Sam Bankman-Fried details his two years in MDC Brooklyn’s "dystopian" monotony—chess, legal appeals, and isolation—while denying Adderall use but admitting hyperfocus during FTX’s collapse. He calls Gary Gensler’s SEC a power play, speculates the DOJ targeted him pre-collapse, and blames Democrats for abandoning him after legal troubles. Acknowledging FTX’s $15B liabilities and $93B lost in bankruptcy, he regrets failing to stop asset theft and notes few allies visited, citing coercion like Ryan Salem’s case. Prison’s accelerated aging and absurd economies (muffin trades) contrast with his pre-imprisonment world, now reshaped by AI and fading connections, leaving him questioning systemic fragility over personal bonds. [Automatically generated summary]
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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?
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,
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...
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.