True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 325: Sam Jailman Trial
Aired: 2023-10-10
Duration: 01:29:39


=== Music in Trials (07:37) ===

[00:00:00]  I miss the oh my god, the banging has begun.
[00:00:04]  I miss the music that we did for the trial so much for the Ghillaine Maxwell trial.
[00:00:12]  And I was like singing it in my head on the way here.
[00:00:14]  I was like.
[00:00:21]  You know what that did?
[00:00:25]  Yeah, fuck yeah, I know.
[00:00:26]  First of all, yes, I know, because Young Chomsky made it.
[00:00:30]  Why don't you?
[00:00:32]  Oh, that's a real question.
[00:00:33]  Yeah.
[00:00:35]  I was more talking on the episodes rather than listening to them, but you know, maybe that's the difference between me and you.
[00:00:39]  No, I was listening to the music that he made when he sent it to us.
[00:00:43]  I listen to all the music he makes, so I would say actually most of Young Chomsky's other music is in my head.
[00:00:48]  You just forgot because you forget everything.
[00:00:50]  in the justice system of New York.
[00:01:16]  I was going to try to do a Law and Order poly, but I can't remember how.
[00:01:19]  I haven't watched an episode of Law and Order in many years.
[00:01:22]  Well, I know that.
[00:01:23]  Oh.
[00:01:23]  But they say like in the justice system.
[00:01:26]  In the New York justice system.
[00:01:27]  In New York justice system.
[00:01:28]  Sexually based offenses are considered especially heinous crimes.
[00:01:32]  Oh, wait, yes.
[00:01:32]  Okay.
[00:01:33]  Well, of course it's SVU.
[00:01:35]  In the New York justice system, unethical non-monogamy is considered especially heinous.
[00:01:41]  In the Bushwick justice system, unethical non-monogamy is considered a specially heinous crime.
[00:01:46]  We have assembled a team of blue-haired investigators to go from every...
[00:01:52]  I don't know what kind of places those people hang out at.
[00:01:55]  Bar.
[00:01:55]  I got to ask my primary what's up.
[00:01:58]  Wait, is that what they call?
[00:02:00]  Yeah, I know there's, I don't know what they call their secondary partners, but I don't think they would call them secondary partners.
[00:02:04]  It feels very dehumanizing.
[00:02:06]  My primary?
[00:02:07]  Yeah.
[00:02:07]  I am your primary.
[00:02:08]  I am your primary.
[00:02:09]  It is time to make love with you.
[00:02:13]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:14]  Hello.
[00:02:15]  My name is Primary Race.
[00:02:19]  Today is our scheduled time to have sex.
[00:02:25]  I'm Luz.
[00:02:26]  My secondary.
[00:02:26]  And of course, our tertiary.
[00:02:30]  You can't be your own primary.
[00:02:32]  No, my primary, your secondary, my primary.
[00:02:35]  You called him tertiary.
[00:02:36]  No, but that sounded mean, so I was restricting that.
[00:02:39]  My tertiary is River.
[00:02:43]  And, of course, donut and, famously, barf bag.
[00:02:47]  Well, that's more like...
[00:02:49]  Okay.
[00:02:50]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky, and this is True Anon.
[00:02:52]  And this is True Anon.
[00:02:54]  We are the world's first polycule-based podcast.
[00:02:59]  We all live in one big bed and one big, one small apartment.
[00:03:05]  Like the old people on Willy Wunka.
[00:03:07]  One big bed, one small apartment, one great motherfucking podcast.
[00:03:12]  That's the new tagline.
[00:03:14]  I wonder, listen, I know that some of you out there listen to podcasts that aren't ours.
[00:03:18]  I would say that I find that to be a violation.
[00:03:22]  I'm not going to tell you what to do.
[00:03:24]  I'm just saying for me personally, it doesn't feel good.
[00:03:26]  agree uh are there any podcasts out there with just fully i'm not talking about like a husband-wife duo whatever Like a poly pod?
[00:03:34]  Like, I'm saying like three plus people who are poly together.
[00:03:39]  That has to exist, right?
[00:03:40]  There's Choppo.
[00:03:41]  There's probably Chapo, yeah.
[00:03:42]  There has to be, I guess, a Poly podcast where that's the case then.
[00:03:46]  Probably.
[00:03:47]  I don't want to look into it.
[00:03:48]  A non-poly-based podcast where the hosts are all poly.
[00:03:52]  Together.
[00:03:53]  Together.
[00:03:54]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:54]  I'd like to hear that.
[00:03:55]  Kind of like a real world situation.
[00:03:57]  I would like, that's kind of the bachelor's sort of poly.
[00:04:00]  Kind of, but not really, because they're all vying to be one.
[00:04:05]  It's not like everyone's agreeing to poly.
[00:04:07]  It's like Mormon-style poly.
[00:04:09]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:10]  Where like you have one, a patriarch.
[00:04:12]  There's got to be a poly TLC show.
[00:04:15]  I mean, there has to be.
[00:04:16]  Right?
[00:04:17]  Yeah.
[00:04:17]  I feel like there's a TLC show for every sort of weird.
[00:04:20]  I came up with a good idea.
[00:04:21]  American TV.
[00:04:23]  Oh, yeah.
[00:04:24]  Has this been done in like an HG TV show where like you, instead of rehabbing houses, you rehab old castles in Europe because they're pretty cheap because of too much money to heat.
[00:04:36]  That would be a good pitch.
[00:04:40]  That's a terrible pitch.
[00:04:41]  That would be a good pitch.
[00:04:42]  I don't think it would get made.
[00:04:43]  But you know what?
[00:04:44]  But that was not really my thing.
[00:04:46]  I found it a little satanic.
[00:04:48]  I'm more into Brooklyn-based media, such as podcasts.
[00:04:50]  Bushwick media.
[00:04:51]  Bushwick-based sort of media things like podcast, whatever.
[00:04:55]  Hyperpop?
[00:04:56]  I heard that for the first time.
[00:04:58]  I don't know what that was.
[00:04:58]  Like last year.
[00:04:59]  It's crazy.
[00:05:00]  It's not super fast.
[00:05:02]  It's just, it's shit.
[00:05:04]  It's shit.
[00:05:05]  It's like all, it's all shit.
[00:05:07]  I don't know what anything is anymore.
[00:05:08]  Thin Lizzie is a great band.
[00:05:11]  You said that line just, you've said that so many times.
[00:05:14]  I love all of it's good.
[00:05:17]  Just cut it.
[00:05:17]  Just so he's saying, Lizzie is a good.
[00:05:20]  Lizzie is good.
[00:05:21]  There you go.
[00:05:22]  But not thin.
[00:05:23]  Interesting, the self-view you got going on there.
[00:05:26]  Careful.
[00:05:27]  Very thin.
[00:05:27]  Careful.
[00:05:28]  I think you're too thin.
[00:05:29]  We have with us today a friend of ours.
[00:05:34]  A friend?
[00:05:35]  We're doing friends now?
[00:05:36]  I don't know.
[00:05:37]  Yeah, he's our friend.
[00:05:37]  He's been on the show a couple times.
[00:05:39]  I feel like that's a friend.
[00:05:39]  A friend does make.
[00:05:40]  I've hung out with them outside the podcast before.
[00:05:43]  There you go.
[00:05:43]  We're friends.
[00:05:44]  There you go.
[00:05:45]  I've loaned him.
[00:05:46]  Well, he's loaned me a substantial amount of money, I would say it was only Which he, of course, borrowed from others.
[00:05:54]  Yeah, but it's getting, it all comes out in the wash.
[00:05:56]  Yeah.
[00:05:57]  We have Jacob Silverman with us here today.
[00:05:58]  Yeah, to talk about the trial of Sam Jailman Jail, aka Sam Bankman Freed.
[00:06:06]  Who's on trial right now?
[00:06:08]  Well, without further ado, you know what?
[00:06:10]  Let's push that button and let's hear from the silver man himself.
[00:06:28]  Coins and coinettes to another episode of Krypton, sponsored by Katarcoin on the Doji Network.
[00:06:35]  I'm your host, CD, otherwise known as aka Coin Dexter, reporting live from the jungles of El Salvador.
[00:06:46]  We tried to get my arch enemy, Hitler, for this podcast, but we had to settle for the second worst enemy to cryptocurrency.
[00:06:55]  That would be Jacob Silverman, co-author of Easy Money and host of the Naked Emperor podcast on CBC.
[00:07:06]  I have to use a voice modulator now as I would have collapsed in a fit of coughing.
[00:07:13]  But a coffin is what I would like to put you in for your slander against Web3 type-based digital, unregulated, distributed styles of money fiat.
[00:07:29]  Welcome to the show, pig.
[00:07:32]  Thank you.
[00:07:33]  I'm here to answer for my crimes.
[00:07:35]  Yes, we're putting Jacob on trial.

=== Grub Street Chronicles (02:50) ===

[00:07:38]  Yes.
[00:07:39]  Jacob Silverman, how are you doing?
[00:07:40]  You're back again.
[00:07:42]  It's great to be here.
[00:07:43]  It's a real pleasure.
[00:07:43]  Thank you.
[00:07:44]  He brought us cookies.
[00:07:45]  He did.
[00:07:46]  He brought us cookies.
[00:07:46]  I had one and I feel fucking jacked.
[00:07:49]  Jacked?
[00:07:50]  Yeah, on sugar.
[00:07:51]  Okay.
[00:07:52]  Wait, does that not work that way?
[00:07:53]  It's kind of more of like a you're hopped up on sugar.
[00:07:56]  Yeah, I'm all hoppy.
[00:07:59]  I feel crazy.
[00:08:00]  That's a lemon drop.
[00:08:02]  Jacob, you're here because you are covering the Sam Bankman Freed trial, which I got to say, seeing you tweet about it, reading some of your pieces, I was getting a little nostalgic.
[00:08:15]  Yeah.
[00:08:16]  I was starting to really miss it.
[00:08:17]  I can feel those halls, the metal detectors.
[00:08:20]  Do you want me to just say the weird elevator so we can get you back in going?
[00:08:25]  I do miss it.
[00:08:26]  I have to ask before we start, just straight off the bat: how are the US Marshals and do they say anything about me?
[00:08:33]  I'll have to ask them about you in particular, but these guys seem great as usual.
[00:08:39]  You know, they're all a little bored and just sort of like very outer borough dudes.
[00:08:44]  Yeah.
[00:08:46]  I've kind of seen it all.
[00:08:47]  And yeah, it's hard not to feel some affection towards them because they're just cartoon characters.
[00:08:53]  Yeah, they're just kind of dudes doing their jobs, and they're the softer side of law enforcement, I guess.
[00:08:58]  Let me ask you this.
[00:09:01]  And this is this is, I mean, there's a lot of kind of sad stuff we'll be covering today.
[00:09:05]  Betrayal, heartbreak, love, lost, parents.
[00:09:07]  Polycules.
[00:09:08]  Polycules.
[00:09:10]  In the basement of the courthouse, there was a sort of hidden gem of New York foodie eatery.
[00:09:20]  That restaurant was known as Cafe Lorenzo.
[00:09:24]  And from what my sources at Eater tell me.
[00:09:30]  Grub Street.
[00:09:31]  Grub Street.
[00:09:32]  I'm trying to think of other food blogs.
[00:09:33]  I think those are the only ones.
[00:09:34]  Eater and Grub Street tell me that that hidden gem is no longer existing.
[00:09:40]  So have you been to the basement and what have you eaten?
[00:09:43]  I have not been to the basement, and now I feel like I really should have done the feet on the ground shoe leather reporting that this requires.
[00:09:51]  Yes, we liked going down there.
[00:09:52]  Well, one, well, not for the food, but because of the little scuttle butt that you'd get from all the reporters sitting down there having their coffees and very suspect blueberry muffins.
[00:10:05]  Yeah, I've seen some people go to the cafeteria on the eighth floor, which is sort of decent but more like functional than charming or any show.
[00:10:12]  Well, I wouldn't, I don't know if I'd call Cafe Lorenzo charming.
[00:10:15]  But it wasn't functional.
[00:10:17]  On the scale, I had to go you somewhere.
[00:10:19]  Well, the overflow room, so if you arrive early, like if you arrive at seven, maybe you might get into the courtroom, but I admit I can't get there that early.
[00:10:27]  So I've been in the overflow room mostly.

=== Cross-Examining the Rats (15:45) ===

[00:10:28]  And that is sort of where some of the gossip between reporters and.
[00:10:32]  Because they're a little loosey-goosey in there, and you can kind of like, you know, walk around, chat everyone up, a little water cooler talk.
[00:10:38]  Yeah.
[00:10:39]  What is the media scene like there?
[00:10:42]  Well, I mean, it's probably annoying and insidery to some people, but it's been kind of fun to talk to folks and like, you know, a lot of people who you just know via Twitter.
[00:10:50]  And to be honest, also, there are things happening in the case that sometimes are confusing or you're still trying to understand.
[00:10:58]  So there's that like, hey, how many billion did they steal?
[00:11:01]  But that's different from the other 8 billion that they were talking about, that kind of thing.
[00:11:05]  But it's pretty kind of convivial.
[00:11:08]  There are probably a few dozen reporters.
[00:11:10]  It's not the madhouse that I, I don't, for whatever reason, expected.
[00:11:14]  There are cameras outside on the street, and there are some like CNBC and other TV types who come in, watch some of it, and then go out and do a video report.
[00:11:23]  There's a definite contrast between sort of the people who write and people who appear on camera and how we look.
[00:11:32]  But yeah, I'd say like people are definitely also looking for angles, like, what am I going to write?
[00:11:37]  There's sort of some cynicism, like, we're all going to write the same thing.
[00:11:40]  Sure.
[00:11:40]  But, you know, I think there's been good coverage so far.
[00:11:43]  It's probably pretty good for readers or people who want to obsessively follow this stuff.
[00:11:47]  Yeah.
[00:11:48]  We should talk a little bit about the trial right off the bat for our listeners who aren't following it very closely and just say, you know, Sam Bakeman-Fried, we've talked about it before.
[00:12:00]  I think the easiest way to say it is what's being alleged is that Sam and his company, FTX, which everyone probably remembers from Super Bowl commercials, was charged with basically taking customer funds that customers had deposited at FTX Crypto Exchange to buy crypto and kind of giving it to their research wing, Alameda Research,
[00:12:27]  and then using that money to basically make insane bets and then siphon some of it off to political donations and what seems to be real estate and parents' salaries.
[00:12:38]  They're breaking off a piece here and there.
[00:12:40]  A lot of pieces.
[00:12:41]  Yeah, and then at some point the customers said, well, I want my money back.
[00:12:45]  And they were like, we don't have it.
[00:12:47]  Yeah.
[00:12:48]  So that's the basic story.
[00:12:50]  And that's sort of the central crime here, really, is that they funneled $8 plus billion dollars.
[00:12:55]  There's a few different ways to define it, but in the end, the whole was like $8 to $10 billion of customer funds from FTX.
[00:13:01]  So if the people, the everyday people mostly, but also some hedge funds and stuff like that, who deposited dollars on FTX or crypto and then expected to be able to withdraw those dollars later.
[00:13:14]  The main thing to know is that those FTX customer funds were supposed to be sacrosanct, you know, segregated.
[00:13:19]  You don't touch them.
[00:13:20]  You just keep them in the bank.
[00:13:21]  Instead, they were kind of like kept in this one bank account that Alameda, the hedge fund, used.
[00:13:27]  Sam owned both companies.
[00:13:29]  And then there was also in their internal system, Alameda had an unlimited line of credit to withdraw money from FTX directly from the customers, pretty much.
[00:13:39]  They had something like a back door, right?
[00:13:41]  Yeah, and that I think they might get into in more detail in this coming week.
[00:13:46]  But in the trial this past week, Gary Wong, who helped supposedly code that back door, he was the CTO, a co-founder.
[00:13:54]  He was the only one who actually owned a piece of Alameda besides Sam.
[00:13:57]  Sam, sorry.
[00:13:59]  Someone's been giving me grief lately for calling him Sam or SBF like it's too familiar, which I don't know.
[00:14:05]  Sam is fine.
[00:14:06]  It's demute.
[00:14:06]  See, here's the thing.
[00:14:07]  We're going to fucking call him Sammy loser face moron.
[00:14:12]  What do we call him?
[00:14:13]  Sam Jail.
[00:14:14]  Sam Jailman Jail.
[00:14:15]  Sam and Jailman Jail.
[00:14:17]  So I want to pause right here and do a little style guide.
[00:14:21]  I think we could all agree that it's gauche and whack to call him a kid and a child because he's almost too old to be drafted.
[00:14:32]  But it's okay to call him Sam because that's a disrespectful thing.
[00:14:38]  To call somebody that you have no real personable familiarity with by their first name is, in many cultures, a sign of disrespect.
[00:14:46]  That works for me.
[00:14:47]  It's shorter than Bankman Freed.
[00:14:48]  I don't want to do Bankman Freed.
[00:14:50]  Plus, call him a guy.
[00:14:50]  Can a guy?
[00:14:51]  Yeah, calling a guy by the last name, and it's a hyphen.
[00:14:54]  We're not dealing with that.
[00:14:54]  So Sam is fine.
[00:14:55]  All right, thank you.
[00:14:56]  And I think I've proven my skeptical take on this.
[00:15:00]  I like the idea that critics were like, you should call him Samuel.
[00:15:05]  We've already had testimony.
[00:15:07]  basically saying that the central charges are true, that Sam authorized all this stuff.
[00:15:12]  Alameda had special privileges on FTX.
[00:15:16]  They lied about those special privileges in tweets to investors, to customers, everyone.
[00:15:22]  That's fraud, basically.
[00:15:24]  We had testimony from venture capitalists who it's just funny because this guy is like a crypto bro venture capitalist, but he comes in a little more soft-spoken and is like, I've been lied to by Sam Bankman Freed.
[00:15:38]  Oh, no.
[00:15:38]  He was almost sympathetic.
[00:15:39]  He's so scandalized.
[00:15:41]  But there's already been a lot of sort of proof, or at least what might count as proof in a legal sense, that this stuff happened, that it was in the actual code, some of the privileged access, for example, to customer funds.
[00:15:54]  They showed some of the code, and they had Gary Wong, the CTO, the only other person who owned a piece of Alameda, testify to this.
[00:16:04]  And he, you know, one of the first questions was, did you commit financial crimes while working at FTX?
[00:16:10]  And he said yes.
[00:16:11]  And it was very methodical as a prosecution is supposed to do, but leading him through it all.
[00:16:16]  And so already you have one of the three executives who have already pled guilty and agreed to cooperate has already testified and been pretty damning.
[00:16:25]  Yeah, my question is, so like you said, several executives have already pled guilty and turned state's evidence against their old friend, Sam Bankman-Freed.
[00:16:36]  And which is, we're coming to the first true and on tip of if you're on trial, immediately rat.
[00:16:43]  You just got a rat.
[00:16:44]  You got it for financial crimes, you're ratting.
[00:16:46]  I'm not saying save your ass.
[00:16:48]  It's morally suspect.
[00:16:50]  In fact, you shouldn't do it.
[00:16:52]  But here's the thing.
[00:16:53]  You should do it.
[00:16:53]  You already did the crime.
[00:16:54]  You're already a criminal.
[00:16:56]  You're a bad guy, and they're going to rat on you.
[00:16:59]  I'm not saying that.
[00:17:00]  It's a race to rat.
[00:17:01]  I'm not saying you should, but what it is, is it is a race to rat.
[00:17:04]  You're correct.
[00:17:05]  They've had a ton of cooperation, too.
[00:17:08]  I mean, we have the three main people of Gary Wong, Caroline Ellison, and Nisha Tsingh.
[00:17:16]  There was a fourth, Ryan Salem, who plead guilty but isn't cooperating.
[00:17:19]  But then you have all these other people from FTX who are testifying or gave evidence.
[00:17:24]  There's one guy, Adam Yadidia, who was testifying under an immunity agreement.
[00:17:28]  He hasn't pled guilty to anything.
[00:17:30]  He was a pretty good witness and a close friend of Sam.
[00:17:33]  I mean, all these people were also people who, a lot of them looked up to Sam or really admired him.
[00:17:38]  They were close with him from college.
[00:17:40]  You know, as much as I think effective altruism is kind of bullshit, you can sense in some of these people there was kind of an authentic idealism or a sense of betrayal at least that like they thought they were somehow doing good even if they were just making a casino in the Bahamas.
[00:17:54]  So there's like, you know, there's a lot of emotion and anger among these people.
[00:17:57]  So that I think also motivates the desire to cooperate.
[00:18:00]  Are Ellison and Wong and everybody facing jail time themselves?
[00:18:04]  Like guilty, but they like it.
[00:18:07]  I mean, but the prosecution tries to preempt the idea that these people are rats or might be looked askance at by the jury by saying, and you're here as part of a cooperation agreement.
[00:18:19]  You're hoping for less jail time, that kind of thing.
[00:18:22]  So that when the defense cross-examines and they say the same thing, it doesn't really look so bad.
[00:18:26]  I mean, everyone knows the pretense.
[00:18:28]  Gary Wong said, ideally, I'd like to have no jail time.
[00:18:32]  It's possible some of these people might go to jail for a few years, but I do really think that there's no guarantee.
[00:18:39]  Even the prosecution is not going to say to the judge, please give them less jail time.
[00:18:43]  They're just going to simply kind of list or enumerate the items of their cooperation.
[00:18:48]  But we know how this works, and so it might end up being something like time-served or a brief couple years.
[00:18:55]  Let's talk a little bit about the defense, because I feel like the case, I mean, at least, you know, look, we're all critics in here of crypto and SPF, Sam, and FTX, and everything that's been going on, the kind of madness of the crypto explosion of the past like three, four years in particular.
[00:19:16]  But so the case, but for the pro from the prosecution's point of view, seems like very straightforward because, you know, like you kind of lay out, it is like textbook fraud.
[00:19:25]  There's all this kind of confusing stuff about crypto and certain kind of specifics about that sort of technology, but it's at bottom like just textbook fraud.
[00:19:36]  So what is the kind of defense of Sam going to look like, do you think?
[00:19:40]  Or how has it kind of shaped up to be?
[00:19:42]  Well, so originally they were sort of leaning towards making what's called an advice of counsel defense, which, you know, I'm just going to say once, I am not a lawyer.
[00:19:53]  But basically means, you know, I had bad lawyers, which, but then they didn't officially.
[00:19:58]  Wait, what?
[00:19:59]  They were going to argue that he's had just bad, he's had bad lawyers.
[00:20:02]  Which includes his dad among those people, lawyers providing counsel.
[00:20:07]  Oh my God, he keeps the score.
[00:20:10]  It's sort of an official type of defense, but then they never actually invoked it.
[00:20:15]  And the judge basically, I think it was from the prosecution there was a motion, but I think it was basically like there were some limitations on how much he could kind of invoke that kind of defense without actually doing it.
[00:20:26]  But so far, it's not really clear what they intend to do.
[00:20:31]  I mean, there were some intimations earlier on, yeah, this is going to be about he thought he did nothing wrong, he was acting in good faith, things were messy, kind of mistakes were made almost, but I don't see how they can possibly get away with that before, much less after these first few witnesses.
[00:20:46]  The cross-examinations have been really weak.
[00:20:49]  There have been no defense witnesses, and it's not clear who they might call.
[00:20:53]  They're kind of there's no chance he's gonna.
[00:20:56]  I don't know.
[00:20:57]  I mean, the expert witnesses were denied, basically, I think, by the judge.
[00:21:02]  Sam, we don't know if he's gonna testify.
[00:21:03]  He has the option.
[00:21:04]  The judges, of course, said you have the option no matter what your lawyers say.
[00:21:09]  I think his lawyers probably don't want him to, but he is such a verbal guy.
[00:21:13]  You know, he's very awkward, of course.
[00:21:16]  And we saw that month between the company collapsing and his arrest where he was on social media and on Substack and at the New York Times thing remotely.
[00:21:24]  And the DMs.
[00:21:24]  He would not shut the up.
[00:21:25]  And the DMs, yeah.
[00:21:26]  I was communicating with him a little bit.
[00:21:28]  Yeah, he would not shut the fuck up.
[00:21:29]  Yeah, and so that's that worked.
[00:21:32]  I mean, and we can talk about the media and stuff, but that worked well for him on his way up, being very talkative and available, but certainly has not helped him on the way down.
[00:21:39]  I could imagine him insisting on testifying, though, just because of the type of person he seems to be.
[00:21:43]  But yeah, the defense has been really bad.
[00:21:47]  It's been almost funny.
[00:21:48]  Like, speaking of sort of camaraderie in the overflow room, like, there's been laughter and just like, you've been a little stunned.
[00:21:55]  So the main lawyer is this guy, Cohen.
[00:21:57]  He gives the opening statement, and it's sort of like, hey, my client didn't really mean any of this.
[00:22:03]  Or like, you know, kind of just, you know, this has been a tragic series of airs and weren't explained.
[00:22:09]  Whoopsies.
[00:22:10]  Yeah, kind of a big whoopsies.
[00:22:11]  The Nuremberg defense.
[00:22:14]  Famously.
[00:22:15]  And then, but most of the cross-examination so far has been this guy, Christian Everdale.
[00:22:20]  Is that his name?
[00:22:21]  We're familiar with old Christian.
[00:22:24]  Yeah, Christian Everdale, for our listeners who might not remember or weren't our listeners back then, in which case go back in the archive and listen, bitch, was one of Gillian Maxwell's lawyers during the Gillian Maxwell trial that we covered.
[00:22:37]  And he was actually, I would say, in the middle of the road there.
[00:22:42]  He was fairly sharp.
[00:22:43]  Yeah, we thought he was one of the better lawyers of hers.
[00:22:46]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:22:46]  Because we had old Bobby.
[00:22:48]  Well, I would say Bobby is the top.
[00:22:49]  Oh, Sternham, right?
[00:22:51]  Yeah, who was quite a character.
[00:22:53]  I mean, unbelievable.
[00:22:55]  Beautiful.
[00:22:56]  Yeah.
[00:22:56]  Like, yes.
[00:22:57]  Not physically, but a far side woman, if I've ever seen one.
[00:23:01]  A far Sidian.
[00:23:02]  Yes.
[00:23:03]  And then Christian was maybe, I think, second to that one.
[00:23:06]  Yes.
[00:23:07]  And he was kind of, he had a certain boyish charm.
[00:23:09]  I hate saying that, but it's true in the courtroom.
[00:23:13]  It sounds youthful.
[00:23:14]  I admit the feed isn't very good in the overflow room.
[00:23:17]  And mostly they've had it focused actually usefully on the witness and on the evidence screen where they like publish exhibits.
[00:23:23]  So that's kind of what we need to see.
[00:23:25]  So I admit I haven't seen a lot of Sam.
[00:23:27]  I've talked to people, been looking at him, but it's kind of what you expect.
[00:23:31]  You can see him a lot on a crazy thing.
[00:23:33]  What's that?
[00:23:34]  Sweatpants, Dorito stains.
[00:23:36]  He is wearing a suit.
[00:23:37]  I heard he got a haircut from a fellow inmate.
[00:23:39]  He definitely got a haircut and looks.
[00:23:42]  I think it was from an inmate.
[00:23:43]  Well, my jail sources tell me that he has now achieved the rank of shot caller in the Aryan Brotherhood, which I found spectacular.
[00:23:52]  But yeah, I can, God, I would love to just be like cutting his motherfucking hair in there.
[00:23:57]  I would wonder how you hook up with SBF in prison because he's like some guy that you could probably get money for your commissary from.
[00:24:04]  Not money, though, Bitcoin.
[00:24:06]  Bitcoin, yeah.
[00:24:07]  But the commissary should take Bitcoin.
[00:24:09]  But so he hasn't been doing very well.
[00:24:11]  Oh, yes.
[00:24:12]  So he's been leading the cross-examination.
[00:24:14]  It's been very weird.
[00:24:15]  I mean, again, like, I haven't spent a lot of time covering trials, but you can tell this guy's not doing so hot.
[00:24:22]  And yeah, as you said, he has one of these sort of A-list pedigrees for a big-time defense lawyer.
[00:24:29]  But his cross-examinations of several witnesses so far have basically been recapitulating things we already know.
[00:24:34]  It's like, so you worked at FTX, is that correct?
[00:24:37]  And all these statements followed by, is that correct?
[00:24:40]  Which are, one, he's just asking these kind of yes or no questions, but two, the formulations are really annoying and it's just repeating shit that you already know.
[00:24:50]  And so the judges admonished him a few times.
[00:24:52]  And there was one time, I think, on Thursday last week, where the judge straight up just says, like, interrupts him and says, sidebar now, kind of thing.
[00:24:59]  And there was this like, ooh, he's going to the principal.
[00:25:02]  It is equivalent.
[00:25:03]  Yeah.
[00:25:04]  And there have been many objections to the forms of his questions because I think basically he's just asking these, he's just making these statements and then doing the, is that correct?
[00:25:13]  And you're not, he's not really getting anywhere.
[00:25:15]  Like, he's not undermining the answers or narrative told by the prosecution.
[00:25:20]  And he's pissing off the judge.
[00:25:22]  The judges started saying sustained before there's even an objection sometimes.
[00:25:26]  Like there were a couple of those on Friday.
[00:25:28]  So like he would like, like Everdell would ask a question and before the prosecution could even object, the judge, would you say sustained?
[00:25:37]  Yeah, with a heavy sigh, like sustained.
[00:25:41]  Interesting.
[00:25:42]  And interesting.
[00:25:43]  The judge is this guy, Lewis Kaplan, who is a top judge, especially in securities cases.
[00:25:51]  He's kind of a classic judge in the sense, like, I'm sovereign.
[00:25:54]  This is my courtroom.
[00:25:54]  Don't fuck with me.
[00:25:56]  He also makes some wisecracks.
[00:25:58]  You know, he quotes learned hand.
[00:26:00]  He's like.
[00:26:01]  I'm not a fan of judges.
[00:26:02]  Yeah, he's like 79 years old.
[00:26:04]  He is worth noting, like, the judge that put Stephen Donziger on trial or was behind that whole thing.
[00:26:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:26:10]  So this is an intense or sort of serious guy.

=== Judge Kaplan's Reign (04:36) ===

[00:26:14]  Like, he runs the courtroom how he wants.
[00:26:16]  And he is certainly, I mean, in the pretrial hearings over the summer, he showed some sympathy for Cohen, the lead lawyer.
[00:26:22]  He just said something like, you're a good lawyer.
[00:26:23]  I know you have a tough job here because your client's a crazy man who acts recklessly.
[00:26:28]  But now the judge is certainly very impatient and annoyed with Everdale because Everdale is simply failing to ask good or proper questions and not really advancing the testimony at all.
[00:26:39]  Yeah, something that I learned from our brief stint as courtroom, not so brief stint as courtroom reporters, is that like you really, I would say a big part of your job as a lawyer, maybe even a majority part of your job as a lawyer is just making sure the judge likes you.
[00:26:56]  Yeah.
[00:26:57]  Like that's really like suck it up to them because they, boy, they really run those things in a little few years.
[00:27:02]  Maybe they're playing the long game, trying to lay down some, I don't know, some bad lawyering on appeals.
[00:27:11]  Well, some people are joking that actually this is the advice of counseling.
[00:27:16]  He's acting it out right now, exactly.
[00:27:18]  Which I thought was pretty funny.
[00:27:19]  He's definitely not a moron, that guy.
[00:27:21]  And his parents are in the audience, you know, which is PFs.
[00:27:25]  And they're writing down notes and stuff, and they're both lawyers.
[00:27:28]  They're just doodling.
[00:27:29]  Yeah, they might be, planning their own escape.
[00:27:32]  So it's been a little odd so far.
[00:27:34]  I mean, I got to say the prosecution, like, they're not, you know, they don't blow you away with rhetoric or charisma or anything, but they're doing a good job.
[00:27:41]  Like, they guy, I mean, they're their witnesses, of course, and they've worked with them, but they just guide the witness through these questions, building the case, and not going too deep into the technical aspects or the crypto, but basically saying, you know, they've shown us a little bit of code, but not too much, but enough to say, like, here it is.
[00:27:58]  I wrote this.
[00:27:59]  You know, this is Gary Wong talking.
[00:28:00]  Sam told me to write this.
[00:28:02]  And this is, we lied about that, and then we lied about it.
[00:28:06]  You know, stuff like that.
[00:28:08]  And really progressing through the materials and these different exhibits in a way where, at least from my perspective, it's pretty easy to put together.
[00:28:15]  I mean, I do wonder about the jurors because, look, they don't want to be there.
[00:28:19]  This shit's boring.
[00:28:21]  Probably a lot of them don't have any idea who SBF is.
[00:28:24]  Well, if the defense did their job correctly, they would have.
[00:28:27]  Yeah, but there were people who, I have to admit, I don't remember specifically who some of these people were cut, but there was like, I think there's a Solomon Brothers employee, a former one on the jury, like a retired guy.
[00:28:39]  There was someone who said, oh, my wife works for a firm that's doing FTX bankruptcy work, not Sullivan and Cromwell, but something else.
[00:28:48]  You know, it's New York, so eventually people have connections to law or finance or something.
[00:28:51]  So you think that you don't want to get those guys out of there.
[00:28:53]  Yeah, there's been some of that, but some of the things that kind of hit us obsessive observers as important, I'm not always sure how the jury sees that.
[00:29:02]  But I should have said this at the beginning, there's seven basic charges of various types of securities fraud, commodities, fraud, conspiracy, commit those things, a wire fraud.
[00:29:12]  And we've already seen all these examples of saying one thing and doing another, and that being presented to investors, to customers, because he's accused of defrauding both.
[00:29:23]  So I think any decent jury would be able to kind of follow that along and put that together.
[00:29:30]  I mean, but we've got like four or five more weeks.
[00:29:32]  Yeah.
[00:29:33]  It's funny.
[00:29:33]  You know, I was trying to think on my way here.
[00:29:35]  I was kind of like thinking through some of the possible defenses that could be offered.
[00:29:39]  And it seems like it all has to hinge on he just didn't know or thought that it would be, it would go different, kind of.
[00:29:50]  Like, and it's funny because I think that in some of the kind of charm offensive basically that was in the media in anticipation of this trial, basically on behalf of Sam, whether it was like through his own sources that he was working, I call him, I mean, through his own journalists that he was acting as a source to at the New York Times, there's been a couple of pieces that were, I think, a bit friendlier than probably should have been.
[00:30:16]  There was one piece in the New Yorker where I was like pretty shocked at some of the ways in which the author was, I mean, at one point literally said, I think, you know, that FTX, you know, that customers should have anticipated that FTX could use their funds for other investments in the ways that banks do.
[00:30:42]  As if when it's a complete, you can't compare the two.
[00:30:44]  FTX is not a bank.
[00:30:45]  I mean, that's just right off the bat.
[00:30:48]  And in addition to all the other things where that kind of analysis is.

=== Charitable Investments Debunked (15:35) ===

[00:30:51]  They wouldn't do that.
[00:30:52]  Yeah, and that it totally falls into that.
[00:30:54]  We do not invest client funds.
[00:30:55]  I think he then deleted it.
[00:30:56]  But I mean, there were many times they said things like they played clips from interviews.
[00:31:00]  I'm sorry to interrupt, but they play clips from interviews with Bloomberg, not even the most notorious.
[00:31:05]  Yeah, that's got to be coming, right?
[00:31:07]  Yeah, that one is going to come, the Ponzi scheme one, I think, the black box Ponzi scheme.
[00:31:10]  And they played another clip from the interview with, I think it's a Blockworks guy, and he says, like, I've heard this one before too, where Sam is talking about like why they called it Alameda Research, because he's like, you can't call it like shitcoin traders limited or something like that.
[00:31:26]  And they called it Alameda Research to disguise the company when banking.
[00:31:30]  They still had to still set up other shell accounts.
[00:31:34]  They made a really complex web of shell.
[00:31:37]  Yeah, I mean, this is one thing that certainly the people sympathetic to Sam, like Michael Lewis, I think, miss is that there were more than 140 FTX-related companies.
[00:31:48]  And of course, some of that was because they grew really big and they acquired companies all over the world.
[00:31:53]  But they also had these shell companies that were purely to move money around or make investments.
[00:31:58]  And we know very well, this has already been mentioned in court, but people knew this through the bankruptcy.
[00:32:03]  There was this thing called North Dimension.
[00:32:05]  So they couldn't bank with Silvergate, which is like a very crypto-friendly bank in Southern California, I believe San Diego, that went bust last year.
[00:32:14]  Yeah.
[00:32:15]  And deeply important to kind of to crypto and to moving around money a little quietly among the crypto companies.
[00:32:23]  But they even rejected Alameda.
[00:32:26]  And then what they finally did was they set up this fake electronics retailer with a website that said like, oh, we ship in Berkeley.
[00:32:33]  Yeah.
[00:32:33]  Like not by North Dimension.
[00:32:36]  I believe the company might have been registered in Washington State, but I guess something's confused.
[00:32:41]  But they did have offices in Berkeley at the time.
[00:32:43]  It was a good easy commute for me.
[00:32:45]  Oh, yeah.
[00:32:47]  And they banked at Silvergate under this North Dimension shell company, which is totally fake.
[00:32:53]  I mean, that's fraud.
[00:32:54]  You're lying to the bank even.
[00:32:55]  Supposedly Silvergate didn't know.
[00:32:57]  Maybe they did.
[00:32:58]  But even if you don't know, it doesn't make it not fraud.
[00:32:59]  Yeah.
[00:33:00]  It's still fraud.
[00:33:02]  I mean, there's a lot of that too.
[00:33:03]  Another apparent defense that they want to give that the prosecution is seeking to limit, though I don't know, I don't even think this is that effective, is that Sam, yeah, sure, Sam stole money allegedly and made all these investments that he wasn't allowed to through Alameda and other shell companies.
[00:33:19]  But hey, a couple of those investments did well.
[00:33:22]  The one that people talk about is Anthropic, which is this AI company.
[00:33:26]  He gave them, I believe, $400 million.
[00:33:29]  And now it's being invested like crazy by Amazon's promising up to a couple billion, I believe.
[00:33:35]  And now Google's coming in with billions.
[00:33:38]  So it's just drowning in money and that investment.
[00:33:40]  Well, it's drowning in valuation.
[00:33:42]  There you go.
[00:33:43]  Yeah.
[00:33:43]  A lot of that money hasn't been sent yet.
[00:33:45]  The Amazon investment is supposed to be over time, all those caveats.
[00:33:48]  And this could all pop in a year or two.
[00:33:51]  Even still, that's not a defense to fraud.
[00:33:53]  No, and it's like, as someone told me today, yeah, I committed fraud, but a lucky market saved me or whatever.
[00:34:00]  That's not a defense either.
[00:34:01]  You still weren't allowed to make those investments, just like the charitable donations.
[00:34:05]  You stole people's money to make those charitable donations.
[00:34:07]  In fact, I think that's what happened with Martin Shkreli, or whatever you say his name.
[00:34:11]  I can never say it right.
[00:34:12]  He paid back his investors.
[00:34:14]  Yeah, because he still committed the fraud.
[00:34:16]  So just because the market swings and one of your investments might be able to sell it for a few billion, possibly, they're still not in a great position.
[00:34:25]  There's still a lot of money to be clawed back.
[00:34:27]  And you still did the crime.
[00:34:30]  well it's funny because i feel like so much of that the kind of i don't know the mystique of all this hinges on apparently how this man sam has charmed all of these people I don't understand this at all because I find him completely and totally revolting.
[00:34:56]  I think he's cute.
[00:34:58]  On so many different levels, I find him like, I want to just push him into the Hudson off a very, very tall bridge.
[00:35:08]  We'll say.
[00:35:09]  Interesting.
[00:35:09]  I don't know where I was going with that.
[00:35:11]  However, many people and many people who were presumably intelligent up until we saw their assessment of Sam in the press seem to really be charmed by this guy.
[00:35:25]  And one of those is Michael Lewis.
[00:35:26]  Now, he came out with a new book about FTX and Sam called Going Infinite, which the title alone makes me want to blow my fucking money.
[00:35:35]  It's so funny.
[00:35:36]  It sounds exactly like a Hulu Limited series.
[00:35:39]  Totally, it does.
[00:35:40]  Well, I do believe he sold the rights to the book before writing the book.
[00:35:43]  Before a word was even written.
[00:35:45]  Talk about Going Infinite.
[00:35:46]  Talk about a businessman, though.
[00:35:47]  Yeah.
[00:35:48]  But you reviewed that book for Graydon Carter's Airmail, which, fun fact, we were told were too political to be featured in.
[00:35:56]  Really?
[00:35:58]  Yeah, that's a little lore for the loreheads out there.
[00:36:00]  However, filing that away.
[00:36:03]  You did not like this book.
[00:36:05]  No, I didn't.
[00:36:07]  And there is something to be said when you review a book by a major writer like this, you don't really have to hold back.
[00:36:13]  If this were a first-time writer, you might feel a little guilt.
[00:36:16]  For people who don't know, who is Michael Lewis?
[00:36:18]  Sure, he's basically America's preeminent popular nonfiction chronicler of especially plucky underdog stories that might be set in the world of business or finance.
[00:36:29]  He wrote The Big Short, Moneyball, Flash Boys, The Blind Side, which has been a subject of controversy lately too.
[00:36:38]  And a subject of some controversial comments by Michael Lewis.
[00:36:41]  Yeah, he's not helped.
[00:36:43]  So basically with that story, the football player at the heart of it was adopted by a white couple.
[00:36:48]  He realized years later, oh, they didn't actually adopt me.
[00:36:50]  They had a conservatorship.
[00:36:52]  They probably took a lot of money that was owed to him.
[00:36:54]  And among other things, recently, Lewis has said, oh, he's getting a lesson in Hollywood accounting.
[00:36:59]  And he also basically said he has a head injury and is an angry black man now.
[00:37:03]  You know, this happens to football players.
[00:37:04]  They get head injuries and they get angry.
[00:37:06]  Yeah, he was like, he has CTE.
[00:37:08]  Yeah.
[00:37:09]  So the kind of arrogance has really been showing.
[00:37:14]  You know, it's not a humble book.
[00:37:16]  So a little bit of foregrounding this.
[00:37:19]  Michael Lewis met Sam and was one of these people who was apparently charmed.
[00:37:24]  I also don't understand why necessarily.
[00:37:27]  He liked that the infinite part of the title is because Sam said he thought he needed infinite money to do what he wanted to do.
[00:37:33]  And then he could get infinite money.
[00:37:35]  You know, that seems like right off the bat, that should be a red flag.
[00:37:38]  Well, I understand that, though, because sometimes I think about the things I want to do.
[00:37:40]  I'm like, dude, I need infinite money to do this.
[00:37:43]  Well, part of the reason he said he needed infinite money was because he was like, I'm going to save the world from all of its problems.
[00:37:49]  Yeah, it's amazing.
[00:37:50]  So there are a lot of things taken for granted in the book, but the two main things I think are that one, crypto has utility and is good for the world and is not sort of overshadowed by its negative externalities or just like, and is actually innovative.
[00:38:04]  He just assumes crypto is good in Sam and Sam is this financial genius.
[00:38:08]  Yeah, insane assumption.
[00:38:09]  Yeah, no exploration of that or like that he's just creating a new generation of gamblers.
[00:38:13]  And then the other assumption that he makes is that, yeah.
[00:38:17]  He's actually going to save the world, whatever that means, and that effective altruism and kind of the philanthropic and charitable intent is legit and actually effective.
[00:38:26]  I mean, he even says at one point in the book, like that Sam donate, when he was on Jane Street and other places, he donated a lot of his money, but he donated to three organizations, two of which were founded by effective altruism people.
[00:38:40]  Just look at that.
[00:38:41]  He's giving money back to the people who sort of sponsored him.
[00:38:45]  There's a lot of opportunity there to investigate corruption whether in crypto or the EA world and all this stuff.
[00:38:51]  And he just takes everything as evidence of Sam's good intent and of the virtue of this world.
[00:38:58]  That's fascinating because I feel like if you are at all a curious writer or even just somebody who's like, fuck, I want to just write a juicy good book.
[00:39:09]  It's so easy to kind of interrogate the EA people because it's so both like cultish, but also like on the face of it, just like absurd in so many aspects that it could be easy to approach it with a critical lens.
[00:39:25]  And it would be palatable to an audience too, because I think most people who like learn about that stuff, it's like, this seems a little weird and very, very much a cult-y kind of thing.
[00:39:34]  And yeah, Lewis seems to have none of that real curiosity.
[00:39:39]  I remember when SBF got arrested or indicted, I believe Michael Lewis was with him in the Bahamas.
[00:39:47]  And there were so many people pointing to that, like, oh, like, if Michael Lewis is like, oh, you think that you're like not going to get arrested, but Michael Lewis is with you?
[00:39:57]  It's like, what are you talking about?
[00:39:58]  He's not Batman, dude.
[00:40:00]  He's fucking Malcolm Gladwell with a different haircut.
[00:40:05]  It's crazy.
[00:40:06]  And then like, yeah, this book seems to just be like pretty baldly what the young people call dick writing.
[00:40:16]  Well, he calls it a letter to the jury.
[00:40:18]  I don't think he has that line.
[00:40:19]  It's just psycho.
[00:40:20]  Yeah, I don't think that line's in the book, but he said it in interviews, he said on 60 years like that's jury tampering, I guess.
[00:40:27]  Or, I mean, it came out the same day the trial started.
[00:40:29]  Like, the jury can't read the book.
[00:40:30]  What are you talking about?
[00:40:31]  And he also, a phrase that's been quoted is, he says in the book, there's a Sam-sized hole in the world, which I think speaks for itself.
[00:40:41]  I think it's an interesting shape for sure.
[00:40:43]  And one that most people could use as a portal with a bit of give on both sides.
[00:40:49]  But wow, astounding.
[00:40:51]  I think that you tweeted something that it takes him like 30 pages to refer to Sam as a child.
[00:40:56]  Yeah, I think it's page 13.
[00:40:57]  He calls him a child billionaire.
[00:41:00]  How old is Sam Bakeman-Fried?
[00:41:02]  Right now he's 31.
[00:41:03]  When they met, I think he was 29.
[00:41:05]  Interesting.
[00:41:06]  Yeah.
[00:41:06]  29.
[00:41:07]  Sam is, you know, Sam Bakeman Fried, the world's oldest teenager.
[00:41:11]  I will say, both his face and brain seem to be of child size, childlike.
[00:41:16]  You could call him immature or juvenile, but he is an adult male from a very privileged background, well-educated, even if he doesn't really care for books.
[00:41:25]  And, you know, he was handling billions.
[00:41:27]  Well, those Bayesian priors.
[00:41:29]  Right, the Bayesian Priors.
[00:41:30]  He was handling billions of dollars in other people's money.
[00:41:33]  Like anything about like, oh, this guy is just sort of an awkward genius lost in the woods is just bullshit.
[00:41:39]  I'm just a kid.
[00:41:41]  What is it about him that is like allowing people, because I mean, I get that Michael Lewis, you know, he secured this deal to write this book before all the fraud shit came out, right?
[00:41:52]  Though people certainly had been examining and looking at and trying to raise the alarm about FTX and stuff had already started cascading throughout crypto and other kind of obviously fraudulent schemes that also Alameda had ties to, right?
[00:42:08]  Like I, so on the one hand, it's like, okay, you secured the book before a lot of this stuff started happening.
[00:42:14]  But on the other hand, like it was kind of already happening in the general vicinity of this thing for some time.
[00:42:21]  But at the same time, like I was reading this book, I got a decent way through.
[00:42:25]  And I'm just like, it seems like he, at the very last minute, was trying to figure out how the fuck to pivot it a little bit.
[00:42:32]  Yeah.
[00:42:33]  Because he was already planning just a kind of like preemptive hagiography and like preemptive sort of like canonization of this kid who's a man, like we point out, who's criminal, alleged criminal.
[00:42:48]  But then at the end of it, was just like, ah, fuck it.
[00:42:50]  I'm not even going to pivot anymore.
[00:42:52]  I'm just going to go full in and just say that he's innocent.
[00:42:55]  Yeah.
[00:42:55]  And he does all this sort of back of the envelope math.
[00:42:57]  I mean, he jokes about it too.
[00:42:59]  It's a little jokey in places that, frankly, I mean, I don't think it's terrible or on the list of offenses.
[00:43:03]  It's not that bad.
[00:43:04]  But he's a little jokey in parts where I'm like, no, this isn't that funny.
[00:43:07]  Or like, you need to take this a little more seriously.
[00:43:10]  Because that's one of my problems with the book, actually, is like, look, you can make fun of people for investing in crypto if you want, but there are a lot of everyday people who did for whatever reason, who bought in.
[00:43:20]  Superball ads.
[00:43:21]  Yeah, for understandable reasons, which we can go through, but a lot of desperate folks and their money is stuck on the platform.
[00:43:27]  Like there are millions of people, and not every one of those is just some asshole crypto broke.
[00:43:31]  And there's been a lot of social consequences from that and financial consequences for people.
[00:43:36]  And those people are never considered at all in the book.
[00:43:39]  So instead, kind of late in the book, he does this back-of-the-envelope math.
[00:43:42]  They're like, where did the money go?
[00:43:44]  And it's not even really worth recapping because it's so haphazard.
[00:43:49]  And also, like, there are people like the new FTX leadership, like, frankly, just some amateur blockchain sleuths and investigators and some crazy people on Twitter who have done a lot of this work and even in more detail.
[00:44:01]  And there's still a lot to be known.
[00:44:02]  But he kind of lands on this idea that the money is still there, basically, in this common bank account, and that things were moved around, but it was all Sam's money.
[00:44:12]  That's what he calls it.
[00:44:13]  It wasn't Sam's money, but that's what he calls it.
[00:44:15]  And then it's kind of like, well, throw up your hands because people just don't get it.
[00:44:19]  That it's, yeah, it's messy.
[00:44:20]  Maybe there's no CFO or proper accounting records, but the money's there.
[00:44:24]  You know, he's good for it.
[00:44:26]  Because that was Sam's defense that he's made a couple times is that he was basically denied access to that money to pay things back and make things whole by the people that took over.
[00:44:37]  I mean, this was Sam Bankman Freed's very public, not apology, but like excuses immediately after this, is that he was basically locked out of being able to pay people back.
[00:44:48]  And there was a sort of something like a coup that occurred.
[00:44:50]  Yeah, which is also a little hard to sum because so Sam voluntarily signed a bankruptcy filing, you know, like 4 a.m. one morning after a crazy week.
[00:45:01]  Okay, but he's a tweaker for him.
[00:45:03]  Yeah, I'm going to say, he's one of the most tweaked individuals in the history of the United States.
[00:45:07]  He sends me DMs once in a while at like 4 in the morning.
[00:45:09]  Exactly.
[00:45:10]  Man is up.
[00:45:11]  And so like, yes, I'm sure he's signing lots of things.
[00:45:13]  He's up and then he's up and then he's up.
[00:45:15]  He's up.
[00:45:15]  He's up.
[00:45:16]  But he claims that he immediately regretted it, but it's like, you can't take that back.
[00:45:20]  I'm sorry.
[00:45:20]  Postnote clarity, not my problem.
[00:45:22]  Exactly.
[00:45:23]  It's like the blockchain.
[00:45:24]  It's permanent.
[00:45:25]  Permanent.
[00:45:26]  But he claimed that an offer, I think it was in the New Yorker article maybe, that an offer from Justin's son, who is the shadiest person in crypto, probably.
[00:45:35]  He's the ambassador from the ambassador from Granada to the WTO.
[00:45:40]  And then the government changed.
[00:45:42]  I mean, he obviously bought his way in.
[00:45:44]  And then the government changed in Granada.
[00:45:46]  And they're like, nah, he's not our ambassador anymore.
[00:45:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:45:48]  But he still calls himself His Excellency.
[00:45:50]  He's hilarious, but he is probably the most shady, incompetent person in crypto.
[00:45:55]  He's still like a shitcoin billionaire on paper.
[00:45:57]  But he apparently offered $400 million, according to one report.
[00:46:00]  That's like nothing compared to what he needs.
[00:46:03]  It's like 5% of what he needs, or maybe even less.
[00:46:08]  But he claims he immediately regretted it.
[00:46:09]  He says he tried to cooperate with the new leadership, that John J. Ray, who is sort of like a swinging dick type.
[00:46:16]  AJ Ray.
[00:46:17]  Yeah, it was like...
[00:46:18]  I mean, it's in the name.
[00:46:19]  Yeah.
[00:46:19]  Yeah, I know who he is.
[00:46:20]  He's straight from Central Cash.
[00:46:21]  I'm sure he's somehow was involved with Dallas.
[00:46:25]  That's what he sounds like.

=== Shady Crypto Billionaire (04:34) ===

[00:46:26]  He did kill Dallas.
[00:46:27]  Yeah, totally.
[00:46:28]  But he claims that John Jay Ray and the new FTX leadership just ignored him and his entreaties to help.
[00:46:33]  But you could even understand that.
[00:46:34]  I mean, they had cooperation from other FTX employees like Gary Wong, who they still didn't quite trust, it sounds like.
[00:46:40]  But Sam, I think, thinks he somehow holds the keys to all this, or he might even hold the literal keys to some of these wallets, but he was never going to fix it.
[00:46:52]  And it wasn't going to get better.
[00:46:53]  I mean, the whole just kept getting bigger.
[00:46:55]  And that kind of sentiment just gets kind of repeated by Michael Lewis.
[00:46:59]  I mean, it's interesting because, I mean, I'm not like a huge, I feel like I've only read a couple of his books.
[00:47:05]  You hate the big short.
[00:47:06]  Well, I hate the movie.
[00:47:08]  The book I don't love.
[00:47:09]  But the movie I really hate, but the book I don't love.
[00:47:12]  But I do think that Lewis has sort of usually, I mean, in the case of the big short, even in the case of the one about the high frequency trading, the, I can't remember what it's like.
[00:47:21]  The Flash Boys.
[00:47:22]  And somewhat with Moneyball, it's like he finds these sort of characters who are sort of like going against the grain, who are kind of, you know, in the case of the Big Short, it's like the one, you know, trader who against all odds was going to, you know, trade against the wind, kind of, because he knew that the whole market was a sham and it was going to blow up at some point.
[00:47:44]  Now, Lewis sort of declines to mention that that's really what allowed the great financial crisis to become great as opposed to kind of contained.
[00:47:51]  But that's, again, subject of another podcast.
[00:47:54]  But in this book, it's like, I don't know if he, I guess he saw Sam as maybe one of those type figures, but it seems just completely absurd to me.
[00:48:04]  And I mean, I know that you've spent the past years and some change, like really following Sam.
[00:48:12]  And I just don't, it makes me crazy because I'm like, this guy's not charismatic.
[00:48:17]  He opens his mouth.
[00:48:18]  He sounds like a fucking moron.
[00:48:20]  Everything he says, he's, you know, even just down to the like, oh, well, I don't think Shakespeare, like Shakespeare's a bad writer because the odds are that someone will be better in the future.
[00:48:30]  It's like just completely moronic.
[00:48:32]  These anecdotes that Lewis puts in here about Sam's time at Jane Street, where he's just completely reckless and making these reckless bets in order to like basically punish his colleagues at Jane Street when he's an intern there.
[00:48:50]  It's like, just this guy is a fucking asshole.
[00:48:53]  Like he's fucking awful.
[00:48:55]  How does, it's so plain to me.
[00:48:59]  I agree with your assessment because I don't get the charisma or anything like that.
[00:49:04]  There was some kind of bubble built up around him.
[00:49:06]  I mean, maybe very financially driven that contributed to this.
[00:49:11]  But one thing I will say, the Jane Street thing is interesting from the book.
[00:49:14]  So in the book, Lewis says a lot of stuff about Sam's time at Jane Street, this high-frequency trading firm when he was straight out of MIT.
[00:49:22]  And they were all making bets with each other all day, the traders.
[00:49:25]  And there was one guy there for whatever reason.
[00:49:27]  Sam says he's not even sure why, but he hated the guy.
[00:49:29]  His name's like Asher or something.
[00:49:31]  Yeah.
[00:49:32]  Asher Roth.
[00:49:33]  Probably the rapper.
[00:49:36]  And so basically one day, it's not even worth getting into, but Sam somewhat cleverly engineers a series of bets where he can make the same bet over and over with other interns because they bet that no intern would lose more than a certain amount of money that day.
[00:49:50]  And Sam, he bet it with the guy he hates.
[00:49:53]  And Sam then makes all these other bets with very favorable odds to with other interns and essentially like engineers a scheme where he can keep making this bet with other people, ensuring that the initial bet with the guy he hates goes in his favor.
[00:50:07]  So basically he's humiliating this guy that he doesn't like by continually like telling other interns, who wants to bet this, who wants to bet that?
[00:50:15]  Max Payne, Max Gain.
[00:50:17]  Yeah, and the one thing it shows is, yeah, this guy's kind of an asshole.
[00:50:21]  I mean, there's some stuff in there about his depression.
[00:50:24]  I mean, I think Sam basically just has depression and like anhedonia.
[00:50:27]  Like it's briefly mentioned in the book.
[00:50:29]  He's probably sociopathic in some ways.
[00:50:31]  Like he says, I don't feel empathy.
[00:50:33]  I don't really care about people's feelings.
[00:50:34]  Well, that would be just kind of a jerk.
[00:50:36]  And the thing you do come away with at the end, like crime or no crime, like this type of person should not have been given so much money and power and responsibility.
[00:50:45]  And he was completely reckless as a young man even, or in his early 20s.
[00:50:50]  But that's part of the EA culture kind of is embracing of these huge risks because you see this very long-term potential benefit.
[00:50:59]  It's bullshit, but it justifies it.

=== Sociopathic Influences (02:56) ===

[00:51:01]  It's so funny, too, because that way of viewing the world too would naturally give somebody with such, let's say, mental and personality problems that Sam Bankman-Free clearly has, would give you something like a messianic complex, right?
[00:51:15]  And would give you this sort of outsized view of your world.
[00:51:18]  And once you start believing that and truly believing that, and you inhabit that in a way that I understand why a schmuck like Lewis might think you're some sort of real hero.
[00:51:31]  I want to talk a little bit about some of the people that were close to Sam.
[00:51:35]  So Sam Bankman-Fried was in a well, I mean, as an amateur student of alternative sexualities, there are, I would say, a few different types of polycules.
[00:51:47]  And I would say SBF was engaged in a very Northern California-style polycule situation.
[00:51:55]  Wait, what are the other kind of styles?
[00:51:56]  Bushwickian polycules?
[00:51:59]  I would say there's the type of rural polycule that is practiced.
[00:52:03]  I think the most dangerous one is the one in the Sunbelt.
[00:52:06]  Give it to me.
[00:52:07]  Oh, the Floridian polycule.
[00:52:08]  No, Sunbelt, like Arizona, New Mexico.
[00:52:11]  Oh, I would say that's a kind of the greater Phoenix area.
[00:52:15]  Yeah.
[00:52:15]  You work in insurance.
[00:52:17]  Like, there's just like, you know, I'm reminded of the congresswoman with her bag of ruffles on the dresser.
[00:52:26]  Some of the nastiest photos to ever emerge.
[00:52:29]  Oh, that is, that is, they give you, they transport you, though, to the situation in a way that few photographs ever have.
[00:52:36]  That's true.
[00:52:37]  They're remarkable artifacts.
[00:52:39]  I would say probably the most positive type of polycule is the Floridian, the aged Floridian polycule.
[00:52:45]  Obviously, many gross, disgusting things there, but sort of the leathery, beach-style polycule.
[00:52:51]  Also, kind of Lindy, like the retired.
[00:52:54]  Oh, yeah, key parties, the party pineapples.
[00:52:56]  Kind of like the hot tub.
[00:52:58]  Yes.
[00:52:58]  A hot tub at the Howard Jones.
[00:53:00]  Like, you all lost your virginity sometime when, like, post-Sauk hop, but pre-Woodstock.
[00:53:06]  And, like, you're now just like, yeah, you're in like a sort of boiling hot tub filled with sea.
[00:53:12]  See, I think the Sunbelt variety definitely has like more, what are the little toys called?
[00:53:19]  Sex toys.
[00:53:20]  No, not sex toys.
[00:53:21]  I mean, like, the actual, the little figures.
[00:53:23]  Oh, funkos.
[00:53:24]  Yeah.
[00:53:24]  Like, it's much more.
[00:53:25]  The Sunbelt one is like, has its kind of like, it's like an epic Funko.
[00:53:29]  I would say that is more the furry, sort of like progressive type polycule formation, which would be more related to the Bushwick one, although the Bushwick one wouldn't have the Funko pop.
[00:53:41]  But the, the, I'm going to say the less wrong EA Yudkowski style polycule, of which you know what I'm talking about.
[00:53:50]  Uh, you know what I'm talking about.
[00:53:52]  See, listeners here might be like, these guys are talking out of their ass.
[00:53:55]  No, I know what I'm talking about.
[00:53:57]  I'm not, oh, Michael.

=== Bail Revoked Hearing (09:54) ===

[00:53:58]  Speaks with authority.
[00:53:59]  I understand polycules, although I am, of course, a practitioner of non-ethical monogamy.
[00:54:06]  But is the polycules that are practiced in Berkeley, for instance, of which Sam Bankman-Fried was a member of.
[00:54:16]  Famously, he was fucking and sucking with Carolyn Ellison, who was the head of Alameda Research.
[00:54:23]  Many people who've even sort of cursory knowledge of the SPF case know that that ended somewhat acrimoniously.
[00:54:30]  And that Sam Bankman Fried, when he Fran Bankman Fried, when he was first indicted, he was allowed to go basically live at his parents' manths in Palo Alto and was, I mean, this is a nice house.
[00:54:44]  Both his parents are very wealthy, some of it from FDX, from ill-gotten Sam funds.
[00:54:51]  But he was allowed sort of free reign to chill at home and kind of hold court for various reporters until he gave Carolyn Ellison's diaries to the New York crimes.
[00:55:04]  And that to me is, first of all, as somebody who's had my diary read by multiple people against my will is fucking, I would say my worst nightmare would have the New York Times publish it.
[00:55:17]  But that, I think, speaks to a certain amount of, what do you think he was going?
[00:55:20]  Because he had his bail revoked for that.
[00:55:22]  Yeah.
[00:55:23]  And I was at that hearing also when he had his bail revoked.
[00:55:26]  So he has a First Amendment right, of course, when he was under house arrest to speak to the media.
[00:55:31]  There were some hearings where the lawyer for Sam, Cohen, basically said, look, it may not be a good strategy, but it's a legal one.
[00:55:40]  And eventually the judge disagreed because they said, and the prosecution too.
[00:55:44]  I do like that honestly.
[00:55:45]  It's honestly funny that.
[00:55:46]  I can't help to have a fool for a client.
[00:55:48]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:55:50]  But the judge said no.
[00:55:52]  I mean, the prosecution, of course, first disagreed.
[00:55:54]  Then the judge said, Well, he was exercising his First Amendment rights in the service of a crime.
[00:55:58]  I mean, this is sort of similar to Trump in the RICO case in Georgia.
[00:56:01]  It's like if you're just when conservatives are like, oh, so now it's illegal to tweet or to talk to people, it's like, no, you're talking in order to commit a crime.
[00:56:10]  Commit a crime.
[00:56:10]  Commit a crime in advance of conspiracy.
[00:56:13]  So a reporter from the New York Times had gone over to Sam's house, his parents' house, signed in, did it all the way it's supposed to be.
[00:56:22]  Put away his cell phone because you were not allowed to bring Internet connected devices to Sam.
[00:56:27]  And Sam showed him.
[00:56:29]  I mean, this was pretty much confirmed in court, and I think it's evident from the article.
[00:56:33]  The guy is full of the sound.
[00:56:34]  Yeah, we know that he's a source.
[00:56:37]  I thought one of the journalists confirmed it.
[00:56:38]  No, he did.
[00:56:39]  He did.
[00:56:39]  Oh, he did.
[00:56:40]  Yeah, I believe so.
[00:56:44]  And in court, his lawyers as much acknowledged that they were actually going to provide the writings to the defense.
[00:56:49]  I mean, to the prosecution.
[00:56:50]  I'm not sure what ended up happening with that.
[00:56:54]  And it was clear that he had access to some Google account or Google Drive or Google Doc, whatever, that Caroline had written all these personal things that was rather like a diary, but I mean, it was addressed to Sam, pretty much.
[00:57:06]  And she was writing for him.
[00:57:08]  I don't know if this is honestly some EA-driven relationship process.
[00:57:15]  It does kind of seem like an act of submission, sort of like it was all about, but when you get down to actual content, it was pretty typical insecurities, about work, about Sam.
[00:57:26]  I mean, one thing you do learn from the Lewis book is that, as sort of expected, Sam was pretty indifferent towards Caroline.
[00:57:31]  He told her he really liked her, but he wanted their relationship to be a complete secret.
[00:57:34]  He did not want to be public in any way.
[00:57:38]  And he had some professional reasons he claimed, but it hurt her.
[00:57:44]  And when the article finally comes out over the summer, to be honest, Caroline Ellison seems a little sympathetic.
[00:57:51]  I mean, you just kind of feel bad that someone got exposed this way.
[00:57:53]  Yeah, because she seems like Caroline Allison strikes as whatever else you might say about her, a pathetic figure, right?
[00:58:00]  Yeah, kind of in over her head, not treated well by the other people.
[00:58:03]  While everyone else was plundering the place for tens or hundreds of millions, I mean, some numbers have been revised, I think, but at one point it looked like she only got paid $6 million.
[00:58:14]  I mean, only $6 million.
[00:58:15]  But again, people around her are taking on the business.
[00:58:17]  There's even a gender gap in fraud.
[00:58:19]  It's funny, though.
[00:58:20]  It did kind of seem to extend to the organization.
[00:58:22]  I mean, this is sort of a misogynist subculture broadly, and certainly in tech.
[00:58:26]  And like, we know about various issues, women being paid far less across the economy.
[00:58:31]  But like, she's sort of, I mean, this is why he's throwing her under the bus right now, too, is that he's saying that she was in charge of Alameda and he wasn't paying attention because he trusted her to run it.
[00:58:41]  But he lived with her.
[00:58:43]  He was sometimes sleeping with her.
[00:58:44]  He owned 90% of Alameda.
[00:58:46]  He was involved.
[00:58:48]  And he also, one thing we heard in court was he had Alameda's balances open on one of his six screens at all times.
[00:58:56]  That's so cool.
[00:58:57]  That's how Liz is.
[00:58:59]  So yeah, over the summer, the judge said, hey, you committed witness intimidation.
[00:59:03]  This is like the third time you've done something that's really crossed the line.
[00:59:08]  And you're basically threatening other witnesses with exposing them somehow or trying to embarrass them.
[00:59:12]  And that's when he went back to jail.
[00:59:14]  That was early August and was sent to MDC in Brooklyn.
[00:59:17]  Yeah, where he has not been able to get vegan food and I believe might be having trouble getting some of his many medications that he spends his time on.
[00:59:24]  Apparently, so I honestly wonder, like, how much is it just like, this is a guy addicted to the internet?
[00:59:28]  Like, we all are, but like more than any of us.
[00:59:31]  In a way that like you, we couldn't even fathom.
[00:59:33]  And video games.
[00:59:34]  Yeah, and video games.
[00:59:35]  People are telling me.
[00:59:35]  He's like legends.
[00:59:37]  I'm kind of hazy on some of the details, but apparently there were things he was doing in the Bahamian prisoner.
[00:59:41]  One reason why he might have agreed to extradition was the internet access wasn't that good.
[00:59:45]  And he was trying to tell them, I don't know, there's this whole thing about how he's trying to get better internet access in the Bahamas.
[00:59:51]  This guy needs to be online.
[00:59:53]  It seemed like from that initial point, though, when he was arrested and then the kind of ensuing months, it seems like it took him a very long time, if he's even there yet, for him to come to terms with the reality of his own situation, where he was just like, well, I'm in jail and I need internet.
[01:00:11]  He couldn't understand.
[01:00:13]  You are in jail.
[01:00:14]  I think this question of seriousness actually is a valid one because certainly throughout the whole life of his business, there were no consequences.
[01:00:22]  There was a real lack of kind of seriousness behind the enterprise and taking life and risk and other people's money and other people's financial fate seriously or just even the fact that you have to tell the truth about certain things.
[01:00:35]  And then in court, and especially how he handled himself while on house arrest, I mean, he had more than 400 phone calls with Michael Lewis.
[01:00:43]  I mean, again, he's allowed to do these things, but really pushing the limits on some stuff.
[01:00:48]  And then when he was remanded into custody, I mean, that seemed to be, I'm just, you know, reading him from afar at that point about 20 feet away, but he went pale and like these huge marshals come up around him and tell him to empty his pockets, take off his tie, take off his shoelaces.
[01:01:04]  His mom started crying, kind of running up there and was being told to stay back.
[01:01:09]  That was one of those moments where it's like, dude, this is serious.
[01:01:12]  And I don't know if you really have taken it seriously.
[01:01:13]  Like the judge told you to take this seriously a few weeks ago in another hearing.
[01:01:17]  I saw you that day.
[01:01:18]  Yeah, that's right.
[01:01:19]  Yeah.
[01:01:19]  And like, it was, I mean, man, it was striking.
[01:01:22]  And like, this is a guy who's been as pampered as anyone can be for the first 30 years.
[01:01:27]  Infantilized, even, and all throughout the media.
[01:01:30]  It's funny, like, you know, talking about this, like, there is like, I actually, part of me does understand why people call him a kid, but that's because he really does in many ways resemble like his personality, the way he acts, the way he reacts to stuff.
[01:01:46]  And it really, his inability to, I think, grasp his situation reminds me of like children that I know.
[01:01:54]  You know, like a three, like, you know, I spent a lot of time with a three-year-old I'm friends with.
[01:01:59]  And he is like, you know, it's like a child that like doesn't understand the consequence of his actions.
[01:02:04]  Like what, you know, like hitting the button for something like actually does something.
[01:02:09]  And that's what it seems like.
[01:02:12]  His big thing now, like, oh, I can't get vegan food in here.
[01:02:14]  My brother, you are in jail.
[01:02:19]  You are in jail.
[01:02:20]  You should be happy.
[01:02:20]  You're getting something that you can even call food.
[01:02:23]  Maybe they're not going to be a little bit more.
[01:02:25]  They are making a lot of accommodations for him.
[01:02:27]  So there are millions of documents.
[01:02:29]  They're putting them on hard drives.
[01:02:30]  They're gave him an air gap laptop.
[01:02:33]  They were going to put him in a different facility in August where they thought he had better internet access, but he didn't want that, it seemed like.
[01:02:39]  And he has hours where he can meet with his lawyers at the courthouse, or I think there's another spot at the lawyer's office, is like under legal supervision.
[01:02:47]  A lot.
[01:02:48]  I mean, there's a lot of this.
[01:02:49]  But this is a guy who needs unfettered access to the computer and thinks that if only he has time to spend with these millions of documents, he can come up with an answer.
[01:02:58]  But it's interesting, because I feel like just bringing this back to the media thing real quick, I feel like in the case of other high-profile, like I'm trying to think, eccentric CEOs, or we had that whole rash of eccentric, weird personalities during the kind of big secondwind.com flush, I guess.
[01:03:20]  I'm thinking of specifically like WeWork of that time, right?
[01:03:24]  And there's been a lot of mea culpas, although not as many as there probably should be, of like some of the coverage that was given to those guys and some of the like lack of scrutiny that their kind of practices received and their kind of like, you know, the way that they were portrayed in the media or the way that they carried themselves and all this stuff.
[01:03:45]  And we haven't really seen that much of it from the coverage of Sam.

=== Email Controversies 2019 (14:34) ===

[01:03:52]  I mean, I think that what's been so frustrating is like all of these people sort of presenting themselves as if they had always been savvy knowers and like savvy understanders that like all of this was bullshit from the beginning.
[01:04:05]  Now that it's comfortable and easy to do so when it just that just hasn't fucking been the case.
[01:04:12]  And this man has been, you know, both by his own creation, but then the media going along with it.
[01:04:18]  And you point out that there was a lot of money involved and a lot of reason and incentives for people to do so.
[01:04:23]  And I understand that.
[01:04:24]  But also then treating him like a child and continuing to kind of like carry this image of him as some like, well, I didn't really, you know, I just basically doing the defense's work of like, well, he just didn't know any better because he's a moron, which I agree with, but not for those same reasons.
[01:04:42]  It's very annoying.
[01:04:43]  And, you know, earlier I said it's like kind of fun hanging out with the other journalists, but I don't want to seem like too clubby or something because it is annoying sometimes when there are people there.
[01:04:51]  There's some good journalists there.
[01:04:53]  There are also some people who are just like, look, I know you wrote a flattering profile of him a year and a half ago.
[01:04:57]  Or like some of the TV people, frankly, I was talking to someone the other day, perfectly nice person from one of the financial networks, but they were saying like, yeah, what did we miss?
[01:05:06]  Kind of like, oh, it just went over our heads, or maybe I should have asked XYZ.
[01:05:11]  How could it go over your heads?
[01:05:12]  And it's fake.
[01:05:13]  I don't have it out with these people necessarily at the time, but it's just like, you know, this whole industry is filled with bad actors and bullshit, right?
[01:05:20]  Like, why did you think Sam was any better?
[01:05:22]  Or that his shit coin empire was real or that he wasn't just paying celebrities to be his friends.
[01:05:28]  Oh, yeah.
[01:05:29]  Yeah.
[01:05:29]  And that he wasn't just doing gambling offshore.
[01:05:32]  Or that Tether, his most important business partner, is probably the shadiest company in crypto.
[01:05:37]  Tether doesn't appear once in the Michael Lewis book, by the way.
[01:05:39]  Yeah.
[01:05:40]  And so it's like these easier questions, I think, or like the basic questions, which should always be focused on the money, where is it coming from?
[01:05:48]  Where's it going?
[01:05:49]  That kind of thing, were never really asked.
[01:05:51]  And now you have this sort of cohort of journalists who are just like, okay, we'll just keep writing the story and write about the downfall now, but we don't really have to do much of a serious meal culprit or self-examination.
[01:06:03]  And that's the problem also with the Michael Lewis book is that he's incapable of that.
[01:06:07]  Maybe it could have been something very interesting if he's like, wow, I thought one thing, but then in the extreme, this crazy thing happened.
[01:06:12]  It could have been an interesting book.
[01:06:13]  Yeah, maybe I need to reassess things, but he just doesn't even do that.
[01:06:18]  There are a few good examples.
[01:06:19]  People who are widely known as at least not the most virtuous people in crypto are treated as sort of heroes or spurn colleagues in the book.
[01:06:28]  One of them is Dan Freeberg, who's a very important lawyer from the company.
[01:06:30]  He's treated sort of as this voice of reason.
[01:06:34]  And we don't really need to go into all of his background, but there are other specific events that Lewis just excuses.
[01:06:40]  There was one point where $200 million was invested in FTX from Sequoia, which was one of their biggest investors and boosters.
[01:06:50]  And then Sam sent it back and invested through Alameda in a Sequoia fund, $200 million.
[01:06:56]  I mean, that's really weird.
[01:06:58]  I say in my review, that looks like money laundering.
[01:07:00]  Yeah, I was going to say that's sort of classic money laundering.
[01:07:02]  Yeah, you don't take money from an investor and then send it back through your other company into another part of your investor's fund.
[01:07:09]  No one does that.
[01:07:12]  Well, criminals do that.
[01:07:12]  Yeah, Lewis brushes it off as, oh, they didn't need the venture capital.
[01:07:16]  And there are a lot of moments like that where it's like, no, dude, like there was something there, and you're completely ignorant.
[01:07:21]  You gloss it over.
[01:07:22]  Yeah, one thing I do want to mention, just if you don't mind, is if, so there was this lawsuit in 2019 by a guy named Pavel Pogodin.
[01:07:29]  And this is, if you know, I'm putting out the word.
[01:07:31]  If anyone knows anything about this guy, I'd love to talk to you.
[01:07:34]  But he sued, he was a lawyer who kind of did have a side make a pretty good living for a while and suing the crypto companies.
[01:07:41]  He sued BitMEX, which was later proved to be breaking all kinds of laws.
[01:07:45]  And he would form these companies to kind of sue crypto companies.
[01:07:48]  This happens a lot in the corporate world.
[01:07:52]  And he sued FTX early on, I believe in 2019.
[01:07:56]  All the same stuff, market manipulation, Alameda special privileges, Alameda kind of manipulating the market too on FTX.
[01:08:03]  And it was basically, he was paid off.
[01:08:07]  It was settled.
[01:08:08]  It's been described in some recent court documents and in that civil complaint against the parents as basically Dan Freeberg at Joe Bankman's suggestion paid this guy off and made it go away.
[01:08:21]  Pavel Pogodin died last year supposedly in his villa in the Dominican Republic.
[01:08:26]  There's a death certificate going around.
[01:08:27]  I confirmed with someone that he is dead, but like, you know, there's a lot of weird deaths in crypto.
[01:08:32]  It could have been a natural death.
[01:08:34]  But also, I just want to hear about, like, this guy knew in 2019.
[01:08:38]  And then he died.
[01:08:39]  Yeah, you can bracket his death for a second if you want, but like, people knew.
[01:08:43]  And like, that was a lawsuit that was reported on a little bit.
[01:08:45]  But, and all the kinds of things that he was calling out, whatever his sources were, are basically the same things that they were doing pretty much the whole existence of the company.
[01:08:55]  I mean, FTX was started in 2019.
[01:08:57]  This was not a legitimate business by any means, pretty much ever.
[01:09:02]  And Alameda may not have even been in the two years before that that existed.
[01:09:05]  I mean, there's stuff in the Lewis book about, oh, yeah, Sam was in Hong Kong trading billions of dollars in crypto on exchanges that let you be under pseudonyms or completely anonymous, meaning no KYC AML, no know your customer anti-money laundering provisions or protocols.
[01:09:19]  Like, okay, that's for a reason.
[01:09:22]  Like, he's doing all this stuff in secret, and there's constant waving away in excuses.
[01:09:27]  And yeah, it's basically journalistic malpractice.
[01:09:30]  I'm pretty shocked by it.
[01:09:31]  There's a line in the book that it's actually, I think it's in that portion, the Jane Street portion, where they're talking about that insane, he's talking about that insane kind of bet that Sam was running, trying to kind of like humiliate his colleague.
[01:09:46]  And he says, Sam says to Michael Lewis in it, he says, people get so obsessed with free dollars if you frame it correctly.
[01:09:52]  And I read that and I was like, Lewis, that's the book.
[01:09:55]  But he just fucking gave you the framework for the book.
[01:09:59]  He said it.
[01:10:00]  It's like the fucking meme.
[01:10:01]  Like, he admitted.
[01:10:02]  He said it.
[01:10:03]  It's right there.
[01:10:04]  He literally just framed the whole thing.
[01:10:06]  And it's just whoop right on by.
[01:10:08]  Like, oh, this crazy, the crazy kind of assholes that Jane Street is like creating.
[01:10:12]  It's like, no, dude.
[01:10:14]  Yes, but.
[01:10:15]  Yeah, yeah, I agree with you.
[01:10:17]  Which is also, by the way, like James Street was profiled in his book on high-frequency trading.
[01:10:21]  So it was like very weird that, and he portrays them very like critically.
[01:10:26]  Yeah, some of the focus of the book is strange too, because he has a whole chapter about Sam's assistant, Natalie Tien, who I met briefly and dealt with.
[01:10:33]  But this is no disrespect to her, but it was just kind of odd to place her as a main character, and especially early on, because she doesn't necessarily have a big influence.
[01:10:42]  She's always just sort of chasing after Sam because he's you never know when he's going to show up to something or if he's ever going to actually sleep in his hotel.
[01:10:51]  But I found that odd.
[01:10:53]  I just didn't really understand that order why she's given pride of place when like she definitely has a role to play, but she wasn't involved in important business decisions or anything like that.
[01:11:03]  So it kind of feels like, yeah, he just sort of wrote the book that he could quickly turn out and that felt comfortable for him, I think.
[01:11:09]  I want to ask, we've got to wrap up soon, but I want to ask, you mentioned Joseph Bankman.
[01:11:15]  Yeah.
[01:11:16]  And we do have to talk a little bit about SBF's parents.
[01:11:21]  Stanford law professors Joseph Bankman and Barbara Freed.
[01:11:26]  And as that recent civil suit has shown, like they, we already knew that they were connected with the company, especially dad.
[01:11:34]  But it appears that their penetration of FTX was possibly deeper and harder than we might have even, geez, what?
[01:11:45]  Than we might have even suspected from the start.
[01:11:48]  And that there was a part of the civil lawsuit where it's like, I think it's dad emailing with son about some promised compensation and being like, don't make me get your mother involved.
[01:12:02]  Yeah, it's so embarrassing.
[01:12:03]  And it's like asking for like tens of millions of dollars.
[01:12:05]  It's astounding.
[01:12:07]  I have no respect for...
[01:12:09]  It was after his soup company closed.
[01:12:12]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:12:14]  I have no respect for Stanford.
[01:12:19]  Especially Stanford.
[01:12:22]  But the debasement that the SBF's parents put them through, sells through, really, like how they debase themselves, really lays out how pathetic and cretiness these individuals really are.
[01:12:37]  I mean, tell us about what the fuck is going on with SBF's freak parents here.
[01:12:42]  Well, part of the rise of SBF and the playing of the media has been that, oh, he comes from this great family.
[01:12:47]  His parents are eminent legal scholars at Stanford.
[01:12:50]  They are somehow very concerned with ethics in their scholarship and are assumed to be very virtuous and well-regarded people and progressive fundraisers and things like that.
[01:13:00]  In fact, people would say like, oh, Sam, we have to take it for granted that Sam is an ethical person.
[01:13:07]  You can't criticize him because his parents raised him in this.
[01:13:09]  Kevin O'Leary, the Shark Tank guy, said, I think he even said in my interview with him that like, oh, he came from this great family.
[01:13:17]  And like, you know, and of course Sam rose to the meritocracy, MIT, like, so the whole elite educational and Silicon Valley backdrop was supposed to somehow speak well of him.
[01:13:28]  The parents, they were involved in the company very early on.
[01:13:33]  They joked that it was a family business.
[01:13:35]  I mean, the mom, there's an email from the mom where she says, like, we're partners in crime, though not the criminal kind or something like that.
[01:13:40]  Not a thing you want in the email.
[01:13:42]  No, no, no, no, true on rule number two.
[01:13:45]  Always make references to crimes you're doing with the name crime in the email.
[01:13:50]  And then saying not crime.
[01:13:53]  Not crime.
[01:13:54]  But to say it's not a crime, yeah.
[01:13:55]  Well, a quick side note, in some of the pretrial hearings, they were talking about the fact that the company used Signal and auto-delete messages on Signal.
[01:14:03]  And the prosecution was basically saying there's a deliberate destruction of records and using of Signal and Sam ordered it.
[01:14:10]  The defense started saying, well, they may have used auto-deleting messages on Signal, but Sam didn't order it.
[01:14:16]  And now all the witnesses are saying, like, yeah, Sam told us all to do that.
[01:14:19]  But there seemed to be this assumption on the defense's side that the records wouldn't be there.
[01:14:24]  There are tons of screenshots and emails and all kinds of things.
[01:14:27]  Like, just because you use auto-delete on Signal doesn't mean there's nothing there and people aren't keeping records.
[01:14:33]  But so we see a lot.
[01:14:34]  And like the civil complaint, which is from the new FTX leadership, that John J. Ray guy, who's the new CEO, against the parents trying to get money back, says that the parents, well, first of all, Sam's dad emails them and says, a little problem here.
[01:14:49]  I'm getting paid $200,000.
[01:14:51]  I thought it was going to be a million.
[01:14:52]  I'm going to have to talk to your mother.
[01:14:54]  And so he got that.
[01:14:55]  Then they got a gift of about $10 million, which he said in an email, this will let your mother retire.
[01:15:02]  He got about $5 million or more for Stanford, where he could just sort of splash it around to some of his allies and colleagues at Stanford.
[01:15:10]  Arrests need to be arrested.
[01:15:11]  Go on.
[01:15:12]  War crime tribunal.
[01:15:14]  Stanford claims that they're giving that money back because, of course, they're guiltier than Sin, or richer than Sin.
[01:15:20]  Well, both.
[01:15:21]  And very notably, they bought the parents.
[01:15:24]  I mean, Alameda spent hundreds of millions of dollars on real estate.
[01:15:27]  Another thing that's kind of brushed off in the Michael Lewis book is just like something they did.
[01:15:32]  Mostly this guy, Ryan Salem, who was kind of like the smooth operator at the company.
[01:15:36]  He was a CEO of a subsidiary, and he was the Republican political kind of liaison.
[01:15:42]  And he was just like more of like a cool guy than Sam, like looked good in a suit, could talk to people.
[01:15:47]  And he went around and bought all the real estate.
[01:15:49]  It's a real baseline there.
[01:15:50]  Yeah, I know, but he went around and bought all the real estate and then like kind of dipped off to D.C. and also bought a lot of real estate.
[01:15:57]  He owns a bunch of restaurants in his hometown in Massachusetts and is sort of a local celebrity there.
[01:16:02]  So he bought all this real estate, including a $35 million, I think it's been pushed up to $35 million apartment in the nicest resort, private resort in the Bahamas.
[01:16:14]  And they were all living there.
[01:16:15]  So, of course, if anyone tells you that Sam was somehow living an ascetic life or sleeping on a beanbag chair, they bought the nicest real estate in the Bahamas and flew private and any other number of luxurious items.
[01:16:26]  But they bought the parents a $16 million beachside apartment.
[01:16:31]  The parents signed for it.
[01:16:32]  Again, these are elite lawyers or elite law scholars.
[01:16:36]  They claim that they thought what they were signing was making the ultimate beneficiary FTX.
[01:16:43]  But they signed a deed saying that they owned it.
[01:16:46]  And then they started charging things like, I believe, landscaping and furnishings to FTX, and they called it our house.
[01:16:53]  So there's no ambiguity here.
[01:16:56]  They're like, we're elite lawyers.
[01:16:58]  Oh, we didn't know that we were signing a deed.
[01:17:02]  I'm not an elite lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that I could look at a piece of paper and be like, that's a deed to a house.
[01:17:07]  Well, Barbara Freed is supposed to be an expert in corporate ethics.
[01:17:11]  Joe Bankman is an expert in the tax code and simplifying it, and also offshore tax shelters.
[01:17:17]  So I do think that Sam learned a thing or two from his dad, but just not what people think.
[01:17:21]  Yeah.
[01:17:23]  I've talked to some people who joke a little bit, but it's not entirely far-fetched that somehow the parents are sort of more masterminds or enablers than one might think.
[01:17:31]  I mean, certainly they are complicit, and I wouldn't be surprised if there were some kind of charges, especially when the if there's a second set of charges against Sam next year, which there might be, including the bribery of Chinese officials and the I got to say, that's a pretty cool charge.
[01:17:47]  Bribery of Chinese officials.
[01:17:49]  And all the political corruption stuff.
[01:17:51]  Just as far as charges go.
[01:17:52]  Absolutely.
[01:17:53]  I mean, if you're going to just pay $40 million to a Chinese official to unfree some crypto, you know, that's the kind of international criminality I can get behind.
[01:18:01]  You could see the bankman-freed parents getting busted, too.
[01:18:06]  Yeah, I don't know.
[01:18:06]  That means they go to jail for the rest of their lives, but there's written evidence in emails in that civil complaint where Barbara Freed tells Nishad Singh, an executive at FTX, oh, you should make a huge donation to her group, Mind the Gap, and so it's not coming directly from Sam or FTX.
[01:18:25]  And he did that.

=== Diamond Hands, Final Question (03:39) ===

[01:18:26]  And then he pleaded guilty earlier this year or the end of last year.
[01:18:30]  So I don't know.
[01:18:32]  It's like all but charged, pretty much.
[01:18:34]  Like it's all there.
[01:18:36]  So it definitely seems like they're in trouble.
[01:18:38]  I mean, it would be hard to imagine them testifying against each other or their son or anything like that.
[01:18:42]  Well, you don't have to testify against your wife, right?
[01:18:44]  Or husband.
[01:18:45]  I don't know if they're married.
[01:18:46]  I've been trying to, someone must know, but there's an article in Bloomberg where it says they initially didn't get married because non-ethical monogamy?
[01:18:54]  They actually thought they were signing.
[01:18:55]  They thought it was a marriage certificate, but it was a deed that they were signing.
[01:18:58]  It was a conservatorship, actually.
[01:18:59]  Wow.
[01:19:00]  So They were like, as long, this was like many years ago.
[01:19:04]  Like, they said as long as their gay friends couldn't get married, they wouldn't.
[01:19:07]  It's unclear if they eventually did.
[01:19:08]  I think they might have.
[01:19:09]  Yeah, Newsom passed that one real quick.
[01:19:11]  I mean, that was quite early on.
[01:19:12]  So it's clear.
[01:19:15]  And I think the thing that we need to take away from this is like greed is pretty universal.
[01:19:19]  And virtue is not inherent or just something you say that you have.
[01:19:24]  People get greedy.
[01:19:25]  If you have a billion dollars in free money or if infinite money falls in your lap, people will find a way to spend it.
[01:19:32]  Some people sleep on a beanbag chair, but then fly private and buy insane real estate.
[01:19:37]  And the parents are no better, I would say.
[01:19:40]  I mean, their world is crumbling, I think, in some ways, because eventually they're going to be persona non-grata at Stanford.
[01:19:45]  They've stopped teaching there.
[01:19:47]  Some of their friends are still behind them and stuff like that.
[01:19:50]  But like, this is kind of how a person's life unravels, and they're very focused on keeping their son out of prison.
[01:19:55]  But there's no world in which they are distant from this.
[01:20:00]  Even if they don't eventually face legal liability, they are being sued and they were part of this.
[01:20:04]  They took paychecks.
[01:20:18]  One final question.
[01:20:20]  Well, 1.5 final questions.
[01:20:22]  First of all, how much longer is this trial supposed to last?
[01:20:25]  It could go up to six weeks, so it's long.
[01:20:28]  This could go up to around Thanksgiving.
[01:20:30]  What is your prediction?
[01:20:33]  So it's two questions.
[01:20:34]  I think guilty, I mean, at least on some of the charges, it's just, it can be pretty clear-cut if they explain it well to the jury.
[01:20:41]  Final question: Is Sean McKelwey going to be arrested?
[01:20:46]  I think next year there's already scheduled a second trial.
[01:20:49]  Again, there hasn't been an indictment for that trial, but the judge put it on his calendar for March of 2024.
[01:20:54]  That's when we expect the bribery, the political corruption stuff.
[01:20:58]  I mean, if Sean McKelwey is going to face criminal action or be subpoenaed or anything like that.
[01:21:03]  Or turn state switch.
[01:21:05]  I mean, it would be very much to his advantage probably to cooperate.
[01:21:08]  That's when it would happen.
[01:21:09]  I mean, he was involved in the political operation.
[01:21:11]  That's when you would hear from probably a gay bankman freed in some form.
[01:21:15]  The brother.
[01:21:15]  The goat.
[01:21:17]  What's that?
[01:21:18]  We call him the vaccine goat, where I'm from.
[01:21:22]  The most vaxed man in the world.
[01:21:23]  Probably one of the most vaxed dudes out there.
[01:21:25]  Yeah.
[01:21:26]  Oh, my God.
[01:21:26]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:21:28]  This thing is so far from over.
[01:21:29]  Like, the litigation is going to last a lifetime.
[01:21:32]  Yeah.
[01:21:33]  There's going to be some new lawsuits, too.
[01:21:35]  They also have this huge kind of like they combined a bunch of lawsuits against FTX and their partners into something called an MDL.
[01:21:44]  It's like a big blob of litigation.
[01:21:47]  So there's going to be so much money made by the lawyers, which of course sucks.
[01:21:51]  And I honestly think some of the lawyers are probably going to get sued too.
[01:21:55]  It's just going to be a huge cash grab.
[01:21:58]  Well, when billions of dollars go missing, a lot of people come out of the woodwork trying to figure out how they can get some of that back.

=== Vaccine Goat Debunked (07:33) ===

[01:22:06]  Yeah, they want a taste.
[01:22:07]  Well, I think I speak for everyone in this room when I say, if you're hodling, keep holding.
[01:22:13]  Diamond hands.
[01:22:14]  I'm telling you, diamond hands.
[01:22:16]  I understand recent lamestream fake news has come out saying NFTs have lost 96% of their value as a whole since that whole craze started.
[01:22:25]  Guess what?
[01:22:26]  You're in the 4%.
[01:22:28]  You're special.
[01:22:29]  I understand that you might have paid a lot of money for a crypto punk.
[01:22:33]  I understand that it is a JPEG in your hard drive right now.
[01:22:37]  But what that actually is, what that represents is the future for you and your beautiful fucking family.
[01:22:42]  I love you.
[01:22:43]  I think that, I mean, I know that, I know that Jacob's too, he's a journalist, so he can't say stuff like this, but there is a real future in crypto and NFTs in these sort of distributed networks, Web3 kind of things.
[01:22:54]  And that I'm telling you, all this stuff aside, Moses had to part the Red Sea.
[01:22:59]  He had to leave Egypt in order to bring his people to the promised land.
[01:23:04]  And that is sort of what we're going through right now.
[01:23:06]  That's the trials and tribulations that crypto is going through.
[01:23:09]  So, Jacob, I understand that you are a journalist.
[01:23:12]  You can't say this kind of stuff, but invest now.
[01:23:15]  Invest now.
[01:23:17]  Facts.
[01:23:17]  Facts.
[01:23:18]  There you go.
[01:23:19]  Thank you, Jacob.
[01:23:21]  And we'll see you next time.
[01:23:22]  Thanks a lot.
[01:23:42]  Sam, Jim, and Jim didn't really pick up.
[01:23:45]  Didn't really catch on, but you'll get them next time.
[01:23:47]  Jalem and Jail.
[01:23:48]  I think it's very fun.
[01:23:50]  I am feeling neglected in our relationship.
[01:23:56]  I feel as if you have spent more time with other men than me.
[01:24:03]  That was.
[01:24:04]  Isn't that my prerogative of secondary?
[01:24:06]  Yeah, I guess that's true.
[01:24:08]  I don't know how they work.
[01:24:09]  I don't know how it works either.
[01:24:10]  Also, wait.
[01:24:11]  So can I be your secondary, but then you're my tertiary?
[01:24:15]  Yeah, I think so.
[01:24:17]  Right?
[01:24:17]  Because it's not a harem situation.
[01:24:19]  Like, we're supposed to be on equal playing fields.
[01:24:21]  Because if you allegedly, if you don't know, even though everyone knows in the real world, that's not how it works.
[01:24:24]  Like, your secondary probably has their own primary, right?
[01:24:27]  Yeah.
[01:24:28]  Like, say that, like, me.
[01:24:30]  Oh, I see.
[01:24:31]  You know what I mean?
[01:24:31]  Like, more fractal.
[01:24:33]  Yes.
[01:24:34]  My primary is Pamela Anderson.
[01:24:37]  But my secondary is, let's go with Father Coughlin, the famous anti-Semitic 1930s radio commentator.
[01:24:46]  Sure.
[01:24:46]  Coughlin would have his own.
[01:24:49]  Like, I would.
[01:24:50]  Coughlin's got his own gig that's not that's separate from Pamela Anderson, obviously.
[01:24:55]  Exactly.
[01:24:55]  Like, he might not even mess around.
[01:24:57]  might only get with Pamela through me.
[01:24:59]  I see.
[01:25:01]  But wait, Polycule isn't like.
[01:25:04]  But that's yeah, that's more.
[01:25:06]  You're not all doing it together.
[01:25:08]  Yeah.
[01:25:08]  You're just sort of like – you're just going – you're just having multiple dates monogamously with different people.
[01:25:14]  Am I just talking about – Right.
[01:25:15]  Am I talking – Because you're talking about three cents.
[01:25:17]  No, well, that's just like, that's an act rather than a lifestyle.
[01:25:22]  No, but there's Poly, there's Polycule, Polyamory, and then what's the other one where you're like, there's like another one, right?
[01:25:31]  Not an open relationship, but there's like another one.
[01:25:36]  Thruple?
[01:25:37]  Thruple?
[01:25:37]  No, thruple.
[01:25:38]  That's a polycule, but it's just small.
[01:25:40]  But can't you be in a polycule, but then you're like, this is what I'm saying.
[01:25:44]  Yeah.
[01:25:45]  Let's take a thruple.
[01:25:47]  Yeah.
[01:25:47]  Which I understand people want to say thrupple, and I just won't do it.
[01:25:50]  Tom Dick and Hyde.
[01:25:50]  I like thruple better because it's funny.
[01:25:53]  Okay.
[01:25:54]  So you have a thruple and you've got, let's say, a gal named Katie in the middle.
[01:26:03]  And then in the thruple is also she's seeing someone named Gary.
[01:26:09]  Oh.
[01:26:11]  And also someone named George.
[01:26:14]  Uh-huh.
[01:26:15]  Now, here's my question: Gary and George, are they seeing each other too?
[01:26:19]  Or is it just what Katie's doing?
[01:26:22]  Here's the thing.
[01:26:23]  Like, I think if like, if it's, you've got like an MMF thruple there, you gotta be rocking with the dick a little bit if you're one of the fellas.
[01:26:31]  You know what I mean?
[01:26:32]  Like, you can't just, what are you fucking?
[01:26:33]  But couldn't Gary just be seeing other, like another, couldn't Gary just be seeing Linda and not fuck with?
[01:26:41]  It depends on if you have a, wait, sorry.
[01:26:45]  Sub-dom relationship.
[01:26:47]  Because what if Katie is a like a she's like the alpha lady and Gigi's or like I know, but like Gary and Gwen or the guy?
[01:26:57]  No, no, Gary.
[01:26:57]  Gary and Gavin.
[01:26:59]  The two guys are like more sub to Katie.
[01:27:02]  They like might not go and get any other tertiary, secondary lovemaking things.
[01:27:09]  Like they're sort of in the same way.
[01:27:10]  Like I guess what I'm saying is, couldn't there just be one long link as opposed to like a kind of like total I think so.
[01:27:18]  Like I should dedicate the rest of the entirety of our podcast to figuring this out, but also not asking anybody.
[01:27:26]  Anybody and just us walking through and then walking through logical kind of like possible logical explanations, but then also forgetting who we're talking about.
[01:27:35]  Exactly.
[01:27:36]  Gary.
[01:27:37]  Remaking up their names.
[01:27:38]  So it's going to be Gary, Katie, and Garth.
[01:27:43]  Garth.
[01:27:44]  Yeah.
[01:27:45]  And Garth is seeing Linda now, not Gary.
[01:27:48]  Gary is seeing Tanya.
[01:27:51]  Interesting.
[01:27:51]  But so couldn't Gary be seeing Tanya and Katie and Katie is seeing Garth?
[01:27:57]  No, because I do give your primaries.
[01:27:59]  There are primaries.
[01:28:00]  My thing is, I want a show called What's All This Then? where I walk in on people's like, you have to basically be in the act of like a relationship thing.
[01:28:10]  And I walk in and I say, what's all this then?
[01:28:11]  What's all this then?
[01:28:13]  And I have you explain to me while I'm only half listening exactly the parameters.
[01:28:18]  Then you have to tell me in such a way that I can understand it and figure it out.
[01:28:22]  And then if I have questions, that's where the podcast goes.
[01:28:24]  Yeah, because I got a lot of questions.
[01:28:26]  I will say this.
[01:28:26]  I do think a lot of podcasts, the premise is, what's up with that?
[01:28:31]  That's kind of ours.
[01:28:32]  Well, ours is kind of like, what's look at that?
[01:28:33]  But a lot of podcasts are just like, hey, what's up with that?
[01:28:38]  And then they go on a debunking of what's up with that.
[01:28:42]  So I feel like it could work.
[01:28:44]  There's a few different kinds of podcasts.
[01:28:45]  There's a what's up with that?
[01:28:46]  There's a check this out.
[01:28:47]  There's a you ever think about.
[01:28:49]  And then there's a let me tell you about.
[01:28:52]  Yeah.
[01:28:53]  Yeah.
[01:28:53]  We're kind of a different one where it's like, we're like, check out this freak.
[01:28:58]  Yeah, you're sort of.
[01:28:59]  Yeah, you love saying the word freak.
[01:29:01]  Oh, yeah, it's kind of a freak show.
[01:29:02]  Yeah.
[01:29:03]  And with that being said, certainly hosted by one.
[01:29:07]  Yep, by one whose name is Liz.
[01:29:10]  And it's kind of like a yin-yang thing where like you got a freak, you got a normal person, and then the line down the middle is a little bit of both.
[01:29:17]  That's why they call him the black and white cookie himself.
[01:29:21]  Young Chomsky, who I'm outroing first, the producer for this show, Young Chomsky, my name, of course, is one of the top practitioners of polyamory.
[01:29:33]  My name is Brace Belden.
[01:29:36]  I'm Liz, and this has been Dronan.
[01:29:38]  We'll see you next time.