Episode 1: Silicon Valley Nerds

Starting his career at a secretive Wall Street firm, Sam learns to gamble and is praised for taking big risks. He embraces Effective Altruism, a movement aimed at doing “the most good,” and starts “earning to give” big donations to charity. He strikes out on his own to found a tr ...  Show more

Sam moves Alameda Research’s headquarters from Berkeley to Hong Kong to take advantage of the unregulated crypto market there. Caroline comes along for the ride, struggling to manage the stress of he r new job. Sam pitches investors on a new idea: a crypto exchange called FTX tha ...  Show more

Sam Bankman-Fried took the stand in his criminal trial to present his case, emphasizing that FTX and Alameda Research's problems stemmed from errors, a lack of dedicated risk management, and mistakes made by key lieutenants rather than deliberate fraud on his part. During the tes ...  Show more

Sam Bankman-Fried, the fallen golden boy of crypto, is going on trial for what prosecutors are calling the largest financial fraud in recent history.

David Yaffe-Bellany, a technology reporter for The Times, explains the case of the man who was supposed to save the crypt ...

Just a year ago, Sam Bankman-Fried was heralded as a wunderkind, a genius, a crypto innovator, a major philanthropist and political donor. He was worth tens of billions of dollars. FTX, the crypto exchange he founded, was buying Super Bowl ads. Now, he’s standing trial on multipl ...  Show more

Reporter Joshua Oliver joins us just hours after the closing arguments of the fraud trial of Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the FTX crypto exchange. We talk about why it’s hard to find a smoking gun in a white-collar criminal trial, why Bankman-Fried testified and what it was l ...