Patrick McKenzie - How One Discord Server Saved Thousands of Lives During COVID

[@Leo-uo9lb]

Something interesting about this interview is that you can tell that Patrick spends a lot of time talking and communicating with other people in tech in a very precise way and it shows in how he talks.

[@arjunyg4655]

this is the primary trait of people who are successful in engineering businesses :)

[@honor9lite1337]

Interesting ​@@arjunyg4655

[@chriswolgamuth23]

"lets zoom out to the object level" yeah hes a smart guy

[@JamesBarry-j7m]

​@@arjunyg4655FYI He's an example of why America is wonderful People like him make me very happy.

[@The_Kharski]

pretty elaborately but in a dying lizard monochord voice?

[@bernpri7580]

Here for the education on money laundering

[@honor9lite1337]

Hear hear!

[@alexcovey1200]

Writing a story.

[@margodphd]

What an incredible cool guest. Intelligence and kindness are a best combination of traits - I'm jealous of his wife. Wonderful conversation, thank you for taking the time to make this.

[@DwarkeshPatel]

Glad you enjoyed!

[@adverseinperpetuity]

It’s actually wild how intelligent Patrick is

[@xxmadmanxx9882]

Its wild how much people support totalitarianism these days.

[@honor9lite1337]

True!! 😮

[@mildsauce5019]

@adverseinperpetuity Another thing worth noting is how absolutely horrendous these disembodied nerds look like. Just LOOK at the dude. He built like a sour patch kid. Absolutely docile men have only ONE option -- and that is to """""BELIEVE"""""" whatever tf the herd does and never question it. these are pathetic beings.

[@aaronboggs5799]

He can stream-of-consciousness rattle off a response to something that is so well formulated and articulate. And he talks so fast that it’s like his mouth can’t keep up with his brain. Dude is on another level.

[@thewolverine2010]

Patrick is a hero. Great interview Dwarkesh. Bravo.

[@MichieldeMare]

Fascinating interview! I must say I’m pretty happy with how the Dutch government handled the distribution: you didn’t have to call, you got an invitation in the mail when it was your turn, which was mostly by age descending. Plenty of other stuff went wrong, but not the website or the logistics. Can’t wait for your Factorio article, Patrick!

[@pedroavellarcosta9389]

in Brazil you had a date, after which you could go (priority groups first) widely available, and a list of places where it was available (all public primary care clinics...

[@ajokhai]

Patrick is such an intelligent and transparent individual. I'm just simply marvelling at the conversation and impact he and his team were able to make. Definitely going to read more on his website.

[@Stevenpwalsh]

My favorite part of this guy is he had top tier nuclear powered SEO skills, and he used it on a Bingo card creator app.

[@silvercomic]

"F- the rules, I swore an oath." Love that.

[@ii8283]

This guy is both intelligent and candid to an insane degree

[@alexwright3731]

Around minute 7 or 8 they talk about how whether countries after loosing a war would do some reflection on what went wrong, and to that point the historical record is filled with countries making major reforms in the wake of military defeat. Examples that come to mind are Russias reforms after loosing the Crimean war, India reforming its military after the 1962 India China war, and Ukraine improving its defenses after loosing Crimea. Of course you can indeed find examples of countries who lost wars and didn't make sufficient changes after loosing conflicts like the Ottoman empire but there are plenty more who do make major reforms.

[@joshp4053]

bro. Losing not Loosing

[@nathandfox]

How can you miss the GDP ranking number 3(Japan) and number 4(Germany), both lost WWII and reformed 🙂big time.

[@Terminus316]

⁠@@nathandfoxdifferent story. Those countries were forcibly reformed, actually the term used at the time was de-radicalization, and the majority of their economic and social growth for at least 50 years after the war were a direct result of US occupation and influence.

[@christophermcanally1246]

The US engaged in major reforms after Vietnam.

[@DABATTLESUIT]

1917 Russia was one hell of a reflection.

[@thetomhfh]

30:00 - worth noting the UK did go for a delayed second dose strategy. It also stuck rigidly to age (and pre-existing condition) based distribution of doses. The vaccine rollout (along with mass rapid testing) was one of the two things the UK did pretty well.

[@StephenButlerOne]

Yes UK seemed fine. I'm male 40 at the time so was near the last groups. My wife had suffered with cancer in the past and she was one of the first to get it. I was probably 2 months behind her. I just got a text message to my phone, assuming they got my number via my doctors office, it was my time to arrange a location and time for my jab. I never even thought about it, so it must have gone ok.

[@arjunyg4655]

took them a long time to vaccinate people for other reasons though…

[@thetomhfh]

@@arjunyg4655 it didn’t! The U.K. was the second fastest country (after Israel) in vaccinating its population through the first months of 2021. Check out the graph on OurWorldInData.

[@paramsb]

Watched this whole video after randomly coming across it. A lot of interesting ideas and references. Criminally under watched

[@agee1961]

Kind of hilarious he starts this interview out with Government had information but refused to organize it and put it out for the people, and 10 minutes in he says I have the info you are asking for but refuse to give it up… hypocrites under the guise of assistance. Dangerous stuff

[@darkprincecharmin]

So glad to see SOMEONE is willing to have this conversation

[@KJB123etc]

Patio11 is a national treasure. And the nation I refer to is the internet.

[@imogenmcgough9689]

I could listen to Patio11 talk forever. As someone who made the switch from software to healthcare, this is super interesting. The healthcare system is practically in the technological dark ages because of the horribly misaligned incentives.

[@mrjimmbo]

This will be criminally underviewed it seems

[@joesinkwitz6053]

Patrick is super smart; great guest.

[@Sciolist321]

I also have several thousand hours in games. My current lives-saved-count is safely under four figures, but what I've taken from this interview is that I've at least done half the requirements.

[@karlmay5306]

I was watching a video of Bobby Lee trying smelling salts and this was the next recommended video.

[@Rumplenutskn]

Weird I have similar overlap...

[@michaelsch2644]

Of course tech companies would have been lauded for doing something with regards to the pandemic.They didnt and that has nothing to do with Jan 6th that is just an insane statement.

[@JamesBarry-j7m]

I just love Patrick McKenzie he's just so fabulous

[@nikolasmartinez5152]

Dude how do you find such interesting, genuinely, interesting folks to interview?

[@pianoforte611]

Great interview, and really interesting perspective into the politics of the vaccination efforts. It felt like it left out a rather big issue though - to what extent was the slow vaccine rollout due to people not wanting the vaccine? To say that there were conspiracies over the vaccines is frankly a massive understatement. There were many vaccination sites, set up directly in communities with low rates of vaccination that allowed walk ins, that couldn't get people in the door.

[@lylechipperson3407]

My buddy who went to school with Patrick asked me when I sent this to him "oh shit I'll watch that tonight. Does he still try to talk like Lester from GTA V?" I'm fuckin dead. I'm sorry Patrick, but he's not wrong.

[@spencergains7346]

How does this only have 4K views

[@attilamagyar91]

Its long form content where people talk. Not really popular in the eyes of the algorithm. On the other hand his shorts are exploding very well.

[@biesman5]

​@@attilamagyar91His most recent podcast have all more than 100k views.

[@Chelsea_2001]

@@attilamagyar91 The interviewer is pretty awful (Interviewee is awesome though) at least in this video hence the 1:12 like to dislike ratio. Good content tends to have closer to 1:100, less popular good videos might have 1:200, best I've seen was 1:1000 on a PeteComplete Naked Solo Icesheet video 6 years ago. EDIT: One clip from this video has 1:67 like to dislike because the interviewer didn't speak (3k to 200k).

[@jamesfrancese6091]

It was up for 1 day at the time of this comment…4K views within 24hrs for a video like this is pretty damn good. And it’s continued attracting that viewership daily

[@whorlingwisteria]

This was such an eye opening interview, and really inspired me to learn the nuances of history and motives

[@nyariimani7281]

The CDC should've done this.

[@miyagifatghost2684]

CDC got a cut to 🤫 Where you been at? CDC sold us OUT!!!

[@klrs8525]

Great interview and glad you are also getting the ads support. Minimal intrusion

[@Guest655321]

Amazing guest, amazing questions, beautiful video!

[@brandonhanrahan1748]

I agree that the tech world should not be an enemy. But then again. The tech world should stay OUT OF POLITICS. The problem with any business getting into politics. Is no matter what. A side is chosen. And when that happens. You automatically alienate at least half your business and prospective business.

[@KurtisRainboltGreene]

You're like 1900 years too late. Even the oldest companies in the world were heavily involved in politics, the very nature of a company requires an investment in the politics because the politics of a nation can change the existence of a company. Further more life itself is political. Why did you go to work today instead of feed the homeless? That's a political choice, even if you didn't make it naturally.

[@jhanschoo]

I lightly resent the off-hand comments that nobody (internationally) got COVID distribution right, because my memory was that at least the Asian tigers did well in their pandemic response. Some partly credited that to lessons learned from the SARS scare. I can't speak specifically to their ability to manage vaccine distribution but for the one I live in.

[@mackiej]

South Korea made dozens of reforms after the 2015 MERS outbreak. COVID hit in 2020. Is it fair to compare months/years of structural reforms to the USA building capability on the fly?

[@nichendrix]

Not only the Asian Tigers, for example Brazil, had a very hard time before the Vaccines, but Brazil has an Universal Healthcare System, that not only centralized information nationwide and in case of epidemic even the pivate Healthcare System have to repot to the National Healthcare Agency, also the country allowed all companies from a around the world who wanted to test their vaccines here to do so, Pfizer, Moderna, all American and European universities and companies, multiple Chinese and Russian vaccines, multiple indigenous vaccines, if they wanted to perform their tst here, provided they do it a co ding to international standards for such tests, were not only allowed to do so, and the tests results would count as a facilitator for their approval facilitated by the national regulatory agency. Over 1 million peoe died before the vaccines got in but once they were available the government, the national Healthcare system, at the federal, state and municipal level, the private Healthcare systems, even the military was involved, when there logistics were e still messed up due to travel restriction, the Military sent cargo planes to bring the vaccine. And as soon as they got here, anyone could receive it for free on places near their home or work, most cities created drive thru vaccination sites in bus terminalss, in front of train and subway stations, in airport parking lots in shopping mall parking lots, in every Healthcare unity in the country, almost the entire population was vaccinated in the first half of 2021. Obviously there was a prioritization system, decided by not by politicians, but by epidemiology professionals, and everyone knew when there was their turn, where there will be vaccination every day, because it was announced on TV, radio and internet. In many cases you could even schedule to be vaccinated at home my grandmother was 90 years old in 2021, she was among the first 100 people in our city that received th vaccine, her neighborhood's family healthcare unity sent a nurse to apply the vaccine and later the booster shots at her home, even if it was just 3 blocks away on the same street, her age made she one of highest priority group, and should not get out of home, and so were most people with very high risk in our city, the extremely old, the people with health conditions that made the predisposed, like cancer, precious respiratory conditions, patients on hospitals and nursing homes, Healthcare professionals etc. When more than 50% of the higher priority group was vaccinated, they started vaccinating the next priority group until they were vaccinating kindergarden kids, and healthy, fit young people. One interest ING thing was that the president of the time was a vaccine dennier, he made everything to mess up with this process, he even tried to disupt the information flow by decree, but the system was so used to do nationwide vaccination campaigns, and the state governors went on and defied him, buying vaccines sometimes ahead of the federal government and donating them to the national Healthcare system to distribute that what the president wanted became irrelevant, because the national vaccination system was in place for over 30 years, it resisted a dictatorship, hiperinflation, economic stabilization, many economic crysis, and president's from all political ideologies, sometimes helping, sometimes getting in the way, but every year there is the national baby, kids, teens, and elderly vaccination campaigns, it is scheduled to happens in the same month every year, the COVID Vaccine just was more of the same, but instead o multiple vaccines geared to different diseases, it was a condensed in one big effort to get people vaccinated.

[@kittytrail]

PRC had a very efficient worldwide COVID distribution system based in Wuhan though... 😏👌

[@Mark-ux7yh]

Its amazing and horrible that i found this video from a youtube reel

[@kenneth.topp.]

The US doesn't have a top down medical system. For example, look at covid tests, the regulators are used to approving medical tests, not managing all the medical test laboratories around the country to run an efficient testing regime, let alone manage to scale the rapid rollout of a new test during a pandemic. If you take a first principles look at just the medical testing in the united states, you'd see that creating a marketplace for tests is actually the opposite of what the regulatory structure encourages, and even allows in most states.

[@elios-0001]

Holy shit, this is a really good interview, and I just stumbled upon it on youtube shorts?

[@Ryan.G.Spalding]

You have a really good podcast. I had listened to a couple, but hadn't subscribed and hit up the back catalog, but it is really good! Good work sir! Keep it up! Very intelligent and undiscussed topics.

[@joshhickman77]

One of the most important interviews of our time.

[@misterjam5346]

Thank you for making noise🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼🙌🏼

[@legendarycondor]

I was lucky to meet Pat over a decade ago in Philly. He’s a beast!

[@michaelsch2644]

there was also no vaccine against the spanish flu at the time, let alone a vaccination campaign.

[@danielleburke87]

That's exactly why i didn't take the vaccine my body natural immunity is best

[@TrentYakle]

What examples are there of the US govt forcing twitter to remove things? actual examples not general statements. Reports say things were requested for twitter to decide, things were removed that shouldn't have been as twitter emplyees struggled to know what to do with Russia being a problem, but when was something forced by govt

[@Love4Faye]

Right there is not violation of 1st A because there was not threat that a Twitter was going to taken offline or work will be arrested. I would say he was exaggerating to make a point that he thinks its overreach. Doesn't the government have a interest in keep its citizen alive and not falling for false information?

[@SJND20]

I worked on a similar thing during covid to ensure vaccine information is available.

[@glg210]

Amazing interview, I loved how he objectively addressed the issues he encountered as CEO of vaccineCA.

[@julesjacobs1]

Great episode!

[@andrewwachtel6452]

Wow this is like the best KZbin channel I’ve ever seen. Just an insane amount of brilliant data here that will help me tremendously with my book. Thankssss

[@pettahify]

Interesting interview! I do think a lot of countries did better with handing out the vaccines. In my country they announced in the news and stuff when another "tier" was welcome to book a time to get the covid-vaccine. The tiers were basically high risk patients first and then age. You either booked via a website, app or on the phone. The vaccine centres were well "designed" and it took 15 minutes maximum including wait times. For testing you could either ask someone to pick it uo for you, or order free home delivery of testing kit(taxi companies delivered it and picked it up) or go to a drive-in "testing site". You booked home delivery of testing kit with a website, app or by phone. This was in Sweden. I guess the rest of the nordics had similar systems. In the beginning of covid sweden failed to protect the elderly by stopping visitors snd stuff like that, thats the main reason we initially had more deaths compared to neighboring countries.

[@srnissen_]

Not sure if it's deliberate, but this podcast is chronologically out of order on the playlist (Or, it could be argued, all the other items are) Apart from that: Great podcast, looking forward to digging into the back archives.

[@beasttammer9265]

Power to the people, with great freedom, great responsibility

[@Seyeler]

I get recommended this channel a lot. The guests and topics are fascinating. The interviewer is just awful. One of the worst I’ve ever seen. How are these people coming on.

[@chriswolgamuth23]

Amazing convo learned so so so much may have to return for a relisten

[@oldschoolpanels]

Nice to see my comments are being smited. Well played. Tech censorship, while watching a video about tech censorship

[@mcs131313]

This gets into the blame side - but also on the consequences of helping side: the gov gave Moderna funding to accelerate development. Then after the fact (not as a condition of the funding), our president tried to assert gov ownership over their intellectual property, while also publicly speaking negatively of that. This type of thing has a clear chilling effect on the willingness of any innovative company to work with the government regarding valuable proprietary skills.

[@deepakrao5317]

Make this man the president of America. Crazy intelligent and competent guy.

[@Gregoryzaniz]

Very smart guy clearly, but so annoying and moralistic. He's dislikable. I prefer his writing....

[@danielpauldouglas]

Agreed. Typical beta Silicon Valley / Stanford do-gooder vibe.

[@basskick666]

Yeah, don't you just hate people who put morals and doing good over being "likeable"....what a nerd.

[@basskick666]

​@@danielpauldouglas"Betas" are the ones who give a f about their "vibes".

[@juliettemoschetti]

Wow! Fascinating.

[@vee6761]

This should have way more views

[@el.blanco552]

This video needs way more views

[@adverseinperpetuity]

The entire conversation is built upon the false premise that mRNA vaccines saved lives. That said, it provides fascinating insight into the interplay between and incentives of big tech and big gov.

[@oldschoolpanels]

Had to scroll way too far to find this comment. I understand he did this under false pretext, but it still stands. He facilitated totalitarian control.

[@danielpauldouglas]

This! 👏

[@basskick666]

Gay comment

[@WiseWorld_FM]

I’m here for the money laundering

[@brettricia1]

The Trump administration disbanded the “pandemic response” team (2018), but some of the team members were reassigned to roles that included pandemic response. Possibly adding to a confused response?

[@charliesmash]

No.

[@jobloluther]

''Systemic racism is a problem'' Here's the great limit of all these techbros: by acquiescing for too long to this kind of nonsensical notion, they made American society less economically liberal, more prone to leftist divagations. Is it systemic racism that makes tens and tens of thousands of Euro-Americans claim every year to have American Indian origins that they don't have, in order to benefit from the actual advantages of this classification?

[@cyberft]

Amazing show.

[@RatherCrunchyMuffin]

07:43 its an ironic misunderstanding of what went wrong in the War on Terror to imagine that Generals should be the ones to testify and explain themselves to Congress, rather than Congress itself which should explain abdicating its own Constitutional warmarking responsibilities to the Bush administration. We didnt lose on the battlefield, we lost when impossible political objectives were set, like making functional democracy just blossom out of tribal Afghanistan

[@Chelsea_2001]

1:13:18 "A very smart LLM" I now understand where all the downvotes are coming from. The Interviewee is awesome but the interviewer is borderline, if not straight up ********. To clarify a Large Language Model doesn't do smart, it does text.

[@khayyin359]

100% agreed. And even if they were "smart", the amount of energy required to run that many queries would be devastating 😒

[@andreac3362]

Patrick is very giving with his people; tech peeps.

[@ETHEREALARIELS]

He's the only one saying SBF was actually intelligent or that his crimes were sophisticated. They were not and he isn't.

[@ocimak]

Dang this was a good interview. Sheesh.

[@mattstakeontheancients7594]

Listened to a couple of these and the guest are great. Actually bought Making of the Atomic Bomb because to the interview with Richard Rhodes. Imagine this one will be too.

[@ThoughtsonThoughtsandFeelings]

I feel so thankful tiktok brought me here lol // “a broad lack of seriousness across institutions” … yes. Yes! Edit: “let’s play like we’re trying to win” new plan!

[@andrewtoth9403]

Patrick is unbelievably intelligent.

[@MayorMcC666]

pretending that geofencing is as racialized as the racial covenants behind redlining is insanity

[@pepecebolla69]

Why will this video not play on the background?

[@karlirwin8005]

1:50:10 can anyone provide a link to something by Derek Thompson (Chemical engineer)? Can only manage to track down the author of “Hit Makers”, whom I don’t believe is the same chap

[@GNARGNARHEAD]

bravo 👏

[@kreek22]

Andy Kaufman lives! And he's much smarter this time around.

[@jai_nasu]

I genuinely hope he has an underground money laundering operation. He should.

[@hendricks4wd476]

He’s looking at crypto as a whole 1:04:35 and not judging each project on its own. That’s his first mistake.

[@user-cl5fk5en8l]

now i want to join this discord server! please share

[@callanmitchell1596]

Great video!

[@timtom-d5n]

just remember make video games one of the many hobbies you participate in and then just balance time between them all. Realistically if you want to get good in any of them try to keep it to about 4 hobbies at a time. That leaves about 2 hours per hobby if you work a 9-5, which is more than enough time over the course of a year to become proficient in any of them. It also gives you something to talk about when you meet people. My favorites are, programming, math, reading, and gaming/watching tv

[@RandomRandom-g5z]

One thing to always remember: Rules are written in Blood.

[@MikeDemarais]

you mfin goats 🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐🐐

[@martindbp]

I wish he asked more about money laundering and AI: won't money laundering soon be next to impossible as long as we can put the relevant records into an LLM and have it look for suspicious patterns? I'm guessing the bottle neck for catching more cases is just hiring enough people.

[@cronosloverszymon3704]

Nobody notice the Freudian slip at 1:06:24 he said CRO which is a crypto currency then the instant disheveled retraction “I want to eat CRO”

[@andy_ppp]

Love the comments by people who have never achieved anything dismissing Patrick as a poor quality guest 😂👍🏻

[@chrisellis-ai]

At 1:55:31 Dwarkesh asks a question about Patrick and ab testing. Where are his writings on this

[@karlirwin8005]

training.kalzumeus.com/newsletters/archive/ab_testing

[@333BIGern]

Feels like this is at 2x speed lol

[@dr_cheez811]

It's weird hearing "software engineer" as shorthand for "really smart guy". Just not really a thing outside sf.

[@ishaankoratkar9242]

Is this about the form filling difficulty? (In which case software engineer seems appropriate).

[@michaelsch2644]

thats honestly such a load of nonsense. Where do I even start. And what is he going on about with vaccination programmes. Those actually worked extremely well, especially in europe and tech companies had 0 to do with it

[@DerLangolier]

DHS maintains a list of hospitals and contact info beds.. ER's

[@nathandfox]

I think it's very naive at this point to think ANY part of the US government is even remotely competent.

[@thecannabisapp]

Institutions inevitably work for the benefit of its members than society at large. This is the way.

[@coscorrodrift]

love patrick, he's goated. his "dangerous professional" stuff is golden. really interesting the parts about money laundering and the tech sector, and of course the VaccinateCA thing (altho i enjoyed the side parts like the wow raid guild part of it lol) the part about writing was a cool response, but imo to a somewhat flawed question. i mean if you love money and startups etc obviously the writers you're gonna love the most are those, but i wouldn't have ever said that the biggest writing talent is in finance lol, most great writers i know of (the classics, etc) are basically humanities/artist type ppl

[@paytonj2620]

Men of culture ... we meet again

[@sasa-sv8kd]

oh no, I could not get the governement-promoted vaccine. But at least I know this intro is vaccine friendly and yt has not to inform me about potential misinfo, am I right?

[@epursimuove1633]

Don’t see this as anywhere near an urgent problem

[@EthelbertCoyote]

Crypto has changed things for the better... but not financial markets so much. The Asic and that approach to accelerators for specific areas of compute are important. Understanding governments responsibility to money laundering, energy v.s. Ai compute, so many related tangential things. I however for now agree with Mr. McKenzie.

[@TheCrusades1099]

He could play a great Willy Wonka or better yet… Mad Hatter!

[@nneisler]

Money laundering seems like a good job to get into