# RAW FOOTAGE Hexayurt Vinay Gupta Robert Vrtis Combined Endeavor

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [338]. 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=F-DSRhgMimw. 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): Origin of the hexayurt in refugee-response exercises, with open, patent-free mass production as the goal.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Expedient Infrastructure for Transient Populations (EITP) (2007): The 2007 program on shelter and infrastructure for 100,000 to 1,000,000 displaced people, between civilian... (suggested by machine)
  - The Physical Aspects of Distributed Infrastructure (2008): Design study for ultra-low-cost solar thermal homes off the grid: cooling from the ground and evaporation,... (suggested by machine)
  - Hope for the World (2009): Talk at an emergency housing workshop in Sweden: disaster relief and development aid are one problem, and... (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. (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: Burning Man shelter building (33%); Distributed infrastructure — integrated utilities and thermal engineering (22%); Property, NFTs & real-estate transactions (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Combined Endeavor (3 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Strong Angel (3 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); refugees (13 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); distributed infrastructure (3 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); refugee camp (4 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); gasification stove (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); scheduling (1 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2012, 1 undated); Appropedia (2 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); composting toilet (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); water purification (1 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): scheduling
- Importance: core-text score 0.40 (1.00 is the top), number 167 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [740] [Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [270] [Hope For The World (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/270.md): close in content (cosine 0.94)
- 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: [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); [408] [H4D2 review (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/408.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: RAW FOOTAGE Hexayurt Vinay Gupta Robert Vrtis Combined Endeavor, video, 2012-05-04, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [338], https://guptaoption.com/texts/338.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=0s) so tell me what what began this project um well it really goes back to an event called strong Angel uh which is run by uh directed by uh Commander Eric raspon who um can't remember his specific title I think he heads up the naval Med the Naval Medical Center so Eric became extremely interested in Refugee issues after one of his bosses said Eric and go learn about this so Eric held an event called strong angel in Hawaii first strong Angel 1 and2 where they did a simulated disaster they had a bunch of people in Refugee tentage and they just tried to sort of run a disaster and observe what was going on learn from the experience and figure out how they could improve Disaster Response capabilities um what came out of that was a meeting called the sustainable settlement Charrette at the Rocky Mountain Institute where they got about 40 people together in an environmental Think Tank setting and said what do we do with refugees how do we make this work better and point with that was a specification and the specification was what we need is a high quality shelter that lasts a long time and is cheap and can be transported with the refugees and this is really critical um one of the reasons that host countries tend not want to accept refugees is once you have a refugee camp it's really hard to relocate the refugees back home again because they build a life there they build infrastructure there they build homes there and you can't resettle them without driving them out of their homes so the idea was to design a shelter where you could house the refugees comfortably but when the time came to move them you could take the shelters down ship them by truck and then put them back up again for the refugees in their native Villages once they were free to go home so that was the specification um the other part of the puzzle was a thing we call distributed infrastructure which is providing all the basic Services of life without requiring what we call pipe and wire harness so if you look at one of these buildings around here every one of them has electricity running into the building clean water running into the building sewage running out of the building uh many have natural gas lines have have telephone lines and the combined cost of all of those additional Services can equal the cost of the building itself so when you put these two threads together what you get is a requirement for a building which you can transport easily and which also comes with a complete infrastructure harness that's self-contained because if you're in a refugee camp you dug sewers for every building when you move the buildings the refugees would have lost their sewage if you did the same thing with electricity if you had like a big you know Kow generator in the center of Camp

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=150s) when you sent the refugees home again they'd have lost their power so everything has to be self-contained at this sort of family level um structure and that's basically why this building is the way that it is um when you need to take it down again you just cut the tape with a craft knife and the whole thing goes back into a single panel 4 ft by 8 ft by about a foot for the US Dimensions or whatever the equivalent is in meters it's probably oh I don't know 36 CM by UH 60 by 120 again I know we talked about this earlier but who essentially would be P for their Refugee well in the refugee camp context these things are kind of expensive you're still talking about $50 to $100 per Refugee and uh typically refugee camp costs are51 $15 per head so these kind of things are not designed for your typical refugees scenario this is really looking for a new approach to handling refugees which acknowledges that your average Refugee is a refugee for 17 years so because people are in the field for so long um if you start paying more of those costs up front you can build them proper infrastructure initially and then pay less later on as you have to send out generation after generation after generation TS and additional equipment uh in terms of bearing the cost what we're hoping to do is create an open-source design pool so we'll do all of the designs put them into the public domain find cost uh bulk distribution points and then whichever government is paying for that group of refugees can just buy those Technologies off the shelf from whichever ven they like uh right now the US government is footing the bulk of the development costs but uh I work remarkably cheaply so uh you know even if I don't get paid the work continues so it's a really very kind of gorilla effort and um what do you hope to see uh comes out of this pod and what do you hope for future well refugees are a relatively small population it's about 9 10 million people and although they have through the worst living conditions in the world there are many more people who are living in poverty than are actually refugees so what I'd like to see is an approach to doing housing for villages and slums which draws in these kind of techniques and these kind of Technologies but scales through uh straightforward Commerce if people want solar powerered lights and they cost5 or $10 a piece they'll buy them if they want wood gassification stoves and it

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=300s) costs $20 a piece they'll buy them so by developing these Technologies kind of Under the Umbrella of the US government but making sure that they can go into mass production without high patent fees and these kind of things what we hope to do in the long run is change the available technology in the developing world and I think that that approach offers a lot of environmental benefits it offers a lot of health benefits it offers a lot of humanitarian benefits without having much of an upfront cost I'm going to stop you because I like what you just said change the change something for the developing developing world yes and you've shifted oh no I'm sorry it's okay so I just want you to say it again because we might use it yes little right there and you say that line again how it's how you hope to change so what we want to do is change the uh available Technologies for the developing world so that they have good solutions that they can buy for 5 10 15 $2 and what we're trusting is that the free market will take care of both resource availability so people will see there's a profit to be made designing these things and selling them but also resource reach like the fact that you can buy a Coca-Cola almost anywhere on the planet is really important it means that when people want a product they're capable of building a distribution Network to carry it so if a solar lighting system or a stove system becomes as important as Coca-Cola is to people they're going to make sure that it becomes available all over the world you know there's this myth these things are hard to export or hard to distribute but they're not as long as it's a single self-contained package you can make those things available all over the place just by publishing the design and gradually gradually if people want it they'll buy it and they'll buy it and they'll buy it and it'll gradually spread and you can see this with cell phones me cell phones have gone Global in maybe 10 years just because they were useful so if we think of it as trying to make something that's as useful as Coca-Cola or as useful as a cell phone but solves basic human living problems I think we'll do quite well and what is the initial cost to make one of these structures um for demo purposes we make them out of temporary materials so us prices building this size is about $200 and what different sizes do you have for uh these structures uh the smallest one is one4 of this floor space so it's 42 Square ft and it's about 6 ft high and it's big enough for just about two people and there are four sizes from that to one which is larger than this so it's 12 ft High 66 Square ft uh you can also extend

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=450s) them and cluster them because they have a hexagonal base you can put three or four of them together and they fit precisely and then you cut doors that go straight through from one building to another and um so how do you how do you feel um how do you feel that this project um relates to combined Endeavor what has attracted you combined Endeavor well um there are two factors the first is that the military communicators are often first on the scene with the engineers so um they're the people who are going to be initially facing a population if there is a disaster and by making sure that they understand that these kind of options are available it makes it possible for them to request the materials to be sent out to teach people locally how to do the construction so they're it's sort of a first population to make aware of the fact that these are there uh the second thing is that European command is in the process of standing up Africa command and we think that Africa command is a place which has got much more of a direct need for these kind of building options if you're dealing with displ populations if you're dealing with poverty uh even if you just need a cool dust free environment for a radio rig these kind of improvised Building Solutions have a lot to offer and um have you spoken to anybody here find a number about these you really been talking to any of the doll Chiefs and people about what it is that you're doing uh no we we're scheduling a briefing later on in the week but until we actually had the buildings up there's very little to talk about okay once you actually have the building then mostly it comes down to Word of Mouth and food traffic and you know have you seen that shiny Hut over there they're telling a crazy story about infrastructure and that's really I mean the core approach it's very much showand tell um because really until you see it nobody would believe it you know you're building a building at F ir and cardboard and duct tape you know no okay and um where uh where can people find more information about this and about the project and what it is that you're doing um if you type hexayurt into Google h e x a YT you'll find a variety of resources online uh there are videos on YouTube which show construction uh there's a website called appropedia

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=600s) so infoshare hub.org which is where we're putting together a field manual documenting this and the whole distributed infrastructure picture as part of the EIP project what is apedia uh appropedia is an appropriate technology Wikipedia so it's a bunch bunch of people working together to try and develop a library of appropriate technology resources which is licensed in such a way that anybody can use them and they're talking about water purification stoves uh environmental best practices all of that kind of stuff okay is there anything else you'd like to add about your project or um what else that you're doing working on right now um yeah I want to talk a little bit about the infrastructure package because this in itself is just a building so if you put 100,000 of these on a piece of land immediately you're going to wind up with terrible infrastructure fail you won't be able to get cool water you'll have sewage problems you'll wind up with disease lot people will die so the building itself is really nothing the important part is that it ships with infrastructure so you have an approach to electrical lighting for about $20 a house where you take a single solar panel per Village connect it to a doublea battery charger and people just come charge their batteries at the charger take them home and plug them into a fluorescent light fixture and a 7wt bult will run for about uh 12 hours on 4A it's 2 days worth of Life very very low cost um for water pastu water sterilization there's a thing called the solar water pasteurizer which is basically a plastic bottle and some tin foil and that will sterilize drinking water under almost any condition Le render it non pathogenic uh similar approaches for uh cooking there's this thing we call wood gasification stove PRS 10 times more efficiently than a regular stove that gets you heating into the mix uh composting toilets we're working with some people to try and design an extremely lowcost composting toilet and what you wind up with there is something like a porta potty that simply never needs to be emptied and they just run forever and all they produce is compost that you can just park on the edge of town until it degrades all the way into so um and these are I mean revolutionary approaches it means that you can get a high standard of living um without having these big centralized plants that are so expensive and so difficult to protect and maintain and this is the real hope that when we talk about building resilience in societies when you have a disaster if you roll out systems that just work and keep working you don't have this problem that when you go home everything you built collapses and I think that's really our key uh take-home here we want to build systems which once they're installed run

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=750s) forever okay thank you else uh no I can't think of anything okay uh it'd be nice if we we're just going to get started uh right now by if you could just state your name okay spell it for me and your official title and look at me ah my official title too yes my name is Bob Veris and it's spelled v r t i s and I am a contractor working in support of OS D nii OSD the office of the secretary of defense for networks and integrated information and how are you um directly related to the hexayurt project ah I was given the task of bringing Mr Gupta here to uh combined Endeavor uh to help him integrate into the exercise and be able to demonstrate uh how the the hexayurt uh uh to 44 different nations uh how easy it is to build uh and how useful it might be in support of people that are in crisis and need shelter quickly and is this your first time working with Mr G yeah I met him on the internet and uh we've had a couple telephone conversations but the first time we've actually met face to face and um so why is it that your position was selected um for you know relaying him to the exercise the uh often ask myself the same question uh Mr GTA was actually able to get the attention of uh Dr Lyn Wells uh who's the principal Deputy assistant secretary of defense for nii for networks and integrated information uh explain the concept to him and some of the other Concepts about how you bring uh a distributed infrastructure to people uh who don't have much money or nor much of an infrastructure to support them in the first place and that might be as a result of a disaster might be as a result of just their normal living condition uh it fits in the sense that when you go out and respond to a crisis a lot of times the first people on site are the communicators uh they're the ones that are out there setting up the communications so that the main portion of the response force will be able to talk back to the home base and be able to relay request for support uh so a lot of times those guys are the ones that are out there seeing a lot of the needs uh and this is a good way to get and share information on a technique that can be used used to bring something uh

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=900s) to people in crisis uh bring a roof over their heads and some initial safety and and protection and some shelter without having to impact military operations I don't have to give up one of my tents uh to have a family live in I can continue to use that as a command and control structure and we can take something like the hexayurt and that becomes a home for a family uh at a cost of only $200 as opposed to the cost of a military GP small okay and so what have you learned um about the project at large that you feel is important um for how the world the military um Communications just trying to put this in uh do this as an implementation elsewhere in the world uh we've done this before in the states uh we've been able to take hexayurts out and been able to put them up just go down to the Home Depot uh order some tape online uh the logistics of getting that together and making that happen in Germany were different uh the building materials are slightly different uh the tape was a little bit more difficult to have uh but once you're able to sort that out uh the concepts for construction were simple enough to translated well uh and we were able to get a fire team of about five German soldiers well trained and putting up the hexayurt YT in about two hours great and so as you continue to implement this around the world what other problems do you expect for our what other the challenges are are are really kind of uh what makes this of value to people in crisis what makes them want to have this as a home uh instead of if they if they're used to living in the slums the cardboard and the plywood that they normally construct their homes from What will what will make them want to have this as a better infrastructure uh and and will make this whole concept that much easier to to kind of bring a little bit more stability uh to people in crisis uh to people on the move and so how how is it that y'all are marketing this to people how is it that this hexayurt it really is better than what they're living in now uh that's difficult um mean right now it's it's very much like the I guess the best characterization is the the Linux operating system it's kind of like share War software uh somebody comes up with the idea on it uh talk they tell

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=1050s) two friends they tell two friends and you begin to refine the concept and and do that so we're hoping to create a community of in that's interested in using this of people who typically respond to crisis situations whether they be military or non-governmental organizations so they can discuss techniques for how uh how this can be done uh and and share Lessons Learned uh when I get back to the States I'll be blogging on on what it is that Benet and I did here uh some of the lessons that we learned come up with a full bill of material and hopefully use some of your video uh to demonstrate the techniques that we're able to use and what worked well uh and then in a in kind of a Wikipedia fashion uh looking for people to to fix our mistakes uh to add additional Concepts to that so that we get information shared around and working in the military I'm sure you've seen a lot of ideas proposed for making things better and constantly coming up with new humanitarian missions and ways to what do you think is unique about the hex project and what makes this maybe something better than what they've come up with before um it doesn't try and answer it doesn't try and be something for everyone everywhere in one in in one instance we're not waiting on the concept so that it works not only in the Arctic but also in the desert this is a concept that will work worked better in some areas of the world rather than others uh and so we're trying to get it out there and in uh in software we we build a little fix a little build a little fix a little it's same kind of concept here uh if it makes sense to to to use this in a humanitarian assistance uh Mission uh that we come across great we hope that we get the lessons learn back from that so that we can continue to improve on it as well and um can you tell me about some of the the politics of this how how is the US government going to use this to help our own country other countries um do you know what they're focused on there there there's not a formal movement at this at at this stage uh I I guess kind of going back to one of your your earlier question what makes this different nobody's trying to sell anybody anything on this one we're introducing the concept and we're and and we're introducing the the the capability and the context it would be useful in uh this may be just as useful in humanitarian assistance as it would be to have have to take along uh to the

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-DSRhgMimw&t=1200s) slums of Rio De Janeiro and introduce down there as uh the Home Depo of Brazil a quick way of building houses down there uh for a population that doesn't have a lot of money uh and it's housing that that doesn't cost a lot of money to have uh so introducing that concept as well is the US government uh formally behind this no not at this stage but this this kind of fits a niche of uh you know we're the we're we're taking close pretty close to half of the taxpayers dollars uh we are expected to respond to crisises our our nation our our people want us to do that kind of work uh we need to be able to have options and have choices for doing that efficiently and smartly uh and and with our partners and with other nations as well we don't us doesn't have to be the first one to use this in a crisis response uh we've got a fire team of Germans trained now uh they may very well be the first ones to use this in a crisis okay and do you think that if more Americans knew about this system and about the project and the benefits of it do you think that more of them would be more supportive in getting the US to back it and to really get on board with it um I'm going to be interested to see how it develops um you know van Mr Gupta and I were talking uh there's a movement to bring this to The Burning Man festival in California uh as a as an expedient structure to the goes up which is I guess an Arts Festival is probably the best way to characterize it uh okay I got that wrong I'm sure it's an Arts Festival formally but it's uh kind of a different one uh not one necessarily that theod gets exposed to that often uh the uh just to kind of get an idea of how it's going uh and it' be nice to see where this takes off and goes to and um anything else you'd like to add no we did good we

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End of [338] RAW FOOTAGE Hexayurt Vinay Gupta Robert Vrtis Combined Endeavor. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [321](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md) Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012); the most closely related, [740](https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.md) Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at... (2017); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.