SBF's Last Stand — With Molly White

Molly White is a crypto researcher and critic. She joins Big Technology Podcast to break down the latest in the U. S. case against ex-FTX CEO Sam Bankman Fried. In this episode, we go through the charges, the defense, and the likely outcome. Stay tuned for the second half, where we discuss how SBF pulled this off, his ties to the 'effective altruism' movement (and what happens next for that cause), and where crypto goes from here. --- Enjoying Big Technology Podcast? Please rate us five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ in your podcast app of choice. For weekly updates on the show, sign up for the pod newsletter on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/6901970121829801984/ Questions? Feedback? Write to: [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  A leading crypto researcher and skeptic joins us to discuss the Sam Bakman-Fried FTX trial and what it means for the broader tech industry. All that and more coming up right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voya Financial, to go inside a large scale agentic CX transformation, including the business decisions, trade offs, and lessons along the way.

• 0:44Alex Kantrowitz?

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• 1:16Speaker 01

  LinkedIn presents.

• 1:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Welcome to Big Technology Podcast, a show for cool-headed nuanced conversation of the tech world and beyond. We have a great guest for you. Molly White is here. She is a crypto researcher and critic. She writes Molly White's newsletter, which you can find at newsletter.mollywhite.net. I think she's probably the most lucid crypto critic in the world today, and she's been following the Sam Bankman-Fried trial extremely closely, as have I. So it's great to have her on today. Molly, welcome to the show.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Thanks for being here. So now I think is a good time to just talk a little bit about what Sam is accused of. I mean, he's got, I think, seven charges against him. Can you run through exactly what he is accused of doing?

• 2:03Speaker 02

  So he's actually got more than seven charges, but there are seven charges that are being tried right now. There's going to be a later trial for some other charges. Right now, everything that he is facing has to do with fraud on customers, on lenders to his crypto exchange and his trading firm. There's money laundering charges, and then there's a bunch of conspiracy charges. So all to do with basically, you know, at least allegedly misappropriating customer funds that were sent to FTX, which was the crypto exchange, and then used by Alameda Research, which was the trading firm to do their trading, which they were really not supposed to be doing.

• 2:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And that's the way that I understand it broadly also is that people, the biggest problem here is that people put billions of dollars into FTX to trade crypto. They had this secondary firm, Alameda Research, which then drew on a massive line of credit using the funds that people had deposited into FTX and then spent that money and then couldn't pay it back. I mean, $8 billion that haven't been accounted for. Just the first thing that comes to mind after that is, I mean, this is pretty blatant, you know, it seems pretty obvious. What could possibly have been going through the minds of Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda and was his ex-girlfriend, and everybody

• 3:31Alex Kantrowitz?

  involved in this operation to say, there are customer funds in FTX and we're going to use them, bring them to Alameda, and they were used for pretty unbelievable things that didn't really seem like they had a chance of, you know, returning any money, including almost $5 billion in loans to Sam and his lieutenants. I mean, what could be the possible order of operations that runs through someone's mind that allows them to do that and think they're going to get away with it?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think that they were probably hoping that Alameda Research's trading operations would go a lot better than they did. You know, Alameda Research sort of started out in the run up to sort of a historic cryptocurrency bull market. And so there was a period of time where a lot of people were making a lot of money on the market. And, you know, it's possible that they were hoping that that would happen again, and Alameda would just, you know, make the right trades and make it all back, or something like that. But I'm not, I'm not really sure how they justified this to themselves. I mean, it seems like Sam Bankman Fried had an extremely high tolerance for risk. Even

• 4:40Speaker 02

  when the possibility of things going wrong was substantially higher than the possibility of them going right, he sort of felt that it was still appropriate to take that kind of risk. And so I think that might be a part of it. But, you know, it's really hard to say. I mean, I think that they were just hoping that things would go better in the crypto world, and they were, that, you know, that people would be willing to loan money to FTX and Alameda if necessary, and that this would be like a temporary stopgap, maybe.

• 5:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And so even if they were good at making these bets, still sounds like a crime.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:19Alex Kantrowitz?

  The thing that's, that's interesting is they may actually make the money back long term with their investment in Anthropic. So I think this is kind of a sidebar, but do you think they have a chance of recouping? I mean, they led the Series B in Anthropic, which is a big AI technology company, does research, has a chatbot like OpenAI, founded by ex-OpenAI people. Now it's worth like a tremendous amount of money. Still a crime, I suppose, if, if that pays off. But how do you think that might change, like, the legacy of Sam and the amount of time he spends in jail, if at all?

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's an interesting question and it's one that I think the defense has been sort of trying to make, although it's unclear at this point to what extent they'll be allowed to make that argument because as you point out, even if you make all the money back, it's still a crime to do fraud on your customers. But yeah, I mean, I think it is, there is a chance that FTX customers may come out of this at least better off than customers of some of the other crypto companies that have fallen apart, which is a fairly long list. And adding to that, I would say the FTX bankruptcy team has been very aggressive in trying to claw back funds from all kinds of different places. I mean, right now, they're trying to get money back from Sam Bankman-Fried's parents.

• 6:31Speaker 02

  Like, there's all these, from different companies, there's all these different actions in progress pertaining to that. So, you know, I think that it's still going to be challenging, but there is some potential that people might be made whole or at least close to it. I think that may ultimately not be super relevant to Sam Bankman-Fried's legacy. I think it's hard to overcome the perception in the public eye that he was a fraudster, which he was regardless of whether or not customers are made whole. And then I'm not sure necessarily how it will affect sentencing. I know that the amount of money involved is relevant when the judge is determining

• 7:16Speaker 02

  what sentence to apply. I don't know if they made the money back is something that would be considered there or if it's just the amount of money involved in the first place and they don't take into account later activities that recovered some of the funds. I really can't speak to that part.

• 7:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, so talk a little bit about the mechanics of how this worked. So, obviously, Alameda Research, this investment arm, had taken the money from FTX. But what is it? Do they just go and transfer the money? Or how did this work? I mean, obviously, they knew, again, that commingling funds from customer deposits is wrong. So is there a technical way that they did this to justify themselves? Or like, what did it look like inside this exchange in this investment house?

• 8:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think there are a couple of ways that it happened. One was that there is this long history with the two firms where it was really challenging for FTX to get banking. Banks have historically been hesitant to work with crypto firms. And so there was a period of time where FTX did not have bank accounts, but Alameda Research did. And so they decided they would just circumvent that, which itself is legally questionable, by having customers send money to Alameda, which would then be sort of credited on their FTX accounts. And so a lot of the issue here came down to the fact that as things progressed, as FTX

• 8:46Speaker 02

  was able to get bank accounts, there was still an amount of, you know, US dollars pretty much that was in an account that belonged to Alameda Research. And so, you know, part of the argument that the defense has been trying to make is that the accounting was bad, they forgot about it, and oops, you know, they used all that money. But that's not the extent of the ways that money was being pulled from FTX. So Alameda Research also traded on the FTX exchange and they served as a market maker there. And they were given the ability on that exchange to draw down a line of credit such that they

• 9:29Speaker 02

  could have a massively negative account balance on FTX. And that's something that was not in place for other firms or other market makers on FTX. It was specific to Alameda Research. And so they were given what was effectively a line of credit that was capped at like $65 billion, which is just an obscene amount of money that they should really never have needed, you know, to draw down upon. But they did draw down on that line of credit to a fairly substantial amount over various times or various points in time, you know, around $10 billion or so. And they were able to basically just withdraw crypto from the FTX exchange and then do with it what they liked. You know, they could be making trades with it, but they were also just withdrawing it and using it for other purposes as well.

• 10:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  What are those other purposes?

• 10:16Speaker 02

  A lot of it went to venture investments. So Sam Bankman-Fried was investing in a bunch of different companies, Anthropic being one of them. And he decided to do so through Alameda for a lot of them, just to avoid having his name associated with it. I mean, there are all sorts of reasons.

• 10:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  So if you're basically an FTX customer, you've now become an unwitting limited partner in Sam Bankman-Fried investments.

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Right, yes.

• 10:43Alex Kantrowitz?

  Which was not a very, not very good at what it was doing. Well,

• 10:46Speaker 02

  It doesn't appear so, except, except for maybe Anthropic, yeah.

• 10:50Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 10:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then there were also a whole series of loans that were being made to Alameda research executives, mostly for the benefit of Sam Bankman-Fried. So even though the money was going to his deputies, it was often being used to make those investments or to make political or charitable donations, sort of on his behalf, but via other people.

• 11:13Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And one of the things to me that was wild, being in the courthouse, watching Caroline Ellison testify, is that the Alameda Research line of credit keeps getting bigger as the net asset value inside FTX keeps getting smaller. Can you kind of take us into exactly what was going on as it became clear that FTX had less money than Alameda owed?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there was a period of time where things were going really badly in the crypto markets. You know, crypto prices were falling and a lot of crypto companies were going under as a result of both the market and also just these sort of cascading failures. And as that was happening, it started to put strain on some of the companies that were lending money to Alameda Research. And so they started to recall their loans. And so they decided, you know, they needed to pay back these loans. They didn't necessarily have much in the way of liquid assets because so much of the money had been put into these, you know, long-term venture investments and things like that. And so they paid back these

• 12:23Speaker 02

  loans by taking, basically drawing down that line of credit, replacing effectively the loans with loans from FTX. And so, you know, as things went poorly, as FTX was, or and Alameda were both struggling because of the wider crypto markets, they were also racking up this enormous debt effectively to FTX customers because that was where the money was coming from.

• 12:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah. And that's what you can see in the court is just that they keep on borrowing more and they keep on having less. And it seems like it's eventually going to, you know, hit a wall and it does. I mean, so one of the key questions is whether Sam was aware of this. And I think Caroline Ellison's testimony that she kept on preparing balance sheets and rearranging things and naming them in interesting ways to make sure that, you know, Sam understood what was going on, but the general public might not if they came across the documents was very interesting. So can you talk a little bit about that?

• 13:21Speaker 02

  Yeah. So there was a lot of sort of creative accounting going on that was trying to really mask all of this debt that Alameda had. And so Caroline Ellison testified to preparing balance sheets for the company. And then at Sam Bankman-Fried's request, preparing what he referred to as alternative balance sheets. And those were basically copies of the balance sheet where she would move around or rename entries so that it looked like, you know, the, the loans to FTX executives were just a part of some other spending. She sort of removed some of the liabilities from some of the balance sheets. You know,

• 14:06Speaker 02

  it was all stuff, I think, I think in accounting, you know, there's some degree of flexibility where, you know, some of it's up to interpretation, just exactly how you present things. But this was like, well beyond anything that would be accepted by any competent auditor.

• 14:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  And so they, she basically testified that she prepared those balance sheets at his request and then sent some of those alternative balance sheets to lenders and investors.

• 14:33Speaker 02

  So that they thought that Alameda was in a much better financial position than they were. And, you know, there was testimony later on in the week from one of those lenders, who basically said that had he had access to one of the more truthful balance sheets, there's no way that his firm would have lent to Alameda.

• 14:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Exactly. I mean, there was a line item there where Ellison prepared it and it was called FTX borrows. And it's like, huh, what does that mean? But it's code for Alameda borrowing money from FTX. And, you know, during the case, you saw month after month, that line item go from like eight billion to 10 billion to 13 billion. And then the net asset value within FTX hover somewhere around six to eight billion. It's sort of even maybe even less because it's unclear. They like marked their own token as being worth more than it was.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's another big part of this is that there was a lot of assets that they were holding that were strongly tied to the success of the FTX exchange and which a lot of these insiders have testified would never be able to be liquidated at anywhere near the price that they were putting on their balance sheets. And so a lot of this money was sort of made up in the first place.

• 15:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  And talk about how it all comes to a head in November 2022.

• 15:51Speaker 02

  Well, that was a big part of it is the sort of made up tokens. So FTX had this token called FTT, which was effectively the FTX token. And there was one of these balance sheets that had been prepared. In fact, it was one of the sort of falsified balance sheets that showed a rosier picture of things at Alameda was leaked by a crypto media outlet called CoinDesk. And even that falsified balance sheet was enough to really get people concerned about the financial stability of Alameda Research and the extent to which it was really linked with FTX. So, you know, Sam Bankman Fried had spent a long time trying

• 16:35Speaker 02

  to maintain that FTX and Alameda Research were very separate, that they were sort of firewalled. And people realized that that really wasn't true. Once this balance sheet was leaked. And so that sort of set off the initial concern around FTX. There was then a later incident in which the

• 16:55Speaker 02

  CEO of FTX's largest competitor basically announced that he was going to sell a substantial amount of FTT tokens that he had.

• 17:03Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, this is easy, the head of Binance.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  Right. He had, you know, the stash of FTT tokens that he had been given as FTX have pretty much bought him out as an investor in the exchange. And so he announced that he was going to sell these tokens, which really sparked a panic that such a massive sale would decrease the price of FTT, which would then make FTX potentially insolvent because of the degree to which they were relying on FTT as a part of their balance sheet. And so that was when things really went badly. There was sort of a run on the exchange where everyone tried to withdraw their assets. Lenders were really concerned about loans to Alameda,

• 17:48Speaker 02

  so they simultaneously were trying to call back those loans. And so FTX, you know, for a day or two was trying to meet these withdrawals and repay these loans, but very quickly that $8 billion hole in the balance sheet became an issue and they could no longer process withdrawals or repay those loans. And that's the point at which FTX filed for bankruptcy.

• 18:11Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yep. So where is that $8 billion?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Uh, well, some of it has been clawed back by the bankruptcy team, but there's sort of a big question mark around, you know, exactly where it all went. It seems like it was a combination of bad trades, venture investments, loans, you know, donations to political and charitable causes, real estate in the Bahamas. I mean, it's a really long list. They were spending pretty extravagantly, it seems like.

• 18:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Does, does this sound like a typical Ponzi scheme to you? Like, on one hand, it's like, yes, it needed money flowing in the door, but. On the other hand, they were making investments. I mean, does it does it? Maybe it's like more of like just old school theft versus Ponzi scheme, or it's hard for me to kind of even wrap my head around how to classify this one. What do you think?

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think it shares some traits with Ponzi schemes in the sense that they were sort of combing like funds. They were trying to keep things afloat by bringing in more and more investors and trying to keep sort of trust in the whole scheme alive so that people would continue to put assets into the company. But yeah, I think, I mean, I think there's, you know, there are parts of it that are a little bit different as well. But it seems pretty clear to me that it was fraud one way or the other.

• 19:33Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, everyone's flipped on Sam. Seems like everybody who was around him has flipped on him, maybe outside of his parents.

• 19:40Speaker 02

  And Michael Lewis.

• 19:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Michael Lewis. So why don't we talk about his parents, Michael Lewis, and then kind of like where the trial goes from here. So first of all, his parents, there were some emails that came out that like made it seem like his parents weren't just bystanders, but active participants in this. What can you tell us about that?

• 19:57Speaker 02

  Right. So that was sort of what I alluded to earlier when I spoke about the FTX bankruptcy team trying to claw back funds from SBF's parents. They filed a lawsuit against them, which was quite descriptive of the activities that they were doing to try to prove that, you know, they were not being given these funds for any business purpose. It was really just for, you know, their own enrichment. It was a gift, pretty much. And there, as a part of that lawsuit, there were some emails back and forth where it really appeared that his parents were sort of complicit in a lot of this. So, you know, for those who aren't aware, his parents are both Stanford law professors.

• 20:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  They teach ethics. So.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  Well, yes, his mother was an ethics professor. His father was a tax law professor.

• 20:47Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  And his.

• 20:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  I give a combo when you're trying to pull off an eight billion dollar fraud.

• 20:51Speaker 02

  It's like the dream team.

• 20:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yes.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  And so his father was very active in some of the business where he was giving legal advice. He was helping them recruit other lawyers. He was advising them on tax stuff. You know, there were, there were emails where he was talking about trying to make assets bankruptcy remote, taking advantage of Bahamian sort of tax law to, to try to, you know, avoid paying taxes and a lot of this stuff. And then there were also emails from his mother, who was a very active political sort of philanthropist. She ran a fund to try to donate to progressive causes. And she was effectively making, you know, giving advice in these emails about making

• 21:38Speaker 02

  straw donations where, you know, Sam Bankman Fried didn't want his name tied to some of these investments for various reasons, or maybe he was reaching caps on the amount that he could donate to some cause. And so she was suggesting that the donations be made through the names of other FTX executives. So I think it's pretty bad news for them. You know, I think there could be criminal charges filed against them if, you know, someone decided to go after it. I don't know if they will, but I think they definitely face a strong risk that money given to them by their son will be clawed back by the bankruptcy estate. Money that is, I think, currently financing Sam Bankman Fried's legal defense.

• 22:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, one of the things that kind of struck me is like Caroline Ellison was sharing some of the things that Sam talked about inside the company was that he was very keenly aware of like these ethics tests, like the New York Times test where like you shouldn't say anything you don't want to see in front of like the New York Times. It's like what you would teach in like day one in an ethics class. And it's kind of showing up inside FTX as he's doing this crime. I know we said we want to talk about Michael Lewis, but I actually kind of want to go back to, you know, what, what happens from here. I feel like we've talked about Michael Lewis enough on this podcast. We'll give him a break this week. The, the, everybody's flipped on him. Caroline Ellison has some of his other business partners, people who didn't even really have like charges brought against him have flipped in exchange for immunity.

• 23:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Does he stand a chance?

• 23:09Speaker 02

  I don't think he does. Um, I didn't really think he did even before the trial started, but now that we're, you know, a week or two into the trial, it's looking pretty bad for him. And I don't see a strong defense being made, honestly. His, his defense team has not been particularly impressive, it seems like, for reasons that are a little bit unclear to me. And so I really don't see a strong chance that he gets out of this without serious jail time.

• 23:39Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, like their, their cross-examination of Caroline Ellison, like we thought that, you know, the people in the courtroom thought that the cross of Caroline Ellison was going to be the real fireworks in the case. And it was extremely meek. Actually, the turned out the most interesting part of the case was Caroline just kind of walking through all the internal documents. I mean, I think it's rare that you have someone who is so directly involved in, in a fraud, just say, all right, well, here are the receipts and I'm going to walk you through exactly what happened. So.

• 24:08Speaker 02

  Yeah. And in this case, he's got several of those people all doing that, you know, people who are involved in various facets of it. I think it's going to be really challenging to come back from that.

• 24:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  What is his defense? Just that he hired these people and they should have known better? Like, he didn't necessarily order the code red, like they should have hedged or something? I mean, what do you say?

• 24:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, we've only really seen a preview of it because the defense has not made their case yet, but they have, I think, they, at least towards the beginning, were hinting that they might try to implicate Caroline Ellison in this and say that she, you know, technically she was the CEO over at LME to research. They were trying to argue that Sam Bankman-Fried had very little insight or control over what was happening there. I think evidence maybe has painted a different picture on that, where there's sort of evidence that he was directly involved in a lot of this stuff, even after she took the CEO role. They've also tried to make arguments. Well, they're, they're starting to sort of preview

• 25:09Speaker 02

  a new argument now, which is that FTX terms of service maybe technically didn't prevent them from using the funds in the ways that they did. Again, I think it's going to be challenging to sort of watch that play out, but you know, they can try it, I guess. And then, yeah, I mean, I think, I think the argument is, you know, one thing we were seeing a lot early on was it wasn't intentional. He was maybe incompetent or, you know, not paying enough attention, but he wasn't intentionally doing it.

• 25:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right, like.

• 25:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, he was just a small boy who made a mistake, you know, it was kind of the argument.

• 25:45Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 25:46Alex Kantrowitz?

  And I don't think that's gonna go over.

• 25:47Speaker 02

  Drives a boring car.

• 25:49Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Yeah, that's, that's a tough one to put up. I mean, it's just kind of, if none of his contemporaries testified, maybe that would have worked, but they all did and showed that he was effectively in full knowledge of, we'll see what he says.

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, we'll see what happens, but.

• 26:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do you think he's gonna testify?

• 26:08Speaker 02

  So I don't know. Technically, I have a bet going that he will.

• 26:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's.

• 26:16Speaker 02

  A friend of mine who also sort of watches crypto markets, but I actually don't know if there's a more likely chance than not that he will. But, you know, as the trial goes on, I feel like I'm getting more and more convinced that he will, just in the sense that like, what does he have to lose? You know, the defense has not been very strong. Maybe he'll do it as sort of a hail Mary. I also am a little bit skeptical of his ability to, or his legal team's ability to sort of keep him in check. I think his legal team probably would love for him to not testify. But, you know.

• 26:55Alex Kantrowitz?

  You know, go ahead.

• 26:57Speaker 02

  I was just saying, in the, you know, as in the early days of his, you know, as he was preparing for the defense, after the charges had been filed against him, he was talking to everyone who would listen because he seemed very convinced that like, if he just talked enough, he would be able to convince people that he was innocent. And so he was like blogging and tweeting and talking to journalists and talking on Twitter spaces with random people and like, you know, just trying to, to make this argument any way he can. And so, you know, that makes me think that he might believe the same thing. Like, oh, if I just talk to them, I can get the jury to understand.

• 27:35Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. And the judge has told him, I mean, people were buzzing about this in the court. This was kind of the dramatic moment that everybody's been waiting for. The judge has said that if his lawyers don't advise him to testify and he still wants to anyway, all he has to do is stand up and state his intention and he can take the stand. I mean, what a moment that would be, huh?

• 27:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I think the judge wants him to testify too, you know, if, if he gets up there and starts talking under oath, you know, I think that for the judge, that would be the dream because like, how do you appeal that, right? At that point, you know, you have a pretty solid case, but we'll see. I mean, we've got a couple of weeks before that.

• 28:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  You had something that you wrote a little bit about how this might not be as good for Sam as he thinks if he testifies because he's used to effectively talking circles around journalists and the jury might not appreciate that.

• 28:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, he, you know, has previously, you can just watch interviews with him both before and after charges were filed where someone will ask him a tough question and he'll just go into this long sort of rambly response where he doesn't always answer the question. Sometimes he just like changes the subject and, you know, gets into these really weird sort of verbose explanations of things. And I think just relies on the fact that people don't understand him and aren't going to press too hard. But in, you know, he's never had to testify under oath in front of a competent cross examiner. And so I think that, you know, his past experience might lead him to think that he

• 29:11Speaker 02

  can successfully just bullshit people on things. Whereas, you know, in real life, in front of a judge and a jury, that might go very differently.

• 29:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. You've interviewed him before. Did you feel he was giving you the runaround?

• 29:24Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. He, I think, was probably lying to me when we were speaking. And, you know, he, like I said, that's just his sort of standard demeanor in interviews.

• 29:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Right. Okay, I want to go to break, but before we do, what's your prediction of where this case ends up? Is it going to, I mean, it seems like pretty clear that you think he's going to be found guilty. What do you think the sentencing could look like if that's the case?

• 29:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think he will be found guilty, at least on, you know, a substantial number of the charges. It's hard to say, and I'm certainly not legally qualified to.

• 30:00Alex Kantrowitz?

  You've done the research, though, so.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I think that, you know, 10, 20 years is probably the minimum that we'll be seeing. But I also think that some of the headlines that have been talking about 100-plus years might be a little bit overstating it, just in the sense that those tend to rely on sort of flawed logic around how sentencing is done. But I think, you know, there's a good chance that he spends the rest of his sort of meaningful life in prison. He could be pretty old by the time he gets out. I mean, he's 30 now, so give him 30 years in prison, and he's already 60 when he gets out.

• 30:38Alex Kantrowitz?

  And then the question is, what does his legacy look like? Because it's not just, okay, so his sentencing is one thing, but it's, he will have shockwaves that, that will ripple through, not just the crypto industry, but the tech industry and venture capital for years. And that's why this is an interview that's not just about Sam's crimes, although I think it was important that we laid out what, what's being alleged in court. In the second half of this conversation, though, we're really going to talk about what this is going to mean for venture capital, for the effective altruist community, which is quite interesting. And where else this could reverberate? So we'll be back here in just a moment with Molly White. Stay tuned, back right after this. This episode is brought to you by Avpoint. Everyone's racing to roll out AI right now.

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• 33:23Alex Kantrowitz?

  And we're back here on Big Technology Podcast with Molly White. She is a crypto researcher and critic. She writes Molly White's newsletter. You can find it at newsletter dot mollywhite.net. So let's talk about the implications here. First of all, Molly, I'm curious, how do people get involved in this? I'm not talking about the actual principles here. I'm talking about the masses, right? That not only went to FTX to trade these crypto tokens, but also went to banks like Celsius and thought that they were going to get like a 20% return on their money. And I'm just paraphrasing here, you know, citing broadly, I'm sure I'm off by a percentage point or two. This was obviously something that was too good to be true. How did so many people get caught up and believe in it?

• 34:05Speaker 02

  Well, I think there was just sort of mass hysteria to some extent in the sort of 2020, 2021 time period where, you know, everywhere you looked, people were talking about crypto. It was in the news. It was on social media. It was on advertisements. And some people, at least on paper, were making a lot of money. And so I think a lot of people decided they didn't want to get left out. That was a lot of the marketing as well was, you know, don't be left behind. Come put your money in this crypto thing. And people really fell for it, you know, it was, I think there's nothing like a good old get rich quick scheme where, you know,

• 34:44Speaker 02

  people always fall for those. And the veneer of the technological sophistication was there, you know, there were really high profile people talking about this stuff. And then I think also people just aren't used to getting straight up lied to. That was something that came out a lot in a bunch of these cases is they, they were like, you know, Celsius was a, it was based in the US. You know, surely they must have been regulated. Surely someone was making sure they weren't just lying to us. And turns out, no, there was no one doing that until everything fell apart. So I think a lot of things went into it, but you know, it was, it was this weird period of time where it was like, reality had just been paused for a second.

• 35:27Alex Kantrowitz?

  Yeah, it was definitely a combination of greed from summarizing right and FOMO. And then legitimacy conferred upon this type of company from people like.

• 35:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  Tom Brady, who I wrote it down, he was paid something like $55 million for 25, for 20 hours of work. And you're like, oh, that's pretty good money for Tom. But that $50 did a tremendous, I mean, sorry, that $50 million did a tremendous, they probably got great ROI on that. I mean, this is probably where all the billions are. Not only that, they named stadiums after FTX down in crypto capital of the world, Miami. And, you know, I recall walking around downtown San Francisco, and I still live there, and you couldn't go five feet without seeing Sam's face being like plastered on some vestibule or bus stop or whatever it was.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:18Alex Kantrowitz?

  I mean, it does go to show you that spending that kind of money, you know, I mean, they stole the money, but allegedly, but, but, you know, that money did serve a purpose. They were able to buy public opinion and get people to trust them. It was almost a perfect crime until they got caught.

• 36:34Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, we've already seen FTX customers testifying that it was those ads and the sponsorships and things like that that really made them think that this was legit. You know, they were like, surely no one would be advertising on the Super Bowl if, you know, they weren't in a financially good position. And then, you know, turns out like this.

• 36:52Alex Kantrowitz?

  Do some of the celebrities that were part of this, do they bear some responsibility? Like, does Tom Brady have to think if it's too good to be true, maybe there's something wrong here?

• 37:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I'm kind of split on that. I do think that celebrities should be more thoughtful about the type of stuff that they're promoting and that, you know, they have to realize that they really do carry a lot of clout. But on the other hand, I don't necessarily know that it is the celebrities who should be tasked with making sure that these companies aren't frauds. You know, I feel like that's where the regulators really should be stepping in.

• 37:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  You're saying the SEC has bigger responsibility than Tom Brady and Shaq for knowing whether this was a Ponzi scheme?

• 37:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think so. I know, it's a controversial opinion, right there.

• 37:34Alex Kantrowitz?

  But there was another part of it, too, which is Sam was like part of this effective altruism movement. And I bring in Mike Lewis into it because I'm reading his book and he actually explains it quite well, talking about basically that if you can, if you can earn a ton of money over your life, even as like a banker, or you set up an exchange and you spend that to help people out, you're going to be much more effective than, let's say, dedicating your life to be like in Doctors Without Borders. Actually, that is more, more impactful.

• 38:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  And Sam was part of this group, which sort of, and he like, maybe he didn't front and center talk about it too often, but he always talked about how he's earning to give and he's trying to improve the world. And that community also bolstered him. I mean, that, that seems to me, and that community has deep roots through the tech world. So what do you think is, you know, what do you think about that? And what do you think the impact is going to be now that like, he's the most famous or infamous effective altruist to walk the planet?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I think that a lot of people didn't know about effective altruism until the Sam Bankman Fried saga happened. And he, unfortunately for them, was the face of effective altruism in a good way before everything went wrong, and then in a very, very bad way. I don't know how they're going to recover from this, honestly, as a community, other than maybe rebranding. But, uh, you know, the

• 38:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that's a story for sure.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think there's really no chance they don't. But, um, you know, he, he was really the figurehead for this in a lot of ways, because he was so visible and he was speaking so prominently about these philosophies. And, uh, you know, they were really trying to manage their reputation, manage the reputation of the movement as Sam was the face of it. And then, you know, as things went poorly, uh, I think they've discovered that there's sort of no coming back from this.

• 39:29Alex Kantrowitz?

  So it's interesting because Anthropic, right, that opened, that OpenAI competitor that he invested in, they're all, not all, but largely effective altruists at the top. Dustin Moskovitz, uh, Facebook co-founder is also an effective altruist, who by the way, was behind that, um, the big pledge about pausing AI research and talking about its dangers. So they're a very powerful group in Silicon Valley. And it is very interesting to see how this is going to reverberate with them.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I, I mean, I think that even if effective altruism under that name does not continue to exist, I think the philosophy will. Um, you know, we've already seen sort of variations of it around like, uh, effective accelerationism and all these weird sort of spinoffs of it that are, uh, becoming weirdly popular, especially in the tech sector.

• 40:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  I kind of hold two things when I think about effective altruism. First of all, It's obvious now, like when someone comes and tells you their business is going to save the world, so you should give them your money. Like, maybe that's a big red flag. On the other hand, like, I kind of like the philosophy of like effective altruism. Like, there is some logic behind what they're trying to do. So, I mean, am I being, like, delusional?

• 40:43Speaker 02

  I think that effective altruism makes sense, sort of on the face of it, where like, yeah, obviously, you want to donate money to the most effective causes. You know, you don't want to donate to ineffective altruistic causes. That makes no sense. But then, once you actually sort of dig into the philosophy and the way that they make decisions and the types of decisions that they've been making, it gets really, really weird really quickly, to the point where, like, people in the movement start to, yeah, they start to talk about, you know, the idea that future lives are more valuable than any life today on Earth. And so therefore, instead of spending money to prevent starvation, or pandemics, or whatever it might be, we should all be focusing

• 41:28Speaker 02

  on the risks that are facing far future generations, like AI, you know, dystopia, and all these crazy things, or moving the whole world population to Mars, or something like that. And so it becomes, you know, it goes from being like, yeah, right, effectively donating your money, to like, what? You know, very quickly, where, you know, people would even talk about, like, sure, we should sacrifice, you know, people today to save millions tomorrow.

• 41:58Alex Kantrowitz?

  Wow. So that sort of now makes me understand that AI pledge a little bit more. The fact that Dustin was behind it.

• 42:04Speaker 02

  That's why there's so much of it. Yeah, that's why the AI and effective altruism overlap is so substantial.

• 42:10Alex Kantrowitz?

  Oh, that is very interesting. Hmm. But they actually say that it's better to lose lives today to save lives tomorrow?

• 42:18Speaker 02

  Some of them do. Yeah, there's a, there's sort of a long-termism subset, I guess.

• 42:25Alex Kantrowitz?

  So that's what their belief is in terms of long-termism?

• 42:28Speaker 02

  They're talking about saving lives in the long term as being the number one priority, even if it means that people are dying today. Yeah.

• 42:37Alex Kantrowitz?

  Really, really strange.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 42:40Alex Kantrowitz?

  I could see how logically someone might talk themselves into it. It's just like, I don't know, the deprioritization of people living today is a little bit odd. And you did have Sam basically admitting that this was a, do you think that he actually believed this stuff? Or did he kind of use it as a front? Because there was a Vox journalist who DM'd him and then published the DMs and said, "You were really good at talking about ethics for someone who kind of saw it as a game with winners and losers." And he goes, "I had to be, it's what reputations are made of. I feel bad for those who got F'd by it, by this dumb game we woke Westerners play where we say all the right she bolus and so everyone likes us."

• 43:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I mean, I think to some extent he did believe it. And I think to some extent, it was just a convenient way to rationalize his behavior. He, you know, I think that the thing about effective altruism, and especially about the earning to give portion of that community, is that you can rationalize a lot based on that type of philosophy. I mean, you could rationalize stealing $8 billion from your customers if you thought that it was going to be spent, you know, in a better way than they might have spent it themselves.

• 43:51Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, there is this moment, right? In the trial where Caroline Ellison mentions that he told her that he was utilitarian, and therefore, if he thinks it makes the world better over time, it's okay to lie and steal. This actually came out in the trial.

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:05Alex Kantrowitz?

  That's insane.

• 44:06Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he's talked about, you know, his risk appetite for, you know, she said something about how he would say that if he were given the opportunity to flip a coin and if it came up tails, all of humanity would be destroyed. He would do it so long as if it came up heads, all of humanity would be more than twice as good. Like, he had these types of risk. Equations in his head, I guess, where he was able to justify sort of whatever behavior he wanted and sort of understand himself to be a good person as a result of it. So I do think, you know, he did believe some of this stuff, but I also think that it was very effective to tell people that, you know, oh, no, I'm not making money for

• 44:49Speaker 02

  myself. I'm making money because I want to save the world. You know, that's an attractive sell to people who might not otherwise care too much for you.

• 44:57Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, it worked, obviously, to great, great effect. We'll see if people are skeptical after this. I hope so. So where do you think crypto goes after this? I mean, obviously, we've seen a great evaporation of wealth, both in the falling of so many coins, like going from basically three trillion to a $1 trillion industry within a couple of months, and then these billions of dollars that were lost in FTX. What is the future for crypto?

• 45:26Speaker 02

  Well, I think it's going to be challenging reputationally to come back from this, but I do think that they will certainly try. You know, the, I think, people in sort of the general public see FTX and Sam Bankman-Fried as almost synonymous with crypto, where, you know, because he was so prominent, the advertising was so prominent, because he was talking to Congress, you know, he was very visible. For a lot of people, that was all they really knew about crypto. And so seeing this failure to them is like seeing crypto fail. And I think that'll be really challenging for the crypto industry to move past. They've certainly been trying to sort of say like, oh, well, Sam Bankman-Fried

• 46:08Speaker 02

  wasn't crypto. He was just one fraud. You know, real crypto is all better than this. But I think that's a challenging distinction for a lot of people to make in sort of the more lay public. But I also know that, you know, if there's one thing about crypto, it's that it's very good at rebranding itself. You know, we've seen crypto go through these boom and bust cycles where it gets really big, and then something goes bad and it all crashes down again. And then, you know, two years later, it's like, nobody remembers what just happened. I mean, you could look back at the collapse of like Mt. Gox, for example, which was devastating to crypto. It was, you know, one of the biggest scandals in the crypto world. This was, for those who are not familiar, it was an early crypto

• 46:52Speaker 02

  exchange that eventually basically lost everyone's money. But by 2020, when people were talking about putting their money into crypto exchanges again, it was like no one remembered that ever happened. So, you know, I have some worry that people will just sort of move on from this, or that crypto will so successfully rebrand itself as something else that, you know, in a couple of years, we'll be going through this all again.

• 47:15Alex Kantrowitz?

  Now, Molly, I asked on Twitter earlier, what should I ask you? And, and basically, the question boiled down to, there was a number of varieties of this, but I'm going to try to synthesize them. You know, are there legitimate uses for crypto? And can this industry sort of function in a way that does not include some of the stuff we've seen with the Mal Goxes and the FTX? So I'm curious what you think.

• 47:40Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think there, it depends sort of how you define that question. I think there are people trying to do legitimate things with crypto. I don't necessarily think that they are succeeding at them very well. You know, there are all kinds of things you could potentially do with crypto. It's just, you know, when you get down to it, it's just sending money from point A to point B. But, you know, the, the actual implementations of these things have been really flawed to, to date and sort of poorer implementations of systems that already exist, I would say, in the, in the broad strokes.

• 48:14Alex Kantrowitz?

  But do you see any good use cases for, let's say, like, you know, the blockchain or NFTs or anything like that? Or is it just sort of like?

• 48:22Speaker 02

  Only in the very limited circumstances. You know, I think that you can point to instances where people have benefited from crypto. You know, you could say like, oh, look at this person who was trying to flee an authoritarian government and they were able to get their assets out of the country, you know, despite capital controls, you know, using Bitcoin or whatever. And it's like, yes, okay, good. That was a use case that was, you know, helpful for a person. But I don't see that as sort of a promising future use case in any sort of scalable way. And I also don't think it's by any means something you can base an entire industry around. And so, you know, the, the companies that are trying to create, you know, the future of finance using blockchains, or, you know,

• 49:06Speaker 02

  tokenize your Rolex using an NFT, I don't think there's much future for them.

• 49:12Alex Kantrowitz?

  What do you think this is going to mean for a venture capital firm like Andreessen Horowitz, right? They raised billions of dollars. They told us that crypto was going to not only, you know, save the world, but create it. Well, not only create a new internet, but effectively save the new world, save the world, right? Just like the evangelism from that company was something I've never seen from a VC firm. And they were the most outspoken proponents of crypto. And of course, plenty of VC firms. And I guess as a VC firm, you have to bet on it, but they, it did seem like they went a little overboard. What happens to all that money? What happens to their reputation? What do you make of this whole moment with Andreessen Horowitz and crypto?

• 49:55Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, I think sadly, Andreessen Horowitz probably came out of this financially kind of okay, because with the, well, the crypto venture capital model is very slanted towards the venture capitalists, where they can invest money in a firm, they receive these tokens before anyone else gets access to them. The firm launches their token, and then there's this huge spike in price because people get really excited about it, especially if Andreessen Horowitz has been promoting it, or, you know, some other high-profile person has been promoting it. And then Andreessen Horowitz, or whichever venture capital firm, can immediately sell those tokens and make massive returns, effectively off of the backs

• 50:38Speaker 02

  of these retail customers who then lose money because the token goes down in price. There's this like graph that you see in the crypto world where a firm launches a token, it goes way up in price, the venture capitalists sell, and it comes way back down again. And so everyone else loses money, but the venture capitalists are fine. And so, you know, I think that that model served them really well. And it's unpleasant, you know, if people understand that that's how it works, but I think that people don't. And so they're like, great, you know, they're making great returns. I think the reputational aspect of it, you know, I think they should be embarrassed by this. And I think people should view them negatively for this pretty blatant tuxerism that they were

• 51:21Speaker 02

  involved in because, you know, they, this evangelism that they were doing where they were saying that Web three is the future and crypto is going to be how everything works in 10 years was, you know, pretty nakedly being done to promote these tokens so that they could make these returns. And so I think people should really think twice about these firms and, and, you know, any statements that they're making like this, uh, you know, especially as we're entering sort of new tech hype cycles every couple of years, you know, if you see a firm that's saying stuff like that about, for example, AI, like, maybe you should question the motives behind these bold predictions that they've been making. I don't know necessarily how much people will actually hold them to account for their

• 52:06Speaker 02

  past statements or, you know, actually if there will be any shift in the impression, you know, most people have of Andreessen Horowitz, but I certainly think there should be.

• 52:17Alex Kantrowitz?

  Well, the thing is that the constituency that they have really is the limited partners who are going to get paid back.

• 52:21Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:21Alex Kantrowitz?

  Like, um, if a network of companies like screw retail investors, like they're going to be, I mean, I guess some might be mad at Andreessen Horowitz, but it's, they lose little by building up the hype and gain much, uh, even if it turns out to be a complete aberration.

• 52:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. I think that's exactly right.

• 52:41Alex Kantrowitz?

  And it seems to be, that's what happened. Uh, two more questions for you. First of all, uh, Bitcoin seems like if you're, if you're talking about how like crypto might have a future as a place to move money, Bitcoin might be that future, right? And it, it does seem like there's some move from institutional investors, like I believe it's called grayscale. They're putting together a, uh, coin, uh, sorry, uh, an ETF of Bitcoin and the SEC sued to stop it and now, and they lost and they're not going to appeal. And everyone's like, oh, these banks are bringing legitimacy to Bitcoin and Bitcoin's going to skyrocket again. What do you make of that?

• 53:19Speaker 02

  I think beyond anything else, it is enormously ironic. Because if you actually look back at the history of Bitcoin and like the white paper that was released when Bitcoin was first created, it's all talking about how banks are so, you know, twisted, that the financial system is broken. I mean, Bitcoin was created in the wake of the global financial crisis. And so there was this enormous lack of trust in the banking system and in traditional finance. And Bitcoin was created pretty much to do away with that whole system. And so now we're seeing Grayscale and BlackRock and all of these, you know, huge financial institutions, Fidelity, JP Morgan's, you

• 54:03Speaker 02

  know, they're, they're starting to talk about crypto. They're looking at these ETFs. And I think it's just hilarious that that's sort of where we've come from this, you know, now the same system that was supposed to subvert the financial system is being adopted by them because they feel like they can make a profit off of it.

• 54:20Alex Kantrowitz?

  But will it add legitimacy? I mean, it does look like when Bitcoin, when these, the appeal was basically dropped, Bitcoin went through the, well, it surged. And that is because people believe that if the banks are adopting it, there's going to be legitimate use for it.

• 54:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's important to note that Bitcoin prices surge on the news of this, not because there is an influx of institutional investors or, you know, retail investors who would, who are buying these products, but because the crypto people believe that there will be future inflows of money. And so it's really just the belief. It's not actual money coming in when these market moves happen based on that news. I think that to some extent, you know, these types of things are used to legitimize crypto. But I think it's important to note that we've had that type of institutional adoption for years now, where, you know, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust has been around for years.

• 55:21Speaker 02

  You can, if you want to say that Grayscale is involved in crypto, you don't need a spot ETF to make that argument. They've already been doing that.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  People have been pointing at headlines that claim at least to show that these huge institutions are involved with crypto, even if that's not always the case, for a very long time. And so I don't actually know to what extent the approval of a Bitcoin ETF, Best Spot Bitcoin ETF, or something like that, will actually move markets versus, you know, just the belief that maybe it will someday. You know, we've seen, there was recently an approval of an Ethereum ETF that people thought was going to be the biggest thing, and it was extremely embarrassing, the, you know, the lack of attention that people put into this and the, the level of volume that was being traded. So, you know, I think people have their hopes really high, but it remains to be seen exactly what happens if, if these types of products are approved.

• 56:16Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay. Last question. Well, do you, do you own any crypto yourself?

• 56:19Speaker 02

  Uh, I have a small amount that I use just for research purposes, but it's not anything substantial.

• 56:26Alex Kantrowitz?

  So here's the last question. There was kind of a joke that came in when I sent that tweet about what I should ask you, but I'm going to ask it anyways. Someone goes, uh, should I buy Bitcoin?

• 56:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 56:36Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay.

• 56:39Speaker 02

  Do whatever floats your boat, but I, I wouldn't.

• 56:42Alex Kantrowitz?

  Molly, thank you so much for joining. This was great. Hope to have you back sometime soon.

• 56:46Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me.

• 56:48Alex Kantrowitz?

  Okay, great. Thanks for being here. Thanks, everybody, for listening. Thank you, Nick Watney, for handling the audio. Thank you, LinkedIn, for having me as part of your podcast network. Uh, and thanks to all of you listeners. Really appreciate you tuning in, appreciate your feedback. Week after week, it's great to hear from you as we drop these and, uh, get a sense as to how you feel about them. So thanks for chiming in. Okay. Uh, that'll do it for us this week. Join us again Friday. We're going to be covering the week's news, probably a little bit more on the trial, but lots more about the tech world more broadly. So thanks again for listening and we'll see you next time on Big Technology Podcast.

• 57:28Speaker 01

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