Dwarkesh Podcast / episode intelligence
Speakers in the public record
Claim mix
Evidence policy
Every row below preserves an exact excerpt. Identified speakers are linked; unresolved voices are labeled and excluded from people counts.
Claim ledger
37 published records
01 / recommendation
“And the best thing people can do is invest in sort of diversified instruments. And it is far less expensive to invest in indices now than it ever was in history because of the advent of ETFs.”
02 / belief
“I think as of what we're speaking about right now, volumes are down because people are sort of generally fearful.”
03 / belief
“I think either way, it was worth a try. And I think maybe the biggest misconception about the application was that if we got approved, it meant suddenly FTX is going to list everything from corn to soybeans to oil to SMP 500 overnight and completely, you know, destroy the existing derivatives landscape.”
04 / belief
“I think you might not get a clear answer on this thing for a place like Jane Street, where the firm is really run by, like, 30 or so, you know, partners and senior employees who have, like, been there.”
05 / belief
“You can't not go through a broker dealer. But I think that we could eventually try to get the appropriate licensing required to be an intermediary that is focused on being like a technology forward interface towards people being able to do more program trading.”
06 / belief
“I think that people in my circles were quicker to take action in the face of knowing about COVID There are a lot of people who kind of stuck around in cities and their existing particular situations not knowing kind of where this was going to head long term.”
07 / belief
“I think a lot more differences than people appreciate from the outside. Different companies have established different niches and areas like Jane Street established its early niche and ETF at kind of like a mid frequency level.”
08 / belief
“I was still an equity holder in FTX and FTX US. I was still very pro FTX, in spite of my experience with Sam.”
09 / belief
“I think if you believe if you want to question whether getting a few extra milliseconds or microseconds or nanoseconds is worth it, I think you're then putting some kind of value judgments on.”
10 / belief
“Although then again, the bar was extremely high at Change Street, so I think that's already sort of a compliment.”
11 / belief
“I think the primary reason is that existing settlement systems in traditional markets seem to be very slow and built on very outdated technology that's like highly non transparent and very error prone.”
12 / belief
“We have to maybe distinguish between centralized and decentralized finance here. But I would say regulators saw FTX as at least one of the companies that was very willing to work directly and collaboratively with regulators, as opposed to trying to kind of skirt around the regulatory system.”
13 / belief
“I never visited the places where they lived in that Albany section of the Bahamas, so I think I didn't fully grasp the extent to which they were all living in this particular arrangement.”
14 / belief
“I was on chat groups that he was in, and so occasionally he would respond to something I say on that group, but one on one conversations, I think there were fewer than ten for my entire tenure.”
15 / uncertainty
“I mean, I don't know about you, but I've never gotten an offer to a company and said before I signed, show me your audited financial.”
16 / belief
“I would say the United States, except what's happened is US. Companies like Nasdaq have licensed their exchange matching engine technology to other exchanges around the world.”
17 / belief
“I think that sometimes there can be liquidity differences that cause at least temporary dislocations and stocks.”
18 / belief
“I think the conventional wisdom, at least in 2009 when we applying for internships, was like, okay, I'm going to sit in the cubicle and stare at a screen for 16 hours a day.”
19 / belief
“I think a lot of them found that their preexisting ideas that in order for the team to succeed, everyone needed to be the exact same place.”
20 / belief
“If I'm going to be an optimist about this, I'd like to think that when it was like older, single or married males hoarding a large amount of wealth that for the most part, they kept it to themselves and kind of waited until later in life to do anything with it, and were the kind of people who really, like, saved their same career their whole lives, as opposed to if younger and younger generations are amassing wealth through what they can actually perform with their skills, then I think that hopefully injects more Dynamism into the distribution of that wealth later on because those millennials within like or Gen Z or whoever will go on to found new companies, and maybe they'll be able to see the company themselves, their own money, and have a lot easier time, like bringing, like, interesting new things to market.”
21 / uncertainty
“I don't know. I think that's up for a professional with credentials that I don't have.”
22 / belief
“There's a very large chasm between I don't think they're doing a good job running the company and I think that customer funds are at risk.”
23 / uncertainty
“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.”
24 / belief
“We're building very general infrastructure and we think crypto is a viable asset class, but is one of many.”
25 / belief
“I'm not going to speculate what's inside Sam's head. I think Sam had built up his empire through bartley his control over media.”
26 / belief
“When I got to FTX, I think over the course of my time there, I saw someone who was very different than that person I remembered.”
27 / belief
“A healthy amount of cross pollination would be good for both where I think a lot of trading firms are doing the exact same thing that all the other trading firms have done and some healthy injection of creativity into.”
28 / preference
“Yeah. So I think if you start from the premise that having liquid, tight, efficient markets is important for the world and you say, like, how do I design a system that optimizes for that?”
29 / evaluation
“Because if you're used to working on Nasdaq where Nasdaq processes like a single message in somewhere between like tens and hundreds of nanoseconds per order a blockchain, like ethereum processes what, like 15 to 50 messages per second, so significantly slower by numbers of orders of magnitude.”
30 / evaluation
“Like, for example, if you had an ether futures position and also an ether spot position on this one exchange, you could get liquidated on your ether futures position even if you had enough ether spot as collateral, because you needed to have that spot crypto within the ether futures spot collateral wallet, which was different than the ether spot wallet.”
31 / preference
“In that case, I would say yes, because I think that you get a lot of the sort of static typing and compile time safety in Rust that you get from Ocamol.”
32 / evaluation
“On one hand, I think people were rowing frustrated within the company because of the lack of direction and some of like the power vacuums that resulted from Sam's continual absence.”
33 / evaluation
“It was like getting access to a direct expert who was also this famous person, who was also this billionaire, who was also this extremely well connected person, who was also this very insightful person, who knew a lot was going on in the industry and can give them insight and tips. And I think there was some amount of what I like to call like, reputation laundering going on here, where it was like, okay, so you get the famous celebrity to endorse Sam, which makes this politician think highly of Sam, because they also like that celebrity.”
34 / evaluation
“I think we wouldn't spend $5 trillion in a microwave network because there isn't $5 trillion of extra value to be created in doing so.”
35 / commitment
“Knowing that I was going to leave, I started thinking what I was going to do next and thought, well, if I think I can run a company better than Sam, I should put my money where my mouth is and start a company.”
36 / preference
“There was one really unfortunate time where it was the first time I visited the Bahamas in November of 21. And I'm the kind of person who, if I see something wrong at a company, it doesn't matter what company I've worked at or how junior or senior I've been.”
37 / prediction
“Because if you know there's going to be an auction every 30 seconds, and it's not going to be by time priority, it's going you buy price, then it doesn't matter if you send that order at the beginning of the 32nd period or the end of 32nd period.”