Bill Gurley: Searching for Feynman

The excerpt opens with an introduction that presents the guest as a long-time investor who backed Uber and Zillow and has lived through more than 25 years of tech cycles. The speaker then sets aside the expected subject. Three years earlier, the speaker says, they gave a talk on regulatory capture at the same event and are glad the term entered public discussion. This time they say they will not talk about AI. The topic is serious, has been on their mind for five or six years, and starts with how humans usually respond to catastrophes.

The first case is the June 2021 collapse of a condominium tower in Surfside, Florida, which killed 98 people. The speaker separates two kinds of failure. The institutional failure had three parts: design problems from the start, a poor maintenance schedule, and a condominium board that ignored an inspection report. The technical failure was that the pool deck, exposed to saltwater air, corroded and collapsed into the basement, taking out structural columns and bringing the building down.

The point of the example is the number of parallel investigations. The speaker lists a New York Times investigative team with a 3D reconstruction, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (assigned after 9/11 to investigate building collapses, with two people spending five years on the case), a building-collapse expert hired by the town, a Florida grand jury, and 17 victim lawsuits consolidated into one class. These groups sometimes ran into each other and sometimes helped each other, but all tried to find the cause.

The Miami Herald gets particular praise. It had just been through bankruptcy, yet its beat reporter reached the scene within two hours, an investigative team brought in a University of Washington professor, and staffing grew to 37 people. The paper built its own 3D model and won a Pulitzer Prize. The speaker then stresses that finding the cause matters only if it leads to prevention, pointing to changes in Florida condominium rules that several other states, especially coastal ones, also adopted.

The second case covers the two 737 MAX crashes in October 2018 and March 2019. In the speaker's short version, Boeing was losing share to a fuel-efficient Airbus plane. A new design would have required extensive pilot training and been harder to sell, so Boeing put a fuel-efficient engine on the old 737. The engine was too large and had to sit further forward on the wing, which unbalanced the plane and occasionally made it tip up in test flights. Boeing added software called MCAS without telling anybody. When a sensor reported the nose tipping up, the autopilot pushed it down. In the Ethiopian crash, the speaker says, a sensor malfunctioned and the software pushed the plane into the ground.

The speaker counts "six searchers": a Senate commission, a House commission and the Department of Justice; the Indonesian agency that inspected the black boxes and quickly saw the pilot fighting the autopilot; the press, including a Seattle Times reporter who had covered Boeing for 16 years and won a Pulitzer, and the book Flying Blind; 57 whistleblowers who wrote to the Senate; victims' families who kept pressure on Congress; and the pilots' union, which secretly recorded a meeting with Boeing, gave the recording to the press, and filed FOIA requests against the company.