# Vinay Gupta on Blockchain, Biotech and Consciousness - E43 (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [676], part 2 of 3. 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, 2018-12-13 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): States the raise-the-floor aim the plan serves.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - 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). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: meditation / lineage / spiritual (33%); culture / history / fiction (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: social enterprise (3 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); basic income (5 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Hope For The World (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Estonia (2 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); recycling (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Singapore (3 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); TechCrunch (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); The Synthesis (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); India (5 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); global GDP (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2018)
- Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 221 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [677] [Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
  - [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
- On the same works, just before: [600] [Mattereum Highlights - Chris Wray - Impact of smart... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/600.md); [721] [Vinay Gupta, founder Mattereum, putting assets on the... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/721.md); [597] Mattereum Smart Property Register - Rob Knight (2018)
- On the same works, just after: [207] [Black Elephants (CCCR2018) - CSER (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/207.md); [692] [Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md); [931] [Blockchain and the Future of Humanity | Malta AIBC... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/931.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: Vinay Gupta on Blockchain, Biotech and Consciousness - E43, video, 2018-12-13, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [676], https://guptaoption.com/texts/676.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=2250s) probably not even a good idea so with responses and reflexes and that dad's you know should we be that surprised I don't think we should be surprised at all hmm it's it's interesting feeling into what that brings up for me on a personal level of how you growing up Brown obviously but in a very very very white like surrounding often being the only brown person in most rooms I've been in yeah what subtly is into playing underneath throughout that it's very very very tricky to you know imagine a world in which we were blind to gender to the level where in the event of a fire or a flood or a war and the women grunt words at the danger at the same rhythm ended mm-hmm it'd be interesting to see how that's working in Israel you know they've got a lot of women in uniform they've got a lot of women that are trained to fight and it may be the in that cultural context they've largely overcome those reflexes and they're much more socially conditioned than genetic or and maybe the social condition can overcome them you need accurate data from actual battlefield conditions to see what happens but my guess is if those instincts are basically impossible to override and if we can't override them for gender it's not an absurd proposition that we might not be able to only come by race I am half Scottish and half Indian a few times I've got to hang out with other people that are half Scottish and half Indian and it's weird there's just this very deep sense of like just the same and without feeling because I have it so rarely sticks out as being remarkable if you go someplace like Finland I bet they're all feeling that way all the time like oh we're all just the same isn't this thanks we're all just the same oh no you know is that racism mmm right the fact that I feel a sense of kind of comfortable familiarity with people that are half Scottish and a half Indian that it all sort of makes sense to me you know it's quite strange right it's a weird thing it's certainly not happening a rational level so is there some genetic calculus that is just kind of looking at the whole thing and measuring stuff and telling me how to feel maybe so this doesn't excuse structural and institutional racism but

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=2400s) I think we have to make a distinction here between the racism that you can measure inside of organizational decision-making and the racism that is weird personal preferences that I think trying to stamp IO is just very very difficult yeah I'm sure education because part of the way I'm sure experience because part of the way it may be easier to break down than we expect you know in New York it's race still the same thing that it was 50 years ago in New York are they involved in a post-racial thing Singapore Singapore has enormous on it's a marriage between different ethnic groups and it's quickly building a single Korean ethic identity that is definitely not any one of the original inputs so you know I'm willing to be guided by the data on this stuff we could look at the places where race is breaking down and we could look at the places where race is norm and we can make distinctions about how people have done this stuff like Japan right Japan has it no culture which enormously supports the idea of inherent Japanese specialness it's probably going to take a lot longer to break down in Japan than it is in for example Singapore mm-hm but I'm not sure that it matters that much to be honest I think the real damage that people take is from the institutional structural racism where it's quote can you get the low and can you get the university please can you get the job and because we've got statistical analysis of those decision-making environments we can detect the racism we can fix it in people's personal lives how do you objectively tell whether somebody is racist or they just don't like you right hey very very difficult and I think spending too much time and personal racism well we still have institutional racism is a structural mistake right we can go to the places you can measure the problem and we can fix the problem in the places where we can't measure the problem how do you prove it very very very correctly and then there's this other element of where we are today in terms of surveillance so surveillance becoming a kind of new class-based culture based race based tool so the more privileged you are the less you're watched yeah the more freedom you have the easier it is to pass few borders yes this kind of thing well rush people tend not to steal things unless it's countries that time but I mean with all of this the world is not fair and it's not getting any fairer right it's getting better but it's not getting fairer and I think that that's an important distinction to make you can still have a world in which almost everybody has a reasonable quality of life but the ultra-rich will continue to

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=2550s) be massively ahead of everybody else and I think that that is the most credible world that we could create I think attempting to fix inequality between the richest and the poorest is basically impossible in our current culture but we could make sure that none of the poorest die of preventable disease we could make sure that none of the poorest died of starvation we could raise the floor of humanity to a level that nobody would fall below with far less effort than we could make even small changes to fundamental economic inequality so my preference is the progressive cause is reframed as we fix the living conditions of the poorest and we let the rest of them get on with I think a court is a total red herring because it allows the middle class to feel pain that they are not the ultra rich and it also allows them to ignore all the people that are poor them there it's the wrong form of engagement we need to put the attention on the energy not on the fact that the middle class or not the ultra rich but on the fact that the poor people having to do without wheelchairs mm-hmm yeah we could put the attention of the energy on where the real damage is being done in the society rather than watching on to the inequality narrative because I think that inequality as a narrative has some horrendous problems you know what do you do about people that are just damn lucky well they're doing so well that's because they always seem to be the right place at the right time Bob what are we gonna do tax them right it's very very very hard to build an equality narrative that is not somewhere filippo actually absurd and that's a completely different thing from talking about poverty narrative where we can say look why in a world this rich there's this person not have a wheelchair this is crazy we should just fix that every you put something in the bucket we're gonna fix that and that approach with just minimum standard of living you cannot fall below it's a so much easier a supporting or dialogue and that's something you can really get people behind right everybody in the UK should have an income of 100 quid a week we will pay every penny under all conditions all the time in the event that you are making more money than that because you have a job we will get it back off yours task a task income tax problem solved there is no more dole and you would just do that and you could fix it and then you wouldn't get homeless people who have no food because they'd have a hundred quid a week to play with and that is enough to eat it may not be enough to get you a place to live in London but it's enough to find your place to live in you know the back end of York track we could do this the numbers work it's not very complicated it gets rid of this constant problem we

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=2700s) feel getting kicked off their benefits because some piece of paperwork went wrong because there is no benefit system the means tests for that basic income everybody gets it doesn't need to be five grand a month right enough that people don't starve you know on the streets enough the people don't have to beg to eat we could really do that it doesn't have to be means-tested we've already got the mechanisms to claim it back in taxation you just record it as income for the people that are middle-class it's not not difficult and it's our unwillingness to put the attention of fixing ups a little poverty that causes the confusion about how are we gonna run our welfare state right separate problems when you say it's our unwillingness I mean I know a lot of people that massively support a universal basic income how do we actually get that into play I think the concerns the old left is dead the union's have gone because waiver is gone because so much work was put into breaking the unions and so the next round of reorganization of the left is probably going to be our own basic income if we're lucky it will be around basic income rather than around economic inequality because basic income you can do an economic inequality you probably can't and I'd rather see a successful life than a failed West in the same way I would rather see a successful right than a failed right right the branch of the right wing that is entirely about independence personal liberty personal accountability free speech resistance to encroaching government power and all the rest on that part of the right wing it needs to win in the same way that the part of the left wing which says nobody should go without a wheelchair if they need one needs to win that are good agendas on both the left on the right the problem is there's also a bunch of garbage on the left on the right right you know you get incredible hatred of people that are fortunate on the left and with is completely irrational on the right you get enormous signs of racism hatred of the poor you know all of that stuff you need to basically just block try and stop and get into the real world try and contain the problem on the other side of the fence you know something you need a synthetic politics that combines the left on the right I think that's not the real approach but you need the competition between the left and the right to take out the bad ideas and only weave the best of each tradition in play and I think that it's the sort of politics I'd like to see it's a politics where you were very consciously using the competition between the various teams to focus the energy on the stuff that needs to get done I thought is not

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=2850s) an easy approach but if we don't do something along those kind of lines we're going to be stuck with increasingly destructive competition between these books different political forms and we're not going to get any real progress and is this something that the technology can help us to do okay so how do you fix democracy right I have a proposal for a really comprehensive overhaul of the democratic process that we have in the UK that requires almost no actual change right the proposal is this instead of reacting all of the MPs once every four years we reelect one MP every four days and you just have a constant running election where you know you have a calendar and it tells you when when each era will be reelected and if somebody quits as an MP or is you know dies or there are something wrong these kinds lines if there's a forced election in that borough you just do to that week or something along those lines right new you get you fiddle with the details but what that gives you is a continuous process for politics is happening all the time and you don't get these crazy crazy crazy you know sudden changes of national direction if it's accepted that the ruling party is making a mess over the course of the year gradually they lose MPs until they get to the point where they can no longer govern you get a smooth transfer of power and I think that systems along those lines you would likely wind up with cabinets that contained members of all parties simply because it made the drifting of power from one side to the other much easier to manage if you were and had a few people in government and you could move from something that was this pitched battle once every four years to a continual shifting of tensions and allegiances and it doesn't change the structure of her democracy at all it's literally a tiny little bureaucratic reorganisation of how we do things it doesn't change the principle of first-past-the-post it doesn't change the districting it doesn't change the party system it's a small shift but it's a big shift in the power structure yeah sure right and so how does how does something like that happen well some things it's probably not gonna happen right you could talk about the ideas you can wait you can see what happens in times of crisis new things often get done in a bit of a hurry sometimes these crazy ideas up will get implemented but you know it just goes to show that there are radical proposals and don't require shifting the principles they just require shifting the implementation

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=3000s) methods and any kind of technological intervention in the democratic processes is far more likely to succeed if you're just shifting the implementation methods than if you're attempting to shift the democratic principle we should have shifted the democratic principle art every new round of technology that went into democracy right once you had the invention radio pal Kraft television the Internet every one of those things should have updated the machinery of democracy a little bit instead we just decided that button acts on paper every four years was the last and final and perfect form of democracy and that was where we were gonna leave it that was a mistake right we should have been much more a proactive in small incremental technological innovation one at a time no we've got hundreds of years of democratic technology backlog but I don't think we're gonna get that updated anytime soon maybe small countries will get on that bandwagon like Estonia you can just the moment imagine Estonia - saving that it was going to do some kind of ultra-modern it post Internet Governance model you could just about imagine they give a try if it was hugely successful other countries might copy them and I think that's how we will get change at those levels but the large industrial democracies it works well enough that you'd be very scared to dicker with it you know it's not that bad it's bad but it's I think could be a lot worse and very small changes could have very unexpected effects so I think you know a small country experimentation a large country conservatism is not not that bad a wave like that and so for our friends they're listening where where do they put their energy where do they put their resource so a lot of that depends on what kind of resource they have this is a much harder question that it looks like because we sort of assume that there's a single sort of best path for people as a whole like everybody should be kind well maybe maybe but what if your job is to fight yeah it's pretty hard to fight and be kind at the same time maybe some people should be really effective being angry you know there's a diversity of approaches that may be required to get the world to behave the way we want it to behave to get a better world it might require genuine diversity rather than this kind of again we come back to the American food as a model where they've got a single pamphlet for what a good human being looks like maybe we need to break that down allow the diversity of strategies a diversity of personality types all of which can be regarded as having utility and having objective value rather than the idea

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=3150s) that you should come to all peaceful and kind and creative and and all the rest of these innovative is the same way things would be better well maybe not maybe you need people that are obsessively detail-oriented in love contouring other people in making mistakes of being dishonest maybe you need people that are incredibly show booty and charismatic and stand in front of crowds and make big happy noises maybe you need a genuine mix so the first piece of general advice I'd give to people is this and almost everybody is lying to by the nature of the problem right doesn't matter what the problem is in almost all cases for somebody frames a problem and asks for support they're lying about the nature of the problem to make the problem into a problem which fits inside of a container which shiny happy people are willing to deal with yeah I mean I'm doing that with this podcast I call it the future is beautiful yeah which I know is you know a question you know I maybe just chose that as the name to invite people in maybe it's the aspiration you have right maybe that's what you're working towards and there's some value to a declaration but you know understanding the social dynamics of how we form Kalitta chol consensus super important so we take a horrendous problem like homelessness right we then take this notional kind person a nice person a good person right and we basically fit the story to be something that our archetype will help her person will react to us something they can touch so if we home law says we don't focus on homelessness of mental illness which is where most of the action is we focus at risk youth here is the least socially unexpectable story about homelessness now we will need to give us resources to go to fix homelessness but if we raise money for dealing with at-risk youth we're only gonna solve the at-risk youth part of the homelessness problem and we're still going to end up with a bunch of schizophrenic former veterans or sorry systematic veterans kicking around on the streets because they got broken in the wars and can't function in society anymore right so the first thing that we have to resist is the simplification of the problems into a socially acceptable form the reason the things are problems is because they're not socially acceptable right what is the problem with large-scale consumption of meat well there are environmental issues but

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=3300s) there's also the cow murder right the abattoir thing I mean I mean right because if I stop eating meat I stopped caring the world just fades into this kind of blissful calm a happy serene watching of the River of Life go by and I find it almost impossible to generate the will to engage seriously seriously very very very carefully huff to limit my spiritual practice and do very very hardcore grounding activities or I revert to the mean for somebody that's done the kind of meditation I did yeah I expected to spend my life as a meditation teacher I trained for it until I was 30 that was why I was gonna do with my career and then I could pushed off into doing energy policy and defense planning and all the rest of this stuff to try and intervene in the processes of reducing war you cooped up go and do something about the war problem the meditation teaching thing this is going to have to wait go do something about the war problem this is your job now go and do and getting into a position where I care enough about politics to have an opinion no you know what meditation teachers like oh yes the world is very complicated that's why you come to the ashram where everything is something you can just let it all go the eternal truth is more important than the Munchkin hang out there or you know or the gym thing that is the default which I'm normally resort yeah so I because it's one of the things that brings the consciousness down to the point where I have an opinion very hard very hard terrible ethical problems what do you do yeah I have a bit of scotch to do that ah there we go yeah after being very sober and very late and very her in my practices and then realizing that I was pulling me away from the activism the being awake there and then realizing that we need to bring these inner and outer worlds together so I've had to just relax a little bit and you know if it's a glass of scotch here and or whatever it is I haven't gone to meet okay they my yeah in emergency I sometimes feel that it would also help so physical strength because you have to be a bit more careful when you're a vegetarian do you have an electric pressure cooker and the electric pressure cooker the silikal instant pump

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=3450s) is completely life changing for vegetarians okay and because you can go from you know two handfuls of dried chickpeas to actual food in 40 minutes with no planning so it means you could get high-quality dry proteins very very very quickly it just makes being vegetarian super convenient in a way that is it just normally isn't because it takes out of the long-simmering time for the dried pulses it's really good it's dramatic how much easier it makes being registered because we wouldn't use to feed a lot of people at the house and we still do sometimes and you're kind of two choices are meat in the oven or beans in the in the machine and it's not very good at the instant vegetarian curry mmm-hmm I'm about to what people should do eat meat drink scotch so the the thing when understanding the real problems is extremely important right so the real problems you have to take the story about what the problem is and the official narrative of the problem homelessness is about art risk youth is the official narrative of homelessness the truth as far as I can tell is that homelessness is largely about mental illness right the fix might be the same in both cases but we mischaracterize the problem right we think about famines what is it the causes farmers or its food supply problems usually it's political violence right cutting off the food supply to a region which is in some kind of insurrection or he stays where we're bringing them back under control there's a lot of that kind of stuff and the famous story about Live Aid they finally sent all the food to the country and they let it rot on the docks because they weren't gonna send the food to the rebels how my understanding of the live aid story is that very few people are got fed but what people felt like they've done something so clearly stepping outside of the official frame well the problems understanding what the problem is global warming is about mass starvation it doesn't matter at all if you know Scotland is three degrees warmer it's it's irrelevant it makes things a little nicer it Mars quite a bit if the temperature in Central India goes from 35 degrees to 50 degrees in the middle of summer that's a real problem but it really really matters if you get a drought and agricultural collapses across the subsistence agricultural belt in Africa now you've got a real problem hundreds of millions of people with no food and no money whoa now what right so

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=3600s) those sorts of narrations of the problems if everybody understood that the real damage from global warming is going to be mass starvation it's so much easier to characterize when we need to do something about this all these people are directly dependent on the food that they drove with their own hands and we're breaking the interest so nothing will come out of the ground because it will be dry baked earth and it will starve we need to do something about the oil burning right oh yeah your coastal cities will flood and you get some big storms but you also get nicer weather you know a lot of people of global warming wasn't about subsistence agriculture and starvation you could sort of make an argument it wasn't that higher priority what make set priorities it's good break aggghhhhh if it breaks the food system we're really gonna feel it using the ritual feel in those scenarios clear problem statement thing one when somebody gives you a story about what the problem is it's not about gorilla habitat it's about whether millions and millions and millions of people starve right you always have to go back to the source material to understand why the problem it's the problem because if if we give people an income somebody sells you the socially acceptable face of a problem there is a completely socially unacceptable face of the problem a little further back in the story mmm-hmm every time somebody gives you that story further back in there's a much worse story you have to get to that story before you understand the top and the whole kind of female circumcision thing right they found the least scary way of talking about what was happening and then tried to sell people there it was a bad idea right if you dig under the surface of the story what's happening is so incredibly horrific you really wonder why they haven't done like mass scale Human Rights prosecutions like seriously terrible things are being done here and you know you you pry the lid off to get to the truth right in America you know they talk about segregation what the root mean was apartheid then you look at the way the black people were actually treated in America while they lived under the American apartheid you look at the genocide of the Native Americans the actual stories are so much worse than you know a bunch of Canadian guys in lumberjack jackets want more control with their traditional tribal wands it's like yeah they're like 4% of the remaining population well I'm into the rest of them you don't really don't want to know the stories are much worse than we think they are right and you say uh but but but but but you know people will overwhelm and then they'll won't they get overwhelmed they're gonna change their lives and if they change their lives because they can't cope with the

[1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=3750s) world as it is theory they're gonna go in or they're gonna go out if they go in they develop the ability to more deeply understand themselves in the world around them and why they're overwhelmed if they go out you've got an entirely tougher more forceful variety of activists right so we have to step out of the idea that the problems need to be dumbed down to the point where they fit inside of an American folk buddhism solution framework and we need to deal with the idea that the solution frameworks require a huge diversity of personal responses that the problems are generally speaking not soluble my license there's a breaking of the frame which is necessary there and it has to be done with enormous force because they we've had 50 years of hippie good vibe activism it hasn't solved a single problem they're all still there most of them were worse than they ever were so we break the hippie good vibe optimism we threw out the American folk Buddhism we go back to the intellectual tradition of the West we go back to authentication spirituality we go back to looking at the problem since they really are rather than trying to dumb them down to the point where you think you can solve it by being nice this is advice number one I got it second thing is fortunately a heck of lot easier which is stop pretending that structural problems are about personal choices there's been an enormous pressure in society to pretend that the environmental problem is a series of personal choices and if everything gets a little bit more recycling needs a little bit less beef everything will get better generally speaking individual behaviors that people be whatever is most convenient and if you want to change the world you have to change what's most convenient by changing the law to take the bar option off the table mmm-hmm so we should stop wasting our time with cultural change and we can really seriously strap in an armed to the teeth for legal challenge right front line of defense for almost all of the causes that matter should be lawyers it should be litigation lad it should be well being lad it should be power lad right mass consciousness change to the point where nobody eats meat hard clearing all the regulatory obstacles to biotech we're solving the meat problem way more likely to be effective on the industry will paper right my advice to everybody right now if it's looking for a career where they can change the world in a really meaningful way is get into the Queen business and figure out how to get that stuff adopted and scale right it's gonna be such a cultural battleground you know with the Daily

[1:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=3900s) Mail questions for the queen bee is really neat if you wind up with a government that bonds it oh no oh we've come to a conclusion we have to protect agriculture and the traditional British lifestyle so we're not going to let this Queen meat thing happen you know those are fights where if we get in there early and we figure out what's going on we win we really change the world mm-hmm and those are fights where people can come in from a variety of different ethical positions some of them are honorable rights people some of them are climate change people some of them are in a tub of science people business people you can put all those people together and you could go out there and you can do the legislative agenda you can do the cultural agenda you get the technology adopted and that sort of an approach that's a very different kind of activism yes some of it is about changing individual consumer behavior the vast majority of it is about legislation lobbying and that understanding that we've taken a huge range of fundamental structural problems in society and we've pushed them back on to the individuals at the individual had any power that's not my chance right industry groups worked really hard to frame the environmental problem as being about consumer choice rather than being about legislation well it turns out it's about legislation to a very large degree it's about technology under legislation to force the adoption of the technology so again you break the idea that the kind of american buddhists you know kind of like yeah third-rate bought us on the archetype it's like well we just all need to change the way that we think it's all the consciousness you know it's about war change i don't trade consciousness change the war so with you on the law change but can't we change both at the same time isn't there an energetic impact of millions of people eating less meat like of course that's not going to change it in the same way that legislation will but isn't there an energetic impact of that well i mean you know you're an indian i presume yes from some part of the tradition that does intense spiritual practices okay I've got some recollection your sheep maybe half Jane half Hindi oh there we go right so it that's kind of context right there is no doubt at all that to get anywhere you do a lot of work mmm-hmm lot of work thousands of hours of work and in Jainism you make a lot of sacrifice in particular lifestyle sacrifice is a huge part of it serious

[1:07:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=4050s) business if there was an easier way of doing it that's what our ancestors would have done mm-hmm so yes there is a lot of opportunity for transformation of consciousness to make the world work the way we want it to work there's a huge amount of room for that to be the way things are dot dot dot dot effort at less than that level is generally speaking almost completely wasted right it didn't get easier just because Europeans and Americans were doing it and they're not doing enough of it for it to work but people come to me and say meditation meditation is it right I already for six months right then come back and tell me with your like what I did and if it did we can discuss a real practice schedule mm-hmm and that's about realistic right I mean I got where I am because I did more than an hour a day for eight or nine years with basically no progress and then I go kick it into a completely different universe all at once overnight boom whoa Wow amazed it now what do I do and I went off to find a guru so you know those kinds of processes that's about how hard you gotta work to get things to move mm-hmm I don't see anybody talking about evolution of consciousness talking about the head of level of effort again I hate to keep harping on this as if it's this core of all evil I really think it's the biggest single problem we have the American folk Buddhism model is that you could do 15 minutes twice a day and gradually you'll turn into a better person and this doesn't really work it might make you slightly more efficient it might like you slightly less stressed but in no way does this constitute fundamental evolution of consciousness mm-hm under mental evolution of consciousness eight people look it's a PhDs worth of work assuming that you're starting from high school that's the level of effort required and at the end of that you're won't be an enlightened being maybe it'll be harder if you turn out not to be very diligent maybe I'll be a little easier if you go some pre-existing mental training but generally speaking of looking at a decade of your life in which this is the primary activity if you're going to actually they could be some crack up becoming enlightened yes or no UN or not very few people prepare for our level of effort so why do you think that you know conscious the evolution of consciousness is going to be attacked [Music] hello this is ameesha we are just taking a little break from the conversation

[1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=4200s) here on behalf of myself and the team I want to say thank you for being part of creating a beautiful future we make this for you so that we will all have the vision wisdom and activism we need at this time to weave a new narrative can you help us with this you can do that by making a monthly donation to the podcast to cover our costs just the equivalent of a Fairtrade banana you might eat or a chai latte you might drink whilst you listen to this will make a huge difference to us head to WWE future is beautiful Co forward slash community to become a monthly patron and the other thing is to tell your friends about this podcast so they can tune in to send them a message or post on social media and let them know what you love about it and whilst you're at it leave us a review and now back to the conversation thank you for your loving beauty I suppose my question or my my hope is that we hold the bigger picture and we work towards the bigger picture but we're diligent about the small steps underneath - yes what I don't want to give people is the illusion that the sum of many small actions is one large action and I hear that but I feel like what I'm saying is that it's about the discipline the discipline for the people that are proper spiritual practitioners is more or less all the tenants right I mean you know actually just getting it right is more or less the whole of them all yeah the precision of action is required and if you don't have it there's just no point showing up so in advance or a setting most people are not able to hold that wealth of perceiving than their person decision making they get dragged around a lot my culture they get drugged or not by their families the a drug turned what by the expertise they're friends it's very very hard for them to make the necessary steps to get things precisely right and if they do a different severe damages their cultural power right so if it was well understood and here you know I put them on my traditional Hindu heart for a moment right this is not the hi we're on the time but just for the sake of argument right so if it was well understood that more or less everybody who's doing yoga practices was either monogamous or

[1:12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=4350s) celibate how much less popular would you be right traditional culture anybody that's doing heavy yoga is going to be monogamous or celibate that's more or less universal so you then break this notion that yoga is a thing that makes you have a really fit hot body which you can then take to nightclubs yeah well in my experience where celibacy has come in without me one thing interviewed elusive interest well there yet I don't know the practices are stronger than the will if that makes sense like it's just about what shows up what doesn't show up once you're at work walking a certain path and then yet the amount of neo Tantra events again no skip through this that because but where I want to get to of this is if you take away the spirituality it part of it that this is how I feel even though I know that if we all recycle we're not really getting to the problem I feel that there is a thing about values based living where you separate your recycling anyway yeah rather than just carelessly throwing it into the bin so this is when a energetic action even though that isn't what's going to change everything is still important because it's part of integrity yes ah right yes so yes I absolutely agree but almost no one has any integrity we even have integrity how long did it take you to develop integrity it comes engaged right how much effort yeah so you know in the Indian cultures right there is an understanding that everybody should do a little and a few people should do a lot in terms of spirituality uh-huh yeah no you know you and I are over the demographic we are the few people that do a lot that the thing the identity of being a few people that do a lot there's a lot of difficult things that you do that lead you to be the kind of person that can actually get it right when it counts mm-hmm that path is a

[1:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=4500s) professional career development path right it's like becoming a brain surgeon right and it really is like becoming a brain surgeon right you're going to be dealing with people at the most intimate level of their psyches in the most careful possible way to change the fate of their entire families in many cases you know if you can talk to somebody about why they're alcoholic and and make them stop drinking you know it's psychic surgery it's a rearrangement of the entire psyche and that kind of capability is for the vast majority of the Indian spiritual practices as a mental need to do you're meant to become a person that can help people when they are sick in the soul or help a culture when it's sick in the decisions so for the people who are on that professional development path it makes a whole bunch of sense to go climb these horrible honors because they make you a better person of that level of function question is what about everybody else right is a sort of spiritual first-aid training really worth putting people through where they can get the very basic stuff right most of the time or are we better focusing the attention on political change of legal change and the kind of folk Buddhism approach has been very very very strong on the idea that you do kind of spiritual first aid training for everything and eventually you evolve them forward but for the most part what I see is that you give them the spiritual first aid training and then they basically figure out that they can drink the hand sanitizer you know it's generally not working I remember being a kirtan the the Hindu singing thing curtain and jeevan mukti yoga in new york remember who it was it was somebody pretty decent and I know it's the in the yoga studio they have showers with frosted glass doors on a public hallway and I'm like you have a yoga studio in which you have showers which are basically intended to show off people's naked bodies in the yoga studio and you sort of look at this like you know I don't know whether to be impressed or appalled and mostly I was appalled like you know the total mutation of the tradition into something that serves the agendas of the local culture unbelievable I like that you were slightly impressed whilst being mostly opposed no you know they're really going for it and this gets into yeah god I hate that Haiti he didn't use the T word right but there is a question about what is the relationship between Tantra and birth control and modernity

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/676-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [676] Vinay Gupta on Blockchain, Biotech and Consciousness - E43, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.