, covering parties is kind of tough because you're there and it seems... Well, I'll give you an example. There's a scene in the book where I'm at Brock Pierce, one of the founders of Tether. I'm at a house he rented for a crypto conference where he's throwing these parties. And

If you read it, I think it's pretty funny. A lot of funny stuff happens. Some annoying guy asks me to taste a pastry for him. Someone insults a woman playing the piano. Someone talks about promoting this Trump coin and says, F the SEC. But for me...

Being there, I mean, I was sitting there for like 15 hours to generate like the one mildly amusing page in the book. And that's sort of like the... And it also gets depressing. I mean, I think back to Sam Bankman Freed put on this one big conference when things were going great for him called Crypto Bahamas. And...

I mean, I guess I'm maybe a little, I don't know why I thought this, but I was, I sort of had, I thought this is going to be like, these will be the, finally I'll meet the legit crypto guys. This is Sam Bigman Freed's conference. It's not for, you know, regular gamblers. This is only like institutional crypto. And then all I got presented with was like one like dumb scheme after another. And a boatload of ketamine lollipops. Yeah.

No ketamine was offered to be there. Oh, man. Every once in a while, a new security tool comes along and just makes you think, this makes so much sense. Why has nobody done this already?

And why didn't I think of it? Well, Push Security is one of those tools. I'm in a browser right now. Most of us do pretty much all of our work in a browser nowadays. It's where we access our tools and apps using our digital identities. Push turns your employees' browsers into a telemetry source for detecting identity attack techniques and risky user behaviors that create the vulnerabilities that identity attacks exploit.

It then blocks those attacks or behaviors directly in the browser, in effect making the browser a control point for security. Push uses a browser agent like Endpoint Detection Response uses an endpoint agent. Only this time it's so you can monitor your workforce identities and stop identity attacks like credential stuffing, adversary in the middle attacks, session token theft.

Think back to the attacks against Snowflake customers earlier this year. These are the kind of identity attacks that Push helps you stop today. You deploy Push into your employees' existing browsers, Chrome, Arc, Edge, all the main ones. Push then starts monitoring your employees' logins so you can see their identities, apps, accounts, and the authentication methods that they're using. If

If an employee gets phished, Push detects it and blocks it in the browser so those credentials don't get stolen. Like we said before, it's one of those products where you ask yourself, why isn't everyone already doing this? The team at Push all come from an offensive security background. They do interesting research.

into identity SaaS attack techniques and ways of detecting them. You might know of the SaaS attack matrix. Well, that was the folks at Push that helped develop it. And those are the kind of attacks that they're now stopping at the browser. A lot of security teams are already using Push to get better visibility across their identity attack services and detect attacks that they couldn't previously see with endpoint detection or their app and network lock.

I think this is an area that's blowing up and not just identity threat detection response, but also doing threat hunting at the browser level. Like it just makes sense. Push Security is leading the charge here. It's a very cool product, a very cool team, and it's well worth checking them out at pushsecurity.com help.

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Shop blinds.com right now and get up to 40% off select styles plus a free professional measure. Rules and restrictions may apply. I guess to kind of keep going on the theme of institutionalizing all this stuff. One of the more surreal parts of the book is El Salvador. El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as national currency. Why do you think that happened and what happened next? So,

This Bitcoin 2021 conference was very eventful. And this was announced at the end of the conference. It was one of the moments that convinced me that I was onto something perhaps book-worthy. There was this crypto bro on stage, young guy, maybe in his 20s.

Curly hair. He's wearing a hoodie. He's sort of mumbly. He walks back and forth. He's cursing a lot. He seemed to be talking about his summer vacation in El Salvador and how Bitcoin would save the poor people there. And then, boom! He plays a video and he's got Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, saying, Bitcoin will be legal tender in our country. And then he's crying. He's bawling on stage. And he's saying...

We will die on this hill. We will fucking die on this fucking hill. And the tears are falling. And I look around the audience thinking everyone's going to be laughing like me. But no. People are wrapped. I swear some of the people there were crying too. And I realized that as I talked to people involved with the project, this was kind of a fulfillment of a dream, which was that not like a...

Very sophisticated dream. But initially, just like a few more people being interested in Bitcoin was enough to make the price go up. But like the price has gone up pretty high. So now we need like bigger pools of money to come into Bitcoin to push the already high price up even higher. And who's got a bigger pool of money than a country? So the idea was that El Salvador and its citizens, even being a small country, could

would be like a big uh boost for bitcoin not calling it a pyramid scheme but just like picturing a pyramid um could be helpful for understanding the shape structure call it yeah um it's not a pyramid it's a cone no it's kind of hard to say what's in it for bukele um i mean he got a lot of

notoriety out of this and became um like a crypto influencer and he's always somebody who's been very active on twitter and i mean putting trying to put a good spin on it i mean this was it's a it is a really small country so even the like relatively limited amount of bitcoin related tourism that came to el salvador um could be helpful to them but um

Overall, the experiment's been kind of a total bust. What happened was that they created a national Bitcoin app. And they told all the citizens, if you download it, we'll give you $30. It's called Chivo. And they told all the merchants, you've got to accept Bitcoin now. But the app was super buggy. There's all sorts of problems with the rollout. And when I went there, it had been going on for about nine months. And...

It was very hard to find anybody using Bitcoin for anything. There was also this sort of attitude where people are kind of sick of the gringos coming there and making them use Bitcoin. I went to this El Zante, this like surfing community or it's a beach community that's a popular surfing destination. And

It was sort of the birthplace of this Bitcoin project. So it's like if you're a Bitcoin tourist, you go to El Salvador, you're going to go to El Zante. Well, the first store I went to was like a little roadside stand. And I went to go buy a bottle of water. And in my best gringo Spanish, I was like, puedo pagar con Bitcoin? And the guy running the store was just like,

which means trash. He took the water and he left. There were like bars on the window. It wasn't like a store that you went in. That was it. There would be no water for me if I wanted to pay with Bitcoin. And that was the typical attitude. It was very embarrassing to go to all these stores and try to buy Bitcoin. But

Bukele has also, I mean, he promised he would build a Bitcoin city financed by Bitcoin bonds and a Bitcoin mining volcano. Like none of that has happened. But he has become kind of popular. He's made some deep pocketed new friends. For example, the guys who run Tether now have an office there. You've been pictured with Bukele. And maybe that has some sort of

It's unclear what benefit that has for the government, but maybe there could be something going on between them down the line. Bukele has invested some of El Salvador's treasury in Bitcoin, and he hasn't been very transparent about that. But based on the timing of his tweets and when he said he's buying Bitcoin, it seems like he's done all right. He's probably made some money on that, but that might be offset by the cost of this investment.

national Bitcoin rollout. But honestly, it was totally eclipsed by his Mano Dura crackdown on El Salvador's gangs. They've arrested more than 50,000 people arrested in prison. Basically, anyone who is suspected of being a gang member could be thrown in prison indefinitely without

charges or proof on it's like uh human rights groups are up in arms i it appears to be genuinely like a pretty popular policy the country was really suffering from gang violence uh there was an article in the new york times about it where they interviewed someone who was saying that their own son had been locked up unjustly but they supported this policy um

So going down there to report about Bitcoin, I just felt like, you know, people were like, don't we have something we have more important things to talk about? And for the it was surprising to me to see the Bitcoin promoters who I see at these conferences talking this up like this El Salvador experiment was some sort of big win when anyone who went there could tell that nobody knew.

had any interest in Bitcoin there. Like as a test of whether people would use Bitcoin as a currency is a total failure. But they still, you still see people talking it up. And now, I mean, sort of the pitch for El Salvador was like first El Salvador, next the world. Like once other countries see how great it's going in El Salvador, they're going to want in too. And we've seen none of that until recently when presidential candidate Donald Trump

came to the 2024 edition of this Bitcoin conference and basically gave his version of the Bukele speech. He didn't say the U.S. would make Bitcoin legal tender, but he actually went through most of their other talking points and announced that he would have the U.S. government establish a strategic Bitcoin reserve. So again, experiment failure, plans seem really far-fetched,

But in spite of that, Bitcoin marches on. I can't help but feel like the American dollar is already kind of digitized with the growth of things like Zelle and Cash App. Movement of money between people and retailers and customers

in a digital form, Apple Pay. There's so many versions of it that have essentially digitized the actual USD that ties to the traditional banking system. I just feel like any utility that Bitcoin had in its early days or any proposed utility that Bitcoin had in its early days has been circumvented by the traditional system already. I mean, I...

You can think of exceptions, but yes, I generally agree. And I did a lot of traveling for this book. And there were countries where I never even took money out of the ATM. I had a tap and pay credit card that charged no transaction fees and actually rebated me airline miles. So there was no need for me to use crypto. And you see this at...

I would see often at crypto conferences, they would not use crypto. It's like the whole idea of using crypto, again, it's kind of passe. Donald Trump, a couple nights ago, he visited a Bitcoin-themed bar in downtown Manhattan called PubKey, and he used Bitcoin to buy some cheeseburgers. Now, let's be clear.

When I say he used Bitcoin to buy some cheeseburgers, there were two other guys with some phones. They were doing the Bitcoin-ing. It took like a whole minute. And by the end of it, they weren't even sure if the Bitcoins had moved. And Donald Trump was making some really weird faces. So I don't know if you can really count this as the first presidential Bitcoin transaction. But...

Setting that aside, that's very 2020. People aren't even excited about that kind of thing anymore. Totally. They've kind of moved on. And you were sort of talking about this before, but if you strip away all of the potential breaking the rules use cases of crypto, it's like, what's left? Like a very slow database. And...

When you're dealing with a regular person, when you're trying to get a regular person to adopt a product, let's say my mom, you can't just pitch her on how cool the blockchain is. She knows about her credit card and how it works and you just tap it. You need to compete with that. And they're just so far away from...

any sort of like consumer product. And I would ask a lot of this. One of my go-to questions when I talked to these crypto guys was, let's say it stops going up. Like, I'm not saying it crashes, but like your coin, whatever it is, let's say it just sort of was flat, which not unreasonable thing to expect. Why would anyone want your coin then? What is it good for? And people like, they just didn't have, um, good explanations. Um,

And like many of those people are in jail now. And how can it function as a currency if it doesn't get at least kind of flat at some point? I don't want to buy something with an extremely volatile currency. Yes. Or, I mean, actually, if you have the expectation that it's going to go up a lot, you really don't want to spend it. It's a big...

disincentive to invest that money. Why would you buy a business if you're Michael Saylor and you think Bitcoin's going to $13 million, you would not invest that Bitcoin in opening a new business and buying a house or anything. You've got to just hold on to it until it goes up to $13 million. I also like the idea of going to a crypto conference and standing in the bar lineup and getting to the front of the bar ordering drinks and then them being like, sorry, we only take...

You know, Visa tap. You're like, but... I will say, to their credit, at the most recent Bitcoin conference, the Bitcoin machine did seem to be working. This is like... Has not been the case at many crypto events I've been to in the past. I mean, one of my favorite examples of that was... NFTs were...

If you were... The least hype-y pitch for NFTs was that maybe they'd be good for concert ticketing. There's all these problems with counterfeit ticketing. Maybe the artist wants to control how the options for reselling the tickets. NFTs would be great for that. And in the book, I go to ApeFest, a big concert put on by the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And even...

you had to have an ape to get in they still did not use the apes as tickets like there was this whole other system that like a secondary ape validation system to get into ape fest um so it's like if you guys can't even figure it out you're so motivated why are the normal people gonna do it you're uh to jump to the other side of the world from el salvador

Your investigation took like a pretty dark turn when you started uncovering how crypto was fueling human trafficking in Cambodia. I was curious if you could tell us that part of the story. And I'm curious, did you have a sense going into this that an anonymous currency is going to take you somewhere pretty ugly? Or was that still very startling to uncover? I totally did not think it would get this dark. When I pitched the book, I had no idea about this problem. And it

Maybe it was only just getting off the ground. But the problem we're talking about is called pig butchering. And it's like, it's what's behind these wrong number text messages that most people I know get. And in the book, I get one from someone who calls themselves Vicky Ho.

And I play along to try and see how it works. I was especially... I was investigating Tether, and I was curious if she... How she would make use of Tether. And she said to me at first, like, Hey, David. You know... It's me, Vicky. Been a long time, or something like that. And...

If you engage with these people, what they'll do is they'll try to make friends with you. They might try to establish a kind of romantic connection, but they start dropping hints that they're really good at trading crypto. And they'll eventually have you download... Vicky had me download an app called ZBXS. And she told me that if I could...

get some crypto and send it there, she would teach me short-term contract node trading for games of 25% to 70% per time. And, like, we laugh. It sounds stupid. But at the time, I mean, there were so many things in crypto that sounded stupid that were getting people rich. So, like, is this more implausible? And the... Now, the reason you need crypto for this scam is that, like...

The scammers have you down this fake app. And look, if they could do it, they'd have you just pay with credit card to put your money in the fake app. Because like you said, it's much easier. But the credit card companies actually have whole teams designed to detect suspicious transactions. And if I tried to charge $10,000 to some sort of Cambodian merchant on my visa, it would get flagged. They'd call me. And also, I could charge it back. If enough people complain, the account would get closed for the merchant. It's this whole problem. Same with

bank wires. So these scammers tell you to go on a real crypto app like Coinbase, acquire some crypto, most often Tether,

and then send it to their address on the blockchain. And then you've got this app, you've got this new friend, in my case, Vicky, and they're giving you these tips. And as you trade, it looks like you're making money in the app. So you might be tempted to send in more and more. And they will even let you take out some money to show you that it's real.

But in their whole conversation with you, they're sizing you up. And once they've got you to send in as much as they think they're going to get, they just disappear and take all the money. And the FBI estimates that last year, Americans lost $4 billion to this. I found a guy, there's a guy who lost $47 million to this. He was a bank CEO, and he started embezzling from his bank.

And the bank failed because he sent so much money to pig butchering scammers. So, but the really dark thing is that the scammers themselves are often victims of human trafficking. And they're in these like heavily fortified office towers in Cambodia or Myanmar. They're often from, they're,

lured from other countries with offers of a good job, and then they may be in customer service. And they get there, their passports are taken, they're trapped, and they're forced to run these scams under threat of torture, beatings, electrocution, or worse. And for the book, I interviewed a lot of people who had escaped from these compounds, or generally bought their freedom by paying a ransom, who told me,

I just like the most terrible stories about it. And I ended up going to Vietnam to meet one of them and then to see Nookville in southwestern Cambodia to see the compound that that he had escaped from.

And the crypto guys will tell you, like, what does this really have to do with crypto? But what I would... It's a little bit like... I would put this sort of in the ransomware category. It's a crime that's, like, theoretically possible without crypto, but crypto has made it so much easier that it supercharged it and almost, like, turned this into a new category of crime. I mean, it's one...

academic estimate was that these pig butchering scams generate something like they've generated like 75 billion dollars in uh proceeds they figured this out by looking at the blockchain it's just like like the un is estimating that this makes up like a decent percentage of the uh gdp and some of these in cambodia or

I mean, it's I cannot over they estimate that um the UN estimated 220,000 people are trapped in scam compounds on So it's like it's horrible and when I first heard about it it was less well documented and I sort of thought of it as almost like a sounded like some sort of Pizzagate conspiracy, but I investigated it and It's real and I one thing that um was

very surprising to me was, excuse me. So one thing that was surprising to me was that

I was taking a bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh, the capital of Cambodia. And I'd just been interviewing this victim, a Vietnamese victim. And the bus crossed the border at Bavette, which is like a casino town, just across the border into Cambodia. And I'd seen videos of

scam compounds in Bavette. I've seen videos of people escaping from them. It's pretty well documented that there were some big ones. And so I got off the bus there to like

I don't know what I was hoping to accomplish, but just to see them in person. And I'm in the parking lot of this big casino that's like a known hub for scam compounds. And right in the parking lot, there's a little booth where you can trade Tether for US dollars or local currency. And it just struck me that I'd spent years at this point going around the world trying to figure out if people were using crypto for anything.

They weren't even using it to sell you beer at the crypto conference. But here in the parking lot of the scam compound, there was a convenient way to trade crypto for cash. And like, doesn't prove anything. But for me, that was like a very telling moment. Like a light bulb moment. I think we're kind of getting close to the end. We don't want to ruin too much of the book because I highly recommend everybody should read it. It was definitely my favorite book from last year.

But before we jumped on the call, you'd actually fired over a note that your book, Number Go Up, was actually imparted into evidence in the Sam Bankman Freed trial. And Sam Bankman Freed was...

forced to read sections of your book aloud during the trial. So I just wanted to get your take on how you felt about that, how you, how you've, if you've listened to the testimony and, and just kind of your perspective on it, because that's something super unique to you and to this book. So it was pretty weird. So like after FTX had failed, I had flew down to the Bahamas and I, I,

interviewed Sam for like a full day, going up until the middle of the night at his $30 million penthouse. And we talked about why FTX failed. And he gave me his version of the story. And he admitted some things to me in the moment that struck me as ill-advised, given that

It was clear to both of us that he was likely to be in big trouble soon. And in fact, the cops did show up like a couple weeks later. And so I won't get into the details of exactly what he said, but some of these statements he made to me, he changed his story when he testified in his own defense at trial. And so the prosecutor brought in the book to say to Sam, well, you said this,

now but like look what you said before why why is your story different and honestly um it's of course exciting to see the book play this role but i had um kind of mixed feelings about it because when i'm doing all these things i like to think about myself as someone who is just like sort of a

regular person who is doing their best to figure out the truth of the situation and what's really going on, and who's asking the questions that anyone would ask. And I don't really think of myself as someone who is gathering evidence for a future prosecution, and I don't go into my interviews looking to

trip someone up. You know, when I was interviewing Sam, I told him before the interview that he'd been making some public statements about what happened. They were kind of confusing. And that I wanted to try to understand his side of the story. And when I'm talking to him, I'm pretty open where when he said things that I didn't agree with or I didn't believe, I would say, I don't think that's very credible. Can you tell me more about that? Like, what's your evidence for that? And

But what I'm doing all these things, I think it would make them more challenging if in the back of my head I was thinking this is like evidence for a trial, you know? It's just I think of it as like, hey, we're talking about something that happened. And why can't we just talk about this like regular people understand it better? Yeah.

Oh, your excellent telling of this story has become part of the story. It's a fascinating full circle moment. Number go up inside crypto's wild rise and staggering fall. It's out on paperback October 1st with new chapters about the trial and the crypto resurgence. Zeke, thank you so much for sitting down and chatting with us about it. Yeah, thanks for coming on. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, guys. It was really fun.

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