Sam Bankman-Fried - Crypto, Altruism, and Leadership

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:09)
Today, on The Lunar 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.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:18)
All right, first question. Does the consecutive success of FTX and Alameda, does that 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 probably more of the former. I think there were probably just a lot of inefficiencies.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:35)
So I guess another part of this question is, if you had to restart earning to give again, what are the odds you'd become a billionaire, but you couldn't do it in crypto?

**Sam Bankman-Fried** (0:45)
I think they're pretty decent. A lot of it depends on what I end up choosing and how aggressive I end up deciding to be. There are a lot of pretty safe and secure career paths from before me that definitely would not have ended there.
But I think that if I'd decided to really dedicate myself to starting up some businesses, there would have been a pretty decent chance of it.

**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 do earning 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 have advised you to start a startup or a nonprofit.

**Sam Bankman-Fried** (1:31)
I mean, I don't think it was literally the best possible advice in that 2012 or something.
Think about starting a crypto exchange, which may have been a... But I think it was definitely helpful advice. And I think that relative to not having gotten advice at all then, I think it probably helped quite a bit.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (1:50)
Right. But then there's a broader question of, are people like you who could become founders, are they 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 probably people are advised too strongly to go down safe career paths. But I think it's worth noting that first of all, there's a big difference between what makes sense altruistically and personally for this. And 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 is specifically for altruistically minded people.
The other thing is that when you think about where or what is it that is advising people to choose a safer route, I think people will often try and look to, oh, well, what was the career advice that they got? What were these outward facing factors that you can see? But I think often the answer has to do something with them and their family or them and their friends or something much more personal. And when we talk with people about what they're thinking about doing with their career, personal considerations and the advice of people close to them weighs really, really heavily on what decisions they end up making.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:17)
So I didn't realize that the personal considerations were as important in your case as the advice you got from Ian.

**Sam Bankman-Fried** (3:23)
Oh, I don't think in my case, but I think that in the case of many, many people that I talked to, they are.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:29)
So speaking of declining marginal consumption, I'm wondering if you think the implication of this is that over the long term, all the richest people in the world will be utilitarian philanthropists because they don't have diminishing returns from consumption. They're risk neutral.

**Sam Bankman-Fried** (3:40)
I mean, I wouldn't say all will, but I think there probably is something in that direction where people who are looking at sort of how they can help the world are going to end up being disproportionately represented amongst the most and maybe least successful.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:54)
Let's talk about effective altruism. So in your interview with Tyler Cowen, you were asked what constraints is the number of altruistically minded projects? And you answered, probably someone who can start something. Now, is this a property of the world in general or is this a property of EAs? And if it's about EAs, then what do you think is about? Is there something about the movement that drives away people who could take leadership roles?