Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…I mean, it concerned me, and I tried to raise concerns multiple times. If you raise concerns multiple times and they don't listen, what can you do other than leave? But you have to understand that every company I've ever worked at, and I would think any company anyone's ever worked at, has management problems and growing problems. And especially for a super high growth startup like FTX, it's a very natural progression to have the visionary CEO who brings that product to product market fit, who enjoys that sort of explosive success, and then the reins of the company are eventually handed over to professional managers who sort of take it into its maturation phase. And I thought, well, really, I'm not that person because Sam and I have interpersonal issues. But there's 100 plus major investors in FTX. Someone will figure out how to install the correct management of this company over time, and we'll bring it to a good place. Like, one way or another, this is going to succeed. There are too many people with vested interest in doing so. And so, no, I wasn't concerned that FTX wouldn't somehow figure this out. I still thought FTX had an extremely bright future. But there might be, I guess, these sorts of visionaries. A lot of them might have, like, problems, to put it in that kind of language, but I don't know how many of them would make you suspect that there's, like, mental health issues or there's addiction issues that for somebody who's in charge of a multibillion dollar empire, I don't know. Seems like something that's I can't quite speak to. Whether people would think there are mental health issues of other people who are supposed to be the kind of figureheads of large companies. But remember, at this point, sam is not leading the day to day operations of the company like many other people are. Right. And as the kind of public figurehead of the company, sam was obviously doing a very good job. He was extremely successful at raising money. He was extremely successful at building a positive image for the company. And so in that sense, that was all going fine and the rest of the company was being run by other people. So, you know, I didn't witness anything like, you know, the addiction stuff firsthand. I definitely thought he was not as happy a person as I met, you know, a long time ago. But could you blame a person for, you know, inheriting a 20, $30 billion company and not taking it super well when you're 29 years old? I think so.…

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