Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.

Welcome back, everyone. So I'm delighted to have Zeke Fox on the channel, the author of Number

Go Up, which is a book that just came out two days ago and I kind of read it in a

day and a half it's it's not a short book but it is awfully entertaining and so I

spoke to him and asked him if he would come on the channel and talk to you guys and

so the the book is basically it's about crypto, it's about Sam Bankman

Fried. It's, you know, all of the stuff that you've probably been reading in the press

over the last few years. But the thing that's most entertaining is it's not just sort of a technical

manual of kind of how things work in the world of crypto. It's much more of a kind of a social

history of cryptocurrencies. It's telling you about kind of what went on and how it affected real

people, how it works, who the key players are, and so on. And so here is Zeke Fox. Yes. I mean, like the last thing I would ever want to read or write was like some sort of long explanation of how blockchain worked. This, you know, as you saw like I pass over the technical stuff as quickly as possible, and I've tried to tell

the story of these last two years, which was, in my view, the greatest financial mania the world

has ever seen. And for me, as a reporter, I was like, had a front row seat. I was hanging out

with these hustlers and zealots and conmen when things were going great.

And then I'm down, you know, two years, at the end of two years down the rabbit hole, I'm at

Sam Bankman-Fried's penthouse in the Bahamas just before the cops show up.

So, yeah, went into it not doing that much about crypto, but it turned out to be

like the greatest adventure that I think I'll ever go on.

Well, there was even, I thought like the book, you know, not to give too much away about it,

but there was almost a bit, you know, it kind of started out with a friend of yours.

I think his name was Jay, who bought some Dogecoin, made a bit of money and went to Disneyland. And, you know,

that's sort of the kind of fun end of cryptocurrencies. But as we get towards the end of the book,

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