Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him

So where are you?

Yeah, well, I'm in MDC, Brooklyn, in a little side room. How long have you been there? I've been in prison for about, oh boy, what's it been now? It's been about two years.
So what's it like? It's, I mean, it's sort of dystopian. you know the fortunate thing the place i'm in i'm not in sort of

you So what's it like? It's, I mean, it's sort of dystopian.

You know, the fortunate thing, the place I'm in, I'm not in sort of, I'm not in physical danger. And, you know, frankly, a lot of the staff, they're trying to be helpful.
They're trying to, you know, do what they can, given the constraints. But, you know, no one wants to be in prison.
And you can imagine what happens when you take sort of 40 people

you know all of whom have been

at least charged with crimes and

lock them in a single room

for years on end and throw out the key

which is

the most trivial things

become all that

people have left to care about

yes

have you had any problems

Thank you. things become all that people have left to care about.
Yes. Have you had any problems? Not of the sort of acute kind.
Like I haven't had, you know, I haven't been attacked or anything like that. I've had a lot of logistical problems.
And, you know, the biggest frankly was when I was on trial, trying to get access to legal work was nearly impossible. I would, you know, on a typical trial day, they'd wake me up at 4 a.m.
I'd spend five hours in various buses, vans, and holding cells until my trial started in the morning. Then trial straight through to 5 p.m., another four hours in holding cells in vans,

and get back at 9 p.m., way after any access to legal work was cut off for the day.

So that was the biggest problem.

So what do you do all day when you're not on trial?

Well, it's a really good question

because there's not a whole lot to do in prison.

I read books. I've, you know, started reading novels again.
I play some chess and I work on my legal case to the extent I can. You know, there's appeal, there are other things.
I do what work I can from in here on that. But the lack of other meaningful things to spend my time on is one of the most kind of soul-crushing things about prison.
I got to say, we've never talked before, but obviously I've watched you from afar. And I just also say, I feel sorry for every man in prison, no matter what he's accused of or did.
I just, I don't think we should be locking people away. I know, I guess we have to, but I feel sorry for everyone in prison.
prison i'll just say call me liberal um but you you do you do seem kind of healthier and less jumpy i have to say after two years in prison you know i've had a lot of time to reflect on how to communicate and in retrospect you know i was i think i was not at communicating, especially when the crisis first hit.

In the months thereafter, I made a mistake I often make.

I get swept up in details and forget to make the bigger picture.

You seem like you were just flying high on Adderall every time I saw you on tv you don't seem that way now were you no i wasn't but i was um my mind was racing because there were you know a billion things to keep track of you know which sort of typically i'd have and back when i was running ftx you know i i'd go on to have an interview. But while on the interview, there would be two issues I'd have to resolve with the company.

So I'd have sort of one eye on Slack open, responding to messages.

And I knew that I had something else I had to do right after the interview that I hadn't had time to prepare for yet that I was sort of preparing for in the back of my mind.

So maybe, like, the digital world is bad for us. Is that, I mean, like what's your view of that? You've been taken away from your phone.
So that's kind of big. Yeah.
Oh, it is. I prefer having the digital world.
You know, at the end of the day, like it's, but I will say that when I say that it's less from a perspective of like enjoyment or or or you know pleasure or leisure and it's more from a perspective of productivity and ability to have impact in the world um you know from that perspective it's so hard to do anything we don't have the digital world so like have you made friends there how do you are you hanging with diddy i think he's in there with you uh he is he is um and i it's i don't know you know he's been kind um the i've made some friends it's it's a weird environment you know it's sort of a combination of a few other high profile cases and a lot of,

you know,

ex gangsters or sort of,

you know,

alleged ex gangsters.

Definitely alleged.

So what,

what's Diddy like?

I,

you know,

obviously I've,

I've only seen one,

one piece of him,

which is,

you know,

Diddy in prison.

And, you know, he's been kind to people in the unit. He's been kind to me.
It's also, it's a position no one wants to be in. You know, obviously he doesn't, I don't, as you said, it's kind of a soul-crushing place for the world in general.
And, you know, what we see are just the people that that are around us on the inside rather than yeah we are on the outside oh i'm i'm sure and it i mean you're two of the most famous prisoners in the world in the same unit what what are the other what are you like what are the armed robbers think well it's a really interesting question and if of course some of them are i i think you're thinking like wow this is sort of a big opportunity like you know to meet people they wouldn't otherwise get to meet which is it shocked me the first time i heard that right it makes sense their perspective but like boys i know not how i. Sorry.
Sorry to laugh. No, that's such a good, I bet it's not how you think about it.
No. It's not.
And laughing is all you can do sometimes, you know, there's, there's no better alternative. They're good at chess.
That's one thing I've learned. Like, you know, former armed robbers who don't speak English and, you know, probably't graduate middle school are a surprising number of them are like fairly good at chess like you know not I'm not saying they're grandmasters but like you know I lose games to them all the time um I was not expecting that wow so how is it that's so interesting how has has that changed your views? Well, you know, I would say it's part of a larger whole, which, you know, it's one of the most sort of profound things that I've come to learn over my life, but still something I don't fully understand, which is obviously, you know, what we call intelligence or IQ or whatever.
It matters. It's important.
Working hard matters. It's important.
But there are other things, things that we don't have good words for. I still haven't found the right words for.
But things that can make someone an unbelievably impressive and successful and productive person that seem to kind of outshine what I or others would expect of them and obviously not everyone you know everyone's in different places but you know something we saw a lot at ftx we'd find someone with an absolutely shit resume i mean just nothing to recommend themselves no real relevant experience and all of a sudden we'd realize they were outperforming almost everyone else at the company. Just because they had the grit, they had the instincts, you know, they had the dedication.
They knew how to work, how to interface with others, and how to see solutions to problems. Yeah.
I mean, I've known, on the flip side, a number extremely stupid people who've gotten rich in finance. They're clearly have a kind of brilliance that I can't see.
They seem like morons to me. I'm interested in what types there are.
I was on Wall Street in a farmer life and there are a variety of people there. So there's been a lot of talk about changes to the U.S.
tax code, especially changes that affect cryptocurrency investing. What are those changes? Well, what if there was already a way to invest in the market with tax advantages? Well, iTrust Capital makes that possible.
iTrust Capital is a software platform that lets you invest in crypto using a self-directed IRA. That means with a traditional IRA, taxes are deferred.
And with a Roth IRA, you won't have to pay taxes on your crypto gains, just like a retirement account. On top of that, the crypto market never closes.
You can buy or sell 24-7 in case you stay up late. iTrust Capital makes investing easy, safe, and accessible.
You don't have to be an expert. Their website has easy to understand articles, videos, and if you ever need help, you can speak with an actual person in the United States because the whole thing is based on the United States, the whole company.
So if you're looking to add crypto to your retirement portfolio, sign up today at itrustcapital.com slash Tucker and use a promo code Tucker for $100 funding bonus. Don Jr.
here, guys. Are you receiving letters from the IRS claiming you owe back taxes? As penalties and interest fees pile up, the IRS gives you no

clear path to resolution. Don't speak to them on your own.
They are not your friends. To reach a team of licensed tax professionals that can help you reduce, settle, and resolve your tax matters, go to TNUSA.com and check them out.
Solve your tax problems today. Call 1-800-780-8888 or visit TNUSA.com.
That's 1-800-780-8888. Tucker says it best.
The credit card companies are ripping Americans off and enough is enough. This is Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas.
Our legislation, the Credit Card Competition Act, would help in the grip Visa and MasterCard have on us. Every time you use your credit card, they charge you a hidden fee called a swipe fee, and they've been raising it without even telling you.
This hurts consumers and every small business owner. In fact, American families are paying $1,100 in hidden swipe fees each year.
The fees Visa and MasterCard charge Americans are the highest in the world, double candidates and eight times more than Europe's. That's why I've taken action, but I need your help to help get this passed.
I'm asking you to call your senator today and demand they pass the Credit Card Competition Act. Paid for by the Merchants Payments Coalition.
Not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. www.merchantspaymentscoalition.com So, I mean, big picture, without getting into, like, all the details of your case, but it does seem like you guys made a decision at your company to form political alliances through political donations, which is not singling you out.
You're hardly the only businessman who's done that. It's actually kind of par now.
But you gave so much to Democrats that I kind of thought they would rescue you in the end. Where were all your friends in the Democratic Party? They usually keep their friends from going to jail.
Tony Podesta never went to jail. Why did you? Oh, it's a really good question.
Obviously, I can only guess with the answer to that i can only speculate because

i'm not in their minds um but you know one fact that might be relevant is you know in 2020 i was center-left and i gave to uh biden's campaign um i was optimistic he'd be a sort of solid center-left president. I spent the next few years in D.C.
a lot.

I made dozens of trips there and was really, really shocked by what I saw, not in a good direction from the administration. By late 2022, I was giving to Republicans privately as much as Democrats.
And that started becoming known right around FTX's collapse. So that probably played a role.
Why were you shocked? I know you spent a lot of time in DC. There are pictures of you with, you know, you met everybody.
What was shocking about it? Some of it was just more extreme versions of what I worried about. Crypto regulation is a good example.
You know, I never thought that, frankly, the Democrats in general would be the party taking the lead on good financial regulation. But, you know, there were good and bad people in each party and a lot of thoughtful players.
But Gensler's SEC was something out of a nightmare.

You know, a company would go offer something to the United States.

Gensler would sue them to the ground for not registering.

So you'd go to Gensler to register.

Say, hey, you know, we'd love to register.

Offense says what you want.

What should we register as?

And the SEC would say, well, there's nothing for you to register as.

We don't have any ideas.

And there's just no solution. They required licenses that they didn't know how to give.
And every company in crypto ran into this. They basically failed to register a single person ever.
That was one pretty disturbing thing that I saw. And go for it.
So can I just ask you to explain a little bit there it's obvious to non-experts like me that you know Gary Gensler is obviously corrupt I mean that was clear but it was his motives were less clear like what was that what what was his goal it's a really good question and again I'm not in his brain but here are some impressions i had um you know he uh i you really like being in the center of things power everyone likes that uh not every most people he's no exception you know part of this is a turf or he wanted his agency to get more power even if he didn't want to do anything with it except block industries uh you know why did he make everyone register with him while he loses power you know otherwise even if he didn't know what to do with them i you know he had there are lots of stories about him you know being very politically ambitious and feeling like if he could, you know, get on CNBC enough,

make a big enough stink about things, raise his profile that, you know, maybe be treasury secretary, something like that in the future. I mean, he's remarkably successful.
Like he became sort of one of the few faces of democratic financial regulation. Interesting.

That sounds right to me. I mean, those sound like Washington-type goals.
I've seen those before. Right.
It wasn't moral. It's not like he had deeply rooted communist beliefs or anything like that.
Right. No, no, I knew that.
Right. No, no, it's not like, or any beliefs.
Self-advanceancement. So when things started to go south and you were criminally charged or thought you might be criminally charged, you know, you've given so much money to the Democratic Party that I think it's pretty leaving aside moral judgment here.
But it's pretty normal in business for the donor to call the person he's donating to and saying, hey, I'm in trouble. Can you help me? Did you call Schumer or any of the people you had supported and say, you know, hey, I need your help.
It's the Biden Justice Department. Help me.
I didn't for multiple reasons. One was, you know, I didn't want to do something inappropriate.
A second was I that many parts of it very quickly made their positions known and were running away as quickly as they could. You know, I had a good relationship, probably better with Republicans in D.C.
as with Democrats by that point in time, although that wasn't public. It wouldn't have been easy to see that from the outside.
And at the end of the day, there's a long story here.

It involves a law firm that took a pretty unusual and active role in the case.

But before I even gave up control of FTX, before it was ever filed for bankruptcy, the DOJ had already made up its mind.

And so you didn't call in any favors or try to? No. Interesting.
What do you think of the future of crypto? I mean, obviously, you must have complicated feelings since you ran a crypto company or in jail because of it, but you know a lot about the topic. You sort of feel like things are moving very fast on crypto.
Do you think they're moving in a good direction? I know it's sort of weird to ask you this question, but I can't resist. No.
Hopefully, is what I would say. You know, you look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office, there are a lot of good things.
There are a lot of things that, you know, were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took, that, you know, Gensler and the SEC took. Obviously, you know, the follow through is what matters.
And that's the stage that we're at now, which is what will come of this. And I mean, not surprisingly, like changing the guard helps.
But financial regulators, they're big, giant bureaucracies in the federal government. They're not used to changing overnight.
And they have been playing a really obstructive role for, you know, a decade in crypto. You know, the U.S., it's 30% of the world's finance.
It's about 5% of the world's crypto. And the reason it's entirely regulatory, it's just the U.S.
was unique in its difficulty to work with. So I think the big question is, will, meets the road, will the administration do what needs to be done and figure out how to do it? I mean, I remember when the concept of crypto first arrived in the popular press, and the whole idea was that this was a currency that could restore to the individual his freedom of commerce.
I get to buy and sell things without the government controlling me, and I could do it privately. It would restore my privacy as well.
And that obviously has never happened. It doesn't seem like it's ever going to happen, and I don't hear anybody say it anymore.
And now it just seems like it's kind of another asset scam. Whatever happened to, I mean, these are broad brush statements, but whatever happened to the privacy thing?

it's a really good question and there's sort of a related thing about the technology

right payments remittances like all the things that are not just an investment but ways that

crypto could actually be useful for the world you know they happen on longer time scales than

investments do, basically. You know, with what social media has become, you see bubbles, you know, grow and pop and grow and pop on a daily to monthly basis.
Technology is built out on a decade basis. So, you know, right now, crypto is not quite at a point where it could become an everyday tool of, you know, a quarter of the world or something.
The tech isn't there yet, but it's not that far away. And if, and this is an if, if the industry keeps making progress rather than getting distracted too much by market prices, then, you know, five, 10 years from now, you can imagine a world where all of a sudden it is the case that anyone can have a crypto wallet, you know, a billion people could use it each day with privacy, with security, fast, cheap, international, all the things that, you know, that was promised and that absolutely are distracted from by the latest mean points.
You think world governments would allow that? I mean, if you actually allowed the world's population to conduct financial transactions without the control of governments, then governments would collapse

instantly, wouldn't they? Well, it's an interesting question. And there are a lot of degrees here

about the level of oversight control that a government has. You look at something like

Bitcoin and the wallets are anonymous, but there is a public ledger of every transfer that happens.

So it is possible for governments to have some level of knowledge without having control of

All right. or if every transfer that happens.
So it is possible for governments to have some level of knowledge without having control of it. That being said, not all the governments in the world view this the same.
And the United States government over the last 30 years has taken one view towards control of, you know, not just the United States, frankly, but the world's monetary, you know, dealings. And you see, I mean, a different viewpoint, much more authoritarian, but also much more insular in a lot of sort of dictatorships.
But half the world doesn't try to have nearly the level of government involvement in day-to-day financial transactions that the United States has. So the people who built this country built it because they wanted freedom.
One word, freedom. They wanted freedom from oppressors who forced them to buy overpriced tea, then blockaded them when they tried to dump it into the ocean.
How'd that work out? Well, we built America in response. So it's time to throw your big overpriced wireless contract overboard to a new tea party.
You don't have to pay $100 a month just to use a phone. Most people don't use that much in services, but they pay it anyway.
Our cell phone company, Pure Talk, says no to those prices. With a qualifying plan, you can choose an iPhone 14 or a Samsung Galaxy for nothing, zero.
Get premium service on America's most dependable 5G network. It only takes a minute to switch.
We highly recommend it. No hassle, no gimmicks.
Just honest to goodness, wireless priced right. So you get your iPhone 14 or Samsung Galaxy for nothing, zero dollars, with a qualifying plan.
Go to puretalk.com slash Tucker. Visit puretalk.com slash Tucker for details.

America's wireless company.

Do you have any money left after all this?

Well, basically, no.

The company that I used to own,

maybe I still do own, I don't know, it's in bankruptcy,

had nothing intervened um today it would have about 15 billion dollars of liabilities um and about uh 93 billion dollars of assets so the answer should be in theory yes yes, that there was enough money to pay everyone back in kind at the time or today with plenty of interest left over and tens of billions left for investors. but I that's not how things worked out and instead it all got broiled up in a again world in a bankruptcy where i the assets were dissipated incredibly quickly by those controlling it um they're siphoned off uh tens of billions of dollars worth.
And it's been a colossal disaster. And I mean, not stopping that from happening is by far the biggest regret of my life.
So you knew everybody else in the crypto business. You're one of the most famous people in the business before the charges, before all of this happened.
Being as honest as you can, do you think you were the biggest criminal in the crypto business? I don't think I was a criminal. So certainly the answer to that is no.
I mean, I think the DOJ thinks that I may have been, but I don't share their view. Well, yeah, you're in jail.
They definitely, that's their claim anyway. But I wonder, and I'm not, you know, I've certainly criticized your business and other businesses like it in the past.
And again, I'm not even getting into the details of your case because it's like Byzantine. But I'm just wondering, like, do you think there's a lot of shady behavior in the crypto business? You honest.
Yeah. Ten years ago, the answer was clearly yes.
Or at least yes relative to the scale of the industry. You look in the 2014 to 2017 sort of era, and the industry is a lot smaller than it was today.
And a lot of the transactions I saw, or at least a higher fraction of them, were, well, different people use different words for it, but Silk Road, you know, as an example, right? People purchasing narcotics online was a common use of crypto back 10 years ago or so. obviously there are always going to be criminals in any industry, but over time, the fraction of the industry that that represents has fallen off really substantially, both because of sort of growth of other areas of interest in crypto and also because of more government involvement on the anti-money laundering side so yeah they're still some but not it's not as as prevalent as it once was so you were famously identified with a worldview and ideology maybe even a religion called effective altruism and the idea was that as i understand that you you know do the greatest good for the greatest number.
You make money in order to help the maximum number of people. And some have pointed out the irony that in the collapse of your company, like a million people lost their money.
So there were a lot of individuals hurt in an effort that you described as the greatest good for the greatest number. And I wonder if all of this has made you rethink the precepts of effective altruism.

It hasn't made me rethink the precepts.

Obviously, I feel terrible about what happened.

It's not at all what I intended.

And whatever one's intentions are,

I, you know, if you screw up,

then the results might be different.

You know, people have their money back at the end, but it is too excruciating years waiting for it. They got it back dollarized rather than in kind.
And certainly all the good that I've been hoping to do for the world ended up dissipating, or at least most of it did, when the company collapsed. I guess what I'm saying is, do, I mean, I think it's hard for most people to understand the idea that it's more virtuous or valuable to help people they've never met than it is to help the people right in front of them.
In other words, like's way more virtuous. To help your wife girlfriend mother daughter.
Brother college roommate. Than it is to help like a village in a country you've never visited.
I think that's how most people feel intuitively. But you disagree.
I disagree although there is a caveat to it. Which is that you know a classic, which people make, and I may have made at some points, is with people who you don't know, who are distant from you, thinking you know what they need when you don't.
You know, being paternalistic, kind of condescending. And, you know, there's so many foreign aid type projects that have gone awry, ended up being complete wastes of money, because no one knew the people they were giving to no one knew what their lives were like and right they're just guessing at what they're speaking it's just wrong and you know they show up with like a bunch of water pumps to a village that has plenty of water and no food and like you know exactly shipped in from harvard to go hand out these water pumps no one wants and you know there's like there's like example after example of this going awry.
Whereas obviously, like when you're dealing with people you know, you know, you have a much better sense of how to help them. And that's real.
Like that effect is absolutely real. And, you know, even if I think the life matters as much in one place as another, that doesn't mean that you know as well how to help one as you do the other.

Well, see, I think you're sort of making a counter case.

You're arguing against your own position.

I mean, isn't it?

I mean, I guess the problem I have with the effect of altruism is just too easy.

I mean, it's like it's easy to cure polio.

It's really hard to make the same woman happy for 30 years.

And so maybe it's better to do the hard thing.

Well, I think what I'd say is, look, you look at, I mean, malaria is a good example here, right? No one dies of malaria anymore in the United States. And basically no one does.
But globally, it's what, like a million people a year or something die of it. And that's horrible that it happens.
Like, this is just a disease people shouldn't be dying from anymore. We know how to basically eradicate it.
And we should absolutely be doing that as a world. But, you know, because it's sort of, like, easy in some sense, that shouldn't stop us from being able to help people, you know, at home.
You look at, like, the scale of resources that would be required to many of these, you know, interventions in the poorest part of the world. And it's not that big.
It would not take a big bite out of our domestic health if it were done efficiently. But the efficient part is a big piece of this.
You can throw as many useless water pumps at villages without food as you want without curing anyone. That's demonstrab true.
And 60 years of aid to Africa has shown that as life expectancy has declined. But I guess as a moral matter, how can you justify worrying about malaria when your cousin is addicted to Xanax? Shouldn't you fix that first? If I could, but, you know, at the end of the day, we have responsibilities to each of us.
And, you know, if I know my cousin well, and I know how to solve his problem because I'm his cousin, then absolutely, like, I have a responsibility to do that. But if I've tried and I'm flailing at that, I can't figure out how to make progress, but I can figure out how to save lives internationally, or if someone can, then I don't think it takes away from the good that they can do internationally that they couldn't figure out how to solve their cousin's problem.
Right. So do it again.
I don't think that's a crazy point. Last question on this topic.
Can you think of a big recent international aid project that was an unequivocal success? So, sort of, but I'm not going to name it. It's not going to be a government aid project, to be clear.
There are private projects that happen. Right.
You know, actually, malaria is a good example where a substantial fraction of the world's malaria has been cut down already by mostly private contributions from people to South Saharan Africa and India that, you know, saving probably hundreds of thousands of lives a year right now for, you know, thousands of dollars per life on average, which is, you know, sort of a stunning success on a relative scale. Now, we're not talking about a trillion dollars.
We're talking about single-digit billions of dollars directed by really careful work by philanthropists. And, you know, of course, you can look at gigantic government programs that did absolutely nothing.
You know, if you want to go to the government approach, I mean, I don't know, the Marshall Plan, like, that's sort of digging pretty deep in history, but rebuilding Germany after World War II was probably a huge success on many fronts. Yeah, I think we've undone it by blowing up Nord Stream, but yeah, no, I think it's a fair point.
So how old are you now? You know, the funny thing, it took me a second to think of the answer that prison time changes when you're in prison. It becomes sort of an amorphous concept when every day is sort of like the last and they just blur together.
The answer is, well, I guess my birthday is tomorrow. So as of right now, I'm 32, but I will be 33 soon.
How are you going to celebrate your birthday? I'm not. I was never big on birthdays on the outside, and

celebrating another year in prison just doesn't

feel like all that

exciting to me.

So you're not going to tell Diddy it's your birthday tomorrow?

I don't believe you.

Someone else might tell him, but I don't plan to.

So, okay,

so you'll be 33 tomorrow.

If you are not pardoned, all things being equal, how old do you be when you get out? It's a complicated calculation, which I don't understand all the details of because of like first step back stuff. And if you just add, you know, my prison sentence, my age, so to speak, um, you know, then the answer is, uh, in my late forties.

Wow. Could you handle that?

Um, uh, sorry, what I said was wrong. I misspoke.
If you had my prison sentence, my age, the late fifties, if you include all of the possible decreases, it might be the late forties.

But, but the raw answer is, I mean, it's 32 when I was convicted and I got a 25-year sentence. So that's 57.
So having done two out of the 25 so far, do you think you could, could you make it? It's a good question. I'm not sure.
I mean, the hardest thing is just not having something meaningful to be doing in here.

And, you know, and you can look at their studies.

I have no idea how good they are, but they show, you know, you age at roughly three times the normal rate in prison.

So, you know, you have three times 25 to my 32 years when I was convicted. And, you know, that gets you an answer of maybe.
So, I mean, it strikes me there's a kind of weird, it's, I mean, you went maybe more than anyone I've ever talked to from one world to a completely different world. So you were in the world of digital money.
Now you're in a world with no money. What's the medium of exchange in prison uh you know it's whatever people have and you know muffins like these little so like little plastic wrapped you like you go to like a like a gas station and like on the counter there might be like a plastic bowl with little individually wrapped plastic muffins that have been sitting there for a week at room temperature you know know, imagine one of those.
That's sort of, that's like standard, is that a packet of ramen soup or a kind of disgusting looking little foil package of fish in oil at room temperature? Ooh. Yeah.
So you went from crypto to the muffin economy. Yeah, that's right.

How would you compare them?

Obviously, it's harder to move muffins internationally, but as a currency. I don't think there's going to be a strategic muffin reserve.

So, you know, they're a currency of need.

They wouldn't be anything else.

They don't have that much to recommend themselves. But at the end of the day, they're kind of fungible.
They're not exactly fungible, but they're close enough. You know, two muffins are kind of similar, so you can kind of trade them for each other.
They kind of work as long as you're never dealing with more than like $5, right? Because if you wanted to do a $200 transaction in muffins, like what, you know, it doesn't work physically right and it's unwieldy yeah it's unwieldy and so one of the things that like you realize really quickly is i mean the scale of everything is so diminished in prison you know you see people getting into a fistfight over a single banana.

Not because they even care about it that much, but because

what else is

there to channel

your caring into?

Ooh, that's

grim.

Do you eat the muffins, by the way?

Or do you just hoard them?

No, I just hoard them and

I don't actually eat them. I mostly

eat rice and beans and ramen.

Wow.

Well, it looks like it's been good for you. Have you gotten any tattoos? I have not.
I know some people who have, but I have not gotten any prison tattoos. Have you thought about it? So, you know, there's a part of me that's always like thought about getting a tattoo, but talking with the inmates about their, you know, sanitization procedures or lack thereof for the needles sort of, you know, that that cured that idea in my mind.
Not no, no interest anymore. It's not worth the hep C.
It's not worth the hep C. It's, you know, I would say like maybe they go to like four people or so before bothering to sanitize a needle.
Ooh. Yeah.
Ooh. Okay.
So you're not doing that. So since you've been away and you're facing, I guess, 23 more years, I always wonder, like the people you helped.
I mean, you're in prison because you hurt people, but you also helped a lot of people in Washington by giving them many, many millions of dollars. Did any of them call you to say, you know, good luck? I hope you're doing okay.
Don't join a gang or say anything to you at all. Right when the collapse hit, like in the immediate wake of it, I got a number of really nice messages from a lot of people including some in dc by six months later none and so by the time trial happened where i was you know put in prison nothing and it's it became too politically toxic um it became the incentives were too skewed against people you know risking their next i even heard frankly about people saying third hand like nice things about me but no one wanted to be in contact with me directly did anyone contact you i mean i i noticed that your i you? Like, you were there.
Did you have any friends who stayed loyal and supported you and continue to? Barely. Yes, but very, very few.
I was surprised. It makes sense in retrospect.
Anyone who was close to me ended up with a gun to their head, you know, being told that they had two options and one of them involved decades in prison. And I mean, I think Ryan Salem is sort of the saddest example of that and the most disgusting example from the government's perspective where you know

they charged him of totally bogus crimes um he he said no i'll see you in court this so they went

back and said all right well how about your pregnant wife um what if we put her in prison

and so he pleads guilty because they're his wife in prison which no sane legal system would

I'm not sure. What if we put her in prison? And so he pleads guilty because they're going to put his wife in prison, which no sane legal system would make that a permissible thing for a prosecution to do.
And then, and he wasn't even charged with most of what the other people who pled guilty were charged with. You know, Ryan, he doesn't testify at trial because he doesn't want to lie.

He doesn't want to say what the government wants him to say.

And he ends up getting four times as much prison time

as the other three guilty pleas combined.

And, like, he couldn't send a clear message.

Is it because he was a Republican

or is it because he refused to parrot the government's lies at trial?

Like, those are the only things I can imagine why they give him seven and a half years in prison it's disgusting and i had him to my house and i interviewed him and i think they charged his wife as well it's totally immoral what they did totally right they went back on their promise and charged his wife anyway, you know, just to sort of disabuse any notion of them sort of like operating in good faith. It's disgusting.
He's a good guy. You know, he didn't serve any of that.
Has it dawned on you, you know, I don't know what kind of news coverage you're getting, kind of contact you have with the outside world sounds like not too much, that things are moving so quickly out here oh yeah by the time you get out i mean ai for example it sounds like we're reaching uh agi or some yeah something singularity uh soon yeah that you may emerge whenever you do into a world that that doesn't look anything like the world you left yeah Yeah, I feel pretty acutely. And it's, you know, the sort of feeling of the world moving on without you.
Is having children part of your effective altruism philosophy? No, different people in the community have different views on it. And at the end of the day, I mean, for five years, I felt like I had about 300 children most days, my employees, like it was, obviously, I couldn't be a father in the same way to all of them, but I felt responsible for them.
I mean, feel terrible about all their work being tossed down the drain.

But I didn't have time for my personal life at all, basically, when I was running FTX. And I mean, I certainly am not in a position to have kids from in-person.

Have any of those 300 employees visited you in jail?

No. I think the answer is no to that.
You know, there's one or two. Probably ought to have some real kids at some point, don't you think? Because when things go bad, they stick around.
You know, it's got me thinking about what it means to have real friends. And it's and about the amount of power that some systems in our country end up having and the amount of intimidation that can be achieved implicitly.
But I, but also about, yeah, having people I know I can count on. Yeah.
Other people are all that matter. Sam Bankman-Fried, I'm grateful that you did this, and it's probably the only interview you ever do where you don't get pressed on your business because there are other people to do that, but I was glad to talk to you, and I hope you'll give our best to Diddy.
I will absolutely do that. I can't believe you're in jail with Diddy.
I know, right? If someone told me three told me three years ago, like you'll be hanging out with Diddy, you know, every day, be like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder if that's going to happen.
I guess he gets into crypto or something. This is what I thought.
Oh, life is so weird. Godspeed.
Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. We want to thank you for watching us on Spotify, a company that we use every day.
We know the people who run it, good people.

While you're here, do us a favor.

Hit follow and tap the bell so you never miss an episode.

We have real conversations, news, things that actually matter.

Telling the truth always.

You will not miss it if you follow us on Spotify and hit the bell.

We appreciate it. Thanks for watching.