# Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [245]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2021-08-12 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Distributed manufacturing as how relocation shelter gets built locally.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - First hexayurt built (2003): The first Hexayurt prototype, built at Burning Man from cardboard panels. (suggested by machine)
  - One Network, One World: Designing for a 7+ Billion Person World (2013): Talk at the OHM2013 hacker camp: housing everyone at one planet's worth of consumption, and why... (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.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community.
  - 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.
- Topics: Burning Man shelter building (19%); fab / yes / laser (19%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: distributed manufacturing (5 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); DARPA (3 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); LaunchPod (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); open hardware (2 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); Fab Lab (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); Burning Man (5 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); ShiftPod (1 here; 10 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 2 undated); cheap solar (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); refugees (3 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); climate refugees (1 here; 28 sources in all, earliest dated 2010)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): LaunchPod
- Importance: core-text score 0.57 (1.00 is the top), number 53 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [270] [Hope For The World (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md): same career work: Hexayurt
  - [753] [(OHM2013) One network one world designing for a 7 plus... (2013)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/753.md): same career work: Hexayurt
- On the same works, just before: [774] [All Power To The Imagination #10 | with special guest... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/774.md); [741] [Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, and the Hexayurt |... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/741.md); [773] [Vinay Gupta — Incentive-based epistemology | Ideamarket... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/773.md)
- On the same works, just after: [677] [Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md); [762] [MetaGame meets Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/762.md); [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.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: Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation, video, 2021-08-12, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [245], https://guptaoption.com/texts/245.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=0s) hello i'm Vinay gupta uh founder of the hacksaw project and i want to talk to you about distributed manufacturing climate change uh resource scarcity and how these pieces fit together into a different model for how we might approach the upcoming chaos that we're going to see in our societies caused by climate change um so i guess i should start with a very brief

[0:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=26s) bio um i am nearly 50. um so i first heard about climate change as an issue in the mid 1990s from a guy called albert bates of an organization called world watch and he sat me down and explained to me vide you know there's this one called the environment and by the time you're growing up we're going to have run out we're just going to mash this uh and i walked away from that really quite shocked it was like you know i never really heard of that i was in the kind of enthusiasm that came from the end of the nuclear era we no longer expected nuclear war to be our future suddenly like hey there's real cause for optimism here and then suddenly it was like no no you don't understand there is something bad coming um and then what came out of that was a sort of five six year period where i didn't really have a plan i didn't know what to do didn't seem like my problem and then life rolled around in 2002 i was asked to take a crack at designing a refugee shelter that could be transported with the refugees so that if they were allowed to come back to their homes and but their homes had been destroyed by for example flooding they would be able to take the shelter with them and then deploy the shelter to protect them and that would be kind of the next step in disaster shelter or resolution and i had a very strong interest in buckminster's floor's work i've done a lot of work on that and so i invented an incredibly cheap small gdc dome structure called hexayurt

[1:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=105s) and the hexayurt is very quietly one of the world's more successful open hardware projects um they took root at burning man very very very strongly and there are now maybe half a dozen companies commercially producing them for burning man there's a second generation shelter called the ShiftPod which is an industrial mass production and is being used in refugee camps uh and at burning man probably something like 10 to 20 000 people stay in the hexayurt every year um there are hundreds of videos online about how to produce them how to manufacture them um and in every way shape and form this is uh an open hardware project which has completely slipped into the vernacular i always said that i wanted the hexayurt to have the same intellectual property status as tying a shoelace i wanted to just be a thing that you did like mortise joint or make a boot case make a hexayurt i want no copyright no trademark no patent and that approach has been very successful um and the thing about it is it's not a cool project uh this was a critical decision we made there were kind of two ways that we could have taken it we could have gone very sort of high concept high art this is an amazing thing it will change the entire world you should all pay attention to this thing oh my god this is the coolest thing you've ever seen wow wow and we very deliberately didn't do that um we chose to spread it as a very very dull kind of you know matte you know kind of olive drab like this is just thing you could do it's really useful sometimes there is the potential we're going to see 150 million 250 million 350 million climate refugees this is the sort of approach you could take to doing industrial sheltering to cover those numbers of people but it also solves a lot of problems right here right now you could use a burning man you could use it for camping you could use it for sheltering homeless people i think it might make a pretty good ski lodge uh you could do this maybe as a garage and we tried to encourage vernacular use we tried to get people actually working with the technology and having it using it living in it i want to show you a little bit of video not from me but from one of the people building hexayurts just to give you a sense of how all this works so this is video made by a friend of mine um who developed a new way of

[4:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=255s) making folding hacks here so this came out of a project called space yard or la launchpod where we actually deployed a set of hexayurts for homeless people in the la area on a very quiet basis and this is very typical of the sort of genre of how to make your own hexayurt videos uh somebody who has a breakthrough or an innovation or just wants to show what they've done um will basically grab a camera grab their materials and they'll shoot a little video to show how to build a hexayurt and these things can be pretty basic this one is pretty straightforward um or they can be very very elaborate and you know they're become the predominant way that the hexayurt kind of spreads culturally people make the films they show them to their friends they've got a few hundred people that will watch them um now switching to the second video

[5:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=301s) and as you can see here you know these things are just you know the camera's on a tripod you have somebody uh just folding up this unit and it's just a really simple straight up direct kind of show and tell approach um what we discovered was that if we made videos which showed every single step in the process without any cuts just the whole thing end to end for about three hours um that was what it took to get sort of first five dozen units built by people that weren't me you know physically present building and things um what we discovered over time was that the more people built hexayurts the more sort of simple and direct the instructions could be because people started with the faith that it was possible and they could do it and then they just looked at the video for details of how it was going to get done so this entire sort of approach this tutorial genre has become the kind of cultural footprint of the asset and that was really the heavy engineering kind of culturally psychologically sociologically was i didn't want the hexayurt to be something that stopped growing if i for example died or lost interest or took a job that didn't allow me to do this kind of part-time because i would say working for the un and they wanted you know like they want to control what's happening so um what this gets us is a slightly different way of thinking about how these sort of technologies spread how this kind of distributed manufacturing works because a lot of times distributed manufacturing has a very technical very digital very high tech feel you know you sort of have this impression of like you know everything is going to be stored in git repositories and you're going to download a bunch of dxf files you're going to cut the pieces in a particular way and you know what comes out of that is a slightly clinical slightly technical feel which is very divorced from older models of craft construction and in my case um sorry craft production and in my case craft construction and my grandfather on my mother's side was a finnish carpenter and a framing carpenter and so this notion that you would basically take a pile of lumber and you kind of you know take a look at a set of plans figure out well you ought to be about like this right he doesn't mean that that can't be the way that they'll just do the way we always do it and so you'd always get this notion that you the plans were sort of a notional idea of what would happen and then the guys that were actually framing out the building would do what needed to be done given the materials

[7:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=451s) they had given the plans given what looked right for you know like drawings might be an exact um and so what i wanted was a building that would be uh um what i wanted was for the the understanding of the building to be fully absorbed and fully captured by the vernacular so that people just viewed it as another kind of simple construction you could have a tent you could have a monkey hat you could have a gg dome you could have a hexayurt a lot of people build hexayurts because they're easy they're cheap they're extremely well insulated and it's quite hard to make an easy cheap building which is also well insulated waterproof is hard enough but waterproof and thermally efficient that's a real challenge and then what's grown up around this is a sort of subculture of hexayurt experts you know you'll have somebody doing a camper burning man and they'll be like okay here's bob bob is our hexayurt guy and he organizes building days and everybody gets together and you have like a barn raising and at the end of it you've got two dozen hexayurt it's packed into a sea container um and there are guides for doing that there are you know guides for how you get hexayurts into sea containers you know how to get all the furniture to fit how did how's everything placed um but the this is a this is a nuanced point the thing that i was attempting to avoid was the idea that this was a tech project right you know it's a very simple shelter but it doesn't feel technical to build in the same way um

[8:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=537s) there's an air conditioning unit which has become standard uh i kind of mocked up a rough version of it out of a little solar powered fan and a bunch of um kind of like the square rags you would see in like an auto parts store and so the rags were hung as baffles using little bent pieces of um paper clips to hold them in place and it formed a very long snaking air path so the fan was pulling the air through this air path in in this box and then you'd fill the box say four inches deep with water all the fabric would soak because the uh it would just absorb kind of up through the cloth and then the water would gradually evaporate as the air was pulled all the way through the air cloth over this large surface area very very simple the modern units are much much much better typically they're built inside of five gallon plastic buckets and so what we have now is a very substantial community where there are probably 500 people could be a thousand who are perfectly comfortable producing shelters and air conditioners as long as they've got a supply of boards and um motors and fans and solar panels you know and that notion that there isn't really you know there's no guild there's no training there's no official standard what we have is just a lot of people have done it for a lot of years now it's become an established skill this is the way that things become for an acura architecture and that creation of a new vernacular architecture that people have complete ownership of and complete understanding of um that was our goal because this is a kind of knowledge which doesn't come back out of culture very easily those people will remember how to do that in 50 years they'll be able to teach it pretty easily and so over time you just get the establishment of a new way of doing things human beings confronted with a situation where they need shelter and they have access to sheet materials like plywood or as osb or celitex isotherm any of these kind of boards you know rmax they could take that material and they could just turn it into housing now that is an approach right this is very culturally distinct from the way that file blobs have traditionally operated the file labs and you know i've been involved in a couple of fab lag projects and maybe a bit maker space stuff as well um the fab labs have always carried with them a sort of agenda of like this is a demonstrator this is a thing which exists sort of to educate and to

[11:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=687s) show people how the world could work but they've tended to de-emphasize the use of these things for production and some of that is you know well if you're going to build an electronic gadget maybe you're going to do industrial mass production of that thing and do it as a business you'll get yourself a kickstarter do this properly um but i think it's also something about the soul of technology um and you know i use that term advisably right i don't necessarily mean this literally in the sense of technology has a soul but the soul of technology in the sense of you know the soul of the human being that's relating to a technosocial system and if you take something like linux you know linux is extremely technical but it's also completely vernacular because so many people with such deep expertise are using it modifying it tinkering out recoding it's uh you know device drivers whatever it happens to be um that there is now a very large community of people for whom re-engineering the way that your linux environment works it's just it's a trivial operation it's just a thing you do you know you need to write a bunch of kernel modules to drive some new piece of hardware find there are lots of people that can do it and it's become something that is completely internalized note right for the people in that community it is no harder to you know recompile a kernel with some additional modules built into it than it is for somebody who is in an art school to you know do like t-shirt printing um and i feel like what we've seen in the fab lab world is we've never quite gotten this vernacular style and i think a lot of that is because there just hasn't been quite the angle in terms of the way the culture works um and here i'm going to go out in the whim because it's a few years since fab labs were a fundamental part of what i was looking at um but you know the impression that i always got was that the fab labs were very much like think tanks they were places where things were done outside of the real world in a special environment that kind of lowered the cost of the difficulty of doing things and that as an approach it's very useful for getting a look forward to how things could be but we are rapidly catching up with the world that the fab labs are originally architected in um there is a facebook group uh called um f that i'll just print it only they spell out the f and those folks uh have totally changed my relationship with 3d printing because i

[13:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=837s) always said you know i've never seen anything made in a 3d printer that i actually desired i've never seen anything i wanted i've never seen anything i would pay for um but that group right uh that group is made for people who don't want to print things they need to print things they break a knob off their cabinet they print a new knob they're doing some piece of diy and they you know screw up a piece of skirting board they print a patch that fits into that niche and you know they just slot it in and then pass it over and paint over it's that sorted um you know they lose some piece of plastic flippery inside of their car and they just print another one you know in roughly the right color whack it into place off you go and that is an approach right that's a really really novel strange different way of relating to the uh the 3d printer environment right i mean you know they've still got the skills of 3d printing you know they're building their models and they're very familiar with you know shape reverse and they're building their own printers and all the rest of this kind of stuff but it's gone from like wow look at my cool high-tech gadget to a culture which is almost indistinguishable from woodworking and that question of whether the high-tech manufacturing environment kind of raises up as part of a kind of pathway towards molecular manufacturing or whether it slides down the path until eventually you're going to get a 3d printer made from somebody like makita or ryobi and you know it's going to come with some funny little scanner thing that you wave over a piece you want to make a duplicate of and then you hit print and it's kind of like a job site photo copier um that to me is is what i mean when i say that it's something about the soul of our relationship with the technology you know is this a thing for builders and craftsmen or is this a thing for scientists technicians and engineers and of course many scientists technicians and engineers wear the other hat as well i'm thinking here clifford stahl who does a fantastic thing where he blows glass to make clean bottles out of at the same time as being you know like a sort of leading light in computer security back in the day so that balance point about our relationship with the tools and our relationship with the culture around the tools that's the kind of first thing that i will leave you with like that there is a there is a fundamental question about how a person relates to a tool right am i a scientist am i a technician i'm an engineer is this a high culture thing or am i a builder am i a workman i'm a craft

[16:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=987s) someone to some degree this is seen as being a low culture thing and the difference is really only inside of a person and it's sort of like how do you feel when you make a mistake when you budget yeah is it all right is it close enough or is it like oh i was meant to do this right now screwed up is anybody watching you when you make something is it school class where you're expected to be functioning at this kind of artisanal level or is it something you're doing kind of in your own time and if you're happy with the result that's it it's not like anybody's grading you um so that that human relational question the relationship between us and our tools right this then becomes a kind of foundation for us beginning to think about our relation with the tools that we don't own that we don't control and this is where we get into the questions

[17:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=1036s) about industrial mass production and the fate of the world so um the second question is this question of our

[17:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=1041s) relationship with industrial mass production um industrial mass production is killing us it's killing us and it's killing the world um co2 is you know the front end of the problems with industrial mass production um but there is no end to the problems right uh toxic chemicals being reached out into the environment right left and center horrific working conditions um you know i could go on with it and you know these arguments as well as i do probably so in this step between craft production and industrial mass production we go from the certain notion of a medieval standard of living where you have you know uh a blacksmith and an anvil and that's where all your tools come from and there is some kind of iron mine somewhere else and maybe you've got a bunch of woods and making charcoal and the whole village together can just about manage to maintain metal tools uh as part of an economy with very limited international trade um to the point where you know if you order an ipod off amazon and you live in the middle of big city they'll have it within to you within an hour all right these seem like two completely different universes the problem is that we're running this universe where you can get an ipod within an hour we're running that universe on exactly the same energy and natural resource budget that we had back in the days of blacksmithing um the only difference is that there are now 10 times as many people sharing that resource budget and by the way half the trees are gone and this notion of increasing numbers of people and diminishing natural resources with massively increasing uh material um sophistication refinement and esotericism you know in a world where people are manufacturing diamonds you know by creating incredibly hot tiny little ovens with gigantic amounts of pressure to form carbon into diamond you know at the same time as you have sort of i don't know maybe three million people will starve to death this year could be more it could be less uh but it's on that order we still have a billion people hungry we've got vaccine production distribution issues i mean it's you know we're in a position where it's very hard to look at manufacturing and say okay this is actually serving humanity's needs or even serving the needs of individuals i mean nobody wants to get you know poisoned by estrogenic chemicals that are you know messing with their uh your hormone levels as a result of drinking out of the wrong plastic bottle you know we're just doing this wrong and

[19:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=1191s) i think part of why we're doing this wrong is because we've lost control of our relationship with the manufacturing process so this notion that you have this kind of you know esoteric level of production where everything is done in a laboratory and it's done by you know people in white coats and everything is great versus kind of down here where you have this kind of like you know bunch of folks turn up on a building site and chuck the wood over their shoulders and they go out there and screw the damn thing together and then spray it with concrete you know those kinds of distinctions in how we feel about processes do we own it do we control it do we understand it or is it done by them far away who are in some way better than us and we trust their judgment over us i think this is the thing that you know the fablab conceptually has the potential to break down because by the time you're making your own electronics no matter how simple you're beginning to get a real sense of insight into what it is to have a laptop have an ipad have a phone have a camera you're beginning to understand that these things are simply much more complex versions of the artifacts that you're already making and demystifying manufacturing to understand that it is a bunch of humans you know standing in a long rhine in the middle of an enormously complex supply chain clipping these things together one at a time you know that gives you a real sense of like oh wait a minute you know like i made this whole thing with an arduino and it's it's pretty good and it does this and does that that has the next thing but actually you know that arduino it's made of components soldered onto a board and then there's the chip in the middle of it and the chip you know you've seen what it looks like to have uv um what do they call them the uh the mats that they're basically using to make chips you know the wiring diagrams you've seen that stuff you have an understanding of like it's just a wiring diagram it's just a really complicated wiring diagram at the end of the day this thing is made of transistors

[21:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=1309s) and so we begin to demystify manufacturing um if we can get the demystification of manufacturing down to the point where we start asking really awkward questions about hey you know this etching that we're using is that is that okay you know um you know i'm you know as i'm soldering this thing you know i am occasionally getting a one full of flux is that okay um that sort of thing you know it's very transformative to begin to understand that like you know you get covered in very very fine wood dust because something goes wrong with your filter and gear when you're cutting a plank and you know rather than the dust being sucked into the you know dust vacuum you wind up you know accidentally getting a nose full of the stuff and then you sort of think like you know wait a minute furniture factories in the developing world these people have no protection they're getting lung cancer because they're breathing in hardwood dust oh oh wait a minute so seeing ourselves in the role not of you know esoteric technicians but in the role of manufacturers who have some kind of solidarity with all the other manufacturers i think that that is sort of the deep lesson that i'd like us to be able to take out of distributed manufacturing distributed manufacturing may not be the most commercially efficient way of doing almost anything but it is certainly the most humanizing way because if you are a manufacturer you begin to think about things like health and safety in a completely different way than if you're not a manufacturer you begin to feel some common cause and common humanity with the people who manufacture because they have to not because they want to and this is a little bit like the thing that happens when people begin to grow some of their own food and they begin to realize that agriculture is not particularly fun when it's not going well and then you have that little moment of like oh farming's hard you know once in a while you'll meet somebody who's like i keep chickens and it's kind of like how's it going and then you know one in three they'll be like not so well and then you hear the chicken horror story you know something go in and eat their chickens or their chickens all died of weird disease or they're just being mean to each other all the time and you know you start to begin to realize like oh chickens are kind of difficult to work with and then there's this moment of like oh industrial chicken farms the matrix for chickens um and you know that notion that we run your essentially poultry death camps as a way of life it's not until you're actually around chickens that you sort of have this realization of like these things don't really belong in enormous concrete floored warehouses

[24:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=1459s) you know that is not what a chicken is that's that's something that is chicken shaped it is being abused into a different form um hard to cross these bridges from the position of the only interaction you have the food supply chain being buying things that are wrapped in plastic sanitized in a store um you know and just this experience of like you know the first time you cut yourself with a tool god forbid it's a power too god forbid it's a bad cow but you know the first time you see you know a chisel draw your own blood and you're you're kind of you know that's her moment um your humans have been cutting their hands making tools for probably two million years two and a half million years um you know the archaeologists will find these mounds of flakes of flint another stone where the people who were making stone tools just have these discard piles of razor sharp bits of rock and you can still cut your hand on these things you know industrial waste that has a two million year life spawn as bruce sterling says in his book making things um so the final thing i want to leave you with in terms of sort of thinking about this is we're going to have to do an unprecedented amount of new industrial design to get through climate change um almost everything that we do right now just just is not fit for a world with climate change as a constraint um everything consumes way too much energy i mean you want to be able to run your house on the same amount of power that the standby electronics take on your current appliances you know that's about the power budget for a green world you know it's it's in tens of watts i haven't done the numbers in a while um and you know that can be enough energy if everything is designed efficiently can't be enough energy if anything's designed wastefully so you know radical constraints on energy and those constraints are going to be there for a while you know much as cheap solar and wind and all the rest of that are coming along much as there is discussion of fusion you know we can't just wait until we get clean fusion and trust that we're going to be able to pull the carbon back out of the atmosphere in some enormous hail mary pass right we've seen those promises from the nuclear industry before that did not go so well um similarly you know insulation of buildings insulation people i've been experimenting recently with electronically heated jackets to sell them on amazon they're not particularly expensive they're remarkably effective

[26:49](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfji8KI95vE&t=1609s) you know that kind of stuff makes a huge difference if you're living in cold climates um and you know how do you retrofit insulation into existing building stock you pretty much have two choices it either goes on the outside of the building and the building looks weird or it goes on the inside of the building and you've got to worry about all the problems that are come from some moisture management and in fact you have that problem regardless which side the insulation is on so there are a whole bunch of problems about you know how are we going to retrofit buildings or are we just going to build a whole bunch of new extremely efficient buildings and let a huge amount of the existing housing stock that can't be retrofitted go where are the experiments going to get done right it's going to be individual activists retrofitting a couple of houses and seeing whether they can make it work that is going to decide whether or not those things are practical or impractical because you know what we really need is something that looks like darpa level spending to make an enormous investment in figuring out how to do the technological side of climate change mitigation but right now there is no darpa for climate change um and if there's no darpa for climate change you know it kind of comes down to us who have the ability to do the experiments do the research build the prototypes take them out test them document them see if they work it comes down to us to start building out the technology base for surviving climate change um and i guess i guess that's what i had to say today i mean you know i did it right i put 20 years of work into getting a technology platform that would be suitable for doing mass construction housing for refugees i think it's worked not as well as i had hoped but certainly far better than i expected and you know with another 10 years of work i think we'll have a fantastic deployable capability um you know what else is it possible for us to design build that would genuinely mitigate um the oncoming trouble uh thank you very much for listening to me today

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End of [245] Vinay Gupta - Fab 16 presentation. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [677](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md) Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021); the most closely related, [270](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md) Hope For The World (2017); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.