Ep. 93: Feelings Check-in. 1) SBF Trial Week 3 Recap 2) Personal Feelings on MONEY

[00:00] As many of you know, [00:02] I... [00:03] took a break from being a court reporter this week to [00:06] Be an F1 driver. [00:09] Just kidding. [00:11] Welcome to the Feelings Check-In, a feelings first look at the news of the week. Takes no one asked for on topics everyone's talking about. I'm Natasha Hoskins. I'm Dina Burke. And this is Boys Club. Wait, is it just Boys Club? It's just Boys Club. The Boys Club podcast? No. No. [00:29] Just boys club. [00:30] Hi, Dina, what's boys club? Boys club is many things. [00:35] It is a community of people who hang out together online and talk about the internet and talk about technology and talk about culture. And it's also a media company. [00:45] that does things like newsletters and podcasts and events. [00:49] and a magazine i'm actually december 7th that's what boys club is [00:54] Love it. How does that land for you? [00:57] It lands. All right. Here's where it comes from. I was at a wedding the other day and someone said, [01:01] What do you do? They were being nice. They didn't know that that was such a trigger question for me. Trigger warning. Trigger warning. [01:08] And you're like, what do you do? And they're like, whoa. Sorry, ma'am. It's trying to be nice. Make conversation at table eight. Trying to get to know you. And they're from like a totally different industry. I had to. [01:22] come up with something that felt like it would land at a table of strangers. And so I said media company and people got it. People are like, oh, she's a podcaster. And I was like, that's not quite that, but it's not, not that.

[01:34] Right. [01:34] Great. I love it. I just felt like we should throw it back a little bit for long time listeners. [01:40] fans of the pod you know every week we used to be redefining it and it feels good to have settled into something [01:45] Yeah. And also with an open invitation to continue to not be settled in it. This is a dynamic environment. Okay. This is our feelings check in podcast. We're checking in on the SBF trial for the first half. And then we're going to get into some personal feelings about our life and our work and things like that. So stick around, give it a listen. [02:09] Hey, Natasha, what is crypto to you? Crypto is so much more than charts and gains. It's a whole [02:15] Entirely new technological rails to enable creativity, ownership, wealth building, and more. Free of credit scores and spending habits, Kraken is your easy-to-use, newbie-friendly bridge to this whole new world. Everything can be better, so why not finance? To get started, go to kraken.com backslash boys club, sign up in just a few minutes, and see what crypto can be. Not investment advice, crypto trading involves risk of loss. [02:45] DBA Kraken. [02:47] We had an amazing event in Austin with Kraken and Williams Racing and Alex Albin was there who dream come true. I'm such a fangirl and he's such a lovely guy and it was such a lovely event and we had so much fun. But that did mean you weren't in 500 Pearl. [03:02] reporting live from the SVF trial. Exactly. And that was upsetting because I really enjoy being there and learning and also posting dumb ass selfies outside the courtroom. It's really fun. But we want to keep you up to date. We can't let you go. We had so many friendly, nice people at this Austin event telling me they were loving our coverage of the trial, which I felt so honored by. Did anyone give you a coverage in air quotes? No, but I gave that energy back to them. And then

[03:32] myself down live right in front of you. So no, they were all like really supportive, which was so nice. But anyway, you're going to give me a briefing today on what's going on. Great. So we are wrapping up week three of the SVF trial. And there's a few big things that happened this week. And then a few open questions for moving forward, which I want to talk about the few things that [04:02] on a side quest crazy side quest that is happening the second one was an expert witness that was called in that was a forensic accountant that really looked at the flow of funds we need one for boys we need a forensic accountant for boys and then the third was they interviewed can son who testified under immunity who was a former general counsel of ftx [04:24] juicy get juicy get those are the three things [04:28] So we'll start with the Adderall sideshow, the side quest. [04:30] Sam Bankman Freed's lawyers are concerned that he cannot quote meaningfully participate in his defense. [04:37] without his full dose of Adderall to treat. [04:39] his ADHD and depression. [04:42] That's not me. I'm sorry. I had no idea that was part of the story. It was just a little surprising. That's their words. I think if I defrauded customers of... [04:52] seven, eight billion dollars, I would also feel a little depressed. Depressed as fuck. Yeah. As the kids say. And it has been a very noisy part of the trial coverage is around the Adderall. Is it going to get it?

[05:05] The Adderall of it all. The Adderall of it all is a big deal. Apparently, he got approved for his extended release Adderall. [05:11] I'm still trying to verify this information. [05:15] He did. I did. I saw it all over. Yeah, that he got approved. He got approved for it. It feels like a tactic of some sort, and I'm not quite sure by whom or for what end, to what end. I think he's an addict. I think he's addicted to Adderall. [05:29] Wasn't that the whole speculation? Yes. That he was some sort of... [05:34] That was part of the weird behavior? Yes, totally. Okay. [05:37] That's speculation. Definitely speculation. Okay, but that's part of it. That's been like a big part of the conversation, and he got his Adderall. That may mean that he's more willing to take the stand. Right. So a big open question moving forward is, [05:51] Is Sam going to take the stand? [05:53] As. [05:54] a Hail Mary last shot. [05:57] to saving this trial. What could this man say? What could he say? [06:03] I truly do not know. I don't know what he could say, but I bet he'll be better at saying it if he's on his full extended release Adderall dosage. So I feel like it might point towards him [06:15] being willing to or being able to take the stand. You have a hot take on the stand thing. What's your, my hot take is that any lawyer, [06:23] Anywhere. [06:24] will tell you he should not take the stand that you do not want to take the stand in this type of situation. I mean, any lawyer would tell you that he should have pled and not gone to trial, but he's gambler and he wanted to gamble and see if the,

[06:39] 5% chance that he could get off. Something happens. There's some mistrial or something weird goes on. He'd rather take that risk. And any lawyer would tell you, do not take the stand. That's a terrible idea. [06:51] But he's so fucked at this point. Like, so fucked. There's no way, in my opinion, that you could not think that he is... He's committed all these crimes. That... [07:02] It's sort of like, why not? Like, if you're at this far down, like, he's up a creek without a paddle. Like, might as well just, like, get in the water and try to swim somewhere. Like, he's totally fucked. A YOLO testify. A YOLO testify. And I think he's obviously very comfortable with risk. So I think he's willing to... [07:20] Do it. [07:20] Yeah. [07:21] I also get the senses, just totally feelings, but I get the sense that his lawyer doesn't like him very much. So I think if he was like, I want to take the stand, I think his lawyer is like, sure, whatever, what the fuck, you suck, sure. Instead of being like, no, we should not do that. [07:36] So that's also my opinion. Okay. So that's that. The second piece is this forensic accountant basically concluded that a vast majority of FGX customer funds went to the wrong place. [07:49] Political donations, a 6.4 million property in the Bahamas under his parents, SBF's parents' names, venture investments. We talked about this on the pod earlier this week. This isn't, again, new news, except to say that it's been confirmed by an expert witness. And we also have like the brass tacks on the numbers, which are pretty. [08:04] Super in the weeds. We won't get into it. They spent the money they shouldn't have spent. My take from like reading through and learning about this expert witness, Peter Easton's

[08:15] account of what happened. He did a really good job through charts and graphs and visuals showing the flow of money. [08:22] which from my experience of being in there, it has been very difficult to really understand the flow of money, especially when you're talking about billions of dollars or hundreds of millions of dollars. It's so easy to get lost. Even like looking through my notes a few days later, I'm like, okay, wait, seven, eight million, billion, a hundred million. Million, billion. Yeah. It's like completely impossible to follow it. So I can see from a jury being able to see, okay, this much money came in. [08:48] This went into this account and they've been really specific about the different types of accounts, the fiat account, like all of these different things, because it demonstrates how interwoven these two entities were and how they were not supposed to be. And so having a clear sense of this is what came through from customer funds. And then these were the withdrawals that came out of that same fund. And then a really clear chart that showed that. [09:13] Essentially, this is how much they should have had in that account if they were clearly holding all of the funds that they were supposed to be holding and what was in reality in that account. So I think if I was a jury, there might have been a light bulb moment for me sort of up until now thinking. [09:29] okay yeah this guy's probably guilty and like it seems like he used customer funds and but seeing it spelled out very clearly okay this is exactly what should have happened where money should have been and where it wasn't and that being [09:42] really damning in light of what we talked about on Tuesday, where all of these very opulent expenses were coming out of FTX and understanding how directly correlated they were to customer funds. He's a storyteller. He's an artiste. He's a storyteller. He's at the intersection of technology and culture, that man. Okay, great. So that's that second piece. And then the third piece has been the general counsel interview. Can Son, again, testified under immunity. So...

[10:10] he was able to let loose. And the story goes that SBF asked him to try and find legal justification to use customer funds kind of. [10:20] coming in backwards to that conversation. He's like, "Hey, so totally random thought here. Let's just say..." And basically, CanSun came up with three scenarios. They weren't great. CanSun had not become aware that there had been misuse of funds [10:39] until November 7th. So he had no idea that this was happening until the day before FTX imploded. Yeah. So... [10:49] there were three scenarios that he came up with. And the prompt from SBF was find legal justification for why they were misusing customer funds [10:58] at Alameda and he came up with three different arguments. Each one of these arguments basically showed a scenario of why they would use customer funds but all of them were invalid for [11:10] an actual defense or justification as to using those funds for all of the things that they ended up using those funds for so basically on this walk sam was basically like [11:19] Okay. Cool. [11:21] Cool. So a few other things that were sort of interesting around this time when everything was going down in the final week of FTX. One is that the reason Sun was, [11:32] this lawyer finally [11:34] had context for the whole was that he was helping sbf try to raise money and essentially

[11:42] saw the balance sheet and... [11:46] realized that there was, I believe at the time, $7 billion that was missing from customer funds. And he started to ask all these questions and started to really probe. And apparently they were at one of the apartments, I think maybe the penthouse. And it was him, SBF's father, SBF, and Nishad, and one other person, I think. And the story goes that Nishad was like white and like sick to his stomach and was basically realizing it's all crumbling down and there's no going back from here. And SBF was... [12:15] typing on his computer, going in and out of the room, taking calls, [12:20] just... [12:21] He's a psychopath. Like, he's... [12:24] insane and the lawyer was then realizing and then they go on this walk and he says it and that's when he basically realizes oh my god they've [12:32] just been sending customer funds to alameda to make all these crazy investments and spend all this money insane [12:38] and say, where do we go from here? [12:40] We have a court break until Thursday, October 26th. So Natasha, you can take a couple days off from heading down to FIDI and hanging out with your journalist. I get to take a little reprieve. There's apparently three more witnesses that are in the docket for the prosecution. An FBI agent, an FDX investor, and an FDX customer. But there are these three witnesses. [12:59] folks that are scheduled. And of course, the big open question is if Sam is going to take the stand as a Hail Mary pass or not. And that's kind of it. So that's what's up on the SBF front. We'll see you here next week with some more live coverage. Thursday, we'll be back.

[13:18] We're going to now transition into some personal feelings, which is funny because I feel that I have presented many personal feelings around the SBF stuff. [13:26] What are we talking about today? We're gonna talk about money. I saw this tweet earlier today that I'm gonna send to you right now that really sums up, I think, [13:35] kind of how I feel about things. It's from Philip Jackson, who is building future commerce. We're gonna actually have him on the pod in a couple weeks. But it's a screenshot of a girl on TikTok saying the pay cut is insane, insane. And his tweet goes with a little like celebratory emoji. It says join me in celebrating today my one year anniversary as a full time founder. [13:57] with that visual paired. Incredible. I'm liking it as we speak. Like, subscribe, retweet. I can't relate to that feeling enough where it's like on one hand, amazing that we get to do... [14:12] what we want to do all the time together and on the other hand there's not very much money. [14:18] There's not very much money. I mean, there is money, and... [14:21] There's enough money for us to do this, but we're basically paying ourselves [14:26] as little as possible to keep the lights on in our homes and our kids fed and our like faces botoxed our faces botoxed our basic needs [14:38] but we're like everything else we're just piling back into the business and so that just means more than anything else it's just like lifestyle realities and sacrifices that we're all making willingly but are very present to every day

[14:50] Yeah, day-to-day present too. [14:53] them. Yeah, I think so much of the [14:57] Revenue that we're bringing into the business. We're reinvesting back into the business. And that feels like the most responsible. Most responsible. In the sense that we want to grow. Boys Club. And... [15:09] we have a big vision for it and in doing that it means making sacrifices but i think any founder you [15:16] feels the realities [15:18] of... [15:20] what they could be making if they weren't a founder. At a traditional job or something like that. [15:25] at a traditional job and [15:29] I have no desire to do that. There's no other job in the world that I want, but [15:34] there's definitely moments where I'm like, man, I feel really broke and it sucks. And... [15:39] it puts pressure on the business. [15:42] Not necessarily because I'm wanting to pull from the investments we're making back into the business into my own personal income, but more this thing needs to work because the bet I'm making is that I'm personally not taking as much money. [15:57] because I'm building equity in something that's much more valuable. And so if that thing is not becoming much more valuable, then, [16:04] then there's no reason I'm getting paid how much I'm getting paid. And so it makes me feel like I'm a little bit in a pressure cooker around it because I really wanted to work. And I wanted to work for a myriad of reasons, but one of them is because I want fuck you money. I don't get to fuck you money without making sacrifices.

[16:21] so i feel that and looking at the roadmap there's so many things that we want to do and so many [16:27] areas of opportunity that require capital. [16:30] that I don't know when, I don't see necessarily a horizon of us being able to get paid, paid well. [16:37] like yeah we're we're under compensated but i feel like responsively compensated as founders right now for the business the size of our business but getting paid well and getting paid [16:48] in a way where I'm not thinking about like, wow, I'm making less than most everybody else in my life and every single one of my friends. And I'm happy for them. But I think about it. Yeah, totally. [16:59] So what's amazing about it is we're all on the same page about it. I don't feel tension with anything. [17:04] you or Miranda. And that's a gift because I think it could be a really different conversation if someone wasn't willing to be in the same boat together. Yeah. I think it makes you really present to timelines as well. It's like, what's the threshold or inflection point when... [17:17] were able to be [17:19] paying ourselves more and that won't come until the business is really at a different stage [17:24] Yeah. Where... [17:25] we're no longer trying to [17:28] figure the business out and that [17:30] comes when there's a step change. [17:33] in what's [17:35] going with business and she's like, [17:37] Not quite sure what that is. Yeah. And so I think it's like its timeline. It's hard to look at this math, but I think it's also important to look at the math of like, okay, what? [17:44] could I be making at a different job given my experience and level right now? And like the difference between that and what I'm making right now and what

[17:54] multiplying that over like how many months we're thinking of doing this until we're able to pair ourselves more and it's like okay is that [18:02] Exit. [18:03] amount of money [18:05] going to be realized later on in some other form and hopefully it will in some multiple that's [18:12] the very real trade-off that's happening right now. And it's fine. [18:16] And... [18:17] I'm happy doing it. It's just like, like you said, it's a pressure cooker from a timeline perspective. Okay, what's going to be the thing that gets us into the next phase? And yeah, I just like, I feel... [18:30] Broke. [18:30] laughter [18:33] and of course like I say that with an incredible amount of privilege and like recognizing the privilege and also happy to be doing the job that I'm doing and feel grateful that there's money at all so I don't want to sound like a brat [18:45] And I also want to be honest that I also feel broke. And that's where we're at. Yeah. And I think the realities of cost of living, like all of these things then become really stressful where I'm looking at different apartments and rent costs and just... [19:02] Money is stressful and money is like really emotional and the conversation around it gets [19:08] So... [19:10] emotional so quickly because it, it, [19:13] it's like a trickle down to all the other decisions that you're making in your life. Trickle down economics. It's trickle down economics. Exactly. So anyway, but I, I am so present to loving my job. And I was on a plane yesterday and I was doing like grunt work for the podcast, like creating social cut downs and stuff that is not fun, but I'm having so much fun. And I was laughing like the whole plane ride doing my work and it is not lost on me how special that is.

[19:43] feel like [19:44] Okay, in my most low moments around feeling like, "Oh, I can't afford to do this thing," or, "I can't afford this apartment," or, "X, Y, Z," or whatever. [19:54] I... [19:55] try to [19:56] conjure that to the top of my mind. Totally. I also, I think one thing about this tweet, the Philip Jackson tweet that also comes up for me is that there's a romance around being a founder. And [20:12] it's been romanticized in our culture. Girl bossified. It's been what? Girl bossified. It's been girl bossified. And everyone's like, oh, I want to be a founder. I want to, I want to like, do that. And I'm like, [20:23] Do you? You know, like it's a quarter of what you could be making. Yeah. And think about this thing every single waking moment and not be able to talk about literally anything else with anybody else. Sure. Yeah. Come on down. [20:36] The water's warm. [20:38] Oh, man. Okay. [20:41] That's that. That's that. [20:44] When you're first getting started with crypto, it can be scary. Am I doing this right? Is this just like my bank or trading app? How is it new and different? Well, that's why we love Kraken. They have a 24-7, 365 customer support team that's there to hold your hand all along the way. This isn't a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Fight-a-Bank. This is crypto. It's all the time. Anyone's welcome. Open-door policy. Come one, come all. Try something new at kraken.com backslash boys club. [21:11] involves risk of loss. Cryptocurrency services are provided to U.S. and U.S. territory customers by Payward Ventures Incorporated. PVI, DBA, Kraken.

[21:22] Let's end with some draft tweets as like a little bonus, little bonus fun round. Okay, I have a super dumb tweet that... [21:30] I'm ready to... [21:31] You're ready. [21:32] To release to the world. [21:33] I'm not going to release it. [21:35] it's so dumb okay you're ready to talk about it though yeah okay [21:41] "Why when you trip over a stair, you must skip up the next three [21:45] Question mark to make it up? Question mark, exclamation point to the stairs? Question mark, exclamation point. [21:52] It's so dumb, but I tripped on the subway stairs the other day and then I like scurried up the next three and I was like, who am I trying to prove myself to? [22:01] like who's around thinking like the stairs the stairs the stairs [22:07] Anyway. [22:09] That's funny. I wrote a draft and then I was like, I'm going to sleep on this one. And then I woke up the next day and I was like, no, what? [22:16] Absolutely not. [22:19] Okay. Do you have one? Oh my gosh. Well, I already shared with you what this event, but I will share the tweet draft here. [22:27] do they put in plain air? [22:28] Why am I weeping watching David Beckham get a red card in a 1998 World Cup soccer game? Weeping on the plane watching that documentary. You should tweet that. You should tweet that. It will hit. It will hit with people who have seen the documentary. [22:42] They'll be like, absolutely. Altitude? I don't know. It's really enjoyable, though. I mean, I like doing it. It's like a... It's an emotional release. You know what I mean? Like... Uh-huh.

[22:53] Just let it go. Let it flow. [22:55] Anyway, I think you should send it off. Okay. Okay, bye. [23:02] There it is. That's Boys Club. We have two podcasts, two online, where we talk about internet culture, and this podcast where we report on some Web3 or emerging tech story and then talk about our feelings, the feelings check-in. So thank you for listening. Please like, subscribe, share, send to your friends. Anything else? That's it. Thank you so much.