David Z. Morris, a journalist who has covered cryptocurrency since 2013 and author of Stealing the Future, a Repeater Books study of Sam Bankman-Fried and the FTX collapse, argues that effective altruism and longtermism supplied the moral logic for the fraud. He points to Caroline Ellison's sworn testimony that Bankman-Fried did not think rules against lying and stealing bound a sufficiently gifted utilitarian calculator, and says this licensed diverting customer funds into ventures including the AI company Anthropic. Morris places Bankman-Fried in a network running through Peter Thiel and Eliezer Yudkowsky, and draws on Byung-Chul Han in discussing technofeudalism. He and Pinchbeck differ over crypto's usefulness: Pinchbeck sides with Paul Krugman's skepticism, while Morris defends real use cases, particularly for people outside the United States cut off from the banking system by post-9/11 anti-terror rules.
Guest: David Z. Morris
In brief
- Morris argues longtermist utilitarianism lets a person justify killing or robbing people now by claiming privileged foresight about benefits decades away.
- Morris cites Caroline Ellison's testimony that Bankman-Fried told her moral rules such as do not lie and do not steal did not apply under utilitarianism.
- Morris says customer money was routed into AI startups including Anthropic on the belief that they would create something like a god.
- Morris resists the flat verdict that crypto is entirely a scam, saying it lets people avoid learning how the financial layer of the fraud actually worked.
- Morris says anti-terror rules imposed after 9/11 disconnected many overseas banks from the US financial system, producing genuine demand for crypto workarounds.
- Morris says he is beginning reporting for The Verge on Jeffrey Epstein's funding of early Bitcoin development.
Full text
Under this utilitarian long-termist framework, you can say, "Okay, what I'm about to do is going to kill 20 people tomorrow." But because I'm so smart, because I'm genetically gifted, because I'm genetically superior, I know that that same action 50 years from now is going to save 100 people. And therefore, killing these 20 people today is ethically justified, and I'm fine, and I'm going to go ahead and do it. Um, Sam Bankman Freed specifically told Carolyn Ellison, she testified under oath, um, that he did not believe that moral rules such as don't lie and don't steal applied under utilitarianism. Um, and I think he's correct. So, he didn't believe that he had any obligation to tell the truth.
He didn't have any obligation to abide by agreements that he had made with his customers because he believed himself to be such a genius that he could predict the future implications of his actions today. Um, and that's where you get, you know, I'm going to steal all your money now, um, and invest it into, uh, Anthropic, another AI startup, um, because I am 100% confident that they're going to create God. Um and and and that is literally the the chain of logic that um that underwrote this you know one of the largest frauds in in history. So yeah, I mean the book um uh it seems like I mean you use kind of him as a as a lens to talk about uh a lot of seems like you you wanted to talk about you know you've got um Peter Shiel in there and uh you know kind of tech technofudalism and uh Bang Cholhan uh and one of my Yeah, I I definitely self it's my first book so I decided to make it incredibly self-indulgent um but it uh it was also yeah I mean these are all connections that um when you trace them out they they're they're very real um at least the um not so much I mean the philosophy is like my attempt to explain it um but the actual like movement is this just sprawling thing where there really is I mean I mean it's like a well it's it's a tangent it's it's a stretch to connect it but it's um definitely similar to the Epstein stuff in the sense that like everything seems so tightly connected once you start tracing all of the relationships. Um so yeah there is definitely like there are lines from from Peter Teal to you know SPF and and all the other figures in the book and um the uh sort of movement figureheads the philosophers like Eliza Yukowski who's kind of one of my um least favorite people um and uh but it's a huge it's a huge sort of uh scene you might say generously but really a huge network of of influence and uh sort of ideology.
So there's a lot to lot to follow. Yeah. Well, uh, just to sort of, um, start up, I'll say that, uh, since this will go up on my You Tube, you know, welcome to Liinal News. I'm here with David. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, no worries. Uh, he's the author of a new book, um, Stealing the Future, focused on, uh, Sam Beckman Freed and the FTX scandal. Um, and um, yeah, if you, you know, enjoy this conversation, please like, subscribe, share on You Tube, all that stuff really helps. Uh, and, uh, so, David, you've been covering crypto for quite a while, it seems.
Yeah. Um, you know, it's it's one of those things where, especially these days, it doesn't seem like nearly as much of a badge of honor, but um, I uh, I I first became kind of aware of, um, Bitcoin and the technology in like 2013. um and uh and wrote about it for for you know mainstream finance magazines. Um and then over time kind of saw that it was sort of growing into this huge more like financial like I'm interested in the technology. I go I'm like a bit of a hacker or at least like was familiar with some of those movements around decentralized technology, MP3s, file sharing going back in into the early 2000s.
Um and so I was very interested in it on the technological side. Um but obviously it has become this incredibly useful tool for scammers. Um and and now like national international scammers and frauds. Um and uh and so you know SPF was one of one of many of those I guess. Yeah. I mean you know years ago I was very intrigued by the potential of cryptocurrency and uh you know the idealism around Ethereum and all that stuff. But over time, I'm having a harder time finding much sympathy for the whole thing. I kind of like more and more in agreement with Paul Krugman, uh, who's a complete, uh, you know, negative, uh, nab of negativism about crypto where, um, you know, it's been many years now and I'm just not really seeing the utility and um, uh, you know, but maybe I'm I keep thinking maybe I'm missing something.
I I guess you know Ethereum you know many billions of dollars have got into a huge fortune. I guess it's being used for some you know De Fi stuff and so on. I mean are are there some legitimate are you are you seeing that there's some like super legitimate uses for these things that that that that justify the value and all that stuff? Yeah, I mean I think it would be a lot less interesting if it was just a scam from top to bottom. And and frankly I think that um you know to some extent over the past decade I would say that people sort of on the left or maybe even more so people sort of on the center left in the sort of liberal world have um and I mean if you've come to this position over time having like learned a lot about it it sounds like but I think a lot of people sort of hear it and the very first thing they think is or you know the the easy version of the message that they want to share is like it's all a scam and and you know for me Um, in addition to the sort of technology side, I have learned over the years a lot about finance and how the finance industry works.
Um, and uh, and I think that this sort of like blanket dismissal of crypto kind of leaves people free to not learn about the financial side of it, which is, you know, a a different level of the scam almost that you have to kind of unpack. Um but the the actual legitimate use cases are definitely there. Um I mean the the sort of classic argument I guess which I tend to agree with is that um you know there are still a lot of um and in fact more ever since uh 9/11 the uh sort of anti-terror regulations have disconnected commercial banks around the world from the US system. And so, um, just one example of of things that crypto has become very widely used for is, um, people outside of the US trying to interface with, uh, the US financial system having to use these workarounds because, uh, like anti-terror laws have ended relationships between what used to be normal correspondent commercial banks. Um, so that's just one example, but the the lending stuff you're talking about, I mean there are obviously there there's a lot of activity on uh crypto networks and you know uh not all of it can be can be fraud although you know a lot of it is and that's a it's a a sort of conundrum that you I think the important thing to remember is that this stuff is not going away.
Um and so you kind of have to confront that contradiction of um it's enabling a lot of bad things. How do we deal with that? um if we can't actually like shut it down um which is uh the the situation we find ourselves in now. What are some of your favorite specific uses of it uh that you that you've tracked or that that are still going today uh where you're like oh that shows that there's some really great utility here. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned De Fi, and for those who don't know, that's decentralized finance, which um you know, the uh I'm I'm actually working on a new project now, um a documentary about a criminal trial that took place over the summer, uh in connection to this thing called Tornado Cash, which is a privacy protocol on Ethereum.
Um and, uh Ethereum allows you to do things like take out loans. Um and they're, you know, it's not perfect. It's a collateralized loan. It's kind of anonymous. Um, but it does open up that functionality to kind of the entire world. Um, and you know, the quote unquote legality of all of this is very much debatable, but um, these are real like financial instruments that are kind of now globally available. Um, and it's at least very interesting. you know, it's hard to say like thumbs up, thumbs down, good or bad, but um they're very interesting tools where, you know, you can just like deposit your your collateral, just log onto the internet, deposit, and even if it's like $10, you know, you can borrow $10.
Um if you're like a, you know, a small farmer in I mean, these are like the kinds of examples that get trotted out to kind of manipulate people's sympathies a little bit, but they're also actually real. Um, if you're a small farmer in Africa, you can like borrow $10 to take care of something that you have a need to build out on your operation. Um, and uh, and and on the other side, and this is what's fascinating to me, is that all of that money is being lent by individual people um, who go to the blockchain and like deposit uh, their money to be lent and then they get returns on that. And it's this like peer-to-peer lending that um you know it's it's actually happening on a pretty substantial scale. Um and uh and is like genuinely novel interesting addition to kind of the way money works.
And it's nothing like crazy I think is the interesting part. It's not like some elaborate you know um financial structure where you're like getting free money. it's just a like regular ass loan that you're probably paying 10% for that is um just happens to be done in this entirely different way that doesn't involve a bank. Um so you know that stuff I still have considerable optimism for what it sort of means long term. Um but again there is this problem that like because all of this is permissionless uncensorable um you do wind up with a lot of fraud. Um and so that's kind of the horns of the dilemma.
Um yeah, I mean obviously over the last few years I've been, you know, trying to understand the kind of tech oligarchs who kind of shifted from mainstream progressivism or liberalism to basically we're now more looking like fascism, uh Christian white nationalism even. And it feels like the promise of crypto has played a big part in this. I mean um Peter Teal's favorite book is his book, The Sovereign Individual. that he actually for and Mark Andre has also called it like the most influential book for him and uh it's a very strange I mean that's like I'm sure you've read it right it was like two I'm familiar with it but I haven't read it. No, the two libertarians um in 1997 basically argued that uh as a result of digital technologies ultimately would not have you know national centralized currencies and ultimately you wouldn't have nation states and so the future would be this sort of disruptive breakdown of the nation state and you know sovereign individuals would be able to create their sort of private fifoms you know which kind of what they're trying to do with these freedom cities like Braspera uh and what they want to do in Greenland and so on, right?
So I think that the network state, what's that? The network state is is one of the sort of terms bluran's idea, right? You know, and he's, you know, very much a fascist. I mean, um he talks about how the future of San Francisco could be like you have like red and blue neighborhoods where you actually have to have like a card, you know, to if you're if you're blue to go to the red zone or whatever. Um, so, um, yes, that's also kind of, you know, enhanced my suspicion around it. I'm kind of, uh, enjoying, you know, even though I have a little bit of skin in the game, so I've I've lost, you know, half of the amount of money that I had in the whole thing, I'm I'm having some, you know, short shoutout.
It's a bad week. What's that? It's a bad week. It's a bad week in the markets in general. But, yeah, cryp crypto, I think, has lost more than Bitcoin has lost more than half its value. Is that correct? Yeah. from the from the peak of just a year ago I think um and yeah I mean the opportunities for shot and frea in this space are like infinite because basically every four years there's something like this where there's a huge crash and there's like some somebody who has cooked up and I think this is actually a pretty crucial point is that like crypto itself um is kind of limited in its usefulness for elite fraud which is you know part of the subtitle of my book is that and the the sort of network state stuff um is I think very tied into fraud.
One of my sort of I kind of problems that I work at a lot and partly get at in the book is that there is this connection between um eugenics authoritarian thought and and just straight up fraud because basically and I think in Sam Bank's case it's very much the case that like he when you think of yourself as a genius you don't think you're capable of making mistakes and so you act accordingly. um and wind up just lying rampantly which is which is what he did. But to the kind of like sovereign individual question um I mean there's a there's a a book that came out way back in 2016 which I you know we'll talk about the nuances but um it was very precient in its own way by um a guy named David Colombia called um Bitcoin I it's called Bitcoin the politics of or the technology of right-wing politics or something like that. I forget the exact title. I read I read that book and I found it very persuasive.
Yeah, I'll look at your book. I mean, I I'm a um my my background is in Mc Luhanite media studies and so I'm very sympathetic to the idea that the design of a system has a long-term impact on the politics of how it's perceived and used. Um and so I'm very sympathetic to the general idea. That book is a short book. It's called The Politics of Bitcoin: Software as Right-wing Extremism. Right. Right. Yeah. Exactly. Um and you know there are some things I mean obviously like in the macro he has been highly vindicated because this entire thing has become really really highly affiliated with the right or Bitcoin specifically.
Um which a lot of people by the way have an issue with because there are a ton of people who are very passionate about Bitcoin who are not on the right. Um but the the sort of high level that has definitely been the case. And just to kind of like spell out for anybody who might not be super familiar with like the practical elements of this, I mean the very very simple version of the argument is that because Bitcoin allows you to kind of like hold property entirely yourself with like no institutional affiliation, no um like reliance on a government that that then makes it sort of more appealing to, you know, you you think back even to the '9s or 2000s survivalists, uh, the like prepper movement. Um, it's it this sort of resonates with that in the the kind of like self-reliance sense. Um, I think that the the actual like rhetoric around Bitcoin is probably even more right-wing um, long-term than the actual technology itself.
it became, you know, very discussed as uh yeah, like a like a sort of counterpoint to the Federal Reserve's ability to centrally manage um a a currency. Um which obviously again, those of us who have memories of the '9s and 2000s, the sort of opposition to the Fed as this like supposedly undemocratic actor in the economy is is very very right-wing coded. So, I think that's a strong connection there. Um I will say because uh you know we you mentioned Ethereum I think Ethereum is for a lot of reasons much less associated with um the the politics of the right but that's really more internal and I don't think people um on the outside are all that interested in the distinction there. So unfortunately or for better or worse it all gets kind of painted with that same broad brush.
Yeah, it yeah, it's a it's a long complicated discussion around like which I've never quite totally understood the politics of Ethereum's founder or what his like vision of like a future society is and Vitalik Bhutan who I would love to meet talk to some you ever talk to him I've met him face to face like twice uh but never never talked at any length um he's an understandably quite you know private person in some ways but um I mean he he is he is out and out um this is a whole other discussion but he has done a pretty good job of not being kind of like a figurehead. So um there is some influence from him on the kind of way that Ethereum politics plays out I suppose. Um but really I think if you want like the dime store version I think that Ethereum is maybe like the extreme lib version in the sense that it is all about like mechanism design incentives um and like sort of institutional structures built on the blockchain you might say. Um so it's very um it's very much like market liberalism I think would be how I I would describe the Ethereum ethos. Yeah.
Well, let's um let's let's go through Sam Beckman Freed's story a little bit, then we'll come back into more of the macro scale stuff uh towards the um so how old is he now? When was he born? Um I'm not going to be able to tell you exactly, but I'm going to say like 32 or 33 at this point. And so he grew up in a very privileged uh background, right? His parents were Stanford professors. His mother was an ethicist. Uh what was what was his father? A lawyer or a law professor? Well, I mean, this is where it gets really fun. His his father was a um a lawyer focused on tax policy and specifically focused on at least theoretically trying to um fight moneyaundering um internationally, which you know, obviously his his son became a major vector for international moneyaundering and then um Joe Joe Bankman is is his name.
Um frankly, became an accessory to all of these crimes. Um and and then uh you know because there was no second trial, a lot of those um did not get investigated or or at least exposed in court. Um so there's there's still kind of some loose threads there with the parents, right? I mean uh what's the father's name again? What's his first name? Joe. Joe Bankman. Yeah. I mean, even more than an accessory, from what I from what I noticed in the book, you're talking about how uh they brought in the Bankman brought in a lawyer who' been part of a of like fraud uh what was it called?
United Bet or something. Some kind of poker thing. Ultimate Bet. Yeah. Um and the guy's name is um Freedberg. Dan Friedberg. Yeah. Daniel Friedberg. And this is where this might be the the part of the entire thing that smells like the absolute most fishy. Um, if you want to think about it as maybe more than just a fraud. Um because yeah, like Joe Bankman hired Dan Freedberg to be basically the head of a of a a full like the entire FTX operation um of the the legal head legal head of of FTX as a whole at a time when it was already known that he had been caught participating in a cover up of a fraud where coincidentally perhaps um Ultimate Bet was an online poker site and they were using software to steal from their customers effectively which what FTX wound up doing as well.
Um so it's um it's a very very weird thing like you're the Stanford professor father of an entrepreneur you would the ethicist you know family um and you hire somebody who's already publicly known to have been involved in a fraud cover up um it it's a very strange decision one among many obviously. Yeah. Um, so Freriedman grew up in a kind of a culture of the sort of Jewish privilege I guess or like intellectual uh elitism and he was sort of seen as some kind of potential genius even though he was kind of weird. Is that the idea? Yeah. I mean I think the the sort of um intellectual privilege I think is an interesting way to put it.
I you know I'm very obviously we're we're both writers. We're very pro-learning but um he was uh you know they were sort of supposedly having like ethical conversations at the dinner table. he was invited to um you know when there were sort of meetings of other Stanford professors at the house um he was there having conversations with people um supposedly very intellectually mature very like thoughtful and I mean this gets to one of the the real I think deep puzzles that I'm you know trying to get out at the book in the book is um you know was Sam Bankman Freed a a genuinely good person at some point who like lost sight of that was He, you know, I I I I think he's um at least to a significant degree uh a sociopath. Um but, you know, he did get this like education in specifically um utilitarian philosophy, which um I sort of spent some time in the book pointing out. I mean, I personally find um utilitarianism pretty problematic and I think that it feeds into a lot of authoritarianism.
Um and so that was what he was he was sort of brought up to believe in. Um and and we can talk about it, but utilitarianism also is very important to um what I describe in the subtitle as technoutopianism. But uh we we now I think a lot of people are are referring to it as just techno athoritarianism or technofascism. Um which we see again from people like Peter Teal um and uh and in various forms in our actual government now. Um so so that's part of the effort of the book is to really tie all of that together um under that utilitarian umbrella um which is what he was being taught at home.
So you're saying that his parents in that sense were probably atheists or secular materialists. Oh yes, they were very much um they were very much atheist secular material secular secular Jewish. Um and uh and you know one of the um fascinating examples of um you know I I I write a decent amount about Michael Lewis who is the the finance writer who wrote unfortunately really badly conceived and and deeply flawed book about Sam Bankman Freed that came out before the criminal trial started. Um and one of the the stories that kind of saw him as a hero, right? He was he was a big fan. He thought, "Oh, this is a rebel who's breaking up the system," you know.
Yeah. Yeah. And and you know, that's um I think been Michael Lewis's stock in trade and uh he he sort of has found these heroes of capitalism, you might say, and written these very loud auditory books. Um, but it's fascinating that this uh this fraud happened kind of in the middle of him reporting this book and he just wasn't able to to turn the ship to where he could actually like acknowledge that he had been misled. Um, and so the book basically comes off as a defense of Sam Bankman Freed. Um but one of the stories that is told that um I think you know Lewis takes as this kind of sign that Bankman Freed is a genius to a certain extent was just like him having a conversation with people about God.
Um and being like apparently Sam had some moment where he was like wow people really do believe in God. It's unbelievable to my secular brain. Um, so I'm just going to, the way Michael Lewis put it, um, is that Sam realized then that he could be completely right and everybody else could be completely wrong, which both from Lewis and from Sam Bankman Freed is an amazing thing to say about the question of the existence of God, right? Like Sam is 100% convinced when he's in his early 20s that God doesn't exist. He is certain of this and he is 100% confident and just has no doubts whatsoever.
Um, which then becomes, I think, very typical of the way Sam moves through the world, which is, you know, thinking that he has this thinking of himself and and leading other people to think of him as this genius when really all he's he's got is confidence in his own um biases, I think. Um, which I think has, you know, now become very typical of the geniuses that we see out in the world, people like Elon Musk. Um and uh and so again there's you know this big world of of people who think too much of themselves I think. Right. Well this conviction of uh atheism or secular materialism you know has been kind of the um standard for people particularly in like the tech world.
I mean, you know, as I wrote about, I know you read my book, Breaking Open the Head, you know, I grew up in a very, you know, artistic but totally secular materialist atheist culture and it would just seemed absurd the idea that you would, you know, believe in a god or anything divine or that the soul could exist outside of the body like that. And it was only when I had a massive existential crisis in my uh mid20s that I started to, you know, ended up exploring psychedelics, mushrooms, LSD, going to uh indigenous cultures in Africa and Ecuador and so on, going through these different Mexico, going through these different experiences and then having these kind of psychic uh um you know, psychic portals open, direct paranormal activity, transcendent, transpersonal experience. And I and I ultimately had to reject that um materialist worldview. But um I think that um yeah, I mean now we're seeing you know kind of like you know what some people talking about as the meaning crisis. Um the guy Patrick Denin wrote that book about the death of liberalism and so on like that whole ethos seems to have hit the limit.
And personally I believe that um there's a a better alternative to the scientific theory of you know rational materialism which is something along the lines of monistic or analytic idealism that somebody like Bernardo Castra uh you know explores or you know Swami or Riddle Steiner which basically said basically was that consciousness is more likely the fundamental reality and everything we experience is a projection or extension of that field of of of consciousness itself. And um yeah, I think that until our whole paradigm toggles in that direction uh we'll we'll you know be in this um you know madness that that we've entered into. I mean you know I mean TL is interesting because you know he's clearly I would say a nihilist but he understands the value of a religious belief because he needs to you know convince enough of the underclass that he has their best interests at heart. Um, and so yeah, I mean that's just cynical, you know, Peter Teal pretending to be a Christian. It's just like it's interesting sort of politically, but it's not so much interesting theologically because he's just bullshitting.
But you know the the I you know I think that probably um it doesn't come up a ton in the book but somewhat of a subtext of the book is you know my my issue with the secular materialists is not necessarily just the confidence that God doesn't exist but the confidence that in the absence of God humans can know everything. Um, you know, this is this is really like there is no humility and and you hear it now again um when you listen to like Sam Alman who I feel like is just Sam Baitman Freed 2.0 know and we're going to find out but you know the fundament and this is sort of where we go from Sam Bankmanf freed into this technoutopian project which is um the the open AI people who by the way share this effective altruist um and rationalist ideology with Sam Bankman Freed you know they they sincerely believe that they're going to build you know what they variously call artificial general intelligence but really they believe is going to be a kind of computer god um they believe that they can get knowledge about the entire world into a box in digital form. And I spent some time in the book talking about just how deeply flawed and terminally flawed um this this conception is. I mean there are you know if you start thinking about if you start learning about physics I don't know if you're familiar with the the thought experiment called Maxwell's demon. Um but you know if you try to come up with a model by which you can understand everything in the universe um it's actually physically impossible.
the process of gathering knowledge creates enough entropy that humans cannot ever have total knowledge of reality. That like that sort of is is intuitively true. Um but you kind of have to go to a little bit of an extent to prove it because these people are so committed to this idea that you can just scan the universe and have the AI come up with the total answer to everything. Um and and that I think as I further argue is where you find these like gigantic blowups, frauds like FTX, um but also the the giant blowup that we're about to have of AI LLM based AI scaling hitting its limit after we've promised that we're going to invent God. Uh but that's not going to happen even though we're super confident.
Um and and so we have just economic catastrophes driven by this materialist confidence in our own knowledge. Um and so you know whatever the sort of like spir I have you know maybe I have a more intellectual um view of God than you might. I'm not you know super intimate with your views but um I I my one of the things that I say in the book is that um you know a certain strain of religion over time has been very focused on the idea that we should fear God. And that's not fear in the sense that fe that God is like some monster that's out to destroy us, but that God is another name for the unknown and for the unknowability of the universe and therefore for the humility with which we have to approach the world and interact with it. Um, and so I think that like that's where the secular humanism sort of reaches its own self-destructive limit is in order for that worldview to make sense, you have to conceive of it as eventually reaching some totalizing knowledge.
Um, and and that's just never going to happen. And so we have to have some place in our worldview for you know whether you call it God or just the unknown or you know like the uh the sort of experiment experience of being on this deep level where you acknowledge that you are just a small part of something much larger. I mean these are all different ways of saying that we can't control the world and we should behave as if we can't control the world. Um and and and the uh the sort of yeah materialist project ultimately is we need to be able to control the entire world. And so that just again and again runs into the impossibility of its own project.
Um and and so I think that that's another one of the kind of underlying themes of of the book. Who do you think would win if you had like an ultimate fighting uh cage match between Rocco's Basilisk and Maxwell's demon? Oh, I mean, Maxwell Zean wins every time. I mean, because it's actually a real thing. And Ro's bass list is made up. Uh, by the way, Roko is a real guy. Uh, I don't know if we should recap more. Um, I met him actually, he he is a at least online presence, terrible, just a racist freak. Um, and that like, you know, speaks to the context of the the broader movement where, yeah, these people are all eugenicists.
Um, but you know, for for kind of the benefit of of listeners, um, Roko's basilisk is I'm not going to do a great job of summarizing this, um, but it's basically the idea that if you oppose the construction of a benevolent AI in the present when it is created, sorry, basically, yeah, it's basically if um, if you if you try to thwart or slow down artificial super intelligence, right, it'll remember you as as being against it. And when it becomes super conscious and multi-dimensional, it will be able to go back in time and sort of like grab your, you know, being and torture you for eternity. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, this actually it's an interesting idea because it illustrates the way they think in two ways.
One is again they're they're completely blind to Maxwell's demon because both in this and in other contexts they're talking about you know you I don't know if you're familiar with Ray Kerszswe but he also has this idea that you know we should if we will eventually have like nanotechnology that allows us to go into somebody's grave and suck out all of the particles that made them up and then from that reconstruct their mind in digital form that these people then regard as not just ethically equivalent to the actual person but literally a continuation of your subjective experience. So with Roko's Basilisk, one version of it is the idea that the future AI is going to go back in time and not necessarily like resurrect you, but create a model of your your mind in the future computer and then torture it in the simulation and that that is somehow continuous with your own experience of humanity. Um and and so like the absurdities here um just pile up, right? Like there is no reason to believe that there can be like a subjective experience experienced by a human mind simulated on a computer, but this is like fundamental to the way that they um view the future. Um and so the absurdities are just are just legion in all of this stuff.
Um and uh yeah, Roko is a is a clown, frankly. Let's go back to young Bikeman Creed. So, did he go to college or did he drop out or what was his pathway? No, shockingly, he did not drop out of college. He went to MIT and and finished with like a physics degree. Um, and you know, like everybody who studies physics, immediately went to uh go trade stocks on Wall Street. Um, so that was kind of his arc and and I mean one of the funniest things about the the the Sam Bankman Freed story is, you know, he's in college and he's kind of like he describes himself as being a little bit lost at that time, unsure of what he wants to do with his life, thinking about volunteering or maybe going to be a doctor and then having this meeting with um Will Mc Kascal, who's uh one of the two sort of figureheads of effective altruism.
And Will Mc Kascal sells him on this idea. It's called earn to give. Um and that is this pitch that if you are good for example at a high at a lucrative job like stock trading um even if you're really philanthropic even if you want to do the best thing for the world you should not go volunteer for like a nonprofit that's actually trying to improve the world you should make all of this money and then donate it to a nonprofit which you know this is one of the you know for for a long time one of the main concepts of effective altruism um and we could talk more about it but the The funny part of all of this is that Sam Begmanf Freed has this like ethical revelation and then does exactly the same thing as every other kid in his position, which is get a physics degree at MIT and then go to Wall Street to trade stocks. So there's this like gloss of ethics on it, but the actual thing that he does is exactly the same as some guy who just wants to get rich on Wall Street. Um, which I think is very emblematic of, you know, the the way these people operate, which is really just to put like a thin kind of rhetorical justification on the thing that they already want to do.
Yeah. I mean, I guess um, you know, at least, you know, in terms of politics, I guess Bengreed was, you know, Democratic Party uh, supporter. uh and actually his fall from grace may have may have even been significant in terms of the types of funding that he was bringing to uh Democrats. But so let's go. So he was he was trading on Wall Street uh then he got into crypto or or what happened? Um yeah so the the the specific story is he was at Jane Street which was the hedge fund where he started. Um did relatively well there. He had a notorious blow up that was the biggest loss in the firm's history.
Um but I guess that's kind of you're supposed to do that apparently. So nothing happened to him. Um and uh but he then went and spent maybe a summer um after he got sold on effective altruism he volunteered for a few months at the center for effective altruism which is a an institute in Berkeley. Um, and effective altruism even before Sam came along was very wellunded by mostly billionaires. Um, including a guy named Dustin Moskovitz who's one of the less known co-founders of Facebook. Um, and Jan Talon who um was I think I don't know if he's Dutch or Norwegian, he's uh he's one of the co-founders of Skype.
Um, and so it's all very funded by the tech world. Anyway, Sam went to the Center for Effective Altruism for three months. He hated volunteering. Um he's pretty much a lazy and untalented guy at everything except for uh trading. Um and and that's you know he talks about it kind of quite openly. Um and so while he was volunteering at this nonprofit, he was actually mostly trading crypto um and doing very little of the actual volunteer work that he had signed up for. And then from there went and founded um a uh a hedge fund called Alama Research. um that was kind of immediately a flop, believe it or not.
Um the the narrative for a long time was that he made a bunch of money um arbitrageing on Bitcoin prices between Japan and other exchanges just doing really simple buy low here, sell high there. Um and he did make, you know, maybe $35 million, but according to insiders, that sort of went away very quickly. um he made a lot of bad trades personally in the early Alama days um would like lose funds and so in 2018 I mean literally like lose funds like not know where they were um and so in 2018 um a group of people who had been sort of co-founders of Alama in some sense um including um well people who were effective altruists um tried to depose Sam basically saying like he's a habitual liar. Um he has been having inappropriate sexual relationships with uh underlings. Um and this is, you know, 2018.
This is four years before the same things were going to happen at FTX. Um but uh Will Mc Kascal, the Oxford-based effective altruist uh co-founder, basically went to bat for Sam at the time. Um Macascal's name was used to kind of bully and silence people who were critical of Bankman Freed. Um, and then about half of the Alama team left to go found um, a different hedge fund that's still successful today in the UK. So like Sam was the the the sort of weak half of the team. Um, the people who left, they're still doing fine. Um, so that happened and then um, you know, it's starting to look interesting in many ways.
There are parallels to what's going on now. Obviously at Open AI people tried to push out Sam Alman in part because they claimed he was a habitual liar. Um and we also the past couple of days have seen Elon Musk selling his companies to his other companies to effectively give them big bailouts. Um and in retrospect that's what um the founding of FTX looks like. Sam used staff, money, and time from Alama Research to start building FTX, which is illegal because he's not giving any claims on FTX to his previous Alamita investors. Um, and so, you know, this was just kind of like, okay, Alama is not going well.
We actually had all of our loans reversed. there was tax um tax records showing that they had at least according to the tax filings. They lost something like $3 billion between 2020 and 2023. Um so, you know, there were there's a lot of signs that Alamita was not going well. He started FTX um arguably Alamina is like a sort of a crypto fund or kind of like a crypto yeah hedge fund trading shop. they just traded their own book to try and make money by you know arbitrage or eventually they started doing much more crazy stuff which is when they started losing money a lot um and uh and then he started FTX which um became became FTX.
What was different between FDX and Alamita in terms of what it was doing or its mission? You know, Alama um hedge fund, they have a portfolio, they buy and sell, they you know, take profits from successful trades. FTX um at least in theory was just a crypto exchange where you have a platform and users can come and trade their own assets to, you know, let's say bet on the price of Bitcoin going up. So it's the users who are making those bets whereas at Alama it's actually the company itself that has positions and is taking risks when it's trading crypto. Um the problem was that ultimately the problem wound up being that um Alama was still around when FTX the exchange started up and Alama was still trading on FTX um and as we found out later had special privileges that effectively allowed it to borrow and it seems then lose um all of the money that actual customers had deposited in FTX.
And that's the that's the basic um fraud that was alleged was he just gave Alamita access to all the money when FTX was going well. What was the competitive advantage that was was understood to have? Yeah. Um there were a few, but to be clear, FTX was not by any means the largest crypto exchange even in its heyday. Um FTX was sort of understood to have a pretty good interface. um some some perhaps technical advantages, but you know, I've really never talked to anybody who was like completely clear on that competitive advantage. I think a lot of what Alam or Alamita or sorry, what FTX had was good marketing.
um they had good messaging, good marketing, and of course the fact that Sam Bankman Freed was this effective altruist who um not only was he like saying, "I'm going to use all of these profits for good," he was actually kind of openly cynical about cryptocurrency itself, um which I think in a perverse way, as um uh Matt Lavine from Bloomberg kind of observed later, that cynicism weirdly made people trust him a little bit more. He was to some extent he he said like you know all crypto is a scam but we can make money off of it so we're just going to make money off of it. So it was kind of openly cynical in a certain way. I remember some reading some interview with him that was maybe a year or six months before he he collapsed. I was like I can't even believe it.
like the what what people what he's saying is this is openly a Ponzi scheme that has no intrinsic value and is just um a marketing scam basically which I think is actually kind of an example of one of the things I was mentioning before which is that especially people in the kind of like you know centerleft media sphere have been getting a lot of messaging since like 2013 that like Bitcoin is for criminals this is all like a kind of like a like the crypto itself is a Ponzi scheme and so I think that kind of made it a lot more appealing when when Sam was like, "Oh, yeah, this is all kind of like fake, but you know, you can you can make a little money off of it." Um, when in fact, I think that the, you know, whatever you'll say about them in in other aspects, I mean, again, the these people's politics suck. Um, but like the more sort of true believer platforms like Coinbase, Kraken in the US, um, and and, uh, Binance internationally, you know, say what you will about them, they never stole anybody's, uh, any customers money, um, and and actually like kept decent books. So, in a weird way, the cynicism and the like cynical attitude towards crypto made people more vulnerable to to Sam Bankman Freed's con in a weird way. So, but and so the the exchange itself would would hold people's crypto. Uh I mean, and then he would then he would be able to siphon some of that off.
Yeah. Very much so. Those debts or whatever. Yeah. And and the the the structure here is so bizarre for a lot of reasons. One being that like crypto companies understandably for for fairly good reasons have a lot of difficulty getting access to traditional dollar banking which they need because people will deposit dollars and then that will be used to buy uh tokens on the exchange. Um but what happened with FTX was they in in fact Daniel Friedberg helped them set up um effectively fraudulent banking that gave Alamita a way for people to deposit dollars. So for a long time at FTX um the way to deposit dollars was actually to send the money to Alama which is a great example of these are supposed to be separate companies but they were being treated as one company.
Um what happened was that Alamita then never sent those dollars to FTX. Um so a lot of the crypto that was reflected in people's balances on the FTX website, right? You would go to the website, look, and it would say like you have 200 Bitcoin or whatever, apparently a lot of that crypto was never actually even purchased for them. Like it was just kind of a fake entry on a ledger that they could look at on a website, but was never really in FTX custody. Um and so instead those dollars were being used by Alama to make venture capital investments um primarily but also to do things like uh buy Sam's parents a $26 million house in the Bahamas to um allegedly there was never a trial but allegedly to bribe Chinese officials um to uh not just make conventional campaign finance donations but to engage in campaign finance fraud um which Barbara Frerieded, Sam's mother, by the way, actively coached them in the methods of committing finance fraud, campaign finance fraud.
Um, again, that never went to trial. So, that's another open question. Um, so I guess the point being that, um, the money did not go where it was supposed to from the very beginning. um Alamita was given license to run this huge negative balance which if you're trading on an exchange is this like unfair advantage where you effectively get to steal more money by targeting other people's positions um without having to worry about your own risk. So really Alama had a cheat code on FTX that Sam gave them and they used it to steal everybody's money. So that was it which you know Sam owned both of them so it's just him doing it and then he became like super wealthy right like in terms of his you know ascribed net worth it was how much billions and billions I mean it was like um um I think that the term that was used was that he and I actually have to kind of like push back a little bit on the phrasing of the question because people do even in the mainstream finance finance press people say you know he was worth pro maybe he was worth like I don't even know the number but maybe he people will he was worth $20 billion at his peak.
He was never actually worth $20 billion, right? So, none of these guys are in that sense, right? It's always invested in like um you know the sort of speculative capital compared to like what's actually on Yeah. But you you know, you add on top of that the fact that it was a fraud and all of the revenue was fake. Um and so it was just like completely an illusion. He never really had that money. Um and so it's not just that like FTX had this inflated valuation based on fraudulent metrics of its revenue. Um he also created uh a token called FTT which ultimately became his downfall because he you know very similar I compare it to the Enron scandal where they used Enron stock to sort of do these offbook entities that allowed them to borrow money against their own stock which is normally not legal.
Um but he had a coin called FTT which behaved very much like FTX stock. Um and then he used it as collateral for loans. So when the fraud was discovered um that collateral collapsed, all of the loans got recalled and he was bankrupt. Um so that was the that was the structure of the downfall was um the the the collapse in the value of this basically like fake money that he invented. Got it. Um, so how long I mean he was like a folk hero. He was like lauded some he was in like all these amazing com I can't remember. There was like was like Bill Clinton or you know some you know he was on stage with all these great people.
Bill Clinton, Tony Blair great lineup a two-year kind of period where he was like king of the world basically. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean just to be super clear all of these people were being paid to sit next to this guy, right? Like it wasn't like Bill Clinton was calling somebody and being like, "Hey, uh, I I really want to come and be on stage with with Sam Bankman Freed." What actually happened specifically was SBF um connected with this guy named Michael Kes who had been a former chief of staff for Hillary Clinton and then became a major bundler for the Clintons. Um, he's also Katie Perry's former manager, and Katy Perry was kind of throwing FTX some free PR at the time, posting stuff on Instagram about how she was going to like quit music and go work for FTX.
Um, so all of this stuff that at the time and like they they hired um, God, what was the football player's name? Uh, Tom Brady. So they gave Tom Brady like $30 million for three five minute appearances or something insane like that. um all of this appearance of kind of social validation, the the Clinton thing. I mean, I think Clinton Clinton got ripped off. He only got I think like 20 grand to go do that appearance. Um so he he sold out pretty cheap. Um and uh and all of these people were getting paid to kind of create this halo around Sam by sitting next to him, taking pictures.
Um, and it was all kind of quite centered on Michael Kes who, um, you know, kind of got off clean. Um, he got $500 million of largely stolen customer funds, uh, given to his venture fund slash uh, PR firm. And one of the deals within that deal was uh, FTX paid something like um, effectively like $20 million. I'm I'm I'm using round numbers here, but they bought indirectly um a vodka company that Kives had co-founded with um one of the Kardashians that had some like minuscule valuation of like a few million and they wound up paying like a hundred million for it um without doing any due diligence and and so like all of this was just handouts by Sam rampantly to anybody who he thought could be influential and help him. Michael Ky just being one particular example there.
And and part of Freriedman's whole shtick was he was always in those like ugly shorts and t-shirts. He never wore food or whatever. So it was like he was such a genius that he didn't have to be in like the way of being or whatever. And then I guess you know after his downfall we learned more about the culture around him kind of like you know ketamine polyamory kind of like sort of chaotic kind of young people who really didn't have their together who were just kind of like you is that would you say that's a well I I mean I think that it's actually kind of a crucial distinction. I don't think I've heard and maybe I just haven't seen this and I'm sure they were but I don't know about ketamine specifically.
What I do know is that they were being um let's say quote quote unquote prescribed amphetamines or you know whether it's rolin or aderall or whatever. Um Sam had a medical like a genuine medical diagnosis of uh like serious anhidonia and clinical depression and he took he had these things called MSAM patches uh which the drug is called seleene u which is a an anti-parkinson's treatment primarily that's sometimes prescribed for serious cases of depression. So he I mean Sam genuinely did suffer clinical depression and you know I'm not going to judge his use of of stimulants to try and counter that. But we do know that stimulant use um and this is a really crazy but very real um parallel. Obviously stimulant use was rampant in the Third Reich and it made people more obedient.
Um, and that's one of the things that Carolyn Ellison, one of the convicted co-conspirators, said in her actual um, you know, clemency plea when she was sentenced was that she had developed a serious aderal addiction and tolerance and that sort of impaired her critical thinking. I mean, these are all bad people. By the way, I'm not going to defend Carolyn Ellison. She's a racist, too. Scientific racist who wrote about it a lot. Um and uh but she did sort of make the point that yes there was a lot of um aderall going around and it probably contributed to the fraud by reducing people's capacity to sort of look at the big picture of what they were doing and instead to focus on this constant activity which is as you mentioned where Bjungcho Han comes into my my my my book.
Um, you know, these were people who sort of willingly submitted themselves to total capitalist exploitation. Um, you know, the exploitation of their own bodies. You mentioned Sam's uh dress, but he also like was sort of notoriously he didn't just wear shorts, he like looked like garbage all the time. He was increasingly overweight over the years. Um, he never got his haircut. He sort of knew that his hair was part of his image. Um, and he also very studiously um put out this message that he was like barely sleeping, right? Which was probably true. You're on two different kinds of uh amphetamines. But he would like fall he was like, "I sleep on the bean bag in my office." All of this like hustle culture grind stuff that we would now recognize um or or that we've known for a long time is like affiliated with Silicon Valley and and the sort of culture of startups where we're not going to sleep, we're going to work 24/7.
Um and oh wait, our like lack of sleep led us to make some really bad mistakes is also um what happens a lot. Uh so it was um you know he he performed but the performance wound up leading to his downfall you know. Cool. I mean I think um that's mostly what what is useful to say about him and the whole the whole thing that happened unless there's anything else um that uh we missed. Now the intricacies of the fraud are less interesting than the the actual like network that I think created and supported him and and sort of taught him how to think about it.
Um which is the main focus of the book really. And so that network includes his like childhood you know family network but also the kind of culture of Silicon Valley and and the sort of tech finance world like the effective altruism. I know Musk and Eel are also I think well yeah I mean they you know for them it's a great excuse not to give anything to philanthropy because if you're if you're doing the thing that's going to make people live forever or live for you know take over the galaxy you know then that's way more important than you know trying to save people from malaria or anything like that yeah and this is the um this is kind of the the maybe the core point of the book because the ideas do come some of them from Silicon Ali um Peter Teal was one of the first funders of Elizer Yudkowski. He gave Yukowski a million dollars to start um the machine intelligence research institute which you know basically has led to open AI and the current AI moment while you know weirdly claiming that AI is the most dangerous thing in the world. Ydcowski is fascinating an extremely tragic figure.
Um but the really like key ideas actually come from Oxford. So like Macascal is at Oxford, Toby Ord is is at Oxford. Um Nick Bostonramm is at Oxford. Um another notorious racist um and uh and technoutopian. Um and uh you know their idea as you as you say is you know we need to think about what life is going to be like 20,000 years from now, right? Um, when Musk talks about becoming a multilanetary or intergalactic species, he's talking about this vision of, you know, human expansion, which, you know, to a certain extent we all like dream of living amongst the stars. Star Trek is a thing.
It doesn't make you evil just because you want to go settle another planet. Um but it's when you you know the key thing that Macascal introduced to all of this is they explicitly claim that future humans should be treated as ethically equivalent to um present presently living humans. Um, which again the reason that becomes a sort of authoritarian trap is that it assumes that you know the impact of your actions today in the far future. And then if you claim to know that, then you can say under this utilitarian long-termist framework, you can say, "Okay, what I'm about to do is going to kill 20 people tomorrow." But because I'm so smart, because I'm genetically gifted, because I'm genetically superior, I know that that same action 50 years from now is going to save a 100 people. and therefore killing these 20 people today is ethically justified and I'm fine and I'm going to go ahead and do it.
Um Sam Bankman Freed specifically told Carolyn Ellison, she testified under oath um that he did not believe that moral rules such as don't lie and don't steal applied under utilitarianism. Um and I think he's correct. So he didn't believe that he had any obligation to tell the truth. He didn't have any obligation to abide by agreements that he had made with his customers because he believed himself to be such a genius that he could predict the future implications of his actions today. Um, and that's where you get, you know, I'm going to steal all your money now, um, and invest it into, uh, Anthropic, another AI startup, um, because I am 100% confident that they're going to create God.
Um and and and that is literally the the chain of logic that um that underwrote this you know one of the largest frauds in in history. It also makes sense if you from a nihilist perspective or a materialist if you believe that consciousness is totally annihilated the death of the brain then really the only thing that would you know matter to you would be building a system an advanced technological system that could preserve you know ego identity and consciousness you know which is just through these like gestures you know we're going to like program a a fake brain that will like make the same moves as the human brain or something and I think Peter Teal is very much focused on um life extension. I think all these guys are I mean you know Prospect is all about these like um you know kind of free space for these biotech companies that are too risky or couldn't get licensing in the US so they can like you know grow grow bodies without brains that so that brains can be transplanted into them or um yeah yeah and you know there there is also quite a bit of interesting you know I know they've reverse engineered mice to to to be younger and so on so you know it's quite possible they're on the cutting edge of of um uh doing this kind of stuff. You never know. I mean, you know, we'll see what happens.
Um um cool. So um so Frank Bankman Freed now is in is in jail in Brooklyn still or where is he now? No, no, he uh he wishes he was still in Brooklyn. Um this is uh you know this is a good opportunity to talk about one of the other sort of points of the book and well or I guess to kind of like extend the the thing that I just said is that like you know you operate from this place of complete confidence that you're correct. What actually winds up happening is that you look like a um and Sam Baitman Freed again and again made these decisions basically you know another um big aspect of uh this entire movement and especially the rationalists and Yudcowski is this idea that there's no such thing as expertise that there's no such thing as um you know a a person who knows something that other people don't know all they care about is IQ right like this independent single metric of intelligence and so they all believe that they can reason things out from verse principles.
They all believe that they are just because they're like smart in some abstract sense that they're good at everything. And we've seen this with like Elon Musk interfering with the government and things like that. In Sam's case, this manifested in some very funny behavior. Um, specifically in his total defiance of his lawyer's advice about anything and everything. Um, starting with, you know, he gave a million interviews immediately after the collapse, but before he was arrested. Um, and what that means is that his defense team had to actually like comport with the version of events that he gave in those interviews, which were total lies. Um, and and later, the reason he's not in Brooklyn anymore, um, is that he did sort of claim that he wanted to stay in, uh, I get them mixed up, but he was either in the MDC or the MCC.
He was in the one where Epstein did not die. Um, but he gave a jail house interview to Tucker Carlson using the uh the phone system or I guess it was like an electronic system that's normally supposed to be used for talking to family. He didn't get like permission from the prison to give this interview which apparently you have to. Um, so he um he got uh forcibly transferred from the MTC to a federal prison in I believe California. So, he was just like punished for for giving that interview. And so, because of that, he um doesn't get to spend any more time with Diddy, who according to Sam Bankman free treated him very well when they were in prison together.
Um yeah. Um so, what uh you know, what what are the larger you know, meaning uh mechanisms? What do you draw from this ultimately as um you know something that expresses where we are now and kind of where we're going? Um I mean it's a it's a it's a good question in terms of like the the longer term. I don't know if I've really like thought it through in that exact sense. I think that he remains kind of a he was the first to do some things that are now very dominant in the way that the political system works. Obviously, he like sketched out a path for the crypto people who then had a huge influence in getting Trump elected.
Even though he was like a Biden guy, they then kind of flipped it and went to Trump. If he had been giving millions of dollars to Trump, he'd no doubt be out on parole already. Yeah. I mean, it's it's one of the funny again, the funniest thing that he did was this disastrous choice to conceal the donations to Republicans that he actually was making through um again some of this like perhaps campaign finance fraud. Um so he hid those post as a Democratic mega donor because it was at a time when it was convenient for him. And then now 5 years later, he really wishes he had been more public about his donations to Republicans.
Um, and he has also like pivoted where he's now saying like, oh, he's basically a Trump guy now, he says. Um, but it's because he wants that pardon. And it's very funny to watch him like pivot and riot and squirm and try and like get out from under his own lies. Uh, speaking of Shod and Frea. Um, but in terms of what he reflects for like the the future, I think that I mean I'm probably too much of an optimist in many things. Um, but I will say I think that the way he got blown up is the way that I mean the entire Trump project is blowing up right now.
I I you know I don't want to say that it's all going to like flip over and and everything's going to be fine again because they've done such a disastrous job of this. Um, but I do think that you know once FTX blew up a lot of like it became a lot harder to do crypto fraud. It's not easy or it's not um it's not that hard. It's still a great place to go and do fraud. Um but once you like burn people that bad you you create a sort of defense in the in the system you you make people more skeptical. Um and so I do think that we are reaching a certain maybe not end point but I think that there is much more skepticism out there ambiently not just of like crypto but I think I see a lot more um weirdly enough I think I see more harsh and open skepticism of AI now than I did of crypto even at like the top of the crypto bubble.
Um, so I think maybe there are signs that like there's just been enough of a critical shift in people's I mean just people's understanding that all of these people are trying to defraud you, you know, that like all of the tech investing stuff um is if you're not careful I mean some of it is is real, but like if you're not careful a it's a lot of it is just a fugazi um and you have to keep an eye out for that. So maybe that's my optimistic spin is that we did at least get a few of these guys and now the entire project is like falling apart in a certain way that um I think people are waking up to. I don't know, maybe that's naive of me, but um that's my that's my positive take. How's your millennia coin doing these days? Oh um it's funny you mentioned that.
Uh do do you want to hear about a project that I'm working on that's like tangentially related but crazy? Um, so the Melaniacoin was either launched or just ripped off by this guy named Hayden Davis who um he also did the Libra thing. If you remember the Argentinian president Malay issued a meme coin that turned out to be a total what we call a rug pull where people just took the money out immediately. And this guy Hayden Davis wound up stealing about $100 million between Melania and Libra. Um, and uh, funny enough, it actually kind of like popped the bubble at the beginning of last year.
So, the the last year of crypto going down sort of started with this guy committing fraud. Turns out this guy Hayden Davis, he's a great grandson of the guy of a guy named Eil Learon, um, who is known as the Mormon Manson, who programmed his polygamous wives to assassinate his rivals in the 1970s and 1980s. Um, and then also Hayden Davis might be somewhat linked. I've I've been trying to do that for years. Get my polygamous wives to assassinate. I know. Uh, I I shouldn't say this in public, but truly living the dream, this guy. Um, so, but not like that. It doesn't even end there.
Apparently, um, Keith Reeri, the head of Nexium, later connected with Hayden Davis's family in a place called Colonia Leberon in Mexico and advised them to essentially go up against the Sinaloa cartel. Um, which then led to possibly some of the connections that formed between Hayden Davis and Donald Trump allowing them to meet Melania, connect with Malay, and then do this fraud. So, it's this just incredibly bizarre network of uh cults and scammers um that is linked to to Melania and her token um in ways that I'm still working on but uh seem incredibly spooky so to speak. This is what you're writing about or another book or um um no this is just some stuff that I'm writing for my Substack which you know davidzores. substack.
com you've got the links right there I'm sure. Um and uh yeah there'll there'll be more about that coming out in the in the next few days. It's really wild. Very very like parapolitical stuff going on. Obviously a ton of corruption in the Trump world. Um but this one was particularly you're breaking my heart. Yeah. Yeah. Hard to imagine. Okay. Well, listen, I think that's that was a great uh long chat and joining me today and uh yeah, maybe we'll do it again. We can always find a uh triangulation and do it with somebody else. Uh do Yeah. Well, I am I'm about to speaking of spooky stuff about to start um writing something for The Verge about Epstein and Bitcoin.
Um we've just learned well we we've known for a while but Epstein funded a lot of Bitcoin development. We don't really know what the implications are yet but going to be looking into that. So always plenty to discuss. He was a busy man with his you know he couldn't spell but he he had his fingers an um interest so to speak. Yeah. And you know, it's funny the uh I don't I don't think Epstein was like I mean maybe he was doing a ton of Aderal, but um the the stimulants definitely helped SPF be involved in a baffling amount of stuff going on. Um and and so it's one of the reasons why this conversation like it's inevitably a little bit woolly because there just are connections everywhere because he had his hands in a in a frankly very Epstein like way.
He had his hands in one way or another in so many different things. It's hard to believe. Totally. Cool. David, thank you so much. Uh the book is fun. Stealing the future and yeah, look forward to to hanging out more and chatting more and uh hope everybody, you know, to all the normal things. Buy the book, subscribe to the You Tube channel, join ours, all that stuff. Have a great day. Repeater books. Thank you. Thank you so much, Daniel. Take care. This was great.
Automatic transcript, lightly edited for readability. Originally published on the Liminal News channel.