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fm, Slash Plus. Welcome

0:57

to Judging Sam, The Trial of Sam

0:59

Bankman Freed. I'm Michael Lewis. Court

1:02

is on a break until Thursday, October twenty

1:04

sixth, the day we expect the prosecution

1:07

to rest their case and the defense to

1:09

begin there possibly even

1:11

with the beginning of Sam Bekman Fried's testimony.

1:15

I'm here with Rebecca Mermelstein, defense

1:17

attorney, former prosecutor and partner

1:19

at O'melvinie and Myers, and also

1:22

with Lydia Jean Cott, our intrepid courthouse

1:24

reporter. I should note we're

1:26

recording this conversation on Monday, October

1:28

the twenty third Lydia Jean, I

1:31

imagine you have some questions you're dying to ask,

1:33

Rebecca, and I understand you might have some for

1:35

me too. Where do you want to start, Rebecca?

1:37

I would actually love to start with you. The

1:40

prosecution has pretty much wrapped their

1:43

case, and I wonder, from a distance

1:45

from how you've been watching, what stood out to you.

1:48

I think that what stands

1:50

out is really how overwhelming the evidence

1:52

is. The prosecution has

1:54

put on a very strong case. We've talked

1:56

about before how many cooperating

1:58

witnesses there are, but you

2:00

don't know until they testify if

2:03

they're going to be good witnesses, if they're going to be good

2:05

at explaining what happened, if

2:07

they're going to fall apart on loss examination.

2:10

And we do know the answer to that now, and I

2:12

think they were strong witnesses for the government.

2:15

I think the cross examination did not buy

2:17

and large undermine the core testimony,

2:20

and so I think the government's done a good job.

2:22

How do you feel the defence is done? You're

2:24

now a defense attorney, so you can look at it through that

2:26

lens.

2:27

I am and I feel compelled

2:29

then to preface it by saying, this is a really

2:31

hard case to be the defense attorney in, and

2:33

so there's only so much

2:36

they can do. I think from a distance people

2:39

often look at a trial and they look at the two sides

2:41

and you say, well, sort of, who's the better

2:43

lawyer. That's who's winning. But it's not

2:46

a mock trial exercise. The

2:48

two sides don't have equal evidence

2:51

and ammunition, and the

2:53

defense has to play the cards that they got dealt, and

2:55

so often the deck is very, very stacked,

2:57

and it's not really a battle of better

3:00

lawyering. I don't think they've

3:02

really scored a lot of points. Were

3:04

there points that they could have scored

3:06

and they haven't scored. It's hard to know from

3:09

from this distance if there's more

3:11

they might have done. But at

3:13

the end of the day, they haven't really

3:16

undermined I think the core allegations.

3:18

To me, they haven't suggested

3:20

that these cooperators are lying.

3:23

And if these cooperators are telling the truth, he's going to

3:26

get convicted. So I think

3:28

it's not going well for them.

3:30

One thing that stood out to me a lot

3:32

about the prosecution is the extent

3:34

to which they're really telling a story, like

3:36

to the point where it feels like a movie almost.

3:39

There was one moment when Nishad saying one of the cooperating

3:42

witnesses, was on the stand and he talked about

3:44

this heated conversation he had with Sam bankman

3:46

Fried when he said he realized

3:48

that Alameda had taken money from

3:51

FTX that it couldn't pay back. And

3:53

this conversation was on the balcony of this penthouse

3:55

in the Bahamas, and the prosecutors

3:57

showed a picture of the balcony, and then the picture

4:00

was in the evening and they had Nishad

4:02

explain where he was standing

4:04

and like where Sam was. It didn't seem to

4:06

be part of the legal making of the case,

4:08

but it feel like for the screenwriters

4:10

who are in the courtroom, and I think there were some, they were

4:13

just handing them a scene on a silver platter.

4:15

And I wonder what you think about that, Rebecca.

4:18

Well, I totally agree with you. That's

4:20

not a piece of evidence that's important to

4:22

the key facts of the case, but it really

4:24

does give you some of the color about

4:27

being able to think back and sort of think about

4:29

what it would have been like on this luxurious

4:31

balcony, and I agree that the prosecution

4:34

has done a nice job of bringing

4:36

moments of drama to the trial.

4:39

People think criminal trials are

4:41

all going to be a few good men and big

4:43

moments, got you moments, and really actually

4:45

it's often a slog of evidence that you have to

4:47

get through. But they have done a nice

4:50

job of finding those kinds of moments. One

4:52

I really liked was that

4:54

the lawyer for FTX was testifying

4:56

mister Son, and he was describing

4:59

a conversation that he had with Sam bankman Fried

5:02

after Apollo had

5:04

it started to ask questions about the missing money,

5:07

and in mister Son's recitation of

5:09

it, he says, you know, Sam asked

5:11

me for explanations, like what might we say about

5:13

this? And Son's reaction was, well,

5:15

like, you could try to say this, or you can try to say that, but

5:18

these are not legitimate explanations,

5:20

and he was clear with Sam that they're not legitimate, and Sam

5:22

understood they were not legitimate. And then the

5:24

prosecution immediately played a clip of

5:26

Sam Bekminfried on kind of his

5:28

post collapse press tour giving

5:31

those explanations to a

5:33

reporter and then

5:35

turned off the tape. Circled back to Son and said,

5:38

you know, is that the fake explanation

5:40

you gave him? Essentially? You know, yes,

5:42

no more questions. Prosecutors

5:45

and all lawyers are thoughtful about trying

5:48

to end on a note that's really strong.

5:50

We know just about the way people's

5:52

minds work, that there's a recency

5:54

and a primacy, right the thing that happens first, that the

5:56

thing happens last, and you want to really nail

5:58

those moments. And they're doing a great job.

6:01

You know, you just answered a question

6:03

I had after it collapsed

6:05

and Sam started doing all this media and

6:07

the lawyers we're saying to me like, this

6:10

is just not going to help. And I

6:13

kind of thought, like, how could he make

6:15

it worse? It was so bad already, and

6:18

I wondered how that stuff would ever

6:20

be used, And this was an example like how

6:23

it gets used.

6:23

Yes, I think a lot of us wondered if it would

6:25

come back to bite him and predicted it would, and

6:28

it did.

6:29

Judging Sam will be right back, welcome

6:36

back. What are the arguments

6:39

for and against him testifying?

6:41

Arguments against are

6:43

the obvious ones. He has

6:46

a right to remain silent. People

6:49

are familiar with that idea from

6:51

television, from movies, and

6:54

he doesn't have any burden of proof. He doesn't

6:56

have to do anything. And so what his lawyers

6:59

are presumably trying to do is poke

7:01

all kinds of little holes in the government's case

7:03

to give themselves enough ammunition and closing

7:06

to say, look, we don't know

7:08

exactly what happened here, but we don't have to

7:10

tell you. They fail to do their jobs.

7:12

That's the story. If

7:14

he gets up and he puts on an affirmative

7:17

narrative by telling his own story,

7:19

then the government gets to poke holes in

7:22

that story. And even though that

7:24

doesn't change the presumption, the government

7:27

keeps its burden of having to prove its case beyond

7:29

reasonable doubt. As a practical matter

7:31

my experiences, the minute the defense puts

7:34

on that kind of real affirmative story,

7:37

you lose that presumption. It becomes

7:39

really like, well, which one do I like more

7:41

as between the two, And that's a very bad

7:43

thing for a defendant. And of course

7:45

he's made, as you say, a lot of public statements.

7:48

The government has a sense of what story

7:50

he might try to tell, so they're going

7:52

to be armed and ready. If he tells the story he's been

7:54

telling, and if he tries to tell a different

7:57

story now, then it's a different problem,

7:59

which is he's already locked in. He's already

8:01

committed to what his explanation is in his big press

8:04

tour. He can't now offer

8:06

a third explanation because the government's

8:08

going to come out after him with that too. So

8:11

I think the downside in that respect is

8:13

obvious. In terms of what the risks are to conviction.

8:17

I think in a case like this where conviction

8:19

is looking very likely, the other

8:21

big risk of testifying is pissing

8:24

off the judge.

8:25

Yeah, that's what I wonder, right.

8:26

And this is a judge who's been kind of cranky with him for

8:28

a while. So you don't want to do that. If

8:31

you testify and

8:34

you tell a story that, by

8:36

virtue of its verdict, the jury essentially

8:38

says it doesn't believe. Right. If

8:40

you get up and you say I didn't know this was happening,

8:43

or I knew it but I didn't understand it, or

8:45

I thought it was okay, and the jury

8:47

convicts you anyway, then the jury has

8:50

more or less said we think you were

8:52

lying, and there are specific enhancements

8:54

that's sentencing for having done that and

8:57

more than that, you really then have a judge

8:59

who says, sitting here a

9:02

year later, after all of

9:04

this, you're still not sorry. You still

9:06

haven't accepted responsibility, and that's

9:08

going to put you really in a very marked

9:10

difference, I think, to all these cooperators

9:12

in this case, because one thing that's really noticeable

9:15

about these guys is how fast

9:17

they started cooperating with the government, right, how quickly

9:19

they came in and said, we did it,

9:21

it was wrong, we knew it was wrong. And

9:24

how remorseful they've been on the stand.

9:26

I think how much they've owned that they were

9:28

wrong and that they knew it was wrong. Not all cooperators

9:30

are quite as good at that, And so you have

9:33

everyone else saying we knew this was no

9:35

good all along, We're really sorry,

9:37

and the minute the wall came

9:39

tumbling down, we tried to accept responsibility.

9:42

And here you have Sam being a holdout, fighting

9:45

and fighting and fighting against it, and I think you might

9:47

see real additional sentencing exposure from

9:49

doing it. So big risk. What's

9:52

the upside. It's a hail Mary,

9:54

right, it's a hail Mary. Things are not going well.

9:56

I think if you asked one hundred

9:59

white collar lawyers one hundred are going to

10:01

tell you he's going to get convicted, and

10:04

what can you do? At this point the government's proof is in. There's

10:06

not much you can do left to undermine it. The defense

10:08

has said they may need a week for their case, so

10:10

maybe there's evidence. I'm not predicting. There

10:12

may be things coming, But the hail mary

10:15

is you put him on the stand. You

10:17

either get the jury to believe

10:20

that he was naive enough or not

10:22

paying attention enough or sympathetic enough

10:24

to not have known what was

10:26

going on. I don't think that's

10:28

going to be a likely outcome for him. You'll

10:31

know from knowing him better, Michael, what

10:34

he's going to seem like on the

10:36

stand. But I'm not sure he's going to do

10:39

himself any favors there either. But it's

10:41

a hail mary because there's nothing left to do about that.

10:44

What do you imagine the effect on his sentence

10:46

could be if he gets up and he

10:48

pisses off the judge.

10:50

It's really hard to quantify. So the

10:52

Sentence and Guidelines are a

10:54

very long and complicated book that

10:57

provides judges with recommended ranges

11:00

for sentences for every kind of case. And

11:02

so for every kind of crime

11:05

there's a base number, and then there are pluses

11:07

and minuses. If you sell

11:09

drugs and you had a gun, that's a plus

11:11

factor. If you only played a small role, that's a

11:13

minus factor. And it's an algorithm, it

11:16

pops out a number, and then there's a

11:18

whole part of the algorithm that relates to people's

11:20

prior criminal history, which won't

11:22

be relevant here. So as a technical matter,

11:24

you get a two point enhancement on that algorithm

11:27

for having lied. And how

11:29

much of a bump that is in mathematical

11:32

months depends on where you started in the analysis.

11:35

I think because of the loss amount here, the

11:38

recommended sentence is going to be off the charts anyway,

11:40

so it won't actually move the needle in terms

11:42

of what the recommendation is. How much

11:45

does it move the needle for the judge,

11:47

it's really hard to say. Very occasionally

11:49

judges in imposing sentence will say, I

11:52

was going to do acts, but because of this, I'm going

11:54

to do Why you might hear that here, you

11:56

might not, you know, twelve

11:58

to twenty four months. I'm making it up. No one

12:01

really needs, but that's my guess.

12:03

That's what you think you would add, Yeah, but

12:06

on top of what thirty years?

12:08

It is so hard to predict what Judge

12:10

Kaplin is going to do here. I think the recommended

12:14

sentence is going to be essentially life because the

12:16

loss a mounts so high. That's not useful to anyone,

12:19

right. I think it's going to be between ten and twenty

12:21

five years.

12:22

Huh, You've been right about a lot so

12:24

far.

12:25

Well, this one's very hard to predict. I've been wrong about sentencing

12:27

many times in my career, Michael.

12:30

I'm curious, as someone who has spent time

12:32

with Sam Magmanfried, what do you think we could

12:34

expect if he were to take the stand.

12:38

You know, he's expected to take the stand.

12:40

I would not be surprised if he

12:43

changes his mind. I

12:45

think his lawyers think

12:47

that the likely effect of taking

12:49

the stand is not twelve to

12:51

twenty four months, but a lot

12:54

more. I think they think the judge is just

12:56

waiting to pounce on that.

12:59

So he's going to be sitting there thinking am

13:01

I going to get fifteen years? Am I going to get forty

13:04

years? I think they feared that kind

13:06

of effect. So there's a part of me

13:08

that thinks if as a betting man, and you gave me

13:10

the odds right now, and the odds are probably

13:12

twenty to one that he's going to testify.

13:15

I take those if he takes the stand.

13:18

You know, it's tricky because if

13:20

you look at the whole case, I mean, nobody

13:23

disputes like what they agreed

13:25

all agreed was true was so damning

13:28

just to start with, right, all his money was never

13:30

in FTX. It started out in Alameda,

13:32

so the funds were mixed all the way back in twenty

13:35

nineteen. The argument's all about

13:38

when in state of mind. So it seems

13:40

that the prosecutors and their witnesses

13:43

have sort of agreed that people

13:46

really started to wake up to this as

13:48

a big risk in June when

13:50

the crypto markets collapsing, And so I

13:52

see, Sam is going to try to tell a story about

13:54

how out of touch he was from June

13:57

until November, and it's not going

13:59

to be believable because he's got all these

14:01

other people saying we told him. There

14:03

are a couple things I've learned that have been interesting

14:06

to me. One was the

14:08

way he active avoided the meetings to

14:10

discuss the subject that

14:12

came up. Nobody made a huge deal

14:14

about it. But that was interesting to me, and

14:19

that it was almost like a

14:21

willful act. I mean, if

14:23

someone tells you that there's a bug

14:26

and it looks like we're short sixteen billion

14:28

dollars, but maybe actually know that we're short

14:30

less than that. You're in that meeting, right,

14:32

You don't avoid that. So

14:35

he just has too much to explain how he will

14:37

seem. I bet

14:40

the jury after they listened to him for a

14:42

couple of days, it's not going

14:44

to change their decision, but

14:46

it's going to make them feel a little differently about it.

14:48

They'll see a person I

14:51

don't see how they do anything but convict him,

14:53

but it will change the tone of the conversation

14:55

a bit. The whole thing's been riveting

14:57

to me, Rebecca, I it's

14:59

been interesting to me to watch

15:02

the way a lawyer tells a story

15:05

it's and also the way the court

15:07

constrains the story it

15:09

can be told. Let's say all

15:11

the money's actually there, and after a

15:14

sentenced John Ray says, oh, we found it all. It

15:16

was all just in these weird accounts in Asia

15:20

or or the things he bought

15:22

are worth way more. The customers can get all their money back

15:25

now that actually doesn't affect

15:27

the legal outcome, right,

15:30

nobody cares. Nobody cares.

15:33

However, people when you tell the story story,

15:36

people care. That's interesting. So it's not

15:38

just all stolen and gone. It's

15:40

there, but that

15:42

you can't get that in the courtroom.

15:44

I think you'll hear prosecutors say all the time

15:47

thin to win, and what they mean

15:49

by that is, don't take

15:51

on problems you don't have to take

15:53

on, don't prove more than you have to, don't

15:56

open the door to some side, show that's going

15:58

to be a distraction and confuse the jury. And

16:00

this definitely feels to me like it's in that

16:02

zone. Who cares, Right, it's still a crime

16:04

either way. Lots of the money went where it wasn't

16:06

supposed to. Don't sweat the details.

16:10

Maybe we'll find out the bankruptcy could be relevant

16:12

at sentencing, right, It will be interesting to see

16:14

if at sentencing, assuming there's a conviction,

16:17

I imagine you'll see an argument which is, look, this was

16:19

a huge mistake, but at the end of the day, everybody

16:21

got paid back. Maybe there was.

16:23

You know, Sam will say I always thought it was going to work

16:25

out. The prosecution will say he got really lucky with

16:28

this completely other thing that he couldn't have predicted

16:30

was going to save him. But bottom line, sort

16:32

of everyone got their money back, and so that

16:34

should be taken into account. I expect you'll see

16:36

that argument.

16:38

Yeah, but it doesn't seem like the judge

16:40

would be that receptive to that

16:42

argument.

16:43

I don't think so.

16:44

Yeah.

16:44

I think the judge will say, you got lucky,

16:46

and that's great, and I'm glad people got their money

16:48

back, But what you did, right, had

16:51

the risk of losing everyone's money, and

16:53

you did it for your own selfish purposes. It didn't

16:55

care, right.

16:57

I got a question Rebecca that I it's

17:00

just been flicked around in the back of my mind. So as all as started,

17:02

what does it mean to prove intent? Intent

17:06

to what? Intent to misappropriate

17:09

the funds?

17:10

Is?

17:10

What are they What intent do they have to prove?

17:12

Yeah, so it's an intent to defraud

17:15

under the statute. But I think

17:17

you're right that here

17:19

it's really an intent to misappropriate

17:21

the funds because well,

17:24

I'm certain you'll see this in the jury instructions.

17:26

A standard instruction in a case like this is

17:28

going to be that it is not a defense if

17:30

the defendant believed it would all

17:33

work out in the end. Right. So if

17:35

you work in a small

17:37

company and you take money out of petty cash

17:40

to pay your rent, but you know you're going to be

17:42

able to pay it back, right, that's still stealing and

17:45

that is going to be the instruction you're going to get. I would expect

17:47

in this case, it doesn't really matter if Sam

17:49

thought he could work it out in the end, as

17:51

long as what he was doing was taking customer

17:53

money that he wasn't authorized to take.

17:55

Gotcha.

17:56

So, best case scenario, what

17:59

could Sam say on the stand that

18:01

would help him.

18:02

I'm not optimistic there's anything he could stay on the

18:04

stand that would help him. I think

18:07

that in a ideal

18:09

world that is really hypothetical.

18:12

A defendant could be so

18:14

sympathetic that they could encourage

18:16

a jury to nullify right. So in

18:19

our system we allowed jury nullification.

18:21

It's a very strange concept. We

18:24

don't tell the jury they have the right to do this. In

18:26

fact, if they asked, they would be told that they

18:28

could not do this. They're instructed they must

18:30

follow the law, that it is not for them right

18:32

punishments for the judge, and they have to follow the law.

18:34

But if a jury nullifies,

18:37

if after the fact you discover that the jury

18:39

got in the room and said, oh, yeah,

18:41

that guy totally did it. But we really

18:44

don't think this should be even be a crime, right, we

18:46

think marijuana should be legal, So we're not

18:48

going to convict him. That there's

18:50

no recourse for the government. That's it double

18:52

jeopardy and the case is over. So

18:55

you could imagine a defendant, and I don't

18:57

think this is a good case for that. You can imagine

18:59

a defendant who was so sympathetic, so young,

19:02

so naive, so compelling, that

19:05

even though the jury really thought they had done it, the

19:07

jury didn't want to convict them. Is that gonn happen

19:09

here? I don't think so, and I'm not sure he has the right

19:11

personality for that. But best

19:13

case scenario, a defendant could hope for that, And

19:16

so if I were his lawyer,

19:18

I would tell him not to testify. I think

19:21

I would understand why someone might feel it was the

19:23

only alternative. But I don't think he's going to help himself.

19:25

And there's so much to confront him with. He's made

19:28

so many public statements that

19:30

I think it would be a mistake, and I don't think he's going to

19:32

because no one knows.

19:35

But I think that he has

19:37

learned his lesson now that he has seen at the

19:39

trial the way in which the government has used

19:41

his words against him, and

19:43

he's going to decide to

19:45

sit quietly. But we'll see.

19:47

If he doesn't testify, what will happen? What

19:49

will the defense do?

19:51

They may have other witnesses they've suggested

19:53

that they do. Many of their experts have been precluded,

19:56

so I don't know who's left, but you

19:58

can imagine them calling a few small witnesses

20:00

or nothing. They'll do nothing. They could offer

20:02

some documentary evidence if they wanted to, but

20:05

they could have a very small.

20:06

Case stick around. Judging

20:08

Sam, we'll be right back, Welcome

20:15

back.

20:16

Now that your book's been out for a while, has anyone

20:18

any characters in the book reached out about either

20:21

what they're thinking about the trial or the book.

20:23

Lots at least ten

20:25

FTX people, most of them

20:28

like Zaane Tacket or Ramnik

20:30

Aora or pretty

20:32

main characters in the book have reached out

20:35

to say that it captured the feel

20:37

of their experience, and I

20:40

think people like being reminded of why

20:42

they got charmed into the situation in the first

20:44

place. Some of these people are still as furious

20:46

as hell at Sam and most of the employees

20:49

FTX are furious because they went down with

20:52

him. You know, they had all their

20:54

life savings on the exchange. So that's how they

20:56

feel. They feel like I imagine the jury will feel if he

20:58

gets up and talks. They're

21:00

furious it happened. They're

21:02

angry with his decision, but towards

21:05

him. Mainly they feel just sadness, a

21:07

kind of sadness slash pity. It's

21:10

been kind of interesting. The stuff in the trial

21:13

has been their details that have

21:15

been riveting to me. You listened to

21:17

it in one way, Rebecca, I listened to it in another.

21:20

I'm not actually paying a whole lot of attention to is

21:22

he going to be convicted or e quitted? Because I just assumed

21:24

it was done when it started almost. I mean, the whole

21:26

thing was a mess from the start. You should never have all

21:28

the funds in Alameda. Put

21:31

that to one side for a second. All

21:33

the problems are

21:35

so concentrated in such a short period

21:38

of time. There are a couple of exceptions,

21:40

but mostly they're talking about the period

21:42

from June to November of last year,

21:45

and watching them talk about

21:47

it and talk about how they felt about it

21:50

is so interesting to me because I was with them and

21:54

there was no surface

21:57

indication that anything

21:59

had changed in their mind except Nishad

22:03

had started to talk about we shouldn't spend

22:05

all this money. That was the

22:07

only thing I noticed, and I was in a viewing

22:10

all of them. I'm not Gary because Gary didn't

22:12

speak. If it's true the

22:14

story they're telling, and I don't have any reasons to doubt

22:17

the veracity of it, how

22:20

good they were at not seeming

22:22

like anything had really changed. And

22:25

I think the truth is that part of their

22:27

brains didn't want to believe that anything had really changed,

22:30

the part of their brains thought this is all going to work out, because

22:32

they'd been through this once with Sam before, you

22:34

know, back in twenty eighteen. They'd

22:36

watched this chaos ensue, money

22:39

be lost, everybody calling him a criminal,

22:41

and then they find the money. You

22:44

know, I think they thought I kind of thought Sam had magical

22:46

powers.

22:47

How did it feel for you to

22:51

be learning that they It seems like knew

22:54

this thing and were acting like

22:56

it wasn't happening while you were there.

22:58

So I didn't know what

23:00

Sam knew, what Sam didn't know, I knew who what Sam

23:03

told people he knew and didn't know. A

23:05

couple things surprised me. The first thing, that really

23:07

is it surprised me that not all of them knew that,

23:09

that Nishah doesn't know that till September. It

23:12

surprised me that Caroline was

23:16

so insistent about her interactions with

23:18

Sam because they

23:21

were busted up. In Sam's telling,

23:23

they weren't talking very much because

23:26

none of this stuff comes up in her memos

23:28

to him. So how

23:31

did I feel about it? It tilted my calculation

23:34

just a bit towards it's really

23:36

not likely that he didn't know anything.

23:39

And this shacker was like be willful,

23:41

not wanting to be at the meetings, that kind of stuff.

23:44

That was sort of a tell I

23:46

have all kinds of questions about

23:49

the decisions he made. The questions that are all

23:51

right. So this thing blows up in May or June

23:53

that the crypto markets collapse and these people

23:56

who are lending US crypto demand their eight billion

23:58

dollars back, and Sam makes the decision

24:00

to give it to him, and what he's given to him is

24:02

an effect customer money. Why didn't

24:04

you just let it go? Like it's just a crazy

24:07

decision, It doesn't matter the

24:09

lawsuit, But I would like to poke and

24:11

prod him on that that

24:13

is the active decision. There is a moment

24:15

where he could have just said, we're stiffing these lenders

24:18

and Alan Mete his bankrupt. But FTX is

24:20

fine. And I

24:22

mean, I have theories about it's

24:25

sort of the psychology of it. My theory is

24:27

that it is his identity was all

24:29

bound up in being this great trader and

24:33

it just cut to who

24:35

he was to let that thing go,

24:37

and he just couldn't imagine

24:39

the shift in his

24:41

perception, the perception

24:44

of him.

24:44

I think it's interesting that you say that it

24:47

was his identity was bound up

24:49

in being the successful trader

24:52

and that's why he made the decision,

24:54

because it also goes to why he went to

24:56

trial. Right, Why

24:58

didn't he look for a plan. Now

25:01

we don't know that he didn't, but it sounds like there really

25:03

were never any serious plane negotiations. Right,

25:05

he was never interested. It was clear there was going to be a trial.

25:08

Wh he knew what happened,

25:10

right, he knew what Caroline

25:12

and Nishad and Gary were able

25:15

to say, and in advance

25:17

of the trial, he was given all of the

25:19

they're called three to zero two's right, the reports

25:21

the FBI wrote of the interviews with them, he knew

25:23

what they were in fact going to say, but

25:26

he still went to trial. And I think when people do that,

25:28

it's often this inability to accept

25:31

the mantle of failure,

25:33

of embarrassment of admitting

25:36

that you knew. It's even in the face of all that, it's

25:38

easier to be able to maintain to yourself that it's

25:40

not true.

25:42

In his case, if you look over

25:44

his life, he preserves

25:46

a kind of romantic notion of himself in

25:49

a totally socially isolated situation,

25:52

and that romantic notion of himself

25:54

isn't paid off, isn't

25:56

confirmed until he collides with wall Street,

25:58

and wall Street says, yes, you're absolutely right, you're

26:01

a genius, that

26:03

you're a genius at this this kind of

26:05

decision making, and Alimeda

26:07

was home to that kind of decision making. FTX

26:10

wasn't I mean, FTX was just a dumb exchange.

26:13

It was the risk taking

26:15

was all in Alameda, and it

26:18

was such a threat to who he was to have that thing

26:20

go down.

26:22

This was fun, This was fun. I have a homework

26:24

assignment for LJ. What's my assignment?

26:26

Okay, So it's a maybe

26:29

an urban legend among trial

26:31

lawyers, but everyone says that if you look

26:33

at the jury when they come in with their verdicts, because

26:35

what'll happen is, at some point the judge is going

26:37

to say we have a note, or he's going to say we have a verdict. They're going to

26:39

bring the jury in and there's someone's

26:41

gonna be the four person. They're gonna have an envelope

26:43

in it, and it's very dramatic, right, They're going to pass

26:45

it to the judge. He's going to quietly open

26:48

it, he's going to look down, he's going to read

26:50

it. Everyone's looking at his face and he gets to

26:52

know what the verdict is before everyone else. Then

26:54

he passes it back to the to the

26:56

juror, and the juror stands up and the judge's

26:58

deputy will say, as to count one, how do you find

27:01

and they'll go through each of the counts. Everyone

27:03

says that if you watch the jurors faces

27:06

when they come into the courtroom for that, if

27:08

they look at the defender they're going to acquit him,

27:10

and if they look away, they're going to convict. And

27:13

I don't think it's true, but I do think you

27:15

sometimes see what's happening. Sometimes they stare

27:17

down the defendant in anger, and

27:20

you can tell that they really sort of are personally

27:22

angry at him. And sometimes

27:24

you can't get anything from them. So we're

27:26

not there yet, but I won't

27:28

be in the courtroom. I'm curious to see what they

27:30

do when they come in. I will report back,

27:34

all right.

27:34

Al Jay, I will see you on the courthouse

27:36

steps on Thursday.

27:38

See you soon, and thank you so much. Rebecca.

27:40

Bye, guys, bye bye.

27:43

We'll be back in your feed soon with more expert

27:45

analysis and news from Sam bankman Fried's

27:47

trial. Thanks for listening. Olivia

27:50

Gencott is our court reporter. Catherine

27:52

Gerardeau and Nisha Venken produced this

27:54

show. Sophie Crane is our editor.

27:57

Our music was composed by Matthias Bossi

28:00

and John Evans of stell Wagon Symphonet.

28:02

Judging Sam is a production of Pushkin Industries.

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