45 min
Sam Bankman-Fried - Crypto, Altruism, and Leadership Dwarkesh Podcast
-
- Society & Culture
I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly + hiring A-players, and much more.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.
Episode website + Transcript here.
Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes
Subscribe to find out about future episodes!
Timestamps
(00:18) - How inefficient is the world?
(01:11) - Choosing a career
(04:15) - The difficulty of being a founder
(06:21) - Is effective altruism too narrowminded?
(09:57) - Political giving
(12:55) - FTX Future Fund
(16:41) - Adverse selection in philanthropy
(18:06) - Correlation between different causes
(22:15) - Great founders do difficult things
(25:51) - Pitcher fatigue and the importance of focus
(28:30) - How SBF identifies talent
(31:09) - Why scaling too fast kills companies
(33:51) - The future of crypto
(35:46) - Risk, efficiency, and human discretion in derivatives
(41:00) - Jane Street vs FTX
(41:56) - Conflict of interest between broker and exchange
(42:59) - Bahamas and Charter Cities
(43:47) - SBF’s RAM-skewed mind
Unfortunately, audio quality abruptly drops from 17:50-19:15
Transcript
Dwarkesh Patel 0:09
Today on The Lunar Science Society Podcast, I have the pleasure of interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX. Thanks for coming on The Lunar Society.
Sam Bankman-Fried 0:17
Thanks for having me.
How inefficient is the world?
Dwarkesh Patel 0:18
Alright, first question. Does the consecutive success of FTX and Alameda suggest to you that the world has all kinds of low-hanging opportunities? Or was that a property of the inefficiencies of crypto markets at one particular point in history?
Sam Bankman-Fried 0:31
I think it's more of the former, there are just a lot of inefficiencies.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:35
So then another part of the question is: if you had to restart earning to give again, what are the odds you become a billionaire, but you can't do it in crypto?
Sam Bankman-Fried 0:42
I think they're pretty decent. A lot of it depends on what I ended up choosing and how aggressive I end up deciding to be. There were a lot of safe and secure career paths before me that definitely would not have ended there. But if I dedicated myself to starting up some businesses, there would have been a pretty decent chance of it.
Choosing a career
Dwarkesh Patel 1:11
So that leads to the next question—which is that you've cited Will MacAskill's lunch with you while you were at MIT as being very important in deciding your career. He suggested you earn-to-give by going to a quant firm like Jane Street. In retrospect, given the success you've had as a founder, was that maybe bad advice? And maybe you should’ve been advised to start a startup or nonprofit?
Sam Bankman-Fried 1:31
I don't think it was literally the best possible advice because this was in 2012. Starting a crypto exchange then would have been…. I think it was definitely helpful advice. Relative to not having gotten advice at all, I think it helps quite a bit.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:50
Right. But then there's a broader question: are people like you who could become founders advised to take lower variance, lower risk careers that in, expected value, are less valuable?
Sam Bankman-Fried 2:02
Yeah, I think that's probably true. I think people are advised too strongly to go down safe career paths. But I think it's worth noting that there's a big difference between what makes sense altruistically and personally for this. To the extent you're just thinking of personal criteria, that's going to argue heavily in favor of a safer career path because you have much more quickly declining marginal utility of money than the world does. So, this kind of path is specifically for altruistically-minded people.
The other thing is that when you think about advising people, I think people will often try and reference career advice that ot
I flew to the Bahamas to interview Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX! He talks about FTX’s plan to infiltrate traditional finance, giving $100m this year to AI + pandemic risk, scaling slowly + hiring A-players, and much more.
Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.
Episode website + Transcript here.
Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes
Subscribe to find out about future episodes!
Timestamps
(00:18) - How inefficient is the world?
(01:11) - Choosing a career
(04:15) - The difficulty of being a founder
(06:21) - Is effective altruism too narrowminded?
(09:57) - Political giving
(12:55) - FTX Future Fund
(16:41) - Adverse selection in philanthropy
(18:06) - Correlation between different causes
(22:15) - Great founders do difficult things
(25:51) - Pitcher fatigue and the importance of focus
(28:30) - How SBF identifies talent
(31:09) - Why scaling too fast kills companies
(33:51) - The future of crypto
(35:46) - Risk, efficiency, and human discretion in derivatives
(41:00) - Jane Street vs FTX
(41:56) - Conflict of interest between broker and exchange
(42:59) - Bahamas and Charter Cities
(43:47) - SBF’s RAM-skewed mind
Unfortunately, audio quality abruptly drops from 17:50-19:15
Transcript
Dwarkesh Patel 0:09
Today on The Lunar Science Society Podcast, I have the pleasure of interviewing Sam Bankman-Fried, CEO of FTX. Thanks for coming on The Lunar Society.
Sam Bankman-Fried 0:17
Thanks for having me.
How inefficient is the world?
Dwarkesh Patel 0:18
Alright, first question. Does the consecutive success of FTX and Alameda suggest to you that the world has all kinds of low-hanging opportunities? Or was that a property of the inefficiencies of crypto markets at one particular point in history?
Sam Bankman-Fried 0:31
I think it's more of the former, there are just a lot of inefficiencies.
Dwarkesh Patel 0:35
So then another part of the question is: if you had to restart earning to give again, what are the odds you become a billionaire, but you can't do it in crypto?
Sam Bankman-Fried 0:42
I think they're pretty decent. A lot of it depends on what I ended up choosing and how aggressive I end up deciding to be. There were a lot of safe and secure career paths before me that definitely would not have ended there. But if I dedicated myself to starting up some businesses, there would have been a pretty decent chance of it.
Choosing a career
Dwarkesh Patel 1:11
So that leads to the next question—which is that you've cited Will MacAskill's lunch with you while you were at MIT as being very important in deciding your career. He suggested you earn-to-give by going to a quant firm like Jane Street. In retrospect, given the success you've had as a founder, was that maybe bad advice? And maybe you should’ve been advised to start a startup or nonprofit?
Sam Bankman-Fried 1:31
I don't think it was literally the best possible advice because this was in 2012. Starting a crypto exchange then would have been…. I think it was definitely helpful advice. Relative to not having gotten advice at all, I think it helps quite a bit.
Dwarkesh Patel 1:50
Right. But then there's a broader question: are people like you who could become founders advised to take lower variance, lower risk careers that in, expected value, are less valuable?
Sam Bankman-Fried 2:02
Yeah, I think that's probably true. I think people are advised too strongly to go down safe career paths. But I think it's worth noting that there's a big difference between what makes sense altruistically and personally for this. To the extent you're just thinking of personal criteria, that's going to argue heavily in favor of a safer career path because you have much more quickly declining marginal utility of money than the world does. So, this kind of path is specifically for altruistically-minded people.
The other thing is that when you think about advising people, I think people will often try and reference career advice that ot
45 min