Very excited that youre all here this is a great crowd my name is evan ratliff. I am one of the hosts of the long form podcast. This is aaron lammer. Im also one of the hosts of the longform podcast and i believe you probably all know zeke fox, everybody. So were here for, the launch and celebration of number go up and this is being recorded for the long form podcast. Now normally only one host would interview an author, a writer on our show. In this case, aaron and i were, fighting over this book, who was going to get a chance to talk to him . Partly because weve never had zeke on the show. Hes many, many pieces for Bloomberg Businessweek that we want to talk about. And we waited until book came out because we mostly want to talk about the book. So we decided to both be questioners of today. So if you havent read the book yet, if youre just getting a copy today, youre in for an enormous treat with this book. Socioeconomically well kick it off. I just want to say as a preamble, i did not know that your name was pronounced fox until right now and for about years i thought you were on like a super anon wasnt revealing his own identity and had come up with like the like a really great fake name. So its lovely. Its lovely to meet you. Nice to meet you too. I kind of had so credit in crypto that it shows you the brain virus that i was operating under the time that i was like so cool. He never revealed his real identity. So lets start. If you dont know, zeke is a time Investigative Reporter for, Bloomberg Businessweek magazine. He has done stories about fraudsters, scammers, thieves. Some of my favorite types of stories over the years. And i was wondering what, do you remember your first kind of story about crooks and what kind of what drew you to it . Im im always like, i came through traditional reporting and had like what i found to be kind of boring assignments to cover wall street. And i was always drawn to like people who worked in gray areas and there was a moment when i realized, like, was something that i could pursue as sort of like my beat i had done an expose of some i dont know, some shady business. And there was a guy who was in the story id written some not very nice things about his company. And when the story came out, he was like, hey, you want to go out for a drink . And i was like i had also gotten a call from the u. S. Postal inspection service, which i think, i mean, thats like they can arrest you. Its something and they were like, hey, we read your story. Were just so, you know, like we, want to arrest these guys. And i so, i was like, oh, this is really interesting combination of calls today. And i was like, i was going, you know, now this sort of thing has become routine. But i was kind of i was like younger. I was kind of worried. I was like, all right, well, ill ill go out for the drink. And i met the guy and he was like, you know, you did a pretty good job with that story. And like, let me tell you about this Shady Hedge Fund and like how they took money from and like secretly invested it payday lending without telling harvard. I was like, wow, this is like a really great tip. Thank you guy that i just wrote me and things about and like felt like i was off and running. Did you develop any kind of over the course of these stories did you develop any kind of unified theory of scammers and fraudsters who. One thing i noticed is that they are always that creative, like these guys all watch like the wolf of wall street, like boiler room, like theyre theres one guy i wrote about had even hed studied oh, hed study these films to try and figure out he should act as like a so this can be a little bit frustrating because when im writing like a feature story, i dont want to like totally fall into these tropes of like these scam movies and stories that weve heard before. So im always looking for somebody whos got like, whos done it differently somehow. There is a bit of a feedback loop. I mean, isnt that sort of true at the mafia that like the mafia is so influenced by movies about, the mafia that its dramatically changed actual way that the mafia sort of operates esthetically . Yeah that totally. I think youre right. I mean, they probably know more about the tactics from like rewatching goodfellas. Then i, their grandfather probably was in jail their whole life. They didnt get to like tell them. Their mafia secrets. So at the early part of this book, you set up to investigate whether can you give like im going to give a max 3 seconds, but what what is tether and what were you like looking to find out at the very, very origins of your reporting . So id resisted investigating crypto. I just thought that like it didnt have the same kind of cool, complicated scamming that i could untangle and write about. But tether was a mystery that appealed to me. Its called a stablecoin because its a coin that you get the company tether a dollar and give you one tether token. And so can sort of think of them like casino chips that you take gamble with elsewhere in crypto land. And when i went to start into it, tether had sold billion dollars worth of these chips and they had not said to anyone satisfaction where they were keeping that 50 billion. So there was this fear that if people went cash in their tether chips, the 50 billion would be gone and the entire crypto economy would crash. And so felt like this was the kind of thing i could work on trying to find this like missing money. And that was the mystery that like sucked me into crypto world for two years and when you start mean if this was a a bank a proper bank they would have a pr be like a pr division you who to call up you know who works at the bank like where do you start . Would you enter into this world . You yeah. Tether was just like compared to a Traditional Company and crypto world. There were just so many red flags. It was laughable. Like the company i wasnt really based anywhere. They had suggested they are regulated by the British Virgin islands. But then when i called the regulator, theyre theyre like, no, the the ceo had not only never given an interview. He was had never been seen in public. And some people speculated that he didnt even really exist and the guy that i was told was the real boss was the cfo john carlo vicini, who is a former Plastic Surgeon for milan, who then had become an electronics importer and had been sued for counterfeiting so and. Even as i was learning all this weird stuff about tether, i was constantly being told by people in crypto that this was super important. It was central to the crypto economy and. Yeah, i just couldnt believe that. Like crypto traders really, really trusted this company. It seems like you set on a journey that you thought would have like a simple resolution and then it just got like more and more complicated terms of like what you were looking for because it seems like were able to figure out fairly rapidly that this was like a very Sketchy Company that was like telling, but it didnt lead to like a neat, simple, resolute zen like, oh, like now that people know that they certainly wont keep their money in their right, like in traditional finance, then like when do an expose of a mainstream finance company, you dont usually have like conclusive proof that theyre a fraud like the story. If you go back and look at the stories that expose enron, they just sort of like, hey, you might want to look at this like weird financial maneuver theyre using. So tether, you definitely have that already. And anyone who invested in tether tokens had reason enough to, sell them to try and get their money out. But in the crypto world, it just didnt seem like anybody cared. So how did you go about sort of attacking the reporting so you end up at these conferences, these crypto conferences, and from what it sounds like youre sort of an overwhelming number of kind of ridiculous seeming people at these. And how did you go finding the threads you were going to pull in order to keep following the story . All right. So i went to an were you at bitcoin 2021 in miami . I was not okay. And in fact, i described this like to evan in a text message. Like, if you were like writing about pop music and you went to like the parking lot of like Insane Clown Posse show is like not the most like flat hearing where so okay so ive totally heard that before. And this was like a really crazy Conference Full of bitcoin zealots. But i also feel a little bit like okay with like superhero movies. People are always like, oh, you got to see antman this the good one . Its not like the other superhero movie is when you see it and youre like, oh, great another one. And so like with the crypto conferences, everyone was like, oh, you didnt to the intellectual one. Like, thats why . Its like, oh, but youre definitely like this bitcoin 2021 conference. Im when i, i had this kind of, even though i was skeptical of crypto, i had this like impression, it was about to go mainstream and that there were like Major Players on wall street who were looking to get involved, which was kind of true. But then, yeah you get there and its like all these kind of gold bugs were talking about like the evils of money and like central bankers and how theyre ruling the world. Theres a guy giving a speech. Who had said that, uh, he called, he, he called green fiat food. And he thought that, like, together with only bitcoin, like, we should only eat steaks. And he wasnt even the only one with that, that theory. And so at conference, like, oh, its, but thats not necessarily a good target for investigation. Just like some weirdo, um, and so i set up all these meetings. I was kind of like poorly. I didnt have time to research because i just was basically there to ask them about tether, but i had to feign interest in their company. And i, one of the ones that i met with his name was alex moshinsky. He ran this Company Called celsius. And when i sat down with him, he was like, hes real like hype, man. Hes got this shirt. Says banks are not your friends. He was all over the conference like you seem like he was really like it was clear he was a big player he tells me his pitch. Hes like give me your money, ill pay you like 18 interest. But if you want a loan from me, i charge 0 . And like in thats like a recipe to lose money. It doesnt make any sense at all. And im like, but i just sort of smiling because i dont want to. I want to say anything rude before we get to heather. And so im like, okay, thats how much money do you manage . And hes like, 20 billion. And then he got arrested a few weeks ago. If you dont follow things closely. But yeah, so when i got back from the conference, i told, i told my editor i was just like, we could do this crypto stuff. Like, like, if you dont mind that i read about crypto. Theres like a lot of things we could write about about. And one of the interesting dynamics in the book is that, i mean, clearly skeptical of many of boosters of cryptocurrency, but also the skeptics are not necessarily trustworthy. People like you meet this guy bitfinex who is like on this long standing crusade against tether that. The information hes giving is not totally verifiable either. How did you sort of like know who to trust . How do you think about like whos a worthwhile that i can actually use what they say in this book that . That was definitely a real challenge like this bitfinex guy. Hes just an anonymous account on twitter, but surprisingly influential. He would tweet all these things about like not back. They dont have the money. Wheres the and like he had the ear of like regulators like i heard people really listen to him and. So like when we when we met and i agreed like protect his identity, i, i, i dont know what i expected, but i think i was thinking more like, like he was some sort of insider, like he had and he walks in with, you know, his shirts like, stained with tacos and like he he had some, like, gave me some swag of and he yeah, i realized, like, he didnt really know anything. He might be right, but hes just, uh, posting a bunch of, like, crazy stuff online. Um, and yeah, its on me to try and figure things out, so, but it was very with tether especially. Its very hard like even when i got some financial records showing like what they had invested in, im just like, i dont know, could this be made up. Like, how do you actually know anything . And yeah, it was a real it was a real challenge. Well, theres sort of it feels like theres two challenges in there. One is the reporting challenge, collecting the information, trying to get to the bottom of those mysteries. The other one is this psychological challenge that i wanted to ask you about, which is i mean you pitch the book and you start working on the book. What crypto is like at its, you know, bitcoin is hitting whatever 60 plus thousand or whatever the limit was that it hit and so as you were doing it and you just you talk about this a little in the book like how did it feel to kind of anticipate that skepticism might not pay off . Yeah. So when i when pitched it over november 20, 21 and in the pitch i was like more or less its the house of cards, its all going to collapse, which wasnt like that controversial you at the time. Um, and like more or less it did happen, but it definitely didnt feel that way. Like youre saying, like after a immediately. Im very nervous. Im seeing like, the price is not collapsing. Im like, what am i going to write about in this . Whats going to happen . And the time i know it was only five months later, but by the time got to april 22 when prices had dropped little bit, but not too much, i was at Sam Bankmanfried big conference in the bahamas and i was feeling kind of depressed. I was like, i dont know, i guess like this is how the world is going to be. Like, you can got some like dumb Crypto Company and, your coin you can raise, you know, billion dollars and like i or maybe they will just raise the money and figure out later. Yeah, i mean, theres like the title number go up could be like read like literally or ironically depending on where we were the market cycle, i think its coming out like a very good time. But i somewhat surprised like particularly reading the blurbs on the back of the book, theyre very much like, yeah, its over. And i was like, dont know. Theres probably going to be like a sequel to book. Like what, what has happened like since then . Like i that like the trial the Sam Bankmanfried trial starts i think a few blocks from here. And i think three weeks like, how are you feeling about the like aftermath of what you wrote about . So thats how i definitely feel like i think i saw it. Amazon filed it in history and im like, i think that i think thats appropriate but i, i just i cant imagine well ever see like another bubble like, like this one. And i dont think the outcome of sams trial is in like, too much suspense and, yeah, maybe some crypto will happen in the future, but i think it will be different from the one that if it does, wont be the same stuff that i wrote about. Well, i mean, thats something i wanted to ask about as well. Like in the book, there are theres like the idea crypto and the associated ideas like smart contracts and you know, everything kind of circles around it. And then there are the people it has attracted all variety ponzi schemers and scammers that you describe and is it possible to separate the idea in your mind from the people, or was it inevitable that this idea would attract these people . So for me, its very at this point, its very to separate. And i can only really judge crypto by what i saw, which was bad, but i also know that think i can see the ideas have a lot of appeal and like a lot of smart people have worked on them. Um but the question i would just come back to when, i was talking to these guys. Its something that like as a writer like you want to see stuff thats happening so you can write about it and i would be like, hey, youve got this company. You say that you raise 200 million by selling spaceship nft is can maybe can like play the game together. Itll be like better scene and then the guys like, oh no, no, no. Like the nft is exist. We have the 200 million. But like the games five years away like we cannot play the game and i just felt like i was always pulling back the curtain and was like very disappointed. What i saw. So yeah, so, so at this point its hard for me like really get excited about the, about the ideas. And so i should disclose that i. Also, i made a podcast check, check, check out about. Check that and this is cutting out now it sounds okay. Okay. And one of the biggest was so of course one of the Biggest Challenges for me was like what of depth that describe the technical stuff it could be. Zero it could be like 10,000 pages of footnotes on how you handled it. What was your thinking like . How much explanation to be in this book versus like the more fun friday parts . So definitely my thinking was like as little as you can get away with like do not explain anything if you dont need to and definitely it right at the beginning because thats going to be going to turn people off. Was that something you had to like calibrate through people reading it and being like this part is extremely boring . I mean, im to be fair, like im very easily bored, so i didnt need anyone to tell me like which the writing about blockchain would be would be boring. Also, i have a colleague, bloomberg levine, who writes about these concepts like way than i ever would, so i was like not trying to to match that. Im going to write about like these characters and this what happened in this boom and the way here was listening to the rewatchable podcast about the movie black hat and i was sort of thinking about how this whole era of like Computer Bank robberies is like extremely cinematic, very difficult to like adapt or make exciting and feel like your book is pretty exciting. Like where did you find the parts of the story that were exciting were sort of captivating . Where are the scenes in a mostly computer story . Yeah, i mean, that was certainly like when i pitched the book, that was certainly my was like, you need to find some interesting stuff going on that you can write. And theres only so much that can be about different crypto conferences that attended those went to the right one for jesse. And so we werent going to top that. So one thing that i write about in the book is i heard about you hear about crypto being used for like illicit purposes and thats also kind of hard dramatize because like its unlikely that some, you know, money launderer is going to invite you over while he, you know, does this thing. Well, i heard about these romance scams. Its called pig butchering where like, if you we all get these like random spam Text Messages and. It turns