Front Burner - Front Burner Presents | The Naked Emperor E2: The Beginning of the End

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

We return to the beginning of Sam Bankman-Fried’s lucrative foray into crypto and ask: how did it all fall apart? Sam Bankman-Fried rose to the top of the crypto world with help from his friends. Gary Wang was a former fellow math-camper and brilliant programmer; Caroline Ellison was a former colleague at an elite Wall Street firm and an avid LARPer on the side. While still in their twenties, they were entrusted with billions of dollars of customer and investor funds. But in retrospect there were signs that maybe their enormous fortunes weren't created simply through their supposed technological and financial genius. For more episodes of The Naked Emperor, check out its podcast feed: https://link.chtbl.com/uXdCyMR8 For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hey everybody, it's Jamie. Today we've got the second episode of our mini-series, The Naked Emperor, for you. It's the story of the rise and fall of Sam Baikman Freed and his disastrous crypto exchange, FTX. We've been dropping them in our feed on Fridays, but you can also follow The Naked Emperor's standalone feed if you don't want to wait a week for the next episode.

You can just search The Naked Emperor wherever you get your podcasts. The first three are live and they're all there right now. Or you can listen here, whatever works for you. The episode you're about to hear answered so many questions I had about Sam Bateman Freed and FTX. I guess the big one was, did this Swift implosion really come out of the blue? Like, it felt that way in the moment, but were there signs along the way? Well, that is what you are about to find out. Hope you like it.

And we'll talk to you next week. I didn't just randomly decide to do crypto on my own, obviously. It's 2018. Caroline Ellison is just two years out from studying math at Stanford. And on a visit to California, she looks up her friend Sam. And Sam, who had started Alameda a few months earlier, although I didn't know about it at the time, was here.

So I asked him if he wanted to get coffee and he like canceled a few times and then eventually said yes. a few times and then eventually said yes. Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline had met at a prestigious Wall Street trading firm where they both interned and then worked when they finished their undergrads. Now he was off doing his own thing. And I met him for coffee

and I was like, oh, so what are you up to? And he was like, oh, I can't tell you. You don't need to tell me anything you're not comfortable with. If you're like, you have some kind of like secret thing going on, that's fine. He was like, no, okay, I'll tell you about it. It was about to become her thing too. So yeah, that's how I learned about Alameda.

And yeah, basically after talking with Sam, I decided it seemed like too cool of an opportunity to pass up. A version of this fateful encounter appeared on Sequoia Capital's website in that over-the-top glowing profile of Sam we mentioned last episode. In that telling, Caroline was on her way to a live-action role-playing event when she met up with Sam.

She's described as being dressed as a sultry wood nymph. Caroline has been part of Sam's business empire since nearly at the beginning. She'd eventually rise close to its top. And it all started on the way to a LARP.

Maybe it felt like a LARP all along. For all of them, playing around, getting rich in the cryptoverse. You can see an immaturity in Caroline and Sam, the proud dorm room shabbiness while living in a multi-million dollar penthouse, the way they seem to joke that they're just winging it, their flippant posts about drug use. Sam tweeted about using stimulants,

and one tweet of Caroline's reads, nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-Medicaid human experience is. In the government's view, none of this was a game. In December, a month after FTX collapsed, the government announced criminal and civil charges against SBF. And Gurbir Grewal, the director of the SEC's Enforcement Division, alleged that the business had been a fraud from the start. You see, FTX operated behind a veneer of legitimacy

that Bankman Freed created. But as we allege in our complaint, that veneer wasn't just thin, it was also fraudulent. Because in reality, from FTX's inception in 2019, Bankman Freed began secretly and improperly diverting FTX customer funds to his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research. Sam denies this. Graywell went on to claim that back when Sam was out there looking like his industry's savior, his company was, like so many others, nearing collapse.

Bankman Freed's entire house of cards started to crumble as crypto asset prices plummeted in May of 2022, and as Alameda's lenders demanded repayment on billions of dollars in loans. So I want to go back now to the beginning of Sam Bankman Freed's business empire. How did it all fall apart? I'm Jacob Silverman, and this is The Naked Emperor, episode two, the beginning of the end. Sam Bankman Freed's biography fits neatly with what you'd expect of a billionaire tech entrepreneur. He was born on Stanford University's campus to distinguished law professor parents. He went to math camp and to one of the top universities in the U.S. He starts at MIT in 2010, studying physics and math, where he lives in a co-ed house called Epsilon Theta. His friend once described it by saying to a journalist,

think of a fraternity, but replace all the alcohol with the nerdiest stuff you can imagine. Sam blogs in those years with the arrogance you might expect from a youthful STEM student at an elite university. In one post, he refers to Shakespeare as a shitty writer, and Citizen Kane as almost unwatchably empty. Later, he'd say he didn't think much of school. The friends in the classes didn't do anything. And he partially said they just started dicking around in classes. But I also think they just wouldn't have been that useful no matter what. But, you know, it was a sort of formative social period of mine and also gave me a lot of time to sort of mull on, you know, what I wanted to do with my life. What he realized he might want to do with his life was make a lot of money in order to give it away.

Remember, it was in college that he discovered effective altruism. So he goes to work for Jane Street Capital, a cutting-edge Wall Street finance firm. Then he discovers crypto. Hey guys, good news. Bunch of 25-year-olds. We don't really know what a Bitcoin is, but we're trading it. In late 2017, Sam starts Alameda Research. By his side is Gary Wang, a buddy from MathCamp and Epsilon Theta,

who leaves a job as a software engineer at Google to join him. Unlike Sam, Gary avoids the spotlight. I've only found a few photos of him online. So Alameda Research is the first company I started up, and it was a crypto quant trading firm. And, you know, the sort of founding of it was basically, well, you know, Bitcoin was trading on a lot of different crypto exchanges and it was not trading at the same price on all of them. So you might see it trading for $10,000 on Coinbase and $10,100 on Bitstamp. And, you know, in theory, there's a 1% arbitrage to do their trading those against each other. That's how Sam says he first started making money in crypto,

through these kinds of arbitrages. Apparently, this was a whole lot more logistically complicated than it sounds. Kadam Schuber, an investigative reporter at the Financial Times, who's taken a closer look at Alameda Research, explains more. Alameda Research, I guess, is pretty simple to think about. Effectively, what they're doing is they're making bets on crypto. And if they make the right bets, they're going to make money. If they make the wrong bets, they're going to lose money. What's important also to understand is they're often making these bets using borrowed money. So they're going to people, going to lenders in the crypto space, borrowing money from them to make their bets. During a podcast appearance in 2021,

Sam is asked where the name Alameda Research comes from. His answer is kind of trollish and revealing. We knew banks were going to shut us down. There were not yet U.S. banks that were happy with crypto. Instead, there are just a lot that did not want to have to fucking think about it. We just knew that was going to be a thing. And that if we named our company like shitcoin day traders, Inc, like they probably just reject us. But I mean, no one doesn't like research. But yeah, Sam seems to be saying he knew banks wouldn't want to be involved in messing around in risky markets or the crypto equivalent of trading penny stocks. So he obfuscates and Alameda Research is born. A few years later, Sam expands his empire. In 2019, he launches FTX again with Gary. In 2019, he launches FTX, again with Gary.

It's a digital currency exchange. Basically, a place where people can buy and trade crypto. So now Sam has both a hedge fund and an exchange. Here's Khadim. So in the crypto world, this is completely standard. In the much larger, mainstream, more regulated financial world, this is not how things operate. Over decades and, I guess, centuries of blow-ups and crises and fraud and malfeasance, we've developed rules that try to separate the different roles and activities

in the financial markets into their own entities, so you don't have conflicts of interest. You don't have people able to move money from one pocket to the other pocket. I often tell people that crypto isn't like most other normal industries. This is just another example of that. FTX starts overseas, first in Asia and then in the Caribbean. There's freedom in being offshore. It allows them to offer financial products that aren't legally allowed in the U.S. They can offer high margins, essentially allowing customers to borrow huge amounts of money from FTX to make bigger bets. One of those customers who borrowed a lot of money was Sam's own Alameda Research. FTX will eventually set up a U.S. affiliate along with

other subsidiaries all over the world. They hire strategically, bringing on former regulators and government officials from countries in which they do business. But the main action is with FTX International, now headquartered in the Bahamas. FTX grows to be a major exchange and one of the most marketable. Meanwhile, Alameda is considered a sophisticated trading operation. They had a reputation for being smart, for being kind of trading nerds. Even as they brag about doing things that, I don't know, just don't sound all that sophisticated. For example, another MathCamp buddy of Sam's, a guy named Sam Tribuco, worked for Alameda as well.

And in spring 2021, he goes on a podcast called Market Meditations. Meditators, today you will benefit from our guest's insight into Alameda Research, one of the best crypto trading firms in the world. And on this podcast, Sam Tribuco is asked how he assesses risk on longer term trades. What about with longer term plays? How do you guys assess risk or make decisions for that? I would say

that the way we assess risk is idiosyncratic. It really just depends on the kind of bet we're making. Tribuco starts talking about Dogecoin, the cryptocurrency based on a picture of a shiba inu dog which is at its core a joke we got uh so in january or so like whenever elon started tweeting about doge we sort of just decided like the two possibilities here are he's gonna keep

tweeting about doge or he's gonna stop if he stops like probably doge goes back down a little bit but it's possible it just it's gonna like 10 or 100x or whatever if he like does things like talk about it on SNL, which apparently he's going to do now. So yeah, so that was something where like, we don't know which of these two paths is going to take, but the upside is like so much higher than the downside for this kind of thing. And like probably the upside is like a little less likely than the downside, but like probably not that much. So that makes it really plus EV to like put on this long doge position and sort of hold it for a while. EV is short for expected value. So what Shibuko is describing here is

buying a meme coin because Elon Musk is tweeting about it. This doesn't strike me as some brilliant trading insight. This is what thousands of regular guys did from their phones in the pandemic. And a few days after this podcast comes out, Elon Musk does go on SNL, and he does talk about Dogecoin. In a segment

on Weekend Update, the Dogefather, that ends with Elon calling Dogecoin a hustle. For conventional money. Oh, so it's a hustle. Yeah, it's a hustle.

I didn't just say that, man. The price crashes. About five months after that podcast appearance, Sam Tribucco will become CEO of Alameda Research as SBF formally steps away to focus on FTX. Caroline will be Tribuco's co-CEO at first. And eventually, when Tribuco leaves the company, she becomes the sole CEO of Alameda. She too confidently leans into risk. Young people tend to be too risk-averse or like young, kind of high earning, highly educated people tend to be too risk averse.

And jokes online about how what she calls Alameda's sophisticated proprietary techniques are actually just her frantically searching Twitter for the fair price of a stock. Still, Alameda did know how to pick winners. They became prolific investors and had their hands in important projects. It seemed like they had the Midas touch. Everyone wanted their money, or to give them theirs. This surprised me,

because sometimes even SBF doesn't sound all that much like an eccentric financial savant. He sounds more like a slacker trying to get out of homework. His main strategy seems to be to filibuster his audience. The guy can talk. In the most infamous example, he goes on a Bloomberg podcast called Oddlots and is asked by Matt Levine to describe what yield farming is. This was a way crypto traders were making impressive returns at the time, just by lending or staking their coins.

Stay with me here. I promise there's a punchline. So here's how Sam's explanation starts. Let me give you sort of like a toy model of it, which I actually think has a surprising amount of legitimacy for what farming could mean. You know, where do you start? You start with a company that builds a box and in practice this box they probably dress it up to look like a life-changing you know world-altering protocol that's going to replace all the big banks in 38 days or whatever maybe for now actually ignore what it does or pretend it does literally nothing it's box. Okay, so we've got a box that does nothing.

And Sam says you can put crypto in this box and later take it back out. Sam also says this box can issue its own token. We'll call it whatever X token. And he suggests these X tokens will be linked to the success of the box. The box that does nothing. So wait, what do these X tokens do? For now, what X token does, it gets given away to the box people.

And now what happens? Well, X token has some market cap, right? It's probably not zero. Let's say it's, you know, $20 million market cap. And a bunch of arbor treasures. From like first principles, it should be zero, but OK. Sure. OK. Completely reasonable comment. At this point, Matt Levine has to interject.

How did this token, which comes from this box that still does nothing, get to be worth $20 million? Sam concedes that's fair, but... In the world that we're in, if you do this, everyone's going to be like, ooh, box token. Maybe it's cool. If you buy a box token, that's going to appear on Twitter and I'll have a $20 million market cap. So the answer to why $20 million is pure hype and FOMO.

Sam carries on, describing how money will start piling into this box in return for these X tokens. So, you know, sophisticated traders and or people on crypto Twitter or other sort of similar parties go and put 200 million dollars in the box collectively and they start getting these X tokens for it. And now all of a sudden it's like, wow, people just decide to put 200200 million in the box. This is a pretty cool box, right? Like this is a valuable box as demonstrated by all the money

that people have apparently decided should be in the box. Anyway, let me skip through a bit more of Sam talking about this magic box and pick up at the end. And so then, you know, X token price goes way up and now it's at $130 million market cap token. Right. So they go, they pour another $300 million in the box and you get a cycle and then it goes to infinity and then everyone makes money. I think of myself as like a fairly cynical person.

And that was so much more cynical than how I would have described farming. Like, you're just like, well, I'm in the Ponzi business and it's pretty good. Yes, Sam went on Bloomberg, described one of his investment strategies, and was basically told, congratulations, you've described a Ponzi scheme. After that appearance and the attention it got, Sam said he had been misunderstood, that he was describing how this works if you remove all the potentially useful things the box could do. But listening to it laid out like that, it felt to me like, oh my god, he actually admits it. Occasionally, Sam would offer these strange or ominous insights that didn't sound like industry cheerleading, and they left the door open for more questions.

When prompted to list some negatives of crypto, he suggested that it might leave users more vulnerable to scams. I think that one piece of this is that, you know, for better or for worse, it democratizes access to finance. And I think when phrased that way, people generally think it's better. But one thing that I think you do have to live with, at least to some extent with that, is if you let people make their own choices financially, you have to think about scams, right? You have to think about like how

much are people going to be, you know, victims of scams? And are there parts of the current system that are, while restricting people's access and freedom and egalitarian uses of their funds, are, you know, doing consumer protection at the same time? When asked at Bloomberg's crypto summit why he was bailing out other companies, he talked about how it could prevent them from dipping into customer funds. And, you know, they're like, look, we need a buffer here

so that we can, like, definitely pay salaries without dipping into customer funds, like, you know, right? Because otherwise they would. Well, depending on the company, right? Otherwise, maybe they would declare bankruptcy or maybe they would dip into customer. Whatever. There's a lot of unpleasant choices there, right? To be clear, dipping into customer funds is what some people might call not exactly legal. And in an interview with Forbes, he said that some exchanges were running out of money.

Quote, there are some third-tier exchanges that are already secretly insolvent. It became an immediate headline, the talk of crypto Twitter. Who was he talking about? And what other major problems were lurking that Sam would only hint at? Despite Alameda's smart reputation, when the crypto crash comes, their idiosyncratic approach to risk becomes more, well, risky. Here's Khadim again. You know, there's different factions in crypto. And there's certainly, you know, the way that, say, the mainstream media would think about crypto, which is that you have a category of more responsible actors or smarter actors, and then you have a category of maybe less responsible or less smart. But I think the lesson is that there was never smart money. There

was never dumb money. There was primarily an enormous credit bubble. There was an enormous amount of money sloshing into very speculative investments. And that kind of explains everything far more than, you know, these people were smart, these people were dumb. Sam is able to keep fashioning himself as an industry savior for a little while. But behind the scenes, his hedge fund is taking hits. When prices fall and projects fail, debts start being called in. Alameda needs to pay up. And that's soon going to have grave consequences for FTX. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income?

That's not a typo. 50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. I've never seen a business empire implode as quickly and as publicly as Sam's did. To an outsider, how it happened might be a bit confusing, but I'm going to walk you through it. It begins quietly,

with an article on a crypto industry news site on November 2nd. So the first thing that happens is there's a media outlet called Coindesk. They publish a story which is basically revealing the Alameda balance sheet. And what people see is that the Alameda balance sheet is full of assets that are tied to FTX and tied to Sam Bankman Freed. Now, first of all, FTX and Alameda are supposed to be totally separate businesses. The lines between Sam's companies are not supposed to blur. But this peek under the hood depicts a different story. Alameda has very little actual cash and a lot of FTT. What's FTT? A token wholly created by FTX. This is the thing in crypto. Exchanges print

their own money and then sell it or dole it out as rewards for participation on the exchange. The CEO of rival exchange Binance, who is about to become a very important part of the story, once described this kind of so-called native token as part of a virtuous cycle. If the value goes up, users, quote, are incentivized to use your platform more and get more friends onto your platform. Think of it as part magic money, part multi-level marketing scheme. So Alameda owns a lot of this stuff, and they've overvalued it, marking up its price enormously. FTT wasn't a very popular token. Selling any significant amount would tank the price if anyone even wanted it. It didn't look good.

On November 6th, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao or CZ as he's widely known enters the drama. or CZ as he's widely known, enters the drama. He tweets that he's going to sell his holdings of the FTT token, which is the token that's linked to the success of the FTX exchange. The reason, just as a side note, the reason he has so much of this token is because he actually used to be an investor in FTX itself. And when he was bought out, they paid him a large part of it in the FTT token. All these crypto companies are so entangled in each other's business. Even rivals are intertwined.

So now you have the Alameda balance sheet is out there. People see it and they don't like what they see. And now you have this incredibly influential figure in the crypto world saying that he's going to sell an enormous amount of, you know, the FTX token. This is where FTX users start to get nervous. Here's this rival crypto giant publicly expressing a lack of confidence in the exchange. People who have holdings on FTX start to pull them out. Reuters will later report that over $100 million was withdrawn out of FTX every hour that Sunday. On Monday, SBF tries to calm his customer base by tweeting, a competitor is trying to go after us with false rumors. FTX is fine. Assets are fine.

And at this point, Chris, the FTX user in Quebec, who you heard from in the last episode, starts catching wind of what's going on. I guess noise was building up on social media. And then I saw something about a spat or a feud between the CEO of ByteDance and CEO of SBF. And I kind of laughed it off as this Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos kind of tiff. Like, these two billionaires are publicly fighting over something. What does it have to do with me, right? And like, good for them. Ah, fuck.

It doesn't worry him too much. He checks his account and everything's still working. This looks like a tiff between two people that I don't know that are ultra rich. One says something, the other says he's lying. Well, I can access my funds. Seems okay to me. But still, as he was trying to fall asleep that night, something in him says, in the morning, maybe move your crypto off FTX. Just in case. I woke up and then I made a withdrawal on every single asset.

At that point, I had Bitcoin, Ethereum and Polygon and the old Ethereum. And I went into the status page and it said withdrawal pending. Oh, no, sorry. Withdrawal requested. Requested was the specific word, which is where I started having major doubts because why would it be requested? If it's an automated system, which I would expect it to be like any specially high tech stuff, which is what we're talking about is crypto. We're not talking about an old bank in 1950 where a teller has to do it. So why would it be requested?

teller has to do it. So why would it be requested? That morning, FTX stopped processing customer withdrawals. Despite what SBF had tweeted just one day earlier, FTX was not fine. At first, Chris feels confused. Then a possible rescue plan emerges with Binance swooping in to buy FTX. It's another shocking turn. CZ had helped drive FTX to ruin. Now he's saving it. Sam again assures customers that despite the liquidity crunches, all assets will be covered one-to-one. But the agreement between the two was contingent on Sam opening the books. The next day, CZ backs out.

The official Binance account tweets, The issues are beyond our control or ability to help. The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg report that Sam is frantically looking for other investors to help him cover an $8 billion hole. And Chris's hope curdles. Paddock attacks, heart palpitation, getting really hot physically, and then scrambling on every site slash tweet slash reddit forum to see if anybody had a way out and then it became full-on anger four thousand five hours dollars on its own is not a tremendous amount of money but there is a context in which in my personal life right now which i'd rather not get into, is a substantial amount of money.

A lot of big fish, but it still hurts. I'm not going bankrupt, but it's still, it's rent for two months or three months. On Friday, November 11th, at 4.30 in the morning, Sam Bankman-Fried resigns as CEO. FTX, Alameda, and more than 130 other affiliated companies file for bankruptcy protection. Sam tweets, I'm really sorry again that we ended up here. Hopefully things can find a way to recover. sorry again that we ended up here. Hopefully things can find a way to recover. He says he's

shocked at how things unraveled and that he's still piecing together the details. The speed of it is incredible and it's stunning. SBF, Sam Beck-McFeed goes from somebody who he didn't get the toughest media coverage, he was viewed as someone

who was credible and doing things the right way. He had connections in Silicon Valley, in Washington, to the media. He was a big figure in the crypto industry. He goes from the golden boy to zero in like six days. It's absolutely stunning. It was a remarkable turn for SBbf and the entire crypto industry a week earlier sam was one of crypto's most trusted players shaping its political future in washington he had become so powerful and so overconfident that he and one of his lieutenants publicly mocked CZ on Twitter.

They joked that the rival mogul couldn't even come to D.C., implying there was a government investigation into CZ's activities. A week later, CZ helped destroy FTX, and it was Sam who was about to be called a potential criminal. It was Sam who was about to be called a potential criminal. When FTX declares bankruptcy and Sam steps down, a new CEO is appointed, John J. Ray III, the lawyer who took over after the collapse of Enron and Nortel, two of the most historic corporate failures in American

and Canadian history, respectively. Yet in one of his early filings for FTX, he writes, Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. Another lawyer helping lead the bankruptcy proceedings will later describe this moment as the first time anyone could really see under the covers and recognize that the emperor had no clothes.

We'll later learn through a government indictment that as FTX was crumbling, Caroline Ellison seemed almost relieved. Sam allegedly showed a colleague a message from her that read, in part, I just had an increasing dread of this day that was weighing on me for a long time. And now that it's actually happening, it just feels great to get it over with, one way or another. For a short while after the bankruptcy, Sam lays low at his luxury penthouse in the Bahamas.

He'll continue to tweet, saying that he wants to do right by customers, that FTX was a valuable enterprise, but more leveraged than he realized, that FTT had value, and that a market crash and a run on the bank exhausted liquidity. Meanwhile, FTX customers like Chris are left reeling from the loss.

The question still remains to me is what now? What does all this mean for me? Am I being told, tough luck, you lost it, it's gone? Is that what I'm supposed to understand here? He's not the only one wondering where his money went. So is the Department of Justice. Coming up on The Naked Emperor. First, we charge that from 2019 until earlier this year,

Bankman Freed and his co-conspirators stole billions of dollars from FTX customers. He used that money for his personal benefit. Bankman-Fried lied to Alameda's lenders about the source of the money that he was using to pay those debts. Like, when I first got on the phone with Sam, the thing I was most curious about was if he was just some, like, diabolical villain that had lied about everything. I thought maybe. We as a society have, in my opinion, my humble opinion, spent about enough time

this week trying to figure out whether anyone living in Albany was polyamorous. You've been listening to The Naked Emperor, a Frontburner miniseries from CBC Podcasts and CBC News. The show was written by me, Jacob Silverman,

with producer Imogen Burchard, associate producer Yvette Sin, sound design by Julia Whitman and Yvette Sin. Sarah Clayton is our digital coordinating producer. Executive producers are Cecil Fernandez, Chris Oak, and Nick McCabe-Locos. In order of appearance, audio courtesy of the FTX Podcast YouTube channel, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York's Facebook page, Thank you. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.