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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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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
Published on 3 years, 5 months ago