Sam Bankman-Fried
speaker
105 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Sam Bankman-Fried’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But there are other things, things that we don't have good words for. I still haven't found the right words for. But things that can make someone an unbelievably impressive and successful and productive person that seem to kind of outshine what I or others would expect of them. And obviously not everyone. Everyone's in different places. you know, something we saw a lot at FTX.
We'd find someone with an aptly shit resume. I mean, just nothing to recommend themselves. No real relevant experience. And all of a sudden, we'd realize they were outperforming almost everyone else at the company. Just because they had the grit, they had the instincts, you know, they had the dedication, they knew how to work, how to interface with others, and how to see solutions to problems.
I'm interested in what types they are. I was on Wall Street in a former life, and There are a variety of people there.
Oh, it's a really good question. Obviously, I can only guess what the answer to that. I can only speculate because I'm not in their minds. But, you know, one fact that might be relevant is You know, in 2020, I was my center left and I gave to Biden's campaign. I was optimistic he'd be a sort of solid center left president. I spent the next few years in D.C. a lot.
I made dozens of trips there and was really, really shocked by what I saw. Not in a good direction from the administration. By late 2022, I was giving to Republicans privately as much as Democrats. And that started becoming known right around FTX's collapse. So I probably played a role.
Some of it was just more extreme versions of what I worried about. Crypto regulation is a good example. You know, I never thought that, frankly, the Democrats in general would be the party taking the lead on good financial regulation. But, you know, there were good and bad people in each party and a lot of thoughtful players. But Gensler's SEC was something out of a nightmare.
You know, a company would go crazy. offer something in the United States, Gensler would sue them to the ground for not registering. So they go to Gensler to register, say, hey, you know, we'd love to register. Office says, what you want? What should we register as? And the ICC would say, well, there's nothing for you to register as. We don't have any ideas. And there's just no solution.
They required licenses that they didn't know how to give. And every company in crypto ran into this. You know, they basically failed to register a single person ever. Um, that was like one pretty disturbing thing that I saw and, you know, go for it.
It's a really good question. And again, Again, I'm not in his brain, but here are some impressions I had. You know, he really liked being in the center of things. Power. Everyone likes that. Not everyone. Most people. He's no exception. You know, part of this is a turf war. He wanted his agency to get more power. Even if he didn't want to do anything with it except block industries.
You know, why did he make everyone register with him? Well, he loses power otherwise. Even if he didn't know what to do with them.
I, you know, he had, there are lots of stories about him, you know, being very politically ambitious and feeling like if he could, you know, get on CNBC enough, make a big enough stink about things, raise his profile that, you know, maybe be treasury secretary, something like that in the future. I mean, he was remarkably successful.
Like he became sort of one of the few faces of democratic financial regulation.
So it wasn't moral. It's not like he had like deeply rooted communist beliefs or anything like that.
I didn't for multiple reasons. One was, you know, I didn't want to do something inappropriate. A second was that many parts of it very quickly made their positions known and were running away as quickly as they could. You know, I had a good relationship, probably better with Republicans in D.C. as with Democrats by that point in time, although that wasn't public.
It wouldn't have been easy to see that from the outside. And at the end of the day, there's a long story here involves a law firm that took a pretty unusual and active role in the case. But before I even gave up control of FTX, before it was ever filed for bankruptcy, the DOJ had already made up its mind.
No.
No, absolutely. hopefully, is what I would say. You know, you look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office, there are a lot of good things. There are a lot of things that, you know, were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took, that, you know, Gensler and the SEC took. Obviously, you know, the follow-through is what matters.
And that's the stage that we're at now, which is what will come of this. And, I mean, not surprisingly, like, Changing the guard helps, but financial regulators, they're big, giant bureaucracies in the federal government. They're not used to changing overnight. And they have been playing a really obstructive role for a decade in crypto. In the US, it's 30% of the world's finance.
It's about 5% of the world's crypto. And the reason it's entirely regulatory, it's just the U.S. was unique in its difficulty to work with. So I think the big question is, when rubber meets the road, will the administration do what needs to be done and figure out how to do it?
It's a really good question. And there's sort of a related thing about the technology, right? Payments, remittances, like all the things that are not just an investment, but ways that crypto could actually be useful for the world.
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