# Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan Hellard: From Hexayurt to Disaster Relief Garments (part 2 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [724], part 2 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, 2024-04-24 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024), the latest step.
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Design reasoning for the Hexacloak: body-level shelter shipped as raw cloth for millions.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - STAR-TIDES (2007): Helped start STAR-TIDES, a National Defense University project on supporting populations under stress.
  - Hexacloak (2023): A hooded cloak from standard 60-inch cloth with no manufacturing step: drape, tie, twist a double loop....
  - Hexayurt Refugee Shelter (MICA, Baltimore) (2024): A lecture and a roundtable with Bryan Hellard at the Maryland Institute College of Art: cities instead of...
  - 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.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - hexayurt builds: Hexayurt variants, many designed and built by the community.
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum.
  - nuclear / panflu: Pandemic, evacuation and rehousing plans.
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts.
- Topics: housing / house / quality (21%); culture / history / fiction (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Gandhi (33 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); UNHCR (3 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); survival needs (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); refugee camps (5 here; 37 sources in all, earliest dated 2007, 1 undated); refugees (8 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); human rights (4 here; 38 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); supply chain (8 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); Afghanistan (3 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); India (7 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); refugee camp (3 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006)
- Importance: core-text score 0.60 (1.00 is the top), number 42 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [727] [Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/727.md): same career work: Hexayurt Refugee Shelter (MICA, Baltimore)
  - [321] [Vinay Gupta talking at FreeAndReal / The Telaithrion... (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/321.md): same career work: STAR-TIDES
- On the same works, just before: [37] [http://hexayurt.com/coat (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/37.md); [749] [Vinay Gupta: AI's Impact on Jobs and Society (2023)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/749.md); [727] [Undergraduate Lecture Series 2024: Vinay Gupta & Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/727.md)
- On the same works, just after: [663] [Ownership Fractionalization: Kickstart Innovation (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/663.md); [736] [Mattereum (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/736.md); [243] [Multipolar Realpolitik (Omnibus draft) (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/243.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: Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan Hellard: From Hexayurt to Disaster Relief Garments, video, 2024-04-24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [724], https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 3
[47:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=2850s) here the most the most brutal thing I ever saw was a woman that grew up uh in a refugee camp in Africa went to Canada became a doctor turning up at a un event in Geneva and telling them exactly what she thought of them their organization and every time they stood up to defend themselves she would just take them down with a machete it would the anger and the knowledge from I was there and this is what happened and now I'm would doctor let me tell you the thing that made her most angry was they started not getting their full food deliveries so they found the phone number of people in Geneva that were responsible for the budget that they were supposed to be getting and they started phoning and text messaging those people to give reports about the fact that the food Aid that had been arriving was now going missing and they were getting like 2third of what they were supposed to and the people in didn't Evena change their phone numbers that's what we're doing with okay I wanted to backrack a bit um when you were talking about how like separating the racial politics from um like like humanitarian crisis I think it's um like personally speaking it's really difficult for me to do that cuz I feel like America is the case where it came after when I guess when colonization was controlled by by like white people and so I feel like from my perspective it's really difficult for me to separate like breaks when it comes to talking about like the problems of um like exploit exploitation so um I guess I'm just wondering how I mean that's a that's a very you know we think about Tibet right Tibet is a full scale Colonial Invasion and there are no white people involved in that story right it's a very you know the white folks will tell you that white culture is the center of global civilization right in terms of Imperial Power white culture peaked 150 years ago when the British Empire invaded 160 countries white power at this point is on its last legs right it's it's a teetering Enterprise uh and the rising you know

[50:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=3000s) military and you dominant Colonial powers that are coming up around the world right now we're not operated by white folks the new empires are not going to be white and we have to deal with them so I guess I just wonder how like can like I guess like ID ourselves so like not only Center like these issues with white so so I think that I think it's very important here to think of whitness as being a legal category And I stress legal right so the Americans go through a period where the legally defined white and they legally defined black and in American culture those legal categories are staggeringly evil and destructive So within the discourse inside of America whiteness is a legal category you can point to segregation you can point to all the rest of that stuff and in that context white this is an exact and precise discourse Mak perfect sense so I'm fully supportive of that analysis for white is tit to Legal category the hard part is whitness in Europe so the Irish have 700 years of full Colonial Rampage carried out on their soil murder persecution genocide colonizations effectively slavery um for 700 years right that place is wrecked I spent a year of living in Ireland oh my God the colonial scarring is like you know it's literally he boom poking out all over the place it's horrendous right and a lot of that by the way was not even done by the English a lot of that done was done by Scottish mercenaries right um so in that analysis from across the room they're all the same shade right a kind of white translucent blue color um and so coming from that on the doorstep it's very hard to say that that whiteness right white people on both sides Catholics Protestants English Imperial colonial power but most of the sub which was then inflicted on brown people and black people all over the world it was all started with the Irish because the Irish were invaded in I don't know 1350 something and the English didn't start turning up and INF invading you know inflicting their show on brown and black people until substantially later in the so it's very historic to talk about pness in an American context but it's a historic to talk about colonialism and whiteness in European context because there's hundreds of years of white and white colonialism before we get to the BR folks uh and it's super messy because

[52:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=3150s) the Americans tend to view everything through an American lands but when you talk about race in Europe it's so much more complicated because remember also we have black colonialists running most of Europe at one point right mean Africa the boers took all of Spain more or less all of Spain quite a bit of the rest of southern Europe and that was wave after wave after wave of black violent Colonial expansion coming into European so kind of hard to make that fit into the American story but it's a very real part of European herit so yeah I think I think it's just it's worth remembering that the history of race in America is very legalistic very extreme and very black and white you go to Europe it's a whole different kind of messed upu because we both black and white colonialism and then you look at Asia you know they had vast horrendous genocidal massacres on a scale we can't even imagine before they' even seen white people um it's real messy but I do think that it's important to attach to he as a legal category into this discourse of America it's a very different thing everywhere um the viable alternative to capitalism was not Marxism but ganism and I'm I'm curious what you mean by that I need to get something oh all right so let's talk about Gandhi um has anybody ever heard political radicals talking about Gandhi one one okay anybody heard political radicals talk about marks yeah quite a few more kokan yeah one or two right good who you hanging out with so so the thing about Marx is that Marxism largely failed right you know the estblished a variety of very very large Enterprises like the former Soviet Union and the Chinese regime they gave it a really good try at a very large kind of Continental level and for the most part they wound up eventually conceding to capitalism rolling over and doing it more or less the American way kind of because it just worked better for managing the entire continent so most of the political activity around Marxism is not perceived as being any kind of real threat to capitalist power because capitalist power knows that it could be Marxism after all they've already done it a few

[55:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=3300s) times see what I'm saying so from my perspective as a very different kind of radical practically everything you see on the left in American society in European Society is controlled opposition right Colonial capitalist power has no fear of Marxism those guys had entire continents and failed to mount any kind of substantial long-term challenge to the normal Colonial super structure the thing that nobody talks about is Gandhi so think of the three people that played the Gandhi game for reals Gandhi Martin Luther King Nelson Mandela right and all of those people won without violence and they won in ways that made permanent structural change in the countries that they were working in if you want to talk about mounting a serious threat to power using tools that are proven to work it is not communist that represents the thre to colonialism communism from many people's perspective is just another form of colonialism as the depends right the real sharp end if you want to see like serious Democratic change without violence is Gandhi right now Gandhi is a mixed bag right Gandhi is I Gandhi even by Indian standards was weirdo when that's really saying something um but nonetheless the political ideology works and it works in a way that was replicated in uh South Africa replicated in the US and it's highly effective the reason that there is such an enormous void around Gandhi and nobody really follows it up is because it is a genuine threat to power if you start talking about boycotts if you start talking about Civil Disobedience if you start talking about nonviolent non-cooperation if you talk about ethical Supply chains um people with real power start to panic because that's the stuff they're actually afraid of which is why nobody has ever really heard about about Gandhi as a tool pit that could be applied to overthrow modern political power structures even though it's been done successfully three times in the 20th century um because it is effective you have no herur it right and hence what my work is modernization of Gandhi an attempt to retool Gandhi for the environment that we're in now because all this stuff here right gandi started with appropriate technology he designed a a wound a spinning wheel that people to manufacture in small quantities and use to make their own cloth as a way of

[57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=3450s) making them independent from the colonial activity of the British Empire the British Empire basically you know had um uh let's say coerced labor in places like Egypt or in Cotton they would process that cloth in factories with again horrible labor conditions in the UK and then they would sell it in India and that mechanism was hugely profitable for the British Empire and Gandhi said well here's the deal nobody's forcing us to buy it if we stop buying it they're going to stop coming here to sell it everybody have you know make your own cloth or have your neighbors make cloth and buy it from them if you can't afford to wear much cloth just wear a couple of blankets and that approach puts so much pain on the British Empire that Gandhi actually visited England to apologize to the factory workers that he was making unemployed for making them unemployed and they were like but Mr gandi you can't understand you're throwing us into poverty and gandi snapped and was just like you've never seen poverty right so this is an approach right you know we all know that the electronics manufacturing supply chain is evil right and I I mean there's capital e evil Nets outside of the windows on the factories to stop the workers ding when they jump out of the windows right I don't know what the working conditions are like to make those Nets necessary but I think we've all got a general idea right and that is our equivalent of slavery very similar moral problems not anything like the same level of barbarism that was present in the American slavery which is even by the historical sence of slavery American slavery is an entirely different kind of nasy right you know when they say slavery in Rome it it not mean the same thing that slavery meant in the South so always remember American slavery is a whole different Cony of slavery but nonetheless right horrendously evil things are being done to maintain our standard of living which is why you can buy one of these things for $11,000 rather than $8,000 and we are all fully embedded and implicated in this does anybody here not own anything that was manufactured in China right so this is our program right regards to who we are where we came from we are all beneficiaries of a system in which human beings are treated in inh human ways for our benefit we are all fully implicated now what would it take for us

[1:00:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=3600s) to redesign our lives so that we were not fully implicated we'd have to start tracking where the stuff was made and we'd have to start monitoring the labor conditions of the people have manufactured our stuff can you imagine anything more radical than 40 million Americans demanding the Opel sorts out their labor relations or we're all going to switch to Android how much negotiating power will that give you over Apple so nonviolent consumer activism to crush the corporations into serving out their human rights situation is an entirely possible kind of American political activism that would hit corporations right in their wallets in the most severe way and it doesn't require anybody to go outside and get their skull crushed by a policeman swimming a stick given that this is such an obvious way of improving the world and bring the corporate power under control why have you never heard anybody seriously suggest this because it will work you could have any amount of Street protest the system knows how to handle Street protest the system does not know how to handle Mass organized consumer boycots and every time that technique has been tried in the past has worked so my suggestion is that most of what you hear about politics is controlled opposition you are told to invest your time and your energy in a set of organizational principles and techniques which the state of the corporations absolutely no fear of and do not care about which is why you could go and buy a book telling you all about that kind of stuff in any bookstore the corporation will sell it to you right if you could go and buy books on you know anarchism and communism in bookstores for 995 and it will tell you all about how anarchism and communism are going to you know be a threat to capitalism if it was a threat to capitalism the capitalists would sell it it's all controlled opposition if you actually want to do something which is a threat to power start cleaning up your own individual moral Affairs figuring out things like the supply chain figuring out things like food and when you get people Mass organizing to sort out those problems that is when you see governments scream right and I will controversially point out an example uh in America in a lot of places my understanding is there are laws on the books to prevent people boycotting Israel right that would not be illegal if people weren't afraid of it

[1:02:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=3750s) this uh you've already started talking about this uh but said I would just want to hear more uh so you've talked about gandhism uh in the past and as you're working on it in the present for the future what do you see as a future in which gism is is I guess push to the furthest it could be pushed like what does the world look like in that circumstance okay so um let's start with the first problem which is G's been dead time and nobody has really modernized G's work in that type per so if you think about you know the kind of broad Frameworks of electoral democracy English common wall this kind of stuff it's gone through 78 years of update since World War II Gandhi you kind of have Gandhi you have a few gandi kids you have one or two people in Schumaker but for the most part the gambi legacy is Legacy so you know at that point it's not like I'm part of a big living movement and there a whole bunch of modern work on consequently the quality of the model is relatively um so Gandhi's core principle could be thought was being IND socialism what Gandhi says is you're responsible for taking care of the people that are immediately around you so Gandhi would say Okay step one if you guys are political progressives sort out all the problems of all the homeless people that are around you hire them to do jobs feed them I don't care because you are there you're in contact with them they're your responsibility now that alone is incredibly radical and that you really me right he basically said look if everybody does their duty to their neighbors we do not need de centralized a bureaucracies building the welfare state so you can have the activity of humans taking care of each other without having huge bureaucracy organize it which was of course one of the problems with the Soviet system when you have a large scale bureaucracy to redistribute resources the first thing that bureaucracy does is by marble polyiso so an individual socialist approach where people take care of the needs of their immediate neighbors why that's radical it's also in America potentially kind of dangerous so you have to think immediately like really and then you got started thinking about the practicali but think of that as

[1:05:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=3900s) being a building block right G also doesn't believe in human right you go what he doesn't believe in human rights God believes in human duties a human being is a duty not to be violence to people that are weaker than they are and Gandhi says that's a duty and Gandhi is a lawyer so Gandhi says the problem with rights is who's responsible for implementing the right oh another bureaucracy ah I know let's have some rights and then let's have a bureaucracy en forc rights and then let's oh we go some more Marvel palis so gami says is you have a list of Duties when somebody's in breach of the duty the society can then say how they going to deal with that person hey there was a there was a homeless person who's living outside your garage yes and you didn't bring them any food yes well that's a breach of your duty to take care of the people we do way around you isn't it yes oh here's your $200 F just give to the H this guy now I'm not saying that that's a practical system conceptually a model based on human rights rather than human duties is a model in which you've got the potential for enforcement and because it's organized an individual level rather than a bureaucratic level you have the potential for making that work without having to create huge bureaucracy around the problem is that if You' only got few people who doing that those people then become crushed by demand so this is where you start kind of getting into complicated stuff so that that is the kind of welfare state side of the gambi story the other side of the gambi story is the supply chain side so what gambi says is rather than having unemployment payments that we make to people what we should do is we should use simpler manufacturing technology that creates employment everybody would much rather have handmade quotes that fit in perfectly unw taxes right so if everybody agrees that we're going to continue to create labor by increasing our standards for clothing for housing for our right no welfare statement nobody unemployed because we will create labor to soak up all the additional resources rather than having maral powers welfare bureaucracy what you have is everything that counts is hard made for anybody that's middle class above there's no all this is sort of unink but maybe not so if you think about this question of you know the kind of structural violence ined to cheaps can you imagine a future American society in which it

[1:07:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=4050s) was seen as being a toxic negative behavior to have electronics that didn't have some kind of absolute clear certification of the labor condition right okay so you're still using a black phone yeah yeah absolutely rather than a green phone or a blue phone oh yeah CU you know some kind of copyright or trademark use that to and so you could begin to see a movement where the American Elites to demonstrate Ro superiority by literally paying $112,000 for a l and the thing is in a particular color that you to make it those goods are actually e all the way through but if a company wants to use that color and advertise those goods me that certification they don't they have direct Financial penalties that are PID directly to the people AFF so those kind of cultural Trends I think you can build many of the most functional parts of gandi ideology directly inside the Western consumer Society right now but I kind of feel like this is like taking something that's 7 years old out of a garage trying to get it running and then figuring out which bits of it are still functional and well you've got build scouch so what I would love to see is active political research and development to figure out how to modernize and fix Gandhi and then potentially the launch of gandan Enterprises inside of consumer Society is prod Brands and if any of that stuff looks like it's going to get legs you then have God help us Market mechanisms to finance cultural Insurgency because if you have a bunch of green Browns are making a ton of money out of advertising themselves as being genuinely fair trade at every level the Prospect and the possibility is that you could push very hard using those Brands as the source of political war chest to do the advertising to pursue the next 20 million people that it's time to divest so I think I think there is an optionable political agenda there unfortunately it's all sitting and bits on the marriage floor good luck okay so speaking back to what this actually looks like and taking the idea of Duties instead of Rights a lot of this I think comes down to I hesitate to say it but personal responsibility because I know there's a huge debate on oh it's corporations and other things who cause problems so we can't really internalize too much of it but at the same time moving forward if we think of people around the world who have place like refugees or all the things we talked about before they're just people

[1:10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=4200s) people have survival requirements we need food we need shelter we need things to live a comfortable life and since so much of the system that we have in our developed worlds we've outsourced a lot of the power and requirements to build those things and a lot of that is I'd say artificial complexity about like a house doesn't need to be a complicated house it can be a simple house so the more that you're able to cover your own survival needs without playing the game and being connected to the system then that gives a whole bunch of freedom to do things in a lot more sustainable way and I think there's a lot of overlap with other systems such as uh like permaculture and uh I don't want to say Preppers but preppers are into it a lot of growing their own food and living off grid and more sustainable living in that sense so what does this look like in the future I think more Societies in that sense more permaculture more building things local which is moving away from the globalization side of things which then you lose of course economies of scale and things get a little more efficient and everyone has to do more of their own things but that's what it looks like if you are taking responsibility and building things that you know are in a sustainable way instead of offl ac across the planet and hoping things worked outk you uh do we have other questions questions from anybody back I'll bring have a question all the way from the I can also just project my voice no no we need can't do that sorry microphone only um okay I just have a question that has to do with how this is going to seem maybe like a frivolous style question but actually is somebody who thinks about experimental fashion and fashion in relation to fiber and textiles I feel compelled to ask about the pallet of these capes like where the the red and the green are coming from if that is actually the pallette of the um the way that somebody is identified this microphone might be dying while I'm talking so there's that question but then there's also a question about style which I I think is like an important thing to address in the situation of a refugee's life of like losing their ground let talk about the power um that's what was available on Amazon to get delivered

[1:12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=4350s) last minute okay right thank yeah absolutely so the the in terms of power I have been told that the only color which is not associated with any bad political thing anywhere pretty much globally is kind of chestnut brown color um I am personally quite fond of denim I think simply because there such an enormous you know like it's manufactured in such huge quantities and generally speaking it's pretty decent fabric um but I think this is one of these areas where you real cultural research and experimentation or it may just be that we get whatever comes cheapest in huge sea container roles and you wind up with like Refugee CS entirely covered in like you know purple checked kingom cuz that was a backck t i just don't know yeah I was not planning going do this the other thing I should mention is a project which I love some if anybody's interested in this I'd love to get involved with so a lot of the equipment that you want in Refuge comes like backpacks is typically manufactured by military vendors right and it will come in anyone of 42 colors of camouflage uh and you got to kind of pick one right and you can't put like camo backpacks into a refugee camp because now they look like it Sur as some doable nightmare so the idea is called peace pad you know you've got like bar pad and CAD pad and all these different you know names for military camouflage pad so PE spot is the idea of having a standard reference camo which was maybe made of some set of very bright colors that was super visible that could be given to the military goods manufacturers when they were making backpacks for refugee camps so they just throw the peace po file in and this stuff comes in peace po as well as various military patterns but the PE po would be absolutely useless as camouflage and it would only really be used to Refuge here uh and the notion of making it some kind of like digital C kind of look but it's done with like bright new and waiver colors or something I probably should not be allowed to be involved in this well cuz camouflage has like a relationship to invisibility it's supposed to disappear in front of a landscape whether that be architecture or land which is why there's so many different kinds of it to blend in so I guess like the I just have a question about style under these circumstances and um at what point like affiliation is for the person wearing it or the the I mean it was an interesting point to hear you talk about the Red Cross there and also The Branding like the billboard

[1:15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=4500s) that those tents become yes but it has me thinking about agency of the person in that situation and like their choice under those circumstances to have style absolutely so on this um one of the things I kind of want to set as an objective is figuring out what other kinds of clothing it's possible to make with rectang is cut straight off a rle so um there are some Massi designs have you seen this thing they do where they kind of they take a piece of fabric and they tie it at the neck here and it comes across kind of off one shoulder and then then they take a second piece and they tie it the same way across the other shoulder so you get kind of like two rectangles will make a shirt or a dress and then you have some very clever ties for capes so that stuff to me looks like a fully featured um uh I'm trying to think of I don't actually know the word but like it's not just a fashion but it's like a family of Fashions you know it's a it's a whole it's like a fully developed cultural aesthetic you know it's it's as fully developed as like the three-piece suit would be for European men's We it's not just like a bunch of people wear a thing it's said there are 50 different ways to wear it and there are all kinds of variations and they've got their own Styles and Fashions within that kind of cultural What's the phrase I should be using for that I I don't even know what you call that family of Fashions full range of culture decisions I don't know I think you're encapsulating it well there but I I think it comes down to like personal agency with style yeah so the notion that you would basically have rolls of raw material in the refugee camps and then the refugees themselves could make their own Cod out with them you know here's the fabric everybody gets allocated a bunch you know initially you use it as whole bow and then you can sew it into clothing because you can get scissors and time and thread customize manufactur and so on my kind of feeling is that you work with the whole CL as the initial immediate 72-hour thing and 6 months later they've cut it into three piece um because if you don't provide the needles and thread eventually they're going to get them themselves and one way or another that stuff's going to get turned into real clothing so I kind of feel like the fabric in the first instance is the emergency phase and then once they've got better shelter other clothing supply chain more cough available my expectation is that people would customize inside of that context um but um and this is this is the tricky thing right so a lot of the traditional garb is very very highly stylized and engineered you know if you

[1:17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=4650s) think about like any kind of traditional culture where they've still got their own clothing Norms you know think of like how seriously Posh Indian wedding stuff is you know inside of a ruge camp context there's a need for functional clothing and then there's an aesthetic tradition for which those people come either more or less close to the functional clothing that goes out so if you doing this stuff in England a lot English functional clothing is not that far from this know wax and canvas these kind of fabrics but if you go to Scandinavia doesn't work at all right so the kind of place where I think that there is a very tricky part is what is modern functional gear which is just like gortex jackets for everybody and it's the standard of functional moving around the world and what is hear raw materials makeer traditional stuff because that work in the context you're in I have the feeling this might be very very very experimental Case by case because that balance point I think could be radically different in different places um it's it's it's one of those things which is like it might be more complicated the food and that sort of say so I don't know well yeah improvisation is really um informed by location yeah and and the and the you know if you're dumping cheap Fabrics into places that may not be suited for that environment you know it's like oh we got a ton of Nyon and we're going to drop it in Tanzania oh boy wow it's bad move right or you know we took wool to the jungle and the bugs ate it all so you know it's something where you kind of have to plan for making a lot of mistakes and fixing them rather than trying to map it all out ahead of time because it's so complicated um but I definitely feel like you know typically I figure it takes about 15 years to go from the beginning of an idea to have something Deployable so that's kind of like a year old really we got the Breakthrough and we started working on it think of this as being like 10 or 15 years of increasingly Wide Circle research before we would even think about doing a life human test you know the hexayurts we having rich people build their own hex shirs and use them for burning L for 15 years before we build them for homeless people in America because that's about how long it takes for we to be confident that something is not stupid idea thank you

[1:20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=4800s) questions um going back to thinking about the supply chain for electronics and things um my brain jumped to in Europe there's a a couy called pherone that's trying to track those things um I also jumped to a book that I I saw in your work I was reminded of a book by Bruce Sterling called shaping things he introduced this idea of spine it's a neoism that was about tracking the information associated with the object not that to be materials as it moves through thing or maybe where a go thing goes to be dismantled um but it was this possible future world with lots of information there just almost so much information that a a consumer wouldn't be able to take all of that in um and this book is like 2005 um blockchain things have been floating around am I recalling correctly that you have some involvement in a Enterprise that uses the blockchain and if so I hope you because this where this questions going um how do you see handling information as as part of the design problem yeah okay um uh actually I have an object uh I'll have Brian grab it in a second which actually shows that system running life um so uh what one of the one of the things I joke about is Bo Ser R my life uh I read a book of his called uh um I can't remember Crystal Express there's a short story in it about a Buddhist technology movement uh building like robot building counter morons using robot factories that were doing like Global spread of appropriate technology I read it when I was around 15 or 16 and there was just this immense clicking noise in my head as I read I'm like oh I could do this and you know at then my been 30 years chasing Bru you could you grab the camera as well the one that has the RFID tag on the B with turns out turns out we're talking about spy yeah so um I actually worked with Bruce for a while own a company so what what I actually do for a living is uh I run a company which does legally enforceable product definitions which are faceted so if you've got 15 different people who all see different virtues or problems of product they can all legally attach a claim about the accurate information on the product so

[1:22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=4950s) you say it's fair trade somebody else says it's non-toxic plastic somebody else says that it's manufactured expected lifespan for next8 years somebody else comes along and says yeah the problem is and then tells me the problems in the design are tell why will asra six all of these legal claims and cter claims are attach the object on the blockchain and then the individual assets have a tag on them so every single indiv instance of the T there we go uh and here's one I made earlier so if anybody is interested in this there's a tag on the botton of this thing that does a digital signature on the tag so there's a chip on the tag when you scan it it loads up a digital description of the camera in the form of set legal warranties that get guarantees and the idea is that this would be a circular so if you're going to buy this from me the tag it would tell you what it is your software will calculate what you're going to offer me for it if I accept it you transfer the asset from blockchain Andross um and and all that stuff works we don't use it for cameras because it's kind of too much pay about to do kind of expensive but we do use it for things like real estate gold uh and I've working L for seven seven or eight years because basically I kind of spend much of my time and energy doing this stuff until I was over 40 and then I realized I was broke I had no pension I had nothing with career prospects uh so I wented to go get a real job uh and I want do this instead but I mean it is something where you know the prospect of a mass commercialization like if you're going to have a large scale political movement around gandan principles of transparency how do we stop companies lying to us about how S as manufactured this is what got me into the idea of moving into the domain of enforceability of claim about how physical assets we um but yeah if anybody's interested in that stuff there's a demo I also have a bunch of business cards you can come and get look at the website see what we're actually up to did that answer the question I'm sure did think just giving you an opportunity touch yeah I mean it's in the in the long run you know the notion of building tiny little Queen Enterprises in sa with capitalism you know it's it's a viable for stabilized will still being great pointed in the right direction um because I don't know how long it will be

[1:25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=5100s) until we real large scale transformation of society around these kind of ethical lines but if you make a bet on that your 10 years too early you wind up right about all those 60 rals that wound up with absolutely crappy lives you know you find up something out his intellectuals and learn up McDonald's if they were lucky you know you have to is a radical about how your future will be protected otherwise you wind up in the pile ofen radicals I know what my mans were on that pile and I decided that was going to try and avoid it so building out functional systems inside the capital in a small scale those become the prototypes of much larger systems if Society moves in that direction it can then adopt those systems it's kind of like the fake meat companies you know all these people working on fake meat these are economically marginal Enterprises they can't make this stuff cheap it's all very shaky but if you see a huge turning away from animal agriculture a societal level they'll take two zeros of the price and stuff will become cheap so if you don't do prototyping somewhere in the ethology whether it's Acadia whether it's government whether it's Charities whether it's in business if you don't do the prototyping the option of large scale cultural transformation goes away completely so I'm kind of trying to keep the options open where I can't much rather this full time uh we have time for some more questions from anybody um so I want to come back to this idea of romanticizing the prean and they see so many examples of how uh throughout the history of consumer culture since its beginning there was this tension between um religious guilt of making money and being successful businessman and uh simple life movement and so um you know what I'm seeing is this widespread uh commodification of Ys and TPS and small house movement or at least idealization of simple living within the safety of uh consumer capitalism right

[1:27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=5250s) so it's kind of playing The Burning Man full time right and what you're saying is that we have to step into this this is going to be the new reality no longer the exoticism but that's where the world is moving right now do you know any people who live in in simpler structures like yours and what what would be the Practical advice let's see for young people or for all of us if we were to transition to something like that okay so um yeah I mean so my my prediction is that the entire existing um real estate system is about to crash so commercial real estate basically got nuked by the pandemic because everybody went to work from home and commercial real estate prices are done by I don't 30% 50% crazy crazy 1% so similarly residential real estate prices have been artificially inflated for Generations by people using building codes to prevent housing being built and by various other kinds of Financial and essentially entra right this whole thing is racket um because we got better at doing every other single thing right price performance for every single other area has improved and improved and improved and improved since World War II housing has only gotten crappier and more expensive right so why is that if we've gotten so much better at manufacturing cameras and tripods and loudspeakers and cars and buses and planes not counting B um if all those things are improving all the time why is housing the one area that's moving in the other direction and the answer is massive attempts to keep housing expensive by entrenched interests so what I'm expecting eventually is that that equ room breaks down and you get Mass adoption of new housing Technologies not even necessarily first in the US um but as that begins to kind of Click into place um what I think you'll get is an enormous cultural tear between the people living in the new technology houses and the people living in the old technology houses the old technology houses are expensive to maintain they're expensive to buy they're not properly insulated they're made old materials new

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/724-3.md (part 3 of 3).
End of [724] Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan Hellard: From Hexayurt to Disaster Relief Garments, part 2 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.