Patrick McKenzie

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, you know, there are no debates and no one is asking, you know, 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 Newsom that 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.

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 like really approaching this like a 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 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.

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 that 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.