# Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @ Human // Nature // Stories > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [760]. 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/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2020-03-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - 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): Theory behind the fiction-to-design-to-build path that Harappa follows. - Career works it belongs to: - Cyberpunk (1984): The 1980s cyberpunk culture that came first; first computer a ZX81 in 1982. - 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: - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - 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: culture / history / fiction (32%); flu / infection / risk (21%); Climate politics & democracy (16%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: science fiction (6 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Cyberpunk (2 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); pandemic flu (2 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); scenario planning (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Shatner (2 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); Silicon Valley (2 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); vaccines (1 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); Scotland (1 here; 29 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); clean water (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); William Shatner (1 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated) - Importance: core-text score 0.52 (1.00 is the top), number 75 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [683] [CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/683.md): same career work: Cyberpunk - [562] [Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md): same career work: Cyberpunk - On the same works, just before: [191] [My Thoughtmenu on Enlightenment | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/191.md); [239] [The Future of Stuff (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/239.md); [251] [ODM 6981 Oxford Technology and Media Network Climate Change (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/251.md) - On the same works, just after: [771] [Vinay Gupta talks about Myths and Fears (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/771.md); [685] [Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 2 with Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/685.md); [681] [Pandemics and the Coronavirus Part 1 with Vinay Gupta (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/681.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 - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @ Human // Nature // Stories, video, 2020-03-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [760], https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=0s) well I'm thank you for all turning up on this freezing afternoon this was apparently the boiler house which is why they didn't put any insulation in it because it would have had an enormous boiler designed for getting rid of heat um so um there are multiple rules that we play in our lives and one of my roles is that I'm Hindu clergy I'm a member of an old yoga corridor called the naphtha sampler Dai and in that domain my name is Anna rock enough which basically means Lord of hell which is kind of appropriate if you spent half of your career dealing with nuclear terrorism pandemic flu failed States and so on I did a lot of time dealing with the end of the world my business card used to say I don't get out of bed for less than 1% mortality and it was true if it was good to kill less than 1% of the ambient population there was no point getting me involved um and I worked mainly as a strategic planner so as we watch the current flu pandemic come up around us you know bear in mind you're going to spend most of the rest of the summer staying indoors and staying away from people because if you go outside they might give your disease it has about a 1 in 200 chance of killing you and way more if you're old right we really are going to have a very very complicated difficult year China has you know hundreds of millions of people in quarantine right now just to keep them away from each other to slow up the rate which the flu is spreading now here's the question did I just tell you the truth or did I just tell you a myth kind of both right you [1:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=95s) know it's quite hard to say right now on available data for sure how bad that flu pandemic will be right the the critical number is a thing called the CFR the case fatality rate over the number of people that get the flu how many of them died and what makes that hard to tell is we don't know how many mild cases that are so everybody agrees it's looked at the flu about 50% of humans will catch the flu it's incredibly infectious and we've got really good evidence to show it's incredibly infectious the infectiousness is not in doubt what we don't know is for people that have died how many people got infected for every person that died because the people they get mild cases think they've got the cold and the people that have severe cases wind up in hospital so how do we know at this point in the game which way it's gonna go the answer is we don't write some scenarios it over helms a Health Service and a whole bunch of people die needlessly at home because there were no hospital beds in the other direction the whole thing largely blows over because it turns out everybody gets it and it's basically a common cold apart from one old person in 50 that gets really ill and then the Health Service saves them we really don't know which way this goes but if we wait until we've got solid data it's too late for us to do anything so you have to start the machinery before you know the truth and the assumptions you make the stories that you tell that enable you to act before you have all the facts are the myths which are inevitably folded up inside of all of our activities in any situation where you deal with the unknown and where you have to make decisions before you have all the data you wind up telling yourself a story about what will happen and that story is a kind of projective myth and those projective myths they're not there because we're dreamers or because we're run realistic they're there because if you wait until you of all the facts it's too late to act now does that remind us [3:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=216s) of any other situations where we might have a need to take stiff action but be unable to do it because we don't have the right methodological structure to gas moving right so the obvious one is climate change right we don't have all the data we've sure got a lot of data we've got way more data than we did 20 years ago but the smart money started panicking 25 34 years ago right I remember meeting Albert Bates of the world watch Institute in 1995 and he told me exactly where we were going you know here we are 25 years in the future from that point he nailed it exactly he knew exactly what was gonna happen so because we whack the myths to cause us to take action before all the facts are in play we're going to get hit way harder by climate than we would have gotten hit if we had had the correct mythic structure that correspond to getting us to apt in the ways that were necessary for our own survival decision extensors a model right no you think but you know what are the other you know examples where that's hit us like is this really that big a problem and is anybody old enough to remember the AIDS epidemic where suddenly pretty much all the gay people you knew died so there the problem is that there was an insufficient basis for panic right if they've done panic if they've done contact tracing if they've done all the normal things you do when you have an epidemic and in all probability they could have hugely slowed up the number of people who would have gotten AIDS in the early years and far more of those people would have lived long enough to get a protease inhibitors because they would have gotten infected after the medicine had a chance to catch up but because of the mythic structures that emerge around AIDS were nothing could be done you know gay cancer grid it was a widely understood as not being a thing that could be addressed so all the logical sensible stuff that could have been done wasn't done and the death toll was enormous Lee larger than in a heart to be so again and again and again and again we get into situations were confronted by data the data suggests a threat but isn't fully compelling and in the instances where we've got the right myths in our heads we react and often overreact can we think of a threat that [5:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=357s) we're overreacting because we've got the right myths for overreaction say terrorism is a good one terrorism say again immigration immigration is another good one right although immigration you know there's a bunch of really horrible suppressed data about immigrant behavior in Scandinavia right because the Scandinavian myth is immigration should be fine and the reality is it turns out that moving people across cultures is super hard so hard to say which way that one goes because in that instance we've got multiple myths simultaneously a bunch of bad right-wing myths and a bunch of evidence suppression on the left kind of hard to say where the truth is because the truth has become politicized and the politicization of true is a problem for another talk right now I'm really just talking about how we deal with the unknowns rather than why some people keep the unknowns as unknowns when we couldn't know that's a different problem so if we did the terrorism instance nobody you know is gonna die of terrorism it's almost as rare as getting hit by like falling space junk but because we had a mythic structure that could readily absorb that threat as a threat people very very very quickly mobilize down around terrorism as a thing that they were worried about and you saw an enormous over reaction around terrorism because we hunt the myths where we took a little bit of data we massively extrapolated that into a story and then the myth caused us to take action so the thing that I want to highlight here is that we think of myths as being about things which aren't real right oh the myth of the Green Man well you know real unreal depends what kind of really you mean but certainly not something that you're likely to run a car into on a country road at night and those kind of myths are all well and good but the myths actually govern our behavior are the myths where we look into the future on available data and guess what will happen projections futurism scenario planning a anticipatory response design science all of these are situations where we take a little bit of data and we just fill in the gaps with these mythic structures and if you map out those mythic structures in the areas where we have stories about reality which are not based on very much data there based on press media older stories previous generations experience the kind of boiling down of things that happened over and over again into patterns all of [8:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=503s) that stuff constitutes the vast majority of what happens in our society when were confronted with a new situation everybody runs four of their myths because the thing that makes a new situation new is that you don't really know which way it's gonna go in my own life I've watched three generations of the crypto revolution where computer scientists suddenly got a new round of tools to play with in cryptography and in every one of those rounds of the myth they tell is libertarian anarchism will take over the world and everybody will be freed from the shackles of the sake and every single time what happens is that the photographer's rapidly turn into bankers and then at that point they might as well be the state because they've picked up all of the trommel's of capitalism in the process because it just turns out that money has its own logic and you start with a bunch of anarchist rebels who have no money who suddenly have some money and pretty soon what you discover is that you know four legs are good but two legs are better and we've seen that cycle time after time after time you know Orwell's Animal Farm turns out to be enormously predictive of revolution because it turns out that running things turns you into the kind of person that runs things right or the kind of people that run things happen to be latent with nothing to run inside of your anarchist population and as the anarchists get a chance to run some stuff pretty soon the anarchists that are most like that wind up the ones in charge he's being in charge of Anarchy is always a forward so these kind of patterns does everybody see how this stuff is kind of unavoidable right it's baked into the structure of time that you will have to make decisions before you have all available data as a result you have to make assumptions and the way that we store and catalog those assumptions as is in cultural stories about the future which are the fabric of our mythic reality now there are two ways that things cross from this mythic fabric into the after ality of life one of them is like with the pandemic flu people just keep getting flu right and government's either keep them away for each other and make adaptation or don't individuals either make adaptation or don't but one or the other what settles the situation of what is happening with the flu is a bunch more people get flu and then eventually the thing Peters out and you see how many people died and that's pretty much the entire cycle but this is not the only situation because that's a situation where the thing goes [10:53](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=653s) from being a myth to being a reality [10:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=656s) generally speaking without human intervention events take their course some governments will keep people safer and keep them away from each other because mythically assume bad other governments will largely ignore it because they mythically assumed good but in both cases history will make up its own mind it's a whole different kettle of fish when we start talking about technology so if I look at computers I'd say in 1984 I can say hmm that's a pretty good replacement for a spreadsheet and I can see how you'd use it for typing letters on and you could play some games that's amazing I think there's a global market for maybe 2 million computers right or you could look at it and say you know 10 years ago that thing cost 50 times what it does today and in the future these things are gonna be so cheap you could use them to replace practically every appliance in the home that's amazing Wow this is the most important thing I've ever seen so when we're confronted with new technology some people have a mythic structure that causes them to engage other people have a mystic structure that causes them to ignore and because technology has been coming on so fast so hard and so successfully for the past 50 or so years the people whose mythic structure enables them to rapidly absorb technology and make optimistic forecasts about what it will achieve or at least how much of it will be available those people have tended to prosper and the people that have a mythic structure are of course nerds now the nerd thing you know it's kind of ill-defined because non nerds don't really understand what makes nerd stick right there's a lot of ambiguity about what is the nerd and the nerd is basically a combination of two forces the first force is autism right I'm absolutely serious an enormous amount of the kind of alpha nerd class the people that really get things done in nerd them are somewhere on the autism spectrum usually on the strong side of Asperger's and there's a lot of this I've spent an awful time working for companies run by alpha nerds who are well on the spectrum and my artist wrangling skills are excellent because that's essentially what I've done for all a good chunk of the time and you know you've got a few sociopaths kicked mixed in as well to kind of help the Nerds get things done but for the most part autism is the dominant cultural style of [13:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=806s) Technology the other force is the great unnamed religion of the era right can anybody name the state religion of the Nerds does anybody know what it is that unites all the nerves in a fundamental monolithic cultural bloc google google pickup world wide web no no one more try Star Wars close but no cigar sorry cuz Star Wars is about magic and swords and nerds are really poorly coordinated and they don't believe in magic right no the great unifying force is of course Star Trek right and by the [14:11](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=851s) way right now my first customer is William Shatner so I have to make a kind of disclaimer here I am actually Shockers blockchain dude so I have quite a lot of exposure to this thing right now typically what I go to conference is I'm carrying around a clear plastic plastic briefcase filled with Star Trek toys that Shatner has signed and I'm talking about the blockchain and Providence and all the rest of that stuff the company is called material and you will never see a nerdier project we designed it very carefully it is the apex of nerdery so Star Trek is the state religion of the geeks and I literally say state religion because the vast majority actual content in Star Trek is moral philosophy and specifically it is kind of high liberalism right if you think about Kirk Kirk basically constantly tries to avoid em screwing up a moral level they're always trying to do the right thing they always get into complicated moral situations and to get out of the complicated moral situation they usually have to do something absurd like kill a god or fix an entire culture by showing them the truth about where their religion originated but in every instance there's a rational explanation for what happened and the lead characters are struggling for a moral solution they hardly ever use violence to solve their problems and when they do use violence it's always in it's always what's what I'm looking for unsatisfactory they never get into a position where the answer is just to kill the bad guy in there everything is fixed they might wind up killing the bad guy but they always have to deal with the odd problem the bad guy caused as a separate process and the rosetta rules for this robbery had a manual that he forced the Star Trek writers to adhere to and that manual was a manual about the morality of an evolved human species and they tried to pump the morality of an evolved human species backward into the Nerds this is a really impressive piece of cultural engineering right I mean like a lot of work went into that and you know there are all kinds of weird stories about the Roddenberry's being involved in like talking to spirits from other dimensions that would basically give them all these stories that they then write down the whole thing gets weirder the longer you look at it and I have no idea what's true and what's not true from those stories now would everybody like to get really uncomfortable yeah so we take this Star [16:41](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1001s) Trek thing and the Nerds grow up as children watching the Star Trek thing and then they get to the productive part of their lives where they have the ability to change the world by building new technology right so what happens is that the Nerds gradually start to drag human society in the direction of Star Trek whether you like it or not right no [17:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1033s) how far have they gotten down this process well does everybody have a communicator right 100% market penetration for the Star Trek communicator 100% this thing is the most powerful force in your society and I guarantee you if Star Trek hadn't been there it would have been held up another 20 years maybe longer right so every time you pick this up you're picking up Star Trek every time you touch this you are touching the state religion of the Nerds because this is our first miracle and if you want to reject the religion of Star Trek you have to stop using cell phones right is anybody willing to make that sacrifice to have their own religion great so you're on with us you know young got one okay one heretic quick fetch the wood file right oh wait that's that's Catholicism not Star Trek in Star Trek you just ignore those people so this right this is no joke because what's happening is that there is an enormous transformation of human culture by technology and that technology is exclusively steered by science fiction whatever is the Nerds of reading is what you're gonna get right in the 1980s and 1990s there was a brief fashion for a science fiction sub genre called cyberpunk which was basically were noir fiction and the kind of dystopian future ISM intersected with cybernetics and computers and it was all about surveillance societies and enormous ly powerful corporations and you know a screwed up environment and dystopian use of robots and artificial intelligence and all the rest of that and that stuff was super fashionable from over 85 to probably 9/11 right which is basically a 15 year 20 year wedge and all of the Nerds of my age group read that stuff watch that stuff got exposed to that stuff and now they run Google Amazon Facebook and everything else right and all of those dystopian ideas about corporate power and the interface between estate and market and all the rest that stuff that were baked to cyberpunk because that stuff got read or what these people went when own built it know what I'm not suggesting is that [19:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1180s) we need state regulation of science fiction in the Soviet model right I mean that's literally how the Soviets tried to steer their society they tried to steer what myths you were allowed to talk about and think about in a way that allowed them to control the imaginations of entire generations this is not what I'm saying but what I'm saying is how many of you regularly read science fiction okay right now that's happening because of class war right you know Jules Verne and the Bronte's are writing about roughly the same time right there's an enormous upsurge of science fiction around the early days of the Industrial Revolution and there is a cultural war in the UK between the landed aristocracy that want to deny cultural legitimacy to science and engineering because they don't control science and engineering um on the science and engineering elites who are largely in the North who have their own fiction they have their own authors they have their own a desire to see the future shaped a particular way and they have tons of money because it turns out that they're incredibly productive so this whole thing of you know William Blake and the dark satanic Mills versus this kind of pastoral hogwash that right there is a way of making sure that the scientists and the engineers don't wind up running society and so what happens is the deal with determination of the myths of the scientists and the engineers and from the literary canon right that's why you don't study Star Trek in high school you live in a world which is completely dominated by 50 year old myth which has shaped the imaginations of three generations of scientists in shape to the physical world around you and incredibly deep ways but if you do a PhD in Star Trek people laugh at you they don't just laugh at you they laugh at your institution and this is literally because the English landed aristocracy cut a deal with the poet's to pretend that sheep were magical right well how much of sheep transformed your civilization right lost you know lost major impact that she was the Highland Clearances were my answers who's got kicked off their wanded airship right so this idea that pastoralism is in some way naturally related to the poetic right that is cultural warfare by the English aristocracy on the working-class so that they are a stock recei are looked upon as being associated with that which is [22:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1330s) good and artistic and holy because that's what William Blake told you rather than asking questions about going to the moon which is where Jules Verne rosanna right at that systematic cultural warfare to deny cultural legitimacy to science fiction is when nobody reads it and my very few people right here which means that you wind up with a cultural schism in which all of the power to control the future is in the hands of people that nobody has any respect for and that is class war that happened right here right not that long ago where the fiction and the art of the engineers and scientists was dealer Jetta mised as being high art but there is no higher art than the art that controls the future of the species and we are making it and nobody is reading it at least we're reading it and we continue to define the future of the species based on it well everybody else is going back to read the freaking Bronte sisters right Frankenstein was [23:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1387s) the important story not watering Heights Frankenstein was the story that informed generations of people working on artificial intelligence and robotics weathering Heights informed who about what and that cultural gap is why we feel like we have no control of what is happening in society because all the people that are making those decisions are living in a different parallel culture which is the culture of the outcasts it's the literary culture that dare not speak its name but it's where all the definitive decisions are being made now did that all broadly make sense and here's the question is that the truth or is it just another myth right it's a very convincing story that fills in the gaps and points to a whole bunch of data points but how do you figure out whether it's real or not yeah you have to wait and see whether the world continues to look more and more like Star Trek generation by generation by generation or whether some other body of mythic material comes in and takes over you have to figure out whether the Japanese really build giant fighting robots after four years of exposure to power - manga or whether they go off and do something else you know when you see the Japanese take to the field in four-story high killer robots you will know that this hypothesis is true how long do you think it's going to be now I think we are now ready to get to the [24:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1477s) point right he's looking really something bad is gonna happen so practically everything in human life involves dealing with the unknown right and we all have machinery in our brains which causes us to tell stories about the unknown and then we sort of put weight on those stories as if they're true because doing something and getting it wrong is still better on average in the long run than doing nothing and waiting for the facts we're made to take the risky gas because if we don't take the risk you guess we stay in our cave and we freeze to death right so what I want everybody to walk away from this with is a model where they understand that they have a whole operating system inside of their head about how to take the risky gas every time you have confronted in a situation where you don't have real information you look inside of yourself and you pull out a story you match the story to reality more or less and then the story gives you some advice about what to do and you do it or you do some of it or you kind of know what you ought to do and you don't do it depending on your level of confidence in the story right every time we deal with the unknown and every day we deal with the unknown so the dark mountain projects perspective on shaping the myths about the future is way of changing the way the people would act in the one run was spot all right and more and more and more of the dark material was fooled ago into reality and that's turning into a very successful attempt to get people to do something about climate change before it's too damn late because their opponent says look if you don't do something about climate change you're gonna get a world that looks like the one that were writing about and it's not the end of civilization and it's not the end of life and it's not the end of the future but it's by no means Star Trek and if you want a Star Trek you've got to empower the Star Trek people to build your Star Trek which means enormous funding for fusion research and by the way we wants a spaceships or you have to accept that you're gonna get the dreams of another band of wizards making their own stories about the future and telling them to you as if they were inevitable which is everybody else right the way that we deal with the unknown roots and myth there are multiple competing myths the myths that people act on tend to become true and my suggestion is that if you don't go for the utopian tech future and make sure that we deliver it you're [27:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1627s) gonna get some variety of dark pastoralism which is a dream that nobody really wants to live in right it's a question of fundamental Allegiance are we just gonna sit here and take this or are we gonna form Broncs behind the people that gave us clean water cheap electricity healthcare that works vaccines and the internet and get those people to solve the rest of our problems there we are we have time for three [27:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1659s) questions we have two questions so whoever puts their hand up quickest gets it nobody agreed there's lots of stories and myths out there and then you've got politicians like Bernie Sanders who's trying to do the right thing but there's a vast majority of people that aren't believing in that how do you shift that narrative um I don't think that Sanders can solve the problems that confront the human species he can solve the problems that confront the American middle class maybe but I don't see how he's gonna solve the rest of the problem right I mean you know it's all very well that we tell stories to change things but Sanders really going to deliver us a highly functional society with no scarcity right over the entire world by punching through all the technological barriers we need to punch through to get to that world or is he gonna rearrange how Americans pay for their healthcare and the bond will continue to play on eight worlds worth of consumption then I'll take it but you know like I would rather Frank we've had better work who was once known as a psychedelic warlord and was one of the early actors and a great hacker underground scene called the cult of the dead cow right president psychedelic war word that's my guy I'd give better work another you know eight years to polish his political game and we will get president psychedelic war Ward because he'll figure out how to cut the deal with Silicon Valley and we'll finally have a Silicon Valley President of the world okay next question so that was so absolutely interesting and I love the techno future but what about our connection to nature or separation from nature them all of Matt and many others have spoken about so the horrible truth here is that the only nature that has any realistic chance of surviving into the future are national parks right at the end of the day if we don't fence off nature and keep the monkeys out of it the monkeys will wreck [30:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1809s) it right and you know the national parks are more or less the only exposure than most of us have to nature because more or less anywhere you go in the earth which is vaguely human to habitable if this stuff isn't fenced off as parkland it will just be villages every five or ten or fifteen miles until the entire landscape is filled up and all the trees are chopped down so I think at this point it's more realistic to think about nature as being a heritage asset that we protect so that we have to consciously take responsibility for guarding nature against ourselves then thinking of nature as being a default baseline assumption that we kind of have and we have to not interfere with because the bottom line is that we've turned something like 95 percent of the animals by weight so if you weigh everything on earth that has a spinal column ninety-five percent of that is humans and their pets and their food animals we've wiped out pretty much all the vertebrates and turned them into pets or food so at that sense you know nature is more or less made of mice at this point and that's really horrendous right I mean you could go look up the stats oh listen it will shake you to the core we basically do the entire world's animals killed everything that wasn't a cow and then had the cows take all the remaining space and the you know the active guarding of nature against ourselves that the National Park mythos embodies I think is the right way forward ideally you want an earth which is basically run with morosely into our planet as a National Park right you put all the nasty heavy industry in space where there's no nature or screw up you take all the genetic engineering and you exile not only the people but the knowledge right you just can't get training in advanced biology if you're gonna live on plan so you go do that on Mars um because frankly there's no other realistic way of controlling the risk of genetic engineering you just cannot have genetic engineering know-how on earth in high densities with any realistic prospect of preventing somebody you know who develop schizophrenia and has access to a lab doing something insane right we have to push the genetic engineering into space or we have to stop genetic engineering entirely or we are screwed and nobody has a realistic approach to handling this you read the policy papers coming out with things like National Defense University or rusi on handling biotech risk and they're laughable they're just nonsense they're not even wrong so you know we have to really think about this stuff as nature as an asset that we're protecting from humans [32:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pNOcG75VA7w&t=1959s) and then we can take proper care of it um there's a there's a nuance here like I've kind of mangled that I want to go back and try and catch this why I can so because we don't understand that we've essentially terraformed the planet once already in the form of Agriculture it's very hard for us to understand that the only nature that is left is the nature that we specifically protected everything else is agriculture you know the high ones in Scotland those vast you know treeless barren mountains that everybody is so enthusiastic about that's a landscape made by agriculture because we cut down all the trees and place them with bloody sheep so what a lot of what we think of as being unspoiled wilderness is just peasant agriculture and the damage done by peasant agriculture and it's not until we get the cows out with the food economy by either all going vegan or replacing them with fake meat that we're going to be able to get nature back because that's how we make enough space for the national parks to take up half of each continent which is about the size of the nature that you need for it - meaning if we do things like stabilize the climate but you know it's it's really helpful to look at the numbers for how much of the mass of mammals is now humans and their pads and their food cows compared to what it was say five centuries ago you know we've really pretty much eaten everything that was there to eat and the nature that remain we basically keep it in cages cheerful okay I think we're gonna have to wrap it up there because we're about 30 minutes behind Thank You Vinay --- End of [760] Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @ Human // Nature // Stories. 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