The AI & Crypto Czar’s Conflicts
What Next
Slate Podcasts
4.6 • 2.3K 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.
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Podcast production by Evan Campbell, and Patrick Fort.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Vanta. |
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| 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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