Sam Bankman-Fried: belief

Transcript context

…Let’s say you had a magical capital gain of $1 million, and you had already decided to give it away. This happens to you all the time, but at the margin, the next million — where do you give it? I think that there are a lot of good places to give it, first of all. I think that there’s no shortage of good answers, and you can look at any of the standard ones that I think people will talk about. Let’s talk about great answers. What would be something that I think would go above and beyond what people can usually think of to do with money? I think there are things there, but to some extent, I think that they need more than just money. I think money is an important piece of it, but it’s not the only piece. They also need that drive to exist and to happen and to happen right and well. What I think I would do is one of two things, and I don’t want to say these are the causes that necessarily matter the most, long term. I do think that they’re the most important for the long term of humanity maybe right now, but others might develop really great ways to innovate soon. Right now, the things I’m most excited about — one of them is pandemic preparedness. This is probably the one I’ve been thinking about the most recently. I think the single clearest takeaway from COVID is that we don’t have our sh-t together as a world. That’s what’s become clearest, is that there is no magical wizard behind the curtain who makes everything go okay. It’s actually a mess, and everyone can agree that we screwed up the COVID response in every possible way. But I think one of the more depressing things is, it also seems like we’re not really ready for next time. Not at all. We haven’t improved anything as far as I can tell.…

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