 At Indiana University, she's the author of two prize winning books, the invention of the restaurant Paris and modern gastronomic culture and stuff and money in the time of the French Revolution, both published by Harvard University Press. When I first learned of Zeke's work a few years ago, it was far more popular to be a crypto enthusiast and cheerleader than to ask questions about the emerging field with informed curiosity. He was able to document and share these wild stories that read more like fiction, but are unfortunately our reality, because he approached this topic at all angles, rather than accepting anything at face value, even in a time when that wasn't the popular approach. But if we can get past the ridiculousness of many of the things that have happened in the crypto space in the last few years, many vividly captured by Zeke, and look at the tech and the opportunities for innovation, big questions remain about how to harness or leverage these advancements in a way that is designed in the public interest. More work, research and understanding is needed on this front. The technologies powering cryptocurrencies may offer ways to make payments faster, cheaper, more accessible, even safer. But to realize these benefits, new technologies, actually all technologies need commensurate safeguards and trusted practices designed to protect individuals, households, businesses and our economy. So with that, please enjoy this conversation about number go up. Rebecca over to you. Thank you so much Allison. Hi everybody. It's really a thrill and a joy and an honor to get to do this for New America with Zeke Fox and the New America Fellowship is a wonderful thing. And it was obviously a stroke of some pretty clever genius that I got to be a fellow at the same time as Zeke. So Zeke, when I was reading this book. I kept remembering a conversation that I had with a colleague in fall 2017. So that's a crypto bubble moment. And my colleague who was a smart, well read man said to me one day, can I ask you a question. And I said, sure. And I was surprised when he came back with what's Bitcoin. And I said, it's a computer program. And he said, it's a computer program. And I said, yeah, it's just, it's just a computer program. And he said, well, you know, what are those gold shiny things. And I said those gold shiny things are tricks meant to make you think that it's something other than a computer program. So we're not going to go into the whole thing about how the computer program works because we're not computer programmers, and we're not even going to go into the ridiculous sort of side hustle of manufacturing those shiny things. What I have is, if Bitcoin is a computer program, why were there so many cryptocurrencies? Do we really need so many different computer programs? I mean, statistic claims that there are 9000 cryptocurrencies right now. Other people will say 23,000. How do you explain this proliferation? And do you have a favorite? Rebecca, and thank you so much for hosting this. It's been like a pleasure being a fellow fellows this year. So, um, now, I mean, there's so much of what you said that a true Bitcoin or would object to, but I think that the work is not the one to read if you really want to understand how all this works. I give only like a real shorthand overview before we get to the the exciting stuff about how it's being used in practice. And I think that, yes, like, there's really like not that much to it. It's essentially like a computer program is a good analogy. I boil it down to a spreadsheet with two columns, column A being like a list of people and column B being how many do they have of whatever it is. Like if it's Bitcoin, column B is Bitcoin. If it's Ethereum, column B is Ethereum. And yeah, like why would you create so many? It's so easy to spin up new ones. And I mean, I think you may disagree with me, but I think the reason is that the best thing about crypto is for you to start a new one and then you can collect people's real money and you can give them your Z-coins or your Rebecca coins or whatever. And there's always like a, I mean, it's not that easy. You need to create like a believable story. You need some sort of reason why your currency is a really good one and why this like your new app is really popular. We're really going to need this kind of coin. But I think that everybody really wants to get an early. We can't all get an early. So entrepreneurs spring up to feed this desire to get an early by offering a new coin and a new story about how whatever coin is going to be the future of money. And I do have a favorite from my two years getting sucked down this rabbit hole. So just for sheer hood spa, there was a crypto company called Yuga Labs. They had created the Board Ape Yacht Club, which were, if you're not familiar, the sort of monkey cartoons that lived on the blockchain and sold for 500,000 or even a million of each that were really popular celebrities. And at one point, so people who bought these monkey cartoons, they wanted some sort of reward. And Yuga Labs was really successful and was making tons of real money. But rather than share that real money with the owners of the monkey cartoons, they were like, Hey, and they claim that they were not officially the creators of this it was some sort of independent entity. At one point they were just like, Hey, everyone who owns one of these monkeys will give you some eight coins. It's our new currency. It's the unofficial currency of our metaverse which will exist soon. And it actually worked like these eight coins that were just had really no use only hypothetically might be useful in a virtual world that didn't exist yet were given away and then started trading for five or $10 each. And, you know, if you had one of these monkeys you got like a good supply of eight coins that you could cash in. And I even saw, I went to a week long eight festival where I saw Snoop Dog perform a whole song about why eight coins were good, and we're better than doge coin, which is a coin that's about a dog joke. So just in pure meaninglessness eight coin was my favorite. Um, like, let's let's pause and think about this folks. Zeke just said monkey cartoons that live on the blockchain. And he said it like it was a thing I mean this is just it's really it just is mind boggling. You know, is the one point early in the book. You're on a multi floor 21 bedroom super yacht called the chakra and some has been child actor is saying things like we're going to claim our sovereignty by declaring independence and we're the crypto superheroes the crypto adventurers. And I just read all this and how is this even vaguely possible. Like it just seemed so improbable. But, and then my follow up question, the one that I have for you really is, what is like to suddenly find yourself in this impossible world. As a historian, and I find out all sorts of sort of strange and unexpected things that people didn't know, but I do it by going to very boring stayed institutions, and you know, asking to see my five cartons of archival documents a day, and obeying the rules about how to go for lunch and can I use a pencil and can I take photographs. And this is just a totally different world. So, again, tell me what is it like to be in this impossible world you stand there and think, This is weird, or do like not even notice how weird it is because you have to be part of it to do your job. I mean, I'm definitely sitting there in the moment thinking, This is very weird. And I feel like to really explain this world to everyone. Sometimes I think of myself as just sort of like, like a log like a drift in this ocean of the that's the cryptocurrency world. And I have to see like where I float to, and what kind of strange characters that I mean, and but maybe not really a drift because I need to like, I'm steering myself to where I might observe interesting. And I'm always thinking about where interesting things happening in this crypto world, and where are so especially since so much of it happens online. I'm thinking where are these people gathering. How am I going to put myself in a position to observe them so I can write about things that someone can read. So for example, like when I started hearing about Sam bankman freed the billionaire crypto genius. I contacted him and said, Can I come down to the Bahamas where you are running your cryptocurrency exchange and observe you at work for a couple days and just sort of see what's going on. Maybe that's not. Well, clearly it was not the best way to find out what was really going on, but it was a way to like see this scene and see what it was like when to observe these like 20 year olds who seem to have conquered the world of financial technology. And we're now like making billions of dollars and getting courted by celebrities and politicians and bankers and venture capitalists. So And they let me because you're from Bloomberg and so they figure all publicity is good publicity or Certainly like not everyone will let you do that. I found in the crypto world, people were very eager for publicity. So they're more open to I'm seeing speaking with me also in the crypto world being kind of unusual and out there was viewed as a positive and being really uptight and careful with what with your words would be make you seem uncool which would hurt your financial success. So I think people are more willing to say crazy stuff and to be observed speaking candidly by a reporter, then they would be on. You know what I'm writing about like big banks or something like that. That's fascinating. Right. So really, their logic is like that of the perloined letter the best place to hide something is in full site. Right. So they're going to be completely upfront about their nonsense and even want you to publicize it and assume that because I'm being public about it. Nobody will actually think it's nonsense. That's that's pretty canny with their points in this stuff when you find yourself sort of scared. I mean, some of the descriptions I was like I can't do that. I can't do that. Or we were disgusted, annoyed, or just like, this is curious. I mean, I would get annoyed when people really wanted to debate me about the financial system, because I'm not like a great debater. And so I would finally have to say things like, you know, I don't think the Federal Reserve is a big scam, but I'm not going to engage with like each of your points about this. Can we move on to some other topic? That was like a big one. But mainly, I'm just, I like people, I don't like to give off a false impression. I like to be friendly and engage with what the person is saying. And if I'm skeptical of it, just ask skeptical questions, but in kind of a friendly way so the conversation continues. And so I'm always thinking about what do I want to ask this person about but also how do I say it in a polite way that is not going to offend them too much. And I mean, it seems like, again, they're quite eager to say outrageous things about monkey cartoons that live on the blockchain or whatever. Did you have to sort of humor them by saying outrageous things yourself or as long as you just gave them an opportunity they were, they were willing to come up with this stuff? No, I was definitely, I would say I was the straight man. And I even, I'll write, I quote myself in the book sometimes I give some of these conversations. And I'll often, there's one person where I was just looking at this and I asked them, you know, what would you say to people who say that, and like I'm sure they are always saying this about everybody else too but people who say this is a Ponzi scheme. And rather than just being like, hey, I think this or I'm softening it a little bit, but I did not have to act crazy myself to get these people amped up. And you, in terms of how I present myself, yeah, I think being yourself is good and seeming authentic and if I feel like if they see who I am, they're more willing to share who they are. And I considered putting on like a crazy crypto outfit so that I would be more recognizable at all these crypto events but decided against it. And but still one embarrassing story the first time that I went to the Bahamas for research for this book. And I did, I thought I was just wearing my normal clothes. I get in the taxi at the airport, and the cab driver says crypto guy, huh. Let me take you to the Sandbagman Freed's office. And I was, I was thinking to myself, oh man, what was it the LLB and backpack. You know, was it the hoodie. I don't know how he how he made me but that's really funny. So, right. So again, the dread that any of us as young starting historians of France had, I'm going to go into the archive and how long will it take them to figure out I'm American. And it'll be okay if they say, ah, you were British or oh, are you Irish but if they find me out as American right away then you're like, oh, I hope I can't fit in. And definitely like there's a line between the believers and the non believers and everyone was sort of eager to know whether I was a believer. Right. And I did not want to lead people on to think that I was a believer when I was not. But I also didn't want to be really disagreeable and say I wanted to hear what they had to say. And I was open to the idea that someone would one day present a really cool use of cryptocurrency that would impress me. I would just in two years exploring this world was continually disappointed by what I saw. I actually thought I would tell you about this. I found myself again in autumn 2017 it's sort of in that bubble at an event in Bermuda. Yeah, that was that had been organized by the CFA certified financial advisors of Bermuda about the end of the dollar. And so I was there to be the historian talking about changes in most globally significant currencies. But then there was also a crypto true true believer there who gave the most. He said, Well, there have been a lot of failed crypto currencies but there are also a lot of failed websites. And so that's what you expect with the new technology is that this percentage of them will fail. Everybody in the room is like very important, very important point. Oh, yes, it's only 40%. I was thinking, right, like, what am I doing here but it was kind of fascinating. But of course I never wrote about that. How do we literally do what you're doing so you're having these conversations with people are now you secretly recording or do you just have a really good memory for conversations. Do you rush back to take notes. Pretty much. If if I'm sitting down with someone, I'll pull out my tape recorder and say can I record this it's it's firm. I'm not going to. Usually I'll say I'm not going to publish this tape it's just so that I don't have to write down what you say very, very contemporaneously. And then other times if it's not convenient to tape record, I'll have my notebook out and I'll be scribbling down what they say, there's only a couple parts in the book where I'm writing anything that was not recorded in one of those two ways. And that frees me up because one of the challenges is that I want to have it. It's great when we're sitting and I've got the recording going, because then I still do have my notebook and I'll be I'll make notes that say things like. When he said this word he scratched his ear, or he seemed this way when he said that on. And I can also another part that I find challenging is is describing people's appearances. And I've realized that your first impression is often something that could be useful to use in your description. So I'll spend while they're talking and I'm trying to think of questions. I will also be thinking, what does this person look like is there anything noteworthy I could, I could describe, which I find to be a very, very challenging part of the writing process. So often I don't even the tape is great to because I don't necessarily catch all the most exciting things that they say, until I have a chance to listen to it again, because I'm so busy focusing on like what's going on on that I don't they may say a total gem that I miss. Right, right that's again as a as a social historian who works on people who have been dead for 100 200 years, I spend pathetically little time trying to describe them and and maybe actually that's that's a good hint for us. So I've got all sorts of questions. I'm starting to see a question or two coming through in the chat. So I hope everybody in the audience is thinking of questions as well. The next main question is, I mean, obviously, you talk to actually I have no idea how do you have any idea how many people you talk to doing the research for this book. A few hundred. Yeah, it's hard to say because there are certain days when I'll be at a conference and I'll spend 12 or 18 hours between the conference and then the after parties just talking to people all day long. And I try my best to keep records of each conversation and everyone I speak with but it can be the count is difficult. Yeah, but I'm not trying to take like some sort of representative sample. I'm looking for interesting scenes that I find meaningful that will help me tell this story. Yeah, yeah. So, and again, actually, that's funny that I can't get a vaguely reminds me of what has happened to historians in the world of the digital, which is that you go into the archive and you order the box and you just start taking photos. And you never actually like, because you're like, all right, if I can just photograph this all that I can read it later, but you do still have to read it. Oh, very often actually it turns out that just would have been much simpler just to sit down and read the stuff in the box. But if you're feeling like boy they'll let me have 10 boxes a day I can never get through 10 boxes. This is a faster way to do it but then you've still got to do the work eventually. Oh, and one thing that I think will be challenging for future historians of this era is that the just the volume of communication that's being generated, all of these. Nearly everyone who's very who's active in crypto from the investors to the people who create the coins are tweeting all day long. And they're also texting with their friends, they're, they're slacking with their coworkers. So they're generating this like giant volume of communications but that are kind of hard to understand. The stuff they say on Twitter is obviously intended for public consumption, and they may not really mean what they're saying. And they're talking, and the more that even like a few months after after a tweet, the context gets sort of lost it could be hard to tell if it's a joke or what they mean. So, yes, I wanted to ask you if you were coming to this subject 100 years from now, and we're trying to write a book about this odd mania from the 2020s. How would you go about it like what would be. Where would you start. So, I'm thinking about other histories of manias. So, the sort of founding book about this extraordinary popular delusions and the madness of crowds, which is published in the mid 19th century, right after the railway mania has bankrupted lots of people. And that book starts with the example of the Dutch tulip bubble. I'm thinking about how that book works but I'm also thinking about recent book that does a really good job of sort of sorting out different kinds of bubbles and manias. So I think my first question would be to try to figure out the sort of regulatory context like what was it at that moment that made the idea of a new kind of money seem exciting and interesting to people and even plausible. And so maybe actually the launch of the euro had been enough to make people think oh money is completely changing. The crypto world has been tied to libertarianism both left and right. So I'd want to think about that. The hard part but it seems to me the really interesting part is to get at not the big name characters and the con men that you're tracing. But the ordinary people who do actually invest in it, like the people who only have $1,500 and say, yeah, okay, I'll buy an eight coin because this is the future. The number will go up. I really want to try to get at that side of it. Do you think the people that you write about knew they were running scams? Definitely arranged like some people certainly did. Other people, imagine you have sort of you're a startup guy, you come up with this idea for a startup, and it just sort of takes off. And suddenly people are telling you you've created the future of money venture capitalists are handing you huge amounts of money, your coin is going up and up. There's would be a temptation to just say, you know, all this praise of me is correct. I am a genius, and I have maybe created what's going to be the future of money. So I think there's a lot of people like that to who get really fascinated by the idea and think the idea is great, and then feel validated when the prices start going up. And, you know, move to capitalize in different ways, but maybe did not set out originally to scam people. And then there are others who really did set out to scam people. Oh, definitely. I mean, there's, there's so many scams in this world, and the beauty of crypto is it makes it so easy to set up a new venture into raise money from investors around the world. So that of course is going to attract a lot of scammers. I want to my specialty before was writing about these odd corners of the stock market. And if you wanted to run a stock market scam, even if your intentions were totally dishonest from the beginning, you still need to do a lot of paperwork. You need to hire a lawyer, you need to create sort of this shell company and get it listed on different places where people can trade it. The upfront investment to start even the simplest stock market scam is going to be like $500,000 or more. Whereas, you know, we could get our new cryptocurrency going with help from a programmer we hired on like a gig work site, you know, for just like a few hundred dollars. Yeah, and for a while there people were creating all sorts of harebrained ideas and really it was it was easy to raise some money now I think the our moment has passed. Oh dear. So much for the Fox Fang coins. One thing you said, if I were going to write the social history of crypto 100 years from now, those venture capital guys would have to be a big part of it, like, why are they throwing money after this I mean, are we to conclude that there's just so much money swashing around that they figure it doesn't matter if this is a loser, or if I throw money into this somebody else is going to throw their money in and then I can pull my money out and make a profit. Do you have any sense because they're they're not so much the focus of your book, but it couldn't have happened without them. And they they keep coming up as backers of the craziest schemes that that I write about. And I would have liked to have another chapter about about venture capital. And in some cases, it may just be, you know, the traditional approach where they invest in lots of things and hope that some of them work out. But the other thing to look at would be, if they invest in Z coin, they might be promised a huge supply of Z coins at a very low price as sort of a bonus for their investment. So they may feel that they're getting in so early at such a low price that judging by the performance of other similar new cryptocurrencies. They're virtually guaranteed to turn a profit and that they are not necessarily, they don't need to be in it for the long haul. They don't need to believe in Z coin. They just need to think, All right, this might get going. And it'll keep going long enough that we can sell our stockpile of Z coins that we were given as like a bonus. So I think like one one clue that I've seen is that some of these crypto venture capital funds, even after the huge collapse, their returns have been good. So they are getting in early, they're still profiting, even though we had these companies haven't been producing real products that people like to use, or, you know, achieving mainstream success. This is like, when I tell my undergrads, you know, Uber has never made a profit, and they're like, What, what, how can that be its name is is a word and you're like, Look, look at the documents. And they're just shocked at that. Do you think it's worth trying to sort out the motives of all these different people I mean the most famous case of course would be bankman freed and effective altruism and I guess maybe we'll find out in the course of the trial. But did you get the sense that he was genuine about that. So, I'm of the belief that he was. I what captivated me about his story was that from speaking to people who knew him when he was young. He, when he was in college decided he was very interested in utilitarianism, and the idea that he should decide to live his life, based on how he could have the greatest impact for good in the world. And he had been volunteering for anti animal cruelty group. Then a philosopher, Will McCaskill, who started the effective altruism movement said, Hey, you're pretty smart. How about you go out and make a lot of money. Anyway, anyone give out pamphlets, we could hire 1000 people to give out pamphlets with all the money that you're going to make. And so, by the time I met bankman freed. It had been less than a decade. He was now one of the richest people in the world. And from talking to people who spent time with him. And yes, at the trial, we'll see maybe some new evidence will come up. But it really seemed to me like him and his colleagues believed they were the heroes of their own movie in that by getting really rich. They might be able to fund the right scientists who might prevent the next pandemic, or who might develop technical artificial intelligence that was safer and prevent, you know, a terminator type AI apocalypse. So, to me, I think that, but if you believe that you that making money is so so important, you might have a decent you have a some sort of chance of saving the world that could justify almost anything. And so, stealing your customers money. The badness of that would be totally outweighed by the potential good that you might do. And yeah, I'm eager to find out when this trial happens, if these young people had conversations about that. They made that kind of decision, or big men free to saying, sort of it was. There was no intentional fraud. It was all just like a big oversight. Things just got out of control, as they made more billions than they could keep track of. Who hasn't that happened to. I mean, I guess it's like when your fighter jets just disappear. I was thinking, have you read Ethan lose book once a Bitcoin miner. Not thoroughly, I do have a copy. Right. So, yes, I mean he's definitely inside the increasingly shady Canadian and then South Asian crypto world. But what came through to me very, very clearly in the opening chapters of that book is, you know, here's a guy who I guess is now probably in his early 30s, but when he's writing the book he's in his early 20s. And the world just looks bleak, you know, it's climate change, it's overpopulation, it's governments that are non responsive. Everything seems bad. Oh, why not do something crazy. And yes, to me like what you're saying about sort of the, the bank man freed can I do something to save animals. Oh, I know I better save the world. Maybe to understand this moment you do have to really grasp the extent to which people under the age of what 3540 are likely to feel the world is so messed up I might as well do something crazy. Yeah. And in my social history of crypto, and this could have gone in my book had I known its importance at the time but I was speaking with a closet salesman at IKEA. And we just got to chatting and he explained to me that he'd, he'd made some bad investments in crypto and meme stocks. And I said why would you know why would you do that you know, you know, just gambling on this stuff you're often going to lose. And he said to me, look like I don't make very much money. I was saying if you invest in the stock market it generally goes up a few percent a year and it's kind of a fool's errand to try to beat that. And he said, that's not going to do anything for me. In order for me to achieve the goals I have for my life. I need a big score. Like regularly saving will not get me anywhere. I'm earning, you know, 20 bucks an hour here. And so I'm going to gamble on the next meme that that I see again even though I've already lost a couple times. And like I saw I heard that nihilistic attitude, quite a bit from crypto investors. And I do think that that explains a lot and there are a lot of people have this belief that everything's rigged. The stock market's rigged. The system is against me. And this is my chance, even if they're not really believing that whatever coin they're buying is a future of money, they see it as a chance for them to get in early and maybe get a big score like these people they've been reading about. Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. I think that's right. And so actually, yes, as we write the social history of crypto, I think growing inequality has to be part of the picture. Right. If the idea that you could be comfortable by aspiring to the middle class, but if you realize that, you know, as an ordinary working person, you're never going to get there. You've got to either jump all the way into the wealthy or you're just going to get poorer and poorer. That I think is actually an important part of this story as well. Yeah. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. I do also think it's gendered. Right. I mean, it doesn't seem it seems like this is really more of a guy's attitude. Is that right? Definitely. I mean, it's heavily male. Plenty of women did invest. I spoke to lots of women who did invest and who did work at these companies, but the industry is overwhelmingly male. It's obvious if you go to any industry gathering or even just to start following these crypto people on Twitter. Right. That's been my impression. And there's something about taking risk and gambling in the crypto world became like a symbol of part of manliness and they would feel like I'm doing something manly by buying this ape because it's so crazy, but I don't care. I'll take this big risk and I'll be the one to buy the ape and see it be worth a million dollars in the future. One last question and then I want to go to the ones that are coming in from the audience. But my last question to you is, are there any good guys in this book? Well, except for the IRS agents. I mean, the IRS guy is really great. So, both IRS agents who are in the book have since gone to work in the cryptocurrency industry themselves, cashing in on their experience. Well, that's what we get when we don't fund the IRS properly. They get better offers from somebody else. Okay, that's really all right then I guess there are no good guys in this book. I like writing about people who are operating in gray areas. And I, this last two years in crypto, I see as like a mania the likes of which who knows and will ever see this again. So many people lost lost their shirt. And so I see a lot of people to blame and not a lot of not a lot of heroes. But maybe someone will turn some up in the in the future. Okay. I guess I kind of hope they do but maybe they won't. So, we have lots of questions and please do. We have time folks probably for gosh almost half an hour 40 minutes of questions so we can definitely take a few more. I want to start with one. Because it's also a question I had the photos and strings in your background. Is that how people in your book are connected to each other or your travels, or is it a piece of artwork by one of your children. These are people from the book and the strings do very, very loosely represent connections. But I this is not my research method I mainly made this just for fun. Okay. And do you have any idea how many air miles you wrapped up doing this research. Oh, no, I don't know but I did. I had to go it was very, very hard and but I did have to go to the Bahamas four times. You went to the Bahamas four times where else did you have to go. El Salvador to the country that adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender. Milan twice Vietnam Cambodia, Philippines. And I'm probably leaving some out but it was great that Oh Miami a lot several times I think from Miami, the crypto people hang out in cool places. So it was a great book to write in that way too. Okay. Was there any bit that you had this is again from from the audience was there was there part of the end one of these sites you had to leave out of the final book, we're like oh I just can't get that bit in here. Oh, like something really good that I cut. Something comes to mind right now. I did a lot of pre planning where before I would go somewhere, I would be pretty sure that there'd be something to see. And I, in many cases worked with a local reporter who had hired ahead of time to do research and set up interviews and come up with things that we might do if I did come. So by the time I went somewhere, I was I was pretty prepared. This is mentioned in the book but I went to Milan for a week to go to one of the main characters in the book is very elusive. And I thought I was very clever because his partner was having an art show. And I thought who it's a big deal for the partner I thought this guy will definitely come to the art show. And even if he doesn't want to see reporters, what reporter would be crazy enough to go to the art show he won't suspect that the reporter will be waiting for him there. So this took like a whole week. He did not go to the art show. So that it is mentioned in the book but this is like two sentences in the book that took a week of time so that was kind of a bust. Right, yeah, no, no, no, that is that is and I realize I just said that I thought we had half an hour 45 minutes left we only go into one not 130 so let me get to some more questions. And somebody asked and I think maybe we've touched on this. In all of the wild crazy stuff you turned up. Is there one thing that you still just keep thinking about and that just shocks you the most surprises you the most. This is a very long story but I'm, there's a couple chapters about cryptocurrency scams that are being run by Chinese gangsters who are in Cambodia. These gangsters have the tricked tons and tons of people with offers of high paying jobs to come to Cambodia. Once they're there, they're held they're not allowed to leave. They're abused and they're forced to run these online scams. And it sounded like a total conspiracy theory. I went there to look into how crypto is part of this. And since then there's been a lot of news that have come out. The UN just estimated that 200,000 people in Cambodia and Myanmar have been tricked in this way. It's just like a it's a huge international issue. And the stuff that I saw from out of these scam compounds from talking to victims and seeing videos that people had sent out was really horrific. So, I often think about if there's more reporting that I could do there. And if there's some way that I'm that I could expose some, some of the people who are involved in this. But it has become such a big international issue that I'm hopeful the powers that be are on it. And maybe, maybe there's something more for me to do there. Right. Oh, that's such a good point, right. I mean, it's easy. I think when we talk about this particular bubble to fix a on the sort of quirky characters and the washed up actors and the dentist turn in and all the rest of it without realizing that it could also really mean that there are thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people suffering and basically in enforced labor situations to support and perpetuate some of these scams. Another question from the chat. This is a funny one. What do you think the future of crypto will be? Does it have a future? So, I think that the power of the crypto story which learned in so many people in the past has eroded. And now when people think about crypto, they will wonder, Hey, is this new thing I'm hearing about? Is it a scam? Or if I send my money to this new website where you can trade crypto, is the guy running it just going to steal my money? So I think it's going to be really hard to generate enthusiasm from new people to get crypto going again. And I believe that for a company or an app or an idea to be successful, you need to provide some sort of use that regular people will find appealing. Nobody had to sell me Facebook. As soon as I heard about it, I wanted to sign up. It spread like crazy at my college. And the people compare crypto to the early days of the internet. I was a kid in the early days of the internet. I loved it. I signed up right away. There's all sorts of cool stuff to do. Just ask yourself, have you ever used crypto for anything? Do you even know anybody who has? Because going on Coinbase or Robinhood, sending in some dollars, gambling on some stuff, and then taking the dollars out is not actually using any of the crypto technology. It's just, you might as well be gambling on anything. I was just very disappointed. As a writer, I need to write about things that I can observe. So I was always asking people, can I see your product? Where do people use it? What does it do? And I was just continually disappointed. You never know. So a lot of smart people are working on crypto. Maybe one day they will come up with something that will have mass appeal. But I'm not holding my breath. Right, right, right. I mean, it does seem like if the only use case that anybody can come up with is it's a good way to defraud people. It's useful for criminal activity. It's, yeah, what is the future of that? We've got less than 10 minutes left. I think maybe one other really interesting question related to that is the pressure that the various cryptocurrencies and especially the exchanges were putting on government authorities and the SEC in particular. Do you think that's going to have any sort of long term consequences for the financial system? Or do you think the moment of bankman-free testifying in Congress, that's over lawmakers have learned their lessons, they're not going to go that direction? Yeah. I mean, the crypto industry is really trying to memory hole these last two years. And isn't that still beating the drum for comprehensive crypto regulation? But the SEC is starting to enforce. So there are existing rules about investment and transparency that have been around for 100 years. For a few years, it seemed like the cryptocurrencies were perhaps immune from these, but now, or at least crypto people started to think that. But the SEC moves very slowly and they're now sort of getting into gear and they're taking stock of what's been happening and they're starting to bring more and more cases against people who've been breaking their rules with their new coins or their offshore exchanges. And I think we're learning all over again that these rules have a point and it's important for companies to disclose their financial information. It's important that executives don't speak honestly about the prospects for their company and don't make misleading statements. But yes, there's still this pitch that we don't want to drive away the financial innovators. This could create a lot of jobs. Do we really want the future of finance to happen in Dubai and Singapore? Maybe we need these people in America. So I'm kind of curious to see if Congress does do anything, but it's so hard to get Congress to do anything at all. That I think it's really unlikely that crypto industry could get everyone together to pass some sort of pro-crypto law that they're pushing for. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a good point and I'm really glad that you reminded people that the SEC is basically 100 years old. Why was the SEC created because of all the gambling and fraud that led to the stock market crash of 1929, right? So it's in the response to that. So in a sense, I mean, happily we're not living through another great depression, but a moment when investors, you really ought to be aware. Oh yeah, I was going to say one thing that I thought was interesting was I felt like the SEC, even though there were really obvious cases they could bring, they were hesitant to bring them while the numbers were going up. And I think no one wants to be blamed for popping this bubble because the bubble was a lot of fun for a lot of people while it was going on. And it's a lot easier to bring a case once the bubble has popped, then you can say, look, everyone lost their money. Even if the rule breaking in some cases was pretty clear the moment it happened. Right, right. And then the, because at that point the SEC or other authorities stand to be critiqued for why weren't you regulating this better. It was a bubble. You should have alerted people. It shouldn't have blown up as high as it did. And now, now that they don't have to worry that they're popping somebody's fun. Now they can show that actually they're capable of doing what they're supposed to be doing and trying to put things in place to prevent a repeat. The last question I want to turn to that comes from the audience is from Kevin Kerry who asked if you knew you were competing with Michael Lewis and I think you did know you were competing with Michael Lewis. And so it'll be interesting to see what his book is like when it comes out. And also, so anything else you want to say that but also from the same question or we surprised to learn and this just came out a couple days ago, the SPF parents were making so much money off FTX. Okay, so in response to the first question. At different points I was was unsure of whether I was competing with Michael Lewis or not. I would, I saw him at one point I heard that he was spending time with SPF. And of course this is my first book. Of course I'm a bit nervous when someone who's regarded as like the master of this genre is going to be coming out with a book at the same time as me. But now that I've finished it, I've, I'm not that worried about it anymore. I feel like this. I feel so lucky that I was there to chronicle this mania. And I'm really proud of how it came out. And I think that his book is going to be different and is really based on his based on solely his access to Sam Bankman freed. And I think that this is a valuable chronicle of this crazy time in history, and that people will really enjoy it. So, in terms of the parents on their, their involvement was kind of known, but I am surprised to learn that they were making so much money. And they're what a very funny detail came out. In these days, the parents were sued by the bankrupt FTX, which is trying to recoup money for the customers. And there's a big reproducing email exchange between Sam's dad and Sam, in which the dad is saying, Hey, I noticed that I'm only getting paid $200,000 a year. I was thinking maybe more like $1 million per year. Do I need to call mom? So, I'm, I'm curious to see what other kinds of interesting tidbits come out at this, at this trial. Indeed, indeed. And, and my final final question is, what are you going to write about next? I don't know. I just, I feel like nothing's going to top this. I don't know how I'm going to go find such. I always wanted to write one of these adventurous nonfiction books. And now I feel like I'm going to need to find some new adventure that's even better than this one. But I can't imagine what it will be. But I mean, history shows us there will be another bubble to write about one day. There will, there will. And in the meantime, perhaps your family will get to see more of you, even if you don't get to go to the Bahamas quite so often. All right, well, thank you everybody for joining us. Thank you so much to New America for having Zeke and me as fellows last year and for hosting this event. Thank you Zeke for making time in your busy book tour to do this. And thank you to everybody in the audience for listening and for your excellent questions. Have a good afternoon, everybody. Bye.