All right, everybody. I hope everybody's having a fantastic morning, noon or night, wherever you guys are in the world.

Crip Nation, you are certainly in the right place today because we have an incredible guest who's got just some insight that most people don't have.

And most people don't even know half of what Adi knows.

So we are joined by a former Alameda employee and trader and we're going to get into

that background as well as the CEO and founder of a new project called Astra. So Adi Baradwaj,

welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast. How are you doing today, my man? Thank you for having me, Bryce.

I'm doing great, doing great. Yeah, just happy to be on and happy to chat with you guys. Awesome.

Well, let's rewind and start from the beginning. You know, I want to spend a good chunk of time

talking about two things. FTX and what the heck happened, but also I want to spend some

time on, you know, your learnings from that and what you're building at Astra. But let's go

ahead and start with from the beginning. You're an ex-Google engineer. How did you find yourself

working for Sam Bankman-Fried at Alameda Research?

And when did that all start?

Yeah.

So I used to work at Google as a software engineer on the Google Analytics Infrastructure Team.

And I was there for a few years and I had always kind of been interested in cryptocurrency

and blockchain more from the point of view of like, you know, understanding consensus protocols and things like that.

You know, basically all the consensus mechanisms underlying all these different blockchains and L2s.

And that was a passive interest of mine over the past several years.

And then after a few years at Google, I decided to look for a new job. And actually,

I was not looking for anything in crypto specifically. I was looking for just drop, excuse me,

jobs kind of in the trading space more generally. And I applied to a bunch of trading firms.

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