Other topics include the value of printed work, why futurists should care about history, and why Kevin ultimately doesn’t regret the vanishing past too much.

Kevin is co-founder of Wired magazine, where he continues to hold the title of Senior Maverick. He is also co-chair of the Long Now Foundation and a prolific writer, photographer, and traveler.

Palladium Magazine previously interviewed Kevin about his philosophy of technology and related topics. Check out that discussion here.

Dr. Nicholas Christakis is the Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University. He is also Director of the Human Nature Lab and Co-Director of the Yale Institute for Network Science. His research focuses on topics such as biosocial science, behavior genetics, and network science.

He is author of the newly-released Apollo’s Arrow: The Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live, in which he explores the impact of the pandemic on our institutions and what lessons it teaches us about our evolved social nature.

The first half of the show is available to all our listeners. The full discussion is available to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.

To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.

Roman grew up in Sydney and Hong Kong. He studied at the universities of Oxford, London and Essex, and gained a PhD in political sociology. He is a Research Fellow of the Long Now Foundation, and founder of the Empathy Museum. His previous books, including Empathy, The Wonderbox, and Carpe Diem Regained, have been published in more than 20 languages.

The first half of the show is available to our listeners, but the full discussion is available solely to Palladium Members. Members also get to participate in the Palladium Community Salons, which the editorial podcasts are based on, as well as other benefits like the community chat.

To become a Palladium Member, subscribe here.

Laura Deming is the founder of The Longevity Fund, a Venture Capital firm that focuses on life extension. She was homeschooled in New Zealand, taught herself mathematics, literature, and history, and was working in a biological research lab on aging research by age 12. She was accepted to MIT at age 14, but later dropped out for the Thiel Fellowship.

Michael O’Sullivan is a member of the World Economic Forum’s Council on the New Economy, a Forbes contributor, and a speaker at the 2020 TED Talk conference. He is a former Chief Investment Officer in the International Wealth Management Division of Credit Suisse, where he worked for 12 years. He was also the lead contributor to Credit Suisse’s think tank, the CS Research Institute. He also writes a weekly blog called The Levelling.

Prince Michael is Executive Chairman of Industrie- und Finanzkontor Ets. as well as Founder and Chairman of Geopolitical Intelligence Services AG Vaduz. He is also co-founder of the International Institute of Longevity.

Bruno Maçães is the former Europe Minister of Portugal from 2013 to 2015. He is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute in Washington and the author of two recent books, The Dawn of Eurasia and Belt and Road. The Dawn of Eurasia was selected as a book of the year by both the Financial Times and Foreign Affairs. His new book, History Has Begun, is available now.

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of Mathematica, Wolfram|Alpha and the Wolfram Language; the author of A New Kind of Science; the originator of the Wolfram Physics Project; and the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Over the course of more than four decades, he has been a pioneer in the development and application of computational thinking—and has been responsible for many discoveries, inventions and innovations in science, technology and business.

Charles Fishman is the acclaimed author of One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon. He is a three-time winner of the Gerald Loeb Award, the most prestigious prize in business journalism. Our own Ryan Khurana recently reviewed One Giant Leap for Palladium: “The Apollo Program took an impossible goal and achieved it within a decade. Charles Fishman has written an invaluable history of how social engineers, institution builders, and political deal-brokers made it happen.”

Samo Burja is the founder and president of Bismarck Analysis, which applies the foundational sociological research that Samo and his team have produced over the past decade to deliver unique insights to clients about institutional design and strategy. Samo’s studies focus on the social and material technologies that foster healthy human societies with an eye toward understanding and restoring the structures that produce functional institutions.

Samo has authored numerous articles and papers on his findings, including his manuscript, Great Founder Theory, available here. Samo is a Senior Research Fellow in Political Science at the Foresight Institute and a Research Fellow at the Long Now Foundation. He speaks about his work to audiences around the world, including at the World Economic Forum at Davos, Y Combinator’s YC 120 conference, the Reboot American Innovation conference in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere. Samo spends most of his time in California and his native Slovenia. He can be followed on Twitter at @SamoBurja.

Wolf Tivy

Hello everyone, and welcome to Palladium Magazine’s Digital Salon with Samo Burja. I’m Wolf Tivy, Editor-in-Chief of Palladium. I’m joined, as usual, by Ash Milton, our managing editor.

Ash Milton

Hi, everyone. Nice to see you again.

Wolf Tivy

Thanks, Ash. Our guest today is Samo Burja. In 2017, Samo Burja founded Bismarck Analysis, a consulting firm that investigates the political and institutional landscape of society. He also studies how institutions endure, as a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation, and how institutions can shape the future of technology, as a senior research fellow in political science at the Foresight Institute.

Samo Burja

Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Wolf Tivy

Thanks for coming on. As usual, we’re joined by our live audience of Palladium members and friends. This conversation will be recorded and re-broadcast on YouTube and as a podcast. To become a Palladium member and get invited to upcoming salons please visit palladiummag.com/subscribe. The plan is for Ash, Samo, and I to have a discussion for about half an hour and then move to questions with our live audience. Please be sure to use the Q&A feature in Zoom to post your questions.

Let’s start with an overview of Great Founder Theory. You’ve developed what you’re calling Great Founder Theory, which proposes that great founders impact the world through the institutions they create, particularly those which outlast them. These institutions carry a civilization’s knowledge, organization, and social technologies. When they decay, so does society at large. How does Great Founder Theory compare to other narratives and challenge those other narratives like Great Man Theory or more structural theories like institutionalism?

Samo Burja

In particular, I think what is often missed by some of the more structuralist theories is a sense of human choice and construction. Often it is said that various things that are a part of everyday lives are social constructs. I think this is completely true! They are social constructs. Just as my home is a physical construct, you don’t necessarily want to deconstruct all your physical constructs and you don’t want to deconstruct all your social constructs. But yes, fundamentally, the house is kind of arbitrary, as are things like having a job, or participating in an organized religion or being a citizen of a state.

Now, what drives these social technologies forward? I think a lot of people imagine that this stuff is overdetermined. I would say that there’s a scarcity of innovation in social technology. So I think it’s a significant bottleneck in a big historical and civilizational event, when someone introduces a new social technology such as a new functional code of laws, or a different form of organized religion, or a new way to organize militaries and so on. Essentially, this is the innovation bottleneck. I think this innovation necessarily comes from individuals and small groups. Now while these individuals and small groups are themselves socially determined, it can be extremely difficult to work out what the psychological consequences of living in a certain society are.

Even though, in a way, I’m kind of a determinist, I think it’s extremely difficult to predict how a creative individual is going to deterministically result from a particular society. And since it’s a very stochastic event, since it’s not necessary, such an individual happens to come into play – such a prophet, general, statesmen, entrepreneur, or technologist – it’s very hard to predict what happens. I think that it’s very useful to have a theory that takes, as a given, that this individual is relatively unconstrained modulo knowledge. You can’t necessarily predict which knowledge they will or won’t have. You can predict that they’ll be pursuing some objectives, right? So, I think that a lot of these social determinist theories would propose that, actually, the biggest determinants are these invariants, like large population centers or material technology – the absence or presence of things like steam engines and so on.

But if it actually hinges on these individuals – these unusual individuals – these small groups of people, I think then that that type of prediction just doesn’t hold. And all we can do is this other type of prediction, where we just take the founders for granted and we can analyze what they’re doing, we can analyze how difficult or easy it is for them to intervene on society. As to their objectives, their goals, it’s often very idiosyncratic.

Ash Milton

Do you think of this as an individualistic theory?

Samo Burja

Truly depends on what you mean by individualistic.

Ash Milton 

Suppose that the individual matters more than the contexts around them. Perhaps we think of individuals as primarily shaping rather than being shaped by their social context?

Samo Burja 

I think that a few individuals shape their social context far more than others. So I think that there are some exceptional individuals that shape society. In here, there is perhaps the nuance that distinguishes this from Great Man Theory as such. Great Man Theory proposes that you shape society by participating in grand events, right? It might focus on a general’s victory on the battlefield. I wouldn’t focus on the general’s victory on the battlefield at all unless, in the aftermath of the battle, the great founder was killed. No, I’d focus on the military reforms.

For example, if we look at Napoleon, I perhaps would acknowledge that his skill at winning battles is extremely important. But his enduring contribution to society and civilization would be something like the organization of the national conscription system, the precise way the Central Command functioned – the battlefield command where he often delegated decisions to his underlings – influencing later things like the Prussian system [of military staff command]. The Napoleonic Code of Law was extended and spread across all of Europe, often kept even after Napoleonic forces were kicked out. Finally, he engaged in a massive amount of myth-making. He revived this cult of Alexander the Great and Caesar.

If you read 19th century literature, the man of destiny that shapes history, that shakes history, was Napoleon! And this archetype shaped European thinking and European statesmanship. Everything from Nietzsche and Hegel’s commentary on it on the philosophy side, and also on the statecraft side: at least Napoleon III tried to imitate him and arguably, less successfully, many 20th century leaders sought to imitate Napoleon and imitate his jump from military success to political control. So being an archetype, I think he also has a founder-like role there.

Wolf Tivy 

Interesting. Just earlier, you characterize this as an innovation bottleneck problem, but it’s not just an innovation, is it? It’s also reviving or rebuilding institutionally embodied social technology. It’s not like our social technology sticks around without the institution.

Samo Burja

No, it has to be embodied in a community of practice. This community can be highly bureaucratized the way that, arguably, parts of the Catholic Church have been, with the legal system and these clear divisions of responsibilities and roles. It can be less embodied and more like this practice where, say, a particular tribe might have a festival, somewhere out there next to a lake or in a desert every year. This is certainly something that can persist in a distributed manner, but is created in this very, almost centralized manner, though not presupposing that the innovator is at the center of society, right? They might actually be at the fringes of society. If you look at something like the creation of the Mormon religion by Joseph Smith. He doesn’t start off at the center of American society, but he creates a new center around himself.

Ash Milton 

It sounds like you’ve, in part, at least created here a theory of history. I’m wondering: why then do you think it’s important to have a theory of history?

Samo Burja  

To conclude an earlier thought, I do want to say the founders are always working with the raw materials available to them. They are building up on whatever surrounds them and they are somewhat constrained as to what they can achieve in a lifetime. I think, however, you can achieve quite a bit and I think there have been significant jumps in civilizational complexity driven by founders, the sort of thing where you might have a transition where, in two generations or in a single generation, you have a nomadic people become a settled people. Or build a grand city larger than any has ever existed before, with all the intricacies in it, or transition to an industrial society. But to answer your question, why is it important to have a theory of history? There are several reasons.

First off, I think it’s good to understand the social world. I think stories about how the social world works – ideologies around it – can be more or less accurate. People would direct their efforts and evaluate the legitimacy or illegitimacy of pro-social efforts to try to build up civilization through the framework they believe in. There’s a classical note during the French Revolution: “The Republic has no need of savants”. When speaking of people like Laplace and other mathematicians and scientists, if the belief is that the Republic has no need of statesmen and statesmen are persecuted, then the Republic’s revolution fares poorly, let alone the Republic’s evolution to whatever it might be trying to achieve that replaces the ancien régime.

So, I think that in societies where we don’t understand the role of founders, we have a confused relation to our heroes, where the confusion can go either way. It can be deeds-focused, which is perhaps useful – it’s useful to commemorate those who participate in grand events – but I think it’s much more important to look at the origin of social order, to look at the Moses’s and Lycurgus’s of the world, that set up particular social systems, and to understand what they look like.

Wolf Tivy 

So the idea there is that you almost need these archetypes kind of floating around in society that can legitimize certain types of constructive action.

Samo Burja 

Yes, I think the constructive action will often seem illegitimate, because if you are bypassing dead institutions, institutions that are dead players, that are dysfunctional, they obviously won’t like this very much, right? They won’t like the sort of circumvention that’s necessary to construct something new. You might be trying to bypass something like a political monopoly, or you might be trying to bypass something like an economic monopoly. Just to say one or two things more about why theories of history matter, I think everyone is always acting on an implicit theory of history.

If you talk to anyone in Silicon Valley right now and you ask: why do you think what you do matters at all? They’ll say, well, technology drives history, right? Or they’ll say, well, I want to contribute to human progress, or, I want to advance technology. And this is the most important thing in the world. Embedded in those statements is an assumption of technological determinism, right? And that technological progress necessarily improves human lives and that the technological progress is kind of unstoppable and desirable. It’s important for us to participate in it, so that an individual can accelerate or decelerate it, but if you start talking to them about questions such as, how would you evaluate the speed of technological progress? Is this the right way to accelerate it? They usually run out of material, but that basic, believed theory is there. And arguably we all have these, right?

I think, for many people, they might see history as a play of patriots and tyrants. This would be sort of this kind of American constitutionalist mindset. Or you might see it as a sort of moral reformation or direct formation, you would have saints and sinners, and they can shape the society. Or you might think people have no role at all, that individuals have no role at all, and it’s all pre-determined, and it’s the technology that’s moving us. But I would claim any individual that’s acting on the world must have, on some level, belief that they are affecting the world and that counterfactually, it matters whether or not they’re at home, playing video games, or at home coding, or leaving the home to win a battle. There’s some sort of implicit belief that it matters.

Ash Milton 

Right. It’s interesting that you’re talking about implicit theories of history here. As you probably know, we had a piece just this week at Palladium on Xi Jinping and his more explicit theory of history. It’s also the case that, in the world, a lot of the major theories about how history works originate from from Europe and from the Western world. And yet despite that, Western institutions and particularly America definitely don’t seem to have an explicit model of how history works anymore. Do you think that this is a serious problem in some way? And how would you get back to having an explicit model of history rather than just an implicit one?

Samo Burja

I’m going to note here that China is a Marxist-driven society and Marxism is one of the better demonstrations of coordinating power. So any theory of history can, in fact, serve as the basis of an ideology, right? And the more correct this theory of history is, the more powerful the adherents of the ideology are. For example, a Marxist ideology might actually describe fairly well what you need to do in order to industrialize while interacting with the market system.

It might propose things such as the need to maintain industrial sovereignty, the need to focus on heavy industry and so on. But it might get other things wrong. Let’s remember that no matter how wasteful or inefficient the Soviet Union was, at the end of the day, it could deliver many thousands of tanks to the frontlines of Eastern Europe. These are incredible feats of coordination and incredible feats of planning. I can even make this more visceral: consider something like D-Day. If large-scale, society-scale planning is not ever possible, then how in the world did they happen? They obviously did happen. Therefore, sometimes, society-wide planning is possible.

You might get these gems of accuracy that enable correct policy or enable constructive action or you might have destructive things that lead to destructive action. For example, if you only have a class-based analysis of the role of military officers, rather than track the ideology of military officers – which is often centered on protection of the homeland, whatever the homeland itself is, it doesn’t matter if it’s Czarist or Communist, you might end up being a loyal officer to whichever regime – but if you analyze an officer through a sort of Marxist lens, you might come to the conclusion that, necessarily, because of their background, they’re going to have reactionary beliefs, and therefore, it’s important to purge them. And arguably that was a big problem for Stalin.

The explicit ideology of the Soviet Union is very close to the basis of current Chinese ideology. It’s good to remember that the Sino-Soviet split between Khrushchev and Mao was over Khrushchev denouncing Stalin. Mao emphatically believed this was revisionism, that you should not denounce Stalin. So Stalin is, in a way, directly part of this intellectual legacy. When we look at Xi’s decisions today, if you analyze them through this deeply post-Stalinist lens, it makes a lot of sense. And not only is there a believed explicit ideology by Xi, the explicit ideology is used as a method to coordinate the Chinese Communist Party. People are expected to be well-versed in this.

Again, the comparison I would invite is quite naturally between the Chinese Communist Party and the Catholic Church, or, arguably, in some aspects. They both govern about a billion people. They both have a catechism. They both used to also have the equivalent of the Inquisition, they had – theoretically – a central decision-maker and so on. Now, this analogy only goes so far. There are important differences. The first important difference is control of a nation-state. Secondly, a different belief about the course of history. You can’t just plug in one ideology for the other and expect the organizations to work just as well. The Marxist vision of the future is a globalizing future. It’s a technologically advanced future. In theory it’s also a materially abundant future. But it’s a future achieved through class struggle, so it’s fundamentally adversarial. This fundamental assumption of adversarial reality leads to fundamentally adversarial responses to social challenges. In the West, we also have adversarial ideology of a different type. Like say, the idea free market competition is pretty adversarial actually.

Wolf Tivy

A bit more closer to home, and related to that, is the Silicon Valley archetype of the founder, which almost seems, in some way, that it’s a socially constructed mythology of someone founding a disruptive start-up that roots around sclerotic economic institutions to create some value. It’s this theory of history that legitimizes a certain form of action and motivates a certain form of action. It’s very much in line with what you’ve been saying.

Samo Burja

Yes, well, if they didn’t believe in founders, there would be fewer companies, right? The PR would also be different. I think something like about 80% of the companies would exist in a Silicon Valley that didn’t believe in founders. But the 20% that wouldn’t exist are the most interesting ones. They’re counterfactually the most interesting ones. So I think we have to judge this idea of founders – if we analyze it as a social technology – on the basis of these things that might not have happened, these things that were not overdetermined.

Wolf Tivy 

So, in institutions – slightly different track – there’s this idea of knowledge embedded in those institutions, some of which we can’t see. And you’ve defined intellectual dark matter as the knowledge we can’t see publicly, but whose existence we can infer because the institution wouldn’t work without it. What are good examples of intellectual dark matter in present society? Are there key traditions of knowledge that are at risk of failing to be passed down and being lost?

Samo Burja

Intellectual dark matter is much like physical dark matter. We have the galaxies that must be much more massive than we can infer from the stuff that’s visible with normal light, the galaxies are spinning so fast and spin apart. In the physical world, it’s possible we just don’t understand gravity well enough. Maybe an alternative theory of gravity will reveal that the dark matter is just an illusion. However, the principle rested on stuff that we can show exists just as you hopefully summarized some of my thinking there.

What are the types of dark matter? I think one, at least, is national security or state technological secrets. From the perspective of the Soviet Union, the atomic bomb in 1946 is intellectual dark matter. Second, trade secrets. Many of the details of how, say, a particular microchip might be constructed today are such dark matter. Further, what is the generating principle, the basic principles and tricks that a very, very good Fields-medalist mathematician might use to come to some of his or her strongest results? Those are things that the mathematician perhaps could put into words but might choose not to write. It’s not quite a trade secret, but a personal secret. But some of them are things you could never hear or should never put into words. That’s where we get to the implicit tacit knowledge. And it might be intellectually implicit – stuff that you might just perceive – it might be physically implicit, such as a surgeon moving through the human body with a scalpel.

The numbers are quite clear: you should definitely research how good your surgeon is! It’s one of the most variable tasks we accept in the modern world as primarily the result of individual skill, literally a matter of life and death. And the numbers, again, are very clear: these are order of magnitude differences between an extremely good surgeon and a mediocre surgeon, and it seems to be very difficult to get the extraordinary surgeons. This is why sometimes we see very old surgeons, even though you might assume that as far as age goes, that the shaking of the hand would be more important than the knowledge. But it seems, for a long time, this implicit knowledge is more important than the tremors.

To move further on this, let’s look at a number of things. I think a lot of our social technology is running on fumes. A lot of the established high-trust nature of our society was built in a very, very different era in very, very different socioeconomic conditions. For the United States in particular, I think the massive expansion of both wealth and population from 1950-1970 caused a number of institutions to assume this pattern of growth that’s essentially a pyramid scheme, that’s unsustainable. One of these would be probably academia and the economics around grad students.

But the small, small details matter so much. In particular, I think there’s a certain kind of personal ability that millennials probably don’t have, having grown up, economically and socially, primarily in a zero-sum world, rather than a very positive-sum world like the one the baby boomers grew up in. Usually we critique the baby boomers and we know how unfair the world is for the millennials, but I still feel that the millennials often just actually lack some of the basic human interpersonal skills that the Boomers have. The millennial might find it frustrating that they have to teach the baby boomer how to use Microsoft Excel, but they never asked themselves how exactly the baby boomer managed to maneuver in the workplace such that they never needed to learn any of these new tools. They just know how to move the millennials around, right? I think part of it is seniority and privilege, sure, but part of it is just legitimate skill at management of people. Everything from team-building to judging individual psychology much more strongly.

Critically, the practice of science is significantly endangered. Possibly the best way to think of academics is that there are categories out there and they’re producing a catalogue of human knowledge. And I think that through the course of this training that proceeds through homework and practice, there is never any sort of training or practice in what research would look like at the edge of a field, before knowledge has fully crystallized.

I think in the 18th and 19th centuries, this kind of science was primarily practiced by a few privileged individuals, people who could support themselves economically and had enough social stability and support that they didn’t need to prove themselves to anyone. In other words, they started off with tenure when they were 20 years old, not crawled their way to tenure at 50 or 60, over 99 grad students that never made it. No, it was just like, you’re here, you have this privilege, this noblesse oblige commands that you use it. If you don’t use it, you’re a disgrace, at least go be a military officer somewhere. Somebody said it is acceptable to become a natural philosopher. I think they did quite a bit.

Ash Milton

It makes me think of the Ivy League universities right now: universities around the world are talking about flipping to Zoom for classes in the fall. Given that we’re talking about intellectual dark matter at elite institutions, it sounds like if we assume that people go to these kinds of elite universities, in part, to associate with elites and elite institutions and learn these kinds of skills that can’t just be made legible in a textbook, if it becomes normalized that most people are experiencing the Ivy League universities through Zoom, is there still a point in going? It seems like this will kind of collapse in part what they’re trying to do.

Samo Burja

I think the question is: to what extent has it already collapsed before Zoom made it apparent? The biggest critique one can make of Skull and Bones today is that not much plotting happens there. Arguably the entire point of Skull and Bones at elite universities is to produce elite conspiracies. I note elite conspiracy production seems to be falling rapidly. If we had a national conspiracy index, the national conspiracy index is super low right now. It’s high in China, it’s high in Russia: we can’t allow a conspiracy gap! Now, I’m not saying we should make more Epsteins, but, someone must do the function of coordinating and informal coordination is what you do at the institutional frontier, when you encounter new problems that the previous bureaucracies weren’t programmed for. If we’re perpetually stuck running the FBI of the 1960s, and this was our only law enforcement agency, we would be in a lot of trouble.

Ash Milton

There’s a problem that happens in conspiracies where – I call this “losing the joke” – you can have a public frame, but if you fail to inculcate your successors, then they will essentially just believe the public frame without understanding why it exists. I think something like this kind of happened with neoconservative conservatism, between the original generation and the Iraq War generation, it seems like you can’t explain a conspiracy over Zoom. Maybe there are no longer good conspiracies in the world. If there are any, they might not survive this.

Samo Burja 

I think that that’s very interesting. I think that writing can be critiqued in the same way. If Leo Strauss would propose that you can, in fact, communicate between the lines over writing, arguably much of the same can be done by video. So I think there are some methods to say things without saying them and so on. And this can provide a differential advantage. But, again, what I would propose is that the Harvard experience has already been so bureaucratized, that it was not a good sandbox for people to truly learn leadership. I think, at this point, it primarily grants you a minor patent of nobility. Other organizations hire a Harvard person because no one ever got fired for hiring someone from Harvard, right? So I think actually, my answer is, I don’t expect a critical shortfall of leadership because I believe no critical leadership skills were taught. That’s a pessimistic view.

Ash Milton 

You have a viral article that is sort of relevant to this, “Live Players Versus Dead Players,” that you wrote some time ago. Just to explain this distinction: a live player is someone who can do new things, who can act outside of the pre-existing norms that they are in. A dead player is not capable of this. They basically only work according to the scripts that they are surrounded by or that the institutions that they’re in have. It sounds like you don’t think there are very many live players in our institutions. I’m interested in why you think that is.

Samo Burja

I think performance is a very strong indicator here. How many institutions have, in an agile way, adapted to the shock of the coronavirus? Very few. How many of these institutions are having an easy time navigating the economic fallout? Again, very few. How many of our media institutions or political institutions adapted to the last few years of unusual politics? Very few, right? So when I look at governments and large economic bodies, they don’t display this behavior. If there are live players within them, they’re not piloting the institutions in question and their range, the range of their adaptability, what it can do for us is extremely limited.

So in a way the effective intelligence of the organizations has gotten massively dumbed down. They become these dumb, lumbering giants that can’t see reality, but repeat these things over and over again, they used to do. Even worse, if you have essentially normal careerists filter up through a bureaucracy, the natural course of the wiring of an organization – its sensors – is that the wires rot away. Everyone always wants to report good news. So unless there’s a countervailing force, at the end of the day, if there’s a control room, all the panels have green lights because the lights are broken, not because everything is fine. And right now if you look at the stock market, how much of our society is used to looking at the dashboard of the stock market to figure out if things are fine? A significant number of organizations! But you would be insane to look at the stock market and decide that it’s actually all fine.

The only way you can justify it is something like an excessive belief in the efficient market hypothesis. But I think this is overbearing, and over-believing in the information system that was set up for a very specific purpose, that has been many times modified, that has been adulterated through all sorts of strange legal, financial, and governmental mechanisms. So we introduced these measures to boost economic productivity and eventually we lost track of it. We started looking at these measures instead of the underlying thing. And that’s why it’s very easy to have an economy in crisis and have a stock market that, at least on the surface, you should interpret as a belief that things will return to normal and will be good.

Wolf Tivy

So this is interesting. This is related to the idea that these institutions kind of decay over time and need to actively prepare, and one of the aspects that you mentioned is that there might be live players around, but not actually embedded in controlling positions within the institutions, and thus not able to do that repair. Is locking out the live players part of the process of decay there?

Samo Burja

I think it’s either eliminating or locking out the live players but, also, not fostering the creation of enough live players. One could argue that the true reigning ideology of the industrial system has always been Six Sigma, a manufacturing ideology and method, where, when you find an error, when a type of error occurs at the end of the assembly line in your product – it could be a car, it could be a computer, it could be a can of soup – you don’t try to figure out what went wrong with that can of soup.

What you instead do is, you go to every single step of the process in the assembly line and try to reduce variance. And then the end result is, often, your error goes away. What we’ve done is that through every single step from your childhood environment, to your early education, to your professional career, we’ve tamped down on the variants. So in a way, we have excellent cans of soup, but we don’t have very good live players, because the live players were never built by an assembly line.

The problem of the creation of excellent free human beings was never industrialized. We know how to make good factory workers who know how to make good cars. And again, I’m not even saying that this is immediately achievable. I am saying, though, that when we look at something like the Sputnik moment and the Sputnik crisis, where the U.S. massively upscaled its production of engineers and technicians on paper, we should be very skeptical whether this resulted in the production of more excellent engineers and scientists, because if you’re reducing variance on some problem like educating engineers, well, you might get a very excellent mediocre engineer, but precisely the measures you use to get to that very excellent mediocre engineer precluded the outliers, precluded the outlier that might have been the inventor, or the industrialist or whatever.

Wolf Tivy

It’s notable that most of the engineers who did the great things in subsequent decades were trained before that, basically before the early Cold War, right? So, as institutions decay and society changes, occasionally, there’s these large institutional transitions, sometimes in the form of a revolution. But the degree of actual novelty versus continuity and the actual agents of change there are often not clear on the surface as to who’s actually the actor – how much are things actually changing? So I’d be curious: how do you see what a revolution is? And what do people not understand about how these big institutional turnovers actually work?

Samo Burja

My view of my view of revolution tends to be surprisingly – or unsurprisingly – Leninist. I tend to think that, yes, any transformation of society is spearheaded by a small fraction of a rising elite, organizing resources that were previously not organized to change the balance of power and the balance of coordination between society’s existing elites. So what are the consequences of this?

For example, I think in a revolution, often a surprising amount of the establishment before the revolution is preserved. It’s just reconfigured. Examples of this might include the modern Japanese Diet, their parliament. I think about half of parliament members are descended from samurai families. How long has it been since 1945? And even before 1945? The Meiji Restoration itself disempowered the feudal system and installed the bureaucratic system. How is it possible that the samurai families survive both the centralization of the Meiji Restoration, the defeat of World War II – which really shattered the military institutions into which the samurai families had gone – and American occupation, and now, again, people from the same families from the same social circles are at least half of the people in Japanese parliament?

To give a different puzzle: why is it that so many of the early Bolsheviks ended up having some noble ancestry, usually from the minor nobility? And again, the same phenomenon can be seen in China. I’m not going to go into details of the French Revolution, but when the French Revolution was over, the aristocrats that survived from the ancien régime often found a spot in the new regime, whether Napoleonic France or the Restoration period. The continuity is even stronger in the American Revolution. In the American Revolution, just a few extra people joined the business of government, but the main thing that happens is the governments that were already active in the colonies receive independence from the central government in London. So it’s almost better to think of it as a secession rather than a revolution. The same people are running Massachusetts, the same people are running Boston, the same people are running Virginia on the same basis of power as before and after.

Ash Milton

You earlier mentioned the Sino-Soviet split, where part of what happened was that Khrushchev had denounced Stalin, forcing this break in the ideological continuity. In Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in China, one of the notable aspects was that he essentially, despite having been persecuted by Mao and his inner circle, refused to denounce him and very explicitly framed his project as a continuity of the Chinese Communist Party’s revolution. To this day, they have a party line where the history of Communist Party rule has been developing throughout, but always unbroken. I’m interested to hear how you interpret that kind of move on the part of leaders who are invoking revolution.

Samo Burja

It’s kind of risky, right? If you propose the revolution is a one-time event, a founding event, you might be stuck with a very narrow set of interpretations for how politics should go or how economics should go. If you propose the revolution is permanent, then you’re perhaps not securely in power. Arguably one of the biggest problems with having a government that is significantly staffed with a revolutionary cadre is that they might wish to continue the revolution as in the Reign of Terror, even if they need to step over your neck. The revolution eats its children, right? You kind of have to tamp down on it from a pragmatic perspective of self-preservation. On the other hand, if you valorize it as completely in the past, its relevance is lost to new generations. There is a significant victory cult in China where the victory over Japanese imperialists is considered as important an achievement of the Chinese Communist Party, as is the overturning of the old class system.

I don’t think the desire for continuity is just a feature of revolutionary regimes, even reactionary regimes will try to claim the revolution for themselves as a positive good. This is seen in some of the restoration monarchies and 19th century France, where even people who are themselves from the same monarchy, the same royal family that was guillotined there essentially, adopt and argue that the revolution was necessary and good. And for example, Vladimir Putin today might suggest that Stalin’s crimes against his people are unconscionable, but Stalin’s victory over Hitler is beyond reproach. He’s both condemning an aspect and endorsing or elevating an aspect, the belief being that there is a way in which the presence of unassimilated historical events could be considered a liability, like ideological ammunition. These events might turn out to be ammunition for a different type of ideology. So unless you can integrate into your history both the Gulag system and the defeat over Hitler and have it integrated well into your ruling ideology, these are essentially things that make alternative worldviews, something that are undesirable.

In modern China, I think claiming the mantle of communism and claiming the mantle that we are truly communist likely preserves the optionality for China to eventually start becoming more ideologically expansionary. Currently, it’s not. Currently it just wishes to preserve its own system for itself and have a different system for other countries. My read on the big historical landscape is that eventually they’re going to have to transition to a more universalist ideology. And here’s the reason: elites can only properly negotiate international treaties if they understand each other on a deep social level. In 17th and 18th century Europe, this might be the sort of Christian secularized aristocracy. They have common norms and common beliefs: if they go to a dinner party together, they know exactly what the things that matter are. They read the same people. It doesn’t matter if you’re Russian nobility or French nobility or British nobility or German nobility. You probably even speak the same language whether you’re from a German family or from a French family, no matter if you rule Greece, or if you rule Russia.

And it’s very similar in the American system and American ideology. Why does America want there to be democracies all over the world? Well, because then this makes the politicians and the civil servants in the other countries intuitive. You don’t have to go into a deep dive to study exactly how France works. You kind of intuit it. When you meet the French president for a photo-op, you know exactly what you’re doing. If you meet Xi for a photo-op, it’s less clear exactly what you’re doing. How are you benefiting him? How are you hurting him? The mechanisms are different.

Now, again, there is some similarity. He wants good pictures for a newspaper. But he maybe wants good pictures for a party newspaper, or a good quote to put in the party newspaper, something you can say or did not say that’s tactically useful for winning or losing particular inter-party fights. It gets very complicated very quickly. This kind of complexity means that you’re not necessarily sure who to negotiate with: just because someone is called the foreign minister of a country, doesn’t mean they have any treaty-making ability whatsoever. It might exist de jure, but does it exist de facto? Because of this, if you have many client states, sooner or later, you will want to make their political system compatible with your own, so that their elites are weaker and easily comprehensible and legible to the elites of your country. In many ways, for example, Athens or Rome did something very similar. Arguably, the failure to assimilate local elites into their own value system might have been one of the driving forces of colonialism. What is the common framework of relationship between say, an upper middle class Englishman and a Hindu prince? Possibly, there isn’t any, so maybe you need to remove the Hindu prince and install the Englishman as a governor.

Ash Milton  

I am conscious of time, so we’re going to have one final question from us. Lots of other subjects: we could talk about long history, technology, China… hopefully we’ll get to some of that in the Q&A. A more practical question for you Samo: you’ve written a lot about the need to find exceptional thinkers and to learn from them. You had an essay on this, which is on your website, called “How to Find the Frontier of Knowledge” and you’ve put this in practice yourself. You’ve talked to Slavoj Žižek, Peter Thiel, David Deutsch, Tyler Cowen, others that I’m not mentioning. I’m interested to hear what kind of value this has provided for you. How do you reach out to thinkers like that? How do you establish those kinds of relationships?

Samo Burja

Unsurprisingly, because I believe in intellectual dark matter, I think almost anyone that’s very intellectually generative will have things that are difficult to put into words or possibly don’t travel well. An in-person conversation is better – a physically in-person conversation. Ideally, an extended correspondence over time can reveal many very, very productive subtleties to it. So they might have special pieces of knowledge that they can share. You might observe something about how they think or approach questions. After you’ve talked to someone many, many times over, it’s easy to recognize something as a Žižekian answer, or a Thielian insight, right? Something that really fits the thinking style of that person.

In a way, if that gets good enough, you’ve essentially been informally apprenticed by that thinker. I actually think that some of the greatest thinkers in history were people who went out of their way to apprentice themselves to other exceptional thinkers. If you want to be a Fields medalist, one of the best things you can do is show up at a Fields medalist’s door and say “I just want to learn from you. Let me help any way I can. I just want to work on math with you. How can I make this viable?” When you look at the intellectual lineages, the numbers back it up. The best way to be an exceptional mathematician is to be taught by an exceptional mathematician. This doesn’t guarantee it, but it biases the odds.

Secondly, it’s always good to correct your perspective. You never can be an expert in everything, but many things matter for active decision-making. So why would you settle for less? Why wouldn’t you go to the source? Why would you go to the photocopy of a photocopy of the photocopy if you can just read the original? If you apply this logic to originality and if your model of political economy of intellectuals is that there’s a small number of general thinkers who sort of emanate outwards, we’ll go to the source: that’s the best possible place you’ll be greatly advantaged! That’s the reasoning for why you want to inherit their tradition of knowledge as much as possible and you want them to correct your opinion on object-level topics and you want to offer value yourself, hopefully helping them in their service to society, because whether or not they want to serve society, they are serving society. The positive externalities are absolutely massive. I wrote an article for Palladium Magazine recently on how I think that Confucius, Lao Tzu and so on are possibly responsible for some of the unique positive features of Chinese civilization. Even if they did not intend it, as long as they were active, and as long as they were assisted, the positive externalities are there.

I haven’t yet answered how to approach. I think, surprisingly often, an insightful cold email helps, though it has to be brief. Even more often, an endorsement by people whose opinion they respect. This kind of endorsement can get you a proper meeting. The endorsement can come either on intellectual grounds or if you have some economic or other value you can provide, so you kind of have to make yourself the right kind of person and you have to talk to the people right next to the exceptional individuals and eventually good opportunities and good reasons to talk to them arise. I will actually say it’s very easy to talk to some of the most prominent people in the world, but it’s much more difficult having something worth saying.

Ash Milton 

I think that’s a useful note then to end our first portion on. Wolf, do you want to take us to the Q&A?

Wolf Tivy

Sure. Michael asks: are you strictly agnostic on the question of the origin of great founders? Or do you have a view of how they’re produced? To what extent have any past societies figured out how to produce great founders better, for example via training programs or tyke bomb succession efforts. Are any societies or individual cases very interesting on this topic in terms of training more great founders?

Samo Burja 

The tyke bomb is a fun concept. It’s the concept of a kid that is trained from childhood or from birth for a specific purpose. There are a few of those. Michel de Montaigne is arguably such a person. The creator of the modern concept of an essay, he was raised from childhood by caretakers who only spoke classical Latin and Greek to him. That’s a really extreme approach: banning from your child’s ears any sort of profane language, only having mastered these languages, educating them and so on. A different example is John Stuart Mill, who was basically educated to be a replacement for Jeremy Bentham. I think Bentham was the intellectual they were trying to replace. Sometimes this stuff works. I don’t think it can reliably work. I think we don’t necessarily see the failed tyke bombs.

I think the more specialized and rigorous a training program is, the more rigorous it is in a bureaucratic sense. The narrower it is, the more it’s an assembly line. The more it is a set of challenges, like the cursus honorum in ancient Rome, where you had a number of posts that were different in nature, possibly like a general, a provincial governor, someone who’s essentially dealing with law, someone who’s dealing with logistics – you have to succeed at each of these posts to eventually make it to consul as the crowning achievement. When the cursus honorum was least standardized, it worked the best. By the time when people aspire to complete the cursus honorum, at that point, it was dead. There was this joke at the time of Augustus and later on where people were made consuls for a period of 30 days just so they could say that they went through the cursus honorum and that they were made a man that year and that they were consul. That’s such a decayed version of it. And of course, by that point, it’s the period of empire, right? The Republic is long over.

This is why I think that, if I wanted to learn, educate and connect to others who want to feel responsibility for American society, the Harvard of 1900 might not have been a bad choice at all. It’s just that these things change over time, so I think the training programs for exceptional individuals are very specific. They cannot be bureaucratically administered for long. They often require direct contact with exceptional people. The parents of Montaigne and John Stuart Mill were not themselves exceptional individuals, but decently competent individuals that were, however, inspired by other exceptional individuals or put their children in touch with those individuals. But you have to make it worthwhile, right? If you have a society where it’s possible to invest in an intellectual successor, that’s a society that will have more great founders. When I say intellectual, let me be very clear: I consider Alexander the Great an intellectual successor to Aristotle, because I think the barrier between thought and action is, in the best of us, the best humans, very porous both ways. It’s actually a failure to think of thought as something that is stuck on paper. It’s never enacted in physical reality.

Ash Milton

Geoff has a question that fits as a follow up pretty well here. What are the most useful things individual people can do in the context of a declining civilization? Maybe, if they believe themselves to be living in a declining civilization, to overcome that decline? You touched on this in your article recently.

Samo Burja

The article on how late Zhou China reverse-engineered civilization is a pretty good approach. I think the most remarkable thing about late Zhou China is that they realized they were in decline. The default answer is you’re not in decline. So I would say: approach your society’s claims of victory with some minor skepticism, but not with the desire to see it fail, okay? Don’t be a blind contrarian, but examine the facts of the matter. Try to figure out whether it is or is not in decline, then I really do recommend that, if your belief is that it’s in decline, try to do an analysis: what’s the actual thing that’s going wrong? If possible, try to provide something no one else is providing. So if excessive bureaucratization is an issue, create pockets of resources, both social and economic, where you don’t need the usual credentials to have otium, another Greek and Roman concept: leisure time, reflective time, training time to master some of the things.

Because if it’s only possible to master science in an academic environment and the academic environment itself is broken, then there won’t be any scientific progress, right? You might try to reform, say, academia, or reform the cursus honorum. That’s a super difficult task: to reform the cursus honorum in the early imperial context would mean overthrowing Augustus, changing the economic fundamentals of Rome so that the land-owning class doesn’t dominate. Reform is more resource intensive than building something new. But you might be obliged to do reform, if you are late in a centralized declining empire, where the society itself is fairly unified and fairly dysfunctional. If it’s this unified and dysfunctional, you have to actually go to the center and just reform things at the center. What you then need to do is bring fresh forces. Maybe I would very, very cautiously propose a revolution – what do I compare it with? It’s sort of like a Heimlich maneuver. It’s like a desperate last attempt to save the thing, when it works. I don’t think it’s ever the normal, best way to achieve progress.

Ash Milton

And given what you were saying earlier, it sounds like you need to understand how the society you’re living in is structured. You mentioned centralized or decentralized. Perhaps if you study a person who responded in a society that was structured differently and you just take all their lessons to heart, but your context doesn’t allow for the same things, you will end up failing.

Samo Burja 

Of course! You can imitate something that’s completely ill-suited to your circumstances. Arguably, the brilliance of someone like Napoleon at the end of the day was that he understood when the lessons of Alexander the Great applied and when they did not apply, because, in fact, he understood quite well how, say, artillery changes things, or how Paris and France are very, very different countries from the Roman Empire at the time of Caesar. The balance of power and everything is quite different. It can be very harmful to be confused as to the nature of your society in this way. You might end up, in fact, producing perverse results. There are uncountable examples of attempted serious reform that weaken countries and weaken civilizations. And again, I want to emphasize, when I say the center, I don’t necessarily mean in government. You can have someone that is in the center of a civilization or in the very central heart of it, but doesn’t officially have a government position.

Ash Milton

Like the Pope in the declining Roman Empire.

Samo Burja

Exactly right. One way we could think about the papacy is that the papacy preserved itself and preserved the Catholic Church – the Roman state religion – past the decline of the Roman Empire. Maybe the brilliance of the Church was not being taken down with the Empire, so that’s also a viable thing. But in that case, you have to think: well, my institution was created in symbiosis with this thing. Can there be a church after the Empire? That was profoundly unclear.

Again, there’s no large organized Zoroastrian religion after the fall of the Persian dynasties right after the conquest. If you were a Christian in the 4th century, you might not know that Christianity can outlast the Empire. It’s actually a significant achievement that it could. It means that you were essentially, over time, producing a whole new civilization. I think this reached fruition in the synthesis between the papacy and the Frankish warlords. Charlemagne sponsors the study of Latin and a revival of Latin law. However, this Latin law is applied in a context where it’s essentially this tribal feudal-ish society, this tribal society, translating into a feudal society, so completely different from Republican Rome. More like the early Kingdom of Rome. So even though the law might be super similar, the application is so different. This act of civilizational reengineering, necessarily, always is an act of civilizational creation, because so much of the intellectual dark matter has to be reinvented.

So it can be implemented differently, right? It’s like finding the chassis of a car. You’re not obliged to put in an electric motor and you might, in fact, put an internal combustion engine into the same chassis and it might work better. Or if you’re really, really unlucky, you might just put a horse in front and call it a carriage.

Wolf Tivy

We have another question from Jeremy Real, who asks: who are some of the historical examples of individuals that are performing these repair or rebuilding functions other than, say, Charlemagne?

Samo Burja

Here’s an interesting argument. I think Alexander the Great was such a person because, usually, we consider him the person that ended the city-state and created the Greek Hellenistic empires, the Greek kingdoms that succeeded, and possibly even a template for the Roman Empire. Let’s remember that much as Napoleon admired Caesar and Alexander, Caesar himself and his contemporary Pompey both deeply admired Alexander the Great. There is the classical anecdote of the 30-year-old old Caesar crying and weeping in front of the statue of Alexander, bemoaning what all Alexander has achieved, and well, Caesar has done so little. Learning is by imitation, right? So I do think that there’s something that can be transferred between great founders and a society that’s aware of great founders will tend to produce more of them, if only through imitation and attempt, noting, of course, that Pompey fails and Crassus fails. So keep those attrition rates in mind.

You might think you’re Caesar, but you’re much more likely to be Pompey or Crassus. To actually answer the heart of your question, Alexander the Great produced a new form of Greek state. It’s my belief that even though we don’t have much written from Aristotle, Aristotle was an astute enough observer of humanity to realize that the city states of Greece were in his era quite dysfunctional. He, after all, had unfavorable run-ins with the Athenian government. There’s a reason he ended up being the tutor of Alexander the Great in this court in Macedonia, which was at the time considered half-barbarous. It was considered barely Greek. Why were they so focused on horsemanship instead of ships? So I think that Alexander the Great qualifies.

He found a new formula for Greek society to operate politically. It preserved and even caused a flourishing of Greek technology over time. The aqueduct is not a Roman invention. It’s an invention of these Greek kingdoms that preceded Alexander’s conquest. They were all over Asia Minor and Central Asia. It’s good to remember that every place we might today think of as Islamic was essentially Greek-speaking in this period, as a consequence of Alexander’s conquest. There were Greek cities, Greek citizens, and Greek speakers in modern day Afghanistan. Or there was a Greek Kingdom all the way in India. And this definitely shaped future society.

I won’t go into as much depth for other founders, but I will say Confucius. I think Charlemagne is more like the creation of a new one rather than reform. But I think Confucius counts as reform. I would say, Alexander the Great would. As I stated, I think that there’s a strong, strong argument to be made that Augustus is also such a such a figure. Once the Republic is no longer viable, you can maintain some of the features of the Republic. But fundamentally, you need to build something new. You need to build a new type of political system and machine that can work. And not only a new type of political system, arguably a whole different system of public religion. Religion in the Roman context was not separated from the state.

Arguably, Constantine the Great is another such example with the integration of Christianity. There are some more interesting examples of people who would be seen more as reformers than founders. There’s a strong argument to be made that, assuming America is a world-historically important society, civilization, or fragment of Western civilization – I think an argument can be made just on the basis of its 20th century track record – I think Abraham Lincoln is straightforwardly a reformer, and possibly single-handedly shapes it more than most other Founding Fathers. I can say “most other founding fathers,” even though he’s 60 years later, and that that intuitively makes sense is testament to what a big reforming figure he is, for better or worse. Unsurprisingly, I also think Bismarck created the modern nation-state proper. So I think Bismarck also counts as a reformer in this sense.

Ash Milton

That’s a very good list. On your earlier point about the Islamic world, I think there’s often too little consciousness in the West that several Islamic empires, but especially the Ottoman explicitly considered themselves successors to the Roman Empire. It’s interesting to look at when these refounders or conquerors come about, who they themselves are taking as their own inspiration. I do want to get to Siavash’s question which has been pretty popular with the listeners. Siavash asks, what are some objective metrics that can be used to evaluate whether an institution or a civilization is declining? He proposes perhaps net out-migration or low savings rates. What metrics do you use?

Samo Burja

Wow, that’s an interesting question. I think most of the modern measures are in a way too attuned to a bureaucratic framework that might not survive it. What is net savings? If wealth is fleeing from a monetary medium? You could imagine a world where people are trying to stash assets in land rather than stuff that’s denominated in dollars or whatever. I also think that if you have a failing society, you might have incorrect numbers coming in or out. I think it’s possible to establish a few things. I think, for example, in the late Roman period, you had a decline in atmospheric lead pollution. This isn’t because the Romans invented green technology. It’s because they were mining much less.

How do we know what the content of atmospheric lead is? We know because of the Greenland ice samples. The ice in Greenland, as it layered up, the small bubbles trapped basically atmospheric samples. Today, when we drill down into the ice, we can retrieve core samples and analyze the ice. There are all sorts of other physical measurements of byproducts. We could use things like how you know how much of the desert was irrigated, that’s like basically something you can just establish through material measures. I also think that it’s relatively more difficult but viable to track population size.

I think, almost always, a society with declining population sizes is a declining society. Something has just deeply gone wrong if human beings are failing to replace themselves. I’m not even saying that they should replace themselves. I’m just saying that if you were looking at an animal and the animal stops breeding in captivity, it’s clearly because of some difference between captivity and its wild environment. I think perhaps right now, we have accidentally put ourselves in captivity because almost all advanced industrial societies have this failure mode.

I think though more than low fertility, I’m thinking sudden population crashes when societal infrastructure fails. Key examples of this would be the aftermath of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, popularly known as the Three Kingdoms period, where China has a drop in population over the period of 60 years. That is, I think, a two thirds population drop. That didn’t happen through low fertility, okay? That happened through starvation. Probably some of it through disease and some of it through just direct killing. While the period of the Three Kingdoms is romanticized, that is a catastrophic drop in population size and arguably a catastrophic drop in societal complexity. There is a nonlinear relationship between population size and complexity.

Also, I think that the late Bronze Age collapse is another great example. We just see a massive population decline. So, you can have material measures to track various kinds of production going down, you can have population drops, which can be figured out through things like examining how many people are in the cities, whether their cities are being abandoned or not, or just by like looking at their official figures, such as censuses, assuming the censuses are accurate.

Finally, the loss of key indicating technologies. What’s the most fragile technology you can think of? It’s a little bit like a canary in the coal mine, right? You might see, as toys – not as methods of production – but as toys, steam engines in Alexandria at its peak. You won’t see toy steam engines in Alexandria when it’s declined. Likewise, you might see as arguably very expensive physics toys, the Large Hadron Collider today, but if these colliders were no longer built, while the justification for their building remains, likely something has gone wrong, something has gone a little bit off. We should be suspicious of things such as “Well, we are so rich now, we are so much richer than we were 50 years ago that we can’t possibly afford something as expensive as the Apollo missions”. There should be something weird there. That’s a little bit of a contradiction, isn’t it? These are not completely sure, but if you saw several of these indicators, it’s a good sign.

Ash Milton

What I’m taking from your statement about looking at lead levels, is that we today would think of this as a good thing, but it’s probably a sign of decline. I’m also thinking here of when urban dwellers in the late Western Roman Empire were abandoning the cities to live in monastic communities, for example, they themselves experienced that probably as an improvement in their own lives. But we know that in looking at the broad social level, it ended up being a decline, you could even look at how a surplus which is no longer reinvested in productive activity and civilization might sometimes get spent on gargantuan monuments which we think of as wonders of the world, but in those societies perhaps were signs that they could no longer be productive in other ways. So, I think you’re making an excellent point here, where sometimes we only know in the historical hindsight, that something was actually a sign of decline.

Samo Burja

It’s difficult, but I think, in general, societal capacity is something that you know it when you see it. Like in something like intellectual creativity or flourishing, or the creation of new entirely new traditions of knowledge. That’s something that’s way trickier to establish. Because there, the material in question is less preserved. For all we know, we have the intellectual history of the Roman Empire completely wrong. It’s all a matter of these sorts of obscure effects where we see certain pieces of literature and we don’t see other pieces of literature. It might be their censors because of religious or political frictions, or it might just be lost due to happenstance, so the intellectual imprint is always weaker. But if you have a good intellectual imprint, if you’re certain of it, I would add this as a fourth indicator, like a lack of any sort of intellectual production. Finally, I’m going to say I know of no great society without exceptional people.

Wolf Tivy

Interesting!

Ash Milton

Matt asks a question which takes us more to Silicon Valley: one common view in Silicon Valley is that technology lets us escape and route around politics. You can decentralize your way out of Washington, D.C. or something like that. You wrote at Palladium recently that material technology is often downstream of social technology and the institutions that exist. Given that, how should people in tech be thinking about politics and about social technology?

Samo Burja

Let’s put it this way. Every technology exists in a social context. By producing something intensely technological, you are always – without exception – producing something intensely social. I think by making something that’s more powerful technologically, that replaces a previous piece of perhaps intangible social technology, you’re always making yourself more the center of attention, and more a power player not less. So the idea of exit through technological progress seems the ideal of the absentee landlord.

I think it’s much better to think of it as like, if I am building new technology, if I’m replacing social systems, then it befalls me or befalls people like me to steward society. In a way, if you look at, say, coverage of Mark Zuckerberg, the coverage is split. It’s outraged that Facebook is doing, like, censorship and privacy violations, and on the other hand, people are outraged that they’re not using their powers to mold elections and mold public discourse. In a way, I would almost say that the second complaint is more real. Facebook has become extremely powerful, and we are upset with Facebook or rather, with Zuckerberg, that he is not ruling us.

We’re upset that they’re not thinking about society. I think that my formulation would be that technologists that strive to remain ignorant of politics and society will encounter ever worse pushback as they try to innovate. And founders or technologists that keep society in mind and accept both responsibility and limits, but also accept the reality of their personal power, will be able to innovate without limit. And I would argue that Bezos for example is very good at thinking about politics. Now, we might not agree with the direction of his politics or whatever, or we might agree that doesn’t really matter. What matters is that he is not disliked in the same way, because he clearly does engage with the power structure. He doesn’t he doesn’t have the illusion that he’s outside of society. He’s not anti-social quite in that way.

Ash Milton  

And so perhaps he gets more goodwill from the people that do approve of his actions.

Samo Burja 

Somewhat. I think that, technological innovators, perhaps their desire for decentralization is coming from the very real feeling that technology is being choked off. I think that’s happening. I think Silicon Valley is no longer the center of innovation. I think that has moved to China. But I think China is much less productive than Silicon Valley was at the peak of its productivity. So I think the desire for decentralization, I can empathize with it. I think it’s a desire to alleviate the symptoms of malaise.

Ash Milton  

Do you think that, looking at people like Zuckerberg and Bezos, that they built these companies that are also social technologies? To what degree is it possible to build something thinking it’s just a material technology and actually output something that’s a powerful social technology? Do you have to actually be aware that you’re building a social technological institution? Or can you do it by accident, so to speak?

Samo Burja

You don’t have to think of it as a social technological institution. Just think of it as changing human behavior or believing it’ll change human behavior. Certainly there’s found innovation. It’s just that the most potent things historically have many moving parts. But let’s consider when America’s founding fathers are setting up the Constitution, how many moving parts are there in that design? That’s way too many to be unaware of what you’re doing. The same is true when it comes to a significant reform of the Church or when it comes to Rockefeller’s innovations in the industrial sector. There are too many interlocking parts. I think there are a few cases where a very naive discovery of something might result in massive changes, but again, I think it’s usually something that takes into account many, many different factors. Hopefully, that answers the question, but feel free to rephrase it again, if I didn’t quite answer it.

Ash Milton 

No, I think that was a fleshed out answer. Wolf, do you want to grab another question?

Wolf Tivy

Sure. So, Juan Manuel Segura asks: does society have to have its own consistent theory of history for great founders to work on that society? Or does it work when society has kind of lost its identity and doesn’t know how to think about history and how to think about itself? How do great founders react to, say, a situation where there’s a whole host of theories of history competing for prominence?

Samo Burja

I think that’s a great time. I think it can be a wonderful time of ideological competition. This is a relatively fragmented society, right? Again, the classic example might be the Hundred Schools period in Chinese history. Or it might be the 19th century in European history or possibly the 20th century. You can have a period of intense ideological competition with their radically different theories of history motivating very different factions resting on very different stacks of social technology. The theory of history of the Mohists is as distinct from the theory of history of the Legalists as the theory of the Soviet Union is from the theory of the United States during the Cold War, or even more so like Nazi Germany versus the Soviet Union.

Ideally, they should be evidence-based, so if you see low belief, low understanding, low action at this relatively ambitious scale, versus a lot of activity on rapidly changing ideas, these are two different environments. One of those is an intellectually relatively dead environment. The other one is an intellectually very generative environment. You might have a lack of coherence because of overabundance of thinking on how history is happening or just because of the death of awareness where this kind of old ideology has been eroded away. These old understandings and beliefs have been eroded away almost into nothing, yet, nothing is happening, almost like a kind of heat death situation.

I think the heat death situation is actually super unstable and very artificial. You can imagine it towards the end of a particularly dysfunctional Egyptian dynasty, or you can imagine it at the end of a particularly dysfunctional Chinese dynasty. But it feels like it’s very fragile, because there’s always an outside world, and the outside world has individuals that are motivated and other bases of power and infrastructure that might overcome your very, very stagnant society. But just to try to get to the crux of it, I think Great Founder Theory holds whether or not people believe in it. Because almost any social theory you might believe will change the function of society if it’s believed at scale. But in a way, Great Founder Theory is somewhat invariant. If people think it’s true, it’s only even more true and if people don’t believe it’s true, it’s still kind of true, actually.

Ash Milton

But if acted on, can a society structure itself in such a way as to create more great founders? I think they can.

Samo Burja 

Yes, I think they can. But it’s not going to be a big aware effort. It’s going to be like a very narrow institutional effort for human excellence.

Ash Milton

Do you think that, with founders, water travels to the lowest place? If there is an area in society where there has been a significant amount of decay, is that a place where we might expect to see either, if not more great founders, at least more people trying to be great founders, disrupting something that seems ossified, or how do you think about this?

Samo Burja  

I think that the most important thing often is that there is a resource base that the founders can command. So if the circumstances are too challenging, then the difficulty is higher. Then probabilistically you just expect fewer of them. This is what I mean by stochastic. It might be that an individual in a very tranquil society can change everything, but it’s very unlikely that they arise. I don’t quite know how to predict the probabilities of such individuals. I think that would be an extremely interesting research project. Probably best left for the next civilization, I think we’re probably not going to have the ability to crack that one. But the socio-emotional learning or the acquiring of both the right type of information and retaining the ability to act on that information, this seems to be exceedingly hard for human beings.

We seem to very easily slip out of it or fall out of it, or go into a lower energy or more stable state. In a way you could think of it as live versus dead players. I think live players can go dead and dead players very infrequently go live. I think this is almost an anthropological claim. People burn out way more than they are inspired or transformed. For every time Joan of Arc receives the revelation from God, about 10 or 15 people have to lose belief in life or lose belief in their ability to shape the world through knowledge. Maybe 1000, maybe thousands is the actual right ratio. I don’t know. It’s just lopsided.

Wolf Tivy

Pulling together a bunch of different threads here about revolution, about theories of history, and about founding the great archetypal mythologies that we have in society: there’s this moment, after a revolution, or after some large institutional change, or with the founding of some new dominant institution where the mythology becomes society’s new framework for interpreting things. It’s like these large institutions often carry along with them an ideology. And this relates also to what we were talking about with Russia reinterpreting its history to integrate all these different things. I would just be curious to hear you talk more about how great founders, through their efforts, can plan and take into account these longer term effects of the grand mythological narratives that they end up founding and how much these are themselves institutions in a way that end up shaping subsequent civilization.

Samo Burja

It’s this deep spectrum where different civilizations have fallen on different ends of it. If we think about it in one way, there are kind of only two or three societies that have really embarked on rigorous historical analysis in the way we would understand it. So you could say China of a certain time period with the records of the grand historians, Greece with paragons like Thucydides, and early modern Europe. I would actually argue that right now we are transitioning from a society with a strong awareness of the past and the physical realities of the past towards a society with low awareness of the physical reality of the past. I think we’re actually transitioning out of a society that’s capable of having long term reflective historic memory, like early modern Europe, Greece, and China.

This doesn’t however mean we lose all track of it. Again, the mythological component is another way to refactor history. You might not remember the particular lawgiver, but you might remember a particular story about Zeus, you might confabulate it or create it. And that type of memory can also be very potent or arguably can last for a very long time. There have been some claims with analysis of language and analysis of folk tales that there are folk tales that have stayed basically unchanged for about 10-12,000 years. The arguments on that are interesting; people can Google that if they want. One one has to be careful with them. Linguistic analysis is always very tricky. The question is how much one should believe the theories of linguists.

My point being, historical memory isn’t an intended choice and requires a certain type of apparatus in society to even access. So direct material facts of the past – mythological memory  – is usually available, though even myths can be subsumed and destroyed with explicit ideology. Because let’s remember what the term pagan meant. It meant rural backwater.

Ash Milton  

The country people.

Samo Burja 

The country people keep on sacrificing stuff and leaving beads and flowers next to the streams, even though we tell them good Christians don’t do this. And a few centuries later, will the country people like to keep giving beads and flowers to saints in the river even though we’ve told them no good Protestant does this? And today we might say, again, the country people keep having these local superstitions even though they’re not scientific. It’s this kind of memory that’s possibly emotional. It’s cached. It needs interpretation.

You can have more or less sensitivity to mythological traditions as well. You can have more or less ability to reason about your environment. So I would say that the historical civilizations that track material history will communicate to each other through the depths of time. I think something like the Pyramids continues to shape history to this day. I think, were the Pyramids not constructed, 19th century British imperialists, 17th century Ottoman imperialists, and 10th century Arab rulers would have been less reflective on the transience of empire.

The British Empire was keenly aware of its own mortality, and otherwise might have been blissfully unaware. Maybe the Pyramids aren’t enough, maybe the Romans need not have left ruins of a certain type. But I think there’s this fact that for societies that do rely on historical memory, these large material artifacts, but also the trajectory of past societies, are very important. They are facts about the world that shaped their beliefs. Again, why in the world is there a causal chain from Alexander the Great to Napoleon? It’s only because of historic memory.

Ash Milton

So Samo, I assume you’re working on how to transmit Great Founder Theory to the next civilization.

Samo Burja

I mean, obviously, right? We’re still working on the Pyramid. It’s being constructed. It’s like this nice ziggurat-style structure. I think you guys might give us some advice on that.

Ash Milton 

If they wall off part of the Bay Area, now you know why, yeah? Yeah, we’ll figure it out soon.

Wolf Tivy  

Well, we’re just about out of time for the recorded section, Samo. Thank you so much for coming on. This is a very interesting discussion. We’re definitely looking forward to having more of your work at Palladium Magazine. You can follow Samo over on Twitter at @SamoBurja. He archives all his writing and talks at SamoBurja.com. Thanks to the audience for the great questions. Special thanks to all our Palladium members for coming out and supporting us! To become a member and get invited to our upcoming salons, please visit us at palladiummag.com/subscribe. And remember to subscribe to Palladium Magazine on YouTube and follow us on Twitter at @palladiummag. So thanks everyone. We’ll see you next time.

Samo Burja 

Thanks guys. Thank you for having me on the show.

Michael is the author of more than a dozen books of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, including The Next American Nation and Land of Promise. He has been an editor or staff writer for The New Yorker, Harper’s, The New Republic, and The National Interest. He has taught at Harvard and Johns Hopkins and is currently a professor of practice at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.

In his most recent book, The New Class War: Saving Democracy from the Managerial Elite, Michael debunks the idea that recent populist insurgencies in America are primarily the result of bigotry, traces how the breakdown of mid-century class compromises between business and labor led to the conflict, and reveals the real battle lines: the managerial overclass on one side and the working class on the other.

Vitalik Buterin is best known for co-founding Bitcoin Magazine and the Ethereum project, but he has been recently expanding his attention into more general problems of political theory, governance, and society. This journey has led to collaboration with the Taiwanese government, among other projects.

Jaan Tallinn is a founding engineer of Skype and Kazaa. He is a co-founder of the Cambridge Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, Future of Life Institute, and philanthropically supports other existential risk research organizations. Jaan is on the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, member of the High-Level Expert Group on AI at the European Commission, and has served on the Estonian President’s Academic Advisory Board. He is also an active angel investor, a partner at Ambient Sound Investments, and a former investor director of the AI company DeepMind.

Palladium interviewed Jaan last summer, in which Jaan discussed the potential need to regulate concentrated computing power.

On June 30, Harper Collins will publish Michael Shellenberger’s timely new book, Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All, which is available for pre-order on Amazon and has received strong pre-publication praise from Harvard’s Steven Pinker, Pulitzer-winning author Richard Rhodes, and climate scientists Kerry Emanuel and Tom Wigley. Apocalypse Never is a comprehensive debunking of environmental misinformation about everything from climate change and rainforest destruction to nuclear energy and renewables.

John Vervaeke is an assistant professor in cognitive psychology and cognitive science at the University of Toronto. His work centers around the relationship between science and spirituality and the meaning crisis. He is on Twitter at @vervaeke_john.

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and influential writer. He is known for his challenging views on human motivations and biases, futurism and artificial intelligence, and information markets. He previously worked at Lockheed and NASA. He is the author of The Elephant in the Brain, about human cognitive biases, and the Age of Em, on the prospects for society after the development of computer-emulated human minds.

Robert Zubrin is President of Pioneer Astronautics, an aerospace R&D company located in Lakewood, Colorado. He is also the founder and President of the Mars Society, an international organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars by both public and private means. Formerly a Staff Engineer at Lockheed Martin Astronautics in Denver, he holds a Masters degree in Aeronautics and Astronautics and a Ph.D. in Nuclear Engineering from the University of Washington.

Zubrin is the inventor of several unique concepts for space propulsion and exploration, the author of over 200 published technical and non-technical papers in the field, and was a member of Lockheed Martin’s “scenario development team” charged with developing broad new strategies for space exploration. In that capacity, he was responsible for developing the “Mars Direct” mission plan, a strategy which by using Martian resources, allows a human Mars exploration program to be conducted at a cost 1/8th that previously estimated by NASA.

In addition to his many technical publications, Dr. Zubrin is the author of seven books, including The Case for Mars: How We Shall Settle the Red Planet and Why We Must, Entering Space: Creating a Spacefaring Civilization, Mars on Earth: Adventures of Space Pioneers in the High Arctic, Energy Victory: Winning the War on Terror, the humorous How to Live on Mars: A Trusty Guidebook to Surviving and Thriving on the Red Planet, and Merchants of Despair: Radical Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudoscientists, and the Fatal Cult of Antihumanism.

William Eden is an entrepreneur-in-residence at Ulysses Diversified Holdings and a former biotech investor at Thiel Capital. Prior to that, he worked as an economist at the Federal Reserve.

Matt Parlmer is a software engineer, who is now dedicating his time to the Open PPE Project, a venture to re-shore N95-style mask manufacturing in the U.S. as fast as possible and is looking for an infusion of capital. He can be reached at Twitter or his website.

Watch the video on YouTube.

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Wolf Tivy: Hello and welcome to Palladium’s first Digital Salon. I’m your host, Wolf Tivy, Senior Editor at Palladium Magazine. We’re joined today by Matt Parlmer, and Will Eden, and a selected audience of friends and governance futurists. Hi, guys. Welcome to the show. For a bit of explanation before we get started, we’re all in quarantine, so we’re unable to run proper in-person events. Instead, we’ve decided to do online events for the foreseeable future. This is our first foray into that world doing a digital salon. The salon will be recorded and released like a podcast. You may be listening to this as a podcast. The plan basically is I’m going to moderate a discussion between Will and Matt about our topic for about half an hour and then we’re going to open it up to questions from our audience.

Before we get started, I’d like to introduce our participants. First of all, we have Will Eden, who has previously worked at the Federal Reserve as an economist. He’s previously worked at Thiel Capital doing biotech venture capital and he’s been one of the loudest and earliest alarm raisers on this whole coronavirus situation. He’s been at the forefront of a lot of the key advocacy points: social distancing, hospital capacity, a bunch of stuff like that. We’re all very grateful to Will for helping to raise the alarm on this and help contain the issue. And I think as a point of pride. He’s been in quarantine much longer than the rest of us.

William Eden: Yeah, I started about two weeks before I was supposed to.

Wolf Tivy: Excellent. Yeah, I think I was perhaps a week after you but yeah, we’re all in it now. Anyway, so then we have Matt Parlmer. He’s a software entrepreneur who’s been loud and early talking about supply chain risk and stepping up to actually start working on a project in that space working on manufacturing personal protective equipment in the United States, by any means necessary. And so, Matt. Anything else you want to add before we get started?

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, right now we’re—so I’ll be transparent. I’m just going to pitch everybody. I don’t know if there’s anybody on here who can deploy six figures of—

Wolf Tivy: Well, we’re also broadcasting. I mean, the podcast. So the audience is potentially much larger than just the immediate audience.

Matt Parlmer: Alright. Good deal. Well, to everybody listening: I’m working with several colleagues to spin up an N95 mask manufacturing facility in Grand Rapids, Michigan, using spare capacity at a couple different plants they have there. We have identified a supplier of the extremely scarce and extremely difficult to find meltblown polypropylene filter material, and we are currently in need of capital from anybody who is feeling like they want to be effective with their altruism—

Wolf Tivy: Anyone who wants to be a hero, basically.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, pretty much. Our goal is to on-shore as much PPE manufacturing capacity as possible because we consider this to be both a national defense priority, in my opinion, and also a bit of a national disgrace that this doesn’t exist in the first place. So if that’s something you’re interested in helping out with please reach out to me or one of the organizers of this stream on Twitter, and we’ll go from there.

Wolf Tivy: Well, yeah. So we’re all very grateful to you for running that kind of project is something we need right now.

Matt Parlmer: Don’t thank me yet. We haven’t done anything yet.

Wolf Tivy: Well you’ve been trailblazing and showing the way for a lot of people.

Matt Parlmer: I appreciate it.

Wolf Tivy: The reason I wanted to bring you guys together is to talk about generally the disconnect between the online community of epistemically astute amateurs and the official experts. I think we’ve seen a fairly significant disconnect there that’s been showing up in multiple ways and I want to talk about. Additionally, what we have and have not been able to do, despite the lack of institutional power. So there’s a lot of people who have been really calling this the way it was going to play out and knew what was going to happen and were unable to move through official institutional channels, but a lot of stuff was done nonetheless.

This is the general topic that I wanted to get you guys to weigh in on. So how did this look from our perspective in these strange circles on the internet to seem to know everything before the experts do and what we’ve been doing? So Matt, you’ve given us your little pitch on what you’ve been up to. Will, can you give us kind of an overview of some of the advocacy that you’ve been doing and how it how you saw it play out? When, when did this first really become your thing? When did you start “coronaposting,” Will?

William Eden: I probably should have checked when I actually changed my name on Twitter to say that, which I think was probably in late February or early March, but yeah I started following the situation in China mid-to-late January. It’s a little bit hard to remember what was going through my head at the time, but I think the thing that really tipped me off was that it was spreading asymptomatically. And as soon as I heard that, my first thought was, wow, this is going to be really hard to contain.

At that time, it was still pretty much only in Wuhan and there were only a few hundred cases. And so it started a little bit as a curiosity. The first thing I did is I was like, okay, so this is pretty similar to SARS. How did SARS play out? Well, SARS spread to quite a few countries, but it ultimately did get contained. So for a while my thinking was: it’s bad that this is happening, but we’re probably going to be okay because I basically thought that institutions were a little more capable than they turned out to be.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah.

William Eden: The other thing too, though, is SARS was mostly only transmitted symptomatically. And so right off the bat we knew that this would be harder to contain. It didn’t make it impossible to contain but just much, much harder. It started as this intellectual curiosity. Even after it started to get bad in China, but it hadn’t really spread throughout the world in a serious way yet. By the middle of February, it was clear that China had really cracked down and was actually turning the corner on it. It was, it was clear by mid-February that maybe China was actually going to get this thing under control. Look, I thought then like, okay, we have a model that works. It’s not that widespread yet; we’ve got this under control. That turned out to be very, very wrong.

Wolf Tivy: When did you realize you were wrong?

William Eden: Yeah, so it started taking off in South Korea, right? It still sort of felt like, okay, that’s unfortunate, but probably still containable via similar methods. Still at this point, Singapore had contained it, Hong Kong had contained it, Taiwan had contained it. It started to blow up in South Korea but even then it was, okay, well, we still have this playbook. South Korea did end up doing different things, but it still seems to be effective, even though their strategy was somewhat different. Which again, sort of gave me hope, right? But then basically seeing the complete sort of failure of the West to respond and then starting to see this exponential take off. Someone in the chat says I changed my name on March 3 [on Twitter to include “coronaposting”] which feels right.

I would say the other really big flag for me was finding out that it was in Iran, and that it was going uncontrolled spread in a country without the best health care and monitoring. At that point, I became very, very, very concerned because even if every other country in the world successfully contained it if you have one that’s basically this viral reactor that’s throwing off tons of cases.

Wolf Tivy: Where they’re still licking the shrine. (Laughs.)

William Eden: Yep, exactly. And very soon after it became obvious to the outside world that it was in Iran. Every country that borders them showed cases just going like this [gestures up in a rising curve]. Every single country. After Iran came out, that’s when I thought this could be much, much worse. And probably, we’re not going to contain it at least there [in Iran], right? But yeah, a lot of countries just continued to drop the ball, and with each increasing week I was more frantic, and I’ve been pretty much only posting about it non-stop for two weeks or more now.

Wolf Tivy: What did it look like with respect to—you’re watching the situation develop on the ground in these other countries like China and Iran and South Korea. And then how did that contrast your level alarm contrast with sort of the stories you’re hearing domestically here in the United States?

William Eden: Yeah, zero correlation. I mean, as recently as one month ago, you had the media making fun of folks in Silicon Valley for starting to do some social distancing measures. Right? Which, in retrospect, is a very bad look. I think obviously a lot of people are going to have a lot of egg on their face—or should.

Wolf Tivy: Yea there’s a few screen cap comparisons going around now of the media making fun of the issue, like a month ago, and then now calling the people who are denying it conspiracy theorists when they were denying a month ago. And yeah, it’s been interesting to see the sort of official information institutions, just like flip flopping manufacturing narrative real-time in ways that that in retrospect have seemed extremely irresponsible.

William Eden: So, in fairness, I think we started to see this the most blatantly with Trump, who can just turn on a dime and just change his story and then pretend he talked that way the whole time. And I think everyone in the country has basically just become this, if they weren’t before. I’m not totally convinced that it didn’t always work like this. It was just never so blatantly obvious and maybe to have so many people online calling out how inconsistent and how just completely hypocritical this whole thing has been.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah. So Matt, how did it look from your perspective? I remember I looked; you had one very important tweet I think on the 23rd of January or something, where you were talking about the supply chain implications of this whole thing. And that’s been pretty well borne out and more. What did this look like from your perspective, kind of, how did you get onto the issue? How has your thinking changed and how has that contrasted with the narratives you see?

Matt Parlmer: Right. So a lot of this goes back to me sort of obsessively following open-source intelligence channels for the last several years. My interest in things like Bellingcat and various other open ways of aggregating a bunch of information, such that you have, for Twitter at least, something comparable to a nation-state intelligence agency just happening in there in the feeds. That was always an appealing and interesting thing for me. So those organizations started to target the Hong Kong protests in the middle of last year. They started aggregating tons of information and started distributing it all over the place, and I had been obsessive really following that, and those same channels started to report in late December lots and lots of viral pneumonia among relatives in central China. Anybody who follows epidemiological channels knows that whenever you hear about an interesting spike in viral pneumonia in central China, it’s generally not a good sign.

Basically the alarm bells were going right around then. We now know based on Caixin’s excellent reporting that it was indeed spreading all the way back then; that the PRC government knew about it and was hiding information on it. So that started to break out into the Hong Kong channels for the OSINT open-source intelligence world.

After that, one of the first people on that was a guy on Twitter who goes by the name Comparativist, so I definitely recommend following him, Trey. That started to break out and it became clear to me that given the fact that PRC since the opening has been a huge exporter of people all over the world that COVID would start moving along those networks, very quickly in a way that was very difficult to contain, if we didn’t start taking measures immediately. So around that period of time I started that—

Wolf Tivy: Let me just interrupt you here, Matt.

Matt Parlmer: Go ahead.

Wolf Tivy: What was the Twitter account you just mentioned, it was a little bit unclear?

Matt Parlmer: Comparativist. Yeah, yeah. Yep. Tanner just linked to it in the [chat].

Wolf Tivy: Great. Excellent. Okay.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, how’s it going, Tanner? Tanner’s feed also if you want to follow interesting things in China is also quite good: @Scholars_Stage.

So I started seeing that sort of thing, pop up all over the place. And yeah, it was interesting because our first line of defense for a lot of these for a lot of these outbreaks is the quite excellent international sort of biological perimeter defense that the various different virology organizations out there have established. That’s how we can figure out that some random village in Uganda has a novel relative of Ebola popping up all over the place.

We’re getting awfully good at finding random hemorrhagic fevers in the jungle so it shouldn’t be that hard to find a new coronavirus in a developed country like China.

It was from that point onward that I started trying to raise the alarm bells and whatever minimal way that I could. And it’s been awfully frustrating to watch all of the institutions— particularly the press, whose job it is to be ahead of the curve on stuff like this—just ignore it completely as it continued to get worse every single day.

Wolf Tivy: Speaking of the press not being ahead of this thing and not catching everybody up to how serious the situation was. What are both of your estimations on how much of that was narrative management, like deliberate planned sort of narrative management, and how much of that was just that they were not good enough at their job?

William Eden: I personally think it’s because they were not very good at their job. It’s the kind of thing that without a little bit of expertise in the subject, it’s a little bit hard to see just from looking at a headline number. Like, oh, how many hundred people have it? How many countries, is it in? It just continues to sound like a small deal without having the kind of underlying causal model of how these things actually spread.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, I guess if you’re not used to thinking about sort of the exponential process spreading through a network and thinking through the process of how it’s actually going to get stopped.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah.

Wolf Tivy: You look at, oh, there’s a couple hundred cases in China of this novel pneumonia. It doesn’t seem like a big deal, right, and then some hated tech bros in Silicon Valley are making a big deal out of it and refusing to shake hands. And of course, this becomes a point that you can make fun of them on.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, I think the press is just bad at relaying specialist information—or frankly just understanding specialist information—in general. And that is, in the sense that they’re conditioned to do a lot of just regurgitation of people who are considered to be experts. In this case, the expertise that they were turning to were a bunch of public health bureaucrats who absolutely do have an incentive to claim that all as well and that everything’s under control. And they just continue to do that again and again.

Yeah, I do think there was some narrative management, though. I do absolutely think that’s the case, I think that I think that there are a lot of people who have a—particularly ever since the 2016 election—this orientation towards explicit attempts to prevent actors that they see as destabilizing to the current order from spreading what they consider to be disinformation.

You can see that with Twitter’s active Weibo-style spiking of communications about coronavirus yesterday. You literally cannot link to certain websites. Your tweets and DMs will get deleted. It’s an active attack on the informational immune system that people like Balaji [Srinivasan] and other folks who were raising the alarm bells about this constitute. So yeah, I do think there’s some active narrative management going on there. There are a lot of people who really like the idea that the authorities are always right, and those people have blood on their hands.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, I think by now it looks fairly clear that they are definitely trying to manage public perceptions here, especially with stock market worries and election worries and all the general kind of political order concerns that you were talking about—and sort of perception of political order concerns. And I’m wondering, sort of, when it flipped from incompetence to narrative management or whether it sort of had elements of both the whole time?

Another thing I’d like to raise here, actually, is that we need to desegregate official institutions and official experts here a bit because from what I understand the epidemiologists and the actual scientific community was quite on top of the thing—

Matt Parlmer: Right! Totally!

Wolf Tivy: —And it was the bureaucrats that were not, or were keeping it under wraps, and the journalists.

Matt Parlmer: I was literally getting into flame wars with people telling them, listen, there’s absolutely evidence that this is going on. And I would get a reply like, no, the public health authorities say that this is fine. I would link directly to a virology paper or directly to the interview that Caixin, the very excellent independent news agency in China, did with the guy who managed the SARS response in PRC saying that this was the worst outbreak of his lifetime. And I would get blocked or poo-pooed

Matt Parlmer: It’s ridiculous. People can’t— there’s so much conditioning around what people want to—

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, I see what you’re saying. And, yeah, there’s this big disconnect. One of the ways this was put well and articulated well is that there’s this big disconnect between people who are reasoning directly about the evidence, and directly about the models, and directly trying to model the situation. And people who are reasoning, primarily, in terms of authorities and established lines of information flow and so on. We’ve seen this big disconnect. The Silicon Valley, a lot of technical people, a lot of people who are really pressed up against reality with their companies and the things that we’re working on tended to be more on the side of raising the alarm because they were directly reasoning about the problem, and the established informational channels tended to be dominated by people who were thinking in terms of the informational authority and the sort of top informational authorities were not raising the alarm for whatever reason. And so, that whole system kind of ended up failing.

But if I can briefly defend the idea that there ought to be a lot of people taking the official information authorities seriously. It is kind of necessary in a society that you have someone somewhere like sorting through all the possible discourse that’s happening and saying, here are the things that are important, here are the things you need to be paying attention to.

There’s a reason that a lot of people kind of end up following those authorities. The situation we’re in is we end up having a crisis of either competence or will or good intention among those authorities. Right now, something’s gone wrong there.

William Eden: Though I do think that my thinking has changed on this a little bit, just sort of seeing how folks have started to respond, now that the public health authorities are more kind of on board. I’m starting to think the government was actually more constrained than I had thought by the people. I basically think there’s sort of a feedback loop here where the government can’t really tell people that they have to take drastic action until the people are panicking.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah.

William Eden: Yeah, and then to some degree the people aren’t going to panic until they’re told something is wrong. So my read of the last couple of weeks has actually been this slow unrolling of, like, hey, public, it’s a little more serious. Hey, it’s a little bit more serious. Hey, it’s starting to get really serious now. Hey, it’s really serious, we need to take drastic action now.

Wolf Tivy: Right, yeah. And so there’s sort of the interlocked very constrained system hypothesis that you’re laying out. Another hypothesis I’ve heard for sort of explaining that slow rollout is that it’s actually part of the narrative management: you don’t want to just say, like, okay, the government is going to take decisive action to limit and contain this issue before anyone has any clue what’s going on. You know, that’s very authoritarian, that’s very China, we’re not like that. We sort of do things as a public discourse and so we take it much slower. Just as a matter of our ideological precepts. And perhaps those are related.

Matt Parlmer: That may be the case, but I do think that they should have been telling people to panic back when back when a modicum of public alarm would have actually done a lot of good and kept this crap out of the country. Or not really out of the country—that’s not the big thing to worry about—more like out of the out of the air transport network.

If people had actually been listening to extremely credible scientific minds working on this back in the very beginning of January, and been making sensible policy on the basis of that, we would have had closed flights to China in mid-January. We would have basically done everything that the Singaporean government has done, or at least giving people the opportunity to respond in a collective fashion like the people of Hong Kong.

Matt Parlmer: It’s not that that either of those models are wrong. It’s that we need to have an information infrastructure that allows us to actually drop into one of those models quickly during crises, and right now we just don’t have that in any way at all.

William Eden: I will note that Trump did close air traffic to China and everyone gave him a ton of crap for it, right? He was doing it later than we probably should have stopped that traffic, and the public was not ready for that. I think that’s some evidence for this theory of mine that like people needed to be a little bit more scared before we could actually take serious action.

Then, on the flip side, I’ve been really surprised, actually, how much supposedly half the country that hates Trump and thinks that he’s Hitler, but they’re waiting for him for guidance about what to do during a pandemic.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah. And that’s the Democratic politicians included. I remember hearing some rumors about that. That was interesting.

William Eden: Yeah, like he still is, for whatever reason, the national figure that everyone expects to be sort of taking point on how we respond to and think about this crisis.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, and the interesting thing is he didn’t change his mind until—well, one story is that Tucker Carlson went and talked to him and said, look, this is actually really serious and actually got him to change his mind, which is interesting.

There’s this question of how constrained are the public authorities by the degree to which the public just wouldn’t accept or sort of decisive action here. We see this with the sort of Spring Break types, and you’ve seen a lot of people with these sort of narrowly libertarian kinds of responses to the thing of like, oh yeah, we don’t need the government to help us with this, this is not something that they should be doing. Or, I don’t care; I’m not worried for myself or whatever.

There’s just been quite a bit of public disobedience, though, orders have not actually been given as well because of the possibility of public disobedience. But just general disarray in the sort of natural chain of command there. And, Will, I think that’s what you’re bringing up is the government is actually constrained by the people and has to bring them along, which is a slow and painstaking process in a crisis like this.

Another issue that sort of speaks to how much this is just an informational system problem versus a general institutional decay problem is the testing and personal protective equipment availability problems. We have not been able to spin up testing, and we have not had the supply chains worked out on personal protective equipment. These are not matters of politics or information or anything; it’s just the capability there institutionally and in the hardware.

Matt Parlmer: I would push back against that a little bit. I do think that the libertarians, they do get a lot of flack. One thing they’re absolutely right about is that the regulatory state has been one of the primary impediments to this.

William Eden: A hundred percent.

Matt Parlmer: From the very beginning.

William Eden: A hundred percent.

Matt Parlmer: You know, the CDC rolling into labs and the University of Washington telling people that they can’t run a PCR test because, you know, because paperwork. It’s like something— you know, it ended up in a Reason Magazine profile—but it is something out of a Reason Magazine profile. It is such an obvious textbook case of bureaucratic proceduralism imposing itself on people actually trying to do things in the public interest.

William Eden: I just have to point out the parallels with the U.S. story and the China story. In China, there was a doctor that realized there were clusters of patients, tried to publicize it and raise the warning, and got suppressed. There’s a doctor at the University of Washington who thought she had a patient, ran a COVID-19 test in her own lab, published the results when the CDC was telling her not to, which finally got people to wake up and take this seriously. Which one is the totalitarian state here, right? They look the same.

Matt Parlmer: It’s almost like there are tons of functional similarities between big sclerotic land empires.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, and then meanwhile, supposedly authoritarian Singapore has been the most open and the most transparent actor in this whole thing. It’s absurd. You literally go to the Singaporean health authority’s dashboard, and they publish all these charts and graphs that are updated like instantaneously from their excellent unified data infrastructure for all their healthcare workers so that the public can see precisely what’s going on. At all times. This is a supposedly authoritarian state and yet they have a level of transparency that puts nominal democracies to absolute shame. I mean, it makes you wonder about the language we use to describe these sets of systems.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, exactly. And this has been one of our ongoing points of Palladium, as we examine different regimes around the world. One of the major and most important dimensions is just the competence of the regime and a lot of the other stuff that we say about regimes, you know, democratic, authoritarian, etc., tend to just be branding of the sort of high level narratives that actually don’t weigh very much on the day-to-day actual competence of the regime.

So before we get too much further into continued discussion here, which is very interesting, let’s start answering some questions from the audience. There has been some great discussion in the chat and some great questions. I want to start with Misha’s question for Matt.

Wolf Tivy: If you had 100K right now, how much would that accelerate or how long before the first masks would be rolling off the production line?

Matt Parlmer: I can answer that very specifically; we don’t know how long it would take to roll off a production line because we’re still waiting on quotes from a couple different suppliers of ultrasonic welding equipment. Part of the issue with that is that this is a very limited infrastructure with a lot of dependencies on expensive German toys and we can get into that another time. Wolf, I think I owe you a piece on industrial civil disobedience. That’s going to be a point—

Wolf Tivy: Yeah. That’d be awesome, we’d love to.

William Eden: I would love to hear that.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, absolutely, it involves breaking IP law aggressively. But what we could do right now is place an order with Lydall, which is I think the second largest manufacturer of N95-grade meltblown polypropylene. And right now, we’ve been shaking all the trees to see if we can find a hundred grand or so to just go place an order with those guys so that we can at least get in their production pipeline for early April.

That would secure our ability to get this done. That is what we would be able to do, and we’re probably going to start crowdfunding early next week or over the weekend, but we really could use a $100,000 check right now. I know exactly where I’m sending it. It would sit in our bank account for about 10 minutes. We can deploy capital effectively right now: I want to really underline that to anybody who’s listening.

Wolf Tivy: Great and another part of that question is, are you doing this as a for-profit or nonprofit kind of venture?

Matt Parlmer: We’re, we’re not planning on making any money off of this. Look, I’m a software engineer. I might go do manufacturing work down the road, but personal protective equipment is not something I find intensely interesting beyond its ability to make sure that my dad isn’t walking into the ICU he runs with a bandana around his face next week. My interest in this is primarily wanting to ameliorate an immediate need.

As far as the vehicle we’re using right now, we have several very excellent lawyers trying to figure that out, working on a pro bono basis for which we should thank them. They are working on figuring out what sort of vehicle that would be appropriate for this. If push comes to shove, I’ll just end up bringing this to my consulting LLC and I’ll take the hit on taxes, but I’d rather not. And I’d rather that people that people who would like to donate to this be able to in a tax deductible fashion. It definitely smooths things out quite a bit. But yeah, stay tuned to my Twitter feed and then the @OpenPPEProject’s Twitter feed as well for official updates on this.

Wolf Tivy: About the intellectual property aspect in particular, during wartime mobilizations there’s these interesting provisions for the government to just basically seize IP for the war effort. And this is really the case or that that kind of thing needs to be happening.

William Eden: And I think we’re officially in that state of the world as of a few days ago.

Wolf Tivy: Right, where they’re officially on wartime footing?

William Eden: Yeah.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, they invoked that Act.

Matt Parlmer: I’ll be honest, we actually looked at 3M’s design, and I don’t think that’s IP we want to steal. (Laughs.)

William Eden: Ouch.

Matt Parlmer: No, I’ll be honest, disposable respiratory personal protective equipment is a category where there’s been near-zero consequential innovation in the last several decades.

Wolf Tivy: That’s pathetic, unfortunate.

Bonnie asks how long do you think life will be disrupted and how long are we going to have to be doing the social distancing thing? Is it going to be a few months? Is it going to be a year? What do you guys think?

William Eden: That really depends. In the situation where we choke this thing off effectively with our current lockdown—if we do that for a month, it’s burned out of almost every host. There’s still going to be a few floating around, but it’s going to greatly shrink the numbers that we have to deal with. Then we could maybe do a South Korea/Singapore solution where we don’t actually have to be all that careful.

Wolf Tivy: Assuming we have the testing capacity.

William Eden: Yes, the testing capacity is currently ramping up quite quickly I’ll note.

Wolf Tivy: That’s great.

William Eden: It’s suffering a number of significant bottlenecks, largely because we don’t build anything here, such as reagents and even cotton swab. Literally, we’re running out of cotton swabs to test people. I’m so furious about this whole thing and, Matt, you’re absolutely right. Supply chain ended up totally killing us. It totally killed us.

Matt Parlmer: I’m a committed wide-eyed ideological neoliberal. I like globalization. I think it’s good. I think it’s here to stay, but I really do hope that the next wave of globalization is not driven by Third World sweatshops; I’d like it to be driven by American robots.

William Eden: I totally hear you there. So anyway, if we manage to actually close this off. If we get almost everyone uninfected and then start to do contact-tracing with phones and widespread testing, I think we actually don’t have to change life that much, and we will contain it.

If we don’t contain it, then the question becomes, do we have lifelong immunity or is this a seasonal virus. If this becomes a seasonal plague that we have to go through every single winter, it could be a lot longer than a year. It could be every year.

Matt Parlmer: That’s what the WHO and CDC people have been saying in private communications or internal communications. They do think it’s going to go seasonal and that this is here to stay.

Wolf Tivy: That would be quite concerning. So far it hasn’t quite reached the level even of the flu. We’re still actually in the early stages where this is the major impact is still pretty hypothetical, but there is nothing particularly stopping it from getting quite big.

William Eden: Yeah, if you look at syndromic surveillance, where you just like to find the number of people that are having flu like symptoms at a given point, there are certain parts of the country where it’s now above peak flu season. So it’s not going to be just the flu for any longer if it’s not already.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, and we’re off of peak flu season, aren’t we?

William Eden: Oh, well off now. Yeah.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, that’s early February.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, I remember seeing a graph with flu symptoms and there’s usually a spike in the winter, basically. And we had that this year with a big spike of flu symptoms in the winter. But then we’re having a second spike of flu symptoms that starting to, again like you said, Will, overtake that peak, and that must be the coronavirus which is actually spreading more than we’re testing. I think that was specifically in New York, and I’m not sure how much that generalizes at this time.

William Eden: Syndrome surveillance across the country shows there are a number of regions in the country where you still don’t really detect symptoms above baseline, but in several parts of the country, they clearly, clearly are. And the ones where they’re not are still kind of marginal, and it looks like the flu season’s flattening off rather than falling. So those will almost certainly go like this over time.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah. I mean, well, we’ll see how it all plays out. This thing getting seasonal could get—I mean, eventually, we would have to just go on a fairly serious campaign to squash it because otherwise I think it would become a very serious inconvenience if we just let it go.

Matt Parlmer: One thing I’ve heard floating around public health circles is mask month, so we pick some period of time every year where we just all wear masks all the time. And that would drive basically every respiratory disease down close to zero if we started to do that. I’m beginning to think that that might end up being a good idea. You know, every October, or whatever, that’s mask month and everybody’s got the surgical mask on whenever they’re in public and we just drive that down to zero along with the common cold.

William Eden: Yeah, totally. The “it’s just the flu” has made me now think we need to get rid of the flu with these same methods, right? Let’s end the flu. Why do we put up with the flu?

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, absolutely.

Wolf Tivy: This reminds me of the Hong Kong numbers where—

William Eden: Yes, where every disease is falling.

Wolf Tivy: Because they did an effective hygiene approach to this, the flu actually tanked as well, as soon as they got word of coronavirus, which is sort of hartening right? It’s like, okay, well maybe if we get good at crushing these things, this won’t be the only one we crush.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, and to everyone who who’s still got residual like you know

“masks don’t work” propaganda in their decision tree somewhere, that that is objectively not true. Masks work great. What masks do—surgical masks of the type that you see commuters wearing in Asian countries, quite wisely. What they do is they protect you from direct droplets spread, but they also catch a bunch of viral matter if you are sick or if you are an asymptomatic carrier, so when they’re catching all of that viral matter it starts to drive things down to zero. I will also say that with all of the facial recognition technology coming out these days, the civil libertarian in me really likes the idea of a lot of people masking up in public. But we’ll see.

Wolf Tivy: What do you guys think about whether this has given us enough of a wake up call that we’re going to be much more effective in the next pandemic, or are we going to substantially change our procedures here? This is a question from Jessica Dang.

Matt Parlmer: You want to take this one, Will?

William Eden: God, I don’t know. I had, which is so tragic, right? I think some of it depends what the, what the shape of the pandemic looks like, to a certain degree, though, probably respiratory viruses are the thing that would spread the fastest anyway. This is not quite the maximally bad condition. I think the strategic reserve will have more stockpiles which will help. I don’t know whether international institutions are going to be better. The World Health Organization definitely seemed to be driven by politics and trying to keep relationships with China happy. China didn’t let the U.S. CDC in early, which was another sign that this was more political than about stopping the crisis. It’s tough to imagine all of these political concerns going away. I think it’ll be easier to convince the population that something’s more necessary and the media might be more on board with treating it more seriously sooner. I do think pieces of it will be easier and pieces of it won’t. It’s a hard question.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, I think our existing perimeter defense systems are very good. Very, very good. Like I like I said, we are typically outbreak of, say, novel hemorrhagic fever in the jungle in Uganda to MSF (Médecins Sans Frontières, i.e., Doctors Without Borders) on the ground, CDC and WHO, on the ground attacking the problem, we’re incredibly good at that.

Where that doesn’t work is central China where the CCP won’t let people go in and operate that extremely good epidemic surveillance infrastructure. The perimeter defense stuff I think is quite good. I’m not very optimistic, though, about our ability to actually contain large scale outbreaks once they do get past that perimeter defense infrastructure. If you look at the Ebola crisis, which was very terrifying and should have been the wakeup call that prevented this, or if you look at the response now, the issue isn’t even at the level of our public health authorities, it is at every level of Western governments. We are screwing the pooch at an enormous scale.

It’s obvious that under this level of pressure, every facet of our institutions is crumbling like a paper airplane hitting the ground. It’s so obvious that we just don’t have the institutional gas to respond to pandemics right now. If you just play out the institutional decay that has been happening at an accelerating rate for the last forty years, you play that out another twenty, to when you see something come out of Brazil or whatever. I don’t think that ceteris paribus (i.e., all else equal) we actually do a better job after this.

Wolf Tivy: A lot of it really depends on what kind of larger institutional reform this spurs, right? This actually gets into another question from Gabriel, which is what are the possible upsides in terms of institutional rebuilding as a result of this thing. I mean societies get hit by these shocks occasionally. It really sucks in the moment, it’s going to be awful, but they are also a shock that forces a renewal often. What do you guys think about the chance that this whole crisis spurs more widespread institutional renewal that can get us ready for the next one—not just the next one, but renew other aspects of the system?

William Eden: I think that it might. Something that’s tricky about a complex system that it’s hard to predict in advance what’s going to cause damage and what’s going to cause an adaptive response. My fear is that this could end up being damage, instead of adaptation.

With a particularly sort of sclerotic bureaucracy, I think if there’s a positive movement, adding another layer of bureaucracy that just overrides the other ones. Not that the other ones are going to go away. Both the CDC and the FDA massively dropped the ball. You really believe either the CDC or the FDA won’t exist after this, right? That’s hard to imagine. Maybe what we get is like the executive branch really puts its foot down and just like cuts a ton of laws. That I can see maybe happening. Something like if there’s ever any emergency pandemic situation, the FDA has to automatically grant the authority to run a test or something. You could imagine something like that gets enshrined, largely by taking away existing regulations. But I think, given our current state, we’re much more likely to just layer on something else than we are to actually fundamentally fix the parts that are broken.

Wolf Tivy: So that’s the ethos of the current system. Matt, were you going to say something?

Matt Parlmer: Well, yeah, I think that we will attempt to layer something on, but I think that credibility of federal public health authorities, both in the eyes of the public and in the eyes of municipal and regional health authorities, is completely spent. I do not see university research hospitals, I do not see municipal or state level public health authorities, taking anything that comes out of the CDC’s mouth seriously ever again, nor should they.

I think when something like this comes down the pike again, it’s going to end up being a much more distributed response, which means it’s going to be worse in some places and better than others. Frankly, I think that’s probably the outcome that’s optimal.

William Eden: I’m actually less sure than you that the state and local authorities aren’t going to listen to the national authorities. Again, I’m just updating in that direction so hard, seeing this whole thing play out now. Like none of the localities wanted to take action before they got a higher up on board.

Matt Parlmer: Right.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, they were all fairly timid in this thing even though the force of moral righteousness is definitely with them and the force of necessity.

William Eden: Certainly, there were one or two notable examples, like here in San Francisco. The mayor declared a state of public emergency before there was the first confirmed case in San Francisco, because it was obvious to everyone that was spreading in the Bay Area.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah.

William Eden: We got the first confirmed community spread a couple of days after she did that. That’s the kind of foresight someone who’s actually in touch with the situation should be showing here. Also, New York State—not New York City—New York State. Their governor has actually been on top of this thing.

Wolf Tivy: I was impressed by New York.

William Eden: Yeah, absolutely. They’re leading the charge. But I will say something that both the Bay Area and New York are two of the hardest hit places currently. Seattle’s maybe the outlier of being even harder hit, but still not really getting ahead of the problem.

Matt Parlmer: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the future governor of California, current Mayor of San Diego Kevin Faulconer was ahead of the curve on the coronavirus situation, but also was ahead of the curve on housing situation, and ahead of the curve on homelessness situation months ago. You are starting to see a much more effective—(Mayor of San Francisco) London Breed’s as you said early state of emergency declaration. You’re starting to see a lot more state and regional authorities or state and local authorities take this sort of thing seriously. I can’t stand Andrew Cuomo, but credit where it’s due. He is doing a good job.

Wolf Tivy: So, Matt. So to answer your prediction that the state and local authorities might stop listening to the higher ups and start doing more independent action. I think the counterpoint is that it’s very easy to imagine when the thing is happening, things are changing, it seems like a very powerful situation to change your mind, but these changes tend to need to be institutionalized for there to be a lasting consciousness of the thing.

And the default really is that public memory fades away, everyone forgets about it and goes back to the standard operating procedure, whatever that is. I think any kind of institutional change in behavior really depends on institutional reconstruction, changing how things work a bit.

William Eden: I would put one caveat on that which is I agree that the institutions, ideally should get this figured out and change themselves. But even if something like the 2008 financial crisis, a number of people gained status and a number of people lost status, largely because of if they saw it coming or not and what they did.

William Eden: We talk about, like, Nassim Taleb. Who wouldn’t give him any time of day at all if he didn’t sound the alarm in 2007, right? No one likes that guy. No one would listen to that guy.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, his point is much more powerful, given the 2008 actually happened.

William Eden: Yeah, so I think we could see something like that coming out of this, where like a small number of people get listened to and have a platform that didn’t before.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, I think that’s a very important prediction of how this actually affects things. I think one of the things I’ve been seeing here and that I’ve been calling and talking about is the degree to which this is really causing the victory of certain themes in the discourse and certain people who have been saying things about state capacity, who have been talking about the dangers of offshoring the entire supply chain, of institutional decay. A large number of issues that people have been talking about, and that have been addressed in certain circles and not others.

Right now, this situation is really resulting in a transfer of credibility that I think will be partially permanent. It won’t necessarily just fizzle out. There will be a lot of it that fizzles out, but there will be some things that, with this salient in the public imagination, certain ways of thinking are going to be seeming a lot more natural over the next couple decades.

So Tanner Greer has asked a very long and complicated question, so let me just try to read through that and see what we think of it: He’s currently writing a history of the United States in the 21st century. One of the extraordinary things he’s noted is the amount of time elected officials spent with crisis management. And “crisis management” really means public relations, or as we’ve called it, “narrative management.” Many weeks, the National Security Advisor or the Secretary of State spend more of their hours trying to shape the narrative and coverage of events and actually trying to shape facts on the ground. The majority of these crises are not meant not remembered two months later. So this is the pattern of public action. Put more effort into knowledge management than crisis resolution. It’s been going like this for two decades. What do we need to do to change that? Is it just an inevitable feature of democracy caught in the grip of the news cycle or is it possible to incentivize and focus on action instead of spin?

That’s a very deep question. I’m very curious to hear what you guys have to say about that.

Matt Parlmer: Tanner, when that book comes out, I will absolutely preorder it. In fact I’d like to read a preprint if you’d be willing to share. That sounds absolutely amazing.

I think we need a greater degree of independence for essential institutions. The Fed can go and act rapidly and without having to ask anybody. And that has been what has kept us from having a complete and total financial system collapse as opposed to a 75%—

Wolf Tivy: Partial—

Matt Parlmer: Partial financial system collapse, right? But you need ideological unconstrained, ideologically low voltage, expert institutions that can do things effectively quickly and impactfully. And when you don’t have that you get what we have right now. You can think back to, for example, what the British Foreign Office was able to do back in the 1800s, without ever having to go check in with Parliament.

They were able to conduct Britain’s foreign policy almost as a peer to Parliament, rather than as a subject institution, even though Parliament could ultimately just take the funding from them. So I think a greater degree of institutional independence is how we avoid that trap, but I don’t think that’s going to happen under the under American political regime. I don’t think that’s going to happen at all.

William Eden: It sounds like the answer is yes, this is an inevitable feature of a democracy, and therefore we need less democracy, this sounds kind of like the answer.

Wolf Tivy: To put some nuance on that, we recently published a review of the book 10% Less Democracy on Palladium. And the idea there is that we don’t necessarily just have to write-off democracy, we can just look at the successes of institutions like the Federal Reserve and say, well, maybe we just need more of that kind of thing. What are the areas where people are getting too caught up in this narrative management stuff, and free those institutions from those pressures. It doesn’t have to be something radical, though perhaps radical things are called for, but you can imagine this just 10% less democracy version of that.

Matt Parlmer: I think a system of government changes are called for at this point, but that’s another thing.

William Eden: It’s interesting to use the Fed as an example because what actually makes the Fed work? Why can it be independent? And it seems like there’s this one feature that folks have decided gets to be handled by someone else. I mean, there’s a lot of unaccountable bureaucracy in the Executive Branch in general. We don’t seem to treat it as independent. We don’t seem to treat it as ruled by technocrats either, but what’s the difference between the Fed and the entire rest of the government?

Wolf Tivy: That’s a very important question. I don’t know the answer.

William Eden: Why is the Fed different than the CDC?

Matt Parlmer: Well, the Fed has a very important set of customers, the banking system. And I think that part of why they’re able to move independently. Now, should it necessarily be that way? Should we have that sort of monetary system? That’s a point for debate. But you could do a lot less a lot worse than the setup that we presently have for the monetary system.

William Eden: Yeah, I mean, something like having a CDC that was as independent as the Fed, but had the ability to shut down the entire US economy in order to stop a virus, I sort of have a hard time imagining that we would do that.

Matt Parlmer: Right, but they don’t necessarily need to have the authority to shut down the economy if they do have the authority to, for example, institute temperature checks on flights without having to go through Homeland Security.

They could conceivably have the ability to go and essentially commandeer parts of the federal infrastructure in the public interest during emergencies. And I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to have. There’s plenty of precedent. There’s this great book called Contagion. It’s an academic work on the spread of trade and disease from the Plague of Justinian onward. It talks a lot about how Italian city states, during times of epidemic, would appoint some independent counsel of usually a couple merchants and whatever past for doctors: usually a priest or two. And they would go take over the import-export policies of the port of Genoa, or whatever, and start putting people in the lazaretto for fourteen days so that they can see if they had buboes popping up all over their body—that sort of thing. I think it’s clear that that sort of institution is required in this specific instance in addition to the perimeter defense stuff that we have.

Wolf Tivy: Let’s move on to another question. Byrne Hobart asks if we do tests and traces, is that something that will be done by the private sector or the public sector? And does this kill HIPAA?

William Eden: It should kill HIPAA, but it probably won’t, is the sad thing. Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I mean, testing absolutely can be done by the private sector. Tracing is an interesting question. There’s this very real question going on right now around who do we trust with our data because cell phone tracking has been one of the major things that every East Asian country that has successfully contained this has used. They know where every single person is because we have one of these [holds up a smartphone] on hand at all times. That does contact racing for you. This can be a fully automated system right like Palantir could just solve this problem tomorrow, right?

Wolf Tivy: Right, given the data.

William Eden: Given the data indeed. We’re already having this whole preexisting debate around the role of privacy and tech companies. I’m a little bit worried that just because of the political implications, the private sector is not going to want to do it. And for a lot of reasons, I think the public sector isn’t necessarily going to be able to swallow that and people just go along with it.

Wolf Tivy: Even if you could swallow it and had the mandate to do it, just negotiating the transfer of data between agencies. Who actually has the data, right, who has access to that surveillance data and I guess police can subpoena it?

William Eden: We know the NSA has access to a lot of data. Or at least it did.

Matt Parlmer: For “foreign entities only.”

Wolf Tivy: But do they have channels of information sharing with the rest of the government?

Matt Parlmer: They shouldn’t.

Wolf Tivy: Right, but there’s a lot of institutional barriers there that aren’t just will, I think.

Matt Parlmer: I’m terrified of the security state implications of this. I think that they’re going to use this as a power grab, and I think they’re going to get away with it.

Wolf Tivy: Yes, as one does.

Matt Parlmer: As, as I said earlier, you have messages disappearing on Twitter right now as if we’re working on Western Weibo, and I think that’s an indicator of things to come, and I think it’s completely unnecessary to go do that. You can go look at Hong Kong where trust in government is basically zero and they were able to stop this completely with a bottom up implementation of everybody just going and wearing masks. You really don’t need to get a whole lot more complicated than people just practicing good sanitation.

Wolf Tivy: Good luck getting Americans to do anything sort of public spirited.

Matt Parlmer: Or coordinated. Well, it doesn’t even need to be public spirited, it can be panic or self-preservation driven. I think it’s incredibly naive to suggest that we need to knock down firewalls that we have against the security state extending its power to implement only one version of a workable solution to something like this. I think the people who suggest a massive deployment of the security state to fix this are clueless, and do not realize how many guns there are in this country.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, so more and more restrained statement of what you’re saying is that there are—

Matt Parlmer: I don’t do restrained statements. (Laughs.)

Wolf Tivy: Yeah. Okay. Yes, but this is a responsible publication that we have to do very restrained students of all these things.

Matt Parlmer: Of course, of course.

Wolf Tivy: Just to rephrase, it’s that there are important barriers within the government and discipline about how we use the powers that we have that ought to be maintained. And related to what you’re saying is that some of these things, especially around the role of the security state domestically, those barriers and those sort of limitations and how we use the power may be more important than the expediency of the moment.

Matt Parlmer: Absolutely.

Wolf Tivy: We should be keeping a vigilance on the larger question of disciplined government, not just the immediate need and like you said there are many other ways to solve this, though. Yeah, I’m not necessarily sort of taking one side or the other. I’m just trying to rephrase, how I understand what you’re saying.

Matt Parlmer: That’s a good representation of it.

William Eden: Yeah. I guess I wonder, is there any way by which we can plausibly expect the government to hand this power back after they use it? Is there any way to shape or form any institution, any structure, we could set up that could actually guarantee that it’s just this once?

Matt Parlmer: No.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, that’s the thing, right? It’s very difficult once you get a ball rolling to stop the ball from rolling. Once you have a bureaucracy that’s job is to go and surveil people for public health issues, then it’s going to find ways to continue operating.

And so that’s why I think it sort of discipline is and foresight is especially warranted in these things. Whenever you’re spinning up some new piece of machinery, you have to be careful. Is this something we actually want to be sticking around? And in many cases, you want to think very hard, the way we do—or at least we ought to—about laws and precedents.

William Eden: I do still wonder if there’s a purely private solution to the tracing problem that does rely on basically mass voluntary opt-in, and very selective reveal of necessary data, sort of, if and only if you’ve been exposed.

Wolf Tivy: Isn’t that the way Korea or Singapore did it? I thought I saw something to that effect that someone had actually done this voluntary thing where everyone downloads an app, the app keeps track of where you are. And I think somehow they notify you if you’ve been in contact with someone, and then it allows you to then upload your data. And so, it’s there in a way where the data is not being centrally collected, but is being submitted in a decentralized way that keeps it from being a central database of general purpose where everyone has been. I’m not sure whether that actually happened. But I thought I saw something to that effect.

William Eden: Yeah, I should probably look into the implementation details a little bit closer, but I didn’t think there were any that were voluntary, universal, and private. I could be wrong.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, I’m not sure how these things work. It would be very good to look into that; we should definitely do that. Anirudh asks, do we think the media will face any repercussions for this? Will there be anything that’s going to change the journalism industry out of this?

William Eden: Nope.

Matt Parlmer: Nope.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, I think that’s sort of a fair—

William Eden: That was our fastest answer yet!

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, I mean their incentive structure is chaos. They love chaos. The press is absolute trash, and has been absolute trashed throughout this whole process, and probably will continue to do so. When I say that I mean particularly the press release and hot take driven political press. Vox, for example, they really showed their true colors throughout all of this. So we’ll see.

William Eden: Yeah, I don’t think there’s anyone there that’s going to forcibly hold their feet to the fire.

Matt Parlmer: Of course not. Of course not.

William Eden: So why would they change?

Matt Parlmer: There have been zero internal repercussions for the stories that they wrote earlier on that which will have body counts.

Wolf Tivy: Another question from Peter. He’s curious about the backstory: what’s going on behind the split between testing capacity and personal protective equipment availability? The testing is at least ramping up, but the personal protective equipment is still quite scarce. What are the factors in American industry that are accounting for that?

William Eden: So I know the testing story pretty well. And I know pieces of the protective equipment story, but I think Matt can probably do that one better.

Matt Parlmer: Yeah, you do testing and I’ll do PPE.

William Eden: Sure. There are lots of labs throughout the U.S. that are very, very good. They basically could have gotten a test up and running at any point. And generally, the FDA is a little bit looser with a diagnostic test. Particularly, there are categorizations that are basically tests that are sort of only used by the doctor for informational purposes. Those are generally regulated much more loosely. So there are very, very broad certifications that the FDA can give you that will allow you to basically do whatever you want in the lab—if you aren’t handing someone a drug; if it’s literally just a test.

The problem is that once the CDC declared that this was an emergency situation it activated a different pathway inside the FDA. Something called “emergency use authorization.” That meant every time someone wanted to run a test for this virus, they had to get a waiver from the FDA that allowed them to do that. And the FDA—

Wolf Tivy: What’s the justification for that?

William Eden: Supposedly what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to stop just anyone off the street from selling their “COVID-19 Test” that is obviously false right, and just selling that to make a profit at expensive folks who are scared. So what the FDA did is they gave any emergency use authorization only to the CDC, So they gave a legal monopoly only on the CDC. Then it was up to the CDC to make all the test kits that we would need. They botched it. The CDC literally messed up the test. They didn’t get the reagents right for the test. They ended up particularly trying to make a much more complicated test. It wasn’t just “yes or no: do you have COVID?” it was trying to diagnose a whole range of different diseases, not just COVID, so that you could do one test and then say, oh, well you have the flu, or this, or that, or COVID. We just needed a “yes or no: do you have COVID?” test. So it was over complicated and they blew it.

It took about a month later, but the FDA finally said, alright, we’ll give emergency use authorizations to any of those labs that we’d previously allowed to just do diagnostic testing in general. And that’s it. All they had to do was just make that one change. And it took them a month. So now everyone is scrambling trying to get the testing up and running because they weren’t legally allowed to do it. And as we mentioned, a doctor at the University of Washington was the one who illegally did the test to inform people that COVID was spreading in the community.

Wolf Tivy: And they weren’t spinning up the tests in anticipation that they might be allowed real soon?

William Eden: I mean, a few people have “for research purposes,” which is how we started to find out about community spread at all because the CDC produced zero viable tests after a few hundred. So that was just an absolute horror show, the FDA finally changed their mind, and now every lab in the country is scrambling to get it up and running now that they can. And what we’re finding is we don’t make reagents in the country. We don’t make cotton swabs.

Wolf Tivy: Oh man.

William Eden: Every lab now is fighting for supplies. There are universities sending out emails to the alumni saying , hey, if you’re a tinkerer, and you have some of these tools sitting around, can you send it to the lab right now? Just crazy scramble in this system, which, quite frankly, should have been on this two months ago.

Wolf Tivy: Hmm, interesting. Matt, how’s the personal protective equipment side?

Matt Parlmer: The question is how did we get here right? Well, there’s the macro reasons for this, and then there are the specific reasons. So back in the 70s, 80s, 90s, obviously there was tons and tons of stuff going offshore. One of the things that got offshored is basically any sort of small single-use plastic widget. That sadly involves basically all disposable personal protective equipment. Yeah. So basically, all of that got moved overseas over the years. Kimberly Clark was one of the last companies to finally make the jump and they did so because everybody was feeling cost pressures, and everybody wanted to shave a few pennies off of the masks they were using. So they moved it all overseas.

The government made the determination that since, of course, we have this great perimeter defense infrastructure, you know, “pandemics don’t happen anymore; we solved that problem.” So they cut the National Stockpile down to 50 million of them sitting around, last I checked. Almost all of those are in the process of being deployed right now. They’ll run out very shortly here. Many of them won’t even make it to hospitals.

That’s the macro reason. We don’t make things here anymore. We’re an industrially hollowed-out country that decided at a strategic level, a while back, that it was a good idea to take manufacturing of almost everything—with the exception of aerospace components, some cars, and a few other little things—we decided to move it overseas. I think that’s a big discussion that we need to have after this: do we want American robots to be doing this or do we want overseas sweatshop workers to be doing this?

Wolf Tivy: Well, we’ve got a lot of B.S. jobs that could be redeployed into manufacturing.

Matt Parlmer: Yes, we do. I couldn’t agree more.

Wolf Tivy: We’ve got a lot of human workers as well available.

Matt Parlmer: 95% of the people working in HR would be of greater social utility on a factory floor. So there’s that.

In terms of the immediate problem, basically the outbreak started in China, and as soon as the outbreak started, PRC basically using a number of different laws that they have on the books nationalized just a ton of different production capacities all over the place. One of the things they also did is they went and bought up almost the whole world’s stockpile supply of N95-grade meltblown polypropylene, which is the primary filter media that people use.

So the machinery for turning meltblown polypropylene into masks is not that complicated at all, which is why my team and I are able to address this. But the problem quickly became lack of this material and most of the fabricators for this are in China. There are some European Union or some of the United States, but the lion share is in China. What we’re dealing with right now is as an upstream scarcity in addition to the lack of manufacturing capability here in the States. Beyond that, the macro situation and the immediate material scarcity, we just didn’t have enough of these things stockpiled. There was a conscious decision to be underprepared for something that people considered to be unlikely, and here we are.

Wolf Tivy: Oh, man. Wow, that’s a fairly good answer to that question as far as what happened here and what’s the comparison between the test kits and the personal protective equipment. Chris Gillett asks, how is this particular event going to drive change? How is this particular event going to drive change? A lot of people are optimistic that it’s going to, it’s going to change things. Why will this particular event change or not change things? I think we’ve touched on some of these aspects already—some of these questions. But I think there’s more to say there. Is this going to sort of break the camel’s back on things, or is this just another blip in the news cycle? One might hope. Even if it’s a big one. There were other things that have shown serious dysfunction: Katrina, the 2016 election, before that the Iraq War. It’s been becoming obvious that there’s something seriously wrong with the system for a while. Is this going to be the different one, or is it going to be more of the same?

William Eden: Yeah, I think with each of those examples, I could sort of come up with a story in each case why it didn’t result in change. With Iraq and Afghanistan, it was mostly volunteers. And these are mostly volunteers from parts of the country that the coastal elites have no exposure to. We took on more debt to fight those wars, but we seemingly have an infinite capacity to finance our state

Wolf Tivy: Debt is just numbers and some wizardry.

William Eden: Yeah, and it’s sort of horrible to say that, but I think that’s how it is to almost everyone in the country. Similarly, with Katrina, or more recently, there was a huge hurricane that destroyed Puerto Rico, and that just a blip for Trump. I don’t know if that’s just because it’s regional or something like that. Look, we were both pretty skeptical about how much this is actually going to change things, but I think my case for it changing things is that literally 100% of the US population is caught up in this now.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, we’re all at risk.

William Eden: Things changed during 9/11. Things changed a little during the financial crisis, but not as much as they should have. So there are examples of profound change, though I think you can argue whether again that’s damage or an adaptive response.

Matt Parlmer: On the Puerto Rico point, actually, I do think it’s important to note that a lot of those people moved to Florida, and they all to-a-person think that Trump is incompetent buffoon. I think correctly. That could very easily cost him to state this year, all of the people who moved to Miami and changed their voter registration to a place where they’re no longer—despite being U.S. citizens—no longer second class citizens. So that’s going to be interesting to see.

Wolf Tivy: Basically this is in many ways a much bigger and harder to contain issue than a lot of these other things. This is going to be something that affects everybody. Certainly we’re all seeing the changes in our lives from it quite directly. Most of us haven’t had friends get sick yet. But we might get there. And then, yeah, that might have—

William Eden: I know a couple of people that are sick now.

Wolf Tivy: Okay, yeah. I’ve heard of a couple cases that fortunately turned out not to be the coronavirus. There are a few friends that had scares, but I don’t know anyone directly who’s stricken by this thing yet.

William Eden: I have one that has an actual positive test, and then a few people who think that they have it but haven’t been able to get a test and so they may never know.

Wolf Tivy: There’s definitely a lot of people who are not able to get a test.

Matt Parlmer: My dad’s going to get it.

Wolf Tivy: Right, because he’s frontline.

Matt Parlmer: He’s frontline in an ICU. Yeah, so I’m just, I’m mentally preparing myself for that. And I’m not going to lie, I’m pretty scared.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, that’s hard.

William Eden: I hear you, man.

Wolf Tivy: Peter asks another question: Will the U.S. be able to enforce a lockdown? For how long? How will democratic lockdown be narratively distinguished from Chinese lockdown? Let’s make this the last question. There’s no way we’re going to get through everything, but let’s start wrapping it up.

Matt Parlmer: There’s no chance of actually being able to enforce a lockdown in this country. That’s absurd. I mean the only thing that’s going to actually happen is you’re going to do an enormous amount of unnecessary economic damage. This is another area where the libertarians actually probably deserve a little bit of credit, the whole Hayekian like you do not understand the economy; you cannot compute the economy. That whole thing is going to become evident to a lot of people when you realize that shutting down “non-essential businesses”—

Wolf Tivy: When you realize that they actually were essential—

Matt Parlmer: Yeah. How in the world are our hospital cafeterias going to stay open when the people who sell their napkins are shut down? It is classic managerial hubris to think that we can go and actively shut down an economy without causing enormous immediate, potentially politically destabilizing, harm.

The extreme lockdowns that we’re seeing right now. The one in Chicago they’re calling it the stay at home rule, but if you actually look at the implementation of it, it’s martial law with a friendly face. And there’s no way people are going to react well to that. When the economic implications of that starts pan out, you will have riots in places. We’ve already seen the first coronavirus riots on college campuses with kids drunkenly brawling with cops. I think when the chemical factor is not being able to buy food because your grocery store shelves aren’t stocked in a week or two from now—and not a bunch of ethyl-alcohol in your bloodstream—I think, I think we’re going to start to see a lot of extreme repercussions.

William Eden: It’s probably the first time I’m going to heavily disagree with Matt. We’ve been on the same page up until this point. I think the U.S. is going to successfully implement a lockdown. I don’t think that it has to be very long. Just given what we know about this virus, even doing it for a few weeks will help enormously and a month, I think basically almost all of us can get through that. I don’t think we’re going to see serious disruptions to food supply. I totally agree, if we did, then I would expect riots, but they’ve been rolling out over the course of this last week, and San Francisco is just quieter. I don’t think it’s going to be much different in the second week than the first week, or the third week, or the fourth week.

Wolf Tivy: People will get antsy and start going outside again. When enforcement starts having to happen, that might be the thing.

William Eden: I can see that. But the order, at least here in San Francisco, and now all of California allows you to go out for a walk. You just can’t hang out with people. I predict that it’s going to be pulled off and I think it will end up being pretty damaging to the economy; just what we’re seeing on unemployment rolls. But I think the policy response to that economic dislocation will be the difference between mass unemployment and a temporary blip.

Wolf Tivy: Yeah, totally.

Matt Parlmer: The factors at play whenever anyone’s looking at this—particularly from the perspective of somebody who has a remote-work friendly tech job or whatever; I’m speaking for myself in this case—I think that there can be a tendency sometimes to underestimate the extreme precarity in which many, many American workers actually live.

I also don’t think we’re going to have a month of lockdown. I think we’re going to have several months of badly enforced lockdown that will allow viral spread to continue. So I don’t know. I think if we didn’t keep it to a one month somewhat effective lockdown, the outcome that you’re talking about would come to pass. But I really don’t think that’s going to be what we’re going to get because I haven’t seen any indication that we have institutional capability to do that well. Whether it’s delivering meals to old people who are locked inside, or whether it’s, or whether it’s having consistent enforcement of quarantine rules by our famously excellent police forces.

Wolf Tivy: This is a good issue to end on, because it’s some bold predictions there, some controversy. I guess we’ll see where it all plays out over the next few weeks. Thank you so much guys for coming on. This has been a fantastic discussion. I’ve really enjoyed your perspectives here. This was very informative and I’ve loved the conversation that our audience has been having in the chat. Thanks as well to the audience for tuning in. And thanks everyone outside for listening.

Wolf Tivy: This was great. Thanks so much, guys.

Matt Parlmer: Thanks, everybody. Adios.

William Eden: Bye.