What happens when your child becomes the center of one of the biggest financial collapses in history? How do you survive when your worst nightmare becomes national headlines?
This isn’t a conversation about cryptocurrency or the legal intricacies of the FTX collapse. Joe made it clear from the outset that he won’t discuss the specifics of his son’s case since appeals are ongoing, and his role in our interview is that of a father.
What we talked about instead was far more universal and, in many ways, more important: how does a family survive when everything collapses?
The Tidal Wave
Joe’s description of what happened in November 2022 is haunting in its simplicity: “It’s like you’re walking along the beach and a tidal wave hits you.”
Before that moment, Joe and his partner Barbara Fried (Sam’s mother) were living full, meaningful lives as law professors at Stanford. They loved teaching. They loved their work. They had built careers around making impact, whether through Joe’s efforts to simplify the tax code or Barbara’s scholarship. They watched their son build FTX from afar, proud but focused on their own lives.
Then the wave hit and suddenly, one of their family members was “swept to sea.” Their house was ruined. All their possessions were gone. And they were left standing there asking: “How can I get a boat? What do I do now?”
“When the doors close, you’re with loved ones. You can control to some extent what you’re thinking about, what you’re doing.”
What strikes me most about Joe’s story is how unprepared anyone can be for this kind of crisis, even someone with extensive legal training.
“I’d rather just be a dad,” Joe shared. “I’d rather not have to be the attorney as well.” But when the costs of legal representation can drain everything you have, many families find themselves forced into roles they never imagined.
The Hidden Costs: Debanking and Institutional Fear
One of the most shocking revelations in our conversation was something Joe described as “the small thing that isn’t small”: debanking.
“All of our banks debanked us,” Joe explained matter-of-factly. “And that’s a small thing, but you actually need a bank because you’ve got credit cards and you don’t have that much money anymore. And what are you going to do without a bank?”
Think about that for a moment. You’re going through the worst crisis of your life, and suddenly institutions that held your money for decades simply say: “get out.”
Joe tried to open a new account under his own name, without the Bankman-Fried surname. He got an account. Then that bank kick him out too.
This is something that members of the White Collar Support Group know all too well: the cascading consequences that come from being associated with a federal case. Your bank. Your electricity. Your credit cards. The basic infrastructure of modern life suddenly becomes uncertain. It’s one of the reasons that establishing a federal right to banking is one of the group’s primary initiatives.
And Stanford, Joe’s employer for years, initially didn’t want him teaching. “That was very tough for Barbara and myself,” he said, “because teaching us what gives us meaning.” He had to argue and insist to do the work he loved, to continue the thing that made him feel human in the midst of catastrophe.
SBF’s Trial: Public Grief
If debanking was a “small thing,” the trial was the tsunami.
For over a month, Joe and Barbara sat in a courtroom while prosecutors said what he called “the worst things on earth about your child.”
Every day started at 5 AM when Sam was delivered to the courthouse from prison and kept in a holding cell.
Sometimes – if they were lucky and a federal marshal showed humanity – they could catch Sam’s eye or say “we love you” before he was marched out in handcuffs. That was all. That was the only contact during those weeks.
“Every sentence (we heard) is actually the worst sentence (we) ever listened to,” Joe recalled. “And they’re just starting. They’re going to go on for an hour and the next sentence is going to be just as bad.”
And all the while, dozens of reporters surrounded them coming and going, cameras everywhere, analyzing their faces for any reaction. Joe eventually developed a strategy: pose for the pictures. He thought, we might as well give the press what they need so you can get to the subway and just be a person again for a few minutes.
Moments of Grace in the Darkness
Despite everything, or perhaps because of everything, what Joe remembers most powerfully are the moments of unexpected kindness.
Students who still showed up to his classes, grateful for his teaching, treating him like a person, not a headline.
Colleagues who reached out with simple gestures of support.
There were prison guards who, moved by a parent’s grief, bent the rules slightly to allow a few extra words, a moment, a brief connection.
“There’s a lot of goodness that can be shown to you,” Joe reflected. Small acts of humanity from people who had no obligation to show compassion became lifelines.
They’re the moments Joe and Barbara will never forget, even as the broader institutions around them reacted with fear and distance.
The Protective Strategies
How does a family survive this? Joe and Barbara developed some key strategies:
- They stopped reading the news. “Is reading this account by a reporter who doesn’t really know the facts going to be helpful to me?” Joe asked. The answer was no. So they stopped, with the unexpected benefit of freeing themselves from the constant churn of national headlines entirely.
- They controlled their bubble. As Joe put it: when the doors close and you’re with loved ones, you can control what you’re thinking about and what you’re doing. The outside world may be chaos, but your home can be a sanctuary.
- They made others comfortable. “Your main job has to be to make other people relax,” Joe learned. When people are scared by association with you, their fear can drive them to places nobody wants to go. By helping others feel at ease, Joe opened the door to genuine human connection.
- They found meaning in service. Joe kept teaching. He kept seeing patients as a psychologist. He kept doing the work that mattered to him, the work that helped other people. When control is stripped away in every other area, serving others can be a profound source of stability.
Why This Story Matters for All of Us
Joe Bankman’s story isn’t just about FTX or cryptocurrency or a high-profile case. It’s about what happens to any family when crisis hits with overwhelming force.
It’s about the power differential when the federal government works against you. “However powerful you might think you are, you are nothing compared to that,” Joe said. It’s an “amazingly horrible feeling of just helplessness.”
It’s about the hidden consequences that pile up: debanking, institutional fear, loss of privacy, the inability to simply exist without scrutiny.
And it’s about resilience: not the triumphant kind often portrayed in movies, but the quiet, grinding kind. The kind where you get up each day and decide to keep teaching, keep being there for your students, keep showing up for your family, even when the weight of the world feels crushing.
“It’s really hard to accept that,” Joe admitted when I brought up the concept of riding the wave. “When it’s a horrible wave that has kind of destroyed almost everything you can see, including lives of people you love.”
But acceptance is different from giving up.
Joe is still teaching. Still advocating. Still being a father. Still finding meaning in service to others. Still remembering and honoring those moments of grace and kindness that sustained his family through the darkest time.
A Message for Families in Crisis
If your family is facing a white-collar nightmare right now, Joe’s story offers some hard-earned wisdom: you’re not prepared for this, even if you think you are. That’s okay. As Joe shared, the costs – financial, emotional, social – will be more than you imagined. But you can survive them.
Institutions will react with fear. Focus on the individuals who show up with compassion.
Control what you can: your home, your relationships, your service to others.
Let go of what you can’t: the headlines, the anonymous opinions, the institutional judgments.
For more, watch the full episode: