Pomp Podcast #295: Balaji Srinivasan On The Argument For Decentralization - Part 1

Foreign guys. Bang bang. I have Balaji here with me. Thank you so much for doing this. I'm super excited to talk to you.

Cool. Good to be here for sure.

For those that don't know who you are, you've got a lot of relevant experience and I know that you are not a fan of credentialism, but maybe just give us a couple of data points just on your background and training so that people can understand the perspective you're coming from.

Sure. So my background, you know, Stanford, Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Also have an Ms. In chemical engineering. I taught computer science and stats at Stanford for several years, started a genomics company which ended up a CTO and co founder that ended up, that ended up being sold for 375 million. I was angel investor in Soylent, Superhuman, Lambda School, Cameo, Bitcoin, early in Ethereum, zcash, other kinds of things. Also I was a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz multibillion dollar venture capital firm. Helped boot up what became parts of our bio and crypto funds. I taught a MOOC course with 250,000 students worldwide back in 2013. So being an educator as well and, and then within crypto I done a bunch of stuff. I'm an investor in lots of crypto companies and coins and whatever. But most recently I took over one of our portfolio companies, long story which I wrote about, turned that around, turned into Earn.com, got that to profitability, sold it to Coinbase, was CTO of Coinbase while at Coinbase did a bunch of stuff but in particular a few headlines. Took earn and integrate into Coinbase at Coinbase, Earn, which has done several hundred million dollars in sales from 2018, 2019, you can, it's on the homepage of Coinbase if you, if you tried it right. So. And helped launch usdc, our stablecoin which has done very well, drove all the asset addition and so on there. All this is obviously with a team of folks and whatnot, brought on billions of dollars in assets for custody and basically just did a bunch of stuff there and, and then since last June I finally taken the first time off that I've had in more than 10 years or whatever and because I can't like I'm not wired like a normal person to take a vacation just because you're either doing something or you're not doing it and if you're not doing it, it's much easier than you don't have. It's like a homework assignment or whatever. When you're a kid and you have something due on a Christmas break and know. So I can never take like a normal vacation, but took time off first time in a long time and basically just, you know, did math. I do math and I program and I angel invest and whatnot. And that brings us to the present day, you know. And you know, I can take from here for sure.

Before we get into the fun stuff, what's the biggest surprise or learning you've had from taking time off? Like the thing you didn't expect to walk away with or learn during that time?

I think I was surprised at how easy it is to like. Like the time passes fast actually. You wouldn't kind of think that. So yeah, just it's, it's not, it's not like a learning or anything like that, but rather, um, unless you go after things with the same discipline that you have when you're an operating executive, it's easy to just lose a week, lose two weeks or whatever, which is fine. You don't always have to be super efficient on everything. Um, but that was just something which I hadn't had time off in such a long time that I hadn't realized that.

Yeah, that's awesome. You were one of very few early on that identified the potential issues with the coronavirus. And we're quite vocal about, hey, this is serious. This may come here. Here's potential implications. And you know, frankly, we all now know many people. One laughed, two literally disagreed publicly. There was articles written, kind of the whole nine yards. You've been vindicated kind of in a weird way of nobody wanted this to happen. But at the same time you were able to kind of warn people, if you will, what is your evaluation as we sit here kind of mid May of just what's transpired?

Right.

We don't have to go in tons of detail. People obviously know a lot of this, but just kind of what's your general evaluation of that health crisis?

So, you know, I've tweeted some of this and I'm writing a bunch of long form stuff which I will, which I will drop at some point. But act one was and is the virus crisis, which is ongoing. Act two is the financial crash. And act three, I think is the crisis of our institutions. And I really think that we are in for some crazy stuff. And I think I called some of these aspects actually pretty early on. But I think the new political axis, or whether you want to call it trade off axis or what have you, we'll worldwide is antivirus and pro freedom. Okay, so those are like kind of like the two poles, you might call it the total state versus market anarchy. Okay, so what's kind of going on here? So we're in the middle of this huge political realignment where old issues just don't matter as much and things are rotating and new coalitions are forming, even if there's some old party labels or things like that. And I think you can identify those two camps as centralization versus decentralization, as modern monetary theory versus btc, as the state versus the network, as kind of mandatory versus free and health versus wealth. Okay. It's actually interesting to think of those as kind of opposite poles in the sense that the state is, you know, the actor that is now pushing quarantines. And it's, you know, it's enforcing stay at home orders, you know, masks being mandatory, all the type of stuff. And there's a genuine argument for it in the sense that, you know, many, many predispositions or presuppositions rather that people have about, okay, you know, my neighbor can do their thing and it doesn't matter so long as it doesn't affect me completely break down in a coronavirus world where if your neighbor is not taking precautions, you very well could get sick. And so you have an interest in their health in a way that you just didn't before. Now, in a sense, arguably that's good because, you know, okay, well, I have an interest in their health. I will help them stay healthier and keep myself healthier at the same time. There's, you can make an argument from a skin in the game or alignment standpoint that, you know, a community of people who care about each other's health will probably be better. You know, just like, you know, you're part of a fitness club or whatever, you know, and, you know, people lift together and that's actually good, right? So, but let's call this one axis, right, the total state. And that's, you know, the lockdown of Wuhan. That is the, you know, surveillance of folks who, you know, with yellow and green and red codes, not just in China, but other places. That's price controls, et cetera. Okay? Now on the other side is market anarchy. And this is essentially the polar opposite of that. And this is to caricature it in extremists. It is don't wear a mask, or I should have the choice as to whether to wear a mask. It is like the laws are necessarily bad, everything the state is doing is wrong, et cetera. But the good aspect of it is, look, we're gonna need to decentralize, we're gonna need to encrypt, we're gonna need to protect privacy and we're gonna need to have a free market because the state may protect health at the expense of wealth to such an extent that folks are giving silly orders to seize masks, seize hand sanitizer, to impose price controls to ban people at Walmart, and Target to stop Uber Eats from doing things. You know, Elizabeth Warren even proposed like banning mas or whatever over a certain size. Those things have nothing to do with controlling the virus whatsoever. And there are things and of course printing trillions of dollars. Right. And so there's legitimate abuses and failures on the side of the total state that the kind of anarchy poll will correct and push against. And I think either of these two poles is probably bad, but what's not probably is bad. What's interesting is how many different permutations and so on there are in the center. It's like a very, you know, there's, there's a number of different combinations and things you can do. Okay, and I'll give some of them. So lots of many different countries. It's almost like the ideologies that they had almost didn't matter and now they've just executed in totally different ways. For example, Sweden and New Zealand, you would have clustered them together ideologically before this. They've taken polar opposite policies where Sweden has basically taken a let it rip policy and New Zealand has controlled the virus. The US and Australia, you might have clustered them and Australia has contained the virus and the US is not. But then even more than that, to give some sense of where society ends up, you could have a Chinese authoritarian state. You could have a Taiwanese democratic state that didn't even have a lockdown but has managed to mostly keep the virus under control. Or actually not mostly, seemingly totally. You could have a New Zealand policy which is democratic, but also did a lockdown and got the virus under control. You could have Sweden's policy which had no lockdown and is letting the virus go crazy. Or you could have America's policy, which is kind of a cargo cult half ass lockdown and then combined with letting the virus go out. So it's like at least five different combinations. Taiwan, China, New Zealand, the US and Sweden. And then there's a sixth which I think is emerging in the US which is the snow crash strategy. And I think this is actually where the US is probably going to land up, where some combination of snow crash and ready player one, the state has failed. It is actually not capable of Doing the blocking and tackling. If it had any tricks up its sleeve, we would have seen them already at this point. Right? There's no crack military unit. There's no special forces or super vaccine. There's nothing like that. There's no Area 51, there's no Manhattan Project. No one's coming to save us. And so once you realize that, that's actually, it's something where it's completely the opposite of the movies. You know, in Contagion or in, you know, any movie, you know, there's a. I mean that's the biggest thing that Contagion, the movie got wrong, that the CDC was going to be competent. Right. I'm not saying the CDC is completely incompetent. They've done some things right. You know, some of the studies they've done are fine, but. But they are not actually able to control a disease and they're the center for Disease Control. Right. So where I think we land up is some combination and I'm not endorsing this, by the way, but I think there's a few possible scenarios where the US lands up. So one is, and these are not mutually exclusive, but let's call it Snow Crash. Ready Player one. And then someone else actually said Asimov's like Naked sun or Solaria is also another one. Right, but let me go through these. So Snow Crash would basically be where the state can't protect people. For example, Amazon is doing mass testing of all its employees. It's developing all these technologies to essentially turn Amazon's campus into a green zone. And potentially that becomes an export where they can export that to other corporate campuses and other communities. It's like the natural extension of Ring and some of the other products that they sell, but where you basically keep the virus out with multiple layers of defense. Everything the most extreme would be like negative pressure, air rooms, but hand sanitizer, gloves, all that type of stuff. Then so basically what that is as a corporate, individual and community imposed order that controls a virus and keeps it out of your campus. But the commons are a tragedy. Okay, then second is ready player one, where there's proposals, serious proposals to print $2,000 a month for everybody. If you've seen that. Right. And if that proposal goes through, and I think it might, you have a scenario where everybody is sitting at home and they're receiving $2,000 a month and that's money. Which, see, the thing is, I think we're going to see both deflation and inflation. Deflation in the price of all the things that People don't want anymore like air travel or. Well, actually air travel is tricky. I'll come back to that. Let's say concerts, events, things of that nature. People will slash prices to try to bring folks in. But then you look at price inflation of things people do want like masks, hand sanitizer, other type of things, right? And once you get soaring prices, here's where the crypto stuff comes in or one of the many angles. You have soaring prices for masks, for hand sanitizer and you know, pulse oximeters, all the type of stuff to deal with the disease as well as for things like food, consumer staples, because you've suddenly injected a huge amount of printed money and capacity. Supply is usually flat or down because people are staying at home, people because supply chains have been disrupted, because folks overseas aren't shipping as much stuff and so on. So you have like much more money and flat or down supply. Well, and you have demand, right? Prices are going to increase, which we've seen for masks and hand sanitizer. So then once you have prices soar, many states will impose price controls which will cause shortages and, or they will prevent the sale of some of these things. And ebay and other places have actually already prevented the sale, I believe, of masks and hand sanitizer. And again I'm using as a placeholder for a lot of other things that people would buy. At which point markets go dark and you start to get the crypto economy. You know, things like open bazaar and so on become important because you can't buy the stuff on an above ground market like a mask or whatever is like hard to, hard to buy in N95 mask. And you know, you can make the argument like people shouldn't be able to buy those masks, they should only buy a surgical mask or whatever. I understand, right. But the demand will be there that people will want to buy those things and they'll want to buy food and they'll want to buy consumer staples and whatnot. And so, you know, essentially this printed money that they get will be I think useful for three things. You know, one, maybe it'll pay the rent, maybe there'll be some price control imposed on the rent or something like that. Two, maybe it'll buy food and three, it'll pay for Internet stuff which is probably the most. Something like Dropbox is probably going to have the least problem if there's significant inflation because their margins or gross margins are so high that the marginal cost of delivering another Dropbox thing to somebody is not that high. But then you have this ready player one world where people are basically staying home and being paid to play video games or just surf the Internet and they, they just don't go out. But consumption is dropped off a cliff. And then the third model is this naked sun model where you know, folks go out to rural areas and work remote from there and they kind of have a natural social distancing built into it. And you know, they just socialize over the Internet for the most part other than being with, you know, like obviously they're probably with family members, maybe there's some friends who move out there. But it's like more like a rural life. Like a lot of people used to live in the 1800s in the U.S. you know, you just really relatively low population density and you, you know, maybe you put on your VR headset or you, you otherwise connect that way, but you have just, you know, greenery and so on around. It's kind of a beautiful landscape. Right. So I'm not saying all of those. I mean those are not mutually exclusive. All of those could happen at the same time. But we start to get a future that in the US that looks very different than what is happening in green zones that have managed to keep the virus under control. Well, anyway, let me pause here because that was a long kind of burst, but I want you to get in a word and go ahead.

No, I think, keep going. The big thing that I would just if you can clarify. So I think part of what you're talking about is like a decentralized response and then the state response. Right. And those two things are somewhat counterbalanced to each other, but it's not. Also, I don't believe you think that it's a complete blanket in even a country.

Right.

So right now I think most people would say, hey, the east has been very, very good from a centralized standpoint. And part of that is because the population buys into those centralized governments. Here in the west there's a little bit less of that kind of buy in. And so people are maybe somewhat wary and also kind of have this democratic view of like the government is one voice, but we also have a voice. And so that has been somewhat of a more decentralized response. I've seen you talk a lot though, like it isn't just country by country. You actually may get a breakdown even further than that. Yeah. At the state, county, maybe even the city level. So kind of keep going on that thread, but just totally.

Yeah, sure should address this once. Yeah. So one very important high level thing I think is so two Important high level things in my personal preference stack rank and other people may differ on this, but at least I think I am consistent or what I say is consistent given this implicit value set, which is, or not even implicit. I've been very explicit about it, which is I would rank like a competent centralized state like Singapore, I think that delivers the best quality of life. I know Singapore is trying to get corona under control and so on, but a Singapore, a Taiwan, a South Korea, and now this gets my second point. In New Zealand and Australia they have managed to get the virus under control, so it appears. So is Slovakia. I think Estonia has, I think Israel has. Right. These are places which, you know, I think will provide. Those are like, that's the best answer, like a competent centralized state for something like this. Then a distant second is the decentralized response, the snow crash response, where in the absence of a competent centralized state, if you have an incompetent or even worse, a malicious state, the decentralized response at least allows you, your community, your company to get it together. Right. If you have a hapless government, what's happened is the government is now, by not doing a good job of keeping the commons free of this virus, it's like a tax on every transaction that's happening. It's basically like an out of control fire that's burning because the fire department can't put it out, because the CDC can't control disease, because the FDA hasn't approved tests. We have this viral fire burning that has imposed a tax on every transaction. Right. Okay, so then at least allow individuals to put out the fire in their own little zones. That's the decentralized response. And then the worst is like the incompetent or malicious. And you know, you can always argue which, which is which. But I do think there's a distinction. You know, malicious is like, you know, North Korea. Right. Or something like that. And you know, incompetent is simply just much of, much of the US unfortunately. Right. And frankly the uk, France, Italy, Spain, even Germany. Right. Basically Western Europe, the US and Canada have actually had some of the worst responses to this, which I can get into. When you've got an incompetent centralized state, they're doing things like infinite lockdown with no plan. Right. And that's not, that's, that's also, that's stupid. Right. Like one way of thinking about it is every country that is doing lockdown, whether they admit it or not, is copying China because China did it first and it was like, oh my God, I can't believe they're doing this. And you know, at first there was a lot of, oh, they would only do this in autocratic and, you know, crazy society, et cetera. Then people basically ignored the virus while it was spreading through China and then Iran. And it was only when it hit Italy that actually people are like, wow, it could actually hit here, not in a third world country. And I'll come back to that point, by the way. China is not a third world country. I think one of the biggest issues that people in the US Especially, I think on the east coast had is they still have a time warp model of China from like the 70s as a primitive country or, oh, it only happened over there, blah, blah, blah. And it's simply not right. It's a very sophisticated place in many ways. And I'm not saying it's all good, but I'm just saying to appreciate that. Anyway, once it hit Italy and Italy went into lockdown, then in mid March, the US copied Italy. And so you're copying a copy without admitting you're copying. And whenever that happens, I mean, you've been not being. You're in tech, right, like as a product manager. And if you're copying a feature from another company without admitting you're copying that feature, you get like a Zune kind of experience. Remember the Zune versus the iPod, right? Or you get like just, I mean, early Bing. Bing is actually okay today. But like Bing versus Google, you're just having an ersatz, you know, version of the same, right? And you know, one mental model is you have this, you have this very agile state, you know, that is able to execute this kind of lockdown. And then you have this lumbering American, you know, or Westerner who tries to follow the same gymnastics and simply can't do it, right? And so it might, you know, when you're talking about like how the Chinese executed lockdown or how, you know, it's being executed in other places, um, it's not just, oh, everybody go stay at home. It's like a hundred things they were doing, for example, you know, centralized quarantine, right? They set up these field hospitals, but, you know, they built these things in, you know, 10 days. And the hospital they built in 10 days wasn't like the thing in the Javits Center. It was a hospital that had negative pressure rooms. I mean, the Javits Center, I mean, look, it's fine that they built it. I'm not taking anything away from it. But the Lishenshan Hospital that was built In China had negative pressure rooms. It had telemedicine for doctors to come in remotely. It had drone delivery bots. And it was basically set up so that you could remote operate the hospital and the patients weren't exposing doctors to the virus because healthcare workers were dying over there. It was stuff like drones with thermal imaging cameras. It's stuff like, you know, mobile CT scanners that are very high throughput that can scan a bunch of folks. It was simply a technological feat where all the levers of both technology and policy were applied at the same time. I wrote a blog post on this, by the way. You know, I tweeted it like, you know, piece of. It was, you know, Chinese government's guide to containing the virus. It was like in V7. And again, to be clear, I'm not saying, you know, oh, China is good and moral or anything like that. I am saying that insofar as you're copying a copy, you should at least understand what it is you're copying and what it is you're doing. And what happened was in China the lockdown was executed. And I've tweeted about this also. You can see my tweets in march on this. But in China, the lockdown was a top down thing that was executed by the technocrats running the Chinese state. In the US Lockdown was like a bottom up cry from Twitter, you know, from like all these academics or engineers or whatever. Like Tomas Pollo, like, you know, he wrote a great article like this Hammer and Dance. He's like a random guy, right? And he's fine, he's smart, right? Like I'm like I'm glad he wrote the article and so on. But this is something where it's rear wheel drive. The smart people are not in our press and state. You know, these people literally can't divide. You know, like, I don't know if you saw that, that thing where you know, like everyone, Bloomberg could give everybody a million dollars in the U.S. it's true. And Brian Williams nods at this, right? Like, like, you know, and obviously our, you know, whether it's the mayor or the governor or the president, like these, these folks are not like they're not doing a great job, right? And so you have something where it's not just the idea, it's execution, right? And the idea is, oh, have people stay at home and then execute all these complicated series of steps to control the virus. Well, you know, we simply don't have the talent in our state to do that. And so that's a huge divergence in a branch point, especially relative to the past, because, you know, 1950, 1968, you know, the U.S. did Apollo, right, within living memory, basically about 52 years ago, right? The U.S. was number one, right? It could do things that nobody else could do. It was the best at coordinating huge projects, right. It could bring men, material, everything together to get things done. Right. And what's happened is that the state capacity of the US since, since basically the, you know, like Apollo project has just fallen off a cliff. And the state capacity of China and actually India and other countries has risen over that period. And now there's like a crossing point, right? You know, there's no way that China in 1968 would have out executed America 1968, but China 2020 has out executed America 2020, as has, frankly Taiwan and New Zealand and Australia and Slovakia and Vietnam and all these other countries. There's a website called ncoronavirus.org countries that goes into this, right? And so it's really important to recognize that in the same way that it was important, for example, Steve Ballmer to understand that Google had out executed them before you can actually, that Apple had out executed them. He was famously in denial about this for a long time, you know, and there'd be this sort of corporate nationalism, you know, that would happen in Microsoft where he'd say, oh, you know, I tell my kids, you don't, you don't use an iPhone and you don't use Google. And it's a great way of basically blinding yourself to what's happening in the rest of, you know, the industry. Again, not saying that you copy it directly and naively, I am saying that you understand when someone's ahead of you and what they're doing, and if you decide to clone it or you build something better, fine, but don't be in denial about it, right? Another example of this that I tweeted was with Yeltsin, who in the late 80s came to the US right? So this was around the time of the thawing of US and Russian relations right after, towards the end of the Cold War. And Yeltsin came and he visited and he saw like a NASA control panel or whatever, right? And you know, he was like, we've got rockets in the Soviet Union as well. Not a big deal, whatever, right? But you know what he was really impressed by?

What's that?

It was. There was a random stop that they made on the trip home to a supermarket. And when he saw like this, Randall's Supermarket. Okay, Randall's was just the name of the chain. He was awestruck. There's a famous photo of him just holding up his hands in dismay. And basically he's like. Because the thing is that an American supermarket had so much plenty relative to the drab Russian supermarkets. And at first he thought this was some special showroom supermarket and a fake one that he'd been brought to because that's what the Soviet Union did. It faked everything. He's like, this is fake, or whatever. And then once he realized it was real, he realized that even the leaders of the Soviet Union, of which he was one, right? He was a very exceptional person who was allowed, during the time of the USSR to travel abroad, not just anywhere, but to America. Right? So even the leaders of the Soviet Union had fallen for their own propaganda about how, you know, the capitalist west was behind and so on and so forth, and the leaders of the Soviet Union. You didn't have the quality of the supermarket experience that a random working person in Texas would have had. Right? And so he said, look, if people at home knew about this, there'd be a revolution. Right? And so this is something where it's so, so, so important to not have excessively nationalistic or corporate nationalism or whatever. Nationalist blinders on. You know, I'll give a third example. Do you know what the Meiji Revolution was?

I do not.

Okay, so that's how Japan modernized in the mid-1800s. You know, they'd been an isolated society for a long time. And to shorten a longer story, in the mid-1800s, they came into contact with, you know, the West, Right. And, you know, these boats arrived and opened up Japan as a market and so on. It's a famous kind of story. And the Japanese realized they were behind. You know, they had been isolated for so long, and, you know, here were these Westerners with all of this technology that, you know, was like just a level of magic, almost like a UFO landing level thing. Right? But they were very pragmatic and very smart, and they said, look, we're gonna. We are going to change our national slogans, right? And, you know, gosh, I'm gonna find the term for this. There's a. There is a. Yes. They. They changed the slogan. So it was. The new slogan was enrich the country, Strengthen the military. But the. Hold on, I want to find the. They have different slogans for different eras. See if I can find. Was. It's sort of like a mission statement, but for the country. Right. I think it was something like, expel the barbarians and revere the emperor. Right. And one Second and then, and then the new one was like, enrich. I'm probably butchering this. But the new one was enrich the country, strengthen military. So point being that going from expel the barbarians and revere the emperor to, you know, enrich the country, strengthen the military. That's, that's actually very different, Right. The first is, you know, a slogan which is about stasis, right? Expel the barbarians, revered the emperor. Right. And the second is a slogan which is about growth, right? You know, enrich the country, you know, strengthen the military. And that's, that's a radical shift, actually. Right. It's a change in mission statement. And so, and so Japan modernized and they became, you know, that's why they, you know, the first, you know, non white country to actually be a European power. That was actually a very big deal. The Russo Japanese war in the early 1900s, right. Which was the first time that a non white country had beaten a white country, you know, European majority, however you want to call it in a war. And it was a huge thing for like colonialism to. It was one of the big things that helped colonized people realize they could win. Right. And I, you know, like, that gets to all kinds of historical stuff. But my main, main point on this was whether it was Sethia turning around Microsoft, whether it was Yeltsin looking and seeing how behind Russia was, whether it was the Japanese going and doing the Meiji, you know, restoration. This was something where folks who were smart realized they were behind. And rather than get all outraged about someone pointing that out, they're like, okay, we're behind. How do we get ahead? Right? And this actually brings us to China, which is, you know, 1978, when Deng Xiaoping, you know, took over China. It was very difficult, by the way, for him to take over China. That's a whole story most Americans. It's actually kind of interesting to me. You know, this is actually one of the more important things to know, like, how did China become rich? Right? How did India become rich? Just like you'd read a Harvard Business School case study on Netflix, right? Or Amazon. How did these countries turn around? You read about how companies turn. How do you turn around a country that's even harder, right? Many, much harder. And I think there's a lot of lessons for business and management and so on. Even if again, you know, like, I'm sure there'll be the comments, oh my God, China's evil. Okay, got it. Right, fine. I may agree with you on many of these premises. Just like the Soviet Union was evil in many ways. And yet we can discuss it in a dispassionate way that they did do Sputnik, Right. And that was something that helped put out the space race and so on. And so we can kind of separate those two bits. Right? Okay, coming back to Deng Xiaoping for a second. He also turned around the country. So it's a fourth example of these turnarounds. Satya, turning around Microsoft, Russia, at least partially turning themselves around. I mean, they had a horrible go of it in the 90s with the transition to capitalism, but former Soviet Union countries like Estonia did extremely well, Poland has done well, and so on. So on Net, it's probably not. Probably it is a win. And certainly Japan did well. Okay, so how did Deng Xiaoping turn around China? Well, he had a few things which have become slogans now. The famous one, black cat, white cat, doesn't matter if it catches mice. Another one was let some people get rich first, which basically said, look, I know that we're going to go from everybody equally poor to some degree of income and wealth inequality, but that's okay so long as you realize you'll get wealthier later. And these are very compact slogans. Let some get rich first doesn't mean you'll never get rich. It just says by injecting the word first, it's like, okay, fine, they go first, I'll go second, but it's fine, right? Later. There's another slogan that the Chinese have, which is the backwards will be beaten. Okay, that's very important. Where, you know, there's a. There's a guy called Scholars, I think Scholar stage on Twitter. I may be butchering that, but he has a good article on this. But backwards will be beaten basically means that, you know, China, you know, it's a proud country. And during, you know, the Opium wars and you know, during the. How the Japanese invaded them during World War II, you know, they were. They were brought low, right, by folks outside with superior technology. And so China itself has a balance between rationalism and nationalism, right? So, and these are intention, okay? So nationalism is, you know, like, be proud, China is the best, you know, etc. And rationalism says, hey, we may not be the best in something. What are we not the best in? Let's learn about that. Those are intention, okay? And, you know, when you combine them, you have something where you can both advance science, you know, strengthen the military and the country and so on and so forth. You know, another place that rationalism and nationalism are intention, that you're actually very familiar with where? Crypto. Because every crypto tribe, there's the nationalism of boosting my coin and there's the rationalism of the technology and the science and the features of other coins that might be worth adopting or thinking about or looking at. Obvious example being, let's say, privacy. Anybody in Bitcoin should know about zcash and zero knowledge. And that's just important. That makes Bitcoin better. If you're in the mode of oh, everything's a shit coin or whatever, that's just excessive nationalism and not enough rationalism. Now with that said, something I have learned over the last six, seven years is there's more value to nationalism than you might think. Because the tribalism of crypto is in a sense an extension of Mac versus PC or Emacs versus vi. There's something about it where it's not just a technology but a community and it's a sunk cost. And there's something where a community gains value from expanding because if you have a billion people using iOS, it's better for you as an iOS user than if there's only a million people. Which is kind of why this technology evangelism takes place on a. I'm not saying it's like always that quote, self interested or whatever, but I think it's one of the reasons, right? And that reaches its apotheosis. Or maybe not. Maybe it's not Zenith yet, maybe there's more forums yet, right, with crypto where there's a financial incentive to bring other people into your coin, etc. So that irrational nationalism is actually helpful to fight off price drops, to say, this is the best, I don't care what it says on the screen, I don't care what you say, I'm going to close my ears, never going to sell, etc. It's actually kind of good to have some of those folks in the community, but not too many, because if there's too many, then you can't improve or react to anything. You'll never admit flaws of any kind. Right? So. All right, let me pause there because that's. That's like a lot of history, a lot of stuff. Yeah.

So I want to go back to the China thing in a second, but staying on this nationalism versus rationalism, it sounds like what you're saying is if you have nationalism without the rationalism, it's almost like everyone feels like, hey, we're in this together, but we're all the poor people in China back in the day, right? Like there's no ability to actually Improve or change or recognize what needs to be done. It's just we are all bought into this blind belief.

Yeah, it gets even worse than that though, because it turns into there's no growth, right? The rationalism is what provides the growth. The nationals is what provides a tribalism. And in the absence of any growth, people fight over a zero sum pie because it doesn't just stay as nationalism, it becomes nationalist socialism where, you know, right. Like, like those tribes. You know, one way of putting it is, you know, you see this dynamic on Twitter, whatever ideology somebody may claim to have on Twitter, it becomes Twitterism, where the most extreme version of that ideology is selected for likes and clicks and so on. And the folks who promulgate that are reinforced in that by other people's social reinforcement. And it just like is this feedback loop that is kind of a radicalizing sort of thing, right? You see this all the time. No matter what your ideology is, if it's whether it's tolerance, well, you get fu, right? Whether it's a non aggression principle, it ends in fu, right? These things. Well, that's interesting. Non aggression is fu. Now of course people say, oh, well, that's just violence or whatever. But no, it actually means civilization as well. You know, like, you know, there's, there's a. The point of the non aggression principle is not to go around saying F you to everybody. The point is to maintain a civilized society. And you know, like it's, it's something where like civilization is good even if people take it for granted. Right? And so, oh gosh, I lost my train of thought.

Let's keep going down that path of how does that apply to China? Which I think part of what you're.

Let me finish. I just remember my point. So the thing is that all of these ideologies become Twitterism and Twitterism becomes zero sum. Because once you have tribalistically managed to shoo off everybody, shoe off all growth, show off anybody that wants to improve it and so on, then you fight among other people for who is the most tolerant of them all, who is the maximalist of the max, you know, like this, this kind of stupid thing, right? Like in this very closed loop of people where you try and find some flaw that this person had and then just attack them, right? You know, and that's actually the trap that China was certainly stuck in for many, many years, right? Purge after purge after purge, internal political rivalries and so on and so forth. So you get tribalism without the growth mentality. And then, you know, the flip side of it is. You can also have excessive rationalism, right? Excessive rationalism, I think, is less pathological than excessive nationalism. But it basically results in you having, you know, a bunch of science and a bunch of engineering and a bunch of cool stuff. But, you know, somebody will come and take away all your toys. It's like, it's like in civilization, you know. You ever play the game? Of course, yeah. So civilization, the game. If you put all your money into technology and commerce and nothing else, the guy next door with one Spearman can just come in and take all your stuff. Right? So if you go excessively rationalist, you do not survive either. Right? So clearly there's some kind of balance here. And I think that that trade off is something that we're going to need to negotiate as a society because it's a real adaptation. And unfortunately, I feel we're moving in the wrong direction on it, where people are becoming more irrationally nationalistic just at a time when it's actually more important to be open minded.

So on this piece, I guess part of this is, is that balance, right? We talk about negotiating the balance. Is that driven from the state level or is that something that's more bottoms up and driven by the people and who they elect into office and kind of the people actually end up controlling that in some way.

It's all of the above. I mean, in the sense of, you know, the state, just as one example, right, World War II, the state had women go off to war or not to actually fight, but they were working in factories and so on. And then afterwards there was a new normal and women were working more frequently. So something where a centralized thing came in from above, changed behavior and preferences. And then even when that force was removed, there was still a permanent delta, right? There's still a change. So that was something where top down and bottom up, like, you know, even when top down, left, bottom up, retained some imprint of the top down force and then kind of went on its own. Right? And so I don't think it's, you know, it's just one example. Like, you know, tariffs matter, right? Like, you know, the trade policy really matters, immigration policy matters. Those are things that are set, you know, somewhat top down and we should say somewhat because obviously outcry matters and so on as well. But you know, those definitely influence what is feasible bottom up, right? So I wouldn't, I wouldn't be able to divide it necessarily. But what I would say is certainly in, if you feel you're in a technology space, right, it behooves you to look at every green zone that's out there and understand what they're doing. Right? And then also think through, okay, what's going to happen in red zones. And so just let me define terminology here, because I'm just using it for my Twitter or whatever. But a green zone is basically a place that's gotten the virus under control and in, you know, you can be more precise and say it's a. It's a region with comprehensive testing that has no new cases in, let's say, you know, two weeks or four weeks. Right. Some time period. And the reason both those are important, comprehensive, a region. So a spatial region with comprehensive testing. So because if you're not testing, then I don't believe you're a green zone, right? And no new cases, meaning you have extended a streak, right? You've been just sampling and what have you, and you really have quelled the virus, right? Okay. And a red zone is everywhere else, right? Both places without testing, because you don't know if the virus is there. And certain the places that I've testing and that have let it go vertical. So one of my theses is that green zones will actually in general be able to sort of let up on. The state will be there. But in general, they're going to have better health, better wealth, and less of a state presence, okay. The reason being because you've sort of managed to keep society wobbling on a new normal, right. Rather than just have it crash, right. Conversely, in a red zone, I think you're going to get huge strain pressures where you get a series of things where viral destruction leads to, economic destruction leads to, viral destruction leads to. They actually stack on top of each other, for example, right? You have the serious virus, okay? Then folks, you know, they do lockdown or in, you know, a cargo cult lockdown, okay? Then they all get mad, understandably, because people are going bankrupt and so on. They come out and some of them unfortunately are like, oh, the virus isn't a big deal, or, you know, just the flu, bro, or whatever, right? Don't wear masks. Boom. That leads to another level of viral destruction, right? Oh, actually, yeah, it may not kill you, but it might significantly diminished lung function for the rest of your life or for weeks or months. Who knows, right? And who knows the percentage on that yet we don't have good morbidity stats. We have good mortality stats, or I should say, okay, mortality stats. Like we know case, fatality rate and so on. We don't yet know, like, what percentage of normal people, you know, have eight week convalescences or who have permanently decreased lung function. We don't know the long term effects of this thing. Right. So folks who just rushed out there, oh actually bam. They just walk right into this virus, which is going crazy by the way, in 50 states. And then that leads to yet another pullback where demand goes back into, you know, like people go back at home and so on. And that leads to more unemployment and more unhappy people and that kind of stuff stacks. Now you don't have the money to go and pay for, you know, like masks or hand sanitizers. So people get the virus more, you know, that type of stuff.

Right.

So you can have is really negative feedback loop. Actually not a negative feedback loop, it's a positive feedback loop in the sense of amplifying it. Right. That leads to more unrest potentially. And you know, so Iran actually had some civil unrest and whatnot. Right. And I mean the biggest thing is Americans should understand that it can happen here. I mean, just as one example, Michigan, evidently armed. Do you see this thing?

I did see it. And I think that actually Michigan was real guns. And I don't know if you saw Raleigh, North Carolina, where I grew up, there was people who walked around with fake guns. So they literally took like a piece of wood and made it look like a 50 caliber. They had an inner tube that they made look like an AT4, you know, rocket launcher. And they were basically doing a play on Michigan was real. We're pissed off. We're not going to go walk around with the at 4 for real. But like, here's our almost social unrest display. And so very interesting to see that happening in multiple locations.

Exactly. And so, I mean, look, it's. This whole situation is bad on like a number of different levels, but it's something where you're getting more sci fi movie almost every day. Right. And the problem is that there's at least two analogies for what the virus is doing. Let's talk about some of the crypto implications of it. One analogy is to analogize it to an invasion. Okay. So people have talked about this. They're like, oh, is this a recession or a depression? And that's because, you know, those are things that come to mind as is this like the 2008 Christ or not? Because everybody lived through that. It's a reference point. Right, But I think that a better analogy, I mean, this is not fundamentally an economic event. It's not fundamentally a political event. It's a biological event. It's a physical event. Right. And it's like, imagine this thing floating in space, and then you project it down into the XY plane. Okay.

It's basically like Red Dawn.

I don't know if you ever saw the movie.

Yeah, right. They look out the window and all sudden they're getting invaded. People are parachuting into the parking lot. Right. It's not people. It's a biological incident.

That's exactly. I think it's. So. With the very, very important caveat, just because I know someone will misrealers. I'm not saying it's a bioweapon or anything like that. Okay. I'm not. Okay. It's a naturally occurring virus, probably. With everything we know, it's possible it could have escaped from the lab or whatever. People have talked about that. I think that's. It's a possibility. But, you know, like, there's no evidence indicates a bioweapon. Okay. With that said, the entire US military and NATO were basically imaginot line, Joe. That is right, yeah.

So good. Yep.

Well, so, you know, in France after World War I, they're like, oh, we're going to build a system of fortification so the next time the Germans come with their trench warfare, we'll be ready for them. And the Germans just completely invalidated that where the Nazi blitzkrieg just went around, you know, and it was like a classic example of fighting the last war. And then the French just got defeated. Right. And, you know, the US military and NATO have been MIA in the pandemic. Right. And by the way, you know, people say, oh, you know, Asia had SARS and they were ready and we weren't. I'm like, the U.S. had an anthrax scare in 2001. Right. Number one. Number two is, you know, there was Ebola in 2014. Right. And number three, there were actually written pandemic plans. Like, Bush had something on this. You know, DARPA has stuff. There's all this stuff that's written down that's supposed to be like a biodefense program or whatever. It's just they can't execute on it. Right. They're literally incapable of doing it. So the. Every rogue state, every terrorist, frankly, every state in the world has seen that. You know, all the defenses of the U.S. right. You know, you have the Atlantic and the Pacific. You have all these aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles and so on, all the soldiers, everything basically just completely invalidated by the virus.

Well, here's one kind of analogy that I've thought through. So I don't know if, you know, this I was in the army for six and a half years, and so.

Oh, really?

Okay. Relatively intimate with both the expertise and the incompetence that goes on within those ranks, just like any organization.

I'm not beating up on the military, by the way. I'm just saying that. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah.

Well, so here's one way to think about this. Right. Is one of the most successful ways to attack the US Military over the last decade or so has been actually to either use embedded soldiers. So like in Afghanistan, for example, US and Afghan soldiers go out on a mission. All of a sudden the Afghan soldiers, which are deemed friendly, turn and shoot a US Soldier.

Right.

So kind of a blue on blue type incident. But yes, they have a different uniform. They're just our ally. The second thing would be something like a Fort Hood shooting where literally it's somebody in a US Uniform radicalized. Who just radicalized and shoots. Yep. Then if you go to, like the aircraft carrier, where I think it was a general or a colonel or whatever.

Right. So the virus extends that because you basically are capturing somebody and turning a soldier into a threat by basically.

Yeah. And so we saw this on kind of steroids. If earlier, just a couple of weeks ago, there was a. I'll call them the captain of the ship. I don't remember his exact.

Crozier. Yeah, Crozier.

He wrote the letter and he said, look, I'm basically stuck on an aircraft carrier with a bunch of soldiers, and every single one of them is now a weapon against each other because they're just infecting each other. And I don't have the tools to handle this.

Right.

Basically, let me become not ready for war. Let me actually destabilize my ship so that I can protect my soldiers and we can preserve our readiness in the future. And I think that that is something just people didn't understand, people didn't think about. And when, then when you see it happen, you're like, whoa, that could decimate an entire military force. It could decimate a lot of different functions.

A French aircraft carrier got taken down. Right. And you know, like, basically there's. There's a sense. I mean, you know, World War I started with cavalry. Do you know that? Right. Like, actually, you're an army guy. You know, more military history than I do, for sure. But a lot of people don't know this. That's actually, you know, it started with horses and horse charges and ended with, you know, the first mechanized warfare. Right. I have a feeling that, you know, COVID 19 may make the Era of infantry and even human staffed, you know, boats and so on. Go away. And it'll just all be a robot war. It's all drones, all drone ships, all drone everything. And it won't be human staff. Go ahead.

Yeah, and I think part of this, this fits into the larger narrative. Just like the virus has just served as an accelerant. Right. And obviously, you know, if you had talked to people a year ago and said, hey, in the future are we going to have more foot soldiers or more drones right on the battlefield? Most people would say, hey, it's going to get more automated, it's going to get more kind of autonomous and all that stuff. Now all of a sudden it becomes, well, not only is that technology one component of it, but we actually may be rendered not as effective if there's things like this out there, right? I mean, you know, any sort of military unit that spends lots of time together, that's like the exact opposite thing you want to be doing for, you know, some sort of viral outbreak.

Exactly, that's right. And especially given, you know, a few things first is, I mean, like, it's actually a pretty serious virus for at least some fraction of healthy people.

Okay.

We don't know the exact percentage, but you know, for example, I posted that thing with that 45 year old former football player, right? Or Mara Gay in the New York Times has written about her story, right. You know, Kat Gleason is an entrepreneur, very fit. Alyssa Swinsky, you know, Lauren Sugarman. Like these are folks who, you know, they've all tweeted about it and what have you. There's plenty more who, you know, I can't even talk about. But I've, I've talked to a lot of COVID 19 patients because, you know, in tech, you know, there's a saying, right? You look at your dashboards and you talk to customers, right? There's a quantitative and the qualitative and you know, it's. People will often, I think, have a middle brow dismissal of talking to customers or talking to patients. They'll be like, oh, that's anecdotal, that's, you know, n equals 1. Oh, you know, blah, blah. And what they don't understand is every data collection starts or not every. Many data collection efforts start with a conversation like that. For example, you're looking at your dashboards and you talk to a customer and they say, oh, I wasn't able to log in. You're like, oh no, really? And then you go and you instrument that and you find 10% of your customers can't log in on mobile safari or whatever. Right. And you're like, oh my God, you're just blind to that. You were data blind because you didn't have the metric. And you'd have the metric because you hadn't talked to customers. Right. The analog of that today is folks are looking at lethality stats, case fatality rates and they're seeing correctly. And this is important, 92% of deaths are for people over age 50 and 75% of hospitalizations are for people over age 50. And I've quoted those stats a lot and it's important to know those things. But the wrong conclusion is, okay, then that means, you know, I'm 30, so I've got nothing to worry about. Right? Yeah, you may not die. Right, that's true, but. And so relative to death, everything is mild. Okay. However, relative to a cup of coffee in person, you may not want to risk, you know, a 10 week sickness and permanently decrease lung function. Right. So, so like it's where you set that bar. And the problem is people are comparing it to death and they're thinking, oh, it's not a big deal, of course.

Sure.

You know, few things are a big deal relative to death. Right, Go ahead. You're going to say.

Well, I was just going to ask. So part of this I think in the thing that I personally struggle with the most and I think other people that I talk with, there's this element of like, how accurate is the data?

Right.

And you got the whole conversation with, I don't think it is a fair question or a fair expectation to have 100% accuracy in the data in the middle of kind of the firestorm. Right. It's kind of like you're at war and if you said to somebody how many bullets you got left? Maybe somebody knows. But most people say, well, I got less than I had when I started.

Right.

And they can kind of directionally. And so I think that for this.

I can give you a good answer and I can give you my answer on that.

Okay. So I just want to understand like how important you think like exact accuracy versus directional accuracy is during this.

Yeah. So I mean it does depend, you know, if you're talking about the dosing of a drug, sometimes, you know, like it actually can be sensitive. Right. But yeah, in general, I, you know, I, I think directional is a way to go because we're in kind of fog of war kind of situation. With that said, there's some very high signal events. Right. Wuhan happened, Italy happened, NYC happened Right. Like, these are well documented. You know, they're like, basically, you know, in late January and early February, when I was fighting off the first. Just the flu, folks, right. I would basically make the following point, which was, December 1, Wuhan was a normal city. By January 23, hospitals were overflowing and the city was shut down by the Chinese government. Like, you know, you had, like, you basically had the thing brought to a halt. Right? Like, the sickness brought the city to a halt. That's not like a flu situation. Right. And then the same thing. What's that, 53 days? Yeah, exactly. 53 is less than two months. You had a city basically brought to its knees. Right. And, you know, that is. That was. That's not. That is simply. I mean, every. Every single person in that city, you there been the flu coming through before, right? So the flu thing, by the way, is. It's one of these mind viruses that I think will end up killing. Or what it does is it increases the number of people killed by Corona because it disables the behavioral immune system. It's kind of like, you know, this thing has a stealth mode to it where, because the symptoms it produces are variable, not everybody melts down in a pool of blood. Like Ebola. Right? Like Ebola. Everyone's like, okay, that's going to kill me. And you take extreme precaution on it. Right. You know, or like, you know, something like 9, 11. Right? Like, it was very obvious that things got blown up. It was very visible. It was very tangible. This is invisible. And it's highly variable. And you're basing everything. I mean, you're not getting close to a Corona patient, right? You know, probably right. At least not intentionally so. Everything is, like, at a distance. And what I've realized is that if you don't trust, you know, experts or the press, and you know what? There's unfortunately a lot of good reasons not to trust them, because they've messed up a lot yet on their hand, they're not, you know, even if they. I mean, this is. You know, I tweeted this our day, but basically, expert. I mean, it's so obvious, right? But I'll just say this. It's like, you know, Democrats need to learn that experts aren't always right. Republicans need to learn that experts are always wrong. Libertarians need to learn that a state can succeed, and progressives need to learn that a state can fail. And those are all, like, almost tautologically obvious kind of things. Yet I think, given some of the responses to that, it pokes Directly at a few blind spots there, right? Because once you move from the Manichean ideological 0 or 100 aspect, right, you say, yeah, okay, CDC did screw up. Who did screw up. But they don't. Not everything they publish is wrong. You have to be able to read it critically. And then that. Now here's the rub. The rub is most people cannot do technical diligence. If they can't do technical diligence, they can only do social diligence. And so they can only like trust something uncritically or say it's all fake. So what's happened is because our institute. And so one of the issues also is just as our institutions have become more noticeably unreliable, they've thumped their chest harder to say how they are the truth. Great example. The New York Times literally runs an ad campaign about how it's the truth when it published a bunch of bad reporting on Corona early on, like, including things that said, oh, it's all xenophobic and what have you, right? And then, you know, like it actually had some justice for journalism in there. And then, you know, two months, three months later saying it's not just the flu. Well, who would have given them that idea, right? You know, like Fox did and Rico did and buzzfeed did and Washgrove's perspectives did and Wired did and so on. Who would have given that idea, right? And so the, the issue is that there'll be a real tragedy, which is folks who reasonably do not trust these institutions will find that they're not always wrong. So.

Yeah, and then press on this component of it, right? Because you mentioned earlier, like the people in Michigan who show up, you know, with guns and are basically saying, look, we don't want to agree to the lockdown. And there's this underlying sentiment in the United States specifically around freedom, the Constitution, just don't tell me what to do.

Right.

And that to me kind of feels like it bleeds into this idea of the countries or the government's there. They're not always wrong, but there is a, some sense of distrust or if everything goes to shit, I'm going to take my personal freedom and I can go solve my own problem. And I think you're seeing some of the extreme examples of that when people show up in Michigan, et cetera. But at what point do we get where that becomes not the extreme and starts to seep into the main mainstream mentality and it leads to the ultimate failure of an institution, Right? Or actually it's not just the who being wrong. Sometimes people just point and Say they're always wrong, we no longer trust them.

Unfortunately, it's already there where like this QAnon stuff and you know, plan Demic and what have you. I mean, that's some true crazy stuff, right? And you know, it's not even, it's, it's no longer rational. It's like arguing with like a religion or something. Because folks, they don't, they don't, they're not arguing in the way that I would talk to a scientist, which is here's X, here's why. If A, then B, you know, that kind of thing, they're just, they're shown another planet, right? And the problem is people, people don't understand how much stuff is running like you know, to just keep society going. Right? And if you, if you break all of that, you're taking it for granted, right? These armed protesters and so on. Like, look, I understand that they're quote, mad about the lockdowns and so I think that they're not really. But let's talk about that just for a second, okay? Just because it's been turned into this binary thing and it's much more complicated than that. Okay, first, the best outcome would be like a New Zealand or Australia or Taiwan, which is a democratic country that managed to control the virus that's going to have healthier people and wealthier people in the long run. Okay? So it shows that A, it's possible, B, is achievable and C, is achievable without becoming a police state and so on. Very, very important to know that that was possible. Okay, all right, so that was possible, but the US hasn't achieved it. So what does that mean? Okay, so when you've got an out of control virus and it's a serious virus, okay, so let's take that as a premise because folks want to, there's folks who want to say it's like just a flu or whatever. Leave that aside for now, okay? You've got an out of control serious virus. That means. So we gave the analogy of an invasion, right? I'm going to give a different analogy, which is the power going out. Okay? So our society is explicitly premised on power, water, roads and increasingly Internet. Right? And if the power goes out, you don't expect a restaurant to be able to serve the same number of customers. The oven doesn't work, for example, the lights don't go on, you know, all that type of stuff. Right? Okay. If the water goes out, you don't expect them to serve customers. You expect the, you know, state the utility to fix that. And then if it can't, you realize, okay, I need to get a generator. I need to get, like, a water purifier. And those, by the way, are inefficient. You know, when they're not done centrally. A lot of the stuff is much, much, much more efficient when it's done centrally. From a power standpoint, from a cost standpoint, having 10,000 generators is just, you know, those things aren't as good. Right. Solar panels are different. I come back to that. But let's just say in general, okay, plus a pain. Pain in the neck. Right. It's something where it's a tax not just on your money, but it's on your time to like, not be able to plug something in and have it go on. Okay, so these are utilities that were explicitly premised on. But we are implicitly premised on the absence of serious infectious disease in the public square. Okay, I want to linger on this point. We are taking, or we, until COVID 19, took for granted the public health triumphs of the 20th century. So I tweeted this, but basically there's a review from 1976 of the Conquest of infectious diseases. Like a bicentennial summary, right? It talked about all the measures, and you're talking an enormous. It was thought of at that time in 1976 as a massive social and technological achievement on par with getting to the moon was controlling cholera, malaria, tuberculosis, all these infectious diseases in the United States. And this is before they had pcr. They didn't have PCR testing. They didn't have much of the technology we have today. They did a lot of it with, you know, draining of swamps and, you know, like, sanitation, certainly vaccines and whatnot. But basically, they took the problem seriously and they executed on and they went and eradicated or controlled a lot of these diseases. And what's happened is over the last 50 years, people have just sort of forgotten that that was ever a thing. And so that's how we have society. Or many, many businesses are premised on the presence of this utility, which is public health. For example, conferences or concerts or, you know, frankly, any large crowd of any kind. Rallies, right? Or public. Public transit. You know, restaurants, bars, all of these things with gatherings of large crowds are implicitly premised on the public health being present. So, like, the power going out. You can think of the health going out. So what happens if the health has gone out? Just like it would be kind of crazy to say to a restaurant, power through and just serve your customers. If the oven doesn't work. Well, you. If the health has gone out and the restaurant opens back up, a bunch of things happen. First, some significant fraction of customers stay home. Second, there's new costs that are imposed on the restaurant. I don't know if you saw California's reopening guidelines for restaurants, but they basically expect, like Joe's Diner to implement biodefense mode. Okay. All right, so if Joe Zeiner. Go ahead.

I was gonna say that sounds very reasonable.

Right, Exactly. The state has failed. So it's a snow crash thing. All right, so number one, many customers will stay home. Number two, new costs are imposed on a place which is at its lowest point financially. It's just been two months out of revenue. It's like sucking wind. Business is down. And now the state expects it to like, you know, basically build a clean room around a dining table. Right. Okay. Number three, workers will get sick because the virus is uncontrolled. Right. So you have much more in the way of random matches. Number four, you have PR and liability risk. The moment that, like your restaurant or whatever is marked a hotspot because you know there's a report, a news report of someone getting it, boom, business vanishes again. Right. To show that that's not an exaggeration, In South Korea, 2,000 bars were shut down after one guy, you know, walked through five. Do you see that?

I did not.

Okay. Yeah. So after South Korea opened up. Okay. Because they've gotten the virus under control. One COVID 19 guy walked into a bar and he mentioned to a few bar hopped for a night and managed to infect, like on the order of 40 to 70 people, the exact number still being determined. 1900 people had to be test and traced and 2000 bar were shut down. One guy.

One guy.

Yep, one guy.

Right.

Now, I'm not saying it's his fault or anything like that. He didn't know. I think he was asymptomatic or what have you. Right. But this gives a sense of how when the health has gone out, a significant part of the economy is no longer economically feasible. To the same extent. Right. Anything based on you go ahead. So. And the lockdown doesn't. Doesn't fix it is my point. Right. Unless you control the virus, you have less customers because people will social distance. You have like bio defense mode that you need to implement. If you don't implement it, then workers will get sick and people who come will get sick. And there's constant.