Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…team for the next couple of months so that we can do what we can around the edges here. Again, people can do what they want with their own money. I understand that charitable funders have many things. I was told, “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, it doesn't make sense for us. Could you do it in another nation?” We said, “okay, we're the American effort. We have some advantages here. We would not have them in another nation. We did talk to people there. We tried to see if we could help a team there or go there, etc. 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.” We lost that argument. We didn't get the money. The last $100K in was my daughter's college education fund. My God. I agree that it shouldn't be up to tech to solve this huge society-wide problem. But given that nobody else was solving it, I still don't understand. Have you gone back to any of them? Have any of them reflected like "yeah, maybe I should have just written you a million dollar check and saved you all this hassle so you could have gone back to business." Ultimately I'm the CEO. Responsibility for fundraising lies with me. I've thought a number of things about how I could have done better. How could I have strategized? I did not stop fundraising efforts, but I stopped lighting up new conversations for a number of weeks. I thought, “okay, we've got the $2 million that we need to run this till the end of August.” That's my internal target for the point at which it doesn't quite stop being useful, but it starts actually being a question on the margins. It's not a question until the end of August. Could I've done better? Probably. There’s 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. I broadly consider them positive. They are the "but for" cause of VaccinateCA. Ask me about that in a moment. Some EA funders talked to me after my piece about it came out. They said, "this is physically painful to read. We wrote bigger checks with less consideration to projects that had far less indices of success. Why didn't you just ask us for money?" The answer there was twofold. One, I thought I had high quality introductions and a high quality personal network to people who are likely already going to fund it. So I didn't light up additional funding sources. And two, this is a true answer, I'm a flawed human who has a limited number of cycles in his day. I was running a very complex operation. 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.” That was not entirely an irrational belief for me because I had reached out to people who are making a lot of noise about writing money for pandemic checks. They said, "not in the United States, not in May." I thought, “oh, if I light up a conversation totally cold with someone now, it's likely to just get a no again.” I should try to scrimp and save and break the piggy bank for my daughter's college education fund. By the way, she'll go to college folks, no worries. But it's how far down the list of Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C. We were down to Plan C at that point.…

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