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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.

Time for your weekly edition of the Defector Funbag. Got something on your mind? Email the Funbag. You can also read Drew over at SFGATE, and buy Drew’s books while you’re at it. Today, we're talking about college football, Reacher, unsalted snacks, and more. Your letters: Elliott:

The 2026 U.S. Open is done, with Elena Rybakina and Alexander Zverev hoisting the trophies. The Defector tennis corps got together to talk about their impressions of the tournament, their feelings on players who didn't win either Final, and the hair situations of the ATP Nos. 3 and 7. Enjoy! Patrick: Lorenzo Sonego, I'm pouring vinegar on you, goat. Two points and all this could have been different. Instead, Alexander Zverev has won as many slams as Sincaraz combined this year and we had to talk about 20,000 ball bounces instead of Carlos Alcaraz's hair. Kathryn: Which is tragic because it looked the best it's ever been, especially considering the, uh, previous situation, and that he was bald at this exact time last year. Between the Zverev slam count and the Alcaraz hair situation, change simply happens too quickly.

In a time when the algorithmically determined social internet serves primarily to trick people into becoming hosts to various parasites or simply drive them mad, it might be perversely comforting to imagine that the people on the other side of the screen are knowing, cynical actors, free from the brain-shredding effects of life online. Noxious as it is, some sort of harmony or human logic would at least be familiar and capable of being understood. But no, those guys are the algorithm's subjects too. Two of those guys are Hunter Biden and YouTube personality Andrew Callaghan, presently involved in what I'll call a crypto scam email whoopsie perpetrated by the former with the unwitting help of the latter. I find it quite instructive. You can see in the odd anti-collaboration something like the algorithm talking to itself. There are no good proper nouns here, only two people driven to make the world a little worse by the incentives of their platforms. Presumably you know who Biden is. The son of former president Joe Biden was a fascination of right-wing media for years, both for the salacious details of his years of addiction and for the various sinecures his father hooked him up with. In October 2020, the New York Post published a bunch of supposedly damning emails from a laptop the younger Biden inexplicably brought into a Wilmington computer repair shop. The laptop scandal was less interesting for its particulars than for the way it turned him into a sort of hyperobject among right-wingers. To them, Hunter Biden was the neat personification of both the personal moral decay and corrupt dealings of their opposition.

Fair warning: This is a short blog post in which you are going to encounter exhausting behavior from some fellas who will leave you pining for the restoration of our culture's sense of shame. Texas beat Ohio State in dramatic fashion on Saturday night, and Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian was all jacked up after the final whistle. After having skipped out on his halftime sideline interview due to a technical delay, Sarkisian decided that he also did not want to talk to ESPN sideline reporter Holly Rowe at the conclusion of the game. As Rowe attempted to corral Sarkisian on the field, he shouted some stuff in her direction, threw up the horns sign, and then ran off. https://bsky.app/profile/awfulannouncing.bsky.social/post/3mvenpr4jw22n

The new Polymarket ad spot opens with LeBron James stepping onto an elevator and pushing a button labeled "SPORTS." This is not some AI-extruded, near-enough visual representation of a generic basketball player of the stature of LeBron James. It is the actual LeBron James, newly a paid endorser of Polymarket, the marginally less sneering and brazen—but still apocalyptically corrupt—of the two big prediction markets. To get to the SPORTS floor, in the ad, actual LeBron will pass betting floors for culture, economy, and weather; above the sports floor are floors for politics and cryptocurrency. Polymarket is working on all of these areas, you see. The elevator doors open and LeBron steps into chaos. It's a scene yoinked visually and tonally from The Wolf of Wall Street—a trading floor bacchanalia, where, sure, there are desks and open laptops and a drop ceiling and fluorescent lights, but what is going on is unmistakably an insane party. The Wolf of Wall Street was queasily delighted with the picture it painted of piratical capitalism as a decadent blowout, and counted (I think) on its viewers to supply the distaste and disapproval. The Polymarket ad is (I think) what you get when a depraved, bottomlessly cynical, and terminally stupid culture discovers a compelling aesthetic template for enjoying the absolute hell out of separating suckers from their paychecks. Martin Scorsese gave viewers a bewildered Rob Reiner, aghast at his own son's greed and lawlessness. Someone at Polymarket looked at everything happening around that and diagnosed, correctly, that America no longer wants a conscience. A Pinocchio-themed Polymarket ad would have Honest John and Stromboli high-fiving over a pile of gold while the pulped remains of the wooden boy crackle in the fireplace. There would simply be no Jiminy. There are so many sell-outs present in this ad. John Leguizamo works a Jugs machine. Eli Manning rampages through it, throwing destructive JACKED-UP de-cleaters at anyone who catches a football, including Richard Sherman. Spike Lee is in there. Rajon Rondo is playing chess. LeBron says, "it's a beautiful day to be great, y'all," and then daps up Derek Jeter. Reggie Bush works a jumbled whiteboard, pointing a stick and shouting, "Trade, ball, money!" Emily Ratajkowski, conferenced in via live video, declares her approval, seductively. People are high-fiving all over the place. The only lyrics to the song playing over the ad are "Win, win win win win."

What does it mean for an NFL team to be "AI-first?" It's a question that football fans have been pondering ever since New York Jets Chief Analytics and Data Officer Iwao Fusillo revealed in May that the organization would be striving to "to think AI-first." It was hard to detect the influence of AI in the Jets' 23-10 win over the Titans in Week 1, but maybe that's just because the paltry competition didn't require unleashing the awesome power of Microsoft Copilot on the gridiron. They might be saving that for Week 2 against the Packers. The organization did, however, find a novel use for AI away from the field. On Aug. 23, a random Titans fan tweeted, "If the #TitanUp lose to the Jets week 1 I will walk from MetLife Stadium all the way to Nissan Stadium non stop." This is the kind of post that yippy social media managers dream about, because it creates the opportunity to use the official team account to clap back, perhaps even epically, and thus earn a lot of replies that say, "Yoooooo, admin snapped on this one [three fire emoji]" from guys who have forgotten the password to their Robinhood account. This morning, whoever runs the official Jets Twitter account made their move, and quote-tweeted the Titans fan's tweet with this:

On Monday morning, the rapper Macklemore posted a lengthy Instagram statement alleging that New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and other NFL owners pitched a hissy-fit to get him dropped from the United States leg of Ed Sheeran's tour. Kraft, who has never shown much interest in music, allegedly called Ed Sheeran to tell him who was allowed to open his shows. According to Macklemore, "Ed also told me that Kraft had rallied some of the other stadium owners and collectively they gave him an ultimatum: if Macklemore stays on the tour, you will not be allowed to play in our venues." Macklemore was set to play Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, which is owned Kraft and his family, on September 25 and 26. Now, Sheeran will play there without him. https://www.instagram.com/p/DdRdsy0m2HK/?hl=en&img_index=4

How strange it is to watch a whole Slam and feel as though we learned almost nothing about the true power hierarchy at the top of the men's tour. In Sunday afternoon's U.S. Open final, Alexander Zverev beat Ben Shelton, 6-3, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-2. Check the box next to every single boring prediction: At least one tiebreak would be played; Shelton would struggle heroically to return serves; Zverev would play visibly nervy tennis in at least one juncture of the match and captivate viewers with his pre-serve ball-bouncing routines, but ultimately keep owning this matchup and lefties in general. We got all of that. The match was neither an especially compelling spectacle nor particularly predictive of the future. I would be somewhere from surprised to gobsmacked if either one of these players won a Slam next season. The central thing I'll remember about this match is that Zverev did not initially realize he had won it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VQEluGKDF4

Ryan Garcia, the often troubled and always magnetic Californian who to this point in his career seemed unsure if he’d rather be an influencer who fights or a fighter who influences, struck a blow for his fighter side on Saturday in Las Vegas. Garcia hit Conor Benn flush in the face with the mightiest right hand he’s capable of throwing early in the second round of their welterweight title bout, putting his outclassed British antagonist down shortly before putting him out. If Garcia’s not on top of the fight world already, he can at least see it from where he sits after his boffo performance.  As four-minute bouts go, this was a helluva fight. Benn’s father is Nigel Benn, a former world middleweight champion who was absolutely beloved in his native U.K. as his fight career peaked in the 1990s. Through those bloodlines and shrewd promotion, the younger Benn became wildly popular back home. Last year, he headlined two fight cards in front of sold-out Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London with Chris Eubank Jr., whose father, Chris Eubank Sr., was the elder Benn’s main rival decades earlier. Eubank Jr. came out on top in the sons' first meeting, in April 2025, by a close but unanimous decision after 12 rounds. Their November 2025 rematch also went the distance, but Benn put Eubank Jr. down twice in the 12th round and the judges had him far ahead on all scorecards come the last bell.