YouSaid · the spoken record

Sam Bankman-Fried

lines on the record: 72
first: 2024-04-01
most recent: 2024-04-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Taken the pledge. That's over 300 million dollars of pledged donations. And so I guess it just goes to show that, yeah, the listeners of this podcast, they just are people who are taking good ideas seriously. And you might think people who listen are just interested in the ideas just for their own sake. You know, they find them intellectually engaging. But no, actually people are just willing to put those ideas into practice and do something like take giving what we can pledge. And that's just, yeah, that's amazing to see.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, thank you so much, Sam. That really, yeah, it really means a lot that you feel like that, especially because, yeah, your advocacy has just, it's really been unreal in terms of the impact it's had. So I was saying that given what we can has over 9,000 members now, over 1,000 of them cite you the Sam Harlows podcast as why they have...”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And yet, that's exactly, you know, not in nearly as dramatic a way, perhaps, but that's what's happened actually several times over. And so now I think, yeah, we're getting back to basics, basically, back to the core principles of effective altruism, back to the idea that all people have model claims upon us. We in rich countries have an enormous power to do good. And if we do just devote some of our money or some of our time through our careers to those big problems, we can make a truly enormous difference. That message is as inspiring to me as ever.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could be that amount compared to where I was 15 years ago. It's like hundreds of thousands of people who are alive that would have otherwise been dead. Like I live in Oxford, has a population of 120,000 people. If I imagine a nuclear bomb went off and killed everyone in Oxford, that would be world news for months. And if a kind of group of altruistically motivated people had managed to come together and prevent that plot saving the city of Oxford, that would be huge news. People would write about that for decades.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like Sam's actions do not change in any way how serious the problems we're facing are and how important it is to take action and how important it is to ensure that our actions have as big an impact as possible. So there really was a sense of people rolling up their sleeves and wanting to get back to it. And then in terms of the land, like I think once you go off Twitter, people again are like quite understanding. People understand that the actions of one person don't reflect on an entire movement. And ultimately just not that many people have heard of either FTX or effective altruism. So there's still kind of plenty of room to go. And so I think we're starting to see things change again. And it's just made me the reflect on the good things that the effect of Ultra's movement is accomplishing and has continued to accomplish. So just recently givewell has now moved over to...”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And I was talking about just what's going on, what was going on in my mind, not about what in fact happened. So we can talk about what the hit was to EA. So, yeah, huge band damage. I think people were definitely keen to disassociate themselves. In my own case, I actually got surprisingly little in the way of being cancelled, but it definitely means it's harder for people, especially in the aftermath, to go out and advocate. But I'm now feeling much more optimistic. So it was really tough. Like the year afterwards, it was Lomal. I think it was as harder for people associated to EA to just do the work they wanted to do. But a few months ago, there was a conference among many of the leaders of the kind of most call in organizations. And I honestly just found that really inspiring because for so many people, the principles are still there. The problems in the world are still there.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, the reason for me thinking, you know, maybe I was just going to give up was nothing practical like that. It was psychological, like after. I really felt like I'd been punched or stabbed or something. I felt like I'd been building this thing for 15 years and it really worked unsustainably hard on that. I was tired. And it had just been blown up in this one swoop. And it'd just be blown up by Sam's actions. And yeah, it was just hard to then think, okay, I'm going to get back up off the ground and go into the shallow pond and rescue another child or something.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so the collapse was, yeah, I mean, it was extremely hard for me, and there's just been no doubt at all it's the hardest year that a half now of my life, both for so many reasons, just the harder of the harms that were caused, the incredible damage it did to organizations and people that I loved. And so I found that just very tough, very tough to deal with. And I was, you know, really quite a dark place, like for the first time in my life, actually. At this chunk of time where I just didn't lost the feeling of moral motivation. I didn't really know if I could keep going. So I did actually even think about just stepping back, like really just giving up on EA as a project in my life because it felt kind of tainted. And that was weird. I mean, that was weird not having that motivation.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think misalignment and misinformation are some of the challenges we'll have to face. But it's really just like facing all of technological progress at once and doing it in an incredibly short period of time such that I think the default outcome is not that we handle that well.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of a very short period of time. Why not now? Why might it happen in such a short period of time? Well, that's the classic argument that goes back to I.J. Good in the 50s. Which is once you've got the point in time when AI can build better AI, you've got this tight feedback loop because once you built the better AI, that can help you build better AI and so on. And that argument has been subject to really quite intense inquiry over the last few years, building it into leading growth models, really looking at the input-output curves in existing ML development for how much of a gain you get for an increase in input. And it really looks like the argument is checking out. And then that means that it's not long from the point of time that you've got your first AI that can significantly help you with AI research to then trillions upon trillions of AI scientists that are driving progress and all sorts of scientific domains forward. And that's just a really quite dizzying prospect.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in that period of time, okay, we're developing new weapons of mass destruction. We now have an automated army and an automated police force. So that in principle, all military power could be controlled by a single person. We now have created beings that plausibly have moral status themselves. What economic rights, welfare rights, political rights should they have potentially, I mean, you talked about misinformation, but potentially now we have the ability to just have superhuman persuasive abilities far, far better than even teams of the best, most charismatic lawyers or politicians in the most targeted ways possible. And I think more challenges too, like over this period will probably also have new conceptual insights and intellectual insights, or radically changing the game board for us too. And all of that might be happening over the course.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“However, I think that AI will pose an enormous challenges that haven't really been appreciated. And the reason I think this is because I find it increasingly plausible that AI will lead to much accelerated rates of technological progress. So imagine as a kind of thought experiment. All the technologies and intellectual developments that you might expect to happen over the coming five centuries. Everything that might happen there. And now imagine all of that happens in the course of three years. Would we expect that to go well?”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I want to say I'm focused on both, but also other things too. So I think misalignment risk, I think it's real and I think it's serious and I think we should be working on it and working on it much more than we currently are. I am an optimist about it though As in, I think very probably it will either turn out not to be an issue because it's just really quite easy to make advanced AI systems that do what we want them to. Or we'll put in a big effort and be able to solve the problem. Or we'll notice that the problem has not been solved and we'll actually just hold back, put in regulations and other controls for long enough to give us enough time to solve the problem. But there should still be more work.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I am now much more worried about really very advanced, very fast advances in AI in a very near timeframe, as in literally the next five, six years or the next decade, much more worried by this from that than I was even just a few years ago.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Term the risks that we are talking about were. So in particular the risk from AI, where the risks we face from really advanced artificial intelligence, even artificial general intelligence, these are coming in the next decade at most the next couple of decades. And secondly, the scale of the problems that are imposed by technological development like AI are so great that you don't need to think about future generations at all. Even if you just care about the 8 billion people alive today, imposing the size of risks that we are imposing on them via these technology is more than enough for this to become one of the top problems that the world should face today. And over the last few years since the publication of the book, I just think that perspective has been getting more and more vindicated.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I suggest a goal, kind of a way of operationalizing that of rich countries putting 1%, at least 1% of their resources to issues that distinctively impact future generations. Because at the moment they currently put close to 0%. And I do think the mode of operating in which you think, oh, a present catastrophe is nothing compared to the unparalleled good that may come in a trillion years' time. Like, I think that's a really bad way of thinking, even just from a pure long-term perspective. I think it doesn't have a good track record. And it's really not how I would want people to think. There has been a different line of criticism that I got from within EA, from the publication of what We O the Future Onwards. That I think has had a lot of merit. And that line of criticism was that I was misunderstanding actually how near”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think that's in what we are the future, I was very careful to defend only what I call the weak form of long-termism. Positively impacting the long term future is a model parallelity of our time, not claiming it's the only one, nor claiming its overwhelming importance either. Like, I think we should be uncertain about this.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because if I have $5 to spend, that can buy a bed net. If I have a billion and $5 to spend, that final $5 still buys a bed net. Global health and development can just absorb huge amounts of money without the cost effectiveness going down very much.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I also just think if your concern is with hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty or the tens of billions of animals suffering in factory farms, the scale of those problems are more than enough for the same reasons, for the same kind of worries to arise. And in fact, we have seen, like in the animal welfare movement on the fringes, people taking violent actions even in the pursuit of what they regarded as the kind of greater good. Long-termism, if anything, kind of actually shifts against it because this argument about, oh, you should be willing to take more risk if you're using your money philanthropically than if you're willing to just spend the money on yourself. That argument applies much less strongly in the case of long-termism than it does for global health and development, for example.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I mean, I really think long termism wasn't at play. I mean, again, like I've said, I feel like it wasn't what happened to FTX was not the matter of some rational calculation in pursuit of some end. I think it looks dumb in a model from many perspectives.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People who are willing to put their money or their time where their mouth is. And because they care, they're really willing to think this through and willing to go where the arguments or the evidence lead them. And, you know, I'm not someone who's naturally kind of on the internet all the time. I find Twitter and internet for them quite off-putting. And when I meet people in person who are engaged in the project of effective altruism, it just feels very, very different than it does if you're just kind of hanging out on Twitter or on some of the forums online or something.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whoever there's kind of most loud on the internet, where people can be poly if they want no moral objection to that at all. Find way to live. People can have all sorts of weird beliefs too, and like maybe some of them are correct. Like, I think AI risk was extremely weird for many years. And now people are taking it really seriously. So, I mean, I think that's important. But I think the vast majority of people within the effect of altruism movement are like pretty normal people. They're people who care a lot.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Income to causes that effectively help other people. I still think that's a really good way to live. You talk about the kind of online cult-like and shot foo with Sperger's side of the movement. I think I want to do say that EA is many things, or like the EA movement is many things. And also, of course, you can endorse the ideas without endorsing anything to do with the movement. But I definitely worry that there is a segment that is extremely online and perhaps unusually weird in its culture or something. And it's a bit of a shame, I think, if people get the impression that that's kind of what everyone within the EA movement is like on the basis of”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think it's part of the tragedy of the whole thing. It's just, you know, giving what we can has over 9,000 people who are trying to pledging to give at least 10% of their income to highly cost effective charities, naming for 10,000 people this year. For those people, you know, generally living pretty normal lives, middle class, maybe they're wealthier, like in what way does the action of Sam and the others invalidate that? And the answer is not at all. Like, that is just as important as ever. And yeah, one of the things that's so sad is like maybe fewer people will be inclined to do so, not for any good national reasons, but just because of the bad order that surrounds that idea now. And that's just a little tragedy. I think that's donating a faction of...”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There wasn't kind of investigation being held by Effective Ventures. Of the charities, and the law firm doing that, they didn't want me to speak while that was ongoing. But then also because I think a healthier effect of altruism movement is more decentralized than it was. And there was an issue when the collapse happened that I was in the roles of being on the board of the Charity also if anyone was being a spokesperson for the EA, but also having advised Sam and the creation of the foundation. And that meant I wasn't able to kind of offer guidance and reassurance to the community at that time of crisis in a way that I really wanted to and wish I'd been able to. And so I do think like a healthier EA movement is great to decentralization in that way. And there's some other things happening in that direction too. So various organizations are kind of separating projects, like separating out legally and becoming their own.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. And Sam was too, and so vegetarians having a bad time Yeah, exactly. Exactly. But there have been a lot of changes to the institutions within effective altruism. So it has essentially entirely new leadership now, at least on the organizational side. So Center for Effective Altruism, Open Philanthropy, 80,000 Hours, and the boards of at least some of these organizations are like really quite refreshed. This is partly just a lot of people had to work exceptionally hard as a result of the fallout and got really quite burned out. In my own case, I've stepped back from being on the boards of any of these main organizations and I won't do that again really for quite a while. You know, one thing was just that I wasn't able to talk about this stuff in the way I really wanted to for over the year. Like I spent, again, like months, literal months kind of writing blog posts and reviting them and having them then kind of knocked back because they were”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In no way undermine that. I mean, take any ideology, take any moral view that you can imagine. You will find advocates of that ideology that are utterly repugnant.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whether that's because of this catastrophe itself, or just if there's any point in time for self-reflection, I think it was in the aftermath of that. And so there's a whole bunch of things that have changed over the last year and a half. Not in terms of the principles, because what is effective altruism, it's the idea of using evidence and reason to try to make the world better. That principle is still good. I still would love people to increase the amount by which they are benevolent towards others and increase the amount by which they think extremely carefully and are like really quite intense about trying to figure out how they can have more positive impact with their money or with their time. That's just still as true as ever. And the actions of one person”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Archaeology. So there's an essay by Eliasa Yukowski called The Ends Do Not Justify the Means Among Humans. Basically making the classic point that you are not a god at calculation, even if you're 100% consequentialist, which I don't think you should be, but even so, follow Shivistics that are tried and true, including heuristics not to violate side constraints. And this was shared in a group, on a kind of discussion group. This is well before FDX. Sam's response was like, why are you even sharing this? This is obvious. Everyone already knows this. So, yeah, this was, in my view, in spite of VA, not because of it. But yes, the damage is huge. Also internal damage as well. Morale was very, very low. Trust was very low, the thought being, well, if Sam and the others did this, then who knows what other people are like? And there has just been enormous amount of self-reflection, self-scrutiny.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, huge harm, huge harm to EA, where, you know, at the time of the collapse, I put it like 20% or something that the EA movement would just die, that this was a killer blow. And so obviously in terms of hit to the band, so many people think ill of EA now or critical of EA now and all sorts of different ways delivered by this in a way that's not surprising. It was this horrific, horrific thing. I don't think it happened because of EA. I think it happened in spite of EA. I think like EA leaders and communicators have been very consistent on the idea that the ends do not justify the means really since the start. I mean, and really this goes back centuries. Go back to John Stuart Mill. And actually even Sam knew this. So again, as part of just trying to figure out what happened, I did some Facebook.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One to 200 million in a year is like a very big scale up and it's actually just quite hard to do. And so I guess if you are asking me, yes, it's a tiny fraction. And I agree with the point in general that when someone who's a center billionaire then gives $100 million to something. That is just really not very much at all, especially once they've had that money for decades and they can really kind of distribute it But in that case, the way it seemed to me at the time, and I guess still does just seem to me, was like basically consistent with someone trying to scale up they're giving as fast as they can. And in fact, in a way that plausibly should have been paying more attention to the business. Not getting distracted by other things.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure, yeah. I think that issue is, I think that wasn't really an issue. So a couple of reasons. One is just, you know, his net worth is basically entirely in FTX. There's no way of converting that. So if you're in a startup and all your wealth is in the equity of that startup. There's not really any way of converting that wealth into money, the sort of thing that you could donate. You have to basically keep building the company until you can have an exit. So have a get acquired or sell the company. And then you can become more liquid. And then the second thing is just at least relative to other business people. He was very unusual in wanting to give more and give quickly. So, I mean, I advised on the setup of his foundation. And it got a lot of criticism for scaling up Giving too quickly. So going from kind of zero to...”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I know the Fed. And yeah, I mean, in a way, from the perspective of the brand of effective altruism, maybe it would have been better if he'd actually been a big con to. But no, I think he believed in these ideas. I think there he was the further to kind of what you might call sort of corporate ethics that are really kind of PR. So, you know, companies will often make these big charitable donations to their local community and so on. And, I mean, in this case, Exactly. Everyone knows this is marketing. And I guess I don't know the lead details, but presumably FTX was doing stuff like that in the same way other companies do. And my interpretation of those texts is that that's what he was referring to.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Said that, you know, how distought he was, and he was talking to Sam about this. So, all of these things are possible to me. As for him pleading guilty, well, I mean, whichever of these is true, I think it would make sense to plead guilty if you're in that situation where, you know, there are huge costs to going to jail. And I don't know, plausibly also he just thought, look, yes, I thought, so there's various stories, but plausibly he thought, look, yes, I knew what I was doing was bad. I thought it was only a little bit bad. Actually, I was wrong. It was fairly bad. It was extremely bad. I'm willing to just fess up and take the hit I should get. Like, there are various possible explanations there.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, so I don't know about whether Nishad at this time was ignorant, as in just really did not know the risks they were running. I don't know if he was just delusional. So, again, this is a thing that Soltes talks about is just the capacity for humans to create a narrative in which they're still the good guys. I don't know. Perhaps he thought that, yes, this was bad, but they would get out of it. And so it was a little bit bad, but it'll be fine. Maybe that was there too. Oh yeah, one thing that he does is he buys this fee and a half million dollar property for himself in October. Again, it's just not the action with someone who, again, on the stand.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think another thing that came out during the trial, though I'm not sure if it was admissible as evidence, was that Nishad commented to the government kind of immediately upon pleading guilty, that in that period he kind of thought, he still thought that FTX would last for years And yeah, and in terms of just giving an indication of what Nishad's personality was like, when the collapse happened, he had to be watched because he was on the verge of suicide. He was so distra About what happened to the customers, and I think was really quite close to taking his own life.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I was aware there was a crypto downturn. So I talked in Ashad and I say, I ask, look, look, is there anything up with a company? Like, are you in trouble? And he says no. And we talk about this for, you know, it's not a passing comment for some time. And that by any account is like past the point when he allegedly had learned about the huge hole that the company faced. Similarly, Michael Lewis was the same time asked both Caroline and Nishad as a kind of fun question like, oh, what could go along with the company? Like if this all goes to zero, what happened? And again, he said, no indication of stress upon hearing that question. They had fun with it. They were like, oh, maybe Krypto is just a lot of her air and everyone gets turned off. Or maybe Sam gets kidnapped. That was kind of one of their big worries. But nothing that kind of leaked out there.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, in terms of how things seem to me, I just think they didn't think the company was at risk, not at serious risk. And here's a couple of reasons why. I mean, one, this is kind of how I felt like why I was so confused this whole time. I visited the Bahamas a number of times in 2022. I never saw any kind of change in attitude from them over that time. Like you would literally think if you're engaging this major thought that something would seep out, some sort of flax. Maybe I'm a fool, but I did not see that. And in fact, even so in September, my last trip to the Bahamas, I heard from Michael Lewis that Sam had been courting funding for FTX from Saudi Arabia and other places in the Middle East. And I do not love the idea of taking money from Saudi Arabia. I have issues with that. And it also just struck me as kind of odd.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The co conspirators talking about how bad they felt and how they knew what they were doing was wrong at the time. They were really torn up. That seems quite inconsistent with my experience of them, but maybe they were just incredible liars.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going on the stand because the other people probably will get no jail time. They will award people in that way for going on the stand and testifying. And so that just does mean they can't tell lies or not verifiable lies, but there are very strong incentives to present things in a certain way. And again, I don't want to, this is all sounding much more defensive of Sam than I want to be, but the Soltes book talks about some people who were just, you know, they would be the hearse with their lawyers for hours and hours and hours in order to seem, you know, display appropriate contrition and so on. And so the view of this that kind of Michael Lewis took is just, you know, people understand. They will have just said true things throughout, but the kind of tone of it is maybe a little different than it really was, where there was a lot of...”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, again, this is something that comes up in Eugene Saltis' book and he talks about where it's a very strange aspect of the US legal system. Like it's not something that happens in the UK where the government will reward people literally with their lives.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's where they were able to get licensed. Or asked kind of why is your apartment so nice? And they would say, well, you can't really get kind of mid-level property in the Bahamas. We just need somewhere that we can create a campus feel. And so, yeah, it is nicer than we'd like. Hopefully we can move over time to something a bit less nice. So over and over again, or other kind of ethical issues in crypto we can go into. And yeah, over and over again, he was painting that picture. And something that was just so hurtful and confusing is just, was he lying to me that whole time? Like, was that just all false? Or was he just like a gullible fool?”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They thought that's how they could get the edge over their competitors was by being much more open and open to regulation. And then secondly, because they planned to give the postseeds away, they knew that they would get, they would face a higher bar for criticism. And that claim got made to me over and over again where not just Sam, but Nishad, you know, Sam was very busy. So I spoke to him a number of times, like half a dozen times or something one-on-one, more times in kind of group settings. But I would talk to Nishad. And Nishad really came across, like, I mean, this is the thing that maybe breaks my heart the most about the whole story, where he came across just as this incredibly thoughtful, you know, morally motivated, careful, just kind person. And I would ask him kind of, okay, so why are you in the Bahamas? And there would be an answer, which is that.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is trying quite self consciously to be much more ethical than the standard crypto exchange or anything going on in the crypto world. And there are two reasons why we need to do that, even putting aside the intrinsic desire to act ethically. One is because they were trying to get regulated. So they were very actively courting regulation in the US because they thought that was a way in which they were these center-left people. They were not the libertarians that populate crypto normally.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He did seem like a very thoughtful, incredibly morally motivated person all the way back to 2012. I mean, his main concern was for the plight of non-human animals on factory farms for most of that time. It's kind of an unusual thing to care about if you're some sort of psychopath or something like that. Yeah, when I first reached out to Sam after FTX had been so successful, I talked to him about, you know, okay, you've started this company, it took crypto company. Isn't crypto like, you know, pretty sketchy? How much have you thought about risks to the company and so on? And there was a narrative that came from him and then was echoed and emphasized by Nishad Singh, who, in my experience, was really a kind of crucial part of the story, like really crucial part of my interface with that world. And the story I got told was FTX.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So there's, yeah, a lot to say here. And briefly on the not feeling love. So yeah, my descriptions of Sam and feelings about Sam are quite varied and variegated. On his ability to not feel love, it's, you know, that wasn't something that seemed liking or notable to me. Like after the Michael Lewis book and lots of things came out, it seemed like he had just emotional flatness across the board and whether that's a result of depression or ADHD or autism is like not really that clear to me. But that wasn't something that seemed obvious at the time at least. I guess I interact with people who are relatively emotionally flat quite a lot. I certainly wouldn't have said he's a very emotional person.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that seems like really quite clear flawed. And I don't know. It hasn't been discussed fairly much, but seems totally inexcusable and was applied even when the going was good. But then the big fraud, the $8 billion, it seemed like that really started kicking in from June of 2022 onwards. Though I'll also say, like, you know, we can talk about my interactions with the people there. It seemed like looking back, I think it seems to me like they did not know just how badly bad the situation they were then was. But yeah.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, again, flagging that probably lots that I'm saying that are wrong because this is, you know, it's complex and I'm not confident there's like lots of different stories. My guess is both like in the trial, one thing that came up, and I'm surprised didn't have more attention, was that FTX advertised it had an insurance fund. So if its liquidation engine, basically a bit of technology that meant that even if a customer was borrowing funds on the exchange in order to make basically a bet on the exchange with borrowed money, on other exchanges, you could easily go negative by doing that. And that would mean other users would have to pay to cover that loss. FTX had this automatic liquidation engine that was quite well respected. But they said, even if that fails, there's this insurance fund that will cover any losses. However, the number that was advertised on the website seemed to have been created just by a random number generator.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the final thing to say just is that this isn't saying that they didn't commit fraud from June onwards after this hole has been I think then it becomes pretty clear that there are just blatant lies to try to get out of the position that they've put themselves in. I think there are also other cases of things that seem like clearly flawed, though they are not of the kind of $8 billion scale.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, if it was a carefully calculated ploy, you would want to know where all of your assets were in case there was a mass withdrawal of customer deposits. And so I think, yeah, that hub this. Also kind of not a risk calculation, but maybe an attitude to risk, where many people, I think, when they're in the position of really quite rapidly of earning a multi-billion dollar company, would think, holy shit, I should really get some experienced professionals in here, whereas that was and be quite worthy about have I attended to everything? Have I basically just have I got this company under control? And I think at that point they did, you know, that was not at all how Sam and the others were thinking.”
2024-04-01 · Making Sense with Sam Harris · #361 — Sam Bankman-Fried & Effective Altruism · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source