Nick Bilton, Roben Farzad & Molly White

us about what the hell is happening there. Then we'll talk to Molly White, who writes the amazing blog web three is going just great about f t X and SPF and many of the other woes of the crypto industry. But first we have the host of NPRS Full Disclosure and here and now, Robin fars Odd. Welcome to Fast Politics. Robin, thank you for having me, Molly. What a joy, what flattery? Oh well, I'm thrilled. It's like there's so much ship

going on right now. Excuse my French. The economy and inflation and the numbers and are they better are they worse? So my first question for you is here we are, And again I always feel like my feelings do not necessarily drive with what has actually happened. In my heart, it feels like the economy is better than we thought it was going to be am I wrong. What the hell is happening? The economy has got deep power to it.

I don't know where this money is left over from, if it was extraordinary stimulus from the pandemic or the fact that many of us are working from home and not commuting or not spending on wardrobe. But you can't really kill it as much as the fete is hiked. And now you've hiked more than four points in a year. This is the biggest surge of inflation we've had in forty years. Many of us have never experienced capital I inflation that they keep taking rates up. But nope, we're

still doing the fomo travel fomo dining out tickets. I mean, pandemic be damned, rs v B damned, fever be damned. And I was at Chippolle late the other day and these, uh, these hucksters actually shook me down for three dollars for an extra dollar of chicken. I remember what extra chicken was a dollar twenty five. All you need to know about this economy is Chipotle. I mean, you have a willingness to pay. I don't even like it that much. The kids send me there, but they extort you every

time they have pricing power. And that's the way things are headed. And there's a tip button now too. Okay, so you finance people, economists, people do with the economy, very involved in Chippotele. Is inflation worse than we thought? I mean, the numbers went down. The Biden administration seems very joyous. They're not. I mean they're still high, right, I mean, explain to us where we are with inflation. You have the Federal Reserve look at things in terms

of bifur k like a duality of economy. You want stable prices and full employment. We have arguably more than full employment, with unemployment at three and a half percent. In fact, we have too many job openings. No by are willing to take these jobs. I think the Fed privately, if you've got Jerome Powell beer or vermouth at a bar, you tell you I'd gladly trade you know, five percent

unemployment for two three percent inflation. It used to be that we just got used to two or three percent inflation. It's closer to seven percent now, and it hit as much as nine nearly ten percent, and that's really hard to snuff out. I mean by hiking rates up. In theory, you're making borrowing so difficult for people. You're making short term treasury yields or maybe bank saving zeald so attractive that people don't want to spend the money and practice.

Like you said, there's a lot of money out there and there's still plenty to spend and FOMO I call it f O m O if you're missing out versus f O m C, the Federal Open Market Committee. That's really what this boils down to sow the raising interest rates. The Fed is raising interest rates because of this inflation in the hopes of slowing it down. It's making the

mark it's mad, yeah, and it's making things perverse. Like on many days you have a bowl run on bad news, because if there's bad news, there's this idea that, oh, it's going to make the Fed thing twice about hiking again, or we'll have a sooner end to this rate hiking cycle. If there's good news, like, whoa, we're gonna we're gonna take rates up to six percent. This is worse than

we thought. And so there's a complete disconnect now between news you should be rooting for and news investors and speculators are rooting for and this has actually been the worst year for diversification in recent history. It used to be that if you're in stocks and bonds, you get ballast, you get protection. But everything has gotten taken out and shot this year, so an enormous amount of confusion and capitulation among investors. So this is real. The markets are

not the economy. That's right. It's really not that way. I mean, you know, we first came to the United States, and this is a little cliche that I tell this story. One of my coming of age things is my dad, there's an immigrant. It was very proud to take me to the Savings Bank of America in North Dade County, Florida and give me my first past book savings account in two and I was a kindergartener, and I remember there were toasters and blenders everywhere, and the CDs were

paying fifteen sixteen percent. That's when the FED was last killing inflation. Banks were begging you to give them your money. And if we have the highest inflation of four years, we don't have anything like that at a bank. I walk into a b of A or a chase, and they feel like they're doing me a favor if I open up a CD or a money market account. Things have changed so much. I haven't felt inflation in my

adult life. There's been a lot of crying wolf. I know, you're gonna let this thing out of the bag, and you're not gonna be able to put it back in the bag. And it's finally visited it this year. And I speak to traders and investors in Wall Street people and they're just isn't an institutional memory. A lot of the greenhorns out there have never had to deal with

a foe like this. We we we largely have broken the back of inflation for more than a generation, but we haven't this time, right, I mean, inflation isn't going up anymore, but it's not going down. And they've raised rates almost every month, though this month they only raised by half a percent. Yeah, but again we raised by a chunky four full points, more than four points, and we have another hike in the offing I think in February, and inflation you could say, is getting sanded down a bit,

but seven point one percent that's still chunky. And I gotta tell you the theoretical stuff you see the government stats, they don't jive with what you see in the grocery store Avian flu has eggs at nearly four dollars. Or people are complaining about Roman and lettuce, you know, basic staples. Gas prices for much of this year choked people off, and the Chipotle factor, to me, that's still I don't want to I want to never talk about that restaurant again. Well,

I mean, I just don't think it's a good. Mexican food is good. I don't either. There's better food out there. But they single handily caused inflation. They send so much power. They single handily caused hassa avocado. Back when I lived in Manhattan, I used to get sweet hass avocados fors and regale my men girlfriend now wife with him. Now I can't buy one for less than four bucks. That's neither here nor there, but go ahead. That really is yes, Well,

I mean I guess it shows inflation. Gases though down right, I mean gas is down now right, And that's was one of the big drivers, right, gases down. Labor is not down enough. I think that people are still feeling that stores cannot beg people to show up for job interviews, much less show up for the job. You've had to up the anti what was effectively now the de facto minimum wage in many cities in service sector jobs, not

statutory necessarily as fifteen dollars and fifteen dollars. And there's much more clout now in terms of negotiating for tips a tip option. You see what's happening with Starbucks. I had recently a person on my show who's turning his coffee shop into a bit of a Kibbutz collective type thing, a co ownership thing with his baristas because there's no management track, there's no equity track. It's and and then on top of that, getting people back to the office

is like pulling teeth. Now have we If we had more of an economic shock and unemployment was back up to six percent or seven percent, I think that would expose a lot of honesty and price discovery in the market. But we're still enjoying less than four percent unemployment. Some of this has to do with immigration, absolutely, And this is where you know somebody's got to do a great thing on the Chamber of commerce is cloud versus MAGA.

You have so many people who are nominally GOP voting and everything, like the CEO of grocery store chains and restaurant chains and everything. Privately, they tell you that I've been killed on the lack of immigration, whether it's was the Trump administratration channeling hostility. I used to depend not just on illegal or undocumented workers, but people who would come here seasonally and work in my diner. I could

get a short order chef. There's this tradition, a history have not just in fruit picking and agriculture and painting and towering the roof and landscaping, but on repaytrading money back to Mexico and Central America and other places. And we so bad, badly need that immigration right now because there just aren't there too many openings, and the wages, the clearing price wages for these things which aren't even effective, are driving up menu costs and everything else. You're seeing

it in agriculture, You're seeing it in home building. You're seeing it just across the board. And it's a conversation that I think the diminishing chamber of commerce wing of the GOP needs to have with its cultural right wing. I mean, maybe you could have found this somewhere in that two thousand and twelve post boredom of the election, which is in Embers somewhere I don't even know. Let me ask you what happens now? Where do we think

this goes? Right? There's no fix for immigration on the horizon, so the labor markets are not going to loosen. I mean, the only way labor markets get looser is by adding more people. I mean, are we just stuck in this forever? I think here's where the FED would privately like to see higher unemployment, because you'll see slack in wages, and you'll see people who were unwilling to show up at work more willing to show up at work. Do you remember what happened at the outset of this pandemic? We've

really we visited unemployment in the high teams. The TV news networks had all this aerial footage of long breadlines, people waiting to get that that that was very short lived and it immediately shot back down. That exposes a lot of truth, you know, as as Warren Buffett says, and it's a little cliche. You see when the tide goes out, you see who's not wearing swim trunks. It's entirely possible that way. And the FED, while probably doesn't want to tip the economy into a full blown recession,

wants to see higher pain so that wages subside. So much is so much as captured here in wages and and the vicious wage price spiral of people demanding higher wages, bosses and everything, increasing menu prices, passing it down to consumers, consumers going to their bosses getting higher wages. We're still feeling that. And now I'm going to sound like a socialist, but higher wages are good, especially in the world or

cost of living, you know. I mean part of this is there hasn't the wage growth hasn't kept up with the economy. I mean, don't you think that share our by backs and things like that, where profits were put onto the managerial class and the wealthy and not given to the workers was kind of how we got here in the first place. And you're saying this from the upper east Side, not the upper west side. I mean, I'm from the z Bars district. I know this, I

know this field. But yeah, no. But here's the problem is if you have inflation at north of wage growth, then you're still losing money in real time. But the good news is that workers rested back a tremendous amount of cloud in the battle between capital and labor. This has been a real defining moment of workers who just didn't want to show up. You've read about quiet quitting, about people who just wanted to lie flat and do these other things. And there's still that cloud in whatever

peculiar area we are in this economic cycle. The worker right now, the blue collar worker, the service sector worker, has an enormous amount of bargaining power and that just hasn't been seen over decades where there this is this learned helplessness. The money is going to go first to shareholders and dividends and management and profit, and now you can't. You're leaving money on the table if you don't have workers, so you need to pay them. So that actually is impositive. Yes,

that's an equilibration. In the past, you did and after the financial crisis two thousand and eight, two thousand nine, I remember I was covering Lehman and everything, and people are saying, if this doesn't get workers in the streets with pitchforks, the fact that you're bailing out Wall Street, I don't know what will, but it didn't. I mean Obama took power. They say, don't waste a good crisis. Wall Street got to recapitalize with dividends again, and then

we went back to business as usual. The pandemic. Fundamentally, it's a it's a sea change moment where people who are putting up with crap, working at diners, working at Walmart's, working at grocery stores with I rate crabby customers coming out and getting hero pay at the outset and seeing

that hero pay go away. And on top of the fact that something like Obamacare has been normalized now and you comport health insurance, don't underestimate how important that's been, and it's gonna be hard to take that bone back from the dog's mouth that I think together has really given the worker much more cloud. Watch what's happening at Starbucks very closely. I think it's fascinating. And then on top of that, you know tips tips, You know you

can't go anywhere now without a tip option. Wait, I want to talk to talk to you about unions because one of the things that we talk a lot about here are unions, and uh, you know, I come from this union family. My grandfather was very in welve with unions. So, like, I want to know, it seems like we're in a period right now where there are huge victories for unions. Starbucks at least that's an ongoing victory, small victories. Amazon is in fight trying to you know, kill a young union.

But then there are also some really terrible things that have happened, like what's happening with the railroad workers. So we are are away with unions. I still think unions are in the part of a long inexorable a client generationally. You tell me, if gen Y gen Z really feels this clamoring to join a union, it's a hard sell. I think if there was more unanimity, if you saw all of these Amazon unionization pushes be slam dunks. If you saw Starbucks slam dunk with unionization across the country.

Right you're even seeing a move to have a three day work stoppage across a hundred stores. There just isn't that unanimity journalists where the journalist unions that are banded together, I mean various things that have happened. They had a

lot of power. There's a Life magazine story I read, I think from nineteen seventy two on the power of unions, and so much of that is curtailed and what's gone out the door with that is a lot of the Democrats blue collar cloud, which was siphoned away from Reagan as you're feeling right now with lesser educated blue collar workers kind of sifting away to cultural issues. I think

that that's largely continuing. And I don't see younger people, I at least anecdotally or quality quantitatively, don't see evidence that they're lining up to join unions. I mean, do you think, though, I just want to it back to the second, it does seem like the only way you can protect those lower weight turners would be unions. It's possible. I would, you know, I would ask these Starbucks workers.

I know many baristas. Some feel that they get much more self determination in terms of banding together with the store and using social media and the other stores, and you know, shaking down a regional executive like the Starbucks National movement. A lot of the problem is some of these jobs are transient type jobs, Amazon warehouse workers. A lot of people take these jobs as a stepping stone

to something else and can't see themselves in unization. That's why this barista who I recently had on Eric Spivak of Alchemy Coffee, said I need to take this into my own hands, because I don't want people to think of this as a transitional job. I want them to have ownership. I want them to potentially have equity. Now that on a kind of a Maslow's hierarchy of needs level. If insurance is provided for, I need to give you

a path. And if you have ownership, you're gonna think twice it's about waste, or you're gonna think twice about absentee is um and all these other things. And I think that's a fascinating experiment. And I would hope that the likes of Amazon and Starbucks and others look at it that way instead of kind of zero some it's either my shareholders or my workers, right right, right, right right. It's a good point. I have one two part question here. What the funk is Elon Musk doing? Is he playing

three dimensional chess? And I just don't understand the process of how distressed debt is, uh. I mean, you know, there's a lot of theories going on. I mean, is he having some kind of meltdown or is he playing some kind of three dimensional jazz? Do you remember what is it? Producers, Bali, Stock and Bloom right now? Oh yes, springtime for Hitler and Germany. Yeah, there's a little bit of springtime for Hitler going on here. Do you want

to sabotage Twitter as a going concern? So you, as a person with a hundred and fifty billion dollar Tesla equity a t M can buy the distressed debt back for the reluctant banks at a fraction of what you bought it for. I mean, it seems like a ludd Eye type thing to do you think that's going on? I can't get in the guy's mind. You're already you know what if what do we say, Dianeu, It would have been good enough and you just ran Tesla and SpaceX and change the world type person. You had goodwill

and you're the wealthiest person on the planet. But you had to be a big shot, did you. You had to go and buy Twitter and blow forty four billion dollars on it and let everybody go and then have these you know, tilted windmills with journalists and other people on the platform as advertisers flee. What's amazing to me is that people he can entirely not care that he has forty billion or probably forty eight billion dollars. I think he sold three billion in Tesla stock, probably to

retire debt. At some point. Money doesn't matter. You just have so much of it, what are you gonna do eat more? So I can't get into his head. One thing that really bothers me, and I mentioned it on TV this morning, is Twitter's management that was there, Yes it was a publicly traded company. Was the only consideration that this was the highest bid that they could get in the markets? That they not have an independent director's committee that said, well, we can't risk having a man

child narcissist run the company into the ground. No, they just they took the money and ran. And that's a problem with me, is that that money in an efficient market, right, you should have it should be more than the shareholders, their stakeholders. You had half your employees a shit can' you have the standards people that are gone. You have a person out there willy nilly claiming that he's you know, an assassination risk, and I'm gonna take public information down.

It's turned into such a sad ship show. And everybody who's on Twitter has a love hey relationship with it already. And I'm just frustrated that, you know, you can't have something like a Google bird that just shows up and replicates this experience in a non nefarious, kind of more organic way that we're all kind of beholden to this guy. Give me you're under over on where this goes. I think that he keeps owning it. I don't know how

he I don't think he cares anymore. It's private, and I think he keeps selling Tesla stock to get the bank out of it. What leverage does anybody have to get him out of it? And we hang on because our accounts are all there. I mean you are invested significantly, Molly in Twitter. I mean you could go to Masodon, you could go to substock and people will follow you. But what's going to happen? He will then lose control

of Tesla? Right, A simple economic question here. If you have a choice between Olden stock and Tesla or owning stock in Twitter, wouldn't you rather have stuck in Tesla. I think he's still worth a hundred and fifty billion dollars substantially in Teslas, so much of Tesla. I don't see him losing control, but it is. It should be

very worrisome the Tesla shareholders. The stock has gotten murdered over the past year, and the fact that he's redeeming the stock and selling it on the way down, not probably not for financial planning reasons, but more than likely than not to retire the bank's debt. If that wasn't the case, then the banks could come in and say, you're not hitting performance milestones, we could take the company, we could rest control from you. And I think he's

forestalling that. So in the end he just keeps selling Tesla stock and keeps buying Twitter stock. It's this lud eye type arrangement. The Twitter debt, it's private now he'd be buying it from the banks, and it's almost Citizen Kane, like it's this combination of narcissism, ego paranoia with the soussante of kind of right wing heroism and a man

with so many followers. And I'm probably gonna get banned myself for saying this, but you look at you look at the great reporters who suddenly it felt like squid Game last night, Like gosh, should I say this? Should I change the you and musk to a V to kind of conceal my footprints. You don't think there's a grand plan here, I just can't see it. Why would you do that? If you come in, you should be worried. You know how much debt he put on this company.

You should be worried about advertisers. You should be genuflecting before people. If you're a torch bearer for speech, free speech, then be it. You know, worst case scenario, he decides to spit it out in two years when tech markets back up it, let's say nine of what he bought it. It doesn't matter to him. Again, he's worth a hundred

and fifty billion dollars at his peak. He was worth well north of that, but his net worth is hemorrhaging because Twitter share I mean Testlas shareholders are livid right now, and they have a right to be. The man took his eyes off the ball. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Oh it's my joy. Nick Bilton is a special correspondent Vanny Fair and author of Hatching Twitter. Welcome Too Fast Politics. Nick Bilton, thank you so much for having me on. I'm so excited to talk about all the lunatics out

there in the technology world. Well, I felt we had to talk about it because there's so much going on. I feel like for such a long time, Facebook was this problem that needed to be dealt with, right, and there's certainly a lot of Facebook news about its involvement with in multiple genocides. Can we talk about Mark Zuckerberg? Yeah, I mean I kind of feel like we need to

talk about all of them. It's like you've got Duck and Facebook, You've got on on Twitter, You've got SPF and f TX, and like it's almost like their robots and someone spilled water on them and they just broke and we like finally got to see it will happen. And I feel like, for the first time ever that the government is actually aware of what's going on to it feels like the end of days for the tech world. Oh see, I like this take you wrote about zapp

being surrounded by sycophants. You know, she seems to me like he's having this sort of quietest downward spiral of the three of them. Yeah. I think you're right. I mean, I think you know, you look at the market cap of Facebook over the last year has fallen several hundred billion dollars, and I think that they're the reason for that is that he picked the wrong bad look. I think the thing about Mark is He's an incredibly smart, incredibly driven person, but at the same time he is

not an ideas guy. Every idea has ever had has essentially constole them and something else right, borrowed, or whatever you want to call it. I think stolen, I'll do it. Stolen is a good term. And he had this original idea of like, oh, the metaverse, Like that's cool, I don't have to like go talk to other humans in real life. I can do it on a on a screen that's like duct taped to my face. And he made the wrong back, because no one wants to go

live in the fucking metaverse. Like if anything, COVID taught us that technology allows us to be connected to other people when we don't have the ability. But the end of Covid Shodah's that we don't want that, we want human interaction. And I think Zuck is the opposite and made the worst petable as a results of that. So we have Zuka metaverse. He's killing his company, but he's doing it quietly and he's spending a lot of time in Hawaii. Then we have this incredible elon whatever this is?

What is this? Honestly, I've been covering Twitter since the day of the company started in one form or another. I've known all these guys for years and years and

years and years, Elon included. And if you would have told me ten years ago when I wrote a book about the company, if you just said, write me a list of a hundred thousands sinnaire, let's just say a million scenarios of what Twitter, you know, could end up looking like in the future, This would not have made it on that list, Like Ellen buying the company, literally obliterating everything that has been built up over the past seventeen years, and to the point that now I just

think he's trying to destroy I don't actually know what he's doing. And I think that you know, you're seeing his lunacy play out in public. I think in the past I've heard many, many stories about how crazy he was at SpaceX and Tesla, and I think that he was surrounded by and insulated by people that you know, ensure that that lunacy was used for good and off evil. And I think Twitter, he's not surrounded by that, and it's all in public, and it's, I mean, honestly, one

of the craziest stories I've ever seen. Do you think and then SBF let's talk about because that's like the third billionaire in the Tripic of broken billionaires. There are many more broken billionaires right now. Now he's a for one of the story of the story of the week is the se Tripic. He's going to jail and quickly, well, he's actually currently Yeah, he's currently sitting in a jail cell in the Bahamas, which I think is such a sweet revenge for what he did to you know, everyone.

You know, Look, I think he is a I don't know, the sociopath, that's the right description for him. I just think he's just an arrogant brat from what I can tell. And he thought he was smarter than everyone else, and clearly was was very, very far from that. And he squandered billions of dollars that belonged to other people and

thought he was just gonna get away with it. And thank god that you know, the government when arrested him, and you know, based on the potential charges that are against him, he could spend up a hundred and fifty five years in jail, Like this is a Bernie made off, you know, size screw up. And I think that he's going to be in a lot of trouble, Like I truly believe that it actually will. This will be one of those whether actually will be justice served. What has

happened to Ellen? It seems to me a sort of he was maybe right wing, he was maybe slight less right wing. It's not clear, but he's clearly been radicalized. I don't know. I mean, look, I think put aside the stupid Q and on tweet this week, and like, I have a different point of view on this, Like

I think most people. I'll speak anecdotally from people I know in Hollywood, people I know and tech people I know, in the arts, you know, so on and so forth, like and pretty much you know every dinner party, every play day, every school conversation over the past couple of years.

And I think what happened, my personal opinion is what happened is a lot of people were on the left and anti Trump, and then when Trump went away, the left started to kind of eat its own, which it always does, and I think that it put people in it in a situation where they were like, I don't I love I agree with that. Like I'll give you one example. In Los Angeles, there's this build a past

called and what it was was you had. For whatever reason, I think it's because of the way these the schools are designed in America, but in Los Angeles specifically, all the schools were surrounded by homeless and canbras like elementary schools and middle schools and high schools and more so in poor neighborhoods, and so there were kids that were literally walking through homeless encampments of people shipping on the sidewalk and smoking meth and all these other things to

get to school. And people were like, this is not cool, Like, you know, let's move them across the streets. So there was this rule put in place that said, let's move the homeless in canblems fivest away from from this school's daycares and East centers. And there were people on this extreme left that went berserk and they were like, you

can't do that to the homeless people. And I think that there's a million instances like that of issues around trans issues, this, all these things where people can't agree, and I think that it drove a lot of people to the center, Ellen being one of them. I mean, I don't think Ellen's in the center though, right, I think, yeah,

why I think elon is is right of center. I think where I think where Ellen goes sol that is that he like his like Fouci Cans spariracy theories and his you know Q and non tweets and and the deep state and things like that. Like I would put him in like kind of like a Joe Rogan like right wing. I wouldn't put him in like a Ben Shapiro right wing kind of bucket. You know what I'm saying. I think it's like there's a difference between it, and I'm not justifying anything that Ellen does. I think he's

a nut job. The biggest problem is he now has one of the large, loudest voices in the world. He's got a hundred million followers on Twitter, and he's the stuff he's talking about is just insanity, total insanity. I mean, I think there certainly is some kind of internal Los Angeles debate about the homeless problem, which has radicalized from some rich people who live in Los Angeles. But I'm curious, you know, he technically lives in Texas, doesn't he. No, No,

I'm not. I'm just saying I'm not talking about him and his viewpoints on homelessness and long I'm using that as an example to talk about how there are these There are a million stories, right, and they are issues that where people who are liberal right. And actually it's not just rich people in Los Angeles. It's a lot of poor people in Los Angees that were pushing for this because there it was primarily this was happening in the poor neighborhoods and their kids were being forced to

walk through the stuff. This stuff is not happening in Brentwood and Beverly Hills. Like I think that there are a million stories like this that have driven a like eighty percent of people that were on the left to the center. And I think that most of them have stayed left of center, and they still you know, a pro choice and anti gun and this that and the other. It's just some of these these like extreme issues where

they don't agree with. But what happened with Elon was he just kept driving the truck and he went he kept going right and writer and he's just in some weird like nebulous like Nomam's land of I don't even know what his viewpoints are anymore. I think they changed by the hour. It's just it's it's it's unlike anything I've ever seen. I think he likes to be liked, right, because he said, like democrats will really mean to me, right, Yeah,

I totally agree. I think I think most of them want to be liked at the end of the day, and they're like very insecure people. And uh, I mean, did you see what happened with the Dave Chappelle's show this week? Yeah, let's talk about that. So that was in California. He went on stage and a Dave Chappelle show. I mean I listened to it. It sounded like they were booing him. It was San Francisco. Was in San Francisco, Yeah, so he was. It was San Francisco. Dave Chappelle was

doing a set. Eighteen thousand people in the arena, and Dave said, who wants to see the richest guy in the world. And Ellen comes out with its arms in the air like some national hero. And at first there was some booze and some claps, and then it was just old booze and for five minutes straight. I talked to people who were there. For five minutes straight, it was just booze. And Dave Chappelle was like, it looks

like this. Some Twitter Twitter employees in the audience, which is of course funny, but after the fact, I mean, he was like, I've talked to people who said they don't like Ellen and even they felt bad for him, and it was just this constant like boo boo boo. Afterwards, you know, this is just typical Ellen, he tweeted, it was only the woke people in the audience that were booing. Excuse me, it's a Dave Chappelle show. There was no

one woke in the audience, like they don't know. Those people wouldn't go and see Dave Chappelle because of all the stuff he said about fans people. So it's like the people who were booing him were the people that probably used to adore him. I don't think he gets it.

So it does seem to me like if you look at what's happened with SPF, there is a sense in which the government is getting more right involved and quicker, and you know, there's been a hesitation I think on a part of a lot of legislators to legislate tech, despite the sort of fact that tech companies pretend to want to be legislated. Of course they don't. We have Section to Thirday trending like every day and Twitter. Where does this go? I think that you know, have you

been following chat g t P the new AI? Yeah? I was gonna ask you about that, but this is this is to answer that question. Okay, So chat g t P. It's this new artificial intelligence system that has built on a concept that was introduce in two thousand seventeen which completely changed AI and natural language processing so that you could it could start to understand humans the way humans understand humans and start to speak to humans in the same way. And it's I've been covering TEX

for twenty years. It's the most astounding, scariest thing I've ever seen because it is so good at what it does and we'll get so much better. And a lot of people were reaching out to me who are in the tech community and saying this is terrifying. It should not be out there. It needs to be regulated in the same way that nuclear power and nuclear weapons and all these other things need to because it has the ability to decimate the job market. Fifty to eighty million

jobs could advantage. And these are not garbage people and and sidewalk cleaners. These are like lawyers, accountants, writers, all of these crazy creative industries. And what I heard this week is that the White House was immediately making calls and that there's a task force there that's involved in AI and they were like starting to reach out to people.

I've never seen that happen before. Usually it takes, you know, a year or two years, five years before the White House and the U. S. Government is aware of the things that are happening. You still that play out with bitcoin to ten years before they were they realized. And so I do think that we're getting to a point where the people who are working in government are becoming more aware of the things that are happening and quicker.

But there's also massive limitations on what they can do because we live in a time where the U. S. Constitution was not written for things like chat, GQP and Twitter and other tech that exists today, and so there I don't know how these things go from them being aware of them to change actually happen. Predict for us, and if you're wrong, don't worry, We'll make fun of you for it. I'll be wrong, I'll be wrong. Predict

for us. Where this goes with the elan you could say to me, predict to me like how long humanity will live before we kill ourselves with some kind of rogue whatever. And I would probably get it more aptly correct than if I were to try to predict where it goes with the one. I'll give you what I've heard as a addiction. The prediction is that he defaults on the debt, and no bank on planet Earth is going to want to own Twitter and deal with it, so they come to some sort of agreement where it

pays fifty cents on the dollar or even less. He continues to gut the staff, advertising continues to plummet. No one pays for the blue check marks, at least not not a large number of people, and more and more people on the left or any anybody who has center to left, which is a lot of people, continues to leave the platform, which has been happening like in mass this week. And I think it gets to a point where he breaks it. And then at the end of that, uh,

it's a shell of itself. It's some sort of right wing kind of true social like thing. And he goes back to play with his rockets in his cars, and he loses for you for billion dollars. That's my prediction. That was depressing. Thank you, Nick Filton, of course, thank you for having me on. I know you, our dear listeners are very busy and you don't have time to sort through the hundreds of pieces of pundentry each week. This is why every week I put together a newsletter

of my five favorite articles on politics. If you enjoy the podcast, you will love having this in your inbox every Friday. So sign up at Fast Politics pod dot com and click the tab to join our mailing list. That's Fast politics pod dot com. Molly White is a crypto researcher and critic, and she writes the blog Web three is going just great. Welcome to Fast Politics, Molly. Thanks, it's been a bad week for crypto. Yeah, that's I

think an understatement. Let's talk first about f t X and what's happening with s b F. Yeah, the acronyms are a little bit a lot so f t X, you know, and major cryptocurrency exchange that until somewhat recently was the second largest in the world, but is now bankrupt and the subject of some fraud investigations thanks to its founder and former CEO Sam Bankman. Freed, who's often shortened to SPF. So you have been covering this pretty hardcore.

Explained to me sort of how you got to this story. Yeah, So I follow the crypto industry pretty closely. I maintain a blog called Web three is Going Just Great, which is a sarcastic title because tracks many frauds and scams and hacks and just general disasters in the cryptocurrency and Web three industry, and so f t X and its explosion. The past month or so has been under that per view, I would say, But you know, it's something that people

find interesting. I think fraud is clear at this point that will have in packs on many, many people, and so I've been doing what I can to try to help people understand what happened, the context in which it happened, and you know, the impact and reflections that should have on the crypto industry as a whole. I just kind of want you to talk about SPF and and sort of a little bit about him, because he's got this sort of he has a ship going. It's pretty interesting, right.

I mean, I think a lot of these figures in the crypto industry becomes sort of larger than light, and each of them seems to have their own little persona. But Sam Bankman Freed is an a M I T graduate. You know, he is a pretty nerdy guy. He absolutely plays that up by you know, he's always a little bit disheveled. He wears shorts all the time and and like FTX branded T shirts, and he always looks kind

of like he just woke up. He claims at least to sleep in a bean bag chair in the f t X office, despite having a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas that he could avail himself of. And you know, he has really made this brand for himself as sort of a boy genius who created this hedge fund or this rather this quantitative trading firm, and then this crypto exchange and made himself a billionaire at a fairly young age.

I would say a lot of that is sort of a crafted persona that has been used really to make people trust him and believe that he might be the next nerdy kid who comes up with a billion dollar company, you know, in the wake of other nerdy tech personalities like Mark Zuckerberg in folks like that. Can we talk about the parents, because I'm telling you the parents as a Jewish mother myself, I don't know why this speaks

to me. Yeah, so his parents are kind of an interesting feature of this story, which, you know, it's a fraud case for sure, you know it's a question of fraud and it's a crypto collapse, but it also has this very sort of bizarre drama behind it with some of the personalities who were involved. And some of those personalities are Sam Bankman Freed's parents, who are both Stanford

law professors. They are specifically knowledgeable about compliance, which you would think might have been useful knowledge to share with their son. And he sort of like made his brand that like, I'm an expert because of my parents. Right. Well, he definitely played on the fact that he is American. He is, you know, from a prestigious background, both in his own education but also in his family's background as Stanford law professors. So yes, I mean I think he

did really lean on that. I'm going to get to a larger question, but just talk about what the mother said. The mother has had some great lines in this drama. Yeah, I mean, his parents reactually to this have been somewhat strange. You know, they they were in attendance in the court hearing that happened. I want to say it was a

state before yesterday. In the in the in the Bahamas, he had a court hearing to determine if he should be granted bail, and his mother apparently was sort of audibly laughing when he was referred to as a fugitive, and apparently at various times his father put his fingers in his ears when the the hearing was ongoing, which is just sort of strange behavior. I mean, I can definitely see how it would be traumatic for parents to see their son in you know, appearing in court in handcuffs.

But on the other hand, they are Stanford law professors. You would sort of expect they might have some composure

in this. But you know, who's to say, I suppose and he bought them a penhouse, right, Yeah, So some of the real estate that was purchased by f t X in the Bahamas was in his parents names, and you know, his parents definitely were not divorced from what was happening at f t X. When when this first started happening, I was a little bit skeptical of, you know, people bringing up his parents because you know, just because you're the son of a law professor doesn't necessarily mean

you have inherited, you know, knowledge of the law from birth. But I did then learn that, you know, his father was actually fairly involved in f t X. He was directly involved in some of the philanthropy that was happening and some of the various other programs that f t X was putting on, And so, you know, I think it is reasonable to pay some attention to what might

have been going on there. There's a lot of talk fd X, and there's a lot of talk about and f t S and what do they get wrong about crypto? I think one thing that's happening, especially recently in the wake of the ft X collapse, is the idea that these are really isolated incidents. You know, that this was just an issue at fraud Sam Bank men Freed is just one bad apple. This is not a systemic problem. It is not reflective of issues in the crypto industry

as a whole. H The crypto industry is always very quick to dissociate itself from bad actors and from disasters that happen. But these disasters happen all the time. I mean, like my blog specifically follows disasters in the crypto industry, and it's usually at least one a day, and that's hacks and scams and you know, bankruptcys and things like that. This is not an issue of a one off problem.

This is absolutely representative of crypto as a whole. And I think that the media has to be careful when it comes to repeating the lines that are coming out of the crypto industry, which is very much motivated to maintain as much as possible of a mirror of respectability here. So let's talk about that hearing yesterday, Senate hearing on crypto. I'm going to have you debunked something Stu bed as

opposed to what you've been doing this whole time. Elon Musk, perhaps you've heard of him, had a tweet that said that SBF is not going to face an investigation because he gave a lot of money to democratic politicians. Yes, okay, So now he's in jail, he has denied bail, waiting for extradition. He's probably going to get in the new year January February brought back to America. He's likely going to go to jail for a long time. This investigation

seems like it's moving very fast, relatively speaking. People online, many of whom are hopefully bought um have been saying, well, they got to him before he could testify. His testimony was published yesterday. Talk to me about his testimony and also just how you know everything else. Yeah, So that's been a pretty popular conspiracy theory fairly recently has been that Sam Bankman freed is going to just get off scott free because he made all of these large donations

to Democratic candidates and committees and things like that. But that ignores is that he also made substantial donations to Republicans as well, he just was quieter about them. He made them through sort of back channels and was not making headlines for it. So I think the idea that Sam Bington freed himself is, you know, this huge supporter

of the Democrats, is a little bit overblown. But I think also the idea that he is just going to get away with all of his fraud in various crimes without any prosecution is kind of a silly thing to say now that he is in custody and has had charges filed against him by the Attorney General of the Southern District of New York, the SEC, and the CFTC. I saw an amusing article this morning or yesterday in the American Prospect that said if the Forest Service could

have filed charges against him, they would have. You know, people are really cracking down on him. As far as the testimony thing, that isn't interesting question. He was scheduled to testify in front of the House on Tuesday, and he was arrested in the Bahamas the night before, and so he was unable to appear for that testimony. And

some of the Congress members did bring that up. They questioned why that arrest would happen at that time when it would presumably be in the interest of the prosecutors to have Sam Bankman free testify in front of Congress under oath for hours. You know, they could potentially add lying to Congress to his charges if he did lie to Congress, which you know, he spent on a bit

of a lying tour recently, so that seems likely. That was something that someone asked the Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York during a hearing that or during a press conference they had about the charges, and and the the U S Attorney said that it was a coincidence they had filed the charges the week before and then the indictment had come down the friday before, and so it was just a matter of waiting for law enforcement to act. And it was not an intentional thing.

Who's really to say, I mean, I don't have any more visibility into that than anybody else, but some Congress people did seem a little bit concerned about the timing the idea that aunt voluntary testimony. And remember he had said, I mean, didn't you interview him in a Twitter spaces? Yeah, I had the opportunity to ask him a couple of questions, like the day that he was arrested, several hours before, I mean, somebody asked him about the testimony and he

was like, yeah, I think I'm gonna do it. Right at that point, he had committed to testifying in front of Congress, but he had not committed to appearing in front of the Senate, who was having a hearing the day after. And so I asked him first why was he going to be appearing virtually in front of Congress instead of in person? And then I asked why he did not plan to testify in front of the Senate, and he said that he was needed in the Bahamas,

which is ridiculous. Because he is not involved with ft X in any way. The current executives who were handling the ft X bankruptcy, you're not involving him. They're not asking questions of him at this point, so there is probably nothing important for him to be doing in the Bahamas.

He also said he was overbooked, which was a silly thing to say when his bookings seemed to be various interviews on Twitter spaces and in various other places, which I would not think would be more important than testifying in front of the Senate. Yeah, me and wild stuff. I want to talk to you about Mr Wonderful versus Elizabeth Warren. Yes, I saw that you tweeted it. It was a pretty amazing bit of amazing Nous talked to us about this Senate hearing and what it meant and

how badass Elizabeth Warren knows. So. Yeah. The Senate brought in for witnesses, one of whom was Kevin O'Leary, who was a paid spokesperson for f t X. F t X it paid him fifteen million dollars to become basically a brand ambassador, a position that he fulfilled quite adequately. I would say he was chilling for FTXIT basically every opportunity, and now that it's collapsed, he's still been very friendly

to Sam Bankman freed. I mean he said in an interview at one point that he would fund Sam Bankman Freed again. And this was after the evidence of fraud began to come out. So it was a very strange choice I think to have Kevin O'Leary come as a witness. I don't know who decided that was a good idea, well for him anyway, Yeah, I mean part of me was wondering if it was, you know, someone who was crypto critical who brought him in front of the Senate

because they knew it would make Crypto look bad. But you know, you're right that it was good for him in terms of getting his name into headlines and things like that, which I think is maybe his top priority.

But Senator Warren asked a question of him which was basically, do you think crypto is so incredible and so innovative that it should be exempted from the same anti money laundering laws that are required of traditional financial institutions, And he said no. But he then tried to object to something she had said earlier, which you know she basically said that crypto is particularly useful for criminals, and he tried to make the argument that is pretty common among

crypto advocates, that the US dollars are also used for crime, and he said something very weird, which is that drug traffickers have been using currencies for drug trafficking since the sixties, which is a really weird thing to say. It's like, I don't know if he thinks that drug trafficking just sprung into existence in the nineties, sixties or what I thought he was describing a movie, because remember what he said, like they're throwing the cash out of the airplane in

a suitcase. I don't know if he lost his train of thought halfway through what happened, but it came out very strange. She did not push back on that, which she could have absolutely but she just moved on and basically said, well, since as you knowledge, crypto is also used for crimes, as is the US dollar, shouldn't crypto then be subject to the same types of regulations that

are applied to financial institutions that use the dollar. And he said, no, you know, and tried to object to what she said, but he came out looking pretty coolish. I think, for example, I know Puerto Rico had you know, there was some and Miami and New York there were some machinations between our insane mayor's and cryptos. The f is just a part of crypto. What is the larger exposure for the U. S economy? I mean, are we

looking at another housing crisis? Absolutely not. And that's something that Professor Hillary Allen spoke about at the Senate hearing yesterday. You know, she is an expert on financial stability, and she really credited banking regulations for their effectiveness in keeping crypto from infecting the traditional financial system. So, you know, f t X collapsed, but it had no discernible effect

on the stock market. You know, there was no concern that the government might end up having to bail out crypto in the same way that they bailed out banks in two thousand and eight. And for people who have no you know, they hold no crypto, they don't have money that they were keeping on f t X, they

won't notice any difference. And so I think that is something to to realize here is that despite the prevalence of crypto in the last couple of years, it has not become entwined in the traditional financial system in a way that contagion would be a risk, and I think, to Hillary Allen's point yesterday, that's something that is critical to remain the case, because you know, it would be extremely concerning if you know, everyday people who did not

decide to engage in the risky type of behavior that is investing in crypto had to pay for the failures and the frauds that are absolutely common occurrence in the industry. Yeah, exactly, what do you what's coming down the pike that looks crazy and interesting. I think the finance situation will be

very interesting. Explained to my father what finances? Yeah, so finance is much like f t X, a cryptocurrency exchange, and it is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world, and it is orders of magnitude larger than f t X, and it's not, you know, just a little bit bigger. And there I think are some questions now about what's been going on at Binance, which has for a long time been acknowledged as a bit of a shady operation. I mean, they won't even disclose where they are based.

You know where they are headquartered pretty much, you know, f t X had to buy out Finances investment in f t X because it was such a regulatory hurdle that they basically could not cross that Finance had a stake in the company, so they had to buy them out. And so now we're starting to hear people question what's

going on at Finance. There was recently billions of dollars of withdrawal so that they processed during sort of a miniature version of the run on the exchange that we saw with f t X, And you know, senators were asking questions about Finance and it's now much larger position in the crypto exchange world now that f t X,

it's largest competitor, is no longer there. There was a report recently about a long running investigation into Finance that has been happening that has been examining questions around money laundering and sanctions of Asian uh. Reuters reported that some of the prosecutors were split and believed that they should pursue criminal charges against Finance executives, including their CEO UM and then other prosecutors believed that they should hold off

for a little bit keep examining the evidence. So you know, there is the possibility of criminal charges coming against Finance, but all that to day that you know, if Finance were to collapse or even falter, it would have enormous effects on the cryptocurrency industry. I mean, we've seen what's happened in the recent couple of weeks with f t X, which was quite extreme and quite widespread in terms of

its contagion effects throughout the crypto industry. Something happening to Finance would be absolutely devastating to the crypto industry, I think, And in fact, Finances lawyers made that argument to prosecutors. They basically said that if you come after Finance, you will threaten the entire cryptocurrency industry. Yeah, well, a good reason to let them keep doing what they're doing. Look into it. Thank you so much, Molly, this was great. I hope he'll come back. Thanks for having me, Molly

junk Fast Jessie Cannon carry Lake. It seems as doing now the portion of her audition to be Trump's vice president where she runs to every organization to do a speech where she tries to say the most insane thing to get attention, and what a ride. I think she's either auditioning to be his fourth wife or his either of which in my mind seemed like bad jobs. You know what I found really interesting though, because I'm obsessed

with the filter she gets on the cameras. The lighting both these speeches is so much different than all the other lighting on everybody else, because you know, her advanced team sat there making sure she's lit just perfectly for Mr Trump to find her attractive. Golden c three po carry Lake saying lots of crazy things. Her pronouns are I one is what she said at the Turning Point USA.

This bit never gets old for them. Turning Point USA is an entire conference built around the fact that Charlie Kirk didn't get into the college you wanted to go to, and so we decided that college was a scam. And for that, that entire moment of Carrie Lake screaming about her pronouns, proudly announcing she's an election denier and auditioning for Donald Trump's fourth wife, that is our moment of fun. Right,

that's it for this episode of Fast Politics. Tune in every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to her the best minds and politics makes sense of all this chaos. If you enjoyed what you've heard, please send it to a friend and keep the conversation going. And again thanks for listening.