The Sam Bankman-Fried Update

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.

(1 Part)

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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 Carve Vehicle Master of Disguise.

(00:22):
What do you have to say for yourself?

Speaker 2 (00:24):
I feel fucking sick with myself, Robert, I haven't been
able to sleep in the twenty years since its release.
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 kingship
with it.

Speaker 1 (00:40):
Yeah, birthdays are like a performance enhancing drug for movies
that you see when you're eleven.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
Absolutely true, the blood.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
Doping of positive movie memories.

Speaker 2 (00:51):
And furthermore, it's the most famous children's movie that was
shooting on nine to eleven, And so I thank you.
I wows 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

(01:15):
sick with myself every single day.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
Yeah, I wonder because famously Dana Carvey was dressed as
the Turtle Man when those planes hit those towers, and
James Cameron was twenty thousand feet below sea level exploring
the bottom of the ocean, and I wonder if they
ever cross paths at like a Hollywood event and started
talking about nine to eleven, So what are you up
to on that day?

Speaker 2 (01:39):
And then Marlo Alberg just leans in apropos of nothing
and is like.

Speaker 1 (01:44):
If I was there, I would have stopped it. Oh, Jamie,
you know, I can honestly say nine to eleven 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 it sure it sure did,
features a classic Patrick Warburton performance, by the way, it

(02:06):
sure do. Goddamn right. You see his ass, everybody, if
you want to see Patrick Warburton's ass, it's in that movie.

Speaker 2 (02:13):
He is so underrated. I absolutely love love that man.

Speaker 1 (02:17):
A total of talent.

Speaker 3 (02:20):
Friends, just to say, this is behind the ba this.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
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, making.

Speaker 2 (02:40):
Me an answer for my sins right off the jump.

Speaker 1 (02:43):
Yeah, by talking again about our friend Sam Bankman Freed,
who you and I chatted about right after his life
collapsed last year, and I like we should do an update.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
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.

Speaker 1 (03:05):
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 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.

(03:28):
Every time I see this guy.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Let me just check it has his face changed.

Speaker 1 (03:36):
He wears suits sometimes now when he goes to court,
He's not wearing the basketball shorts.

Speaker 2 (03:41):
Helpful and well, oh that's true. God, yeah, that's like
two different versions of an embarrassing, desperate way to present. Okay,
he's wearing a he's wearing a suit.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
Now, yeah, he's wearing a suit. Now it looks like shit,
but whatever. Of course, I try not to judge people
on how they look unless that's part of the Cohn
and Sam as a guy for whom the dressing like
a slab was always part of his his like techbro genius,
you know, persona that he was putting on like a

(04:13):
fooled every puddy. A mug shot, Oh yeah, yeah, there's
got I believe there's a mugshot of him out at
this point, certainly when he went at the Bahamas. So
when we last left our buddy Sam in November of
twenty twenty two, 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

(04:35):
more than one hundred and fifteen years in prison.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Wow.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
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

(04:59):
to buy a sovereign name he could use as an
apocalypse shelter. That is by far the funniest story that's
dropped about these guys in the days months since.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
What was the plan there?

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Oh, that's a great question, Jamie. So let's talk about
the island of Nauru. It's an island in the southwest Pacific.
I think it's about twenty one hundred 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. It is presently the world's smallest island nation.

(05:32):
It's got a population of about twelve thousand or so,
not a ton of people, 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 then 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

(05:52):
country that doesn't 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.

Speaker 2 (06:05):
Plan is coming to get.

Speaker 1 (06:08):
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 twenty nineteen,
but there's been a couple of waves of this and

(06:29):
it was not a pleasant place, right. Conditions were so
brutal in sort of the offshore processing center on Nauru
from twenty twelve to twenty nineteen that several residents carried
out like deadly forms of protests, sowing their own lipshut
or lighting themselves on fire as a protest of the
conditions they were facing. Pretty ugly scene in the late

(06:52):
nineteen nineties. 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. All the archetypes you've
heard about in the context of Putin laund are about
seventy billion dollars in the ill gotten funds during the
early stages of the Russian Federation.

Speaker 2 (07:08):
I have a good bastard's cameo.

Speaker 1 (07:10):
Oh yeah, no, Naro's nar who's adjacent to a whole
lot of shitty people. Great, yeah, here, it's a lovely place.
Narus also designated a money laundering state by the US
Treasury in two thousand and two, 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 twenty nineteen, Sam Bankman, Freed

(07:34):
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.

Speaker 2 (07:44):
Well, it's an opportunity to be effective.

Speaker 1 (07:48):
Yeah, yeah, to be effectively altruistic towards yourself. Specifically, Sam
and his brother Gabriel Bankman Freed is actually the guy
sort of like organizing this attempted endeavor using ftx's charitable
donation's arm and their goal was to purchase the entire
island in order to construct what Gabe called a bunker,

(08:09):
shelter that would be used to quote ensure that most
effective altruists survive in the event that between fifty percent
and ninety nine point nine to nine percent of the
world population perishing a catastrophe.

Speaker 2 (08:21):
Jesus, And that's like a pretty common this. I feel
like the Gabe of the situation is a very common
character in bat 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
weeks of insecurity get your own grift man.

Speaker 1 (08:41):
Especially since they're framing it not as look, you know,
when you got like a guy like Peter teal right,
and everybody knows Peter Teel's got like an evil rich
guy bunker to wait out the end of the world
if it happens, and like, fuck Peter teal but at
least that's Peter Tel'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,

(09:02):
like fucking Peter Teel, but at least it's honest. They're
framing it as my blood bunker for just boys. Yeah,
it's me and my blood boys. Jabe 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

(09:23):
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.

Speaker 2 (09:36):
So lucky that they all met each other.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
So lucky all the good people I would love, I
would love honestly, Like, look, 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.

Speaker 2 (09:55):
Okay, another incentive to end the strike would fucking rip.

Speaker 1 (10:01):
Yeah, yeah, we could do. We could do quite a tale.
We could have some fun with this one, Jamie.

Speaker 2 (10:07):
I don't I think that there would be some effective altruism,
uh like ridiculous enough to do cameos.

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Oh, I believe we could get We could get fucking
William mccaskell in. There no problem bring his Scottish ass
on board.

Speaker 2 (10:20):
Yeah, vain little perverts.

Speaker 1 (10:23):
Oh, and they're all They're all I'm gonna be honest,
kind of 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 him, liking what was that
fucking movie with uh? Oh yeah, Steve Martin where they

(10:46):
where they have to film the fake movie around Uh
what is it Chris rock Ship.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Oh, it's the It's oh.

Speaker 1 (10:55):
See now you're now now now it's I know, it's
driving me nuts. We have to figure this out. Uh.

Speaker 2 (11:00):
I rewatched it recently.

Speaker 1 (11:02):
It holds up.

Speaker 2 (11:04):
It does hold up. It's like one of the best movies.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Bofinger fucking dope.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
Younger.

Speaker 1 (11:09):
We could do a bow Finger with William mccaskell where
he thinks he's getting interviewed for a documentary and we're
really making him the bad guy off our HBO series,
bringing Steve Martin to fuck it. He's still he still
got it.

Speaker 2 (11:23):
Yeah, he's got good politics. He'd be great.

Speaker 1 (11:26):
Yeah. Uh glad, glad we remembered it. Watch Bowfinger, guys.

Speaker 2 (11:31):
It holds up truly if you take anything away from today,
it really does. I was shocked at how well it helped.

Speaker 1 (11:36):
Yeah, startlingly good movie, pretty good, like scientology joke. So,
Gabriel Bankman freed 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

(11:58):
much has been known for a why, But it was
not until the current management of what remains of FTX
sued Sam. Because 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 because they have all of
ftx's internal communications, so they found a bunch of shit
like that Sam was having Gabriel try to buy the

(12:20):
island of Nauru. 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,

(12:41):
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, which is cool.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
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.

Speaker 1 (12:56):
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.

Speaker 2 (13:10):
Right, they may in fact be that dumb.

Speaker 1 (13:14):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Now there were discussions between these FDx
guys about using Naru as a base for human genetic experimentation.
You get the feeling that what their goal was to
create modified posthuman godlike bodies for their fellow effective altruists
so that they live forever and dominate mankind after the

(13:34):
collapse is undying immortals.

Speaker 2 (13:36):
That just sent the ugliest photoshopped image like it was involuntary.
How quickly the like no neck, huge chest photoshops super.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
So absolutely absolutely, Hey yeah, it sounds like a mix
between that one video game with the big robot dinosaur
and those sci fi books by that guy who wound
up being real anti Muslim But yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:08):
A lot would be a lot of guys. I wonder
which guy.

Speaker 1 (14:10):
Oh it's I think Ilium and olympos okay, 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,

(14:31):
it's it's it's quite a series, except for the weird
moments of bigotry. Oh that 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

(14:53):
a lab. And while they're talking about this, Gabriel ads cryptically,
probably there are other things it's useful to do with
sovereign country. I don't know what he means by that,
but yeah, probably huh. So that could be as banal
is just like money laundering, which NARU obviously is quite
a history of, or issuing things like passports. But given

(15:13):
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 by the fact that they never got too far
in this scheme. Now, 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

(15:34):
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 gonna 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

(15:56):
were hoping that since Naru'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 grow much food, which means it has to import
in ninety percent of what it needs to sustain its
very small population it has.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
It's all good, we have so much money.

Speaker 1 (16:17):
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.

(16:39):
The main reason current FTX is revealing all this is
that they are suing the old management of the country 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 bankment Freed and his
lieutenants in the months before FTX collapsed due to insolvency.

(17:00):
Suit against SAM also includes some more confounding lines described
in this 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 three hundred dollars one thousand
dollars grant to an individual to write a book about
how to figure out what humans utility function are, as

(17:22):
well as a four hundred thousand dollars 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?

Speaker 2 (17:37):
I don't know. Robert let's hear them out about the
grabby alien.

Speaker 1 (17:41):
Don't worry, I'm going to explain all of this horseshit
to you.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
Uh my god, what kind of Rick and Morty ass nonsense?

Speaker 1 (17:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (17:59):
Unlike the at Please understand that it's a joke.

Speaker 1 (18:02):
But it's a bit. Yes, yeah, 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 three hundred grand to write about what a human's
utility function is? Now, yes, what is a utility function?
Great question? In economics, a utility function is the measure

(18:25):
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

(18:45):
outcomes aligned with their own objectives. 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.

Speaker 2 (19:07):
Right, one could argue that Sam Bankman, Freed and co.
Are a great example of a wonderful example of the
IR But that's economics. This is not an economics podcast.
I'm not an economist, And the way that Bankman, Freed
and his fellow Eas talk about utility functions is not
the same as how economists talk about it. Right, So

(19:28):
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, Freed, and Eas
talk about utility functions, what they mean is something even
more abstract. And I'm going to quote from a summary

(19:51):
from a write up on a effective altruism dot Org,
a website you should avoid at all costs.

Speaker 1 (19:56):
Quote.

Speaker 2 (19:56):
I'm really not looking forward to finding out how this
somehow relates to to the grabby aliens.

Speaker 4 (20:02):
I'm sorry in a very dumb way, Jamie.

Speaker 1 (20:05):
Quote Okay, good 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 towards

(20:25):
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 utility function.
This function can then guide you to allocate your resources

(20:46):
like time or money, where they will generate the greatest
utility or good. 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.
This context is a way of assigning a number that
you have made up. There is no objective value to

(21:08):
this number. There's no rigor to this. You are making
up a number to 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 I see you can. You can

(21:28):
argue in this way by assigning these values whenever wonky
way you want. Now, me, paying taxes to fund roads
and a 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

(21:50):
beings in the long term. So in utilitarian speak, you know,
the greatest good for the greatest number of people is
that's getting to Mars as opposed to feeding starving people.
Right now, you know the utility function of getting to
Mars as much higher, So that's where our money ought
to go.

Speaker 2 (22:03):
Well, it's all yeah, it just like comes down to
like the great the greatest good is me hah smiling
a little bit.

Speaker 1 (22:10):
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 it 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 spend our money
investing in AI companies or whatever. The fundamental selfishness of

(22:31):
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 AIX 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 to rationalists adjacent

(22:52):
and Yeah. 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 web site 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

(23:13):
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 ten to the fiftieth 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.

(23:33):
Rationality is the art of getting more of what you want,
whatever that is, 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 to in the way
you're a 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.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Best, whatever gives me a little smile.

Speaker 1 (23:57):
Don't let people shame you for spending your resources, you know,
entirely on yourself and your own whims Like you're actually
a hero if you do that.

Speaker 2 (24:06):
Oh, it is so fascinating to me to watch, like,
I don't know. It seems like this like 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 yeah,

(24:30):
that's said.

Speaker 1 (24:32):
The core of it is always being able to say that, like, well,
if you suggest the 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,

(24:54):
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, you know,
a public school system. And in fact, I'm often going
to advocate for some sort of like weird voucher based

(25:16):
system that allows me to not fund public schools because
the greatest good for the greatest number of peoples 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

(25:38):
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
five hundred years from now, and there's going to be

(25:58):
more of them there than there are today. So I'm
a hero for like getting rich off of this company today.

Speaker 2 (26:04):
You know, yes, well, because there's, first of all, there's
definitely going to be people in five hundred years.

Speaker 1 (26:10):
Sure, for sure, definitely, Garrett. If these eas get their way,
sure yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:15):
Yeah yeah. If we are doing the most good they're
that's so fucking exhausting. I mean, it does, like your
Peter Teel 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 that time, that it
deserves to cut the fuck up and ruin my life

(26:38):
or don't.

Speaker 1 (26:39):
It's the same thing with a lot of these fucking
right wing media grifters. Were 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 their ode, like being cool
and respected, and it's the same good. Like these people
are all finance schools. They are all like actively fighting

(27:01):
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 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, because what they're doing is guaranteeing.

(27:25):
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 long run.

Speaker 2 (27:43):
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.

Speaker 1 (27:53):
Fucking hate these people. So yeah, it's it's cool stuff.
And I think 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,

(28:13):
as like scientifically rational.

Speaker 2 (28:15):
This is really 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 I don't know, it's

(28:38):
just they're so fucking annoying, is what I'm trying to say.

Speaker 1 (28:41):
That's very true, Jamie. And yes, this is all really
clear when you look at how the movement, the EA
movement treated Sam Bankman freed 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 kirklan Brand Catholicism. Hope is
Will mccaskell, an Oxford moral philosopher and co founder for

(29:04):
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. Now, the only reason I
would hesitate to call this horseshit, Jamie, is that horseshit,
by virtue of being inanimate waste, possesses a fundamental honesty

(29:28):
that mcaskell is incapable of.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
Yeah, fuck yeah, Robert, that's the bitchiest thing I've heard
you say in a while.

Speaker 1 (29:35):
That's thank you, thank you. He and SBF met back
at MIT when Sam was an undergrad. Mccaskell 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
way that presumably will help the world. Now. When Sam
ultimately launched Alimeter Research, it was an EA project from

(29:57):
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 Buscal, a former software engineer at Alameda.
That was the pitch we gave people. This is an
EA thing.

Speaker 2 (30:14):
I know, I once again thinking about sports video games,
and I know it's not sports video games.

Speaker 1 (30:20):
It is it is basically a sports video game.

Speaker 3 (30:22):
I just had the flashback to the Yeah interview you did.

Speaker 2 (30:28):
I was thinking, Okay, it's true, it's true.

Speaker 1 (30:32):
In the early days, Sam's pitch was that fifty percent
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,
mccaskell 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, and just nine months

(30:54):
in twenty twenty two, the Future Fund, run by Nick Bexted,
a moral philosopher who used FTX money to support various causes,
gave more than one hundred and sixty million dollars in
other people's money funneled through FTX too effective altruism, including
thirty three million dollars to organizations that mcaskell had a
direct interest in. So that's why mcaskell spoke so positively

(31:16):
about Sam, which is is made even more fucked up
when you realize that, like other people in the EA
movement had started warning mcaskell about Sam Bankman freed and
about him being a con man as early as twenty eighteen.
And I'm going to quote again from time this is
about from the very start of Alimeter research. Within months,
the good karma of the venture dissipated in a series
of internal clashes, many details of which have not been

(31:39):
previously reported. Some of the issues were personal Bankman Freed
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 Freed
with forty percent control of the firm, according to a
document reviewed by Time. Instead, according to two people with

(32:02):
knowledge 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.

Speaker 2 (32:14):
Its like, and he's also a sex pest.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
He's also a sex.

Speaker 2 (32:17):
Surprising And he's I've ever heard in my entire life.

Speaker 1 (32:20):
Taking money from people's what are effectively bank accounts and
FTX and he's using it to prop up the value
of different cryptos 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.

Speaker 2 (32:35):
Or is it the future Robert remember that?

Speaker 1 (32:37):
I mean, yeah, remember what Larry David taught us all.

Speaker 2 (32:42):
I know, there were some really unforgivable.

Speaker 1 (32:45):
Uh, 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 this seems like a credible company to me,
I don't know. That's a little bit on you, right,

(33:06):
that's a little bit on you.

Speaker 2 (33:08):
Oh Els was in that commercial there was that was
a that was a damning commercial.

Speaker 1 (33:13):
Those Yeah, it is. It is. I still say a restaurant,
Larry David. But that's for a variety of reasons.

Speaker 2 (33:20):
So I'm curious what your other reasons are. But that's
for another day.

Speaker 1 (33:23):
Yeah, that's for a different day. So this caused so
again all of this shit. That is why this is
like everything that was obvious in Alameda in twenty eighteen.
This is all the stuff that he gets arrested for
in twenty twenty two. And when they become aware of this,
of the fact that he's fucking is subordinates and money laundering,
a bunch of EA people start raising alarm bells. In

(33:46):
twenty eighteen, several Alameda executives try 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 you could see this as like, well,
maybe those effective altruist types were just in it for
the altruism and once they saw Sam with Shady, they

(34:06):
packed up. 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.

Speaker 2 (34:18):
Movement incredibly low there, including unbelievable Will mccaskell.

Speaker 1 (34:22):
It's pope never disaffiliated from Sam. Mccaskell was saying talking
about Sam like the second fucking coming up until late
twenty twenty two. And in exchange for laundering Sam's reputation,
Sam sent tens of millions of dollars one hundred and
sixty million to EA causes in twenty twenty two alone.
And that's why mccaskell maintained movement ties with Bankment Freed

(34:44):
quote in the weeks leading up to that April twenty
eighteen confrontation with Bankman Freed and in the months that followed,
Maccoley and others, who was one of the executives that left,
warned mccaskell, Bexted and Karnofsky about her co founder's alleged
duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics. According to four people with
knowledge of those discussions, buscal recalled speaking to McCully immediately
after one of McCauley's conversations with mccaskell in late twenty eighteen.

(35:08):
Will basically took Sam's side, said Buskal, who recalls waiting
with McCauley in the Stockholm airport while she was on
the phone, Will basically threatened her. Buskall recalls, I remember
my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile
stance here and he was just believing Sam side of
the story, which made no sense to me. So Will
again perfectly willing to like throw down against, you know,

(35:29):
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 right.

Speaker 2 (35:37):
And then the second that it becomes you know, pr
inconvenient to keep the association, 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.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Like you're like, Okay, now 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.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
Right, No, light, Yeah, it no longer serves your best
interests to stand by him.

Speaker 1 (36:12):
Yeah, so yeah, now you'll yeah anyway, So, Sam, we
don't actually know if he's completely bankrupt. 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 try to make a few more
of the investors that they had whole. That said, we

(36:35):
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 two hundred and fifty million dollar bond,
his parents are signed on to the bail agreement with
their house as collateral, but there were also two mystery

(36:55):
co signers and their house. We'll be talking about this
in a second is on the stand for campus. The
two mystery co signers were Larry Kramer, a family friend
and the former dean of Stanford, and Andreas Popke, who
signed a two hundred thousand dollars bond. Popke is a
senior research scientist at Stanford and an advisor to several
Valley startups. So Stanford is very invested primarily because of

(37:20):
who Sam's parents are in this case, which is interesting
to me and.

Speaker 2 (37:24):
Okay, because that was I mean, that is my outside
of his parents, I guess realistically, what is in it
for them by taking that risk.

Speaker 1 (37:35):
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.

Speaker 2 (37:44):
I can, I mean, I can very much see like
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 rock.

Speaker 1 (37:56):
This has to just be 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
got a sure stock tip and then gambling at Vegas.
Like legally, there's no difference between that and what he did.

(38:18):
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.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Jamie, Oh, tell me, Robert.

Speaker 1 (38:37):
The products and services that support our podcasts.

Speaker 2 (38:41):
Uh, never encountered a product I didn't love.

Speaker 1 (38:44):
No, that's exactly right. That's exactly right, and we are back.
So initially, the reason why these other Stanford people are
secret signers on to this bail agreement is because they

(39:08):
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 arrested
his parents home, someone drove their car into a barricade
set up outside of their house on the Stanford campus. Now,
as I stated earlier, both the elder Bankman Freeds are
former Stanford professors and their home is on campus, which

(39:29):
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, Stanford.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
Like really fumbleshit constant.

Speaker 1 (39:45):
Oh yeah, yeah, it's absurd. It's because they're not really
that smart.

Speaker 2 (39:50):
But well, yes, this again another great case for it.
It's also like, I don't know, just the arguing, like, well,
his parents are like ethesis, how could he be fucked up?
Have you ever met someone who raised no offense?

Speaker 1 (40:04):
People in the people.

Speaker 2 (40:09):
Call out any love, but it's like they know, they
know the language.

Speaker 1 (40:15):
Yeah yeah. So one part Washington Post article I found
noted Stanford Law School didn't respond to requests for comment
when asked whether they could confirm a rumor that nearby
student co op had attacked the Bankman Freed home with eggs.
Stanford campus police did not respond. Socially, however, Bankman Freed
is a source of deep fascination. There are party flyers
with his likeness. He's a punchline. In campus comedy sketches,

(40:38):
students ride their bikes by on dates. The campus community
is well aware he's there. An annotated map located the
Bankman Freed home was posted on a student only social network.

Speaker 2 (40:49):
Okay, I 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 Bank We're getting.

Speaker 1 (40:59):
We're getting married that night. Jamie, I was.

Speaker 2 (41:02):
Like, we're going like, bring a flask, watch one of
history's stupidest villains, and then for each other in a
parking line.

Speaker 1 (41:12):
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.

Speaker 2 (41:21):
Sam could stand to learn a thing or two from these.

Speaker 1 (41:25):
These theoretical Stanford students. Yes, so if you so again.
Sam's parents are both well respected teachers and experts in
different fields of ethics. Both were recruited to the university
in the nineteen eighties, 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

(41:47):
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.

Speaker 2 (42:02):
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?

(42:25):
For example? Yeah, 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 doctor Vagenis and met. Nevertheless,
Glorious insisted in going into team. For some reason, I
found it infuriating. I'm like, just roll with it, man,

(42:46):
that's your last name.

Speaker 1 (42:49):
ANOD 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 you you know, are
the labydpeaking of nominative determinism. Joe Bankman would be it.
I wouldn't trust Joe Bankman as a drug dealer, but
I would. I would. I would trust Johnny Cocaine as

(43:12):
a financial expert, like like as a stockbroker. Johnny Cocaine, Yeah,
let him invest my money. He knows what he's doing.

Speaker 2 (43:21):
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.

Speaker 1 (43:30):
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.

Speaker 2 (43:45):
Ones you must talk about Ted Lasso.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
In two thousand and two, 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's ruck that could only be avoided if the players
donated money to charity or the teams agreed to sell
Nickel hot dogs giants fans. Now, I don't know what

(44:09):
the joke is here, but it apparently tore it up
among upper middle class Ivy League finance academics. They all
talk about this is very funny.

Speaker 2 (44:18):
Wait it comes up again. Is like remember when he said.

Speaker 1 (44:22):
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.

Speaker 2 (44:34):
Imagine maybe it's hilarious that Yeah, I don't get it.
Christ maybe Stanford people were just like I think it's hilarious,
just like the word hot dog. They're like, oh, poor
people food. Like I don't know.

Speaker 1 (44:48):
Now, everything you find about these people is like, wow,
it 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, 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,

(45:09):
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 case books on tax
shelters and tax evasion, becoming one of the country's leading
experts on the subject. One of Bankman's law students in
those early years was Peter Teal, who later told Bankman

(45:31):
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 on
a podcast, this modest feed of financial engineering would save
Teel more than a billion dollars. So ethics, Jamie. Avoiding
a billion dollars in taxes so that Peter Teal can
spend it given Joe swastik Oat money to write New

(45:54):
York Times columns on racism. Hooray, I love ethics.

Speaker 2 (46:00):
Shit yeah, and I 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.

Speaker 1 (46:09):
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, I am
an expert on being a piece of shit though, So yeah, but.

Speaker 2 (46:21):
You're a far different piece of shit.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
Thank you, Jamie.

Speaker 2 (46:24):
Thank Can I celebrate that about you? I like that is,
but I mean I'm not. I guess shocked that that
is exceedingly ethical to the Stanford crowd. But wow, damning.

Speaker 1 (46:38):
So anyway, Barbara Freed, being a good Liberal, was horrified
by the Trump election and shows to fight back by
founding a political fundright raising group, Mind the Gap, which
was extremely successful during the Trump years and is rumored
to have acted is 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

(46:59):
a quote from Puck. Official property records show that Joe
Bankman and Barbara Freed were the named owners of a
sixteen point four million dollar 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 a company
sometime over the last year. Sam said, though he denied

(47:19):
knowing any details about the three hundred million dollars worth
of real estate that FTX and his parents bought in
the Bahamas.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Oh, okay, so they know about absolutely everything in the.

Speaker 1 (47:29):
Yeah, it sounds like it sounds like now. Joe and
Barbara have said that they've been working to return the
property to the company for some time, working too. 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
Alimeter Research back in twenty seventeen, and effectively served as
ftx's first attorney. He handled the inbound that came and

(47:51):
made the resulting introduction that helped FTX raise one hundred
and thirty 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 eleven. So they seem very involved in shady themselves.

(48:11):
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 have no respect for them. I
hope they lose their fancy Stanford house. They heard a
lot of it.

Speaker 2 (48:29):
It's like, yeah, particularly because I mean it sounds like
this was their mo o 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.

Speaker 1 (48:47):
Yeah, you think it's not illegal for Peter Teal to
get this billion dollars that he doesn't paid taxes on
because you know, fuckery anyway, mister Bankman and missus Freed
have joined now the expanding cast of disgrace Stanford affiliates.
This includes recently university president Mark Tessier Levine, currently accused
of manipulating images on research papers in a way that

(49:08):
is equivalent to falsifying lab data for Alzheimer's research. Obviously,
there's also Bastard's Pod alumni, the Thernose Lady, another famous
Stanford disgrace. And then there's the fact that they're alumni.

Speaker 2 (49:19):
King my favorite Stanford disgrace.

Speaker 1 (49:21):
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 in German Studies and the author

(49:42):
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 ten years ago.
He notes, when the Silicon Valley hepe machine operated at
more of a fever bitch than it does today. Other
than his physical location, it's actually not that connected to
us for once, Dob said, And that way, it's a
sign of progress and also a little bit melancholy. Stanford

(50:05):
was 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. That's so funny.

Speaker 2 (50:18):
I'm hug up on other than its physical location.

Speaker 1 (50:22):
Yeah, other than the fact that he's here. He's not
very involved.

Speaker 2 (50:25):
That's a big one, babe, that's a big one.

Speaker 1 (50:27):
But it does seem significant to me.

Speaker 2 (50:30):
No, if they're happy, I'm happy. That's great.

Speaker 1 (50:33):
It's funny.

Speaker 2 (50:34):
We have to return to to Elizabeth Holmes at some
point because I'm very uniquely interested in her rebranding as Liz.

Speaker 1 (50:43):
Yeah, genius, because now I've forgotten her horrible crimes.

Speaker 2 (50:48):
Yeah, I forgot about all of her crimes once she
had a cool and relatable name and had school relatable babies.

Speaker 1 (50:54):
Well, escape hay kiss started going by Alan.

Speaker 2 (50:58):
That's true. We can't take away that she's scammed Henry Kissinger. Yeah,
scam people out of their lives. But you know, yeah,
but the Henry Kissinger thing we cannot forget.

Speaker 1 (51:09):
I say, we give her six months off as a
result of the Kissinger stick to me. 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,

(51:31):
the Southern District of New York, accused him of inappropriately
contacting former and 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.

Speaker 2 (51:48):
Yeah, did he hit the notes up? What happened?

Speaker 1 (51:51):
Oh, he's like calling them. Actually, I'm going to read
a quote from Puck in order to describe how he's
illegally contacting people. On a simber twelfth, the same day
he was rested in the Bahamas, Bankman Freed emailed FDx
bankruptcy CEO John Jay Ray the Third, offering potentially pertinent
information concerning future opportunities and financing for FDx and its creditors,
and asked to work constructively with Ray in the chapter

(52:13):
eleven teen to do what's best for customers. No response Then,
after his extradition, the crypto mogul sent another email to
Ray on December thirtieth, 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 second.
Mister Ray, I know things haven't gotten off on the
right foot, but I really do want to be helpful.

(52:33):
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, to not take
him up on this offer, And.

Speaker 2 (52:41):
He has no shit.

Speaker 1 (52:42):
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 like, you're not supposed to be talking to
people when you're in Sam situation who were involved in
the company like this, because they're probably going to testify
against you.

Speaker 2 (53:03):
I don't feel convinced that he understands that. I don't know,
he's talking like a fucking spam email.

Speaker 1 (53:09):
Yeah, he really is. And in general, Sam has opted
to take all of the actions under house arrests that
are likeliest 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 fd and
it's like, there's that famous line from the wire, are
you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy? But in this

(53:31):
point the case, it's like, are you publishing blog posts
about your criminal conspiracy after being indicted?

Speaker 2 (53:39):
It's out growing an audience, Robert h Loah, It's all
a part of the play.

Speaker 1 (53:44):
Yeah, it's like if al Capone had started in New
York Times call um on having people machined gun and
alleys after he'd gone away to fucking Alcatratz.

Speaker 2 (53:53):
Like, hear me out, you guys, It actually makes way
more sense when I explain it.

Speaker 1 (53:59):
Yeah, uh so neither. He only writes, like I think,
two posts before he gives up because they're they're bad.
He's bad and blogging. I tried to read them. He's
dog shiit writer.

Speaker 2 (54:08):
Well can I I mean not to be aggressive, but
that's most substacked people.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
It's by the way, find my substanct not you, Robert No,
I know.

Speaker 2 (54:19):
You have more than two, but I'm just saying the
average friend of mine that harangues me into you know
these damn emails, it's too and and then they're done anyways,
but not I'm probably going to start one that I'm
just being insecure.

Speaker 1 (54:37):
What I wanted to do in a I think you'll
beat Sam Bankman Freed, No, no question.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
Your substock is great.

Speaker 1 (54:45):
Thank you, sir.

Speaker 2 (54:46):
Your substack is great.

Speaker 1 (54:47):
Thank you, Jamie. This has been wonderful for my ego.

Speaker 2 (54:52):
Those are two that I actually read.

Speaker 1 (54:54):
So Sam's is bad though, and it's bad like in
part of 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 in arcane spreadsheets to try and like argue that

(55:18):
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 doing. It's the same thing
as like the EA shit we open 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, is he's throwing out
chaff in the way of a bunch of poorly formatted spreadsheets.

(55:41):
They don't convince anyone that he's innocent.

Speaker 2 (55:43):
I was to say, but it sounds like it. Also.
It did not work.

Speaker 1 (55:47):
It did not work at all. 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 app like Signal
because he was so frequently trying to talk to other
people who were part of this case with him in secret,
which is illegal. He also got in trouble because he

(56:10):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:20):
So I was like, did he just say he was
trying to want a Canadian Netflix. Yeah, that would be
fucking classical officer.

Speaker 1 (56:28):
I just had a lot of shit to torre at homie,
Like you get it, my men, 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

(56:48):
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.

Speaker 2 (56:58):
Which is take me through the Witch's wi.

Speaker 3 (57:03):
That wasn't what I thought you were going to say.

Speaker 1 (57:05):
I know, I know, nobody thought it was gonna head here.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
You know, I mean, it's although it seemed like we
were due for another spiteful action against a woman for
seemingly no reason.

Speaker 1 (57:16):
Oh, absolutely absolutely. Now I will say I don't like
this woman either. Caroline Ellison is I think a pretty
shitty person.

Speaker 2 (57:26):
She was the we spoke about her last time, right, Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 (57:29):
She 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 Freed. 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

(57:50):
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.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
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?

Speaker 1 (58:11):
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 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

(58:33):
campuses in order to get by. You know. That's that's
that's the Cool Zone guarantee or adderall.

Speaker 2 (58:38):
You know, 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 truck. No.

Speaker 1 (58:48):
In fact, we will not hire you if you were
good at selling trump campus. Why did you even apply
to this media mediocre part time campus drug dealers. That's
our that's our higher ring pool. Yeah, that's our, Like,
I don't know whatever, I don't know the names of
enough fancy news.

Speaker 3 (59:05):
Really not that big of a stretch, Let's be honest.

Speaker 2 (59:09):
I'm fucking proud of that.

Speaker 1 (59:11):
So Carolyn Ellison, former CEO of Alameda and also Sam's
on again off again bo she immediately turns.

Speaker 2 (59:25):
Like you using the term bo but continue?

Speaker 1 (59:27):
Why not?

Speaker 2 (59:27):
That's what I should I use boo. I kind of
like boo.

Speaker 3 (59:33):
I was like, I was like, that doesn't really make sense.

Speaker 1 (59:36):
But they were ko boos. So she immediately turned state's
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 diaries was part of
the terms of like the Yeah, so it gets introduced

(59:56):
into evidence, which obviously Sam I think will get access
to as a result to that, because that's the way
discovery works. I believe that's how he got her diary.

Speaker 2 (01:00:04):
Was she also a Stanford Head?

Speaker 1 (01:00:07):
I don't think she went to I think she her
parents were professors at M I T h Wow.

Speaker 2 (01:00:12):
Yeah, losers over it Yeah yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:00:15):
Yeah, just Hobo University right there.

Speaker 2 (01:00:19):
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 her creepy
little sexts with Sunny Belwani ooh.

Speaker 1 (01:00:32):
Some of the worst some of the very worst sex.

Speaker 2 (01:00:37):
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 text to this guy and
then he was sending me back. Okay, and it's like, you.

Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
Know what, brutal. No, No, she deserves 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 was bonded a live girl.

Speaker 3 (01:01:03):
That's right, that's right. I think we we as we
we we we we as a collective blocks that out intentionally.

Speaker 1 (01:01:15):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
But unfortunately, yeah, chat GPT could have outdone that in
terms of sounding like a person.

Speaker 1 (01:01:38):
Absolutely. Yeah. 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 bay will be revoked because

(01:01:59):
of what he did. 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 just wanted to update you that, since we
recorded this episode a couple of days before you're hearing it,
Sam Bankman freed was remanded to custody. He is incarcerated
now and he will remain in jail after violating his

(01:02:21):
bail conditions, until his trial in October at least, and
possibly well beyond that, depending on how the charges and
sentencing and all that stuff go. I should note that
kind of the most recent story after that is that
his lawyers requested that he'd be allowed to have his
ADHD medication and depression medication, which he ran out of

(01:02:44):
soon after being taken into custody. The judge has ordered
that he'd be given that medication. Obviously, I'm always in
favor of people who are incarcerated having access to medication
if anyone's interested. I don't actually think putting Sam in
jail's 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 wee work guy

(01:03:08):
who got off Scott free from his giant financial crimes
and is now starting another giant grift company. And we'll
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

(01:03:29):
of them up. So, you know, fuck the guy. Sam's
lauriers have argued he was not attempting to discredit a
week a witness, but just to respond 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

(01:03:49):
to the New York Times is a bad way to
seem like, not the villain. That's kind of villain behavior, homie.
That hate to tell you.

Speaker 2 (01:03:57):
I again, but it's like again you can imagined his
like doofy loser fucking logic of like no officer, I
was just being a petty bitch. Is that the law?
And you're like, yeah, this is, yes.

Speaker 1 (01:04:11):
Yes it is, actually, sir bruh. So humorously enough, that
is the legal argument his lawyers are making. And 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

(01:04:33):
bad guy in that article that he made happen. So
that's funny he comes up, this.

Speaker 2 (01:04:37):
Is the bad guy in most things.

Speaker 1 (01:04:41):
Yeah, I'm gonna quote from some of that New York
Times coverage here. Mister Bankman Freed and Miss Ellison have
started an unsteady also started an unsteady romantic relationship, with
multiple breakups and reconciliations. At times. Miss Ellison worried that
mister Bankman Freed thought she wasn't good enough when he
was around. She wrote in February twenty twenty two in
a Google document, she had an instinct to shrink and

(01:05:03):
become smaller and quieter and defer to others. After one split,
miss Ellison cut off communication with mister bankmin Freed. I
felt pretty hurt rejected, she wrote in the April twenty
twenty two Google document. Not giving you the contact you
wanted felt like the only way I could regain a
sense of power. Miss Ellison was compensated far less generously
than other top executives at FTX and Alomedia, though it's

(01:05:23):
unclear whether she was aware of it. According to court filings,
the Exchangees, founders and other key employees received three point
two billion dollars in payouts and loans. Of that total,
six million went to Miss Ellison, compared with five hundred
and eighty seven million for mister Singh ftx's head of engineering,
and two hundred and forty six million for mister Wang,
one of the founders. Mister Bankman Freed received two point

(01:05:43):
two billion. So's 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 CRISP

(01:06:04):
crypto empire using customer funds. And this basically the six
million he gave her, which is a tiny fraction of
like the three billion they funnel to executives. That's like
him paying her to be a smoke screen. 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

(01:06:24):
in 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 path for him.

Speaker 4 (01:06:33):
Stop stop what I'm not doing this. I'm just talking
about what he did. I just really just it's well,
it's bad. He's a bastard. That's why we're talking about him.

Speaker 2 (01:06:43):
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 Pankman.

Speaker 1 (01:06:50):
That's this is very bad, gross behavior.

Speaker 2 (01:06:56):
It's gross and it's bad for the world.

Speaker 1 (01:06:59):
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 in private security, so it's like
he's got an entourage again. He gets to travel. This

(01:07:21):
is like the closest he gets to feeling like when
he used to be a billionaire. So that's kind of fun.
The downside is from the perspective of an FBF 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,

(01:07:45):
when we put together the agreements that they'd extra died 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 at FTX probably will not be charged for
very likely committing crimes. And I say they likely committed

(01:08:06):
crimes because FTX executive Nashad Singh already pled guilty this
spring to participating in a straw donor scheme. 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.

Speaker 2 (01:08:26):
Wow, that's I mean. Look, sometimes you do the ethical
altruistic thing and it comes back to bite you in
the ass.

Speaker 1 (01:08:33):
What do you do? Yeah, what are you going to 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

(01:08:55):
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, yeah, how you doing.

Speaker 2 (01:09:13):
I really well, I have a question for you.

Speaker 1 (01:09:16):
I have an answer for you.

Speaker 2 (01:09:18):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:09:29):
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

(01:09:53):
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 did have some dirt
on some people. He was that kind of cunning, right,
I wouldn't be shocked if John McAfee had put together
some dirt on some people, right. I don't think Sam

(01:10:13):
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.

Speaker 2 (01:10:29):
Okay, 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 these types
you get some sort of press narrative that it's like
they're playing four D chess, and like, even if that's
not entirely true, there's like a median narrative that sticks
to them. That makes them seem more plausible. But I

(01:10:50):
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 every way.

Speaker 1 (01:11:05):
Yeah, yeah, I would say that, Well, good.

Speaker 2 (01:11:11):
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.

Speaker 1 (01:11:18):
I hope he's fucked. I hate him. I think he's
a gross person. I hope Will mccaskell goes away or
gets like eaten by eaten by a large fish would
be my pick, if I got it. If like God
is like, what do you want me to do to
Will mccaskal, I'm like, you, you remember that thing he
did with a whale back in the day. What if
he didn't get out? What if a whale just eats him?

Speaker 4 (01:11:38):
You know?

Speaker 2 (01:11:39):
And then God'd be like, oh, amazing. I love playing
the hits.

Speaker 1 (01:11:42):
I love great pitch. You know what, Robert, I'm gonna
give you that HBO series you've been asking for.

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):
Robert, you were an amazing collaborator.

Speaker 1 (01:11:52):
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 path Jamie, I mean premises.

Speaker 2 (01:12:07):
No, go ahead, tell me the promise of super Soaker
full of piss, Robert. I'm ready.

Speaker 1 (01:12:12):
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 score them with a super soaker full
of piss, and then we film it and then I
leave very quickly.

Speaker 2 (01:12:27):
Okay, I mean I'm on top with that.

Speaker 1 (01:12:29):
Yeah, I think it's a great I think it's good.
You know, I will get you know, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:12:35):
I would be kind of pro like if you could
get I think the soundtrack is going to be really
key there, Like I think if you could give me
some like Jock jam situation, like.

Speaker 1 (01:12:45):
This is exciting. All live all live editions of Blink
one eighty two songs doues, you know, because they they
are one of the worst live bands that ever played.
So it's really just upsetting to the to the viewer.
That's the goal here, and you know.

Speaker 2 (01:13:02):
Given who blink one eighty two like rolls with these days,
you may in fact run into Travis on Rodeo Drive.
Oh yeah, utial full.

Speaker 1 (01:13:10):
Poet right in the face, just just a full load
of it, you know, just to say.

Speaker 3 (01:13:16):
I hate this idea because it means that some fucking
celebrity will murder you and then we'll be gone, and
then I'll be sad.

Speaker 1 (01:13:24):
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, I
know we can sell. No, we just roll down the
streets and stick Jonas Roberts spray, pray, spray, get the
fuck out of here.

Speaker 2 (01:13:43):
Wow, No Jonas, Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:13:46):
That's right, that's right, that's right. I'm going to rely
on Jamie to recognize him though.

Speaker 3 (01:13:52):
Oh my god, I did see that, Jamie.

Speaker 2 (01:13:54):
Yeah, all right, Well the Jonas brothers have their own
vanity popcorn brand, now, isn't that something? These are the
amazing things I can teach you, Robert.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
I've already taught me so much about hot dog through
your best selling book Raw Dog.

Speaker 2 (01:14:11):
Wow. Perfect trans pivot.

Speaker 1 (01:14:13):
You're welcome.

Speaker 2 (01:14:14):
Let us spicy plug though gorgeous, gorgeous plug. Hey, it's
never too late to start reading about hot dogs. It's
never too late, never learning.

Speaker 1 (01:14:24):
Reading about hot dogs and also America fascinating story. Raw
Dog find it wherever books are found.

Speaker 2 (01:14:33):
Yeah, well, thank you so much. I truly I was.
I mean, as you know, I did a Bastard's episode
about hot dogs as I was writing that book so
that I would remain focused.

Speaker 1 (01:14:46):
And it's the best way.

Speaker 2 (01:14:48):
And I have heard that the subject of that episode, George,
say that the hot dog eating community is actively protecting
him from its existence. He does not know it exists.
He does not the book. Everyone in his life is
really actively try Like every hot dog eater or many
gaters I talked to, We're like, yeah, no, we know

(01:15:11):
about the Bastard's episode and we know about the book,
but we really don't want George to know about it.
I was like, okay, fair.

Speaker 1 (01:15:17):
Enough, beautiful jam. 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

(01:15:37):
into a bookstore and demand it from the manager at
sword point. Anyway, Goodbye, Goodbye Bye.

Speaker 3 (01:15:48):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia
dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or where you get your podcasts.