Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Totally. A couple of other squintable, the value creation exists. It’s easy to knock that all these smart people are going into finance, and you wish they were doing something more productive for the world. At the end of the day, humans are going to do what they’re incented to do, absent a larger global concern that is incredibly motivating to people. You look at World War II, people’s level of patriotism and wanting to go save the world from evil was a huge, unbelievable motivating factor to move mountains. When that is absent or when people feel that there’s some existential thing that is absent, they’re going to go do what’s best for them and their family. If they’re an empire builder, go build empires. If they’re fierce capitalists, go make a bunch of money. The system is set up the way that it is. You can be mad about that. Given that, okay, people are going to go engage in quantitative finance as a lucrative profession. Fortunately, there’s a bunch of valuable stuff that comes out of that. I think that is often missed is that these really lucrative professions and businesses can often produce R&D that becomes valuable elsewhere. For example, we just did this big NVIDIA series. What do you think Mellanox was used for before large language models? This is such a really mind-blowing point here in value creation, value capture. Go for it, take it away.…

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