Nov. 6, 2023 - The Tucker Carlson Show
01:00:26
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unidentified
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He's been called the most hated man in America because he jacked up the cost of a life-saving drug. | |
| Raised the price of a life-saving drug 5,000%. | ||
| So he could get filthy rich, an even bigger jerk than we first thought. | ||
| There's no excuse from going from $13.50 to $750 for one pill. | ||
| Breaking news, we have the verdict now for the former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli. | ||
| Seven years in prison. | ||
| You've been sentenced to seven years in prison? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| Hillary Clinton, you gave her the finger. | ||
| Like, you didn't expect to get arrested when you did that? | ||
| What do you think the public missed about your story? | ||
| I think virtually everything. | ||
| To this day, I never made a dollar from terrible. | ||
| I'm not going to bow down to the government. | ||
| You get taught in school. | ||
| You're free to do and say as you wish, and the government can't meddle in your life if they feel like it. | ||
| And I learned differently. | ||
| I think the DOJ's prosecution of former president, it doesn't make a difference whether you're guilty or not, because it's a foregone conclusion. | ||
| You have a better chance of being acquitted than Russia. | ||
|
unidentified
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Four separate indictments from four separate divisions of the government. | |
| Al Capone, John Gotti, can't compete with that. | ||
| Sam Bankman's going to prison, most likely, for a long time. | ||
| Sam's from an upper-class family in California. | ||
| He's never been around minorities. | ||
| So he asked you your advice on prison? | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| No, Sam, there's no internet in prison. | ||
| It's a rough place. | ||
| So I said, you should learn rap music, learn slang, and invent a backstory for yourself where you're Sam Bankman from Oakland. | ||
|
unidentified
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If you think I'm a bad guy, see how I live my life. | |
| Every time I read a story about me, it's convicted felon Martin Shkreli. | ||
| Everyone says, oh... | ||
| You lost four years of life. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| I experienced four fascinating years of life. | ||
| On December 9th, 2015, Hillary Clinton issued a press release from a presidential campaign office attacking a man called Martin Shkreli. | ||
| Clinton claimed that Shkreli was immoral for daring to raise the price of an antiparasite drug called Daraprim. | ||
| Shkreli responded not with shame, but instead with defiance. | ||
| In fact, he said, many patients would wind up paying less for Daraprim. | ||
| And in any case, he pointed out, no politician had a right to set the prices of a consumer product. | ||
| So effectively, Martin Screlly told Hillary Clinton to get bent. | ||
| Eight days later, he was arrested. | ||
| A team of heavily armed FBI agents showed up at his apartment in New York and took him into custody. | ||
| Screlly was charged with securities fraud in a case that had nothing to do with the price of Daraprim. | ||
| And then he was sentenced to seven years in prison. | ||
| He was released from custody last spring and remains unsupervised release. | ||
| He joins us now in our studio to tell us what he's learned. | ||
| Martin Skrally, great to see you. | ||
| Thank you for doing this. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| So this was 2015-2016 that you became almost instantaneously famous when the Hillary campaign decided to use you as a prop for corporate greed. | ||
| And so our viewers who've forgotten you or can't recall why they hate you so much might have their memories jogged by the following montage of what it looks like when you're the most unpopular man in the world. | ||
| Here it is. | ||
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unidentified
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The so-called most hated man in America is an even bigger jerk than we first thought. | |
| That's what Martin Shkreli's critics are saying about these new secret memos that show he bragged about jacking pill prices for the sick. | ||
| So he could get filthy rich. | ||
| Whether he's committing securities fraud or trolling people on the internet, Shkreli doesn't think he has to answer to anybody. | ||
| The 32-year-old former hedge fund manager became an internet pariah, headlined as the most hated man in America. | ||
| The most hated man in America. | ||
| Most hated man in America. | ||
| The most hated man in America. | ||
|
unidentified
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The face of evil pharma, Martin Shkreli. | |
| So overpaid news anchors thought you made too much money. | ||
| You feel like, and I've never defended pharma in my life and I'm not going to now, but I feel like maybe there were facts omitted from that summation of your case. | ||
| Definitely a few facts. | ||
| So summarize, so for people who remember hating you because you raised the price of this anti-parasitic drug by 5,000% or something. | ||
| What do you think the public missed about your story? | ||
| I think virtually everything, you know, and when the media can find a way to tell a story that sounds great and sells clicks. | ||
| For example, Bloomberg's number one story of 2015, I happened to date the reporter that covered me, which was its own fiasco. | ||
| Wait, you dated the reporter who covered you? | ||
| She ended up a woman named Christy Smyth. | ||
| She's a wonderful lady. | ||
| She was the court reporter for Bloomberg. | ||
| Senior reporter in the business for a long time. | ||
| And Bloomberg consistently sort of tried to lean on her to not report kind of evenly. | ||
| And it was the number one clicked news article for Bloomberg that whole year. | ||
| You being bad. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So that was your time in the barrel. | ||
| Everyone in public life experiences that. | ||
| You really did at... | ||
| Maximum velocity. | ||
| What was that like? | ||
| I think it was surreal. | ||
| I was defiant because I couldn't imagine this was happening. | ||
| I thought it was all a joke. | ||
| When is everybody going to come out and say, oh, just kidding? | ||
| Of course, that wasn't the case. | ||
| Every time I doubled down, the opposition, if you will, doubled down as well. | ||
| It got to this brinksmanship almost of me telling politicians like Hillary and so forth, you can't do anything about this. | ||
| It's a sovereign right of a business. | ||
| It's not sovereign, but it's very cherished right of a business to be able to choose its price for its product. | ||
| And this idea that you could interfere with that right is so anti-American, so against everything I learned in school and in business that it was just surreal that somebody thought they had that kind of power over a company. | ||
| Imagine her trying to tell Tim Cook, hey, your iPhone is too expensive. | ||
| You've got to lower the price 200%. | ||
| What does an iPhone cost? | ||
| It's like $1,000. | ||
| And everyone kind of has to have one? | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Does anyone complain about that? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I do think there's a lot of, fair or not, I think you think it's unfair. | ||
| I probably have the other position, but there is a lot of resentment toward pharma. | ||
| Do you think that was part of it? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| It's the most hated industry of all the industries. | ||
| And I remember challenging, they kind of brought me up in CBS to be an expert speaker on a panel about drug prices. | ||
| This is when EpiPen, this is Joe Manchin's daughter, raised the price of EpiPen. | ||
| For the same reasons, and I feel totally legitimate reasons. | ||
| And everyone is aghast, you know, that people can't afford EpiPens now, they're really important in medicine, and everyone's screwed. | ||
| And I asked the CBS people, I said, hey, do you know what the net margin of CBS is? | ||
| No clue. | ||
| So do you know what the net margin of Mylan is, the Joe Manchin's daughter's company? | ||
| CBS makes twice as much profit as Mylan. | ||
| So you have a company that makes a life-saving medicine, EpiPen, which literally could be the difference between life or death. | ||
| And then you have a company that makes reality TV shows and sensationalized news. | ||
| And one of them, which one deserves profit? | ||
| I think capitalism is a function that sort of assigns profit to the deserved. | ||
| And in this case, this pharma company, Mylan, makes like one out of every 10 medicines in the world. | ||
| And they kind of deserve the right to stay in business and keep doing that. | ||
| Whereas, you know how I feel about CBS. Yeah. | ||
| And for good reason. | ||
| You're running this company. | ||
| You get attacked in public. | ||
| You become a prop in the Hillary Clinton campaign. | ||
| The media, as always on cue, aligns their coverage with her propaganda priorities. | ||
| They're sort of a seamless unit, the Hillary campaign, CBS News, NBC, Jeff Smith. | ||
| But your job at that point is to sort of bow your head and say, busted, you caught me. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm going to give money to breast cancer research. | ||
| Why didn't you do that? | ||
| It would not have been hard to resign, even stage a firing and tell my board, say, you guys can fire me to make this look good so our company can continue and be successful. | ||
| And usually that's the solution is off with their head of the CEO. The number two option is a PR campaign of laying low. | ||
| You know, you pay a big DC PR firm $300,000 and they just tell you to, you know, don't say a thing. | ||
| And that's, you know, this will blow over, the news cycle will change. | ||
| And I dug in because, you know, I really felt like a few different dynamics are at play. | ||
| The first is that CEOs are not allowed to have personalities anymore. | ||
| You know, and I think you see the handful that do, the Elons and, you know, others, you know, they get criticized routinely. | ||
| For their personalities. | ||
| And what corporate America and boards want to see is a CEO that's, you know, just completely, you know, impervious to attack. | ||
| Just eat a massive pile of dung and keep going. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I think that, you know, so when you have a personality that's defiant or something that you want to be, you know, a hill that you're willing to die on, for me, that hill is capitalism. | ||
| And it's our American way of life. | ||
| And it's this hill that no politician can tell us. | ||
| Business people, what our prices should be. | ||
| I know, but Hillary Clinton, you gave her the finger. | ||
| Like, you didn't expect to get arrested when you did that? | ||
| I think that I was a little naive that, you know, that what we learn in school, you know, that when we pledge allegiance and that we will learn about the First Amendment and all this stuff, that it's not connected. | ||
| That the courts are not connected to the media and they're not connected to politicians and there's not this web that really does exist. | ||
| And part of me feels like, is the web consequential or is it... | ||
| Set up ahead of time. | ||
| And sometimes it's both. | ||
| I think the prosecutor that went after me, for example, he may or may not have gotten an order from somebody, but he may have just felt like, well, this is a guy that I can make a career on. | ||
| He's super unpopular. | ||
| Let's send him to jail. | ||
| I'm the good guy. | ||
| He's the bad guy. | ||
| What do the good guys do? | ||
| We corral him and throw him in jail. | ||
| It's a story as old as time. | ||
| And they're doing it to Trump as we speak. | ||
| So just to, not to belabor the point, but for those who don't remember, this is... | ||
| Part of the answer to the question, why were you so attacked and so hated? | ||
| Because you didn't bow at all. | ||
| So you were dragged before Congress to kowtow, but you didn't. | ||
| Instead, you did this. | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, he has been called the most hated man in America, and his latest actions will likely do nothing to change that reputation. | |
| Forced to appear before a congressional committee on drug pricing, former pharmaceutical CEO Martin Screlly refused to answer any questions, repeatedly invoking his Fifth Amendment rights. | ||
| Here's part of a report from NBC's Ann Thompson. | ||
| Appearing to smirk. | ||
| Are you listening? | ||
| And often inattentive. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Former Turing Pharmaceutical CEO Martin Scarelli lived up to his bad boy reputation appearing before Congress. | ||
| I intend to use the advice of my counsel, not yours. | ||
| Posing for pictures instead of listening. | ||
| It's not funny, Mr. Scarelli. | ||
| People are dying and they're getting sicker and sicker. | ||
|
unidentified
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Scarelli declined to answer why the company he once led raised the price of a life-saving drug 5,000 percent. | |
| So just so you know, when a corrupt moron like Elijah Cummings speaks to you, serf, he's speaking not as your peer but as the feudal lord and you have to pay attention or at least pretend to pay attention. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, when you try to challenge authority and, you know, that authority expects your subservience, it's a really huge insult because, you know, if Congress doesn't have power, then who does? | ||
| And it's really dangerous to sort of like cross that line. | ||
| And I was willing to cross it for a few reasons. | ||
| The first was... | ||
| I was a huge fan of The Chappelle Show, and Chappelle had a skit of what if black people were treated like white people, and he was a drug dealer in the skit, and he goes down to Congress. | ||
| And Congress is asking him questions, and he's reading this very defiant, it's hilarious skit. | ||
| And I said, this is my one chance in life to be able to reenact this skit. | ||
| And my lawyers felt the same way. | ||
| They remembered the Godfather scene, I think it's Godfather II, where lawyers come down to Congress and they try to defend. | ||
| Michael Corleone. | ||
| And so my lawyers, we were all interested in this as an entertainment thing more than anything else. | ||
| We already told Congress we're not going to answer any questions. | ||
| And in fact, in Congress's own handbook, it is defined as unethical to make a witness come to Congress to only invoke the fifth. | ||
| In fact, you're not supposed to bring somebody to do that. | ||
| But they bent the rules in this case because it's a great media stunt. | ||
| But when they say, are you listening? | ||
| And you basically said, well, you said yes, but what you meant clearly was no. | ||
| I mean, they kind of have to hurt you after you do that, don't they? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I felt like, you know, at that point, I'd already been arrested. | ||
| So what more can they do? | ||
| You know, and I felt like- We'll send you to prison for seven years? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| You know, I think that's a foregone conclusion, right? | ||
| I mean, at some point, you know, when you have a 99.5% conviction rate, you know, the idea of the burden is on the state to prove the charges. | ||
| What burden? | ||
| You know, the burden's on the defendant. | ||
| And when you have the media indicting you every day, and a media that will refuse to sort of say, well, here's why he thinks he's innocent. | ||
| And one of my greatest triumphs, and it sounds very strange, is actually being found not guilty of five out of eight charges, because it's almost impossible. | ||
| Let me just ask you, I want to tie up the Daraprim controversy before we move on. | ||
| So this is a drug whose price you raised by a lot, at least on a percentage basis, thousands of percent. | ||
| What's the price of it now? | ||
| Well, it's generic now. | ||
| So it costs pennies to get now. | ||
| So the price went up for a short period of time before generics entered the market. | ||
| And the free market kind of, if you believe there was a problem, which I don't, the free market fixed the problem. | ||
| Lots of medicines are much more expensive than Daraprim. | ||
| And I think that's, you asked about misunderstandings earlier. | ||
| That's one of the biggest misunderstandings is that people said, well, if you raise something 5,000%, isn't it unaffordable now? | ||
| And the answer is, of course not. | ||
| It depends on the beginning price. | ||
| If something's one cent and you raise it up, 50X, you know, it's still affordable, depending on what the product is. | ||
| And so there are drugs in the drug system that are millions of dollars. | ||
| And what folks don't understand is for rare diseases, we talk about cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, there are not many people with these diseases. | ||
| And in fact, cystic fibrosis makes toxoplasmosis, which is the daraprim disease, seem extremely common. | ||
| You know, toxoplasmosis is exquisitely rare. | ||
| So you cannot afford to keep a company in business making Daraprim unless you raise the price. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| And this is conventional across all drug manufacturers? | ||
| Well, what's really funny is I had a friend named Brent Saunders who ran Allergan. | ||
| And he was an investor in my fund. | ||
| He was kind of a big shot in pharma. | ||
| And he had Botox. | ||
| You know, as his flagship product. | ||
| And he raised the price of Botox like 9.9% every year, just to avoid a double-digit distinction. | ||
| And the price increase on Botox costs the healthcare system hundreds of millions of dollars. | ||
| And the same thing at AbbVie for Humira or Johnson& Johnson or Pfizer or Merck. | ||
| Their price increases while they're smaller on a percentage basis. | ||
| They cost the healthcare system billions of dollars. | ||
| And nobody talks about them. | ||
| I had to raise the price of a minuscule, tiny medicine that nobody takes. | ||
| And nobody mentioned that in the media. | ||
| But to keep that medicine on the shelves, because I've done this before where a medicine that sells very little, less than a million dollars, a couple million dollars, the big pharma guys don't want to make that medicine. | ||
| They want to get rid of it. | ||
| And the only way that that medicine can stay reliably on the shelves is if it merits making. | ||
| What's interesting is that, so you were not a big pharma company. | ||
| Hillary Clinton is a slave to the big pharma companies, obviously, their obedient servant. | ||
| All the Democrats in Congress, many Republicans are also. | ||
| It seemed to me as an outsider, they went after you because you weren't Pfizer. | ||
| They'd get away with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I started two drug companies in my own hands. | ||
| One became a billion-dollar company. | ||
| I was 28 when I started that company. | ||
| And pharma is kind of one of the more successful entrepreneurs. | ||
| And what a lot of people don't know is we've invented a lot of medicines. | ||
| We got a drug FDA approved, which is through the gauntlet from phase one all the way to phase three. | ||
| Very hard to do. | ||
| We were one of the first companies to pursue intranasal ketamine for suicidality and depression. | ||
| We made about 20, 30 different drug projects. | ||
| In fact, Daraprim was one of the least significant things we ever did. | ||
| And it became this like really big magnifying glass on quote unquote corporate greed. | ||
| To this day, I never made a dollar from Daraprim. | ||
| Really? | ||
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unidentified
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No. | |
| So one thing I didn't know about you until we had dinner last night was that you worked while you were in high school, at Hunter College High School, probably the top public high school in New York City. | ||
| You worked for Jim Cramer? | ||
| Yeah, Jim was... | ||
| Later of CNBC fame? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was a great hedge fund manager. | ||
| And a lot of people knock him for seemingly getting every stock pick wrong these days. | ||
| But when he ran an actual hedge fund for wealthy clients, he was extremely good at it. | ||
| And we overlapped for only about nine months. | ||
| When you became the most reviled human being in human history, did he call you? | ||
| He didn't. | ||
| And I think he... | ||
| He said something really prescient and smart on CNBC because Jim is a brilliant guy. | ||
| A lot of people knock him. | ||
| Yeah, I'm one of them. | ||
| But people don't understand just how, quite frankly, how brilliant he is. | ||
| And he doesn't make it easy for folks. | ||
| No. | ||
| What he said on CNBC is the same thing. | ||
| He said, this guy isn't making it easy to root for him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's right. | ||
| And part of the reason he was right is I was sort of enjoying like... | ||
| You know, if you're a cat playing with a mouse or something like that, in this case, I think both of us thought we were cats playing with mice, me and the media and the media and me, I sort of felt like, why take this seriously? | ||
| If they're not going to engage on my terms... | ||
| Why not just flip everybody off, call them names, disregard them? | ||
| You know, look at Congress, right? | ||
| Why does Congress deserve respect? | ||
| You saw that clip a second ago. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| $33 trillion in debt? | ||
| You did this? | ||
| I have no respect for you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| The MSNBC lady said, well, this won't help his reputation. | ||
| Wait a second. | ||
| Congress is more hated than I am. | ||
| Yes, for good reason. | ||
| You know, so a lot of people messaged me, sent me letters. | ||
| I got over 5,000 letters in jail. | ||
| 1% or less were hate mail. | ||
| 99% were, way to go, stick it to the man, screw Congress, and I'm the most hated man, but that's wishful thinking. | ||
| I walk around in New York and people hug me. | ||
| They take selfies. | ||
| There's no hate. | ||
| That's a liberal, wishful thinking to project on who they want. | ||
| They're the most hated man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| So the FBI shows up December 2015. You've been the subject of all these news reports about your immoral behavior. | ||
| What did you think the FBI was doing at your apartment? | ||
| Well, you know, I had a fund from like three or four companies ago. | ||
| And in the hedge fund business, it's, to be frank, it's kind of an awful business. | ||
| And it's a business that almost like, I think half of all top hedge funds have basically been closed down for legal reasons. | ||
| Many hedge fund managers have gone to prison. | ||
| It's a dangerous job. | ||
| Because you are the symbolism of wealth. | ||
| You are literally not making any product. | ||
| You are taking information and manpower and converting some pile of money into a bigger pile of money. | ||
| And it's really, if there's anything in life that symbolizes greed and excess, and I don't necessarily believe this, but from the outside perspective, hedge funds are it. | ||
| It's not hard to sort of point a finger at hedge funds and say, there's some fraud here or there's some transaction that I didn't like that wasn't disclosed properly. | ||
| And this is why hedge funds are like half compliance departments these days. | ||
| But they don't even care about the return anymore. | ||
| They care about the compliance because it's such a dangerous business. | ||
| So they found some irregularities in my old hedge funds. | ||
| None of my investors ever lost a dime. | ||
| In fact, they made quite a bit. | ||
| In fact, one of my investors said he made about 30%, 40% a year. | ||
| Investing in my hedge fund. | ||
| It was the second best hedge fund he ever invested in his life. | ||
| And he'd been a hedge fund investor for 20 years. | ||
| And he invested with Soros and some of the best hedge funds ever. | ||
| And I still went through the ringer. | ||
| So you were charged with securities fraud. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Who did you defraud? | ||
| I defrauded the investors that made the 30%, 40% a year. | ||
| But I'm confused. | ||
| How can you defraud someone who makes 30% or 40% a year? | ||
| So it's funny. | ||
| You can be a victim. | ||
| Of a crime without necessarily losing anything. | ||
| And while the government normally never pursues a case like that, they pursue cases where somebody opens their pockets and says, look, I gave this guy a million bucks. | ||
| Yeah, it's a Ponzi. | ||
| The million bucks is gone. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And this guy's got a Lamborghini and I have a whole million dollars. | ||
| What the hell? | ||
| And, you know, that's, you know, I think why I was relatively spared on a sentence, even though I thought it was excessive. | ||
| The government normally never brings a case like that. | ||
| And the Southern District is kind of known as the fraud sort of center. | ||
| They're pursuing Sandbank and Fried at the moment. | ||
| They hop on these cases. | ||
| They love these cases. | ||
| The Eastern District isn't really the place to do that. | ||
| They mostly deal with visa cases, gun cases, drug cases, things like that, mob fraud. | ||
| Brooklyn, Queens, Rhode Island. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Not Manhattan. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| It was Loretta Lynch's division. | ||
| It's a fairly political division. | ||
| And the person that prosecuted me is now a partner at a law firm and making a lot more money than he made before. | ||
| So did you sense from the beginning that your prosecution was political? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean, I know it was. | ||
| And when you say political, it's not a left or right thing, necessarily. | ||
| It's actually more of a status thing. | ||
| Every player in this... | ||
| Symphony of Grift has a different role to play. | ||
| And, you know, the prosecutor's role is looking out for himself. | ||
| You know, he's not interested in the community of New York City being, you know, better or worse than it was yesterday. | ||
| You know, he's a lawyer from a top law school. | ||
| He's trying to make millions of dollars. | ||
| And prosecuting Martin Scott is a great way to do that. | ||
| If it happens to make his bosses happy, great. | ||
| But politics has nothing to do with his decision. | ||
| You know, his decision is about how do I make more money? | ||
| So someone sees you on TV and you're at the middle of a 15-minute hate ritual and they're like, let's look into that guy's hedge funds. | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's par for the course. | ||
| I think that if you are a bad guy in the newspaper, that for whatever reason, AGs or the Department of Justice says, the people want to see this guy go down. | ||
| And we've got a whole big book of laws that we can apply. | ||
| You've got to violate one of these things. | ||
| But bottom line, just to be totally clear on this, I guess we could look it up if we wanted. | ||
| Nobody lost money in this fraud that you committed. | ||
|
unidentified
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Correct. | |
| Highly unusual. | ||
| Never heard of a fraud like that. | ||
| It happens very, very rarely. | ||
| Like one out of a thousand or one out of five thousand. | ||
| And look, truth be told, I understand it. | ||
| If I said, Tucker, give me a million bucks. | ||
| I'm going to invest it because I'm a biotech genius. | ||
| And I went out to the casino and I said, you know, let me throw it all in red and see what happens. | ||
| And if I lost it all and I went back to you and said, Tucker, sorry, we lost our biotech investments in the work, that's still fraud. | ||
| But if I doubled the money and gave it back to you and said, my biotech investments are great, it's still fraud. | ||
| And I think it's wrong. | ||
| But in my case, I mean, I did what I was, you know, what I told people I would do. | ||
| And, you know, there was, there was. | ||
| Not anything there that... | ||
| I mean, the whole hedge fund community who has looked into this thinks this thing stinks to high heaven. | ||
| What did you think you were going to get? | ||
| I thought I'd get a light sentence because there were no damages. | ||
| And damages are the centerpiece of how you get sentenced. | ||
| There's actually a rule book, and it's a point system. | ||
| It's kind of absurd. | ||
| You get seven points off the bat for conviction. | ||
| But seven points is almost no time in prison, which is great. | ||
| So it's all right. | ||
| Give me the seven points. | ||
| But then on a sliding scale, there's a dollar amount that gives you more and more points. | ||
| So Sam Bankman, for example, his fraud amount is $10 billion. | ||
| They don't have a section for that. | ||
| It's like off the charts. | ||
| Mine was something like $7 or $8 million. | ||
| And there is a section for that. | ||
| And it gets you to about 40 years in prison. | ||
| 40 years? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And my calculation was 300 months or something like that plus. | ||
| You know, the judges pared that down to sort of say, okay, that's probably not what he deserves, but they would have been well within their right to do so. | ||
| And I'm very lucky that— But you think the prosecutor would have put you away for 40 years? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| They asked for at least 12, and they would have been just as happy. | ||
| What do they care? | ||
| Because it's a man's life? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think they should have—there's a term that they use called prosecutorial discretion. | ||
| And they said the weight of the government is so heavy, and that burden of proof that we learn in school that, oh, it's the government's burden, it's not a burden. | ||
| You know, it's a very easy thing to prosecute somebody. | ||
| It's 99.5% conviction. | ||
| So for them to put their finger on the scale and say, you're done and you're removed from society, it's very easy. | ||
| I happened to draw the best judge in that courtroom. | ||
| And it was like just a blessing, a lucky draw of a judge that happened to be very sympathetic and known for short sentences. | ||
| So you're from a working class immigrant family. | ||
| You got three siblings, two parents, close family sounds like. | ||
| What did they think of all this? | ||
| My parents defended me. | ||
| They sort of cautioned me to be less loud and less defiant. | ||
| Is that the first time they cautioned you that? | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| But you know, my parents are from a communist country and they fled America. | ||
| I'm sorry, they fled Albania to come to America and make it in the big city. | ||
| And I sort of said, well, you know, I'm not going to sort of like bow down to the government because it's... | ||
| That's not kind of why we came here. | ||
| And I think that, you know, again, what you get taught in school is that you're free to do and say as you wish. | ||
| And the government can't meddle in your life if they feel like it. | ||
| And, you know, I learned differently. | ||
| And I think, again, you know, I'm not the first one. | ||
| And I think the DOJ's prosecution of the former president just lays bare of the kind of fraud that the DOJ is, which is basically... | ||
| We'll prosecute anyone for anything. | ||
| And it doesn't make a difference whether you're guilty or not because it's a foregone conclusion that you are guilty. | ||
| And in fact, our conviction rates are higher than other banana republics. | ||
| You have a better chance of being acquitted in Russia than you do in America. | ||
| And we have 10% of our country has been to jail. | ||
| 1% is presently incarcerated. | ||
| 1% of the entire population? | ||
| Of the US, yeah. | ||
| Right now? | ||
| In jail right now. | ||
| It's a nutty thing. | ||
| And you never think it'll happen to you. | ||
| But as you start to look around, what the prison population is shifting towards is more political crime, more white collar crime, more things that aren't really crimes. | ||
| But for example, Dinesh D'Souza. | ||
| Less rapists, more securities, politically motivated securities. | ||
| Whatever it takes to sort of shift society and mold society into the way that folks want it to be molded to. | ||
| Do you really think that's happening? | ||
| I think it's sad but true. | ||
| I mean, the president is the best example. | ||
| I mean, you have four separate indictments. | ||
| Tucker, I met a lot of bad people in prison, mobsters, drug dealers, kingpins. | ||
| There is nobody I met that got four separate indictments from four separate divisions of the government. | ||
| That is like an all-time best-selling record. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Al Capone, John Gotti can't compete with that. | |
| President Trump is the biggest criminal, according to the government. | ||
| That ever existed. | ||
| It's so absurd. | ||
| John Gotti spent his life running my city, New York City, into the ground as the biggest criminal, the godfather of the Gambino crime family. | ||
| He got indicted four times. | ||
| Guess what? | ||
| It took him 50 years to accumulate that. | ||
| Four indictments. | ||
| Trump did it. | ||
| Trump did it in five minutes. | ||
| He didn't try and build a border wall or criticize NATO, did he? | ||
| That's true. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's true. | |
| Fair. | ||
| Fair. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm just trying to keep the crimes in perspective. | ||
| So, when you find out that you've been sentenced to seven years in prison, and you're a pretty young man at this point, what do you think? | ||
| Well, you know, I take it a step a few months before that, where I was on bail. | ||
| And happy-go-lucky, I was actually getting into the software business at the time. | ||
| And I figured, you know... | ||
| You're on bail and getting into the software business? | ||
| Yeah, I just, I was, you know... | ||
| I was starting up on a small effort to look and I needed to do something. | ||
| And, you know, I was expecting to go to prison, but I didn't expect to go for four years. | ||
| And I made a joke on social media about Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And all of a sudden I find myself in front of a judge and they're throwing me in prison. | ||
| What? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I said something stupid, snide. | ||
| It was a joke. | ||
| You know, as a comedian, not all your jokes land. | ||
| And I actually, one of the reasons I have a social media following is I think some people find my stuff funny. | ||
| You know, I try to poke fun at power and authority and, you know, all kinds of people who need to be taken down a peg. | ||
| And, you know, I try to do that. | ||
| And, you know, this joke fell flat. | ||
| It was some silly joke about Hillary Clinton's DNA. And it got taken the wrong way by actually a New Yorker reporter, kind of flagged it. | ||
| This guy named Ali, he sort of flagged it, basically took it to the government and said, look at this, arrest him. | ||
| And they did! | ||
| A New Yorker reporter didn't... | ||
| They're such monsters. | ||
| Yeah, they said this is a threat to Hillary Clinton. | ||
| I'm not threatening anybody. | ||
| What was the joke? | ||
| It was about if I can get a sample of her hair, I can determine through DNA analysis, one of my expertises, that she may or may not be a lizard person, which is a completely, you know, it's a joke, obviously. | ||
| You know, she's a human being. | ||
| But, you know... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there's some debate, but I mean, but it was a joke. | |
| It's clear it was a joke. | ||
| I don't want Hillary Clinton's hair. | ||
| I'm not going to do a DNA analysis. | ||
| No, you don't want her hair. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| It's all a joke. | ||
| And, you know, they said this is a serious threat to her safety. | ||
| The New Yorker reporter said this. | ||
| And the government took it and ran with it. | ||
| The judge said, you know what? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Who would find this funny? | ||
| And my lawyer's sort of sitting there saying, about half of America thinks this shit's funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this, you know, very liberal judge from Berkeley. | ||
| Great, great judge, by the way. | ||
| But she said, you know, this is a bona fide threat to her safety. | ||
| Your bail's done. | ||
| Get out of here. | ||
| You got sent to prison for, I guess you're not the first. | ||
| I mean, we just interviewed someone else. | ||
| Who's about to be sent to prison for the same? | ||
| But I guess you can't make fun of Hillary Clinton. | ||
| There are limits to the First Amendment. | ||
| There are very strong limits, and I think that's another thing I learned, is that the First Amendment is this very qualified right. | ||
| I mean, it's extremely qualified. | ||
| And I had to learn that the hard way, and I became a constitutional law scholar trying to understand why I can't make a joke. | ||
| And it was frustrating. | ||
| I think that making a joke about Trump would not have reached the radar. | ||
| You think? | ||
| I mean, I just would have not been, you know, that interesting. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So you went back to jail for how long? | ||
| That's the... | ||
| So basically from there, I had to stay until my sentence. | ||
| My sentence was... | ||
| How long were you in jail before trial? | ||
| No, I was already convicted. | ||
| So I was waiting sentencing. | ||
| And when it came time for sentencing, you know, I don't think that helped that, you know, she had to throw me in for this joke. | ||
| You know, and it probably... | ||
| My lawyer says it'd cost you at least another year or two because it's not a great thing. | ||
| Did you ever reach out to the New Yorker reporter and say, hey, thanks for throwing me in prison for a joke? | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| That person who does a lot of takedowns, that was their shtick. | ||
| They write these big takedown pieces of, this person's awful. | ||
| Well, I feel bad for that person, actually. | ||
| I'm Catholic. | ||
| And I look at that person and say, This is a sad existence. | ||
| And that person actually ended up, over the years, becoming depressed and suicidal and said, I don't want to live like this, tearing people down for a living. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, it was fascinating to see. | ||
| My girlfriend, who's the reporter who covered my case, sent me in documents that… This guy was literally on Twitter saying, I'm suicidal. | ||
| I want to take my own life. | ||
| And I look back and I said, those things aren't an accident. | ||
| I mean, if you spend your life digging up dirt on people, trying to ruin their lives, and, you know, it must be a miserable existence. | ||
| That's, wow, what a wonderful take on that. | ||
| Because I think you're absolutely right. | ||
| But you can see past your own bitterness to... | ||
| You have to be able to turn the other cheek. | ||
| I mean, I don't even blame the government, to be honest. | ||
| I mean, it's something where, you know, I've had a great life. | ||
| I'm halfway done. | ||
| And I'm going to keep... | ||
| Doing great things. | ||
| And, you know, nobody can get you down. | ||
| I mean, for me, the hallmark of a good entrepreneur is persistence and perseverance. | ||
| Okay, four and a half years in prison. | ||
| Okay, so what was, I mean, that would be enough to get most people down, in fact, to drive them into insanity. | ||
| I had a friend kill himself before. | ||
| He was a hedge fund guy in the same field as me. | ||
| And he insider traded. | ||
| And he got arrested on Monday. | ||
| He killed himself on Tuesday. | ||
| And it's not easy. | ||
| But if you're a real entrepreneur, jail is nothing. | ||
| You know, the ups and downs of your own company, you know, surviving and fighting and a customer wants to pull out or there's going to be a hit piece on you in Bloomberg or John is leaving to go to a competitor. | ||
| This stuff will make your stomach turn. | ||
| And jail is like a break from reality. | ||
| You know, it's a four years where you're just on the bench. | ||
| You know, you're in the penalty box. | ||
| Were you afraid going in? | ||
| You know, I of course didn't know what was going to happen, but I talked to enough people who said, you know, it's the kind of place where if you want to fight, you'll find a fight. | ||
| And if you want to be cool, you'll be cool. | ||
| And I think the number one thing you don't want to be in prison is, I learned this on the spot, is you don't want to be an informant and you don't want to be a child sex offender. | ||
| Those are the two big kind of red flags. | ||
| And most of the negative attention kind of goes to those two people. | ||
| As somebody who went to trial, which almost nobody does because it's a foregone conclusion what the verdict is. | ||
| You're guilty. | ||
| I mean, there's nobody that's found innocent. | ||
| And again, my pride for the five charges that was found not guilty of means that the US government made a huge flagrant error that they accused me of five crimes that I didn't do. | ||
| And a jury of my peers determined that that was true. | ||
| And I take a huge amount of pride in that. | ||
| But anyway, You know, jail is not nearly as a violent place as you might imagine. | ||
| People just want to go home. | ||
| It's warehouses of human beings that, you know, by far and large, you know, probably have gotten over-sentenced for what they've done. | ||
| You know, I'm not saying that prison shouldn't exist. | ||
| It should. | ||
| It's necessary. | ||
| But, you know, it's fairly inhumane, you know, in my opinion. | ||
| And the idea that all these white-collar folks should get 20 years or 30 years or 40 years, I think it's wrong. | ||
| I did it with a smile on my face. | ||
| But it's not something that I think is really great or fair for a lot of folks. | ||
| The whole time you had a smile on your face? | ||
| Not every second was great. | ||
| In federal prison? | ||
| No! | ||
| But you have to, like I said, growing up in a bad neighborhood in New York, fighting for relevance and success on Wall Street, starting a company, having all the... | ||
| Successes and setbacks of that, it pales in comparison. | ||
| I mean, jail is, you know, you're sitting around and reading. | ||
| You know, it's not something where… How much did you read? | ||
| I read hundreds of books in prison. | ||
| Yeah, it was… Honestly, you know, there's a Twilight… The old show… Twilight Zone? | ||
| The Twilight Zone. | ||
| There's a skit called Time Enough Forever or something like that. | ||
| And the guy goes down to the basement in the library. | ||
| And when he comes up, there's a nuclear bomb. | ||
| And the whole world's dead but him. | ||
| He was the only guy in a fallout shelter. | ||
| And he's in the library and he says, this is the greatest thing ever because I can read for the rest of my life and no one will ever bother me. | ||
| And that's happened to him. | ||
| And so I think that there's a paradox of if you took your cell phone away and said, you can't have that. | ||
| And then you took all the other kind of BS that you have to do all day, whether it's meetings or should we go to this restaurant or that restaurant or can I get an Uber or this, you have none of that. | ||
| You wipe your slate clean and here's just a stack of books. | ||
| It's actually awesome. | ||
| There are bad parts of prison. | ||
| It's not fun being there. | ||
| But if you just kind of zoom in on that, there's a real big civil lining there. | ||
| What are the people like? | ||
| The people are not great. | ||
| But you can find humanity in anybody. | ||
| And I think that's one of the big lessons for me from prison is Sam Bankman's going to prison most likely for a long time. | ||
| Sam's from an upper class family in California. | ||
| He's never been around minorities, let alone inner city minorities who have a very different way of life. | ||
| And when he asked me for advice about this, I said, I think you should learn rap music. | ||
| I think you should learn slang. | ||
| I think you should invent a backstory for yourself where you're not Sam Bankman, the businessman, but you're Sam Bankman from Oakland. | ||
| Wait, so he asked you your advice on prison? | ||
| Something like that, yeah. | ||
| One of the questions was, is there internet in prison? | ||
| I said, no, Sam, there's no internet in prison. | ||
| If you can smuggle a cell phone in through somebody's butt or something, maybe you can find a way to get some cell phone reception. | ||
| But no, there's no internet kiosk where you can go play video games. | ||
| It's a rough place. | ||
| And I think one of the reasons I was successful in prison, I have many friends from there, is that I understand. | ||
| I grew up in Brooklyn, melting pot. | ||
| I understand minorities. | ||
| A lot in common. | ||
| And commonality is humanity. | ||
| And, you know, all of the trials and tribulations they would face with their families, I'd face with mine, that commonality existed. | ||
| No, they didn't go to college most of the time. | ||
| No, we had different levels of education. | ||
| But there were a lot of smart people there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I mean, you know, the circumstances that people can fall into making a left turn or a right turn in life, you know, you can make mistakes. | ||
| There are a number of people who have, who have been very successful. | ||
| Michael Milken, you know, obviously people like, you know, Charles Kushner. | ||
| You know, there are folks who have gone to prison and made a mistake in life. | ||
| And the young men, mostly, who get locked up, who are mostly black or Hispanic. | ||
| It is a sad thing to see. | ||
| And I don't know what the solution is. | ||
| But I do see that, you know, a good 10-20% of them are really good eggs that kind of just... | ||
| You know, are sorry for what they did. | ||
| They felt like they had no choice. | ||
| Maybe that's right. | ||
| Maybe that's wrong. | ||
| But, you know, there are people that probably do deserve a second chance. | ||
| And unfortunately, society, you know, every time I read a story about me, it's convicted felon Martin Shkreli. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I'm saying, why don't you say U.S. patent owner Martin Shkreli or billion-dollar, you know, company starter Martin Shkreli? | ||
| Like, where's that? | ||
| Why is it convicted felon? | ||
| And again, I'm reading the media, so we know why. | ||
| Were there still mob guys in prison when you were there? | ||
| Yeah, in fact, one of my roommates early on was an 80-year-old mob boss, and he was a huge fan of yours. | ||
| I'm flattered. | ||
| And, you know, he was an interesting fellow. | ||
| But yeah, the mob... | ||
| But he was literally like a mafia boss in his 80s. | ||
| It was like out of a movie. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| Did you make spaghetti sauce together? | ||
| Believe it or not, yes. | ||
| Did you really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How was it? | ||
| One of the finest things you could get is we would somehow pay a guy to pay a guy to get spaghetti in. | ||
| And then we'd pay a guy to pay a guy to get the sauce in. | ||
| And we'd kind of have a lookout to make sure that the police, the guards, didn't see what we were doing. | ||
| Now, some of the guards saw, but they kind of liked the mob guys. | ||
| So they were like, yeah, you guys are all right. | ||
| Because they felt like they were in a movie or something like that. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| And like I said, there were people. | ||
| One of the things is when you're faced with four years of time, everybody's bored. | ||
| So we're trying to make something interesting and exciting. | ||
| So we're telling war stories. | ||
| We're playing cards. | ||
| We're playing chess. | ||
| We're doing whatever we can to pass the time. | ||
| And everyone says, oh, you lost four years of life. | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| I experienced four fascinating years of life. | ||
| And I learned more than I have. | ||
| Like I said, I read about four or five hundred books in prison. | ||
| I've read one book since I left prison. | ||
| One. | ||
| And I think, you know, the friends that I have that read a lot, I know a friend of mine that reads and writes a review of every book he reads. | ||
| He's on 23 for this year. | ||
| The year's almost over. | ||
| You know, and he's a voracious reader. | ||
| You know, most people don't have the time these days to read an entire book from start to finish. | ||
| And, you know, the joy of being able to do that is something that I really, you know, when I was younger, I did a lot of. | ||
| And I realized in the business world, you got meeting to meeting to meeting before you know it. | ||
| We're in bed doing texts, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you're working all the time. | ||
| And where do you have the time to read a book? | ||
| And God forbid you read a fiction. | ||
| That's a waste of time. | ||
| You might read a business book to somehow get ahead in business, but to read a fiction book or a history book or something like that that's really good stuff, there's no time in that for modern society. | ||
| I mean, we look at TikTok for three seconds and the company's monetizing and studying how can we get them to four? | ||
| So the idea of you reading a book for just sitting there in a lazy chair reading a book for hours and hours, it doesn't compute with modern reality. | ||
| How did you keep the self-pity at bay? | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| I looked around at guys who dropped out of college or dropped out of high school or sometimes middle school and were given a gun and said, go sell drugs. | ||
| And I said, you know, am I like one of these guys? | ||
| Does this make sense to me? | ||
| And I think that humility helped a lot, you know, to say, well, you know, we all kind of have this common denominator of, you know, we pissed somebody off and we did something wrong and we're in here. | ||
| And of course, I felt like I didn't do anything wrong. | ||
| I pled not guilty. | ||
| I went to trial. | ||
| I fought and fought and fought. | ||
| I appealed, appealed, appealed. | ||
| And I still believe, you know, I'm not guilty. | ||
| But, you know, I kind of just realized that, again, Some people get hit by cars. | ||
| Some people die of rare diseases. | ||
| I met some of the worst, sickest people in the world in pharma and tried to make medicine for them. | ||
| And raising prices on drugs is one way to afford the ability to do that. | ||
| A lot of people said, why don't you just go to Wall Street? | ||
| Well, I know a lot about that and it's not that easy. | ||
| There's another set of masters you have to kiss the ring to if you want to do that. | ||
| And a lot of that's about what school did you go to and all the check boxes that you have to check. | ||
| And I didn't check a lot of those boxes. | ||
| So I needed to do it the old-fashioned way, which is revenue and profits, which is a good way to run a business. | ||
| And the other guys get to raise money at any valuation, any amount of money, and that's sort of a lottery ticket. | ||
| I didn't want my company to be a lottery ticket. | ||
| I wanted it to be a substantive company that had products. | ||
| Costs and earnings. | ||
| So anyway, I think I'm very lucky. | ||
| I think a lot of people have this woe is me attitude at every wrong thing that happens to them. | ||
| And I think that life's tough. | ||
| You've got to fight. | ||
| And it's really just an attitude that I've had since I was a little kid. | ||
| If you're going to be a crybaby about every little bad thing that happens to you, then you're going to be a miserable person. | ||
| Silver lining every time, you can end up being actually a terribly happy person. | ||
| I think one of the things the media hated the most about me and the government is that they couldn't get me down. | ||
| No matter what they could do, throw at me, it was, okay, you know, life goes on, you know, I'll turn the page, you know, and I think that That bravery and that courage is something that, again, turned out to be a blessing that coming out of prison, I was inundated with messages and emails from some of the biggest business people in the country saying, we stand by you, we support you for being one of the few guys to not cave in the face of all that adversity. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| What's it like getting out of prison? | ||
| It's not just one day you get dropped off at the bus terminal, correct? | ||
| Yeah, it's a little surreal. | ||
| It's hard to explain. | ||
| It's like this continuum of incarceration. | ||
| It doesn't end. | ||
| So what's ironic about these four and a half years is they start well before and they end well after. | ||
| So it's this really long-term period. | ||
| Some people have 10 years of probation or more and some people have lifetime probation. | ||
| So it can be this like semi-incarcerated state where you really can't do very much. | ||
| For example, you lose your right to a firearm. | ||
| You lose your right to vote. | ||
| You lose your right to all these things. | ||
| And if you do get incarcerated again, the way the system is set up is you're going away for a long time. | ||
| There's this criminal history concept. | ||
| And the point system I mentioned, it kind of two Xs if you go again for a second time. | ||
| If you go for a third time, they call you a career criminal. | ||
| And, you know, again, by Trump's standards, he's literally a career criminal at this point. | ||
| You know, it's a really insane kind of concept, but it is the way the system works. | ||
| How is Trump seen in prison? | ||
| I think he'd be liked if he went. | ||
| One of my top defense attorneys thinks he's going. | ||
| I think he will be remanded. | ||
| In other words, have his bail revoked. | ||
| I think that he's liked in prison quite a bit. | ||
| A lot of folks in prison, for example, especially the old timers who have been there forever, he passed something called the First Step Act. | ||
| Which I think is a brilliant piece of legislation. | ||
| And it was mostly, I think, shepherded by Kushners who pushed it very hard because their father went to prison. | ||
| And what the First Act does is it basically lets you lessen your sentence if you go through this rehabilitative process. | ||
| And I did some of those programs. | ||
| And I have to say that they actually are useful. | ||
| They kind of help reorient your goals and meaning in life. | ||
| And they really make you confront like, well, why am I trying to just grow this stack of money to the ceiling when What about my kids? | ||
| What about, you know, what really makes me happy? | ||
| And this program is fantastic, and it could cut your sentence by a third. | ||
| And guess who didn't want this to happen? | ||
| Virtually everyone in Congress. | ||
| He said, you know, this is a bad idea. | ||
| And he got it passed by the skin of his teeth. | ||
| So when people talk politics, like what percent, I'm just interested, of the guys you served with? | ||
| Where were they on the spectrum? | ||
| Mostly right. | ||
| Mostly right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They were mostly apolitical before Trump showed up. | ||
| And I think you'd hear some jokes like, well, Trump's a lot like me. | ||
| You know, he's a gangster and he does what he wants, says what he wants, and that's what I do. | ||
| And, you know, that's like an unhealthy kind of attitude, obviously. | ||
| But a lot of guys sort of said, that's my role model. | ||
| You know, he does what he wants, says what he doesn't care about the rules. | ||
| He throws caution in the wind. | ||
| He's that guy that I respect. | ||
| That's what I am in my dilapidated neighborhood. | ||
| So, you know, he's that for America. | ||
| And that's, you know, again, I don't agree with that. | ||
| I think that's awful. | ||
| But I also think that they saw what the average American, I think, sees, which is a guy that obviously is an outsider to politics, at least. | ||
| You know, I would say that he tells it like it is. | ||
| We know that he doesn't always tell like it is. | ||
| He does lie sometimes. | ||
| But I think that he's more or less loved in prison because of that mix of he's got this almost criminality to him where he flouts the law. | ||
| And according to the DOJ, he's flouted the law. | ||
| But to a lot of people, they interpret that as that's not criminality. | ||
| That's just a guy that has conviction that does what he wants and kind of lets the aftermath kind of... | ||
| He's brave. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And I think that's what... | ||
| Is appreciated. | ||
| That he's also not a double talker that kind of will spin you. | ||
| He wears his incoherence on his sleeve. | ||
| That he's just sort of like direct and he'll fib and he'll do things like that. | ||
| But you kind of know what you're going to get from him. | ||
| He's kind of consistent. | ||
| And I think that people like that. | ||
| Obama, remember, a good chunk of the prison population is black, somewhere between a third and a half. | ||
| When asked guys about this, they said, Obama didn't do anything for us. | ||
| This is supposed to be our black president. | ||
| We're overrepresented in this community. | ||
| They got nothing in common with Obama. | ||
| No. | ||
| No. | ||
| So you mentioned you talked to Sam Bankman-Fried about prison. | ||
| I don't want to let that go. | ||
| Let's back up. | ||
| How do you know Sam Bankman-Fried? | ||
| He's a young entrepreneur who romanced the Clintons, romanced the world. | ||
| He is friends with Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton. | ||
| He was a big donor of Democrats. | ||
| And he was also a guy at a very young age who had a very big company. | ||
| And I know what that's like. | ||
| And he had a much bigger company, 10 times bigger than mine, but not 1,000 times bigger. | ||
| We're in the same universe. | ||
| And he was just kicking butt. | ||
| He was on the cover of Forbes and was all a lie. | ||
| And he actually didn't succeed at all, which is ironic. | ||
| He represented this group called Effective Altruism, which has sort of took Silicon Valley by storm. | ||
| And me and a few other people created a countergroup called Effective Accelerationism, where we kind of said, we're the diametrical opposite of you guys, and you guys are going to ruin our country if you keep sort of talking about what you're talking about. | ||
| And EA, Effective Altruism, has basically died with Sam. | ||
| You know, he was laid bare as a fraud, and I think that whole movement has been laid bare as a fraud. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| It doesn't entail actually helping anyone around you. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| You don't have to tip at dinner or pay your housekeeper a bonus, right? | ||
| What's really funny about effective altruism is that it's a movement for people who can afford to be altruistic. | ||
| It only counts if you're a billionaire. | ||
| The most selfish people in the world seem to love it, I have noticed. | ||
| But you know him because you disagreed on that? | ||
| No, I started to get to know him when his company was succeeding and then I really started to get to know him when he got in trouble. | ||
| And I think that it's just a sort of sorry situation. | ||
| I kind of went through it too where you just can't believe that this has happened to you and you're in denial that they're going to win. | ||
| There's nothing you can do about it. | ||
| And this is a guy who's gone to every math competition, every MIT thing and he's been told he's special his whole life and he's in this spider's web. | ||
| Of the DOJ indictment where it doesn't matter how smart you are. | ||
| You cannot think your way out of this. | ||
| You're going to jail. | ||
| And the one or two cases where you somehow were acquitted was a huge mistake for the DOJ and they went back and studied how that won't happen again. | ||
| It's a system designed to incarcerate you. | ||
| And he's been defiant. | ||
| He went on a speaking tour. | ||
| He went on all the stuff. | ||
| They had to lock him down to his house on house arrest because he was talking too much. | ||
| And they finally said, enough. | ||
| We're tossing it in. | ||
| And it's hard enough to be indicted. | ||
| It's harder to fight it from inside a jail cell. | ||
| It's basically impossible. | ||
| I always wonder this. | ||
| And I've asked friends of mine who are going to prison this question. | ||
| I never get a good answer. | ||
| You think you're being unfairly treated. | ||
| Most people being prosecuted think they're being unfairly treated. | ||
| Some are. | ||
| Some aren't. | ||
| But they all think they are. | ||
| And you think you could spend the rest of your life in prison. | ||
| He definitely could spend the rest of it. | ||
| Why don't you flee? | ||
| It's a funny question. | ||
|
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No one flees. | |
| No one flees. | ||
| There was a guy who fled and he actually fled successfully and he came back. | ||
| My lawyer was his lawyer. | ||
| And he came back and he said, look, the thing you were charged for isn't illegal anymore. | ||
| Can my guy come back to the US? And Judd said, absolutely not. | ||
| If he comes back here, he's got to do another three or four years. | ||
| And they made an agreement to do that. | ||
| But it's hard if you're Sam Bankman with his face to sort of flee and find a place to flee. | ||
| And they tend to find you. | ||
| The government of the US stretches to almost every other country in the world. | ||
| They have agreements to send you back, extract you. | ||
| Only three countries don't have those agreements. | ||
| So you better be ready to be Edward Snowden, in essence, if you want to sort of have a way to flee and survive. | ||
| And it's just one of these things where… You know, as soon as there's a warrant or something like that, they pay pretty close attention to you. | ||
| Fleeing, you know, is also kind of, I think to a lot of folks, a bit of a cowardly kind of way out. | ||
| You know, I think that arrogance that comes with, you know, success in life leads over to the system. | ||
| I can beat this. | ||
| I can find a way to get out of this. | ||
| And there is no way out of it. | ||
| And I think he's learning that the hard way right now. | ||
| So just to wrap up on this, you think there is no way out of it for Sam Bankman Freed? | ||
| There's no way out of it for anyone. | ||
| The justice system is a joke. | ||
| It's a performative act. | ||
| It is no different from a show trial in communist China. | ||
| Find me one case where somebody's been acquitted at federal court. | ||
| It is the outlier of outliers. | ||
| There's thousands of these indictments every year, tens of thousands, and there's no acquittals. | ||
| You might get acquitted on a charge, as I did, or many of them, but they throw enough spaghetti at them. | ||
| Why does nobody say this? | ||
| There are very few trials, as you point out. | ||
| Most people just plead out. | ||
| But when there is a trial, the media acts as if it's like a cliffhanger. | ||
| It's really funny because it's a foregone conclusion. | ||
| And I think that there's a mix of things that make these trials unfair. | ||
| One of them is this putative burden on the government, which doesn't exist. | ||
| So they get to go first. | ||
| And if you know anything about behavioral economics or Daniel Kahneman, if you have to sit through five weeks of why this guy's a bad guy... | ||
| And after five weeks, he gets to speak his piece. | ||
| It's really unfair because the anchoring principle of, I've just heard this guy be back. | ||
| When did you stop beating your wife? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They've already framed it. | ||
| It's a framing problem, and it's just impossible to beat that. | ||
| One of Sam's jurors was sleeping, which is the death knell. | ||
| You know, if a juror starts to go to sleep, he's made up his mind you're going to jail. | ||
| And it's so hard to beat the government at trial that it's virtually impossible. | ||
| Again, you have better odds in other countries, which you wouldn't expect. | ||
| So I think Sam's in it pretty deep. | ||
| A lot of people think he should go to jail for life or something like that. | ||
| And I think he's not as maybe as culpable as some people think, but he's certainly culpable. | ||
| And I think there's a fair sentence for him. | ||
| I can't say exactly what it is, but he's going to get something. | ||
| What are you going to do next? | ||
| So I have a software company. | ||
| And again, I'm just... | ||
| Brush all this off. | ||
| I think that I'm very lucky that unlike Sam, I've actually built things successfully and I've had a track record. | ||
| This is a black eye to say the least, but it's also something I can move on from. | ||
| I meet with investors every day and to the extent they... | ||
| I don't necessarily like our company. | ||
| It's not because of this. | ||
| It's because of, oh, your product doesn't make sense to us or something like that. | ||
| I never hear, well, we're not going to invest in a felon. | ||
| I don't hear that, which is awesome. | ||
| So I think, again, I'm blessed to have a second chance. | ||
| And I think that's the power of kind of like the way media works now is that if this was 20 years ago, I had no chance. | ||
| A librarian or something at best. | ||
| And I'd probably have to go from library to library. | ||
| An itinerant librarian! | ||
| The most kind! | ||
| Once they found out I was who I was, you know, they'd be like, yeah, get out of here. | ||
| You can't be here. | ||
| You know, so I'd be pumping gas somewhere. | ||
| And I think thanks to social media, you can actually speak your mind. | ||
| So what I did is I started live streaming and I said, you know, if you think I'm a bad guy, see how I live my life. | ||
| And I started teaching chemistry and finance on YouTube and folks watched it and I said, this guy's a bad guy, you know, he's... | ||
| He's a normal guy. | ||
| And being able to show who you are to the world is one of the small gifts of this new technological age. | ||
| There's a lot of drawbacks too, but that's one of the small gifts is that you can set the story straight and NBC is not setting the story for you. | ||
| In the old days, you'd go on TV and say, hi, mom. | ||
| Because it was like this one opportunity to say, I'm on TV. Isn't this amazing? | ||
| And now there is no TV show you can pay me to go on. | ||
| Because it's... | ||
| Irrelevant. | ||
| I tried that. | ||
| It's irrelevant. | ||
| They typecast you however they want. | ||
| You're their product. | ||
| Why would I let you make advertising revenue off of me? | ||
| Am I getting a cut of this? | ||
| It's sort of an absurd concept that you're going to interview me for free and then you're going to go sell Toyota a bunch of ads. | ||
| You know, and I'm fodder for your business. | ||
| And not only that, but whatever I'm going to say, you're going to twist so that Toyota pays you the most amount of money to sell those ads. | ||
| And it's kind of an absurdity. | ||
| In the past, we viewed this as something that was attractive because it was the only way for millions of people to know who you are. | ||
| This is my last question, but you're still off Twitter, off X, distressingly. | ||
| Hope that'll change. | ||
| How did she get booted off? | ||
| Twitter in the first place. | ||
| It's an irony that ties together a lot of commonalities here. | ||
| So I got into a big fight with Lauren Duca. | ||
| I actually thought she was... | ||
| What's Lauren Duca? | ||
| Lauren Duca is a person who was a Teen Vogue writer. | ||
| And she actually appeared on one of your shows. | ||
| And she rocketed to fame because of that. | ||
| And I was needling her a bit and she was needling me. | ||
| In fact, she used my name first. | ||
| And I said, well, what do you do? | ||
| You're just a Teen Vogue reporter. | ||
| And we just kept going back and forth. | ||
| And I actually kind of thought that she was sort of enjoying this, raising her profile, raising my profile. | ||
| It was this kind of thing that happens in media that wasn't so bad. | ||
| And one day, I guess I took it too far, and she complained, and I was banned off to her. | ||
| What did she say? | ||
| I made a valentine of her. | ||
| I took a photo of her and her husband, and I cheekily kind of Photoshopped my face on his face. | ||
| And I invited her to the inauguration and I said, well, won't you be my date? | ||
| And she was Trump's biggest enemy, one of many sort of left-wing people that hated Trump. | ||
| So she found the whole idea very disgusting. | ||
| And she says, how is this allowed? | ||
| It's Photoshop. | ||
| It's not that big a deal. | ||
| What allowed? | ||
| Inviting her to the inauguration? | ||
| Yeah, it was seen to her as this deep harassment. | ||
| So she called for your censorship? | ||
| She called for my censorship. | ||
| I've been permanently banned ever since. | ||
| I've tried to make burner accounts that... | ||
| Live anywhere from a day to a couple months and then they get banned again. | ||
| And it's tough because free speech is important. | ||
| And the reason this is extremely funny is she got a letter from Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And the letter she posted online, she said, and she references pretty clearly you and me. | ||
| She says, I know what it's like, dear Lauren, I know what it's like when powerful men gang up on you. | ||
| It was a clear allusion to yourself and myself. | ||
| And I just want you to keep going and keep fighting the power and this and that. | ||
| And lo and behold, I go to prison. | ||
| Entitled white ladies unite! | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| It was something else. | ||
| So, interestingly, she becomes a lesbian. | ||
| She decides that she doesn't want a husband after all, whether it's me or anybody else. | ||
| I bet she's not enjoying it. | ||
| I'm just throwing that out there. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| I bet you 20 bucks she's not enjoying it. | ||
| She ended up being kind of... | ||
| It's fairly miserable and withdrawing from public society. | ||
| Ended up being miserable? | ||
| Continued being miserable. | ||
| And she wrote on X, her Twitter, now X, she wrote that they never should have banned Martin. | ||
| She said that? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, good for her. | ||
| And she said, I wish they would have banned me instead. | ||
| And part of this is this left reaction to X of now being a cesspool of right-wing conspiracies now that there's free speech. | ||
| A lot of people... | ||
| In her shoes are saying, oh, this is a bad place to be, you know, and they should ban me because I don't want to be here at night, you know, etc. | ||
| You know, this is a place now for people like Martin and maybe like you. | ||
| So, you know, it's a funny world. | ||
| But I think Lauren, again, seven years banned. | ||
| I spent more time in real jail, in Twitter jail than real jail. | ||
| And it's, you know, I'm begging for clemency. | ||
| Which is better? | ||
| I was really upset about Twitter jail. | ||
| You seem to have enjoyed the penitentiary. | ||
| Well, no, I didn't go to penitentiary. | ||
| That's the worst prison system. | ||
| So I went to a low security, which is the second worst. | ||
| These are distinctions a lot of us in the outside world don't understand. | ||
| The penitentiary is where- People get raped, killed, you know, where you have to become a white supremacist, where, you know, that kind of world is a very dark world. | ||
| But that's for people who get life sentences or things like that. | ||
| And Ross Ulbrook, sadly, is this, you know, skinny, nerdy computer programmer who's in that world, in that milieu. | ||
| And imagine Sam Bankman, who's, you know, if Ross isn't built for pros and cons, Sam is, you know, this marshmallow guy. | ||
| What gang do you think he'll join? | ||
| He's going to have to become Aryan Brotherhood, which is going to be hard because his name is Sam Bankman Freed and he's Jewish. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, he either can pretend he's not and try that. | ||
| I mean, he's screwed. | ||
| You know, this is going to be tough for him. | ||
| Learn Spanish. | ||
| Join the Hispanic gang. | ||
| That's not a bad idea. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Martin Scrawley, I just think you were the most interesting approach to life and the most interesting life. | ||
| And so I'm grateful that you spent this time with us. |
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