Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Let’s say you ask someone deep in the bowels of pharmacies' accounting departments, "could you, by the end of 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 shockingly accurate relative to that number being truly millions. If you could say, "break it down by address, please. Where are they physically present in the world?" That’d be an easy problem. Managing inventories of drugs, that's what we do. The United States could not do that. It did not perceive that to be an urgent problem to be solved. I do want to ask you about the actual finance and software stuff at some point, but this is such an important topic. The world is brought to a stand still. We still haven't learned the lesson. I'm just going to keep going on this topic because I still don't understand. Here's another question that's related to this. You have many rich tech industry friends. I read your article and you're saying, “I'm filling out these grants for $50k a year. That's taking up all my time. I'm trying to raise a couple hundred grand a year, a couple tens here. ” I'm thinking to myself, how is this not as trivial a problem as, “hey XYZ, if you give me money that you can find between your couch cushions, we will save thousands of lives and get the world economy back on track. ” How is raising money for this hard? Or why was it hard? Again, 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 has it come down to Patrick McKenzie's ability to fundraise in the tech industry for us to have a system here? Bracketing that, the tech industry underperformed my expectations for what it should have accomplished here. There were some bright spots and less bright spots with regards to the fundraising project. For those of you who don't know, the total budget of this project was $1.2 million. It’s not quite couch cushion money, but it’s not large relative to the total amount of resources that the tech industry can deploy on problems. I looked at my email this morning to refresh my memory. I'm not going to name people, but they're welcome to claim credit if they want to claim credit. I emailed the CEO at a particular company, "hey, I saw you like to tweet about this on Twitter. I'm essentially raising a seed round except for a 501(c)(3) charity and we urgently need money for this. Here's a two page memo." I sent that email at 4:30 p.m. California time. He got back to me. There were some internal emails routed to this person and then to that person. “Hey 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.” The wire cleared the same day. So yay for that. On the less yay side, tech is not exactly a stranger to having bureaucracies. In some cases, it was a matter of "oh indicatively, we want to support that, but we have a process" and that process went on for six weeks. By the time six weeks was over, it was May. By May, most people in the professional managerial class who had prioritized getting a vaccine for themselves and their loved ones had succeeded at that. They said, "okay, the vaccination supply problem is 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 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. They’d 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 underserved, people don't have it or they can't get transportation, etc. You should continue funding this 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.…

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