The roots of this episode date back to 1986…
When I (Alper) was doing middle school exam prep during weekend school, I recall this guy who sat in front. He listened to the teacher intently, took notes carefully, and followed every conversation diligently. I turned to my neighbor and told him my prediction: “This guy is going places.”
I took a slightly different approach. I sat in the back. I was following the class too, I wanted to succeed after all, but I was mostly quiet. If he wanted to answer every teacher’s question, fine, but I didn’t need that to learn. I was listening and digesting the material in my own way.
Our styles were different but our results were comparable. We consistently aced the exams and carried that momentum over to the big national exam, the only one that mattered. We aced that too. Coincidentally, we ended up at the same school and in the same classroom from 6th through the 12th grade.
The pattern continued. He sat in front and was very active. I was in the back, quiet. He was a good student, I was ok. We became very good friends. Later, when it was time for another national exam, this time for college, I turned on the jets and so did he. We often studied together and shared ideas. We both ended up doing well on that too and ended up at the same college.
Post graduation, geography often separated us, but we kept in touch. He is currently in the field of finance in Europe, and as predicted, has done well. We over here are busy with Lexicon Labs and our roots are also in finance. When he heard more about what we are doing, his first reaction was that this is a good academic discussion, and philosophically very satisfying. But does it matter?
That brought me to a realization. Perhaps to an outsider, our mission feels like meddling with semantics. However, once you are in the trenches, it’s anything but. If a private company’s valuation could be de minimis under one interpretation of the law and tens of billions under another, that doesn’t strike us as semantics. If a new “asset class” can reach a $3 trillion market cap, sitting on a single word, that’s not academic. That’s real people parting with real money.
It’s difficult to appreciate the staggering scale of capital tied to contested definitions. Perhaps it’s not obvious that the linguistic ambiguity isn’t just semantics, it’s the foundation of trillion‑dollar markets and the source of systemic risks that ripple across the economy. One thing is clear: The lack of clarity isn’t incidental — it’s the business model. Ambiguity itself has become the market opportunity.
In this week’s episode, Lex and Bianca tackle the chaos at the intersection of finance, crypto, and sports gambling — and argue it isn’t random at all. From there, they unpack four outcomes of this definitional vacuum:
Transfer of wealth from the uninformed to those who exploit the loopholes;
Innovation suffers;
Competition breaks down; and
Democracy corrodes.
So, yes, my friend is not incorrect: We do have a philosophy. It is simple, but profound: Words make worlds.
At the same time, describing our work as just philosophical would be grossly inaccurate. The worlds these words make are worth more than a trillion dollars.
