"When you start a company, there are enormous  amounts of shit that looks like that.   Things that are dumb or annoying or broken or  unfair, or not how the world should work. But   that’s how the worl..."

"When you start a company, there are enormous  amounts of shit that looks like that.   Things that are dumb or annoying or broken or  unfair, or not how the world should work. But   that’s how the worl..."

"Thanks for having me. Alright, first question. Does the consecutive  success of FTX and Alameda suggest to you   that the world has all kinds of low-hanging  opportunities? Or was that a property   of..."

"Thanks for having me. Alright, first question. Does the consecutive  success of FTX and Alameda suggest to you   that the world has all kinds of low-hanging  opportunities? Or was that a property   of..."

"I don't think it was literally the best  possible advice because this was in 2012.   Starting a crypto exchange then would  have been…. I think it was definitely   helpful advice. Relative to not havi..."

"Right. But then there's a broader question: are  people like you who could become founders advised   to take lower variance, lower risk careers  that in, expected value, are less valuable? Yeah, I thi..."

"I didn't realize that the personal considerations   were as important in your  case as the advice you got. Oh, I don’t think in my case. But, it is  true with many people that I talked to. Speaking of..."

"personal. When we talk with people about  their careers, personal considerations and   the advice of people close to them weigh very  heavily on the decisions they end up making. I didn't realize that..."

"something about the movement that drives away  people who took could take leadership roles? Oh, I think it's just the world in general. Even  if you ignore altruistic projects and just look   at profi..."

"quite frequently for them is the right  person or team to take the lead on it.   In general, starting something is brutal.  It's brutal being a founder, and it requires   a somewhat specific but exten..."

"okay with that. I don't think we have that  right now, I think very few communities do. Now, there are many good  objections to utilitarianism,   as you know. You said yourself that we don't  have a g..."

"Most startups and especially very early-stage  startups should not be trying to maximize the   chances of having at least a little bit  of success. But that means you have to be   okay with the person..."

"what I mean by that is, I'm sure one way that you  can calculate the expected value of an action is,   “Here's what's going to happen. Here are the two  outcomes, and here are the probabilities of the..."

"what I mean by that is, I'm sure one way that you  can calculate the expected value of an action is,   “Here's what's going to happen. Here are the two  outcomes, and here are the probabilities of the..."

"Political giving In the May 2022 Oregon Congressional Election,   you gave 12 million dollars to Carrick Flynn,  whose campaign was ultimately unsuccessful.   How have you updated your beliefs about t..."

"But does it make you think there  are diminishing or possibly negative   marginal returns from one donor giving to  a candidate? Because of the negative PR? At some point, I think that's probably true..."

"One thing that I've been really happy about is the  re-granting program. We have a number of people   who are experts in various areas to who we've  basically donated pots that they can re-grant.   Wh..."

"things like international cooperation important  for it? When you look at pandemic prevention,   we're talking tens of billions of dollars of scale  necessary to start putting this infrastructure in  ..."

"Let's talk about Future Fund. As you know,   there are already many existing Effective  Altruist organizations that do donations.   What is the reason you thought there was more  value in creating a n..."

"other thing is that it helps with a large number  of smaller grants. When you think about what an   organization giving away $100 million in a year  is thinking about, “if we divided that up into   $2..."

"Distributing it and letting them act  semi-autonomously can help with that. The   other thing is that it helps with a large number  of smaller grants. When you think about what an   organization givin..."

"re-grantor program gives us a way to do that.  Instead, we have 10, 50, or 100 re-grantors,   who are going out and finding a lot  of those opportunities close to them,   they can then identify those ..."

"It also biases it less towards people  who we happen to know, which is good. We don't want to just like  overfund everyone we know   and underfund everyone that we don’t. That's one  initiative that I..."

"on making the (application) process smooth  and clean. There are pros and cons to this.   But it drops the activation energy necessary  for someone to decide to apply for a grant   and fill out all of..."

"We do have oversight of them. But, we also do  a deep dive into both all of the large ones,   but also into samplings of all the small  ones. We do deep dives into randomly sampled   subsets of them—w..."

"Adverse selection in philanthropy If you make it easy for people to   fill out your application and generally fund  things that other organizations wouldn't,   how do you deal with the possibility of ..."

"But that's a way to be able to have more trusted  analyses for more scaled-up numbers of grants. Correlation between different causes A long time ago, you wrote a blog post about how  EA causes are mu..."

"I do think it's more complicated now.  It's not cleanly things just multiplying   with each other. There are lots of cases  where you see multiplicative behavior,   but there are cases where you don't..."

"What’s the most likely reason that Future  Fund fails to live up to your expectations? We get a little lame. We give to a lot of  decent things. But all the cooler or more   innovative things that we ..."

"If you think of your philanthropy from a  portfolio perspective, is correlation good or bad? Expected value is expected value, right?  Let's pretend that there is one person in   Bangladesh and anothe..."

"What’s the most likely reason that Future  Fund fails to live up to your expectations? We get a little lame. We give to a lot of  decent things. But all the cooler or more   innovative things that we ..."

"When you look at a proposal and think  this project could be promising,   but this is not the right person to lead it,  what is the trait that's most often missing? Super interesting. I am going to ig..."

"When you look at a proposal and think  this project could be promising,   but this is not the right person to lead it,  what is the trait that's most often missing? Super interesting. I am going to ig..."

"cost you tens of millions of dollars a year to get  set up. You have to get a physical colo(cation) in   Secaucus, New Jersey, have market data agreements  with these companies, think about the sip an..."

"that is a good trade to buy one share of Apple  stock on NASDAQ, there's a button to do that. If you as a random citizen want to buy one share  of Apple stock directly on an exchange, it'll   cost you..."

"If you're going to be like, “I'm  the CEO, I don't do that stuff,”   then no one's going to do that at your company.  It's not going to get done. You won't have a bank   account and you won't be able ..."

"you should use the latter. That's going to get  the better pitching on average, and just as many   innings out of them—and baseball has since then  moved very far in that direction. The average   numb..."

"for a founder and for an early team at a company  (but not important for everything in life)   is willing to do a ton of grunt work if  it’s important for the company right then. Viewing it not as “lo..."

"you should use the latter. That's going to get  the better pitching on average, and just as many   innings out of them—and baseball has since then  moved very far in that direction. The average   numb..."

"How do you assess that short of hiring them  for a month and then seeing how they did? It's tough, I don't think we're perfect  at it. But things that we look at are,   “Do they understand quickly wha..."

"billions of dollars of value on the table. Why  didn't they just fix what you told them to fix? My sense is that it’s part of a larger  phenomenon. One piece of this is that   they didn't have a lot o..."

"How do you assess that short of hiring them  for a month and then seeing how they did? It's tough, I don't think we're perfect  at it. But things that we look at are,   “Do they understand quickly wha..."

"billions of dollars of value on the table. Why  didn't they just fix what you told them to fix? My sense is that it’s part of a larger  phenomenon. One piece of this is that   they didn't have a lot o..."

"There're two ways of thinking about the  impact of crypto on financial innovation.   One is the crypto maximalist view that crypto  subsumes tradfi. The other is that you're   basically stress-testing..."

"Are you replacing that risk with  another risk? If there's one exchange   that has the most liquidity om futures and  there’s one exchange where you're posting   all your collateral (across all your p..."

"There're two ways of thinking about the  impact of crypto on financial innovation.   One is the crypto maximalist view that crypto  subsumes tradfi. The other is that you're   basically stress-testing..."

"I don't think we're going to have a single  exchange winning. Among other things, there are   going to be different decisions made by different  exchanges—which will be better or worse for   particula..."

"Let's talk about your proposal to the CFTC  to replace Futures Commission Merchants with   algorithmic real-time risk management.  There's a worry that without human   discretion, you have algorithms ..."

"Are you replacing that risk with  another risk? If there's one exchange   that has the most liquidity om futures and  there’s one exchange where you're posting   all your collateral (across all your p..."

"should work. People should be allowed to choose  the option that makes the most sense for them. What are the biggest differences in  culture between Jane Street and FTX? FTX has much more of a culture..."

"How has living in the Bahamas   impacted your opinion about the  possibility of successful charter cities? It's a good question. It's the first time  and it’s updated positively. We've built out   a l..."

"I don't think we're going to have a single  exchange winning. Among other things, there are   going to be different decisions made by different  exchanges—which will be better or worse for   particula..."

"should work. People should be allowed to choose  the option that makes the most sense for them. What are the biggest differences in  culture between Jane Street and FTX? FTX has much more of a culture..."

"taking a giant, empty plot of land, and  creating a city in it. That's way harder. How has having a RAM-skewed mind influence  the culture of FTX and its growth? On the upside, we've been pretty good ..."

"How has living in the Bahamas   impacted your opinion about the  possibility of successful charter cities? It's a good question. It's the first time  and it’s updated positively. We've built out   a l..."

"How has having a RAM-skewed mind influence  the culture of FTX and its growth? On the upside, we've been pretty good at adapting  and understanding what the important things are at   any time. Trainin..."