Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 15: Coronavirus Special

This blog is a transcription of the 15th episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.

In this episode, Gregory engages in a long form conversation about pandemic preparedness with Vinay Gupta and Lucas Gonzalez to help cut through the static, and design personal and local responses. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Stitcher; or read the transcription below.

Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, I’m your host Gregory Landua.

Hello and welcome to this special edition of the planetary regeneration podcast. I pinged Vinay earlier this week, or over the weekend because over the years, I’ve respected his perspective and hard work for a long time on preparedness and just this sort of scenario of pandemic. I really wanted to talk with him and get an understanding of how close to the edge of different collapse scenarios we’re walking. Talk about strategies for preparedness, probabilities, and just generally, my framing for all of this cooperate, coordinate and be real with as much as possible. Let’s just be real about what’s happening. There’s such a dearth of good information and thoughtful nuanced voices about any of this. My hope is that we can share some insight, maybe some hope and definitely some truth. Vinay, I’m super grateful for you happing on to spend a little bit of time. As we go, I’ll do my best to pop in resources and what not. For folks who are interested, I’m trying to tune into the Regen Network public telegram channel and maybe my twitter feed, and maybe Vinay will do something similar, so we’ll keep a gentle eye. Though I want to make sure that we can have a good solid conversation, so I don’t want to get distracted either.

Vinay: Maybe we’ll take a tea-break once every half hour and then go check the web and see what questions people have.

Gregory: Yeah, that sounds good. With that, Vinay, I was actually thinking about this before we started, and I think — let’s just let people do research on your credentials in this area on their own and not get into the story telling of that is my sense. Because there’s just so much actual information to dig into and that’s your superpower. Let’s start with, what’s your assessment? I saw a tweet of yours maybe a couple weeks ago and you said, “This isn’t that flu.” You were referring specifically to maybe the fact that this isn’t the societal collapse flu. Let’s start there and then go deeper and deeper in a sequence. Is that still true? Is that still your read [and what was your meaning of that?]

Vinay: If we do nothing at all. If we do nothing. Everybody just wanders around. Nobody wears masks. Nobody wears gloves. Everybody proceeds as if nothing has changed. We would lose probably 5% of the population globally. That is not a showstopper. You could just march through that it’s probably about the same amount of mortality that we got from World War Two. You could just roll straight through that. I’m not saying you’d want to, but compared to some of the organisms — like if research of smallpox, the equivalent number for smallpox would be 25% of people, that’s enough to bring down power girds, completely lock international logistics, kill the financial system, disrupt agriculture. As you get towards the higher case fatality rates, people will simply stop turning up to work under any circumstances and then your systems implode.

Gregory: What do you think the tipping point is there — where’s the tipping point where it turns from –

Vinay: Ah! Lucas!

Gregory: Lucas! Welcome.

Lucas: Sorry I’m late. I was trying to figure out how to join the conversation. I couldn’t get the audio to work, but now I can. Just to catch up, how many of us are there? Just the three of us?

Gregory: Just the three of us. Yeah.

Vinay: Plus, we are live on the internet, so everyone is watching us. We don’t know how many. Let me introduce Lucas. Lucas is a doctor, Lucas Gonzalez, who was my partner in all of the heavyweight pandemic flu work that I did ten years ago. And Lucas had went on to write a very, very strong report for the Spanish government which you can find on resiliencemaps.org so he is the epidemiological master planner.

Gregory: Cool. Thank you for joining us Lucas and thanks for making sure to invite him Vinay. Really grateful to have both of your voices here. Lucas, I was just sort of trying to get the threshold for mortality rates that start to threaten social fabric. Where is that tipping point and I know it’s an open question, but that’s where I was starting the conversation.

Lucas: Okay. The way I talk about this stuff is that I think in terms of severe enough, and we don’t know what severe enough looks like. The definition for a severe pandemic — you could have three degrees of severity. One of them is that it overwhelms the intensive care units and nothing else. The next level, that was the flu in 2009. The next level is that it squashes the health care system, all of it. And the next level is it messes up to whatever degree, the essential, by essential I mean vital, essential for human life services, including –

Gregory: Water treatment, power–

Lucas: Including the service of getting the supplies to people who need them, getting the insulin to people who need them. And that kind of stuff. It’s difficult to judge because the definition of severity, according to the WHO and to anyone who thinks about it for a little while is that the severity depends on the biological characteristics of the virus, how deadly it can be. Also, about the epidemics of the thing, is it moving fast? Is it infecting many people? What is the way it [inaudible] all of that is important? And then the other element is our capacity to respond. If we are very bad at responding a non-deadly pandemic could be very destructive. It’s up to us, I mean a tsunami could be horrible. But if we all run away from it, it will not kill anyone.

Gregory: Right. What’s your sense — We can sort of see in real time different countries responding in different ways. China, Italy, now the United States, Europe, more generally Northern Europe [inaudible 00:07:30] and Germany are starting to kick into gear. How are people responding on a continuum from maybe that sort of nothing and 5% or people are going to die to “Oh wow, that’s a pretty solid response in terms of limiting [threat]”

Lucas: We’re having very different situations in different places, and nobody wants to look like Italy. That’s one example in Europe, and it hits close to home. Sometimes people find it difficult to relate to China because they have never been there and don’t know how things work. But Italy? People relate to that in Europe. Nobody wants to find themselves in that kind of situation.

Gregory: Could you just share a little bit more details?

Lucas: One of the problems that we might find ourselves facing in however many weeks, is if instead of having one Italy, we have five or ten or twenty Italys. Because then many of the things that we take for granted that they work because a product or a service goes from country to country to country to country in a chain, the probability that that chain is going to be effected when you have 20 Italys is much bigger than if you have only one Italy. I’m saying Italy just because it is not their fault. I mean, it could be some is their fault, but it could have happened to many other places, it’s not personal. This is as impersonal as a broken bone, it can happen to anyone.

Vinay: One of the things which is really kind of weird about the Italian situation is I wonder how much of it is just the habit of three kisses on the cheek when people meet.

Lucas: We don’t know that. I honestly don’t know that. There are culture elements, whether bad luck people having taken a holiday to China and then coming back, it’s really complicated.

Vinay: Yeah, absolutely.

Lucas: And some of these things we will be able hatch them out later when it doesn’t really matter.

Gregory: Right. Well that’s the obvious hindsight of 2020 as they say. But in real time, I’m always looking for heuristics. Like just thresholds. So, you’re saying there would need to be 20 Italys, for instance, and I know that this may be in order of magnitude sort of estimate. But there needs to be a number of countries that respond slowly enough that there’s sort of — it spreads as much as Italy’s

Lucas: Descends into temporary chaos, yeah. And it could be that what matter is not the number of countries, but the size, the population of the countries, or the position of the countries in terms of being in the middle of important supply chains or service chains.

Gregory: What’s your rating of how China did as a key actor in the global economy? Maybe setting aside — maybe people being worried about human rights or totalitarian this or that. How did they do in terms of stopping the spread of this disease and keeping vital supply functioning going.

Lucas: We may have knowledge or liking about the political system. I don’t have knowledge, so I honestly don’t have a very strong idea of that. Apparently, judging from the opinion of visitors who went and cross interviewed thousands of people to try and make sense of what they had done. It was impressive. It’s impressive that they managed to hold it in place for so long. And it’s probably a function of the political system, the capacity for sacrifice of the people, or maybe they’re used to being sacrificed, I don’t know that. Also, the function of having been subjected to other outbreaks in the past. They have had avian bird flu, and they have had SARS, and they have had all this stuff. All these countries that have had those kinds of problems, they are at the forefront because they have suffered already.

Gregory: I was reading that similarly Taiwan and Japan had some policy and infrastructure that they were able to kick into gear and were seeing that that spread curve get flattened significantly in those months. What’s your read on the U.S.? How are we doing? How much are we gambling here on –

Lucas: My understanding of the U.S., and again, it’s a culture and a place that I don’t understand. I haven’t lived there. I don’t know how things work and there’s probably a great deal of diversity. My understanding is that they have a federal government and they have the government in the states, in different states. And then they have the people. They are very strong on individual initiative and getting around an individual initiative and helping it out. So, it’s going to be really, really mixed. Some of it is going to be — it’s easy to make predictions and easy to fail, but it could get messy. My understanding is that it’s already messy. They don’t know how much they have. And when you don’t know how much you have — the potential is that they have a lot. Somebody was doing the piece of paper statistics of how many famous people are in a country relative to the total population, and how many of those people have been diagnosed. That gives you an idea of how many non-famous people might have the disease.

Gregory: Right. Because the famous people would have had a test even though it’s –

Lucas: Yes. Because if out of 600 politicians, a number of them have it. What are the chance that the normal people don’t have it? You say politicians, you say basketball players, you say all that stuff. One way of measuring how prevalent, how frequent some disease is, is do you know somebody famous who has it? Do you know somebody in your neighborhood who has it? Do you know somebody in your family who has it? Those are three levels of frequency. And we know famous people who have it. So, it’s out there. We don’t know how much. We hope that it’s not a lot. We hope that there are some asymptomatic cases. We hope, we hope, we hope. But we don’t know.

Vinay: That’s quite a nice statistical technique. They do this sometimes when you’re doing things like [when you’re trying to catch fish in ponds]. You pull out a hundred fish, you tag them all, you drop them back in, you come back two weeks later, you pull out another hundred fish, and you see how many of the hundred fish are also in the second batch. You do this a couple times. You get a very good estimate of the number in your pond. The crux of this is we’ve seen that if you do all out quarantine early, you could get very, very good containment. My understanding of the Chinese data right now is that their number of new cases has dropped enormously. At that point, the situation is stable. The question is, as everybody goes back to work, are they going to get another wave or are they going to basically keep the quarantine tight enough that they just wait it out until you get either vaccines or effective treatments?

Gregory: There was another element beyond just quarantine. My understanding is they also have this fever clinic approach where as soon as your — sort of at like key places, they’re doing temperature readings and if you have a fever, you get immediately sent to a clinic. And what they’re doing is they’re getting people out of their homes, so they’re trying to reduce families spread by removing people into sort of central facilities essentially.

Vinay: I mean that kind of approach you could see very, very clearly why that would work. Right? Epidemiologically, you just separate the virus from the people who aren’t infected yet and you keep doing that until you don’t have a problem anymore. It’s not an inherently difficult approach, it’s just hard to do, if you see what I’m saying.

Gregory: Definitely. China has a number of things going for them. One is maybe a sort of social willingness to — I can see in the United States, people would be very skeptical and reluctant to start with around something like that and there’s just no forethought or infrastructure. And in China, as we were discussing earlier, having gone through SARS and MERS they already — this is a protocol that they had previously developed.

Vinay: Also, you get to be a 5,000-year-old civilization by not collapsing. I don’t know how Chinese culture [initially] handled things like plague but you kind of saw what the Black Death did to Europe. That was not really a very well-organized response, shall we say? I don’t know what the Black Death did in China, but it’s entirely possible that they’ve got thousands of years of clinical practice and managing pandemic that match this model.

Gregory: Right. It’s culturally ingrained that there like an innate [tasset] capacity to just think, “Oh, the right response here is to isolate people in groups who are sick to lower the care threshold and optimize our resources then get them out of the population” and etc. They just assume that that’s how it happens –

Vinay: Or think of it as bureaucratic duty. If bureaucrats in China are raised to the expectation that one of the things you’re going to be doing is dealing with pandemics because that’s an integral function of the state, you could imagine that there would be a readiness to get right on top of this stuff. So, I’m speculating here about that, but I know for example Indian management of smallpox. They’ve lived with Smallpox a really long time and they had very different approach to handle in smallpox for a lot of other places.

Gregory: Right. So that the cultural overlay of how diseases spread is very radically different in different societies.

Vinay: And as a result, the willingness and the ability of the population to respond to whatever the instructions happen to be — highly variable.

Gregory: Hey, do you guys mind if I invite my buddy [Jaquan] here who cofounded Cosmos? He just pinged me and he was like, “Aw, I want to get on.” He’s been glued to the new cycle and sort of called this back in January. So, I think he’s excited to hop on if you guys don’t mind. Let me just get the — so that’s an interesting point. I think we can — I don’t know how useful it is for those of us trapped inside of a culture to have the meta-analysis and critique of how different cultures across space and time are able to deal. That’s sort of like forward looking, we could think about how we would like to evolve our culture. But it may not — I’m also interested in thinking — but keeping the spectrum because I actually think there’s going to be viewers, because this is a global podcast and the [Corona] community many of us are in is global –

Vinay: You’re in the [model] of evolving your culture right now. Right? Really since the 60s everything has gone completely nuts in American culture. You’re [50] years into a great transformation that may or may not be a route to nowhere. This is how culture adapts.

Gregory: Well, we take that for granted. Let’s use this continuum sort of idea of — Welcome Jay, nice to have you.

Jay: Hi.

Gregory: I like the background you got there.

Jay: Yeah, I’m virtually in San Francisco.

Vinay: Hey, how’s it going?

Jay: Hi.

Gregory: I just wanted to sort of set a frame for us to keep referring to in this sort of cultural continuum idea that different cultures will have variable success and capacity — and cultures evolve. So, we can sort of be holding out limbs. I’m also interested thinking, given the present moment, being there’s a coevolution taking place and there’s like — you play with the team you’ve got, or you go to war with the army you have. So where are we and maybe pick a couple different places, like I think it’s useful for the United States, for us to think about that. Maybe the UK. Lucas where are you calling in from?

Lucas: I’m calling in from the UK.

Gregory: Okay. Let’s just start with the U.S. and U.K. which are similar but slightly different cultural contexts. What does a responsible individual response look like with the cultural and governmental plusses and minuses that we have.

Lucas: I am more acquainted with the response that you would have in Spain. And that is not going very well at the moment. Culturally, my understanding is that we let the government act and then we complain about how the government didn’t act properly. That could be said that that is part of our culture. I would love to be proved wrong, but I think that is what it is. And I think that that is kind of the old map. That’s how we’ve been doing things until now. Are we ready to engage in transformation? Are we ready to engage in a situation in which we do our personal best and demand the personal best from the people who are closer to the driving wheel of certain things? I would hope so, but I am not sure that that is happening fast enough. And that could happen at the global level. And we could also — and I think that’s a generational situation that is not very clear cut. You have young people who are extremely angry with their elders. And you have younger people who are extremely fed up with this duration and are wanting to get their hands on the wheel as quickly as possible.

Gregory: Yeah. There is definitely this overlay of this backlog of unmetabolized — it’s just like a social debt of mistakes and mistrust and a demand for transformation that I think — my sense of things is, I would lump Corona firmly into the global [weirding] umbrella includes atmospheric carbon accumulation and global warming and other things that people have different responses to. But by in large, there’s a lot of people that are fed up and pissed and scared.

Vinay: It’s worth noting that America is in a collapse in exactly the same way the Soviet Union was at a collapse in the early 1990s. The Soviet collapse, you didn’t see it in Moscow. What happened was at the periphery, people just drank themselves to death in [amorous] numbers. In America, it’s opiates rather than alcohol. The point where your civilization begins rapidly dropping life expectancy numbers, that’s the point where you’ve entered a collapse, almost [inaudible 00:25:39]. So, you have an ongoing American collapse condition or what is a steep decline, and then on top of that you get a series of shocks.

Gregory: And here one is. Yeah.

Vinay: They’ve closed the stock market for the first time since 1931 or something? 1929? That should be an indicator. Like, “Wow that’s an unprecedented thing which just happened. Okay, we’re really in trouble here.”

Gregory: My sense is we’re in a hundred-year shock right now for sure. If you think of cycles like that we’re in and maybe even bigger than that, but it’s hard to say.

Vinay: The flu is the major trigger here. Corona virus is a minor, minor factor in the American instability.

Gregory: I think maybe it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back so to speak

Vinay: There’s a lot of desire in America for people to have their culture radically change. And a lot of people look at any incoming systemic stress as like, “Now we’re going to get that cultural change we’ve been promised since the 60s.” I Remember in 2008 during the financial collapse, everybody was running around like, “yay, it’s the reinvention of capitalism. Everything is going to be great.” Nothing changes. You’ve got to remember that this is just a very, very bad bug. It is not the ticket to the new age.

Jay: I feel like the two [box] swans’ analogy is perfect. We didn’t even see that coming, but we knew one was coming. That’s what [tripped us for]. I think this is a good opportunity to demonstrate our ability to help a situation. I bet crypto can get to the point where we can convince the treasury to buy some crypto to support initiatives to help the situation. You know what we need right now? Is like localized, transparent directory of sanitizer and mask production, as well as oxygen concentrators and hospital beds. Right? Put all of that on the blockchain locally, there should be a community effort to create a blockchain craigslist, all the shit.

Vinay: Why does there need to be blockchain in this instance?

Jay: Because people are fed up with lies and censorship, and they see it daily and they’re seeing it on Reddit and Twitter and Facebook. They don’t trust them anymore.

Gregory: What you’re saying Jay, is if it was a public ledger, there is the ability for all of the users to essentially audit and sort of make attestations that confirm the truth of what’s said and where as if it was some central database that isn’t necessarily [inaudible 00:28:32]

Jay: Right. It’s pretty clear that you can’t rely on the central government, the federal one, right now. For anything because [inaudible 00:28:40] United States — with China and the United States have censored –

Vinay: In China the central government did a magnificent job of containing the virus. They did great work.

Jay: It’s that initially they both — China censored, and U.S. was slow to respond. This is the truth and the reason why it got to this point is because of censorship.

Vinay: No. That’s not true at all. Like come on man. Look, you’re talking to people with serious epidemiological experience and [my first year] being paid 100% in cryptocurrency was 1999. I’ve really thought about this stuff. This is not an opportunity to take your political acts and grind it on the [convenient] surface of a fucking pandemic. Show some fucking respect. There are people that are going to die because of this thing.

Jay: You’re trying to shame me because — it appears that you are trying to censor me which [shame], but the fact –

Vinay: No. You’re just being stupid! Jesus fucking Christ!

Jay: Look at you, amazing.

Vinay: Dude, I launched Ethereum. I was the project manager of the Ethereum launch. I’ve worked with crypto stuff for 20 years. I wrote software to start screwing with governments in 1997. And you don’t even see-

Jay: You haven’t even asked me what I know.

Vinay: — and you don’t see me rolling out some hippie dippy god damn plan for how we’re going to use crypto to fix mask supply. This is not about censorship.

Jay: Why are you so pissed off?

Vinay: Because people will die if this kind of stupidity takes root.

Jay: This makes no sense to me, I am so confused –

Vinay: That is because you don’t understand the situation.

Jay: Oh yeah?

Vinay: This doesn’t make sense to you because you don’t get–

Jay: I was the first to tell the world you can see the coin that’s [guarded] that points out that I'm trying to make a big deal of this. Because back when before anyone thought this was going to be a big deal, I fucking predicted it before you did. So why are pissed off at me for, man?

Vinay: Because the solutions that you're proposing are going to get people killed.

Jay: Why? I'm telling you that one of the reasons why this got so big in the first place was because it was hidden and I'm telling you that what we need is not to rely on central government but to put things in a transparent ledger and take things to a more local level as the states have, by declared their own emergencies for example. Every community and person should take this into their own hands.

Lucas: Can I say something?

Gregory: Yeah. Please Lucas.

Lucas: So my understanding (break in audio) [inaudible] [00:31:22] epidemics and epidemiology suggests that this is actually a wicked problem and it's an equation with many, many components and many, many factors. When we look at how to stop flow, the idea that was most clear to me was that when you wanted to prevent flow, nothing worked well enough. So, you had to use many things at the same time. It's a bit like having a raincoat with holes. That you need to have several raincoats like that. If you want to be truly protected from the rain. So, any single individual solution that is suggested is probably going to be not enough. My understanding is that I would rather shift the conversation into, what other things could we add to this? How are we going to do this? We are finding ourselves in a situation similar to having one narrow door with three people wanting to go out, and three people wanting to go in. and the question is, how are we going to do this? We know we’re going to do it. Are we going to do it in a friendly way, everybody cooperating, everybody adding what they can or are we going to fight each other to death and then we die more from aggression than from the pandemic itself. That is the real question that is at the bottom of all of this. Are we going to be good people to each other and that means starting from the truth, we need to have information about what's going on and then we need to have creativity to find out how to solve things. For instance, if we don’t have enough resources to test everybody, if we only have so many units of test that we can use, are we going to spread them out so that we have some knowledge of what's going on everywhere or are we going to test only the people who are close to the testing machine or who have economic or political power to be tested. Are we going to find out what the truth is so that we can take proper action? [inaudible 00:33:53]

Gregory: I think that’s great framing Lucas, and it brings up two subsidiary questions to me which is, 1) as Vinay brought up, this sort of statistical ability to model so that you can test a small population and a sort of subset of a small population and then model it out. Okay that’s really interesting, let's think about that and 2) what does it take to develop a good enough test that – and where’s the threshold? I don't know where this sort of laboratory threshold is. Is this something that state universities could be on independently? For instance, to develop, or is it just so hard that it's impossible?

Lucas: They are making huge [inroads] into all of this. There are people who know what they are talking about. I don’t. What I read on the internet, what I read on twitter from people whom I really trust in terms of their technological capacity to read what's going on with the tests. Is that many people are developing many different tests. What we recognize at a machine that accepts a molecule, the piece of a virus or a whole virus and gives you a number. Some kind of measure of this looks like this is this virus and it's not a [pneumonia] by some other [bar]. Having that understanding is going to bring clarity to local picture. Local meaning New York City or local meaning Minnesota or local meaning Italy or local meaning the north part of Italy or a certain city in Italy. We want to know what's going on because we want to know if we want to keep schools closed or not. We want to know if we are going to be overly concerned or less concerned. How are we going to do this?

Gregory: There's sort of like a – Jay, I'm hearing you and I want to weave your voice in here for a second. But I just want to call out I think there's a I don't know what the right mental model is to hold this, but the exchange between Vinay and Jay just a second ago was I think an important one maybe to go another layer deeper in a civil organized ordered way. Because I think how we respond – not that you guys weren’t civil. Because I think there is this need to grapple with institutional distrust with the need of social coordination with the need to be excellent to each other as humans so that we can coordinate same responses. Right? We have to hold all of these three things simultaneously and direct energy appropriate to what's going to be really truly deeply effective while also perhaps not squashing things that are less effective.

Vinay: No. That’s a horrible error. Right? Let me just very quickly frame this. Everybody’s running to their favorite brand of bullshit thinking that they can fix the problem with their favorite brand of bullshit.

Jay: Can I say something?

Vinay: Please.

Jay: I really must say something. This is really important. And I don’t care if you guys censor me after I say this, but my point is this. I called this up before it was going to be a pandemic. I said it was going to be and I'm stating the same thing now. The tests don’t matter as much because it spreads before you show symptoms. The point is it's going to affect most of people anyways –

Vinay: Yeah. We know that.

Jay: – and it kill 10-20% to the people. What we need is not tests. We need to help the people who are going to get sick survive. And for that you need beds and oxygen and if we run out of supplies, because it will when it infects of a third of all continents. This is going to be [inaudible][ 00:38:38] –

Vinay: This all great, I agree with all of this. What you're saying is absolutely spot on.

Jay: The federal government has an incentive to prevent us from coordinating because the current president would rather have marshal law.

Vinay: Okay. This is where [inaudible 00:38:57] becomes complicated, because we’re not just talking about the U.S. Right? The Chinese government, the Japanese government, have done fantastic work, right? When did the Japanese government close all schools? Was that beginning, like almost a month ago now? Does anybody remember the date?

Lucas: I don’t.

Vinay: Quality of government makes and enormous difference to the outcomes that we've got. Where the government is competent, let the government continue to be competent. Where the government incompetent, you have to take a different approach. I'm not saying that the government is good overall. I think some governments have done great work on this. I've just seen the U.K. governments release pandemic strategy and at first [brush] it looks completely insane. They say they’ve got sound scientific reasoning behind it. I’m catching up on the reading right now to figure out if it's true. But I'm not making a [blanket] against the government. But all the available blockchain technology, what is going to be stable, scalable, appropriate to the actual need usable by ordinary people. My concern here is not that we don’t need these localized databases. My concern is, I just don’t think any of the available blockchains are suitable for running that stuff.

Lucas: Can I share my framework?

Vinay: Please.

Lucas: I started thinking about this around 2005 and I published my contribution. It was demanded of me and I did it – I would have done it anyway – in 2011. Since then I have kept thinking because can't stop your brain, can you? The framework is very, very simple. It's like a stool. You have a rectangle on the top which is the information and then you have three legs, which are the three things that you can actually do about this. The things that you can actually do about this is prevent, treat, and cope with the mess. Coping with the mess is something that is not very important with winter flu. Coping with the mess is, “Okay. You have more people in the emergency room, you put up with it. You insult the providers of money and you keep going because you're so upset.” But In this kind of situation, the coping is going to be significant. It is going to be a big part of it. So, when you introduce a measure to try and slow down the transmission such as closing schools, etc. You find yourself having to cope with that. So, the question that people have is, “Okay. Public health has closed schools, now what? How do I cope with this? How do I take care of my parents and my children at the same time? And how do I feed my family when I cannot go to work and my work was a small business selling sandwiches in the corner.” This is going to be challenging to say the least. These challenges are challenges in terms of the only actions that we can take which is prevent, treat, and cope. All the other layers of information are going to help us to do all those actions. If bitcoin is going to help us carry out those actions. I will very gladly see that happening. But is it going to be enough? Most likely it's going to be one of 20, 50, 100 things that we need to do. That’s my understanding. I don't know about bitcoin honestly.

Gregory: I think sort of blockchain bitcoin is probably useful here but the complexity of all of this is really important to understand because I was reading that between 20 to 30 percent of public health nurses in the Unites States have children in school, for instance. So, if you shut down schools, you may end up in a situation where you decrease your available health worker – so there's all these dependencies that are very – incompetency of government is prime on the list of things that are needed and we are in a situation in the United States where –

Lucas: Nothing is going avoid us having to look at ourselves and take our own responsibility.

Gregory: Yeah. That’s what I actually want to get to because I think –

Vinay: Does everybody know the term, ‘Wicked Problem’?

Gregory: Yeah.

Lucas: Oh yes.

Vinay: Right. It's a wicked problem. For the listeners, if you don’t know what wicked problem is, go take a look at wicked problems. Everyone who reads says it's a wicked problem, right? The thing is that everybody is running to the toolkit they have already. The religious people are running back to God. The crystal huggers are running for their crystals. The crypto people are running for crypto. The bottom line is – and I just want to really clarify around this, the only thing you could do is like Lucas says, prevent, treat, manage. The prevent is you have to keep human being separate from viruses and everything after that is methodology for keeping humans and viruses away from each other. Treat, as you very rightly say it's going to come down to availability of whatever is required to keep people who go into the acute phase alive. Some combination of ventilators, oxygen, I don't know what the clinical details are [inaudible 00:45:05]

Lucas: And burying people safely and dealing with the PTSD and burnout. It's going to be all of that. It's really, really nasty.

Jay: You're right. It's not just that crypto people are going to crypto. Within crypto, some projects were made for this. They were designed for this moment. Bitcoin and cosmos. Satoshi Nakamoto first post was a newspaper article [point] in 2008 pointed a collapse – an oncoming collapse. We need the finance, crypto finance. Our job is to make sure that despite the fact that these banks are about to fail because they're going to lose people and the Great Depression recession is coming anyways. Now it's our job to make sure that there is a financial payment system despite all of that, that is actually secure.

Vinay: Maybe. As far as I can see, most of the governments are in no danger of failure at all and their going to print as much money as it takes to stabilize the system. People have been waiting for the system to fall over for a really long time. And it is stubbornly resilient.

Jay: I knew that at least [it] would come [ever since] 2008. I was affected by it and I read Zero Hedge is pretty clear to that this day would come – hyperinflation is what's coming. [inaudible 00:46:39]

Vinay: Maybe, maybe. In the U.S., possibly. I've got to tell you, quantitate easing hasn’t caused inflation in ten years. They’ve printed an awful lot of money. To me that looks like imaginary money meets imaginary debt and the two cancel out. Because we just haven’t seen any inflation at all. I don’t understand what's happening in the global financial system. I mean, yeah they’ve shut the stock market down. For sure that was a massive indicator of potential problems. But bitcoin is not in a position where it can take the load. If you're trying to run a world with Bitcoin right now, Bitcoin will fall the hell over.

Jay: [It may not work] and even centralized exchanges, I think they all help as well as –

Gregory: Just for context, Jay is not actually a Bitcoin maximalist. I've heard Jay argue against proof of work and Bitcoin many, many times, so just –

Jay: I am a proof of work minimalist, but not to the extent that it should go away. I think bitcoin should stay proof of work and when it comes to [staking] tokens I'm an ADA maximalist, but when it comes to currency, I believe I am a beta coin maximalist.

Gregory: Which is a proof of stake Bitcoin.

Jay: Yeah, it's a proof of stake system that depends on Bitcoin.

Lucas: Are we losing the audience that is interested in [inaudible 00:48:07] the pandemic?

Gregory: Well my guess is the audience is interested in the nexus of this. I'm happy to let it play just a little bit Lucas because I think we always need to bring it back to the scene [inaudible 00:48:19] but there's some room because I think a lot of the audience is going to be coming from the crypto landscape –

Vinay: Let's do some simplification and some extermination of bullshit. When people panic, they run for that they know. Every weird little phycological cult that has its own weird value system is running for what it knows right now. The Christians are running for Jesus. The crystal huggers are running for their crystals. The crypto people are running for crypto. The preppers are running to their food stores and counting their ammunition. It's natural when confronted with the fear of the unknown future for people to gravitate towards the stuff that they currently trust. The thing that we have to fight against is that everybody then winds up with a fractured and diffused model of reality because they're kind of like the famous [mulliner rudence] story about the guy that loses his house keys and winds up looking outside where the streetlamp is because that’s where the light it. Even though the keys are in the backyard. The tendency is for people to pick whatever it is that they’ve got and say, “Okay, this is going to be the solution to the problem we have because it takes our focus away from the problem. The problem is viruses, hospital beds, staff, and it becomes this fractile wicked problem kind of a mess relatively rapidly as you go into the implications but it's important that we start with the correct top-level analysis. Because if you've got the correct top-level analysis, you could take all these fractured aspects of world view and you could reconnect them back to the mothership which is, as Lucas says, prevent, treat, manage. Here’s our prevention layer, here’s our treatment layer, here’s our management layer. We take all of these desperate models, desperate approaches, different communities, different resources and experiences, and we slot them in. but what we have to do is keep people’s attention on the god damn problem rather than on whatever they're current pet solution happens to be. Because if we operate in problem space, everybody speaks the same language when they come to communicate with each other, but if we operate in solution space everybody operates in a different language. Because the problem exists in objective reality and is factual, assuming you could get good data. Whereas the solutions are almost entirely hypothetical until they're tested. And if we don’t get that right very early on and keep people’s attention very firmly on the damn problems, this thing is going to slide under us culturally and we’re going to end up with 500 balkanized communities talking unintelligibly to each other.

Gregory: Which may be unavoidable.

Vinay: It's unavoidable to a degree. But –

Lucas: [inaudible 00:51:09] be minimized.

Vinay: If you've got rot in your kitchen, the rot is an objective fact.

Jay: In the 500 balkanized communities, how do you have finance? You need finance and still money. I think the main question we should be answering is just really quickly, is this going to be something that affects most people or not? If it's likely or even possible that it will, then yeah what's the next step? How do we save lives?

Vinay: [70% infection rate for sure]

Lucas: Can I bring another model?

Gregory: Yes please

Lucas: So the OODA model, I don't know how you pronounce it, “OOH-Da”.

Vinay: How did we end up with [FluSkin] but not [FLOODA]?

Lucas: I don’t know that. Okay. Stop it. Observe, orient, decide, act, and go back to the beginning. That’s what we need to look at this reality. And because at this moment we are having a very hard time orienting ourselves. I am. I don't know about other people, but I am. I find this really difficult. When we try to answer supposedly simple questions like how many people are going to get infected. We have no clue. We honestly cannot give an answer to that. We have to take [positions] in a situation of high uncertainty. And what we do know is that if this kills a significant fraction of the people who get the infection, we are going to want to reduce the number of people who catch the infection at least in the next few months before we find better treatments, maybe a vaccine at some point? We don’t know that. We may even find that masks actually work. Or certain types of masks actually work, and others don’t. We don’t know that. We’re trying to figure out things and we’re buying time. All our decisions at this moment are going to be for this moment. And it's going to stay difficult for a while. And what we need I think is a framework for capturing our observations. What is it that we have learned already so that things are updated so that people in different cities in different countries can take the best decision possible in that situation. Whether that decision and that action is driven by a very wise government or by people themselves because the government is not really that functional this year. I don’t really care to be honest. We need to get things done, no matter who is driving the Lowry or the truck or the train. That’s my understanding I don't know. Because I am very concerned with the actual problem. Are we going to have many deaths from this virus are we going to have deaths from disruption? Those are the two key questions.

Vinay: So here we've got a set of approaches. I mean there's no doubt as far as I can tell the containment has been effective in China. I do hear your points about there was a bunch of additional censorship of doctors in China that were reporting the problem. All that is true. But nonetheless, once the Chinese government got on top of it, it seems to be effective. japan distinctly different case trajectories. There was one other country that had a really good curve, I can't remember who it was.

Gregory: Taiwan appears to have a really good –

Vinay: Taiwan, Singapore maybe.

Lucas: Singapore?

Gregory: Singapore as well yeah.

Lucas: Singapore is a tiny place.

Vinay: In the places where you've got highly functional governments. It turns out you can organize a pretty good response. I would say that in the U.S., [called] your government is pretty patchy. So, what do we do about that?

Gregory: That’s where I would like to center the conversation and I think I want to take a step back and recognize with Lucas was saying. There's going to be a set of a hundred interlocking strategies, but as Vinay is saying, we need to be coordinated and pretty disciplined and focus on the problem. And there may be things that are – from what I would like to take away from this conversation is how I as a citizen of a small town in the United States can most effectively support the public health of the structure in my community and most effectively behave in a prosocial way, not in an antisocial way. And how I can also help also communicate and coordinate with other people that I have relationships with. So that there's like a critical mass of people who are levelheaded and sane and so that we can do our best in our little part of thing to prevent, treat, and cope. Or let the people who are doing those things do it and stay the fuck out of the way or whatever it is that is the appropriate response. I'm also interested at another level of – Vinay you were pointing out everybody – I would throw my lot in with the people who – you know I'm not old enough to literally be waiting since the 60s for change, but I want to evolve our culture to make more sense as it relates to a bunch of different levels of interaction. Our economic relationship with ecology, our societal relationship with governance. All these things I am motivated around. And so I also look at this as an opportunity not so much to take advantage of the situation, but I always say, “out cooperate the competition”. Those of us who are willing to throw in and work really hard and roll our sleeve up will have the ability to start to set a new set of patterns maybe.

Vinay: Yeah. The maybe is important. Are you familiar with the term, ‘Boomer Remover’?

Gregory: Yeah.

Vinay: The generational split. The open wound in America between the old and the young has just cracked wide open because the young suddenly have the advantage again and something is coming through and hardly affects them and kills maybe 15% of the older generation. And they're absolutely explicit like, “Okay. You fucked us on education. You fucked us in health care. You fucked us on minimum wage and we’re going to fuck you on flu.”

Gregory: Yeah. I don't know how – there are a few vocal – I'm not clear about how much – I mean I can resonate with the woundedness, but I don’t actually think that that’s a dominant perspective amongst Gen X or millennials necessarily.

Vinay: No. I mean Gen X are basically at this point practically boomers. A lot of Gen X are in the demographic bracket where they could actually die of this [thing]. I mean gen X now goes up to people in their 50s.

Gregory: Yeah that’s true

Vinay: Gen X is no longer young people. Gen X now really means middle aged. Everybody wants this kind of coordinated village scale hippy eutopia thing. We keep grasping for this thing because there's an instinctive human desire to build something that looks like that and it's an imprint left over from the days of tribalism. There is absolutely no guarantee that it fits the problem that we’ve got on our hands any better than people feel better when they sleep in dark rooms or they like dogs and cats. It's an ethological impulse and I've watched [seven] years of people destroy their lives trying to build communities in an environment that actually doesn’t economically support them in a position where they’ve lost most of the cultural skills required to make them operate. Community is like this rock that generation after generation after generation of people throw themselves at, break themselves on and get practically nothing out of the other side.

Gregory: Yeah. Let's shelve that argument, because I'll argue with you about that at a future date. But I want to go back to my previous point which is, what is it actually that is a practical response – what does a practical response look like?

Jay: I feel like I know but –

Gregory: Jay go ahead, take a shot and we’ll see how that goes.

Jay: Look, I don’t want to sell just my project. But I want to sell an idea. That the way to solve this is to make possible commissionless coordination, leveraging transparency on a high bandwidth –

Vinay: That’s one useful thing. Okay. Great it's one useful thing. There are 50 other things we talked about.

Jay: Yeah but it's the very top. It's the very top in the genesis of how to coordinate and admitting that you cannot rely on any authority to provide this for you but that everyone must do one of two things. Define the things –

(crosstalk)

Jay: Why are you guys – I just want to finish this. I haven’t even had two minutes, just let me finish.

Vinay: Look. Seriously, enough. Enough.

Jay: Moderator.

Gregory: Vinay let's give him another minute.

Vinay: This is not a place to shell some goddamn fucking crypto project. If you told me we were going to come here to talk about shelling some fucking crypto project, is there any way that I would have turned up to do to this?

Jay: [inaudible 01:01:33]

Gregory: No. You're right, it's not what we’re trying to do and in the large conversation, let's let Jay try to complete his thought. And then everybody can judge if it feels silly of not. Or whatever we move on to other details, it's fine.

Jay: Thank you thank you. Yeah. It's really simple, just one minute. I don’t even need that. Really simple. The idea is this, it doesn’t matter what blockchain you use as long as it's [inaudible 01:02:04] tolerant, accountable. And you use it as a store, a transparent store of data. The idea is that you use transparency as a tool to help coordinate from the top and you create conventions. And to create new structures and everyone can participate together in an open ecosystem. We need to see and incentivize more of this doesn’t matter if it's on cosmos, bitcoin or whatever. Because it doesn’t matter, it's just a data score. What matters is building the tools on top of it that interpret it. Then we can create supply chains, actually publicly usable supply registries that show where you need to connect the dots to create masks and oxygen concentrators, and where the beds are, and where you can offer your own bed for the hospital. You don’t have to rely on Airbnb. Everyone can participate in permissionlessly creating a registry.

Gregory: I feel like I have a good sense of what your invitation is Jay and I want to just, without going straight at it. Because I also have the sense, that myself and I can probably speak for Vinay and Lucas, I have a hard time – I mean as someone who’s deeply bought into the theme there. I have a hard time landing that into the next six weeks to two months of what we need to do (crosstalk) [inaudible 01:03:40] six weeks to two months and [we’ll] see what –

Vinay: Hang on, let me come in here. [there's] an absolutely point. We have need large scale software for coordination of disaster response that was decentralized and objectively sharable. The first time I saw people talking about that as a requirement was 15 or 16 years ago and it was a group of people at the department of defense that wanted that software to exist.

Gregory: [it needs to happen]

Vinay: There's no doubt at all that something like that is useful. The problem is this: crypto is not anything like mature enough to take that load right now.

Gregory: Well it may or not be, let's actually –

Jay: Well that’s where your – I [disagree] with you.

(crosstalk)

Vinay: Look, I have actually goddamn expertise in both [fluid] and crypto. I would not trust our ability to get people on to some kind of new decentralized software platform for us at mapping within the scope of this crisis.

Gregory: I would agree

Vinay: I'm all about building stuff along those kinds of lines. I think that should happen afterwards for goddamn sure. The need will be apparent. But right now, of all the 58 things that people who are listening to this can learn about to actually solve their goddamn problems and stay alive. That is dead goddamn last along with reading the fucking bible.

Jay: No. You don’t have to depend on it. What I'm saying is everyone should hold Bitcoin.

Gregory: Jay let me push back on this.

Jay: It would be irresponsible to not diversify.

Vinay: Look, we’re wasting our time and we need to talk about this topic anymore. Change the fucking topic and let's go back to talking about the fucking flu.

Jay: Okay

Gregory: Jay, let me take a crack at this.

Vinay: No, guys this is wasting my time. I'm literally going to leave this thing if we don’t talk –

Jay: I will leave. I will leave myself, thank you. It's been a pleasure.

Vinay: I really got to say, I think you're basically right. I think the timing sucks.

Gregory: Yeah. So that’s my sense of it as well, Vinay. I completely agree with you. And I guess what I'm wondering is, and we can put this conversation to bed after this wonder. Is there a case to be made for kind of concerted effort of all of the crypto geeks and engineers out there to lock themselves at home and fucking work on this wicked problem for the next two months and see what happens and say that uncorrelated. That’s like using the present moment to inspire self-isolation and dedicated work on creating the software that’s needed in a way that doesn’t get them infected and meanwhile there's a bunch of other response that is demanded.

Lucas: Can I say something?

Gregory: yeah.

Vinay: Sure. Come into this.

Lucas: Many, many people think that the answer the one answer – that’s speaking from public health. Many people think that the one right answer to epidemics is to have vaccines. That is highly technological only a few people can do it. And it takes time to do it. And it may not be here soon enough. So, the rest of us have to deal with this situation. What are we going to do while the vaccine arrives? If it ever arrives in significant quantities. So, I would say that this deeply rhymes with what is being said about crypto. I would really love people who can do these things to give it a very good try. The rest of us are going to focus on other things.

Gregory: Yeah. Word. That’s my sense as well. That there's a place to focus there and maybe – the challenge I see traditionally with the crypto space is that there's a lot of disconnection from grounded reality. And I wonder if it's possible to actually anchor the real design demands of a distributed software, social coordination system into this moment in a meaningful way that drives that kind of innovation so that these tools are available next time. I don’t think the software is a conversation for the present moment in so far as that it maybe gives some people something to do while they're at home.

Vinay: [inaudible 01:07:56] is actionable intelligence. What people need right now is actionable intelligence. They need to get oriented to the problem. What I'm saying about orienting and problem space rather that orienting in solution space is incredibly important. It's two ways of parameterizing. If we’re orienting over here and we’re orienting in solution space, we look at the problem through the lens of our solution and this is the consensual landmine that Jay had stood on. If you look at the problem through the lens of your solution, you don’t see the problem clearly you only see the aspects of the problem that fit in with your solution. The problem with ruling out new software into a pandemic is getting anybody to use the fucking thing.

Gregory: Yeah totally. I don’t know if Jay was or wasn’t suggesting – I don't know if he was or wasn’t suggesting.

Lucas: Can we move one?

Gregory: Yeah. Let's move on.

Vinay: Hang on. Problems faces objective. Here is the flu, here are the symptoms. Here’s the prognosis, here’s where we need healthcare workers. You get a really solid grip and then everybody ends up speaking the same language. If somebody comes in with a bunch of ideas about how to use crypto to solve the problem –

Lucas: Can we move on?

Vinay: Yeah, yeah, we’re moving. But they're operating in solution space, you don’t get it to work. If they're in problem space, you do. This has to be the bedrock of building these collaborative structures you need ontological certainty at the heart of your collaboration framework. Without the ontological certainty, which is basically epidemiological certainty, you cannot get diverse groups to cooperate because everybody looks at the problem through the lens of their solution and it's like the blind man and the elephant. The only part of this that is fully objective is the virus. Everything else cultural. Does that make sense?

Gregory: It makes perfect sense to me.

Vinay: Building that fundamental platform of epidemiological certainty, this is the objective situation we’re in. This is how you get everybody into cooperation space.

Gregory: Yeah. And you play with the team you've got. So, let's drill in again. Lucas I'd love to hand it over to you. Take us into the next phase of this conversation in a way that feels meaningful for you and maybe serves listeners to know what the fuck is going on.

Lucas: Okay. My understanding of this – partial understanding, I don’t have the full picture at all even though I try like everybody else. The understanding is that we’re facing a situation at which we have a virus that is capable of endangering the lives of older people and to lesser extent the lives of less old people. We have that and we have a virus that is creating a big pressure onto the health care systems of that fraction of countries that have health care systems. We’re talking about the global problem here. I don’t want to know – well I do, but I don’t really want to think too deeply about what might be going on in Syria or in Kenya or other places. This is a big, big, big problem and it belongs to all of us. And we’re only going to be doing whatever it is that we can do from our corner. And my understanding is that if we develop the tools in the places where they can be developed to achieve the best possible reduction of contagion. And the best possible treatment of those who happen to fall ill, and the best reduction of the problems associated with the disease itself and with our handling of the crisis. Then we’re going to be able to look at it from the other end and say, “Oh we did our best and we did our best means that if this biological tsunami is able to kill – I don't know how ever many millions of people. We could end up having twice as many deaths because we did it wrong. Or we could have a tenth of the deaths because we did it very, very well. That’s what we’re looking at.

Vinay: We can see this differentiation right now between Italy and Japan. It's very clear.

Lucas: One of the things that might or might not need to happen is that we need to see our emotions for what they are and look at our emotions and say, “Hello emotion. You stay on the side. I'm going to cooperate.” And that’s my idealistic self. I'm sorry but that’s how it is.

Vinay: Yeah. I mean I think – let's talk a little bit about what cooperation means in this instance. Inside of the prevent, treat, manage framework. One of the things about something which is infectious, is it makes some kind of cooperation really hard because if you go around to help somebody, you may also infect them. So, our zones of cooperation, where we could get a difference between good outcomes and bad outcomes. How do we cooperate to stay away from each other? You see what I'm saying?

Gregory: I think that is a big – it's been on my mind for the last month really and increasingly over the last two weeks.

Lucas: Welcome to our nightmare.

Vinay: Yes. There we go. God this is the old days all over again. Lucas and I spent so much time in two thousand and – what year was it we really got dug into this Lucas?

Lucas: I think it was 2005.

Vinay: Was it that early?

Lucas: That’s when bird flu the H5N1 situation started. And even though I was trained in public health and I knew what and epidemic was, I honestly didn’t know what a big wicked problem was and I remember it was a couple of years after the big tsunami and people were using the Wikipedia to organize around that and to collect phone numbers for giving donations and all sorts of stuff. So, I went to the Wikipedia and I looked up the H5N1 page and I changed it. And I said, “There could be a pandemic from this.” The next day I went, and it had been removed, my edit had been undone. And the comment from the editor was, “We don’t accept rumors. Put a link.” So, I put a link to WHO page that said that this could develop into a pandemic and then that was accepted. Then I went to ProMED-mail which is a program for monitoring emerging diseases. This is one emerging disease among others, but it is just respiratory, and it can be brutal. So, I looked at that and I went to ProMED-mail and I said, “Look, people are going to access the Wikipedia before they access your specialized information. So let's educate the Wikipedia so that people will learn from the quickly.” When I did that, I did that publicly and I got picked up by [cashio] and then somebody contacted me and Flu Wiki was being created. They had been looking at it for some time and I was one of the thousands of people who got into that game. And I learned what it was to look at public health from the perspective of somebody who is not a public health professional which was highly educational. What I found was that governments and people with good intention in the position to give advice to other people, such as public health people, sometimes drop a rope that is 16 meters long, but the cliff is a hundred meters. You are saying, “Okay, we are going to close schools.” And people are looking at you puzzled, and they say, “Now what?” That is coping, and that is where we need to introduce the word, ‘facilitation’. Making things easy. We need to make things easy. We need to make good things easy for everybody. We need to help people not go to work if they have to stay at home. We need to help people do childcare properly. We need to care for our neighbors. And if we’re in a position of being in the government, any kind of government, local, national, regional, whatever, we need to provide tools so that neighbors will take care of neighbors. We need to do the shopping for the old. And we need to facilitate that. Crypto or no crypto or vaccine or no vaccine.

Vinay: Lucas, let's talk a little about the specifics here.

Lucas: Okay

Vinay: Things that we've talked about in the past that are probably relevant. Some categories of people are very dependent on hard to get hold of drugs to stay alive. Insulin dependent diabetics are right at the top of that list because there are a lot of them and insulin requires a lot of [care] –

Lucas: In some cases, it's young people so the number of potential years of life that we lose is higher than if somebody dies in their 90s. Yeah.

Vinay: Insulin supply chain, huge deal. What we have because this bug is so particularly infectious, we also have the situation where if somebody has to go out to get their insulin and come back. They're now risking themselves and everybody around them. So, getting a supply chain working for delivering food is pretty easy. We already good supply chains for food. But getting a relatively safe delivery mechanism for pharmaceuticals – like that to me looks like an American shaped, American sized problem. I think that that’s going to be a real problem in the states and the idea that smoothing out all the crap that you need to do so people can pick up the drugs at the pharmacy and then deliver them to people and we can just make sure that the prescriptions are filled. I think that’s probably a substantial thing that will cause a lot of inconvenience and potentially infection in America. And I don't know that in federal government is going to make a mandate to fix that. I don't know when the state governments are going to fix it. But these are the kinds of things that I think our listeners ought to be thinking about. That’s an achievable problem. You can get hold of that. There's even a crypto angle to that problem. How we do know the area involved [inaudible 01:19:40]. Absolutely fine but it's not a solution to the entire thing. Lucas, what are the other greatest hits that are things that people ought to be worrying about here?

Lucas: When we talk about contact reduction, we’re talking about contact reduction in different – we’re all human, but we’re in different position and we have different situations from each other. One of them is being a person who does work that is vital for other people's lives. You're a firefight or you are a health care worker or you clean the streets. Those people need to be protected extra. So, if there is a diabetic that is also running the nuclear power station, I would rather give him my insulin if I had it.

Gregory: Yeah

Vinay: You've got straight into the hard stuff now Lucas.

Gregory: [inaudible 01:20:53] problem like at the grand scale

Vinay: Triage. Triage.

Vinay: Well triage and deep cooperation, some of the things – so triage means that we only have one piece of cake for two mouths and we’re going to have to decide who gets it. I am much more in favor of trying something else first, which is design. We need to look at the problem. We need to look at the space of solutions. Now we’re looking at the space of solutions and we create something that’s better than the first two or three solutions that come to mind and then we act. Call it lateral thinking, call it divine inspiration, I don't know. Whatever works but we need to have better ideas than the first ones if they are really not very good. And it can be done. This flu wiki stuff. Some ideas took lots of brainpower to come up. And when they came up, we were surprised of how simple they were.

Gregory: Is there a corona wiki yet?

Lucas: Oh I wish. I so long for the times of flu wiki. I'm so old.

Vinay: Yeah. Flu wiki was like a global think tank, it was really, really remarkable.

Lucas: Yeah. But we have other ways to do that. We need – I don't know, a semantic space of hashtags? I don't know.

Vinay: I mean the bottom line is somebody could establish a pandemic wiki. 90% of the material will be good for any viral pandemic. It would be nice if it was a [toucher] institution that has the ability to keep it running. It's going to require quite a bit of investment to make it work. Firstly, because it will get a lot of traffic. Secondly, because it will get a lot of trolling. And thirdly because it's going to require enormously strict policies to ensure that you don’t have pseudoscience or drug company shelling –

Lucas: Or people suggesting that the one solution is one cubic meter of tuna and a box of ammunition on top of it.

(laughs)

Lucas: Yeah, I'm being serious. There are many ways to disrupt cooperation.

Vinay: But I mean cooperation is not the answer in every case.

Lucas: I know

Vinay: Because maintaining the supply chains. Okay, that is a kind of cooperation but it's still very much like just profit driven activity continues to run as it always did. This is a particularly delicate thing because the Corona virus lands at a very difficult level of fatality. If it was substantially more lethal then We’d be in a position where you could expect very serious supply chain failures and potentially grid infrastructure failure and you wind up with a really serious end of the world type scenario.

Gregory: Which is possible but unlikely with the current –

Vinay: For this organism, I see very little evidence that it's going to go that way and because they’ve managed containment in places like China pretty effectively. There's very strong evidence that you can run a society with this virus around and not have the virus spread in it. It might be inconvenient as all hell. But unless the Chinese are lying through their teeth, [nod to our friend] it does look like they have it under control reasonably well. On the other hand. If it was much less lethal, we'd be kind of casual about it. It's in this level where it's maybe half as bad as it could be before you would see really serious structural failure, so it's going to hit an awful lot of people, but it's below the threshold where things implode.

Lucas: But we can see excess mortality due to our difficulty in organizing ourselves.

Vinay: Um, yes.

Lucas: I mean, not huge, not at the level of your pandemic paper, which was half of the people getting infected, half of the people who are infected die, and the other three quarters are full of PTSD. So that’s not that scenario at all. But I have ended up using the expression, ‘but enough’. This is but enough to demand rational action.

Gregory: Alright we can't just skate by on – we shouldn’t just skate by on the “Well it's not bad enough, so.”

Lucas: It is bad enough.

Gregory: “So shoulder shrug.” Like we actually have to accept that it is actually beyond the threshold and act as if – Isn’t it smarter to act as if this is…

Vinay: I'm not entirely not a fan of a cubic meter of tuna and ammunition. I love that, Lucas. Because at the end of the day. The first line of social distancing is the ability to not continue to run to shops for groceries. The Chinese model was that they run everything on delivery. Delivery. Delivery. Delivery. Presumably the delivery people were well trained to not spread the virus as they went. So blanket testing for temperature plus delivery of food. Think of how much that reduces the opportunities for infection. And this stuff is not difficult to do in a country that already has 700 different delivery services for food and digital thermometers are pretty ambiguates. You see what I'm saying? We can learn from what's been done successfully on containment in other countries and a lot of that can be imported. And in America, it doesn’t have to be imposed by the federal government.

Gregory: Yeah. Uber eats could just be making a lot of business or whatever.

Vinay: Right. Think of situations where – let's talk about contract tracing. If somebody that’s running deliveries for Uber Eats turns out to later have a diagnosis of Corona. We could figure out every place that they’ve delivered and tell them that they’ve been exposed.

Gregory: Yeah.

Lucas: Yeah.

Vinay: This is the kind of thing that you could do inside of an American context where a lot of the infrastructure is corporate rather than government and a lot of the management strategies will be corporate policy rather than government fear. And America being America, if Uber Eats makes me a very strong guarantee – or you know uber eats gives me a week guarantee on flu and just eat gives me a strong guarantee on flu. I'm likely to migrate to the provider that gives me the strongest guarantee that they’ve implemented effective infection control in their service.

Gregory: One of the folks on the telegram channel is saying, “Hey folks, could you return to the question of over the next two months, what are we doing as community members in our local context?” and first I want to take a crack distilling what I've heard over the last ten minutes which is, there are key cooperative actions such as engaging in lateral thinking to ensure that there's a strategy around taking care of critical service providers, taking care of local and regional supply chain – and that requires, in our context in the United States, that’s going to require citizen and corporate led actions. Like in my context, there's no such thing as Uber Eats because it's a small enough town. That means we need to figure out – it's like in my context it's like call the leadership at the grocery stores and the chamber of commerce and the local taxi and say, “Hey, everybody this is something that we need to do. Community boards, whatever. What's the protocol, how do we do that?”

Vinay: Right. Now you're thinking like an American. Local sheriff fixes it.

Lucas: You're thinking in terms of the problems face of the need. That was one thing that became really clear when I started using the SCIM model. The Simple Critical Infrastructure Model that Vinay came up with. It took me a long time to digest it and process it and understand it relatively, I think. It's about looking – we tend to look at the system and we want to protect the system. We want to protect the electrical grid. We want to protect the roads and the trains. Actually, what we need to protect is people being fed. And if the road is blocked, then we put the food in the river, and we paddle. That’s the approach that I think could be more productive. That is, we look at the problem, we have a good diagnosis of what the problem is and we congregate around the problem. If the system that we have works, we keep it. If it's starting to fail, we protect it. Fails completely, we replace it.

Vinay: Yes. And something critical here –

Lucas: Because we, at the end of the day, if we have a system that provides for our needs and the system breaks or becomes insufficient. Then we get to keep the pieces of the broken system and we get to keep all the other things that are lying around and we get to keep the need. And we rearrange our energies. [inaudible 01:31:25] we need water, food, heat, too cold or whatever. All those things. Please, please look at the resiliencemaps.org which has the model. It has a very simplistic language. It's extremely simplistic. If we look at hospitals, they have very specialized needs. They have the need to sterilize the equipment. They have the need to have enough light to do surgery at night. They have specialized needs. You look at those needs, and you solve them in some way or another. [inaudible 01:32:10] we don’t have the electricity to kill the bacteria in a surgeon’s knife, then you boil it. It's working towards solving the needs in a humane way and trying to make things work for everybody if at all possible. Please.

Vinay: Lucas let's talk a bit about wicked problems. So wicked problems –

Lucas: I lost the sound from you.

Vinay: Oh, can you guys hear me?

Gregory: I can hear you. You sort of broke up there for a moment. But I think you stabilized.

Lucas: I can't hear you.

Gregory: Can you hear me, Lucas?

Lucas: I cannot hear you.

Vinay: Okay, hang on a second.

Gregory: I think it's Lucas that’s having internet issues.

Vinay: Okay, something must have glitched for him. I'm sure he’ll get back on. Worst case, he can reload Zoom. So wicked problems. Everybody gets paralyzed by the wicked problems. We've got 500 moving parts. Everything is connected to everything else. Bunches and bunches of positive and negative feedback loops and the situation goes completely to shit when you try to interact with it. Military calls it [Vooca] –

Lucas: Hello?

Vinay: Lucas can you hear us again?

Lucas: I cannot hear you.

Vinay: Aw rots.

Gregory: We can hear you Lucas.

Lucas: Oh. You can hear me, sorry, sorry about that I probably messed up all the audio. Are you problem on my end?

Gregory: It looks like an audio problem on your end.

Vinay: I'm sure he’ll fix it.

Lucas: Now I can hear you.

Vinay: Okay great. Welcome back.

Lucas: Sorry about that, whatever happened here. I had the need to hear you, but I couldn’t

Vinay: There you go. So wicked problems. The paralysis that comes from looking at wicked problems is that when you try and take the existing system which is extremely efficient and then you put a whole bunch of new stress on it. The efficient system just doesn’t have the slack to absorb the stress and the system begins to break down. This is generic to everything from earthquakes to meteor strikes. And it is because our system is very complex and very efficient. It has inherent [fragility]. And the thing that drives [inaudible 01:34:57] when they do disaster planning is you look at this enormously interwoven complex system with all of its [fragility] and you say there's no way to keep this running in the disaster. The exercise that I give people is to go to their local Walmart, or even better the mall. I'm not saying you should do this now. You want to stay away from these places.

Gregory: Don’t go there now.

Vinay: Don’t go there now. But conceptually in your mind astrally project to Walmart. That’s not a phrase that’s probably ever been said by a human being before. But you place yourself mentally in Walmart and you walk around in Walmart and the things which are actually necessary to human survival occupy 30% of the store. Here’s the food. Of that food, 80% or 60% of it is junk food which is really recreational rather than nourishing. And then you've got the clothes. Most of the clothes are basically frivolous. You're not really going to need those. If everything is really rough and you've got the toy section. Okay the kids are going to need toys. Half of that’s going to have to stay, maybe a quarter, maybe ten percent. Any you can just kind of go through and there are entire sections of the store which are just like nobody needs this. Think of the size of the section of the store which is freaking hair product. Nobody needs it. As things begin to become difficult. If you focus on the complexity of the existing system and maintaining it. You go crazy and it's not going to work. If you focus on too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness and injury – even when you take illness and you break that out into: we need masks, we need glove, we need hand sanitizer. And we take injury and that turns into a bunch of stuff like we need to make sure that we've got light at night so that people don’t trip over things. Even when you ramify out those six needs to keep human beings alive, the system is like 95% over capacity. We've got 20 times the amount of life support stuff that we need. If you have to run to Walmart, the only stocks of things that are required to keep somebody alive, it's like 200 product lines. And the store currently had – I don't know ten thousand product lines. So, if we expect that there is going to be a temporary simplification in our functions, then everything becomes really so much easier. and this is – I mean SCIM was designed Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps, was designed as a direct antidote to wicked problem paralysis. It's only a wicked problem if you look at the sheer complexity of the real world if you're just going to keep people alive for a relatively short period. Say six months. It turns out that no problem is all that wicked. It may still be very difficult to deal with, there may be a lot of complexity you have to face. But the actual process of focusing when we’re just going to keep people alive first then we’re going to worry about everything else brings down the web of interconnectedness to a level that you can cope with. And this is the heart of the SCIM system is it's a way of basically breaking out of the wicked problem space into, “We’re just going to keep people alive and we’ll deal with the next thing after that.” Did I forget anything Lucas? Or is that a decent summary?

Lucas: Yeah. I think it's a decent summary and at the end of the day, once we have crossed that river, if you want to play the electric guitar or the ukulele, that’s your business. I'm happy with either. It's keeping people alive while the crisis is going. If people are alive and they – if most of them stay friendly to each other. I'm okay with that, that is a very good result.

Gregory: Yeah.

Vinay: Yeah. This is the thing the cubic meter of tuna answers pretty well. Cubic meter of tuna and a box of ammunition is the kind of thinking that comes when people say, “We’re just going to solve for our own survival and we’re going to wait it out at home.” The place where it becomes tricky is where we've got real interdependence. So, we have to keep the people that are running the power grid healthy enough to go to work. The hospitals are incredible complicated places because it turns out that keeping people well in hospitals is a really complicated architecture. It's not that this simple critical infrastructure maps model is the whole fix. But it takes the kind of 70% of the problem which we probably don’t have to solve and let's just push that to one side. Okay. I accept that we have a critical problem and that we are not going to be able to keep the hair salons open. I'm really sorry, that’s very unfortunate and then move on from there.

Lucas: But the people running those hair salons are going to have to be fed.

Vinay: Yes. That’s right. Because otherwise you solve one problem and then you make another.

Lucas: Oh yeah.

Vinay: This mindset about escaping from the wicked problem space – I mean I can practically hear the entire internet complex systems complexity community beginning to spin up their wheels like, “Oh pandemic flue, we need to think about that.” The thing that I learned. Because I was very well versed in complexity science when I started this stuff. My first exposure to complex systems was in the mid-1980s and that stuff soaked into me very deeply when I was a teenager and I maintained my interest in that stuff all the way through. So, when I came to this stuff, I went into it initially with the whole complex systems mindset and it just turns out to be impossible forest of interconnections. You can't get through this stuff in a complex systems model because it's just that complex systems break. The kind of summary rule for all of this is complex systems behave unpredictably so if you need the system to behave predictably, the system must be simple. We have to simplify and simplify and simplify and simplify and simplify, stick [inaudible 01:41:02] eliminate complexity, stop trying to do unnecessary things. The first question should always be, do we need to solve this problem or can we focus on something more important? And we get it right down to a really small cluster of fundamental things. Childcare for health care workers. Getting prescriptions filled and delivering stuff to people's houses. Making sure that the hospitals have priority access to whatever it is they need from the industrial supply chain. Like first access to bleach or whatever it is that they happen to want. Making sure that the delivery people don’t infect people with Corona virus when they're delivering food to people’s houses. It's an identifiably small list of basically soluble problems and then there are a couple of really big chunky bastard problems hanging out there. Like is it possible to mass manufacture respirators in time to meet the enormous oncoming demand of respirators. Can we figure out flu testing quickly? Is there going to be a decent antiviral drug that works and can we mass produce it quickly enough? Are we going to get a vaccine? And those things really are big and complicated [authority] problems and you need a much different toolkit for addressing them. But the simple stuff we can keep simple. And that’s what freezes the resources for addressing the big hard problems, like can we figure out a quick way to make respirators?

Lucas: There is going to be complexity that it's just there. If we try to deliver medication to neighbors who need it, are we going to see certain neighborhoods served better than others just because they have a different color or they have a different level of income? We’re going to see that. We’re going to have to look at that as well. On top of solving the problem, we’re going to have to solve it with fairness, justice, love, and kindness and all the other good virtues that we all have and use every day.

Gregory: Yeah. So again, just sort of serving and just distilling for listeners what I'm hearing and using that as a reflection for the two of you to see where it's useful to deepen or clarify. In my context here in [Berkshire] county Massachusetts rural – two and half hours from Boston, two and a half hours from New York City if you drew an equilateral triangle. If I'm going to be a proactive cooperative citizen, there's sort of like a – I'm starting to synthesize a strategy here. And that is, I can spend my weekend learning and getting smarter about more of the details about the power grid. More of the details around the pharmaceutical supply–

Vinay: Hang on. So power grid, unless you're a power engineer, power grid is above your pay grade.

Gregory: Well no – so listen.

Vinay: Focus on what's in your grip.

Gregory: Let me finish. What I'm thinking here is that I don’t care about the technical details. What I care about is keeping the existing technical staff healthy. So, if I make a [few phone calls and] –

Lucas: In this situation –

Gregory: Sorry Lucas we were talking over each other, go ahead.

Lucas: No, no. what I was going to say was that in this situation, people are the critical infrastructure. It's not a broken bridge. It's somebody [who’s ill].

Gregory: That’s my overarching takeaway from everything that’s been said is that my role – I have technical expertise in some areas that are not particularity relevant for the next two months. But what I can do, is I'm a problem solver. I'm intelligent and I can get on the phone and I can send emails and I can text people and I can figure out – I can just scout some things. I can scout out a few key areas and I can maybe, understand if there are leaders who are willing to have conversations and I can try to maybe distill clear information for them so that I'm serving for them to have access to information about what it looks like for – so that’s some things that in thinking about. The other big problem that I identified that I probably could take entrepreneurial action on is delivery. Delivery, delivery, delivery. I can talk to entrepreneurs and business owners in this community and I can say, “Let's get a delivery service out.” And I could do that. Right?

Vinay: Let me really draw a path here. For people who are trying to get their heads around this. the most important thing is to have a clear picture of the problem. By clear picture we have to slow right down and we have to literally have to chart out – literally it's a path through the day in which you don’t get infected. If on every day you have a path through the day when you don’t get infected, you don’t get infected. For different people that path through the day looks very different, but this is a thing that happens hour by hour and we very seldom pay enough attention to our lives to figure out the architecture of the patterns of things like, “I'm not going to get infected with this damn virus. You see what I'm saying?”

Gregory: Yeah.

Vinay: It needs this micro attention to things that we normally never pay attention to like, “Hey, I ordered this from Amazon, if one of the Amazon workers has a cold, am I going to get cCrona virus when I open this box?” That’s a discreet question for which there is analysis and potentially an answer. I think the answer right now is that it dies in three days on cardboard, even if it's embedded in mucous. Again, what the answer is in two weeks when the science is a little improved, we dont know. That’s a discreet potential infection. Moment we figure out what the answer is to that question, we move onto the next thing. And there are a long list of these discreet things that we've got to figure out. But the thing is – and this was the generous of flu wiki, the thing is that everybody that receives a package in the mail has the same question, “Okay, can I get infected from this action?” The number of things that we have in common hugely outnumbers the number of things that we have different. Your small town is structural similar to probably 50 thousand other small towns in America. And there are probably half a dozen different small town templates that they’ll all kind of fall on. If you're way up north your risk model is very different from if you're in the desert in California. But the similarities are really large. This is where there's an opportunity for mass collaboration to get a definitive answer on, “Okay, what's our protocol for dealing with packages we get in the mail? What's the best practice for delivery men to deliver? How are we going to organize syllabus material for our kids who aren’t going to school for the next three months?” The collaboration around getting the accurate scientific answers to the micro interfaces to reality across which we do not allow the flu to cross. That’s where the leverage point is. It's getting and propagating definitive answers to the microtransactions across which we have to function. It's boring as hell when you look at it at that level, it's boring but bloody hell that’s how we solve this thing.

Gregory: Yeah and doing that quickly. If there's a lot of – I guess the call here is for who people who are listening, may listen to this when it's published as a podcast or I’ll try to write up a little blog so there's some distillations here. But the takeaway is, I think all of a sudden I think there's going to be a bunch of people with a bunch of time on their hands because you can't go to shop and you can't go to work and whatever. So, let's all use that time to start being methodical in answering these small questions in a through way together so that that information – as quickly as possible so that that information is widely available.

Vinay: Yes.

Lucas: I have started a blog on blogspot.com which is called “FluScheme”. Because I don’t know that much about corona virus. In that fluscheme.blogspot.com, there is this model of the information layer and then the three pillars of action and then there is another layer on top which is our values. What is it that we find important? People can reflect on all that for themselves and find out what is it that they want to do. And get good things done. This is an opportunity for trying mass collaboration. I have friends in the climate change fields and they say, “Oh but climate change is going to be worse.” Okay, so consider this as training for climate change.

Gregory: Yeah. Definitely. I think there's going to be a silver lining in all of this, it's that we start to realize what it actually takes to coordinate effective community social country state scale responses to wicked problems and do it.

Lucas: Yeah. You look at reality, which is the problem. Then you look at the solutions [space] and then you act and then you reflect and you learn from what has happened and you keep going. It's like crossing the street. I mean it's not that difficult. You keep your eyes open.

Vinay: Very important that we don’t get pulled into the idea that we’re going to solve wicked problems. What we do is we subset and solve the simple problems that we can solve which are parts of these larger wicked problems. If we frame the problem with climate change as, “How do we maintain the full complexity of society in a way which is carbon neutral?” We’re probably not going to be able to do it. If we frame climate change as, “How do we kill the oil industry in a weekend?” Any first world military can stop climate change tomorrow morning. 50 nuclear bombs over the oil fields and a bunch of carpet bombing of the oil terminals climate change is solved. You just can’t have that and also your complex society and the correct solution is somewhere between the wicked problem which is changing an existing dynamic system while maintaining all of its features is impossible and the simplification which is the cutting of the Georgian knot where Alexander the Great just brings out the sword and cuts. So, I am much closer towards the cutting Georgian knots with a machete kind of end of this thing. Because it just turns out that every time we hit this thing of “How do we maintain the status quo while at the same time changing everything?” It turns out you can't do that. All of my work is about breaking people out of the wicked problems space, because the wicked problem space is hell on Earth, and nothing ever gets done. Do you know about the goat rodeo?

Gregory: I'm not sure.

Vinay: Alright. We've invented two animals to help people think about avoiding wicked problems. The first of these is the black elephant. And the black elephant, believe it or not is widely used in the Asian military strategy community. I took it over there when I went to Singapore maybe five years ago and it turns out there's a bunch of writing out in now, it amazing. So [Peter Hobe] put a bunch of work into the black elephant. The black elephant is the thing that nobody wants to deal with and then suddenly one day it explodes and it rampages around and everybody says, “Oh my god that was a black swan.” Corona virus is a black elephant. Everybody knew the viral pandemic was coming because viral pandemic is always coming because viral pandemic has always come. It's unpredictable. You don’t know when. You don’t know how bad. You don’t know which virus. You don’t know yadayadayada. Lots of unknowns, but any idiot could have told you that there was going to be a viral pandemic eventually and if we were unlucky it was going to really suck. We knew that, we all knew that. It's a black elephant. So, most of the problems that we've got in dealing with Corona are actually black elephants. America has shitty healthcare and enormous poverty in the inner cities and in rural areas. The existing poverty makes people fragile to shock as a result, these people are going to get absolutely hammered but this goddamn thing because of the existing fragility that everybody was trying to ignore in positions of power.

Gregory: You have two black elephants rampaging together in this case.

Vinay: You see what I'm saying. This herd of black elephants – but I love that framing, nice right? So, the black elephant stampede where a herd, a whole herd of black elephants all kick off. This is the thing that disciplined approaches, even meditation, write down the black elephants. What are all the things I know to be true that I don’t want to deal with? My god that waste is valuable. So dangerous animal one, black elephant. Dangerous number two goat rodeo. Again, I am a post complexity thinker. I went through complexity and I came out the other side and all that I really have is a machete with the words ‘Fuck it’ written on the side of it – on one side and on the other side it says, ‘fuck you’. Because the complexity trap is murderous for getting anything done and the goat-rodeo is the apex of the complexity trap. So, take a group of people that want to solve a problem. The people are either all the same or they're all different. The solution that they want is either they all want the problem solved the same way, or they all want it all solved in a different way. See how that gives us a two by two matrix? So, if the same people all want to solve the same problem in the same way, same people same solution, this is a cartel. Super easy we’re all telecom operators we all want to reduce the cost of internet access and we've all agreed that we’re going to use fiber optic to do it, it's a cartel. If you've got different classes of actors and they all want to solve the problem the same way, you have cooperation. You're the federal government. I'm the hospital insurers. Him over there, that’s the general public. We all agree we want the same solution. Cooperation, problem solved. If we've got the same class of actors, so everybody’s in cooperation and we disagree about the solution we want, we get competition. You want ethernet. I want token [inaudible 01:56:59]. We fight it out in the market. I lose you win. Competition, perfectly healthy gets problems solved. Maybe it's efficient, maybe it's inefficient, but it terminates this process. Goat rodeo, different classes of actors who want different solutions. You're the catholic church. I'm the federal government. Lucas is the general public. We want to solve this problem. We each pick a different solution. Nobody has the ability to force their will on the other actors because there's no interface between these things for them to force their will on each other. So, they can't form a cartel. They can’t cooperate. They can't compete and all that you get is endless circularity. And that’s the climate process.

Gregory: Yeah.

Vinay: It's also going to be the majority of our response to the pandemic because it's the majority of our response to everything right now. The goat rodeo is the cultural pathology that curses us to ineffectiveness. And we have to exit that cultural pathology as forcefully as possible because otherwise we’re going to get stuck going around in circles in this thing while the bodies pile up.

Gregory: Well it seems to me that it's less likely that we end up in the goat rodeo with the corona virus.

Vinay: We’re already in it.

Gregory: You think so?

Vinay: I mean what you saw in the first part of this call was me exiting the goat rodeo. Okay? That was a goat rodeo. That we were in because we couldn’t cooperate, we couldn’t compete, and we couldn’t form a cartel and I simplified the problems based by being an asshole. That’s what avoiding goat rodeos often looks like is that you take the things that don’t fit and you just kick them out the room so the adults can have a fucking conversation. It's brutal, but I really want to model this as like, you're going to see an enormous number of rooms with people that do not agree on the objective and do not speak the same language trying to solve these problems. And unless they can very quickly get to the point where they agree on their goals, they will not get anything done.

Gregory: Right, but there has to be enough space. Like case in point, the conversation – there is an opportunity for that conversation about social coordination and applied cryptography that we call blockchain to play, if we’re clear about the goals. And to say, “Okay great. Do some software design and do some tests while you do social isolation around these three problems. If you agree on the problems then it's useful, but if you don’t agree on the problems then it's trying to solve something that isn’t useful then it's sort of a distraction.

Vinay: It's not just a distraction, it's a total systemic failure to govern manage or [inaudible 01:59:56]

Lucas: Yeah.

Vinay: The goat rodeo is going to kill so many people in the next few years because the first goat rodeo will be our attempt to have a response and then the second goat rodeo will be the lessons learned and then the third goat rodeo will be the failure to implement the lessons learns.

Gregory: It seems like the line between the goat rodeo and the cooperative cooperation quadrant, there like a need – what you're modeling Vinay is a very hard line kick it out the door and you have your machete, but there may be a case for good cop bad cop in these situations where there's also a need to understand – like within a time bound analysis, can we actually get clear on a shared goal so that we can move into the cooperative quadrant.

Vinay: Generally speaking, no.

Lucas: Yeah.

Gregory: Generally speaking, you're saying it's sort of impossible even that those preexisting – it either exists or it doesn’t, you just leave.

Vinay: We would be far better if the people that agreed with each other just got together and worked on the stuff they agree on rather than spending all their time trying to form consensus before taking action. We form consensus three times or five times more than we need to, to get things done. The genious of the open source software revolution which has given us, what, a trillion dollars of free software? Is that when people disagree with each other, they just do both things. Your half of the team wants to do it this way. My half of the team wants to do it this way. We’re going to fork the project. We’ll implement both solutions. We’ll see which one works better for people. Then once it's done and you've tried it both ways, usually what happens is that the more successful branch just assimilates the less successful branch and nobody hates each other because the existing model of how that game works is we do it both ways.

Gregory: The cartel turns into competition. Essentially and then –

Vinay: See what I'm saying? So, most of the time when we’re stuck, it would actually be possible to simply agree, “Okay, you three want to do it this way. We five want to do it that way. We don’t have to prioritize the same things. We’re just going to form two groups and we’ll try it both ways.” That is a cultural reflex that we can take from open source and we can have cultural change, because at the end of the day, we've tried large scale cooperation before we take action as a troop really for 50 years, and that’s been the main cultural emphasis of cooperation as a study. I don’t think it actually works very well, and all the problems are amenable to that approach have been solved using that approach.

Gregory: Let me push a little bit here because I sort of sense, or maybe I'm interpreting this wrong. For me, I have lots of experience in open source and open space and the experience of open space sort of [unconferences] where you walk out the door, if the conversation doesn’t fit, go find another one whatever, there's no need to talk to anybody about it.

Vinay: Great model. Works great.

Gregory: Yeah. It's a fantastic model.

Vinay: Lucas is also a big fan of open space. I'm a big fan of it. We've got grounding in that stuff.

Gregory: I'm wondering with Jay’s voice entering into the conversation and sort of like trying to steer in a certain way which was maybe not the most grounded set of information, but maybe it was. I mean he was making good points, but anyway. It was a little chunky, it gave us a lot of food for thought and I think it moved to conversation in a meaningful way, but I sense –

Lucas: It was a very good natural experiment.

Gregory: Yeah. Thank you. My sense is that – at least how I'm holding it is, hell yeah, if Jay and his friends and people I know want to sit down and try to create medicine delivery coordination tools, then they should go do that and that’s awesome. But is also got a hard edge and I'm trying to find where this edge is. I got a hard edge from both of you that you don’t want a bunch of people working at an oblique angle to what needs to just get done in order for it to protect people's lives. Where am I missing where that angle is? Like where’s the line? How [inaudible 02:04:31]

Vinay: It's really simple, the hard edge is these ideas are going to get people killed.

Gregory: What we’re saying – I thought I was on safe ground saying that they're not going to get people killed. If they're [inaudible 02:04:43] –

Vinay: If he's in his bedroom writing code to build the system that he wants to build with a bunch of his friends, that’s great. But what they shouldn’t be doing is interfering in a bunch of relatively experienced epidemiological thinkers having a negotiation about how to approach this thing.

Gregory: Right. So there's sort of like a way in which we need to retrain how we engage with conversations and media and information in which we can sort of rate our relative ability to contribute to a conversation and either be an active listener or a contributor is kind of what you're saying.

Lucas: Okay. Another model. Can I bring in a physical model? If we need to move chairs, we can do that independently. You move your chair. I move mine. I can be as slow as my arthritis demands. If we need to move a table, we need to go in the same direction. We need to have ways to force ourselves or to put in another way to strongly invite ourselves to cooperate even when we don’t feel like it in this minute. So, there's going to be a variety of situations and some of it is going to take the humility that maybe we really don’t know how to solve this. But sometimes that humility is realistic and sometimes it isn’t. In terms of this, some people have been thinking about pandemics for longer than others. That doesn’t make them and expert in everything else, I wouldn’t dare to talk about crypto, personally. No clue.

Vinay: Yeah. If people are being effective, they're building the thing they want to build they think it's worth trying, there's no harm in letting literally a thousand flowers bloom. In this case, maybe more like a million. And you're damn right we’re going to have a lot of time at home to think about things and make prototypes and play with stuff. At least the lucky ones are. The trick of this is not getting in the way of people when they're doing something productive. The genius of open source was it kept everybody moving forward. And okay, there were times when you took half a million-man hours of work and you threw it away. We tried something else, it worked a lot better. All that stuff that was built over here, it's our junk we threw it away. Those kinds of losses are very evolutionarily sustainable. We've got seven and a half billion people. They can work super hard on something that takes a million-man hours and throw it away. We’re not short of man hours. What we’re short of is solutions. So approaches which are wasteful in manhours but produce a lot of solutions are way better than approaches that are very efficient with man hours but don’t solve anything.

Gregory: Which is completely at odds with how most people think about business competitiveness. There’s a switch that we need to shift the lens here around the approach to getting (break in audio) [inaudible 02:08:17] wicked problems

Lucas: One way to look at this is that competitiveness is a value, is something that we value. We think it's a good thing, therefore we foster it. The thing about values is that sometimes it's better to look at them in pairs, or even in triples. So, you have the value – or the virtue, the virtue would be the muscle of the value. So, I value free air and the muscle is I get into the habit of going out for a walk. When you look at values or virtues, it makes sense to look at them in groups, at least in pairs. If you value honesty, it would be good if you also value kindness so that you can be both honest and kind at the same time, because (crosstalk) [inaudible 02:09:17] –

Vinay: This is the calculus of competing virtues. Never trust somebody that only has one virtue.

Lucas: That’s the thing. So, apply two at the same time at the very least. That would be my understanding, that’s what I try to do. And for some time, I've been more kind than truthful, so I need to Improve my truthfulness. And for some people it will be the other way around.

Vinay: Yeah. There are many virtues that you could pick, but one virtue thinking tends to be very, very toxic. You want at least two or three virtues because it gets you a little more [power lapse] and a bit more toolset. So, I want to go back to the thing –

Lucas: No, no, no. When I say virtues, everybody’s going to decide what they call a virtue. That’s not my business.

Vinay: Exactly. I want to go back to the thing you said about solving wicked problems. I want to stress very strongly that we can't solve wicked problems.

Gregory: Got it. Yeah that was a misstep.

Vinay: I was going to say we can't solve wicked problems quickly.

Gregory: [inaudible 02:10:28] my understanding from listening to you, what's forming in my mind is wicked problems are a complex tangle of different things that we can indeed understand as more simple opportunities for engagement and there's sort of like these [notal] acupuncture points that you can hit that and it disentangles things and it transforms the context essentially.

Vinay: Let me frame this in total simplicity. Keeping people alive is not a wicked problem. Running a complex society in the middle of a pandemic with all of its multi-various goals, that’s a wicked problem. Keeping people alive? Not a wicked problem.

Gregory: As long as we’re willing to simplify, we can coordinate, and we can achieve keeping people alive and keeping – yeah.

Vinay: Right? Complex systems behave unpredictably. If you need the system to be predictable, the system has to be simple.

Lucas: Your understanding of the system has to be simplified.

Vinay: Yeah. Everything has to –

Gregory: Well that’s a good lead into – like I have two questions from the audience that came in over the last 15 minutes or so and one is, which I think we sort of spoke about in terms of wiki and we got into – but the question is specifically, “how can communities make unclear needs visible? And how can a small community like mine that may engage in this as a leader make that quickly available to other communities?” And I think we sort of treated that. I feel like we already kind of got there. The next question – maybe if not, I'll go through both questions and we can circle back and if there's something missing, we can speak to it. The other is, from [Christina] as well, and she's asking, “How can solid ontologies get us away from goat rodeo dynamics?”

Vinay: Okay. The thing about communities is this, communities are not the answer to anything. Everybody keeps saying community, community, community, community, but god damn it they grow food and they don’t make hand sanitizer come out of thin air. Rather than focusing on community, what people ought to be focusing on is capability. We all think that we exist in communities and we all think that those people will be there for us, but people in their 20s make these enormous investments in communities then what generally happens is that everybody has kids and move to the suburbs and the things evaporate as if they were never there. We have an enormous biological drive towards community and to be honest in most cases it's no more healthy than out biological drive towards sugar. I say this, by the way, as somebody that spent like an enormous amount of time and energy doing community stuff in my 20s and 30s. the first place that I went when I came to America was Gaskin’s farm because I wanted to see what the biggest intentional community in the world had turned into. And the horror stories that they told me –

Gregory: What year did you go?

Vinay: Late 95.

Gregory: Okay.

Vinay: The horror stories that they told me – we made the personal into the political, okay great, but we also made the political into the personal. So, everybody hated everybody because every major decision was six months of politicking and being nice to people that you hated because you needed their vote in a committee. And what I saw there was like, “this is not the answer.” My community in the late 90s, we had a reunion on Facebook a few years ago and man I was not pleased with the results. People had really, really, really had hard lives whereas my straight friends had basically done the nuclear family thing and kept it on the straight and narrow had generally done much better. So, I think we have to reexamine why we think community matters. Because I think it might be a biological red herring where we feel like our tribes are too small, so the first [question] is get a bigger tribe. But does a bigger tribe actually solve our problems right now?

Gregory: I think what you're saying is an important cautionary tale, but I would circle back to something that you said earlier around capability. And I think if you're thinking – yeah so cooperative decision making, capabilities are rare and can be grown but it's a multigenerational process and so anyway. We’re sort of stuck in the middle and –

Vinay: Let's think capability. What matters to me is not whether I like my next-door neighbor. What matters to me is whether me and my next-door neighbor will share resources to get through this thing.

Gregory: Yeah. Together in this moment. I think what you're saying as well as really – again, like sort of parsing this out, getting away from the community and starting to think like, armor or grocery store owner or manufacturer of a key good that my neighbors and I need so that I can relate [inaudible 02:15:48]

Vinay: Right. The guy next door knows how to fix trucks and the guy four doors down from him runs a bakery. Okay. So, we need to put the food into the truck and we need to deliver it to the people.

Gregory: Concrete mutualism. It's not just like everybody, it's like, “No, these three intersecting people or groups, we need to have a clear relationship and develop a protocol that keeps us healthy while we interact for our mutual aid.”

Vinay: You have just nailed this so precisely. Concrete mutualism. Yes. Because the bottom line is that there is a value to community. People like communities. They enjoy communities. It's nice to part of a community, but we instinctively think that the answer to our problem is a community because most of the time when we evolved it was. “Wow, we've got a real problem with wolves here. What we need is more humans to fight the wolves. We've got a real problem with food. We've got all this land and we don’t have enough people to farm it.” It's like a sort of economy of scale in our heads. We think that the natural problem-solving units about 50 dozen people or whatever it is. Maybe it's Dunbar's number, 140. We keep trying to fit this biological template to the problem we have. The problem that we have here is of relatively constant problem and it's largely about industrial supply chain management. What will allow you to stay at home is that the local Amazon depo stays open. And unfortunately, the Amazon depo is nothing to do with community. The Amazon depo is corporatism and most of our survival in this thing is going to rest on corporatism, not community. And I don’t necessarily like that answer, but my ability to have food turn up on my doorstep without anybody infecting me in the process is largely driven by Amazon. And that’s going to be the case for almost all of us. Right now, Amazon is earning its wings as a lifesaving machine for tens of millions of people. And that does not fit well with a lot of people’s values. 15 years ago, that would have rankled me super badly, now I've come to the conclusion that [utterly] Jeff Bezos is basically next door to god. And the only person between him and god is Elon Musk. I don’t like that conclusion, but bloody hell, they're getting the job done.

Gregory: Well yeah, they're getting certain jobs – and this may be one of those places where the competitive cartel coordinate goat rodeo if we don’t like certain elements about how Bezos behaves or let's just say Amazon, it's not just Bezos at this point. It's a corporate structure that he happens to sit atop that will live beyond him at this point probably. So, it's its own thing. If I really dislike it, I can still honor the fact that the thing be an enormous efficiencies and capacities that it has and I can be honest with myself about competing with it and what does it look like for myself and other people to compete with what Amazon is doing well right now.

Vinay: Right. And why would we do that? Because we've plenty of problems, right? Amazon doesn’t do pharmaceuticals. We can't get insulin through the Amazon supply chain. I don’t think Amazon has a meaningful [call] chain, [inaudible 02:19:26]

Gregory: I guess I was actually saying that just your response, which is we go through the mental process of, “Well I don’t love everything about it, but in order to have an alternative that’s viable, I actually have to do all of that.” Is that really the best use of my time right now?

Vinay: I mean this is not easy for people. There's a whole bunch of stuff that we want to hang onto as we look at this pandemic that’s coming towards us. And this is part of the reason that I was so angry earlier on. Is that if everybody continues to reach for what they know in a situation they’ve never been in, most of what they do is going to be wrong. This is why we need the laser-like focus on keeping people alive. If this does not contribute to keeping people alive, why is it in the room with us right now? The first question, the SCIM model. The way that you use that thing, it's an 18-point checklist and most people are not going to go beyond about the first 12 points. Too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness, injury. Is anybody dying of heat right now? Because you could die of real fast. Nope, nobody is dying of heat, nobody’s dying of dehydration. Okay next point, is anyone dying of cold? Right now, we’re kind of coming out of winter, we don’t think anybody's dying of cold right now. Okay. [table cold] nobody’s dying of cold. Hey, I could use a blanket. You're not dying. Next point, hunger. Thirst is usually a much more urgent issue than hunger is. So, it seems out of order, it's there because it's naturally linked to things like fuel, cooking, all the rest of these kind of issues. Hunger, how much food do we have in the house? If I go outside, I'm going to get exposed to a virus. So now, if I'm going to go outside to find food, I need protective equipment, so I don’t get I'll on the journey of food. Okay. Bookmark, we've got to do something about protective equipment, it's key to sorting out this hunger problem. By the way is there anything else left to eat in the store? If not, now we have a second problem, how do we get somebody to bring us food? Hunger, tabled. Thirst. Okay water still comes out the tap. There's no rumor that water is contaminated, we’re going to assume water will work. There's no news of grid failure, we’re going to ignore thirst. Illness, this is the big one. Now we write down everything we know about the pandemic flu. We write down everything we know about our situation. Injury, very notable that you don’t want to go to the hospital right now because the hospitals are going to be huge havens of infection. Now we've got to be really careful not to get injured because if we get injured, we've got to go back and we’re back into the illness context. Just sitting down with that six-point checklist in a room full of chimps trying to figure out how not to die, will cut the conversational bullshit level 90%. That’s why SCIM exists. It's to keep people focused on staying alive rather than on their imaginary bullshit. It's to keep people focused on staying alive rather than on their imaginary bullshit. Next level up, we did the individuals, now what do we need for our group to function? Communication, so we can talk to each other. Transport, so we can reach each other if we’re going to meet. Workspace, so we can have a place to meet so we can do productive things together when we arrive. Then resource control, which is how we stop people using our communication, transport, workspace to do other stuff. And those two things, that’s a nine-point checklist which is basically all of the critical stuff that you need to worry about in order not to get screwed. System one. Second part of that, seven tiers of political organization: Individuals, households, neighborhoods, towns, regions, countries, the whole world. So, we track back. Okay we’ve decided that we need insulin. The insulin is stored at a municipal level at the pharmacies. The towns handle it, and beyond that there's – oh can we go right to the beginning of that thing? And we can show people the six ways to die model. Right back at the top. There we go. Come back down, yeah let's go down one. Yeah there we are. Too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness, injury. Seven tiers of political organization from the person up to the world. And you ought to just draw out on this thing what it is that’s keeping you alive and you can also draw on it your threats. So beside illness you put Corona virus. That’s our incoming threat. If you're in a really cold place like you're in Minneapolis in winter, you put freezing to death as a big freaking arrow. That’s out incoming problem and this is how you tier your responses. Just getting people to draw that map and write down on that piece of paper what it is that they need, that is really enough to get the vast majority of the nonsense out of the way. Like, if you draw this diagram and then you go shopping for things, you're not going to come back with 200 kilograms of toilet paper. And this is really – this is like 90% of the nonsense you could get rid of with a checklist and once we’re in a condition of mind where we accept the simplicity and we get rid of things by dechecklisting and all the rest of that. Once we’re doing that, all of the rest of our problems become so much easier to address because this is what frees up the capacity to worry about the hard cases. My grandmother is 84 years old and she has dementia. Okay, well we simplified all of our relationships. We sorted out our priorities, we've managed our critical infrastructure, we've gotten pretty well organized. That’s what frees up the resources to deal with the difficult case like how do we keep grandma with dementia alive? Because if we don’t do this kind of radical simplification to basic needs at the beginning of our planning process. By the end of the planning process, we don’t have anything left for grandma. Everybody has to give ground early on in the process so that we have enough capacity to carry the hard cases. See what I'm saying?

Gregory: Yeah. And that’s where, again, just serving to sort of recontextualize this and do some meaning making. That’s where well intentioned and correct in the long term thinking such as a blockchain social coordination project might need to humbly and quickly get cut if there's some way in which there's a higher demand of attention than staying fixated and fighting to focus on that. There's like a need to be able to be like, “Okay, well that may be a good idea after we get through the crisis. But in the moment, let's stay focused on the discipline of understanding reality. And then maybe my time is well spent pulling up and doing coding virtually with some friends, but maybe not. Maybe there's something that comes up to this process that demands my attention. Maybe my uncle is so and so or maybe I could do deliveries, or whatever it is that is maybe actually in this moment a demand of my time to help us get through the crisis moment. Right?

Lucas: Yeah. And there's an element here in the sector of injury is that it's not only things that break our skin and our bones, it's also phycological injury we being angry at each other without any beneficial outcome. So that’s part of it. And one way to avoid deaths from injury – so physical conflicts in which people do nasty stuff to each other. Is about getting everybody watered, fed, and medicined, and everything else. That could be part of the solution as trying to solve injury indirectly by being fair and solving everybody’s needs if at all possible. Even if you don’t like other people. It's not about liking each other. It's about doing it.

Vinay: Yeah. What's that phrase you use these days Lucas? How are we going to get this thing done?

Lucas: No – what do I say? “How are we going to do this?”

Vinay: Yes.

Lucas: That is a situation of people who want to cross a threshold, three from one side, three from the other side, and the door is [inaudible 02:28:55]. Are we going to do this by punching each other in the face or are we going to behave like gentlemen and ladies? Not in that order, by the way. Anyway.

Vinay: I just saw this headline. The Italian Corona virus medical chief has just died of corona virus. Ugh.

Lucas: Oh gosh.

Vinay: Yeah you know what I'm saying, that’s the second or third of this.

Lucas: Oh gosh.

Vinay: The thing is so infectious that it just keeps making its way up to the people at the head of the medical system and whacking them.

Lucas: That’s one thing that reminds us of our common humanity. We breathe the same air. We die from the same bugs. We can have babies with each other.

Vinay: This thing is kicking our asses. It really is kicking our asses. It's such an existential challenge. You know, you're old, I've got a lot of problems.

Lucas: I am not old, I'm only in my later 50s.

Vinay: (laughs) Okay, well I certainly feel old and I'm only in my late 40s.

Lucas: Well there you go. Go out for a walk mate.

Vinay: We’re both in the demographic where this thing could really hurt us personally if we caught the damn thing and that’s not reassuring – really not reassuring.

Lucas: No.

Gregory: No, it's not. I mean I know we've been sort of dwelling I think for a while and I'm so grateful for the strategic overview. I think there’s more we can do there, but I also want to land for, because I'm sure people are sort of thinking basic things like somebody sent me a text like, “Gregory, you have a mustache still, that means you're not wearing a mask.” So, these basic things about how we actually appropriately socially isolate and what that actually looks like in a healthy way and a meaningful way. The real risks and risk mitigation when do you go to the store versus not. I think that would be useful to opine with everybody noting that we’re not – none of here are Corona virus experts per say and we've been trying to keep it like, “Hey, the societal response from past learning conversation.” But maybe it's worth having a more targeted conversation about what we’re hearing what we’re thinking. What may be wise at this juncture in terms of precautions and social distancing for people?

Lucas: I don’t even like to call it social distances, I don’t even like to call it social distancing. I mean there is a place for that term, but I think the preferred term is contact reduction. When we see a child going to school, they get on the bus, they go to class, they go to the playground, they go to have meals together, they go and play together after school. They may have 200 respiratory contacts per day within one meter, 200. You want to reduce that to, I don't know 5, 10. Stable contacts. You don’t want to go out with different groups of friends every day. Because by the end of the week you have been in contact with a hundred people and that defeats the purpose. So, we need to be mindful of that and we need to make that work in a sustainable manner in a way that doesn’t destroy our phycology. We don’t want to go out the other end of this crippled psychologically. If at all possible, I mean, let's be ambitious here. We want to be alive and mentally healthy if at all possible.

Gregory: Thinking about this conversation about – for instance, how do you deliver in a safe way, or when you are in an interaction that needs to be coordinated, what are the protocols there that we can understand and describe about person to person meeting that minimizes that risk as much as possible and keeps things functioning.

Lucas: I cannot hear you anymore.

Vinay: Let's crack this down just in terms of the simple things. The job is to stop a virus getting out of one human and into another human. It's pretty simple. The virus, generally speaking at this point is not understood to float free in the air for very long. But if it's exhaled in a droplet and it gets on a surface, it will live for days. Most of the risk to people is an aerosolized droplet enters their eyes, nose, or mouth, potentially ears. But most of the contingency seems to be that people touch a surface where the virus has been previously breathed and then it gets transferred to their mouth. Possibly through food, possibly though unconscious touching of face. And that’s pretty much the epidemiological story. Don’t be around sneezing people. Then we get to the mask thing. So [everybody reads] handwashing is critical and not hand wiping in the way that we normally do, but a detailed surface removal of everything that is everywhere on any part of the hand. And there are all kinds of things and procedures that you do and that’s how you wash your hands. Because it's not as simple as handwashing, it's really hand disinfection. Hand sanitizer fits into the same category. The hand thing means that any contact that you found at the surfaces doesn’t get transferred into your eyes, mouth, nose. Then we have the mask question. I personally thing masks are great and if you look at China, you'll see lots of people who have cut the button off large plastic water bottles and are wearing these things on their head or they're [outfitting] crash helmets. I personally don’t think that’s a bridge too far. The Chinese are not foolish people and if that’s how they came to do this. it's probably not a bad plan. If you're going to be exposing yourself to risk, take precautions. I think general use of mask is excellent. The mask has two functions. First of all, if you're infected, it stops you infecting other people at zero cost, for free you didn’t kill somebody, amazing. If the mask is as simple as a t-shirt or a scarf or some piece of cotton that you cut. You wear it on your face, you sterilize it by washing it or you put it in and oven. 70 degrees Celsius for a half an hour will kill everything. you could keep the masks running for a long time. 75% alcohol solution will disinfect masks. And doesn’t break up the fabric of the mask. If you use 100% alcohol, it often breaks holes in the masks. But 75% alcohol solution will kill the virus, I think ovens are probably better, but then you've got to take a potentially infected mask through your kitchen. So, masks for stopping you infecting other people, definitely effective. Masks for stopping you getting infected, I think their great. A lot of people are more skeptical on the masks, but I'm actually pretty pro mask. Gloves, primary purposes of gloves are you touch surfaces, you then don’t touch your face because you're wearing a big glove and you look at the glove like, “Ugh”. Also, they stop straight infection. Disposable gloves are hard to get off and on in a way where your hands are definitely clean afterwards, so you're still going to be washing your hands a ton. Clothing, I think there's a lot of room for wearing things like lab coats, or plastic clothes, like you would get those cheap rain ponchos that you can buy. Something like that means you get home, you take that thing off at the door, and at that point the clothes underneath it are much less likely to be carrying virus on them. All of these things are staggered responses and we still don’t have a ton of data about relative effectiveness. But at the end of the day for a conceptual model is I don’t want to get this bug into my eyes, nose, and mouth. You're not going to go far wrong. You could reason about this in a relatively linear way and get it right as long as you know a few things about the biology of the virus. Like at this point it's not water borne, it doesn’t live in streams, you don’t catch it by drinking contaminated water. There are other kinds of epidemics where water would be the main vector. This thing is largely snot borne. It's basically – snot is now a lethal bodily fluid. Okay fine, we deal with that.

Gregory: Yeah and it's been that way, to some degree for a long enough time that that’s not a crazy, it's within people's ability to reason about.

Vinay: Yeah. Absolutely. We've had germs theory for a few hundred years. We've gotten used to colds and flues and things like that. It's just that you need to take that understanding really seriously and you need to do a bunch of socially weird stuff. Like staying at home all the time. “Oh well that’s kind of what recluses you.” Yeah, well now rational people are recluses. The situation has changed, sensible human norms have to change with the situation. What we consider to be natural has to shift.

Lucas: Yeah. And they will continue to change as our information evolves. There are people now who are trying to look, finally, into washable masks. Into cloth masks. And I think there needs to be more research on that. So far, what we have is a slight contradiction between official recommendations and the general common sense. The general common sense would suggest that we use masks, the official recommendation is, leave the masks for certain situations and don’t use them because they are going to make you feel safe when you really aren’t so they would play the role of multi-pierced condom. They make you think that you are safe, you're not. You get a pregnancy or worse. The idea with this is that we’re going to have to take whatever decision we are going to take personally but we’re going to have to stay open to new information. And there's going to be new information very soon. And for the time being, all our criteria about people having a false sense of security has to be part of the package. So, if somebody is going to use a mask because they decide to do it. They have to know that that is not the official recommendation, point number one. And they also have to know that because it's not a very good protection, they should add masks to whatever else they are doing. Not replace precaution by using a mask. That’s not the way a mask is used. If you're going to use it. You have to do it properly. And you have to use it as an extra layer. Remember the idea of the multiple raincoats with holes in them? Masks are not perfect at all. Stacked

Vinay: Yes stacked, stacked is key. Perfect stuff looks like moonsuits.

Lucas: I'm not recommending mask. Honestly, I have no clarity about – I invented something that I don’t even want to mention, but it looked like a box and you walk inside it to get close to an Ebola patient – I'm not going to mention it. But it's the kind of thing that means that maybe we should look at these things before we recommend them. But we should definitely look at these things.

Vinay: We've got to tell that story for just a moment. So Lucas did a bunch of work on making a disposable cardboard moon suit. You know the things that you see people wearing when they're dealing with Ebola or in films about pandemics? Turns out essentially those things are really hard to mass manufacture, but carboard boxes are pretty easy to manufacture. And the thing about cardboard boxes is that they’ve got so much air inside of them that you don’t need the same kind of sophisticated apparatus. So, if all you're doing is going into a room and giving a patient an injection and coming back out again, you could actually potentially do that in a cardboard box that was kept by the door. Like a person-sized – you kind of look like a [dallok].

Lucas: Yeah. I stayed inside one of those boxes, it was a fridge box for 20 minutes and I didn’t faint. But that tells you the kind of respect I deserve. So, if I do that kind of thing, how can you trust anything else I say?

Vinay: No, no, no. this is the practical expertise, you're the [Benjamin Franklin]of pandemics. Because the critical thing about this is, we went through all of this with bird flu. Lucas and I spent years of our lives modeling out in the event of the big one. If this thing goes pandemic, 30% fatal, what are we going to do? And at that point, the idea that you take factories and you just switch the factories over to using cardboard moon suits, you have to investigate whether that could work. Because if it could work, you're going to wind up doing it because there might be 50 different strategies to be tried for scaling mass manufacture of moon suits. And you have to try all of them because you have no idea which one will hit dirt.

Lucas: Yeah, the whole idea behind lateral thinking is that most ideas are going to be bad.

Vinay: Yeah that’s right, and then research is relatively cheap. It would be nice if we had 20 million a year sustained going in to figuring out how to do control viral epidemics by keeping people away from each other. It’d be really great if we had the kind of money in society that could do things that way but it just turns out it would be very, very difficult to get people to continue to invest in years with no virus in building the scaled capacity to control these things when they arrive.

Gregory: It totally blows my mind that that’s true. It doesn’t compute for me, I don’t understand.

Vinay: Oh wow. I mean look, we’re the kind of chimps that ignored global warming for 40 years. We’re not actually very good at investing money and avoiding future trouble.

Lucas: Okay. We act on emotion. And emotion is very good for short distances. You see a snake, you hit it on the head. That works very well, but if we tried to apply the same thing to long term problems, it actually doesn’t work that well.

Vinay: Yeah. It's a horizon thing.

Gregory: What's the name of the bias? I apologize I'm drawing a blank on – I feel dumb –I'm drawing a blank on the name. The bias where essentially, you have sort of the bias that got trump elected where people are unwilling to admit something they think is going to be an unpopular belief but it turns out that everybody think that and as soon as somebody –

Lucas: Oh! The anti-Greta situation. Greta doesn’t go by other people's opinions.

Gregory: Well exactly. That Greta is just saying stuff but actually many people would agree with what Greta’s saying as like a – this is a phenomena that happens in social groups that people will actually – and I have the hypothesis that actually funding things, climate response, all these things is actually a majority of people would be all about it, but there's like this – I forget what it's called, but there's this social bias for whatever reason, they feel like they're going to be threatened if they actually speak up clearly about it. [marginalized] whatever.

Lucas: That would be the bad side of community. So, community is cuddly but if we go together down a cliff, that’s not very nice.

Vinay: That’s so true. I mean, I, at the time, was so far outside of what people understood as being reasonable that I eventually just resorted to theater to try and communicate what was happening. This is one of my old business cards that I found a couple of days ago. Just hold that a little closer to the screen.

Gregory: The global Apocalypse Mitigation Agency.

Vinay: You see the card looks like a laminate pass that you would get inside some kind of secure installation. It's got a passport photo. Because what I was trying to communicate to people was, “Look, I am doing massively critical long-term planning work on behalf of the entire species. And the fact that your agency doesn’t support this kind of long run work doesn’t mean that that work isn’t necessary, it just means that your agency has the wrong horizon.” The U.S. has a center for disease control filled with incredibly intelligent people working on pandemics and we still don’t know whether wrapping a t shirt around your face stops you getting flu. See what I'm saying? They’ve had ten years since last big scare to figure out for god damn sure how people can make masks, what you need to do in terms of hand sanitizer. As soon as this thing came over the horizon, all of those questions needed to be figured out really, really quickly. And the fact is that we’re so poor at applying money to solving the practical survival problems – it's a pathology. The Red Cross has exactly the same problem. The tents that they give out in disasters are un-insolated. So, when you have a cold weather earthquake like in Pakistan, the Red Cross just hands out a bunch of tents and then everybody freezes to death. And that actually happened. They had an earthquake way up in the snow belt and the tents were collapsing because of the snow. People were freezing to death. There were all of these fundamental problems that were completely obvious and then after the disaster they started running around trying to commission warmer tents to put people in to get more insolation into these things. This kind of inability to do strategic investment in keeping people alive in the long run seems to be a pathology that’s nailed down deep inside of our [funding] machinery. And I have a feeling that the Chinese may have solved that problem although I can't say for sure. But it certainly looks like they were very effective in their handling of this thing. And I wonder whether they’ve actually had a much more serious and much more disciplined approach to large scale public health than we've taken in the west. Because our inability to get to the simple fundamental answer of, “Do masks works?” And the fact that we don’t have a generally available design for make at home mask that’s been tested in real laboratories. Like, come on guys. Like what are we doing here?

Lucas: We do have the t shirt mask done by the CDC. So, if you Google, ‘t-shirt simple mask CDC’, you get that design.

Vinay: Yeah. Lucas, your finger is over your camera.

Lucas: Oh sorry. Yeah okay. So, the simple face mask CDC t-shirt one has a method for testing it. But I don’t know how that can be replicated in more places so that we can test more masks. I honestly don’t know that. Would I like to see it? Yes, I would. Do I feel uncomfortable about the whole field of masks? Yes, I do.

Vinay: Yeah. This is because you're a doctor. I'm allowed to be superstitious, I'm an engineer. That’s no joke. I just wish we had clinical data on this stuff where we actually knew. If we were gathering the data accurately – If we had really good logs – actually this is another project somebody could get their teeth into. Maybe Facebook or Google. If we had really good logs of what protective measures people are taking. Are you wearing masks? Are you wearing gloves? Are you doing social distancing? Take a selfie before you go outside and let's look at your gear. It might be that if we had a million people doing that we could actually begin to extract –

Gregory: Well Amazon should have all – I mean when I ordered mine a month ago when all this started moving and I was like, “Oh I should probably order…” – what I did is I got a mask for home remediation. Respirator mask –

Vinay: Like a rubber mask rather than a paper one.

Gregory: Yeah. Rubber mask with the disposable filters.

Vinay: Yeah. Like a proper moon suit mask.

Gregory: Yeah, and a pair of big – I almost got the full-face thing for remediation but I didn’t want to drop 300 bucks, so I cheated out a little bit. But anyway, Amazon knows who ordered when. Amazon could figure out –

Vinay: And then we could look at the mortality stats depending on what you bought and then compensate it for income level. And out of that would come a pretty decent estimate of what measures work. Absolutely spot on. That’s a really great insight.

Gregory: So, the people –

Lucas: How do you measure that because they don’t order again?

Vinay: Maybe the government would have to take the mortality data and correlate it with the shopping data.

Gregory: Well, you know. I don’t even know that the government would have to be involved. It would be public information so you could – this is the kind of this that the MIT media Labs works on a lot. where they have enough industry connections where they have partnerships with Amazon or Google or Facebook or the telecom folk and they can pull this big data and public data sets and then they run these sort of creative big data analysis and then they find out – you can at least get a sense. It's a big data approach to getting answers, I guess. I would like to see that information. That somebody should do it. That it's there, so somebody should do it. Separating my feeling about surveillance capitalism out of it. I think it would be useful data, so somebody should do it.

Vinay: I've got to say, if we’re going to have surveillance capitalism. We've got to get some bloody services out of it.

Gregory: Yeah exactly.

Vinay: Look, if you're going to have an authority government, okay now solve all of my problems. You're in charge. So, this is the thing that I think we should be really thinking about. When I made that post on twitter saying, “this is not that flu.” This is not that flu. Overall population morality, my guess is by the time all is said and done about 2% of the total population of the world will die of this thing and it’ll be about as bad as 1918. It will have hotspots where it's way worse, it’ll have other areas where it's less bad. It could be well under that number if we get really good at social distancing. Like the Chinese are saying, “Look, if you guys won't get serious about controlling this, then the epidemic will be over by June.” This is what we did, it worked, you should do that too. It will work for you. The U.K. government basically thinks the Chinese are going to get nuked again in winter because the Corona virus will come around again and they're going to get hit in the second wave. I don't know, that’s a different kind of epidemiological [knowledge]. I'm a simple man, my focus is in keeping people in their houses, making sure they don’t give each other plague at a bus stop. So, we ought to take this as a learning experience. We ought to understand that this is not the last time that we are going to see a viral epidemic rip through the human population. There is no possibility that I can see with current science and technology which makes this the last time we are going to be sitting in the position that we are in right now. The more human –

Gregory: [inaudible 02:54:37] is this like humans or is this like you, Lucas, and I?

Vinay: Humans. The general human population. Because –

Gregory: It might be 50 years. Which would be just enough to lull everybody into a false sense of security.

Vinay: Unlikely it will be that long because the – so Corona virus and Influenza are two different viruses.

Gregory: But we’re still due for the flu.

Vinay: Exactly. Nothing about what's happening with Corona virus changes the flu probability at all and – like in Hong Kong – Lucas do you remember how many chickens they killed in Hong Kong? Wasn’t it like 150 million chickens?

Lucas: Two million?

Vinay: Two million? They killed every chicken. It was some enormous number. However, many it was. I want to say it was 150 million chickens. They basically killed every chicken within 100 miles of Hong Kong. Because in that population of birds, there were bird flus which were getting better and better and better and jumping to humans and they didn’t kill very many chickens, but they killed all the humans. There was a pig flu that went through, what, six months ago was the pig flu? The last three months? So, there was the swine flu that came through and was expected to kill 25% of the pigs in China. And pigs are so close to human beings that if you've got pig flu and you've got a lot of human beings that are around pigs. The damn thing stands a really excellent chance of jumping and then when they cross species barriers. My impression is they get a lot more lethal. The flu thing is still kicking around in the background and we could, in theory, go directly from Corona virus two years later into another flu. We have to think of this as being a warning shot.

Gregory: Well, I'd almost rather that because I actually feel like if that happened people would – as we were just talking about, people are shitty when crisis subsides, everybody’s like, “Whoohoo, I don’t have to think about this again.” I think we'd respond better if it just happened. But anyway. That’s wishful magical thinking.

Vinay: Well, wishful magical thinking there's a lot of that around and some of it's probably pretty accurate. The idea that this thing is entirely the millennials’ revenge on the boomers for screwing them so hard. When I saw that – what's that hashtag again? Boomer Remover? When I saw that, I knew we were in an entirely different domain. There is no generation prior to this one that wouldn’t ever have said that. And that’s because these kids very clearly perceive that the older generation have totally betrayed them.

Lucas: Excuse me sir. There was a generation that said anybody beyond 30, they are too old.

Vinay: Don’t trust anyone over 30, that’s right.

Lucas: That was it.

Vinay: Yeah. And I was too young to see that generation. But you're dead right.

Gregory: That was the boomers, right?

Lucas: Yeah. We all do that to each other. We need to stop that.

Vinay: Oh god. It's coming right around again.

Gregory: Boomerang.

Lucas: Boomer – ang. Yeah. Boomer – angst.

Gregory: Oh man. Well my teeth are swimming I've got to pee so bad. I mean we could go all night, this has been fantastic, but I think probably you two are in European time zone or U.K. time zone. I don’t want you guys to be up all night. Well this has been great.

Vinay: I'm glad you did this. I feel sorry for our [Peru] listeners. My god, what a trauma. What an ordeal.

Gregory: Well, hopefully some people got something out of it. The transcript of this, I'll make available. I'll do my best. I have so much on my plate that I'm not going to promise too much, but I'll do my best to obviously link to resources and make a little distillation and –

Vinay: To be honest, there are probably only 15 or 20 minutes or half an hour of transcribable stuff from this. There are some sections where we get right into it. Where Lucas lays down the law, or I explain why complex systems suck or where there are bits of actual informative dialog. There's a lot of chit chat that will be terrible in a transcript.

Gregory: Yeah. That’s okay. It's useful for search. That’s the big thing. That’s why I do the transcript stuff. Because it makes it easy to type in a search.

Vinay: I hope your automated service does a good job on it.

Gregory: Yeah exactly. Well we have a human. We have like the hybrid. We do an automated service and then somebody actually sort of listens and makes sure that it's –

Vinay: That’s good. That’s a great system. I want to touch on two things very briefly. Why don’t you run to the bathroom and I will touch on those two things because then your listeners will hear and I'll tell you what I said.

Gregory: Fantastic. That sounds good. I'll be right back.

Lucas: Oh my gosh. Being in real time. Yeah well there's just things you've got to do sometimes.

Vinay: I think the two things that I wanted to sort of highlight here are the panic is not uninformed. Like we do expect to [inaudible 03:00:15] respirator capacity in hospitals. We do expect a lot of people to die as a result. It's not that people are freaking out over nothing. But it's also not an apocalypse which is going to crash their critical infrastructure. I feel like it's quite hard for people to gauge whether their emotional reactions are appropriate or inappropriate. And I feel like that is something where I think some consorted effort to help people model what is a realistic sense of risk is really important. Like how much panic is appropriate. Then the second thing we haven’t talked about very much is the role public health and public health officials in managing all of this. Do you have any thoughts on that, because you were the public health official right? I mean you were the guy that ran flu surveillance for the canaries.

Lucas: I am unretired now. I thought I would retire but this thing is calling me back and I don’t like it. Anyway.

Vinay: Do not become one of these people that catches the flu on the job. Do your job from your cottage. Do not go to the office.

Lucas: Stop it. Okay, so the thing is, we need to look for the best advice and there is very good advice out there. Its one big role in all of this is that we need to consolidate it and make it understandable. That was one role that flu wiki played. Because you had people who were extremely anxious about their families and themselves needing to understand complex things. And that takes time and patience and a little bit of space to (crosstalk)[inaudible 03:02:15]

Vinay: We’re pretty much wrapped up here. Dinner time. Sorry, Lucas.

Lucas: Okay so the other thing is that panic has been researched properly and what we know from the distillations and the [reasoning] done by Peter Sandman and Jody Lanard. They have this website psandman.com and it's abundantly clear that what we call the panic reaction in most people is short lived, it's very temporary, and it's only the precursor of rational action.

Vinay: Right. First you freak out then you plan.

Lucas: You touch on the physical world. You touch a very hot object and your hand moves away from it really fast. And then you bring your hand closely to the thing as you realize that it's hot, but you can put your hand ten centimeters away from it. But first you move it half a meter or more. That is the normal reaction.

Vinay: Sandman is a good resource.

Lucas: Understanding that and tolerating our own panic and the panic of other people as a temporary thing is a good introduction to rational thinking five minutes later. Just let it be there and there you go. That’s what you do with a bird or with a butterfly, you accept that it is there and then you – yeah. Some people talk about welcoming and releasing. You allow the fear to be there, you open the window, and if it's going to go away, it will go away and you will be left with your observer self and your rational self and you're constantly solving problems.

Vinay: Flu Jedi man. Flu Jedi. To master the mind well enough you can think rationally.

Gregory: Important.

Lucas: Yeah and then once your emotion is not in the driving seat, then you think rationally and creatively. But first acknowledge your emotion and let it flow through you and past you. It's like any thought that you have in meditation, you watch it as it comes, and you watch it as it goes. This is said and done, but you know that’s how you do it, I think.

Vinay: Yeah, it's spot on Lucas spot on. Wise advise. Sage advice.

Gregory: Yeah that’s really

Lucas: [old enough].

Vinay: Alright guys, shall we wrap it? Do you have any final points?

Gregory: That’s a fantastic thing to wrap with I mean maybe reiterating resources, websites, how people can get in touch with you if that’s something that you'd like for each of you. You want to go first?

Vinay: Lucas?

Lucas: Yeah. All I want to say is thank you for the invitation. I think I had said everything I had to say ever. The only thing I would wrap up is, this is nature speaking to us and I think it makes sense to take it as a very kind invitation to do things well if we can like be good to each other or else kind of warning. You know? But I don't know. That’s just my take on it. What do I know really?

Vinay: Quite a bit. Quite a bit. So, the Sandman link was really good, what's his website again Lucas?

Gregory: psandman.com I just looked it up.

Lucas: Great resource. And the person to follow on flu wiki is eidgeek, I think. I don't know. I will give it to you. That’s Jody Lanard.

Vinay: Oh yeah. Another big name from the flu days. Eid, infectious disease something? Anyway.

Lucas: I think it's something, something [geek] yeah, three letters.

Gregory: I think it it's iegeek flu wiki.

Vinay: One more time? You broke up.

Lucas: No, no, no.

Gregory: It's not iegeek?

Lucas: I think it's emerging – I think it's the initials of emerging infectious disease [geek]

Vinay: Ah there you go

Lucas: I think that’s what it is. But I will tell you later.

Vinay: I'm checking right now. Yeah it looks like – come on twitter, it's taking it's time to load. On our end resiliencemaps.org yeah it is the idgeek, Jody Lanard. [inaudible 03:07:56] following him now. So, resiliencemaps.org has a document called, ‘dealing in security’ which is the abstract model. The practical application model to pandemic flu which is most of the same attributes as corona virus in terms of infection, control, is Lucas’s document which is a Macaronesian islands document. Macaronesian islands is basically – it's designed for use for people that live on islands. Public health officials on big islands. But that means it's very focused on logistics and supply chain because those issues are hard on islands. Everything in there directly applies to what we’re dealing with right now. The practical difference between not getting a Corona virus versus an Influenza virus is relatively small. The modes of transmission are very, very similar although the care is very different and the biology is very different. Nonetheless, all the advice in there is still entirely relevant to this thing.

Lucas: They seem to be insisting more on handwashing than they did with flu.

Vinay: Yeah, it's true. It is very infectious. Really infectious. If people want to go all the way down the rabbit hole on this, there is an archive called the ‘Gupta state failure management archive’. The Gupta state failure management archive is basically all of the horrendous things that I know about. The way the things fail and how they hold them together. It's very scrappy and kind of badly put together. A lot of it is not very well edited. But it's a series of talks and a series of documents that are basically a brain dump of the state of the art as of about ten years ago. It's so old that it was made to fit on a DVD back when people used DVDs for getting large amounts of data [inaudible 03:09:48] thumb drives hadn’t been invented. So that is really the kind of apex analytical toolkit for taking these entire things to pieces in a way that gives you a flexible mindset for managing a whole wide range of very high fatality events. I would recommend that only for people that are really seriously want to get this thing crammed into their heads properly. If you absorb that material, after that you will be able to think rationally about almost any contingency. It's just a horrible process because it just dismantles your sense of what is real and replaces it with a very new model of how the world works. Not recommended except for people that are really serious about doing this stuff in a deep way.

Gregory: Good. Thank you both for your work and your time and fantastic conversation and I learned a lot. [Hopefully it was] helpful to our listeners.

Lucas: I'm not going to do this again, I think. It’s really – I have nothing else to say.

Gregory: Okay. This is it. This is the final statement of Lucas about the –

Vinay: The great transformation has arrived.

Gregory: The great [transformation] has arrived.

Vinay: Lucas, one of the folks working with us is reformatting all of the old flu docs and put them in a format that will show up nicer on our mobile devices

Gregory: Oh, that’s fantastic.

Vinay: Yeah, it's good.

Lucas: Okay.

Lucas: It will be easier for future translators as well. We ought to get somebody to work with us to do an update of that thing to put in Corona virus specific information into the old flu doc.

Gregory: [inaudible 03:11:29] be useful. We’ll put the call out. That was one of the reasons why I wanted to do this. If people are still listening at this stage of the conversation or when we do the podcast if you're still engaged with us and you have volunteer time or you have philanthropic capital or you'd like to make an investment. Reach out and we can coordinate that with these two fine gentlemen and get some shit done.

Vinay: If we could find a dashing young epidemiologist who basically wants to update some of those documents for what we know about Corona virus, that would be amazing. Yeah, we are both are pretty fully [deployed] right now. My god, what a mess. Right. Thank you so much for doing this and hosting and coordinating. I hope that it has long legs and big echoes.

Gregory: I hope so too.

Lucas: Good. Thank you so much. That was great.

Vinay: [inaudible 03:12:24] take care.

Lucas: Be kind to each other.

[End of Audio]

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