Investor Balaji Srinivasan is a highly original thinker in Silicon Valley on Biotech to Blockchain and everything in between. Most recently, he was quite early in warning us about the Coronavirus and was ridiculed for his efforts by many in the world of institutional sense-making. That is before people realized he was not wrong, but simply early.
In this episode Eric talks to Balaji on the topic of what it was like to see the future before it arrived and what his crystal ball suggests about what is likely to happen next. As Balaji understands our world, the Corona virus presents a complex set of challenges that will strongly discriminate between those who can pass it’s tests and those who will fail them. He sees this resulting in functional Green Zones which will become dominant in the future and Red Zones which will be characterized by dysfunctional responses. Presumably this new divide will then be expected to take over from the “North-South” divide between industrialized and developing nations.
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Essay
Eric Weinstein: Hi, it’s Eric with some thoughts for this week’s audio essay on the topic of superposition. Now, to those of you in the know, superposition is an odd word in that it is the scientific concept we reach for when trying to describe the paradox of Schrödinger’s cat and the theory and philosophy of quantum measurement. We don’t yet know how to say that the cat is both dead and alive at the same time rigorously, so we fudge whatever is going on with this unfortunate feline and say that the cat and the quantum system on which its life depends are a mixture of two distinct states that are, somehow, co-mingled in a way that has defied a satisfying explanation for about a century.
Now, I’m usually loathe to appeal to such quantum concepts in everyday life, as there is a veritable industry of people making bad quantum analogies. For example, whenever you have a non-quantum system that is altered by its observation, that really has nothing to do with the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees are almost certainly altered in their behavior due to her presence, but there is likely no competent quantum theorist who would analogize chimps to electrons and Goodall to an omniscient observable executing a quantum observation. Heisenberg adds nothing other than physics envy to the discussion of an entirely classical situation such as this. However, I have changed my mind in the case of superposition as I’d now like to explain.
To begin with, superposition isn’t a quantum phenomenon. For example, imagine that you’d come from Europe to Australia and had both Euros and Swiss Franks in your pockets. You might, then, be said to be in a superposition, because you have pocket change in both Euros and Franks rather than a pure state of only one currency or the other. The analogue of the physical observable, in this situation, would be something like a multiple choice question found on the landing card about the contents of your pockets. Here it is easy to see the danger of this set-up. Assuming you have there times as much value of Euros that you do in Franks, what happens when you get a question that doesn’t include your situation as an answer. What if the landing card asked, “Is all of your change in A) Euros or B) Swiss Franks?” with no other options available. Well, this, as stated, is a completely classical superposition problem having nothing to do with quantum theory.
Were you to have such a classical question asked of you like this, there would have been no way for you to answer. However, if the answer were on the multiple-choice menu, there would be no problem at all and you would give a clear answer determined by the state of your pockets. So, if the state in question isn’t on the multiple-choice menu; the classical world is forced to go mute as there is no answer determined by the system. Whereas if it is found on the list of allowable choices, the answer is, then, completely determined by the system’s state at the time that the question was asked.
Oddly, the quantum world is, in a way, exactly as deterministic as the classical one just described, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. In order to understand this, we’ll have to introduce a bit of jargon. So long as the system, now called the Hilbert space state, is on the list of answers, technically called the system of eigenvectors, corresponding to the question, now called a quantum observable, the question will return a completely deterministic answer, technically called the eigenvalue corresponding to the state eigenvector. These are, in a sense “good questions” in quantum theory, because the answer corresponding to the state of the system actually appears as one of the multiple-choice options.
So, if that is completely deterministic, well, then what happened to the famous Quantum Probability Theory and the indeterminacy we hear so much about? What if I told you that it were 100% confined to the situation which classical theory couldn’t handle either.? That is, Quantum Probability Theory only becomes relevant when you ask “bad” quantum questions which say that the system isn’t on the list of multiple choice answers. When the landing card asked if all of your change were completely in Euros or only in Franks, the classical system couldn’t answer because three times your value of Swiss Franks were held in Euros, so no answer could be determined, but if your pocket change were somehow quantum, well, then you might find that 75% of the time your pocket coins would bizarrely turn into pure Euros and would bewilderingly turn into pure Franks 25% of the time just by virtue of your being asked by the landing card. In the quantum theory, this is due to the multiple-choice answers of the so-called observable represented by the landing card question, not being well-suited to the mixed state of your pockets, in the superposition between Euros and Franks.
In other words, quantum theory gets probabilistic, only where classical theory went mute. All of the indeterminacy seems to come from asking bad multiple-choice questions in both the classical and quantum regimes in which the state of the system doesn’t fit any given answer. Quite honestly, I’ve never heard a physicist re-work the issue of quantum probabilities in just this way, so as to highlight that the probabilistic weirdness comes only from the quantum being overly solicitous and accommodating really bad questions. For some reason, they don’t like calling an observable that doesn’t have the state of the system as an allowable answer a bad question, but that is precisely why I do like it. It points out that the quantum is deterministic where the classical theory is deterministic and is only probabilistic where the classical theory is mute. This is because it is weirdly willing to answer questions that are, in a sense that can be made precise, “bad questions” to begin with.
That doesn’t get rid of the mystery, but it re-casts it so that it doesn’t sound so weird. The new question is: “Why would the quantum system overcompensate for the lousy questions imposed while the classical system seems to know not to answer?” So, why bring any of this up? Well, the first reason is that I couldn’t resist sneaking in personal reformulation of the quantum measurement problem that most people will have never considered, but the second reason is that I have come to believe we are wasting our political lives on just such superposition questions. For example, let’s see if we can solve the abortion debate problem right now on this podcast using superposition. as it is much easier than the abortion problem itself.
The abortion debate problem is that everyone agrees that, before fertilization, there is no human life to worry about, and that after a baby is born, there is no question that it has a right to live. Yet, pro-choice and pro-life activists insist on telling us that the developing embryo is either a mere bundle of cells suddenly becoming alive only when born, or a full-fledged baby the moment the sperm enters the egg. You can guess my answer here, the question of, “Is it a baby’s life or a women’s choice?” Is agreed upon by everyone before fertilization or following birth, because the observable in question has the system as one of the two multiple choice answers in those two cases.
However, during the process of embryonic development, something miraculous is taking place that we simply don’t understand scientifically. Somehow a non-sentient blastula becomes a baby by a process utterly opaque to science, which, as yet, has no mature theory of consciousness. The system in-utero is in a changing and progressing superposition tilted heavily towards not being a baby at the beginning and tilted heavily towards being a baby at the end of the pregnancy, but the problem is that we have allowed the activists, rather than the embryologists and developmental biologists, to hand us the life versus choice observable with its two terrible multiple-choice options.
If we had let the embryologists set the multiple-choice question, there would be at least 23 Carnegie stages for the embryo before you even get to fetal development, but instead of going forward from what we both know and don’t know with high confidence about the system, we are instead permanently deranged by being stuck with Schrödinger’s embryo by the activists who insist on working backward from their political objectives.
So, does this somehow solve the abortion issue? Of course not! All it does is get us to see how ridiculously transparent we are in our politics that we would allow our society to be led by those activists that would shoehorn the central scientific miracle of human development into a nutty political binary of convenience. We don’t even think to ask, “Who are these people who have left us at each other’s throats debating an inappropriate multiple choice question that can never be answered?” Well, in the spirit of The Portal, we are always looking for a way out of our perennial problems to try to find an exit, and I think that the technique here of teaching oneself to spot superposition problems in stalemated political systems brings a great deal of relief to those of us who find the perspective of naive activism a fairly impoverished world view.
The activist mindset is always trying to remove nuanced selections that might better match our world’s needs from among the multiple-choice answers until it finds a comical binary. Do you support the war on drugs? Yes or no? Are you for or against immigration? Should men and women be treated equally? Should we embrace capitalism or choose socialism? Racism, systemic problem or convenient excuse? Is China a trading partner or strategic rival? Has technology stagnated or is it, in fact, racing ahead at break-neck speed? Has feminism gone too far or not far enough? In all of these cases, there is an entire industry built around writing articles that involve replacing conversations that might progress towards answers and agreement with simple multiple-choice political options that foreclose all hope. In general, we can surmise when this has occurred, because activism generally leaves a distinct signature where the true state of a system is best represented as a superposition of the last two remaining choices that bitterly divide us handed to us by activists.
So, I will leave you with the following thought: the principle of superposition is not limited to quantum weirdness and it may be governing your life at a level you have never considered. Think about where you are most divided from your loved ones politically. Then, ask yourself, when I listen to the debates at my dinner table, am I hearing a set of multiple choice answers that sound like they were developed by scholars interested in understanding or by activists, who are pushing for an outcome. If the latter, think about whether you couldn’t make more progress with those you love by recognizing that the truth is usually in some kind of a superposition of the last remaining answers pushed by the activists, but you don’t have to accept these middlebrow binaries, dilemmas, and trilemnas. Instead try asking a new question: “If my loved ones and I trash the terms of debate foisted upon us by strangers, activists, and the news media, could we together fashion a list of multiple choice answers that we might agree contain an answer that we all could live with and better describes the state of the system?”
I mean, do you really want open or closed borders? Do you really want to talk about psilocybin and heroin in the same breath? Do you really want to claim that there is no systemic oppression or that it governs every aspect of our lives? Before long, it is my hope that you will develop an intuition that many long-running stalemated discussions are really about having our lives shoehorned by others into inappropriate binaries that only represent the state of our world as a superposition of inappropriate and simplistic answers that you never would have chosen for yourself.
Transcript
Hello, you found the portal. I’m your host, Eric Weinstein. And today I get to sit down with my friend, constantly inspiring mind, which is always restless. Mr. Balaji Srinivasan Balaji. Great to have you with us, Eric, great to be here. So Balaji, of course, is the former CTO of Coinbase, as well as general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And also the founder of a biotech startup that I think sold for over 300 million if I’m not incorrect biology, is that correct? Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. Yep. And generally just a great, uncorrelated mind and spirit, who has been particularly good, getting us early information on the corona situation? So Balaji, can you just give us a little bit of history with you, and the Coronavirus? And how you came to be concerned about this and what you’ve learned in this process?
Balaji 21:05
Yeah, sure. So, um, you know, I’ve been; basically, I guess, a part-time citizen journalist, Sean Corona for the last three months or so four months, since late January, you know, I was going to be doing some other things this year. And I may still do them and try and fold them in or reboot them. But I was basically just following the news. And I saw the lockdown of Wu Han on January 23. And I realized that was a very serious thing. Because actions mean louder, you know, speak louder than words, especially in China. And, and from that, I started digging into the biomedical literature and read everything I could get my hands on and talk to a lot of people in China to get a view on the ground. And mainly, the reason that I dug into it is, um, you know, like, as an investor, you’re tuned to look for things that can get very big from a small base, you know, and, and this was the first thing that I felt like I was diligence thing on that if it did get really big, that I would feel bad about it. Like, normally, you’re doing your due diligence, good investment, and you want to hope you hope it gets big. And this was something where I was diligence, can try to attack it and cut the legs out from under it, like, you know, like what one normally would, and I couldn’t, and so I started tweeting about it and covering it. And, and that brings us to the presentation, lots of things happen, obviously, over that period. So this is really an interesting perspective. In some sense, the virus was pitching us from Wu Han with all of those fumigations. And there were a small number of early adopters in the states who really got the virus, but for the most part, the herd couldn’t understand what was going on. And in part, that puts you as an early adopter, because you started talking very early about this being a potentially worldwide disaster.
Yeah, I mean, like, the thing about it is, it’s one of the things that had tail risk, right? Actually, you know, I was certainly by no means the only person like Nassim Taleb, on, you know, also had, you know, some writing at the same time, put out a paper on this. And, and, you know, if you think about tail events, right, whether Taleb has from kind of a, you know, Wall Street perspective, or, you know, like I have we have from a tech or VC perspective, um, Tyler Cohen is a good way of talking about this, where he calls it like, base Raiders versus growth cases, right? And the base rate, people essentially say, hey, what you’re talking about has never happened before. And therefore, tomorrow will be the same as today. And therefore, you know, you’re crazy. You know, like, things won’t change, right. And frankly, actually, most of the time, that prediction algorithm is pretty good in the same way that like predicting tomorrow’s weather from today’s is actually took a while for weather prediction to beat that. Right. Um, and, and then, of course, you’ve got another school of thought, which is a growth algorithm, or the growth mindset, where you can say, hey, actually, maybe this thing could go vertical. And, and in truth, intelligence, right,
Eric Weinstein 24:15
Yeah. So who do you think of as being early on this that had a large platform and a strong voice?
Balaji 24:24
Aarly, it had a lash large part from a strong voice? Um,
so I actually want to give a let’s see who.
So there’s folks in China, like Chi Ching. I’m probably mispronouncing that, but basically, there were actually some Chinese news outlets publish really important stuff on the Coronavirus, and it was actually censored in real time, like I archived the links, and I could see them being taken down in real time. And they had a fairly large platform. You China. So that’s kind of one group. A, let’s see, it was so I’d say Laurie Garrett, who she had written a book on, basically, you know, illnesses like the, I think the coming plague she had written.
I think,
Taleb is somebody I think actually, Scott Alexander put together a long list of folks. And you can kind of go through that list. I’m sure I’ll, you know, forget somebody off the top of my head. And, you know, actually Matt Stoller, who I disagree with on many things on was was also early on this. You know, Matt, Matt, and I have, I don’t know, we may agree on 30% of things, may 40%. But we’re very much discussing the rest However, he was, he was absolutely right. And early on, this
Eric Weinstein 25:48
is a very disagreeable person in general. And it seems to me like no one who lack there was no agreeable person who got this early.
Balaji 25:59
You had that right. And that’s, that’s because, um, you know, the thing is, the term disagreeable has a pejorative connotation. Right? Um, and, you know, you can use it in the neutral sense of someone who will not agree for the sake of agreeing. But it’s basically something where, you know, you might, you might portray both of them as positive. There’s like a consensus model. And there’s like, I don’t know, an independent thinking model, right? Or first principles model. And, yeah, like if you’re a consensus thinker, it’s is something where they’re, you know, you just get attacked and yelled at and mocked for, for saying something that was quite different. And, and you know, what, like, a lot of people who say something that’s different from the consensus aren’t necessarily correct. And then you get back into the loop of Okay, how do you know whether they’re correct or not? Right, but go ahead?
Eric Weinstein 26:54
Well, I guess I just I, if I feel like if I actually have to refight that battle, every show, I’ll get nowhere. So I’ve just decided that we’ve won and that they’re obviously wrong because the record shows that they’re obviously wrong and wrong for the same reasons, every time. Like, if I were to say something about the fact that we should really be thinking about the potential for the COVID epidemic to turn towards armed conflict and war. I’ll elicit the same reaction from people who aren’t allowed to think that many steps ahead, like well, Chicken Little, I don’t know, you know, great, I guess the sky is falling again. And right. And whatever that energy is, part of our lesson, I think, is just to ignore it, to learn. That it’s it’s sort of an evil thing that will hurt us very badly. Because what we’re doing is we’re learning to associate the people who have the timestamps again, on this one, I don’t have the timestamps. In fact, the first thing that I say on this is on February 9, where I say, No, I don’t yet have a take on the Coronavirus, where I at least knew that I wasn’t doing the work, I was seeing too much crazy stuff. So I guess what I want to do is to sort of say, look, let’s try to do something different on my show. We don’t have to refight the Battle of disagreeability, the disagreeable people are writing the other people are wrong. Okay.
What do we do now with the coexistence of these communities? Like, for example, you’ve seen these tech journalists who really wanted to go after the tech bros who are like preppers. And you know, the whole thing?
How do we continue to manage our sense making operation in a world where the giant sense making organs get things wrong, and don’t even stop to take, you know, the measure of the situation, they don’t catch their breath. It doesn’t matter whether somebody like Mike cernovich was early. The point is Mike cernovich is off the menu, and whoever got it wrong and said, this is a psychological problem. We should treat it psychologically, that person will continue to have a job at the Washington Post. Why won’t this change?
Balaji 29:14
So, um, so a few things. One is actually I think both these questions, but they’re the first thing and this is related, which are
there’s two ways that you can diverge from the conventional wisdom, this is almost tautological, but one is you can be more correct. And the other is you can be less correct. And, and the thing is, I think, you know, let’s call it and that’s just on the west coast, but there’s a the disagreeable state of mind or you know, Taleb state of mind is you divert from the consensus, because you’ve got a better view than this. You’re not consistent, right, you know, and gillar Milligan and we’re also seeing, you know, I would say the, like q&a type stuff and so on, which is non consensus and You know, I’d argue wrong, and kind of crazy stuff.
Eric Weinstein 30:03
And even there, you have to be very careful because any large group of disagreeable people finds a lot of discarded truth that the mainstream doesn’t want to deal with. So even in the darkest corners of the web and make them as dark as you want, they usually have a little bit of truth that they’re carefully polishing, because the mainstream won’t deal with.
Balaji 30:24
So So this gets basically to I think one of my one-liners, which is the internet increases variance. And you can hover on that, and you can do a lot with that statement. So for example, you go from 30-minute sitcoms to 32nd clips and 30 episode Netflix binges. You go from, you know, a stable nine to five job to gig economy on one side, and you know, a 20-year-old billionaire on the other side, right. And on many different dimensions, the internet is increasing variants, it’s going, you know, for example, from three television channels or cable news to incredible, you know, variety of different media outlets, every personal view on
Eric Weinstein 31:04
what’s up, and we’re in has grown arbitrarily large,
Balaji 31:07
yes. And as arbitrary, the large That’s right. And, you know, in the sense, every person is now a personal media channel. And I think a big next thing is that they are going to become personal media corporations. And so what I think is important in this world is to think about what decentralized truth looks like. And, you know, how do you come back to reference points that are true, even if people don’t want to believe they’re true? So, you know, one that I think about a lot is, you know, the blockchain, right? So basically, the Bitcoin blockchain, there’s actually a great book on this concept of this angle on Bitcoin that I don’t think people outside the space really think about too much. It’s called the truth machines by Paul Vigna. And Michael Casey. Casey is a former Wall Street Journal, journalist, and, and vigna is a current alias journalist. And so both think about they’re actually very good. They’re not haters or anything like that. They’re smart. And you can learn something from them. Anyway, so this book, the truth machine makes the point that I’m, or it popularizes the point that’s well known within the community, that whether you’re Saudi or Japanese, or Brazilian, American, Norwegian, Chinese, what have you, you have the same view of the Bitcoin blockchain as everybody else. And that means the database of who has what money everybody agrees on, on and that’s a really important point, because that’s, that’s a truth, which there’s an enormous literal incentive to change in the sense of, if you could, you know, falsify it, if you could somehow manipulate it to award yourself a billion dollars on you would do so or people would do so. And, and so this is a really interesting example of truth in an adversarial environment where there’s an enormous incentive to, to break it to abuse it, but the database hasn’t been corrupted, because we’ve used technology, cryptography, other kinds of things, proof of work to make it difficult to fake this history to fake this truth. And that’s very powerful because I think you can extend that to other kinds of things, as traditional sources of authority are metabolized. Um, people do want to have common reference points where you can cite this, and the other person will have to concede it’s actually true. And then you can kind of move forward from there premise, premise premise premise, at least with a rational person. So let me pause there. Because I think that’s part of where I think we end up going.
Eric Weinstein 33:42
Well, I like that a lot. And this is what I talked about in terms of self refereed games that in a math department, you may really dislike somebody, but if they have the better argument as to who’s right and who’s wrong. I’ve almost never seen an argument go multiple days where people can’t come to terms with who is correct and who is not. So there are these, you know, jujitsu to an extent as long as you’re not talking about rule-breaking, somebody either choked you out, or they haven’t. And there are edge cases, of course, in every situation, but we have a, we have a coming world in which the attempt to reference things to authoritative sources, as I think now going to fail. Wikipedia, which is the ultimate sort of top layer on top of an authoritative source model is probably going to get degraded because too many people have write privileges inside of what were previously authoritative sources. So I like the idea that the blockchain is an example of how you force reason and rationality because it’s too expensive not to participate in communal truth. Although I don’t think it works as well for situations where you’re not solving an arithmetic problem or something equivalent to an arithmetic problem. I mean,
Balaji 35:08
so so that’s so wait here. So you’re smart enough that you’re you added that qualifier on the end, which is somewhat something equivalent to an arithmetic problem. And a really interesting question is how many things can be so reduced? And I think it’s a much larger set of things and people think so once you can track, you know, who has what Bitcoin, you can extend the same thing to any digital form of property, right, which includes stocks, bonds, you know, much of the world economy, it includes the passwords to who has access to what, you know, website, who has a private keys to a device to a car, to a house, right. So it has to
Eric Weinstein 35:48
do with what who can, you know, we can agree that a robber might have a painting, that the painting may not belong to the robber. And so when you start getting into issues of fairness, as opposed to just issues of custody, and again, you know, to the same extent, when you have something that might or might not be equivalent to arithmetic, one thing that you find that’s very interesting is watching the number of bets that don’t complete, where two people start off acting like they’ve got a really serious disagreement. And then somebody says, well, let’s, let’s settle it with a wager. And then you watch as the stape statement gets sharpened, you realize that the two people never really had a disagreement, because they can’t come to an agreement as to what the bet should be. Because quite frankly, they both have the same underlying model of reality, but they wanted to put a different sort of emotive layer on top.
Balaji 36:44
Yes, I think it’s also interesting, because in the formulation of a bet, on each participant immediately with the prospect of loss starts hedging. Right. And, and, and that’s rational to do in the sense of, you know if you think some metric is going to hit 80%. Well, you take the bet, if you think it’s own says it’s only going to hit 10%, right, there’s a sort of a tug of war on it, and people want to give themselves more margin, right. Um, but actually Tyler Cowen A while back tweeted, or maybe was tab rock, he posted something about how bedding produces partisanship. That’s to say it is, you know, capitalism is the opposite to tribalism, where it, uh, you know, the prospect of individual gain and loss means it there’s an incentive to give a non-consensus answer now, but I want to return to your point about, you know, sources of authoritative truth melting down, you know, like, the center cannot hold and metabolizing I think I have, I think there are at least five replacements for universal authority of truth. Um, the first is most obvious, which is tribal truth. You know, like, it’s true, because your Chieftan says, it’s true. And we see that a lot, right. So that actually kind of rebuild authority of truth. That’s just not a universal truth. That’s what your group leader is saying. Right? So that’s a big thing on social media. On a second is iterative truth. So the next three, I’m going to talk about come from, I think, tech, so inner truth of the GitHub sense, where rather than put out a story and say it’s capital T true, you know, like the New York Times, literally, The New York Times markets itself, as essentially infallible, neutral truth. Right. And, you know, like it runs it that ad campaign saying the truth isn’t easy. The truth isn’t this truth, isn’t that right. And they published a fair number of just the flu, you know, pieces, by the way, you know, and then recently, they’re like, you know, the truth is, it’s not just the flu. And I just kind of laughed when I saw that, right. So I’m an alternative to saying the article is true. And how dare you question it is the Git or GitHub model where you put out some code, and you know, it’s going to have bugs. And, you know, whereas in an East Coast model, or an academic model of retraction or correction is this huge black mark, right, that people will fight tooth and nail to avoid? Right, as you’re aware, you know, folks will try to avoid that academia, they try to avoid that in journalism, a correction is like, ooh, you know, and it’s like, you know, man, that was a humiliation for them, right? Um, by contrast, a pull request, you know, as somebody who files a bug, you know, an active project will have edits, and it will have issues and bugs and pull requests. There’s nobody’s ever in software, who will pretend to say, Oh, my code is always right. And it has no bugs, right. In fact, the whole thing is set up, recognizing that it’s fallible and iterative. And so that’s the second model of literature. Okay, it works well in the West Coast model to get a model.
Eric Weinstein 39:41
Except that the problem is that in the GitHub model, you have individual coders who are submitting code, and there is this concept of just a very basic level, whether or not the code should or should not run, does it run well. compile a lot of what we see in. And I guess the first thing you had was tribal truth, which I don’t even want to call tribal truth. Maybe it’s tribal strategy. Like, don’t contradict the quarterback. We’re trying to win a game here, you know whether the quarterback is right or wrong, the quarterback is running the show. And so this could be like, well, the Democratic Party has chosen Joe Biden and our, our associated organs are behind him. What are you doing questioning Tara Reid and the fact that he’s 77 years old? Like that’s, that’s a particular kind of an issue, which is, you’re going to break down the coherence of the system. I guess what, where I’m, I’m really driving with all of this biology is. I saw this with 2008. And I saw it with the seem of all people, which is when it was clear that the world had gotten this wrong, and that a tiny number of people have gotten it right. We did not promote those tiny numbers of people appropriately. So. And one of the things I find interesting in this situation, I’m just going to repeat myself. One of the things I find interesting about the situation, I went through this a little bit with Nassim Taleb in 2008. And, you know, he was getting it right. And there was a small group of us who were very alarmed about the state of finance and the risks that were being swept under the rug, in particular, through well-established metrics like value at risk. And what we found was is that the people who had been the big critics didn’t become super prominent establishment figures, the establishment would rather deal with the failed people who screwed everything up a second time, a third time, a fourth time. Because it’s really not about us improving as a society, it’s about the fact that it’s hard to profit. In stagnant times, if you’re not getting things wrong, like get getting things wrong is actually valuable if what you’re doing is transferring money between parties. So for example, when you print money, you can talk about it in terms of stimulus, much-needed stimulus, we were determined to put a floor in the market, restore confidence, all of that is the language for transferring wealth. We don’t hear it as wealth transfers, and to your point about Bitcoin. What happens when I have a group of people who can transfer wealth by using a printing press? And they talk only in terms that are so abstract as to be lifeless, bloodless, meaningless?
