Unchained

For the tenth anniversary of Unchained, Laura reflects on the SBF question she never asked, the Charles Hoskinson beef, and why she may be done with strict neutrality.

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Unchained started as a side project by Laura in 2016, with two interviews recorded on Necker Island. Ten years later, it’s become a network of podcasts and newsletters. Haseeb Qureshi of one of most beloved podcasts on the network, The Chopping Block, chats with Laura about everything from its origins to biggest regrets to her interview style and more.  Plus, she reveals the one regret she has over a question she never got to ask Sam Bankman-Fried after the collapse of FTX.

Haseeb, managing partner at Dragonfly and an effective altruist himself, traces whether EA's moral framework enabled SBF's fraud, or whether SBF simply had ordinary delusions of grandeur. 

The conversation also moves through Charles Hoskinson's disputed PhD claims, the Brian Armstrong interview that never happened, and Laura's emerging conviction that ten years of institutional disillusionment may be pushing her away from the neutrality that built her career.

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guests:


⁠⁠⁠⁠Haseeb Qureshi - Managing Partner of Dragonfly - https://x.com/hosseeb

Timestamps

🎙️ 1:46 How Unchained started: Necker Island, first guests, and the year-one sponsor

📰 6:46 Why Laura sold her crypto for journalism ethics and why she bought back in years later

😳 10:45 Why the SBF collapse was Laura's biggest shock in 11 years of covering crypto

🧠 14:24 Laura's 'license to play God' critique of effective altruism and Haseeb's rebuttal

❓ 23:32 The question Laura would have asked SBF after the FTX Collapse and why nobody did

🎤 25:16 Why Brian Armstrong has never been on the show and Laura's neutrality code

📣 30:08 Fidelity: Explore crypto careers and make the decision that could change your future at https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com

🌐 30:58 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months at https://cape.co/unchained

⚔️ 32:19 Laura ranks her worst and best Crypto Twitter brawls

🎭 38:33 Why Haseeb thinks The Chopping Block works best as a play, not a roundtable

🤔 47:06 Laura asks whether she should shed journalistic neutrality after ten years

🗞️ 51:06 Why Laura now believes independent journalism is better for humanity
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The US government issued a Friday-night export control directive against Anthropic's Fable 5, citing a jailbreak that could expose advanced cyber capabilities built into the underlying Mythos model. No statutory authority was publicly disclosed. No comment period was given.

Sam Enzer, Partner and CahillNXT Co-Chair at Cahill Gordon & Reindel, joins Austin Campbell, Ram Ahluwalia, and Chris Perkins to assess the directive's legal standing. Enzer draws a parallel to Gensler-era regulation by enforcement: familiar government power applied to new technology, with no transparent framework. His central question: if export controls can reach an AI model's API, can the same authority reach a US-based DeFi protocol serving foreign nationals?

Austin raises the Choke Point parallel and asks where the limiting principle actually is. Ram argues that restricting software is restricting speech under the First Amendment. Chris warns that national security will always be the trump card unless the industry makes a credible counter-argument.

Hosts:


Austin Campbell, Host of Bits + Bips, Founder of Zero Knowledge Consulting, and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern - https://x.com/austincampbell


Ram Ahluwalia, Co-host of Bits + Bips and CEO of Lumida - https://x.com/ramahluwalia


Chris Perkins, Co-host of Bits + Bips and CEO of 250 Digital Asset Management - https://x.com/perkinscr97

Guest:


Sam Enzer, Partner and CahillNXT Co-Chair at Cahill Gordon & Reindel

This clip is from a longer conversation on AI export controls, national security, and the First Amendment. Full episode here: https://youtube.com/live/pEh1zr1pj90 

We go live every Monday at 4:30pm ET - subscribe to catch it live.

Sponsors

👉 Fidelity: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com 

Chapters

🤖 00:00 Austin on the Fable 5 export directive: what the ban said and what Anthropic disputes

⚖️ 02:09 Sam Enzer's initial take: a familiar overreach pattern with unfamiliar stakes

📜 05:03 Sam on what's missing from the directive: no public letter, no statutory basis, no comment period

🏛️ 07:06 Austin on the Choke Point parallel and the question the government hasn't answered

🔒 08:40 Chris on national security as the regulatory trump card and what the industry needs to counter it

📚12:21 Ram on why banning a model is the new book burning

🗳️ 18:15 Sam on what the government should do: due process, disclosed authority, and FOIA
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OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceXand the AI IPO cycle face a structural problem: a cheap, capable open source exit is already drawing enterprise users away before either company goes public.

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Thank you to our sponsor!


⁠Fidelity⁠: Fidelity has been building in crypto and DeFi since 2014 — now they're hiring. Explore career opportunities at one of the most forward-thinking names in finance here: ⁠crypto.fidelitycareers.com⁠.


⁠Cape⁠: Your biggest crypto vulnerability isn't your wallet, it's your phone number. Cape is America's privacy-first mobile carrier that rotates your SIM identity daily and blocks SIM swaps before they happen. Get 33% off your first six months at cape.co/unchained (use code: UNCHAINED).

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A viral tweet by Tom Shaughnessy, founding partner of Delphi Ventures, identified the most basic way AI could blow up: a 40x subsidy gap between consumer AI subscriptions and enterprise API costs quietly pushing businesses toward open source inference providers at 1% of the price. Citadel Securities published a near-identical thesis shortly after.

Shaughnessy joins Laura Shin to map the implications for the AI IPO wave, starting with SpaceX. Low floats and passive index demand should lift these stocks out of the gate, but public market disclosures will force OpenAI and Anthropic to reveal payback periods, margins, and subscriber numbers for the first time. He also argues OpenAI's reported price cuts target Anthropic's growth metrics before the IPO, not user demand.

The episode also covers the China model wildcard, whether AI model restrictions amount to big brother fearmongering, and whether crypto's tools for capital formation could keep the AGI flywheel from stalling.

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guests:


⁠Tom Shaughnessy - Founding Partner of Delphi Ventures and Co-Founder of Delphi Digital

Timestamps

💸 01:10 Why over $600B left crypto in 30 days: AI deal outflows, the SpaceX IPO. and quantum concerns

🧵 04:46 Tom's viral tweet: the 40x subsidy gap hidden in AI subscription pricing

📊 07:51 Why AI IPO filings will force the financials nobody has seen

💡 10:16 Why open source inference will compete with the frontier labs

🏗️ 13:06 Why frontier labs need to own what they create, not collect $200 per month

📣 15:55 Cape: Get 33% off your first six months at https://cape.co/unchained

📣 17:01 Fidelity: Explore crypto careers that could change your future at https://crypto.fidelitycareers.com

🌏 18:08 Chinese open source models and why going closed source could help OpenAI

⚔️ 20:58 Why Tom says OpenAI's price cuts target Anthropic's IPO, not users

🤬 22:09 Why AI model censorship is big brother fearmongering

🔗 24:42 Crypto's answer: ICO for open source AI, Nous Hermes, Venice, Grass, Ambient
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Claude Fable 5 refuses security work, Kain Warwick pulls $5,000 of compute from a $200 plan, and Humanity Protocol loses its bridge, token, and treasury to one infected device.

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⁠Multichain Advisors⁠: Get help navigating TGEs, go‑to‑market, BD and partnerships, capital markets advisory, PR, media placements, KOL activations and more at https://multichainadv.com.

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Anthropic promised Mythos and shipped Claude Fable 5 instead. The model found a four-year-old bug in Zcash's shielded pool that survived multiple expert audits. But when Anthropic shipped the model days later, it was no longer willing to audit smart contracts, bailing the moment a prompt smells like security work.Jailbreakers are already turning a jailbroken Opus 4.8 against it, while white hats sit locked out.

Kain Warwick, Taylor Monahan, and Luca Netz weigh the defender's dilemma: builders cannot point the model at their own code, but nobody can prove black hats have not jailbroken their way in —  and, the hosts warn,North Korean threat actors have spent more than six months harvesting AI API keys.

Then Kain runs the numbers on the subsidy: roughly 200 million tokens in four hours on a $200 plan, about $5,000 at API rates, and on the 22nd Fable goes API only as the first unsubsidized frontier model. Plus Pump.fun's bounty marketplace and the Humanity Protocol hack, which left the hosts asking why a 3-of-6 multisig existed at all. When the subsidies stop, who still gets the frontier?

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kain Warwick⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Founder of Infinex and Synthetix


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Taylor Monahan⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Security Expert


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Luca Netz⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, CEO of Pudgy Penguins

Timestamps

🤖 00:40 Why Kain says Fable 5 should have been named Fable zero

🛡️ 03:50 Taylor on how Fable downgrades the second anything touches security

🕵️ 10:42Taylor on stolen AI keys,tokens and North Korea's new favorite loot

🧠 15:48 Does Fable reason like a senior engineer? Kain's 100-doc planning test

💸 20:06 How Kain pulled $5,000 of API value from a $200 Claude plan in four hours

🐧 ~33:45 How Igloo budgets $50K a month on AI, and the bot "brain" running the org

📊 44:00 Multichain Advisors: start building real traction with the team behind $50B at https://multichainadv.com

🎪 44:41 Pump.fun's bounty circus: tattoo typo, the Bootywork coin, Luca's steelman

🚨 55:36 How one infected device cost Humanity Protocol its bridge, token, and treasury
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Coinbase's chief policy officer explains why the bank lobby failed to kill stablecoin rewards — and what 'workable compromise' actually means for crypto users.

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Adaptive Security: Test and strengthen your company’s defenses against AI deepfakes and synthetic identities at adaptivesecurity.com. 

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The Genius Act established that stablecoin issuers could pay rewards to users. The banks said no. For months, the American Bankers Association used the Clarity Act as a pressure point to reverse that decision — tying up a bill that was supposed to govern an entirely different corner of crypto. Now there's compromise language. Coinbase's chief policy officer, Faryar Shirzad, says it's workable. The banks say it doesn't go far enough.

Meanwhile, the Clarity Act itself is racing toward a July 4th deadline, with a Senate Banking Committee markup expected the week of May 14. Ethics provisions around government officials holding crypto assets remain the hardest open question — and, as Shirzad puts it, one entirely above his pay grade.

This is where the biggest crypto legislation in US history actually stands.

Host:


⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Laura Shin⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠, Host / Unchained

Guests:


Faryar Shirzad (@faryarshirzad) — Chief Policy Officer, Coinbase

Timestamps
🎙️ 0:00 Introduction
💰 0:43 What the Clarity Act's stablecoin rewards compromise means in practice
🏦 4:04 What the banks got, what crypto kept — and why rewards are still workable
⚖️ 7:51 The American Bankers Association pushes back — is this fight really over?
🔵 13:36 Coinbase One ad: Get 20% off the first year of your Coinbase One annual plan
🔒 14:58 Adaptive Security ad: Run deep fake AI generated phishing and vising simulations
📋 15:55 Getting the Clarity Act over the finish line — what's still unresolved?
🔑 18:54 Remaining issues, such as ethics, SEC exemptive relief, whether DeFi apps are money transmitters
🗓️ 28:27 Can the Clarity Act pass by July 4th? What happens if it doesn't?
🌍 32:33 What's next after the Clarity Act — taxes, rulemaking, and global expansion

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