[1] - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sam-bankman-fried-and-...
Technically he was describing tokens for a hypothetical dapp that had questionable/unproven value, whereas the business he ran (FTX) and the associated tokens (FTT) were straightforwardly profitable, but went bankrupt due to bad investments/trades.
Also the interviewer (Matt Levine) came away with a totally different conclusion from that interview:
>People on Twitter now are like “he admitted that FTX is a Ponzi!” but of course that’s not true. He conceded a certain validity to my claim that some crypto businesses — not his — are Ponzis. He is just in the business of trading their tokens.
>In fact, I came away from that conversation bullish on FTX and Bankman-Fried. My view was, and is, that if you talk to a crypto exchange operator and he is like “crypto is changing the world, your old-fashioned economics are just FUD, HODL,” then that’s bad. A wild-eyed crypto true believer is not the person to operate an exchange. The person you want operating an exchange is a clear-eyed trader. You want someone whose basic attitude to financial assets is, like, “if someone wants to buy and someone wants to sell, I will put them together and collect a fee.” You want someone whose perspective is driven by markets, not ideology, who cares about risk, not futurism. A certain cynicism about the products he is trading is probably healthy.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-11-10/ftx-is...
He basically described how you can make transaction fees or arbitrage fees on others engaging in speculation.
A very dumbed down example would how the post office can make legitimate income on postage while someone else operates a Ponzi by mail schemes. Or for that matter, brokerages take commissions when people trade meme stocks and unprofitable companies every day.