Coffeezilla: SBF, FTX, Fraud, Scams, Fake Gurus, Money, Fame, and Power

Lex Fridman Podcast #345 – Coffeezilla: SBF, FTX, Fraud, Scams, Fake Gurus, Money, Fame, and Power Machine transcription by Qwen3-ASR 0.6B (MLX, local, Apache-2.0). May contain recognition errors. The following is a conversation with Coffee Zilla, an investigator and journalist exposing frauds, scams and fake gurus. He's one of the most important journalistic voices we have working today, both in terms of his integrity and fearlessness in the pursuit of truth. Please follow, watch and support his work at YouTube dot com slash Coffee Zilla. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Rocket Money for savings and subscriptions, Eight Sleep for naps, BetterHelp for mental health and MasterClass for online learning. Choose wisely, my friends. And now onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting. I swear I do. But if you skip them, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by Rocket Money, a app that helps you identify and stop paying for subscriptions you don't need, want or simply forgot about. On average, people save up to seven hundred dollars a year with Rocket Money. You know there is garbage out in space, and space is really big. But it starts getting cluttered up. Same with there is garbage out in the ocean. And it's funny how this garbage just starts accumulating in different places, and that's that's why I think of like subscriptions. And these little things that sneak in you are not paying attention to, that you signed up for with the best intentions but don't use anymore. You forgot you subscribed to it. It's just really nice to get rid of that because it really does add up. It's a great great way to save money and also to have an easy heart that you can feel safe signing up for stuff if you are legitimately curious, knowing that it'll be caught and eventually removed. With Rocket Money, so anyway, start canceling subscriptions today at Rocket Money dot com slash Lex. You could save hundreds a year at Rocket Money dot com slash Lex. This episode is also brought to you by Eight Sleep and its new Pod Three mattress. It's a place of happiness for me—a great nap on a cold bed with a warm blanket. Away from the world, I am thinking focused on reading and drifting slowly into sleep, as you probably are to the sound of my voice. Oh man, maybe I should collaborate with Eight Sleep, where they have a little audio device in the mattress and I speak sweet nothing's into your ears as you fall asleep. I think nobody will want that, but you know I am just brain brainstorming ideas here. Anyway, yeah, this is I am a big big big big believer of power naps. It's a really powerful way for me to refresh my mind and it's just honestly really something I look forward to is the doing that on an eight sleep bed versus like on the floor or on a hotel mattress. I just that's one of the things I look forward to actually to to get back home to. Anyway, check it out and get special savings when you go to eight sleep dot com slash Lex. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp spelled H E L P Help. They figure out what you need and match you with a licensed professional therapist in under forty eight hours. I've been speaking with a bunch of folks recently about the value of therapy. It's kind of surprising to me how many people from all kinds of walks of life at some point in their life, if not continuously throughout their life, got a lot of value from therapy. I didn't realize this. I think earlier in my life. Yeah, there is a huge amount of value to it, and I think the nice thing about BetterHelp is it's just really accessible and easy to get started. So if it's something you haven't tried before, it's definitely worth trying. You should you should try as many things as possible. So this has helped a lot of people. So why why don't you give it a try? Check them out at BetterHelp dot com slash Lex and save on your first month. This show is also brought to you by MasterClass one hundred and eighty dollars a year gets you an all access pass to watch courses from the best people in the world in their respective disciplines. We got Chris Hatfield, we got Will Wright, Carlos Santana, Gary Caspar, Daniel Ground, Neil Game, and Martin Scorsese. What would I not give to talk to Martin Scorsese? But until then, you can listen to the MasterClass. Actually, I mean there is a really fundamental difference between MasterClass and podcasts. I think long form podcasts are good at sort of having the fun relaxed exploration of ideas and MasterClass is no pun intended masterful at. Doing structured communication of those ideas from the best people in the world. It it really it's just a really crisp lecture on what those folks know best and are best at. So it's it's it's just infinite value honestly, especially if there is people on there that you really want to learn from and I bet there is if you look at the list. Yeah, definitely worth trying. Go to MasterClass dot com slash Lex to give the gift of an annual membership when you buy one of your own. That's MasterClass dot com slash Lex. Terms apply. This is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it. Please check out our sponsors in the description. And now dear friends, here is Coffee Zilla. How do you like your coffee? Dark and soul crushing. That was the number one question on the internet. Do you like your coffee to reverberate deeply through the worst of human nature? Is that how you drink your coffee? I've gone through a lot of phases on coffee. I used to in college I would go super deep into you know grinding fresh beans all of that kind of stuff water temperature exactly right. And then I hit a phase where I was just it was the maintenance dose. Then I went to like espresso because I could get a lot more in. And now I go through phases of like sometimes I like it with a little oat milk sometimes a little half and half and sugar if. Oh, you've gotten soft in your old age. I've gone a little. I have, but hey, if I am doing a SBF interview, it's black that day nothing less. Yeah, it's black no. The lights go down. What do you actually do in that in those situations like leading up to a show? Do you get hyped up like how do you put yourself in the right mind space to explore some of these really difficult topics? I think a lot of it's preparation and then once it happens, it's mostly fueled by sort of adrenaline I would say. I really deeply care about getting to like the root cause of some of these issues because I think so often people in positions of power let off the hook. So I really care about holding their feet to the fire and it translates into like. A lot of energy the day of so I never find myself like funny enough. I usually drink a lot of caffeine leading up to the interview and then I try to drink like minimum the day of because I have so much adrenaline I don't want to be like hyper stimulated. I have to say, of all the recent guests I've had, the energy you you had when you walked into the door. Was pretty excited. People not excited here. I don't know. I think they're a big deal, Lex. I think they're scared. I don't know if you know. I feel like you were going to knock down the door or something. You were very excited like that just energy. It was terrifying because I am terrified of social interaction. Anyway, speaking of terrifying, you chose a good living of interviewing people for. Face your fears, my friend. So let's talk about SBF and FTX. Who is Sam Bankman Freed? Can you tell a story from the beginning as you understand it? Yeah, so Sam Bankman Freed is a kid who grew up sort of from a position of huge privilege. Both his parents are lawyers. I believe both of them were from Harvard. He went to MIT, went to like or sorry backing up a bit more. He went to like this top prep high school, then to MIT, then he went to Jane Street. And after that, he started a trading firm in I think twenty seventeen called Alameda Research with a few friends. Some of them were from Jane Street, some of them worked at Google, and they were sort of the smartest kids on the block or that's what everyone thought. They made a lot of their money on something called the kimchi premium or at least the story goes which just to explain that. The price of Bitcoin in Korea was substantially higher than in the rest of the world and so you could arbitrage that by buying Bitcoin elsewhere and selling it on a Korean exchange. So. They made their money early, doing kind of smart trades like that. They flipped that into market making, which they were pretty early on that. Just providing liquidity to an exchange and it's what it's a strategy that is considered delta neutral which means basically if you take kind of both sides of the trade and you are making a spread. Like a fee on that, you make money whether it goes up or down. So in theory, there shouldn't be that much risk associated with it. So Alameda kind of blew up because they would offer these people you know people who are giving out loans they say hey we'll give you this really attractive rate of return and we're doing strategies that seemingly are low risk so we're a low risk bet. Where these smart kids from Jane Street and you can kind of trust us to be the. Smarter than everyone else, kind of thing. Around twenty nineteen, Sam started FTX, which is an exchange. Specifically, it specialized in derivatives, so like margins kind of more sophisticated crypto products. And it got in with Binance early on. So Binance actually has a prior relationship to FTX, which we'll explore in a second because they're going to play a role in FTX's collapse actually. Binance is the number one crypto exchange and they're led by he's called C Z on Twitter. I don't want to butcher his full name but really smart guy. Has played his hand really well and built up a quite large exchange and Binance was funding a bunch of different like startups so they funded they helped invest into FTX early on they invested one hundred million so these guys were kind of like teammates early on SBF and C Z. And FTX quickly grew. They got like especially in twenty twenty twenty one they got a lot of endorsements. They got a lot of credibility in the space. And eventually FTX actually bought out Binance. They gave them two billion dollars, so pretty good investment for for C Z in a couple years. Um and now lead that up to twenty twenty two what happens? Luna collapse, three arrows capital collapse. Which if you don't know, there is just these kind of cataclysmic events in crypto, led by some pretty risky behavior. Whether Luna was a token that promised really attractive returns that were unsustainable ultimately and it just kind of spiraled. It did what's called a stablecoin death spiral which we can talk about if we need to. The stablecoin death spiral. I can't wait till that like actually enters the lexicon like a Wikipedia page on it like economic students are learning it in school. Yes, that's like a chapter in a book anyway. I mean this is the reality of our world. This is a really big part of our of the economic system is cryptocurrency and stablecoin is part of that. Yeah, it's weird because on the one hand cryptocurrency is supposed to somewhat simplify or add transparency to the financial markets. The idea is for the first time you don't have to wait for an SEC filing from some corporate business. You can look at what they're doing on chain right. So that's good because a lot of big financial problems are caused by lack of transparency and lack of understanding risk. But ironically, you get some people creating these arbitrarily complicated financial products like algorithmic stablecoins which then introduce more risk and blow everything up. So anyways, three arrows capital blew up. And all of a sudden, this crypto industry which everyone thought was going to the moon, Bitcoin to one hundred thousand is in some trouble. And FTX seems like the only people who besides like Binance who's also really big and stable and Coinbase they seemed like they were doing fine. In fact, they were bailing out companies in the summer. I don't know if you remember that. SBF was likened to like Jamie Diamond who's the you know CEO of Chase who like kind of was like the buck stops here you know. I am like the backstop, right? So SBF was supporting the industry. He was like the stable guy. So come to like around October and November, there is all this talk about regulation. Everything's been blowing up. SBF's leading the charge on regulation. And C Z, the CEO of Binance, gets word that maybe SBF is kind of like cutting him out or making regulation that would maybe impact his business. And he doesn't like that too much. They start kind of feuding a little bit on Twitter. So when it comes out, a CoinDesk report came out that FTX's balance sheet wasn't looking that good. Like it looked pretty weak, they had a lot of coins that in theory had value if you looked at their market price. But for a variety of reasons, if you tried to sell them, they'd collapse in value. So it's sort of like this thing a house built on sand. And a friend of mine on Twitter he goes by Dirty Bubble Media he released a report and he basically said I think these these guys are insolvent. Well, C Z saw that and he retweeted it and started adding fuel to the fire of like the speculation because up to this point everyone thought FTX is super safe super secure. There is no reason to not keep your money there. Tom Brady keeps his money there whatever. And C Z kind of fuel adds fuel to the fire by saying not only am I retweeting this adding kind of like validity to this speculation but also I am going to take the FTT that I got which part of their balance sheet was this FTT token which is FTX's like proprietary token. And Alameda and FTX controlled a lot of it. They were using this token to basically be a large amount of collateral for their whole balance sheet so it accounted for this huge amount of their value. And the CEO of Binance had a huge chunk of it as well and he said I am going to sell all of it. And the the fuel that that introduced to the market is if he sells all this FTT and this FTT is underwriting a lot of the value of FTX. Does FTT almost approximate like similar things if you were to buy a stock in a public company? Is that kind of like a stock in FTX? It sort of was this proxy because what FTX was committed to doing was sort of like buying back FTT tokens. They would do this thing called the buy and burn. I think there was some amount of sharing in the revenue fees of FTX. It was kind of this convoluted thing. In my opinion, the exact value of FTT was speculated from the beginning and it was clear that it was very tied to the performance of FTX, which is important because we'll get to later. FTX sort of built their whole scaffold. On FTT, which meant that this scaffold was very wobbly because if FTX loses a little bit of confidence, then your value goes down. When your value goes down, you lose more confidence and this goes down. So it was kind of like this thing that this flywheel that when it was going well you got huge amounts of growth when it's going bad. You get a exchange death spiral sort so to speak. Actually, this structure it's a pretty non standard structure. Did the architects of its initial design anticipate the wobblyness of the whole system? So putting fraud and all those things that happened later aside, do you think it was difficult to anticipate this kind of FTT FTX Alameda Research weird dynamic? No, because I think sophisticated traders always think in terms of diversification and correlation. So if you are trying to the way to think about risk in investing is like if I invest in you Lex Friedman and then I also invest in some product you produce those the performance of those two things will be pretty correlated. So whether I invest in you or I invest in this product that you like are completely behind. I am not derisking. I am basically counting all on you doing well, right? And if you do bad, my investments do very bad. So if I am trying to build a stable thing, I shouldn't put all my eggs in the Lex Friedman basket unless I am positive that you are going to do well, right? And these people. As your financial advisor, I would definitely recommend you do not put all your eggs in this basket. Right, and so you can think about it like if I know that these people were trained to think like this and so the idea that you could start this exchange you are worth billions of dollars and you underwrite your whole system by betting. Putting most of it on your own token is is insane and what and what's crazy is we'll later find out that they were basically taking customer assets which were real things like Bitcoin and Ethereum with. With risks that were not so correlated to FTX and they were swapping them out they were using to go basically gamble those and putting FTT in its place as quote value so they were increasing the risk of the system in order to bet big. With the idea that if they bet big in one, we'd all be singing their praises. If we bet big in law, if they bet big in lost, I don't know if they had a plan, but I think they were I think they were being extremely risky and there is no way to avoid their knowledge of that. So when you say customer assets, is I come to this crypto exchange I have Bitcoin or some other cryptocurrency and this is a a thing that has. Pretty stable value over time. I mean, as crypto relative so and I am going to store it on this crypto exchange and that that's the whole point. This is a. So this thing to the degree that crypto holds value, it's supposed to continue holding value. There is not there is not supposed to be an extra risk inserted into the thing. Right, and FTX was pretty clear from the beginning that they wouldn't invest your assets in anything else. They wouldn't do anything else with it. They wouldn't trade it. That's what made FTX so such like a horror story for investor confidence is basically they made every signal that they would not do anything nefarious with your tokens. They would just put them into the side, put them in a separate account that they don't have access to and they just kind of wait there until the day that you are ready to withdraw them. That's explicitly what they told their customers. So going back to the story a little bit, C Z then says, "Hey, I am selling this token that underwrites the value of FTX." There is a total panic. SBF during this time makes set says several lies such as FTX assets are fine, we have enough money to cover all withdrawals. And a day later he basically admits that that wasn't the case. They don't have the money. They're shutting down. And then a few days later after that they declared bankruptcy. There is I should be clear there is Alameda Research. FTX International and FTX US, which is the US side of things, these are three different entities. All of them are in bankruptcy, and it's not clear to the extent that they were comingling funds, but it's clear that they were comingling funds to some extent. So they kind of were taking from each other, and that is where the fraud happens, right? Because if going back to our earlier analogy, if you are supposed to set funds aside, and I find out you were using it to go make all these arbitrage trades or do market making or all these activities you were known for for your like hedge fund trading firm thing, that's a huge problem because he basically lied about this, and especially when he's saying explicitly that we have these things we have these funds and these things turn out to be lies, well again the question of fraud comes in and it's just like there is no way he didn't know so the obvious question might be well why isn't he locked up why why is he running around and it's because really his story is that he didn't know any of it he found out that they had to steal man's position he would say he was totally disconnected from what Alameda was doing he had no idea that they had such a large margin position that they had an accounting quirk and that accounting quirk hit eight billion dollars from from his view and so when he was saying that they had money to cover it he was saying that truthfully to the best of his ability and he just was so distracted at the time that he made a series of increasingly embarrassing mistakes and now he owes it to the people to write those wrongs by publicly making this huge apology tour so you might have seen him on I mean he's been talking to nearly everyone about basically how he's just didn't know what he's doing he's the stupidest man alive so what what what are some interesting things you've learned from those interviews I think I've appreciated why you don't talk in that position most people wouldn't talk most people would listen to their legal counsel and not talk I do not think he's any lawyer worth their salt would tell him to talk because right now I think the danger of what he's doing is he's locking himself into a story of how things happened and I don't think that story is going to hold up in the coming months because I think it's impossible from the insider conversations I've had with Alameda research employees with FTX employees it's impossible to square what they are telling me with no like incentive to lie with what SBF is telling me with every incentive to lie which is fundamentally that he didn't know they were comingling funds he didn't know they were gambling with customer money and it was basically this huge mistake and it's Alameda's fault but he wasn't involved in Alameda a company he owned so like a compassionate but heart hitting gangster that you are recent very recently you interacted with SBF on I like I just the suspenders as you are saying this you interacted on Twitter spaces with SBF and really put his feet to the fire with some hard hitting questions what did you ask and what did you learn from that interaction sure I should say first this was not a willing interaction I mean I thought that was kind of the funny part of it because I've been asking him for an interview for a while he's been giving interviews to nearly everyone who wants one big channels small channels um he didn't give me one but I managed to get some by sneaking up on some Twitter spaces and DMing the people and like being like hey can I come up so I didn't get him to ask everything that I wanted because he like would leave sometimes you know after I ask some of the questions but really what I asked was about this eight billion and zooming in on the improbability of his lack of knowledge um it's sort of like if you if you run a company and you know the insides and outs and you are the top of your field top top in class and all of a sudden it all goes bust and you say I had no idea how any of this worked I didn't I didn't know it's like the guy who runs Waterberg saying I didn't know where we sourced our beef I didn't know where we that's a Texas example actually thank you I appreciate let's let's take it like worldwide Walmart like I didn't know we used Chinese manufacturers it's like that's impossible to become Walmart you have to know how like how your supply chain works you have to know even if you are at a high level you know how this stuff works can I do a hard turn on that and go sure as one must to Hitler Hitler's writing is not on any of the documents around as far as I know on the final solution so in in some crazy world you could theoretically say I knew I didn't know anything about death camps so there is this plausible deniability in theory so that's but that most people would look at that and say it's very unlikely you don't especially if all the insiders are coming out and saying no no no of course he knew he was directing us from the top I mean um what was clear what's interesting about the structure and like I love the nitty-gritty sorry we're back to SBF went to Hitler sorry now we're back to SBF I wanted to turn us as fast as possible away from Hitler um I yeah I so the insiders in what Alameda research Alameda research what was interesting is that there was this sort of one way window going on between Alameda and FTX where FTX employees didn't know a lot of what was going on Alameda insiders and I would say by design knew almost everything that was going on at FTX um and so I think that was really interesting from the perspective of a lot of the so called like what you could what he's trying to ascribe to as like failures or mistakes or ignorance and negligence when looked at closely are much more designed and they sort of don't arise spontaneously because like let's say so there is this thing in banking and like trading where if I run a bank and you run like a trading firm we need to have informational walls between us because there is huge conflicts of interest that can arise right so the negligent argument might be that like oh we just didn't know we're sort of these dumb kids in the Bahamas so we shared information equally but when you see a one way wall that starts to look a lot different right if I have a back end source of looking at or sorry you are the trading firm so you have a back end way to look at all my accounts and I have no idea that you are doing that that all of a sudden looks like a much more designed thing when it would be plausible let's say going to to use another another analogy too if you are saying look I comingled funds because I was so bad at corporate structures you would expect those companies to have a very simple corporate structure because you didn't know what you are doing right but what we see with FTX and Alameda is they had something like fifty companies and subsidiaries and this impossibly complicated web of corporate activity you don't get there by accident you don't wake up and go oh I designed like this watch that ticked a very specific way but it was all accidental if you really didn't know what you were doing you'd end up with a simple structure so even just like from a fundamental perspective what SBF was doing and like the activities they were engaging in were so complicated and purposely designed to obfuscate what they were doing it's impossible to subscribe to the negligence argument and I want to quickly say too like I don't think a lot of people have honed in on this there was insider trading going on from Alameda's perspective where they would know what coins FTX was going to list on their exchange there is a famous effect where let's say you are this legitimate exchange you list a coin the price spikes insiders told me it was a regular practice for Alameda insiders to know that FTX was going to list a coin and as a company buy up that coin so they could sell it after it listed and they made millions of dollars how do you do that accidentally yeah and that's that's illegal totally illegal so that's illegal from like and if an individual does it it's illegal it's fraud what if a company is systematically doing it and you can't tell me that FTX or somewhat at FTX wasn't feeding that information about to Alameda or somehow giving them keys to know that and that would happen at the highest level it would happen at FSPS level and this is why his arguments of I was dumb I was naive I was sort of ignorant are so preposterous because he's dumb and ignorant the second it becomes criminal to be smart and sophisticated right but then also coming out and talking about it which is a it's a bizarre move it's a bizarre and almost a dark move can you tell the story of the eight billion you mentioned eight billion what's the eight billion what's the missing eight billion yeah so it's really interesting because it's sort of like wire fraud you sort of he's sort of copying to like smaller crimes to avoid the big crime the big crime is you know everything and you were behind it right the smaller crimes are like a little wire fraud here little wire fraud there so what the eight billion is is that FTX didn't always have banking it's hard to get banking as a crypto exchange there is all these questions of like where is the money coming from is it coming from money launderer so for a variety of reasons it's always been hard for exchanges to get bank accounts so before when FTX was just getting started they didn't have a bank account so how do you put money on FTX well they would have you wire your money to their trading firm their wiring instructions would go to their trading firm it's easier to get banking as a trading firm so you put your money with the trading firm and then they'd credit you the money on FTX okay first of all this is a whole circumvention of all these banking guidelines and regulations that's the first like thing that I think is illegal but basically what SBF argued is that there was an accounting glitch error problem where when you'd send money to Alameda even though they'd credit you on FTX they wouldn't safeguard your deposits like your deposits would go into what he called a stub account which is just like some account that's not very well labeled um kind of like a placeholder account and he didn't realize that those were Alameda's funds or they were playing with those funds and that they basically should have safeguarded that for customers that's his explanation it's preposterous because it's eight billion dollars but anyways just poor labeling of accounts of an eight billion dollar account I mean it's a billion between a billion this is like do this all the time this is the craziest thing like he was he was talking to me and at one point in the conversation he's like yeah I didn't have precise not because he said I didn't have knowledge of Alameda's accounts and I said well Forbes a month ago was getting detailed accounting of Alameda and he goes oh that wasn't detailed accounting I just knew I was right within ten billion or so what is that error margin ten billion dollars for a company that is arguably never worth more than one hundred million probably never never even worth more than fifty billion your error margin is ten billion dollars you have to be this is a guy who is sending around statements that like there was no risk involved and you are telling me he had a error margin of ten billion dollars that is the difference between like a healthy company and a company so deep underwater you are going to jail so it you have to believe that he is impossibly stupid and square that with the sophistication that he brought to the table it's I think it's an impossible argument I don't even think it did you think he is incompetent insane or evil if you were to bet money on each of those incompetent insane or evil insane meaning he's lying to everyone but also to himself which you could which is a little bit different than incompetence he's not incompetent so the I think he's some combination of insane and evil but it's impossible to know unless we know deep inside his heart how self like deluded he is versus a calculated strategy and I think if you look at SBF he's such a I think he's a fascinating individual just I mean you know he's a horrible human being let's start there but he's also somewhat interesting from a psychology perspective because he's very open about the fact that he understands image and he understands how to cultivate image the importance of image so well that I think a lot of people even though they've talked about it aren't emphasizing that enough when interacting with him this is a man whose entire history is about cultivating the right opinions at the right time to achieve the right effect why do you think he would suddenly change that approach when he has all the more reason to cultivate an image so he is extremely good naturally or I don't know if he's good but he's like he's a hyper aware he's deliberate in cultivating a public image and controlling the public image you you know about the like Democrat donations like he he knew to donate to the right people forty million dollars he says on a call that we released with Tiffany Fong he says on a call that he donated the same amount to Republicans there is speculation on whether this is true because he's a liar whatever so caveat there but he said he donated to Republicans the same amount but he donated dark because he knew that most journalists are liberal and they would kind of hold that against him so he wanted all the all the sides to be on in his favor in his pocket while simultaneously understanding the entire media landscape and playing them like a fiddle by cultivating this image of I am this progressive woke billionaire who wants to give it all away do everything for charity I drive a Corolla while living in a million dollar penthouse multimillion but but that was sort of the angle he he understood so well how to play the media and I I think he underestimated when he did this how much people would put him under a deeper microscope and I don't think he has achieved the same level of success in cultivating this new image because I think people are so skeptical now no one's buying it but I think he he's trying it he's doing it to the best but it has worked leading up to this particular wobbly situation so before that wasn't the public perception of him being a force for good a financial force for good one hundred percent yeah somebody from Sequoia Capital you know wrote this glowing review that he was going to be the world's first trillionaire there are so many pieces done on he's the most generous billionaire in the world that um he was sort of like the steel man of you know it's possible to make tons of money this is like the effective altruism movement make as much money as you can as fast as you can and then give it all away and he was sort of like the the poster child for that and he did give some of it away and got a lot of press for it and I think that was kind of by design I want to address a real quick point a lot of people have said that like finance played a role and while they catalyzed this insolvency is a problem that will eventually manifest either way so I don't put any blame on CZ for basically causing this meltdown the the underlying foundation was unstable and it was going to fall apart at the next push I mean he just happened to be the final kind of like I don't know the straw that broke the camel's back yeah the catalyst that revealed but yeah but it's like I don't I don't think he's culpable for FTX's like malfeasance in how they handled accounts if that makes sense so what what what role did they play could they have helped alleviate some of the pain of investors of people that held funds there yeah I mean probably I don't know I would see some kind of weird obligation like with the two billion they made on FTX remember they got two billion some of it in cash some of it in some of it in FTT token so I don't know how much actual cash they have from that deal but they have billions from the success of what seems to be a fraud seems to have been a fraud from early on they had the back door as early as twenty early twenty twenty from what I can tell so the the back door between FTX and Alameda Alameda research do you think CZ saw through who SBF is what is he's doing no I think I think CZ is like he's a shark I think he's he's good at building a big business like a good shark or a bad shark I don't know I don't know I think sharks just eat I mean I don't I don't know I think my relationship with shark has like finding Nemo there is a shark in that I don't know I think like Jeff Bezos is a shark so whether people have loaded connotations of like how they feel about Jeff Bezos I mean I would say like I think CZ is a ruthless businessman I think he's cold he's calculated he's very deliberate and I think what he should do in this position is forfeit the funds that he profited from that investment because largely I think it was um it's owed to the customers there is so much hurting out there so I think I think they could do a lot of good around that um I don't know if they will because I don't know if he sees it in his best interest I think that's probably how he's thinking but yeah I I think they could have helped or they could still help there who do you think suffered the most from this so far the little account holders this is always true so one of the big temptations with fraud I've covered a lot of scams frauds is everyone looks at the big number everyone that's the headline billions of dollars the top fifty creditors or whatever one thinks at first but quickly when you dig down you realize that most people who lost ten million dollars I mean I am sure that's terrible for them I wish them to get their money back but it's usually the people with like fifty thousand or less that are most impacted usually they do not have the money to spare usually they're not diversified in a sophisticated way um so I think it's those people I think it's the small account holders that I feel the worst for and unfortunately they often get the least press time or air time that's the really difficult truth of this is that especially in the culture of cryptocurrency there is a lot of young people who are not diversified they're basically all in on a particular crypto and it just breaks my heart to think that there is somebody fifty thousand or thirty thousand or twenty thousand but the point is that money is everything they own right and now now what their life is basically destroyed like you know imagine you are eighteen nineteen twenty twenty one years old you saved up you've been working you saved up and this is this is it this is basically destroying a life what's so brutal about this is that this all comes on the back the entire crypto market comes on the back of comes from the deep to distrust of traditional finance right yeah two thousand eight Everybody lost trust in the banking systems, and they lost trust that if those banking systems acted in a corrupt way, that they would receive the justice. It turned out that the banks received favorable treatment. People didn't, so people lost faith in the the structure of our financial system in a way that is we're still feeling the reverberations of it. And so when crypto came along, it was like kind of this way to reinvent the wheel, reinvent the world for the the like sort of lowly and the like less powerful and kind of level the playing field. So it's so sad about events like this is you see that fundamentally a lot of the the power structures are the same where the people at the top face little repercussions for what they do, the people at the bottom are still getting screwed, the people at the bottom are still getting lied to, and law enforcement is way behind the ball. Do you think this really damaged people trust in cryptocurrency? For sure