Jamie Loftus

Anyway, whatever.

According next, according to the popular Sam Bankman Freed endorsed version of the story, he pivoted towards an almost obsessive devotion to ethics in his freshman year.

He went vegan.

He organized a protest against factory farming and he worried obsessively over how he could change the world for the better.

And it was at this point that Sam met a man who was going to change his life forever, William McCaskill.

If you want to learn more about this guy, I do recommend the episode of It Could Happen Here on effective altruism.

This guy is today the pop philosopher of effective altruism and long-termism.

He is in Elon Musk's text messages that we all got as a result of the Twitter lawsuit.

Oh.

Yeah.

At this point, he was also at MIT and he met with Sam at a cafe in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where McCaskill is.

Which one?

I don't know.

I'm sure it's out there somewhere, Jamie.

I'm sure you've gotten a hot dog there.

That's that seems likely.

So, yeah, you're probably right.

So McCaskill explained the concept of effective altruism to him, which is, again, this idea that like what matters is you should like think kind of coldly and robotically about how you do help to make sure that your charity money does the most that it can do.

But one of the big like arguments about it is that like, OK, well, what if you, you know, should you save a drowning child instead of saving like three kids from a burning building?

And it's like that's a nonsense choice.