# Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket podcast | Ep 1 (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [773], 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, 2021-08-02 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM. 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): Vinay's own description of the mass-relocation programme that Harappa targets.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Black Elephant (2009): The black elephant: a foreseeable disaster that institutions ignore and later call a black swan. Coined by...
  - 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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (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.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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: Incentive-based epistemology — truth markets and Mattereum (61%); Climate politics & democracy (13%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: human rights (7 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Black Elephant (3 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); black elephants (2 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); walled gardens (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); FluSCIM (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); climate disaster (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); State Failure Management Archive (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); world trade (2 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Mattereum (9 here; 127 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 2 undated); masks (2 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.52 (1.00 is the top), number 71 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [303] [How To Sell Ideas from (from Ethereum DEVCON Berlin) (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/303.md): same career work: Black Elephant
  - [128] [Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md): same career work: Black Elephant
- On the same works, just before: [774] [All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/774.md); [733] [Trust models, founding Mattereum, and 'Turning Law into... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/733.md); [741] [Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, and the Hexayurt |... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/741.md)
- On the same works, just after: [245] [Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md); [717] [The Novum Insightful - Ep1: Vinay Gupta | CEO of Mattereum (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/717.md); [677] [Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.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 — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket podcast | Ep 1, video, 2021-08-02, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [773], https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=0s) okay welcome to the very first idea market podcast i'm your host james ellis uh where we invest your attention as carefully as if it were your money uh we would like to welcome our honored guest for this first podcast the inaugural episode of idea market podcast technologist futurist hindu warrior priest founder of Mattereum and all around okay guy mr Vinay Gupta thanks very much for joining us good to be here um so uh yeah i don't know if i don't quite qualify as a warrior priest but i certainly have fought a number of engagements mostly on the internet maybe warrior troll priests okay perfect perfect we just need all that all the hyphens in there and we're good i didn't question the intro mike sent this over to me i read the words hindu warrior hey i i i was once called him i did i did this one's called a master of nepalese magic in an official department of defense blog Vinay gupta you know scientists also i think that quality futurist monster netflix magic to be fair master of magic i was not going to say no because at the end of the day who but a master of nephew's magic would wind up called by the department of defense a master of nephi's magic you know even if it wasn't true when you started by the time that some august body like that has decided it's true it's obvious that the magic has worked it's kind of like a self-certifying credential that makes perfect sense perfect said it is sort of good ellie and post normal post rational swamp like way so vinay uh before we before we do jump in for those you know i'm i'm aware that you have quite a wide wide presence quite a big presence online but for those who don't know you um just tell us a little bit about yourself what it is and yeah what it is you do um so i've done a number of things over the years uh in this kind of phase of my game i am ceo of a company called Mattereum and Mattereum exists to um basically bring all the world's physical property onto the blockchain as tradable assets with very strong providence and also documentation of what the thing is and the objective is to produce a kind of hyper liquid commerce which sort of does for

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=150s) commerce and what social media did for media right if you could buy and sell things with equilibes right you take the books on your bookshelf if you can order a book from amazon and take delivery or sell a book off your bookshelf and send it out with exactly the same faculty what will happen is it will stop winding up these enormous repositories of disused material which are eating environmental resources to come into existence and are also eating capital because they're sitting there unused so the kind of vision here is distributed by directional commerce where every single thing that you buy you expect to sell again at some point in its life rather than the current model which is we've got this kind of weird myth if we just store it forever which actually means that we die we leave it to our kids and they throw it in a landfill so it's it's a vision of a different relationship between people and things and the blockchain is what supports the kind of decentralized nature of that vision and then before that i spent i don't know since really the time since uh 9 11 working on worst case scenario planning for environmental crisis and a variety of unfortunate events like pandemics oh pandemics right i remember seeing uh probably 10 or 20 hours of pandemic prep video on youtube from 2008 or something like that yeah yeah there's a lot of stuff out there the gupta state gupta state failure management archive there was a bunch of pandemic papers and yeah i mean we knew it was coming we knew what needed to be done and nobody listened to anybody and the result was what we got it has not been a particularly successful pandemic response right that kind of speaks to the core of our concerns as well in that the current information age is not one of lacking information it's not the case that we don't know what we have to do we don't know what we can do we don't know uh what's worth hoping for we have all of these things but we're not focused on the right ones there's this big gap between where most of our attention is and the actual best stuff out there on any given topic and this applies to virtually everything so along those lines i've been particularly appreciative of your talk that you gave on spreading ideas you helped with the ethereum launch you've of course spread a lot of ideas uh with the hexayurt concept and stuff like that

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=300s) um i'm wondering what your latest thinking is on that and how maybe you're applying that to Mattereum pandemic stuff whatever's relevant at the moment um

[5:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=309s) so you've heard of black swans right this notion of these statistically improbable events which nonetheless have outsized impacts yeah um my thinking on this uh really has only sharpened in the last 10 years in that i think that what is important is not so much the black swans as the black elephants and what is a black elephant um a black elephant is the elephant in the room which will go on the rampage and then everybody will insist after it has gone on the rampage that it was a black swan and nobody could have seen it coming right so we have known that there was a very high probability that we were going to see an airborne respiratory tract infection type pandemic that's been assumed to be coming for more than my entire life you know we've seen big FluSCIM through about every 30 years for the whole recorded human history you know we've watched these things stewing in the corners with things like bird flu you know everybody in the business is like oh my god it's only a matter of time then we saw sars then we saw mers you know the kind of heightening probability of a big viral event was just and cracking and cracking everybody that had been in that business was like this is coming this is coming this is coming this is coming then it arrive and the governments act as if they've never ever possibly considered such a thing could occur you know the vast gap between how prepared we you know theoretically were and how prepared we acted could be interpreted as uh you know malicious or deliberately incompetent or it could be interpreted as accidental incompetence or some incentive problem or something like that but since that debate might never be settled uh my question is how can uh anyone sort of help society become immune to this problem regardless of what the cause is how can we sort of compel attention in the right directions so this is a fitness for purpose problem right um it wasn't just the us which was run by ass clowns that screwed up it was all of the countries right other than new zealand can you point to a single country that really got on top of this thing vietnam did amazingly well so you've got new zealand you've got

[7:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=459s) vietnam but like france disaster germany disaster sweden norway denmark disaster film disaster uk disaster ireland disaster you know canada mexico like russia south africa like all of the big countries india right china china how did china do not as badly as they could have done but still not great right japan right clobbered nobody's going to get to look at the olympics because it turns out they're just too afraid of kovacdy so that is a situation like if every major government on earth with maybe half a dozen exceptions totally screwed the pooch on this thing you know what does that tell us to expect from the response from climate change yeah given that uh hopefully we have a little more latency to correct course on climate change than we did to a a fast spreading pandemic what are the kinds of of pressure points we can can push on to bring attention to the right places in time oh in time was 20 years ago we've missed the boat on fixing anything to do with climate change and we're about to slam face first into that thing yeah but by the time portland oregon is 50 celsius 50 celsius in portland you know by the time that's happening the climate change has happened you can no longer prevent it and all the carbon that we put into the atmosphere is going to continue to produce batshit insane weather until the carbon's been metabolized back out of the atmosphere either naturally or artificially and we're still continuing to contaminate the atmosphere with another 24 gig tons of carbon a year right we are completely [ __ ] and how do you get people to pay attention to the fact that we're completely [ __ ] because nobody wants to think we're completely [ __ ] but we're completely [ __ ] right we are now outside of the safe operating envelope for the planet and we're continuing to throw the carbon out 24 gigatons a year oh my god we are screwed and people don't understand this but at the point where we realize how badly screwed we are you know that's the first thing that has to happen before we're capable of changing it how do we get people to relate to and face grotesquely unpresent truths it's hard there's a there's an

[10:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=605s) interesting um point to be had there with those two the two concepts that you brought in right the the black swan and the black elephant your own concept that you know this idea that we're all ignoring this obvious truth but it seems that the climate change problem is actually a bit of both there's a there's a whole host of people who know for well it's a big problem and are trying to change it but there's a load of other people who are still going on about their business but equally no it's a problem but just don't want to admit to it so my question i guess my question to you to you would be that one is it's the huge question which is why do we ignore these black elephants and to you know what what what do you think is to be done in relation to that answer you know why why is it that we ignore them and then how can we sort of alter the reason why we ignore them so we no longer actually do so back in the day um roughly 10 women died in childbirth and over the course of having three four five six eight kids um you know a huge percentage of the female population died in childbirth now this was not true for all societies but it was certainly true for victorian london which had horrendous practices around childbirth and you know like doctors didn't wash their hands and i mean it was just it was kind of an apocalyptic worst case but for example there are a lot of countries in africa today which have very very high rates of maternal mortality right south america a couple countries you know there are places where it's just super dangerous to have babies somehow people continue to manage it you know if you know that there are alligators in the water you know if you don't going to get good and get water everyone is going to die and if you do go down to get water the alligator is only going to eat one of you and you know 30 people are going to get water so i think that human beings are unfortunately deeply biologically pre-programmed to go and get the water out of the alligator infested pit and to continue to have babies regardless how dangerous it appears to be at the time we're programmed to be risk blind um because if you're living out as a monkey on the fields way back in the day and you know before we'd invented fire you know almost everything you do is going to get you killed and you just have to breed faster than you die and that's evolutionary success so i think that we're in a position where what's happening is a lot of people are

[12:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=755s) still acting as if the objective is to breed faster than we die and that doesn't really work for meta systemic problems like climate change you know there is this thing of like look if i just pay attention to the fashion papers i skip everything else there's a decent chance i'm going to make it through this lifetime and have three grandchildren which point biological success evolution is happy we won and that might even be true right but it's still going to leave us with like a two billion to our first death toll from climate change you know we need to start taking risks seriously because we need to start looking at the danger rather than looking around the danger

[13:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=795s) it sounds like you're seeing uh climate change and and this sort of uh focus problem i i can't help but interpret everything from an idea market lens because i'm kind of like looking staring through that glass of water all the time and uh one of the things i love to say is we want to treat common knowledge as a risk management problem we want to have everyone constantly evaluating the landscape of possibilities and risks and looking for the thing that will improve common knowledge looking for the thing that will uh be a worthy replacement for the things that we're focusing on now um it sounds like in this sort of fashion magazine versus two billion deaths you know sort of scenario on a personal level it may be you know perfectly safe to to just focus on the fashion magazine and on a collective level there has to be some kind of curation process or trickle-down effect of having our priorities straight that will maybe enable more people to look at that fashion magazine and have have less of a negative externality from it um so there is an economics by which we decide our social priorities you know you have elections and the elections are run on a fabulously corrupt basis on corporate money you know like if you don't succeed in raising billions of dollars for corporations you can never run for u.s president as a result the corporations get to decide who is eligible to try and become president which is not the same thing as deciding who will become president but they do have complete control over who will not become president see what i'm saying right the corporations have to at least ascend to giving somebody enough money to make a presidential run otherwise that person does not run for president well you know major corporations you know budgets are designed done in quarters and climate change is a 20-year problem how do you get an entity that thinks in three-month time windows to consider a 20-year problem that is not going to take effect until long after they use retirement and we tried that and we tried we tried to try to make the corporations wise up and be accountable and change the practices all the rest of that stuff nobody was willing to legislate corporate behavior in any substantive way on climate because the governments were already paid off by the corporations

[15:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=945s) and the corporations weren't willing to take the long view because the corporations are assessed based on the needs of the shareholders in these three-month windows as a result total paralysis of the corporations continue to emit carbon for the critical 20 years in which we had a chance to avoid millions to hundreds of millions of people die of climate change right what we're looking at here is literally a holocaust well let's uh and let's uh let's start go on no no no problem i

[16:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=978s) just i wanted to shift the conversation slightly to something more optimistic such as childhood starvation i wanted to ask you about this because you wrote an article a while back saying that arguing that we should have a new standard of social uh prosperity and that standard should be how we treat children how we treat people who are vulnerable and have basically no rights in the public square and uh do you remember what i'm talking about yeah yeah this is the article about article human rights for children yeah human rights for children the reason i loved this was because it resonates with this sort of three-prong criteria i like to apply true surprising and important that this is not something that we think about a lot in the public square as like a point of leverage by which we might uh reorganize our standards and improve our priorities in a certain way but i think our treatment of children as as a culture because it's so voluntary is a great measure of uh of of priorities and a great sort of beacon around which we can organize things i was wondering if you can elaborate on uh your your case for that and where you see it going sure so you know to understand where we are right requires us to think about what we're baking into the future right now right and what we're baking into the future right now is you know 24 000 24 billion tons of carbon a year more than the earth can absorb going to the atmosphere every year right and we're already at the point where you know 50 celsius in portland that's kind of a problem right if we had seen 50 celsius in iowa it would have wiped out u.s corn production and then you have a real problem right so that additional 24 gigatons a year that we're putting out every single year we continue to do that makes the average existence of every child on earth worse and less probable to reach adulthood right we're literally taking the curve of the future and we're burning resources in the presence so fast that we're just ramping down future expected net quality of life

[18:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=1128s) every single year that we continue with the current status quo right because we're not willing to take the hit ourselves we're passing that on to future generations so it sounds like uh the human rights for children idea is a way of sort of sneaking around the climate change uh moniker which people are familiar with and kind of tired of being hit over the head with and like they've already kind of decided to push it aside but if you give people this new uh potent sort of angle to approach it with that ends up having the same effect uh while feeling like a fresh new imperative am i kind of feeling that right or do you see it differently we've we have a huge groundbag of issues related to the human rights of children right um compulsory education being administered by the state but being of a crappy standard i think you could argue that's a human rights problem and we have gigantic problems identifying and prosecuting sexual abuse cases that's a human rights problem um we have a whole bunch of problems with whether or not children get to vote right you're going to get a very different world if you get 12 year olds voting you're getting an even more different world if you've got nine year olds voting right and at the end of the day they're affected by these decisions just like everybody else is and they're going to have to live with those decisions for one girl why aren't they allowed to vote right i mean if we let stupid people vote yeah you let stupid people vote being able to explain the issues to children uh will make it easier for the adults to make clear decisions as well given just the amount of uh twisting that goes into framing the issues in the first place in order to be deceptive in order to engineer uh preferential results of one or another lobbyist by by making it possible for children to vote we may be increasing the clarity of adult you know voting as well one would hope right one would hope so you know this notion of like you just look at all the places where society is failing to think about the future you think of that as being about human rights for kids hugely clarifies greta thundberg does a very very good job of making it clear that she would quite like for the future not to be so broken that she has to ditch high school to go out there and try and make sure that she grows up in a world where the systems that provide our food and our

[21:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=1278s) water continue to function you know knocking on the door like excuse me i've just noticed that you're going to leave me starving to death as an adult and i'm very unhappy about this why does nobody seem to care whether i live or die and you know she got a couple years of shut up little girl and now she's in a position where the world trade organization not world trade organization who was it a world economic forum austrian economic forum you know they invite greta thunder again and she's become like the ritualized tearing off of the faces you know and she's getting increasingly pissed off and increasingly interested in making clear that the entire system is disenfranchised she's begun to say look we can't play by the rules because the rules of the game are the problem and at some point greta thundberg is going to start telling you what the rules ought to be and if people follow her we're in the full-scale revolt of the young against the old over climate change um okay just to bring this back to the problem of attention i mean there's there's a couple of things i'd bring in there so one with the greta thundberg thing is that the the world economic forum routinely rolls out uh usually a young girl every 10 or 20 so years as a sort of a spokesperson and i think really the attention needs to be not on what they're saying but whether or not anything actually comes from it and it's almost as if they're simply using these people to as a front whereas they can just continue doing what they're doing which brings me to the problem which we brought up about the regulation problem and i'll i'll be interested to see where you you you sit on this finale you know often it's brought in from both sides and they both have different opinions on this which is the problem of agency so on the one side you can say there's people who say right we need to regulate the corporations who are firing out of this carbon we need to regulate the companies the businesses and the corporations on the other side there are the people who saying well that might work but equally we need to remember that it is the consumers who do purchase these products and therefore uh bolstered the continued carbon output if they weren't purchased the corporations wouldn't output all the carbon so the the attempt you know do you think the attention needs to be more on the corporations or do you need to think the attention needs to be on how as consumers we can actually alter our mindset to not desire these things which do pump out increased carbon or do you think it's a bit of both it's neither it's

[23:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=1428s) it's 100 the government right it's 100 the government what should we be pressuring the governments to do uh maybe along that dichotomy or uh like is it a regulation on on consumption or on production that's more important so i mean there are 55 different things that you can do to try and get civilization into a sustainable flight envelope you know like right now we're basically just flying the plane into a mountain range and everything like as long as we can have one more round of cocktails first we don't mind this is not acceptable so um you know the the first thing is right the issue of public attention right the position that we're in is extraordinarily bad right i mean my my backyard here right it's been unseasonably hot in london like 93.95 celsius fahrenheit sorry not celsius um say 32 celsius right this is hot right from london that's really quite hot um if it was another five or six degrees warmer for a sustained period and it has been that hot in london last year it hit like 36 37 degrees if it was that hot out here for a sustained period all the trees and grass out in my backyard would die and the next year they wouldn't grow back right you'd get scrub or something else but you would not get the big old trees and you would not get you know the kind of nice lawn or all the rest it would be dead um when that happens to your agricultural fields you starve that simple right so for me as i look out the window uh you know like the grass is going a little yellow that's the point where you sort of think like oh we might have a problem like this is a bad thing and then you've got this 10 20 year overshoot with this enormous emission of carbon that will continue to cause warming even if we stop today we still have to live with this and it will get worse so how do we get people to snap out of this haze of thinking that things are all right when they're not right um i think both of you guys are probably a little bit young to remember aids activism in the 1980s correct so aids activism in the 1980s is kind of what it looks like when people have realized that they're going to die unless something changes and i think the act up is you know largely

[26:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=1578s) responsible for setting the cultural turn of aids activism which was incredibly effective at taking aids from being something that governments were ignoring to something that was being really acted on you know they made an enormous difference because their lives were on the line and they were the ones who were going to die and they needed something done right now and they were enormously irritating to groups like the fda you know use of people who would break into fda offices and handcuff themselves to desks and then they would stand there watching the fda people do their jobs and you know saying things like you know do you really need to take that tea break you know i'm dying here could you could you please hurry up because the fda was taking so long to approve uh approved drug trials it seems like part of the challenge is tying these decade scale problems to day scale situations to make it more tangible in this regard especially given that when there are localized uh disasters as a result of climate change there's still enough prosperity elsewhere to sort of rebalance and make the daily effects not really felt like when the uh covert pandemic was happening or or the hysteria around it was happening in america and everyone was rushing to buy toilet paper and masks and this and that there was this felt daily sense of urgency about it because we didn't really have you know the liquidity to move toilet paper from here to there and make it feel like everything was fine but we still sort of have that with agriculture to a certain extent i'm wondering if you have any ideas for bringing the time scale of awareness down from decades to days in that similar sort of way and give people you know a uh a compassionate sense of urgency why do we compassionate i don't think we need that part just a sense of urgency will do um okay i mean i don't i mean i've i've i mean compassionate to distinguish from actively withholding things removing things in order to you know deprive people and make them free no i think i think we want people freaking out we want people panicking because if they don't panic they're all gonna die panic is necessary this is the time to panic actually the time to panic was 15 years ago i started panicking in 2001.

[28:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=1728s) you know the reason i've got 20 years of work on how to manage relocation of hundreds of millions of people in the event of you know severe climate disaster is because i started on that work 20 years ago when everybody was serenely sailing around like somebody else was going to fix this i decided that i was going to fix this because nobody else was coming and i was right 20 years in there is still no large-scale systemic effort at the u.n level or the governmental level to figure out how to move hundreds of millions of people from the areas that climate change is going to be completely uninhabitable and the default position here is that all of those people die if we don't make a plan we have simply planned for a genocide and that's where we really are right now the unwillingness of the news media to talk about climate change properly 20 years ago is why today we're in a position where we're headed directly dead into a genocide right if the news media every day started with today's carbon emissions were this on the current projection you've got y long before that turns into an uninhabitable you know in agriculturally collapsed planet you know nothing has been done about this for the last eight years the last measure was taken was this and that measure failed if that was the top line item of the news every single goddamn day do you think we would still be fighting climate change with two arms tied behind our back relying on little girls to do the frontline combat

[30:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=1816s) we can all agree that corporate media's management of our attention has been disastrous for as long as they've uh existed apparently and that actually gives me a certain hope that we may not be as bad at managing problems as we've been engineered to be as a culture as a society for example a tweet that you sent sure i loved it was about the recent corporate media coverage of ufos and you said something like is it possible that the tech on these ufos can become a new energy source uh that can basically solve climate change immediately and end all these unnecessary emissions and provide power to the whole world in a way that's never been seen before and given that for example nikola tesla invented wireless electricity 100 years ago i wanted to give it to the whole world and now 100 years later the best we can do about wireless energy is charge our cell phone from a pad with a wire plugged into it it seems like there may yet remain an enormous gap between the tech we have the ability to harness and where our attention and our production efforts are going how optimistic are you about ufos and about you know bridging that gap between what we could potentially do technically and what we've been doing so i mean i guess the first thing here is we've got to accept that the ufo thing is no longer where it was six months ago you know six months ago the u.s government did not have the position of ufos are real we've seen them with radar we've seen them optically we've seen them on multi-sensor networks we've seen them with multiple different vehicles with independent sensor systems looking at the same object these things are real and we've got a bunch of cases where they move around in ways that we don't have physics to explain that is now official us government reality that's where we are right notably pretty much the entire ufo community is totally uninterested in that story right and it's not like oh yeah we knew for years no they were interested in a conspiracy where the government was hiding something from them when the government was like no you were right it is all real the response is not like great let's get started the response is like yeah i'm going to pay attention to big food now right but you know we're operating in a world where the ufo thing is actually true it's really really there

[32:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=1966s) we've got the data do you think that's because the uh the uf generally ufo culture has a history of distrusting the government every time the government's released something on ufos it's come out about 10 20 years later that it was uh just a new iteration of something they were working on and they used the ufo thing to cover up that it was something they were working on so the technology that we were using for say like fighter jets or whatever is covered up as a as an excuse so no one then investigates that thing right i mean i it's certainly plausible that the us government has some kind of you know weird technology that allows you to do these things right you know if they would have had to figure out some new physics but you know like we've had 70 years since we invented nuclear bombs so there's a lot of time to have done new physics in that period um i think a lot of its personality type you know like if you're a conspiracy theorist the last thing you wanted to be doing is singing off the same sheet as the us government yeah you know you're in it to point the finger at the bad guy and say they're lying to us well okay now they're not lying to you of course they're not lying to you the way they were lying to you they're telling you a partial truth rather than denying everything how's the way we meet them halfway no that's not our game that's not why we're in this it's not the emotional register of their activity sure that makes that makes a lot of sense and just psychoanalyzing myself as a as a ufo amateur you know researcher and stuff like that is that there is this sort of sense of pressure you enjoy the tension between what the party line is and what you're looking into and when the government says oh yeah all that stuff it's it's totally real like when they make it official it sort of lets the air out of the balloon it you know takes the tension out of that relationship so you have to go to look for something else to get that kick in the meantime it seems like there's room here for actual activism to come in about ufo tech about new physics why aren't we like pushing on those leverage points why aren't we exploiting what clearly is possible why aren't there new industries and venture capital springing up all over the world immediately once it becomes clear that this is all within the realm of possibility even even for the physicists right like you know how big a collider do you have to build before you can see as much new physics as there is in the navy radar details about the flight of these ufos precisely you know why is the physics com right why isn't the physics community just like okay give us all the sensor data we you know like we're gonna use this stuff

[35:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=2116s) in the same way that we would data that we got out of a super collider yeah and extrapolate and extrapolate right if if we can see something do this then the following has to be true about the laws of physics right well if it did this and it did this then what must be happening is that and suddenly we've got a whole bunch of input about physics that we don't currently have because these are experiments that we can't perform ourselves but we can certainly see them being performed yeah and it strikes me as still an attention problem that we have the the government coming out and officially endorsing things but they're actually not endorsing things that hasn't already been public information often for decades and there's often uh patents filed in ownership of the secretary of the u.s navy that reflect some of the abilities that these reports are describing the information is all there it's that there's no sort of economic or political will in the direction of exploiting it uh to the extent that we could you know the the crux of it is it is an attention problem but it's a paradigmatic attention problem you know people carry a paradigm that wife is basically fine when it's not they carry around a paradigm that ufos are not really real or if they are real they're not important when they're short of central to everything you know they carry around a story that you know kovid is not that big a deal well you know let's just see what happens next because historically these things have tended to be quite important you know there's a sort of positioning where there's a kind of business as usual acceptable default reality and almost any piece of new data that threatens the integrity of that story just gets sidelined in favor of that story even though even though that story is in fact fundamental without grounding

[37:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=2223s) how can we accelerate a paradigm shift in this regard is there some kind of activism or dare i say uh gandhian satyagraha that could bring attention in you know the right ways and force the issue um to me it's legitimization of panic as a response to modernity you know we should have been in continuous hyper vigilance screaming mood since the inventor of the nuclear bomb well fortunately it coincided with the invention of the tv which kind of nullified that maybe right the tv the antidepressants the anti-anxiety medications you know like we went from a world in which the future of the species was safe and even if we died we knew that life around us would go on the situation of the future the species is acutely imperiled without ever changing our emotional attitude towards the world that we live in isn't this sort of one of the key problems though is that it seems at least to me correct me if i'm wrong or you believe different that you can't really eat your cake and have it too with regards to modernity and climate change you can't be going on uh flights around the world on holidays every year and equally try save the planet so this this idea of modernity which you you brought up people love it because it's comfortable so in warning people about climate change and making it a reality they've got to become discomfortable for quite a while that's right that's right and this is a critical thing right how do we persuade people to get better dealing with the discomfort which comes from dealing with reality as it is it sounds sort of like the therapeutic this psychotherapeutic imperative but at a cultural scale at a mass scale yes i mean it's it's a lot to do with how we form gestalts you know like we build a world model based around a set of data and usually there's some data that is anomalous and that we just leave out the world because it doesn't fit and we're now in a position where the anomalous data pile is beginning to overwhelm the kind of regular ordinary 1950s leave it to beaver false world and we don't even have a really good name for that false world you know somewhere in the nuclear era we basically just pulled this backdrop down in front of our eyes you know stuck it to our hot rip brim and we've just had this like kind of you know um set dressing hanging in front of our

[39:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHri_FW-OeM&t=2373s) faces since the nuclear bomb arrived like of course the government is on your side it's built death machines enough to kill the entire future and wipe out your planet forever but you know they're really good-hearted and they're here to take care of us and that kind of relationship between people and information right you know like come on guys like the nuclear bomb is the problem the climate change is a small problem the nuclear bomb is a much bigger problem than the climate changed its way because you the nuclear bomb and the failure to react to the nuclear bomb like that's all us um so i kind of feel like this is the and yeah i don't want to i don't want to find a point on this but like you know the attention economics problem starts with how do we break the paradigm that things are okay and once we've broken the paradigm that things are okay how do we then help people prioritize what their major emergency concerns are given that there are such a large number of potential sources of trouble if i understand correctly you've been working on this problem from a variety of angles for some decades and one of your more recent

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