# Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical Blockchain Vision (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [692], part 1 of 3. 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, 2019-04-30 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU. 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): Explains the contracting/finance layer as the economic engine for the humanitarian programme.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Nath Sampradaya initiation (2004): Initiated into the Nath Sampradaya.
  - CheapID (2006): Design for a sub-$1 identity card, written for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense, that keeps...
  - 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)
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - CheapID to Mattereum: One identity pattern, from a person's ID card in 2006 to warranties on physical goods in 2017.
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - cyber and defense: Security work for defense clients, built on one idea: set rivals to check each other. Resilience and Opportunity in...
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - solo practice to the cutting machinery: From solo sitting in the 1980s to a taught meditation system.
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (28%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Red Cross (8 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); UNHCR (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); IKEA shelter (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Afghanistan (4 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Nath Sampradaya (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); citizens (6 here; 63 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 3 undated); Iraq (4 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); automated morality (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Legalese (1 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2015); Haiti (3 here; 42 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.50 (1.00 is the top), number 87 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [730] [The Bitcoin Podcast Interview #343- Vinay Gupta CEO Of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/730.md): same career work: CheapID
  - [52] [When? | The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/52.md): same career work: Nath Sampradaya initiation
- On the same works, just before: [597] Mattereum Smart Property Register - Rob Knight (2018); [676] [Vinay Gupta on Blockchain, Biotech and Consciousness - E43 (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/676.md); [207] [Black Elephants (CCCR2018) - CSER (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/207.md)
- On the same works, just after: [931] [Blockchain and the Future of Humanity | Malta AIBC... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/931.md); [257] [Vinay Gupta - Oslo Blockchain Day - Merging the Physical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/257.md); [747] [Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.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: Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical Blockchain Vision, video, 2019-04-30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [692], https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md.

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

## Passages, part 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=0s) the mindset that I'm in right now is basically I've gotta build something which a billion people will use you know multiple times a day I'm gonna bolt as an engine of economic productivity to the long-term humanitarian research programs and I'm just going to force this thing through capitalism and you know I can't over stress the level of nihilism that it takes for hindu clergy to wind up a war in the competence market for the resources to go to build housing for the poor this time on the pluto pia news network jon and scoop sat down for an extensive interview of a serial entrepreneur and blockchain innovator Vinay Gupta mr. Gupta outlined some of his past ventures then takes us into the present and future a blockchain and smart contracts welcome to another edition of the Tokyo podcast blue Tokyo

[0:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=55s) news network today welcome and a Gupta who is the CEO of Mattereum an organization that seeks to use the blockchain to organize the world's property to be universally accessible and useful again Vinay look happy to

[1:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=75s) have you with us good to be here and my friend Scoob Sweeney is here and I'm John Witkowski Foreman so the first thing I wanted to ask about or talk about it's sort of pre material some years ago when when you and I first knew each other you were focused along I think you called it the Gupta option but it was you were sort of proposing a way to make a reasonable quality of life sustainable for all the world's population hmm could you say a little bit about that sure so all this stuff is unfolding in the context of you know post 9/11 America invasion of Iraq and understand and the kind of defense community is digging in for resource conflict right population is up resources is down we've mined out all the easy stuff and the certain notion is that we might wind up in a series of you know nasty complicated long drawn-out resource conflicts which basically bleed America drys attempts to maintain an unrealistic standard living in direct conflict with rising global middle class and the middle class would basically being chased up the ladder by the poor or right behind them and nobody in the defense world liked that as an option because at the end of the day those wars are extremely difficult to win armed so there was a lot of interest in DoD this you know in this idea of structural action to avoid long-term resource scarcity which then avoids long-term resource conflict so to get there and you need some alternative to the idea of a gigantic growing growing middle class with massive resource conflicts and massive pressure on resources there are if everybody's chasing you know for example copper there's only something like five kilograms of copper for every man woman child on earth further entire lifetime no we're just not in a situation where these things are kicking around in in casual accessibility so within that context the proposal was if you won't avoid the resource conflicts you have to provide people with a different option the heading straight up into the two-car

[3:45](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=225s) garage land and then branching out from there and the economic pressure doesn't go away right we all have to live with the economic pressure so how do you decouple quality of life from direct economic competition with American citizens this was this notion of if you could find some way for people to have a development path which increases the quality of life but doesn't put them in direct conflict with American citizens for resources where you have is an alternative development path right we took the hard velman path it's super high burn it's massively resources human but it was also designed with like 1930s technology all right you know kind of two-car garage vision of the future that basically is a century-old vision of what it looks like to be rich so if you redesign the idea of what it looks like to be rich on 21st century don't you what does it look like right you know it's video projectors it's high-quality loudspeakers it's you know far data pipes it's access to virtual reality or 3d printers on the production side you know high-tech organic agriculture you know you monitor the hell of everything you know exactly what you're planting in the ground it's and water filtration you know using some normal materials and monitoring technology rather than gigantic municipal water plants and huge plumbing systems you know so you could get a go through every category of stuff and it turns out that if you build the model on modern technology rather than century-old technology everything looks different right if you had to start urbanization from scratch today using modern technology with no cultural baggage from the past everything changes you know houses are made of you know cardboard and polypropylene you know cars weighed two or 300 kilograms they're largely made of bamboo they're electric they've run unlike washing machine motors and you could just make your way down the list and that technological jump water make itself right so what I was basically proposing was what you want is a concerted effort from the department to prototype and build out those technologies such that modernization in developing world countries goes directly to a sustainable 21st century model rather than grinding up the industrial path it's agony attraction yeah I mean the folks that were interested in that work were extremely senior because the the case I made at DoD was a sickness in terms of

[6:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=375s) representing the interests of American citizens of the 21st century the DoD's function as a war fighting institution is vastly secondary to the DoD's function as being the world's best at all gee development house in terms of the impact on ordinary American lives the DoD's technology out poop is vastly more important than its warfighting right you know the overall impact of Iraq and Afghanistan murdering Americans was massively nat- right it bankrupted the country a whole bunch of them were killed way more of them were injured and way more than the vodka traumatized and you know was there any actual benefit to the American citizens for having fought those Wars not that I've been able to define right you might be able to make an argument that you had to spend country guys to Afghanistan to go and get bin Laden but that part failed you know they went out there to get they didn't get in front of the tank for 15 years so it's hard to justify those words as being effective representation of the interests of American citizens on the other hand you know the internet Gortex communication satellites solar panels and all of the other technology that came out of military spending their silicon chips themselves all of the stuff has been enormously good for American citizens so if you're an ordinary American citizen DoD's primary impact on your life is nothing to do with fighting wars its forging the future and then everybody Falls the military technology so the DoD uses is its R&D capacity to build a different set of technologies which are adopted by the global markets which then shape the future of the global market and the global lifestyle it's already done that 20 times in the last 50 years why not do it in an intentional way rather than just as a side effect you're interesting

[8:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=486s) like they just started a defense innovation project which is housed here in fact a couple of blocks from here well you know here in Austin they just launched that I went to like a ribbon-cutting ceremony for that it a couple of weeks ago and it's a little bit vague about what they're gonna be doing with that project but I just wonder if part of that project lines with what what you were talking about yeah are they still on that um so I left the states in 2007 I don't think a lot about work survived and because you know although the people that I was dealing with were you know very much in the kind of philosopher-king end of that story that kind of radical reconsent realization doesn't really take effect in the DoD for decades you know somebody very senior says yeah this is really interesting a bunch of you know minimal tear people are like oh yeah right that's important but it's not gonna get implemented even if everybody says that's amazing which by no means was a universal opinion even if everybody says that's amazing it's still an intergenerational project because reconceptualization of what a military is for really seems to take 20 or 30 years and you can see that in the u.s. you know the the alternate narrative of what the US could have done with itself after the fall of the Soviet Union is they could have cut the defense budget 25 percent they could have used that money to bail you out enormous numbers of defense contractors and troops into education and into kind of swords into plowshares retooling that would have proved probably 2 percent on American GDP growth you know he would have vastly increased the speed of economic growth because it would have been this massive spending on in sort of improving industrial production the rest of this kind of stuff but the time 9/11 comes around and you have a substantially less militaristic country and the Pentagon isn't sitting there twiddling its thumb was looking for something to fight and in that context you've got the political option of shrugging off 9/11 as a criminal rather than a military matter you know you just watch Interpol the CIA and Special Forces and you leave the Regular Army at home the economic growth continues on the same massive basis for another ten years and I thought point in America is like 50 percent of the global economy again and that path the long-term goals of American hegemony would be been reached really without a shot fired just by

[10:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=636s) economic competition which is after all how the Americans beat the Soviets right it was a massive departure from any kind of common sense Imperial play like even at the heart realpolitik analysis well there was no possible scenario in which Iraq and Afghanistan were going to produce you know benefit to the interests of the order American citizen and it's not remotely clear to me why there was any long-term strategic interest they were told well the benefits seem to have

[11:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=669s) gotten basically to a very small number of mega corporations that were heavily entrenched in the military and it was more to their benefit than to the benefit of the American people yeah absolutely and this is the problem with not cutting the Pentagon budget in after the Soviet Union fell so the thing that the states didn't do in the 91-92 is they didn't declare victory there was no Cold War winning party right if they'd be in a national celebration of hey we won the Cold War it's all over now and you'd kind of demob the military you know you guys have been high wire for 40 years you won congratulations thank you very much it's time to go home you know there would have been the kind of wave of national relief and then there would be the notion of going back to a peacetime fruit and that was the thing that we never did we never had the party at the end of the Cold War it was never celebrated as the end of the danger so there was no okay now we go back to a peacetime future they just stayed on the wartime footing and if you've got all of these huge defense contractors returning our tanks and guns bombs plane and so on and no realistic threat you know it almost me felt like an autoimmune disorder you know you'd built this enormous military machine to defend from an enormous ly sophisticated superpower opponent those guys vanish and then it just basically sat there looking for something to bite they were creating solutions in search of a problem yeah absolutely and I think it's a conceptual problem you know if you're in a company which is existed to produce weapons to protect America from the Soviets for 40 years you know the country had an enormous kind of slob of DNA it was a think of its being like a second liver you know you got a second liver there just produces anti-soviet antibodies in the form of tanks and guns and bombs and planes and used all the rest of that and then you know it just it was looking for something to do and I don't think the the hardest part of this is the even relatively good people you know if all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail so if you've got million people that are conditioned to think that their job is to produce weapons and fight wars and that's how you keep

[13:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=819s) America safe unless you do something really profound in terms of the global narrative it's very hard to get those people to stop doing that job it's all

[13:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=828s) about the money too right I mean you have a defense industry that depends on wars movie its coffers and if those wars in what are they gonna do can they retool themselves are they gonna have an inclination to do that and that this is the kings in spending problem right so if you were gonna cut the defense budget you had to reinvest that money and more in another round of industrial growth right there was no way to keep those institutions they were so big and heavy and politically powerful you couldn't just cut their their budget without breaking the American economy in a whole bunch of crazy ways right so you've got a good boxer McDonnell Douglas and say right so we did the Cold War we won the Cold War that's all over now um what else could you guys do if we keep your budget at the same level but we want over the next 10 years 25% of that spending to be on non-military things what have you got and you know they go off and they come back and say like hey how's about asteroid mining or they come back and they say hey you know how about you know dredging the deep sea floor and pulling up all that you know you know heavy metals or they need to be come back with something else that you can prove that kind of sophistication to do you know how'd you like a version of Concord is fuel-efficient so you could get to Tokyo in six hours I thought all right so you had to put the month of Magha projects and you had to keep feeding them partly because they were too politically powerful just cut the budget um but also because you don't want to lose the kind of technological supremacy that those organizations have created yet you know the end of the Soviet Union wasn't the end of superpower conflict you know it's easy to forget that America is 5% of the global population and for all its faults America is still you know one of the most politically sophisticated and potentially egalitarian societies in the world we're trying to undo that now well you've been trying to undo it many times I mean you know the American system has gone from crisis to crisis to crisis to crisis but compared to the British feudal aristocracy who have had you know pretty much unbridled control of our country for a thousand straight years you know it's still an amazingly open society so you know if you if you throw away that technological leadership and you throw away those institutions that maintain things like the weapons stockpiles you get into a position where

[16:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=978s) you're beginning to kind of break the formula of success right the ability to produce you know the internet came from four years of defense spending and there's no way at this point to separate America from the military-industrial complex you're in you know full Imperial mode and that's not really gonna stop it you just have to get smarter about empire right because there's no way there's no there's no path back down from the Imperial position other than fall so you kind of have to hang on once you're on top of that hog yeah it occurs

[16:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1012s) to me this is served for most people this question of defense and defense industries and how to deploy them and that sort of thing is sort of in the shadows and out there they're paying no attention to it they're not really aware of it yeah absolutely and that's not surprising you know but the the footprint is not you know it's a hard to see right you know you just look at the defense spending and there's a lot of money going into this stuff I know a lot of its poor and it's very inefficiently spend a lot you have expensive toilet seats and that sort of thing you wind up with a whole bunch of ridiculous and always but the the thing I really want to kind of communicate here is that from the point where the nuclear bombers invented America has only really one track which is you have to run into the future faster than anybody else to maintain technological supremacy or you wind up being given orders by the people that played that game and won you know there's a winner-takes-all quality to high-tech war that wasn't there when war was you know horses and maybe cannon because once you're in this kind of you know ultra technology war the ability to reach out and touch people globally comes in so there's no sense of like we'll be over here and you'll be over there and we're not really gonna interfere with each other's business you know because it's not that you have to go and take the army to go off and fight somebody right you can whack them with a missile you can infiltrate their computers and you know you could attack their crops with bioweapons or wherever it happens to be the global nature of war means that there's perpetual competition okay so there's still an arms race but it's a cyber arms race there's an arms race but it's an arms race global reach so if everybody was a whole building walls building cannon maintaining huge piles of horses you know your militaries are never bumping up against each other but if somebody's developing a missile that has the ability to hit the center of your country from their country they're grinding up against each other even though they're five thousand miles apart you know there's a there's a there's a there's no locality anymore the big high-tech weapons systems all have such enormous reach the they're in constant pressure against each other they're no conveniently separated by geography so it's basically like America Russia China Israel and all the other big actors you know imagine that they all share the border are the intervening countries they don't matter at all from the perspective of a flying missile so we're

[19:22](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1162s) in a position where all of the militaries are jammed up against each other on a tiny little planet so they're constantly preparing for war as if they shared a common border because relative to modern weapons they do and said this is a tricky concept the the other thing is that new military technology is pouring in from the future extremely rapidly and if you think about World War two I mean radar wasn't commonly understood to exist until way after world war two was won using radar cryptography wasn't commonly thought to exist you don't like the Enigma machine and all the rest of that stuff you know that remained classified a long time after the war so there's always a very long technological gap between what we see of the military's capabilities and the actual capabilities and if historically you go back and it's it's 10 or 20 years in most cases so the military at the kind of cutting edge are almost certainly operating in an environment where at least some aspects of like nanotechnology are already usable artificial intelligence you know I don't know what they've got but they've probably got a hundred times the computing power of anybody else do the math interesting so if you imagine you know what the technological frontier must look like in the black world and then imagine that everybody's playing the same game you could imagine that there's an enormous amount of pressure to stay ahead in that game because if you lose you could lose a war and not even notice you know if somebody has you know a military artificial intelligence and you unleash it on somebody else's stock market and it so subtly manipulates the situation that human beings can't perceive it and then crashes our economy that's the kind of high-tech war that we could be fighting right now and nobody would ever know in the civilian world because it's all in you know the kind of classified future and it's kind of like a curve right you know ultra technology block state classified stuff might be twenty years ahead and then you get kind of like regular military classified stuff which might be ten years and then you get the stuff that rich consumers have access to which might be five years ahead and then you get kind of Walmart reality which is kind of where you are right now and then if you're poor you've got the stuff that washes up in thrift stores and you're within ten fifteen twenty years behind and so there's like a 40-year technological range between the Block State and the poor and if you take that

[21:52](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1312s) down into you know the villages they've got a 500 year technological gap in you know the rural areas of say Brazil to where you know we experience things and so you were smeared out in time and that smearing out in time is almost more important than physical geography because the really heavy military tech has global reach automatically and so we're in a very different position to the one that we're commonly perceived to be it and I think that that is you know that that's a ratchet just like the nuclear ratchet was you know we have to maintain technological supremacy if we're not gonna get screwed and reason nobody understands and then the downside of that is that everybody else is on the same treadmill and you don't necessarily

[22:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1359s) know where they are on the treadmill because everybody's keeping everything that matter secret and every use in there for a break up I mean there are large areas of computer science that I'm fairly sure they just classified everything that was interesting and then it vanished but remember artificial life yeah right thirty years ago all of the interesting people in computer science are obsessed by artificial life all right well then sort of the fashion changes and it vanishes right dude just the entire field of artificial life vanishes does it vanish or doesn't or is it hidden well the mouths suspicion is that you know because it went from being so fascinating for so many people to just just no longer being a fan I think the academic research was defunded and I think that it moved into the black because I can't imagine that that many people just lost interest in artificial life so I have to speculate that somebody found something interesting and the entire thing would have wrapped up date they probably built a bridge between that and a iris research relationship or and you know if you were thinking about you know autonomous robot fleets or something along those kind of lines you know you can see the artificial life research reviewed a sensible place to start so you know there are there are several things of that kind where there was a bunch of really interesting academic research and there's a ton of community interest and then the academic research just stops where does it go so you know if you speculate along those lines you know you could begin to see how big the gap would be between the civilian technology in the military technology if they for thirty years of working on evolving systems and simulators goodness only knows what's coming up ah you know I mean if you were gonna do some kind of military level you know cyberattack and what you're coming out with is you know artificial life viruses for thirty years of evolution new fresher military labs you can just pose he and and you know this is the speculation of like well you know what if a rocket or what if they're you know nuclear bombs or artificial intelligence what if they discover new physics and worrying about that sort of stuff is what the sort of heavy end of the military does for a living right trying to guess their other person's technological capabilities and trying to figure out how they could use them in a war that's been the real grinding surface over the military for it really since the invention of the nuke no well just shifting gears a

[25:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1506s) little bit here that's a fascinating course we were on but I'm interested also and how you came to the blockchain I mean I think when you and I first met you were you had sort of developed the idea that hexayurts and that was a prominent subject of discussion at that time but I never really saw exactly how you crossed over into the blockchain world so I mean all of this stuff it comes from a kind of different perspective from my take on this is the I've always considered myself as basically being an individual the foreign policy right you know the nation-states are really not very good at making decisions and if we of other nation states support the future course of humanity we're going to get crappy answers I'm in much the same way that you got crappy answers about the future of humanity if you ask the Catholic Church what you should do in like 1750 the nation-state is a massively out loaded political institution but it's completely the wrong shape to deal with the modern world right you know global problems like global warming are going to require global solutions like global government and there's no way around this so after the prior to 9/11 I was basically a heavyweight student of a Hindu meditation lineage called the nath sampradaya and that was pretty much what I was doing my objective was to be a household or yogi teach meditation as I got older and that was gonna be my you know the majority of my impact on the world was going to be teaching the education so that was my theory of change I will teach meditation that is what I'm doing with my life now after 9/11 and you know my so you know teachers were basically like right no right go and do something useful about the state the world you know we're obviously running off a cliff here you know we got plenty people in India that will teach meditation justifying the lineage is in no danger of extinction go off and do something useful and it was kind of like being demobbed right like we don't need another meditation teacher go and do something like that so right around 2002 2003 I begin looking at the global problem is my problem okay I've been sent on this mission to go and do something about this mess that's what I'm doing with my life laughs okay um so

[27:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1656s) the first thing that comes out of that is trying to build a model of the mess okay oh the obvious problem here is resource war we're over there fighting for oil if we don't need oil we don't need to fight these wars fantastic takes me to Rocky Mountains you I get very heavily exposed to the Buckminster for work and vent the heck's here but the hexayurt is invented in the context of what do we do about resource conflict what do we do about global warming it's a technological solution to a very broadly defined global problem and I work from the

[28:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1689s) bottom up so okay we've got hacks here great there's housing okay if we put a hundred thousand of these in a field what else do you need will you need sanitation you need water supply you need to do something a lot of food which allows you to do something like cooking which means you need to do something like energy you need to do something about lighting otherwise people are gonna fall over in the dark and so you kind of wind up with this gradually widening spiral of concerns and then as you get towards the top end of that you think well you're going to need to know where the stuff is you're going to need computers to organize who is where you're gonna need identity documents two thousand six of you around to work on a genocide resistant biometric ID card design which basically flashes our space that was previously unexplored where you've got partially transparent public records you know you have an ID card you can use it for trade you can use it for security you can use it for travel but it doesn't give people the ability to shoot you in the head based on your last name and that was a you know kind of fusion of national security thinking with cyberpunk thinking because in the context of Iraq and Afghanistan protecting people's privacy was part of winning your Wars right if the population had too much access to each other's data and you end up with a sectarian conflict the government databases were going to become things that were used there's a large scale death you know we do would make the u.s. look absolutely terrible so there is all of this kind of thinking of this you know gradually widening circle of concern but there comes a point where you know every villager still needs the ability to prove who they are to assert title to property to sign contract you need all of that capability if you're going to enable trade which how people pull themselves out of poverty which is how they stop being a problem and and all of this comes down to what does it look like to build a genuinely 21st century economy right genuinely 21st century economy is is not 1950s in american-style industrial production two car garages a genuinely 21st century economy is point seven planets of consumption per human you know living inside of a small world in which we're using the resources so efficiently that we don't wind up with resource Wars you see what I'm saying and and you have to think of it as like the the thing they're trying to

[30:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1836s) communicate here is that the geography of conflict is no longer about geographical territory right and this this is the core mistake that people make when we think about foreign policy they're still thinking that the geographical 2-dimensional knob on the table with rings around who controls walk is the actual structure of the conflict that hasn't been true since invention of the ICBM right once you got the intercontinental ballistic missile you were all operating essentially in a single teacup and then it was all technology development inside of that teacup because there are no borders from things like nuclear missiles there are also no forgers or a resource conflict because if the folks in Brazil are using an enormous amount of copper there's less for everybody else right if the Americans are taking most of the world's oil there's less for everybody else if you've got you know countries belching out huge amounts of co2 and methane the atmosphere is a shared global resource so we're in this position where you know the actual conflict space is defined by patterns of resource consumption patterns of technology development and it's all global there is no geography anymore single global economy single global battlespace globalism its de facto where we are right and then figuring out how you maneuver as a power block inside of globalism you know what do you do to fix the world's problems so that America isn't directly exposed to the trouble so just as an aside I think that we would also

[32:13](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1933s) say that this evolution of a global perspective is triggered a resistance which explains things like Donald Trump and the rise of white nationalism and that sort of thing so we have to deal with that too well so what this stuff is that we totally failed any kind of intelligent responsible globalism right you know the inability to get the agreements and play some things on global warming the refusal to even discuss the turning of the UN into an effective institution you know all that sort of stuff we just have an ongoing global catastrophe a governance level you know but if you want to point to you know the functional end of global government it's the International Telecommunications Union right and Visa and Swift and those institutions are essentially all we've got in terms of functional global government you know one of them runs financial payments one of them make sure that the satellites don't bash into each other in the sky and that's about all we've got it's not just there but it's

[33:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=1996s) also the fact that we have people with power and with force who completely don't understand the kinds of things that you just said about the inherent need to take a global perspective and thing locally and are resisting it with an assumption that they can kind of roll time back to the 19th century maybe early yeah early 20th if you guys if those people understand they may not want globalization because it takes away their power over certain resources isn't it yeah so it's you know even having them up to speed on you know the whole globalization concept it scares the crap out of some of those people yeah and I mean that's the heart of the problem the whole situation that we're in changes so rapidly that it's very hard to keep leadership in contact with reality right and I mean the problem is an innate human problem it's a really deep problem but I talked a little bit about time because the the core thing that I'm saying here is that time is the new geography right we think the conflict of being fought over maps they're actually being fought over time lines who can get up the time line fast enough to get the technology that gives them the leverage you know you hear like the Chinese government saying it was it the Russians Putin right saying that whoever gets the AI first is gonna rule the world right the conflict in time is very different from conflict in space probably the first big example this was the moonshot the space race conflict in time not conflict in space once you think of it as the superpowers are having conflicts in time rather than space you begin to see why there's so much pressure on R&D science corporatization but it's all in this conflictual space of whoever gets there first wins and nobody's really counting the costs on this stuff so the leadership problem um is basically this the guy that first figured out the washing your hands prevented people dying in childbirth because they didn't get infections was locked up in a lunatic asylum for the rest of his life right and it was something like a hundred and thirty years before hand

[35:46](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=2146s) washing became common medical practice because the horror the doctors had been infecting their patients with the germs that cause sepsis general this is pre microscope right they didn't really know what was happening um though that horror was so enormous that the medical fraternity okay I don't cover your results are you must be insane so you've got that guy who's just like no no you don't understand we have to wash our hands and they literally lock him up that's what happens when you figure out truth that nobody wants kills and that's how you wind up with leaders that are still looking back at the 1950s is the golden age at the same time as that people are actually conducting the conflicts on locked inside there trying to figure out how to make artificially intelligent robot killers you know the the unwillingness to deal turns out to be a definitive human trait field after field after field after field after field we've seen it and I don't know what you do about that because particularly inside of a democracy before not going to vote for people that don't know they don't understand so the kind of people that are smart enough to navigate that future are also fundamentally unelectable and that's a real problem because the Chinese don't have that problem because they're not promoting people based on electability something like seven of the nine engineer the sort of ruling Council of China or engineers in the UK government I think we've got like five people with science degrees in Parliament and in fact within the ruling

[37:23](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oAHwAnLfgU&t=2243s) body of the USA we have a kind of hostility to science really yeah absolutely absolutely right and that's that's very problematic right there there's no way around you know those cultural biases you can't change that overnight and so what we have is a set of problems which are basically unsolvable and and this stuff is not just insoluble in a government complex right so you know the heck's your project 2002 right gets gain what Burning Man in 2010 it's nearly ten years after that the entire time we've been telling people it's a refugee house it's a distributed research project try experiments document try different materials try different geometries you know invent things work together there's no public participation in that project right people build the same old design that we figured out in 2005 they build it over and over and over again there's zero interest in refugee issues in that community they're just building it for Burning month and their interest and that's 6,000 hex he rats every year a burning the hex our male when was this five or six hundred people I had somebody that was rehousing people that had been displaced by the wildfires write to me and say hey you know could we have some hexayurts I'm like well yeah you can build them if you've got the resource issues like we don't have the resources you know could you give us some my own you know I think that was in London I don't have the ability is handy actors but we do who the mailing list I'm sure there are some burners who've got some spare units send out to the mailing list not a single reply nor force of support nothing right that's not happening because the community works right that's happening because people are detaching the hex Europe from its context because they don't want to think about the context if you're somebody who's building the hexayurt for Burning Man your walked onto it as a way of being comfortable Burning Man you're not thinking in terms of like well this thing as a refugees house and we're part of an a prototyping project there is also like the disaster relief

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End of [692] Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical Blockchain Vision, part 1 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.