Sam Bankman-Fried Wants to Save the World

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Sam Bankman-Fried is the founder and CEO of the crypto exchange FTX. His problem: How to spend billions of dollars to save humanity.

Sam is one of the most interesting people in crypto — in large part because he doesn’t think crypto is the most interesting thing in the world. He got into the business because he wanted to make as much money as possible in order to give almost all of it away.

He’s now worth over $20 billion, and he’s already donated hundreds of millions. In the next few years, he could give away billions more.

On today’s show, he lists a few of the causes he’s supporting — and explains why he’s likely to make massive political donations in 2024.

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The Quest for the Perfect Avocado

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Katherine Sizov is the founder and CEO of Strella Biotech.

Her problem: Tons of food is wasted before it ever gets to the consumer.

Katherine started working on this problem in 2018, when she was a junior in college. Her idea: imitate the natural world and build a device that detects when fruit is ripening. It worked. Now some of the biggest apple and pear packers in America use her device.

Next up: Avocados.

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Making Electronics Better

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Anna Katrina Shedletsky is co-founder and CEO of Instrumental. Her problem: How do you make electronics manufacturing more efficient and less wasteful? 

Anna started her career as a design engineer at Apple. It was her job to visit the factory when a new device was about to go into production and try to figure out all of the potential manufacturing problems that might arise.

She realized this was an almost impossible task that relied on hope and luck — and that it led to an incredibly inefficient and wasteful manufacturing process.

So she started a new company, Instrumental, to try to come up with a better way to figure out what’s likely to go wrong, and how to fix it.

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From Slate Money: 37.8% Scammier

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Today we’re sharing a preview from another podcast we love, Slate Money. Every week, Felix Salmon of Axios is joined by Emily Peck, also of Axios, and Slate Pay Dirt columnist Elizabeth Spiers to chat about the latest in business and finance news.

In this episode, Felix and Emily sit down with Alexandra Roberts, professor at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Peirce School of Law. They talk about everything trademarks, from social media to counterfeits and parodies. They also talk about trying to fix racist logos and what happened when Mastercard tried to low key change its logo.

Hear more episodes of Slate Money wherever you get your podcasts.

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Turning Cells into Tiny Factories

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Reshma Shetty is co-founder and chief operations officer of Ginkgo Bioworks. Her problem: How do you turn cutting-edge science into a sustainable business?

Ginkgo is a synthetic biology company. The idea is to make industrial products — fragrances, or food, or whatever — by genetically engineering DNA, sticking it into a yeast or bacteria, and getting the yeast or bacteria to produce the thing you want.

Creating a profitable synthetic biology business is a really hard problem. But if it does work, it could be massive — like an industrial revolution with cells instead of machines.

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Seeing Data From Space

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Will Marshall is the co-founder and CEO of Planet, a private company with a fleet of tiny satellites that takes photos of the entire Earth every day. Will’s problem: How do you turn all those images into useful data?

In today’s episode we talk about shooting smartphones into space, turning a million-dollar antenna into a thousand-dollar paperclip, and how to count every tree in the Amazon.

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Growing a Weed Business

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Joy and Raft Hollingsworth run The Hollingsworth Cannabis Company. Their problem: How do you help more Black people get into the legal weed industry?

They faced this problem from the very beginning as they tried to start a marijuana farm from scratch in rural Washington. The Hollingsworths lived their entire lives in downtown Seattle and didn’t know anything about farming.

It’s a story that includes a paper bag full of cash, dinner with Anthony Bourdain, and hundreds of millions of dollars in weed taxes.

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Building a Company that Builds Companies

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Noubar Afeyan is the co-founder of Moderna and the founder of Flagship Pioneering. His problem: How do you turn the chaotic hero’s journey of entrepreneurship into a repeatable, systematic process?

Noubar created Flagship Pioneering to solve the problems he saw with entrepreneurship. Flagship’s mission: To create new companies in a systematic, repeatable way. On today’s show, Noubar explains how that system led to the creation of Moderna, a company that developed a COVID vaccine and saved millions of lives.

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Delivering Everything Right Now

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Rafael Ilishayev is the co-founder of the instant delivery company Gopuff. His problem: How do you deliver everything from bananas to hot coffee in around 30 minutes — and still make a profit?

On today’s show, Jacob Goldstein surprises Rafael with a live Gopuff order. And they discuss the problems the company is working on in real time as they wait to see if the order will arrive on time and in good shape.

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Chatting with the Machine

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Luis von Ahn is the founder and CEO of the language app DuoLingo. His problem: How do you teach people to speak a language — really speak it — using only an iPhone app?

On the surface, DuoLingo looks warm and fuzzy. Underneath the hood, it’s a serious tech company built on artificial intelligence. But the best machine learning in the world still isn’t good enough to really teach people how to fluently speak in a new language. Luis is trying to change that.

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