Sam Bankman-Fried and his family face scrutiny over a "blood bunker" plan for Nauru, Stanford's controversial bail bond support, and FTX's $160M donations to Will McCaskill despite early warnings of SBF's dictatorial behavior. The episode details SBF's post-arrest violations, including illegal contacts and leaking Carolyn Ellison's diary, while mocking his parents' ethics background and Joe Bankman's tax shelter expertise. Ultimately, the hosts argue that SBF's incompetence and malicious actions make avoiding prison unlikely, contrasting him with other Stanford disgraces like Elizabeth Holmes. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Trust Your Girlfriends00:05:33
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I'm Lori Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
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Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
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Welcome to the movies you liked as an adolescent and are now ashamed of Shamecast.
I'm Robert Evans, and today in the seat of eternal self-hatred, Jamie Loftus.
Jamie, you have just admitted prior to the show starting that you once loved the Dana Carvey vehicle Master of Disguise.
What do you have to say for yourself?
I feel fucking sick with myself, Robert.
I haven't been able to sleep in the 20 years since its release.
In my defense, it came out on my birthday, which I feel like had a lot to do with why I considered it my favorite movie.
I felt a kinship with it.
Yeah.
Birthdays are like a performance-enhancing drug for movies that you see when you're 11.
Absolutely true.
It's the blood doping of positive movie memories.
And furthermore, it's the most famous children's movie that was shooting on 9-11.
And so I think it also felt like it would have been disloyal to my country to say a word against the Master of Disguise, particularly the Turtle Turtle scene.
However, I think the movie certainly doesn't hold up and I feel fucking sick with myself every single day.
Yeah, I wonder, because famously, Dana Carvey was dressed as the Turtle Man when those planes hit those towers and James Cameron was 20,000 feet below sea level exploring the bottom of the ocean.
And I wonder if they ever crossed paths at like a Hollywood event and started talking about 9-11.
So what were you up to on that day?
And then Mark Wahlberg just leans in apropos of nothing and is like, if I was there.
I would have stopped it.
Oh, Jamie.
You know, I can honestly say 9-11 was the first time I felt like this country let me down because it delayed the release of the seminal Tim Allen film, Big Trouble, which features a classic Patrick Warburton performance, by the way.
It sure does.
God damn right.
You see his ass, everybody.
If you want to see Patrick Warburton's ass, it's in that movie.
He is so underrated.
I told you that I love.
I love that man.
A total king.
What a talent.
Look hard.
Friends, just to say.
This is behind the bastards.
This is behind the bastards, a podcast about none of the things that we were talking about.
And today, actually, Jamie, I've got you back in the hot seat, back in the office, which is more of an ephemeral feeling than a physical space these days.
Making me answer for my sins right off the jump.
Yeah, by talking again about our friend Sam Bankman-Freed, who you and I chatted about right after his life collapsed last year.
And I felt like we should do an update.
I think we should too, because I'll be honest, I have done truly everything I can to avoid knowing more about him.
So I would say I know basically nothing about him since we last spoke.
Yeah, it's amazing because normally, you know, I'm an empathetic being.
Like Sam has a face that I've just always wanted to hit from the first time I saw a picture of him.
And normally when somebody goes through this much shit, when like their life is this ruined, right?
Like I might, I feel a little less like hitting them because the world has hit them.
But I still kind of want to sock him in the fucking jaw every time I see this guy.
Let me just check it.
Has his face changed?
He wears suits sometimes now when he goes to court.
He's not wearing the basketball shorts.
That's helpful.
Well, that's true.
God.
Yeah, that's like two different versions of an embarrassing, desperate way to present.
Okay, he's wearing a he's wearing a suit now.
Yeah, he's wearing a suit now.
It looks like shit, but whatever.
Buying A Sovereign Nation00:04:26
Of course not.
I try not to judge people on how they look unless that's part of their con.
And Sam is a guy for whom the dressing like a slob was always part of his like tech bro genius, you know, persona that he was putting on.
Like fooled everybody.
Oh, yeah, yeah.
There's good.
I believe there's a mugshot of him out at this point.
Certainly when he went at the Bahamas.
So when we last left our buddy Sam in November of 2022, he had been arrested in the Bahamas and extradited to the United States, where he was charged with so many financial crimes that he might theoretically spend more than 115 years in prison.
Wow.
Now, in the days and months since, a lot has happened and a lot more has come out about how the former crypto mogul behaved before and after his fall.
I want to start with some of the latter information because by far the most entertaining story to drop as a result of these seried legal filings against Sam is that he was using the nonprofit arm of FTX to attempt to buy a sovereign nation he could use as an apocalypse shelter.
That is by far the funniest story that's dropped about these guys in the days, months since.
What was the plan there?
Oh, that's a great question, Jamie.
So let's talk about the island of Nauru.
It's an island in the Southwest Pacific.
I think it's about 2,100 miles away from the coast of Australia, which given the fact that Australia is really out in the middle of nowhere is pretty close to Australia.
It is presently the world's smallest island nation.
It's got a population of about 12,000 or so, not a ton of people.
And as an incredibly tiny country, one of its primary assets is simply the fact that it is a sovereign nation, because there's things that countries can do that nothing else can do, like issue certain kinds of like passports and visas and do certain kinds of things with banking, right?
So if you're a really tiny country that doesn't have like a shitload of natural resources, one thing you can export is the benefits of your sovereignty to say really rich people who might want certain things that you can do as a country.
Plan is coming together.
So there's a number of ways in which Nauru has kind of taken advantage of this to get by.
One of them is that they've sort of sold access to their land to Australia to use so that Australia has used them for years as an offshore processing center for asylum seekers.
I think this stopped most recently in 2019, but there's been a couple of waves of this and it was not a pleasant place, right?
Conditions were so brutal in sort of the offshore processing center on Nauru from 2012 to 2019 that several residents carried out like deadly forms of protests, sewing their own lips shut or lighting themselves on fire as a protest of the conditions they were facing.
Pretty ugly scene.
In the late 1990s, kind of prior to this period, Nauru was the chief money laundering location for the emerging Russian oligarch class.
They helped a lot of these oligarch types you've heard about in the context of Putin launder about $70 billion in ill-gotten funds during the early stages of the Russian Federation.
I love a good bastard's cameo.
Oh, yeah.
No, Naru, Naru's, Naru's adjacent to a whole lot of shitty people.
Great.
Yeah, here it's a lovely place.
Nauru was also designated a money laundering state by the U.S. Treasury in 2002, which led to sanctions, which I think is probably why they moved to like letting Australia offshore migrants there for a while.
And since Australia stopped doing that in 2019, Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow effective altruists felt like they might have had an opportunity there, right?
Like Naru is kind of looking for some new cash flow.
They're looking for a sovereign nation to do some things for.
It's an opportunity to be effective.
Yeah, yeah, to be effectively altruistic towards yourself.
Specifically, Sam and his brother, Gabriel Bankman-Fried is actually the guy sort of like organizing this attempted endeavor using FTX's charitable donations arm.
And their goal was to purchase the entire island in order to construct what Gabe called a bunker shelter that would be used to, quote, ensure that most effective altruists survive in the event that between 50% and 99.99% of the world population perish in a catastrophe.
Jesus.
Steve Martin And Bunkers00:03:12
And that's like a pretty common, this, I feel like the Gabe of the situation is a very common character in bat, like just the devious brother.
I mean, I hate the bastard most of all, but I really detest the devious brother as well.
There's just, it just reeks of insecurity.
Well, your own grift, man.
Especially since they're framing it not as, look, you know, when you got like a guy like Peter Thiel, right?
And everybody knows Peter Thiel's got like an evil rich guy bunker to wait out the end of the world if it happens.
And like, fuck Peter Thiel.
But at least that's, Peter Thiel's not pretending I have a bunker to like save the world by putting aside just the best people.
He's like, no, I'm a giant piece of shit and I'm going to save myself if things go wrong.
Okay.
Like, fuck you, Peter Thiel, but at least it's honest.
They're framing it as like...
It's a blood bunker for just boys.
Yeah, it's me and my blood boys.
Gabe is like, no, we have to, in the event, there's an apocalypse.
We have to save all the EAs because they're the best people.
And that's what's best for the world that we'll do.
We're utilitarians, right?
The greatest good for the greatest number of people is to save all of the best people, which is me and my friends, the other finance kids who call themselves effective altruists.
So they don't have to feel bad for the fact that all they do is play the stock market like every other piece of shit.
Anyway.
So lucky that they all met each other.
So lucky that they're all friends.
All the good people.
I would love, I would love, honestly, like, look, when the strike is over, somebody at a network, bring me on.
I will write you a banger fucking script about an apocalypse where just the EA guys are left in their bunker trying to figure out society.
Okay.
Another incentive to end the strike.
That would fucking rip.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We could do, we could do quite a tale.
We could have some fun with this one, Jamie.
And you know, I don't, I think that there would be some effective altruists like ridiculous enough to do cameos.
Oh, we could get we could get fucking William McCaskill in there, no problem.
Bring his Scottish ass on board.
Yeah, vain little perverts.
And they're all, they're all, I'm going to be honest, kind of stupid.
So I bet we could trick him.
Like, you don't have journalistic ethics with an HBO show.
Yeah, we could just say we're bringing them on for an interview.
We could like film around them like an movie with, oh, shit.
Steve Martin, where they have to film a fake movie around, what is it, Chris Rock?
Shit.
Oh, it's the, it's, um, oh, fuck.
See, now you're now, now, now it's, I know, it's driving me nuts.
We have to figure this out.
Uh, I re-watched it recently.
It holds up.
It does hold up.
It's like one of the best movies.
Bofinger.
Fucking dope.
We could do a Bofinger with William McCaskill, where he thinks he's getting interviewed for a documentary, and we're really making him the bad guy of our HBO series.
Bring in Steve Martin, too.
Fuck it.
He's still, he's still got it.
Yeah, he's got good politics.
He'd be great.
Yeah.
Glad we remembered it.
Watch Bofinger, guys.
It holds up.
Truly.
If you take anything away from today, it really does.
Genetic Experimentation Base00:03:49
I was shocked at how well it helped.
Yeah.
Startlingly good movie.
Pretty good, like Scientology joke.
So Gabriel Bankman Fried ran FTX's charitable donations wing, which included a ton of money for what many people have characterized as political bribes.
I'm not saying that he was bribing politicians for FTX.
I'm saying that's what a lot of people have characterized what he was doing as.
Now, that much has been known for a while, but it was not until the current management of what remains of FTX sued Sam.
Because again, there's new management that's trying to recover as much money as possible.
And they're throwing Sam under the bus because why wouldn't they?
And that's how all this stuff got revealed because they have all of FTX's internal communications.
So they found a bunch of shit, like that Sam was having Gabriel try to buy the island of Nauru.
Now, it is unclear how serious their attempt to buy this island was.
A representative of the island's government has been like, no, no, no, we were never putting our island for sale.
This was never a thing that was going to happen.
And maybe that is the case.
Maybe they were just being idiots fucking around.
But in a memo between Gabriel and an FTX officer, the discussion was centered around the idea of buying the island, of being in control of it as a sovereign country, not just purchasing land.
I mean, that's a lot of work for a bit.
Not that I put it past him, but I'm just like, it's not sounding like it.
Yeah.
No, and I think I don't put it past.
It's possible that Naru, whatever, is telling the whatever government official is telling the truth.
They were never considering selling the island.
But it's also possible that Gabe et al. believed they could buy the island, right?
Right.
They may in fact be that dumb.
Yeah.
Now, there were discussions between these FTX guys about using Naru as a base for human genetic experimentation.
You get the feeling that their goal was to create modified post-human godlike bodies for their fellow effective altruists so that they could live forever and dominate mankind after the collapse as undying immortals.
That just sent the ugliest photoshopped image.
Like it was involuntary how quickly the like no-neck, huge chest Photoshop super soldiers came to mind.
Absolutely.
Hey, okay.
It's a, it sounds like a mix between that one video game with the big robot dinosaurs and those sci-fi books by that guy who wound up being real anti-Muslim.
But yeah.
Oh, I feel.
I wonder which guy.
Oh, it's, I think, uh, Ilium and Olympos.
I forget the name of the author, but the premise of the book is that like in the future, a bunch of rich guys turn themselves into gods and decide to like recreate the Trojan War with themselves as the Greek gods.
And they like resurrect a bunch of dead archaeologists to make sure that they get the details right.
It's fun.
It's quite a series, except for the weird moments of bigotry.
Oh, that'll happen.
Good stuff.
Dan Simmons, I think, is the author.
Anyway, so yeah, they're talking about we want to create a human genetic experimentation base.
And they're like, we want to figure out what the sensible regulations around human genetic enhancement are, but we also want to build a lab.
And while they're talking about this, Gabriel adds cryptically, probably there are other things it's useful to do with a sovereign country.
I don't know what he means by that, but yeah, probably.
So that could be as banal as just like money laundering, which Nauru obviously has quite a history of, or issuing things like passports.
But given the fact that all these dummies are permanently poisoned by a mixture of sci-fi fandoms and weird futurist cults, I think it's safe to say we all dodged a bullet by the fact that they never got too far in this scheme.
Rational Utility Functions00:16:06
Now, my favorite thing about this whole idea is how dumb it is on its face.
There are some countries that could act as really good apocalyps shelters for the super rich, right?
Switzerland is one.
A lot of rich people have their apocalyps shelters in Switzerland.
New Zealand is another.
But the problem for that is that like Switzerland and New Zealand are both functional states.
Obviously, if you're a billionaire there, you can have some outsized influence, but you're not just going to run everything because there's other interests and like a functional system of government in place in all of those places.
I think Sam and them were hoping that since Nauru's small enough, they could just utterly dominate the government.
But they ignored the fact that it's like one of the worst places imaginable to have as an apocalypse shelter.
For one thing, the island does not grow much food, which means it has to import 90% of what it needs to sustain its very small population.
It's all good.
We have so much money.
It's okay.
We'll just keep importing it.
Yeah.
It also has very little freshwater, and most of its infrastructure is on the coast and vulnerable to both rising sea levels and hurricanes.
It is very close to the bottom of places that you would want to have as a shelter.
So very funny.
All these people are silly.
Now, Jamie, the main reason current FTX is revealing all this is that they are suing the old management of the country, company, i.e. Sam, to try and reclaim a billion or so dollars they argue was funneled illegally into nonsense like this and into the pockets of Bankman Fried and his lieutenants in the months before FTX collapsed due to insolvency.
The lawsuit against Sam also includes some more confounding lines described in this paragraph from an article on the suit by crypto news site Decrypt.
The lawsuit further says that the projects run by the FTX Foundation were frequently misguided and sometimes dystopian.
These included a $300,000 grant to an individual to write a book about how to figure out what humans' utility function are, as well as a $400,000 grant to an entity that posted YouTube videos related to rationalist and effective altruism material, including videos on grabby aliens.
Now, does that all seem like nonsense to you, Jamie?
I don't know, Robert.
Let's hear them out about the grabby aliens.
Don't worry.
I'm going to explain all of this horseshit to you.
Oh my God, what kind of rick and morty ass nonsense?
It is some rick and morty ass nonsense.
It's much dumber than anything in Rick and Morty because at least some of the people there understand story structure.
And at least understand that it's a joke.
That it's a bit, yes.
So if you aren't terminally adhered to one of the stupidest subcultures in the broader tech sphere, that probably does seem like nonsense.
And it is.
but let's start with the bit about paying someone 300 grand to write about what a human's utility function is.
Now, what is a utility function?
Great question.
In economics, a utility function is the measure of welfare or satisfaction of a consumer as a function of the consumption of real goods like food.
In simple terms, it's a way of describing the satisfaction or other benefits gained by consuming a specific resource.
This is important to rational choice theory, which is a theory that states that individuals use rational calculations to make rational choices to achieve outcomes aligned with their own objectives.
Now, most people who aren't economists think that talking about the economy this way is silly because people are not in fact rational actors.
And in fact, we make shitty decisions all the time guided by misinformation or pressure that causes us to inaccurately interpret the potential value of something like a college education versus the cost of, say, student loans, right?
One could argue that Sam Bankman Fried and co are a great example.
Wonderful example of the irrationality.
That's rational.
But that's economics.
This is not an economics podcast.
I'm not an economist.
And the way that Bankman Fried and his fellow EAs talk about utility functions is not the same as how economists talk about it, right?
So when economists are talking about this, it's part of how to kind of figure out why people might make rational choices by understanding like the value of sort of their the ranked like preference they give to certain things that they might expend resources on, broadly speaking.
When Bankman Fried and EAs talk about utility functions, what they mean is something even more abstract.
And I'm going to quote from a summary from a write-up on effectivealtruism.org, a website you should avoid at all costs.
Quote.
I'm really not looking forward to finding out how this somehow relates to the grabby aliens.
Oh, sorry.
Yeah.
In a very dumb way, Jamie.
Quote.
Okay, good.
EAs and rationalists love dropping the term in every conversation.
Using the term utility function can be immensely helpful when aiming to maximize positive impact or do the most good.
The concept of a utility function provides a systematic way to quantify and compare the potential benefits of different actions, thus helping to guide decision-making toward the most effective outcomes.
By representing values, goals, or beneficial outcomes numerically, utility functions allow for a structured comparison and prioritization of actions.
If, for example, your goal is to alleviate global suffering, you could assign values to different charitable actions based on their estimated impact, thus creating a utility function.
This function can then guide you to allocate your resources like time or money where they will generate the greatest utility or good.
Now, that just seems like you're saying you should try to figure out how your money is going to be spent best, right, before you spend it.
But that's not actually what they're saying.
What they are doing here is they are, they are saying, like, a utility function in this context is a way of assigning a number that you have made up.
There is no objective value to this number.
There's no rigor to this.
You are making up a number to like determine the value of spending your money in certain ways.
And you are doing this so that whatever it is you want to do with your money, you can justify numerically as the scientifically best way to spend your money.
So I see.
And you can argue in this way by assigning these values whenever wonky way you want.
No, me paying taxes to fund roads and the healthcare system is a shitty use of my money because it doesn't optimize this thing that I consider to be of higher long-term value.
And the thing that's of higher long-term value to me is spending money on fucking space travel research so that I can be a demigod on Mars, right?
That's best for human beings in the long term.
So in utilitarian speak, you know, the greatest good for the greatest number of people is us getting to Mars as opposed to feeding starving people right now.
You know, the utility function of getting to Mars is much higher.
So that's where my money ought to go.
Well, it's all, yeah, it just like comes down to like the great, the greatest good is me smiling a little bit.
Yeah, exactly.
There's literally some writing on that in that vein.
So it is through math like this that EAs are able to look at at a world where millions face death by famine or disease or rising sea levels and say, the best way to help the planet is for us to become finance bros and then spend our money investing in AI companies or whatever.
The fundamental selfishness of this whole community is made clear when you read the essays these people write on their websites, like Less Wrong, a blog founded by self-declared AIX, yeah, Eliza Yudkowski.
Yudkowski is a rationalist, which is a related subculture to the EAs.
There's a lot of bleed over.
Sam and a lot of his people were rationalists, irrationalists, adjacent.
And yeah, to give you an idea of how these people talk about utility functions, I'm going to read an excerpt from an article on this website titled, Your Utility Function is Your Utility Function by David Udell.
I've been thinking a lot lately about exactly how altruistic I am.
The truth is that I'm not sure.
I care a lot about not dying and about my girlfriend and family and friends not dying and about all of humanity not dying and about all life on this planet not dying too.
And I care about the glorious transhuman future and all that and the 10 to the 50th power or whatever possible good future lives hanging in the balance.
And I care about some of these things disproportionately to their apparent moral magnitude.
But what I care about is what I care about.
Rationality is the art of getting more of what you want, whatever that is, of systematized winning by your own lights.
You will totally fail in that art if you bulldoze your values in a desperate effort to fit in or to be a good person or to or in the model in the way your model of society seems to ask you to.
So you see what he's saying, if you read between the lines there, what the most rational thing for me to do is whatever makes me feel best.
Whatever gives me a little smile.
Don't let people shame you for spending your resources, you know, entirely on yourself and your own whims.
Like you're actually a hero if you do that.
It is so fascinating to me to watch like, I don't know.
It seems like this like self-conscious reflex where they feel the need to define rational by something that is more closely aligned with reality and then immediately be like, but what that actually means is the exact opposite.
The core of it is always being able to say that like, well, if you suggest that number one, I have a responsibility to other people and that that responsibility is to some extent out of my hands, which is what we all say when we're in a society, right?
I don't have kids.
I don't have a choice not to spend some of the significant amount of money I pay in taxes educating other people's kids.
Now, I'm not a complete piece of shit, so I'm fine with that because like I've, I've done very well for myself and kids need educations.
That's just a nice way for the world to work.
But these people are more of the feeling that like, no, I should do whatever is possible to avoid paying for, you know, a public school system.
And in fact, I'm often going to advocate for some sort of like weird voucher-based system that allows me to not fund public schools because the greatest good for the greatest number of people is for me to ensure that like me and my rich kid friends all get to send our kids to special schools where like, well, you know, fuck anybody else.
Like I don't have any other responsibility for the broader population.
All that actually matters is like me maximizing, you know, my own personal happiness.
But I still want to feel like I'm a hero for doing it, right?
If I avoid paying taxes in order to like spend all of my money investing in open AI so that I can like take people's jobs away, like I want to feel like a hero for doing that because what I'm arguing is that it's best for the people 500 years from now.
And there's going to be more of them than there are today.
So I'm a hero for like getting rich off of this company today, you know?
Yes.
Well, because there's, first of all, there's definitely going to be people in 500 years.
Sure, for sure.
Definitely, Gary.
If these EAs get their way, sure.
Yeah.
If we are doing the most good, that's so fucking exhausting.
I mean, it does like your Peter Thiel example.
Not that, you know, doing evil is good in any capacity, but the most exhausting kind of evil is the one that also insists on you validating that it's not actually evil.
That it's that it deserves to shut the fuck up and ruin my life.
Or don't.
It's the same thing with a lot of these fucking right-wing media grifters where like it's not enough for them to be rich.
It's not enough for them to like get their way politically.
They feel like they have like an ethical, they're owed, like being cool and respected.
And it's the same, like these people are all finance ghouls.
They are all like actively fighting to avoid paying taxes and to be able to concentrate ever more power in an ever smaller number of people to destroy the lives of artists and people who are like working folks in order to like make more short-term profits.
This is all what they actually care about personally.
But they want to feel like Gandhi while they do it.
Right.
Because what they're doing is guaranteeing what they'll argue, Jamie, is that like, well, you know, this may hurt this company, you know, me getting involved in this company.
Sure, we may destroy a lot of jobs in the short term, but by doing so, we'll be able to make sure that the AI we build that eventually becomes our God is one that cares about the future of humanity.
And that's better for the most people in the long run.
Yes.
And history should remember me as the greatest man to ever live.
And people will, you know, that'll be on television someday when my computer is writing every television show.
I fucking hate these people.
So yeah, it's cool stuff.
And I think the fundamental selfishness of these people, because all that effective altruism and rationalism are really about is by is creating a made-up system of numbers to justify you pursuing your own benefit as like science, right?
As like scientifically rational.
This is really...
It's not as if that doesn't, you know, like math problems to serve a very small group's self-interest.
It's not as if that doesn't exist outside of this circle, but it's just like bizarre how uniquely like they lack any sort of self-awareness or I don't know.
It's just they're so fucking annoying is what I'm trying to say.
That's very true, Jamie.
And this is all really clear when you look at how the movement, the EA movement, treated Sam Bankman Freed before and after his fall from grace.
If effective altruism can be said to have a pope, and it can, because all of these Silicon Valley philosophical movements are just Kirkland brand Catholicism, that pope is Will McCaskill, an Oxford moral philosopher and co-founder for the Center for Effective Altruism.
When FTX collapsed and Sam got arrested, he was quick to put out a statement of outrage.
I don't know which emotion is stronger, my other rage at Sam and others for causing such harm to so many people, or my sadness and self-hatred for falling for this deception.
Now, the only reason I would hesitate to call this horseshit, Jamie, is that horseshit, by virtue of being inanimate waste, possesses a fundamental honesty that McCaskill is incapable of.
He and SBF.
Yeah, fuck.
Yeah.
Robert, that's the bitchiest thing I've heard you say in a while.
That's awesome.
Thank you.
He and SBF met back at MIT when Sam was an undergrad.
McCaskill convinced him that he could maximize his impact in humanitarian causes by earning to give, you know, making as much money as possible so that he can give it away in a way that presumably will help the world.
Now, when Sam ultimately launched Alameda Research, it was an EA project from the start, staffed by Sam's friends in the community.
One software engineer told Time, almost everyone who came on in those early days was an EA.
They were there for EA reasons, says Naya Buscal, a former software engineer at Alameda.
That was the pitch we gave people.
This is an EA thing.
I know.
I'm once again thinking about sports video games, and I know it's not sports video games.
It is.
It is basically a sports video game.
I just had the flashback to the interview you did.
I was thinking, okay, it's true.
It's true.
In the early days, Sam's pitch was that 50% of the company profits would be donated to EA causes.
And the initial round of investing that got the company off the ground was funded entirely by rich EA types.
Publicly, McCaskill talked about Sam like he was the EA Messiah, probably because FTX's future fund provided a huge amount of support for his movement.
And just nine months in 2022, the Future Fund, run by Nick Beckstead, a moral philosopher who used FTX money to support various causes, gave more than $160 million in other people's money funneled through FTX to effective altruism, including $33 million to organizations that McCaskill had a direct interest in.
So that's why McCaskill spoke so positively about Sam, which is, it's made even more fucked up when you realize that like other people in the EA movement had started warning McCaskill about Sam Bankman-Fried and about him being a con man as early as 2018.
And I'm going to quote again from Time.
The Stanford Connection00:09:44
This is about from like the very start of Alameda research.
Within months, the good karma of the venture dissipated in a series of internal clashes, many details of which have not been previously reported.
Some of the issues were personal.
Bankman Fried could be dictatorial, according to one former colleague.
Three former Alameda employees told Time he had inappropriate romantic relationships with his subordinates.
Early Alameda executives also believed he had reneged on an equity arrangement that would have left Bankman Fried with 40% control of the firm, according to a document reviewed by Time.
Instead, according to two people with knowledge of the situation, he had registered himself as sole owner of Alameda.
So basically, Sam has unethically taken control of the firm and all of the money invested in it.
And he is like fucking his subordinates.
I was like, and he's also a sex pest.
He's also a sex pest.
He's a more surprising thing than I've ever heard in my entire life.
Taking money from people's, what are effectively bank accounts in FTX, and he's using it to prop up the value of different crypto targets tokens on Alameda to make shit look like it, which is money laundering, right?
That's all, it's like theft and money.
It's fraud, you know?
Or is it the future, Robert?
Remember that horrible?
Yeah, remember what Larry David taught us all.
I know.
There were some really unforgivable.
Oh, it's pretty funny.
It is of all, it is like, I am on team.
Like, I can't be angry at Larry David because honestly, if Larry David advertises a financial product and you decide he seems like a good guy to advise, this seems like a credible company to me.
I don't know.
That's a little bit on you, right?
That's a little bit on you.
Who else was in that commercial?
There was, that was a, that was a damning commercial.
Yeah, it is.
It is.
I still say arrest Larry David, but that's for a variety of reasons.
So I'm curious what your other reasons are, but that's for another day.
Yeah, that's for a different day.
So this caused, so again, all of this shit, that is why this is like everything that was obvious in Alameda in 2018.
This is all the stuff that he gets arrested for in 2022.
And when they become aware of this, of the fact that he's fucking his subordinates and money laundering, a bunch of EA people start raising alarm bells.
In 2018, several Alameda executives try to force him out of the company and accuse him of gross negligence.
Sam wins the power struggle, though.
And so most of the EA management team and half of the company resign.
Now, this might be, you could see this as like, well, maybe these effective altruist types were just in it for the altruism.
And once they saw Sam was shady, they packed up.
And that's true for those individual people.
You know, there's some decent people who just got caught up in the movement, and they clearly had some degree of moral integrity.
But the broader effective altruism movement, including incredibly low there, including unbelievable Will McCaskill, it's Pope, never disaffiliated from Sam.
McCaskill was saying, talking about Sam, like the second fucking coming, up until late 2022.
And in exchange for laundering Sam's reputation, Sam sent tens of millions of dollars, 160 million to EA causes in 2022 alone.
And that's why McCaskill maintained movement ties with Bankman Freed.
Quote, in the weeks leading up to that April 2018 confrontation with Bankman Fried and in the months that followed, Macaulay and others, who was one of the executives that left, warned McCaskill, Bexted, and Karnofsky about her co-founders' alleged duplicity and unscrupulous business ethics, according to four people with knowledge of those discussions.
Buscal recalled speaking to Macaulay immediately after one of Macaulay's conversations with McCaskill in late 2018.
Will basically took Sam's side, said Buscal, who recalls waiting with Macaulay in the Stockholm airport while she was on the phone.
Will basically threatened her, Buscal recalls.
I remember my impression being that Will was taking a pretty hostile stance here and he was just believing Sam's side of the story, which made no sense to me.
So Will, again, perfectly willing to like throw down against the more honest people in his movement and personally threaten them in order to keep the money flowing to his fancy cause so that he can hear.
Right.
And then the second that it becomes, you know, PR inconvenient to keep the associate.
There should be some, maybe there is like a term for that of just like even the cadence of what you read earlier of just like the disingenuousness of like, oh, I had no idea.
Like you're like, okay.
No, you knew damn well what was going on and you knew that that's you were willing to continue pretending he was a good guy and aligned with your movement as long as the money kept flowing, right?
It no yeah it no it no longer serves your best interests to stand by him.
So yeah.
So yeah, now you'll, yeah, anyway.
Um, so Sam, we don't actually know if he's completely bankrupt.
Uh, we know he took about a billion in payments and loans from FTX.
He claims not to really have any of that money and that he's he's working on getting what assets he does have to like get try to make a few more of the investors that they had whole.
Um, that said, we know that a big chunk of the money that he made was funneled into real estate in his parents' names.
Um, so that's fun.
Speaking of his parents, one of the big early mysteries of his case was that when he gets out on $250 million bond, uh, his parents are signed on to the bail agreement with their house as collateral.
But there were also two mystery co-signers, and their house, we'll be talking about this in a second, is on the Stanford campus.
The two mystery co-signers were Larry Kramer, a family friend and the former dean of Stanford, and Andreas Popke, who signed a $200,000 bond.
Popke is a senior research scientist at Stanford and an advisor to several Valley startups.
So Stanford is very invested, primarily because of who Sam's parents are in this case, which is interesting to me.
And outside of his parents, I guess, realistically, what is in it for them by taking that risk?
I think it's actually just that these people are close with his parents who are professors at Stanford and deeply tied into that community.
I can, I mean, I can very much see like bougie, bougie parents with influence being like, Sam's just a boy.
Anyone could have made this mistake.
He thought he was doing the right thing.
He got mixed in with the wrong person.
This has to just be like some sort of crazy mistake because they can't imagine he just, it's so dumb and blatant.
Like all he did was rob people in order to like gamble, right?
Like fundamentally, there's not a difference between like him taking people's money, claiming that he's like got a sure stock tip and then gambling at Vegas.
Like legally, there's no difference between that and what he did.
But they can't because his parents are like ethicists, basically, at Stanford.
And I don't think any of the people they are social with can imagine that his crimes were that venal and foolish.
But you know whose crimes are not venal and foolish, Jamie.
Oh, tell me, Robert.
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In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
Joe Bankman Scandal00:15:03
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So initially, the reason why these other Stanford peoples are secret signers on to this bail agreement uh, is because they were afraid that they would be attacked.
Because of how angry people are at Sam.
And there was a reason for this uh, shortly after he was sent to house arrest at his parents home, someone drove their car into a barricade set up outside of their house on the Stanford campus.
Um now, as I stated earlier, both the elder Bankman Frides are former Stanford professors and their home is on campus, which has created issues for the school.
The university still will not officially acknowledge that one of the world's most famous accused felons currently resides in their prestigious walled academic garden.
One Washington Stanford.
Like really fumbles constantly.
Oh yeah, yeah.
Like it's absurd, it's because they're not really that smart, but well yes, this is again another great case for it.
It's also like I don't know, just the arguing like well, his parents are like ethicists.
How could he be up?
It's like, have you ever met someone raised by therapist?
No offense, but not trying to call out any of it.
Lovely, but like they know, they know they have language yeah, yeah.
So one Washington POST article I found noted, Stanford LAW School didn't respond to requests for comment.
When asked whether they could confirm a rumor that nearby student co-op had attacked the Bankman Freed home with eggs, Stanford campus police did not respond.
Socially however, Bankman Freed is a source of deep fascination.
There are party flyers with his likeness.
He's a punchline in campus comedy sketches.
Students ride their bikes by on dates.
The campus community is well aware he's there.
An annotated map locating the Bankman Freed home was posted on a student-only social network.
Okay, I be honest, if someone asked you out and they're like, here's my concept for a first date, we're gonna go watch Samuel Bankman Freed, be on home, we're getting, we're getting married that night Jamie right, I was like we're.
We're going like, bring a flask, watch one of history's stupidest villains and then go finger each other in a parking lot.
Absolutely Jamie, that's.
That's the dream.
That's the dream.
None of this.
That's effective altruism.
Right there, that's the greatest good for the greatest number of people.
Sam could stand to learn a thing or two from these, these theoretical Stanford students.
Yes, so if you so again, Sam's parents are both well-respected teachers and experts in different fields of ethics.
Uh, both were.
Both were recruited to the university in the 1980s and they almost immediately hooked up.
Barbara Freed made a name for herself as a she's like a philosopher, basically.
Uh, her big thing was she wrote a paper dissecting the ethics of the trolley problem, whereas Joe Bankman is a finance ethics guy.
He writes a lot about like again like, not breaking the law with finance.
Shit seems to be a big focus of his.
Um, this is a very obvious thing to say, but I do.
In defense of the Bankman family, I do appreciate when someone really rolls with their last name.
I think that that is a very fun quality.
This is this is an example of it not working out.
I think it's also equally bizarre when someone has a last name where you're like, why are you not doing that job, for example.
Yeah, maybe i've told you this before.
It's one of my favorite facts i've learned in my life.
Uh, my childhood dentist's name was dr Vigenis, And Great.
Nevertheless, he's interested in going into teeth for some reason.
And I found it infuriating.
I'm like, just roll with it, man.
That's your last name.
An ethics board needs to go after this guy.
No, I'm sorry.
I know you don't know how to do this job, but that's your life now.
People will trust you until you figure it out.
I do think that's the thing.
You are the labia doctor.
Speaking of nominative determinism, Joe Bankman would be, I wouldn't trust Joe Bankman as a drug dealer, but I would trust Johnny Cocaine as a financial expert.
Like, like as a stockbroker.
Johnny Cocaine.
Yeah, let him invest my money.
He knows what he's doing.
I just, you know, say what you will about Joe Bankman, and I'm sure you should.
I know nothing about this man, but at least he got into the right business.
Yeah, he does.
He does.
Now, people talk with like awe about this guy.
Like he's so ethical.
He's such like a decent man.
He thinks so much about doing the right thing.
When the Washington Post is like giving examples of noteworthy things in his past, one of the ones that he loves.
Let's talk about Ted Lasso.
In 2002, he wrote a tongue-in-cheek suggestion on how to avoid a major league baseball strike.
And his solution in this paper that's supposed to be a joke was to levy taxes on teams and players who struck that could only be avoided if the players donated money to charity or the teams agreed to sell nickel hot dogs to Giants fans.
Now, I don't know what the joke is here, but it apparently tore it up among upper middle class Ivy League finance academics.
They all talk about this as very funny.
Wait, it comes up again as like, remember when he said hot dogs?
It was in the Washington Post article about this guy as like, look at a, look at this.
This is like a noteworthy moment from his career, this like bad joke that he made.
But I guess that's what fucking Stanford people find funny.
Imagine it's hilarious that Stanford.
Yeah, I don't get it.
Jesus Christ.
Maybe Stanford people were just like, think it's hilarious, just like the word hot dog.
They're like, oh, poor people food.
Like, I don't know.
Now, everything you find about these people is like, wow, like, is their friends talking about life?
It's so shocking that this could happen.
You know, these were like the best people we knew.
They were so concerned about ethics.
They raised their sons like little adults and they were always talking about utilitarianism.
How could this have gone wrong?
I don't know.
I feel when I read anecdotes about them, like it's pretty obvious why it went wrong.
And to kind of make that point, Jamie, here's a quote from an excellent write-up by Puck News.
Quote, Bankman, who once boasted to a friend that his father had dutifully recorded every cash receipt, wrote three case books on tax shelters and tax evasion, becoming one of the country's leading experts on the subject.
One of Bankman's law students in those early years was Peter Thiel, who later told Bankman that his tax law class was his most valuable because he was able to put a lot of his Facebook stock in an IRA, as Bankman would later recall in a podcast.
This modest feat of financial engineering would save Thiel more than a billion dollars.
So ethics, Jamie!
Avoiding a billion dollars in taxes so that Peter Thiel can spend it giving Joe swastika money to write New York Times columns on racism.
Hooray!
I love ethics.
Holy shit.
Yeah, and I, and here I was, a clown, a fool, about to be like, well, everyone wants to rebel against their parents.
That's probably why he's a cartoon villain.
When he talks ethics, it's not getting busted for being a piece of shit with money.
That's what it seems like to me.
Not an expert on ethics.
I am an expert on being a piece of shit, though.
So, yeah.
But you're a far different piece of shit.
Thank you, Jamie.
Thank you.
And I celebrate that about you.
I mean, I'm not, I guess, shocked that that is exceedingly ethical to the Stanford crowd, but Wow.
Damning.
So anyway, Barbara Freed, being a good liberal, was horrified by the Trump election and chose to fight back by founding a political fundraising group, Mind the Gap, which was extremely successful during the Trump years and is rumored to have acted as the model for FTX's own political donation machine.
Both of Sam's parents have seen their reputation suffer with his arrest.
And I'm going to continue with a quote from Puck.
Official property records show that Joe Bankman and Barbara Freed were the named owners of a $16.4 million beachside vacation home in Old Fort Bay, part of a broader real estate portfolio owned by FTX and senior executives, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars.
They may have stayed there while working with a company sometime over the last year, Sam said, though he denied knowing any details about the $300 million worth of real estate that FTX and his parents bought in the Bahamas.
Oh, okay.
So they know about absolutely everything and deny it.
Yeah, it sounds like it.
Sounds like it.
Now, Joe and Barbara have said that they've been working to return the property to the company for some time.
Working to.
Joe Bankman, in particular, has hardly been a passive observer in his son's scandal and may now be exposed to some legal risk himself.
Bankman interviewed and hired the first lawyers for Alameda Research back in 2017 and effectively served as FTX's first attorney.
He handled the inbound that came and made the resulting introduction that helped FTX raise $130 million from his former law student, private equity mogul Orlando Bravo, spent his free time on FTX's charitable and regulatory efforts and was ultimately in the room before Sam made the fateful decision to sign the documents that declared Chapter 11.
So they seem very involved and shady themselves.
I don't buy, oh, they're so innocent.
Their son just broke, you know, made a mistake or whatever.
They're all, they all just didn't think that this was criminal because the people's money they were taking were poor and they're fucking Stanford brats.
Like, I have no respect for them.
I hope they lose their fancy Stanford house.
They heard a lot of people.
Particularly because, I mean, it sounds like this was their MO from the start anyway.
So why would we now think that they would be above this behavior if they're like, oh, no, here's a way, like, I don't know.
It seems like their definition of ethics is things you can technically get away with.
Yeah.
It's not illegal for Peter Thiel to get this billion dollars that he doesn't pay taxes on because, you know, fuckery.
Anyway, Mr. Bankman and Mrs. Freed have joined now the expanding cast of disgraced Stanford affiliates.
This includes recently university president Mark Tessier Levine, currently accused of manipulating images on research papers in a way that is equivalent to falsifying lab data for Alzheimer's research.
Obviously, there's also Bastard's pod alumni, the Theranos lady, another famous Stanford disgrace.
And then there's the fact that their alumni came.
My favorite Stanford disgrace.
Yeah.
And then there's all their alumni who have created companies or helped run them that have shattered the foundations of our democracy in pursuit of a quick buck.
Stanford's current reputation is so grimy that a Washington Post article on SBF's associations with the school ends with these lines.
And this is very funny, Jamie.
Adrian Dobb, a Stanford professor of comparative literature and German studies and the author of What Tech Calls Thinking, sees an encouraging sign in Stanford being only peripherally involved in the Bankman-Fried scandal.
That might not have been the case 10 years ago, he notes, when the Silicon Valley hype machine operated at more of a fever pitch than it does today.
Other than his physical location, it's actually not that connected to us for once, Dobb said.
And that way, it's a sign of progress and also a little bit melancholy.
Stanford was a place where the future was shaped, so it's quite possible that's not happening anymore, that it's happening in the Bahamas now and only comes to Palo Alto once it gets indicted.
That's so funny.
I'm hung up on other than its physical location.
Yeah, other than the fact that he's here, he's not very involved.
That's a big one, babe.
That's a big one.
That does seem significant to me.
No, if they're happy, I'm happy.
That's great.
It's funny.
We have to return to Elizabeth Holmes at some point because I'm very uniquely interested in her rebranding as Liz.
Yeah.
Genius.
The Liz.
Because now I've forgotten her horrible crimes.
Yeah.
I forgot about all of her crimes once she had a cool and relatable name and had cool and relatable babies.
Or she married a scapegoat and started going by Alan.
That's true.
We can't take away that she scammed Henry Kissinger.
Yeah, scammed people out of their lives, but you know.
Yeah.
But the Henry Kissinger thing, we cannot forget.
I say we give her six months off as a result of the Kissinger scam.
Yeah, that's fair to me.
So this brings us to the subject of what precisely Sam Bankman Fried has been up to in the nine months or so since his fall from grace.
The short answer is that he has not had a wonderful time.
In January, a month or so after he was granted bail under house arrest, the Southern District of New York accused him of inappropriately contacting former and FTX employees in order to influence their testimony on his case.
Sam tried to frame all of this as part of his ill-advised apology tour that he embarked on last year in the lag period between FTX collapsing and his formal charges.
Did he hit the notes app?
What happened?
Oh, he's like calling them.
Actually, I'm going to read a quote from Puck in order to describe how he's illegally contacting people.
On December 12th, the same day he was arrested in the Bahamas, Bankman Fried emailed FTX bankruptcy CEO John J. Ray III, offering potentially pertinent information concerning future opportunities and financing for FTX and its creditors and asked to work constructively with Ray and the Chapter 11 team to do what's best for customers.
No response.
Then after his extradition, the crypto mogul sent another email to Ray on December 30th, in which he offered advice accessing Alameda funds.
Still no response.
Then while being summoned to court in New York, SBF tried Ray again on January 2nd.
Mr. Ray, I know things haven't gotten off on the right foot, but I really do want to be helpful.
As I'm guessing you've heard, I'm in NYC for the next day.
I'd love to meet up while I'm here, even if just to say hi, right, and not take him up on this offer.
And he has reached out to several people and it's always like, I just want to help, you know, get as much money as we can for the customers.
I just want to, you know, help you deal with the confusing aspects of this.
But it's, it's like, you're not supposed to be talking to people when you're in Sam's situation who were involved with a company like this because they're probably going to testify against you.
Substack Spreadsheets00:04:36
I don't feel convinced that he understands that.
I don't know.
He's talking like a fucking spam email.
Yeah, he really is.
And in general, Sam has opted to take all of the actions under house arrests that are likeliest to cause stress ulcers in his lawyers.
In addition to repeatedly contacting FTX employees, he decided to start a substack where he planned to explain how FTX, and it's like, there's that famous line from the wire.
Are you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy?
But in this case, it's like, are you publishing blog posts about your criminal conspiracy after being indicted?
Sucks.
Outgrowing an audience, Robert.
It's all a part of the plan.
Yeah.
It's like if Al Capone had started a New York Times column on having people machine gun in alleys after he'd gone away to fucking Alcatraz.
Hear me out, you guys.
It actually makes way more sense when I explain it.
Yeah.
So neither, he only writes like, I think two posts before he gives up because they're bad.
He's bad at blogging.
I tried to read him.
He's dog shit writer.
Look.
Well, can I, I mean, not to be aggressive, but that's most substack people.
It's just two and then they're out.
Wow.
By the way, find my substack.
Yeah, not you, Robert.
No, I know you have more than two, but I'm just saying the average friend of mine that harangues me into, you know, these damn emails.
It's two and then they're done.
Anyways, I'm probably going to start one.
I'm just being insecure.
I can't help what I want him to do in a couple of days.
I think you'll beat Sam Bankman Freed.
No question.
Robert, your substack is great.
Thank you, sir.
Robert, your substack is great.
Thank you, Jamie.
This has been wonderful for my ego.
Those are two that I actually read.
So Sam's is bad, though.
And it's bad.
And part of what he's doing is like he's been charged with a bunch of specific crimes, right?
And the posts that he puts up, he does not acknowledge any of the charges against him.
He doesn't like defend himself from them.
Instead, he lays out a bunch of misleading and arcane spreadsheets to try and like argue that the company shouldn't have collapsed the way it did and that he like didn't realize why he didn't realize it was so bad.
He's doing, it's the same thing as like the EA shit we open the episode with, right?
This throwing out like confusing piles of numbers in order to distract people, right?
Like this is just like chaff, you know, that's what he's doing is he's throwing out chaff in the way of a bunch of poorly formatted spreadsheets.
They don't convince anyone that he's innocent.
I was about to say, but it sounds like it also, it did not work.
It did not work at all.
You should not do this if you are being indicted for numerous financial crimes, BT dubs.
So in early February, the judge overseeing Sam's case forbade him from using encrypted messaging apps like Signal because he was so frequently trying to talk to other people who were part of this case with him in secret, which is illegal.
He also got in trouble because he was caught using a VPN, which could have potentially allowed him to hide his communications.
Sam argued he was just using a VPN to access his international NFL Game Pass account.
I was going to say, I was like, did he just say he was trying to watch Canadian Netflix?
Yeah.
That would be fucking classic.
Hey, officer, I just had a lot of shit to tour in, homie.
You get it, my man.
He has since been limited to a normal flip phone due to his repeated inability to abide by his bail conditions.
Now, some might note that Sam has already gotten more second chances than most accused criminals get with their bail conditions.
It seems accurate to say that the leniency he has received gave him reason to feel as if he could act with impunity, which is why a couple of weeks ago, he leaked his ex-girlfriend's diary to the New York Times.
Witches take me through the witch's watch.
That wasn't what I thought you were going to say.
I know, I know.
Nobody thought it was going to head here.
You know, I mean, it's although it seemed like we were due for another spiteful action against a woman for seemingly no reason.
Oh, absolutely.
Absolutely.
Now, I will say, I don't like this woman either.
Carolyn Ellison is, I think, a pretty shitty person.
I remember she was the...
We spoke about her last time, right?
Yeah.
Yeah.
She's an unpleasant lady.
She was the former CEO of Alameda.
I've been fucking listening to this podcast called Spellcaster, which is like a wondery podcast about Sam Bankman Freed.
Jail Time For Sam00:15:20
I don't like it.
The woman who does it like was at a, was at a bachelorette party with Carolyn Ellison right before the charges dropped and was like, oh, she's so smart.
She's so, and she repeats the same bullshit everyone says about Sam.
They were such, they were like geniuses.
And it's like, no, they just like blew out a bunch of numbers you didn't understand and convinced you they were smart because they said numbers, right?
Like there's nothing these people have done that is smart.
With situations like that, I'm like, I guess I appreciate the disclosure, but like, why the fuck were you hired to do this show?
Well, it's, it's because big media is just as tiny and insular a world full of rich people as finance.
And in fact, a lot of the same families have people at the Times and people and fucking investment banks, which is why here at CoolZone Media, we exclusively hire people who used to sell ketamine on their college campuses in order to get by.
You know, that's the cool zone guarantee.
Or Adderall.
You know, Lucy's of Adderall.
Yeah.
And I appreciate that you made an exception for some of us that you didn't have to be good at it.
You just had to try.
No, in fact, we will not hire you if you were good at selling drugs on your college campus.
Why did you even apply to this mediocre part-time campus drug dealers?
That's our hiring pool.
Yeah, that's our like, I don't know, whatever.
I don't know the names of enough fancy New Yorkers.
Really not that big of a stretch, let's be honest.
I'm fucking proud of that.
So am I. There's two golden rules that any man should live by.
Rule one, never mess with a country girl.
You play stupid games, you get stupid prizes.
And rule two, never mess with her friends either.
We always say, trust your girlfriends.
I'm Anna Sinfield, and in this new season of The Girlfriends.
Oh my God, this is the same man.
A group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist.
I felt like I got hit by a truck.
I thought, how could this happen to me?
The cops didn't seem to care.
So they take matters into their own hands.
I said, oh, hell no.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He's going to get what he deserves.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe.
On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
What's up, everyone?
I'm Ago Monument.
My next guest, you know, from Step Brothers, Anchorman, Saturday Night Live, and the Big Money Players Network, it's Will Farrell.
My dad gave me the best advice ever.
I went and had lunch with him one day, and I was like, and dad, I think I want to really give this a shot.
I don't know what that means, but I just know the groundlings.
I'm working my way up through and I know it's a place to come.
Look for up and coming talent.
He said, if it was based solely on talent, I wouldn't worry about you, which is really sweet.
Yeah.
He goes, but there's so much luck involved.
And he's like, just give it a shot.
He goes, but if you ever reach a point where you're banging your head against the wall and it doesn't feel fun anymore, it's okay to quit.
If you saw it written down, it would not be an inspiration.
It would not be on a calendar of, you know, the cat just hang in there.
Yeah, it would not be.
Right, it wouldn't be that.
There's a lot of luck.
Listen to Thanks Dad on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
In 2023, former bachelor star Clayton Eckard found himself at the center of a paternity scandal.
The family court hearings that followed revealed glaring inconsistencies in her story.
This began a years-long court battle to prove the truth.
You doctored this particular test twice, Miss Owens, correct?
I doctored the test once.
It took an army of internet detectives to crack the case.
I wanted people to be able to see what their tax dollars were being used for.
Sunlight's the greatest disinfectant.
They would uncover a disturbing pattern.
Two more men who'd been through the same thing.
Greg Oespi and Michael Marcini.
My mind was blown.
I'm Stephanie Young.
This is Love Trap.
Laura, Scottsdale Police.
As the season continues, Laura Owens finally faces consequences.
Ladies and gentlemen, breaking news out of Maricopa County as Laura Owens has been indicted on fraud charges.
This isn't over until justice is served in Arizona.
Listen to the Love Trapped podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, Carolyn Ellison, former CEO of Alameda, and also Sam's on-again, off-again, Bo.
She immediately turns out to be a title.
I don't like you using the term Bo, but continue.
Why not?
That's what it is.
I mean, Boo?
Should I use Boo?
I kind of like Boo.
I was like, I was like, that doesn't really make sense, but I don't know.
They were co-boos.
So she immediately turned state's witness and admitted guilt for her share of the illegal activities committed by Alameda.
And she apparently, as a reparte, as part of immediately rolling, handed over her diary.
I think that's how they got her diary.
It was part of the terms of like the, yeah.
So it gets introduced into evidence, which obviously Sam, I think, will get access to as a result of that, because that's the way Discovery works.
I believe that's how he got her diary.
Was she also a Stanford head?
I don't think she went to, I think she, her parents were professors at MIT.
Wow, low losers over at MS. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Fucking Hobo University right there.
And until it happens to me, I love when someone's diary is introduced into evidence.
And that brings me back to Elizabeth Holmes yet again when she like her creepy little sexts with Sonny Balwani.
Ooh, some of the worst sexs.
Some of the very worst sexs.
That is maybe the moment that I felt closest to her.
That's when she, that's when Liz almost got me because she was sending walls of text to this guy and then he was sending back okay.
And it's like, you know what?
Oh, brutal.
No, no, she deserved, she deserved a man like Jeff Bezos who would call her the most unsettling nickname I've ever heard.
You know, but at least he responded.
A live girl.
Oh.
That's right.
That's right.
Wow.
Oh, I think I'm just going to.
Oh, Jeff.
I think we, we as we as a collective blocked that out intentionally.
Yeah, it's very funny.
It does make it clear that he's not a robot because like nobody, nobody fakes that.
That's that's a that's evidence that he feels something.
What he feels is off-putting.
It's frightening.
It's like profoundly unsettling, but he does feel something.
But unfortunately, yeah, ChatGPT could have outdone that in terms of sounding like a person.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
So anyway, Sam gets access to her diary one way or the other.
And then he hands her diary to the New York Times so that they can write an article about it.
Now, that is unethical as fuck and possibly illegal.
The prosecution has asked that he be jailed, that his bail be revoked because of what he did here.
Sam's, this is still going on as we talk.
I'll record a little update if he does go to jail as a result of this.
Hey, everyone, Robert here.
Just wanted to update you that since we recorded this episode a couple of days before you're hearing it, Sam Bankman Freed was remanded to custody.
He is incarcerated now and he will remain in jail after violating his bail conditions until his trial in October at least and possibly well beyond that, depending on how the charges and sentencing and all that stuff go.
I should note that kind of the most recent story after that is that his lawyers requested that he be allowed to have his ADHD medication and depression medication, which he ran out of soon after being taken into custody.
The judge has ordered that he be given that medication.
Obviously, I'm always in favor of people who are incarcerated having access to medication.
If anyone's interested, I don't actually think putting Sam in jail is going to do much good.
I'm a little bit more mixed on this than I normally am, just because of the case of Adam Newman, the WeWork guy who got off scot-free from his giant financial crimes and is now starting another giant grift company and will probably fuck with a bunch of other people's lives.
But I do kind of think it's unlikely that we're going to get much benefit out of this.
That said, I don't really feel for Sam.
He had many, many chances not to be in this situation and he fucked all of them up.
So, you know, fuck the guy.
Sam's lawyers have argued he was not attempting to discredit a witness, but just to respond to a toxic media environment, which he says unfairly portrays him as a villain.
And I guess we're part of that toxic media environment.
Although, Sam, free tip here, handing your ex-girlfriend's diary to the New York Times is a bad way to seem like not the villain.
That's kind of villain behavior, homie.
That's hate to tell you.
Again, but it's like, again, you can imagine his like doofy loser fucking logic of like, no, officer, I was just being a petty bitch.
Is that against the law?
And you're like, this is yes.
Yes, it is, actually, sir.
So humorously enough, that is the legal argument his lawyers are making.
And they, they kind of have a point because they're like, look, if you read the New York Times article based on her diary, he seems like a piece of shit.
So clearly we weren't trying to influence the prosecution.
And like, they do have a point because he does come across as the bad guy in that article that he made happen.
So that's funny.
He comes across as the bad guy in most things.
Yeah.
I'm going to quote from some of that New York Times coverage here.
Mr. Bankman Fried and Miss Ellison have started an unsteady, also started an unsteady romantic relationship with multiple breakups and reconciliations.
At times, Miss Ellison worried that Mr. Bankman Fried thought she wasn't good enough.
When he was around, she wrote in February 2022 in a Google document she had, an instinct to shrink and become smaller and quieter and defer to others.
After one split, Miss Ellison cut off communication with Mr. Bankman Freed.
I felt pretty hurt rejected, she wrote in the April 2022 Google document.
Not giving you the contact you wanted felt like the only way I could regain a sense of power.
Miss Ellison was compensated far less generously than other top executives at FTX and Alameda, though it's unclear whether she was aware of it.
According to court filings, the exchange's founders and other key employees received $3.2 billion in payouts and loans.
Of that total, $6 million went to Miss Ellison, compared with $587 million for Mr. Sing, FTX's head of engineering, and $246 million for Mr. Wang, one of the founders.
Mr. Bankman Fried received $2.2 billion.
So Ellison is definitely not innocent here.
She has admitted guilt in this case, but the reporting makes it seem as if her main role was to act as a patsy.
Sam knew she was in love with him and deeply insecure, so he put her in charge of Alameda so that he could use it as part of his grift to manipulate the value of his crypto empire using customer funds.
And this basically the $6 million he gave her, which is a tiny fraction of like the $3 billion they funnel to executives.
That's like him paying her to be a smokescreen, right?
She's not an equal partner in this enterprise.
And one of the things that had happened right before this fell apart is he had he had stopped paying attention to her and Alameda in order to start throwing money through another crypto exchange run from a woman he was fucking now that he had like.
So it seems like this was a pattern for him.
Stop, stop what.
I just I'm not doing this, I'm just talking about what he did.
I just want that really.
I just it's well, it's bad.
He's a bastard.
That's why we're talking about him.
I just really.
I just really need I don't know who needs to hear this, but we just really need people to stop fucking Sam Bankman.
That's my.
This is very bad, gross behavior.
It's gross and it's bad for the world.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, you know, fuck this guy.
One bit of Schadenfreude I can give you all is that according to Puck News, Sam's present situation is so unpleasant that he considers his trips across the country to go to court in New York the highlight of his life now because he gets to like go out in the street.
He's surrounded by lawyers and private security.
So it's like he's got an entourage again.
He gets to travel.
This is like the closest he gets to feeling like what he used to be a billionaire.
So that's kind of fun.
The downside is from the perspective of an SPF hater.
The downside is that recently one of his charges was dismissed, the campaign finance violation.
This was not due to him being innocent, but due to some legal weirdness involving the letter of the extradition agreement the U.S. signed with the Bahamas.
Basically, when we put together the agreements that they'd extradite him, that was not on the document.
So the feds had to like drop the charge in order to not deal with a bunch of other bullshit.
It's a technicality, but it means that his brother Gabe and several members of the philanthropic team at FTX probably will not be charged for very likely committing crimes.
And I say they likely committed crimes because FTX executive Nishad Singh already pled guilty this spring to participating in a straw donor scheme.
So he is, yeah, and he pled guilty before they dropped this charge, which he's got to feel like an asshole for doing because now he is going to get punished for that, even though SBF is no longer being charged for it.
Wow.
That's, I mean, look, sometimes you do the ethical, altruistic thing and it comes back to bite you in the ass.
What are you going to do?
Yeah, what are you going to do?
Hey, everyone.
Just wanted to note that since we recorded this, the prosecution has noted that they will be seeking to add those charges back on that were dropped.
So it's possible that both Sam and other members of his inner circle will be charged with all that stuff.
We just really kind of don't know at this point.
But I do want to note that the prosecution is at least saying, hey, like despite this little mess up, we are not just giving up on this charge.
So heads up about that.
Could change in the future.
Well, Jamie.
Yeah.
How you doing?
I really, well, I have a question for you.
I have an answer for you.
Well, I sure fucking hope so.
No, my question is that I'm curious, what do you see happening here?
What feels plausible to you at this time?
You know, I've been seeing a lot of people be like, oh, he's going to get off.
He's going to get all.
He's got too many connections, too many, you know, people who he could roll on.
I don't think he has many people he could really roll on.
I don't think he was like, especially since these finance charges have been dropped.
John McAfee Dirt00:04:48
I don't know that I really think he's got the savvy to have like a guy like John McAfee.
I believe John McAfee killed himself.
I don't believe there's anything shady there.
I know a lot about the guy.
It makes sense to me that when his fucking running finally stopped, he would do that.
But McAfee probably did have some dirt on some people.
He was that kind of cunning, right?
I wouldn't be shocked if John McAfee had put together some dirt on some people, right?
I don't think Sam Bankman Freed is that cunning.
I don't think he was like smart enough to have dirt on anyone who could get him out of this situation.
I think there's a pretty good chance he does hard time.
I think he fucked with too many people.
He fucked with the money and he fucked with it in too dumb of a way.
So I think he's screwed.
Okay.
That's that was my instinct as well because I feel like he doesn't even have, I mean, he doesn't have any sort of like I think sometimes with these types, you get some sort of press narrative that it's like they're playing 4D chess.
And like, even if that's not entirely true, there's like a media narrative that sticks to them that makes them seem more plausible.
But I just feel like everything that's like all of his actions and all of the media surrounding him, except for a very, very small amount, seems to reinforce the fact that he's completely incompetent and malicious in every way.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, I would say that.
Well, good.
I, God, I mean, not that I, you know, I don't know.
I mean, it seems like he's fucked.
I certainly hope he's fucked.
I hope he's fucked.
I hate him.
I think he's a gross person.
I hope Will McCaskill goes away or gets like eaten by eaten by a large fish would be my pick if I got it.
If like God is like, what do you want me to do to Will McCaskill?
I'm like, you, you remember that thing you did with a whale back in the day?
What if he didn't get out?
What if a whale just eats him, you know?
And then God would be like, oh, amazing.
I love playing the hits.
Great pitch.
You know what, Robert?
I'm going to give you that HBO series you've been asking for.
Robert, you are an amazing collaborator.
Oh, yeah.
Me and God, co-creators of my HBO series.
I am hoping if the strike goes on, they take my reality show pitch, Super Soaker full of piss, which I really think has some potential, Jamie.
The premise is.
No, go ahead.
Tell me the premise of Super Soaker full of piss, Robert.
I'm ready.
So I'm in a van.
I filled a super soaker with my piss and I drive around like Rodeo Drive and I get out when I see someone who looks famous and I squirt them with a super soaker full of piss.
And then we film it and then I leave very quickly.
Okay.
I mean, I'm on board with that.
Yeah, I think it's a great, I think it's great.
You know, we'll get, you know, I would be kind of pro, like, if you could get, I think the soundtrack is going to be really key there.
Like, I think if you could get some like jock jam situation, like going all live, all live editions of Blink 182 songs.
Wow.
Because, you know, because they are one of the worst live bands that ever played.
So it's really just upsetting to the to the viewer.
That's the goal here.
And, you know, given who Blink 182 like rolls with these days, you may in fact run into Travis on Rodeo Drive and beautiful poetic.
Piss right in the face.
Just a, just a, a full load of it, you know?
Just to say, I hate this idea because it means that some fucking celebrity will murder you and then I, and then you'll be gone and then I'll be sad.
I'm going to be honest, I'm not great at recognizing celebrities.
So I'm anytime I could just see someone in a suit and spray them with the piss.
Yeah, Jamie.
I know.
Let's take my other bestie.
No.
We just roll down the street and stick Jonas Roberts.
Spray, spray, spray.
Get the fuck out of here.
Wow.
No, no, no, that's a good one.
That's right.
I'm going to rely on Jamie to recognize him, though.
Oh, my God.
I did see that, Jamie.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, the Jonas Brothers have their own vanity popcorn brand now.
Isn't that something?
These are the amazing things I can teach you, Robert.
And you've already taught me so much about hot dog through your best-selling book, Raw Dog.
Wow.
Perfect translation.
That's a fucking pivot.
You're welcome.
What is a spicy plug, though?
Gorgeous.
Gorgeous plug.
Hey, it's never too late to start reading about hot dogs.
It's never too late to start learning.
Reading about hot dogs and also America.
Fascinating story.
Raw Dog.
Find it wherever books are found.
Hot Dogs And America00:03:04
Yeah.
Well, thank you so much.
I truly was, I mean, as you know, I did a bastards episode about hot dogs as I was writing that book so that I would remain focused.
That's right.
It's the best way.
And I have heard that the subject of that episode, George Shea, that the hot dog eating community is actively protecting him from its existence.
He does not know it exists.
He does not know the book exists.
Love to hear it.
Everyone in his life is really actively trying.
Like every hot dog eater or many hot dog eaters I talked to were like, Yeah, no, we know about the bastards episode and we know about the book, but we really don't want George to know about it.
I was like, Okay, fair enough.
Beautiful.
Thank you, Jamie.
That made me feel great.
You can sign up for this show and all other CoolZone shows ad-free at CoolerZone Media.
That's for Apple.
Subscribers, we are working on the Android option.
You can find my novel After the Revolution by typing After the Revolution into whatever book buying site you use, or just walk into a bookstore and demand it from the manager at SwordPoint.
Anyway, goodbye.
Goodbye.
Behind the Bastards is a production of CoolZone Media.
For more from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
When a group of women discover they've all dated the same prolific con artist, they take matters into their own hands.
I vowed I will be his last target.
He is not going to get away with this.
He's going to get what he deserves.
We always say that: trust your girlfriends.
Listen to the girlfriends.
Trust me, babe, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm Laurie Siegel, and this is Mostly Human, a tech podcast through a human lens.
This week, an interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
I think society is going to decide that creators of AI products bear a tremendous amount of responsibility to the products we put out in the world.
An in-depth conversation with a man who's shaping our future.
My highest order bit is to not destroy the world with AI.
Listen to Mostly Human on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, it's Nora Jones, and my podcast, Playing Along, is back with more of my favorite musicians.
Check out my newest episode with Josh Grobin.
You related to the Phantom at that point.
Yeah, I was definitely the Phantom in that.
That's so funny.
Share each day with me each night, each morning.
Listen to Nora Jones is playing along on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.