Sam Bankman-Fried - Crypto, Altruism, and Leadership

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.

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Episode website + Transcript here.

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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