The Exchanges

Q Well, it was about, um, I, Sean, did you see the documentary on Netflix about, uh, was it, what was it called? Uh, it was with Ilya, was it Bitfinex? What was that called?

A It was the couple, uh, Bitcoin, Bonnie and Clyde. I did a documentary on them for Netflix, uh, with Chris Smith, who did Tiger King, uh, that was about this couple that had stolen 5.4, well, they stole seventy two million dollars in crypto, uh, and then were trying to launder it, and every, they were the only two people on the entire internet who wanted the price of bitcoin to go down. Uh, and they had, every time they were trying to launder it, it would double, and double, and double, and double, and double, and to the point that it was at one point at its peak was worth 8.4 billion dollars, and she was this, like, wacky, uh, cringe rapper, and he was, like, a part-time magician investor, and, like, It's one of those stories. If it were fiction, you'd be like, ah, this is stupid. This would never happen.

AI assessment note: “It was the couple, uh, Bitcoin, Bonnie and Clyde. I did a documentary on them”

Q they had sex, or like, like, the comments that they made to each other, I'm like, how on earth does he know this? And then I find out that you, I heard you spent time with her, like, getting info, like, Why on earth would some of these sources talk to you? Why not? Why wouldn't they just say, I don't need that in my life. Get out of here.

A I think, um, uh, one of the things I've learned as a reporter for two decades is that people talk, people want to talk for different reasons. So, uh, you get, there's, you know, endless numbers of them, and one of, one of, I think, the thing, people think being a reporter is like, you gotta break the news, and you gotta write the story. It's like, no, it's a, it's relationships. It's like, it is literally just relationships, and, and what you have to do is you have to figure out You need these people to talk to you, and you have to figure out how to make them want to talk to you, and so, for example, everyone has a reason. So people that would, would leak stuff to me that worked at Apple or Facebook, some of them were so, just so excited to say, oh my god, I worked on this thing, and it was like, and they, and they just want it out there, and they don't have the patience, and you know, and others of them worked on something that never got made, or they got fucked over by their boss, or they didn't get the credit, and like, Or, like, they have other egotistical reasons, whatever it is, and so your job as a, as a reporter is to try to get them to talk to you, and to try to figure out, and my job is to be like, why, what can I say to you? What is it that you want? I know you want, we all want something, and so with Julia, um, you know, I think, I think she wanted, she wanted to be…

AI assessment note: “with Julia, um, you know, I think, I think she wanted, she wanted to be part of the story”

Q Does that 90% of the, of the crap include your past employers? Does that, does that include New York Times?

A Yes, 1000%, because I think Because the system, it all broke. Like, it's broken, and I, I believe it's broken beyond repair for now. I, my hope is that, and maybe this is me being delusional, but, like, my hope is that AI can somehow help fix it, but for, but I believe that, or AI in the hands of people can help fix it, but when I first started at the Times, like, you weren't allowed an opinion, you weren't allowed, there was no, you know, you, there was no social media, like, there was no Twitter. Like, I was at the Times when Twitter came out. Like, you, I remember being in meetings in those rooms, and I would ask an editor, right, what do you, what do you think? And they would be like, I'm not, I don't have an opinion on this. My, I'm a journalist who comes at this impartially, and all I want to do is report the facts. And, and, and so, I think that what happened was, you had this, the problem was, the internet came along, right, and you had to, to get to the Times, like, I was the first one that, one of the first ones that came in I remember being In a meeting once, with 40 or 50 people at the time, it was this big meeting, and everyone kind of went around, and they introduced themselves, and they talked about, like, where they'd gone to school, and how they'd ended up here. I, I barely graduated high school. Like, I literally had a 2.1 GPA. I got kicked out of art school. …

AI assessment note: “Yes, 1000%, because I think Because the system, it all broke.”

Q What would be the first, what would be the, well, what can I do in six weeks? I got 19 bucks. What do you got for me?

A If you, um, I have all these books on, like, on storytelling that I read, and like, and they're interesting, and like, you get a little snippet. I think the most interesting of all the books was, I read was, um, when I wrote Hatch on Twitter, I really wanted it to feel like a murder mystery, because no one knew what really happened, and I read a book on murder mysteries, which was unbelievable. Like, you can read any of them. Just Google, like, how do I murder mysteries? It's a, it's a blue book. It's a collaboration where a bunch of, Murder writers, and, and screenwriters, and so on, each write a few chapters each. And there's a few things I learned from that, which were, um, which one is, um, I, when you read a lot of books, um, people forget to describe smells, um, and murder mysteries always do, and it's like, and it brings, it really brings you in. It's, it's wild to see how it can add, like, this extra layer, like, sounds, smells, You know, the noises, you know, um, uh, not just the creaking stairs, but, but the, you know, the mold or whatever it is, it just creates this sense of story in your brain. The other thing is, um, the Save the Cat, which is really interesting. Even if you don't write screenplays, it's a really interesting way of understanding character and so on. And, um, I read a bunch of screenplay books by like some of the old greats and they talk about chara…

AI assessment note: “I have all these books on, like, on storytelling that I read”

Q What was the context? How'd you meet him?

A Oh, just at this, at a rally once, um, years and years and years ago, I think, in 2015 or something like that, you know, spent time with Elon. Like, he's kind of funny. He's funny. He's like a weird dude, but he's funny, you know. Jobs had this, like, Or to him, you know, Bezos too, like they, um, funnily enough, Zuck doesn't necessarily have the charisma, but it's almost like he's a robot, and you're like, oh, how does this thing work? But, um, but they all have this, this, there's something to them that is, um, That is enticing. And, and, and Jack's funny. He's a funny, nice guy. Like, when you're hanging out with him, he like, you, it's like, you're, you're like, oh, this, he's fun. I like hanging out with this guy. And, um, and, and so, and I never met Ross. I covered him in the court, in the trial, so I saw him many, many times, but never spoke to him. Um, and, um, but they have this charisma to them that I think makes them great in some respect. And it's not something that you can learn. It's just something that you either have or you don't have. And, um, And so, you cannot help but like them for that, but I think for me, I just, I don't understand. Here's the part with Jack, and then we should move on from it, because, uh, I could talk all day about this, but Jack is worth twelve billion dollars, give or take. Um, Noah Glass is worth about a zero dollars, ok? He never go…

AI assessment note: “Oh, just at this, at a rally once, um, years and years and years ago”

Q Know what he was thinking. How did you get access to his diary? Why do, why does a writer like, how does a writer like you get that? And you got a lot of stuff. You got like the footage of the library where he got arrested. You got like the chat logs from, you know, from the, with the government. How did you get access to all this information?

A Well, I can't tell you exactly how I got a lot of it because that's the, that's investigative reporting. And, uh, and I, you know, obviously can't divulge where it came from, but The way I approach these stories is I want to know everything, literally everything, um, and so I have these researchers, uh, who work for me, and one of them, uh, one of them actually used to do oppo research for the, for the Democratic Party, trying to find, you know, bad stuff on Republicans, and, um, we literally just blanket approach it, and what's been really interesting, I have a new project, which I can't talk about, but I can tell you a little bit about how I've been reporting it. What's been interesting is I have this new project that we're doing, And we've been using LLM, Google LLM's notebook. And so now we stuff millions of words into these things and I can just query it. Whereas before we had to build like Excel spreadsheets and databases. And like, it was very, very complicated the way we did it, but we kind of put into three tranches. So we, we have the Dreadpire Roberts and we get access to the chat logs that were on his laptop. Um, which I don't actually know if he knew were there cause they were in a hidden folder. And I don't think he actually knew he'd been Or maybe he was, I don't know. Uh, and then there's some diary entries. He'd, he'd literally been making a diary about, about …

AI assessment note: “I can't tell you exactly how I got a lot of it because that's”