# Vinay Gupta - Maker Faire UK - Newcastle 2014

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [316]. 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, 2014-04-30 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- 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): Argues personal-scale camping technology is the cheapest life support, the idea later built as Hexacloak.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt infrastructure kit (2003): A household kit around the Hexayurt: water-purifying bottles, dry toilets, efficient stoves and solar lights.
  - Small is Profitable (2002): Co-edited Rocky Mountain Institute book on the hidden benefits of right-sized, distributed power; The... (suggested by machine)
  - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (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:
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts.
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - rich data capitalism: Cheap information changes what a market can carry: price signals hold only a few bits (2013), blockchains cut... (through a work suggested by machine)
  - social enterprise: Enterprises that turn money into social capital and back: the capital conversion matrix from the Rocky Mountain... (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Distributed infrastructure — integrated utilities and thermal engineering (30%); Burning Man shelter building (20%); Tweets & captured social feeds (10%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: nanomaterials (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); solar light (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2013, 1 undated); Hexayurt Project (1 here; 70 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 4 undated); refugees (1 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); jobs (1 here; 85 sources in all, earliest dated 2003, 4 undated); Burning Man (1 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.46 (1.00 is the top), number 124 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [335] [STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/335.md): same career work: Hexayurt infrastructure kit
  - [740] [Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.md): same career work: Hexayurt infrastructure kit
- On the same works, just before: [696] [Vinay Gupta - Pandemic means Death? | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/696.md); [700] [Vinay Gupta - Basic Income | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/700.md); [746] [Bitcoin Future - Vinay Gupta | London Real (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/746.md)
- On the same works, just after: [172] [vinay gupta | be you. (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md); [73] [A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine | The... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/73.md); [315] [Three Bureaucracies of Sharing: Owners, Managers and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/315.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 - Maker Faire UK - Newcastle 2014, video, 2014-04-30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [316], https://guptaoption.com/texts/316.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=0s) Hi everyone. So I'm Vinay Gupta of the hexayurt project. So today I'm going to be talking about nanotechnology in forms that we typically encounter it which is nanomaterials rather than sort of replicator engineering. Um so let's have a think about what happens. There's a shame that technology is anything invented uh after the time you turn the technology is anything invented after the time you turn 40 and I certainly feel that way. The rate of change in things that I've been around my entire life is completely unprecedent. So um we're going to start with something that's very very simple and then work up to a story about how the future is going to work for all of us but particularly for this is the first airplane literally the first uh power flying device that's heavier than from there there were a series of incremental changes over the course of a century that took us to here that's the SpaceX reusable rocket and We went up that path really without anybody noticing. There were lots of little incremental improvements and then you'd occasionally get breakthrough like Concord. There were spikes like first man on the moon. But the real story here is that this used to require full resources and superpowers at war and now it was done off the back of a dot business. So it went from the full resources of US empire at its peak to being done basically by a bunch of rich guys only shop. And that transformation happened by Greece. Think about the iPhone. The iPhone has been around for seven years. And we sort of take it for granted that this is what phones are like. But actually that's a completely new phenomena. We've never seen that before. H it came from nowhere. It's going we don't know where. And it came over literally 7 years. We have no conception of when did phone become something. I mean phones still have wires, right? Then they became wireless. Then they became computers. Then they became pocket supercomputers. And it

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=150s) just slides up this curve, but everybody calls it a phone. So nobody notices it.

[2:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=154s) And this is what's happened with nanotechnology. Nano materials have snuck in everywhere. We weren't paying attention to it. Notice it. So thinklessly warm and dry. This is a jacket made up of some kind of vortex. Um the basic material was invented to replace wool and fur. wool and fur were the height of organic evolution for managing being cold and wet and they're incredible. They don't have much flexibility. Uh dogs, for example, their woolen coat in winter all falls out in the summer. So if they fly from a warm place to a cold place, they get frozen and there's nothing we can do about it. So we need more flexibility. We needed more adaptability and we didn't grow fur. So, you know, we've constantly had this challenge of trying to figure out how to read the world drive. Enter Gortex. So, this was taken with a live microscope and it's basically um nor PTSD and you stretch it very suddenly and it forms this kind of sparse matrix and these holes are so tiny that water can't come through them. So you know if you have water through a fine mesh the surface tension of the water stops it coming through and as a result um you wind up with uh no water on the right side which is what you want for your gates. Um so the other property is that if there's no water here these holes are big enough the air can pass through water vapor can pass through and as a result you get this. All of this material here is breathing so it stay cool uh but the water won't come through it. And that's a completely new thing, right? Nature doesn't have that capability. Nature solves this problem with oil and thick layers. So the outer layers get damp and they swell and they form the sign of some sort of protection. This is a complete breakthrough. It's like the fuel for staying warm and dry. You could go outside in your gear. If it rains, you don't have to care. You're going to stay warm. It's amazing. Um, the trick of this stuff is that over 40 years it's gone from being kind of expensive and a bit esoteric to being completely ubiquitous. It's just everywhere. And that transition uh really happened by series of tiny improvements. And you don't really notice it until suddenly, you know, one of these days you're going to start seeing pictures of refugees and Gortex jackets and everybody's going to be turned around and go, "When did that happen?" Well, you know, you go down to your local Walmart or your, you know,

[5:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=304s) Target and you can see kind of Gorex knockoffs for about 20 quid a piece. It doesn't need to drop much further before suddenly everybody has access to it, just like happened with the cell phone. There's a progression down the curve as the technology makes its way out so that everybody can use it. Now, um, is Gortex nanotechnology? Well, it's certainly a material with a nanoructure that does useful work, but it's not kind of the Eric Drex or self-replicating machine kind of nanotechnology. It's a nano material. The nanostale structure is extremely important, but it's not like little replicator robots made out of DNA that are doing jobs for us yet. Um, but it is an example of how control of materials at the atomic level can produce breakthroughs in ways that we would never have expected before they have. Um this is kind of the peak of the Gortex experiment. You go into completely unmanageable places and human beings with their you know thin layers this and that and the next thing are completely functional and climate killed us completely 200 years ago. And this is amazing. Now let's go back on. What

[6:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=370s) about these robes? You think oh you know you spin it out wool canvas cotton whatever it happens to be. You stretch it too far it breaks. So, this is material called Spectra. And uh it's not the big yellow rope that you can see on the end. I'm using for handles. It's this very very thin string. Now, I have some of it here on a roll. So, uh I'm going to basically roll some of this out and then I wonder if you could pass it around the audience so you get a potential just now. Can I have some volunteers to do a break test for this? We're going to need six or so people, maybe 10. Come on down. Yeah. Come on. Right. Take your hands on the handles. All right. We'll take a few adults as well. We got a couple verbly guys. Can we give that hand? Yeah. Oh, great. So, it's going to be adults versus kids. Fantastic. You might need another adult. All right. Don't get older. Grab your handles right now. Do you see how thin the string is there? There's really not very much to it, is it? Right. So, pull as hard as you can. Keep going. Keep going. Do you want to try to get some more people in there helping? All right. Does it even feel like it's stretching at all? No. No. Funny though, isn't it? You know what's really amazing about that stuff? It's about 25 p a meter. It's dirt cheap. Have a look at it. Spectrum. So what makes this material what it is is nothing fancy at all. Carbon atoms. It's a chain of carbon atoms in very very fancy fibers all connected together and they're wrapped in hydrogen. Thank you very much. Make sure you got a look at the string. It's amazing. It is amazing. Great stuff, right? So again, it's kind of an amateur, right? Carbon atom to carbon at carbon to carbon wrap in one long jeans. Wrap the entire thing in hydrogen. Line them up so they're more or less kind of sort of pointed in the same direction of the fiber. Uh, and then let the fiber set. This is actually ultra high molecular weight polyethylene, right? Polyethylene. It's polyine. It's made of the same stuff you

[8:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=520s) make polyine bags out of, but you get the molecular structure, right? And you make that chain 20, 30, 40,000 carbon atoms long, all of a sudden it begins to behave in this completely improbable way. That's got 300 kg breaking strength. It's completely ridiculous. You could hang like, you know, five people in a hammock off that. It wouldn't break. Um, now, right, incredibly strong. Well, we've seen that. Dirt cheap. Way cheaper than the equivalent steel cable. It's amazing. Um, it's not ideal for everything. There are a few things that you if you hang a heavy weight off it, it will eventually break, which is a little inconvenient. Um, now, right, this is really the fun part. When did string become this way? When did string go from being this kind of fairly easy to work with lightweight material that you use for this and that, next thing to being this completely impossible, unbreakable thing, right? It just sort of happened invisibly. It comes up that curve. If you're 10 years old, you know, this is kind of sort of what string will be like everywhere by the time you're 20. You'll just think that's string. All of us old farts will be looking at this like, when the heck did that happen? You're cooling an entire car off a hair, right? And it just creeps up a new invisible and suddenly everything changes, right? I'm going have some tea. Um, so, uh, unfortunately for the rest of this, I forgot some of my stuff. Right. So this is a cup made of much the same stuff and you kind of fold it together and you could probably you manage to fold and unfold and then pass it back. It's made by a friend of mine called J Cousins on a cuff. So you fold it like this and it's made of ultra high molecular weight polyethylene which is to say really long carbon chains but this time instead of being as a string they're made of plastic which means I can find te I can have some tea and that doesn't seem to be counting the right way. How many for I wasn't expecting this to boil it over quite as fast as I was

[10:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=659s) surprised there. So this stove is another one of these wondrous things that um so it's called a bolite and it's got about half a dozen really fundamental breakthroughs. I've been working with stoves of this general pattern for about 20 years and this is the first one that I use and every time I use it this is what happens. So it's got a battery inside of it and it's got a fan. It's driven by the battery and it's got this double wall steel wall. So the heat comes all the way, the air rather goes all the way around between the two steel walls and it's incredibly hot that it comes out into contact with wood and burns and it's got a po electric not plect electric a junction in it which is a little piece of a chip that generates an enormous amount of electricity from heat and they're not very efficient. They're not they're kind of expensive, but it means that once the stove is running, it runs the fan on its own heat. So, you could just take that stove outside and you could run it for 10 years. The batteries will never run out cuz they're constantly charged. And it generates enough extra power that you could run a USB light off or you can charge a phone. And that's the first one of these stoves that you can charge a phone off. There's been about five or six generations and Philips did a crack at it. And as you can see at the beginning, you know, I was running that on a handful of twigs and a bit of cardboard and within a minute, minute and a half, you wind up with a foot long jet of flame coming out the side of the stove. Ridiculously overpowered. It's about 5 kW. The people making this are not just aiming it at us camping and hiking and this kind of stuff. They're looking at distributing that stove in a simplified, cheaper form all over the world. Right? And when I say all over the world, they're talking about getting these things down to 10, 20, $30 a unit. And you take that stove and a solar light and a Mozilla phone that you can charge off the stove. Incredibly cheap phone made open source. I won't talk about it too much today, but you know, that's $25 and it looks pretty much like a standard phone. Um, you know, web browsing, all the rest of that. And what you begin to see, you know, the the LED lights and the little solar panels, all the rest of it, what you begin to see is that there's a pattern. And if you put all of those pieces together, you get very high quality of life from very old material stuff. It's very durable, lasts a long time. It gets your water, your sanitation, uh your your cooking, your heating, your internet access that are similar tools

[13:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=809s) for various kinds of agricultural stuff. And you get this possibility of an incredibly high quality of life for really thoroughly poor people off the back of technology most of which started out in the camping and hiking business. You know it comes off this very very very long slow chain of development for extreme outdoor stuff and then the prices drop and drop and drop and drop and drop and then suddenly your villagers are living inside these little nanotechnology bubbles in which everything works great and they don't need a national grid. They don't need a huge power and water company. They have more or less total political freedom because everything that they need to survive at perfectly happy level will fit inside a backpack and it will all last forever. Um, so that's my story. Thank you very

[14:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=862s) much. The final thing I'll talk about very briefly is this thing called hex. So okay for a minute. Yeah, I got comments. Okay, so a hex is a very simple structure. The wall is 1.2 m by 2.4 and the roof pieces are half of 1.2x 2.4. So you take a triangle by taking a rectangle like this, cut it in half, two pieces together, make your triangles. And from that standard shape, you can make little ones like this, which are good for one family, and all the way up to big ones like this, which are good enough for school, 45 m or 450 ft. And for making these uh the materials that I'm suggesting is that you work in cardboard, big thick industrial cardboard, an inch maybe 2 in thick. Uh sometimes it's got kind of a honeycomb structure and you wrap it in the material that you see outside quite often in the woods or lying in gutters which never corrods, never degrades, never rusts, which is the aluminium that we cover Coke cans in which is an incredibly highspec multi-wacker laminated aluminium product and it costs about 50p a square meter. So you wrap your industrial cardboard in that stuff to protect them and to reflect off the sun and then you can go out and make these buildings. And this is not, by the way, an architectural rendering. This is a a temporary city in America called Burning Man, which is kind of like a recreational refugee factory. And they build about a thousand of these things or more every year. People download the plans from the internet, build them. So my vision of the future is that everywhere that people need a house, you go out there with a bunch of cardboard and coke can metal, fold it together in a really clever way, and you get houses that last until the coke can degrades, which could be decades or centuries. And then you equip them with all of this kind of equipment. And what you get is a really high quality of life on practically no environmental footprint um with real durability for the things that you're using. And I think that we could do that for billions of people radically improving their conditions without having them to do things like move their villages, move to the cities and go through all the kind of social disruption that goes with that cuz this kind of equipment, that kind of house and a decent computer, this is a lifestyle I think almost anybody can love. So that's it. Thank you. [Applause]

[16:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhSMS7VGZ6g&t=1008s) Yeah, questions, but I mean there's always time outside as well. Yeah, absolutely. I'll be outside. You can take a look at the rest of that stuff there. We got one or two. Yeah. And there's a microphone over here. I'll come to you guys if you want. Where can we get those cups? They're on Amazon for050 each. And what do I search for? O R I K A S O. Oricas. Uh my friend Jay started a company to sell them and they were so good and they lasted so long that eventually everybody had wanted one hand. So now they've become quite cheap on Amazon. After we buy them all up, they're actually ideal to make in a hacker space. Um because you could buy this sheet material pretty cheaply and then you score it with a screwdriver. uh and you get cut directly to your order, you know. I mean, if you wanted one of 200 mil for your coffee, for example, make code. Well, I mean, it is an object that really does look good in a kind of hacker context, but you imagine this beside your phone trying to teapot and it doesn't look silly. Uh if you don't happen to like this kind of you know stainless steel and weird or weird primary color plastic aesthetic uh maybe the future is going to be a little difficult. Um talking about the rope or the cup is the material recyclable or yes so HDP is you know it's long chain polyethylene. You can basically melt it down and reuse it. Uh in the form of the rope if you melt it down it loses most of its strength. You put it back together again. So you could down cycle from the rope into the cup, but the cups you could recycle and recycle and recycle and recycle because you just melt it and then turn it back into sheet and then cut the sheet to your shapes. It's the only plastic the green piece endorses. Really? The only plastic that green piece endorses. Apparently it's the good plastic. Jay works really hard on the good plastic. Set. Yep. Okay. Thank you all. So please figure out password. Thank you.

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End of [316] Vinay Gupta - Maker Faire UK - Newcastle 2014. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [172](https://guptaoption.com/texts/172.md) vinay gupta | be you. (2014); the most closely related, [335](https://guptaoption.com/texts/335.md) STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta (2012); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.