# Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with Vinay Gupta – DOUGALD HINE (part 2 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [128], part 2 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: document (Web page), 2010-05-01 (publication data), https://dougald.nu/black-elephants-skull-jackets-a-conversation-with-vinay-gupta/. Text: document text - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the money step (Global Village Development Bank, 2009), before the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Clear early statement of the six ways to die, the SCIM individual tier that the whole plan serves. - Career works it belongs to: - RMI Sustainable Settlements charrette (2002): Rocky Mountain Institute workshop on sustainable settlements where the Hexayurt idea took shape a second time. - Winning the Oil Endgame (2004): Rocky Mountain Institute study, Pentagon co-sponsored, on getting the US off oil profitably. Technical... - Black Elephant (2009): The black elephant: a foreseeable disaster that institutions ignore and later call a black swan. Coined by... - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine) - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine) - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. - black elephant: The black elephant term, from its naming to a Singapore lecture series. - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans. - transport: tribike and cars: Vehicles: the oil-efficiency car work and the tricycle. - Ideas whose earliest source in this archive is this one: Black Elephant - Topics: Rural poverty & development infrastructure (43%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (14%); gupta / vinay / blockchain (14%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Collapsonomics (4 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Six Ways To Die (5 here; 24 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 3 undated); Six ways (5 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 5 undated); Plan B (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); The Perimeter (2 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); next four billion (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Infrastructure for Anarchists (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Avoiding Capitalism for the Next Four Billion (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); Black Elephant (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); Rocky Mountain Institute (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002) - The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Scotland; Guardian; consumerism; Oil Endgame; future scenarios; climate disaster; next four billion; Avoiding Capitalism for the Next Four Billion - Importance: core-text score 0.78 (1.00 is the top), number 18 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [854] [UNCIVILISATION, The Dark Mountain Festival 2010: Vinay... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/854.md): Same 2010 moment: this Uncivilisation / Dark Mountain Festival talk, and Dougald Hine's Black Elephants & Skull Jackets conversation with Vinay - [117] [The Black Elephant Lapel Pin & Logo | Metalabel (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/117.md): same career work: Black Elephant - [200] [black elephant (2009)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/200.md): same career work: Black Elephant - On the same works, just before: [826] [Index of /in_a_page (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/826.md); [828] [The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/828.md); [38] [Hexayurt Country: The Hexayurt Project plan for relief... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/38.md) - On the same works, just after: [91] [The imperialists of the future are imperialists of the... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/91.md); [854] [UNCIVILISATION, The Dark Mountain Festival 2010: Vinay... (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/854.md); [224] [The Unplugged: The Videos - Shareable (2010)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/224.md) ## Reading it Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it. Cite as: Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with Vinay Gupta – DOUGALD HINE, document, 2010-05-01, https://dougald.nu/black-elephants-skull-jackets-a-conversation-with-vinay-gupta/; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [128], https://guptaoption.com/texts/128.md. ## Passages, part 2 of 2 [passage 14](https://dougald.nu/black-elephants-skull-jackets-a-conversation-with-vinay-gupta/) not have enough. That is coming because the plenty we took for granted was based on the absurd political power imbalances that gunpowder and mechanised war brought us, when only we controlled them. As military force runs out as an option, and industrial production becomes available to everybody, America and Europe lose the economic advantages which came with being in control of the majority of resources of the globe. In the future, all of us on Planet Earth are going to be dealing with the fact that there are seven billion of us. In the future, you do not get a jacuzzi. Not unless you are very, very lucky and are one of the rich, or unless your jacuzzi runs on abundant resources, not scarce ones. If you live in a hot country, you can use the sun. In a country with abundant biomass, you can burn wood. In a cold country with geothermal springs, you can use the ground. But you are not going to burn natural gas for fun in 50 years time in any scenario I can imagine from here, and that’s the end of a brief, short, foolish age. We can still live well, but it must be wisely and appropriately, as if we were going to live a thousand years, but knowing we will not. DH: You know, that sounds pretty upbeat, from a man wearing a skull jacket! What’s left, though, is the question of how we get there from here? VG: That’s exactly what we don’t know. It’s where the history of the 21st century is going to be made, in the same way that wrestling with the nuclear bomb was the defining dilemma of the twentieth-century. We don’t have a canned solution for this one, it’s a whole culture, and a whole world, engaging with a problem we’ve never seen before. It’s a pass/fail grade on evolution. It’s not a problem which can be project-managed. DH: What’s striking is, when you talk about this, you sound hopeful. VG: The hope starts at the point when you give up. I’m going to die one day, so are you, and the most we can expect from this life is to enjoy the ride. As long as the grass still grows, and the young are optimistic, life will be wonderful. First published in Dark Mountain: Issue 1 . climate change collapsonomics Dark Mountain development More posts Kartan över oss – How Does the Future Make You Feel? 2nd September 2020 On the Forest of Thought podcast 30th June 2020 When Your Ancestors Are The Problem 26th June 2020 Heading to Denmark 11th June 2020 --- End of [128] Black Elephants & Skull Jackets: A Conversation with Vinay Gupta – DOUGALD HINE, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [91](https://guptaoption.com/texts/91.md) The imperialists of the future are imperialists of the... (2010); the most closely related, [854](https://guptaoption.com/texts/854.md) UNCIVILISATION, The Dark Mountain Festival 2010: Vinay... (2010); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.