# Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [677], 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, 2021-08-25 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU. 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): Global-tier governance framing for the plan.
- 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)
- 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)
  - 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: Climate politics & democracy (30%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Afghanistan (5 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); geoengineering (3 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 2 undated); global governance (3 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); state support (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); function of government (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Cutting machinery (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); The Cutting Machinery (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); CO2 footprint (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); Pentagon (3 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); ZOMBIE (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2012)
- Importance: core-text score 0.55 (1.00 is the top), number 59 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [704] [Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/704.md): close in content (cosine 0.93)
- On the same works, just before: [741] [Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, and the Hexayurt |... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/741.md); [773] [Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md); [245] [Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md)
- On the same works, just after: [762] [MetaGame meets Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/762.md); [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md); [702] [Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.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 - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World, video, 2021-08-25, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [677], https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=0s) hi and welcome to global governance futures based out of the global governance institute at university college london this is a podcast about the challenges facing humanity and possible global responses if you're new to the show and you want to get a list of our favorite books other resources listen to past shows and to join our community go to dot ucl.ac.you forward slash global dash governance we're really delighted to have vinay gupta join us for this episode one of twitter's great iconoclasts binet has one of the most lively eclectic and dare i say provocative twitter feeds out there one which i've been following for some time now and no stranger to challenging topics vinay has been working at the cold base of risk resilience and humanitarianism for decades now including a stint at our very own ucl institute for strategy resilience and security he's perhaps best known for his work in the crypto space for helping launch the ethereum blockchain platform in 2015 and he's currently ceo of the company Mattereum which is using the blockchain to build a system which can authenticate physical goods in his spare time he is the founder and lead for the hexayurt project a refugee shelter which he has designed to scale quickly in case of humanitarian disaster and vinay is also a meditation instructor who's divided his own bare bones meditation technique called the cutting machinery specifically designed to increase psychological resilience in the face of challenging situations so thanks so much vinay for taking the time out to speak with us today it's great to have you here uh good to be here good to be here and uh before we we get get to the questions i'll just invite the pog crew to introduce themselves hi so my name is sam and i run the video editing and hopefully some of the store behind the podcast hi i'm jessica and i'm one of the founders and i do research for the podcast hi i'm zoe i help out some of the logistics and also some other research for the podcast

[2:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=145s) all right so shall we begin with some scene setting um how difficult is the situation that we currently face as a global collective right now so it's a bit more put a bit more meat on the bones of that i mean how do we begin to make sense of the core social problems that we confront given their complexity and to put that into context you know a week ago the ipcc released its 2021 scientific assessment declaring code red for humanity already the news cycle has moved on given events in afghanistan and running along in the background we have covid19 and the possibility of repeat waves of infections so do all of these data points have something in common and where do we begin when it comes to defining the core problem or problems that we face um so there's a lot packed into that question right um i saw a recent piece on existential risk um that said you know the definition of an existential risk is something so bad that it even affects rich people and i think that that's a really important lens to bring to all of this stuff you know like you know oh it's the apocalypse everything is completely horrendous half of the human race will die in the next 20 years but only the poor half don't worry right and that kind of thinking pervades all of our thinking about these issues you know during covid we divided into two classes the class that got to work from home and the class that had to turn up and do their jobs in a mosque and hope that they weren't going to die right and that class division where you know the middle class and i include myself in this manage our kovid risk by having people deliver things to our houses rather than going shopping and you sort of hope that their workplaces are taking appropriate precautions but you know they're probably not you know that kind of fundamental class rooted hypocrisy is super deep rooted in everything to do with the crisis that we're currently facing right that that is absolutely the bedrock of where we're at climate change is not that hard to handle if you're going to have rich people massively splash their private footprints and by rich i mean the top say 600 million

[4:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=295s) people in the world i'm not talking about 14 billionaires no longer having super yachts there aren't enough of them for their personal consumption to be particularly significant right it's the you know billion or so middle class humans on earth are really doing the bedrock of the environmental damage and if you're going to wind down their standard of living to something which was sustainable claim it's a fairly manageable problem right but when you take you know class-based intransigence about hanging onto privilege and then you square it with the fact that that is already overpopulation by the rich you know the planet can't support on the current technology base a billion middle-class human beings with you know three-car garages and state-of-the-art health insurance never mind eight billion human beings with that standard of living and when you take this kind of class-based intransigence plus the fact that we've got limited technological solutions on the table you wind up with this seemingly immovable force hitting a an immovable object but it's irresistible for taking a movable object right and all of our problems right now are of this nature where if you can get human beings on mass behave differently these problems are pretty easy to get around but in the position that we're in where the human beings are essentially just randomly folding their own self-interest and fighting each other for every scrap of food um even relatively simple problems like kovitch should have been relatively containable even relatively simple problems like that become these enormous monsters

[6:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=390s) so let's drill down on this a bit more then i mean you've raised lots of different um points that i think we could we could click on i mean one would be um i mean how do we understand the kind of historical origins of what seems to be a highly defective maladaptive kind of social operating code that we that we're currently having to work with and you know how important is it for us to sort of trace backwards to the source of the problem before we can even begin to build out some kind of adequate something that looks like an adequate solution um so you know most of our countries started out as small businesses you know if you think of like uk plc 500 years ago you know uk plc was probably i don't know how many people work directly for the crowd three thousand five thousand you know you had a small kind of you know the crown with a you know a handful of soldiers and a bunch of artisans and maybe some scribes and a judge or two and then you had a vast sea of peasantry who were basically concerned with growing turnips in the occasional sheep and over a few hundred years that's scaled up in population by a factor of i don't know maybe 20 something like that um and the complexity has gone off the charts because of the growth of technology and there's also been this massive pervasive transformative um you know process of globalization where these things went from being relatively isolated to be massively networked so if you imagine that happening for companies you know if you took ford's management practices from say 10 years after it was founded and attempted to apply them to modern ford it would collapse you know if you run ibm like you did for ibm as a bankrupt company it would collapse and i would suggest that we're running our governments on much the same governance principles and methodologies that we were using for them hundreds and hundreds of years ago um and the the most kind of uh visible example of that is the ballot process where your pencil scratch on a piece of paper once every four years that's been in place since the invention of dirt and unsurprisingly it doesn't seem to be helping us sort of navigate the kind of complex modern environment that we're in all that well um so i would suggest that basically it's just government hasn't changed as much as everything else has changed and as a result government is less and less

[9:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=540s) able to cope with the environment that it's in and things which should have been caught pretty early and dealt with are being caught far too late by the time for the crisis

[9:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=550s) yeah so let's let's talk about that a little bit so uh last month the senior director at kpmg re-ran the models from the famous 1972 limits to growth reports which predicted that society would collapse sometime in the middle of this century and this senior director basically found that the results still apply that the original findings were confirmed that on the current sort of industrial growth trajectories across various metrics we are on track for collapse so i mean you've pointed to questions around you know ideology questions around social organization class divisions but also with in a context of hard physical limits earth energy systems how do we navigate a context of what would appear to be looming collapse what's your take on collapse what is your time frame for collapse and how does this qualify the claim that we can fix this situation okay so you know the reason i smile when you say the word collapse is you think it hasn't happened already right as i've said to people for years collapse means living in the same conditions as the people that grow your coffee right for whom has the world not collapsed the answer is rich people right uh you and i are probably top other what three percent of humans in terms of access to wealth yeah a little hard to measure because you know salaries versus taxes university level resources versus inherited wealth versus you know access debt how you measure wealth is a tricky question but at the end of the day we're hope winners look like in this environment and above us there are several tiers winners and hyper winners and hyper hyper hyper winners but from the perspective of almost everybody in the world they would change places with us in a metric heartbeat right so for us we say when will the collapse come everybody else they've already experienced the collapse you know these poor folks in india who you know 50 celsius in a city that doesn't have running top water for everybody never mind air conditioning that's a collapse you know what do you mean there's no more water there's a reward all the truck comes at 6 pm but you know my kids

[11:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=700s) are thirsty well there isn't any water does that sound like collapse conditions to you right that happened to me i would consider myself to be looking through a collapse so you know to paraphrase william gibson you're the collapse is here it's just not evenly distributed yet um and you know we have to live with that fact you know it's just we are in a world where there is a small elite which is hanging on by its fingernails to the illusion of business as usual while the rest of the world is going very rapidly to hell in a handbasket

[12:17](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=737s) on that point the name in terms of the unequal distribution of the collapse there's an inevitable element of colonialism and and past wrongs i wanted to ask how far is the situation we are now how far is it important to balance righting wrongs and solving a problem are they uh the same thing are they things that we should but we don't have to include or what's your opinion on the kind of writing past wrongs in its relation to just solving the problem plain and simple so my kind of take on this is the only kind of action on racism and colonials and i think matters at all is reparations right uh i think anybody that is not talking about racism in terms of representation i've sailed by some fly uh i think that anybody that is not talking about racism in the context of reparations is basically wasting everybody's time right and when i say reparations we're looking at by some estimates a bill of about 45 trillion pounds as the wealth extracted from the uk um but you know from india by the british right the uk is 45 trillion up and india is 45 trillion down and the capital which fueled the industrial revolution was stolen at gunpoint from the empire you know it's not a coincidence that the industrial revolution and the empire are happening at the same time the cheap raw materials and the gold that pays for building the machines this is all stolen right the empire goes out there to feed industrialization so you know then you say well what possible role could reparations have in the process of managing the climate problem and the answer to that is how are we going to pay for all of the poor countries leaping over the phase of coal and oil and natural gas and going directly to solar panels and batteries and windmills and all the rest of that stuff um because they don't have the access to capital to make that transformation so i think this is a relatively straightforward equation the west pays its debts to the development world and the developing world deploys that money so that we don't make the climate problem any worse in the process of pulling ourselves out of poverty and getting into a position where we have a reasonable standard of living for our people right there's no complexity about doing this right other than the fact that it's

[14:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=887s) going to you know absolutely economically most of the western powers can i just ask quinoa when you

[14:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=891s) say there's no complexity to doing this some scholars or analysts looking at energy systems are skeptical about the potential for renewable green tech to essentially replace fossil fuel energy that we are inevitably going to move to a situation of energy scarcity uh which will be very different to what we've experienced over the last 150 years uh energy abundance due to the energy return on investment that that oil and fossil fuels produce so i just wonder if you could address that sort of level that that complexity which some some analysts would would say actually is is going to be a key stumbling block in trying to make this transition so the crux of that problem is being able to put on you know say uh six or eight kilowatts of heating in you know four a.m when it's minus 10 celsius outside requires a gigantic energy infrastructure which you're not going to immediately be easily able to do but that's not the condition that the majority of the world faces the majority of the world live in hot countries and you don't really need electricity for heating except very very rarely you probably don't even need it for cooking because your houses are pretty well ventilated and you could cook for example wood or gas right you're you know if you are going to use electricity maybe it's going to be a single small induction plate that's burning you know 600 watts for 10 minutes right the possibilities for renewable energy are vast when you don't need to use it for heating right heating you know i mean if you put on a kettle right the kettle is something like three kilowatts two kilowatts um you know a phone charger is 10 watts so charging 200 phones or running one kettle if you're not using the electricity to make heat we can do renewable energy for everything everywhere very very very rapidly and then when you do need heat the possibility is you do that by wood burning from sustainable forestry and those kind of combinations i think can get to most of the human need for energy and then you've got to deal with a handful of countries which are so freaking cold that you have to do something catastrophic in order to be able to keep their homes in winter and my guess for that is you might wind up with a lot of

[17:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1041s) nuclear power right but maybe it's offshore wind um most of the people who are trying to model global energy demand are imagining that this kind of ludicrous first world wealth bubble can be extended to cover eight billion people and the truth is most of those eight billion people would like it but it's not happening but getting into a position where your children can get a decent education because they have night lights and they can read in the evenings and you know you've got access to television and other forms of entertainment and you know maybe you've got some cheap vr here in the background to keep your kids in use that level of energy consumption where everything that you're powering basically runs on five volts you know if you can charge it with a usb cable we can do renewable energy for everybody right and why do we think that this first world wealth bubble is going to continue to exist in an environment where most of the humans are starving you know let them eat cake is not really a thing and the less stable the world gets the more this kind of let them meet cake style environmentalism starts to fall to pieces it's not about making the ludicrous first world wealth bubble sustainable it's it's not about that the books just don't add up it can't be done why are we even trying

[18:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1116s) so in regards to this first world wealth bubble uh you've spoken about um how unsustainable the current government system is and how stagnant our means for electing leaders are and um and about how gross the reparations for uh over-exploiting countries are going to need to be and the massive policy changes and the reduction of uh or the change in lifestyle that is going to be necessary for the top you know 10 or you know whatever the number is so the current government system where we have leaders that are holding on to power i in my perspective is big problem in terms of the lack of proactive policy and the fact that changes aren't going to be made during the current election cycle so the electorate is not going to respond to problems that are not visible or in the collapse for the for the first world so what are the other options and do you see some form of global authoritarianism panopticon as inevitable are there uh any kind of government structures that we can draw inspiration from in the past so i think you could fix all of this with two very simple changes to how democracy works right and you know you're gonna laugh but you know if you've got make a cut somewhere i think this is how you do it and i think the answer is you just stop anybody uh over the age of 30 voting we just withdraw the franchise from anybody that is going to be dead by the time the climate crisis really hits and i think if you stopped anybody over the age of 30 from voting we would very rapidly wind up with progressive governments that would take climate change seriously because all of the voters are going to be young people who will be here to reap the whirlwind when this thing lands and you could implement that in a weekend right there's no bureaucratic problem we just take everybody on the voter's rules over the age of 30 and we take them off boom problem solved in 20 years you'll have seen environmentally centered governments that will do the right thing to solve these problems and it's a lot less unthinkable than most of the other answers people have for how we reform the system that's really interesting i've never heard about before um and i agree with you except for the fact that um a lot of people under the age of 30 are

[21:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1266s) exposed to media cycles that are fleeting and full of misinformation and the education and then all are just simply not there for the majority and this is the second part of the proposal um which is you make the term limit you so you make the electoral um period of service 12 years so rather than having four-year governments elected by everybody you have 12 year governments elected by people under 30. so if you're going to be stuck with these people for 12 years you are going to take selecting them extremely seriously because you don't get rid of them in four years and it also means that the politicians don't spend all of their time campaigning so i want to point out that this retains all of the principles of electoral democracy right we don't let young people vote because they're said to be irresponsible well that's exactly the same reason we shouldn't be letting 85 year olds vote they're irresponsible you can tell that because of the choices they make when you let them vote which currently indicate that they have diminished responsibility relative to climate because they're voting for a comfortable age rather than for saving their grandchildren and you know that kind of a responsibility maybe that shouldn't be allowed and i'm you know i'm obviously making kind of a bit of a sort of like reasonable proposal model here right like i'm deliberately taking an extremely provocative position but you know simply getting rid of these people um from the electoral process by deciding we're not going to let them vote because they have no stake in the future if you do that in a sensible way right um it's simply an extension of the same reason that we don't let for example 15 year olds vote right we've already got a democratic principle where we deny franchise to certain kinds of people based on their opinions no children voting no teenagers voting in america no people that have been convicted of a certain class of crimes voting right so we've already accepted the principle that we selectively remove franchise because we don't consider people to be fit and proper for exercising it let us consider how we might extend that principle to solve our problems oh my god you're talking about taking the vote away from both people yeah yeah i totally am right now is that a sensible proposal or not if we're talking about climate emergency and something must be done and this is absolutely the worst crisis we've ever faced that might be the cleanest and most bloodless proposal for rectifying the situation

[23:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1416s) right how serious are we about our own survival because the existing system doesn't work what is the simplest change you could make to the existing system to get a working change and i would suggest this is one of a class of proposals that might be relatively simple one-shot fixes that involve radical restructuring of the society using the existing machinery with slightly different parameters right you have to be between 12 and 30 to exercise a vote if you're not between 12 and 30 you don't get democracy no more well but but right you tell me why children can't vote well they can't vote because they're very responsible oh you've been like old people but old people have the benefit of a lifetime of experience yeah in an environment nothing like the one they're in and they still act like it's 1970 and it's a national disaster you know so in the scope of radical policy changes to fix the world i think you've got to say that is one of the least radical radical policy changes and if you don't like the result you get you can always move the number back right same thing with 12 year term limits why is it four years why is it five years why isn't it ten years why isn't it 15 years it's just a number and it's a number that we can adjust there's nothing magical where you know five years is the ideal number for the boxing you can't make it work at 12 it will be different but different is what we need and these are reversible changes nobody's being disenfranchised the property that can't be given back to them you could try it in a bunch of countries and see if it works well and if it doesn't go well you try it somewhere else differently but you know compared to things like direct democracy and you know uh bioregionalism and these kind of really radical structural changes this kind of stuff is much much much safer to try because if you don't like it you can put it back again and yeah i think it's radical enough to deliver us the changes that we need

[25:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1532s) so i just kind of want to pull on something that jess said about misinformation education you mentioned that um for young people to be able to vote they would have to select very carefully could be 12-year terms how would you propose i guess sort of resolving the education issue because if we're going to give young people and everyone an adequate access to education to make these decisions society is going to have to reform in some pretty drastic way because even though the changes seem simple they're they're drastic um how would you go about that how would you change education avoid sort of the disenfranchisement and the conspiracy theory runaways that we have today with young people um so i have a lot of respect for conspiracy theories right i mean take a take a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true right have you seen this list of wikipedia of conspiracy theories that turned out to be true there's a long list of conspiracy theories that turned out to be true so um i think that we you know are headed down a very dark path right when we suggest that there is an official received version of reality which is correct and that is taught to you by the education system and everything outside of that as a conspiracy theory and here i would point to the question of whether or not kovid 19 was originally cooked up in a lab in china right is that true or is that not true well you know kind of depends who you ask and it kind of depends when you ask them right lots of different people have said lots of different things i think it's entirely credible that this thing you know was originally an american occurrence where somebody got exposed to a virus robot it started in america then circulated to china i also think it's perfectly reasonable that somebody was doing a bunch of genetic tinkering with viruses because they wanted to understand them better and that happened in china and the virus jumped to the people who worked in the lab and then from there to the world now you know there was a point not so recently when facebook was banning people for discussing the possibility that that viral outbreak happened in a lab in china now a lot more people are beginning to take that seriously and you have you know like mainstream politicians who are raising that as a realistic possibility so when we say education is the answer we have to be very careful that we need education and not indoctrination

[28:02](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1682s) right and if education is the answer you know beyond the scientific method what can we teach people which is true if you want to teach people truths you've got basically you know uh mathematics and the scientific method everything beyond that is just temporary opinion um and here i would point to the pentagon's ufo report uh have we all read the pentagon ufo report it's only about nine pages right department of defense says by the way we've got radar traces for what appear to be physical objects that are moving in ways which are outside of our definition of the laws of physics right we've learned more about physics from watching the ufos using the pentagon's radar systems than we have at cern in the past 30 years because we now know for sure that the existing laws of physics we have are dramatically not the way the world really works and we've got radar data to prove it it's not like you can have an optical illusion on a military radar so what is it that we are to teach people the scientific method and mathematics maybe some history but it's it's very hard to say what is real in a really definitive way and if we're going to be basically telling people the parameters on the reality that may not be education as we understand it now i think i'm more i didn't mean so much indoctrination but i mean how do we give people the tools to determine their own truth well i mean is that not this i mean when we say determine their own truth right do you think the cia was responsible for the crack epidemic in america i'm not sure maybe right it's kind of an important question if you're american and you're black the question of whether the cia was deliberately importing cocaine into los angeles right as a continuation of the cultural warfare that started when they decided they were going to criminalize marijuana because black people smoked it you know we've got government documents about the war on drugs which make it very clear that it was intended originally as a tool of cultural oppression right if we're going to teach people to make up their own minds about things i think they're going to be very angry about what the things that have been done to them over the last 30 40 50 years and the stuff that has been going on particularly in america is like something out of the freaking x-files you know the tuskegee syphilis experiment right

[30:32](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1832s) you know how is anybody supposed to trust in an institution that did that to their ancestors you know if you let if you really educate people to make up their own minds you know i think they're going to be very unhappy why was alan touring well how did alan turing come to die right the guy who is dramatically centrally responsible for a huge part of the allied victory in world war ii right you know injected with a bunch of hormones um driven to suicide or possibly assassinated why did that happen right if we're going to be able to make up our own minds we're going to have to get serious about getting transparency from the governments about what they've actually done if you want the people to make up their own minds they're going to need first-class access to data and that means declassification of almost everything in the process i think the people are going to get very very very angry with the state because the state has been doing a lot of incredibly evil stuff not only on their behalf but also to them on the state's behalf so you know i'm all for education but what is it we're going to teach people

[31:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=1900s) so i'd just like to circle back to that question of truth uh you know and certainly when we think about truth uh as it applies to say moral claims so and to put it perhaps more starkly i mean how do we actually arrive at a collective at uh wise decisions so the standard empiricist model in science brackets such questions outside the appropriate scope of science i mean the first question is are there any wise decisions right i mean only available data there are things that you think are a good idea but if the available data is 50 wrong and a third of the data you need to make the wise decision it's impossible to make wise decisions right okay but as someone who's worked a lot in existential risk obviously you you're very familiar with and you thought a lot about the precautionary principle sure so how does that relate to that argument it would seem that even in the in in a situation where you don't have sufficient data to know what the consequence of your actions will be sometimes it's the wise decision is not to actually perform the experiment or whatever it may be sure but all of these things are horrifically important so you know if we simply ban biotechnology completely on the basis that you know like hey you know come on if we're going to wind up with 90 the human race dying it's going to come out of a lab right so we take a position that we're going to ban biotechnology we're just going to stop teaching that material we're going to defund the departments and we're going to get rid of biotech as an industry right great then the next plague runs around we don't have the mrna vaccine preparation capacity and it kills 90 of us or we go down the other track and we go whole hog on biotechnology and you know every high school is teaching people how to edit dna and then we wind up being wiped out by a series of designer plagues produced by angry 14 year olds right you know we literally don't have enough data to know what decision is the right decision and we can't get enough data to know that right which decision is the right decision so perhaps just to be provocative here's another example the development of say ai weaponized drone technology yeah is that a good idea well i mean if that's how you're going to end the age of oil is you're just going to send out a bunch of robots to blow up anything looks like an oil well or a coal mine maybe it's great right i mean you know the question is who's holding the weapon

[34:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=2050s) you know if we give greta thunderbird control of her very own global army is the world more or less likely to be here in a hundred years hard question you'd have to be very wise to make that call right and i'm not sure anybody is that wise you know i think at the end of the day we are still in a position where we're asking people to guess

[34:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=2076s) just to on that point going really old school plato guardians um where do you stand with that idea but it seems that in a lot of societies the idea of a a leader so there might be a in france for example there's a prime minister there's still a president you know figurehead and um do you think that we need to move beyond guardians or is it this weird paradox where we need people to lead but no one is ever able fully to lead because of human cognitive issues so my my suggestion is that it's not a human cognitive issue right i think it's an information theoretic issue um most of the really important decisions are decisions where we simply cannot know the outcome until the experiment is run and we can't run the experiment twice because we're going to have destroyed something that we can't get back in the process so if we model this as somebody is going to have to roll the dice right you know we've got the best available modeling about whether or not you do the following thing with your central band can you either get inflation deflation or a healthy economy we've run over numbers we think it's about 30 likely in each direction which policy are we going to pick right well how do we decide so if we model this as when we have to make a decision and there is no right or wrong answer because we can't get access to the data because the data doesn't exist and we don't have the mobiling power to predict how do we make those decisions that to me is the job of your head of state or your supreme court or your system of government wherever it is the you know the up actually maybe not supreme court but the the kind of ruling structure whether it's an individual or a group or the entire population by plebiscite however that is done that structure is there to make the decision when there's just inadequate data and somebody's got to guess and the critical thing about that institution is that institution is there to say we made the decision in the best possible way and at that point we're going to have to live with the outcomes whatever they may be um that is a very different thing from the kind of normative bureaucratic function of government where it has to figure out the best way of managing to collect taxes on vehicles you know like you're collecting taxes on vehicles there aren't many unknown unknowns you could kind of figure it out and all you need is a bunch of reasonably intelligent people who are interested in doing the right thing to

[37:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=2226s) solve the problem right those kind of decisions i don't think any country has really gotten dramatically better or dramatically worse performance out of that level of the bureaucracy you know you can argue maybe california is worse than singapore is better but you know at the end of the day there's not much in it the high level decision making where it's like we don't have adequate information we're just going to have to take a guess at this that job i think we have enormously different outcomes depending on how we get people into those positions of power and what they're allowed to do and you you could take a diversity as large as say you know the great dictators in the mid 20th century compared to say the swiss um so yeah i think i think it's i think the kind of bureaucratic normative levels of government i don't think it matters that much how we do that but the really really big decision making where you have to basically stare into the unknown to roll the dice i think there's huge room for improvement there so to merge the two ideas we've been talking about in terms of decision making and also voting for leaders one of the issues it seems to me is that we're voting for leaders who guarantee hopefully the prosperity of our plot of land that we happen to have been kind of birthed on um but we've also looked at um in previous discussions kind of the problems with voting for a group that will govern the whole planet and to the issues there and if you could just talk a bit about that that'd be quite an interesting discussion yeah planetary scale governance i mean realistically if we're going to get planetary scale governments it's going to be the u.n security council which is to say all the nuclear nations basically just telling the rest of the world how it's going to be from now on right there's no other body that exists that has any realistic ability to enforce globally so if you don't have the ability to enforce the people that don't like you are just going to ignore your opinion um so further into the climate crisis i could very easily see a rule by security council being the thing that turns the u.n into an efficient body right i'm very sorry you know albunia you have been continuing to run your oil extraction thing outside of the mandates that were set by the u.n and you've got three days to stop where we're going to carpet bomb you right we're simply going to destroy your royal infrastructure if you won't turn it off take it or leave it right that

[39:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ty27zTfcRU&t=2376s) kind of ability to enforce the only way you're going to get that is if the u.n security council basically declares itself to be the supreme high ruling council of earth and then starts pushing mandates down the pipe right because you know we're not going to get like even if you have run a planetary democracy tomorrow morning as a parallel institution you know one human one phone one vote right could we do that sure we could do that no problem with doing that you know it could advise it could be wise it could rule it could make the kind of you know it could have a council of 35 people like nelson mandela who basically define how the world is going to work and then all the people who have nuclear bombs will simply ignore them it might be able to exert influence it will not be able to exert power so you know you could have enormous social movements organized globally that kind of pushed in the right direction that voted for politicians with the right policies that tried to have a coordinated international response by coordinating responses inside of each country and interconnecting them and i would point to for example the sort of international network of green movements or green political parties or international federation red cross and red crescent as being things like that but on the other side of it just having nuclear cartel take over the world and then start giving orders about how things are going to get done that seems much more credible i'm not saying it would be good but you know even having a bad group of people visibly in charge might be better than having nobody visibly in charge you've written um you've written that our existing political structures and i assume you know that is both national and perhaps international perform extremely poorly because they cannot handle complex long-duration multi-actor conflicts and what you seem to be suggesting here is that one solution is to just reduce it down to the nuclear cartel that would make the game theoretic uh you know uh strategic considerations much simpler possibly yeah but i was

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