# Dubai trip notes September 2016 > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [276]. 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: video, 2016-09-03 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Observations of special-jurisdiction city states relevant to SEZ thinking. - Career works it belongs to: - Dubai Blockchain Strategy (2016): Helped create Dubai's government blockchain strategy, which aimed to run all applicable government... - 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) - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (suggested by machine) - Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of: - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine) - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (through a work suggested by machine) - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (33%); culture / history / fiction (17%); fab / yes / laser (17%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Dubai (8 here; 41 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); Singapore (5 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); human rights (1 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); India (1 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006) - Importance: core-text score 0.28 (1.00 is the top), number 280 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [265] [European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017 (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/265.md): same career work: Dubai Blockchain Strategy - [706] [Blockchain Beyond Bitcoin - with Vinay Gupta | Virtual... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/706.md): same career work: Dubai Blockchain Strategy - On the same works, just before: [764] FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 1/4 - "The Mind of Design" (2016); [782] [FutureRant w/ Gabriel D Vine - Vinay Gupta TEASER (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/782.md); [679] [FutureRant - Vinay Gupta Pt 4/4 - "Cypherpunk to Cyberpunk" (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/679.md) - On the same works, just after: [227] [Dubai Mandates Blockchain-Only Government Documents By... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/227.md); [273] [2 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/273.md); [274] [3 (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/274.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: Dubai trip notes September 2016, video, 2016-09-03, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [276], https://guptaoption.com/texts/276.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8&t=0s) hi guys uh I just wanted to record a couple of thoughts on the trip to Dubai uh just so everything is fresh in my mind um so I came out here on very short notice to have a couple of conversations uh firstly about blockchains and secondly about the entire VC idea and I think this has been an extremely successful trip uh obviously I'm not Liberty to disclose details of exactly what went on but I want to give some thoughts on the place um just so it's all kind of fresh in my mind so Dubai [0:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8&t=27s) has a very very complicated reputation uh a lot of the stuff that I've seen in the UK press focuses on things like Labor Relations here uh a lot of stuff about the economic upturns and downturns and the strange effects it has in a place which is entirely driven by immigration and has a very different set of legal structures particular around bankruptcy so I came out here with that kind of as a mental model of what I was going to see uh and then I came out and what I basically saw was uh a place that culturally is probably where New York was around 200 years ago in terms of new city huge amount of immigration um but in an environment with a very very very high-tech feel because everything is being built with modern infrastructure um so this idea that Dubai is essentially uh this kind of immigrant explosion City in a way where you know everybody is from somewhere else was really surprising to me I was in Singapore maybe a year ago and Singapore has the same thing um but in Singapore because their history is very different their circumstances are very different and they very space constrained because they're an irand um the feel is very different they have the Immigrant City thing there's an enormous amount of mixing and complexity in the local culture um but it has a very different Fu from Dubai because Dubai has essentially Infinite Space they have external sources of wealth initially in the form of oil which gets to the initial liftoff um and it has a very very uh just astonishing audacity I mean you see it in a very physical sense in the buildings but also the attitude of the state is very much like we can do BR about anything we have the resources we have the people we have the intelligence there's no reason we shouldn't Build You Know The Shining City on the Hiller whatever you want to think of it as um so I found this extremely surprising I mean uh you know I stood on the top of a nearly Mile High kilometer High building half mile high building uh 865 M or something like that on the observation deck and at that altitude you know the skyscrapers like 40 story buildings look short they look tiny um and the perspective you get over the land the only place you see anything like it is Sim City there was this there [2:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8&t=154s) was a mall uh which is astonishing I mean just astonishing I had never seen anything like it basically imagine something like nights bridge but indoors and 15 times the size um you know and just a section of the mall that looked basically like four haton Gardens end to end uh I saw one place which must have had I don't know conservatively 10 million worth of Jewelry in the window could could that much yeah could easily have been that much um so you know in this kind of environment you begin to understand you know why they have the ambition that they have um and it's you know at this point if you look at the demographics and the uh sources of revenue it's not remotely as old driven as you would expect which again is very surprising the I had some folks sit down and explain roughly to me how to buy works and essentially it's acting as a trade hub for a catchment area of about 2 and A2 billion people so uh if you're going to basically do a deal where you're going to export tractors you know from China to Egypt in all probability the deal will be done in Dubai um because the geographical location the uh National carrier the ability to get people in and out is very high people from literally 200 Nations here so somebody knows somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody and that Hub function is to some degree a natural monopoly so although there are several places in that role with a little bit of specialization and a little bit of diversification each one has a new position within that [4:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8&t=241s) and the final thing is that there is a certain maale order quality to the place in that nearly everything was taken from a working model somewhere else and then localized individualized uh wrapped in the local culture and style and then established boom so many of the buildings look like buildings that were done in other places because at the Inception somebody says well why don't we make it kind of like this and then it becomes kind of like that and that is very interesting um if it goes well I think that what you'll get is this kind of genuinely Cosmopolitan Global Hub uh if it goes badly it will retain this kind of smoggers board property where things are here but they never fully integrate or bed down uh and I think that that's as much an industrial design and an architectural question as it is a culture question uh because so much of how we interpret a places from the visual look um uh business culture again extremely surprising um very very very very very you know complex you know subtle thinking about the future technology the way the region is going to develop uh it also helped that I landed here right in the middle of an MIT Workshop including a bunch of stuff on Refugee issues uh and that was very very interesting um I'm trying to think what else I should talk about um oh yeah so the other thing is my friend Noah is building this thing the museum in the future uh he runs a thing called the Dubai Futures foundation and Museum of the future is this large kind of you know landed Starship kind of building you know the this impossible lce of metal tubes in this kind of complex curvature structure and that is a really really remarkable project uh I was absolutely Amazed by the plans uh they have a building type they're actually in construction right now uh and I think that that is also going to be another one of these kind of unique pin in the map moments [5:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8&t=350s) um yeah so I want to come back around and address the whole kind of reputation that both Dubai and Singapore have um I think call really going to say about that is this the expectation that everybody will have the same kind of social settlement that it took uh Britain hundreds of years to reach I think is unrealistic um I have an ancestor on my mother's side Scottish who apparently avoided being deported to Australia for labor organizing uh sometime uh in the kind of General window of the Tall part Martyrs uh the family mythology is that he left the uh left to go to the pub about 15 minutes before the secret police arrived and that sort of thing you know it's not that far back in our history that that was the way things worked if you think about America they had a full aparti state right blacks and whites segregated over half of the country until what 50 years ago so I think that there's a certain amount of unreasonable expectation among you know kind of Western liberal democracies that everybody at the same time as they take you know the ATM card on the internet will also take a full set of contemporary modern Western values particular around things like human rights civil rights Labor Relations and all the rest of this kind of stuff and forgetting that culture changes much more slowly than technology does you know you can basically take Wi-Fi and plug it into more or less any culture in the world the culture will adopt it but if you want to export ways of life or models much more difficult and we also forget that for example the swedes uh have something like what is it 200 days of paid child leave something like that that could be be split between um no must be more than that maybe it's 600 it could be split between either the father or the mother for 10 years after the child is born you know an enormous reservoir of paid time that you can use to look after your kids if they're ill you can even use it to go on vacation you could anything you like with it it's there as a kind of gift from the state um to protect the experience of being a parent and you know I don't see us exploring that to the UK or America anytime soon while it's clearly a much more Humane and much less barbaric way of treating people if removes the enormous punishing time crunch which is so much of a part of the parenting experience in the cultures which are run on hard Democratic um capitalist lines so I think that it's important not to immediately take this stuff on face value when you hear about the you know awfulness of X Y or Z or the anti-democratic nature of you know de andf um those things are a lot more complicated than they appear there are [8:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1Dz3x1ilX8&t=500s) many many many areas where our own societies have gaping holes in them and the conditions in much larger much less complicated environments and think in particularly of China and India are much worse than they are for most of the people in places like Singapore or duai even among the classs that are pouring concrete for a Liv H that's why they're here right so you know I think that we need to cut these kind of uh city states a little bit more breathing room than they have because they represent an enormous step forward compared to what was here before or what the alternatives are um they are struggling very very very hard to establish a place in global society and of the global economy with very little as a starting point um and I think overall uh they are you know extremely productive templates for potential futures for a situation where you're going to in almost all certainty see an astonishing migration into cities as time progresses so if you think of these as kind of being a new generation or template cities you might not see the full maturation of these models for 50 or 100 more years but the initial steps I think have to be given us a little bit more slack and a little bit more respect than they often get particularly in the UK press um because it has to be seen to be believed and the work that is being done is much more subtle than you think so um yeah these are my thoughts uh more when I get back --- End of [276] Dubai trip notes September 2016. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [227](https://guptaoption.com/texts/227.md) Dubai Mandates Blockchain-Only Government Documents By... (2016); the most closely related, [265](https://guptaoption.com/texts/265.md) European Parliament blockchain presentation May 2017 (2017); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.