# STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [335], part 1 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/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2012-05-04 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE. 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): A full early briefing on providing life support when states fail.
- 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.
  - Resilience and Opportunity: Effective Tools for Victory in Fourth Generation Wars? (2006): Briefing arguing that insurgencies end when fighters can go home to a living, so distributed...
  - disastr.org (2007): One-page plan to house disaster refugees with host families: insulation board from the building industry,...
  - Networked Domestic Disaster Response (2007): Plan for evacuating millions to tens of millions of US citizens.
  - Nuclear / mass evacuation (2007): Plan for millions of US refugees after a disaster, epidemic or nuclear attack.
  - STAR-TIDES (2007): Helped start STAR-TIDES, a National Defense University project on supporting populations under stress.
- 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.
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in...
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - 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: STAR–TIDES / Starfish — distributed humanitarian knowledge networks (65%); Engineering as political action — Fuller and material provision (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: TIDES (15 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); gasification stove (6 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); distributed infrastructure (9 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); FEMA (5 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); refugees (13 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); NDU (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2008); Iraq (6 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); clean water (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); four billion poor (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Six ways (3 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 5 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Spiral; four billion poor
- Importance: core-text score 0.58 (1.00 is the top), number 50 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [137] [STAR-TIDES (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/137.md): same career work: STAR-TIDES
  - [68] [STAR-TIDES | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution (2007)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/68.md): same career work: STAR-TIDES
- On the same works, just before: [354] [The Future We Deserve - 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/354.md); [240] [The Future We Deserve — Introduction (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/240.md); [210] [The Future We Deserve (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/210.md)
- On the same works, just after: [327] [Papa Bill's Stew-Stick Jam - Marmaduke Dando - Second Song (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/327.md); [321] [Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md); [322] [Vinay Gupta at the Athens Hackerspace, 2012 September 2 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/322.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: STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta, video, 2012-05-04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [335], https://guptaoption.com/texts/335.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=0s) [Music] right all righty okay that's a very slightly better field of you but not much all righty so um I made some notes earlier on basically there are seven points that I think we should cover so that you guys have a you know complete sort of fundamental model here um so uh I'll send you this outline of this later on and I'm just going to bang through the points and ask questions as they come up sound good all right so let's talk about the first thing which is why is the US government doing ties why why is the dod remotely interested in doing all this stuff and uh I want to point to a couple of reasons for this um the first is that it's strategically important there are something like 4 million refugees in Iraq and the collapse of the Iraqi infrastructure plus the number of refugees in Iraq is almost certainly one of the feeding uh routes that's driving the Insurgency at the end of the day if you've got 20% of the population of refugees and the rest can't get clean water to drink you're I'm going to wind up with a lot of annoyed people if you have an infrastructure collapse at a state level then you don't really have the same basis of jobs and employment and financial welfare and people become poor and angry it's sort of the inverse of the Irish miracle that you know basically as the Irish economy boomed subscription and the IRA collapsed because if you're you know 21 22y old guy who could either become a terrorist leader or you know run a pizza Bakery you kind of wind up doing something else with your time and this is I mean this is clear we're you know we've got billions if not trillions of dollars going behind fighting the war in which infrastructure is a critical component so that's the Strategic reason for this fundamentally uh fighting winning wars is not just about going over there and knocking the enemies out you know as we saw in World War II the Reconstruction planning is a great deal of what it takes to stabilize peace and

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=150s) the Modern Warfare environment is very much about getting back to peace as quickly as possible and making the peace stable it's it's you know this is the sstr picture it's it's creating and maintaining stable peace with potentially relatively small amounts of fighting at the beginning of that process if that makes sense could somebody move that coffee cup thank you H the other coffee cup yeah that one much better all right so I mean does that make sense any questions about that yeah no so then there's the humanitarian thing which is something like 20 million refugees globally including uh internally displaced people um most of those refugees are refugees for between one and two decades so and I mean there are exceptions that you have refugee camps in Africa like uh I'm trying to remember the name of the place uh I think it's in no I'm I'm not going to get the name which is working on like its fifth generation and it's something like half a million people I mean they've just been there forever the thing is functionally speaking it's a city um and there's just a lot of that stuff and again from a strategic perspective particularly for Africa command anytime that you're going to be doing fighting in Africa you're almost certainly going to have enormous numbers of displaced people many of whom were already incredibly poor and and now things are even worse so you know you can imagine that if you had another sort of Rwandan Genocide situation 5 years after Africa command was fully stood up you could easily wind up with two or three million refugees that were now under Africa command's mandate you know you you go in you make peace all the people that you're managing are now your problem you know there's no government functioning at that point both sides have withdrawn the US is potentially not going to turn up at that point what do you do so there again there's a need there to be able to integrate humanitarian operations at much higher questions no all right so finally there's the domestic instance um as we saw with Katrina you know it's not that difficult to wind up with a couple hundred thousand Americans hold

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=300s) um just off the top of my head you know pandemic flu the bay Quake uh something like nuclear terrorism all of these could easily wind up with you know hundreds of thousands to 5 or 10 million stray people without any place to go um and in those kind of scenarios you know I mean Fimo was completely overwhelmed by a relatively small predictable event there were days of warning and every understood the threat model because the Army Corps of Engineers have been down there building dikes for you know Generations so you know in a really severe scenario and what we've you know taken to call you know cat you know catastrophes um the ability to do things like rehouse 5 million Americans you know half of whom might have nuclear contamination issues that's a pretty high bar you know to get capability that you can actually do something sensible in that situation is going to require the development of some new techniques and new technologies uh and those I mean those scenarios are fundamentally why the global war and terror is being fought it's not about somebody banging an airline into a building it's about somebody taking out New York with a suitcase and you could be bought from some dodgy Russian in you know aeran it's it's not about these kind of small scale incidents it's about the very small risk of really serious in and that's not to belittle the loss of life in small scale terrorism but small scale terrorism is a completely different threat model from Big scale terrorism I mean there's just no comparison between the cultural impact and the loss of life involved in wmd terrorism compared to even very effective conventional terrorism and most wmd terrorism is going to result in very large sudden displacement of US population so what's the difference between an African Refugee and a US Refugee budget and expectations also climate to some degree but fundamentally once people are driven out of the Cities because it's just not safe to be there pandemic flu you know Fallout whatever it happens to be once you're out of the Cities at the end of the day it's people and dirt and it's much the same wherever those people are whatever the dirt is

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=450s) you know it's the same basic human needs so cheerful I know and you know it's not that we don't have credible things to say about dealing with half a million or a million or 5 million American refugees right we have a great story about how to approach that problem and if we had to do it tomorrow it would work out okay right so it's not that these things cannot be coped with it's just that the ability to cope with them has not been observed you know absorbed by the institutions yet and Tides is part of changing that so uh any questions there should be something about that I think we're with you on that okay um so um I want to just put this into context for a second one of the things that we're going to consistently find is that the current way of breaking down institutional reality into you know South C North C domestic operations FEMA versus you know uh DOD all of that stuff is you know largely historical breakdown of the bureaucratic space you know this stuff really has nothing to do with the actual problem domain uh in if you were going to break it down by capability the same institutions that do domestic Disaster Response in America would also be the guys that we send to deal with something like the Pakistan earthquake right and there's this fundamental you know problem that we've broken the problem down by sort of geography rather than by capability and a lot of the problems that we find in trying to get you know Concepts from Tides absorbed is that people don't really quite understand that you know the current breakdowns are not really oriented around solving the problem that oriented around solving yesterday's problem and by the time you've got budgets allocated over a 5 10 15 year cycle and you've got programs that have been passed down for three generations it's extremely hard to turn the institution in a way that will allow you to actually face the problem of the deac so there's this constant pressure to try and get new ideas into the old

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=600s) format and that in itself is probably going to turn out to be the single hardest part of getting this stuff done and I think that there's you know excellent evidence that that's turning out to be the case the technology is not really all that difficult the problem is getting people to actually learn how it works and do it in the field um so you know I mean I don't really have any horses in that race I'm I'm fundamentally allergic to all forms of bureaucracy but you know if you see this stuff happening that's what's going on um all right so uh let's go back to some more cheerful material again uh six ways of dying there are fundamentally six things that can kill you you can be too hot you can be too cold you can be thirsty you can be hungry you can get a disease or you can die from violence um five of those things are typically prevented by infrastructure the first five are typically blocked by infrastructure to the maximum extent possible um you know we don't get too hot we don't get too cold we don't get thirsty we don't get hungry and we don't get diseases because we built machines that keep us away from those problems like you know places like Minneapolis are fundamentally uninhabitable for five or six months of the year you try and live in Minneapolis without infrastructure you'll die immediately just without without hesitation you will freeze to death uh and people regularly do when their infrastructure breaks down you know your car breaks down when you're driving from one place to another in a snowstorm and Minneapolis you freeze to death in like 20 minutes um so you know this this fundamental infrastructure framework around us is like an extension of our capabil to exist in the environment we basically terraformed Earth using infrastructure to make places which are uninhabitable habitable and to make population densities which are fundamentally impossible possible if you look at a place like New York City the only reason New York City is humanly possible is sanitation and constant you know pumping in of clean water and electricity those processes stop New York ceases to be inhabitable immediately and you know call deia you

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=750s) know all the rest of these kinds of problems would spring up immediately and this is what's happened in Baghdad right the infrastructure has collapsed the population density is unsupportable because now you've got things like waterborne diseases because you've just got too many people you know essentially uh you know putting waste into the same water table um I mean it's it's very important to understand that the infrastructure is the difference between life and death in almost anywhere in the world there are only a few places where you can comfortably live without infrastructure and those places are typically uh you know not able to support enormous population densities so the fundamental goal of Tides is to be able to protect people from the first five ways you can die too hot too cold thirsty hungry and disease um the first two of those are basically shelter the third is water the fourth is uh food supply Logistics which we don't touch and cooking which we do and then disease is largely water purification and some of the public health stuff um additional services like lighting and all the rest of that kind of stuff are conveniences they're very nice they help with education they make people feel much more at home but fundamentally their conveniences ICT is critical because ICT is the glue that allows you to figure out how to deliver the services that keep people alive it's very very important and you know I mean we all know that already but this I mean this is the fundamental underlying model you know you're trying to put something between people and death from their environment and the ICT is you know not a critical part of that until you try and do it without any ICT you know nobody really understands what it contributes until it fails and at that point you simply understand that the guys on the ground don't have the complete picture and now they can't get anybody who does have it and this is I mean this is a Perpetual crisis you know I mean the NGS over and over and over again send people out and people wind up making bad guesses because they can't find the right engineer you know you can't get the water tested so you feed it to people and discover it's you know it's just

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=900s) it's a mess so yeah the ICT is very important even though it's not immediately between people in one of these ways of dying it is I mean the critical thing it's a way of tapping into the global education database which is you know fundamentally why the West is the west and everywhere else is not it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years of education science technology engineering research and investment and the ICT connection allows people to tap that base even when locally they don't have any of those resources you know even if you can't send a plane right now as long as you can send data you can still get people access to a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure and education all right um so I'm I'm going to take a break for a second to breathe have a think about that figure out whether you have questions okay right Dr Wells has talked at least me through a lot of this stuff as well in the in a week and a half that I've been here ah good I've I've been catching up on on good I've I've been catching up on on the the tides and all the websites reading all the literature and postings there as well too so oh good EXC right along with right along with what you're saying we we definitely need somebody to be kind of the content manager like you know I still don't know of a single web page we can go to that has links to all of the different places where TI's pictures are online it's something to address I think when we get back from uh hondur at least if not sooner well take take lots of pictures um is one of you taking down a video camera yeah we have a couple of the RCA Small Wonder video Camas cool all right let me uh just move my notes down here and then we'll wait into the next bit all right um granularity of infrastructure uh this is reasonably well written up in

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=1050s) the sort of 40 page introduction to Tides document um so I'm not going to go into this super deep but basically the smaller the component is the smaller the unit of service is the more it's possible to basically pour infrastructure into an area pretty much like a liquid you know you just have this you know you have a a bucket of stoves or a container of stoves if it's one per household you just hand them out if it's something like electrical power and then you could have a distribution harness then you wind up with all the second order fragility because now you've got this uh service tree you know you have this kind of tree structured uh connection of pattern of wires and the trunk of that tree is extremely vulnerable as are the major branches so that's an example of a structure which is inherently fragile and if you deploy infrastructure which has that kind of tree structure where you've got lump in the middle which generates the service and then a tree that spreads it out the tree is inherently unguardable it's inherently fragile and if anybody wants to break it it's just not very difficult never will be um the authoritative write up on that is a book called brittle power from 1982 by Amy 11 and IT addresses fragility in the US electrical infrastructure and is I mean it's just a road map of what happened in Iraq to the to the Power Systems it's just it's chapter and verse you cannot do power infrastructure in that way um so this part of the sort of implicit context of the tides thing is that we're focused very much on fine grained infrastructure so we're mainly aiming at the household level and once in a while we might be focused on the sort of Municipal level the town level so um the big distinction between household level infrastructure and town level infrastructure is in household level infrastructure you don't need a bureaucracy to do the administration because you don't have different administrative units different households sharing a resource you don't need a bureaucracy to divide up how the resource is allocated um this becomes extremely important when you're dealing with situations where there's just an enormous amount of chaos the ideal Tides item is something where you give somebody a box they can figure out how to use it in the same way that most people can figure out how to use a hammer and then they take take it home and you don't hear from them

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=1200s) again I mean that's that's the perfect tide solution if we had something like that for every one of these basic human needs we would be done um because the if we had for example cheap solar panels so you could do power generation household by household all of these problems that we have with grid fragility in Iraq just wouldn't be there um and similarly if you imagine dealing with you know a half a million person refugee camp you don't really want to be in the position of trying to set up an electrical utility you know if you have a single large generation station and then you run wires are you going to do billing how do you stop people using five times more power than their neighbors I mean it's just you know it's this enormous can of worms um and this happens for things like stand pipes you know I've seen some pictures from refugee camps of a spiral of buckets going around a stand pipe and it takes something like you know 2 and 1 half hours or 3 hours to wait in line all the way around this spiral until your bucket is at the top of the queue and you can actually get your water and that's an example of um allocating the resource based on people's tolerance for standing in the sun of boredom and it's just dumb you know boredom is not I mean it's basically like turning people's entire lives into the DMV right right you know because this is It's a fundamentally economic problem you know in in the west we have very efficient services like Starbucks because money changes hands and if Starbucks was slow and they made you wait in line for 3 hours they would be out of business you know there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of extremely smart people who in every area of your life attempt to optimize the way in which your services are delivered you know so that you will buy from them and not from somebody El and that's fundamentally why it's very easy to get through life in the west because you know for the most part people are trying to do things in a way that makes you happy the exception are the bureaucracies that you have to deal with where you have no other options like your telephone companies where from their perspective they can use bureaucracy and difficulty of dealing with them and forms and end user agreements and all the rest of this stuff as a way of making you not use their services in a way which causes

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=1350s) them to make less money so you know what I want to get out here is the the current approach to dealing with refugees and displaced people is entirely based around the convenience of the NGS administering the aid the NOS are not in any way shape or form accountable to the refugees and they're also not accountable to uh any kind of really serious technical oversight the only of the only point of accountability that most NOS have is the donor public and the donor public are shown only a very small subset of what goes on and the donor Republic are not experts and have no understanding of what the other options are and this is why NGO a practices have fundamentally not evolved in approximately 50 years they figured out what they were doing shortly after World War II they made one round of adjustments once they run out of the hardware they got from the militaries and nothing has changed since and this is also what the Red Cross thinks the Red Cross is acutely aware that they do not innovate and they do not absorb engineering risk so where this ties back together is fine grained infrastructure that gives high quality of life is not something that it's been in anybody's commercial interest to develop at this point this is Terra incognit nobody's been here because in the west infrastructure is provided by Victorian Hardware giant factories that produce services that spread out over a pipe and wire harness and we've got billions and billions of dollars of sunk costs not just in the infrastructure but in the systems that allow you to build more infrastructure that looks just like that makes sense if you want to build a sewage plant it's going to be like all of the other sewage plants and it's cheap to build the sewage plant which is just like all the others if you want to build a new kind of sewage plant you have to eat all the engineering costs so in the west we have a very high quality of life infrastructure system but it's entirely LED at a nation state level and a municipal level it's entirely built at a town level for the most part so the result is that when you get into areas where you don't have enough stability to deploy that kind of Victorian infrastructure there's essentially no coherent work on how to deploy those same high quality services using household granularity infrastructure and there's not been a commercial case

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=1500s) for doing this until relatively recently and what commercial case there is is the so-called Off the Grid Community which is all of these Back To Nature hippies you know living in solar panels with electrical Wells and you know it's just it's a tiny Market there's not really any money in it and as a result nobody's really done serious research in making this stuff work um the reason that I think it's very important for tides to be doing this kind of research is all of the Strategic reasons that were you know listed in the first part are you know very heavily influenced by high quality distributed infrastructure you know it's it's not clear that a refugee camp is anything other than a temporary City and if you expect refugees to manage in kind of horrendous conditions for 20 years at the end of the day you're going to be left with a lot pissed off people you know you have to treat people right at every step of your interaction with them or eventually you know you wind up making enemies that we just don't need to be making so don't think of the refugee thing and the Disaster Response thing is being separate from for example rebuilding the Suburban infrastructure in Iraq at the end of the day all human beings want high quality services and we can deliver those services for $50 or $100 per head if we get the research right and that's not all that much more than is being spent by the refugee handling agency like the UN now and they're spending a significant amount of money on these people they're just not solving any fundamental problems in the process so you know try and break away from the idea that it's about refugees or it's about you know distributed infrastructure in a reconstruction context fundamentally it's about filling human needs everybody wants high quality services and the actual fundamental Hardware that you need for you know a a building versus a tent versus a hex it's all the same human needs the infrastructure package is not that different um you know it's it's the the key is the granularity of the infrastructure not the deployment context if that makes sense all right good good good um I'm just checking my notes Here oh okay um so one thing here uh is you know

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=1650s) no model has the right blend of price resilience and speed right nobody has the problem you know and the budget to develop engineering Solutions of turn up build infrastructure for half a million people leave and that capability is something that the US government really wants and really needs you know and it applies at home in a domestic context for FEMA it applies in places like Iraq and it applies in the kinds of situations that Afric and South come are you know talking about dealing with it's that same basic Fe show up give people what they need to stay alive leave and you know from my perspective if FEMA was really well you know was really well built and ready to do this kind of work then an expeditionary FEMA is actually a lot closer to what we need than necessarily putting this stuff into a military context but right now the military is the group that's furthest ahead and thinking about this so in a military context it goes all right um so any questions on that usual all right um so let's get back to the tides stuff right we've broken the tides thing down into these seven areas uh shelter water power integrated cooking um lighting and Heating and Cooling and all the rest of that stuff sanitation and ICT so part of the reason that we have that specific breakdown is because it Maps fairly closely to the pipe and wire architecture that provides the services you use already the water system is the water system that you're used to the sanitation system is a toilet uh integrated cooking is a stove and it substitutes for your gas or your electrical and you know cooking heating lighting is or cooling Heating and lighting is basically small appliances so that breakdown is not necessarily fundamental to the problem in the same way that the six ways to die is fundamental um but what it is is fund Al to the way that westerners think about

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=1800s) solving the problem and that's an important distinction the the tides model of these seven infrastructures is not built in problem space that Tides model was built inside of Western mind space right that's a way of having people think about substituting you know the the nice 110 volts that comes out of their wall socket for you know four AA batteries they recharge once a day oh that's your power service that's what provides your life you know um so it's important to have this distinction between the sort of six ways to die Level which is extremely fundamental in general and the breakdown into these civid infrastructures which is kind of specific to the way that we're thinking about solving these basic problems um you will eventually find places where the sort of whole systems thinking level um make puts a lot of pressure on the 7even way breakdown you know you'll find situations where a single piece of equipment is actually serving you know much a broader set of needs than you know would immediately be thought of in that breakdown and you know those kind of systems you know we need to make sure they're modeled correctly because those are really important the systems which spawn and provide many services in a single system are very very valuable because they tend to be much more efficient than the systems which are broken down one at a time um so uh let's s of just run over the infrastructures for a minute shelter you've you've built hexayurts you know what they look like you've put up tents you've put up uniforms you put up does I think I think one person at least has done each one of those things yeah okay so um as far as POS try and cross train on the shelters you know learn what they're like to put up and take down um try and spend a week or two living in them I mean that might sound kind of dumb but um you know until you've lived in one of these insulation hexayurts and you can compare it to living in one of these Brown hexayurts you won't really understand why the brown hexayurt is not something you're going to want to live in for so long you know the fact is the silver exterior and an R value of 6 and2 makes

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=1950s) an enormous difference to your quality of life um and one of the fundamental things that we from the Hexayurt Project is we use our own gear you know I've lived in hexayurts for an extended period of time I've cooked on the stove you know I've lit my house with the light and you know those kinds of systems unless you actually live in them for a while and use them day in day out you don't really build a full inter model of why one system is good and another system is bad so I don't know how you fit this into your schedules but at some point you know maybe you guys all you know put the shelters up somewhere that's a 5 Mile Drive from ndu and everybody just has you know a twoe camp out and you just you live like refugees for a while when you rotate through the shelters document everything possible on video right up notes and you know go to work and go to school as you do now but when you go home go back to your refugee camp without doing that kind of stuff it's very very easy to assume that two solutions which look kind of similar are similar when in fact they work in completely different ways and have completely different performance characteristics and it's you know it's important to understand for example the amount of Labor that goes into solar cooking is quite high but in a refuge context or in an agricultural context it's not a big deal you know you have to go there once every hour or two hours to turn the cooker you have a bunch of kids who are running around playing tag and keeping the goats in check it's not a big deal for them to look after the cooker too but if you have to go somewhere else to work and then you come back what you want is very quick instant heat that allows you to cook your meal immediately so you can see that there's some preconditions that are necessary for silver cooking to be you know equally convenient to using a stove um the difference between the rocket stove and the wood gasification stove is the rocket stove makes a lot of smoke with the wood gasification stove if you're really good at using it and you get pretty good if you use it every day for a couple of weeks or a month or two months you could cook with almost no smoke which means you could cook inside the difference is if with wood gasification stove you can have an interior kitchen and you just open a window you have a small chimney you can't really do that with a rocket stu um the difference that that makes it

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=2100s) a winter emergency is with a wood gasification stove you could run the stove in the shelter with no ventilation which sounds insane but once you've gotten pretty good at running the stove you begin to understand that you could actually do that and the difference that it makes is 80% of your heat typically goes out through the chimney so suddenly you can keep your shelter warm on a fifth of the wood that you could otherwise because you like to outside you get the stove hot it goes into the gasification mode there's no smoke and you bring it back inside of your shelter in the placees immediately warm and this is the kind of detail that you need to get if you're going to be teaching people how these systems work right and that means living in them for extended periods which is not necessarily fun but that's where you build the hands on expertise and uh one of the things that Lindsay and I are looking at doing in the next year or two is finding some funding and actually having a village with all of this gear somewhere in South America and you know basically people can come for training you can come and live in the village for as long as you're willing to live in these conditions and rotate around using all the different systems and at the end of it you will become you know an expert in distributed infrastructure in a developing World context because you'll have done it yourself and that's I mean that's really important the reason that this stuff looks so different from the refugee stuff that people are typically given is because when I designed the system I designed it for myself you know the hexayurt and the infrastructure package and all the rest of that stuff is something that I designed for me to live in for 2 years at a time as a baseline for asking anybody else to live in and Tides as a whole really has to try and stick close to that all yes it's a fascinating con I know that that at least in a small scale way but what kind of materials would you use

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=2250s) think I think the best uh way of doing this stuff for South America is probably cardboard and tin foil so you start with an industrial cardboard and you wear it you know probably you you want triple wall but you can also get it up to maybe five or six layers thick and then you put literally tin foil ordinary baking fil in uh layered sheets on the outside using wallpaper paste so you get a roll of thick baking foil and you shingle it onto the outside of your building reflect Heat Of The Sun It's yeah exactly because I mean the heat of the sun is you know something like a th000 watts per square meter so you either need very big thick heavy walls or you need to reflect the Sun away um cuz that that turns out to be a lot of heat you know paste you know um and you know there are some questions about waterproofing but I think that you can plus potentially have like a layer of paint and then put the wallpaper paste on top of it this is the kind of stuff that's going to take experiment you know I mean when we talk about local materials um the the sort of the correct level of resolution for the local materials is nearest industrial city you know you want to you want to be thinking about what they have in the big city rather than what you can find in the immediate Village and most big cities will have some capability to do cardboard on a pretty industrial scale some of them will have building materials like this press board stuff um you know but usually the local industrial base makes some kind of durable sheet goods and then from there you've got to do this sort of math of looking at the local climate and you know looking at what you can do in terms of surfaces and what you can do in terms of boards and how you can anchor it that part is very much art not science yet unfortunately um does that answer your question th Paul yes I mean I much as I would like to be

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=2400s) able to ship the insulation boards not not the ones from Home Depot but the heavy duty ones all over the world it's just it's not happening you know it's a wonderful material but at the end of the day da is just not helping us here and that's their loss well yeah I I know when I met Justin out in San Diego um and he and you I guess are experimen with some some other materials that could aluminum Alum yeah that's it's about 3 cm thick right but just over an inch thick kind of silver on both sides it's actually quite a bit thinner than that yeah about a qu of an inch I wonder what that was that must be one of the samples from the the American company yeah they yeah yeah um I mean there Paul so I me may be conceivable that someone would come up with some some new uh composition of some new material that would blend itself very nicely to preate uh preformed next uh material that could be shipped or pre stock pile put in place in Risk areas oh yes relatively low cost um yes I mean within the within the packaging industry they have a lot of this fairly cheap honeycomb CW um maybe 7 to $10 a sheet and it's kind of bulky I mean it's it's a good inch inch and a half 2 in thick but it's incredibly strong and if you waterproof it effectively it could easily last 10 or 20 years um they used to build houses out of a very similar material in California and they were I mean they were real houses they were durable for years and years and years um but for a disaster

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kfm1Y74ghFE&t=2550s) you're yeah but for disaster relief I mean I just you know there's this big Gulf between pre-positioning and fabricating stuff in an emergency and you know Justin's company is very much looking at the preposition market and I think it's a very good business to be in but you know realistically for South comes needs particularly they're probably more likely to want to figure out who in America has the manufacturing capability and then make some kind of agreement that in the event of a disaster they'll get materials quickly you know that kind of an approach right um and I don't think that' be very expensive for southcom to set up you know I mean it's basically uh you know somebody who speaks you know Spanish and Portuguese sitting down with a telephone for a couple of months you know figuring out exactly who's got which capabilities in which countries and then negotiating a bunch of you know purchase contracts that say okay you know how much will it cost us for 20,000 shelters worth of materials on a 10day basis and then if it happen you know you you turn the handle um and I mean I think that there's also a need to do that uh for northcom you know in terms of uh you know the mass Evac paper have you guys read that what you say the the paper about using hexayurts in a nuclear context in America ah okay um I'll send you guys a link to that so I mean basically the situation is that as far as I can tell um we use about 4 billion board feet of that uh insulation board material a year in America which is a lot I mean it's 500 million boards a year uh just over a million boards a day um which gives you the ability to build something like 100,000 or 120,000 hexayurts per day from the material that's already in the supply chain so that's enough for 600,000 people and then on top of that you add the fact that there's probably somewhere between 3 days and 3 weeks of that material in warehouses and in the supply chain and and that means you get a kick start of somewhere between 1.8 and maybe

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/335-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [335] STAR-TIDES briefing from Vinay Gupta, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.