Coffeezilla: SBF, FTX, Fraud, Scams, Fake Gurus, Money, Fame, and Power | Lex Fridman Podcast #345
do you think he is incompetent insane or evil the following is a conversation with coffee Zilla an investigator and journalist exposing frauds scams and fake gurus he's one of the most important journalistic voices we have working today both in terms of his integrity and fearlessness in The Pursuit Of Truth please follow watch and support his work at youtube.com/ coffeezilla this is Alex Freedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's coffee Zilla how do you like your coffee dark and soul crushing that was the uh number one question on the internet do you like your coffee to reverberate deeply through the worst of human nature is that how you drink your coffee I've gone through a lot of phases on coffee I used to in college I would go super deep into you know grinding fresh beans all of that kind of stuff water temperature exactly right and then I hit a phase where I was just it was the maintenance dose then I went to like espresso because I could get a lot more in yeah and now I go through phases of like sometimes I like it with a little oat milk sometimes a little half and half in sugar if I'm oh you've gotten soft in your old age I've gone a little I I have but hey if I'm doing a SP SPF interview it's black that day nothing less yeah there's black no Su the lights go down what do you actually do in that in those situations like uh leading up to a show do you get hyped up like how do you put yourself in the right mind space to explore some of these really difficult topics I think a lot of its preparation and then once it happens it's mostly fueled by sort of adrenaline I would say um I really deeply care about getting to like the root cause of some of these issues because I think so often people in positions of Power are let off the hook so I really care about holding their feet to the fire and it translates into like a lot of energy the day of so I I never find myself like funny enough I usually drink a lot of caffeine leading up to the interview and then I try to drink like minimum the day of because I have so much adrenaline I don't want to be like hyper stimulated I have to say of all the recent guests I've had the energy you you had when you walked into the door pretty excited people not excited to be here I don't know deal scar I felt like you were going to knock down the door or something you were very excited um Like That Just Energy um it was terrifying because I'm terrified at social interaction anyway uh speaking of terrifying you chose a good living of interviewing people for face your fears my friend uh so let's talk about SP SPF and FTX who is uh Sam banin freed can can you tell a story from the beginning as you understand it yeah so Sam bakman freed is a kid who grew up sort of from a position of huge privilege both his parents are lawyers I believe both of them were from Harvard he went to MIT went to like or sorry backing up a bit more he went to like this top Prep High School then to MIT then he went to Jane Street and after that he get started a trading firm in I think 2017 called Alam research with a few friends some of them were from Jane Street some of them worked at Google and they were sort of the smartest Kids on the Block or that's what everyone thought they made a lot of their money on something called the kimchi premium or at least this The Story Goes which just to explain that uh the price of Bitcoin in Korea was substantially higher than in the rest of the world and so you could Arbitrage that by buying Bitcoin elsewhere and selling it on a Korean exchange so they made their money early doing kind of smart trades like that they flipped that into Market making which they were pretty early on that um just providing liquidity to an exchange and it's what it's a strategy that is considered delta neutral which means basically if you take kind of both sides of the trade and you're making a spread like a a fee on that you make money whether it goes up or down so in theory there shouldn't be that much risk associated with it so Alam kind of blew up because they would offer these people you know people who are giving out loans they'd say hey we'll give you this really attractive rate of return and we're doing strategies that seemingly are low risk so we're a low risk risk bet were these smart kids from Jane Street and you can kind of trust us to be this smarter than everyone else kind of thing uh around 2019 Sam started FTX which is an exchange uh specifically it specialized in derivatives so like margins kind of more sophisticated crypto products and it got in with binance early on so binance actually has a prior relationship to FTX which we'll explore in a second cuz they're going to play a role in FTX is collapse actually binance is the number one uh crypto exchange and they're led by uh he's called CZ on Twitter I don't want to butcher his full name but um really smart guy has played his hand really well and built up a quite large exchange and binance was funding a bunch of different like startups so they funded they helped invest into FTX early on they invested 100 million so these guys were kind of like teammates early on SBF and C easy and FTX quickly grew they got like especially in 2020 20 21 they got a lot of endorsements they got a lot of credibility in the space and eventually FTX actually bought out binance they gave them $2 billion so pretty good investment for for CZ in a couple years um and now lead that up to 2022 what happens Luna collapse three arrows Capital collapse which if you don't know there's just these kind of cataclysmic events in crypto uh led by some pretty risky Behavior whether Luna was a token that promised really attractive returns that were unsustainable ultimately and it just kind of spiraled it did what's called a stable coin death spiral which we can talk about if we need to the stable coin death spiral I I can't wait till that like actually enters the Lexicon like a Wikipedia page on it like uh e economics students are learning it in school yes that's like a chapter in a book anyway um I mean this is the reality of our world is this is a really big part of our of the economic system is cryptocurrency and stable coin is part of that yeah it's weird because on the one hand cryptocurrency is supposed to somewhat simplify or add transparency to the financial markets the idea is for the first time you don't have to wait for an SEC filing from some corporate business you can look at what they're doing on chain right um so that's good because a lot of big financial problems are caused by lack of transparency and lack of understanding risk but ironically you get some people creating these arbitrarily complicated Financial products like algorithmic stable coins which then introduce more risk and blow everything up so anyways uh three hours Capital blew up and all of a sudden this crypto industry which everyone thought was going to the Moon Bitcoin to 100,000 is in some trouble and FTX seems like the only people who besides like binance who's also really big and stable and coinbase uh they seemed like they were doing fine in fact they were bailing out companies in the summer I don't know if you remember that SB F was likened to like Jamie Diamond who's the you know CEO of Chase who like kind of was like the buck stops here uh you know I'm like the back stop right so SPF was supporting the industry he was like the stable guy so come to like around October and November there's all this talk about regulation everything's been blowing up spf's leading the charge on regulation and CZ the CEO of binance gets word that maybe SBF is kind of like cutting him out or making regulation that would maybe impact his business and uh he doesn't like that too much they start kind of feuding a little bit on Twitter so when it comes out a coindesk report came out that ftxs balance sheet wasn't looking that good like it looked pretty weak they had a lot of coins that in theory had value if you looked at their market price but for a variety of reasons if you tried to sell them they'd collapse in value so it's sort of like this thing a house built on Sand and uh a friend of mine on Twitter he goes by Dirty Bubble media he released a report and he basically said I think these uh these guys are insolvent well CZ saw that and he retweeted it and started adding fuel to the fire of like the speculation because up to this point everyone thought FTX is super safe super secure there's no reason to not keep your money there Tom Brady keeps his money there whatever and CZ kind of fuel adds fuel to the fire by saying not only am I retweeting this adding kind of like validity to this speculation but also I'm going to take the ftt that I got which part of their balance sheet was this ftt token which is FTX is like proprietary token and Alam and uh FTX controlled A lot of it they were using this token to basically be a a large amount of collateral for their whole balance sheet so it accounted for this huge amount of their value and the CEO of binance had a huge chunk of it as well and he said I'm going to sell all of it and the the fuel that that introduced to the market is if he sells all this ftt and this ftt is underwriting a lot of the value of FTX does ftt is almost approximate like uh similar things if you were to buy a stock in a public company is that kind of like a stock in FTX it sort of was this proxy because what FTX was committed to doing was sort of like buying back ftt tokens they would do this thing called the buy and burn I think there was some amount of sharing in the revenue fees of FTX it was kind of this convoluted thing in my opinion the exact value of ftt was speculative from the beginning and it was clear that it was very tied to the performance of FTX which is important because we'll get to later FTX sort of built their whole scaffold on ftt which meant that this scaffold was very wobbly because if FTX loses a little bit of confidence then your value goes down when your value goes down you lose more confidence and this goes down so it was kind of like this thing that this flywheel that when it was going well you got huge amounts of growth when it's going bad you get a uh exchange death spiral s so to speak actually this structure it's a pretty non-standard structure did the uh architects of its initial design anticipate the wobbliness of the whole system so putting fraud and all those things that happen later aside do you think it was difficult to anticipate this kind of ftt FTX elemented research weird dynamic no because I think sophisticated Traders always think in terms of diversification and correlation so if you're trying to the way to think about risk in investing is like if I invest in you Lex fredman and then I also invest in some product you produce those those the performance of those two things will be pretty correlated so whether I invest in you or I invest in this product that you like are completely behind I'm not drisking I'm basically counting all on you doing well right and if you do bad my investments do very bad so if I'm trying to build a stable thing I shouldn't put all my eggs in The Lex Freedman basket unless I'm positive that you're going to do well right and these people as your financial adviser I would definitely recommend you do not put all your eggs in this basket right and so so you can think about it like if I know that these people were trained to think like this and so the idea that you could start this exchange you're worth billions of dollars and you underwrite your whole system by betting putting most of it on your own token is is insane and what and what's crazy is we'll later find out that they were basically taking customer assets which were real things like Bitcoin and ethereum with with risks that were not so correlated to FDX and were swapping them out they were using to go go basically gamble those and putting ftt in its place as quote value so they were increasing the risk of the system in order to bet big with the idea that if they bet big in one we'd all be singing their praises if we bet big and L if they bet big and lost I don't know if they had a plan but I think they were I think they were being extremely risky and there's no way to avoid their knowledge of That So when you say customer assets is I come to this crypto exchange I have Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency and this is a a thing that has pretty stable value over time I mean Rel as crypto relative relatively so and I'm going to store it on this crypto exchange and that that's the whole point this is uh so this thing to the degree that crypto holds value is supposed to continue holding value there's not there's not supposed to be an extra risk inserted into the thing right and FTX was pretty clear from the beginning that they wouldn't invest your assets in anything else they wouldn't do anything else with it they wouldn't trade it that's what made FTX so such like a horror story for investor confidence is basically they made every signal that they would not do anything nefarious with your tokens they would just put them to the side put them in a separate account that they don't have access to and they just kind of wait there until the day that you're ready to withdraw them uh that's explicitly what they told their customers so going back to the story a little bit CZ then says hey I'm selling this token that underwrites the value of FTX there's a total panic SPF during this time makes said says several lies such as FTX assets are fine we have enough money to cover all withdrawals um and a day later he basically admits that that wasn't the case they don't have the money they're shutting down and then a few days later after that they declared bankruptcy there's I should be clear there's Alam research FTX International and FTX us which is the US side of things these are three different entities all of them are in bankruptcy and it's not clear to the extent that they were co-mingling funds but it's clear that they were co-mingling funds to some extent so they kind of were taking from each other and that is where the fraud happens right because if going back to our earlier analysis if you're supposed to set funds aside and I find out you were using it to go make all these Arbitrage trades or do Market making or all these activities you were known for for your like hedge fund trading firm thing that's a huge problem because you he basically lied about this and uh especially when he's saying explicitly that we have these things we have these funds and these things turn out to be lies well again the question of fraud comes in and it's just like there's no way he didn't know so the obvious question might be well why isn't he locked up why why is he running around and it's because um really his story is that he didn't know any of it he found out that they had to steal man's position he would say he was totally disconnected from what Alam was doing he had no idea that they had such a large margin position that they had an accounting Quirk and that accounting Quirk hit 8 billion from um from his View and so when he was saying that they had money to cover it he was saying that truthfully to the best of his ability and he just was so distracted at the time that he made a series of increasingly embarrassing mistakes and now he owes it to the people to write those wrongs by publicly making this huge apology to her you might have seen him on I mean he's been talking to nearly everyone um about basically how he's just didn't know what he was doing he's the stupidest man alive uh basic what what what are some interesting things you've learned from those interviews I think I've appreciated why you don't talk in that position uh most people wouldn't talk most people would listen to their legal counsel and and not talk I do not think he's any lawyer what their Sal would tell him to talk because right now I think the danger of what he's doing is he's locking himself into a story of how things happened and I don't think that story is going to hold up in the coming months because I think it's impossible from The Insider conversations I've had with Alam research employees with FTX employees it's impossible to square what they are telling me with no like incentive to lie with what SPF is telling me with every incentive to lie which is fundamentally that he didn't know they were comingling funds he didn't know they were gambling with customer money and it was basically this huge mistake and it's alam's fault but he wasn't involved in Alam a company he owned so like a compassionate but heart hitting gangster that you are uh recent very recently you interacted with SBF on I like how you adjust uh the suspenders as you're saying this um you interact on Twitter spaces uh with SP SPF and uh really put his feet to the fire uh with some hard-hitting questions what did you ask and what did you learn from that interaction sure I should say first this was not a willing interaction I mean I thought that was kind of the funny part of it cuz I've been asking him for an interview for a while he's been giving interviews to nearly everyone who wants one big Channel small channels um he didn't give me one but I managed to get some by sneaking up on some Twitter spaces and dming the people and like being like hey can I come up so I didn't get him to ask everything that I wanted because he like would leave sometimes uh you know after I asked some of the questions but really what I asked was about this eight billion and zooming in on the improbability of his lack of knowledge um it's sort of like if you if you run a company and you know the insides and outs and you're the top of your field top top in class and all of a sudden it all goes bust and you say I had no idea how any of this worked yeah I didn't I didn't know it's like the guy who runs waterburger saying I didn't know where we sourced our beef I didn't know where we that's a Texas example actually thank you I appreciate uh let's let's take it like world Walmart like I didn't know we used Chinese manufacturers it's like that's impossible to become Walmart you have to know how like how your supply chain works you have to know even if you're at a high level you know how this stuff works can I do a hard turn on that and go sure as one must to Hitler uh Hitler's writing is not on any of the documents around as far as I know uh on the final solution so in in some crazy world he could theoretically say I knew I didn't know anything about the death cams uh so there's this plausible deniability in theory so that's but that most people would look at that and say uh it's very unlikely you don't know well especially if all the Insiders are coming out and saying no no no of course he knew he was directing us from the top I mean um what was clear what's interesting about the structure and like I love the nitty Sor we're back to SPF we went to Hitler now we're back to I wanted to turn us as fast as possible away from um I yeah I I so the Insiders in what ala research Alam research what was interesting is that there was this sort of one-way window going on between Alam and FTX where FTX employees didn't know a lot of what was going on Alam insiders and I would say by Design knew almost everything that was going on at FTX um and so I think that was really interesting from the perspective of a lot of the so-called like what you could what he's trying to ascribe to as like failures or mistakes or ignorance and negligence when looked at closely are much more designed and they sort of don't arise spontaneously because like let's say so there's this thing in banking and like trading where if I run a bank and you run like a trading firm we need to have informational walls between us because there's huge conflicts of interest that can arise right so the negligent argument might be that like oh we just didn't know we're sort of these dumb kids in the Bahamas so we shared information equally but when you see a one-way wall that starts to look a lot different right if I have a backend source of looking at or sorry you're the trading firm so you have a backend way to look at all my accounts and I have no idea that you're doing that that all of a sudden looks like a much more designed thing when it would be plausible let's say going to to to use another another analogy too if you're saying look I comingled funds because I was so bad at corporate structures you would expect those companies to have a very simple corporate structure because you didn't know what you're were doing right but what we see with FTX and Alam is they had something like 50 companies and subsidiaries and this in impossibly complicated web of corporate activity you don't get there by accident you don't wake up and go oh I designed like this watch that ticked a specific way but it was all accidental if you really didn't know what you were doing you'd end up with a simple structure so even just like from a fundamental perspective what SPF was doing and like the activities they were engaging in were so complicated and purposely designed to obfuscate what they were doing it's impossible to subscribe to the negligence argument and I want to quickly say too like I don't think a lot of people have honed in on this there was insider trading going on from From alam's perspective where they would know what coins FTX was going to list on their exchange there's a famous effect where let's say you're this legitimate exchange you list a coin the price spikes M insiders told me it was a regular practice for Alam insiders to know that FTX was going to list a coin and as a company buy up that coin so they could sell it after it listed and they made millions of dollars how do you do that accidentally yeah and that's that's a Al totally illegal so that's illegal from like and if an individual does it it's illegal it's fraud what if a company is systematically doing it and you can't tell me that FTX or someone at FTX wasn't feeding that information of to Alam or somehow giving them keys to know that and that would happen at the highest level it would happen at SPF level and this is why his arguments of I was dumb I was naive I was sort of ignorant are so Preposterous because he's dumb and ignorant the second it becomes criminal to be smart and sophisticated right but then also coming out and talking about it which is um it's a bizarre move it's a bizarre almost a dark move uh can you tell the story of the 8 billion you mentioned 8 billion what's the 8 billion what's the missing 8 billion yeah so it's really interesting because it's sort of like wire fraud you're sort of he's sort of copping to like smaller crimes to avoid the big crime the big crime is you knew everything and you were behind it right the smaller crimes are like a little wire fraud here little wire fraud there so what the 8 billion is is that FTX didn't always have banking it's hard to get banking as a crypto exchange there's all these questions of like where's the money coming from is it coming from money launder so for a variety of reasons it's always been hard for exchanges to get bank accounts so before when FTX was just getting started they didn't have a bank account so how do you put money on FTX well they would have you wire your money to their trading firm their wiring instructions would go to their trading firm it's easier to get banking as a trading firm so you'd put your money with the trading firm and then they'd credit you the money on FTX okay first of all this is a whole circumvention of all these banking guidelines and regulations that's the first like thing that I think is legal but basically what SPF argued is that there was an accounting glitch error problem where when you'd send money to Alam even though they credit you on FTX they wouldn't Safeguard your deposits like your deposits would go into what he called a stub account which is just like some account that's not very well labeled um kind of like a placeholder account and he didn't realize that those were alam's funds or they were playing with those funds and that they basically should have safeguarded that for customers that's his explanation it's Preposterous because it's $8 billion but anyways um just poor labeling of accounts of an eight billion dollar account I mean a billion a billion this is I do this all the time this is the craziest thing like he Wasing he was talking to me and at one point in the conversation he's like yeah I didn't have precise because he said I didn't have knowledge of alam's accounts and I said well Forbes a month ago was getting detailed accounting of alam and he goes oh that wasn't detailed accounting I just knew I was right within 10 billion or so what is that error margin $10 billion for a company that is arguably never worth more than 100 million yeah probably never never even worth more than 50 billion your error margin is $10 billion you have to be this is a guy who is sending around statements that like there was no risk involved and you're telling me he had a error margin of $10 billion that is the difference between like a healthy company and a company so deep underwater you're going to jail so it you have to believe that he is impossibly stupid and square that with the sophistication that he brought to the table it's I I think it's an impossible argument I I don't even think it's do you think he is incompetent insane or evil if you were to bet money on each of those incompetent insane or evil insane meaning he's lying to everyone but also to himself uh which you could which is a little bit different than incompetence he's not in competent so the I think he's some combination of insane and evil but it's impossible to know unless we know deep inside his heart how self like diluted he is versus a calculated strategy and I think if you look at SBF he's such a I think he's a fascinating individual just I mean you know he's a horrible human being let's start there but he's also somewhat um interesting from a psychology perspective because he's very open about the fact that he understands image and he understands how to cultivate image the importance of image so well that I think a lot of people even though they've talked about it aren't emphasizing that enough when interacting with him this is a man whose entire history is about cultivating the right opinions at the right time to achieve the right effect why do you think he would suddenly change that approach when he has all the more reason to cultivate an image so he is extremely good naturally or uh I don't know if he's good but he's like he's a hyper aware so he's deliberate in cultivating a Public Image in controlling the Public Image you you know about the like Democrat donations like he he knew to donate to the right people $40 million he says on a call that we released with Tiffany Fong he says on a call that he donated the the same amount to Republicans there's speculation on whether this is true cuz he's a liar whatever so cave out there but he said he donated to Republicans the same amount but he donated dark because he knew that most journalists are liberal and they would kind of hold that against him so he wanted all the all the sides to be on in his favor in his pocket while simultaneously understanding the entire media landscape and playing them like a fiddle by cultivating this image of I'm this Progressive woke billionaire who wants to give it all away do everything for charity I drive a Corolla while living in a million dollar prin housee multi-million um but but that was sort of the angle he he understood so well how to play the media and um I do I think he underestimated when he did this how much people would put him under a deeper microscope and I don't think he has achieved the same level of success in cultivating this new image because I think people are so skep now no one's buying it but I think he he's trying it he's doing it to the best but it has worked leading up to this particular wobbly situation so before that wasn't there a public perception of him being a a Force for good a financial Force for good 100% yeah somebody from seoa Capital you know wrote this glow glowing review that he's going to be the world's first trillionaire there's so many pieces done on he's the most generous billionaire in the world that um he was sort of like the Steelman of you know it's possible to make tons of money this is like the effective altruism movement make as much money as you can as fast as you can and give it all away and he was sort of like the the poster child for that and he did give some of it away and got a lot of press for it and I think that was kind of by Design I want to address a real quick Point yes a lot of people have said that like binance played a role and while they catalyze this insolvency is a problem that will eventually manifest either way so I don't put any blame on CZ for basically causing this meltdown the the underlying Foundation was unstable and it was going to fall apart at the next push I mean he just happened to be the final kind of like uh I don't know the straw that broke the camel's back yeah the Catalyst that revealed the yeah but it's like I don't I don't think he's culpable for ftxs like malfant and how they handled accounts if that Mak sense so what what what role did they play could they have helped alleviate some of the pain of uh uh investors of people that held funds there yeah I I mean probably uh I don't know I I would see some kind of weird obligation like with the two billion they made on FTX remember they got two billion some of it in cash some of some of it in FDT tokens so I don't know how much actual cash they had have from that deal but they have billions from the success of what seems to be a fraud seems to have been a fraud from early on they had the back door as early as 20 early 2020 from what I can tell so the the back door between FTX and el el research uh do you think CZ saw through who SPF is what is he's doing no I think I think CZ is like he's a shark I think he's he's good at building a big business um like a good shark or a bad shark I don't know I don't know I think sharks just eat I mean I I don't I don't know I think uh my relationship with shark has like a Finding Nemo there's a shark in that I don't know I think like Jeff Bezos is a shark okay so whether you people have loaded connotations of like how they feel about Jeff Bezos I mean I I would say like I think CZ is a ruthless businessman I think he's cold he's calculated he's very um deliberate and I think uh what he should do in this position is forfeit the funds that he profited from that investment because largely I think it was um it's owed to the customers there's so much hurting out there so I think I think they could do a lot of good around that um I don't know if they will because I don't know if he sees it in his best interest I think that's probably how he's thinking but yeah I I think uh they could have helped or they could still help there who do you think suffered the most from this so far the little account holders this is always true so one of the big Temptations with fraud I've covered a lot of scams frauds is everyone looks at the big number everyone that's the headline billions of dollars the top 50 creditors or what everyone thinks at first uh but quickly when you dig down you realize that most people who lost $10 million I mean I'm sure that's terrible for them I wish them to get their money back but uh it's usually the people with like 50,000 or less that are most impacted usually they do not have the money to spare usually they're not Diversified in a phisticated way um so I think it's those people I think it's the small account holders that I feel the worst for and unfortunately they often get the least press time or airtime that's the really difficult truth of this is that especially in the culture of cryptocurrency there's a lot of young people who are not Diversified they're basically Allin on a particular crypto and it just breaks my heart to think that there's somebody 50,000 or 30,000 or 20,000 but the point is that money is everything they own right and now now what their life is basically destroyed like you know imagine you're 18 19 20 21 years old you saved up you've been working you saved up and this is this is it this is basically destroying a life what's so brutal about this is that this all comes on the back the entire crypto Market comes on the back of comes from the deep distrust of traditional Finance right you 2008 everybody lost trust in the banking systems and they lost trust that if those banking systems acted in a corrupt way that they would receive the Justice it turned out that the banks received favorable treatment people didn't so people lost faith in the the structure of our financial system in a way that is we're still feeling the reverberations of it and so when crypto came along it was like kind of this way to reinvent the wheel reinvent the world for the the like sort of lowly and the like less powerful and kind of level the playing field so it's so sad about events like this is you see that fundamentally a lot of the the power structures are the same where the people at the top uh face little repercussions for what they do the people at the bottom are still getting screwed the people at the bottom are still getting lied to and law enforcement is way behind the ball do you think this really uh damaged people Trust in cryptocurrency for sure way bigger than uh Luna way bigger than three capital it's because of who SBF was it's not just the dollar figure behind it it's because he woed so many of our media Elites who should have been calling him out or at least investigating him and not rubber stamping him it's an indictment of our financial system even our most sophisticated people in Black Rock in seoa who didn't see this coming who also rubber stamped him um and you just wonder like if you can't trust the top people in crypto who are supposedly the good guys the guys saving crypto I month just a month ago or two months ago he was the guy on Capital Hill that was talking to Gary ginzler to all the top people in Washington he was orchestrating the regulation of crypto if that guy is a complete fraudster liar psychopath and nobody knew it until it was too late what does that mean about the system itself that we're building so you are one of if not the best like frauder investigators in the world did you sense did you uh was this on your radar at all SPF in the over the past couple years were any red flags going off for you yes so funny enough like one of my videos from six months ago or so blew up because um I got to give a lot of credit to Matt Lavina BW blomberg great journalist great Finance journalist and I want to say when I like talk about media Elite there are people doing great work in these mainstream institutions it's not a monolith just like Independent Media isn't all doing great work and all the corporate media is bad or whatever there's like these overarching narratives that I don't subscribe to so Matt lavine's great journalist he he did an interview with s SPF where he got Sam to basically describe a lot of what was going on in defi but at kind of a larger philosophy around crypto and he described a Ponzi scheme where he just described this black box it does nothing but if we ascribe it value then we can create more value and more value and more value and it kind of was this ridiculous description of a Ponzi scheme but there was no moral judgment on it it was like oh yeah this is great we can make a lot of money from this and Matt is like well it sounds like you're in the Ponzi business and and business is good I made a video about that I said this is ridiculous this is absurd whatever it's obscene but um I didn't explicit call SBF a fraud there and I think if if I'm being I think I saw some of it but like many people I think a a lot of us were kind of like I think a lot of us missed how wrong everyone could be at the same time I did notice leading up to the crash what was happening and I and I called it out a day a day or a day and a half before it happened cuz I saw my friends post Dirty Bubble media and this was the first real look into the heart of their finances cuz there were this black box you just kind of had to evaluate them without knowing much and once we got a peak under the hood of what their finances were I realized oh my gosh these guys might be completely insolvent so I made a tweet about it I hope some people saw it and got their money out um but pretty quickly after that I caught The Narrative of what was really going on at Alam that it was basically this pondi scheme that that they had built do you ever sit like Batman in The Dark since he fight crime and wonder like sad just staring into the darkness and thinking I should have caught this earlier yeah I think in your in your uh 10 billion dollar 10 million million we're working our way there um with with a bunch of the table it's never enough it's Never Enough like you always could be catching stuff sooner you always could be doing more I mean the fascinating thing you said is that one of the lessons here is that a large number of people influential smart people could all be wrong at the same time in terms of their evaluation of SP SPF this is this is one thing that I don't understand too is like I think it's one thing to not see something I think it's another thing to like rubber stamp or explicit L endorse I feel like a lot of people didn't look too close ATF because I think a lot of the warning signs were there but my feeling is if you're a sequoia if you're a black rock wouldn't you do that due diligence I mean like yeah like before just endorsing something especially in the crypto space this is just why I don't do any deals in the crypto space ever because it's impossible to know which ones are the going to be the like big hits or the big frauds or you know whatever um but if you're going to make that bet if you're going to make that play you would think that you would do all the research in the world and you would get sophisticated looks at their liabilities at how they were structured all that stuff and that is the most shocking part is not that you know people missed it because you can miss fraud but that there was so much so many glowing endorsements like this guy is not going to be that thing we explicitly endorse him I saw a Fortune Magazine he was called the next Warren bu it's just crazy do you think it's possible to have enough like Tom Brady uh endorsements that you don't really investigate so like yes that there's the kind of momentum like societal social momentum yes I think that's the problem I actually think that's hugely a blind like a a blind spot of our society is we have all these heuristics that can be points of failure where like a rule of thumb is if you go to an Ivy League where you must be smart mhm right a rule of thumb is if your both your parents are Harvard lawyers you must not you must know the law you must like kind of be sophisticated the rule of thumb is if you're running a a billion dollar exchange you must be somehow somewhat ethical right and all of these heris can lead to Giant blind spots where you kind of just go oh we'll check like I don't really it's a lot of energy to look into people and if enough of those rules of thumb are met we just kind of check them off and put them through the system so uh yeah it's been hugely exposing for sort of like our are blind and you don't know maybe how to look in for example there's a few assumptions now there's a lot of people are very skeptical of institutions of government and so on but for um perhaps too much so AG but for some part of history there was uh too much faith in government and so um right now I think there's faith in certain large companies there's distrust in certain ones and Trust in others like uh people seem to distrust Facebook extremely skeptical of Facebook mhm but trust I think Google with their data I think they trust apple with their data much much more so like search people don't seem to be your Google search like I'm just going to I'm going to in there have you ever looked at your Google search history your Google search history has got to be the some of the darkest things oh I don't think I've ever looked at my Google search history I'm pretty careful with uh like browser hygiene and uh stuff like that because I think it's well Google search has unless you explicit delete is there I recommend you look at it it's fascinating look because it goes back to the first days of you using Google search history fun fact actually about that no no no I I I I am I am aware of that um I just mean for like certain sensitive topics where like I'm investigating some fraud and I go sign into their website right log in I won't use like a traditional browser I'll use a VPN and I'll like put it on like Brave or something like that you log in you create an account as Lex fredman yeah exactly you start exactly exactly uh you mentioned effective altruism yes you know SPF has been associated with this effective altruism which made me look twice at EA sure and see like wait um are the what's what's going on here uh is this was this used by SPF to give himself a good Public Image or is there something about effective alism that makes it easy to misuse by bad people what do you think yeah it's interesting he could have endorsed a wide range of philosophies and I guess you just have to wonder are all those would those philosophies also be tainted if um he had gone bad I guess effective altruism is sort of unique because he used it as part of his brand it wasn't like he was he described himself as a consequentialist and like that ended up mattering it was like he described himself as an effective altruist and he used that part of the brand to lift himself up I guess that's why it's getting so much scrutiny um I think the merits of it should speak for themselves I mean I don't personally I'm not personally an effective altruist um I personally am motivated by giving in part emotionally and for some reason that I can't exactly describe I think that's somewhat important I don't think you should detach giving from some personal connection I I I I find trouble with that and and like I said it's for reasons I Can't Describe because effective altruism is sort of the most logical Ivory Tower position you could possibly take it's like strip all Humanity away from giving let's treat it like a business and how many people can we serve through the McDonald's line of charity for like the dollar right um I just personally don't resonate with that but I don't think the entire movement is like indicted because of it typically most people who care about giving and charity on the whole are nice people and are so I can't speak for the whole movement I certainly don't think SPF indicts the whole movement even though I personally don't subscribe to it yeah that it made me pause reflect and step back like um about the movement and about anything that has a strong ideology so if there's anything in your life that has a strong set of ideas behind it be careful yeah I mean look I kind of feel like what it teaches me and what I kind of think about when I think about systems is that no system saves you from the individual no system saves you from the individual their intentions their their lust for power or greed I mean I think one of the great ideas is the decentralization of power and like this is why I think democracies are so great is because they decentralize power across a wide range of like interests and groups and that being an effective way to kind of try as best as you can to spread out the impact of one individual because one bad individual can do a lot of harm as I mean clearly as seen here but um now I don't think it has anything to do with ideology because it's not like being an effective altruist made Sam bankman freed to fraud he was a fraud who happen to Be an Effective alterist makes sense so there is something about yes no system protects you from an individual but some system enable or serve as a better Catalyst than others for uh for the worst aspects of human nature so for example communist ideology I don't know if it's the ideology or its implementation in this in the in the 20th century it seemed like such a sexy and powerful and viral ideology that it somehow allows the evil bad people to like sneak into the very top and so like that's what I mean about certain ideas sounds so nice that allow you like the the lower classes the workers the people that do all the work they should have power they they have been screwed over for far too long they need to take power back that sounds like a really powerful idea and then it just seems like with those powerful ideas evil people sneak in to the top and start to abuse that power yeah I think I mean I don't have a lot of probably big brain political takes but what I can say is that you can never get away from both the system and the individual mattering for sure some systems incentivize some behaviors in certain ways but some people will take that and go okay all we need to do is design the perfect system and then these individuals will act completely rationally or responsibly in accordance to what our incentives say that's not true you could also say all we have to do is focus on the individual and all we have to do is just create a society which raises very well adjusted people and then we can throw them into any system with any incentives and they will act like responsibly ethically morally and I also don't think that's true so incentives are real but also the individual ultimately plays a large role too so yeah I don't know I come down sort of in the middle there and some of that is just accidents of History to which individuals finds which system you know uh become the face of that yeah with FTX versus uh coinbase versus bance which individual which kinds of ideas and uh life story come to power that matters it's kind of fascinating that history turns on these small little events done by small little individuals that um you know Hitler is a failed artist or you have FDR or you have uh all these different characters that do good or do evil onto the world and it's like single individuals and they have a life story and it could have turned out completely different it's I mean it's the flap of the butterfly wings so yeah you're right it we should be skeptical is attributing too much to the system or the individual it's all like a Beautiful Mess The Lex fman podcast that's like a that was like a Lex line I've heard I've heard quite a few episodes and that's like such a Lex line it's a beautiful M beautifully said all right sorry I'm a fan of the show okay all right I love you too uh all right can you think of possible trajectories how this FTX SPF Saga ends uh and which one do you hope for do you hope that SPF Goes to Jail that's the individual and in terms of the investors and the customers what do you hope happens and what do you think are the possible things that can happen so a yeah I definitely think SPF should go to jail um for nothing else for a semblance of Justice the fact simil of Justice to occur for all the investors um I also think there are people probably several steps down the chain that probably knew at least Caroline Ellison you can have questions about sort of their you know Dan Friedberg who I'd love to talk about as well um there were a lot of people in that room who I think knew I think we do so much of like the one guy is All To Blame let's throw everything at him when clearly this was a companywide issue so everyone who knew I think should face the same punishment which I think should be jailed for all of those people um in part to send a signal to anybody that tries this kind of stuff in the future yeah abolutely I mean one of the big things that you saw like okay take a microcosm of all of this action and just look at like the influencer space right there's a ton of deals that were done that I've covered at nauseum about influencer finds out they can make a lot of money selling a cryptocoin the first thing they wonder is am I going to get caught if I do this is there a consequence and if the answer is no then it's a pretty easy decision as long as you don't like have any moral Scruples about it which apparently none of them did or a lot of them didn't I should say so as soon as somebody steps in and regulates that math changes and all of a sudden there's a self-interest reason to not go do the bad thing so for ex and I can give a concrete example of this there was a nft the first ever nft sort of Like official indictment or the doj released this press release that they're charging these guys who ran a nft project that they didn't follow through on their promises they made all these promises lied and then ran away with the money first ever consequence for anyone in the nft space that day that that press release came out I saw several nft um projects come back to life from the dead why because all those Founders are freaking out and they realized we scammed people we have to go at least make make it look like we're doing the right thing right even just so that's on the optic side but there's also tons of people who now go oh the basically law enforcement is on the scene we can't do the same thing so there is a very pragmatic reason to for this punishment it's very much just because people work it into their math of should I commit fraud and the last several years have been very um sort of been like a little bit of a nihilistic landscape where no one was getting punished and so there's this question of you're almost an idiot if you didn't take the deals um so I think it's really important extremely important for kind of law enforcement to play a role regulation to play a role to make it harder to commit those crimes and if you commit those crimes there's actual real world punishment for it to your point about like what's going to happen to the investors I think that was kind of your question it's tough because the if the money's not there the money's not there I mean there's going to be the guy they got the best in class guy it's the guy who ran the dissolving of Enron so I mean I can't imagine someone better equipped to run a complicated corporate fraud like dissolution but yeah it's it's it's tough because everyone's going to get probably I don't know 10 cents on the dollar maybe less I wonder if there's a way to do a progressive redistribution of funds so I just I'm just really worried about the pain that small investors feel I yeah I think um there's a lot of thought around that I forget if if they actually do do this I mean I know there's a lot of law about like you can't treat creditors differently you have to treat them all the same so I think it'll be some kind of proportional payback it's certainly not going to be that the guys at the top get you know a significant amount of their money back and the rest get nothing unfortunately I think there's such a small amount of assets that backed this whole thing in the end and that value is actually declining every day because it was inextricably tied to F SPF it was like the Ft tokens which now what are those worth the serum tokens that was his project or the project they made what is that worth basically nothing so you know it's a very it's a hard situation and you know there's a bigger ethical concern which is FTX us it's unclear how backed it was but it was clearly more backed than FTX International do you take all that money and throw it into a big pot and give people money back or do you give the US people back their amount of money which is probably going to be significantly more and leave everyone internationally out in the cold and to add to that ethical issue let's say you're a liquidator and you're us-based there's a tremendous question like legal questions about you know how do you ethically do that it's not it's not clear there's a tremendous incentives to just favor the US people over everyone else cuz it's our country America whatever but um I don't know if that's necessarily Fair it's it's really hard it's like it's impossible and some uh I forget where you said this but one of the I mean it probably uh permeates a lot of the investigations you do which is this idea that it's really sad that the middle class in most situations like this get fucked over so the the IRS go after the middle class they don't go after the rich is basically everyone who doesn't have a lot of Leverage in terms of lawyers money get fucked over yes and then they're the ones like it's always the rich and Powerful who get the favorable treatment as a like a microcosm of this funny story so one of the big criticisms of crypto and I think rightly so is the irreversibility of the transactions so if I accidentally send a transaction somewhere it's gone right yeah so crypto.com accidentally sent a lady t million and now they want the money back and they're suing her but the funny thing is is if you are on crypto.com and you send let's say I accidentally send you money and I come knocking on your door Lex I didn't mean to send you you know like uh $1,000 I need my money back or if I go to crypto.com and I said hey I sent that to the wrong person can you reverse it they'll say screw off no way if I go to court they'll kill me in court because they're going to go look this is how the blockchain works but then they do it they do the exact same thing they send this lady $10 million they're suing her they're going to win now it's now what's in court is not whether they get the money back it's should she be liable for theft I believe so and that's just another case of the same rules apply differently to different people whether you have the money to back you or not it's a very sad thing and that's why I think people like you need journalists fighting for the little person we really need it and it's kind of like this unfor thing where that's the most risky thing to do like legally you should not be doing that but um I think it's important to do it's the ethical thing that's the right thing to do uh what do you think about influencers and celebrities that supported FTX and SPF do they should they be punished yeah I think I think they should take a huge reputational hit I mean I think they should be embarrassed I think they should be ashamed of themselves but it was really hard to know sorry to interrupt to for them to know like for examp ex Le I I think about this a lot yeah is like who do I because I don't investigate you know like uh sponsored by athletic greens okay it's a nutritional drink should I investigate them deeply I don't I don't know you just kind of use reputational like it seems to work for me should I like I think I think it really depends on I think your credibility hit will depend on what domain you're an expert in if you're sponsored by a robotics company and you're an expert in robotics if that company turns out to be a disaster and fraud then you should have looked more deeply we're talking mostly about like I hold Tom Brady a lot less accountable than financial advisers Financial influencers because that is their world of expertise and you treat their Rec recommendation differently proportionally to what you think their expertise is so in some ways I don't actually think Tom Brady I'm sure he reached a lot of people I personally didn't feel at all moved by his recommendation because you know it's just m but when you hear somebody who should be an expert in that thing endorse a product in that space you hold that opinion to a higher standard and when they're completely cat cataclysmically wrong it's going to be a different level of accountability and I think rightfully so when um Jim Kramer in was saying Bear Sterns is fine he made that terrible call in with be Sterns in 2008 he was rightfully reamed for all of that even though it could be considered that like well you know did he have all the information maybe not but he's a financial adviser he does this for a living if you go on and you make a big call and you turn out to be wrong and people lose tons of money you are going to take a hit and I think rightfully so but no I don't think these people should go to jail or anything like that like oh but it's such a complicated thing I mean I just feel it personally myself I get it but you still feel the burden of the fact that your opinion has influence I know it shouldn't I know Tom Brady's opinion on financial investment should not have influenced but it does that's just the reality of it right that's a real burden I didn't know anything about SP SPF or FTX it wasn't on my radar at all um but I could have seen myself like taking them on as a sponsor I've seen a lot of people I respect uh Sam Harris and others like talk talk with s SPF uh like he's doing good for the world so I could see myself being Hoodwinked having not done research and the same thing makes me wonder like I I don't want to become cynical man uh but it makes you wonder who are the people in your life you trust that are like that could be the next SPF or or Worse big powerful leaders Hitler and all that kind of stuff um to what degree do you want to investigate do you want to uh hold their feet to the fire see through their bullshit call them on their bullshit and also as a friend if you're happen to be friends or have a connection how to help them not slip into the land of fraud I don't know all of that is just overwhelming yeah I mean I mean we should be clear like Finance is sort of a special space where you're talking about people's money you're not talking about whether PE someone takes a bad supplement or like a supplement that is just they're $50 out right I think the scale of harm and therefore responsibility escalates depending on what field you're in just like I wouldn't hold Tom Brady as like if he gives a bad football opinion right and he should have known better that is a different scale of harm than a doctor giving bad advice right like life like he tells you a pill works and the pill kills you or something like that there's just Le different levels of accountability depending on the field you're in and you have to be aware of it Finance is an EXT you have to be extremely conservative if you going to give Financial advice because you're playing with people's lives and you cannot play with them half-hazard you cannot gamble with them you cannot play with them on a bet because you're getting paid a lot of money it's just the nature of the space and so with the with the space comes the responsibility and the accountability and I I don't think you can get around that who was uh Dan Friedberg that you mentioned some of these figures in thef realm that are interesting to you super interesting kind of subject because Dan fredberg is uh the former general counsel for ultimate bet ultimate bet is a was a poker site where famously they got in a scandal because uh the owner Russ Hamilton was cheating with a little software piece of code they called God Mode God mode allowed you to see a the guy across from you hand obviously you can imagine you can win pretty consistently if you know exactly what your opponent has very unethical they uh I should be clear that for some inexplicable reason I don't think they were ever charged and convicted of a crime but they were investigated by a gambling commission that found they made tens of millions of dollars this way for sure and Dan fredberg is the general counsel he's caught on a call basically conspiring with Russ to hide this fraud he's saying we should blame it on a cons you know a consultant third party and Russ Hamilton famously says you know like it was me I did it I don't want to give the money back find basically a way to get rid of this so that's Dan friberg's big achievement like that's what he's known for he's most known for and this is the guy they pick as their Chief regulatory officer for FTX why do you hire some who I I get it the not formally charged and convicted investigated there's all the and there's tape out there so I want to be clear about what's actually available evidence but someone whose seemingly own achie only achievement is hiding fraud why do you hire that guy if the intention is not to hide is not to hide fraud so this is a question I put to you know Sam Bank M freed and his answer was well we have a lot of lawyers well and I said well it's your Chief regulatory officer he's like well wasn't we we did regulate a lot and it was just this big dance of you know basically he's done great work he's a great guy and I think that tells you everything you need to know and there's figures like that probably even at the lower levels like just infiltrate the entire organization well was just like why yeah why wasn't there a CFA why why wasn't there anyone in that space who could seemingly be the eyes that goes holy whatever we need to we we're in dangerous territory here right um so yeah it seems very deliberate I mean I talked to one FTX employee that they talked about who's told me they talked about taking I think it was taking FTX US public and Sam was very against the idea and the employee in retrospect speculated that it might have been because You' face so much scrutiny like regulation wise like you'd have to you know go through a lot like more thorough audits all that kind of stuff that basically he knew they would never pass um so yeah I mean it's it's red flags all the way down with that guy and you hope all of them get punished everyone who knew I mean I think for sure there are people at FTX who didn't know I think there are some people at Alam who didn't know there's degree sorry to interrupt but there's degrees of not knowing yes there's a looking away when you kind of know Shady stuff that's still the same as knowing right that's might be even worse well yeah like I was talking to one Insider and we were talking about the trading he they were telling me about this insider trading and I said do you think this was criminal and they said it was probably criminal in hindsight yes and the question is someone who answers a question like that what does that like mean you know like it was probably so you're right there there are different degrees I mean I'll say at the most basic I would be very happy if everyone who had Direct knowledge went to jail which I don't think will happen to be clear I think a lot of people are going to cut deals prosecutors are going to cut deals so they actually nail Sam bankman freed I think that's their only focus what about his reputation what do you think about all these interviews um do you think they are helping him do you think they're good for the world do you think they're bad for the world like what's your sense and like say you get a sit down interview with him for 3 hours and I'm holding the door closed what uh what kind is that a useful conversation or not or at this point it should be legal and that's it I think it's useful I mean I think with it's all it's all about how you interview them you can interview someone responsibly you can interview him irresponsibly I think we've seen examples of both what's an irresponsible I keep interrupting you rudely that's okay no it's unacceptable no no no I think it's fine um there was like a New York Times interview which spends an amount of time any amount of time talking about his sleep and he's like yeah I'm sleeping great I me I think that's so deeply disrespectful to the victims and especially when you're you're not even releasing an interview live it's like you have time to triage what you're going to talk about why would you spend any amount of time talking about the sleep that a fraudster is get get it's just so weird and well it's can I steal man in that case I don't I don't I don't think it turned out well I think that's I think that's I I think okay here's the thing I could see myself talking about somebody's sleep or getting in somebody's mind if I knew I have unlimited time with them if I knew I like four hours because you get into the minds of the person how they think how they see the world because I think that ultimately reveals if they're actually really good at lying it reveals the depths the complexity of the mind that through like osmosis you get to understand like this person this person is not as trivial as you realize also makes you maybe realize that this person is has a lot of Hope has a lot of positive ambition that's like uh that has developed over their life and then certain interesting ways things went wrong they become corrupt and all that kind of stuff you just that's all fine but this was this conversation was not properly contextualized yes in the world of what he did it and I you know I've I've asked about this interview because I was like so curious it was out of the New York Times and there was not much mention of fraud or jail or the the big crimes like misappropriation of even client assets it was just sort of this you know Sam sat down with me he's he's under investigation but there's not much specifics and then it's like yeah he's playing storybook brawl he's sleeping he's and it's just like okay this isn't adding to the conversation especially when the New York Times it's like uh you should be grilling right right exactly so um but as I said I mean it's it's all range the gamut and some interviews like some of it's okay and then some of it's weird like the Andrew sorin interview he asked some hard-hitting questions which I really appreciated and then at the end he goes ladies and gentlemen Sam bankman freed and everyone gives like a like an ovation for Sam I mean the Steel Man of that of course is like they're actually applauding Andrew sorin but the way you like lay it up I wouldn't go like ladies and gentlemen it's like an Applause line it's like ladies and gentlemen the Eagles Elton John Lex fredman and so to go to so you have this like dealbook Summit where you have all these important figures that are positively important and at the end you have Sam bankman fre of fraudster and you go ladies and gentlemen Sam bankman fre everyone's applauding that I think is a net like I think that's a negative I think the way that the Optics of that just were all wrong yeah and so I think um yeah you have to be very responsible I think it's useful going back to how you can usefully do this you can even when somebody's determined to lie to you it's always important to pin them down to a an accounting of events because that is unimaginably helpful when it comes to a prosecutor trying to prove this guy's guilty is if you say you didn't do a crime but you don't tell me any de details about it day of the trial you can basically make up any story right but if you tell me in detail where you were that day I can go hunt down you say you were with Joe I go hunt down Joe and he says he wasn't with you boom you've lost credibility and now you're much more you're much more um likely to be convicted so it's really important to get S spf's exact accounting of how things went wrong because right now now he's positioning himself to throw his uh Alam CEO Caroline Ellison under the bus like she did everything she knew everything I knew nothing well is Caroline Ellison's going to take the stand and go well I have all these text messages and this is all a lie and then Sam bankman freed is going to be completely you know uh ruined like self- ruined by his own design so I think it's more like a legal type of uh like get the details of where he was what he was thinking what the I think it's like yeah I think it's I think the public probably cares to get to know what happened to and and again I think if you're if you're careful you can expose someone for as they lie to you without giving into those lies right like without capitulating to oh I'm just going to assume you're correct I think you can point to well Lex you say it happened this way but you've lied about X Y and Z why should we believe you that's a suddenly a totally different conversation than just being like Oh okay that's how it happened the thing I caught that bothered me and the thing I hope to do an interviews if um if if I eventually get good at this thing is the human aspect of it which is like which I think you have to do in person is he seems a bit nonchalant about the pain and the suffering of people that I have red flags about in the way he's he communicates about the loss of money like the pain that people are feeling about the money I I get red flags like you're not uh for forget if you're involved in that pain or not you're not feeling that pain well he'll he'll say he is but he'll be playing a game of League of Legends while doing it no but I I you see from his face the D and that's needs to be grilled like that little human dance there that's I I mean I um I considered I talked to him I considered doing an inperson interview with him um and you still are you still considering it I don't know do you think do you think I I should in person I think it depends if you think you have anything to add to the conversation a lot of people have yeah this been already you did an incredible job thanks I think I I think I would like to grill the shit out of him as a fellow human but not investigative coffe investigative yeah yeah yeah like like another human being another human being who I can have compassion for who has caused a lot of suffering in the world like that that grilling like basically convey the anger that people and the pain that people are feeling right like that yeah I think I think it'd be really hard I mean like that guy is sort of a master dancer and what he would say at the end of it because I've listened to so many interviews of him um I probably am like a GPT model for Sam I think he would do some kind of thing about like yeah I really um I really um hear you and um you know it's it's it's just terrible I feel such an obligation to the people who've lost money and you know it's just it's a lot of money it's a lot of money you know he'd do something like that and it would be very superficially like okay but when you g when you drill down to the details of what he did it's just impossible that he didn't know and one of the things that I wish I had asked maybe I can talk about like I wish I had gone on this it's just so hard when you're doing a live interview to kind of focus on one thing everyone's asked about the terms of service so in the terms of service there was like we can't touch your funds your funds are safe we're never going to do anything with that anytime anyone brings that up he says oh well there's this other term of service over here with margin trading accounts remember we talked about it's a derivatives platform if you're in our derivatives side you have you're subject to different terms of service which kind of lets us like move your money around with everyone else okay so we treat it as one big pull of funds and that's sort of the explanation of how this all happened is we had this huge leverage position and we lost everything but what no one has sort of done a good enough job getting to the heart of is that this pool of funds never was segregated properly it was all treated under the same umbrella of we can use your funds there was no amount of we have the client deposits which were just deposited with us and not like used to margin trade or do anything over here these funds over here we have saved they didn't fundamentally they lied from the get-go about how they were treating the most precious assets which is your customer deposits that you said you didn't invest clearly you put them all over here you YOLO gambled them and then when everyone starts uh withdrawing from here they don't have any money over here so that is like one one of the most fundamental things that I haven't seen anyone Grill him on and uh the next time if I get the chance to Ambush him again that's that's what I'm going to drill down on because it's impossible for that not to be fraud there's no world where you had a pool of funds over here and now you don't have them without you somehow borrowing over here because if you deposited one Bitcoin and I never sold that Bitcoin and it's earmarked Lex fredman and you come and it's not there something had to happen right well so this is so interesting so for me the approach that like you said the most important question of uh because for you it's like were those funds segregated for me the question is as a human being how would you feel if you were observing that so like you know that like marshmallow test with the babies like it's the human thing it's a human nature question like uh I can understand there's a pile of money and you uh the good faith interpretation is like well I know what to do with that pile of money to grow that pile of money let me just take a little bit of that like how willing are you to do that kind of thing how able are you to do that kind of thing and when shit goes wrong what goes through your mind how does it become corrupted how do you begin to delude yourself how do you uh delegate responsibility for the failures like as opposed to getting facts try to sneak into the human Mind of a person when they're thinking that because the facts there's they're start going to start waffling they're going to start like trying to make sure they don't say anything they get them incriminated right but I just I want understand the human being there because I think that indirectly gives you a sense of where were you in this big picture I think I've talked to so many people who have sort of committed some range of like outright fraud to like misleading marketing no one thinks they're a bad person nobody admits that they did it and they knew they or almost nobody does there's actually one funny exception but um I had a guy who admitted like yeah I did it it was wrong and uh you know but I did I wanted the money which was kind of like almost refreshing in its honesty but um the reason I focus on like the facts is Because unless you find a bright red line humans can rationalize anything I can rationalize any level of like well I did this because I had the best of intentions and if you play the intention game you'll never convict anyone because everyone has good intentions everyone's honest everyone's doing the best they can and got misleaded and got misguided and da da da da ultimately you have to drill down to the concrete and go look I get it you're just like the last 50 guys that I interviewed you had the best of intentions it all went wrong I'm very sorry for you but at the end of the day there's people hurting and there's people that that have significant damage to their life because of you what did you actually do and what can we prove taking intention out of it taking motivation out what can we prove that you did that was unethical illegal or immoral and like that is sort of what usually I try to go to because I will do those human interviews but um you know it's just like it's just a it's like the same record on repeat I mean a lot of I I'm with you I'm with you on the everything you said but there is ways to do to avoid the record on repeat I mean those are a different skill set you're exceptionally good at the investigative like investigating I do believe there's a way to break through the the re the repeat there's the different techniques to it one of which is like taking outside of their particular story yes when everyone looks at their own story they can see themselves as a good player doing good but you can do other thought experiments I mean there's uh but they'll follow you they'll know what the thought experiment is no well it depends it depends my friend I mean the like uh you know to me there there's a million of them but of just exploring your ethics would you kill somebody to protect your family and you explore that you start to sneak into like what's your sense uh of the ingroup versus the out group how much damage you can do to the out group and who is the out group and you start to build that sense of the person are we like the two Mobsters that we're dressed as do we protect the family and fuck everyone else you're with us and the ones who are against us fuck them or do we have a sense that human human all human beings are all have value equal value and we want to we're a joint Humanity there's ways to get to that and you start to build up this sense of like some people that make a lot of money are better than others they deserve to be at the Top If you have that feeling you start to get get a sense of like yeah the poor people are the dumb asses they're the idiots if you believe that then you start to understand that this person may have been at the core of this whole corrupt organization to yes two things one I think you should join me on this side of the table we'll put s SPF over here yeah we'll good guy bad guy human facts like you're you're the bad guy I'm like no no no slow down coffee what is your feeling about Humanity yeah I have you been getting enough sleep yeah right so I so I think no I think there's a lot of Truth to what you said one thing I've noticed that is hard to combat is sort of like preference falsification and just like just the outright lying about those things is tough to kind of pin down but yeah you're absolutely right right there's ways to interview people there's all sorts of interesting techniques and yeah I don't disagree good good cop bad cop we we should do this should be like a sitcom okay you uh did an incredible documentary on safe Moon uh the title is I uncovered a billion dollar fraud uh can you tell me the story of safe Moon sure so uh safe moon was a cryptocoin that exploded on the scene in um 2021 I think at this point sorry losing track of my years one year in crypto is like five years in real life um but it kind of gained a huge amount of popularity because of this idea that it's in the name you go safely to the Moon how they were going to do this is with sort of a sophisticated smart contract idea where there's I kind of have to explain the way some contracts get rug pulled for a second or there's scams happen so in the uh sometimes it's called like the shitcoin space the altcoin space anything like below Bitcoin ethereum and maybe the top five or 10 is kind of seen as this Wasteland of gambling and like you know you don't know if they're the developers going to become anything or not you're kind of like reading the white paper trying to figure it out so there's this big question about like how can you get scammed how can back to the interests you don't want the the developer to have some like parachute cord where they can pull all the money out so one way this happens is that that in decentralized decentralized finance there's something called the liquidity pool okay it's basically this big pot of money that allows people to trade between two different currencies so let's say like safe Moon and Bitcoin right or ethereum or it's actually on the binance smart chain so it'd be B&B um and this pool of money can be controlled by the developers in such a way they can steal it all right they can just grab it I don't want to go too much into details because I feel like I'll lose people here but the point of safe moon was the core idea was we're locking this money up you can't touch it and actually every transaction that you buy safe moon with will take a 5% tax of that we'll do a 10% tax but 5% of it will go back to all the holders of safe Moon okay and 5% of it will go back into this little pool of money okay so the idea is as you trade as this token becomes more viral two things will happen one the people who are holding it longterm will be rewarded for holding it longterm by receiving this 5% tax that's distributed to everyone and two you can kind of trust that your your money is going to have this stable value because this pool of money here in the middle that's kind of guaranteeing you can get your safe Moon out into this actually valuable currency it's not going to move so the story of safe moon was that fundamentally this was not the case uh they promised that this money was going to be locked up it was not actually locked up at all they said it was automatically locked up you don't have to worry about it well it was very manually locked up and they didn't actually lock a lot of it up um they took a lot of it for themselves for the developers so there's a lot of players in this um some of the a lot of them have left by now there's kind of this main CEO that everyone knows John coroni now and you know despite saying that they were going to lock up all the funds for four years somehow he's gone from as everyone else in the in the token has lost 99% of the value of the token so they've lost 99 % he's gotten uh like a $6 million crypto portfolio multi-million doll real estate portfolio invested Millions into various companies so he's he's acrew this huge wealth and so I made a video basically exposing that and showing how this this coin which once had a $4 billion doll market cap is just viral everywhere everyone was talking about it because of these viral ideas of like it is sort of a captivating idea that by holding it you could get returns right like you just hold on to it you automatically get money and it's a viral idea that this money in the middle in the pot isn't going to leave you when those things turned out to be false this community has had a slow death as a lot of people realized it was a scam and there's been a core part of the community which gets to an interesting Dynamic we can talk about if you want to where they have like doubled down on the belief in coroni and so part of it was out of a hope to let those people know what was really going on in their coin and like hopefully save some of them um not in like some altruistic sense but like or not in like some like I'm like a hero since but in the sense of um like I think a lot of them didn't know like literally didn't know so just sort of like as a public service letting them know so they could get their money out and hopefully save themselves uh a lot of pain and suffering so yeah so they really dug in so some did some did some did some left I mean a lot of people have left but the people who are left are people with large amounts of safe Moon Holdings that are down immensely and you can imagine at a certain point in losses there's a tremendous psychological pressure to go look I'm I'm in it I got to go for the Long Haul and then you want to believe that this thing is legitimate and will succeed because a there's an ego component around I haven't been scammed I'm too smart to get scammed it's tremendously uh you know it's it hurts psychologically to acknowledge you've been taken for a ride and also you just want this thing to succeed for your financial wellbeing so you like want to believe it so there's tremendous psychological pressure to build cult-like communities around these tokens and I've noticed with the incentive of like community-built it's sort of new to finance there's like these meme coins or these these Colts I don't want to it's not really fair to call all of them Colts like some of them are open to criticism but one of the things that defines Colts is they're not open to sunlight or criticism there's these Financial communities that are opening up with crypto with a few stocks where if you criticize them you are attacked and the entire Community has every incentive to kind of like downplay your legitimate criticisms or kind of um go after you And So It intro it creates this interesting Dynamic that I'm fascinated by what do you think about Bitcoin then do you think it's one of those communities that does attack you when CRI ized so which I guess which coins do you think are open to criticism and which are not it's kind of tough like no Community is a monolith so just like it's just a spectrum of how open they are there's just like there's always this core contingent of extreme believers who will go after anyone who criticizes them and it's just about how wide of a band that makes up of the entire token sure how intensely how active that small community is so it's in Bitcoin they're called Bitcoin maximalists but you can also call any any community's subgroup like that maximalist whatever the belief is I don't know uh Dunkin Donuts maximalists uh that Community is probably small in terms of attack you online if you you know which Community has a very intense following so I got attacked on the internet when I said Messi is better than Ronaldo oh yeah it's controversial and so that's that's a very intense maximist Community there uh the other one that surprised me is when I said now I did it in just okay folks I said emac is a better ID than Vim I love emac I agree listen I have trauma I wake up sweating sometimes at night thinking emx Master is the the Vim the Vim people are after me they're everywhere they're in the shadows no Vim is an amazing and it's actually surprised I've recently learned that it's um still even more so than before an incredibly active community so a lot of people wrote but do you use space Max it's just emac and Vim no I haven't I use raw uh I have old schoem but but oh you got to use yeah hold on a second I actually recently I have recently said you know what um Let's Make Love Not War and I went to vs code I uh I went to a more modern ID I put uh cuz I did most of my program emac I did most of anything as one does in emac just cuz I also love lisp so I can customize everything then I realized like like how long will vim and emex be around really well I I was thinking as a programmer looking like 10 20 years out you know I should challenge myself to learn new IDs to learn uh the the new tools that the majority of the community is using so that I can understand what are the benefits and the cost I found myself getting a little too comfortable with the tools that I've grew up with and I think one of the fundamental ways of being as a programmer is anyone involved with Technology based on how quickly it's evolving is to keep learning new tools like the way of life should be constantly learning you're not a mathematician or a physicist or any of those disciplines that are more stable this is like everything is changing crypto's like you said a perfect example that you have to constantly update your understanding of the of of digital Finance constantly in order to be able to function in order to be able to criticize it uh in order to be able to know what to invest in so yeah that that was why I did uh I tried pie charm a bunch uh the whole jet brains uh uh infrastructure and then also vs code cuz that's really popular and you know Adam and um U Sublime all of those I've been I've been exploring I've been exploring code is amazing you should check out space Max I'm just going to give one more pitch for it it's just basically like a customizable customizable configuration well emac is already customizable but it's uh it's pretty useful I'm not even much of a coder but for like certain journaling applications or like time management like I find it really useful so but anyway but we're so like in I feel like half this podcast is what it should have been and the half of it's just us nerding out about our own engineering like idiosyncracies sorry sorry guys um all right so what were we talking about safe Moon and Bitcoin Bitcoin what do you think is there uh have you made enemies in certain communities what do you think about Bitcoin so I've made certain enemies in the sort of crypto Skeptics space because there's sort of this range of skepticism you can have about cryptocurrency I'm obviously a skeptic of a lot of it um but there are certain aspects of crypto that I think are inevitable and I'm going to do my best to kind of describe those here but I'm not committed to any crypto specifically but there are some I've taken a lot of heat ironically for not being skeptical enough there's some people who believe that like the entire thing is a complete waste of time they're uh r/ buttcoin on Reddit it's a amazing Community actually it's very funny they have what's a buttcoin is like is that it's like a play on bitcoin they're like oh they're just like at least we admit it's a scam very funny guys uh very funny people there so but they like but they'll they'll be like you know coffee AA should just admit that all of it's a giant Ponzi scheme all of it's a basically like not real so everything including Bitcoin includ yeah it's all it's all basically all the pony nomics it's all it's it's Pony nomics all the way down it's like there is no fundamental use case that uh is that useful I don't know if I guess I don't want to straw man them here I don't want to say that I don't know if they're saying that it's all useless at minimum they're saying the level of interest in cryptocurrencies is far the actual usefulness of it is far less than the amount of attention and time and money that's being poured into it so like the the Revolutionary of this technology is not at all revolutionary let me kind of Steelman what I think the pro crypto take is I think that Technologies are sort of this inert thing and the success of them in my opinion is not based on PR it's not based on marketing it's based on cheaper faster better fundamentally the success of any technology relies on those three things and longevity of it so I have two employees and both of them are out of the country so I have to frequently make international wire payments to them um he one of them SPF just um as a reporter I have to ask no okay all right he's not on the payroll yeah I think he'd have to pay me I'm trying to do my best coffeezilla where it's like an hard hitting investigative question good so with these International payments you face all sorts of slow fees and you fa you face like kind of like this time thing yeah and it's this painful process so if I use different cryptocurrencies some of them are like really fast some of them have really low fees I just believe in a world where digital currencies with fast payments with cheap payments revolutionize the global exchange of currency and I don't know if this if this is going to include the blockchain it's just that the blockchain is the first thing that's really embraced truly digital currency which doesn't need to go through this complicated system of wire transfers and just happens so I can send you let's say I want to send you ethereum or Bitcoin I can send it to you just as fast if I send you a dollar or a billion dollars and I can send it to you just as fast if you're across from me or if you're across the world from me that I think is a step change and easier faster better in terms of like just this really basic International payments kind of idea so I think at like its core if the the lowest form use case of cryptocurrencies is that I think it will um change the world in some variety it's just kind of the larger question is is that going to is that technology going to include the blockchain specifically or not the other benefit is transparency which I personally like as an investigator it's just that previously it's like hard to describe how opaque our financial system is until you've tried to investigate someone or something understanding finances unless you have a subpoena unless you're like the FBI or like the SEC and you can get a subpoena for someone's finances or you're going through Discovery you don't know what someone has you're basically playing poker with everyone and the cards are faced down for the first time the blockchain to some extent cuz there are ways to obfuscate it and in some ways cryptocurrency has enabled more fraud which is kind of this irony but in some ways it's enabled people to also audit a lot better and in real time and I think that is a structural change that is fundamentally for the better the question of all this is do those betters outweigh the cons that this introduces and how much can those can regulation mitigate those cons some of those cons being like fraud money laundering all these negative externalities that are easier with cryptocurrency why do you think cryptocurrency in particular seems to attract fraudulent people uh like uh scammers and frosters and cuz it's unregulated it's the wild west and you can transmit large amounts of money very quickly across the world what about with very little oversight creating new crypto projects like uh new coins uh because you have to show very little actual use case you can just promise so it's like true of any emerging technology so much Vapor Weare happens at the beginning when it's all promise because fundamentally let's say you're legitimate I'm illegitimate we look the same at the start of a technology because both of us are promising what this can do and in fact the less Scruples and morals I have in some ways I can out compete you because I can say mine does what Lex's does but like way better and way faster and it's going to happen in a year rather than 10 years you're being honest I'm playing a dishonest game I look better once this space matures and you actually have some people actually doing the thing things that they say they're going to do suddenly this equation changes now you're Amazon you're delivering in two days I can say whatever I want you do the thing you do and I have no credibility so I think the like part of part of the fraud is you know just the ability to transmit so much money so quickly with such little oversight part of it is like this just happens with any emerging technology vaporware is a real thing and hopefully as the space matures as regulation comes in things will improve well let me ask you your own psychology sure you're going after some of the richest some of the most powerful people in the world do do you worry about your own Financial legal and psychological well-being uh yes yeah I do I mean I'm not totally oblivious to the precariousness of like any kind of Journalism like this obviously there's risks I've always believed there's a quote and I'm going to butcher it but I hope you guys understand the spirit of it um you know news is when you print something someone else doesn't want you to print everything else is public relations I really believe to do meaningful journalism you have to go after people like it's not inherently a safe profession I mean if you're going to do important work you have to have risk tolerances and I think everyone has a line of what that risk tolerance is and it's different for everyone I don't think I could do what Edward Snowden did I think that would be my bright red line is going against my own government it's such a in my opinion I really see him as a hero like it's such a selfless Act of self-destruction you know that the the party you're going after has all the power and will crush you and you do it anyway out of the like the true I don't know platonic ideal of Journalism I think that's beautiful I don't think I could do that I think I need some ability to live and subsist in the society that I am in and I think my bright red line would be like if I'm forced to flee the country for my work I think I'd finally have to say no but for as journalists go I'm pretty risk I take risk pretty well um I especially like think risk is important to take when you're young and when you can do that I think when I have I mean I'm married so when I have a family I think I will probably dial this risk thing down just being honest I mean I think you you kind of have to um but right now I mean I'm kind of like running on all cylinders I'm willing to take on quite a quite a range of people but um well you're also think a lot about it wolf pack of one or small yeah wolf pack as opposed to having like a New York Times behind you or a a huge organizations with lawyers with a team with a history with these people are less courageous this is the this is the dirty truth the bigger the organization the more conservative a lot of them are it it's true that sometimes they like and this is not to bash big organizations I'm just saying this as an observation of someone who's talked to a lot of people and especially in the world of fraud a lot of them are scared to engage in fraud that is obvious but hasn't been litigated yet this is why you'll never see documentaries about ongoing fraud on Netflix it's too much of a liability they'll Sue Netflix to hell and they know that if they win Netflix has the money to pay it so corporations like the New York Times you know a lot of these some of them are very C like they're as courageous as they can be but at the bottom line if someone sues you to hell and back and you have to pay up you will disappear and you're relying on liability insurance which you're already paying out the ass for to try to cover you if you get sued but if you get sued even if you win that liability insurance now goes up in price the next year and if you're the New York Times it goes up by a lot so I mean um I think there's work that independent journalists can do uniquely that they can actually take like in some ways more risk than a giant institution which has a lot more in my sense to lose even though it would appear like they have more in terms of Defense too but you get uh you can be bullied legally yeah do you get afraid of that sure I mean I just uh all these things are things you have to be aware of and then forget to do your job like you have to be you know it's like it's it's like being like a snowboarder and it's like do you realize you could hit your head and it's like yeah of course but in order to go do the like the flip or whatever you have to just accept the risk mitigate the risk as much as possible and move on so we have um we have like insurance we keep like a pool of funds for that kind of thing like I'm I'm very conservative with how I I spend my money basically all on production and like trying to make my life as secure as I can and then I just do the work that I you know I I want to do because so 99% of your fun goes into the in the studio into the studio and then into into that elaborate space of yours yeah of course um how many kittens had to die to manufacture that studio but anyway that's that's my investigation for later um what what keeps you mentally strong through all of this what's your source of mental like strength of your olical strength through this uh I think there was a time when I was getting a lot of cease and assists some people were like actually like like saying like they're going to show up to my house all that kind of stuff I don't think I was that um I think I was pretty worried about that for a while my wife was huge s source of strength here where she was like hey if you're not comfortable with it you need to get out of the game or you need to basically like suck it up and like this is what it is if you're going to go after these people you have to basically um be mentally strong around this and seeing her have that realization helped me have the same realization and I really deeply admire and respect that about her and it solved a lot of my concerns around that it's just it just made me realize every profession has risks it is what it is you mitigate and then you move on why do you think there are so few journalists like you you you're basically the embody at least in the space you operate of what great journalism should be why do you think there's very few like you that's such an enormous compliment and probably overstatement but um I first want to pay respect there are a lot of great journalists and a lot of them are like I don't want to just kind of take it and go yeah you know it's just me there's so many great journalists Matt LaVine Kelsey Piper um you know you've got Anonymous journalists like Dirty Bubble you've got citizen journalists like Tiffany Fong but who yeah but I think if you going to be in the space in the long term you do need to accept certain risks and I think in the long term it's like I don't know how easy it is to play that game for a long period of time because you make to do great journalism you don't get paid a lot compared to what you could get paid if you did press pieces or anything like that you take a lot of risks legally you take physical risks you take it's just like if you care about money it's not the profession and I feel like a lot of people when they get notoriety they move to like well I can just maximize the money security side of things and I think it takes out a lot of would be great journalists and also so first of all comfort of a of physical and mental well-being yes and also being invited to parties with powerful people uh you um you make enemies rich and Powerful enemies doing this yes but that's why it makes it that's why it's admirable I mean you know uh it's it's an interesting case study that you've been doing it as long as you have and I hope you keep doing it but it's just interesting that it's rare I'll say I want to make a call like I think societies can create better journalists and worse journalists in so far as they support the journalists who are doing great work and I want to call out Edward Snowden specifically because what we have done to him is such a travesty and the only lesson you can learn if you're a logical human being is that you should never never whistleblow on the United States Government after looking at what they did to Snowden so as a society we can put pressure on lawmakers to make it easier for people to do the great work by not punishing the people who do great work if that makes sense and drisking it for them because we shouldn't expect journalists to be martyrs to do great work right to do important work and part of that comes from protecting whistleblowers there's like very common sense things I love like it's great to heroici you know people like Edward St and stuff like that but we shouldn't expect them to be heroes to do that work do you ever think about going you've been focused on financial fraud mhm do you ever think about going about after other centers of power uh like uh government government politics politics it seems to me you can't do good work um like everybody doing good work in politics is to some extent from my limited perspective as I as I said I'm not that into it it seems like everyone has to take a side because even if you do great work whoever you're exposing half the other people no matter how good your work is are going to claim it's just for partisan hackery and they're going to malign you so it seems like a lot of journalists have to take a slant even if it's not explicit like bias they have to take a slant on who they expose I hate that I would really like a world where you could freely expose both sides without having a constant malalignment of like you know who are you working for or you did this for XYZ or whatever like I really find that deeply problematic about our current uh like journalism in the political sphere as far as Government stuff I think it's easy to do not easy but like it's much more enticing to do foreign journalism than to do local journalism on positions of power because if you question it's so easy to just get the bigger you the bigger cases you expose locally you're you get in danger like it's just like very very clear-cut the bigger the case the more your your financial wellbeing your access your entire life is like sort of in Jeopardy whereas if you do foreign journalism you can do great work and largely you're protected by your own government so it's kind of this weird thing where if you want great journalism on America sometimes going abroad might be but the politician thing that's that's interesting you mentioned that and going abroad I think the way you think about your current work I think applies in great journalism in in politics as well so what happens I I have that sense because I aspire to be like you in the in the sort of in the conversation space of like uh with politicians I tried to talk to people on the left and the right and do so in nonpartisan way and criticize but also steal me on their cases what happens i' I've learned is when you talk to somebody on the right the right kind of brings you in it's like yes we'll keep you comfortable come with us and then the left attacks you and and so uh and the same happens on the left you talk on the left the right attacks you and the left is like come with us so like there's a there's a Temptation and mo uh a momentum to staying to that one side whatever that side is um the same with foreign journalism you can cover Putin critically there's a strong pull to being pro Ukraine pro zalinsky pro basically really covering in a favorable way to the point of propaganda to the point of PR the zalinski regime if you criticize zinsky regime there's a strong pull towards then being supportive of not necessarily the Putin regime but a very different perspective on it which is like NATO is the one that created that war there's a there's a there's narrative is that pull you and what I think a great journalist does is make enemies and pul siiz and walk through that fire and not get pulled in to the protection of anyone's side because they get so harshly attacked anytime they deviate from the center well and I think also like there's a criticism of all centrists which I think in some way is fair and I say that as someone largely who's this interest which is that this what about is or like this like what about the left or what about the right can skew when it's not a one it's not a both sides issue so in the case of like Russia Ukraine I think like I'm strongly in favor of Ukraine even though I tend to go like on both sides and that might be partly because one of my employees is Ukrainian um and I think what a great journalist does especially like in politics is I think they criticize the regime that's most in Power most controls the keys and is the most corrupt at that time and they might appear to be like let's say during the realm of trump a great journalist would criticize Trump but that same journalist who held Trump's feet to the fire should be capable of holding Biden's feet to the fire four years later if that kind of makes sense that's exactly right yeah yeah so any uh revealing any so attacking any power center for the corruption for the flaws they have uh irrespective of like your political agenda or your political ideas yeah so that and that's what I mean about sort of the war in Ukraine there's several key players NATO Russia Ukraine China uh India you I mean there's several less uh important players maybe some of the like Iran and like Israel and maybe Africa and what great journalism take requires is basically revealing the flaws of each one of those those players irrespective of the attacks you get and you're right that throughout any particular situation there is some some parties that are worse than others and you have to um weigh your perspective accordingly but also it requires you to be Fearless in certain things like for example I don't even know what it's like to be a journalist covering China now oh that's an exact case of like China has made it so difficult to be a good journalist that they've effectively squashed criticism because to be a journalist in China means constantly risking your life every single day to criticize that government and so the best journalists are a lot of times outside the country um or they have sources inside the country who are like there's like this you know different there's layers to the journalism where there's insiders who are leaking information but they themselves cannot publish because it's like it's you know it's it's extremely risky so yeah I think I think as a societ one measure of how healthy the political structure is is how well you can criticize it without fearing for your safety in that sense the chaos and the bickering going on in the United States politics is is a good thing that people can criticize very harshly very harshly and be in terms of safety are pretty safe yes absolutely I think our only challenge is like where it gets dangerous is around like top secret information the government comes down so hard that the danger in in covering politics here is you can expose something that's top secret that should be exposed and they'll ruin you so that's where you again give props to Snowden for stepping up 100% 100% what's uh the origin of of uh the suspender wearing Batman what how did you come to do what you do like what we talked about where you are and how your mind works but how did it start I've kind of always been interested in fraud or or at least I saw fraud early on and I was just like curious about what is this I didn't know what I was really looking at so basically my mom got cancer when I was in high school and it was pretty traumatic I mean she's fine she had thyroid cancer which is I we didn't know it at the time it's like cancer is cancer but it's fairly easily treatable with surgery uh it's one of the better you know survivable ones and I just watched her get like bump Ed with all these like phony Health scams of you know just like collodial silver you know all these different like remedies and she was very into you know all the different ways that she might treat her cancer and obviously surgery is very daunting and you know I was just confused I was like why are we doing so many different remedies that all seem of very dubious health value later I'd find out that these are like all grifters I mean they they take advantage of free speech in America to like advertise their products as you know life-saving Miracles whatever when they're of course not um eventually she got the surgery thank God but I know people in my life who their parents passed away because because they didn't have the surgery they instead took the alternative option I know like I don't want to go into specifics because I don't want to mention their specific like case but their uh family member went to Mexico for some alternate treatment health treatment instead of getting an easy surgery and they died and so it's like I realized you know where is the outrage about this where's the who covers this stuff and I realized well not many people do then I went to college I was getting a chemical engineering degree and all my friends were like telling me you know hey you should come to this meeting you know we don't need this like you're doing this engineering stuff that's great you're going to make like 70k a year but don't you want to get like rich now like why wait till you're 60 years old to retire like you can be rich now Lex so I'd go show up to a hotel and there'd be an MLM like multi marketing you know pitch for uh Amway or whatever it was that day and I was once again fascinated I didn't know what I was looking at but I was like what is this weird game we're all playing where we sit in this room we're looking at the speaker who says he's so successful right but why is he taking a Friday or a Saturday to do this you know pitch at night and they're going to telling me I'm going to be financially free but they're working on their Saturday and Sunday and so it's like how financially free are they so I just like confused I was like you know none of my friends were rich they all said they were going to be rich no one ever seemed to get rich and so I was sort of baffled by what I was looking at later I graduate I had no interest in doing engineering which we can kind of get into but I wanted to do something in media um and I started covering a variety of topics but eventually I sort of Revisited this interest in fraud and I started talking about these kind of get-rich quick grifters that were online sort of the the Tai Lopez variety you know 67 steps or you know whatever like five steps to get rich coins to 5 million you know these get-rich quick schemes that a lot of people were interested in no one seemed to get rich once again except for the people at the tippity tippity top selling the get-rich quick thing and I was like fascinated by the structure of it I was like does nobody see what this is like does nobody get it so I started making a series of videos on that and the response was like palpable I mean it was like I've made a lot of stuff before that i' had made stuff that got a million views I'd had like some marginal success but the response of like the emils that came in the I could tell this work even though it had far less views at the time was having a different level of impact and that's what I was really interested in one of my problems with engineering was from my standpoint I did chemical engineering at Texas A&M and like I was like is my future just going to be in a chemical plant improving some process by 2% and that's like my gift to the world like I just I didn't see the hard impact and that maybe that's a lack of imagination cuz chemicals matter but I needed I wanted to see an impact in the world and so when like I did started doing this fraud stuff exposing fraud I like clicked in my brain I was like whoa this is kind of doing what I want to do and so I started posting videos at first it really focused on like get-rich quick scheme grifty advertising which I think is super predatory and we can go into why but um it eventually graduated to crypto and it's snowballed I guess cuz now we're talking to Sam freed okay grifty advertising so actually just a step back what what is a multi-level marketing scheme like what because I've I've experienced a similar thing I I remember I worked at I sold women shoes at Sears uh and a in a bank and I just remember like some kind of I forgot the name of the company but you like you can sell like knives or whatever like that's a oh uh I know what you're talking about I'm I'm sure there's a lot of things like this right and I remember feeling a similar thing like why to me what was fascinating about it is like wow like human civilization is a interesting like a pyramid scheme like I didn't maybe didn't know the words for that but it's like it's cool like you can like get in a room you convince each other of ideas and you have these ambition there's a general desire especially when you're young to like like life sucks right now nobody respects you you have no money you want to do good and you want to be sold this dream of like if I work hard enough at this weird thing I can shortcut and get to the very top yes I don't know what that and it I also in me felt that like life really sucks and I could do good and I'm lucky I I found a way to do good I'm like and I don't know you connect with that somehow I think there's like this weird fire inside people to like to make better of themselves right I don't know if it's just an American thing or if it but anyway that was fascinating to me from a human nature perspective grifters play on this though right like this is so the best salesmen play on true narratives that you already believe so the true narrative is you know life is unfair it is tough um The American Dream as described by go to a job work at the same company for 40 years and then retire to a safety net that your positive is going to be there that is largely dead and so they like play on those fears and those problems to then sell you a pill a solution a thing and this the problem is that is that the solution is usually worse than even the problem they sketched out like you will do better most of the time by going with the regular company than you will by going with these goofy multi-level marketing but let me answer your question what is a multi-level marketing so there's a criticism first of all that um well let me get to what it is in theory like at its most ideal multi-level marketing is where you have a product that you're selling and one of the ways ways you help sell it is by rather than going through traditional marketing like where you go and you put out print advertising it's like sort of a social network of marketing I sell to you and then actually Lex not only can I sell to you you can then go sell this product and you'll make money selling it and you know what to incentivize me to get other salesmen because when I get another salesman I'm actually giving myself competition so that's bad so to incentivize me to do that they'll pay me part of what you make right and then you go out and you go okay well I can sell this product I also can get new salesmen to like sell for me and I'm going to make money from you whatever so it goes down the line of you create multiple levels where you can profit from their marketing right the problem with this system is that however well-intentioned it is is that usually the emphasis of that selling and making money ends up not being about the product at all and ends up entirely being about recruiting new people to recruit new people to recruit new people that's the real way to make money in multi-level marketing this is where the very true criticism of most multi-level marketing if not all are pyramid schemes in structure because what a pyramid scheme is is it's all about I put in $500 and I recruit two people to put in $500 and that comes up to me and they put in they get two people to put in $500 and it goes to them and the reason it's a it's a flawed business model is in order for it to work and everyone to make money you'd have to assume an infinite human race and so that's not the case most people end up getting screwed in multi-level marketing and in pyramid schemes that's what that is that's that thing and the quality of the product it doesn't necessarily matter what you're selling to people who are financially incentivized to like buy this thing yeah and so you're um you're selling the dream of becoming rich yes to the people down in the pyramid that's the real product of multi-level marketing unfortunately um and so you look at the statistics of these companies and although they'll make it seem like it's so easy to be the top you know 0.1% who's making all this money the stat statistics are that 97% make less than a minimum wage doing this they spend an enormous amount of time and just what's so cruel about it is that's not advertised up front I mean it's like if I go work at McDonald's I know what I'm getting if I go work at Amway I have visions of they've sold me visions of beaches and whatever and more than likely I'm losing money so better than 50% of people lose money but 97% of people make less than minimum wage it's like it's such a bad business uh for the vast majority of people who join it and the people at the very top who are lying to the people at the bottom saying they all can do it when they can't are making all the money so it's it's yeah it's really messed up and the interesting thing I've I've noticed maybe myself too because I've participated in that knife selling for like a short amount of time that's probably the experience that most people not Cutco is it I don't know I don't think it was Cutco I I I know what you're talking about it's killing but I think there's several variations of it I think I was part of an um a less popular one it doesn't I keep wanting to say it was called Vector yeah yes I I I something with a V was what I was going to say it might be Vector um yeah I get what you're saying though it's a multi-level marketing knife selling but the the the thing is I just remember my own small experience with it is I was too I was embarrassed at myself for having like participated I think there's an embarrassment that's why you that's why people down in the pyramid don't like speak about it right that you're part like I don't I'm trying to understand the aspects of human nature that facilitate this well this is one of the problems with fraud is there's a tremendous embarrassment to being had yeah also if you buy so slightly different human nature is that if you buy into a get-rich quick scheme and then it doesn't deliver you're more likely to blame yourself than blame the product for not actually working you go well there must be something flawed With Me true and they constantly reinforce this they go well it's all about your hard work the system works look at me I did it so if you're failing it must be some indictment of your character and you have to always double down you have to D the system can't be flawed you must be flawed and so yeah it's a it's it's a really messed up system it really prays on people's psychology to Pro to keep them in this Loop and that's why in some ways these things are so viral even though they don't actually get most people a significant amount of wealth and they cost most people money so very unfortunate most people do have the dream of becoming rich most young people right and the thing thing is is that everyone knows in business what do you sell you sell solutions to problems so if so many young people want to get rich the product is that pitch it's you sell them the dream why this gets so grifty and so cruel and predatory is because there is no easy solution to this there is no solution that people are going to buy um because the real solution people want is no work no education no skills required no money upfront and people will pay any price for that magic pill and people are happy to sell that magic pill and I think those people are very cruel and I I think deserve to get exposed for it so somebody that's been criticized for MLM type schemes is uh Andrew Tate uh somebody that I'm very likely to talk with so for people who have been telling me that I'm too afraid to talk to Andrew T first of let me just say I'm not a afraid to talk to anyone it's just that certain people require preparation and you have to like allocate your life in such a way that you want to prepare properly for them sure and so you have to kind of think uh who you want to prepare for because I have other folks that have more power than this particular figure that I'm preparing for so you have to make sure you uh allocate your time wisely but I do think he's a very influential person uh that raises questions of what it means to be a man in the 21st century um and that's a very important and interesting question because young people look up to philosophers to influencers about what it means to be a man they look up to Jordan Peterson they look up to Andrew Tate they looked up to others to other figures I think it's important to talk about that to uh think what does it mean to be a good man in the Society of course in the other gender there's the same question what does it mean to be a good woman I think obviously the bigger question is what does it mean to be a good person but podcast I swear to God um uh did now interrupt okay uh so on that said one aspect of the criticism that Andrew's received is not just on the misogyny is on the MLM aspect of uh the multi-level marketing schemes they done so is is there some truth to that is there some fraudulent aspect to that so yeah I I definitely think so I mean that's the main reason I criticized him um so let's back up there's a few clarifications I need to make what Andrew Tate is selling is not multi-level marketing although he is selling the dream he's selling an affiliate marketing thing which is slightly different so in multi-level marketing if I sell to you and then you go sell to two other people I make money from those two other people down the chain multi-level affiliate marketing is sort of like one level I only make money so Andrew Tate had this affiliate program where if you sold Hustler's University to somebody else which sounds like something people would Boomers would put on Facebook in like 2010 like I went to Hustler's University um School of Hard by the way you were a member of Hustler's University so yeah I joined I joined I became a hustler that's that's in large part due to my why I'm so successful is because of my Hustler University membership I'm just kidding um but so it's an affiliate program so you'd sell like I sell to you this $50 course and I make like $5 and Andrew Tate in perpetuity makes $50 a month off of you okay what does this course actually sell right because ultimately he's selling the dream he's selling hey The Matrix has enslaved you he's really gone down this like Neo Rabbit Hole um so the Matrix has enslaved you your life is controlled by these people who want to keep you like kind of weak you know lazy whatever you need to break out and you need to achieve the new dream which is sort of like hustling your way to the top you don't need the Antiquated systems of of school you can just pay me $50 a month and I will teach you everything okay so what do you actually get well and why is it a scam so you actually I think it's just a scam in terms of like value and like you're selling based on these completely unrealistic things he's like let's get rich okay you get a series of Discord rooms you you know what Discord most people know what Discord is it's like a bunch of you know chat rooms basically right so it's like AOL or is it like yeah yeah yeah right right talking to the guy who who uh quit emac so I don't know there's Discord servers and in these like there's like there's like seven uh different rooms you can go in or there's several rooms and each one is like a different field of making money yes Ecommerce trading cryptocurrency um I think fulfillment by Amazon like copywriting okay so I went to all of these I checked them out I checked out all their money making tools the first funny thing is that Andrew Tate is nowhere to be found the supposed successful guy that you like bought into is nowhere to be found it's these professors that you have now he has hired and said these guys are super qualified so like looked up some of what some of these guys have done and some of them have launched like scammy crypto coins the cryptocurrency professor was like Shilling a bunch of coins that did bad and then like deleted the tweets I mean just completely exactly what you'd expect behind the pay wall it's nothing of substance you're not going to learn to get rich by Escaping The Matrix and going to work for Jeff Bezos fulfillment by Amazon is not Escaping The Matrix right like that's not the way to hustle to the top it's literally a field of making money that everyone in the world has access to if you want to differentiate yourself and make money the first thing you realize is going into skill sets that literally anyone with an internet account can do is a bad way to do that because you have to have some differentiating factor to add value so so it's just such a obvious and complete scam because there is no value to this like so-called education the professors are crap the advice they're like hiding some of the bad things they've done and Andrew Tate's nowhere to be found ultimately that's why everyone joins what he's done is very interesting because and I'll give him Credit in his marketing he's been very Savvy to like make the reasons you admire him not the thing he's sort of selling which is weird like he's selling get-rich quick which seems like it relates to his persona but is actually very orthogonal to it his Persona is like the tell it how it is like tall buff rich guy it's like actually his Persona that you're buying into and then he's selling you this thing to the side which when people get in there and they're not delivered on the product he still is those things that you first thought he was so it's like I think it's to some extent he's made a lot of money by making the thing that he makes money on not the thing he gets so much push back online for and what he's also loved for so people will push back for his misogyny but the real way he's making money is just like basic get-rich quick schemes that are super obvious to spot but everyone's distracted by like oh he said some crazy stuff about women or you know all these various other scandals he's gotten himself in to get more and more and more attention so with the with the Persona uh is the Hustler University still operating I think they've rebranded cidate I'm part of their pitch now I'm like they put me on as like I mean as like the Matrix is trying to take us out Lex and then it's me saying like you know they put me in like saying I'm part of the Matrix they put me in saying oh this guy sucks you know I joined it sucks and so they'll play that and they do like a bass drop and it's like you know don't listen to people like this da d d i mean it's I'm basically like a by The Matrix to attack yes you're an Insider threat that infiltrated and now is being used by The Matrix to attack him well to everyone who criticizes him is part of the Matrix he won't say who the Matrix is it's just it's just the shadowy cabal of Rich powerful people it's just like the easy narrative for people who are disaffected and who feel cheated by the system you just collectivize that system and you make it the bad guy and you go look look those guys those guys who have been cheating you they're the bad guys they want me shut up and then now the person that the the people who harmed you they want this guy shut up you're going to listen to him so that's like it's like the ba most basic psychological manipulation that everyone seems to constantly fall for it's it's really uh trivial and stupid but can you Steelman the case for husters University where it's actually uh giving young people confidence uh teaching them valuable lessons about like actually incentivizing them to do something like fulfillment by Amazon the basic thing to try it sure to learn about it to fail or maybe see like to try to give a a catalyst and incentive to try these things as much as it pains me I will try to give a uh a succinct maybe Steelman of it as best as I can thinking that it's such a Griff but um I think what you would say is that some people in order to make a change in their life need a someone who they can look up to and men don't have a lot of like strong Role Models like big male presences in their life who can serve as a proper example so the most charitable interpretation would be Andrew Tate would encourage you to go Reach for the Stars I guess my problem is I have a deep like I have a deep issue with the like lust and greed that centers all these things it's like this glorify ific ation of wealth equals status wealth equals good person wealth and Bugatti equals you are meaningful you matter and like the dark underlying thing is that none of that none of that matters like none it matters that you make a decent living but past just like that I think the like lust for more stuff and the idolization of these people that is just like opulence is a net bad so that's like I my Steelman has to stop there because I really disagree with like the values that are pushed by people like that yeah no I agree that that's the thing that should be criticized I I shouldn't say it doesn't matter I think it's uh just like a an amazing meal at a at a great restaurant it matters it's money and Bugattis for many people make life beautiful like those are all components but I think money isn't the you can also enjoy beautiful life on a hike in nature you can um there's a lot of ways to enjoy life and one of the deepest that's been tested through time is the intimacy close connection friendship with other people or with a loved one like they don't talk about like love Yeah like what what it means to be deeply connected with another person it's just like get women get money all those kinds of things but that that I think I I don't want to dismiss that cuz there's like value in that there's fun in that I think the the positive I I haven't investigated hostage University but the positive I see in general is young people don't get much respect from society uh it's easy to call it the Matrix and so on but there's a kind of uh dismissal and uh of them as human beings as capable of contributing of of doing anything special and then here's you have young people who are sitting there broke um with big dreams they need the mentors they need somebody to inspire them so like um I would criticize the flawed nature of the message but also it's just like you have to realize like there needs to be institutions uh or people or influencers that help like Inspire right the the problem is though is the people who are pitching unrealistic versions of that are getting a lot of attention whereas like there's so many great free courses where you can learn everything and more about fulfillment by Amazon or about copywriting or all these different things that I think like so often the air is just the oxygen is sucked up by all the grifters who promise everything it's back to what we said about vaporware this is one of the reasons that um like educational products can so often be co-opted by grifters is vaporware is very hard to distinguish because PR like the feedback loop on education is not clear it's not obvious immediately so I can sell you a book and I can say this is going to change your life if you apply it if you don't CH if your life doesn't change I just say well you didn't apply it right like it's it's there's this weird relationship it's not clear the value it's not so easy to like quantify education so that gets co-opted by people who make all the promises they get a ton of attention a ton of money and then those people are often left left confused and like kind of disillusioned maybe thinking well this didn't work in one year so it's not going to work at all um and so I think yeah there there are problems there there's certainly a need for like male role models there's certainly a need for somebody kind of to speak to a younger generation I just think that person shouldn't shouldn't be maybe Andrew Tate like personally yeah there so you have to criticize those particular individuals uh I also and yeah I I think the like the Bugatti aspiration is so stupid like it's like it's so well let me steal man so I'm a person who doesn't care about money don't like money um the women maybe I appreciate the sort of the the beauty of the other the other sex but like um yeah cars in particular is like really is this really the manifestation of all the highest accomplishments a human being can have in life yes I can criticize all that but the to steal man that case is um a young person a dreamer has ambition and I often find that education throughout my whole life there's been people who love me teachers who saw ambition in me and Tred to reason with me that my ambition is not justified looking at the data look kid you're not that special look at the data right you're not and they they want it they want you to like not dream essentially and then again I look at the data which which is all the people I just talked to hajer Gracie this hajer Gracie is just a person widely acknowledges probably the greatest of all time dominated everybody but for the longest time he sucked and he he was surrounded by people that kind of you know don't don't necessarily believe in him so he had to believe in himself you have to it's nice to have somebody I just as as older I get and I've seen it it's so powerful to have somebody who comes to you an older person whether it's real or not that says you got this kid I believe in you you it yeah it does I mean I think so I think dreaming is actually really important I'm more protective over People Co-Op those dreams for money yes yes and like I do think it matters so much that we encourage people to take risks it's one of the great things about America is it lionizes like sort of people who have taken risks and won but I think it's just a weird vapid thing when like the reason you do all of it is for this thing you can get out at the end of the day when we all know and you like you've just heard a million interviews like nobody ever is gets the Bugatti and goes this now completely fulfills me everyone knows the the Beauty and the like fulfillment actually comes from becoming obsessed about what you're doing for its own sake sort of the joury Journey the beauty of that thing um and I think money is just this thing we have to deal with to be able to do cool stuff like I acknowledge that you know you need money to build the $10 million Studio like you got to get the cameras you got to get the lights and I'm very blessed to be able to have gotten that but past a certain point like I think that is really the function of money is to just do cool stuff but ultimately if you can't fall in love with the process and like the craft itself you will be left very unhappy at the end of it and so to start people off on that journey by pointing to the shiny object and going like that's what you should care about seems to me so backwards we should learn from the actual people who have done it and said that shiny thing did nothing for me learn to love the journey and like that's the thing we pitch people yeah as unsexy as that might be yeah absolutely that that's what and the same applies to like the red pill community that talks about dating and so on there's uh there is uh it's not just about the number of hot women you go to bed with it's also about intimacy and love and all those kinds of things and so like there there's components to a fulfilling life that uh is important to sort of educate young people about totally but at the same time feeding the dream and saying take big risks sure and you the little you that has no evidence of ever being great can be great because there's evidence time and time again of people that come from very humble beginnings and doing incredible things that change the world yeah and there's just a tremendous like funny thing where you can't become great without having a willful denial of the statistics like in some ways you have to take the chance even if that chance is so improbable and it's always those people who did take that chance who end up winning so I agree probably SBF and FTX is the biggest thing you've ever covered but previously you've called the save the kids scam the world's influencer scam the like the the the the the biggest in the world influen scam you've ever seen uh can you describe it sure so save the kids was a charity coin that was launched by a number of extremely popular influencers I think they had over 50 million followers together huge names and they basically said hey guys invest in this coin we're going to save the kids a portion of the proceeds go to charity and this coin it's unrug so rugging is the term for remember earlier we talked about safe Moon you just grab the pool of funds in the middle and you take them out okay it's unrug because we have this smart code that is going to prevent people who are quote whales which is a crypto term for saying you have a large portion of the tokens it'll prevent those people from selling a large amount of that at one time right and so basically you don't have to worry about trust in US it just is what it is join and we will you know change the world save the kids whatever the the it was really skey from the beginning and sketchy because their logo matched the save the children logo which is like an actual charity that you know so they basically copied it and said we're saving the kids um like a knockoff brand and almost immediately the the project rugged the they stole the money and tracing back through the code was changed the last second before launch like if you looked at their code that they launched as a test versus the code they launched in actuality they changed only like two lines and it was the whale code to basically make the whale code non-existent like you can sell as much as you want as fast as you want um and it turned out that some of the influencers had not only sold that and made money but also had a pattern of pump and dumping tokens so we can talk about what that is like yeah what's pump and dump a pump and dump is just where you know know you have a huge following you promote your little Lex coin to everybody while holding a big portion of it and as everyone rushes into buy it the price is going to pump and you dump at the same time so that's where the name comes from pump and dump you pump the price sell all your tokens make a lot of money so I traced basically their Wallets on the blockchain and found that two of the actors specifically had had a long history of doing this um which really proved malicious intent and why called it the worst is not it certainly wasn't the worst in terms of like the amount of people affected it uh relatively was like a small pump and dump because it rugged almost immediately but in terms of the amount of people that were involved in it in terms of the amount of malicious behavior before it that like sort of proved that this wasn't an accident the fact that there was like this whale code it was one of the most cynical attempts to just take the money of the followers you had and just like that's mine now so that's that's why I I called it that but that's to save the kids so that was uh that was a lot of the FaZe members and uh it was I think Addison Ray there were a lot of people who seemed like they were kind of taking shrapnel on it there was like this guy too who he didn't even sell the tokens he just like held on to it the entire time and lost like a few thousand dollars or maybe even I forget the exact amount he lost a lot of money a decent amount and so like he took a lot of shrapnel with that but there were also people who were maliciously doing this so in that investigation like several of the members of FaZe got kicked out one of them got like permanently banned and then this other guy that I talked about fled the country like he sold all his belongings and like fled the country and you know hit out in in London or wherever he is now I don't really know where he is somewhere in the UK area so the basic idea there is to try to convert your influence into money correct okay that's the basic idea behind a lot of influencer crypto promotions well but right but that that little word influencer means something because there are most crypto scams influencer scam they're not right most most right the most high-profile ones like just by Nature they tend to be made high-profile by the influencer so sometimes they are but you're right a lot of money has been lost and like nobody finds out because there's no one big sort of attached to it they just steal a lot of money but um influencers are great salespeople because like in order to overcome the resistance of getting you to buy some random coin there has to be a reason and so much of the 21st century content creator generation is defined by these strange parasocial relationships where people feel like they know you not the character you play but you and you have some friendship with them when an actuality you don't know the viewers you know you have a sense but you don't actually know all of these people and so that relationship is extremely powerful in terms of persuasion yeah so you can say I believe in this and I've watched you years for years and all of a sudden I say Lex if Lex believes in it I believe in it I trust him as a human and so that differentiates these coins and all of a sudden the coin blows up gets really popular you made this side deal and you make a ton of money I have to say podcasting in particular is an intimacy like I'm a huge fan of podcasting I feel like I'm friends with the people I listen to right and boys at a responsibility yes and that's that's why it it uh really hurts me to announce that I am launching Lex coin no no man I this the I hate money I hate this kind of the schem of all of this the the use the use of any kind of degree of Fame that you have for that kind of stuff there's something makes it so like frustrating is these people I have a general sense of what they were like sort of what I'm I'm I'm in the even though I wouldn't describe myself as an influencer I make content on YouTube I know that especially since they were taking these huge corporate sponsorships they were making tons of money they didn't have need for these scams I mean I think it's one thing to scam if you're like broke on the street you know and you're playing three card Monty to like live and I think it's a whole other eth ially cruel thing to do if you basically trying to upgrade your Penthouse to the building next door and like you're already well off and you just kind of want to get even further ahead I think that's where well this the fascinating thing so I've been very fortunate recently to sort of um get you know whatever a larger platform and what you find out is like life is amazing I I always thought life is amazing but you it becomes more amazing like you you meet so many cool people and so on but what you start getting is you have more opportunities to like yeah like PE like scammers will come to you and then try to use you right and um I could see for somebody could be tempting to be like o it' be nice to make some money I wanted to say like on this kind of we're on this topic of opportunities you get you know kind of when you get a platform so one of the reasons kind of I railed a little bit earlier against um materialism or whatever I think to the extent to which you can moderate your own greed you can play longer term games and I think so many people end up cutting an otherwise promising career short by just wanting it too fast so I think it's like a huge Edge just like discipline is in terms of like achieving what you want I think a like a very moderate like being comfortable with a moderate existence and finding happiness in that is a huge Edge because really your overhead is so much cheaper than the people who need a Ferrari or a super nice house to feel fulfilled and your over have luyet offers you haveed that people don't a lot of times people don't pitch it this way they pitch a Ferrari as Freedom or like a big house is like you've made it in a lot of ways those shackle you back to like you got to find the cash flow for those things it's never a free ride yeah that's really beautifully put I I've always said that I had fuck you money at the very beginning I was broke for most of my life the way you have fuck you money is by not needing e much to say fuck you that's that's that's right I mean that's the overhead that you're talking about if you can live if you can live simply and be truly happy and be truly free I think that means um that means you could be free at any in any kind of situation you could make the wise kind of decisions and in that case money uh enables you in certain ways to do more cool stuff but it doesn't shackle you like you said too many people in the society you would shackle cuz material possessions kind of like draw you into this race um of uh more and more and more and more and then you feel the burden of that bigger houses and all that kind of stuff and now now you have to keep working now you have to keep doing this thing now you have to make more money and if it's a YouTube channel and so on you have to you have to get more and the same it's not even just about money um that's why I deliberately don't check views and likes and all that kind of stuff is you don't want that dopamine of like um of pulling you in have to do the thing that gets more and more attention or um more and more like yeah like money and wise yeah agreed it's it's a huge negative hit on your um on your ability to do creative work can can I ask you about that because I always I'm always interested in this um I completely agree I think it's funny because when you extract yourself out to the people you admire and respect who inspired you to do the Creative work you do you never think about like the views they were getting or the money they were making or the influence they had all you ever think about is the work itself and it's funny when a lot of people get in this position your temptation is to focus on that which you can measure which is like all the stuff you said like the likes the view that's not actually the Target or what you got into it for if you get into it for like because you're inspired or whatever your goal is inspiration it's impact and like that can't be Quantified that same way so it's interesting you have to find a way as a creator of any of this stuff to like deliberately detach yourself from the measurable and focus on this thing which is kind of abstract and I was wondering if you have any like ideas for that so one yeah there's a bunch of ideas so one is uh figure out ways where you don't see the number of views on things that so I have a I wrote a Chrome extension for myself that hides the number of views um that's really funny that I no what's funny is I have for me cuz it's useful for other people's content oh my gosh that's fre I'm going to need to borrow this that was my problem I actually have some Chrome extensions for like I don't like going down like recommendation rabbit holes when I'm at work I just want to like search for a video find it I don't want to see like all the up next cuz I'll the waste time so I use Chrome extensions for that but the views is a problem because it's relevant to me as a Creator like is this a big video is it a yeah which is why I really hurt when they remove like likes and dislikes cuz I want to know for tutorials and so on uh what's I mean that's probably really useful for you the dislikes yeah yeah do you have that do you ever ever considered making that Chrome extension public sure yeah actually yeah and there would be a good philosophy behind it right like don't if you're a Creator I like it I love the idea I've wanted this thing before I don't know if it necessarily exists cuz I don't think I've made a a Chrome extension that would be cool I would love to see yeah I would go to that process of adding it to the cuz I love like open sourcing stuff so yeah I'll go add it to the Chrome extension like the the store yeah cuz I I totally have I've hated this for like a long time YouTube made a change and they just continue to make the analytics front and center which makes sense from their perspective they're trying to give people better data on what is successful and what makes something successful they're trying to train their creators but in the process it can lead to some unhealthy habits of thinking views Define a video and so I've long thought okay I've learned analytics I understand retention now I sort of want to do like the Zen like forget it all and you can only do that if it's out of your sight depends how many friends you have who are creatives the other really important thing and I found this this has nothing to do with creatives but uh people I respect very much in my life some of them people would know that they could be famous they will come to me and say they they will comment on how popular a video was on YouTube they will sort of complement the success the the the success defined by the popularity even for a podcast where most of the the listenership is not on YouTube or and Spotify now is getting crazy the they will still complement the YouTube number so one of the deliberate things I do is I either depending if it's a close friend I'll get offended and made fun of them for that and to sort of signal to them this is not the right thing yeah I don't want that and uh for people more like strangers that compliment that kind of stuff I show zero interest I don't receive the compliment well and I focus on the aspects of the compliment that have to do with like what what do they find interesting I like you know I kind of make them uh reveal to them that you shouldn't care about the number the number of views it is strange there's like this weird hypnotism that happens once you get past a certain number and that number is some approximation it's like it's like hard numbers it's like 100,000 a million 10 million people just see a number and they just go like wow that is and they assign a quality to it that may not like it usually means nothing at all so I agree I've never I've never been good at like handling that because you're like thank you yeah you know it's like okay okay that said I do admire very different from me but I admire Mr Beast who unapologetically says like the number is all that matters like basically the number shows like the number of views you get shows like how much uh I don't know Joy you brought to people's lives because if they watched the thing they kept watching the thing they didn't turn tune out that means they loved it you brought value to their life you brought enjoyment and I'm going to bring the the maximum amount of enjoyment to the maximum number of people and I'm going to do the most epic videos and all that kind of stuff so I admire that when you're so unapologetically into the numbers yeah he's sort of it's interesting he's like gosh we're getting way too in the weats am I is this a I don't know I'm like constantly self monitoring about like what topics we go on but if we can Mr Beast is so interesting because he's almost done what have you ever seen Moneyball uh yes it's the story of how someone brought statistics to baseball and it revolutionized everything he's Moneyball YouTube yeah he took statistics to YouTube and it changed everything and everybody now so many people are playing catchup I think it would be interesting in a few years to see how he develops and now that he's like kind of revolutionized like the data side of things how he then approaches future videos because there's a point at which you've optimized you've optimized you've optimized but optimizing for short-term video performance is not the same as optimizing for long-term viewer happiness yeah and how do you do that assuming the YouTube algorithm does not perfectly already do it for you which it doesn't but they're trying to obviously do that optimize for long-term happiness but and also growing optimizing for long-term creative growth sure I think the thing that people don't I mean maybe I don't know I don't actually don't know enough about Jimmy that but like to me the thing that seems to be special about him isn't the Moneyball aspect that that's really important is like taking the data seriously but to me is that the part of the idea generation the constant brainstorming and coming up with videos so it's nice to connect the idea generation with the with the data but like how many people when they create on YouTube and other platforms really generate a huge amount of ideas like constantly brainstorm constantly constantly brainstorm I at least for me I don't I don't like I I don't think I go uh so many steps ahead in my thinking I don't like try to come up with all possible conversations I don't come up with all possible videos I can make but but you can't so the one mistake to make is to and map Jimmy's philosophy onto every genre because not every genre fits that model your model is not an idea Centric model it's a people Centric model and so you like if you were in the business of creating just Mass entertainment for the sake of mass entertainment you might focus on Okay the reason going idea focused instead of person focused is so such a revolutionary idea in some senses is because ideas can be broader more broadly appealing than any single human can be but you're not going for that you're going for a podcast interview and I think for you the goal should always be how deep can you get with interesting guests and like finding the most interesting guest which is a different probably set of skills well put really well put but I think the the right mapping there is finding the most interesting guest yeah and I I think uh I don't do enough work on that so for example I I I I try to be something I do prioritize is is talking to people that nobody's talked to before so because it's like I I kind of see myself as not a good like I know a lot of people that much better than me I really admire I I think uh uh Joe Rogan is still the goat I he's just an incredible conversationalist so it's like all right who is somebody Joe's not going to talk to uh not either he's not interest it's not it's not going to happen like I want to talk to that person I want to I want to reveal the interesting aspect of that person and I think I should do a a Mr Beast style rigor in searching for interesting people and you should probably find people to help you search sure he does that but if we're being honest he does that of course with other other folks but he's the main engine yeah you need like sort of like a a prefilter you're the final filter cuz your problem is you're only able to think of humans that you've thought of before or been exposed to and most of the world you've never been exposed to so you need people to like pre-filter and go okay these guys are just interesting humans Lex has never heard of them and then you sort of take a batch of like a hundred people and you go who seems the most interesting for me yeah but by the way on that topic where we into we I I've uh almost done I'm building up uh I I I programmed uh this guest recommendation thing where I want to get suggestions from other people cuz I really want to find people that nobody knows this is the tricky thing like not you're not famous you but I I the idea is there's probably fascinating humans out there that nobody knows correct that I want to find those and I believe in the crowdsourcing aspect will raise them and now of course the top 100 will be crypto scams no but yes so like I have to make sure that these kinds of swarms of humans that recommend I can filter through and there's there's all kinds of systems for that but I want to find the the fascinating people out there that nobody's ever heard from and um from a programmer perspective I thought surely I could do that by just building the system um yeah that's how programmers always think they'll just automate a system to do it well that's the Jimmy Moneyball right like looking at the data yep uh uh Weeds on Weeds how do we get to Mr Beast exactly I'm not sure okay save the kids influencer influence that's probably let me ask you more on the guru front you've uh okay let's start with somebody that you've covered that I think you've covered a lot and I'm really embarrassed to not know much about him I think this like old school coffee Sal you've been through stages okay I've been through stages and phases true uh so a character named Dan lock yeah uh who is he you uh you''ve exposed him for a cult-like uh human and his cult-like practices who is he what has he done so Dan lock is sort of he's gone through a number of iterations but he was kind of this like sales trainer guy who really made a hard push into what he called high ticket sales and he was telling people that they could kind of escape the the nine-o-five rat race if they just learn High ticket sales and they can have the life of their dreams basically it's like I'll teach you to sell but I'll teach you to ask like not only will I teach you to sell sell you that pen but I'll teach you to sell it for $50,000 instead of a dollar right um so I talked to a lot of the people who had taken this course because it was pretty expensive I think it was like $2,500 or $1,000 and mind you the people who are taking it are like teachers and like people who don't have a lot of money and then you take the course and immediately you find out okay well there's an upsell at the end of the the course you're not ready you need to go from like high ticket closer which is one of the products to Inner Circle or like the level up right and all of these courses are structured like this so they spend a tremendous amount on Google ads to get people in the door promising the dream and then once you're in you're actually not done being like the product you're actually in this system that tries to upsell you again and again and again and again and eventually you're paying monthly and you're getting more and more you're constantly paying for access to Dan Lock's wisdom and like ideas and fundamentally this sales system wasn't working for people I mean I talked to like for example a teacher who put in like $25,000 was in debt at one point and has nothing to show for it I know and it was sort of these tactics of pressuring pressuring pressuring and then anytime anyone would complain he would try to silence them so I heard from like um funny enough this was a teacher as well she put together a Facebook group basically saying I think this guy's a scam his course didn't work it's not working for a lot of people because fundamentally the promise of turning someone from a non-s Salesman into a person who's making six figures selling is not an easy thing to do it's not just a matter of just like take my course but anyways it wasn't working she created a Facebook group about it and he like Su her or and was like legally pressuring her to stop doing that um and and I realized like somebody has to speak out about this and everyone who is is getting silenced so I was like I'm going to use my platform to raise awareness to this and people came out of the woodwork I mean saying that this guy defrauded me or he scammed me and I want to just really quickly take take a second take a beat to explain why get-rich quick schemes are different than let's say selling a water bottle and saying it's the greatest water bottle ever right because sometimes people wonder they go like well doesn't like Nissan say their car is going to make you happy and then it doesn't make you happy like why is that different from the kind of advertising of a get-rich quick course I mean both of them are sort of promising things that aren't true but you get something you take some kind of a training you know isn't it the same thing no here's why there's this concept in economics called elastic demand and inelastic demand what it essentially means is that if I raise the value of this water bottle there's a point at which you're just going to be like no it doesn't make any sense right but there are areas in our lives where we have desperation around them that can get deeply predatory very quickly because they have no there's no elasticity around their demand for example your health if you get cancer and I have the pill that will solve it or at least let's say I don't I have a sugar pill here but if I can convince you that this pill will solve your cancer or treat your cancer answer you will pay any amount of money you have on this Earth to get this pill that but obviously that gets really predatory really quick because selling something that isn't real is almost as compelling as selling something that is real right so this happens in the get-rich quick space too there's any amount of money you would pay to make a lot more money right so these products have inelastic demand that's why you see what is essentially a few webinars getting sold for $2,500 courses that literally have identical videos on YouTube like very similar course curriculums that are selling for such extravagant amounts of money and I think there can be comparisons made to college because obviously there's similar like questions about benefits but in this case there's not even statistics available that even shows the average person gets something out of it that's true of like if you go to college your average income will improve right that's the justification there there's none of that there's no case study there's nothing backing their extravagant claims of you're going to make all this money you're going to make all this wealth instead they're just as we said before they're selling you a dream so that's why I find all those like types of get-rich quick schemes so problematic and uh it's why I've railed against them for significant amount of time what have you learned from um attacking exposing some of the things that Dan lock is is doing what what have you learned about human nature and and frosters and gurus and so on it's a great question so I think one of them is that there's this systemic problem that the the phrase there's a sucker born every minute is very true there is no end to the people who will fall for something like this and the problem is is because there's just no into to need and want and like and just lack I mean it's easy to on the one hand criticize people's greed but a lot of times you have to put yourself in their shoes if you're at a dead- end job you have nothing going for you you you don't have the money to go to college you don't want to get in debt fair play where do you go right as you said there's somebody who's there saying they believe in you they believe you can make six figures you know you're you're going to believe in that and so I really felt like it made a lot more sense to tackle it from the other side from the side of people that can stop that can basically be exposed and basically be um have sort of like a negative put on their work I mean they're largely going under the radar so I kind of felt like you know do you want to educate they do you want to like blame it on the victims and say you should have known better you should have done this you should stop but there there's no end no end to that or do you go after the grifters themselves and so that's what I realized I realized like that's the tactic that I went with um and it's tough cuz it's a little like legally risky to do that but um yeah you just kind of got to be smart about it gu so your your platform has gotten really big so there's some responsibility to that weirdly big yeah yeah um let's say cuz like only a year ago it was like a lot a lot smaller and then it's hard to make that adjustment you know cuz like to me it's just the same it's the same show I've been doing so how do you avoid becoming a guru yourself or uh your ego growing in in um there's different trajectories it could take one one of which is you can start seeing everybody as a scammer and only you can reveal it and like and like you have a audience of people who love seeing the Epic coffeezilla grilling and you can destroy everyone and that power now is getting to your head how do you avoid that well I mean this is like less optically obvious I think the main way is like my circle of friends doesn't care about any of that like and my wife doesn't care the people that I whose opinion I value has no relation to like a subscriber metric or anything like that I think that's like tangibly the most important thing to just staying grounded as far as like becoming a guru I just don't have anything to like sell I mean I'm not interested in teaching people Finance I'm not interested in teaching people not interested in selling a course and I've kind of given myself a hard line on that which I think has helped me a bit is there's a temptation to go well I can tell what's a scam so let me tell you what's not a scam and a lot of people have offered a lot of money to do that and basically be like hey I have such and such legitimate product come be like an endorser and I just don't do that because I think it undermines a lot of what I do is if you get like if you're taking money and on the side to say this is legit and you're saying this isn't legit that's a huge conflict of interest so I think it's about managing conflicts of interest and keeping people around me that are grounded and also I think um yeah my only Interest really is just like make cool stuff and I guess I'll do that until people stop watching so a question from on that topic from the coffeezilla subreddit shout out shout out how does coffee find the strength to maintain his integrity and resist temptation of being paid a great amount of money to advertise or promote a potential scam uh I think that's like goes back to what we've been talking about a lot which is just on what you prioritize what you value I've just never I guess I grew up kind of lower middle class and I had a great time like I had a great childhood I had very loving parents and because of that I I guess intuited at an early age that money doesn't do a whole lot and I knew a lot of people who were way better off who had miserable childhoods because whether their dad was always gone at work or like they just had other family issues that just money can't buy mhm and I realized I I guess quickly um that money is a very like it's a glittery object that isn't what it appears to be and so to me I'm like I'm having the time of my life making my show I'm not going to have the time like I could R you could ruin all that just trying to go for this quick check when it's like no I'm having a great time like yeah it's actually uh maybe you're you're probably the same way but uh for me there's a lot of happiness and having Integrity in looking in the mirror and knowing that you're the kind of person that has that in fact walking away from money is also fun because it's it's like promising your like it's showing it's easy to like just say you have integrity it's nice to like ah I actually I've discovered several times in my life that I have integrity it's when you get put yeah you get put like basically to the test yeah I I I I've said like uh I don't know if a public said but to myself I say like you can't buy there's a lot of things you can't buy with me like for a billion dollars like a trillion dollars um but it'd be nice to get tested that way it'd be cool to see CU you never know until you're in that room it's true um the same with power given power I'd like to believe I'm the kind of person that wouldn't abuse power but you don't know until you're tested so anyway you're in a really tricky position because you're doing incred I mean you are a world class journalist straight up and so there is pressure on that of like not having like airing on the side of caution with like having conflict with interest and stuff like that it's tough It's a really tough seat to sit in um it's really tough it's really tough but it's unfairly tough I feel like um but it's good that you're sort of um weighing all of those but that said go donate to coffeezilla donate all everything support him is a really a really really important human being uh the other guy I did I think is the first person I discovered that you investigated is Brian Rose of London reel can you talk about his story um Brian Rose he was sort of this interesting figure because he was like trying to be to one level or another The Joe Rogan of London which I don't think he did a terribly bad job of especially initially he had some really interesting pod with some really interesting people and uh it funny enough I started out as a like I would watch him I mean I don't know if I was like a huge fan but I was like I I like some of his interviews he had some really good like big gits in terms of you know great guests um however when kind of covid started he went down this really weird grifting Rabbit Hole where he did like this interview with David Ike who's as you know like a pretty big Co conspiracy theorist um and I mean like actual like he believes some of the Royals are literally lizards um so he got shut down for that and uh he kind of made a big stink which it's I think it's fine nobody likes to be censored and I'm not even saying that he should have been censored but his reaction to that was to like raise a ton of money from his audience promising this digital Freedom platform and at first it was like oh we want to raise $100,000 and then they raised it like within a day so he's like well we got to raise a lot more money and So eventually they raised a million dollars and he's trying to raise $250,000 a month to kind of keep putting his viewers money into this stuff so I started digging into the platform they were building and there was nothing free about it they had censorship guidelines and there was nothing about a platform at all there was no underlying infrastructure he just got some White Label uh live streaming thing so I criticized him for that it was just this ridiculous thing all the donators expected one thing they they thought Brian Rose was going to take on Google and Facebook and like bring Free Speech back for everybody and of course he didn't um and then it kind of got worse because he started taking a lot of heat for that and he really pivoted hard into like the defi grift so he started selling this course about defi Mastery and this is a guy who knows nothing about crypto um or very little at the least so it just got really kind of he just kind of um doubled down on this course model of you're going to be rich if you just follow me and it was ultimately you just type in Brian rose on on YouTube you can see what his audience thought of that because almost all of them have left him at this point he's getting like a thousand views a video and it wasn't because of me I mean it was like people lost taste in just the constant ask for more money more money more money at some point people get sick of it and it's like everyone has an understanding that like no one works for free but when it starts to be ego driven and driven around money everything's about money it uh it drives people away well you're part of that sort of helping it's nice to have a voice yeah I certainly spoke out I mean it wasn't like I was quiet I was very loud about it at the time um but I mean in the sense that there if you look at someone like Andrew Tate I've made a video about him even though he's been Bann off all the platforms he gets more views than Brian Rose and I think it's just like it was a testament to how much Brian Rose was like doing like the grift that people could even people who were fans and didn't care about what I said like couldn't look past you know just the constant ask for more and more money people just get burnt out is there some aspect that you worry about where with a large audience there seems to be a certain aspect of human nature where people like like to see others destroyed sure uh do you worry about hurting people that don't deserve it or rather sort of uh attacking people their grifter light but they get like a giant storm of negativity towards them and therefore sort of uh overpoweringly cancel them or like yeah hurt them disproportionately sure I mean I try to be sensitive to my platform and as I've grown I've tried to make sure my video topics have grown with me and like it does Reach This tricky point where if you're exposing a grifter with like 50,000 Subs who's doing some harm are you punching down right and so far there's been enough high-profile things that I can distract myself with to where this has never been a problem you don't ever want to be um sort of like Siran aot in retirement um where have you heard this analogy okay so there's this great analogy where it's like sir lancelot's the guy who slays the dragon right he gets a lot of Fame and he gets a lot of Fortune for saving the dragon or at least a lot of you know people love him but what happens after he slays the first dragon he's got to go find a bigger dragon so he goes finds bigger dragon and a eventually depending on how many dragons you think are there in the world maybe he kills all the dragons and one day people go see sir Lancelot and he's in a field with cows and he's chopping their heads yeah and he's he's sort of put himself in retirement but he can't even enjoy the fruits because his whole thing is like I'm killing the dragon so I try to be cognizant and I try to always make myself willing to hang up my my suspenders I guess hang up my hat I I try to be aware like if I significantly improve the problem I put myself out of business I want to be okay with that basically um and just be fine with it I don't the funny thing is I was more worried about this as like an issue earlier because I thought there was a finite like I was like I'm going to solve this faster especially as it started gaining traction like I'm going to solve this fast I got this you know classic naive um you know we all think we're so influential FTX comes along well yeah and you just you just yeah you just get like uh with time you get humbled because you talk to people I've talked to like versions of coffeezilla that are older and it's like it's like oh yeah they didn't solve it and they probably were better I just imagine a smoke filled room like of of just like retired Batman and you're this young bright-eyed oh yeah fiery spirit Ed investigator yeah exactly what uh what's the process of investigation that you can speak to what are some interesting um things you've learned about what it takes to do great investigations sure great investigations reveal something new or bring something to light so I think what everyone thinks in terms of Investigations is like a lot of like you know Googling or like searching through articles I think uh that's the first thing you want to get away from and you want to try to talk to people doing like the non-obvious things and just trying to get perspectives that are Beyond just what is available so a lot of it's just having conversations is so enlightening um both to victims and also obviously trying to get talk to the people themselves secondly there's Sometimes some analysis you can generate that's meaningful like blockchain evidence so in the case of safe moon for example uh going back to that I found someone's secret account where they were pumping dumping coins they were saying things like who sold I'll I'll you know I'm so mad at the guy who sold F the guy who sold and you look at his account and he was the guy selling and it's like that is just that's great stuff so digging through the blockchain kind of I've gained some skills there um and that's kind of this fun I guess I would say it's this weird Edge I have right now because a lot of people don't know too much about that um and so I have this weird expertise that works now I don't think that'll work forever cuz I think I think people kind of figure out how to do very similar analyses but uh so it's it's like kind of an interesting Edge right now that I have so that's like a data driven investigation but you also do interviews right yeah definitely and then also recently I've tried to get more respon speaking to your point about like as your platform gets bigger you need more responsibility I've tried to get much more um responsible about like reaching out or somehow giving the subject some way to talk because I think in early on I was such a small channel that a I if I asked them they wouldn't answer but B I kind of felt like I was launching these videos into the abyss and when some of my videos had real traction I was like okay hang on a second let's double check this let's triple check it let's try to make sure um all this stuff is correct and there's no other side of the story I'll say this has interesting implications because for example I investigated this thing called Genesis they're a billion doll crypto lender and my conclusion was that they were solvent that's a huge accusation so what do you do well I emailed their press team everybody I said hey I think you're insolvent I think you're this I think I laid out all my accusations and I said you have till I think 2 p.m. the next day to respond MH at 8: a.m. before I made my video they announced to all their investors that they're freezing withdrawals they don't have the money so they front I I don't know if they saw the inter like I don't know if they actually saw that email I don't want to take credit for collapsing them or whatever but my point is had I not taken that level of kind of care and just said hey you're a you're a scammer you're frauds ironically could I have done more good by allowing people to withdraw their money early I made some tweets that people did see that like some people got their money out but my YouTube audience is much larger and could I have helped more people had I not given them basically the ability to know what I was going to produce when I produced it boy your life is difficult cuz you can potentially hurt the company that doesn't deserve it if you're wrong or you if you're right and you warn the company you might hurt the uh well I'm glad your wife is a supporter and keeps you strong that's the tough tough decision um ultimately I guess you want to air on the side of the of the individual people of uh the investors and so on but it's tough It's always a really really tricky decision to make very tricky oh boy that's so interesting and then um the thing I've seen in your interviews I that I don't remember because I I think when you I watched you earlier in your career you were a little bit harsher you were having you were like troler you're having a little more fun sure and when I've seen you recently you do have the fun but whenever you interview you seem respectful like like you you attack in good faith which is really important for an interviewer so then people can go on and actually try to defend themselves that's really important signal to send to people because then you're not just about tearing down you're after like the you know it's cliche to say but the truth like you're you're really trying to actually investigate in good faith which is great so that signal is out there so like people like SPF could like he should he should go on your platform I think I mean now it's like in full not just like a half ass conversation on Twitter space but in full so that's that's great that that signal is out there but of course the downside of sort of as you as you become uh more famous people might be scared to sort of go on um but you're you do put that signal of being respectful out there which is really really important you know what interesting it surprises me I know it surprises other people because other people have commented but it consistently surprises me how many people still talk to me um in and maybe it's because they and I really do give a good attempt to try to argue in good faith I try not to just like load up ad homonyms or anything like that I just try to present the evidence and let the audience make up their mind um but it surprises me sometimes that people will just be like yeah they want to talk they want to talk they want to talk I think it's very human in a way and I think it's like almost it's almost like good like one of the things that is always told to everyone who's going to talk to the cops is like you should never talk to the cops whatever um which is true you shouldn't talk to the cops CU because even if you're innocent they can use your words they can twist your words but there's something that that gets lost in that like almost robotic like you know self- that I think having open conversations even if you've done something wrong I think there's something really compelling about that that continues to make people talk in interrogation rooms in Twitter spaces wherever you are regardless of whether you totally shouldn't be talking and I don't want to downplay that that's actually really important I mean it's like a lot of cases get solved a lot of Investigations go farther because people sort of make the miscalculation to talk but I think it's like almost important in a way that we have that human bias to like connect in spite of self-interest yeah but also they they're judging the integrity and the good faith of the other person so I think people consume your content especially your latest content they know that you're a good person I found myself like there's a lot of journalists that reach out to me and I find myself like not wanting to talk to them because I don't know if the other person in the side is coming in good faith even on silly stuff I'm not a same way like I'm I'm not a I don't have anything to hide like you don't really have anything to hide but you you don't know what what their like spin is can can I tell you an example I'm Dy cuz I I believe so strongly that journalists have done themselves such a disservice okay one of the truest things is that like everyone loves journalism in theory and almost everyone dislikes journalists as a whole like there's a deep distrust of journalists and there's a deep love for journalism it's this weird disconnect I think a lot of it can be summarized in there's this book called The J the oh God what it's called I think it's called the journalist and the murderer it's written by Janet Malcolm the first line of this book is that like every journalist who knows what they're doing who isn't too like is smart enough to know what they're doing knows what they're doing is deeply unethical or something like that and what they're talking about is that there's a tradition in journalism to betray the subject to lie to them in the hopes of getting a story and play to their ego and to their sense of self to make it seem like you're going to write one article and you stab them in the back at the end when you press publish and you write the totally different article this is what actually everyone hates about journalists and it's happened to me before so I did a story like way back in the day I got interviewed about something that was like data with YouTube I made a few comments about data in YouTube and somehow by the time the article got published it's about me endorsing their opinion that PewDiePie is an anti-semite and I'm like I reach out to this person I said I never said that like what are you how did you even twist my words to say that and I felt so disgusted and betrayed to have like I'm like this mouthpiece for an ideology or like a thought that I do not actually agree with so J and when journalists do this they think well I'm never going to interview this person again so it's okay so it's like it's almost like the ends justify the means I get the story but the ends don't justify the means because you've now undermined the entire Field's credibility with that person and when that happens enough time times you end up sitting across from Lex Freedman and it's like well I don't know if they're going to represent me fairly because the base assumption is that regardless of what the journalist says they could betray you and they might betray you at the end of the day and be saying you're great while they're secretly writing like a hitpiece about like you know how much you know you're a bad Force for the world where whereas there's an alternate universe where if the journalist was somewhat upfront of about their approach or at least didn't mislead and didn't say like I love you I I think you're great um you would end up with less access but you would end up with more trusted journalism which I think in the long run would be better I think you get more access I think the longterm yeah but all of these like everything we're talking about is long-term games versus short-term games yeah in the short-term you get more access if you suck up to the person if you say this say this say this and you stab them in the back later longterm you build a long-term reputation people trust you it actually matters more but and it's nice when that reputation is your own individual so like you have a YouTube channel you're you're one individual so people trust that because you have a huge disincentive to screw people over true be uh I feel like if you're in the New York Times if you screw somebody over the New York Times gets the hit not you individually so you can like uh you're safer but like the reason I don't screw people over is I know that I mean well there's my own ethics and and integrity also there's a strong incentive to like cuz you're now I'm going that person is going to go public with me screwing them over completely lying about everything how I presented the person for example and that's just going to you know that's going to uh percolate throughout the populace and they're going to be like leex is the person is a lying lying sack of shit and so there's a huge disincentive to do that yeah have that that is what's interesting about yeah independ the move towards independent journalism um I think we'll probably end up at a space where it's so interesting mainstream journalism has so much work to do to repair the trust with the average individual um and it's going to take a lot of like self-reflection I've talked to a few mainstream journalists about this and a lot of them will admit it behind closed doors but like there's there's this General sense that oh the Public's not being fair to us like they're very self they're defensive I guess in a way and I understand why because sometimes it's just a few bad apples that ruin it for everybody but without the acknowledgement of the deep distrust that they have with a good portion of our society there's no way to rebuild that just like when there's no acknowledgement of the corruption of the 2008 financial crash there's no way to rebuild that even if most Bankers most Traders are not unethical or duplicitous or they're totally normal people with who maybe aren't deserving of the bad reputation but you have to acknowledge the damage that's been done by Bad actors before you can like heal that system well what do you think about Elon just opening the door to a journalist to see all the emails that were sent the the quote unquote Twitter files yeah that's really interesting I mean I saw a lot of I'm like in this weird thing where I see I'm so I follow a lot of independent people and I follow a lot of mainstream journalists and the the there very polar opposite takes on that now people really quickly politicize it but to me this thing that was fascinating is just the transparency that I've never see from one of the really frustrating things to me because a lot of this podcast has been about interviewing tech people CEOs and so on and they're just so guarded with everything it's hard to get to and so it's nice to get get um hopefully this is a signal look you can be transparent like this is a signal to increase transparency hopefully so I don't yeah it's it's been tribalize so quickly it's like I've lost a lot of faith in that right and unfortunately it's been this like bludgeon match of like you know if you're on the right you think it's uncovering the greatest story ever about Hunter Biden if you're on the left you think they were just sharing they were just silencing revenge porn picks of Hunter Biden so therefore it was justified and by the way Trump also sent messages to Twitter so doesn't that mean that like we should be criticizing trp it just like this is goes back to why I don't touch politics is because I think as many problems as I have I think when you become a polit like a journalist that not even a political journalist when you become a journalist in politics you have like twice the problem so I'm like I'm happy to be well outside of that um kind of sphere but it's an interesting um it is interesting twwiter you know forget Twitter fils but Twitter itself is really really interesting from uh the virality of information transfer yeah and from a journalistic perspective it's like how information travels how it becomes distributed it's interesting what do you think about Twitter I'm I'm always conflicted on Twitter because I almost hate how much I enjoy using it because I'm like this is like this mindless Bird app is consuming my time mhm um it's this incredible networking tool but what's weird is when I think about my own presence on Twitter they've almost made it too easy to like say something that you've half like the friction to send a tweet is so much less than like if I'm going to make a YouTube video there's several points at which I'm like well what's the other side what's this what's that there's no friction there and so one thing I've noticed is everyone I follow on Twitter a lot of them after reading all their tweets I think nothing more of them nothing L of them but there's a lot of them that I think less of and I don't think I've ever had an experience where I've read read someone tweets and I think more of them in a way and I'm like what does that say that yeah what is that like there's so many people I admire that the worst of them is represented in Twitter like um there's there's a there's a lot of people million examples they become like snarky and uh sometimes mocking and derisive and negative and like emotional messes um I don't know yeah what is that um maybe maybe we shouldn't criticize it and accept that as like a beautiful raw aspect of that human being but not encompassing not representing the full entire it does reflect like it's impossible to not reflect it to some extent or you'd have to counter that bias really carefully because that is them it is a thought they had it's just probably something that should have been an unexpressed thought perhaps um so yeah I I I kind of Wonder like my I'm like should I be on Twitter but the problem is is it's such a great place where so many like so much of the news happens on Twitter so much of the journalism breaks on Twitter even people in the New York Times they'll tweet their scoop and they'll like they'll put that out on Twitter first so it's this really weird thing where i' love to be off it and it's like too useful for my job but I kind of I kind of hate it no no you need well it depends but from my perspective you should be on it oh definitely am yeah so like coffee Zilla should definitely be on Twitter but have uh developed the calluses and the uh the strength to um not give into the sort of the Lesser aspects like that cuz you're like a you're you're silly you're funny you can be you could be cutting with your humor I wouldn't give into the um like the darker aspects of that like low effort negativity if you're the way you are in your videos I would say if you're ever negative or making fun of stuff I think that's high effort so I would still put a lot of effort into it like calmly thinking through that because and also not giving into the dopamine desire to do to say something that's going to get a lot of likes uh you know I have that all the time you you use Twitter enough you realize certain messages that are going to get more likes than others and uh and are usually the ones that are Extreme More extreme yeah and like emotional like Lex is an idiot or like Lex say I'm the greatest human being ever it's much better than oh wow what a polite nuanced conversation I can tell you right now which of those three tweets isn't going to perform well yeah yeah so I I think extremes are okay if you believe it like I I will sometimes say um positive things I said that the the the the Twitter files release was historic of course this before I realiz I mean I I the reason I said it is not is because the transparency it's so refreshing to see some any level of transparency and then of course those kinds of comments the way Twitter does is every side will interpret it in the worst possible way for them and they uh will run with it or some side when it's political yeah one side will interpret yes uh I agree with it's historic they might not have even read the article they just like they literally or the Tweet thread and they're just like it is historic historic because Hunter Biden was finally the the collusion or whatever it is and then the other side's just like no it's it's it's a nothing Burger um yeah that that aspect of nuance and it's frozen in time even with editing there's a so tough it it's It's Tricky but if you maintain a a cool head through all of that and uh um hold to your ethics and your ideas and use it to to spread the ideas which you do extremely well on YouTube I think I think it could be a really powerful platform there's no other platform that allows for the viral spread of ideas good ideas than than um than this and this is where like especially with Twitter spaces I mean where else would I see I think twice in promptu conversations with coffee Zill in SPF like never yeah nowhere else cuz he wasn't going to come on my show he wasn't going to come on some big prepared thing it's like hey YOLO let's go on Twitter space and I like pop up and you know what's funny and this I hope this releas is late enough or well SPF probably won't see this um although I'm sure he's a unfortunately unfortunately he will yes well hopefully I'll have time to enact my little plan but um I'm hoping if he goes on any f spaces I can like haunt him from interview to interview where just like I keep showing up and he's like ah I hate this guy but I think he's he's already kind of probably um has like PTSD of like in the shadows lurks of coffeezilla that just would make that would just it's just like a that really amuses me I mean there is um I think he honestly would enjoy talking to you there's a aspect of Twitter spaces that's a little uncertain of like what are we doing here cuz there's there's an urgency because other voices might want to butt in exactly exactly if it's an intimate oneon-one where you can like breathe like hold on a second yeah I think it's much easier so that sense qu space is a little bit negative um that there there there's too many voices if if especially if it's a very controversial kind of thing so It's Tricky but at the same time the friction it's so easy to just jump in yeah uh right so I I could just I mean I could I mean you it just imagine like a Twitter space with like zilinsky and Putin like how else are these two going to talk right like can't you imagine if you try to set it up on Zoom like it never happened too many delegates like way it happen like sitting there like zin's live just live right just jumping in it's hilarious um okay uh actually just in a small tangent so how how do you have a productive day do you have any insights on how to manage time optimally yeah I I mean I've gone the gamut of from obsessive time tracking in 15-minute buckets to kind of like the The Other Extreme where it's more um kind of like large scale some deep work here two-hour bucket you know account for an hour of lunch and some other thing but now now I just roughly because I manage a team and there's some things that kind of come up I it's only a team of two it's not like big but I just have things that are not necessarily controllable by me I like have to take some meetings or whatever it's not as easy to plan out my day ahead of time so I do a lot of retrospective time management where I look at my day and that's what I mostly do now um and I account did I spend this day productively what could I do better and then try to implement it in the future so a lot of this I realized is very personal for me I do very well in Long streaks of working and if I I can't do a lot of work in 15 minutes I can't do a lot of work in even an hour but if you give me like 3 hours or 5 hours or 6 hours of uninterrupted work that's like that's where I get most of my stuff done so from the it just it' be fun to explore those when you did 15minute buckets so you have a day in front of you yeah and you have like a Google sheet or spreadsheet or something yeah I did an Excel Excel uh and you're do you have a plan for the day or do you go like when you did it uh or you just literally really sort of focus on a particular task and then you're tracking as you're doing that task of every 15 minutes yeah I would kind of do it live um I'm not so one of the reasons I'm so obsessive about it is because I'm not organized by nature and I lost like in college I learned how much lack of organization can just hurt you in terms of output and so I realized like I just had to build systems that would enable me to become more organized so uh really I think I think that doing that really taught me a lot about time in the same way that tracking calories can teach you about food yes like just learning accounting for these things will give you skills that eventually you might not need to track on such a granular level because you've kind of like figured out so that's kind of how I feel about it I think everyone should if you care about productivity and stuff should do a little bit of it I don't think it's sustainable in the long term it just takes so much effort and time to like and I think the marginal imp effect of it in the long term is kind of minimal once you learn these basic skills but um yeah I was basically tracking like live what I did and what I saw is that a lot of my real work would be done in small sections of the day and it would be like a lot of just nothing like a lot of small things where I'm busy but little is being achieved and so I think that's a really interesting Insight I've never figured out how to busy myself and focused on the like core Essentials I'm still getting to that but um it is interesting realizing most of your day is like a lot of nothing and then like some real deep work where most of your value comes from is like 20% of your day yeah I try to start every day with that so the hardest task of the day and you focus for long periods of time and I also have the segment of two hours where it's a set of tasks I do every single day well the idea is you do that for like your whole life it's like long-term investment of anky and is just like learning and um reminding yourself of facts you know that they're useful in your everyday life and then for me also music I'll play a little bit of music play piano piano and so like keeping that regular thing is part of your life and one thing that I've really taken from this is because I've read all the like I had a self-improvement phase in my early 20s um and one thing you learn is that everyone wants to give you a broad General solution but really the real trick of figuring out like optimizing is figuring out the things that work for you specifically so like one interesting thing you said is like oh I like to do my hard work at the beginning of the day um I know a lot of people recommend this I've tried so many times and I just do better work late at night and so usually my streak of work is like from like after dinner 7:30 to like 2:00 a.m. that's my prime time um and so like a lot of my videos which you'll see which is like lit from this studio which appears to be daytime it's like shot at 3:00 am. you know just like in a caffeine field Rush um but that's kind of how it works for me and then also like with the social outlets and stuff like that which it's easy and I know I feel like we think similarly on this so it's easy to Discount these things as less relevant because they don't have quantitative metrics associated with them but in terms of longev it and like I think to be able to do creative work there's an amount of recharge and like re inputting stuff that is frequently discounted by People Like Us who are like obsessed with you know quantitative metrics and so I really found that some of my best work gets done after I take like a break or like I'll I'll go play like live sets uh of music and I mean like that's like for me really recharging but nowhere on a spreadsheet is is that going to show up as productive or like meaning full but for me for whatever reason it recharges me in a way that like I need to pay attention to yeah for sure I I usually have a spreadsheet of 15-minute increments when I'm socially interacting with people and I evaluate how uh I'm getting roasted right now no I'm not it's actually I uh probably roasting myself but I do find that when I do have social interactions I like to do with people that are in outside of that exceptionally busy themselves because then you understand the value of time and when you understand the value of time your interaction becomes more intimate and intense like the the cliche of work hard Party hard or whatever the cliche play hard damn it whatever the social Interac no just kidding um uh the that I mean that cliche there's a truth to that but the intensity of the social interaction even like you know it's not even the intensity like it's not not even the party hard it's like um even if you're going hiking and relaxing and taking in nature so it's very relaxed but you understand the value of that there's when you put a huge amount of value on those moments spent in nature that recharges me much more so you have to surround yourself with people that think of life that way that think about the value of every single moment that's one of the things you do when you break it up in 15minute increments is you realize how much time there's in the day how much awesomeness there's in the day to experience to get done and so on and then so you can feel that when you're with somebody um and then for me personally like when I interact with people I really like to be fully present for the interaction like I can tell this is for anyone who had you know I've been the audience forever so I I haven't been on the side of the table before you're very intense you look right in the eye you're like well I don't know about right in the eye eye contact is an issue but yes A Soulful gaze guys just in case you're wondering it's very soulful right very it's like a back back to serious talk okay you've uh you've studied a lot of people who lie who defraud uh cheat and scam on a basic human level um how do you have trouble trusting human beings in your own life uh how what's your relationship with trust of other humans it's a great question so funny enough before I did this I was like an incorrigible Optimist I everything the sun shined every which place um I always saw like everybody is fundamentally good nobody was bad it just was like sort of B wrong place wrong time bad incentives that view has darkened significantly uh but I just try to remember remember my sample set and just like I'm just sampling sort of the worst and uh I try not to let it bleed into my day-to-day life and I think I've I think it's probably because I was such an optimist early on that I've I've been able to kind of retain some of it I call it enlightened optimism like choosing to be optimistic in the face of a realistic sense of the problems in the world and with a realistic sense of like the scale and the challenge ahead um I I actually think it's much braver to be an optimist when you're aware of what's going on in the world than to be a cynic I think being a complete cynic is maybe I'm not saying it's wrong but I'm saying it's maybe the easier way just mentally to cope with so much negativity it's like just saying well it's all bad it's all doomed to fail it's all going to go bust is easier yeah that leap into a believing that it's a good world is um it's a little it's a little baby AC of courage or at least I think so I don't think it's naive no it it can be some people are naive that are optimistic but but often times um just because someone's optimistic does not mean they're naive they could be be full well aware of how troubling the world is and I also believe some of the people you study you know I'm a big believer that all of us are capable of Good and Evil um so in some sense the people you study are just a the successful ones the ones who uh chose sort of the dark path and were successful at it and I think all of us can choose the dark path in life and it's uh that's like the that's the responsibility we all carry is we get to choose that at every every moment and it's like a big responsibility and it's a chance to really have integrity it is a chance to stand for something good in this world and all us have that because I think all of us are capable of evil all of us could be good Germans all of us could in atrocities um be part of the atrocities yeah I think it's I really have um especially in recent years tried to somewhat depersonalize my work and um see it almost like as like a I don't know like a force of nature that I'm fighting more than like individuals because of this exact thing I think like sort of therefore but the grace of God there go ey is kind of a really profound way to understand yourself rather than as just like fundamentally good and like in full of Integrity acknowledging that so much of that is a product of your environment and your family and your upbringing and so much of the people who don't have that is a product of their environment it doesn't absolve them but it gives you more perspective to tr like to sort of deal fairly if that makes sense and not approach it from a place of anger or a place of outrage there is a sense of like sadness for the victims there's a sense of outrage for the victims but approach the individual who's done the thing from that place of understanding of this isn't just this person there's like a whole broader thing going on here uh do you have advice for young people of how to live this life how to have a career they can uh be proud of so high school students college students or maybe a life they can be proud of it's a great well let me think about this for a second I think don't be afraid to go against the grain and sort of challenge the expectations on you um like you sort of have to to do this weird thing where you acknowledge how difficult it will be to achieve something great while also Having the courage to go for it anyways and understanding that other people don't have it figured out I think is a big theme of my work which is that everyone wants like the guru to show them the way to show them the secrets so much of life and achieving anything is learning to figure it out yourself and like The Meta skill of being an autodidactic where you can I don't know if I said that word right basically you self- Te You Learn The Meta skill of like learning to learn mhm I think that's such an underrated aspect of Education people leave education they go when am I going to use 2 plus two when am I going to learn you know use calculus but so much of it is learning this higher level abstract thinking that can apply to anything and getting that early on is um incredibly powerful so yeah I would say like a lot of it is is I guess to some extent like you kind of have to do that Steve Jobs thing where you realize that nobody else in the world is smarter than you and that both means that like they can't show you the perfect way but it also means you could do great things and kind of chart your own path I don't know that's so cheesy this is why I hate giving advice I feel like it's chees I mean and I don't think it is I think my my journey is so full of luck and like specific experience I wonder how generalizable it is but if I've learned anything and if I could talk specifically to myself I guess that's what I would say I mean you you've taken a very difficult path and I think part of taking that path like of of of a great journalist uh frankly is like I I can be I can be that person like just believing in yourself that you can take that cuz like if you see a problem in the world you could be the solution to that problem like you can solve that problem yeah I think that's like uh it's really important to believe that it depends maybe you're lucky to have the belief inside yourself uh maybe the thing that you're saying is like don't look to others for that strength and also and also like be really comfortable failing I think um one of the best things that like you would never know about me just looking at my background that helped me was playing music live I had incredible amounts of stage fright yeah growing up mostly because I was terrible at piano I like sucked and I specific I taught myself how to play and I joined jazz band in like high school did it through college I remember all my recital I messed up every single solo I ever did I never like actually nailed it and every time I'd go up there i' like have so much dread around this and uh it was easier to get up there cuz there were sort of some people up there but eventually I started like playing live too and I sucked at that and I've just gone through the trenches of like just like being publicly sort of in my mind humiliated like that prepared me so much for what I do now of trying to basically being Fearless of failure in the face of like a wide audience I don't have that anymore cuz kind of I've experienced so many iterations of it at a smaller scale of just like abject public humiliation to where it's like not something that bothers me I have no stage fright that doesn't bother me anymore but you'd think like oh maybe he just was always good at this I was terrible at I had a complete phobia about public anything so um it was that rapid iteration of just failure and eventually I just like came to the conclusion of like I want to love it I want to like love like getting up on a stage and bombing if you can learn to like love that and be Fearless there there's almost nothing you can't do yeah that's brilliant advice I I've I'm I'm with you was still terrifying to me like live performance but yeah that's exactly the feeling is loving the fact that you tried and somehow failure is like a deeper celebration of the fact that you tried cuz success is easy but like yes failure is like bombing I mean music yeah I on small scale on on the smallest and the largest of stages I I'm not going to say who but there's a huge band huge band that wanted to me G on stage and it probably will happen but like wow but I turned it down because I was like no terrified cuz I'm going to suck for sure so the question is do you do do I want to suck in a front of a very large live audience yeah and uh and then I turned to do I was like no but now I realize yes embrace it it's good be good it's going to be good for you it's going to crush your ego to the degree it's remaining and it's just good for you it's good not to take yourself seriously and do those kinds of things but honestly I feel that way in an audience like in an open mic the it hurts that's why I really admire Comedians and um like uh I go to open mics all the time with Comedians and musicians and I just see them bomb and or play play in front of like just a a few folks and they're putting their heart out and especially the ones that kind of suck but are going all out anyway I I think I think open mics are the best place to learn though because it's the lowest Stakes you can get while still being public if you're going to face like fears around this because we're talking very specifically like public speaking or any kind of like you know being in front of a camera if you're going to face your fear you have to do it and the easiest way to do it is to lower the stakes you're not going to start being Lex Freedman on stage with a huge band you don't want to be like it's like in that way it is so impossible um but the more you lower the stakes and just like open it up to like two strangers five Strangers Like The the most dive bar open mic you can go to and like start performing that's that's really what I did is like like I love open mics now because it's like low stakes on the one hand but you really get the feeling of like going for it and you get better and better and better at that yeah for sure and then you'll get the strength to take bigger and bigger and bigger risks listen coffee I'm a huge fan of yours uh not just for who you are and but for what you stand for people like you are rare and they're a huge inspiration I just I'm inspired by your fearlessness that you're that you're taking on some of the most powerful and richest people in this world and doing so with respect I think with with good faith but also with a with a boldness and fearlessness listen man I'm a huge fan keep doing what you're doing as long as you got the strength for it because I think you inspire all of us you're doing important work brother thanks for having me thanks for listening to this conversation with coffee Zilla to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from Walter Lipman there can be no higher law in journalism than to tell the truth and to shame the devil thank you for listening and hope to see you next time