# Blockchaingers Hackathon 2018 - Interview with Vinay Gupta CEO of Mattereum

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [729]. 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, 2018-04-07 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q. Text: automatic captions, uncorrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Shared-sovereignty framing relevant to international tier.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - 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)
  - The Future of Stuff (2020): Book on the philosophy under Mattereum: risk and morality in deals about physical things. (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - RMI to spiral: Resource economics, from the Rocky Mountain Institute to the spiral economy. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - environment / green capitalism: Green economics: from oil efficiency to markets for facts about products. (through a work suggested by machine)
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: culture / history / fiction (24%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: hackathon (3 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); enclaves (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); global trade (4 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); supply chain (5 here; 92 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 4 undated); world computer (1 here; 11 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); global GDP (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); world trade (1 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); drinking water (1 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 2 undated); political change (1 here; 25 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Afghanistan (1 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.23 (1.00 is the top), number 334 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [677] [Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
  - [724] [Roundtable Discussion with Vinay Gupta and Bryan... (2024)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/724.md): close in content (cosine 0.95)
- On the same works, just before: [726] [Talk by Vinay Gupta at the Blockchaingers Global Digital... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/726.md); [635] [Ian Grigg (Chamapesa) and Vinay Gupta (Mattereum) on... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/635.md); [633] [Mattereum panel at the Internet of Agreements conference (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/633.md)
- On the same works, just after: [630] Michael Mainelli - "The economic impact on world trade... (2018); [732] [Vinay Gupta - How Blockchain will change our global... (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/732.md); [618] [Vinay Gupta - Space - Internet of Agreements (2018)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/618.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: Blockchaingers Hackathon 2018 - Interview with Vinay Gupta CEO of Mattereum, video, 2018-04-07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [729], https://guptaoption.com/texts/729.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=0s) and welcome back to the live stream from the block changers hackathon 2018 coming at you live from Groningen we are now joined by Vinay Gupta via a welcome hi house good and I have to start up by admitting that I'm a huge fan so I'm a little bit starstruck to be here at the same table with you I have you reasonably impressed I wouldn't say that too quickly because as soon as I got interested in Bitcoin and blockchain most of that was technical stuff that I could find you were one of very few people first people that I came across to consider the larger impact on society on the ecosystems etc and actually formulating ideas and and hypotheses around those that resigned it resonated with me so that's a very personal point of view of course but still I'm very happy to have you here what you thought that stuff useful and I'm very happy for the participants that they they get to interact with you at this afternoon too because there's still a lot of extra knowledge needed to get all these teams to enhance to the next step the thing I wanted to talk with you about is the tagline of this blockchain hackathon co-creating the new operating system of society that kind of is based on on the assumption that our current society has an operating system what are your thoughts on how the world works right now do we have such a thing oh yeah I

[1:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=94s) mean we definitely have an operating system and I think we're still basically operating on the Viking model the Viking model Viking model so what you call capitalism was built directly on top of what you call colonialism and what you'll call colonialism is basically turning up in books and stealing everything that isn't nailed down which is basically the Viking business model so the Vikings invade the UK in 1066 right and that invasion basically replaces the English aristocracy with the Vikings and then after while the Vikings kind of begin to feel a little bit bored and restless and they start another round of raids but this time we call it the British Empire right it's a very very simple model of history it assimilated and then all the kind of banking infrastructure is owned that we have now dates back to the colonial so if you think of basically capitalism as colonialism Coryell ISM just means Vikings it's very easy to understand why we have this take make waste cycle because the entire thing is based on kind of a you know thousand fifteen hundred year old you know kind of sea piracy cattle right does that apply to the entire world yes the so Vikings also kind of had their influences on East Asians oh sure I mean in as much as the British invaded 180 countries right right and set up the basic framework of global trade that we have today mm-hm so you know the operating system that we're in is basically you turn up in boots and seal things and then slowly we've kind of round it off the edges of that and we've gone through some proximation of a fairer world a fairer trade but we haven't broken that fundamental foundation right the wealth still comes from African boats when they try and charge fair prices for that wealth we have a nasty tendency of invading their countries and looking over their regimes and we haven't really broken the tie between violence and money yeah and it's that tie between violence and wealth that was what caused so much of the early ideological support for things like Bitcoin where who people wanted a currency that wasn't dependent on capitalism that wasn't dependent on colonialism that was genuinely issued by free people in a free market and that wasn't backed by violence per se right and of course when you actually get to looking at this stuff closely what you discover is it's all total hippie nonsense because all of the micro processors are using to run their bitcoins tougher sell manufactured by factories we've completely uncertain working condition to China all the mining happens in China and they all the electricity burn is wrecking the environment right it turns out that you can't just burn a clean spot inside of the world pretend that everything is perfect and then ignore the externality which kind of makes sense because you're building we're standing on the shoulders

[4:04](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=244s) of giants were also stepping along in the footsteps in the from from the ones that were made before so it's very hard to make a radical change you you can't just draw a line around an organic farm and pretend that the rest of the world isn't there because every time your kid you know I need to go to the hospital they're getting an MRI machine that came out the back end of industrial capitalism you can't get away from the way the world walls but all we can do is is not to pretend that we can kind of make these little enclaves everything is perfect but we have to do is systemically clean up the historical mess right so how do we go about that

[4:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=278s) well so I mean this kind of you know pirate capital was a model but we're kind of evolving out off a lot of the damage done by that model is that we throw away the information about what's happening on the other end of the supply chain you know if you think about and if you ever go to an expensive neighborhood and you know through the windows you see these kind of $25,000 handbags and you sort of look at these things and the impression that they try and give you is that this object descended from heaven on the wings of alves and was placed directly on its plinth in the bright silver whites you know by the hands of angels and even the angels had to wear white gloves when they handled it right and the actual thing was probably made in the Philippines by a bunch of people that were working 60 hour weeks to send their kids to high school right and we obscure and we throw in we obscure and we throw away all the information right if McDonald's had to show you a picture of the actual individual cow your hamburger was made form on the menu would you like to eat some of Edith one-for-one you know that she was she was really well we don't know her she was but this is a picture nobody would eat meat right I don't know there's there's apparently a growing number of people that do appreciate that kind of provenance that actually say I want to eat from cow bertha 135 because she seems like a nice cow and she had a good life right and it's not hot a good wife that's the key part right so what I really want to upset people I asked them how much would it cost to make a fair trade laptop and it's probably on the order of 5,000 euros right the second which is who's willing to pay for a fair trade laptop that's the one almost nobody right and if we've tried to produce equitable fair trade for everything that we do the economic costs would literally collapse civilization we're still dependent on exploitation to make things work right this is the great externality at the other end of the supply chain now hang on hang on because I do get your point but I've also been talking to people like Scott Nelson which you've been talking to as well who they tell us that if you look at global trade there's so much money tied up in in inefficiencies that if you were to free those up that maybe those costs would come down well so this is the great question right if we correctly use computers can we clean up the mess of the past which is still the legacy of capitalism and this is a uses a civilizational scale challenge right you know it's a challenge on the same order of making sure that our cities have clean drinking water and that our airplanes don't fall out the sky on a regular basis you have to have the whole

[7:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=428s) of civilization the whole society say look we think this kind of stuff is unacceptable we're gonna figure out what's on the other end of the supply chain and if you don't like what we see we're gonna fix it right we don't like the fact that our energy is wrecking the future of our kids right so if we don't like where the energy comes from we're gonna fix it right but that requires us to to have the at least the idea that we have choice well one of the things I come across a lot of times just have people say you know what I would love to make that distinction but I don't have the money to make the distinction so there's like a chicken and egg thing here well isn't it

[7:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=462s) I think it's question scale right if you basically have these little enclaves where you make up you make a clean spot because these things don't have scale they're expensive right so organic food used to be ludicrously expensive and as more and more and more people selected it do you gone to get mass production of organic food and then you gradually began to see the prices come down and now you know I don't know what the premium is but it looks like it's maybe 20 percent something like that I mean it's very nice of an exact number AB same thing for AB green electricity if you wanted to live entirely on green power in the 1970s you were gonna wind up at home with an axe chopping firewood right and that was more or less your options right now you've got entire countries that run on hydroelectric power by real first world computer infrastructure whoo-hoo very high cool places like Norway right Iceland and you know even poorer countries that gets Uruguay or Paraguay is like 91% hydropower all of this kind of stuff um you know we're scaling and scaling scaling towards these kind of green sustainable solutions what we're and we're at a point which I think is the early stages of a tipping point right where there's enough proof of concept out there that you say you know if we pushed hard we could make that the new standard that could just become the way things are and then we would take the old model of production stigmatized as that's just black market garbage we don't touch that right and that notion that we might be at a tipping point it's a few years ambitious but if we don't start building the weavers fluffa over it will take ten years rather than four okay I'm looking for analogies to picture this and one of the things that comes to my mind is if you look at the food that's presented at this hackathon it's for a large part vegan yeah which it's kind of an example of the intolerance of minority right the right listen to lab describes so maybe the tipping point is also about finding ways in which people say you know what I just don't want to be bothered by the notion that it might be wrong I'll take this option because it feels better easier right I mean that that sort of thing is definitely a process right you wind up in a position where more and more and more people davonne change and you get more and more and more change right there's a there's a slow forward push you can't avoid in society and you saw with disabled rights you saw with gay rights you saw with feminism you know over and over and over again minorities who should be treated like everybody else is treated and the society winds up

[10:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=612s) carrying the necessary costs to make that happen who the idea that you could say the people consuming the goods and the people producing the goods should have roughly the same access to health care and education that's the next step in inclusion it is so if we take this

[10:26](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=626s) tagline co-creating the the operating system of this future that does sound like it's something that you can think through upfront and design and just start implementing but that's not how it works this this has to scale in a organic way as well I think how do you steer that okay huge dear dad I mean what's not going away as capitalism right now as I used to say you know um three people make free markets but free markets don't necessarily make free people who right so the more freedom people have the more they will tend to participate in equitable exchange and they won't accept any kind of exchange which is not equitable okay right so the only thing that causes people to accept the terrible living conditions in these kind of factories or an even worse than mines is because they don't have the choice of doing something else and they don't have the choice of doing something else because largely of political oppression right you know you you force people to work in these conditions just like happened in our countries a few hundred years ago before unionization and before labor was so the same political forces inside of Europe inside of America right inside of the UK the pushed for unionization and labor laws those same forces can be applied all the way down the supply chain if we decide that we're not going to buy any laptop which isn't a fair trade laptop and we're going to insist on the use of a blockchain to verify all the way down those links it is fair trade you know it only takes 5% of our top buyers to require that and you'll see this kind of vegan food transition minority intolerance tipping point and what you could do with these technologies is you could pull the capital to buy political change so if we said right we're gonna have a kind of bucket and we're each gonna promise $5,000 into that bucket for a fair trade what prop when you get to 100,000 units you're gonna do the manufacturing run you know those kind of projects started with things like Kickstarter and IndieGoGo when you are a blockchain to that you've got a much more effective way of enforcing the promises tracking the money making sure that the job gets done right uh-huh right follow the money all the way down the supply chain it won't be long before you see the pooling of enormous amounts of money to do this kind of custom hardware production where you can't do the ethical verification because that's what people really want they don't want deliver other people's expense how do we know that that is what people really want I'm I'm pretty sure that the open source types right there should say the free software types who have made enormous efforts and enormous sacrifices

[12:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=776s) to make sure the free software is the way that the world can run I think if you offered those people free hardware that was guaranteed slavery free that was guaranteed patent free that was Darrent lead copyrighted code in there or I am secret code free right if you went down the track I've no doubt at all that the resources are there to follow that and make it work okay I don't think that was necessarily true before the advent of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency but I've no doubt at all that it's true now how how did it require the introduction of Bitcoin for us to be able to make this next step yes I think so and because what it's done is an enormous transfer of wealth from speculation of real estate speculation in calm startups and speculation and stocks and bonds and it just directly burns out money on innovation by technical elite you know it's super empowered a bunch of very very aggressive forward-looking nerds and you know you don't want to agree with everything those folks have to say but there's no guaranteeing that there's now a huge reservoir of risk seeking capital which is pointed at building a different future and I was not you know tied marches forward you will see all kinds of systemic transformation come out of that okay and some of it will be good and some will be bad so if we

[14:08](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=848s) consider an operating system for the world capitalism money is a very important part of that and this is about influencing the stream of money the flow of money towards different goals mindsets its changing the sound hurt right I mean you've got to remember that you know the kind of horrendous working conditions that we complain about in poor countries where the working conditions that our grandparents had mm-hm I mean I'm sure my grandmother worked at a woollen mill right and in those days you know I bet the most Chinese factories have hostly higher standards of health and safety than the ones that she lived under right you know I mean thought was a bad mad dangerous job and nobody complained because nobody realized it could be different and it was you know intergenerational struggle that got us a better world and that struggle continues for all people everywhere right and there's no reason that we as the victors of that struggle and the inheritors of those victories you know we live in countries that have health and safety regulations there's no reason that we couldn't charge a higher tax on goods imported from countries that don't have appropriate health and safety regulations one could argue that that would limit the possibilities for the workers in those countries because the products wouldn't be sold and they would lose their jobs sure right or how is that helping them it's direct economic competition right if the folks in country a could no longer import efficiently but the folks at country B pass better labor laws that they can import right we've benefited the workers who country because country B is a better country ok this was even more fresh or country to clean up its act right and this can be done right it's not that you have to choose between schools and healthcare you have to choose between schools and private yachts for dictators right it's all that you have to choose between good working conditions and effective exports you've got to choose really good working conditions and massively inflated executive salaries right you know it's the skimming of the proceeds of all of this hard work by economic elites with political power that causes the issues so are you convinced that being able to track the provenance of more and more products etc adds a transparency that would eventually reduce those excessive salaries of CEOs that do not actually add that much value well I mean let's put it this way right we've seen this

[16:38](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=998s) happen with organic food there is no doubt at all that it's gone from a fringe thing to a mainstream thing relatively quickly that are a bundle of benefits you know it may taste bare it may or may not be better for your health it's certainly less damaging for the environment by most calculations you know there's no denying that we've seen that transformation happen in one area Fairtrade is making very heavy and roads in other areas it sounds large they should be bit we're working towards it the idea that the next thing over the horizon might be slavery free trade right why not you know there's a movement towards building a better world and we've got the technology to make it really clear what the real impacts of what our decisions are and I think it's only a matter of years to do you could walk into a shop and you know there's the slavery fee thrown and there's the we don't really know where this came from foe and it's a couple hundred bucks difference eventually that gap will become smaller will become easier to make the decision yeah believe it I feel better about your choices well I mean just to make better choices right right I mean nobody wants to be the bad guy in the story right when I talk about you know capitalism is built on top you know clue is colonialism and colonialism it's just Vikings right you know there's a lot of truth in that it's a small exaggeration but the difference between the Vikings showing up in the British showing up was not that large and there's a historical reason for that right but if you look at what Scandinavia is like today you couldn't imagine a less Viking civilization they completely got out of that phase of their operations and there's no reason the rest of us shouldn't follow suit so how much of this is is talking and thinking from a typical Western perspective are there other perspectives around this globe that are not taken into account well I

[18:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1104s) mean because I started to elaborate please my understanding is that if we see as we see did the Chinese for instance hmm growing in some words taking over the world but having a bigger influence by a typically different mindset from ours as far as I can tell hmm that has to make me wonder is my perspective the only one and the one we're talking about now can it be challenged by them or by any other culture on this planet and do we need to take that into account oh boy well I mean since we're just going for this right there are two theories I use when I'm teaching young people history and the first day is the whole thing of Vikings tweets the colonialism leads to capitalism one the second model is what is the real story of China and you know in the fall of the Roman Empire Rome becomes kind of decadent and soft and then they get invaded by a bunch of Germans with horned helmets and axis or something like that right so I make these comparisons to this age where we'll have excessive wealth just like you see etcetera right sorry so Don that sacking of Roman thing right China was Rome and we were the barbarians and horned helmets and now China is recovering China Wally the Empire the heart of civilization for for five to six thousand years right they were enormous ly sophisticated enormous we were to find they had mass manufacturing they had division of labor they had you know advanced industrial chemistry efficient agriculture you name it they had it right there were a couple of key technologies that they did not wrap their heads around and and as a result they had a bunch of very persistent problems but they had the entire framework in place and they maintained it for thousands of years with all kinds of political chaos and overthrows and trouble from time to time but it was a stable industrial base right pre-industrial not quite the industrial revolution but it was it was extremely sophisticated and it printed money on an enormous scale right in a thousand AD China was about 40% of global GDP India was about the other 40% the rest of the world would in rounding out right right because in Europe they hadn't invented soap I mean it was like 300 more years before the Europeans start mass manufacturing soap again it was an incredibly barbaric period in Europe and then we discovered gunpowder and boats so if you think of the Europeans is basically being the kind of barbarian hordes that threw themselves

[20:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1254s) up against the boundaries of the old empires and mostly one it gives you a very clear model of what's happening right the old cultures would never have poisoned the planet for wealth right they almost certainly would not have pursued the nuclear bomb pathway mm-hmm right they got dragged up far by the enormous violence which came with this kind of Viking culture Agassiz which the British adopted then everybody else copied right and so you had to have means to defend yourself otherwise and as a result the entire world militarize us right in all probability if the Chinese had had the technological breakout then what you would have seen would've been a peaceful adoption of these kind of technologies followed by a massive expansion in Chinese economic and political power followed by a basically a world dominated by peaceful trade but largely to China's advantage and disease earlier more or less sensory organized right but this time from China because at the end of the day the Chinese model was always that you beat people with efficiency right the military you know the the use of arms and again I am NOT Chinese I've not studied Chinese culture in dormers there fail me know the outlines of the history but the strong impression I get is that the Chinese model of Miller the use of the military was it was seen as being kind of the seventh or eighth option rather than being the second or third option right it was much west there was much less tendency towards this kind of war largely because they were very short of resources right large population limited amount a fair trial and not an enormous amount of natural resources per head when you fought a war it depleted your country for a century right because you just didn't have the resources lying around to burn whereas if you've got this kind of nomadic boat war thing where you just turned up in steal stuff you're much more inclined to violence because it's not in your home soil right if you're gonna fight a ward it's gonna be somewhere else cuz you're gonna go there and do the fighting you're not fighting with your neighbors so much well there's some current examples of that going around as well right okay so it's over so so if you had a Chinese lad you know a ruler of globalization or in almost all probability it would be driven by manufacturing and commerce and it would be largely peaceful but it'd be extremely high demonic right it would concentrate wealth and power inside of China because you know after over the Chinese we're better of those things just let us sort out and send us the gold you know there's some consideration there yes it's a tough it's a tough case so there's a lot of talk about China

[23:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1404s) paying for oil and in their own currencies instead of dollars so that's a significant tipping point maybe oh yeah so talking about the future and the

[23:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1415s) next operating system for society it's probably gonna take a few more very very very violent terminal a lot of thermo couple of years decades maybe even before we stabilize into an or new order um nobody's really got the stomach for more war no right I mean we hope any television cameras we've got too much internet people have done too much traveling I really don't think the likely outcome from the current round of political masses is going to be a war between nation states because to be honest the problems that we have are not soluble by a war between nation states right this is not as simple as you know Bob is the bad guy and he's invaded journey or Harry's land and we've gotta go fix it you know really the problems that we have are massive global disorganization and the structural damage from a legacy of a thousand years of crazy people on boats invading stuff I'm British we did that that's awesome sorry guys right I'm also Indian you know we could play this both ways but the bottom line is that we've got this history from which we are recovering right and if you think of this entire process as being about recovering from history and bury in the past right we're midway through the process of doing that for women we're midway through the way of doing that for minorities that live inside of our own cultures we haven't really gotten started on straightening out the global trade regimes that were created at the point of a sort right so if you think about basically decolonizing global trade to the point where people are back trading on a fair basis with each other and if you don't like the deal you don't take the deal rather than you take the deal where you get in facia it's right right we can unpick the past in the same way that we've tried to unpicked structurally the inequalities inside of our own societies right we built welfare states to unpick class divisions we built you know as standards for inclusion in the workplace as wave unpicking the heritage around women not being allowed to work or own property all of these things are points where we took conscious social action and scale to remedy the problems that we were left with in the past world trade is no different right you build the instrumentation you understand the trading systems you figure out how all of these things can work and then you slowly you migrate people across because given the choice most people would rather have you know four pairs of fair shoes rather than six pairs of slave shoes they just need to be given the choice and they need to be given the information right and market pressure will I think do the rest because who wants to be the bad guy in

[26:05](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1565s) their own story so that we're coming

[26:07](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1567s) full circle in a nice way or coming to a conclusion I think because if we're dealing with problems that cannot actually be solved by letting one nation-state go at it against another nation state what would what would be the the form of our next society would we still require nation states could you and I also be citizens in virtual states would that be can we actually comprehend how that works already so I mean yeah you must be about my age right certainly the generation we can respond the pre European Union some almost 48 years old yeah okay 46 right right so you know we remember Europe when it was a bunch of individual nations many different currencies to the point now where to most young people Europe feels like a country it does with a lot of political stuff going on what's there lots of struggle on turmoil I think more or less you know you can work where if you want to work and you can live for if you want to live and you can marry whoever you want to marry and you've never really experienced the national borders inside of the European continent because for you they weren't there to all intents and purposes for the young Europe is a nation-state um no we didn't notice any horrible problems when our nation state was absorbed inside of Europe write some more nationalist sentiments might disagree but but you know it's not like you know there were massive riots or people were killing each other in the streets now or suddenly the electricity grid went down it didn't come back up for a year and a half you know it was pretty painless and quality of life afterwards went up now that is not an example of sovereignty collapsing it's an example of sovereignty being pooled with your neighbors and shared all the countries in Europe shared their sovereignty with each other and it created this nice equitable fair balance thing that was very successful and now it's going through another round of teething troubles but the tensions inside of Europe are caused by the same problems that caused the tensions inside of America the problems inside of China and I would say Europe is the least bad form of our problem right compared to the structural problems inside of America the European disharmonies are they're pretty manageable and and they're not trying to be solved with violence nobody's even thinking about it actually and not physical violence I mean you know finally getting rid of the British by a big a lot of people very happy but it's not being done at gun

[28:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1711s) so you know when we talk about globalization globalization doesn't have to look like the collapsing of sulfur team it can look like the sharing of sovereignty so on climate change or on the eradication of poverty or on the imposition of some kind of fair trading standard for all of the world's underlying Manufacturing's right there is no reason that that stuff has to be some kind of coops of sovereignty or abrogation of sovereignty it could be a sharing of sovereignty right if the you know countries that do most of the heavy industry in the manufacturing and the countries to do most of the consuming meat and agree you know we'd like to extend similar worker protections to our country and your country can we have a negotiation and a dialogue about how to do that you can work forward incrementally over years or decades to get labor protections for the whole world it's basically the start of the European Union as well you see okay so so it's not that we're will have to go through an apocalyptic change there's a lot of room for a gradual evolution and an expansion of the victories that we've had in the West in terms of fairness and decency at our societies you know that stuff is spread and then possibly to a large extent the acceptance of those news models also hinges on new generations not knowing what went how life was before they forget it forgetting right I mean neither you or I have ever gotten on a boat to go and invade somebody else's country - and come back with a bunch of sheep and cattle right you know haven't it's been a while I mean possibly might drown mother's parents Scotland was a rough place but you know cattle fee fingers a way of life is largely a historical knot and that's largely true for gunboat colonialism you know the last couple of wars that were fought in that kind of expansionist mode we're probably Iraq and Afghanistan and in both instances they lost money and that kind of you know boat reading kind of Kalam you know capitalist expansion you could only keep that up if you make money on your wars when you start losing money on your wars you stop fighting them of course and I don't think you're gonna see any appetite in America for more of these kind of wars within 30 or 40 years because they're just done with it they tried it they failed it doesn't work there that's the one thing that seems to come out of it at this point which is encouraging I guess you know peace takes over but everybody's too tired to fight yeah this is what I mean about the the lapsing of national will right but nobody thinks that another war is in their interests right then everybody has to come to the negotiating table and figure out how to improve conditions by

[31:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=1861s) pooling of sovereignty sharing negotiation just like that was done for the formation of the European Union so climate change and the sustainable development goals are the ideal venues for this gradual pooling of sovereignty to create global agreements enforceable global agreements on things our carbon emissions and on things like slave free trade and you can imagine these global processes rolling out their accelerated by the internet they are facilitated by the blockchain they're enforced by international treaty they're enforced by consumer choice I think there's every possibility that the next round world history is no longer a story of nation-states beating each other with stakes but it's this you know sustained collective concerted effort to clean up the mess left by you know the last millennia of unfair insanity and we've all just kind of looked around a bit okay are we done with that now and I think the large degree we are let's hope we are well I mean you look at this right you know that's your technical table right actually it's it's becoming a lot more diverse than just technical talents hmm if we look at the teams members there's a lot more diversity than we had last year so both of water that's not helpful we need those two but a lot of specific domain knowledge in here yeah better men to women ratio lots of different nationalities so perfect yet but we're doing fine major progress right I can improvement so how many of those teams do you think we're building something that is fundamentally unethical versus building something they believe will create a better world I have come across fundamentally unethical projects just yet I have come across about a few openly commercial projects which is about as bad as it gets I think but if you went back you know 50 years right you would have had way more stuff that was just like well let's buy a hood sell it high and who cares were polluting the environment the solution to pollution is that we shouldn't you know the consciousness has really changed a couple of generations that's not just happening here right that's in America that's in China it's in India the young people have grown up in an environment with relative peace relative flat D and the Internet and it's fundamentally changed the model of how the world operates a final question shoot then the

[33:21](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=2001s) older generation which might even include us just step aside and let the younger generation do their thing well I mean the other problem is that young people are idiots right all right maybe they've no way out of my wealth right because they've know we're doing when they see something new just happen once every 20 years or is that the first time in human history that's happened they have no visceral feel through so this is the third round of the crypto tech bubble that I've been part of I've seen two runs of this already and that's made me quite circumspect or quite wary in some ways so I think it's more a case of accepting that the world increasingly runs on young people's values but you are now an ire of the generation which assumes structural power the people that really run the world are constantly trying to pass the ball down to guys in their 40s and it usually is guys and that's changing much more slowly that issue but you know guys in their forties tend to get offers of like well when I retire from this boost I'm gonna need somebody to fill my shoes you want the job right so sell your soul to me we're getting into the positions where we have structural power right I'm here judging these kids efforts right how am i why am I the one who's judging cuz I'm the one well I shaved it off but you know the beard is there virtually so we have to be in a position where we responsibly use the power of middle-age just select the young people that we want as future global leaders right because we're in the position of being you know kingmaker to in our own little ways and that responsibility is heavy on us all right getting heavy as you explain it to me yeah you see right and this is really the role for people of our generation which is we have to decide what are the shoots are going to be watered and what are the weeds that are going to be ignored in much the same way that the folks who are in their 60s who put us in these roles are looking at middle-aged generation to deciding who are the weeds to be warden who are the people to be ignored right and that process of intergenerational selection as we figure out who we're going to pass the privileges we have onto we just need to be more conscious about doing that you know I mean we have to cultivate an aesthetic that says what kind of people will the future need right in the world that we're going into who will have been right to sponsor and favor and privilege and who will we have ignored or neglected and every day we have to make that choice because you get more email than you know how to answer and you have to decide what you're gonna do so I think that there's an enormous role for middle age to basically take on the conscious choice of not replicating the errors of the future jet of the previous generation and you know trying to dampen

[35:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MIbfIMdB5Q&t=2151s) down the worst of the chaos of youth and we're basically there to broker the transition between the old world new world before we ourselves become the old world it sounds like an inviting challenge to me I'm very happy to have you here you'll be doing the rounds you'll be talking to numbers yeah yeah I'm to impart some more wisdom here Jedi move today around helping people do this so if you're in the tracks and you see you having a walk around see if you can catch him because he only has so much time you know thank you very much for taking the time to be here enjoy your stay here we'll see you back as a judge tomorrow and you guys keep watching because we will a lot more of interesting interviews coming up stay tuned [Music]

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End of [729] Blockchaingers Hackathon 2018 - Interview with Vinay Gupta CEO of Mattereum. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [630] Michael Mainelli - "The economic impact on world trade... (2018) (no text here); the most closely related, [677](https://guptaoption.com/texts/677.md) Vinay Gupta - A Radical Manifesto for Fixing the World (2021); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.