Book Launch: Number Go Up by Zeke Faux with Longform Podcast

Wednesday Sep 13, 2023
6:00 pm - 7:30 pm

POWERHOUSE Arena
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street across from the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY 11201

About the Book.

The “endlessly entertaining” (Matt Levine) and “ludicrously compelling” (Evan Osnos) account of the crypto delusion, and how Sam Bankman-Fried and a cast of fellow nerds and hustlers turned useless virtual coins into trillions of dollars.

“One of the greatest business stories of all time.”—A.J. Jacobs, bestselling author of The Puzzler

In 2021 cryptocurrency went mainstream. Giant investment funds were buying it, celebrities like Tom Brady endorsed it, and TV ads hailed it as the future of money. Hardly anyone knew how it worked—but why bother with the particulars when everyone was making a fortune from Dogecoin, Shiba Inu, or some other bizarrely named “digital asset”?As he observed this frenzy, investigative reporter Zeke Faux had a nagging question: Was it all just a confidence game of epic proportions? What started as curiosity—with a dash of FOMO—would morph into a two-year, globe-spanning quest to understand the wizards behind the world’s new financial machinery. Faux’s investigation would lead him to a schlubby, frizzy-haired twenty-nine-year-old named Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF for short) and a host of other crypto scammers, utopians, and overnight billionaires.

Faux follows the trail to a luxury resort in the Bahamas, where SBF boldly declares that he will use his crypto fortune to save the world. Faux talks his way onto the yacht of a former child actor turned crypto impresario and gains access to “ApeFest,” an elite party headlined by Snoop Dogg, by purchasing a $20,000 image of a cartoon monkey. In El Salvador, Faux learns what happens when a country wagers its treasury on Bitcoin, and in the Philippines, he stumbles upon a Pokémon knockoff mobile game touted by boosters as a cure for poverty. And in an astonishing development, a spam text leads Faux to Cambodia, where he uncovers a crypto-powered human-trafficking ring.When the bubble suddenly bursts in 2022, he brings listeners inside SBF’s penthouse as the fallen crypto king faces his imminent arrest. Fueled by the absurd details and authoritative reporting that earned Faux the title “our great poet of crime” (Money Stuff columnist Matt Levine), Number Go Up is the essential chronicle, by turns harrowing and uproarious, of a $3 trillion financial delusion.

About the Author.

Zeke Faux is an investigative reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg News in New York. He’s a winner of the Gerald Loeb award for explanatory business journalism and the American Bar Association’s Silver Gavel award, a finalist for a National Magazine Award, and a National Fellow at New America. Faux lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and their three children.

About the Moderator.

The event will be moderated and recorded by Aaron Lammer and Evan Ratliff to be included on their podcast Longform. The podcast features interviews with writers, journalists, filmmakers, and podcasters about how they do their work and is hosted by Aaron Lammer, Max Linsky, and Evan Ratliff.

Lammer has worked in DeFi at a crypto trading firm, made music with Drake and Kanye West, and his 2021 podcast series “Exit Scam” investigated whether the founder of Canada’s largest Bitcoin exchange faked his death while on his honeymoon in India.

Ratliff is the author of “The Mastermind: A True Story of Murder, Empire, and a New Kind of Crime Lord” and the writer and host of “Persona: The French Deception,” the hit podcast about a scam that took over the world, and the man who made tens of millions of dollars fleecing some of the richest people on the planet.