YouSaid · the spoken record

Zeke Faux

lines on the record: 137
first: 2023-11-02
most recent: 2023-11-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yeah, and I will admit, I also thought I was skeptical of crypto, but I thought, hey, FTX is a casino for cryptocurrencies. They're encouraging people to gamble there. People probably lose their money. I did not suspect that Sam Bankman Fried was stealing all the money out of the back of the casino.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I spent a lot of time with Sam Bankman Fried in reporting this book because it was clear he was. Major player in crypto, and it was actually very fun when I went to go write the book FTX had collapsed, and some of his quotes like that one took on some new meaning. And I'm like, was this guy just toying with me while he was giving this interview?”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like a thousand bucks to buy a team of monsters, and it had lost it for these people who took out loans to get in on it. It had been a real setback in their life. You know, this was no joke to them. This is not like just their pocket money.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and like, I'm not making that up, like the U.S. government has said North Korea's nuclear program is partly funded from hacking this Pokemon knockoff game. And this was game Axie. The crypto guys, when it was going well, they loved to talk about it. This was their number one example of Web3. You had to buy a team of monsters. It was a game you played on your phone. You had to buy the monsters before you could play. And then when you battled, you earned smooth love potions. And it had the same circular logic where you needed the potions to get more monsters. Why do you want monsters? Well, to get the potions. Why do you want the potions to get monsters? It was going great for a while. And more than a million people in the Philippines started playing. I went there to check it out. I mean, even my driver had taken out a loan for some.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So once you got the apes, you got to watch out because they're going to get hacked. They might get stolen. And there was a art dealer who actually got hacked and $2 million of NFTs was stolen from him. And he tweeted mid hack all my apes gone. The saddest tweet in all of crypto.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And like before you install it, they make you watch this video. And it says, welcome to the wonderful world of crypto. Now please engrave your 12 word password on a piece of metal and bury it in your backyard, which I did not do. But just the process of getting my $20,000 into this foxhead so that I could waste it on this mutant ape was so horrible that I was just like, this is a huge obstacle to crypto ever taking off. No one normal is going to do this unless they think they're going to get rich.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, I'd heard it would be bad. You know, my expectations were low, but then I went to go do it, and I was like, oh my God, like no one normal will do this. It boils down to your money lives. Like, you know where you put the URL in your web browser? You might type in Google, and then maybe you have like a little red stop sign if you have ad block. Now, maybe next to it, how would you like to add a picture of a foxhead? And that's where your money's going to be.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Only cost us $20 It actually learned a lot from buying the board Ape. Because if a lot of people who, even if you are sort of into crypto, maybe you have some Bitcoin, you have some Ethereum, you probably just do it on Coinbase or Robinhood or whatever, you're not actually using the blockchain. Right.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, this is like a cartoon of a monkey. It's a very ugly cartoon. They were going for like 500 grand. And they were having a party in New York called Ape Fest. You had to have one to go, and I found out you could still get in if you got a mutant ape, which is still, it's like the ugly cousin of the board ape.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The crypto people would say actually, even that policy introduces some bias because you're invested in standard stock market funds. And so you're sort of against crypto and how you don't know about this. You got to try it out. And so eventually they kind of got to me. And I was like, you know what? I tried out Steppin'. I got a shoe. It was in the middle of collapse by the time I bought a shoe. But that didn't do much for me.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I got a lot of criticism from crypto guys as I was researching this book, and they would say, how are you writing about crypto if you don't have any crypto? And I would tell them, well, listen, first of all, as a reporter, I'm not supposed to invest in anything.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I mean, by some estimates, Bitcoin mining uses more energy than the whole country of Argentina. And it's just like warehouses of these computers running around the clock. And I was surprised to learn that there's not really doing anything that's crucial to the Bitcoin network. They're just playing sort of this guessing game that makes it difficult for anyone to hack Bitcoin and steal all the Bitcoins, but it just uses this insane amount of energy.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. But the weird thing about Tether was that there are all these red flags, and we didn't even mention they'd been sued for fraud by the New York Attorney General who had shown that they'd lied about the reserves in the past, that even John would say, I didn't know where all the money was. I could only account for a portion of it. So there are all these red flags, enough that in the traditional finance world, investors would be scared off. But in the crypto world, people kept trusting Tether and their coins still traded for a dollar. And like I wrote there, people just kept sending in their real money to get these tokens. And every day, it's the most traded crypto coin.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He also bought a mansion in the Bahamas, a pink colonial mansion on the beach that you can actually see in a James Bond movie. In the movie it's the villain's house. He flew his own jet. He piloted it. Very charming guy. And so he says, I am holding some of Tether's money. And I say, okay, I'll see you tomorrow in the Bahamas. So I fly down there. We get to his office. And when I walk in, he pulls this book off the shelf. I think it's called Misplace Trust. And it's about like financial schemes And he starts flipping through it and says, The strange things people do for money. And I'm just like, John, are you playing a character in a new episode of Inspector Gadget right now? Like, what is going on?”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and he's not just like the finance guy behind it, he's the creator. I don't think he drew the cartoons, but like he came up with the idea, he was on the team. This is what made him rich. He created Inspector Gadget and then this whole cartoon company around it. And he's honestly, he's like a character from James Bond movie. He bought a castle with the Inspector Gadget money.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah, we need to bring in all my favorite media. So I'm looking for this $50 billion. That's like what gets me into crypto. I'm like, I'm the guy who's going to see if they have this $50 billion. I'm going to track it down. When I go look, the only bank that I can find that will say we have any of this money is Dell Tech Bank in the Bahamas. And its chairman is Jean Chalapin. And he's a French guy who got rich by creating Inspector Gadget.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and he's in the flashback. He misses this crucial penalty shot that haunts Coach Gordon Bombay later in life. This guy had had this crazy career in the dot-com bubble, in World of Warcraft item trading. And then he thought up this tether coin. Now he'd passed on ownership to a new team, and I found that the de facto boss of Tether was a former plastic surgeon from Milan who had this crazy online diary where he posted about his admiration, it seemed, for Bernie Madoff.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So they weren't saying where. Red flag number one. Red flag number two. One of the coins inventors was Brock Pierce, who is a child actor from the Mighty Ducks.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, they're keeping a dollar in the bank for you. You can always trade your token in for a real dollar. So when I started looking into it, they had 50 billion tether tokens. It gotten huge. And that meant they were supposed to have $50 billion in the bank somewhere.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're talking about Tether. There's a lot to unpack there. And it was the first crypto company that I really set out to investigate in the regular financial world. If you're investigating a hedge fund, a fintech company, basically a lot of times even the investigation that brings down the company, the reporter just points out one red flag. Like they'll be like, hey, Enron, maybe what's with this off-balance sheet stuff? Maybe it's a bit fishy. And that's what brings down Enron. Right. Now, Tether, this is a company that was the central bank of crypto. And when I started looking into it, it's a stable coin. So they say that every Tether token is worth $1.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but the reality was people were like teams of bots planned to step in. And it just boiled down to a pyramid and they were trying to bring everyone who did step in was dependent on new people wanting to do step in and wanting to buy these shoes because otherwise there was no use for these green Satoshi tokens. And inevitably every other game like this, the price crashed and shoe prices are way down. Yeah.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you bought the shoe and it cost like a thousand bucks equivalent, then you could earn green satoshi tokens. So once you'd spent your thousand bucks on the shoe, you'd better keep walking every day, or you're just throwing away your chance to earn these valuable green Satoshi tokens.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, it was very circular, but it seemed like every couple weeks somebody was starting one of these things and it was really taking off. And there was one that got very popular called Step In. And it's like a health app on your phone. And to use the app, you have to buy a virtual shoe. For some reason, only one shoe. I don't know why. You need a pair of shoes. Yeah, only one. You just buy one shoe. Should be called hot. Yeah.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a slightly related to number go up technology. It's about on that level. And some of these new coins that were being started at that time would explicitly say that they were adopting Ponzi-ish structures. And we're talking about like DeFi apps. So these were like new crypto apps. And what it would boil down to is that if you started doing whatever this thing was, they would pay you in a new coin. And you might think, well, why do I want Ritho's coin? And they'd say, well, you need Ritholt's coin to use the Ritholtz app. And they'd be like, well, why do I want to use the Ritholtz app? And it's like, well, that's how you earn more Ritholtz coin.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, it's like the logic of a pyramid scheme, but for a couple years there, it seemed to work. And the crypto people like to say wag me. The W-A-G-M-I, we're all going to make it. We're going to make it. And the idea was just buy, hold it, buy some more. It's going to go up as long as we don't lose the faith and we keep promoting it to our friends. We're all going to be rich”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and one guy's on stage, and he's talking about Bitcoin, and he says the most important innovation in Bitcoin is number go-up technology. And he's like, number go up technology is a powerful piece of technology. It means when the price goes up, More people will hear about it and they'll want to buy it, and that'll make the price go up some more. And then more people hear about it, and then they'll buy it, and it'll go up even higher. And pretty soon we'll all be rich.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the big guys are getting in on it. So I go to this conference thinking, all right, I'm skeptical of crypto, but I'm also sort of expecting to see regular Wall Street guys there talking about financial technology in ways that I can understand. Instead, on stage I see like the craziest guys that I've ever heard people are just like scream at that time they were down on Elon Musk people are screaming about Felon. Yeah, F. Elon.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had resisted looking into crypto, but I took on the assignment after this argument with Jay. And one of the first places I went was Miami for Bitcoin 2021. It was one of the first big conferences of pretty much any kind since the COVID restrictions lifted. It was like 10,000 people descended on this warehouse in the Wynwood District. And I'll go in kind of skeptical. But also Bitcoin people and crypto people are great at PR and they spread this narrative that there's like this wave of institutional adoption that's just around the corner. I think at any time in like the last 10 years, there's always been the sort of sense that, oh, you've seen a headline about like BlackRock or JP Morgan”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, there's a coin called Litecoin, which is like a Bitcoin knockoff. And it's since come out that a lot of the early run-up in Litecoin that got people interested in Litecoin was the result of just manipulation. But in those early years, even more than today, like anything went, the Securities and Exchange Commission was not following Bitcoin trading closely.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Silk Road was actually very important to the early years of Bitcoin. It got it on the map. It got a lot of people buying. But really what made Bitcoin popular was not so much that it was useful for anything, it was number go up. It was the price going up and people seeing headlines about somebody making money on Bitcoin. Everybody had a friend like Jay who was telling them, hey, I made some money on crypto. Maybe you should too. And it became hard to resist. And it's interesting that in these early years, there wasn't much liquidity in Bitcoin. And it was easy for people to manipulate the prices. So since then, it's come out that some of the price changes that got people's attention in these early years may have been from manipulation.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of I mean, it was pretty cool. Not that I did, but if you wanted to buy drugs off the internet, you could just, there was this new magic internet money just. Fire up your Tor browser and send some of this new fangled internet money to order your LSD or whatever.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm like, it's pointless. And he's like, I know it's pointless. I don't care. I just think it's funny. And I'm trying to argue it's not funny. It won't go up. And this goes on for like weeks and weeks. And it does go up. And he keeps telling us about it. I'm getting kind of jealous. Finally, he sells out. I think he may have even called it right and sold before Elon Musk hosted Saturday Live, which that was like the rumor, sell the news moment. And he went to Disney. He's sending selfies with his proceeds. Yeah, he made enough on Dogecoin to go to Disney. He texted us, I am freaking Nostradamus. And I'm jealous that he made money and I didn't. But more than that, I also, I like being right. And I think of myself as the one who knows about finance. And I'm an expert on pump and dump schemes.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's starting to bubble up a bit. I can see you here taking Jside in the argument ahead of time. Right. I mean, he's like, hey, people are talking about it on Reddit. I can see this going up. It's funny. Get in early. And I'm thinking to myself, I remember when this went sort of viral a few years earlier, there'd already been a very funny segment on the daily show making fun of crypto in Dogecoin.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me being like the know it all financial reporter, I tell him, Jay, it's called Dogecoin and it's dumb. It went, because this is 2020. It's the height of the pandemic. We're all stuck at home. We're really bored. Dogecoin.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I have group text with a bunch of friends from high school. We call it Dan's basement because that's where we used to hang out. And Jay is a smart guy. He's a funny guy. We used to write a humor column together back in high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And out of the blue, he starts texting us about this thing that he calls Doggycoin.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't like to say that because my job depends on talking to people and getting me to tell their story. So I prefer to describe it as, well, I write profiles of people who make a lot of money in an interesting way. And I was drawn to that because I'm somebody who plays by the rules. I went to school. I got pretty good grades. I got a job. I've worked at Bloomberg for more than a decade now. But I really like these characters who are willing to take crazy risks. And they operate in great areas, like loan sharks, pump and dump schemers, deck collectors. I have spent my whole career writing about these guys who operate on the fringes of Wall Street. And I love getting to know these characters and figuring out what makes them tick. Because there's a lot you can do if you are willing to run the risk that maybe the security is an exchange commission will sue you. Or like maybe.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and I mean, the title of the book Number Go Up Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. Little bit give away my perspective there. I think this whole thing is over and done.”
2023-11-02 · Masters in Business · Zeke Faux on Crypto and the Digital Asset Frenzy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source