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This is Recode Media with Peter Kafka.

That is me.

And today I'm talking about crypto and SBF and FTX with an authority.

He's written a book about it. His name is Z-Fox. He's an investigative reporter for Bloomberg.

His book has got an awesome title. It's called Number Go Up. You can buy it now and you should.

Welcome, Zeke.

Hey, thanks a lot, Peter. Thanks thanks for joining us you're one of several people

who has been chronicling the the rise and fall of crypto in general and specifically sambank

mfreyd and ft x and i want to talk to you just a big a big opening question for you here it seems to me

you're telling two stories in the book one is about sam backman fried and fttX. He's on the cover. He's pretty infamous at this point. We're going to talk about him in this conversation. But the other half of the book is about something called tether, which won't ring a bell to most people who weren't deeply involved in crypto, but it's kind of the thread throughout the book. It's the reason you started writing about this stuff. So before we get to Sam Bankman-Fried, what is tether and why is important and why is it the thread that connects everything in your book? Roll this back to like 2020. It's the pandemic. We're all in lockdown. We're super bored. People are just like, there's this new thing. People are talking about

crypto. My friends are telling me, like, buy this random coin, buy that random coin. I'm like a skeptic.

I'm actually not even really that interested in learning about it. But as like an investigative

reporter whose specialty is chronicling like weird stuff happening in the

world of finance, I keep getting told that I should, crypto would be perfect for me. And finally,

...