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
you know, they happen on longer timescales than investments do basically, you know, with what social media has become, you see bubbles, you know, grow and pop and grow and pop on a daily to monthly basis. Technology is built out on a decade basis. So, you know,
right now crypto is not quite at a point where it could become an everyday tool of you know a quarter of the world or something the tech isn't there yet but it's not that far away and if and this is an if if the industry keeps making progress rather than getting distracted too much by market prices then you know five ten years from now you could imagine a world where all of a sudden
It is the case that anyone can have a crypto wallet, you know, a billion people could use it each day with privacy, with security, fast, cheap, international, all the things that, you know, that was promised and that absolutely are distracted from by the latest meme points.
Well, it's an interesting question. And there are a lot of degrees here about the level of oversight and control that it can have. You look at something like Bitcoin, and the wallets are anonymous, but there is a public ledger of every transfer that happens. So it is possible for governments to have some level of knowledge without having control of it. That being said...
Not all the governments in the world view this the same. And the United States government over the last 30 years has taken one view towards control of, you know, not just the United States, frankly, but the world's monetary system. you know, dealings and you see, I mean, a different viewpoint, much more authoritarian, but also much more insular in a lot of sort of dictatorships.
But half the world doesn't try to have nearly the level of government involvement in day-to-day financial transactions that the United States has.
Well, basically, no. The company that I used to own, maybe I still do own. I don't know. It's in bankruptcy. Had nothing intervened today, it would have about $15 billion of liabilities and about $93 billion of assets. So the answer should be, in theory, yes, that
You know, there was enough money to pay everyone back in kind at the time or today with, you know, plenty of interest left over and tens of billions left for investors. But that's not how things worked out. And instead, it all got boiled up in a bankruptcy where I... The assets were dissipated incredibly quickly by those controlling it. They were siphoned off, tens of billions of dollars worth.
And it's been a colossal disaster. And, I mean, not solving that problem is by far the biggest regret of my life.
I don't think I was a criminal. So certainly the answer to that is no. I mean, I think the DOJ thinks that I may have been, but I don't share their viewpoint.
Yeah. Ten years ago, the answer was clearly yes, or at least yes relative to the scale of the industry. Right. You look in the mid-2014 to 2017 sort of era, and the industry is a lot smaller than it was today. And a lot of the transactions I saw, or at least a higher fraction of them, were, well... Different people use different words for it, but Silk Road, you know, as an example, right?
People purchasing narcotics online was a common use of crypto back 10 years ago or so. Obviously, there are always going to be criminals in any industry, but over time...
the fraction of the industry that that represents has fallen off really substantially, both because of sort of growth of other areas of interest in crypto and also because of more government involvement on the anti-money laundering side. So, yeah, they're still solid, but it's not as prevalent as it once was.
It hasn't made me rethink the precepts. Obviously I feel terrible about what happened. It's not at all what I intended and whatever one's intentions are. I, you know, if you screw up, then the results might be different. You know, People got their money back at the end, but it is too excruciating years waiting for it. They got it back dollarized rather than in kind.
And certainly all of the good that I've been hoping to do for the world ended up dissipating, or at least most of it did, when the company collapsed.
I disagree, although there is a caveat to it, which is that You know, a classic mistake which people make, and I may have made at some points, is...
with people who you don't know who are dissent from you thinking you know what they need when you don't you know being paternalistic kind of condescending and you know there's so many foreign aid type projects that have gone awry ended up being complete wastes of money because no one knew the people they were giving to no one knew what their lives were like and right they're just guessing it with those people it's wrong and you know they show up with like a bunch of water pumps to a village that has plenty of water and no food
And like, you know, all these people shipped in from Harvard to go hand out these water pumps no one wants. And, you know, there's like example after example of this going around. Whereas obviously, like when you're dealing with people you know, you know, you have a much better sense of how to help them. And that's real. Like that effect is absolutely real.
And, you know, even if I think the life matters as much in one place as another, that doesn't mean that you know as well how to help one as you do the other.
Well, I think what I'd say is, look, you look at, I mean, malaria is a good example here, right? No one dies of malaria anymore in the United States. I mean, basically no one does, but globally it's what, like a million people a year or something die of it.
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