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Welcome to the second episode of Conspiracy Theories Book Club. I'm Julian Buarro. If you haven't listened to last week's episode with journalist Jefferson Morley on the JFK assassination, I'd encourage you to check it out. In our book club series, the producers behind Conspiracy Theories interview expert authors and researchers. In this episode, we're digging into cryptocurrency. You might say that 2023 was a sobering year for investors as the industry was met with some significant challenges.
The founder of the world's largest crypto exchange, Binance, pled guilty to federal money laundering charges and resigned as CEO. FTX co-founder Sam Minkman-Fried was found guilty of fraud, and many NFT projects crashed in value to such a large extent that they are now worthless. If you're like me, you're probably left wondering what exactly the value proposition of crypto is at this point, and what inspired millions of people to engage in this worldwide movement.
This episode features Jacob Silverman, author and investigative journalist. He's our subject today because he's the co-author of one of my favorite books of this year, Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud. The audiobook is available for Spotify Premium subscribers in our audiobook catalog, where you can check it out after listening to this episode. If you're interested in purchasing the book itself, I'll share a link in the show notes.
As always, if you enjoy this episode and want to recommend experts for us to speak with, or topics you'd like to learn more about, don't hesitate to reach out at [email protected] or theconspiracypod on Instagram. I think you'll really enjoy this conversation with Jacob, but I'd like to note that this interview was recorded in mid-September 2023, before the FTX trial, and has been edited for clarity and length. Stick around.
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- Bocas del Toro, Panama.
Scott Makeda's tropical haven becomes his personal hell. A serial killer pretending to be a therapist. A gringo mafia. A slaughtered family. Everybody knows I'm a monster. The law of the jungle is simple. Survive. I'm Candace DeLong. This is Natural Selection, Scott vs. Wild Bill. Available now wherever you get your podcasts.
Jacob, thank you for joining us. Glad to be here. For our listeners who don't know much about your background, I wonder if you wouldn't mind giving us a little bit about what you do.
Sure. I'm a freelance journalist based out of New York. I have been writing a lot about tech for more than 10 years, really about where the politics of tech and where it meets other issues like labor, economics, culture. I do wade into politics and spent a long time as a book reviewer too. So I have kind of an eclectic journalism background.
And for the last couple of years, I've been researching and reporting on cryptocurrency and kind of the wider world of fraud and illicit finance that often accompanies that. I read Easy Money, and I thought that our listeners would be very interested in hearing from you because we cover a lot of fraud on this show. So tell us a little bit about the book and what the genesis for writing it was.
Sure. So Easy Money, the subtitle explains a lot, I think. It's cryptocurrency, casino capitalism, and the golden age of fraud. So that's the milieu. And it's a book I co-wrote with the actor Ben McKenzie, who some people know from The O.C. or Gotham. And during the beginning of COVID, he got really interested in fraud, sort of as a spectator and a little bit as a short seller. And
he started finding that there seemed to be a lot of fraud in the markets. The golden age of fraud phrase comes from, I believe, the short seller Jim Chanos. But it's something both that you kind of feel in the air and also see in the culture and you see in the markets too. And nowhere did that seem more concentrated to Ben than in crypto.
And about a little over two years ago, Ben got in touch with me. He had read some of my journalism and my pretty skeptical writing about Bitcoin. And he asked me if I wanted to sort of dive down the rabbit hole with him. And we met a lot of bizarre people and some of the big characters in crypto. And it's kind of us exploring the absurdity of this area. Also, the the
Incessant comic characters that are popping up all the time. And I wonder, as you were researching the book and writing the book and doing journalism on your own, what were some of the use cases and value propositions for cryptocurrency at its inception?
Well, I think that's the constant question that's kind of dogged crypto throughout its history. Some people in the industry right now would argue that there are use cases. Some people might admit to you that there aren't or they haven't really taken off yet, that remittances is one that's cited sometimes. But in the case of El Salvador, for example, which has embraced Bitcoin, it's not used very much for remittances. I would argue that there is no effective
legal use case for crypto. And even some crypto people might admit that actually the first major use case for crypto was illegal finance or illicit finance, especially in the Silk Road. There are lots of people who are pro-Bitcoin who will say, actually, the Silk Road, for all its illegality, it was mostly an online drugs market for people who aren't familiar. But it
It was one of the most successful onboarding mechanisms for crypto and Bitcoin specifically in its history. It introduced a lot of people. Some people
who went on to have a legal relationship with cryptocurrencies. But some people also saw, wow, this has tremendous possibility to potentially bypass existing financial networks and forms of anti-money laundering controls and things like that. But again, I do come back to this argument that I don't think crypto is really found. It's affirmative use case. It's killer app. The one that's going to make it scale as hugely as its boosters would like it to.
How large is the footprint of fraud presently? When you Google how much have people lost on crypto, there are many articles that come up that three in four people who have invested in crypto have lost money, some rate at a much smaller percentage. But I was wondering, just in terms of the volume of investors in this country and around the world, how large is this footprint?
Yeah, it's interesting. You can assess it a few different ways. Broadly speaking, and one little preamble is that, unfortunately, in crypto, the numbers often aren't reliable. For example, right now, I think the crypto market cap overall is over a trillion dollars, but you couldn't sell all that crypto or even a large amount of it.
for it and get a trillion US dollars in return, because there's not a lot of liquidity in crypto. If you go on a stock exchange in the United States and say, I want to sell Apple shares, well, you'll have buyers easily. And even if you're selling millions of dollars worth of Apple shares, it's probably not going to move the price. If you're Tim Cook or something like that, yeah, then maybe it might move the price.
But those kinds of dynamics, that liquidity, that sort of price stability, the lack of volatility don't exist in crypto. So, you know, the numbers are sort of fake in a way. They're guesses. They're on paper. So I would say that most people have, according to some scholarly studies that are out there and just sort of what we know, most people have lost money. They either didn't sell at the right time.
The price is tanked because crypto overall is worth about a third of what it was in November 2021. Or it's stuck on exchanges like FTX or BlockFi or Celsius or wherever else, all these companies that went bankrupt. It doesn't mean that crypto consumers made bad choices, but sometimes they did trust these companies and now they might on paper own crypto.
$500 worth of crypto or $500,000 worth of crypto. But if they can't get it, it's basically like they own zero. So once all this shakes out between the bankrupt exchanges and some of the stuff being sold off, I think you're going to find that most people are going to be in the red if they aren't already. And when it comes to the people who will be most in the red,
at least from my reading, most people who bought in at the height of cryptocurrency were relatively low on the socioeconomic scale. So what kind of stories have you heard or cultivated through your own reporting as far as people who have really felt significant financial damage from these losses?
I I've heard it all. I have to say, I mean, from people who lost a few hundred dollars and that was a big deal to them. I think that's what you need to recognize going into this is that what matters, you know, a significant amount of money can really vary based on the person, their socioeconomic status and also the time in their life.
They might need that money right away to keep the lights on or something like that. Or it might kind of be the last straw for them. I've heard everything from people losing tens of millions of dollars, and some of those people I do feel genuine sympathy for. Some of them happen to be very good traders, and I kind of respected their skill at that. But then...
There was an outage on Binance and suddenly all their money was gone. And then, you know, I talked to people who have a few thousand dollars that they thought, hey, it's something I can gamble on and maybe I can turn this few thousand into 30,000 and that'll solve some of my problems. And you understand where people are coming from, especially because
There's so much marketing now around gambling in the U.S. I always have a lot of sympathy for consumers or if you want to call them victims or people who just bought in and lost or who were scammed. And I have heard about suicides. And there is a chapter in our book about some uneasy money about someone who committed suicide and.
These stories aren't necessarily unique. There are a lot of these varying types out there. You start to learn that people buy in for various reasons and sometimes, yeah, against their own better interests. Maybe they should know better. But I do have a lot of sympathy because the forces that were sort of arrayed supporting crypto for a while were very powerful in the culture.
they you know celebrities people like sam bankman freed who are held up as geniuses some of the most prominent financiers and sort of celebrity businessmen there are all kinds of folks who who are just saying buy in and people had stimulus checks and fomo and were stuck at home and gambling was suddenly taken off everywhere so why not try to buy an nft and flip it because it suddenly might be worth the price of a house i mean for a lot of people and i meant for me it seemed a little absurd but
I think you still have to have some understanding of why people get into it and then reserve a lot of skepticism and criticism for the people running this because the VCs and the CEOs and the people running the coin offerings and stuff like that, a lot of them knew better. And some of them were outright criminals or scammers, or some of them were basically just conducting the equivalent of securities fraud. But a lot of them knew who was profiting and the people profiting were the executives and the VCs.
They're not really the average guy on the street. One last thing I would say is that, well, actually a couple of things. One, we've seen that people of color in general have bought in more to crypto in the US, are sort of statistically overrepresented, often because it was marketed to them as a solution to the discrimination they faced from mainstream banking for years.
And I think there is sort of something insidious in there and how it's marketed to folks like that. The other thing is you often hear crypto people saying, well, this is the most successful investment of the last 10 years. And perhaps if you bought Bitcoin 10 plus years ago and still have it or sold at its peak,
That is true. But most people do not engage with the crypto market that way. Most people have not bought and sold at exactly the right times. And so that's why, again, we go back to this idea that most people, unfortunately, are going to end up in the red.
When it comes to Bitcoin, one of, I think, the appeals is that there is a finite amount. But I wonder if people understand the volatility isn't necessarily random in so far as a few people who own a large amount of Bitcoin can very easily manipulate the market.
Yeah, I think that's something that's not very well understood, at least by... I mean, I think insiders understand it. You want markets where people can't manipulate them by knowing that they can change the price by putting in orders. And you have a lot of that in crypto exchanges because they're largely offshore, run by...
You don't even necessarily know who they're run by, but often run offshore by unregulated operators. And the whales or the big traders or the people who with insider information, they are at times adept at moving prices by putting in a lot of buyer sell orders, by stacking them in certain ways. There's a lot of what's called wash trading, which is effectively trading back and forth between accounts one controls.
In some ways, this can help form liquidity in a market, but it also can be just a way of simulating volume and making it seem like, oh, this is a place you want to come trade when actually most of the volume is fake. And if you go on, say, Google Scholar and just search for wash trade in crypto, you'll see some real eco-summing.
economic studies or more rigorous statistical analyses that I can offer you here about how this stuff does happen. And, you know, this has been called out by the SEC and CFTC and other regulatory agencies, but you just have to question a lot of what you see on crypto exchanges. Like I said earlier, the numbers, the values, the volumes of trading, a lot of stuff isn't real in the conventional sense of what you might imagine a competitive market to be. That's
That's not to say this stuff doesn't happen on Wall Street. There's all kinds of market manipulation and illegal activity, but there is more regulation. There are people from federal agencies who are sitting in banks saying, hey, can you explain the strange pattern of trades we notice? That simply doesn't happen on Binance or Bitfinex or one of these other overseas exchanges.
What does justice mean? Like, what kind of justice can we expect? Over a million people lost money in the FTX collapse. They're probably not going to see any of that come back. Some people will, but I think it'll be much diminished versus what they had on there. And, you know, there's the opportunity cost or sort of the time issue. Some people need that money a year ago.
It's going to be messy and people sometimes hope for a high percentage recovered during the bankruptcy process, but it takes time. Some people have more rights to recover their assets than others. And there's also some question of where all the money in crypto is. A lot has been recovered, billions worth, but I'm not sure where the exact number stands, but it's certainly far from complete. And there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done.
needs to be sold like real estate or that needs to be clawed back from people who don't necessarily have the legal right to money they receive from Sam Bankman-Fried and his colleagues. So
It will be kind of a sad and prolonged and very bureaucratic and legal mess. One thing people point out repeatedly is that the law firms are going to do incredibly well on this and the bankruptcy lawyers. Unfortunately, that's part of the process or the legal system that we've built. I often tell people Sam Eggman-Fried is going to be in litigation for the rest of his life, practically.
I'm sure there'll be a lot of settlements. I don't think he can pay any of them at this point, but there are so many lawsuits and they won't necessarily achieve any kind of justice. They will make a lot of money for lawyers. One potential upside, if we want to be more optimistic, is that maybe they'll serve as a warning. Because it's not just Sam and FTX who are getting sued, it's
a lot of lawyers who gave them advice, it's venture capitalists and others and celebrities. Maybe that will cause some people to reassess how they promote the next financial sensation or get rich quick scheme. And that maybe there is something called due diligence that actually needs to be done.
But, you know, in the end, it's not going to feel very good for anyone, I think, because the people that get rich from this kind of liquidation and criminal and civil proceedings are the big time corporate lawyers. You know, some kind of justice will probably involve Sam being found guilty. I think there's a tremendous amount of evidence against him.
Several of his top lieutenants and friends are testifying against him. But those people are guilty, too, and they have pleaded guilty to crime. So even as a lot of this is being pushed at the feet of Sam and he may be the buck stops with Sam, the founder and CEO.
As I say, there are a lot of accomplices, some of whom will go to jail, and there are a lot of enablers who may not go to jail, who may not ever see the inside of a courtroom or pay a lawsuit settlement. But there are people who help make this happen. And I think that there's a bit of a disappointment that some of those people will get away and then just, you know, put all their money into AI. What is it about this country or legal system that allows for this white collar crime?
I think we've certainly had a deficit of prosecutions. I mean, only, I believe, one major significant executive went to jail after the 2008 financial crisis. And, you know, impunity, legal impunity has long been a staple, I think, of the legal system, certainly as it
concerns the rich and powerful. Is it just because their lawyers are so good? Is it a lack of motivation on behalf of the prosecution? Where can we channel our frustration? I think towards U.S. attorneys, towards members of Congress and whoever happens to be in the White House. But I think it has to be towards the powerful, towards people who would prosecute these crimes, towards people who would make prosecuting these kinds of crimes a priority.
Again, I don't think we necessarily need new legislation. I mean, there's sort of a meme going around that the crime wave is white collar. There's a lot of wage theft out there, and there are a lot of financial crimes being committed. There's a lot of illicit finance going on. There's a lot of tax evasion. I have to say, I had a skeptical view going into crypto, but also, there was hardly a company that I looked at, large or small, where I came away feeling like,
This seems more legit than I anticipated. It was often worse. And I really mean that from trying to talk to people at various companies from an evidentiary basis, from legal actions that happened just while I happened to be paying attention to some of these companies. And, you know, there are a lot of bad actors out there. You see it in stuff like the Panama Papers or the Paradise Papers that
The rich, and especially people in big business, often operate by different rules than you or me. I mean, we could get prosecuted for voting twice or, I don't know, for some minor infraction perhaps, but people who move millions or billions of dollars offshore face no repercussions. And
something does need to be done about that. I mean, you could talk about money in politics and the various political entanglements that stop these kinds of prosecutions from happening. I have been relatively reassured by Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, because
He's prosecuting a lot of people in crypto on Wall Street, people who have committed major financial crimes, sometimes with a lot of victims. As you noted, there are hundreds of thousands or even millions of victims of Sam Bankman Freed. Some of them are crypto hedge funds, but some of them are normal people who need that money
or wanted to cash out to pay for a surgery or something like that. And it's deeply unfair that people can get away with this stuff to just go do it again, I think. And it is a little absurd that we live in this age of the grifter where they're not only, or even if they are punished, they kind of are instantly welcomed back to either grift again or to become an influencer or media type. I mean, and one last thing I'd say is that
Frankly, fraudsters are rarely one-time offenders. People get into it for all kinds of reasons. Sometimes it's a slippery slope. Sometimes they don't mean to. But fraudsters often strike again. You know, they lie again or they steal again. And so I think we need to be cognizant of that, too. It doesn't mean everyone is pathological and needs to be put away for the rest of their lives. But, you know, there's a reason why the Fyre Fest guy just went right back to making Fyre Fest, too.
For our listeners who are more conspiratorially minded, I wonder if you wouldn't mind digging deeper into the use of cryptocurrency and organized crime. Sure. Yeah.
Yeah, now certainly the IRS has taken note of cryptocurrency. And in terms of on the criminal front, there are task forces at the DOJ and FBI and other agencies that are dedicated to tracking crypto. There are numerous government contracts with companies like Chain Analysis that are basically about conducting blockchain forensics or crypto tracking in various ways.
I mean, there are examples of the government certainly being able to track down and seize huge amounts of crypto in ways that people might not have thought were possible a decade ago. So I think, well, we don't always have a firm sense of the U.S. government's capabilities or how it might vary from one intelligence agency or law enforcement agency to another. These capabilities definitely exist. And you see it in the prosecutions and in the confessions that they get from people and in the seizures that they make.
So, I think it kind of cuts two ways. I mean, crypto is still widely used for illicit finance and criminal activity. In some ways, it is suited for that, or some coins and financial networks and exchanges are more suited for those kinds of criminal activity than others. At the same time, the US government and some other foreign governments have grown in their capabilities.
There's some people who even say, and this is sort of, you know, this could be called conspiratorial, but I don't think so entirely that
you know crypto also kind of acts like a honeypot for law enforcement and intelligence agencies i mean that some people wonder why certain exchanges or perhaps a company like tether which has had a lot of accusations against it haven't been shut down or had kind of concerted legal action against them and i think it's reasonable to wonder whether kind of the honeypot nature of these of
of these kinds of companies or organizations or online exchanges or even some of the DeFi platforms, the government has some visibility into them, I think, and is able to say, okay, we can track some criminal and illicit finance that's going on through this kind of stuff. Now, I'm not saying that the US government is behind Bitcoin or crypto exchanges, though some people like to speculate that. I don't really think so in the end, but I do think there is this kind of
back and forth. Sometimes it is easier and more useful to monitor people than to actually shut them down or their operations. And that might be going on in certain sectors of the crypto economy.
Why does the United States spend so much money on militarization around the globe trying to suppress potential terrorist threats? And yet we don't put any money towards helping these terrorists.
emerging nations that create loose laws to incentivize cryptocurrency companies to come and spend money within their borders. Isn't that as big a threat to the United States populace as any kind of, you know, potential terrorist threat?
Well, certainly, having lived through the last 20 years, I think the terrorist threat is vastly inflated and serves a lot of purposes for military contracting and entrenching government power and things like that and expanding the security state. I think the illicit flow of money is a huge problem for the U.S., and not necessarily because some of that goes to terrorist groups, but because
Tax evasion is a huge problem in the US, which leads to all kinds of other issues in terms of the funding of our government and what we can actually do for society. Right now, it seems the only thing we can really do is spend close to a trillion dollars on the military. But as a number of studies have shown, putting a dollar into the IRS gets you several dollars more in enforcement or eventually yield from delinquent taxpayers.
And our priorities are certainly all out of whack. It can be framed as a national security issue. I mean, when there are large revelations like the Panama or Paradise Papers or occasional leaks from Swiss banks, things like that, you see that elites are and sometimes very dangerous people are funneling money basically all through these wallets.
well-known tax havens and money laundering havens, some of which are politically significant countries like Switzerland, some of them maybe less so like the Bahamas or even Panama, which is a big center of illicit finance. And I think sometimes it's a question of priorities. And the government didn't necessarily care, I think, for a while, the U.S. government. I can't speak authoritatively on this, but I don't think they necessarily care that
this guy, SPF, had corrupted pretty much the entire government of the Bahamas. When you read about people in the Bahamas' perception of what was going on, he was kind of looked at by some people as a bit of a local hero because he was paying for meaningful development. But when you look at how much money he was actually spending there, it's not a crazy amount.
If the U.S. would have stepped up to potentially give that in terms of some kind of aid and say, hey, a condition of this aid is that we don't really want you serving as a tax haven for these shady companies that are defrauding our people, our citizens, and then also not even paying into –
to the tax base and allowing us to improve our country. So I thought what you said was extremely well put in that regard. Well, even just one example of the Bahamas, I believe it was in the Snowden revelations that the Bahamas serves as some kind of listening post or technological infrastructure for the U.S. to do a lot of phone surveillance in the Caribbean and gathering up huge amounts of phone calls, as many as they can. It's
Those are the kinds of interests that the U.S. seems keen to pursue or to attach to aid. Let us build a drone base. Let us have access to your telecoms network. Tell us when these people pass through your country. Let us hook into your passport and border system, things like that. I mean, I'm sure there are good-hearted people in government or in the State Department, but even the State Department is sort of an adjunct
to more militarized US foreign policy. And I certainly agree with you that we'd have a better world and probably a safer one if we pursued more of these kinds of interests or even made aid conditional on more noble causes like anti-money laundering or whatever else it might be. We just rarely seem to see that in practice.
I consider myself to be somewhat squarely in the market kind of avatar for someone who would be investing in crypto because I'm a man, I work for a tech company, and one of the ways that they marketed different crypto platforms in the past was through sports.
And famously, the Super Bowl ads that some of those celebrities are now being investigated for. But now what we're seeing a lot of is sports gambling. And I was wondering, is there a larger kind of societal effect at play here that some of the most popular and desirable ad space is being taken up by celebrities?
get-rich-quick schemes, for lack of a better word. Definitely. And even some crypto proponents say, hey, it is a get-rich-quick scheme because you're mostly speculating on sentiment driving the price up. Zee Fox, a great reporter at Bloomberg, has a new book called Number Go Up, and that's a popular meme in crypto. That's what you're hoping for, number go up. They're still looking for reasons or use cases to make that number go up. But
The culture of gambling is so important, I think, and that's why casino capitalism is part of our book subtitle. A few years ago, some court rulings opened up the gambling market, essentially, the sports gambling market in the United States, and you had media companies and gambling apps on your phone making it very easy everywhere. And if you turn on sports networks, you'll just see gambling odds as a frame around the screen. It's kind of remarkable.
And then the other aspect of that, though, is what we call casino capitalism, which is just this idea that
It's hard to get ahead in America. There's been some inflation in recent years. A lot of people haven't seen wage growth in decades. Union membership is down, income inequality, all those things that we identify with inequality in the United States. Sometimes it seems like the way to get ahead is to roll the dice, is to gamble either on sports or crypto or trying to make it as a musician or an athlete, something very low percentage but very high percentage.
upside if you actually make it. And again, that's where I think some of the pathos comes from in these stories that we're trying to tell about people is that people get into get rich quick schemes, whether it's a pyramid schemes or crypto or whatever else, or even more fraudulent things, often because there is a desperation
and a deep need driving them it's not to necessarily excuse certain things especially not fraud but um you can certainly understand the human emotions and some of the economic impulses that go into this stuff and that define the this kind of age we're in where people do want to take risks or are willing to take enormous risks because they don't think they have another option frankly
And this isn't the first time we've had rampant speculative markets with massive investment, most recently with the dot-com boom. And I was wondering what comes after this period of time where people are really investing a lot in these get-rich-quick schemes because of inflation and massive inequality? Mm-hmm.
It'll be interesting to see. I mean, I don't think consumer crypto is done in the US, at least. I mean, some of these VC firms still have a lot of money to invest. I mean, might feel a little burned. And some of the remaining crypto companies do have some money. But, you know, the enforcement is coming and the investigations and, you know, if Binance or Tether or Coinbase, basically the three remaining pillars go down, one of them, it'll be Ragnarok for a crypto. But
AI is obviously the new buzzy tech, and it does arguably have some applications, though it has a lot of kind of scary ones for mass-producing bots or disinformation or defrauding people in new ways. On the other hand, it's not something that normal people can get in on as easily because you're not going to buy a bunch of GPUs or a data center. And
I think one mistake crypto also made was with investing, most people don't own stocks. A lot of people can't afford it or it's just not part of their financial portfolio, frankly. Most stocks are owned by mutual funds and retirement funds and corporations and the very rich in the U.S.,
So I don't know sort of what the next hype or get rich quick scheme will be. It'll have to kind of be open to a wider audience, I think, than AI is. AI right now is kind of a get rich quick scheme for influencers and kind of online LinkedIn hucksters or people who might be able to put a little bit of money into NVIDIA stock or something like that.
But I still think we're gonna see these things crop up because these dynamics, as you talk about, still exist. And unemployment is down, which is great, but there are a lot of fundamental features of the economy that aren't better for folks, whether it's healthcare or income inequality in general. So I think in some ways, tech as the buzzy, innovative industry will still offer something to fill that void for people, whether it's new ways to gamble
or new dog tokens, I'm not sure what it'll be. Whenever you think that the world is coming to an end, people tell you people have always thought that.
But for our listeners who engage with this show regularly, what we're telling them is that there are vast conspiracies and oftentimes there's some truth to them. I just wonder, just from your personal experience, like we've been through this pandemic, which was very difficult for a lot of people.
A lot of people in this country don't know when they're going to be able to retire, what the state of Social Security is going to look like. So there's a lot of the idea of getting yours while you can. And that comes down to people flipping watches and sneakers and even hoarding toilet paper during the pandemic and trying to flip that. And is there some kind of cultural mechanism that's not just enforcing the bad guys, but
How do we come together to start taking care of each other again and bringing it down to a smaller level? Just from your personal opinion.
Yeah, it's a great question and a soulful one in a way that I like. How do we take care of each other? Because in crypto, it is a zero-sum game or even arguably a negative-sum game. I mean, I don't think it has a lot of social utility. And I think it often pits, just like gambling, pits people against each other. There is a house that wins. The house is the venture capitalists and the people in charge of the crypto companies who
who sell their tokens at the top. There's a phrase or a line discussion in crypto about how the everyday retail traders, as they're called, people like you or me, are exit liquidity for the venture capitalists and the CEOs. They're the ones who dump their tokens on us, and then we give them the real money that they want, which is dollars. So I think we need
both economic systems and also kind of a tech culture that isn't so kind of competitive. And whether it's in a, you know, a big, vicious capitalistic sense or more in sort of like the rise and grind hustle mindset that that is kind of underlying some of this stuff, too. There's nothing wrong with working hard or wanting to kind of to hustle and get yours a little bit.
But so many of the ways in which we have it now are based on fraud or forms of manipulation or just getting out of the Ponzi scheme before it comes crashing down, which has really had a profit in crypto. And I think there's something sad about that, certainly, and something socially corrosive when people don't trust each other or don't have reasons to trust each other. And we see, obviously, there's political polarization and widespread cynicism, but
even serving our social and economic exchanges or on social media, which can often be just a contest to dunk on one another. Whether we're talking about trying to find more ways to foment economic equality or just to be kinder and more equal to one another in our technologically mediated social interactions, that's something we sorely need. Right now, whether it's the paranoia on the right,
or a kind of a sense of fading solidarity and cynicism that you might see on the left, not saying these two things are equal, but there are ways in which those kinds of sentiments are in trouble and we're not taking care of one another in the same sense because, you know,
the people who buy in early are supposed to be the ones who profit, whether you are selling sneakers or dropshipping or in crypto. There is an expression in Bitcoin that basically everyone buys in eventually, or I've heard various forms of that. And to me, some people will just buy in at a higher price and some people buy in at the price they want. Or also related phrases, everyone gets the price that they deserve.
And to me, there's a darkness to that, something very unfortunate to think that like, hey, you'll wise up eventually, but it'll cost you. And I think we need forms of economic emancipation or equality or liberation that aren't based on that, on you being smarter than the next guy or you kind of out-competing your neighbor.
There's so many great things about having your credit cards and your bank accounts on your phone because you can Venmo a friend and you don't have to run to the ATM for it or whatever.
you have Apple Card and you're tapping to pay for everything. But then the flip side of it is when you're on TikTok and it asks you, do you want to buy 20 emojis for $5.99? You don't even get the chance to think about it before it's like double click the side button and your face makes the payment. So technology can do so much for us in terms of improving our lives, but it also made your wallet...
much closer to all of these hands on the internet trying to reach into it. Absolutely. And they are trying to reach a lot. And, you know, the internet is a very coercive space. This algorithmic influence that's being projected upon us all the time. You know, now, especially under the crypto mindset, everything could be a financial interaction or a micro transaction. So,
So it's unfortunate, of course, and totally out of whack with some of the original utopian visions of the Internet. I listened to you on another podcast really asking the question of, OK, what are we getting out of this? I think that what are we getting out of this is key. Like, what are productive uses of capital if we're talking big? Like, do you want there have been billions of dollars going into crypto?
and some people might have gotten rich on paper or cashed out for real US dollars, but what have we really created? I think we've had this tech industry that has occupied a lot of kind of cultural and media oxygen for the last 20 years, sometimes for good reason, but we've missed a lot of fundamentals about how we can kind of make this country a better place to live, a more profitable and economically dynamic place.
and a healthier place. I mean, our lifespans are declining, which is, I think, the most disturbing number out there that you can find. But perhaps if we were actually building things, whether it's ways to clean the atmosphere or just make new trains, I think we'd find a much better role even for the tech industry and all that than building the equivalent of online casinos.
I'm going to let you go soon. It does feel like everything is trying to scam us and take as much money from us as possible now. I can talk all day about the idea that every single subscription service on my phone auto-renews. And then it's on me basically to remember not to pay these people more for a service that I don't use anymore.
it's bewildering to me that that can become the default and that we're all okay with that. Yeah. And that's something that probably could be legislated against by sort of the war night wing of the Senate, or maybe the FTC can issue a ruling or something like that, because there's just like how their do not call lists and things like that. There's no reason that consumers should be constantly sort of peppered or assaulted with these prompts or just money and be automatically taken out.
You know, there's a way in which consumers deserve to be protected from that kind of stuff and to make our lives easier and to make it so also people who don't understand these technologies or older people aren't being, you know, nickel to dimed and scammed all the time, which is happening. Yeah, I would totally advocate for a consumer protection agency with a little bit more teeth. Certainly. That can make some meaningful changes in this country because it does feel like a grind.
all the time and you can see it in people's faces for sure that they're pretty that a lot of people are very worn down okay uh tell our listeners where they can follow your work and anything that you're working on that you want to surface to them right now
Sure. I'm at Silverman Jacob on Twitter. My website is www.jacobsilverman.com. I have a sub stack on there. I haven't been writing as much lately, but I'll pick that up again. Got some other features in the hopper and trying to figure out the next book. Thanks so much, Jacob. Glad to do it. Thanks. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Conspiracy Theories Book Club. We'd love to hear your feedback.
Reach out to us at [email protected] or theconspiracypod on Instagram. I'd like to thank Jacob Silverman for this fascinating interview. I can't recommend his book strongly enough. The audiobook edition of Easy Money, Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud by Ben McKenzie with Jacob Silverman is available for Spotify Premium subscribers in our audiobook catalog, where you can check it out after listening to this episode.
If you're interested in purchasing the book itself, I'll share a link in the show notes. We'll be back with more Conspiracy Theories Book Club episodes soon. Conspiracy Theories Book Club is a Spotify podcast. This episode was produced by Julian Buarro, Nick Johnson, and Alex Button. This episode is brought to you by Hills Pet Nutrition.
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