Episode 232 Promo - SBF's Ineffective Altruism (w/ Teddy Schleifer)
Bad Faith
Bad Faith
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 5 December 2022
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This week, Briahna speaks to Teddy Schleifer, a journalist who covers Silicon Valley billionaires for Puck News, about Sam Bankman-Fried, the collapse of his crypto exchange FTX, and his obsession with media. Why does he keep exposing himself via high profile interviews (and DM exchanges) that amount to free depositions for the SEC and DOJ -- both of whom are investigating him? Was his emphasis on "effective altruism" part of his effort to charm the media into seeing him as a good faith actor in an unregulated financial sector primed for fraud? Is it possible to be a "good billionaire?" This conversation took a philosophical turn. Come for a play by play of his NYT DealBook interview, stay for a materialist analysis of billionaire philanthropy.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You live by the media, you dive in the media, and that's a fundamental Newtonian law of nature. |
| 0:04.5 | I mean, so to some extent, like the psychology element, a lot of people like talking reporters, |
| 0:09.5 | like, and people should keep talking to me all of it. But look, I mean, the standard crisis |
| 0:14.0 | comms playbook, especially with a legally-dice situation, it's just shut up and say nothing. |
| 0:18.2 | And I hope that you can take a few years of bad stories in order to protect yourself legally, |
| 0:24.3 | and guess depends how badly you don't want to go to jail. If you'd rather have a slightly less |
| 0:29.2 | negative public profile in exchange for maybe going to jail, then maybe it's worth it. I can't make |
| 0:34.7 | the decision for you. But ultimately, yeah, I mean, he's obviously placing his public relations |
| 0:39.6 | mission above his legal mission. I'm not commenting on kind of Sam specifically, but there is a |
| 0:44.4 | conservatism like small sea or, you know, not political comfort tourism, but like there is a |
| 0:49.4 | out of two no conservatism to like crisis that sometimes serves people wrongly in my experience. |
| 0:54.8 | I think that's true. Yeah. Where do you think that the downside of talking is great on the |
| 0:59.1 | upside? Maybe, but there's also like a flood the zone element where I mean, we're recording this |
| 1:03.0 | on Friday, like Sam's done 10 interviews or something like that. I don't know. There's people out |
| 1:07.1 | there who might say on Monday, I thought this guy was a total fraud and a total crook. And you know, |
| 1:12.7 | maybe by Friday, you say, okay, maybe he was in over his head. I'm not saying I agree with this, |
| 1:17.5 | but like you could see someone saying that. So like, I do think it has just objectively improved |
| 1:23.1 | his public relations posture partially because you couldn't really go down from the bottom |
| 1:26.0 | when they was at the question is does this boomerang on him in like six months? So there's this |
| 1:31.5 | truism that many lawyers understand, especially like tort lawyers that if you just apologize, |
| 1:38.0 | you are much more likely to get out of a lawsuit. If there's an accident or some kind, you know, |
| 1:43.7 | however, and this is a medical malpractice tourism, you know, all of that is true. However, |
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