Making Sense with Sam Harris - #271 — Earning to Give

Episode Date: December 24, 2021

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Sam Bankman-Fried about effective altruism. They discuss how he became the wealthiest self-made billionaire under 30, what might go wrong with cryptocurrency, the Giving What We Can pledge, how SBF thinks about using his resources to do the most good in the world, how not to stigmatize wealth, wealth redistribution, norms of generosity among the ultra-wealthy, pandemic preparedness, impact through lobbying, how ambitious should we be in doing good, and other topics. SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, as we get to the end of the year here and into the holidays, I guess the theme of the moment for me is doing good in the world. How to think about that, how to do more of it, how to appropriately show gratitude for one's good luck, and share that luck with those who need it. So at the top here, I am going to produce an ad.

As you know, I don't run ads on the podcast, but this is an ad for a very good thing, with which I have no direct affiliation. A couple months ago, Peter Singer, the Australian philosopher and one of the patriarchs of the effective altruism movement, told me about a company called Humanitix, which was founded by Joshua Ross and Adam McKirtle. They started in Australia and New Zealand, but now they are global, and they've just set up their first U.S. office in Denver. And this struck me as an extraordinarily cool idea. Humanitix is an event ticketing platform that donates 100% of its profits to children's charities. So they operate like a for-profit business in that they don't ask anyone for donations. They just sell tickets. It's like Eventbrite or Ticketmaster. However, they're also a registered

charity, and 100% of their profits go to social impact projects for disadvantaged kids. And their service is free for free events, and for paid events, their fees are actually lower than most ticketing services. And they offer a special discount for non-profits and schools, etc. And again, all the profits go to charity. So if you're organizing an event and selling tickets, it seems to me this is just a totally straightforward and ethical way to make a tangible contribution to the world. And it's just a very cool model. I think it has the potential to massively scale the amount of money that gets allocated to philanthropy. Because what they've done is they've effectively replicated the venture capital model in the charity sector, which is to say they've built

a real business, and in this case they're taking on businesses like Eventbrite or Ticketmaster, but they're doing it 100% for charity. But unlike normal charities, they never have to ask for donations, and they're not sitting on a large endowment that's covering their costs. They're just operating a successful business. This does strike me as genuinely new. It opens up a path for what might be called compassionate capitalism or ethical consumption that has not been altogether obvious, but all of a sudden, here it is. So, I think this is very exciting, and I want to congratulate Josh and Adam for doing this.

Great idea. Best of luck to you both. And if any of you want more information, if you're looking for a job and want to work for an inspiring company, or you just want to sell tickets, please check out Humanitix.com. That's H-U-M-A-N-I-T-I-X dot com. Okay, well, continuing with that theme, I want to say something which I believe I've said before on the podcast, but it's an epiphany I keep having again and again, and it's about the generosity of the Making Sense audience, all of you guys and gals. I keep hearing from charities which I've mentioned on the podcast, or perhaps I've interviewed someone involved. These are

charities like the Plowshares Fund, which is working to reduce the threat of nuclear war. I mentioned them a couple of times, in particular when I spoke to William Perry about his book on the topic. Or the Good Food Institute, or the Bard Prison Initiative, or GiveWell.org, which recommends a wide range of effective charities, these and other organizations

keep contacting me just to say how astoundingly generous my audience is. And I'm wondering if you can appreciate what an amazing feeling that is to be on the receiving end of that kind of information. It seems that you all have given millions of dollars to various causes here. And it's just remarkable to see. So, sincere thanks to all of you for that. This has become one of the amazing and unexpected pleasures of doing this job. Now, as many of you know, at some point in 2020, I took the Giving What We Can pledge, which exists in various forms, but the basic pledge is to give at least 10% of one's pre-tax

income to the most effective charities each year. And this is the minimal pledge. Some people give much more than that. And that's over and above anything one gives to any other causes, whether it's your church or synagogue or your children's school or to your university, or perhaps to some GoFundMe campaign that inspires you. The giving what we can pledge stands on its own over and above all of this. And the main criteria there is to target what you can rationally understand as the most effective ways of minimizing human and animal suffering and mitigating the most catastrophic risks. So

there's often long-term thinking built into many of the charities that effective altruists tend to support. And once again, givewell.org is a great source for recommendations. And waking up, my meditation app was the first company to take the Giving What We Can pledge. At my urging, they created a pledge for companies, which is analogous to the personal pledge. Here you commit to giving 10% of profits to charity each year. And if you want to see some of the organizations we've supported so far, you can go to wakingup.com forward slash foundation. But I wanted to say a little more about taking the Giving What We Can pledge because, as you'll hear, it's relevant to today's podcast. Taking this pledge is psychologically much more interesting than I realized, and it's interesting wherever you sit on the economic

spectrum. For instance, if you don't make a lot of money, you might think, well, I need all the money I make. I spend more or less every penny, and if I don't make a lot of money, you might think, well, I need all the money I make. I spend more or less every penny. And if I don't spend every penny, I need to save something for the future. So I certainly can't afford to give a minimum of 10% of my money away every year. But the interesting thing is that as you begin to earn more money, and even a lot of money, earn more money, and even a lot of money, you begin to think, well, 10% of what I'm earning now is quite a bit of money to be giving away every year. It's a lot more money than most people at my level give away. And so what's interesting is that you can find a way to be uncomfortable with this pledge at any level of earning. But once you take it, some very interesting things happen. Speaking for myself, it really has become a source of great satisfaction, because it's just an

amazing privilege to support great causes, and to know that whatever else I'm doing with my time, and however mixed my motives might be in any moment, by making this decision, I've taken all the psychological friction out of my being generous and effective in the world. Because I've decided in advance that I'll support these very good causes to this degree. And my giving here is no longer vulnerable to my moods or to my rethinking anything. I mean, the only freedom I have is to give more than 10% away, or to give to other things that wouldn't count toward my minimum of 10% that goes to the most effective charities. As I told Will McCaskill in one of our conversations, it is an amazing feeling to be giving money to a children's hospital or to a woman's shelter and for it to feel like a guilty pleasure. It's like

you're splurging on something that you really want selfishly. The pledge just inverts the usual psychology around generosity in a fascinating way. Anyway, I'll have more to say about that in the new year. We have a project over at Waking Up that's relevant here. But in the meantime, if you're at all interested in taking the pledge, in any of its variants, please go to givingwhatwecan.org for more information. Okay, and now for today's podcast. Today I'm speaking with Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam is the founder and CEO of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, and he's also the CEO of Alameda Research, a quantitative cryptocurrency trading firm. Forbes described him as the richest person in crypto and one of the richest people under 30 in history. I believe he's made about $29 billion in the last

few years. What is more remarkable than that is that he set out to make all this money explicitly for the purpose of giving almost all of it away to the most effective charities, and to thereby do as much good in the world as he possibly can. Needless to say, he's an early adopter of the giving what we can pledge, and as you might imagine, he's one of the most prominent people in the effective altruist community. Sam is also the son of two Stanford law professors, and he received a degree in physics from MIT. So in this episode we talk about how Sam became as wealthy as he has, how he got into cryptocurrency. We have a brief discussion about that space to bring you all up to speed. We talk about the

giving what we can pledge, and about how Sam thinks about using his resources to do the most good. pledge, and about how Sam thinks about using his resources to do the most good. We talk about not stigmatizing wealth, wealth redistribution, the norms of generosity among the ultra-wealthy, pandemic preparedness, the impact we can have through lobbying, how ambitious we should be in doing good. Anyway, it seemed like a great topic to close out the year on, good. Anyway, it seemed like a great topic to close out the year on. And I wish you all a happy holiday and a happy new year. This episode is yet another PSA, so there's no paywall. And as always, thanks to all of you who are supporting the show through your subscription. You are in fact what makes all of this possible. And now I bring you Sam Bankman Freed. you, Sam Bankman-Fried. I am here with Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam, thanks for joining me.

Thanks for having me. So there's a lot to talk about. My general interest in speaking with you is your all-too novel interest in effective altruism. But before we jump into that topic, let's talk about your background a little bit. I mean, you are now quite famously referred to as, I believe, unless something has changed based on the volatility of crypto since I began this sentence, the wealthiest self-made billionaire under the age of 30, something like that. Is that still approximately true? Yeah, sounds about right. And how did that happen? I guess before we get into your crypto experience, maybe summarize your background before that. You're only 29, so there's not that many years to run through. But how do you describe your intellectual interests before you jumped into the world of cryptocurrency?

Yeah, totally. So I grew up in Stanford, California, went to MIT after that and really had no clue what I was going to do with my life there. I sort of like half-heartedly thought maybe I'd be a physics professor for kind of no good reason. And, and quickly at MIT learned that I didn't really like research and I probably wasn't really built for it. And, and that, that, that was sort of like not going to happen. And, and around the same time started thinking for the first time about what I should do with my life. And, and I think that started out basically just coming from a utilitarian

standpoint of, you know, what would maximize ultimate wellbeing of the world. I hadn't thought about it very carefully, but I, when I, when I like finally confronted this as opposed to just sort of like hiding it somewhere in my mind,

it sort of quickly became clear that at least there are going to be some things I could do that would have real impact. And, and, you know, that, that one of those was going to be earning to give, just basically thought of trying to make what I can so I can donate what I can. And at the time, I think I was sort of most involved with animal welfare organizations. And, you know, basically went to them and said, hey, like, would you prefer my time or my money? And they said, definitely your money. You're not very good at leaflets.

So, but you've jumped into the mode of already earning enough to be of help to anyone. So what was the transition from physics at MIT to finance of some sort? Yeah, So I sort of jumped to the point of thinking about it before I actually got involved in anything that would actually make money. It was very much a sort of like, theoretically, I probably could type thing and figure out how to do that. And that was sort of the tentative plan. But yeah, I hadn't actually yet figured out how. And around that time, I met Will McCaskill and Ben Todd and a few others from sort of the

national EA movement who were visiting Cambridge and talked to them about what I was going to do with my life. And they very much thought that their earning to give plan made sense. They also said a bunch of things I hadn't thought about before around what causes I could ultimately give to, and also confirmed as I'd sort of been thinking that if I was going to earn to give, that probably Wall Street was a good place to look for that. So you met Will McCaskill. Did you meet Toby Ord as well? I hadn't met him yet. I met him later, but he was not in that particular excursion to the States. Right. So did Will give a talk at MIT? Is that where you met him? I think he gave a talk at Harvard, but I had lunch with him beforehand in Harvard Square.

Right. Yeah, Will's fantastic. And he really is my gateway drug to effective altruism as well. He's been on the podcast a bunch and on the Waking Up app, and Toby has subsequently. And it is fairly thrilling when the scales fall from your eyes and you realize that there's an opportunity to systematically do good in a way that is just like, there's such a clear view of ethical daylight in this direction that interestingly becomes uncoupled from the usual things that drive altruism, just the good feels of a very compelling story. It's not to say that the good feels aren't important. We want to be as rewarded as possible by the good things we do in life. But there's this other layer of rational acknowledgement that sometimes the most effective ways of benefiting the world are not necessarily the sexiest, not necessarily the ones that are effortlessly most enthralling to people. And it's just to get a very clear-eyed view of all of that and then to prioritize doing the most

good. It's an amazing game to find out that it even exists, much less to get involved in. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that, you know, prior to college, I sort of had somewhere in the back of my mind, oh, maybe I could try and do something with my life that would have impact. And then some sort of part of me was like, oh, I don't know, that sounds kind of hard. I don't even know what that would imply. Maybe I'll just sort of ignore that, you know, who knows what that would mean. And I think like when I started thinking harder about it and then met Will and others and actually sort of dove into the effective altruism community. Yeah, I think one of the first things that really stood out was like, all right, here's like a few concrete proposals, which aren't necessarily the single best thing to do, but are clearly incredibly compelling.

And are clearly like massively better than anything sort of like accidental or random that I would have done. And that were sort of like a really convincing case of like, you know, if you think carefully about this and really do focus on your impact. rather than, as you said, on sort of just that reverberation of the impact back onto you, that you can really get massive, massive numbers. So I noticed we've pitched already into the topic of interest, effective altruism, skipping over the world of crypto. Let's go back for a second because I would be remiss in not extracting any insights you might have on that topic. First, how did you get into crypto and what is actually your contribution at this point to that space? Yeah. So I went to Wall Street when I graduated

college and worked as a quant trader at Jane Street Capital for three and a half years. And I had a really, really good time there in a lot of ways. It was a great environment. It was a great fit for me as a job. And it seemed like a really compelling earning to give path. And they were really good to me there. And I just kind of thought that's what my life was going to be. And I was pretty happy with that. And as you know, in New York, and then late 2017 came around. And for the first time in three years, I sat down and forced myself to go through an exercise like what I had done in college, where I sort of, you know, drafted down ideas of what I could do, tried to estimate like how much impact could I have through each of them. And shortly after starting that, it became clear what the sort of conclusion of that

was going to be, which was that I don't know what I should do with my life, that there are actually a lot of things that could have large impact that I wasn't sure which of those was going to be the best and that the only way really to find out was going to be to try them. And it was sort of, you know, either don't try anything and just optimize for this path or leave and, and try a bunch of things. And, and that the second in expectation was probably going to be the, the better one. So I left, this was, you know was late 2017. And I did try a few things. I worked briefly for a center for effective altruism. I also started looking at crypto. And the sort of original thesis with crypto was a pretty clear one, which was, it seems like there might be good arbitrages here.

Maybe that's true. Maybe that's not true. If that's true, these numbers might be huge. Let's check that out. And so I basically just dove in and I, you know, create some accounts on some exchanges and like tried to do one example transaction to see like, will this even work? And so what, what are, in fact, were you arbitraging at that point? So at that point, I mean, it was all over the place, but the clearest one was literally just Bitcoins against dollars. Like you look at Bitcoins on one U.S. crypto exchange against Bitcoins on another U.S. crypto exchange.

You know, they'd be trading for $10,000 on Coinbase and $11,000 on Bitstamp. And in theory, one could then buy a Bitcoin on Coinbase, send it for $10,000, send it to Bitstamp, sell it for $11,000 and make $1,000 and then sort of like rinse and repeat. And, you know, whenever you see something like that, you should wonder, like, is this data real or is it garbage? And in particular, the numbers were hilariously big on like in real trading on Wall Street. If you can make two percent of a percent on a trade, so two basis points, that's a good trade. You know, most firms would be like, yeah, do that trade. You know, if you can do more of that trade, do more of that trade.

That's pretty good. Well done. You know, like not unheard of, but just like a really solid trade. And here we were seeing things like 2%. So a hundred times as big. And that's almost always fake when you see it, but it was a hundred times as big. And the volume wasn't trivial. You know, it was trading a few billion dollars a day globally. And so in theory, you can sort of do this naive calculation of like, well, let's say

you made 1% on every trade. And let's say you made 1% on every trade. And let's say you did 1% of volume. And so that means, you know, $10 million of volume and a percent on that is $100,000 per day of revenue. And so, you know, $35 million a year or whatever. And that's a pretty substantial number, you know. And obviously that was like just some complete bullshit calculation that I did with no idea what a Bitcoin even was. No idea if any of this, you know, any of these numbers are real. But it was enough to convince me that like maybe there's something good to do here and that it's worth trying out.

And so I just sort of created accounts on all the exchanges and started trying to like, you know, go send in the money, buy the cheaper Bitcoins, sell them in other places and see if I could make money doing that. Did that turn out to be real? I mean, what explains that inefficiency of pricing? Yeah. So half of it turned out to be fake. About half the cases, it turned out the data that was reported was just misleading in one way or another. A classic example of this is that they would call it a quote Bitcoin USD market, but the USD there would not really be US dollars. It would be like dollars on some sketchy third party payment site running through Russia that cost 25% to get money in and out of, and you could only get to a Brazilian bank account. So, okay,

that was not a real trade. We got to get you earning to give first. Your path is blocked by a labyrinth of sketchy tax schemes. Exactly. And then you look at like, okay, how about the legitimate data? And it was sort of like a scaled down version of the same issues where, all right, the Bitstamp Coinbase ARBs were sometimes real. But what would happen when you tried to do them? First of all, you'd pay half a percent in fees, all things considered. Second of all, you have to start by getting dollars from your bank account to Coinbase, right? And you send that wire transfer and then you get a notice from your bank that they shut down your account because they didn't have a compliance policy yet for crypto. And now you no longer have a bank account.

And then I guess if you want to do the trade a second time, you need a new bank account. And then you get the funds on Coinbase and you buy Bitcoin and they tell you you can withdraw $100 per day. And so you're sitting there and be like, well, I guess I can make $1 per day doing this trade, 1% on the $100. And you like reject them, but like, hey, can have higher withdrawal limits, and get like an automated message back saying, sorry, the queue for getting support from us is three months long right now. And you just start running into all these logistical issues that sort of were reflections of the fact that the ecosystem was incredibly new and incredibly unwieldy and, and not very like well developed. The infrastructure was all broken and it wasn't

impossible to do these trades. It was just like really hard and annoying. I'm guessing you now probably have Brian Armstrong's cell phone number. Probably have Brian Armstrong's cell phone number. Yeah, I do. And that was, you know, going through that sort of like step-by-step process of like getting an account manager at these exchanges, finding a bank that was comfortable with the cryptocurrency ecosystem and willing to allow us to send transfers to and from crypto exchanges, things like that, you know, getting automated train systems hooked up to these exchanges, some of which didn't even have APIs.

And then eventually looking overseas and saying, well, here's a big arbitrage between American and Japanese exchanges. How do we do that? I guess we have to replicate this entire setup in Japan with a Japanese bank. And that was like the hardest part back in 2017, 2018 of actually doing these trades. So then when did you graduate to build in your own exchange? Yeah. So after about a year of this, it's, you know, there are clearly still good trades to do in crypto, but just as clearly like the ecosystem was a mess and, and the ecosystem in crypto really means

the exchanges in a way it doesn't in traditional finance. Like if I asked you like, what are the five most important finance companies? You probably wouldn't just start listing off like New York stock exchange, NASDAQ, CME, ICE, SIBO. Like maybe one of those would make the list. Probably not. You know, I'm guessing you'd name like, I don't know, like Goldman or JP Morgan or something or Robin hood, maybe crypto is different. And the reason crypto is different is that the entire financial stack is collapsed into one product. And that product is the exchange.

And so when, when you go to buy a stock, you're going through 12 companies, you're going from Robin hood to some payment for order flow firm. There's some stock clearing, there's some dollar clearing system in there, some stock loan desk. You go to a dark pool, another PFOF firm, eventually end up at an exchange. And then the whole other side of that on the selling side. In crypto, the only people involved in the average transaction are the buyer, the seller, and the exchange. And all of those functions from clearing settlement, risk, compliance, know your customer, mobile app, API, matching engine, all of that is collapsed into the exchange. And so they really are the backbone of the trading ecosystem in crypto. And so if you wanted to address the infrastructure, that's where you went.

And boy, did the infrastructure need addressing. So then you started FTX? Yep. So started building FTX out in late 2018, launched spring 2019. And basically the thesis was like, on the one hand, these businesses are making a billion a year collectively. They seem like fairly understandable businesses. Like we understand their core function pretty well and could build that. They're online products, which are easier to launch, and they're just shit shows all over the place.

They're losing a million dollars per day of customer funds to incompetent risk controls. Their customer support departments were nearly non-existent. Many of them basically didn't have compliance departments. Many of them didn't have banking. And it just seemed like, boy, if this is the barrier, we can do better than that. That we can build a better product than. On the other hand, I had no idea how to get a customer. And that was sort of our biggest worry about this was like, sure, maybe we build a good product and just no one ever knows about it. No one ever uses it. And I didn't even know where to start with getting users. But even if we said there's an 80% chance of failure from that, like 20% of that upside was still a lot and enough to convince us to go for it.

I'm tempted to take a slight detour in describing somewhat what is, I mean, I got to think most of our audience at this point understands what Bitcoin is. I'm happy to give like a one minute version of it. Yeah, let's do it. You know, there are many people listening to us who have listened to me and Bology for four hours. So they've gotten an eyeful or an earful, but certainly from a crypto maximalist. But give us how you described to someone's grandmother or grandfather what crypto is. Yeah. And when I got involved, by the way, in crypto, I had no idea what it is, other than a number that went up and down that you could trade. But the core of crypto is basically like, you know, you want some system where you can like send, you know, money back and forth, send assets back and forth,

send information back and forth between each other. And that means you all need to agree on the protocol for it. And you need to agree on like, who decides, you know, ultimately, which transactions happen who records that. And with Gmail, the answer is Google does. You know, everyone tells Google they want to send an email and then Google, you know, records that and sends it along. And, you know, with the New York Stock Exchange, the answer is, well, the New York Stock Exchange, you send your orders to it and then it spits out what happened.

It sort of is like the controller of this database. With cryptocurrencies, you know, generally the way it works is there's some decentralized group of parties that together are effectively voting on what happens step by step. And anyone in the world can submit transactions to them. You know, so I could submit a transaction saying, I'm going to send $30 to my brother, Gabe, or a third of Bitcoin or whatever. And I'll submit basically a proof that I have the password to this account. And then you have this sort of global group of validators. Sometimes it's miners, sometimes it's staking validators, depending on the blockchain

that sort of get together, you know, vote that yes, this is a legitimate transaction, you know, the necessary information was submitted, and record that. And that's a block. And then they iterate on that adding block after block after block, which sort of adds a new set of transactions on to this like growing ledger of the whole history of the blockchain. And the goal in the end is to create a system of payments and sending information and money back and forth that doesn't rely on one central party or government to ultimately be this source of truth on what's happened. Right.

Right. So there's no trusted third party. It's distributed across thousands of computers. And because it's distributed, it's transparent to everyone. And there's a consensus algorithm that ensures that no one can cheat or become so expensive to cheat that it's effectively impossible to cheat. Yep. So, you know, this whole space has a Wild West component to it. And it is, you know, as I said, incredibly volatile. And, you know, the upside is extraordinarily high, as you've demonstrated. But, you know, we have not seen, I guess there have been micro busts in crypto. I'm sure people got in at the peak and then lost a lot at various moments, but it's generally been a very quickly rising upward trend. So more or less everyone, if they got in early and are still in,

feels like a genius. How does this go wrong? What's the probability of this going wrong in your view? And if it does, what would account for that? I mean, you could also bring in, I guess, I'm sure, regulatory concerns are top of mind. I know you recently testified in front of Congress. So you can bring in that part of the picture as well. Totally. So, you know, I think that there is, it's a volatile asset and it might go down and it might go down a lot. We've seen it have 50% movements in both directions in a few day period before a number of times.

And I definitely wouldn't want to promise that that won't happen. I think that like each year, the odds have gone down substantially that it's going to go away. If you rewind to March 2020, I think there's a real risk of that. You know, Bitcoin dropped down to $3,500 per token, less than 10% of what it is today. And there was just very little liquidity in it. There was no buyer of last resort that was obviously coming out there. The whole space was sort of teetering

on the edge and COVID had just hit. The world was a mess. You know, fast forward to today, the amount of institutional capital getting involved in crypto is massively higher. The number of important financial institutions that are purchasing themselves or on behalf of their customers is massively higher. And all of that just means that there's just a lot more, there's a lot more, I think, sort of, you know, power behind what's going on in this space and a lot more people who, if things did drop enough, would be willing to jump in and backstop on the liquidity side. So I think that that risk has gone down substantially. And a number of institutions have basically decided that they are going to get involved

one way or another. On the regulatory side, which I do think is one of the bigger risks, I think that risk has also gotten a little bit less big, maybe substantially less big over the last year or two. At this point, crypto is too big for people to just go out and ban it en masse. You know, I don't think that you're going to see, you know, major governments, at least not many of them, hard ban crypto. Which is essentially, didn't China, I mean, China banned crypto mining, correct? China banned crypto mining. It's a little bit complicated exactly what it has and hasn't banned.

And I think that the stories on it are lacking a bit of nuance. You know, they they've been mine. They've nationalized some of the industry. And it didn't didn't hurt Bitcoin. Not that much. It hurt it a bit. But it's I mean, if anything, I think that there is some advantage in, you know, the sort of forced decentralization geographically of it. But, you know, I think it's also the case that like, you know, I think it's basically also the case that if you look at, I mean, they, you know, Chinese government's intervened in a number of sectors domestically over the last year. This is one of them. Almost no other world governments have been trying to ban crypto recently, although many of them are trying to regulate it. And so I think what you're going to see instead is, you know, a messy step-by-step process, jurisdiction by jurisdiction, as countries

try and decide what the regulatory framework should be for crypto. And I think that's going to be messy. It's not going to follow a really clear, you know, sort of a really clear progression. It's not going to be consistent. There's going to be missteps in both directions. And I think that about six months ago, my biggest worry probably was that for whatever reason, regulations end up forcing crypto out of major jurisdictions because the regimes just don't end up being workable. But I think there's been a lot more education and a lot more excitement and willingness on the behalf of regulators and lawmakers to engage on that over the last six months. And hopefully that the industry has done

a better job of, you know, communicating reasonably about this with regulators, because I don't think the industry had always been very good about that. Okay, so now you're earning to give out there in crypto paradise. And I noticed you also took the giving what we can pledge. I think you took it some years before I did. This is the pledge that was started by Toby Ord and Will McCaskill. And there are various bespoke versions of it. I think the generic one is to give at least 10% of one's lifetime income to effective charities. Waking Up was actually the first company to take the pledge. They didn't have a company-based pledge until I twisted their arms. So I'm happy they did that.

And so for companies, it's giving a minimum of 10% of profits each year to effective charities. But what pledge did you actually take? How do you think about the pledge you took and how are you implementing it? Yeah. So I guess I've taken a couple over the course of the years in a few different places. I've taken given what we can pledge. different places. I've taken given what we can pledge. More generally, if also, I, you know, pledge to give way more than 10% away. And, you know, my my actual goal is to give away almost everything one way or another. I think it's worth caveating that I don't know what

formula of that is going to take. And I don't know if all that's going to be, you know, 501c3s. But, but, but in the end, you know, other than the sort of amount that I'm living on, my goal is to use all the resources that I have to, you know, do as much good as I can. Do you think you'll have a family? I'm not particularly planning to. I think it's, A, it's just isn't something that had ever been extremely exciting for me. And I think, you know, it's never been a priority of mine, the caveat I would add there is you really are young enough, I think, to not be surprised by a sea change in your view on this topic. I mean, when I was your age, I think I would have said more or less the same thing. I certainly had zero plans and was somewhat skeptical around the prospect of having a family, but that changed. But its relevance to this topic

is many people... Actually, this is the larger topic of just how you view wealth and generational wealth in the context of effective altruism. In my conversations with Will, I've wanted to find a line here where wealth itself is not stigmatized. I think we want to live in a world where people grow wealthier and wealthier, and the pie gets bigger and bigger and bigger, so that even the poorest person a hundred years from now would be unrecognizably wealthy by today's standards. I mean, that's what real success would look like, you know, within whatever constraints the laws of nature impose on us as a species. So wealth itself can't be the problem, and yet so much talk about philanthropy does set up a zero-sum contest between a certain kind of lifestyle and being a good person, essentially. and elsewhere, I think there are just obscene attitudes toward redistribution that you often

meet among the most fortunate people in our society, where there's very little concern about the common good or very little apparent concern about the common good once one has read a sufficient amount of Ayn Rand in Silicon Valley. And so I'm just wondering how you think about things like wealth inequality, generational wealth, and redistribution. I mean, I guess the other piece I'd put in here is I think it's as much as I think we need to engineer a tide that raises all boats, recent proposals of taxing unrealized gains on billionaires just seem, whatever the ethics, they seem practically unworkable. So I'm just wondering as a fantastically wealthy person who is committed to the common good, how do you view

things like wealth inequality, redistribution and the rest? Totally. And I think I agree with a lot of what you said there, where it seems to me like there's way too little focus in the world on doing good. And that what we see a lot of instead is this weird sort of hybrid thing in sort of large centers of wealth, which is it's not exactly trying to use, you know, it's not trying to redistribute. It's not trying to use the resources or wealth to have positive impact on the world. It's sort of, I don't know, almost this weird constrained problem of like doing things which seem kind of good-ish and also are sort of like weird brand building exercises almost. And I think it ends up being a confusing combination of things. And I think that like

the sort of classic type of like kind of do-gooder thing would be like endowing a university building or something like that which is it's sort of like is kind of trying to do good but it's also kind of trying to like build your personal brand maybe or or maybe not but but i guess it sort of seems hard to me for that not to be part of what it is given that's like a big part of the impact of it and it's sort of is it kind of focused on like like i i don't know that there's like a really coherent theory of top universities are underfunded is the biggest problem in the world right now and so i think that that form is like quite popular right now. And I think it's not what you would do if you're actually just trying to like, you know, do what was best for anything that you can do that's going to have much impact on your life, even if it weren't the case that you could have absolutely massive impact on the rest of the

world. But in fact, you can have absolutely massive impact on the rest of the world. And, you know, impact that's way outsized compared to what you're sort of putting into it. And I think that that is incredibly important. And I think that's been sort of one of the key pillars of effective altruism. So I basically agree with all that. But then looking at sort of another thing you brought up about like proposals to address this, I sort of also agree that I think a lot of the ones we've seen recently have not really, they've seen weirdly not trained on, you know, doing it in an efficient or effective way. And I guess what I mean by that is like, you know, you look at the, you know, unrealized cap gains tax. And I think there's like really compelling arguments for increasing tax rates

on the very wealthy. I think that it should almost be your prior. I think that, that like, probably it's correct to consider doing that at least. Um, and you know, I think there's certainly arguments on, on addressing a lot of loopholes in the tax code as well. I think like that particular approach is probably not the right approach because any of these probably what you're getting at, but like, it's a total mess from an operational perspective where you end up taxing people for more money than they actually have. And, you know, assessing a tax that they literally can't pay. And there's sort of a question of like, what next? Like, what, what, what And so I think that that sort of is like probably not the right instantiation of it. And probably came in some senses more from a direction of like decreasing wealth for the wealthy rather than thinking about how to have like positive impact for others.

I think it's almost how sometimes society treats these things. It's them sort of optimizing for the wrong piece of it. Well, yeah, because there's this moralistic layer to it, which is demonizing extreme, understandably extreme disparities in wealth in a world where there's obvious suffering that could be addressed by money. But in stigmatizing those disparities, you know, just the shocking inequalities in the world, we wind up stigmatizing wealth itself. And so you have people like Elizabeth Warren and

Bernie Sanders who, they don't even attempt to conceal it. What they are communicating is They don't even attempt to conceal it. What they are communicating is contempt for people of sufficient wealth. I mean, I think they've even said. And so there's moral opprobrium attached to having succeeded to the degree that you and something like, I guess, 3,000 others on Earth at the moment have. I think there's something like 3,000 billionaires. And that part seems completely wrong because it's just... One, we have to just, on a first principles basis, we just have to acknowledge it's going to be some degree of inequality. And our real interest is in canceling the most painful extremes at the bottom, right? We don't want to cancel the top. We want to raise the bottom so that the poorest among us still have all that normal people actually need to live lives of real integrity and well-being. And that seems possible, right? And that's the thing we should engineer without. And we certainly shouldn't want to create any just given that it's possible to incentivize the wrong things and disincentivize the right things and that there's a lot of confusion about just what the and just basic uncertainty about what the outcomes would be if we rigged the system very differently. If you could tinker with it, what would you recommend that we do?

Yeah, totally. You know, I'm not an expert, I think, on tax policy, and all of these are just sort of guesses at it. But in the end, I think that sort of in line with what you said, like, I would put the focus here on the focus on the good that we're trying to accomplish or on the problems we're trying to stamp out. And so focus on like, you know, those that are in extreme poverty, like what can we do to get them out of poverty? And, you know, the actual amounts that it would take sometimes to do this, they're significant, but I think they're not as

gigantic as some people would sometimes think they would be. I think that for, given the amount of resources that we have as a society, we should have plenty if we're good at targeting what we need to do in the ways that places like GiveDirectly against malaria and others have done at addressing that. I think looking at, you know, the suffering of factory farmed animals, it's not a good place right now. And, you know, looking at, I mean, obviously pandemic preparedness, whatever, there's sort of a lot of areas where we clearly need to make progress as a society. But I would refocus the conversation on those and on what we can do to address those. And I think, you know, concerted effort could get a lot of progress on them. The kinds of donations that get newspaper articles written about them really are, you know, so someone writing a check for $50 million to a hospital, say, right?

I mean, that is an astounding act of generosity when you measure it against most people's wealth. But when somebody has $100 billion, it is really a rounding error. They couldn't even estimate their wealth within $50 million on any given day. And they don't have to be in cryptocurrency for it to be that obscure. I think we would be in a different situation with respect to the reality of human suffering and animal suffering and the perception of wealth if more people in your situation and beyond had your attitude toward the amount of wealth they were giving away or planning to give away. And it wasn't just about getting your name on a university building for a comparatively tiny amount of money, as large, as expensive as a building on the Johns Hopkins

or Harvard or MIT campus might be. Still, when you're talking about how much wealth people privately hold, these are in fact crumbs, albeit self-aggrandizing crumbs in many cases. So what about spreading this meme to the ultra-wealthy that virtually no one is doing enough, and to have it be... Guilt is probably not the best motivator here, but at a certain point, I think we would reach a tipping point where it would just be... It's the only thing that will seem decent to do in the end, is to be much more generous than people are tending to be. Yeah, I totally agree. And I think that, like, you know, first of all, there's just absolutely massive amounts that could be done by this. And as you said, like,

the meme has been successfully spread amongst sort of ultra wealthy that, you know, the sort of like, you know, the right thing to do is to give. But as you said, I think on the amount to give, it's like pretty arbitrary right now. It's sort of like, I don't know, you know, like a significant amount. Right. But, but what is the significant amount in a lot of cases, a significant amount might be a pretty small fraction of what someone actually has. And, you know, that doesn't mean it all has to happen tomorrow. And, you know, we can get in sort of all the caveats about like, how to do this strategically, but that doesn't change sort of the high level thing of like, you know, you should be trying to find ways to do that.

And, and I don't think people are in a lot of cases i think that there's a lot of cases where people are basically just not at all trying to find ways to do good for the world and so yeah i i agree with all that and i think that like that that really spreading the notion of like you should try and do as much as you can you should try and give most of what you have. And when doing it, you should be focusing on how much good you can do rather than focusing on, you know, a sort of diverse series of goals, many of which are kind of self-serving in the end and are basically just consumption. Like, you know, getting your name. I mean, you know, we've, my, my company is paid to get our name on various things.

That is not charity. Like you're not, you know, that that's not, my company is paid to get our name on various things. That is not charity. Like you're not, you know, that that's not going into the, in the charity budget. And, and, and I think that sort of something along with that is that when you think about, about doing good, like think about it from the perspective of the people you're helping rather than necessarily from like your own perspective. And I mean, from that perspective, like, you know, they're not in it for your warm fuzzies, right? Like from their perspective, like it's not relevant to them.

Who's giving, it's not relevant to them. What like, like the relevant part for the actual impact you're having is the actual impact you can have and on how many people's lives you're having that impact. And I think that, you know, from that perspective, right, you might get all the warm fuzzies that you need from $50 million of donations, but that's not the relevant thing. The relevant thing was helping people. And there's a lot more help to give than that. Yeah, this is interesting. It's interesting to navigate this

space of ethical norms and pseudo-ethical norms and questions of pragmatism. So this is something I spoke about with Will at one point. It used to be thought, it is still widely thought that the highest form of giving is anonymous giving, because there you can be absolutely sure that your, you know, ulterior concerns about your own reputation are not in play. You're not just, you know, it's not virtue signaling, it's not vanity, it's not getting your name on the building. You're just prioritizing the good you can do with the money. But I've come to believe, and Will, at least for the purposes of this conversation, agrees that, at least in certain cases, anonymity is not the, practically and ultimately ethically speaking, is not the

highest ideal because there's so much good to be done by persuading people to follow this example. You know, so for you to be, I mean, you could be anonymously giving, you know, having taken no pledges publicly, and that would be great. But I think it is much better for you to be modeling to your fellow ultra-rich people that this is a value you hold and that one can hold, and that there may even be great social rewards for promulgating this value. Because what we want to do is to spread this attitude as far as we can. And I can just say, personally, whenever I talk about these things on the podcast, whenever I talk about these things on the podcast, and especially whenever I mention any specific charity, what happens is my audience reliably supports that charity, and to a degree that is fairly astounding. And that's a wonderful thing to inspire that kind

of generosity in thousands of people. And none of that good gets done if you just hide your light under a bushel and do it anonymously, content that you have not been contaminated by the sin of your own vanity. Yeah, I agree. It could be a complicated balance because obviously you want to do that. You want to be able to spread that meme around. I think that's one of the most, you know, in the end that's for most people, that's the biggest impact that they can have. You also want to obviously make sure while doing it that, you know, you don't sort of lose focus

on what mattered in the first place and that the publicity doesn't become the goal in and of itself, except to the extent that that goal is for spreading, you know, spreading the meme and encouraging others rather than sort of self-satisfaction. But I think that contingent on being comfortable that you can weather that and stay committed. Yeah, I agree that, you know,

probably the biggest thing that you can do is to, you know, help others get to that point where they're optimizing for what impact they can have on the world. So what is your approach to giving at this point? What are you doing currently and what do you plan to do? And is it just personal

or does FTX give a certain amount of profit away? I mean, how do you approach this? Yeah. So I guess I'll start with the last part, which is the easiest, which is that the bulk of it is personal. FTX is also giving some. FTX is giving 1% of what it makes. But those aren't the big numbers here.

That's not where I expect most of this impact to come from. I expect most of it to come from, uh, from what I personally give. And, you know, in terms of what it looks like in the end, and I think there's something I think is really, really important is that in the end, there is no metric other than what, what, you know, has the most positive impact on the world. And, you know, if it starts to look like something that I hadn't previously thought was other than what has the most positive impact on the world. And if it starts to look like something that I hadn't previously thought was important is the most important thing,

I think it's important to recognize that and pivot to that and to keep iterating and not to get sort of stuck in the mindset of one particular path, but kind of putting aside long-term hedge words and focusing on like, but, you know, kind of putting aside, you know, long-term hedge words and focusing on like, okay, but sure. How about like today? You know, I think that the things that I've been looking at the most, there's some amount of giving that I do to a variety of places for a sort of set of reasons that maybe I don't think are ultimately the most important for the bulk of the money, but that I think is quite valuable to do with some of it. And I think that like,

you know, examples of things there are, you know, basically like, you know, making sure that I'm giving at least some periodically, no matter what, even if I can't find something that seems like the best place to give to me, to make sure that I'm in the habit of it, making sure that I am supporting causes that I think are good, and that I want it to be known I'm supporting and that I want, you know, there to be more supporters of. And so I'm doing sort of some of that. But for for sort of the biggest parts of this, you know, and maybe i'll say like you know on on on those fronts like i think you know i've been giving some to global poverty causes each year i've been giving some to animal welfare causes each year i've been giving some to effective altruism

community building charities like center for effective altruism each year i think the things though that like i've ended up giving the most to recently and thought were the most interesting probably fall in a few buckets. One of which is, is pandemic preparedness stuff. And you, you know, it's, it's sort of false. And I think this really dangerous middle category right now where it's, you know, decently likely to, you know, pandemics have the potential to be massively more deadly than something like global warming is. But on the other hand, they're actually kind of shovel ready in the bad sense. And I think that's something that we've learned over the last few years is that global pandemics can happen. This isn't like a theoretical concern. And I think we've it's also become super clear that we have no ability as a society to react to them, that we have no no idea what we're doing. And, you know, we're flying blind here. And and that's not great. blind here. And that's not great. I think almost no countries would I give more than a B-2 over the last two years for handling COVID. And we got lucky with COVID. We got lucky because it's nasty,

but it's not deadly in the way SARS is. This isn't something that has a 30% mortality rate. Right. Like this isn't something that has like a 30 percent mortality rate. Yeah. This was a dress rehearsal that we clearly failed in our defense in large part because or at least this is a possible alibi. We were just in we were in the uncanny valley with respect to the lethality of the virus. It just was not lethal enough to get our attention or get everyone's attention. And so now we have debates about whether COVID is even worse than the flu or whether you should get vaccinated for it. I mean, the one success here is that we did develop the vaccines very quickly, but we can't even get half of our society to agree that they should be vaccinated in the first place. One could imagine that's because this isn't MERS or

SARS or something that's far more lethal. One can only hope that if there were bodies being piled in the streets in order of magnitude worse lethality, you wouldn't have the same conspiracy thinking and sheer lunacy that is causing us to fail this test of cooperation and coordination. I would hope so. I wish I felt more confident in that than I do. I'm with you. In my darker moments, I'm entirely with you. I think a maniac like Alex Jones and anyone who would listen to him is capable of being just as crazy in the presence of the bubonic plague. I think that's mostly right. And I think some of it is, as you said, like, we don't have a good understanding of society as some of something.

And we're really bad at sort of addressing middles, like at saying this is like, clearly more deadly than the flu and clearly less deadly than SARS. Like, that's just not it's not in our lexicon. Our lexicon is like, it's fine or it's terrible, you know? And I think similarly, like we're really bad at strategically addressing things and saying like, this intervention seems to have like 80% reduction for like not that much cost. This intervention seems to have 25% reduction at enormous cost. Like it is absolutely worth it to do number one and probably not to do number two. And like, instead you just like, I find myself in like a shockingly few set of people who like,

you know, things that like vaccines are great for this, but that like, it's not clear we should be shutting down society forever for it. So, so yeah, we don't know what we're doing. And if you look at sort of the takeaways that society has had from this, I almost want to say the biggest thing that I noticed is that there isn't a clear takeaway. What moral has society taken from COVID? It's a very confused lesson. I mean, the lesson that many of us have drawn is what you just stated, that we are painfully unprepared for the real thing because we have botched this so fully. Again, you know, modulo the vaccine development, which was impressive.

And some parts of that, I think, are a good story where we now have the ability in 24 hours to make an mRNA vaccine, which is absolutely fucking amazing. Yeah. And it's a superpower. On the other hand, it still took a year from COVID appearing to people getting vaccinated. And so I think when it comes to, I mean, obviously detection, like we're really bad, but also like it then took us eight months after having the vaccine to get it through the process to start giving to people. That was eight months when people were dying and COVID was

spreading. And, you know, one lesson here is that we know that people will volunteer for challenge trials. So if we can just articulate the ethics of that more clearly, I think the next time around, we can probably get challenge trials approved. And hopefully, yeah, that would speed it up. Yep. So anyway, going back to like what I've been giving to recently, some of it is various pandemic preparedness related things. A lot of this actually is lobbying. A lot of this is information for lawmakers and trying to get, you know, the government to take seriously its role in preparing for pandemics. take seriously its role in preparing for pandemics. And I think you can have extreme leverage doing that. If you look at, you know, just sort of the ratio of what it costs to, you know, versus how much impact you could potentially have there. I think it's super compelling. Now that doesn't mean it's necessarily going to get there, right? Like it, you could absolutely imagine a world where all that is

for naught. And I don't want to say that that's definitely not happening. But that's, I think, one of the things I've been doing that I actually feel sort of weirdly best about, and that I think has been super high leverage. And then on the side, I've also been having a lot of conversations with people about what infrastructure do we need to be developing as a world to be better prepared for the next pandemic and what we can do to fund some of that infrastructure, whether it's, I mean, there's sort of, you know, one idea which I've seen thrown around a few times and I think is like fairly compelling is, you know, what if we just went out and funded a giant vaccine stockpile, right?

And sort of variance on that. So that's one direction that I've been going with. And that I think is just like, really high upside if it can be pulled off well. You know, I think these are threats that could be potentially, you know, existential, and if not existential, at least like really fucking bad. and if not existential, at least like really fucking bad. And then, you know, I've been doing more generally, a bunch of policy work in DC, and, you know, electoral work there. And I think there's also just some numbers there that don't quite that are sort of shockingly out of line with what you might predict. You know, if you just look at like, how much is spent on elections, how much is spent on lobbying, It's sort of a big amount, but it's actually a really small amount compared to the scope of the impact that the government

can have and that it has had on, among other things, just global discourse. Well, that was always amazing to me. I mean, they've lost their influence, I think, a little bit of late. But just to look at how little an organization like the NRA needed to spend every year to completely dominate our politics, right, to become an unmovable object in the middle of American politics for as long as I've been alive, it's a trivial amount of money when you're talking about the resources of even one very wealthy person. Yeah, it's absolutely right. And it's pretty wild. Like at some point, you know, there's all this pushback on, on their lobbying, but, but I think some of the answer is like, geez, like that's how

much they gave, like how, I don't know, like there are a lot of people who could be looking to have impact in, in DC. And I think like, you know, we're. And I think people sometimes have the wrong takeaway from that lobbying. And the takeaway is everything is fucked instead of being like, we're getting outplayed here. Right. Well, it's not all causes are equivalent, right? It's like, yes, everybody thinks they're the good guys, even when they're the bad guys. But there are some good guys, right? And there are benign, there are at least benign causes. And they're, you know, truly malicious and destructive causes. So it's, yeah, no, I'm with you there.

Do you have people advising you at this point on philanthropy? I mean, I got to think this is not just you doing Google searches. You must have smart people who are in your ear. Yeah, I've been building that up. And I mean, it's something I would really want to spend more time on than I can and regret that I can't or at least haven't just because work takes up so much of my life. But I've been growing out the team that's working with me and advising me on that quite a bit. I recently hired, I don't know if you've ever talked with Nick Beckstead, but he's one of

sort of the original hardcore EA. I don't think it's possible. We've exchanged emails, but the name's not ringing a bell. Yeah, he's a great guy and he's recently brought him on to help lead our foundation. I'm working with a number of people in DC, who have way more knowledge than I do of that arena, a number of people who have way more knowledge about bio than I do. And in general, like trying to, you know, build out subject matter experts on everything that we're working on, in addition to sort of a core group of people focusing on what our direction should be. And I think it's worth knowing that this isn't all me. I'm really fortunate to have started FTX up with a number of other effective altruists who have a ton of respect for and who have been working with me on all of this. Nice. Well, if I can ever profit from your research, I'd love to do that.

I've got various effective altruists advising me. I don't know if you know Natalie Cargo from Longview Philanthropy and the Founders Pledge and other groups there that I've connected to through Will. But yeah, if at any point your summary of what you're doing in any given year can be exported to my brain, I'd love to see what

you're doing and perhaps just follow your lead. Absolutely. We should absolutely stay in touch with that because there's a ton that we've been doing and I think a lot of it is super cool. And obviously, we'd love to also just get your thoughts on all of it as well. Nice. Well, Sam, it's been great to speak with you. Is there anything that we didn't cover that you think we should touch? The only other thing maybe I'd touch on briefly is something around how when you're trying to do good, how ambitious I think it makes sense to be. Where, you know, if you're just optimizing for your personal well-being, because you just sort of cap out pretty quickly with like a really

comfortable life, I think there are a lot of incentives to be not super ambitious on that. But I think that if you're optimizing for impact to the world, I think that really changes the story. Because all of a sudden, you're looking at something that can really scale something where there really isn't this sense of like, oh, you know, you've had a fair bit of impact. You can't really have much more impact than that. I think instead, the answer is generally like, no, you can have absolutely massive impact, it just keeps going and going and going. And I think that means that it makes a lot of sense to shoot really high with it. And I think one piece of that that we've touched on is like, not just thinking about how can we do good, but thinking about how can I maximize the amount of good that I'm doing with the resources

I have, you know, not just giving away 5% eventually, but giving away 95% eventually, and not just trying to give it to something good, but think hard about what would be better, what would be the best that we could give to. I think another side of that, though, is also, you know, trying to think about, I mean, if you think about like how much impact you've had with your life, I mean, actually, I don't know how you thought about what you're going to do with your life earlier, but you've had absolutely enormous impact on a huge number of people. I think like massively outscaling what I think most people would think of with their careers. And I think that thinking about ways that you can have not just some impact, but absolutely enormous positive impact with your life and your career and what

that would imply you should be doing is actually really important and powerful. Yeah. And again, it is, in fact, separable from the good feels component of it. And again, I don't want to diminish the importance of good feels because, I mean, that really is the driver for a lot of people. But it's also just the moment-to-moment substance of what it's like to be you. It's the difference between whether you are smiling or not. But the reality is that there are things each of us can do that can affect the lives of literally millions of people positively. They're almost entirely out of sight and out of mind, even when we're consciously engaging them. You could cut a check for tens of millions of dollars, hundreds of millions of dollars used as effectively as possible, and it could take you five minutes. And the thing that's going to leave a much bigger residue on how you feel that day is the interaction you had with some stranger in a Starbucks, right? There's a paradox of sorts there. I think we want to optimize both of those things. And I think it's good to reflect in a way on the more ambitious good we do so as to internalize

the psychological rewards of doing that good. But I think it is just a fact that certain things will always be more salient than other things. And this is a conversation I had with Will about if you could run into a burning building and save a child on your deathbed, that will be the thing you remember as the best thing you ever did in your life, perhaps. But the reality is, is that if you just use your resources at all compassionately,

you could be saving children in analogous situations by the thousands and thousands, you know, every day of your life at this point. And it just, but it's not going to feel the same. And that's okay. You know, you can get your good feels elsewhere, and this is what rationality is for, is to uncouple us from being entirely pushed around by our emotions and to get more of a bird's-eye view of the ethical terrain so that we can actually do the most good that's there to be done. Completely agree. And I think, as you said, it doesn't mean denying the existence of the feelings

that you have, but acknowledging that while it's really important not to lose sight of that and not to forget that the goal in the end is to make people feel better and not to lose track of what that feels like, that when you start to scale things, that's not the thing that scales. The thing that scales is the more direct impact that you have on other people's lives. Nice. Well, Sam, to be continued. I look forward to meeting you someday and please keep me in the loop as you learn more and more about how to do good in the world. Absolutely. And if you're ever thinking about coming how to do good in the world. Absolutely. And if you're ever thinking

about coming down to the Bahamas, we would love to have you here. Sure, sure. Well, twist my arm. you