Factually! with Adam Conover - Inside the Crypto Crash with Zeke Faux

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

Remember crypto? Only a year ago, it seemed like the future of finance, but now it's a smoldering crater in the ground. Between large corporations and everyday people that got caught up in the grift, trillions of dollars vanished seemingly overnight. But what was it like in the heart of this surreal, million-dollar-monkey-jpeg storm? Zeke Faux, investigative reporter and author of Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall, joins Adam to deliver a captivating and hilarious account of the sharp ascent and rapid collapse of the world of cryptocurrency. Find Zeke's book at factuallypod.com/booksSUPPORT THE SHOW ON PATREON: https://www.patreon.com/adamconoverSEE ADAM ON TOUR: https://www.adamconover.net/tourdates/SUBSCRIBE to and RATE Factually! on:» Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/factually-with-adam-conover/id1463460577» Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0fK8WJw4ffMc2NWydBlDyJAboutHeadgum: Headgum is an LA & NY-based podcast network creating premium podcasts with the funniest, most engaging voices in comedy to achieve one goal: Making our audience and ourselves laugh. Listen to our shows at https://www.headgum.com.» SUBSCRIBE to Headgum: https://www.youtube.com/c/HeadGum?sub_confirmation=1» FOLLOW us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/headgum» FOLLOW us on Instagram: https://instagram.com/headgum/» FOLLOW us on TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@headgumSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me on the show again. Hey, do you remember crypto? Just a year and a half ago, every financial publication from the Wall Street Journal to Bloomberg was saying it was the future of finance. Valuations were going to the moon. People were selling monkey JPEGs for millions and billions of dollars were flowing into this obviously sketchy space from big money institutions, venture capitalists, and everyday Redditors hyped up on the promise of ever increasing returns. It was supposed to be the future of finance, and now it's a smoking crater of fucking failure. Sam Bankman Freed, the supposedly genius crypto wunderkind, is going to jail for a long time. And trillions of dollars were lost in the year after crypto peaked in late

2021. And most importantly, no one is currently using crypto for anything other than scams and crime. The most dire predictions for this bullshit sector turned out to be the correct ones. But even though all of this just happened like a year ago, we've already memory holed the whole thing. People forget that during the fever crypto pitch, average Americans were frothing over the chance to make money in this brand new way. When 14-year-olds were playing around with cartoon JPEGs that were supposedly worth millions. When people seemed absolutely detached from the value of their magic coins.

Today, there's no question that that magic has run out. But what was it like in the middle of the shitstorm of crypto at its very peak? Well, our guest today is going to offer an unbelievable and incredibly funny view of what it looked like. But before we get to that, I just want to remind you that if you want to support this show, you can do so on Patreon. Not with your crypto magic beans, but with your regular old money. Just five bucks a month gets you every episode of this podcast ad free.

We also have a huge number of wonderful community features. We'd love to have you there. And just to remind you, I am also a touring standup comedian. If you live in St. Louis, Missouri or Providence, Rhode Island, come see me. I'm doing tour shows there in October. Head to AdamConover.net for tour dates and tickets. And now let's get to this week's guest. His name is Zeke Fox, and he's an investigative reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek. And he is the author of a new book called Number Go Up, Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall. He spent the crypto years deep inside the belly of the beast and has tales to tell that no one else knows.

And I am so excited for you to hear this interview. Let's get to my conversation with Zeke Fox. Zeke, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thanks, Adam. So I think it's kind of hard for us to appreciate here in 2023 just how massive the crypto mania was at its height. It was a moment where a lot of people like myself were saying, this seems like a crazy bubble, but a lot of people were just completely swept up in it.

You were in the middle of it. How big was this bubble and what did it look like to you from the inside? What were you seeing? So I was kind of an outsider too, always skeptical of crypto, but for during the pandemic, it got to be inescapable. I just felt like I was always hearing about like DeFi, the metaverse, blockchain, Bitcoin,

Ethereum, whatever. And most annoyingly, one of my best friends started texting me about something that he called doggy coin and telling me like, I should get some of this doggy coin. Little did he know he was pronouncing the stupid name of the stupid thing in the wrong stupid way. It's not doggy coin, doggy coin. It's doge coin, which is just a completely different dumb ass way to say that word.

Yeah. And I said him straight, but he didn't care. He was just like this. And it's not like, you know, and I felt like this was a very telling conversation. And I've talked with so many people who've had conversations like this. But he was just saying, hey, it's not that I think dogecoin is the future of finance or, you know, that I think it's like really good for anything. doggie coin is the future of finance or, you know, that I think it's like really good for anything. It's just that I can see people talking about on Reddit and I want to get in on it. And he did. I didn't. I told him it was dumb. He made like 20 grand and sent me pictures from

a Disney vacation with his family and texted me. I am freaking Nostradamus. family and texted me, I am freaking Nostradamus. I think a lot of people have that experience where your dumbest friend suddenly made some money and you're like, oh, hold on a second. I got to get in on this too. But that's what happened to a lot of people, why a lot of people jumped on the crypto bandwagon before it all fell apart and everybody lost their money. But you are different from most people because you are a financial investigative journalist. So most people maybe just go along with it. You, I hope, ask some deeper questions when you heard about that, when you got that text from your friend. Yeah. I mean, so it's my job to investigate weird things in finance. And I'd kind of like, I'd resisted crypto as a topic. And I just felt like what was there to investigate? These people are just saying, oh, snooty restaurant reviewer to go check out like a new Taco Bell in Union Square. Like, yeah, like, of course, he's not going to like it.

And I should I don't want to malign my my Dogecoin friend. He's actually a very smart and funny guy. my Dogecoin friend, he's actually a very smart and funny guy. And that is what really set me off about this because I was like, even he is now saying, buy Dogecoin. And I'm like, why are so many people doing this? And like some estimates, it's like a quarter of the population got some crypto. So I got over my hesitation, decided to try to get to the bottom of it, to dive into this crypto world and try and figure out why is it so appealing to everyone? Why are all these coins going up and up? Who are these people who are behind it and turning themselves into overnight billionaires. And I found that two years later, cut to, I'm at Sam Bankman Freed's apartment, the boy genius of crypto, after his exchange had failed. And we're up in his 30 million dollar penthouse talking about why he his very unconvincing excuses about how he had not committed a giant fraud.

The biggest financial fraud in United States history, I believe. Probably depends how you measure it, but he's definitely like in the Hall of Fame. Yeah. Yeah. And as are so many other, you know, crypto billionaires from around that time. But Sam Bankman Freed is unusual because he was the only one who was on the cover of magazines, was lauded as the the one smart, safe guy in crypto, the one who everybody could trust. And it turned out that he had committed this this gigantic fraud. Well, what did you find, though, when you when you started looking at it? Like, what was the first thing that stunned you when you started looking at it? Like, what was the first thing that stunned you when you started jumping into this in an investigative way?

So even though I was skeptical of crypto, I still kind of thought that you just heard so much about it. So many like seemingly smart people, well-informed people, Wall Street people were getting in on it that I had this idea that it was maybe kind of going mainstream and that there would be like legitimate uses for crypto that even though I didn't really think it was all going to the moon, I'd hear about promising startups that were going to somehow change the way we traded assets or move money around instead. So luckily, when I started my investigation, it was just after that, there was the first big crypto conference in years.

It was Bitcoin 2021 in Miami. There were like 10,000 crypto fans flew in for it. And I get there and instead of like respectable Wall Street types talking about, you know, real ideas, it was like a bunch of maniacs talking about like how Bitcoin was going to save the world. Yeah. There was one speaker. he has written like several books about bitcoin and what have they they all are very against fiat money which is what they just call what they call regular money they have to like give it like a pejorative title as fiat yeah yeah oh no and they'll just like you know rip it up set it on fire just to they really like to show they don't like fiat money but he blames it for everything from like poverty to malnutrition um i was just hearing

he calls uh grain fiat food um and yeah it's fake food the government made up they just invented grain what the fuck is that there's like a little there's this weird overlap where the people who really like bitcoin also like beef some of them just like only eat beef oh okay i like the jordan peterson diet like i'm gonna eat nothing but meat until i get addicted to oxy and sweat my blood out um sorry you can move on you don't need to comment on that part of it i mean some of them look very fit i don't know i mean maybe that's the way to go um okay um so i'm in this like alternate reality where uh i'm hearing all sorts of crazy conspiracy theories and where it seems like people really do believe that the prices

of all these coins are just going to go up and up and up and make us all rich. And so the quality of the ideas is really low. But then the people that I meet are insanely rich. There's way more real money in this than I had realized. One of the first guys that I met, his name was Alex Mashinsky. And he wore this t-shirt that said, banks are not your friends. And I didn't really know that much about him when I set up this meeting. But he was very prominent at all these conferences. And so as a reporter, I meet somebody. I'm pretty polite.

I'll ask them, hey, what do you do? Give me your spiel for the company. And so he tells me, I run this sort of thing that's a little like a bank, but it's not a bank. You give me your coins, and I pay you interest as high as 18%. But if you want a loan, I don't charge any interest. And so like, if you don't know banking, like that's like a backwards business plan. Like you're paying people lots of money

and you're not collecting any money. So it's like a recipe to like lose money. Well, if I was told this, I'd be like, oh, you're literally like, this is literally a Ponzi scheme. This is like, I'd be just 18 percent interest is like is like Bernie Madoff numbers. You know, it's like, well, that's right. That's impossible. So I don't believe it's like slightly above Bernie Madoff's fake returns. So I'm like, so I'm like, I'm, you know, like I'm being polite.

So I'm like, all right. But I'm thinking to myself, this is one of the worst business plans I've ever heard. So I'm like, so Alex, how much money have you raised with this for Celsius, your business? And he sells me $20 billion. And I'm just like, wow. Yeah, I had this. I'm like, am I sitting across like the next Bernie Madoff? Like, what is this ridiculous business plan? And, you know, he couldn't explain how they made the money to pay these interest rates.

Sounds like he made the money from the $20 billion. Sounds like he was taking, like, that's where, that's where it was coming from. But like, how does he then make more money? That was what was completely unclear. Yeah. Well, spoiler alert. He got arrested a few weeks ago and is facing like massive fraud charges. So when you when you're sitting across from this guy, are you like, man, I see like a

jumpsuit in your future? Like, you know, were you were you feeling this this dude is is going to crash and burn and get arrested? Like, you know, were you were you feeling this this dude is is going to crash and burn and get arrested? Well, like kind of, yes, but also I'm not that confident a person. I'm not like so sure. I always know what's going on. So I'm just like, is there something I'm missing? Because this wasn't the only person I met who had some sort of crazy idea and also had billions of dollars. And as like a financial reporter, I don't know, maybe I give maybe more credence

than I should to people's financial success. So I'm thinking, I don't know if he's been able to attract all this money. And not just from random retirees, definitely a lot of those, but also from big name Wall Street investors. I'm like, they must have checked him out. Can there really be nothing to this? I just wasn't sure what to make of it. But when I got back to New York, I told my editor that, you know, I'm sorry I ever resisted writing about crypto. This is all of like... Your editor is just sitting there counting bitcoins going like, yeah, you are sorry. Uh-huh.

Yeah, you are sorry. Uh-huh. Yeah. You came crawling back. I told him we will not be able to investigate all of these people before this bubble explodes. Like there's so many funny stories here. At first you're like, there's no stories. You go to one conference. You're like, oh shit, this could keep me in business for a lifetime. I got to cover this before it explodes.

Let me just ask you this. Like, I feel like we have this belief generally that the people who are running the economy, the people with the biggest money are geniuses. And a lot of us, when we see that, OK, this guy got 20 billion dollars. Well, those smart people with the money must really checked him out. Like you said, I think one of the things that the crypto collapse showed to us is that they don't and that they are as stupid as anybody else. At the very least, they only have the same number of hours in the day as anybody else. Do you end up, did you end up like, you know, with a similar revelation? Does it look like that to you? Or do you think that some smart people really got, you know,

the wool pulled over their eyes? No, I feel like... Well, so the title of the book, Number Go Up, comes from something I heard at this conference that I think really says a lot about the mentality at the time. And this guy on stage gives this speech where he says, he calls it number go up technology. And he says that essentially as the price goes up, that will make people excited. More people will buy Bitcoin. That will make the price go up even more. And that will make people even more excited. And it'll become like a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the price of Bitcoin will go up and up and up. And I kept telling myself that can't possibly be what the smart people are thinking. But I think actually it was in the case of a lot of these coins, but also in the case of a startup like Celsius or FTX, the smart people felt the same FOMO that

I did when my friend got his big Dogecoin score. And they thought, you know, we're investing into FTX, this Sam Bankman Freed's exchange at a $10 billion valuation. And it's not so much because they've checked it out and they think that that valuation is really solid. It's more like they can see how hot it is. And they think it's going to be a $20 billion valuation in a couple months. And for like two years there, everyone who thought this way was right. And a lot of them made a lot of money.

Yeah. But yeah, that number go up philosophy. I mean, to me, it almost literally sounds like a pyramid scheme because the problem is with that idea, oh, more people get excited. They put in more money. More people get excited. They put in more money. Eventually you run out of people, right?

Like there is, that's the problem with that, with that kind of thinking is like, well, there's, there is in fact a limited number of suckers out there. Is that, is it not? Like it seems it's not infinite. Yeah. Yes. I mean, this guy, he's calling it number of go up technology and he's describing a pyramid scheme.

Like it was just ridiculous. technology and he's describing a pyramid scheme like it was just ridiculous um but the the FOMO that you describe though is a really powerful emotion I remember you know I used to work at College Humor it was a website so people were pretty you know up on on the internet I worked at a website so people were pretty hip to the internet okay but this is like it this is like in 2013 around the very beginning of Bitcoin and I remember a lot of talk about it in the office and one or two people bought Bitcoins. This was like way before the boom. It was when it was just getting started. A couple of people bought Bitcoins and Doge coins. And I remember thinking at the time, oh, the reason they're doing it is they don't want to get left out. And they're like, you know what? If I just buy a bit, if I just buy one or just a

couple, whatever it is, you know, if I just put a thousand bucks on it or five thousand bucks on it, then I won't get left behind. I won't feel like I missed out. And if I lose it, it it will be OK. And I remember consciously thinking at the time, you know what, I'm going to make the opposite bet. I'm going to make the bet that this is bullshit and I'm not going to buy one. And it's funny because if you asked us at different points, which one of us felt like we were right, me or the guy I worked with, we would have had different answers, right? Around 20, around 20, you know, 19, 2020, he would have said, oh yeah, I'm really happy I bought that. I made a great return. I would have been like, oh yeah, maybe I was wrong. But now I'm like,

I made more money with that shit in the bank, you know, based on what would have, I made more money with that shit in the bank, you know, based on what would have what would have happened. And so that like that FOMO feeling, though, really motivated so many people. It's shocking to hear it and motivated institutional investors as well. Oh, it definitely did. I mean, on Wall Street, let's say I mean, think about their incentives this way, too. Like, let's say you run a hedge fund and you're kind of skeptical of crypto, but another guy has a hedge fund and he bought some Bitcoin. His returns are looking great. He's getting lots of new clients. Your clients are asking you, why are your returns so bad? And isn't it kind of tempting to just maybe buy some Bitcoin, even if you don't really

believe in it, to try to juice your profits and attract more clients. So you started diving into this really, you know, I got to cover these stories, right? These crazy stories that are out there before this pops. What did you go after first? Or what was the craziest story you discovered? So the one that the mystery that set me off on this journey was a coin called Tether. It's like the one coin that doesn't go up and up. It's supposed to be always worth a dollar because it can be exchanged for a real dollar. So you give Tether $100, they give you 100 Tether tokens, and they're supposed to stash that $ bucks in the bank. And when I was starting out, they'd sold so many Tether tokens that they were supposed to have $50 billion in

the bank. That would make them one of the biggest banks in the US if they were a bank in the US. But nobody knew where this money was. And there were all sorts of rumors flying around that maybe the money didn't exist. And the concern about Tether was so great that the Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, called a meeting of all the top financial regulators in the country. They were talking about like, what is this coin? Does it really have the money? And could it crash the world economy if it was revealed to be a fraud? The world economy? Wait, I'm sorry. Why would they be concerned that this could crash the world economy? It's just some dudes with a website and some algorithms. So the thinking was that the risk was greater because of the connection to real money.

And then if there was like a bank run on Tether, everyone wanted to redeem their tokens for real money, then Tether would have to dump all sorts of assets that it held, and it would dump them at low prices. And then that would sort of cascade into financial markets. Other funds would be seeing their assets marked down, and there might be a run on those funds too. Kind of like happened in the 2008 financial crisis with money market funds. To me, this sounded far-fetched. But what I thought was really silly was sort of like you're saying, I started looking into Tether and its co-founder was a former child actor from the mighty ducks named Brock Pierce.

And I saw that movie. So he, he's not one of the main kids. Okay. He plays, he plays Gordon Bombay in the flashback at the beginning. And he misses the, he misses the crucial penalty shot.

Oh no. Yeah. Haunts him. So, so this, so this child actor has been trying to make up for for this bad moment his entire life. Yeah. And he the he had become by the time I started looking into it, like one of the the biggest players in crypto. And I'm just like. The rest of the company was just as weird.

The boss was a former plastic surgeon from milan turned low-end electronics importer um the company wasn't really based anywhere you couldn't tell where it was this the heads of the company were never seen in public they never gave speeches or interviews and i'm just like this is a great mystery i want to get to the bottom of it. So one fun part was this guy, Pierce, he's quite a character. I caught up with him in the Bahamas. I was down there for a crypto conference. I realized he was in town when I met with a friend friend of mine and she was telling me that she was really hung over and she was just like oh last night i was at this crazy party on this yacht like this crypto guy bought from this russian oligarch and like it was wild people were doing like big business deals

in like one room and uh partying like next to it and she showed me this video of of a guy jumping off this like giant yacht and i've recognized i'd been wanting to meet up with brock for a long time by then so i recognized him texted him he uh i don't know have you spent much time on on yachts no i've never been on a yacht not not not yet i mean i hope one day yeah well i mean me neither so i'm like score i'm gonna do this interview on a yacht so he sends a speedboat to my hotel to take me to where this like giant yacht is moored offshore and i'm thinking this is awesome there's gonna be like something out of a bond movie i'm gonna meet the co-founder of Tether. Maybe he's going to tell me some secrets. I'm going to see like the coolest yacht ever.

Yeah. Yeah. I get there. I get there. And it's just like, this is a recurring theme in crypto, but I get there and it's just like, I don't know, a couple dozen people kind of standing around looking kind of bored. They're talking about one one guy they're starting

is it an actual yacht so it was huge it was like the biggest boat i've ever been on but then i start getting pitched on like do you want a tour of the yacht and i don't see brock at first but i realize it's kind of like a yacht timeshare. It's like a crypto yacht timeshare. And they're trying to get us to like buy some coins so that we can spend time on this yacht. The yacht itself is a crypto scam. You got to get in on this yacht, bro. Number go up. Sale go up.

Yeah. So we come across we come across brock and i mean look you look for good characters to write about and he definitely is one he's dressed like johnny depp in pirates of the caribbean oh my god he's got like this fedora with feathers in it of he's a maybe like five five he's got a he's wearing he's shirtless with a leather vest that's kind of like knee length uh and he just talks he's giving like a speech yeah um but and he's a great talker he talks like in total riddles he's giving a speech about how we're like this is the future of humanity this is the avengers we're on like the avengers yacht and i'm like i think i just heard the timeshare presentation but but okay um this

was just one of like the many weird stops in trying to find this tether get to the bottom of this tether mystery which which proved like very tricky. And Brock, I explained like what I was trying to do to Brock. And we had this very intense conversation. And I felt like I have a habit of kind of like daydreaming when I'm talking to people, especially if they're telling me like long pitches for the crypto thing. And he's talking to me and he starts he starts to like i feel like he's looking into my soul and he's like zeke this is like your one shot this is your one opportunity

like don't screw this up this is all for all the marbles like humanity's fate is in the balance in a fedora and a knee length leather vest he's telling he's he's talking to you like he's fucking uh uh what samuel jackson and the avengers you have to you have to get on board the what does he want you to do put money in like you're reporting on him i think his concern was that i would not be sufficiently pro crypto in my reporting. I needed to I needed to see the truth. But he seems like you were seeing the truth. It seems like you were seeing the truth of the short guy in the leather vest, you know, on Molly in the middle of a rented boat. And I mean, the other guys on the yacht were talking about you know scams that people they

saw you know sitting around were running one guy's like where are we gonna get some coke when we go back to you know my hotel on shore like yeah these are not serious people not titans of industry yeah these are not serious people but they have like serious money yeah so why uh why would anybody believe this guy like i like tether i remember when it collapsed was like it was one of the first big crypto collapses it was covered in in bloomberg every day people must have been actually invested in it but this guy is ludicrous and the whole premise like if the whole company is premised on they have $50 billion nobody has ever seen and it's all fly by night.

Like why is anybody buying it? So the crazy thing is, that's the question I was asking and Tether actually did not collapse. You're probably thinking of Terra, the similarly named. I am thinking of Terra. Okay, thank you.

Yeah, so Terra, not to be confused with Tether, The similarly named. I am thinking of Terra. Okay. Thank you. Yeah. So Terra, not to be confused with Tether, was also a coin that was supposed to be worth $1. And this one, instead of being backed by real money, was backed by another made up coin called Luna. coin called Luna. This had it had like a very nonsensical promise that was. If you traded in your your Terra coin, you would get one dollar worth of Luna coins for sure. But then nobody really stopped to ask, like, but why are the Luna coins worth anything? And so, yeah, yeah, it's like if I'm like like, Hey man, I got a, you know, let me some

money. I'll give you some Adam bucks. And you're like, well, what, what can I get for an Adam buck? And I'm like, Oh, well you can get a monopoly buck from me. And like, okay. Okay. It makes me feel better, but no one says, well, what can I do with that other, with that other fake buck? And, but the thing that's so wild is that first of all these like luna bucks were going up and up and up for a while for they were worth like 60 90 each and okay guy it was this terror one was run by this really obnoxious south korean bro and if you asked anything but anybody who raised questions about this scheme, he just he hit him with like the go to crypto insult. Have fun staying poor.

You know, something like that. But meanwhile, he this one, Tara, was like almost openly a Ponzi scheme. And it raised huge amounts of money from big time investors. And there's a funny story. There's one guy, Mike Novogratz. He's former Goldman Sachs. He started a crypto company called Galaxy, regarded as like one of the sharper and more mainstream guys in the crypto world.

People are like, he's not wearing a fedora and a leather vest. So we, he's not that big of an idiot. He's still dumb, but he's not fedora leather vest. Dumb. Okay. Go on.

Please. Yeah. Not so fast because he got, uh, he got so into, into Tara that he got the Tara Luna logo tattooed on his shoulder. And tweeted it. And then he's like,

I like, yeah, man, I got Bernie Madoff's face right on my ass. Check it out. That's how much I love the guy. You know, you got taken in by a scam when you get the scammer tattooed on your

fucking body, bro. That sucks. He's like pushing 62. He be um just gets it like x'd out and replaced with mom could you make it say i gotta i gotta marry a girl named therese so i can get it changed that sucks that sucks for this guy um but still sitting pretty despite his terror losses that is the kind of thing the lesson of crypto is that if you're like in the inner circle and you get in really really early you can still make money but by the time like you or me if by the time we're hearing about it on the group chat like it's too late we. We're the suckers at the, at the table,

you know, when we buy in, it's about to crash. I mean, look, it's, it's almost a cliche to call these a Ponzi scheme, but that is how they work.

The PR, the people at the beginning make the money cause they're in on the scam, but it depends on wider and wider numbers of the public putting their own money in. And that is how the people in the center of the web make the money. And so by definition, if you're the one putting money in, you are late the people in the center of the web make the money. And so by definition, if you're the one putting money in, you are late. You know what I mean? You're, you're, you're adding gasoline to the fire. Uh, you're, you're having, you are, you are making the rest

of the machine go with your energy. You're not going to profit off of it. Yeah. The way to profit is to create those atom bucks. Get that going. Oh yeah. You don't want to buy like somebody else's coin. Yeah. And that's why Oh, yeah. You don't want to buy like somebody else's coin. Yeah. And that's why we saw this incredible entrepreneurial energy of people creating coins, people creating NFTs. Oh, by the way, I know you at one point bought a board ape. But before we get into that, we got to take a really quick break. We'll be right back with more Zeke Fox.

OK, we're back with Zeke Fox. You were more in the middle of the crypto explosion than anyone and specifically i know that you ended up buying a board ape one of the stupidest parts of the entire crypto hype bubble tell me about that what how did you end up happening happening across the board ape and what what the hell did you do with it so crypto people would always tease me that i didn't know what i was talking about because i didn't do crypto and one guy was trying to get me to buy something called a solana monkey business nft for 25 500 it's like a little pixelated monkey head and dude until you have a Solana monkey business NFT, you do not know what you're talking about. That is the only credential I respect.

OK, like exactly what he said. And but I'm thinking to myself, you know what? Like, maybe there's something I'm missing. Maybe if I join the club and kind of went with it, I would see some sort of appeal to this stuff that wasn't apparent to me as an outsider. I would see some sort of appeal to this stuff that wasn't apparent to me as an outsider. But I knew enough that Salon of Monkey Business was just a knockoff of the real top NFT collection, the Bored Ape Yacht Club. And this is the one you may have seen on Jimmy Fallon. Get the Jimmys right,'s right It's really important that we

Are clear about which Jimmy Fell for this shit go on So he had Paris Hilton on and With like totally straight faces They each pulled out Pictures of their Bored apes and these are like

Really ugly cartoon monkeys That they supposedly had each paid 300-,000, $400,000 for. Yeah. And he's like, oh, this is so cool. We're both part of the same club. Like, here's your ape. Here's my ape. Oh.

And she's like, yeah, mine's really cute. He's like, yeah, mine is like really cool. And it's like, what the fuck are they talking about? But they did this on national television. I mean, I really, I couldn't believe it. And I saw that the apes were having eight fest, which was going to be like a week long party in Manhattan. And you could only go if you had a board eight. And I thought to myself,

whoever reads this book, they don't want to hear some like excuse, like, Oh, the board apes are really expensive. They want me to try this out. They want me to go to the ape fest. Yes, we do. You know what the audience demands, and I'm glad to hear it. This is wonderful. So you bought a bored ape.

Well, I learned that luckily you could get into the party with a mutant ape, which is like an ape derivative. The ape slurped this juice juice and it turns them radioactive and they melt so it's like a lot uglier and the okay but also everything you're describing is also a complicated financial product right like oh yeah it's a piece of digital currency that you applied some other piece of digital currency to and that's what it means for the ape to slurp juice and become a mutant. So one night after dinner, I told my wife, Nikki,

that I had something important to discuss about the book. I'm sorry. Sit down. I, I have, we had to discuss something very serious. As you know, I'm writing a book.

I need to purchase an ugly ape cartoon and make it slurp juice so that I can go to a party of other people who bought, who bought slurped apes. Okay. And are you still together? We are very, very happily married because she was super supportive. I mean, she looked very unhappy when I told her it was going to be $40,000. Very, very happily married because she was super supportive.

I mean, she looked very unhappy when I told her it was going to be $40,000. Hey, I know you really had your heart set on Alexis, but you know what? Can you drive the 92 Corolla a little bit longer because daddy's going to have a monkey drawing yeah it's a 2015 town and country and i love it okay but uh yeah the so by the time i actually bought it the price had dropped to it had been a couple weeks before i got around to it and the price dropped to twenty thousand dollars and this was cool because i didn't want to spend $40,000, but it was also, but there's also like, it's also bad because it shows you that the price could drop really fast. Right, right, right. You're like, you're like 20,000 is as low as it's going to go. I think

I'll be fine. So the process to buy it, truly you cannot, it actually, like the guy had told me I didn't know crypto until I tried it. And he was right because it was so horrible to buy this ape. Like so, like, you know, I work for a website too. Like I know I'm on the computer all day. I'm doing stuff on the computer. But like the actual process of sending my money into crypto land to buy this ape was was truly horrifying um it turns out that i mean you've probably heard of like a crypto wallet

yes it turns out like what that means is in your chrome on your browser like you got where the url goes then maybe you have a little like red hand for the ad block yeah now what if i how would you like another icon that's a picture of a fox and your money's gonna live in this fox and this is honestly one of the reasons i did not get into crypto because i was like i knew you could like you know store it on your computer or whatever crypto wallet the first time i heard about crypto i, hey, this is kind of a cool idea. Digital currency, you know, I like cryptographically secured. Neat. And then I was like, I need to download a Chrome extension.

Like literally this tens of thousands of dollars live not even in like a web app or like a native Mac app, a fucking Chrome extension. I don't trust my money to a Chrome extension. Give me a fucking break. And it did not make me feel any better. When, before you install the Fox head Chrome extension, you have to watch a video in which they tell you that you should write, you should engrave your password to this Chrome extension on a piece of

metal and bury it in your backyard. And like, you should engrave your password to this Chrome extension on a piece of metal and bury it in your backyard. Well, yeah, you don't want to be one of those poor, poor fools who has, you know, $2 million in crypto on a hard drive that they forgot the password to. Those people are, are, you know, you've read those articles. Those people are in hell, you know, or the ones who are trying to drink the, hard drive out of the out of the dump or whatever awful but i also didn't i didn't want to be like uh seth green the actor who had his board ape

stolen and had to buy it back for like 300 grand right right i was hearing all these stories about how my ape was going to get stolen and i mean one of the worst parts you buy the ape it's supposed to go live in the fox head and i'm like i just spent 20 grand it doesn't it doesn't it's the most i've ever laughed at this podcast it's the ape has to go live in the fox head yeah it didn't it wasn't there i went to go look and i was like i'm like what the fuck did i just lose 20 grand it turns out you have to like the ape is gone from my fox head go for it you have to you have to like restart your computer twice and reload chrome oh god like um so but with this oh also by time I got the ape, it wasn't even good to get into ApeFest because you had to go through this whole separate process to prove your ownership.

Like the fox head wasn't good enough. Luckily, I had a friend who was willing to take me in. Okay. After all that is just a guy goes, yeah, I can get you on the list. A lot of problems with the ape thing revealed themselves immediately. So like I was trying to get into the spirit of it. So I texted my friends and my mom and sent them a picture of my new mutant ape who was like, I, he was, uh, had the kind of a melty face and his sweater was made of maggots and he was smoking a pipe. His sweater was made of maggots and he was smoking a pipe.

And I, so I sent this to my mom and she's an English teacher in the Boston suburbs. And she immediately just sent the picture back to me. And she's like, this is my mutant ape. And I was like, dear mom, you will never own this ape.

Only I own it. Yeah. She was like, I have the picture too, dumbass. You sent it to me and now it's on my computer. I'm like, for very, very important blockchain reasons, this is my ape. But it would take me a really long time to explain why it's mine and not yours. So just like, get out of here. Then at ApeFest fest everybody's got apes so they're not impressed either they're all just

saying like keep going they just think that like they're like this is the worst ape we ever saw that looks like an ape that costs 20 grand my ape costs 500 grand like you're a loser did you ever meet a single person who was impressed by the ape they do this kind of love bombing thing where people would be like yo bro welcome to the club but i could tell what they really thought like i tell they didn't they were not impressed by my mutant and i tried to parlay this into uh i wanted to get i wanted to get an interview with the the elusive founders of the board ape yacht club who were like by that time probably billionaires and so i found them at the party i showed them my ape and i was like hey i'm in the club can i get an interview

they're like nah then i i did i heard snoop It was a pretty good party, albeit like 90% bros who are really wasted. But Snoop did perform. Whoa. Snoop Ape. Oh, yeah. He had his Snoop Ape. His Snoop Ape was dancing. Snoop Ape was humping people.

Wait, it came into the our physical reality i mean it was a guy wearing a head with a head on it but okay he actually i i don't think he got enough uh people didn't criticize him enough for this he performed a song an original song the chorus was that Dogecoin was stupid and that you should buy ApeCoin, the official currency of the Bored Apes. Snoop Dogg, Snoop Dogg the rapper, the one who's friends with Martha Stewart, he performed a rap song about how Dogecoin is stupid and you should buy Bored Ape Yacht Club.

Yeah. Eminem showed up. Wow. He did not rap. He just like flipped everyone off and hit play on his music video. Amy Schumer did a set that people didn't like, but she had. What? What? Amy Schumer did a set that people didn't like, but she had, uh, why? Well,

all the people, of course the board aid yacht club audience are not Amy Schumer fans. Wonderful comedian. My God. Yes. Well, she had, she had a really good joke about them and she like,

yeah, she surveyed the crowd. And she's like, I don't even really know what NFT stands for. But looking at all of you, is it not fucking tonight? Ah, yes. Yes, Amy. Yeah, they didn't like that. Love her. And Jimmy Fallon, he did show up i saw him there

and he was kind of in the back in the vip um but i was able to you know walk past his guards and flash my mutant ape to him he he looked at he looked at my mutant ape like him. He looked at my mutant ape pretty politely. He was like, oh, wow, so cool. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. Wow, that's an ape. I have an ape. You have an ape. Oh, wow. Oh, it was so great to meet you. It's so great to meet you. I didn't get the full Jimmy Fallon, but I don't blame him. I'm sure celebrities get really annoyed with randos just walking up to them all the time well you're in the club though he has to be nice you're in the club just like paris hilton well that's true because he when i said like i was like jimmy um at this point the price of apes had dropped so like anyone who was there just

lost like you know at least 20 grand 100 grand unless they bought their ape like the day before and i'm like jimmy these people like you're actually pretty influential many of these people might have bought the ape because i saw it on your show now they've lost like real money what do you think about that and he was just like you're my hero you're my hero he said i i did it for the community i did it for the community it's like a cool art project. I'm not making investments. And I thought, easy for you to say, a couple hundred grand isn't an investment. But some of these people, it represents their biggest asset.

So I was able to sell my ape. I got rid of it as soon as I could. I lost $2,000, but I was able to sell my ape. I got rid of it as soon as I could. I lost like $2,000, but I was so happy. Yeah. Because once I had it, I knew intellectually that like these other people did buy and sell these. They traded regularly. But I also had this feeling like I'm the last idiot that will ever buy one of these.

Like no one will buy it from me. Yes. But someone did. Then I felt bad about that. Right. Because now this person, maybe that's the final sucker. And you left them holding. It's literally a game of hot potato.

Like who gets left holding the bag of shit? Amazingly, I looked it up. These apes still, even the mutant apes, even after all this huge crash, they go for uh eight grand wow and so you it lost a bunch of money but like people are still well holding out hope what were they at their height though the mutant so eight grand for a mutant those got i think as high as 60 and like the board apes bieber paid supposedly like one or two million. The rare ones were going for like that much. Now you can get like the lowest price board apes for there's still like 50. Wow.

I want to know who's, who's buying in now. Yeah. Because I think they're overlooking, I mean, kind of questionable whether this was ever cool, but also like an investment that's dependent on something maintaining its coolness just doesn't seem like a good idea to me right i mean like you know uh

obey giant like the shepherd fairy stuff is like that had a moments where it was cool but if you bought stock in a literal one of those obey giant drawings you'd be stupid because like it's a fad it's a trend it. It's a trend. It's, it's just a way, you know, something that some people at one point thought in time looked cool. It's, it's immediately disposable. And yeah. And like the worst thing is that once you, if you had bought stock in Obey Giant, then you'd be like tied to it and you'd have to be pretending like it was so cool and tweeting about it all the time. And like, like even you, you're like committed to this joke now and you're just like, let's all laugh at this joke really hard and hopefully it'll make us rich.

Well, let's talk a little bit about the crash itself. I mean, people have lost so much money on crypto. You said 25% maybe of Americans bought into it. That number sounds insane to me when you think about how many old people there are in America. Because if you just talk about people over 65, that is a huge portion of the population. And then also people under 20. So I'm like a little bit, how do you get to, how do you get to one in four? But even if it's one in eight or one in 10, it's still a massive number. Um, uh, and you know, their crypto eventually had so much mainstream energy pouring, despite this ridiculous scene you told us about crypto had so much mainstream energy pouring in famously advertised during the super bowl, multiple sports arenas were named after crypto companies. You know, you had like major companies doing,

you know, major banks doing ads about how they're going to leverage the blockchain and all this shit. It really seemed for a moment like it was here to stay. And now it's fucking gone. Go on Bloomberg.com or the Wall Street Journal or any of them. You will not see a single crypto article except about what a disaster it was. Nobody is following this anymore. No one, no one anymore thinks that it's something you're going to make a lot of money off of. So what happened to all of the people who bought into it? You know? I mean, that's the sad part because we love these great, these stories about like the

overnight wealth. But one of the things I did for the book was one of the earliest crypto manias was in the Philippines and the whole country went wild for this crypto game called Axie Infinity. I heard about this. Yeah, they were treating it like basically you had to. It was a form of an NFT, but the NFTs were little monsters that you could play this Pokemon game with. And people were playing it like it was their job. Like whole families were just sitting around playing Axie on their phone and earning these things called smooth love potions. God damn it.

Yeah. The price was good for it was good while it was gaining followers. It got up to like more than a million people in the Philippines. But then, of course, it all crashed. And so I went out there. I spoke with people who had, you know, got into serious debt to buy their crypto monsters to play this game. And now had this was like a real setback in their life. Like I spoke with one couple, they were talking about leaving their children with their in-laws and moving to Dubai so they could work their way out of the losses that they that they took on this game. Yeah. And this is like one of the most insane parts of it.

So the crypto guys, they loved Axie. They talked this up. They were like Axie Infinity is the future. I remember seeing articles about this, like a friend of mine who is a big crypto booster sent me an article saying, oh, Axie Infinity is the fastest growing game in history. And it's so great. And in fact, it's really popular in the Philippines. The people, the Philippines are making real money off of it. And it's so good for everybody. And then six months later, it was done.

Yes. And just like rubbing salt in the wound, Axie got got hacked. A lot of the money that they'd made got stolen. got got hacked a lot of the money that they'd made got stolen and the u.s government has determined the hackers were the north koreans wow they made off with 600 million dollars and it's funding it's funding nuclear weapons development for kim jong-un so like now say what you will about pokemon or animal crossing but it's not funding nuclear weapons, weapons development. OK, and that's Nintendo's promise is that they don't use it. They don't do that shit. Please go on. Yeah, so the crypto bros were just oblivious to like all the harm they were causing to

people around the world. And it was like regular people in the US who put the money, invested the money that they thought, you know, they were saving to buy a house. It was people in people in the US who put the money, invested the money that they thought they were saving to buy a house. It was people in the Philippines. And another one that crypto guys love to talk about was El Salvador. This was the president of El Salvador became a Bitcoin bro. And he announced at that first conference I went to, this was like one of the weirdest moments. There was this guy on stage, like a kid in a hoodie who was just like pacing around, cursing, like stereotypical crypto bro.

And he's announcing that El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as an official currency. And the president appears via Zoom. And he's like, yes yes we will make bitcoin our currency in el salvador and all the guy the bitcoin guy on stage is crying the people in the audience are crying and i'm just like what is going on and so they talked about this as like a real success story so i i decided to go down there and check it out my this happened a lot in crypto. My expectations were pretty low. I'd already heard it wasn't working out that great.

And then I got there and I'm like, oh, it's way worse than people said. Literally no one likes Bitcoin. People just sort of... It was the law, the restaurants in every place is supposed to accept Bitcoin. But one of the first places I tried to use it. And I,

when I said to the bodega clerk, I want to pay with Bitcoin. He literally took the bottle of water out of my hand and was just like, get out of here. And this was, wasn't it like El Salvador, like gave everybody a crypto wallet and like put Bitcoin in it that you could use. But I think I remember reading people would just like cash out the free Bitcoin and then never use it again.

Yeah, everyone got 30 bucks, which was pretty cool. And everyone liked that. And they just but yeah, everyone got a free pizza. It was great. Sure. Yeah. up free pizza it was great sure yeah and i i actually met a guy who ran a pizzeria and he was he offered to give people pizza for the 30 bucks and he sold a lot of pizzas that first month right it was the kind of thing where like nobody really knew how to get the 30 bucks so you're like calling your cousin who says he knows how to get the 30 bucks and you're like i'll let you if you could be 20 you can can do it. Take my phone. So like for a month, everyone did get 30 bucks and they liked that.

But then the Bitcoin was just like something they had to accept. And, you know, if they saw, I mean, it was embarrassing for me because I'm like trying to, I'm not one of these crypto bros, but like just for journalistic purposes, can you pull out the Bitcoin machine? And they're like, oh, like, do we have to? They'd be like, the manager's gone. Like he has it. It's in the closet.

He locked it. Like nobody wanted to take Bitcoin. It's very slow. So basically what you're saying is I remember when there first started to be like convenience stores that would have a Bitcoin ATM. And like, in reality, nobody was using the Bitcoin ATM. It was just placed there by some Bitcoin booster who wanted you to think that Bitcoin was being used by people.

But if you actually went and said, could I use the Bitcoin ATM? They'd be like, I don't know how to do this. Like, it's not going to work. And that was basically the entire country of El Salvador was a fake Bitcoin ATM set up by Bitcoin bros is that what you're telling me yes it was like the best ad for bitcoin they're like yeah um and they had they did they put in the atms and they were guarded by like legit teams of soldiers 24 hours a day so you have this like bitcoin atm that nobody

uses oh and they plopped them in like like Bitcoin ATM that nobody uses when they plopped them in. Like, it was really offensive, honestly. Like they're plopped in the center of like the town, every town's plaza, like prime real estate where people go to hang out, where you'd have like little markets. You know, there's like this giant Bitcoin ATM lit up in neon in the middle of each one guarded by like five soldiers. And you can sit there for like an hour. You won't see anybody use it. Wow. Look, as somebody who knows the Bitcoin landscape better than anybody or sorry, the crypto landscape generally, did you ever find a single authentic, legitimate use case that people were

people were using blockchain to do something interesting and useful at all so i i did find one use oh it was not it was not good okay um but it did i did see the appeal finally and this was um i learned that tether the coin that i set out to investigate was really popular for people running online scams you ever get like one of those text messages that's just like hey bill did you get the cat food on your way home yeah like just random like spam yeah so if you if you play along they will eventually try to be your friend then try to get you to trade crypto with them. And they'll eventually ask you to send Tether. And people, they find people who send huge amounts, like 100 grand, 200 grand, a million dollars.

And I found- How do they even find people who know how to use Tether to begin with? They'll teach you. They'll teach you how to do it. They're going for the people that don't know how. And so- I see. But this is like, serious people that I talked to who researched this said this accounts for billions of dollars of crypto use.

Wow. But the really dark part is that I found out that these messages mostly originate in Cambodia and Myanmar. And there's in Myanmar, there's huge office towers where there's just floor after floor of people working around the clock, armed with like phones with fake accounts, sending these spam messages. Wow. These people themselves, they're tricked into coming there with like an offer of a good job. Once they get there, they're like, no, get to scamming. If you don't do it, we'll beat you. We'll shock you with an electric baton. We'll torture you. And you can't leave unless you pay a ransom. And I know it sounds like a kind of conspiracy theory. I didn't really believe it myself when I heard it. But in the book I talk about, I went to Cambodia and teamed up with a couple of the top reporters in the country to see some of these scam compounds for myself and investigate how they use crypto. And more recently, the United Nations estimated that more than 100,000 people have been victimized in this way and work in these scam compounds.

I spoke with people who escaped. These are extremely scary places run by Chinese gangsters. But for them, crypto is awesome because some little old lady in Iowa, if they get her to zap them some tethers, there's no refunds. Those tethers just go over to the gangster's account instantly. It's, you know. It works internationally. There's no laws governing it. They would literally have to like go to China to get the money back or go to Cambodia to get the money back.

Yeah. And good luck over there because these guys are like in good with the government. They operate with like almost impunity. So what you're telling me is that the main use for crypto so far is scamming and literal human trafficking. These are people who are being forced to work against their will. Yeah. I mean, that might be going a little far. Like, I think honestly, the main use is gambling. The main use is like, the main use is like, hey, let's go buy some Dogecoin and maybe it'll go up.

You know, that I think is at the heart of the market. And I had this moment when things kind of came full circle for me. So Sam Bankman Freed, we haven't talked about that much, but he's one of the main characters in the book. And I was with him. We're in his penthouse just a couple of days before the cops showed up to arrest him for this big scam. And we're talking about his rise to power.

And I find out he had this image as being like sort of the genius who had it all figured out, who wasn't like some crazy gambler. And he tells me that actually at the peak of the bubble just a few months earlier, he was actually worth $100 billion on paper because he had been buying so many of these random made up coins and like making them up himself. made up coins and like making them up himself. Even the guy who is like treated as the smartest person in crypto was basically just effectively by Dogecoin and like hoping that it went to the moon. That literally was one of his strategies. Like his hedge fund bought Dogecoin based on the timing of elon musk's tweets

that's insane that's like finding out warren buffett is just going like yeah i just uh bet a billion on the bucks um you know just like and that's and that's how what's your financial plan yeah roulette i guess like it's insane to uh to think that again this guy was called the one of the smartest financial whizzes of his generation. He was the Mark Zuckerberg of crypto. And that's what he was doing. I mean, now that all of the chickens have come home to roost on crypto

and people like SBF, SBF is in jail right now. The people who run the other big financial crypto exchanges are like on the run from the from law enforcement. So many people have gone to jail. So much money has been lost. Is there any future in this technology or, you know, quote unquote, community at all? Or is it is it just like, you know, fun to pick through the wreckage and like look at

what blew up and and, you blew up and with apologies to those who were hurt by it. Bitcoin is as old as Uber. It's as old as WhatsApp. And those are apps that now have become verbs. We use them so much. And crypto has come up with nothing that any regular people use for pretty much any reason. Right. Other than gambling. And when it comes to gambling, the biggest casino, FTX, has been revealed to be a giant scam. So it's hard for me to imagine anything good coming of crypto with the caveat that so many smart people have spent so long

working on this. Like you have to imagine eventually they'll come up with something. Yeah. But I'm just glad that they gave us this crazy bubble to for me to like, I'm just glad that I was there for this crazy bubble. It was like, I don't think we'll ever see anything like it again. Yeah. I mean, I think what it did give us was the stories that you told us in the book that you wrote, which sounds fascinating. You know, I'd leave it there, but I just wanted to ask you one final question. What, what in your view is what finally killed it? I mean, the drop was so precipitous, right? From Larry David and Matt Damon in the Super Bowl ads to today, like, was there, you know, what caused the scales to fall from people's eyes

and for the truth to finally be known about this? You know, it's like you said before, like, when the number go up is just like the description of a pyramid scheme and eventually like people aren't going to come in the price won't go up and once the price starts falling then people are jumping off the bandwagon you know as quick as they jumped on and so that's basically what happened last summer with the fall of terra. And that set off a total set of dominoes in the crypto world, which finally led to the failure of FTX. But it wasn't like, oh, some rogue operator did in crypto. It wasn't anything that complicated. It just took people, for some reason, pulling their money from that

Terra Ponzi scheme, and that set off the whole collapse. Do you think it's possible for us to learn anything from this? Because, I mean, look, I wish I could say that we'd be more critical in the future, but even as this was happening, a lot of people were saying, this is a pyramid scheme. This is a Ponzi scheme. And most people did not listen. And we got in this position anyway, where so many people put their money into this system and then lost it. And, you know, the assholes who started it profited massively. Some of them went to prison, but some, as you say, are still billionaires. So is there any defense mechanism that we can build against this

happening again in the future? Or are we just doomed to repeat this cycle every time there's some new tech buzzword? It's a good question. I think that it's not like we need some new law to defend against this. So many of the things that people are doing broke the rules that have been around for 100 years that require companies to be honest in their disclosures to investors. And I'm just hopeful that people will be on notice now that you can't break those rules and the next hot startup that comes around, they will behave more honorably. But yeah, it's hard to know. There's always

another bubble. Well, and the next time there is a bubble, I hope you'll dive into it and get the story and come back and tell us about it because it has been so entertaining talking to you and hearing about the truth of the Fedora yacht and the board Ape Yacht Club party. Zeke Fox, I can't thank you

enough for being here. The name of the book is number go up. You can get it at our special bookshop. Factually pod.com slash books. Where else can people find your, your work? Zeke? You can follow me on Twitter at Zeke Fox. Hell yeah.

Zeke. Thank you so much for coming on. I hope you'll be back in the future. Thank you, Adam. That was really fun. Well, thank you once again to Zeke Fox for coming on the show.

I hope you loved that conversation as much as I did. If you want to check out his book, head to factuallypod.com slash books, and you'll be able to support not just your local bookstore, but this podcast as well. If you want to support the show directly, head to patreon.com slash adamkhan. Over five bucks a month gets you every episode of the show ad-free. For 15 bucks a month. I will read your name on this very podcast and put it in the credits of my YouTube monologues. This week, I want to thank Alex Sull, Chris Rezek and Nara Niles, our most recent $15 a month subscribers.

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