UPDATE: On 11/29/22 Bankman-Fried did a phone interview with RU-vidr Tiffany Fong, where he revealed that his political donations were equally split between Democrats and Republicans, but the Republican donations were hidden through dark money groups. According to him, “All my Republican donations were dark. And the reason, was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to a Republican because they’re all super liberal. And I didn’t want to have that fight so I just made all the Republican ones dark.” He went on to say that he was the 2nd or 3rd largest Republican donor in the 2022 election cycle. Listen to the interview here: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-6DezodR9hNI.html
The “effective altruism” thing reminded me of something one of my philosophy profs said. She said she never trusted anyone who when asked about concrete problems started talking about “values”
Effective altruism is good moral philosophy for making personal goals. It’s not something other people should invest in, though. If you personally want to make it a goal to take your banking fortune and give it to the homeless after you hit a billion dollars, fine. That’s all on you. But no one should be investing someone else merely because that person promised they were practicing effective altruism.
@@awb2498 Or at least, "how to be in it for personal enrichment and not feel bad about it." That's what people like SBF are really selling to guilt-ridden, Silicon Valley progressive-types.
"I need to be rich so I can give it all to the poor. You know... To stop all the rich people like me getting it" One of the great non-sequiturs of our time.
Steal $2,000 worth of stuff for Walmart, get a year in jail. Steal billions, get a slap on the wrist and some fines that don’t even put a dent in the money you scammed.
Well it never was something else than a scam. Why do you think someone donate half the money they make in trading to a company like that? Because he earned the money fairly? Not a chance, nobody would that. The money was seeded.. just pure money loundary
It's great, except that it's a temporary fix like welfare. You have to treat the root causes of poverty, which politicians and especially a bunch of greasy business cutthroats really aren't interested in. EA is really just a vanity project for rich people to feel good about themselves.
i am just waiting for the meltdown when the lid is blown on tether. Literally all crypto goes to hell when stablecoins tied to fiat fail, funny isn't it? the future of currency
@@Louis-wp3fq except this dynamic exists in capitalist economies as well. How many times have you seen multimillionaire celebrities get on stage/television and beg for donations for some cause or charity when they could easily give up their own wealth and solve the problems to begin with
@@JohnSmith-mc2zz no it's not. It is the exact same MO as every champagne socialist, including Marx who earned nothing of his own to distribute to anyone. It's easy to play socialist with other people's earnings.
I totally believe what he said about the empty shibboleths. There's no way every institutional and corporate head suddenly started passionately believing exactly the same things that most people hadn't heard of a few years before Those people are always inherently dishonest
It's just human bandwagoning. People flock to whatever they think is going to impress others. Ergo - the relentless virtue signalling by people who are, fundamentally, actually quite selfish.
@@j.2512 as if there weren't wealthy white, right-wing people weren't also committing all kinds of white collar crime and pretending to be good people while doing so, you're just looking for a reason outside of yourself for the reason you're poor, insignificant and overall pathetic.
"She was dressed as a wood nymph... because she was on her way to LARPing party." You know its a weird story when this line gets no further explanation.
This Sam guy lives in a world of petulant immortality, narcotics, child of the elite, egos and playing savior under the pretense of morality. How many classic anti-heroes tropes can we fit in one person?
I think you mean Villain Protagonist. Our society has confused these two terms for three/four+ generations now. Walter White, Michael Corleone, Gorden Grecko. They are not the good guys.
The sheer mediocrity of these manifestations of evil cannot be overstated. Nuggets of utter naffness making our world a worse place, one scam trade at a time.
Look they’re total pieces of shit, but they were quant traders, which you have to be super intelligent to get a job in. So I wouldn’t call them mediocre. They were definitely talented st something
A casino built on top of a Ponzi scheme. Not only that, but a casino that secured loans by valuing its stacks of plastic gambling chips in terms of the $$$ numbers printed on them, instead of the actual value of the plastic they were made from.
@@ChooseLoveToday316 It actually annoys me that so many people use the casino analogy but then fail to follow through with the obvious additional point. i.e. the casino putting up its own plastic chips as collateral, as if those chips were actually worth the abstract values they have during a poker game. It works so perfectly within the bounds of the initial metaphor, and is EXACTLY what FTX really did withh the FTT tokens.
"As long as we make obnoxious amounts of money, it'll be okay, we can call ourselves extreme philanthropists and break every finance law with impunity." Enjoy your Natty Ice, Georg 👍
And, like Madoff. I was told once that the rich don't think like we do. Now, I see how true that is with each new scam. Dean is right: No self-made billionaires. Don't believe that nonsense.. Rich people come from other rich people and have a lot of backing. Sure, there are a few new members admitted to the Club each year, but that is not the majority. Also, most wealth is inherited. Americans won't accept this because of the constant Horatio Alger brainwashing and "hard work" nonsense. Let me be clear: 99.999% cannot compete with these people because of birth and connections. It really is that simple.
Its incredibly disappointing to reach adulthood only to find out the James Bond villains of the real world have no genius plans for domination, but instead are just wood elf LARPing nerds who move money around and reply like a fumbling NYT article when asked about anything they're up to. No one liners, no dramatic monologues, no aura of intimidation. Ah, its all so tiresome.
Nope, it's funny and expected. Remember, the Russian Tsars were obsessed with midgets and the British monarchs had multiple mistresses. It's the very thing Austin Powers and Silicon Valley mock regularly. Hell, they even come from the same crop of cringe that Vox and the NYT use to hire new writers and editors.
You know, 14 years ago there was a heist in Sweden. It involved careful planning, the theft of a helicopter and ex-Yugoslav Special Forces. It almost ended with the Swedish Air Force diverting fighter jets to stop them. They prevented police intervention with fake bombs and caltrops, they left a decoy helicopter to confuse their pursuers and it ultimately required a Swedish Special Forces Unit to hunt down one of the perpetrators, ambushing him on the Canary Islands. Wanna know how much they stole? 3.9 million dollars. Meanwhile, when we're talking about 8 billion dollars, a sum 2051.28 times that of the helicopter heist, it's just some fat, upper class asshole and his Chinese harem of LARPers who sit around in air-conditioned offices and commit crypto-fraud. We need more heists and fewer scams.
Whenever you say "effective altruism" I heard "neo-feudalism". So it kind of make sense that "neo-feudalism" is big on Silicon Valley right now... This has to be the lamest cyberpunk dystopia.
Watching independent crypto RU-vidrs, they all saw it a month before the fall. Yet none of the business networks found out about it, until after the election.
Crypto fanboys: "Banks are regulated. A few still manage to screw their customers. We don't like banks. Let's instead give all of our money to those kids playing in a totally unregulated market."
For years we have had a regular coin war in my office discussing the phenomenon, where the majority triumphantly claimed "coins" did not need to be regulated, they would work by themselves in some miraculous way, (I was in the more reserved camp) and now, with the "FTW" issue, the coin enthusiasts in the office do not pay attention to crypto anymore, ond one of my colleagues told me there must be regulation, I did not mentioned that with regulation crypto will be "fiat" which they hate
@@straightfacts5352 Most "crypto" moonbois don't understand what decentralization means. For them, it means any central organization (like Ethereum or Charles Hoskinson) that is not regulated by massive corporations. This is how ignorant these crapcoin gamblers are.
@@doncarlodivargas5497 Regulation wouldn't necessarily make them fiat. And any new regulations would be on the exchanges like FTX and Binance, not on the coins themselves. I say new because they are already regulated to at least be compliant with KYC laws. Funny enough Bankman was the one spearheading the push for regulation and discussing with Congress about it.
@@kavky - as soon as anyone accept regulation and interference from government they will eventually take over, and now "crypto" is only for storage, if it should be used as we use money they will be regulated in the same way as our current currency, and therfore also "fiat" Ironically, in the same moment "coins" are replacing "fiat" the value will be fixed and no longer interesting for speculation, and all coins enthusiasts will loose interest, the motivation today for being obsessed with crypto are a mix of greed and with to be seen as avant-garde, there is an inherent contradiction in crypto it is difficult to get away from
it's a bizarre phenomenon. People lie, often very transparently, and other people believe those lies. The lying, while terrible, is only half the problem. The other half is the incredible naivete which seemingly compels people to take everything they see at face value.
i think (especially when it comes white-collar crime) it's the manipulation tactics that are used along with lies that make it more believable to people, once you know what these manipulation tactics are and how they are being used than you'll more than likely not fall for this shit.
It's because of the long term effects of the government method of brainwashing the citizens which activates whenever a select word or words are spoken to them. Check yourself out and find out what triggers you.
It doesn't help that these rich sociopaths use the media as a way to launder believability. Anytime one of these crooks go down, I believe any media group that gave them a platform should be fined.
Effective altruism is what billionaires use to be able to sleep night, without it they would have to admit that they are just greedy and don’t actually give a shit about anyone but themselves
Yeah it's just another name for 'trickle down economics'. "The richer I am, the more money will fall from my pockets to the peasants beneath me, I'm helping."
@@j.2512 well seeing as your previous comment implied that this only applied to jewish people. it would be great if you got a braincell infusion and pulled your head out of your ass and saw just how prevalent this was with wealthy people of all kinds of races and religions and saw how many jewish activists have fought against wealthy sociopaths fucking over the common man for decades upon decades.
Oh yes, the problem of poverty, an insufficient distribution of wealth, is cleary to further concentrate the distribution of wealth. Fucking brilliant.
I mean, SBF's parents are compliance attorneys, so their job was and is basically finding loopholes and how to benefit from them, and how to help other people benefit from them. His parents also were greedy, and a paper his mother wrote about blame shifting is truly baffling..the rotten apple doesn't fall far from the diseased tree.
If you give part of your money to the poor, you’ll have less capital to reinvest and therefore profits will be less. So you will have less money to give to the poor. Therefore, the way to give the maximum amount of money to the poor is to not give them anything
So people invest their hard earned money and in doing so SBF gets to claim he has 32 billion dollars? I never understood this...32 billion in deposits doesn't make it the founders money and it drives me crazy that this has been the norm with many of these crypto scams. Hope the people can be made whole eventually.
If I understand correctly, it's because he was running an exchange. Want your internet funbux to translate into real currency? Be careful who you trust with the task.
Effective altruism. Could start with eliminating tax avoidance schemes, tightening up regulation (and criminal consequences) and not buying up politicians to keep lowering taxes for the rich.
@@Raelven That is barely half of the story. The other half --- the key part --- is the crypto "magic": he pulled tokens out of his ass, assigned them value, and people bought them/it.
Great work thank you Georg. You gave a perfect summary of recent events and more importantly where these guys came from. Let me break a joke: FTX investors (more correctly gamblers) have been "effectively altruicised" off their money.
puts a real smile on my face whenever tony blair is referred to as a war criminal. ofc justice and a yard of rope would put a bigger smile on my face but you take what you can get
Yep. The truly altruistic would never say they are and you would never hear of their charitable work. Anyone who mentions they are altruistic is a narcissist.
Much of the US media are still carrying water for this guy even now. The mainstream media should be forced to append "Here's a word from our sponsors" to all their content from now on.
seems strange they'd carry water for him, when they didn't for Enron. They were doing the same thing. Inventing numbers and funding politicians, including the current president.
@@gamesthatiplay9083 Government, big business, and the media weren't as cozy back then. Whereas they more or less operate in unison now. Mussolini would very much approve.
Why did people invest in him? Because he got good grades at the right uni and was a rich kid. Privilege. While he is immoral, it's also worth remembering, he also wasn't smart enough to make money other than roleplaying as a quant. I'm sure he was good at maths, theoretical maths anyway, passing tests anyway, but he clearly couldn't make money in the market. Either he lacked the knowledge or emotional stability. Nerds aren't as amazing as they seem on tv apparently.
The truth is, no one human being can solve all the world's problems, and those who believe otherwise are fools. I don't have all the answers, but I do know this: cooperation and transparency go a long way.
Just a slight comment on effective altruism. Effective altruism is basically a counter argument to the argument that if you spend your life constantly performing charity for others that you will actually wind up doing very little, because you will let your own mind and body deteriorate and thereby lack the means to help others. Well, effective altruism counters that, supposedly, by saying that you should do whatever it is you’re best at, but just make sure you act charitably with your gains. So if you’re a banker, donate lots of money. If you’re a baker, donate lots of bread. If you’re a soldier, defend the weak and innocent. If you’re a veterinarian, treat lots of injured wild animals, etc…. Effective altruism is not simply _Make as much money as possible._
The problem with "effective altruism" (pretending for a moment that it's a serious philosophy and not self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley dorkery -- the name alone is amazingly arrogant) is that they treat hypothetical far-future outcomes as equivalent to near-term outcomes in their moral calculus. It's joined at the hip with "long-termism". Utilitarian philosophies normally discount the value of outcomes the further in the future they are, because they're less certain. "EA" doesn't, and treats its hypothetical distant post-human future as morally equivalent to the present. Which leads to all sorts of perverse outcomes -- hypothetically making a trillion hypothetical future people very slightly happier outweighs certain, material improvements to the lives of a billion people alive today. So they squander a lot of their gains on dubious projects that are supposed to pay off in the far future.
@@JohnSmith-mc2zz *Effective altruism* is code for _effectively rationalizing away one's total lack of desire to suffer the cost of doing real charitable works_ 'Volunteer my time down at the local foodbank? Be around poor people? But dude, I've got this orgy to attend! Then a serious coke session afterwards! Dude, priorities!"
This mini doc Is the best I’ve seen to date featuring the backstory of SBF and the history of this companies FTX and Almeda. Keep up the great work I’ve subscribed and will be watching for future post
Hold hard there. "FTX, a crypto exchange, was valued at $32 billion dollars." How can an exchange, which merely does office work and helps other people buy and sell their own assets, have a value like that? What assets does an exchange have? Desks, computers, rented space, copy paper, break rooms with or without free donuts, and arguably a reputation. How can that be worth $32,000,000,000?
I have an idea: let's invest billions of dollars in a "currency" that is not legal tender anywhere in the world, that no business will accept in payment for any good or service, that you cannot use to your rent or mortgage, or your utility bill, your taxes, etc., and that is not backed by any commodity or other asset of established value or by the promise of any government or other known and well-established institution, and which is not even a currency, and which is issued by a bunch of narcissistic megalomaniacs. What could go wrong?
Remember, there was a time when if you screwed up 1/100th as bad you'd end up falling out a high window or having an accident while cleaning a firearm. Shame is a dead concept now I guess. EDIT - I should probably clarify I was implying self-inflicted atonement (the gentlest euphemism I could come up with) as opposed to retribution at the hands of a third party. Having to rely on outlaws for anything resembling justice is a sad indictment on the system itself. So ironically, it appears that if it wasn't for outlaws the concept of justice would be just as dead as shame.
It would be unjust to bury his entire family under the prison next to him . But we've witnessed generations of injustice to the non rich , while not a single wealthy person has faced justice . At least during the guilded age it was possible for the wealthy to lose it all.
Well, Elizabeth Holmes is facing eleven years in prison. Bernie Madoff died in prison. Wealthy people do avoid prison more often than poor people but some have done hard time.
@@larryo6874 hard time yeah right. They go to posh prisons or "minimal security facilities" made for wealthy people like them and rarely serve their entire sentence anyway
@@runswithraptors Yes, I heard Holmes will go to a minimum security prison so most likely more pleasant than a “regular” prison. Still, however, you aren’t free to go anywhere so still an unpleasant experience. My understanding is that Holmes will have to serve 85% of her sentence or about 9 years.
Wow. I don't know if it was on purpose, but this was the most optimistic video I've seen in a while. For every Bankman-Greed there is one George, and me, and perhaps you reading this. It's not that bad.
Best explanation yet. Thanks so much. One explanation I’ve heard as to why Sequoia Capital and others invested in FTX was not so much that they believed in FTX but rather fear of missing out on a huge profit even though they knew it was fraud.
I love seeing more and more examples of how people in financial fields actually do nothing of consequence and make 100X the money that actual workers do. It is unbelievable to me how completely ass backwards our socio-economical system is. You can work 40 hours at a store or as a truck driver, or in a warehouse somewhere and make in a year what someone who simply trades in foreign exchanges does in a minute. Its absurd and embarassing.
The first time I read the definition of utilitarianism I thought it was dangerous. It's like who defines what is "good"? How about this, I'll define what's good, and we're going to spread that good to everybody, or else. Ya see? It can get dark fast.
I don't say this for anyone except you, Georg; I'm a transwoman and I really value your input. I feel like you're a very reasonable person and you have a balanced sense of the world, without abandoning decency like some who claim "balance" do. Your ability to dissect complex subjects with scalpel precision while maintaining a sense of humor is really admirable and I respect you for it. Take care, and keep creating!
@@hudsona4004 bro what? is this your idea of a joke? or is this an actual belief you hold because that's honestly kind of pathetic but a lot more funnier than any joke you could muster up.
@@gombocdimensional9050 It's a reference to one of the weird posts Ellison wrote (23:20). You have to have paused and read them, and without that context this could seem toxic but it's all good :)
There is class action being taken against the "celebs" that advertised FTX. I don't think it will succeed and truth be told I don't want it to, it was clearly an advert. Far more dangerous is the puff pieces from Sequoia and media outlets that in effect were PR (ads) that pretend to be independent, but the writers receive reward. Its no difference to the "influncers" who were fined for endorsing without declaring it was "paid for"
@@JohnSmith-mc2zz Yup! If the advert was fraudulent then it is the makers of the advert responsible not those reading lines. People have to be responsible and if they were receiving financial advice for an actor in an advert then, I feel sorry for them.
I wouldn't't be so sure. Clebs/influencers have been successfully prosecuted for said "Ads" and endorsements. Securities are serious business that exists under different laws than your run-of-the-mill ad for say cereal. I much rather they can be sued in order to tap down on this nonsense. All crypto is scams. Even those that don't start as a scam will become a scam.
I've seen people so nervous to do TV interviews that they vomit on camera. They never shake. I'd say the shaking is because Sam knows he's a fraud, and feared the TV audience knowing it too.
@@gamesthatiplay9083 - He was also doing it in some of his video conferences. Perhaps he's extremely nervous. Perhaps his roommate/girlfriend bragging about doing speed on social media was a prime insight. I'm familiar with the behavior.
I had never heard of these grifting nerds before they filed for bankruptcy early November, now I can't seem to get away from hearing about them. Every day a new video appears.
yeah like that's most cults use that terminology and look how they turned out. but i'm trying to be less cynical nowadays so i'd like to think that as long as there is proof someone is changing the world for the better than it can be believable, its just that its rare.
Glenn Ellison is Caroline Ellisons father, he worked with Gary Gensler from the SEC at MIT & Stanford, SBF went to both these places & his parents are mega lawyers who work in compliance.
Everything about those kids is weird. From the hyphenated name to the look, voice and ideas. If this is representative of the younger generation, this country is truly doomed.
Actually, I do agree with him, no one rich or in positions of power actually cares about the things they say they do - they only care about themselves.
A scammer is a scammer, this won’t be the last unregulated exchange to crash, the scams make money fast and people are addicted to get rich quick promises. “Making as much money possible” is always going to screw over the most people possible.
Nah, I'd say they should keep pouring more fuel. Fire is beautiful to look at. Plus, it makes for good material for future history books about the 21st Century.