Tuesday night, November 19, Columbia University panel on Burning Man, Technology, Religion and the Future:

“I once asked a group of Wall Street types: if you had to give up one thing, all your assets or all your friends, which one would you choose? And they all said they would give up their assets, because, they realized, they could rebuild their assets with the help of their friends, but not vice versa. So then I asked them, so if you think your friends are more valuable, why don’t we have a system that actually takes account of the value of our social assets, instead of spending all this time trying to assign exact values to material assets? <pause> They said they were working on that. Not very hard, it appears.”