The Exchanges

Q opinions, and assumptions. Uh, and if we can try to preface things with, um, this is true, or this is what I think, and here's why I think it, or I'm assuming this to make this happen. Um, just so we're trying to get people the best information possible. So I want to start with something super basic, right? Like I'm not well versed in this. So what's an epidemic?

A So, uh, an epidemic is the, you know, the spread of a new disease, dictionary definition, widespread occurrence of infectious disease in a community at a particular time. But sometimes people use it to refer to like, you know, the obesity epidemic, which is a more kind of colloquial usage where at least we don't know if obesity is caused by an infectious disease. And we, you know, Maybe there's an infectious thing on top of that. So people sometimes use it casually, but at least in this context, occurrence of infectious disease in a community. And then maybe to your next question, a pandemic is when there's an infectious disease that is occurring on multiple continents or the whole world and spreading. So it's, you know, pan in the sense of everywhere. Um, and, uh, you know, what's interesting with just about that term for a second, WHO, the World Health Organization, has not actually declared this a pandemic yet. They're still I think kind of, I don't know, in some mental model where they either think it can be contained or for political or sociological reasons are deciding not to call it such, but simply from like a dictionary definition standpoint, this is definitely spreading in an uncontrolled way on multiple continents. Um, so in that sense, it's a pandemic.

AI assessment note: “widespread occurrence of infectious disease in a community at a particular time”

Q How do you recognize talent? I mean, you must have some sort of, Insights or methods or different ways of thinking about it that help you do that?

A Well, first it depends. There's different kinds of talent. You know, there's, there's raw intelligence, there's persistence, you know, creativity and, you know, various kinds of dimensions to it. Right. Uh, and then if, if you were recruiting for, uh, like a sports team or the military, you know, you'd need their speed, their strength, their 40 yard dash time, their bench press, NFL combine type stuff. Right. So if you had in theory, like, um, a data set, which had, um, You know, their NFL combine, their standardized tests, their classwork, and so on and so forth, their, their resume, all that stuff, right? That's helpful, but I think the single best thing is basically just looking at their, their portfolio and what they've actually done. That's like the materialized result. You know, your brain is probably pretty well tuned for this. If you can load their portfolio and you're like, hmm, not bad, right? It could be a great open source project. It could be a great piece of design. It could be a creative blog post. It could even be just a really clever tweet or something, but You can sort of see from somebody's high point, how clever they are in some area. And then from references, you can see how persistent they are. And so the first order intelligence plus conscientiousness, that's, those are important. And the third is like ethics and integrity and whatnot. And that's also som…

AI assessment note: “the single best thing is basically just looking at their, their portfolio and what they've actually done”

Q The number of available beds, which. That's right. Further. And how does it transmit? So it's airborne obviously, but it's also surfaces and.

A Well, yeah, so, so, I mean, it seems highly contagious. So, uh, you know, it being airborne, which really sucks because you should wash your hands, you should avoid handshakes, but that won't necessarily save you because it's, if it's airborne, right? It appears that fecal transmission is another vector. And that was something that happened with SARS, which is a related virus, you know, 17 years ago, but there's a famous, infamous case of a apartment complex in Hong Kong called Imoy Gardens, and about 300 people there contracted SARS because, you know, it gave some of them diarrhea, and this is gross, but, you know, some of them flushed, and the sewage system wasn't perfect, and some of the droplets or whatever were coming back up, and so people were all infecting each other within the building. That's a more general thing, which is, Apartments are not biohazard containment units. For example, if you think about your soundproofing in an apartment, it's not perfect.

AI assessment note: “It appears that fecal transmission is another vector.”

Q And so what is it? Like, where does it come from? I heard a rumor there's like a bat or something.

A So there's something called molecular phylogenetics where you can actually Build evolutionary trees of not just, you know, humans and, and dogs and cats and, uh, so on, but also viruses and, uh, bacteria and what have you. It's called molecular phylogenetics because normal phylogenetics, you're kind of just looking at macroscopic features of, of an animal. Like, does this have four legs or two, you know, does it have fur or not? And trying to classify them that way, right? Those are like features. Yeah. With molecular phylogenetics, the features are more like Do you have an A in this position or a C? You know, uh, do you have a T or a G? In this case, it's an RNA virus, but the concepts are the same. You're not using DNA, but RNA. And the, um, the molecular phylogenics of this, uh, you know, coronavirus, uh, you can, you can put it in a tree with Other related coronaviruses. And you can see that it's similar to these coronaviruses that came out of Yunnan province. So evidently there's some coronaviruses that were in bats, or at least labeled as such on, on GenBank, where they appear to be viruses that were resident in bats from Yunnan province in China. So this particular substrain of virus appears to be most similar to those. And so that's why people have talked about, oh, did it come from bats, you know? But we don't really know, I don't think. I haven't seen anything that ac…

AI assessment note: “this particular substrain of virus appears to be most similar to those”

Q Yeah. Going back to sort of like, how should governments respond? Like what is the decentralized response? What is the, what, what is it that, and then what on the individual level can we do?

A So I think the single most important thing that the government should do is, um, emergency expanded right to try laws. And what that would do is it would unblock. So we've already seen what happens with the diagnostics bottleneck, right? Making it something where, um, it had to go through FDA approval and also the CDC's case definition, right? So FDA was blocking tests at the physical level, and the, the case definition which said, oh, only people who had returned from China are eligible for COVID-Covid-Covid testing. That twin kind of centralization bottleneck were two bad decisions that were a central point of failure that's led to the, you know, Epidemic, or really, you know, in the sense of the US is part of a pandemic that we have now. So, so when you can't yell at institutions, like institutions that made that bad a call, you can't bottleneck more stuff through them. Right?

AI assessment note: “the single most important thing that the government should do is, um, emergency expanded right to try laws.”

Q And what's the most underrated big tech in the US?

A Facebook. Why? Because Facebook still has its founder and that's the most important thing. Uh, like Zuck will take the hits of pushing them into new territory, even with the five hundred billion dollar markdown or whatever that they just had. Like I'm still more bullish on them because Zuck has taken hits like that before, uh, when Facebook had to make the transition to mobile, you know, around the time of IPO. And I think what he'll just do is he'll be like, okay, all the parasites, all the people who are here for the paycheck get out. And now we're doing web three and we're doing, you know, metaverse. Like I'm not saying it's a hundred percent. Who knows? Future's unpredictable. Maybe he's like, you know, screw it. I've accomplished whatever I wanted to do in my life. I'm leaving blah, blah, possible. I doubt it because he is a will to power founders overcome so much. At least there's a chance of him. Cause he's got a strategy on web three and the metaverse. And that's more than you can say for most of their big tech companies. Google does have exceptional AI. Okay. They do. And deep mind and stuff like that is genuinely, absolutely world-class, ok? But, It is kind of become a researchy labs thing where they're doing this, these prestige things, but it's not really in their products. Right. Gmail, Google docs, Google search. Those basically look the same as they did five year…

AI assessment note: “Facebook. Why? Because Facebook still has its founder and that's the most important thing.”

Q So is that Chinese reaction, or is that like a necessity? Like, uh, do you think that

A Well, here's the thing, like, you don't, I mean, it's, it's one of those things where, um, First of all, Iran seems to have had a similar experience, um, where, I don't know if you've seen this guy on Twitter, Ali Ostad, and his, his, you know, tweeting from Iran, or this guy Del Luca Anna, he's giving stats from Italy, and people are showing, you know, the number of beds. This is actually on Wikipedia from the Italian government, increasing exponentially. In the first week, the, you know, the region of Italy that's been hit by this announced he had run out of beds, ok? Now, When you're seeing things from China, Italy, and Iran, I don't think this is psychosomatic. I don't think it's a lot of people who are hypochondriacs going to the hospital. Like, it's a hospital, right? It's expensive. You know, it's, um, even if you have universal healthcare, or what have you, and, you know, I don't think that's, it's not a trivial decision to go to the hospital. And, and so, so I think that in very different societies now, we have to kind of take the warning and heed. It just, it sort of beggars imagination to believe that the Chinese government would have seven hundred and sixty million people under lockdown and quarantine because they're scared of a sniffle. That's just not what this is. This is simply not the most parsimonious explanation. You know, you can, you can sort of wait for th…

AI assessment note: “Chinese government would have seven hundred and sixty million people under lockdown and quarantine”

Q Will you be able to go to the airport before you board a plane, like, spit in something?

A No, they're not. Even though it's called real-time PCR, it's not, it's not that fast. It's, um, the real-time aspect refers to something different, which is a little bit, a little bit technical. It's, uh, you know, You're basically looking at the ratios of curves. You're not going to get it on the spot that like, there's a different term for that. It's like point of care diagnostics. You're thinking of like, like a pregnancy test or something. And I do think we want to get this stuff into a, we're actually, well, point of care is a little different from a pregnancy test. Pregnancy test is the ultimate where you can do it at home, but ideally you want to have something where the point of care is at home and you can kind of test yourself. You can plug into your smartphone and we're not there yet with this Yet, I think we're going to have to get there rapidly, and there's, there's potential tools that, that, that could be used for that. You know, there's also proxies. You, you don't necessarily have to go to the molecular level right away. You can look at something like an Oura ring, or even a thermometer, and just measure your temperature, right? And, and so then that's symptomatic. It's not going to detect the asymptomatic stuff, but it's, it's maybe a cheaper and more widely deployable proxy, because thermometers are well understood, wearables are well understood,

AI assessment note: “No, they're not. Even though it's called real-time PCR, it's not”

Q If you had to bet on one country to dominate the future, and I know it's not sort of country specific, but if you had to pick one and go all in, which country would it be?

A One, China. Two, it'll be, I think by 2040, there's a chance, I'm not saying a hundred percent, but I think that if the last century ended up at least the second half was USA versus USSR, right? I think this century may end up as being China versus Indians, not India. I think that's where it might land up by like 20, 40 or so centralized China versus the international India or international Indians. Okay. It's not, this is just a historical analogy and it may be completely wrong. And so, so I'm giving a scenario. So I'm putting not extremely high weight on this. Okay. But At the beginning of the twin century, or, uh, you know, you had the British empire. It was, you know, the big deal. It was like the American empire, but it's rickety. But in 1913, it was the big dog. Right. And then like a effectively a 30 years war arose starting in 1914. You can think of the next 30 years as just being like a giant conflagration. Um, even though there's a break between world war one, world war two in the west, there's invasion of Manchuria, other stuff that was happening in the east. So it's like this giant bar brawl across continents. Right. And in this sort of final four showdown, you had Japan, Germany, the US, the USSR, also, you know, France and, um, and the UK. And the guy who's in number one, you know, the number one spot, the UK got knocked out, uh, and reduced to basically like numb…

AI assessment note: “One, China.”

Q What's the most interesting or surprising thing you've learned or changed your mind about in the last three months?

A Last three months? I don't know, uh, but the last year I actually wrote an essay on this for Barry Weiss's blog, and, um, essentially what was surprising to me was that the reduction in state capacity was bipartisan in the U.S., and that is to say, like, under Bush or under Obama, state capacity had been moderately high enough to do, like, even if you don't agree with it, the invasion of Iraq is a logistically complicated thing, You know, even, you know, operations in Syria or their domestic actions, you know, foreign actions that were taken that required some degree of coordination. Under Trump, there was a huge visible decline in state capacity under Biden that seems to have continued. Why is that surprising to me? Last summer, I kind of had this little tweet, which is a little bit surprising, but I said, you know, the federal government is losing control of affairs, both, ah, domestic and international. Inflation, Afghanistan, China and Taiwan. Uh, France on AUKUS. El Salvador on Bitcoin. 17 states were suing the feds on education. Texas on abortion. Vaccines. Many others, and of course, obviously now the, you know, Ukraine issue. You know, what I thought might happen, and the thing that I was concerned about was that, ah, you know, a new government would come in, and with total control, they'd be able to implement all kinds of crazy surveillance or whatever tactics, and in …

AI assessment note: “essentially what was surprising to me was that the reduction in state capacity was bipartisan”

Q We, we pursued a path of, uh, it seems in, in at least the United States and Canada, where housing is an investment and not sort of a consumption asset at this point. And that, that implies that we want it to grow faster than inflation. How do you see the price of housing and what are the impacts?

A So I think of the last 10 years and maybe the last several decades, but certainly the last 1010, The state's inflation versus technology's deflation. So the state is propping up mortgage prices. It's bailing out GM, right? It is trying to keep the status quo intact, right? And subsidizing all of these jobs that wouldn't basically exist otherwise. And, um, technology is trying to, uh, you know, bring down car costs with autonomous cars and bring down shipping costs and automate this, disrupt that, Bring down housing costs with drone construction and robot construction and, um, and, and all these things. So it's this tug of war between inflation and deflation, right? And so what that's resulted in so far is that all these things in the physical world have become more expensive, especially education and healthcare and, uh, and housing in, in, especially in, in not everywhere, but in, in blue areas, housing can be expensive and everything digital has, has deflated and the combination of the two kind of evened out Over the 2010, so people were like, whoa, where did the inflation go? But if you look at the graphs, some prices went way up and some went way down. And in a sense, the Fed is like upstream of all of that. It's upstream of every political issue. Medicare for all. Why? Because the Fed printed money and that led to healthcare prices going up in part. There's other factors as…

AI assessment note: “all these things in the physical world have become more expensive, especially... housing”

Q of trends or things we've been dabbling with because there'll be a huge health benefit or a perceived health benefit in the future to having things operate this way. But then what are the second order consequences of that? Like social isolation? Don't, we need to feel part of something and part of society and connected to our community. Like what are the psychological impacts of If everybody worked remotely.

A So what I think happens is you get two compliments that all the things that are canceled, people are going to want to bring back or, you know, bring back in some, some other form. There's a couple of options for that. First is work from home is going to get really good. Things like tandem office, tandem chat, and so on. Uh, people are going to try, there's a hundred different things that you could argue are the reasons that people aren't as productive at home. And people are going to push that. And VR is an obvious angle. There's a bunch of other obvious angles to try, you know, like maybe it's a, it's like a Facebook portal like thing. The tricky part is anything that's hardware related, maybe, maybe tough because supply chains will be hit, right? So there might be demand for the VR headsets, but they not, may not have the ability to supply them, which would suck, uh, for the, for the VR companies. Uh, they may figure out some work around though. So one aspect is that remote work is going to become really good. The second thing is people are going to lean harder into social networks and e-sports and all of these online complements or proxies for offline socialization. A third aspect I think is that people are still going to want meat space, you know, or physical space. I think you're going to start to see trusted communities where you're literally trusting the other person. Yo…

AI assessment note: “people are going to lean harder into social networks and e-sports and all of these”

Q So is the implication of this giving people information to make the choice, or do you feel like they should be forced to take the vaccine? Or, like, I'm just trying to tie this back to the Canadian and truckers.

A Yeah, yeah. So this is a complicated one. We know that their, you know, sickle cell trait can give some resistance to malaria. We know there's mutations that are, have been hypothesized To give resistance to everything from HIV to the black death. And so, uh, that is probably also the case for COVID-nineteen. There's probably almost certainly, and I haven't looked at the literature recently, but almost certainly at this .2 years in, we know some genetic variants that might give more or less susceptibility to COVID-nineteen with millions and millions of, you know, cases and deaths and so on. We've probably done these studies. I haven't, I haven't looked, but if I, if I just dug into it. And so what that means is that one size fits all may not actually be the case. The maximum that we've been able to communicate so far is, oh, older people are more likely to get COVID. Overweight people are more likely to get COVID. Those have strong signals. And therefore, if you're in those risk categories, then you should go get it. But ideally we would have, um, everybody having a personal genome and you having a regression function where you could look at your phone and you could see an estimate based on all of your characteristics. And then if you wanted to, you could drill down into it and you could see The underlying raw data and where those coefficients came from. And even if you didn't …

AI assessment note: “one size fits all may not actually be the case. The maximum that we've”

Q Okay, that makes sense. Um, so how does it transmit?

A Okay, so first let's start with some definitions. Um, the R naught, which is basically an R with the subscript zero, is the basic reproduction number. The Australian Department of Health defines as the average number of cases directly generated by one case in a population where all individuals are subject to infection, there's no immunity from past exposures or vaccination, nor any deliberate intervention in disease transmission. So if the R-naught is three, the first person infected, it passes on to three people, who in turn each passes on to three more, giving nine, and nine people infected, and so on. So it's basically this exponential. Um, now going from that same citation, the Australian Department of Health, you know, the basic reproduction number R-naught is contrasted to the effective reproduction number, where there is some immunity, or vaccination, or some, you know, intervention measures are in place. So while some people say this colloquially, at least by that definition, you can't Reduce the basic reproduction number by human interventions like vaccination or quarantine or lockdown. That reduced number would be the effective reproduction number after human intervention. And so the R-naught is supposed to refer to what happens when a disease is tearing through a population. There's no natural immunity or vaccination against it, sort of like we have with COVID-ninete…

AI assessment note: “the R naught, which is basically an R with the subscript zero”

Q Yeah. You're Trudeau. You're, you're in charge of the government. How would you have handled this differently?

A It's a good question because like, okay, now you're not just second guessing. You're actually there to do something and so on and so forth. The upstream is what you actually want is to build an aligned high trust society where you have noblesse oblige. You have, you know, the elites are from the people and part of the people and the people feel that the elites are on their side. And it's like, you know, cheering the quarterback who came up from your small town, as opposed to this sort of Alien Davos class that seeks to rule you rather than middle managerial elite, rather than, um, like actually feel your pain, right? So that, you know, people talk about representativeness, but there's representativeness in terms of sort of an arbitrary demographic cross-section. There's representativeness in terms of people truly feeling these people are generally representative. And what's happened is that Good Heart's Law thing where those proxies for representativeness I feel have been taken away Where people don't fully feel despite the mechanics of the whole system that the government represents on many of these issues. Right. And, um, so the, the upstream, it, it's a little bit like asking this guy who's in the last stage of bankruptcy and you're like, okay, what should you have done in that last stage? And my answer is there are things that should have been done five or 10 or 15 years ag…

AI assessment note: “my answer is there are things that should have been done five or 10”