Bill Gurley @bgurley: the Army Corps of Engineers built the levees that failed in Hurricane Katrina. It paid an outside engineering society $1 million to help investigate itself. At Jason Calacanis's @Jason All-In Summit, Gurley walked through what happened next. The Corps paid the American Society of Civil Engineers $1 million to join its internal review, and the ASCE team got folded into the Corps' own process instead of staying separate from it. Engineering professor Raymond Seed later wrote a 42-page report to the ASCE cataloguing every place it had blocked the investigation. Paying an independent reviewer does not make the review independent. The check only holds if the reviewer's paycheck comes from somewhere else. Podcast Alpha's coverage of this talk maps the same failure across five separate catastrophes, plus where Gurley applies it to COVID. Source: All-In Podcast -