# CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In Conversation With Michael Mainelli (part 2 of 2) > One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [683], part 2 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/.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages. ## Where this source sits - Source: video, 2020-06-27 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected - On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024). - How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Social-safety ideas. - Career works it belongs to: - Cyberpunk (1984): The 1980s cyberpunk culture that came first; first computer a ZX81 in 1982. - Taming Black Elephants (2017): Singapore's former civil service head took up the black elephant idea in a lecture series and book. - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine) - Exploring Data Generated by Pocket Devices (2013): UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies paper: smart devices turn physical capital into... (suggested by machine) - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine) - 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: - black elephant: The black elephant term, from its naming to a Singapore lecture series. - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017. (through a work suggested by machine) - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine) - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine) - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine) - Topics: Open government & anti-corruption (13%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (13%); housing / house / quality (13%) - Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Black Elephant (5 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); basic income (4 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Cyberpunk (4 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); money creation (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); Shatner (3 here; 35 sources in all, earliest dated 2014, 1 undated); science fiction (3 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); collectibles (2 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); William Shatner (2 here; 32 sources in all, earliest dated 2019, 1 undated); black elephants (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); second hand (1 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2011) - Importance: core-text score 0.31 (1.00 is the top), number 233 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation - Related sources: - [760] [Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md): same career work: Cyberpunk - [562] [Vinay Gupta at The Promise of the Blockchain 2015 (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/562.md): same career work: Cyberpunk - On the same works, just before: [206] [Vinay Gupta's Big Idea: An Identity Layer for Your Things (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/206.md); [731] [Vinay Gupta l The Internet of Agreements l Meaning 2017 (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/731.md); [770] [Grounded Gabbin' with Vinay Gupta (on the meta-crisis) (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/770.md) - On the same works, just after: [248] [Vinay Gupta Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/248.md); [247] [Hexayurt Interviews Hexayurt Footage From The... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/247.md); [723] ["Saving the Climate with Real World Asset NFTs" by Vinay... (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/723.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: CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In Conversation With Michael Mainelli, video, 2020-06-27, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [683], https://guptaoption.com/texts/683.md. Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps. ## Passages, part 2 of 2 [37:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=2246s) you think will vote in the direction which is correct so uh you know this is a medical issue i'm going to delegate that vote to my friend bob krupal's medicine this is a uh an international relations issue okay that one's going to go to michael oh this is an environment issue that one i won't control i'm going to cast my votes myself so it provides this way of creating kind of like micro representation and also the the issues themselves the the experts help to define those issues is that right um so yeah my take on it has always been that you need two tiers of experts the first group decide what the issue is about and then the second group come along and you know kind of provide options on it but the the hitch was just interesting when you look at some of these experiments on people's fora they go by a variety of words but you know ireland's tried it others have tried it where they they assemble a representative group of people a bit like a kurt vonnegut novel uh or they chose they choose the average person to cast the one vote that day yes yes absolutely sorry i startled because any norm of raven just flew up my window i said i sent them over very hard just quickly uh you know is this the case that executive government has no future or is it just this could work well with it um so it's it's 300 years out a day as a model right i mean you know it's back to the horse and cart days and we haven't modernized it to keep pace with technology so executive government yeah for sure but the representation of the will of the people to the government could be massively overhauled and then the transparency of the government systems you know nobody really knows what's happening inside the departments and the departments have enormous implementation power so a kind of structural opening out i think is extremely important um because we've got the ability to do it now and we didn't have the ability to do it 300 years ago and if they had i mean if i really want to upset americans i say what do you think the american founding fathers would have done with america's political structure if they had the internet as a starting point you really think they would have picked you know an x on a piece of paper once every four years and that was the end of your participation they would have laughed until they fell over if you knew that was how you run your democracy in the age of the internet you know what would jefferson have said it's difficult to see a lot of people understand what [39:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=2396s) intellectual radicals they were yes jeff jefferson and washington owned slaves yes they were large landowners but politically they were at the forefront and they were in many ways technologically constrained you know you had to send a whole cart from deepest virginia up to boston because that was the corridor uh and it was not an easy thing to do not an easy thing to do and i mean you know like uh the the hamilton musical you know there's a whole bunch of fussiness in that and i don't know how historical it is my american uh early history is patchy oh it's pretty bad uh about the fact that the deal was they were going to move the capital closer to the south because it was easier for them to get to it right we have no such constraint right what is going on here um so that that notion of so if we're all about founders intent which is quite a popular position in america founders intent is not that you run the country on paper with elections every four years that is crazy talk so that question of what would we do if we were genuinely going to make a democracy that work in the world that we're currently in i've never heard a good answer for that but it's nothing like this yeah this is where you and i sort of maybe have often parted ways which is to do with uh i tend to define uh money as technology communities used to trade debts across space and time and then within that fiat currency to me is the trading of tax credits that's that's what i i call it uh yeah i can see trevor hilder and bob mcdowell uh piping up with the trevor says you know isn't the us dollar in reality and global currency backed by oil uh bob mcdowell is looking at the confidence in in any currency of whatever spec but the thing to me is that government is a monopoly on the use of force in a specified geographic area therefore uh the monetary system of course and one of the problems i foresee in a lot of this is that the maintenance of that geographic area leads to increased tensions in defense terms so i'm sort of curious about uh about where that goes yes so huh very concisely uh agricultural land used to be the generator of value so governments became things which herded out agricultural land but now agricultural land is one percent of the uk economy and it's not much more for america and in a lot of cases agriculture is actually a cost center rather than a profit center because it has to be massively subsidized or it just stops in rich countries so what the state really protects at [42:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=2546s) this point is trade right it takes us back to the world traders but really what we're interested in is protection of trade and protected trade routes and that work is largely corporate now right the corporations manage trade in the same way that the government's manages land and because we haven't recorded the corporation's political rights or put them under democratic control we have a position where one part of the government manages archaic systems which is land and we can control it and the other part of the government manages trade and it manages the modern systems and these systems are out of control democratically um so i think that we need to go and we need to think of governments as things that manage value rather than things that manage land and from there it becomes much easier to see what governments really are in terms of what we do about this um i think that the city-states are in the long run going to turn out to be the only things that could cope with the rate of change and then the question is how do we manage the hinterlands around the city-states well city states are certainly taking a hit with covid which is uh given that their core advantage is intensity well you can see it's all up in the internet wasn't that if you can't get that intensity but that's for another chat i'm already getting things like please do pass on my thanks to Vinay for this fascinating thought-provoking talk um which is a sign sadly that we've come to the end of our three quarters of an hour but i did say to you that you had an opportunity to ask ask the audience to do something what is your aspen um so there's a subgenre of science fiction called cyberpunk which was very big in the 80s and 90s and my request is that people go back and read an anthology called mirror shades which was kind of one of the seminal collections of cyberpunk uh or if you just want the kind of quick and gory details a role-playing game like a dungeons dragons thing called cyberpunk 2020 which i played to death in the 1980s uh and um well i mean we're now in 2020 and it's quite funny to see how it's all turned out so yeah back back to the x-files i must say hey i have read uh mirror shades and so i i too would commend it as a very good anthology of a very important genre uh from people like my dear friend uh neil stephenson uh so you know wrote to snow crash and kryptonomicon and others so um i i think this is a a really fascinating ask because uh it's a bit like you know take your five or whatever or eat your greens and eat your fruits [44:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=2696s) folks uh Vinay's asking you know read your sci-fi please future shot fire began becoming because it's the literacy of the present you know like the brontes are all very well uh if you have bronte problems but right now what we've got is crypto problems and stability of government problems and corporate takeover policing problems and that's all cyberpunk material well i would commend the folks to to think that if you go to the gresham college website progression.ac dot uk there's a fascinating uh lecture given by neil stevenson [45:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=2725s) where he points out it's not so much science fiction as speculative fiction and he divides that from uh from normal fiction normal fiction being sort of about relationships uh and and speculative fiction being about what if i could change one thing in the world what would the consequences be and taking that to the extreme but that's for another day um i just wanted to end on one final final question vinnet the fs club is uh is about technology and finance but it has a bull bear move motif so looking to the future are you bullish or are you bearish um so in a world where solar panels are cheaper than coal and they're getting cheaper by 10 15 20 every year it's impossible to be long-term bearish right yeah free energy falls from the sky and the microprocessors are incredibly cheap and we're gonna work this out right um but if we don't figure out how to tear down not fit for purpose structures at 50 times the pace we're doing it the oil companies are going to continue to bribe the governments to do the wrong thing and to subsidize the hell out of them and the world will go to hell in a hand basket before we clean up you know it's how deep a trough do we dig for ourselves before we apply the technologies to build ourselves a functional utopia rather than applying the technologies to build an enormous pet and then bulldoze ourselves into it which is what we're doing now well you make a great economist on the one hand and on the other but i'm glad to see you're basically uh optimistic which uh i think we should always be you know oh if we didn't have better times yeah if we didn't have the cheap solar panels i would be very pessimistic but we do so at that point we should just get on with this all right well i'm gonna have to drag this to close sadly and i do meet saturday and perhaps you can have you back for a couple of the subjects that you've spoken about whether it's a sci-fi or what materials doing or some of the stuff about stuff or climate change i'd be absolutely delighted but i must do three sets of thanks so you can hold on for a minute today my first set of thanks is very clearly to our sponsors without you we would be uh incapable of doing this and we do genuinely really appreciate the fact that you let us arrange this widely and freely without any editorial control which is lovely many of you provide goods and services that are important for the four major areas that vinay was talking about and i look forward to seeing you again i would like to thank you the audience uh without you there's no point in doing this [47:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=2875s) and i and appreciate all the comments and questions you haven't had time to get around to quite everything uh but it really has been uh super to see you getting involved in this we do uh have another webinar tomorrow and it's not sci-fi although it might sound it quantum resistant encryption maury shank who wrote a report with me a while back is going to be talking not about quantum computing so much as oh my gosh it's a threat from the skies but what can we practically do about it today and there are some things uh simple things he's going to recommend and it should be a fun discussion anyway meanwhile uh my biggest thanks must go to juvente i count you as a friend and i'm delighted that you spent the time with me today unfortunately in this modern wfh work from home uh office office on the road uh community it's a little hard to let everybody get on the call to give you applause so i will represent everybody uh with my uh with my traditional thank you gong and i would like to thank you very much uh for your time today and we hope to see you again soon really fun michael really fun thanks everybody and catch me on twitter if you got more questions okay bye all ciao --- End of [683] CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In Conversation With Michael Mainelli, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt. Read next: next on the same works, [248](https://guptaoption.com/texts/248.md) Vinay Gupta Thought Menu on Enlightenment (2020); the most closely related, [760](https://guptaoption.com/texts/760.md) Vinay Gupta - Across the Abyss: From Myth to Reality @... (2020); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.