We’re Still Living In The World Sam Bankman-Fried Made

The year is 2022. Movies are finally back, Bad Bunny is taking over the world, and everyone is trying to become a member of the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The immediate post-pandemic years were strange ones along many axes, most notably the economy. In the short, six-year window following 2020, a schlubby South Bay denizen named Sam Bankman-Fried became the world's youngest self-made billionaire, watched his empire crumble, and got sent to federal prison, where he currently resides. The first episode of this season of Only If You Get Caught tells the story of the incredible rise and swift fall of SBF, and does so in this specific context. More than anything, he's a creature of the Covid economy, the odd cash-rich, activity-poor moment that defined 2020 and 2021. That moment allowed a company like FTX to become as valuable as it did because of the atomized culture of gambling that followed in Covid's wake. To help tell the story, I drafted in Jacob Silverman. Jacob is the author of three books, including Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud as well as Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley. He covers crypto, technology, and capitalism, and I spent the Bitcoin Conference in Vegas with him in 2025.

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