Jeffrey Tucker on Sam Bankman-Fried marketing FTX with social justice causes

He was a physics major who got a lot of social justice in his head and began to realize that he was looking for a new angle on how to market cryptocurrency.  And the anti-government philosophy of the usual crypto crowd of "buy bitcoin to get away from the government and secede from the Fed and have your own private money and change the world toward freedom," he went the opposite direction and realized that he could market his little business with some version of ESG and DEI and all the fashionable social justice causes.  So he came up with this idea of effective altruism.  And so he wasn't in it to make money for himself.  He was in it to support good causes and to give all of his money away.  And he drives an inexpensive car and he dresses in a shabby way, and it was all virtue signaling within the crypto space.  And this was new, actually, for the crypto world which had usually been about kind of a cowboy anarchism: "let's get away from the government to do our own thing."  He went the opposite way.  So he developed very tight relations with the left basically.

~ Jeffrey Tucker, "FTX cryptocurrency scandal is just the beginning," Will Cain Podcast, 0:15 mark, November 15, 2022