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Episode 550: Zeke Faux

Longform

The Challenges of Reporting and the Psychological Impact

29min Snip

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In this chapter, they discuss the challenges of reporting and the psychological impact of working on a book about crypto during its peak. They reflect on their initial skepticism and the concern that their book may not have any material to cover as the market did not immediately collapse. They also mention attending a conference and feeling somewhat depressed about the state of the cryptocurrency world.

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg. His new book is Number Go Up: Inside Crypto’s Wild Rise and Staggering Fall.

“I have a rule of thumb, which is that if somebody did one scam, they probably did another scam. If they did one scam in the past and now they have a new thing, odds are good it’s also a scam. That’s not always true, but that was definitely borne out sometimes in crypto-world.”

Show notes:

@ZekeFaux
zekefaux.com
Faux on Longform
Faux’s Bloomberg archive
06:00 “Secret Network Connects Harvard Money to Payday Loans” (Bloomberg • Sept 2014)
08:00 “Anyone Seen Tether’s Billions?” (Bloomberg • Oct 2021)
21:00 Matt Levine’s Bloomberg archive
22:00 “‘Don’t You Remember Me?’ The Crypto Hell on the Other Side of a Spam Text” (Bloomberg • Aug 2023)
32:00 “The Rise of FTX, and Sam Bankman-Fried, Was a Great Story. Its Implosion Is Even Better.” (Alexandra Alter • New York Times • May 2023)
58:00 The Mastermind (Evan Ratliff • Penguin Random House • 2020)

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