How Covid-19's Second Order Effects Could Make Humanity Stronger, feat. Emerson Spartz

The Breakdown

Blockworks

Investing, Business

4.8 • 806 Ratings

🗓️ 6 April 2020

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Second order effects are things that happen as unexpected outcomes of something else happening. These effects can create surprising causal chains. Take this for example: A pandemic makes everyone need to work from home leads to an increase in video calling leads to Walmart reporting that people are buying more shirts, but not pants. Emerson Spartz is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on virality and the internet. He founded Mugglenet - the world’s biggest Harry Potter fan site - as a middle school drop out, and would later found and raise tens of millions for Dose. In the past weeks, Emerson started an open crowdsourced document on the Coronavirus’ second order effects that has, itself, gone viral, especially among venture capitals and other investor circles trying to understand what the world looks like on the other side of this. Emerson brings a surprisingly optimistic perspective on where this could lead a generation of people who are now more fully plugged in to the internet than ever before.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Breakdown, an everyday analysis breaking down the most important stories in Bitcoin, crypto, and beyond, with your host, NLW.
0:14.0	The Breakdown is distributed by CoinDesk.
0:20.0	Welcome back to the breakdown.
0:22.5	It is Monday, April 6th, and today we have something a little bit different that I'm
0:27.3	really excited about.
0:28.1	It has obviously been a tremendously trying time for the last few months as the real
0:34.0	implications of coronavirus and the economic shutdown became clear. This is something that I
0:39.4	think will leave permanent changes to big parts of our economy, our psyches, or society as a whole.
0:46.6	And so today I have a guest who's basically been obsessively thinking about what all those
0:52.6	implications are.
0:54.2	So it started with him just trying to think about the second-order effects of the coronavirus crisis.
1:00.7	Take, for example, people buying shirts but not pants because they're on Zoom calls.
1:05.5	It's a second-order effect, or actually a third-order effect after being on Zoom calls because they have to work from home.
1:10.5	This is something that Walmart is actually seeing.
1:12.9	Sales of shirts are up, but not pants.
1:15.3	So my guest, Emerson Sparts, started a document on Google, got a friend involved,
1:20.1	and they got a whole much more people involved,
1:21.7	and now thousands and thousands of people are contributing to this document around
1:25.2	second order effects of this corona crisis that is
1:28.7	across dimensions of family, business, and so much more.
1:32.8	Emerson shares a little bit about his background at the beginning of our conversation,
1:36.5	but he is a true, true multi-hyphenate, and someone who is just obsessed basically with
	...

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