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Sam Bankman-Fried Revisited · What's Your Problem?

0:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin. In May of this year, I interviewed Sam Bankman
0:23
Speaker 1: Freed for this show. Sam was a very young, very
0:26
Speaker 1: rich entrepreneur and philanthropist who ran a crypto exchange called FTX.
0:33
Speaker 1: And then last week, in a matter of just a
0:36
Speaker 1: few days, FTX collapsed and filed for bankruptcy. And you know,
0:40
Speaker 1: even to say that, even to say it collapsed and
0:43
Speaker 1: filed for bankruptcy in a few days, somehow amazingly kind
0:47
Speaker 1: of understates how fast and dramatic the fall of the
0:51
Speaker 1: company and of Sam Bankman Freed was. Until last week,
0:56
Speaker 1: Sam Bankman Freed had this persona of being like a
0:59
Speaker 1: good guy. He wasn't chilling some ridiculous future where crypto
1:03
Speaker 1: was going to solve all our problems. He was running
1:06
Speaker 1: a real business, an exchange for crypto t and all along.
1:11
Speaker 1: He said. His plan was to make as much money
1:14
Speaker 1: as possible and then give it all away, and it
1:17
Speaker 1: seemed to be working. He was only thirty and already
1:21
Speaker 1: he'd given away hundreds of millions of dollars. Now the
1:25
Speaker 1: money is gone, customers and investors may never get paid back,
1:29
Speaker 1: and federal prosecutors are reportedly investigating both Sam and FTX.
1:35
Speaker 1: This week as all this was happening, I listened back
1:37
Speaker 1: to my interview with Sam from May, and there are
1:40
Speaker 1: parts that I definitely find embarrassing in light of the
1:42
Speaker 1: new news, moments when I should have challenged him more,
1:45
Speaker 1: been more skeptical, and for that matter, my whole framing
1:48
Speaker 1: of the show seems absurd, over the top. I mean,
1:51
Speaker 1: I called the show Sam Bankman Freed wants to save
1:55
Speaker 1: the world spoiler alert. He did not. And yet, and yet,
2:01
Speaker 1: I did find the interview really interesting to listen to
2:05
Speaker 1: again in light of the news. Some parts of it
2:08
Speaker 1: still seemed true, but in a really different way, and
2:11
Speaker 1: at least one thing Sam said seems very very prescient.
2:19
Speaker 1: I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem? But today,
2:22
Speaker 1: let's be honest, it's more of a what's my problem situation.
2:26
Speaker 1: My problem is this, I interviewed a guy who was
2:29
Speaker 1: not at all what he seemed to be, and I
2:32
Speaker 1: didn't quite see it. So what we're gonna do for
2:35
Speaker 1: today's show is we're gonna replay the original interview, and
2:39
Speaker 1: at a few points in the interview, I'm going to
2:41
Speaker 1: pop in now with a quick update based on everything
2:44
Speaker 1: that has happened since now here is my conversation with
2:49
Speaker 1: Sam Bankman Freed as it aired back in May of
2:52
Speaker 1: this year. Before we get to the interview, I just
2:55
Speaker 1: want to take a minute here and set up this
2:57
Speaker 1: one big idea, this really useful intellectual framework that drives
3:02
Speaker 1: almost everything Sam does. It's called expected value. I try
3:07
Speaker 1: to use it a lot because I think it's started
3:09
Speaker 1: is the default correct way in some senses to calculate something.
3:14
Speaker 1: It's like if you're just trying to do a generic calculation,
3:18
Speaker 1: I think it's usually the right thing to use. You
3:20
Speaker 1: can understand expected value by understanding how Sam decided to
3:24
Speaker 1: start his company, the crypto exchange FTX. He was working
3:28
Speaker 1: as a trader making millions of dollars, and when he
3:31
Speaker 1: thought about starting FTX, he knew there was a really
3:35
Speaker 1: good chance it might fail. It might ultimately be worth zero.
3:38
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, if it succeeded, it could
3:41
Speaker 1: be worth tens of billions of dollars. So here is
3:44
Speaker 1: a slightly oversimplified version of how you would use expected
3:48
Speaker 1: value in this case. Say, Sam thought there was only
3:52
Speaker 1: a one percent chance that his exchange would be really successful,
3:56
Speaker 1: but that if it were really successful, it would make
3:58
Speaker 1: him twenty billion dollars. The expected value of starting the
4:02
Speaker 1: exchange is the probability of it being successful one percent
4:08
Speaker 1: times the value if that success happens twenty billion dollars,
4:13
Speaker 1: which comes out to two hundred million dollars a lot.
4:19
Speaker 1: So in twenty nineteen, Sam started FTX, and Sam told
4:23
Speaker 1: me there is a really important lesson here about expected value.
4:28
Speaker 1: One of the sort of takeaways that often ends up
4:30
Speaker 1: coming from really thinking hard and critically about expected values
4:34
Speaker 1: is that you should go for it way more than
4:37
Speaker 1: is generally understood. Go big. You should really go really big,
4:40
Speaker 1: even if you probably will fail and wind up with zero.
4:44
Speaker 1: That's absolutely right. And I think one of the intuitions
4:47
Speaker 1: for why that's the case, for why I think going
4:50
Speaker 1: big is often the right thing to do well if
4:53
Speaker 1: you think about it, like you know, you've got obviously
4:55
Speaker 1: a number of options available to you. Somewhere on the
5:00
Speaker 1: far right hand side of distributions, is like the best
5:03
Speaker 1: possible thing, meaning the really good outcomes. That's right, the
5:08
Speaker 1: best possible thing you could imagine happening, And the best
5:11
Speaker 1: possible thing is probably really good. You know, it's probably
5:16
Speaker 1: orders of magnitude bigger than whatever you're sort of expecting
5:20
Speaker 1: to do. Right, it's not a little better, it's wildly better.
5:24
Speaker 1: It's almost unimaginably better, that's right. And if you're thinking about, well,
5:27
Speaker 1: if I found a company, how is it going to go?
5:30
Speaker 1: You know, you're probably thinking this might be a million
5:32
Speaker 1: dollar company, right, But the right hand distribution, the right
5:35
Speaker 1: hand tail of that is going to be a billion
5:37
Speaker 1: dollar company, and that's a thousand times bigger. And so
5:41
Speaker 1: in order for it to be justified to choose that decision,
5:44
Speaker 1: if you really do care linearly about money, if you
5:46
Speaker 1: really do think that getting that marginal dollars worth a lot,
5:51
Speaker 1: you know, even once you already have a lot of money,
5:54
Speaker 1: then it should lead you to think that that, you know,
5:58
Speaker 1: the best outcomes might be outcomes that have a ninety
6:01
Speaker 1: nine percent chance of failure, right, because in ninety nine
6:03
Speaker 1: percent chance of failure and a one percent chance of
6:06
Speaker 1: that billion is still that's ten million, and that's a lot.
6:09
Speaker 1: And so any time that light there is some nonzero
6:12
Speaker 1: and non negligible chance of a really really good outcome
6:16
Speaker 1: are times when you're gonna be incentivized more than seems
6:20
Speaker 1: natural probably to choose extreme outcomes. Okay, that was Sam
6:26
Speaker 1: back in May, and listening back now, I have to
6:28
Speaker 1: say this part kind of holds up, but in a
6:31
Speaker 1: really different light. It's basically saying you should make massive,
6:36
Speaker 1: long shot bets with a high probability of failure if
6:39
Speaker 1: the potential payoff is big enough. And you know, that's
6:42
Speaker 1: clearly what Sam was doing for the first part of
6:44
Speaker 1: his career when the price of crypto was going up,
6:46
Speaker 1: and he kept making these big bets and having huge successes.
6:49
Speaker 1: Now we don't know all the details of what happened
6:52
Speaker 1: at Sam's crypto exchange FTX before it collapsed, but remember
6:56
Speaker 1: one of the key things that prosecutors are apparently looking
6:59
Speaker 1: into is FTX allegedly loan customer funds to a trading
7:04
Speaker 1: firm also controlled by Sam making that loan. Deciding to
7:08
Speaker 1: make the loan, that is a kind of bet, right.
7:11
Speaker 1: It's a bet that the training firm will make profitable
7:14
Speaker 1: trades or investments with the borrowed money, a bet that
7:17
Speaker 1: the market will go up, the money will be returned,
7:19
Speaker 1: and nobody will get in trouble. It's possible that Sam
7:22
Speaker 1: decided that was a bet that had positive expected value,
7:26
Speaker 1: and he went ahead and did it. Okay, now let's
7:29
Speaker 1: get back to the original interview. At this point, we're
7:32
Speaker 1: talking about how expected value shapes Sam's thinking about philanthropy,
7:37
Speaker 1: and what he says is when he's thinking about giving
7:39
Speaker 1: away money, he doesn't just think about the world today.
7:42
Speaker 1: He thinks about like the whole future of humanity. How
7:47
Speaker 1: many people will live if we play our cards right,
7:50
Speaker 1: as a world, like in the ninetieth percentile outcome, how
7:53
Speaker 1: many people will live in the future. The answer is trillions,
7:55
Speaker 1: probably maybe hundreds of trillions. Right, It's thousands of times
8:00
Speaker 1: more than the number of people who have ever lived.
8:03
Speaker 1: And so that's just that's a huge factor. Right, Anything
8:07
Speaker 1: that we do that actually has packed on the whole
8:10
Speaker 1: future of the world is massively important. It's kind of
8:13
Speaker 1: a ridiculous way to think at some level, right, it
8:16
Speaker 1: just gets so big then, like you're just some guy
8:19
Speaker 1: with a lot of money at some level, right, talking
8:22
Speaker 1: about like trillions of people in the whole future of humanity.
8:24
Speaker 1: Like it gets weird, Right, it does get really weird.
8:28
Speaker 1: You should really stress uses and and think like, Okay,
8:30
Speaker 1: do I really believe this? Like do I really actually
8:33
Speaker 1: think that there's compelling evidence that like, you know, these
8:37
Speaker 1: numbers that I'm looking at are as big as I'm
8:39
Speaker 1: claiming they are, or am I kind of bullshitting myself
8:42
Speaker 1: on this? Like, you know, you should absolutely have some
8:45
Speaker 1: humility around that, but but it's not totally implausible. And
8:49
Speaker 1: there are examples of people people who we've heard of
8:52
Speaker 1: were very famous, and people who no one has ever
8:54
Speaker 1: heard of, who have had massive, massive impact on the world,
8:59
Speaker 1: who have had that massive multiplier, and so it's not
9:02
Speaker 1: totally implausible. And so you know, I think that, like,
9:06
Speaker 1: while we should absolutely have you know, ay dosa humility
9:10
Speaker 1: towards extreme outcomes, you know, we should also acknowledge that
9:14
Speaker 1: they can be real and that often the highest expected
9:17
Speaker 1: value things are in fact pushing directly towards them. Well,
9:22
Speaker 1: and in fact, you did hit the extreme right tail
9:26
Speaker 1: of the distribution in work, right, you did just get
9:30
Speaker 1: implausibly rich in a ridiculously short period of time. So
9:34
Speaker 1: at least on that one it worked. That's right, and
9:37
Speaker 1: I think it's that's certainly it's been a big update
9:39
Speaker 1: towards me in the direction of life. This stuff is plausible.
9:43
Speaker 1: Uh huh. So the fact that you got so rich
9:46
Speaker 1: so fast in crypto, does it make does it push
9:48
Speaker 1: your altruism toward like Welsh shit? If I could make
9:52
Speaker 1: twenty billion dollars in three years, everybody on Earth could
9:55
Speaker 1: in fact die from a pandemic or from some out
9:58
Speaker 1: of control AI and I should spend some of the
10:00
Speaker 1: money to try and reduce the probabilities of that. I mean,
10:04
Speaker 1: is it like that? Yeah, it absolutely does. I think
10:06
Speaker 1: it absolutely does make me think, you know what, like
10:09
Speaker 1: these you know, really extreme outcomes are probably plausible, and
10:14
Speaker 1: they're probably plausible enough that I should be taking them
10:16
Speaker 1: really seriously, you know, and that has pretty profound implications,
10:21
Speaker 1: I think for what we should be doing. So listening
10:25
Speaker 1: back to that section now, I do feel like there
10:27
Speaker 1: was a moment in there when I was starting to
10:30
Speaker 1: push in the right direction. It was when Sam started
10:33
Speaker 1: talking about the whole future of humanity thing and helping
10:36
Speaker 1: trillions of people, and I was like, come on, trillions
10:39
Speaker 1: of people, the whole future of humanity. That seems like
10:41
Speaker 1: a bit much. But Sam had a reasonable answer there.
10:46
Speaker 1: He said, yes, we should have some humility and thinking
10:49
Speaker 1: about things this big. But you know, look, he said,
10:51
Speaker 1: there are people who have had really really profound effects
10:55
Speaker 1: on humanity, and why shouldn't I, Sam Bankman freed try
10:59
Speaker 1: to be one of those people, and that made sense
11:01
Speaker 1: to me. It did seem reasonable, and I think that
11:05
Speaker 1: is part of what was so appealing and convincing about Sam.
11:09
Speaker 1: I think that is part of why I and so
11:12
Speaker 1: many other people really believed him and wanted to believe him.
11:17
Speaker 1: He seemed guided by this sort of straightforward logic. He
11:21
Speaker 1: seemed like a very smart, very reasonable person. In a minute,
11:27
Speaker 1: we'll have more from the May interview about Sam's role
11:30
Speaker 1: as one of the biggest donors to democratic political candidates. Now,
11:46
Speaker 1: let's go back to the show as it originally aired
11:48
Speaker 1: in May of this year. Sam told me he's given
11:51
Speaker 1: away about two hundred million dollars so far, which obviously
11:55
Speaker 1: is a lot, but it is also somewhere around one
11:58
Speaker 1: percent of what he plans to give away eventually. His
12:02
Speaker 1: giving has been broad anti poverty, animal welfare, healthcare, but
12:06
Speaker 1: he has started to focus on a few areas. One
12:09
Speaker 1: of the biggest is pandemic preparedness. That is a category
12:13
Speaker 1: that fits right into that expected value framework. You know,
12:17
Speaker 1: a low probability but super deadly pandemic is worth spending
12:22
Speaker 1: a lot to prevent. Another place, where he's been giving
12:25
Speaker 1: is politics. Sam was one of the biggest donors to
12:28
Speaker 1: President Biden's twenty twenty campaign. More recently, he donated over
12:33
Speaker 1: ten million dollars to support a candidate in a Democratic
12:37
Speaker 1: primary for a congressional seat in Oregon, largely because that
12:41
Speaker 1: candidate wanted to focus on pandemic preparedness. The primary was
12:45
Speaker 1: held just last week, and Sam's candidate lost by a lot.
12:49
Speaker 1: I think that there are a lot of takeaways from it,
12:51
Speaker 1: and you know, I think that might do it again.
12:55
Speaker 1: I would do it a bit differently than last time.
12:58
Speaker 1: But you know, fundamentally, I think it was a well
13:02
Speaker 1: fought race. I think that you know, he had a
13:04
Speaker 1: real shot. And you know, going back to this discussion
13:08
Speaker 1: of expected values, right like, if you're donating blagal races,
13:12
Speaker 1: that's that you think your candidates are ninety nine percent
13:15
Speaker 1: to weigh, you're almost certainly doing something right because that
13:18
Speaker 1: person doesn't need your money exactly. You should be donating
13:22
Speaker 1: such that you think that you have a pretty substantial
13:25
Speaker 1: chance of losing. And you know, I first stand by that.
13:29
Speaker 1: Do you expect you'll give a lot of money in
13:31
Speaker 1: the twenty twenty four election cycle? I would guess. So,
13:34
Speaker 1: I don't know for sure, it's going to depend on
13:36
Speaker 1: who's running, but you know I would guess so, well,
13:39
Speaker 1: let's say Donald Trump runs for president. Would that cause
13:41
Speaker 1: you to probably give a lot of money to the
13:43
Speaker 1: person who's running against him. That's that's a pretty decent guess.
13:47
Speaker 1: And you know, I think that I'm going to be
13:49
Speaker 1: looking a lot less at like political party um from
13:52
Speaker 1: that perspective, and a lot more about you know, uh
13:56
Speaker 1: same governance Like that is you know at it's for
13:59
Speaker 1: the thing that I think I care the most governing governance.
14:05
Speaker 1: I think the United States has both a big opportunity,
14:09
Speaker 1: big responsibility to the world to shepherd the West in
14:15
Speaker 1: a powerful but responsible manner, and that everything that we
14:20
Speaker 1: do there has massive, massive ripple effects on what the
14:24
Speaker 1: future looks like. You've talked before about being surprised at
14:28
Speaker 1: how little money is in politics. It is quite small,
14:32
Speaker 1: the amount of money that is donated relative to how
14:35
Speaker 1: much money the government spends. Right, does that lead you
14:40
Speaker 1: to want to donate a lot? But does it follow
14:43
Speaker 1: from that that, like, you'll probably donate a lot of money?
14:46
Speaker 1: It follows that I might in the end. That's basically
14:49
Speaker 1: what I think, um, I think that like there are
14:53
Speaker 1: in some ways, there's you know, in some ways surprisingly
14:56
Speaker 1: little money in politics and given sort of the skipe
14:59
Speaker 1: of its impact. Note that doesn't necessarily mean they're good
15:03
Speaker 1: things to do, um donating politics right, Like it might
15:06
Speaker 1: be that sure, but like how are you actually going
15:08
Speaker 1: to do anything? You full? You know, maybe that's how
15:10
Speaker 1: it turns out, but but maybe not, you know, I mean,
15:13
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily the case that more money can have
15:16
Speaker 1: a meaningful effect on the outcome. That's right, It's not
15:19
Speaker 1: necessarily the case, but it certainly gestures a little bit
15:22
Speaker 1: in that direction. I mean, I imagine you have some
15:26
Speaker 1: probability distribution in your mind of how much money you
15:30
Speaker 1: might give in the next election cycle, Like give me
15:34
Speaker 1: some number I would guess north of one hundred million UM.
15:42
Speaker 1: And you know, as for how much north of that
15:45
Speaker 1: if I don't know, you know, it really does depend
15:48
Speaker 1: on what happens, Like it's really dependent on exactly who's
15:51
Speaker 1: running where for what like like these these are are
15:54
Speaker 1: a super contingent thing. But but yeah, I think that
15:58
Speaker 1: gives maybe some sense of what the what the sort
16:02
Speaker 1: of like scale might be here more than one hundred
16:05
Speaker 1: million sort of spread across many organizations, but towards the
16:11
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four election. So if that's a floor, what's
16:14
Speaker 1: the ceiling? Like a billion? Might you give a billion? Yeah?
16:19
Speaker 1: I think that's a decent life thing to look at
16:22
Speaker 1: as a as a sort of like I mean, I
16:25
Speaker 1: would hate to say like hard ceiling, because whom knows
16:27
Speaker 1: what was going to happen between now and then, But
16:29
Speaker 1: as like at least sort of a soft ceiling, I
16:32
Speaker 1: would say, yeah, okay, So so the ballpark is like
16:36
Speaker 1: one hundred million ish to a billion ish, with again
16:40
Speaker 1: a lot of caveats on this, and you know, there's
16:42
Speaker 1: a world WHI should end up being close to zero
16:44
Speaker 1: if they're you know, if things just work out such
16:47
Speaker 1: that there isn't Is there much I'm excited about? Like
16:49
Speaker 1: that seems like a very low probability to me, based
16:52
Speaker 1: on what I know about you in the world. Yeah,
16:55
Speaker 1: it's I think it's I think it's very low that
16:57
Speaker 1: it's actually gonna end up being zero. That does seem
16:59
Speaker 1: pretty unlikely. Yeah, a billion seems way more likely than
17:03
Speaker 1: zero to me. I think it's really right. Um, So
17:08
Speaker 1: I think the most anybody gave last time, if I
17:10
Speaker 1: have the right numbers is two hundred and fifteen million.
17:14
Speaker 1: That's for the twenty twenty cycle, the last presidential cycle.
17:18
Speaker 1: It seems like you'll probably give more than that. Based
17:21
Speaker 1: only on what you've told me, I think it is
17:23
Speaker 1: eminently possible that I think that that would not surprise me.
17:31
Speaker 1: Just to pop in here again in the present in November.
17:34
Speaker 1: Back in May, when this interview was published, this part
17:38
Speaker 1: of the interview actually made a little bit of news.
17:41
Speaker 1: NBC News and Politico both reported based on the interview
17:45
Speaker 1: that Sam might give a billion dollars in the twenty
17:48
Speaker 1: twenty four campaign. So that happened, and then some time passed,
17:53
Speaker 1: and then in another interview just last month in October,
17:56
Speaker 1: Sam walked this part of the interview back. He said
17:59
Speaker 1: it was a dumb quote to give on his part,
18:01
Speaker 1: And at the time when when I saw this news
18:03
Speaker 1: last month, I thought it was just, you know, that
18:05
Speaker 1: his philanthropic priorities had changed. But now, in light of
18:10
Speaker 1: what we know now, it seems like maybe Sam knew
18:13
Speaker 1: by October that he just wasn't going to have a
18:16
Speaker 1: billion dollars to give in the next presidential cycle. One
18:20
Speaker 1: other thing pops out at me. From this part of
18:22
Speaker 1: the interview, and that is the moment when Sam says
18:25
Speaker 1: his giving for the twenty twenty four election might be
18:28
Speaker 1: close to zero, close to nothing. And I just dismissed
18:31
Speaker 1: that idea out of hand. But of course, given what
18:34
Speaker 1: we know now, the situation now, it might be the
18:36
Speaker 1: most clearly true thing he told me in the whole interview. Okay,
18:40
Speaker 1: we're gonna go back to the interview now. We're going
18:42
Speaker 1: to talk more about philanthropy and also a little but
18:45
Speaker 1: in retrospect, not enough about the relationship between his political
18:49
Speaker 1: donations and government regulation of the crypto industry. I've heard
18:54
Speaker 1: you say that you know, at some points over the
18:58
Speaker 1: next few years, you hope to find opportunities where you
19:00
Speaker 1: can spend give away like a billion dollars really quickly.
19:07
Speaker 1: What are some of the places you think that might happen.
19:08
Speaker 1: I mean, the election, the twenty twenty four election is
19:10
Speaker 1: clearly one. What are a few others? I think pandemic
19:14
Speaker 1: prevention is potentially one of them. I think you look
19:16
Speaker 1: at like how much would it cost to you know,
19:20
Speaker 1: really definitely prevent the next pandemic or you can never
19:23
Speaker 1: definitely prevent it, but to have you know, a really
19:26
Speaker 1: good shot at it. I think you're probably talking tens
19:28
Speaker 1: of billions of dollars, which is crazy that that governments
19:32
Speaker 1: aren't spending that money, right, that's right, that really should
19:36
Speaker 1: be government spending it. And part of this might be
19:38
Speaker 1: working with governments that because it's not that much like
19:41
Speaker 1: if truly if they could reduce the risk of a
19:43
Speaker 1: pandemic by half, say for thirty billion dollars a year, like,
19:48
Speaker 1: do you actually think that is that true? Or fifty billion?
19:52
Speaker 1: I think I think something like that's probably true. I
19:54
Speaker 1: think something that's like not too far off from that
19:57
Speaker 1: order of magnitude, and that probably you know, by the
20:00
Speaker 1: time you're talking about you know, many tens of million
20:04
Speaker 1: billions of dollars um. You know, that's something that you're
20:07
Speaker 1: probably going to need to have government stepping in on.
20:10
Speaker 1: But you know, I would be happy to throw in
20:12
Speaker 1: a fair bit to health facilitate that. So I should
20:17
Speaker 1: actually I should have asked this earlier. But to what
20:20
Speaker 1: extent are your political donations a pandemic prevention strategy? So
20:27
Speaker 1: I think most of them have been so far, and
20:29
Speaker 1: you know, going forward, like there may become other policy,
20:32
Speaker 1: you know, things like AI policy, that that that that
20:35
Speaker 1: you end up being really important. And so it's not
20:37
Speaker 1: to say that like pandemics are the only things that
20:40
Speaker 1: are ever going to matter to me policywise, but that
20:42
Speaker 1: has been the big one so far, and it's the
20:44
Speaker 1: idea there, like tens of billions of dollars a year
20:47
Speaker 1: to significantly reduce the risk of another pandemic is not
20:50
Speaker 1: that much for the government, but it's more than you have, right,
20:54
Speaker 1: So you need a lever You can't you can't actually
20:56
Speaker 1: spend all of your money and meaningfully reduce the chances
20:59
Speaker 1: of another pandemic. And so if you can use political
21:02
Speaker 1: donations to elect candidates who want to spend money to
21:05
Speaker 1: prevent a pandemic, that works, that's right. So you're giving
21:10
Speaker 1: lots of money to political candidates. You're also doing a
21:13
Speaker 1: lot of work to shape regulation of crypto in the US.
21:19
Speaker 1: Tell me about the overlap between those two things. So
21:22
Speaker 1: most of the giving has not been done with crypto
21:26
Speaker 1: in mind, and I have been doing a ton of
21:29
Speaker 1: policy engagement on that, but that's mostly going to DC
21:34
Speaker 1: and talking with policymakers. I mean, here's the narrow version
21:37
Speaker 1: of the question. Is part of what you want from
21:41
Speaker 1: your political donations, some particular outcome in cryptoregulation that is
21:47
Speaker 1: not a big part of it. That is where we
21:51
Speaker 1: left the main part of the interview back in May,
21:53
Speaker 1: and when we zoom out now and look at what
21:56
Speaker 1: happened at FTX, you know, what Sam did is still
22:01
Speaker 1: really hazy. The details will probably emerge over time, but
22:05
Speaker 1: for now, one big question that is really interesting to
22:09
Speaker 1: me is was the basic altruism story Sam was telling true.
22:16
Speaker 1: Was he really trying to earn as much as he
22:18
Speaker 1: could to give it all away and help humanity or
22:21
Speaker 1: was that whole story a lie. I don't think we
22:24
Speaker 1: know the answer to that for sure yet, but it
22:27
Speaker 1: is possible that in spite of everything, that is really
22:31
Speaker 1: what he was after, That was really his intent. And
22:35
Speaker 1: if that is true, if he did mean to do
22:38
Speaker 1: great things in the world, and if he did do
22:40
Speaker 1: some of the bad things that have been alleged in
22:43
Speaker 1: order to do those good things, well that is a
22:46
Speaker 1: very complex, very human story about good intentions and bad
22:51
Speaker 1: decisions and ultimately, maybe Hugres He'll be back in a
22:57
Speaker 1: minute with the Lightning Round. Here is the Lightning Round
23:08
Speaker 1: with Sam Bankman Freed as it originally ran back in May,
23:12
Speaker 1: several of the answers played pretty differently now in light
23:15
Speaker 1: of the collapse of FTX. Let me just let's just
23:18
Speaker 1: do a lightning round a few quick questions and you
23:21
Speaker 1: can answer them fast. What's the least rational thing you do?
23:26
Speaker 1: Least rational thing? And I spend way too much time
23:28
Speaker 1: like aimlessly browsing my Facebook fee. Is it true you
23:32
Speaker 1: still sleep on a bean bag chair? And if so,
23:34
Speaker 1: why I did last night? I do do many nights. Um,
23:39
Speaker 1: it's I find it. I kind of I don't know,
23:43
Speaker 1: It's what I'm used to. Is honestly just part of
23:45
Speaker 1: the answer there. It's like it's what feels natural for me.
23:48
Speaker 1: If everything goes well, what problem will you be trying
23:50
Speaker 1: to solve in five years? I would say, the details
23:57
Speaker 1: of how to of what to prioritize for pandemic prevention
24:02
Speaker 1: funding with you know institutes that have been set up
24:04
Speaker 1: and are you know online and get a ton of
24:06
Speaker 1: capital into it and you know really great eight teams
24:09
Speaker 1: who are are devoting themselves to building it out. So
24:12
Speaker 1: the dream is you'll be like deep in the weeds
24:15
Speaker 1: figuring out how to prevent a pandemic. I've seen in
24:19
Speaker 1: other interviews You're doing lots of different things during the interview.
24:22
Speaker 1: I couldn't actually tell if you were doing other things
24:24
Speaker 1: during this interview, But were you and if so, what
24:26
Speaker 1: were you doing? As playing game of Storybook Brawl. I
24:30
Speaker 1: say the name of the game again, Storybook Brawl. How
24:33
Speaker 1: did they? I took second place out of eight, could
24:37
Speaker 1: have been worse, and I apologize. I do have to
24:39
Speaker 1: haul off. Okay, last one. What's one piece of advice
24:42
Speaker 1: you'd give to somebody trying to solve a hard problem.
24:45
Speaker 1: One piece of advice I would say, I just keep going,
24:49
Speaker 1: Just keep going, stuff by stuff, you know, try and
24:52
Speaker 1: solve it, but by a bit, and you know, eventually,
24:53
Speaker 1: hopefully you'll get there. That was my interview from May
25:01
Speaker 1: with Sam banksman Free. At the time, he was the
25:04
Speaker 1: founder and CEO of the Crypto Exchange FTX. Last week,
25:08
Speaker 1: f filed for bankruptcy and Sam resigned from the front.
25:13
Speaker 1: Today's show was edited by Robert Smith, produced by Edith Ruslo,
25:17
Speaker 1: and engineered by Amanda ka Wong. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and
25:21
Speaker 1: we'll be back next week with another episode of What's
25:23
Speaker 1: Your Problem.