hey mate! Just in case you’ve been forwarded this email but would like to subscribe - click the link here.

Number Go Up… w/ Bloomberg Investigative Reporter - Zeke Faux

The general consensus for Zeke’s book is that is that it’s the better half of Michael Lewis’s ‘Going Infinite’. 

‘Number Go Up’ documents, first hand, from the Bahamas to Cambodia to El Salvador to the halls of power of US, the wild mania of crypto and the insanely eclectic, deranged and interesting characters that colour in those lines. 

Zeke opens up for this episode of ‘A Curious Worldview Podcast’ unlike he has for a podcast before. 

His answer to the role of serendipity in his life at the end is beautiful, his reflections of what is required for good journalism is amazing, and his documentation of crypto’s wild ride and its consequences is perfect.

There is plenty for everyone is this.

A bit of gossip about Michael Lewis (who authored the big short), Marc Andreeson and a16z’s role in the crypto bubble, the damage that crypto has caused. The incredible characters at the heart of tether, SBF, journalism and more.

#155 of ‘The Curious Worldview Podcast’ with Zeke Faux on Number Go Up, SBF & Crypto Mania here.

Or a link to the book here.

Forward this email or share this podcast episode with a mate whose crypto investments are 2 cents from 0!

Here is a transcript of the opening exchange from the conversation…

Ryan
Alright mate, welcome.

Zeke
Thanks, Ryan.

Ryan
I wanted to start by reading you a tweet from Ashley Vance, author biographer of Elon Musk before Walter Isaacson, um, because it seems like you and your book hit a nerve with some of your journalistic comrades. Every major review of Michael Lewis's SBF book is the same. They chastise Lewis for taking it too easy on SBF, and then spend two paragraphs saying Zeke wrote a much better book in number go up, but none of them reviewed Fowkes's book on its own. That was then retweeted by Scott Patterson, former guest on this podcast. I'm familiar with this phenomenon and then liked by Tom Wright, the co-author of a billion dollar whale and amazing just like top of the mountain investigative journalism piece. So you really struck a nerve with your comrades, but do you feel like the book has been overshadowed by the floodlights that is Michael Lewis.

Zeke
So, first off, it has been an amazing part of putting this book out to get to meet and talk to some of these other, like, non-fiction authors who I really admire. I mean, Billion Dollar Whale, I was so jealous of when it came out and I wish that I could do something like that. It's like always been my dream to write one of these adventurous non-fiction books, so that has been really cool. And while I was writing the book, I became aware that Michael Lewis was also working on a book about crypto. And this is definitely like bad news, right? Like you don't wanna be, whatever he does is gonna be a number one bestseller. And it was his book going infinite. But as I worked on it, I kind of realized, I just couldn't worry about that. And I was actually just having so much fun writing this book and doing this investigation. And I realized, I was like, it doesn't matter what he does. Just get to the, do whatever it takes to get to the bottom of this crypto thing. Write the best book that you can. And what does it matter? Like if, what his book is like. And once I finished the book, I was really proud of how it came out.

And I thought, you know what, if Michael Lewis does a better book, I will tip my cap to him because I think mine's pretty funny. I think people will like it. And so it did come out. And Michael Lewis's book did get a lot of attention, but it actually worked out kind of well for me because a lot of the, despite what Ashley said in that really nice tweet, a lot of reviews.

like New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Economist, LA Times, some others that I'm not even including. Everybody's reviewing Michael Lewis's book because it's just like a big deal. Michael Lewis wrote a book. The guy who wrote The Blind Side has something new. So these reviews have been getting a lot more attention than like a review of some random book by a first-time author would get. And they're all saying quite amazingly, hey, you should check out Zeke's book instead. Like, number go up is really funny and you might like it better than Michael Lewis's book. So it's been beyond like my wildest dreams for how this would be received. I sort of thought, I'm a little bit of a cynical guy. So I thought maybe somebody just to be contrarian would write one review that said, you know, I kind of like this part of Zeke's book better than Michael Lewis's book. And then just that, you know, just somebody would do it just to have like a hot take. And then I could seize on that and put it on the cover of my second book. So like the reception has been just like way better than I expected. And I just I get a kick out of seeing it at the airport, at the bookstore. I told my wife we were taking the subway to Manhattan and she was asking me how I felt about how things were going and I said it would be really cool. The one thing I really want is to see somebody reading my book on the subway. And then the subway doors opened and a friend of mine from high school who I had not seen in more than a decade, walked in through the doors reading the book on his phone so it was not a hardcover but he showed me um so that was pretty sweet so um so yes i have not felt overshadowed by the Michael Lewis book in the even not nearly as much as i had expected

Ryan
Congratulations mate. What an incredible moment to experience that.

Zeke
Thank you. I mean, I just feel really happy that people are enjoying the book and I feel like I really tried to do whatever... when I was thinking about where to go in this investigation, I tried to think, if I was reading this book, what would I want the author to do? It's sort of like a weird choose your own adventure. And I was like, yeah, you know, when I got to because you face these choices. There's times when, in a book you could just, sometimes you could just write a chapter summarizing things that other people had written. You don't need to go see it for yourself necessarily. But for me, I feel like I do gain something by investigating things myself. And I just wanna see things with my own eyes. And I feel like I notice things that, in a different way than other people do. So for example, there's a chapter about this particular cryptocurrency mania in the Philippines, this game called Axie Infinity that became like a national craze and people were quitting their jobs to try and earn money playing with this game all day. It's a little like a knockoff Pokemon, but people really thought they could earn a living playing this game on their phone and winning crypto coins. And so I, you know, I had to see it for myself. It's just too crazy to believe. And because it's my book, I'm the Boss, I went to the Philippines and worked with, I hired a local reporter named Gil Ramos, who is really amazing, and she helped me get to the bottom of this and find like patient zero of this crazy bubble. And, yeah, because I thought, you know what?

The reader doesn't just want to hear like, oh, this happened. They want to go there. And like, I'm their representative going to check all these things out.

Ryan
And most of the humorous anecdotes, apart from your description of all the colourful characters that just decorate the crypto world is your interactions with them and the scenarios that you find yourself in because you go to the place.

Zeke
Yeah, I mean, I had initially thought that crypto would not be a good thing for me to investigate. I felt like, okay, so many of these coins are just transparently silly. And like, I'm like a veteran fraud investigator. That's my thing at Bloomberg where I have my day job. I specialize in investigating shady things in the world of finance. And so crypto would have seemed like a natural fit, but I felt like these coins, so many of them, it was just like some kind of annoying guy being like, buy my coin, it's going to go up and up and up to the moon. And then it would. And I just I didn't see what I would bring to the table there as a investigative journalist. But then like you said once I threw myself into it and I started meeting these people, I just found them to be really amusing characters. And I was having a great time talking to them. And I realized that even though crypto, I do think it largely proved to be a silly thing with some exceptions, I realized this was a silly moment in history….

……. continue the conversation with the podcast here.