Amazon, Google, and crypto are on trial _ The Vergecast

### The Trial of Sam Bankman-Freed: A Glimpse into the Crypto World's Downfall

The trial of **Sam Bankman-Freed (SBF)** marks a pivotal moment in the history of cryptocurrency. Once seen as the golden boy of crypto, SBF is now facing charges that include wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud investors, and misappropriation of funds from his company FTX. The case, which began on October 30, 2023, has already sparked widespread interest due to its implications for the crypto industry.

The trial delves into the collapse of **FTX**, once one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. The prosecution alleges that SBF and his co-conspirators misused customer funds to prop up their struggling trading firm, **Alam Research**. This misuse of funds led to a $4.5 billion shortfall, revealed after FTX's November 2022 bankruptcy. The trial is expected to last about five weeks, with testimony from former employees and co-conspirators, including SBF's ex-girlfriend and business partner Carolyn Ellison.

One of the most compelling aspects of this trial is its potential to uncover the inner workings of the crypto industry. **FTX**'s collapse was precipitated by a series of missteps that included questionable accounting practices, reliance on a volatile native token (FTT), and allegations of money laundering. The trial could set a precedent for how regulators approach cryptocurrency exchanges in the future.

### Meta Faces Antitrust Investigation: A Blow to Its Dominance

In a separate development, **Meta** is under antitrust scrutiny for its dominance in the social media market. Federal authorities are investigating whether the company's acquisition of smaller competitors like **Instagram** and **WhatsApp** stifled competition. This probe follows years of accusations that Meta has engaged in anti-competitive practices to maintain its market power.

The investigation could have significant implications for Meta's business operations. If found guilty, the company may be forced to divest some of its acquisitions or modify its business practices. This would mark a major shift in the tech industry, where consolidation and mergers have been common.

### Google Faces Antitrust Scrutiny: A New Frontier for Big Tech

Meanwhile, **Google** is under investigation by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) for potentially monopolistic behavior in the digital advertising market. The probe focuses on how Google collects and uses consumer data to target ads more effectively than its competitors, raising concerns about data privacy and competition.

This investigation comes as part of a broader regulatory push against tech giants. It highlights the growing recognition that Big Tech companies wield too much power in the economy and in people's daily lives. If successful, this case could lead to changes in how Google operates, particularly in its handling of user data.

### Vergecast Hotline: E-Reader Recommendations for a Child

In a lighter vein, **Vergecast** listeners often reach out with tech-related questions. One such query came from Zach in Milwaukee, who is looking for an e-reader for his voracious young reader. The challenge is to find a device that allows access to library apps like **Libby** and **Hoopla** without locking the child into one ecosystem.

The discussion highlighted several options:

1. **iPad**: A versatile choice with access to all major app stores, but potentially more expensive and prone to distractions.

2. **Android Tablets (e.g., Barnes & Noble Nook)**: These offer a balance between affordability and functionality, though they may require some technical know-how to set up.

3. **Amazon Fire tablets**: Affordable and user-friendly, but limited by Amazon's ecosystem.

Ultimately, the decision hinges on how much Zach is willing to troubleshoot and whether he wants a device that encourages focus or flexibility.

### Conclusion

The week in tech brought significant developments in legal battles involving major players like Meta, Google, and Sam Bankman-Freed. These cases underscore the ongoing scrutiny of big tech companies and their impact on competition and consumer privacy. Meanwhile, everyday tech decisions, like choosing an e-reader for a child, highlight the practical challenges of navigating today's tech landscape.

For more updates on these stories and others, visit **theverge.com**. As always, feel free to reach out with your thoughts or questions by calling 866-VE-RGE-111 or emailing vergecast@theverge.com.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 I'm your friend David Pierce and I am currently in the hallway outside of courtroom 10 at the E Barrett Prettyman United States courthouse in Washington DC inside courtroom 10 is where USV Google one of the most important Tech trials in the last two decades and probably the biggest antitrust trial since the Microsoft trial in the late '90s is currently going on I'm here in the building today because satian Adella the CEO of Microsoft is taking the stand to talk about search engines Bing AI Apple chat GPT and who knows what else there's a lot to talk to that guy about this trial has been weird and complex and important and today should be more of the same and that actually it's a big part of what we're going to talk about on the show today yes there are tons of gadgets coming out and lots of news to cover and we're going to get to all of that don't you worry but we also have three very different lawsuits happening that could all change the way the tech industry works so we're going to going to talk about USV Google and what we've learned so far about the future of search we're also going to talk about the ftc's lawsuit against Amazon which could be the next big Tech trial and we're going to talk about the trial of Sam bankman freed the former CEO of FTX and for a long time the Golden Boy of the whole crypto world and now he's on trial in New York and in some ways honestly it feels like the whole crypto industry is on trial with him so there's a lot to dig into there as well all that is coming in just a sec but the proceedings here are just about to start and if there's one thing I've learned about the US District Court these last few weeks it's that they are sticklers for punctuality that and they never seem to be able to get the screens in the courtroom to work but I digress got to run this is The Verge cast see you in a sec welcome back all right I'm home satin nella's testimony is over he said some really wild stuff about why Bing can't compete with Google and why it's kind of Apple's fault it was a lot and I have a lot of thoughts so actually let's just start there today today like I mentioned we have two big antitrust trials in progress now one at the very beginning of the process which is the government's case against Amazon and one very much in the middle US versus Google these two cases are very different in some ways but I think they also have a lot in common and the combination of them is going to tell us a lot about the future of the tech industry so I called up the verges addy Robertson and McKenna Kelly to help me dig into the differences and similarities and where we go from here hello hi McKenna hello hi so okay we have basically two big trials to talk about in like very different versions of the process and I want to talk about the ways in which they are the same but let's just sort of catch up on both of them first and let's start with USV Google because I've been in the courtroom a bunch and Addie and I have been talking about this non-stop for like two weeks so it is like deep in my mind Addie where are we in this trial right now like what's what's your sense we've talked a bunch about kind of the stakes of the search engine and like what it means to be a default we're now what 3 weeks in almost four weeks in where do you feel like we are so pragmatically in the course of this trial we're at the part where the justice department is getting close to having made its argument for why Google is an unlawful Monopoly which gives us kind of a skewed view of it that right now we're hearing all of the bad stuff about Google and after this there's going to be some State's Attorney General making their case for why it's ad business is also a monopoly and then we're going to get Google's rebuttal and I think that's going to probably bring out some details that cast the current case in a new light right yeah I kind of don't care about the advertising part of this is that okay am I allowed to just not be interested in the advertising piece of this case I get that it's relevant I just cannot make myself care about it I think yeah well in one sense this is all about ads because ads is how search makes money and ads is also if you're going to treat this as their consumers and they are harmed for maybe through raised prices this is where you get the prices but it's a lot of it is I think less juicy yeah and so to your point about the the sort of side of it that we've seen so far what's your sense of how much of a preview of Google's argument we've actually gotten cuz you're right that Google has spent most of its time responding to different allegations from the doj and John Schmid line Google's lead council is like spectacularly good at his job and his done a very good job of like being mad at various people for lots of reasons but Google's always seem to be you know Google is very good and that's not illegal and that's definitely been the case so far do you think there's going to be sort of a different turn once Google actually starts to take the stand here it seems like what we're probably going to get is more people testifying in more detail about how Google is good and the flip side of this is how Bing does the same things in Google's estimation as Google but Bing is bad and therefore does not succeed yeah beinging being bad is like like we've been saying the the Crux of this entire case it also seems like this is maybe when Google tries to poke holes in some of the more sort of embarrassing things that the justice department has brought up what's your sense of how the doj's side of this is going I was in court on Monday for Sati and Adella and before they got to satio they spent a bunch of time on scheduling stuff and it came up a couple of times that Google's stance on how the doj is doing is that the doj is taking a long time not moving its case forward and just sort of mucking around without actually proving its point of course Google is going to say that loudly and on the record as many times as it can but what's your sense now a few weeks in does it feel like the doj is doing a good job of making the case it's trying to make yeah Google's case is sort of just that the doj is wasting a bunch of time throwing Google's dirty laundry out right but it's also not necessarily clear to me that this case is not partly about cougle's dirty laundry and that judge meta is not not interested in potentially embarrassing things that Google Executives have said but it's also I think it's often pretty hard to tell how judges are going to rule and you should probably not read too much into them and I also I don't think that meta has said a lot of incredibly pointed things he's asked questions but I think it's a little bit hard to tell and uh there was a hot mic moment where he was talking about how frustrating this all is with another judge because it's so complicated and there's not like a there's not DNA evidence oh interesting I didn't know that that was not his words that was the the other judge I believe but it seems like he's a little bit frustrated with a lot of this case but it's hard for me to tell how that translates into a ruling do you think that's because of the way the case is going or because of the actual sort of stakes of the case like we've been talking from the beginning that it's not even necessarily super obvious what the boundaries of the fight are here everybody's kind of arguing these nebulous things that are good or bad right yeah you have to argue okay so if there's consumer harm who are the consumers what does harm mean is it enough to say that Google just isn't as good as it could be even if it's the best thing on the market or is that unfair and then there's been this AR this whole sort of meta layer to the trial about how much can be fairly disclosed and so there have been a lot of arguments about how much of any of this is vital to the doj's argument and I think that has been its own source of frustration for a lot of people very much so that got better hooray that has gotten better McKenna my first question for you if I'm remembering this correctly we've been waiting for this case for what feels like hundreds of thousands of years what actually made this case happen like how did we finally get to the point where we have like words on paper about what the FTC is mad about at Amazon yeah so the investigation into Amazon on antitrust grounds has actually been going on since the Trump Administration the former FDC chair Joe Simons kicked it off of course A lot happened uh in Tech under the Trump Administration as well Cambridge analytica a bunch of other FTC stuff with that company and so instead of pursuing the Amazon case Simon kind of designated the ftc's very meager resources they've gotten more in recent years towards like Facebook and meta but of course in 2021 President Biden nominated Lena Khan to be the chair of the FTC Lena Khan of course is famous for a somewhat viral legal paper on Amazon the only one ever yeah the only one ever called the Amazon antitrust Paradox and in it she kind of talks about basically how common antitrust American antitrust Doctrine the way that we've approach approached antitrust law for decades doesn't really apply too well to Big tech company so KH gets into office she's confirmed and then she designates you know more of the FTC resources to that case and so it's been you know probably about 5 years that the company has been under investigation for anti-competitive Behavior the thing that strikes me about this case and I want you to kind of lay out the basics of what the FTC actually thinks Amazon is doing wrong but one of the things that it strikes me big picture is that like you said lenon knows better than most that it's very hard to bring an antitrust case against a company like Amazon right we we talk a lot about how do you prove consumer harm we typically these things are like Monopoly plus raiseed prices equals bad is like the legal framework for a lot of this stuff and that's very hard to do when products get cheaper and when in many cases they're free like Google search what it seems like they tried very very very hard to do in this case is make a case about how Amazon has raised prices and part of me wonders if that case which is very different from like the big sort of heady argument about Amazon being too powerful that Len con was making a bunch of years ago now we're in this place where she's like I get the sense she tasked a bunch of people with saying we have to make an argument about Amazon being bad for customers because things are getting more expensive is that a fair way to look at what's happening here yeah I I mean that's how the US antitrust enforcers have long approached you know antitrust law is whether or not a company the be behavior that it's engaging in is driving up prices lowering them and I'm sure people on this podcast have heard you know for so many years the consumer welfare standard so so she has been losing a lot uh we've talked about the Microsoft Activision uh merger not so hot there the FTC didn't win um of course like meta and the within acquisition they didn't really win there and so with a case so Monumental like this Amazon case the FTC really needs to show that it can take these companies on cuz for the first you know couple years of her tenure it hasn't quite been working out and so trying to make those arguments you know about whether Amazon is Raising prices is might just be the only winning argument that the FTC can find under current antitrust Doctrine right yeah so walk me through that case a little bit like what what are the sort of specific accusations that the government is making against Amazon sure so I don't want to make it seem like the FDC isn't looking at structural parts of Amazon as well cuz really the heart of the case is saying that Amazon for as long as it's been around has been making sizable investments in its company creating Amazon Prime um Prime video it's basically a fashion designer uh has Logistics and fulfillment Amazon is a behemoth and by reinvesting all of this you know wouldbe profit back into the company um it's been able to grow immensely and have a lot of control over individual sellers and then also being very competitive against other you know big box stores like Walmart Target and um other companies like that and so because of that structural you know power that Amazon has created over decades the FTC is making the argument that it has a lot of control over requesting you know that some third party sellers put their products on Amazon at a significantly lower price than they would on other platforms also requiring basically requiring third party sellers to buy ads on Amazon's you know search when you go into type of product in order for that product to even be seen while Amazon is selling its own you know Amazon Basics products which are competitors it has that control over the infrastructure in order to create a better system for its own products and services uh compared to those of its competitors which yeah sounds a lot like the case Addie is talking about in a little bit yeah I mean that's the thing right that we're we're in this weird place where just the overarching question is like are these companies too powerful and it feels like the Amazon version of that cycle at least the way the government describes it is kind of unusually tight and succinct where it's like I I you can actually explain the whole cycle of how things get more expensive because of Amazon I don't know whether that's true Amazon obviously like vociferously denies that it is responsible for prices going up all over the internet but it's like the the government sort of lays out this case where it's like okay Amazon forces sellers to use the fulfilled by Amazon things those fees are super high and also Amazon prevents them from offering cheaper prices anywhere else because it it has these mechanisms to figure out what you're pricing around the internet and then they either like bury you in search results or they get rid of the buy box I've like learned so much about how the Amazon website works through this case which is really fascinating but Amazon has all these little knobs it can turn to just wreck your business on Amazon if it feels like it and so what you do is you raise all your other prices elsewhere in order to not run a foul of Amazon's increasingly expensive process and that is like an actual case of consumer harm like if that's true that is the most like straightforward this is bad for consumers antitrust argument against a tech company I feel like I've heard in a long time yeah there were a lot of figures in the lawsuit that were redacted that I much I would have loved to see like the percentage of you know how many people subscribe to Prime um how many people over other websites order stuff through Amazon because of prime I think those fig would really really say a lot and help us to drive that point home if we had them but of course we don't yeah that complaint was very redacted like there was one thing that kept coming up this thing called project Nessie which you can tell is this like very exciting internal program at Amazon that does something and every time it's about to reveal anything there's just like two full lines redacted uh do we know anything about project Nessie what what is the story here it is just as elusive as the Loess monster that it's named after I have not been able to find too much information on it and I bet you know I hope that when this case if this case right because Amazon could still settle if that will happen not entirely sure it's very hard to predict right now but in a couple of years you know if this case actually goes to court I'd be really excited to see what else you know comes out of that complaint those those pieces of data more info on Nessie you know and all these things that we haven't really seen but kind of vaguely know about uh because of you know the text and I'm assuming if I remember right Addie the first version of the Google case was super redacted just like the Amazon case was and then we got another version of it that was much less redacted which is when we learned all the actual information about the case am I remembering that right yeah I think that we've gotten this is kind of typical in a lot of these cases that you'll get very heavily redacted versions and then they slowly get exposed as the trial gets closer okay so we might get Nessie information at some point here in the near future I just want to know about project Nessie that's all I want to know in the whole world I don't care about anything else I just want to know what project Nessie is if you know please email me David theverge.com that's all I want to know Addie my my question for you is like these two cases sort of rhyme to me in the sense that they are like they're happening at roughly the same time which is either really interesting or a total coincidence and I'm curious if you guys see it one way or the other but it also feels like if you if you sort of boil it all the way down the question of like is it illegal to be wildly successful feel feel like the question of both of these things and where does being wildly successful and protecting all of that success tip into monopolistic practices like do you see similarities between these two cases Addie or are they more different than I'm giving them credit for it's definitely not a coincidence that this kind of aggressive enforcement is happening under the Biden Administration which has nominated people who are very strongly pro- being antitrust Watch Dogs so on that side like the big Tech investigations have been going on for years this is sort of just this finally coming to fruition on the other hand I actually think that there are some levels of difference in the case at least the allegations that Google's case so far the trial has been all about look Google is legitimately good there are downsides that we haven't gotten into the really the arguments for like privacy but Google really it knows what you want it uses its data to produce a product that's actually genuinely good the Amazon case at least from the parts that we've seen the allegations are basically Amazon's terrible Amazon forces prices up it throws ads all over everything and forces sellers to buy them which is part of the Google case too but has not really come up as much yet that there are all of these cases where their argument is look people don't even necessarily want to be signed up for Prime as a part of a separate case they they're just getting signed up accidentally that it really feels like the argument in the FTC case is that Amazon sucks and there's no alternative the doj case against Google at least so far in court has been Google's really good but it's bad that no one else can be that good McKenna is that your read too like do you think the the Amazon is bad case is part of this I I have gone back and forth on this because on the one hand some of the things they're talking about like it's super easy to buy stuff and you get things really fast is like those are good things and and those are things people like right like lots of people did sign up for Prime on purpose and really fast shipping is one of the things that people really like about Amazon I do think it's true that the Amazon shopping experience has been on a pretty fast decline for a pretty long time and I wonder if now is the moment where it's like the the case is Amazon used to be good and then got really big and has gotten worse for everyone involved and there's nothing you can do about it I mean to be clear people make that case about Google too all the time outside the Court Fair like this isn't necessarily about the reality of the sit of the actual platforms right now but it's sort of the cases that that both sides are making yeah I think that's totally fair I think when it comes to similarities between the two it really becomes it really comes down to like the consumer experience and how that feels for the consumer so when I buy cat food right I normally buy my cat food from Amazon I have to Wade through so many listings and often it's not the same seller that I'm buying the same cat food from and it's really confusing it's a different price oftentimes it's like it like it sucks but like my cat needs food and I know it's going to be here in two days CU I have Prime right so you know you weigh the cons you know the benefits and the cons over that and then also you know similarly with Google it's using that service using that search bar and how the company controls that search bar that plays a really key role in the case yeah I I'm very curious to see especially in the Amazon case it doesn't seem like in the Google case we're going to have the Google has gotten worse argument uh it would be interesting if we did but it does it just doesn't seem like we're going to get there Google certainly not is not going to argue the Google is a worse product than it once was but it does seem like Amazon worked for a long time because it was good and now it's bad and there's nothing you can do about it is like that's part of how you wi this everything is getting worse and more expensive case like if you're Le a con you kind of have to make that argument yeah I think that's really the argument that the case looks at the most and I mean when you look at also like it comes down to like what does the FTC want as well now lenina con has been very like tight lipped about the exact remedies that they're looking for but in the press release it says like structural remedy that is a breakup right what gets broken off what goes where who buys what I'm not entirely sure but it'll be interesting to see you know how that pans out over the next you know months and years yeah Addie do you have a do you have a theory if you were going to break up Amazon how would you if you're Lena con and you're you have to figure out how to split up that company what would you do well the really cheap answer is that you split up Amazon the it's not always called Amazon Basics now but the equivalent of Amazon's white label product right it's many many many many in-house brands that you don't realize are Amazon brands in many cases especially because there are specific antitrust allegations around that there's the argument that they use all of their consumer data to see what's selling well and then they clone it um I don't know if that's necessarily where the FTC thinks it would be most useful to split up Amazon but that's just the obvious cleavage Point yeah personally for me I think the place where it could be most beneficial for the case to break up Amazon would be the logistics and fulfillment side because that really is what adds that additional competitiveness like we're saying that knowing that the product is going to come in two days right to you so instead of like Amazon having you know its own fulfillment services having to operate with like a UPS or a FedEx more often than not I think would really if not if that's not the only thing that gets broken up I imagine that would be a really intimate focus of uh the FTC as well yeah and that would obviously be a huge huge huge blow to Amazon I think realistically you could get rid of the in-house Brands and like a bunch of people at Amazon would be like a Shucks and they'd all move on if you split off the logistic side of Amazon you have like fundamentally changed that company right which I suppose is if you're the FTC the goal so I I I it'll be interesting to see how big That Swing turns out to be um Last Thing Before I let you guys go I I have been trained over the years that if we're going to talk about tech antitrust we have to argue about Market size because all they argue about is Market size and I've been sitting in the courtroom at Google where everybody is arguing about what a general search engine is and no one seems to know and it's very complicated and there's Vertical Search Engines there's General search engines and Tik Tok is neither of those but it's something else and everybody just sort of spins out of control about whether Google just competes with Bing or competes with like every other site that exists on the internet Amazon I feel like is about to go through exactly the same thing right Amazon's case has been we compete with every store on planet Earth and we're actually like a pretty tiny minority of the retail Market the FTC is going to have to make a different and much harder case now right yeah so in the case of Amazon the FTC basically defines the market as the Online Marketplace um industry which is a really interesting way to define it which I think honestly I don't think Amazon would really even like that because it wants you to think that it competes with the big box stores with Target and Walmart and all the antitrust hearings and all this stuff that we paid attention to over the last couple years you always have the Amazon reps pointing to you know the way that it arranges products in search to the way that a Walmart or Target arranges products on a shelf so in order to Define it as an online Marketplace I don't think Amazon would be really happy with that and I imagine they're going to challenge that in court just looking at like the way that it's defined it really has to do with like online storefronts and I I imagine that will get kind of shaken out a bit more as time goes on it seems kind of even more complicated because stores like Walmart have gotten more like Amazon that if you go to Walmart w.com now you can get a bunch of third party storefront items but even that well so this is this is where it gets really hey for me right because I think like if Amazon has its way the competition is everyone who sells anything in any way anywhere in the world right I would argue that is a reach but also if the FTC has its way it's like companies that allow other companies to set up storefronts inside of your storefront on the internet which is a much much smaller thing that Amazon and to like a lesser extent Walmart cuz Walmart will a third part stuff but you can't really have a store on Walmart.com in the same way that you can kind of have your own store on amazon.com so it's like that teeny tiny thing is probably too small because I don't know that like if you're a real person on the internet you're not thinking like oh I'm going to go to the storefront on amazon.com you're just like shopping for things on Amazon the answer seems to be I mean it's somewhere in the middle there but it does feel like even where like if you go 6040 on one side or the other that's going to end up being really important in this case yeah what are the competitors cuz the thing that I'm thinking of is Etsy for example very small company in comparison like Shopify sort of but it's it's a slightly different thing Alibaba Alibaba is a good one yeah Instagram is setting up a bunch of like ways to buy products in like storefronts which I guess are essentially people's accounts now and then also like Tik Tok shop maybe but that's like really really new so you know other than like to think about like competitors it's mostly you know these kind of smaller companies compared to like I guess like meta stuff and like Tik Tok stuff which is really still very nent and not people I'm not going to Instagram to buy things and also then you add the whole distribution Logistics chain that you mentioned too that really none of these competitors have that that it's fairly unique none of the small like meta and Tik Tok don't have that at this point right the only company doing Amazon things is Amazon which is I suppose a strength of the argument here but also going to make it a challenge to figure out like who are we who else are we arguing about here is going to be weird in this case whereas like at least Google has one real honest to God Like Apples to Apples competitor which is why the Google trial has become so much about Bing because like why isn't Bing good is like a central question but in a way you can't quite ask the same question about Walmart and and get answers about Amazon it's going to be very it's going to be very strange to see how we talk about this because there just isn't any company out there remotely like Amazon anymore and we are also not evenou ing Amazon's media business the fact that it runs Prime which is its own very powerful player in its Market yeah um like Prime movies it has Lord of the Rings now right yeah there's like although that show sucks so I I suspect that will not come up on anybody's side in this argument well there's the MGM acquisition yeah all these things to bolster Prime like in a lot of ways it does seem like and this goes back to like is this raising prices things like is the is the ongoing push and existence of prime good or bad for consumers is a big part of the question here and Amazon has spent a long time being like it's cheap we keep giving you reasons to make it better and the FTC is going to be like no actually what it's doing is like building ever higher wall Gardens through which it can screw both Sellers and customers a solution to a problem it created essentially yeah right right and has made more and more expensive to solve over time what what do we have any sense of the timeline on the Amazon trial like the Google thing took what almost 3 years to actually go to trial from that first complaint is is that a roughly good guide for the Amazon one do we think yeah I think that's probably Fair Justice moves very slowly in this country on all fronts but I do imagine it's going to be quite a bit of time and well people interested I think we just have to continue following it before we have like a gauge of when arguments could take place when things start right now it's just it could be anyone's guess we also don't really know what's going to end up going to trial like even the Google case that went to trial is somewhat subtly different than the one that was filed yeah that's very true well listen as long as project Nessie doesn't go away in this process I'll be okay okay which is a cooler name project Nessie or Jedi blue they're both very good but project Nessie for something that is heavily redacted is perfect yeah like it's the Sasquatch like they should just have secret names for everything and then just redact them all like that's what I would to they all have crypted names all right thank you both very much for being here we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about a very different trial about a very different industry with very different Stakes it's crypto time y'all we'll be right back welcome back as you're hearing this on Wednesday it's day two of the trial against Sam bankman freed who's better known as SP SPF and is also known as the former founder and CTO of FTX which was was for a while one of the hottest companies in crypto it was huge now of course crypto has taken a dive and so have spf's fortunes and the two things have a lot to do with each other actually there are a lot of folks out there who think this trial which is a sensibly just about s SPF is going to have huge ramifications for the whole crypto universe as new information comes out about how the industry actually works it's a complicated trial and an important one the verges Liz laado is covering it for us and I suspect right this second she's probably in a courtroom so we caught up a couple of days ago before things really got going hi Liz hey David how's it going okay so I realized I was prepping for this and like you and I have both been following this pretty closely for a long time you mercifully more closely than I you have a higher Tower Lance for this nonsense than I do I think but I realized after all of like the chaos of the last however many months it's been I've sort of lost track of what Sam bankman freed is actually on trial for so in a weird way let's just start at like absolute ground level here I think there are a lot of layers and a lot of things to talk about but like what is this man actually being accused of and on trial for well conveniently David I brought something to the recording and it is it is a copy of the superseding indictment so this is what he's on trial for I love it and there are seven counts in it okay and they are wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud mostly okay so count one is wire fraud on the customers of FTX count two is conspiracy to commit wire fraud on the customers of FTX sure that's this is pretty straightforward and I just want to pause here and talk about how you prove this because this is part of what's exciting part of it for wire fraud you have to show the bank transfer happened that's boring but then you have to prove that people were defrauded that Sam bankman freed knew he was lying to the customers of FTX and so this is something where we might hear testimony from actual customers you know who are talking about what he told them um it's where we might talk about what he was saying in front of Congress is where we might talk about what he you know what the Super Bowl ad said those kinds of things are where this all comes into play right and the sort of Base underlying thing is that he used customers money basically funneled it to this his investment arm called Alam was it Alam Capital Alam research Alam research but also used it to buy himself real estate and to make some Investments it's it's a straightforward the accusations are straightforward it's embezzlement um it's very oldfashioned see this is why this is useful because I feel like this is all it all spins in so many directions about like the crypto industry and tax fraud and all this stuff but ultimately it is just like he used money that wasn't his to do things you're not allowed to do with money that isn't yours it's like pretty simple okay all right so that's the first two what else we got so we have count three wire fraud on lenders to Alam research so this is his crypto trading arm and they had borrowed money and now the allegation is that he defrauded the people he borrowed money from and then count four is conspiracy to commit wi fraud again this you you see where this is going you want to do it and then you do it yeah yeah and then count five is conspiracy to commit Securities fraud on investors of FTX so that's different and that's the one where we might see VC testimony so the people who were investing were given bad information Sam bman freed had re reason to know it was bad information that's the allegation right so you might see somebody step up on the stand and say hey this is what the documents that I got said here is what Sam said and here's the due diligence we did here are our due diligence documents and again you have to prove that he knew what he was saying is wrong cuz like being an idiot isn't illegal right so that's count five and then we have count six which is conspiracy to commits commodity fraud on customers of FDX I'm seeing a trend here Liz yeah let's well we're going to get to the conspirators in a minute right and then count seven is conspiracy to commit money laundering okay so those that's what that's what we're going to be hearing from and part of the reason I wanted to go through those things specifically is that there's a bunch of other stuff that's going on around this there are so many things going on there's like an SEC lawsuit there's a cfdc lawsuit there's another trial actually that's going to be happening it's scheduled for next march uh for a number of counts we aren't going to be hearing here so I wanted to make sure we knew which counts we're dealing because some of the allegations around like campaign Finance stuff for instance while they might show up in this trial uh they are not the charges that are being brought against him here yeah and you've kind of alluded to this but one of the things I think is important and sort of complicated to understand is what's different about what happened at FTX versus what has happened in some of these other crypto messes we've talked about on this show over the years and I think about like everything from you know the the Luna debacle where a bunch of people people lost a lot of money to like what happened with axi infinity where a bunch of people lost a lot of money it seems like there's one thing that is like crypto gone bad and that seems to have all gone kind of Gone One Direction and this has gone a slightly different direction like how do you explain the difference between what all those things are where a lot of people lose a lot of money and what this has become oh boy so Tera Luna was a project that I think was badly conceived from the jump and there were a number of people who predicted that that death spiral would happen in exactly the way that it did and now there are you know also some allegations that are being brought against dwan about you know um the last I saw was that he might have been falsifying some trading okay but as far as I know and I'm I'm saying this now we may we may see something else in the future as far as I know Doan did not tip his hand into the till and actually take money okay right and when you talk about like the various crypto failures of things like three arrows capital again like they had loans that went bad and they couldn't make good on them sure there's a difference between making bad bets and actually taking people's money so like that's kind of what we're looking at and there are people within the crypto industry by the way who are very happy to see Sam bankman freed go down because they want they want the fraudsters out of the industry they really do think that this is something that's big and real and important so clearing out all of the villains if you will is a positive for crypto I think that they are a little confused about what the general public understands about crypto because I think once you're in it like there's a lot of stuff that there a lot of subtleties and nuances it's kind of like an onion right like there's just always more down there yeah but Sam bankman freed was really really successful at marketing and really really successful at promoting himself and really really successful at making himself synonymous with crypto in the United States he was the good guy like Not only was he not the villain he was like the disheveled good guy of crypto who like wasn't trying to sell you a bunch of nonsense he was the other one right and so that makes it a lot harder for anybody who says hey we want to be regulated cuz you know who else said that with Sam bankman freed right right so there's like sort of a lot of a taint here I think for people who are not directly involved in crypto and one of the sort of long-term goals of crypto is I think to get a lot of people involved and I think potentially you know this kind of trial and the associations with Sam bankman freed as a very public face of crypto could be bad for the entire industry um as far as like recruiting new customers goes yeah I was thinking about this I rewatched the The Big Short movie relatively recently I love it very much but there's this character in it Michael bur who is like one of the first people to see that the housing crisis is coming and that the way we've propped up mortgage bonds is a disaster and he is like the voice of reason he's also like a maniac and I had this moment of reading about Sam bankman freed in the run up to this trial thinking he's both trying to be like the CEO of Goldman Sachs setting up these systems that are a disaster and the Michael bur saying this is all a mess and is all going to come crashing down he like tried to do both of those things simultaneously and sort of play all sides depending on who he's in a room talking to and did it really well for a surprisingly long period of time he was like this is the future also we need to be regulated also it might be nothing but it's possibly everything and like it worked until it didn't well I have a I have a couple thoughts about this and there's there's something that I've noticed when I explain crypto to people which is I'll explain it to them and they'll say oh is that it is that all and it's like yeah that that's all I that is it you know and they think it must be much more complicated than it actually is and there you know there are like a bunch of there's a bunch of complicated math in there you know but conceptually it's actually not that difficult to understand and so as soon as you explain like an nft to people they're like but I thought I thought this was supposed to to be sophisticated it's like well the math is sophisticated the programming is sophisticated but like the concept pretty simple and I think one of the things that people like Sam bman freed really benefit from is this Assumption of technical complexity and that if you think it sounds you know half baked maybe it's just that you don't understand it maybe you're just not smart enough to understand it and bankman Freed's background um as somebody who went to MIT uh worked on Jane Street you know math quiz makes it easy to sell something like that part of what's really striking to me about all of this is actually running the casino is a pretty profitable business and if he had just run FTX and like let Alam fail I think he would be fine the problem here is that he wanted to prop up Alam research which was the reason he founded FTX in the first place like if you go back to that um that profile from Sequoia Capital that they like deleted because it was so embarrassing but don't worry it's it's on the internet archive go read it he talks about you know other exchanges being rickety and Alam having losses because the exchanges weren't good enough and so he wanted to build an exchange that was good enough for what he wanted to do and again you know there are moments in that profile where the the VCS are like well we assumed he wouldn't need money but here he is and it's like that's an alarm Bell for me right there you know there might be a good reason to go get VC money even if you don't need it just because it lets you expand faster for instance lets you do more things but in retrospect that does seem like a striking thing in the profile where they're like oh we assumed he was just minting money hand over fist but here he is asking us for some and you know if you read the SEC complaint they say FTX was a fraud from the jump that the like from the very beginning you know customer funds were being misallocated and so I'm partially curious to know sort of like the timeline of all of this because the way that FTX was exposed was particularly chaotic yes and we found found out about the misappropriated customer funds after a different kind of chaos that is not on trial explain that really quickly and then let's again there are many more tentacles of this story that are going to come out over time but I do think that part is important because you're right it's not on trial but it is like Central to what happened to FTX so just explain that chaos real fast sure so coindesk gets a hold of alamer research's balance sheet and the balance sheet is weird it's the easiest way to put it y there's an awful lot of the token ftt that's minted by FTX that's propping up the balance sheet and backing up their loans it's like if Sephora were to go out and get loans based on the beauty Insider points which they determine the value of okay that's a good example I like that yeah and so there's there's something like weird happening here and s bank mfre has a long running rivalry with the head of binance uh CZ and CZ happens to have a lot of ftt tokens because CZ was an early investor in FDX and Sam bought him out and gave him ftt tokens to do it and so CZ essentially announced he's going to dump his tokens and at that point the market panics um and so people there's there's a run people are trying to get their money out they're you know dumping tokens left right and Center FTX is like uh we're up for sale binance is like oh we'll buy you and then binance like after a day is like just kidding we're not buying this and then after that there's bankruptcy and it's in this period of time post bankruptcy that these details start to emerge that get weirder you know like the the sort of like funky accounting of valuing yourself by a token that you get to assign the value of yourself like that's not great in and of itself but the customer fund stuff that comes up afterwards where it's like there's this hideous balance sheet of Terrors that the uh the financial times gets a hold of but like it's still up there like if you want to go look at that terrible spreadsheet like it gives me panic attacks but like go look there's you know just like a hole there's an8 billion doll hole billion with a B that's when everybody was sort of like okay well where's the money where's the money Labowski well and so this is where the FTX trial and this sort of relatively specific set of allegations against Sam bankman freed becomes the trial about crypto right and you you wrote a sort of run up to the trial getting at a lot of this that there is a there is a in the industry that actually what's about to happen is a lot of evidence is going to be introduced and a lot of testimony is going to be given not just about Sam but about the crypto world and this is both a a it seems like both a prosecution tactic and a defense tactic is to basically make the whole crypto world look really really really really bad yeah that's right I think there's a lot of danger here without knowing the specifics of what's going to be said we're going to find out during opening arguments what we've got is an offshore exchange that is doing something that would be illegal in the United States you can't run both your own trading firm and your own exchange like that's an obvious conflict of interest right we have laws about that yeah it turns out yeah so it's in and it's in the Bahamas so and you know as we we ran through the charges I think it's worth thinking about what kind of evidence it takes to prove each one of these charges like there's the boring part where you show the wire transfer happened like that's going to happen sure there's like some chain of C stuff about like text messages also boring but that has to go in the record but then it's like you have to demonstrate what was actually said by Sam bankman freed and what Sam bankman freed knew and those might be two entirely different things and so you think about like okay what kinds of text messages were there what was going on in slack what conversations were happen happening we know that there are a couple of his co-conspirators who pled guilty and are cooperating will most likely testify including his ex-girlfriend Carolyn Ellison who was one of the CEOs of alam research you know who was in a position to know everything about what happened here exactly and there is a recording of her contemporaneously explaining what happened like you can say you can make an argument maybe to try to take her down oh well you know she's trying to pin it all in Sam because she wants a an easier sentence but like if you have that contemporaneous evidence of her explaining what happened that's a much harder thing to make you can't make it stick if she's she said it before where she thought she was going to get caught you know so there's a lot of stuff that is going on that I think we could potentially hear about but one of the things that I want everybody to sort of remember because there are so many moving Parts in this case that it's easy to get lost is that right before Sam bankman freed was arrested in the Bahamas he was going to testify before Congress and we had his prepared testimony which included a group chat of crypto exchanges where um he was being you know sort of scolded by CZ and I wonder One if we're going to see more of those exchanges especially brought in by the defense and two what they will say because you know this is the sort of thing where like I don't think it's unusual for crypto exchanges to have conversations with each other I'm I'm sure that happens all the time sure if only because you know everybody's trying to be like okay so what's the SEC going to do next but like I am interested in you know what kinds of evidence might be brought forward potentially either to try to get the not- guilty verdict or to try to get Sam a later sentence because you have to keep in mind the defense is doing about three things at once first and foremost they want him not guilty sure but should that fail they second want to make sure that sentencing is relatively light and third want grounds for appeals so that means there's a bunch of evidence that they're going to be stuffing the record with that may not necessarily be directly relevant to the verdict itself but might for instance be helpful for those other two goals okay and it seems like if you're his defense the only two moves I can think of are you either have to make the case that he didn't know what was going on like you said that being an idiot is not illegal and so they they either have to make the he's just sort of a dumb figurehead case or make the everybody in crypto as a con man Sam's not worse than everybody else case is there a is there a third version of the defense that you've heard about yeah so one of the things that that that's sort of a joke in white collar crime is either you're too small to be responsible or you're too big to be responsible and yeah there you go like that you're too far down the food chain to be responsible for the crime or you're so high up the food chain you had no idea it happened right he's like I'm hobnobbing with Democratic hopefuls who how could I possibly have known what was going on that's right yeah so I expect that we're going to get the he was he was too far up the food chain to know the specifics of what happened but I also think that based on the reporting I've seen there's going to be an advice of council defense he's basically going to say that his he's going to throw his lawyers under the bus he's going to say the lawyers told me that this was the best way to do things so I did it their way I don't know how much water that's going to hold I'm very curious about what kind of evidence you might present in order to make that defense particularly because uh there seems to be a lot just like a mountain of evidence here in terms of like chats and recordings and press you know moments in the press all of these things just a just a mountain of stuff that he said so I'm very curious about what could possibly be brought forward in order to to show that he was acting at the advice of councel that he was doing what his lawyers told him to do and it wasn't his fault just from a trial perspective itself how do you think this is going to compare to say the Elizabeth Holmes trial which you also covered very closely that one was just like a nonstop spectacle right there were people cosplaying as Elizabeth Holmes outside of the courthouse do you think this one's going to be sort of a show in the same way I honestly have no idea I think there are going to be a lot of people from the crypto industry who are going to pop by to watch I've certainly spoken with people who've expressed an interest in doing so just out of curiosity in the same way that like you know I think a lot of us are very curious about this certainly I am curious that's why I'm going one of the things that I'm interested in is you know with a lot of the sort of like crypto bankruptcy proceedings there are investors who show up and so I'm curious if we're going to see people who are FTX customers who are going to show up to see what happens and you know the other thing that's like worth keeping in mind here is we've been talking about the sort of boring financial side of all of this but there is this salacious human element that I am now going to talk about because I think that's one of the things that people are really interested in you know questions about recreational drug use a lot of the people within FTX were dating each other I mean Carolyn Ellison is Sam bman Freed's ex-girlfriend you know and like someone who is likely to testify and who has already pled guilty is his childhood friend from math camp like oh right there's some operatic stuff going on so I think that there's like I don't know if we're going to see necessarily people showing up dressed as Sam bankman freed or in FTX gear although we might who knows but I do think that there is a very very high likelihood of like real fireworks because if you think about like David you've worked at a startup too if you think about what people are like when they're you're working at startups like especially because you're working these long hours and everybody's in their 20s and like you don't know what you're doing y it's just just the case there are Shenanigans and these are shenanigans that are now going to be in the courtroom and so like you can imagine in an attempt to discredit a witness you might bring up some dumb stuff they did in the office yeah or in an effort to discredit the defendant you might bring up a lot of their own personal Shenanigans and I I do I think you're right that there were a lot there are a lot of shenanigans we know about because especially like since the man went on house arrest he has he had the most public house arrest of all time and just happily told anyone who asked about all the shenanigans going on going on at FTX and yeah I have a feeling there is a lot more to come how long is this trial supposed to be it's scheduled for about 5 weeks um it may run a little longer a little shorter but I I will be in New York City for all of October in the first couple weeks in November I'm actually turning 40 while I'm there ah happy almost birthday very tell Sam that he he owes you this is how I'm celebrating yeah it's it's it feels very fitting for you as actually it's how to celebrate your birthday this feels right but yeah I you know I think that there's uh there's a lot to come and I I really can't wait to find out what kind of evidence I'm going to see because you know there's a lot of stuff that as a reporter I just love being in other people's business I'm a huge gossip like that's just the truth of the matter like I was that before I was a reporter I grew up in a small town gossip was a contact sport like this is like a game I love and the government can get a hold of so much more juicy info than I can like I would love to see the due diligence that Sequoia did like I would love it I never get to see that stuff so this is the kind of thing that I'm really hyped for it is a really underrated thing I had this experience being in the the courtroom for USV Google for a couple of the sort of bigger named people the people who a never meet with reporters most of the time Sam bankin fre is sort of unusual in that he loved talking to reporters but most of the time these people either never tell the truth or never meet with reporters in general but just watching them sit there and they're it's like oh they have to tell the truth now and they have to say it out loud and I get to just sit here and listen to it it's the best it rules sometimes it's very boring and procedural and it takes a long time but eventually they have to answer the question and it's kind of great um all right well we're going to check in a bunch over the course of this trial like you said it's it's long I suspect if I had to guess I would say it's going to kind of e and flow there's going to be a lot of really wonky talk about how money moves around but then we're going to get a lot of shenanigans and we're going to check in on both of those things I'll tell you what David because I I don't know how many of our listeners are aware of like the sort of the reporting that goes on but because there's a limited amount of people that just a limited physical number of bodies that can fit in that courtroom I'm usually like for something like this I'm going to be standing outside at like an Unholy hour in the morning and so if there are Shenanigans I have some time where I'm doing nothing standing on the streets of New York City and so yes I will be calling in you'll get to hear the cell phone report this is what I like to hear all right thanks Liz we'll talk to you again soon all right bye David all right we got to take one more break and then we're going to get to the vergecast hotline we'll be right back welcome back let's answer a question from the vergecast hotline as we do on this show every week as a reminder the hotline number is 866 Verge 111 call and ask us all of your best tech questions no question too big no question too weird the weirder the better if I'm being honest with you we've gotten some amazing questions recently thank you for all of your most Bonkers thoughts about all things technology oh and if you don't want to call or can't you can always email us vergecast thee verge.com that works just as well today's question comes from Zach hi this is Zach I'm in Milwaukee Wisconsin my daughter is a voracious reader very proud dad that also means she just go goes through tons of library books basically anytime we go to a bookstore she's picking up something I kind of don't know where to go as far as a electronic reader this feels like a really natural holiday gift but do I just go for the iPad because it's got the most access to apps especially things like hoopla things that work with the local uh Library System I don't want to really get super locked into a into an ecosystem but on the other hand like if you go with the E Inc it's not going to use for anything else it's just going to be for for reading but then it doesn't have access to those those library apps and and we're kind back to square one spending you know 10 to $15 for every single book especially books you will read once I I don't know what the correct answer is so light up the uh cray signal and get me uh the best information you've got thanks bye ask and you shall receive we lit up the cran signal Alex CR is here hi Alex hi oh my God this is a great question right there are so many layers to this question in ways that I find so very interesting so let me just try and like lay the land for you here and see if you think about this the way that I do okay there's like a hardware and a software question here I think we can immediately rule out buying a Kindle yes because we don't want to be Tethered to one ecosystem right Fair good on that okay so I think we're we're basically in one of three places now we we can either tell our buddies act to buy an iPad we can tell our friends act to buy a different eink eBook reader which is I I know you're going to have several thoughts about certain brands that may or may not exist in America but are possible to find or you can buy a different Android tablet those seem like the three categories am I missing anything I I think that's exactly right okay because the Kindle Kindle can work with some libraries but it only works with Libby and and overdrive and that's not like the only Library ecosystem out there and it's also kind of wacky and complicated and yeah they just haven't done a good job of that for kids like it's very involved and Cobo has kind of built itself as like oh you can use it for your library books and all these other kinds of reading like I think it's got pocket built in or used to it's also not really great because again it's really limited to overdrive and otherwise you're going to be like teaching your daughter how to sideload stuff and that is a great skill she should have like I highly encourage you doing that I don't know if this is the time you want to do that yeah so I don't want to get into your parenting like you teach your kids to Sid load whenever feels right to you yeah that's a very personal moment for you and your daughter so yeah it really is like okay do you want to go iPad and you know it's more likely to she can crack it and break it and and make it more difficult to use a lot easier than a lot of other devices but it is very very flexible but also like you could catch you're playing Roblox on it or watching YouTube like there's a lot of things that can happen there or you can go with something like probably the best brand and I've I've mentioned it a bunch of times on the show and David knows what I'm going to say which is books b x we should say yeah b x and they're probably the best at like Android E Ink tablets I'm a little hesitant to say go that route just because she is a child and like it can be a little complicated and so you will probably still have to teach her the side loading situation but also a whole bunch of other things and like if you want your daughter to be really really understanding of how technology works the books is the best way to go if if you don't want to also be participating in that educational activity the iPad or like an Android tablets like a traditional Android tablet feels right yeah my my heart wants books to be the answer because in theory that combination of it's almost exclusively a reading device but I also need all the other apps because there are lots of places you read not just in the one ebook system right like yes what an incredibly common use case that no one has fixed I want books be the answer but I I do agree I think for most people the books version of Android is just like somewhere between 1 and five ticks too complicated to really work I'm using like the the most recent color one and it's got the most recent software on it night and day difference in onboarding versus yeah like the Google Play Store is built in now so you can just start using the Google Play Store whereas before you had you would have had to teach your daughter about patience and and waiting for 24 hours for Google to Reg register the device after you register it now you can just start using it so it has improved a lot and and there's some pretty affordable ones there you know there's there's some I think like the Pokey 3 is like $150 maybe it's it's a little more affordable I definitely would look into it and have a serious conversation with yourself on how much you are willing to troubleshoot things cuz I think it's still going to require it even with a software update there's still going to be more handholding than with iPad but it's probably going to get you closer to that experience you're looking for so yeah it just depends on like how often you want to have to answer Tech questions for your daughter Fair can I throw one wrench in here that I am not 100% sure I think is a good idea but I think might be a good idea which is one of Amazon's tablets my hesitation with all tablets whether they run Android or iOS is that they have all the apps that's true but buying stuff on those those devices is a gigantic pain in the ass because of the way that Google and apple run those platforms you can't buy Kindle books in the Kindle app you know where you can buy Kindle books in the Kindle app and buy other things in other apps is on the fire tablets and those tablets aren't like amazing Hardware but like the the Fire HD Plus 8 in has a decent screen it's pretty rough and tumble you're not really going to break it if you beat it up they make a kids version that's even more rugged and it's $70 like I I cannot explain enough how much more expensive every other tablet is this one is not a great tablet but if if truly all you want is a reading device this feels like it might be enough it might be I think you'd have to double check on what apps will work with it because it's still like Amazon's thing and they want you to buy their books they don't won't necess like they might make it difficult I I don't know the state of like the Libby app on on the Fire tablet or or the hoopla or whatever so you probably would need to do just a touch of research there cuz I haven't used one in a little bit it's definitely significantly more open than the Kindle but significantly Less open than like full Android you're still getting Amazon spin on Android that's definitely true yeah but if it's got the apps it's probably like the most affordable and like easiest to use of it it just requires like quadruple checking that the app is available for it also it's like a hundred bucks and easy to return so if you get it and it doesn't work return it buy books buy an iPad and you'll be happy yeah I I will say I think we're probably aligned on this one that like if money is No Object and you're not worried about like breaking the thing the iPad Mini is the correct answer right it is like objectively the best device of all these devices yeah I I I try to switch between my my e-reader and my iPad Mini a lot and I often times will find my like my iPad Mini just does more stuff so I use it more but I love having my my e-reader I love being able to read it outside I love it for just focus and I think for a kid it's that might actually be a good thing in some cases right like they got to focus on the reading and not just go off on a tear being like I wonder like when you read a chapter in a book and you're like oh that's interesting and you immediately go Google it on your iPad that's easy on your on your e-reader you have to wait and do it later and that's kind of nice because then you just keep reading right yeah it's either a feature or a bug depending on how you look at it and I think that has a lot to do with it so I think we're relying on that I would say if you're feeling ambitious Zach buy a books device see how it feels my sense would be it will immediately be obvious to you if it's more and more work than you want right like you're going to take the thing out of the box turn it on and immediately just be like nope or you're going to be like oh this solves all my problems right that's that seems it it will not be unclear I wouldn't think yeah it will not be unclear you're going to know really really quickly and generally speaking the new the new operating system the new version they've rolled out has been really really good they're very good about like getting the latest version of Android on things you you just can't use 70% of Android cuz it's not meant for a black and white tablet so like you can watch YouTube on it don't if you yeah it's a specific kind of torture trying to watch YouTube on a device like that so my other question for you is where do you buy your ebooks I realized in prepping for this that I accidentally just became sort of Amazon exclusive like a million years ago I loved the Kindle and had a bunch of Kindle books and now that's where all my books are so I have kept buying Kindle books and like am I here to tell you that the caliber app exists and does a really good job of stripping DRM from your Kindle books so that you can use them on other devices no that's not what I'm here to tell you it's true and the app is free and open source and it strips DRM from all your ebooks so you can use them on other devices but that's not the point my question for you is where do you get your ebooks if not from Amazon I originally started with Nook and then I found caliber and and made the switch to Amazon and took my whole Nook library with me which is really really nice and then I was at Amazon for a while and and then I was like H I feel weird being in this one ecosystem so I switched back to Nook and brought all my books back via caliber and so now I'm usually like I I tend to go Nook but I've got a couple of like there's ebooks.com there's a couple of other ones and I'll kind of look around CU sometimes the story The Selection is different and honestly Amazon has a ton of books it's gotten so big with self-publishing that a lot of like self-published books somebody will say oh you got to read this it's really good it's only available at Amazon which is super frustrating um and also sometimes I'll just buy it directly from the the publisher and the author gets more money that way so that's if you really are supporting an author buying it directly from their publisher if available best way to buy the books yeah and you can usually if you know what you want to buy if you just Google the title and ebook you can pretty quickly find that publisher website usually and and get the book that way that's a good trick what I wish existed like bookshop.org which is this amazing website for buying physical books from like actual books stores that are better citizens of the publishing world than your Amazon I love that website and I wish something like it existed for ebooks it feels like ebooks.com is like kind of that but not quite ebooks.com is kind of doing that uh lib FM does that but it's almost exclusively audio books I spend like $15 a month there and it gives me one book credit and that's nice and I know I'm supporting an author and I'm supporting my local bookstore like feels great you can also find your local bookstores a lot of actually will have Partnerships with book sellers online and be like oh yeah you can go here and buy any ebook from us at this they often will have garbage websites but if you want to support your local bookstore that's the way to do it it just unfortunately requires more work than logging into Amazon the only thing I would add to your list of websites which is which is very good and I just am going to go sign up for Libro FM right now is there's this website called BookBub B kb.com and its whole thing is just spectacular deals on eBooks from around the internet and so it's like not a place to go if you're like I want to read this specific brand new book but if you're just like I like spy novels let me know when I can get a spy novel for $1.99 as an ebook uh they send emails and it has become my like most quickly clicked email every week because it's just non-stop ebook deals uh and it's great and I use it all the time so highly recommend I'm doing that as soon as we're done with this podcast I think we've helped right this this feels Zach let us know what you end up doing I think your instincts are good and if you if you buy a books and you love it it will warm Alex's heart so let us know it will it will Alex thank you appreciate it as always always all right that's it for the vergecast today thanks to everybody who came on the show today and thank you as always for listening as ever there is lots more from everything we talked about at the verge.com we're covering all of these trials pretty closely so we'll put some links in the show notes but also we're posting all over the verge.com as everything happens so keep an eye on the website also if you have thoughts questions feelings or tips on how to improve my handwriting because I'm not allowed to have Electronics in the courtroom you can always email us at vergecast the verge.com or keep calling the hotline 866 Verge 111 we love hearing from you send us all your thoughts and questions and ideas for what we should do on the show we do at least one hotline question every week so please keep them coming this show is produced by angrew Marino and Liam James Brook mters is our editorial director of audio Verge cast is Verge production and part of the VOX media podcast Network Nei Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about the pixel event the sphere in Vegas the sad fate of the $177,000 Apple watch and all the rest of this week's Tech news we'll see you then rock and rollwelcome to the vergecast the flagship podcast of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 I'm your friend David Pierce and I am currently in the hallway outside of courtroom 10 at the E Barrett Prettyman United States courthouse in Washington DC inside courtroom 10 is where USV Google one of the most important Tech trials in the last two decades and probably the biggest antitrust trial since the Microsoft trial in the late '90s is currently going on I'm here in the building today because satian Adella the CEO of Microsoft is taking the stand to talk about search engines Bing AI Apple chat GPT and who knows what else there's a lot to talk to that guy about this trial has been weird and complex and important and today should be more of the same and that actually it's a big part of what we're going to talk about on the show today yes there are tons of gadgets coming out and lots of news to cover and we're going to get to all of that don't you worry but we also have three very different lawsuits happening that could all change the way the tech industry works so we're going to going to talk about USV Google and what we've learned so far about the future of search we're also going to talk about the ftc's lawsuit against Amazon which could be the next big Tech trial and we're going to talk about the trial of Sam bankman freed the former CEO of FTX and for a long time the Golden Boy of the whole crypto world and now he's on trial in New York and in some ways honestly it feels like the whole crypto industry is on trial with him so there's a lot to dig into there as well all that is coming in just a sec but the proceedings here are just about to start and if there's one thing I've learned about the US District Court these last few weeks it's that they are sticklers for punctuality that and they never seem to be able to get the screens in the courtroom to work but I digress got to run this is The Verge cast see you in a sec welcome back all right I'm home satin nella's testimony is over he said some really wild stuff about why Bing can't compete with Google and why it's kind of Apple's fault it was a lot and I have a lot of thoughts so actually let's just start there today today like I mentioned we have two big antitrust trials in progress now one at the very beginning of the process which is the government's case against Amazon and one very much in the middle US versus Google these two cases are very different in some ways but I think they also have a lot in common and the combination of them is going to tell us a lot about the future of the tech industry so I called up the verges addy Robertson and McKenna Kelly to help me dig into the differences and similarities and where we go from here hello hi McKenna hello hi so okay we have basically two big trials to talk about in like very different versions of the process and I want to talk about the ways in which they are the same but let's just sort of catch up on both of them first and let's start with USV Google because I've been in the courtroom a bunch and Addie and I have been talking about this non-stop for like two weeks so it is like deep in my mind Addie where are we in this trial right now like what's what's your sense we've talked a bunch about kind of the stakes of the search engine and like what it means to be a default we're now what 3 weeks in almost four weeks in where do you feel like we are so pragmatically in the course of this trial we're at the part where the justice department is getting close to having made its argument for why Google is an unlawful Monopoly which gives us kind of a skewed view of it that right now we're hearing all of the bad stuff about Google and after this there's going to be some State's Attorney General making their case for why it's ad business is also a monopoly and then we're going to get Google's rebuttal and I think that's going to probably bring out some details that cast the current case in a new light right yeah I kind of don't care about the advertising part of this is that okay am I allowed to just not be interested in the advertising piece of this case I get that it's relevant I just cannot make myself care about it I think yeah well in one sense this is all about ads because ads is how search makes money and ads is also if you're going to treat this as their consumers and they are harmed for maybe through raised prices this is where you get the prices but it's a lot of it is I think less juicy yeah and so to your point about the the sort of side of it that we've seen so far what's your sense of how much of a preview of Google's argument we've actually gotten cuz you're right that Google has spent most of its time responding to different allegations from the doj and John Schmid line Google's lead council is like spectacularly good at his job and his done a very good job of like being mad at various people for lots of reasons but Google's always seem to be you know Google is very good and that's not illegal and that's definitely been the case so far do you think there's going to be sort of a different turn once Google actually starts to take the stand here it seems like what we're probably going to get is more people testifying in more detail about how Google is good and the flip side of this is how Bing does the same things in Google's estimation as Google but Bing is bad and therefore does not succeed yeah beinging being bad is like like we've been saying the the Crux of this entire case it also seems like this is maybe when Google tries to poke holes in some of the more sort of embarrassing things that the justice department has brought up what's your sense of how the doj's side of this is going I was in court on Monday for Sati and Adella and before they got to satio they spent a bunch of time on scheduling stuff and it came up a couple of times that Google's stance on how the doj is doing is that the doj is taking a long time not moving its case forward and just sort of mucking around without actually proving its point of course Google is going to say that loudly and on the record as many times as it can but what's your sense now a few weeks in does it feel like the doj is doing a good job of making the case it's trying to make yeah Google's case is sort of just that the doj is wasting a bunch of time throwing Google's dirty laundry out right but it's also not necessarily clear to me that this case is not partly about cougle's dirty laundry and that judge meta is not not interested in potentially embarrassing things that Google Executives have said but it's also I think it's often pretty hard to tell how judges are going to rule and you should probably not read too much into them and I also I don't think that meta has said a lot of incredibly pointed things he's asked questions but I think it's a little bit hard to tell and uh there was a hot mic moment where he was talking about how frustrating this all is with another judge because it's so complicated and there's not like a there's not DNA evidence oh interesting I didn't know that that was not his words that was the the other judge I believe but it seems like he's a little bit frustrated with a lot of this case but it's hard for me to tell how that translates into a ruling do you think that's because of the way the case is going or because of the actual sort of stakes of the case like we've been talking from the beginning that it's not even necessarily super obvious what the boundaries of the fight are here everybody's kind of arguing these nebulous things that are good or bad right yeah you have to argue okay so if there's consumer harm who are the consumers what does harm mean is it enough to say that Google just isn't as good as it could be even if it's the best thing on the market or is that unfair and then there's been this AR this whole sort of meta layer to the trial about how much can be fairly disclosed and so there have been a lot of arguments about how much of any of this is vital to the doj's argument and I think that has been its own source of frustration for a lot of people very much so that got better hooray that has gotten better McKenna my first question for you if I'm remembering this correctly we've been waiting for this case for what feels like hundreds of thousands of years what actually made this case happen like how did we finally get to the point where we have like words on paper about what the FTC is mad about at Amazon yeah so the investigation into Amazon on antitrust grounds has actually been going on since the Trump Administration the former FDC chair Joe Simons kicked it off of course A lot happened uh in Tech under the Trump Administration as well Cambridge analytica a bunch of other FTC stuff with that company and so instead of pursuing the Amazon case Simon kind of designated the ftc's very meager resources they've gotten more in recent years towards like Facebook and meta but of course in 2021 President Biden nominated Lena Khan to be the chair of the FTC Lena Khan of course is famous for a somewhat viral legal paper on Amazon the only one ever yeah the only one ever called the Amazon antitrust Paradox and in it she kind of talks about basically how common antitrust American antitrust Doctrine the way that we've approach approached antitrust law for decades doesn't really apply too well to Big tech company so KH gets into office she's confirmed and then she designates you know more of the FTC resources to that case and so it's been you know probably about 5 years that the company has been under investigation for anti-competitive Behavior the thing that strikes me about this case and I want you to kind of lay out the basics of what the FTC actually thinks Amazon is doing wrong but one of the things that it strikes me big picture is that like you said lenon knows better than most that it's very hard to bring an antitrust case against a company like Amazon right we we talk a lot about how do you prove consumer harm we typically these things are like Monopoly plus raiseed prices equals bad is like the legal framework for a lot of this stuff and that's very hard to do when products get cheaper and when in many cases they're free like Google search what it seems like they tried very very very hard to do in this case is make a case about how Amazon has raised prices and part of me wonders if that case which is very different from like the big sort of heady argument about Amazon being too powerful that Len con was making a bunch of years ago now we're in this place where she's like I get the sense she tasked a bunch of people with saying we have to make an argument about Amazon being bad for customers because things are getting more expensive is that a fair way to look at what's happening here yeah I I mean that's how the US antitrust enforcers have long approached you know antitrust law is whether or not a company the be behavior that it's engaging in is driving up prices lowering them and I'm sure people on this podcast have heard you know for so many years the consumer welfare standard so so she has been losing a lot uh we've talked about the Microsoft Activision uh merger not so hot there the FTC didn't win um of course like meta and the within acquisition they didn't really win there and so with a case so Monumental like this Amazon case the FTC really needs to show that it can take these companies on cuz for the first you know couple years of her tenure it hasn't quite been working out and so trying to make those arguments you know about whether Amazon is Raising prices is might just be the only winning argument that the FTC can find under current antitrust Doctrine right yeah so walk me through that case a little bit like what what are the sort of specific accusations that the government is making against Amazon sure so I don't want to make it seem like the FDC isn't looking at structural parts of Amazon as well cuz really the heart of the case is saying that Amazon for as long as it's been around has been making sizable investments in its company creating Amazon Prime um Prime video it's basically a fashion designer uh has Logistics and fulfillment Amazon is a behemoth and by reinvesting all of this you know wouldbe profit back into the company um it's been able to grow immensely and have a lot of control over individual sellers and then also being very competitive against other you know big box stores like Walmart Target and um other companies like that and so because of that structural you know power that Amazon has created over decades the FTC is making the argument that it has a lot of control over requesting you know that some third party sellers put their products on Amazon at a significantly lower price than they would on other platforms also requiring basically requiring third party sellers to buy ads on Amazon's you know search when you go into type of product in order for that product to even be seen while Amazon is selling its own you know Amazon Basics products which are competitors it has that control over the infrastructure in order to create a better system for its own products and services uh compared to those of its competitors which yeah sounds a lot like the case Addie is talking about in a little bit yeah I mean that's the thing right that we're we're in this weird place where just the overarching question is like are these companies too powerful and it feels like the Amazon version of that cycle at least the way the government describes it is kind of unusually tight and succinct where it's like I I you can actually explain the whole cycle of how things get more expensive because of Amazon I don't know whether that's true Amazon obviously like vociferously denies that it is responsible for prices going up all over the internet but it's like the the government sort of lays out this case where it's like okay Amazon forces sellers to use the fulfilled by Amazon things those fees are super high and also Amazon prevents them from offering cheaper prices anywhere else because it it has these mechanisms to figure out what you're pricing around the internet and then they either like bury you in search results or they get rid of the buy box I've like learned so much about how the Amazon website works through this case which is really fascinating but Amazon has all these little knobs it can turn to just wreck your business on Amazon if it feels like it and so what you do is you raise all your other prices elsewhere in order to not run a foul of Amazon's increasingly expensive process and that is like an actual case of consumer harm like if that's true that is the most like straightforward this is bad for consumers antitrust argument against a tech company I feel like I've heard in a long time yeah there were a lot of figures in the lawsuit that were redacted that I much I would have loved to see like the percentage of you know how many people subscribe to Prime um how many people over other websites order stuff through Amazon because of prime I think those fig would really really say a lot and help us to drive that point home if we had them but of course we don't yeah that complaint was very redacted like there was one thing that kept coming up this thing called project Nessie which you can tell is this like very exciting internal program at Amazon that does something and every time it's about to reveal anything there's just like two full lines redacted uh do we know anything about project Nessie what what is the story here it is just as elusive as the Loess monster that it's named after I have not been able to find too much information on it and I bet you know I hope that when this case if this case right because Amazon could still settle if that will happen not entirely sure it's very hard to predict right now but in a couple of years you know if this case actually goes to court I'd be really excited to see what else you know comes out of that complaint those those pieces of data more info on Nessie you know and all these things that we haven't really seen but kind of vaguely know about uh because of you know the text and I'm assuming if I remember right Addie the first version of the Google case was super redacted just like the Amazon case was and then we got another version of it that was much less redacted which is when we learned all the actual information about the case am I remembering that right yeah I think that we've gotten this is kind of typical in a lot of these cases that you'll get very heavily redacted versions and then they slowly get exposed as the trial gets closer okay so we might get Nessie information at some point here in the near future I just want to know about project Nessie that's all I want to know in the whole world I don't care about anything else I just want to know what project Nessie is if you know please email me David theverge.com that's all I want to know Addie my my question for you is like these two cases sort of rhyme to me in the sense that they are like they're happening at roughly the same time which is either really interesting or a total coincidence and I'm curious if you guys see it one way or the other but it also feels like if you if you sort of boil it all the way down the question of like is it illegal to be wildly successful feel feel like the question of both of these things and where does being wildly successful and protecting all of that success tip into monopolistic practices like do you see similarities between these two cases Addie or are they more different than I'm giving them credit for it's definitely not a coincidence that this kind of aggressive enforcement is happening under the Biden Administration which has nominated people who are very strongly pro- being antitrust Watch Dogs so on that side like the big Tech investigations have been going on for years this is sort of just this finally coming to fruition on the other hand I actually think that there are some levels of difference in the case at least the allegations that Google's case so far the trial has been all about look Google is legitimately good there are downsides that we haven't gotten into the really the arguments for like privacy but Google really it knows what you want it uses its data to produce a product that's actually genuinely good the Amazon case at least from the parts that we've seen the allegations are basically Amazon's terrible Amazon forces prices up it throws ads all over everything and forces sellers to buy them which is part of the Google case too but has not really come up as much yet that there are all of these cases where their argument is look people don't even necessarily want to be signed up for Prime as a part of a separate case they they're just getting signed up accidentally that it really feels like the argument in the FTC case is that Amazon sucks and there's no alternative the doj case against Google at least so far in court has been Google's really good but it's bad that no one else can be that good McKenna is that your read too like do you think the the Amazon is bad case is part of this I I have gone back and forth on this because on the one hand some of the things they're talking about like it's super easy to buy stuff and you get things really fast is like those are good things and and those are things people like right like lots of people did sign up for Prime on purpose and really fast shipping is one of the things that people really like about Amazon I do think it's true that the Amazon shopping experience has been on a pretty fast decline for a pretty long time and I wonder if now is the moment where it's like the the case is Amazon used to be good and then got really big and has gotten worse for everyone involved and there's nothing you can do about it I mean to be clear people make that case about Google too all the time outside the Court Fair like this isn't necessarily about the reality of the sit of the actual platforms right now but it's sort of the cases that that both sides are making yeah I think that's totally fair I think when it comes to similarities between the two it really becomes it really comes down to like the consumer experience and how that feels for the consumer so when I buy cat food right I normally buy my cat food from Amazon I have to Wade through so many listings and often it's not the same seller that I'm buying the same cat food from and it's really confusing it's a different price oftentimes it's like it like it sucks but like my cat needs food and I know it's going to be here in two days CU I have Prime right so you know you weigh the cons you know the benefits and the cons over that and then also you know similarly with Google it's using that service using that search bar and how the company controls that search bar that plays a really key role in the case yeah I I'm very curious to see especially in the Amazon case it doesn't seem like in the Google case we're going to have the Google has gotten worse argument uh it would be interesting if we did but it does it just doesn't seem like we're going to get there Google certainly not is not going to argue the Google is a worse product than it once was but it does seem like Amazon worked for a long time because it was good and now it's bad and there's nothing you can do about it is like that's part of how you wi this everything is getting worse and more expensive case like if you're Le a con you kind of have to make that argument yeah I think that's really the argument that the case looks at the most and I mean when you look at also like it comes down to like what does the FTC want as well now lenina con has been very like tight lipped about the exact remedies that they're looking for but in the press release it says like structural remedy that is a breakup right what gets broken off what goes where who buys what I'm not entirely sure but it'll be interesting to see you know how that pans out over the next you know months and years yeah Addie do you have a do you have a theory if you were going to break up Amazon how would you if you're Lena con and you're you have to figure out how to split up that company what would you do well the really cheap answer is that you split up Amazon the it's not always called Amazon Basics now but the equivalent of Amazon's white label product right it's many many many many in-house brands that you don't realize are Amazon brands in many cases especially because there are specific antitrust allegations around that there's the argument that they use all of their consumer data to see what's selling well and then they clone it um I don't know if that's necessarily where the FTC thinks it would be most useful to split up Amazon but that's just the obvious cleavage Point yeah personally for me I think the place where it could be most beneficial for the case to break up Amazon would be the logistics and fulfillment side because that really is what adds that additional competitiveness like we're saying that knowing that the product is going to come in two days right to you so instead of like Amazon having you know its own fulfillment services having to operate with like a UPS or a FedEx more often than not I think would really if not if that's not the only thing that gets broken up I imagine that would be a really intimate focus of uh the FTC as well yeah and that would obviously be a huge huge huge blow to Amazon I think realistically you could get rid of the in-house Brands and like a bunch of people at Amazon would be like a Shucks and they'd all move on if you split off the logistic side of Amazon you have like fundamentally changed that company right which I suppose is if you're the FTC the goal so I I I it'll be interesting to see how big That Swing turns out to be um Last Thing Before I let you guys go I I have been trained over the years that if we're going to talk about tech antitrust we have to argue about Market size because all they argue about is Market size and I've been sitting in the courtroom at Google where everybody is arguing about what a general search engine is and no one seems to know and it's very complicated and there's Vertical Search Engines there's General search engines and Tik Tok is neither of those but it's something else and everybody just sort of spins out of control about whether Google just competes with Bing or competes with like every other site that exists on the internet Amazon I feel like is about to go through exactly the same thing right Amazon's case has been we compete with every store on planet Earth and we're actually like a pretty tiny minority of the retail Market the FTC is going to have to make a different and much harder case now right yeah so in the case of Amazon the FTC basically defines the market as the Online Marketplace um industry which is a really interesting way to define it which I think honestly I don't think Amazon would really even like that because it wants you to think that it competes with the big box stores with Target and Walmart and all the antitrust hearings and all this stuff that we paid attention to over the last couple years you always have the Amazon reps pointing to you know the way that it arranges products in search to the way that a Walmart or Target arranges products on a shelf so in order to Define it as an online Marketplace I don't think Amazon would be really happy with that and I imagine they're going to challenge that in court just looking at like the way that it's defined it really has to do with like online storefronts and I I imagine that will get kind of shaken out a bit more as time goes on it seems kind of even more complicated because stores like Walmart have gotten more like Amazon that if you go to Walmart w.com now you can get a bunch of third party storefront items but even that well so this is this is where it gets really hey for me right because I think like if Amazon has its way the competition is everyone who sells anything in any way anywhere in the world right I would argue that is a reach but also if the FTC has its way it's like companies that allow other companies to set up storefronts inside of your storefront on the internet which is a much much smaller thing that Amazon and to like a lesser extent Walmart cuz Walmart will a third part stuff but you can't really have a store on Walmart.com in the same way that you can kind of have your own store on amazon.com so it's like that teeny tiny thing is probably too small because I don't know that like if you're a real person on the internet you're not thinking like oh I'm going to go to the storefront on amazon.com you're just like shopping for things on Amazon the answer seems to be I mean it's somewhere in the middle there but it does feel like even where like if you go 6040 on one side or the other that's going to end up being really important in this case yeah what are the competitors cuz the thing that I'm thinking of is Etsy for example very small company in comparison like Shopify sort of but it's it's a slightly different thing Alibaba Alibaba is a good one yeah Instagram is setting up a bunch of like ways to buy products in like storefronts which I guess are essentially people's accounts now and then also like Tik Tok shop maybe but that's like really really new so you know other than like to think about like competitors it's mostly you know these kind of smaller companies compared to like I guess like meta stuff and like Tik Tok stuff which is really still very nent and not people I'm not going to Instagram to buy things and also then you add the whole distribution Logistics chain that you mentioned too that really none of these competitors have that that it's fairly unique none of the small like meta and Tik Tok don't have that at this point right the only company doing Amazon things is Amazon which is I suppose a strength of the argument here but also going to make it a challenge to figure out like who are we who else are we arguing about here is going to be weird in this case whereas like at least Google has one real honest to God Like Apples to Apples competitor which is why the Google trial has become so much about Bing because like why isn't Bing good is like a central question but in a way you can't quite ask the same question about Walmart and and get answers about Amazon it's going to be very it's going to be very strange to see how we talk about this because there just isn't any company out there remotely like Amazon anymore and we are also not evenou ing Amazon's media business the fact that it runs Prime which is its own very powerful player in its Market yeah um like Prime movies it has Lord of the Rings now right yeah there's like although that show sucks so I I suspect that will not come up on anybody's side in this argument well there's the MGM acquisition yeah all these things to bolster Prime like in a lot of ways it does seem like and this goes back to like is this raising prices things like is the is the ongoing push and existence of prime good or bad for consumers is a big part of the question here and Amazon has spent a long time being like it's cheap we keep giving you reasons to make it better and the FTC is going to be like no actually what it's doing is like building ever higher wall Gardens through which it can screw both Sellers and customers a solution to a problem it created essentially yeah right right and has made more and more expensive to solve over time what what do we have any sense of the timeline on the Amazon trial like the Google thing took what almost 3 years to actually go to trial from that first complaint is is that a roughly good guide for the Amazon one do we think yeah I think that's probably Fair Justice moves very slowly in this country on all fronts but I do imagine it's going to be quite a bit of time and well people interested I think we just have to continue following it before we have like a gauge of when arguments could take place when things start right now it's just it could be anyone's guess we also don't really know what's going to end up going to trial like even the Google case that went to trial is somewhat subtly different than the one that was filed yeah that's very true well listen as long as project Nessie doesn't go away in this process I'll be okay okay which is a cooler name project Nessie or Jedi blue they're both very good but project Nessie for something that is heavily redacted is perfect yeah like it's the Sasquatch like they should just have secret names for everything and then just redact them all like that's what I would to they all have crypted names all right thank you both very much for being here we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about a very different trial about a very different industry with very different Stakes it's crypto time y'all we'll be right back welcome back as you're hearing this on Wednesday it's day two of the trial against Sam bankman freed who's better known as SP SPF and is also known as the former founder and CTO of FTX which was was for a while one of the hottest companies in crypto it was huge now of course crypto has taken a dive and so have spf's fortunes and the two things have a lot to do with each other actually there are a lot of folks out there who think this trial which is a sensibly just about s SPF is going to have huge ramifications for the whole crypto universe as new information comes out about how the industry actually works it's a complicated trial and an important one the verges Liz laado is covering it for us and I suspect right this second she's probably in a courtroom so we caught up a couple of days ago before things really got going hi Liz hey David how's it going okay so I realized I was prepping for this and like you and I have both been following this pretty closely for a long time you mercifully more closely than I you have a higher Tower Lance for this nonsense than I do I think but I realized after all of like the chaos of the last however many months it's been I've sort of lost track of what Sam bankman freed is actually on trial for so in a weird way let's just start at like absolute ground level here I think there are a lot of layers and a lot of things to talk about but like what is this man actually being accused of and on trial for well conveniently David I brought something to the recording and it is it is a copy of the superseding indictment so this is what he's on trial for I love it and there are seven counts in it okay and they are wire fraud and conspiracy to commit wire fraud mostly okay so count one is wire fraud on the customers of FTX count two is conspiracy to commit wire fraud on the customers of FTX sure that's this is pretty straightforward and I just want to pause here and talk about how you prove this because this is part of what's exciting part of it for wire fraud you have to show the bank transfer happened that's boring but then you have to prove that people were defrauded that Sam bankman freed knew he was lying to the customers of FTX and so this is something where we might hear testimony from actual customers you know who are talking about what he told them um it's where we might talk about what he was saying in front of Congress is where we might talk about what he you know what the Super Bowl ad said those kinds of things are where this all comes into play right and the sort of Base underlying thing is that he used customers money basically funneled it to this his investment arm called Alam was it Alam Capital Alam research Alam research but also used it to buy himself real estate and to make some Investments it's it's a straightforward the accusations are straightforward it's embezzlement um it's very oldfashioned see this is why this is useful because I feel like this is all it all spins in so many directions about like the crypto industry and tax fraud and all this stuff but ultimately it is just like he used money that wasn't his to do things you're not allowed to do with money that isn't yours it's like pretty simple okay all right so that's the first two what else we got so we have count three wire fraud on lenders to Alam research so this is his crypto trading arm and they had borrowed money and now the allegation is that he defrauded the people he borrowed money from and then count four is conspiracy to commit wi fraud again this you you see where this is going you want to do it and then you do it yeah yeah and then count five is conspiracy to commit Securities fraud on investors of FTX so that's different and that's the one where we might see VC testimony so the people who were investing were given bad information Sam bman freed had re reason to know it was bad information that's the allegation right so you might see somebody step up on the stand and say hey this is what the documents that I got said here is what Sam said and here's the due diligence we did here are our due diligence documents and again you have to prove that he knew what he was saying is wrong cuz like being an idiot isn't illegal right so that's count five and then we have count six which is conspiracy to commits commodity fraud on customers of FDX I'm seeing a trend here Liz yeah let's well we're going to get to the conspirators in a minute right and then count seven is conspiracy to commit money laundering okay so those that's what that's what we're going to be hearing from and part of the reason I wanted to go through those things specifically is that there's a bunch of other stuff that's going on around this there are so many things going on there's like an SEC lawsuit there's a cfdc lawsuit there's another trial actually that's going to be happening it's scheduled for next march uh for a number of counts we aren't going to be hearing here so I wanted to make sure we knew which counts we're dealing because some of the allegations around like campaign Finance stuff for instance while they might show up in this trial uh they are not the charges that are being brought against him here yeah and you've kind of alluded to this but one of the things I think is important and sort of complicated to understand is what's different about what happened at FTX versus what has happened in some of these other crypto messes we've talked about on this show over the years and I think about like everything from you know the the Luna debacle where a bunch of people people lost a lot of money to like what happened with axi infinity where a bunch of people lost a lot of money it seems like there's one thing that is like crypto gone bad and that seems to have all gone kind of Gone One Direction and this has gone a slightly different direction like how do you explain the difference between what all those things are where a lot of people lose a lot of money and what this has become oh boy so Tera Luna was a project that I think was badly conceived from the jump and there were a number of people who predicted that that death spiral would happen in exactly the way that it did and now there are you know also some allegations that are being brought against dwan about you know um the last I saw was that he might have been falsifying some trading okay but as far as I know and I'm I'm saying this now we may we may see something else in the future as far as I know Doan did not tip his hand into the till and actually take money okay right and when you talk about like the various crypto failures of things like three arrows capital again like they had loans that went bad and they couldn't make good on them sure there's a difference between making bad bets and actually taking people's money so like that's kind of what we're looking at and there are people within the crypto industry by the way who are very happy to see Sam bankman freed go down because they want they want the fraudsters out of the industry they really do think that this is something that's big and real and important so clearing out all of the villains if you will is a positive for crypto I think that they are a little confused about what the general public understands about crypto because I think once you're in it like there's a lot of stuff that there a lot of subtleties and nuances it's kind of like an onion right like there's just always more down there yeah but Sam bankman freed was really really successful at marketing and really really successful at promoting himself and really really successful at making himself synonymous with crypto in the United States he was the good guy like Not only was he not the villain he was like the disheveled good guy of crypto who like wasn't trying to sell you a bunch of nonsense he was the other one right and so that makes it a lot harder for anybody who says hey we want to be regulated cuz you know who else said that with Sam bankman freed right right so there's like sort of a lot of a taint here I think for people who are not directly involved in crypto and one of the sort of long-term goals of crypto is I think to get a lot of people involved and I think potentially you know this kind of trial and the associations with Sam bankman freed as a very public face of crypto could be bad for the entire industry um as far as like recruiting new customers goes yeah I was thinking about this I rewatched the The Big Short movie relatively recently I love it very much but there's this character in it Michael bur who is like one of the first people to see that the housing crisis is coming and that the way we've propped up mortgage bonds is a disaster and he is like the voice of reason he's also like a maniac and I had this moment of reading about Sam bankman freed in the run up to this trial thinking he's both trying to be like the CEO of Goldman Sachs setting up these systems that are a disaster and the Michael bur saying this is all a mess and is all going to come crashing down he like tried to do both of those things simultaneously and sort of play all sides depending on who he's in a room talking to and did it really well for a surprisingly long period of time he was like this is the future also we need to be regulated also it might be nothing but it's possibly everything and like it worked until it didn't well I have a I have a couple thoughts about this and there's there's something that I've noticed when I explain crypto to people which is I'll explain it to them and they'll say oh is that it is that all and it's like yeah that that's all I that is it you know and they think it must be much more complicated than it actually is and there you know there are like a bunch of there's a bunch of complicated math in there you know but conceptually it's actually not that difficult to understand and so as soon as you explain like an nft to people they're like but I thought I thought this was supposed to to be sophisticated it's like well the math is sophisticated the programming is sophisticated but like the concept pretty simple and I think one of the things that people like Sam bman freed really benefit from is this Assumption of technical complexity and that if you think it sounds you know half baked maybe it's just that you don't understand it maybe you're just not smart enough to understand it and bankman Freed's background um as somebody who went to MIT uh worked on Jane Street you know math quiz makes it easy to sell something like that part of what's really striking to me about all of this is actually running the casino is a pretty profitable business and if he had just run FTX and like let Alam fail I think he would be fine the problem here is that he wanted to prop up Alam research which was the reason he founded FTX in the first place like if you go back to that um that profile from Sequoia Capital that they like deleted because it was so embarrassing but don't worry it's it's on the internet archive go read it he talks about you know other exchanges being rickety and Alam having losses because the exchanges weren't good enough and so he wanted to build an exchange that was good enough for what he wanted to do and again you know there are moments in that profile where the the VCS are like well we assumed he wouldn't need money but here he is and it's like that's an alarm Bell for me right there you know there might be a good reason to go get VC money even if you don't need it just because it lets you expand faster for instance lets you do more things but in retrospect that does seem like a striking thing in the profile where they're like oh we assumed he was just minting money hand over fist but here he is asking us for some and you know if you read the SEC complaint they say FTX was a fraud from the jump that the like from the very beginning you know customer funds were being misallocated and so I'm partially curious to know sort of like the timeline of all of this because the way that FTX was exposed was particularly chaotic yes and we found found out about the misappropriated customer funds after a different kind of chaos that is not on trial explain that really quickly and then let's again there are many more tentacles of this story that are going to come out over time but I do think that part is important because you're right it's not on trial but it is like Central to what happened to FTX so just explain that chaos real fast sure so coindesk gets a hold of alamer research's balance sheet and the balance sheet is weird it's the easiest way to put it y there's an awful lot of the token ftt that's minted by FTX that's propping up the balance sheet and backing up their loans it's like if Sephora were to go out and get loans based on the beauty Insider points which they determine the value of okay that's a good example I like that yeah and so there's there's something like weird happening here and s bank mfre has a long running rivalry with the head of binance uh CZ and CZ happens to have a lot of ftt tokens because CZ was an early investor in FDX and Sam bought him out and gave him ftt tokens to do it and so CZ essentially announced he's going to dump his tokens and at that point the market panics um and so people there's there's a run people are trying to get their money out they're you know dumping tokens left right and Center FTX is like uh we're up for sale binance is like oh we'll buy you and then binance like after a day is like just kidding we're not buying this and then after that there's bankruptcy and it's in this period of time post bankruptcy that these details start to emerge that get weirder you know like the the sort of like funky accounting of valuing yourself by a token that you get to assign the value of yourself like that's not great in and of itself but the customer fund stuff that comes up afterwards where it's like there's this hideous balance sheet of Terrors that the uh the financial times gets a hold of but like it's still up there like if you want to go look at that terrible spreadsheet like it gives me panic attacks but like go look there's you know just like a hole there's an8 billion doll hole billion with a B that's when everybody was sort of like okay well where's the money where's the money Labowski well and so this is where the FTX trial and this sort of relatively specific set of allegations against Sam bankman freed becomes the trial about crypto right and you you wrote a sort of run up to the trial getting at a lot of this that there is a there is a in the industry that actually what's about to happen is a lot of evidence is going to be introduced and a lot of testimony is going to be given not just about Sam but about the crypto world and this is both a a it seems like both a prosecution tactic and a defense tactic is to basically make the whole crypto world look really really really really bad yeah that's right I think there's a lot of danger here without knowing the specifics of what's going to be said we're going to find out during opening arguments what we've got is an offshore exchange that is doing something that would be illegal in the United States you can't run both your own trading firm and your own exchange like that's an obvious conflict of interest right we have laws about that yeah it turns out yeah so it's in and it's in the Bahamas so and you know as we we ran through the charges I think it's worth thinking about what kind of evidence it takes to prove each one of these charges like there's the boring part where you show the wire transfer happened like that's going to happen sure there's like some chain of C stuff about like text messages also boring but that has to go in the record but then it's like you have to demonstrate what was actually said by Sam bankman freed and what Sam bankman freed knew and those might be two entirely different things and so you think about like okay what kinds of text messages were there what was going on in slack what conversations were happen happening we know that there are a couple of his co-conspirators who pled guilty and are cooperating will most likely testify including his ex-girlfriend Carolyn Ellison who was one of the CEOs of alam research you know who was in a position to know everything about what happened here exactly and there is a recording of her contemporaneously explaining what happened like you can say you can make an argument maybe to try to take her down oh well you know she's trying to pin it all in Sam because she wants a an easier sentence but like if you have that contemporaneous evidence of her explaining what happened that's a much harder thing to make you can't make it stick if she's she said it before where she thought she was going to get caught you know so there's a lot of stuff that is going on that I think we could potentially hear about but one of the things that I want everybody to sort of remember because there are so many moving Parts in this case that it's easy to get lost is that right before Sam bankman freed was arrested in the Bahamas he was going to testify before Congress and we had his prepared testimony which included a group chat of crypto exchanges where um he was being you know sort of scolded by CZ and I wonder One if we're going to see more of those exchanges especially brought in by the defense and two what they will say because you know this is the sort of thing where like I don't think it's unusual for crypto exchanges to have conversations with each other I'm I'm sure that happens all the time sure if only because you know everybody's trying to be like okay so what's the SEC going to do next but like I am interested in you know what kinds of evidence might be brought forward potentially either to try to get the not- guilty verdict or to try to get Sam a later sentence because you have to keep in mind the defense is doing about three things at once first and foremost they want him not guilty sure but should that fail they second want to make sure that sentencing is relatively light and third want grounds for appeals so that means there's a bunch of evidence that they're going to be stuffing the record with that may not necessarily be directly relevant to the verdict itself but might for instance be helpful for those other two goals okay and it seems like if you're his defense the only two moves I can think of are you either have to make the case that he didn't know what was going on like you said that being an idiot is not illegal and so they they either have to make the he's just sort of a dumb figurehead case or make the everybody in crypto as a con man Sam's not worse than everybody else case is there a is there a third version of the defense that you've heard about yeah so one of the things that that that's sort of a joke in white collar crime is either you're too small to be responsible or you're too big to be responsible and yeah there you go like that you're too far down the food chain to be responsible for the crime or you're so high up the food chain you had no idea it happened right he's like I'm hobnobbing with Democratic hopefuls who how could I possibly have known what was going on that's right yeah so I expect that we're going to get the he was he was too far up the food chain to know the specifics of what happened but I also think that based on the reporting I've seen there's going to be an advice of council defense he's basically going to say that his he's going to throw his lawyers under the bus he's going to say the lawyers told me that this was the best way to do things so I did it their way I don't know how much water that's going to hold I'm very curious about what kind of evidence you might present in order to make that defense particularly because uh there seems to be a lot just like a mountain of evidence here in terms of like chats and recordings and press you know moments in the press all of these things just a just a mountain of stuff that he said so I'm very curious about what could possibly be brought forward in order to to show that he was acting at the advice of councel that he was doing what his lawyers told him to do and it wasn't his fault just from a trial perspective itself how do you think this is going to compare to say the Elizabeth Holmes trial which you also covered very closely that one was just like a nonstop spectacle right there were people cosplaying as Elizabeth Holmes outside of the courthouse do you think this one's going to be sort of a show in the same way I honestly have no idea I think there are going to be a lot of people from the crypto industry who are going to pop by to watch I've certainly spoken with people who've expressed an interest in doing so just out of curiosity in the same way that like you know I think a lot of us are very curious about this certainly I am curious that's why I'm going one of the things that I'm interested in is you know with a lot of the sort of like crypto bankruptcy proceedings there are investors who show up and so I'm curious if we're going to see people who are FTX customers who are going to show up to see what happens and you know the other thing that's like worth keeping in mind here is we've been talking about the sort of boring financial side of all of this but there is this salacious human element that I am now going to talk about because I think that's one of the things that people are really interested in you know questions about recreational drug use a lot of the people within FTX were dating each other I mean Carolyn Ellison is Sam bman Freed's ex-girlfriend you know and like someone who is likely to testify and who has already pled guilty is his childhood friend from math camp like oh right there's some operatic stuff going on so I think that there's like I don't know if we're going to see necessarily people showing up dressed as Sam bankman freed or in FTX gear although we might who knows but I do think that there is a very very high likelihood of like real fireworks because if you think about like David you've worked at a startup too if you think about what people are like when they're you're working at startups like especially because you're working these long hours and everybody's in their 20s and like you don't know what you're doing y it's just just the case there are Shenanigans and these are shenanigans that are now going to be in the courtroom and so like you can imagine in an attempt to discredit a witness you might bring up some dumb stuff they did in the office yeah or in an effort to discredit the defendant you might bring up a lot of their own personal Shenanigans and I I do I think you're right that there were a lot there are a lot of shenanigans we know about because especially like since the man went on house arrest he has he had the most public house arrest of all time and just happily told anyone who asked about all the shenanigans going on going on at FTX and yeah I have a feeling there is a lot more to come how long is this trial supposed to be it's scheduled for about 5 weeks um it may run a little longer a little shorter but I I will be in New York City for all of October in the first couple weeks in November I'm actually turning 40 while I'm there ah happy almost birthday very tell Sam that he he owes you this is how I'm celebrating yeah it's it's it feels very fitting for you as actually it's how to celebrate your birthday this feels right but yeah I you know I think that there's uh there's a lot to come and I I really can't wait to find out what kind of evidence I'm going to see because you know there's a lot of stuff that as a reporter I just love being in other people's business I'm a huge gossip like that's just the truth of the matter like I was that before I was a reporter I grew up in a small town gossip was a contact sport like this is like a game I love and the government can get a hold of so much more juicy info than I can like I would love to see the due diligence that Sequoia did like I would love it I never get to see that stuff so this is the kind of thing that I'm really hyped for it is a really underrated thing I had this experience being in the the courtroom for USV Google for a couple of the sort of bigger named people the people who a never meet with reporters most of the time Sam bankin fre is sort of unusual in that he loved talking to reporters but most of the time these people either never tell the truth or never meet with reporters in general but just watching them sit there and they're it's like oh they have to tell the truth now and they have to say it out loud and I get to just sit here and listen to it it's the best it rules sometimes it's very boring and procedural and it takes a long time but eventually they have to answer the question and it's kind of great um all right well we're going to check in a bunch over the course of this trial like you said it's it's long I suspect if I had to guess I would say it's going to kind of e and flow there's going to be a lot of really wonky talk about how money moves around but then we're going to get a lot of shenanigans and we're going to check in on both of those things I'll tell you what David because I I don't know how many of our listeners are aware of like the sort of the reporting that goes on but because there's a limited amount of people that just a limited physical number of bodies that can fit in that courtroom I'm usually like for something like this I'm going to be standing outside at like an Unholy hour in the morning and so if there are Shenanigans I have some time where I'm doing nothing standing on the streets of New York City and so yes I will be calling in you'll get to hear the cell phone report this is what I like to hear all right thanks Liz we'll talk to you again soon all right bye David all right we got to take one more break and then we're going to get to the vergecast hotline we'll be right back welcome back let's answer a question from the vergecast hotline as we do on this show every week as a reminder the hotline number is 866 Verge 111 call and ask us all of your best tech questions no question too big no question too weird the weirder the better if I'm being honest with you we've gotten some amazing questions recently thank you for all of your most Bonkers thoughts about all things technology oh and if you don't want to call or can't you can always email us vergecast thee verge.com that works just as well today's question comes from Zach hi this is Zach I'm in Milwaukee Wisconsin my daughter is a voracious reader very proud dad that also means she just go goes through tons of library books basically anytime we go to a bookstore she's picking up something I kind of don't know where to go as far as a electronic reader this feels like a really natural holiday gift but do I just go for the iPad because it's got the most access to apps especially things like hoopla things that work with the local uh Library System I don't want to really get super locked into a into an ecosystem but on the other hand like if you go with the E Inc it's not going to use for anything else it's just going to be for for reading but then it doesn't have access to those those library apps and and we're kind back to square one spending you know 10 to $15 for every single book especially books you will read once I I don't know what the correct answer is so light up the uh cray signal and get me uh the best information you've got thanks bye ask and you shall receive we lit up the cran signal Alex CR is here hi Alex hi oh my God this is a great question right there are so many layers to this question in ways that I find so very interesting so let me just try and like lay the land for you here and see if you think about this the way that I do okay there's like a hardware and a software question here I think we can immediately rule out buying a Kindle yes because we don't want to be Tethered to one ecosystem right Fair good on that okay so I think we're we're basically in one of three places now we we can either tell our buddies act to buy an iPad we can tell our friends act to buy a different eink eBook reader which is I I know you're going to have several thoughts about certain brands that may or may not exist in America but are possible to find or you can buy a different Android tablet those seem like the three categories am I missing anything I I think that's exactly right okay because the Kindle Kindle can work with some libraries but it only works with Libby and and overdrive and that's not like the only Library ecosystem out there and it's also kind of wacky and complicated and yeah they just haven't done a good job of that for kids like it's very involved and Cobo has kind of built itself as like oh you can use it for your library books and all these other kinds of reading like I think it's got pocket built in or used to it's also not really great because again it's really limited to overdrive and otherwise you're going to be like teaching your daughter how to sideload stuff and that is a great skill she should have like I highly encourage you doing that I don't know if this is the time you want to do that yeah so I don't want to get into your parenting like you teach your kids to Sid load whenever feels right to you yeah that's a very personal moment for you and your daughter so yeah it really is like okay do you want to go iPad and you know it's more likely to she can crack it and break it and and make it more difficult to use a lot easier than a lot of other devices but it is very very flexible but also like you could catch you're playing Roblox on it or watching YouTube like there's a lot of things that can happen there or you can go with something like probably the best brand and I've I've mentioned it a bunch of times on the show and David knows what I'm going to say which is books b x we should say yeah b x and they're probably the best at like Android E Ink tablets I'm a little hesitant to say go that route just because she is a child and like it can be a little complicated and so you will probably still have to teach her the side loading situation but also a whole bunch of other things and like if you want your daughter to be really really understanding of how technology works the books is the best way to go if if you don't want to also be participating in that educational activity the iPad or like an Android tablets like a traditional Android tablet feels right yeah my my heart wants books to be the answer because in theory that combination of it's almost exclusively a reading device but I also need all the other apps because there are lots of places you read not just in the one ebook system right like yes what an incredibly common use case that no one has fixed I want books be the answer but I I do agree I think for most people the books version of Android is just like somewhere between 1 and five ticks too complicated to really work I'm using like the the most recent color one and it's got the most recent software on it night and day difference in onboarding versus yeah like the Google Play Store is built in now so you can just start using the Google Play Store whereas before you had you would have had to teach your daughter about patience and and waiting for 24 hours for Google to Reg register the device after you register it now you can just start using it so it has improved a lot and and there's some pretty affordable ones there you know there's there's some I think like the Pokey 3 is like $150 maybe it's it's a little more affordable I definitely would look into it and have a serious conversation with yourself on how much you are willing to troubleshoot things cuz I think it's still going to require it even with a software update there's still going to be more handholding than with iPad but it's probably going to get you closer to that experience you're looking for so yeah it just depends on like how often you want to have to answer Tech questions for your daughter Fair can I throw one wrench in here that I am not 100% sure I think is a good idea but I think might be a good idea which is one of Amazon's tablets my hesitation with all tablets whether they run Android or iOS is that they have all the apps that's true but buying stuff on those those devices is a gigantic pain in the ass because of the way that Google and apple run those platforms you can't buy Kindle books in the Kindle app you know where you can buy Kindle books in the Kindle app and buy other things in other apps is on the fire tablets and those tablets aren't like amazing Hardware but like the the Fire HD Plus 8 in has a decent screen it's pretty rough and tumble you're not really going to break it if you beat it up they make a kids version that's even more rugged and it's $70 like I I cannot explain enough how much more expensive every other tablet is this one is not a great tablet but if if truly all you want is a reading device this feels like it might be enough it might be I think you'd have to double check on what apps will work with it because it's still like Amazon's thing and they want you to buy their books they don't won't necess like they might make it difficult I I don't know the state of like the Libby app on on the Fire tablet or or the hoopla or whatever so you probably would need to do just a touch of research there cuz I haven't used one in a little bit it's definitely significantly more open than the Kindle but significantly Less open than like full Android you're still getting Amazon spin on Android that's definitely true yeah but if it's got the apps it's probably like the most affordable and like easiest to use of it it just requires like quadruple checking that the app is available for it also it's like a hundred bucks and easy to return so if you get it and it doesn't work return it buy books buy an iPad and you'll be happy yeah I I will say I think we're probably aligned on this one that like if money is No Object and you're not worried about like breaking the thing the iPad Mini is the correct answer right it is like objectively the best device of all these devices yeah I I I try to switch between my my e-reader and my iPad Mini a lot and I often times will find my like my iPad Mini just does more stuff so I use it more but I love having my my e-reader I love being able to read it outside I love it for just focus and I think for a kid it's that might actually be a good thing in some cases right like they got to focus on the reading and not just go off on a tear being like I wonder like when you read a chapter in a book and you're like oh that's interesting and you immediately go Google it on your iPad that's easy on your on your e-reader you have to wait and do it later and that's kind of nice because then you just keep reading right yeah it's either a feature or a bug depending on how you look at it and I think that has a lot to do with it so I think we're relying on that I would say if you're feeling ambitious Zach buy a books device see how it feels my sense would be it will immediately be obvious to you if it's more and more work than you want right like you're going to take the thing out of the box turn it on and immediately just be like nope or you're going to be like oh this solves all my problems right that's that seems it it will not be unclear I wouldn't think yeah it will not be unclear you're going to know really really quickly and generally speaking the new the new operating system the new version they've rolled out has been really really good they're very good about like getting the latest version of Android on things you you just can't use 70% of Android cuz it's not meant for a black and white tablet so like you can watch YouTube on it don't if you yeah it's a specific kind of torture trying to watch YouTube on a device like that so my other question for you is where do you buy your ebooks I realized in prepping for this that I accidentally just became sort of Amazon exclusive like a million years ago I loved the Kindle and had a bunch of Kindle books and now that's where all my books are so I have kept buying Kindle books and like am I here to tell you that the caliber app exists and does a really good job of stripping DRM from your Kindle books so that you can use them on other devices no that's not what I'm here to tell you it's true and the app is free and open source and it strips DRM from all your ebooks so you can use them on other devices but that's not the point my question for you is where do you get your ebooks if not from Amazon I originally started with Nook and then I found caliber and and made the switch to Amazon and took my whole Nook library with me which is really really nice and then I was at Amazon for a while and and then I was like H I feel weird being in this one ecosystem so I switched back to Nook and brought all my books back via caliber and so now I'm usually like I I tend to go Nook but I've got a couple of like there's ebooks.com there's a couple of other ones and I'll kind of look around CU sometimes the story The Selection is different and honestly Amazon has a ton of books it's gotten so big with self-publishing that a lot of like self-published books somebody will say oh you got to read this it's really good it's only available at Amazon which is super frustrating um and also sometimes I'll just buy it directly from the the publisher and the author gets more money that way so that's if you really are supporting an author buying it directly from their publisher if available best way to buy the books yeah and you can usually if you know what you want to buy if you just Google the title and ebook you can pretty quickly find that publisher website usually and and get the book that way that's a good trick what I wish existed like bookshop.org which is this amazing website for buying physical books from like actual books stores that are better citizens of the publishing world than your Amazon I love that website and I wish something like it existed for ebooks it feels like ebooks.com is like kind of that but not quite ebooks.com is kind of doing that uh lib FM does that but it's almost exclusively audio books I spend like $15 a month there and it gives me one book credit and that's nice and I know I'm supporting an author and I'm supporting my local bookstore like feels great you can also find your local bookstores a lot of actually will have Partnerships with book sellers online and be like oh yeah you can go here and buy any ebook from us at this they often will have garbage websites but if you want to support your local bookstore that's the way to do it it just unfortunately requires more work than logging into Amazon the only thing I would add to your list of websites which is which is very good and I just am going to go sign up for Libro FM right now is there's this website called BookBub B kb.com and its whole thing is just spectacular deals on eBooks from around the internet and so it's like not a place to go if you're like I want to read this specific brand new book but if you're just like I like spy novels let me know when I can get a spy novel for $1.99 as an ebook uh they send emails and it has become my like most quickly clicked email every week because it's just non-stop ebook deals uh and it's great and I use it all the time so highly recommend I'm doing that as soon as we're done with this podcast I think we've helped right this this feels Zach let us know what you end up doing I think your instincts are good and if you if you buy a books and you love it it will warm Alex's heart so let us know it will it will Alex thank you appreciate it as always always all right that's it for the vergecast today thanks to everybody who came on the show today and thank you as always for listening as ever there is lots more from everything we talked about at the verge.com we're covering all of these trials pretty closely so we'll put some links in the show notes but also we're posting all over the verge.com as everything happens so keep an eye on the website also if you have thoughts questions feelings or tips on how to improve my handwriting because I'm not allowed to have Electronics in the courtroom you can always email us at vergecast the verge.com or keep calling the hotline 866 Verge 111 we love hearing from you send us all your thoughts and questions and ideas for what we should do on the show we do at least one hotline question every week so please keep them coming this show is produced by angrew Marino and Liam James Brook mters is our editorial director of audio Verge cast is Verge production and part of the VOX media podcast Network Nei Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about the pixel event the sphere in Vegas the sad fate of the $177,000 Apple watch and all the rest of this week's Tech news we'll see you then rock and roll\n"