# All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest VINAY GUPTA (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [774], 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, 2021-04-24 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk. 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): Wide-ranging conversation.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (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)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (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: Open government & anti-corruption (19%); meditation / lineage / spiritual (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: speed of light (4 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); shared database (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Burning Man (4 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); NFT (2 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); cypherpunk (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Ethereum team (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); human rights (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Singapore (1 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); platforms (1 here; 76 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); markets (1 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.23 (1.00 is the top), number 332 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [704] [Vinay Gupta: Liberation, Culture, Conflict and Catastrophe (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/704.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
  - [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- On the same works, just before: [247] [Hexayurt Interviews Hexayurt Footage From The... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/247.md); [723] ["Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/723.md); [730] [The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/730.md)
- On the same works, just after: [680] [Blockchain technology, trade-offs, and helping launch... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/680.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)

## 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: All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest VINAY GUPTA, video, 2021-04-24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [774], https://guptaoption.com/texts/774.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=0s) all right i'm here from vinay gupta i think i'll just let you start wherever man so yeah i mean you know here i am i am a 49 i turned 49 this year i run a tech company which is now four years old we just launched our first product uh i'm sitting in the middle of a gigantic boom in exactly my area of tech so we've gone from kind of you know marching through the marshes with our welly boots on wondering whether it was ever going to turn in something to suddenly being like oh my god who just called um uh and yeah it's all a little disorienting it's like you know you get used to things being very hard and very slow and then suddenly they're very fast and very unpredictable yeah you're the uh overnight success point of facebook right um well i mean our corner of the world is right the nft thing has suddenly become the great global focus and then within that we've got this kind of physical nft thing of like nfts for physical stuff and people are still a bit like you what what do you mean physical stuff are you sure so i wouldn't say we're quite at the overnight success part i think it's gonna be probably three months before there is a sudden realization of like wait a minute wait a minute this is a generalized trade instagram this isn't just cryptokitties this is this is like a thing so yeah i think we're i think we're a little bit out from the point where people were like oh but yeah i mean we're here we are um so like you you obviously like had something of a life before you got into this whole blockchain space um could you tell us a little about that sure so my first year being paid 100 in anonymous digital cash was 1999. this is my third way possibly my fourth wave uh i was a cypherpunk back in the 1990s

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=150s) i was writing software to basically do you know kind of private communication for human rights groups uh then i was part of the eagle ecosystem um and then i did a bit of time in the defense world and then i walked across the um aisle and joined the material team in 2014 as our ethereum team in 2014 yep yep material was a little later yeah um so could you actually could you explain what ethereum is because like my audience i assume is pretty tech savvy but i'm sure there's some people out there who don't know what it is um yeah so yeah to be honest even people that know think they know what ethereum is do not know what a theory is okay cool it's like quantum physics no no it's it's just everybody has gotten the wrong end of the stick on blockchain because the currencies have confused them right right um the reason the blockchain exists is because the speed of light is slow right now how often do you hear the speed of light brought up in terms of reasons why the blockchain is a thing um pretty infrequently and i run in circles that like would bring that sort of thing up so go on the only reason blockchain is relevant technology globally is because it's it's one of two or three known solutions for dealing with the fact that the speed of light is slow and trade is global now what do i mean by slow right um a high frequency trading system will do on the order of 10 million transactions a second running at peak right that's not a large number i mean you know if you have a computer which is clocked at four gigahertz that's four billion events a second so the idea that a ship a chip which is doing four billion events a second could be clearing 10 million transactions you know okay you're not doing that on one computer but these numbers are not wildly far from so yeah now the flip side of that is that to get a message from you know london to australia and back takes about a seventh of a second assuming that everything is working perfectly yep yep right and that's a hard physical limit because the speed of light is three hundred thousand kilometers a second and the world is something like twenty four thousand kilometers around so at that point there's just an inevitable lag seventh of a second go back to your high

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=300s) frequency trading system it's gonna do a million transactions in the length of time that it takes the signal to go to australia and back so there's a million transaction synchronization lag inevitably on anything that involves doing high frequency trading with computer with computers in a global context right and that's a physics limit there's no way you have this yeah so the way that we solve this problem right now is that we cram all the computers running the algorithms for hft into a single building and then they measure the ethernet cables right down to the closest millimeter yeah we try and minimize the time differential that you get from having a shorter cable yep now in that world right you can either have everything traded hft style or if you want people to not trade at disadvantage based on their geography you have to find another architecture yep and the only other architecture we have that allows people to trade without a differential based on their geography is our good friend the blockchain yep and the reason for that is that a block is just a lump of quantized time right rather than running time as if it was continuous where every second counts we divide time into a 10-minute walk or a 15-second block and we say relative to the operation of the blockchain everything in this block happens at the same time yep yep and the block is large the light speed delay is small and the result wipes out the advantage based on geography which allows us to do globally synchronized trade without your position on the earth giving you an advantage on the internet yep yep that's where the blockchain matters right all of this stuff about independence from governments and this that the next thing all of that is basically nonsense all right and you know that's just kind of where it goes right i mean we just have to deal with that none of that stuff is absolutely that fundamentally significant or even fundamentally true you know if the governments of the world say they've had enough of bitcoin it's not going to take them that long oh yeah yeah wind it down right yeah grinding with the kind yes who has the most powerful computers on earth the nsa you know and i'm not saying that they could necessarily kill it but they could

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=450s) certainly knock it well down all right so basically it's like a way to create like well like a more even playing field because like i know that um oh i can't remember who i heard it from but i know that like apparently like new york the city is like apparently looking more and more like a circuit board from above because you know the architecture of a circuit board is structured in such a way to like minimize uh the time that like the electrons moving through it doing the actual calculations on the actual material um so you know you can make that efficient and then you're seeing that in like you know the actual physical space because people are also trying to minimize the time because like it matters so much in high frequency trading is that true yeah absolutely i mean you know you see these same things in nature like tree structures and trees right you know the answer is it just turns out to be that that's what water does yeah or that's what trees water to do yeah it just takes on a different it just takes on a similar structure yeah yeah there's a really cool um thing where like they got um a bunch of japanese scientists got like some slime mold and they put it in like a space that resembled i think the like tokyo city no the like tokyo city and like various population hubs uh and then like they let it grow and it like you know created like this optimal uh network um that you know could have been used as like the subway infrastructure or something like that uh yeah but yeah there's like there's like some really cool like convergent evolution stuff uh happening that you can see yeah absolutely well i mean you know the same the same forces will make things roughly the same shape you know all wings are sort of alike you know all fins are sort of like all feet are sort of like yeah um you know there's this thing where crabs apparently have independently evolved yeah yeah there's some really funny memes based around that uh yeah all right cool well now i know what i'm gonna use uh yeah sorry go on yeah it just it just gives you a sense of like the selective pressure to make things crab like is very strong yeah yeah all right so what is what what do crabs have to do with the um like actually what what so what might

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=600s) the consequence be if like we know we figure this stuff out um and we actually do like uh we we we institute like a blockchain and then you know people actually start using it as opposed to the standard high frequency training like what what might the consequences of that be so the main thing that the blockchain gives you is a single shared global database of property rights right and this is exactly the kind of architecture that you want for dealing with carbon yeah right single global shared database single google shared problem right yeah there ought to be some way of doing global tracking of who's embedding the carbon and how much they're bidding so that we know that collectively species were not admitting too much right if only there was some kind of technology that might actually address this problem well i mean if you were going to build that you know because it's global nobody is going to trust any individual government to run that database they're definitely not going to trust an individual company to run that database so you know global problem you're going to need some kind of massive you know global map of who's admitting what i'm not suggesting that you're going to trap like you are driving down the street and it's located just after a global day it's more that you would be tracking this at the level of yeah here are the big carbon emitters in your country in these yep um because it doesn't matter what the political profession you have yeah i i remember uh like a vox article on um how people are using satellites and machine learning to like track um like fairly accurately like coal consumption um across the world and i feel like you know the big centralized like you know uh power stations mines um oil refineries etc like those are very legible uh from you know that sort of perspective and so you know like obviously obviously you can't track like everything but i i feel like you know if you can just get like the really big things uh you can get a lot done with that um and then you know the little stuff like you know maybe i don't know like i'm sure you have thoughts on this you've been working in this problem space for much longer than i have yeah i mean if you get the big stuff

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=750s) right the small stuff is pretty much irrelevant right yeah i mean you know like that's the that's the fundamental situation it's all kind of pareto principle um and you know that is the um i mean that's the crux of it right there's just there's just a very strong limit to how much carbon you know small farmers are able to emit yeah and um and you know like that thing with the you know 12 ships or something as much carbon as 200 million cars or something all these lines you've seen that story uh yeah i think so um you know there just aren't that many gigantic emitters in the world yeah yeah you know the cr think of a power grid it's got a few gigantic emitters which are the power stations and then those go down onto an even fewer number of actual creation sites where you've got people doing things like mining the coal yeah yeah as sir like as an australian with like my government is really [ __ ] shitty about this there was like you know some recent news stories about like how you know clean energy task force or something you know like they had like like people in the coal industry being appointed to them it's like completely insane um so yes i am very aware of like just how you know how how when you get down to it like the number is relatively small compared to like you know it like it like starts in these very small places and like disperses out across the world um but it's like a it's like the hub and spoke model i think it's yeah tree structured right you know you've got a big trunk in the middle which is the main carbon economy and then it fans out into an essentially infinite number of leaves when you get things like cars yeah yeah um and you know that the simplicity of that model right it's not that hard to do things like carbon tracking if we wanted to yep you know hey how much cold would you pull out the ground glass site well here's our number how do we know the numbers accurate because that's the number they're paying taxes on you know so at that point what does that tell you about the global carbon management situation i mean it tells you that like if you like you wanted to make change there's only like like the the the number of entities you need to put pressure on is relatively few

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=900s) right well i mean if you saw away the trunk it's going to affect all the branches normally yes yes yes but yes if you just want to count what's happening that's a relatively small number of things ah yeah yeah and right now you've been doing the counting okay yeah that yes make that makes sense we're not at the point where like soaring off the trunk is preferable to like the alternative and that's terror well getting to that point would be terrifying but we're not i mean we're not even tracking the stuff in any kind of sensible looking way yes right yeah i mean you know we've got a truly gigantic um you know global problem here there are probably no more than a thousand companies that have substantial primary carbon capture capability you know there's no real attempt by government to get these companies you know clearly mapped and to do the horse trading you know it's a political problem yep it's not really even a technical economic problem is a political problem yeah so yes it is a political problem and it you know it is the mother of all like tragedy of the commons plus like uh what what is it like hyperbolic discounting uh where like you know the consequences are unevenly spread uh the benefits are concentrated and like the time between like you know the bad act and the consequences is long and it's also really difficult to like precisely trace cause and effect because it's so [ __ ] complex yeah yeah exactly nightmarishly difficult thing to get action on as we're finding out yes i am of the opinion that um like the uh the good people who like got solar subsidies and like brought down the cost uh uh and i i you know i am politically an anarchist but you know the people who made that happen in government i will happily ship my hap to them because um like i really do think that you know the primary way we're getting out of this is just like really just like

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=1050s) you know on the edges we have to bring this stuff down in cost and like any method that does that i think is good and there are there are like a lot of you know perverse incentives and stuff at play but the consequences are so like utterly terrifying that like you have to bite bullets sometimes yeah i mean i saw something recently that said the um lithium-ion batteries were 50 times cheaper now yes than they were panels yeah no that that is like sorry go on well i mean you know it's pretty clear that the problem is not going to get solved other than through the thing which is getting 50 times cheaper in 30 years continuing to get cheaper until the point where it's cheaper than everything else and then yes yes and i think i think the primary role that you know people who really give a [ __ ] like have to play because i know like you know you um you've talked a lot about like the inadequacy of like the sort of model from the 60s where you know everyone becomes enlightened and then we you know all like rationally move towards a better better world uh i also think that's like kind of [ __ ] i think i think like the role that you know people who like really give a [ __ ] about this it's to like you know just just get in the [ __ ] trenches because like you know you are intrinsically motivated and therefore can endure more than like people who aren't it's like your job is to just like drag you know the solutions um and like willingly accept a lower quality of life and all the difficulty that comes with that and just like you know like drag us to the point where like what like the prisoner's dilemma dynamics uh no longer makes sense and then suddenly you know like governments around the world suddenly like wake up and they go oh that the the money that the fossil fuel lobby gives us uh is is clearly outweighed by the fact that you know like our entire business community would really like cheaper cheaper energy or like you know we can get like cleaner air and you know like there's all these benefits from that uh without you know losing out in other ways and i i really think that that's the way um and

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=1200s) you know it's not it's not like sexy um but like [ __ ] it like you know if if you look at the history of social change like it it kind of always was like that so you know yeah i mean i think that's a pretty reasonable read um you know the whole sort of mass awakening thing like if everybody that was interested in mass awakening was doing an hour of either tai chi or half a yoga a day or some equivalent discipline under an hour of meditation and was getting regular therapy i would take the story of my awakening a lot more seriously right i mean you know i i have done a lot of spiritual work in my time and the levels of effort required are you know an hour to a day sustained over a decade to make any kind of really substantial progress for most people or for everybody for most people and you know if all the people who are just like oh mass awakening age of aquarius you know the cosmic opera you know grand coordinate whatever the term of the day happens to be right the people who think that it's going to be a conscious and slight solution if i saw everybody who has their jaw hanging open about that actually putting in a couple of hours a day to make it happen for them individually then you know a few hundred thousand people at that kind of effort you would begin to see some things happening but you know how many people are actually putting in that kind of effort i mean like yeah i mean like i i certainly don't like i like i [ __ ] right and maybe it's maybe it's just because you know like my body isn't like strong enough but like i like i'm like 10 minutes of meditation and then like holy [ __ ] [ __ ] like i just can't go any further um but you know i don't i don't think like i don't think i need you know to like put in that much work well no yeah there are many mechanisms for changing things right the world is filled with different strategies that people can use to change the world but you know the thing that i'm trying to get to here is like it's not that much awakening isn't a strategy right master opening is a strategy but for that strategy to be executed successfully you have to have a mass that is doing the work of a week right you know it's like well you know our pitch is masked battle and how many people turned up to your masked battle

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=1350s) well four or five people and all they brought with dustbin lids and broomham yes this is not gonna go very well so you know it's not that i disagree with the notion of spiritual awakening obviously i don't but when we talk about spiritual awakening as a solution to spiritual problem to political problems right spiritual awakening is going to solve political problems how many people have to be doing the work of waking up before they're a meaningful political force it's minimally hundreds of thousands and i mean in terms of people sustaining an hour a day practice for multiple years other than the people that are doing that from the stuff that i've taught over the years yes that's i've met maybe three or four you know because at the end of the day very few of the people that are teaching are teaching with a serious intention that the people that they're teaching are actually going to wake the [ __ ] up right mostly what they're teaching is the stuff that they could teach without anybody having a hard time and you know it turns out that the path to weakening is very hard and if you're going to be doing that you are going to have a hard time definitionally right yep definitionally this is a hard process um i mean yeah you've always got exceptions your ramana maharishis and so on but you know for the vast majority of people they're going to get there by hard work if they're going to get there at all and i just don't see civilizational engagement with that even among the cultures that say they're dedicated to this kind of awakening right imagine burning man right you know 10 a.m to 11 a.m every morning at burning man the entire goddamn top is silent because everyone is meditating right well how different an event is burning man if you have an hour of meditation baked into the schedule in the same way that you've got the burning of the man and the temple baked into the schedule how different is this right and you know it's again it's not that i'm saying that's what burning man should be what i'm saying is we know that these movements are not fundamentally spiritual movements because they don't fundamentally have spiritual practices baked in at their core and at that point i think you could take those entire set of structures built around the dream of awakening and you can just ring fence it is like never going to happen they just don't have the manpower and then at that point you're back looking at either politics or tech

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=1500s) all right well politics you know democracy like when we designed four-year electoral democracy with you know paper ballots people were still shipping in buckets and throwing out windows as a normative practice for urban sanitation what was what were the literacy sorry what were the literacy rates exactly i i don't know if the top of my head but they kind of been great oh so if we don't if we don't upgrade the machinery of democracy to better implement the goal of democracy we should not be surprised if democracy is ineffective you know nothing else in our society has changed as little as the voting process in the last three or four centuries everything has been completely transformed and yet we've still got this kind of horse-drawn wagon approach to voting and then we wonder why the politicians don't seem to represent our interests very efficiently i mean like yeah and this isn't a new problem have you um have you heard of the crisis of democracy report no all right well it's it's it's worth reading the wikipedia summary but um basically it was written in like the 70s uh basically after you know like the 60s happened in not just america but also europe and japan and it's basically like a bunch of you know elite sociologists who were like all advisors to you know political types um it's it's published it was published by the bilderberg group um i think actually it was one of like the first publications of it but it's it's basically like argument was basically like uh society is like becoming increasingly complex uh citizen engagement in democracy is making it hard for the process to actually work uh we're seeing like generalized mistrust um all these things are unsustainable uh especially with like you know the uh geopolitical sort of interests of um like that the governments have uh something needs to be done uh we should actually make society less democratic i i know that um chumps gnome chomsky really really likes citing it well i mean if that was the objective i would say they've made fairly good progress

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=1650s) yeah yes yes um no but i i actually think that i actually think that like from a purely like instrumental point of view i think it was actually quite rational i think that having like an institution that governs millions of people and trying to like sort through like the millions of preferences that those people have i i think that you know just information like information theoretically like unless we develop telepathy um i just like i i think that just like breaks and i think like the only alter like the two the two options like are either deadlock or like you basically have to retreat to like some sort of oligarchy uh to run things i don't think it's i don't think it's that that way around at all i don't i mean the problem that we have in the democracies is not problems finding consensus the problem we have in the democracy is that we don't punish liars everybody has come to the conclusion the politicians lie all politicians lie lying no longer harms or ends your career as a politician so you know we're in a position where we've got a massive problem with the politicians saying one thing and then doing another um but we don't punish them when they do that behavior should they continue to do it because it works for them and you know that's our fundamental problem is that we're governed by liars and thieves it's not that the system of democracy is not working it's that we haven't gotten into a situation where the voters are adequately punishable that lie to them all right and that's a cultural problem right you know i'm a politician about something who simply destroyed their career and moved on i am very sorry you were caught lying to the public about something substantial we will never vote for you again get off the [ __ ] platform if we had that kind of an approach we would have an honest political class i i will respectfully disagree with you you don't think we develop political class if we did that um i think i mean okay yes i think that if we if we manage to do that i think that consequence would result it's just that well okay i think i think that if we did that we would have a political class that was far more timid and that would in terms of like decisions they would be a lot more conservative um just because i think that yes politicians do lie but there's also just

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=1800s) like dynamics where you know you implement a change and then the consequences of that change you can't know in advance because again the system is too complex um there isn't there is inherent ability and risk and politics i would i would certainly like to live in a world where politicians are far more upfront about like risk and uncertainty uh i that yes i now agree with you because you know we're going to do well if our politicians are honest and we're going to go bad it's going to go badly if our politicians are thieves you know what's going on having a system where the public get to vote for people if those people are lying to the public about who they are and what they're going to do the public are voting for illusions and that as a fundamental approach you know this is we have a cultural problem which is we do not punish lying in politicians nearly severely enough as a result there's no penalty for wang as a politician as a result lies dominate truth in political discourse and it turns out that you can't make effective decisions the information that you're working from his lies and you know you wonder why democracy broke well we broke the cycle of truth that was meant to be the heart of the democratic process but the thing that blows my mind about this right the thing that fundamentally you know is just shocking to me is the degree to which the voters are directly responsible for their choice to accept lying politicians to represent them right why are the voters accepting people that lie to them rather than insisting that the people that are going to be doing their political representation tell the truth i think the answer to that is very complicated and there are probably entire books written on it that i haven't read and so i will decline to answer i'm sorry about my pet theory oh yeah truth is simply so horrifying and unacceptable um the the voter right yeah are you are you familiar with um terror management theory no i'm not that sounds right up my street what is oh okay yeah so um yeah no you you should you should check it out you'd love it um so actually i got into like philosophy through existentialism uh and like the main existentialist book i read was um this book called the denial of death by

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=1950s) ernest becker um and his basic argument is that uh culture is basically like a very convoluted way to cope with the fact that we are we know that we will all die and so we are rationally irrational when it comes to things that threaten our sense of self that we project beyond ourselves because that is the way that we achieve immortality because you know we might die but these like symbols or things that we leave on uh they secure a sort of immortality for us because they are like a way for our project to keep going and of course this has obvious implications for politics um like you know in like the olden days when you had like absolutist kings like they in many ways represented like they were uh in some polities they were like you know the direct representative of god right um and then you know like democracies come along and like instead it's like the people and of course you know like nationalism uh was in many ways like a way to kind of get over this uh was a way to like you know channel deaf anxiety because you know you had like this nation that you know had this history um and it like was this group of people who you know would work together to achieve certain things and then you know i guess and this i think like has gotten like very you know sort of confused uh since like the world war ii um because well like nuclear weapons have sort of stopped mass war um but you know like there's there's like other sort of like things that people identify with anyway um yeah yeah that's interesting that's interesting so you know the sort of nation or you know as a super family you know well my genes will go on nation will go and my culture will go on yeah our people will go on very kind of volkisch yeah yeah i mean that notion that we've got these kind of cultural blocks that are partly genetic guilds and partly epi phenomena makes a ton of sense right but the question is so why are

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=2100s) these things universally so badly run like for god's sake why are we not making a goal of like can you think of a single country that has a good government um i think taiwan and new zealand maybe new zealand's made a pretty good show of it recently right but wasn't there an enormous amount of structural corruption in their housing markets you know massively high rent yeah anything new you know slavery yeah you see what i'm saying yeah yeah you know like i think it's just very hard right singapore under week one you oh yeah fantastic economic performance fantastic economic performance right socially culturally open questions there's certainly a lot about that track record so you know all the way through i think we're in a position where the systems of government that we're using are very inefficient yep and a huge part you know think of the american founding fathers right with a single stroke of the pen all men are created equal you know with certain inalienable rights endowed by their creator right at the same time as continuing the institution of slavery right i mean you know what was happening in their heads i mean you could assume that all men except for the ones that we owe i mean like i i pretty sure i feel like if you look into it like there were like loopholes um i think i think religious in nature so like you know uh these people don't actually count because you know they don't have god-given rights because we you know found a loophole um yeah they did right you know there's writing from that time with people pointing out exactly that oh yeah you know english the american revolution who are just like it is funny how the americans managed to do you know all this talking about you know rights would be inalienable rights while maintaining slaves oh yeah yeah oh and also and also like the haitian revolution that was like inspired by the french revolution and that gets put down by the french yeah yeah absolutely right so this kind of bondy hypocrisy in politics and in power yeah and the fact that the population are willing to put up with that i gotta say right if you buy government from thieves and liars don't be surprised when you get called and

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=2250s) defrauded yep i i very much agree so why is nobody for honest government so i think the reason why is that like so you know obviously everyone's lives would be improved by having like better systems of governance and i'm using that instead of government because i think there are like non-state ways or like alternative ways of resolving disputes um but you know like the the cost of getting to that point uh is is pretty tremendous and if you want to see it just like look at the history of you know revolutions or like major you know social battles to reform the system like they're all you know fairly costly they all result in like unintended consequences and so i think at the end of the day it like actually is just a matter of sort of rational choice uh even if people don't like consciously you know realize it on the same level that i did but you know like you know you could fight for change but like there's no reason you're gonna see it and you know even if you're altruistic uh the chances that you'll succeed like are quite low and so i think i think it's you know like you're just kind of trapped yeah yeah i mean so how do you think we could get out with this right i how what's the escape from a culture of pervasive corruption i i jesus [ __ ] crust oh man that is okay yeah um let me let me just you know like solve all of political philosophy over a um podcast interview easy easy no problem you're pressure well i mean all of things look how do we incentivize people to tell the truth i mean right or put another way stopping us telling the truth to each other i don't know uh maybe maybe blockchains have a role to play in it i i certainly don't think that going through like the current system right now wait what well-established place of truth i don't know no but i don't know well i have i have a suggestion here right which is this people are lying to each other because

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=2400s) society has made people being what they actually are completely unacceptable right domain after domain after domain after domain the sociological norm that people think they're supposed to behave like and that other people think they're supposed to behave like turns out to be some total freaking fiction um there is a lovely bit of research done 50 something years ago by the u.s air force where they measured all of the you know pilots to try and figure out what the average pilot looked like so they could make planes that fit the average pilot and what they discovered was if you took something like 14 body measurements for people only 3 of people were average on all 14 body measurements most people were average on gross measurements but almost nobody was average in all measurements so if you think about you know the 557 ways for somebody to be a freak most people if you look at them real close are a freak on one of those axes right a bunch of them are gay a bunch of them are super introverted a bunch of them are super extroverted a bunch of them are sociopaths a bunch of them are psychopaths a bunch of them have major depressive incidents a bunch of them have schizoid tendencies right and you know what we don't have is very many people that are just normal people like the people that people think they're supposed to be right so we have an artificial restriction on what constitutes normal people um and it's not that most people don't fit into that there's always an outlier a thing that they're an outlier on right right and what we've learned to do as a culture presumably because of our brutal massive evil medieval past is people have gotten very into concealing those outliers right and that culture where we basically think hey this is normal you're supposed to conform and the fact that almost nobody does it places us into a kind of hypocrisy inside of our heads and then everybody else is working around the need to maintain that illusion i yeah this is about i actually i i agree with you on all that um i think though it actually stems from the industrial revolution um and i think i think especially what what like a culprit is well a major culprit is the fact that uh

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFXx_sch7Wk&t=2550s) they tried to apply like methods of mass production that worked well for you know like really simple things like i don't know like pins is the classic example to like people um you know it was like the same sort of logic and and in like a certain way um in a certain way it makes sense because like you know you have massively expanding populations you have like constant change in technology you don't have the people to like you know give everyone like i don't know a holistic classically liberal arts education or whatever you just need to like you know get get the people with something so they don't like they can work the machines and you know maybe that maybe their kids will uh have something better and so you know maybe if it was like for a generation or two i could see the utilitarian calculus but like the fact it's continued for so long uh when we still like obviously have far more organic and dexterous ways of um like socializing people i guess um is like a is it true travesty yeah yeah yeah yeah so i mean here i think that it's very very important to think about the goals of the system right the goal of the system is yeah yep stephanie does right staff for beer right golden system is what it does industrial mass production makes it very easy for big companies and big platforms like churches and states to make bets about future yep it increases the predictability of society in a way that is optimal for people that are managing large amounts of resources throwing them into the future by force right it's just a thing that we do so you know i think it's important for us to think of this in terms of if we've got better ways of doing modeling of risk maybe that's what it takes for us to accept the real complexity of society like you know if you think about how comfortable we are with the the unpredictability of the weather because we can now do a four day forecast which is pretty damn accurate at that point for the most part people have stopped worrying about what the weather will be like right you get the four day forecast you look at the day that you're going to do the thing you want to do you take the umbrella or not or the coat or not depending on what the weather will be like and it's accurate so much of the time that you're not really fast

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