Justin Wolfers

Boy, you give a bloke 30 under 30 and all of a sudden he thinks he can walk on water.

But it's actually a really interesting point because if that point is correct, it says the amount of mental illness among world leaders is likely exorbitantly high.

Right.

That in turn changes how we ought to think about institutions.

It says that we basically need to design our political institutions so they're lunatic proof.

Yeah.

And in some sense, you go back and you read like, you know, the Federalist Papers, you get a sense of this.

They would often talk about good versus evil instead, but I think actually just batshit versus not.

Yeah.

And maybe, you know, after Nixon, we had a whole cleansing of like, how do we corruption proof the US government?

And I wonder whether people all around the world ought to be thinking about how do we mental health proof our governments.

And, you know, we are meant to have checks and balances.

And our biggest problem right now, of course, is Mike Johnson, which is we do have checks and balances.

They just refuse to play.

And they refuse to play because the guy with potentially the mental health problem is also the most charismatic figure in the country.

And maybe that's what a mental health problem allows you to do.

Anyway, that was more about politics than markets.

Let's come back to markets.

I think the threat here is utterly dire.

What I haven't had a chance to do today is if I wanted to make the case that it was what I said, a small probability of a horrible outcome rather than it being a moderately large probability of a moderately bad outcome, which I think is what you were suggesting.