On February nineteen two, there was a mass shooting in Portland, Oregon. Right wing extremist opened fire at people doing traffic support for a weekly racial justice march. He killed one person, he injured several others. One of the people who was injured, a young woman, is currently paralyzed from the neck down.
Her friends and family are raising money, um, not for immediate survival, stuff for for quality of life things, for things to you know, allow her to enjoy herself out in the world with people, given the fact that she's dealt with something and is dealing with something, uh, permanently life changing. So I wanted to highlight that they're already
above their initial goal. But obviously, you know, any anything we can give will help her and her family have a higher quality of life, and I think they deserve it. So go to go fund me Portland mass shooting Paralyzed Survivor Fund. That's go fund me Portland mass shooting Paralyzed Survivor fund. If you've got some extra cash, you know, the season being what it is, I get that everybody's got a lot of expenses coming up. But if a few folks have some extra bucks, I know it'll be appreciated.
It will help her have a warmer season this year, and she certainly deserves it. So again, go fund me Portland mass shooting paralyzed survivor fund Thank you. Oh God is dead and you, Jamie Loftus, have killed him. I did it, I did it, you did it. You did it. No God was a hymn and Jamie killed him, hammered at the back of the head. And and people are going to be critical of that, but you know, you
don't know my story. And in my six part mini series in which I'm played by Amanda Sea Freed, You're going to start to see my side of the story. And she is definitely not going to jail for what I did. That's good. Unlike Founder of Their Enough Elizabeth Holmes, who we just found out has been sentenced to eleven
point to five years in in prison. I'm kind of like, yeah, I have mixed I have mixed feelings because it's like people don't go First of all, the prison industrial complex in general, it doesn't make anyone better to the extent that there's value in the present day, and putting people in prison, it's people who are like a severe ongoing danger. And I don't see this making anything better. Like at the same time, I hate her, so I don't. I'm not gonna it's not it's not going to be the
top injustice I write route today. I do kind of like that HERU after being exposed as an unrepentant criminal, She's like, Oh, I think I'm just going to kind of be like a norm e girl for a while and I'm gonna gon gomal kid. And You're like, Liz, it's too late. It's too late for that. Liz. You defrauded people with a fake medical device that led folks to to get treatment for things they didn't have and
ignore all this as they did, which is bad. That before too many bodies at the floor, but that would have stopped you, but you didn't really care. You applied Steve Jobs logic to something that was not just a silly box to keep in your pocket. Lizzie, you know, Lizzie, uh, Lizzie again. Also putting her in prison for you know, probably nine years, when you consider all the other things,
is like not gonna help anything. It'll just mean that that kid she has grows up without a mom for nine years, and that's not going to make that It's like it's a huge moment for many things can be true at once and having to hold all of those truths and um, still recording episode of Behind the Bastards, I can tell you about this. Actually, this actually will be relevant to the episode. But yes, please please really yes, Okay, this is definitely not going to be relevant. So let's
let's okay. I was a legal case I was thinking about today. Um was the beanie baby is billionaire. Um. When he went was taken the court in for holding money in a Swiss bank account. Um. He it was
like a tax a tasion, tax evasion charge. Um. So he was up for as many as five years in prison for tax evasion, and he got off with I mean, he's a billionaire, he's never going to suffer a consequence, right, But like, he ended up getting a two years of probation on the ground that it had been too publicly humiliating so he didn't have to get to go to jail because he was too and so farnest. It was so embarrassing that he didn't have to go to jail.
What that's absolutely fucking weird. Anyways, I'm gonna I'm gonna see how far this goes by committing murder and then having my pants fall down and like, well, Judge, look, yes I did stab that man seven times underpants. Yeah pp myself so feel like that. Yeah we can we just zero this one out. Man. I love the Beanie Baby's story so much. I'm surrounded by my beans feeling safe. Wow, that's good. You do literally have one on your shoulder right now. Yeah, just just like I have this rifle
next to me. I think that we both have our comfort objects at the ready. Um so, Jamie, speaking of Elizabeth Holmes, because the person we're talking about today is going to be the next story like that. By this time next year, they're probably is going to be an HBO documentary about this guy. God, maybe Taylor Taylor Kitch could probably play him. Um, actually, if he wanted to. Really, Taylor Kitch played hot David Koresh in The Waco Show, walked into that. Yeah, they'd have to give him like
a belly suit or something. That's not anti fantom, just being accurate, but he could do it. Maybe that is I don't want to see this man ever again. No, I'm mad. You don't want to see Taylor kitchigain you don't want to see those cum gutters again. Unbelievable, goddamnit. Plenty in this town, Robert, there's a million cum gutters. I don't need those. Oh that that is true. But anyway, so through the street that that that is that is
true of Los Angeles and no other city. Today we are talking about a guy who absolutely never comes Sam Bankman Freed. Why do you know this guy? Do you know this guy? I don't know this guy. You don't know this guy. You don't know this guy? Have you? Have you caught any news in the last week about how like a massive cryptocurrency exchange has collapsed Plummett? This is that guy. Oh, this is the guy with his like polyamorous sex ring that was running a big crypto
bank in the Bahamas and it all fell apart. Now billions of dollars are gone. You've lost me again. Oh great, Okay, well, well I'll right. This is still breaking. Um we are because this is a Thanksgiving week episode. We only do one episode on Thanksgivings. I needed a single one, so I just want to give everyone background on this guy. We will we may come back to this story because there's a lot we don't fully understand about how he
did what he did and the degree to which. But is that this guy, this guy ran a trading service called Alameda Research and a crypto exchange, and exchange is basically like a bank, right, It's a cross between a bank and like a trading platform called f t X, which was one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world, and was also considered by most people to be the most stable and like ethical and legitimate, right, people who are just kind of on the outside looking at when
everything collapsed earlier this year, Right, you remember that we have that I was engaged in that. It's just that I get a lot of my news journalists on Twitter and they've been busy this week. Yes, So when when the when the when crypto like fell apart? When a lot of crypto fell apart earlier this year, and like a bunch of places went under. F t X was one of the ones that stayed stable. And actually we're buying up a bunch of like failing crypto companies to
try to like prop up the industry. They just collapsed and like the value of all everything has been plummeting for for the last several days. It's a big disaster. It is very like yeah, in in and as in words that will annoy me as little as possible. Can you explain why fts remained solvent and others? It is
not so why did it outlast? Because they lied? Um, so they were they were operating the short end of how to describe it, And we may there will be more details to come, but at present it seems fair to say that it was a giant Ponzi scheme where they were they were they were taking in money, promising unreasonable returns, using other investor money to gamble on stuff to try to provide anyway. And it was like all the other guys they were, they were dishonest. Yeah, it is.
It is very likely. What what what differentiates this is the scale because this is very likely a financial crime on the level of what Bernie made off did. We are talking in the ten to twenty billion dollars stolen a lot of money. This is a serious financial crime.
I'm in on this pretty cold. And so for the other the other kind of mass of um like touchstone of this is that it has led to a class action lawsuit against Larry David, Shaquille O'Neal, Tom Brady and a number of celebrities who were all in a Super Bowl ad for f t X. I remember that ad that was so embarrassing for my man Larry. The lawsuit
is basically advertise. Basic was the high dollar Ponzi scheme, and you guys were using your name recognition to sell unregistered securities, which they were, which they were, which they definitely were. Sorry, I just want to circle back to Shaquille. Shaquille O'Neil will put his name on anything, to the point where to the point where I worked at a Haunted hay Ride this year, which we don't talk about because it was a bad idea, but the rival what idea?
I guess what. I'm alive, bitch, bitch, I lived, I lived to tell the tale. It's very unclear who is right in the side of should I work at a Haunted hay Ride or not? I still haven't really landed on a name answer point being. Our closest rival Haunted Hayride wise was sh Octoberfest. It was Shack themed haunted attraction in which the only Shack related thing was a gigantic inflatable Frankenstein that looked like Shack, which did sound awesome.
That sounds actually like the best time anyone's ever had Shack put his name on an anything, including crypto and Halloween. What a what a King? Um? Probably not. I'm sure there's horrible things about Shack that have come out that seems almost unavoidable. Anyway, Sam Bankman Freed is the guy behind this gigantic financial crime that is still unraveling as
we do this episode. And I want to talk about less about what happened on the exchange, because none of us want to talk about how somebody carries out the nuts and bolts of a cryptocurrency scam. But I want to talk about I want to talk about the social elements of the scam. I want to talk about how he conned the media, how he conned celebrities, and how
he conned regulators UM. And I just want to talk about also the way some of these people talked and wrote about him, because there's a lot about I don't know.
A week or so ago, we did an episode on The Daily Show we do what could happen here about ethical altruism, which is in brief theory that like the instead of trying to help people just because they need help, you should only help people after you consider the way to help people that is like the absolute most beneficial way for like the least amount of you know, effort. The it's utilitarianism, right, what can I How can I
do the greatest good with the least resources? And yeah, and it's it's the way a lot of these like and it's merged with this kind of thinking towards what billionaire types called long termism. And the gist of this is like, it's not worthwhile for me to do stuff like pay taxes to have a society or guarantee like
universal health care. Instead, I should make Instead, the most ethical thing that I should do is make as much money as I personally can and then put that money into things that I believe will save the world, like research to stop aies from killing everyone and getting to Mars and ship It's a way for billionaires, trains, It's a way for billionaires and the other mega rich to justify like continuing to do exactly what they want and feel like they're saving in the world anyway, Sam, you
guy from Beanie you know the beanie babies billionaire did to improve the world may a lot of beanie babies, and then he bought the four seasons hotel and kept making beanie babies. He didn't do ship. That's well, you know, that's I'm fine with that compared to these guys because they're where they're pretending anyway. Bank Sam Bankman Freed is
one of these guys. We're gonna get into that. But we did this episode on It could Happen Here where he was kind of a tangentle character in this very unsettling and insidious movement that is behind guys like Elon Musk who are claiming to be saving the world will just sucking over people. And then like four days after it came out, his entire life unraveled and his fortune disappeared overnight because he was a giant con artist. What a treat. It's very funny. So that's why we're talking
about him right now. He's like thirty years old and looks like Mark Zuckerberg and David Dobrick's love child. He's thirty years old, was a Mark Zuckerberg and David dobricks love child. Look. I shouldn't call anyone a schlub, but he looks like a schlub. I forget what David Dobrick looked like because my brain protects myself respectfully. Two villains, two villains, love child. Yeah. Um anyway, so I uh yeah.
Sam Bankmnfried was born in nineteen ninety two on the campus of Stanford University, uh, continuing a long and proud tradition of absolutely nothing good ever coming from that hellhole. His parents are both extremely prominent Stanford professors. His mother, Barbara, is a lawyer her clothes who clerked for the Second Circuit Court and graduated from Harvard. She founded Mind the Gap,
a somewhat shady and mysterious democratic fundraising group. I think it's shady and that people don't exactly know where all the money comes from or like what their goals are.
She also yeah yeah. She also pinned an essay in two thousand thirteen that the right wing is going nuts about because she was basically arguing that like it's good and evil are less a factor in in what people do than environmental factors and and and all that stuff, Like when people do things that are bad, it's more and a product of their And it was kind of
am oh god, what's that fucking psychologist. It was like a Skinner type argument where it's like, well, if people have bad inputs in their youth and that's going to determine anyway. Um, I think that's funny given what happens. Um, I'm gonna guess she sucks at what she's she's she sucks. Uh, And so does his dad, Joseph Bankman. Joseph is also
a lawyer. He is a graduate from Yale. His big claim to fame was developing a proposal for an overhaul of the California tax return system that would have filled out citizens tax returns in advance. And I don't know, I just said he sucked, But actually that sounds like a good thing. Um, I think that that's actually a cool thing to advocate for. The measure failed by one vote after heavy lobbying from into It, a tax prep
prep software company. Um yeah, it kind of is. It's it's total bullshit because stuff, it's the thing everybody agrees with on paper, but nobody will actually fight the tax prep companies, which is like, Hey, the I r S like knows more or less what I'm ache and like knows more or less what I owe. Why don't I just get a thing from them? Why do I have to go through this? Like anyway, there's no need but it's like that's the other countries do it that way.
We don't, though, because there has to be a convoluted system that's expensive and where they can charge you if you make the tiniest mistake because you can't read size one font well. And more to the point, because I don't actually think the I R. S. Is advocating to keep it a pain in the ass. I think it's these tax prep companies because they have an entire industry based on charging people to do the thing that they
have to do to avoid going to fucking prison. Um. Anyway, I said he's an asshole, and I'm sure he is, but he was right about this, and I don't know what to say about that. Like all of us. Joseph is also a podcaster. He is the host of the co host of the Stanford Legal podcast too, and he's a nerd. If it wasn't the holiday season and I wasn't like getting ready for friends and family and all that that good stuff, I would have listened to his podcast and we would probably be making fun of him.
But you can do that on your own goodness, I believe, isn't it doesn't it feel so horrible when you think of how many people do what we do, but they're the worst person you've ever heard of. It's so sad, it's embarrassing. Yeah, it's it's like, I don't know, I avoid self identifying as a podcaster as it is, it's
still not a stem. But then on top of that, they're like, oh, like what, like I mean, you know, you know, the only you know, the only thing that I can compare it to is like when I started making a living as a writer fifteen years ago, and I would say that at like a at like a party or something, someone asked like, well, what do you do And I'm like, well, I'm a writer, and like four other people would say yeah, me too. Uh and then you wind up listening to everybody's pitches for their
novels that they're never going to finish. Um. So eventually I just started lying and saying that I still worked a special at well. I like, I mean, it's the same thing with like if you say you're a comedian in a party, you're god no, never never identify as a comedian And oh me too, do you? And I've done one whole open mic and Mike was very offensive and he's had a comedian's job to push boundaries and oh, tell me your job, you know how Lenny Bruce, Let
read that. Let read that list of curse words. Will I just do that with slurs here? Let me show you. Yeah, you're like yeah, like slame. Bruce was not funny in that period of his career, even a little. Anyways, Anyways, our job, I mean, are embarrassing what I'm saying. Anyway, our jobs are indeed embarrassing. So, as you might guess from all of that, Sam was born into what amounts to America's like liberal aristocracy. He is a fucking coastal elite, right.
This kid grows up on the Stanford campus to Stanford professors. One of his aunt's teaches at Columbia University is like a professor there. So seems like he has close family connections to employees at Yale and at Harvard UH as well as Stanford, like his parents both go to Harvard. I think it is Kennedy. He is a Yeah, he's he's that. He is as you do not get much more of a rarefied like intellectual air. He's wearing Linen's around.
This is how I think about this. This is a child who at age eight, has strong opinions on a manual kant Um, which will cheer for him at the table. No, No, we're about to get into that, Jamie loves. I just had I just had a vision of a child sitting at like a holiday dinner and saying derivative and then amazing, Wow,
he is really coming along, isn't he. Yeah, this is a little kid that, when he likes sits down at the doctor's office, pulls out a fucking I don't know, doritta or something book just just just so you know, just so you know, he knows fancy philosophers. God damn it board book. So his parents and his raised him in his brother to be utilitarians. Uh one of the articles about them into SpongeBob. Okay, yeah, yeah, I was. I was raised to hassle cows in our back forty Um.
His parents nights. So this article notes that nights around the family dinner table often focused around debates about how to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Um. In later interviews with I'm gonna get to this guy in a second, the absolute dick writing this journalist to ever write, Dick Sam would claim that his most formative moment came at age twelve, when he was weighing arguments
around the abortion debate. So, first off, because because not only no, also like in the context of like where would he have been doing this? I'm guessing at like around the family table or when they have the all. You know, everybody's got their brandy and he's drinking in some sort a fucking t that's insufferable, and they're all talking about people's rights as if it's like a fun
intellectual problem, like how to fix it for them? It is because whenever, wherever they land, the rules aren't going to apply to them anyways. Yes, yes, where does he? Where does he fall? Where does That's a great question. So I'm going to quote now from an article previously published by Sequoia Capital and written by Adam Fisher, who should never be allowed to lift this article down. When I say the dick writing ist like fucking pr flak journal,
it's it's it's shameful quote right. A rights based theorist might argue that there aren't really any discontinuous differences, as a fetus becomes a child, and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder. The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child's life, a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested, is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life in utero, and thus to a utilitarian
abortion looks more like birth control than murder. SPF. That's what they always call him, the kid Sam spfs application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him feel comfortable being pro choice, as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith. So
that's very fucked up. That is, that is so deep, Like the term choice is used at the very ind there, but it's clear that like he's not thinking about this in terms of like the actual value of human bodily autonomy.
That does not weigh in the utilitarian calculus for him whatsoever. No, that is, to would argue my friend Robert, no, no, no, And again, even like, look, I ship reflexively sometimes on utilitarianism, not because of the inherent value or disvalue of thinking that way, but about the way it gets talked about
by these people. But like, if you're actually a utilitarian and you care about the greatest good for the greatest number of people, then bodily autonomy should factor into at right, like human bodily autonomy is he should be hugely important to you. But no, that's not logical. All that matters is like, well how many If you've if less resources than this have been invested in the fetus, then it's not a person. So abortion makes that's fucking bullshit logic.
Fuck you, you're doing too much math. Stop, this isn't This isn't a math problem, Sam, Like, this is not a fucking math problem. Not everything is goddamn math problem. Robert, he won't listen to unless you call him SBF, and I was like, sunscreen, Yeah, we'll get that. They all call him fucking SBF, and I hate it. But also as this went on, I started using it more and more because it's a pain in the astotype his whole
fucking last name out. Um. I look, I this is one where I'm not going to give him a pass. But I get it. If you write about this sucker a lot, it does make it easier. So anyway, all of this is very bad. Um, but you know what's not bad, Jamie, the products and sir this to support this podcast. That's not true. They are that's well, I've checked. Hold on, I just ran a quick check on that, and you can. But but what about the greatest good
for the greatest number of people? And and given that I'm I'm a people, so it works out pretty well, it works out very well for me. I think that if you actually have more advertising revenue, you will actually built a really fast train like you've been promising me you would. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna build the hyper loop. Um yeah, yeah. And I'm gonna promise you one thing.
It's going to kill a hell of a lot more people than that Simpsons monorail did and that and and I'm gonna and and look, not everyone is going to hold you to task for that, but I am thank you, Jamie, thank you for keeping me honest and ensuring that we we we really make a memorable disaster. Look, I'm available anytime. I'm not visiting my friend Liz in jail. M uh we are back. What a good time. So Sam bankman Fried is above all else a numbers guy, and I
guess as a kid he was a numbers kid. His parents sent him to Crystal Springs Uplands, a fancy prep school in Hillsborough, California. I looked through the website because I wanted to make fun of it, but it just kind of seems like a really fancy school. I don't know. I'm sure it's a great place to get an education. They make, they put a lot of I will tell this. They devote a lot of screen resources to letting you know that they are not racist and that most of
their students aren't white. Um. They also have a friend. They also have a French cinema class for sixth graders, which is fine, But the cranky asshole in me that still has a little piece of my soul raised by
right wing radio wants to say shit about it. I was raised by by left wing people, and I still think that that's some loser shit, and I think that that's fucking dorky and goofy and like should it's like what you know you meet because you meet people like that in the wild, and they're sometimes there and maybe
even often very sweet people. But I'm like trying to be like, oh, you know who Plankton is, and they're like no, and then but they've been watching French movies since they were like seven, and I just don't expect that if I made a sixth if I meet a sixth grader with strong opinions about French cinema, like I'm just gonna leave. I'm gonna leave. I'm just gonna walk away, Robert, that's really brave of you to march out of a conversation with an eleven year old like I am not.
I'm not putting up with that ship. Absolutely not. I'm leaving this sixth grade class. My name is Robert Evans, and out here do fi is? Go watch your Renoir? Is that one of them? That sounds like one of them? Cloud Renoir? Is he a painter? Or Renoir is a painter? I know the one you're looking for it, and I was looking for it too, but I don't remember. But guess who do you know who Plankton is? Of I know who Plankton is, And I also know that at least one of the directors they study as a pedophile.
Just knowing a little bit about French cinema, that's that's unavoidable. So he does well. Again, the school is probably fine. He does well. At the school. UM, he was notably insular. He avoided most of his classmates to play StarCraft, which is good, and League of Legends, which objectively sucks. He also played a lot of magic the Gathering. So I am confident he did not get late in high school. Um, this is based on extensive personal experience. Like I just
actually did some field research and about four years of it. Okay. Interesting. For college, he was accepted to and attended My Tea, which marked out his family's elite North American University punch guard. Um, they really hit him all now now that they've got it in my kid in the family, they get a free coffee. There used to be an m I T. So when I was doing comedy in Boston, there was like m I m I T had like a secret comedy club that was just for M I T students
And it was awful. That's oh god, Yeah, they paid you, okay, But it was like they're like, if you like knew someone who like met someone who went to M I T and they came to your shows, and they're like, oh we we've we did the math and you are allowed to come to our They called it their speak easy I wonder if it's still around. It was so it was. I mean it's not fun. Yea not a fun crowd, I will say. But best of luck to
to whatever was going on there. So he goes to m He goes to he might have been at one of those shows where he might have because he joins a fraternity there. Uh and and M I T. Well, Jamie, it's a an M I T specific co ed nerd fraternity. So night it's theta Um. And here's how Adam Fisher, the guy I hate, described them in his article, which was bad quote. A co ed fraternity of super geeks
similarly interested in magic and video games. Theten's are fond of debating math, physics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and logic problems for fun at alcohol free parties. Now I do know a little bit about M I T. And I know another thing these nerds often do is kill themselves using nitrous oxide, because they will try to flood entire rooms with nitrous to do like nitrous to ratio and kill themselves. It's a thing that happens. Look it up in M T. Nitrous des Yeah. I all I did
in college was drink too many blue moons. It's uh, it's it's quite a thing. Um. So I don't know doing over there, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know how much I believe that that they were always alcohol and drug free parties, because if there's one thing I know from ner, it's that they do a shipload of drugs. I definitely didn't hear of this one because I went to a couple of m I T frat parties and they were, um, not sober.
Fun fact one the one of the m I T frat parties I went to some for some reason when I was in college, and I would get really drunk. I would always I would like, I would I like to like steal things from wherever I was. And so I stole two critical pool balls from an m I T frat house and someone was able to trace it back to me and they demanded their pool balls back. Um, and I embarrassingly, I think I capitulated. I think I
did give them back. I shouldn't. Wow. Wow. Actually, so this one kid I'm finding and died because he put a bag over his head to in hale Nitris, which is the funk man. How did you get into in M I T. I don't know any I was like this guy, I don't know, don't put bags. Don't put bags over your head kids. Um, yeah, I learned that in public school. No less, so many there ways to do whippets than putting a plastic bag over your head anyway, whatever.
According next, according to the popular Sam Bankman Freed endorsed version of the story, he pivoted towards an almost obsessive devotion to ethics. In his freshman year, he went vegan, he organized a protest against factory farming, and he worried obsessively over how he could change the world for the better. And it was at this point that Sam met a
man who was going to change his life forever. William mcgaskell. UM. If you want to learn more about this guy, I do recommend the episode of it could happen here on Effective Altruism. UM. This guy is today the most the pop philosopher of effective altruism and long term is UM. He is an elon Musk's text messages that we all got as a result of the Twitter lawsuit. UM. At this point he was also at M I T, and he met with Sam at a cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts
where mccast which one, which one? Which I don't know. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, Jamie. Um it's I'm sure you've gotten a hot dog there. Um, that's that seems likely now, any place this guy's going it doesn't have hot talk. They're not ethical. They're famously unethical, So
you're probably right. So mccaskell explained the concept of effective altruism to him, which is again this idea that like what matters is you should like think kind of coldly and robotically about how you do help to make sure that your charity money does the most that it can do. But one of the big like arguments about it is that like, okay, well, what if you, you know, should you save a drowning child instead of saving like three kids from a burning building. And it's like, that's a
nonsense choice. Nobody's ever been presented with that choice at any point in the history of the human race. It is not a reasonable that is not a there's no point to that ethical argument. You're not smart, just draft driver. Yeah, it makes no sense. Yeah, it makes no fucking sense.
There's like bits of it that are reasonable, which is that like, well, you know, it makes sense to like look at the best thing you can do financially, you know, in terms of donating money, is you know, malaria prevention, because it winds up being the most cost effective thing. But it's like, okay, does that mean we shouldn't put money into making the water in Flint, Michigan drinkable? And a lot of these guys will say no, because that's
not the best use of money. And it's like, well, we could do many things with money, especially if we tax billionaires and put it towards rebuilding infrastructure. Um number a number of things can be done anyway, McCaskill. McCaskill kind of pills this guy on effective altruism. He frames it as a strategic investment whose success um was measured
in populations worth of human lives. He estimated, using back of the envelope math that two thous dollars could save one life, and so a million dollars could save five hundred people, a billion could save half a million, and a trillion dollars could theoretically save half a billion lives. Based on that totally legitimate math, people are math it all works out that way based based on that absolutely real math. The only ethical way for a genius like Sam to use his time and talents is to become
the world's first trillionaire. And I'm gonna quote again from that article that I know. SPF listened nodding as MS Castell made his pitch. The urn to give logic was air tight. It was SPF realized applied utilitarianism. Knowing what he had to do, SPF simply said, yep, that makes sense. But right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb strewn red brick floor, SPF's purpose in life was set. He was going to get filthy rich for charity's sake.
All the rest was merely execution risk. His course established, McCaskill gave SPF one less navigational nudge to set him on his way, suggesting that SPF get an internship at Jane Street that summer, and so for the good of man, from the good of mankind, get in the finance industry and gamble like a mother final asshole. I god fucking hate these people so much. What makes sense? Yeah, you know, look, I think that I can't debate that lot. There's no
argument to be made about that logic. Jamie. I mean, I know that this is the wrong person to be turning on in this moment, but this is the dick writing is like, this is the Jamie's like, he has not begun to ride dick. This is this is this man's got no gag reflection down, Jamie. I'm going to read you some passages from this that are going to make you gag. It is unbearable. So and it's like this article is like ten fucking words. It took me like an hour to get through this thing. It's massive.
Is He's like, maybe if I do it, he'll give me a kiss on the mouth. Well, basically this this was published by Sequoia, which is a massive like investment fucking fund thing on their website journalistic entity. Yeah, it looks like that. It looks exactly like an article from like Wired or something like. They clearly laid it out like that. But I think it was done because they put like two hundred million dollars into his company, so they needed to justify it by making them look like
a genius. So it's like those articles that like are occasionally, I mean, it's more scary when they're on actual journalistic outlets. And then there's just a little tag saying like hey, this is sponsored by RuPaul's fracking farm or whatever the funk, and it's like why why on mobile um LGBT icons. So yeah, Sam Bankman freed gets into finance and he's a very good trader. As I mean, I have no way to judge this, but Sequoia says he was a
good trader. Um, he was good at making a lot of money for other people and also a lot of money for himself. Besides from he gave away fifty percent of his income to his favorite charities, but those charities were mostly the Center for Effective Altruism and eighty thousand Hours, which is also an effective altruism charity. Good money, that's
a great question, Jamie. Um. It allows guys like like mccaskell to live very well, while also saying they only take thirty thou dollars in salaries and give away the rest because their lives are heavily subsidized by these organizations that allow billionaires to pretend to be heroes. So like, so like charity, so like charity. Yeah. So he remains there happily for years until two thousand seventeen, when he
begins to feel as if something is not right. Now spoilers having crisis, he is having a quarter life crisis. And this kid absolutely as a con artist. And what I am giving you was the polished, press friendly version of the story for a guy whose entire life, as far as I can tell, was one long set up
for an ambitious con. So when I say stuff like he gave a lot of money to charity, because there's like other charities he gives to some which sound reasonable, but I have actually no evidence that he did like, I have no evidence that he did, and I haven't seen it. Um So when I say stuff like he felt like that, or when they say stuff like he felt unfulfilled at Jane Street, that doesn't mean he actually did.
Because we are at present reliant on a lot of reporting from back when this kid was the toast of Wall Street. Now after his life fell apart and his company crash and it became clear that he was a financial criminal, it also came out that the guy who wrote the big short has been following him for six months. So I suspect at some point it's got that's gonna be fun. We're all going to be in for a real treat when that books. I love. I love when
you're like, and guess who is following him around? You're like, oh, he's got Michael Lewis on his dail. It's like and also, if you're an investor, shouldn't like it's somebody involved in one of these companies. Probably should have been able to find out, like, oh, hey, the big short guys hanging out with him, that probably means this is a giant
financial crime. That guy's not gonna just hang out with a dude who's good at legally making money to write about how good he is it making money legally, because that's not Michael Lewis is beat. I'm kind of going for like a change of paces time, just gonna try to see a guy who's like doing something right. Yeah, Michael, aren't you the guy who only writes about financial crimes on like a gigantic scale. No, No, I think this
is he's just probably just trying to network. Yeah, it's just just just really like this guy's attitude towards altruism. So anyway, um, yeah, anyway, here's how that again, very dick writing pr flack motherfucker wrote about what happens next. He was he realized too secure. Spfs mind had been trained almost from birth to calculate as a schoolboy that hedonic calculus of utilitarianism. And I'm trying to maximize the
utility function measured in Util's of course for abortion. During his teenage game I know, I know that's a sentence. Does he say, of course? Uh no, No, I said that he does say, he does say, he does say, of course, yes, measured of course, of course. Suck my ass, you find unbelievable. During his teenage gaming years, his mathematical abilities allowed him to sharpen his tactics and win. And of course, every trade spf Ever made at Jane was the subject of a risk reward calcul lation, all of
it boiled down to expected value. The formula is fairly simple. If the amount one multiplied by the probability of winning a bet is greater than the amount loss multiplied by the probability of losing a bet, then you go for it. Irrespective of units Util's euros, dollars, We're all subject to the same reckoning. But at Jane, spf us most another
trading principle. He learned to be risk neutral. In simple terms, a trader given a choice between a fifty fifty dollars and a fifty chance at a hundred dollars must be agnostic if they want to maximize the expected value of earnings over a lifetime. Those who prefer that sure win are risk averse and those who would rather gamble our
risk lovers. But both risk lovers and the risk averse are suckers equally because over the long run they lose out to the risk neutral who take both deals without prejudice. That makes no sense. That makes no sense at all, because like you, you're you're assuming you have to like choose between one? Can you just take both? Is that like the is that the offer? Because it seems like the whole thought experiment is about choosing between one. None
of this makes very much sense. I had a brain hemorrhage in them it all of that, and then I was thinking I couldn't stop thinking about do you think of the utilitarians? How do utilitarians feel about kissing with tongue? Do you think, um, how many utils does it take to kiss with tongue? Or or don't waste your fire. Let me write the equation out, Jamie and try to try to sketch out the math on I think they wouldn't be into it. I think they would be like, well,
what's the point. Yeah, that's that seems real. Five utils. Sorry, James, Jamie, I gotta continue to say, I don't know, but we have to read another one quote here. SPF realized was the rub When he applied this principle to his own life, he came up short. There was little chance he'd get himself fired from Jane Street. Thus, the decision to stick
with Jane was a risk averse preference. It was the logical equivalent of being offered a choice between fifty dollars and fifty of a hundred dollars and saying give me President Grant. SPF was risk neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not He realized for his own life, to be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor,
he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk neutral career path, which, if we strip away the trader jargon, actually means he needed to take on a lot more risk. Oh Jamie, you need to hear this, boy. We're driving it away. I've been asleep for six minutes. Come on, Which if we strip away. The trader jargon actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math
couldn't be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth. Trump's low risk multiplied by mere rich guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SPF needed to find a path on which he'd be a coin toss away from going totally bust. So has this risk neutral, But that means taking a lot of risk, because the most risk is the only way to become the wealthiest person in the world. And only by becoming the wealthiest person in the world can you avoid risk. You get it, Jamie. Yeah,
And that's the most ethical thing you can do. That's the really the most logical ethical way to live. So do you think that they kissed with done or not? I mean, I think what he's saying is ordered in order to avoid the risk of catching an STD you have to take on a job as the bathroom at at a brothel. Um Ah, that's the risk a verse or risk neutral presentation. Frantically rubbing my final grand cells together, trying to make heads or tails of that, and it is.
It is howling clown shit. It is absolutely sparking nonsense. Is like of a vortex of bullshit to be like, so anyways, it's really clear and the math couldn't be clear that he has to be the most richest guy or everyone is going to die, like actually really urgent. You know, it's one of those things because I have I have known a number of rich guys in my life, um, and some of them are in late for you, there's
two kinds. There's people. There's people who were poor at one point, and some of those people are unhinged and some of them still remember being poor enough to talk like normal people. And then there's people like this who Sam was never rich as a kid, but he lived in this rarefied air where finance and like the concept of worrying about money or his economic status was not a thing because everyone around him when he was a
kid was so high status. And he like, he's just lived in this it's not even a it's not even a bubble. He grew up on a different planet, Like the world does not exist to him the same way it does to everyone else. And so he's like, that's the only way you can talk about things in this way. Um, that you're sort of sinister thing where you're talking about
everything like it is very my thinking. It's like it's so easy for him and people like this to think of other people as theoreticals because they've never had a problem before. So it's are a game of chance because met a person, right, right, he has never known a human being. Just Stanford professors exactly, just Stanford professors and problems in his video games. So yeah, and not that
all nerds. I mean, I'm not I'm I'm afraid of nerds, you know, people who identify as nerds coming into my mansis. I'm not saying that that's everybody, but I'm saying like he's not socialized like a person, and that these are has to do with class. Yeah, God damn it. Um. So the next thing that SPF did after deciding he had to quit Jane Street, um is start pondering how he might change the world in a way that minimized
his risk. By maximizing his risk or some ship anyway, as he told it, he considered four career fields and this is These are his notes on the four things he might do after being a traitor. Number one journalism low pay, but a massively outsized impact potential. Number two running for office or maybe just being an advisor. Number three working for the movement e a effect of altruism needs people. Number four starting a startup. But what exactly Number five bumming around the Bay Area for a month
or so just to see what happens. Now again, it sounds like a bad bumble day, Like it's like, so what do you do? It's like, oh, well, um, so start up maybe, but what is a start up? Really? What is a startup? So again, he spent years working in finance, He's got plenty of money. He came from the Bay Area, So five was an option and it's
one he took. Um And by the way, like as a general rule, if you decide to quit your job and you have the financial ability to put her amount around for a month or two and think things through, not a bad idea, um, But Sam is going to do this in the worst way possible. He eventually hits upon his great next idea, which is to make a
shipload of money in crypto now when he quits. Jane Street is two thousand seventeen, and if you guys can remember back that far, that's the first big winter when cryptocurrency boomed like kind of all throughout the last quarter or so of two thousand seventeen, bitcoin was just say laying up like massive rises. Ether had a big rice to just kind of went around early. A lot of bitcoin nerds who have people have been making fun of
her years became overnight multimillionaires. And this was kind of the first point at which normal people started to think, ship, maybe I should get into this, maybe I can make a lot of money. Right. This is this is the thing that blew up bitcoin. And there was a crash
after this, but it recovered, YadA, YadA, YadA. Sam was savvy enough to look at this and know that these moments where this thing where a lot of funny money is on the table but there's no regulation um and regular people who started to get interested because they think they might get rich. This is the point at which an unethical person can make the absolute most money in a financial market. Right, And you can be unethical, to quote one of the greats, you can be unethical and
still be illegal. That's the way I live my life. And you know who else lives their life that way? Jamie loftus you and you're tossing the ads. Yeah, that's right, I am indeed, baby. Uh here we go, all right and we're back. So Jay Loft, Yes, it's actually j Low. It's the first. I'm the first person to use that, and it's really starting to catch on bowls um afflex calling me one sect, Jamie, let me take this call.
Oh that's why, boyfriend. Now he's just weeping outside of a dunkin Donuts and pocket dialed me again, normal normal Ben stuff? Am I right? Ben? Look sometimes I meet I meet up with my friend Ben at the Atwater Dunks and I really, I really said him straight. It's nice. Yeah, Ben afflick sober for years and looks like he's hungover in every single photograph. What a king man, I know, I do, I do. I have a lot of There's just a something about him that warms my heart. It's
his back tattoo. You love his back tattoos. It's just that takes courage, you know, oral courage. I think he's amazed that I think we need to have that back tattoo and still got to marry Jennifer Lope. I think I think put his name on the Vietnam Memorial in honor of the courage that it took to get that that back tattoo really is braver than the troops. And he did for a while hold hold the status of most divorced man in America. Um, but that is now
what he fixed it. But the contest, I was going to say, they did they did get married at a plantation. I don't know. Yeah that I mean, that's all. That's all very fucked up. But I do feel the contest for most divorced man. Did you ever watch dragon ball Z as a kid, Jamie, I didn't know. I didn't know. Well, there's this thing that Dragon ball Z would always do this thing where like you have this guy and he's like the most badass person ever that everybody has to
figure out how to fight. And it's this big problem because this is the most terrifying thing in the universe. And the next season, like there's something that's like a thousand times scarier. It's just this like power creep kind of thing. I feel like we've all been dealing with that with a divorced guy, because divorced guy Ben affleck Not doesn't even register on the divorced guy scale. Living in the Age of Kanye and it's really divorced and
look out because Tom Brady is about to hit the world. Trade. Tom Brady is gonna go super say and divorce that is going to a third divorce Man has hit the world. It's incredible. So back to Sam Bankman freed. He is just he has just decided to get into crypto now the first way to make money in crypto. That that occurred to him because he spends a bunch of time looking into the market and he finds he sees that there's this thing called I think it's like the Kimchi
premium or whatever like that. They come up with some weird, kind of racist name about it, which is basically bitcoin is worth a lot more in Japan and Korea than it is in the United States. Right, It's like worth fifteen grand in Japan and Korea and it's like tin grand in the United States something like that. Why is that there's a variety of complicated factors. Basically there's a bunch of different laws around banking and who can and
cannot hold accounts and execute trades in those areas. That leads to this premium. Because like normally, if a premium like that, if the markets were kind of accessible to each other, and bitcoins worth fifteen grand in Asia and ten grand in the US. Then you buy bitcoin in the US and you sell it in Asia and you get free money, right um. Very obvious, um if you can.
But you can't do that because you can't get access to as an American, you can't like get a Chinese account in order to buy bitcoin there, right M or a Korean account or a Japanese account. There's all these laws and they can't VPN. No, you can't. You cannot do that, and no one can figure out how to do it how as a Westerner to sell bitcoin over in these parts of Asia and get that premium, right and like just get a bunch of free cash. Sam years out a way to do it, um, which is
basically like picking up a pile of free money. Right if you're buying bitcoin for ten grand and other people want to pay fifteen grand for it, you're just making cash, right um. And primarily the way he does that is through friends in the effective altruism community who are like placed in banks and stuff over in Asia, who like help him figure out how to do this. I'm not
going to go into details. They I mean, this fucking dick writing article spends a long time explaining how he figures this out, and it might even have been legal. He may not have broken the law to do this, although it's kind of hard to know because all of this is complicated finance gibberish um. By the way, honestly,
I'm not getting a word of this. Finance guys call this an arbitrage, and it's basically the ideal that if you can, if there's a resource that's worth a bunch more money one place than it is the other place, you buy it where it's cheap, and you sell it where it's expensive, and you get free money. Right, that
makes sense? Yeah? Yeah, If if my drug dealer sells me ketamine for like forty bucks a graham, right, and I don't know, at a house party you're hanging out at a couple of blocks away, somebody gibb says that they'd pay seventy dollars a graham for ketamine. You can make thirty free bucks by taking the ketamine you bought for forty bucks and selling it at that other house party. Right. Okay, so that was you speaking to me in terms that you would understand. But I do think I got it. Yeah, yeah,
ketamine makes everything makes sense. So he just gave it to me. In Robert's speak, I got it, I got he makes He makes a shipload of money doing this, and he decides to roll this money into a company which will allow him to hire employees to gamble with cryptocurrency at scale, to try and find different funked up little areas like this where they can make a bunch
of money by executing trades. He picks members of the e A community as his first employees, including Carolyn Ellison, a former coworker co worker at Jane Street who we will be talking about in a little bit, and Nishad Singh, a former Facebook employee. Industrial scale dick writer Adam Fisher lets you know that sing is an incredible, almost impossibly
good human being by describing him this way. He often wears a T shirt with the words Compassionate to the core printed in diminutive all lower case font over his heart. Do you do you think that this guy, this writer like just it's at this point he's on like a bucking bronco ASBFS dick, Like it's just absolutely he is he is, he is fift this guy's dick by weight. It is unbelievable. What does he think is going to
happen for him? He's got to get paid by Sequoia to write a ten thousand word article that they then pull from their website. When it becomes clear this man is a massive financial crinamental, he's like, no, my greatest work, it's extremely funny. No, look, I don't know sing. But based on the description that guy gives, I am convinced he's murdered a child with his bare hands. And that is my head cannon for this man. UM. No one
else would wear that shirt. So these these e A nerds all form a trading firm called Alameda UM, and in doing so, they came down on one side of
probably the biggest split within the crypto community. See, the core of the idea that's not bad that exists within cryptocurrency is that decent is that centralized state controlled money is like has problems, right, you know that there's things about that that are bad, um, And it could be cool and useful to be able to separate the money from the state if you could do that right, if you could do that in a way that reduced the state's power to like you know, just locked down the
bank accounts of dissidence and stuff like that. There's there's cool benefits to it. And what I just had an idea, what if we did that, but then we gave all the money to one guy. Well that's kind of what keeps happening. Um So. But also like spfs on the other side of this argument, right, because obviously most of the actual benefits of a truly decentralized online currency are just you can buy drugs with it over the internet.
But still that is a real value people do in fact by drugs using cryptocurrency, and that's fine, um And the committed ideological crypto people tend to keep their money offline in a wallet only they can access, right. So you basically you have like a hard drive that has all of your crypto on it, and that that only touches the Internet when you plug that into your computer and you use it to make a transaction, right and otherwise it's completely offline, and so people can't just take
it from you, right right, that's the smart people. This is a pain in the ass though, right, Like keeping it in this thing, like there's all these security you can lose your password people actually do lose their money this way too, But anyway, it's it's there's a measure to which it it makes sense and is secure, but most people don't want to go through that pain in the ass, so they put all of their cryptome currency and what are effectively crypto banks these exchanges, and these
exchanges are places like Mount Cox which a few years ago all of the money got stole, and from an f t X which Sam Bankman freedmakes, which also all of the money gets stolen from. Right. So the people who are like, no, you shouldn't do what Sam is doing. You shouldn't make an exchange because that's not decentralized, and we like this because it's decentralized, they are the ones who get robbed less often because because they're a little smarter um. And that's part of the point these exchanges.
They're meant for people who don't see crypto actually is like, well, I I want to fight the state by removing my money from the banking system. There for people who are like I want to try to get rich quick by gambling, right, and that's why those people are also the most vulnerable to scams. UM. However, anytime you explain crypto with me.
To me, even though I know I need to understand it for the context of the episode, I just feel like I'm in a corner at a house party and I'm holding a clammy bud light and it's mostly empty, and You're like, just one more thing though, because you know, I mean, the important thing to understand is that what Sam has done so crypto is like unregular aided right. It is detached from any state, Okay, which is why
people like it, Which is why people like it. Yes, Sam has what Sam has done has come in and he's not the first persons to do this and said, I have built a place where you can keep all of your crypto and you can trade it with other crypto to try to make money the same way people do with the stock market, right where it is more secure. No, because here's the thing, Jamie, he says, it's secure. But
here's the thing. So you know how the banking system, how banks used to just go bust and everyone would lose their money and it caused a great depression. You get that part of the history of finance, right. Oh yeah, one of the characters from Titanic killed themselves over that. Exactly exactly. So that was a big problem, and we developed a bunch of regulations so that So what Sam has done is he's built a bank that has none of that so that people can gamble on the internet.
So yeah, got exactly. That's all you need to understand is that Sam has built a big unregular they did bank for people to gamble with. UM. Yeah, anyway, UM, and this is this is it is. It could not have been clearer that this was a Ponzi scheme. And two eighteen they put out an advertisement to investors and I'm going to read it right now. I think you'll be like. We offer one investment product, annualized fixed rate loans. We can accept both fiat and crypto and can pay
interest denominated in either. UM. These loans have no downside. We guarantee full payment the principle and interest enforceable under US law and established by all parties legal counsel. We are extremely confident we will pay this amount in the unlikely case where we lose more than two percent. Anyway, Again, I'm not a finance expert. Neither of you Jamie banks offer like three percent return on like a fucking uh.
If you're like putting a pile of cash in a bank and you're getting three percent back, You're doing okay nonsense that nobody, no one can guarantee that it's not a real product. I would pretty struck by their use of the length whiche like we're pretty confident we're gonna be able to play it sounds like it's such just
sounds like someone who is not actually very confident. And also if this is if you are if you are investing in a mark in the stock market, right, and someone says this investment has no downside, it's impossible for it to fail. That person's lying to you and breaking the law because it could and often does. Oh right, because then you're just you're you're making an almost guaranteed false problems. Yes, you cannot do you cannot say this
stock can't go down. Right, If you're a stockbroker, you cannot tell a client it is impossible for your investment in this company to fail because that would be a crime. Um. But with crypto crypt that's unterted territory, territory, you can do anything. This is also a Ponzi scheme, right, What what what fucking made Off was doing is he had this investment portfolio that was I forget with the exact but it was promising an unbelievably high return and guaranteeing
that people would get it right. And what he was doing is as new people put money into the investment, he was using their money to pay the old investors so that nobody noticed that things were sucking up. But eventually new people stopped putting money into the thing, and it all fell apart and a lot of people lost billions of dollars, right, Like, yeah, he was also using a lot of that money to live, you know, an
incredibly lavish rich guy live anyway. Sorry, I only understand financial concepts when Selena Gomez breaks the fourth wall and explains it to me. I'm doing my best to be your Selena Gomez. But do you know who Selena Gomez is? Yeah,
she's that chick from the Thing Nailed It. She's she's kind of in the middle of a fun scandal right now where she's in a feud with someone who donated her a kidney what which is a very funny online feud feud with that person because she Okay, if you asked Robert, this is something I can explain to you. This so, so what happened was Selena Gomez needed a kidney donated her close friend who works in the industry.
I don't know who it was, but I guess she's like sort of famous gave her a kidney a couple of years ago. Then Selena Gomez turns around a couple of weeks ago and says, I have no friends in the industry except Taylor Swift incomes her kidney dontor being like, oh, that's interesting because I'm one kidney light d like I'm not quoting it, but and then, and then Selena, instead of apologizing, Selena Gomez is like, oh, sorry, I didn't thank every person I've ever met in my life. Yeah,
but I mean, Selina, she did give you a kidney. Yeah, that's a special kind of friend. You guys weren't just like drinking buddies. She literally gave you a kidney. Um, and that she did. She did the thing that you would use as like a joking description of someone who've done a lot for you, to like like hyperbolically say that you owed them a lot you know who's done and implying that Taylor Swift has done more for you than your kidney don't so. I just think it's the
funniest feat of all time. Alright, we were talking about a cryptocurrency. We weren't. Um, we were talking about let's let's get back to cryptocurrency. So to talk about what came next after establishing Alameda, UM, I'm going to quote again from that sequoia right up at this point mid two thousand nineteen, SPF decided to double down again and
scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda's multimillion dollar trading profits on a new venture, a trading exchange called f t X. It would combine coin bases, solid stolen regulation loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by by Anance and others. He only gave himself a twenty chance of success, but in his mind, SPF needed extreme risk to maximize the expected value of his lifetime earnings and therefore the good his earn to give strategy
could do. The fact that he was, by his own lights overwhelmingly likely to fail was besides the point. The point was this, when SPF multiplied out million billions of dollars a year, a successful cryptocur and the exchange could throw off by his self assessed chance of successfully building one. The number was still huge. That's the expected value. And if you live your life according to the same principles by which you trade an asset, there's only one way forward.
You calculate the expected values, then aim for the largest one, because in one, but just one alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously. To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky f b SPF of the future can reach into the other parallel universes and compensate the fail sun spfs for their losses. It sounds crazy, perhaps even selfish, but it's not. It's math. It follows the
principle of risk neutrality. Yes, it actually is crazy. That's not math. I'm sorry, that's actually not math, but a lot of words all at once. That is like, oh my god, the spiraling launch is this? You are using hundreds of words and high minded bullshit rhetoric to be like gambling is the best way to make money. He's fabulously three times in one sentence. Yeah, man, you know who.
I've heard this basic argument from my friends drunk in Las Vegas, explaining what they're trying to play at the craps. Why they don't want me to leave the little Horsey game? This is something. Yeah, someone's like, no, don't leave the Sex in the City slot machine, and you're you want to You want to hear my mathematical thinking on gambling, Jamie Loftus, because this will make more sense than anything
that happens in the Sequoia article. Okay, when I go to Las Vegas, I find me the penny slots where I can see the most waitresses walking around with those little trays that they have the drinks and stuff on. Then I sit down at them and I don't start to play until one gets close to me, and then I pressed the button as soon as she walks past, and I like, catch your attention, and then I get
a free drink. And the way that it works out is that as long as I can get more free drinks than I'm spending at the penny slots, and mostly I'm just reading a book and hiding it while I'm at the penny slots and only press it when the waitress gets near. Like the other Vegas guys, I can drink effectively for free. Right, it works out to be like twenty five cents of drink if you're really smart about it. That is my financial advice to all of you. I do. I do respect that how you make it
even better. I used to go with a bag because when I was poor. What I would do is I would go to Vegas once every couple of years, usually for work, and I would get all the free drinks, which came in glasses a lot of the time, and I would keep the glasses, and so I was able to furnish my apartment with stolen Las Vegas glasses. Love
stealing glasses. I've my fair share of glasses. And I would get up to the floors where there were the nicer hotel rooms, and I would find all the people who set out their plates and stuff from like room service, and I would just take those and take them back to my house. I respect that. I'm trying to think. I was like, I don't have a real system for well. Actually, when I go to Vegas, I always stay at the hotel with a roller coaster on top. And here's what
I do. I go on the roller coaster once, sometimes twice. Then I go see one show. Usually it's horrible. The last time to see the Backstreet Boys. And guess what I found out One of the Backstreet Boys is in Q and on and then I got bumped up from this. It was a real The point I want to make, Jamie, is that what I just described to you, my Vegas strategy has made me infinite, infinitely more money and net profit than Samuel Bankman. Freed is actually going to make
in crypto Kurts. Oh fun foreshadowing. Um, So never hang out near waitresses though, because he's probably afraid of women. He's probably afraid of them. But I am fine with asking women for a free drink as long as I'm paying at the penny slots, you know, So it's not weird. Wow. Feminist icon, robertist icon, Robert Evans, getting those getting those shitty Vegas Irish copies. They come in the glasses. I want a nasty but I like the glasses they used to come in. They do have, I know, but then
there's the consequence of having to drink with inside. Well, you know, Jamie, that's why they call me a hero. Um. But the Mahatma Gandhi of the West, they call me the Jesus Christ. And podcasting. These are all things people if you're gonna lie, make it realistic, James, So James soup. Anyway, let's continue. Um, I'm like, yeah, I think it's hard to justify being risk averse on your own personal impact impact SPF told me when I quized him about it,
unless you're doing it for personal reasons. In other words, it's selfish not to go for broke if you're planning on giving it all away in the end. Anyway, again, just clown shit. So all of this is a con spoilers, so you don't have to think that much about it.
In a recent series of text messages with a Vox journalist, after his entire exchange exploded and everyone found out he was a financial criminal, Sam Bankman, Freed more or less admitted that everything he'd had to say about effective altruism was a con meant to get people to trust him and invest in his company. And I'm gonna read the text Yeah, I'm gonna read the texts to you between him and this journalist who, by the way, he put money in the v so he helped fund this journalist.
So the ethics stuff, this is the journalist. So the ethics stuff mostly affront people will like you if you win and hate you with you lose, and that's how it all really works, Sam, Yeah, I mean that's not all of it, but it's a lot. The worst quadrant is sketchy and lose. The best is win plus question mark question mark question mark clean plus loses bad but
not terrible. He also misspells terrible but whatever the journalist and then replies, you were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers. Yeah, he he, I had to be. It's what reputations are made of. To some extent, I feel bad for those who get sucked by it. But this dumb game, we woke Westerner's play where we all say the right shibboleths and so everyone
likes us. And that's the actual truth here, right, That's the thing that's honest about it is Like, man, it was all of this talk for everyone. That's the entire this Miscastell motherfucker. The only reason his effective altruism thing exists as a funded thing is as a fucking shibba left for billionaires who don't want to pay taxes and
want to let the world crumble around them. Will sucking as much value out of the working class as they can and want to pretend like their heroes at the same time, so that people write their dicks and articles like that fucking sakoyapies that absolutely fucking ridiculous text. Actually is like a very important document. It's incredibly important. It's deeply crucial. I hate that there's such a crucial document
that also includes he in it. Yeah, there's nothing to be done about that one, Jamie, Look, there's it doesn't feel good, but you know we are previous most important document to that effect was an I am that said ha ha, So a text with he he is kind of the logical progression that is fascinated. Do you have any like insight into like why he would so freely admit that? Now, I don't. Actually, one of two things has to be happening, because again the spoilers, this all
falls apart. His exchange goes from worth thirty two billion
dollars to worth basically zero dollars. In the space in my head anytime you say, like like twenty four hours this happens, his net worth falls in a day, Um, like it is it all because they realized that all of the money has gone that he'd been taking money from one business and using to gamble in another, and also to pay him and his friends, and all of the money that the investors had put in when they tried to withdraw it, like the their money that was
supposed to be in there on paper, none of the money existed because again he had stolen it um anyway, the context of this article makes it clear that he felt like, I don't know whatever. This was all the confidence game, right, that's the key all of this could work, and the balance because people were looking at their balance. Shee, I'm making money. I'm making money. The returns are great.
And that money existed on paper until they tried to take it out because then it actually wasn't there because he had already frittered it away. It's a confidence game, and we have an you know that's the way it actually worked. We also know and this is all still coming out, so I'm not gonna get too much into it, but we know that he had f t X loan himself. Sam BigMan freed about a billion dollars, Like his paper value was like two billion, but he gave himself basically
a billion dollars in other people's money. Um, although he may have gambled that away. It's really unclear how much money he actually has liquid at the moment um do we think he has any I have no idea either either. He was like actually a gambling addict and a narcissist and he really did lose it all or this was a con from the beginning, knowing it would all collapse, and he got as much as he could out of it, and he's going to wind up someplace without extradition, right like,
and that was the goal. If you asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said it's the latter. But I feel like the last couple of years have demonstrated so often that like people are just straight up not smart and don't have a plan, and it is all a narcissist shell game. It's very it's it's un at the moment. I'm going to read you some things at the end here and you can kind of make
your anyway. Whatever. So after you know, starting FTX, the company moves to Hong Kong and then the Bahamas and they use they buy these very like a thirty nine million dollar mansion that he lives in with his friends using FTX tokens, which is like internal cash that his company issues based on the perceived value of the company. They don't know how many rooms is that it's a shipload, and and they're able to buy it because everything's like
their paper on paper. They've gone from nothing to worth thirty two billion dollars in like a year or two. And these these idiots, like property owners in the Bahamas, are like, well, clearly, the best thing we could do is by this building using the fake money they created for their own company that they tell us is worth
a lot of money. This is worth it. Um. So since everything collapsed, some people that SPF had like reached out to as early investors have commented about why they didn't invest in this company in the early days, and most of them it's because, like what they could see of his investments, the tens of millions that he promised to charities in the long positions in risky cryptocurrent companies
didn't make sense. They would look at like the things he was buying with the company assets and the things that like he was investing in and be like, well, there's no way he could have that kind of liquidity if this is a legitimate exchange right, he can't have that kind of cash on hand. It doesn't make any sense. Rich fucking assholes always telling themselves like that, that's funny.
And what's funny is that, like I found one of these guys who like, yeah, I didn't invest because I could tell it was a con and then was like, but I didn't tell anybody because I didn't want to get yelled at. That's unfortunately. I do see myself that statement a little bit where I was like, oh, someone might be someone might send me a rude text. I guess I will this. Yeah, oh my god, it's very fine, goofy bullshit. I don't I'll tell you one thing, Jamie.
He's a spineless guy who still has his fucking money. Wow, you're in love with him? That's what. Yeah, you know whatever. It's the finance industry. They're all ghoules from what we can actually tell now, because again, this fucking Captain Dick writer, the bad writer, Like, I have to read you another quote that I didn't have in my script to give you an idea of just how much he fucking how much he loves SBF. Here's a quote, um from him.
Uh okay, yeah, this is this is actually, Jamie, oh boy, this is when this is when, this is when, this is when the writer Captain Dick writer is hanging out with him in the Bahamas at his office quote, and he's like, what if we kissed? Sensing an opportunity for connection, I chip in with my own two satoshi, which is two cents but a bitcoin term. Anyway, I'm going to walk into the ocean. Wow. Okay. I don't pay any
attention to social media. Not because I have any moral case against it, I say, but because for me, reading books is the highest band with way I know to get quality information into my brain, which just craves the stimulation I'm addicted to reading, which explains how I ended up being a writer. Oh yeah, said SPS say, SPF, I would never read a book. I'm not sure what to say. I've read a book a week from I hate them both because I'm not sure what to say.
I read a book a week for my entire adult life, and I have written three of my own. I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that explains SPF. I think if you wrote a book you fucked up and it should have been a six paragraph blog post. Those guys writing word article that he will not read. It's like two guys whose heads are made out of rocks, just like clunking
against each other repeatedly. Just just wait, Jamie, Jamie. It has it hasn't gotten as bad as it's going to get. Whatever the case, I hate books. Whatever the case, I find myself sad for the man, And it occurs to me that my reaction is exactly what might be expected from a beta in the brave New world Old Crypto
is creating. Whoa how can you write that and not leap off the top of the building He literally self identified as a beta to also, just like what I love about this is just like what we have to take it. We have to take it as given that Crypto is creating a brave new world and none of us has any choice in that. It's inevitable, it's unstoppable. It's going to dominate everything, which is like capitulate to our Yeah, so I think again, what I wonder does
he think? I think? Wouldn't someone with i Q points to spare realized that dismissing books, all books is essentially worthless? Might rile a writer? Was he playing with me? Is this fun? Is this humor? I'm satisfied with my meta analysis until I realized that one can always increment the level of strategic play in this sort of game. It's like poker. Level one is just thinking about how to strengthen your own hand. Level two is thinking about what
your opponent's hand is. Level three is thinking about what your opponent thinks your hand is, and so on. And since SPF is obviously a genius, I should simply assume that compared with me, SPF will always be playing at level in plus one, which was making which makes my analysis of the intent behind SPS books for losers idea spiral into infinity and crash like a computer like it
was how you write about me and your diary? No, Jamie, because do you know what the only ethical speaking of ethics, you know what, if you think this way about conversations, the ethical thing to do is fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean. Wow, you're wolfing this guy. Yeah, I absolutely am him and Sam Bankman Free. I could not hate these people more. I mean, they're both there. There's never been two wronger people having a conversation, and
of course it came out. He's just like, well, obviously he's a genius. We have to assume that because he became a billionaire. So and he's like, no, he was never a billion There his defense, that's math he did to balance sheet, Like we've now gotten access because he had to like go to the bankruptcy and step down.
So like there's a caretaker trying to get people's money out of the company, and we know ship like we've seen the Excel files where they kept their financial records, and it's him being like, this is basically bullshit, Like, sorry about this, we funck this up. We weren't actually keeping records here the company balance sheet. There was no
accounting department. People would file there, like like when they would spend hundreds tens and hundreds of millions of dollars and things, they would just message each other on signal about it to get approval and had deleted deleted messages on so there's actually like no record of a lot
of the accounting they did. At one point hier and outside accounting firm to handle their accounting of this thirty two billion dollar company and the firm they hired is the first builds itself as the only metaverse based accounting firm. Um His the accounting firm for this thirty two billion dollar company, exists entirely within a crypto themed video game called decentral Land. Um. It is so futpid with everything
you're saying. Okay, so this is really this is bad and this field bad to hear Um, I have a question, Yes, Jamie Um, who is I guess because I am I am kind of back in in Lizzy holmes Land because that whole last I mean, like departments that should be, you know, taking care of ship don't even exist, which is very farops adjacent to me parasian if you will. As with both written books, we can just make up for Yeah, of course, yeah, that's that's mostly what writing
a book is. For sure. I view myself as the beta of this conversation, and so I feel comfortable asking Robert Um who is ultimately affected by this, Like what is the like trickle down of this what happens? Um? Is it just other rich assholes or it doesn't affect regularly? Like does it affect Probably there will presumably be some here's the thing, and here's why there's that lawsuit against like Larry David and all those other guys who appeared
to the ft X. AD. Yeah, presumably a bunch of regular people got suckered into putting their money on ft X, and those people have probably lost some money. That said, for the most part, it's fine because most of the people who lost money are like gamblers who probably suck as much as this guy did. Um. And it's one of those things. There's just an article I think at Financial Times where someone's like, actually, and I think they
actually had a good point. We shouldn't regulate the crypto industry because if we regulated, it will be brought in closer to the actual financial industry as it exists, and banks will put more investments into crypto and it will get seen as like legitimate and backed by the state. And so when these conmen destroyed tens of billions of dollars overnight and cause panic in the industry, it will affect the real economy. And right now it doesn't seem to And like, yeah, I guess that is kid, that's
not a bad point. Maybe we just let it die on its own. I don't know. Um, And it seems so more like, well we'll know more. So, yeah, we will continue to learn more. One of the things that's funny is about this is that Sequoia, this investment firm, put like two hundred million dollars into the company, which they have all written off. Now they're accepting it as
a total loss. They're going full that girl on this. Okay, Now, when you hear this very serious investment firm put two hundred million dollars into this business, you probably assume Jamie wow, I bet he had a good pitch, right, I actually I don't know if we're talking Sarin knows. I actually don't think that that is. That's not just qualifying to have a dogshit pitch. You know. You know who can make this clear for us is Captain Dick Ryder. Thanks
SPF told Sequoia about the so called super app. I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin, you can send money in whatever currency to any friend
anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything with you you want with your money from inside f t X. Suddenly the chat Yeah, I don't know, I feel like I can do anything I want with my debit card, Like I've never run into a thing I wanted to buy and been like, ah, I cannot know how do I even buy drugs with it?
By going to an A t M. If I were to be a person who buys drugs, which I'm not, I could go to an A t M and take out cash and purchase support your local drug dealer and banana vendor for crying out so he gives this banana pitch quote. Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia's side of the zoom lights up with partners freaking out. I love this, founder, typed one partner, I am a tin out of tin pinned another Yes, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclaimed
a third. What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SPFS vision. It wasn't a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto crypto or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself, with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. I sit tin from him, and I know it's These people are just actually like three executives doing lines of coke and once swallowing a banana with the peel still on. They're like, yes, yep,
oh my god. Okay, so it's I mean, which does kind of continue with the trend of like, you know, as as b F has never had a problem or a like anything to overcome, Like if it's this easy for him to con people into ship, like, of course you would have a god complex. You've never you've never been told no, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. It's cool. So what Sequoia was? Yeah, sorry, I have to continue this this fucking quote. And next he's going to talk about a person who works at Sequoia and is in
the room for this. I sent ten ft from him and I walked over thinking, oh shit, that was really good. Remembers Aurora. And it turns out that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting. And this is framed in the article and in all the coverage before everything fell apart. It's like, so awesome, He's so cool. This writer talks a bunch about how like Sam never stops playing video games when he's talking to this writer,
when he's having corporate meetings, he's playing video games. Basically, a hundred percent of the time. Um, and this has always mentioned like he's always working, He's always in the office, he sleeps in a beanbag chair at his desk, and it's like, no, dude, he's not always working. He's conning you. And he plays video games all the time and pretends that that's a fucking job. Um, which is great, great con good for you always working in always They're two
very different flavors of things happen exactly. Um, it's all part of the fucking con So is the fact that he always he always were like ratty old athletic shorts and like a wrinkled T shirt. Because like that's if you are a young man in the tech industry, that makes people think you're a genius, right, because genius is dressed like shit. Yeah, he's like, now, if I bring a real stink into their people are gonna like jack
up my already fake i Q score about twenty points. Yeah, and it's what you know who else dresses like ship the guy I used to buy weed from. Yeah, yeah, you know who? Also? You know who wears the same outfit of Sam Bankman Freed, my old buddy who once at a party got into an argument with the guy and broke fifteen bones in his face because they were
both drinking. Not a corporate genius. I do like that shared aesthetic where it's like, really the difference is the pet snake, that is that's the that's that's how you
truly can sniff out the africa he's based. He's the same kind of person as Elizabeth Holmes and he was again he's a confidence man, and this gets us into the Larry David ship because the thing about being a confidence man is that as long as people are convinced there's money, their money is safe and most of them don't try to pull it out, then you can keep the con going, and you can keep the fake numbers increasing, and you everyone will think you're richer and you can
actually get real money out of this. So one of the things that he did is he would pour shiploads of money into sponsorship deals and to other ventures to make his company seem legit. One way he did this, Yeah, he spent seventeen and a half million through FTX to sponsor the athletic teams that you see Berkeley. Uh. He launched a twenty million dollar ad campaign with Tom Brady
and just sell Bunchen. He offered n F T s at coach uh huh, And he spent a hundred and thirty five million dollars on the naming rights for the Miami Heats Home arena. And the purpose this is all to build confidence, right you see, you see it's the It's the same thing Crypto dot Com did, by the way with the arena, and I want to say, I was like, I feel like the Crypto dot Com arena is not long for this world, and you should I
don't recognize that as an act. Is my money safe in this thing that's a bank but not a bank? Well their name is on the arena, so it's probably legit. Here's the thing, is like, yeah, it's like now walking into the Crypto dot Com area arena, I couldn't feel less safe. I couldn't feel less secure. Like when it was the Staple Center. I'm like, oh, you know what's never going to go out of style? Little notebooks. People have been using Staples since we were cavemen. I assume. So, yes,
technology just like the worst fucking name on earth. But it infuriates me these people. So if he has a dog in the fight, I do In his interview with Vox, Sam basically admits this, albeit in a slightly careful way. Journalist so, f t X technically wasn't gambling with their money. F t X had just loaned their money to Alameda, who hadn't, who had gambled with their money and lost it. And you didn't realize it was a big deal because you didn't realize how much money it was. Same response.
And also, I thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonably cover it. Journalist says, I get how you could have gotten away with it, but I guess that seems sketchy. Even if you get away with it, Sam, it was never the intention. Sometimes life creeps up on you, um so literally that life comes at you fast. So Sam's worth taps at around twenty two billion dollars on paper. In reality, neither Alameda nor ft X had ever taken
and even close to that much money. The valuation was based entirely on nonsense calculations that were themselves based on lies from ft X. Is extremely cooked books. There's a lot more about this than we're getting into. People are
still finding this all out. There's one thing I should probably read, which is, so you know when his company collapsed, he had to step down from running it, right, And because a lot of money is still in there and a lot of like investments are still tight up in that, they put a guy in charge of the company again, right.
And there's like there's specific dudes in the business world, um whose like job is to come in when a company fucks up like this and like try and get as much money back out for the shareholders as possible to minimize the bleeding. So they kind of have like a like how they had like old Hollywood, they have like a fixer guy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, they have. And this is this fixer guy specifically, he is the guy that they brought in, um when in Ron, he took over in Ron after it fell apart in order to
try and like minimize the damage from it. So he is the guy who got brought in to deal with like the fact that this massive fucking crime happened with Enron. UM one sec. My my favorite, um, my favorite en Run memory not that you asked, um, was the women of Enron playboy spread that I got too archived during my time there. Oh god boy, did those en Ron girl bosses have their there? So the second only two women of seven eleven, which is my actual favorite spread
continue first option. This company has about a million creditors, so about a million people possibly lost their entire investment in this company, which is a stunning amount of people to take money from um. And again, we're probably we are probably looking at like five or ten billion dollars stolen something like that. Kind of unclear the exact amount, but anyway, this is what the guy in the Delaware
bankruptcy court filing. This is what the guy who was the guy who took over in Ron after it became clear that the whole company was a criminal enterprise. This is what that guy wrote about Sam's company. Oh no, never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of
trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromise systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated, and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented. Again, that's the guy who took over in Ron, literally like Bill Clinton dropping a notes post, being like never have I seen a more cheated on my wife? And like, well,
I will say it's different. This guy did not commit any of the iron crimes, right, this is the guy who comes saw them all. This guy is after he's brought in it becomes clear that none never in my career. This guy, Yeah, it's probably best to look at this guy is like an E M. T. When it becomes clear that a company that has a shipload of money in it and is central in the economy has collapsed because people broke the law. He comes in to minimize
the damage. But he was not working at in Ron previously, right, Like, it's not he's not trying to like stop anyone from getting in trouble. He's trying to minimize how many people are hurt by this anyway. Yeah, um, I just want to make clear, like that guy's anyway whatever, he's not. He's not the end he is not the end runner. He did not make in roun bad. He's just was there afterwards and was like this company is even worse.
He bought the issue of Playboy and then he pushing so I should god, there's yeah, we're we're getting close to done. I should note that before everything collapsed. Sam again, he's in the effect of altruism. He's he's he promised to donate like a couple of hundred million dollars to these e A causes. I'll lot less than that actually wound got out. Some of them were good, but a lot of it was like So he made a huge point that he was like his one of his major
priorities was pandemic prevention. Right, we have to stop the next pandemic. I'm gonna put as much money as i can to pandemic prevention. That's the best effective altruist thing that I can do. Um to talk about how well that actually worked, I want to quote from the Washington Post here. Ft X backed projects ranged from a twelve million dollars to champion a California ballot initiative to strengthen
public health programs and detect emerging virus threats. Amid lackluster support, the measure was punted four to investing more than eleven million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon bio security expert, and even a hundred and fifty thousand dollar grant to help moncleft Slough, the scientific advisor to the Trump administration's Operation Warp speed vaccine accelerator. Right his memoire. So that sounds like a giant waste of money. Right,
that sounds like none of it. Even if it was like good, it sounds like it did in the like, even if the goals are good, like well, the ballot measure failed, like it got punted, So it's not like it worked. Um, and it gets worse because SPFS fund also put a lot of money, like five million dollars into Pro Publica. And Pro Publica they've done a lot of cool stuff. They also published an extremely flawed investigation
that backed the lab leak hypothesis. Um, I'm gonna the l A Times and their analysis of this deeply flawed, flawed piece of reporting. And also, you know, we've got some notes for the l A Times as well. Yes, nobody's perfect. The The l A Times called it a train wreck, noting the article is based heavily on Chinese language documents that appear to have been mistranslated and misinterpreted, according to Chinese language experts who have piled on via
social media since its publication. It also takes as gospel or a report by a rump group of Republican congressional staff members asserting that the pandemic was more likely than not the result of a research related incident. And this has been the fact that Pro Publica published this has like provided a shipload of fuel to the It was all a fucking lab leak for China. It's China's fault.
Um Republicans. Yeah, Sam Bankman Freed funded that ship. Um and god yeah, basically none of the ship he was putting in money into that was supposed to be good really worked, and a lot of it was. So another thing the right is doing right now is they're talking about he was like the number one or number two donor to Democrats during the mid term elections. Seth McFarland. Yeah, yeah, but none of his donations worked. And also he gave it was like thirty two million he gave to the DIMS.
He gave like twenty four million to the Republicans. And the reason he was giving this money Number one, there were some like pro pandemic response candidates he wanted to back, most of whom didn't you know, do well. But also like a lot of the money was towards Republican and Democratic candidates who were going to be part of the regulation of the crypto industry because he wanted to have a seat at the table and push regulations in a
way that yeah, that would enable that is yeah exact lee. Um. So anyway, in general, nothing at Alameda or f t X was as it seemed. And that Dick writing Sequoia article Carolyn Ellison, the CEO of Alameda is he talks about her a bit, and like she frames her as like this quintessential innocent nerd girl, plucky and ethical and optimistic to show like these are the kind of you know, smart young gen z kids that are you know, building
this this great company. And like she showed up in Larpe gear to meet with Sam and talk about the future of their great financial enterprise. And she's an ethical altruist. Um. Since everything fell apart, it's come out that she and Sam were dating each other and possibly other members of the company. Um. And also people have found her here we go. People have found her tumbler um, and boy is she's sketchy as hell. Um. I'm gonna quote from
a report on her tumbler activity and decrypt dot com. Boy, howdy. When I first started my first foray into POLLI I thought of it as a radical break from my trad, pas asked, the account wrote in February, but tbh, I've come to decide that the only acceptable style of polly is at best characterizes something like imperial Chinese harem. The account went on to detail how a polyamorous dynamics should ideally function as a cutthroat market of sexual competition and subjugation.
None of this, none high, non hierarchical bullshit, the account elaborated. Everyone should have a ranking of their partners, people should know where they fall in the ranking, and there should be vicious power struggles for the ranks. God, it gets worse, Jamie.
The Ellison linked account also demonstrated a substantial preoccupation with hb D or human biodiversity, an online euphemism for the discredited fields of race science and eugenics popularized right, oh oh boy, give me one more paragraph and then we can talk about this. Jamie Ellison has for years vocalized her die Heart obsession with Harry Potter, and one post her affiliated Tumbler account tied her love of online character chrizz Is Quizzes to her pinshot for sorting Indians by
their cast, which she presumed to indicate nedic distinction. Oh my god, it even J. K. Rowling wasn't thinking something that fucked up, and that's really saying something there, someone is amazing astonishing. Tumbler is exclusively for Sherlock fan fiction and things that trigger my eating disorder. That's it. I cannot like. Oh, that's so dark, it's I almost can't
fathom it. Right, And again, there's so much. We probably will do a follow up at some point because like the fact that the fact that it was this easy for like some fucking crypto rage are the ones who reported on it to find her Tumbler where she talks about race science makes me think these guys were all probably into a lot more fucked up ship than they let on. Yeah, so we'll see, we'll see. I just we don't have the hour for me to decompress the
way I need to after hearing that sentence. Specifically, I need a cigarette. I'm going to start smoke today. And I hope she's fucking happy. Oh my god, that is
that is brutal place to land. Hopefully they're all all of their money's gone, but they probably squirreled away millions and stuff for themselves, although at least one of the articles I've read says that, like, his net worth is effectively zero now, but I don't think anyone actually knows what his net worth is right now, like and how much he got, like his company went from valued at thirty two billion dollars to most recently there's something like
six fifty dollars in actual assets left. Um. But I also kind of think he and the others probably have millions or tens of millions that they set aside um in shady ways for themselves. Yeah, I mean, well that does sound like what the Beanie Baby's guy would do, and that is my yardstick for morality. That is so um that that is very very scary to uh to consider.
I feel like guys like that the thing that is, I mean, I don't know whatever you hear about, Like it is so karmically satisfying to know that someone like SBF can can be completely bottomed out and like destroyed by something like this. But the thing is like when when rich guys like that lose everything, they just come up with worse, more hateful ideas and then come back. And that is like always what kind of scares me about that? It is so funny. Um. I don't know, Jamie,
I don't know what the solution is. That's not like I want him to have money again. I just you know, what, how can you make someone say less again? I think the podcasters dilemma. Look, here's here's where I'll land on this. You know, I don't think I don't think people should be thrown into cages generally unless there's literally no other way to stop them from harming folks. So and I
don't think that's the case with these people. So instead, I think the actual solution is to close from the outside all of the doors to that the fucking rich person apartment complex they occupy in that Bahamas development, lock it from the outside, and once a week drop in food and necessities via a helicopter and never let them leave or use the internet again. Them all just be with their friends in their in their weird little compound,
going increasingly insane with their Chinese harem ship. I don't know. I guess that's another kind of prison. But if we film it, we can make money. But then SBF might may have to face his worst fear, which is reading a book. Yeah, I guess, Like, like, my serious answer is what do you do to people like this is you stop them from ever being able to have access to money again, or start companies again, and hopefully eventually they find something to do that actually helps human beings.
And it is like like of any kind of use, Like we're going to a a grocery store there, that's a real benefit. People need to get food, and people need like that's a respectable, honest way to make a living. Um. And if any of these people were to get a job working in a safe way, they would be providing an infinitely greater benefit to the human race than they could ever have performed. Perhaps a bit more of that that ethical side of the ethical altruism you're looking. I'll
be honest. I did not come to the recording today with a solution for the prison industrial complex. But I don't. But I still don't like it. Um, I still don't love it. Um. Yeah, yeah, I have no solution. Um, But you know what I do have, Jamie, what you're plug? No you don't. I have those? Well you have them, but I'm letting you have them. Oh my god. I mean, I mean I could probably do them. If nobody wants to take this job, I'll do it. I can. I'll do them, Sophie, do you want to do them? Yeah?
I mean you can pre order Jamie's book. Um, and that that is linked in her Instagram bio. Um that you can follow her on Instagram at Jamie christ Superstar and you can follow her on Twitter at Jamie Loftus. Help if Twitter is still around. Uh. She has a podcast that she co hosts with Caitlyndt called The backtel Cast. You should listen to her many limited run series, including her most recent run, which is Ghost Church and Sophie produced along with The Vital Cast and everything every podcast
on the planet. This has now become a plug for me. Um, do I get everything, Jamie? Yeah, that's exactly what I would have said, except worse. Yeah. So pre pre pre order raw Dog. Yeah, thanks, Sophie. Yeah, preorder raw Dog. If you listen to the hot Dog episode of Bastards and didn't like it, you did like it now by the book, Yeah, legally you did like it. And if you disagree with that statement, we will send the CIA
to kill your family. Yeah. And that, and let's make sure to attribute that quote to Robert Evans specifically, and speaking specifically, Robert Evans specifically, Margaret killed Joy specifically, and myself will be doing a Behind the Bastards virtual livestream show on December eight. You can get tickets at a moment dot co slash bTB. Yeah. Also, I have a sub stack now because Twitter's not doing great. So that makes me so sad. Why I like writing things. I
got to write a thing last night. Write more things better for me than being on Twitter all the goddamn time. Yeah, you can find it at shatter zone dot sub stack dot com. Go there and I will be writing. I'll try to write something every week. Maybe I won't, maybe all of this will will fall apart, be austin time like tears in the rain. Or maybe you'll get a new thing for me every week. There's no way to
know every time. Half the time, when I get something from someone's substack, because I have subscribed to quite a few, but every time I get a message from someone's substack, it's always like I'm so sorry and like I didn't notice. Just give me the content and I'll send to hear about Yeah, yeah, it's fine, Look we all I don't know. I'm meaning to write more stuff as opposed to just tweeting ship posts. So maybe it will happen, maybe it won't.
There's no way to know, perfect by Behind the Bastards is a production of cool zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.