Pushkin.

Hello against the rules listeners. It's your long lost host Michael Lewis. I've missed

you guys and it's going to be a little while before I come back and I want to explain

what we're doing. I'm in the middle of a book. It's about FTX, the crypto currency exchange

that has collapsed in the last few months in dramatic fashion and it's taking all my

time. But there's this thing I do with books. I do a lot of interviewing around the book.

Stuff that's never going to be in print just to educate myself around the boundaries of

my subject and talk to a lot of interesting people for this. All the stuff winds up on

the cutting room floor except in this case. So what we're going to do is basically call

up a bunch of experts and talk to them about what they know and you'll be getting the

same kind of education I get before I put words on paper. I hope you find these people

as interesting as I do and you can hold your breath until against the rules is back

out towards the end of the year. So welcome to on background from against the rules.

I'm Michael Lewis. So the cryptocurrency movement arose on the back end of the 2008 financial

crisis in response to the crisis in response to the perceived injustices of the global financial

system. The transparency, decentralization and global nature of the blockchain are supposed

to have made it safer for cryptocurrency traders and investors. But it also makes it easier

for bad actors to hide illicit activity. How much illicit activity is there? The cryptocurrency

analysis from channel. So estimated that there were $14 billion worth of shady dealings

in 2021 alone. Tracking crypto crimes can be a nightmare but there is a way and I need

to understand the nitty gritty of how it's done. So I call up Andy Greenberg who's the

senior cybersecurity writer for wire and author of the new book Tracers in the Dark, the

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