Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy

This is Master's in Business with very rid holds on Bloomberg Radio this week on the podcast what Can I Say? Zeke Fox's book Number Go Up. Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall is just a shocking and hilarious and fun read. I read it pretty quickly, in less than a week, and I thought it was just fascinating. It is a deep dive, a no holds barred look at crypto and the many, many scams that take place across everything from NFTs to icos, to hacks to bitcoin business models.

Yes, and I mean the title of the book, number go up inside Crypto's wild rise and staggering fall. A little bit giveaway my perspective there. I think this whole thing is over and.

Over done, never never to rise from the ashes.

Sayin about it.

Yeah, so we'll talk more about that. We'll talk about why number go up is a business mind and how Crypto Winter seems to come more and more frequently. But let's start a little bit with your background. Your beat seems to be financial related crimes. How did you ever find your way to this area of interest.

I don't like to say that because my job depends on talking to people and getting me to tell their story. So I prefer to describe it as I write profiles of people who make a lot of money in an interesting way. And I was drawn to that because I'm somebody who plays by the rules.

You know.

I went to the school, I got pretty good grades, I got a job. I've worked at Bloomberg for more than a decade now. But I really like these characters who are willing to take like crazy risks, and they operate in great areas like loan sharks, pump and dump schemers, deck collectors like I have spent my whole career writing about these guys who operate on the fringes of Wall Street.

Seems like a fair approach. Let's talk about how you fell into crypto. It cracked me up. Your buddy Jay made a bunch of money on doge coin. He's freaking nostra Damis. Tell us about your conversations with Jay.

So I have a group text with a bunch of friends from high school. We call it Dan's Basement because that's where we used to hang out. And Jay is a smart guy. He's a funny guy. We used to write a humor call Umn together back in high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, And out of the blue, he starts texting us about this thing that he calls doggy coin and he.

Is not doge coin, doggie coin right.

And me, being like the know it all, you know financial reporter, I tell him Jay it's call dogecoin, and it's dumb. It went because this is twenty twenty, it's the height of the pandemic. We're all stuck at home. We're really bored.

Just before Elon starts tweeting about.

It, Yeah, it's starting to bubble up a bit.

I can see you here taking Jay's side in the argument ahead of time, right, I mean, he is like, hey, people are talking about it on Reddit, you know, let's I can see this going up.

It's funny.

People everybody likes doggy coin. Get in early. And I'm thinking to myself, I remember when this went sort of viral a few years earlier. Already there had already been a very funny segment on The Daily Show making fun of crypto and doagecoin. And I'm like, it's pointless, and he's like, I know it's pointless.

I don't care.

I just think it's funny. And I'm trying to argue it's not funny. It won't go up. And this goes on for like weeks and weeks, and it does go up, and he keeps telling us about it. I'm getting kind of jealous. Finally he sells out. I think he he may have even called it right and sold before Elon Musk hosted Saturday Night Live, which that was like a you know, buy the rumor so loose moment, and he

Sort of scam or you know, fast talking salesman who was gonna leave you holding the bag, right, Yeah, of course you're gonna be skeptical. In fact, in the book you describe bitcoin's first commercial application was silk Road. How did that work out for everybody?

I mean it was pretty cool if you were not that I did. But if you wanted to buy drugs off the internet, you could just there was this new magic Internet money. Just fire up your tour browser and you know, send some of this new new fangled Internet money to what are your LSD or whatever.

Actually, we're recording this October twenty twenty three. It was literally a decade ago October twenty thirteen when silk Road got busted, when the founder, Ross Olbright got busted, and you note in the book, hey, bitcoin might have crashed, but a month later it's up ten x to over one thousand dollars, and that looked very suspicious.

Yeah, So silk Road was actually very important to the early years of bitcoin. It got it on the map, it got a lot of people buying. But really what made bitcoin popular was not so much that it was useful for anything. It was number go up. It was the price going up and people seeing headlines about somebody making money on bitcoin. Everybody had a friend like Jay who was telling them, hey, I made some money on crypto, maybe you should too, And it became hard to resist.

A substantial portion of the volume were just various interested companies trading coins back and forth with each other.

Yeah, I mean there's a coin called light coin, which is like a Bitcoin knockoff, and its sense come out that a lot of the early run up and light coin that got people interested in light Cooin was the result of just manipulation. But in those early years, even more than today, like anything went, the Securities and Exchange Commission was not following bitcoin trading closely at all.

And you mentioned number. Go Up is the title of the book that's essentially the business model of bitcoin. It will go up because it has gone up. Explain.

So I had resisted looking into crypto, took on the assignment after this argument with Jay, and one of the first places I went was Miami for Bitcoin twenty twenty one. It was one of the first big conferences of pretty much any kind since the COVID restrictions lifted. It was like ten thousand people descended on this warehouse in the

A tewan as kaiser from Russia television or I don't know where he is today.

But yeah.

And one guy's on stage and he's talking about bitcoin and he says the most important innovation in bitcoin is number go up technology, and he's like, number go up technology is a powerful piece of technology. It means when the price goes up, more people will hear about it and they'll want to buy it, and that'll make the price go up some more, and then more people hear about it, and then they'll buy it, and it'll go up even higher, and pretty soon we'll all be rich.

So number go up technology sounds a lot like the Greater fool theory of speculation.

Yeah, I mean it's it's like the logic of a pyramid scheme. But for a couple of years there it seemed to work, and the crypto people like to say, wag.

Me the w A G M I were all they made it.

The idea was just buy, hold it, buy some more. It's going to go up. As long as we don't lose the faith and we keep promoting it to our friends, we're all going to be rich.

The problem with that is at a certain point you run out of people to come in and buy it. This is true with every Pumpin' up scheme, every pyramid scheme, and it comes out in some of the court documents later that in some of the corporate slack accounts, one of the people say they should be the director of Ponzi economics. Tell us what is ponzi nomics?

This is slightly related to number go up technology. It's about on that level. And some of these new coins that were being started at that time would explicitly say that they were adopting ponzi ish structures. And we're talking about like DeFi apps. So these were like new crypto apps. And what do we boil down to is that if you start to doing whatever this thing was, they would

So it sounds like almost a legitimate business plan. We're going to give you a financial incentive to exercise, and it'll all take place in crypto on the blockchain, and so not only are you going to get healthy, you're also going to get rich. What could go wrong?

Right?

I mean, honestly, a lot of these pitches, if you just heard them for a couple of minutes, they sounded pretty good, not bad. Yeah, But the reality was was people were that were like teams of bots planned step in and it just boiled down to a pyramid and they're trying to bring everyone who did step in was dependent on new people wanting to do step in and wanting to buy these shoes because otherwise there was no

Yeah.

By the way, I found the book to be infuriated and hilarious, very informative, very fun, but also serious. Lots of really serious things were in it, and despite that, some of the pros just really was laugh out loud. What I want to do is read a couple of quotes to you and get your reaction as to what's going on here, and just give us a little color.

Explain, we're talking about Tether. There's a lot to unpack there, and it was the first crypto company that I really set out to investigate. In the regular financial world, if you're investigating hedge fond of fintech company, basically, a lot of times even the investigation that brings down the company, the reporter just points out one red flag, like they'll be like, hey, Enron, maybe what's with this off balance sheet stuff. Maybe it's a bit fishy, and like that's

And there's a dollar in reserve somewhere.

Yeah, they're keeping a dollar in the bank for you. You can always chade your token in for a real dollar. So when I started looking into it, they had fifty billion tether tokens. It gotten huge, and that meant they were supposed to have fifty billion dollars in the bank somewhere.

How hard is it to show those ordited returns. It's not even return on investment. Here's our fifty billion dollars.

Right, So they weren't saying where red flag number one, Red Flag number two. One of the coin's inventors was Rock Pierce, who is a child actor from The Mighty Ducks.

Emilio Estevez's younger self.

Yes, and he's in the flashback he misses this crucial penalty shot that haunts coach scored in Bombay later in life. This guy had had this crazy career in the dot com bubble in World of Warcraft item trading, and then he thought up this this Tether coin. Now he'd passed on ownership to a new team, and I found that the de facto boss of Tether was a former plastic surgeon from Milan who had this crazy online diary where he posted about his admiration, it seemed for Bernie Madoff.

And how does it Inspector Gadget get into this?

Oh yeah, we need to bring in all my favorite media. So I'm looking for this fifty billion dollars. That's like what gets me into crypto. I'm like, I'm the guy who's gonna see if they have this fifty billion. I'm going to track it down. And when I go, look, the only bank that I can find that will say we have any of this money is del Tech Bank in the Bahamas and its chairman is Jean Schalapin. And he's a French guy who got rich by creating Inspector Gadget.

Like really like the cartoon that kids.

Yes, And he's not just like the finance guy behind it, Like he's the creator. Like I don't think he drew the cartoons, but like he came up with the idea.

He was on the team.

This is what made him rich is that he created an Inspector Gadget and then this whole cartoon company around it. And he's honestly, he's like a character from James Bond movie. He bought a castle with the Inspector Gadget money, right, and he also bought a mansion in the Bahamas, a pink colonial mansion on the beach that you can actually see in a James Bond movie. In the movie, it's the villain's house. He flew his own jet. He piloted it.

Like what is going on?

It was all foreshadowing.

Oh yeah.

But the weird thing about Tether was that they're all these red flags and we didn't even mention they'd been sued for fraud by the New York Attorney General, who had shown that they'd lied about the reserves in the past. That even John would say, I didn't know where all the money was, I could only account for a portion of it. So they are all these red flags enough that in the traditional finance world investors would be scared off.

Let's go to the next quote that cracked me up. You actually reference a tweet quote. Imagine if keeping your car idling twenty four to seven produced solved seducos, you could trade for heroin.

Explain love this tweet.

It's a great explanation of bitcoin, which in the bitcoin mining process very power hungry. Yes, I mean, by some estimates, bitcoin mining uses more energy than the whole country of Argentina. And it's just like warehouses of these computers running around the clock. And I was surprised to learn that there's not really they're not really doing anything that's crucial to the bitcoin network. They're just playing sort of this guessing game that makes it difficult for anyone to hack bitcoin

H here's one of my favorites, quote all my Apes Gone. Tell us a little bit about your experience purchasing a mutant ape n f T.

I got a lot of criticism from crypto guys as I was researching this book, and they would say, how are you writing about crypto if you don't have any crypto And I would tell them, well, listen, first of all, as a reporter, I'm not supposed to invest in anything.

I was told to ask you how much money have you made shorting bitcoin? And the answer is, yeah, nothing. You're not allowed to, right, yeah.

And the big the crypto people would say, actually, even that policy introduces some bias because you're invested in standard stock market funds and so you're sort of against crypto, and how you don't know, you don't know about this.

You got to try it out.

And so eventually they kind of got to me and I was like, you know what, I tried out step in. I got a shoe. It had it was in the middle of collapse by the time I bought a shoe, but that that didn't do much for me.

So your poor wife, so you spend a couple hundred bucks on a shoe. You spend twenty thousand dollars on a mutant ape that fortunately you sold for almost all your money back.

Yeah, I decided to try it out, and I was like, I'm going straight for the top. I want to join the board Ape yacht Club. Right, that's the crypto thing that the celebrities are doing.

But those are hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Yeah, this is like a cartoon of a monkey, is a very ugly cartoon. They were going for like five hundred grand, and they were having a party in New York called Apefest. You had to have one to go, and I found out you could still get in if you got a mutant ape, which is still it's like the ugly cousin of the board Ap.

And a much more reasonable twenty thousand dollars.

Yes, So when I asked my wife and she very nicely said, yes, they're actually going for forty.

When I asked her, right, and good news, honey, it's collapsing. It'll only cost us twenty.

I was happy that I hitd a collapse, but I was also like, wait, so if it went from forty to twenty and like two, is it gonna go to ten, and I was like, please do not go to ten. But even more than it going to ten, my fear was does all my apes gone?

Thing?

Because it actually I learned a lot from buying the board ape. Because if a lot of people who even if you are sort of into crypto, maybe you have some bitcoin, you have some ethereum, you probably just do it on coinbase or robinhood or whatever. You're not actually like using the blockchain, right, Like.

But to get the NFTs you have to go through the blockchain, and it's a horrific arduous process.

Yes, I mean i'd heard it would be bad. You know, my expectations were low, but then I went to go do it and I was like, oh my god, Like no one normal will do this. I'll get like just it boils down to your money lives. Like you know, where you put the URL in your web browser. You might type in Google and then maybe you have like a little red stop sign if you have ad block. Now maybe next to it, how would you like to add a picture of a foxhead? And that's where your money's.

You're on a Chrome extent, yes, And like before.

You install it, they make you watch this video and it says, welcome to the wonderful world of crypto. Now, please engrave your twelve word password on a piece of metal and bury it in your backyard. And which I did not do, but I just the process of getting my twenty thousand dollars into this fox head so that I could waste it on this mute ape was so horrible that I was just like, this is a huge

And tell us who said all my apes gone?

So once you got the apes, you gotta watch out because you're gonna get hacked. They might get stolen. And there was a art dealer who actually got hacked and two million dollars of NFTs was stolen from him, right, and he tweeted mid hack all my apes Gone, the status tweet in all of crypto.

The saddest tweet in all of crypto. So let's talk a little bit about Axie Infinity is a massive multiplayer online game, and this quote is just bonkers. Crypto Bros. And Silicon Valley vcs gave Filipinos false hope by promoting an unstable bubble based on a Pokemon knockoff as the quote future of work unquote, making matters worse, North Korean hackers broke into the crypto exchange affiliated with the game made off with six hundred million dollars worth of stable

Yes, and like I'm not making that up. Like the US government has said, North Korea's nuclear program is partly funded from hacking this Pokemon knockoff game.

And this was game AXI.

The crypto guys when it was going well, they love to talk about it. This was their number one example of Web three. You had to buy a team of monsters. It was a game you played on your phone. You had to buy the monsters before you could play, and then you when you battled, you earned smooth love potions. And it had the same circular logic where you needed the potions to get more monsters. Why do you want monsters well to get the potions? Why do you want the potions to get monsters?

You know? But it was going.

Great for a while, and more than a million people in the Philippines started playing. I went there to check it out. I mean, even my driver had taken out a loan for something like a thousand bucks to buy a team of monsters, and it had lost it. For these people who took out loans to get in on it, it had been a real setback in their life. You know, this was no joke to them. It's not like just their pocket.

Money, serious serious damage. Here's could be my favorite Sam Bankman Freed quote quote. It's like the narrative would be sexier if it was like, holy, this is the world's biggest Ponzi scheme, right.

Yeah.

So I spent a lot of time with Sam Bankman Freed in reporting this book because it was clear he was a major player in crypto, and it was actually very fun. When I went to go write the book, FTX had collapsed, and some of his quotes like that one took on some new meaning and I'm like, was this guy just toying with me? While he was giving this interview.

That's hilarious. And then on the FTX bankruptcy, this could be my favorite quote in the whole book. The shocking reversal was the biggest news crypto had ever seen. It was as if Sutoshi Nakamoto's identity was finally revealed and it was Janet Yellen, the central banker hated by bitcoiners. That's just a hilarious sentence. I mean, it's so great. Everybody thought FTX was the most legitimate entity in all crypto, turns out not so much.

Yeah, and I will admit I also thought I was skeptical of crypto, but I thought I thought, hey, FTX is a casino for cryptocurrencies. They're encouraging people to gamble there. People will probably lose their money. I did not suspect that Sam Bankman Freed was stealing all the money out of the back of the casino.

So let's talk about some of the things that happened after FTX collapsed. Here's a quote. The past two years have felt like this perpetual gaslighting of anyone who expresses caution. Now it's all unraveling very quickly. That's from Twitter. Someone called bitfinext tell us a little bit about him and what his role was.

So bitfin next has been tweeting about his skepticism of crypto and especially tether for years and years now, a.

Long like seven eight years yea since it was formed.

Yeah, dozens of times a day. And he seemed to have some pretty like sometimes he tweet photos or things. It seemed like he was an insider. And I arranged to meet him, and what I realized when I met him was, oh, no, this is like a dude who lives in his mom's basement.

But turns out to be pretty insightful as to what's going on.

You know, his like me.

We both started out looking at tether, and it's turned out that Tether has held up pretty well. Has actually only grown since I started investigating it. It's up to eighty four billion now.

It really is crazy. Let me run through a few a few more quotes that just cracked me up. First, did Peter Teel really col Warren Buffett a sociopathic grandpa for doubting Bitcoin?

Yes?

That was at Bitcoin twenty twenty two in Miami. He played the like Max Kaiser, role of the guy who yelled the craziest stuff on stage.

Right, But at the same time you revealed that he was secretly dumping all his crypto or not so secretly, because you could track all this on the blockchain.

Yeah, his fund had had sold crypto and it only came out after that speech, right.

A little misleading. There were a couple of other people that you reference that I too, in particular. I just have to ask about first Michael Sailor at micro Strategy. My memory of micro Strategy when I was on a trading desk was somebody had released what was a false, a fake press release when micro Strategy was like, I don't know, a buck fifty some crazy price, and it plummets on this news it's halted, and then the company comes out and says this isn't a real news release.

Sailor said that to The New Yorker in an amazing profile about his dot com riches. He's the biggest loser of the dot com bubble. But micro Strategy plugs along, and.

They had some real technology, some software.

Right.

It was like a real company that was making a decent amount of money. And in recent years he's changed the company to be all about bitcoin. He sunk all the profits into bitcoin. He's levered up in orrowed money and bought bitcoin. So now if you want to invest in micro Strategy stock, it's just a bet on bitcoin. And he's also become like the craziest bitcoin maximalist out there.

Right, It's definitely has cult like aspects. You also take a swing at the mooch at Anthony Scaramucci. Scaramucci fifty eight, looking tanned and botox smooth, wearing a well fitted suit, his pompadour freshly die jet black. Now I know the Mooch. He's a good guy, good enough guy, botox and and hair dye. Is that true?

So the book was thoroughly fact checked and not only did the Mooch confirm that, I believe that that was if I remember correctly, he announced this at this event.

Oh he did.

Oh, he was like, check out my hair. I got a name.

He likes to say, this is a BRIONI shoot, these are Ferragamos on my feet. Like he definitely drops brand names on a regular.

We were at Crypto Bahama's, the big conference to celebrate the success of Sam Bankman Freed. He had just made this partnership with FTX, and the Mooch loves a press conference. Sure, so he called. There were a lot of reporters there at the conference, and he had this sort of press conference at the beginning, but it seemed like, I mean, the only thing he wanted to talk is he just kept talking about how good he looked and how bad

Forgot where I read that before the book. But all he talked about is that. Maybe that's where the Brioni suit came up.

Yeah, I mean that was sort of Sam Bankman's Freed thing. It was this thing is I don't dress up for anybody. Congress he would, uh, he put on a suit, although he didn't tie his shoes famously, but at this conference, the mooch look I mean, he looked great. Bankman Freed was wearing you know, khaki shorts and a T shirt, his hair all messed up, even when he was on stage with Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Tom Brady.

Yeah.

By the way, there's a famous photo. You have it in the book of Sam Bakman Fried and Gizelle, and you look at him and go, these aren't representatives of the same species. These are two completely different life forms.

I love that photo because it must have been taken backstage before they went out to speak at this conference, and Sam just looks like a deer in the headlights, like the flash has caught him off guard, and Gazelle like, you're never gonna catch her off.

She's great, and also he's a.

Professional's absolutely, but they posed for an ad campaign together that ran in like classy magazines like The New Yorker.

He didn't look much better in those acts either, Right, It's it's the same sort of disheveled. I mean, I guess that was part of the whole Mit Genius rap.

I will say this, it kind of worked on me. It was like, I'm authentic, I don't care. I'm being myself. I'm not gonna pretend. He didn't come off like this slick salesman. He was like, I'm just the guy who you know, spends all my time thinking about how to make money trading crypto. I went down to shadow him at his office when things were going great, and I was just like, I'm not leaving untill he falls asleep on that bean bag. I want to see him nap

By the way, I see where the unior in the book comes from. It's basically how you see the world. It's really very funny. You start with the Tether web site and you go through the various disclosures, including the list of risks. The company could go bankrupt, bank holdings could lose money, the government could confiscate its assets, and then you notice what seems like a risk disclosure red flag,

I mean, look at Sam beigman Fried. He's trying to use the terms of service of FTX as a defense now and basically trying to argue that they allowed him to lend all the customer money to his hedge fund. So you know, you never know what maybe it could come in handy one day.

So early on you actually asked SBF about tether. FTX has wired lots of money through three different jurisdictions and intermediary banks to move US dollars to tether. What ftx's relationship to the stable coin.

I met SBF because I wanted to ask him about tether. They were one of the biggest users of tether. Something like thirty five billion of tether passed through wow them. Now, what I've learned more recently is that a lot of that came because there was actually in the during the crypto boom, there was demand for There was so much demand for tether that on exchanges like FTX it often traded slightly above a dollar. And so Alameda, his hedge fund,

They were borrowing all the customer money. Right, So a zero cost to capital one percent a day is real money. It adds up.

Yeah, even if it was like a tenth of a percent, they could do it, So I think that accounts for why they were using so much Tether. He did not disclose that at the time. If you think of all the crypto exchanges, like different casinos, Tether is basically like the cashier, and it's like in the early years of crypto, these casinos had trouble receiving dollars, like banks did not

So what was supposed to be disintermediation became additional media. You need to had another middleman in the way.

Right, Crypto is always sold as trustless, and in reality it turns out you keep having to trust these people who prove themselves to be totally untrustworthy.

So tell us a little bit about the leadership of Tether. Who was the founder and who was the CEO.

One of the co founders was this the Mighty duckskuy Brock Pierce, and I had a lot of fun meeting him on his mega yacht off the coast of the Bahamas. He sent a speedboat to pick me up. So you know, I don't know how often that's gonna happen in my journalistic career.

But in the.

CEO was this guy, Jean Louis Vanderveld, and we also met in the Bahamas. The meeting was broken by Jean Chalapin, the inspector gadget guy. So I'd gotten to the Bahamas hoping that I would meet one of these Tether guys, and I didn't see any of them there, even though it was a big crypto conference. I thought they'd come. But then finally Charalapin is like, get over here. JL is he Vandervelt's here, and I see this tall Dutch guy with silver hair, kind of a funny scar on

I appreciated it.

So this guy JL, he's the CEO of one of the biggest company and crypto. Most people in crypto love to promote themselves. The skeptics like this guy bit the next would say that there was so little out there about JL. They were like, we don't even think he's a real person. So I go to shake jl Vanderveld, the CEO of Teather's hand, and I'm like, nice to meet, and then he says the man who doesn't exist.

I'm like, wow, I just love these guys.

These guys, they're full bond villains. They're playing right into the carriage.

Yeah, and we had we had a lot.

We spent hours talking in the casino, me and Jail and had a conversation another conversation. I was very funny in hindsight. I was telling him. I was like, listen, man, I just spent a couple of days at Sam bankman Fried's office. That guy doesn't have anything to hide. He just let me see walk around the whole office and see everything. Yeah, how come you're being so secret? And then he wasn't like he totally bought into it. And he was like, well, it's easy for Sam bankman Freed.

Yeah.

I mean He's basically like, there's stuff in our past that we can't reveal for the record.

As we're recording this, Tether's trading at still a dollar. The point it's a dollar and here you reference this in the book. But their business model, now, with FED funds over five percent, you could get riskless treasuries just about five percent. Their business model is collect eighty five billion dollars, put it in riskless treasuries. Hey, you're gonna get a billion dollars a quarter for doing almost nothing. That's not a bad business model.

So when I started looking into Tether, interest rates were zero, and so Tyther was sitting on this huge pile of money and they had incentive to put it at risk because they needed to earn interest something. So that was another reason to be suspicious of them. I found evidence they'd invested in Chinese commercial paper, They'd been making loans to other crypto companies. It seemed like not riskless, but now, yeah,

Assuming they have all eighty four billion dollars or eighty five billion dollars accounted for free money to them. Now that you're getting a yield, they really don't have to do anything other than not get hacked.

Yes, I mean, which, to be fair, they have. They were the victims of one of the biggest tacks ever, so I don't know if they're that trustworthy on that front. But yeah, even if let's say, just hypothetically, let's say they had been a billion dollars in the hole, they could easily earn their way out of it now the interest.

Rates are higher, right, very easily. Let's talk about some of the other players in both crypto and stable coins. Binance founder Chang Peng Zau, better known as cz is he now the richest man in crypto.

He's got to be.

It's down to him and Justin Sun from the tron blockchain. Both of them show a notable reluctance to enter us soil g Yeah. Sun's been sued by the SEC and financed, has a number of cases. These guys do still have a ton of money. And when I went down to the Bahamas after FTX failed and I was with Sam Bankman freed. When he just before he got arrested, he was still.

Thinking, how do I get myself here?

Yeah, I gotta bail myself out. I need to find someone to give me five ten billion dollars so I can get FTX going again.

Pocket change walking around cast so.

But it was interesting to me was I was like, so, who's got five ten billion dollars? He'd already tried CZ.

That didn't worry And from the book it's pretty clear CZ is the one who's stuck the knife in.

Oh yeah, you can't really blame CZ because I mean, fraud is a fraud, you know if he but he's the one who made a tweet that got people started starting to pull their money out of FTX, which revealed the hole at the sun of the exchange. But the other people bankman Fried said had five ten billion dollars were tether. They said, no, we're not bailing you out. And this guy, Justin's son who has this coin tron and is like a crazy character in himself. Missing chapter from the book.

Let's talk about Celsius and is it Alex Mishinski another stable coin, right, he.

Had a kind of Celsius was like a crypto bank, and he was saying, send me your stable coins.

I'll pay you interest on them.

We met at Bitcoin twenty twenty one, my first crypto conference, and I was there I wanted to gather info on Tether. Celsius had done business with Tether, so I set up a meeting with this guy, Mishinsky. He was a big hustler. He was at every conference. He was the one giving all the speeches. He always wore this t shirt that said banks are not your friends. We sit down, he told me his I asked. I'm polite, so before i get to like the the investigative questions, I'm like, so,

Of all the frauds in the world of crypto, when you detail many of them, when interest rates are zero and they're going to pay you eighteen percent on your coins, it sounds like we're going to keep eighty two percent of your coins and the eighteen percent is a scam. Well, it just seems like, how can you pay when the ten years yielding one and a half percent, How could you legitimately pay eighteen percent other than number go up? Yeah, is that all it is.

Maybe he bought a lot of those shoes and he had a whole army of people walking in circles.

But he told me.

He told me at the I had the same reaction, even when things were going great. This seemed very fishy. And I was shocked when he told me he had twenty billion dollars. But he told me, the banks are the scammers. They're taking your deposits and they're earning huge propit and they're lying to you, and they're saying they can't pay you any interest.

By the way, they don't lie to you. They released their profits every quarter. Hey, here's how much money we've made on your demendon. It's all public. It's not like it's hidden.

Yes, And I hated to find myself. I spent I was over at Mashinski's apartment on the Upper East Side, and I found myself like defending Wall Street being like, listen to JP Morgan is very safe even in the financial crisis. People didn't lose their deposits, right, But he's like, somebody's lying. Either JP Morgan is lying or Celsius is lying. And even in the moment, I was like, this is a great line it's definitely Alex.

That's lying.

I'm gonna take Jamie Diamond over Alex Mashinsky just because I'm fifty one to forty nine. I'm leaning Diamond's way.

Celsius did collapse in the end, and actually a month or two ago, Mashinski got arrested and charged with fraud.

Unbelievable. So one of my favorite stories from this era was the Terra Luna stable coin situation and a pretty well regarded HEDGEPHND manager Mike Novograts. He got a howling wolf Luna tattoo on his upper arm. Tell us a little bit about Tara and Luna and Novograts.

So Novograts back a few years ago he gave an interview to our colleague Eric Shatsker where he said something that I thought was very honest and that I really liked this quote. And he said, listen, this crypto thing is the biggest bubble of our lifetime. There's great fortunes to be made on the way up, and like, I'm gonna get mine, And he.

Did for the most part. Let's give him credit. He bought when things were low, he saw I'm not gonna suggest he top ticked it, but he definitely cashed a decent amount out right before the most recent collapse.

Yeah, I mean, I think his profits overall are high. He was definitely wrong though on this Tara Luna one.

Well, the whole tattoo thing was just yeah, you know, talk about talk about the wrong thing to etch on your body.

Oh my god.

So it was run by this guy, this South Korean guy named Do Kwan, who was very mean on Twitter. He'd always just be insulting people if you ever questioned tether But it pitch was a lot like Celsius. You could earn eighteen percent. I think it actually was also eighteen or nineteen percent.

That seems to be the magic number.

Yeah, that you could earn if you deposited your Terra coins into the anchor protocol. And now, unlike Teather, which is backed by real dollars in the bank or so they say, the Terra coins were backed by lunar coins and you could always trade your Terra coins for one dollar worth of lunar coins. Now you might ask, why do I want any lunar coins.

The answer is they don't ask about that.

They're back like Terra coins.

No, the lunar coins were there actually there was no story from why you should buy the Lunar coins, and a lot of people in crypto even when this was going on, we're like, Zeke, you might want to take a look at this uh Terra Luna one.

So even the crypto bros were skeptical of this.

Yes, but Nova Grats was a big investor in it, and he got the Luna logo tattooed on his shoulder. And I don't want to like totally let him off the hook because what he said in his quote and also by like tweeting about this, tweeting.

His tattoo, he was promoting.

He's promoting it, and he's bringing in people who because the way to really make money on crypto is to get in early.

Right, find greater fools to sell it to.

Yeah, and a lot of these insiders I'm not saying him with Luna, I don't remember the details, but they get special deals and they get the tokens at like for a penny it can rise and fall and they're still sitting pretty. And so these guys, by promoting these bubbles, are bringing in new people who are going to lose real money.

Speaking of losing real money, let's talk about the initial point offerings. I was. I always thought they were sketchy. I was shocked to read in the book eighty percent of icos are fraudulent, explained.

Yeah, so this was the last bubble. It's important with crypto you need to keep coming up with like a new twist on the story.

So is that where NFTs come from and icos come from.

Yeah, I would say that. I mean people in the new in the most recent bubble, people talked about coins right, and even in sort of like a loving way. They'd be like, oh, I'm buying the latest like coin It's going to the moon.

And that literally, by the way, was the cover of a BusinessWeek edition rhymes with bitcoin.

Oh yeah.

Even people who like NFTs will tell you they're basically coins with pictures on them. And so icos are like the previous iteration of this technology. Back in twenty seventeen, you could just say, Hey, I'm gonna put dentistry on the blockchain. I got denti coin. That's like a real one.

Actually, I think one of the more legit ones.

But they got like a man, how is that more legit than others?

I like there was some real effort to like get dentists to update their tooth databases or something.

So the most legit thing I read had to do with ethereum and smart contracts. And you can imagine a use case where if Taylor Swift were to put her tickets up for sale, she could build into it. Hey, no, nobody can can go out and sell these these for fifty times what fans want to pay. If you resell them, I get half of the proceeds, and that that would keep the scalpurn to a minimum. Like that is a use case that makes sense. None of these other things seem to have a real use case.

Yeah, and even I mean even that use case. I was frankly surprised is continually surprised to the downside in this crypto world. With Apefest, you would think that this is like the premiere NFT event. There's all this talk about how NFTs will be good, the blockchain will be good for ticketing. It turns out they do not use the NFTs for ticketing, right. There's this whole other, like complicated system set up to figure out how you get

And you use the example that bitcoin has been around for as long as it took us to go from the first website to the iPhone, longer than Airbnb and Uber have been around, and those have become real businesses. What is the problem that bitcoin is trying to solve.

I don't deny if we had a bitcoin, if we had Michael Saylor here, he could probably talk quite convincingly about how great bitcoin is in theory, and I would just say, look at what's happened in practice. Nobody's using it for anything. Even in El Salvador, where it was really promoted as this great success story, where we see bitcoin in the real world. Nobody likes it, nobody's using it. And if this crypto stuff was so great it would sell itself, you wouldn't need to be pushing it on people.

Huh really amusing. I want to talk about some of the damage from crypto, but before we get to that, you've been going to the Sam Bankman Freed trial about ftx's collapse. It seems from this book there's a lot of blame to people like Carolyn Ellison who ran Alami to research, Gary Wang, who was their technologist and wrote all the code, and Nichad Sing. Is it just that they played the prisoner's dilemma better than Sam Bankman Freed, like everybody was so quick to throw him under the bus.

What the trial has been so far is Sam sitting there and there's been a parade of his best friends, his colleagues, and they've each been saying, I'm really sorry, I committed fraud. I did it with that guy over there, and like the jury has been falling asleep for some of the details.

Does the defense get up and say so, tell us about the fraud. You were an adult, right, you didn't do this when you were fourteen. Tell us about the fraud you committed when you were running this hedge funds or when you were writing the code. It's kinda that kind of laid back, aren't they.

The problem is that if the more they hammer in that these witnesses committed fraud, that would show that these people know a lot about the fraud. And they're all saying that they did it with Sam. A lot of times. They have a lot of details about which fraud they worked on and how they did it. They pulled out like Google docs that show them doing the fraud. Some of them even have comments from Sam on the Google doc. And it's not like you get a free ride just

But not twenty or thirty years. No.

Caroline, the head of Alameda, Sam's ex girlfriend. She cried on the stand when she was talking about how bad she felt about participating in this fraud. I don't think they're trying to minimize their own involvement. They're just saying this guy was the boss, and like we did it with him fair enough.

So let's talk a little bit about In the book, you talk a lot about some of the damage crypto and tether has caused. Probably the most harrowing section was on human trafficking. You go to Cambodia to look at some of these sleeve or prisons. How else do you describe these?

It's pretty accurate. I mean it's really crazy. You know, we all get these spam text messages right like they're like Sam, did you pick up the milk on your way home for the dog? They're not like that great at English that don't always make sense these messages I learned. They will try and make friends with you, and they'll eventually try to get you to trade crypto with them to try out some new hot crypto app, and they always use tether. They'll say, hey, I got this great

You got a spam text from Vicky who sent you pictures clearly not from New York, which is what she told you, and you sent her one hundred dollars worth of tether and you were able to track it. Yeah, which is kind of surprising because we've always been told all this crypto stuff is anonymous. Turns out not to be very anonymous either.

It's kind of weird that way. I mean, it's pseudonymous. So everybody's wallet has an address that's not associated with their name. It's just like a string of random numbers, and you can see all the transaction. If I know, like, hey, this string of random numbers is Barrie's address, I might even be able to go see like what exchanges you used or where you sent your money. But if I don't have that first clue that says this is Barry's address,

They're horrifying.

Yeah, it's like dozens of towers, each of them filled with people, thousands of people who are sending these spam messages who can't escape. Obviously it doesn't prove anything, but what really seemed quite telling to me. I get to Chinatown, the most famous of this scam compound site where this Vietnamese guy interviewed had escaped from where people were tortured,

So if you want to pay ransom to get someone freed, you can do it then and there.

So the crypto guys would say, Hey, the scams existed before crypto, This isn't really crypto stuff, But I think that crypto made all this a lot easier, made it possible on a bigger scale. I spoke to a veteran human trafficking investigator from Taiwan who'd been to Cambodia to rant some young women who'd been tricked into going there

Now they use tether. What am I supposed to do?

I can't try, you know, he was like, this is making my job of investigating human trafficking a lot harder.

I'm genuinely shocked the United Nations hasn't stepped into this because this is really horrific.

You know, it is actually risen to their attention now, and they actually put out a report where they estimate that as many as two hundred thousand people work in these scam compounds.

Skill Yes, that's horrible.

The Chinese government has cracked down and there's been a number of busts, a lot of the worst compounds that have moved to me and mar where they're essentially like outside of the reach of law enforcement. They're in these like border regions where even like the police don't go. I went to one in a national park in Cambodia behind like a big, big hotel.

You know, it's really unbelievable. Another statistic from the book that blew my mind. FTX had donated money to one in three members of Congress. How is that possible?

Yeah, So, Sam, he had this idea that you know, a lot of people say there's too much money in politics. He said, there's not enough money in politics. Just think about how And his logic kind of made sense.

No, it definitely does.

The Congress controls these huge pots of money. And if you can influence Congress to spend on your preferred causes, even if it costs you, you know, one hundred million dollars to buy influence, that could actually be very small in comparison to how much money you get Congress to spend.

It was mostly two Democrats, but a lot once Republican.

Yeah.

So he was one of the biggest donors to the Biden campaign. Gave something like five million dollars. And these were not like you know, cash and bags. These were like donations that like other corporations give. And I think it was like pretty much two thirds to Democrats but still a third to Republicans.

He used to work at a hedge fund. He knows how to hedge his bets, right.

Yeah, And and he had a lot of things, a lot of priorities. But one of the things he wanted was for the CFTC to regulate crypto. It seemed to me, even when things were going well, he was basically trying to get his preferred crypto legislation passed that would effectively cement FTX as like the go to crypto exchange that followed all the rules and box out some of his competitors like Binance, that were not run by Americans, didn't have the same political influence and wouldn't be able to comply.

Huh. So you also mentioned in the book two of my favorite authors, the first being Carl Hiassen, who I just love everything he ever writes, just the best Beach reads about the endless corruption in Florida. He's an amazingly entertaining writer. But also Michael Lewis, who has a book out Going Infinite that came out just around the same time you guys did. What are your thoughts on Lewis's portrayal of SBF What did he get wrong?

I was writing this book, I became aware that pretty early on that Lewis might be working on crypto book too. And this is my first book. You know, he's like the goat like.

Poet laureate of financial rights, right right.

So that was pretty that was pretty scary to me. But then I was at Crypto Bahamas where I saw the Mooch. I saw Michael Lewis interviewing Sam Bankman feed on stage. I was looking forward to hearing what he had to say. At this point, I'd learned about the shoes, I learned about the Pokemon game. I mean, I came in pretty skeptical of Crypto and all I was seeing was like a bunch of scams. And then I see Michael Lewis on stage interviewing Sam, and he's just like

Crypto's better.

And I'm like, Michael Lewis, like, I grew up reading books. I learned a lot about finance from you. But I really think I can't believe you would say that. So at that point I actually wondered, maybe he's not writing a book, maybe he's just here giving speeches, or maybe he's working on a documentary or something. It turned out he said he was not paid and he did.

Write a book. He was there to write a book.

So he wrote a book which turned out to be a best seller, and he sold the movie rights to Apple TV for a decent amount of money.

Yeah.

Now, he said something in what I assume was a paid speech. He spoke at Bitcoin twenty twenty three in Miami. He was on stage with Arthur Hayes, the head of bitmes, and Michael Lewis said he got asked about He was like, you know, all you guys here want to know do I believe in crypto? And he's like, you, you remind me of the born again Christians that I met when I was writing The blind Side. You everyone wanted to know if I believed And he's like, listen, it doesn't

So if you read the end of Going Infinite, Michael Lewis suggests that the bankruptcy trustee who said FTX was a bigger mess than Enron, which was a giant mess in and of itself. He implied that by the time this is all said and done, by the time they liquidate the venture investments and everything else, the missing eight billion dollars is going to be found. Is that still the case today, or has that gap marrowed has gotten wider? What's going on with that rec of the missing funds?

It's still a bit mysterious. Now bankruptcy claims traders are not paying, you know, ninety cents on the dollars for FTX claims. They're going for like forty cents, all.

Right, so a little above average, but not a whole lot above that.

So, I mean what that suggests is that they think there's going to be a pretty good recovery, but not.

The whole something like that.

Yeah, Now, Sam Bankman Fried's lawyers, this is the defense of Sam Bankman Freed. But like, hey, the money isn't actually gone, right.

It's just misplaced. Like literally other places are saying, hey, is this your three hundred million dollars in bitcoin we're holding now.

First of all, it's come out at trial. Everyone at all the witnesses have said, we committed fraud, We took the customer's money, we knew it was wrong. And Sam bankman Fried's lawyers have brought this up and they're like, hey, how about we bring up as a defense that like some of these bets worked out and maybe the money's

So, to be fair, Lewis says, it wasn't that the bets were going to pay off. It's that all the money wasn't accounted for properly, and if that happens, maybe that money you'll be missing. Since then, we've learned a lot of that money has been speculated with or gambled with.

If Lewis was saying that the money was simply misplaced, like that has been proven to be wrong. The money was definitely not just misplaced, and they found it like it was bat on a lot of things. And for example, it came out at the trial that customers give money to the exchange, they're counting on the exchange holding it and giving it back when they want to withdraw, just like you'd count on e trade to have your money

Good bet, giant winner.

Yeah, but it doesn't mean it was okay. The customers never agreed that he could gamble with their money. They thought that they were gambling with their money on dogecoin or whatever.

Right this is, you know. Part of the description was Alameda had broader parameters for going over the limits, the lending limits, because they were helping to facilitate making a market. But that would have been a little over not billions of dollars, over tens of billions of dollars over.

Yeah, And what the witnesses have testified to is that from actually very early on, Alameda was allowed to treat like the customer money like a piggy bank and use it to gamble on whatever. And actually, one of the things that Michael Lewis has said that has also been shown to not be true at the trial, he said, FTX, if you set aside the fraud, it was a good business, right.

Well, the argument is, hey, we're gonna do a bajillion crypto trades and take a tiny little piece of each and it's a couple of billion dollars a year.

So the problem is that FTX, the way the exchange was set up, they claimed they had this great risk management system, this amazing liquidation engine, but it turned out that they didn't, and the exchange over the years actually took big hits at different times, and that they covered those up by shunting the losses to Alameda.

So not just hacks, but actually trading losses.

Yes, so the exchange lost almost a billion dollars because of a failure of the liquidation engine on something called mobile coin. And if they had disclosed this first of all, that would have erased all the exchange's profits, right, so like no more venture capital, you know, thirty two billion valuation. So instead they had Alameda take the hit. And Alameda could take the hit because they had a limited access to the customer money, right, and there.

Were no outside real owners because it was all mostly sam bankman Freed.

So that is not a good business. And it's looking like the truth is much closer to this was a fraud from the start. Then this was a good business that was that got out of control because Sam bankmcfreed wasn't paying attention.

So the summation that I came away from with your book, as opposed to lots of of the other things I've read on crypto, is there's no regulation, there's no disclosure requirements, there's no transparency. When there's a billion dollar loss, nobody says anything. It's all covered up. And on top of all of that, there's no federal Reserve or federal government as a backstop. As much as the libertarian crypto bros,

I don't talk about the SEC that much in the book, and I actually would blame the SEC for not being a little quicker to crack down on some of this crypto stuff. But I think the book is, if anything, like, an argument for financial regulation and saying that some of these age old rules make sense. There's a reason why companies have to disclose stuff, and it's to prevent exactly things like this FTX collapse.

Really really interesting stuff. So you guys have sniped at each other a little bit in public, You've traded barbs. What's it like when an author whose books you've loved is taken a swing at you.

Yeah, he said some pretty nasty things to The New York Times about me.

Oh really, what did he say?

He called me?

He said that I was skeevier than Sam Bankman Freed.

Come on, really, Uh that's not right.

Yeah, So look, I didn't like that, And I think it's been pretty cool. A lot of the reviews have compared our books, and I really didn't imagine that people would prefer my book to Michael Lewis's, and I've been amazed to see that it's gotten such good reviews.

This is the book to read on crypto, is what wired said, read the other SBF book.

What I realized when I finished the book is that before all this, I was just like, you know what, this was an amazing adventure. I've always wanted to write a book like this. I'm really proud of how it came out. I'm sure Michael Lewis's book is going to be a hit, but like whatever, I don't care about his book. I think people should read this, and it's

Well, you're a relatively young guy. I'm sure there's another book that will come along. This is really a deeply researched work of investigative journalism. Number go up. And if you were skeptical or even just crypto curious beforehand, it's hard to read this and not come away with the thought that this is a massive bubble that will end badly for everybody involved.

You know what.

I've been particularly pleased. I've gotten some comments from crypto people and they've said that they actually really liked the book, and one guy said, please stay in crypto. We need you to make fun of us.

So when I put something out on Twitter yesterday saying hey, I got Zeke Fox tomorrow, what should I ask him? There were a handful of kund of goofy questions. Ask him if he's shorted bitcoin was one of them. Someone said, hey, you know, would you and Michael Lewis ever this Someone slipped into a DM and said, hey, would you and Michael Lewis ever sit down on a stage together and have a debate about Sam bankmin Freed, FTX and crypto.

I would love to do it, Michael Lewis, if you're listening, let's do it.

You know we can.

You're a big draw, we can sell tickets, we can give money to one of the charities that SBF stiffed.

And to be fair, I really enjoyed both books, but they're two very different types of books. The one other question I wanted to ask you before we get to our favorite questions. You were part of the team that wrote this interesting BusinessWeek series on how local New York state courts had been weaponized by debt collectors. Signed here to Lose Everything. You want a lob award for that? Tell us a little bit about that bit of investigative journalism.

One of the best threads that I pulled in my whole career has been this world of brokers who sell small business loans. It's called merchant cash advance. And basically the guys who were like worked for Jordan belfourt like back in the nineties. That whole business of cold calling people and selling stocks has dried up and if you're still but if you still want to cold call people and earned commission, a lot of those guys now sell

Sounds usurious and should be illegal.

Yeah, but they've got all these loopholes, and the series was about this one amazing loophole that they came up with. These guys are super creative, and it was like, this is.

The confession of judgment that's been around for a long time, but it wasn't really used.

Yeah, so these guys they would if if you were the bodega, you would have to before you got the loan, you'd have to sign a paper that said I have defaulted on this loan and if judge when you see this document, please rule against me and seize my assets. So the lender would be holding that document and if they ever.

Dated or undated, because if you're getting the loan on October first and the confession of judgment is dated October first, seems a little sketchy.

They had all that cover. The wording was not exactly how I just said it. It was it all. It would all get stamped. It would be the point of the series is this was legal. You could do this. You could take it to court. So what would happen is the bodega misses a payment and yeah, the lender goes to court with this document no warning. They get

Wow.

So me and my colleague Zach Miterer did a series about this. We wrote about a bunch of crazy characters who were exploiting this loophole, and New York State passed the law closing this loophole. After that, they moved to Connecticut and started doing it there. We exposed that loophole, Connecticut passed the law closing the loophole. I'm sure they found a new state.

So how did you talk about a thread to pull? How did you find this?

I was writing about these crooked brokers and I was doing I did a kind of fun story about how it was around the time The Wolf of Wall Street came out, and it was the point of the story was sort of like these guys are down on their luck and like the cold calling business is no good anymore. And a lot of these guys so I was spent a long time taking them out for you know, stakes at Harry's or whatever downtown, and they a lot of

Now? This might be kind of interesting.

And one of the first guys I met in it, this is back in like twenty fourteen. I went to this guy's office. So the Financial district like it's like the it's got the low office rents in New York. These offices are like dumps. I go to this guy.

It's a Wall Street address, right.

So I go to this guy's office who runs this thing called Pearl Capital. I meet this guy named Abe runs Pearl Capital, and it's one of these cash advands outfits that charge like five hundred percent interest. And it's like this dumpy office with like cases of red bulls stacked up.

They're not wasting money on marble and walnut.

No, no, no.

And I meet one of his his minions, who is like eighteen years old. He had this He has his minion give me a ride home. The guy's driving like a V twelve Mercedes. He has this like high school dropout who can with this thick Brooklyn accent. And as he drives me home in his one hundred thousand dollars car. He's calling these bodega owners and being like, you're laid on your payment, and I'm just like, what is with

Just just don't tell any of that to an investigative reporter from Business Week, and you might have something left to sell.

Well.

So he did tell me that, and then I was like, I was newer at this, so I wasn't quite sure how to do the story. But then one day I obtained a letter and it said, dear Abe, we would like to buy your company for a hundred million dollars, sincerely, Goldman Sachs.

Get out yes, and did he sell?

He did sell. He didn't get quite a hundred million. He sold to a different company, and he had actually he moved. He did the Puerto Rico tax thing, right.

But you talked about in the book, By the way, what is it about Puerto Rico, Miami, Bahamas? All these fraudsters they like warm weather. What's that about.

You can actually, you can get out of all your taxes by moving her company and yourself to.

Puerto Rico for Puerto Rican tax rate. That's all you are.

Yeah, no federal tax, capital Dames tax. Yeah, but you have to live in Puerto Rico for more than half the year.

So if you don't want to pay New York state tax, New York doesn't care where you live as long as you're not in New York for more than half the year. Puerto Rico is saying, no, you have to be here, rainy season, hots it whatever. Yeah, half a year and a day.

And so it takes like a certain kind of person who's so concerned about maximizing their money that they're willing to do that.

Why would you want to live someplace if you could afford not to.

Well, this this ave guy, he had a funny he was a great character. At one point, James Franco was talking to him about playing him in the movie. That didn't help really, but he said he so he grew

That's really interesting. All right, So I only have you for a few more minutes. Let me jump to my favorite questions. We'll kind of make this a speed round, starting with what have you been streaming? Tell us some of your favorite Netflix, Amazon Prime, or even podcasts you listen to.

So my recommendation is a series of Korean action movies. I love action movies.

Oh really, It's.

Called The one that I like the best is called The Roundup. That's entry number two in the Crime City series, and it stars this guy down Lee, and he plays he's like the prototypical cop from like an eighties nineties action movie, where like he doesn't follow the rules, but he always gets his guy right. You know, he's always like beating up the suspect instead of you know, asking him the questions, like the other cops do. And it's got it's funny, it's got great action scenes.

I love it.

Yes title or you watch it dubbed.

You gotta get subtitles. And I'm waiting there's the roundup. Three is out. It came out in theaters, but you can't stream it yet, so I'm waiting for for number three.

All right, so let's talk about your early mentors who helped shape your career.

My first job as a reporter was at a paper called the Brooklyn Paper. It was like a free weekly you got at the supermarket. I was an unpaid intern. My boss was Gersh Kuntsman, and he was like a tabloid guy he'd worked at the Post. He was an amazing mentor because he was he was a very tough editor, and he insisted that each of the stories be interesting, like we couldn't, we wouldn't. There was no like meandering.

You you must have been twenty countries in the book. I mean, you traveled all around the world.

I really thought, all right, it's my first book.

I don't know.

I don't want to disappoint anybody. I want the reader to feel like I did my best. I went to look at everything I could think of, and like, any questions you had, I really did my best to go to Cambodia to answer them, or to El Salvador to see if, like this bitcoin experiment it was real. So maybe some part of that came from Gersh telling me quotes are boring. Get back out there to the subway station, ask people about the election.

So let's talk about some other books. What are you reading and what are some of your favorites.

My picks are there's a pretty mainstream because the kind of book that I wrote is the kind of book that I love. Like when I was a teenager, I always I loved these crazy nonfiction adventures. So that was like Into thin Air by John Krakauer or The Perfect Storm, or I loved Bringing Down the House by Ben Mezrich about the Mit Blackjack Kids. And I still love that kind of book, like David gran The Last City of

Have you ever read Endurance the Shackleford story. No, that put that at the top of your list. The book has to be true because if it was fiction, people would throw it away and say, this is just too not believable. If you like Into thin Air, oh this is the book that started that genre. It's insane.

Oh nice, I will check it out.

So that's a good I have a more often.

One that you might you might want to check out is called The Tiger by John Valiant, and it's about like a killer tiger in Siberia.

Huh.

And the guys who like they're guys who are like tiger detectives who have to go find the killer tiger are all true, right, I mean, one of the best of nonfiction books of this genre. Right now, I'm reading a lot of Diary of a Wimpy Kid to my children. I have twins who are six, right, and my son loves this serious Diary of the Wimpy Kid. Actually very boring. I don't like it. I actually like children's books a lot of the time, but these Wimpy Kid books, it's the number one children's book.

They're super regular.

They're just like it's a it's a kid's diary, you know, it's it's a little repetitive. There's like twenty of them, almost to the end. But then they eli said, we're going to start back at the beginning.

No good. So let's get to our last two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad who was interested in a career in journalism, investigative reporting, finance, or crypto. What would you suggest to them.

If you get into financial journalism, one thing I didn't really understand is that finance guys, a lot of them are on their on the phone all day. They're just gossiping with their buddies, and you can like get in the mix. And if you just act like you belong, you can call these guys up and be like, hey, did you hear about Jill at Goldman Sachs, Like I heard she took a big loss last week, And they'll talk about it with Happy to Dish. You know, they're

Because now you let them in on the secret method.

Yeah, go for it.

That's amazing. And finally, what do you know about the world of again investigative journalism, reporting, or finance today? You wish you knew? I don't know, when did you begin your career, like fifteen twenty years ago?

That's about right.

Yeah, There's one thing about the world of crypto that I wish I knew when I started this book, which is that number goes up, numbergo I actually wish I knew that. Alameda Research Sam bank, mcfred's head fund was secretly borrowing all the customer money from FTX cause I'm still kicking myself that I didn't catch this guy. That could have been like my claim to fame.

Really interesting stuff. Thanks Zeke for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Zeke Fox, author of Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Ride and Staggering Fall. If you enjoy this conversation, check out on any of the previous five hundred or so discussions we've had over the past nine years. You can find those at iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, wherever you find your favorite podcast. Sign up for my daily reading list at rid Helts dot com. Follow me