# Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [685], part 1 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=0s) hey this is James Taylor host of the fringe voices show today I want to welcome back and thank Binet Gupta for taking the time to speak to me again about the coronavirus again Vinay Gupta is a Renaissance man and futurists interested in the technological transformation of society of Commerce the neh has a strong track record of thought leadership and environmental and infrastructure risk failing States energy policy and disaster management it was also responsible for helping to launch the cryptocurrency Ethereum and is currently the founder and CEO of Mattereum a technology startup for creating digital identities for the world of physical goods today we spoke about what exactly a pandemic is the politics of this issue importance of people on the front lines of this crisis societal challenges with intergenerational families responding to the coronavirus and some different scenarios of what may happen thanks again for listening and if you wish to support the show great interview and subscribe and also consider going to my patreon page hello fringe voices listeners today we welcome Vinay Gupta once again Vinay how are you doing and not too bad not too bad it's been a good weekend I got a lot of sleep and I watched a bunch of dumb TV I'm glad you got a lot of sleep like not getting a lot of sleep at all and but you did mention before that we started recording that it's definitely important to get sleep during these times right well yeah I mean in terms of general immunity like being well-rested is definitely a big part not getting ill in normal times I'm assuming this is gonna work the same way and I think you're right yeah and so I wanted to invite you back on again today because things are getting more real especially in the United States and I know in Europe as well and I just kind of wanted you to take the lead on presenting maybe some examples of practical solutions that people can think about your Twitter account has been amazing with the amount of resources and I'll link to a lot of the resources that you mentioned in the show notes but I think the first thing that you did make a good point about is what is a pandemic your definition of a pandemic now because this is what it officially is now yes so this came to my

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=150s) site when I was trying to explain what was going on so to be a pandemic is when society as a whole gets sick right you know the corona virus it affects individuals individuals get sick but society as a whole also gets sick so many people are ill but it affects everything that we do it affects the structure of the culture affects the economy you know the whole society has coronavirus because it's affecting the web of interconnections that ties all of us together into a society okay and then you know another thing so I think that's a clear distinction of what a pandemic is and that's what's going on right now and another thing that you had mentioned is the and I think we need to start talking about this too was called the dartboard of death it sounds like the ominous name but maybe you could take the down chord it is an ominous name I mean so this is a run for work that goes back to my work on worst case not total disasters I was doing what this work for the US Department of Defense there's a project there called star tides which I think now runs out of George Mason University humanitarian relief Network stuff so what we were looking for was a way of handling like refugee camps right if you're gonna build refugee camp in some climate how do you know that you've got all the right equipment how do we know that we have the right tents how do we know that we've got the right food how do we know that we've got the right medicine just how do we know that we've got all the bases covered and traditionally this had been done by having experienced people just don't figure that stuff out but what I wanted was a methodology that would like allow non specialists to work together to figure these things out and to get the same kind of results that you would hope for from experts so if you think of like small towns in America you might have the hospital administrators you might have the Chief of Police you might have you know a representative the governor's office you might have the school superintendents and you know everybody you know the folks running the hospitals you get all those people together and you sit down and you have a conversation about what you need to do it how everything's gonna work and at the end of that you want to walk out with the same kind of planning that you would have gotten if you had an expert in the room with you and so it was it was this idea of like how much of the X how much of the mental model that is inside of the head of the expert can be

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=300s) written down as a methodology that people that are thrown into the crisis without extensive preparation can use to get similar results of what you get for an expert and and so this model is officially called simple critical infrastructure maps and informally is known as the dark word of death because what you're left with at the end of it is a dartboard shaped graph that shows you or a chart really that shows you all the places through your risk exposure it shows you your risks it allows you to write down on this where'd all your countermeasures are so if your risk is you know we risk getting pandemic flu from our kids being at school or coronavirus sorry I keep calling it flu you know you you risk getting corroded virus to your kids go at school you don't have some decisions to make we can take the kids out of school are we gonna do not eat the kids when they come home who's gonna pick them up and it just allows you to systematically go through every area of your life just detailing out your exposures are and how everything is gonna work and it's quite methodical I've come under what pressure over the years to give it a nice hopeful name like you know the Wheel of Life instead of the daughter her word of death um but to be honor the process of doing this kind of planning is so frightening that I kind of feel like people deserve a fair warning before they start that's a good point right I mean I don't have you have you done it yeah have you done it for yourself you know I've been starting to do it because we did talk about this last time with you know the cold and all of that and illness mmm but I am lacks and not preparing more for it so I think this is a good reminder that I do need to do it I mean as you work through that filling its own resilience map store you could download a document they're called dealing in security and resilience mops org so as you as you start filling this thing in it is scary as hell because it makes you aware of all the places where you've got exposure to the you know risks of the world and that process is quite frightening and because it makes us aware of our interdependence with other people and this is where the pan in pandemic really hits home which is that every single person that you were dependent on to maintain your quality of life and your safety every single one of those people is also exposed to the same pandemic risks that you are some of them were some of the last so but we really are all in this

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=450s) together um and so doing this exercise makes people acutely aware of that interdependence and it also brings up lots of issues about the people that we don't normally think about so our delivery people or our garbage man or the you know orderlies at hospitals show up on these maps very very very clearly as being very important because it turns out they are very important it's just normally for really bad social and cultural reasons we don't think of those people as being important so it has a very strong tendency of revealing what's hidden to people and a way that's often initially quite disturbing and then it's very liberating and empowering but it's definitely one of these things where it tends to be you go down and then you come back up the other side yeah oh go ahead oh sorry please no and I'm just gonna say that you have made a lot of good points about like delivery driver or delivery people and you know people that we don't necessarily think about and how they are on the front lines right now of this pandemic this is something which is very it's bred into our culture right when I take an uber if I say to my friend when is the car I mean you know I'm not really thinking about the driver I'm thinking about the car and I could very easily instead say when is the driver coming and just this question with your head is the critical factor in the ubirr the fact that it's a car the fact that there's a driver like which one of these is necessary actually it turns out to be both of them but I would general respect to another human being we should probably think of the important part of that story is the driver not the car see I'm saying yeah and all of those little mental glitches kick you right in the knees when you start trying to do things like pandemic preparedness because all of those are tiny little blind spots where a problem can slip through if you're not thinking about the humanity of humor driver you're also not thinking about the infection status of the you put driver right you see how this works yeah definitely right that really des you know take off a mask because it reveals a whole bunch of sort of existing structural problems inside of our society which at the point where you get into pandemic country those little existing structural problems flare up as big problems we all serve you the Amazon workers were getting a ruby fraud deal from the company and they were being worked into the ground and now we're putting gigantic like

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=600s) at Christmas level load on Amazon in an environment where if one of those people is sick comes into work when they should say home ceases all over a bunch of boxes you could kick home for the entire new branch pandemic and and you're not in a position where you can say that that's the workers fall or Amazon's fault it's the system's fault we demanded low prices they delivered the low prices suddenly safety and workplace and in fact them control was more important than cheap and we didn't retool the deal where we started to treat these workers with a ton more respect because then we need them to do a safety critical job right all of this stuff is have gonna have to get sorted out because we're gonna be in this condition for a while and it's not like the government just sets the rules of the game and then everybody plays by those rules in America in the UK and the rest of Europe this stuff is largely negotiated we don't have the kind of authority that can just dictate a new structure for the society we have to hash this thing out the slow way which on one hand makes our societies free and open and very so durable but in the other way it closes up at the beginning of a crisis so as we work through this stuff you know it's really important to remember that this whole thing is about people and it's about understanding where you are interdependent with people in such a way that their problem is your problem which is to say their infection is your infection yeah and one thing that I did follow up on when we spoke the last time Mike's personally speaking is that I did talk to my building about you know how we can handle this epidemic or pandemic and then how are we cleaning surfaces and things like that I did get some positive responses but also some you know sort of the negative responses as well but what are some ways that individuals and we did touch upon this a little bit last time but what are some practical ways besides social distancing that individuals can take control of their lives as this pandemic starts to proceed so you need a super clear model is happening and unfortunately there's a lot mental cost involved in that model and there's or mental cost in maintaining keep it current so right now my understanding is that we're going to be looking at conditions until one of two things happens the first thing is that we develop a vaccine or an effective treatment and it goes from being

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=750s) extremely dangerous to being relatively manageable and you get slightly different outcomes if it's a vaccine then if it's a treatment but one way or the other you get into a condition where this thing is medically controllable and we go back and and where it's like any other infectious disease that we've got a reasonably good block on okay that's track one right and track two is that we fail to get that kind of control the situation but basically you know so many people have had the disease now have some or a lot of immunity to it that society kind of goes back to normal and the people that haven't got it yet are still gonna have serious health problems if they get it some of the time but the hospitals will have gone back to normal because we're well over the peak and it's still a problem but it's a problem for a relatively small percentage of the population and the virus tends to die out because most of the time when it tries to jump from an infected person to another person the other person jumps to more than half of the time has already had the disease the virus dies on their skin you see so these are two exits from the structural problem that we have right now either it goes back into the medical thing or our sort of immune systems collectively figure it out and at that point so many of us who renew that virus can't really get a toehold and the ones I have never had it aren't immune or general would be not gonna be exposed to the virus because it just can't spread very well does that make sense yeah these are these are the two strategies so in the meantime then you've got the social distancing stuff which is the infection control mechanism and the infection control mechanism resolve the social distance stuff and all the rest of that okay makes sense yeah that makes sense yeah yeah so social distancing is what we're doing in the meantime and then on the outside track you've got the people who are running towards getting us vaccines and antiviral drugs somewhere medical approaches and on the inside track you've the kind of long slow grained towards so many people had it that nobody else is gonna get very very very tricky right right so now you gotta start thinking what do we do from now until then and the answer generally speaking is just you know structured your life in such a way that your risk is minimized now here we have to talk about class again we have to talk about politics because the things which will prevent us responding correctly to this our political problems right pre-existing areas where we've got

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=900s) fuzziness called right causes the issues so right now there are basically there's a new class divide opening up which is the people that can't work from whom other people who can't work from home right if your work from home people then you work from home your exposure to the outside world is minimized you get your food and so on delivered and life is weird because you can't go to the office but it's sort of a bit like permanent vacation right I mean okay it's a vacation where you still have to work but the whole thing has this weird slightly dreamlike quality that you get up in the morning and you don't go to the office yeah right now yeah you know what of us are if you are of the work from home class cost hurryin refer to it social standing and your experience of the pandemic is completely different than if you're somebody that has to go to work to do their job so if you work in the medical field the medical arena you don't get work from home right you get and you know unless you're doing some kind of back off his desk job you get turn up in a place with tons of infected people and you know pray that you don't accidentally rub your eye you see yeah front lying direct exposure to high-risk areas versus I'm staying here in the comfort and security of my own bubble right right this is a stark class divide right this is two completely different experiences of what this whole pandemic situation is going to be like if you're somebody that's making minimum wage and your job is to turn up you know in a factory or park boxes on production line with 50 other people then you know your direct exposure is enormous and until the government steps and it stops people going to work then those jobs are going to continue there and unless the government steps in and does things like prevent people being kicked out of their houses for not paying rent how are these people gonna stay home and in America you want an additional layer of risk here which is do these people have medical cover UCI yeah so people listening to this is the pre-existing social structural problems get massively amplified by the presence of the pandemic so for you and me right we are in a position where work from

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=1050s) home as if there we can't I've been working from home for several years because I'm doing a start-up and basically office was an unneeded expense most of the time right I've got a little you know I have old there's an office like a rickety old office building new roof or I've got like a one-room office that I use cuz I've got like huge white words down there in a bear no conference string rig but like the actual team will assemble there maybe once in two weeks in normals function and I just go down there that's right thinking space and it's supposed to our goal or writing and you know that's kind of my that's for the heavy lift it gets done but it's not like I'm going into an office filled with people right that's my space that's where I work instead of doing in a bedroom right I also do an office down the way so the sort set up is a position of enormous privilege in the best of times but in a position where you have a pandemic going on that's absurd privilege you know like I walkie right and it's don't even really about money right we like you know I live a room I don't want to see our frugal life but like you know I've read an apartment in a very unfashionable part London I share with two other guys you know this is by no means the lap of luxury but it's just I'm in a position where I'm um just to get my life to work quite nicely in a way that I was really comfortable and happy with and that position of privilege is about having that freedom about having money but that freedom has given me a lot of adaptation capability in the position that we're in you learned then but if I had a boss breathing down my neck if I was doing exactly the same kind of work that I do right now by the boss breathing down my neck that expected me a turn up in the City of London work on the 24th floor in an open plan office with 600 people I could be getting paid four times while I'm getting paid now and my quality of life would be much lower and my risk exposure would be much higher that wouldn't have control to say I'm not gonna do that see what I'm saying yeah makes total sense especially when you're taking different classes now and then it does it's not like you're saying you gave some concrete examples this isn't necessarily depending on money either no it's not dependent on money but it is a pending a war on you know free and to some degree privilege and power right right it's a it's a very you know you're in a powerful place if you could say I'm

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=1200s) not gonna expose myself to there's risk and you can't make me write your name even more powerful place if you say I'm not gonna expose myself to this risk and nobody's even trying to make you write right so you know this is really important right now the people that are on the hard end of this are people that have to go to work they have it bad people that have to go to work in hospitals for them this is world war two dude right if you are hospital staff you're expecting to spend six months watching people die in corridors because you don't have another ventilator or another bed yes or you read any of the pieces coming out of Italy for medical stuff and it's a we're just like you guys have no idea what's happening what in Hell's name are you thinking why isn't every video home with your plastic tape over there where books yeah it's awful right and it's completely predictable that if we don't do the social distance and stuff in a full-on radical extreme way we won't wind up with those kind of results right and you're telling me the National Guard was doing food too he's in New Rochelle right right yeah the National Guard is New Rochelle yeah right so you know like that's don't stay in New Rochelle right that condition is don't it's not good to be confined at one place that sort of trouble is coming in to a Walter places I think another interesting thing is that there's a right now there's like a lot of hot pockets of where this is happening is specifically in the United States where like it's Seattle New York a couple of other areas like Ohio I think is another one and like my for example my parents live in Arizona there's not like a lot of cases there yet so that's kind of an interesting thing as well that's happening and but wouldn't you agree that it's probably gonna spread to all of those places anyways and I think it will be patchy you know I mean it depends a lot on infection control measures effects it depends a lot on dumb luck you know what we so the 1918 flu was that depending on when you close things like theatres or how much social distancing you did my friend Lucas refers to term contract reduction which i think is nicer contract right depending on how much contract reduction you did and you had half of the death rate in some places and others so I

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=1350s) think I think it will be very patchy you know if people in a little mountain town act like nothing is wrong because they don't like strangers anymore and then one of them turns out to get it then everybody's gonna get it right even if you're in a place where you don't think it is you still have to maintain precautions because not pertaining maintaining precautions is how you go from not having a lot of it having a lot of it that makes sense yeah you know it's it's pretty you know you just it's it's almost like wildfires right if you've got an enormous pile of dry wood eventually something will set on fire ramp if you just have a huge number of people interacting with each other as if there's no flue in the environment no coronavirus in the environment eventually somebody will talk to somebody who talked to somebody who had the damn thing and you'll have contagion and then run like wildfire right so you know even in the areas where you think you're secure you hafta maintain precautions because know her is so secure that nobody who ever breathed on anybody ever got there except maybe a nuclear bunker so I'm gonna I'm gonna talk more about this whole sort of the categories of how people are you know under pressure or under exposure so the other two super hard cases right so condition one you could work from home condition two you have to go to work right um condition three you're in medical you're in medical oh my god I feel for you now and it's gonna be so much harder later on you know we really ought to be restructuring society as if our medical people for like the new class of Special Forces guys you know if you're a hospital person you are deserving with the same kind of respect that we've traditionally reserved for elite combat units because frankly their death rate could be much the same as soldiers and wars if we don't figure out effective treatment regimes for keeping our doctor as well and it's the doctors it's the nurses right the nurses are going to be taking enormous amounts of the load on this because most of what you could do for these patients is nursing care right behind that you have all the orderlies and the cleaners the cooks and all the rest of the you know kind of facilities staff that make hospitals possible all the receptionist's and all you know all the entire structure everybody involved is going to be going to work in a building where you know that half of the people inside of that building have coronavirus and many of them are not gonna survive and as far as I can tell from the

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=1500s) numbers going to be the condition for the next six months once it starts and the hospitals max out yeah yeah yeah cuz I mean if you look at the reports in Italy the pandemic is not contained in Italy they're still getting more cases pouring in hospitals are already maxed out the Marik's screaming their head and their head of coronavirus control died of coronavirus that's right um you know well it turns out having a seven year old guy in that position was putting about a lot of risk we're gonna have to start putting like 25 in charge of things loose if they get sick they get well again and then they can continue to do the damn job yeah yeah it's a lots of structural change so medical condition 3 can do for is the people that have old parents and if you've got old parents you have some super hard decisions to make right again if you've got old parents you've got a car and you work from home you know you get into your car pretty sure you're not carrying the virus you go and visit your parents you bring them their food or their groceries or wherever is you took out of your storage so that you know that those things are safe you hand them to your parents you say how you give them a hug very carefully and then you come home again right that's the lucky that's the privileged condition if you're in a position where you're working a job you don't have control of your own infection status endear of the same way that you would if you were working from home then you have to sell it whether you're going to go and see your parents and help them take care of themselves or but they're in doing that you're endangering them by possibly taking a virus into their home yeah it makes sense right and this is that's the good the living choice I don't know tens of millions of Americans oh yeah what did we do in that situation yeah totally you're gonna say personally speaking Oh personally speaking yeah I mean I I don't live near my my immediate parents but my wife's family I you know we're trying to gauge this decision to because they're older they're susceptible and it's and we have you know they have a granddaughter so it's like how do we juggle this it's a lot of complicated decisions right now it's in the law of complicated decisions and there's very little clear clinical

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=1650s) guidance right so we're asking orderly people to take responsibility for a bunch of life or death where the medical science is still not sufficiently certain that the government's willing to give an opinion right okay you know much stress as this this is all the stress of the world because you're making wife or death decisions about people that you love in a position where the experts will get yeah I'm not happy with this I have noted and say no kids both my parents are already dead and the only old people that have particularly close relationships with with on other continents and you know the people that I really worried about have largely died in the last few years like you know I had an old friend Peter Feltham who was really important to me in some really deep ways and Peter died a while back so you know I'm in a position right don't have that as a load in my personal life but one of the people I shared my apartment with has parents I live a couple miles from here right and you know we're constantly trying to figure out like alright how are we gonna sort this out and right you know um you know I kind of sort of girlfriend lives with her parents right you know because wondered it's an expensive time you can have like a real job and be like a career person so with your folks and all of these questions but do you turn off to work or not you know these are ass-kicking problems right these right really really ass-kicking problems so you know if people have enormous angst about this and they're uncertain and they're scared and they're worried and they don't know what to do that is exactly where we are right now because the people with the expertise are not giving us clear a direction of what we ought to do about this stuff right compare that to the Chinese example where the government just said everybody go home nobody's allowed excited we'll make sure that you don't die your apartment you know that was kind of a different proposition it was yeah and there was you know people posting videos on tick-tock you know they just there's a lot of mass death going on but people were also able to or almost refrain themselves from those tough decisions I think in that the government kind of I mean this sort of defines authoritarian right the government made the decisions are told people what to do and people what he well did it right but you know the price

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=1800s) of freedom is that Americans get to make these decisions for themselves because if you're an authoritarian government and they get it wrong and then the enforce their will in the population and enormous number of people die there's kind of nothing you could do in that situation and now you're totally screwed yeah so when they get it right it was great and when they get it wrong everybody's completely hammered and you know how much face do we ever have and the ability of governments to get things right right any an additional thing of the in the United States and I don't know how much we want to get into politics but you know we have the presidential election that's happening right now and I know that a lot of you know the two candidates that are left are usually doing rallies or trying to get support and now that is large as well and we all the stuff you know I'm less and less interested in kind of a current electoral politics because in a sense the political framework of the society doesn't change depending on who's currently you know the chairman of the board the company is still in the same line of business right so the concern to me is more about class and structure than the specifics of exactly who happens to be in charge I know whoever is in charge it's going to make an enormous difference the outcomes you know different measures will get prioritized all the rest of that stuff but the end of the day it's really the personal aspect of the politics that hits us on this so right you know old folks taking responsibility for your parents in a position where you don't know whether or not you're gonna track a virus to them is a huge deal people that have the parents in their homes you know everybody is freaking out about the care home situation if they're taking a look at that because if somebody does bring an infection into a care will be enormous on the other hand if they get really good at keeping infections I don't care homes everybody will be safe there right maybe the staff start living there I don't know say again you know somebody who's real expertise needs to take a look at that I don't wanna do the analysis on that I don't have all the tools I would need never worked in the care home business don't really understand what options they've got for managing it you know back tell that that's gonna be a nightmare right and then the other thing schools so thank God I mean seriously thank God one of the phenomenal strokes the fact that we've

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=1950s) had with this thing is that it doesn't kill children right right my understanding of the way its data is that nobody that's been infected under the age of nine has died yeah which is very teenagers shoot oh my god can you imagine assisting also killed kids at the same rate killed so too we would be talking a whole different scenarios and yeah totally different covers right because it would run through schools and then all the kids who died oh my god right yeah you know I mean I can't you know we can't help the for you know a seven-year-old kid to die is a completely different tragedy when a 77 year old person dies now in 77 there is this tendency like well you know think run what are they really gonna do in the next ten years but a seven-year-old dies it's it puts a hole in an entire community oh yeah so you know there is a brutality that unfortunately you know we'd consider the deaths of the old to be less tragic than the deaths of the young but at the end of the day anybody that has children oh no it's just like oh my god fun god it's something to take my kids oh yeah but then you've got this intergenerational thing of you know your kids can still get it they can still infect you they can affect your parents you can they can infect you and then you can infect your parents and are we gonna take the kids out of school or are they gonna leave the kids in school there's all this faffing around about you know we want to keep the kids in school because this is where we feed them you know can you not just hire some teenagers with motorbikes the cooler and food to their houses if foodists the problem like yeah there's you know there's just layer by layer by layer by layer right right so all with this stuff I want to say really clearly is political right it's all political and and I think you know one thing that we've talked about is also like just having a lot of empathy as well for people I think I mean no social distancing guess that's gonna you know flatten the curve as they say but I think as you're expressing to is let's have some empathy and some kindness towards one another too because there is gonna be a lot of people that are extremely affected by this if not already and then you know I I don't know if we really want to get too deep into

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=2100s) this but I know you had mentioned that there's like boomer side going on on Twitter and things like this but empathy and kindness at a time like this is needed but I mean the Millennials are kind of in a bad position right I mean is he I think this is account of worms I've contained to leave largely lidded right now but I do so let's read the label and you know the the you know the really young kids the kids are basically born off for 9/11 have grown up with 20 years of war they've grown up with a federal government that has been really quite brutal in the way that it's handled all kinds of issues with foreign and they've grown up in the world so largely thought of America as a place it used to be great and then went off the rails 9/11 because it went back into militarism in a way that was largely seen as being destructive and unproductive so they've grown up in a totally different world economically culturally politically socially and even spiritually from the people like me where you know when I was 20 or 18 right when I turned 18 we got world's peace broke out you know the Berlin wall collapsed the economy boomed in the UK then I came to American the economy boomed four times harder from 20 to 30 it was just a ball you know and then it hit where as for these kids so just that the world has always sucked for us or asinus suck and now even more suck and what they see is the people of my generation or the older who they perceived to be very very rich and very very powerful particularly the people in their 60s who are allowing the kids struggle and struggle and struggle and squeezing them to death the student loans and all the rest this nonsense so you know but for them you know they kind of naturally or unnaturally some of them agrees to feel like this is basically just kicking the older generation the teeth of the old bastards deserve it you know we do when we needed you did you loosen the purse strings did you sort out the student loan thing did you get aren't us Healthcare knew you did none of these things don't expect us to cry about this and I feel like that is on one hand kind of totally outrageous and on the other hand I don't think anybody can deny that the younger generation has gotten completely shafted unsuccess through right I mean I grew up

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZdy6tPjNlc&t=2250s) with much better conditions then kids are growing up with now in terms of things like the her access to education right I think my entire student world was about I don't know twelve hundred pounds or something like that and you know for Kay it's her yeah I mean it was because prior to that we didn't even have student loans at the U K we used to pay people to go to university then it was read then we started having them take out loans to pay for their rent and food and then in America they have to take out huge loans to pay for their education and let me tell you something right if everybody in a room has paid thirty thousand dollars to be in the room and there are a hundred and twenty of them why is the person teaching the room also making thirty thousand dollars a year right right like you know if the garage who's teaching is making thirty ground and the student is paying thirty grand in theory you could have one Graz you per student so where the hell is the money going in that system yeah right yeah that's totally true totally true and because the whole thing is you know because nobody really gave a about what was happening to these kids because everybody just assumed education was expensive that's how it was gonna be you know there was no massive outrage to go there and audit the goddamn system figure out who was taking advantage and stop them the kids right every single one of the things which is flaring up here is an existing political structural problem and when you put the society under stress all of the existing problems suddenly erupted into new class problems right so this is kind of the lens that I looking at this through is you know elder care has been a big problem in the u.s. underfunding of school systems has been a problem in the u.s. access to health care has been a big problem in the u.s. food insecurity has been a big problem in the u.s. rural areas not getting proper support as the deindustrialization in the US every single one of those big problems now intersects with the pandemic and all those problems if it was a bad thing before now you want a pandemic - it never gets much worse yes it makes them make sense right so you know this is the predictive model if you understand that that's kind of where we are then you're taking an accurate model of our political strains and then you're adding

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