Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Finance
Episode: David Morris, "Stealing The Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia" (Watkins Media, 2025)
Description: Stealing the Future is the first book to tell the true and full story of Sam Bankman-Fried and his historic crimes. It chronicles the $11 billion FTX fraud with the detail and nuance of a financial fraud expert and cryptocurrency insider – but unlike any book before it, it also traces the ideas that enabled the crime. “Effective Altruism” and related tendencies, such as longtermism and transhumanism, remain dangerously influential in today’s Silicon Valley. Despite Bankman-Fried’s pose as a cuddly liberal philanthropist, they are now center stage in the global rise of the far right, and also lie at the heart o...