Sam Bankman-Fried - Crypto, FTX, Altruism, & 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. Episode website + Transcript: https://dwarkeshpatel.com/p/sbf Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3KxGOFI Spotify: https://spoti.fi/3B11Vgv Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes: https://twitter.com/dwarkesh_sp Unfortunately, audio quality abruptly drops from 17:50-19:15 TIMESTAMPS: 00:00 Preview 01:03 How inefficient is the world? 01:56 Choosing a career 05:00 The difficulty of being a founder 07:06 Is effective altruism too narrowminded? 10:42 Political giving 13:40 FTX Future Fund 17:26 Adverse selection in philanthropy 18:51 Relationship between different causes 23:00 Doing difficult things 26:36 The importance of focus 29:14 How SBF identifies talent 31:54 Why scaling too fast kills companies 34:36 The future of crypto 36:31 Risk, efficiency, and human discretion in derivatives 41:45 Jane Street vs FTX 42:41 Conflict of interest between broker and exchange 43:44 Bahamas and Charter Cities 44:32 SBF’s RAM-skewed mind