Speaker 1: Pushkin. One of the most interesting people in the crypto
Speaker 1: world right now is Sam Bankman Freed. He's thirty years old,
Speaker 1: founded the crypto exchange FDx a few years back, and
Speaker 1: today he is worth around twenty billion dollars according to Forbes.
Speaker 1: And yet he still lives with roommates and drives a
Speaker 1: Toyota Corolla. And maybe the most interesting thing about Sam,
Speaker 1: it's actually not that into crypto. He didn't get into
Speaker 1: it because he thinks bitcoin is going to replace the dollar,
Speaker 1: or that we're on the brink of some revolution in
Speaker 1: the very meaning of money. He got into crypto so
Speaker 1: that he could make as much money as possible and
Speaker 1: then give almost all of it away. So when Sam
Speaker 1: thinks about really big problems, he doesn't necessarily think about
Speaker 1: how much the price of bitcoin is falling, or that
Speaker 1: a big stable coin fell apart a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1: He thinks about things like how to save humanity from extinction.
Speaker 1: How many people will live if we play our cards
Speaker 1: right as a world like in the ninetieth percentile outcome,
Speaker 1: How many people will live in the future dancers trillions,
Speaker 1: probably maybe hundreds of hundreds of trillions. I'm Jacob Goldstein
Speaker 1: and this is what's your problem? The show where entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: and engineers talk about how they're going to change the
Speaker 1: world once they solve a few problems. My guest today
Speaker 1: is Sam Bankman Free, and his problem is this, how
Speaker 1: do you save the world. Before we get to the interview,
Speaker 1: I just want to take a minute here and set
Speaker 1: up this one big idea. This really useful intellectual framework
Speaker 1: that drives almost everything Sam does. It's called expected value.
Speaker 1: I try to use it a lot because I think
Speaker 1: it sort of is the default correct way in some
Speaker 1: senses to calculate something like if you're just trying to
Speaker 1: do a generic calculation, I think it's usually the right
Speaker 1: thing to use. You could understand expected value by understanding
Speaker 1: how Sam decided to start his company, the crypto Exchange FTX.
Speaker 1: He was working as a trader making millions of dollars,
Speaker 1: and when he thought about starting FTX, he knew there
Speaker 1: was a really good chance it might fail. It might
Speaker 1: ultimately be worth zero. But on the other hand, if
Speaker 1: it succeeded, it could be worth tens of billions of dollars.
Speaker 1: So here is a slightly oversimplified version of how you
Speaker 1: would use expected value in this case, say, Sam thought
Speaker 1: there was only a one percent chance that his exchange
Speaker 1: would be really successful, but that if it were really successful,
Speaker 1: it would make him twenty billion dollars. The expected value
Speaker 1: of starting the exchange is the probability of it being
Speaker 1: successful one percent times the value if that success happens
Speaker 1: twenty billion dollars, which comes out to two hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars a lot. So in twenty nineteen, Sam started FTX,
Speaker 1: and Sam told me there is a really important lesson
Speaker 1: here about expected value. One of the sort of takeaways
Speaker 1: that often ends up coming from really thinking hard and
Speaker 1: critically about expected values is that you should go for
Speaker 1: it way more than is generally understood. Go big. You
Speaker 1: should really go really big, even if you probably will
Speaker 1: fail and wind up with zero. That's absolutely right. And
Speaker 1: I think one of the intuitions for why that's the case,
Speaker 1: for why I think going big is often the right
Speaker 1: thing to do well if you think about it, like
Speaker 1: you know, you've got obviously a number of options available
Speaker 1: to you. Somewhere on the far right hand side of
Speaker 1: distributions is like the best possible thing, meaning the really
Speaker 1: good outcomes. That's right, the best possible thing you could
Speaker 1: imagine happening, and the best possible thing is probably really good.
Speaker 1: You know, it's probably orders of magnitude bigger than whatever
Speaker 1: you're sort of expecting to do. Right, it's not a
Speaker 1: little better, it's wildly better. It's almost unimaginably better, that's right.
Speaker 1: And if you're thinking about, well, if I found a company,
Speaker 1: how is it going to go? You know, you're probably
Speaker 1: thinking this might be a million dollar company, right, but
Speaker 1: the right hand distribution, the right hand tail of that
Speaker 1: is going to be a billion dollar company, and that's
Speaker 1: a thousand times bigger. And so in order for it
Speaker 1: to be justified to choose that decision, if you really
Speaker 1: do care linearly about money, if you really do think
Speaker 1: that getting that marginal dollars worth a lot, you know,
Speaker 1: even once you already have a lot of money, then
Speaker 1: it should lead you to think that that, you know,
Speaker 1: the best outcomes might be outcomes that have a ninety
Speaker 1: nine percent chance of failure. Right, Because of ninety nine
Speaker 1: percent chance of failure and a one percent chance of
Speaker 1: that billion is still that's ten million, and that's a lot.
Speaker 1: And so any kind that like there is some non zero,
Speaker 1: non negligible chance of a really really good outcome are
Speaker 1: times when you're gonna be incentivized more than seems natural,
Speaker 1: probably to choose extreme outcomes. I feel like that maps
Speaker 1: in different ways both to your work you do for
Speaker 1: money and your altruism, which obviously are tied up, right,
Speaker 1: They both seem like very much rooted in those extreme outcomes.
Speaker 1: In the case of your work, it's an extremely large
Speaker 1: amount of money in a short amount of time, and
Speaker 1: in the case of the altruism, it's profoundly bad outcomes
Speaker 1: like everybody dying. Right, Like, both of those are sort
Speaker 1: of the same. In the kind of expected value universe,
Speaker 1: there are things we should probably think more about than
Speaker 1: seems intuitive if we're not using expected value, that's exactly right.
Speaker 1: And you know, when you think, as you said the
Speaker 1: altruism perspective, right, how many people will live if we
Speaker 1: play our cards right as a world, like in the
Speaker 1: ninetieth percentile outcome, how many people will live in the future.
Speaker 1: The answer is trillions, probably maybe hundreds of trillions, rights
Speaker 1: if thousands of times more than the number of people
Speaker 1: who have ever lived. And so that's just that's a
Speaker 1: huge factor, right, Anything that we do that actually has
Speaker 1: impact on the whole future of the world is massively important.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a ridiculous way to think at some level, right,
Speaker 1: it just gets so big then, like you're just some
Speaker 1: guy with a lot of money at some level, right,
Speaker 1: talking about like trillions of people in the whole future
Speaker 1: of humanity. Like it gets weird, Right, it does get
Speaker 1: really weird. You should really stress us these and think like, Okay,
Speaker 1: do I really believe this? Like, do I really actually
Speaker 1: think that there's compelling evidence that like, you know, these
Speaker 1: numbers that I'm looking at are as big as I'm
Speaker 1: claiming they are, or am I kind of bullshitting myself
Speaker 1: on this? Like, you know, you should absolutely have some
Speaker 1: humility around that, But it's not totally implausible. And there
Speaker 1: are examples of people people who we've heard of were
Speaker 1: very famous, and people who no one has ever heard of,
Speaker 1: who have had massive, massive impact on the world, who
Speaker 1: have had that massive multiplier, And so it's not totally implausible.
Speaker 1: And so you know, I think that like, while we
Speaker 1: should absolutely have you know, a healthy dose of humility
Speaker 1: towards extreme outcomes, you know, we should also acknowledge that
Speaker 1: they can be real and that often the highest expected
Speaker 1: value things are in fact pushing directly towards them. Well,
Speaker 1: and in fact you did hit the extreme right tale
Speaker 1: of the distribution in work right, you did just get
Speaker 1: implausibly rich in a ridiculously short period of time. So
Speaker 1: at least on that one it worked. That's right, and
Speaker 1: I think it's that's certainly it's been a big update
Speaker 1: towards me in the direction of life. This stuff is plausible.
Speaker 1: Uh huh. So the fact that you got so rich
Speaker 1: so fast in crypto does it make Does it push
Speaker 1: your altruism toward like Welsh? Shit? If I could make
Speaker 1: twenty billion dollars in three years, everybody on Earth could
Speaker 1: in fact die from a pandemic or from some out
Speaker 1: of control AI and I should spend some of the
Speaker 1: money to try and reduce the probabilities of that. I mean,
Speaker 1: is it like that? Yeah, it absolutely does. I think
Speaker 1: it absolutely does make me think, you know what, like
Speaker 1: these you know, really extreme outcomes are probably plausible, and
Speaker 1: they're probably plausible enough that I should be taking them
Speaker 1: really seriously, you know, And that has pretty profound implications
Speaker 1: I think for what we should be doing. We'll get
Speaker 1: to those profound implications and to exactly where Sam is
Speaker 1: giving his money away in just a minute. That's the
Speaker 1: end of the ads. Now we're going back to the show.
Speaker 1: Sam told me he's given away about two hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars so far, which obviously is a lot, but it
Speaker 1: is also somewhere around one percent of what he plans
Speaker 1: to give away eventually. His giving has been broad anti poverty,
Speaker 1: animal welfare, healthcare, but he has started to focus on
Speaker 1: a few areas. One of the biggest is pandemic preparedness.
Speaker 1: That is a category that fits right into that expected
Speaker 1: value framework. You know, a low probability but super deadly
Speaker 1: pandemic is worth spending a lot to prevent. Another place
Speaker 1: where he's been giving is politics. Sam was one of
Speaker 1: the biggest donors to President Biden's twenty twenty campaign. More recently,
Speaker 1: he donated over ten million dollars to support a candidate
Speaker 1: in a Democratic primary for a congressional seat in Oregon,
Speaker 1: largely because that candidate wanted to focus on pandemic preparedness.
Speaker 1: The primary was held just last week and Sam's candidate
Speaker 1: lost by a lot. I think that there are a
Speaker 1: lot of takeaways from it, and yeah, I think that
Speaker 1: might do it again. I would do it a bit
Speaker 1: differently than last time. But you know, fundamentally, I think
Speaker 1: it was a well fought race. I think that you know,
Speaker 1: he had a real show. Um. And you know, going
Speaker 1: back to the discussion of expected values, right, like, if
Speaker 1: you're donating blacal races such that you think your candidates
Speaker 1: are in ninety nine percent to weigh, you're almost certainly
Speaker 1: doing something right because that person doesn't need your money exactly.
Speaker 1: You should be donating such that you think that you
Speaker 1: have a pretty substantial chance of losing. And you know,
Speaker 1: I first stand by that. Do you expect you'll give
Speaker 1: a lot of money in the twenty twenty four election cycle?
Speaker 1: I would guess so. I don't know for sure. It's
Speaker 1: going to depend on who's running, but you know I
Speaker 1: would guess so, well, let's say Donald Trump runs for president.
Speaker 1: Would that cause you to probably give a lot of
Speaker 1: money to the person who's running against him? That's that's
Speaker 1: a pretty decent guess. And and you know, I think
Speaker 1: that I'm going to be looking a lot less at
Speaker 1: like political party, um from that perspective, and a lot
Speaker 1: more about you know, uh same governance Like that is
Speaker 1: you know, at it's for the thing that I think
Speaker 1: I care the most governing governance. I think the United
Speaker 1: States has both a big opportunity and big responsibility to
Speaker 1: the world to shepherd the West in a powerful but
Speaker 1: responsible manner, and that everything that we do there has massive,
Speaker 1: massive ripple effects on what the future looks like. You've
Speaker 1: talked before about being surprised at how little money is
Speaker 1: in politics. It is quite small, the amount of money
Speaker 1: that is donated relative to how much money the government spends. Right,
Speaker 1: does that lead you to want to donate a lot?
Speaker 1: But does it follow from that that, like, you'll probably
Speaker 1: donate a lot of money? It follows that I might
Speaker 1: in the end. That's basically what I think. I think
Speaker 1: that like, there are in some ways, there's you know,
Speaker 1: in some ways surprisingly little money in politics, and given
Speaker 1: sort of the scope of its impact, noe, that doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily mean they're good things to do donating politics, Like
Speaker 1: it might be that, sure, but like, how are you
Speaker 1: actually going to do anything useful? You know? Maybe that's
Speaker 1: how it turns out, but but maybe not, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not necessarily the case that more money
Speaker 1: can have a meaningful effect on the outcome, That's right,
Speaker 1: It's not necessarily the case, but it certainly gestures a
Speaker 1: little bit in that direction. I mean, I imagine you
Speaker 1: have some probability distribution in your mind of how much
Speaker 1: money you might give in the next election cycle, Like,
Speaker 1: give me some number. I would guess north of one
Speaker 1: hundred million, um, And you know, as for how much
Speaker 1: north of that, I don't know. You know, it really
Speaker 1: does depend on what happens, Like it's really dependent on
Speaker 1: exactly who's running where for why, like like these these
Speaker 1: are are a super contingent thing. But um, but yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that gives maybe some sense of what the
Speaker 1: what the sort of like scale might be here more
Speaker 1: than one hundred million, sort of spread across many races, organizations,
Speaker 1: but towards the twenty twenty four election. So if that's
Speaker 1: a floor, what's the ceiling? Like a billion? Might you
Speaker 1: give a billion? Yeah? I think that's a decent life
Speaker 1: thing to look at as a as is sort of
Speaker 1: like I mean, I would hate to say like hard
Speaker 1: ceiling its whom those was going to happen between now
Speaker 1: and then, but as like at least sort of a
Speaker 1: soft ceiling, I would say, yeah, okay, So so the
Speaker 1: ballpark is like one hundred million ish to a billion
Speaker 1: ish with again a lot of caveats on this, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's a world which told end up being
Speaker 1: close to zero if they're you know, things just work
Speaker 1: out such that there isn't Is there much I'm excited about?
Speaker 1: Like that seems like a very low probability to me,
Speaker 1: based on what I know about you in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty I think it's I think it's very low
Speaker 1: that it's actually gonna end up being zero. That does
Speaker 1: seem pretty unlikely. Yeah, a billion seems way more likely
Speaker 1: than zero to me. I think it's quaitely right. So
Speaker 1: I think the most anybody gave last time, if I
Speaker 1: have the right numbers, is two hundred and fifteen million.
Speaker 1: That's for the twenty twenty cycle, the last presidential cycle.
Speaker 1: It seems like you'll probably give more than that. Based
Speaker 1: only on what you've told me, I think it is
Speaker 1: eminently possible that I I think that that would not
Speaker 1: surprise me. I've heard you say that you know, at
Speaker 1: some points over the next few years, you hope to
Speaker 1: find opportunities where you can spend give away like a
Speaker 1: billion dollars really quickly. What are some of the places
Speaker 1: you think that might happen. I mean, the election, the
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four election is clearly one. What are a
Speaker 1: few others? I think pandemic prevntion is potentially one of them.
Speaker 1: I think you look at like how much would it
Speaker 1: cost to you know, really definitely prevent the next pandemic
Speaker 1: or you can never definitely prevent it, but to have
Speaker 1: you know, a really good shot at it. I think
Speaker 1: you're probably talking tens of billion dollars, which is crazy
Speaker 1: that that governments aren't spending that money, right, that's right,
Speaker 1: that really should be government spending it. And part of
Speaker 1: this might be working with governments that because it's not
Speaker 1: that much like if truly if they could reduce the
Speaker 1: risk of a pandemic by half, say for thirty billion
Speaker 1: dollars a year, like, do you actually think that is
Speaker 1: that true? Or fifty billion? I think I think something
Speaker 1: like that's probably true. I think something that's like not
Speaker 1: too far off from that order of magnitude, and that
Speaker 1: probably you know, by the time you're talking about you know,
Speaker 1: many tens of million billions of dollars um. You know,
Speaker 1: if that's something that you're probably going need to have
Speaker 1: government stepping in on. But you know, I would be
Speaker 1: happy to throw in a fair bit to help facilitate that.
Speaker 1: So I should actually I should have asked this earlier.
Speaker 1: But to what extent are your political donations a pandemic
Speaker 1: prevention strategy? So I think most of them have been
Speaker 1: so far, and you know, going forward, like there may
Speaker 1: become other policy, you know, things like AI policy that
Speaker 1: that that that you end up being really important. And
Speaker 1: so it's not to say that like pandemics are the
Speaker 1: only things that are ever going to matter to me policywise,
Speaker 1: but that has been the big one so far, and
Speaker 1: it's the idea there, like tens of billions of dollars
Speaker 1: a year to significantly reduce the risk of another pandemic
Speaker 1: is not that much for the government, but it's more
Speaker 1: than you have, right, so you need a lever You
Speaker 1: can't you can't actually spend all of your money and
Speaker 1: meaningfully reduce the chances of another pandemic. And so if
Speaker 1: you can use political donations to elect candidates who want
Speaker 1: to spend money to prevent a pandemic, that works, that's right.
Speaker 1: So you're giving lots of money to political candidates, you're
Speaker 1: also doing a lot of work to um shape regulation
Speaker 1: of crypto in the US, tell me about the overlap
Speaker 1: between those two things. So most of the giving has
Speaker 1: not been done with crypto in mind. And I have
Speaker 1: been doing a ton of policy engagement on that, but
Speaker 1: that's mostly going to DC and talking with policymakers. I mean,
Speaker 1: here's the narrow version of the question. Is part of
Speaker 1: what you want from your political donations some particular outcome
Speaker 1: in crypto regulation? That is not a big part of it.
Speaker 1: I wanted to talk more about crypto with Sam, but
Speaker 1: our time was running short. I do promise to talk
Speaker 1: more about crypto on the show before too long, and
Speaker 1: Sam did have time for a quick lightning round. We'll
Speaker 1: have that lightning round in a minute. Okay, let's get
Speaker 1: back to the show. We're gonna close with the lightning round.
Speaker 1: Let me just let's just do a lightning round. A
Speaker 1: few quick questions and you can answer them fast. What's
Speaker 1: the least rational thing you do? Least rational thing? I
Speaker 1: know I spend way too much time like aimlessly browsing Facebook. Fee.
Speaker 1: Is it true you still sleep on a bean bag chair?
Speaker 1: And if so, why I did last night? I do
Speaker 1: do many nights. Um, It's uh, I find it. I
Speaker 1: kind of I don't know, it's what I'm used to
Speaker 1: is honestly just part of the answer there. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's what feels natural for me. If everything goes well,
Speaker 1: what problem will you be trying to solve in five years?
Speaker 1: I would say, the details of how to of what
Speaker 1: to prioritize for pandemic prevention funding with you know institutes
Speaker 1: that have been set up and are you know online
Speaker 1: it a ton of capital into it, and you know
Speaker 1: really great teams who are are devoting themselves to building
Speaker 1: it out. So the dream is you'll be like deep
Speaker 1: in the weeds figuring out how to prevent a pandemic.
Speaker 1: Um I've seen in other interviews you're doing lots of
Speaker 1: different things during the interview. I couldn't actually tell if
Speaker 1: you were doing other things during this interview, But were
Speaker 1: you and if so, what were you doing? As playing
Speaker 1: game of Storybook for all? I say the name of
Speaker 1: the game again, Storybook Brawl. How did you say it?
Speaker 1: I took second place out of eight, could have been worse,
Speaker 1: and I apologize I do have to haul off. Okay,
Speaker 1: last one, what's one piece of advice you'd give to
Speaker 1: somebody trying to solve a hard problem. One piece of
Speaker 1: advice I would say, I just keep going, Just keep going,
Speaker 1: stuff by stuff, you know, try and solve it, but
Speaker 1: by bit, and you know, eventually, hopefully you'll get there.
Speaker 1: Sam bankman Fried is the founder and CEO of FTX.
Speaker 1: Today's show was produced by Edith Russlo, edited by Robert Smith,
Speaker 1: and engineered by Amanda K. Wong. You can reach us
Speaker 1: at problem at Pushkin dot fm, or you can find
Speaker 1: me on Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I'm Jacob Goldstein and
Speaker 1: I'll be back next week with another episode of What's
Speaker 1: Your Problem