Interview
Patrick McKenzie — Money laundering, big tech censorship, SBF & Japan
- In the event of a worldwide pandemic, the team can mobilize resources via text to a specific number set, though this is explicitly not designated as "Plan A" for society.
- The United States government is predicted to continue institutional abdication of software as a core responsibility, despite the presence of individuals attempting to alter this trajectory.
- By 2030, the crypto industry is expected to maintain the claim that "you can still get in early" despite having created significant technology without achieving true potential or value proportionate to hundreds of billions in staked assets.
- If Large Language Models achieve sufficient competence, they may be deployed to run across every financial transaction, creating an implicit invasion of privacy exceeding current systems.
- The judicial outcome for Missouri v. Biden is predicted to be a "limited hangout" involving a walkback of actions, while government coercion of tech companies to censor speech is expected to persist.
- The tech industry is forecast to increase engagement in public policy advocacy and lobbying, transitioning away from viewing these activities as "dirty."
- Had the US recruited tech leaders into military capacities (e.g., as colonels) during the pandemic, a functional system could have provided political cover and clear deliverables to solve logistics problems.
- Current US government state capacity is deemed insufficient for competent pandemic administration, yet accepting the nation as incapable of performing "nice things" is viewed as an incorrect premise.
- The current "first doses first" vaccination policy is identified as objectively correct, saving more lives than the previous tiered system despite taking six weeks of meetings to adopt.
- If the US had prioritized operational speed over "health equity" regarding vaccine expiration, end-of-day shots could have been distributed to the public rather than discarded.
- Tech industry inaction during the pandemic is attributed to political incentives to avoid appearing more competent than the government, a dynamic predicted to repeat in future crises.
- The "Copenhagen principle of culpability" is expected to continue discouraging private entities from building public infrastructure due to liability for the totality of any failure's consequences.
- The US will face the necessity of addressing the decline in institutional state capacity, contrasting current conditions with the competent nationwide vaccine campaign execution during the 1918 flu pandemic.
- A future is predicted where pockets of the US can choose to have "nice things" without increased spending or 90-hour work weeks, framing this "will" as a choice rather than a cultural monolith.
- The tech industry must develop higher fidelity models for Washington to move beyond the simplistic view that the government is universally incompetent.
- A systemic shift from "blame" to "blameless postmortems" focusing on factual records and fixes is predicted to reduce fields of distortion and improve outcomes.
- Banking KYC/AML protocols currently function as a government policy arm generating millions of unactionable alerts, evolving into an intelligence community-sized operation of unread memos that was rational in the 1980s but is now inefficient.