# Vinay Gupta on Blockchain, Biotech and Consciousness - E43 (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [676], part 1 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 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=0s) some combination cultural optimism and hard capitalism should deliver us a relatively utopian technical fix for the old world portal we could make sure that none of the purest die of preventable disease we could make sure that not the poorest died of starvation we could raise the floor of humanity to a level that nobody would fall below would 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 forest and we let the rest of them get on earth I think you call it is a total red herring for episode 43 my guest is Vinay Gupta a Renaissance man and futurist interested in the technological transformation of society and commerce he is the CEO of Mattereum which TechCrunch recently named as perhaps the world's weirdest and most daring startup in this conversation which took place in London this summer we discussed blockchain the myths we live in and where the real opportunity for destruction of the old world lies this brings about interesting questions of how we can hide in our spirituality belief systems and cultural identities and what happens if we move beyond what Vinay calls hippie good vibe activism I want to say a thank you to some of our newest patrons Nicky French Blake Ben Carter Sam Struthers and Alicia Naples your support means so much to us and if you want to join me in India in the new year I have to immersions coming up in January and March you can find the details on WWWE Misha that you enjoy this conversation and it opens up possibility in you [Music] welcome to the future is beautiful with me your host ameesha Gaddy Ali on this show we explore the weave between politics spirituality creativity and sustainability it's time for us to move beyond silos and into an integrated way of being every one of us has ideas and personal experiences to share that can lead us to a brighter future this is the revolution despite the challenges we face as a global community or the pressures that we meet in our daily lives when we stop and dare to dream to ask ourselves the big questions and to share what we are already doing

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=150s) we create the future that we wish to wake up for that future is beautiful I am delighted today to be joined by a vinegar to welcome to the show Vinay and thank you for hosting me here in your home I'm glad I'm glad to be here with you if it gonna be an interesting chat let's dive right in we have talked a bit about blockchain on the show before but I feel like that chain is something that you have to hear or some of us have to hear multiple times before we really understand what it is and what the opportunity is doctrine is basically the next generation of Internet technology the last fundamental change in the structure of the Internet was when we put credit cards online in the late 1990s this was the whole ecommerce revolution group we took a tiny little bit of cryptography the the thinnest possible slice of cryptography and that gave us the padlocks on websites that let you send money over the internet so before that there was no commercial internet because you couldn't take payments there were no adverts because people wouldn't buy anything the whole thing was basically an academic exercise that was very popular it's very interesting then you took this tiny sliver of cryptography and you can just get a single financial instrument online which was the credit card payment and from this comes in the entire Internet ecology that we currently have so the blockchain is going back to the cryptographers and saying what else do you have well howzabout global electronic cash system how's about I chain tracking how's about invoices and they want you know all of these things you build the cryptography that can represent those things instead of just doing credit card payments how you can do all the rest of the financial instruments and the whole thing opens up again an enormous way okay and so there's a lot of hype around what that means can you enlighten us a little bit on where that opportunity is I have some friends a company called sweet bridge and Scott Nelson their CEO explains it like this right now basically the business-to-business payment market the invoices is on the order of 50 trillion a year consumer spending over the internet is on the order of one or two trillion a year so the thing which is next door to where we are is 25 times or 20 times the size of the current internet market because right now all the business visits payments are not being made online right there is no you know Amazon for you know heavy trucking

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=300s) none of that stuff is really there because the payment mechanisms that countability the track and race and all the rest of that stuff don't really fit inside of the current generation of Internet technology because the only payment instruments we have our credit cards and real businesses don't do that kind of stuff on credit cards they just don't have the right affordances so you bring in a new generation of payment instruments that do fit for that market and you can basically begin the internet ization of the entire business-to-business economy which is 20 times the size of the consumer economy it's not going to be small and if you think about it you know think of how difficult and manual everything to do with invoicing is it's the same in big companies it's not like it magically becomes better past some level in fact the outlet becomes worse it's more and more complicated more and more bureaucratic board more humans in the loop is you have to get auditors and rekey things and reconcile books and all the rest of that stuff all the underlying computer systems are 30 years old and they're terrible and we're just connecting these terrible or non-functional computer systems by creating more and more people in the loop to manually key stuff it is disasterous if it's still happening with spreadsheets emails invoice is all so you go through with set new payment instruments and you automate the entire thing and end and on the other side of that you get liberation and probably a five percent or maybe even ten percent jump in global GDP this is what we're playing for it makes the current generation of the internet story will click small potatoes and we hole in our business lives seem the pain of ineffective invoicing problems figuring out where physical goods are and you know a slipshod communication about what will happen or when it will happen all of that stuff is potentially automatable but you have to actually do it and this is what the blockchain revolution TM might bring it's pretty full-on mm-hmm can you give us a really easy to understand example of how that will transform business as we know it well I mean I think again this this all comes from sweet bridge but the the crux of it is just the invoicing is horrible everything about invoicing as a process is broken you really want a situation where you type the invoice into your computer and it automatically appears in their computer as the same invoice and if you make an update to it their version of it should reflect the update immediately it should be a single thing which is shared between know the people

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=450s) across all the departments across all the companies who are all in the business of managing that invoice right and that when a payments then made that that automatically updates to say that payments happen and it should be shared state across all the participants in the system including regulators and tax people all of that stuff should be a single integrated fabric now getting there is non-trivial even the blockchain getting there is non-trivial but imagine how much it would take out of the hassle of being alive if all of that stuff just worked as easily as credit card payments online it's it's a fundamental process that consumes you know a few percent of the time of every business in the world and you just go through and you sensibly automate and life becomes easier and that turns out to be a huge amount of our savings of cost and effort it's not fundamentally complicated getting there is extremely complicated but the actual there is not that complicated and there are also other versions of this story and you can talk people about currencies globalization regulation free trade there are all kinds of things people will pop them but I think just this notion that it's moving the business-to-business payments online in a sensible way I think that's the simplest credible version of why this is a big deal and for you this is the focus more than say the opportunity for the opportunity for shifting the way that we experience democracy for example it's a lot of talk about that in the blockchain story yes so the story the technology will affect society and make it fundamentally more democratic has been retold by every generation of anarchists since probably Kropotkin or before Kropotkin Oh HM 2013 was a big hot professor than other ones mari mccarthy and herbert snorrison who remembered the Islamic pirate party gave a talk about history of classical anarchism and technology and what they said very clearly and amazingly irritates me about all of my recorders were out of batteries it was the end of a really long day and I just didn't have any recording devices so we don't have a recording of the talk which is unfortunate because it was legendary but what they said was look every generation of classical anarchists has looked at the new technology and the disintermediated zone around the new technology and said look in this this one we didn't disintermediated zone we have small-scale community level freedom so Kropotkin it was the electric motor the electric motor will decentralize agriculture because you will no longer have to go to the mill to get everything processed as a result we'll get in a gamete aryan society direct electrical

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=600s) motor is the salvation of map trying to think it turns out and practice this doesn't happen we mistake the disintermediated flexible chaotic zone around new technology for being the potential of the new technology right it's not the potential the new technology it's just what rapid rate of change zones look like so every new technology comes along it's surrounded by this kind of bubble of freedom and possibility and openness and all the rest of this stuff and then as soon as the new technology fully matures it gets completely integrated into the enormous crystalline slab of mainstream society and then you get a set drop in the amount of Liberty in the system until the next new technology opens up another zone of exception so for example when everyone got excited about Facebook and social media and the ability to spread messages and then before long realize that it's actually being used to watch what you're interested in and sell you think you shouldn't release it where your desires and human drivers are precisely right the initial period the thing is brands parking you everybody that's interested in brands Sparky newest it's like ooh the fad why it's government's parks this is amazing let's go over there that's really fun whoo so you get this kind of early phase of novelty seeking chipping and everybody dances around the new thing like look the future of freedom freedom freedom because that's what the novelty seekers want once it becomes apparent to the rest of society that the novelty seekers have something worth having the rest of society trompin and the rest of society has a different set of desires they want it mainstreamed they want it regularize they want it simplified and they want it to pay and pretty soon the new thing is just another thing and so is that that's already happening with blockchain mm-hmm the blockchain dream of decentralization died before most people have ever even heard of the name the actual critical decisions were made about 2013 maybe even a little earlier so the original vision of Bitcoin and people will confess this but I'm very comfortable with my position was that people would largely do the Bitcoin mining at home on their laptops overnight as a result Bitcoin would never be a thing that person bought it reeling that was me at home in craft production if you had a laptop you would be all the class of people that could mine Bitcoin at home and as a result you'd have a secondary income stream of this kind of internet funny-money what happened was it they figured out there was a more efficient way of making Bitcoin which was it you designed special silicon chips which were enormously expensive to set up but then

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=750s) they would completely outclassed the laptop users as a result Bitcoin went from being a thing that you made yourself to a thing that you bought and at that point the entire profitability of Bitcoin as an enterprise instead of being distributed across the entire population of users assuming they had a laptop and went around of his concentrated power structure would the Bitcoin miners and these are very very heavy capitalist elites who reads enormous sums of money to build the next generation of chips to stay ahead of the development curve and the Red Queen race at the front of the Bitcoin process but then a room lead maybe half a dozen or a dozen players in that race mm-hmm and at that point turns out that you just have more capitalism and then for the rest of us it's little more than buying shares kind of coming into the crypto market mm-hmm so the original decentralization version was dead before most people ever heard of it and I remember fighting that like hell on the way down you know I was in the scene at that point just like this is a disaster this is not the way that we should do this boy holy is this gonna cause trouble and a bit and that's an example of this crystallization ossification process where things go from these zones of exception to being bolted into the real world does that mean that that's all of the potential around transparency democracy but all of this is somewhat pretend it's somewhat a spectacle well rember social enterprise right social enterprise ten years ago was going to fix everything social enterprise in practice is almost universally nonsense there's practically none of it that does any good and pays some things pay those who are almost exactly what businesses and they're constantly sacrificing their social mood agenda for the money other things take the other truck and they're basically territories they don't make any money they're constantly looking for grants and they might as well be charities that are only a tiny handful like two or three companies which successfully combine a business and the social agenda in a way which is good for both simultaneously almost all of the Morean trade offs only a few have achieved the synthesis niro the entire field is just nonsense and bankrupt and this is very very very typical there is a cyclical process where each generation seizes onto the things like this is how our generation will make the world a better place the world is not a better place right we're stuck in a loop of optimism for every generation of young optimistic people grab on to something and they build a little cargo cult

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=900s) around it which is their generational myth and then by the time they're in their 40s the ones that salvo we played the generational myth of the next generation of the elite and the ones who didn't are broke mm-hmm okay let's just take a deep breath is it still worth having a go and dying trying or is it pointless to engage in these myths to try and find a way you know as a famous American general once said nobody ever won a war by dying for their country you win a war by making some other bastard die for his right so I think that we have gotten into a trap where we think that we can solve the world's problems by creation and in fact what is required is not more creation what is required is extremely precise clinical destruction we need the old world to die and we need to kill it and because we don't have any strong positive rhetoric around destruction we use phrases like disruption we're going to disrupt the moribund industry that are such and such what that really means is we're going to just kill it coal-fired power plants these need to dolly right you might beat them to death with a solar panel but the basic impulse is look this thing is toxic for the whole humanity toxic for the future it's wrecking the environment it's poison and everything around it the people that work in our image are one of the people that extract the coal or living in terrible conditions why would we do this kill that yes get rid of it and I think that this is you know kind of the fallout of the American folk Buddhism the 1960s really took a completely incomplete understanding the culture latched on to it as if it was the new Christianity and then that distortion became the default reality for most progressive Westerners they all live inside of folk Buddhism they've got values like compassion it's not a Western value they don't understand it in the Asian way and they don't understand it in the traditional Western way they have this kind of mishmash of terrible ideas and then they're running around painting this stuff on all the surfaces assuming that will make impaired people just doesn't work you see a lot in the kind of you know South American ayahuasca thing you see all these old tribes in London a Viking are various kinds of IR skaters oh yes we're gonna have to see such and such and so on so we're not going to do so and so and I have no idea for the locals we think of these folks but I have a feeling that it's not very point you know a few of them might be sincere enough that they're making some genuine connection with the old culture and that they're learning something but the vast

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=1050s) majority of them we're just using their psychedelic experiences to bolster the myths in which they already live rather than to strip them and replace them with something which is closer to the actual grain of reality the folk religion of the Western progressives I think is the largest single block that we have to work to making real progress on any substantial global issue and with you and I'm just feeling into our friends listening many of them who are deep in this myth as you described it who are looking for a different way to relate to a world that doesn't make sense to them and have travelled physically or metaphorically into teachings that have provided some comfort and some roadmap mmm and yet I can hear that that's also perpetuating the story that we're in so how do we how do we take ourselves out of that how do we understand if what we have come to believe in is myth or is actually keys to take us somewhere else it's all bit both you know I mean regardless of what religious tradition you come from or spirituality you embrace you know somewhere period for in nearly everything that you know is just nonsense right I mean you know if you look at my own traditions Hinduism there's a whole bunch of totally hilarious nonsense in Hinduism and if it's understood as being like a Punch and Judy show at the site of the main religion you do okay and if you take it seriously you're in dreadful trouble the nuance that it takes culturally to know what's the Punch and Judy show and what's the actual main science this is not an easy thing to acquire right I am only half Indian I grew up in the West I'm sure there are things that I think are true that are just part of the Punch and Judy show that I just you know get that great and educate I might be enlightened but it's all the same things being educated right I have a Brahmin friend who's just like today I mean with all due respect you know nothing I'm like I know I know I just fail here and you know that sort of balance even for the people that are lifelong students is still there so I don't think it's realistic to expect the second or third generation of Western Ridge exposed to Asian religion to have good gentlemen but the first generation second generation of people exposed to

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=1200s) South American shamanism I have no idea even what they're our spectrum is of ideology inside of the shamanic world in South America right are they're good ones and bad ones are they're chaotic ones that orderly ones are there you know Sun worshipers and moon worshipers and jungle worshipers I just don't even know what the range of you know the spectrum of identities is for those people I couldn't even begin the mapa and what's happening is we're going down there and everybody assumes that it's the same like or does your shaman yeah but which kind I don't know I don't know the chemical I don't know that they're coming kinds maybe they're all identical but I would be very surprised the mixing of everything together that's happening so I was just gathering where there had been an ayahuasca ceremony just before it and then you know those people sending offering native-american prayers offering this and there's a group home it's also like mixed together and this is the American folk wisdom tradition right the the universal solvent for that stuff is that the idea that everybody should be in some way nice and that if everybody is nice the world will automatically improve and that's the the apse of a bedrock off the mythology and then they've got a fairly soft notion that there's some kind of individual spiritual development that will reads in the long run to some kind of a high state of consciousness in which you have a kind of charmed life in the world understanding that as the beginnings of an indigenous religious tradition in the West as a new religious movement would be the typical way of thinking of it it's extremely diffused and very very gated things are helpful we're thinking about so actual Buddhism it's not quite the new age it's matured a little since then it's got elements of a bunch of things it's very syncretic you know it's done enormous damage but also enormous amplification of hatha yoga all that stuff you know it's in the bucket the problem is and this is the the crux of the entire mass in the West doesn't constitute a valid spiritual path through which a person can attain self-realization if the answer is yes then you feed it your water you try and broaden the path everything will be fine if the answer is no they're all stuck in hell and they're never getting out because you know as they say in Tibetan Buddhism right the best thing to do is

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=1350s) not to start and if you start the best thing to do is to finish right like a snake going through a bamboo tube they say so if all these folks are you know snakes are three-quarters of the way down a bamboo tube then the thing has a blockage they're righteously screwed because if you can't go deep enough into the tradition that you come back to the equanimity of the world has always been here and we are only small if you can't get to that place where you can react cept the universe in a very profound sense you're just gonna wind up torturing yourself with completely impossible moral questions that you get more and more and more awareness of but you never break past and that's only one of half-a-dozen problems that you could get at that level of play it's an extraordinarily dangerous cultural possession because much of the innovation capital the human innovation capital the people that can do the thing in the Western culture have fallen into this incomplete folk tradition and if they can't get from the incomplete folk tradition to a proper fully integrated transcendence by their fifties the moral compromises that you have to make as part of the real world will eventually tear them to pieces and you see a lot of that you know the high level people inside of these scenes are often enormous ly burdened by spiritual insights they can't integrate an enormous moral guilt about the condition of the world their inability to change it you go to the Asian cultures the top class of teachers are just like yep I never said it was but it's also not our problem and they're still enormously engaged in the world in many cases but they're also free of the burden you know the kind of text on the world fully engaged but also fully liberated and if you come get fully liberated with the fully engaged the fully engaged ripped you to pieces we have issues indeed so that question about whether or not the kind of American folk Buddhists or ever you want to call that tradition can take people all the way I don't know how we would answer that I mean Ken Wilber certainly gave a pretty good old try but I'm not convinced that anybody from Ken Wilber gun has gone all the way there are a few other groups out there that have their own kind of isolated pockets of this and that there's Scientology which is bizarrely not to be sneezed on there's a whole bunch of weird stuff out there but if we don't have a fully matured Western enlightenment tradition that works how then are we to carry on the negotiation between Western culture and the rest of the world or the behavior of Western

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=1500s) culture who are we negotiating with if they have no enlightened leadership mm-hmm so if we're talking about you mentioned earlier the old world and the destruction of the old world that needs to happen what is that what is the old world and why does it need to be destroyed and I know that this is in many ways obvious but it helps to sort of bring it into the conversation so I'm I'm an engineer right at the end of the day I view global warming as basically three or four technologies which all completely suck right badly insulated housing two-ton heavy metal petrol breathing cars beef produced by methane in cows and those three technologies it's your transport is your housing and it's your soup and they all generate huge amounts were men and as a result the world is warming eventually it will break out the culture as we currently know it and then very bad things one legendarily bad things but things so bad people will talk about them in The Times dears bad things a lot I'd like to add our clothes into that begins enormous impact yeah absolutely absolutely I know less about that but certainly I'm gonna keep hearing about noises about fast fashion and you have pictures of these you know kind of garbage dumps of used clothing that look like aircraft hangars so yeah in that context how much cultural change is it take to get rid of those technologies if you've got alternate technologies which are much better than these technologies zero cultural changes require the adoption of solar panels that's happening right now started as a cultural movement and now it's run on pure heart efficiency arguments oh we could build a really expensive power plant or we built a really cheap one that's much more performant oh and we do the cheap thing that seems obvious so it's over the hump with the solar revolution is being driven by the fact the solar panels is better than the old world you'll come to a change required but it started as cultural change the Germans invested an unbelievable amount of money in building a really inefficient solar economy and because it drove through world war gender that they wanted and that was a key part because my understanding is it was a key part of what drove the price of solar panels down and built the industrial infrastructure that's currently decarbonizing the electricity industry in America and I think that's 14 that was the crossing point might mean 16 more than 50% of the new island tricity generation capacity that was built in the States was renewables so we're getting close to the point where the only new energy systems which were built or renewable energy systems and at that

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=1650s) point the old stuff just wears out and dies the coal plants are just like well you know the sins been in business 28 years we're gonna power it down next year and I'll be the last of them and then it up hundred free or not and same thing with meat getting people off the heavy meat diet is practically impossible right it's just very very hard time you make meat without having cows cow free meat well they can't clean me you grow it in you know industrial factories like you would have yogurt or cheese but what comes out is meat with very low carbon emissions and there's a decent chance that it's gonna be very cheap and very good quality because you can design exactly the meat that you want eventually it will probably don't even be animal cells you'll probably just build it from scratch but initially it's likely to be a cultured animal protein so you take a few cells of cow and you just turn it into a river humph rehearse that are some kind of like it's not even really food arguments but I think that if it's any good it will rapidly displace meat from the ecosystem and if we get rid of the downtown's nature grows back because across most of the world it will become so economic for human beings to occupy a huge part of nature that nature will just grow back because the people can no longer afford to compete with nature South America the thing which is eating the jungles is beef pasture if all those cows have been replaced with industrial cell culture the beef pasture goes back to be in Jungle and you don't need a set of environmental mandates do that the wrong economic power drives it so from my perspective there's a need for cultural activism when these things are not quite good enough to pass and the cultural will is to make up the gap but then once they're good enough it just rolls out through reality and things move very very very quickly and on most of the most of the worst problems are on that trajectory right now I'm actually more hopeful about the long term story than I have ever been in my life largely because of the solar panel revolution and I think the the replacement of the cow with industrial production is that's probably the biggest news of the 21st I hope we can crack up because you finally have a human race which doesn't live by cannibalism animals question all the Indians so it was a very good idea it's still hard to see that one happening the money is going in the technology is there biotech moves extremely quickly and I suspect it will be an option the people we a few times a year within less than five years and I think it could be massively mainstream in ten I think it will go from sort of you know prototype

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=1800s) products to really really everywhere very very quickly because the industrial supply chain you know you you get to the point where you're buying hamburgers from McDonald's and it arrives in the same truck you just check tech box in your box B and then hundreds of millions of people are now eating the new product mm-hmm so the switching is because you've got a lot of central power in the switching what's in the store in Walmart what's in the storm with donald's one of the big restaurant distributors carry on its task or by the switch could be extremely rapid and it's questionable how much meat is in some of those products anyway and so if it's being designed in a meatless but more refined way then the quality is going up yeah absolutely so you could get market driven transformation of the big three problems mm-hmm you know electric cars clean electricity clean meat not bad right 50 years ago that would have looked impossibly miraculous now it's pretty close some combination cultural activism and hard capitalism should deliver us a relatively utopian technical fix for the old world football and there'll be some fighting and screaming on the way down like government of Spain there's a whole bunch of pressure back against solar panels because I'm afraid they'll destabilize the electrical grid there are issues like that have to be contended with the old one occasionally kicks back but it can't be put down simply by you can only means as long as we have the investment in new technology do we have time for this to play out generally over 10 years - the myth is that somewhere around 200 million to 500 million people are going to starve to death in the next 20 years because of climate change right it's kind of a back-of-the-envelope gas you've got a mix of very questionable assumptions about how the agricultural system works it doesn't include things like you might be able to mass-produce protein in a biotech way there what's a questions about how it might work but I think there is a pretty decent chance that we'll get a big enough drought that it will pick up agriculture if that happens and portable goofy wall and enormous numbered and there'll be a whole bunch of civil war or hunger and the rest of this kind of stuff where do you see there's these wars and these droughts happening in the world I mean is this gonna be in London or are we talking mostly in agricultural nations oh I mean the poorest were good in war first right it could be Africa could be South

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=1950s) America it could be Asia India it could be everywhere simultaneously and it depends on the nature of the driver or whatever other condition it might be right but the closer you are to the ground the closer you are to lobbed rather than being insulated by the market the more direct leaks you are to climate change if you live directly from nature and nature is under attack you get hit first and cinemas and as an underlying race issue there as well well I mean in the world there is a straight-line correlation between skin color and life expectancy the darker you are the less one you live it's about 25 years right even in America there is a straight line graph between skin color and life expectancy so you can't get away from that right you plot it on a graph it's pretty clear what's happening there's no easy way to deny it and then there are a forest of different factors that contribute to that problem now what do you do about that is there anything that can be done yeah we've gone some way in decolonized in some parts of the culture to a limited degree but nobody really doubts that the world works in the way the world works and it's gonna be that way until something changes maybe it will be a slow easy and often things will gradually improve maybe there will be a sudden transformative moment of some kind a lot of people point to Obama and America as being you know the break with the tradition you could also look at the magnet Markel I mean you could suggest that the elites are beginning to accept that they're post-racial and given three or four generations that might always have doing anything about it in a more accelerated way than that I just don't know what we were she would pool you know how do you get hold of a problem that may have roots really may be genetic to the hundreds of millions of years point that we have a tendency to be hostile to animals that are less genetically somewhere to us we may not be able to dig a human being without changing the DNA where we've got statistical machinery that can observe racial bias we ought to be beating out of our controllable systems you know if you're a bank that's making wounds you want to be able to use software to detect racism and then stop racism inside of your institution because you've got a statistical base to make decisions from in areas where we don't have a statistical basis make decisions from but it's not institutions but it's individuals I think it's vastly harder to make a reasonable guess at how you would stop racism institutional racism where you've got a statistical basis and you can measure for it and you can detect it and you can change culture

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELF9RQUgKss&t=2100s) and you can fix it by force if you have to I think that kind of racism we could effectively stomp out the kind of racism which is just who does or doesn't get invited to the dinner parties we're not getting rid of that today right and it applies in all directions you know I mean you know if you if you're deep in Indian culture you know you invited too you know it cuts both ways on this stuff mm-hmm so yeah institutional racism I think we fix we can detect we can test for it we can do something personal racism and I'd be nice if people were nicer to each other but it's a big ask and that's because it's deep in our DNA I think there's a very good chance of it yeah I mean if you think about you know you think about across animal species it's very clear that you know things would compete in the same ecosystems are often very hostile to each other yeah cats fight you know dogs that kind of stuff I think there is a decent argument that many species are very very territorial and the territories are held by similar genetic groups think of your prairie dogs or something like that right you know if you're in travail and the other prey drugs and try be these two groups of prairie dogs they just don't mix the competitors they have a territorial boundary they you know make displays when they're holding court no no this is ours it's ours do you refute that kind of a thing would we expect humans to be free of that just because they grew thumbs them maybe some fundamental genetic tendencies there towards tribalism towards insularity there may be some places where we judge people's genetic similarity before we decide how we treat them I don't know this happens completely unconsciously I'm not saying that is for sure this way but I think it's a reasonable gasp and you can see some where things are on gender you know if you do experiments where somebody falls down stairs the reaction of the people around them is a hundred percent gender they're almost any fundamental psychology experiment you have to calibrate for gender because people treat many women completely differently a deep instinctive level and that really shouldn't surprise us because the men have always expendable the women have always not be right you know the size of the next generation is almost unrelated to the number of men you have around it's almost entirely related to number of women you have around so in almost any group if there's an incoming danger the men are instinctively thrown into the line of fire first to protect the women or children are we gonna change that anytime soon it seems unlikely and it's

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