I really think that it is very, very simple. If the young are going to get anything resembling a future that they need to survive in, they're going to have to kill the old. And whether that's guillotines or ballot boxes, I kinda don't care.

The conversation with this week’s guest Vinay Gupta is as hard-hitting as it gets, my friends, so please don’t listen to this if you’re feeling overwhelmed at the state of everything.

This a challenging macro point of view on why and how the world is simmering - economically, environmentally, societally. Vinay - who was writing about pandemics in 2009, who invented the open source Hexayurt disaster shelter, and who coordinated the launch of Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency in the world - won’t conveniently airbrush how he sees the world and what he believes comes next.

Our conversation bounces between pandemic, technology, geopolitics including USA, UK, China and Europe, democratic process, the environment - all centered on what’s happening in society, why things are as crazy as they are, and why that is not about to slow down yet. And it’s not all bad news - we do briefly touch on utopia and the role solar power can play in that.

All in, it’s a compelling, vigorous account and will leave you with strong reactions, open questions and - wherever you land - an even greater alertness to the significance of what’s happening in the world right now.

Links

Vinay Gupta on Twitter

Hexayurt - ‘free hardware housing for the world’

Vinay on Swine Flu in 2009

Institute for Collapsonomics

Mattereum

‘Plausible Utopias’ - Meaning Conference, 2012 (28 min video)

Credits

Jack McInnes for intro music

Lee Rosevere for outro music

Automate Transcript

Will McInnes 0:02

Hello and welcome to here right now with me Will McInnes. In this episode we explore. Well, the end of times, there's no way to put a smiley spin on it. I found this conversation to be incredibly confronting, with no place to hide, and no real silver lining. growing on his track record as a resilience thinker, disciple of Hindu meditation, global policy analyst and now an entrepreneur working with blockchain, my guest today Vinay Gupta has consistently made it his business to stare our emerging reality in the face. You know, discussion, Vinay lays out the current state we're in economically and society in such blunt and simplified terms as you're unlikely to hear anywhere else. If you're feeling overwhelmed by the news, or just life in general, now might not be the time to listen to this. But if you do want an unflinching point of view on the world right now The economic malaise, simmering geopolitical tensions and violence on the streets in the USA into some kind of context, then keep listening. I first came across Vinay sometime in the late 2000s through the early London digital community. This was not long after the 2008 financial crash, and I was aware there was a group of people that gathered regularly to discuss Black Swan events, and through their work had coined the term collapsonomics is something Vinay wrote in April 2009. on what to do in case of pandemic: a) prepare to stay at home for a month while a wave of flu passes by. b) be prepared psychologically for an extremely difficult period. c) understand what pandemic flu is and is not do some reading, not just the news. d) go out today and buy four things: Surgical or n95 masks, hand sanitizer, a gallon of bleach, and a week's worth of groceries. Back then I found the pandemic stuff interesting, but I was more captivated by Vinay’s Hexayurt design an open source template for low cost shelters, which if you've been to Burning Man or seen photos, you'll have seen by the thousands. Turns out I should have paid more attention to his work on pandemics. And more recently when I helped coordinate the launch of Etherium, the second largest cryptocurrency after Bitcoin, a topic we don't get into today. So strap in, listen up and let me know what you think on the other side. How are you doing?

Vinay Gupta 2:44

oh, it's good to be here. Quiet Sunday afternoon in London, you know that the world's continues to smoulder quietly in the corners. I've spent the afternoon kind of rearranging a bunch of just random equipment and tidying up because you know, you spend so much time at home Right now with things being kind of nasty outside, there is that thing of like, Oh, I should really do all this, I should figure out what's in this plastic tub. Maybe Yep. But in view, it's like that kind of a day.

Which does feel a little bit like fiddling while Rome burns. I mean, it's, you know, complicated times, it would be great

Will McInnes 3:17

to help people understand a bit about your story, because for me, your, your path so far has just been so incredibly interesting.

Vinay Gupta 3:27

And will it be it turns out that the way that you move forward in this life is generally by failure? You know, if you succeed at what you first do, and then the tendency is to keep doing that, what kind of this conference call we do with a bunch of my mates from university, and most of those sons of b*****s are in the same job that they had 20 years ago, 25 years ago, you know, like, you know, they might change companies and then you know, they're now much more senior than they were, but they found their niche. They stayed in that niche and they seemed like the Same people. And I feel like since then I've crashed through maybe five or six completely different universes. And it's very odd to see the people that are relatively static, because you know, you find a good niche, you stop changing war. And so I mean, my background, the reason for two threads, right? There's a tech thread, and there's a meditation thread and meditation thread, start meditating one of 14 and keep it up extremely hardcore, multiple hours a day, practice, find a normal, like straight down the line, strict Hindu guru, get enlightened by 26 which is kind of unheard of you tell us Are you serious meditators? And they're just like, so your quality of life was not so great in those years? I'm like, No, it was completely insane. Yeah, so that's why we do it slowly. And parallel to that, I started out in computer graphics and they're really ease early 90s I helped to invent the world's fastest volume rendering algorithm for doing like medical data set stuff on commodity PCs. Then went in fight Sims invented a new way of doing fog, which in 1990s, fight Sims fog was super important because it allowed you to shrink the world. And I found a way of faking volumetric fog, which I mean at the time, we had this flight simulator running on like standard PCs like graphics acceleration that had fog that lead in the valleys, but not on the mountaintops in a way that looked like it had come at the back of $100,000 worth of graphics hardware. It was outrageous. And it was a total cheat because it was it was amazing. So did that kind of stuff in the 90s. And then after 911, I sort of decided that I should just kind of well, I basically got Rajan decided I was going to do something with state of the world, joined an energy policy outfit in Colorado, and invented the world's cheapest and best refugee shelter. There was a point where we came very close to rehousing I don't know half a million Haitians in the refugee shelter that I designed, open sourced it. And off the back of that spent several years working on and off for the Department of Defence. A ridiculously high level of my boss managed a budget of 10s of billions of dollars a year. And then came back to the UK worked in charities and defence think tanks under john Reed, who was labour secretary defence for a good long time, Minister of Defence here. And then 2014 I basically had enough the defence world and I lagged it for the opposition and joined the theorem team. So project manager to launch the world's second biggest blockchain did a whole bunch of early cons and strategy. And started a company in that space, basically using the blockchain to do very hardcore legal authentication or physical goods.

That company is called Mattereum and that's that's basically it. That's pretty much

Will McInnes 6:58

how we got here. It's an incredible journey. And like so many journeys that makes maybe more sense seem backwards than then at the time because for me, you were part of a group that coined the term collapsing omics into in 2009. You invented, you know, you invented the open source hexia refugee shelter that you described there in 2002. You've been thinking about and working on resilience, and here we are in a global pandemic. And you're the guy that I think of who I've known, all of that time has been thinking and planning for large or small scale critical moments that threaten humanity's welfare. And how does it feel to be someone who said all along this could happen?

Vinay Gupta 7:44

Well, a lot of people said this could happen, right? I mean, it was it was completely understood inside of the business, that eventually the big one would arrive and we would all be hurt and cowboys. Well, I don't think anybody in the business plumped for was the unbelievable stupidity of the American Government in the American public, if you look at most of the countries, most of the countries with some kind of semi sensible response, kindness or hava under control, and UK currently has 5% as many cases as we had at peak that's dependent on us having had a tonne of social distancing, and masks and all the rest of that stuff. But nonetheless, 5% as many cases we have a peak. If we are stupid, we will have another peak, right? In America, they haven't had two peaks because they got stupid on the first peak. And it's just it hasn't peaked. It's just continuously going up. The numbers continue to accelerate. It sort of burned itself out a little in New York because a lot of people got it. And everybody changed behaviour and it seems to have gone away for the meantime being settled down. Well, but the numbers coming out of Florida, Arizona. Oh, whoa. And it's entirely driven by stupidity given that it is

Will McInnes 8:55

where does it end?

Vinay Gupta 8:57

Well, I mean, the ends but everybody that can get it has got And everybody that will die has died. Pretty simple. And we still have very poor estimates about how deadly COVID is. It seems to be dependent on a number of factors that we haven't identified air pollution that seems to be very strongly correlated with people stuffing it. So die of COVID. Yeah, the whole disaster said to you where you're like, there's a particularly bleak humour that runs in the disaster world. It's so bad. The bottom line is that America's probably going to lose by the time all was said and done between half a million and a million people to COVID. Right, and it's something like 150,000 have died so far. So about three times that bad could be five to 10 times that, but we don't really know. We haven't seen what COVID does in winter, it could be five times as infectious in winter. It could also be to a different store. There have been a lot of people wondering whether we would see a huge spike after all the outdoor protests. Turns out the important part of that is they were outdoor They do wear a mask. And we haven't seen huge transition on the back of that. On the other hand, it killed 12% of all the population in nursing homes in New Jersey, one in 10 nursing home residents, not one in 10 of the ones that got infected, one in 10 of the total nursing home population, and they're just like, hey, let's put our kids together in school because as we all know, school is not a place that infections go round at all. You know, the whole thing has this horrible Hey, let's kill grandma kind of vibe to it.

Will McInnes 10:24

Given that you've been thinking about this stuff for a long time. What's the broadest assessment you can give of where we are right now?

Vinay Gupta 10:32

Simply put? We went. Capitalism went bankrupt in 2008. Right, capitalism does this every roughly seven years. It just corpses. And it's for the same reason, right? You once you have no living memory of what global bankruptcy looks like, people begin to take stupid risks because they don't remember why that's about idea. And risk is on average, profitable. So If you have a prudent insurance company, a stupid insurance company, the stupid insurance company makes much more money than the prudent insurance company until you get a wave of mass bankruptcies. So what happens is that the morons out compete the smart people in the good years. Because the smart people are like, Well, you know, this is only a good year. We don't know if next year will be good. And the dumb people are like, Hey, we have three years in a row that we're good. Let's have another good year next year. Yeah, what's all good broken up bonuses? Right. And it's just that simple. The institutions that have long memory die in the good years because the idiots out compete them. And then the bad years, everybody left standing dies, apart from a few private banks or very, very, very cautious insurers, and you just hit the systemic Wipeout, because people are really f*****g stupid.

Will McInnes 11:49

So when you say capitalism when pop in 2008 how can how can I make sense of that? Because right now, you know, I order things they arrive. In boxes, I live in the world, I fill my car with gas, like, What? How do I how can I see or understand that that that capitalism has has gone bankrupt?

Vinay Gupta 12:11

Okay? You know that thing where people lose their job and just continue to live off their credit cards, and then suddenly the whole thing goes, boom, hmm. And often they do things like not telling their wives they've lost their job. Turns out governments can do that, too. There's a thing called the central bank base rate, right. And this is the right phrase Express risk level. Remember, it's the rate at which governments rent lend money to backs the money supply number, it's the interest rate the central banks charge. So that number historically bounces around three 4%. Sometimes it's as high as six 7%. And it came to sort of keeps pace with inflation. In theory, if you want prices not to rise, you have to create money at the same rate as the economy expands. So the idea is that you ensure price stability by printing money at the same rate as GDP growth, roughly speaking, the Lots of arguments for other ways you could do that there's modern learning theory, the market, monetarism, you name it, there are all kinds of people who think government should print money at different rates or figure out how much money to print in different ways. You know, it's it's a dial that a government can turn, right? What's the interest rate? How much money will we print? So, since 2008, that number has been zero, the government has kept the economy running with interest free lending to central banks, or from sorry, from central banks, to all the big banks. Hey, you know, we're just going to give you interest free loans for as much money as it takes to keep the economy running. And what that does is it weakens the currencies in theory at all restore the door, somebody else from the outside asks us altogether to threaten a question. Will the US government ever appear to that Well, right now the or is it $100,000 $200,000 per taxpayer, and the average us taxpayer is broke? So where's the money gonna come from? And eventually what happens is somebody calls b******t. The entire thing, because there's no way the government will ever pay its debts other than by printing worthless money. And there, you're in the hyperinflation cycle. So what happened was basically, view the US went through 10 years of boom in the 1990s, then you hit the kind of first.com crunch, which was a localised warning shot. At the same time as that was happening. The US government put an enormous amount of money into Iraq and Afghanistan. And by enormous I mean $6 trillion, roughly ballpark, something along those lines. It's really a substantial amount of money. And all of that money came with the National Credit Card. And I mean, that sort of spending $6 trillion. It's a lot of them seem to remember, I'm just going to take one second to work that's so easy. This is this is one of those numbers I should have in my head, and I don't, so 6 trillion divided by I think there were about 100 and 50 million US taxpayers, maybe 120 $50,000 per taxpayer for the war? Did anybody really get $50,000 worth of benefits out of that? I don't think so. But imagine what that looks like if it's just that's the bill that arrives in your letterbox from the government in the warrior. We've went war, here's a $50,000 check. Well, that means your kids aren't going to college means you aren't buying a house. Where did that damage go in the economy? What happens is that we just continue to run central bank lending zero for 12 years, hoping the economy picks up again. And it doesn't, why doesn't the economy pick up? Well, economies pick up in response to new technology? But we really don't have any new technology. Right? There are no flying cars, solar panels. Great. You know, the web is all very impressive. Mobile is kind of cool. But none of this is like, Hey, we just invented steam engines. None of this is like we're all story. remaining in space. Right? None of this is like, you know, we've got amazing new materials that were like cotton last for 50 years, we've got 20 cents a kilogramme, like, the the fundamental engineering, physical reality has changed very, very, very little in that time period. Minor refinements process improvements, better material science, but we haven't gone through an efficiency revolution. So at that point, where's the economic growth going to come from?

Will McInnes 16:27

So that's a big part of, of what you see happening in the world right now, which is that capitalism is is kind of falsely resuscitating itself for its toppling, but it's not yet fallen, but it's dead from the inside or something. Well,

Vinay Gupta 16:42

I mean, it's fallen for 40 million uninsured Americans, it's fallen for all the people that used to have jobs and now we're on Zero Hour contracts. It's fallen for you know, the the enormous numbers of people that are stuck in, you know, sub minimum wage jobs in reality matter. wage plus flexible hours, this kind of stuff. Right? It's only a question whether it's fallen for you personally yet. Okay, right in the heart of the economic collapse in the 1930s. You know, the jet set didn't notice or note that they were Jet Set in those years. But like, you know, the QE two, you know, still went coast to coast and you know, you could cross the Atlantic and drink champagne and eat salmon and everything was fine. I don't really understand what people were complaining about. Same thing in World War One, right? I mean, you know, the world was on fire. But part of the benefit of being inside of an elite is that your life doesn't turn to s**t when the world turns to s**t. Because you've got insulation and buffering. And if you're incredibly wealthy, the roof turns to s**t and all the kinds of things that you like to buy, like enormous amounts of real estate are suddenly practically worthless, and you buy them off for 20 cents on the dollar.

Will McInnes 17:48

You're right. For me, it might not feel like capitalism has failed. But for many, many people, it tangibly profoundly has Yeah, the world is burning right now. What are the other drivers going into that

Vinay Gupta 18:00

This upgrade cycle is explained to me when one of my old bosses was it's a four step cycle, right? Boom, bust, protectionism war, if you're lucky, you go from the bust back to a boom without going through the protectionism and war phase. If you go through the protections and war phase, you reflect the economy, wartime economics. And what's referred to the economy during war is military innovation. So the end of the war, you've got 50 pieces of new technology you didn't have when you started the war, all those terms of industrial application. If we had a war with China today, you bet the survivors would have incredible new technology, because for five years, or however long it took for that word, in the fall, all the best engineers in the world would have all the bureaucrats shoved into a corner and duct tape to their chairs, while they actually shipped radar on the Enigma machine, and all these other you know, astonishing technologies, you know, guns that can fire through a propeller, you know, they actually connected the government firing mechanism to the engine so that you could have the gun mounted axially along the base of the plane. And the bullets pass through the propeller blades perfectly safely. So you'd never shut off your own propeller made an enormous difference, right? And somebody thought that are built up in a hurry in a war. So you can imagine, you know, how much strain the world is under right now, because there's no guarantee the high tech world works that way. If the war was actually you know, an exchange of let's say, high altitude nuclear bombs that fried all the electronics in America and China, you could have a war which everybody loses simultaneously. And you think war with China is very improbable war with China is very improbable. That doesn't mean no idiot will do it. That's truck one. Truck two is you just fight the war against your own people. Highland clearances would be a good example of that, right? You just shove people through juanda replace a machine and then force them to work in factories for no money. And you can see all those policy options are on the table right now in the States, whereas in the UK, what we've done is we've just sold multirow hot and cold it progress breaks 10% dropping, you get UK GDP anticipated for next year 10% drop. It's like losing 20 years of economic growth and with a conservative government in power, who is going to feel the pain on them? It won't be though it certainly won't be the landowners.

Will McInnes 20:18

So what other big drivers are at play here? I'm thinking about, you know, your work on hexia was was at least part driven by changes to the climate what else is going on either socially or geopolitically? that's helping this current situation similar to the degree that it is

Vinay Gupta 20:36

to be honest, there's not a whole heck of what else you have to model. Yeah, climate change shirts, contributing factor, you know, cultural strings from the failure of the 1960s to produce a stable new way of life. You know, there are all these kind of bits and pieces like that floating around, but the predominant drivers really artists economic, if people feel like confident that they will have more money. Next year, then this year, they will put up with whatever this year's problems are on the basis of the next year, they'll have less problems because they have more money. If they lose the confidence that next year will be better than this year, then they start looking for hard political solutions to their problems, because simply staying where they are and working harder is no longer a valuable solution. And that's where we are right now. nobody in their right mind thinks that next year is automatically going to be better than this year ago. It's not in the ankles fear, right? both the US and the UK have run into horrific problems at the Swedes have also really screwed the pooch on this thing. It's not so much about hidden drivers. It's just about the stuff which is obvious and nasty and nobody wants to deal with it. You know, you vote for Tony Blair, you get Tony Blair, you got Martians war, but they have a war anyway. And you know, 20 years later your kids reap the whirlwind. And that's just how this is. That's just how it works.

Will McInnes 21:52

I read a tweet from you earlier today that said, and I found it hard to read, even though I liked it, but I guess a little Doesn't mean unnecessarily like the meaning of it. You said part of what makes positive change so hard in this world is the existing stack of incomplete solutions, piled 200 layers deep. Each externalising and exporting some problems of its own a dense, dysfunctional we've sure I mean, this is another one of these kind of Imperial collapse symptoms. So towards the end of the Roman Empire, they had hundreds of years of Imperial edicts,

Vinay Gupta 22:27

you know, the Emperor says xy and z, the Emperor is never wrong, the Emperor's mind kind of changed. Need, it's commonly reversed, and gradually their society choked on too much law. And things fell over. Right. So I mean, you've had plenty of contact with software over the years. Does any of that ever work? actually work like Swiss Army Knife style work? Or is it all sort of just the hochatown and vaguely functional,

Will McInnes 22:54

they don't know me too close to the actual code, but I guess it's collegial I

Vinay Gupta 23:00

mean, even the systems you use, right? How often do you spot some kind of weird bug like behaviour in Microsoft Word? Right? How often does Gmail do something weird to the formatting on an incoming email? Hopefully Bluetooth devices work flawlessly. Yeah. For nav, I have one Bluetooth device that actually behaves we've been guilty of that connection, by the way, is a Sony phone with a Sony pair of headphones, that works pretty well. All other connections? I mean, are we left in a world for Bluetooth? It doesn't work across devices? Is that what we're saying? So what you have is a layered mess, right? You know, the database is about 90% 95% almost works. Well, you know, apart from this thing where everything gets read as a text field sometimes or you know, and then you have some compensation for those hacks. And then on top of that, the web server has weird bunch of corner cases. And then you've got some, you know, scripts or some server whatsoever, isn't there a bit flaky and then you get to the front end and the front end is okay, except on this web browser, where we never got to the bottom of that. The bottom line is it's not economic to solve the law. 123 5% of bugs, it's just not economic, right? Getting that bug will make the software closer to perfect but it will also cost more than the benefit of solving it. So what we get is basically the worst software which is still usable in layers. And as a result, all the software systems are virtually unpredictable plugs, international plugs, you fly around the world that are seven 810 different punk standards. Who does this benefit? Is anybody actually making money from that maybe the people that make chords are making money from the people that make adapter plugs. Why do we have so many bunk standards answer because people are morons, right? USB cables, we've had what 14 different USB standards, mini USB, micro USB, USB a USB C USB, B you know, USB a with the fast stuff on it. Where it's got this other bit kind of hanging off the side of it, I mean, you know, one cable to rule them all 95 cable standards, this is progress. We're in a position where it's not clear that the market is capable of delivering near flawless technology. And if you then pile these things up on top of each other into a complex society, for every link is inherently rickety. Eventually you will have problems doesn't seem like an enormous problem. It really does sneak up on you.

Will McInnes 25:29

Yeah, it makes me think about in the UK a few times. ATM networks have gone down. Yeah. And I think it was a particular bank and and they couldn't find engineers with the legacy knowledge of an arcane programming language. I think it was. It might have been COBOL. Yeah,

Vinay Gupta 25:48

it still would that happens. It's usually COBOL. So it's all like, right. And when your economy is expanding, and things are getting better, that stuff doesn't matter as much when you Your economy is rapidly contracting, and you don't necessarily have the ability to solve problems by throwing money at it. That's when it bites you in the ass. For example, Chernobyl fight when the economy was on the way up, and there was plenty of money for maintenance and training, on the way down, not so much money for maintenance, or so much money for training a bunch of guys want to do some rideability testing turns out the damn thing isn't so reliable. And to do the viability test, they have to turn off a bunch of safeguards, because otherwise you couldn't stress the system that you wanted to stress and go hard. So, you know, all of these kinds of things are fundamentals of human civilization. We're not the first culture to make these mistakes. And somehow the Chinese have weathered multiple rounds of this, everybody else, they tend to get one round, and then it falls to pieces and it stays forward. In terms of where we're at foreign policy wise with China. The fact that the Chinese are not that concerned about the West should concern us.

Will McInnes 26:53

I know that you've done a lot of deep thinking about at a global level, I guess a global perspective and what we've talked About so far has been predominantly about the economies of, you know, the engine of the West. Yeah. So the US and we've talked about, you know, falling Falling standards of living for people in those in those economies, what's happening in the rest of the world right now, what's your, your shallow broad assessment of, you know, of everywhere else,

Vinay Gupta 27:21

Europe is unfortunately headed for civil war, not the whole of Europe, but Italy, Spain, Greece, the broke, they're covered in immigrants that they never wanted. They've got uncontrolled open borders, existing tensions inside of those countries, North Italy versus South Italy, in Greece, communists versus fascists in Spain, anarchists versus fascists left over from the Spanish Civil War. And then on top of that regionalism were both the Basques and much more acutely the cutter lunians won't help. Now that you know, is not necessarily a civil war with have guns, but it's the fragmentation of nation states inside of the EU. If the EU humbles out gracefully, you just won't see much trouble as a result of it. You know, if there's no real change except local regulation between Catalonia as a part of Spain, Catalonia, not as a part of Spain, kind of sort of who cares because it's all tied to the EU. Right? Smart, civilised, reasonable. This is not the approach that the Spanish government is taking to this issue. So we'll see what happens with that. And with all of these things, you know, to what degree are the Germans responsible for the impact that their economic policy has inside of the EU? Is it a single government? You know, you don't see it of Europe? Or is it actually just a Trade Federation? So open questions to the EU and South America as a mass but American adventurism has been largely slowed down by the age of Trump. You know this, this has been a lot less of a sense of a concerted US foreign policy, which is generally good for the rest of the world. Africa continues to read Should I just buy technology and is generally speaking as far as I can tell, dude, all right. Global warming hasn't hit that hard. And yet, India, ultra right wing Hindu nationalists all over the shop and possibly headed towards a genocide certainly headed towards being an officially Hindu state. I don't know whether that will provoke regional war or not bunch of shenanigans between the Indians and the Chinese. I don't think it's going anywhere. And then China, rapidly hardening towards a relatively formal dictatorship after a period of being run by a relatively meritocratic council system. So there was a point where you either now have six or seven people running China another kind of back down to one China lots of internal stress because the development has largely been coastal. The interior of China is still dirt poor, unfortunately. So they have to figure out whether or not they're clean. have basically toxin their coastal elite to pay for development in the interior. Or if they raise taxes to get that done, will the coastal elite simply begin to fissure and that's very delicate, and all kinds of historical stuff in training that's happened before on those kind of lines. You know, I mean, overall, the incremental improvements we've had in technology over the past 20 years, particularly solar panels, we've got the ability to run a relatively utopian world. But it's also very clear that we don't have the capability. The Tech is there, the engineers have done their part we can run a utopian world tomorrow morning if we wanted to. But there is no country which is monitoring decision making at the level necessary to make that work.

Will McInnes 30:42

So tell me about utopia. What does the solar panel unlock in in building a legitimate utopia for for billions of people

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