The following is a conversation with Coffee Zilla,

an investigator and journalist exposing frauds,

scams, and fake gurus.

He’s one of the most important journalistic voices

we have working today,

both in terms of his integrity and fearlessness

in the pursuit of truth.

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Same with there’s garbage out in the ocean.

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Oh man.

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And now, dear friends, here’s Coffee Zilla.

♪♪♪

How do you like your coffee?

Dark and soul-crushing?

That was the number one question on the internet.

Do you like your coffee to reverberate deeply

through the worst of human nature?

Is that how you drink your coffee?

I’ve gone through a lot of phases on coffee.

I used to, in college, I would go super deep

into grinding fresh beans, all of that kind of stuff,

water temperature exactly right.

And then I hit a phase where I was just,

it was the maintenance dose.

Then I went to espresso because I could get a lot more in.

And now I go through phases of,

sometimes I like it with a little oat milk,

sometimes a little half and half in sugar

if I’m feeling it.

Oh, you’ve gotten soft in your old age.

I’ve gone a little, I have.

But hey, if I’m doing a SBF interview,

it’s black that day, nothing less.

Yeah.

It’s black, no sugar.

The lights go down.

What do you actually do in those situations,

like leading up to a show?

Do you get hyped up?

How do you put yourself in the right mind space

to explore some of these really difficult topics?

I think a lot of it’s preparation.

And then once it happens, it’s mostly fueled

by sort of adrenaline, I would say.

I really deeply care about getting to the root cause

of some of these issues because I think so often

people in positions of power are let off the hook.

So I really care about holding their feet to the fire

and it translates into a lot of energy the day of.

So I never find myself, funny enough,

I usually drink a lot of caffeine

leading up to the interview.

And then I try to drink minimum the day of

because I have so much adrenaline,

I don’t wanna be hyper-stimulated.

I have to say, of all the recent guests I’ve had,

the energy you had when you walked into the door

was pretty intense.

I’m excited!

Are people not excited to be here?

I don’t know.

I think they’re scared.

I think you’re a big deal, Lex.

I think they’re scared.

I don’t know if you know.

I felt like you were gonna knock down the door or something.

You were very excited.

Like that just energy.

It was terrifying because I’m terrified

of social interaction.

Anyway, speaking of terrifying.

You chose a good living of interviewing people.

Face your fears, my friend.

So let’s talk about SBF and FTX.

Who is Sam Bankman-Freed?

Can you tell the story from the beginning

as you understand it?

Yeah, so Sam Bankman-Freed is a kid who grew up

sort of from a position of huge privilege.

Both his parents are lawyers.

I believe both of them were from Harvard.

He went to MIT, went to like,

or sorry, backing up a bit more,

he went to like this top prep high school.

Then to MIT.

Then he went to Jane Street.

And after that, he started a trading firm

in I think 2017 called Alameda Research

with a few friends.

Some of them were from Jane Street.

Some of them worked at Google.

And they were sort of the smartest kids on the block

or that’s what everyone thought.

They made a lot of their money

on something called the Kimchi Premium,

or at least the story goes, which just to explain that,

the price of Bitcoin in Korea was substantially higher

than in the rest of the world.

And so you could arbitrage that

by buying Bitcoin elsewhere

and selling it on a Korean exchange.

So they made their money early

doing kind of smart trades like that.

They flipped that into market making,

which they were pretty early on that,

just providing liquidity to an exchange.

And it’s a strategy that is considered delta neutral,

which means basically,

if you take kind of both sides of the trade

and you’re making a spread, like a fee on that,

you make money, whether it goes up or down.

So in theory,

there shouldn’t be that much risk associated with it.

So Alameda kind of blew up

because they would offer these people,

people who are giving out loans,

they’d say, hey,

we’ll give you this really attractive rate of return.

And we’re doing strategies that seemingly are low risk.

So we’re a low risk bet.

We’re the smart kids from Jane Street,

and you can kind of trust us to be this

smarter than everyone else kind of thing.

Around 2019, Sam started FTX,

which is an exchange.

Specifically, it specialized in derivatives.

So like margins,

kind of more sophisticated crypto products.

And it got in with Binance early on.

So Binance actually has a prior relationship to FTX,

which we’ll explore in a second,

because they’re going to play a role

in FTX’s collapse actually.

Binance is the number one crypto exchange,

and they’re led by,

he’s called CZ on Twitter.

I don’t want to butcher his full name,

but really smart guy has played his hand really well

and built up a quite large exchange.

And Binance was funding a bunch of different like startups.

So they funded,

they helped invest into FTX.

Early on, they invested a hundred million.

So these guys were kind of like teammates early on,

SBF and CZ.

And FTX quickly grew.

They got like, especially in 2020, 2021,

they got a lot of endorsements.

They got a lot of credibility in the space.

And eventually FTX actually bought out Binance.

They gave them $2 billion.

So pretty good investment for CZ in a couple of years.

And now lead that up to 2022, what happens?

Luna collapse, Three Arrows Capital collapse,

which if you don’t know,

there’s just these kinds of cataclysmic events in crypto

led by some pretty risky behavior,

whether Luna was a token

that promised really attractive returns

that were unsustainable ultimately,

and it just kind of spiraled.

It did what’s called a stable coin death spiral,

which we can talk about if we need to.

The stable coin death spiral.

I can’t wait till that like actually enters the lexicon,

like a Wikipedia page on it,

like economic students are learning in school.

That’s like a chapter in a book.

Anyway, I mean, this is the reality of our world.

This is a really big part of the economic system

is cryptocurrency and stable coin is part of that.

Yeah, it’s weird because on the one hand,

cryptocurrency is supposed to somewhat simplify

or add transparency to the financial markets.

The idea is for the first time,

you don’t have to wait for an SEC filing

from some corporate business.

You can look at what they’re doing on chain, right?

So that’s good because a lot of big financial problems

are caused by lack of transparency

and lack of understanding risk.

But ironically, you get some people

creating these arbitrarily complicated financial products

like algorithmic stable coins,

which then introduce more risk and blow everything up.

So anyways, Three Arrows Capital blew up

and all of a sudden this crypto industry,

which everyone thought was going to the moon,

Bitcoin to 100,000 is in some trouble.

And FTX seems like the only people who,

besides like Binance,

who’s also really big and stable and Coinbase,

they seemed like they were doing fine.

In fact, they were bailing out companies in the summer.

I don’t know if you remember that SBF

was likened to like Jamie Diamond,

who’s the CEO of Chase,

who like kind of was like the buck stops here.

You know, I’m like the backstop, right?

So SBF was supporting the industry.

He was like the stable guy.

So come to like around October and November,

there’s all this talk about regulation.

Everything’s been blowing up.

SBF’s leading the charge on regulation.

And CZ, the CEO of Binance gets word

that maybe SBF is kind of like cutting them out

or making regulation that would maybe impact his business.

And he doesn’t like that too much.

They start kind of feuding a little bit on Twitter.

So when it comes out, a CoinDesk report came out

that FTX’s balance sheet wasn’t looking that good.

Like it looked pretty weak.

They had a lot of coins that in theory had value

if you looked at their market price,

but for a variety of reasons,

if you tried to sell them, they’d collapse in value.

So it was sort of like this thing, a house built on sand.

And a friend of mine on Twitter,

he goes by Dirty Bubble Media.

He released a report and he basically said,

I think these guys are insolvent.

Well, CZ saw that and he retweeted it

and started adding fuel to the fire of like the speculation.

Because up till this point,

everyone thought FTX is super safe, super secure.

There’s no reason to not keep your money there.

Tom Brady keeps his money there, whatever.

And CZ kind of adds fuel to the fire by saying,

not only am I retweeting this,

adding kind of like validity to this speculation,

but also I’m going to take the FTT that I got,

which part of their balance sheet was this FTT token,

which is FTX’s like proprietary token.

And Alameda and FTX control a lot of it.

They were using this token to basically be

a large amount of collateral for their whole balance sheet.

So it accounted for this huge amount of their value.

And the CEO of Binance had a huge chunk of it as well.

And he said, I’m going to sell all of it.

And the fuel that that introduced to the market is,

if he sells all this FTT,

and this FTT is underwriting a lot of the value of FTX.

Does FTT almost approximate like similar things

if you were to buy a stock in a public company?

Is that kind of like a stock in FTX?

It sort of was this proxy because what FTX

was committed to doing was sort of like

buying back FTT tokens.

They would do this thing called the buy and burn.

I think there was some amount of sharing

in the revenue fees of FTX.

It was kind of this convoluted thing.

In my opinion, the exact value of FTT

was speculated from the beginning.

And it was clear that it was very tied

to the performance of FTX,

which is important because we’ll get to later,

FTX sort of built their whole scaffold on FTT,

which meant that this scaffold was very wobbly.

Because if FTX loses a little bit of confidence,

then your value goes down.

When your value goes down,

you lose more confidence and this goes down.

So it was kind of like this thing that this flywheel

that when it was going well,

you got huge amounts of growth.

When it’s going bad,

you get a exchange death spiral, so to speak.

Actually this structure,

it’s a pretty non-standard structure.

Did the architects of its initial design

anticipate the wobbliness of the whole system?

So putting fraud and all those things

that happened later aside,

do you think it was difficult to anticipate

this kind of FTT, FTX element of research weird dynamic?

No, because I think sophisticated traders

always think in terms of diversification and correlation.

So if you’re trying to,

the way to think about risk in investing is like,

if I invest in you, Lex Friedman,

and then I also invest in some product you produce,

the performance of those two things

will be pretty correlated.

So whether I invest in you or I invest in this product

that you are completely behind, I’m not de-risking.

I’m basically counting all on you doing well, right?

And if you do bad, my investments do very bad.

So if I’m trying to build a stable thing,

I shouldn’t put all my eggs in the Lex Friedman basket

unless I’m positive that you’re gonna do well, right?

And these people-

As your financial advisor,

I would definitely recommend

you do not put all your eggs in this basket.

Right, and so you can think about it like,

if I know that these people were trained to think like this.

And so the idea that you could start this exchange,

you’re worth billions of dollars,

and you underwrite your whole system by betting,

putting most of it on your own token is insane.

And what’s crazy is we’ll later find out

that they were basically taking customer assets,

which were real things like Bitcoin and Ethereum

with risks that were not so correlated to FDX,

and they were swapping them out.

They were using to go basically gamble those

and putting FTT in its place as quote value.

So they were increasing the risk of the system

in order to bet big with the idea

that if they bet big and won,

we’d all be singing their praises.

If they bet big and lost,

I don’t know if they had a plan,

but I think they were being extremely risky

and there’s no way to avoid their knowledge of that.

So when you say customer assets is,

I come to this crypto exchange,

I have Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency,

and this is a thing that has pretty stable value over time.

I mean, as crypto, relatively so,

and I’m going to store it on this crypto exchange.

And that’s the whole point.

This is, so this thing to the degree

that crypto holds value,

it’s supposed to continue holding value.

There’s not supposed to be an extra risk

inserted into the thing.

Right, and FTX was pretty clear from the beginning

that they wouldn’t invest your assets in anything else.

They wouldn’t do anything else with it.

They wouldn’t trade it.

That’s what made FTX so,

such like a horror story for investor confidence

is basically they made every signal

that they would not do anything nefarious with your tokens.

They would just put them to the side,

put them in a separate account

that they don’t have access to.

And they just kind of wait there

until the day that you’re ready to withdraw them.

That’s explicitly what they told their customers.

So going back to the story a little bit,

CZ then says, hey, I’m selling this token

that underwrites the value of FTX.

There’s a total panic.

SBF during this time says several lies

such as FTX assets are fine.

We have enough money to cover all withdrawals.

And a day later, he basically admits

that that wasn’t the case.

They don’t have the money, they’re shutting down.

And then a few days later after that,

they declared bankruptcy.

There’s, I should be clear,

there’s Alameda Research, FTX International,

and FTX US, which is the US side of things.

These are three different entities.

All of them are in bankruptcy.

And it’s not clear to the extent

that they were commingling funds,

but it’s clear that they were commingling funds

to some extent.

So they kind of were taking from each other.

And that is where the fraud happens, right?

Because if going back to our earlier analogy,

if you’re supposed to set funds aside,

and I find out you were using it

to go make all these arbitrage trades

or do market making or all these activities

you were known for,

for your like hedge fund trading firm thing,

that’s a huge problem

because he basically lied about this.

And especially when he’s saying explicitly

that we have these things,

we have these funds,

and these things turn out to be lies.

Well, again, the question of fraud comes in

and it’s just like, there’s no way he didn’t know.

So the obvious question might be,

well, why isn’t he locked up?

Why is he running around?

And it’s because really his story

is that he didn’t know any of it.

He found out that they had,

to steel man his position,

he would say he was totally disconnected

from what Alameda was doing.

He had no idea that they had such a large margin position

that they’d had an accounting quirk

and that accounting quirk hit $8 billion from his view.

And so when he was saying that they had money to cover it,

he was saying that truthfully to the best of his ability.

And he just was so distracted at the time

that he made a series of increasingly embarrassing mistakes

and now he owes it to the people to right those wrongs

by publicly making this huge apology tour.

So you might’ve seen him on,

I mean, he’s been talking to nearly everyone

about basically how he’s just didn’t know what he’s doing.

He’s the stupidest man alive.

It’s basically it.

What are some interesting things

you’ve learned from those interviews?

I think I’ve appreciated why you don’t talk in that position.

Most people wouldn’t talk.

Most people would listen to their legal counsel

and not talk.

I do not think any lawyer worth their salt

would tell him to talk

because right now I think the danger of what he’s doing

is he’s locking himself into a story of how things happened.

And I don’t think that story is gonna hold up

in the coming months

because I think it’s impossible

from the insider conversations I’ve had

with Alameda Research employees, with FTX employees,

it’s impossible to square what they are telling me

with no incentive to lie

with what SBF is telling me with every incentive to lie,

which is fundamentally that he didn’t know

they were commingling funds.

He didn’t know they were gambling with customer money

and it was basically this huge mistake

and it’s Alameda’s fault,

but he wasn’t involved in Alameda, a company he owned.

So like a compassionate but hard-hitting gangster

that you are, very recently you interacted with SBF on,

I like how you adjust the suspenders as you’re saying this.

You interact on Twitter Spaces with SBF

and really put his feet to the fire

with some hard-hitting questions.

What did you ask

and what did you learn from that interaction?

Sure, I should say first,

this was not a willing interaction.

I mean, I thought that was kind of the funny part of it

because I’ve been asking him for an interview for a while.

He’s been giving interviews to nearly everyone who wants one,

big channels, small channels.

He didn’t give me one,

but I managed to get some by sneaking up

on some Twitter Spaces and DMing the people

and like being like, hey, can I come up?

So I didn’t get him to ask everything that I wanted

because he like would leave sometimes,

after I asked some of the questions,

but really what I asked was about this 8 billion

and zooming in on the improbability of his lack of knowledge.

It’s sort of like if you run a company

and you know the insides and outs

and you’re the top of your field, top in class,

and all of a sudden it all goes bust

and you say, I had no idea how any of this worked.

I didn’t know, it’s like the guy who runs Whataburger

saying, I didn’t know where we sourced our beef.

I didn’t know where we, that’s a Texas example, actually.

Let’s take it like worldwide, Walmart.

Like I didn’t know we used Chinese manufacturers.

It’s like, that’s impossible.

To become Walmart, you have to know

how your supply chain works.

You have to know, even if you’re at a high level,

you know how this stuff works.

Can I do a hard turn on that and go as one must to Hitler?

Hitler’s writing is not on any of the documents

around, as far as I know, on the final solution.

So in some crazy world, he could theoretically say,

I knew, I didn’t know anything about the death camps.

So there’s this plausible deniability in theory.

So that’s, but that, most people would look at that

and say, eh, it’s very unlikely, you don’t know.

Especially if all the insiders are coming out

and saying, no, no, no, of course he knew.

He was directing us from the top.

I mean, what was clear, what’s interesting

about the structure, and like, I love the nitty-gritty.

Sorry, we’re back to SPF.

We went to Hitler, now we’re back to the SPF.

Sorry, I wanted to turn us as fast as possible

away from Hitler.

So the insiders in what, Alameda Research?

Alameda Research.

What was interesting is that there was this sort

of one-way window going on between Alameda and FTX,

where FTX employees didn’t know a lot of what was going on.

Alameda insiders, and I would say by design,

knew almost everything that was going on at FTX.

And so I think that was really interesting

from the perspective of a lot of the so-called,

like what you could, what he’s trying to ascribe to

as like failures or mistakes or ignorance and negligence,

when looked at closely, are much more designed

and they sort of don’t arise spontaneously.

So there’s this thing in banking and trading

where if I run a bank and you run a trading firm,

we need to have informational walls between us

because there’s huge conflicts of interest that can arise.

So the negligent argument might be that,

oh, we just didn’t know,

we’re sort of these dumb kids in the Bahamas,

so we shared information equally.

But when you see a one-way wall,

that starts to look a lot different.

If I have a backend source of looking at,

or sorry, you’re the trading firm,

so you have a backend way to look at all my accounts

and I have no idea that you’re doing that,

that all of a sudden looks like a much more designed thing.

When it would be plausible,

let’s say going to use another analogy too,

if you’re saying, look, I commingled funds

because I was so bad at corporate structures,

you would expect those companies

to have a very simple corporate structure

because you didn’t know what you’re doing, right?

But what we see with FTX and Alameda

is they had something like 50 companies and subsidiaries

and this impossibly complicated web of corporate activity.

You don’t get there by accident.

You don’t wake up and go,

oh, I designed like this watch

that ticked a very specific way,

but it was all accidental.

If you really didn’t know what you were doing,

you’d end up with a simple structure.

So even just like from a fundamental perspective,

what SPF was doing

and like the activities they were engaging in

were so complicated and purposely designed

to obfuscate what they were doing,

it’s impossible to subscribe to the negligence argument.

And I wanna quickly say too,

like I don’t think a lot of people have honed in on this.

There was insider trading going on

from Alameda’s perspective

where they would know what coins FTX

was going to list on their exchange.

There’s a famous effect where,

let’s say you’re this legitimate exchange,

you list a coin, the price spikes.

Insiders told me it was a regular practice

for Alameda insiders to know that FTX

was going to list a coin and as a company buy up that coin

so they could sell it after it listed.

And they made millions of dollars.

How do you do that accidentally?

Yeah, and that’s illegal.

Totally illegal.

So that’s illegal from like,

and if an individual does it, it’s illegal, it’s fraud.

What if a company is systematically doing it

and you can’t tell me that FTX

or someone at FTX wasn’t feeding that information

to Alameda or somehow giving them keys to know that.

And that would happen at the highest level.

It would happen at SPS level.

And this is why his arguments of,

I was dumb, I was naive, I was sort of ignorant

are so preposterous because he’s dumb and ignorant

the second it becomes criminal to be smart

and sophisticated, right?

But then also coming out and talking about it,

which is a-

It’s a bizarre move.

It’s a bizarre and almost a dark move.

Can you tell the story of the 8 billion?

You mentioned 8 billion.

What’s the 8 billion?

What’s the missing 8 billion?

Yeah, so it’s really interesting

because it’s sort of like wire fraud.

You sort of, he’s sort of copping to like smaller crimes

to avoid the big crime.

The big crime is you knew everything

and you were behind it, right?

The smaller crimes are like a little wire fraud here,

little wire fraud there.

So what the 8 billion is,

is that FTX didn’t always have banking.

It’s hard to get banking as a crypto exchange.

There’s all these questions of like,

where’s the money coming from?

Is it coming from money launderers?

So for a variety of reasons,

it’s always been hard for exchanges to get bank accounts.

So before when FTX was just getting started,

they didn’t have a bank account.

So how do you put money on FTX?

Well, they would have you wire your money

to their trading firm.

Their wiring instructions would go to their trading firm.

It’s easier to get banking as a trading firm.

So you’d put your money with the trading firm

and then they’d credit you the money on FTX.

Okay, first of all,

this is a whole circumvention

of all these banking guidelines and regulations.

That’s the first like thing that I think is legal.

But basically what SBF argued

is that there was an accounting glitch error problem

where when you’d send money to Alameda,

even though they’d credit you on FTX,

they wouldn’t safeguard your deposits.

Like your deposits would go

into what he called a stub account,

which is just like some account that’s not very well labeled

kind of like a placeholder account.

And he didn’t realize that those were Alameda’s funds

or they were playing with those funds

and that they basically should have

safeguarded that for customers.

That’s his explanation.

It’s preposterous because it’s $8 billion, but anyways.

Just poor labeling of accounts.

Of an $8 billion account.

I mean, it’s like-

What’s a billion between?

A billion.

I do this all the time in programming.

This is the craziest thing.

Like he was talking to me

and at one point in the conversation, he’s like,

“‘Cause he said I didn’t have knowledge

of Alameda’s accounts.”

And I said,

“‘Well, Forbes a month ago was getting

detailed accounting of Alameda.’”

And he goes,

“‘Oh, that wasn’t detailed accounting.

I just knew I was right within 10 billion or so.’”

What is that error margin?

$10 billion for a company that is arguably

never worth more than a hundred million.

Probably never even worth more than 50 billion.

Your error margin is $10 billion.

You have to be,

this is a guy who is sending around statements

that like there was no risk involved.

And you’re telling me he had a error margin

of $10 billion?

That is the difference between like a healthy company

and a company so deep underwater you’re going to jail.

So you have to believe that he is impossibly stupid

and square that with the sophistication

that he brought to the table.

I think it’s an impossible argument.

I don’t even think it’s-

Do you think he is incompetent, insane, or evil?

If you were to bet money on each of those.

Incompetent, insane, or evil.

Insane meaning he’s lying to everyone,

but also to himself,

which is a little bit different than incompetence.

He’s not incompetent.

So the, I think he’s some combination of insane and evil,

but it’s impossible to know

unless we know deep inside his heart

how self like diluted he is versus a calculated strategy.

And I think if you look at SBF,

he’s such a, I think he’s a fascinating individual.

Just, I mean, you know, he’s a horrible human being.

Let’s start there.

But he’s also somewhat interesting

from a psychology perspective,

because he’s very open about the fact

that he understands image

and he understands how to cultivate image,

the importance of image,

so well that I think a lot of people,

even though they’ve talked about it,

aren’t emphasizing that enough when interacting with him.

This is a man whose entire history

is about cultivating the right opinions

at the right time to achieve the right effect.

Why do you think he would suddenly change that approach

when he has all the more reason to cultivate an image?

So he is extremely good naturally or-

I don’t know if he’s good, but he’s like,

he’s a hyper aware.

So he’s deliberate in cultivating a public image

and controlling the public image.

You know about the like Democrat donations.

Like he knew to donate to the right people, $40 million.

He says on a call that we released with Tiffany Fong,

he says on a call that he donated

the same amount to Republicans.

There’s speculation on whether this is true

because he’s a liar or whatever.

So caveat there.

But he said he donated to Republicans the same amount,

but he donated dark

because he knew that most journalists are liberal

and they would kind of hold that against him.

So he wanted all the sides to be in his favor,

in his pocket,

while simultaneously understanding

the entire media landscape and playing them like a fiddle

by cultivating this image of I’m this progressive,

woke billionaire who wants to give it all away,

do everything for charity.

I drive a Corolla while living in a million dollar

penthouse, multimillion.

But that was sort of the angle.

He understood so well how to play the media.

And I think he underestimated when he did this,

how much people would put him under a deeper microscope.

And I don’t think he has achieved the same level of success

in cultivating this new image,

because I think people are so skeptical now,

no one’s buying it.

But I think he’s trying it.

He’s doing it to the best of his ability.

But it has worked leading up

to this particular wobbly situation.

So before that, wasn’t there a public perception

of him being a force for good, a financial force for good?

100%, yeah.

Somebody from Sequoia Capital wrote this glowing review

that he’s gonna be the world’s first trillionaire.

There’s so many pieces done on,

he’s the most generous billionaire in the world,

that he was sort of like the steel man of,

it’s possible to make tons of money.

This is like the effective altruism movement,

make as much money as you can, as fast as you can,

and then give it all away.

And he was sort of like the poster child for that.

And he did give some of it away and got a lot of press

for it.

And I think that was kind of by design.

I wanna address a real quick point.

A lot of people have said that Binance played a role.

And while they catalyzed this,

insolvency is a problem

that will eventually manifest either way.

So I don’t put any blame on CZ

for basically causing this meltdown.

The underlying foundation was unstable

and it was gonna fall apart at the next push.

He just happened to be the final,

kind of like, I don’t know,

the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Yeah, the catalyst that revealed the fraud.

Yeah, but I don’t think he’s culpable

for FTX’s malfeasance in how they handled accounts,

if that makes sense.

So what role did they play?

Could they have helped alleviate some of the pain

of investors, of people that held funds there?

Yeah, I mean, probably, I don’t know.

I would see some kind of weird obligation,

like with the 2 billion they made on FTX.

Remember, they got 2 billion, some of it in cash,

some of it in FTT tokens.

I don’t know how much actual cash they have from that deal,

but they have billions from the success

of what seems to be a fraud.

It seems to have been a fraud from early on.

They had the backdoor as early as 2020,

from what I can tell.

So the backdoor between FTX and Alameda Research.

Do you think CZ saw through who SPF is?

What he’s doing?

No, I think CZ is like, he’s a shark.

I think he’s good at building a big business.

Like a good shark or a bad shark?

I don’t know.

I don’t know, I think sharks just eat.

I mean, I don’t know.

I think-

My relationship with shark has, like finding Nemo,

there’s a shark in that.

Sure.

Jeff Bezos is a shark.

So whether people have loaded connotations

of like how they feel about Jeff Bezos.

I mean, I would say like,

I think CZ is a ruthless businessman.

I think he’s cold, he’s calculated, he’s very deliberate.

And I think what he should do in this position

is forfeit the funds that he profited from that investment,

because largely I think it was, it’s owed to the customers.

There’s so much hurting out there.

So I think they could do a lot of good around that.

I don’t know if they will,

because I don’t know if he sees it in his best interest.

I think that’s probably how he’s thinking.

But yeah, I think they could have helped

or they could still help there.

Who do you think suffered the most from this so far?

The little account holders.

This is always true.

So one of the big temptations with fraud,

I’ve covered a lot of scams, frauds,

is everyone looks at the big number.

Everyone, that’s the headline, billions of dollars,

the top 50 creditors, what everyone thinks at first.

But quickly, when you dig down,

you realize that most people who lost $10 million,

I mean, I’m sure that’s terrible for them.

I wish them to get their money back,

but it’s usually the people with like 50,000 or less

that are most impacted.

Usually they do not have the money to spare.

Usually they’re not diversified in a sophisticated way.

So I think it’s those people.

I think it’s the small account holders

that I feel the worst for.

And unfortunately,

they often get the least press time or air time.

That’s the really difficult truth of this

is that, especially in the culture of cryptocurrency,

there’s a lot of young people who are not diversified.

They’re basically all in on a particular crypto.

And it just breaks my heart to think

that there’s somebody with 50,000 or 30,000 or 20,000,

but the point is that money is everything they own.

Right.

And now-

Now what?

Life is basically destroyed.

Like, you know, imagine you’re 18, 19, 20, 21 years old.

You saved up, you’ve been working, you saved up,

and this is it.

This is basically destroying a life.

What’s so brutal about this is that

this all comes on the back.

The entire crypto market comes on the back of,

comes from the deep distrust of traditional finance.

Right?

Everybody lost trust in the banking systems.

And they lost trust that if those banking systems

acted in a corrupt way,

that they would receive the justice.

It turned out that the banks received favorable treatment,

people didn’t.

So people lost faith in the structure

of our financial system in a way that is,

we’re still feeling the reverberations of it.

And so when crypto came along,

it was like kind of this way to reinvent the wheel,

reinvent the world for the like sort of lowly

and the like less powerful

and kind of level the playing field.

So what’s so sad about events like this

is you see that fundamentally

a lot of the power structures are the same

where the people at the top

face little repercussions for what they do.

The people at the bottom are still getting screwed.

The people at the bottom are still getting lied to.

And law enforcement is way behind the ball.

Do you think this really damaged people trust

in cryptocurrency?

For sure, way bigger than Luna,

way bigger than Three Arrows Capital.

It’s because of who SBF was.

It’s not just the dollar figure behind it.

It’s because he wooed so many of our media elites

who should have been calling him out

or at least investigating him and not rubber stamping him.

It’s an indictment of our financial system,

even our most sophisticated people in BlackRock,

in Sequoia, who didn’t see this coming,

who also rubber stamped him.

And you just wonder like,

if you can’t trust the top people in crypto

who are supposedly the good guys,

the guys saving crypto,

just a month ago or two months ago,

he was the guy on Capitol Hill

that was talking to Gary Gensler,

to all the top people in Washington.

He was orchestrating the regulation of crypto.

If that guy is a complete fraudster, liar, psychopath,

and nobody knew it until it was too late,

what does that mean about the system itself

that we’re building?

So you are one of, if not the best,

like fraudster investigators in the world.

Did you sense, was this on your radar at all,

SBF, over the past couple of years?

Were any red flags going off for you?

Yes, so funny enough,

like one of my videos from six months ago or so blew up

because I gotta give a lot of credit to Matt Levine

of Bloomberg, great journalist, great finance journalist.

And I wanna say, when I like talk about media elite,

there are people doing great work

in these mainstream institutions.

It’s not a monolith, just like independent media

isn’t all doing great work

and all the corporate media is bad or whatever.

There’s like these overarching narratives

that I don’t subscribe to.

So Matt Levine’s a great journalist.

He did an interview with SBF where he got Sam

to basically describe a lot of what was going on in DeFi,

but it kind of a larger philosophy around crypto.

And he described a Ponzi scheme

where he just described this black box.

It does nothing, but if we ascribe it value,

then we can create more value and more value and more value.

And it kind of was this ridiculous description

of a Ponzi scheme, but there was no moral judgment on it.

It was like, oh yeah, this is great.

We can make a lot of money from this.

And Matt is like, well,

it sounds like you’re in the Ponzi business

and business is good.

I made a video about that.

I said, this is ridiculous.

This is absurd, whatever, it’s obscene.

But I didn’t explicitly call SBF a fraud there.

And I think if I’m being, I think I saw some of it,

but like many people, I think a lot of us were kind of like,

I think a lot of us missed how wrong everyone could be

at the same time.

I did notice leading up to the crash, what was happening.

And I called it out a day or a day and a half

before it happened.

Cause I saw my friend’s post, Dirty Bubble Media.

And this was the first real look

into the heart of their finances.

Cause they’re this black box.

You just kind of had to evaluate them without knowing much.

And once we got a peek under the hood

of what their finances were, I realized, oh my gosh,

these guys might be completely insolvent.

So I made a tweet about it.

I hope some people saw it and got their money out.

But pretty quickly after that,

I caught the narrative of what was really going on

at Alameda, that it was basically this Ponzi scheme

that they had built.

Do you ever sit like Batman in the dark

since he fight crime and wonder, like sad,

just staring into the darkness and thinking,

I should have caught this earlier?

Yeah, I think.

In your $10 billion, $10 million, $10 million.

We’re working our way there.

With a bunch of cocaine on the table.

It’s never enough.

It’s never enough.

Like you always could be catching stuff sooner.

You always could be doing more.

The fascinating thing you said is that

one of the lessons here is that a large number of people,

influential, smart people,

could all be wrong at the same time

in terms of their evaluation of SBF.

This is one thing that I don’t understand too,

is I think it’s one thing to not see something.

I think it’s another thing to rubber stamp

or explicitly endorse.

I feel like a lot of people didn’t look too close

because I think a lot of the warning signs were there.

But my feeling is if you’re a Sequoia,

if you’re a BlackRock,

wouldn’t you do that due diligence?

I mean, like before just endorsing something,

especially in the crypto space,

this is just why I don’t do any deals

in the crypto space ever.

Because it’s impossible to know

which ones are gonna be the big hits

or the big frauds or whatever.

But if you’re gonna make that bet,

if you’re gonna make that play,

you would think that you would do

all the research in the world

and you would get sophisticated looks at their liabilities,

at how they were structured, all that stuff.

And that is the most shocking part

is not that people missed it because you can miss fraud,

but that there were so many glowing endorsements

like this guy is not gonna be that thing.

We explicitly endorse him.

I saw a Fortune magazine.

He was called the next Warren Buffett.

It’s just crazy.

Do you think it’s possible

to have enough like Tom Brady endorsements

that you don’t really investigate?

So like, that there’s a kind of momentum,

like societal social momentum.

I think that’s the problem.

I actually think that’s hugely a blind spot of our society

is we have all these heuristics

that can be points of failure,

where like a rule of thumb is if you go to an Ivy League,

well, you must be smart, right?

A rule of thumb is if you’re both your parents

are Harvard lawyers, you must know the law.

You must like kind of be sophisticated.

The rule of thumb is

if you’re running a billion dollar exchange,

you must be somehow somewhat ethical, right?

And all of these heuristics can lead to giant blind spots

where you kind of just go, oh, we’ll check.

Like I don’t really,

it’s a lot of energy to look into people.

And if enough of those rules of thumb are met,

we just kind of check them off

and put them through the system.

So yeah, it’s been hugely exposing

for sort of like our blind spot.

And you don’t know maybe how to look in.

For example, there’s a few assumptions.

Now there’s a lot of people are very skeptical

of institutions of government and so on,

but perhaps too much so.

I agree.

But for some part of history,

there was too much faith in government.

Yeah.

And so right now I think there’s faith

in certain large companies.

There’s distrust in certain ones and trust in others.

Like people seem to distrust Facebook,

extremely skeptical of Facebook,

but they trust, I think, Google with their data.

I think they trust Apple with their data.

Sure.

Much more so.

Like search, people don’t seem to be Google search.

Like, I’m just gonna, I’m gonna-

Put it in there.

Have you ever looked at your Google search history?

Your Google search history has gotta be

some of the darkest things.

Oh, I don’t think I’ve ever looked

at my Google search history.

You should.

I’m pretty careful with like browser hygiene

and stuff like that because I think it’s-

Well, Google search history,

unless you explicitly delete, is there.

I recommend you look at it.

It’s fascinating.

Look, because it goes back to the first days

of you using Google search history.

Fun fact actually about that.

No, no, no.

I am aware of that.

I just mean for like certain sensitive topics

where like I’m investigating some fraud

and I go sign into their website, right?

Log in.

I won’t use like a traditional browser.

I’ll use a VPN and I’ll like put it on like Brave

or something like that.

You log in, you create an account as Lex Friedman.

Yeah, exactly.

You start.

Exactly, exactly.

You mentioned effective altruism.

Yes.

You know, SBF has been associated

with this effective altruism,

which made me look twice at EA and see like, wait.

What’s going on here?

Was this used by SBF to give himself a good public image

or is there something about effective altruism

that makes it easy to misuse by bad people?

What do you think?

Yeah, it’s interesting.

He could have endorsed a wide range of philosophies.

And I guess you just have to wonder are all those,

would those philosophies also be tainted

if he had gone bad?

I guess effective altruism is sort of unique

because he used it as part of his brand.

It wasn’t like he described himself as a consequentialist

and like that ended up mattering.

It was like he described himself as an effective altruist

and he used that part of the brand to lift himself up.

I guess that’s why it’s getting so much scrutiny.

I think the merits of it should speak for themselves.

I mean, I don’t personally,

I’m not personally an effective altruist.

I personally am motivated by giving in part emotionally.

And for some reason that I can’t exactly describe,

I think that’s somewhat important.

I don’t think you should detach giving

from some personal connection.

I find trouble with that.

And like I said, it’s for reasons I can’t describe

because effective altruism is sort of the most logical

ivory tower position you could possibly take.

It’s like strip all humanity away from giving,

let’s treat it like a business.

And how many people can we serve

through the McDonald’s line of charity

for like the dollar, right?

I just personally don’t resonate with that,

but I don’t think the entire movement

is like indicted because of it.

Typically, most people who care about giving and charity

on the whole are nice people and are,

so I can’t speak for the whole movement.

I certainly don’t think SBF indicts the whole movement,

even though I personally don’t subscribe to it.

Yeah, it made me pause, reflect and step back

like about the movement and about anything

that has a strong ideology.

So if there’s anything in your life

that has a strong set of ideas behind it, be careful.

Yeah, I mean, look, I kind of feel like what it teaches me

and what I kind of think about when I think about systems

is that no system saves you from the individual.

No system saves you from the individual,

their intentions, their lust for power or greed.

I mean, I think one of the great ideas

is the decentralization of power.

And like, this is why I think democracies are so great

is because they decentralize power

across a wide range of like interests and groups

and that being an effective way to kind of try as best

as you can to spread out the impact of one individual

because one bad individual can do a lot of harm.

I mean, clearly as seen here.

But no, I don’t think it has anything to do with ideology

because it’s not like being an effective altruist

made Sam Bankman free to fraud.

He was a fraud who happened to be an effective altruist.

That makes sense.

So there is something about, yes,

no system protects you from an individual,

but some system enable or serve as a better catalyst

than others for the worst aspects of human nature.

So for example, communist ideology,

I don’t know if it’s the ideology

or it’s implementation in the 20th century.

It seemed like such a sexy and powerful and viral ideology

that it somehow allows the evil bad people

to like sneak into the very top.

And so like, that’s what I mean about certain ideas

sound so nice that allow you like the lower classes,

the workers, the people that do all the work,

they should have power.

They have been screwed over for far too long.

They need to take power back.

That sounds like a really powerful idea.

And then it just seems like with those powerful ideas,

evil people sneak in to the top

and start to abuse that power.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I don’t have a lot of

probably big brain political takes,

but what I can say is that you can never get away

from both the system and the individual mattering.

For sure, some systems incentivize some behaviors

in certain ways, but some people will take that and go,

okay, all we need to do is design the perfect system.

And then these individuals will act completely rationally

or responsibly in accordance to what our incentives say.

That’s not true.

You could also say, all we have to do

is focus on the individual.

And all we have to do is just create a society

which raises very well-adjusted people.

And then we can throw them into any system

with any incentives and they will act like responsibly,

ethically, morally.

And I also don’t think that’s true.

So incentives are real,

but also the individual ultimately plays a large role too.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I come down sort of in the middle there.

And some of that is just accidents of history too,

which individuals finds which system, you know.

You become the face of that.

Yeah, with FTX versus Coinbase versus Binance,

which individual, which kinds of ideas

and life story come to power.

That matters.

It’s kind of fascinating that history turns

in these small little events done

by small little individuals that, you know,

Hitler’s a failed artist or you have FDR

or you have all these different characters

that do good or do evil onto the world.

And it’s like single individuals and they have a life story

and it could have turned out completely different.

It’s, I mean, it’s the flap of the butterfly wings.

So yeah, you’re right.

We should be skeptical as attributing too much

to the system or the individual.

It’s all like a beautiful mess.

The Lex Friedman podcast.

That’s like, that was like a Lex line.

I’ve heard quite a few episodes

and that’s like such a Lex line.

It’s a beautiful mess.

All right.

Beautifully said.

All right.

Sorry, I’m a fan of the show.

Okay, all right.

I love you too.

All right.

Can you think of possible trajectories

how this FTX, SBF saga ends?

And which one do you hope for?

Do you hope that SBF goes to jail?

That’s the individual.

And in terms of the investors and the customers,

what do you hope happens?

And what do you think are the possible things

that can happen?

So A, yeah, I definitely think SBF should go to jail

for nothing else for a semblance of justice,

the facsimile of justice to occur for all the investors.

I also think there are people probably several steps

down the chain that probably knew

at least Caroline Ellison.

You can have questions about sort of their,

Dan Friedberg, who I’d love to talk about as well.

There were a lot of people in that room who I think knew.

I think we do so much of like the one guy is all to blame.

Let’s throw everything at him

when clearly this was a company wide issue.

So everyone who knew, I think should face

the same punishment, which I think should be jail

for all of those people.

In part to send a signal to anybody

that tries this kind of stuff in the future.

Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, one of the big things that you saw,

like, okay, take a microcosm of all of this action

and just look at like the influencer space, right?

There’s a ton of deals that were done

that I’ve covered ad nauseum about influencer finds out

they can make a lot of money selling a crypto coin.

The first thing they wonder is, am I gonna get caught?

If I do this, is there a consequence?

And if the answer is no, then it’s a pretty easy decision

as long as you don’t like have any moral scruples about it

which apparently none of them did

or a lot of them didn’t, I should say.

So as soon as somebody steps in and regulates

that math changes and all of a sudden

there’s a self-interest reason to not go do the bad thing.

So for example, and I can give a concrete example of this.

There was a NFT, the first ever NFT

sort of like official indictment

or the DOJ released this press release

that they’re charging these guys who ran a NFT project

that they didn’t follow through on their promises.

They made all these promises, lied

and then ran away with the money.

First ever consequence for anyone in the NFT space.

That day that that press release came out,

I saw several NFT projects come back to life from the dead.

Why?

Because all those founders are freaking out

and they realized we scammed people.

We have to go at least make it look like

we’re doing the right thing, right?

Even just, so that’s on the optic side

but there’s also tons of people who now go,

oh, basically law enforcement is on the scene.

We can’t do the same thing.

So there is a very pragmatic reason for this punishment.

It’s very much just because people work it into their math

of should I commit fraud?

And the last several years have been very,

sort of been like a little bit of a nihilistic landscape

where no one was getting punished.

And so there’s this question of you’re almost an idiot

if you didn’t take the deals.

So I think it’s really important, extremely important

for kind of law enforcement to play a role,

regulation to play a role,

to make it harder to commit those crimes.

And if you commit those crimes,

there’s actual real world punishment for it.

Your point about like what’s gonna happen to the investors.

I think that was kind of your question.

It’s tough because if the money’s not there,

the money’s not there.

I mean, there’s gonna be the guy,

they got the best in class guy.

It’s the guy who ran the dissolving of Enron.

So, I mean, I can’t imagine someone better equipped

to run a complicated corporate fraud like dissolution.

But yeah, it’s tough

because everyone’s gonna get probably, I don’t know,

10 cents on the dollar, maybe less.

I wonder if there’s a way

to do a progressive redistribution of funds.

So I’m just really worried about the pain

that small investors feel.

Yeah, I think there’s a lot of thought around that.

I forget if they actually do do this.

I mean, I know there’s a lot of law

about like you can’t treat creditors differently.

You have to treat them all the same.

So I think it’ll be some kind of proportional payback.

It’s certainly not gonna be

that the guys at the top get a significant amount

of their money back and the rest get nothing.

Unfortunately, I think there’s such a small amount

of assets that back this whole thing in the end.

And that value is actually declining every day

because it was inextricably tied to FBF.

It was like the FTT tokens, which now what are those worth?

The serum tokens, that was his project

or the project they made.

What is that worth?

Basically nothing.

So it’s a hard situation.

And there’s a bigger ethical concern, which is FTX US,

it’s unclear how backed it was,

but it was clearly more backed than FTX International.

Do you take all that money and throw it into a big pot

and give people money back?

Or do you give the US people back their amount of money,

which is probably gonna be significantly more

and leave everyone internationally out in the cold?

And to add to that ethical issue,

let’s say you’re a liquidator and you’re US-based.

There’s a tremendous question, like legal questions about,

how do you ethically do that?

It’s not clear.

There’s a tremendous incentive to just favor the US people

over everyone else,

because it’s our country, America, whatever.

But I don’t know if that’s necessarily fair.

It’s really hard.

It’s like, it’s impossible.

And some, I forget where you said this,

but one of the, I mean,

it probably permeates a lot of the investigations you do,

which is this idea that it’s really sad

that the middle-class in most situations like this

get fucked over.

So the IRS go after the middle-class,

then go after the rich.

It’s basically everyone who doesn’t have a lot of leverage

in terms of lawyers, money, get fucked over.

Yes.

And then they’re the ones,

like it’s always the rich and powerful

who get the favorable treatment

as like a microcosm of this funny story.

So one of the big criticisms of crypto,

and I think rightly so,

is the irreversibility of the transaction.

So if I accidentally send a transaction somewhere,

it’s gone, right?

So crypto.com accidentally sent a lady $10 million,

and now they want the money back and they’re suing her.

But the funny thing is,

is if you are on crypto.com and you send,

let’s say I accidentally send you money

and I come knocking on your door,

Lex, I didn’t mean to send you like $1,000,

I need my money back.

Or if I go to crypto.com and I said,

hey, I sent that to the wrong person, can you reverse it?

They’ll say, screw off, no way.

If I go to court, they’ll kill me in court

because they’re gonna go,

look, this is how the blockchain works.

But then they do it, they do the exact same thing.

They send this lady $10 million,

they’re suing her and they’re gonna win.

Now what’s in court is not whether

they get the money back,

it’s should she be liable for theft, I believe.

So, and that’s just another case of

the same rules apply differently to different people,

whether you have the money to back you or not.

It’s a very sad thing.

And that’s why I think people like,

you need journalists fighting for the little person.

We really need it.

And it’s kind of like this unfortunate thing

where that’s the most risky thing to do,

like legally, you should not be doing that,

but I think it’s important to do.

It’s the ethical thing, it’s the right thing to do.

What do you think about influencers and celebrities

that supported FTX and SBF?

Do they, should they be punished?

Yeah, I think they should take a huge reputational hit.

I mean, I think they should be embarrassed.

I think they should be ashamed of themselves.

But it was really hard to know, sorry to interrupt,

for them to know, like for example,

I think about this a lot.

It’s like, who do I, because I don’t investigate,

like sponsored by Athletic Greens.

Okay, it’s a nutritional drink.

Should I investigate them deeply?

I don’t know.

You just kind of use reputational,

like it seems to work for me.

Should I like-

I think it really depends on,

I think your credibility hit will depend

on what domain you’re an expert in.

If you’re sponsored by a robotics company

and you’re an expert in robotics,

if that company turns out to be a disaster and a fraud,

then you should have looked more deeply.

We’re talking mostly about,

like I hold Tom Brady a lot less accountable

than financial advisors, financial influencers,

because that is their world of expertise.

And you treat their recommendation differently,

proportionally to what you think their expertise is.

So in some ways, I don’t actually think,

Tom Brady, I’m sure he reached a lot of people.

I personally didn’t feel at all moved by his recommendation

because you know, it’s just money.

But when you hear somebody who should be an expert

in that thing, endorse a product in that space,

you hold that opinion to a higher standard.

And when they’re completely cataclysmically wrong,

it’s gonna be a different level of accountability.

And I think rightfully so.

When Jim Cramer was saying Bear Stearns is fine,

he made that terrible call with Bear Stearns in 2008.

He was rightfully reamed for all of that.

Even though it could be considered that like,

well, you know, did he have all the information?

Maybe not, but he’s a financial advisor.

He does this for a living.

If you go on and you make a big call

and you turn out to be wrong and people lose tons of money,

you are going to take a hit, and I think rightfully so.

But no, I don’t think these people should go to jail

or anything like that.

Like-

No, but it’s such a complicated thing.

I mean, I just feel it personally myself.

I get it, but you still feel the burden

of the fact that your opinion has influence.

I know it shouldn’t.

I know Tom Brady’s opinion on financial investment

should not have influence, but it does.

That’s just the reality of it.

That’s a real burden.

I didn’t know anything about SBF or FTX.

It wasn’t on my radar at all.

But I could have seen myself taking them on as a sponsor.

I’ve seen a lot of people I respect, Sam Harris and others,

like talk with SBF like he’s doing good for the world.

So I could see myself being hoodwinked,

having not done research.

And the same thing, it makes me wonder.

Like, I don’t want to become cynical, man.

But it makes you wonder, who are the people in your life

you trust that are like, that could be the next SBF

or worse, big, powerful leaders,

Hitler and all that kind of stuff?

To what degree do you want to investigate?

Do you want to hold their feet to the fire,

see through their bullshit, call them on their bullshit?

And also, as a friend, if you happen to be friends,

or have a connection, how to help them

not slip into the land of fraud?

I don’t know, all of that is just overwhelming.

Yeah, I mean, we should be clear.

Like, finance is sort of a special space

where you’re talking about people’s money.

You’re not talking about whether

someone takes a bad supplement,

or like a supplement that is just, they’re $50 out, right?

I think the scale of harm, and therefore responsibility,

escalates depending on what field you’re in.

I wouldn’t hold Tom Brady as,

like if he gives a bad football opinion, right,

and he should have known better,

that is a different scale of harm

than a doctor giving bad advice, right?

Like, he tells you a pill works,

and the pill kills you, or something like that.

There’s just different levels of accountability

depending on the field you’re in,

and you have to be aware of it.

Finance is, you have to be extremely conservative

if you’re gonna give financial advice,

because you’re playing with people’s lives,

and you cannot play with them haphazardly,

you cannot gamble with them,

you cannot play with them on a bet,

because you’re getting paid a lot of money.

It’s just the nature of the space,

and so with the space comes the responsibility,

and the accountability,

and I don’t think you can get around that.

Who was Dan Friedberg that you mentioned?

Some of these figures in the SBF realm

that are interesting to you.

Super interesting kind of subject,

because Dan Friedberg is the former general counsel

for Ultimate Bet.

Ultimate Bet was a poker site

where famously they got in a scandal

because the owner, Russ Hamilton,

was cheating with a little software piece of code

they called God Mode.

God Mode allowed you to see the guy across from you’s hand.

Obviously, you can imagine you can win pretty consistently

if you know exactly what your opponent has.

Very unethical.

I should be clear that for some inexplicable reason,

I don’t think they were ever charged

and convicted of a crime,

but they were investigated by a gambling commission

that found they made tens of millions of dollars this way.

For sure, and Dan Friedberg is the general counsel.

He’s caught on a call basically conspiring with Russ

to hide this fraud.

He’s saying we should blame it on a consultant,

third party, and Russ Hamilton famously says,

it was me, I did it, I don’t wanna give the money back.

Find basically a way to get rid of this.

So that’s Dan Friedberg’s big achievement.

That’s what he’s known for, he’s most known for.

And this is the guy they pick

as their chief regulatory officer for FTX.

Why do you hire somebody who, I get it,

not formally charged and convicted, investigated,

there’s all the, and there’s tape out there.

So I wanna be clear about what’s actually available evidence

but someone who’s seemingly only achievement

is hiding fraud, why do you hire that guy

if the intention is not to hide fraud?

So this is a question I put to Sam Bankman Fried

and his answer was, well, we have a lot of lawyers.

And I said, well, it’s your chief regulatory officer.

He’s like, well, it wasn’t, we did regulate a lot.

And it was just this big dance of basically

he’s done great work, he’s a great guy.

And I think that tells you everything you need to know.

And there’s figures like that probably

even at the lower levels,

just infiltrate the entire organization.

Well, it’s just like, yeah, why wasn’t there a CFA?

Why wasn’t there anyone in that space

who could seemingly be the eyes that goes,

holy whatever, we need to,

we’re in dangerous territory here, right?

So yeah, it seems very deliberate.

I mean, I talked to one FTX employee that they talked about

who’s told me they talked about taking,

I think it was taking FTX US public

and Sam was very against the idea.

And the employee in retrospect speculated

that it might’ve been because you face so much scrutiny,

like regulation-wise, like you’d have to go through a lot,

like more thorough audits, all that kind of stuff

that basically he knew they would never pass.

So yeah, I mean, it’s red flags all the way down

with that guy.

And you hope all of them get punished.

Everyone who knew, I mean, I think for sure

there are people at FTX who didn’t know.

I think there are some people at Alameda who didn’t know.

There’s degrees, sorry to interrupt,

but there’s degrees of not knowing.

Yes.

There’s a looking away when you kind of know shady stuff.

That’s still the same as knowing, right?

That’s might be even worse.

Well, yeah, like I was talking to one insider

and we were talking about the insider trading.

They were telling me about this insider trading.

And I said, do you think this was criminal?

And they said, it was probably criminal in hindsight, yes.

And the question is someone who answers a question

like that, what does that like mean?

You know, like it was probably criminal.

So you’re right, there are different degrees.

I mean, I’ll say at the most basic, I would be very happy

if everyone who had direct knowledge went to jail,

which I don’t think will happen to be clear.

I think a lot of people are gonna cut deals.

Prosecutors are gonna cut deals.

So they actually nail Sam Bankman Freed.

I think that’s their only focus.

What about his reputation?

What do you think about all these interviews?

Do you think they are helping him?

Do you think they’re good for the world?

Do you think they’re bad for the world?

Like, what’s your sense?

And like, say you get to sit down,

interview with him for three hours,

and I’m holding the door closed.

What kind, is that a useful conversation or not?

Or at this point, it should be legal and that’s it.

I think it’s useful.

I mean, I think it’s all about how you interview him.

You can interview someone responsibly.

You can interview him irresponsibly.

I think we’ve seen examples of both.

What’s an irresponsible?

I keep interrupting you rudely.

That’s okay, no, no, no.

It’s unacceptable.

No, no, no, I think it’s fine.

There was like a New York Times interview,

which spends any amount of time talking about his sleep.

And he’s like, yeah, I’m sleeping great.

I mean, I think that’s so deeply disrespectful

to the victims.

And especially when you’re not even releasing

an interview live.

It’s like, you have time to triage

what you’re gonna talk about.

Why would you spend any amount of time

talking about the sleep that a fraudster is getting?

It’s just so weird.

And-

Well, can I steal a man in that case?

I don’t think it turned out well.

I think that’s-

I think, okay, here’s the thing.

I could see myself talking about somebody’s sleep

or getting in somebody’s mind

if I knew I have unlimited time with them.

If I knew I had like four hours.

Because you get into the mind of the person,

how they think, how they see the world.

Because I think that ultimately reveals,

if they’re actually really good at lying,

it reveals the depths, the complexity of the mind

that through like osmosis, you get to understand

like this person, this person is not as trivial

as you realize.

Also, it makes you maybe realize that this person

is, has a lot of hope, has a lot of positive ambition

that’s like, that has developed over their life.

And then certain interesting ways things went wrong.

They become corrupt and all that kind of stuff.

You just, that’s all fine.

But this conversation was not properly contextualized

in the world of what he did.

And I’ve asked about this interview

because I was like so curious.

It was out of the New York Times.

And there was not much mention of fraud or jail

or the big crimes, like misappropriation

of even client assets.

It was just sort of this, Sam sat down with me,

he’s under investigation, but there’s not much specifics.

And then it’s like, yeah, he’s playing storybook brawl,

he’s sleeping, he’s, and it’s just like, okay,

this isn’t adding to the conversation.

Especially when the New York Times,

it’s like, you should be grilling.

Right, right, exactly.

So, but as I said, I mean, it’s all arranged the gamut

and some interviews, like some of it’s okay.

And then some of it’s weird,

like the Andrew Sorkin interview,

he asked some hard hitting questions,

which I really appreciated.

And then at the end, he goes, ladies and gentlemen,

Sam Bankman Freed, and everyone gives like an ovation

for Sam.

I mean, the steel man of that, of course,

is like, they’re actually applauding Andrew Sorkin.

But the way you like lay it up,

I wouldn’t go like, ladies and gentlemen,

it’s like an applause line.

It’s like, ladies and gentlemen, the Eagles,

Elton John, Lex Friedman.

And so to go to, so you have this like deal book summit,

where you have all these important figures

that are positively important.

And at the end, you have Sam Bankman Freed, a fraudster,

and you go, ladies and gentlemen, Sam Bankman Freed,

everyone’s applauding.

That I think is a net, like, I think that’s a negative.

I think the way that the optics of that

just were all wrong.

And so I think, yeah, you have to be very responsible.

I think it’s useful,

going back to how you can usefully do this.

You can, even when somebody’s determined to lie to you,

it’s always important to pin them down

to an accounting of events,

because that is unimaginably helpful

when it comes to a prosecutor

trying to prove this guy’s guilty,

is if you say you didn’t do a crime,

but you don’t tell me any details about it,

day of the trial, you can basically make up any story.

But if you tell me in detail where you were that day,

I can go hunt down, you say you were with Joe,

I go hunt down Joe and he says he wasn’t with you,

boom, you’ve lost credibility.

And now you’re much more likely to be convicted.

So it’s really important to get SBF’s exact accounting

of how things went wrong,

because right now he’s positioning himself

to throw his Alameda CEO, Caroline Ellison, under the bus.

She did everything, she knew everything, I knew nothing.

Well, is Caroline Ellison’s gonna take the stand

and go, well, I have all these text messages

and this is all a lie,

and then Sam Megman Freed is gonna be completely

ruined, like self-ruined by his own design.

So I think it’s important.

So more like a legal type of get the details

of where he was, what he was thinking, what the-

I think it’s like, yeah,

I think the public probably cares

to get to know what happened to.

And again, I think if you’re careful,

you can expose someone as they lie to you

without giving into those lies, right?

Like without capitulating to,

oh, I’m just gonna assume you’re correct.

I think you can point to, well, Lex,

you say it happened this way,

but you’ve lied about X, Y, and Z,

why should we believe you?

That’s a suddenly a totally different conversation

than just being like, oh, okay, that’s how it happened.

The thing I caught that bothered me,

and the thing I hope to do in interviews

if I eventually get good at this thing

is the human aspect of it,

which is like, which I think you have to do in person,

is he seems a bit nonchalant about the pain

and the suffering of people.

They have red flags about,

and the way he communicates about the loss of money,

like the pain that people are feeling about the money,

I get red flags.

Like you’re not, forget if you’re involved

in that pain or not.

You’re not feeling that pain.

Well, he’ll say he is,

but he’ll be playing a game of League of Legends

while doing it.

No, but I just see it from his face,

the dynamic, and that needs to be grilled.

Like that little human dance there,

that’s, I mean, I considered, I talked to him,

I considered doing an in-person interview with him.

And that’s-

Are you still considering it?

I don’t know.

Do you think I should in person?

I think it depends if you think you have anything

to add to the conversation.

A lot of people have-

Yeah, there’s been already, you did an incredible job.

Thanks.

I think-

I think I would like to grill the shit out of him

as a fellow human, but not an investigator,

but a coffee sale investigator.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like another human being,

another human being who I can have compassion for,

who has caused a lot of suffering in the world.

Like that, that grilling.

Like basically convey the anger that people,

and the pain that people are feeling, right?

Like that.

Yeah.

I think, I think it’d be really hard.

I mean, like that guy is sort of a master dancer,

and what he would say at the end of it,

because I’ve listened to so many interviews of him.

I probably am like a GPT model for Sam.

I think he would do some kind of thing about like,

yeah, I really, I really hear you.

And, you know, it’s just terrible.

I feel such an obligation to the people who’ve lost money.

And, you know, it’s just, it’s a lot of money.

It’s a lot of money.

You know, he’d do something like that.

And it would be very superficially like, okay.

But when you drill down to the details of what he did,

it’s just impossible that he didn’t know.

And one of the things that I wish I had asked,

maybe I can talk about like, I wish I had gone on this.

It’s just so hard when you’re doing a live interview

to kind of focus on one thing.

Everyone’s asked about the terms of service.

So in the terms of service, there was like,

we can’t touch your funds.

Your funds are safe.

We’re never going to do anything with that.

Anytime anyone brings that up, he says, oh,

well there’s this other terms of service over here

with margin trading accounts.

Remember we talked about, it’s a derivatives platform.

If you’re in our derivatives side,

you’re subject to different terms of service,

which kind of lets us like move your money around

with everyone else, okay?

So we treat it as one big pool of funds.

And that’s sort of the explanation

of how this all happened is,

we had this huge leverage position and we lost everything.

But what no one has sort of done a good enough job

getting to the heart of,

is that this pool of funds never was segregated properly.

It was all treated under the same umbrella

of we can use your funds.

There was no amount of, we have the client deposits,

which were just deposited with us

and not like used to margin trade or do anything over here.

These funds over here, we have saved.

They didn’t.

Fundamentally, they lied from the get-go

about how they were treating the most precious assets,

which is your customer deposits

that you said you didn’t invest.

Clearly you put them all over here,

you YOLO gambled them.

And then when everyone starts withdrawing from here,

they don’t have any money over here.

So that is like one of the most fundamental things

that I haven’t seen anyone grill him on.

And the next time if I get the chance to ambush him again,

that’s what I’m gonna drill down on

because it’s impossible for that not to be fraud.

There’s no world where you had a pool of funds over here

and now you don’t have them

without you somehow borrowing over here.

Because if you deposited one Bitcoin

and I never sold that Bitcoin and it’s earmarked Lex Friedman

and you come and it’s not there,

something had to happen, right?

So this is so interesting.

So for me, the approach that,

like you said, the most important question of,

because for you it’s like, were those funds segregated?

For me, the question is, as a human being,

how would you feel if you’re observing that?

So like, you know, that like marshmallow test with the babies

like it’s the human thing, it’s the human nature question.

Like I can understand there’s a pile of money

and you, the good faith interpretation is like,

well, I know what to do with that pile of money

to grow that pile of money.

Let me just take a little bit of that.

Like how willing are you to do that kind of thing?

How able are you to do that kind of thing?

And when shit goes wrong, what goes through your mind?

How does it become corrupted?

How do you begin to lose yourself?

How do you delegate responsibility for the failures?

Like, as opposed to getting facts,

try to sneak into the human mind of a person

when they’re thinking of that.

Because the facts, they’re gonna start waffling.

They’re gonna start like trying to make sure

they don’t say anything that gets them incriminated.

But I just, I want to understand the human being there

because I think that indirectly gives you a sense of

where were you in this big picture?

I think I’ve talked to so many people

who have sort of committed some range of like outright fraud

to like misleading marketing.

No one thinks they’re a bad person.

Nobody admits that they did it and they knew they did,

or almost nobody does.

There’s actually one funny exception.

But I had a guy who admitted like, yeah, I did it.

It was wrong.

And, you know, but I did it and I wanted the money,

which was kind of like almost refreshing in its honesty.

But the reason I focus on like the facts

is because unless you find a bright red line,

humans can rationalize anything.

I can rationalize any level of like,

well, I did this because I had the best of intentions.

And if you play the intention game,

you’ll never convict anyone

because everyone has good intentions.

Everyone’s honest, everyone’s doing the best they can

and got misleaded and got misguided and da, da, da, da.

Ultimately, you have to drill down to the concrete

and go, look, I get it.

You’re just like the last 50 guys that I interviewed.

You had the best of intentions.

It all went wrong.

I’m very sorry for you.

But at the end of the day, there’s people hurting

and there’s people that have significant damage

to their life because of you.

What did you actually do?

And what can we prove taking intention out of it,

taking motivation out, what can we prove that you did

that was unethical, illegal, or immoral?

And like, that is sort of what usually I try to go to

because I will do those human interviews,

but it’s just like the same record on repeat.

I mean, a lot of people go through the same.

I’m with you, I’m with you on everything you said,

but there is ways to avoid the record on repeat.

I mean, those are different skillset.

You’re exceptionally good at the investigative,

like investigating.

I do believe there’s a way to break through the repeat.

There’s different techniques to it.

One of which is like taking outside

of their particular story.

Yes, when everyone looks at their own story,

they can see themselves as a good player doing good.

But you can do other thought experiments.

I mean, there’s a-

But they’ll follow you,

they’ll know what the thought experiment is.

No, well, it depends.

It depends, my friend.

I mean, like, you know, to me, there’s a million of them,

but just exploring your ethics.

Would you kill somebody to protect your family?

And you explore that.

You start to sneak into, like,

what’s your sense of the in-group versus the out-group?

How much damage you can do to the out-group?

And who is the out-group?

And you start to build that sense of the person.

Are we like the two mobsters that we’re dressed as?

Do we protect the family and fuck everyone else?

You’re with us, and the ones who are against us, fuck them.

Or do we have a sense that human beings all have value,

equal value, and we’re a joint humanity?

There’s ways to get to that.

And you start to build up this sense of, like,

some people that make a lot of money are better than others.

They deserve to be at the top.

If you have that feeling, you start to get a sense of, like,

yeah, the poor people are the dumbasses.

They’re the idiots.

If you believe that, then you start to understand

that this person may have been at the core

of this whole corrupt organization.

Yes, two things.

One, I think you should join me on this side of the table.

We’ll put SBF over here.

We’ll, good guy, bad guy, human, facts.

Like-

You’re the bad guy.

I’m like, no, no, no, slow down, coffee.

What is your feeling about humanity?

Yeah, I-

Have you been getting enough sleep?

Yeah, right.

So I think, no, I think there’s a lot of truth

to what you said.

One thing I’ve noticed that is hard to combat

is sort of, like, preference falsification

and just, like, just the outright lying about those things

is tough to kind of pin down.

But yeah, you’re absolutely right.

There’s ways to interview people.

There’s all sorts of interesting techniques.

And yeah, I don’t disagree.

Good cop, bad cop.

We should do, this should be like a sitcom.

Okay, you did an incredible documentary on SafeMoon.

The title is, I Uncovered a Billion Dollar Fraud.

Can you tell me the story of SafeMoon?

Sure, so SafeMoon was a crypto coin

that exploded on the scene in 2021, I think, at this point.

Sorry, I’m losing track of my years.

One year in crypto is like five years in real life.

But it kind of gained a huge amount of popularity

because of this idea that, it’s in the name,

you go safely to the moon.

How they were gonna do this

is with sort of a sophisticated smart contract idea

where there’s, I kind of have to explain

the way some contracts get rug pulled for a second,

or there’s scams happen.

So in the, sometimes it’s called like the shit coin space,

the alt coin space, anything like below Bitcoin, Ethereum,

and maybe the top five or 10,

is kind of seen as this wasteland of gambling.

And like, you don’t know if they’re,

the developers are gonna become anything or not.

You’re kind of like reading the white paper,

trying to figure it out.

So there’s this big question about like,

how can you get scammed?

How can, back to the interests,

you don’t want the developer to have some like,

parachute cord where they can pull all the money out.

So one way this happens is that in decentralized finance,

there’s something called the liquidity pool, okay?

It’s basically this big pot of money

that allows people to trade between two different currencies.

So let’s say like SafeMoon and Bitcoin, right?

Or Ethereum, or it’s actually on the Binance Smart Chain.

So it’d be BNB.

And this pool of money can be controlled by the developers

in such a way they can steal it all, right?

They can just grab it.

I don’t wanna go too much into details

because I feel like I’ll lose people here.

But the point of SafeMoon was,

the core idea was we’re locking this money up.

You can’t touch it.

And actually every transaction that you buy SafeMoon with,

we’ll take a 5% tax of that.

We’ll do a 10% tax, but 5% of it,

will go back to all the holders of SafeMoon, okay?

And 5% of it will go back in this little pool of money, okay?

So the idea is as you trade,

as this token becomes more viral, two things will happen.

One, the people who are holding it long-term

will be rewarded for holding it long-term

by receiving this 5% tax that’s distributed to everyone.

And two, you can kind of trust

that your money’s gonna have this stable value

because this pool of money here in the middle,

that’s kind of guaranteeing you can get your SafeMoon out

into this actually valuable currency.

It’s not gonna move.

So the story of SafeMoon was that fundamentally,

this was not the case.

They promised that this money was gonna be locked up.

It was not actually locked up at all.

They said it was automatically locked up.

You don’t have to worry about it.

Well, it was very manually locked up

and they didn’t actually lock a lot of it up.

They took a lot of it for themselves, for the developers.

So there’s a lot of players in this.

Some of the, a lot of them have left by now.

There’s kind of this main CEO

that everyone knows, John Karony now.

And despite saying that they were gonna lock up

all the funds for four years,

somehow he’s gone from, as everyone else in the token

has lost 99% of the value of the token.

So they’ve lost 99%.

He’s gotten like a $6 million crypto portfolio,

multimillion dollar real estate portfolio,

invested millions into various companies.

So he’s accrued this huge wealth.

And so I made a video basically exposing that

and showing how this coin,

which once had a $4 billion market cap,

is just viral everywhere.

Everyone was talking about it.

Because of these viral ideas,

like it is sort of a captivating idea

that by holding it, you could get returns, right?

Like you just hold onto it, you automatically get money.

And it’s a viral idea that this money in the middle,

in the pot, isn’t gonna leave you.

When those things turned out to be false,

this community has had a slow death

as a lot of people realized it was a scam.

And there’s been a core part of the community,

which gets to an interesting dynamic

we can talk about if you want to,

where they have like doubled down on the belief in Karony.

And so part of it was out of a hope

to let those people know what was really going on

in their coin and like hopefully save some of them,

not in like some altruistic sense,

but like, or not in like some like, I’m like a hero sense,

but in the sense of like,

I think a lot of them didn’t know,

like literally didn’t know.

So just sort of like as a public service,

letting them know so they could get their money out

and hopefully save themselves a lot of pain and suffering.

So yeah.

So they really dug in.

So there’s-

Some did, some did, some left.

I mean, a lot of people have left,

but the people who are left

are people with large amounts of SafeMoon holdings

that are down immensely.

And you can imagine at a certain point in losses,

there’s a tremendous psychological pressure to go,

look, I’m in it.

I got to go for the long haul.

And then you want to believe

that this thing is legitimate and will succeed

because A, there’s an ego component around,

I haven’t been scammed.

I’m too smart to get scammed.

It’s tremendously, you know,

it hurts psychologically to acknowledge

you’ve been taken for a ride.

And also you just want this thing to succeed

for your financial wellbeing.

So you like want to believe it.

So there’s tremendous psychological pressure

to build cult-like communities around these tokens.

And I’ve noticed with the incentive of like community built,

it’s sort of new to finance.

There’s like these meme coins or these cults.

I don’t want to,

it’s not really fair to call all of them cults.

Like some of them are open to criticism,

but one of the things that defines cults

is they’re not open to sunlight or criticism.

There’s these financial communities

that are opening up with crypto, with a few stocks,

where if you criticize them, you are attacked.

And the entire community has every incentive

to kind of like downplay your legitimate criticisms

or kind of go after you.

And so it creates this interesting dynamic

that I’m fascinated by.

What do you think about Bitcoin then?

Do you think it’s one of those communities

that does attack you when criticized?

So which, I guess,

which coins do you think are open to criticism

and which are not?

It’s kind of tough.

Like no community is a monolith.

So just like, it’s just a spectrum of how open they are.

There’s just like,

there’s always this core contingent of extreme believers

who will go after anyone who criticizes them.

And it’s just about how wide of a band

that makes up of the entire token.

True.

How intensely, how active that small community is.

So it’s in Bitcoin, they’re called Bitcoin maximalists.

But you can also call any community’s subgroup

like that maximalist, whatever the belief is.

I don’t know.

Dunkin Donuts maximalists.

That community is probably small

in terms of attack you online.

You know which community has a very intense following?

So I got attacked on the internet

when I said Messi’s better than Ronaldo.

Oh yeah, that’s controversial.

And so that’s a very intense maximalist community there.

The other one that surprised me is when I said,

now I did it in jest.

Okay, folks?

I said, Emacs is a better ID than Vim.

I love Emacs, I agree.

Listen, I have trauma.

I wake up sweating sometimes at night thinking-

Emacs master race.

The Vim people are after me.

They’re everywhere.

They’re in the shadows.

No, Vim is an amazing,

and it’s actually a surprise I’ve recently learned

that it’s still even more so than before

an incredibly active community.

So a lot of people wrote to me-

But do you use Spacemacs?

It’s just Emacs and Vim?

No, I haven’t.

I use Raw.

I have- Old school Emacs?

Oh, you gotta use, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But hold on a second.

I actually recently, I have recently said,

you know what?

Let’s make love, not war.

And I went to VS Code.

I went to a more modern ID.

But, because I did most of my programming in Emacs,

I did most of anything as one does in Emacs,

just because I also love Lisp,

so I can customize everything.

Then I realized, like,

like how long will Vim and Emacs be around, really?

I was thinking, as a programmer,

looking like 10, 20 years out,

you know, I should challenge myself to learn new IDs,

to learn the new tools

that the majority of the community is using,

so that I can understand what are the benefits and the cost.

I found myself getting a little too comfortable

with the tools that I grew up with.

And I think one of the fundamental ways

of being as a programmer,

as anyone involved with technology,

based on how quickly it’s evolving,

is to keep learning new tools.

Like, the way of life should be constantly learning.

You’re not a mathematician or a physicist

or any of those disciplines that are more stable.

This is like, everything is changing.

Crypto’s, like you said, a perfect example of that.

You have to constantly update your understanding

of the, of digital finance, constantly,

in order to be able to function,

in order to be able to criticize it,

in order to be able to know what to invest in.

So yeah, that was why I did,

I tried PyCharm, a bunch,

the whole JetBrains infrastructure,

and then also VS Code,

because that’s really popular,

and, you know, Atom and Sublime, all of those.

I’ve been exploring, I’ve been exploring.

But VS Code is amazing.

You should check out SpaceMax.

I’m just gonna give one more pitch for it.

It’s just basically like a customizable configuration.

Well, Emacs is already customizable,

but it’s pretty useful.

I’m not even much of a coder,

but for like certain journaling applications

or like time management, like I find it really useful, so.

But anyway, we’re so like,

I feel like half this podcast is what it should have been,

and half of it’s just us nerding out

about our own engineering, like idiosyncrasies.

Sorry, guys.

All right, so what were we talking about?

SafeMoon and Bitcoin, Bitcoin.

What do you think?

Is there, have you made enemies in certain communities?

What do you think about Bitcoin?

So I’ve made certain enemies

in the sort of crypto skeptics space,

because there’s sort of this range of skepticism

you can have about cryptocurrency.

I’m obviously a skeptic of a lot of it,

but there are certain aspects of crypto

that I think are inevitable,

and I’m gonna do my best to kind of describe those here,

but I’m not committed to any crypto specifically,

but there are some, I’ve taken a lot of heat,

ironically, for not being skeptical enough.

There are some people who believe

that like the entire thing is a complete waste of time.

They’re rslashbutcoin on Reddit.

It’s an amazing community, actually.

It’s very funny.

They have-

What’s a butcoin?

Is that-

It’s like a play on Bitcoin.

They’re like-

Oh.

At least we admit it’s a scam.

Very funny guys, very funny people there.

So, but they’ll be like, you know,

CoffeeZilla should just admit

that all of it’s a giant Ponzi scheme.

All of it’s basically like not real.

So everything including Bitcoin?

Yeah, it’s all basically all the Ponzi-nomics.

It’s Ponzi-nomics all the way down.

It’s like there is no fundamental use case

that is that useful.

I don’t know if,

I guess I don’t wanna strawman them here.

I don’t wanna say that,

I don’t know if they’re saying that it’s all useless.

At minimum, they’re saying the level of interest

in cryptocurrencies is far,

the actual usefulness of it is far less

than the amount of attention and time and money

that’s being poured into it.

So like the revolutionariness of this technology

is not at all revolutionary.

Let me kind of steel man what I think the pro-crypto take is.

I think that technologies are sort of this inert thing

and the success of them in my opinion is not based on PR,

it’s not based on marketing,

it’s based on cheaper, faster, better.

Fundamentally, the success of any technology

relies on those three things and longevity of it.

So I have two employees

and both of them are out of the country.

So I have to frequently make

international wire payments to them.

Is one of them SBF, just as a reporter, I have to ask.

No.

Okay, all right, he’s not on the payroll.

Yeah, I think he’d have to pay me.

I’m trying to do my best Coffeezilla words,

I get hard-hitting investigative questions.

So with these international payments,

you face all sorts of slow fees

and you face kind of like this time thing

and it’s this painful process.

So if I use different cryptocurrencies,

some of them are like really fast,

some of them have really low fees.

I just believe in a world where digital currencies

with fast payments, with cheap payments,

revolutionize the global exchange of currency.

And I don’t know if this is going to include the blockchain.

It’s just that the blockchain is the first thing

that’s really embraced truly digital currency,

which doesn’t need to go through

this complicated system of wire transfers and just happens.

So I can send you,

let’s say I want to send you Ethereum or Bitcoin,

I can send it to you just as fast

if I send you a dollar or a billion dollars,

and I can send it to you just as fast

if you’re across from me

or if you’re across the world from me.

That I think is a step change in easier, faster, better.

In terms of like just this really basic

international payments kind of idea.

So I think at like its core,

if the lowest form use case of cryptocurrencies is that,

I think it will change the world in some variety.

It’s just kind of the larger question is,

is that technology going to include

the blockchain specifically or not?

The other benefit is transparency,

which I personally like as an investigator.

It’s just that previously it’s like hard to describe

how opaque our financial system is

until you’ve tried to investigate someone or something.

Understanding finances, unless you have a subpoena,

unless you’re like the FBI or like the SEC

and you can get a subpoena for someone’s finances

or you’re going through discovery,

you don’t know what someone has.

You’re basically playing poker with everyone

and the cards are face down.

For the first time, the blockchain to some extent,

because there are ways to obfuscate it.

And in some ways cryptocurrency has enabled more fraud,

which is kind of this irony.

But in some ways it’s enabled people

to also audit a lot better and in real time.

And I think that is a structural change

that is fundamentally for the better.

The question of all this is,

do those betters outweigh the cons that this introduces?

And how much can regulation mitigate those cons?

Some of those cons being like fraud, money laundering,

all these negative externalities

that are easier with cryptocurrency.

Why do you think cryptocurrency in particular

seems to attract fraudulent people?

Like scammers and fraudsters.

Because it’s unregulated, it’s the wild west

and you can transmit large amounts of money

very quickly across the world.

What about-

With very little oversight.

Creating new crypto projects, like new coins.

Because you have to show very little actual use case.

You can just promise.

So it’s like true of any emerging technology.

So much vaporware happens at the beginning

when it’s all promise.

Because fundamentally, let’s say you’re legitimate,

I’m illegitimate.

We look the same at the start of a technology.

Because both of us are promising what this can do.

And in fact, the less scruples and morals I have,

in some ways I can out-compete you.

Because I can say, mine does what Lexis does,

but like way better and way faster.

And it’s going to happen in a year rather than 10 years.

You’re being honest, I’m playing a dishonest game,

I look better.

Once this space matures,

and you actually have some people actually doing the things

that they say they’re going to do,

suddenly this equation changes.

Now you’re Amazon, you’re delivering in two days.

I can say whatever I want.

You do the thing you do, and I have no credibility.

So I think that like part of the fraud is,

you know, just the ability to transmit so much money

so quickly with such little oversight.

Part of it is like, this just happens

with any emergent technology.

Vaporware is a real thing.

And hopefully, as this space matures,

as regulation comes in, things will improve.

Well, let me ask you your own psychology.

Sure.

You’re going after some of the richest,

some of the most powerful people in the world.

Do you worry about your own financial, legal,

and psychological wellbeing?

Yes.

Yeah, I do.

I mean, I’m not totally oblivious to the precariousness

of like any kind of journalism like this.

Obviously there’s risks.

I’ve always believed, there’s a quote,

and I’m going to butcher it,

but I hope you guys understand the spirit of it.

You know, news is when you print something

someone else doesn’t want you to print.

Everything else is public relations.

I really believe to do meaningful journalism,

you have to go after people.

Like it’s not inherently a safe profession.

I mean, if you’re going to do important work,

you have to have risk tolerances.

And I think everyone has a line

of what that risk tolerance is.

And it’s different for everyone.

I don’t think I could do what Edward Snowden did.

I think that would be my bright red line,

is going against my own government.

It’s such a, in my opinion, I really see him as a hero.

Like it’s such a selfless act of self-destruction.

You know that the party you’re going after

has all the power and will crush you.

And you do it anyway out of the like the true,

I don’t know, platonic ideal of journalism.

I think that’s beautiful.

I don’t think I could do that.

I think I need some ability to live and subsist

in the society that I am in.

And I think my bright red line would be like,

if I’m forced to flee the country for my work,

I think I’d finally have to say no.

But for, as journalists go, I’m pretty risk,

I take risk pretty well.

I especially like think risk is important to take

when you’re young and when you can do that.

I think when I have, I mean, I’m married.

So when I have a family,

I think I will probably dial this risk thing down,

just being honest.

I mean, I think you kind of have to.

But right now, I mean,

I’m kind of like running on all cylinders.

I’m willing to take on quite a range of people,

but yeah, I think a lot about it.

Wolfpack of one or small Wolfpack,

as opposed to having like a New York Times behind you

or a huge organizations with lawyers,

with a team, with a history.

These people are less courageous.

This is the dirty truth.

The bigger the organization,

the more conservative a lot of them are.

It’s true that sometimes they like,

and this is not to bash big organizations.

I’m just saying this as an observation

of someone who’s talked to a lot of people.

And especially in the world of fraud,

a lot of them are scared to engage in fraud

that is obvious, but hasn’t been litigated yet.

This is why you’ll never see documentaries

about ongoing fraud on Netflix.

It’s too much of a liability.

They’ll sue Netflix to hell.

And they know that if they win,

Netflix has the money to pay it.

So corporations like the New York Times,

a lot of these, some of them are very,

like they’re as courageous as they can be.

But at the bottom line,

if someone sues you to hell and back

and you have to pay up, you will disappear.

And you’re relying on liability insurance,

which you’re already paying out the ass for

to try to cover you if you get sued.

But if you get sued, even if you win,

that liability insurance now goes up in price

the next year.

And if you’re the New York Times, it goes up by a lot.

So, I mean, I think there’s work

that independent journalists can do uniquely

that they can actually take like in some ways more risk

than a giant institution,

which has a lot more in my sense to lose,

even though it would appear

like they have more in terms of defense too.

But you get, you can be bullied legally.

Yeah.

Do you get afraid of that?

Sure.

I mean, I just, all these things

are things you have to be aware of

and then forget to do your job.

Like you have to be, you know,

it’s like being like a snowboarder

and it’s like, do you realize you could hit your head?

And it’s like, yeah, of course.

But in order to go do the flip or whatever,

you have to just accept the risk,

mitigate the risk as much as possible and move on.

So we have like insurance.

We keep like a pool of funds for that kind of thing.

Like I’m very conservative with how I spend my money

basically all on production

and like trying to make my life as secure as I can.

And then I just do the work that I, you know,

I want to do because.

So 99% of your fund goes into the studio

and then into that elaborate space of yours.

Yeah, of course.

How many kittens had to die to manufacture that studio?

But anyway, that’s my investigation for later.

What keeps you mentally strong through all of this?

What’s your source of mental like strength

or your psychological strength through this?

I think there was a time

when I was getting a lot of cease and desists.

Some people were like actually like saying

like they’re going to show up to my house,

all that kind of stuff.

I don’t think I was that.

I think I was pretty worried about that for a while.

My wife was a huge source of strength here

where she was like, hey, if you’re not comfortable with it,

you need to get out of the game

or you need to basically like suck it up.

And like, this is what it is.

If you’re going to go after these people,

you have to basically be mentally strong around this.

And seeing her have that realization

helped me have the same realization.

And I really deeply admire and respect that about her.

And it solved a lot of my concerns around that.

It just made me realize every profession has risks.

It is what it is.

You mitigate and then you move on.

Why do you think there’s so few journalists like you?

You’re basically the embodiment,

at least in the space you operate,

of what great journalism should be.

Why do you think there’s very few like you?

That’s such an enormous compliment

and probably overstatement.

But I first want to pay respect.

There are a lot of great journalists

and a lot of them are like,

I don’t want to just kind of take it and go,

yeah, it’s just me.

There’s so many great journalists.

Matt Levine, Kelsey Piper,

you’ve got anonymous journalists like Dirty Bubble,

you’ve got citizen journalists like Tiffany Fong.

But I think if you’re going to be in this space

in the longterm, you do need to accept certain risks.

And I think in the longterm,

it’s like, I don’t know how easy it is

to play that game for a long period of time.

Because you make…

To do great journalism, you don’t get paid a lot

compared to what you could get paid

if you did press pieces or anything like that.

You take a lot of risks legally,

you take physical risks, you take…

It’s just like, if you care about money,

it’s not the profession.

And I feel like a lot of people, when they get notoriety,

they move to like, well, I can just maximize

the money security side of things.

And I think it takes out

a lot of would-be great journalists.

And also, so first of all,

comfort of physical and mental well-being.

Yes.

And also being invited to parties with powerful people.

Absolutely.

You make enemies, rich and powerful enemies doing this.

Yes.

But that’s why it makes it…

That’s why it’s admirable.

I mean, it’s an interesting case study

that you’ve been doing it as long as you have.

And I hope you keep doing it.

But it’s just interesting that it’s rare.

I’ll say, I wanna make a call.

I think societies can create better journalists

and worse journalists insofar as they support

the journalists who are doing great work.

And I wanna call out Edward Snowden specifically,

because what we have done to him is such a travesty.

And the only lesson you can learn

if you’re a logical human being

is that you should never whistleblow

on the United States government

after looking at what they did to Snowden.

So as a society, we can put pressure on lawmakers

to make it easier for people to do the great work

by not punishing the people who do great work,

if that makes sense, and de-risking it for them.

Because we shouldn’t expect journalists to be martyrs

to do great work, right?

To do important work.

And part of that comes from protecting whistleblowers.

There’s like very common sense things.

I love, like, it’s great to heroicize people

like Edward Snowden and stuff like that,

but we shouldn’t expect them to be heroes to do that work.

Do you ever think about going,

you’ve been focused on financial fraud.

Do you ever think about going after other centers of power?

Like government, politics?

Politics, it seems to me, you can’t do good work.

Like everybody doing good work in politics

is to some extent, from my limited perspective,

as I said, I’m not that into it.

It seems like everyone has to take a side

because even if you do great work,

whoever you’re exposing, half the other people,

no matter how good your work is,

are going to claim it’s just for partisan hackery

and they’re going to malign you.

So it seems like a lot of journalists have to take a slant,

even if it’s not explicit, like bias,

they have to take a slant on who they expose.

I hate that.

I would really like a world where you could freely expose

both sides without having a constant malignment of like,

you know, who are you working for?

Or you did this for X, Y, Z, or whatever.

I really find that deeply problematic

about our current journalism in the political sphere.

As far as government stuff, I think it’s easy to do,

not easy, but it’s much more enticing

to do foreign journalism than to do local journalism

on positions of power.

Because if you question, it’s so easy to just get,

the bigger cases you expose locally, you get in danger.

Like it’s just like very, very clear cut.

The bigger the case, the more your financial wellbeing,

your access, your entire life is like sort of in jeopardy.

Whereas if you do foreign journalism,

you can do great work and largely you’re protected

by your own government.

So it’s kind of this weird thing where if you want

great journalism on America, sometimes going abroad

might be the way to go.

But the politician thing that’s interesting,

you mentioned that and going abroad.

I think the way you think about your current work,

I think applies in great journalism, in politics as well.

So what happens, I have that sense,

because I aspire to be like you in the conversation space

of like with politicians.

I tried to talk to people on the left and the right

and do so in a nonpartisan way and criticize,

but also steel man their cases.

What happens, I’ve learned, is when you talk to somebody

on the right, the right kind of brings you in.

It’s like, yes, we’ll keep you comfortable, come with us.

And then the left attacks you.

And so, and the same happens on the left.

You talk on the left, the right attacks you

and the left is like, come with us.

So there’s a temptation, a momentum to staying

to that one side, whatever that side is.

The same with foreign journalism.

You can cover Putin critically.

There’s a strong pull to being pro-Ukraine,

pro-Zelensky, pro, basically really covering

in a favorable way to the point of propaganda,

to the point of PR, the Zelensky regime.

If you criticize the Zelensky regime,

there’s a strong pull towards then being supportive

of not necessarily the Putin regime,

but a very different perspective on it,

which is like NATO is the one that created that war.

There’s narratives that pull you.

And what I think a great journalist does

is make enemies on both sides and walk through that fire

and not get pulled in to the protection of any one side

because they get so harshly attacked

anytime they deviate from the center.

Well, and I think also like there’s a criticism

of all centrists, which I think in some way is fair.

And I say that as someone largely who’s a centrist,

which is that this what about is, or like this,

like what about the left or what about the right

can skew when it’s not a both sides issue.

So in the case of like Russia, Ukraine,

I think like, I’m strongly in favor of Ukraine,

even though I tend to go like on both sides.

And that might be partly because

one of my employees is Ukrainian.

And I think what a great journalist does,

especially like in politics,

is I think they criticize the regime that’s most in power,

most controls the keys and is the most corrupt at that time.

And they might appear to be like,

let’s say during the realm of Trump,

a great journalist would criticize Trump,

but that same journalist who held Trump’s feet to the fire

should be capable of holding Biden’s feet to the fire

four years later, if that kind of makes sense.

That’s exactly right, yeah, yeah.

So any revealing any, so attacking any power center

for the corruption, for the flaws they have.

Irrespective of like your political agenda

or your political ideas, yeah.

And that’s what I mean about sort of the war in Ukraine.

There are several key players,

NATO, Russia, Ukraine, China, India.

I mean, there’s several less important players,

maybe some of the like Iran and like Israel and maybe Africa.

And what great journalism requires

is basically revealing the flaws

of each one of those players,

irrespective of the attacks you get.

And you’re right that throughout any particular situation,

there is some parties that are worse than others

and you have to weigh your perspective accordingly.

But also it requires you to be fearless in certain things.

Like for example, I don’t even know

what it’s like to be a journalist covering China now.

Oh, that’s an exact case of like,

China has made it so difficult to be a good journalist

that they’ve effectively squashed criticism

because to be a journalist in China

means constantly risking your life every single day

to criticize that government.

And so the best journalists

are a lot of times outside the country

or they have sources inside the country

who are like, there’s like this,

there’s layers to the journalism where there’s insiders

who are leaking information,

but they themselves cannot publish

because it’s like, it’s extremely risky.

So yeah, I think as a society,

one measure of how healthy the political structure is

is how well you can criticize it

without fearing for your safety.

In that sense, the chaos and the bickering

going on in the United States politics is a good thing.

That people can criticize very harshly.

Very harsh.

And be in terms of safety are pretty safe.

Yes, absolutely.

I think our only challenge is like

where it gets dangerous is around

like top secret information.

The government comes down so hard

that the danger in covering politics here

is you can expose something that’s top secret

that should be exposed and they’ll ruin you.

So that’s where you again give props to Snowden

for stepping up.

100%, 100%.

What’s the origin of the suspender wearing Batman?

How did you come to do what you do?

We talked about where you are and how your mind works,

but how did it start?

I’ve kind of always been interested in fraud

or at least I saw fraud early on

and I was just like curious about what is this?

I didn’t know what I was really looking at.

So basically my mom got cancer when I was in high school

and it was pretty traumatic.

I mean, she’s fine.

She had thyroid cancer, which is,

we didn’t know it at the time.

It’s like cancer is cancer,

but it’s fairly easily treatable with surgery.

It’s one of the better survivable ones.

And I just watched her get like bombarded

with all these like phony health scams

of just like colloidal silver,

all these different like remedies.

And she was very into all the different ways

that she might treat her cancer.

And obviously surgery is very daunting.

And I was just confused.

I was like, why are we doing so many different remedies

that all seem a very dubious health value?

Later I’d find out that these are like all grifters.

I mean, they take advantage of free speech in America

to like advertise their products

as life-saving miracles, whatever,

when they’re of course not.

Eventually she got the surgery, thank God.

But I know people in my life who their parents passed away

because they didn’t have the surgery.

They instead took the alternative option.

I know like, I don’t wanna go into specifics

cause I don’t wanna mention their specific like case,

but their family member went to Mexico

for some alternate treatment, health treatment,

instead of getting an easy surgery and they died.

And so it’s like, I realized,

where is the outrage about this?

Where’s the, who covers this stuff?

And I realized, well, not many people do.

Then I went to college,

I was getting a chemical engineering degree

and all my friends were like telling me,

hey, you should come to this meeting.

We don’t need this.

Like you’re doing this engineering stuff, that’s great.

You’re gonna make like 70K a year,

but don’t you wanna get like rich now?

Like why wait till you’re 60 years old to retire?

Like you can be rich now, Lex.

So I’d go show up to a hotel and there’d be an MLM,

like multi-level marketing pitch for Amway

or whatever it was that day.

And I was once again fascinated.

I didn’t know what I was looking at,

but I was like, what is this weird game we’re all playing

where we sit in this room,

we’re looking at the speaker who says he’s so successful.

But why is he taking a Friday or a Saturday

to do this pitch at night?

And they’re gonna telling me I’m gonna be financially free,

but they’re working on their Saturday and Sunday.

And so it’s like, how financially free are they?

So I was just like confused.

I was like, none of my friends were rich.

They all said they were gonna be rich.

No one ever seemed to get rich.

And so I was sort of baffled by what I was looking at.

Later, I graduate, I had no interest in doing engineering,

which we can kind of get into,

but I wanna do something in media.

And I started covering a variety of topics,

but eventually I sort of revisited this interest in fraud.

And I started talking about these kind of

get rich quick grifters that were online,

sort of the Tai Lopez variety, 67 steps or whatever,

like five steps to get rich, five coins to 5 million,

these get rich quick schemes

that a lot of people were interested in.

No one seemed to get rich once again,

except for the people at the tippity tippity top

selling the get rich quick thing.

And I was like fascinated by the structure of it.

And I was like, does nobody see what this is?

Like, does nobody get it?

So I started making a series of videos on that

and the response was like palpable.

I mean, it was like, I’ve made a lot of stuff before that.

I’d made stuff that got a million views.

I’d had like some marginal success,

but the response of like the emails that came in,

I could tell this work,

even though it had far less views at the time,

was having a different level of impact.

And that’s what I was really interested in.

One of my problems with engineering was from my standpoint,

I did chemical engineering at Texas A&M.

And like, I was like,

is my future just gonna be in a chemical plant

improving some process by 2%?

And that’s like my gift to the world.

Like I just, I didn’t see the hard impact

and that maybe that’s a lack of imagination

because chemicals matter,

but I needed, I wanted to see an impact in the world.

And so when like I did start doing this fraud stuff,

exposing fraud, I like clicked in my brain.

I was like, whoa, this is kind of doing what I want to do.

And so I started posting videos.

At first it really focused on like get rich quick scheme,

grifty advertising, which I think is super predatory

and we can go into why,

but it eventually graduated to crypto

and it’s snowballed I guess,

because now we’re talking to Sam Bankman-Fried.

Okay, grifty advertising.

So actually there’s a step back.

What is a multi-level marketing scheme?

Like what, because I’ve experienced a similar thing.

It’s like, I remember I worked at,

I sold women’s shoes at Sears and a bank.

And I just remember like some kind of,

I forgot the name of the company,

but you’d like, you can sell like knives or whatever.

Like that’s a couple of-

Oh, I know what you’re talking about.

I’m sure there’s a lot of things like this, right?

And I remember feeling a similar thing, like why?

To me what was fascinating about it is like,

wow, like human civilization is a interesting,

like a pyramid scheme.

Like I didn’t, maybe didn’t know the words for that,

but it’s like, it’s cool.

Like you can like get in a room

and you convince each other of ideas

and you have these ambitions.

There’s a general desire, especially when you’re young

to like, like life sucks right now.

Nobody respects you.

You have no money and you want to do good.

And you want to be sold this dream of like,

if I work hard enough at this weird thing,

I can shortcut and get to the very top.

I don’t know what that is.

And I also in me felt that like life really sucks

and I can do good and I’m lucky I found a way to do good.

I’m like, and I don’t know, you connect with that somehow.

I think there’s like this weird fire inside people

to like, to make better of themselves, right?

I don’t know if it’s just an American thing or if it,

but anyway, that was fascinating to me

from a human nature perspective.

Grifters play on this though, right?

Like this is, so the best salesmen play on true narratives

that you already believe.

So the true narrative is, you know, life is unfair.

It is tough.

The American dream as described by go to a job,

work at the same company for 40 years and then retire

to a safety net that you’re positive is gonna be there.

That is largely debt.

And so they like play on those fears and those problems

to then sell you a pill, a solution, a thing.

And the problem is that the solution is usually worse

than even the problem they sketched out.

Like you will do better most of the time

by going with the regular company

than you will by going with these goofy

multi-level marketing.

But let me answer your question.

What is a multi-level marketing?

So there’s a criticism, first of all, that,

well, let me get to what it is in theory.

Like at its most ideal, multi-level marketing

is where you have a product that you’re selling.

And one of the ways you help sell it

is by rather than going through traditional marketing,

like where you go and you put out print advertising,

it’s like sort of a social network of marketing.

I sell to you and then actually Lex,

not only can I sell to you,

you can then go sell this product

and you’ll make money selling it.

And you know what?

To incentivize me to get other salesmen,

because when I get another salesman,

I’m actually giving myself competition.

So that’s bad.

So to incentivize me to do that,

they’ll pay me part of what you make, right?

And then you go out and you go,

okay, well, I can sell this product.

I also can get new salesmen to like sell for me

and I’m gonna make money from you, whatever.

So it goes down the line of you create multiple levels

where you can profit from their marketing, right?

The problem with this system

is that however well-intentioned it is,

is that usually the emphasis of that selling

and making money ends up not being about the product at all

and ends up entirely being about recruiting new people

to recruit new people to recruit new people.

That’s the real way to make money in multi-level marketing.

This is where the very true criticism

of most multi-level marketing, if not all,

are pyramid schemes in structure.

Because what a pyramid scheme is,

is it’s all about I put in $500

and I recruit two people to put in $500

and that comes up to me.

And they get two people to put in $500 and it goes to them.

And the reason it’s a flawed business model

is in order for it to work and everyone to make money,

you’d have to assume an infinite human race.

And so that’s not the case.

Most people end up getting screwed in multi-level marketing

and in pyramid schemes.

That’s what that is.

That’s that thing.

And the quality of the product,

it doesn’t necessarily matter what you’re selling.

To people who are financially incentivized

to buy this thing.

Yeah, and so you’re selling the dream of becoming rich

to the people down in the pyramid.

That’s the real product of multi-level marketing,

unfortunately.

And so you look at the statistics of these companies

and although they’ll make it seem like it’s so easy

to be the top 0.1% who’s making all this money,

the statistics are that 97% make less

than a minimum wage doing this.

They spend an enormous amount of time.

And just what’s so cruel about it is

that’s not advertised upfront.

I mean, it’s like if I go work at McDonald’s,

I know what I’m getting.

If I go work at Amway, I have visions of,

they’ve sold me visions of beaches and whatever

and more than likely I’m losing money.

So better than 50% of people lose money,

but 97% of people make less than minimum wage.

It’s such a bad business

for the vast majority of people who join it

and the people at the very top

who are lying to the people at the bottom

saying they all can do it when they can’t

are making all the money.

So it’s, yeah, it’s really messed up.

The interesting thing I’ve noticed,

maybe myself too,

because I’ve participated in the knife selling

for a short amount of time.

That’s probably the experience that most people have.

Is that Cutco, is it?

I don’t know.

I don’t think it was Cutco.

I know what you’re talking about.

It’s killing me.

There’s several variations of it.

I think I was part of a less popular one.

It doesn’t, I keep wanting to say it was called Vector.

Yeah, yes.

Something with a V was what I was gonna say.

It might be Vector.

Yeah, I get what you’re saying though.

It’s a multi-level marketing knife selling.

But the thing is,

I just remember my own small experience with it

is I was too, I was embarrassed at myself

for having like participated.

I think there’s an embarrassment.

That’s why people down in the pyramid

don’t like speak about it, right?

I’m trying to understand the aspects of human nature

that facilitate this.

Well, this is one of the problems with fraud

is there’s a tremendous embarrassment to being had.

Yeah.

Also, if you buy,

so slightly different human nature

is that if you buy into a get-rich-quick scheme

and then it doesn’t deliver,

you’re more likely to blame yourself

than blame the product for not actually working.

You go, well, there must be something flawed with me.

That’s true.

And they constantly reinforce this.

They go, well, it’s all about your hard work.

The system works.

Look at me, I did it.

So if you’re failing,

it must be some indictment of your character

and you have to always double down.

You have to double, the system can’t be flawed.

You must be flawed.

And so, yeah, it’s a really messed up system.

It really preys on people’s psychology

to keep them in this loop.

And that’s why in some ways these things are so viral,

even though they don’t actually get most people

a significant amount of wealth

and they cost most people money.

So it’s very unfortunate.

Most people do have the dream of becoming rich.

Most young people.

Right, and the thing is,

is that everyone knows in business, what do you sell?

You sell solutions to problems.

So if so many young people wanna get rich,

the product is that pitch.

It’s you sell them the dream.

Why this gets so grifty and so cruel and predatory

is because there is no easy solution to this.

There is no solution that people are gonna buy

because the real solution people want is no work,

no education, no skills required, no money upfront.

And people will pay any price for that magic pill

and people are happy to sell that magic pill.

And I think those people are very cruel

and I think deserve to get exposed for it.

So somebody that’s been criticized

for MLM type schemes is Andrew Tate.

Somebody that I’m very likely to talk with.

So for people who have been telling me

that I’m too afraid to talk to Andrew Tate,

first of all, let me just say,

I’m not afraid to talk to anyone.

It’s just that certain people require preparation

and you have to allocate your life in such a way

that you wanna prepare properly for them.

And so you have to kinda think who you want to prepare for.

Because I have other folks that have more power

than this particular figure that I’m preparing for.

So you have to make sure you allocate your time wisely.

But I do think he’s a very influential person

that raises questions of what it means

to be a man in the 21st century.

And that’s a very important and interesting question

because young people look up to philosophers,

to influencers about what it means to be a man.

They look up to Jordan Peterson,

they look up to Andrew Tate,

they look up to others, to other figures.

And I think it’s important to talk about that,

to think what does it mean to be a good man in the society?

Of course, in the other gender, there’s the same question,

what does it mean to be a good woman?

I think obviously the bigger question

is what does it mean to be a good person?

But-

It’s for the men podcast.

I swear to God.

Now we’re into, okay.

So that said, one aspect of the criticism

that Andrew’s received is not just on the misogyny,

is on the MLM aspect of the multi-level marketing schemes.

So is there some truth to that?

Is there some fraudulent aspect to that?

So yeah, I definitely think so.

I mean, that’s the main reason I criticized him.

So let’s back up.

There’s a few clarifications I need to make.

What Andrew Tait is selling is not multi-level marketing,

although he is selling the dream.

He’s selling an affiliate marketing thing,

which is slightly different.

So in multi-level marketing, if I sell to you

and then you go sell to two other people,

I make money from those two other people down the chain,

multi-level.

Affiliate marketing is sort of like one level.

I only make money.

So Andrew Tait had this affiliate program

where if you sold Hustlers University to somebody else,

which sounds like something people would,

boomers would put on Facebook in like 2010,

I went to Hustlers University.

School of Hardware.

By the way, you were a member of Hustlers University.

Yeah, I joined.

I joined.

I became a Hustler.

That’s in large part due to why I’m so successful

is because of my Hustler University membership.

I’m just kidding.

But so it’s an affiliate program.

So you’d sell, like I sell to you this $50 course

and I make like $5 and Andrew Tait in perpetuity

makes $50 a month off of you.

Okay.

What does this course actually sell, right?

Because ultimately he’s selling the dream.

He’s selling, hey, the matrix has enslaved you.

He’s really gone down this like neo rabbit hole.

So the matrix has enslaved you.

Your life is controlled by these people

who want to keep you like kind of weak,

you know, lazy, whatever.

You need to break out and you need to achieve

the new dream, which is sort of like

hustling your way to the top.

You don’t need the antiquated systems of school.

You can just pay me $50 a month

and I will teach you everything.

Okay.

So what do you actually get?

Well, and why is it a scam?

So you actually, I think it’s just a scam

in terms of like value and like you’re selling

based on these completely unrealistic things.

He’s like, let’s get rich.

Okay.

You get a series of discord rooms.

So you, do you know what discord?

Most people know what discord is.

It’s like a bunch of, you know, chat rooms basically.

Right?

So it’s like AOL or is it like?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right.

Well, I’m talking to the guy who quit Emacs.

So I don’t know.

There’s discord servers.

And in these, like, there’s like,

there’s like seven different rooms you can go in

or there’s several rooms

and each one is like a different field of making money.

Yes.

E-commerce, trading, cryptocurrency.

I think fulfillment by Amazon, like copywriting.

Okay.

So I went to all of these, I checked them out.

I checked out all their money-making tools.

The first funny thing is that Andrew Tate

is nowhere to be found.

The supposed successful guy that you like bought into

is nowhere to be found.

It’s these professors that you have now,

he is hired and said, these guys are super qualified.

So like looked up some of what some of these guys have done

and some of them have launched like scammy crypto coins.

The cryptocurrency professor was like shilling

a bunch of coins that did bad

and then like deleted the tweets.

I mean, just completely exactly what you’d expect.

Behind the paywall, it’s nothing of substance.

You’re not gonna learn to get rich by escaping the matrix

and going to work for Jeff Bezos.

Fulfillment by Amazon is not escaping the matrix, right?

Like that’s not the way to hustle to the top.

It’s literally a field of making money

that everyone in the world has access to.

If you wanna differentiate yourself and make money,

the first thing you realize is going into skill sets

that literally anyone with an internet account can do

is a bad way to do that

because you have to have some differentiating factor

to add value.

So it’s just such a obvious and complete skill set

scam because there is no value

to this like so-called education.

The professors are crap.

The advice, they’re like hiding

some of the bad things they’ve done

and Andrew Tate’s nowhere to be found.

Ultimately, that’s why everyone joins.

What he’s done is very interesting because,

and I’ll give him credit in his marketing.

He’s been very savvy to like make the reasons

you admire him, not the thing he’s sort of selling,

which is weird.

Like he’s selling get rich quick,

which seems like it relates to his persona,

but it’s actually very orthogonal to it.

His persona is like the tell it how it is,

like tall, buff, rich guy.

It’s like actually his persona that you’re buying into.

And then he’s selling you this thing to the side,

which when people get in there

and they’re not delivered on the product,

he still is those things that you first thought he was.

So it’s like, I think it’s to some extent,

he’s made a lot of money by making the thing

that he makes money on,

not the thing he gets so much pushback online for

and what he’s also loved for.

So people will push back for his misogyny,

but the real way he’s making money is just like basic,

get rich quick schemes that are super obvious to spot,

but everyone’s distracted by like,

oh, he said some crazy stuff about women

or all these various other scandals he’s gotten himself in.

To get more and more and more attention.

So with the persona,

is the Hustler University still operating?

I think they’ve rebranded it.

I’m part of their pitch now.

I’m like, they put me on as like,

I mean, as like, the Matrix is trying to take us out, Lex.

And then it’s me saying like,

you know, they put me in like saying,

I’m part of the Matrix.

They put me in saying, oh, this guy sucks.

You know, I joined, it sucks.

And so they’ll play that and they do like a bass drop

and it’s like, you know,

don’t listen to people like this, dah, dah, dah, dah.

I mean, it’s, I’m basically like a-

Oh, so you’ve been co-opted by the Matrix to attack.

Yes.

You’re an insider threat that infiltrated

and now is being used by the Matrix to attack him.

Well, to-

Everyone who criticizes him as part of the Matrix,

he won’t say who the Matrix is.

It’s just, it’s just the shadowy cabal

of rich, powerful people.

It’s just like the easy narrative

for people who are disaffected

and who feel cheated by the system.

You just collectivize that system

and you make it the bad guy and you go, look, look,

those guys, those guys who have been cheating you,

they’re the bad guys.

They want me shut up.

And then now the person that, the people who harmed you,

they want this guy shut up, you’re gonna listen to him.

So that’s like, it’s like the most basic

psychological manipulation

that everyone seems to constantly fall for.

It’s really trivial and stupid, but-

Can you steel man the case for Husserl’s University

where it’s actually giving young people confidence,

teaching invaluable lessons about like,

actually incentivizing them

to do something like Fulfillment by Amazon,

the basic thing to try it, to learn about it,

to fail or maybe see like, to try,

to give a catalyst and incentive to try these things.

As much as it pains me, I will try to give a succinct,

maybe steel man of it as best as I can

thinking that it’s such a grift.

But I think what you would say is that some people

in order to make a change in their life

need someone who they can look up to.

And men don’t have a lot of like strong role models,

like big male presences in their life

who can serve as a proper example.

So the most charitable interpretation would be,

Andrew Tate would encourage you

to go reach for the stars, I guess.

My problem is I have a deep,

I have a deep issue with the like,

lust and greed that centers all these things.

It’s like this glorification of wealth equals status,

wealth equals good person,

wealth and Bugatti equals you are meaningful, you matter.

And like the dark underlying thing

is that none of that, none of that matters.

Like it matters that you make a decent living,

but past just like that,

I think the like lust for more stuff

and the idolization of these people

that is just like opulence is a net bad.

So that’s like my steel man has to stop there

because I really disagree with like the values

that are pushed by people like that.

Yeah, no, I agree.

That’s the thing that should be criticized.

I shouldn’t say it doesn’t matter.

I think it’s just like an amazing meal

at a great restaurant, it matters.

Money and Bugattis for many people make life beautiful.

Like those are all components,

but I think money isn’t the,

you can also enjoy a beautiful life on a hike in nature.

There’s a lot of ways to enjoy life.

And one of the deepest has been tested through time

is the intimacy, close connection,

friendship with other people or with a loved one.

They don’t talk about like love.

Like what it means to be deeply connected

with another person.

It’s just like get women, get money,

all those kinds of things.

But that, I think, I don’t want to dismiss that

because there’s like value in that, there’s fun in that.

I think the positive,

I haven’t investigated Hustlers University,

but the positive I see in general is young people

don’t get much respect from society.

I know it’s easy to call it the matrix and so on,

but there’s a kind of dismissal of them as human beings,

as if capable of contributing, of doing anything special.

And then here’s, you have young people

who are sitting there broke with big dreams.

They need the mentors, they need somebody to inspire them.

So like I would criticize the flawed nature of the message,

but also it’s just like you have to realize

like there needs to be institutions or people

or influencers that help like inspire, right?

The problem is though,

is the people who are pitching unrealistic versions of that

are getting a lot of attention,

whereas like there’s so many great free courses

where you can learn everything and more

about fulfillment by Amazon or about copywriting

or all these different things

that I think like so often the air is just,

the oxygen is sucked up by all the grifters

who promise everything.

Back to what we said about vaporware.

This is one of the reasons that like educational products

can so often be co-opted by grifters

is vaporware is very hard to distinguish

because like the feedback loop on education is not clear.

It’s not obvious immediately.

So I can sell you a book and I can say,

this is gonna change your life if you apply it.

If you don’t, if your life doesn’t change,

I just say, well, you didn’t apply it, right?

There’s this weird relationship.

It’s not clear the value.

It’s not so easy to like quantify education.

So that gets co-opted by people who make all the promises.

They get a ton of attention, a ton of money.

And then those people are often left confused

and like kind of disillusioned,

maybe thinking, well, this didn’t work in one year,

so it’s not gonna work at all.

And so I think, yeah, there are problems there.

There’s certainly a need for like male role models.

There’s certainly a need for somebody kind of

to speak to a younger generation.

I just think that person shouldn’t be maybe Andrew Tate,

like personally.

Yeah, so you have to criticize

those particular individuals.

I also-

And yeah, I think that like the Bugatti aspiration

is so stupid.

Like it’s like, it’s so-

Let me steal Matt.

So I’m a person who doesn’t care about money,

don’t like money.

The women maybe appreciate the sort of the beauty

of the other sex,

but like, yeah, cars in particular is like,

really, is this really the manifestation

of all the highest accomplishments

a human being can have in life?

Yes, I can criticize all that.

But to steal Matt in that case is,

a young person, a dreamer has ambition.

And I often find that education throughout my whole life,

there’s been people who love me,

teachers who saw ambition in me

and try to reason with me

that my ambition is not justified.

Looking at the data, look, kid, you’re not that special.

Look at the data.

You’re not, and they want you to like,

not dream, essentially.

And then again, I look at the data,

which is all the people,

I just talked to Hodger Gracie.

This, Hodger Gracie is just a person,

widely acknowledged as probably the greatest of all time,

dominated everybody.

But for the longest time, he sucked.

And he was surrounded by people

that kind of don’t necessarily believe in him,

so he had to believe in himself.

It’s nice to have somebody,

I just, as older I get and I’ve seen it,

it’s so powerful to have somebody who comes to you,

an older person, whether it’s real or not,

that says, you got this, kid, I believe in you.

Sure.

Yeah, it does.

I mean, I think, so I think dreaming

is actually really important.

I’m more protective over,

people co-opt those dreams for money.

Yes, yes.

And like, I do think it matters so much

that we encourage people to take risks.

It’s one of the great things about America

is it lionizes like sort of people

who have taken risks and won.

But I think it’s just a weird vapid thing

when like the reason you do all of it

is for this thing you can get out at the end of the day.

When we all know,

and you’ve just heard a million interviews,

like nobody ever gets through Bugatti and goes,

this now completely fulfills me.

Everyone knows the beauty and the fulfillment

actually comes from becoming obsessed

about what you’re doing for its own sake,

sort of the journey, the beauty of that thing.

And I think money’s just this thing we have to deal with

to be able to do cool stuff.

Like I acknowledge that, you know,

you need money to build a $10 million studio.

Like you gotta get the cameras,

you gotta get the lights.

And I’m very blessed to be able to have gotten that.

But past a certain point,

like I think that is really the function of money

is to just do cool stuff.

But ultimately if you can’t fall in love with the process

and like the craft itself,

you will be left very unhappy at the end of it.

And so to start people off on that journey

by pointing to the shiny object

and going like, that’s what you should care about,

seems to me so backwards.

We should learn from the actual people who have done it

and said, that shiny thing did nothing for me.

Learn to love the journey

and like, that’s the thing we pitch people.

As unsexy as that might be.

Yeah, absolutely.

That’s well said.

And the same applies to like the Red Pill community

that talks about dating and so on.

That there is, it’s not just about the number of hot women

you go to bed with,

it’s also about intimacy and love

and all those kinds of things.

And so like, there’s components to a fulfilling life

that is important to sort of educate young people about.

Totally.

But at the same time, feeding the dream

is saying take big risks.

Sure.

And you, the little you

that has no evidence of ever being great, can be great.

Because there’s evidence time and time again

of people that come from very humble beginnings

and doing incredible things that change the world.

Yeah, and there’s just a tremendous like funny thing

where you can’t become great

without having a willful denial of the statistics.

Like in some ways you have to take the chance,

even if that chance is so improbable.

And it’s always those people who did take that chance

who end up winning, so I agree.

Probably SBF and FTX is the biggest thing

you’ve ever covered,

but previously you’ve called the Save the Kids scam

the world’s influencer scam,

like the biggest in the world

influencer scam you’ve ever seen.

Can you describe it?

Sure.

So Save the Kids was a charity coin

that was launched by a number

of extremely popular influencers.

I think they had over 50 million followers together.

Huge names.

And they basically said,

hey guys, invest in this coin,

we’re gonna save the kids.

A portion of the proceeds go to charity.

And this coin, it’s unruggable.

So rugging is the term for,

remember earlier we talked about Safemoon,

you just grab the pool of funds in the middle

and you take them out.

Okay.

It’s unruggable because we have this smart code

that is gonna prevent people who are quote whales,

which is a crypto term for saying

you have a large portion of the tokens.

It’ll prevent those people from selling

a large amount of that at one time, right?

And so basically you don’t have to worry

about trusting us.

It just is what it is.

Join and we will change the world,

save the kids, whatever.

It was really skeezy from the beginning

and sketchy because their logo matched

the Save the Children logo,

which is like an actual charity that,

so they basically copied it

and said we’re saving the kids,

like a knockoff brand.

And almost immediately the project rugged.

They stole the money and tracing back through

the code was changed at the last second before launch.

Like if you looked at their code

that they launched as a test

versus the code they launched in actuality,

they changed only like two lines

and it was the whale code

to basically make the whale code non-existent.

Like you can sell as much as you want,

as fast as you want.

And it turned out that some of the influencers

had not only sold that and made money,

but also had a pattern of pump and dumping tokens.

So we can talk about what that is like.

Yeah, what’s pump and dump?

A pump and dump is just where,

you have a huge following,

you promote your little Lex coin to everybody

while holding a big portion of it.

And as everyone rushes in to buy it,

the price is gonna pump

and you dump at the same time.

So that’s where the name comes from, pump and dump.

You pump the price, sell all your tokens,

make a lot of money.

So I traced basically their wallets on the blockchain

and found that two of the actors specifically

had had a long history of doing this,

which really proved malicious intent.

And why I called it the worst is not,

it certainly wasn’t the worst in terms of like

the amount of people affected.

It relatively was like a small pump and dump

because it rugged almost immediately.

But in terms of the amount of people

that were involved in it,

in terms of the amount of malicious behavior before it

that like sort of proved that this wasn’t an accident,

the fact that there was like this whale code,

it was one of the most cynical attempts

to just take the money of the followers you had

and just like, that’s mine now.

So that’s why I called it that, but that’s to save the kids.

So that was-

That was a lot of the FaZe members.

And it was, I think Addison Rae.

There were a lot of people who seemed like

they were kind of taking shrapnel on it.

There was like this guy, Tico,

who he didn’t even sell the tokens.

He just like held onto it the entire time

and lost like a few thousand dollars or maybe even,

I forget the exact amount.

He lost a lot of money, a decent amount.

And so like, he took a lot of shrapnel with that,

but there were also people who were maliciously doing this.

So in that investigation,

like several of the members of FaZe got kicked out.

One of them got like permanently banned.

And then this other guy that I talked about

fled the country.

Like he sold all his belongings and like fled the country

and, you know, hid out in London or wherever he is now.

I don’t really know where he is.

Somewhere in the UK area.

So the basic idea there is to try to convert

your influence into money.

Correct.

Okay.

That’s the basic idea behind

a lot of influencer crypto promotions.

Well, but, right.

But that little word influencer means something.

Because there are most crypto scams,

influencer scams, they’re not, right?

Most kind of-

Right.

The most high profile ones, like just by nature,

they tend to be made high profile by the influencer.

So sometimes they are, but you’re right.

A lot of money has been lost and like nobody finds out

because there’s no one big sort of attached to it.

They just steal a lot of money.

But influencers are great salespeople

because like in order to overcome the resistance

of getting you to buy some random coin,

there has to be a reason.

And so much of the 21st century content creator generation

is defined by these strange parasocial relationships

where people feel like they know you,

not the character you play, but you,

and you have some friendship with them.

When in actuality, you don’t know the viewers.

You know, you have a sense,

but you don’t actually know all of these people.

And so that relationship is extremely powerful

in terms of persuasion.

So you can say, I believe in this,

and I’ve watched you for years.

And all of a sudden I say, if Lex believes in it,

I believe in it.

I trust him as a human.

And so that differentiates these coins.

And all of a sudden the coin blows up, gets really popular.

You made this side deal and you make a ton of money.

I have to say podcasting in particular is an intimacy.

Like I’m a huge fan of podcasts

and I feel like I’m friends with the people I listen to.

Right.

And boy, is that a responsibility.

Yes.

And that’s why it really hurts me to announce

that I am launching LexCoin.

No.

No.

No, man.

I hate money.

I hate this kind of, the schemingness of all of this,

the use of any kind of degree of fame

that you have for that kind of stuff.

There’s something just-

What makes it so like frustrating is these people-

Disgusting.

I have a general sense of what they were like,

sort of what I’m in the,

even though I wouldn’t describe myself as an influencer,

I make content on YouTube.

I know that, especially since they were taking

these huge corporate sponsorships,

they were making tons of money.

They didn’t have need for these scams.

I mean, I think it’s one thing to scam

if you’re like broke on the street, you know,

and you’re playing three card Monty to like live.

And I think it’s a whole other ethically cruel thing to do

if you’re basically trying to upgrade your penthouse

to the building next door.

And like, you’re already well off

and you just kind of want to get even further ahead.

I think that’s where-

Well, this is the fascinating thing.

So I’ve been very fortunate recently

to sort of get, you know, whatever, a larger platform.

And when you find out, it’s like, life is amazing.

I always thought life is amazing,

but it becomes more amazing.

Like, you meet so many cool people and so on.

But what you start getting is you have more opportunities

to like, yeah, like scammers will come to you

and then try to use you, right?

And I could see for somebody it could be tempting

to be like, ooh, it’d be nice to make some money.

I wanted to say like on this kind of,

we’re on this topic of opportunities you get,

you know, kind of when you get a platform.

So one of the reasons kind of I railed

a little bit earlier against materialism or whatever,

I think to the extent to which

you can moderate your own greed,

you can play longer term games.

And I think so many people end up cutting

an otherwise promising career short

by just wanting it too fast.

So I think it’s like a huge edge,

just like discipline is in terms

of like achieving what you want.

I think I’m like a very moderate,

like being comfortable with a moderate existence

and finding happiness in that is a huge edge

because really your overhead is so much cheaper

than the people who need a Ferrari

or a super nice house to feel fulfilled.

And when your overhead is less,

you have the luxury to say no to like sketchy offers.

You have freedom that other people don’t have

because a lot of times people don’t pitch it this way.

They pitch a Ferrari as freedom

or like a big house is like you’ve made it.

In a lot of ways, those shackle you back

to like you got to find the cashflow for those things.

It’s never a free ride.

Yeah, that’s really beautifully put.

I’ve always said that I had fuck you money

at the very beginning.

I was broke for most of my life.

The way you have fuck you money

is by not needing much to say fuck you.

That’s right.

I mean, that’s the overhead that you’re talking about.

If you can live simply and be truly happy

and be truly free,

I think that means you could be free

in any kind of situation.

You could make the wise kind of decisions.

And in that case, money enables you

in certain ways to do more cool stuff,

but it doesn’t shackle you like you said.

Too many people in this society you would shackle

because material possessions kind of like

draw you into this race of more and more and more and more.

And then you feel the burden of that,

bigger houses and all that kind of stuff.

Now you have to keep working.

Now you have to keep doing this thing.

Now you have to make more money.

And if it’s a YouTube channel and so on,

you have to get more.

And the same, it’s not even just about money.

That’s why I deliberately don’t check views and likes

and all that kind of stuff

is you don’t want that dopamine of pulling you in.

I have to do the thing that gets more and more attention

or more and more like, yeah, like money.

It’s so wise, yeah, agreed.

It’s a huge negative hit on your ability to do creative work.

Can I ask you about that?

Because I’m always interested in this.

I completely agree.

I think it’s funny because when you abstract yourself out

to the people you admire and respect

who inspired you to do the creative work you do,

you never think about like the views they were getting

or the money they were making

or the influence they had.

All you ever think about is the work itself.

And it’s funny when a lot of people get in this position,

your temptation is to focus on that which you can measure,

which is like all the stuff you said,

like the likes, the views.

That’s not actually the target or what you got into it for.

If you get into it for like,

cause you’re inspired or whatever,

your goal is inspiration, it’s impact.

And like that can’t be quantified that same way.

So it’s interesting, you have to find a way

as a creator of any of this stuff

to like deliberately detach yourself from the measurable

and focus on this thing, which is kind of abstract.

And I was wondering if you have any like ideas for that.

So one, yeah, there’s a bunch of ideas.

So one is figure out ways where you don’t see

the number of views on things.

So I wrote a Chrome extension for myself

that hides the number of views.

That’s really funny.

No, what’s funny is I have-

For me, cause it’s useful for other people’s content.

Right, oh my gosh, I’m gonna need to borrow this.

That was my problem.

I actually have some Chrome extensions for,

like I don’t like going down like recommendation rabbit

holes when I’m at work.

I just wanna like search for a video, find it.

I don’t wanna see like all the up next

cause I’ll waste time.

So I use Chrome extensions for that.

But the views is a problem because it’s relevant

to me as a creator.

Like, is this a big video?

Is it a-

Yeah, which is why I really hurt when they remove

like likes and dislikes.

Cause I wanna know for tutorials and so on what’s,

I mean, that’s probably really useful

for you, the dislikes, yeah.

Do you have that?

Do you ever considered making that Chrome extension public?

Sure, actually, yeah.

And there’ll be a good philosophy behind it, right?

Like don’t, if you’re a creator-

I really like it.

I love the idea.

I’ve wanted this thing before.

I don’t know if it necessarily exists.

Cause I don’t think I’ve made a Chrome extension public.

That’d be cool.

I would love to see, yeah, I would go to that process

of adding it to the, cause I love like open sourcing stuff.

So yeah, I’ll go add it to the Chrome extension,

like the store.

Yeah, cause I totally have,

I’ve hated this for like a long time.

YouTube made a change and they just continue

to make the analytics front and center,

which makes sense from their perspective.

They’re trying to give people better data

on what is successful and what makes something successful.

They’re trying to train their creators,

but in the process, it can lead to some unhealthy habits

of thinking views, define a video.

And so I’ve long thought, okay, I’ve learned analytics.

I understand retention.

Now I sort of want to do like the Zen,

like forget it all now.

And you can only do that if it’s out of your sight.

Depends how many friends you have who are creatives.

The other really important thing,

and I found this, this has nothing to do with creatives,

but people I respect very much in my life,

some of them people would know that they could be famous.

They will come to me and say,

they will comment on how popular a video was on YouTube.

They will sort of compliment.

The success.

The success defined by the popularity.

Even for a podcast where most of the listenership

is not on YouTube or Spotify now is getting crazy.

They will still compliment the YouTube number.

So one of the deliberate things I do is I either,

depending if it’s a close friend,

I’ll get offended and made fun of them for that.

And to sort of signal to them,

this is not the right thing.

I don’t want that.

And for people more like strangers

that compliment that kind of stuff,

I show zero interest.

I don’t receive the compliment well.

And I focus on the aspects of the compliment

that have to do with like, what do they find interesting?

Like, you know, I kind of make them,

reveal to them that you shouldn’t care

about the number of views.

It is strange.

There’s like this weird hypnotism that happens

once you get past a certain number.

And that number is some approximation.

It’s like, it’s always like hard numbers.

It’s like 100,000, a million, 10 million.

People just see a number and they just go like,

wow, that is, and they assign a quality to it

that may not, like, it usually means nothing at all.

So I agree.

I’ve never been good at like handling that

because you’re like, thank you?

You know, it’s like, okay.

That said, I do admire, very different for me,

but I admire Mr. Beast who unapologetically says like,

the number is all that matters.

Like basically the number shows,

like the number of views you get shows like how much,

I don’t know, joy you brought to people’s lives.

Because if they watched the thing,

they kept watching the thing.

They didn’t turn to now.

That means they loved it.

You brought value to their life.

You brought enjoyment.

And I’m going to bring the maximum amount of enjoyment

to the maximum number of the people.

And I’m going to do the most epic videos

and all that kind of stuff.

So I admire that when you’re so unapologetically

into the numbers.

Yeah, he’s sort of, it’s interesting.

He’s like, gosh, we’re getting way too in the way tonight.

Is this a bad, I don’t know.

I’m like constantly self-monitoring

about like what topics we’re on.

But if we can, Mr. Beast is so interesting

because he’s almost done what,

have you ever seen Moneyball?

Yes.

It’s the story of how someone brought statistics

to baseball and it revolutionized everything.

He’s Moneyballed YouTube.

He took statistics to YouTube and it changed everything.

And everybody now, so many people are playing catch up.

I think it would be interesting in a few years

to see how he develops.

And now that he’s like kind of revolutionized

like the data side of things,

how he then approaches future videos.

Because there’s a point at which you’ve optimized,

you’ve optimized.

But optimizing for short-term video performance

is not the same as optimizing

for long-term viewer happiness.

And how do you do that?

Assuming the YouTube algorithm

does not perfectly already do it for you, which it doesn’t.

But they’re trying to obviously do that,

optimize for long-term happiness.

And also growing, optimize for long-term creative growth.

Sure.

I think the thing that people don’t,

I mean, maybe I don’t know.

I actually don’t know enough about Jimmy.

But to me, the thing that seems to be special about him

isn’t the money ball aspect.

That’s really important.

It’s like taking the data seriously.

But to me, it’s the part of the idea generation.

The constant brainstorming and coming up with videos.

So it’s nice to connect the idea generation with the data.

But how many people, when they create on YouTube

and other platforms,

really generate a huge amount of ideas?

Like constantly brainstorm.

Constantly, constantly brainstorm.

At least for me, I don’t think I go

so many steps ahead in my thinking.

I don’t try to come up with all possible conversations.

I don’t come up with all possible videos I can make.

But you can’t, so the one mistake to make

is to map Jimmy’s philosophy onto every genre.

Because not every genre fits that model.

Your model is not an idea-centric model.

It’s a people-centric model.

And so you, like, if you were in the business

of creating just mass entertainment

for the sake of mass entertainment,

you might focus on, okay, the reason going idea-focused

instead of person-focused is such a revolutionary idea

in some senses is because ideas can be broader,

more broadly appealing than any single human can be.

But you’re not going for that.

You’re going for a podcast interview.

And I think for you, the goal should always be

how deep can you get with interesting guests

and finding the most interesting guests,

which is a different, probably, set of skills than-

Well put, really well put.

But I think the right mapping there

is finding the most interesting guests.

Yeah, right.

And I think, I don’t do enough work on that.

So for example, I try to be,

something I do prioritize is talking to people

that nobody’s talked to before.

So, because it’s like, I kind of see myself

as not a good, like, I know a lot of people

that are much better than me.

I really admire, I think Joe Rogan is still the GOAT.

He’s just an incredible conversationalist.

So it’s like, all right, who is somebody

Joe’s not gonna talk to?

Either he’s not interested or it’s not gonna happen.

Like, I wanna talk to that person.

I wanna reveal the interesting aspects of that person.

And I think I should do a Mr. Beast style rigor

in searching for interesting people.

And you should probably find people to help you search.

Sure, he does that.

But if we’re being honest, he does that, of course,

with other folks, but he’s the main engine.

Yeah, you need like, sort of like a pre-filter,

you’re the final filter.

Because your problem is, you’re only able

to think of humans that you’ve thought of before

or been exposed to.

And most of the world, you’ve never been exposed to.

So you need people to like pre-filter and go,

okay, these guys are just interesting humans.

Lex has never heard of them.

And then you sort of take a batch of like 100 people

and you go, who seems the most interesting for me?

But by the way, on that topic, where it weeds into weeds,

I’ve almost done, I’m building up,

I programmed this guest recommendation thing

where I wanna get suggestions from other people,

because I really wanna find people that nobody knows.

This is the tricky thing.

Not, you’re not famous, but the idea is

there’s probably fascinating humans out there

that nobody knows.

Correct.

That, I wanna find those.

And I believe in the crowdsourcing aspect will raise them.

And now, of course, the top 100 will be crypto scams.

No, but yes.

So like, I have to make sure that these kinds of swarms

of humans that recommend, I can filter through

and there’s whole kinds of systems for that.

But I wanna find the fascinating people out there

that nobody’s ever heard from.

And from a programmer perspective,

I thought surely I could do that

by just building the system.

Yeah, that’s how programmers always think.

They’ll just automate a system to do it.

Well, that’s the Jimmy Moneyball, right?

Like looking at the data.

Yep.

Yeah.

Weeds on weeds.

How do we get to Mr. Beast exactly?

I’m not sure.

Okay, save the kids.

Influencer.

Influencer, that’s probably how.

Let me ask you more on the guru front.

You’ve, okay, let’s start with somebody

that you’ve covered that I think you’ve covered a lot

and I’m really embarrassed to not know much about him.

I think this is like old school coffee sell.

You’ve been through stages, okay?

I’ve been through stages and phases, true.

So a character named Dan Lok.

Yeah.

Who is he?

You’ve exposed him for cult-like human

and his cult-like practices.

Who is he?

What has he done?

So Dan Lok is sort of,

he’s gone through a number of iterations,

but he was kind of this like sales trainer guy

who really made a hard push

into what he called high ticket sales.

And he was telling people that they could kind of escape

the nine to five rat race

if they just learn high ticket sales

and they can have the life of their dreams.

Basically, it’s like, I’ll teach you to sell,

but I’ll teach you to ask,

like, not only will I teach you to sell you that pen,

but I’ll teach you to sell it for $50,000

instead of a dollar, right?

So I talked to a lot of the people

who had taken this course,

because it was pretty expensive.

I think it was like $2,500 or $1,000.

And mind you, the people who are taking it are like teachers

and like people who don’t have a lot of money.

And then you take the course and immediately you find out,

okay, well, there’s an upsell.

At the end of the course, you’re not ready.

You need to go from like high ticket closer,

which is one of the products to inner circle

or like the level up, right?

And all of these courses are structured like this.

So they spend a tremendous amount on Google ads

to get people in the door, promising the dream.

And then once you’re in,

you’re actually not done being like the product.

You’re actually in the system that tries to upsell you

again and again and again and again.

And eventually you’re paying monthly

and you’re getting more and more.

You’re constantly paying for access to Dan Lok’s wisdom

and like ideas.

And fundamentally,

the sales system wasn’t working for people.

I mean, I talked to like, for example,

a teacher who put in like $25,000,

was in debt at one point and has nothing to show for it.

I know, and it was sort of these tactics

of pressuring, pressuring, pressuring.

And then anytime anyone would complain,

he would try to silence them.

So I heard from like, funny enough,

this lady was a teacher as well.

She put together a Facebook group,

basically saying, I think this guy’s a scam.

His course didn’t work.

It’s not working for a lot of people

because fundamentally the promise of turning someone

from a non-salesman into a person

who’s making six figures selling

is not an easy thing to do.

It’s not just a matter of just like take my course.

But anyways, it wasn’t working.

She created a Facebook group about it

and he like sues her

and was like legally pressuring her to stop doing that.

And I realized like somebody has to speak out about this

and everyone who is, is getting silenced.

So I was like, I’m gonna use my platform

to raise awareness to this.

And people came out of the woodwork.

I mean, saying that this guy defrauded me or he scammed me.

And I wanna just really quickly take a second,

take a beat to explain why get rich quick schemes

are different than let’s say selling a water bottle

and saying it’s the greatest water bottle ever, right?

Because sometimes people wonder, they go like,

well, doesn’t like Nissan say their car

is gonna make you happy

and then it doesn’t make you happy.

Like, why is that different

from the kind of advertising of a get rich quick course?

I mean, both of them are sort of promising things

that aren’t true, but you get something,

you take some kind of a training.

You know, isn’t it the same thing?

No, here’s why.

There’s this concept in economics called elastic demand

and inelastic demand.

What it essentially means is that if I raise the value

of this water bottle, there’s a point at which

you’re just gonna be like, no,

it doesn’t make any sense, right?

But there are areas in our lives

where we have desperation around them

that can get deeply predatory very quickly

because they have no,

there’s no elasticity around their demand.

For example, your health.

If you get cancer and I have the pill that will solve it,

or at least let’s say I don’t, I have a sugar pill here,

but if I can convince you that this pill

will solve your cancer or treat your cancer,

you will pay any amount of money you have on this earth

to get this pill.

But obviously that gets really predatory really quick

because selling something that isn’t real

is almost as compelling

as selling something that is real, right?

So this happens in the get rich quick space too.

There’s any amount of money you would pay

to make a lot more money, right?

So these products have inelastic demand.

That’s why you see what is essentially a few webinars

getting sold for $2,500.

Courses that literally have identical videos on YouTube,

like very similar course curriculums

that are selling for such extravagant amounts of money.

And I think there can be comparisons made to college

because obviously there’s similar questions about benefits.

But in this case, there’s not even statistics available

that even shows the average person

gets something out of it.

That’s true of like, if you go to college,

your average income will improve, right?

That’s the justification there.

There’s none of that.

There’s no case studies.

There’s nothing backing their extravagant claims

of you’re gonna make all this money,

you’re gonna make all this wealth.

Instead, they’re just, as we said before,

they’re selling you a dream.

So that’s why I find all those types

of get-rich-quick schemes so problematic,

and it’s why I’ve railed against them

for a significant amount of time.

What have you learned from attacking,

exposing some of the things that Dan Lok is doing?

What have you learned about human nature

and fraudsters and gurus and so on?

That’s a great question.

So I think one of them is that

there’s this systemic problem that the phrase,

there’s a sucker born every minute, is very true.

There is no end to the people

who will fall for something like this.

And the problem is, is because there’s just no end

to need and want and just lack.

I mean, it’s easy to, on the one hand,

criticize people’s greed, but a lot of times,

you have to put yourself in their shoes.

If you’re at a dead-end job, you have nothing going for you,

you don’t have the money to go to college,

you don’t wanna get in debt, fair play,

where do you go, right?

As you said, there’s somebody who’s there saying

they believe in you, they believe you can make six figures.

You know, you’re gonna believe in that.

And so I really felt like it made a lot more sense

to tackle it from the other side,

from the side of people that can stop,

that can basically be exposed and basically be,

have sort of like a negative put on their work.

I mean, they’re largely going under the radar,

so I kind of felt like, you know, do you wanna educate,

do you wanna like blame it on the victims

and say you should have known better,

you should have done this, you should stop,

but there’s no end to that,

or do you go after the grifters themselves?

And so that’s what I realized.

I realized like that’s the tactic that I went with.

And it’s tough,

because it’s a little like legally risky to do that,

but yeah, you just kinda gotta be smart about it, I guess.

So your platform has gotten really big,

so there’s some responsibility to that.

Weirdly big, yeah.

Yeah.

Let’s say.

Because like only a year ago, it was like a lot,

a lot smaller, and then it’s hard to make that adjustment,

you know, because like to me, it’s just the same,

it’s the same show I’ve been doing.

So how do you avoid becoming a guru yourself

or your ego growing?

And there’s different trajectories it could take,

one of which is you can start seeing everybody as a scammer

and only you can reveal it.

And like you have a audience of people

who love seeing the epic CoffeeZilla grilling,

and you can destroy everyone,

and that power now is getting to your head.

How do you avoid that?

Well, I mean, this is like less optically obvious.

I think the main way is like,

my circle of friends doesn’t care about any of that.

Like my wife doesn’t care.

Whose opinion I value has no relation

to like a subscriber metric or anything like that.

I think that’s like tangibly the most important thing

to just staying grounded.

As far as like becoming a guru,

I just don’t have anything to like sell.

I mean, I’m not interested in teaching people finance.

I’m not interested in teaching people,

not interested in selling a course.

And I’ve kind of given myself a hard line on that,

which I think has helped me a bit,

is there’s a temptation to go,

well, I can tell what’s a scam,

so let me tell you what’s not a scam.

And a lot of people have offered a lot of money to do that,

and basically be like,

hey, I have such and such legitimate product,

come be like an endorser.

And I just don’t do that

because I think it undermines a lot of what I do,

is if you get like,

if you’re taking money in on the side to say this is legit,

and you’re saying this isn’t legit,

that’s a huge conflict of interest.

So I think it’s about managing conflicts of interest

and keeping people around me

that are grounded.

And also I think,

yeah, my only interest really is just like,

make cool stuff,

and I guess I’ll do that until people stop watching, so.

A question on that topic

from the CoffeeZilla subreddit, shout out.

Shout out.

How does Coffee find the strength to maintain his integrity

and resist temptation of being paid a great amount of money

to advertise or promote a potential scam?

I think that goes back

to what we’ve been talking about a lot,

which is just on what you prioritize, what you value.

I’ve just never,

I guess I grew up kind of lower middle class,

and I had a great time.

Like I had a great childhood, I had very loving parents.

And because of that,

I guess intuited at an early age

that money doesn’t do a whole lot.

And I knew a lot of people who were way better off

who had miserable childhoods

because whether their dad was always gone at work

or like they just had other family issues

that just money can’t buy.

And I realized, I guess quickly,

that money’s a very like,

it’s a glittery object that isn’t what it appears to be.

And so to me, I’m like,

I’m having the time of my life making my show.

I’m not gonna have the time,

like you could ruin all that

just trying to go for this quick check

when it’s like, no, I’m having a great time.

Yeah, it’s actually maybe,

you’re probably the same way,

but for me, there’s a lot of happiness in having integrity

in looking in the mirror

and knowing that you’re the kind of person that has that.

In fact, walking away from money is also fun

because it’s like promising yourself,

like it’s showing,

it’s easy to just say you have integrity.

It’s nice to like,

ah, I actually,

I’ve discovered several times in my life

that I have integrity.

Yeah, you get put like basically to the test.

Yeah, I’ve said,

like, I don’t know if I publicly said,

but to myself, I say like,

you can’t buy,

there’s a lot of things you can’t buy with me,

like for a billion dollars,

like a trillion dollars.

But it’d be nice to get tested that way.

It’d be cool to see,

because you never know until you’re in that room.

It’s true.

The same with power, given power.

I’d like to believe I’m the kind of person

that wouldn’t abuse power,

but you don’t know until you’re tested.

So anyway, you’re in a really tricky position

because you’re doing incredible,

I mean, you are a world-class journalist, straight up.

And so there is pressure on that

of like not having,

like erring on the side of caution

with like having conflicts of interest and stuff like that.

It’s a really tough seat to sit in.

It’s really tough.

It’s really tough, but it’s unfairly tough, I feel like.

But it’s good that you’re sort of

weighing all of those.

But that said, go donate to Coffeezilla.

Donate all, everything.

Support him.

He’s a really, really important human being.

The other guy I did,

I think is the first person I discovered

that you investigated is Brian Rose of London Real.

Can you talk about his story?

Brian Rose, he was sort of this interesting figure

because he was like trying to be,

to one level or another, the Joe Rogan of London,

which I don’t think he did a terribly bad job of,

especially initially.

He had some really interesting podcasts

with some really interesting people.

And it’s funny enough, I started out as a like,

I would watch him.

I mean, I don’t know if I was like a huge fan,

but I was like, I like some of his interviews.

He had some really good, like big gets

in terms of, you know, great guests.

However, when kind of COVID started,

he went down this really weird grifting rabbit hole

where he did like this interview with David Icke,

who’s, as you know,

like a pretty big COVID conspiracy theorist.

And I mean like actual,

like he believes some of the royals are literally lizards.

So he got shut down for that.

And he kind of made a big stink,

I think it’s fine.

Nobody likes to be censored.

And I’m not even saying that he should have been censored,

but his reaction to that was to like

raise a ton of money from his audience,

promising this digital freedom platform.

And at first it was like, oh, we want to raise $100,000.

And then they raised it like within a day.

So he’s like, well, we got to raise a lot more money.

And so eventually they raised a million dollars

and he’s trying to raise $250,000 a month

to kind of keep putting his viewers’ money into this stuff.

So I started digging into the platform they were building

and there was nothing free about it.

They had censorship guidelines

and there was nothing about a platform at all.

There was no underlying infrastructure.

He just got some white label live streaming thing.

So I criticized him for that.

It was just this ridiculous thing.

All the donators expected one thing.

They thought Brian Rose was going to take on Google

and Facebook and like bring free speech back for everybody.

And of course he didn’t.

And then it kind of got worse

because he started taking a lot of heat for that.

And he really pivoted hard into like the DeFi grift.

So he started selling this course about DeFi mastery.

And this is a guy who knows nothing about crypto

or very little at the least.

So it just got really kind of,

he just kind of doubled down on this course model

of you’re going to be rich if you just follow me.

And it was ultimately,

you just type in Brian Rose on YouTube.

You can see what his audience thought of that.

Cause almost all of them have left him at this point.

He’s getting like a thousand views a video.

And it wasn’t because of me.

I mean, it was like people lost taste

in just the constant ask for more money,

more money, more money.

At some point people get sick of it.

And it’s like, everyone has an understanding

that like no one works for free,

but when it starts to be ego driven

and driven around money, everything’s about money,

it drives people away.

Well, you’re a part of that sort of helping people.

It’s nice to have a voice.

Yeah, I certainly spoke out.

I mean, it wasn’t like I was quiet.

I was very loud about it at the time.

But I mean, in the sense that there,

if you look at someone like Andrew Tate,

I’ve made a video about him,

even though he’s been banned off all the platforms,

he gets more views than Brian Rose.

And I think it’s just like it was a testament

to how much Brian Rose was like doing like the grift

that people could, even people who were fans

and didn’t care about what I said,

like couldn’t look past, you know,

just the constant ask for more and more money.

People just get burned out.

Is there some aspect that you worry about

where with a large audience,

there seems to be a certain aspect of human nature

where people like to see others destroyed?

Sure.

Do you worry about hurting people that don’t deserve it?

Or rather sort of attacking people that are a grifter light,

but they get like a giant storm of negativity towards them

and therefore sort of overpoweringly cancel them

or like hurt them disproportionately?

Sure.

I mean, I try to be sensitive to my platform.

And as I’ve grown,

I’ve tried to make sure my video topics have grown with me.

And like, it does reach this tricky point

where if you’re exposing a grifter with like 50,000 subs,

who’s doing some harm, are you punching down?

Right.

And so far there’s been enough high profile things

that I can distract myself with

to where this has never been a problem.

You don’t ever wanna be sort of like Sir Lancelot

in retirement.

Where have you heard this analogy?

Okay, so there’s this great analogy where it’s like,

Sir Lancelot’s the guy who slays the dragon, right?

He gets a lot of fame and he gets a lot of fortune

for saving the dragon,

or at least a lot of people love him.

But what happens after he slays the first dragon?

He’s gotta go find a bigger dragon.

So he goes finds a bigger dragon.

And eventually, depending on how many dragons

you think are there in the world,

maybe he kills all the dragons.

And one day people go see Sir Lancelot

and he’s in a field with cows and he’s chopping their heads.

And he’s sort of put himself in retirement,

but he can’t even enjoy the fruits

because his whole thing is like, I’m killing the dragon.

So I try to be cognizant

and I try to always make myself willing to hang up my,

my suspenders, I guess, hang up my hat.

I try to be aware, like,

if I significantly improve the problem,

I put myself out of business.

I want to be okay with that, basically.

And just be fine with it.

I don’t, the funny thing is,

I was more worried about this as like an issue earlier

because I thought there was a finite,

like, I was like, I’m gonna solve this faster,

especially as it started gaining traction.

Like, I’m gonna solve this fast.

I got this, you know?

Classic naive, you know, we all think we’re so influential.

FTX comes along.

Well, yeah, you just, you just, yeah,

you just get like a, with time you get humbled

because you talk to people.

I’ve talked to like versions of Coffeezilla that are older

and it’s like, it’s like, oh yeah, they didn’t solve it.

And they probably were better.

I just imagine a smoke-filled room

of just like retired Batman

and you’re this young, bright-eyed.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Fiery-spirited investigator.

Yeah, exactly.

What’s the process of investigation that you can speak to?

What are some interesting things you’ve learned

about what it takes to do great investigations?

Sure, great investigations reveal something new

or bring something to light.

So I think what everyone thinks in terms of investigations

is like a lot of like, you know, Googling

or like searching through articles.

I think that’s the first thing you wanna get away from.

And you wanna try to talk to people

doing like the non-obvious things

and just trying to get perspectives

that are beyond just what is available.

So a lot of it’s just having conversations

is so enlightening, both to victims

and also obviously trying to get,

talk to the people themselves.

Secondly, there’s sometimes some analysis you can generate

that’s meaningful, like blockchain evidence.

So in the case of SafeMoon, for example,

going back to that, I found someone’s secret account

where they were pumping, dumping coins.

They were saying things like, who sold?

I’m so mad at the guy who sold, F the guy who sold.

And you look at his account and he was the guy selling.

And it’s like, that is just, that’s great stuff.

So digging through the blockchain,

kind of I’ve gained some skills there.

And that’s kind of this fun,

I guess I would say it’s this weird edge I have right now

because a lot of people don’t know too much about that.

And so I have this weird expertise that works now.

I don’t think that’ll work forever

because I think people kind of figure out

how to do very similar analyses.

But so it’s like kind of an interesting edge

right now that I have.

So that’s like a data driven investigation,

but you also do interviews, right?

Yeah, definitely.

And then also recently I’ve tried to get more response,

speaking to your point about like,

as your platform gets bigger,

you need more responsibility.

I’ve tried to get much more responsible

about like reaching out or somehow giving the subject

some way to talk.

Because I think in early on,

I was such a small channel that A,

if I asked them, they wouldn’t answer.

But B, I kind of felt like I was launching these videos

into the abyss.

And when some of my videos had real traction,

I was like, okay, hang on a second.

Let’s double check this.

Let’s triple check it.

Let’s try to make sure.

All this stuff is correct

and there’s no other side of the story.

I’ll say this has interesting implications

because for example,

I investigated this thing called Genesis,

they’re a billion dollar crypto lender.

And my conclusion was that they were insolvent.

That’s a huge accusation.

So what do you do?

Well, I emailed their press team, everybody.

I said, hey, I think you’re insolvent.

I think you’re this.

I think I laid out all my accusations.

And I said, you have till I think 2 p.m.

the next day to respond.

At 8 a.m. before I made my video,

they announced to all their investors

that they’re freezing withdrawals.

They don’t have the money.

So they front, I don’t know if they saw the inner,

like I don’t know if they actually saw that email.

I don’t wanna take credit for collapsing them or whatever.

But my point is, had I not taken that level of kind of care

and just said, hey, you’re a scammer, you’re frauds.

Ironically, could I have done more good

by allowing people to withdraw their money early?

I made some tweets that people did see

that like some people got their money out,

but my YouTube audience is much larger.

And could I have helped more people

had I not given them basically the ability

to know what I was gonna produce when I produced it?

Boy, your life is difficult

because you can potentially hurt the company

that doesn’t deserve it if you’re wrong,

or if you’re right and you warn the company,

you might hurt the,

whew.

Well, I’m glad your wife is a supporter and keeps you strong.

That’s a tough, tough decision.

Ultimately, I guess you wanna err on the side

of the individual people, of the investors and so on.

But it’s tough.

It’s always a really, really tricky decision to make.

Very tricky.

Oh boy.

That’s so interesting.

And then the thing I’ve seen in your interviews

that I don’t remember,

because I think when I watched you earlier in your career,

you were a little bit harsher.

You were having, you were like trollier.

You’re having a little more fun.

Sure.

And when I’ve seen you recently, you do have the fun,

but whenever you interview, you seem respectful.

Like you attack in good faith,

which is really important for an interviewer.

So then people can go on

and actually try to defend themselves.

That’s really important signal to send to people,

because then you’re not just about tearing down.

You’re after like the, you know, it’s cliche to say,

but the truth, like you’re really trying

to actually investigate in good faith, which is great.

So that signal is out there.

So like people like SBF could, like he should,

he should go on your platform, I think.

I mean, now it’s like in full,

not just like a half-assed conversation on Twitter space,

but in full.

So that’s great that that signal is out there.

But of course the downside of sort of,

as you become more famous,

people might be scared to sort of go on.

But you do put that signal of being respectful out there,

which is really, really important.

You know, it’s interesting.

It surprises me.

I know it surprises other people,

because other people have commented,

but it consistently surprises me

how many people still talk to me.

And maybe it’s because they,

and I really do give a good attempt

to try to argue in good faith.

I try not to just like load up ad hominems

or anything like that.

I just try to present the evidence

and let the audience make up their mind.

But it surprises me sometimes that people

will just be like, yeah, they wanna talk,

they wanna talk, they wanna talk.

I think it’s very human in a way.

And I think it’s like almost,

it’s almost like good.

Like one of the things that is always told

to everyone who’s gonna talk to the cops,

like you should never talk to the cops, whatever,

which is true.

You shouldn’t talk to the cops.

Because even if you’re innocent,

they can use your words,

they can twist your words, et cetera.

But there’s something that gets lost

in that almost robotic self-interest

that I think having open conversations,

even if you’ve done something wrong,

I think there’s something really compelling about that

that continues to make people talk

in interrogation rooms, in Twitter spaces,

wherever you are,

regardless of whether you totally shouldn’t be talking.

And I don’t wanna downplay that.

That’s actually really important.

I mean, it’s like a lot of cases get solved,

a lot of investigations go farther

because people sort of make the miscalculation to talk.

But I think it’s like almost important

in a way that we have that human bias

to like connect in spite of self-interest.

Yeah, but also they’re judging the integrity

and the good faith of the other person.

So I think when people consume your content,

especially your latest content,

they know that you’re a good person.

I found myself,

like there’s a lot of journalists that reach out to me

and I find myself like not wanting to talk to them

because I don’t know if the other person on the side

is coming in good faith.

Even on silly stuff, I’m not a-

Same way.

Like I’m not a, I don’t have anything to hide.

Like you don’t really have anything to hide,

but you don’t know what their like spin is.

Can I tell you an example?

I’m dying because I believe so strongly

that journalists have done themselves such a disservice.

Okay, one of the truest things is that like

everyone loves journalism in theory

and almost everyone dislikes journalists as a whole.

Like there’s a deep distrust of journalists

and there’s a deep love for journalism.

It’s this weird disconnect.

I think a lot of it can be summarized in,

there’s this book called the,

oh God, what it’s called?

I think it’s called The Journalist and the Murderer.

It’s written by Janet Malcolm.

The first line of this book is that like

every journalist who knows what they’re doing,

who isn’t too like,

is smart enough to know what they’re doing,

knows what they’re doing is deeply unethical

or something like that.

And what they’re talking about

is that there’s a tradition in journalism

to betray the subject,

to lie to them in the hopes of getting a story

and play to their ego and to their sense of self

to make it seem like you’re gonna write one article

and you stab them in the back at the end

when you press publish

and you write the totally different article.

This is what actually everyone hates about journalists.

And it’s happened to me before.

So I did a story like way back in the day,

I got interviewed about something

that was like data with YouTube.

I made a few comments about data and YouTube.

And somehow by the time the article got published,

it’s about me endorsing their opinion

that PewDiePie is an anti-Semite.

And I’m like, I reached out to this person,

I said, I never said that.

Like, how did you even twist my words to say that?

And I felt so disgusted and betrayed to have like,

I’m like this mouthpiece for an ideology

or like a thought that I do not actually agree with.

So, and when journalists do this, they think,

well, I’m never gonna interview this person again,

so it’s okay.

So it’s like, it’s almost like the ends justify the means,

I get the story.

But the ends don’t justify the means

because you’ve now undermined

the entire field’s credibility with that person.

And when that happens enough times,

you end up sitting across from Lex Friedman

and it’s like, well, I don’t know

if they’re gonna represent me fairly.

Because the base assumption is that regardless

of what the journalist says, they could betray you

and they might betray you at the end of the day

and be saying you’re great

while they’re secretly writing like a hit piece

about like, you know, how much, you know,

you’re a bad force for the world.

Where, whereas there’s an alternate universe

where if the journalist was somewhat upfront

about their approach, or at least didn’t mislead

and didn’t say like, I love you, I think you’re great.

You would end up with less access,

but you would end up with more trusted journalism,

which I think in the long run would be better.

I think you get more access.

I think in the long-term, yeah, but all of these,

like everything we’re talking about is long-term games

versus short-term games.

In the short-term, you get more access

if you suck up to the person,

if you say this, say this, say this,

and you stab them in the back later.

Long-term, you build a long-term reputation,

people trust you, it actually matters more.

And it’s nice when that reputation is your own individual.

So like you have a YouTube channel, you’re one individual.

So people trust that because you have a huge disincentive

to screw people over.

True.

I feel like if you’re in the New York Times,

if you screw somebody over,

the New York Times gets the hit, not you individually.

So you can like, you’re safer,

but like the reason I don’t screw people over

is I know that, well, there’s my own ethics and integrity,

but also there’s a strong disincentive to like,

because you’re now, that person’s gonna go public

with me screwing them over,

completely lying about everything,

how I presented the person, for example.

And that’s just gonna percolate throughout the populace

and they’re gonna be like,

Alexis, the person is a lying sack of shit.

And so there’s a huge disincentive to do that.

Yeah, journalists don’t have that.

That is what’s interesting about, yeah,

the move towards independent journalism.

I think we’ll probably end up at a space where,

it’s so interesting.

Mainstream journalism has so much work to do

to repair the trust with the average individual.

And it’s going to take a lot of like self-reflection.

I’ve talked to a few mainstream journalists about this.

And a lot of them will admit it behind closed doors,

but like there’s this general sense that,

oh, the public’s not being fair to us.

Like they’re very self, they’re defensive, I guess,

in a way.

And I understand why,

because sometimes it’s just a few bad apples

that ruin it for everybody.

But without the acknowledgement of the deep distrust

that they have with a good portion of our society,

there’s no way to rebuild that.

Just like when there’s no acknowledgement

of the corruption of the 2008 financial crash,

there’s no way to rebuild that.

Even if most bankers, most traders are not unethical

or duplicitous or totally normal people

who maybe aren’t deserving of the bad reputation,

but you have to acknowledge the damage

that’s been done by bad actors

before you can like heal that system.

Well, what do you think about Elon

just opening the door to a journalist

to see all the emails that were sent,

the quote unquote Twitter files?

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

I mean, I saw a lot of,

I’m like in this weird thing where I see,

I’m so, I follow a lot of independent people

and I follow a lot of mainstream journalists

and that there’s very polar opposite takes on that.

People really quickly politicize it,

but to me, the thing that was fascinating

is just the transparency that I’ve never seen from,

one of the really frustrating things to me,

because a lot of this podcast

has been about interviewing tech people, CEOs and so on,

and they’re just so guarded with everything.

It’s hard to get to, and so it’s nice to get,

hopefully this is a signal, look, you can be transparent.

Like this is a signal to increase transparency.

Hopefully so.

I don’t, yeah, it’s been tribalized so quickly.

It’s like, I’ve lost a lot of faith in that.

And unfortunately it’s been this like bludgeon match

of like, you know, if you’re on the right,

you think it’s uncovering the greatest story ever

about Hunter Biden.

If you’re on the left, you think they were just sharing,

they were just silencing revenge porn pics of Hunter Biden.

So therefore it was justified.

And by the way, Trump also sent messages to Twitter.

So doesn’t that mean that like we should be criticizing,

this goes back to why I don’t touch politics

is because I think as many problems as I have,

I think when you become a journalist that,

not even a political journalist,

when you become a journalist in politics,

you have like twice the problem.

So I’m like, I’m happy to be well outside

of that kind of sphere.

But it’s an interesting-

It is interesting.

Forget Twitter files,

but Twitter itself is really, really interesting

from the virality of information transfer.

And from a journalistic perspective,

it’s like how information travels,

how it becomes distributed, it’s interesting.

What do you think about Twitter?

I’m always conflicted on Twitter

because I almost hate how much I enjoy using it.

Cause I’m like, this is like this mindless bird app

is consuming my time.

It’s this incredible networking tool,

but what’s weird is when I think

about my own presence on Twitter,

they’ve almost made it too easy to like say something

that you’ve half thought.

Like the friction to send a tweet is so much less

than like, if I’m gonna make a YouTube video,

there’s several points at which I’m like,

well, what’s the other side?

What’s this, what’s that?

There’s no friction there.

And so one thing I’ve noticed

is everyone I follow on Twitter,

a lot of them after reading all their tweets,

I think nothing more of them, nothing less of them.

But there’s a lot of them that I think less of.

And I don’t think I’ve ever had an experience

where I’ve read someone tweets

and I think more of them in a way.

And I’m like, what does that say that?

Yeah, what is that?

Like there’s so many people I admire

that the worst of them is represented in Twitter.

Like there’s a lot of people.

There’s a million examples.

They become like snarky and sometimes mocking

and derisive and negative and like emotional messes.

I don’t know.

Yeah, what is that?

Maybe we shouldn’t criticize it

and accept that as like a beautiful raw aspect

of that human being, but not encompassing,

not representing the full entirety of that human being.

But it does reflect like,

it’s impossible to not reflect it to some extent.

Or you’d have to counter that bias really carefully

because that is them.

It is a thought they had.

It’s just probably something

that should have been an unexpressed thought perhaps.

So yeah, I kind of wonder like my,

I’m like, should I be on Twitter?

But the problem is, is it’s such a great place

where so many, like so much of the news happens on Twitter,

so much of the journalism breaks on Twitter.

Even people in the New York Times, they’ll tweet their scoop

and they’ll like, they’ll put that out on Twitter first.

So it’s this really weird thing where I’d love to be off it

and it’s like too useful for my job.

I kind of hate it.

No, no, you need to, well, it depends.

But from my perspective, you should be on it.

Oh, I definitely am, yeah.

So like, Coffeezilla should definitely be on Twitter,

but have developed the calluses and the strength

to not give into the lesser aspects.

Because you’re like, you’re silly, you’re funny.

You could be cutting with your humor.

I wouldn’t give into the darker aspects of that,

like low effort negativity.

If you’re, the way you are in your videos,

I would say if you’re ever negative

or making fun of stuff, I think that’s high effort.

So I would still put a lot of effort into it,

like calmly thinking through that.

Because, and also not giving into the dopamine desire

to say something that’s gonna get a lot of likes.

You know, I have that all the time.

You use Twitter enough, you realize certain messages

that are going to get more likes than others.

And-

And are usually the ones that are extreme, more extreme.

Yeah.

And like emotional, like, Lex is an idiot.

Or like, Lex is the greatest human being ever.

It’s much better than, oh, wow,

what a polite, nuanced conversation.

I can tell you right now which of those three tweets

isn’t gonna perform well.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think the extremes are okay, if you believe it.

Like I will sometimes say positive things.

I said that the Twitter files release was historic.

Of course, this before I realized,

I mean, the reason I said it is not,

is because the transparency.

It’s so refreshing to see some, any level of transparency.

And then of course, those kinds of comments,

the way Twitter does, is every side will interpret it

in the worst possible way for them,

and they will run with it.

Or some side, when it’s political,

yeah, one side will interpret, yes, I agree with Lex.

You’re right, it’s historic.

They might not have even read the article.

They just like, they literally, or the tweet thread,

and they’re just like, it is historic because it’s-

Historic because Hunter Biden was finally the collusion,

or whatever it is.

And then the other side’s just like,

no, it’s a nothing burger.

But yeah, that aspect of nuance,

and that it’s frozen in time,

even with editing, there’s a-

So tough.

It’s tricky, but if you maintain a cool head

through all of that, and hold to your ethics

and your ideas, and use it to spread the ideas,

which you do extremely well on YouTube,

I think it’d be a really powerful platform.

There’s no other platform that allows

for the viral spread of ideas, good ideas,

than this.

And this is where, like, especially with Twitter Spaces,

I mean, where else would I see, I think twice,

impromptu conversations with coffeezilla and SPF?

Never, yeah, nowhere else.

Because he wasn’t going to come on my show.

He wasn’t going to come on some big prepared thing.

It’s like, hey, YOLO, let’s go on a Twitter Space.

And I like pop up, and you know what’s funny?

And this, I hope this release is late enough,

or, well, SPF probably won’t see this.

Although I’m sure he’s-

And unfortunately, he will.

Oh, okay.

Yes.

Well, hopefully I’ll have time to enact my little plan,

but I’m hoping if he goes on any future Spaces,

I can haunt him from interview to interview,

which is like, I keep showing up,

and he’s like, oh, I hate this guy.

But I think he’s already kind of probably

has PTSD of, like, in the shadows lurks a coffeezilla.

That would just, it’s just like, that really amuses me.

I mean, there is, I think he honestly

would enjoy talking to you.

There’s an aspect of Twitter Spaces

that’s a little uncertain of, like, what are we doing here?

Because there’s an urgency,

because other voices might want to butt in.

Exactly, exactly.

If it’s an intimate one-on-one where you can, like, breathe,

like, hold on a second, I think it’s much easier.

So in that sense, Twitter Space is a little bit negative

that there’s too many voices,

especially if it’s a very controversial kind of thing.

So it’s tricky.

But at the same time, the friction,

it’s so easy to just jump in.

So I could just, I mean, I could,

I mean, you just imagine, like, a Twitter Space

with, like, Zelensky and Putin.

Like, how else are these two going to talk, right?

Like, can’t you imagine?

If you try to set it up on Zoom, like, it’s never happening.

It’s never happening.

Too many delegates, like, the only way it happens

is Putin, like, sitting there, like-

Zelensky’s live.

He’s live, right?

Just jumping in.

It’s hilarious.

Давай по-русски поговорим.

Okay, actually, just on a small tangent.

So how do you have a productive day?

Do you have any insights

on how to manage your time optimally?

Yeah, I mean, I’ve gone the gamut of,

from obsessive time tracking in 15-minute buckets

to kind of, like, the other extreme,

where it’s more kind of, like, large-scale,

some deep work here, two-hour bucket, you know,

account for an hour of lunch and some other thing.

But now, I just roughly, because I manage a team

and there’s some things that kind of come up,

it’s only a team of two, it’s not, like, big,

but I just have things

that are not necessarily controllable by me.

I, like, have to take some meetings or whatever.

It’s not as easy to plan out my day ahead of time.

So I do a lot of retrospective time management,

where I look at my day, and that’s what I mostly do now,

and I account, did I spend this day productively?

What could I do better?

And then try to implement it in the future.

So a lot of this, I realize, is very personal for me.

I do very well in long streaks of working.

And if I, I can’t do a lot of work in 15 minutes,

I can’t do a lot of work in even an hour,

but if you give me, like, three hours or five hours

or six hours of uninterrupted work,

that’s, like, that’s where I get most of my stuff done.

So from the, it just, it’d be fun to explore those,

when you did 15-minute buckets.

So you have a day in front of you,

and you have, like, a Google sheet

or a spreadsheet or something.

Yeah, I did an Excel.

Excel.

And you’re, do you have a plan for the day,

or do you go, like, when you did it,

or you just literally sort of focus on a particular task,

and then you’re tracking as you’re doing that task

of every 15 minutes?

Yeah, I would kind of do it live.

I’m not, so one of the reasons I’m so obsessive about it

is because I’m not organized by nature.

And I lost, like, in college,

I learned how much lack of organization

can just hurt you in terms of output.

And so I realized, like, I just had to build systems

that would enable me to become more organized.

So really, I think, I think that,

doing that really taught me a lot about time

in the same way that tracking calories

can teach you about food.

Like, just learning, accounting for these things

will give you skills that, eventually,

you might not need to track on such a granular level

because you’ve kind of, like, figured out.

So that’s kind of how I feel about it.

I think everyone should,

if you care about productivity and stuff,

should do a little bit of it.

I don’t think it’s sustainable in the long term.

It just takes so much effort and time to, like,

and I think the marginal effect of it in the long term

is kind of minimal once you learn these basic skills.

But yeah, I was basically tracking, like, live what I did.

And what I saw is that a lot of my real work

would be done in small sections of the day.

And then it’d be, like, a lot of just nothing.

Like, a lot of small things where I’m busy,

but little is being achieved.

And so I think that’s a really interesting insight.

I’ve never figured out how to un-busy myself

and focus on the, like, core essentials.

I’m still getting to that.

But it is interesting realizing most of your day

is, like, a lot of nothing.

And then, like, some real deep work

where most of your value comes from

is, like, 20% of your day.

Yeah, I try to start every day with that.

So the hardest task of the day,

and you focus for long periods of time.

And I also have the segment of two hours

where it’s a set of tasks that I do every single day.

Well, the idea is you do that for, like, your whole life.

It’s, like, long-term investment of Anki.

And it’s just, like, learning

and reminding yourself of facts,

you know, that are useful in your everyday life.

And then for me, also music.

I’ll play a little bit of music.

Play a piano.

Piano.

And so, like, keeping that regular thing

is part of your life.

And one thing that I’ve really taken from this

is, because I’ve read all the, like,

I had a self-improvement phase in my early 20s.

And one thing you learn is that everyone wants

to give you a broad, general solution.

But really, the real trick of figuring out, like,

optimizing is figuring out the things

that work for you specifically.

So, like, one interesting thing you said is, like,

oh, I like to do my hard work at the beginning of the day.

I know a lot of people recommend this.

I’ve tried so many times.

And I just do better work late at night.

And so, usually, my streak of work is, like,

from, like, after dinner, 7.30 to, like, 2 a.m.

That’s my prime time.

And so, like, a lot of my videos, which you’ll see,

which is, like, lit from this studio,

which appears to be daytime, it’s, like, shot at 3 a.m.,

you know, just, like, in a caffeine-fueled rush.

But that’s kind of how it works for me.

And then, also, like, with the social outlets

and stuff like that, which, it’s easy.

And I know, I feel like we think similarly on this.

So, it’s easy to discount these things as less relevant

because they don’t have quantitative metrics

associated with them.

But in terms of longevity and, like, I think,

to be able to do creative work,

there’s an amount of recharge and, like, re-inputting stuff

that is frequently discounted by people like us

who are, like, obsessed with, you know, quantitative metrics.

And so, I really found that some of my best work

gets done after I take, like, a break

or, like, I’ll go play, like, live sets of music.

And, I mean, like, that’s, like, for me, really recharging.

But nowhere on a spreadsheet is that gonna show up

as productive or, like, meaningful.

But for me, for whatever reason,

it recharges me in a way that, like,

I need to pay attention to.

Yeah, for sure.

I usually have a spreadsheet of 15-minute increments

when I’m socially interacting with people.

And I evaluate how-

I’m getting roasted right now.

No, I’m not.

It’s actually, I’m probably roasting myself.

But I do find that when I do have social interactions,

I like to do it with people that are, outside of that,

exceptionally busy themselves.

Because then you understand the value of time.

And when you understand the value of time,

your interaction becomes more intimate and intense.

Like, the cliche of work hard, party hard,

or whatever the cliche is.

Play hard.

Play hard, damn it.

Whatever, the-

English is my second language.

No, I’m just kidding.

I mean, that cliche, there’s a truth to that.

The intensity of the social interaction,

even like, you know, it’s not even the intensity.

It’s not even the party hard.

It’s like, even if you’re going hiking and relaxing

and taking in nature, so it’s very relaxed,

but you understand the value of that.

When you put a huge amount of value

on those moments spent in nature,

that recharges me much more.

So you have to surround yourself with people

that think of life that way,

that think about the value of every single moment.

That’s one of the things you do

when you break it up in 15 minute increments,

is you realize how much time there is in the day,

how much awesomeness there is in the day

to experience, to get done, and so on.

And then, so you can feel that when you’re with somebody.

And then for me personally, like,

when I interact with people,

I really like to be fully present for the interaction.

I can tell this is, for anyone who has, you know,

I’ve been the audience forever,

so I haven’t been on this side of the table before.

You’re very intense.

You look right in the eye.

You’re like-

Well, I don’t know about right in the eye.

Eye contact is an issue, but yes, I’m there.

Lex has a soulful gaze, guys.

Just in case you were wondering.

Yeah.

It’s very soulful.

It’s very comforting.

It’s like a warm hug.

Back to serious talk.

Okay, you’ve studied a lot of people who lie,

who defraud, cheat, and scam.

On a basic human level,

how, do you have trouble trusting human beings

in your own life?

What’s your relationship with trust of other humans?

It’s a great question.

So funny enough, before I did this,

I was like an incorrigible optimist.

Everything, the sun shined, every which place.

I always saw, like, everybody is fundamentally good.

Nobody was bad.

It just was like sort of wrong place, wrong time,

bad incentives.

That view has darkened significantly,

but I just try to remember my sample set.

And just like, I’m just sampling sort of the worst.

And I try not to let it bleed into my day-to-day life.

And I think it’s probably because I was such an optimist

early on that I’ve been able to kind of retain some of it.

I call it enlightened optimism.

Like choosing to be optimistic in the face

of a realistic sense of the problems in the world,

with a realistic sense of like the scale

and the challenge ahead.

I actually think it’s much braver to be an optimist

when you’re aware of what’s going on in the world

than to be a cynic.

I think being a complete cynic is maybe,

I’m not saying it’s wrong,

but I’m saying it’s maybe the easier way,

just mentally, to cope with so much negativity.

It’s like just saying, well, it’s all bad.

It’s all doomed to fail.

It’s all gonna go bust, is easier.

Yeah, that leap into believing that it’s a good world

is a little baby act of courage.

Or at least I think so.

I don’t think it’s naive.

No, it can be.

Some people are naive that are optimistic.

But oftentimes, just because someone’s optimistic

does not mean they’re naive.

They could be full well aware of how troubling the world is.

And I also believe some of the people you study,

you know, I’m a big believer that all of us

are capable of good and evil.

So in some sense, the people you study

are just the successful ones,

the ones who chose sort of the dark path

and were successful at it.

And I think all of us can choose the dark path in life.

And that’s like the responsibility we all carry

is we get to choose that at every moment.

And it’s like a big responsibility.

And it’s a chance to really have integrity.

It is a chance to stand for something good in this world.

All of us have that because I think

all of us are capable of evil.

All of us could be good Germans.

All of us could, in atrocities, be part of the atrocities.

Yeah, I think it’s, I really have,

especially in recent years,

tried to somewhat depersonalize my work

and see it almost like as like a, I don’t know,

like a force of nature that I’m fighting

more than like individuals.

Because of this exact thing, I think like sort of,

therefore, but the grace of God,

there go I is kind of a really profound way

to understand yourself rather than

it’s just like fundamentally good

and like full of integrity.

Acknowledging that so much of that

is a product of your environment

and your family and your upbringing.

And so much of the people who don’t have that

is a product of their environment.

It doesn’t absolve them.

But it gives you more perspective

to like to sort of deal fairly, if that makes sense.

And not approach it from a place of anger

or a place of outrage.

There is a sense of like sadness for the victims.

There’s a sense of outrage for the victims,

but approach the individual who’s done the thing

from that place of understanding of

this isn’t just this person.

There’s like a whole broader thing going on here.

Do you have advice for young people

of how to live this life?

How to have a career they can be proud of?

So high school students, college students,

or maybe a life they can be proud of?

It’s a great, well, let me think about this for a second.

I think don’t be afraid to go against the grain

and sort of challenge the expectations on you.

Like you sort of have to do this weird thing

where you acknowledge how difficult it will be

to achieve something great

while also having the courage to go for it anyways.

And understanding that other people

don’t have it figured out I think is a big theme of my work,

which is that everyone wants like the guru

to show them the way, to show them the secrets.

So much of life and achieving anything

is learning to figure it out yourself

and like the meta skill of being an autodidactic

where you can, I don’t know if I said that word right.

Basically you self-teach.

You learn the meta skill of like learning to learn.

I think that’s such an underrated aspect of education.

People leave education, they go,

when am I gonna use two plus two?

When am I gonna learn, you know, use calculus?

But so much of it is learning this higher level

abstract thinking that can apply to anything.

And getting that early on is incredibly powerful.

So yeah, I would say like a lot of it is I guess

to some extent, like you kind of have to do

that Steve Jobs thing where you realize

that nobody else in the world is smarter than you.

And that both means that like

they can’t show you the perfect way,

but it also means you could do great things

and kind of chart your own path, I don’t know.

That’s so cheesy.

This is why I hate giving advice.

I feel like it’s cheesy.

I mean, and I don’t think it is.

I think my journey is so full of luck

and like specific experience.

I wonder how generalizable it is.

But if I’ve learned anything

and if I could talk specifically to myself,

I guess that’s what I would say.

I mean, you’ve taken a very difficult path.

And I think part of taking that path,

like of a great journalist, frankly,

is like I can be that person.

Like just believing in yourself that you could take that.

Because like if you see a problem in the world,

you could be the solution to that problem.

Like you can solve that problem.

I think that’s like, it’s really important to believe that.

It depends.

Maybe you’re lucky to have the belief inside yourself.

Maybe the thing that you’re saying

is like don’t look to others for that strength.

And also like be really comfortable failing.

I think one of the best things

that like you would never know about me,

just looking at my background,

that helped me was playing music live.

I had incredible amounts of stage fright growing up,

mostly because I was terrible at piano.

I was like sucked.

And I specifically, I taught myself how to play.

And I joined jazz band in like high school,

did it through college.

I remember all my recitals,

I messed up every single solo I ever did.

I never like actually nailed it.

And every time I’d go up there,

I’d like have so much dread around this.

And it was easier to get up there

because there were sort of some people up there.

But eventually I started like playing live too.

And I sucked at that.

And I’ve just gone through the trenches

of like just like being publicly sort of,

in my mind, humiliated,

like that prepared me so much for what I do now

of trying to basically being fearless of failure

in the face of like a wide audience.

I don’t have that anymore

because kind of I’ve experienced so many iterations of it

at a smaller scale of just like abject public humiliation

to where it’s like not something that bothers me.

I have no stage fright that doesn’t bother me anymore.

But you’d think like,

oh, maybe he just was always good at this.

I was terrible at it.

I had a complete phobia about public anything.

So it was that rapid iteration of just failure.

And eventually I just like came to the conclusion

of like, I wanna love it.

I wanna like love like getting up on a stage and bombing.

If you can learn to like love that and be fearless there,

there’s almost nothing you can’t do.

Yeah, that’s brilliant advice.

I’m with you.

It’s still terrifying to me, like live performance.

But yeah, that’s exactly the feeling

is loving the fact that you tried.

And somehow failure is like a deeper celebration

of the fact that you tried.

Because success is easy.

But like failure is like bombing.

I mean, music, yeah.

On small scale, on the smallest and the largest of stages,

I’m not gonna say who, but there’s a huge band,

huge band that wanted to be on stage.

And it probably will happen.

But like, but I turned it down because I was like, no.

Because I’m gonna suck for sure.

So the question is, do I wanna suck

in front of a very large live audience?

Yeah.

And then I turned it down because like, no, no, no, no, no.

But now I realize, yes.

Embrace it.

It’s gonna be good.

It’s gonna be good for you.

It’s gonna crush your ego to the degree it’s remaining.

And it’s just good for you.

It’s good not to take yourself seriously

and do those kinds of things.

But honestly, I feel that way in an audience,

like in an open mic, it hurts.

That’s why I really admire comedians.

And like, I go to open mics all the time

with comedians and musicians,

and I just see them bomb and play in front

of like just a few folks,

and they’re putting their heart out.

And especially the ones that kind of suck,

but are going all out anyway.

I think open mics are the best place to learn though,

because it’s the lowest stakes you can get

while still being public.

If you’re gonna face like fears around this,

because we’re talking very specifically like public speaking

or any kind of like, you know, being in front of a camera.

If you’re gonna face your fear, you have to do it.

And the easiest way to do it is to lower the stakes.

You’re not gonna start being Lex Friedman

on stage with a huge band.

You don’t wanna be.

Like it’s like in that way, it is so impossible.

But the more you lower the stakes

and just like open it up to like two strangers,

five strangers, like the most dive bar open mic

you can go to and like start performing.

That’s really what I did is like,

like I love open mics now.

Cause it’s like low stakes on the one hand,

but you really get the feeling of like going for it.

And get better and better and better at that.

Yeah, for sure.

And then you’ll get the strength

to take a bigger and bigger and bigger risks.

Listen, Koff, I’m a huge fan of yours,

not just for who you are, but for what you stand for.

People like you are rare and they’re a huge inspiration.

I’m inspired by your fearlessness,

that you’re taking on some of the most powerful

and richest people in this world and doing so

with respect, I think, with good faith,

but also with the boldness and fearlessness.

Listen, man, I’m a huge fan.

Keep doing what you’re doing

as long as you got the strength for it.

Cause I think you inspire all of us.

You’re doing important work, brother.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks for listening to this conversation with Koffee Zilla.

To support this podcast,

please check out our sponsors in the description.

And now, let me leave you with some words

from Walter Lippmann.

There can be no higher law in journalism

than to tell the truth and to shame the devil.

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.

Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.