Sam Bankman-Fried
Appearances
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
So where are you? Yeah, well, I'm in MDC, Brooklyn, in a little side room. How long have you been there? I've been in prison for about, oh boy, what's it been now? It's been about two years. So what's it like? It's, I mean, it's sort of dystopian. You know, the fortunate thing, the place I'm in, I'm not in sort of I'm not in physical danger.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
No.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
No, absolutely. hopefully, is what I would say. You know, you look at what the Trump administration said, you know, going into office, there are a lot of good things. There are a lot of things that, you know, were very different from the stance that the Biden administration took, that, you know, Gensler and the SEC took. Obviously, you know, the follow-through is what matters.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 a decade in crypto. In the US, it's 30% of the world's finance.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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, when rubber meets the road, will the administration do what needs to be done and figure out how to do it?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
right now crypto is not quite at a point where it could become an everyday tool of you know a quarter of the world or something the tech isn't there yet but it's not that far away and if and this is an if if the industry keeps making progress rather than getting distracted too much by market prices then you know five ten years from now you could imagine a world where all of a sudden
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 –
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
It is the case that anyone can have a crypto wallet, you know, a billion people could use it each day with privacy, with security, fast, cheap, international, all the things that, you know, that was promised and that absolutely are distracted from by the latest meme points.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Well, it's an interesting question. And there are a lot of degrees here about the level of oversight and control that it can have. 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. That being said...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 system. you know, dealings and you see, I mean, a different viewpoint, much more authoritarian, but also much more insular in a lot of sort of dictatorships.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
But half the world doesn't try to have nearly the level of government involvement in day-to-day financial transactions that the United States has.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
kind of soul-crushing things about prison.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, there was enough money to pay everyone back in kind at the time or today with, you know, plenty of interest left over and tens of billions left for investors. But that's not how things worked out. And instead, it all got boiled up 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
And it's been a colossal disaster. And, I mean, not solving that problem is by far the biggest regret of my life.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 viewpoint.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Yeah. Ten years ago, the answer was clearly yes, or at least yes relative to the scale of the industry. Right. You look in the mid-2014 to 2017 sort of era, and the industry is a lot smaller than it was today. And a lot of the transactions I saw, or at least a higher fraction of them, were, well... Different people use different words for it, but Silk Road, you know, as an example, right?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
the fraction of the industry that that represents has fallen off really substantially, both because of sort of growth of other areas of interest in crypto and also because of more government involvement on the anti-money laundering side. So, yeah, they're still solid, but it's not as prevalent as it once was.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
It hasn't made me rethink the precepts. Obviously I feel terrible about what happened. It's not at all what I intended and whatever one's intentions are. I, you know, if you screw up, then the results might be different. You know, People got their money back at the end, but it is too excruciating years waiting for it. They got it back dollarized rather than in kind.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
And certainly all of 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, I've had a lot of time to reflect on how to communicate. And in retrospect, you know, 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 meet the bigger picture.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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...
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
with people who you don't know who are dissent from you thinking you know what they need when you don't you know being paternalistic kind of condescending and you know there's so many foreign aid type projects that have gone awry ended up being complete wastes of money because no one knew the people they were giving to no one knew what their lives were like and right they're just guessing it with those people it's 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
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
And like, you know, all these people shipped in from Harvard to go hand out these water pumps no one wants. And, you know, there's like example after example of this going around. Whereas obviously, like when you're dealing with people you know, you know, you have a much better sense of how to help them. And that's real. Like that effect is absolutely real.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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. I mean, basically no one does, but globally it's what, like a million people a year or something die of it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
that's horrible that it's 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 um that shouldn't stop us from being able to help people you know at home you look at like the scale of resources that would be required to many of these you know interventions in the poorest part of the world and it's not that big um it's not making it would not
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
if I could, but 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 it, I'm flailing at that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
So, sort of, but I'm not going to name the It's not going to be a government aid project, to be clear. There are private projects that happen.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, actually, malaria is a good example where a substantial fraction of the world's malaria has been cut down already by mostly private contributions from people to South Saharan Africa and India that, you know, saving probably hundreds of thousands of lives a year right now for, you know, thousands of dollars per life on average. Right. which is a stunning success on a relative scale.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 the government approach, I mean, I don't know, the Marshall Plan, like, it's sort of digging pretty deep in history.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
But rebuilding Germany after World War II was probably a huge success on many fronts.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, the funny thing, it took me a second to think of the answer to that. Prison, time changes when you're in prison. It becomes sort of an amorphous concept, right? when every day is sort of like the last and they just blur together. The answer is, well, I guess my birthday is tomorrow. So as of right now, I'm 32, but I will be 33 soon.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Someone else might tell him, but I don't plan to.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 my prison sentence, my age, so to speak, you know, then the answer is in my late 40s.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
No, I wasn't. But I was... my mind was racing because there were, you know, a billion things to keep track of. You know, we sort of typically I'd have, and back when I was running FTX, you know, I'd go on to have an interview, but, you know, while on the interview, there'd 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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-year sentence, so that's 57.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
It's a good question. I'm not sure. I mean, the – the hardest thing is just not having something meaningful to be doing in here. Um, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
So, you know, you had three times 25 to my 32 years, um, when I was convicted and, uh, you know, that gets you an answer of maybe, um,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, it's whatever people have and muffins, like these old – So like 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Is that a packet of ramen soup or a kind of disgusting looking little foil package of fish in oil at room temperature?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Right. I don't think it's going to be a strategic must-fen reserve. So, you know, they're a currency of need. They wouldn't be anything else. They don't have that much to recommend themselves. But at the end of the day, they're kind of fungible. They're not exactly fungible, but they're close enough. You know, two muffins are kind of similar, so you can kind of trade them for each other.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
They kind of work, as long as you're never dealing with more than, like, $5, right? Because if you wanted to do a $200 transaction in muffins, I mean, it doesn't work physically, right? It's unwieldy, yeah. It's unwieldy. And so one of the things that you realize really quickly is, I mean, the scale of everything is so diminished in prison.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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?
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I know I just poured them in. Yeah. Yeah. I don't actually eat them. I mostly rice and beans and ramen.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I have not. I know some people who have, but I have not gotten any prison tattoos. Okay. Have you thought about it? So, you know, there's a part of me that's always, like, thought about getting a tattoo. But talking with the inmates about their, you know, sanitization procedures or lack thereof for the needles, sort of, you know, that cured that idea in my mind. No interest anymore.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
It's not worth the hep C. It's not worth the hep C. It's, you know, I would say, like, maybe they go through, like, four people or so before bothering to sanitize. A needle.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Yeah.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 necks. I even heard, frankly, about
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
people saying third hand, like nice things about me, but no one wanted to be in contact with me directly.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Yes, but very, very few. I was surprised. It makes sense in retrospect. Yeah. 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 Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
the saddest example of that and the most disgusting example from the government's perspective where you know they charged him of totally bogus crimes um he he said no i'll see you in court this so they went back and said all right well how about your pregnant wife um what if we put her in prison
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
And so he pleads guilty because they're his wife in prison, which no sane legal system would make that a permissible thing for a prosecution to do. And then 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
And he ends up getting four times as much prison time as the other three guilty pleas combined. And, like, he couldn't send a clear message. Is it because he was a Republican or is it because he refused to power the government's lies at trial? Like, those are the only things I can imagine why they give him seven and a half years in prison.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Yeah, oh, it is. I... 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Totally. They went back on their promise and charged his wife anyway, like, you know, just just to sort of disabuse any notion of them sort of like operating in good faith. It's it's disgusting. He's he's a good guy. I, you know, he didn't serve any of that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Yeah. Yeah. I feel it pretty acutely. And it's, you know, the sort of feeling of the world moving on without you.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
No, different people in the community have different views on it. And at the end of the day, I mean, for five years, I felt like I had about 300 children most days, my employees. Like it was, obviously I couldn't be a father in the same way to all of them, but I felt responsible for them. I mean, feel terrible about all their work being tossed down the drain.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
But I didn't have time for my personal life at all, basically, when I was running FTX. And I mean, I certainly am not in a position to have kids from in-person, so.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
No. I think the answer is no to that. You know, there's one or two.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, it's got me thinking about what it means to have real friends. And about the amount of... How are 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I will absolutely do that. I can't believe you're in jail with Diddy. You know, someone told me three years ago, like, you'll be hanging out with Diddy, you know, every day. Be like, oh, that's interesting. I wonder how that's going to happen. I guess he gets into crypto or something.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Thank you.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, from that perspective, it's so hard to do anything when you don't have the digital world.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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. Yes.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I... you know, obviously I've, I've only seen one, one piece of him, which is, you know, did he in prison and, you know, he's been kind to people in the unit. He's been kind to me. It's also, it's, it's a position no one wants to be in, you know, obviously he doesn't, I don't, as you said, it's, it's kind of a soul crushing place for the world in general. And yeah,
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
And frankly, a lot of the staff, they're trying to be helpful. They're trying to do what they can, given the constraints. You know, no one wants to be in prison.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, what we see are just the people that that are around us on the inside rather than. Yeah, we are on the outside.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Well, it's a really interesting question. And if. Of course, some of them, I think, are thinking like, wow, this is sort of a big opportunity, like, you know, to meet people they wouldn't otherwise get to meet, which is It shocked me the first time I heard that. It makes sense from their perspective, but boys, I know not how I think about prison. Sorry. Sorry to laugh.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
No, that's such a good... I bet it's not how you think about it. No. It's not. And laughing is all you can do sometimes. 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, you know, probably didn't graduate middle school. A surprising number of them are, like, fairly good at chess.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Like, you know, not, I'm not saying they're grandmasters, but, like, you know, I lose games to them all the time. I was not expecting that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
And you can imagine what happens when you take sort of 40 people, you know, all of them 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
But there are other things, things that we don't have good words for. I still haven't found the right words for. But things that can make someone an unbelievably impressive and successful and productive person that seem to kind of outshine what I or others would expect of them. And obviously not everyone. Everyone's in different places. you know, something we saw a lot at FTX.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
We'd find someone with an aptly shit resume. I mean, just nothing to recommend themselves. No real relevant experience. And all of a sudden, we'd realize they were outperforming almost everyone else at the company. Just because they had the grit, they had the instincts, you know, they had the dedication, they knew how to work, how to interface with others, and how to see solutions to problems.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I'm interested in what types they are. I was on Wall Street in a former life, and There are a variety of people there.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Oh, 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, you know, one fact that might be relevant is You know, in 2020, I was my 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I made dozens of trips there and was really, really shocked by what I saw. Not in a good direction from the administration. By late 2022, I was giving to Republicans privately as much as Democrats. And that started becoming known right around FTX's collapse. So I probably played a role.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, a company would go crazy. offer something in the United States, Gensler would sue them to the ground for not registering. So they go to Gensler to register, say, hey, you know, we'd love to register. Office says, what you want? What should we 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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. Um, that was like one pretty disturbing thing that I saw and, you know, go for it.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
It's a really good question. And again, 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. Not everyone. Most people. He's no exception. You know, 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
You know, why did he make everyone register with him? Well, he loses power otherwise. Even if he didn't know what to do with them.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I, you know, he had, there are lots of stories about him, you know, being very politically ambitious and feeling like if he could, you know, get on CNBC enough, make a big enough stink about things, raise his profile that, you know, maybe be treasury secretary, something like that in the future. I mean, he was remarkably successful.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
Like he became sort of one of the few faces of democratic financial regulation.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
So it wasn't moral. It's not like he had like deeply rooted communist beliefs or anything like that.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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, and get back at 9 p.m. way after any access to legal work was cut off for the day. So that was the biggest problem.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
I didn't for multiple reasons. One was, you know, 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. 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.
The Tucker Carlson Show
Sam Bankman-Fried on Life in Prison With Diddy, and How Democrats Stole His Money and Betrayed Him
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 involves a law firm that took a pretty unusual and active role in the case. But before I even gave up control of FTX, before it was ever filed for bankruptcy, the DOJ had already made up its mind.