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'm essentially raising a seed round except for a 501c3 charity. And we urgently need money for this. Here's a two-page memo. And I sent that email at 4.30 p.m. And 4.30 p.m. California time. And he got back to me. There was some internal emails of routed to this person routed to this person. He run that by blah, blah, blah. 9.30 the next morning. He said, I'm personally in for $100,000 out of my own pocket. My banker is going to contact you as a wire clear the same day. So yay for that. On the like, yes, less EA side, like tech is not exactly a stranger to having bureaucracies. And in some cases, it was a matter of like, oh, indicatively, we want to support that, but we have a process and that process went on for six weeks. And by the time six weeks was over, it was May and not to the credit of funders. By May, most people in the professional management”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, brafetting that. The tech industry underperformed my expectations for what the tech industry should have accomplished here. There were some bright spots and less bright spots with regards to fundraising project. For those of you who don't know, the total budget of this project was $1.2 million, which is not quite couch cushion money, but is not large relative to the total amount of resources that the tech industry can deploy on problems. And in some cases, I looked at my email this morning to refresh my memory. I sent a CEO at a particular company, and I'm not going to name people, but they're welcome to claim credit if they want to claim credit. I email the CEO at a particular company, hey, I saw you like to tweet about this on Twitter.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So again, like trillions of dollars are on the line. The United States is spending tens of billions of dollars or more on its COVID response strategy. The true biggest issue is why is it coming down to Patrick McKenzie's ability to fundraise in the tech industry for us to have a system here?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We had so like pharmacies generally speaking could today, if you ask someone deep in the balls of pharmacies accounting department, could you by the end of the business today give us a count of how many bottles of aspirin the pharmacy has physically in the world? By the end of the day, they would have a shockingly accurate number for that. It wouldn't be exact, but it would be like shockingly accurate relative to that number's like trilly millions. If you could say, break down by address, please. Like, where are they physically present in the world? Yeah, easy problem. Managing inventories of drugs, that's what we do.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you want another funny anecdote, then ask some people in positions that might know. So how real do you think that 25% number is? And they said, well, the good news is in addition to being incompetent at delivering the vaccine, we're also incompetent at counting. So it was probably a bit of an undercount. I'm like, oh, so the good news is the true count was like 100% or 95% or something. Well, no. Not nearly close to that. But we got better at counting after the governor yelled at us because he was embarrassed. We were the 48th state.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should not endorse that decision. There were individual acts of heroism by particular pharmacists who said essentially in as many words to us when we called them and said, hey, what's the procedure for getting the shot? Okay, an individual like the one you just described cannot formally get the shot right now. So I would tell that individual to go to the county website, tell whatever lies are necessary to get an appointment with me. They come in for an appointment and I will inject them rather than verifying the lies that were on the appointment card because Basically, F's rules. I swore an oath”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But can we really trust the quiet word here? One, because do we trust that this actor is not going to change their mind in two weeks and consequence us for something we authorize today? Just throw out the shots. And pharmacies did not cover themselves in glory. A lot of pharmacists did. Some pharmacists did. But pharmacies, like institutionally, we deliver almost all the medications for almost all the diseases routinely in America. We cannot blow up either that position of societal trust or our business results over one drug for one disease. And so throw out the shots and make sure we can still delivering medical care in California tomorrow. That I understand how that decision was made.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Did not correct all the way. The governor did not go out and say, hey, that thing I said a month ago was effing insane. I take that back and apologize. It was like, okay, we're going to like quietly pass out the words. That's no longer the policy, but we don't want to own up to the mistake. And people in, say, like the regulatory departments of pharmacies make rational decisions based on the signals that you were giving them. And the rational decision of pharmacy makes is not, okay, we've been quietly past the word that the old policy is persona non grata.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said he early said that oh man, this is almost a direct quote, and you can see the actual direct quote in my previous writing on this, but I will not just prosecute people. I will go aggressively to try to maximize the reputational impact to your firms and your licenses. metaphorical and when it came down to it, literal guns at physicians in the middle of a pandemic for doing unauthorized medical care. Crazy. But when the system corrected, it did not do”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Forget the tiering system. Forget anything else. Literally walk out into the street and say, I've got the COVID shot. I need to administer it in the next 15 minutes. Who wants it? And in the United States, we had a policy ban on doing that. We said, no, to protect the integrity of the tiering system of health equity. You should throw that shot out. And that policy was stupid. And it was announced by governors proudly in December in front of news cameras. And then a couple weeks later, Reality set in, and they were like people told them, sir. Turns out that throwing out the vaccine is stupid. And the governor did not go on the nightly news again and say, I gave a very confident policy speech a month ago in front of this news camera where I said that I would prosecute anyone who gives out end of day shots.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Then the other shots are on a timer, and those shots will decrease in value to zero after however many hours are remaining on the timer and then get thrown in the trash can. So quick question to test if you are rational human being. At the margin, would you prefer giving a shot to the most preferred patient in your queue of patients who needs for medical needs or like the trash can? You prefer the most preferred patient now follow-up question. Would you prefer giving it to the least preferred patient or the trash can? Still give it to the human rather than the trash can. And Israel adopted the policy of like, if the shots are expiring,”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm underinformed on much of the international comparison, partly because in 2021 I was sort of busy. I remember Israel for a variety of institutional reasons having a broadly functional response on this, in particular around end-of-the-day shots, which. End of the day shots are in the grand scheme of things, a minor issue, but they're a Good quick heuristic for do you have good epistemics on this at all? Okay, you know, physical reality of the COVID shots is there's five, eight, or ten shots in a single vial. That single vial goes bad after 12 hours. Is a bit of an oversimplification. It doesn't actually go bad, but for essentially regulatory reasons, we have to pretend it goes bad after 12 hours. It can't be recealed. Okay, so if you vaccinate two people,”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it turns out that, you know, this is the equivalent of saying you should probably consume calories at some point in the typical week. That is better than not consuming calories. Well, we checked with the medical experts, and it took six weeks of meeting, but they definitely agree. Eating beets not eating for living. So we're going to do that now. On the one hand, like it is a genuine strength of the United States that he's not actually some rando, but relative to the topic in question, some rando on the internet, like, wrote up a 2,000 word blog post, and we stopped doing stupid things. Could have stopped doing the stupid things sooner.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, on the like give people the catch race for this was first doses first. That was not the procedure in many nations which have many smart people in them. And it was not the procedure in the United States until I think, you know, 1 doses first, you can like sometimes trace policy back to individual blog posts. And so to the extent that one can be traced, I think it was Alex Tabarak on marginal revolution who's right. This is very obvious and overdetermined. If we want to win at this first dose is first is objectively the correct policy. And after ping ponged around the political system for a while and they talk to medical experts and et cetera, they were like, yeah.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Granted, the American system is dysfunctional on its own way. I think another thing that's been underdone in the course of the last couple of years is looking internationally. I don't know if any country anywhere with vastly different political systems is happy with the outcomes that it got. Some were obviously vastly better than others, but there are journals of comparative international politics. And why are those journals writing anything but who succeeded at what margins and who did not and what do we learn about the proper functioning of political systems, civil society, and like the United States consider it as one hugely complex machine?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have an absence of that here. Congratulations. Here's your colonel uniform in the United States military. And now your job is we are going to give you a CSV file every day interface with this other kernel, please, from Google, on where this thing needs to go, and you get it there on time every time. And if you can't get it there on time every time, like call the White House. And we will find you political cover is what a functioning system would have done.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in December, people were getting on the night in the news and saying, This is going to be unprecedented logistics challenge because the vaccine has to be kept at ultra-low temperatures, which are the same temperatures at which milk is transported. We understand how to do cold chain logistics. So Amazon would correct that misperception. They say, oh, you guys seem to know what you're doing.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was made by a bunch of Rank amateurs at this topic on Discord in the course of a couple of hours. And similarly, this is like one part of the huge overall vaccination effort. But you could imagine going to Amazon and saying like, hey, Amazon, we hear you're pretty good about getting packages between A and B. This package has a really hard thing about it. It has to be cool as it's delivered. That's like a totally unsolved problem in material science, right? And Amazon would say, we literally do that every day.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know what changed. One of the things that America used to do is when the federal government lacked state capacity for something, it would say who in civil society or private industry has capacity for this and then say, congratulations by order of the president, you are now a colonel in the United States Army. Like, what do you need to get it done, sir? And that was an option. That was an option that was not taken. I will play no fights in either of the two administrations that both individually made terrible decisions. But plausibly some more enlightened counterfactual administration could have gone to Google and said, who is literally your best person for solving the data problem that we currently find ourselves in? Great. Will they accept a commission as colonel? Great. Here's an order from the president. You have a swearing and ceremony starting in 30 seconds. And you will present your project plan tomorrow. And again, like the successful project.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is one of those few times where we were genuinely up against a scarcity constraint that like, you know, physical reality was there were a scarce number of vials and we needed to have a prioritization system. And some people who urgently needed the vials were not going to get them first. Everyone was going to get them eventually. But the mad rush in our political system to dole out favors around the prioritization for those first files. Exceeded the actual distribution and successful injection of the vials as a goal. Again, California reported to the federal government that it was only successfully injecting 25% of its allocation. It had the most desirable object in the history of the world. And rather than adopting any sensible strategy for getting it into people's arms, was bickering over who should get it first.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That fact is enormously frustrating to me. And if you say it with exactly those words and emotional valence, people will say, no, no, that's not exactly what we meant. But when they're talking to other audience, they will say, no, this is absolutely what we mean.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we aggressively train the entire American professional managerial class starting at seventh grader earlier in decrying systemic racism, which, to be clear, is a problem. And so any discussion about what should we do with regards to information distribution, which goes out to a broad audience in the American professional managerial class who essentially call all the shots in the U.S. system, will almost invariably get bent to, I have no particular opinions on server architecture here and nothing useful to comment, but what's our equity strategy? And the equity strategy dominated discussions of the The correct way to run the rollout to the exclusion of Operationalizing it via medical necessity. People brag about that fact”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's this thing we often say in the tech industry called bike shedding, which is if you're building a nuclear power plant, and many people cannot sensibly comment on like, what is the flow rate through the pipes to cool nuclear reactor? But if you build a bike shed next to the nuclear power plant, it's very easy to have opinions on the color of the bike shed. And so in the meetings about the nuclear power plant, you will have... A truly stupid amount of human effort devoted into what colors you should paint the bike shed. So, it is very difficult for most people in civil society to successfully inject a vaccine into someone's arms, to successfully manage a logistics network, to successfully build a nationwide information gathering system, to centralize this information and pass it out to everyone.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult to ask that question because, like, we were clearly in a unique time in 2020 and 2021, and yet point to me in the year in American history in which American society was truly united and had no social issues going on. And if people counterfactually point to say World War II, I will say read more history there, but be that as it may. Was it the case that strong societal feelings in the wake of George Lloyd's death in 2020 and the racial reckoning strongly dictated policy? Yes, as a positive statement rather than normative statement, that is absolutely the case.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, I'm basically subtle tweeting that. And I strongly believe that was a political decision, but I'm just a software guy.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I jump in with one bit of optim Achieve something incredible which was getting the first cut of the vaccine done in two days as a result of many decades of science done by very incredible people. And we successfully got that vaccine productionized in a year. We should have gotten it productionized in far less than a year. But the fact that we were able to do it in one year and not three was enormously consequential. And so we should feel happy about that, a little annoyed that we didn't have better protocols at the FDA in places to get that vaccine prioritized for testing much faster than was quite annoyed at the fact that that was a political football and people probably made decisions that pessimized for human lives and optimized for like defeating a non-preferred political candidate.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paperwork that required you to decide what tier you're in. And the state of New York commissioned a consultancy to administer to 75-year-olds a 57-page web application, which required uploading multiple attachments to check for their eligibility. And talk with a technologist if you don't believe me. We try to remove everything from a web page that people successfully get through it. Like if you can make it two to four form fields, that's already taxing people's patience. And you are asking people who might be suffering from cognitive decline or be less comfortable in using computers to do something which would literally tax the patients and cognitive abilities of professional software engineer. And that wasn't an accident. We wanted to do that. Why did we want to do that? Because it was extremely important to successfully implement the tiering system that we had agreed upon. Why was it extremely important to implement the tiering system? Because that was society's prioritization. Was that the correct priority?”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, like tier 1B school teachers were classified as tier 1b. Why? Because go figure teachers unions have political power in the state of California. And they said, well, we'll accept not being in 1A, but we are going no lower than 1B. And probably no one in that meeting ever said, like, I definitely think that 25-year-old teachers who are currently under stay-at-home orders should be like in front of the line of people who will die if they get COVID. Like we made that choice.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Descriptively. Tier 1A was okay, healthcare professionals and a few others and people above the age of 75. No, wait, we'll change that to 65. Tier 1B was we're going to put a few favored occupational groups here and some other folks. And Tier 1C was people who doctors think will probably die if they don't get the vaccine if they contract COVID but who have not appeared in group 1A or 1B yet. And so who got 1A? Well, healthcare professionals, so like doctors administering the vaccine, that sounds like pretty reasonable. Also, veterinarians, because veterinarians are like urgently required by society at the time, not so much because the California veterinarians association is good at lobbying. And that isn't just me alleging that they sent a letter out to their membership saying we are so good at lobbying. We got you guys into one, hey. Congrats and go get your vaccine now. Have that on my website. Okay.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh goodness. So this was different in different places and confusingly different places in the United States used the same names for these tiers for different people. But in the state of California, Tier 1A comes before 1B comes before 1C comes before the tier 2, et cetera, et cetera. So 1A was descriptively speaking at the start, and this changed over time on like a day-to-day, week-to-week basis, sometimes in mutually incompatible ways at the same time. It was an entire mess.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the complexities of this is that the pharmacies and healthcare departments are not set up to discriminate along the axes of whether one is politically powerful or not, because that is not a thing that they have to do in most vaccination campaigns and not a thing that they have to do on the typical Tuesday of providing medical services. We ask them to do this radically new thing, which is in part responsible for the failures that we had. If we had a much simpler tiering system, for example, we would have had more than 25% of the shots successfully being delivered in the state of California in January of 2021.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a political decision made that the successful administration of the vaccination was not going to be measured solely by saving lives. The prioritization schedule type came up, which was Byzantine and complicated and routinely befuddled professional software engineers and health administrators, and which I could not diagram out on a whiteboard, even if you paid me a million dollars to get it right on the first time. Was downstream of the United States' political preferences. And so Schedule 1A versus 1B versus 1C was like in the first five seconds of the discussion dictated by medical necessity. But immediately after that was about rewarding plums to politically favored groups. And so the”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If I look at the experience of the last hundred years and a little more back to the flu pandemic in 1918, if you read histories of the flu pandemic, a vastly less wealthy, vastly less technologically sophisticated nation, with many less people involved in the actual fixing of this problem, competently executed on nationwide vaccine campaigns and other various measures. And so... In some fashion, we should be urgently concerned with what decayed institutionally in the interim. I think one of the things that health departments specifically faced is that if you had just given them these kind of vanilla vaccination campaign, maybe they would have done better than they actually did. I'm not positive of that. I do think there are actually. And here I have to.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You touch the problem, and so you've immediately taken liability for any number of sins of emission because even at the scale of the largest companies in the world, you have not allocated infinite resources to this problem. And also the stealing a march on the government and embarrassing us will be held against you. And so like you can point back to the Cambridge Analytica thing where Cambridge Analytica is like shorthand for there was this one time back in the day where the news media in New York and the government in DC and places like it talked to each other a bit and convinced themselves that a small team of people with a budget of approximately $200,000 have rooted the United States presidential election. Now rooting the United States presidential election perhaps on behalf of a foreign power would be an enormously consequential thing. Good thing that did not happen in the world that we live in. However, people believe very passionately in that narrative and as a result of that narrative they did like very”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many things could happen. One, if you build a thing, this has sometimes been called the Copenhagen principle of culpability. If you build the thing, various actors in our system will assume, okay, now your responsibility for not just the consequences of the thing you built, but for the totality of consequences of everything associated with the American vaccination effort. So you built the thing, oh, you big tech geniuses. Well, what did you do about localization? You didn't do enough about localization yet. You hate name group of people here. Don't you see the disparity in death rates between demographic A and demographic B? Why haven't you fixed that yet? You have killed so many people, et cetera, et cetera. And no one in government, no one who is making that moral calculation says I have responsibility for killing people by doing nothing. The person who is doing anything has responsibility for killing people by taking up the burden of doing something. And it is a”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It is absolutely the local incentives, like it makes sense in the meeting when you're saying it and you are not in that meeting projecting, I am going to cause tens of thousands of people to die at the margin by making this call. And yet that call was made.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those teams said, Hey, we've got this thing, and other people in the company might have overruled them and said, it would be really, really bad right now to have the tech industry saying we're better at the government's job than the government is. So shut that down.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Felt political pressure in the wake of the January 6 events in the United States. This is another thing that's gone down the rabbit hole. But in the immediate wake of the January 6th events, people in positions of authority very clearly tried to lay that at the feet of the tech companies and internally in the tech companies, their policy teams, teams that supposed to make the company legible to government and avoid government Yankee's permission to do business. And their communications teams, PR departments, told everyone in the company mission number one right now, do not get in the newspaper for any reason. We are putting our heads down. And when people in those companies who work on public health and a thing that might not be obvious to most people in the world is that like AppMagu Booksoft, they're literally like teams of people who their job is public health because they are the operating system of the world right now and the operating system in the world needs public health care.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The tech industry at both the level of App Amagoufe Soft, which is my funny sardonic way to refer to some of the most powerful institutions in the world, and many other places that hire many number of smart engineers who can build the world's least impressive inventory tracking system.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sure. So the federal government and the state government, the American governmental system is quite complex. And there are multiple distinct supply chains with multiple distinct technological systems tracking where these vials were headed all over the country. And there were many attempts at various levels of the government to say, hey, can we commission a consultancy to build a magical IT solution, which will get these databases to talk to each other? And those largely failed for the usual reasons the government software procurement projects fail. Why didn't tech build it? I'm constrained on what I can say and cannot say. So I know a little more than this answer, but I will give you part of the answer.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe that didn't happen. If one goes over the history of military conflicts, I don't know how many people, losers on either side of the conflict ever actually did that reckoning of like, hey, could we attempt to win in the future? I think there was a broad lack of seriousness across many trusted institutions in American society in the government, in civil society, in the tech industry, about really approaching this problem we want to win. And I think a wonderful thing about our country and our institutions is like on things that are truly important to us. We win and win outlandishly because we are a rich and powerful nation. And yet, like this was obviously a thing where we should have decided to win and we fundamentally did not approach it as a problem that we needed to win on.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No one wants to relitigate that. No one wants to relitigate California imposed redlining in the provision of medical care. And that was wrong and evil. But the party that was in the case pro-redlining does not normally like saying that it is pro-redlining. And the other party does not really consider that a hugely salient issue. And so there are no debates and no one is asking Governor Newsom. So when you got on TV and said that you were doing geofencing for the provision of medical care, geofencing in that context was the same as redlining. Can you explain your support for redlining? And no one has asked Newsen them a question. Maybe someone should. But we're. Surrounded by the effects of incentives and the effects of iterated games, and sometimes they don't play out the way we would ideally like them to play out.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think we're memory holding a lot of things that happened in the pandemic, and I wish we wouldn't partly because of political incentives and we're approaching an election era and because of the quirky way that the American parties and the candidates bounce off each other, no one's no one's real incentive to say, okay, I would like to re-litigate the mask issue for a moment. We told people that masks don't block air born viruses. And we were quite confident of that, and the entire news media backed us up on it. And then we like 188 a month later.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Virtually nothing up to and including like the potential of national annihilation that will cause us to actually like put our chips behind making a software problem. That is somebody else who does not have to deal with an electoral mandate or getting called in front of Congress or et cetera, et cetera. Somebody else's problem. Unfortunately, software is eating the world and delivering competence in the modern world requires being competent at software. And the United States, it will tell you differently. And there are wonderful people in the government who are attempting to change this. Broad strokes on an institutional level, the United States federal government has abdicated software as a core responsibility of the government”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it focuses on 27,000 words on this, my article in Works in Progress called The Story of Vaccine HCA, goes into some of the nitty-gritty. Broadly, I think a matter of incentives more than a matter of people choosing to do evil things. Although I will say we did choose to do evil things and we can probe on that if you want to. But if you look at like the federal government specifically, the federal government institutionally learned one, I believe wrong lesson which has terrible consequences from the healthcare.gov rollout a number of years ago when Obamacare was first abuting. And the thing which many actors in the federal government and the political parties came away from is that a president can doom their legacy of their signature initiative if those bleeping tech folks don't get their bleeping act together. And so the United States has decided there is”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, there are so many reasons and a whole lot of finger pointing going on. One of the things was that there were almost no actors anywhere in the system who said, yes, this is definitely my responsibility. Various parts of our nation's institutions, county level public health departments, governors' offices, the presidency, two presidencies over this interval, which will become relevant. They all said, well, I have a narrow part to play in this, but someone else has to do the hard yards of actually putting shots in people's arms. And someone else is clearly dealing with the logistics problem, right? And the ball was just dropped comprehensively. And no one at the time really had a plan for picking it up or didn't feel like it was incentive compatible for them specifically. It would have been great if someone could do this, but just not me.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And gave a few pointers on making scaled calling operations. And then one thing led to another and ended up becoming the CEO of this initiative. At the start, it was just like this hackathon project of a bunch of random tech people who thought, hey, we can build a website, make some phone calls, maybe help some people find the vaccine at the margin. And it grew a little bit from there. We ended up becoming essentially the public-private partnership, which was the clearinghouse for vaccine location information for the United States of America. That felt a little weird at the time and continues to.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In early 2021, we were quite concerned that people were making 20, 40, 60 phone calls to try to find a pharmacy that actually had a dose of the COVID vaccine stock and could successfully deliver it to them. I tweeted out randomly, you know, it's insane that every person or every caregiver is attempting to contact every medical provider in the state of California to find justice as a vaccine. California clearly has at least one person capable of building a website where you can centralize that information and send everybody to the website. If you build that website, I'll pay for the server bill or whatever. And Carly Yang took up the gauntlet and invited 10 of his best friends and said, basically, all right, get in guys, we're going to open source the availability of the vaccine in California by tomorrow morning. This is at like 10 p.m. at night California time. And so I lurked on into the Discord where, of course, all medical infrastructure is built.”
2024-07-24 · Dwarkesh Podcast · Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source