Welcome back to The Breakdown with me, NLW.

It's a daily podcast on macro, Bitcoin, and the big picture power shifts remaking our world.

What's going on, guys? It is Tuesday, October 3rd. The SBF trial has begun. This is all the background that you need to know.

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Hello, breakers. As you can imagine, this is a fairly weird time for me.

A year ago at this time, I was deep in the midst of planning FTX's second Super Bowl ad,

and yet a month later, I had resigned, the company had declared bankruptcy, and the world had

discovered a rotten core of fraud around Sam and his closest conigliaries.

Now, I did a very long episode about the experience of the week of the collapse from the

inside last November 14th. It was called Sam Bankman fraud to give you a sense of how I felt

about it. Since then, I've been covering the FTX

bankruptcy in Sam's legal battles as I would any other crypto story. In other words, just part of the

necessary cleanup of the last cycle, but ultimately something that is hopefully for the past

and not for the future. When it comes to the trial, I've spent a long time deciding about how

to approach it. The reality is, for the next five or six weeks or however long this takes, this is going

to drown out a lot of other things that are happening in the space.

I have to imagine that most products will choose not to launch during this time for fear of

being outshined because everyone is just laser focused on this.

The question then, of course, is how much time to give it? Is there

a risk of overfocusing on it? You bet. It's going to have lots of drama. But does it need to be

...