SILICON VALLEY:
Teddy Schleifer conducts a candid, chilling, gut-punching interview with Sam Bankman-Fried.

Hollywood:
Matt Belloni explains how the Obama media machine petered out.
and…
Julia Alexander details how the Netflix hit factory somehow led to the company’s worst year ever.

Wall Street:
Bill Cohan sees around corners in Elonville.

MEDIA:
Dylan Byers penetrates the GMA affair scandal.
and…
Tara Palmeri and Tina Nguyen put Breitbart on the block.

WASHINGTON:
Julia Ioffe reports how Brittney Griner got home.

PODCASTS:
Listen to how S.B.F. expressed his remorse on Peter Hamby’s The Powers That Be.
and…
Matt welcomes showrunner and soccer club owner Rob McElhenney on The Town.

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On Monday afternoon, my partner Teddy Schleifer casually dropped a note into a small group Slack channel that made me do a double-take: Sam Bankman-Fried, the now ubiquitous crypto carny act, had just agreed to grant him an on-the-record interview later that evening. Teddy wanted to brainstorm some questions with me and Ben Landy, Puck’s peerless executive editor.

Sure, I’d watched Andrew Sorkin casually roast S.B.F. at his Dealbook conference the previous week. And I’d been cognizant of S.B.F.’s other mea culpas on Twitter Spaces, among other platforms. But I also knew that Teddy’s conversation would be different—much different, in fact. For starters, Teddy and S.B.F. are about the same age, a generational link that I presumed would help elicit some of the emotion and earnestness that had been surprisingly muted, at least to me, in S.B.F.’s various conversations, many of which seemed like narcissistic grief management sessions. (Leave it to the millennials, I suppose, to crash two businesses and lose billions of other peoples’ money and then talk about their own feelings…) I also knew that no reporter at work today had a firmer grasp of S.B.F.’s true passion: Effective Altruism, a slightly zany, ideologically driven, mission-based form of philanthropy that often seems like some form of Port Huron Statement for the Palo Alto set. Regardless, it’s religion to S.B.F., and his passion for it, which may or may not have motivated his business decisions, had been previously misunderstood.

But perhaps most significantly, Teddy wasn’t another S.B.F. rubber-necker. He’d been following the guy’s career from the earliest days of FTX. In fact, I’m not ashamed to write that he’s the one who first turned my attention to the guy about a year and a half ago, before Puck had even launched. As a result, Teddy has long been familiar with his unique family dynamic. The Bankman-Frieds, after all, are like a wonky academic version of the Kardashians: fervently ambitious, clan-like, and umbilically connected as adults in a way that few families operate.

Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried are trained law professors who raised Sam and his brother, Gabe, in an effective altruist Petri dish, fostering an intellectual underpinning focused on analytical rigor, civic-mindedness and, ironically, consequences. They have also gone through their own unique career gyrations, including work that has been peripheral to their son’s business interests. His brother, Gabe, had become S.B.F.’s sherpa in Washington, amassing extraordinary clout for a twentysomething on account of his hyphenated last name and proximity to his wild man billionaire brother in the Bahamas, whose Dungeons & Dragons fashion aesthetic belied his extravagant spending on everything from stadium naming rights to dark money contributions to the G.O.P. His shame had become their burden, too, in a very deep way. Few reporters could understand the dynamic like Teddy. Needless to say, a furious brainstorm resulted in advance of Teddy’s Zoom appointment with Sam, still marooned in the Bahamas, that evening. He promised he’d have the file over to us in the small hours of the morning.

I behoove you to throw another log in the fire this morning and nestle up to The Confessions of S.B.F., Teddy’s occasionally chilling interview. I’d also like to turn your attention to a very special episode of The Powers That Be, Peter Hamby’s excellent podcast, in which we played some of the audio. It’s the story of our time, unraveling before our very eyes, and precisely the sort of work you should expect to find at Puck.

Have a great weekend,
Jon