Do Kwon's Beautiful, Dark, Twisted Fantasy World

Wednesday saw the release of a lengthy, rigorous interview with Do Kwon, international criminal fugitive and founder of the collapsed Terra/LUNA blockchain scheme. In the face of implacable, detailed questioning by A-list crypto journalist Laura Shin, Kwon put on a master class in slippery evasion, victim blaming and motivated reasoning, and a staggering commitment to simply denying the evidence against him.

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Among the laughably absurd claims that Kwon advances with a straight face in the interview are:

That’s barely the start – almost every sentence Kwon speaks during the interview contains some degree of deception, denial or evasion. His mouth is a black hole that crushes the truth into dust. As Radiant Commons founder Josh Cincinnati summed it up, the interview was “a window into the mind of an unapologetic sociopath.”

The interview is also a clinic in another common trait of sociopaths: They can be very convincing.

Kwon remains consistently calm throughout, despite Shin’s very specific, well-sourced and damning questions. His answers have the air of a patient teacher explaining something to a child – even when he’s entirely evading the question, offering a complex obfuscation or simply making a false statement with utter conviction. Kwon’s favorite phrase (now that it’s no longer “I don’t debate the poor”) seems to be “Just to clarify,” followed by a string of words that do not do that.

See also: 'Down Infinite': A Ham-Fisted Attempt to Rehabilitate Do Kwon's Image | Opinion

None of this diminishes Laura Shin’s incredible professionalism, precision and persistence. This is the first journalistic interview with Kwon since the collapse of his Terra ecosystem (one previous interview was conducted by a content outlet in which Kwon's Terraform Labs was an investor, making it more akin to advertising than reporting). And Shin is at her best here, calmly and valiantly trying again and again to get Kwon to acknowledge the contradictions and inconsistencies of his own statements.

But this is a man living in an alternate reality, whose genuinely impressive glibness allows him to easily produce answers that sound good, but mean less than nothing.

That highlights a crucial distinction on which Kwon’s entire arc may hang: that between a person who is clever and a person who is intelligent.

Do Kwon is clever enough to make superficially reasonable sounds with his mouth, words that are apparently convincing even to himself. What Kwon lacks to a staggering degree is intelligence, including the ability to think beyond his own immediate concerns, to see other people’s perspectives, to interrogate his own assumptions or to conceptualize larger stakes.

(I’m well qualified to question Kwon’s intelligence ­– I understood LUNA and UST better than Kwon himself seemed to, detailing the logistics of its collapse two weeks before it happened and accurately predicting it would go to effective zero as the depegging began on May 9. I'm hardly special – a good number of other people also understood these things better than Kwon, or the equally dimwitted "professional" investors who bought his shtick.)

The entire conversation really deserves a line-by-line breakdown, but at least for now I’ll limit myself to one particularly incredible moment. At about the 20 minute mark, Shin very generously gives Kwon a second opportunity to apologize for his failures after her first question to that effect generates a stream of evasive platitudes. Though Kwon does ultimately apologize, he also works in an incredible display of his disdain for his victims.

“I believed in the stability of UST. And I do understand that my statements about how stable and safe UST would be led a lot of traders and holders without the tools to understand the complex economic mechanisms underpinning UST to gain confidence in a system that ultimately failed.” (Emphasis mine).

See also: Do Kwon Is the Elizabeth Holmes of Crypto | Opinion

Gaze, if you dare, upon this Demosthenes of denial, this Balzac of blame shifting. He gets exactly halfway through a sentence about his own culpability before pivoting to insulting the people who made the mistake of believing him. Of course, this is a meaningless defense that only highlights the emptiness of one of Kwon’s favorite rhetorical tactics – protesting that those accusing him of wrongdoing simply don’t understand what he’s doing.

To this very day, Kwon, so clever yet so dumb, doesn’t grasp that there was nothing there to understand, that what he built was always doomed to failure – or, most of all, that there’s nobody to blame but himself.