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What Next | Daily News and Analysis

TBD | The AI & Crypto Czar’s Conflicts

What Next | Daily News and Analysis

Slate

News, Daily News, News Commentary, Politics

4.62.3K Ratings

🗓️ 5 December 2025

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A tech mogul who made bank from Paypal with his Stanford buddies and has endeared himself to right-wing politicians and enriched himself the same way? No not him; this one’s South African..no, not him either. Guest: Ryan Mac, reporter for the New York Times.  Want more What Next TBD? Subscribe to Slate Plus to access ad-free listening to the whole What Next family and all your favorite Slate podcasts. Subscribe today on Apple Podcasts by clicking “Try Free” at the top of our show page. Sign up now at slate.com/whatnextplus to get access wherever you listen. Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

This episode is brought to you by Vanta.

0:03.0

Security and compliance done wrong is a headache.

0:06.0

Done right, you build trust and grow faster.

0:08.0

That's Vanta.

0:09.0

For startups, Vanta acts as your first security hire,

0:13.0

using AI to get you compliant fast.

0:15.0

For enterprises, it's your AI-powered hub for compliance,

0:18.0

risk and automating workflows.

0:20.0

From startups like Cursor to enterprises like Snowflake,

0:23.4

top companies choose Vantor.

0:25.1

Do security and compliance right.

0:27.0

Get started today at vanta.com.

0:32.9

Thank you. Thank you very much. Yeah, we worked hard. It's a very important act, the Genius Act. They named it after me, and I want to thank you. I want to thank you. This is a hell of an act.

0:52.9

On July 18th, President Trump signed the Genius Act at the White House, a law creating a light-touch regulatory framework for stable coins, a kind of crypto.

1:03.5

And when that happened, a crypto company called BitGo celebrated, with a message on its website saying, the wait is over. I asked New York Times reporter Ryan Mack to explain.

1:16.2

I knew you'd start with this question about this very strange crypto company, but not strange, but it's for the layperson, a crypto infrastructure company.

1:26.4

So storage of your cryptocurrencies, they don't quite

1:30.5

do transactions. It's not like a marketplace like Coinbase. But it's everything, you know, storage,

1:35.5

it's moving things between wallets, that kind of thing, security. And why was the Genius Act a big

1:41.5

deal for them? So the Genius Act was about something called stable coins, which are cryptocurrencies pegged to the dollar,

1:49.0

and they allow for the ease of trade of other cryptocurrencies.

1:54.0

The problem with Bitcoin, for example, is that it's not the easiest thing to transact in Bitcoin.

...

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