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

“So as my minor observation about culture, with respect to There are places and pockets of the United States that have the will to have nice things. And often they discover, sometimes surprisingly, that the only thing you need to do nice things at the relevant margin without spending more money, without having people kill themselves over 90-hour weeks for the entirety of the career. You can just choose to have nice things. Let's choose to have nice things. Let's not be embarrassed about choosing to have nice things.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think these trade off against each other at the relevant margins. Nothing about culture is monocratizational. Also, I don't think culture is a. Sufficient explanation for some of the differences that are achieved in the United States versus Japan, for example. There's a great book, Making Common Sense of Japan by a person whose name I'm blanking at the moment. An argument he makes in it persuasively and at length, which I don't think is 100% true, but is more true than most people in well-informed on either side of specific belief, is that when people say they do this because it is Japanese culture, what they are often saying is I usually have a model for why people do things driven by incentives and I understand this incentive, this incentive, this incentive. And then there's some error term in this equation that I don't understand. I'm going to call that error term culture. I think culture is a real thing in the world, to be clear. But I often think that we reach for that error term far faster than we should.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Going to fight you on this one. And The comms trained part of me is like, don't use the word fight. We are going to collaborate with stakeholders across civil society to achieve an optimal outcome balancing the multiple disparate and legitimate interests of various arms of the government and civil society and blah, blah, blah, blah. Sometimes that requires fighting. We should fight when it does”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've asked us to do something. You've threatened us with taking away all the wonderful toys and the great business models that make this an extremely lucrative area to work in and to sacrifice a value that is very important for us to continue to do that.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You need to have a risk tolerance, right? Like we, every business everywhere, including the financial industry, including the tech industry, is like bouncing various risks. And the risk tolerance was poorly calibrated. One can achieve results in the world by doing things like embarrassing government officials. And embarrassing a person in a position of authority is not a zero risk behavior. It is relatively low risk in the United States relative to other places. That was like extremely important for vaccinate CA. People thought at the beginning, are we going to get in trouble for publishing true information about vaccines?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very plausibly should get on the nightly news and say, I received the following email from the White House that says we should stop this everywhere. If you point a gun at me, I will comply with this at the point of a gun. That is what it will take.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The do not embarrass that sort of came down, and people were getting very quiet about the fact of feeling constrained by this. Maybe we should have spoken out more and spoken more boldly about it. Maybe when it was like the routine case that the White House was telling Facebook, Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. Everyone knows the names. Companies like on a tweet by tweet, communication by communication basis, and also with regards to broad rules that affected the entire of the citizenry of the United States and residents of the United States and also everyone else in the world because these are the operating systems of the world. Like giving direct orders on there's a certain kind of free speech rather, there's a certain kind of speech act which we find vexatious and we would like you to stop that everywhere.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are some things that will feel unfortunate and maybe a little bit outside of our true sweet spot of what we would want to be doing on Tuesday in the tech industry where maybe we have to ratchet up the amount of public policy advocacy that we do lobbying is a dirty word in the tech industry. It probably shouldn't be. Maybe we, you know, not just lobbying, but like.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We should increase our engagement with government capacity, we can help you build some of that stuff. Also, Constitution of the United States is a document we feel like kind of attached to that document. We understand incentives rule everything around us. Tech industry was in early 2021, very concerned about being told in no uncertain way by people in power if you embarrass us, we'll end you. One thing in the record, judicial record of this case is that the White House routinely and other government actors routinely overreached and asked the tech companies we would like you to censor this and this and this and this. And the tech company said no in a bunch of cases. And so continuing to negotiate for the right outcome rather than the one that people in power merely Is important.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I don't accept that that is the only thing possible for us. I don't accept that the United States is incapable of doing nice things. We can't accept that. We have to be optimistic about the future. Otherwise, what are we doing here? And, you know, in the tech industry, we know it is not like a physical law of reality or of large institutions that one cannot make systems that work. Making systems that work is the job. We have a few existence proofs.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there will be a limited hangout and walk back of some particular things. And do I predict that and probably, you know, there does exist an injunction. I would predict that that continues to happen in the future. What do I know? I'm just a software guy, but do like. People want to achieve power. The tech industry descriptively has power because it is good at achieving results in the physical world. This is certainly not going to be the last time that someone desiring power thinks, okay, can I force you to give me the power that you have accumulated? And that is ultimately political decision about how we construct our democracy. And we should make good decisions about that.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The outrageous part is not that you wrote that down in an email. The outrageous part is you with full knowledge of it engaged in something that is outrageous unconstitutional, immoral, illegal, and evil. To the applause of people in your social circle. And everyone involved in the story thinks that they are the good guy in it. You write that email, you are not the good guy in the story”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we have not repudiated the notion of using tech as catspaw This is like literally written in the decision, by the way, which I would urge everyone to read. There was an individual and a non-governmental organization which was collaborating with a governmental organizations in doing this, which said to get around, I'm not quoting exactly. Get around legal uncertainty, including very real First Amendment concerns, in our ability to do this, rather than doing it in the government directly. We are outsourcing it to a bunch of college students who we have hired under the auspices of this program. What? Like, one, just as a dangerous professional here, you violated the character from the wire, Stringerbell. Stringerbell's dictum on the wisdom of taking notes on a criminal conspiracy. But you literally wrote that down in an email.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was following along this as this was happening, and what was happening was much worse than I understood to be happening. An example of something like as we were growing up as children, would you ever think that the United States federal government would tell, I believe it was the state of Missouri, hey, you have town halls where like citizens can come in and speak their mind and advocate for their policy preferences, and you probably have a civics class and talk about the First Amendment and things. Yeah, someone said something we don't like in a particular town hall. Take down the recording from YouTube. That happened. That is a violation of the Constitution of the United States that is against everything in the traditions and laws and culture of the United States. That is outrageous. And yet it happened.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unaccountable, hard to inspect the system of LLMs and heuristics. And we started like turning off a lot of people's feeds on Facebook. But like, no, like there was an individual person in the White House who was sending out emails like, when are you going to address me on this tweet, guys? We can't have things like this anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Again, a feature of the United States. We are very good about keeping records and transparency and having a functioning legal system. And the record before the court is...”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An injunction issued in a court case last year on the 4th of July, which I find oddly aesthetically motivating. The court case is Missouri et al. vs. Biden et al. But the argument made in the court case, which the judge accepted, which is extremely... Well, supported by the record in front of him is that various actors within the United States government puppeted the tech companies and used them as catspaws to do, frankly, shocking violations of constitutionally protected freedoms like the freedom of speech and that there were like not on the level of we've built this.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Step back from crypto and finance for a moment. I think this is one of the least understood things about the tech industry where we have this. Like societal level question that is not being addressed directly, but it's being addressed by misunderstood proxy questions. Taking as written that the finance industry is a branch of government in a meaningful sense, should the tech industry also be a branch of government? And we don't ask that question directly. We have asked instead things like should the tech industry be responsible for minimizing the spread of misinformation, et cetera, et cetera. And there was the”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. This is like a legitimate worry because as we echoes of like we have extremely low state capacity for this thing that we didn't think was important, which was successfully administering vaccines. But we do have extremely high state capacity with regards to running the security state. And if they successfully manage to get their technological ducks and over in order, which there are pluses and minuses there, but they have built some things that are extremely impressive technologically and then just run it on this data set that we've passively been producing, the sort of implicit ongoing invasion of privacy is much worse than we kind of baked into the system in 1980 when it would have been people going down to archives to look at things in microfiche to try to do this.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Tied into the banking system, which is necessary for a number go up where you can choose privacy. They will say, excellent, I choose number go up.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One ever reads because some tiny portion of those memos will be useful to law enforcement in the future. And if you had explained that trade in like a presidential debate in the 1980s, I find it extremely unlikely that any part of the American polity would say, yeah, yeah, I want to buy that. Could we perhaps spend tens of billions of dollars on it? But we did that. And so to the extent I'm like extremely copacetic with crypto folks on this point, A, like this thing factually exists in the world. I agree with you that it does. B, in an ideal world, I don't think this thing would exist. I agree with you. There are very real privacy fears. And then, however, crypto has this habit and, you know, people who are good at sales have various sales pitches that they give to various people. And crypto will actors within the crypto ecosystem will talk in excellent game about privacy as long as number goes up. And when you say, ah, but you can choose between being”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do effectively ask for transaction level surveillance of every transaction that goes through a bank. And so it is the actual practice, and this is not a conspiracy theory. I'm making nothing up, folks. This is like acknowledge that the actual practice in banks is that they have descriptively about as many intelligence analysts as the American intelligence community has who get this scrolling feed of alerts that are generated by automated systems. And for each alert, they either go, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry, don't worry. Millions of these alerts every day. And then for some tiny percentage, they say, oh dear, this one might actually have been a problem. I'm going to write a two to four-page memo and file it with a financial crimes enforcement network. And in all probability, no one is ever actually going to read that memo. But we have an intelligence community-sized operation running in banks to write memos that.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel for crypto folks that say that things like this feels like warrantless search and seizures of people's information and very undirected dragnet fashion and somewhat complicated thoughts about this. So the modern edifice of know your customer KYC and AML anti-money laundering dates back to the BSA Bank Secrecy Act in the United States, which was late 1970s, early 1980s. And at the time, federal government in the United States was strictly rate limited in how much attention it could give to KYC and AML. And so maybe because we thought we had very limited state capacity at the time, like the government would make rational decisions, and maybe it will go after 10 or 100 enormous white collar crooks and drug trafficking cartels a year and not surveil down to literally everyone in society. But the regulations we wrote and have continued, right, and have continued tightened on over the years.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I'm actually much more sympathetic to crypto people in this folks than they expect most people who have a traditional financial background to be. I think it is just descriptively accurate that the banking system and all companies which are necessarily tightly tied to the banking system. Which might be all companies. Let's come with a central example. So that's the second set first. Are a policy armor of the government?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't find crypto intellectually edifying. I actually think there are some interesting things that have come out of the movement. But I find a computer built in Minecraft out of Redstone to be intellectually edifying. And it's a wonderful educational device for people who don't understand how a CPU works. I'm not proposing to use the redstone emulated computer in Minecraft to be like the next computational infrastructure for the world because that fairly obviously will not work very well.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It seems like reasonable to me. Can I make a prediction of what is said in 2030? You can still be early. Crypto has created huge amounts of things, but it's not achieved anywhere near its true potential. Please invest our new crypto starter. And let's chef back in 2030, folks tweet me if I'm wrong in 2030. I will happily eat crow. I want to eat crow. Crypto people are like, how couldn't you be interested in programmable money? I'm like, I'm interested in programmable money, obviously. Money is programmable money. But my friends who are trying to sell me on this since like 2010 weren't wrong. This should totally smash my interest based on what I usually find intellectually edifying.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At what date in the future do we judge someone has been right or someone has been not with respect to we have created people in crypto have very confidently stated in various places that this is the next iteration of the internet this is you know we'll revolutionize the world not just how payments are conducted but it will be like a fundamentally new computing architecture”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like on the margin. Don't judge it by hypothetical rules. Just keep in mind that hypothetical worlds might exist. Judge it by the actual realized utility at the moment relative to the amount of resources consumed.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely, that is evidence. And, you know, like some text heavy people have a good payment rail. Well, they have a payment rail that they did not have access to 15 years ago. But at the cost of tens or hundreds of billions of dollars, counterfactually, if one had thought like, okay, we really want to work on that payment rail specifically. Another way one could hypothetically have deployed $10 billion is on the best funded lobbying campaign in history in the United States to work on AML and KYC regulation to allow more easy transfers of money worldwide.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So capital Failure. So either like radically pivot and unfail it, or maybe we should stop continuing to stake you with money.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so that is my capsule summary and crypto at 14 years in. We've staked a group of talented people who are very good at giving a sales pitch with tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars. And look at what we have built This would be a failure in any other tech company.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crypto folks certainly aren't accountable to me. In some manner, you're not even accountable to Budarin, even though he's clearly like a leading intellectual in the community. You're accountable to producing positive value in the world. But what is the answer to Budarin in 2024? How many of the unbanked have we truly banked? What is the best use case for crypto right now? Once crypto has a responsive answer for that that has sized anything like proportionate to the hundreds of billions of dollars, tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars of resources that we've staked crypto with, I think crypto people should feel enormously proud of that accomplishment in some future where it hypothetically arrives and in some future where that hypothetically arrives you have my sword. I will love your initiative. However, for the last many years, we have been saying you can still get in early, you can still get in early, you can still get in early because the value has not arrived yet.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I have two broad perspectives on this. One, people often treat the market cap of something as implicitly that some sort of cost on society. And I think the true cost to society of crypto has been that anytime one engages in attempting to do productive enterprise. Some actor in society has said, okay, I will stake you with some of society's resources, which these resources are rivalrous. They cannot be applied to any other thing society needs in the hope that you will produce something that is worthy of being staked with this. How much if we spent on crypto, not on trading tokens around, but on building infrastructure and spending rival resources that we can't get back, whether that's GPUs or ASICs or electricity that could have gone to other things in China but went into mining or the time of talented and intelligent people that could have been building other software products but was instead building crypto that number is in the tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars what do we have to show for that tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“American response effort is not one small group of people anywhere, it's the collection of all these things bouncing off of each other. And I think I'm happy about our individual impact. I'm happy that if you, like, descriptively speaking, if you Googled for the vaccine at any point, like vaccine near me after a certain day, before a certain day, there was no answer. After that day, there was an answer. That answer came from us, a little dissatisfied that that didn't come from like people with vastly more ability to have caused that to happen much earlier. But like. The ultimate takeaway is not about this little tiny piece of the puzzle. It's how can we make the total puzzle better next time?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I can be pretty explicit about it, to the extent kudos are deserved to anyone, Carl Yang for taking up the torch and finding 10 people in tech industry who would jump into something at 9 o'clock. Those 10 people at the other board members, the hundreds of volunteers, the team of about 12 people who worked out full-time for very full definitions of full-time, virtually ceaseless for five, six months. And there were other projects in civil society. There were many people doing this as their day jobs”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, effectively, every time that we had, you say, a verbal green light with regards to money, I would advance the company, the charities are companies, by the way, folks. I don't know if that is obvious. It was called the Shots Incorporated. So I would advance, call the shots, the money that was sort of soft committed before the money would actually arrive in the bank. And the theory that this accelerates our impact, we should always choose acceleration over other things, like say minimizing credit risk. And then, you know, some of the people who had soft committed did not. Actually, end up wiring money at the end of the day. And I was like, oh, shoot. Well, you know, choices now are either don't run the last payroll or do run the last payroll and do not recover the money I've advanced the company.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do I think we have institutionally absorbed all the correct lessons from this No, when I see after action reports praise a lot of the things that people think are very important for maintaining their political coalition, which Were either not productive or anti productive. And they fail to identify things that were the true issues. And to the extent that they identify things that were the true issues, Sort of recommended action is well, I hope someone fixes this next time. And it's no longer sufficient. The default case is that the ball will be dropped. Those of us who were involved in vaccinate CA kind of dread what we call the pet signal God willing there will not be another worldwide pandemic killing millions of people as long as we live if there is one like we know what numbers detect to get the band back together”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that was a choice made. And I'm 100% happy with that choice. No, but we kept some relationships that we really needed. And I'm not saying don't criticize the government, obviously, but be strategic about the sort of things. Like play like you were attempting to win the game. And on the government side, one like dispelling the massive UG field that surrounds software, this is going to be a part of the future whether you like it or not. We need to get good at it. We can no longer accept incompetence of this as the routine standard of practice in Washington. To it is. Maybe we shouldn't treat it like the enemy. Putting that out there Again, this is the thing the United States has done before. There are laws in place. There are decades of practice. We could put a colonel's uniform on somebody. Think seriously about doing that next time.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is important to understand that the government has some manifest competence issues. It's also important when working with the government to understand telling the government to its face you have manifest competence issues is not the maximally effective way to keep getting invited to the meetings. I was very religious about not criticizing anything about this Californian response effort in 2021 because we needed to be in the room where it happens.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's been reported that there was a meeting among tech leaders early in the vaccination effort where a bunch of people got in a room and were like, this is going terribly out. Someone fixes it. And I hope someone fixes it is no longer a realistic alternative. I think we have to be part of that solution there. Partly it's like having higher fidelity models for how Washington works than simply, oh, they're bad at everything.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So discounting to zero is like the opposite of wisdom here because we didn't accomplish zero. We accomplished an extremely impressive thing in aggregate which vastly underperformed the true thing that we were capable of. And so you have to keep both of those parts of the equation in our minds at the same time. I think that People in tech need to become radically more skilled at interfacing with government to the extent that we have some manifest competency issues in government right now. We can't simply sit out here and gripe about this on podcasts and et cetera, et cetera. We've got to go out and do something about it. And there was a”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So maybe on reflection, I just shouldn't have told people and said, oh, the blank check company was this thing and we're making 501c3, which some ethics issues in that, but the ethics issues are less bad than allowing people to die. Yeah.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I'm bumbless. And what castes for humor must be. And so I told folks pretty confidently in the first couple of days, I'm pretty sure I can get us $8 million. And then was actually able to deliver on 1.2 after far more toothpulling. But like, yeah, descriptively, if I was asking for a stage investment, if I wanted to get $8 million wired by tomorrow, I think I could probably do that. And that is a civilizational inadequacy because like you can literally get $8 million for a blank check for something that has a profit motive behind it. But if I write on the check, hey, we want to fix the manifest inability of the United States and figure out where the COVID vials are, that blank paper becomes less valuable by the fact of writing that.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not trying to brag folks just telling you the reality of Silicon Valley and also the reality they put in a document. I misupplied the, like, I have some knowledge of how seed funding would work if I attempted to raise seed funding for a for-profit company. And I thought originally we're probably going to be charitable, but I'm going to pitch this to people as essentially like a seed investment, which they expect to spend all the money as quickly as possible and go to zero while driving the total addressable market of the company to zero.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't think about that in government procurement and in charities. We have some sacred virtues about like you must minimize waste. You must minimize opportunities for corruption. You must maximize for the funders of the charities for their line item. Support of individual things the charity spies. And those sacred virtues conflict with winning. And at the margins where they conflict, we should choose winning. We should choose human lives over reducing corruption. And one of the few things we are reflecting on is the tremendous amount of waste and fraud that happened in the PTP loans and other corona stimulus things. And I'm like, okay, I'm not just saying this to be contrarian, folks. Should be glad there was waste and like COVID stimulus. If there was no waste, we were clearly not choosing the right margin to focus our efforts on.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a flawed human who has a limited number of cycles in their day and was running a very, very complex operation. And it literally didn't occur to me, hey, maybe those people that have been making a lot of noise about writing a lot of money for pandemic checks would be willing to write a pandemic check, which that was not entirely an international belief for me because I had like reached out to people who were making a lot of noise about writing money for pandemic checks. And they said, not in the United States, not in May. And I thought, oh, well, if I light up a conversation totally cold with someone now, it's likely to just get a know again. And I should try to like scrimp and say and break the piggy bank for my daughter's college education fund, which, by the way, she'll go to college folks, no worries. How far down the list of like.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, could I have done better probably? Some of the folks in the broader effective altruist community, I'm not a member, but I've read a lot of stuff that they have written over the years, and I broadly consider them positive. They are the but four cause of vaccinate CA. But ask me about that in a moment. But some EA funders talked to me after my piece about it had come out and said, this is physically painful to read. We wrote bigger checks with less consideration to projects that had far less success. Why didn't you just ask us for money? And the answer there was twofold. One, I thought I had high quality introductions and a high quality personal network to people who were likely already going to fund it. And so I didn't light up additional funding sources. And two, like this is a true answer.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you know, ultimately I'm the CEO responsibility for fundraising lives with me. And so I thought any number of things about how could I have done that better? How could I have strategized at I did not stop fundraising efforts, but I stopped lighting up new conversations for a number of weeks because I thought, okay, we've got the $2 million that we need to run this till the end of August. And that's my sort of internal target for the point at which it doesn't quite stop being useful, but it starts actually being a question on the margins where it's not a question until the end of August.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We lost that argument. We didn't get the money. The last hundred thousand dollars in was my daughter's college education fund”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, people can do what they want with their own money. And I understand that charitable funders have many things. It's just like, okay, relative to the other places we can put money to work in the world, further investment in the American vaccine supply situation as of May and looking forward doesn't make sense for us. Could you do it in another nation? And we said like, okay, we're the American effort. We have some advantages here. We would not have them in the other nation. We did talk to people there. We tried to see if we could help a team there or go there, et cetera. But we don't see that there's a path to positively impacting the problem there in a way that there's manifestly a path to positive impact here.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Class who would prioritize getting a vaccine for themselves and their loved ones had succeeded at that. And they said, okay, so vaccination supply problem pretty much solved, right? I'm like, no, it is not solved right now. It is solved for the people who are smartest about working in the system in a way it was not solved for even them back in January. But there are many people who are not yet vaccinated and they say that's a vaccine hesitancy issue. No, it is not merely a vaccine hesitancy issue. It is still the case that there are logistical problems. It is still the case that people don't know that you can just Google the vaccine now. It is still the case that around the edges of the American medical system in places that are like underserved, et cetera, people don't have it or they can't get transportation, et cetera, et cetera. You should continue funding this team for the next couple months so that we can do what we can around the edges here. And I was told.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source