[vba616]

>but it probably gave him a huge bump in interest when he did and even more now

Nobody listened to or remembered the interview until a couple of people pointed out how prophetic it was with hindsight.

Levine found SBF pleasant to talk to and he's amused by financial chicanery.

At the time he said it sounded like a Ponzi, and SBF agreed, but after FTX blew up, it turned out to be so much more.

They didn't have an accounting department. Reporting makes it sound like they didn't even know what real accounting is. SBF was quoted as rejecting the concept of books. As Levine wrote more recently, their alleged balance sheet was mostly "magic beans" and cobwebs. None of this was part of the interview.

[hotpotamus]

I listened to it at the time because although I'm not a regular listener to the Bloomberg Oddlots podcast, I've actually been subscribed for years and pick out the occasional episode and saw that Levine was on it. I had zero idea who Bankman-Fried was at the time, and was very amused by the whole thing. I assumed he was some sort of fringe ne'er do well who was willing to come on and talk about how scammy the whole ecosystem was, and I didn't actually realize that he was a big deal until some time later and I was shocked at how matter-of-fact he was about the whole thing.

So that is to say, I heard it, but I didn't realize the significance. And Levine is probably the best explainer and journalist in the financial space today.

[JamesianP]

I saw a couple highly-viewed youtube channels that made a big deal of it at the time. Either skeptics of crypto or contrarian types generally.