Ezra Marcus

You know, these guys, they go to bottle service clubs and they...

crypto.

They don't have any kind of particularly obscure theology, philosophy, anything like that.

At the same time, they are in an extremely arcane world full of really crazy context where they're just surrounded by people that are making and losing absurd volumes of money in this really out of control way that, you know, I think we've all become sort of numb to how

crazy it is that these people in the last 10 years started making life altering amounts of money by investing in NFTs and stuff.

But for these guys, they're just living in this world of magic money.

And I think it gave them a sense of the world that was like totally, on the one hand, irrational and fantastical, but also totally valid in terms of what was available to them from a kind of Lamborghini lifestyle perspective.

Yeah, totally.

And he just, I mean, and yet he was quite early, relatively speaking.

So he still had this sort of gravitas within this community.

And anyway, all of which is to say, as with so many of these kind of notorious crypto people like SBF, you know, Sam Bankman Freed, like, had this sort of like, boy genius, I'm going to change the world, like levity to the way he moved through the economy that

on the one hand, ended with him going to jail for life, but on the other hand, was in certain ways rational to what was presented to him, which is that the crazier moves you make, the more money you make in this speculative hot air balloon world.

My co-writer for the crypto story, Jen Vietchner, actually wrote the big New York mag, Sam Bankman-Fried story.

But my sense of it, just from reading, is he was, I think, motivated by some of this EA stuff, the effective altruism stuff, and did have this belief in changing the world that also came out of this incredibly blasé way of essentially...

treating the world through the lens of gambling.

And so he was like, okay, well, I'm in this situation where essentially, he had two arms of the company.

One is the sort of straightforward public facing, you know, the bank, and the other was this like highly speculative crypto gambling vehicle, which lost billions.

So he used money from one to cover bets in the other, the bet turned out wrong, he fumbled it all.

And then, you know, that was actually the

technically robbery because he was using other people's money to gamble.