# Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [702]. 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, 2021-11-30 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected
- 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): Cultural argument for the spiral economy.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Spiral economy (2023): Economic idea: keep goods whole and route them down through tighter budgets.
  - The New Economy: out of money, out of time, but not out of ideas (2010): One-page paper: the richest fifth are eating the planet, so the next economy has to be at peace with other... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy.
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Capitalism, consumption & resources (16%); Rural poverty & development infrastructure (16%); Equity crowdfunding & venture capital (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: second-hand (6 here; 15 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); consumerism (3 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); metaverse (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); circular economy (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); Spiral (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); steel strap (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2010); greenwashing (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2021); science fiction (4 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2011); durable goods (2 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); Extinction Rebellion (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): metaverse; greenwashing
- Importance: core-text score 0.59 (1.00 is the top), number 46 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [793] [COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md): same career work: Spiral economy
  - [507] [Product Information Markets (2025)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/507.md): career thread: Product information markets (keep goods whole, dump the landfill)
- On the same works, just before: [762] [MetaGame meets Vinay Gupta (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/762.md); [793] [COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md); [714] [Autonomous A1 - Taming Capitalism with Vinay Gupta of... (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/714.md)
- On the same works, just after: [778] [Vinay Gupta on the Future of the Metaverse (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/778.md); [678] [WNWB S01E08: Mattereum with Vinay Gupta (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/678.md); [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.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: Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta, video, 2021-11-30, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [702], https://guptaoption.com/texts/702.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=0s) Pat, how are you, sir? I'm very lovely and it's nice to see you in your unnatural habitat or is it natural habitat? I can't tell these days. Well, you wear the camouflage long enough, eventually you're going to think you're a dinosaur! Or a gorilla! Yes, absolutely. UR or OR? Tell me about that? Gorilla or guerrilla. Well, gorilla eternally in terms of my mammalian inheritance. Guerrilla as a tactic to get things done. Ah, way of life. Yes, absolutely. Here we are in the fifth or possibly sixth circle of hell! Do you remember which one? I can't remember. Where are the hedonists, that's the circle I want to be in, but in here? Extinction Rebellion, possibly? I hear they throw a pretty good party Public headers and public expenditure, an excessive spirit and a waste of shame as Shakespeare would have said. That's where we are, an expensive spirit and a waste of shame - but with virtue as our goal, so how are we doing virtuously? Here? Well, so I saw some of the most beautifully architected greenwashing I've ever seen this morning. Congratulations. Statement one and statement two equalled bad thing equals good thing, but statement one sounded perfectly reasonable and statement two sounded perfectly reasonable, and if you connect it to the government carelessly in your head, you wound up with something which was completely not true, even though the true independent components were true. You could imagine that somebody with a PhD in logical philosophy had just, did a map of this thing about Bertrand Russell to get to that conclusion, and I'm just looking at this like the best minds in science, covering up the fact that these materials last forever and we're deploying them to contain our cartons of orange juice. Yes. I mean, I'm sitting juddering in my completion of The Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson, which in terms of events like this is like kind of giant dream of successful administration of an existential climate crisis. I mean, that's the joy. The joy of this is a piece of HG Wells like science fiction rather than dystopian science fiction. Modernism. Yes, it's modernistic, and it's also people that can execute plans, can go over ground in terms of carbon coin and underground in terms of targeted assassinations and inventing new religions, and somehow, so it's like a dream of holistic administration of a complex problem. Whereas, I think what you're talking about and what most people are talking about is how do we, how do we control our externalities so that a tipping point change doesn't happen, and the time on that is getting shorter and shorter. I'm interested to know from you because I know and love the ambition of Mattereum in terms of the instrumentation of the carbon pathways of the world. Are you being heard? Are you being listened to?

[2:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=171s) We tell people what they can cope with? Yes, which is? Durable goods, right? That's your transportation vehicles, your furniture, your clothes and your consumer electronics. You get the highest possible resale price, and you financialize that in such a way that whenever somebody buys something, they buy it with an intention to sell it. As a result, they take care of it and they prioritise buying things which command the highest resale price, which means durable goods. Now that is a story. Right? I expect we'll get five to ten years of running that story, and we might become quite large and muscular. Then we're going to hit super hardcore carbon rationing. The price of new things will go through the fricking roof. The price of the old things will be offset by the older, previous users, and suddenly, we are in an environment where you go to the second-hand markets because the carbon pricing is too high in the primary markets. Your carbon compensated iPhone 14 costs $4.8 million, but your carbon compensated iPhone 11 that was issued before the carbon pricing really came in, these things are still recirculating. That's our medium-term plan, and then the long-term plan is flat out like, do we have enough water filters in Azerbaijan to cope with the refugee influx and who's out there managing, their solar panel deployments, and how do we know the solar panels aren't being stolen? At what point does your plutocratic expenditure items affect production design further up the stream, i.e., when do we start to get a mainstream consumer culture that's about repair but that designs for repairability and durability? At what point does the process that you're incepting pressure on production design to the extent that we need it to be pressured?

[4:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=271s) I think that's already happened half a dozen times. If you go back to Vesper motorbikes or scooters, the point was that you could repair it with a hammer and because it was Italian, you had to, right? Similarly, the great love of denim jackets, denim clothing, leather jackets was that these things were incredibly durable. Mm-Hmm. I've a leather jacket sitting back in my apartment here, which is from the mid-1980s, right? Completely serviceable, it's probably got another 30 years in it. That as an approach, you know, 1970s, the hippies wore denim because denim lasted forever? They didn't have a lot of money. They bought things that were durable. They were easy to wash. Old denim it's just, it's perennial. I think that when we've gone through phases of this, we've done lots of rehearsal, we've done lots of prototyping, right? Your spectacles? Why don't they just etch in the tiny corner of the lens, the prescription numbers, right? Two pixels high, you need a jewellers look to be able to see them. Suddenly, the glasses all have circular value. Without that one critical bit of information that's lost, the changes are so minor for things like spectacles. The changes in terms of lifestyle, attitudes in terms of a philosophy of use amongst communities is going to aid and abet that. Now, at the moment we have that in Bobo, Waldorf, Stroud's, bits of California, bits of middle Europe, where they have decided that they are going to live a high quality, high expenditure lifestyle. The thing, you don't own the watch, the watch owns you, is the high end of it, but all the way down the line. That needs to break out of its bourgeois bohemian enclave. The scale of enterprise and organisation and corporation that turns up to something like this. I'm wanting them to think, well, who's going to help us get there? What's the communal proof of concept, or what's the community that helps the proof of concept for equal production design to happen?

[6:29](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=389s) We have the threads, right? The threads are eBay. If you think of eBay, that is your circular economy right there, or at least it was before they let new stuff onto the platform. Look at Etsy. Etsy was very, very, very close to the ground manufacturing, until they opened it up to mainstream retail. I think that what happens is you get enclave after enclave after enclave, where people with these values do gather, and then what happens is that somebody comes in and starts floating new production from China for four bucks cheaper than used, and then you get the flight away from quality and into the garbage again. I don't want to say I've lost hope for culture, but I've definitely come to quite Thatcherite conclusions about the role of incentives. If we can't find a way of making, good quality vintage cheaper than new for cars, for furniture, I mean, you know I moved house a little while ago? Went to eBay, came out with two white Italian leather sofas for £150 each, and it was just somebody had gotten jammed with them. They needed to get rid of them. They were in a hurry. I gave them what we asked for on eBay, and they sent me two Italian leather sofas. They'd taken a 90 per cent value loss in that transaction, and they'd use the things for five years. That is so typical of what happens when you sell things second-hand, it's not surprising that people would rather buy cheap and throw it in the trash. The way that I see this is like if we just take the existing value haemorrhaging in the second-hand markets and put the bandage over that that says, no, no, no, no, no. Beautifully documented, you sell it six months before it's going to move, and we just take out all of the contingency in those markets. It sounds dumb, but eBay's doing $100 billion a year of transactions. Mattereum might do $500 million dollars of transactions and consider itself well-heeled. If you think of our margins and what our take is and the size of the team we might need when it was all fully built out, $500 million of transactions for used things we would be doing very nicely, thank you. But your certification and authentication processes, aid and abet that aesthetic shift requirement, the consumer aesthetic required, which is that we live in the fragments of our accumulated past, and we are happy about that. We're not relentless neophyte modernists looking for brand-new, we're looking to live, not in the ruins of modernity, but certainly in the archive of modernity, reaching back for our white leather sofas, reaching back for our leather jackets, reaching back for our repairable machines.

[8:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=539s) To me, that's a massive brand marketing opportunity, or even a game world. Make a game world out of it. Make a metaverse out - maybe that's what the Metaverse does is to rehearse us for living in a commodity, cultural commodity world of fragments and themes and strands from the past that we reweave in the present in order to defend the future by not just buying new and new again? Do you see the sensibility as it's required?

[9:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=575s) Absolutely. The unfortunate Warren Ellis called this atemporality. Yes, why not? This notion that we were seeing it in media, right? You're remixing material from the 50s and the 70s was as easy as making it new, so we were working, the whole musical work out, all the genres were available, and you could work on anything. The same thing, so one of the things that I've gotten very wary of over the past 20 years is the idea that cultural change precedes economic change. I've come to the conclusion, it's mostly the other way around. The place where they went second-hand, seriously, do you remember that dreadful Macklemore song 'Thrift Store'? That culture in America was, broke Americans started shopping at thrift stores, right? The ones that had some taste were the ones that were wearing, 1970s brand T-shirts from Coca Cola, rather than 1980's brand T-shirts from Goldman Sachs, right? This whole hipster aesthetic was like, 'I've made my wardrobe look good because I'm shopping in thrift stores, but I'm buying the good stuff.' Yes, you're right, and that, that was really critical. That notion really went back into the thrift store culture in America. They pulled out the best of the stuff that was there, they forged into an aesthetic, and they were the hipsters, right? The second thing that happened was that people that had really a lot of money started to imitate that style, but they didn't want to go to thrift stores, and then what you got was modern reproductions of vintage, which were sold by places like, take your pick, right? What was that store that was really, really big on that stuff a few years ago? You know the one I mean? I can't remember. I think I know the one you mean? Yes, yes, Modern something, and that process where we remanufactured the past. Yes, Urban Outfitters did a bit of that. Urban Outfitters did a bunch of, yes. I think they're probably the ones I'm thinking of. All of that, culture wants to think that it's first. We've been trying culture as a lead on climate for quite a while, it doesn't seem to be having much impact, right? With the exception of fricking vegans who are more like an occupying force. More like an army, less like a cult. Yes, more like a cult than an army actually. I know what you mean. Extremely effective, right? Very effective, very local, personal, communal, global, all connected up, in a string, right? Yes, 30 years of effort on it, maybe 40 years of effort on it.

[12:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=725s) Which shows you how long it takes to make a practice-based cultural change, but yes, you're right, yes. Then vegetarianism mainstreamed because, they brought in the Overton window so much, that teenagers that wanted to be vegetarian would say to their parents, 'Well, at least I'm not going vegan,' and the parents were like, 'Oh my God, she's right. Okay, fine. Please just eat some cheese.' Vegetarian as a hegemonic option, okay. Veganism is the Avant Garde, yes, okay. Yes, the radicals were vegan, and the progressives were vegetarian. I always liked to find a role for the Avant Garde unit, anyway. No, I get your point, so veganism is a metaphor of change, from idealism to world-saving practice. You think that, actually, a re-engineering of an economic contract or a social contract is going to be on and such that it's inescapable in the way that, HTTP or Linux was inescapable, and then it triggers a certain transactional civilisation, then is a support for imminent everyday lifestyles? I think it's driven straight out by poverty. I think poverty is the driver. Non-western poverty.

[13:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=800s) No, no. Individual, poor white boy poverty. The American Meth Belt, they've lost, what 50, 80, 100 per cent of their wealth? Deaths of despair, as Angus Deaton calls it. Deaths of despair, so they're flat broke. They thought they were entitled to better; they didn't get it. They've lost minimally 50 per cent of their wealth since the 2008 collapse. The thing where Homer Simpson has become an aspirational figure. Wow, he's got a stay-at-home wife and a two-car garage, right? That shift where Homer went from being like the symbol of failure to actually, he's holding it together? Like, 'Wow, he must make a lot of money at the nuke factory. Look at his lifestyle!' In the settling of expectations, comes used, right? Well, this charity shop thing, the charity shops were inefficient because nobody cared about that waste strain. If somebody cares about that waste strain, vintage clothing prices are through the roof, right? That's only because if you want to buy that stuff new, it's £800. Now vintage, it's £125. What I see is this inevitable pressure where the former middle classes are being forced into the thrift store layer of reality. At that point, what you're going to get is the middle classing of the second-hand market. At that point, one might be tempted to use the word gentrification. If you thought of Mattereum as being a gentrification of thrift stores...?

[14:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=890s) Well, it's interesting. It's an aestheticization of the thrift store and the interesting kink in that, I would suggest, is the quality of the production of the goods produced from certain eras. The stuff that's happening in the last ten years coming through into TK Maxx and Primark is literally dissolving and disintegrating before your eyes. There's a little bit of a gap there, which is the point at which production for durability becomes, it becomes tied into a whole new service offer, and we have been waiting for the cradle-to-cradle model exist, and do you know what? It's a massive non-turnup. McDonough's thing didn't work. We review carpet surfaces, we review other object services, but the idea that the cradle-to-cradle circularity is part of everyday life at a moment is just purely not, has just absolutely not happened. Is that to do with incumbent retail investment? We've bought this megamall; we've paid money for this property. It's amortised over a certain amount of time. We have to execute it, otherwise, our books don't work. To me, it seems like the opportunity for disruptive, genuinely, socio-politically, socio-technically disruptive business models is really wide, but you say that the cultural thing is secondary to the economic thing. I would have suggested that there are brand promises or brand narratives that probably could jump into that space between economics and culture and say, 'Here is the planet-friendly, yet meaningful, not cluttered, but beautifully arranged object life for you.' In a worlding kind of way, in the way that Apple worlds, and the way that the Metaversians think they're going to world your existence, someone is going to say, I can world your life of objects. Each of which is a narrative, each of which is a story, and it's a good story. It's a story of whether it's either repairable, or it's sustainable or it comes from an ethical place or an aesthetical place, but in any case, you live in this world. This is an attractive world. This Marie Kondo, right? The thing about Marie Kondo is, she doesn't tell you what to do with the things you've got rid of, right? Strip it down to 30 books and no more, does this give me joy? Then there's this kind of like, whomph! The stuff just evaporates because it's no longer in her world. Imagine a universe which is of many, many, many, many, many little Marie Kondo cells. Everybody has their own little 30 book universe, and when you get rid of something, you toss it into the next box over. Hey, does anyone want this copy of Das Kapital? I read it and I'm like...' fling! Right? Whomph, and somebody catches it because to them, it's new, it's shiny. They have the experience, right? Then they go whomph, and it goes to the next person.

[17:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1070s) The throwing and the catching, and the throwing and the catching implies a chain, a system, an integration, whatever you want you to call it Infrastructure... ...that would make that happen beautifully and easefully, and in a way the very action of it being completely pleasing and in way that an app store is a pleasing action, in the way that IKEA is beginning to take constructability from stuff that you buy seasonally to an ethos of life. Yes, absolutely. That part, right? This is the part where we need a genius or two, because I've been putting this question, we're working a bit with Bruce Sterling, who wrote this book, remember Shaping Things? Oh, very well, the spimes! Spimes! We went to Bruce, and we're basically like, so we are spime soaked. We are saturated in spimyness, right? We've got about four-and-a-half of the six points done. Point five is coming along, and six is nearly there. Bruce is basically like, the initial Bruce Sterling thing is almost like, why does anybody take me seriously? I'm a science fiction writer. What have you done?!' We're just kind of like, 'Hi!' Bruce is gradually, gradually kind of being, like, 'Okay, these guys are kind of serious about this. I guess a better help.' The thing that the spime world, I think, didn't clearly foresee is the degree to which we love the accelerator of constant consumption. Constant consumption is perfectly okay as long as it's paired with constant passing on. You want the new dress; you wear the new dress. The new dress is only new to you. It's had 130 previous owners, right? Then it goes out to the 131st previous owner. Consumption is nil, right? It's having a kid with a bicycle take it out of the warehouse and drop it on your door and then drive away. What I see is that we've run consumerism faster, right? You know exactly what size your body is. The app has a library of all the clothing that's currently available that can be delivered to your house by 07:30 pm. You've got literally 13,500 possible outfits, ping! You order clothes like pizza. They turn up, you wear them, right? Maybe you keep them around for a few weeks or a month or two, maybe you hand them back they're dry cleaned, they go out to the next user. That as an economy. If we're renting in economy, we're slaves. If we're buying and reselling, we're tastemakers.

[20:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1220s) Sure. It's interesting though. You say that one of your crises has been, 'I don't think cultural change leads to change as required any more.' My response to that crisis has been to go to neuroscience and effective neuroscience and evolutionary psychology. I've seen too much political, socio-political triggering of the mammalian emotion set. Grrrrrr! Absolutely. Yes, anger, fear and panic is twice as powerful the neuroscientists tell us as a reaction than care, play, love and hope. We're in a situation where we're triggerable for defensive mechanisms. People are getting dug in. Think of how ten years ago, right, do you remember how much more easy and fluid everything felt pre-COVID, emotionally? Now it's like there's sand in every single gear. It's true. To that, if you read, there's a guy called Peter Sterling, who's written a magnificent essay for the great transition called Why We Consume as a neuroscientist. I mean, his argument is that we are easily up for depression and addiction as a result of consumerism, because compared to the various activities of our hunter-gatherer existence, this is what David Graeber and David Wengrow are saying at The Dawn of Everything, that we are not addictable, if we are multiply active. If we are constantly challenged by all the various multimodal challenges of a tribal or a mobile, political existence, as opposed to us being statically doing jobs and statically consuming. This is the rat utopia thing, right? If you give the rats a nice environment, they stop drinking the water with the heroin in it? Yes. That thing, but for people. Yes, but for people. Sure, sure, and play is an indicator that the rats are at their optimum health and organismic flexibility. It's just an area to explore, which is that something that's super consumerist may well be locked into dopamine pathways that we don't want to be locked into, and so therefore we have to think, so I would want the activity that you're talking about. This reselling of a curatable consumer market. It's curatable, it's treasurable. It's coming in on-demand, but it's coming in on-demand from retrievable objects. That is seen to be, not consumption, but in a sense that a kind of, one activity amongst many others. That actually helps us as organisms if we're not locked into dopamine inducing consumerist activities, that helps us, gives us more autonomy, and we have more autonomy, well, if we have more autonomy, brother Vinay, one would imagine that the human animal makes better decisions, but maybe we can have a little query about that.

[22:50](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1370s) Maybe, because so we'll come back to this notion of consumerism, right? There is no denying that there is an enormous yawning spiritual void in Western culture. Nicely put and correctly put, yes. The death of God. They had the funeral and then nobody's figured out what to do next. It's like the hangover of the wake of the death of God. Maybe space travel fills that gap. For me, yes, also. Right? If you get a whole bunch of, if the top 2000 pop stars and actors in the world get on one of these space planes. Thank God, it goes up. Thank God it blows, then we have a lot of problems solved straightaway. You know what, Shatner came back, and Shatner was just like, 'My God. It's full of stars!'

[23:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1435s) If a lot of our cultural leadership have that experience, right? They used to call this the overview effect. Maybe this will percolate down in a deeper way across all the rest of the people? Maybe. Right? Even before we get to that level of void filling, I think that there are destructive and less destructive ways of having people go through these dopamine loops, which are so messy, right? If the dopamine loop, is you go shopping and you buy a bunch of stuff which is second-hand and you wear it till, you're bored and then you sell it on, and it costs you a couple of quid on the transaction charges and delivery charges, and some things you sell for a lot less and some things you make for a lot more. If you're very, very fashionable, you buy things before they're fashionable, and they go up in price 20 per cent, then you sell the model for a wee bit more than you made. Suddenly there's a little world of tastemakers. You get this notion that we could gently take the existing social structure, tidy it up a little, but join the ends of the supply chain. At that point, even if we have this hamster wheel mentality and hamster wheel behaviour, it's not that every revolution of the wheel is taking new raw material out of the Earth and destroying it. It's that we're taking the same toys that we've gotten rid of and swapping them around You said the keyword. It's a costume box. It's a costume box! Global costume box. It's a Lego box or it's a costume box, but from play theory, that's what the human animal is supposed to be good at, is costuming and legging and recombining, but to conceive of it as a costume box, that's probably quite a good metaphor actually. We just invented a brand, there we go. Absolutely. Huge remix culture, clothing, furniture, transportation vehicles, consumer electronics. I mean, that camera is amazing, right? It's a lovely thing. I don't know after using it for three months, whether we're going to decide that dealing with the footage on the back end is too much of a pain in the butt and go back to 2D. If we do and we sell on eBay, we'll get 40 per cent of what we paid for it. That gap, how much experimentation are we're not doing, because if I wanted to buy it on eBay for 40 per cent, I wouldn't be sure if it worked until it arrived, and I don't have the time. I'm paying twice as much for certainty, and it's taking the fun out of the buying and the selling, and the buying and the selling, and the buying and the selling. I want it, I got it, I played with it. It was amazing. I got it eighth-hand and I sold it ninth-hand and the price hardly changed. Yes, there's a whole world of spontaneity there that we could reenable because we take the huge cost out of buying and selling toys, and most things are toys.

[26:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1585s) I mean, like, I think [my watch] had four or five owners before I had it, right? There is this weird, symbolic value, right? It wasn't until I put the stainless steel strap on that, that people at City functions started treating me like a human being. When it had a black, rubber strap on it, it just didn't quite click. Nothing else in my appearance changed. I put the right strap on it, suddenly, I was a human in those experiences, right? This is plutocratic pathology, which I'm not sure we need to be treating with it, but I take your point. Play is also display. That's a lovely idea, is that we have a particularly architected dopamine loop rather than a Friday, £2 an item Primark Potlatch approach to it where you spend money that you don't quite have to exploit, people that you never see in order to wear things that only last for the mayfly equivalent of a few weeks or a month. The exploitation side is very important, right? I will now plug my book. This is The Future of Stuff. It's really good. It's a very good book. I read it twice. Well, thank you. That's nice to hear. I mean, it's quite a small, but I feel like I should maybe write a proper book at sometime, because this one is more of a pamphlet.

[27:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1655s) Well, I've read that twice, so maybe that's an argument against a proper book? Ah, short and sweet. 15,000 words is a good length for me. The notion that we're also not exploiting factory workers in this condition. If we're buying things like, so in my mind, right - sorry, this is a rant. I want to get away from circular economy because I think the circular economy, I mean, we're going to continue to use the term commercially but in terms of the philosophical, but I want to say a spiral economy. In the centre of the spiral, we have the rich with this river of consumer goods that pours down into the centre of the spiral. Paris Hilton buys new shoes, right? I want the rich to keep hyper-consuming. I want every single thing that they're bored with to get sold to the upper-middle class, who sell it to the middle class, who sell it to the working class, who sell to the middle-class in developing countries. Who sell it to the working class in developing countries, who sell it to villagers? By the time those Louis Vuittons go in the trash, 40 wearers, the last of whom was a rickshaw driver, you know, a bride at a Bangladeshi wedding. Then the shoes, they're finally done. The heel broke in the dancing afterwards, nobody knows how to fix them in that venue. They're worn out and they go. This is in absence of political economy. This is presuming there is no such thing any more as an achievable political economy because what a political economy would say is that do you want to cascade an ecological civilisation and ecological sensibilities down the class structure? Then for fuck's sake, sort out your universal basic income and services and sort out your three-day-week. That notion that the rich continue hyper-consumption, but we just make sure that the step down as the stuff radiates out, it just goes wider and wider into the cycle. Here's your 25-year-old digital camera. It takes two AA batteries. It takes one-megapixel pictures, and it's now being used by primary schoolchildren in Mexico. Why, because it works almost like their dad's phone, but nobody cares if they break it. That as an approach, we could vastly fill human need on the consumption that we're doing. Yes, we can even have the rich spend more money, faster, better R&D, and more technology development. Now the new iPhone is $2,000 because they know you're going to sell the old one for $1,985. What that then gives people is civic resource to make decisions about the style of their lives. Those decisions can be made temporally. They can be made starting at trees. They can be made looking after kids. They can be made generating kids. The play box, or the toy box in your life is not the whole of your life, but to have a certain - but I think it's interesting we're here on the basis of COP26, the Westphalian nation-state is not looking like the optimum decision space that we need to get us to a decent place.

[30:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1805s) It's like asking the Catholic Church to figure out what to do about space travel. Yes. Do you know, there's probably quite a few science fiction novels that think that's quite a great idea? I think Iain Banks - his wasn't so much the Catholic Church, his was something else. The regulatory and institutionally directive option, which is what Social Democrats, old-fashioned Social Democrats like me, would look for to get through parliamentary democracy. The last gasp of it was the Corbyn project. It absolutely was destroyed for various reasons. I think many of us are looking for gadgets, processes, viral infrastructures that move the dial in some way for people towards an ecological civilisation on a planetary basis, and I think it's reasonable to assume that a brand-led eco-capitalism could create a few processes that start to get people into a different space and into a different sensibility. I mean, once your Coca-Cola has that level of ambition to sugarify and toxify our planet? What's the other brand that comes along and says, 'Here's how to live on this fragile Earth? Here's where it's attractive. Here's where it gives you a world of objects of gratifications and sensualities,' but we need an infrastructure to make that happen.

[31:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=1915s) It's not that bad an infrastructure. To hop up a level, to remember Las Indias they were a weird Spanish, corporate welfare state. No, I don't know, no. Las Indias? Las Indias, they were old-school political radicals. They had a lot of material on the web. They called their activity Market Activism. They ran businesses that directly addressed the global problem they wanted to solve. The businesses made a ton of money because they were very smart in what they did and they were big IT guys, they were smart at things and then they had a pact that you could sign into, and if you were a member of that pact, you had basically a welfare state that they were operating, and they had maybe 150, 300 people inside of that hall. Company welfare? Company welfare state, but it wasn't just for you, the worker. You could send your dependents into that system, and even if you got fired, they were still in the system. This was extremely radical. When was this? They vanished from the internet, and deleted all their stuff a few years ago, but they were running contemporary. They were always very hardcore and very secretive. They published a lot of stuff, but they didn't tell you a lot. The publications described the theory, but not the practice. That market activism model that they talked about was a big inspiration to me with Mattereum. Like, 'Okay, look, I've tried Open-Source, I've tried politics and governance’. I haven't tried being elected, but I've sure talked to a lot of civil servants. Traction not very good. In that time, Elon Musk has gone out there and done like four or five big things. His method works. My method doesn't. Maybe I should be more Elon Musk. A bit late to try that, but it's not that late. Give it a shot, right? Let’s try building a company was to try and not work against the architecture of capitalism, that's trying to redirect the architecture of capitalism. The process of getting us where we're going is as simple as having a 2D barcode sewn inside of a garment, one number per garment. One number of per bicycle. You can use digital tags for that. I think I've got one in my bag. Here we are. The little parcel of chips on there. That, you beep it with your phone, and it's a unique identifier. At that point, you sew those, stick those, glue those into whatever it is you have going on and what you get out of is this radically transparent hook to which you can then tie the rest of these stories.

[34:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=2065s) To what extent, if any, is that gameable, hackable, fakable, shakeable? They're as secure as crypto wallets. You can't detach it from the clothing and stick it on something else, but the thing itself is as secure as a crypto wallet, and we're about to start handing those out to kids in Central St. Martin's to say, 'Hey, what would you do if you have this technology?' See what happens? Yes, but motivated, I mean, it's interesting, the great nemesis, Dominic Cummings, is about to announce a micro sovereign programme for the UK. Is this the Singapore-on-Thames thing? This is the Singapore-on-Thames, but it's more down-level than that. It's, these institutions are broken, this political class is broken. You have the meso-infrastructures and available technologies to create viable localities, measuring resources. He's really pushing for decentralisation of key governments. Very, pushing for decentralisation, at a level that makes the sovereignty in a territory variable. Whoa. Right? Now, that's the idea coming from the guy that said to a population, 'Take Back Control. You have a deep angst for self-determination and sovereignty. I perceive it. We're going to give you a chance to vote for it.' An action that happened and that has caused, major infrastructural and regulatory destabilisation. A commitment was made. Now, that is an interesting process that goes alongside and somewhat cuts into the universality presumed by your system. Are we in a situation where, radicals and I mean radical in the nonpartisan, non-left/right sense who simply want disrupt for energy, will avail themselves, not just of technology, but also the political openness of a particular moment? You could call it techno libertarianism if you want. You can call it, techno communitarianism if you want. I think there's an appetite out there, which isn't just about consumption, it's also about sovereignty. It's also about a sense of agency and purpose. I think we would be making a mistake if we didn't think that that was just as appealable to, which is that I feel that I can act in a world that doesn't really necessarily recognise my actions otherwise.

[36:55](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qoHpEOXDkHQ&t=2215s) Absolutely. Give me a framework within which I can act, is as attractive as, give me the objects that make me feel happy in my life. We'd be fools, if we didn't think that was a competing impulse. Absolutely. Well, I mean, the politics is going to continue to erupt, right? I mean, we are not at the end of the political change. No, no, it's not, it's remotely, The solvable problems? The things I can get my hands on. They're close up, I'm now in a world where mostly I worry about how do we get the tag sewn into the jacket, and will it actually last through washings? It's a tailoring problem. It's a tailoring problem, right? Those individual micro-steps piled on top of each other in the context of a company. The thing that you get, is you get traction. Cultural engineering is you keep working on it, you keep working on it, and you keep working on it, and then suddenly there's a breakthrough and everything changes, but it's always long shots when you start on that. Yes, but when you get that iteration going and then have a conversation with someone that wants to give you a free zone or a sovereign space or a sandbox next to Birmingham, within which certain rules pertain, that do not pertain beyond those rules. You may be closer to proof of concept than waiting for the UN to apply it, as Kim Stanley Robinson suggests The Ministry for the Future. The idea that there's some kind of massive UN think tank box is going to create a carbon coin... Not happening tomorrow. Create that. You may well have to be, have a relationship with this decomposition of traditional sovereignty. On this, unfortunately, I can't tell you anything about our plans for Honduras today! Have I ever heard you say anything less white-cat-strokey. I don't think I've heard anything less white-cat-strokey than what you just said. Pat, amazing. Darling. Lovely to see you. We should wind up now because I've got to go and catch people at the end of this session. Go, get some capital, please. You're the man that deserves it. Good to see you.

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End of [702] Conversation With Pat Kane & Vinay Gupta. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [778](https://guptaoption.com/texts/778.md) Vinay Gupta on the Future of the Metaverse (2022); the most closely related, [793](https://guptaoption.com/texts/793.md) COP26 Event: The Circular Economy - Finance and Data for... (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.