CZM Rewind: How Sam Bankman-Fried Conned the Crypto World & The Sam Bankman-Fried Update

Part One: Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to talk about the collapse of one of the great financial criminals of our time. Original Air Date: 11.22.22 Part Two: Everyone's favorite crypto conman is back behind bars! Robert sits down with Jamie Loftus to talk about his plans to buy an island and make he and his friends living gods. Original Air Date: 8.15.23 See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Speaker 01

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• 0:34Robert Evans?

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• 1:06Speaker 03

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• 1:37Speaker 04

  Cool Zone Media.

• 1:43Robert Evans?

  Ah, God is dead and you, Jamie Loftus, have killed him.

• 1:48Speaker 05

  I did it. I finally did it.

• 1:49Robert Evans?

  You did it. You did it. No, God was a hymn and Jamie killed him. Hammered in the back of the head.

• 1:55Speaker 05

  And and people are going to be critical of that, but you know,

• 1:58Robert Evans?

  They are.

• 1:58Speaker 05

  You don't know my story. And in my six part mini series in which I'm played by Amanda Siegfried, I think you're gonna start to see my side of the story. And I think I'm definitely not going to jail for what I did.

• 2:10Robert Evans?

  That's good. Unlike founder of Theranos, Elizabeth Holmes, who we just found out has been sentenced to 11.25 years in in prison.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  I'm kind of, I like.

• 2:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I have mixed like.

• 2:24Speaker 05

  I have mixed feelings because it's like, people don't go, first of all, the prison industrial complex in general.

• 2:31Robert Evans?

  No, it it it doesn't make anyone better. To the extent that there's value in the present day and putting people in prison, it's people who are like a severe ongoing danger. And I don't see this making anything better. Like, at the same time, I hate her. So I don't, I'm not gonna.

• 2:49Speaker 05

  She's horrible.

• 2:49Robert Evans?

  It's not, it's not gonna be the top injustice I I rue today.

• 2:55Speaker 05

  I do kind of like that her, after being exposed as an unrepentant criminal, she's like, oh, I think I'm just gonna kind of be like, a normie girl for a while. And I'm

• 3:06Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna go to Coachella with my new boyfriend. Yeah.

• 3:09Speaker 05

  And you're like, Liz, it's too late. It's too late for that, Liz.

• 3:13Robert Evans?

  You defrauded people with a fake medical device that led folks to see to get treatment for things they didn't have and ignore illnesses they did, which is bad.

• 3:23Speaker 05

  Before too many bodies hit the floor, but that would have stopped you.

• 3:27Robert Evans?

  But you didn't really care. You you applied Steve Jobs logic to something that was not just a silly box to keep in your pocket.

• 3:35Speaker 05

  Oh, Lizzie.

• 3:37Robert Evans?

  Lizzie, Lizzie.

• 3:39Speaker 05

  Lizzie, Lizzie's fucked, is what we learned.

• 3:43Robert Evans?

  Also, putting her in prison for, you know, probably nine years, when you consider all of the other things, is like. Not gonna help anything. It'll just mean that that kid she has grows up without a mom for nine years and that's not gonna make the world better.

• 3:58Speaker 05

  That's the thing. It's like, it's a huge moment for many things can be true at once.

• 4:02Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 4:02Speaker 05

  Having to hold all of those truths and still record an episode of Behind the Bastards. I, can I tell you about a legal case I was thinking about?

• 4:11Robert Evans?

  This actually, this actually will be relevant to the episode, but yes, please, please.

• 4:14Speaker 05

  Wait, really? Yes. Okay, this is definitely not gonna be relevant, so let's, let's pivot. I was, a legal case I was thinking about today was the Beanie Babies billionaire. When he went, was taken to court in 2013 for holding money in a Swiss bank account. He, so it was like a tax evasion.

• 4:34Robert Evans?

  Oh, a tax evasion.

• 4:35Speaker 05

  Tax evasion charge. So he was up for as many as five years in prison for tax evasion. Then he got off with, I mean, he's a billionaire, he's never gonna suffer a consequence, right? But like, he ended up getting a two years of probation on the ground that it had been too publicly humiliating, so he didn't have to get to go to jail because he was too embarrassed. It was so embarrassing that he didn't have to go to jail. What? That's absolutely fucking weird. Anyways.

• 5:08Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna see how far this goes by committing murder and then having my pants fall down and like, "Well, Judge, look, yes, I did stab that man 47 times."

• 5:19Speaker 05

  But then I pee peed my pants.

• 5:21Robert Evans?

  But then everybody saw my underpants, yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  Then I pee peed myself, so I think we're square.

• 5:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, can we, can we just zero this one out?

• 5:30Speaker 05

  Man, I love the Beanie Babies story so much. I'm surrounded by my beans, feeling safe.

• 5:36Robert Evans?

  Wow, that's good. You do literally have one on your shoulder right now.

• 5:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, Patty the Platypus.

• 5:42Robert Evans?

  Just, just like I have this rifle next to me.

• 5:45Speaker 05

  I think that we both have our comfort objects at the ready.

• 5:47Robert Evans?

  That's right, that's right. So, Jamie.

• 5:51Robert Evans?

  Speaking of Elizabeth Holmes, because the person we're talking about today is gonna be the next story like that. By this time next year, there probably is going to be an HBO documentary about this guy.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  Oh, God.

• 6:04Robert Evans?

  Maybe Taylor, Taylor Kitsch could probably play him. Actually, if he wanted to really, like, round that out. Taylor Kitsch played hot David Koresh in The Waco Show.

• 6:14Speaker 05

  Oh, Jimmy, I walked into that one. I'm so pissed.

• 6:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they'd have to give him like a belly suit or something. That's not anti-fat. I'm just being accurate. But he could do it.

• 6:23Speaker 05

  I'm pissed.

• 6:23Robert Evans?

  Maybe that is, yeah.

• 6:24Speaker 05

  I don't want to see this man ever again. No, I'm mad.

• 6:27Robert Evans?

  Taylor Kitsch? You don't want to see Taylor Kitsch again?

• 6:29Speaker 05

  No.

• 6:30Robert Evans?

  You don't want to see those cum gutters again? Unbelievable.

• 6:32Speaker 05

  God damn it, Robert. There's plenty of, in this town, Robert, there's a million cum gutters. I don't need those. I need those in my.

• 6:40Robert Evans?

  Oh, that, that is true. But anyway, so.

• 6:43Speaker 05

  Cum runs through the street.

• 6:45Robert Evans?

  That, that, that is, that is true of Los Angeles and no other city. Today, we are talking about a guy who absolutely never comes. Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 6:56Speaker 05

  Why doesn't he come?

• 6:56Robert Evans?

  Do you know this guy? Do you know this guy?

• 6:58Speaker 05

  I don't know this guy. No.

• 6:59Robert Evans?

  You don't know this guy. You don't know this guy. Have you, have you caught any news in the last week about how like a massive cryptocurrency exchange has collapsed, plummeting all of the?

• 7:09Speaker 05

  I did hear about that.

• 7:10Robert Evans?

  This is that guy.

• 7:12Speaker 05

  Oh, my.

• 7:12Robert Evans?

  This is the guy with his like polyamorous sex ring that was running a big crypto bank in the Bahamas and it all fell apart and now billions of dollars are gone?

• 7:20Speaker 05

  You've lost me again.

• 7:22Robert Evans?

  Oh, great. Okay. Well, I'll, I'll try to, this is still breaking. I, we are, because this is a Thanksgiving week episode, we only do one episode on Thanksgivings. I needed a single one. So I just want to give everyone background on this guy. We will, we may come back to this story because there's a lot we don't fully understand about how he did what he did and the degree to which, but.

• 7:43Speaker 05

  I hate Google Images.

• 7:44Robert Evans?

  This guy, this guy ran a trading service called Alameda Research and a crypto exchange. And exchange is basically like a, a, a bank, right? It's a cross between a bank and like a trading platform called FTX, which was one of the large. Just cryptocurrency exchanges in the world and was also considered by most people to be the most stable and like ethical and legitimate, right? People who were just kind of on the outside looking at when everything collapsed earlier this year, right? You remember that we have that

• 8:14Speaker 05

  I mean, no, I was engaged in that. It's just that I get a lot of my news.

• 8:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:18Speaker 05

  Journalists on Twitter and they've been busy this week.

• 8:22Robert Evans?

  Yes. So when, when, when the, when crypto like fell apart, when a lot of crypto fell apart earlier this year and like a bunch of places went under, FTX was one of the ones that stayed stable and actually were buying up a bunch of like failing crypto companies to try to like prop up the industry. They just collapsed and like the value of all, everything has been plummeting for, for the last several days. It's a big disaster. It is very like, yeah.

• 8:48Speaker 05

  In, in, in as, in words that will annoy me as little as possible, can you explain why FTS remained solvent and other

• 8:58Robert Evans?

  It is not solvent. Oh, now why it did?

• 9:00Speaker 05

  Why did it outlast?

• 9:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, because they lied. Um, so they were, they were operating the, the short end of how to describe it and, and we may, there will be more details to come, but at present, it seems fair to say that it was a giant Ponzi scheme where they were, they were, they were taking in money, promising unreasonable returns, using other investor money to gamble on stuff to try to provide anyway. And it worked.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Unlike all the other crypto guys, they were, they were dishonest.

• 9:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is, it is very likely, what, what, what differentiates this is the scale because this is very likely a financial crime on the level of what Bernie Madoff did. We are talking in the $10 to $20 billion stolen.

• 9:41Speaker 05

  Holy cow.

• 9:42Robert Evans?

  A lot of money. This is a serious financial crime.

• 9:47Speaker 05

  I'm going in on this pretty cold. So I'm, I'm listening.

• 9:50Robert Evans?

  So it, it for the other, the other kind of mass of, um, like touchstone of this is that it has led to a class action lawsuit against Larry David, Shaquille O'Neal, Tom Brady, and a number of celebrities who were all in a, a Superbowl ad for FTX.

• 10:07Speaker 05

  I remember that ad. That was so embarrassing for my man Larry.

• 10:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so the lawsuit is basically saying this was a high dollar Ponzi scheme and you guys were using your name recognition to sell unregistered securities, which they were.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  Which they were.

• 10:25Robert Evans?

  Which they definitely were.

• 10:27Speaker 05

  Sorry, I just want to circle back to Shaquille Shaquille O'Neal will put his name on anything to the point where to the point where

• 10:34Robert Evans?

  It is very funny.

• 10:35Speaker 05

  I worked at a haunted hayride this year, which we don't talk about because it was a bad idea, but the rival haunted hayride.

• 10:45Robert Evans?

  I told Sophie that.

• 10:46Speaker 05

  What? You told her it was a bad idea?

• 10:48Robert Evans?

  I told her it was a bad idea.

• 10:49Speaker 05

  Well, guess what? I'm alive, bitch. Bitch, I lived. I supported it. I lived to tell the tale. It's very unclear who is right in the side of should I work at a haunted hayride or not? I still haven't really landed on an answer. Point being, our closest rival haunted hayride wise was Shaqtoberfest. It was

• 11:09Robert Evans?

  Wow.

• 11:10Speaker 05

  Shaq themed haunted attraction in which the only Shaq related thing was a gigantic inflatable Frankenstein that looked like Shaq, which did sound awesome.

• 11:20Robert Evans?

  That sounds actually like the best time anyone's ever had.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Shaq will put his name on anything, including crypto and Halloween, one of which I'm supportive of.

• 11:28Robert Evans?

  What a, what a king. Probably not. I'm sure there's horrible things about Shaq that have come out. That seems almost unavoidable. Anyway, Sam Bankman Fried is the guy behind this gigantic financial crime that is still unraveling as we do this episode. And I want to talk about, less about what happened on the exchange because none of us want to talk about how somebody carries out the nuts and bolts of a cryptocurrency scam.

• 11:51Speaker 05

  I'm going to nosebleed and pass out.

• 11:53Robert Evans?

  But I want to talk about, I want to talk about the social elements of the scam. I want to talk about who he conned the media, how he conned celebrities and how he conned regulators. And I just want to talk about also the way some of these people talked and wrote about him because there's a lot about I don't know, a week or so ago, we did an episode on The Daily Show, we do What Could Happen Here about ethical altruism, which is, in brief, a theory that like, the, instead of trying to help people just because they need help, you should only help people after you consider the way to help people that is like, the absolute most beneficial way for like, the least amount of, you know, effort. The, it's utilitarianism, right? What can I, how can I do the greatest good with the, the, the least resources and whatnot?

• 12:37Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 12:38Robert Evans?

  And it's, it's the way a lot of these like, i- i- and it's merged with this kind of thinking towards what billionaire types call long-termism. And the gist of this is like, i- i- it's not worthwhile for me to do stuff like pay taxes to have a society or guarantee like universal healthcare. Instead, um, I should make, instead, the most ethical thing that I should do is make as much money as I personally can and then put that money into things that I believe will save the world, like research to stop AIs from killing everyone and getting to Mars and shit. It's a way for billionaires-

• 13:08Speaker 05

  Or rockets are really fast trains.

• 13:10Robert Evans?

  It's a way for billionaires and the other mega-rich to justify, like, continuing to do exactly what they want and feel like they're saving the world. Anyway, Sam Bankman-Fried-

• 13:19Speaker 05

  Do you know the guy from Beanie Baby, you know what the Beanie Babies billionaire did to improve the world?

• 13:23Robert Evans?

  He made a lot of Beanie Babies?

• 13:25Speaker 05

  And then he bought the Four Seasons Hotel and kept making Beanie Babies. He didn't do shit!

• 13:30Robert Evans?

  That's, well, you know, that's, I'm fine with that compared to these guys. Cause they're all doing the Elon Musk thing where they're pretending, anyway, Bank, Sam Bankman-Fried is one of these guys, and we're gonna get into that, but we did this episode on It Could Happen Here, where he was kind of a tangential character in this very unsettling and insidious movement that is behind guys like Elon Musk who are claiming to be saving the world while just fucking over people. And then, like, four days after it came out, his entire life unraveled and his fortune disappeared overnight because he was a giant con artist.

• 14:00Speaker 05

  What a treat!

• 14:01Robert Evans?

  It's very funny, so that's why we're talking about him right now.

• 14:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's like, he's like 30 years old and looks like Mark Zuckerberg and David Dobrik's love child. He's 30 years old? I feel great about myself right now. He's Mark Zuckerberg and David Dobrik's love child.

• 14:16Robert Evans?

  Look, I shouldn't call anyone a schlub, but he looks like a schlub.

• 14:20Speaker 05

  I forget what David Dobrik looked like, because my brain protects myself. Respectfully, I understand. Two villains, two villains love child.

• 14:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Um, anyway, so I, uh, yeah, Sam Bankman Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University, uh, continuing a long and proud tradition of absolutely nothing good ever coming from that hellhole. His parents are both extremely prominent Stanford professors. His mother, Barbara, is a lawyer, her who clerked for the Second Circuit Court and graduated from Harvard. She founded Mind the Gap, a somewhat shady and mysterious democratic fundraising group. I think it's shady in that people don't exactly know where all the money comes from or like what their goals are. She also pinned-

• 15:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, that sounds shady.

• 15:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. She also pinned an essay in 2013 that the right wing is going nuts about because she was basically arguing that like it, good and evil are less a factor in, in what people do than environmental factors and, and, and all that stuff. Like when people do things that are bad, it's more often a product of their invite. It was kind of a, um, oh God, what's that fucking psychologist? Uh, it was like a Skinner type argument where it's like, well, if people have bad inputs in their youth, then that's going to determine. Anyway, um, I think that's funny, given what happens. Um, I, I'm going to guess she sucks at what she's, she's, she's, she sucks. Uh, and so does his dad, Joseph Bankman.

• 15:46Speaker 05

  Oh, good.

• 15:47Robert Evans?

  Uh, Joseph is also a lawyer. He is a graduate from Yale. Uh, his big claim to fame was developing a proposal for an overhaul of the California tax return system that would have filled out citizens' tax returns in advance. And I know I just said he sucked, but actually that sounds like a good thing. Um, I think that that's actually a cool thing to advocate for. The measure failed by one vote after heavy lobbying from Intuit, a tax prep, prep software company.

• 16:10Speaker 05

  One vote, no shit.

• 16:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it kind of is. It's, it's total bullshit because stuff, it's the thing everybody agrees with on paper, but nobody will actually fight the tax prep companies, which is like, hey, the IRS like knows more or less what I make and like knows more or less what I owe. Why don't I just get a thing from them? Why do I have to go through this? Like, anyway.

• 16:31Speaker 05

  There's no need, but it's like, that's the only-

• 16:33Robert Evans?

  Other countries do it that way. Don't though.

• 16:35Speaker 05

  Right, well, because there has to be a convoluted system that's expensive and where they can charge you if you make the tiniest mistake because you can't read size one font.

• 16:44Robert Evans?

  Well, and more to the point, because I don't actually think the IRS is advocating to keep it a pain in the ass. I think it's these tax prep companies because they have an entire industry based on charging people to do the thing that they have to do to avoid going to fucking prison. Anyway, I said he's an asshole and I'm sure he is, but he was right about this. And I don't know what to say about that. Like all of us, Joseph is also a podcaster. He is the host of the co-host of the Stanford Legal Podcast.

• 17:13Speaker 05

  Oh, insufferable times too. And he's a nerd.

• 17:17Robert Evans?

  If it wasn't the holiday season and I wasn't like getting ready for friends and family and all that, that good stuff, I would have listened to his podcast and we would probably be making fun of him. But you can do that on your own.

• 17:29Speaker 05

  Oh, my goodness.

• 17:30Robert Evans?

  I believe in you.

• 17:31Speaker 05

  Isn't it, doesn't it feel so horrible when you think of how many people do what we do, but they're the worst person you've ever heard of. It's so sad. It's embarrassing.

• 17:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's like, I don't know.

• 17:45Speaker 05

  I avoid self identifying as a podcaster as it is. It's still not a system. But then on top of that, they're like, oh, like what, like what?

• 17:53Robert Evans?

  I mean, you know, you know, the only, you know, the only thing that that I can compare it to is like, when I started making a living as a writer 15 years ago, and I would say that at like, at like, a, a, a party or something, someone asked like, well, what do you do? And I'm like, well, I'm a writer. And like, four other people would say, yeah, me too. And then you wind up listening to everybody's pitches for their novels that they're never going to finish.

• 18:17Speaker 05

  I mean, it's the same.

• 18:18Robert Evans?

  So eventually I just started lying and saying that I still worked at special ed.

• 18:23Speaker 05

  Well, I like, I mean, it's the same thing with like, if you say you're a comedian in a party, you're about to have.

• 18:28Robert Evans?

  Oh, God, no, never, never identify as a comedian in public.

• 18:32Speaker 05

  Oh, me too. Do you, and I've done one whole open mic and my joke was very offensive. And isn't that a comedian's job to push boundaries and be a, oh, tell me your joke.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  You know how Lenny Bruce let read that, read that list of curse words? Well, I just do that with slurs. Here, let me show you.

• 18:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, you're like, yeah, like, Lane Bruce was not funny in that period of his career, even a little. Anyways, anyways, our jobs are embarrassing, is what I'm saying.

• 19:00Robert Evans?

  Anyway, our jobs are indeed embarrassing. So as you might guess from all of that, Sam was born into what amounts to America's like liberal aristocracy. He is a fucking coastal elite, right? This kid grows up on the Stanford campus to Stanford professors. One of his aunts teaches at Columbia University, is like a professor there.

• 19:22Speaker 05

  Oh, so he's like...

• 19:23Robert Evans?

  He has close family connections to employees at Yale and at Harvard, as well as Stanford. Like, his parents both go to Harvard, I think.

• 19:31Speaker 05

  He's a little Kennedy.

• 19:32Robert Evans?

  He is a, yeah, he's, he's that. He is as, you do not get much more of a rarefied, like, intellectual air.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  He's wearing, he's wearing linens around. This is how I think about...

• 19:43Robert Evans?

  Yes. This is, this is a child who at age eight has strong opinions on Immanuel Kant.

• 19:48Speaker 05

  And people will cheer for him at the table.

• 19:51Robert Evans?

  No. Oh, we're about to get into that, Jamie Loftus.

• 19:55Speaker 05

  I just had a, I just had a vision of a child sitting at like a holiday dinner and saying, derivative. And then someone going, oh, that's amazing. Wow, he is really coming along, isn't he?

• 20:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is a little kid that when he like sits down at the doctor's office, pulls out a fucking, I don't know, Deritta or something book. Just, just, just so you know, just so you know, he knows fancy philosophers.

• 20:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 20:18Robert Evans?

  God damn it.

• 20:18Speaker 05

  Board book.

• 20:20Robert Evans?

  Mm hmm. So his parents and his, raised him and his brother to be utilitarians. One of the articles about them I found say that...

• 20:28Speaker 05

  I was raised to be into SpongeBob.

• 20:29Robert Evans?

  Okay, yeah, yeah, I was, I was raised to hassle cows in our back 40. His parents, so this article notes that nights around the family dinner table often focused around debates about how to do the greatest good for the greatest number of people. In later interviews with, I'm gonna get to this guy in a second, the absolute dick-writingest journalist to ever write dick. Sam would claim that his most formative moment came at age 12, when he was weighing arguments around the abortion debate. So, first off...

• 21:03Robert Evans?

  No.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  No.

• 21:05Robert Evans?

  No.

• 21:06Speaker 05

  On point one, no, because not only no, also like in the context of like, where would he have been doing this?

• 21:17Robert Evans?

  I'm guessing like around the family table or when they have the all, you know, everybody's got their brandy and he's drinking some sort of fucking tea that's insufferable and they're all talking about people's rights as if it's like a fun intellectual problem, like how to fix an engine.

• 21:32Speaker 05

  Because for them it is, because wherever they land, the rules aren't going to apply to them anyways.

• 21:36Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 21:37Speaker 05

  Where does he, where does he fall? Where does he fall in the debate?

• 21:40Robert Evans?

  That's a great question. So I'm going to quote now from an article previously published by Sequoia Capital and written by Adam Fisher, who should never be allowed to live this article down. When I say the dick writingist, like fucking PR flak journal, it's shameful. Quote, "A rights-based theorist might argue that there aren't really any discontinuous differences as a fetus becomes a child, and thus fetus murder is essentially child murder. The utilitarian argument compares the consequences of each. The loss of an actual child's life, a life in which a great deal of parental and societal resources have been invested, is much more consequential than the loss of a potential life in utero. And thus, to a utilitarian, abortion looks more like birth control than like murder. SBF, that's

• 22:24Robert Evans?

  what they always call him, the kid, Sam. SBF's application of utilitarianism helped him resolve some nagging doubts he had about the ethics of abortion. It made him feel comfortable being pro-choice, as his friends, family, and peers were. He saw the essential rightness of his philosophical faith." So that's very fucked up. That is, that is so, like, the term "choice" is used at the very end there, but it's clear that like, he's not thinking about this in terms of like, the actual value of human bodily autonomy. That does not weigh into utilitarian calculus for him whatsoever.

• 22:56Speaker 05

  No, that is, to quote my friend Robert, no.

• 23:02Robert Evans?

  No.

• 23:02Speaker 05

  No.

• 23:03Robert Evans?

  And again, even like, look, I shit reflexively sometimes on utilitarianism, not because of the inherent value or disvalue of thinking that way, but about the way it gets talked about by these people. But like, if you're actually a utilitarian... And you care about the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Then bodily autonomy should factor into that, right? Like, human bodily autonomy is, should be hugely important to you.

• 23:28Speaker 05

  Yes!

• 23:29Robert Evans?

  But no, that's not logical. All that matters is like, well, how many, if you've, if, if less resources than this have been invested in the fetus, then it's not a person, so abortion makes, that's fucking bullshit logic. Fuck you.

• 23:41Speaker 05

  You're doing too much math. Stop.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  This isn't a math, this isn't a math problem, Sam. Like, this is not a fucking math problem. Not everything's a goddamn math problem.

• 23:50Speaker 05

  Robert, he won't listen to you unless you call him SBF. And I was like, why is Robert talking about sunscreen?

• 23:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, we'll get that. They all call him fucking SBF. And I hate it, but also, as this went on, I started using it more and more, because it's a pain in the ass to type his whole fucking last name out. I, look, I, this is one where I'm not gonna give him a pass, but I get it. If you write about this fucker a lot, it does make it easier. So, anyway, all of this is very bad. But you know what's not bad, Jamie?

• 24:21Speaker 05

  Well...

• 24:22Robert Evans?

  The products and services to support this podcast.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  No, that's not true, they are.

• 24:26Robert Evans?

  That's, well, that might be true.

• 24:28Speaker 05

  I've checked. Hold on, I just ran a quick check on that, and you can't guarantee that even 1%.

• 24:33Robert Evans?

  But, but, but what about the greatest good for the greatest number of people? And, and given that I'm, I'm a people, so it works out pretty well. It works out very well for me.

• 24:43Speaker 05

  I think that if you actually have more advertising revenue, you will actually build a really fast train, like you've been promising me you would.

• 24:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I'm gonna, I'm gonna build the Hyperloop.

• 24:54Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 24:55Robert Evans?

  And, uh, I'm gonna promise you one thing, it's gonna kill a hell of a lot more people than that Simpsons monorail did.

• 25:03Speaker 05

  And that, and, and I'm gonna, and, and look, not everyone is gonna hold you to task for that, but I am.

• 25:08Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Jamie. Thank you for keeping me honest and ensuring that, uh, we, we, we really make a memorable disaster.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  Look, I'm available anytime I'm not visiting my friend Liz in jail.

• 25:24Speaker 06

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• 25:54Robert Evans?

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• 26:18Speaker 05

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• 26:54Robert Evans?

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• 27:01Speaker 03

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• 27:35Robert Evans?

  We are back. What a good time. So Sam Bankman-Fried is above all else, a numbers guy. And I guess as a kid, he was a numbers kid. His parents sent him to Crystal Springs Uplands, a fancy prep school in Hillsborough, California. I looked through the website because I wanted to make fun of it, but it just kind of seems like a really fancy school. I don't know. I'm sure it's a great place to get an education. They make, they put a lot of, I will tell this, they devote a lot of screen resources to letting you know that they are not racist and that most of their students aren't white. They also have a French, they also have a French cinema class for sixth graders, which is fine, but the cranky asshole in me that still has a little piece of my soul raised by right wing radio wants to say shit about it.

• 28:19Speaker 05

  I was raised by, by left wing people and I still think that that's some loser shit. I think that that's fucking dorky and goofy and like, should, it's like, what, you know, you meet, because you meet people like that in the wild and they're sometimes, and maybe even often, very sweet people, but I'm like trying to be like, oh, you know who Plankton is? And they're like, no. And then, but they've been watching French movies since they were like seven. And I just don't really respect that.

• 28:51Robert Evans?

  If I made a sixth grader with, yeah, if I meet a sixth grader with strong opinions about French cinema, like, I'm just gonna leave. I'm gonna leave. I'm just gonna walk away.

• 29:01Speaker 05

  Wow, right, Robert, that's really brave of you to march out of a conversation with an 11 year old.

• 29:06Robert Evans?

  I am not, I'm not putting up with that shit. Absolutely not.

• 29:09Speaker 05

  I'm leaving this sixth grade class. My name is Robert Evans and I think you're all doofuses.

• 29:16Robert Evans?

  Fucking, go watch your, what, Renoir? Is that one of them? That sounds like one of them. Claude Renoir? Is he a painter or he make movies?

• 29:23Speaker 05

  Renoir's a painter. I know the one you're looking for and I was looking for it too, but I don't remember. But guess who, do you know who Plankton is? Of course you do.

• 29:30Robert Evans?

  I know who Plankton is and I also know that at least one of the directors they study is a pedophile. Just knowing a little bit about French cinema. That's, that's unavoidable.

• 29:41Robert Evans?

  So he does well. Again, the school's probably fine. He does well at the school. He was notably insular. He avoided most of his classmates to play Starcraft, which is good, and League of Legends, which objectively sucks. He also played a lot of Magic the Gathering, so I am confident he did not get laid in high school. This is based on extensive personal experience.

• 30:08Speaker 05

  Like, I just actually did some field research and...

• 30:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, about four years of it.

• 30:17Speaker 05

  Okay, interesting.

• 30:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. For college, he was accepted to and attended MIT, which marked out his family's elite North American university punch card. They really hit them all now, now that they've got an MIT kid in the family.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  They get a free coffee. There used to be an MIT... So when I was doing comedy in Boston, there was like, MIT had like a secret comedy club that was just for MIT students, and it was awful.

• 30:45Robert Evans?

  Oh, I'll bet that's... Oh, god, yeah.

• 30:47Speaker 05

  They paid you okay, but it was like, they're like, if you like knew someone who, like, met someone who went to MIT and they came to your shows and they were like, oh, we did the math and you are allowed to come to our... They called it their speakeasy. I wonder if it's still around. It was so... It was, I mean, it was not fun.

• 31:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:08Speaker 05

  Not a fun crowd, I will say. But best of luck to whatever was going on there.

• 31:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 31:16Speaker 05

  So he goes to MIT.

• 31:17Robert Evans?

  He goes to MIT.

• 31:18Speaker 05

  He might have been at one of those shows. We're on the same page.

• 31:19Robert Evans?

  He might have, because he joins a fraternity there. And MIT, well, Jamie, it's an MIT-specific coed nerd fraternity. So...

• 31:29Speaker 05

  Nice. What could go wrong?

• 31:31Robert Evans?

  Epsilon Theta. And here's how Adam Fisher, the guy I hate, described them in his article, which was bad. Quote, "A coed fraternity of super geeks, similarly interested in magic and video games. Thetans are fond of debating math, physics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, and logic problems for fun." At alcohol free parties. Now, I do know a little bit about MIT and I know another thing these nerds often do is kill themselves using nitrous oxide because they will try to flood entire rooms with nitrous to do like a 20% nitrous to O2 ratio and kill themselves.

• 32:04Speaker 05

  What's all this then?

• 32:05Robert Evans?

  It's a thing that happens. Look it up. MIT nitrous deaths.

• 32:07Speaker 05

  What's all this then?

• 32:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 32:09Speaker 05

  Man, I, all I did in college was drink too many blue moons.

• 32:15Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. It's, uh, it's, it's quite a thing. Um.

• 32:19Speaker 05

  Yikes.

• 32:20Robert Evans?

  So, I don't know.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  What are you doing over there?

• 32:22Robert Evans?

  I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know how much I believe that, that they were always alcohol and drug free parties. Because if there's one thing I know from nerds, it's that they do a shitload of drugs.

• 32:31Speaker 05

  I definitely didn't hear of this one because I went to a couple of MIT frat parties and they were, um, not sober. Fun fact, one, the, one of the MIT frat parties I went to, some, for some reason, when I was in college and I would get really drunk, I would always, I would like, I would, I would like to like steal things from wherever I was. And so I stole two critical pool balls from an MIT frat house and someone was able to trace it back to me and they demanded their pool balls back.

• 32:59Robert Evans?

  Oof.

• 33:00Speaker 05

  And I, I, embarrassingly, I, I, I think I capitulated. I think I did give them back. I shouldn't.

• 33:06Robert Evans?

  Wow. Wow. Actually, so this one kid I'm finding in 99 died because he put a bag over his head to inhale nitrous, which is, fuck, man. How did you get into N I T, MIT?

• 33:17Speaker 05

  I don't know any, I was like, I don't know anything about drugs.

• 33:19Robert Evans?

  We shouldn't be making fun of this guy. Um, but don't put bags, don't put bags over your head, kids. Um.

• 33:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 33:26Robert Evans?

  Fucking.

• 33:27Speaker 05

  I learned that in public school, no less.

• 33:29Robert Evans?

  So many other ways to do whippets than putting a plastic bag over your head. Anyway, whatever. According, next, according to the popular Sam Bankman-Fried endorsed version of the story, he pivoted towards an almost obsessive devotion to ethics in his freshman year. He went vegan. He organized a protest against factory farming and he worried obsessively over how he could change the world for the better. And it was at this point that Sam met a man who was going to change his life forever, William McCaskill. Um, if you want to learn more about this guy, I do recommend the episode of It Could Happen. And here on effective altruism. This guy is today, the, the most, the pop philosopher of effective altruism and long-termism. He is in Elon Musk's text messages that we all got as a result of the Twitter lawsuit.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 34:14Robert Evans?

  At this point, he was also at MIT and he met with Sam at a cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Where McCaskill.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  Which one, which one, which one?

• 34:23Robert Evans?

  I, I, I don't know. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, Jamie. Um, it's, I'm sure you've gotten a hot dog there. Um, that's, that seems likely.

• 34:32Speaker 05

  No, any place this guy's going, it doesn't have hot dogs. They're not ethical. They're famously unethical.

• 34:37Robert Evans?

  So yeah, you're probably right. So McCaskill explained the concept of effective altruism to him, which is again, this idea that like, what matters is, is you, you, you should like, think kind of coldly and robotically about how you do help to make sure that your charity money does the, the most that it can do. But one of the big like, arguments about it is that like, okay, well, what if you, you know, should you save a drowning child instead of saving like, three kids from a burning building? And it's like, that's a nonsense choice. Nobody's ever been presented with that choice at any point in the history of the human race. That is not, not a reason of, that is not a, there, there's no point to that ethical argument.

• 35:14Speaker 05

  New trolley problem, just draft Robert.

• 35:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:18Speaker 05

  And it makes no sense.

• 35:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it makes no fucking sense. There's like bits of it that are reasonable, which is that like, well, you know, it makes sense to like, look at the best thing you can do financially, you know, in terms of donating money is, you know, malaria prevention, because it winds up being the most cost-effective thing. But it's like, okay, does that mean we shouldn't put money into making the water in Flint, Michigan, drinkable? And a lot of these guys will say no, because that's not the best use of money. And it's like, well, we could do many things with money, especially if we tax billionaires and put it towards rebuilding infrastructure.

• 35:48Speaker 05

  I'm like, la la la la la la.

• 35:49Robert Evans?

  A number of things can be done.

• 35:50Speaker 05

  What? Sorry.

• 35:52Robert Evans?

  Anyway, whatever.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  Elon's shitty McMansion.

• 35:55Robert Evans?

  McCaskill kind of pills this guy on effective altruism. He frames it as a strategic investment whose success was measured in population's worth of human lives. He estimated using back of the envelope math that $2,000 could save one life and so. A million dollars could save 500 people, a billion could save half a million, and a trillion dollars could theoretically save half a billion lives. Based on that totally legitimate math.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  People are math, Robert.

• 36:22Robert Evans?

  People are math. It all works out that way.

• 36:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:26Robert Evans?

  Based, based on that absolutely real math, the only ethical way for a genius like Sam to use his time and talents is to become the world's first trillionaire. And I'm going to quote again from that article that I hate. SBF listened, nodding as Ms. Casco made his pitch. The earned to give logic was airtight. It was, SBF realized, applied utilitarianism. Knowing what he had to do, SBF simply said, yep, that makes sense. But right there, between a bright yellow sunshade and the crumb-strewn red brick floor, SBF's purpose in life was set. He was going to get filthy rich for charity's sake. All the rest was merely execution risk. His course established, McCaskill gave SBF one less navigational nudge to set him on his way,

• 37:10Robert Evans?

  suggesting that SBF get an internship at Jane Street that summer. And so.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  For the good of mankind.

• 37:17Robert Evans?

  For the good of mankind. Get in the finance industry and gamble like a motherfucker.

• 37:22Speaker 05

  Little asshole. I swear to God.

• 37:25Robert Evans?

  I fucking hate these people so much.

• 37:28Speaker 05

  What? Oh, God. Makes sense. Yeah. You know, look, I think that.

• 37:32Robert Evans?

  Airtight. Airtight. You can't debate that lot. There's no argument to be made about that logic, Jamie.

• 37:38Speaker 05

  I mean, I know that this is the wrong person to be turning on in this moment, but this is the dick-writing-est language I've ever heard.

• 37:44Robert Evans?

  Jamie, he has not begun to write dick.

• 37:47Speaker 05

  He's choking. He's choking on the thing.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  This man's got no gag reflex and no sign of slowing down.

• 37:55Robert Evans?

  Jamie, I'm going to read you some passages from this that are going to make you gag. It is unbearable. So, and it's like, this article's like 10,000 fucking words. It took me like an hour to get through this thing. It's massive.

• 38:07Speaker 05

  Who is, he's like, maybe if I do it, he'll give me a kiss on the mouth. We'll see.

• 38:10Robert Evans?

  Well, basically, this, this was published by Sequoia, which is a massive, like, investment fucking fund thing on their website.

• 38:18Speaker 05

  Journalistic entity?

• 38:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah. It looks like that. It looks exactly like an article from like Wired or something like they clearly laid it out like that. But I think it was done because they put like $200 million into his company. So they needed to justify it by making him look like a genius.

• 38:33Speaker 05

  So it's like those articles that like are occasionally, I mean, it's more scary when they're on actual journalistic outlets and then there's just a little tag saying like, hey, this is sponsored by RuPaul's fracking farm or whatever the fuck. And it's like, why, why fracking?

• 38:48Robert Evans?

  RuPaul and ExxonMobil, LGBT icons. So Sam Bankman Fried gets into finance and he's a very good trader as, I mean, I have no way to judge this, but Sequoia says he was a good trader. He was good at making a lot of money for other people and also a lot of money for himself. Besides, he gave away 50% of his income to his favorite charities, but those charities were mostly the Center for Effective Altruism and $80,000, which is also an effective altruism charity.

• 39:19Speaker 05

  What do they do with money?

• 39:20Robert Evans?

  That's a great question, Jamie. It allows guys like, like McCaskill to live very well, while also saying they only take $30,000 in salaries and give away the rest because their lives are heavily subsidized by these organizations that allow billionaires to pretend to be heroes.

• 39:35Speaker 05

  Oh, so like, so like charity?

• 39:37Robert Evans?

  So like charity. Yeah. So he remains there happily for years until 2017, when he begins to feel as if something is not right. Now spoilers.

• 39:45Speaker 05

  He's having a quarter life crisis.

• 39:47Robert Evans?

  He is having a quarter life crisis and this kid absolutely is a con artist. And what I am giving you is the polished, press friendly version of the story for a guy whose entire life, as far as I can tell, was one long setup for an ambitious con. So when I say stuff like, he gave a lot of money to charity, because there's like other charities he gives to some which sound reasonable, but I have actually no evidence that he did. Like I have no evidence that he did and I haven't seen it. So when I say stuff like, he felt like that, or when they say stuff like, he felt unfulfilled at Jane Street, that doesn't mean he actually did, because we are at present reliant on a lot of reporting from back when this kid was the toast of Wall Street. Now, after his life fell apart and his company crashed and it became clear that he was a financial criminal, it also

• 40:30Robert Evans?

  Came out that the guy who wrote The Big Short has been following him for six months. So I suspect at some point it's got, that's gonna be fun. We're all gonna be in for a real treat when that book hits.

• 40:41Speaker 05

  I love, I love when you're like, and guess who is following him around? You're like, oh, he's got Michael Lewis on his tail.

• 40:47Robert Evans?

  It's like, and also if you're an investor, shouldn't like, if somebody involved in one of these companies probably should have been able to find out like, oh, hey, the, the big short guy is hanging out with him. That probably means this is a giant financial crime. That guy's not gonna just hang out with a dude who's good at legally making money to write about how good he is at making money legally. That's not Michael Lewis's beat.

• 41:11Speaker 05

  I'm kinda going for like a change of pace this time. Just gonna try to see a guy who's like doing something right.

• 41:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Michael Lewis, aren't you the guy who only writes about financial crimes on like a gigantic scale?

• 41:23Speaker 05

  No, no, no, I think that this is, he's just probably just trying to network.

• 41:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he just, just, she just really liked this guy's attitude towards altruism. So anyway, um, yeah, anyway, here's how that, again, very dick writing PR flack motherfucker wrote about what happens next. Quote, "He was, he realized, too secure. SBF's mind had been trained almost from birth to calculate. As a schoolboy, the hedonic calculus of utilitarianism had him trying to maximize the utility function, measured in utils, of course, for abortion during his teenage game." I know, I know, that's a sentence.

• 42:01Speaker 05

  Measured in util, doesn't he say, of course?

• 42:05Robert Evans?

  Uh, no, no, I said that. Oh, wait, no, he does say, he does say, he does say, of course, yes.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  Measured in utils, of course.

• 42:13Robert Evans?

  Of course.

• 42:13Speaker 05

  Oh, suck my ass, you fucking loser.

• 42:18Robert Evans?

  During his teenage gaming years, his mathematical abilities allowed him to sharpen his tactics and win. And of course, every trade SBF ever made at Jane was the subject of a risk reward calculation. All of it boiled down to expected value. The formula is fairly simple. If the amount won multiplied by the probability of winning a bet is greater than the amount lost multiplied by the probability of losing a bet. Then you go for it irrespective of units, utils, euros, dollars, we're all subject to the same reckoning. But at Jane, SBF asked most another trading principle. He learned to be risk neutral. In simple terms, a trader, given a choice between a fifty, fifty dollars and a 50% chance at a hundred dollars, must be agnostic if they want to maximize the expected value of earnings over a lifetime. Those who prefer the sheer win are risk averse,

• 43:03Robert Evans?

  and those who would rather gamble are risk lovers. But both risk lovers and the risk averse are suckers equally, because over the long run, they lose out to the risk neutral who take both deals without prejudice. That makes no sense. That makes no sense at all, because like you're, you're assuming you have to like choose between one? Can you just take both? Is that like the, is that the offer? Because it seems like the, the whole thought experiment is about choosing between one. None of this makes very much sense. Like-

• 43:27Speaker 05

  I, I had a brain hemorrhage in the middle of that. And then I was, I couldn't stop thinking about, do you think that utilitarians, how do utilitarians feel about kissing with tongue? Do you think? Um, how many utils does it take to kiss with tongue? Or, or don't waste your fucking time?

• 43:44Robert Evans?

  Let me write the equation out, Jamie, and try to, try to sketch out the math on-

• 43:50Speaker 05

  I think they wouldn't be into it. I think they would be like, what's the point?

• 43:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's, that seems real. So-

• 43:56Speaker 05

  I only have five utils. So, okay, go ahead.

• 43:58Robert Evans?

  Jamie, I gotta continue this-

• 43:59Speaker 05

  What the fuck did that sentence say? What did that say?

• 44:01Robert Evans?

  I don't know, but we have to read another one.

• 44:03Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 44:04Robert Evans?

  Quote, "Here, SBF realized, was the rub. When he applied this principle to his own life, he came up short. There was little chance he'd get himself fired from Jane Street. Thus, the decision to stick with Jane was a risk averse preference. It was the logical equivalent of being offered a choice between fifty dollars and 50% of a hundred dollars, and saying, give me President Grant. SBF was risk neutral on behalf of Jane Street, but not, he realized, for his own life. To be fully rational about maximizing his income on behalf of the poor, he should apply his trading principles across the board. He had to find a risk neutral career path, which, if we strip away the trader jargon, actually means he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of- Oh, Jamie, you need to hear this.

• 44:46Speaker 05

  At this point, we're stripping it away. I've been asleep for six minutes. Come on.

• 44:51Robert Evans?

  Which, if we strip away the trader jargon, actually means he felt he needed to take on a lot more risk in the hopes of becoming part of the global elite. The math couldn't be clearer. Very high risk multiplied by dynastic wealth, Trump's low risk multiplied by mere rich guy wealth. To do the most good for the world, SBF needed to find a path on which he'd be a coin toss away from going totally bust. So.

• 45:14Speaker 05

  What?

• 45:15Robert Evans?

  The path is risk neutral, but that means taking a lot of risk because the most risk is the only way to become the wealthiest person in the world. And only by becoming the wealthiest person in the world can you avoid risk. You get it, Jamie?

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that's the most ethical thing you can do, right?

• 45:29Robert Evans?

  That's clearly the most logical ethical way to live. So.

• 45:32Speaker 05

  So do you think that they kiss with tongue or not?

• 45:35Robert Evans?

  I.

• 45:36Speaker 05

  Ah, I hate that.

• 45:37Robert Evans?

  I mean, I think what he's saying is in order to avoid the risk of catching an STD, you have to take on a job as the bathroom mat at a brothel.

• 45:47Speaker 05

  Oh, I see.

• 45:48Robert Evans?

  That's the risk averse, yeah, or risk neutral presentation.

• 45:53Speaker 05

  Frantically rubbing my final brain cells together, trying to make heads or tails of that and just like, nothing is sparking.

• 46:00Robert Evans?

  It is, it is howling clown shit. It is absolute barking nonsense.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  It is like a vortex of bullshit to be like, so anyways, it's really clear and the math couldn't be clearer that he has to be the most richest guy or everyone is going to die. It's actually really urgent.

• 46:20Robert Evans?

  You know, it's one of those things, because I have, I have known a number of rich guys in my life. And some of them are, and ladies.

• 46:29Speaker 05

  Good for you, Robert.

• 46:29Robert Evans?

  There's two kinds. There's people, there's people who were poor at one point, and some of those people are unhinged, and some of them still remember being poor enough to talk like normal people. And then there's people like this, who Sam was never rich as a kid, but he lived in this rarefied air where finance and like the, the, the concept of worrying about money or his economic status was not a thing because everyone around him when he was a kid was so high status. And he, like, he's just lived in this, it's not even a. It's not even a bubble. He grew up on a different planet. Like, the world does not exist to him the same way it does to everyone else. And so he's like, that's the only way you can talk about things in this way.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  Well, it is like that sort of sinister thing where you're talking about everything. Like, it is very, my thinking is like, it's so easy for him and people like this to, to think of other people's theoreticals because they've never had a problem before. So it's like, oh, problems are a game of chance.

• 47:29Robert Evans?

  And they've never met a person.

• 47:31Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 47:32Robert Evans?

  Like, he has never known a human being. Just Stanford professors. Exactly. Just Stanford professors and problems in his video games. So.

• 47:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. And not that all nerd, I mean, I'm not, I'm, I'm afraid of nerd, you know, people who identify as nerds coming into my mentions. I'm not saying that that's everybody, but I'm saying like, he's not been socialized like a person. And that mostly has to do with class.

• 47:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. God damn it. Um, so the next thing that SBF did after deciding he had to quit Jane Street, um, is start pondering how he might change the world in a way that minimized his risk by maximizing his risk or some shit. Anyway, as he told it, he considered four career fields. And this is, these are his notes on the four things he might do after being a trader. Number one, journalism, low pay, but a massively outsized impact potential. Number two, running for office, or maybe just being an advisor. Number three, working for the movement, EA effective altruism needs people. Number four, starting a startup, but what exactly? Number five, bumming around the Bay Area for a month or so, just to see what happens. Now, again.

• 48:39Speaker 05

  Sounds like a bad Bumble day. Like, he's like, so what do you do? He's like, um, well, um, so startup maybe, but what is a startup, really?

• 48:47Robert Evans?

  What is a startup? I don't know. So again, he's spent years working in finance. He's got plenty of money. He came from the Bay Area. So five was an option and it's one he took. Um, and by the way, like, as a general rule, if you decide to quit your job and you have the financial ability to putter him out around for a month or two and think things through, not a bad idea.

• 49:05Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 49:06Robert Evans?

  But Sam is going to do this in the worst way possible. Uh, he eventually hits upon. His great next idea, which is to make a shitload of money in crypto. Now, when he quits Jane Street is 2017. And if you guys can remember back that far, that's the first big winter when cryptocurrency boomed, like kind of all throughout the last quarter or so of 2017. Bitcoin was just sailing up like massive rises. Ether had a big rise too. This kind of went around to

• 49:34Speaker 05

  Were we ever so young?

• 49:35Robert Evans?

  Early 2018. A lot of Bitcoin nerds who people have been making fun of for years became overnight multimillionaires. And this was kind of the first point at which normal people started to think, shit, maybe I should get into this. Maybe I can make a lot of money. Right? This is, this is the thing that blew up Bitcoin. And there was a crash after this, but it recovered, yada, yada, yada. Sam was savvy enough to look at this and know that these moments where this thing where a lot of funny money is on the table, but there's no regulation. And regular people have started to get interested because they think they might get rich. This is the point at which an unethical person can make the absolute most money in a financial market. Right?

• 50:12Speaker 05

  And you can be unethical. To quote one of the greats, you can be unethical and still be legal. That's the way I live my life. Ha ha.

• 50:18Robert Evans?

  And you know who else lives their life that way? Jamie Loftus?

• 50:21Speaker 05

  You and your tossing the ads?

• 50:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's right. I am indeed. I am indeed, baby. Uh, here we go.

• 50:29Speaker 05

  All right.

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• 52:02Robert Evans?

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• 52:42Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So J-Loft, Jalofthus.

• 52:47Speaker 05

  Yes, it's actually J-Lo. It's the first, I'm the first person to use that, and it's really starting to catch on.

• 52:54Robert Evans?

  Bold. Oh, shit, Ben Affleck's calling me. One sec, Jamie, let me take this call.

• 52:59Speaker 05

  Oh, that's my boyfriend.

• 53:01Robert Evans?

  No, no, he's just weeping outside of a Dunkin' Donuts and pocket dialed me again. Normal, normal Ben stuff, am I right?

• 53:08Speaker 05

  Ben, look, Ben, I, sometimes I, I meet, I meet up with my friend Ben at the Atwater Dunks, and I really, I really set him straight. It's nice.

• 53:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Ben Affleck, sober for years and looks like he's hungover in every single photograph.

• 53:24Speaker 05

  Oh, world's happiest man, I love him.

• 53:26Robert Evans?

  I know, I do, I do. I have a lot of, there's just a, something about him that warms my heart. It's his back tattoo of a phoenix.

• 53:32Speaker 05

  You love his back tattoo.

• 53:34Robert Evans?

  It's just, that takes courage, you know? Moral courage.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  I just think it's so amazing. He's fucked up.

• 53:40Robert Evans?

  I think we need to add him.

• 53:42Speaker 05

  That back tattoo.

• 53:44Speaker 04

  And still got to marry Jennifer Lopez.

• 53:47Robert Evans?

  I think, I think we should put his name on the Vietnam Memorial in honor of the courage that it took to get that, that back tattoo.

• 53:55Speaker 05

  I mean, he is braver than the troops and he did for a while, hold, hold the status of most divorced man in America. But that is now.

• 54:04Speaker 04

  But he fixed it by marrying Jennifer Lopez.

• 54:07Robert Evans?

  I feel like the contest.

• 54:08Speaker 04

  I was gonna say, I was gonna say they did, to be fair, they did get married at a plantation.

• 54:13Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Yeah, that, I mean, that's all, that's all very fucked up, but I do feel the contest for most divorced man. Did you ever watch Dragon Ball Z as a kid, Jamie?

• 54:22Speaker 05

  Yes. I didn't. No, I didn't grow up with Dragon Ball Z.

• 54:24Robert Evans?

  Well, there's this thing, Dragon Ball Z would always do this thing where like, you have this guy and he's like the most badass person ever that everybody has to figure out how to fight. And it's this big problem because this is the most terrifying thing in the universe. And the next season, like, there's something that's like a thousand times scarier. It's just this like power creep kind of thing. I feel like we've all been dealing with that with a divorced guy because divorced guy Ben Affleck not, doesn't even register on the divorced guy scale next to Elon.

• 54:50Speaker 05

  We're living in the age of Kanye and Elon. There's some really divorced guys. And look out because Tom Brady is about to fucking hit the World Trade Center on that one too.

• 54:58Robert Evans?

  Tom Brady's gonna go super saying divorced. It's amazing.

• 55:02Speaker 05

  That is gonna, a third divorced man has hit the World Trade Center. It is bad. It's bad.

• 55:08Robert Evans?

  Oh, incredible. So, back to Sam Bankman Fried. He has just, he has just decided to get into crypto. Now, the first way to make money in crypto that, that occurred to him, because he spends a bunch of time looking into the market and he finds, he sees that there's this thing called, I think it's like the, the kimchi premium or whatever like that. They come up with some weird kind of racist name about it, which is basically Bitcoin is worth a lot more in Japan and Korea than it is in the United States, right? It's like worth 15 grand in, in Japan and Korea and it's like 10 grand in the United States, something like that.

• 55:41Speaker 05

  Why, why is that?

• 55:43Robert Evans?

  There's a variety of complicated factors. Basically, there's a bunch of different laws around banking and who can and cannot hold accounts and execute trades in those areas that leads to this premium. Because like normally, if a premium like that, if the markets were kind of accessible to each other, if Bitcoin's worth 15 grand in Asia and 10 grand in the US, then you buy Bitcoin in the US and you sell it in Asia and you get free money, right? Very obvious. If you can, but you can't do that because you can't get access to the, as an American, you can't like get a Chinese account in order to buy Bitcoin there, right? Or a Korean account or a Japanese account. There's all these laws.

• 56:20Speaker 05

  So you can't just do like a banking VPN?

• 56:22Robert Evans?

  No, you can't, you cannot do that. And no one can figure out how to do it, how as a Westerner to sell Bitcoin over in these parts of Asia and get that premium, right? And like just get a bunch of free cash. Sam figures out a way to do it, which is basically like picking up a pile of free money, right? If you're buying Bitcoin for 10 grand and other people want to pay 15 grand for it, you're just making cash, right? And primarily, the way he does that is through friends in the effective altruism community who are like placed in banks and stuff over in Asia who like help him figure out how to do this. I'm not going to go into the details. They, I mean, this fucking dick writing article spends a long time explaining how he figures this out. And it might even have been legal.

• 57:07Robert Evans?

  He may not have broken the law to do this, although it's kind of hard to know because all of this is complicated finance gibberish. By the way, this is called-

• 57:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm honestly, I'm not getting a word of this.

• 57:16Robert Evans?

  Finance guys call this an arbitrage. And it's basically the ideal that if you can, if there's a resource that's worth a bunch more money one place than it is the other place, you buy it where it's cheap and you sell it where it's expensive and you get free money, right? That make sense?

• 57:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 57:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah. If, if I am, Jamie, Jamie-

• 57:34Speaker 05

  Do I sound panicked and defensive?

• 57:35Robert Evans?

  If, if my drug dealer sells me ketamine for like 40 bucks a gram, right? And I don't know, at a house party, you're hanging out at a couple of blocks away, somebody says that they'd pay $70 a gram for ketamine. You can- Make thirty free bucks by taking the ketamine you bought for forty bucks and selling it at that other house party, right?

• 57:59Speaker 05

  Okay, so that was you speaking to me in terms that you would understand, but I do think I got it.

• 58:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ketamine makes everything make sense.

• 58:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, you just gave it to me in Robert speak. I got it, I got it.

• 58:10Robert Evans?

  He makes, he makes a shitload of money doing this, and he decides to roll this money into a company, which will allow him to hire employees to gamble with cryptocurrency at scale to try and find different fucked up little areas like this where they can make a bunch of money by executing trades. He picks members of the EA community as his first employees, including Carolyn Ellison, a former coworker coworker at Jane Street, who we will be talking about in a little bit, and Nishad Singh, a former Facebook employee. Industrial scale dick writer Adam Fisher lets you know that Singh is an incredible, almost impossibly good human being by describing him this way. He often wears a T-shirt with the words compassionate to the core, printed in diminutive, all lowercase font over his heart.

• 58:53Speaker 05

  Do you, do you think that this guy, this writer, like, just, it's, at this point, he's on like a bucking bronco of SPF's dick? Like, it's just absolutely ridiculous.

• 59:04Robert Evans?

  He is, he is, he is fifty percent this guy's dick by weight. It is unbelievable.

• 59:08Speaker 05

  What is he think is gonna happen for him?

• 59:11Robert Evans?

  He's gonna get paid by Sequoia to write a ten thousand word article? That they then pull from their website when it becomes clear this man is a massive financial criminal?

• 59:20Speaker 05

  He's like, no, my greatest work.

• 59:24Robert Evans?

  It's extremely funny. Now, look, I don't know Singh, but based on the description that guy gives, I am convinced he's murdered a child with his bare hands. And that is my headcanon for this man. No one else would wear that shirt. So, these, these EA nerds all form a trading firm called Alameda. And in doing so, they came down on one side of probably the biggest split within the crypto community. See, the core of the idea that's not bad, that exists within cryptocurrency is that decent, is that centralized, state-controlled money is like, has problems, right? You know, that there's things about that that are bad. And It could be cool and useful to be able to separate the money from the state if you could do that.

• 1:00:07Robert Evans?

  Right. If you could do that in a way that reduce the state's power to like, you know, just lock down the bank accounts of dissidents and stuff like that. There's, there's cool benefits to it.

• 1:00:17Speaker 05

  Well, I just had an idea. What if we did that, but then we gave all the money to one guy?

• 1:00:22Robert Evans?

  Well, that's kind of what keeps happening.

• 1:00:24Speaker 05

  Oh, I see, I see.

• 1:00:26Robert Evans?

  But also like SBF is on the other side of this argument, right? Because obviously, most of the actual benefits of a truly decentralized online currency are just, you can buy drugs with it over the internet. But still, that is a real value. People do in fact buy drugs using cryptocurrency and that's fine. And the committed ideological crypto people tend to keep their money offline in a wallet only they can access. Right? So you basically, you have like a hard drive that has all of your crypto on it. And that, that only touches the internet when you plug that into your computer and you use it to make a transaction. Right? And otherwise, it's completely offline. And so people can't just take it from you. Right?

• 1:01:07Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:01:08Robert Evans?

  Though that's the smart people. This is a pain in the ass though, right? Like keeping it in this thing, like there's all these security, you can lose your password. People actually do lose their money this way too. But anyway, it's, it's, it, it, there's a, a, a measure to which it, it makes sense and is secure. But most people don't want to go through that pain in the ass. So they put all of their cryptocurrency in what are effectively crypto banks, these exchanges. And these exchanges are places like Mt. Gox, which a few years ago, all of the money got stolen from. And FTX, which Sam Bankman Freed makes, which also all of the money gets stolen from, right?

• 1:01:42Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:01:42Robert Evans?

  The people who are like, no, you shouldn't do what Sam is doing. You shouldn't make an exchange because that's not decentralized. And we like this because it's decentralized. They are the ones who get robbed less often. Because, because they're a little smarter. And that's part of the point. These exchanges, they're meant for people who don't see crypto actually as like, well, I, I want to fight the state by removing my money from the banking system. They're for people who are like, I want to try to get rich quick by gambling. Right? And that's why those people are all. Also the most vulnerable to scams.

• 1:02:15Speaker 05

  Robert, anytime you explain crypto with me, to me, even though I know I need to understand it for the context of the episode, I just feel like I'm in a corner at a house party and I'm holding a clammy Bud Light and it's mostly empty and you're like, just one more thing though, because.

• 1:02:31Robert Evans?

  I mean, the important thing to understand is that what Sam has done, so crypto is like, unregulated, right? It is detached from any state, okay?

• 1:02:39Speaker 05

  Right, which is why people like it.

• 1:02:41Robert Evans?

  Which is why people like it.

• 1:02:43Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:02:43Robert Evans?

  Sam has, what Sam has done is come in, and he's not the first person, the only person to do this, and said, "I have built a place where you can keep all of your crypto and you can trade it with other crypto to try to make money, the same way people do with the stock market," right?

• 1:02:56Speaker 05

  Where it is more secure.

• 1:02:59Robert Evans?

  No, because here's the thing, Jamie, he says it's secure, but here's the thing. So you know how the banking system, how banks used to just go bust and everyone would lose their money? And it caused a great depression? You get that part of the history of finance, right?

• 1:03:12Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, one of the characters from Titanic, uh, killed themselves over that.

• 1:03:16Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. So that was a big problem and we developed a bunch of regulations so that,

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  I know this part, Robert.

• 1:03:24Robert Evans?

  So what Sam has done is he's built a bank that has none of that, so that people can gamble on the internet, right?

• 1:03:30Speaker 05

  Okay, so he can just create a crypto great depression. Got it, got it.

• 1:03:33Robert Evans?

  Exactly. That's all you need to understand, is that Sam has built a big unregulated bank for people to gamble with.

• 1:03:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, anyway, um, and this is, this is, it is, it could not have been clearer that this was a Ponzi scheme. In 2018, they put out an advertisement to investors and I'm going to read it right now. I think you'll be like, "We offer one investment product, 15% annualized fixed rate loans. We can accept both fiat and crypto and can pay interest denominated in either. Um, these loans have no downside. We guarantee full payment, the principal and interest, enforceable under US law and established by all parties' legal counsel. We are extremely confident we will pay this amount, in the unlikely case where we lose more than 2%." Anyway, again, I, I'm not a finance expert, neither are you, Jamie.

• 1:04:18Robert Evans?

  Banks offer like a 3% return on like a fucking, uh, uh, uh, if you're like putting a pile of cash in a bank and you're getting 3% back. You're doing okay. 15% is nonsense. That nobody, no one can guarantee that. It's not a real product.

• 1:04:36Speaker 05

  I was pretty struck by their use of the language like, we're pretty confident we're gonna be able to play. Sounds like, it just sounds like someone who is not actually very confident.

• 1:04:46Robert Evans?

  And also, if this is, if you are, if you are investing in a, in the stock market, right? And someone says, this investment has no downside. It's impossible for it to fail. That person's lying to you and breaking the law because it could and often does.

• 1:05:00Speaker 05

  Oh, right. Cause then you're just, you're, you're making an almost guaranteed false promise. Yeah.

• 1:05:04Robert Evans?

  Yes. You cannot do, you cannot say this stock can't go down, right? If you're a stockbroker, you cannot tell a client, it is impossible for your investment in this company to fail. Because that would be a crime. Um, but with crypto.

• 1:05:18Speaker 05

  Oh, crypto. It's uncharted territory, baby. You can say whatever you want.

• 1:05:21Robert Evans?

  You can do anything. This is also a Ponzi scheme, right? What, what, um, what fucking Madoff was doing is he had this investment portfolio that was, I forget what the exact, but it was promising an unbelievably high return and guaranteeing that people would get it, right? And what he was doing is as new people put money into the investment, he was using their money to pay the old investors so that nobody noticed that things were fucking up. But eventually new people stopped putting money into the thing and it all fell apart and a lot of people lost billions of dollars, right? Like, yeah.

• 1:05:53Speaker 05

  I'm back.

• 1:05:54Robert Evans?

  He was also using a lot of that money to live, you know, an incredibly lavish, rich guy life. Anyway.

• 1:05:59Speaker 05

  Sorry. I only understand financial concepts when Selena Gomez breaks the fourth wall and explains it to me.

• 1:06:05Robert Evans?

  I, I, I'm doing my best to be your Selena Gomez, but I just.

• 1:06:09Speaker 05

  Do you know who Selena Gomez is?

• 1:06:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. She's that chick from the thing.

• 1:06:14Speaker 05

  Nailed it. She's, she's kind of in the middle of a fun scandal right now where she's in a feud with someone who donated her a kidney.

• 1:06:23Robert Evans?

  What?

• 1:06:24Speaker 05

  Which is a very funny online feud.

• 1:06:26Robert Evans?

  How do you get in a feud with that person?

• 1:06:28Speaker 05

  Because she, okay, if you asked Robert, this is something I can explain to you. This, so, so what happened was Selena Gomez needed a kidney donated. Her close friend who works in the industry, I don't know who it was, but I guess she's like sort of famous, gave her a kidney a couple of years ago. Then Selena Gomez turns around a couple of weeks ago and says, I have no friends in the industry except Taylor Swift. In comes her kidney donor being like, oh, that's interesting because I'm one kidney lighter dude, like, I'm not quoting it, but yeah.

• 1:07:00Robert Evans?

  Wow, geez.

• 1:07:01Speaker 05

  And then Selena, instead of apologizing, Selena Gomez is like, oh, sorry, I didn't thank every person I've ever met in my life.

• 1:07:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but I mean, Selena, she did give you a kidney.

• 1:07:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, that's a special kind of friend. You guys weren't just like drinking buddies. She literally gave you a kidney. And that's what I can share with you.

• 1:07:22Robert Evans?

  She did the thing that you would use as like a joking description of someone who'd done a lot for you to like, like to hyperbolically say that you owed them a lot.

• 1:07:31Speaker 05

  You know who's done, and implying that Taylor Swift has done more for you than your kidney donor is so, I just think it's the funniest feud of all time. All right, we were talking about cryptocurrency?

• 1:07:42Robert Evans?

  We weren't. We were talking about Selena Gomez, but let's, let's get back to cryptocurrency.

• 1:07:48Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:07:49Robert Evans?

  So to talk about what came next, after establishing Alameda, I'm going to quote again from that Sequoia write up. At this point, mid 2019, SBF decided to double down again and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda's multimillion dollar trading profits on a new venture, a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase's solid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others. He only gave himself a 20% chance of success, but in his mind, SBF needed extreme risk to maximize the expected value of his lifetime earnings and therefore the good his earned to give strategy could do. The fact that he was by his own lights overwhelmingly likely to fail was besides the point. The point was this, when SBF multiplied.

• 1:08:33Robert Evans?

  out millions of dollars a year, a successful cryptocurrency exchange could throw off by his self-assessed 20% chance of successfully building one. The number was still huge. That's the expected value. And if you live your life according to the same principles by which you'd trade an asset, there's only one way forward. You calculate the expected values, then aim for the largest one, because in one, but just one alternate future universe, everything works out fabulously. To maximize your expected value, you must aim for it and then march blindly forth, acting as if the fabulously lucky SBF of the future can reach into the other parallel universes and compensate the fail son SBFs for their losses. It sounds crazy or perhaps even selfish, but it's not. It's math. It follows the principle of risk neutrality. Yes, it actually is crazy. That's not math. I'm sorry. That's actually not math.

• 1:09:19Speaker 05

  That was math, but that was a lot of words all at once. That is like, oh my God, the spiraling logic of this is so.

• 1:09:27Robert Evans?

  You are using hundreds of words and high-minded bullshit rhetoric to be like gambling is the best way to make money.

• 1:09:36Speaker 05

  He used fabulously three times in one sentence.

• 1:09:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, man. You know who I've heard this basic argument from? My friends drunk in Las Vegas explaining what they're trying to play at the crap table again.

• 1:09:48Speaker 05

  Why they don't want me to leave the little horsey game. This is so, yeah, someone's like, no, don't leave the Sex and the City slot machine. And here's why.

• 1:09:56Robert Evans?

  You want to hear my mathematical thinking on gambling, Jamie Loftus? Because this will make more sense than anything that happens in the Sequoia article. Okay, when I go to Las Vegas, I find me the penny slots where I can see the most waitresses walking around with those little trays that they have the drinks and stuff on. Then I sit down at them and I don't start to play until one gets close to me. And then I press the button as soon as she walks past and I like catch her attention and then I get a free drink. And the way that it works out is that as long as I can get more free drinks than I'm spending at the penny slots. And mostly I'm just reading a book and hiding it while I'm at the penny slots and I only press it when the waitress gets near.

• 1:10:34Speaker 05

  Oh, he's not like the other Vegas guys.

• 1:10:35Robert Evans?

  I can drink effectively for free, right? It works out to be like 25 cents a drink if you're really smart about it. And that's my financial advice to all of you.

• 1:10:45Speaker 05

  I do, I do respect that.

• 1:10:47Robert Evans?

  How you make it even better. I used to go with a bag because when I was poor, what I would do is I would go to Vegas once every couple of years, usually for work and I would get all the free drinks, which came in glasses a lot of the time and I would keep the glasses. And so I was able to furnish my apartment with stolen Las Vegas glasses.

• 1:11:03Speaker 05

  I love stealing glasses. I've stolen my fair share of glasses in Vegas.

• 1:11:07Robert Evans?

  Sometimes I would get up to the floors where there were the nicer hotel rooms and I would find all the people who'd set out their plates and stuff from like room service and I would just take those and take them back to my house.

• 1:11:19Speaker 05

  I respect that. I'm trying to think. I was like, I don't have a real system for, well, actually, when I go to Vegas, I always stay at the hotel with a roller coaster on top. And here's what I do. I go on the roller coaster once, sometimes twice. Then I go see one show. Usually it's horrible. The last time I went to see the Backstreet Boys and guess what? I found out one of the Backstreet Boys is in QAnon and then I got bumped up from this. It was a real bummer.

• 1:11:45Robert Evans?

  That was a fun text thread. The point I want to make, Jamie, is that what I just described to you, my Vegas strategy, has made me infinitely more money in net profit than Samuel Bankman Fried is actually going to make in cryptocurrency.

• 1:11:58Speaker 05

  Oh, fun foreshadowing. Can't wait.

• 1:12:03Robert Evans?

  So.

• 1:12:04Speaker 05

  He would never hang out near waitresses though, because he's probably afraid of women.

• 1:12:07Robert Evans?

  He's probably afraid of them, but I am fine with asking women for a free drink as long as I'm paying at the penny slots, you know? So it's not weird.

• 1:12:15Speaker 05

  Wow, feminist icon, Robert.

• 1:12:16Robert Evans?

  Feminist icon, Robert Evans. Getting those shitty Vegas Irish coffees because they come in the glasses. I want the most.

• 1:12:24Speaker 05

  Oh, those are nasty. Those are filthy.

• 1:12:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but I like the glasses they used to come in.

• 1:12:27Speaker 05

  They do have, I know, but then there's the consequence of having to drink what's inside.

• 1:12:32Robert Evans?

  Well, you know, Jamie, that's why they call me a hero.

• 1:12:35Speaker 05

  Nobody does that.

• 1:12:36Robert Evans?

  The Mahatma Gandhi of the West, they call me. The Jesus Christ of podcasting. These are all things people call me.

• 1:12:42Speaker 05

  If you're gonna lie, make it realistic.

• 1:12:44Robert Evans?

  James, so, James, so, anyway, let's continue.

• 1:12:49Speaker 05

  I'm like, yeah.

• 1:12:51Robert Evans?

  I think it's hard to justify being risk averse on your own personal impact at impact. SBF told me when I quizzed him about it, unless you're doing it for personal reasons. In other words, it's selfish not to go for broke if you're planning on giving it all away in the end anyway. Again, just clown shit. So all of this is a con spoiler. So you don't have to think that much about it. In a recent series of text messages with a Vox journalist after his entire exchange exploded and everyone found out he was a financial criminal, Sam Bankman Freed more or less admitted that everything he'd had to say about effective altruism was a con meant to get people to trust him and invest in his company. And I'm gonna read the texts. Yeah, I'm gonna read the texts to you between him and this journalist,

• 1:13:34Robert Evans?

  who by the way, he put money in the Vox. So he helped fund this journalist. Wow. So the ethics stuff, this is the journalist. So the ethics stuff, mostly affront, people will like you if you win and hate you if you lose. And that's how it all really works. Sam, yeah, I mean, that's not all of it, but it's a lot. The worst quadrant is sketchy and lose. The best is win plus question mark, question mark, question mark, clean plus lose is bad, but not terrible. He also misspells terrible, but whatever. The journalist then replies, you were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it all as a game with winners and losers. Yeah, hee hee, I had to be. It's what reputations are made of to some extent. I feel bad for those who get fucked by it. But this dumb

• 1:14:18Robert Evans?

  game we woke Westerners play where we all say the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us. And that's the actual truth here, right? That's the thing that's honest about it. It's like, yeah, man, it was all of this talk for everyone. That's the entire, this Miss Caskill motherfucker. The only reason his effective altruism thing exists as a funded thing is as a fucking shibboleth for billionaires who don't want to pay taxes and want to let the world crumble around them while sucking as much value out of the working class as they can and want to pretend like they're heroes at the same time so that people write their dicks in articles like that fucking Sequoia piece.

• 1:14:49Speaker 05

  That absolutely fucking ridiculous text actually is like a very important document.

• 1:14:55Robert Evans?

  It's incredibly important. It's deeply crucial.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  I hate that there is such a crucial document that also includes hee hee in it.

• 1:15:02Robert Evans?

  Yeah, there's nothing to be done about that one, Jamie.

• 1:15:05Speaker 05

  Look, there's, it doesn't feel good, but you know, our previous most important document to that effect was an IM that said, "Ha ha." So a text with hee hee is kind of the logical progression. That is fascinating. Do you have any like insight into like why he would so freely admit that now?

• 1:15:22Robert Evans?

  I don't actually. One of two things has to be happening because again, spoilers, it, this all falls apart. His exchange goes from worth $32 billion to worth basically $0 in the space of literally-

• 1:15:32Speaker 05

  I hear Lincoln park in my head anytime you say it all falls apart.

• 1:15:35Robert Evans?

  Like, like 20, 24 hours this happens. His net worth falls 94% in a day.

• 1:15:41Robert Evans?

  Like it is, it all, because they realized that all of the money is gone, that he'd been taking money from one business and using to gamble in another and also to pay him and his friends. And all of the money that the investors had put in, when they tried to withdraw it, like their money that was supposed to be in there on paper, none of the money existed because again, he'd stolen it. Anyway, the context of this article makes it clear that he felt like, I don't know, whatever. This was all a confidence game, right? That's the key.

• 1:16:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:16:09Robert Evans?

  All of this could work and the balance sheets, because people were looking at their balance sheet. "I'm making money. I'm making money. These returns are great." And that money existed on paper until they tried to take it out because then it actually wasn't there because he had already frittered it away. It's a confidence game. And we have, you know, that's the way it actually worked. We also know, and this is all still coming out, so I'm not going to get too much into it, but we know that he had FTX loan himself, Sam Bankman-Fried, about a billion dollars. Like his paper value was like 22 billion, but he gave himself basically a billion dollars in other people's money. Although he may have gambled that away. It's really unclear how much money he actually has liquid at the moment.

• 1:16:50Speaker 05

  Do we think he has any?

• 1:16:52Robert Evans?

  I have no idea.

• 1:16:54Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:16:54Robert Evans?

  Either, either he was like actually a gambling addict and a narcissist and he really did lose it all, or this was a con from the beginning, knowing it would all collapse and he got as much as he could out of it and he's gonna wind up someplace without extradition, right? Like, and that was the goal.

• 1:17:07Speaker 05

  If you asked me a couple of years ago, I would have said it's the latter, but I feel like the last couple of years have demonstrated so often that like, people are just straight up not smart and don't have a plan and it is all a narcissist shell game.

• 1:17:18Robert Evans?

  It's very, it's, it's unclear at the moment. I'm gonna read you some things at the end here and you can kinda make your, anyway, whatever. So, and after, you know, starting FTX, the company moves to Hong Kong and then the Bahamas. And they, they use, they buy these very, like a $39 million mansion that he lives in with his friends, using FTX tokens, which is like internal cash that his company issues, based on the perceived value of the company.

• 1:17:43Speaker 05

  They don't, how many rooms is that?

• 1:17:45Robert Evans?

  It's a shitload. And, and they're able to buy it because everything's, like their paper, on paper, they've gone from nothing to worth $32 billion in like a year or two. And these, these idiot like property owners in the Bahamas are like, "Well, clearly the best thing we could do is buy this building using the fake money they created for their own company that they tell us is worth a lot of money. This is worth it."

• 1:18:10Robert Evans?

  So, since everything collapsed, some people that SBF had like reached out to as early investors have commented about why they didn't invest in this company in the early days. And most of them, it's because like what they could see of his investments, the tens of millions that he promised to charities and the long positions in risky crypto companies, didn't make sense. They would look at like the things he was buying with the company assets and the things that like he was investing in and be like, "Well, there's no way he could have that kind of liquidity if this is a legitimate exchange, right? He can't have that kind of cash on hand. It doesn't make any sense."

• 1:18:44Speaker 05

  Rich fucking assholes always telling themselves like that.

• 1:18:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Speaker 05

  That's funny.

• 1:18:48Robert Evans?

  And, and what's funny is that like I found one of these guys who like, "Yeah, I didn't invest because I could tell it was a con." And then was like, "But I didn't tell anybody because I didn't want to get yelled at."

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  No, that's...

• 1:19:03Speaker 05

  That's unfortunately, I do see myself in that statement a little bit where I was like, oh, someone might be, someone might send me a rude text.

• 1:19:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I guess I won't say anything about this. Yeah.

• 1:19:14Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 1:19:15Robert Evans?

  It's very funny.

• 1:19:17Speaker 05

  Spineless goofy bullshit.

• 1:19:19Robert Evans?

  I don't know. I'll tell you one thing, Jamie. He's a spineless guy who still has his fucking money.

• 1:19:24Speaker 05

  Wow, you're in love with him. That's what?

• 1:19:27Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah, you know, whatever. It's the finance industry. They're all ghouls. So.

• 1:19:33Speaker 05

  They're all ghouls.

• 1:19:35Robert Evans?

  From what we can actually tell now, because again, this fucking Captain Dick Rider, the bad writer, like, I have to read you another quote that I didn't have in my script to give you the idea of just how much he fucking, how much he loves SBF. Here's a quote.

• 1:19:55Robert Evans?

  From him. Uh, okay. Yeah, this is, this is actually Jamie. Oh, boy. This is when, this is when, this is when, this is when the writer, Captain Dick Rider is hanging out with him in the Bahamas at his office. Quote.

• 1:20:10Speaker 05

  He's like, what if we kissed?

• 1:20:12Robert Evans?

  Sensing an opportunity for connection, I chip in with my own two Satoshi, which is two cents, but a Bitcoin term. Anyway, whatever.

• 1:20:20Speaker 05

  I'm going to walk into the ocean. Wow. Okay.

• 1:20:23Robert Evans?

  I don't pay any attention to social media, not because I have any moral case against it, I say, but because for me, reading books is the highest bandwidth way I know to get quality information into my brain, which just craves the stimulation. I'm addicted to reading, which explains how I ended up being a writer. Oh, yeah, said SBF, says SBF, I would never read a book. I'm not sure what to say. I've read a book a week.

• 1:20:44Speaker 05

  Kind of ironic. Whoa.

• 1:20:46Robert Evans?

  I hate them both because I'm not sure what to say. I've read a book a week for my entire adult life and I have written three of my own. I'm very skeptical of books. I don't want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that, explains SBF. I think if you wrote a book, you fucked up and it should have been a six paragraph blog post.

• 1:21:05Speaker 05

  Meanwhile, this guy's writing a 10,000 word article writing a stick that he will not read.

• 1:21:11Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 1:21:13Speaker 05

  It's like two guys whose heads are made out of rocks just like clunking against each other repeatedly.

• 1:21:18Robert Evans?

  Just, just wait, Jamie, Jamie, it has, it hasn't gotten as bad as it's going to get.

• 1:21:23Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 1:21:24Robert Evans?

  Whatever the case.

• 1:21:26Speaker 05

  I hate books.

• 1:21:27Robert Evans?

  Whatever the case, I find myself sad for the man. And it occurs to me that my reaction is exactly what might be expected from a beta in the brave new world crypto is creating.

• 1:21:38Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 1:21:39Robert Evans?

  How can you write that and not leap off the top of a building?

• 1:21:43Speaker 05

  He literally self identified as a beta to what?

• 1:21:47Robert Evans?

  Like what I love about this is just like, well, we have to take it. We have to take it as given that crypto is creating a brave new world and none of us has any choice in that. It's inevitable. It's unstoppable. It's going to dominate everything, which is like.

• 1:21:59Speaker 05

  I will capitulate to our, our beep beep boop boop overlords. Yeah.

• 1:22:02Robert Evans?

  So I think again, what I wonder, does he think I think? Wouldn't someone with IQ points to spare realize that dismissing books, all books is essentially worthless? Might rile a writer? Was he playing with me? Is this fun? Is this humor? I'm satisfied with my meta analysis until I realize that one can always increment the level of strategic play in this sort of game. It's like poker. Level one is just thinking about how to strengthen your own hand. Level two is thinking about what your opponent's hand is. Level three is thinking about what your opponent thinks your hand is and so on. And since SBF is obviously a genius, I should simply assume that compared with me, SBF will always be playing at level N plus one, which was make, which makes my analysis of the intent behind SBF's books for losers idea, spiral into infinity and crash like a computer.

• 1:22:46Speaker 05

  Is this how you write about me in your diary?

• 1:22:49Robert Evans?

  No, Jamie, because you know, do you know what the only ethical, speaking of ethics, you know what? If you think this way about conversations, the ethical thing to do is fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the ocean.

• 1:23:02Speaker 05

  Wow, you're wolfing this guy.

• 1:23:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I absolutely am.

• 1:23:07Speaker 05

  You are wolfing this guy.

• 1:23:08Robert Evans?

  Him and Sam Bankman-Fried, I could not hate these people more.

• 1:23:11Speaker 05

  I mean, they're both, there, there's never been two wronger people having a conversation.

• 1:23:17Robert Evans?

  And of course, it came out, he's just like, well, obviously, he's a genius. We have to assume that because he became a billionaire. And it's like, no, he was never a billionaire.

• 1:23:24Speaker 05

  Well, Robert, in his defense, that's math. He did the math.

• 1:23:28Robert Evans?

  He faked a balance sheet. Like, we've now gotten access because he had to, like, go into bankruptcy and step down. So like, now there's a caretaker trying to get people's money out of the company. And we know shit like, we've seen the Excel files where they kept their financial records. And it's him being like, this is basically bullshit. Like, sorry about this, we fucked this up, we weren't actually keeping records here. The company balance sheet, there was no accounting department. People would file their, like, like, when they would spend hundreds, tens of hundreds of millions of dollars on things, they would just message each other on Signal about it to get approval and had deleted messages on. So there's actually like, no record of a lot of the accounting. They did at one point hire an outside accounting firm to handle their accounting of this $32 billion company.

• 1:24:11Robert Evans?

  And the firm they hired is the, it bills itself as the only metaverse-based accounting firm.

• 1:24:18Speaker 05

  Oh, my god.

• 1:24:19Robert Evans?

  His, the accounting firm for this $32 billion company exists entirely within a crypto-themed video game called Decentraland. It is so fucking stupid.

• 1:24:31Speaker 05

  I feel worse and worse with everything you're saying. Okay, so this is really, this is bad, and this feels bad to hear.

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  I have a question.

• 1:24:39Robert Evans?

  Yes, Jamie.

• 1:24:42Speaker 05

  Who is, I guess, because I am, I am kind of back in, in Lizzie Holmesland. Because that whole last, I mean, like, departments that should be, you know, taking care of shit don't even exist, which is very Theranos-adjacent to me.

• 1:24:57Robert Evans?

  Theranos-y, yeah.

• 1:24:59Speaker 05

  Theranosian, if you will, as, look, with both written books, we can just make up random words.

• 1:25:04Robert Evans?

  Yeah, of course, yeah, that's, that's mostly what writing a book is, for sure.

• 1:25:08Speaker 05

  I view myself as the beta of this conversation, and so I feel comfortable asking you, Robert. Who is ultimately affected by this? Like, what is the, like, trickle-down of this? What happens?

• 1:25:23Speaker 05

  Is it just other rich assholes? Or does it affect regularly, like, does it affect people?

• 1:25:31Robert Evans?

  Probably, there will presumably be some, here's the thing, and here is why there's that lawsuit against like Larry David and all those other guys who appeared in the FTX ad. Yeah, presumably a bunch of regular people got suckered into putting their money on FTX and those people have probably lost some money. That said, for the most part, it's fine, because most of the people who lost money are like gamblers who probably suck as much as this guy did. And it's one of those things, there's just an article, I think at Financial Times, where someone was like, actually, and I think they actually had a good point, we shouldn't regulate the crypto industry, because if we regulate it, it will be brought in closer to the actual financial industry as it exists, and banks will put more investments into crypto, and

• 1:26:14Robert Evans?

  it will get seen as like legitimate and backed by the state. And so when these con men destroy tens of billions of dollars overnight and cause panic in the industry, it will affect the real economy, and right now it doesn't seem to. And like, yeah, I guess that is kind, that's not a bad point. Maybe we just let it die on its own. I don't know.

• 1:26:31Speaker 05

  It seems like there's more, like, we'll, we'll know more.

• 1:26:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so, yeah, we will continue to learn more. One of the things that's funniest about this is that Sequoia, this investment firm, put like $200 million into the company, which they have all written off now. They're accepting it as a total loss.

• 1:26:48Speaker 05

  Oh, they're going, they're going full Batgirl on this. Okay.

• 1:26:51Robert Evans?

  Now, when you hear this very serious investment firm put $200 million into this business, you probably assume, Jamie, wow, I bet he had a good pitch, right?

• 1:27:00Speaker 05

  I actually, I don't know, if we're talking Theranos, I actually don't think that that is, that's not disqualifying to have a dogshit pitch.

• 1:27:07Robert Evans?

  You know, you know who can make this clear for us is Captain Dick Ryder.

• 1:27:11Speaker 05

  Oh, thanks.

• 1:27:12Robert Evans?

  SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super app. I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy Bitcoin, you can send money in whatever currency to any friend, anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana, you can do anything with you, you want with your money from inside FTX. Suddenly, the chat window-

• 1:27:29Speaker 05

  That's literally an arrested development. How much did a banana cost?

• 1:27:34Robert Evans?

  I don't know, I feel like I can do anything I want with my debit card. Like, I've never run into a thing I wanted to buy and been like, ah, I cannot.

• 1:27:44Speaker 05

  No, how do I access this banana?

• 1:27:46Robert Evans?

  I can even buy drugs with it by going to an ATM. If I were to be a person who buys drugs, which I'm not, I could go to an ATM and take out cash and purchase drugs with them.

• 1:27:56Speaker 05

  Support your local drug dealer and banana vendor, for crying out loud.

• 1:28:01Robert Evans?

  So he gives this banana pitch, quote, "Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia's side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out. 'I love this founder,' typed one partner. 'I am a 10 out of 10,' pinged another. 'Yes!' exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclaimed a third. What Sequoia was reacting to was the scale of SBF's vision. It wasn't a story about how we might use fintech in the future, or crypto, crypto, or a new kind of bank. It was a vision about the future of money itself, with a total addressable market of every person on the entire planet. I sit 10 feet from him and I, I know, it's, these people are just jokes."

• 1:28:40Speaker 05

  I imagine like, three executives doing lines of coke and one swallowing a banana with the peel still on. They're like, yes!

• 1:28:48Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 1:28:49Speaker 05

  Oh my god, okay. So it's, I mean, which does kind of continue with the trend of like, you know, SBF has never had a problem or a, like, anything to overcome. Like, if it's this easy for him to con people into shit, like, of course you would have a god complex. You've never, you've never been told no.

• 1:29:10Robert Evans?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep. It's cool. So what Sequoia was rea, yeah, sorry, I have to continue this, this fucking quote. And next he's gonna talk about a person who works at Sequoia and is in the room for this. "I sit 10 feet from him and I walked over thinking, 'Oh shit, that was really good,' remembers Aurora. And it turns out that fucker was playing League of Legends through the entire meeting. And this is framed in the article and in all the coverage before everything fell apart. It's like, so awesome. He's so cool." This writer talks a bunch about how like, Sam never stops playing video games. When he's talking to this writer, when he's having corporate meetings, he's playing video games basically 100% of the time. And this is always mentioned as like, he's always working, he's always in the office,

• 1:29:53Robert Evans?

  he sleeps in a beanbag chair at his desk. And it's like, no, dude, he's not always working. He's conning you and he plays video games all the time and pretends that that's a fucking job, which is great. Great con. Good for you, buddy.

• 1:30:06Speaker 05

  Always working and always there. Two very different flavors of things happening.

• 1:30:10Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 1:30:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Robert Evans?

  Um, it's all part of the fucking con. So is the fact that he always, he always wore like ratty old athletic shorts and like a wrinkled t-shirt. Because like that's for, if you are a young man in the tech industry, that makes people think you're a genius, right? Because geniuses dress like shit.

• 1:30:28Speaker 05

  Yeah. He's like, now, if I bring a real stink into the room, people are gonna like, jack up my already fake IQ score about 20 points. Yeah, this is fucking horseshit.

• 1:30:39Robert Evans?

  And it's like, you know who else dresses like shit? The guy I used to buy weed from.

• 1:30:43Speaker 05

  Oh.

• 1:30:44Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:46Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. Does he also have a pet snake?

• 1:30:49Robert Evans?

  You know who wears the same outfit as Sam Bankman Fried? My old buddy who once at a party got into an argument with a guy and broke 15 bones in his face because they were both drinking.

• 1:31:02Robert Evans?

  Not a corporate genius.

• 1:31:04Speaker 05

  I do like that shared aesthetic where it's like, really, the difference is the pet snake. That is, that's the, that's, that's how you truly can sniff out the millionaire from the, yes.

• 1:31:16Robert Evans?

  So anyway.

• 1:31:17Speaker 05

  I don't want a pet snake.

• 1:31:18Robert Evans?

  He's based, like, he's the same kind of person as Elizabeth Holmes. And he was, again, he's a confidence man. And this gets us into the Larry David shit, because the, the thing about being a confidence man is that as long as people are convinced there's money, their money is safe, and most of them don't try to pull it out, then you can keep the con going and you can keep the fake numbers increasing and you, everyone will think you're richer and you can actually get real money out of this. So one of the things that he did is he would pour shitloads of money into sponsorship deals and to other ventures to make his company seem legit. One way he did this.

• 1:31:51Speaker 05

  Come in.

• 1:31:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he spent 17 and a half million through FTX to sponsor the athletic teams at UC Berkeley. Uh, he launched a $20 million ad campaign with Tom Brady and Jocelyn Bunchen. He offered NFTs at Coachella. Uh huh. And he spent $135 million on the naming rights for the Miami Heat's home arena. And the purpose, this is all to build confidence, right? You see, you see it's the, the fuck, it's the same thing crypto.com did, by the way, with the arena in y'all's neck of the woods.

• 1:32:16Speaker 05

  I was about to say, I was like, I, I feel like the crypto.com arena is not long for this world and we don't, we don't, we don't recognize that as an actual thing.

• 1:32:24Robert Evans?

  Is my money safe in this thing that's a bank, but not a bank? Well, their name is on the arena, so it's probably legit.

• 1:32:32Speaker 05

  Here's the thing is like, yeah, it's like now walking into the crypto.com arena, arena, I couldn't feel less safe. I couldn't feel less secure.

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  Nobody calls it that.

• 1:32:40Speaker 05

  Unlike when it was the Staples Center. I'm like, oh, you know what's never going to go out of style? Little notebooks.

• 1:32:46Robert Evans?

  People have been using staples since we were cavemen, I assume. So.

• 1:32:50Speaker 05

  Yes, the earliest technology.

• 1:32:52Speaker 04

  Just like the worst fucking name on earth. It infuriates me.

• 1:32:57Robert Evans?

  These people.

• 1:32:58Speaker 05

  Yeah. Sophie has a dog in the fight. I don't.

• 1:32:59Speaker 04

  I do.

• 1:33:00Robert Evans?

  In his interview with Vox, Sam basically admits this, albeit in a slightly careful way. Journalist. So FTX technically wasn't gambling with their money. FTX had just loaned their money to Alameda, who hadn't gam- who had gambled with their money and lost it. And you didn't realize it was a big deal because you didn't realize how much money it was? Sam responds, and also I thought Alameda had enough collateral to reasonably cover it. Journalist says, I get how you could have gotten away with it, but I guess that seems sketchy, even if you get away with it. Sam, it was never the intention. Sometimes life creeps up on you.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  He literally said, life comes at you fast.

• 1:33:36Robert Evans?

  Life comes at you fast. So Sam's net worth tops out at around $22 billion on paper. In reality, neither Alameda nor FTX had ever taken in even close to that much money. The valuation was based entirely on nonsense calculations that were themselves based on lies from FTX's extremely cooked books. There's a lot more about this than we're getting into. People are still finding this all out. There is one thing I should probably read, which is, so, you know, when his company collapsed, he had to step down from running it, right? And because a lot of money is still in there and a lot of like investments are still tied up in that, they, they, they put a guy in charge of the company again, right?

• 1:34:14Robert Evans?

  And there's like, there's specific dudes in the business world, um, whose like job is to come in when a company fucks up like this. And like, try and get as much money back out for the shareholders as possible to minimize the bleeding.

• 1:34:28Speaker 05

  So they, they kind of have like a, like how they, they had in like old Hollywood, they have like a fixer guy?

• 1:34:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have, and this is, this fixer guy specifically, he is the guy that they brought in, um, when Enron, he took over Enron after it fell apart. In order to try and like minimize the damage from it. So he is the guy who got brought in to deal with like the fact that this massive fucking crime happened with Enron. Um, one sec.

• 1:34:54Speaker 05

  My, my favorite, um, my favorite Enron memory, not that you asked, rude, um, was, um, the, uh, women of Enron Playboy spread that I got to archive during my time there.

• 1:35:06Robert Evans?

  Oh, God.

• 1:35:07Speaker 05

  And boy, did those Enron girl bosses have their, their.

• 1:35:12Robert Evans?

  So as.

• 1:35:13Speaker 05

  Second only to women of 7-Eleven, which is my actual favorite spread. Continue.

• 1:35:18Robert Evans?

  Uh, first off, should note, this company has about a million creditors. So about a million people possibly lost their entire investment in this company, which is a stunning amount of people to take money from. Um, and again, we're probably, we are probably looking at like five or 10 billion dollars stolen, something like that. It's kind of unclear the exact amount. But anyway, this is what the guy in the Delaware bankruptcy court filing, this is what the guy who was, the guy who took over Enron after it became clear that the whole company was a criminal enterprise. This is what that guy wrote about Sam's company.

• 1:35:49Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Okay.

• 1:35:50Robert Evans?

  Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented. Again, that's the guy who took over Enron.

• 1:36:16Speaker 05

  I was like, that is literally like Bill Clinton dropping a notes post being like, never have I seen a more cheated on my wife in, and like, that is so absurd.

• 1:36:27Robert Evans?

  Well, I will say it's a different, this guy did not commit any of the Enron crimes, right? This is the guy who comes in.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  Saw them all, like that.

• 1:36:34Robert Evans?

  This guy is after, he's brought in, the, it becomes clear that.

• 1:36:39Speaker 05

  That guy started a sentence with never in my career.

• 1:36:42Robert Evans?

  This guy, yeah, it's probably best to look at this guy as like an EMT. When it becomes clear that a company that has a shitload of money in it and is central in the economy has collapsed because people broke the law, he comes in to minimize the damage, but he was not working at Enron previously, right? Like, it's not, he's not trying to like, stop anyone from getting in trouble. He's trying to minimize how many people are hurt by this.

• 1:37:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, no, of course.

• 1:37:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I just want to make clear, like, that guy's, anyway, whatever.

• 1:37:10Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's not, he's not the Enroner.

• 1:37:12Robert Evans?

  He is not the Enroner. He did not make Enron bad. He's just, was there afterwards and was like, this company's even worse.

• 1:37:18Speaker 05

  He bought the issue of Playboy and then he kept it pushing.

• 1:37:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so I should, God, there's, yeah, we're, we're getting close to done. I should note that before everything collapsed, Sam, again, he's in the effect of altruism. He's, he's, he promised to donate like, a couple of hundred million dollars to these EA causes. A lot less than that actually wound, got out. Some of them were good, but a lot of it was like, so, he made a huge point that he was like, his, one of his major priorities was pandemic prevention, right? We have to stop the next pandemic. I'm gonna put as much money as I can to pandemic prevention. That's the best effective altruist thing that I can do. To talk about how well that actually worked, I want to quote from the Washington Post here. "FTX-backed projects ranged from a $12 million to champion a California ballot initiative

• 1:38:03Robert Evans?

  to strengthen public health programs and detect emerging virus threats amid lackluster support the measure was punted to 2024, to investing more than $11 million on the unsuccessful congressional primary campaign of an Oregon biosecurity expert and even $150,000 grant to help Monclef Slough, the scientific advisor to the Trump administration's Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Accelerator, write his memoir." So that sounds like a giant waste of money, right? That sounds like, even if it was like, good, it sounds like it didn't, like, even if the goals were good, like, well, the ballot measure failed, like, or it got punted, so it's not like it worked. And it gets worse, because SBF's fund also put a lot of money, like, $5 million into ProPublica. And ProPublica, they've done a lot of cool stuff.

• 1:38:47Robert Evans?

  They also recently published an- Extremely flawed investigation that backed the lab leak hypothesis. I'm gonna, the LA Times and their analysis of this deeply flawed flawed piece of reporting.

• 1:38:59Speaker 05

  And also, you know, we've got some notes for the LA Times as well.

• 1:39:02Robert Evans?

  Yes, nobody's perfect. The LA Times called it a train wreck, noting, "The article is based heavily on Chinese language documents that appear to have been mistranslated and misinterpreted, according to Chinese language experts who have piled on via social media since its publication. It also takes as gospel a report by a rump group of Republican congressional staff members asserting that the pandemic was more likely than not the result of a research-related incident." And this has been, the fact that ProPublica published this has like provided a shitload of fuel to the, "It was all a fucking lab leak from China. It's China's fault."

• 1:39:36Speaker 05

  I wasn't aware of that.

• 1:39:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Sam Bankman-Fried funded that shit.

• 1:39:41Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 1:39:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, basically, none of the shit he was putting in money into that was supposed to be good really worked. And a lot of it was, so another thing the right is doing right now is they're talking about, he was like the number one or number two donor to Democrats during the midterm elections.

• 1:39:57Speaker 05

  Right behind Seth MacFarlane, yeah.

• 1:40:00Robert Evans?

  Yeah, but none of his donations worked. And also, he gave, it was like 32 million he gave to the Dems. He gave like 24 million to the Republicans. And the reason he was giving this money, number one, there were some like pro-pandemic response candidates he wanted to back, most of whom didn't, you know, do well. But also, like, a lot of the money was towards Republican and Democratic candidates who were going to be part of the regulation of the crypto industry because he wanted to have a seat at the table and push regulations in a way that...

• 1:40:28Speaker 05

  Okay, so any candidate that would enable that is someone who's giving money.

• 1:40:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. So, anyway, in general, nothing at Alameda or FTX was as it seemed. In that Dick Writing Sequoia article, Carolyn Ellison, the CEO of Alameda, is, he talks about her a bit and like, she, it frames her as like this quintessential innocent nerd girl, plucky and ethical and optimistic to show like, these are the kind of, you know, smart, young, ginzy kids that are, you know, building this, this great company and like, she showed up in large... Gear to meet with Sam and talk about the future of their great financial enterprise. And she's an ethical altruist. Since everything fell apart, it's come out that she and Sam were dating each other and possibly other members of the company. And also people have found her.

• 1:41:13Speaker 05

  Now we have the full Liz Holmes look has been completed.

• 1:41:15Robert Evans?

  Here we go. People have found her Tumblr. And boy, is she sketchy as hell. I'm going to quote from a report on her Tumblr activity in decrypt.com. Boy, howdy. When I first started my first foray into poly, I thought of it as a radical break from my trad past, the account wrote in February 2020. But TBH, I've come to decide that the only acceptable style of poly is it best characterizes something like imperial Chinese harem. The account went on to detail how a polyamorous dynamic should ideally function as a cutthroat market of sexual competition and subjugation. None of this non-hierarchical bullshit, the account elaborated. Everyone should have a ranking of their partners. People should know where they fall in the ranking and there should be vicious power struggles for the ranks.

• 1:41:58Speaker 05

  Oh my god.

• 1:42:00Robert Evans?

  It gets worse, Jamie. The Ellison linked account also demonstrated a substantial preoccupation with HBD or human biodiversity, an online euphemism for the discredited fields of race science and eugenics popularized by the alright.

• 1:42:15Robert Evans?

  Oh, oh, boy. Give me one more paragraph and then we can talk about this, Jamie. Ellison has for years vocalized her diehard obsession with Harry Potter. In one post, her affiliated Tumblr account tied her love of online character quizzes to her pen shot for sorting Indians by their cast, which she presumed to indicate genetic distinction.

• 1:42:35Speaker 05

  Oh, my god.

• 1:42:36Robert Evans?

  Holy shit.

• 1:42:37Speaker 05

  Even JK Rowling wasn't thinking something that fucked up. And that's really saying something. There, someone needs to tell this.

• 1:42:43Robert Evans?

  Amazing. Astonishing.

• 1:42:47Speaker 05

  Tumblr is exclusively for Sherlock fanfiction and things that trigger my eating disorder. That's it. I cannot fuck like, oh, that's so dark.

• 1:42:56Robert Evans?

  It's, I almost can't fathom it, right? And again, there's so much, we probably will do a follow up at some point. Cause like, the fact that, the fact that it was this easy for like some fucking crypto rag, they're the only ones who reported on it, to find her Tumblr where she talks about race science makes me think, these guys were all probably into a lot more fucked up shit than they let on.

• 1:43:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:43:17Robert Evans?

  So we'll see. We'll see.

• 1:43:21Speaker 05

  I just, I, we don't have the hour for me to decompress the way I need to after hearing that sentence specifically.

• 1:43:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I need a cigarette.

• 1:43:32Speaker 05

  I'm gonna start smoking today and I hope she's fucking happy. Oh my God, that is, that is brutal.

• 1:43:39Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 1:43:39Speaker 05

  Brutal place to land.

• 1:43:41Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 1:43:42Speaker 05

  Nothing, Robert, Jesus.

• 1:43:44Robert Evans?

  Anyway, hopefully they're all, all of their money's gone, but they probably squirreled away millions and stuff for themselves, although I, at least one of the articles I've read says that like his net worth is effectively zero now, but I don't think anyone actually knows what his net worth is right now, like, and how much he got, like, his company went from valued at $32 billion to most recently, there's something like $650,000 in actual assets left.

• 1:44:11Robert Evans?

  But I also kinda think he and the others probably have millions or tens of millions that they set aside in shady ways for themselves.

• 1:44:20Speaker 05

  Wow. Oh yeah, I mean, well, that does sound like what the, the Beanie Babies guy would do, and that is my yardstick for morality. That is so, um, that, that is very, very scary to, uh, to consider. I feel like guys like that, the thing that is, I mean, I don't know, whenever you hear about, like, it is so karmically satisfying to know that someone like SBF can, can be completely bottomed out and like destroyed by something like this. But the thing is like, when, when rich guys like that lose everything, they just come up with worse, more hateful ideas and then come back. And that is like always what kinda scares me about that.

• 1:45:03Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is so funny. I don't know, Jamie.

• 1:45:08Speaker 05

  I don't know what the solution is. It's not like I want him to have money again. I just, you know, what, how can you make someone say less?

• 1:45:16Robert Evans?

  Again, I, I think the solution is.

• 1:45:17Speaker 05

  The podcaster's dilemma.

• 1:45:18Robert Evans?

  I, I think, look. Here's where I'll land on this. You know, I don't think, I don't think people should be thrown into cages generally unless there's literally no other way to stop them from harming folks. So, and I don't think that's the case with these people. So instead, I think the actual solution is to close from the outside all of the doors to that, the, the fucking rich person apartment complex they occupy in that Bahamas development. Lock it from the outside and once a week, drop in food and necessities via a helicopter and never let them leave or use the internet again.

• 1:46:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:00Robert Evans?

  Have them all just be with their friends in their, in their weird little compound going increasingly insane with their Chinese harem shit. I don't know. I guess that's another kind of prison. But if we film it, we can make money.

• 1:46:11Speaker 05

  Well, but then SPF might, may have to face his worst fear, which is reading a book.

• 1:46:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I, I guess like, like my serious answer is what do you do to people like this? Is you stop them from ever being able to have access to money again, or start companies again. And hopefully eventually they find something to do that actually helps human beings and is like, like of any kind of use, like working at a grocery store. There's, that's a real benefit. People need to get food and people need like, that's a respectable, honest way to make a living. And if any of these people were to get a job working at a Safeway, they would be providing an infinitely greater benefit to the human race than they could ever have performed.

• 1:46:55Speaker 05

  Perhaps a bit more of that, that ethical side of the ethical altruism you were looking for.

• 1:47:00Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:47:00Speaker 05

  I'll be honest, I did not come to the recording today with a solution for the prison industrial complex.

• 1:47:05Robert Evans?

  I don't have it either.

• 1:47:06Speaker 05

  I still don't like it. I still don't love it. Yeah.

• 1:47:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I have no solution. But you know what I do have, Jamie?

• 1:47:17Speaker 05

  What?

• 1:47:18Robert Evans?

  Your pluggables.

• 1:47:20Speaker 05

  No, you don't. I have those.

• 1:47:22Robert Evans?

  Well, you have them, but I'm letting you have them.

• 1:47:25Speaker 05

  Oh, my God.

• 1:47:26Robert Evans?

  I am giving.

• 1:47:27Speaker 04

  I mean, I could probably do them if nobody wants to take this job.

• 1:47:31Speaker 05

  I'll do it. I can. I'll do them. Sophie, do you want to do them?

• 1:47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, you can preorder Jamie's book. And that is linked in her Instagram bio.

• 1:47:41Speaker 05

  That's true.

• 1:47:43Speaker 04

  You can follow her on Instagram at Jamie Christ Superstar. And you can follow her on Twitter at Jamie Loftus Help, if Twitter's still around. She has a podcast that she co-hosts with Caitlin Derote called The Backdoor Cast. You should listen to her many limited run series, including her most recent one, which is Ghost Church.

• 1:48:03Speaker 05

  Which Sophie produced, along with The Backdoor Cast and everything, every podcast on the planet.

• 1:48:07Speaker 04

  This has now become a plug for me. Did I get everything, Jamie?

• 1:48:12Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's exactly what I would have said, except worse.

• 1:48:16Speaker 04

  Yeah, so preorder Raw Dog.

• 1:48:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:21Speaker 05

  Thanks, Sophie. Yeah, preorder Raw Dog. If you listened to the hot dog episode of Bastards and didn't like it, you did like it. Now buy the book.

• 1:48:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah, legally, you did like it. And if you disagree with that statement, we will send the CIA to kill your family.

• 1:48:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, and that, and let's make sure to attribute that quote to Robert Evans specifically.

• 1:48:43Robert Evans?

  There we go.

• 1:48:44Speaker 04

  And speaking of Robert Evans specifically, Robert Evans specifically, Margaret Killjoy specifically, and myself will be doing a Behind the Bastards virtual livestream show on December 8th. You can get tickets at moment.co/btb.

• 1:49:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Also, I have a Substack now, because Twitter's not doing great, so.

• 1:49:07Speaker 04

  That makes me so sad.

• 1:49:10Robert Evans?

  Why? I like writing things. I got to write a thing last night, Sophie. Don't you want me to write more things?

• 1:49:15Speaker 04

  I subscribe.

• 1:49:16Robert Evans?

  It's better for me than being on Twitter all the goddamn time. Yeah, you can find it at shatterzone.substack.com. Go there, and I will be writing. I'll try to write something every week. Maybe I won't. Maybe all of this will be, fall apart, be lost in time like tears in the rain. Or maybe you'll get a new thing from me every week. There's no way to know.

• 1:49:36Speaker 05

  Every time, half the time when I get something from someone's Substack, because I subscribe to quite a few, but every time I get a message from someone's Substack, it's always like, "I'm so sorry." I'm like, "I didn't notice. Just give me the content and I'll see the message about."

• 1:49:49Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Look, we all, I don't know. I've been meaning to write more stuff as opposed to just tweeting shitposts, so maybe it'll happen. Maybe it won't. There's no way to know.

• 1:50:01Speaker 05

  Perfect. Bye!

• 1:50:05Speaker 06

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• 1:50:35Robert Evans?

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• 1:51:35Robert Evans?

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• 1:51:42Speaker 03

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• 1:52:14Robert Evans?

  Welcome to the movies you liked as an adolescent and are now ashamed of. Shame cast. I'm Robert Evans and today in the seat of eternal self hatred. Jamie Loftus, Jamie, you have just admitted prior to the show starting that you once loved the Dana Carvey vehicle, Master of the Skies. What do you have to say for yourself?

• 1:52:38Speaker 05

  I feel fucking sick with myself, Robert. I haven't been able to sleep in the 20 years since its release. It, in my defense, it came out on my birthday, which I feel like had a lot to do with why I considered it my favorite movie. I felt a kinship with it.

• 1:52:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Birthdays are like a performance enhancing drug for movies that you see when you're 11.

• 1:52:59Speaker 05

  It's absolutely true.

• 1:53:00Robert Evans?

  It's the blood doping of positive movie memories.

• 1:53:04Speaker 05

  And furthermore, it's the most famous children's movie that was shooting on nine 11. And so I think in that way, I also felt like it would have been disloyal to my country to say a word against the master of disguise, particularly the turtle turtle scene. However, you know, I think the movie certainly doesn't hold up and I feel fucking sick with myself every single day.

• 1:53:30Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I, I wonder, cause famously Dana Carvey was dressed as the turtle man when those planes hit those towers and James Cameron was 20,000 feet below sea level, uh, exploring the bottom of the ocean. And I wonder if they ever crossed paths at like a Hollywood event and started talking about nine 11. So what were you up to on that day?

• 1:53:53Speaker 05

  And then Mark Wahlberg just leans in apropos of nothing and is like, if I was there.

• 1:53:58Robert Evans?

  I would have stopped it. Ah, Jamie. You know, I, I, I can honestly say nine 11 was the first time I felt like this country let me down because it delayed the release of the seminal Tim Allen film, Big Trouble, which uh,

• 1:54:14Speaker 05

  It sure did.

• 1:54:15Robert Evans?

  It sure did. Features a classic Patrick Warburton performance, by the way.

• 1:54:19Speaker 05

  It sure does.

• 1:54:20Robert Evans?

  Goddamn right. You see his ass, everybody. If you want to see Patrick Warburton's ass, it's in that movie.

• 1:54:26Speaker 05

  He is so underrated. I tell you what, I love, I love that man.

• 1:54:30Robert Evans?

  A total king.

• 1:54:31Speaker 05

  What a talent. Um, what a card. Friends, just to say, this is behind the bastards.

• 1:54:36Robert Evans?

  This is behind the bastards. A podcast about none of the things that we were talking about. Uh, and today, actually, Jamie, I've got you back in the hot seat, back in the office, which is more of an ephemeral feeling than a physical space these days.

• 1:54:53Speaker 05

  Making me answer for my sins right off the jump.

• 1:54:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah. By talking again about our friend Sam Bankman Fried, uh, who you and I chatted about right after his life collapsed last year. And I felt like we should do an update.

• 1:55:07Speaker 05

  I think we should too, because I'll be honest, I have done truly everything I can to avoid knowing more about him. So I would say I know basically nothing about him since we last spoke.

• 1:55:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's, it's amazing because normally, you know, I'm an empathetic being, like Sam has a face that I've just always wanted to hit from the first time I saw a picture of him. And normally when somebody goes through this much shit, when like their life is this ruined, right? Like I, I might, I feel a little less like hitting them because the world has hit them, but I still kind of want to sock him in the fucking jaw. Every time I see this guy. Um.

• 1:55:45Speaker 05

  Let me just check it. Has his face? Changed.

• 1:55:49Robert Evans?

  He wears suits sometimes now when he goes to court. He's not wearing the basketball shorts.

• 1:55:54Speaker 05

  Helpful. Well, that's true. God. Yeah, that's like two different versions of an embarrassing, desperate way to to present. Okay, he's wearing a he's wearing a suit now.

• 1:56:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he's wearing a suit now. It looks like shit, but whatever.

• 1:56:09Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 1:56:09Robert Evans?

  I try not to judge people on how they look unless that's part of their con. Um, and and Sam is a guy for whom the dressing like a slob was always part of his uh, his like tech bro genius, you know, persona that he was putting on like.

• 1:56:25Speaker 05

  Did we fooled everybody?

• 1:56:28Robert Evans?

  It sure did.

• 1:56:29Speaker 05

  Mugshot?

• 1:56:31Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, there's good. I believe there's a mugshot of him out at this point. Um, certainly when he he went at the Bahamas. Um, so when we last left our buddy Sam in November of 2022, he had been arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States, where he was charged with so many financial crimes that he might theoretically spend more than 115 years in prison.

• 1:56:50Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:56:51Robert Evans?

  Now, in the days and months since, a lot has happened and a lot more has come out about how the former crypto mogul behaved before and after his fall. I want to start with some of the latter information because by far the most entertaining story to drop as a result of these serried legal filings against Sam is that he was using the nonprofit arm of FTX to attempt to buy a sovereign nation he could use as an apocalypse shelter. That is by far the funniest story that's dropped about these guys in the uh, the days that months since.

• 1:57:21Speaker 05

  What was the plan there?

• 1:57:24Robert Evans?

  Oh, that's a that's a great, great question, Jamie. So let's talk about the island of Nauru. Uh, it's an island in the Southwest Pacific. I think it's about 2,100 miles away from the coast of Australia, which given the fact that Australia is really out in the middle of nowhere, is pretty close to Australia. Um, it is presently the world's smallest island nation. It's got a population of about 12,000 or so, not a ton of people. Um, and as an incredibly tiny country, one of its primary assets is simply the fact that it is a sovereign nation, because there's things that countries. Can do that nothing else can do like issue certain kinds like passports and visas and do certain kinds of things with banking, right? So if you're a really tiny country that doesn't

• 1:58:06Robert Evans?

  have like a shitload of natural resources, one thing you can export is the benefits of your sovereignty to say really rich people who who might want certain things that you can do as a country.

• 1:58:18Speaker 05

  The plan is coming together.

• 1:58:21Robert Evans?

  So there's a number of ways in which Naru has kind of taken advantage of this to get by. One of them is that they've sort of sold access to their land to Australia to use so that Australia has used them for years as an offshore processing center for asylum seekers. I think this stopped most recently in 2019, but there's been a couple of waves of this and it was not a pleasant place, right? Conditions were so brutal in sort of the offshore processing center on Naru from 2012 to 2019, but several residents carried out like deadly forms of protests, sewing their own lips shut or lighting themselves on fire as a protest of the conditions they were facing. Pretty ugly

• 1:59:02Robert Evans?

  scene. In the late 1990s, kind of prior to this period, Naru was the chief money laundering location for the emerging Russian oligarch class. They helped a lot of these oligarch types you've heard about in the context of Putin launder about $70 billion in ill-gotten funds during the early stages of the Russian Federation.

• 1:59:21Speaker 05

  I love a good bastards cameo.

• 1:59:23Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. No, Naru, Naru's Naru's adjacent to a whole lot of shitty people.

• 1:59:28Speaker 05

  Great.

• 1:59:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah, here it's a lovely place. Naru was also designated a money laundering state by the US Treasury in 2002, which led to sanctions, which I think is probably why they moved to like letting Australia offshore migrants there for a while. And since Australia stopped doing that in 2019, Sam Bankman Fried and his fellow effective altruists felt like they might have had an opportunity there, right? Like Naru's kind of looking for some new cash flow. They're looking for a sovereign nation to do some things for.

• 1:59:58Speaker 05

  It's it's an opportunity to be effective.

• 2:00:01Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, to be effectively altruistic towards yourself. Specifically, Sam and his brothers.

• 2:00:07Robert Evans?

  Gabriel Bankman Fried is actually the guy sort of like organizing this attempted endeavor using FTX as a charitable donations arm and their goal was to purchase the entire island. In order to construct what Gabe called a bunker shelter that would be used to quote, ensure that most effective altruists survive in the event that between 50% and 99.99% of the world population perish in a catastrophe.

• 2:00:34Speaker 05

  Jesus, and that's like a pretty comment. This, I feel like the Gabe of the situation is a very common character in that like just the devious brother. I mean, I hate the bastard most of all, but I really detest the devious brother as well. There's just, it just reeks of insecurity. Get your own grift, man.

• 2:00:54Robert Evans?

  Especially since they're framing it not as look, you know, when you got like a guy like Peter Thiel, right? And everybody knows Peter Thiel's got like an evil rich guy bunker to wait out the end of the world if it happens and like fuck Peter Thiel, but at least that's odd. Peter Thiel's not pretending I have a bunker to like save the world by putting aside just the best people. He's like, no, I'm a giant piece of shit and I'm going to save myself if things go wrong. Okay. Like fuck you, Peter Thiel, but at least it's honest. They're framing it as like-

• 2:01:19Speaker 05

  This is my blood bunker for just boys.

• 2:01:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's me and my blood boys. Gabe is like, no, we have to, in the event there's an apocalypse, we have to save all the EAs because they're the best people and that's what's best for the world. That will do, we're utilitarians, right? The greatest good for the greatest number of people is to save all of the best people, which is me and my friends, the other finance kids who call themselves effective altruists. So they don't have to feel bad for the fact that all they do is play the stock market like every other piece of shit. Anyway.

• 2:01:49Speaker 05

  So lucky that they all met each other.

• 2:01:50Robert Evans?

  So lucky that they're all friends. All the good people. I would love, I would love, honestly, like, look, when the, when the strike is over, somebody at a network, bring me on, I will write you a banger fucking script about an apocalypse where just the EA guys are left in their bunker trying to figure out society.

• 2:02:09Speaker 05

  Okay. Another incentive to end the strike. That would fucking rip.

• 2:02:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, we could do, we could do quite a tale. We could have some fun with- This one, Jamie.

• 2:02:19Speaker 05

  And you know, I don't, I think that there would be some effective altruists, like ridiculous enough to do cameos.

• 2:02:26Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. We could get, we could get fucking William McCaskill in there. No problem. Bring his Scottish ass on board. Yeah.

• 2:02:34Speaker 05

  Vain little perverts, each and every one of them.

• 2:02:36Robert Evans?

  And, and they're all, they're all, I'm gonna be honest, kinda stupid. So I bet we could trick him. Like, you don't have journalistic ethics with an HBO show. Yeah, we could just say we're bringing them on for an interview. We could like film around them like in, what was that fucking movie? Um, uh, with, uh, uh, Steve Martin, where they, uh, where they have to film a fake movie around, uh, what is it? Chris Rock? Shit.

• 2:03:00Speaker 05

  Hmm. Oh, it's the, uh, it's, um, um, um, um, um, oh, fuck.

• 2:03:05Robert Evans?

  See, now you're, now, now, now it's, I know, it's driving me nuts. We have to figure this out. Uh.

• 2:03:09Speaker 05

  I rewatched it recently.

• 2:03:12Robert Evans?

  It holds up.

• 2:03:13Speaker 05

  It does hold up. It's like one of the best movies.

• 2:03:16Robert Evans?

  Bowfinger. Fucking dope. Yeah. We could do a Bowfinger with William McCaskill where he thinks he's getting interviewed for a documentary? And we're really making him the bad guy of our HBO series? Bring in Steve Martin too. Fuck it. He's still, he's still got it.

• 2:03:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, he's, he's got good politics. He'd be great.

• 2:03:35Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, glad, glad we remembered it. Watch Bowfinger, guys. It holds up.

• 2:03:41Speaker 05

  Truly. If you take anything away from today, it really does. I was shocked at how well it helped.

• 2:03:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Startlingly good movie. Pretty good, like Scientology joke. Um, so, Gabriel Bankman-Fried ran FTX's charitable donations wing, which included a ton of money for what many people have characterized as political bribes. I'm not saying that he was bribing politicians for FTX. I'm saying that's what a lot of people have characterized what he was doing as. Now, that much has been known for a while, but it was not until the current management of what remains of FTX sued Sam. Cause again, there's new management that's trying to recover as much money as possible and they're throwing Sam under the bus because why wouldn't they? And that's how all this stuff got revealed. Cause they have all of FTX's internal communications. So they found a bunch of shit like the. was having Gabriel try to buy the island of Naru.

• 2:04:30Robert Evans?

  Now, it is unclear how serious their attempt to buy this island was. A representative of the island's government has been like, no, no, no, we were never putting our island for sale. This was never a thing that was going to happen. And maybe that is the case, maybe they were just being idiots fucking around. But in a memo between Gabriel and an FTX officer, the discussion was centered around the idea of buying the island, of being in control of it as a sovereign country, not just purchasing land.

• 2:04:58Speaker 05

  Which is, I mean, that's a lot of work for a bit, not that I put it past him, but I'm just like, it's not sounding like it.

• 2:05:05Robert Evans?

  Yeah, no, I think I don't put it past, it's possible that Naru, whatever is telling, whatever government officials telling the truth, they were never considering selling the island. But it's also possible that Gabe at all believed they could buy the island, right?

• 2:05:19Speaker 05

  Right, they may, they may in fact be that dumb.

• 2:05:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, there were discussions between these FTX guys about using Naru as a base for human genetic experimentation. You get the feeling that what their goal was to create modified post-human godlike bodies for their fellow effective altruists. So that they could live forever and dominate mankind after the collapse as undying immortals.

• 2:05:45Speaker 05

  That just sent the ugliest photoshopped image, like it was involuntary how quickly the like, no neck, huge chest, Photoshop super soldier image came to mind.

• 2:06:00Robert Evans?

  Absolutely.

• 2:06:01Speaker 05

  Hey, okay.

• 2:06:03Robert Evans?

  It's a, it sounds like a mix between that one video game with the big robot dinosaurs and those sci-fi books by that guy who wound up being real anti-Muslim, but yeah.

• 2:06:15Speaker 05

  Oh, I thought there could be a lot of guys, I wonder which guy?

• 2:06:19Robert Evans?

  Oh, it's, I think, Ilium and Olympus. I forget the name of the author, but the premise of the book is that like, in the future, a bunch of rich guys turn themselves into gods and decide to like recreate the Trojan War with themselves as the Greek gods. And they like resurrect a bunch of dead archaeologists. To make sure that they get the details right. It's it's fun. It's it's it's quite a series, except for the weird moments of bigotry.

• 2:06:45Speaker 05

  Oh, that'll happen.

• 2:06:46Robert Evans?

  Good stuff. Dan Simmons, I think, is the author. Anyway, so yeah, they're talking about, we want to create a human genetic experimentation base. And they're like, we want to figure out what the sensible regulations around human genetic enhancement are, but we also want to build a lab. And while they're talking about this, Gabriel adds cryptically, probably there are other things it's useful to do with a sovereign country. I don't know what he means by that, but yeah, probably. So that could be as banal as just like money laundering, which Nauru obviously is quite a history of, or issuing things like passports. But given the fact that all these dummies are permanently poisoned by a mixture of sci fi fandoms and weird futurist cults, I think it's safe to say we all dodged a bullet

• 2:07:29Robert Evans?

  by the fact that they never got too far in this scheme.

• 2:07:33Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:07:34Robert Evans?

  My favorite thing about this whole idea is how dumb it is on its face. There are some countries that could act as really good apocalypse shelters for the super rich, right? Switzerland is one. A lot of rich people have their apocalypse shelters in Switzerland. New Zealand is another. But the problem for that is that like Switzerland and New Zealand are both functional states. Obviously, if you're a billionaire there, you can have some outsized influence, but you're not just going to run everything because there's other interests and like a functional system of government in place in all of those places. I think Sam and them were hoping that since Nauru's small enough, they could just utterly dominate the government. But they ignored the fact that it's like one of the worst places imaginable to have as an apocalypse shelter. For one thing, the island does not

• 2:08:17Robert Evans?

  grow much food, which means it has to import 90% of what it needs to sustain its very small population.

• 2:08:24Speaker 05

  It's all good. We have so much money.

• 2:08:27Robert Evans?

  It's okay. We'll just keep importing it. Yeah. It also has very little fresh water, and most of its infrastructure is on the coast and vulnerable to both rising sea levels and hurricanes. It is very close to the bottom of places that you would want to have as a shelter. So, very funny. All these people are silly. Now, Jamie, the main reason current FTX is revealing all this is that they are suing the old management of the country, the company, i.e. Sam, to try and reclaim a billion or so dollars they argue was funneled illegally into nonsense like this and into the pockets of Bankman Fried and his lieutenants in the months before FTX collapsed due to insolvency. The lawsuit against Sam also includes some more confounding lines, described in this

• 2:09:12Robert Evans?

  paragraph from an article on the suit by crypto news site Decrypt. The lawsuit further says that the projects run by the FTX Foundation were frequently misguided and sometimes dystopian. These included a $300,000 grant to an individual to write a book about how to figure out what humans' utility function are, as well as a $400,000 grant to an entity that posted YouTube videos related to rationalist and effective altruism material, including videos on grabby aliens. Now, does that all seem like nonsense to you, Jamie?

• 2:09:45Speaker 05

  I don't know, Robert. Let's hear them out about the grabby aliens.

• 2:09:50Robert Evans?

  Don't worry, I'm going to explain all of this horseshit to you.

• 2:09:54Speaker 05

  Oh my god, what kind of Rick and Morty-ass nonsense.

• 2:09:59Robert Evans?

  It is some Rick and Morty-ass nonsense. It's much dumber than anything in Rick and Morty, because at least some of the people there understand story structure.

• 2:10:07Speaker 05

  And at least understand that it's a joke.

• 2:10:11Robert Evans?

  That it's a bit, yes. So, if you aren't terminally adhered to one of the stupidest subcultures in the broader tech sphere, that probably does seem like nonsense, and it is. But let's start with the bit about paying someone 300 grand to write about what a human's utility function is. Now, what is a utility function? Great question. In economics, a utility function is the measure of welfare or satisfaction of a consumer as a function of the consumption of real goods, like food. In simple terms, it's a way of describing the satisfaction or other benefits gained by consuming a specific resource. This is important to rational choice theory, which is a theory that states that individuals use rational calculations to make rational choices to achieve outcomes aligned with their own objectives.

• 2:10:57Robert Evans?

  Now, most people who aren't economists think that talking about the economy this way is silly because people are not, in fact, rational actors. And in fact, we make shitty decisions all the time guided by misinformation or pressure that causes us to inaccurately interpret the potential value of something like a college education versus the cost of, say, student loans, right?

• 2:11:17Speaker 05

  One could argue that Sam Bankman-Fried and co. are a great example of-

• 2:11:22Robert Evans?

  Wonderful example of the irrationality.

• 2:11:24Speaker 05

  That humans are not rational.

• 2:11:25Robert Evans?

  But that's economics. This is not an economics podcast. I'm not an economist. And the way that Bankman-Fried and his fellow EAs talk about utility functions is not the same as how economists talk about it, right? So when economists are talking about this, it's part of how to kind of figure out why people might make rational choices by understanding like the value of sort of the ranked like preference they give to certain things that they might expend resources on, broadly speaking. When Bankman-Fried and EAs talk about utility functions, what they mean is something even more abstract. And I'm gonna quote from a summary from a write-up on effectivealtruism.org, a website you should avoid at all costs.

• 2:12:05Speaker 05

  I'm really not looking forward to finding out how this somehow relates to the grabby aliens. Okay, sorry.

• 2:12:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, in a very dumb way, Jamie.

• 2:12:14Speaker 05

  Okay, good.

• 2:12:15Robert Evans?

  "EAs and rationalists love dropping the term in every conversation. Using the term 'utility function' can be immensely helpful when aiming to maximize positive impact or do the most good. The concept of a utility function provides a systematic way to quantify and compare the potential benefits of different actions, thus helping to guide decision-making toward the most effective outcomes. By representing values, goals, or beneficial outcomes numerically, utility functions allow for a structured comparison and prioritization of actions. If, for example, your goal is to alleviate global suffering, you could assign values to different charitable actions based on their estimated impact, thus creating a utility function. This function can then guide you to allocate your resources, like time or money, where they will generate the greatest utility, or good."

• 2:12:59Robert Evans?

  Now, that just seems like you're saying you should try to figure out how your money's gonna be spent best, right, before you spend it. But that's not actually what they're saying. What they are doing here is they are, they are set like a utility function in this context is a way of assigning a number that you have made up. There is no objective value to this number. There's no rigor to this. You are making up a number to, to like determine the value of spending your money in certain ways. And you are doing this so that whatever it is you want to do with your money, you can justify numerically as the scientifically best way to spend your money. So

• 2:13:35Speaker 05

  I see.

• 2:13:36Robert Evans?

  You can, you can argue in this way by assigning these values, whatever wonky way you want. No, me paying taxes to fund roads and the healthcare system is a shitty use of my money because it doesn't optimize this thing that I consider to be of higher long-term value. And the thing that's of higher long-term value to me is spending money on fucking space travel research so that I can be a demigod on Mars, right? That's best for human beings in the long term. So in utilitarian speak, you know, the greatest good for the greatest number of people is us getting to Mars, as opposed to feeding starving people right now. You know, the utility function of getting to Mars is much higher. So that's where my money ought to go.

• 2:14:12Speaker 05

  Well, it's all, yeah, it just like comes down to like the great, the greatest good is me ha, smiling a little bit.

• 2:14:19Robert Evans?

  Yeah, exactly. There's literally some writing on that, in that vein. So it is through math like this that EAs are able to look at a world where millions face death by famine or disease or rising sea levels and say, "The best way to help the planet is for us to become finance bros and then spin our money investing in AI companies or whatever." The fundamental selfishness of this whole community is made clear when you read the essays these people write on their websites, like Less Wrong, a blog founded by self-declared AI ex, yeah, Eliza Yidkowski. Yidkowski is a rationalist, which is a related subculture to the EAs. There's a lot of bleed over. Sam and a lot of his people were rationalists or rationalist-adjacent.

• 2:15:01Robert Evans?

  And, yeah, to, to give you an idea of how these people talk about utility functions, I'm going to read an excerpt from an article on this website titled, "Your utility function is your utility function," by David Udell. I've been thinking a lot lately about exactly how altruistic I am. The truth is that I'm not sure. I care a lot about not dying and about my girlfriend and family and friends not dying, and about all of humanity not dying, and about all life on this planet not dying too. And I care about the glorious transhuman future and all that, and the 10 to the 50th power, or whatever possible good future lives hanging in the balance. And I care about some of these things disproportionately to their apparent moral magnitude. But what I care about is what I care about. Rationality is the art of getting more of what you want, whatever that is,

• 2:15:45Robert Evans?

  of systematized winning by your own lights. You will totally fail in that art if you bulldoze your values in a desperate effort to fit in, or to be a good person, or in the way your model of society seems to ask you to. So you see what he's saying if you read between the lines there? What the most rational thing for me to do is whatever makes me feel best, right?

• 2:16:04Speaker 05

  Whatever gives me a little smile.

• 2:16:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah, don't let people shame you for spending your resources entirely on yourself and your own whims. Like, you're actually a hero if you do that.

• 2:16:15Speaker 05

  It is so fascinating to me to watch, like, I don't know, it seems like this self-conscious reflex where they feel the need to define rational by something that is more closely aligned with reality, and then immediately be like, but what that actually means is the exact opposite.

• 2:16:41Robert Evans?

  The core of it is always being able to say that, like, well, if you suggest that, number one, I have a responsibility to other people, and that that responsibility is to some extent out of my hands, which is what we all say when we're in a society, right? I don't have kids. I don't have a choice not to spend some of the significant amount of money I pay in taxes educating other people's kids. Now, I'm not a complete piece of shit, so I'm fine with that. Because, like, I've done very well for myself, and kids need educations. That's just a nice way for the world to work. But these people are more of the feeling that, like, no, I should do whatever is possible to avoid paying for a public school system. And in fact, I'm often going to advocate for some sort of like-

• 2:17:24Robert Evans?

  Weird voucher based system that allows me to not fund public schools. Because the greatest good for the greatest number of people is for me to ensure that like me and my rich kid friends all get to send our kids to special schools where like what you know, fuck anybody else like I don't have any other responsibility for the broader population. All that actually matters is like me maximizing, you know, my own personal happiness, but I still want to feel like like I'm a hero for doing it, right? If I avoid paying taxes in order to like spend all of my money investing in open AI. So that I can like take people's jobs away like I want to feel like a hero for doing that. Because what I'm arguing is that it's best for, you know, the people with 500 years from now, and there's going to be more of them than there are today.

• 2:18:09Robert Evans?

  So I'm a hero for like getting rich off of this company today, you know?

• 2:18:13Speaker 05

  Yes, well, because there's first of all, there's definitely going to be people in 500 years.

• 2:18:19Robert Evans?

  Sure, for sure. Definitely Gary. If these EA's get their way, sure. Yeah.

• 2:18:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. If we are doing the most good there. That that's so fucking exhausting. I mean, it does like your Peter Thiel example, not that, you know, doing evil is good in any capacity, but the most exhausting kind of evil is the one that also insists on you validating that it's not actually evil all the time.

• 2:18:44Robert Evans?

  That it deserves to.

• 2:18:45Speaker 05

  Shut the fuck up and ruin my life or don't.

• 2:18:49Robert Evans?

  It's the same thing with a lot of these fucking right wing media grifters where like it's not enough for them to be rich. It's not enough for them to like get their way politically. They they they feel like they have like an ethical, they're owed like being cool and respected. And it's the same like these people are all finance goals. They are all like actively fighting to avoid paying taxes and to be able to concentrate ever more power in an ever smaller number of people. To destroy the lives of of, you know, artists and people who are like working folks in order to like make more short term profits. This is all what they actually care about personally. But they want to feel like Gandhi while they do it, right?

• 2:19:31Robert Evans?

  Because what they're doing is guaranteeing what they'll argue, Jamie, is that like, well, you know, this may hurt this company, you know, me getting involved in this company. Sure, we may destroy a lot of jobs in the short term. But by doing so, we'll be able to make sure that the AI we build that eventually becomes our god. Is one that cares about the future of humanity, and that's better for the most people in the long run.

• 2:19:52Speaker 05

  Yes, and history should remember me as the greatest man to ever live. And people will, you know, that'll be on television someday when my computer is writing every television show.

• 2:20:02Robert Evans?

  Fucking hate these people. So, um, yeah, it's, it's cool stuff. And I think the, the fundamental selfishness of these people, because all that effective altruism and rationalism are really about is by, is creating a made up system of numbers to justify you pursuing your own benefit as like science, right? As like scientifically rational. This is really-

• 2:20:25Speaker 05

  It's, it's not as if that doesn't, you know, like math problems to serve a very small group self-interest. It's not as if that doesn't exist outside of this circle. But it's just like bizarre how uniquely like they lack any sort of self-awareness or, um, I don't know. It's just, they're so fucking annoying is what I'm trying to say.

• 2:20:50Robert Evans?

  That's very true, Jamie. And, um, this is all really clear when you look at how the movement, the EA movement, treated Sam Bankman-Fried before and after his fall from grace. If effective altruism can be said to have a pope, and it can, because all of these Silicon Valley philosophical movements are just Kirkland brand Catholicism. That pope is Will McCaskill, an Oxford moral philosopher and co-founder for the Center for Effective Altruism. When FTX collapsed and Sam got arrested, he was quick to put out a statement of outrage. "I don't know which emotion is stronger, my other rage at Sam and others for causing such harm to so many people, or my sadness and self-hatred for falling for this deception."

• 2:21:29Robert Evans?

  Now, the only reason I would hesitate to call this horse shit, Jamie, is that horse shit by virtue of being inanimate waste possesses a fundamental honesty that McCaskill is incapable of. He and SBF- Yeah, fuck, yeah.

• 2:21:41Speaker 05

  Robert, that's the bitchiest thing I've heard you say in a while. That's awesome.

• 2:21:45Robert Evans?

  Thank you. He and SBF met back at MIT when Sam was an undergrad. McCaskill convinced him that he could maximize his impact in humanitarian causes by earning to give, you know, making as much money as possible so that he can give it away in a, a way that presumably will- Help the world. Now, when Sam ultimately launched Alameda Research, it was an EA project from the start, staffed by Sam's friends in the community. One software engineer told Time, "Almost everyone who came on in those early days was an EA. They were there for EA reasons," says Naya Buskal, a former software engineer at Alameda. "That was the pitch we gave people. This is an EA thing."

• 2:22:23Speaker 05

  I know. I'm once again thinking about sports video games, and I know it's not sports video games.

• 2:22:29Robert Evans?

  It is. It is basically a sports video game.

• 2:22:31Speaker 05

  I just had the flashback to your, to the "yeah, yeah, yeah" interview you did. I was thinking, okay, it's true. It's true.

• 2:22:41Robert Evans?

  In the early days, Sam's pitch was that 50% of the company profits would be donated to EA causes. And the initial round of investing that got the company off the ground was funded entirely by rich EA types. Publicly, McCaskill asked about, talked about Sam like he was the EA Messiah, probably because FTX's Future Fund provided a huge amount of support for his movement. In just nine months in 2022, the Future Fund, run by Nick Beckstead, a moral philosopher, who used FTX money to support various causes, gave more than $160 million in other people's money funneled through FTX to effective altruism, including $33 million to organizations that McCaskill had a direct interest in. So that's why McCaskill spoke so positively about Sam,

• 2:23:26Robert Evans?

  which is, is made even more fucked up when you realize that like, other people in the EA movement had started warning McCaskill about Sam Bankman-Fried and about him being a con man as early as 2018. And I'm going to quote again from Time. This is about from like, the very start of Alameda Research. "Within months, the good karma of the venture dissipated in a series of internal clashes, many details of which have not been previously reported. Some of the issues were personal. Bankman-Fried could be dictatorial, according to one former colleague. Three former Alameda employees told Time he had inappropriate romantic relationships with his subordinates. Early Alameda executives also believed he had reneged on an equity arrangement that would have left Bankman-Fried with 40% control of the firm, according to a document reviewed by Time. Instead, according to two people with knowledge

• 2:24:11Robert Evans?

  of the situation, he had registered himself as sole owner of Alameda." So basically, Sam has... Unethically taken control of the firm and all of the money invested in it. And he is like fucking his subordinates.

• 2:24:23Speaker 05

  I was like, and he's also a sex pest.

• 2:24:25Robert Evans?

  He's also a sex pest.

• 2:24:27Speaker 05

  Surprising thing that I've ever heard in my entire life.

• 2:24:29Robert Evans?

  Taking

• 2:24:30Speaker 05

  As that is.

• 2:24:31Robert Evans?

  Money from people's what are effectively bank accounts in FTX. And he's using it to prop up the value of different crypto tokens tokens on Alameda to make shit look like it, which is money laundering, right? That's all it's like theft and money. It's fraud, you know?

• 2:24:44Speaker 05

  Or is it the future, Robert? Remember that? I mean,

• 2:24:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, remember what Larry David taught us all?

• 2:24:51Speaker 05

  I know there were some really unforgivable.

• 2:24:55Robert Evans?

  It's pretty funny. It is of all it is like I am on team like I can't be angry at Larry David because honestly, if Larry David advertises a financial product and you decide he seems like a good guy to he said, this seems like a credible company to me. I don't know. That's a little bit on you, right? That's a little bit on you.

• 2:25:17Speaker 05

  Who else was in that commercial? There was that was a that was a damning commercial.

• 2:25:22Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it is. It is. I still say arrest Larry David, but that's for a variety of reasons.

• 2:25:29Robert Evans?

  So

• 2:25:29Speaker 05

  I'm curious what your other reasons are, but that's for another day.

• 2:25:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's for a different day. So this caused so again, all of this shit, that is why this is like everything that the was obvious in Alameda in 2018. This is all the stuff that he gets arrested for in 2022. And when they become aware of this, of the fact that he's fucking his subordinates and money laundering, a bunch of EA people start raising alarm bells. In 2018, several Alameda executives tried to force him out of the company and accuse him of gross negligence. Sam wins the power struggle though. And so most of the EA management team and half of the company resign. Now, this might be that you could see this as like, well, maybe these effective altruist types were just in it for the altruism. And once they saw Sam was shady, they packed up.

• 2:26:16Robert Evans?

  And that's true for those individual people, you know? There's some decent people who just got caught up in the movement and they clearly had some degree of moral integrity. But the broader effective altruism. Movement, including

• 2:26:28Speaker 05

  incredibly low there.

• 2:26:29Robert Evans?

  Including

• 2:26:30Speaker 05

  unbelievable.

• 2:26:31Robert Evans?

  Will McCaskill, its pope, never disaffiliated from Sam. McCaskill was saying, talking about Sam like the second fucking coming up until late 2022. And in exchange for laundering Sam's reputation, Sam sent tens of millions of dollars, 160 million to EA causes in 2022 alone. And that's why McCaskill maintained movement ties with Bankman Freed. Quote, "In the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation with Bankman Freed and in the months that followed, McCauley and others, who was one of the executives that left, warned McCaskill, Beckstead and Karnofsky about her co-founders' alleged duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics, according to four people with knowledge of those discussions." Bouskow recalled speaking to McCauley immediately after one of McCauley's conversations with

• 2:27:15Robert Evans?

  McCaskill in late 2018. "Will basically took Sam's side," said Bouskow, who recalls waiting with McCauley in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone. "Will basically threatened her," Bouskow recalls. "I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and he was just believing Sam's side of the story, which made no sense to me." So Will, again, perfectly willing to like throw down against, you know, the more honest people in his movement and personally threaten them in order to keep the money flowing to his fancy cause so that he can, he can

• 2:27:45Speaker 05

  Right, and then the second that it becomes, you know, PR inconvenient to keep the associates. There should be some, maybe there is like a term for that of just like even the cadence of what you read earlier of just like the disingenuousness of like, oh, I had no idea. Like, you're like, okay.

• 2:28:04Robert Evans?

  No, you knew damn well what was going on and you knew that that's, you were willing to continue pretending he was a good guy and aligned with your movement as long as the money kept flowing, right?

• 2:28:15Speaker 05

  It no, yeah, it no longer serves your best interests to stand by him, so.

• 2:28:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so yeah, now you'll, yeah, anyway. Um, so Sam, we don't actually know if he's completely bankrupt. Uh, we know he took about a billion in payments and loans from FTX. He claims not to really have any of that money and that he's, he's working on getting what Assets he does have to like get try to make a few more of the investors that they had whole. That said, we know that a big chunk of the money that he made was funneled into real estate in his parents' names. So that's fun. Speaking of his parents, one of the big early mysteries of his case was that when he gets out on 250 million dollar bond, his parents are signed on to the bail agreement with their house as collateral.

• 2:29:03Robert Evans?

  But there were also two mystery cosigners and their house, we'll be talking about this in a second, is on the Stanford campus. The two mystery cosigners were Larry Kramer, a family friend and the former dean of Stanford, and Andreas Popke, who signed a $200,000 bond. Popke is a senior research scientist at Stanford and an advisor to several Valley startups. So Stanford is very invested, primarily because of who Sam's parents are in in this case, which is interesting to me. And

• 2:29:34Speaker 05

  Okay, because I was, I mean, that is my outside of his parents, I guess. Realistically, what is in it for them by taking that risk?

• 2:29:44Robert Evans?

  I think it's actually just that these people are close with his parents, who are professors at Stanford and deeply tied into that community.

• 2:29:53Speaker 05

  I can, I mean, I can very much see like bougie, bougie parents with influence being like, Sam's just a boy. Anyone could have made this mistake. He thought he was doing the right thing. He got mixed in with the wrong crowd.

• 2:30:05Robert Evans?

  This has to just be a like some sort of crazy mistake because they can't imagine he just, it's so dumb and blatant, like all he did was rob people in order to like gamble, right? Like fundamentally, there's not a difference between like him taking people's money, claiming that he's like got a sure stock tip and then gambling it in Vegas. Like legally, there's no difference between that and what he did. But they can't because his parents are like ethicists, basically at Stanford. And I don't think any of the people they are social with can imagine that his crimes were that venal and foolish. But you know whose crimes are not venal and foolish, Jamie?

• 2:30:44Speaker 05

  Oh, tell me, Robert.

• 2:30:46Robert Evans?

  The products and services that support our podcasts.

• 2:30:50Speaker 05

  Never encountered a product I didn't love.

• 2:30:53Robert Evans?

  No, that's, that's exactly right. That's exactly right.

• 2:31:06Robert Evans?

  And we are back. So initially, the reason why these other Stanford peoples are secret signers on to this bail agreement is because they were afraid that they would be attacked because of how angry people are at Sam. And there was a reason for this. Shortly after he was sent to house arrest at his parents' home, someone drove their car into a barricade set up outside of their house on the Stanford campus.

• 2:31:32Robert Evans?

  Now, as I stated earlier, both the Elder Bankman-Frieds are former Stanford professors, and their home is on campus, which has created issues for the school. The university still will not officially acknowledge that one of the world's most famous accused felons currently resides in their prestigious walled academic garden. One Washington-

• 2:31:49Speaker 05

  I feel like Stanford, like, really fumbles shit constantly.

• 2:31:54Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:31:56Speaker 05

  Like, it's absurd.

• 2:31:57Robert Evans?

  It's because they're not really that smart, but-

• 2:32:00Speaker 05

  Well, yes, this is, again, another great case for it. It's also, like, I don't know, just the arguing, like, well, his parents are, like, ethicists. How could he be fucked up? It's like, have you ever met someone raised by therapists?

• 2:32:11Robert Evans?

  You've met an ethicist?

• 2:32:12Speaker 05

  No offense, but like-

• 2:32:13Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're the most fucked up people in the world.

• 2:32:14Speaker 05

  Fucked up people on Earth.

• 2:32:18Speaker 05

  I'm not trying to call out any of the lovely, but it, like, they know. They know.

• 2:32:23Robert Evans?

  They know.

• 2:32:23Speaker 05

  They have the language.

• 2:32:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So, one Washington Post article I found noted, "Stanford Law School Didn't Respond to Request for Comment." When asked whether they could confirm a rumor that nearby student co-op had attacked the Bankman-Fried home with eggs, Stanford campus police did not respond. Socially, however, Bankman-Fried is a source of deep fascination. There are party flyers with his likeness. He's a punchline in campus comedy sketches. Students ride their bikes by on dates. The campus community is well aware he's there. An annotated map located the Bankman-Fried home was posted on a student-only social network.

• 2:32:58Speaker 05

  Okay, I'll be honest, if someone asked you out and they're like, "Here's my concept for a first date. We're gonna go watch Sam, Samuel Bankman-Fried be on house arrest."

• 2:33:08Robert Evans?

  We're getting, we're getting married that night, Jamie.

• 2:33:10Speaker 05

  Right. I was like, we're, we're going, like, bring a flask, watch one of history's stupidest villains.

• 2:33:19Speaker 05

  And they go finger each other in a parking lot.

• 2:33:21Robert Evans?

  Absolutely, Jamie. That's, that's the dream. That's the dream. None of this, that's effective altruism right there. That's the greatest good for the greatest number of people.

• 2:33:31Speaker 05

  Sam could stand to learn a thing or two from these.

• 2:33:34Robert Evans?

  These theoretical Stanford students.

• 2:33:37Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:33:38Robert Evans?

  So if you've, so again, Sam's parents are both well-respected teachers and experts in different fields of ethics. Both were, both were recruited to the university in the 1980s and they almost immediately hooked up. Barbara Freed made a name for herself as a, she's like a philosopher, basically. Her big thing was she wrote a paper dissecting the ethics of the trolley problem. Whereas Joe Bankman is a finance ethics guy. He writes a lot about like, again, like not breaking the law with finance shit. It seems to be a big focus of his.

• 2:34:11Speaker 05

  This is a very obvious thing to say, but I do, in defense of the Bankman family, I do appreciate when someone really rolls with their last name. I think that that is a very fun quality. This is, this is an example of it not working out. I think it's also equally bizarre when someone has a last name where you're like, why are you not doing that job? For example, maybe I've told you this before. It's one of my favorite facts I've learned in my life. My childhood dentist's name was Dr. Vagenis.

• 2:34:47Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 2:34:47Speaker 05

  Nevertheless.

• 2:34:48Robert Evans?

  Glorious.

• 2:34:49Speaker 05

  He insisted in going into teeth for some reason. And I found it infuriating. I'm like, just roll with it, man. That's your last name. You are an OBGYN.

• 2:35:00Robert Evans?

  An ethics board needs to go after this guy. No, I'm sorry. I know you don't know how to do this job, but that's your life now. People will trust you until you figure it out. I do.

• 2:35:08Speaker 05

  You are the labia doctor, man. I'm sorry.

• 2:35:12Robert Evans?

  Nominative determinism. Joe Bankman would be, I wouldn't trust Joe Bankman as a drug dealer, but I would, I would, I would trust Johnny Cocaine as a financial expert. Like, like as a stockbroker, Johnny Cocaine, yeah, let him invest my money. He knows what he's doing.

• 2:35:30Speaker 05

  I just, you know, say what you will about Joe Bankman, and I'm sure you should. I know nothing about this man, but at least he got into the right business.

• 2:35:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he does. He does. Now, I, people talk with like awe about this guy, like he's so ethical. He's such like a decent man. He thinks so much about doing the right thing. When the Washington Post is like giving examples of noteworthy things in his past, one of the ones they list is that-

• 2:35:55Speaker 05

  It's like how people talk about Ted Lasso.

• 2:35:57Robert Evans?

  In 2002, he wrote a tongue in cheek suggestion on how to avoid a Major League Baseball strike. And his solution in this paper that's supposed to be a joke was to levy taxes on teams and players who struck that could only be avoided if the players donated money to charity or the teams agreed to sell nickel hot dogs to Giants fans. Now, I don't know what the joke is here, but it apparently tore it up among mid, upper middle class Ivy League finance academics. They all talk about this as very funny.

• 2:36:27Speaker 05

  Wait, it comes up again as like, remember when he said hot dogs?

• 2:36:31Robert Evans?

  It was in the Washington Post article about this guy as like, look at a, look at this. This is like a noteworthy moment from his career. This like bad joke that he made. But I guess that's what fucking Stanford people find funny.

• 2:36:43Speaker 05

  Imagine being that boring.

• 2:36:46Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I, I don't get it.

• 2:36:48Speaker 04

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:36:49Speaker 05

  Maybe Stanford people were just like, think it's hilarious, just like the word hot dog. They're like, oh, poor people food. Like, I don't know.

• 2:36:57Robert Evans?

  Now, everything you find about these people is like, wow, taught like, is their friends talking about like, it's so shocking that this could happen. You know, these were like the best people we knew. They were so concerned about ethics. They raised their sons like little adults and they were always talking about utilitarianism. How could this have gone wrong? I don't know. I feel when I read anecdotes about them, like it's pretty obvious why it went wrong. And to kind of make that point, Jamie, here's a quote from an excellent write up by Puck News, quote, "Bankman, who once boasted to a friend that his father had dutifully recorded every cash receipt, wrote three casebooks on tax shelters and tax- Becoming one of the country's leading experts on the subject. One of Bankman's law students in those early years was Peter Thiel,

• 2:37:40Robert Evans?

  who later told Bankman that his tax law class was his most valuable because he was able to put a lot of his Facebook stock in an IRA, as Bankman would later recall in a podcast. This modest feat of financial engineering would save Thiel more than $1 billion. So, ethics, Jamie!

• 2:37:55Speaker 05

  Oh, no!

• 2:37:55Robert Evans?

  Avoiding $1 billion in taxes so that Peter Thiel can spend it giving Joe Swastika money to write New York Times columns on racism. Hooray! I love ethics!

• 2:38:08Speaker 05

  Holy shit. And here I was, a clown, a fool, about to be like, "Well, everyone wants to rebel against their parents." That's probably why he's a cartoon villain.

• 2:38:18Robert Evans?

  When he talks ethics, it's not getting busted for being a piece of shit with money. That's what it seems like to me. Not an expert on ethics. Am an expert on being a piece of shit, though, so...

• 2:38:30Speaker 05

  But you're a far different piece of shit.

• 2:38:32Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Jamie. Thank you.

• 2:38:33Speaker 05

  And I celebrate that about you. That is... I mean, I'm not, I guess, shocked that that is exceedingly ethical to the Stanford crowd, but...

• 2:38:46Speaker 05

  Wow, damning.

• 2:38:47Robert Evans?

  So, anyway, Barbara Freed, being a good liberal, was horrified by the Trump election and chose to fight back by founding a political fundraising group, Mind the Gap, which was extremely successful during the Trump years and is rumored to have acted as the model for FTX's own political donation machine. Both of Sam's parents have seen their reputations suffer with his arrest, and I'm going to continue with a quote from Puck. "Official property records show that Joe Bankman and Barbara Freed were the named owners of a $16.4 million beachside vacation home in Old Fort Bay, part of a broader real estate portfolio owned by FTX and senior executives totaling hundreds of millions of dollars. They may have stayed there while working with the company sometime over the last year, Sam said, though he denied knowing any details about the $300 million worth of real estate

• 2:39:31Robert Evans?

  that FTX and his parents bought in the Bahamas."

• 2:39:35Speaker 05

  Oh, okay, so they know about absolutely everything in there, right?

• 2:39:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it sounds like it. Sounds like it. Now, Joe and Barbara have said that they've been working to return the property to the company for Sometime, working to. Joe Bankman, in particular, has hardly been a passive observer in his son's scandal and may now be exposed to some legal risk himself. Bankman interviewed and hired the first lawyers for Alameda Research back in 2017 and effectively served as FTX's first attorney. He handled the inbound that came and made the resulting introduction that helped FTX raise 130 million from his former law student, private equity mogul Orlando Bravo, spent his free time on FTX's charitable and regulatory efforts and was ultimately in the room before Sam made the fateful decision, to sign the documents that declared Chapter 11.

• 2:40:16Robert Evans?

  So, they seem very involved and shady themselves. I don't buy, "Oh, they're so innocent, their son just broke, you know, made a mistake," or whatever. They're all, they all just didn't think that this was criminal because the people's money they were taking were poor and they're fucking Stanford brats. Like, I, I have no respect for them. I hope they lose their fancy Stanford house. They hurt a lot of people.

• 2:40:38Speaker 05

  Well, it's like, particularly because, I mean, it, it sounds like this was their MO from the start anyways. So why would we now think that they would be above this behavior? If they're like, "Oh, no, here's a way," like, I don't know, it seems like their definition of ethics is things you can technically get away with, we think.

• 2:40:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's not illegal for Peter Thiel to get this billion dollars that he doesn't pay taxes on because, you know, fuckery. Anyway, Mr. Bankman and Mrs. Freed have joined now the expanding cast of disgraced Stanford affiliates. This includes recently, university president Marc Tessier-Lavigne, currently accused of manipulating images on research papers in a way that is equivalent to falsifying lab data for Alzheimer's research. Obviously, there's also Bastards Pod alumni, the Theranos lady, another famous Stanford disgrace. And then there's the fact that their alumni keep-

• 2:41:29Speaker 05

  My favorite Stanford disgrace.

• 2:41:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and then there's all their alumni who have created companies or helped run them that have shattered the foundations of our democracy in pursuit of a quick buck. Stanford's current reputation is so grimy that a Washington Post article on SBF's associations with the school ends with these lines, and this is very funny, Jamie. Adrian Daub, a Stanford professor of comparative literature and German studies and the author of What Tech Calls Thinking- Sees an encouraging sign in Stanford being only peripherally involved in the Bankman Freed scandal. That might not have been the case 10 years ago, he notes, when the Silicon Valley hype machine operated at more of a fever pitch than it does today. Other than his physical location, it's actually not that connected to us for once, Dobbs said. And that way, it's a sign of progress and also a little bit melancholy. Stanford was

• 2:42:14Robert Evans?

  a place where the future was shaped, so it's quite possible that's not happening anymore. That it's happening in the Bahamas now and only comes to Palo Alto once it gets indicted. I'm hung up on- That's so funny.

• 2:42:28Speaker 05

  I'm hung up on other than its physical location.

• 2:42:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, other than the fact that he's here, he's not very involved.

• 2:42:34Speaker 05

  That's a big one, babe. That's a big one, but no, I mean-

• 2:42:37Robert Evans?

  That does seem significant to me, yeah.

• 2:42:39Speaker 05

  No, if they're happy, I'm happy. That's great.

• 2:42:42Robert Evans?

  It's funny.

• 2:42:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, we have, we have to return to, um, to Elizabeth Holmes at some point because I'm very uniquely interested in her rebranding as Liz.

• 2:42:52Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm, yeah. Genius.

• 2:42:54Speaker 05

  The Liz-

• 2:42:55Robert Evans?

  Cause now I've forgotten her horrible crimes. Yeah.

• 2:42:58Speaker 05

  I forgot about all of her crimes once she had a cool and relatable name and had cool and relatable babies.

• 2:43:03Robert Evans?

  If Hitler had escaped to Switzerland and started going by Alan.

• 2:43:07Speaker 05

  That's true. We can't take away that she's scammed Henry Kissinger. Yeah, that is- She had to scam people out of her, their lives, but you know.

• 2:43:16Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:16Speaker 05

  But the Henry Kissinger thing, we cannot forget.

• 2:43:19Robert Evans?

  I say we give her six months off, uh, as a result of the Kissinger scam.

• 2:43:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's fair to me.

• 2:43:25Robert Evans?

  So, this brings us to the subject of what precisely Sam Bankman Freed has been up to in the nine months or so since his fall from grace. The short answer is that he has not had a wonderful time. In January, a month or so after he was granted bail under house arrest, the Southern District of New York accused him of inappropriately contacting former Enkirk FTX employees in order to influence their testimony on his case. Sam tried to frame all of this as part of his ill-advised apology tour that he embarked on last year in the lag period between FTX collapsing and his formal charges. Yeah.

• 2:43:58Speaker 05

  Did he, did he hit the notes app? What happened?

• 2:44:00Robert Evans?

  Oh, he's like calling them, actually, I'm gonna read a quote from Puck. In order to describe how he's illegally contacting people. On December 12th, the same day he was arrested in the Bahamas, Bankman Freed emailed FTX bankruptcy CEO John J. Ray III, offering potentially pertinent information concerning future opportunities and financing for FTX and its creditors, and asked to work constructively with Ray and the Chapter 11 team to do what's best for customers. No response. Then, after his extradition, the crypto mogul sent another email to Ray on December 30th, in which he offered advice accessing Alameda funds. Still no response. Then, while being summoned to court in New York, SBF tried Ray again on January 2nd. "Mr. Ray, I know things haven't gotten off on the right foot, but I really do want to be helpful.

• 2:44:42Robert Evans?

  As I'm guessing you've heard, I'm in NYC for the next day. I'd love to meet up while I'm here, even if just to say hi." Ray did not take him up on this offer.

• 2:44:50Speaker 05

  No shit.

• 2:44:52Robert Evans?

  He's reached out to several people, and it's always like, "I just want to help, you know, get as much money as we can for the customers. I just want to, you know, help you deal with the confusing aspects of this." But it's, it's like, you're not supposed to be talking to people when you're in Sam's situation, who were involved in the company like this, because they're probably going to testify against you.

• 2:45:12Speaker 05

  I don't feel convinced that he understands that. I, I don't know. He's talking like a fucking spam email.

• 2:45:18Robert Evans?

  Yeah, he really is. And in general, Sam has opted to take all of the actions under house arrest that are likely as to cause stress ulcers in his lawyers. In addition to repeatedly contacting FTX employees, he decided to start a Substack where he planned to explain how FTX... And it's like, there's that famous line from The Wire, "Are you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy?" But in this case, it's like, "Are you publishing blog posts about your criminal conspiracy after being indicted?"

• 2:45:49Speaker 05

  He's just growing an audience, Robert. Relax. It's all a part of the plan.

• 2:45:53Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's like if Al Capone had started a New York Times column on having people machined gun in alleys after he'd gone away to fucking Alcatraz.

• 2:46:03Speaker 05

  Hear me out, you guys. It actually makes way more sense when I explain it.

• 2:46:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So neither, he only writes like, I think, two posts before he gives up because they're, they're, he's bad at blogging. I tried to read them. He's dog shit writer. Look.

• 2:46:17Speaker 05

  Well, can I, I mean, not to be aggressive, but that's most Substack people. It's two and then they're out.

• 2:46:24Robert Evans?

  By the way, find my Substack.

• 2:46:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, not you, Robert. There's more. No, I know you have more than two, but I'm just saying, the average friend of mine that harangues me into, you know, these damn emails.

• 2:46:38Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:46:39Speaker 05

  It's two, um, and, and then they're done. Anyways, but I'm not, I'm probably gonna start one. I'm just being insecure.

• 2:46:46Robert Evans?

  Sure. No, no, no.

• 2:46:47Speaker 05

  What I'm going to do in a couple of months.

• 2:46:49Robert Evans?

  I think you'll beat Sam Bankman-Fried. No, no question there.

• 2:46:52Speaker 05

  Robert, your Substack is great.

• 2:46:54Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Sophie.

• 2:46:55Speaker 05

  Robert, your Substack is great.

• 2:46:56Robert Evans?

  Thank you, Jamie. This has, this has been wonderful for my ego.

• 2:47:00Speaker 05

  Those are, those are two that I actually read.

• 2:47:03Robert Evans?

  So Sam's is bad, though. And it's, it's bad, like, in part, part of what he's doing is like, he's been charged with a bunch of specific crimes, right? And the posts that he puts up, he does not acknowledge any of the charges against him. He doesn't like defend himself from them. Instead, he lays out a bunch of misleading and arcane spreadsheets to try and like, argue that the company shouldn't have collapsed the way it did and that he like, didn't realize, like, why he didn't realize it was so bad. He's, he's doing, it's the same thing as like the EA shit we opened the episode with, right? This throwing out like confusing piles of numbers in order to distract people, right? Like, this is just like chaff, you know? That's what he's doing. He's throwing

• 2:47:46Robert Evans?

  out chaff in the way of a bunch of poorly formatted spreadsheets. Um, they, they don't convince anyone that he's innocent.

• 2:47:53Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, but it sounds like it also, uh, it did not work.

• 2:47:56Robert Evans?

  It did not work at all. Uh, you should not do this if you are being indicted for numerous financial crimes, BT dubs. So, in early February, the judge overseeing Sam's case forbade him from using encrypted messaging apps like Signal because he was so frequently trying to talk to other people who were part of this case with him, um, in secret, which is illegal. He also got in trouble. Because he was caught using a VPN, which could have potentially allowed him to hide his communications. Sam argued he was just using a VPN to access his international NFL game pass account.

• 2:48:29Speaker 05

  I was gonna say, I was like, did he just say he was trying to watch Canadian Netflix? That would be fucking classic.

• 2:48:36Robert Evans?

  Hey, officer, I just had a lot of shit to torrent, homie, like.

• 2:48:41Speaker 05

  You get it, my man.

• 2:48:43Robert Evans?

  He has since been limited to a normal flip phone due to his repeated inability to abide by his bail conditions. Now, some might note that Sam has already gotten more second chances than most accused criminals get with their bail conditions. It seems accurate to say that the leniency he has received gave him reason to feel as if he could act with impunity, which is why a couple of weeks ago, he leaked his ex-girlfriend's diary to the New York Times.

• 2:49:08Speaker 05

  Which is, take me through the which is why.

• 2:49:11Speaker 04

  That, that, that wasn't what I thought you were going to say.

• 2:49:14Robert Evans?

  I know, I know. Nobody thought it was gonna head here.

• 2:49:17Speaker 05

  You know, I, I mean, it's, although it seemed like we were due for another spiteful action against a woman for seemingly no reason.

• 2:49:25Robert Evans?

  Oh, absolutely, absolutely.

• 2:49:27Speaker 05

  Very much his MO.

• 2:49:28Robert Evans?

  Now, I will say, I don't like this woman either. Carolyn Ellison is, I think, a pretty shitty person.

• 2:49:35Speaker 05

  I remember, we spoke about her last time, right?

• 2:49:37Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. She's unpleasant lady. She was the former CEO of Alameda. I've been fucking listening to this podcast called Spellcaster, which is like a wondery podcast about Sam Bankman-Fried. I don't like it. The woman who does it, like, was at a, was at a bachelorette party with Carolyn Ellison right before the charges dropped and was like, oh, she's so smart, she's so, and she repeats the same bullshit everyone says about Sam. They were such, they were like geniuses. And it's like, no, they just like blew out a bunch of numbers you didn't understand and convinced you they were smart because they said numbers, right? Like, there's nothing these people have done that is smart.

• 2:50:13Speaker 05

  With situations like that, I'm like, I guess I appreciate the disclosure, but like, why the fuck were you hired to do this show?

• 2:50:21Robert Evans?

  Well, it's, it's because big media is just as tiny and insular a world full of rich people as finance. And in fact, a A lot of the same families have people at the Times and people and fucking investment banks, which is why here at Cool Zone Media, we exclusively hire people who used to sell ketamine on their college campuses in order to get by, you know? That's, that's, that's the Cool Zone guarantee. Or Adderall, you know?

• 2:50:48Speaker 05

  That's, I was gonna say.

• 2:50:49Robert Evans?

  Lucy's of Adderall, yeah.

• 2:50:50Speaker 05

  And I appreciate that you made an exception for some of us that you didn't have to be good at it. You just had to try.

• 2:50:57Robert Evans?

  No, in fact, we will not hire you if you were good at selling drugs on your college campus.

• 2:51:02Speaker 05

  Why did you even apply to this job?

• 2:51:04Robert Evans?

  Mediocre, part-time campus drug dealers. That's our, that's our hiring pool.

• 2:51:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's our like, I don't know, whatever. I don't know the names of enough fancy New York schools.

• 2:51:15Speaker 05

  It's really not that big of a stretch, let's be honest. And I'm fucking proud of that.

• 2:51:20Robert Evans?

  So am I.

• 2:51:26Robert Evans?

  So Carolyn Ellison, former CEO of Alameda and also Sam's on-again, off-again beau. She immediately turned states witness.

• 2:51:34Speaker 05

  I don't like you using the term beau, but continue.

• 2:51:36Robert Evans?

  Why not? That's what it means, boo. Should I use boo?

• 2:51:40Speaker 05

  I kinda like boo. I was like, I was like, that doesn't really make sense, but I like it.

• 2:51:46Robert Evans?

  They were co-boos. So she immediately turned states witness and admitted guilt for her share of the illegal activities committed by Alameda. And she apparently, as a part, as part of immediately rolling, handed over her diary. I think that's how they got her diary. It was part of the terms of like the, yeah. So it gets introduced into evidence, which obviously Sam, I think, will get access to as a result of that, because that's the way discovery works. I believe that's how he got her diary.

• 2:52:13Speaker 05

  Was she also a Stanford head?

• 2:52:17Robert Evans?

  I don't think she went to, I think she, her parents were professors at MIT.

• 2:52:21Speaker 05

  Wow, low rank losers over at MIT.

• 2:52:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Fucking hobo university right there.

• 2:52:28Speaker 05

  And until it happens to me, I love when someone's diary is introduced into evidence. And that brings me back to Elizabeth Holmes yet again, when she like her creepy little. Sex with Sunny Balwani, ooh.

• 2:52:41Robert Evans?

  Oh, some of the worst sex. Some of the very worst sex.

• 2:52:46Speaker 05

  That is maybe the moment that I felt closest to her. That's when she, that's when Liz almost got me because she was sending walls of texts to this guy. And then he was sending back, okay. And it's like, you know what?

• 2:52:58Robert Evans?

  Oh, brutal. No, no, she deserved, she deserved a man like Jeff Bezos, who would call her the most unsettling nickname I've ever heard. You know, but at least he responded, a live girl.

• 2:53:12Speaker 04

  That's right. That's right. Oh, I think we, I think we as, we, we, we, we, we as a collective blocked that out intentionally.

• 2:53:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's very funny. It does make it clear that he's not a robot because like, nobody, nobody fakes that. That's, that's, that's evidence that he feels something. What he feels is off putting, it's frightening. It's like profoundly unsettling, but he does feel something.

• 2:53:41Speaker 05

  But unfortunately, yeah, chat GPT could have outdone that in terms of sounding like a person.

• 2:53:47Robert Evans?

  Absolutely.

• 2:53:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:53:50Robert Evans?

  So anyway, Sam gets access to her diary one way or the other. Uh, and then he hands her diary to the New York Times so that they can write an article about it. Now, that is unethical as fuck and possibly illegal. The prosecution has asked that he be jailed, that his bail be revoked, uh, because of what he did here. Sam's, this is still going on as we talk. I'll record a little update if he does go to jail as a result of this. Hey, everyone, Robert here, uh, just wanted to update you that since we recorded this episode, uh, a couple of days before you're hearing it. Sam Bankman Freed was remanded to custody. Uh, he is incarcerated now and he will remain in jail after violating his bail conditions until his trial in October.

• 2:54:33Robert Evans?

  At, you know, least and possibly well beyond that, depending on how the charges and sentencing and all that stuff go.

• 2:54:42Robert Evans?

  I should note that kind of the most recent story after that is that, uh, his lawyers requested that he be allowed to have his, uh, ADHD medication and depression medication, which he ran out of soon after being taken into custody. The judge has ordered that he be given that medication. Obviously, I'm always in favor of people who are incarcerated having access to medication.

• 2:55:04Robert Evans?

  If anyone's interested, I don't actually think putting Sam in jails. Going to do much good. I'm a little bit more mixed on this than I normally am just because of the case of Adam Newman, the WeWork guy who got off scot-free from his giant financial crimes and is now starting another giant grift company and will probably fuck with a bunch of other people's lives. But I do kind of think it's unlikely that we're going to get much benefit out of this. That said, I don't really feel for Sam. He had many, many chances not to be in this situation and he fucked all of them up. So, you know, fuck the guy. Sam's lawyers have argued he was not attempting to discredit a witness, but just to respond

• 2:55:46Robert Evans?

  to a toxic media environment, which he says unfairly portrays him as a villain. And I guess we're part of that toxic media environment. Although, Sam, free tip here, handing your ex-girlfriend's diary to the New York Times is a bad way to seem like not the villain. That's kind of villain behavior, homie.

• 2:56:04Speaker 05

  That's...

• 2:56:04Robert Evans?

  Hate to tell you.

• 2:56:06Speaker 05

  I, again, but it's like, again, you can imagine his, like, doofy loser fucking logic of like, "No, officer, I was just being a petty bitch. Is that against the law?" And you're like, "In this case, yes."

• 2:56:20Robert Evans?

  Yes, it is, actually, sir.

• 2:56:22Speaker 05

  Bruh.

• 2:56:23Robert Evans?

  So, humorously enough, that is the legal argument his lawyers are making. And they, they kind of have a point because they're like, "Look, if you read the New York Times article based on her diary, he seems like a piece of shit. So clearly, we weren't trying to influence the prosecution?" And like, they do have a point because he does come across as the bad guy in that article that he made happen. So that's funny.

• 2:56:45Speaker 05

  He comes across as the bad guy in most things.

• 2:56:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I'm going to quote from some of that New York Times coverage here. "Mr. Bankman-Fried and Ms. Ellison have started an unsteady, also started an unsteady romantic relationship with multiple breakups and reconciliations. At times, Ms. Ellison worried that Mr. Bankman-Fried thought she wasn't good enough. When he was around, she wrote in February 2022 in a Google document she had, 'An instinct to shrink and become smaller and quieter and defer to others.' After one split, Ms. Ellison cut off communication with Mr. Bankman-Fried." Bankman Freed. I felt pretty hurt rejected, she wrote in the April 2022 Google document. Not giving you the contact you wanted felt like the only way I could regain a sense of power. Ms. Ellison was compensated far less generously than other top executives at FTX and Alameda, though it's unclear whether she was aware of it.

• 2:57:34Robert Evans?

  According to court filings, the exchange's founders and other key employees received $3.2 billion in payouts and loans. Of that total, $6 million went to Ms. Ellison, compared with $587 million for Mr. Singh, FTX's head of engineering, and $246 million for Mr. Wang, one of the founders. Mr. Bankman Freed received $2.2 billion. So Ellison is definitely not innocent here. She has admitted guilt in this case, but the reporting makes it seem as if her main role was to act as a patsy. Sam knew she was in love with him and deeply insecure, so he put her in charge of Alameda so that he could use it as part of his grift to manipulate the value of his crypto empire using customer funds. And this, basically, the $6 million he gave her,

• 2:58:19Robert Evans?

  which is a tiny fraction of like the $3 billion they funnel to executives, that's like him paying her to be a smokescreen, right? She's not an equal partner in this enterprise. And one of the things that had happened right before this fell apart is he had, he had stopped paying attention to her and Alameda in order to start throwing money through another crypto exchange run from a woman he was fucking now, that he had like... So it seems like this was a pattern for him.

• 2:58:42Speaker 04

  Right, stop, stop.

• 2:58:44Robert Evans?

  What?

• 2:58:45Speaker 04

  I just...

• 2:58:45Robert Evans?

  I'm not doing this. I'm just talking about what he did.

• 2:58:47Speaker 04

  I just don't want that.

• 2:58:48Speaker 05

  We just really, I just really...

• 2:58:49Robert Evans?

  Well, it's bad. He's a bastard. That's why we're talking about him. He sucks.

• 2:58:53Speaker 05

  I just really, I just really need, I don't know who needs to hear this, but we just really need people to stop fucking Sam Bankman Freed.

• 2:58:59Speaker 04

  That's my, that's my point.

• 2:59:02Robert Evans?

  This is very bad, gross behavior.

• 2:59:05Speaker 05

  It's gross and it's bad for the world.

• 2:59:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. So, you know, fuck this guy. One bit of schadenfreude I can give you all is that according to Puck News, Sam's present situation is so unpleasant that he considers his trips across the country to go to court in New York the highlight of his life now. Because he gets to like, go out in the street, he's surrounded by lawyers and private security. So it's like he's got an entourage again. He gets to travel. This is like, the closest he gets to feeling like what he used to be a billionaire. So that's kind of fun.

• 2:59:38Robert Evans?

  The downside is, from the perspective of an SBF hater, the downside is that recently, one of his charges was dismissed. The campaign finance violation. This was not due to him being innocent, but due to some legal weirdness involving the letter of the extradition agreement the US signed with the Bahamas. Basically, when we put together the agreement so that they'd extradite him, that was not on the document. So the feds had to like, drop the charge in order to not deal with a bunch of other bullshit. It's a technicality, but it means that his brother Gabe and several members of the philanthropic team at FTX probably will not be charged for very likely committing crimes. And I say they likely committed crimes, because FTX executive Nishad Singh already pled guilty this spring to participating in a straw donor scheme.

• 3:00:23Robert Evans?

  So he is, yeah, and he pled guilty before they dropped this charge, which he's got to feel like an asshole for doing. Because now he is going to get punished for that, even though SBF is no longer being charged for it.

• 3:00:35Speaker 05

  Wow, that's, I mean, look, sometimes you do the ethical altruistic thing, and it comes back to bite you in the ass. What are you gonna do?

• 3:00:45Robert Evans?

  Yeah, what are you gonna do? Hey, everyone, just wanted to note that since we recorded this, the prosecution has noted that they will be seeking to add those charges back on that were dropped. So it's possible that both Sam and other members of his inner circle will be charged with all that stuff. We just really kind of don't know at this point. But I do want to note that the prosecution is at least saying, hey, like, despite this little mess up, we are not just giving up on this charge. So, heads up about that, could change in the future. Well, Jamie.

• 3:01:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:01:20Robert Evans?

  How you doing?

• 3:01:22Speaker 05

  I real well, I have a question for you.

• 3:01:25Robert Evans?

  I have an answer for you.

• 3:01:27Speaker 05

  Well, I sure fucking hope so. No, my question is that I'm curious. What do you see happening here? What feels plausible to you at this time?

• 3:01:37Robert Evans?

  Um, you know, I've been seeing a lot of people be like, oh, he's gonna get off. He's gonna get all he's got too many connections, too many, you know, people who he could roll on. I don't think he has many people he could really roll on. I don't think he was like, especially since these finance charges have been dropped. I don't know that I really think he's got the savvy to have like a guy like John McAfee. I believe John McAfee killed himself. I don't believe there's anything shady there. I know a lot about the guy. It makes sense to me that when his fucking running finally stopped, he would do that. But McAfee probably had did have some dirt on some people. He was that kind of cunning, right? I'm not, I wouldn't be shocked if John McAfee had put together some dirt on some people. Right?

• 3:02:21Robert Evans?

  I don't think Sam Bankman Freed is that cunning. I don't think he was like smart enough to have dirt on anyone who could get him out of this situation. I think there's a pretty good chance he does hard time. I think he fucked with too many people. He fucked with the money and he fucked with it in too dumb of a way. So I think he's screwed.

• 3:02:38Speaker 05

  Okay, that's that was my instinct as well, because I feel like he doesn't even have. I mean, he doesn't have any sort of like, I think sometimes with with these types, you get some sort of press narrative that it's like they're playing 4D chess. And like, even if that's not entirely true, there's like a media narrative that sticks to them that makes them seem more plausible. But I just feel like everything that's like all of his actions and all of the media surrounding him, except for a very, very small amount, seems to reinforce the fact that he's completely incompetent and malicious in in every way.

• 3:03:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Yeah, I would say that.

• 3:03:18Speaker 05

  Well, good. Um, I, God, I mean, not that I, you know, I don't know. I mean, it seems like he's fucked. I certainly hope he's fucked.

• 3:03:27Robert Evans?

  I hope he's fucked. I hate him. I think he's a gross person. I hope Will MacAskill goes away. Or gets like eaten by eaten by a large fish would be my pick if I if I got it. If like, God is like, what do you want me to do to Will MacAskill? I'm like, you, you remember that thing you did with a whale back in the day? What if he didn't get out? What if a whale just eats him, you know?

• 3:03:48Speaker 05

  And then God would be like, oh, amazing. I'm I love playing the hits.

• 3:03:51Robert Evans?

  Oh, I love, great pitch. You know what, Robert? I'm gonna give you that HBO series you've been asking for.

• 3:03:57Speaker 05

  Robert, you are an amazing collaborator.

• 3:04:01Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, me and God co-creators of my HBO series. I am hoping if the strike goes on, they take my reality show pitch, Super Soaker Full of Piss, which I really think has some potential, Jamie. Yeah, the premise is.

• 3:04:16Speaker 05

  No, go ahead. Tell me the premise of Super Soaker Full of Piss, Robert. I'm ready.

• 3:04:21Robert Evans?

  So I'm in a van. I filled a super soaker with my piss and I drive around like Rodeo Drive. And I get out when I see someone who looks famous and I squirt him with a super soaker full of piss. And then we film it and then I leave very quickly.

• 3:04:36Speaker 05

  Okay, I mean, I'm on board with that.

• 3:04:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think it's a great, I think it's, you know, uh, I will get, you know, I don't know.

• 3:04:44Speaker 05

  I would be kind of pro, like, if you could get, I think the soundtrack is gonna be really key there. Like, I think if you could get some, like, jock jam situation, like, going out the car.

• 3:04:56Robert Evans?

  All live, all live editions of Blink 182 songs. Cause you know, cause they are one of the worst live bands that ever played. So it's really just upsetting to the viewer. That's the goal here.

• 3:05:10Speaker 05

  And you know, given who Blink 182 like rolls with these days, you may in fact run into Travis on Rodeo Drive.

• 3:05:17Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:05:18Speaker 05

  Beautiful, poetic irony with that.

• 3:05:21Robert Evans?

  Just a, just a full load of it, you know?

• 3:05:24Speaker 05

  Just to say, I hate this idea because it means that some fucking celebrity will murder you and then I, and then you'll be gone and then I'll be sad.

• 3:05:33Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna be honest, I'm not great at recognizing celebrities. So I'm anytime, I could just see someone in a suit and spray him with the piss. Yeah, Jamie.

• 3:05:41Speaker 05

  I know.

• 3:05:42Speaker 07

  Great.

• 3:05:42Speaker 05

  Let's take my other bestie. No.

• 3:05:46Robert Evans?

  We just roll down the street. It's Nick Jonas Roberts. Spray, spray, spray. Get the fuck out of here.

• 3:05:52Speaker 07

  Wow.

• 3:05:52Speaker 05

  I'm like, no, no, that's a good one. That's Kevin.

• 3:05:55Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. That's right.

• 3:05:58Speaker 05

  I hate Jonas Brothers popcorn.

• 3:05:59Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna rely on Jamie to recognize him, though.

• 3:06:01Speaker 07

  Oh, my God, I did see that, Jamie.

• 3:06:03Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:06:04Robert Evans?

  All right, well.

• 3:06:05Speaker 05

  The Jonas Brothers have their own vanity popcorn brand now. Isn't that something? These are the amazing things I can teach you, Robert.

• 3:06:15Robert Evans?

  And you've already taught me so much about hot dog through your bestselling book, Raw Dog.

• 3:06:20Speaker 05

  Wow, perfect transition.

• 3:06:21Robert Evans?

  That's a fucking pivot. You're welcome.

• 3:06:23Speaker 07

  What a spicy plug that was. Nice job.

• 3:06:26Speaker 05

  Gorgeous plug. Hey, it's never too late to start reading about hot dogs. It's never too late to start learning.

• 3:06:33Robert Evans?

  Reading about hot dogs and also America. Fascinating story. Raw Dog. Find it wherever books are found. Yeah.

• 3:06:43Speaker 05

  Well, thank you so much. I truly, I was, I mean, as you know, I did a Bastards episode about hot dogs as I was writing that book.

• 3:06:52Robert Evans?

  You did.

• 3:06:53Speaker 05

  So that I would remain focused.

• 3:06:55Robert Evans?

  And that's right. It's the best way.

• 3:06:57Speaker 05

  And I have heard that the subject of that episode, George Shay, that the hot dog eating community is actively protecting him from its existence. He does not know it exists. He does not know the book exists.

• 3:07:10Robert Evans?

  Loved to hear it.

• 3:07:11Speaker 05

  And everyone in his life is really actively trying, like, every hot dog eater, or many hot dog eaters I talked to, were like, yeah, no, we know about the Bastards episode and we know about the book, but we really don't want George to know about it. I was like, okay, fair enough.

• 3:07:27Robert Evans?

  Beautiful. Jamie, that made me feel great. You can sign up for this show and all other Cool Zone shows ad-free at Cooler Zone Media. That's for Apple subscribers. We are working on the Android option. You can find my novel, After the Revolution, by typing "After the Revolution" into whatever book-buying site you use, or just walk into a bookstore and demand it from the manager at Swordpoint. Anyway, goodbye.

• 3:07:53Speaker 05

  Goodbye.

• 3:07:58Speaker 04

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com/behindthebastards.

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