Listening to a podcast where the expert guest is speaking in absolutes about how China - a country now producing more engineers than the west - can’t design its own chips to compete with the west so western sanctions will be successful. The importance of reading history can’t be overstated. Western experts were adamant World War I would be short since Germany would run out of gold to fund their war machine. Instead those experts broke the world. Ottoman experts were sure no army could cross the empty quarter so their guns were pointed out to sea when Lawrence and the Arab tribes rode out of the desert. The result is an empire fell, like the Romans and Persians before them to Arab tribes and the world has been stuck with House of Saud exporting oil and Wahhabism since. British experts were sure Singapore was an impregnable fortress in World War II. Then the Japanese rode bicycles through the jungle and took the city state easily. The result was the US eventually saving Britain - for the low price of her global empire. She went bankrupt a couple decades later and the once proud maritime empire the sun never set on now can’t deploy without holding onto the US’s pocket like a prison bitch. I’m to the point when I hear someone talking in absolutes on a podcast like they have any idea what will happen in the future I think about the bankers who sent millions of men to their deaths in no man’s lands, the Japanese riding bicycles through the jungle, and Arabs riding out of the empty quarter. The future is unknowable to all of us and experts won’t be the ones paying the price when they are inevitably wrong. I’m to the point anyone speaking in absolutes, I just think he is managing career risk, not real risks like I am. The two are not the same and if I confuse them then I’ll pay the price. Managing for real risks means accepting I have no idea what will happen in the future so I need to be disciplined and have patience. Manage risks for multiple outcomes with building concentric rings of security around my lifestyle. Can’t ever forget arrogance kills and while the future being unknowable is scary, listening to experts is the siren song and I’ll crash on the rocks. I can’t ever forget there are always people willing to do what we think is crazy or impossible to fuck our world up. Thinking a country producing the most engineers who has a national memory of a century of shame at the hands of western powers is going to say ok you win strikes me as arrogant. Similar to thinking governments wouldn’t do capital controls and issue debt to keep dudes slotting each other in no man’s lands when the gold was gone or thinking dudes aren’t willing to ride a camel through a desert or a bicycle through a jungle. We listen to experts and ignore the improbable at our own peril.