# Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan Hellard: From Hexayurt to Disaster Relief Garments (part 1 of 3)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [724], 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, 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 1 of 3
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=0s) large scale supply chain so oh you're too far away from the from the okay so um this piece is 60 in wide by 120 in long so it's basically a 1x2 rectangle and my suggestion is that this is a really good size for handling out Fabric and emergencies for people turn into both housing and clothing um if you want to do any kind of substantial fiddling around the fabric involving sewing cutting putting holes in it zipper velcro anything like that you can't just take Fabric in a two-ton roll drop it in a field and then have people make clothing out of it so what you need is way turning this into clothing without intermediate step so anybody can do that right you know and Knots are pretty easy but not are pretty easy but you could use this up turn this it once it twice P it over at that point that's cool then right so we went from just a rectangle fabric to fairly decent coverage outdoor we have a little hole where we can hand out if we got move something around it doesn't need a hand to hold it in place if I was carrying a backpack I could wear under this or I could carry things underneath it um one size fits basically on right so Point that's a functional technology one KN one fancy looking fold functional [Music]

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=150s) a couple 10 in piece of string what we have is a very basic T you it out a wider than this a larger than that that is enough to keep somebody vaguely dry under conditions so the the point of this is that you can take materials straight out of the industrial supply chain right the the huge bulk materials that be producing you know 100 million ton quantities and you can put them directly into an emergency situation without manufacturing step so the manufacturing step is whereever Botts if we could take a chunk of water resistant Fabric and sew it into a tent you have a factory and it does 500 a day if you take this stuff out right from the end of the industrial supply chain in two time rules we could do like 2 million people a week so getting that entering manufacturing step out where you turn raw materials into stuff that's the key now you this thing you simple as that so anybody ever wor a blanket around a cire you Ty wind up having one hand which does nothing other than M blanket a blanket pin you some of a piece of equipment can't work wearing the blanket cuz the D pin falls off but little thing you t a piece around and you put it over your neck like that that's enough to turn just a rectangle of fabric into something that works on clothing Connolly hold the fabric in place with a hand which means you can carry you can work with this because the KN does the work simple as that thank you and that everybody should be able to do this right

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=300s) e oh you want to do it again yes of course thank you the place where we got started this K was GG domes right so domes are a very old technology they go back as as long as hum have been building' been building does does out of industrial materials are relatively recent we're talking what 1920 something 24 um so I was as whether I could design a dome which didn't require any specialized manufacturing this is like 96 95 somebody said hey could you figure out how to make a do out of P sheet um we got was a rain weird there we go so what you got was a set of does that you could manufacture out of standard industrial heat um which means you can Mass manufacture buildings again with absolutely minimal Factory prep you turn up in the field with a chunk of plywood or a truck you cut half of it in half and suddenly you can make a whole range of different buildings uh and that is a huge empowering technology I've been chipping away that for a while and Brian now going to talk about the models and talk about the modernization thank you so V's initial idea was using the least amount of material to make the biggest possible volume so his original idea the hexayurt was based on a hexagonal shape and did use 12 sheets of material six of them you cut diagonally so you just chop chop the board in half and then when you make put them long side together to make a triangle you get six different roof tiles and then use six of them as wall sheets and then lift the roof up onto the wall and you get a hex and then using that as a baseline a bunch of other people before I got involved in the project made a bunch of of different

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=450s) designs uh one of the big ones was called the quad dome which is using the similar roof structure of the hexayurt Earth but then it makes a much larger structure uh for context of scale the action figure is a scale model so that's how big a person is accordingly to how big these are um when I got involved I wanted to bring in more Unity I guess to the designs cuz they were a lot made between people around the world there wasn't much communication between them and I noticed a lot of similarities between some of the design structures and then thinking of some of the pieces not just as a board in a modular shape but some of the more connected modules as a unit there was a whole bunch of extra designs that could be built together using a lot of the same design principles so here's a few of the designs of various sizes that could be built and there's a website called appropedia which is full of appropriate Technologies open source everyone can work on it uh so I've been updating the hexayurt side of that website and there's probably 50 or 60 different models now that I've been building up with 3D they're all 3D designs for now but I'm working on getting the wooden versions and actual construction areas of them uh so the other huge benefit of having structures built in this sense is how they're flat packed so for example there's a there's a stacked up little everything condenses down into very easy shipments either before or after they're constructed based on how well you connect all the joints and how they fold together and then there's some design tradeoffs of even if you could build the entire thing in one connected piece that folds and unfolds then it makes it big and unwieldy so you probably want to come with smaller pieces and then it's just a tradeoff of how many joints do you want to make in the factory and how many joints do you want to make in the field so I wanted to bring these out and later today or after when we're done talking everyone can come and look at them and see how they move together and all that jazz so come on by afterwards okay all right so I guess we'll get started with the conversation then so my name is fer de robiner I teach philosophy here at uh Marin suit and I've recently been introduced to V GTA's work I think it's quite fascinating and we have a panel of uh some of my colleagues here who will take up and

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=600s) discuss uh these issues and I believe uh we are to introduce ourselves now yes weina yes okay I'm going to start down there with Carl here I'll pass this down because the the video uh Carl Lon product sculpture um there's also been a request then is asking can we turn that down right check check little better so um I'm going to start the ball rolling with a question for B and uh if I understand the format correctly uh my colleagues also have questions or they may take up the conversation yeah okay so I um I had a couple questions that I put together but looking at these plans for the hexayurt I'm I'd like to ask vet um what are could you talk about all of the various contexts and scenarios in which you think these are or could be relevant um I think the most obvious one you have discussed in your work more broadly and even in our conversation today is this phenomenon of climate refugees which is a very real uh problem of course but I've noticed in elsewhere in your work you talked about some kind of uh hopefully maybe even a challenge to the housing market and uh you're about to go to Washington tomorrow which is big problems in terms of housing uh many cities in America and this is a phenomenon in Europe as well there the housing market is getting real it's getting very very expensive and we're starting to see big political ramifications and anger as a result of that and I'm just curious if you might talk about all the ways in which you think these hexayurts could be used where they could show up uh Beyond and in addition to uh the very real Refugee

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=750s) crisis sure so um such a good question um so let's talk a little bit about end State goals right you know end State goals what exactly is it that we doing as a civilization right what's our end State goals so end State go probably ought to include everybody has a place to look right seems pretty obious not not controversial place to live problem is $300,000 is kind of a lot of resources to waste do J you use the the big dome over there this guy there R could you put the option figure for scale so that thing is basically 30 ft across 28 ft across so you know human human for scale that's a really fairly substantial build 450 sareet right yes yeah so you right so 450 s ft is by no means large but it's certainly enough space for one or two people to share you know you're not going to discover your Crum and that kind of space you might have an external unit outside for like a bedroom you know kids room this kind of thing that big building in the most basic materials possible which are not fit for long-term use as ,000 of materials you upgrade it to use really hardcore materials that are really fit for purpose for permanent use you're talking about $5 to $10,000 you add your you know fridge stove Ms and solar panels bit this bit that maybe it's another five grand $15,000 for permanent housing adequate for one or two people and maybe another few th000 every time you an additional gr for kids or something that or you could pay $350,000 for conrete box which was a little bit larger and which will put you into a you know Deb relationship basically the rest of your life so there comes a point where the only reason that we have expensive housing and large scale homelessness is a political pack that was made between the middle class and the government and the banks sometime around probably post World War II there is kind of a deal everybody is going to get very very fancy looking housing they're also going to get lifelong debt and we're going to reto the entire system to stop people building more housing in so if you buy a house now

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=900s) you'll be able to use that as an investment later on everything else in the society is becoming less and less investable because manufacturing gets better and better things get cheaper and cheaper old laptops are worth less than new laptops but we artificially stop technological progress in housing to keep it expensive to keep it scarce as a bribe from the government and the banks to the middle class maintain the existing system you've got all kinds of people all over America that made more money in most years from appreciation of their house and they have some good job and that's not a state nature of thing that's an artificial creation of the government as a bright to part what should be happening is houses are expensive lots of people build more housing house prices become cheap people still build them housing because you can't make any more money building housing that's what you happen and we artificially restrict housing going to keep the middle class CL so what could you do if you were feeling ambitious you could take area that has horrible housing problems illegally occupy a few hundred acres build housing for tens of hundreds of thousands of people and then dare the state to your up on with gun with guns and bulldozers if they feel like that I don't think we're quite at the point in American history we that kind of insurrectionary building is going to become a thing but the notion of kind of you know like what was that thing in Seattle where some folks occupied a park or two you know if you occupy a park or two and then you build a subdivision on it and then you build a school and then you start sending kids to school it's a little harder blers and so my expectation is that not necessarily this technology but something like this technology F Life Next Generation mod building something like that eventually some will have a br fashioned American Insurrection they will legally build a whole bunch of highquality housing they'll start treating it like a subdivision and the state will just be like okay fine they'll write up some paperwork and normalize it into the system and then that point we see the begin getting a renegotiation uh I am very specifically avoiding getting involved in those kind of processes myself because I think it's kind of Poli risky and I know lots of other stuff do on to but something will eventually do well since I'm supposedly running this round table I'm just going to ask another question because I want to um I I want um our audience to maybe appreciate the urgency of your project and the particulars of it and uh before

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=1050s) we started here everybody always talk to V about where V is going tomorrow V is going to George Mason University which is down in Wasington George Mason University down near Washington and we'll also be presenting on this to the dod the Department of Defense H that is interesting and I was I mean V knew already but I was explaining that this is a hot bed of the defense industry here mik is all in no I'm just kidding no but Maryland is Maryland's economy is dependent on this right the the entire job the employment economy of Maryland would be a shambles without defense industry directly indirectly and [Music] uh and so I was posing the question to amov about why the defense industry would be interested in this so uh there is an author I taught in one of my classes Amit go who is I think best known as a fiction writer but wrote a book a few years ago also about non-fiction about climate politics and Amit had this chapter about you know what's going on in America where we're and other countries share denialism you know she he was writing about the various denialism the various breeds you find around the world America is a big denier however there are two sectors of this economy if you will that are Allin and very aware and very serious about the prospect of climate change and that is the insurance industry who has no illusion and the military and so I thought I would ask um I'm have to talk about the urgency of this sorry then would talk about the the urgency of this uh of this project in the context of something that the military now recognizes is an emergency what do they know how do they know why don't we so believe it or not I started working with the US military for moral and ethical reasons right because I tried working with the ngos and the NOS were so terrible morally and ethically that I felt the military were you know a shining Beacon of honesty transparency and Truth inar which should tell you you need to know about how bad the NGS are and um the NGS are terrible they're

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=1200s) worse than you can imagine I'll talk about something so the Bott line is that the military is in the business of displacing people right you go somewhere you buom a bunch of stuff huge numbers of people move around and those are people who are theoretically responsible for not killing and ideally keeping alive uh a collaborator of mine once framed this uh as US military policy was well sometimes you kill people and sometimes there's some left over so managing scale population displacement was a critical missing military capability in Iraq in Afghanistan potentially in previous engagements they've been aware that they need to upgrade their humanitarian technology capability for decades they've also been aware of climate change is a large future shape and force since the 1980s so my kind of Devil's bargain was I thought that this project needed a couple million dollars year serious research money and the humanitarian world has no money set aside to research at all generally speaking private Enterprise has been very cool at developing shelters because building codes prevent you from doing shelter research and then monetizing by having people live in it so that left the military hey guys what do you think and the US military has a lot of people that went in to fight communism now communism in the days that they were fighting it killed roughly four times as many people as fascism right it was the great Mass murdering political do of its time and when they went in to fight communism what they were saying was very much like saying you were fighting fascism today anti-communism and anti-fascism were both seen as being very very similar Enterprises we've largely forgotten how bad communism was and we've largely remembered how bad fascism was but when we say you know they went into the military to fight communism this is in the era when the American Military thought as being antifa fascism broke out they went over there and killed everybody involved yay democracy right and they had a very similar attitude to Communism but communism they decided they were not going to start Hot War but they were going to wait for it to collapse but it eventually did and there's a huge amount of History around the decision not to fight a war with the Communists and to let communism run its course uh the critical documents called The Long Telegram sometimes known as the xmember written by an American Diplomat called George Kon but if you want to understand America really is read the X by it's absolutely fantastic George Kenan work one xmember it basically

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=1350s) explains the decision not to have a nuclear war with the Soviets so all the folks that went into the military 50s 60s '70s era to fight the commies one right Soviet Union collapsed China decided that it was a manufacturing superpower was going to embrace market economies it became capitalist and all the name and at that point we got 10 years of world peace in the 1990s and what those guys were expecting was like hot dog was and a tick or tape parade and what they got was 10 years of kind of crappy world peace and then a massive new global war called the global war on terror at this point a lot of these folks became very disappointed because as far as they were concerned the war that they spend their lives winning with one and now could we please have the peace that was on the other side of war and instead we were starting a bunch of wars that were really very poorly thought out and when this created it was a lot of desire to see a better future for the American Military than the glob War [Music] what's next for military this was a hot topic of debate was it environmental damage limitation was it humanitarian um what exactly is the military for Operations Logistics War fighting with for war fighting is most to done by robots but do we do the operations in the logistics capacity so there is this possibility of seeing the US military retooling for Global humanitarian an enormous scale and not turned into a small set of projects that were kind of doing some long range research in that kind of area and my stuff got rolled up into one of those projects that's what star Tides it's been running for 17 years um and you know if you think of this as not the US military is a huge monic thing this is a bunch of folks who are rounding error of budget maintaining a possible future capability that's kind slots um but to this day uh I have never seen worse Behavior than the NGS and the US military in the mids I've been dealing with have always been fair and even have it because the branch of the research that is long-term thinking and strategy is basically academics who behave well unlike to people that are actually pointing guns of people in horrible situations and then doing horrible stuff so you know you hear what thinking about military is if it was a single integrated unit at one end it has its universities and its think tanks and at the other end it has things that looks like unaccountable police forces running around shoo people night it's a mied bag okay thank you uh I'm going to turn it over to colleagues now see if you

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=1500s) have some thoughts or comments or questions I'm looking at Ben or UTA or Carl anybody here you [Music] go uh V so we got to chat before the the official event so I'll uh revisit some of the topics because I thought you offered a fascinating very Nuance perspective on what is known uh to be cultural appropriation and we as uh Scholars and artists and people who work with culture we always uh have to Grapple with those issues so my question to to vene was whether um they encounter any controversy with adopting Mongolian y um for for their um kind of new product right and um I found your your answer to be fascinating I also came across a book by Amanda Luchia it's titled white Utopias the religious exoticism of transformational festivals so with that I would like to jump into straight into the Burning Man and I have not been to the burning man but um this topic comes up um in my religion and American consumerism class when we talk about um the appropriation of other people's religious traditions and I understand that the Burman man is is a kind of the center of that where anything goes um and this this text um by Amanda armanda Luchia is also a Nuance text um as well as as your perspective on that so I think I'm throwing a bunch of things at you here and um usually what sells in the New Age capitalist Market is is distance whether geographical distance or historical distance right so um in this case let good it's too loud you guys he okay

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=1650s) perfect yeah okay so in this case um the idea of a y is still considered exotic as well as things happening at the burning land there's lots of exoticism so I think I'll I'll leave it at that and that people from other cultures you know representatives of other cultures generously share their culture and bring um some answers to uh modernity's problems or issues right and we talk for precisely about that um you coming from a mix culture from India and and Scottish background so um yeah I mean I kind of feel like the Mongolians are a special case so I mean the Mongolians were probably the most successful militarist operation of their time period I think they killed something with the region of 10% human race in various waves of invasion and everywhere they went to build yards so it's kind of hard to appropriate something that the Invaders bring with them the every we behind this it's just worth remembering that the white folks are not the first people to go to ramp each other here um but you know to be honest I don't think a right the Mongolians are not particularly oppressed people at this point as far as I can tell they don't seem to be particularly protective of the as an inovation that they created I think this is just one of those instances like fishing trips at hurger just m be um this is not to say the cultural appropriation isn't a very real phenomena but in the instances where the culture doesn't seem to care we should Reserve our outrage for places where people really do care you know I don't think the molans are harmed by the World Europe but there are other forms of cultural corations are really making a mess so my kind of feeling is in all these matters we should be guided by folks from the culture of being appr procreated and should kind of follow read of this stuff rather than having a kind of blet response it should be very much about figuring out where to target real problems and there are no problems it's just cultural doctr cultural Americans were not harmed by global adoption of blue jeans they weren't harmed by global adoption of sneakers Scottish people have not being harmed by the global dotion of let's say alcoholism you know it's just a you just have to kind of figure out what part of culture or sensitive which parts of your culture are

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=1800s) say I remember you were explaining before about the choice of calling these hexayurt yurs or hexad and also being more of an architectural term of how tension and structur is and just it's it it could be used either in a technical sense or a cultural sense and I'm sure that in the cultural sense there are plenty of other aspects about it that the decoration and how you put it together and the symbolism and what they're used and I'm sure moving in that direction there's a lot more potential to step on some cultural toes but staying in the you built a really cool thing and let's share it with everyone else from the more technical side that it's a lot better that it's more spread out to everybody and the technical thing is you know very clearly like the the the one here that that one this guy here right so that that guy has a ring at the top which holds the walls up so the walls display open uh and exactly the same way that Europe has a tension ring at the top that has a tension ring at the top so structurally mechanically it is very much a your the big guy doesn't need that tension rate because of mle mle Structural Engineering reasons so that guy is very much do the Y like things go y do like things I think I have two microphones oh you ready to go I have one more question okay so my second question comes more from my own uh discipline which is history of religions and I'm also fascinated uh with the kind of whole desert aism aesthetic that I see in your work in in the capes and in the simplest simple Elegance of the Y and how that also through distance addresses the Pains of of capitalist society and as you Illustrated the housing market right so it's interesting that um you offer a solution to um capitalist Problems by saying be more aesthetic right simplify your life and here's the product you can do it with right and would you like to elaborate on that or this is something that that fascinated man your

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=1950s) work so the the construct that we're in right now is you know there's no real line between colonialism and cism right if people producing the goods and the people consuming fs and I use that word so the people producing the goods and people buying and using FS um have the same stand Li a laptop would cost something like right the only reason this stuff is cheap is because somebody's being brutally oppressed make it cheap and this is the core continuation of capitalism is built direct the top of colonialism how do you take the colonialism out the capitalism now here again we have to be a little delicate Focus right because the idea that white people invented oppression as a lifestyle is really ahistoric right there were other cultures that were m good oppressing people long before white people even heard the word app right China India South America vast brutal dictatorial regimes of large scale slavery while Europeans were still figuring out how to farm goats right white people did not invent this stuff they just happen to be currently the best out it 500 years ago 500 years the future be true right the dominant Empire from most of European history was not Europeans was the opp it perks so you know we shouldn't confuse capitalism colonialism and race as being linked right oppressing people so they work for nothing and then taking the benefit of that lab concentrating it in the hands of the elite is a normal human arange ter and it's what human beings will do unless they're forced to go to people are just like that and we're constantly fighting against that tendency towards oppression and barbarism and violence some cultures are fighting that some cultures are wor but it is the natural tendency of human beings to do that stuff and that's why we have to work so hard to stop ourselves does that kind of make sense as a start right and and you know for my family half got C right one side of the family were brutally oppressed by colonialism lost everything they owned and had centuries you know just terrible Life as a result and the Indians on the other hand did great under the British Empire right the people who got shafted

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=2100s) by colonialism in my were the scsh who were forced up their La at the point of the sord to make way for some rich dude's cheap farm and the family kind of never recovered so you know it's not that to critique capitalism to cre colonialism implies getting all tangled up and ra points right and I think it's actually impossible to proper critique of capitalism and colonialism and also do uh caral Poli were you can't handle what happened in China the hands of Japanese if you think the white people are problem and that's really important right so if we separate out this problem of colonialism and capitalism from the racial politics it also becomes easier to talk about uh Supply chains which are split between different kinds of cultures Democratic F dominated here notion of communist authoritarian Chinese working together in a single oppressive system right and about single oppressive system right here there's your single oppressive system designed in cerino manufactured in China the folks that manufacture these things keep jumping out windows because the living conditions are so bad and they can't unionize because they're already in a communist that's the capitalism cism tied up right here and it reques op impressive for both unchin to produce this so it's not simple right it's not um and then when we talked about ticism this theism is if you pay everybody a fair wage everything gets stag more expensive you just can't before as bun stuffy simp you all see the pictures of D running around in the black yeah so we'll talk about that in a second but does everybody get s like you know the the the oppression of people in the depression of the way price of Labor using violence that's just not a recent problem it predates quite Civilization by quite a long time you know it's really important not to get to Tangled Up the curent political obsessions of America assume that that's an accurate world history it's not it's massively eurocentric to pick the white people EV sure I'll take this in a different direction um I'm listening to you talk I came in I

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=2250s) was playing with the models and I was looking at your work and we were we were tying you have this we were talking about how you just get the bolt cloth size the amount of processing from B you actually getting a piece of clothing is highly and so that that makes you think oh this is something that you're expecting the person at the end to be doing themselves um and now I'm adding this um military angle to highly complex group of individuals that have the um Army Corps of Engineers that can show up can do kind of more advanced things and I'm curious just where are you in this this process how is working with the D change that if you don't have to assume that oh we are going to have very few tools we have to rely on people's ability to TI knot and F she um how that has impacted the design so the military has never real resources it kind of runs in kind of tiny Corridor you know in a much larger kind so you know the budgets for things up billions and the budgets for this kind of research T ofs right this St is a Ry bath Walker kind of fact um the so the pr is basic Z so Zone one after second zone for Walmarts up and starts selling stuff out of trucks kind of TR zone two is this do between military operations and S monian operations so when the US military screws up you turn an entire country into Z Iraq and Afghanistan they destroy Logistics two dangerous Sho it comes it's not and when you throw 100 million people in zone 2 without any of support probably about 4 million people died unnecessarily

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=2400s) that's horrendous right you know I mean that's just oh my God if we had any kind of objective measure of the worth of human life the fact that millions of people died in Iraq and Afghanistan totally coincidental to the objectives of the war US military had no objective to kill those people they were just kind of kill them the process oh my God it just doesn't get any worse than this right um so the notion that you might eventually wind up with serious military that's in the condid zone 2 so you bomb a bunch of stuff you displace a bunch of civilians you drop a bunch of sea containers F the stuff from the civilians take it out put it up live in it and don't die from the perspective of the military all that stuff is like potential future directions for minimizing humanitarian fall right now there reasons for wanting lot technology are not particularly great reasons but as long as the technology gets built do I necessarily care right and this is devil bar and problem of if you start in charity you can't build anything outside of the charity industrial complex parameters if you build a company youd build stuff for people to St to the roof of the rest you be when they go on holiday and too it's something like what space who do you find to fund longterm research the stand of un refugee camp by the way is still built using the same tools technology and um as you would have seen in World War II Refuge in Europe you haven't innovated in basically 8 years because there's no money to innovate and if you don't invest in Innovation you don't get Innovation so we're stuck in a position where there is no budget for Global humanitarian Innovation there's a little bit of rounding error stuff floating around but generally speaking we don't regard the humanitarian crisis as being an invasion and it is an invasion um you know I I put about 100,000 solar lights into refugee camps in Pakistan out of a sanitation budget one and that was about the most interesting thing that had been done in critical infrastructure and refugee camps that decade and it's not that interesting so you know when you have a huge Global funding Gap you take whatever money you can find to fill that Gap uh but it is you know it's a devil's maret I was not that happy to have to do it I'd rather the Red Cross would be decent but the Red Cross were I mean the most hostile and predatory response to these Technologies ever was unhcr unhcr

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=2550s) hates me with a personal passion right because I make cheap long lasting buildings right the the exact phrase was it's too cheap and it lasts too long could you make one that falls apart after 3 months from unhcr right that's how you wind up working with the mil why because they're evil right so is anybody seen those pictures of refugee tents put up in various refugee camps around the world you know that they always have huge branding on the outside telling you what agency put them in the field uhhuh uhhuh right the tents are only Billboards for fundraising they incidentally shelter people but their primary purpose is to be taken pictures of from uh you know TV use Crews to raise money for the organiz the tents themselves decay in the sun then we he over tent up in the backyard and by the end of the summer the ultraviolet light has rotted it out and the tent just Falls to Pieces that's exactly what happens with the majority of the humanitarian tents they put the map they take the pictures they raise the money they leave the tent's rot in the Sun and those people are left in the M then they raise a bunch more money and maybe they send out another tent maybe they don't there are places like Norwegian Refugee Council there's Refugee comps where they've been sending out a tent every two years through 30 years right the entire humanitarian world runs on a line which is that Refuge is a temporary condition so the host governments agree to take the refugees as a temporary measure the refugees have a a citizenship status which doesn't allow them to work and there's a huge Global collusion to pretend that the refugees are temporary we displace them go home again in practice that a refugee comes in Africa that been there for 70 years with millions of people living there they've got kids that are like seven generations BN in GS right there is no such thing as a temporary Refugee except for very occasional things like hurricane right it's a rarity that once you're a refugee you go back to where you started for the most part what you are as a displaced person you state displaced the other thing let be throw out there is you've got refugees and you have idps refugees are typically crossing the border idps are typically stay standing where they are what do you call an American internally displaced person

[45:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oABfflhN3mU&t=2700s) hress so if we take the kind of internationally standard descriptions for idps I think there's a pretty good chance that the majority of American homeless are technically speaking idps and in the same way you get people that are displaced by the bad political system inside of some you know far off country you get people that are displaced by the bad political system here those people are not recognized as idps because if you did recognize them as idps you human rights and so we wake up with this whole schizophrenic language not schizophrenic exactly but you know detached from reality of broken into what a competing World piece is um where you've got you know Refugee IDP homeless people the incredibly poor the lless you know uh pneumatic you kind of have this range of folks that are just kind of slushing around unconnected to the Mima the world and they exist in a variet of different legal categories but actually their survival needs are basically right so if you basically focus on the individual human in their needs and largely or the argument about the weak status turns out that these structures work really pretty well for people going cing they work pretty well for American homeless um I've seen them go up in Africa and India on small test bases it seem to be fine and all that stuff is true because the human being in the shelter doesn't care what their legal status is they just care about whether their shelter works and so this is the kind of um you know if you put the human in the center of the story you do a kind of human Center design approach you can really focus on the primary needs of the people that need the shelter rather than worrying so much about the political categorizations um but yeah I mean the the the sheer hostility of you know the a industrial complex on this stuff they're not there to find permanent Solutions they're there to advertise their brands and raise money and the amount of hostility they show to Country uh humanitarian organizations in country you know if you have a disaster in say some South American or AF in country the UN and the large Western Charities will do everything possible to starve the local groups of publicity and therefore money to make sure that all of the a is chel through Geneva taking a 30% cut off the top rather than going directly in country this stuff is absolutely filthy it's Mafia level po well okay

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/724-2.md (part 2 of 3).
End of [724] Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan Hellard: From Hexayurt to Disaster Relief Garments, part 1 of 3. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.