Oz Veloshian

You can only speak to the present.

You can't speak to the future.

And it's interesting, you said the knock on wood, like that's the whole optimist pessimist problem, right?

In that, if you say we haven't done it yet, the realist or skeptical response is to say, well, yeah, but the reality is all we can do is say what we know.

Sure.

Because we don't know.

And you're right, maybe not.

Maybe none of you will be listening to this because we'll all be dead.

Let's just stipulate that that is a possibility.

I think that that's the rub of these things, which is everything, the doom, the P doom, wherever you are on that scale, every point along that scale is right.

What I mean is every point along that scale is justifiable by some future speculation.

But how you assess future probabilities, you look at the past,

You look at who's saying what, you try to parse it, and then you're left with the temperament issue that we talked about at the beginning, which is which story and tone resonates most for you.

I know that's really unsatisfying.

Like, we want to know, is this going to kill us?

Is this not?

Is this the end of days or is it not?

And I feel like having a certain humbleness about the inherent uncertainty of future outcomes, I take solace in.

Of course, other people, that's really unsettling.

But you've written recently in the Washington Post that focusing on negative possibilities rather than probabilities is actually harmful.