"The classic advice, right: Don’t say anything. Recede into a hole. And that’s not who I am. It’s not who I want to be."

"I don’t have — I think I have a duty to talk to people. I have a duty to explain what happened. And I think I have a duty to do everything I can to try and do what’s right. If there is anything I can do to try and help customers out here. And I don’t see what good is accomplished by me just sitting locked in a room pretending the outside world doesn’t exist."

Said Sam Bankman-Fried, prompted about whether his lawyers are telling him it's a good idea to be talking and quoted in "Transcript of Sam Bankman-Fried’s Interview at the DealBook Summit/In a discussion with Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times, Sam Bankman-Fried blamed 'huge management failures' and sloppy accounting for the collapse of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange" (NYT).

He says he's not focusing on his own liability: "There’s going to be a time and a place for me to think about myself and my own future. But I don’t think this is it. Right now, look, I've had a bad month. This has not been a fun month for me. But that’s not what matters here...."

He takes risks. And he doesn't focus on the future.

Lots more at the link. I'll just cherry-pick this exchange:

SORKIN: But it seems when you read the stories, it sounds like a bunch of kids who were on Adderall having a sleepover party.

BANKMAN-FRIED: Look, I screwed up. I was C.E.O. I was the C.E.O. of FTX. And I say this again and again that it means I had a responsibility, and I was responsible ultimately for us doing the right things and didn’t. We messed up big.

And, about those drugs:

SORKIN: Can I ask you about the drugs? You have tweeted about it, Caroline has tweeted about it. Others have tweeted about uppers and downers and all sorts of things. There have been pictures taken of something called Emsam, which apparently increases levels of dopamine to the brain. It’s actually for Parkinson’s. Were you taking that? It’s a patch.

The answer is verbose and mostly about alcohol, which wasn't the question:

BANKMAN-FRIED: It’s funny hearing this. I had my first sip of alcohol after my 21st birthday. I think I maybe have half a glass of alcohol a year, roughly speaking. There were no wild parties here. When we had parties were we played board games. Twenty percent of people would have a quarter of a beer each or something like that, and the rest of us would not drink anything.

Finally, he gets to drugs:

I didn’t see any illegal drug use at the office or at these parties.

Important qualifying words: "illegal" and "at the office or at these parties." It doesn't address prescription drugs taken in private. Emsam, the specific drug asked about, is not an illegal drug.

And when I say parties, I mean having people over for dinner, that’s what that meant. I can’t talk about anyone else. What they are prescribed is between them and their doctors or psychiatrist. I can say for me, I have been prescribed various things at various times to help with focus and concentration, and I think they have done that.

That seems to be the answer to Sorkin's "Were you taking [Emsam]?"

I haven’t felt any of the sort of impact that people have been theorizing from it.

What a great drug-user line! I especially like "theorizing."

And it’s not a huge impact in the first place anyway. I think these have totally been on-label use of medication that I think on the margin help me focus a little bit. I wish I had been a lot more focused over the last year.

The overuse of the word "focus" in that interview is telling. Focus focus focus. There were drugs for focus — purportedly used "on-label" — and yet still there wasn't enough focus. But not enough focus on the future. Now, I feel like "theorizing": To become more and more focused is to exclude the wider view — the view of the future.