Special Edition: COVID-19 with Balaji Srinivasan

All right, everyone, welcome back to another episode of Masari's Unqualified Opinions. I'm Ryan Selkis at two Bit Idiots, and my guest today might look familiar because I actually just spoke with him a couple of weeks ago. So we're doing things a little bit different. This is going to be a special episode that we release, but I'm joined again by Balaji Srinivasan, the founder of Nakamoto, former CTO at Coinbase. But the context of this conversation, while it's going to touch on crypto, is going to be very different and it touches on a complet different elements of biology's background, and that is as an expert in clinical genomics and healthcare in general. So biology, I think the number has been going up for most crypto assets in the last couple of weeks. And what is otherwise one of the biggest, most alarming stories across the globe that seems to be underappreciated within the crypto community because maybe of the price rally and then in the broader kind of U.S. and and Western coverage sphere, potentially because of the U.S. election and the impeachment drama and all that is basically what has come out of Wuhan with what is now being called COVID 19, the disease that stems from infection related to what looks to be a severe form of the flu or some family that might be similar to SARS and the outbreak that we saw 20 years ago in Asia. So I wanted to do a special episode, special conversation with you about this since obviously you and I have been speaking offline and following this very, very closely, but kind of three goals. Give people a full filter of just what the hell is going on, right? If it's undercovered, if it's overblown, what have you. And then part two, which is related, is isolating the variables that people should be paying attention to so that a on one extreme, they're not freaking out and losing sleep or getting overly concerned or sucked into conspiracy theories, but on the other hand, making sure that they're not overly complacent. And maybe the answer is they're just preparing not to save their own lives from the zombie apocalypse, but maybe it's just an economic recalculation that people, whether they're crypto investors or just general investors, might want to consider based on how some of these variables play out. And then last but not least, I think we do want to speak a bit about some of the implications for tech more broadly and for crypto in particular. And I know that you have a post that's coming out tomorrow, which will be yesterday by the time this goes live. So, Balaji, before we get into all that, there's going to be a ton to cover here, but. But just a reminder for people about your healthcare background and what your street cred is to weigh in on what's going on and being published in medical journals and kind of synthesize all the information that's being really updated in real time, which there is a pretty major caveat around most of the information as it's coming from China. And the quality of information flow is a time suspect, so we'll take that one at a time. But, you know, why should we listen to you at all? For starters, given you're just a crypto guy.

Well, so, you know, to be clear, I think that, well, first let me give my background, then, you know, I'm not asking for people's attention per se. I'm just putting ideas out there that I'd like to discuss with people. With that said, what's my background? I have a PhD in electrical engineering and Ms. In chemical engineering. But the work that I did in grad school was in genetic circuits and systems of biology and computational genomics. All those fields kind of are related. You know, I can show all my papers or whatever, but I've had papers in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example, on the dosage algorithm for warfarin. I have developed genetic tests. I founded a genetic test company which sold for 375 million, and I was CTO of that. And basically, you know, I'm at the. My academic training is at the intersection of engineering and biology and stats. So, you know, like, I can read the literature. I can. And I have published papers. I know a bunch of, you know, these kinds of folks. So I'd actually say that in many ways my bio background is. I have a more formal bio background than I do a crypto background, even though I'm, well, maybe better known for the crypto stuff, right? So, like, I haven't published academic papers in cryptography, but I certainly have in genomics, you know. And, you know, I would defer to, let's say, Dan Bonet in cryptography, but I'm pretty sure I can engage at the deepest levels of the research literature on genomics, if that makes any sense. And that's what I was actually before I got into crypto. So now, with that said, let me also offer some caveats. I'm not an MD, I'm a PhD. So I'm Dr. Srinivasan. But, you know, like, unlike Some of my relatives, not a medical doctor, but I think that if you look at modern medical papers, it's usually somebody like me with someone like an MD collaborative, like somebody like me would do the bioinformatics, the genomics, the statistics, and they would do the clinical diagnosis, recruitment of patients, you know, that type of stuff. So very, very frequently those are the partnerships. So I think I'm qualified to read the literature and to develop, for example, if I wanted to get into the space, develop genetic tests related to this. And, you know, again, I'm not a virologist, not a physician, but I have sequenced thousands of viruses. And anyway, so that's basically where I would say my credentials. I just want to be super upfront on that. And I also, you know, in a time like this, I understand why people want to, like, rely on credentials alone, but there's actually some degree of disagreement, or there was in the earlier days on this, between the experts on this, where, you know, you'd have some folks basically with the, I think soon to be infamous, it's just the flu, and other folks like, you know, the director of vaccines, the Mayo Clinic or Gottlieb, you know, who, you know, just recently ran the FDA and stepped down last year, who were basically saying it's something much more serious. And I think that, you know, the WHO coming out and calling it a public health, you know, international emergency really kind of underscored that if the Chinese quarantine hadn't done so. So the reason I say that is this is kind of related to crypto concepts. The question of how do you determine truth in not necessarily an adversarial environment, though I think this might become that. But if we're unfortunate, not necessarily truth in an adversarial environment, but certainly something. There's a lot of stuff floating around. You can't just trust an expert. You need to figure out which expert to trust. And you know, again, to be clear, I'm not saying, oh, listen to me and not this other guy. No, I'm not saying that. I'm just saying that I think I'm qualified to read the literature and put some ideas out there and discuss with other folks in biomedicine and in the crypto community where smart.

With something that seems to be developing this fast, I don't think any one person can be relied on as an expert anyway. So I personally see quite a bit of value in finding knowledgeable people that you can basically form a distributed network around their version of the truth and then kind of piece things Together. You mentioned a couple of people. There are probably a few dozen that I've been following closely that have been tracking this, whether it's from World Health Organization or cdc. You mentioned Scott Gottlieb from the fda, former FDA commissioner, who's been one of the more public facing so far in terms of interviews in the West. And the general sentiment is that this could be very scary. Now, there's a lot of caveats there, and we might look back on this conversation and people might be able to point to it and say, well, these guys were just Chicken Littles talking about the doomsday scenarios, when in reality, it turned out to peter out. It kind of capped a day later after this conversation, and then it gradually started to subside and go away. I think where I've at least faced some minor pushback. I know you maybe have faced a bit more public pushback on Twitter in particular, is that no one really seems to understand the probabilities that we're talking about here. Where, yes, of course, we're hoping that this is contained and that there is a. I don't know what the number is, but 9 out of 10 chance that this is overblown and it gradually subsides and is ultimately contained. But because there is a 1 in 10 chance that things could get very, very dangerous very quickly because there are so many unknowns, it's worth paying attention to early on and taking it extremely seriously. Even at the risk of, you know, becoming the boy who cried wolf or, you know, some shrill, the sky is falling conspiracy theorist. Right. So how do you help people? How do we help people? Because I'm probably in this camp as well, having been sucked down the rabbit hole the last week, better understand that it's okay if this thing doesn't blow up. That's a good thing. It's good news because it means that it was handled quite efficiently by the Chinese in particular, to stem the tide.

Yeah. So several. Several different points there. I think there's a fallacy of the excluded not. Not that saying that you're propounding this, but I think in general, there is a fallacy of the excluded middle, which is either one is blithely unconcerned or one is a conspiracy theorist crazy person, you know, et cetera, et cetera, you know, and. And there's. There's so much in between. And there better be a lot in between because. So, you know, here's something I tweeted, but let me. Let me put it like this. At least for the people of Wuhan this is not a theoretical catastrophe. Right? In fact, for the main people in China, it is not a theoretical thing. Basically, you know, I tweeted this, but on December 1st, Wuhan was like a normal city. You know, it had problems or whatever, but that's just a normal city in China. And less than two months later, by January 23rd or thereabouts, I believe the hospital system had crashed. People are being sent home who are sick. The entire city and province of Hubei is quarantined. And I'm sure that they've encountered normal diseases before, like, oh, it's flu season or something like that. This was not that. Whether you say it's 10x the flu or 100x or whatever ratio is enough, it crashed their healthcare system and forced the government of China to impose the largest quarantine in modern times. So that right there is definitely something that one should set up and take note. And then number two is unlike, let's say a natural disaster, had this been an earthquake, had this being a fire or something like that, that's like, okay, yes, fires are contagious in the sense that they can spread. Earthquakes have ripple effects. But, you know, or let's say it was like a terrorist attack, God forbid. Okay, that's, that's something where it's, it's, you know, again, folks can mimic that and do another one and you see those copycats. But the contagiousness of a virus dominates all of those things. And so that's really like, the big thing is, as opposed to being kind of an isolated, you know, tragedy on the other side of the world where we'd send aid, this is something that really could make its way back, especially given that it spread so quickly over China. So a, it's not a theoretical catastrophe for, you know, even if it doesn't hit the US or the west or what have you, it certainly wasn't theoretical. For the Chinese, this is like the biggest thing that's happened to them at least since, you know, 1989 and possibly since, you know, they were actually at war, because it's like a wartime level of mobilization over there. So that's a significant event for, you know, a billion plus people. Okay, so let's call that number one. It's not really theoretical. The question that is, or the thing that is in question is will it spread to the west or can it be another piece of foreign news, which the US in particular is covered on the left by the Pacific and on the right by the Atlantic, and it's got these huge Buffers and can be in its own bubble where things are blowing up all around the world and the US Basically can kind of ignore that. And so the question is, will it come over here? Well, so certainly there's 12, I think, confirmed cases over here. We now see person to person spread. You know, I tweeted something yesterday how person to person spread seems to be happening in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in Europe, where like there's a British super spreader and so on. There's a bunch of Americans, unfortunately, who were infected on one of these cruise ships that are, that are docked in port. And those cruise ships seem to be unfortunately, environments where a bunch of people can cash it at once. Like maybe one person grabs a buffet rail or something like that and spreads it to a bunch of people. So that's question number two. Could it spread? Well, it is spreading. And then question number three is, okay, how severe does it get? Well, something like this doesn't just go away because you ignore it. It's not like that. If it goes away, it's because the WHO declared an international public health emergency and, you know, said every country must be prepared. That's simply not a hallucination. You know, it's like, oh, that fire went out. Well, it went out because you blasted it with a fire extinguisher and you, you reacted. You know, it doesn't, doesn't go away if you don't react. This is something which is putting people in Singapore, which is a warm and extremely well governed country. You know, the warm aspect is important because some people thought, hey, okay, maybe this condition only manifests itself or the virus spreads best in cold weather. Well, no, Singapore is like 89 degrees Fahrenheit and you've got several people there in intensive care as Gottlieb tweeted about. So various kinds of theses about, oh, why this won't spread are sort of dropping one by one. Oh, it's only Hubei or Wuhan. Oh, it's only China. Oh, it's only Asia. Now with that said, it may not spread to the west for lots of reasons. One of them is that I tweeted this, but China has extremely bad air pollution. And I saw a stat which I haven't confirmed, but seems plausible worth looking at, that a large percentage of Chinese men smoke. And if that's true, it's possible that everybody kind of suffered some sort of immunocompromization of their lungs such that this virus hit them harder than it would for folks outside. That's possible. There's other Things that are, that are possible where, you know, it's hard to tell, maybe, maybe there's other things that mean that it's more serious in China versus outside, but we can't just take that for granted. And you know, it used to be, by the way, in the west, you know, like the Boy Scout motto was be prepared. Right. And it's funny how that went from like the most obvious thing that every kid would learn, you know, when the Boy Scouts very mainstream, to almost like a quasi dis. Oh, that's a prepper. You know, and that seems really weird to me because if you do anything in logistics, anything in terms of a company, you know, for sure it's all about contingency planning. You know, oh, the speaker may not be able to come to the conference or oh, this vendor may bail on us. And so it's all about being prepared. That's not being a paranoid conspiracy theorist, that's simply assessing, you know, the branches, the possible things that could happen and looking at the cost of preparing for a downside versus the cost of experiencing that downside. That's purely a quantitative thing. Let me pause there and get your thoughts.

Yeah, so there's a ton to unpack there and I think we definitely want to get back into the be prepared element and talk about what behavioral changes this could spark at a much greater scale, not just for this period of time in this kind of temporary self isolation environment that we're seeing in China right now, but how that might ultimately have broader societal implications, what that means for crypto, et cetera, before we get down that rabbit hole, which is its own area that I think we probably want to end with, given the audience that we're talking to. Let's talk about the key variables. And I'd almost prefer to start with the absolute worst case scenario and doomsday scenario and just help people understand the potential severity or at least put it into historical context. Because from what we're seeing right now, there's a couple of key variables that you're trying to triangulate on. One is how fast it spreads, and then two is how deadly it is. From all accounts early on, it looks like this is worse than the flu, worse than probably the swine flu from 10 years ago, which was three to five times worse than the typical flu, but not nearly as bad as the Spanish flu. Right. So this isn't necessarily going to be the quote, unquote, big one. It doesn't need to cause global catastrophe in order to have a pretty meaningful impact. But having said that, and I'll let you chime in here because there are unknown unknowns and we don't want to understate how bad things could be. But right now it seems to be from early returns that maybe the fatality rate is closer to 1% versus 10%, which was the Spanish flu. That's very, very good news. It's an order of magnitude difference in terms of potential deaths. But on the other hand, it seems that the contagiousness of this is significantly higher than most viruses that we've seen. So the odds that this creates severe medium term consequences for China and the Chinese economy seems very real. Even if, as you mentioned, we're able to contain this in other pockets of the world and some of the preparedness measures are ultimately effective. Can you just talk a little bit more about terms that hopefully no one learns about, but on the other hand, might become all too commonplace in the next few weeks if this continues to accelerate. And that is defining, you know, criticality, case fatality rate, and then this R naught score, which is, you know, common in medical circles as people think about the contagiousness of diseases, but is really a key variable that many, many people are trying to triangulate on right now. And exactly what that number means in terms of risk of spread.

Yeah. So let's define a few terms. Right, So R naught, it's actually very similar to virality in social networking or messaging apps. But it's the number of people, basic reproduction number. It's the number of people that, you know, a virus spreads something to, or condition spread something to. And if your R naught is significantly greater than one, then you go from, let's say, let's say it's, it's four, go from one person having it to four people to 16 to 64 and so on and so forth. Now to be very clear, the R naught is a variable and it is different. Obviously if you quarantine a bunch of people versus everybody going and walking around, it's different in different weather conditions, it's different if people have different levels of immunity to the condition, it's different. If, you know, folks are vaccinated, then they might get infected, but may not be as contagious. For example, they may not have as high a viral load, but sometimes. And it's also hard to estimate from a statistical standpoint for a few different reasons. First, because you usually don't know everybody that someone spread it to. It's not like a social network where you can gauge, oh, you know, Facebook knows This person invited these other five people and of the five people they invited, three of them signed up. Facebook has completely digital reproducible information on that going back to 2004. As an epidemiologist, you do not have that. You know, maybe eventually we're going to have some extremely good surveillance of this kind of stuff. And I think the world, at least Asia is going to change on this and probably invest in something like that. I can talk about that. But it's a challenging thing to measure for all those reasons. Plus you're estimating something that's in an exponent. So your statistical estimator for various reasons is going to have large skew on it and whatnot. Okay, with all that said, everything that I've seen indicates this is highly contagious, though the R0 vary all over the place. So essentially just return to the R0. That's something which is challenging to estimate. You know, it's very. Even with good methods, it's kind of finger to the wind simply because we don't have precise data on exactly who somebody spread it to. With perfect contact tracing, you could, you could just calculate it. You don't need to estimate it. But you know, with that said, the. All the estimates seem to make this look quite contagious, number one and number two in terms of lethality rate. You know, so yesterday the Chinese, or I shouldn't say the Chinese cdc, I should say a paper that had authors from the Chinese, you know, equivalent of the cdc. It's actually called like the Chinese center for Disease Control put a paper on medrxiv. Now it's a preprint. You know, I'm not as much of a believer in peer review as fact checking, which is what people seem to think it is. But this one has not been fully peer reviewed yet. With that said, these authors are credible and they're mostly reporting a data analysis along with some point estimates and confidence intervals for parameters. And they estimate a CFR case fatality rate of like 3%, which is not 1%. And the observed case fatality rate in their data is like 1.44. But they have a reason to correct it up because they, I think they've got a model which is saying, hey, not every death is being observed and so on. We have some folks who are going to die who have near being observed and so on. So whether it's 1% or 3%, whether the R naught is like 3 or 6 or something like that, the big issue here, people focus on like, oh, it's going to kill 20% of people like the Spanish. The issue is that if this spreads to like 100 million people, you know, like even a 1% lethality rate is insane. That's like a million people dead, right? That's really, really, really, really bad.

And if it, you know, well, is. But 150,000 people die of the flu every year, right? So it's much worse. But it's not orders of magnitude worse.

Well, it's an order of magnitude worse. But here's the thing. Most medical systems don't have slack capacity. So if you have a whole surge of new patients, you can overwhelm the number of ICU beds. You can overwhelm the number of. Of especially also if it passes to hospital workers. Right. There's a report that 500 medical workers in Wuhan were getting knocked down by this. That's extremely dangerous because that starts hitting society's capacity to deal with disease. So I wouldn't be sanguine about. I mean, we see this also in crypto, right? A relatively small surge in demand can get prices just soaring on an exchange that doesn't have high liquidity. And we don't have high liquidity in the sense of there isn't a lot of slack capacity in the medical system, certainly not for like another hundred thousand people being put in the ICU in the US for example. Right. That's like the number of ICU beds in the US So I think that on the margins, this actually does have an effect. Even if people don't think that the absolute value is, quote, that high. And I potentially cripple with that as well. But go ahead.

Yeah, it's a good point. And I think we want to come back to just the secondary and tertiary effects that this could have. But to be clear, let's close the loop on maybe the worst case scenario. Right now, if 3% is high, it seems like it may be very high because that may not include all of the mild cases that are not included in that denominator, which could be 2, 3, 4, 5 times as many cases as were available in the study. That would be good news. On the other hand, maybe the number is not 100 million people that get infected, but a billion people, in which case, even if it is a 1% fatality rate, it's a pretty big number. I guess the point is that the first order effects here are if this does spread, if it does become a pandemic, then the number to really look for is going to be the fatality rate in Singapore. And from this cruise Ship and some of the early locations where you've seen relatively contained outbreaks and where you can have some degree of trust in the quality of information that's coming out of that system too. Right. They're modern economies and modern health care systems. They're smaller environments where they're essentially controlled experiments in some respects. And they're going to be a few weeks ahead of anything that may happen in the West. So for better or for worse, one way or another, those might be the pockets that you can get the best information and understand, you know, where the long term trend is heading.

Can I jump in for a second?

Sure, go ahead.

Yeah. So one thing, I'll move on to the secondary. Yeah, totally. One thing is, you know, it's useful in any data analysis or scientific study to distinguish the qualitative from the quantitative. And you know, of course I'm a fan of quantification. Of course we should try to measure and calculate the R0 and the case fatality rate and all that stuff. That's very important. But qualitatively, we can also observe that Wuhan basically got nuked by this. Right. Like it was a normal city and then it was basically, you know, just something where all the reports from on the ground, you know, the quarantine, the fact that seven hospitals are full of sick people, that people are being turned away, whatever it was this thing new to Wuhan. So we can certainly debate, and we should debate and we should quantify all the numbers, but we shouldn't be sanguine about it. If anything like that hits your city, if it's anything as bad as what it was in Wuhan, that's problematic. Now it's also true that sometimes, like these kinds of illnesses, the less severe variants tend to spread more because the people who are affected by them are more mobile. And so therefore the folks who are like farther out in this get less severe strains of it. There's all kinds of dynamics like that. But we should want to avoid what happened to Wuhan regardless of the quantification of it. Go ahead.

Sure. And I think that almost goes without saying. My point was more about which cities are next to watch. Beijing, Shanghai today have similar numbers of confirmed cases to what Wuhan had just three weeks ago. Yeah, which is, which is alarming. And that's why, anecdotally at least, there is no official quarantine in Beijing and Shanghai, which are two of the most important economic cities in the world and two of the most densely populated. But they are not going back to work, even though they've gotten the green light. They're still, relatively speaking, ghost towns. So you have to wonder kind of what comes next for them. And then it does Hong Kong to Singapore ultimately climb up to that 300 confirmed case threshold. Is that some sort of tipping point or is it containable there? So lots of variables. You know, don't, don't want to kind of dwell on the doomsday scenario because it doesn't make any sense until you have a little bit more in the way of facts and data to back it up. But you know, more importantly, the only thing that you can kind of do is wait and see what measures have been effective and what the actual numbers look like.

Yeah, I'd say there's a lot. You know, it doesn't need to be full apocalypse for it to be bad and we should definitely try to avoid what's happening in Wuhan. Now the other thing is a bunch of other Chinese cities, you're right that to my knowledge at least, Beijing and Shanghai have not yet had formal quarantines. But a bunch of other cities in China have and I've seen a number of those reports that are linked to Xinhua Net, which is about as official as it gets and in translation are essentially quarantine orders. And it seems that there's at least like 100 million people under quarantine and how many more I don't know. So then the question is, you know, what other countries are going to be taking measures like that. I don't know if you saw the UK yesterday or a couple of days ago was talking about quarantine levels. I think Singapore may do something like that. So yeah, let's just say that doesn't need to be the full quote doomsday apocalypse for it to be, for it to be bad and seriously inconvenience things people at a minimum because quarantining means that like normal life isn't happening. You know, there are folks, MIT reporters who are posting photos of, you know, like train stations and so on in China. Subways that are normally packed that now look like, you know, it's at 9am in the day. It looks like it's 1am on a Sunday, you know, and so it just looks very, very different. Lots of folks are self quarantining even if they're not officially quarantined. And that's definitely going to do economic damage to China in the short run. It is already. We can come to that point or discuss whatever you want.

Yeah, no, I think you talked about some of the secondary Effects of just overwhelming the health care system. And some of the impacts that could have now, least of which is you'd expect the mortality rate to actually rise, not just for the patients that are impacted by this particular virus, but patients in general that are part of the healthcare system. And one of the scarier studies that came out was the number of people early on that were infected in the initial hospital in Wuhan. Right now you can say at least people know better now so you know which precautions to take. Hopefully that would be an extreme kind of upper bound for what type of impact this could have, but it's still there. So let's talk about the other secondary impacts which are as relevant for, maybe more relevant right now for people in the west. And that is economic speaking, right. This seems to have been largely ignored. Yesterday was a new all time high for the stock market today. I don't know what it is doing right now, but the last I checked it was up another half percent. The S&P is up another half percent. So we're talking about real time all time highs in the stock markets, which means none of this risk is really being priced in for any type of prolonged downdraft in the Chinese economy and any ripple effects that might have. But if you have a situation where to your point, something like 50 million are quarantined, the incubation period for this is so high that you're talking about weeks before you even can clear cases, much less gradually kind of kickstart economic activity again. And Hubei is a major manufacturing hub for many industries. If that expands to greater China, then that becomes even more of a potential shock to different supply chains. You've already started to see some companies warn about this. What do you think something like this could do in terms of the broader economy? What are some of the other variables that you might be thinking about right now, just from a hedging standpoint. And then we'll talk about maybe the medium and long term consequences, economically and technologically speaking, of different trends that this might spark. But first things first. What are the variables that you look for since the stock market is not telling us anything right now? Right. This doesn't matter at all because the Fed's going to keep printing money, right?

So that's the thing is it's very hard to short something like this. And you know, like why would you want to make a trade or whatever in this scenario? Well, you know, just to protect your own family and you know, potentially your fund or what have you. You just have to think about those Things, even if they seem, you know, pecuniary in a time which is not, you know, money shouldn't necessarily be the first thing when things are done. But so let's say you're in that situation and you know, you just need to like look at that and see is this a big enough event that you need to rebalance things or what have you. One of the issues with the American stock market is exactly as you mentioned, the QE. There's a thesis that the last 10 years are based on printed money and it's intentionally. What Greenspan called the plunge protection team is just working all the time because the stock market is a measure of confidence. And so if you can kind of, I shouldn't necessarily call it gaming the indicator because you know, the folks who are in the market are experiencing real gains. So it's not like a fake indicator in that sense, but in the sense of its correlation to other events. Yes. If you print enough money, you can probably prop it up in various ways. So it's hard to say. And your shorts are just really hard to time on anything. With that said, let's talk about like the actual disruptions that are likely to happen. And I think you could probably cut it into weeks, months and years in terms of how disruptive international supply chains are. Right. And weeks has already happened. Okay. And the reason that the impact I think has been somewhat blunted is people already stocked up because of the disruption of Chinese New Year. They have extra weeks of inventory. You know, folks need to get up to speed. But you know, that was extended to like February 3rd. And so now we're in this sort of, you know, hold your breath phase where we're entering like, you know, soon the next week will be the second week after Chinese New Year is done. And then at a certain point you stop being able to hold your breath because you know, companies that don't have, you know, if you don't have components, you can't manufacture something if you have 30 day receivables, you can only push it out so far. You need to pay. And so it's like there's a bunch of folks holding their breath and then you're going to start seeing a bunch of fish come to the surface because they held their breath and they ran out of breath. Economic consequence are already quite significant. Across Asia, for example, Cathay Pacific has furloughed people. Airline stocks, I mean they're going to take, I mean, I can't imagine commodities already plunged. That actually did already happen, probably driven by oil. I Haven't looked into every daily fluctuation, but insofar as oil is sensitive to airlines, and airlines have just cut off all flights to China, which is insane. That's like, never happened in my life or your life, to my knowledge. You know, like months of flights being cut off to the factory of the world. That's completely new. Yeah.

And in many cases through the end of March and into mid April, conferences have already been canceled. And not just in mainland China, it's in Hong Kong. It's in Singapore and Korea as well.

Exactly. That is crazy. Has never happened, to my knowledge, in our lifetime. You know, so. And this is. This is not like canceling flights to a marginal area of the world. This is the biggest country in the world, in the center of the second engine of the world economy, where everything is made.

You could make the argument that this is more extreme than if the United States was cut off in terms of supply chains.

That's right. Because the US in terms of physical good export, China, everything is made in China. Right. Now, one thing I've remarked on, which is interesting is a saving grace here, which is this. I'm not being political here in any way, but I would say an unexpected consequence of the tariffs over the last couple of years and the trade war over the last couple of years is it forced many people, against their will, to look at alternate paths and backups to China. Because if you made something completely there, you'd have supply chain risk from this, political risk and so on and so forth. And I think what was happening was a combination of economic nationalism and people thinking, oh, there might be some physical conflict, unfortunately in the future. And so therefore supply chains might get interrupted. I don't think anybody planned for a disruption of a virus, frankly. I would have considered the scenario of sci fi. If you talk to me about on November 30th, I'm like, okay, we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. Sure. So like, two months ago, I would have considered this a sci fi scenario and not, I shouldn't say not worth planning for because pandemic preparedness is important, but there's conditional probabilities. It's like Bitcoin at $0.10 versus Bitcoin at a dollar versus at $10 versus conditional on that previous milestone being hit. The world in the future is different. You have to renormalize all your probabilities based on this previously improbable event happening. Yeah. So you know, this disruption is actually real. And then the question is, what does it get priced into? Okay. And I think that a lot of things are like Wile E. Coyote, you know, like Wile E. Coyote. He runs on a ledge and then eventually he looks down like this, you know, and the 2008 crisis was like that financial crisis. There are a lot of people. You know, Peter Schiff famously made his bones by talking about subprime and so on before everybody saw it. And then of course, the thing afterwards was, who could have known? Who could have predicted? It was so unexpected. But there are often warning signals. And then the question is, can you trade on that in some way?

And Peter Schiff is actually a very interesting example because while he had the thesis right, the execution was largely wrong.

Right, exactly. And that's why this stuff is so hard. Personally, I pretty much never go short on something because the timing is so hard to nail and you can get crushed if you go short. So I try to pick things where it's thesis driven, buy and hold long term. I'm not saying folks can't make money in shorts. I just personally.

Well, this goes back to. Do you really want to be profiting off of a crisis, a humanitarian crisis, or just coming across like Ebenezer Scrooge? I think when I'm talking about strategies, I'm actually personally thinking about bonafide hedging strategies. I have my Bitcoin, my crypto portfolio, my general investment portfolio. But I want to make sure that that portfolio has upward potential without getting halved in some extreme event. And so from that perspective, it seems irresponsible to not consider what dislocations could look like. So this truly is about hedging versus profit maximization, at least for me. Some people, I think, are going to look at this and they're going to rub their hands together and there's always going to be people like that. But this concept of hedging versus going all in on the doomsday scenario is also important because it speaks to what we talked about at the onset, which is being prepared versus buying into the conspiracy theories and kind of being all in on the worst possible view of how this is going to play out. I agree that anyone does that.

So I'd say also, and I mentioned this early on, I definitely, I mean, if one is a professional investor, your LPs are depending on you to make good decisions in a time like this is basically one's job. If one is protecting one's family and your portfolio, you just have a responsibility to do that. It should not be thought of as, oh, you're profiting off of this. Bad event, but rather in the ideal sense, for example, and just to give one example, you buy into antivirals, face masks, stuff like that, and that actually helps those companies make more stuff, you know, and it's actually like a reallocation of resources. And this is the. You know, this is the most idealistic view of how the market operates, to be clear. Right. Because those are usually secondary rather than primary transactions. You're usually not buying the stock of those companies directly and putting money in their coffers. However, it is also true that a rising stock price helps those companies recruit. It signifies that what they're doing is slightly, you know, like, at least valued, if not necessarily improved, important, but certainly their employees are doing better. And so it gives them more resources with which to work with. So, you know, things like antivirals, things like, you know, certainly vaccines and diagnostics are all things to look at, but also secondary things. I mentioned face masks, remote work, anything, you know, telepresence, possibly VR, though I'm not sure if the headsets will be able to be made with these supply chain disruptions. You know, there's a model where people just can't get new consumer electronics. Like the iPhone is delayed. Everything like that is delayed for. For a long time. I mean, Foxconn, I'm not sure if you saw, but they've repurposed, like, at least some of their capacity. I'm not sure how much of it, to developing face masks rather than electronics. So that is definitely, you know, like. It's almost like going from. I don't know if you've ever heard the same going from producing butter to guns. Right. This is going from, like, producing consumer goods to producing medical goods. And I think a huge part of China's economy is going to shift over to that for a time where it's sort of like wartime production, except the war is against the virus. I called it World War V, the war against the virus. Go ahead.

I mean, I think it's an apt comparison. The other thing that might be worth talking about, and this kind of dovetails with the most recent article that you're going to post on Nakamoto about some of the similarities and the general philosophical, technical things that you might be able to take away from an event like a Black swan event like this, that's outside of crypto, so some macro externality that seems to be more or less in line across a couple of different metrics with what we've seen traditionally with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

Can you talk about Black swans for a second.

Yeah, let's do that. I think that's a necessary preface to, I'm sure, what you've written as well.

Yeah, exactly. So Talib. Nassim. Talib has. I may be pronouncing that wrong. And if so, Naseem, I apologize because.

He will come after you.

Yeah, I like a lot of his work. You know, he's like, he's a. He's very aggressive on Twitter sometimes. Yeah, exactly. Right. But. So he deserves credit for popularizing the black swan concept, which is essentially that, you know, most swans are white, but, you know, once in a while you're going to get a black swan that is an unexpected event that has a significant impact. And his general thesis is that people underweight large deviations and their models assume like Gaussianity, where large deviations are unlikely, but if you increase the probability of that large deviation, then you can robustify yourself against. This is what he calls antifragile, among other things. And he has 10 tips for how to robustify against black swans. Now, the issue is there are. So as a startup investor, you're actually kind of dealing with this in a different way. There are a thousand startups that are coming at you and all of them are hyped and all of them think they can be the next big thing. And so you have something where the sheer quantity of possible black swan events is very, very high. Right. Because that's the other side of it. When you have lots of low probability things, you need to have an extremely good filter to figure out which ones to react to versus which ones not to react to and at what time you react to them. Because you need to have some proof points, like some growth of some kind. You know, if this was infecting 10 people, you know, we wouldn't care. You know, like it's. There's a rational ignorance of some of these things. You can't prep for every single eventuality because that starts to have a cost that's more than a benefit. So I don't think it's. I think Taliban is very relatively sophisticated, very sophisticated on this. But I don't think it's sophisticated to just say, oh, it's a black swan, you idiots all effed up, or whatever. Right. That's almost the opposite of oh, you're so paranoid, or whatever. Right. It's not easy to figure out which black swans to react to because they are low probability events that have a non zero cost of preparing for them. With that said, I think the pandemic stuff is Stuff that, you know, the Gates Foundation, Johns Hopkins, we've seen that hit humanity before. If you're familiar, you know, have you ever done anything in, like, construction? Float planes are.

Well, I've built things, but I've never been on a construction crew.

Okay, well, so if you look at, like, surveys, you know, like. Like in the sense of a surveyor, you know, looking at a site, they have contour maps that show what the, like, 100 year and 500 year flood looks like. Okay, so that say if the waters came up and it was the biggest flood in 100 years or the biggest flood in 500 years, how far up would they come? What would get flooded? What wouldn't? Right. And so it's interesting because in a sense, some degree of black swan planning is built into building codes and whatnot. Right. And I think you're going to start to see that, like, after, you know, now I'm looking past to the recovery phase where we haven't even really gotten anything under control. But once vaccines are rolled out, once this thing is defeated, whether that's weeks or months or hopefully not a year. I mentioned this, but I think at least the Chinese are going to build what I think of as a third Great Wall, you know, so the Great Wall, great firewall, and this will be the great biowall of China. And so, like, pandemic surveillance is going to be something where a significant part of the state security apparatus will be devoted to that as well as, like, the scientific establishment. It'll be like a military level of preparedness for that. And there's 50 different things you can do there, from vaccination to, for example, you could do environmental sequencing. So environmental metagenomics, you know, this started, you know, more than a decade ago, but people would take like a big, you know, sample of gunk from a coal mine or a swamp and then put primers that, you know, randomly bind so that they don't just bind to a specific sequence, but they can bind to all kinds of things. They just sequence everything in there to try and figure out what's there. And they could find new organisms or we haven't. You could apply environmental metagenomics to flushes in airport toilets and bathrooms and start doing surveillance to see. I hate that word. But that's a word that people use in this, you know, pandemic surveillance, right? It's called monitoring or what have you to see. Okay, what genetic material is there? Do you have a serious virus or microbe that is gaining, you know, in the population? And you're dealing with A mixture. And you don't have names, but you're starting to actually monitor that. It's like the inverse of putting fluoride in the water supply. You're taking stuff out of the water supply and monitoring it and actually the system. It's probably possible to go and retrofit sewage treatment plants and so on to do this kind of thing. Most people don't think about this type of stuff, but that's what public health is. I think this is a broader part of what I call Hygiene 2.0, which I think is going to roll out across Asia. Everything from touchless faucets and doors and buttons to, you know, potentially just being much more sensitive about who you touch in public. I think it's going to have societal ripple effects and whatnot after that. Okay, a bit of a digression, but go back to your original question.

Yeah. So there seems to me one ultimate outcome here that is interesting in that if China is able to contain this virus and they learn from this experience to create the great third biowall as you framed it, what it does is it more firmly entrenches that surveillance state mindset and that ultra controlling mindset. And on the other hand, it might further distance the west from that level of preparedness because the ethos are democratic and we would never do a forcible quarantine under these same situations. Maybe the Chinese response was draconian. You know, everybody's seen, I'm sure, videos. Whether they're true or not doesn't matter. Perception is reality of, you know, some people being forcibly removed from their apartments if they don't pass temperature checks and thrown into the quarantine. And Wuhan, there is some ultimate consequence here where maybe China becomes more anti fragile because of this, because they develop some of these systems and then whatever the next virus is, whether it's in 20 years or 50 years or 100 years, other freer economies might not be as well equipped to deal with such a threat. Has that changed your worldview at all from a philosophical standpoint? Because there's kind of this meme that crypto is libertarian, AI is communist.

Yeah, it's Peter Thiels.

Yeah, Peter Thiels. Right. So what, if anything, about that libertarian mindset has changed from just studying the response to this and some of the potential consequences for coordinating action against what's a distributed system in this virus?

Yeah. And so, by the way, on Peter's meme, the reason that he said that is crypto people talk about decentralization and AI is usually about Massive centralized data sets that you're crunching through on a cloud and a cloud provider. But it's also actually you can point to things which point the opposite way. For example, China's own blockchain is a centralized version of crypto, and stuff like AI video or deepfakes is decentralized use of AI. So you could call it tendencies, I guess, but you can definitely point to things that point in the opposite direction on those two technologies, even if spiritually they started there. So the philosophical questions here are extremely important and similar in some ways to the terrorism debates that we've had over the last 20 years where people, you know, now there's been so many, you know, so much ink on terrorism that people feel like they've got a hold on it. Maybe it's, you know, maybe it's just simply like being accustomed to it or whatever, you know, over 20 years. But with pandemics. So interestingly, these. This is a booster rocket for certainly state control in many ways, but also for decentralization. It's weird that it pushes both nationalism and decentralization. And let me explain why. So why does it push nationalism? Well, obviously quarantines, border controls, you know, surveillance. You know, it's funny, some of the things I tweeted out like three days or four days later, they're like, you know, getting confirmed or whatever. Right, whatever. They're all speculative things, but like, boy, this is going to juice remote work. And it's like the largest remote work experiment in the world. Or man, their surveillance apparatus is going to go to town and they roll out this app that lets you find out who is next to you, you know what I mean? Which is not something that you can find out otherwise. Right. They're integrating like whatever, hundred signals and basically exposing that finally as an API so you can find out who is near you physically or other variables. Basically, I should say proximal to you and possibly infected in some sense. Right. So certainly it's a booster rocket for the state in that sense. People talk about war is the health of the state. Well, you know, pandemics certainly are, and the reason is people will go along with it because it's actually, it's actually arguably in their interest for the state to restrict the physical exit of somebody who has this condition because you start to get extreme disalignment of interests. For somebody in a quarantine or pandemic zone, they probably want to escape so they don't get infected. For somebody outside, they really don't want them to escape because you Know the person outside could get infected. So you have a two by two where you have extreme disalignment of interests. And that's bad, but you know, like it seems to have. China may be the place in the world where it's like most able to institute a quarantine like that. I'm not sure if you could do so in the West. You know, we're gonna see. The UK is gonna try another point though. So all those things that I just mentioned are things that boost centralized states, the border controls, the nationalism, the surveillance, the suspicion of strangers, trust the government in this time of crisis, they're going to build all the hospitals. That's definitely real. On the flip side, you have things like Lee Wen Liang, the doctor who tried to make a warning about this and then was basically forced to sign a confession that it was all nonsense and he was misinformed and he caught the virus and he died, right. Healthy guy, smart guy, and became basically a martyr in the Chinese Internet. And so, you know, I propose, look, you know, we should, when things cool down, have the Lee Wen Liang Prize for decentralized medicine where you know, when the state fails, you need to sometimes take like your health of yourself and your family into your own hands. And we've seen this in a slow motion way in the US where, and it's certainly not as shocking or as dramatic and so on as what's happening in China. And I don't need to downplay it at all, but the enormous wave of type 2 diabetes that's happened in the US is in part due to the state's nutritional guidelines being bad in the US and the subsidies of corn sugar. And that certainly cost millions of folks their health over time because they're basically being poisoned with constant sugar. So the state can get it wrong and when it gets it wrong, you have to be able to figure out how to fend for yourself. Right? So that's one example with Li Wen Liang. But face masks, when you're guarding against pollution, infection, surveillance, they are in a sense, all three of them are because the state failed in some way. The state should have regulated somehow and figured out the right balance to keep that air pollution out of your lungs. It should have gotten this infection under control and it shouldn't be surveillance, right? So a face mask is without extreme need. There's times when you need that, but I think much of the time you do not. And then some of the other things, like you're going to start to see the next shoe drop where folks are like, oh, these local Officials aren't looking out for us, and they're going to want to move their money overseas and escape. There's actually an article in this in the New York Times about two US Citizens that are sitting in, like, a apartment building, I believe, in Shanghai. And they keep talking to each other, hey, should we leave China? Right, because they can. And so I think this also pushes decentralization in the medium to long term. And so the question is, does that mean that you fight quarantine today? And I don't think the answer is yes. The reason is it took me a little while to articulate this because I don't think it's as simple as, oh, ideological. The libertarians, if I'm against all quarantine or, oh, I'm ideologically state. So I'm against, you know, anybody taking their health care into their own hands and, you know, fending for themselves to some extent or being able to protect themselves, rather. I don't think it's useful to do it in terms of just like, ideologically rigid principles. Instead, I think the Lee Kuan Yew view of pragmatism is important. Here's what I actually anticipate will happen. I think you're going to see enormous state intervention on this, not just from the Chinese state, which is already there, obviously, but Asian states, probably. You know, any state where this thing goes, goes viral, and states will ask for all kinds of powers and may actually use them to bring the crisis under control, maybe. Okay, at least there's a chance of it. I don't want to say it's 100% because states mess up a lot, but sometimes states don't always mess up. There's some competent governments out there. So after these powers, they will probably get them. They may use them to resolve the crisis. And then this is the part you can definitely bank on. They're not just going to give them up afterwards. For example, like, I think over all of Bush's administration, all of Obama's and all of Trump's, they keep signing some declaration of the continuing emergency or whatever into, into effect which authorized all these extraordinary measures. So we've had like, 19 years of emergency in the US after 9, 11. Okay? And so states will not give up these powers in the same way that the TSA has not given up any powers whatsoever, to my knowledge at least. Certainly we're still all being searched at airports, you know, 20 years later. And they'll argue all the crisis could recur. Right. And that's why we're not giving up the powers and that's something that's hard to argue against because essentially society shifted that way and a whole bureaucracy put in place, a whole set of advocates. So that's when I think the next step comes into play. So then we're going to need to decentralize. That's the only way to check those powers after the crisis has passed. So that's a more complicated view, a more complex view than to be against all kinds of quarantine or to be for any form of decentralization even undermines the quarantine. The thing that I tweeted about that, that brought to mind, you know, Ben Gurion, when, you know, he was one of the earliest leaders of Israel, for folks who don't know that, you know, before Israel's founding, he was very upset with the British for a white paper they had put out that seemed to undermine, you know, his aspirations for Israeli independence. But he was also allied to the British at the time against the Nazis. So what he said was, we will fight the white paper as if there is no war and we will fight the war as if there is no white paper. And that's kind of how I think about this. We gotta, you know, we've gotta fight the coronavirus as if there's no crypto and we need to fight for crypto as if there's no coronavirus, meaning we shouldn't do things that undermine legitimate quarantine. You know, like that's something which is destructive to public health. You know, you don't want to have every city in China crash. Like we, that's not a rational thing to do. That's a short term maximization of something against the long term health of a lot of people. On the other hand, you don't want to be saying blind and say, oh, the Chinese state or any state is going to use these powers for good in the long term. And so I think Ben Gurion did get his country. He got both. They won the war and they got the country. And that was a pragmatic and intelligent tactic. And I think that's what we want to do. We want to quarantine and stop this virus. We want to erect a wall, a bywall against it, probably in the future. But we also don't want to give up on our aspirations for freedom.

There might be too many variables. So I am almost afraid to ask this question, but do you have any predictions for what comes next? Not in the super long term of how this is ultimately contained or not contained. We talked about some of the macro shifts that might be inevitable if this continues to get even a little bit worse than it already is. And maybe some of the things that you reference are already inevitable based on just what happened in Wuhan. But maybe looking just a week or two weeks out, what are you either predicting or keeping the closest eye on when it comes to the virus itself and the coordinated international response?

Well, so the dashboard that I look at the most is the Johns Hopkins GIS dashboard, which is showing at least it's aggregating from the World Health Organization many other places, a daily dashboard on the number of people affected by the virus. And the critical thing is it's aggregating non China reports as well. And I believe those non China reports are in a sense decentralized because they are coming from a bunch of different national health agencies. So insofar as one of them we're messing up the numbers or under diagnosing. People think Indonesia for example, which hasn't reported a single case, is probably under diagnosing. That's a very large country that's close to China. As far as you've got one national in an organization that is not doing it, you're a little more robust to it anti fragile in a sense because you've got decentralized measurement. So that dashboard of all of the infections confirmed infections outside of China is the one that I'm most concerned about. And the thing is if you, if you look at that dashboard and you know, if I bring it up Right now on January 20, other locations had about four cases confirmed. And today on February 12, there's 519 cases confirmed. So in about three weeks that's a greater than 100x increase in the number of cases outside. We hope that slows down. In the worst case in another three weeks you have like tens of thousands of cases outside conferred cases outside of China. And then the thing is truly gone pandemic in the sense of an epidemic on multiple continents. So that's the thing to look at is is there some way that the number of infections outside of China starts plateauing? I unfortunately don't see any sign of that happening. But that's the thing that I would watch, the number one thing to watch. So I'm not making a prediction on it. I'm just saying that if that growth rate continues or if it continues at not 100x increase but a 10x increase in three weeks, that's still quite bad. So let me pause there.

Yeah, and it's a good point. At what point do you think? I mean, if at all at Some point, I'd imagine you have to see a citywide quarantine like we've seen with 50 million people in Hubei and kind of surrounding provinces. At what point do you think something similar could happen to some of these other major non mainland China cities like Hong Kong or Seoul or Singapore? Hong Kong and Singapore in particular, because they seem to be the ones that are growing the fastest but are still maybe containable, where each has about 50 confirmed cases right now, but we mentioned at the onset Singapore 8 of those 50 or are critical. Yeah.

So the. So a couple of thoughts. One is that Hong Kong and Singapore, they may not be under official quarantine, but if you look at some of the videos from online and the photos that have been posted of shops that are totally cleared out or, or queues of like a thousand people to get into like a normal drugstore, it's certainly not like a normal situation over there. Hong Kong in particular has been racked by all these protests and whatnot. And they're in this bizarre intermediate state where folks are staying home, but they're mad on the Internet and what have you. So in a sense, and also major Chinese cities are also not in a normal state. They're already kind of quarantined in staying home. The way I would think about it is any company, I mean, the head of the who, the Director General said the containment measures have given countries some time to prepare, but every country must prepare. Okay, so he's saying prepare. Is he a prepper? Okay, he's saying to prepare. And that's as much of an authority as you're going to get on this, the head of the World Health Organization to declare a global pandemic. So I think what that means for probably most people is in the event of a Singapore or Hong Kong level situation, let alone a Wuhan situation, is prepare to be able to work remote for a while. Maybe prepare to be able to self quarantine for a while. It's not theoretical anymore. A lot of Singapore and Hong Kong are not mainland China. They're not Denver either, but they're fairly Western, speak English. They're closer certainly to our way of life and what have you. And so I'd say, you know, A, remote work, B, you know, if you need to, you might need to, you know, self quarantine for some time, C, probably remote conference attendance and so on and just do as much remote as you can. I'm not saying that's like, you know, get in the fallout shelter and lock yourself up for a long time. But I'm also saying it's not a theoretical thing either. There's millions of people who, who wish that they had some of that in place beforehand. So that's kind of how I think about on the individual level, at the city level. I mean, I think Singapore, there's a chance that Singapore saves the world on this because they are pushing through vaccine approval. I made the point that when it comes to a pandemic, folks in the us, people like Anthony Fauci, who's a smart guy, is the head of NIA National Institute, I believe, for infectious diseases and allergies, was like, oh, it's going to take a year to develop a vaccine. And Singapore is saying they can shoot through in like four months because they've got a bunch of prefab stuff set up. Now, the difference between four months and 12 months when it comes to vaccine development for something like this is the difference between R to the fourth and R to the eighth, rather R to the fourth and R to the twelfth, where R is the monthly, not the reproduction number, but the monthly growth rate of this. So it could be a massive, massive difference. So one thing cities, early city states can do is just fast track anything related to vaccines, anything related to prevention, and every day and week really matters. So I'm really glad that Singapore is stepping up here. Another thing cities could do, you know, to prepare is to like, you know, make it feasible, make it easy for folks to work from home, you know, certainly federal employees to, I hate to use this term, but stockpile, you know, like suits for their healthcare workers at a minimum, you know, because you need to protect them to, you know, keep like a close line of communication with the cdc. The issue is that, like the, you know, somebody mentioned this, but the command and control facility for controlling a pandemic in the US is kind of not there. It's sort of decentralized. And it may not be that compliment, it may not be that competent at local levels, and we're going to have to hope it is. So I don't have great answers on that other than the individual answer.

Yeah, and again, it kind of comes back to wait and see and Singapore and Hong Kong maybe the two to most closely monitor over the weeks ahead. One last practical question. When would you, assuming things plateaued and immediately started to look as if they were getting better, when would you feel comfortable traveling to Asia?

That's a great question. I would say what I would look for is the most important indicator, in my view is the number of new confirmed cases per day. On the Johns Hopkins dashboard from outside China. Dropping off a cliff. Now the issue is the reason that's a tricky variable to measure is as something spreads, your ability to test is linear, but the virus ability to spread is exponential. Having built a genetic testing facility, I can tell you there's a huge difference between testing 500 vs 5,000 vs 50,000 vs 500,000 vs like, you know, a virus can 10x much easier than your facility can. You know, you have to like. So at a certain point, actually the government of Singapore also said they would stop testing and just treat folks as if they had nCov, you know, 2019 or cove ID 2019. That's a bad case scenario. But the good case scenario, the thing that would say, okay, things have returned to normality is the confirmed cases start really plummeting, you know, outside of China. And then when would I travel to Asia? I mean, I guess when flights resume and you know, there's been like a period of a month or something just to make sure that things are okay. It's hard for me to give a criterion on that because.

I kind of.

Think this is going to get like, you know, I don't think this is gonna resolve very quickly. Like when I say very quickly, I don't think this is gonna be resolved in a week. I probably don't think it's gonna resolve in a month. I think it's gonna be resolved after you get like a vaccine out to a large number of people. And that's probably gonna be a few months before the vaccine, well, should I say before the vaccine is produced. I don't know, you know, how quickly they can scale it and distribute it. But I think that's probably the answer. I don't know. Those would be the two things I would look at. A, what is the confirmed cases outside China look like on the Johns Hopkins dashboard? And B, you know, when, when have a lot of people gotten vaccinated such that there's a firebreak against it now? Also the thing about, let me make one other point. It's a longer term point. The thing about RNA viruses like this is evidently your immunity isn't. It doesn't last forever. That's why, you know, to different virus, to, you know, the flu, you need booster shots because your immunity doesn't keep forever. And so what I think is going to happen after this. Do you know the term OODA loop? O O D A. Okay, so in the military this is a famous thing, but it's like observe, orient, decide, act. If your opponent is just reacting Faster than you. They'll constantly have the strategic advantage, or rather they'll have such a tactical advantage that it turns into a strategic advantage. They'll just be able to execute faster. They observe and while you're still responding to something from three weeks ago, they run circles around. So I think a very important thing for future things like this is to set up the entire state apparatus such that it can rapidly surveil and then knock out a new vaccine and deploy it. To go from detecting this thing to vaccinating people like an anti missile defense system, it has to like lock onto it and then knock it out of the air. You know, the same way you have to lock onto this virus, make sure it's real, see that it's spreading quickly, push out a vaccine quickly, blend quarantines or what have you and then stop that from happening. And I think that's it's kind of like anti missile defense because most of those missiles won't get through, but one of them is a nuclear missile. Okay. If that hits, you're in really big trouble. So I think that's what's going to happen in the future. You're going to have much more rapid turnout with these vaccines. Right now though, looks like four months at the best from Singapore and it would be after vaccination that I'd feel, I think most people would feel comfortable going back, but we'll see. Maybe I'm wrong about that. Maybe cases just go down.

Yeah. And obviously with Asia being such a critical driver of a lot of the activity in crypto, it's going to be especially relevant to this audience. And looks like Q3, maybe at the earliest will be the right timeframe.

By the way, Amazon and others all, you know, they've all been pulling out the World Mobile Congress. I don't know if you saw that. So large multinational corporations are starting to react to this by not going to.

Conferences, which is a canary in the coal mine.

Huge canary in the coal mine. Like basically, again, as I think this is a stimulus for remote work, it's a stimulus for a lot of these things. I mean, a lot of conferences are as you know, a huge, huge gain and a huge waste of time or whatever. Right. And so like a tiny, tiny silver lining in this is a lot of unnecessary travel. It may shift society over into a new normal when we all recover from this in the same way that obviously, you know, World War II was terrible. One of the things that came out of that was women went to work and then after the war they didn't all go home. There was a new normal that was achieved. Right. So the sort of wartime response to this, I think, folks, you might shift into a new era equilibrium where there's now infrastructure around remote work, remote conferences and, you know, a lot of unnecessary travel is cut down. If you're, you know, sensitive to the carbon footprint that gets cut down and so on. And so that's a tiny silver lining. But I think, you know, something that will happen as one of like a hundred different consequences.

Well, Balaji, thank you very much for joining again on such short notice, especially given that we just. I feel like it was just a couple weeks ago that we had the conversation about Nakamoto. I hope everybody that tuned in for this particular episode has gotten a lot out of it, at least starting to wrap their heads around some of the possible consequences of how exactly this new virus could impact crypto, the economy, and hopefully not, but maybe even your personal preparedness plans in the west or wherever you're listening to this from. But I hope that There is an 80% probability in a few weeks that Balaji and I are mercilessly mocked in the Twitter sphere for being so wrong on this and outlining only the worst possible scenarios because it will be a very good thing for the global economy for everybody throughout Asia that is otherwise dealing with what looks like a nightmare.

Can I offer an asterisk there? I don't think mocking would not be the right approach because it's clearly already a catastrophe. Should be in China. I know you mean that as a joke, but basically I think I would slightly rephrase that, as I would be happy to be wrong about the idea that this will spread outside China. I do think it's probably more likely than not now, but we should all be happy about that and we should. Rather than mock it, we should try and figure out how we can not have such a risky situation in the future with by erecting some defenses in the future against this kind of thing. That's how I would think about it.

Totally agree. It's not going to stop people from mocking us, which is why I hope that it happens, because most people are not going to be rational, but if they are in a position to do so, it will mean that this was contained and the very worst scenarios did not play out. So we can only hope, and I think these conversations hopefully are in at least some small way helping people orient around that preparedness aspect and taking this as seriously as possible so that it.

Doesn'T spiral out of control. Yeah, I mean, Boy Scout level, be prepared. I think is very reasonable. That doesn't mean nuclear fallout shelter, but also doesn't mean blase.

Awesome. Balaji. Thank you so much for sharing some of your insights. Thank you everyone for tuning in. We'll be back with our regularly scheduled crypto focused programming on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is Unqualified Opinions. I'm Ryan Selkis. Until next time, thanks. Peace.