# CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In Conversation With Michael Mainelli (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [683], 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, 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 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=0s) well good day everyone and welcome to another fs club webinar this is part of our community's chest series this is where we have a feature a member of our community and let them get some stuff off their chest and today i'm i'm really delighted to have an old friend of mine here a young friend of mine uh Vinay Gupta vinay and i have known each other a number of years we'll be covering his life but i still have one abiding memory which is about three years ago we were both in stockholm and i was asked to chair a fireside chat with vinay and we were in the oprah kellen above the uh stockholm opera and just as the lights set in the distance bang up came the fire all around us it was all the torches on the outside of the building uh let's hope we don't have anything like that but maybe somebody will throw a community's chest full of money to us today anyway today uh i'm really looking forward to this chat just a couple of quick words firstly an enormous thanks to our sponsors uh as ever they are extremely tolerant allowing us to range widely across technology finance and social purpose and today we're going to be talking about uh social technical economic and political issues uh vinay is truly a polymath and you can read his cv and have read to cv already online uh my job of course is to try and get out of your way and on to our guest so the format today is a number of items uh kind of what's what's been they really working on what's the most surprising thing what's he find funny but we'd like to spend a bit of time on his thoughts on four themes the social technical economic political futures and we're looking forward to you asking questions the go-to webinar facility that you're using has a little question box so please feel free to send me questions and we'll have a conversation hopefully about 20-25 minutes of questions within a but vinay your background is rich and

[1:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=117s) i've pulled three items from it uh would you mind um just explaining what is a hex at a time uh sure so in 2002 i invented a refugee shelter and the point of this thing is that you can manufacture them in huge quantities because the walls are whole sheets of 4x8 just as it comes off the production line and the roof pieces are half sheets and it went on to be commercialized uh a variant and by an outfit called shelter uh shift pods or shift and they're now using them in refugee camps so we managed to get this thing all the way out and it's useful it's not bad it really is home to a place called burning man this big festival in america and a burning man they build about five to ten thousand units a year so it's one of the dominant shelters on the playa and it's all home construction people are building them themselves now another uh link in your little timeline this is your life because you were the project manager is that right for the uh the first launch of ethereum in august yeah the team the absolute edition uh yes so i joined the team late 2014 and my background during cryptography goes back into the kind of mid-90s um and the ethereum thing was the first commercial implementation smart contracts that looked like it would work um so i quit my job in academia joined the team and it's been amazing like we had no idea it would become as big as it has you decided you know that whilst you've done all of this which is exciting and ethereum continues uh quite strongly it's had an interesting history with uh fork and ethereum classic has had an interesting history with that very very famous dao incident uh but it's still it still plows along uh we all keep a very close eye on it and they're very interested in its further developments but what i think is also interesting is you decided that it needed a further extension is that not correct yes so the the whole point of smart contracts for me is that you could move around physical goods with the same kind of nuance and dexterity that you can move around various kinds of tokens right to try and bridge this physical digital gap um so Mattereum is a digital identity firm that works on physical goods and we issue these things called asset passports which are kind of legal identities for valuable things works of art star trek collectibles in fact our first partner is william shatner and so we have a variety of star trek

[4:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=267s) merchandise which shatner has signed uh with all the videos and all the proofs and so on on the blockchain so you get these very very very securely defined collectibles uh but that same mechanism could equally well be used for anything you know boats ships real estate you name it but it's really about this concept of just giving things proper names probably a small disclaimer that yen is somewhat involved in that project at a technical level but that's my point and and you know many of the people that have helped us along are people that we've asked you introduce us to uh yeah a good a good part of our intellectual capital is actually you know like boon city know-how anyway so aside from uh creating a currency worth tens of billions and rehousing the planet uh what is what is actually top of your entry at the moment uh so right now i'm working on a book uh called the future stuff for tortoise and it basically is a bit of a rumination all the things we've figured out about stuff in the process of building material uh a lot of work on supply chains a lot work on supply chain ethics um the other thing is i've been approached by some lovely people from south africa about doing digital identities for farmed rhino horn so uh the south africans and few other countries have decided that they're going to go after rhino farming in a big way because the chinese really love rhino horn they're all over africa and this brings up a number of moral questions i don't know whether we're going to do the project or not but it's definitely a thing that is on the top of my mind right now i've learned a lot about rhinos in the recent conversations apparently temperamentally they're basically a lot like horses they're just a three and a half ton horse that can flip over a car yeah this is a long running thing you know the whole should we trade it should we manage it the whole site is endangered two weeks ago apparently the south african government changed the law and now it's all good so i don't know whether we're gonna do it or not but it's an amazing it's an amazing thing to look at um i i put a couple of things here to help the audience get a flavor of your personality so uh

[6:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=397s) what's the most surprising or thought-provoking thing you've seen uh lately so over the quarantine i rewatched a huge amount of the x-files basically because i just wanted something to do and um surely enough it turns out that the x-files is hugely predictive of modern culture uh we've got all this uh ufo stuff that's been released by the us government here's our footage we don't know what this is maybe you've got some ideas um we've got the whole bill gates vaccine conspiracy and the bill gates vaccine conspiracy is almost exactly what the water three seasons of the x-files are about this idea that people's smallpox vaccinations are being used to implant chips that allow you to track them is what the whole arc is about and it showed on the fox network which as we know is also the home of things like fox news so i have a feeling that the kind of right-wing vaccine conspiracy thing is a dimly remembered imprint of the x-files from 20 years ago that's not being recycled as truth um one of the things that's interesting versus uh we were chatting the other day together about uh transparent aluminium where are we and that's actually uh out of star trek isn't it yeah and i mean it's amazing how much of the science fiction stuff comes around you know voice control transparent aluminum ai that almost kind of sort of works i don't know whether you're teamed with uh william shatner captain kirk uh exit now one of the surprising things for our audience uh might be that you despite being a somewhat iconoclastic techie uh an arco type nerd are actually a member of the venerable worshipful company of world traders in the city of london it's not correct absolutely great well let's uh let's have a quick look here what was your funniest thing you've seen lately uh so this is a lovely little cartoon from smbc uh and i i quite like this idea that the robot rebellion would be the animals as well i mean it's just kind of like we are making kind of a mess of the world um and you know who's to say what robots and dogs might accomplish together well there's the hitchcockian birds up there that's for sure and i saw the birds on the right now should i be worried um i always worry about the birds um i'm slowly becoming surrounded by ravens where i live they they just they're slowly going further along the balcony i haven't found one in the kitchen yet but it's only a maritime i did realize strange i have an entire raven colony outside my door too [Music] well i wanted to structure this

[9:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=547s) discussion a little bit to help the audience so we spent sort of uh eight five minutes getting to know you a little bit but that way you want to know about your thinking uh and just to help the audience i cheated and went out and thought how can we cover sort of four areas and i wanted to look really at the old rumsfeld quote where he defines the world actually he divides the world into three unknown unknowns no unknowns and no unknowns uh the fourth one which he does isn't in his quote but i'm sure he's aware of was unknown knowns things that you aren't even aware are important but you know them quite well um so for example a doctor who does well because he's got a grave or she's got a great bedside manner and doesn't realize that when they move to telemedicine or something like that but there's another category which surrounds all of this in a way which is ignored knowns uh and i i would put code 19 firmly into that uh because we've had pandemics in the past we even had a film uh contagion in 2011 which laid things out very very well oh yeah you know almost almost the script uh for this uh they couldn't listen to the center for disease control as their advisors when creating it um so that was the sort of uh thoughts but you then pointed out to me vinay that uh my concept of ignored knowns had long been around do you want to chat about um some other african animals well so the the ignored knowns kind of come in two kinds right there's the kind that you focus on which is sort of implicit knowledge or things that were in front of you that you didn't see uh and i because i'd be doing a bunch of disaster release stuff but very interested in the other branch of this which is things that people see but they don't want to think about it's like two places in the chain of consent uh conception where things get interrupted so we call this the black elephant because it you know ten years ago we thought of it the black swan was very fashionable on the bottom and what we kept finding was that the problem wasn't black swans it was things that everybody knew about but they didn't want to think about they didn't want to deal with pandemic flu economic collapse uh civil wars all of these big risks asteroid strikes that are completely understood but nobody's doing anything about them so we call these black elephants and the black elephant has quite a trip it's got written about the new york times new scientists um peter hoe who's a big wheel in the defense world in singapore teaches it um so yeah the black elephant has gone on a good a good wander around and now we're knee deep in the black elephant stampede yeah well it's one of the things uh i've been deeply involved with elephants for

[11:37](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=697s) years one of the things that i've always taken away was uh vivec of i fought in india pointing out they're very large highly intelligent migratory beasts and that for years we've ignored the migratory yeah we chose together four subjects to range around uh social technical economic and political and uh i'll start really with the first one uh and just to get the audience going on

[12:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=723s) uh this type of a look ahead uh we thought we'd spend a couple of minutes on the end of the office and we'll we're living it right i mean you know you're at home i'm at home uh we've got our headsets and our cameras and all the rest of that stuff um um you know the 20-foot commute i it's been kind of an aspiration in technology for a long time programmers generally love working from home uh is it gonna catch up with the rest of the world i don't know i mean do you think like can finance function this way everybody making their deals from their back gardens or do you really need the proximity well i think i think the key thing here is we've been struggling for years with the whole notion of using is what we've i think big lesson we've learned is mixed mode doesn't work very well i mean this stuff's been around for 20 years skype was a big trend-setting thing in 2003. and yet loads of people my age hadn't even used any of this until three months ago so you know what was what was preventing it and i think the truth is uh one people are hard to change behaviorally two we've all been on those horrible conference calls in a meeting room where one person is dominating the room because they've got the speaker phone and they can't see the interaction with other people we needed everybody to move at once however the early numbers appear to indicate that only about 25 of jobs could really be fully done from home and so the question is is that seventy five percent annoy adir in others you can't do anything about it or will it start to create as time goes on uh because a lot of that analysis is effectively based on historic analysis and a really good example to me is things like uh other psychiatry and telemedicine you know with uh potential gdp taken by health and being able to do all of that up front it doesn't turn up in the official numbers so i don't think we'll get below 50 but 50 is a big change what do you think um so i'm interested in it as a class divide you know that the middle classes can generally speaking work from home in the working class generally speaking after still turned up in the factory and that notion that you know work from home becomes an aspirational lifestyle because it indicates that you've become white calmer i think is on one hand potentially quite good environmentally and so on and on the other hand you just wonder what happens in the workplace if the workplace is the place where the people at the bottom of the pyramid are i've got a really cool comment slash question from bob mcdonald i think you know bob

[14:33](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=873s) we work at home how can we effectively disconnect from work or perhaps we should never disconnect from work comments please yeah i mean this is this is the crux of this is the two laptop lifestyle where you have you know one laptop or you've got your laptop for working your ipad for everything else and you need to segregate it by physical device so when the work laptop closes that's the end of the day wow yeah so well you've been living that life for a while so it's a it's a habit that you have to get into isn't it yeah i mean for us uh you know when we were um initially setting up material we all got apartments in the same neighborhood and that was a really good equilibrium we had about half of the company within a five minute walk uh and that was great that was exactly the right level of proximity because there was no office but it was you just wander over to you know vinay's living room and we'd sit around the kitchen table and then everybody would go home and do the actual work well i see two two uh trends one is fairly obvious which is uh changes in property structures so commercial property perhaps being less valuable with only a temporary bit about distancing maybe keeping the demand up a little bit uh next thing is of course for all working from home uh i want an extra 500 square feet in fact i'm actually doing up a room at the moment to turn it more studio-like so that'll change the demand for uh domestic but i think there's a third knock-on effect which is actually quality of life that people are gonna say well look if i'm actually at home i want to live some places that's nicer and that's this could push the the outer outer verbs or the rurals in different ways oh uh san francisco property prices uh informally are said to be in free fall like a rental not um purchase but rental apparently because the techies now the places like twitter said yeah work for home as long as you like people are just like montana colorado and here in london we've got some early indicators that some of the outer uh outer verbs are uh are actually uh going up slightly in value while the rest the general markets declining are leaking up relatively uh another point really is uh you know we've we've heralded the death of distance uh for ages we've also heralded the rise of the service economy and yet the service economy has always been uh seemed to be something that's hard to export and whilst we may not be uh exporting barber uh services like we may not be going to the barber ever again uh in our case my hair is actually my hair is actually never been longer

[17:03](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1023s) but the point really is is that could this actually lead to a boom could a positive aspect of this be a boom in service exports around the world i i mean the this is the white collar services right so um lawyers accountants audits all this kind of stuff in theory a lot of that work could go anywhere in the world um in practice you know i still wonder how much of it depends on trust and discovery um and you know if the work from home thing goes on for decades you know if it's just you know the economics switch tell them the priorities on this it's actually end of world war ii where women come into the workplace and suddenly the meaning of home changes because home is actually empty hours a day and now it's like the workplace is moving into the home so there's there these structural changes may be ratchets where it changes it never comes back and if that happens how do we build trust relationships with people that we're never going to physically meet um we've got three more subjects to cover but i'll just try and wrap this up because there's some interesting comments i'd like to feed into this remember our master our master former master adrena morton uh yes yes the worship of company world traders hello edwina uh she points out isn't this also a generational divide and that younger folk have less comfortable space to work in thomas parker uh points out if we could all work from home the word world's elite all moved to bali and andalucia or whatever's the current phrase but much of the developed world only has good weather four to six months of the year uh and angel gaviero bestiaro uh points out do we risk that many confirmed work from home occupations uh are more likely to be outsourced to cheaper labor cost locations which i think is an extremely interesting part because we might see a boom in service exports amongst accountants lawyers uh project managers consultants in the west but only temporarily because something i realized i don't care where these people are from uh since i get used to the ways of working so really good stuff there folks uh but let's move on to the next topic we were gonna sort of gas about and that was to have a look at the

[19:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1150s) technical and kind of the concept of total mediation and i think the bottom two photos from memory are actually uh from a fellow by the name of henry chong who presents regularly at burning man i think that's a picture burning man on the right in a right bottom where we would have seen many hex ears all right you can see one in the background there um so mclean's you know medium is the message and all the rest of this um you know we're having a conversation right now over a platform that somebody else owns and designs the affordances for uh and the notion of you know completely mediated life is that all of our contact with other human beings goes over platforms which are owned by third parties um and that is extremely disturbing right i mean in the long run there's no way that if corporations are invested with that kind of power they're not going to abuse it in dramatic ways and because the rate of technological change is so quick it's unlikely the government will be able to sensibly regulate those kind of uses you see a little of this with people that get like kicked off google and suddenly their websites go down and they can't talk to anybody and their email is gone and it doesn't happen very often but if people mistake you for committing major fraud that kind of stuff goes on um how are we to ensure the people have civil rights in an environment where what they're attempting to regulate is corporate behavior over what amount of commons do you see we sort of have a fork in that regard with the dark web now i know that's heavily tainted by uh drugs uh human trafficking weaponry you know all that but is there a need for some kind of effectively unmediated space where uh there are no passwords i i kind of launched myself into it that's segregated uh because i i remember when i started programming in the early 70s you know the password was there to make sure on time sharing machines somebody else didn't come along and accidentally right over your code it wasn't there to protect uh wasn't there to protect sensitive information my health records or my money it wasn't at all about yeah it was just a little device where we were all working mutually could we maybe set up a free zone like that well so about five years ago i figured out that the internet that i'd encountered first in the kind of early 90s felt the way it did because it was all academic privilege you know it was a bunch of nerds and there was an accountability mechanism if they behaved which was you wrote to

[21:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1300s) their system administrators and they got yelled at so you know it was not unregulated space it was incredibly tightly regulated space in which academic privilege was exercised as always has been so i think there's a role here for you know a kind of a a global village where every village has a sheriff right i think that you could have a system where you have accountability but it's community accountability and it's community accountability that's based around individuals reputations you know if you vouch for 50 people in your network that they'll behave themselves if they're on my platform and one of them misbehaves and i see you like this guy's out of line you know i think we need brokered trust for these kind of arrangements because the alternative is the kind of spam filled wasteland or the kind of stuff you see on the dark web um so i'm i'm in favor of really putting the sheriff back in town um because it's either going to be done by individuals of good character that make it take a leadership position in their communities or it's going to be done by underpaid drones working for faceless corporations to make horrible decisions well we're going to move on a little bit now this next subject here the sort of third area we wanted to have a little look at was an economic uh ignored known or black elephant which has been rising to the fore if we've if we've managed to successfully ignore uh coven 19 and pandemics since 2003 or the 2009 or the 2012 or or even the spanish flu or even the plague we know they're there we've actually ignored this is one with with a 100 uh casualty rate according to the scientists uh whatever the time period is one thing about 100 casually the way that things are going so this needs to be do you know to wonder in a way your book about stuff which i like great george carlin the sketch about stuff life is all about just stuff stuff right right yeah yeah um what what does the book have to say about this issue um so about half of the book is very specifically about carbon and footprint management and my feeling about this is that most of the stuff in the world is designed to basically be throwaway um and you know that doesn't have to be that way right if we design things for long-term value you know i buy it i use

[24:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1450s) it when i'm done i sell it the next user buys it and uses it and then they sell it um the actual market for say and high-end cameras is enormous if the cameras work for 20 years and at the latter part of their life they cost 300 right the problem that we have is that far too much of the expensive stuff that we're going to all this work to make breaks in his end is guarded so what i'm really pushing for is a model where we invest in long life of durable goods with the expectation that they'll be resold maybe dozens of times over their lifespan rather than the current model where the grooves degrade so quickly and the knowledge about the goods degrade so quickly that they wind up in landfills or they wind up being sold for 50 bucks when they are actually still worth 500. um so it's about fighting the loss of knowledge which goes along the second hand market yeah it is it is a definitely uh an area where i just don't see uh where we we're going to get society to pay for it an old story of mine is that i have my first debate on climate change city in 1984 that's 36 years ago and it ended with you know does society really want to pay because the costs are not insignificant yeah what's what's the choice you know there's a tough one but they're rounding errors when you compare them to defense budgets right i mean i think the answer to this is treaties because if we if the world's major military said right here's what's going to happen you know we're all going to spend 20 less on armament and we're going to put that money into carbon i think most of the world's militaries would take that deal because they don't want to be fighting in a resource-constrained desert global economy yeah they'd much rather prevent that now cove 19 gives us opportunity to think i mean it's had a number of facts one uh i love the statistic that more people have been saved through reduced pollution in china than died from uh covet 19 because of the slowdown of economic activity we've seen the potential we spoke earlier about homework but although it's a nice little three-month indicator uh it's miles away from what is claimed we need to achieve isn't that correct yeah i mean the co2 output drops or feeding the estimated as low as five or ten percent and it gives you a sense of like you know you could do a whole scale reorganization of society and still have only cut the carbon by a tenth of what we need to know i mean the u.s is if 17 tons per

[26:40](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1600s) person it needs to be about three tons per person you know the kind of lifestyle changes implied in cutting your carbon consumption by 80 are really large and i think this is the kind of warning signal of like okay guys re-existing the car you know rearranging the existing economy is not going to get you where you need to go right we have to think much more systemically and we've got decarbonization down here is economic because that's where we wanted to focus a lot of technical things we could we could talk about but what lessons can we learn from the economic response to coven about what should or shouldn't be done i mean here we have this thing of we keep printing money and it doesn't it keeps not causing inflation right so if we can print money and it doesn't cause inflation for coved bailouts we all be able to print money and not have it close inflation for things like decarbonization now that's naive but this notion that printing money is bad because it causes inflation has been such an end moment of doctrine forever that i just don't understand why we were able to print so much money and not have inflation and then not use that mechanism for other things now you and i were speaking i mean there's a fellow out here learning work because the title goes by asking about what if the money supply pyramid was inverted uh money creation was happening to sovereignty uh shan turnbull is always talking about uh can we move to some type of energy consumption sort of currency as george monbio i think is a something i'm quite fond of i'm not sure the first two but he talks about land value taxes uh do you think there's a way to reorganize the monetary system and the fiscal system uh to perform better against decarbonization or is it just a fairly straightforward if you want to do it get the job done um so market economies are really good for doing innovation but the practical business of utility level operations inside of society is almost entirely driven by regulation so i think that we're in a position where we're not going to get transformation of things like power utilities except through a very different approach to regulation also the financial impact i mean the obvious game plan here is that you pay people a basic income and then you proceed to break the economy and remake it into something that works in a carbon neutral way

[29:10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1750s) so if you have basic income you can handle the distortion of we have enormous numbers of people who've been thrown out of jobs and it takes the economy five years to figure out how to redeploy them but for those five years you're on basic income and you'll lose your house deal because we don't create that pattern the kind of economic restructuring you have to do to get the economy onto the green trajectory will cause revolutions um so i think your basic income is the social stabilizer and then once the social stabilizer is in place that's when you start breaking things because we don't break things we're not going to get this done it's an interesting yeah it's very very interesting adopting a very much a kind of a west coast to just break it going okay yeah yeah well well revolutionaries is nicely on too uh

[29:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1796s) you wanted to chat about whether or not politics was fit for purpose and i needed to find a slide uh as a bit of eye candy so i'm just typed in fit for purpose and up popped this extremely recent uh poster from the liberal democrats here in the united kingdom uh interesting to see what what what is it certainly a mainstream center perhaps center-left party uh getting this radical so is politics fit for purpose you wanted to chat about what needed to change and i'd be delighted to hear it yeah well i mean the problem is that we just can't get four-year you know democracy working properly you know the world changes very very very rapidly and a lot of the things that we need to deal with unfold over decades so this clocking of policy to you do it now and then four years later you harvest the result at an election means that if the problem doesn't really exist on a four-year cycle you can't get politicians to pay attention to it so the short term and the long term have both gone thrown completely out of the window so i think we need forms of continuous decision making the simplest one is the idea of continuous election of mps so um every three or four days one mp is re-elected and there is no general election so you just stagger the electoral dates for every constituency you know what constituency will be elected when and you just have a continuous electoral process because at that point the governments don't have the option of screwing everybody over in the first six months that they're in power and then slowly patching everything up until the next election it's interesting that you and i both have pondered this uh and then we we put forward a concept of continuous voting slightly different than continuous election in other words i could spark an election any time i basically get a vote a day and i can and i can save it up so i'm very happy with you um and then suddenly uh you know you're caught in bed with the wrong sort of person or whatever whatever gets michael and i say well i've actually i've actually got 730 votes and i now wish to vote against you right or or use it so in other words you've got this kind of ability and so the public can keep the politicians on a short tether by casting their vote every now i'll cast it but i don't have a horde politicians can try and appeal to the horde for major change and do that the other thing that we've been proposing and this is you know uh it speaks clearly your whole point about

[32:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=1946s) we're very bad at long term i don't think i think democracy is in some ways too good at making decisions we end up making a decision every day our problem is sticking to them yeah this in the united kingdom with heathrow we've seen it with hs2 uh we see it with all sorts of things so what you really want is something that binds people to a decision makes them understand the enormity of it one of the proposals we made some 15 years ago which is starting to catch off uh catch up in the corporate world take off in the corporate world is the idea of a policy performance bond so you set out the policy you're going to achieve so that people can align with you uh as a government we're going to do net zero in britain to go back to our decarbonization point and for every bit you're off target you pay a higher percentage rate so we've got 30 years that's 3.3 a year so three years into it you should be 9.9 down but you're only five percent down uh and this pays 4.9 percent so you know it's a it's a good it's a good hedge against government and if you don't if government can't sell the thing it actually means people believe they're going to do it so interesting yeah yeah i like that kind of economic coupling model um but we have to be clear the power of money are two separate things so the economic coupling will work for one half of the equation on the other half of the equation we still need to be able to generate the mandates to drive those changes well thomas barker is sort of curious what are your thoughts on commodity based currencies you know would they help with the adjustments required by decarbonization um so yes but uh and the yes is yes but not as a substitute for for example debt based currency uh i think that you need i think we'd get a lot more done if we had a plethora of different currencies accomplish different functions that weren't tied to nation state borders um because what that allows for is uh simpler approaches to hedging risk you know if copper trading was done in a copper currency then rather than generating enormous seas of futures contracts and so on people would just hold the copper currency until they needed copper and you would have a nicely balanced risk on those kind of things um and i think that that sort of an approach it's not going to work for everything but it would be you know part of a basket of trying to build a system where there's a much more direct connection between decisions and implementation because if you think of the amount of craft involved in doing things like future contracts all of that's replaced if you can make these things work like currencies and

[34:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMQPTytHcHg&t=2096s) then do things like loans well uh adrian gaviero has come back with a point that's aligned with this and once you point out that the economic and the uh and the political zones do differ nevertheless they meet in central banks he's curious what do you think about stablecoins and central bank versus private control of them yeah um so central banking gives you a choke point for the function of an entire economy generally speaking in the hands of a set of people that were not elected um you have to consider whether or not the central banks should be elected um or should they be independent in the same way they say the u.s supreme court is independent um if they're going to have this kind of political independence then the question is well should i be able to buy into somebody else's central banking and right now we can do that by for example storing our wealth into swiss francs or you know elbowing in or wherever it is um the hardest question on this is the relationship between the political boundary in the central bank boundary like if these guys are not being elected by a population why then should the central bank radius be identical the radius of that nation state so if you had a central bank for the oil industry and it was the entire global oil industry used that central bank for over oil transactions maybe that provides you with something which is genuinely stabilizing at the global level industry by industry so we could decouple the central banks from the nation states okay um just uh just a final point here before we move along um both david wood and bob mcdowell are are interested in the democracy and political thinking and uh bob says you know it's been a suggesting that executive government has no future uh and it's interesting to me because you introduced me and got me uh quite interested in liquid democracy which has had a kind of a northern european uh tinge to it i think you were heavily involved in iceland and yet you haven't seen that as a success is that correct i'm quite skeptical about liquid democracy because of what we've seen from the press so i think liquid democracy works quite well at a kind of project sorry i realized we're probably in our own zone do you want to just just explain to the audience what it is so liquid democracy is this idea of delegated voting so um you have a set of issues you're being asked to make a decision on and you simply delegate your vote to people that

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/683-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [683] CommunityZ Chest - Vinay Gupta, Founder of Mattereum, In Conversation With Michael Mainelli, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.