In many ways, James Block couldn’t be more different from Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old M.I.T. and Jane Street Capital alumnus who nuked FTX in a couple years and ensured that the ashes were spread equally across the hallowed halls of Wall Street, Congress, and Silicon Valley before moping around his family’s home in Palo Alto. Block, who is also 30, is from Michigan. He has a degree in biology from Hillsdale College (in Hillsdale, Michigan) and has a M.D./Ph.D. from Wayne State University School of Medicine (Detroit). He is now a resident at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) with a focus on emergency psychiatry and bipolar disorder. He has a Substack presence and is known on Twitter by the handle @dirtybubblemedia, a play on the villainous Sponge Bob character and the fact, as Block told me in a recent conversation, that crypto is “a dirty bubble; it’s a bubble and it’s filled with fraud and just dirty shit going on.”