Inside crypto’s wild rise and fall with “Number Go Up” author Zeke Faux | E1807
This Week in Startups
Jason Calacanis
4.2 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 12 September 2023
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This Week in Startups is brought to you by…
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Today’s show:
Zeke Faux, the author of “Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall,” joins Jason to discuss crypto’s crazy rise and fall (3:58), how SBF learned to play the game (16:22), red flags at Tether (26:13), and so much more!
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Time stamps:
(0:00) Zeke Faux, the author of “Number Go Up” joins Jason
(3:58) Meeting Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas and first impressions
(10:23) Vanta - Get $1000 off your SOC 2 at https://vanta.com/twist
(11:30) SBF, his colleagues, and a hint of substance abuse
(16:22) The group psychosis and how they learned to play the game
(24:51) Lemon.io - Get 15% off your first 4 weeks of developer time at https://Lemon.io/twist
(26:13) Operations and red flags at Tether
(35:44) CLA - Get started with CLA's CPAs, consultants, and wealth advisors now at https://claconnect.com/tech
(37:15) Revisiting Zeke’s investigative journalism in Cambodia
(44:16) From organized crime to legitimate business
(46:59) Terraform Labs and the collapse of Luna
(49:05) The VC perspective and regulations in place
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FOLLOW Zeke: https://twitter.com/ZekeFaux
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | had spent a couple of days hanging out at FTX's offices. I'd sat with Sam. He's answering |
| 0:08.8 | emails from other CEOs. He's on Slack. He's like doing interviews. And in that time, I didn't |
| 0:16.2 | pick up any clues. What I was suspicious of was crypto in general. And I would talk with Sam |
| 0:22.6 | about this, which is that he claimed to be an effective altruist. He claimed that everything |
| 0:29.2 | he did was so that he could do the most good for the greatest number of people. But meanwhile, |
| 0:34.2 | he was running what I thought was at best like an offshore casino where people could go gamble |
| 0:41.2 | on like random tokens and would probably lose their money, which seemed like kind of bad for the |
| 0:47.1 | world. But what I did not suspect was that he was taking all the money out of the back of the |
| 0:55.1 | casino, bringing it to other casinos and gambling it himself and losing it. And that when the |
| 1:00.0 | customers went to cash in their chips, there'd be nothing left for them. You know, I didn't |
| 1:05.8 | suspect that. And pretty much nobody else did. I don't think anyone can say that they called it. |
| 1:11.5 | This week in startups is brought to you by Vanta. Compliance and security shouldn't be a |
| 1:16.9 | deal breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a |
| 1:21.8 | sock to report fast. Twist listeners can get $1,000 off for a limited time at vanta.com slash twist |
| 1:29.8 | lemon.io. Need to speed up your product development without draining your budget? |
| 1:34.9 | Higher vetted engineers from Europe at lemon.io. Go to lemon.io slash twist to get 15% off for |
| 1:42.6 | the first four weeks and CLA. Innovation takes balance. CLA's CPA's consultants and |
| 1:51.8 | well-advisors can help you get from startup to where you want to end up. Get started now |
| 1:57.7 | at claconnect.com slash tech. All right, you may remember back in 2021 at the height of the crypto |
| 2:06.2 | chaos. Tiddle a little investigation on tether on this podcast. So we had a couple of colorful |
| 2:11.8 | characters on the show, including Bitfinex, the anonymous tether critic. And one of our best |
| 2:17.2 | guests during that time period, well, we were all trying to make sense of what was very clear |
... |
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