Vinay Gupta - Resilience Guru

Full transcript: Vinay Gupta on London Real

5:41 This is London Real I am Brian Rose we are sponsored by the folks from Bulletproof coffee today which is if you don’t know coffee that’s free of molds and toxins. I mix that with grass-fed butter and some brain octane oil. It is my breakfast in the morning. It’s a cool company. These guys are biohackers. They’re always looking at what makes us better as humans. So please check them out. You can click on any of the links here on the website where you’re probably watching this video or go to BulletproofExec.com and thank you to them for supporting the show.

6:12 My guest today is Mr. Vinay Gupta who is an expert on resource scarcity, infrastructure theory, state failure solutions, and global system risks like poverty and the environmental crisis. You work as a designer and model builder. We’ve got some on the table here. You look for better solutions to these problems other than, say, centralization or war.

6:32 Vinay, welcome to London Real. Hi. It’s good to be here. Thanks for being here. I thought about you this weekend, funny enough, because I was at home and our water stopped.

6:42 And at first, it’s like, OK, there’s no water in the tap. And at first, it’s like, OK, there’s no water. but we can get through this. And then a little bit later, I can’t brush my teeth. And then a little bit later, nobody can use the bathroom.

6:53 And I’m always, I was always thinking kind of a little doomsday scenario. I’m the kind of guy that wants a pallet of food for a year. Maybe it’s the American in me, I don’t know. And I’m always talking to my girlfriend about this and she’s always like, that’s ridiculous. And then by the next day, you know, the toilets are filling up and I’m like, okay.

7:08 Now this is a small scale, but like I started to see what can happen when all of these things in the infrastructure of London that we assume will work, stops working. And I know you’ve talked a little bit about this in the past, and I was just wondering if you could tell me, should I have been worried? Should I have got a gun, you know? Is there anything that we should always be aware of, like about the resources around this when it comes to something like that?

7:33 Ah, sure, I mean, so if London was just agricultural land, right, if it was just fields like Middle Hampshire or middle of Iowa. Which it used to be before the Romans got here, right? So the carrying capacity, the number of people that can live on that much land is about a tenth or a fifth of the number of people that live in London because you need so much space to grow the food and you need so much space for people to move around and you need so much space for travel and water and all the rest of that stuff.

8:00 So all the other people that are living in London aren’t living on the land, they’re supported by this network that brings food in, that takes waste out, that brings in the power. And that network is everywhere around us. We take it totally for granted, when it stops, 80% of us die, right? If it stops and it never comes back and you stay in the city, the carrying capacity will fall to the natural capacity of the land, which is about a fifth of what we have.

8:25 And what’s the timeline for that decay? Oh, I don’t know, 20 years, right? I mean, London being London, in your unimaginable worst case scenario where the machine just stops, you’re not really going to freeze to death very easily. you’re surrounded by a green and pleasant one that you could walk out into. True.

8:44 Right. You know, in a proper disaster movie scenario, actually very few people died. Have you seen the movie Contagion? No, I didn’t see Contagion. Okay.

8:52 Well, so that was the Soderbergh movie that was about, you know, the pandemic and things like that. But they showed like the breakdown where people can’t get food anymore and people start going into people’s houses. And it was just weird how you see it decay. I remember watching Hurricane Katrina quite closely and it was like three days later you had gangs rolling in the streets. Okay.

9:08 Blowing out of proportion a bit, but is this something you think about from a modelling perspective sometimes? Oh God, yeah, sure. I mean, so the thing is that everybody talks about, you know, like, there’s three days of food in the city and, you know, this kind of stuff. Is that true? Yeah, pretty much, right?

9:21 And because if you think about it, right, go to your local store, right? There’s food in there and then there’s a little warehouse out the back where they keep a few more things, but they don’t have much space. Every morning a truck comes from a bigger warehouse. The bigger warehouse has maybe three, five days worth of food, right? There’s a bit more sitting at the docks, and that’s all there is in the supply chain.

9:39 That’s it. What nobody ever mentions is that there’s basically one cow for every three people in the UK sitting out moving on the land. So you have a real problem, you go, you eat the cows, just like our ancestors did any time there’s a crisis. What do you do? You eat the cows.

9:54 Well, you know, this is a really terrible winter. I’m not sure Matilda’s going to make it, but I’ll get the axe. And that’s what you do. You go to the fields, you kill the cows, you barbecue them. There’s enough food for four and a half months.

10:05 And that’s true in America. It’s true in Europe. It’s true in South America. It’s true in the UK. It’s a bit less true in Africa, largely because their cows are skinnier.

10:14 Right? India, you’re not going to be able to get the people to eat the cows that doesn’t really apply there. What about the anarchy possibilities that would happen in an urban environment like New York or London? That’s what I worry about. Yeah.

10:25 People really, really love that scenario. Is that because it’s in the movies or why? Well, but here’s the weird thing, right? I mean, the world has a long history of completely fucked up situations, right? Can you name one where you got prolonged stable anarchy on the streets and people were eating each other?

10:39 No, that comes to mind. It just never happened, right? Some gang will take over, some force will take over. You get things like, I’m trying to think, was it St. Petersburg, right?

10:49 So there’s a long siege from the Nazis, there’s a bit of cannibalism, not very much, but a little goes a long way. Stalingrad. Stalingrad, that’s what I’m thinking. New movie about it recently, yeah. Oh really?

10:59 Yeah, that’s pretty good. Yeah, Stalingrad, not St. Petersburg. So what did it take to produce Stalingrad? It took the Second World War, and it was only Stalingrad.

11:10 People got hungry. There was a bit of looting. There was a bit of violence in other places. But the really serious like, oh my god, it’s all gone wrong thing, only really happened in one place, and it took a blockade to make it happen. And that’s generally speaking true.

11:24 Anytime you hear about something like a famine, in almost every circumstance, the famine is produced by a government killing the free market locally. Right there’s a whole history about that even that the famine of Ireland, which you have ties to you from there And no, I live there most of the time. Okay, but I can get there a lot of things though We’re politically motivated or absolutely they were still it wasn’t the lack of food It was just that Irish weren’t getting the food. They were exporting grain from Ireland right the way through the famine, right?

11:49 Right heard this so live aid, right, you know 20 years ago 30 years ago There’s enormous festival to raise money for Ethiopia. They sent forty eight thousand or fifty six thousand tons of food down to Ethiopia the government let it rot on the docks. They didn’t want the people fed, they wanted the people dead. Right, right. When the US first went into Somalia, it was because the power lords weren’t allowing the food to be delivered to the people.

12:15 It was a political movement. It’s very political, right? Okay. I mean, Somalia is a really complicated place, but during the period when it was run by the Union of Islamic Courts, they had anarchic governments in a way that a lot of libertarians could relate to, albeit under Muslim law. Then you go to anarchy, anarchy, where just nothing works. Now they’ve got central government again. But throughout that period, you don’t get the famines until you put somebody in charge, and that person decides that part of their population is expendable.

12:46 This is why I am radically pro-gun rights, which is a really unusual position for a Brit. Interesting. Because all the way through history, every time that somebody is going to have a genocide, the first thing they do is ban firearms. There’s a site called armthevictims.org and it’s just a list of all the genocides with the gun laws that preceded them and then you know a little bit of information about what happened. And to me that’s the single compelling fact of human history is that in the 20th century the state killed a quarter of a billion people in death camps. Right? About half or a third as many people died of smallpox, died in guwags and you know ghettos and all the rest of this kind of stuff, like it was a century-old genocide.

13:30 But before we get further into your views, when you meet someone at a party and they ask what you do, what do you tell them? Because I just ran through a bunch of things about you, but how would you describe yourself in a nutshell? Man, usually I’d describe myself as a lost hippie. No, I mean, you know, what I will often say is that I’m, you know, a consultant, right? Or that I’m a, you know, disaster relief specialist, something like that.

13:51 Okay. But actually, I mean, you know, what I made my bones on was working on scenarios that nobody else could handle. Nuclear terrorism, pandemic, bioterror, genocide, the really big death toll stuff. I did about three or four years of work where I just went through all of the real big worst case scenarios, building mechanisms for getting people out with them. Okay. So you kind of model it mathematically and try to think about it very systematically?

14:19 Systematically yes, but mathematically no. So the big break was about 2007, 2008, I’m I’m living in Iceland, and I’ve got a background working on critical infrastructure stuff for energy policy. So I used to be at Rocky Mountain Institute, worked on a couple of books. One is Smallest Profitable, which is fantastic, and the other is called Winning the Oil Endgame. Critical infrastructure is like what?

14:41 Electricity grids or water systems or? Well, so break it down, right? Critical, if it goes away, people die. That’s a definition of critical. Infrastructure is the stuff you don’t see, infra, under.

14:53 So it’s the hidden understructure that keeps you alive. We use the word infrastructure or critical infrastructure all the time without ever really making the link that this is what keeps us alive. You are your supply chain. You are your shelter. You take those things away.

15:11 You have a life expectancy of hours. Okay. So what are those things if you had to be specific? Okay. So the old model was pipes, wires, factories, all this kind of stuff.

15:22 It doesn’t work. You can’t think about it in an intelligible way because it’s too complicated. So I moved from the old model that was prevalent at Rocky Mountain Institute to this new model which is called simple critical infrastructure maps. And it’s a checklist, because in a crisis, you can just about get through a checklist, you can’t get through a modeling tool. Checklist, right?

15:43 What are the things that will kill you? You could get too hot, too cold, hungry, thirsty, you could get ill, or you could get injured. Other than that, you’re not going to die, except of old age, and that’s not our problem. Let the transhumanists get that one. Give me my immortality shot now. So too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness, injury. Repeat it to me. Give me the list.

16:08 Two hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, injury, illness. That’s what you want to make sure that people can not get those things after some type of scenario. Right. Well, right. And then you look at the systems doing it now. So what protects you from dying of being too hot. You live in London. Not a threat. Although a lot of people die, like old people in heat waves. Yeah, I remember. 20,000 or so in France?

16:31 Yeah, they had a bad one in 2005 or 2004. Yeah, right. And because it’s people that are close to end of life, we don’t really count it, but the death tolls are enormous. So you come up with these grand plans and advise governments on what they should do if these big things happen? Well, I did at one point. I’ve gotten a little out of that work because I basically burned out on it, right? I did a long round, got to a point where I didn’t really have anything else to add, and then walked. Do governments really care? Are they really putting those solutions into place? Or is it kind of like, not my problem? Because that’s not a first order problem. Like, I’m sure the Conservative Party wants to get reelected. If something bad happens, like Katrina, they just say, ah, it was my fault. Well, I mean, you know, I used to think that, and then you saw the response to Sandy, right? So on Sandy, slick machine kicks into play, Right?

17:17 So look at Sandy from that model, right? Too hot, not going to happen, too cold, huge risk, right? Hunger. After a couple of days, people get hungry. If you don’t do something, they’re going to get violent, or they’re going to relocate, which is even more difficult to deal with.

17:30 Thirst, not really an issue, could have been an issue. End of the day, people are not going to die of thirst in New York. Right. It was raining still. There was water around it.

17:38 Yeah. You might wind up drinking dirty water. It takes you to illness, right? Yeah. Primary illness threat is always sanitation.

17:43 This is your blocked up toilets. Yeah. really quickly, water supply interruption immediately turns into pandemics, cholera. In Haiti, cholera, it’s probably going to kill more people than the earthquake did eventually. Then finally, injury, right? This is the thing that everybody worries about. Oh my God, we’re going to get shot. Our neighbors will come and knock our doors down and steal our food and all the rest of this crap. Here’s the thing, right? I mean, you know how to fight, right?

18:06 Yeah. Well, I can fight one person pretty good. Pretty good, not great. But if people are serious about killing each other, what’s the odds that one or other party is going to get maimed in a two-man fight? Pretty much certainty.

18:21 What’s the odds that the other party is going to be uninjured? One and three? Yeah. Low. Low.

18:29 You see it happen all the time. With guys that are trained fighters and they’ll be in a bar and somebody will bump them and both of them get injured bad. You see, right? I mean, karate guys getting broken hands for the first time they really punched somebody. mythology but really common, right? Broken knees. So in actual crisis situations people avoid violence unless they’ve got ambush and overwhelming numbers and preferably better armaments. And even then you don’t want to sacrifice any of those things with people that will really seriously fight back. You want to grab what you can from easy targets and move on again, right? That’s exactly the same MO that criminals have any time. You just don’t get this kind of Mad Max Warlord thing where you’ve got large-scale civil unrest because the people that are most able to perpetrate the violence are also the people that are least willing to get injured doing so.

19:16 They might break into grandma’s house and steal everything she owns, but they’re not likely to just shoot her in the head because they happen to be there. It’s a waste of ammunition. So that’s Hollywood scenarios. It’s a fear that government continues to stoke because it makes them look necessary. In actual fact, there’s a book called A Paradise Made in the hell, talks about the 72 hours of voluntary cooperation that you get after any large-scale disaster.

19:38 Right, we saw this in Japan after there was a break. Right. But you also saw it in your wings. OK. Right?

19:44 There’s so many conflicting reports that came out of New Orleans. There was even some misinformation and disinformation that came out of New Orleans. Even the mayor later said that babies weren’t raped and all these things that you heard were happening down there. So look what happened at Sandy, right? Right.

19:57 Occupy Sandy turns out they work hand-in-fist with the military, which was working hand-in-fist with this National Guard and FEMA and all the way up to you know the government right so voluntary cooperation 40,000 people or something like that were involved I can’t remember how big it was but it was enormous maybe they run food to 40,000 people and there were about 20,000 yeah 1,800 vulnerable I can’t remember but anyway huge response effort social pro social not anti-state definitely for the people incredibly smooth response to a situation that really could have been dangerous you’re saying I shouldn’t get a pallet of food and I shouldn’t get a gun is what you’re saying well actually no I think you should do both of those things okay but not because you’re afraid of your neighbors okay right and what you saw in things like Sandy is short-term crisis right if they had had another four days of power outage it would have gone back into freezing conditions and they would have lost an enormous number of people probably hundreds could have been thousands they would just have frozen to death in New York there was no way to reach them door to door there just wasn’t enough manpower. Total failure of organization, but they got lucky on the weather and they had a good response. The kind of scenarios where having a pallet of food matters is pandemics. If you get a global outbreak of some kind of evil flu, right? Want to hear a scary thing? Yeah, hit me. So London has a pandemic flu

21:15 Plan produced by the London Resilience Forum. It maxes out a flu that kills one person in 50. If it kills more people than one in 50, it’s not in that plan. up. The organisms of threat right now, the things that the pandemic guys are really worried about kill two in three. A bit like the movie Contagion. A bit like the movie Contagion, right?

21:37 Significant chunks of the population. Really significant chunks of the population, right? So that’s entirely scientifically credible. And, you know, there are two kinds of threats. Can you prepare for something like that? Oh, hell yeah. Two kinds of threats. Threat Threat number one, the more you know, the less afraid you are.

21:53 Threat kind two, the more you know, the more afraid you are. Pandemic flu is type two. The more knowledgeable people get, the more scared they are. In terms of preparing for it, all you can do is stay inside for a month. You go outside.

22:07 Stay away from people. Stay away from people. Stay indoors. Why? The flu is outside.

22:12 It’s not in your house. Sit in your house. Eat your food. Drink your canned water. Wait.

22:17 Right? The pandemic goes in waves before working with vaccines. the government will take months to get really to its feet with a response plan. So all you can do to stay alive in that situation is just stay the hell away from people and wait. And that’s what you have your palette of food for.

22:30 It gives you the luxury of staying indoors and waiting. Okay. And the gun? The gun is just in case anybody else who doesn’t have that luxury wants to come in. Okay.

22:39 Who wants your food? Yeah. But in London, it’s not legal to have handguns. But your pro handgun, because you think being able to defend yourself would have a lot more problems in the last century. You could get an absolutely amazing crossbow, which is fully legal in the UK.

22:52 You’d be stunned how good those things are. Modern materials technology, you’re talking about half the muzzle energy of an AK-47. OK, crossbow, great. You’re here, telling us we should buy crossbows. Well, hunger, thirst, illness, injury, right?

23:08 How do you prevent yourself from getting injured? Put a spike in anybody that wants your food. So with all of this kind of stuff, The the critical thing to avoid is this feeling that the government will fix it for you right right in any really severe systemic crisis They will be busy handling the places where it got really bad Right, they will be looking for the very worst place. Everybody else will get neglected But the worst place probably will be central London not necessarily. I mean look central London, right?

23:36 You know center of government center of the military center of the crown, right? Right? It probably gets attention. Huge amounts of attention, right? The place where you’d be really afraid of beings like Manchester, you know, like it could get so bad in Manchester under that scenario and nobody would come.

23:52 Why? Because all the troops are garrisoning London. What’s happening up north? I don’t know. Who cares?

23:58 Nobody ever comes from there, really. And the government just moves right along. So do you tell people to prepare themselves or educate themselves or what do you tell people? Well, ready.gov, right? US government’s risk management website says everybody should have a three-day kit in their house, which will enable them to pick up their bag, walk out the front door, and not need anything for three days.

24:17 That is the US government’s advice to everybody, right? You know anybody with that bag? Not even in the US. Right. So start with the three day bag.

24:25 That’s government advice. That’s not paranoia. That’s the state’s advice to everybody. Okay. And it has food too?

24:31 Yeah. And water or water tablets. You just pick up a bag, walk outside, three days, you don’t need anything from anybody. The reason they keep advising people to do that is because in any kind of crisis, the last thing they want to be doing is worrying about ordinary civilians looking for food and water and all the rest of this kind of stuff. They want to be paying attention to the people that got their legs broken in the earthquake.

24:52 They want to deal with the actual problem rather than the supply chain disruption. So everybody should have a three-day kit, right? That’s easy. Anybody can do that. Everybody should.

25:02 And that’s government advice. That’s not paranoia. Okay. However, flip side of the coin, you mentioned the question of whether everybody should be armed, when the state goes bad, it’s like dealing with your friend when they become schizophrenic. The state goes off its meds and decides that the problem is the Jews or the Gypsies or the Armenians or the dissidents, and now you have two problems.

25:24 Because on one hand, you’re relying on the state to protect you, and on the other hand, now the state has become your worst enemy. Okay. That’s a longer term problem. That’s not necessarily a crisis problem. Well, I mean, if it happens, it’s a crisis, right?

25:34 I mean, you had 19, 20 something, I think the big killing starts in Russia, and it runs right through to about 1950, 30 years of gulags doing in on the order of 80 to 120 million people. Bad things. That’s bad things. That’s bad things. We have so much to talk about.

25:56 I’m going to move you on. What is this thing on the desk right here, and why you just built it in my studio here in a matter of minutes? What is it? So this is the infamous hex here. The reason this thing exists is, well, for one thing, Burning Man, right?

26:12 Okay. How many times have you been to Burning Man? Oh, seven? Maybe six. When was your first one?

26:17 Ninety-six. Wow. I went as soon as I could after I got to America. And when was the first one? Sometime the late 80s.

26:25 Okay. I want to say 89 maybe? Okay. Burning Man 95, they had drive-by shooting range, right? Pick up truck, tailors, dummies, assault rifle for our shooting range.

26:36 Very very nice. And in 96, how many people were there? I don’t know, 3,000 maybe? And now it’s 60? 60,000.

26:43 Yeah. It’s big. So this thing here, the hex here, what is it? It’s an emergency shelter, but it’s also potentially a long range solution to the mortgage. So if you buy building materials, they come in four by eight sheets.

26:57 In America here, it’s 1.2 by 2.4 meters. comes in that shape. Wall pieces are a whole sheet, roof pieces are half sheets. You could basically just hack these things out of whatever building material you have, and the instruction is cut half of the sheets in half, bolt it into a shallow roof, put it on top of a wall. Right. Boom. You have a shelf. For people listening to us on iTunes, it is hexa-girt, so hexa, it’s hexagon on the bottom if you were to take a cross section. And then the top is kind of a, not conical, but it’s kind of sloping upwards to a point, and It’s literally made of, yeah, the same number of pieces as the bottom but cut in half, right?

27:33 That’s pretty cool. Yeah. Real simple, right? 12 sheets of plywood, cut six of them in half, make them into triangles. Most people could figure that out if you gave them the pieces and some materials to attach.

27:42 They might get it wrong for a few hours, but yeah, you know, I mean, if you’ve got half a day, you’ll get it, right? If you watch the videos and the instructions, you know, there are literally thousands of people that have done it for the first time at Burning Man on the ply and not screwed it up. Okay. We never hear stories. If we went to Burning Man and we couldn’t get our hexi-art up, it just doesn’t happen.

28:02 How many of these are present at Burning Man? We reckon from the satellite pictures last year it was somewhere between 750 and 1,000. This year we don’t have a satellite picture, but we think it’s about twice that many from reports. Wow. So well over 1,000.

28:16 We don’t know how many. Okay. And why do people use them there? Well, you get two hours more sleep in the morning. Compared to a tent, the tent’s uninhabitable by eight or nine.

28:23 The hexi-art you can sleep till noon without even trying. And that turns into one more day of an actual go. If you go out early in the week, by the end of the week, you are just toasted from lack of sleep and too much heat. Take a hex here. You can be fit as a fiddle Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday, you can actually get your shit together and get out.

28:42 Why did you create this thing? And how was this? Yeah. Where did this come from? Refugees.

28:48 So a bunch of people asked me whether I could do something about a refugee shelter. I knew a bunch about geodesic domes because I used to work in graphics software and the math for geodesic domes is the same math for computer graphics, right? It’s all about triangulated surfaces. So some folks were like, can you fix this? And I sat down and had a think, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, wait, click, 15 minutes later, had the first one, after that it was like, okay, this is a big deal.

29:16 Burning Man 2003 went there with a tiny one that would fit like, you could fit four of them in your living room. They’re just tiny. Anybody with a back garden, you could build one of the small ones. Inside of those shelters, I’m sitting inside of this thing that I put together with duct tape and cardboard. I open the door, there’s a white-out duststorm outside, like less than a meter of visibility. Close the door again. This thought forms in my head, I have changed the world. I’ve turned a bunch of industrial cardboard into a thing that has an inside and an outside. I didn’t even know there was a dust storm.

29:53 And I put it on a roof rack myself. There was almost no material there. The entire thing weighed probably 30 kilos. And it was a house for two people, and it would cost nothing in mass production. Okay. And it keeps you cool in the morning when it overheated scenario.

30:07 Right. And it’s warm in the night. Okay. So it insulates that air in there. Yeah. But the critical thing is, if you get a really big disaster, say somebody drops in Newcomb, New York, and you’ve got to move 20 million people out of the fallout zone.

30:19 There aren’t 20 million tents sitting around. There aren’t 20 million hotels that will take radioactive guests. No, no, no, no, no. So you’ve got to go and build literally 4 million houses. And the only material that you remotely have enough of to even think about doing that is plywood. So you’ve got to try and figure out the minimum trouble way of turning ploughed into emergency housing, that’s about roughly half as efficient again as if you build it square.

30:48 So you could build little A frames or if you want to make your materials go about a third to half further, you build hexiards and they’re easier to put up. There’s more space and then at the end of that process, you can just get rid of them. You can just mulch the damn things to get rid of the radiological contamination, just bury them. And part of your ethos is kind of to open source this stuff, right? You’ve always been about putting your ideas out there so people can use them.

31:10 No copyright. No patent. Free for all purposes. That was a conscious decision. Oh, yeah.

31:15 Absolutely. Because look, I mean, there have been people inventing cool shelters for 50 years, right? There are just no end of these cool shelter projects out there. None of them ever go anywhere, right? You get a little company with three or four employees that sells 5,000 units a year, and that’s as big as it ever gets.

31:30 So most of those shelters are patented. And if they’re patented, you can’t make them where you need them. You can only make them where the company is. It’s still good. It’s just not the solution.

31:39 So no patent, you make them where you need them, that means you can buy the materials, you can configure the design, you don’t have to screw around, you could set up a factory making these things in South Africa tomorrow morning, a month and a half later you’d have a production line and three months after that you’d be housing 20,000 people. It’s that easy. On that same note, do you think a company is the ideal type of structure to produce something like this or even produce every product or do you think there’s another way for people to work together in some type of organization to to make things you know governments on one side may be profitable business on the other is there somewhere in between oh god yeah but before we branch that let me give you the punchline on the hex hair thing right make it in foam cover it in chicken wire spray it in concrete right so super cheap super easy super white permanent insulated concrete shelter okay anybody can build it that means you could do a four-bedroom house one hex yard per room build it with nice tall walls, you’ve got real like, you know, eight feet high ceilings, and then higher from there, 15 grand for four bedroom, that you can build yourself in a month. Now we’re talking.

32:45 That’s pretty good. And now kill the mortgage. Is this mortgage? Is this also have refugee camp possibilities? Everywhere. Okay. Right. I mean, you could build out super cheap materials, whatever material you’re using, there is no cheaper way of using it than a hex here, right? There’s nothing you can do that uses the material more efficiently in space.

33:03 Okay, right. It’s almost a hemisphere. So mathematically right most efficient shape is a sphere almost a hemisphere But no complicated angle cutting, right? There’s nothing to it have on that same No, have you studied, you know refugee camps and is there’s anything you could tell us about what what you know What a good one is what a bad one is if that even exists that concept, you know, Syria we’re seeing it now They’re saying about these refugee camps and they’re always temporary, but they’re never temporary. That’s right. That’s right. People realize that okay So I’m just gonna put this on the stock, right?

33:32 So we’ll come back to that thing about the state in a second because it’s all interconnected. So refugee camps, the problem is this, you’ve got a guy called a camp manager that controls the budget for the entire camp and his agreement is the UN’s agreement or the Red Cross’s agreement with the local government that you guys will not start an economy. So you have to sit there not starting an economy. You don’t have economic rights, you’re not allowed to work, you’re not allowed to start manufacturing, you just can’t get your life together in the refugee camp because you’re only there temporarily. You also have nothing to do, right? Right. 60 years later, the Palestinian refugees are still refugees, and you know, Kibera in, is it Kenya? They’ve been there for five generations, temporary. Right. So. Place off of Morocco, south of Morocco, I forgot the name of that state. They’ve got the temporary camps. And they just go on forever and ever and ever, right? So you got to start thinking of refugee camps as as temporary cities, right?

34:30 Where temporary means maybe not more than five generations. 50 years from now, maybe this will be gone. What’s gonna turn this whole thing around is smartphones, tablets, internet access. Because what happens when you’ve got 25,000 people sitting in a tent city with tablet computers printed on the back of freaking cardboard, screens that recharge from the sun, simple, cheap computers. In that environment, they’re gonna talk to each other, they’re going to self-organize, They’re going to network with their friends.

35:00 They’re going to connect to any family members that are in a better position. The refugee comes once they are wired. The refugees stop being lost stray humans. And they become all kinds of things that they can do. They can make money.

35:11 They can do translations. If they could find a way of getting an income in there, they can figure out how to get enough money and get out again. And in all probability, the only currency that will allow them to do that is Bitcoin. OK. That’s a clever segue into Bitcoin today.

35:25 Well, look. Who’s going to let them open a bank account? All right. Yeah. Well, we’ve never heard this.

35:30 We’ve heard, we’ve been talking about Bitcoin. We had Max Keiser on here. We had Peter Schiff. You know, everyone’s got an opinion about Bitcoin. Some think it’s not a viable currency.

35:38 Some say it doesn’t represent anything. Some people think it’s going to $5 million, like Rick, Rick Falkvinge says it’s somewhere between 2 and 5 million euros is the price of the Bitcoin. What do you think about Bitcoin? You have a, you know, a very good technical background. I reckon that Bitcoin is probably kind of like looking at, I don’t know, what was This is the first social networking site you saw, six degrees.

35:59 Was that it? Something like that, maybe. Was it really rough? Early, well, I mean, think of what MySpace was like, right? So I would say that Bitcoin is probably going to turn out to be the MySpace of digital currencies.

36:10 The first thing that most people saw that said, oh, my God, that’s possible. It might just turn out to be the MS-DOS of digital currencies, totally crap technology that you get stuck with for a generation. But I very much doubt that now that Bitcoin is possible, something that isn’t much better than Bitcoin is now enabled. Bitcoin’s enemy is not the state. Bitcoin’s enemy is its successors.

36:32 It’s new technology. Well, look, after you see Bitcoin, suddenly there must be half a million crypto nerds who are like, I just figured out how to get rich. Let’s start a bank. And you take the level of innovation that Bitcoin managed, and then you say, right, well, from that platform, what else can we do? And all of that thinking, all of that intelligence goes into making a competitor for it.

36:52 And in a free market, the idea that you’re going to have one store of value that becomes a permanent, stable thing. It’s ridiculous. But also, since it is a currency and people have a vested interest in their own money, they literally buy into the currency. Because you put your money where your mouth is. And so is there that legacy cost or sunk cost that’s going to keep it around even if it’s low tech? Is it low tech when you look at it right now?

37:13 No. I mean, it’s real high tech, but not compared to its competitors, which will learn everything that Bitcoin knew and then add some new tricks, right? This is the pace of innovation thing, right? So I don’t think that Bitcoin is going to get sandbagged by the state. I really thought it was going to go down. It doesn’t look like it’s going to go down. It’s probably going to get mainstreamed, but what’s going to happen is Bitcoin 2, Bitcoin 3, Bitcoin 4. There are something like 140 other currencies.

37:37 Yeah, Litecoin and all this other stuff. Litecoin and Purecoin, and everybody who’s got a model of how they want the world to work is going to build a currency, let 1000 flowers bloom. I don’t know where Bitcoin’s eventual value will be, but I think at the 30-year mark, it will either be unrecognizable or dead. Either they’ll keep evolving the platform and they’ll keep changing the rules of the game to stay ahead of the pack or the pack will simply consume Bitcoin and it’ll be like Bitcoin is that still worth anything but there will be a cryptocurrency is that we call it what do you call it I think cryptocurrencies fine okay I think that there’s a lot of confusion that people think they’re currencies right because all we’ve ever seen is currencies right we’re looking at these instruments and we’re saying horseless carriages right okay right yeah what is it actually you You know, is it like money or you can use it for exchange?

38:24 Is it the same as money or not really? So why do we keep calling it money because you can use it like money, that makes it money? No, it’s a thing. What are its properties? We don’t know, right?

38:34 But once there are a lot of those things, right, once you’ve got enough stable cryptocurrencies to be able to throw a party, right, 15, 20, 30 currencies that are used for different things, once that basis is established, I think you can then begin to do kind of a sociological survey, right? In what ways are they like currencies, in what ways are they not like currencies, in what way are they more political? Like, imagine if you did a thing where you did voting with Bitcoin.

38:59 All of these Bitcoins have private keys associated, right? So you could send out voting papers, and everybody that had a Bitcoin could digitally sign it, and their vote would be worth the same as the amount of Bitcoin they possessed. You could do electronic democracy off the Bitcoin key space. Is that democracy or is that a capitalist? Democracy. Well, I mean it’s exactly what we do for limited liability corporations, right number shares you own equals the size of your voting share Okay So, you know in a sense you could do democratic governance a Bitcoin on the same way that we do democratic governance companies in theory Without breaking a sweat. Okay, is that normal for currencies? No, it’s right So it’s a mindset we need to think of a different way of thinking of it. I agree with you I think it’s it’s just a new concept that we have to get our brains around and by trying to call it the gold or money, it’s none of these things.

39:48 It’s none of these things. Right, and now we’re seeing interesting things where we had Kaiser in here talking about doing a crowdfunding run for George Galloway, running for mayor, and then you can do it in Bitcoins, and now you can get people contributing to a political party. And if you imagine a Kickstarter campaign where it’s like, Galloway just did a million pounds, and it’s like, well, that’s not fair. Well, what can you crowdfund? And then it starts getting interesting.

40:10 Oh, just all kinds of craziness. So you think for refugees, There’s a real need for that cryptocurrency. It’s under refugees, right? Anybody who lives in a country that has a shit government would prefer to get a currency instrument that was produced by a not shit vendor. Okay, which is why we saw in Russia then people would hoard dollars.

40:27 Dollars. Black market gold. Gold. Something you can be sure of. So you can think of Bitcoin as being like the poor man’s Swiss franc, right?

40:35 There is no reason that you can’t get Bitcoin off a smartphone in an African refugee camp and use it for paying for your web hosting services you’re running a little business to pay for your kids’ education, right? Because the government can’t say no, the currency control can’t say no, the people that won’t acknowledge that you exist as a human being enough to give you a bank account can’t say no, right? So for people that are unserved by the state and unserved by the system, things like Bitcoin are potentially huge breakthroughs, right?

41:04 There’s a really strong humanitarian case for cryptocurrencies because they’re universally available without government oversight, and refugees have so little support from the state that they’re getting strangled because they can’t get access to services. So if you think of Bitcoin as being like open source currency, it’s universally available to anybody with a phone, and I mean, you know, put up with it, right? This, right? It’s the new Mozilla phone. So it’s running an open source operating system.

41:32 It’s $40 in South America, and it’s a perfectly usable first world smartphone. I don’t notice that I’m not on an iPhone for anything that I do day to day. So when all of these guys are running around with open source telephony, cheap tablets connected to open source currencies, fully participant in the digital economy globally, even though people wouldn’t give them a passport, this is really big. And there are billions of people in that situation who right now can’t do anything internationally because they don’t have telecoms and they don’t have banking.

42:03 But this is happening very soon and it will be happening. Oh, it’s happening now, right? And you think Bitcoin’s gone far enough that in your mind, the government can’t reel it back. They’re going to let it go or they have no choice but to let it go. Maybe the CIA is already using it, who knows?

42:17 I mean, I guarantee intelligence services are using it because if they’re not, they’re stupid. Beating Bitcoin to death at this point would take such an enormous amount of effort, right? I mean, there was a point where it could have been strangled in the crib, it’s far past that point now. This is not to say that it couldn’t be forced back underground and knock down to, you know, $5 a coin, right? I mean, you know, you just need to arrest everybody that ever traded on Silk Road and very quickly Bitcoin will become like, oh, Bitcoin, right? Yeah, it might knock it back a bit, definitely. I mean, there’s a company called Coinbase in San Francisco, just got $25 million worth of funding for this, you know, and that’s what they do. They have 600,000 registered users now that are only Bitcoin and it looks like it’s, yeah, it’s going to be hard to pull that back.

43:00 I mean, you know, 50 businesses will take it, walk up in Berlin. Yeah, you were telling me that, yeah. Yeah, Room 77, right? There’s a network around in Kreuzberg. But, right, the thing is that Bitcoin is actually kind of a shit currency.

43:14 If you just think of it as a currency, because the deflationary thing means that the early movers have massive advantage. So this is great because, you know, my political class, right, the kind of, you know, dot com nerd elite, whatever you want to call it, a lot of my political class went into Bitcoin long early. And as a result, a lot of people that I know are getting rich. It’s like a dot com boom for crypto nerds. Yeah. I talked about Rick Fogman’s. We talked about this. All the next billionaire oligarchs are going to be these early adopter nerds.

43:44 Right. And that might even be true, right? But actually, I am not really sure that the solution to the world’s problem is just changing who the oligarchy is, right? At a fundamental level, I am not sure that our nascent libertarian overlords are going to give the rest of population a fair deal because until we figure out how we’re going to manage natural monopolies we’re always going to be in a position where the people that capture natural monopoly fuck the rest of the population and much as libertarians want to pretend there are no natural monopolies that’s just fantasy. Okay is this something else you spend a lot of time looking at or natural monopolies or or just because you’re a big resource guy as well and you’re always talking about the the limited resources we have usually I think manifest themselves in in what more government or war. I mean, this is something you talk about a lot. Yeah, absolutely, right? I mean, you run out of things, people get mean, people get mean, they form big power blocks called states, and then they beat the shit out of each other, right? The US Air Force during the Iraq War was 1% of the world’s oil consumption. I didn’t know that. Yeah, right. Okay. I mean, that might have included the army as well, but I mean, 1% of the world’s oil consumption. But you’re saying that’s quite significant. Well, look, the amount of gasoline you have to burn to have have an army of 200,000 fighters taking 1% of the world’s oil, right? 7 billion.

45:01 So what does that tell you? Well, war is expensive in resource terms. All of the humans, all of the metals, all of the energy, all of those resources that we can’t get back. Once you burn it in a conflict, it’s gone. Think of all the energy that we put into the space race, right? You know what I say to people about why the world is this way? The world is this way because we put the plutonium in the wrong end of the rockets, right?

45:24 You put the plutonium on the bottom of the rocket, we would have been in Alpha Centauri by 1970. You put it in the top of the rocket, all it’s good for is killing people. Okay. So what’s your take on environmental resources then? I’ve got a funny feeling you don’t have the normal take on it.

45:37 Well, no. Look, I mean, let me show you an object, right? This is not going to help your listeners any, but let me just dig this in and out. I’ll try to describe it. There’s a lot of keys you got.

45:46 It’s a lot of keys, yeah. Ignore the keys. It’s the string. I would expect a man like you to have all your keys digitalized somehow. No, I know far too much about digital technology to trust the end of it, okay Well, um, so see that string. Yeah, take you guys at the breaking strain Um, I don’t know a few hundred pounds. You’re a big guy. Give it give it a good stone Okay, any give A bit, you know a bit a few percent. I guess something like that. It’s pretty strong 450 kilos. Okay, right. Yeah for 40 centimeter Okay, right. So it’s a nun It was a microphone.

46:23 Yeah, cut. Am I doing this right? Yeah. Good. Good?

46:34 Okay. Sorry about that. That’s cool. So it’s a nanomaterial called spectra. Okay.

46:39 Right? So nanomaterials are going to change everything. And when I say everything, like, three of me could hang off a piece of string that’s 1.8 millimeters thick. Right? Five of you.

46:50 This stuff weighs nothing. It costs nothing to produce. It’s basically just long chain carbon and hydrogen. Graphene is going to be, that is the string for fabric. So we’re talking about fabrics which are…

47:03 Keep hearing about graphene, right? Right? Graphene is basically just going to be unbreakable cloth. Okay. So what does that mean?

47:10 Well, how do you like to see an eight-story building that rolls out of a sea container inflatable? Right? You’re obsessed with structures, aren’t you? Well, look, what does everybody need? They need some food, they need some water, they need a place to live, they need some energy, they need some telecoms.

47:25 We can do all of this with new technology for the entire world without breaking a sweat. To provide for the whole of humanity in 1950 with available technology so nobody died of whack would have been difficult. To do it in 1980 would have been possible. To do it in 2010 is getting to be just about imaginable. By 2030 or 2040, it’s going to be easier to do it than not.

47:51 What keeps us from doing this? What makes the markets from being efficient? The markets are efficient. The markets are efficiently concentrating wealth in the hands of the most capable people. Markets are evolutionary, and evolution is brutal.

48:06 Put the weak to the sword, eat their carcasses, that is evolution. People talk about cooperative modes of evolution and social group selection and all the rest of this kind of stuff. Yes, but there’s always a prey animal, and the prey animal is the thing which goes down your neck. is simply the praying of the strong upon the weak. If you want to have a social system that doesn’t work that way, you have to start accepting that the weak are going to be taking things from the strong in ways which are completely unfair to the strong.

48:35 But I’m strong. I could do that. It’s my right. I evolved to do it. I’m going to do it.

48:40 You begin to develop an anti-evolutionary culture. Now whether or not that’s the right thing or the wrong thing to do is a moral decision that people make. From my perspective, I think that we ought to make sure that everybody lives, but But I also think that we shouldn’t do that at the expense of the freedom of the strong because the stronger the people that are going to give us new options. If you tax the Elon Musk’s of this world into the ground, the human race doesn’t go to space.

49:05 On the other hand, I don’t think that we should have infant mortality rates in Detroit that look like Somalia. Right? Okay. So what do you propose? I think there’s a ton of room in basic income.

49:17 I think basic income is really worth a serious look. But it will work or not. Let’s try it in some small countries first and see what happens. Basic income. What’s that?

49:25 So basic income, you basically run a tax rate of around 50% and the government writes everybody a check for $20,000 a year. Interesting. Right? So you are going to lose half your income to tax, but you’re also going to get $20K a year in the form of a grant, not means tested. And maybe about 50% will be lost as it goes through the government somewhere.

49:44 No, no. It’s super clean. Right? Because you close all the social programs. Okay.

49:49 Everybody gets a chunk of money from the government, and that’s all the government does. They don’t do healthcare, they don’t do education, they do nothing. They just redistribute wealth. I already don’t like this, but I’m still listening. Well, I mean, look, if you’re gonna have a government that does redistribution, best it does nothing else.

50:04 Okay, all right. Or you can go down the libertarian path and do kind of wall of the strong stuff. The thing about libertarianism is, it’s one of the few political philosophies that is genuinely intellectually defensible, right? There is no doubt at all that you can bolt that thing a philosophical truth, no questions asked. It’s just if we actually try it, I’m not sure we’re going to like it. Again, let’s have, you know, you don’t partry Friedman? No, I don’t.

50:28 So, C-Setting Institute. Partry, son of David, son of Milton Friedman. So, partry’s perspective is let’s start some new countries, let’s try some crazy government ideas, let’s see what works. And I think that this is essential, right? I mean, capitalism runs on competition, the state is currently immune from competition because if you don’t have the land you can’t start a country, and so we’ve completely stopped evolving governance.

50:54 And this is a freaking tragic, right? This whole thing about representative democracy, right? How old is it? 200 years, right? 400 or so in the UK, but let’s take the American example.

51:04 So for 200 years, people have voted once every four years. Everything else in the world has changed. 200 years vote once every four years. In every other area, life is speeded up by one or two orders of magnitude, right? Transport a thousand times faster and cheaper and easier and you still vote once every four years, right? A friend of mine runs an output called Liquid Law and they have a banner they hold up which is 12 X’s and what it says is in your lifetime that is your total contribution to the way that your government runs. 12 X’s. 12 votes. That’s all you’re going to get in your lifetime.

51:40 Okay. So you’re proposing this kind of minimum. What about the resources though? You haven’t talked about the resources. Well, so the way you get into this jam, right, if you don’t have enough for everybody, the poor are going to get oppressed by the weak, by the strong, because they’re the only people that can get oppressed.

51:57 So right now we’ve got, America’s got what, 25% of the world’s natural resource consumption with 5% of the population, right? You’ve got 30 times the carbon footprint of the Bangladeshis. You go to the bottom billion, you’ve got 100 people living on the income of a single American, and the 1% line for wealth globally is $35,000 a year. If you’re making 35,000 K a year, you are the 1% globally speaking. Is that true?

52:25 Yes. Another great quote from the show. Right? Yeah. So in the world, we’ve completely distorted model of this stuff.

52:32 Of the world, not of America, of the world. the world. So in America, the 1% line is about $2 million a year, 70% of them are farmers. Because what makes them millionaires is that they’ve got an enormous amount of land that they need it for the business. And if they sell the land, they’ve got nothing.

52:49 You’re saying 70% of the 1% is in the US or farmers? 70% of the millionaires in America, the paper book value millionaires are farmers. Last time I checked, that’s from memory. I haven’t looked at this in a while. Somebody double-checked that. But I guess I see the point you’re making.

53:04 So when we get down to this resource thing, here’s the question you’ve got to ask. Can we make 10 billion of these? If you can’t make 10 billion of them, it’s not going to work for everybody, right? So can we do the basic resources for 10 billion people? Sure, right?

53:20 Water filter, it’s a thing called the safe water trust filter, 20 quid’s worth of materials will produce clean water for five years. Then you switch out a couple parts that cost a few dollars, then you get another five years out of it. wood gasification stoves. There’s still a little, the technology is still evolving, but five or $10 for a wood stove that burns wood like gas, right? Incredibly efficient, cheap and easy.

53:44 The BioLite stove is currently the camping version of it. I’ve never seen a better stove. They’re beautiful. Is Gates working on one of these? I know they’ve been working on these for a while.

53:51 Yeah, Gates is working on all kinds of stuff, right? So, too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness, injury. Too hot and too cold, right? Cheap, polypropylene clothing. It costs nothing, it lasts forever.

54:01 Just remember, wash it. Too hot, shade, how hard is it? It’s dead easy. Shelter, we can make hexiards. Too hot, too cold.

54:09 Hunger, safe water, not safe water trust. One acre fund, agricultural training program in Africa, doubled agricultural output from teaching people how to plant seeds properly, right? Super basic agricultural training, doubled agricultural output. Okay, water, you mentioned the filter. Water, there’s the filter.

54:27 Rope pumps, look at a charity called ACFO, AKVO, huge amounts of information on how to actually do water on a nickel budget. Illness injury, most of the illness is simply waterborne diseases. You get that out, you get 70% of it. Smoke inhalation through indoor cooking fires, tobacco. Tobacco kills 10 times as many people a year as malaria.

54:51 It’s unbelievably, unbelievably lethal. So you get waterborne disease, you get the smoking out. you get rid of the smoking, the cooking fires, that leaves you with a handful of things that you can get infected with, which you can get vaccinated for, which is a couple of dollars a person. And then you get the remaining diseases that are probably five or 10 bad illnesses in any given area that are treatable. You know, worming tablets, basically.

55:17 So your point is, is we’re very close. We just need to make sure and push all of these things into place. Well, let’s go right down the range of the West, right? So if you’re unfortunate enough to live in a crap area and you get some disease that there’s no cure for, you’re done, but if there is a cure, it costs $3.50, right? Oh yeah, you’ve got Bill Horsey, I take one of these, fixed.

55:36 Okay, no, but I’m just saying resource-wise, if you nail these six things down. What’s the last one on the list? Injury, right? What do you need to prevent injury? You either issue people cheap handguns or you accept you’re not gonna arm them, right?

55:46 They seem to do pretty well left to their own devices in the free market, AK-47 is what, $50? So we can do this for everybody, right? This idea that half of the world has to be poor, no. They can stay on their dollar-a-day income, they can buy better technology with their dollar-a-day, and they can provide for all of their own needs inside of a fair economic system as long as the market is allowed to function and isn’t distorted by the state. Okay, all right, point made there.

56:14 I want to ask you something before I ask you a few questions, I ask every guest. You mentioned earlier that this structure, we were talking about the government of the state versus a private corporation, maybe it makes something like the hecks of Europe. You know, is there some other entity that we’re not thinking about, which is like a cooperative way of doing these things. Okay, so yes, Wikipedia, Linux, right? Wikipedia, total annual budget, 5 million a year, 30,000 volunteers working in a $5 million a year business.

56:39 And it’s ubiquitous. Oh, it’s huge, right? And think of the amount of value that Wikipedia has dumped into the human species. How many people have not made a measurable financial cost mistake because of Wikipedia, right? Good point, good point.

56:53 And so huge net benefit on almost no actual financial exchange, vast benefit. Then you look at Linux, right? That ecosystem is worth on the order of $100 billion, all of the open source software systems together, on the order of $100 billion. 70% of the mobile phone market is Android, that’s open source. Macintosh is all run on top of BSD, that’s open source.

57:19 The only not open source thing with any substantial footprint left is Windows. So what’s happening is this economic mode that your high banker calls commons-based pure production. And the critical thing about this, right, is, I mean, you know, a bit of economics, right? Markets are all about price signaling. Price is a single piece of data.

57:37 It’s useless, right? In a low bandwidth environment, you’ve got price signaling. As a result, you get some kind of efficiency because price signaling is still more efficient than doing something like feudalism. But in a super rich high bandwidth environment price signaling is suddenly a really weak signal. Yeah Yeah, I know it costs $17. Where is it? Who lives there? Do I want to rent a room there? What’s their Myspace history?

58:00 Let’s have a look at their Twitter feed. Okay, one data point doesn’t tell the whole story is what you’re saying And what we’re seeing is what people are increasingly make decisions based on super rich data Which means that you now have high bandwidth organizations, which are out competing markets Why do I work for a Wikipedia because it makes me feel good, I’m doing a great thing, it’s not about how much they’re paying me, you’re just saying there’s lots of other factors here. Well, look, if you’re an academic and you spend a ton of money on books, Wikipedia is providing you with a service that you would otherwise pay for, and all it’s asking for is a bit of labor in return.

58:34 These are real economic values. If you’re a programmer, you’re not going to sit down and write your own operating system and nobody will give you the source code to theirs except for your 50,000 best friends. So I’m getting enormous economic value from open source software. In return, I’m putting as much value into that as I can. And what we have is anarchist voluntarism, which is beating markets.

58:56 The markets are unable to out-compete this new structure. They can’t do it. It doesn’t matter how much money you put behind something. If I give you $5 billion and tell you to make something that works better than Wikipedia, you can’t because the money is just not an efficient mechanism anymore. It’s just a crap instrument for organizing in a high bandwidth environment.

59:14 Is that because of the bandwidth has increased so much that we have so much information? We’ve got so much information that price signaling is no longer effective. Interesting. It’s still effective, but maybe not on the first order of magnitude. Well, look.

59:25 Well, it still isn’t the first order of magnitude. Where’s the hardcore innovation happening? Is it inside of the markets, or is it the edges in the non-market areas? 70% of the mobile phone market’s running free software. 70%.

59:36 In the most competitive high-deck arena there is, the open source guys have already won. This is Google giving it away. Google gave away Android. They gave it away because they couldn’t get large-scale cooperation unless the mobile phone source code was available to the other vendors. And they’ll make a ton of money in the back end.

59:53 Of course, right? But the critical thing is all of the innovation that they did is now in an open pool, right? So it’s not going away again. That sets a new global minimum for mobile phone function. So more and more and more and more and more, what’s happening is that the innovation is happening in non-market mechanisms, and the markets are lagging behind playing catch-up.

1:00:14 Crowdfunding, right? Well, finally, we found a way of just about managing to raise investment for things we don’t understand. Right? And the regulators are lagging how far behind that on crowdfunding. Like you can’t do crowdfunding for companies because you can’t sell one share each for $5.

1:00:27 And I speak for accredited investors. Yeah, in the US, it’s illegal. They’re doing it here. Just. Right?

1:00:34 So you wind up with this position where you vote once every four years, the state makes regulations two to 10 years later than the actual event happens. And because of crowdfunding, because of Bitcoin, because of these faster and faster renovation cycles, the actual state of the art is running so far in advance of what’s investable. If you have a great idea, you can open source it now and get a whole bunch of kudos that will let you get a high paying job later, or you can try and start a company that’s going to take you three years to find funding.

1:01:03 This is fascinating. So what do I do with the information you just told me, to be aware of it and to make, like if I have a great idea that maybe I shouldn’t go and get angel investing and go to some VCs, is there a different way that we should be thinking about creating things in this world? Well, look, if I had patented the HexiArt and tried to raise money to build them, or if I’d started a charity and financed it, we might have done 20,000 HexiArts, and you’d never have heard of it.

1:01:26 And 10 years from now, there would still be 30 or 50,000 of them, right? It’s doubling every year. The number of hexiards in the world is doubling every year, and it has done for 10 years, right? You run that forward a decade. How many are there now, do you reckon?

1:01:40 I don’t know, 1,000, 1,500? Okay. A couple of thousands? Right. Right.

1:01:45 There are hippies living in them here around up and down the West Coast very quietly. Test shelters, Haiti, Sri Lanka, eventually there’s going to be a natural disaster, and somebody is just going to go buy a bunch of plywood. The next year, there’ll be 10 more people buying a bunch of plywood. Five years after that, we’ve gotten rid of the disaster relief tent, we’ll be making and roads on the refugee camps. 20 years after that, we’ll be building them like a cardboard and tin foil.

1:02:07 They’ll cost $75 a unit and they’ll be evacuated panels or insulated panels, right? Right. That kind of exponential leverage is impossible to do inside a market capitalism. You just can’t make it work. Or a charity, which is hard to believe.

1:02:21 Right. All right, so it’s a just different way of thinking. Yeah, and what it’s about is about fundamentally power rather than money, right? Money is really just not a very efficient instrument for changing the world anymore, as every rich person who goes out there and tries to buy better world finds out, right? If you really want to change the world, what you need is power, and power and money are not fungible.

1:02:42 You can turn money into power, you can turn power into money, but it’s intensely lossy, right? You look at somebody like Linus Torvalds, Torvalds has gigantic amounts of power, right? Who’s this guy? He’s the guy who started Linux. Okay, all right, Linus Linux, all right.

1:02:57 Right, Jimmy Wales, the guy that runs Wikipedia, Enormous amounts of power on very little money, right? So we’re in a position now where the real powers Frequently are no longer the rich and this has never really happened before right some religious societies work right Gandhi Okay once in a while, right, right But what’s happening is because the financial economy is so inefficient that allocating money to things which are changing the world The heavy innovators are often going outside of the market economy Right, and they’re building these enormous power structures, which are almost completely demonetized And they are really seriously putting pressure on the existence of the state and on the existence of big companies That’s fantastic. Um, I think we could talk about that for a whole nother show just thinking about it right now You know, we’ve had a guy in here who his name is Richard Villa. He’s a doctor that goes into Zones of crisis. He went to Haiti after the earthquake. He just came back from the Philippines And I’m definitely gonna hit him up with a hexiurts. Oh, yeah, you know, he was there and he sees on the scene I mean he gets there within 72 hours. Yeah, so he’s doing almost hard or almost a triage He’s a doctor, but he’s almost doing a triage of these people need water. They need a tent Absolutely. It’s all public health stuff before he starts operating. Yeah, and like he’s told me, you know, cholera is a big problem right away

1:04:11 You bet and you much much more dangerous than people with handguns. Absolutely. Oh my god, right? but my closest collaborator on this critical infrastructure stuff is a guy called glucose Gonzalez and And, you know, he’s a doctor in the Canary Islands, works on pandemic flu, and, you know, they’re using it. The other thing that’s worth mentioning on this is a political outfit in the UK called stacktivism.

1:04:30 Right? Like activism, but stacktivism, which is taking all this critical infrastructure work but using it as a lens for doing real politics. So to do a historical analysis of what constitutes the city based on the layers of critical infrastructure that were put in by each level of government. And the sort of notion is that given technologies encapsulate ideologies. So you’ve got municipal dictatorship for the London water system.

1:04:53 It’s run by an activist called Jay Springett. Stactivism is really good stuff. Just early stage, you know, it’s like a couple hundred people are talking about it now. But I think that you could have stacktivism for libertarians, for anarchists, for greens, even for the left, right? It’s a new lens for looking at the political mess that we’re in, which actually reveals a lot of the stuff that change about why we can’t change the world in a much clearer light than older politics.

1:05:20 Okay. Stacktivism. We’re going to check that out. Yeah. I got to hit you with a question.

1:05:25 I ask every single guest on the show. Sure. What’s your question? And I’m going to hit you with it. Vinay, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Vinay Gupta and give that young man a bit of advice.

1:05:31 Where was he? Was he in Ireland? Where was he? I was in Scotland. Where were you born?

1:05:36 I was born in Yorkshire, of all places. Okay. In Yorkshire. My father was an Indian doctor. My mother was a Scottish nurse.

1:05:43 Okay. Grey’s Anatomy. Here I am. So advice on 20-year-old me, it would be go Burning Man in 95, not 96. Why? So you could shoot things?

1:05:54 Well, look, I mean, come on, Burning Man with guns, right, is basically like the kindest most humanitarian Mad Max scenario ever, right? I still have this lingering regret that I wasn’t there the year they had a drive-by shooting range. Okay. All right, that’s good advice. Anything else you would tell them?

1:06:09 That’s a great question. I mean, so at 20, right, I didn’t really know whether I was a mystic or a scientist, and I spent a good 10 years trying to figure out which one I was, and it took me another five years after that to discover there wasn’t a distinction, right? And I had to kick right through the bottom of the floor of Hinduism, right? I went all the way to the guru level, right? I was trained formally as a teacher, I had a guru, I could easily have become a guru. And I had to go back through that entire system with a sludge hammer, because if these guys were so smart, 6,000 years ago, when they wrote the Vedas, why didn’t they know about evolution? Right? You could have observed evolution in goats, in cows, they were around animals, the same way that Mendel did, the same way that Darwin did. Right? If these guys were getting their information directly from Godhead, how come Godhead never nudged them and said, you know when these two brown goats fuck, watch what the kids look like.

1:07:05 Okay. So, I had to go back and say, you know, yeah, there is all this divine inspiration and divine knowledge out there that comes from meditation, but at the end of the day, even the greats in 6,000 years of history of enlightenment never got evolution, which is something they could have known, but clearly were never informed of, because it’s nowhere in the tradition. And what did that tell you? Well, what it told me is that we have to trust science, right?

1:07:29 Because none of the religious traditions got evolution, and any single one of them could have. So at that point we have to assume that these traditions are people having spiritual experiences, getting the best understanding of what happened that they can’t, but it’s basically like the medieval explanations for illness, right? People are writing down what happened to them in their spiritual experiences and treating it as the best available model, but if this stuff is what people tell you it is, why not evolution in any of the old traditions? So we’ve got to basically get into a position where we acknowledge the valid data of spiritual experience.

1:08:04 Humans have been having these experiences from the beginning. It’s well-documented. We should be studying it, right? But at the same time, we also have to accept that the traditional explanations are probably horseshit. Right.

1:08:15 So put your faith in science. Well, put your faith in experience. Science is one way of knowing. Meditation is another way of knowing. We have to accept on the scientific side that it throws out two-thirds of the human experience before it even starts.

1:08:27 And we have to accept on the religious side that if this stuff is revealed truth, where’s the evolution because they got a lot of stuff right like in the Hindu stories about how old the universe is and the composition of matter yeah that stuff is actually pretty close right but evolution is like the big one nobody got it right okay those are good thoughts there on that same note what’s the best advice you’ve ever received um god that’s a great question so the very best advice on virtually I can’t talk about but I would say the second best advice price. Why not? Is it illegal?

1:09:00 99 in 2000, I was heavily involved in building a cryptocurrency that would have had a lot of stuff in common with Bitcoin. I was heavily involved in the e-gold economy, which was a precursor to Bitcoin, right? 80 million, 90 million dollars worth of gold in vaults in Canada. It was real currency. And electronically traded?

1:09:21 Is that what it was? Oh, yeah. Account denominated in grams. I would mail you a coin. You would credit it to my eGold account.

1:09:30 If I wanted the gold back out, I could retrieve it. So they literally ran like asset-based banking in gold. And it was fully fundable, fantastic stuff. So there were a couple of things I learned on that that I’m not willing to talk about. But there’s a blog post on my website that says, I am not known nor have I ever been Satoshi Nakamura.

1:09:51 And it’s there for a reason. So in a nutshell- I thought Max Keiser was Satoshi Nakamura. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Nick Sabu. Yeah.

1:10:00 There’s a lot of old guard from the eagle days that it could be. This is the supposed Japanese man that created Bitcoin or who knows the … Anyways, go look it up. That guy, right? The mythic figurehead.

1:10:12 Okay. So what advice can you pass on to us? Tell me. The second piece of advice was this. It was just sit, right?

1:10:18 The whole thing with meditation, spirituality, all the rest of that malarkey, it all boils down to, you just put your ass on the chair, right? Well said. What you believe, whether you’re doing it right, all the rest of this kind of stuff, first sit, do a lot of sitting. If it’s not going anywhere, go and get some help, right? But you know, the sort of basic notion that like you have to have a practice before you can worry about if you’re doing it right, you know, the discipline of actually turning up on the meditation cushion is much harder to acquire than technique.

1:10:45 Well said. Well said. in the in the past and yeah one of the one of my instructors said you know you’re not gonna have a super you know amazing revealing experience every time meditate sometimes it’s gonna feel like a crappy experience but it might benefit you later or maybe it won’t but just get but just do it yeah yeah it really is weight training for the mind right most of the time you’re not doing anything interesting weight training for the mind but the muscle that it builds the ability to pay attention to what you want to pay attention to and nothing else well said I like that um last bit of that is to the 20 year old that’s listening right now what advice do you have for them okay so I got two really game-changing pieces of advice for 20 year olds there is an amino acid called cysteine sold in the form of an acetyl cysteine any health food store for about six bucks a bottle if you take it after you have been drinking you will never get hangovers I can’t believe you just said that that is what 20 year need to know, right? Second piece of life advice for 20 year olds is when you’re absolutely jammed and you can’t get your brain to work properly and you’re just burned out, DMAE, used to be sold as D&L, been around since the 1970s, a cetical lean precursor, does exactly what you wish coffee did. Don’t use it for more than about a month a year because you weren’t meant to be that smart.

1:12:04 Okay, is it legal? Yeah, absolutely. It is. 10-15 bucks a bottle, right? It was Because used as a prescribed medicine for treating autism for years, it was so safe and so side effect free that they just took it off the prescription list and turned it into a food supplement.

1:12:18 Wow. And that’s the advice you give us, too, pharmaceutical advice. Well, I mean, look, if you’re 20 years old, bandwidth limits are hangovers in how much information you can cram into your brain. Long-term advice, look, if you’re 20 years old today, there’s a 50-50 chance you’re going to make it to 600, right? Another great quote.

1:12:38 Well, you know what life expectancy was in the US in 1900? No. 45. OK. So we doubled our life expectancy in the last century.

1:12:48 Right. Nanotechnology, biotechnology evolving out of all recognition. 50% chance you’re going to live to 600. Come on, I got to call bullshit on that, isn’t it? Well, if you were in 1900, the notion that life’s funds would double in the next 100 years, unthinkable.

1:13:06 If we were here today, and I say that life spans will double in the next hundred years, it did in the last one. Why would you expect it not to? Yeah, we have some pretty serious tech, so. Okay, so now having that knowledge, then what do they do differently? Well, I mean, the first thing is don’t get killed in stupid ways, right?

1:13:24 I mean, look, if you’re 20 years old, everybody tells you that the world is going to look kind of sort of like a lame sci-fi movie, right? When I was 20 years old, it was Blade Runner. And sure enough, some parts of the world look pretty much like Blade Runner. The rest of the world very well changed. And then you get these discontinuities where everything changes.

1:13:46 The invention of the atom bomb, the invention of the internet, first human being on Mars. We’re going to see the first human on Mars in the next 10 years, maybe 20, probably 10. Lady Gaga is going to be singing in space within two years. I am really serious. She’s got tickets booked on Virgin Galactic.

1:14:07 You’re probably right. She will. Will it sound any different? Well, I mean, it’ll sound very different to her because she’s going to be sitting there having the overview effect that all the astronauts had of, oh my God, I’m looking directly at three billion years, 13 billion years of void. And this tiny blue marble where all the life in the universe is.

1:14:24 Apparently it’s really impressive, especially if you space walk. Apparently it’s just hard to imagine. And our celebrities and our rich are going to be doing this within the next decade, right? We’re gonna start getting the overview effect, this knowledge of the preciousness of human life as a tiny puddle of livingness in an otherwise dead universe. As far as we know, we are the only life in the universe, man. Yeah, there’s people that run statistical studies. But yeah, do you think that’ll have a knock-on effect like the psychedelics and make all those rich people that can buy the Virgin Galactic flights come back and be nicer and give back to the world after they see it in its entirety up there? Yes, I think it’s gonna bleed into the culture. I mean it will be the rich, it will be the creatives, and then it will be more or less anybody who’s healthy and well paid. What’s going to come out of that is this. We are basically in the same position culturally that the US was in at the end of the Vietnam War. We’ve had the ship war, everybody understands that it was a bad war fought for bad reasons in a really inefficient way. We couldn’t have screwed up any worse if we’d tried other than maybe carpet bombing Baghdad. Terrible war. At the end of that, the economy is knackered, The government is burned out, you know, an enormous number of injured veterans, everybody’s just had enough of this shit, right?

1:15:38 What do you do at that point? Everything goes back into cultural expansion. Done that, fuck that for a game of soldiers, what’s on the menu? In the 1990s we got peace dividend when the US beat the USSR economically. We got 10 years of total, total growth, right?

1:15:55 It was the revolution, every six months the world changed in a great new way. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Then we started the war, retrograde motion, everything rolls backwards, it rolls downhill, the fruit and the cream of the society is just burned into blood. Total wastage. Now we get the peace dividend back, space is the next push.

1:16:16 So the next 10 years are gonna be big, is what you’re saying. Right, virtual reality is finally here in a real form, right, Karnak is running a company with $75 million worth of funding and a working domestic, you could buy one for $200 VR global, right? virtual reality, private space flight, boom, boom, boom. It’s Timothy Leary’s agenda, right? Intelligence, increased space migration, life extension.

1:16:39 Right, well, you heard it here first. It’d be interesting to see. I don’t think space is that interesting personally, but you know, maybe it is for some people. Well, I mean, when you go take a look around, see if you like it. Yeah, maybe I’ll like it.

1:16:49 I’d love to go see it at some point. Vinay, thanks so much for coming on. You’re a fascinating guy to talk to. You have so many different things to talk about. It’s really hard to find out exactly what it is that you know and do and you’ve studied because all of your interests, they seem very varied.

1:17:04 I know you have some mind maps and stuff on your website where I’m sure all this is interconnected in some way. Well, it’s a really simple thing, right? The interconnection is this, right? I’m a Hindu, right? I’m a pretty heterodox Hindu, but I’m still basically a Hindu.

1:17:17 I intend to continue reincarnating on this planet for another 60 or 100,000 years. So it better be in good shape or I’m going to be pissed. All right. That’s awesome. On that note, how do people get in touch with you? How do they find your website? You know, all the, all the usual good stuff.

1:17:34 So best place to start, right? Is hexiart.com. That’s the building. X H E X A Y U R T. Yep.

1:17:42 Dot com. Dot com. Okay. Or resilience maps.org where you can find the simple critical infrastructure map stuff. On Twitter, I’m at leashless, like a dog without a leash. Yeah. Where’d Where did that come from?

1:17:54 I tend to bite people. Okay. Jesus. Yeah, that’s enough. That’ll get people really going.

1:17:59 Okay. What’s up for you next year? What are you doing? Software. Yeah.

1:18:04 I used to be a programmer, got out when I got into energy policy. Just this weekend, I sat down and I wrote my first real web application in about 10 years. Good for you. Were you rusty? Oh God, unimaginable.

1:18:20 But it felt good. Well, you never forget SQL, right? So basically, SQL, Go, JSON, what do you call that thing again, Ajax, jQuery, D3, SVG, right? Just this long tool path all the way from crazy databases right the way to like bleeding edge graphics. It’s amazing.

1:18:42 The stuff is fantastic. Okay. So you’re back. Well, look, I mean, all of the technologies, right? The web used to be basically just documents, right?

1:18:51 And it was a system for chucking documents around. Might as well have been a file server, right? What I’ve realized is that the browser is now basically a thick client, and the web is programs, right? You come to my website, I show you a computer program. I could just show you a document, but I could show you software that does almost anything.

1:19:08 3D graphics on the web really works. Hardware-accelerated 3D. So I think you’re gonna see virtual reality versions of websites, you know? And this stuff is crazy. You know Levi’s is now making genes with with nano materials in them that spectra stuff Yeah, right Levi warrior genes 4% spectra, right? So, you know 3d graphics in 3d goggles as websites for companies and individuals that care enough to build the tech Right 3d displays on things like phones are becoming relatively common. Now, we’re gonna get some actual 3d content to go in those things software Everywhere right not just internet of things, but the web is a living breathing body of software rather than a pile of static documents All of this stuff is just rushing towards us Jesus. You’re gonna have a big year next year. All right Thanks so much for coming on. I have no idea what title this show because we caught we talked about so much stuff But it was a fantastic conversation. I’m glad we got this on tape and everything so really fun So people know more about you as we say at London Real It’s about the journey if anyone knows that you do and the pieces of the accelerator What’s that?

1:20:14 Peace is the accelerator. Peace is the accelerator. It’s what frees up all the resources that we need to go forward because we’re not wasting our people and our money on wars. Okay. Peace is the accelerator.

1:20:23 That’s why everything is happening now. All this stuff has gone super critical because the US is no longer burning its money on war. That’s why there’s this sudden wave of cultural change, right? It’s just like, you know, we’re no longer burning the resources on the fight. And all of a sudden the world reaps forward again.

1:20:40 Well said. All right. a few days. Vinay, thanks so much for coming on. I wish you well on your journey. Stay in touch.

1:20:47 Really a pleasure to meet you. Yeah, nice meeting you too. And thanks for Victor Tran who set this up. He’s the crazy Hungarian who made this all happen. So like I said, enjoy the journey and take care.

1:20:58 Lovely. A pleasure.