Hey, it's Bill Simmons. Did you know I've had my podcast for 15 years? Do you know that it is

the most downloaded sports podcast of all time? Did you know I have guests from the sports world,

from the culture world, people who work for the ringer, people outside the ringer, celebrities,

experts? You name it. It's on my podcast three times a week, late Sunday night, late Tuesday night,

late Thursday night. The Bill Simmons podcast, check it out on Spotify.

Today, we're taking a break from the war between Israel and Hamas, more in that conflict next week.

And we are bringing you a live update on one of the most lured corporate fraud trials of the

last few decades. And that is the trial of former crypto golden boy Sam Bankman-Freed.

I want to note before we jump into this episode, I am currently transitioning back from book

leave, which became book plus parent leave, which in the last few weeks has been more parent leave.

And now I'm getting ready to go back to work at the Atlantic and return to a two podcast a week

schedule. It might be a few weeks before we're consistently back at twice a week, but that is the

goal by November. So if you've been with us from the beginning, it was the very first episode of

this podcast. Two years ago, I brought on my friend and New York Times colonist Kevin Ruse to talk

about crypto and both of us had the same sort of bemused skepticism, bemused because it's sometimes

hard to predict which of today's silly things will become the big new thing that changes the world

tomorrow and skepticism because I couldn't really think of anything that crypto was good at other

than making asset prices go up. And to be clear, asset prices were at the time going way, way up.

It was doing a very good job at that Bitcoin prices were at all time highs, November of 2021.

Digital pictures of apes were fetching millions of dollars. NFTs remember those.

And a young trader turned crypto entrepreneur, Sam Bankman Fried had become the richest,

youngest self-made billionaire in recorded history.

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