Nicole Lappin

speaker

4,192 appearances 114 recordings 2 series first heard Nov 2024 last heard 9 Dec

Nicole Lappin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Nov 2025 with 2.

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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · Introducing: Scams, Money, & Murder · 2 May 2025 podcast

Yeah, he had a thing called effective altruism, right? That sounds delightful.

So there were a lot of green flags for you. There were these famous athletes who put their name behind it. There was the PayPal mafia. There was, you know, Forbes 30 under 30. Like they were doing all the big marketing things. They checked a lot of boxes. In hindsight though, were there any red flags or gut feelings that you had that you pushed aside at the time?

Totally. And hindsight is it's always 2020. But there were a lot of young founders at the time that didn't go to jail, to be fair. How much ultimately did you end up investing in FTX and over what timeframe?

I see. So outside of what you had in FTX, the market was going down. There were some leverage issues, it sounds like. So you were just in the red in general. And so the max you had in FTX was 250. You were able to get like 45K or so out at the time. What was that like? Was there some delay or hurdle there?

So you thought that it would, you know, freeze for a few days and come back. Exactly.

It never came back. And so it sounds like the group of friends you had were all bullish on FTX at the time. When you first saw the spinny wheel of death, I'm assuming you started texting friends. And what did they say? They had the same issue? How did this spread?

You mentioned NPR, but the tweet, the story played out on Twitter, basically. I mean, I don't know if you were a big Twitter guy before this, but did you see all of it come out? Like you mentioned that you were a fan of Binance. That was SBF's competitor. CZ, I won't say his full name. I will for sure butcher it.

But he tweeted, you know, as part of Binance's exit from FTX equity last year, Binance received roughly 2.1 billion USD equivalent in cash, BUSD and FTT, which is FTX token. Due to recent revelations that have come to light, we have decided to liquidate any remaining FTT on our books, end quote. Did you see this?

Come out real time?

Yeah. I mean, for you, did you think this could spread to more of the financial system? I mean, it sounds like you lived through 2008. Did you have a moment where you thought the whole system could implode?

When do you think it really sunk in that the money was gone? Because I'm sure at that point there was a ton of adrenaline. Get the money out, get it into a traditional bank, move as quickly as possible, try to salvage anything you possibly can. So when was it that it finally hit you?

can only imagine. So just to sort of zoom out, at this point, you had a bunch of other losses and other investments. FTX had gone under. You basically had nothing. There was no hidden bank account or brokerage or something for you to live on. What was I mean, you're going into the holidays too at this point to December. What was that like for you?

I guess not just financially, emotionally and physically.

Not related to FTX. You just had a loan, right?

Wow. So it's safe to say that you went through a hard mental health time. Were you depressed?

So in other words, you're saying that the system around bankruptcy that's in theory put in place to help people out of a bad situation makes it harder to get credit or to get a new place, which is why it sounds like you're staying with a friend or to rebuild financially, which is where you were stuck. And while you were going through this, FTX was also going through bankruptcy. Were you...

able to get any of the funds through their bankruptcy process? Were you part of any of the class action lawsuits?

For their bankruptcy.

You've spent a lot of time thinking about all of this, I'm sure, living through it. What are your thoughts now on Sam Bingman-Fried?

Yeah. It's like when you go to the airport and you now take off your shoes. Right.

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