Patrick McKenzie

very plausibly should get on the nightly news and say i received the following email from the white house that says uh we should uh uh stop this everywhere uh like if you point a gun at me i will comply with this at the point of a gun that is what it will take but this is it almost requires civil disobedience in the sense of if you're right about the earlier statement that in 2021 there are going to be serious political repercussions on the tech companies so

You need to have a risk tolerance, right?

Like we, every business everywhere, including the financial industry, including the tech industry is like balancing various risks together.

And the risk tolerance was like poorly calibrated.

One can achieve results in the world by doing things like embarrassing government officials.

And like 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 extremely important for VaccinateCA.

People thought at the beginning, are we going to get in trouble for publishing true information about vaccine availability that will embarrass the state of California?

And I said, I have a very high confidence that no matter what we do vis-a-vis the state of California, that you cannot get in serious trouble in the United States for saying true things.

The First Amendment exists.

We have backstopping infrastructure here.

And if push comes to shove, we will shove back and we will win.

And this is just me as a guy who took the same civics course that everyone took and does not have a huge amount of resources relative to, say, the entire tech industry.

Maybe we need to have a certain amount of intestinal fortitude, like a, okay,

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.

No, we're going to fight you on this one.

And, you know, 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, blah.