YouSaid · the spoken record

Patrick McKenzie

lines on the record: 148
first: 2024-07-24
most recent: 2024-07-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I don't exactly know what will be my next big professional splash in. I've been on semi-sabbatical this year. I've been writing bits about money, but bouncing between like 20 and optimistically 80% productive relative to what like 100% productive looks like to me. I might do a software company next. I might raise a small VC fund. Not entirely decided. Might do something entirely different at the moment. Family oriented things, and our family immigrated from Japan to the United States and are going through all the fun adjustment issues. And I'm partly, I focused very much on career and other things over the course of the last eight years. And I'm rebalancing that to help them on this adjustment and then figure out whatever happens for the next chapter of life.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should be an inquiry. It's an easy thing to say. Let's set a minimum, like ask all involved parties, hey, can you write down the history of the COVID experience just passionately record dates, times, actions taken? We want it to be truthful and comprehensive and highlight what you think is the most important part about this. That is step one. Like maybe we ask for step one and then try to get to step two.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Less important that it was a disnamed official. It's less important that it was under this legislative authority, et cetera, et cetera. What did we do? Okay. Now, how did what we do lead to the outcome that we got, given that what we did led to this outcome? What could we have done better? Okay Given that there are these things that we could do better, how do we inject that back into the currently running system such that the next time this happens, we don't do the mistake again. Sometimes that will involve in someone losing their employment, although hopefully not that frequently, a non-zero amount that is important to say. There's many things that we post-mortem of the experience that I don't know if we have like several thousand hours of time to go over all of them.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There is some amount of blame which performs useful societal purposes. And then beyond that, like the diminishing return set in pretty quickly. And we are, the magic word in Washington is accountability. We want accountability for failures, et cetera, et cetera. People are terrified of accountability Causes there to be fields of distortion around things that actually happened, mistakes that were actually made, opportunities that were not pursued and similar. And so. Changing our general practice about how we accomplish accountability towards the direction of, okay, first, let's get a dispassionate record of what actually happened.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One cultural practice of the tech industry that I think it would be more. For the broader civil society to adopt the concept of blameless postmortems. We talked about earlier about who to blame for various failures, et cetera, et cetera. I broadly believe that”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And some distractions like proudly wave, I'm a distraction from everything that matters. And some don't. Some definitely say, I'm real work. I definitely feel like real work. And they're just not. And so don't do the things that don't matter, which sounds vacuous and yet.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An important strain of Silicon Valley culture. I'm glad we have it. I'm glad we are popularizing it to as many places in the world, including to me in central Japan. And yet there are always other games that are going on. And those other games are less important, but they are very, very attractive games. Not video games here, but why don't you go to a conference? Why don't you meet more interesting people? Why don't you show up at the best parties, et cetera, et cetera? Showing up at the best parties does not at most margins increase the number of users you talk to. It doesn't write functioning code, like do those things that actually matter.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incentives will draw you into playing the role of the CEO of a successful company. Before your actions have earned the company its level of success, the fundamental nature of early stage businesses is that investment in you is not a vindication of what you have achieved. It's an advance on your future accomplishments. And you need to rigorously pursue actually making those future accomplishments. And there's many ways to rigorously pursue it. Talk to more users, write more software, make something excellent, get more people to use it, get better at selling it, et cetera, et cetera.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So interestingly, I was the marketing engineer earlier in my career and really thought that that was important. And in terms of high level advice, I would give a founder, I would probably tell them a little bit about marketing engineering, but wouldn't spend 95% of my time talking about that unless that was explicitly what they brought me in on. Founders spend too much time on. Playing house and chasing status are both two sort of like well known pitfalls where you can get addicted, which is not quite the right word.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But the fundamental thesis was that for journalism, is that the total size of the pie is decreasing in journalism due to structural factors. And the Wall Street Journal's thesis was not simply that. The size of the pie would decrease in the wake of the dot com bust, which I don't think they even got as far as articulating that, although it's been 25 years, but was more like, oh, you know, companies will maximize for cost of labor, et cetera, and therefore ship out all the jobs.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was at a research university in the United States. I could have found someone who knew someone who was in the software industry to explain this to me.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe I did not have enough knowledge to confilate predicta at the moment, but I can confilate predict some things now, like software companies are going to start to break as older engineers age out of the engineering population and they have no one coming up to replace them, et cetera. The industry institutionally must hire people every year. And hiring freezes are necessarily temporary as a result of that. as close to a law of physics as one can have. If you are telling me something which says the law of physics have been suspended and will be in the future, don't agree to that. How would I learn the law of physics? Did not know anyone in software engineering at the time, which is partly why I was getting my advice from this from the Wall Street Journal. But if I had been slightly more agentic about it.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ultimately, happy with a decision I made, although, like, Percentage is the wrong decision. I'm happy about it for other factors about life. Working in Japan as a young engineer, there are some very rough parts about that. But on a meta level, maybe this is an early opportunity to trust institutions less and trusts systemically viable reasoning patterns more. Like, okay, the Wall Street Journal has asserted, assuming I'm remembering this article right, and I'm pretty sure. What happens in the American software industry?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So I had a whole lot of rigor chasing a decision that had node basis, in fact. So believing in the Wall Street Journal that all future engineers would be hired in places like India and China and not the United States. And so there would be no future engineering employment in the United States. I made a spreadsheet of like, okay, here are the languages my university teaches. Here's my best estimate of the number of people in that country who speak it, Americans who speak it, the amount of their software that gets sold here, amount of US software that gets sold there, blah, blah, blah, multiply these together, sort by column H descending. And this is like LARPing is having rigor here, but it felt like a good decision making process to me in the time. Now, the meta discussion is like, don't LARP it having rigor actually have rigor.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Wall Street Journal said it, and the Wall Street Journal had never been wrong in my experience as a 19 year old who knew nothing about anything.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not yours truly, but descriptively like a lot of the country's top brains into particular fields where they will become experts at those particular fields. I would expect also a lot of the writing talent to be there because good writing is good thinking. That's a Paul Graham quote, I think, but is broadly true.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some path dependence if I had ended up working in a water treatment plant, I'd be writing about water treatment plants because I like writing and I am positive. I know enough about myself to know that a discussion about how Alum works in water treatment plants, which is something I read when I was like six, that could totally captivate me for multiple years on end. And I would write about that if I was captivated by it. I agree with the point Matt Levine made once, which is that finance and the tech industry have for a while been a relatively reliable way to turn intelligence into money. Many good writers are very intelligent. Not all people who are very intelligent are good writers. I think it is a skill that more intelligent people could learn. But simply if we create an incentive system which will tend to allocate”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think there are many good writers in the world, Derek Thompson, for example, has written some, he's a chemical engineer and he's written some things which I barely understand. I have enough of an engineering degree to appreciate half of the chemistry, and I can't appreciate the full totality of why. Uranium hexafluoride or whatever is a terrible substance to work with. And he has some excellent writing on why that is a terrible substance.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Due to depression and other factors, you aren't making as much progress on the true goals you do. You use video game as an escapement from that, and not just video games, books, television, et cetera, et cetera. There are many poisons available in life. You pick your poison, use that to escape. The amount of effort you put into the poison causes you to have less effort available to do the thing. So you get less good results than the thing. So helping people out of those self-destructed spirals is something that we as a society could stand to get much better at.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be there as it may. You can do something with your life, like choose to do something with your life. And then if you want to play a reasonable amount of video games, then play a reasonable amount of video games. And then with respect to individual people, I sometimes worry that kind of get into, I think I've struggled with depression at some points in my life. Many people struggle with underdiagnosed, undertreated depression. I think sometimes you get into a self-destructed spiral measured against like your true values and similar values and preferences where”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Places where intellectual effort comes together in the video game community are much more sophisticated than people give them credit for. When I started vaccinate CA, I told people my sole prior leadership experience is having 60 direct reports in a raid guild. And that's true. And also like. We don't rat hole on the subject, but there are parts of vaccinate CA that are very definitely downstream of intellectual efforts about managing raid guilds specifically. There are multiple people internally who were like, yep, like we are running the raid guild playbook right now”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Question of at relevant margins are you maximizing for your true values? And I was like a little worried about that. And so now my EA checks on me. Do I worry about it for other people? I will say that when I was young at a World Warcraft raid guild leader who spent a thousand hours on that, that it was a substitute advancement ladder for me. The actual job I was working, Sailor Man in Central Japan gave me no scope of control over things. And I thought if I was a startup CEO, I could make decisions right now. I could build something awesome, but I don't have that ability and I don't see myself as being the kind of person who could become a startup CEO. So if I can't be satisfied in my 9 to 5 in terms of making things happen in the world, at the very least I can make sure we kill the dragon in two hours. Don't stand in the fire. Come on, team leaders, you need to make sure the people are equipped with the resist gear before they get there. Oh, we're having internal spats about allocation of resources. We need to have a better DKP system. By the way, World of Warcraft raid guilds and all other”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. I love many things Burn Writes. I think I luckily have a differentiated point of view on this one, so I will hope to get it out to the internet someday. On the one hand, I loved it. I think Factorio Space Exploration mod specifically was the best video game I've ever played. And yet I spent 750 hours on that over the course of a year. And I was, you know, unsabbatical and recharging from six very hard charging years at Stripe and also run in the United States vaccination location information effort.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know if I'm inserting those words into his mouth, but the suggestion was genuinely his, and he heard, you know, on the one hand, Factorio, wonderful game. I actually think Factorio matters far more to the world than most video games do, but that's an entirely different piece that I'm trying to write at the moment. Be that as it may.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got a very good advice given that I spent far too much time rat holding on factorio relative to my true preferences. You're”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worry at least a little bit about it for myself. So I recently started working for an executive assistant and one of the first suggestions that he gave was, hey, Patrick, will you friend me on Steam so that I can see how much you're playing in a given week? And so if you're not making your priorities happen, we can have an honest discussion about priorities.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Knock on what I've accomplished a few things in my career. And also, like against that, what was my Steam counter up to? So Steam didn't include World of Warcraft. World of Warcraft was at least 1,000 hours. For me, Factorio recently was 750. And then if you, like some over 20 years, I've probably played video games for. 6,000 hours. And so that's two to three years of professional effort if one thinks that it trades off directly with professional effort.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh goodness, I don't know about the productivity numbers generally. I do know that Steam keeps the counter of how much I am playing video games at any given time.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's kind of like my dominant hypothesis. There are some things that are affecting the youth that I think are negative. I think some products that the tech industry has created do not maximize for the happiness or productivity of people that consume those products. TikTok, et cetera. But I continue to be bullish about the youths, and I have two children who knock on wood will accomplish things in their lives. And so I'm intrinsically skeptical about, oh, the kids these days, they're just bad kids.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've met many young intelligent people over the course of 20 years in the software industry and young intelligent people continue being young and talented. I think one thing that is partially explanatory is that when there's a new frontier that opens up, the existing incumbents, both in terms of institutions and in terms of people with deep professional networks and personal resources and similar do not immediately grab all the value in that new thing. It's Terra Nova. And so to the extent that tech is no longer Terra Nova, I think you would expect less people who are less resourced or younger, et cetera, to rise to the heights of prominence in tech. To be clear, not at the heights of prominence in tech. And when I ran companies, I was not running companies like some other guests of this podcast run companies. It was bingo card creator. I was making bingo cards for elementary school teachers while living next to a rice petty in central Japan.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, per year. Like you would assume that 500,000 people read it per year as some take the advice. Most who take the advice probably don't write me to say, hey, I took the advice. Thank you. And maybe I missed some emails, yada yada. So, like, the true economic impact is probably larger than that. There are probably people who have the inverse of that spreadsheet where it's like, darn it, we got quoted patio 11 against us again. But because at these numbers, and there's only a few firms in the tech industry that do higher scaling it, you know. Scale hiring anyhow”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More valued, which is just an exhortation for descriptively mostly young people who had some of the issues I had when I was young and growing up, like, hey, you're allowed to negotiate. That's not a moral failing of you. You have no less right to the marginal dollar than a company has to the marginal dollar. Go get it. And then you can put it towards all sorts of interesting ends. 500,000 people a year read that piece and it's now 12 plus years old. I keep a folder in Gmail about who has written and said I got $25,000 to $100,000 per year more as a result of reading this piece. I used to keep spreadsheet. I stopped keeping the spreadsheet after it dicked into the eight figures. I'm like keeping the spreadsheet was just an ongoing source of stress for me.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Came up, we feel we were largely getting beaten down by a system around us. We were not worthy, yada, yada, yada. And then we have Carrie those issues into our professional lives. And some people work their way out of it quickly. Some do not. Some people work for class and et cetera reasons go to institutions like Stanford and hear from, I don't know who you hear things from if you go to Stanford, because I certainly didn't go there, but I don't know, an elder fraternity brother that says, yo, bro, this is the way the world works. You really got to negotiate when you got in the offer in your discussion with Google. I've talked to so many brothers and they don't negotiate. And so the ones that do make a whole lot more money, you're like, wow, good for that. Most people don't like get that talk from their elder fraternity brother because they do not go to Stanford or don't have an elder fraternity brother. And so vaccinates, yeah, the most important thing I probably done professionally was writing a piece on the internet about salary negotiation that gets subtitled Make More Money.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All people are equal in the eyes of God and hopefully in the eyes of the law, but not all cultures physically make the same decisions with regards to the same facts on the ground. And that causes some disparity in outcomes. And so that is one tiny part of that thesis, which I don't. Actually, a lot of books I don't necessarily endorse every word and every book that I read, but I think there is something to that. I think another thing is that. A certain personality type cluster, I guess you would say, of people that got into tech, and many of us. Is over advanced that the tech industry and the pathologies of the tech industry are caused by the Nerd versus Jack distinction in American high schools, heavily overadvanced. Amount of truth to that? Not zero. And many of us were, you know,”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How do you put it? Pro capitalist, pro mercantilist, et cetera, like less of an ingrained skepticism regarding earning money and accumulating resources as goal. And there's other cultures which have an extreme ingrained skepticism about earning money and accumulating resources as a plausible goal. And those cultures generate people who have very different negotiation strategies. And when you impact people with different negotiation strategies against the reality of a well-operated, I don't know, Google, for example, they arrive at very different numbers. What's the, is it Amitois who wrote a market-dominant minorities piece about a book about that subject, et cetera? One of the things in that is that.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I think interestingly, here is one of those places where culture is not necessarily merely the error term, but is actually descriptive in some ways. Without pointing fingers at particular examples because it gets contentious, there are some cultures in the world that institutionally have adopted more of a”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In one sense, that's money laundering. If the original money was the proceeds of crime. In another sense, that's how every real estate transaction goes down at those scales. And so... Often facility at money laundering is one facility at operating the economy plus willingness to do that to hide the proceeds of some other crime. I think I would be really good at money laundering. I'm glad I haven't done it professionally. But it's fascinating intellectually. Previous communications departments I've worked at probably were like explicitly anti-endorse that sense. What can one do?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some shoe has to eventually drop there. I will eat a lot of popcorn. But be that as it may. There's many other ways to launder money. You can do things like. Let's say I establish a shell corporation and I buy a piece of real estate in New York City and then I rent that real estate out to people and I collect a stream of rents from that. And that money looks clean because there is an exclusive business. It's my shell corporation that is renting this real estate that really exists to a totally legitimate person. This money is clean. And the money that I put into the system to buy this on behalf of the Shell Corporation, I'm just going to wire it to a lawyer and the lawyer is going to answer any question from the bank with, I don't know where it came from. I don't have to tell you I'm a lawyer. It's a real estate transaction. What do you want from me?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In Japan, which people would like to pull on more threads there. Like there's still lots of that story that we don't know. But anyhow, how sophisticated you have to be to launder tens of billions of dollars around? SBF did that. So that is ABAR first sophistication. He was eventually caught. He was not caught for laundering tens of billions of dollars around. He wasn't even under suspicion for laundering tens of billions of dollars round. SBF was Tether's banker. Alameda research, you know, one of the parts of like the corporate shell game that they were playing moved tens of billions of dollars of cash around the financial system, largely under full color of law on behalf of Tether to move it from wherever Tether had it, goodness knows, or wherever their buying customers had it to, I think at the moment it's mostly at Counterfeit.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not merely a matter of getting them to look the other way, but if you go back to the original SBF interviews where he's telling the founding myth of Alameda, he says very loudly, the reason why I got this opportunity to do Bitcoin arbitrage between Japan and the United States is because I was able to do something that the rest of the world wasn't. I was able to, he doesn't say this in as many words. I will say it suborn a Japanese bank because you need that as like one of the pieces to run this Arab. And then I pulled tens of millions of dollars out of this. I don't think people really listened to what he was saying there. And he literally says in the interview on Bloomberg, if I was a compliance person, this would look like the sketchiest thing in the world. This looks like it's obviously money laundering because it is money laundering. And then interestingly, Michael Lewis retells this story and he locates the story in South Korea rather than in Japan. And some people who are involved say we try to do it in South Korea.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, this is a disagreement I have with a lot of people. SBF was extremely sophisticated. A person, not just SBF. I think people identify him uniquely, right? They identify the inner circle uniquely as being at fault here. There was an entire power structure there, which was extremely adept at figuring out how power worked in the United States and exercising it towards their own ends. And then it blew up. But until then, goodness, like, you know, they decided we need regulatory licenses. They're called money transmission licenses in the United States. And those are done on a state-by-state basis. They got 50 regulators to sign off on it, et cetera, et cetera. There were many objective indicia of them being very good at their jobs until they lost all the money.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the definition of money laundering is extremely stretchy and like Taffy. And there's a spectrum of people, much like there's a spectrum of sophistication and financial fraud. There's a spectrum of sophistication and money laundering. So if you want to look at probably the most sophisticated money laundering in history, he's currently a guest of the US government, but wherever SBF is staying.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could I cause you to get some yen and have you wire that to me in America and you can take a percentage? And I said, I really don't like where this is going. And they said, well, there's this company and I've got some money over there. And they can send Yen, but they can't send dollars. And I'm like, is that because they don't actually have the money? And they're like, no, no, no. It's a Japanese banking thing. No, it's not. Japanese banks are very good at sending wires. And they said, no, no, no. It's really this thing. This is totally clean. I'm like, you would not be having this conversation with me if it was totally clean. You need a money launderer. I will not be your money launderer.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, get put on the paths of something and have a differentiated point of view. And then another issue for short slugs is you have to find an instrument and you have to find another side of the trade to successfully do that. Without being expert on Bitcoin micromechanics, it was like difficult in size to make the trade Mt. Ox is insolvent right now, other than pull money out of Mt. Gox, which people were definitely trying to do. I got a number of interesting business proposals in the 2012-ish time frame from people who said, hey, you're an American and you clearly understand like international banking and you live in Japan.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is an ongoing, interesting question. I think short sellers provide an enormous service for the world in being essentially society's best use of financial fraud. And yep, they fail to detect lots of them. And not just throwing short sellers or reporters or anybody else under bus. I failed to detect SBF's various craziness despite having sufficient information available to me as a well-read person on the internet to have detected that, like, where were the freaking wallets? Everybody assumed someone else was looking at it essentially. So that's one reason. Short sellers often assume like, okay, I need to find a”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, like financial reporting dropped the ball on just asking individuals that me as a host, simple questions about reality. Maybe you should do that next time. And to the extent that you understand, like, okay. Like, one, understand that the CEO is giving out gold on Bitcoin talk under his own name, where these are obviously reportable statements, the statements of alleged facts about material reality, maybe chase down the truth value of that. Hard, it's so much easier to just like repeat what he says on Twitter and say, as said by this person on Twitter and then quote the Bitcoin price feed. Reporting is hard, like be good at it.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Financial Reporting Institutions in New York City find it incredibly exotic and difficult and maybe in some ways kind of unknowable to extract facts from Misaho, which there are addresses FedEx will deliver letters to them. They have phone lines. We also have fax machines. We love our fax machines. Like, could you send a fax to anybody at Mizaho and say, hey, quick question. You're sending wires today, and Mizaho would like receive the facts, get it kind of quizzically, and say, in response to your facts earlier, yes, we are still sending wires because we are the second largest bank in Japan. Do you have any other easy answer questions for us?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then doing the core job of reporting and finding people at the institutions who will tell you the truth. As an example of this, Mt. Gox many years ago was insolvent. And that fact was widely rumored but not reported, presumably because the global financial news industry didn't find it convenient to have someone call into the Japanese banking system and ask the right questions in the right way. The CEO of Mt. Gox alleged on Bitcoin talk that the reason that they were not able to make outgoing wires was because they had cause to distribute a denial of service attack on their bank's ability to send foreign currency wires. That bank was Mizuho. Mizuho is the second largest bank in Japan. Many people Well, regarded.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Basically, the definition of fraud is you're telling someone a story. The story alleges the fact about the world. The story is not true, and you're using the story to extract value from them. Most frauds will allege facts about the physical world. As the physical world gets more and more mediated by computers, as it gets increasingly sharded between different institutions, there will often be institutions who are not Under control of the fraudster, who have information available to them, which will very dispositively answer the question of whether the alleged fact happened or not. And as a reporter, understanding how institutions and society interact with each other and the physical reality of, okay, if this thing happens as alleged, then these papers will be filed, then these API costs will be made, et cetera, et cetera.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An enthusiasm for the minutiae of banking procedure in a way that few people have enthusiasm for the minutiae. Sometimes banking procedure causes physically observable facts to emanate into the world. And if you know that those facts are going to emanate, then you can have a claim made about a past state of the world. I did this thing or I did not do this thing. And that claim will, if it is true, cause metadata in other places and you can look for the metadata. This is actually how a lot of frauds are discovered because the fraud is like...”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source