I talked with Patrick McKenzie (known online as patio11) about how a small team he ran over a Discord server got vaccines into Americans' arms: A story of broken incentives, outrageous incompetence, and how a few individuals with high agency saved 1000s of lives.Enjoy!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here.Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.SponsorThis episode is brought to you by Stripe, financial infrastructure for the internet. Millions of companies from Anthropic to Amazon use Stripe to accept payments, automate financial processes and grow their revenue.Timestamps(00:00:00) – Why hackers on Discord had to save thousands of lives(00:17:26) – How politics crippled vaccine distribution(00:38:19) – Fundraising for VaccinateCA(00:51:09) – Why tech needs to understand how government works(00:58:58) – What is crypto good for?(01:13:07) – How the US government leverages big tech to violate rights(01:24:36) – Can the US have nice things like Japan?(01:26:41) – Financial plumbing & money laundering: a how-not-to guide(01:37:42) – Maximizing your value: why some people negotiate better(01:42:14) – Are young people too busy playing Factorio to found startups?(01:57:30) – The need for a post-mortem Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Full Episode
Today, I'm chatting with Patrick McKenzie. He is known for many things. On the internet, he's known as Patio11. Most recently, he ran VaccinateCA, which probably saved on the order of high four-figure number of lives during COVID. He also writes an excellent newsletter called Bits About Money. Patrick, welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for having me.
So what was VaccinateCA? 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 in 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 doses of the vaccine. California clearly has at least one person capable of building a website where we 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 Carl 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. Is that like 10 p.m. at night, California time?
And so I looked down into the discord where, of course, all medical infrastructure is built and gave a few pointers on, you know, 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.
Okay, so the obvious question is, why was this something that people randomly picked up on a Discord server? Why wasn't this an initiative either by an entity delegated by the government or by, you know, the White House has, or the pharmacies have a website where you can just sign up for an appointment?
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, governor's offices, the presidency, two presidencies over this interval, which will become relevant.
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