# test (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [384], 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, 2014-09-17 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs. 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): Shelter and water talk; its title hides it from search.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (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)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (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: Tweets & captured social feeds (14%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Berlin (7 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); social enterprise (1 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); refugees (5 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); skills (4 here; 67 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); humanitarian innovation (1 here; 9 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); refugee camps (2 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); too cold (2 here; 40 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 7 undated); too hot (2 here; 42 sources in all, earliest dated 2008, 6 undated); recycling (1 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Pakistan (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.29 (1.00 is the top), number 257 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [752] [Vinay Gupta: The Cities That Will Walk Away (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/752.md): close in content (cosine 0.96)
  - [702] [Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [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); [314] [EMF2014 hexayurt talk Hexayurts, Distributed... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/314.md)
- On the same works, just after: [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md); [311] [Vinay Gupta - Proof of Work / IAmSatoshi (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/311.md); [310] [Engineers Without Borders Sheffield Plywood Hexayurt How To (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/310.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: test, video, 2014-09-17, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [384], https://guptaoption.com/texts/384.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=0s) Okay. So, it's live. Is it camera? Microsoft. Let's try that camera. Let me just use the built-in one. Oh, there you go. Just use this. Good enough. Good enough. Let me try the external again. Hello everyone. Yeah, we're live. It's happening. change lens. No, don't need to change the lens. We'll just keep the light a bit open. We can turn on the one at the screen and um I'll just It's done. So, I can just take the card and we've got streaming basically working. It's okay. It's okay. Okay, great. That's good. Okay. Don't take it off. But he'll take it off here. Yeah. Let let me uh let me tweet the link out too. Excuse me. So I just connect to this. At some point somewhere I should be able. Okay, that's a very disturbing background. Let me just change the background.

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=150s) [Music] I'll be good to go in couple of minutes. Any questions you can quit Right. So that's extended desktop. What do you want to Can we mirror mirror this one? Yeah. So we can do like this. Yeah. Only now I can't see what I'm doing. Can we There's no way to just mirror them. Um I'll just Oh.

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=300s) Bloody AV. It's always problematic. We've just got live stream working. So, you know, it'll be archived on the internet and all that. Here we go. Okay. Fantastic. Uh ma'am Right. [Music] Okay. We all comfortable? Shall we begin? Could we turn maybe some more lights on at this end because the Yeah, the video will have a really hard time in darkness. Yeah, that's right. So, I'm Vinay Gupta of a thing called the hexayurt project. And, uh, this video out there is a video that some random folks off the internet building a uh, the finish here will look like a small kind of conic hexagonal house, kind of low wall, and then there roof. You can see they're monkeying around [Music] and hundreds of hours built all kinds of places, all kinds of context, all kinds of reasons, an awful lot of burning because Burning Man is the perfect intersection of absolutely shitty camping conditions and money. um you know you're dealing with a price insensitive market. They've got any kind of shelter they like because they're spending hundreds or thousands their shelter for the event. They're downloading things from the internet and building the damn thing of kind of open building where you download the plans, you buy the materials online, you buy local hardware store, you do the assembly yourself and you kind of bolt the entire thing together, check out your own resources and a shared design. that proess is at the heart of what you might think of as an open design process that might eventually transform the development world. So I'm going to be

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=450s) talking about is firstly how this kind of design tool works in the case of the head and I'll talk a bit about the limits of that space then other technology in this family of kit that could eventually sort out other problems that we have in chapter and then finally how that interacts with the rest of the world as an approach to getting that kind of stuff done. Does that make sense? That's the basic approach. I just realized I don't have timers on how long. So, uh I'm just going to leave this [Music] running invent the thing when some random person I think tank says, "Hey, could you make a shelter for refugees that they could take down again and move with them on a track?" um your question about five or six years before that any waste. So the hex project has gotten to where it is through a series of questions, right? Could you make a dome with no waste? Could you make a refugee shelter that could be taken down, transported and put back up again and like tens pieces and you do that? Once we had an answer to those questions, you would think that we could then immediately have gone back to the NGOs and said, "Hey, that thing you wanted, we've got one." And initially, this is what I thought would happen too. And I went over to them, hey, we've got one. And they said, "Oh." And then nothing happened for five years, right? To absorb innovation into the existing corporate and bureaucratic structures. And this is a theme that will come back to over and over again as we think about this. How do you get ideas which actually work in the field back through all the way to Geneva which is kind of like the salmon spawning river for humanitarian innovation and then back down all over the world right you have to get to Geneva and then back out again it's a really long way so um we start building these things at Burning Man for recreational purposes but also because it's a very very nice hard weather condition testing area the weather is pollen and so uh well what is it 40° C heat 45 45 right and lows of something like what seven subzero subzero really sometimes it's subzero actually that's horrible right and you know this

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=600s) is some people's idea fun Mr. think care. chain, right? jack have to go buy one. Kind of makes sense. Last year we built on the order of a thousand of these things. Four or five small companies selling them. Huge investment of time and energy from a very broad spectrum of people built them. Right? There are something like 20 designs at this point from about 12 or 15 different designers. Big ones, small ones, funky folding ones. ones which are still in the back and they should be on the desk for demo. Ones which quake ones which look like ants infused from the distance. Does anybody know what I'm talking about? The celestial emperor's benevolent emporium knowledge by borers. Right. So here so no one's made one of those by the way. Well depends who you know. You should see what's in Ian's back garden. Ian, by the way, is the fight that came up in this m. Yes. Can't escape responsibility now. Right. Yeah, we're missing all the good stuff. Okay. Anyway, while we're while we're Yeah. See, there is done. So a technology that is established in the open source game, no copyright, no patent, no funding. There's no hexayurt charity, there's a company, there's no LLP, there's only an open source design pool. The reason we don't take money for it is because we want to be a 100%

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=750s) social enterprise, right? It is an enterprise, but it's an enterprise which is only operating inside of social capital. No financial capital touches it. And this is how we make sure that we're not seen as being in competition with the NOS's for donor dollars. And it's how we make sure that hexayurt activity doesn't pull money out of other aid projects, right? And this is extremely important to us because we don't want anybody to turn around and say, look, you know, you guys have been pulling all of this money out of other aid projects and the result of it is that you've wasted all this time and energy, right? All doing it for their own purposes out of the went the universal response is it is too cheap and it lasts too long. Right? And the reason that this is an issue is that when you've got s We have it completely saturated by the refugees from the Iraq war, right? The area was just jam-packed with refugees at that point. Couldn't set another refugee in the entire area. Then Syria kicked and lost twothirds of the people living in Lebanon were refugees, right? The the actual Lebanese live in a kind of thin strip towards the coast. you go in land, it's just enormous numbers of displaced people. And that's true all around the region. So inside of that context, once you realize that we're at the end of the existing approach to handling refugees, we've got no more capacity for it, you have to start doing some actual innovation. So we're finally at the point where we might be able to get a direct connection from Black Rockck City in America where we've got the experience in the scale straight out to the refugee camps of the Middle East. but without having to go through the Geneva processes in the process. And this is an example of what you might think of as south south collaboration in as much as we're not coming from the abodess of money, power and government funding even though it's only south south in as much as I happen to be half Indian. Right? What we actually mean when we talk about south south collaboration is peer collaboration rather than this notion that you have a kind of uh emperor's new

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=900s) not emperor's new map Pentagon's new map global orthodoxy at the center which is the place where all innovation happens. The idea that you have to drag an idea to Geneva prove it to Geneva and then Geneva will push it out all over the world for you. This is no longer how innovation happens in any real field. And the fact that the humanitarian world exists inside of an innovation bubble for about 50 years is about to end very shortly. It's going to end with this book. We're going to put cell phones in refugee camps and there'll be real-time reporting of conditions and appeal things like transparency and funding, right? Innovation is inevitably going to arrive because the phone is a universal opening device. Cans, bottles, beers, governments with me so far? Does this kind of make sense? Right? And you know the the notion that you can simply make the things you need to survive out of the stuff you have around you. Right? Survivalists think in those terms. Makers think in those terms. All of our ancestors thought in those terms. You know, my ancestors on the Scottish side were uneducated peasant farmers that basically beat what they wanted out of pieces of wood using shovels. More or less. They might have been a little better at that. the Indians were somewhat more civilized. Um, but when you get right down to this, it's always been a hu practice to make what you need to survive out of what you had around you. The idea that we've displaced all of this, the end of literally globe spanning industrial supply chain and most of us have very little ability to make anything, never mind what we need to survive, is not condition of the majority of the people that live in poverty in the world. Most of the people that are poor are poor specifically because they do make what they need to survive themselves. It's not very economically efficient. That's why we call them rural agriculturists, peasant farmers, 1acre farmers and so on. Right? So what we have here is a kind of uh pivot, right? Right now what you can make by yourself to survive without industrial mass production and supply chains is so limited that if you live that way, you'll be very poor. But as we get better technology and newer technology, the prospect arises of the ability to have essentially industrial self-sufficiency at either a village level, individual level using the same kind of progression in technology that Leia was talking about. And the notion that there are two worlds, a kind of rich world, the poor world, first world, third world is only true in spending power. It's no longer

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=1050s) true in technology base. This is a phone that was designed for the development world. It actually works basically fine apart from the fact that it seems to have an operating system crafted today. Anyway, um Google Cardboard. Anybody heard of it? Couple not. Google Cardboard. So Google Cardboard is to my mind the very spirit of technological leaprogging. You take a cardboard box made to fit your face like this and two plastic lenses on stocks. And then you take your smartphone and you slot it into the front and it is ghetto virtual reality. Yeah. Right. And it's not a joke. It works. I've been in it. So virtual reality on smartphones in villages in thatch with mud brick walls where they're farming using the same techniques they used a thousand years ago within two years might take as many as five in the areas that are so beautiful right same thing with bitcoin ethereum phone based clients three connect to the distrib table blockchain right and all of a sudden you discover is you need only a very thin slice of hyper modernity to connect you to the full weight of what we think of as the cloud and this is a completely different model of the world from anything we expect so far. So if you take the pest agriculturist lifestyle in the low knowledge condition where they don't have access to university education or YouTube and you drop in smartphones with all of the information about how to do new kinds of manufacturing, new kinds of thinking, new kinds of resourcing, the question is what can you get out of that? How much can you transform? what actually happens in the real world if you've got access to the physical infrastructure that would be typical of the one to5 a day community with the knowledge infrastructure which is typical of the 21st century west. Do you see this notion of a fusion between this third world style material base first world style knowledge base? What happens in that fusion? Um and the answer is nobody really knows. But let me sketch out a couple wines possibility. There's an African charity called Oneacre Fund. And Oneacre Fund has a guy that comes around to your farm

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=1200s) on a bicycle or motorbike once every few weeks for a year. And you pay him something like $100 in privilege. And at the end of that, your harvest has doubled. And from the additional money, you pay the man back the money that it cost him to come out and visit you, plus a little extra. Right? It's basically a micro credit institution. They're doubling the agriculture using techniques like teaching people how to plant maze properly. Typical maze practice is plant maze 6 in apart. You make a 6-in deep hole and each hole you put seeds and the result of this is the maze grows terribly overcrowded and you know the theory is one for the ground, one for the birds and one for you. But the practice is maze to grow over itself and just doesn't work. It's possible this is because they've got access to that maze seats their ancestors did. It's also possible that it just never worked. New practice 9HR 9D one seat per hole 50% more mates in a single intervention which is clearly something that you've learned off YouTube. Uncle see this video? Yeah. What about it? This is how they plant maze. We're not trying it. We're going to be trying to corner. Okay, fine. Whatever. Get out my hair. Right. Next year, boom, problem solved. Bioand filters, bucket, concrete bucket, plastic bucket, any kind of bucket-l like thing. Alternating layers of sand and gravel into the top. You pour water. It filters very slowly through and comes out. After a while, you got a nice big thick layer of evil looking pond scum on top. And the evil looking pump scum is made of aggressive biology which basically takes all the nutrients out of the water and eats anything that goes by that looks weak. And most of the things which make human beings ill are pretty weak when they're outside of the body. They're not designed for high temperatures, low temperatures. They're not designed for direct attack by aggressive uh protozoa. You know, these things are pretty tough. So what comes out of the end of that pipe is generally speaking very close to a pathogenic very very little survives that process because the nutrients get stripped out. Most of the bugs get eaten and then the rest of them tend to die as they make their way through the dark cold nutrient poor residual area of the filter. How much does it cost to do make a filter like that? If you've got a couple of old plastic buckets or some cement afternoons worth of work, right?

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=1350s) And I'm sure there are good ways of doing it and bad ways of doing it for local materials and all this thing. But as long as the filtration rate is about right, the filter will function. So it's pretty easy to test whether you have it right or wrong. The water comes through too fast, failed filter. So breakthrough in agriculture, breakthrough in water. You guys seen gas stoves? Find a quick link. That'll work. So stove is a super stove that hobbyists are making at home. Go back to you actually see the flame burn. Oh, move on. Motion graphics. by idiots. I don't care. Show me the content. Right. That's burning advanced combustion made out of bean cans. And there are a variety of charities manufacturing variations of these things. But you know, do you think if you were in a slum in India, Africa and South America, you could watch a video like this actually make a gas, right? Do you reckon you've access food is 2 million lives a year, right? What else do we have? Right. Too hot, too cold, hunger, thirst, illness, injury. So, too hot, too cold, hexayurt, improved clothing, this kind of stuff. Uh, hunger, improved agriculture. First, well,

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=1500s) Um thirst and so airborne disease all right um hunger thirst illness we got airborne disease we got waterborn disease right um malnutrition got substantial leverage in all of these things um injury Right? Can we do anything about pervasive violence or fall of the size of trucks? Probably not a lot. Right? But if you get the basic infrastructural problems of life sorted out using simple technology that you'll learn by downloading stuff from the internet, how far can you get? It might be worth uh noting here that one of the identified drivers of kind of endless problems and law is that people don't have. Third year innovation by underpaid academics. together this of blocking most of the worst sequences of poverty. Somewhere between six 10 basic technologies which manufacturable with or industrial supply chain materials

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=1650s) like sheet metal anywhere in the worldly by hand. And if youology is not going to stay static because new things will make them they'll tinker with them they'll make new ones evolve you get regional variations and what will come out with that is completely new ecology. It's like 20 people. It's the only one in the world shelter center. I think 30 people said we Yeah. And [Music]

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=1950s) Yes, I wonder about that. We could kind of the live stream actually worked or not. No way to tell. Sort of. So I don't know really whether there is any way to organize that many people with that little money. Right? There is speculation about using things like Bitcoin. But you know when you're dealing with people whose primary kind of microeconomy runs in just cold hard cash and not much of it getting a billion people to put a dollar a year into a bucket which would be the obvious solution to this. It's very hard to imagine how you'd actually implement that. Right? But again, you know, you take something like this and you start talking about Bitcoin. You know, if somebody was out there doing kind of Bitcoin Gandhi thing, right? Then you could potentially have very large numbers of poor people using efficient microp payment mechanisms to pull money into enormous technical journal could actually go out there and implement some solutions. Oneacre fund. Yes. So basically you have like yeah I mean I definitely it's definitely possible. The other side of this is that most of the stuff that is titled appropriate technology is just [ __ ] right? It's really you know 10 years ago they went out there with improved stoves and the improved stoves were actually not that good. bunch of new research on wood fires that shows that carefully tended wood fires are much better than the vast majority of improved stoves. You know, I would say that it's only now that we're beginning to see gasification stoves that are actually better than fire still tended by skilled people within the last 5 years. So when there was NGO money pushing these technologies, albeit tiny little chunks of it, people always had a tendency to overpromise and underdel.

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=2100s) Oh, it's completely amazing. Just give us more funding. you take out a few locals like yeah this is a this is kind of smoky and and you know and and the feedback tends to get broken in the loop because you don't have a direct connection between the fun and the consumer yeah exactly so you wind up without the necessary connection between the engineering and the finance to produce high quality innovation uh whether that would change if we had a kind of kickstart starter style approach to this. Hard to know. Hard to know. Yes. stuff directly in the field. I think that that could work very well. I mean, imagine if we had a Kickstarter in say, I don't know, Cairo for shade drones. Shade drones. Jay's working on this thing with a drone that flies between you and the sun and it provides you with an umbrella of shade. Well, does not right now. I mean, I've had to think about it. It's technically fairly doable. You should have talk about it. Um, do you see that that notion that you would need some kind of distribution network for physical objects, you know, per language group, per city might work well in urban areas. Um, and I suppose the bottom line is somebody's going to try it, right? You know, there's going to be some Nigerian kid with shed and a design for something that's going to look at Kickstarter and say, "Why don't we have one in Nigeria? Let's actually try and build this." So management absolutely absolutely I did a project that got about 90,000 sorry I did a project that got about 90,000 of those into Pakistan and at the time they were just good enough technologically they were a bit yeah a bit [ __ ] not quite great they're all right um and now the lanterns are five times as good and they're selling like hot cakes straight straight from China, you know, enormous sea containers that go from China to Africa and are just distributed locally, you know, no white guys in the loop, which is always my sign of a successful process. No, seriously. Right. Because if you've got if you have something

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=2250s) which requires western capital and western skill to operate, it's probably operating in some kind of postcolonial gear. Some Western power is using that to squeeze the third world. Otherwise, there wouldn't be white guys in the blue. Right. When you see Africans buying direct from China, you know, this is south south trade. Yeah. Actually, we just want you to send us one of those. We'll put you in zlotki. Okay, right. Anything where you've got European or American involvement, you have to say, how is there so much squeeze in this process that we can afford to pay a white salary out of it? Yeah, absolutely right. In the same Walmart is the only thing that's keeping America stable. If Omar closed tomorrow morning went bankrupt, you would have, you know, massive civil war in America within about 48 hours. People had to pay real prices for this, right? It's the Chinese aid program of America. Um, so yeah, that any more questions? We should probably wrap up soonish. Yes. No. Okay. Well, I'll finish the thought on Walmart. Yeah, let me just finish the thought on Walmart and we can disperse. So, the thing about China is that it's doing the industrial age mass production better than anybody else's in an epic. So, if you're a peasant farmer, you know, you need access to industrial materials for things like sheet metal. There's just no way around it. You might also want high-tech artifacts. So instead of regifications, uh, sorry, instead of a bioan filter, you might want something like a Sawyer filter, which is basically analysis technology. In that kind of situation, by the way, they're dirt cheap, $20. In that situation, the question is, do you then wind up with a feudal relationship where China is extracting natural resources, doing the manufacturing, and then selling these people back, producing or do you wind up with something like an egalitarian balance of power where you actually set fair prices? And this is almost entirely dependent on whether the West prevents China actually putting military boots on the ground in Africa. So the way that the English manipulated trade with India was they went in, they invaded, they set the prices in a way that was preferential to the UK and then they ran trade on a slope like this using guns

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=2400s) and anytime anybody asked for fair prices that the Chinese did, they just invaded the hell out and bombed them. So if China and Africa wind up trading on a level playing field because the Chinese don't have military power there, you could actually imagine quite a nice partnership between Chinese industrial production and African natural resource extraction. Uh same applies to South America. But if the Chinese begin to be able to set the prices using military force, you wind up the second round of colonialism which will be vastly more vicious than what happened in uh the European colonialisms because of modern technology and Chinese culture. So I watch that quite carefully. But my hope is that Western interventionism to stop the spread of Chinese power in Africa will actually result in Chinese getting a fair price, the Africans getting a fair price from the Chinese. This is really, really dark politics, but this is what we worry about. Thank you. Thank you.

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=2550s) I've just got one image for the tour. So if we can switch off the screen, so it's just one image on Twitter. So you should be able. Okay. And after that, you can actually switch off the screen so people don't get distracted if you don't want to. That's why I mean if we switch off the screen saver so it's just got that one image just behind me whilst I'm talking. Yeah, it's just that unfortunately screen saver just kicks in if if nothing is kind of moving around on the screen, right? That's why it takes over and all that YouTube thing that you see that's coming out from here. All right. So So that that's our problem. All right. Okay. So I tell you what, you turn on the beginning. You want to have that Twitter image later on. To be honest, just put it on at the end. On the app. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's uh it's just contact

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=2700s) BJ [Music] J A Y Cousins. Cousins. Yeah. Which one is that one? This one. Keep it real. Is it the one which says keep it real? Uh, a second. No, not this one. Uh, no. No, no, that's this one. Okay, cool. Um, I'll just download this picture. I'll download this picture. Drag it.

[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=2850s) H. Okay. It's not a very good uh picture. Yeah, that's why I was wondering about what

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=3000s) [Music] This is

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=3150s) [Music] online. Excellent.

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=3300s) she wants That's it. We want it to be insulated from both spaces.

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=3450s) same drilling on the end of the honey and then pair supply and uh short channel Yes. Is it [Music]

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=3600s) just principal statements. Are So, we got 35 minutes of tape and the SD card. All right. Are we all settled? [Music]

[1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=3750s) God, I have no idea. You want to talk about the map? Yeah. Um I'm I'm going to talk about um why it's awesome to make things in analog and why we shouldn't always assume that everything should be digital and high tech. All right. So you're not going to talk about So J, see that see that bright orange mug over there. Right. After this is over, make him show you how it folds into a flat sheet of plastic or you can drink it. I will I will show it. Yeah. Yeah. That will be the opening line. It's not just about the mug. It's not just about many things. many things of multiple. He started with the perfect map, then experienced the horror which is hyper capitalism and has since become a kind of like the Johnny Apple scene of anarchist maker spaces. Starting out in friendly environments like Berlin and then making his way to bigger complex scenes like half of Egypt and the secret police have not yet come for him and we'd like it to stay. Um he he's also recently had a bit of experience in the biological production of me. I'm sure I'll tell you what that right okay. Very good. Are we all sitting comfortably? Uh then I'll begin. Um so yeah what I'd like to talk about and what I'd like to address in this short presentation and also like to make it open. If at any point you want to disagree with me or start a discussion, then please do because I'd like this to be as interactive as possible because really at the root of most of what I do is about creating opportunities for dialogue and engagement whether it's dialogue with the world around us that we're actually engaging with it and saying okay maybe you could be different Mr. B or cup or Mr. can be or whether we can um actually create opportunities for people to connect and get to know one another as human beings and look at what they could do together and what they can make together. So I'm going to begin with this little cup which folds completely flat. This was the the start of my journey into international business which I don't really have enough time to discuss or talk about today. But the main reason I wanted to open and show this was that I developed this in my room uh over a period of a couple of days with a Stanley knife and a ruler and a cutting mat and I was able to develop a product actually a series of products um you could reach into my bag. I should have

[1:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=3900s) actually bought the series uh which I subsequently took to to the point where it was an internationally distributed uh product. We were selling this in 22 countries worldwide um very big in the US. We were producing it in China and I had to go down a broad learning path to really get to this point. However, the thing other than a standing knife and a scalpel to get to this point was a smile. the ability to connect with other human beings and to enable me to start a business with very little money and very little funding. Subsequently, the business took off and accelerated very quickly and I learned a lot of lessons about international production which I can't really go into now because it equally decelerated just as quickly. Meta story is probably that everybody that wanted a product bought one. We produced it thinking that we were at one point with the production can but we actually were at the peak and uh we produced and um we filled up the production pipeline. This a good say this is because they were engineered to last forever and they do. Yes, this is another point. This is where ideology meets capitalism doesn't necessarily work. Which was also what got me thinking when I closed down the company and shut it down. I reflected on the business that I created and in that reflection I realized actually by being the bottleneck by owning intellectual property having patents and managing the business and profiting from the business I also created a prison for myself where I was the person that everybody relied upon. I was Orico boy for seven years and I started to question how do we actually uh create products? How do we put things into the world without necessarily owning intellectual property and without going down this control paradigm route? How do we produce things anarchctically and how do we create spaces that enable this production and exploration? So, move to Berlin. I'm also using analog uh as a means of uh managing my presentation. So, I have objects here to remind me of what I'm talking about. So, the beer is Berlin. It's also social objects and social space. I moved to Berlin and I became heavily involved in the maker scene there. I began um co-organizing maker

[1:07:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=4050s) events uh within the community and it very quickly got out of hand just by doing something you very quickly find that you find other doers and other people that are interested. especially in Berlin, it has what I call a frictionless um environment for collaboration that you have a beer with somebody and before you know it, you're doing an event with them or you're creating a space with them or you're creating a product with them to the point where it actually gets out of hand very quickly. Um as a part of organizing these different anarchic events essentially where I would say to anybody you can come and make whatever you want. We have a 250 square meter space for example in BMY and you can come here and you can do a workshop, you can do a design, you can show the products that you make. I don't really care as long as you do it in a way that engages other people and we very quickly found that we had 60 uh different organizations and makers all who wanted to do something within this 250 square meter space. There were some people who wanted to organize it and control it. So what I actually said to them was you're on the organizational team, the organizational committee. So we brought that team out of a way that these people could plan and we could explore and we could really decide how we would best manage all of these different people coming into the space. But the primary objective of that was actually to get controlling energy out of the way so that people could show up and do their thing. The things that we did take care of were things like the furniture and the power supplies and things like that. And the event was a great success. We had something like 40 different activities taking place over over four days. some random things like somebody making half chewing gum through to bioplastic lamp shades through to laser cut products and uh 3D printed products. But the energy that came out of that also led to the forming of a community um which we were we identified we would like a maker space and beta house they sent a um email out to Fred saying we want to make a maker space at beta house which is a co-working space in Berlin is anybody interested I sent an email back and after an hourong conversation with beta house's founder he said okay you In April, we moved in in April to an empty

[1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=4200s) room with nothing available to us at all. And we said to people, "What would you share here? What would you do here? What would you create here?" And they brought their CNC machines that they've made at home. They brought their Maker Box, which is a form of 3D printer that they've made at home. They want to build a community exploring design thinking. I want to build a community exploring weaving. I want to build a laser cutter with other people. We ended up with five communities in less than a year just by granting people the permission to come and make stuff in that space. We populated it with furniture and inside of two weeks and machines and tools just by giving people the opportunity to contribute to that space. And the the reason I want to talk about this is that there there is there are some powerful tools at our disposal, but often we get distracted by the digital tools. But actually our ability to tell stories and to involve other people in what we're doing, I think is a more powerful thing that the maker community has to offer. That it creates these opportunities for people to engage and come together around what I call social objects. that in the act of making something they find an excuse to talk to one another that isn't necessarily alcohol which is in itself a a polarizing social object and I found this especially in Egypt I mean you can't really connect with Muslims over a beard there are some which I have but um most it's uh it's a taboo so gain in these shared acts of making and cocreation, you're able to actually forge connections with people that wouldn't normally connect um from different segments of society um and even different genders in certain instances. So, in my um work in uh in Aswan um I'm cutting a long long story short here, so I hope you don't mind. I'm going to jump around and then I'll stop for questions. But uh eventually I found myself in Aswan working with a community which was um at its core very conservative and on the island that I was working you have men and women that don't even talk to one another at

[1:12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZkHdJowyCs&t=4350s) weddings. You go to the wedding and there is a very strong separation within that community and also within that community whilst there are very strong family bonds and tight social connections that we can learn a lot from at the same time there wasn't um a sharing of ideas and a sharing of knowledge and passion about what they might want to do. So I did a very simple low tech intervention which is what I call a um this is a augmented real world augmented reality social media tool. This was a piece of paper that I invited them to stick on themselves discussing what they would like to share with one another and what they needed to help make their uh project a success. And this these community all of the people in the room knew one another, but this was the first time they'd actually communicated clearly what they needed from each other. One woman needed a camera to start a small project and she was pursuing a funding route. She spent seven months trying to get funding for one camera and it was offered by somebody else in the room and this was just one. They connected over different things and different instances and sometimes it's just about that. It's about that simple connection that real world connection and this real world connection is something I think we actually hide behind um social media can be something which powerful tool but I've been in geek spaces within Berlin where people have been trying to design apps that interesting people to have conversations with this is absurd it's obscene just go and [ __ ] talk to people. Excuse my language, but it's it's all too easy. And that's not just at the extremes. I think we're all guilty of this that we are to a degree we hide behind our technology and we're almost running away from our own humanity and our own human capabilities. And this is why I think it's really important to keep it real and keep it analog. I'm now going to come back to the boat because this is a a little learning also from my time in um in Aswan. I was living on a small island and one of the things I observed was this this was a community without any social media at all. Um and the the structures that they didn't have

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/384-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [384] test, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.