Tech Brew Ride Home - (BNS) @BradyDale On SBF, FTX, All The Stuff

Episode Date: May 20, 2023

I didn't know the whole story of Sam Bankman-Fried. This book will do that for you. From our very good friend of the show Brady Dale: SBF: How the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's Very Bad Good Guy  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. It's been Book Month, folks. You know that.

And we've got another book to talk to you about. But this is a book that is a little closer to our tech timeline than the last one. Last two, actually. And also, I would say a closer friend of the show to talk about their book. We're going to talk to Brady Dale today, who you've heard him on the show many, many times. giving us the lowdown on crypto. The book that he came out with, was it this week, Brady?

Last week. Last week is SBF, how the FTX Bankruptcy Unwound Crypto's very bad, good guy. Brady, welcome. Thank you. Let's start just because I like the story because it reflects well on the show.

But can you tell me how this book came about? Yes, I would love to tell you that story. So the way the book came about is when the FTX unwinding happened, when the bankruptcy happened, Brian and Chris and I, Chris Messina, have a little Twitter thread that we sort of activate every now and then. And I can't remember which of you guys hopped into it first. I think it might have been Chris, but was just like, this is crazy, right? And I cut and paste something I had written to my Axios colleague, Courtney Brown, in there,

where it was, you know, it was just in the book. It was just sort of like launch a hedge fund. launch an exchange, create a giant token for that exchange that's worth piles of money, bet a bunch of money against the token, have it go to zero, you know, deer in headlights emoji. And it was a little more succinct than that. But you liked it and was just like, can I read this on the air? And I was like, yeah, of course. And so you did. And an editor at Wiley heard it.

And he had already had the idea of like looking for someone who could do a book on SBF quickly. And he thought that was funny. And so he hit me up and asked me if I'd ever consider doing a book. which was very surprising. So I didn't reach out about this at all. And I was just like, yeah, let's do it. And we had a deal done in like a week and a half. And then I had it written, you know, less than two months after that.

And like this was around like the holidays, right? So like it's like you have what, six, eight weeks to do this and you just got to burn through it. I mean, you're a, you've worked in digital media for many years. Like did your blogging instincts come in where it's like, you know, writing a book is a daunting thing? under any circumstances, but like, are you like, well, I can do that and just like burn my brain into these pages? Like, how did the writing process go? Yeah, you know, I am a fast writer, especially. The hard part for me with writing isn't writing.

It's like gathering the material. But fortunately, you know, like doing the reporting and stuff like that. But this was a story that largely I had covered all along anyway. You know, there's citations all over the book. You've seen a ton of them are actually mine. You know, it's just like sort of citing my old stories. So I kind of knew the story. And so I just sort of did the math and I was just like, okay, to hit, I mean, what they wanted from me was 75,000 words.

What they got was 90,000. But I, to do 75,000, I think I calculated it was, you know, 1,500 words a day, which honestly for me is just like really nothing. I mean, that's like I can bang that out really fast. That's that flexing that online journalism muscle right there, yes. Yeah, totally. And so the two friends of mine gave me two great pieces of advice on. the writing thing. Diana Lind, who's done a book, was like, you know, you should write an outline and sort of like really make that your governance thing. And I historically have been

kind of anti-outlines. Like, I don't write outlines for my stories and stuff. But that actually turned out to be really helpful. And when I was making the outline, I decided, and you know this having to read part of the book, that I decided I wanted to do really short chapters because I like books with short chapters. So I just came up with a million chapters. I think my initial list was 60. I think the final book, it comes down more like 47 or something like that. And the other piece of advice was my friend Vigeth was like, you should make a progress board on your wall of some kind. And so I put up a bunch of blue, I put up a bunch of blue post-it notes. I think I put up 70 blue post-notes for 70,000 words. And then I would change blue to yellow as I did a thousand words.

And that was like a fun thing in my apartment, you know, as I was doing it. The last question about this writing process, because it's more fun for us. But when I was doing my book, because mine was chronological too, the history of the internet A leads to B leads to C. But then when I would sit down to do a chapter and I'd have an idea and I'd plot it out of where it was going to go. And I'd literally do like a bullet list like you're describing and things like that. But then as I was writing, it was would find its own way. So even if I had plotted out where I wanted the chapter to go, as I was writing it, it would go in a different direction. And I know this is really sort of

smoking weed in your dorm room stuff, but I kept having the thought, like, so who's writing this book? Is it my brain? Because my brain plotted out, we're going to go in this direction, but as I'm doing it, we're going in this direction. Do you know what I mean? Did you find that sort of like flow of writing that writers talk about? Well, I do, I mean, like, you know, part of because I write fast, I did get there pretty well. But I know what you're talking about. I didn't, I also, I didn't outline at the chapter level.

I only outlined at the chapter level, another sub, there was no internal outlines. I would just, and this is how I write in the real world, too. It's just sort of like I look at a topic and I sort of, I can kind of see the whole thing all at once and then it just sort of comes out, you know? So each chapter is kind of a blog post on some level. They all, to assert, I think to a certain degree, stand alone, though they refer to each other a lot.

So that's kind of how it all came out. But I know what you mean, like I'll have a very clear set of sentences in my head. Like I'll often lay in bed and they'll come up. Then as you start writing them down, it changes or more comes in. But I think that's just because your brain, as it puts the things down there, then they become this physical thing that you're, then that becomes a second reference. And so another part of your brain starts generating other stuff off of those things. And so that's how I sort of feel like that happens. But it is funny how it feels so complete in your head.

And then you write it and you see all these other things and it starts to shift. Yeah, something, something age of AI and stuff like that. All right, let's get into SBF. Let me set the table here in the sense that you can treat me like I'm a total normie. You know, I'm not a no-coiner. I've got coins. You know, I bought Bitcoin the day it crossed $100. That's not OG, OG, but that's not, you know. So like I was there for the ICO boom. You know, I knew people that were doing stuff, you know. But I did. My experience with Sandbank McFried was about six months before the blow up. I start, he gets on my radar and I understand

him to be one of the big players, one of the most trusted, one of the most trusted, one of of the most prominent, right? I have no idea where he came from. So, like, I want to start there. Like, I know that he was a smart kid from, you know, an upper class background, goes to MIT and stuff like this. He works on Wall Street, James Street Capital. What I'm curious about, because I don't know this story, you can't just get from there to billions of dollars. I'm curious about where's the bankroll come from? What's the big trouble? What's the big trade that makes things. So, first of all, when he is on Wall Street, what's his pilling into crypto? Is he watching it? Like, what's his exposure to that? Yeah, we don't. Some of the early

stuff I'm not 100% clear on. But so he was at Jane Street, and what he was good at was, you know, arbitrage trading between like, I can't remember now. I don't even know if I write about it. It was ETFs, but also that's going to come back in a second. So arbitrage is key. Go on. Yeah, yeah. And then also in terms of, you didn't exactly ask this, but I think it's important. In terms of where he came from, you know, his parents are law professors, as everyone talks about, but they're also kind of philosophy professors. You know, they're like big into utilitarianism, sort of like, you know, just sort of boiling good down to like data and estimations and being very, you know, rationalist about it.

And apparently he really bought it into that line of thinking. And then sometime in college, he discovered this worldview called effective altruism, which I deal with a lot in the book. And I actually think is really, really, really important understanding Sam. I mean, people, I take his stance on effective altruism as genuine. And yet I also think I see it in a little bit more of a complex way than most people do. But so Sam decided that the best way he could do good in the world, he was just like, you know, I think I could make a lot of money and then give a lot of it away. And Jane Street was a pretty good way to do that.

He was making decent money. It seems like he was quite comfortable when he left there. He also was giving a lot of it away. So the point you're making is that he already had that view prior to crypto. The view was, okay, the view was, I mean, lots of folks, I know a lot of people on Wall Street, lots of folks tell themselves that, that the best thing that I can do is become a centa millionaire, and then my kids will be fine, and then I'll retire at age 35. That never happens.

And I'll give it away and I'll be a philanthropist. That's what we tell ourselves when we decide, oh, I'm going to be rich, right? Yeah, but it's pretty clear that Sam was, he wasn't waiting to give it away. He was always giving a decent amount of money away and was, you know, well, in the effective altruism world, people don't really sit on it and give, you know, like there's, you know, like the big, oh, what's his name, Will something other, the philosopher at Oxford, you know, he makes like $70,000 a year as a, as a philosophy professor and he only holds on to like 35,000 of it, you know, and he just, he gives the rest away and people are very public, but that kind of thing. So I think Sam was giving a lot of way. And then he was tight with this woman, Tara McCauley, who was the staff, the Center for Effective Altruism, and she was for sure trading. And we know that she was in the mix of the original co-founders of Alameda Research. So I'm pretty sure it was Tara who kind of like suggested to him that there was maybe a rare opportunity for money making, especially for someone with his skills there. You know, when he talks about it, he tells this whole story of sort of he went on this vision quest and he was in Berkeley and he was considering all these things.

I thought I might go into politics. I thought I might be a journalist. I don't know how much I really buy all that. I think he did like a little bit of side trading at Terra's suggestion in crypto and was just like, holy crap, this is too easy right now. Like in 2017 for someone who was sophisticated about arbitrage, he was like shooting fish in a barrel. Right. Right. That's basically, I'm trying to think of when I was in this, like, that's the height of the ICO. Like 2016, 2017, yeah. So, again, for Normies like me, the ICU boom is essentially, and please correct if I get this too simplistic.

But, you know, there's a period after Ethereum where everyone can spin up kind of their own version of something. and so you have a thousand coins blooming. Prejoratively, they're called shit coins or whatever. But essentially, if you have a good idea and you can sell that good idea, you ICO like an IPO, the coin goes public, people think it's a good idea. All of a sudden, it has a billion dollar market cap or whatever. Like there was this period of time where, like, just everybody was like, well, I'm going to have a coin that will do this for orange juice futures or something.

to do the trading places example. But so is that the moment that he sees? That's the moment that he's entering. That's what he came in, though. He wasn't trading ICO tokens. I mean, I find it a little bit hard to believe he wasn't, but I searched and found no evidence he was. He was doing global arbitrage.

So like, you know, he was finding, like, for example, the one that he talks about is the greatest trade of his life that only lasted for a while, but like they made a lot of money on it, was trading Bitcoin between Japan and the US, because there was a big difference. And there was a big difference in price. The problem was the logistics of it were really hard. Like if you wanted to take out cash from Japanese exchanges,

it had to go to a Japanese bank, and then that minute was in yen, and then you had to change the yen to dollars. There was just all these steps. And like when he talks about it, he was like, it was the kind of thing where you had to do it really carefully every day. And if you missed a single step or screwed up a single step,

you wouldn't get the trade closed that day, which meant the next day would be screwed up. Like you basically wouldn't be able to start the next day, But that was their whole thing that just managing those logistics. They had people in Japan, they had people in the US. They were doing all this persuading of banks. We're not running drugs, even though we're walking in here with like a million dollars every day and trading it. So that was his big.

And then he did other stuff from there. OK, OK. Let me again, I'm going to put the history hat on. This exists in the annals of finance where the reason that folks laid telegraph cables for the first time was there was the arbitrage play between the markets in New York and the markets in Boston, right? And then also, like, there's the famous trade for when the Battle of Waterloo happened, and was it the Rothschilds or whatever that knew that the British won? So this exploitation of sort of like, I have information sooner than the market and another place has information.

Like, that goes back to the beginning of time, right? Sure, yep. Are we suggesting that that is essentially, like, Alameda, is founded, I think, in November 2017. Is that the play that he starts it as sort of an arbitrage shop to exploit what he sees as a Wild West where, like, he can see angles like this already and just do that? Yeah, that was the initial idea. And, you know, the way he described it even a few years later when he was on the Odd Lots podcast is, you know, as you pointed out, the market will always attack arbitrages vigorously and find a way to close them, right? But they will exist

for a while and they're exploitable. And they'll exist for longer in newer, weirder markets. And so the thing about Sam is he got in pretty early in this weird market where there was bigger arbitrages. But then his stance later was they kept doing it. And the way he tells it, and you know, who knows what to believe, but this does sound credible, is that as the market got bigger, the spreads, the arbitrage has got smaller, but it didn't matter because you could still make a lot of money. You just put in more money into the arbitrage. And so, you know, and I sort of talked about that in there. So that is what they were continuing to do.

I think until it did get to the point, I think the thing about Sam is I do think he was really smart. But I also think, and this is what a lot of people said to me, that's one of those things that's kind of hard to prove, is it a certain point when like the really? sophisticated arbitrators got into the thing, you know, like the jump cryptic those of the world. That's when they had to start looking for new hustles because they were not going to beat them. Okay, okay, right. Because don't get ahead of my thinking on this. Like, okay, so is he just really got lucky he was he was a talented trader, maybe trained on Wall Street and is like Wild West. Because if you're saying that he, he wasn't an OG or like deep into the space, he's just someone that comes from Wall Street and sees an opportunity.

And so, right, was it just timing? Like, why does this guy, there should be a thousand guys on Wall Street that could have seen that opportunity? Is there anything that you can point to for why he was the one that could see it and exploit it first? Well, someone's got to be first. I mean, you know, like, I quote in the book, what's the, what's his, I haven't talked to him a lot, so his name isn't jumping to mind. But, you know, he's also doing great today, kind of like Sam. I mean, he was never as big as Sam, but he did basically the same thing at the same time. Only he chose to exploit arbitrages between ICO coins.

Like he liked that market, you know. And so that was what he was playing. He made a lot of money. And, you know, he's still doing fine in the world. But, you know, the world's gotten more sophisticated, but they've, he feels that they've kept up and they're still on a niche. But they never, the thing is to get access to those really big numbers. Sam is a visionary and a creative guy. I think one of the ideas was, like, we're going to start getting beat on this eventually, unless we just own an exchange.

So like, let's launch FTCX, you know? Yes, okay, but this is getting ahead, because there's one more very key question here, be it poker, be it, I'm, you know, you hear stories of people raising a small hedge fund or something like that. Someone's got to bankroll you. Where did the bank roll come from to even begin the this trading and like? Well, this is the thing that's really confusing. I don't really know.

Like a bunch of EA money came in with Tara McCauley when she joined him early on. as was been well reported by multiple people, he every, all of those people got pissed at him within like a few months and left and most of that money left with him. But like a little bit stayed behind, like, you know, a few millions stayed behind and they were still doing the Japan trade and they were making like a million dollars a day on it. And so like they were able to get a bunch out of that. And then, you know, and nobody really knew about it. I didn't know he existed then. I wasn't paying to I wasn't paying to FTCs, but they're making like a million dollars a day. that starts to be like real money right and so then they start you know fundraising around like there's a

scene in the book where i think it's like early 2019 or maybe 2018 he manages to meet with a bunch of like people who'd become super big guns later like fred erisome and there was arranged by um one a file coin and um and uh the um the guys from a poly poly chain you know like those were some those are some people who would end up being huge later, none of them went in. Well, Fred Erison went in later into FTAX, but they didn't go in at the time, but it still sort of shows how he was starting to oppress people and get access. And then they did their own kind of little ICO. They sold FTT, you know. Okay, hold on, hold on. Okay. So let's imagine that, and if you know the numbers, or give me a ballpark, like, so like, let's say he raises a couple million dollars, but hits this

golden trade, this Asia trade, the Japan arbitrage, and then all of a sudden is making a million a day. So even if it was like a buck or two that he started with, if you're making a buck a day, that can add up fast. And all of a sudden, after a month, you've got $30 million. Okay, I see that. I see where that can happen. Then these bigger players coming in, like, is this the nature of crypto markets where, like, you see who the whales are? You see who the people who are being successful are and so then they would gravitate to him sort of. Wait, what do you mean? What do you ask? So the secondary money that comes in, like you were just saying the people that became big later,

like how do they know that he's being successful aside from the fact that, you know, if I'm making a million dollars a day and I go and tell somebody that they'll like pay attention to me. Do you know what I'm saying? Like was there some nature of the blockchain and the crypto markets where people can see who's on the winning side of trades that helped them? Oh, yeah, I think, yeah, there is. I mean, that gets into deep stuff. But even Sam talks about this and some of this,

like, you know, he's like, we know who the whales are, we see them moving around. I mean, one way in which they do know each other, I should say, actually a big way that they know each other. And I know this was an important part of a thing Sam was really focusing on is, you know, a lot of the people who have real money are trading OTC over the counter.

And so that's just, you know, you call someone up and you're just like, I'm buying, I want to buy a million Bitcoin. Right. So if you come in with a giant bag of money, people take you seriously. Yeah. And those and those OTC guys are all talking. And obviously the big whales and crypto want to know who the OTC guys are talking to. And I'm sure they don't say everything, but things start to go around. And like even I remember, you know, Sam, while Sam says this wasn't as important for them, you know, the cinematically named Kim Chi Premium, I know not everyone loves that that term. But, you know, Korea also had a pretty decent arbitrage for a while.

And a lot of folks credit Sam with finding that. He says it wasn't as important to him. It was really the Japan trade that was more important to them. But, you know, what true or not, apparently, and I didn't know it then, I heard the, I heard the concept of the Kim Chi treating him going around when I was writing about crypto in 2017. Weirdly, I think I heard of it too, so I might have heard it from you. Yeah. Yeah. And so it was floating around.

And so if people who were deep in were associating that with Sam in some way, you know, his clearly his legend was growing among people who cared about crypto on that level. But yeah, I mean, one thing for the book I do want to highlight as long as we're talking about this is I think one of the most emblematic moments of Sam's character is, you know, there's a one of my sources was someone who knew a lot of these OTC guys was kind of she never worked for Sam, but she was working, you know, kind of consulting with him. And she was someone who's kind of a little more pure crypto. And so she liked to think about the philosophy of crypto and like what your coin said about you. That was the ways she thought. And so she asked Sam early in their work, like what is the cryptocurrency you find most interesting? and his answer was one she'd never heard before. His answer was Tether, the big stable coin, which is like, I don't know,

it's just to most people is the least interesting of all the cryptocurrencies. But it's like what Sam found interesting was I think speaks to a lot about Sam. Sort of, am I right? Because Tether is sort of like the underlying sort of pipes inside the system that makes the system. Yeah. Okay. So Alameda is essentially a trading desk, right? a hedge fund on steroids or whatever.

So then let's go to FTX. So why start FTX? And I know that the answer is also going to be, you can do the token. This comes after the ICS stuff. But if you own a market, then you can see what's going on in a marketplace, right? And that's great intelligence.

Explain to me where FTX and the token come from. Well, so yeah, the FTCS in the token comes straight out of Alameda. And, you know, when you look at the old documentations that investors passed around about Alameda, as your point, you know, you've got it, you've got an exchange being started by a market maker. And every exchange, you know, market makers are the people who, the reason why everything will trade is because there's market makers on there. Like, the reason there's always someone to buy your Bitcoin is because market makers are there to always buy. Can I pause and again do a normie thing, which is, and this exists in the stock. market as well. When you sell your Apple stock, it's not necessarily, I mean, eventually it goes to a buyer, but functionally it doesn't. There are market makers there that will take your trade. And then they're doing arbitrage, like, you know, pennies of our arbitrage, half a half a pennies, a tenth of a penny or whatever. But like, they're there to make the market smooth. And as when you want to sell, it's immediately executed. It's on them to then find the buyer. And when markets break.

It's not actually, it's, I mean, it is ultimately because the sellers or the buyers go away, but it's ultimately because the market makers can't function. So just a little explainer there, but keep going. Yeah. So they were, so Alameda was a big market maker and then the market maker was going to start in exchange. And like everybody loves market makers, like the world needs them to run. But also market, there's not, it's not like an exchange has one market maker. There's multiple market makers on there. They're all kind of competing with each other.

They don't love the idea of having a big market maker like that has sort of an inside track. That makes them nervous. And that was a concern that people had about investing in FTX early on. You know, even race capital, their very first investor acknowledged that in their, in their, in their, in their prospectus about investing in sort of reasons why they're investing in FDX. Like Alameda being there was a concern. But so, like the way FTCX was funding. is they create this FTT token and they sell it to a bunch of investors, and that's where the money came to launch it from. And having an exchange token is super normal. Almost all exchanges have them.

Where FTT kind of took it further, where FTCX kind of took it further than other exchanges did is one of the big features of FTT is you could use it as collateral for making directional, making directional bets on different tokens and leverage directional bets. Do we know where that idea came from or from who that came from? I feel like most anything crazy came from Sam. Like it just he was he was the he was the guy. Another thing, another important point to sort of to show how Sam was always willing to question everything is, you know, eventually Alameda would also run an OTC desk.

Obviously, once you have a big pile of money and you're in crypto trading, you open an OTC desk. And one of the big innovations that I'm told that they brought to OTC like no one has told me this was wrong in my book and this is a couple people said this to me is they were the first to do OTC via API. So the way OTC used to work is like you'd get into a telegram chat, you'd float your things, you know, it was still kind of human. And they were like, screw that, we're just going to do an API. And so you can trade much faster. The other innovation brought to OTCs is I guess, as I understand it, there was just kind of a standing agreement among

all the big desks, especially in Asia, that you took a half percent on all trades. And Sam was like, no, we'll take a quarter percent then. Or say it was something, you know, something like that They're like, we'll undercut whatever the standing thing is, even if it means we lose a little bit of money. You will rarely go broke in business by just undercutting your competitor's margins. As Jeff Bezos said, your margin is my opportunity. Let me, okay. So on the one hand, we have Alameda doing good trades, but as you said, it's getting harder to make the money that they saw at the beginning. Start an exchange, and why not?

Because that's a good way to raise money because you can do the token. As we said, the ICO boom, any project. Whether it be an exchange or not, token, if it's a good idea, it floats, it has a value. And then, so if you have the hedge fund, essentially, the Alameda and you have a functioning marketplace exchange, then you can see the inefficiencies in the market. Do you think that that was the, well, but also you could marketplaces are good businesses, because as you say, you could always take a pennies on every trade or whatever. What was the primary motivation, do you think, was it just to, oh, I have the opportunity to create an exchange that's a good business, or I have the opportunity to have insight in the

market so I can keep these trades going that were my cash cow. I think both, honestly. I think Sam wanted to make money absolutely everywhere he could make money because he wanted to be the biggest philanthropist of all time. And so he needed to make an epic pile and then proved to everyone that he was the smartest person about fixing the world but it had ever lived. So I think that was his big vision. And, you know, it makes sense early on. Starting an exchange is hard because you need to convince people to use your exchange. There's already some big exchanges out there already.

One could argue that they're late to the game. But once you've got people in the door, it's a wonderful business. Every time someone makes a trade, you make a little bit of money and basically risk-free. I mean, it's just getting them there, you know. But they had them there. Middlemen, gun a middleman, yes. I think the thing that made people within FTX so mad about the unwinding that happened is because it was so unnecessary. But I think from Sam's perspective, FTX couldn't be, the Sam glomerate actually couldn't be as big

as he needed it to be unless Alameda had some more gigantic wins. They had a war chest that they could plow back into FTX and have it overtake finance eventually. I really think that was his goal. So it wasn't enough to have a really strong business, which he had. He needed to like go into crypto winner and win against finance in there. All right. Crypto winner happens in, what, 2018, 2019 again, you know, the timeline. No, this is the new crypto winner.

This is the second. Oh, okay. Sorry, go ahead. Well, the thing that's confusing about Sam to me is, I mean, I'm kind of glad you brought that up. So, yeah, there was the 2018 crypto winner that came out of the, after the 2017 ICO boom. And the thing that's important about Sam there is it seems like he made money through that.

Like he was smart enough to understand how one functions appropriately. That's interesting. So he knew that. And yet he made, I feel like me and all other people, I mean, I don't trade, but still I have an instinct for the world. All of us who were around in 2017 as Bitcoin crested in November 22, we were all like, okay, everyone needs to chill out now. The party's over. We're going to go into a dark time for a while. They're like, we all understand that.

But what's weird is that Sam and Alameda, they didn't play that downturn as smart as they. had played the prior one when they had just showed up. That's just very weird to me. But it suggests to me that they still, they just felt the need to still make big swings and try to, and try to come out of Crypto Winter 2 as the dominant force. Okay. One more completely unknowledgeable question. To what degree is any exchange, be it Binance, FTX or whatever, any offshore exchange or, you know, names that you could name that I don't know. Is it listing these shit coins? Is listing these unlistable coins, these things that somebody dreamed up.

To what degree is that grabbing market share because it's like, well, I want to go trade Doge.7, but no one else will trade it and then we'll trade it for you, or list it for you? How much of that is part of the success here? Well, I mean, basically everyone believes. The story about Binance is that's why Binance is Binance now. I mean, Binance came along and said,

we'll list all this crap. And also in that era, you know, a thing that's not talked about too much, but in the 2017-2018 era, while these new tokens were coming out, they also made money on it because, you know, I'm told, and there's no documentation of this, but it's sort of an open secret that like the minimum to get listed on any exchange, finance or whatever, was like a million dollars. You walked in, you gave a million dollars to the exchange, and then they'd start talking about listing.

So you didn't just get all of the volume of the excited new traders who were just like win listing, you know, so they could buy. it you also just got a million dollars up front. So like that was really nice. But I don't know, I don't think it was still happening like that in the 2020s, at least not that big of money because it kind of been heated away. But like there's no question that Sam was eager to list things. You know, I mean, they were doing synthetic stocks on there. You know, the first time I ever wrote about Sam was he was hopping to make a derivative off the comp token, which was the compound market maker's token that sort of inspired you by summer in 2020.

you know, they were the first to do a derivative off of that. And so that was the first time I ever talked to him. So they were clearly eager to get things on there because they knew that's a way to excite people and get traders going. So I am going to jump ahead because I want to get to what brings it down. But so if we can get to the 2020s, like essentially FTX becomes a hugely popular exchange. The coin becomes hugely valuable because it's a hugely popular exchange. And interrupt me if I'm a little. lighting over too much. But FTCX, Alameda, and Sam become huge players in the space.

Again, I haven't read the entire book, but in the book, there's a suggestion from you or someone else that the effective altruism stuff, is it possible that it shifted his risk profile in the sense that it might have inspired him to take more risk? Not because who cares, but because like you make bigger gambles or maybe it is who cares because because he he wasn't a crypto-o-g you know what I don't want to put words in your mouth what do you think of what I'm saying right there yeah no that's an argument I'm making the book so I mean first of all like you know hasid kraschi speaks to this too he's a big if you see in the space also an effective altruist he's just like if you get an effective altruism you will become less of risk averse that's a thing

that it will do to you so first of all like that that is just first thing Sam has said multiple times in various interviews and stuff that early on in the Alameda days, he was always game to basically do these, you know, bets that could crush the company because as far as he's concerned, it was just sort of like his money and his investors money and kind of who gives a rat's ass. But if they make a ton of money on big bets, then they can do a lot more good in the world. So like that was their stance. And so I think that continued to inform Sam's thinking.

knowing how it's crucial to understand about Sam that he thinks in this probabilistic way. It isn't just like, I think, you know, I believe, I think we all think probabilistically to a certain degree, but I think mostly, most of us just think, is this a good idea or is this a bad idea? It's kind of like, you know, it's largely binary. Sam trained himself to not really think like that. So I don't, you know, no one can really know, no one can see inside his mind. But it looks to me like what happened with FTX is they started playing with money that they shouldn't play with. And in Sam's mind, what I see going on in his head, the wheels turning is, I know how to make lots of money. We can make this back.

We can overtake finance. We can be the biggest thing in the world. And then when we're the biggest thing in the world, no one will have ever known that there was ever a whole year and will cure malaria or whatever. And so like that's worth it for the world. That expected value is much higher than the expected negative value of me doing the wrong thing. I want to come back to this in the end because I feel like you believe him. on this and I want to find out why. But okay, that's a common thing of anybody.

This allows fraud. I think you say it. I bring up the page. I have it highlighted. But this is how anyone commits fraud where they think, these are your words. Harm committed on the path to justice can't be justified because you can't actually know what the justice is,

that the justice will come after the harms you're doing. But if you believe that, that, again, I use the poker analogy. I don't know if you played poker I did in the early 2000s. When you have bad beats, and it's like, all right, that's when you're at your worst because you're like, fuck it, I'm going to win this all back by being smart on the next hand, right? You know?

And what you're saying there is that, well, now I'm getting ahead of where I said I wasn't going to go. You believe Sam when you think that his mentality was, I'm smart enough to fix this. And in the end, it'll be like, yes, I walked up to a poker table with $1,000. I went in the whole $3,000, but it won't matter if I walk away from the table at the end of the night with $10,000, right? I'm smart enough to do it. And in the end, it won't matter how I screwed up or who I hurt. Because in the end, we'll just walk away with the money, and then I'll be giving it away to malaria.

Right. And that's, I think, the crucial point is. So it's not just, I'll walk away with the money, I'll close the hole, but it's worth the risk because the entire world will be better. So it gives him moral permission to screw up. Right. Just as, you know, utopian revolutionaries had moral permission to execute heretics because they're counter-revolutionary. You know, it's for the greater good. I mean, it's the same thing. Or you mentioned things like, you know, the Bolsheviks and socialism and communism. Oh, so we have a huge famine in Ukraine, but we're going to, in the end, have a completely utopian agricultural system where everyone, all the Kulaks will be broken and everything will be equal. Yes. Before I get to the next question, what do you make of him walking back the EA stuff now?

I don't think he's walked it back. What the quotes that I'm thinking of are him saying, well, this is just what I say to people that I'm going to give the money away. No, that's not what he said. I mean, remember the famous quote on all of that was in a conversation with a journalist who covers, yay. You know, that's the, that's the Fox interview. What he was, what I understood that as being, I mean, I also kind of believe him when he says he didn't really think he was going to publish it. You have to like read it in that way. But I think what he was saying is, you know, I talked about a lot of woke stuff.

I sort of spoke the language of the mainstream media. Oh, that's true. Right of nonsense. But he wanted, he wanted to do his things. Look, and also this is really crucial to understand him is I do believe he wanted to do the charitable things. It was ultimately selfish in its own way, right? Like Sam got thrill and utility out of people thinking he was very smart and good. Some people want penthouses above Central Park, and some people want to think they're the best person on all of history.

That's what Sam won. Or the classic example of smartest person in the room. I'm validated by if in the end I went and cure malaria, it's because I was the smartest person that could do this. So it doesn't matter my fuckups along the way. It doesn't matter people that I heard along the way, because in the end, I was the only one that was smart enough to do this. Yeah, and I think evidence for that comes, you know, New York Times had some good reporting that sort of had evidence of he had PR teams who were making sure people knew about good

things he'd done already. Like it wasn't just important for him to do good things, but he also needed to get credit for it, right? Like so I think that's crucial to getting him. So, you know, me saying, I believe that he was charitable is not me saying, I think he's the best guy on the planet and we should send him for easy to fix the world. I just thought of this. and if this is to psychoanalysis or whatever, like, to what degree would you speculate that

maybe that's for his parents as well or for his background for like, no, this is the utilitarian stuff. I am doing the philosophy that I was brought up in. For sure, yeah, yeah. And also, you know, I know people who say like, you know, every kid in the, you know, the chunk of California that he grew up around in kind of elite California, like they they were all planning on being billionaires, you know. And so if Sam was like, well, I'll be a billionaire too, but is there a way that he could be like the even better billionaire? Better billion.

Okay. Was there one key thing that brought it down? And if the answer is no, because I didn't read this part of the book, was there the one trade? Like I read, you know, the long-term capital management book 25 years ago, whatever, like there was maybe more systemic, but then there's also that one thing. where it's like, oh, crap.

Oh, yeah. We don't know. We don't know that. I think it was just, I mean, it was just they were spending customer money. Like, that was the bad trade. Like, you know. But it's the Roadrunner thing of, or the Wiley Coyote thing of like, okay, I'm running,

I'm running, I'm running. And suddenly the cliff is not below me anymore. Like, do we know, like, even on a macro level what that was? Was it just the blowups of the other stuff? Well, I think the, The big, okay, so if we were going to put it into terms of a trade, I think Alameda and FTX, they knew they had a giant, they knew they always had a giant store of FTT, and they thought that that would hold on to more value than it did.

So it's just like, I think they kind of thought, worst case scenario, we always sell some FTT and we can fill the hole back in, and it won't happen really fast. You know, if there's, if there is a big lesson of the last several months, it's that capital moves more quickly than it ever has. And we've seen that both in actual banks and we've seen it also in exchanges. And so if you're going to assume you've got a week or so to deal with,

you know, a capital crisis like that is not correct anymore. You need to think in terms of a few hours. And, you know, we saw that at FTX and we saw that at banks. The crucial point out, for your listeners, you don't really get crypto. And this is something that I didn't really conceptualize, honestly, until I was writing this book. Exchanges are sort of like banks because you can take out

sort of loans and make bets and stuff like that. But they're also crucially, completely not like banks in this way. And this is a thing I try to really make clear in the book. But they're not like banks and that you deposit money in banks and then they intentionally take it out to have people put it to work elsewhere. You know, like there's only ever 10% of the money in a bank. I'm not being, you know, tinfoil hat here. This is just how banks work. Exchanges work completely differently than that. All of the money should always be there all the time. And people will trade amongst each other, in that money. So it doesn't matter if you're losing money and I'm making money or whatever, you can shake the box up as much as you want. All of the money is always still there. And so

it shouldn't matter. Like if everybody completely freaks out and hates your exchange, it should all be withdrawn in an orderly fashion. Yeah, that sucks for you. You're not able to pay your payroll any longer, but like the money should always be there. In fact, every time someone makes a trade, because a little tiny slice of that moves from their balance sheet to your balance sheet, you actually, it gets safer with every trade, because then that becomes reserved. And that's the weird thing about that, again, never having worked on Wall Street or whatever,

but philosophically, I've always been like, because you're printing money by being on each side of each trade, like you should never, an exchange should never blow up. It's easy money. It's one of the simplest businesses that exist. Just getting people in. That's the only hard part, but then after that, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Well, I'm preventing giant hacks also. Well, in this, well, actually in all cases now in these days. Right. Well, that's also why you have guards at banks and things like that. And we're talking about exchanges, but you have cops at malls or whatever, or security guards at malls. So greed in the end. Because again, there are concepts like Chinese walls where if you're a marketplace and

you're a bank or whatever, like is it just greed where you, you know, you like, well, we're a little short this month, so let's grab from over here. Like, is that also sort of like the macro sort of what happened here? Yeah, I mean, I think it just must be wildly tempting for an exchange to know that like 99 days out of 100, your withdrawals are a sliver of your total deposits, you know? And so you're like, yeah, let's just make a. that with like 0.5% of that, you know, like, we'll, you know, we'll be okay. I just, that must just be a constant temptation for people who run exchanges, especially since we know,

you know, people who run exchanges tend to be fairly mercenary folks, you know, by and large. So have you ever read the, that long-term capital management book? It's called why, oh, sorry, when genius failed by Roger Lowenstein? No, I've heard it mentioned a million times. I definitely need to read it. One of the reasons is because these were the greatest mathematicians and like physicists, like they hired the smartest people. And so the reason that they collected all this money was they're like, based on our models, this should only ever happen once in a trillion years. Now, by the way, in 2008, like people had similar models and things like that. So it's, again, another story as old as time. But that book does a really good job of like the best

minds that they could acquire were like, okay, you can't lose because the math says this is a one in a trillion shot. It's a Black Swan thing. Like Black Swan came after that book, right? Yeah. And so like that's the thing is like, I mean, but in the end, for all of finance, you only ever blow up because of leverage and debt, right? Or like stealing from Peter to pay Paul. Like if you just run the business as a It's a good business. Anyway. Yeah. Well, so a quick point on that, Brian, just another book, All the Devils are Here by Bethany McLean. You know, a point that she makes in that book that's really great is kind of like what you said, but a little bit different.

You know, a thing she argues in that book is people talk a lot about how like, oh, the models said we were fine. And her argument is like, no, the models were always right there. What the models actually said in 2008 was there's only a 5% chance of that, which is 5% is pretty big, you know. But 5% can happen tomorrow. And if you do it on a day-by-day basis, eventually 5% comes up, roll the dice enough times. Right. So everyone was like, oh, it's just 5%. And they took that as meaning nothing.

That's not nothing. You know, like, that is not nothing. And so it's like, people were like, oh, Wall Street was misled by the models. It's just like, no, they misled themselves. The models were right. The 5% day came, you know. The models always said there was a chance. So, yeah.

Okay. Let me ask you the question that I alluded to before, which is, You believe him that he wanted to do this for the effective altruism EA thing, that the ends justified the means. I'm going to be... And by the way, and I'm not saying that Bill Gates is equivalent, but Bill Gates is a person who made a lot of money and has spent the second half of his life being this great person on high

that gives away his fortune that goes to conferences and cures malaria. And that's something that would be a good life, seemingly, right? I'm just curious why you believe him versus are you still being conned by the con man who sold you why he did this because you want to believe that he had a reason for doing it other than greed? Well, wait, fun facts on Bill Gates, just as an aside, you know, if you've read Capital in the 21st century, one of the points in that book made. makes, it's really great. You know Bill Gates has made more money off of the money he made at Microsoft than he ever made off of Microsoft? Interest is a hell of a drug, man.

Yeah, it's so wild. Anyway, so he's real safe now. But I actually think the point that I understand where you're coming from in that question. I actually think the point I'm making about Sam is more damning than that he's just a crook. I'm lumping him in with all of the self-righteous monsters who have done horrible harm in the world because they thought they were more right and just and upright than everybody else. Smartest person in the room. Yeah.

There's a level in which you could argue I'm like lumping in with Fidel Castro, right? Like, I mean, I'm lumping him in with people who thought they knew better, which I think are some of the worst people in history. So I honestly think I'm damning him worse. You know, like we understand the kind of guy who wants a mansion and a bunch of cars in his backyard. and like those guys exist and they kind of suck, but like, I don't know, the world knows how to deal with them. This guy is pulling a trickier trick. That's interesting to me because I don't, this is where I think, and I'm not coming down on you,

I have no interest in debating you on this, but I think you're wrong about that. So you're like a person that wants the cars and the houses and the yachts and whatever is different than the person that wants to cure malaria. But if in the end, it's both out of ego, it doesn't fucking matter. I mean, one is a different kind of ego, a different flavor of ego, you know, but we're all going to die someday. And some people are like, I just want to rack up all the points that I can before I die versus the person that's like, well, if I rack up the points that will last after me, then

maybe I'll live forever on some level. It's all ego. It's all fear of death. It's all like, did my life matter? my important, it's all the ego. So I hear you, I hear you, because there are people that I know that make a lot of money, you never hear from them again.

But if you make a lot of money and the point is, I want to be heard throughout history for centuries, I'd argue that's worse. Well, yeah, I mean, any of the people who actually get there, I guess what I'm saying is just like, I feel like a lot for the year, for your average rank and file rich guy at a certain point that the charm of the hedonic treadmill kind of wears off and then you sort of like,

you know, you kind of chill out and like whatever and like the economy knows, Bosom knows I deal with those. But yeah, there's the, you know, there's the truly mad tycoons, you know, like the Carnegie's and the Rockefellers and all of them. And then, yeah, who knows how to rank them. I'm just saying that I guess what I, my controversial take here is that like is be skeptical of like, we got sucked into Sam because we liked his righteousness. And I'm actually saying, like, righteousness is kind of a red, is not kind of, it's a red flag. That's the controversial. Yeah. And that's in the book. And I do agree with that because, yeah, no, I was going to point out some people that I thought were righteous, but, you know, fuck that because I'm sure you could poke holes in

everybody. But the quieter, rich people, the quieter smart people, in my experience are probably the smarter and more interesting ones. One of my favorite rich guys just really quickly is the dude who he was one of the first columns I ever wrote when I was a campus columnist,

but he's the dude who started the duty-free stores and he wasn't a mega-billionaire. He was a minor billionaire. He had like six billion dollars or something, whatever. I knew his name at one point, yeah. In the late 90s, he went to give away give away all his money. But one of the things I liked about him is he really tried to keep it secrets, you know? It turns out it's really hard to keep it secret giving away $6 billion.

But like, so people did find out. But, you know, he was not trying, you know, he had done well. He'd just been a business, been at a certain point. He thought enough is enough and let me just give it away. That to me is like kind of righteous. And I also, you know, the duty street stores probably weren't horrible for the world. So, you know. Yeah. I think I made this point on the show before too. Like, I know people that got rich at Microsoft and got rich at Google. And, you know, And some of them built their houses, and then they just play Call of Duty all day, right? Or like, this is the example I've used on the show before. Bob Dylan still tours, I think, or at least as of recently, like 150 dates a year.

And the reason is because at some point when you face your own mortality and you've been Bob Dylan or you've been Bill Gates or whatever, you're still going to fucking die. And one of the quotes that I've said on the show, I think, before is that, Bob Dylan reached the point where he's like, I'm just a song and dance man. Where it's like, this is what I'm good at. I go on the road and I do a show. At some point, you become a craftsman, a crafts person, where it's like, I'm going to die. I have all this money, but there's the thing that I'm good at that makes me feel good. And I'll just do that till I die.

Like, you could be a furniture maker or something. Maybe that's why Daniel Day Lewis has retired from acting. Okay, before we close this, Brady, you have come on the show so many times. I always come to you to be like, what's going on in crypto right now? It's been a while. In fact, if I was more organized, I would know when it was. You were the first person to turn me on to defy, to NFTs. I don't need you to give me like a big dissertation, but like give me one or two of the big

stories in crypto right now that I would be completely. completely unaware of because I'm not there. Okay. Well, first of all, before I do that, let me just say, I'm going to, I'm going to flash the book here. Just leave your listeners. You should buy it. I'm going to, no, I'm going to, I'm going to pip that at the end. I can do that. I'm a professional host, man. All right, all right. I want people to know it's a light. It's a light book. Here, I'll tell you what. I'll tell you what. It's a, it's a thin book. It's called

SBF, how the FTX Bankruptcy, Unwound Crypto's very bad, good guy. I will recommend it, but I'm going to do that at the end. Okay, sweet. All right. Um, okay. So, um, I mean, what is going on in crypto right now that you might not know about? I mean, one of the weirdest things that's happening on crypto, I can't remember if you've dealt this in the show. I, you know, I frequently listen, but I don't know. I don't always listen. Right. Um, is, uh, you know, NFTs and, uh, and altcoins have come actively to Bitcoin. Bitcoin, yeah. I wanted to ask you that. Go ahead.

Yeah. So, uh, you know, Bitcoin, uh, had this upgrade that in, uh, and enabled a certain amount of programming called Taproot. And somebody came along and was just like, hey, there's a way that you could do NFTs on here. You could basically connect an NFT to one stat, like the smallest unit of a Bitcoin and hold that record within the record of the blockchain. And so people started making NFTs, and that became really popular.

And then folks made some meme coins on there. Because unlike Ethereum, all you can really do is just create a coin, just like this is this. On Ethereum, it can have functionality built into it. it because it's a full computing suite. So you can really only do mean coins on Bitcoin, really. I mean, it's just like a concept and a point. But like that really blew up in a big way.

And it actually made it for a brief period, miners, you know, the people who secure the Bitcoin network were making more money off of transaction fees than they were off of the new tokens in the Coinbase, which that almost never happens. It's like extremely rare. So that was a big deal. And it could actually be a sign that like the lightning network will finally take off. You know, more and more things are starting to happen with lightning.

So lightning is the big layer two on Bitcoin in which transactions are faster and cheaper. And, you know, much like with Ethereum and it's L2s, there wasn't much motivation to really get serious about the layer two's on Ethereum, as long as Ethereum was cheap. But then when it got more expensive, then people started using the second layers, which also, opened up a bunch of new functionality. So we might see that come to Bitcoin soon, and that would be cool. Can I ask on that real quick? Does that again, completely uninformed opinion, but what I've heard from absorbing, does that play into the narrative that in the end, potentially 30 years from now,

the only thing that will be the winner will be the one thing that had the best brand, which was Bitcoin, so that if you can do these other things on top of Bitcoin, like that just adds to the value of Bitcoin and Bitcoin will win in the end? Well, I think sort of, I think if you look at the world, there's usually two things. You know, the world, any... Coke and Pepsi. Ford and GM, yeah. Yeah, there's two.

So I think you could do a lot worse than betting on Bitcoin and Ethereum. And then I'm like, you're probably right. I mean, that's sort of my stance. You know, I say that in the book, too, is that like Bitcoin and Ethereum and also maybe Dogecoin, but mostly Bitcoin and Ethereum, I think, are the ones. Another way to think about it, though, and this sort of goes to another big theme that's going on right now, which I think you've dealt with a little bit, but I'd have a different spin on it, is lots of new blockchains are being started, not just blockchain projects, but fresh new blockchains. And usually they're just, the crux of them is like they're faster, they're more secure. They're like, whatever.

They're just technically superior, sort of the argument. And lots of VC money is going into these chains. And I am unconvinced that they aren't all just hustles to, you know, dump on retail people because what happens is that the token launches, it pops, a bunch of people buy it, the early investors get out and they just, you know, and maybe they save a little to see if it comes together later, but they just leave. And I think my hot take on that is, you know, blockchains are built on technology, just like nations are built on land. But it is no smarter to pick a blockchain because someone is technically smart who launched it than to have someone who's an expert in soil science be the person to launch a new nation.

Blockchains are a set of ideas. They're not just, and fast transaction time and quit settlement is not an idea. And so yeah. I want to poke at that. And then I got one more for you. So what you just said was there's a bunch of VC money flooding into new chains because they learned from the Solanas

and others that if you can hit the moment right, you can cash out quickly? Is that I'm not- Yeah, well, it isn't hard to hit the moment right at all. It's just it launches, it pops, you sell then. It's like it's shooting fish in a barrel. It's every time. And so what are these new projects? Like because again, unless it's, maybe you're just, maybe you're just, maybe you're just,

You're saying this, unless it's just completely cynical, like, are there good ideas? Are there even proposals here? Or is it just you put famous people together, a plausible idea? And it's just like, it doesn't matter. As long as it hits a billion dollar market cap, then we can sell the coin. Yeah. I mean, look, I don't want to say the people doing it are crooks. I think a lot of them, I think a lot of the founders, you know, they're engineers, they're

nerds. They really do think that like what matters is they have like a slightly better tax. technical stack, right? But I do view cynically the VCs who are telling people these things are a good idea. I mean, hey, whatever, you know, hedge your back, get some other things out there. You know, Ethereum and Bitcoin are sure, janky as hell in a bunch of ways. So maybe they're right. But yeah, I mean, like two of the big ones, Aptos and Sween are just the Facebook, you know, it's just move. It's just, you know, move for you with the thing that Facebook tried to do with the thing that Facebook tried to do.

Yeah, with Libra, okay. Yeah. And then there's just a bunch of, I don't even, I've hardly written about any of them because it's just like there's, it's, there's just tough to keep track of like the, but they're getting big market caps? A lot of them, you know, do pretty, pretty well out of the, out of the box. And then of course, the BCs sell a bunch. So yeah, I don't, I just, I guess, and I, it just frequently blows my mind when I get

a new press release about just like another one of these are punching. Do you know, this is me vaguely being a journalist, but I only ever invested in one thing that had a coin. And there's in the SAFT, for future tokens thing, like you can only sell on a schedule, right? So like in theory, you could, even if the coin goes public, you can only sell 5% here and here and here. Are the early big money investors able to just sell their whole bags

when it goes public or whatever? I think there's usually limitations on it. I don't follow like that deeply. in the weeds. But like, look, if you, if you buy for a dime each and it pops to $4 the first day it comes out, you don't have to sell. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, the math, the math works out way better than waiting 10 years for an IPO. Okay, last question, second of the last question. This AI stuff, again, I, you know, I've talked about this a lot on the show where folks that are in the Web 3 space, folks that are in the crypto space, again, I like to claim that in November, I called it that like, oh, dude, the attention of the VC class and the hustler class is going to shift quick.

What are, number one, you seeing in terms of the attention given to crypto? And number two, what are you seeing in terms of the people that are crypto developers, crypto believers, crypto, I'm building something here. What do they think of this AI moment? So in my view, the attention had already moved away from crypto before the AI thing really started popping. So to me, it was no big deal. You know, I saw somebody tweet recently as if they were like making some intelligent point

that like, you know, 70% of the entrepreneurs that they know who were doing Metaverse and Web3 have all moved to AI. And I was just like, yeah, bye-bye, assholes. Like, we all know that, like, most of the people out there doing stuff. The pretty people always move on to the next party. Right. We know who they are. Yes, exactly. Yeah, it's just like, whatever. What point do you think you're making? Who cares? Like, goodbye to those guys. But I do, I think, I don't, I am not seen anything too substantive in terms of crypto incorporating AI yet I think they're all interested in and I think they think it's cool you know I know a lot of crypto people who are like using chat gbt to write their emails and stuff but I don't think any of them feel like a really cool

concept has hit them and I've seen people do experiments like using AI to generate lines of NFTs and things like that but that's not that's just poking around of the edges that's not but do you feel any sense that from the from the OGs not the pretty people oh god the sun has moved away from shining on us? Oh, for sure, but I mean, that's everyone expected that to happen. That's going to happen. It's kind of good. It's what they call the, this is Biddle season.

This is where the true believers stick around and they come up with the next idea. One thing I will say, actually, on the AI thing, a good, a cool thing I saw, and I didn't take into this. I should write about this, but someone posted something, and there's a lot of stuff with AI and coding right now. But someone was like, oh, wow, AI is pretty promising for helping you, like, if you can sketch out the rough line of of a solidity, you know, solidity is the way you code on Ethereum. If you can sketch out a rough concept there, AI can like take it, you know, take it, you know, get it into like proper code like pretty fast. You know, this will open up a lot more people developing in solidity because it's going

to be a lot easier to learn. So that's a real, that's a real thing. Yeah. So I think that will be a way that we'll see it. But wait, I was, there's something else I wanted to say that was related to another question. Oh, well, I probably lost it. But anyway, I guess that's the, yes. The sun has moved away, but everyone expected this, and that's fine.

There's plenty of money in crypto for people to keep developing. Oh, I know the big thought I wanted to get folks. Good, good. Is, you know, I think there'll be another really big market in crypto. You know, I think there's too many smart people in it now for that not to happen. And I guess in my thinking right now is, you know, obviously I have to write about all the like regulatory stuff that's happened. But I'm trying to start to once again look to the edges of the space because that's where the next boom is likely. to come from. People are like, oh, it's like when the U.S. finally has regulatory clarity,

that'll be the next boom. And I don't think that's true. We didn't even get into that. But yeah, go ahead. Well, I think it's always an interesting new idea. And like, you know, keep in mind, like, the last boom came from NFTs. NFTs are a concept that was just sitting there Moribund from 2018 through to when they popped up. It's like sometimes it takes a while for people to get excited or to find the thing that makes the new idea work. So it'll, it will be, some set of entrepreneurs who do something genuinely new and cool that I'm sure there's not even a sign of it out there yet that will lead to the next exciting moment. And so that's, I'm kind of trying to search for that now. I was early on NFTs in 2018. So, you know, hopefully I can spot the

I can at least point back in the past. If anyone can do it, you can. So, uh, let here's my proper, uh, pitch. SBF, how the FTX bankruptcy unwound, crypto is very bad. good guy. I liked the fact that these are three to five page chapters. It is like reading a blog post. If you like me needed to get quickly updated on this story, where this came from, how it happened, and also educated on how all the crypto stuff works, this book is fantastic. Did you read the audiobook yourself? We were talking about that before. No, I'm so bummed about it. No, you shouldn't have. I'm telling you, it's a slog, dude. Don't do it. But my book is, you know, my book is very voicy.

I, you know, it's like, it's funny and it's like sarcastic. So I would have liked it to have been in my voice, you know, because it's a voicy book. Look, the bottom line is it's in Brady's great voice. If you download the audiobook, it's not in his voice exactly, but it's fine. I think it's great. I also, oh, fuck, this is how unorganized I am. Brady, where are you right now so we can find you? Who are you working for these days?

I'm at Axios. I do a daily newsletter with my co-writer, Crystal Kim. So please come subscribe to our daily newsletter that lets you know what the hot new stuff is, and, of course, I'm on Twitter. But, yeah, besides the book, which people should buy, it'll change their life. There's our daily newsletter to Axios Crypto. I can be forgiven for the fact that all sorts of people are moving to different places. Places are blowing up.

There's BuzzFeed motherboard. Okay, Axios. Axios seems to be healthy. Find Brady on Axios. What's your Twitter handle? Brady Dale. Brady Dale. And then I think we follow each other on Blue Sky.

No, I'm not on Blue Sky. I haven't come to Blue Sky. Oh, okay. I'll get you an invite. Oh, I don't know if I'm going to come. Are you just going to walk away? I would love, I kind of want Elon to wreck Twitter so I can, I can end my addiction to social media.

I mean, I know it's very bad. That's what I was saying. You want to walk away. Well, I've been saying on the show that I'm going to alert the listeners when functionally for the podcast, Twitter is no longer useful for me. We're getting closer to 50%. Oh, yeah. Yeah. The amount of people that are jumping on a blue sky is making that.

But we can talk about that offline. Brady Dale, again, SBF, how the FDX bankruptcy unwound. Crypto's very bad, good guy by the book. Very quick read, very easy read, very insightful. Brady's the best. Come back anytime, sir. Thank you.