Makena Kelly: Hello, good to be back.
Leah Feiger: He is very happy to be here. And Tim Marchman, WIRED’s director of science, politics, and security. Hello, Tim.
Tim Marchman: Hello, I am very happy to be here.
Leah Feiger: I’m so glad you two are here today. We have a lot to talk about. Makena, you wrote this piece, which our listeners can check out on WIRED.com. It’s in the show notes. But let’s start with the basics here. Who is Aaron Kofsky and what did he do to JD Vance?
Makena Kelly: Aaron Kofsky is a financial advisor for JD Vance. Vance, of course, is on the Senate Banking Committee, so he does a lot of work on crypto policy, banking policy. When Silicon Valley Bank failed, Politico wrote that Kofsky was key to Vance’s thinking when it came to new regulations in that space. Before joining Vance’s staff, he worked for Pat Toomey, and before that he was also at the SEC.
Leah Feiger: And it goes without saying that if the Trump-Vance ticket wins, he’s likely to follow Vance into top policy positions.
Makena Kelly: That’s right. The SEC commissioner he worked for, Mark Uyeda, is being talked about and seen among some Bitcoin insiders as at least an interim SEC chairman if Trump wins.
Leah Feiger: Wow. So why do we care about this guy? Why are we talking about Kofsky today?
Tim Marchman: However, as Makena’s investigation shows for more than a decade, he has been writing on Reddit about his use of a surprising number of drugs, including cocaine, a derivative of the opiate, MDMA.
Leah Feiger: I mean a lot of drugs that we didn’t even know about when this story started.
Makena Kelly: Research chemicals.
Leah Feiger: Research chemicals.
Tim Marchman: Another is tianeptine, also known as gas station heroin. It is illegal in 12 states. It’s an over-the-counter, non-prescription antidepressant that creates an opioid-like effect and has a reputation for causing really bad withdrawal symptoms. And another drug is kratom, which is also, a little bit… It mimics the effect of opioids. It is very lightly regulated, it is not regulated, it is usually bought in convenience stores. I’m sure many people have seen it when they’ve just pulled into a gas station in some parts of the country. So during this time, he wasn’t just writing about how he might have done drugs here and there. He was writing in detail as recently as three months ago about how to smuggle them through the TSA, about its effects on him, about how he dealt with withdrawal and writing in general as if he were addicted to heroin and kratom at a gas station. And the purpose of this report is not to judge him for what he does in entertainment. The point is that this is a person in a very powerful and high position. So this raises serious questions about, among other things, Vance as a manager and an inexperienced politician. And here you have key workers sending all over the internet, all kinds of things that led to a breadcrumb trail that Makena was able to connect to Kofsky personally. There are a lot of questions out there about how this could go on for so long.
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