March 6, 2025 - The Tucker Carlson Show
43:15
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| 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 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? | ||
| 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 and vans. | ||
| You know, I'd 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 person. | ||
| I read books. | ||
| I've started reading novels again. | ||
| I play some chess. | ||
| And I work on my legal case to the extent I can. | ||
| 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 gotta 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. | ||
| I'll just say that. | ||
| Call me liberal. | ||
| But you... | ||
| 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 effective at communicating, especially when the crisis first hit. | ||
| And, you know, 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 my mind was racing because there were a billion things to keep track of. | ||
| I go on to have an interview, but, you know, 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, you know, pleasure or leisure, and it's more from a perspective of productivity and ability to have impact in the world. | ||
| You know, from that perspective, it's so hard to do anything when you don't have the digital world. | ||
| So, like, have you made friends there? | ||
| Are you hanging with Diddy? | ||
| I think he's in there with you. | ||
| He is. | ||
| He is. | ||
| And it's, I don't know, you know, he's been kind. | ||
| I've made some friends. | ||
| 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 a legend. | ||
| So what's Diddy like? | ||
| Obviously, I've only seen one piece of him, which is Diddy in prison. | ||
| And he's been kind to people in the unit. | ||
| He's been kind to me. | ||
| It's a position no one wants to be in. | ||
| Obviously, he doesn'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 are around us on the inside rather than who we are on the outside. | ||
| Oh, I'm sure. | ||
| And, I mean, you're two of the most famous prisoners in the world in the same unit. | ||
| What do the armed robbers think? | ||
| Well, it's a really interesting question. | ||
| And, of course, some of them are. | ||
| 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... | ||
|
unidentified
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It shocked me the first time I heard that. | |
| Right? | ||
| It makes sense. | ||
| Their perspective, but, like, boys, I don't know how I think about prison. | ||
| 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's all you can do sometimes. | ||
| You know, there's no better alternative. | ||
| They're good at chess. | ||
| That's one thing I learned. | ||
| Former armed robbers who don't speak English and probably didn't graduate middle school, a surprising number of them are fairly good at chess. | ||
| I'm not saying they're grandmasters, but I lose games to them all the time. | ||
| I was not expecting that. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's so interesting. | ||
| How 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. | ||
| 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 realized 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 of extremely stupid people who've gotten rich in finance. | ||
| They 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 former life, and there are a variety of people there. | ||
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| So, I mean, big picture, without getting into 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. | ||
| But, you know, one fact that might be relevant is, you know, in 2020, I was center-left and I gave to Biden's campaign. | ||
| 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 Why were you shocked? | ||
| I know you spent a lot of time in D.C. There are pictures of you with everyone. | ||
| 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 he'd go to Gensler to register. | ||
| Say, hey, you know, we'd love to register. | ||
| Alfie 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. | ||
| You know, they basically failed to register a single person ever. | ||
| That was like one pretty disturbing thing that I saw. | ||
|
unidentified
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And, you know, 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 was his goal? | ||
| It's a really good question. | ||
| And, again, I'm not in his brain. | ||
| But here are some impressions I had. | ||
| You know, he really liked being in the center of things. | ||
| Power. | ||
| Everyone likes that. | ||
| Most people. | ||
| He's no exception. | ||
| Part of this is a turf war. | ||
| He wanted his agency to get more power, even if he didn't want to do anything with it except block industries. | ||
| Why did he make everyone register with him while he loses power otherwise, even if he didn't know what to do with them? | ||
| There are lots of stories about him being very politically ambitious and feeling like if he could get on CNBC enough, make a big enough stink about things, raise his profile that maybe be Treasury Secretary, something like that in the future. | ||
| I mean, he was remarkably successful. | ||
| 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-advancement. | ||
| 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 accurate 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? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| What do you think of the future of... | ||
| 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 look at what the Trump administration said 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, you know, When rubber 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 timescales 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. | ||
| 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, ten 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 Well, | ||
| it's an interesting question. | ||
| And there are a lot of degrees here about the level of oversight and 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 it anymore. | ||
| 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 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... | ||
| 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? | ||
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| 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. | ||
| Today, it would have about $15 billion of liabilities and about $93 billion of assets. | ||
| So the answer should be, in theory, 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. | ||
| That's not how things worked out. | ||
| And instead, it all got broiled up in a bankruptcy where the assets were dissipated incredibly quickly by those controlling it. | ||
| They're siphoned off, 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, you know, 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 know, being honest. | ||
| Yeah, 10 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 that you saw, or at least a higher fraction of them, were, well, different people use different words for it, but Silk Road. | ||
| 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, there's still some, but it's not 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 it, that you 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, like, 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. | ||
| 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, it's way more virtuous to help your wife, girlfriend, mother, daughter, brother, college roommate than it is to help 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 mistake 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 and 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 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, people shifted from Harvard to go hand out these water pumps no one wants. | ||
| And, you know, there's like example after example of this going awry. | ||
| Whereas obviously, 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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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 at home. | ||
| You look at the scale of resources that would be required to many of these 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. | ||
| No, I mean, that's demonstrably 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 if I know my cousin well, and I know how to solve his problem because I'm his cousin, then absolutely, 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. | ||
| And 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 saving probably hundreds of thousands of lives a year right now for thousands of dollars per life on average, which is 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. | ||
| 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's tomorrow. | ||
| So as of right now, I am 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 will 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 to my age, so to speak. | ||
| You know, then the answer is in my late 40s. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Could you handle that? | ||
| Sorry, what I said was wrong. | ||
| I misspoke. | ||
| If you had my prison sentence my age at the late 50s, if you include all of the possible decreases, it might be the late 40s. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| 25 to my 32 years when I was convicted, and that gets you an answer of maybe. | ||
| So, I mean, it strikes me there's a kind of weird... | ||
| 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? | ||
| You know, it's whatever people have. | ||
| And, you know, muffins, like these little plastic-wrapped... | ||
| You go to, 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, imagine one of those. | ||
| That's, like, standard... | ||
| Is that a packet of ramen soup or a kind of disgusting-looking little foil package of... | ||
| Fish and 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. | ||
| 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 $5. | ||
| Because if you wanted to do a $200 transaction in muffins, it doesn't work physically. | ||
| It's unwieldy, yeah. | ||
| It's an unwieldy answer. | ||
| One of the things that 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? | ||
| I 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's a part of me that's always thought about getting a tattoo, but talking with the inmates about their It's not worth the hep C. 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 D.C. By six months later, none. | ||
| And so by the time trial happened, where I was put in prison, nothing. | ||
| And it became too politically toxic. | ||
| It became the incentives were too skewed against people, you know, risking their next... | ||
| I even heard, frankly, about... | ||
| People saying third-hand nice things about me, but no one wanted to be in contact with me directly. | ||
| Did anyone contact you? | ||
| I mean, I noticed that I thought it was your girlfriend who testified against you. | ||
| Did you have any friends who stayed loyal and supported you and continue to? | ||
| Barely. | ||
| Yes, but very, very few. | ||
| I'm 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. | ||
| He said, no, I'll see you in court. | ||
| So they went back and said, all right, well, how about your pregnant wife? | ||
| 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 clearer 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 gave him seven and a half years in prison. | ||
| It's disgusting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is. | |
| 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. | ||
| They went back on their promise and charged his wife anyway. | ||
| Like, 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. | ||
| He didn't serve any of that. | ||
| Has it dawned on you, I don't know what kind of news coverage you're getting, what kind of contact you have with the outside world sounds like not too much, but that things are moving so quickly out here, by the time you get out, I mean, AI, for example, it sounds like we're reaching AGI or some singularity soon. | ||
| Yeah, that you may emerge whenever you do into a world that doesn't look anything like the world you left. | ||
| 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. | ||
| At the end of the day, I mean, for five years, I felt like I had about 300 children most days, my employees. | ||
| Obviously, I couldn't be a father in the same way to all of them, but I felt responsible for them. | ||
| I mean, I felt 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. | ||
| I certainly am not in a position to have kids in person. | ||
| Have any of those 300 employees visited you in jail? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| I think the answer is no to that. | ||
| Probably ought to have some real kids at some point, don't you think? | ||
| Because when things go bad, they stick around. | ||
| It's got me thinking about what it means to have real friends. | ||
| 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 also about 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. | ||
| You know, if someone told me three years ago, like, you'll be hanging out with Diddy, you know, every day, and be like, oh, that's interesting. | ||
| I wonder if that's going to happen. | ||
| I guess he gets into crypto or something. | ||
| Oh, life is so weird. | ||
| Godspeed. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So it turns out that YouTube is suppressing this show. | ||
| On one level, that's not surprising. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| But on another level, it's shocking. | ||
| With everything that's going on in the world right now, all the change taking place in our economy and our politics, with the wars on the cusp of fighting right now, Google has decided you should have less information rather than more. | ||
| And that is totally wrong. | ||
| It's immoral. | ||
| What can you do about it? |
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