# Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic risks to civilization and responses (2010.) (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [250], part 1 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2010-09-27 (his archive.org deposit filename Through the Looking Glass  Greenhouse Ireland  27Sep2010.mp4; confirmed by Vinay 2026-11-10), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Foundational Ireland / FEASTA talk: coordination (unity of effort without command), SCIM / Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps, Gold State in a Box, and city-state survivalism as responses to systemic and VUCA risk.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - SCIM / INAM (2009): Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps: 18 human needs across 7 scales, from the individual to the world.
  - Through the Looking Glass (2010): Talk for FEASTA in Ireland on systemic risk: government is the wrong place to manage big risks, so...
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with...
  - The Living City (2009): A Buttered Side Down talk to the engineering firm Arup, with Mike Bennett: how cities learned to beat... (suggested by machine)
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015).
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Ideas developed here: State in a Box
- Topics: Open government & anti-corruption (15%); Climate politics & democracy (15%); disaster / refugee / food (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: unity of effort (4 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); interdependencies (4 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 3 undated); Transition Towns (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); city state (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); VUCA (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Ireland (4 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Marcin Jakubowski (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); function of government (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); agro-industrial (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Hurricane Katrina (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): resource control; international recognition; shared map; shared plan; VUCA; effective organizations; failure to govern; Hurricane Katrina; systemic risk; Transition Towns
- Importance: core-text score 0.85 (1.00 is the top), number 8 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [366] ["Through the Looking Glass" - Vinay Gupta - Ireland... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/366.md): Item 250 is the full Ireland, September 2010 Through the Looking Glass talk; item 366 is the workshop announcement video
  - [849] Through the Looking Glass (slides) (2010): Item 250 is the full talk; item 849 is the Through the Looking Glass slides
- On the same works, just before: [74] [“Complex systems behave unpredictably” – Gupta’s law of... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/74.md); [366] ["Through the Looking Glass" - Vinay Gupta - Ireland... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/366.md); [849] Through the Looking Glass (slides) (2010)
- On the same works, just after: [365] [social media and local resilience (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/365.md); [11] [RCDS cyber (Tibbs) (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/11.md); [99] [User:Vinay Gupta/Gupta State Failure Management Archive (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/99.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic risks to civilization and responses (2010.), video, 2010-09-27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [250], https://guptaoption.com/texts/250.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=0s) [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so what we're gonna be covering is what we'd call the hard ground this is the stuff which typically you hear about in the context of other people's problems and one of the big fears we have is it's gonna go for being other people's problems being our problem I want to say a piece of context here which is one-third of the people who die every year all human beings die of poverty so every year 20 million people die of lack of food lack of water or lack of access to medical care and smoky cooking fires and this kind of stuff and that is a real issue right and that is a proper big scale problem which has been ongoing at one level severity or another for your entire life you can ask you has it affected any of you personally have you I mean is any meteor devoting 20% of their time or their money to fix him poverty in the developing world okay one two okay very good right believe me I do believe that cuts is intergenerational change is how we really fix some of this stuff right but the point I'm making is large-scale suffering misery and death have been with you your entire lives in places that were not sufficiently close to you for you to take action on the idea that your lives might be about to get abruptly harder simply means welcome to the real world where all of us what a social collapse means living in the same condition as the people who grow your coffee so the first thing is it's time to sober up and get real about the Peak Oil narrative where we go from 80% of humans being too proved by energy to 95 percent of humans being too poor to buy energy it's not the end of the world its rejoining the rest of the human race and much as we may think that we have severe poverty in the West it's our joke you don't know anybody who's died being poor in all probability but that is the common faith a third of humanity so the

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=150s) framework that we are in is unusual for this debate and as much it is it as a glow framework that does not privilege the Western experience there's a region of India called Kerala where people live on a dollar a day that average income is one dollar a day about a 70th of the US and probably about a fortieth of Ireland's average income right how long do reckon those people live 50s 60s 78 average life expectancy is 78 or 76 what Sura see you might think 30% no 95 percent on a dollar a day so what you think of as poverty is not just an absence of money it's also crappy social organization which leaves you in misery where you could have plenty because everybody in the world making the dollar a day if their societies worked for poor we could live almost as long as Europeans do if they fold the caramel model so I wanted to frame the kind of terrain we're in because it's a very different perspective on these issues from the one which is more common on all those what a lot of what I'm gonna say is superficially similar to the general collapse narrative I want to make sure that you understand that it's embedded in a global perception okay so we will begin if this will behave sorry that so first thing every few slides they'll be one of these when you see one of those if you have a question just shout out right we'll take a couple of short questions just for clarification on that section and then move on to the next bit please don't leave all of your questions for an enormous pile at the end okay all right so the function of government that

[4:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=257s) we rely on most is government's ability to manage risk it does the kind of stuff about national security of a disease about sanitation that reduces your risk of dying in daft ways to practically nil except when you have things like large scale Wars the problem that we're facing is the government's ability to manage risk has started to fail in critical areas on environment made both Kyoto and Copenhagen where all the world's governments led by the big democracies got together and completely failed to figure out how not to burn the world to pieces this is a failure in governance we needed them to get together make an agreement enforce the agreement and sort a problem in the same way they did for the ozone hole right CFCs remember the ozone hole they actually got on top of that one and they fixed it on environment in terms of land use and specifically in terms of carbon dioxide emissions they've totally failed to get on top of that and the consequences could be diabolical and the economy is a similarly risky proposition you've got banks all over the world endangering the lifestyles entire continents and the governments are failing to regulate in a way that gets on top of the problem and and the final category is this thing extraordinary risks which is stuff like pandemic flu or asteroid strikes where a relatively small amounts of money are required for specialized teams to go in and with map the problem and the government's are just not funding a lot of them the asteroid guys last time I checked needed 30 million to conduct a scan that would give us 30 years warning of an incoming asteroid strike and they couldn't raise the money and this is the basic reason why so every you know four years you get to vote and you're gonna vote for less or more and then another few years pops you get to vote for less or more and people consistently on average which is all that matters in a democracy vote for more and more and more and more and by the time you get to the cliff edge you don't have the choice of voting for Wes anymore because you're already committed to the hi burn path see every time we vote for a government we're picking who has controlled the national credit card and they offer us toys and we say yes what would you like for your birthday more or less well we'd like more you realize that you're gonna have to pay that off later don't you yeah absolutely just give me the scale n tracks and this is what we do a national scale every four years right the short-term biases

[6:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=407s) and the populist bias is embedded in democracy make it extraordinarily hard for us to say no to short-term gain human nature combined with our short short terms the service produced this kind of effect there is an alternative and I don't think we want to be down

[7:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=424s) this path do we echo Stalinism echo Maoism do we think that that's an acceptable approach let's try and find something else so if government is the wrong place to manage big risks we're gonna have to examine where you might do it that is not government reason that's the premise we're gonna proceed from because we have to go beyond the current system which doesn't work and right now electoral democracy is not changing the risk management behavior of states nearly as fast as the risks of movement if you think about the kind of massive financial collapse scenarios if you even think about I mean how did you wind up with a million extra bedrooms in Ireland those houses were built a brick at a time right nobody said whoa hang on this is insane maybe they did that certainly nobody listened to them so given that it is not functioning either the nation state level or the global level we have to go beyond the current law yeah you look like you had a question yes ah yes democratically-elected matriarchal market communism if anybody can even translate what that means in conventional terms please well yeah but it's funny I mean it's a very peculiar political system I mean they're democratically elected so we're still inside of a democratic rather than an authoritarian paradigm but they're communist but they're not centralized communists they're at the market communist and it's what surprises me is there just aren't very many good books that describe how Kerala does what it does and most of the developing world countries you would think would have an embassy there trying to copy the model and almost nobody does so Kerala I mean just if you need like a serious injection of hope for the future of the human race there a point six environmental footprint they live in a dollar a day they've got massively effective health care education and long lifespan it's potentially a global solution where you can do the sums on a spreadsheet and think the whole human race could live this way in life would be alright so we are not hopeless it just means a lot of bicycles so I'm gonna press on so this

[9:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=553s) is the core premise if the government isn't gonna do it it's going to come back to us and the question is what could we build instead of the state to do this job right or not even necessarily as a replacement but alongside all because the state is something that was constituent continent theoretically constituted from our individual wells so the idea that we might constitute other bodies to take care of this stuff is not unreasonable in any way shape or form this is a model this is a way that people try and manage a wide range of risks without relying on the state or just about anything else green wizards you know the arch druids thing john michael greer so individuals who learn how to build whole range basic utilities who then put those utilities and the knowledge to build them at the disposal of their neighbors no crisis transition towns how many of your heavy transitioned folks right listen would expect it interesting right transitions basically communal wises the management of supply chains for things like food and essential services in a way that could potentially be effective a quite a large scale and crunch dark moon is due golden pole Kingsnorth Show and what they're doing is finding the space to be able to turn in the ship you know to be able to say we know this works here because we used to do it this way 300 years ago 250 years to stop us it's very interesting and it's this thing of a weakening possibilities that are currently off the edge of the map but we know they work for people like us just a lot further in the past sometimes the future so the first question is how do we compare these things because if we're going to build new risk management capability we need some framework for evaluating systems for handling risk right we've got to be able to compare one thing to another tune over to borrow resources yes absolutely yes absolutely and so we're gonna get to this question of how do you identify the problem in about 15 swipes hang on in there now I have to hurry to

[11:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=686s) them so some people focus on the threat we are getting to there so threat focus groups CND remember campaign for nuclear disarmament or what the green groups are focused specifically on climate and the people who are against Monsanto all these folks are focusing on different threats which they're attempting to clobber so they don't actually happen the problem is very few of these groups actually succeed in fixing the threat that they're working against generally speaking you know the dolphins are still being pulled out of the sea and the wheels are still being culled we'll get to it there is another green thing coming up in a minute so other groups oh and I will say for these threat focus groups some of them do succeed right the SIA the groups that were fighting against the ozone hole one they actually convinced society it was necessary and then they got it sorted splendid more of them lots more fun so reaction focus groups this is the other these are the people who come along after something goes completely Pete Tong and attempt to repair it this is all the people who swarmed into Haiti the red cross and bits of the UN and you know what's the local group combed it's again trucker concerned I was thinking of a Haven right Haven is going out to Haiti to build houses in October and I'm trying to get them to build Heckscher - we got ranked Oh baby so all of this kind of response focus the stuff is just swarming around the problem trying to make sure that the damage done is repaired as quickly as possible or mitigated and that stuff is important and useful but also inherently limited in that by the time you have those kind of problems often it is a little late so this isn't way of thinking about this stuff right so first problem detecting the risk you mentioned that second thing is if you can avoid it all right so some of these risks we identified this risk of associated the ozone hole we avoided the risk by ceasing to pump out they ozone destroying chemicals so we didn't need to mitigate it or recover from it we just got on top a very large degree mitigation so you live in an area that floods you change the way that your house operates so that the flood water can be three feet high before it does you any damage and it floods and you know never gets over your three feet so you're fine perfectly mitigated risk or perfectly avoided risk means you have success finally recovery you didn't manage to avoid you didn't manage to mitigate now you have to pick up the pieces and try and restore function so general model for risk threat focus groups focus on one and two reaction focused on three and four so to

[13:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=836s) answer your question basically some groups will be trying to raise public awareness to get people to act and to avoid the problem and that is an effort in and of itself and then you've got other groups which are running around trying to mitigate and we'll get into that more normal minute questions okay so here's your big problem all of these

[14:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=857s) groups are attempting to get on top of this kind of problem are functioning in the context of the state so the state is providing a whole range of infrastructure to you that you then build a charity on top of you know transitions consumes all kinds of services from the state our food consumes all kind of services from the state to attempt to change the way that the state is behaving or the way that people with power are acting so in this context management of risk outside of the context of the state is what you have to think about doing when you can no longer assume the state is going to be managing your risks so you're saying and this is the question how do you recon texture-wise risk management as a function which is in the hands of the people rather than in the hands of the state so risk sovereign default in the event the sovereign default your government just stops paying its bills and this is not remotely controversial that happens over time whether it could happen in any given place is a topic of large economic debate show of hands anyway right but within that kind of context we all know that it's something that happens in some places systemic catastrophes right this is very much your kind of terrain where something breaks and for the want of a nail right you wind up losing first the horse then the army then the entire country and then some other stuff as well entirely plausible right pandemic flu in the event where your primary risk is the failure of the state how do you mitigate the risk of the thing which is acting is the platform which you use to build risk mitigating organizations and public so you want to say if the state collapse is you suddenly don't have anything sitting around which will do things like incorporation if you can't incorporate how are you gonna build an organization to go into the top more problem in a sentence any questions yes um interestingly enough I generally think that the church is best understood a purely administrative level as the remnants of the state of 500 years ago like the actual structure the governance structures of the Catholic Church or the governance structures to church HOD when it was essentially the state or the superstay organisation you know I think that the Catholic Church from a few hundred years ago is almost better under students being the precursor to the UN than a religion both functions of course

[16:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1007s) but you know I'm saying so

[16:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1013s) we have a set of things that we are concerned about and this stuff is very real it's complex and technical and hard to ascertain exactly how serious it is and we're trying to get something done about it otherwise you wouldn't be here right I mean the idea that you're taking your Monday evenings to come and listen to somebody tell you about what you can do if the systems you're currently using keep yourself alive break completely is an indication of real public concern right I mean think about that for a minute we're in a position where the concern that the state will not function properly has become such a pressing matter that the public are beginning to organize to catch the baby of the state drops it this is not something that is formed as a mythology this is something that's formed by what a rigorous analysis with people come in to the conclusion that we are steering the boat into the iceberg and now we're gonna have to do something this right this is your fundamental threat model right if it breaks USSR Argentina Iraq Afghanistan Detroit all the stuff is real it's all happened within living memory I mean if you watch the stuff coming out of Detroit farming with horses in the place that used to produce all of America's cars and hence home it's just amazing right and imagine if we lived in Detroit if we were having this meeting in Detroit and I'm excited in the window that our buildings that used to be you know had offices of companies which have become just you know complete waste lands if they were talking about bulldozing a third of the city to make space for more fields now this stuff is really an ongoing part of other people's lives and we're worried that it might come here okay so flea on so to get on top of this we have to

[18:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1115s) start thinking a deeper level than mapping the current set of systems and then assuming that some of them will be there in some of them work we actually have to get back underneath the problem in a different way threatened and I want to just point out so threat focused that's detected void reaction focus that's mitigating response so this is very much in the detect and avoid part government's evolved to fight wars anything that managed to become a state managed to become a state because it fought Wars in a month that's how you get to be a country the problem is that it revolves to fight wars and they are very poorly evolved to handle all risk so you know governments didn't really have to do cooperation with all of the other nation states on earth simultaneously to come to international agreements until recently because if it was happening one state over from who you were you were never gonna hear about it you saying they grew up being you know directly managing territorial borders and working in relatively long time skills because change was slow no changes hyper quick and everything is globalized the state is not very well with all the handle this kind of risk and as a result it's doing it very badly so this is a simple way of thinking about different kinds of risks and I'm just gonna scooch through these because they're not critical to the garage we're talking about it's just useful framework so spilled milk can you can you read the stuff on the side scope severity complexity source odds very simple risk crying individual theft a murder point risk because it happens in one place a time rather than everywhere at once caused by humans asteroid strike could affect a whole country could affect the whole world destroy anything at the facts point risk as it happens in one place at a time in Wes it just wipes the entire planet plagues affects all the people a lot of them die it's all over the place at the same time which means you can't swarm resources from the edges to help some problem in the center it comes from other species which means it's an evolving threat and this stuff was actually quite common got to get on top of it climate change this is the first of the current high risks the HotList are so global risk severe destruction disruption it's a systemic risk which means it happens everywhere at once the cause is humans and it's happening now financial collapse global account economic risk serious disruption

[21:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1265s) systemic caused by people right so the similarity of these two

[21:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1271s) risks is also part of why the governments are unable to Humble them in a very similar way it's a class of risks these risks are systemic and they're complicated and intergovernmental cooperation we were required to resolve them within current frameworks and we're doing a horrible job of handling this lots of risks what we're looking at is a failure to govern and this is the real deep core right the government's that we appointed to manage our risks are failing to manage the risks which is to say they're failing to govern and this is a huge global issue because as individuals we've gotten used to having a state that does the right thing in a way that allows us to get on with our lives we're now in a position where we have a state and a set of states internationally that are doing the wrong thing in a week which is threatening our lives and the people who were most acutely aware of this transition were C and E C and E screamed blue murder that the government's had gone bonkers because they were building nuclear weapons in huge quantities and this is not what we appointed governments to do on our behalf that was the active threat the passive threat is the government's are like well you know this is really gonna mess up the next election let me just shove it back under the rug for another four years with peak oil with climate change and with the great financial collapse and with a whole bunch of other stuff I mean this is serious business it's a failure and political culture if it goes back hundreds of years maybe even thousands of years this is the kind of stuff that wipe out road they aware to govern and it does not help that we're now so populous right we're so many and we are so powerful that we threaten the existence of the very planet by our own everyday average behavior combined tough stuff questions yes yeah okay could suggest you yell it louder because yes so 2002 I decided that it was very likely that the entire global financial system was going to collapse in the next ten years and I stopped using money to store my wealth and started working on the hardest problems that I could find and publishing hoping to store my welcome the former reputation and trust so my model of why that was gonna happen was not like Stormies model it's based on the work of a guy called Buckminster Fuller and it's described in book called

[23:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1421s) crunch of giants grun CH crunch of giants and it basically suggests that there are long term systems effects in capitalist societies which bring periodic up or called apocalyptic financial collapses so I'm not you know the exact details are the how and the why not so sure about I personally thought the rest was likely enough to change my entire life nearly 10 years ago now that doesn't mean it will happen right no would be nobody would be happier than me if we somehow managed to right the situation but I took the risk seriously enough to change my life to do something about my own experience of it and I learned a lot of this stuff in that context so that make sense our general picture is probably right by having to the details of that exact model I think it's probably about right but you know there's a lot of play on these things and I think the pump called that all core of the problem is substantially beyond human understanding 700 complicated interwoven factors all looks about rickety I don't wanna see your guess is as good as mine or my guesses as good as hers but past a certain threshold a certainty the question becomes what am I going to do about it rather than exactly when is the axe gonna fall okay and any other questions right there yes is that okay leave it for the end

[24:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1498s) all right so now it might be time to get into the doings of check my time so don't keep us here till midnight okay so how we approach dealing with this stuff this is the model that I'm here to basically teach and give away it's under open license it's gold state in a box and it came for the work that I did for the Pentagon on Iraq it's about figuring out how to manage really really harsh problems and the core of that is getting people to be able to work together in new ways in a hurry to deal with the problem that you haven't seen before something terrible happens everybody does the right thing you take the minimum amount of damage possible in the situation something terrible happens everybody screws up working together you get Hurricane Katrina where 2,000 Americans die it's almost as many people has died in 9/11 right 2,000 Americans died in a disaster but there were 72 hours warning in 40 years of prediction of the threat right think about that for years the risk in New Orleans is flooding three days before the flooding starts everybody knows the flooding will come 2,000 people died in the wealthiest country on earth and everybody afterwards blames it on failure to communicate right so that's what we're trying to avoid right we're trying to avoid disaster right and the core

[26:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1577s) concept is unity of effort without unity of command and this is a concept that goes by many different names people generally instinctively feel this is the way that we need to approach 21st century problems but the military terminology unity of effort without unity of command and I think it's a very very good goal and I think that those precise words convey exactly the meaning that most people want from things like consensus well they want is everybody to be working together without having to create a boss so good term do suggest you use it if it's useful to you is this overkill for Peak Oil right so mr. O'Rourke is this overkill from Peak Oil not in your world all right what do you reckon mr. Horowitz yes if anything it's under a kill in your model okay not really sure that's big enough but you can give it a try Gupta okay this is so yes it is using a sledge hammer it's using a sledge hammer to crack a wall or it's using fight hunger to crack fortress but it's certainly no underpowered so keep the stuff that keeps you alive running so how are we gonna do first figure out what is keeping you alive so for example say that you're diabetic what's keeping your wife is insulin second question what is the threat to your supply of insulin perhaps the threat is the hospital will get looted in the apocalypse third step avoid the threats and mitigate the risks alright this is so this is point two and point three avoid mitigate so how can you avoid your insulin supply being threatened maybe you store it at home maybe you change your diet radically to get back off insulin if you've got the right kind of diabetes and maybe you do something entirely different moving to lower risk country step 4 repeat until safety now um this is a little harder than it sounds first problem you don't control most of what you need to stay along second problem you're competing with start the current systems which are very very efficient and very very fragile so you wind up in this position where the current systems will not let you radically change your affairs like you can't really put a composting toilet in a suburban house if you try they take your house away and finally you're in

[28:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1727s) the position where you're gonna have to spend a bunch of resources building resilience but what it's gonna cost you is the ability to do other things if your community boots solar panels on all of its houses it takes the capital that could have been used to build a hospital heart problems so this approach you find all the interdependencies in the globe in the global system and harden all the vital links mr. Horowitz is this possible no right and that problem again it's rediscovered what's the lots of times given different names right VUCA is a particularly good one called volatile uncertain complex ambiguous problems complex operations central complex operations talks about the stuff complex contingencies is another term urban planning discovered this terrain the called wicked problems right it's the general problem that if you've got 40 things each one of which affects 40 other things when you try and build a big old map of the problem you end up with 1600 things that are connected to each other and you rapidly exceed human comprehension right the brain is not enough to fit all of it in and you just fail right so we need to find some way of doing this and that wait isn't gonna work very quick questions will be a little tight on time okay so simple critical infrastructure

[30:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1807s) maps to the rescue this is under a license called Creative Commons so you can download it use it you can bring it into your transition groups you can do stuff with it this is not intended to be something where I tell you the world is ending it's something where I say you make up your mind whether the world is ending have a planning tool that will help you accomplish your goals both a transition level and also an apocalyptic level so for accounts of actors in society individuals groups organizations on States we're going to ask what are these things need to exist what are the precursors to have a group or the precursors to have an organization what do you need to remain a state for individual there are six things that will stop you existing as an individual getting too hot getting too cold being hungry till you die be 32 you die being ill till you die and being injured so you die six ways to die so we've cut what it means to keep life going for you from the 7,000 things that typically contribute to your welfare to the six basic functions that must be in your environment so you don't die this is a brutal level of simplification and it's designed to get the problem down to the point where human beings small groups can manage the risks in their environment in complex contingencies so let's think about this right now right is anybody in this room currently dying in the now sense rather than in the sort of philosophical sense right we're all dying in the philosophical sense but I mean in theirs right now right not Sylvia Plath but you know Randle so right number one are we too hot no we're not dying being too hot because we're in Ireland ecosystem services prevent us from dying of overheating are we too cold no clothes building heating and cooling external environment which is not too cold so we're not freezing to death generally speaking it's combination of ecosystem services and tools hunger huge global supply chain the food in your belly right and you're probably eating right now in your stomach you probably have molecules which have traveled thousands of miles right your body is made of stuff that shipped around the world wonder people are nervous communications only thirst right water from some local water source filter fed done illness health services injury nobody's currently attacking anybody else now how did it get here

[32:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=1959s) communications were used for you to discover that it was happening transport even if it's roads and a bicycle or you walk brought me here the space that we're in is a workspace and resource control is that aren't a bunch of people in here drinking and playing loud music preventing us from getting this done so the things which are necessary for us to form as a group communications transport works based resources very simple organizations right so right here we are cultivate write cultivate is an organization that's yes cultivate organization yes right so to be an organization the people who work together to create this how to share map of reality which was that green issues are important transition is relevant all of that you know that there is some kind of path that we want to precede them to do something about the situation and plumb the thing exists because of a mother reality of plan of action succession is all the stuff that you inherit from the government which makes you an organization rather than a tribe and it's things like birds directors it's the ability to transfer the leadership role to implement the map and the plan rather than having the whole thing be dependent on personal whim it's what makes you an organization rather than a gang or tribe finally the state right we're all citizens one country or another but exist state state this list is a little more abstract and we're not gonna dig into it but basically effective organizations like police and fire services list of citizens map of territories gives you the women of the state's legal jurisdiction an international recognition ratifies that these elements are present so what

[34:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=2065s) we have there is an 18-point list which gives you the very most basic skinny on the systems which keep you going right 18.1 now it's simple enough that if you look at it for a 10 or 15 minutes and you draw out a couple of times in the back of an envelope you know make a cross over here individual group organizations state and you try and remember the list pretty soon you'll get to the point where you can remember that list and even explain and teach it to people so the idea is this was a fast acquisition tool you have a crisis you teach at all the people who are trying to respond to the crisis because they now have a very simple shared map you can get them to form a simple shared plan and you can get the situation stabilized using unity of effort without unity of command so it's a toolkit for rapidly forming a temporary organization to secure a situation so that people don't die and as long as nobody's dying you have the time to figure out the more complex responses that you might want to implement now the trick of this is the reason this is not in this kind of VUCA territory where everything is completely complicated messed up and impossible is because the vast majority of the complexity of the global system is used to produce Barbie dolls right it's made to you know produce fancy clothing that has no real function of them you can kind of smart it's used to produce you know is anybody gonna die if we'd run out of tripods no right most of the things in the global system are completely useless from a survival perspective and as a result if you can rapidly identify the few percent of what is in your environment that you need to live you can safely ignore everything else right in the event of a national catastrophe you can relatively quickly index the critical things which must exist and everybody else you can say whoa we'll get you later thank you or not remove one simple manageable set system interdependencies means you go from having an unmanageable problem where everything is connected to everything else there's a big ball of string to a manageable problem from a strictly survival perspective does this kind of make sense it's a minimal approach and once you've got those things those basic eighteen points covered at that point you've got the breathing space to deal with the complexity of the rest right keep having the live therefore you can strain the

[36:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=2215s) property questions yes I mean this is for the people who yes I mean this is for the people who are trying to cooperate to make everything work one of the problems you might face in this kind of situation is how do you deal with the people who are not trying to make it work and that would become a security problem so you know one of the things that you have to do in a crisis you have to manage the people who are working against a successful solution to the problem and you might need an organization to do that like the police force but I'm not assuming that you start with perfect cooperation any other questions okay so the interdependencies

[37:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jm5o-ughyD8&t=2269s) I'm gonna actually skip this section because we're out of time but I will give you the concept in one slide which is this right now we're in a civilization where cheap food cheap energy and cheap tools are used to produce more cheap food more cheap energy and more cheap tools so the name that I give this is Iook Oh Oh I grew industrial it's alright go back here I grew industrial Auto catalysis so that basically means is the agro-industrial system maintains the agro industrial system and causes it to grow it's the ability to go and buy a bulb for eleven cents that if you had to make it by hand would cost you one hundred and eleven dollars that system is the core of what has given us the world that we're in and it would be really nice if we were a little more organized about protecting its core functions so we can continue to make things like MRI machines that right and I'm suggesting again that this is a generally useful term because it compresses what is vital about what's sometimes called Western civilization or industrial civilization or anything else into a simple term that people can just use boom how does this affect Dayak oh it's gonna break it so let's go skip skip skip skip sorry no questions boom so let's get

---
Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/250-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [250] Through the Looking Glass - Vinay Gupta on systemic risks to civilization and responses (2010.), part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.