This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily Bloomberg I Heard podcast, and I'm Stacy Marie Ishmael, Managing editor of Crypto for Bloomberg News. It's Wednesday, December seven. Sound bankman Freed used to say that he was on a mission. That mission giving away more than a billion dollars in the service of a movement known as effective altruism. My goal is to do as much great as I can for the world.
I I'm perfect Effective altruism comedy. Basically, it's a group of people looking to try and figure out if you want a maximized the amount of good you do, maximized sup positive impact that you can have on the world through personal giving and through a philanthropic unit called the ft X Foundation, bank when free to pay it to support causes ranging from pandemic prevention to research into climate change.
Fast forward a bits on on bankruptcy later. That message of using wealth to empower people and projects that are doing the most to make positive, long lasting change. A marketing line from the ft X Foundation's website now rings a little hollow blue move reports to Sophie Alexander, A lot of people have died who signed the giving pledge. We have no idea whether they actually gave away the majority of their lifetime or wrote it in their will.
And Laura Davidson, the amount of money that his foundation said it gave or the ft X Foundations that it give didn't actually go out the door. Join me now with the backstory. So if you want, don't you introduce yourself. Hi, I'm Sophia Alexander. I'm a reporter on the Wealth Team. I cover billionaires, what they're doing with their money, and especially billionaire philanthropy. Such a busy time for billionaires and what they're doing with their money. Laura, what about you?
I'm Laura Davison and I'm based down in Washington, d C. Where I'm covering wealth, but also um all things Congress and tax policy and what politicians are up to. Again,
just many things happening in your world. So let's talk about the place where the intersections of your world are happening, and that is a gentleman named Sam Bankman Freed, who I'm no longer going to introduce on the show, because if you're listening to a show about crypto and you you've at least heard of what Sam Bankman tried is.
But perhaps you have heard either slightly less about or don't quite understand what the concept of effective altruism is, which is something that he was closely associated with, Sophie. What does this crypto billionaire or perhaps former billionaire have to do with this particular strand of philanthropy. Effective altruism is this brand of philosophy and philanthropy that picked up steam recently because it's caught the attention of billionaires like
Sam Bankman Free, but also Elon Musk. And what it is is essentially the idea that you should make as much money as you can to give it away, but in a very effective way, hence the first word in the term, but that means saving as many lives as possible. And there's a whole other strand of it called long termism, and the idea behind that is trying to sort of
preserve humanities long term existence on this planet. So there's a lot of focus on artificial intelligence research and trying to make sure that the robots basically don't kill us in the future. They're are definitely gonna kill us. But when you say things like trying to preserve humanity, I think of, you know, cryogenics and this idea that people have like, well we can what we can all freeze
ourselves and be and be alive. I'm not sure if effect of altruism had much to do with cryodraonics, but what I do know is that part of the tension that I've seen in terms of the criticism is how do you know if stuff is working? Like, if you have such a long term time horizon, how are you
even measuring the efficacy of your effectiveness? The things that they focus on sort of get at that, like, but there's no way of knowing whether people are going to be around in two hundred, a thousand years or whatever. But they're trying to focus on issues that will prevent
the collapse of humanity. Pandemic preparedness. Research on bio security is increasingly popular, especially from SPF, and then artificial intelligence is a big one as well, especially among not just SPF, but also Elon Muski does a lot of that as well. And to your point, not about being like yea robots, but more about neigh robots more so, like doing the research now to make sure that artificial intelligence is developed
in a safe way. Got it, Laura, You're in d C, which is in a lot of whiz the opposite of Silicon Valley, from the fashion to the focus to just the way that you know, the priorities that people have spf for lots of reasons associated with you know, lobbying efforts around trying to get certain types of regulations in place.
Spent a lot of time in d C. Was he successful in persuading people around him to like buy into this effective altruism vision from your perspective, he really talked about pandemic preparedness as being one of his key drivers for political giving, which raised a lot of eyebrows because there is almost zero talk in DC about pandemic preparedness, at least among politicians and Congress, in the White House,
maybe in some corners of some agencies. But this has really been sort of an interesting way to see how he spent his money to really bring to life some of these ideas that he's talked about. His crypto giving or his political giving. Really most people believe that was more focused towards crypto when you look at and crypto regulation or less regulation as the case. Maybe he was giving to the key figures there where you see some
of these more altruism ideas come to light. Is in this foundation giving though as a reporting to show that the amount of money that his foundation said it gave or the FTX Foundation said it give didn't actually go out the door. Um, you know, they had a bunch of grants that never ultimately got paid and in some cases some of that money actually maybe clawed back as part of the bankruptcy proceedings. Now, just for context, is
this common in philanthropic giving? Like, is there often this discrepancy between Hey, we're planning to give all this money and is it just that the timelines along it's like hard to give money? Like what's going on here? In like the broader like world of billionaire philanthropy, there are a lot of promises that are made, like the giving pledge. It's a pledge to give away the majority of your wealth in your lifetime or your will. You know a lot of people have died who signed the giving pledge.
We have no idea whether they actually gave away the majority of their lifetime or wrote it in their will. The majority of your wealth is you know a big question work because you know, Jeff bezos Is wealth has varied. You know, tens of billions of dollars since this time last year. He said recently that he wants to give away most of his wealth in his lifetime, But what does that actually mean in terms of dollar figures? Now?
Talking about SPF and his pledge. You know the grants that they said they made on their page, you know a lot of those weren't paid yet. A lot of that has to do with paperwork. There's a lag. I think there is a lot of PR to the world of billionaire philanthropy. So sort of like slapping all these big numbers up makes a person look good, and in SPFS case, that's that's also true. Right to your point about billionaires saying they're going to give things, it does.
I'm reminded of when people were super surprised that Mackenzie Scott formally Mackenzie Scott Bezos was just like literally giving money to just turn up and be like, here's a bunch of money. Buy I am fascinated by what you said.
They're about this idea of PR because bank mun Freed, who has been on a bit of a like texting with reporters tool in a text thread with a report at Vox Media, appeared to concede that for him, at least some of this effective alcatraism stuff was just pr How seriously can we take this movement in general, like, is it unfair to ascribe, you know, cynicism to the vast majority of these folks. It's hard to know what people's real intentions are. Philanthropy has in history been a
very good pr tool. I mean, if you think about Rockefeller today, you think a lot about his philanthropy, literally the Rockefeller Center exactly in New York and Carnegie. You know, you think about his public works, his libraries and things like that. You don't think of the fact that they were robber barons. And you know, the same has been true for you know, billionaires who are still alive today, like Bill Gates. You know, twenty years ago, people didn't
think of him as a fantastic philanthropist. They thought him as this evil monopoly man. And that Look how much that has changed. Sam. For the Sacklers, who you know, are implicated in the opioid crisis, their names are slapped over museum buildings all across the country, and until recently, no one thought anything of it. So it is hard at this point to think, okay, yes, we can take this billionaire at his word that you know he really does mean well, he's just trying to make as much
money as possible to give it away. Maybe we should start asking the question of how are they making their money. The other thing, too specifically about SBF is that he clearly was very conscious about who he gave money to and the reasons he was giving that money. He told Fox recently that he gave as much money to Republicans as he gave to Democrats for political donations through dark money. He sent through dark money, which of course can't be
verified by definition. Those groups don't publish their list of donors, so it's very hard to know whether that's true. But the reason he said he gave through dark money groups versus giving to more public entities was because reporters freak out when billionaires give to Republicans. So it was clear he was thinking about what is the perception of this giving that I'm doing. So this is SBF saying the reason he used dark money was to avoid you know,
quote unquote reports was freaking out. Yes, and you look here to the people that were receiving money from the
ft X Foundation. It's a lot of academics. It's a lot of researchers including you know, undergraduate students and PhD students, master students, some really small dollar donations, you know, comparatively speaking, you know, things that are in like the tens of thousands of dollars, but people that were influential in the field and that we're very influential online of sort of pumping up f t X as well as the effect
of altruism movement. Now, I just want to kind of segue briefly into Future Fund and this idea of influence because it was a part of the overall ft X foundation that was, according to their marketing materials on their website, funded by what looked like Bankman Freed's inner circle. Right, So you had Caroline Allison from Alameda, Gary Wang sing what did they do exactly? Like what was the Future Fund? Yeah? Sure, this was actually a really kind of novel and also
very complicated organizations. So they basically had two tiers of grants that they gave out. They gave up bigger grants which were more like a traditional foundation where you know, applicants could apply and get you know, kind of hundreds
of thousands or millions of dollars. They also had this whole re grant or structure where they had more than a hundred people that were active in the effect of altruism community who would identify different researchers or projects that they thought that they were deserving of, you know, sort
of smaller dollar amounts of money. So these are a lot of students who are applying for specific projects that they were working on, or kind of ragtag groups of of people who were starting different side hustles and they could apply to get this money. So it was really kind of broad. You know, you look at people from you know, it was Trump's former head of Operation Warp Speed, who's writing a memoir. You got some money, as well as you know, a Harvard undergraduate it got thirty dollars.
Up next, more from Bloomberg reportos Sophie Alexander and Laura Davison on what's happening with effective altruism and crypto. Now, we've talked a bit about these smaller dollar amounts and the influence, and so I feel like we have to talk about one of the influencers of this whole movement, which is William David McCaskill. And when I googled him
as research for this. It was like a bunch of photos of him staring off into the middle distance, like really intently, and he you know, he has been described, as it were, as a charismatic leader. Who is this dude and what was his relationship to the ft X Foundation and to the e A movement. He is one of the originators of the effective Altruist movement. He's a philosopher and he was actually on the team of the
ft X Future Fund. He was one of the people who signed the letter that went up on e A Forum, a community online from the team behind the Future Fund after the whole thing collapsed, saying hey, we resigned, big apologies. If you have questions and you're a grantee, please email
us here. So it's unclear to me, at least in my reporting, what the relationship between SPF and McCaskill was, but it does sound like from Ellen Hewett's story recently with Peter Singer, she did an interview with Peter Singer, it sounds like SBF was making the rounds with this group. Peter Singer is another originator of the movement, alongside McCaskill, another philosopher at Stanford, So it sounds like they were
swimming in similar circles and no shade to philosophers. So philosophers, please don't come from me for what I'm about to say. But most philosophers aren't like household names. McCaskill was on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah McCaskill welcomes to the Danny Show. Thanks so much for having me. M it's it's it's interesting speaking to a philosoph because when they say philosopher, I remember thinking, oh, it's probably gonna be like a ninety year old man with like a stick
and what is the meaning of life? But this is an extremely savvy group of folks. Is that sort of common in these EA circles that they are, you know, kind of strategic about getting their message out in these larger forums, in the larger forms, I'm not sure. I mean recently, just within this past year, it's been interesting to watch them sort of gain influence in these billionaire circles. Like I said earlier, Elon Musk has also espoused the idea.
I don't know how recently, but at least earlier this year. There was a poker player named Igor Kirganov, who was in charge of his foundation, and he is where Elon Musk's foundation was run by a poker player. Yes, cool, a poker player, And it seems like there are a lot of poker players who are involved in the effective altuist movement. This guy, yougo or Kirkanov was big in the e A space. Now, I just said, no shade philosophers,
but some shades billionaires. One of the things I've noticed about billionaires is they seem to be hypersensitive to associating themselves with people who are cool, because a lot of billionaires aren't cool. And so tell me a little bit about you know, these kind of billionaire circles and who they're being influenced by. Well, with Elon Musk, it's a completely different story because it's unclear like how many real
close friends he has. You know, this year he had this poker player running his foundation who he apparently met at Burning Man. You know, he dates grimes, he like, you know, he's doing all this stuff. Who knows who's actually close with him and who is just associating with him for the proximity to his power. So that's that's the circle that Ellen Musk runs in with SPF. It sounds like it was this tight knit circle of FTX
folks and also effective altruists. I just I feel like I have to close with this anecdote because it's too good not to. In the New Yorker profile of William McCaskill, they have this sentence, McCaskill like to drink too many pipes of beer and frolic about in the nude, climbing pitched roofs by night for the life affirming flush. He was a saxophonist in a campus funk bland that played the Mabels and was known as a hopeless romantic incredible
thank you both, thank you, thank you. That was super fun. I learned at least five wild things. You can find more of their reporting on the Bloomberg terminal and on Bloomberg dot com, and do check out our newsletter, which is also called Bloomberg Crypto. You can get that in your inboxes twice a week on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is Bloomberg Crypto, a daily podcast from Bloomberg and I Heart Radio. For more shows from I Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
get your podcasts. Send us your comments, questions, or suggestions for the show to Crypto at bloomberg dot net. The supervising producer of Bloomberg Crypto is Vicky Verglina. Our senior producer is Janet Babin. Our producers are Mohammed Farouk and Sharon Barriro. Our associate producers are Ty Butler and Moses on Them. Desta wonder At is our engineer. Original music by Leo Sidron. I'm Stacy Marie schmil We'll be back tomorrow.