# Grounded Gabbin' with Vinay Gupta (on the meta-crisis) (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [770], 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, 2020-06-20 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE. 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): Framing of systemic crisis.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Institute for Collapsonomics (2009): Co-founded a London group studying economies and states at the edge of collapse, formed after the 2008 crash.
  - 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:
  - black elephant: The black elephant term, from its naming to a Singapore lecture series.
  - 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)
- Ideas developed here: Black Elephant
- Topics: culture / history / fiction (21%); Open government & anti-corruption (14%); Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Black Elephant (6 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); scheduling (3 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2012, 1 undated); black elephants (2 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Collapsonomics (2 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); social stability (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2020); World Government Summit (1 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); Course of Action (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 2 undated); ShiftPod (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 2 undated); Pentagon (2 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); global governance (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2009)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): social stability
- Importance: core-text score 0.34 (1.00 is the top), number 201 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [54] [Framing The Collapsonomics Practice | The Bucky-Gandhi... (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/54.md): same career work: Institute for Collapsonomics
  - [223] [Finding Each other in the Ruins - resilience (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/223.md): same career work: Institute for Collapsonomics
- On the same works, just before: [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)
- On the same works, just after: [683] [CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/683.md); [248] [Vinay Gupta Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/248.md); [247] [Hexayurt Interviews Hexayurt Footage From The... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/247.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: Grounded Gabbin' with Vinay Gupta (on the meta-crisis), video, 2020-06-20, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [770], https://guptaoption.com/texts/770.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=0s) i'm here with vinay gupta a man who needs no introduction uh but he's a humanitarian systems designer and would you like to introduce me from your perspective that'd be fun sure uh i mean you're a freelance intellectual attempting to straighten out a whole bunch of our worst cultural misunderstandings yeah perfect um so should we jump right into the meta crisis yeah let's do it so um i mean you've done a lot of thinking around meta crisis and i've done a lot of thinking around individual crisis you know nukes pandemics state failure all the rest of these things um but i've never worked systemically on those issues at a political level so um was it weinstein who originally started this thing with like you know the the fundamental cause of all these problems is that we've got competition rather than cooperation in critical areas what if there was another way of doing it then you know schmachtenberger picks up that torch and you know that becomes this kind of somewhat disembodied game d narrative and then alongside of that i think sneaks this metacrisis story which is by the way all the things which are [ __ ] are [ __ ] in an integral way is that fair summary for yeah they they kind of crash into each other because the meta crisis discourse goes back to the to the 70s at least and a lot of the research of these different fields overlap right and so you know the the club of rome which thomas Bjelkeman is a member of right they had their limits to limits to growth report and i think either in there in another report they had 49 continuous critical problems right it was like a list of these specific things and actually the first thing was like population growth because it was just it's a generator of these sorts of crises at the root level and then there was other things like you know terrorism and stuff but it's all connected and they and they called them meta problems and so for me the metacrisis is you know the deep um kind of narratives and kind of path dependence that allows you know or enables all this to unfold and when we talk about crises like climate change or you know the educate you know education sector or you know financial crises or pandemics for example they're all underpinned

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=150s) um underpinning over determined is a more appropriate word right because there's so many factors that cause these things yep whereas the opposite would be kind of scaffolding and protection to make sure that these things don't happen right um yeah so the kind of discourse goes back far but then you know it's one of the things that brings us together in the meta modern community um but then yeah as as we've discussed there's overlapping intersections with the game b community and i'm not sure if they use the term used it before initially but they they definitely use it now yeah i feel like the meta crisis thing was in many ways game b beginning to sort itself out a little like okay you know so there is actually a single interwoven problem here that problem is you know multifaceted yada yada but you know the notion of game b is the thing that you deploy to fix the meta crisis i think is the kind of shorthand that a lot of people have for game b um but they're very interested in solutioneering and not very interested in understanding the meta crisis yeah and i think you know a problem within game b and within uh meta modernism too and within academia and different think tanks is they people don't realize the depth to which we reproduce the meta crisis yeah absolutely right there's just so many ways and and it can be just in terms of your your footprint obviously that's a big issue for you and your footprint is multiplied if you have children and and also in behavior right so both game b and meta modern people and integral people have different protocols for inter interaction and stuff you know different therapies that they use on themselves and on other people uh to scaffold up but then there's you know you quickly discover kind of double standards and and hypocrisy like you know that like these ideas of just certain standards for communication and of course it's all skewed through the through the internet and through text-based communication as well but you know some common ground is that we're kind of post-capitalist in aspiration right so we agree that capitalism is this driving force that compels us to make a lot of these mistakes over and over again you know on a simple level it's just the profit level because so many people are

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=300s) bound to their paychecks i mean this is the this is the thing about is capitalism an efficient way of allocating capital right like capitalism's claim is that it's the best possible way of allocating capital and at the point where capitalism is no longer the best way of allocating capital capitalism no longer has its central claim to legitimacy it's a good way of moving capital whether it's a good way of allocating capital is a separate question so there's an old paper um paper article uh called in soviet union uh scheduling problem solves you and basically what it examines is the possibility of quantum socialism where um the core economic problem that capitalism theory solves efficiently is the scheduling problem which is how do you marshal the physical resources to produce the most efficient outputs and that problem is you know np complete or np hard or something like that it's completely resistant to classical algorithms the argument is that capitalism is basically a genetic algorithm for solving that problem right capital is invested back in the things that work and it's like a it's like a greedy genetic algorithm uh and that article says well you know in theory if you've got quantum computers then you can solve the scheduling problem with a perfect output because you've got so much computing power that specifically solves those kind of combinatorial problems that you can very quickly imagine a society in which you simply don't have waste because the machine is all knowing and all doing and that i think is quite interesting because it it kind of cracks open this question about what is the necessary technological substrate for socialism right it's pretty clear that if you do socialism with industrial tooling most of the time you get death camps right and you know i refer to this as being socialism like logic bomb that on paper the code looks fine then you run the code then you get death comes yeah like well you know i didn't i didn't realize when we were doing this we were signing up for death camps well no i don't think you were but where did it come you know it's like a logic bomb in the code of socialism and you know socialism is kind of unsafe at any speed because we know that very often when you compile and run the code you get things like stalinism well that wasn't what we had in mind so this notion of like is that a technological problem is it that socialism just doesn't work at an industrial technology level but it

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=450s) might work at a much higher technology level yeah maybe something said yeah i think i think we're getting there and a lot of my work does go in that direction however as soon as you said the technological substrate i thought about you know the social substrate because we're still pretty far from that that necessarily you know whoa so i um before uh before we got on the call i was sitting down and watching a chunk of netflix's version of the ramayana right the ramayana is one of the two big indian myths so ramayana is mostly about the doings of gods and mahabharata is largely about the doings of men and the entire show is an adventure story um about a bunch of people that are massively in love with each other and super devoted to each other so you know entire family groups you know aunts uncles grandparents are just like you know they have this profound reverence for each other um and then they're interacting with a bunch of hobgoblins that want to screw up their plans right the the sort of spiritual social familial unity and familial loyalty that are at the heart of that story are you know they ring like a bell right you know you have these long 20 or 30 second scenes which are just all of the family members sagely nodding as somebody is talking and exchanging these kind of looks of approval like yes yes this is this is what this is our map yes this is amazing um then i switched over to an australian tv show where they locked eight comics in a basement with a huge variety of props and the last person to laugh wins 100 rat right and these people are professional peers they've been set against each other there are no limits because there's no audience so they do whatever it takes to try and get that laugh and they're systematically trying to eliminate each other and the difference in conception of what a human being is for right between those two experiences you know it's like oh this is why i can't function in western society you know i did all this meditation stuff i became enlightened when i was probably 26. you know like i've been enlightened for almost half my life at this point pretty close um you know the spiritual values of asia are really all that makes sense to me

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=600s) and capitalism looks like the goblins from one of these uh old indian epics just got hold of the controls and are attempting to crash the ship into the cliff for fun like it's becoming harder and harder for me to look at capitalism as anything other than demonic in the way that it's currently practiced um and i don't mean that in a literal sense but you know the notion that there are in some sense frequencies of consciousness and that we're stuck in a very low one is valid um but on the other hand the recipes for getting us out of that mess that people propose are clearly nonsense so yeah and what i'm about to say is a little bit of an oversimplification but you know this the the what capitalism does to society you know we have on one hand this kind of general progress right piecemeal change incrementalism yeah you know you know you can say empirically things are getting better but on the other hand um you know especially the the past 50 years of neoliberalism it you know i i i think of it in terms of this you know it it tilts the whole political spectrum sideways so everything slips to the right to the right yeah oh you know so the democrats are more right wings and the soviets stopped being a threat you know the whole political spectrum has right slid right with no restraint yeah and it's often you know people point to like fish hook theory as a meme to kind of capture this um and so you know this is why i think a lot of people are confused because capitalism is distorting us ideologically right and instead of being self-aware people like dig in and rationalize what's happening you know so you have all these so-called centrist people yeah are actually representing pretty crazy ideas like they're anti-left and anti-far right so yeah i mean the the so the democratic party now looks to me like it's got roughly the same political opinion as george bush the first did well and george george bush jr endorsed biden didn't he you know so it's all coming full circle yeah yeah but i mean that so that log jam is like not that big a deal as long as you don't have a dying planet right right like if that was just oh america's political culture is really broken right now give it you know 58 years they'll sort themselves out yeah that's okay

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=750s) but at this point we don't really have fifty or eight years right um i mean i pen pendulum politics and we don't have time for that [ __ ] anymore yeah yeah pendulum politics but also i mean neither end of that pendulum is remotely realistic about the global situation yeah so it's all very well having a pendulum but you know if the pendulum is swinging backwards forwards like this and the problem is somewhere up here right now so i mean 2002 i started working on handling 30 million climate refugees sorry 300 million refugee um and i figured it was going to take me 30 years to get it done right you know just to get a deployable global capability i figured it was going to take 30 years because everything i'd seen from like structure scientific revolutions told me that paradigm changes take 30 years right 15 years to get the first group of people well and up to speed on your paradigm and then another 15 years for that paradigm to spread to the point where it has any kind of global impact um so you know 2002 i would have been 30. i figured out that this thing was going to be done by the time i was 60. um i'm now four two fifths three fifths of the way into that right eighteen years into the hexayurt project we've got live refugees living in a hexayurt derivative called the ShiftPod um the acceleration of the climate mess makes it pretty obvious that 12 years from now it's very likely that we are going to have enormous numbers of hexayurt type things deployed because people are going to get pushed out of their homes at such a rate but yeah you know that course of action even though it's been entirely rational i still can't count 20 people in the world that understand that i'm literally planning for 300 million refugees right yeah and somebody's got to do here are the technologies to stop these people dying right if we don't develop these technologies they will all die because nobody will pay to keep them alive we have to figure out a way of doing this and even though everybody's running around the whole climate climate climate when you sit down and say okay so you know numbers say actually it could be well over a billion displaced by 2050 right like oh that's like an eighth of the human race now we're really talking big numbers right if it costs you a thousand bucks a family to move a billion people you know you're pretty soon talking about like defense level budgets just to move these people

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=900s) um and there's a psychological barrier that seems to stop people understanding that this is the future yeah and it's funny because we expend tons of imagination in films and stuff and books too imagining this but a lot of it like either misses the mark or misses the point or or does not it does not come back into our into our practice and into what we're developing yeah because i mean the the habitual tendency of people who do the same thing that their parents did or as close as they can get to it i think is overwhelming all of the intelligence about what's happening in the future yeah that sort of ethological return to base you know we did this yesterday we're going to do it tomorrow that's just how it is that kind of tendency i think is so powerful that it's very very very hard for people to overcome it um and that is that's extremely worrying because if people don't realize that what climate change means is your children will live in hell it's quite hard to move uh and then we've got nukes and biotechnology and nanotechnology and you know methane emissions and whatever the heck else is you know like this is your whole metacrisis thing of like every one of these systems is connected to every other one of these systems and if you begin to cut through that stock the risk is the kind of spontaneous large-scale collapse uh and yeah i mean i'm i'm still unconsciously braced for that yeah one thing that pops into my head when you mention your refugee hexayurts is the idea of you know and this is i mean your your immediate rebuttal would be something along the lines of well it's going to take so much energy and materials to produce this but but what pops into my head is the idea of like manufactured homes in those kind of shipping containers yeah yeah right so i've seen i've seen prototypes but it's like it's 20 20. like why you know it feels like the the world is so behind the curve on this and you know it but it's a way to scale up the solution with the technology that's becoming you know increasingly advanced and granular and part of you know artificial intelligence i mean the critical thing that you nail there is how far the world is behind in preparing for what is to come right and and it's that conceptual gap right so the the meta crisis thing of all of these interlocking systems that are under strain i didn't realize that

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=1050s) concept went back as far as the club room um so the notion that that is fraying to pieces and the whole thing is going apeshit um and then you know what's your chosen intervention point on that right so the game b intervention point is basically competition is the enemy how do we eliminate the competition mindset right the game b has so far as far as i can tell not generated a single concrete policy proposal yeah they they aggregate a lot of stuff too which is which is great but you know you know touching on the rivalry point obviously they are a bit rivalrous because you and i both got kicked out oh yeah yeah in a competitive way culture is that they are bastards i mean there's just no two ways about it you know a visa you know um the visa corporation has this had this very very flexible fluid decentralized governance model they called chaotix right um but the running joke was the d hawk who's the founder of the v of visa was the most hard-bitten rigid authoritarian son of a [ __ ] that anybody had ever seen right so the flexible decentralized model worked because at the heart of it you had an autocrat right very much like you see with open source like you build a flexible decentralized model and then you put an authoritarian bastard on top of that pile and that's kind of the game b flavor that they have a fundamentally authoritarian process even though they're talking about a non-competitive future their actual way of doing things is brutally authoritarian yeah as we both encountered right yeah um so the thing about the conflict not is this um rendered as absolutely clear economic theory this post-conflict model has some great examples right the primary one of these well you could think of all the stuff about commons management right ostrom you know this kind of thing you know can you figure out ways of cooperatively managing commons so that everybody does better than mood if you don't do that great approach fantastic we ought to do that very nice um but it's not getting done yeah and if it's not getting done what do we have left right yeah related irony is you know uh game b in principle is you know against war but they're not

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=1200s) above kind of you know employing or advocating and and demilitarization is a huge principle for me and because in terms of the meta crisis right so if you know if you read any political theory or history there's a certain you know realism and path dependence as we've said about war like and as as they would say in game b like game theory like there's a kind of determinism to war right like okay historically i get it historically because that's you know you have people separated they don't have phones you know they're separated by distance they have scarce resources there's all sorts of inputs that make that the logical evolutionary track right okay but things are changing and my my theoretical ideas of metamodernism and the medic convergence uh kind of you know presuppose an inversion of that and if we're to you know steel man game b that's what they want too um but it really is becoming increasingly obvious that like you can't solve any of these problems through violence but not only that the premise that we're trying to overturn here is that governance is presupposed or or predicated on the threat on the threat of force like the definition of the state in in some political theory like like hobbes is and and vapor perhaps is that you know the state is legitimate because it has the monopoly on the use of force but that doesn't work anymore to incentivize people to be good what incentivizes people to be good is education you know a little bit of income maybe some community stuff to do yeah that's what we're trying to scale up so this this is where we have a very different model so i want to talk a little bit about the legitimacy the state and then let's talk about what we mean by good right because i mean this is the kind of hardcore philosophical fundamental stuff that there's very little discourse on right we we've almost entirely stopped thinking in moral philosophy terms when it comes to trying to design futures uh and i think that's a huge mistake because a lot of these problems are moral false of your problems so um my you don't used to work a bunch on failed states right so when you look at failed states you get a very different sense of what the state is because you get to see the state in a different phase of its existence right the state in its fully featured

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=1350s) healthy form has monopoly environments but the state when it's going wrong begins to lose monopoly on violence and then you get weird situations like gaza where you've got about five entities that are all capable of doing violence without any reprisals in that area in which sense they're all kind of sort of the state um and so when i looked at this what i came to the conclusion is this it's not the monopoly violence which is the important part about being a state right because for example us government de facto doesn't have the monopoly on violence in a whole bunch of places and hasn't had for a century you know like the chicago mob you know there was no monopoly of violence on chicago either the police of the mob were capable of mounting war to the point where nobody would interfere in their business so you know monopoly and violence are broken down so the model that i use is this the state is any entity that has the ability to retroactively or proactively pardon criminal behavior yeah so you re pardon assault you get police you proactively pardon murder you got armies and you're practically part of theft you get tax collectors right um and the retroactive stuff is you know your intelligence agents get caught blowing something up and they kill somebody they shouldn't have and the problem just kind of mysteriously goes away um that framing of the state i think is quite useful because it permits multiple hierarchies or overlapping state-like entities to share a single geography and i think that that is a really important insight because land was largely valuable because it generated food and food was money yeah this this reminds me of the expression decide the exception um which i just googled and you know people like uh carl schmidt i guess talks about that and that i think that sounds like what you're talking about like it's not just the use of force but the ability you know broadly to decide the exception to have authority over the discourse the regime you know and and as you say retroactively you know decide the history is uh that's what the united states does it's the ability to create power right yeah so then what comes from that is the question about you know the ability of multiple jurisdictions to overlap is much higher in that model than in the

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=1500s) feberian model right so if we start talking about global governance and global jurisdictions their ability to overlay over the nation states is quite strong in the model which is about pardoning of crime rather than in the geographical model which doesn't allow any kind of overweight sovereignty and i don't see a future that works without an enormous amount of overlaid sovereignty yeah um i mean when i was at the dod um you know i did i did a little bit of work for the office of the secretary of defense and what the model that i was talking about was the idea that america had become de facto uh sort of para state that it exhibited state-like attributes across a much wider geography than just america uh and the question was how to legitimize those state-like attributes because if they didn't legitimize it they were going to lose it and you know iraq afghanistan and all the rest of that yeah um and i think that this is one of the things like i mean i was never a soldier i was ever in a uniform but i've spent a lot of years around extremely senior military people and i think that this is probably the key distinction between my perspective and the game b perspective because to me it all resolves in violence right it's control of violence which dictates the future of the world if the violence is in the hands of idiots that use the violence or idiotic ends and overuse it you wind up with enormous defense budgets huge numbers of dead people in a ruined world if the violence is in the harms of you know god kings or you know warrior or saints or whatever it happens to be it's hardly ever deployed the economic costs are kept manageable so it doesn't [ __ ] your societies and the world will bloom very nicely and you know this notion that we've lost control of the sword that's fallen into the hands of evil man to me is just a very simple summary of how we got here right and that notion that you know is it about being post violence or is it just about making sure that the violence is only in the hands of the just that's kind of a knife yeah yeah and i think you know because i'm advocating for for scaling it down um an eventual elimination right a kind of star trek the next generation kind of future but of course they'll always be kind of starfleet is quite an expensive heavily armed you know like we might have gotten the military off earth but we still have a hell of a military apparatus in

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=1650s) starfleet right like the weapons are still there right but it's but the but it's the weaponry is is overwhelmed if that's a functional word here by by the human humanitarian spirit right so it's yeah i mean it's the wise sword rather than the stupid sword yeah right yeah and it's for self-defense right it's very principled and they're they're very post-colonialist right the federation are not much of this absolutely yeah so this is i quite fish something out here so one of the best models of what went wrong in america is that they failed to cut the defense budget in the 1990s right we had essentially 10 years world peace in the 1990s the federer always didn't succeed in cutting their defense spending at all uh and the result of that was basically that by the time 911 rolled around they had a ton of hardware that they were running for a chance to use and a bunch of soldiers that had never seen a war and you put those two things together and you tend to get you know like the insanity begins right um so if the u.s had gone about a serious cut in pentagon budget and had plowed that into kind of a surge into plowshares type program you know the defense contractors start building space harder or whatever it is they could have maintained the overall defense keynesianism where the u.s economy runs on deficit spending to maintain a uh technical apparatus um but they also could have begun the path of global demilitarization and i think that there is a really tangible opportunity here and sorry this is taking us completely off the track we were on but it's something that's been on my mind maybe maybe some of the folks that listen to this will have an opinion right so um if we imagine that the international climate treaties are tied to a coordinated cut in defense spending and that's where we liberate the money for we've done this before for nuclear weapons right we had salt one and salt two and various other treaties anti-ballistic missile treaty and a bunch of other stuff um which seriously reduced the amount of money that was being spent making nuclear weapons and also reduced the volatility of the weapons in the arsenal by getting rid of things like uh first strike and anti-missile missiles the things that created a higher probability of somebody just

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=1800s) jacking somebody um you know we got rid of most of those capabilities we severely limited research in those areas so in that sort of model you know could you convince the chinese um that the pentagon was going to cut its budget by 20 over 10 years and they would like them to do the same with their military spending could you actually cut that deal with china yeah maybe yeah i mean you know going back to doing all things at once like let's do that but also you know keeping in mind that other military budgets are but a fraction of what the us is right yeah yeah the key is to do that but also like invest in in the u.n and build out the u.n like the un you know for whatever the new incarnation we want to call you know it can have its own force but it shouldn't be hyper-militarized right like we need to de-militarize the military so you have social workers and negotiators and peacemakers not profiteers right but i mean this is the this is the kind of star trek option right this is the assumption that we have a wise enough hand at the planetary tower we can get things like this done yeah um whereas i think that bankrupt decrepit broken nation states that are trying to hold together their social stability yeah might be willing to come to the table and actually just cut defense spending because i mean the yeah i don't know how to say that i think they have to agree as well on this idea from modern monetary theory on how the state can print and spend money right so if that action is also coordinated also with uh synchronous policy shifts yeah and yeah we can start to converge towards um these these common goals you know the things that the you know as you say with like the millennium development goals of the un like the earth they're too abstract they're a bit absurd but if we can actually put the you know the the the uh kind of guardrails on this thing um then it can start to work yeah interesting interesting interesting um yeah i mean there is there is a very tricky edge here isn't there you know the utopian uh and the pragmatic have to dance a very careful dance because yeah you know we've had 50 60 years of utopian politics coming out of the san francisco age of aquarius mass awakening

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=1950s) thing and you know my opinion on that you know as a professional meditation at our practitioner is it's all horseshit from one end to the other right there's just no way you know i've seen the kind of work that individual awakening takes a mass awakening is a multiple of individual awakening it's just not happening and that leaves us in a position where we've got a very constrained solution set because we have to solve this problem with the people we have not with the people that we want um and you know you can look at that and become hopeless or we can say look you know we managed to avoid nuclear war even though the conditions were perfect right i mean if you think of america having the only nuclear bombs in the world in the mid 90s mid to late 1940s early 1950s the americans could have flattened russia in a weekend and didn't they could have said if we even hear the word uranium coming out of moscow we're going to pave it yeah it's so complicated because i'm not a historian but there's different theories about japan like whether it needed to be nuked you know so you know like you said about kind of retconning history you know they can decide after the fact that yeah well it did and then also there's the issue from the japanese perspective too like they have textbook controversies about how they tell their own history oh yeah and you know it's a big it's a big moral philosophical problem as you said i mean because japan politics and nagasaki are unbelievably foul yeah in japan perpetrated all sorts of evils you know so so they so they did reckon with it right that's why today germany and japan are such relatively peaceful and economically mature countries absolutely if america had come out of um world war ii with the same level defense spending that japan and germany did you know okay probably stalin would have ruled everything down to you know the southern border of algeria but you know other histories so i want to i want to draw attention to the brute force and ignorance approach that i think will work right um so i don't believe in the naive game b modeling of cooperation is the answer i think it is possible that there are sophisticated reads along the line of australia's covenant's government's work that would make that work but i don't see that discourse anywhere

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=2100s) inside a game b to me they've just gotten lost um no solutions are coming out with that movement so the attack that i took when i was working on this stuff intensively 10 years ago was a different track which became known as the black elephant yeah i like this term i wasn't really familiar before but it sounds good so we had an outfit called the institute for Collapsonomics which was a kind of burbacky style effort where a bunch of people came together did a bunch of thinking published a bunch of work some of it named some of it not named basically Collapsonomics was this idea of studying collapsing systems or failed systems with the same kind of tools that we use in economics so to ask questions about so what is the actual ecology of commerce inside of a collapsing state and we had all the foreign union examples we did the 2008 bus here it wasn't a dumb question we did a bunch of work on it and everybody laughed at us uh we we had a fantastic meeting with the national endowment for science technology and arts here nesta and we rolled in with about seven or eight people uh and just laid out luke you know we could be looking at 25 budget cuts to the uk budget in 10 years right the economy could crack completely there's no guarantee finance stays up and they basically just laughed us out they're like oh it's the wrong part of the economic cycle everything is recovering it's like oh is that so is that so well known we'll see how it goes right this is part what pushed me into ethereum yeah and so just to just to define quickly for clarification right that black elephant is a rare but significant risk that everybody knows about but no one wants to discuss precisely i'm just saying that off yeah or something that changes everything but no one wants to deal with that's right so i think our key here is wrangling the black elephants is an achievable goal in exactly the same way that cooperative consciousness is right i could put 15 people into a room and i can make those sons of [ __ ] actually deal with the [ __ ] that they don't want to deal with yeah right they will not thank me they will not pay me in most instances and they will be very unhappy yeah but it doesn't need to be done twice yeah all right yeah this kind of segue is we can keep going on it but it'll segue into the consensus building idea absolutely no i think we're both anti-ted but but the the interesting thing is like the the ted platform is

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=2250s) attractive and inviting right so well i mean you know if i had the resources i would propose that sort of conference that certainly wrote but then you know what is marrying antoinette's uh sheep no so murray antoinette right there the princess of versailles she's actually the princess prince's girlfriend whoever it was marie antoinette fabulously noble french revolution famously says let the meat cake allegedly right um so the better story about murray antoinette is marie antoinette's sheep so she's going to dress up as a shepherd girl and go out and you know take care of sheep this is the thing that she liked to do to make sure that you know she knew that she was a woman of the people and she understood the conditions of the peasantry and all the rest of that so there were servants that would lovingly lather the sheep and then wash them in rose scented so manicure the lawns trim the hay and all the rest of these things and so she had this little kind of like lovely okay one of the people here i am a man a little bookeep right um and you know my recollection is she went to the guillotine right to me ted is literally not figuratively literally marry antoinette's farm there's an enormous secret machinery underneath ted of hugely exploited you know makers of powerpoint slides and you know organizers of conference marketing all the rest of that there's a huge underlying you know overworked underpaid technocratic slave machinery to get that show on the road and then the surface production yeah is this totally effortless display of intellectual virtuosity right in a single register of truth yeah what does it say about tedx right that's the kind of self-organized spin-off and because everybody thinks if you copy the mannerisms you'll be able to afford to go to the real tech yeah and some you know some of it's good we all have probably friends that have done done ted talks i you know i've never done one i would do one if i was invited but but two companies come to mind yeah two exactly two come to mind as the anti-ted talks which is benjamin bratton's ted talk and then also sarah silverman's ted talk which is taking the piss really we talked about that before yeah so that notion right that what we have is

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQQjNBPJ2RE&t=2400s) the creation of a false reality which then becomes an aspirational goal right the objective of the vast majority of human beings is to make enough money that other people will pull the rule over your eyes about how hard this world really is and the idea that the aspiration is to escape into a world of lies i think is at the heart of all of our problems if you were rich you could live in a world where a bunch of hard-working technocrats would ensure that from morning to night nothing got in your way right your laptop has always got software updates done your email is already sorted you have to do exactly who you're going to meet when um you know the food just arrives as if by magic you never have to worry about your own electricity bills you know everything is just taken care of right and this idea that you are liberated by degrees from the constraints in the material world by wealth until all you have to think about is this kind of like oh everything is awfully how great is this right this is the mindset that produces the english country gardens or the palace of versailles or the sistine chapel or any of the rest of that stuff it's wealth as transcendence and the wealth turns into transcendence because you put thick thick thick layers of hard-working people between you and the inherent uh gritty nature of the world right yeah and this is why the black elephant is the album is the uh the animal of choice right because it's possible to take a black elephant and write it right the [ __ ] through versailles in a way that leaves nothing behind it but shattered dreams and depressed humans and my assertion is this if we don't get a lot more shattered dreams and a lot more depressed humans were [ __ ] right yeah because the the prozac and netflix lifestyle which has become the american norm right these people are sitting ducks for history yeah this is exactly you know for better or worse why you know i do a lot of constructive work but i also try to be a bit of a wrecking ball because um because yeah you know the the facade is already cracking everybody can see it but they need a little nudge it's beyond cracking right i mean the um did you did you watch this tv show uh devs no big hit everybody loved it eight episodes it's about artificial intelligence and stuff

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/770-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [770] Grounded Gabbin' with Vinay Gupta (on the meta-crisis), part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.