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.

What's it like?

It's dystopian. The fortunate thing, the place I'm in, I'm not in I'm not in physical danger. Frankly, a lot of the staff, they're trying to be helpful. They're trying to do what they can given the constraints. But no one wants to be in prison. You Can you imagine what happens when you take 40 people, all of whom have been at least charged with crimes, and walk 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 acute kind. I haven't had I haven't been attacked or anything like that. I've had a lot of logistical problems. The biggest, frankly, was when I was on trial, trying to get access to legal work was nearly impossible. I would On a typical trial day, they'd wake me up at 4: 00 AM. I'd spend five hours in various busses, vans, and holding cells until my trial started in the morning. Then trial straight through to 5: 00 PM, another four hours in holding cells and vans, and get back at 9: 00 PM, way after any access to legal work was caught off for the day. That was the biggest problem.

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 soul-crushing things about prison.

I got to say, we've never I've talked before, but obviously, I've watched you from afar. I just also say I feel sorry for every man in prison, no matter what he's accused of or did. 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 do seem healthier and less jumpy, I have to say, after two years in prison.

I've had a lot of time to reflect on how to communicate, and In retrospect, I think I was not effective at communicating, especially when the crisis first hit and in the months thereafter. I made a mistake I often make. I get swept up in details and I 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 freezing because there were a billion things to keep track of. We typically I'd have, and back when I was writing FDX, I'd go on to have an interview, but while on the interview, there would be two issues I have to resolve with the company. I'd have one eye on Slack open, responding to messages. 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 preparing for in the back of my mind.

Maybe the digital world is bad for us. What's your view of that? You've been taken away from your phone, so that's big.

Yeah, oh, it is. I prefer having the digital world. At the end of the day, it's... But I will say that when I say that it's less from a perspective of enjoyment or pleasure or leisure, and it's more from a perspective of productivity and ability to have impact in the world. From that perspective, it's so hard to do anything. We don't have the digital world.

Have you made friends there? Are you hanging with Diddy? I think he's in there with you.

He is. I don't know. He's been kind. I've made some friends. It's a weird environment. It's a combination of a few other high-profile cases and a lot of ex-gangsters or alleged ex-gangers.

Definitely alleged. What's Diddy like?

Obviously, I've only seen one piece of him, which is did he in prison. 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 a soul-crushing place for the world in general. What we see are just the people that are around us on the inside rather than who we are on the outside.

I'm sure. You're two of the most famous prisoners in the world in the same unit. What What do the armed robbers think?

Well, it's a really interesting question. Of course, some of them, I think, are thinking, Well, this is a big opportunity to meet people, they wouldn't otherwise get to meet, which is... It shocked me the first time I heard that. It makes sense, their perspective, but boys, I don't know not how I think about prison.

Sorry to laugh. No, that's actually good. I bet it's not how you think about it. No. It's not.

Lacking is all you can do sometimes. 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, I would say it's part of a larger hole, which it's one of the most profound things that I've come to learn over my life, but still something I don't fully understand, which is obviously what we call intelligence or IQ or whatever. It matters, it's important. Working hard matters, it's important. But there are other things, things that we don't have good words for. I still haven't found the right words for. But things that can make someone an unbelievably impressive and successful and productive person that seem to out shine what I or others would expect of them. Obviously, not everyone. Everyone's in different places. But something that's a lot at FDX, we find someone with an absolutely shit resume. I mean, just nothing to recommend themselves. No real relevant experience. And all of a sudden, we'd realize they were outperforming almost everyone else at the company. Just because they had the grit, they had the instincts, 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 have gotten rich in finance. They clearly have a brilliance that I can't see. They seem like morons to me.

I'm interested in what types there are. I was on Wall Street in a farmer life, and there are a variety of people there.

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Com. 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 of par now. But you gave so much to Democrats that I thought they would rescue you in the end. Where were all your friends the Democratic Party? They usually keep their friends from going to jail. Tony Podesta never went to jail. Why did you?

It's a really good question. Obviously, I can only guess what the answer to that. I can only speculate because I'm not in their minds. But one fact that might be relevant is, in 2020, I was on a center left and I gave to Biden's campaign. I was optimistic he'd be a solid center left President. I spent the next few years in DC a lot. I meant 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. That started becoming known right around FTX's collapse. So I probably played a role.

Why were you shocked? I know you spent a lot of time in DC. 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. I never thought that, frankly, the Democrats in general would be the party taking the lead on good financial regulation. But there were good and bad people in each party and a lot of thoughtful players. But Genser's SEC was something out of a nightmare. A company would go offer something in the United States. Genser would sue them to the ground for not registering. So if you go to Gensler to register, say, Hey, we'd love to register. Office says what you want, what we'd register as? And the ICC 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. Every company in crypto ran into this. They basically failed to register a single person effort. That was one pretty disturbing thing that I saw. And go for it.

Can I just ask you to explain a little bit there? It's obvious to non-experts like me that Gary Gensler is obviously corrupt. I mean, that was clear, but his motives were less clear. What was that? What was his goal?

It's a really good question. Again, I'm not in his brain, but here are some impressions I had. He really liked being in the center of things, power. Everyone likes that. Not everyone. Most people, he's no exception. Part of this is a turf over. He wanted his agency to get more power, even if he didn't want to do anything with it except block industry countries. Why did he make everyone register with him? Well, he lose his 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. He was remarkably successful. He became 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. It wasn't moral.

It's not like he had deeply rooted Communist beliefs or anything like that.

Right. No, I knew that. No, it's not or any beliefs, the self-advancement. When things started to go south and you were criminally charged or thought you might be criminally charged, 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, Hey, I need your help. It's the Biden Justice Department. Help me.

I didn't for multiple reasons. One was I didn't want to do something inappropriate. A second was that many parts of it very quickly made their positions known and were running away as quickly as they could. I had a good relationship, probably better with Republicans in DC 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. At the end of the day, there's a long story here, involves a law firm that took it a pretty unusual and active role in the case. But before I even gave up control of FTX, before it was ever filed for bankruptcy, the DOJ had already made up its mind.

You didn't call in any favors or tried to?

No.

Interesting. What What do you think of the future of crypto? I mean, obviously, you must have complicated feelings since you're in a crypto company or in jail because of it, but you know a lot about the topic. You feel like things are moving very fast on crypto. Do you think they're moving in a good direction? I know it's 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 were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took, that Gensler and the SEC took. Obviously, the follow-through is what matters. And that's the stage that we're at now, which is what will come of this. And not surprisingly, changing the guard helps. But financial regulators, they're big, giant bureaucracies in the federal government. They're not used to changing overnight. They have been playing a really obstructive role for a decade in crypto. The US, it's 30% of the world's to finance. It was about 5% of the world's crypto. The reason it's entirely regulatory, it's just the US was unique in its difficulty to work with. I think the big question is, will When rubber meets the road, will the administration do what needs to be done and figure out how to do it?

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. 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. Now it just seems like it's 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. There's a related thing about the technology, payments, remittances, all the things that are not just an investment, but ways that crypto could actually be useful for the world. They happen on longer time scales than investments do, basically. With what social media has become, you see bubbles grow and pop and grow and pop on a daily to monthly basis. Technology is built out on a decade basis. Right now, crypto is not quite at a point where it could become an everyday tool of a quarter of the world or something. The tech isn't there yet, but it's not that far away. If, and this is an if. If the industry keeps making progress rather than getting distracted too much by market prices, then 5, 10 years from now, you could imagine a world where all of a sudden it is the case that anyone can have a crypto wallet, a billion people could use it each day with privacy, with security, fast, cheap, international, all the things that was promised and that that absolutely are distracted from by the latest mean points.

You think world governments would allow that? I mean, if you actually allowed the world's population to conduct financial transactions without the control of governments, then governments would collapse instantly, wouldn't they?

Well, it's an interesting question. There are a lot of degrees here about the level of oversight control that if you're going to have, you look at something like Bitcoin, and the wallets are anonymous, but there is a public ledger of every transfer that happens. It is possible for governments to have some level of knowledge without having control of it. That being said, not all the governments in the world view this the same. The United States government over the last 30 years has taken one view towards control of not just the United States, for instance, but the world's monetary dealings. You see a different viewpoint, much more authoritarian, but also much more insular in a lot of sorts of dictatorship. But half the world doesn't try to have nearly the level of government involvement in day-to-day financial transactions that the United States have.

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Well, basically, no. The A company that I used to own, might be 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. But that's not how things worked out. Instead, it all got rolled up in a... It got rolled in a bankruptcy where I The assets were dissipated incredibly quickly by those controlling it. They were siphoned off, tens of billions of dollars worth. It's been a colossal disaster. And not solving that from happening is by far the biggest regret of my life.

So you knew everybody else in the crypto business, you're one of the most famous people in the business before the charges, before all of this happened. Being as honest as you can, do you think you were the biggest criminal in the crypto business?

I don't think I was a criminal. So certainly the answer to that is no. I mean, I think the DOJ thinks that I may have been, but I don't share their view Well, you're in jail.

They definitely... That's their claim anyway. But I wonder, and I'm not... I've certainly criticized your business and other businesses like 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, do you think there's a lot of shady behavior in the crypto business? Being honest.

Yeah. Ten years ago, the answer was clearly yes, or at least yes, relative to the scale of the industry. You look in the 2014 to 2017 era, and the industry is a lot smaller than it was today. A lot of the transactions I can or at least a higher fraction of them were, well, different people use different words for it, but Silk Road, as an example, people purchasing narcotics online. Was 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 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.

You were famously identified with a worldview and ideology, maybe even a religion called effective altruism. 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. Some have pointed out the irony that in the collapse of your company, a million people lost their money. There were a lot of individuals hurt in an effort that you described as the greatest good for the greatest number. 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. Whatever one's intentions are, if you screw up, then the results might be different. People got their money back at the end, but it was too excruciating years waiting for it. They got it back. Dollarized rather than in kind. 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, 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's a caveat to it, which is that a classic mistake, which people make, and I may have made at some point, is with people who you don't know who are distant from you thinking you know what they need when you don't, being paternalistic, condescending. 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 getting to. No one knew what their lives were like. They're just guessing it with those people. They're saying it's wrong. They show up with a bunch of water pumps to a fidget village that has plenty of water and no food. All these people shipped in from Harvard to go I know these water pumps no one wants. There's example after example of this going around. Whereas obviously, when you're dealing with people you know, you have much better sense of how to help them. And that's real. That effect is absolutely real. 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 making a counter case. You're arguing against your own position. I mean, isn't I mean, I guess the problem I have with effective altruism is just too easy. 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 Well, you look at... I mean, malaria is a good example here. No one dies of malaria anymore in the United States. I mean, basically no one does. But globally, it's what? Like a million people a year or something die of it. That's horrible. It's like, this is just a disease people shouldn't we die from anymore. We know how to basically eradicate it, and we should absolutely be doing that as a world. But because it's 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. 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 at the end of the day, we have responsibilities to each of us. If I know my cousin well and I know how to solve his problem because I'm his cousin, then absolutely have a responsibility to do that. But if I've tried 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?

Sort of, But I'm not going to name the... It's not going to be a government aid project, to be clear. They're private projects that happen. Actually, the 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 Southern Africa and India, that's saving probably hundreds of thousands of lives a year right now for thousands of dollars per life on average, which is 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 Of course, you can look at gigantic government programs that did absolutely nothing. If you want the government approach, I mean, the Marshall Plan. It's digging in 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, I think it's a fair point. How old are you now?

The funny thing, it took me a second to think of the answer that. Prison time changes when you're in a person. It becomes an amorphous concept when every day is the last and they just blur together. The answer is, well, I guess my birthday is tomorrow. As of right now, I'm 32, but I will be 33 soon.

How are you going to celebrate your birthday?

I'm not. I was never big on birthdays on the outside, and celebrating another year in prison just doesn't feel all that exciting to me.

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.

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 first step back stuff. If you just add my prison sentence, my age, so to speak, then the answer is in my late '40s.

Wow. Could you handle that?

Sorry, what I said was wrong. I misspoke. If you add my prison sentence my age, the late '50s, if you include all of the possible decreases, it might be the late '40s. But the raw answer is, I mean, it's 32 when I was convicted and I got a 25 a year sentence, so that's 57.

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. You can look at their studies. I have no idea how good they are, but they show you age at roughly three times the normal rate in prison. You had three times 25 to my 32 years when I was convicted, and that gets you an answer of maybe.

I mean, It strikes me there's a 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?

It's whatever people have. And muffins, these little plastic wrapped. You go to a gas station and on the counter, there might be a plastic bowl with a little individually wrapped plastic muffins that have been sitting there for a week at room temperature. Imagine one of those. That's standard. Is that a packet of ramen soup or a disgusting-looking little foil package of fish in oil at room temperature? Sure.

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 they're as a currency. Any time soon globally. I don't think it's going to be a strategic must-fend reserve. They're a currency of need. They wouldn't be anything else. They don't have that much to recommend But at the end of the day, they're fungible. They're not exactly fungible, but they're close enough. Two muffins are similar, so you can trade them for each other. They 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 unwieldy. One of the things that you realize really quickly is the scale of everything is so diminished in prison, 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 you're carrying into.

That's grim. Do you eat the muffins, by the way? I don't eat. Or do you just hoard them?

No, I just hoard them. I don't actually eat them. I mostly eat rice and 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?

There's a part of me that's always thought about getting a tattoo, but talking with the inmates about their sanitization procedures or lack thereof for the needles, that cured that idea in my mind. No interest anymore.

It's not worth the hepsey.

It's not worth the hepsey. I would say maybe they go to four people or so before bothering to sanitize a needle. Oh. Yeah. Oh.

Okay, so you're not doing that. Since you've been away and you're facing, I guess, 23 more years, I always wonder, 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, 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, in the immediate wake of it, I got a number of really nice messages from a lot of people, including some in DC. By six months later, none. 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, risking their next. I even heard, frankly, about people saying third-hand, like nice things about me, but no one wanted to be in contact with me directly.

Did anyone contact you? I mean, I noticed that I thought was your girlfriend testified against you. You're Did you have any friends who stayed loyal and supported you and continue to?

Barely. Yes, but very few. I was surprised. It makes sense in retrospect. Anyone who was close to me ended up with a gun to their head, being told that they had two options, and one of them involved decades in prison. I think Ryan Salem is the saddest example of that, the most disgusting example from the government's perspective, where they charged him of totally bogus crimes. He said, No, I'll see you in court. They went back and said, All right, well, how about your pregnant wife? What if we put her in prison? He pleads guilty because they're going to put his life in prison, which no seen legal system would make that a permissible thing for a prosecution to do. He wasn't even charged with most of what the other people who played guilty were charged with. 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. He ends up getting four times as much prison time as the other three Gueddy, please, combined. He couldn't send a clear message. Is it because he was a Republican or is it because he refused to part the government's lives at trial?

Those are the only things I can imagine why they give him seven and a half years in prison.

It's disgusting. It is. 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 great. They went back on their promise and charged his wife anyway. Just to disabuse any notion of them 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 news coverage you're getting, 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 something singular It's already soon. Something like that. Something singularity soon. That you may emerge whenever you do into a world that doesn't look anything like the world you left.

Yeah, I feel it pretty acutely. It's this 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, 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 didn't feel terrible about all their work being tossed down the drain. But I didn't have time for my personal life at all, basically, when I was running FTX. I certainly am not in a position to have kids in person.

Have any of those 300 employees visited you in jail?

No. I think the answer is no to that. There's one or two- Probably ought to have some real kids at some point, don't you think?

Because when things go bad, they stick around.

It's got me thinking about what it means to have real friends. It's And about the amount of power that some systems in our country end up having and the amount of intimidation that can be achieved implicitly, but 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 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.

Someone told me three years ago, you'll be hanging out with Diddy every day. I'd be like, Oh, that's interesting. I wonder where that's going to happen. I guess he gets into crypto or something. Life is so weird.

Godspeed. Thank you.

Thank you.

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