Unchained - The Chopping Block: Gabriel Shapiro on Why Sam Bankman-Fried May Be a ‘Sociopath’ - Ep. 555

Episode Date: October 12, 2023

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Tarun Chitra, and chop it up about the latest news. This week, the crew is joined by Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel at Delphi Labs, to talk about the key points in the criminal trial of Sam Bankman-Fried and his lackluster defense strategy so far. They also delve into Michael Lewis’ book and his depictions of SBF’s “lore and backstory,” and discuss how SBF’s “quirks of character” may have actually enticed investors. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Overcast, Podcast Addict, Pocket Casts, Stitcher, Castbox, Google Podcasts, TuneIn, Amazon Music, or on your favorite podcast platform. Show highlights:  How Haseeb's previous comments on Sam Bankman-Fried’s intentions "didn't age well" after developments in the trial Why Gabriel believes that SBF is a "sociopath" and should have taken a plea deal if offered Shortcomings in the defense’s strategy and why Gabriel believes they’re “grasping at straws” How the fake numbers of FTX insurance fund highlight the weaknesses of a centralized exchange Why Matt Huang, cofounder of VC firm Paradigm, agreed to testify in such a high-profile trial, and why Haseeb as a VC himself wouldn't have done it Whether SBF understood the technical components of crypto and why he sounded like ChatGPT in his responses, according to Tarun Whether VCs are to blame for investing in FTX or what lessons VCs need to take away from the SBF debacle.  The differences and similarities between SBF and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao Hosts Haseeb Qureshi, managing partner at Dragonfly  Tom Schmidt, general partner at Dragonfly  Tarun Chitra, managing partner at Robot Ventures Guest: Gabriel Shapiro, General counsel of Delphi Labs Previous appearances on Unchained: Are DAOs Strong Enough to Survive the Regulators? What Does Mango Markets Exploiter Avi Eisenberg’s Arrest in Puerto Rico Mean for DeFi? Disclosures Links Previous coverage of Unchained on the trial of Sam Bankman-Fried: Sam Bankman-Fried Trial: Here's Everything That Happened So Far SBF Trial, Day 1: Possible Witnesses Include FTX Insiders, Big Names in Crypto, and SBF’s Family SBF Trial, Day 2: DOJ Says Sam Bankman-Fried ‘Lied’ While Defense Claims His Actions Were ‘Reasonable’ SBF Trial, Day 3: Why a True Believer in FTX Flipped Once He Learned One Fact SBF Trial, Day 4: SBF’s Lawyers Annoy Judge Kaplan, While Wang Reveals Alameda’s Special Privileges SBF Trial, Day 5: SBF’s Defense Finally Found Its Legs, But Can It Counter Caroline Ellison? SBF’s Lawyers Could Be Annoying the Judge. How Might That Impact the Trial? Did Sam Bankman-Fried Have Intent to Defraud FTX Investors? Here’s How Sam Bankman-Fried’s High-Stakes Trial Could Play Out SBF Trial: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Lawyers Might Try and Win His Case The High-Stakes Trial of Sam Bankman-Fried Begins: What to Expect FTX Used a Fake Number to Beef Up Its Insurance Fund: Gary Wang Previous coverage of the trial elsewhere:  NYT: What FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried and J.P. Morgan Have in Common Forbes: Sam Bankman-Fried Knew Plenty About His Alameda Research Hedge Fund–And Sent Details To Forbes Just Months Ago Tarun's tweet on insurance funds being onchain Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We're dealing with, you know, almost like a natural-born criminal sociopath here. He just happened to focus his efforts on crypto. And I think, you know, the trial is sort of bearing that out so far. Not a dividend. It's a tale of two-clan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance. Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. I'm into trading firms who are very involved.

I like that eight of the ultimate puns. Defi protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. welcome to the chopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intros, first you got Tom, the Defy Maven and Master of Memes. Next, we've got Tarun, the Gigabrain, and Grand Puba at Conlet. Today, a special guest, we've got Gabriel Shapiro, general counsel of crypto Twitter, also of Delphi Digital, and then I'm Hesib, the head of hype man at Dragonfly.

So we are early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat that nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice. Please see Chopin Block.X, for more disclosures. Gabe, welcome to the show. We have been tirelessly following your critique and your contextualization of all the crazy stuff happening in crypto law this year. And you've been a very outspoken, just thinker commentator on everything happening so far. Everybody so far has been following the SPF trial. We started talking about it last week. What's been your sense just as an observer, not even talking about the specifics and the details?

What's been your sense so far of has this lived up to expectations? Has it been below expectations? How do you feel about the drama as it's playing out? out. Yeah, the trials lived up to expectations, I would say, in the sense that, you know, we're talking big numbers, really obviously bad acts, and, you know, SBF very much in the hot seat and taking a lot of blame and a lot of big hits in the courtroom. Yes. So when we recorded the last show, this was right when Michael Lewis's book had just been released. And so nobody had really read it yet. There were a few people who kind of dumped details or juicy anecdotes that were in the book. But we

started running through it and basically, you know, crypto Twitter managed to digest almost everything within a couple days. In the last episode, we had a debate more or less between myself and Turun about SBF's intentions. And I got a lot of heat for that conversation where I was saying that I thought that SBF more or less was trying to do what it said on the tin and kind of lost his way. And Tarun was arguing that he was a self-conscious fraud the whole way through. I think I have to leave my words on that. Yeah, I was about to be like, I have to. I don't think. you got much ground stand on. No, no, no.

I would say that my argument did not age well, reading some of the anecdotes from the book. So in the book, one of the most striking things that SBF reveals in this book is some of his, I guess his personal diaries where he talks about,

there's a quote where he's talking about dating Caroline. And Caroline, I guess, like they wrote each other in like these blog posts, essentially, where they talked about their feelings and the pros and cons

of having a potential romantic relationship. A very kind of, I don't know, you know, very rationalist kind of, you know, post-emopathic thing way to navigate relationships. But one of the things that SBF wrote in trying to essentially tell Caroline, hey, you probably shouldn't date me, is he wrote, there's a pretty decent argument that my empathy is fake. My feelings are fake. My facial reactions are fake. I don't feel happiness. What's the point in dating someone who you physically can't make happy? And in many of the anecdotes, so I've probably gotten through about the first half of the Michael Lewis book.

I haven't gotten through the whole thing yet. But he talks at length. There's a lot of stuff in there about SBF not feeling emotions, having sort of Anhedonia, feeling extremely disconnected from, you know, anything and just kind of being driven purely by this kind of cold calculus or probabilistic thinking. And it really seemed, the more that I read about it, the more it really seems like he was a pretty troubled person. and it does kind of seem like there was a lot more power-seeking behavior even earlier on than I originally understood in Sam's story. So I definitely take it back. I still don't think that he was a self-conscious fraud in the sense that he was trying all

along to make FTX a big gigantic Ponzi scheme. I think it's more that he was clearly somebody who was, he seemed to have a lot of emotional issues. from a very early age. And it seemed like he had very weak scruples and was, you know, I don't know. It's hard for me to really understand the psychology of this person, but it does seem like he was a pretty very conflicted person from a very young age. I disagree with you in one way.

I think the moment that they did the private sale of FTT in 2018 to a bunch of market makers at 90% below. And then they had to keep increasing inflation to keep up with the way their growth was created. that was the moment the Ponzi scheme started. And then at that point, it's like, okay, you could shut it down, but they did. And like, to me, that is the original sin, right? Like, none of these books talk about that because I guess, like, I don't know, none of them like talking about actual finance, even though they're talking supposedly

financial novels. I just think he was a sociopath, quite honestly. I mean, that's Martin Schrelli's take for what it's worth who, you may argue takes one to no one, right? But, you know, he sort of read Michael Lewis's book. and distilled the important parts of it, but interprets the facts very, very differently from Michael Lewis and essentially says, yeah, we're dealing with, you know, almost like a natural-born criminal sociopath here. He just happened to focus his efforts on crypto. And I think, you know,

the trial is sort of bearing that out so far. The defense is not really finding, not really finding much to really hang their hat on here, at least, you know, as they're limited to really cross-examining witnesses and so forth. We'll see how they do when they present their case. Well, actually gave a question for you. One thing I've been observing is that, at least just reading the transcripts, is that the SBF lawyer seems to just not be able to get anything like any objections in, like almost all of them are getting overruled. It's actually like very one-sided that the, yes, the US, like, have you, like, I don't know how normal that is in this stage, but like can you give us some context about that like yeah i mean i'm not i'm not a trial lawyer myself

you know but i follow these things to an extent and uh my sense is you know really there's kind of like two strategies there's a saying right when the law is not on your side pound the facts when the facts are not on your side pound the law and the unfortunate thing here is it seems like sps lawyers have neither on their side the facts are clearly against him there's an ocean of evidence against him. And there's no real clever legal arguments here either. So they're grasping at straws. They're desperate. And, you know, their desperation shows in the fact that the kinds of things they're trying to raise are very tangential things relating to SBF's lawyers and the fact that maybe he had some ultimately altruistic motive deep down inside that led him to do all this. And, you know,

the judge just sees the weakness of these and the irrelevance of these. And he's just not letting them make these arguments, and I think rightfully so. Another thing, by the way, just to give some context to listeners, while we are recording this episode, it's during Caroline's testimony. So we're kind of mid-way through that, just to give you some temporal context in case there's some crazy bombshell we don't cover on today's episode. Yeah, I mean, at this point, it is bizarre to me, given how the trial has played out thus far.

And maybe if I can just very, very briefly summarize kind of what's played out in the trial, So far, we've had Gary Wang, who was, I believe he was the CTO. We had him to testify that, for one, Gary was instructed by Sam to give Alameda a special status in their liquidation engine such that they can never be liquidated. They had unlimited borrowing, I think up to $65 billion credit line at one point that was demanded by Sam. I would just make it bigger, make it bigger, make it bigger, make it bigger. And we learned as well that FTX's insurance fund actually did not exist.

So you might know that most exchanges, centralized exchanges, tend to have these insurance funds, such that if there is a bad liquidation, that the insurance fund eats the loss instead of the loss getting socialized among all traders, which is how it used to be back in the olden days. FTX claimed to have an insurance fund much in line with other big exchanges, but their insurance fund was actually completely fake. There was a Python script they wrote that basically just took the daily trading volume and multiplied it with a random number close to 7,500, and displayed that as being the size of the insurance fund, which is just, it's so, like, it's so brazenly just, like, not even trying.

And of course, nobody, no, there's a question nobody even asked. Nobody even wondered, like, huh, I wonder if FTX really has the insurance fund, which just kind of shows, I think, Terun, you tweeted about this, like how many things, I think, that centralized exchanges cut corners with. Like, it's only really now after FTX that we have proof of reserves, and even still proof of reserves is so nascent and it's so kind of not really. Well, it has no proof of liabilities. It only has proof of law.

Without proof of liabilities, with just having proof of reserves, it doesn't really prove what you would want to prove. And with these insurance funds right now, like the insurance funds are not on chain. Most of these kids, they're not anywhere. It's just a number on a UI. And as it turns out, and to be a chill, the only way to actually really have proof of liabilities is basically defy, where it's like something where you know the entire history of the set of all wallets. It's like pretty hard to imagine the Centres on any ever being able to prove to conclusively. Certainly proof, right, certainly proof in the hard sense, right? And I mean, for actual companies off-chain things, I mean, this is why the securities laws exist and have extremely elaborate independent auditor requirements, right? And even then, there still can be fraud, right? If they defraud the auditor, but, you know, it's pretty hard, right? Wait, in the Caroline testimony, she just said something absolutely amazing, which is when they were dating SBF, that he had ambitions to be the president.

of the U.S. Honestly, this is like one of the funniest pieces of testimony of this entire thing. I'm going to send the... Okay. All right. Please interject if anything else good comes out, but we'll continue discussing in the meantime. What's mystifying to me, I mean, SBF, it's hard to read the transcripts or some of the recountings of the trial and not think that SBF is losing horrendously.

And of course, he's paying a lot of money and there's been multiple reports that he's running out of money to be able to fund his own defense. You know, when you are in discovery, you get access to what the opposing party is going to argue, what they're going to say. I don't understand how they could look at the lineup of witnesses against him

of basically every single one of his lieutenants, almost everybody in his organization has flipped at this point, and not think like, wow, we're fucked. Like, why are we wasting money on like a, a not guilty plea. He should have caught a plea. Yeah, I mean, I think he should have copped a plea. And look, we know this guy's personality.

We know he's a very stubborn and somewhat delusional person who always thinks somehow he's going to pull a rabbit out of the hat and win, even when FTCS was collapsing, he was still trying things and still convinced to the bitter end that he was going to find some Saudi Arabian financing or something to save it all. Right. And so, you know, ultimately it is the defendant's decision. whether to cop a plea or go to trial. And, you know, I think, I imagine that his lawyers probably told him that the odds were stacked against him and suggested that he plea. You know, I'm speculating here and that he somehow is convinced, you know, that he can still win. And we also, I mean, there also is a natural thing, right? Right now we're watching the prosecution put on its case. We have not yet seen the defense's case. But they are looking somewhat unprepared. You know, it's hard to imagine. you know, the, the strategy that's been leaked for them is two things. Number one, blame Fenwick and West,

their lawyers somehow for being responsible for this, or at least for convincing, for showing that Sam didn't have an intent to defraud, which would take care of some of the charges. And number two, to portray his motives as being altruistic because he was part of effective altruism and so forth. And, I mean, if that really is their defense, I mean, I think both of those are very, very weak. defenses and I don't think it's going to be successful. So I've seen some stuff in the trial about how the judge is pushing back on some of the reliance on counsel defenses, but it sounds like that is their primary defense is that, look, I relied on the advice of counsel. Why is the judge pushing back on some of these things

or not allowing them to claim that, like, hey, my lawyer told me to do that. They wanted to mention it in the opening arguments. SBF's defense wanted to mention it in the opening arguments. And he said, no, I'm not going allow you to do that. It can be very confusing to the jury at that stage. However, let's see how the trial goes. Let's see what the witnesses talk about, and you may be able to introduce this during the course of the trial. And in fact, that is what happened today. In Gary Wang's testimony earlier today, he did bring up that it was the lawyers that gave him the loan documents that turned out ultimately to be using customer funds. And so him having opened the door to this issue

of lawyers on cross-examination, Judge Kaplan did permit SBF's lawyers to further inquire about the lawyers and Gary Wang's interaction with them, et cetera. So it is coming up so far. And indeed, we don't yet know how much of this they'll be able to bring in when they present their case, but they might be able to bring in a fair amount of it, particularly since the prosecution has somewhat open the door to it during their case. Okay, so I'm betraying not knowing very much at all about litigation. So even though this is their primary defense, they are not guaranteed to be able to raise it depending on like how the cross-examinations play out?

Is that how that works? Yeah, basically. I mean, it has to be relevant to the case, right? So, you know, the judge will weigh in on the things they want to introduce as evidence as they introduce them, right? So that's basically what's going on. He wasn't willing to let them raise it during opening arguments. And you could see why, right?

Because, you know, it would just be very, until you get into the weeds of, okay, you know, what exactly did the lawyers do? Why are they relevant? It could just be very confusing for the jury on the very first day for SBF's current lawyers to suddenly be talking about his prior lawyers. And like, that could totally throw them off. So he just didn't allow it at that stage. But I think ultimately it will be.

allowed to perhaps show that SBF thought that he was acting in compliance with the law in certain things that he did, particularly setting up this North Dimension shell entity, you know, where basically to the public and to certain other parties, it might look like they were interacting with this North Dimension entity when really was FDX behind it all. There actually could be a defense on that particular claim, you know, if indeed the lawyers kind of advised him that it was legal and didn't point out that it could be misleading and so on. There are a bunch of other claims, right? And that's only one, but, you know, it could be relevant. So let's talk about the actual Michael Lewis book. So I'm about halfway through it. I'm not at the

part where things start breaking yet. I'm surprised at how, one, it's a very good read. Like, Michael Lewis is obviously a great writer and he knows how to make people really, you know, jump off the page and make them sound very, right now, I'm, I'm not. I'm at the part still where Alameda and FTCS sound like a swashbuckling adventure and everybody sounds like very bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. Tom, you've read the entire book and The Fall From Grace. What's your feeling about the book on the whole? Do you recommend it? Definitely.

I mean, it's a pretty quick read. And it is engaging. And it also goes more on sort of the SBF lore and backstory, which I feel like is actually kind of the interesting part for me. Like, I already know about the FTX bits, but kind of getting, you know, like the summer camp stories and how we got into Jane Street. Like, that part is interesting. I think he does a very good job, I think of painting the chaos that was internally to FTX and Alameda talking about them losing a bunch of this ripple by accidentally sending it to this like Korean exchange and then, you know, eventually finding it later. And even the whole move to the Bahamas, there's a sort of

anecdote floating around around, oh, they wanted to design the new FTX building as an F and the side should reflect Sam's hair. But that was actually an anecdote from the architects who were hired to build it, and that spec came from some random person, not Sam, because they had like no direction internally as to like how they should actually build the new headquarters. And so there's all these random bits, even like Sam would randomly lock up employees vesting FTT for longer than it was initially agreed to, and did he just sort of unilaterally do that. And so he does a very good job of just sort of painting the chaos, which I think is probably also the image that Sam is leaning on that there was no intent. It was a general sort of chaos, but there's no sort of

intent to defraud people. But I think with anecdotes coming out of this case, and in front part of people's testimony, it's really hard to sort of back that up. I think even in Gary's testimony, he talks about Alameda being able to trade faster than everybody else, which directly contradicts a lot of Sam's tweets. And so, you know, it's worth reading just to get some of those back by color, but, you know, with a grain of salt, you know, with a lot of the details coming out of this trial. Yeah, speaking of that, I mean, the, you know, we sort of knew, I think by last year that all the stuff about Alameda not having privileged access was all untrue. And a lot of the deals kind of came out publicly before the trial itself.

Interestingly, Matt Wong, one of the co-founders of Paradigm, which was an investor, a big investor into FTX, he testified on the stand, basically more or less testifying that he was misled by SBF and that, you know, they made incorrect representations to them about the status of Alameda. and I think there, I can't remember if there were other misrepresentations that were made beyond the status of Alameda that Matt Huang testified to, which is interesting because as a VC,

it's an odd position to be in of being on the stand in a very public trial to the point where, you know, mainstream press is reporting on what this big VC is talking about on his own portfolio company and basically saying, like, yeah, this person defrauded me. I don't know what you guys thought of that because it was a very unique moment.

I would not assume that a VC would want to testify in a trial like this, especially when they, you know, it's one thing if you're like flipping on your boss. It's another thing if you're voluntarily going in front of it saying, yes, my portfolio company defrauded me. Yeah. Well, I mean, most of my private practice in crypto, you know, has been representing, you know, projects when they get VC funding, right? And so I have a good sense of this. And I think it was really a double-edged sword for him, right? Because on the one hand, you know, it's clearly in his interest for the world to know that that he was literally, that paradigm was defrauded, right? Because there is a saying in the, you know, corporate law realm, the one thing

you can't protect against is fraud. You can't prevent fraud, right? Because it's someone doing something bad on purpose. They give you fake information. You could do all the due diligence in the world. You're doing it based off fake information, right? So it's clearly in his interest to portray that. On the other hand, you know, how tight was their due diligence process? There was a lot of FOMO during the bull market. You know, it sounds like SB. Jeff definitely played off that and tried to limit the information he would give. So there may be some due diligence failures here that were done. And that would reflect poorly on them. The ultimate decision not to request a seat on the board, as would be very typical for a, for, you know,

I think there were series A or series B at the time company. You know, I mean, they almost always have at least one outside director. And it should be setting off alarm bells, you know, when that's not the case. So there was definitely some FOMO going on here. I think even though they said they performed a lot of due diligence, I believe, you know, on the one hand, SBF carefully tried to create FOMO and limit how much due diligence they could do. And sounds like they somewhat fell for that, you know. So on the one hand, he looks good because he was actually defrauded and there probably wasn't, you know, anyone could have been defrauded. But on the other hand, I think, you know, they somewhat lowered their standards beyond the typical of what corporate governance,

they would accept. And you've got to think that somewhat reflects badly on them, but, you know, maybe they've tightened up now and they've learned their lesson. I guess, like, one thing I would say is maybe I'd ask you the question, has Steve, like, suppose you were in Matt's shoes, like, would you testify? Like, say the USA came to you and was like, hey, like, do you want to testify against Sam? Like, suppose you were, like, what would you do? What would you have said? Yes or not? my assumption is that I would not want to do that. I mean, again, I don't know how this plays into the optics, as you mentioned, Gabe, of like, look, I want to show the world that I was defrauded and that this was not like me fucking up

in due diligence. This was this person made willful misrepresentations to me, and that's why, you know, this investment went so far south. I can see that being a part of it. In general, I feel like it's just such a, it's such a terrible thing to be a part of, is like the criminal trial of somebody you invested into. My instinct would just be, I just want to be as far away from that as I can. I mean, it's not just also the time and you have to go, actually, you know, go to wherever

the trial is taking place and just be a part of that entire process, which sounds just, you know, painful and time-consuming. But it also, obviously, you know, there were many investors in FTX, right? So somebody, you know, maybe somebody less credible than, then Matt might have been willing to testify to the same thing. Wait, I thought Alfred Lynn was also listed as one of the potential. government. Is he?

Yeah, if I remember correctly, I said. Yeah, I thought he was on the witness list also potential witness. No, no, no, no. That would be much bigger news. Sure. No, no, no, that would be bigger news if he was going to testify. I definitely would have seen that if he was going to testify. I don't believe so.

I mean, correct us if it were wrong, but I don't believe Alfred Lynn is going to testify here. I mean, the other thing is like you want to be away from the headline, right? You kind of want to bury this thing. Like, I mean, that's why Alfred almost certainly would not want to testify in this thing because he doesn't want to call attention to it. Doesn't want to be back in the headlines, right? It's sort of like this re-traumatization. He is on the list. There's a, here's the article, here's a Bloomberg article talking about the filed witness.

Is this like people who are actually going to testify or people who are willing to testify? They're potential witnesses. So I don't know he's actually getting it called. Yeah, see, the list of potential witnesses provided to jurors on the first day of trial. It included him. Really? Yes. Wow.

That's what I'm saying. I don't understand the calculus of these decisions, but I don't think Matt's the only one. Speaking of jurors, I mean, those are the two largest investors. I think Martin Schrelli also had a nice rundown of jury selection, which was super interesting. First of all, of someone from Insight who was an investor in FTX was part of the jury selection process. And obviously got dismissed, but it's very funny that of all the people that could have gotten drafted for jury selection in New York, someone from Insight was part of the potential juror list. And then Martin talked about sort of the strategy for how to like, you know, win over a jury. I can't remember the nuance there, but I think he was saying, like, look, there's some banker and there's some, like, stay at home mom or something like that.

And it's like, these are the people that you're going to want to, you know, win over. But there's some sort of strategy, I think, overall to, like, trying to get some sort of mistrial or trying to make sure there was, like, not consensus within the jury. Strange. Yeah, I don't really understand what would lead you to want to testify in this case, because I would assume you just want to, you just don't want to be in the headlines. I don't know, Tom, what's your intuition? Yeah, I was also very confused, unless it. it's, you know, maybe having some sort of internal sense of wanting to bring justice. But, like, I don't think Matt's testimony or any investor's testimony is going to be

essential to closing up this case because it was not a, you know, solely an issue of defrauding investors, but it was more this broader story around defrauding users. So I don't know. I was also a bit confused, but maybe there's some backstory there that we don't know. Yeah, I mean, I do think there is some positive benefit to be like publicly displaying that maybe you were defrauded. But I think I will say, yeah, I kind of agree, though, that like, I don't think the investor's testimony matters to the criminal case or it doesn't seem like it does at all in any way, shape, or form. Like, if I replayed the trial with or without investor testimony, I would expect the same.

Well, it does because part of the charges are a securities fraud, right? I guess that's true. That is not customer facing. That is investor facing, right. Yeah. Okay, okay. Then that's fair. that's right. That might be the real reason like the this was sort of needed too.

Yeah. And that can that plays into other charges, right? Because all they need, all they need is one fraud thing to stick, right? And then they can get a bunch of sort of like money laundering and bank fraud things that like stem from that. Right. So yeah, there's there's there's there's there's kind of like a domino effect here. You know, they they kind of have a case that they misled investors. And then they also have a case that they make. led customers and also stole money, literally stole money from customers. And then either, proving either one of those things, I think, could lead to some downstream charges. And that all plays into sentencing and prison time and so forth. Right. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Like, the overall outcome, I guess I was thinking more of the binary outcome of like any charge sticks versus none. But you're right that like the overall compendium of possible outcomes does seem to change a lot with investors. I mean, I guess I were the government, I would want the investors to have to find them. That, like, makes tons of sense. Yeah, that makes sense. So what seems

surprising and very un-SBF-like is, so, okay, the trial is going terribly for SBF, right? He's spending a lot of money on his defense. Is it a thing where you can just, like, rage quit a trial and be like, look, there's a waste of our time. I'm paying my lawyers. Like, this obviously he's going to drag out for a while. Why don't I just give up? Clearly, this is going against me. Judge doesn't like me. Like, my counsel is fucking up. Like, let's just call it quits and say, you know what, I'm going to switch to a guilty plea. Like, we're done. I mean, sure, he could do that. It wouldn't make sense for him just to, like, just do a guilty plea. It would only make sense, you know, if the government would strike some sort of deal with him, right? And I think this is very-

deal. He just should go through with it. Right. This is very SBF reasoning, right? Because, you know, He's the one always, he's super into these asymmetric bets, right? Where even if there's a small chance of winning, but it's a really big win, you know, then you should do it, right? And I think that's exactly what's happening here, right? So only if the government would offer some good deal, right, would it make sense for him? And at this point, why would they ever offer that? They're winning, right?

They're kicking his ass. So I don't picture that happening. I think this is going to go to the bitter end. It doesn't feel like the trial is going to last that long, right? I mean, I would just assume that he's wasting so much money. Yeah, but, you know, I think you can't think about this from like a Kelly sizing kind of perspective. It's like, this is effectively your last game. You know, this is your last bet.

So you have to go all in there. There is no sort of, you know, next round. And so I agree with Gabe. I'm guessing that's kind of the calculus that he's doing. It sort of makes sense. At the same time, I would think a very SBF thing to do is like look at the prediction markets and see what the chances are that he wins the actually wins any of the particular charges. And then to say, like, look, I'm just going to get lighter sentencing and save some money. if I just plead guilty, possibly.

Well, it takes us one juror who's sympathetic with him. I mean, it's, yeah. I was looking at the Schrelli tweet, and he said there's basically everyone else on the jury thinks he's going to convict, but there's one banker who has some sort of form of cancer. And he's like, you could probably get him to like get some sympathy and he's sort of, you know, maybe towards the end of his life. And so maybe he can get him to quit. Yeah.

So he's like, that's kind of his best bet. But I don't know. Wow. Just pure speculation. Wow. Man, Schrelli is really playing another level on this trial thinking, breaking it down. Yeah, he's been going to this trial. Yeah, I read that.

That's crazy. He's turning into a hell of a courtroom analyst. I mean, I'd rather see him on the Law and Crime Network than a lot of the people they currently have. He's pretty good. He's had quite a comeback. I've been very impressed at this, like, Schrelli 2.0. I think the contrast between him and SBF is very striking. It is funny to think about how.

that flipped over like the last two years, right? Like if you like plotted the chart of their, their like success and failure. Very true, very true. They are kind of the inverses of each other. When do you think they were like the equal? What like what point in time? Like when in 2020?

I think this slope might have been so severe. I think a little after Luna, a little after Luna. It might have been like as just straight through the floor like there's zero derivative, you know, like actually I would say, I would say like a year ago. Because remember, like, after Luna crashed, somehow Sam got all these, like, puff pieces written about him that were like, oh, this guy is the JP Morgan. The new JP Morgan, that's right. Yeah, do you remember those? I think the media is probably the media should be just as embarrassed as the investors for not doing diligence.

Like, I thought that was some of those things were just like ridiculous. Look, I don't think that's fair to blame the media for that stuff. I mean, it's like how, if we did not know, how would they know? Did you see that spreadsheet that Forbes released for like what qualified him as a billionaire? That thing was more embarrassing because like it came out in the case because of the amount of tether they said they Yeah. Well, also the I think there was some anecdote also in the book about SBF being on you know, Forbes top 100 wealthiest list or whatever in 2021 or something like that. And you have them having to do some rough accounting of his net worth to present to Forbes. and obviously it's like nonsense because they had like a bunch of locked SRM and like FTT and shit as like part of his net worth.

And then, you know, this sort of story comes out and like the Forbes journalist who was working on that was like, oh yeah, I knew from the moment they, they set that spreadsheet that there's probably some bullshit going on because, you know, SBF's net worth sort of calculation looks totally different from everybody else. It's a bunch of like totally random illiquid assets. And so, I mean, obviously it's easy to have, you know, 2020 hindsight, but I thought that was kind of funny. My recollection of that story, it's in the very beginning of the book. And from what I recall, he says that when they were providing their, you know, you have to do some accounting of your assets and what your net worth is to Forbes. And SBF believed internally that he was worth over $100 billion. But they thought that was too dramatic of a number because nobody really knew who he was

and Forbes didn't really have him on his radar. And they're like, we can't tell them that. That's like way too much. And so they basically took out a bunch of stuff. Like they took out a bunch of the Salana. and they took out a bunch of the SRM and a bunch of it. And they basically were like, look, we own, you know, Sam owns 60% of FTCX, FTCS was valued at 40 billion.

And that's where Forbes got the $25 billion number because they were just like, look, we can't really account for the rest of this stuff because I don't know what the fuck it is and I don't really know how to explain it. But SBF internally believe that he was worth $100 billion, which is a crazy number, right? He believed he was worth more than TZ. I mean, it's like Trump. Do you remember when Trump was like, like, it's like exactly like the Trump, like my net worth is my brand and my brand is worth more than my physical assets type of

bullshit logic. But the thing is all of the media, the media fell for it. So like I still blame that. Like I'm much more like militant than you. Well, to be fair, Forbes did take for, I mean, Forbes accounted for FTCS the way the investors did, right? Like they literally didn't credit him with anything else. 25 billion means all he has is FTC.

They credited all the FTT. I thought that was funny. That was included in the calculation. I thought it wasn't. I thought that was the anecdote that he gave at the beginning of the story was that $25 billion is just 60% of $40 billion. And that's the number that he was given in the Forbes whatever richest people thing. That was my understanding.

The spreadsheet that got posted, I think it was actually an exhibit in the trial. I'm not exactly for why. His own internal representation of his net worth was a much larger number than what Forbes credited him with. That's my understanding. They did send a, I think a shave down net worth sheet, but I think the anecdote where they sort of circle back with the Forbes employee, I think it's closer to the end of the book, where it's kind of like

a obvious signs in retrospect. And so, you know, obviously it's sort of post hoc rationalizing what was happening. But yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's kind of the idea. So look, coming back to this thing that Turin, now you were getting into it last time about SBF, one of the things that I I think I rebel again so this is part of the reason why

we kind of got into his back and forth last week about SBF's intentions is that there's this thing that happens when somebody ends up having a fall from grace that everything they do in their past gets reinterpreted as like oh everything was nefarish from the very beginning and like oh he knew it all long

and oh he was this dastardly whatever and people are doing this now with his net worth and with journalists and blah blah and like everything and I think it like the reality I mean, this is, I guess, a very SBF thing to say. But the reality is that, like, everything is uncertain. You know, like, when we were looking at SBF,

none of us thought that he was stealing money from his customers. We thought, yeah, okay, there's probably some bullshit accounting going on with respect to valuing your FTT at par and all this stuff. But, you know, we all understood that there were some things that were, you know, he was moving fast. He was obviously shaving down a lot of the edges of how one normally thinks about accounting and valuation. But nobody knew that he was, that he was defrauding his customers,

that he was taking money out of the cookie jar, so to speak. And I think it's a little bit, what I want to say? Like, people really try to simplify the past when they go back and they redo this accounting and they say, ah, actually everything was part of this big conspiracy. Everybody should have known from all along. And there were all these signs that, you know, I was thinking this and I didn't tell anyone, but I always knew that something was wrong with him. And I hate it when this happens.

It happens invariably whenever somebody falls from grace that, everything they've ever done gets reinterpreted as, you know, this most kind of villainous type of version of what it was. And it just wasn't, right? Like, we were there. We were debating about SBF. Back when all this JP Morgan stuff was coming out and he was bailing out these companies. And, you know, we were talking about it in the show. And, you know, I think knowing what we knew at the time, there was no way that you could have looked at that and said, aha, clearly he is trying to bail out his own lenders and there's this horrible, you know, interconnected web of, and he's really stealing money at the bottom of all this, but that's very much what people want to do.

So anyway, I don't have a deeper point than that, but I think this is part of what frustrates me when something like this happens. Yeah, usually I agree with you that there's kind of a pitchfork and fire going after the person that might not be deserved. But in this case, I don't agree. I'm not saying it's not deserved. To be clear, I'm not saying it's not deserved. I'm not saying it's not deserved.

What I'm saying is that people are going back and revising history in such a way that it was obvious all along. There were all these signs. Why, you know, why didn't people know? And like, look, there are, there are a lot of founders who are weird. There are a lot of founders who have SBF-like characteristics. And I do not, now that SBF turned out to be this, you know, crazy psychopath, I do not automatically assume that like, ah, this guy is like kind of autistic. Great, he must be an SPF type. I, you know, I'm going to do extra diligence now, assuming that he's going to defraud his customers. I mean, look, everyone's doing extra diligence. But it's not because, you know, ah, we should have known it all along that SBF was just a psychopath.

I think, though, you know, a lot of credit to people who kind of avoided the SBF ecosystem. Like, for instance, you know, your partners at Dragonfly when they evaluated the investment in 2018, 2018, you know, there were very obvious irregularities. And, you know, that people talked about for years. And it's like somehow it was like, got there enough. about that internally all the time. And I've talked about it on the show that, like, Sam really did not like us. And we did not invest in anything that Sam ever showed us. We didn't invest into FTX, FDT, serum, blah, blah, all this stuff in the Salana ecosystem. We avoided all of it, right? And we always had the sense that Sam was super aggressive. He was flying really close to the sun.

He was very extractive. That was our perception of him, right? But it was not that he was, you know, this psychopath and he was, you know, on the rampage of stealing money. from people if we thought that we would have behaved very differently than just avoiding him in rounds. Yeah. Yeah. I'm just saying like I think there was, you know, some people did, did to their credit actually stick to doing that, right? Like there were a lot of people I feel like 2018, 2019 were like, no, no, no.

And then 2021, they're like, Solana went up and they made Solana happen. So like, we're going to copy trade. And like, you know, I think the level of like human psychology to erase the former, you know, woes is something that it's the dual of the thing you're describing, right? The thing you're describing is like once something bad happens, everyone goes and revises

to be like, they sucked, they did everything, that. But there's the opposite where when suddenly it looks like, hey, someone is like making yield that is 500% for me, then like I'm willing to revise and pretend that everything that they did that was bad didn't exist. And I think like,

you know, we should, we should keep that in mind when evaluating people's decision-making prowess in hindsight, right? And that's why it's worth kind of calling out some of these. Look, I agree. And look, look, okay, so all of us are at funds. A lot of the first half of the book, which is, again, most of what I've read so far, talks about SBF's upbringing, his personality, his sort of quirks, his quirks of character. And, you know, in the first half of the book, it's also quite a glowing picture, I think, of SBF. It starts off. quite positive before it kind of goes off the rails. And it really made me think like, okay, this person is clearly very unique. He's very exceptional person. He's obviously very smart.

He goes off the beaten path. He is exactly what most investors say they are looking for in a founder. Is somebody who is kind of weird, challenges assumptions, you know, is willing to basically, you know, take the fast path to try to accomplish something that most people take their entire lives to get to. Now, he had a lot of massive problems. in terms of being a terrible leader, being a very bad communicator, obviously being willing to cut corners in places where you should not be cutting corners, such as accounting for all of your assets when you're running a fucking fund. But I guess the question I want to ask is, as you were recontextualizing the story,

how does the SPF story make you rethink the attributes you look for in founders? I think one aspect, having known him for a long time before and talked to him for many, Years? It could never get past the fact that there was someone who would, like, tell you something, like, oh, you know why Salon is the best? It's a low latency blockchain. Okay. How does a low latency blockchain work?

I don't know. I don't care. It's low latency. And it's like, he always had this ability to have the veneer of like just enough technical detail to like sound like chat GPT, but then not enough to like understand. Like, I think the Socratic method is always the best way. It's like the number one way of like trying to really tease out things out of people. and I think like fundamentally for whether it's interviewing people or diligence and investments,

like actually trying to see like how much of what is said is like the veneer of that. Like even this Kelly stuff, right? Like a lot of it got like taken blown out of proportion in a way that's like it's like he almost didn't understand the assumptions of when Kelly worked at all. Like Kelly assumes a bunch of independence. It assumes a bunch of different things about the bets. It assumes that like the possible worth, you know, the possible amount of currency that exists as infinite in theory, right?

Because like there has to be some sort of doubling rate, natural doubling rate. So I think there's sort of a thing in which figuring out of people understand the assumptions of how they get to the end goal versus just only understanding the end goal they want to get to is actually extremely important for understanding how founders think about their companies or their ideas. So you feel like your, you would be more scrup, scrupulous about the intellectual underpinnings of founders after your interaction with SBF.

I mean, I didn't invest in any of the things you tried to pitch me over the last five years. No F2T, no, sir. Right, right. So, like, I, you know, it's like, I got all of those and I listened to them and I asked them questions. I was like, why Solana? And this is not a knock and Solana. In fact, I would say Solana, real credit to them for being the most resilient blockchain

community after that. I feel like they've like come out of the hole as a very strong. Like like I think that they are now a cockroach, right? They've survived like nuclear event and still have users still having like things, you know, growing. Like there is there's a lot to admire. It's just that I don't think SBF understood any of the reasons for their technology. His whole thing was like low latency and tradify good.

Low latency in blockchain good. Right. And if you start asking questions, like, what tradeoffs are you making? What assumptions exist? When does assumptions that hold? He could never answer any of that. And that's sort of like lack of clarity to me always just seemed like, okay, well, what's the difference between you and Richard Hart, right?

Like at some level. And like there's kind of a very small line at that point. Richard Hart is smarter. Technically. In technical terms of actually, I think he's better. Richard Hart does own, is the largest dieholder, which is a fun trivia effect. And I think, and I think he thinks about the legal a lot more. I mean, I think Richard Hartz may have the first truly non-fraudulent Ponzi scheme in history, right? Like, if he's ever on trial, I think it's going to look very different, right?

Because, you know, it was all on chain, in fact. And yeah, yeah, I mean, so I come at this from a more legal perspective, right? and I see this in deals all the time. Like if it's a very big round and they're still raising off of something like a safe, why? If they don't have, if they don't want any sort of corporate governance or don't want independent board members, why? If you put representations about the financial statements into the docs and you get super weird changes back that are not customary, what are they hiding? Right.

And I think, again, bull market, I just saw a lot of deals where they were FOMO driven. people abandoned the usual customary market practices, and then you wind up with this sort of thing. Tom, what's your take on that question? I'm also reading the Walter Isaacson Elon Musk bio in tandem, and so it's actually kind of interesting to compare SBF and Elon, because they are similar in many ways in the sense of being kind of low EQ on the spectrum, being sort of obsessed with challenging assumptions, moving fast, cutting corners. like they talk about sort of the early SpaceX days and sourcing like random consumer grade, you know, products because they assume that it would be sufficiently good for sort of aerospace, which, you know, it turned out maybe being okay. But I do kind of come back to Turin's point, which is, you know, even though Elon was spread pretty thin, he was also very obsessed with a lot of the inner workings and specific engineering and design details of Tesla and SpaceX in a way that SPF just was not. I mean, even if you say, hey, he doesn't know anything about crypto, it was a lot about trading. Like the, so, sort of basic accounting principles are sort of missing at Alameda.

And so how can you actually take, you know, calculate P&L and run a profitable fund if you don't even know, if you don't have sort of basic compliance restrictions in place. And so I think that in my mind is kind of the difference. Yeah, I think one thing to actually note, having done sort of like the job he did before he started Alameda, is that when you're a quant or developer at a trading firm, like a quant trading firm. You're usually isolated from all of the operational details. You're just like, here's a stream of numbers.

Like, find a function that predicts the next stream of numbers. And like, you don't really care about anything else. And there is kind of the sense. I think Matt Levine covered this before he, when he was a little more sympathetic in his sort of going infinite style arc. He was a little more like, oh, well, yeah, these kids, they kind of like only worked on the math side. they never really like did any of the compliance stuff.

So then they get together with their friends. I started trading firm. They're obviously going to mess it up. And there's a sense in which that's true, but there's a sense in which the compounding of that is the fraud to me. It's not the actual like, hey, I don't know how to fucking do these types of reconciliation processes correctly. It's the fact that, hey, I don't know how to do it. And instead of trying to figure that out, I like instead try to like keep, you know,

coming up like a new Ponzi to cover it up, right? And the serum and FTT fundraisers are a great example of that. Aggressively coming into you, telling you that there's a seven-year lockup, telling you that, like, oh, it's going to change everything. And then you ask why, what's your architecture? Like, what are the details? Details doesn't matter. Doesn't matter.

I'm going to make it happen. Like, that type of bozo confidence is like always the thing you should run away from. So, okay, I take your point. both you and Tom are kind of pushing on this like, okay, you've got to really deeply understand the tech. And if you don't and you're abstracting with the details, you're going to fuck it up. Or you have to show that you try or care at all. You don't even have to fully understand. I mean, the thing that occurs to me, so Sam at the end of the day was running an exchange, right? I mean, that was the core, nominally the core business of FTX. I think CZ would have

failed this test, right? If you, if you say this for Sam, I think CZ fails, even though CZ has launched Binet Smart Chain, which is the, you know, probably the single most users of any blockchain today. I don't think he is very deep on the tech. I don't think he's, you know, he can say stuff, but I don't think he's like nearly as deep as one would otherwise want about why Binance Smart Chain, why an Ethereum Fork, why this particular bridging mechanism, I think we're just, I don't know, my tech guy said to do it. He's obviously much higher EQ and probably a better leader than SBF. So first of all, I think it's genuinely hard. And I think you also want to be careful from assuming that every single person who turns out to be a bad apple

contains within them a deeper lesson about, you know, how to find the next bad apple. Fraud is, fraud works because it's hard to find. If the fraud was easy to find, people would have found it. They would have not invested, right? And so there is something in a way from the fact that so many,

you know, very, very experienced, very, very smart investors invested in FTX. I think there's stuff that they didn't understand that maybe people, you know, in this room might have, understood, but what they did understand very well was people. And so I think the fact that they were misled by SBF showed that SPF was very good at misleading people. So it's almost like a little bit of an efficient market hypothesis in a way about personality, right? That like I don't think

there's necessarily a free lunch there. I guess the thing that I would, that I feel like I have updated, and I don't know if this is the correct update to make, is that it really, really underscores the importance of integrity for me. And in crypto, there are a lot of, I don't want say low integrity people, but it's sort of medium integrity people, where it's like, you know, look, I would not trust them with my life, but I more or less assume they're going to follow the rules. And I guess at the margin, it makes me less likely to want to back somebody like that, where somebody who's low integrity in crypto, look, if you're a professional VC, you just never touch people who have low integrity because this space is so easy to defraud people with for all the obvious

reasons, right? It's easy to hack things, easy to hide things. You know, SBF obviously did a lot of that. But I think the amount of integrity you need in order to be backable in the space, to my mind went up. people often draw analogies to like, you know, Travis Kalanick or these kinds of people who are kind of bullheaded, they're kind of assholes, they kind of break the rules. And, you know, you need a little bit of that in order to start a startup. That's kind of the lore of startups in general. And I guess I just feel like in crypto, it's harder to stomach that after seeing what SBF did. And I don't know. At the same time, like, I think that also would have led you to not invest in CZ perhaps.

So that's a real question, right? Like, you know, Binance is the most successful business in this industry. I think there's a sort of cultural context that's also worth differentiating between the two. That is true. Because CZ was really not trying to ever attract Western investors and like agree to certain standards and like fake audits for Western. You know, it's like it was a different context in which he was fun. It was a different contract in which finance was started. And to the credit, you remember, Sequoia sued Binance for basically fucking them on the equity investment.

So I don't know how different it really feels for people who were close to the metal in that one. This was Sequoia China, correct. Yeah. So it's slightly different, slightly different. But I guess like, I think the difference is like, A, the accounting standards weren't well known in 2017. Like, no one knew anything about that. I don't know how people did you. Are you? They still don't.

Are you they still don't? But at least like now there's a bit more clarity. But B, again, I just think like culturally, it was like not trying to like be like we are the uphold, you know, we're uphold like the full Western financial institution standards. Like they were just not claiming that. Whereas FTC is like going to the CFTC and trying to get them to change the rules for collateral requirements for 24 hour trading. Like, you know, one of them is like taking a particular cultural stance.

It's like we will bring this thing and make it match your rules. And then, you know, turned out not to do any of that. And that's where I think it's sort of this weird thing, right? Like I think like the Uber comparison is also kind of interesting in the sense of there are places of the world where like Uber was welcomed, right? Like they didn't actually have that much local transit and it was great. Right. So but the places where it did have the most problem and where they broke the most

were the ones where culturally it was like they already had some sort of standards and that sort of led to this fight. And I think the cultural context in which founders developing a company is also worth keeping in mind. And I'm not trying to say like, oh, then, you know, like, CZ fails my Socratic test. Like, oh, never invest in finance. I'm just saying like culturally would have to be that. But Sam was always representing it as this like Western domination. Goldman Sachs replacement type of thing, right? Like it's like that representation carries with it a different set of standards

and kind of rules of the road that are expected. Yeah. The only thing I'd add to that, I think it's very well articulated. The only other thing I would add to that is that a couple of you guys mentioned board seats and their fight to basically minimize governance from investors. Look, if we get into another bull market,

that is going to happen again. You know, I don't think that FTCS has permanently changed the equilibrium so much as it just changed the market conditions. And that's why investors are basically taking more governance rights today than they were two years ago. If we get into a wild bull market again, the balance of power is going to shift back to entrepreneurs.

And it's not going to mean there's no governance, but that, of course, investors are going to be able to demand less in terms of governance rights than they can right now. I guess the thing that I would fix it on is not so much like, do entrepreneurs want to minimize governance rights for investors? They generally do. You know, yes, we can kind of wax poetic about how great it is for companies to have oversight. If you're a founder, and look, I get it.

You know, I've been in that situation. You want to minimize the amount of control people have other than you because you want to move fast. You don't want to have bosses. You just want to build your thing. And these people are investors. They're not builders. I guess the thing, though, is that, like SBF uniquely felt like he had an adversarial

relationship with his investors in a way that really seemed unique. to me. I think most other founders, I don't see that. I once was at a dinner where in May 2021, like Bitcoin, Miami. And he said explicitly, I view investors as Muppets or something along those lines. I was like, wow, that's fucking crazy for you. So it was like kind of a, I thought it was a joke, but in hindsight, I'm like maybe I don't think that's far from the truth. In the book, he talks about, hey, we don't actually need the money, but we need legitimacy and we need this appearance of being received well by sort of the Western establishment. So let's take on some VCs, even though, you know, I don't actually want them.

Right. That makes sense. Well, sadly, we have spent the entire hour talking about SPF, which was exactly what we were hoping not to do. We had some stuff about Lido on the agenda, and we just have not, we have, unfortunately, have run out of time. Gabe, did we miss anything? Sorry, I know we went on this, like, VC tangent diatribe, but was there any?

No, no, I mean, you know, just the other thing I would throw away, the other comparison point, well, two, number one, the Theranos thing, right? And, you know, she was another total sociopath, even faked her voice. And, you know, there were probably some warning signs of that. And again, you know, maybe it was her feminine wiles and stuff of working on these old guys that led them not to do due diligence. It's always something. And then I think also just that Elon Musk, you know, he also, just another classic case when SBF was considering investing into, Twitter, he detected the fraud, right? Or so he claims, right? So it is kind of a takes one to no one type of thing. And a lot of legit investors just aren't on the lookout for fraud as such, right? Theranos, I think, though, is a very different story because most of the people invested in Theranos were not, like, high-quality VCs. They were mostly, you know, family offices and, you know, retired. Rupert Murdoch like old money. Yes, it was more old money than it was, like, you know, smart VC money. FTC is unique because it was this. dramatic fraud that was taking place, but people were supposed to be good at judges, good judges

as a character. But anyway, it seems like there's going to be a lot more juice coming out over the next week. Gabe, if you had to give over, under, how long do you think until we get to the end of the trial, or at least this portion of the trial? I think it's going to be another three weeks. They scheduled six weeks, but I mean, it's moving very fast. Okay. So you think by basically November, we're going to have a verdict? Well, verdict, I don't know. I think the trial will be done. I don't know how long of a jury, you know, we'll decide, we'll take to decide. Got it. Okay. Yeah, wait, wait, wait, wait.

One last question. What do you think about the sleeping juror? There's supposedly this juror thongs. Yeah, yeah, because he has a night job and he didn't tell him. I mean, you know, these are the sorts of things that on appeal, you know, maybe they can make something out of that, you know, they didn't know what they were doing and stuff like that. But I don't know. My lawyers ate my homework and the juror fell asleep. Please excuse me from 100 years.

Honestly, that's a pretty good cause for appeal is like one of the jurors was sleeping through trial. They get all the evidence to review. They can review it at their leisure during deliberations. The other jurors can fill them in. I mean, my guess is that this is not going to end up making a difference. That's not the banker, is it? No, no, no, no, no. The sleeping juror?

It's like a security guard or something like that. Yeah, he works at night. A security guard. Oh, man. Okay. Interesting. All right. Well, we will be back. By the way, any juice from Carolina while we were recording this? Nothing too crazy. The president one was the one that the internet was going crazy on. I think the other things she talked about were how, like, they did a lot of FTT sold salana trading because Solana was like the only way to get liquidity for FTT. And then she talks a little bit about how Sam sort of, ordered her to like make sure there's a price floor on FTT. People at Alameda didn't really quite like understand why they kept buying it, but she just had to keep telling them to buy more.

Trubuco showed up once, Bez and like his name came up. And anything else? Not really. Nothing that. The president thing was hilarious though. Like the idea that like, I don't know. I will say without disclosing who,

I've had multiple people in crypto tell me that they want to become president. So this is kind of a thing. I don't know why this is a thing in crypto, but this is a thing. Well, you're trying to separate the state from money philosophically. So, like, obviously that means that, like, you know, he who creates the money that separated the state is he who has some sort of, some type of power. But the question is, are you more of a president or are you more like OSHA? Probably the latter.

Osho. The famous cult leader from Oregon from the 1980s. Wild, wild country. You have to watch the documentary. That's a deep cut. That's a great documentary. That's a great documentary. Yeah. It's a good note to end it on a cult leader.

We'll be back next week. Hopefully, I mean, we will almost certainly continue to talk about the SBF trial, but hopefully we'll be able to talk about other stuff as well. Tom, of the four of us, Tom is always the most saddened by the, this SBF. That's it. Tom is the only one who actually read the entire. book. So I feel like it's a little bit, it's a little bit above. You can see the pain on his face of having to keep talking about this.

You're getting back to basics a little bit, you know. All right. All right. Next week, we will try our best get back to basics. Yeah. We'll try our, we'll try our best. Gabe, thanks for coming on and sharing your insight. Always appreciated. Thank you. My pleasure. Looking forward to seeing your takes on crypto Twitter. Great. All right. Until next week. See everybody.