The Breakdown - Is the COVID19 Fiscal & Monetary Response An Overreaction? Feat. Bruce Fenton

Episode Date: March 18, 2020

In his daily Coronavirus press briefing today, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo said “our main scramble now is ventilators.” The state anticipates that within 45 days, it could need 37,000 ventilators. It currently has 3000.  Bruce Fenton was one of the early crypto community canaries in the coal mine warning of the impending threat of Coronavirus. As the world has caught up to the warning, he has shifted his attention to helping coordinate an open source network that is trying to address that exact problem.  On this episode of The Breakdown, Bruce joins to discuss: Where the US is in its awareness cycle  Why bitcoiners are worried about the long-term economic ramifications of massive stimulus What a voluntarist alternative to government intervention might look like How an open source network is trying to solve the ventilator shortage  What regular people can do to contribute to the fight against Coronavirus

Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW. The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk. Welcome back to The Breakdown. It is Wednesday, March 18th, and yesterday, as we discussed on my show with Dan Tapiero, was a huge day in terms of government announcing stimulus. President Trump and Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, basically said that they wanted to go big. And that meant huge amounts of direct intervention in terms of saving businesses, as well as in terms of getting money into the hands of regular people. Now, this has had a fascinating effect of blurring previously unholy alliances when it comes to political positions.

There has been huge blowbacks in terms of the idea of bailing out companies that spent a huge amount of their cash over the last few years on corporate buyback. And for a lot of bitcoinsers, this validates a prophecy that when times got tough, we were going to turn to the government money printing machine to hopefully help. Now, there are a huge variety of perspectives on what the government should be doing and how. But on this show, I wanted to have a conversation that wasn't just about the hot takes on that, although there's plenty of that in the next coming few minutes, but also about what alternatives are. I asked Bruce Fenton to join as someone who has been both sounding the alarm on coronavirus for a while, as well as someone who is taking action through open source networks to address specific problems in the larger context.

In his non-coronal life, Bruce is the CEO of Chainstone Labs. He's the founder of the Satoshi Roundtable. But in his corona life, he is leading the ventilator subgroup of the N-Coronavirus.org organization, which is an effort of the New England Complex Systems Institute, so an open-source network of scientists and thinkers and lots of different folks from lots of different walks of life. This conversation is about a few things. First, we do discuss a volunteerist alternative to government intervention.

Second, we talk about just where in our awareness cycle we are and what we might be able to expect next. Third, though, we talk about this work around ventilators and trying to address a potential and likely shortage of ventilators that will be needed to actually address the health side of this dynamic. Bruce makes a pretty impassioned case for how open source networks can address this type of challenge. And when I ask him at the end of the interview where in his pessimist or optimist cycle he is, the optimistic side of him is that these types of open source networks might have a more privileged,

important place in the society and the economy that comes out with us. us on the other side. As usual, we've only edited this podcast very slightly, and so I hope you enjoy. All right, we are here with Bruce Fenton. Bruce, thanks so much for joining. Thanks for having me. So as we were just talking about, you know, I'm trying to kind of use the show to look at the, obviously the economic impacts of coronavirus, you know, not just in the context of Bitcoin, but more broadly as well, but also just try to keep abreast of the situation as it is moving, right? Because we're dealing with a situation or a crisis that is a health crisis, a financial markets crisis, and a real lived economic crisis all at the same time, which is

part of what makes it so challenging. And increasingly, a foreign policy crisis, I think, too. So where I wanted to start is you were one of the voices, you know, leading the crypto community earlier in saying that, hey, this is a real thing, and you should be thinking about it, you should be paying attention to it, and you should be preparing for it. How do you see, where do you think we are in general now in America in terms of that response in preparation? Well, as I sort of feared, we tend to have an overreaction a lot of times in America. I did see this coming. I saw it coming as a crisis because the way that the virus works is that it tends to overload health care systems. And there's just, and, you know, the number of deaths, the number of severe cases,

of these kind of factors made me realize pretty early on that this isn't something people are just going to let continue. There's no way people are going to have cities, you know, hospitals in their cities that are collapsing, doctors getting sick, loved ones getting sick without, you know, really demanding, you know, the kind of widespread actions that we've just seen recently. So unfortunately, I'm afraid now that the government is probably in a position where they're overreacting, and that can cause even worse problems than the virus itself. So we really want to be careful about that. But clearly everybody knows it's serious now for whatever reason, whether they're concerned

about government or concerned about the health or concerned about the economy or all of the above, like you said, you know, there's now increasing foreign policy issues and other things. So it is very serious and it's unfortunate to be sure for a lot of people. So when you say that you think now the government is overreacting, which context specifically? Well, mostly with the radical printing of new money. I kind of saw that coming. I think two weeks ago, I predicted $100 billion. And a lot of people thought I was nuts. They said, $100 billion. You know, that's crazy. That's crazy. That's crazy. That's never going to be enough.

Yeah, right around then. I said, well, I predict $100 billion in a month. I predict a trillion. in the year. Well, now we're past, we're at something like $3 trillion already. Two, two and a half. I mean, they're talking about another two and a half. Fed has said that they're going to do $500 billion in repos a day. You know, they basically already printed, you know, something like 10 times the equivalent of the total market cap of all cryptocurrencies. So it's really radical. And, you know, as I said a few times lately, bad economics don't make a problem better. You know, Bad economics don't make a problem better. It's like somebody losing their job and saying, well, all right, I lost my job. I have no choice but to go do some online poker. No, that's a bad decision. It's a bad decision before you lose your job. It's a worse decision after you lose your job.

Things like UBI and all these corporate bailouts and printing new money. It's bad economics. We need a strong dollar more than anything right now. We need it more than ever. We need strong economics. good economic policy. And I'm afraid that, you know, maybe your listeners will listen to me, but I think people will ignore me even more than when I was claiming warnings about the COVID virus crisis. I was worried about this. And, you know, some people listen to me, but I don't think

any, I don't think I have any hope of getting, you know, the real decision makers to listen to me on sound economic policy because they didn't understand economics before the crisis. And now they're scared, so they're going to be doing even worse things. So I am worried about the economics for sure. This feels in some ways inevitable. It's just kind of the end conclusion of the nature of politics right now. And it's interesting because there is total across the board consensus so much so that it's now almost a competition of who gets to claim credit for it from the political scorecard perspective. You know, like that's what I've been noticing. Yeah, we've got it.

We've got a meeting the White House and Romney supporting it with all the right along with AOC. It's crazy. Yeah. It's interesting. I mean, you know, the best hope is that there's some amount of interesting conversation, at least that arises from it that we kind of advance. But, you know, I don't think that there are most people who think that there's any, any reality other

than something like this through, especially because. of the impact on, well, I think two things. One, politicians are seeing that they feel like they have to not allow these companies to fail. And they also watched the way that 2002, 2008 bailouts created the entire kind of political context that they're operating in, you know, from Occupy Wall Street to, you know, to Trump, to you name it. And there's just, there's no way that they can. can bail out businesses without feeling like they're doing something that they can claim as a bail out of Main Street as well.

Right. Right. Exactly. And we did create this moral hazard in 2008 and other times where we said, hey, if you're in trouble, the government and come and save you. And I knew the government was going to come save. And even as a free market economist type of person who is very against these, I was never in favor of it. But in the darkest days, you know, a week ago or so, I was, you know, there was some little piece saying, you know, maybe the government, you know, could help. That's sort of the bargaining stage of grief. And, you know, fortunately for me, I understand economics, so I never actually embraced those ideas. But a lot of people just don't get the economics. So in times of fear, they, they just scream, you know, do something, do something. And, you know, the politicians right along with the companies and the citizens all think that these, you know, bailouts, you know, where do it? Did anyone ever get the idea that we should be doing a bailout, you know, to say, well, you know, Boeing's in trouble. We need to help them.

Why? Why do we need to help them? And if you do need to help them is giving them money a good idea. Why not go if you really, I mean, I still wouldn't probably support this. But if the government really wanted to help a better way to do it would be to increase purchases, just go and start buying things. And then you get the wheels of the economy. increased, but to just give money away to either companies or even individuals is just, it's just

unfortunately bad economics. So I think that there's a lot of folks who are against bailouts for corporates, but who are more open to the idea of temporary economic relief, right? Like there's a couple different problems for folks that are nervous about this. One is how is the possibility of temporary economic relief in the form of direct checks to Americans, because, permanent expectation. But the second question, I guess, is just what is, what's the right approach to, you know, potentially 20% unemployment almost overnight, if not something like that? You know, what are the counter policies that are just not being discussed because we've gone so quickly to this sort of direct intervention model? Right. Well, there's, Thomas Sowell said, you know,

who's a great economist for those who don't know him. He said there's no there's no good, something like no good solutions, there's only tradeoffs. And so there is certainly, I have no magical answer, but I do know that better economic policies would make sense. And it sounds cruel to say the government shouldn't do anything because people say, well, you know, hey, well, how do people pay their rents and so on? But giving everybody a thousand dollars actually makes everybody a thousand dollars poorer because we're taking that an aggregate from everybody else. So the, So the country is basically a thousand dollars poorer per person, and we're weakening our economy. So we're making bad economic tradeoffs and sort of a shell game to put imaginary money from here to here.

Sort of makes you feel good a little bit. And if you're on the lower end, certainly paycheck to paycheck, you know, you're working as a busboy in a restaurant. Your wages just went from 15 bucks an hour to zero. Yeah, of course, it seems like it hurts you. but we have to think longer term than that. It doesn't help you because it gives less of a chance of the restaurant becoming able to rebound. It becomes more of a chance of people trying to extend these things, you know, just very, very bad economic. So the way that economics are supposed to work, and it does sound cruel because, like I said, it's all tradeoffs.

There's no great solution. But the way that economics are supposed to work in times like this is that it trickles down and up, from the individual. So the individuals say, you know, hey, landlord, I don't know if you've seen the news, but we're in a little bit of a mess here. And I'm not able to pay my rent this month. And the landlord says, I kick you out? No, not likely.

Most landlords would say, oh, man, I know. And the building, you know, there's 80 other people in the building like you. And the building manager's on my case about it because I'm not giving him the money that we were supposed to. And then the building manager goes to the bank. says, hey, bank, you know, we're not paying our mortgage this month. And in the old days, the bank would say, all right, I got you. This is a problem. We get it. We're going to add those payments on. We're going to give you three months off. You add those payments on the end.

And everybody works it out in voluntary agreement, the landlords, the tenants, the bank, the workers. That's the way that these things work. And those are fairer ways because there's more people with skin in the game. There's more people making tradeoffs. It's more voluntary agreements. Those agreements can be one-offs rather than just blanket statements. You know, wealthy people don't need the thousand dollars. You know, I'm fortunate enough that I'm not facing an issue with my immediate rent in my house. So I wouldn't, I'm going to continue to pay my rent. I'm going to continue to pay my employees for as long as I'm able to. So that kind of socializes the risk a little bit more. You know, I'm going to my landlords. You know, I have a lot of, you know, between businesses

and stuff, I have a few different landlords I deal with. I'm going to go and say, hey, you know, I get the times are tough. I'm going to keep paying kind of thing. You know what I'm saying? It should be negotiated out by people. And that goes for work and everything else. And what government should do is really get out of the way of anybody who needs to make money doing anything. Anything that doesn't harm others or violate others' rights, we should get out of the way. So if we're telling people they can't go to work at their restaurant, we should have, you know, no rules about, you know, can they deliver food from there, you know, can they make a meal outside somebody's door and, you know, go to a large apartment and set up a table and do a food truck, whatever. Anything that people can do

to make a living, government's got to get the heck out of the way because those people need jobs. And the more people that do it who are providing goods and services that people want, that's what's going to make the economy healthy and that's what's going to rebuild us. Yeah, I would say that some of the most encouraging actions have been those restriction loosening's, you know, in terms of which restaurants can deliver and things like that. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, from a free market standpoint, you know, there's probably not a lot of silver linings to this, but one hopeful benefit that comes out of it is that they tear down some of it. And, you know, from a of the, you know, dumb laws that make it so, you know, there's just so many different things,

you know, oh, you can't deliver milk unless you have a milk license and you got to do this separate. And you know, a lot of those things are coming down. And, you know, you see some of the announcements and they're sort of almost silly. You see these regulations like, you know, here now a month into this crisis, the FDA and it's in its benevolence is finally allowing state health boards to administer tests. I mean, come on. What? The state health board isn't allowed to, wasn't allowed to deliver, you know, administer a test. That's crazy. Your local doctor should be able to give a test. In fact, your crazy cousin who's a chemist should be able to give a test, and it should be your judgment whether you trust that test or not. But to have, you know,

even state health boards and even major, you know, these are major hospitals we're talking about, huge, huge medical systems with thousands of doctors, not allowed to give tests until, you know, supposedly yesterday, but we've heard that a couple times, you know. So even the most basic and obvious kind of restrictions. When you have just piles and piles and piles of laws, it really becomes obvious now because you have lives at stake and things that, you know, all these zoning boards and you're so many things that are bottlenecks in the way that the world works. It's one thing if you're a, you know, a millionaire landlord fighting with a zoning board for six months because you want to, you know, add an extra toilet. It's another

thing entirely if you need that extra toilet because somebody is in need and they desperately need an apartment. So I think people aren't going to have much tolerance for these kind of rules. And hopefully, you know, even the citizens, you know, even the people in government generally, hopefully will kind of move towards those solutions and look for ways to help people rather than get in the way. There is a couple percent of people who are bad apples and who really want authoritarianism and they want to use this as an opportunity for that. So you really got to watch out for those people. I mean, I think this is one of the most challenging things for me with this is figuring out where in the cycle of the conversation we are and being able to try to get people

to have all the conversations at once, right, to kind of sift through their own fear and the feeling of playing catch up with their own fear to also still have a conversation about what the right kind of limits of government intervention are. Let's hold aside the any sort of monetary intervention for just a second. There is obviously a glowing global. growing global trend of using data to track citizens under the guise of kind of health results, right? I think Israel today just signed a law allowing them to do this officially. Meanwhile, you've got bills around ending encryption that are kind of, you know, this is being jammed through in Congress right now. And it's difficult to get, I mean, basically this is a classic historical

challenge, but the crisis times are when creeping authoritarian. And this is not a, you know, I am not a chicken little skies falling type. It's more just about, like, can we have the consciousness and the compartmentalization almost to have, to, to defray almost our general kind of philosophical opinions and look at the nuance of the situation and say, this is a thing we're okay with the government doing. This is not and this is a line. And we can have that conversation without it being, you know, a, about just the standard, you know, political rancor. Absolutely, absolutely. And really looking at what ideas are good ideas or bad ideas. And unfortunately, so few people, we knew this for years and years going back, very few people understand economics. They don't understand how money works, where it comes from.

They don't understand the principles or properties of money. They don't really understand economics. I mean, people don't even understand the stock market. I mean, AOC, clearly many, many, many times, as indicated, she just does not understand the stock market or how business works, pretty much any better than any of, you know, her counterparts. Why would she? She doesn't have a background in it. She never worked in it. You certainly don't learn it automatically by becoming a member of Congress.

They don't give you some briefing. I wish they, I wish I could give those briefings, you know, even 10 hours would be better than zero hours. And I'm not trying to pick on her particularly. it is a time for us to all come together. But there are just bad economic policies and people who just don't get it who are pushing for these things because they just don't know better. Their heart might be in the right place. I followed a lot of doctors and a lot of medical experts going back about six weeks

and I still continue to follow them. And a lot of them are liberal-leaning and they don't know anything about economics. So the same people who are saying, we've got to, you know, test and know what we're dealing with. We've got to do this. We've got to do this. We've got to take this virus seriously. They're now saying, we've got to do this stimulus. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute. You know, hold on. You're a doctor. You probably don't know much about this. And, you know, same thing they said about me a month ago about the virus. But, but yeah, I mean, sound economic principles make sense. And it's unfortunate people just don't know those. So I think you're going to have a lot of mania and rushing into things. You know, thinking about how, you know, how things will work. Elizabeth Warren had a multi-point memo about what she would require if companies get bailout. And for one thing, they shouldn't even be getting the bailout. But even if you did, it's a bad idea to give the bailout.

But then she adds all these restrictions, you know, you must have this minimum wage. You must do this. And managers are required by law to do this. Or they can go to jail and blah, blah, blah. that means that you're going to have a nanny state micromanaging. So you have bad decision given to generally bad businesses, because these are typically businesses who squandered their cash on buybacks. So you're taking our money in a bad economic decision,

giving it to bad businesses, and then saddling them with bad management ideas on top of that. It's just a pure recipe for failure, unfortunately. Yeah, buybacks, by the way, I are absolutely going to be this crisis too big to fail type of, you know, rally and cry. You're seeing it from everyone. I think Vortex, for those of you who follow him on crypto Twitter, retweeted AOC yesterday, and he said, you want to know how crazy a time it is?

I agree with AOC on something. And it was about buyback. So I think that's one of the interesting dimensions of this conversation that's starting to come up now as well. But, Bruce, so one of the things that you mentioned in terms of things that government can do is where it can reduce restrictions in certain ways. And that, I think, is a nice segue into the ventilator question. So you've kind of, it seems to me, transitioned from signaling the warning signs to trying to more precisely and kind of surgically go after problems that you're anticipating and that others are. anticipating coming forward. So tell me about the kind of ventilator project that has seen kind of an explosion of interest over the last 24 hours or so. Yeah, that's exactly right. I did

sort of shift, you know, a week ago or I don't know, probably just a few days. It seems like a week. You know, there's no need to call alarm anymore. And there's a lot more qualified than me people than me talking about the virus itself. I was talking about it really, really early. I put hashtag COVID-19 on my tweets because it was so rare. People were following that hashtag, a few of them in our community, Belaghi, Ryan Selkis, and a few others. But now everybody knows about it. Now that COVID-19 is not a topic anymore. It's just subtopics of the topic.

And so I'm going to probably talk about it less, although I would, for those still following the virus itself, I would exercise a lot of caution. there's now a lot more people with a vested interest in shaping a narrative. So I don't really trust data anymore. I was always skeptical of it, but you've got to be even more skeptical now because there are people using this as an opportunity to do bad things. But I did try and figure out something I could do to help, which was looking at this ventilator issue. And I simultaneously heard two things.

One is we need a lot more ventilator. and the manufacturers aren't even really up to capacity. And two, there are ways to make, you know, ventilators from, you know, you can kind of patch together solutions. There's open source ventilators. They've been used in other countries. There's a lot of doctors, even in modern hospitals where they've doubled up ventilators and there's stories of people making 3D parts and things like that.

So I said, well, hey, there's something. I don't know anything about ventilators. but I do know about open source, and I know the power of open source. And I was already in this group, New England Complex Systems Institute, which is a very decentralized, you know, it feels like a Bitcoin or an Ethereum project. It's just a whole bunch of people jumping in doing their thing, and you get some real brilliant people, and they start their own teams, and that kind of thing. So I asked the head of that what he thought about the ventilators, he says, sure, go for it. you know, typical open source kind of decentralized fashion, just, you know, go, go ahead, be a leader. And so I wrote an article about it.

And very, very quickly, we got a lot of response, which is great. It's great for me also because I really looking forward to kind of turning it over to other people, not that I want to abdicate responsibility, but it's just, I don't even know that much about ventilators. I just try and create an environment that people can, you know, I think I did have confidence enough in myself that I know enough about open source from Bitcoin and other projects that I could foster an environment that helps with that. I've been out in Bitcoin saying, you know, hey, be a leader.

You know, that famous line Gavin Andreessen said, what, probably six years ago, hey, don't wait for permission, just go do it. So I figure I could do that, and so far that's worked. And so, you know, we've got some really good team leaders and other people. There's some very experienced medical doctors and, you know, credential people who've dealt with regulatory approvals and issues like that. There's practitioners, designers, medical device people. So we've developed a pretty good group of subteams and people are able to volunteer

and help in the way that they can. We have everything from, you know, just people with a 3D printer at home. We're saying, hey, I don't know anything about ventilators, but I can print a part if you want to people saying, you know, hey, I was head FDA liaison for XYZ giant biomed company. for years. I can tell you exactly what we need on the specs. We've got just today there was doctors giving specs saying, you know, here's what you need. Here's what it needs to basically be legal and safe. And then we got lawyers working on, you know, going to FDA or other authorities in other countries. This is a global effort and saying, hey, we need emergency approval to do this.

In practice, it really is driven by the medical professionals and the doctors, you know, pretty much doctors, one of the ER docs, and this, I'm not a lawyer, and I'm not a lawyer, I'm not, this isn't legal advice, and it really depends on what country you are. But one of the ER docs said, hey, look, we're going to do what we do to save lives, and we're going to use this, we're going to use what we need to use. And I think he's mainly talking about, you know, when they 3D manufacture a part, or they jerry rig two hoses together to make it serve two people instead of one people or one person. You know, those kind of solutions are something that we're seeing right now.

and hopefully a combination of all of this. And again, a main effort pressuring the regular manufacturers, if we can help them get capacity up. And I've gone to several manufacturers. And I say, hey, you know, you've got an opportunity now here that you have activists willing to help you. Is there any regulatory issue that you want torn down? Is there, you know, some, you know, 60-day waiting period requirement

for a new factory certification, something like that, that we can get torn down? because if somebody is already a legal, compliant manufacturer or ventilators, they're the best position. They're by far the best position to say, hey, you know, I've got this factory. I can now expand the factory. Maybe there's a factory down the street that makes, you know, car hoses or car vacuums or something, and we can retool the vacuum factory to make ventilators because, you know, whatever, 50% of the equipment is the same. So those are the kind of things we're working on.

I don't know what results will have. It's certainly I'm optimistic based on the number and quality of people that have jumped into this and the publicity we've gotten so far. So maybe that's just some little piece that we can do. And there's a lot of interesting things like this that people can do on their own. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask. So basically you saw this scenario where one of the particular acute likely issues is this particular. medical part that was, you know, likely to have a shortage. And the response was kind of dealing 360 with it, right? Like, a news story blew up over the last couple days about 3D printing,

but that doesn't take into account all of the regulatory issues, all the legal issues, you know, whatever, all the patent issues, like these things that are not grinding to a halt, even if it maybe feels like they should in some way. And so, you know, your approach was this open Source Network, are there, for people who are listening and who are like, I want to be able to do more, are there other issues like that that, you know, you haven't taken up because there's not enough time or just places that they should be looking or where they should be paying attention? I think, you know, one thing I was going to do, I should probably go, I was going to do like a Q&A or an AMA or something. Just say, tell me your skills and I'll tell you how you can help.

That's something I'm pretty good at, you know, I think anybody can help. I mean, if you're an an opsec or infosec person, if you're a, you know, a pen tester, you say, well, what can a pen tester do? Yeah, I tell you what you do. Go to your local hospital because they're getting attacked right now and figure out where they're vulnerable and don't make more work because they're all overwhelmed, but you can go in there, go ahead, do a free report for your local hospital or for, you know, any of these companies or groups that are getting hammered. You know, you could, and I can make an example like that for anybody. whether your graphics design or whatever.

There's Fold app, which is, they're the ones who did the SETI research, crunching data from SETI for years and years. You could do it on your home computer. That enables you to take a GPU and crunch, I don't even know what kind, some kind of data that is apparently useful in the analysis of the virus that may help with, you know, finding data that people need. So you can go ahead and turn on your computer and run it at home on a GPU. There's some things that are tied with a coin. I'm not really sure about that. I thought about that. That was something I was thinking about a couple weeks ago.

Like, hey, maybe you make a coin that does this. But for the coin to be any good at all, you know, useful proof of work doesn't really jive with, you know, a proof of work algorithm that needs a coin to be strong. And also, you know, there's all the other issues that every alt coin has. You know, why do you need it? Is it worth anything? I thought of it more like a, you know, like a gold sticker. Like, hey, good job, you know, good job.

You know, sort of bragging rights. Like, hey, I got, I accumulated 150,000 COVID foldap coins, which showed that I really put a lot of computer power. I don't think that would have economic value. Anyway, I didn't pursue that. If somebody wants to, go for it. That would be a really, you know, I don't know if it would be a good coin at all. If I was going to write a white paper on that, I would caution that it's, it's, it's, it's, It's probably a horrible investment.

But that's not the goal. The goal is just if you can incentivize people somehow to turn on their machine when they wouldn't have, you know, great. And if somebody's real smart out there, you have a lot of smart, you know, listeners. If they can tie it to Bitcoin or something like that, even better. I don't want to get too much into letting economics ride it because it's more like this is a problem we've got to solve first. So I would encourage people just forget the coin part and just turn on your app. You don't need to have any coin affiliate. You just do this folding up, use your GPUs for free and don't get anything in return,

but what you are doing is potentially helping solve it. So there's a lot of things like that. There's every kind of equipment there's shortage of. I saw a video of a guy. He made his own mask manufacturer machine in his house. And apparently he could make like 100,000 masks in a weekend or something. He had this very fast spinning. You could probably find it.

Very fast spinning kind of makeshift sewing machine. thing and it would cut. And, you know, there's all kinds of interesting things people can do. And what I've seen with New England Complex Systems Institute, which is now over a thousand volunteers, not just on the ventilator project, but across all kinds of projects, is that, you know, we know the power of open source. A lot of real smart people jumping in and they're all very motivated. And you have quality of people that just, you know, wouldn't normally, you know, I mean, a lot of, I mean, I'm busy. I wouldn't, there's no way I would be jumping in doing free volunteer work for yet another organization. If you would have asked me a month ago, I get invited all the time to be on nice, prestigious boards and things like that.

I usually say no. But with this, I, nobody even had to ask me. I just jumped in because I said, well, I got a couple slow weeks of work right now. I don't think a lot of people are beating down the door to, you know, do our conventional services. And frankly, as a CEO, I've got to adjust for how we're evolving anyway. So, yeah, I think there's a lot that a lot of people can do. So, Bruce, one last question for you, I guess, that's a little bit zoom out. Where in the pessimism optimism cycle are you now today as we're recording this? Hmm. Tough to say. A little of both, you know, I want to be positive but also realistic. You know, the realistic part is that we are in a real unprecedented economic mess. And the stoppage is going to cause things to grind to a halt, which may be hard to restart.

Airlines, tourism, restaurants, you know, as you mentioned, these are 20% of our jobs. And that's a big, big deal. And a lot of people, I think, are going to have a root awakening to how the economy actually works. We need everybody. We need the people working as waiters and waitresses because everything is helped by this overall economic movement. So I'm very concerned about that, and that is very, you know, that creates a lot of pessimism. And I don't think the market's even reflected it yet. And I think that the bad decisions by ours and other governments to print new money is going to be economically disastrous.

Maybe to the point where it's so bad, it doesn't, you know, kind of everything suffers. You know, there's some argument you say, oh, this could be good for Bitcoin. Yeah, sort of. I hope so. I actually bought some more Bitcoin today, but when it's real, real, real bad, it's not good for anybody. I mean, nobody wants to be a Bitcoin holder if half their city is out of work. I mean, look what happened to Detroit. You know, when things implode, it's bad.

On the positive side, you know, hopefully the, you know, people have sort of overreacted. And you say, wow, there's this panic. It's bad. But these things do pass. The Spanish flu passed. There's been quarantines of, you know, mass quarantines of people many times in history. I use the example of the Blitz in World War II where, you know, two million people in London lost their homes or in the UK lost their homes. 40,000 died and I think 40 to 100,000 were injured.

You know, you had these 9-11 scale bombings again and again and again. So people get through stuff. And typically when a war is over or a major crisis is over, the economy just booms. So we could be in for a great decade. We could be in for a great decade, a great decade where old broken systems and weak ideas and companies and economic plans and politicians are irrelevant and a new breed of smarter, more logical people and policies take place. Businesses go back to the good old basics of providing good,

and services that people want, and maybe new paradigms and new systems in Bitcoin and health care and decentralization and these kind of things, you know, do well. That's my optimistic hope. Humans are strong. Humans are hard to kill. I try and listen to everything, even conspiracy theorists who think the whole thing's fake. I think it's wise to listen to everybody because you want to have good data and there are people who will lie. And it does look to a conspiracy There's he there's, this looks a lot like a big giant sigh off. I don't think so because for the simple reason that even if it was, whoever created it, wouldn't be able to control it. Nobody can control or predict something this complex. So if it was some sinister plot, it would be kind of the equivalent of like, hey, I'm going to burn down my whole block because I want to burn one set of papers in one person's office. It wouldn't be a good plan. So in any event, I don't think, you know, again, I don't think that somebody created this or this was intentional. I think a lot of the fuel behind it is people with bad motivations.

But either way, it's out of their hands now. It's a big complex thing, and it's in the world's hands. And the world, I think, may make a lot of mistakes, but generally we're going to gravitate towards what's true. We're going to find the truth in an age of Internet, even if there's censorship or stuff. We're going to figure out what's true. And we're going to figure out solutions to whatever it is. and then human ingenuity and good old-fashioned economic principles are going to come to the forefront. So, you know, hopefully the bad period that we're in isn't as bad as a lot of people are talking about.

People are already kind of saying, you know, a year. You know, hopefully we can keep this much shorter and get good diagnostics, you know, and keep this to a short period and then come out of this much, much stronger than ever. That's my hope. It's a hope I share. Well, thank you, Bruce, so much for taking a little time today. I know everyone who's listening appreciates it, and we'll keep checking in with you as things progress. Thank you. And thanks for all you do. We've talked a lot about the Bitcoin price response to the coronavirus crisis.

We've discussed it as recently as yesterday in the context of what this new era of helicopter money might mean for a non-debasable asset like Bitcoin. We talked about it last week with Preston Pish around the idea of, of a coming bond crisis and a currency crisis that might ensue. What we haven't talked about as much is the idea of a shift from centralized to decentralized systems more broadly. Times of crisis tend to lead to consolidation of power at the center. Yet at the same time, as we're seeing in America, the response has to be inherently decentralized and a cooperation between central actors and decentralized actors to make this work.

The massive campaigns to get people to take individual voluntary action to support the health outcomes not just of themselves, but of those around them, is great example of this. I don't know how this ends, but I do know that flexing and growing and developing this open source model and muscle feels important and relevant for the times that we'll face even once we've conquered the coronavirus or gotten it under control. So I hope you enjoyed this episode, guys. we will be back not tomorrow. Tomorrow we're off, but we'll be back on Friday for another episode of The Breakdown. Until then, peace.