| Sam Bankman-Fried has always liked to chat. Whether it be with congressional committees or A-list media figures like Anna Wintour and Michael Lewis, or obscure podcasters and crypto influencers, the co-founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange was always willing to give his not-exactly-undivided attention to almost anyone interested in chatting him up while he spent some quality time with one of his favorite videogames.
So it's no surprise that he's trying to talk his way out of trouble that could land him in prison for a few decades by testifying in his own defense in his fraud trial stemming from the spectacular blowup of FTX a year ago. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges against him.
We got a first draft of that defense last December, when Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New York Times interviewed SBF in front of a live audience in the wake of FTX's bankruptcy filing. The main pillar of his defense at that time was that it wasn't intentional fraud that blew up his crypto empire, but rather failures of oversight on his part. He claimed he was simply too busy running the FTX exchange to pay closer attention to the massive loans piling up at Alameda Research, the trading firm he also controlled, that were funded by assets belonging to FTX customers. "There were oversight failures, transparency failures, reporting, like so many things we should have had in place," he said, according to a transcript of the event.
Yet there's an exchange early in the interview that's quite pertinent now: SORKIN: What are your lawyers telling you right now? Are they suggesting this is a good idea for you to be speaking?
BANKMAN-FRIED: No. They are very much not. The classic advice, right: Don't say anything. Recede into a hole. And that's not who I am. It's not who I want to be.
In other words, SBF decided to ignore the advice of lawyers at the absolutely most-perilous period of his young life.
That is especially noteworthy now that he's started testifying under oath in his own defense, which over the ensuing months has "evolved," as they say, into something along the lines of (paraphrasing here): I was just listening to my lawyers, and they were cool with everything we did! Lawyers drafted the promissory notes involving Alameda loans. Lawyers put together documentation-retention policies. Lawyers wrote the terms of service that he said in "many circumstances" he believed permitted Alameda to borrow funds from FTX, which is the heart of the issue that caused the failure of both. Lawyers were in the same group chats that auto-deleted conversations on the encrypted messaging service Signal, leaving a giant hole in the record of what exactly transpired during the entire episode.
SBF's testimony on Thursday came after the judge in the case sent the jury home so that he could determine what they should be allowed to hear pertaining to certain subjects. An important line of questioning came when prosecutors grilled SBF about FTX's decision to allow Alameda's balance to go negative, and whether he discussed that with one of his lawyers. But SBF kept dodging the question, answering it with more questions. "The witness has what I'll simply call an interesting way of responding to questions," the judge said. Ultimately, it'll will be up to the jury to decide whether SBF's decision to keep chatting was a wise one, or whether he should've indeed decided to "recede into that hole." | 
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