# Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [685], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2020-03-18 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc. 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): Applying SCIM thinking to COVID.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Dealing in Security (2010): Book setting out Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps: the 18 needs every population must meet, across 7...
  - Six ways people die (2008): Framework: people die of heat, cold, hunger, thirst, illness or injury, so infrastructure has to answer... (suggested by machine)
  - The Living City (2009): A Buttered Side Down talk to the engineering firm Arup, with Mike Bennett: how cities learned to beat... (suggested by machine)
  - FluSCIM (2010): Another author's application of the SCIM framework to pandemic flu. (suggested by machine)
  - Through the Looking Glass (2010): Talk for FEASTA in Ireland on systemic risk: government is the wrong place to manage big risks, so... (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:
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it. (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: flu / infection / risk (88%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: coronavirus (8 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); masks (3 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); Dealing in Security (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 4 undated); vaccines (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); supply chain (3 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); expertise (2 here; 65 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); Berlin (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Department of Defense (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); pandemic flu (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); TIDES (1 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.48 (1.00 is the top), number 104 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 0.92)
  - [704] [Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/704.md): close in content (cosine 0.91)
- On the same works, just before: [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md); [760] [Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md); [771] [Vinay Gupta talks about Myths and Fears (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/771.md)
- On the same works, just after: [681] [Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 1 with Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/681.md); [249] A long, difficult conversation about dealing with... (2020); [206] [Vinay Gupta's Big Idea: An Identity Layer for Your Things (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/206.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: Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta, video, 2020-03-18, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [685], https://guptaoption.com/texts/685.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=2400s) the flu to it and this is not politics in the sense of party politics this is politics in this sense of who pays for who you know are your schools can close who's gonna take care of your kids do you enough have enough money that you can afford to work from home and how people bring you food or are you the profession that has to go out there in the world bring the food you know no are you having to turn up in an institutional setting even if you're a banker if your boss insists you come into the office you know do you walk away from your job or you underwater with your mortgage all the way through it's this deeply interwoven matrix of cause and effect freedom and control you know rights and responsibilities and it's about matrix that all of the moral decision making of the ethical decision making in the pandemic attached to it that's the real battleground of our lives on this stuff right and then I don't want to take up too much of your time and also I did want to keep us fairly short but one thing and I appreciate this conversation that we've had so far I think it's like many issues and things that people are probably talking about already and a way to move forward one other thing I wanted to talk about though is just like maybe two concrete examples of practical things that could happen I know in New York City like if the internet and I'm trying not to be outrageous here but if the internet did fail there also is like a community of like a community internet called NYC mesh and I know there's letting other examples of this out here do you have like another like example practical example of when like if delivery stopped then how are people going to get food that type of thing yeah okay so we're talking about here is the general bucket of things people call collapse right right right so I used to work on failed States right I was largely a theoretician in the same time context but I was you know I was a failed state guy so I don't think that this virus is particularly likely to cause substantial interruptions in the function of the core infrastructure of society I think governing you know you know governance policing fire service

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=2550s) electrical internet gas water or all of that stuff I don't foresee much chance of that stuff going wrong systemically right you might get local problems where you know some particular power plant winds up with somebody in the cafeterias these are a bunch of things turns out when everyone gets ill at the same time and you have a temporary outage or you have to ship in workers from elsewhere to run it and you know I'm not saying there won't be a struggle to keep things together but I think that the current situation it's unlikely to be more than occasional party outages here and there um if this was the middle of winter I would have a completely different opinion about that um because keeping everything running in the cold states and American the middle winter takes a hundred percent effort from these folks so if then you knock out a third of them because they all got the flu the same day you're gonna have rope right but during the summer period I don't think that these systems are substantially endangered right okay and because you know even if you think about every time you get an enormous winter storm in someplace like Minnesota you know you have a bunch of incredibly tough people you know driving in monstrous trucks to go to you know fix power transformers or pylons or whatever the heck is they do do you know halfway up a mountain site in snowshoes yeah you know that level of effort and you've got a whole bunch of sick people you're really gonna have problems right but from now until the winter I don't foresee a great deal in the way of infrastructure problems and we didn't see it in most of the places I've already gotten kind of worst flu than we have here keep calling it flu I'm gonna have to switch that over there so I think that said yeah I mean it's best guess you know make a guarantee about it but like you know I'm not in a position where I'm recommending the people's aren't you're buying diesel generators and all the rest of that right it's not a situation okay no bulk food is a different question right so we're already beginning to see you know Amazon coming under strain because everybody's like I was on bring me magic things right mom is unfortunate we used two enormous spikes in bad happening at Christmas so I'm guessing that we got a Christmas play Buchan they're trying to figure out how to run it for six months um god bless our muscle I mean really really how much of a difference has it

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=2700s) made in my wife in the last month being able to think about what I ought to do in terms of preparing and just pull the trigger and it turns up on my doorstep you know oh yeah hey folks oh my goodness oh my goodness you know it's just like here we are and it's simple stuff right like you know I I'm gonna be spending way more time at home on calls and I wanted a tripod mount to put my ipod in so that it was a little closer to head height so it wasn't kind of looming over people when I'm talking them on a call 30 seconds I go quicker goodbye 50 but I'll turn off tomorrow you know and the what to be one of the most critical things that we can do is get Amazon you know to be able to deliver pharmaceuticals right if we could provide that service if they could get whatever licenses they need to basically integrate with the pharmacy system I think that that will save an enormous amount of people you exposed when they're already oh you know if you're you know you need your whatever your antidepressants your antibiotics you know your hay fever medication whatever it happens to be anything that's a box of pills could be dropped into the Amazon system and moved around pretty painlessly if they have the right pricing regulatory stuff insulin is a little harder insulin is always a super hot concern in these kind of situations where you've got some lunch interruption insulin is a huge deal so all of this said what I'm saying is I don't expect the grid services to go down I do expect consistent continuous sure ass in the heavy logistic systems particularly for the kind of stuff which is coming over from China and sea containers um I don't think it's gonna be any kind of issue and food again I'd have to put more tracking but I don't expect us to run out of food particularly in America where America is just a gigantic enormous farm you know you've basically got two coasts separated by three and a half thousand miles far but a little bit a desert in one corner yeah so I don't think food will be more than inconvenience nuisance level things um and it's certainly well within the capability of the National the federal government's to just you know airlift you know two and a half million hamburgers to some corner that winds up with an unexpected food pride crisis I just I just don't see there being big

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=2850s) shrubs around food I think the places where you go to get the problems are around convenience items you know like you run a printer ink well you know okay Amazon doesn't have any printer ink because the see container with printer ink is currently sitting on a dock in China okay where are we gonna get the print drink maybe this turns into you know maybe eBay winds up next in line after Amazonas the thing which comes enormous ly busy and it's just a whole bunch of people figuring out what they need or what they've got and selling off the additional stuff they don't need in their houses partly make a little money Paul things are down and partly to help people that need the stuff that they've got lying around it could be all that but all of this right between now and when society is kind of gotten to its feet and really figured out how to roll with the punches on this stuff in that initial period there's gonna be a whole bunch of herky-jerky we're diverges as companies figure out how to adapt and as you get the kind of first wave of bad surprises um so I would say if you're Mike I don't know what would be the kind of things like if you're if you've got something like eczema and you're very reliant on some particular Creed because it really helps your skin if it's non-prescription this is the kind of stuff that people might discover goes out the supply pretty quickly and then we have this awful problem Wolfe if I buy a bunch of it to take care of myself what happens if somebody else then can't buy it and maybe the answer is honorbound secondary markets where the people the dead stockpile things like that make sure they keep some of it available on something like eBay and then they can talk to people figure out whether the need is genuine and then sell it cost you know like I I feel like we'll figure all this stuff out as we go but it's important that we don't get into kind of scalping markets with these kind of things because then what will happen is you get people that don't have XM are buying the damn stuff up and it's keeping in a cupboard and extorting people and you know there's no way that's acceptable but you know if we're in a position where people who need these things do stock pile we ought to be in a position where that shouldn't be god and for those assets we all be in a position for somebody how stockpile but worth and they strictly need they ought to feel strongly encouraged to sell something or else in the same position so I don't think that we're gonna see large-scale problems in bulk supply I

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=3000s) think there'll be a bunch of torchi that's around it um I you know places where I first use really big problems or you know what do you do with you know tens of millions of bored American children and teenagers who perceive no real risk to themselves for an entire summer oh yeah you know we're already we've kind of stayed inside a lot in our daughter like going a little bit stir-crazy and it's like yeah what do we gotta figure things out here and especially with teenagers too like they're gonna yeah you're right yeah yeah I don't mean I think one approach to the teenager problem is we might just send them all camping I mean just how the Boy Scouts basically become a federal agency everybody ships they're teenagers you know some enormous Scout camp in the sky you know you've got a bunch of you know police officers and parole guys and other hard cases that have had the flu and are now immune who basically just stand around making sure that the kids don't do it each other too badly I did ship them out and let them party for a summer like fire okay there is no I don't supervision apart from these you know 15 retired you know cops that have had the fluid have gone over it and they're gonna make sure that nobody's you know and you know poison me anybody with bad drugs or raping any pity and we're not gonna let you guys have duels like you wanted to um and you know maybe you wind up with some kind of war skill cultural response like that because I just don't think it's particularly plausible that you're going to be able to maintain you know containment with teenagers for half a year in summer oh yeah you know they're gonna sneak out with their bedroom windows they're gonna go party their friends they're gonna come back and then they're gonna get flew to their entire goddamn family so if we don't find an official way of letting the teenagers off leash because they are relatively safe I think that we will find extraordinary problems maintaining containment and I don't know you know culture tends to fix these problems you know these are not really problems that are gonna get solved one parent-child conversation at time it will be one of these things where a trend kind of forms that'll be out sorts itself out I think the you know just geez very rude begin to stagger because I don't have kids so I've got very little insight into how that generation really works um I'm slowly slowly looking for the

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=3150s) right a touch out natural hazard being in your late 40s but I just have a gut feeling that something productive will come out of that mass but you'll be prepared for it to look pretty weird compared to previous norms okay alright because you know I mean how many teenagers are through New York and do we really expect them to stay inside all summer no way it's personally not it's no way you know they're literally gonna sneak out of their bedroom windows they're gonna have big parties on somebody's roof and then they're gonna come back and pretend that nothing happened and then you're gonna discover that somebody there had to go down flu and then half of them will get couvade none of them will die but the costs that around them will totally break containment in a huge lot of people right right so you know if we don't figure out structurally safe ways of letting the people that are a minimal risk and are maximally prone to disobedience of partying if we don't figure out how to let those people off the leash in a fairly safe way what's gonna happen is they're gonna pretend they're on leash and then they're gonna talk about a back with them and anybody thinks that we're gonna solve this by nailing their windows closed has no idea what they're dealing with exactly right it's like teeny nature it will get Waterworld so we got you know we just have to face all this stuff and sorry no go on no it's the realism thing again right you know if you realistic about taking your grandma you also be also have to be realistic about you know what your seventeen year old kid is gonna do know that they can't play football for the summer yeah I agree I think we've had a great conversation about the ways in which individuals could minimize their risk we've also talked about some different scenarios that could potentially play out and it doesn't seem like you're into and I would probably agree with this even though I have absolutely no experience with this that is going to be an extreme model of like supply chain extremes like supply chain disruptions but I just wanted to give you an opportunity before we close this out is there anything else that you wanted people to think about or know about okay so I want to distinguish between sort of rational concern and panic you know there's a lot of people being kind of

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=3300s) down on panic and we don't really a good model for very serious concern looks like that is not panic like okay I have massive concern about this I'm stay concerned a long time you know I'm really worried I'm gonna act accordingly um there's a hashtag kicking around Twitter right now which is high risk Cove 8:19 and it's people that have respiratory or a mutant who's basically saying look look if I catch this thing it's 70% like what you kill me I really want you're a new social distance yeah well I'm sure that we don't wind up with so much of the stuff right that we get infected oh yeah oh yeah and I mean I have you know a bondage from a pneumonia infection that I had in 2004 maybe it's one of the reasons I'm so is my metabolism just never really recovered from nothing um yeah I would ask me if I got the fan base of the Chronicle date I'd probably be about 10% likely to die you know nearly 50 far out shave someone problems that's really not great place to be on the other hand you know I'm also kind of tank-like because up until I was thirty you know I had 22 years of martial arts experience by the time I was 30 so I was pretty in shape when I was younger after I got that lung infection I was really never the same again so you know if you look at a model where half of the population gets in fact and I reckon I've got 10% mortality rate there's only or droop of 5% chance I don't make it to the end of this year right for the people that have that elevated risk of the old all fit into that category this whole thing is very very life and death at the same time where it's completely insignificant to people that are 50 years younger if you were 12 years old there is practically no chance this will affect you severely right where's your grandparents if they get it you know they're 2030 percent like we died right and that structural Taner in the experience between the generations but the single hardest thing for Americans to deal with because I think it's gonna require a washing of all of the intergenerational laundry to get cooperation between the generations and way that allows the sort of smooth integrated family functioning that we're going to need to get through this without a bunch of unnecessary deaths and infections everybody's gonna have to go home do their laundry with their parents or with their kids to get to the

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=3450s) point where people will tell the truth to each other and they can make plans together as a family for what is gonna be a difficult year and a dangerous one for the elders makes sense yeah all right you thought it was just gonna be masks and gloves no no it's much worse we have to do our emotional homework to you right and you were saying a lot a lot about this on your Twitter feed and I would actually like people encourage people to follow the nay on Twitter he just had some great insights into what could happen structural with like society in society structurally and I think these are very real things that if we're not thinking about there were probably gonna be thinking about them as soon as they happen so be you know just like mentally prepare yourself I think is a good thing to say and yeah appreciate you taking the time once again very welcome very welcome because I mean the thing is that people think that this is about masks and gloves and hand sanitizer and it is about those things but masks and gloves and hand sanitizer and the rest of that those things are shopping problems if you've got the stuff you get as much safety as the stuff will give you if you don't got the stuff you don't go outside you improvise you wash your hands you wrap a t-shirt around your face wherever it happens to be you know it's really about a level of comfort with your equipment and that's relatively simple mechanical technocratic process right I would say a week or two weeks from now we have largely figured that stuff out the supply chain will be gonna sort itself out the mask guys were gonna back into high production one way or the other we will have gotten that sore in outer first approximation and the much harder problems about infection control in a very stressed society you know my colleague on - inshallah panel has just written a piece which is based on his experience helping in prisons about how to do infection control based on the models they used for HIV inter-process because it turns out that the criminal justice system is like an enormous and infection accelerator because people go in they get infected on their own room and they come out again and then they bring it back to their communities um so there's a paper which will shortly be up on the material website we'll put on resilience maps to work as well we're like pre-existing social problem turns out to be a vector of for trans but so it's like social distancing is

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=3600s) one approach the other thing that you have to do is you have to close up all the cracks in your society where you can get dishonesty or conflict or people not working together or lack of cooperation you have to sew up all of those open wounds you know disinfect clean treat so that when people do have to work together they're not clearing up thirty years of emotional garbage unhatched up between generations since you know something bad happened in 1994 like you want to get that stuff cleaned out because if you're in a position where you know your parent calls you and says I need help you're gonna have to make a decision about whether or not the risk of you going over there is worth it or not and that requires you and the person you're talking to be fully open and honest to tell the truth to each other you can't have the shadows in the past distorting the communication and still get optimal outcomes when people have to work together in a life-or-death situation which is all of us for the rest of this year Wow thank you Renee I appreciate once again you're taking the time out I know you've got a lot of important work to do and you know we all have important decisions and things to think about so thank you so much once again very welcome um you know dad what's the good night good luck or keep calm and carry on we need you know we need a phrase like that for the flu we haven't got again but yeah we go we do need something no you're right all right thanks flattered thank you too for taking the time I mean these stories don't get told unless somebody you know put some I confront me and says okay tell me what what you think about this you know this stuff it stays inside of my head so thank you for taking the time no problem

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End of [685] Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [681](https://guptaoption.com/texts/681.md) Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 1 with Vinay Gupta (2020); the most closely related, [724](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md) Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.