How Sam Bankman-Fried Gained So Much Influence and Met with the President

They brought him in, the White House brought him in to talk about the pandemic apparently. What? This is general information. They said they're asking about crypto. If you could have fucking asked someone about the pandemic, would it be that guy on the right? I mean, I would love to see a conversation between the guy on the left, Biden, and the guy on the right. The guy on the left is making up words. The guy on the right is on an amphetamines. Come on, man. Come on, man. Secretary Cairne Jean-Pierre conceded that four meetings may have also covered general information about crypto. Senior Biden officials were about the pandemic. What could that fucking young kid doing speed fucking his neighbors? Well, look, here's the thing. A, nobody in the White House really understands crypto to begin with. It seems like very few people understand crypto really. Just in terms of looking at this guy's situation, it's like with Bernie Madoff. If you had gone and if someone had taken the time early days with Madoff, said, I'm going to go visit some basics. I'm going to go look where his accountant sits. Oh, really? He's sitting in a fucking small office in a strip mall, and yet this guy's supposed to be king of the world at this point? Well, how about these guys? You know what they were using? Quickbooks. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. They were using Quickbooks. But a guy uses it if he has a fucking small bookstore. They were using that. You compile information and maybe one or two pieces of it, like, okay, you look at the guy and go, this guy doesn't look like a rocket scientist and his lifestyle. You look at lifestyle issues. Maybe they're bizarre, but you compile as much information about the entire apparatus as possible. I would argue that anybody in their right mind, if they had taken the time to do significant due diligence, would have stepped back and said, oh, no. I don't like doing this guy. I don't care how many celebrities he's got put in there. And he was going after celebrities for a reason, just like your name over an arena, because it gives you fucking credibility. The same reason why he's donating so much money. Yes. And the donations, anybody who thinks he wasn't doing that to exert leverage or to gather information, again, naive, ignorant, whatever. Well, his mother was a big time democratic operative, too, right? So that was probably part of his connection. Yeah, it's a shame because a lot of people were hurt, whether they claw that money back or not. Millions of people. Yeah. And some of the folks in the democratic party are saying, well, we're going to give some money back, but it's going to be ... Yeah, exactly. Where's the money? Where's it coming from? If the money's all nonsense, which is what a lot of crypto is, once it collapses, it's nonsense. There's no legitimate assets, right? Right. And you should also ask yourself, and I think there's some coverage, I think there's going to be more talking about the nature of trading. Again, you know, wash trades are illegal in the financial industry for a reason, right? Explain wash trades again. What's the way to ... It's like, okay, it's like with my book. You might have heard about my book, Company Rules. I heard about it. Yeah, it's being released on the 18th of January on Scribd. How does this have to do with anything? Or is this just- I'm going to tell you. If I really was desperate and I said, I really want my book to become a best seller, right? Well, one of the things I could do is I could set up a bunch of fake accounts on Amazon or wherever, and then I could put money into all those different accounts, and then I could start buying up my book. I know someone who did that. You did. That's a ... It's in a sense, that's a wash trade. Is that illegal? You're on both sides, right? It's illegal in the financial industry. You remember crypto is ... What is it? It's not a currency. It's a piece of property. They haven't decided. They're still trying to figure it out, which again, I would argue is one of the reasons why SPF was putting money into politics. If you can get ahead of the game ... I'll tell you as an example. There's a reason why I'm telling this story. Early days of Iraq, I'm talking like 2003, 2004, 2005, my company had a lot of people there, because we were supporting security operations for a lot of the infrastructure companies. They're out there trying to rebuild parts of the country. They're doing things ... Well, they've got to have security, and they've got to have people handling a variety of problems with them. We had gotten out there very early. We were out there in early 2003, right? At the very beginning. It didn't take long. At first, there was several months where it was relatively peaceful. Shit started to hit the fan out there in about September of 2003. Really started going south, and then it started getting violent. 2004, 2005, the security business in Iraq just ballooned. Suddenly, you couldn't swing at that cat without hitting another security company. They just popped up out of nowhere. You'd be out there and say, who are you guys with? They'd say some company you'd never heard of, right? Just put together because people saw opportunity. I'm going to get some government contracts. I'm going to work for these companies. I'm going to do this. They were pulling people who had no business being out in a hostile environment and providing security. Then they started having problems. There were all sorts of issues. We started thinking, okay, this has got to get regulated. State Department and Pentagon, they're going to come in and they're going to sow, no, we've got to regulate the private security industry that's operating out here. We know we need it, but it's just unregulated. As part of that, once we realized that was going to happen, we got together with some of the more reputable security firms that are operating out there and said, let's form an association so that we can get ahead of the curve and we can help define what the regulations are for these security companies that are out there operating. It's in our best interest. I would argue it's no different than what SPF was doing, spreading the cash around so that he can understand where the regulations were going to come from and he could get ahead of the curve. From an intel perspective, bravo. That's the right intuition. But he didn't recognize his vulnerabilities.