# Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at Combined Endeavor (2007)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [740]. 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, 2017-12-07 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the law step (Mattereum, 2017), before the great powers step (Multipolar Realpolitik, 2024).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Early military trial of hexayurts as refugee shelter, a precedent for relocation logistics.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Hexayurt (2002): A public-domain disaster shelter made from whole 4x8 building panels with one diagonal cut.
  - RMI Sustainable Settlements charrette (2002): Rocky Mountain Institute workshop on sustainable settlements where the Hexayurt idea took shape a second time.
  - Hexayurt infrastructure kit (2003): A household kit around the Hexayurt: water-purifying bottles, dry toilets, efficient stoves and solar lights.
  - Expedient Infrastructure for Transient Populations (EITP) (2007): The 2007 program on shelter and infrastructure for 100,000 to 1,000,000 displaced people, between civilian...
  - The Physical Aspects of Distributed Infrastructure (2008): Design study for ultra-low-cost solar thermal homes off the grid: cooling from the ground and evaporation,... (suggested by machine)
  - Hope for the World (2009): Talk at an emergency housing workshop in Sweden: disaster relief and development aid are one problem, and... (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.
  - STAR-TIDES: The National Defense University project and the papers around it.
  - fiction draws on: The work that fed the fiction.
  - 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.
- Topics: Burning Man shelter building (33%); Distributed infrastructure — integrated utilities and thermal engineering (22%); disaster / refugee / food (11%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: refugees (12 here; 84 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated); Strong Angel (2 here; 8 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); distributed infrastructure (3 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated); refugee camp (4 here; 36 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Eric Rasmussen (1 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2007); composting toilet (1 here; 13 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); composting toilets (1 here; 20 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); drinking water (1 here; 22 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 2 undated); Rocky Mountain Institute (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); Appropedia (1 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 3 undated)
- Importance: core-text score 0.53 (1.00 is the top), number 66 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [711] [Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md): same career work: Hexayurt
  - [294] [Practice Safe Hex - Burning Man Hexayurt Safety Checklist! (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/294.md): same career work: Hexayurt
- On the same works, just before: [691] [Vinay Gupta (Part 2) by Paul Tanasyuk | Blockchain,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/691.md); [699] [Vinay Gupta, Hexayurt.Capital | Blockchain: Ecology,... (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/699.md); [690] [FSCONS 2017 - Vinay Gupta - Resilience (2017)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/690.md)
- On the same works, just after: [639] Stephen Diehl - Smart Contracts for New Entrepreneurs (2017); [644] Imogen Heap - Internet of Agreements Conference (2017); [646] Jeremy Silver - Internet of Agreement conference (2017)

## 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: Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at Combined Endeavor (2007), video, 2017-12-07, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [740], https://guptaoption.com/texts/740.md.

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

## Passages
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=0s) tell me what well it really goes back to an event called strong angel which is run by a direct by commander Eric Rasmussen who's remember a specific title and he heads up the Naval med and evil manacles so Eric became extremely interested in refugee issues after one of his bosses said Eric and go learn about this so Eric held an event called strong angel in Hawaii first something the one and two where they did a simulated disaster they had a bunch of people in refugee tent in and they just tried to run a disaster and observe what was going on weren't the experience and figure out how they could improve disaster response capabilities what came out of that was a meeting called the sustainable settlement Charrette at the Rocky Mountain Institute where they got about forty people together in an environmental think-tank setting and said what do we do with refugees how do we make this work better and that was a specification and specification was what we need is a high quality shelter that lasts a long time and is cheap and can be transported with the refugees and this is really critical and one of the reasons that host countries tend to accept refugees is once you have a refugee camp it's really hard to relocate the refugees back home again because they build a life there they build infrastructure there they build homes there and you can't resettle them without driving them out of their homes so the idea was to design a shelter where you could house the refugees comfortably but when the time came to move them you could take the shelters down ship them by truck and then put them back up again for the refugees in their native villages once they were free to go home so that was the specification the other part of the puzzle was a thing we call distributed infrastructure which is providing all the basic services of life without requiring what we call pipe and wire harness so if you were one of these buildings around here every one of them has electricity running into the building running out building and many of natural gas lines and telephone lines and the combined cost of all of those additional services can be cool the coastal filming itself so when you put these two threads together what you get is a requirement for a building which you can transport easily and which also comes with a complete infrastructure harness that's self-contained because in refugee camp redux sewers for every building when you move the buildings the refugees would have lost their sewage if you did the same thing with electricity if you would like a baked you know 50 kilowatt

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=150s) generator in the center of camp when you set the refugees home again later lost their power so everything has to be self-contained of this family level structure and that's basically what this building is the way that it is when you need to take it down again let's cut the tape with a craft knife and the whole thing goes back into a single panel four feet by peopie boot for the u.s. dimensions or whatever the equivalent is in meters it's probably I don't know 36 centimeters by 60 by 120 well in the refugee camp context these things are kind of expensive we're still talking about fifty to a hundred dollars per refugee and typically refugee camp costs are five ten fifteen dollars per head so these kind of things are not designed for your typical refugee scenario this is really looking for a new approach to handling refugees which acknowledges that the rapid directors use the refugee for 17 years so because before in the field for so long and if you start paying more of those who costs up from you can build them proper infrastructure initially and then pay less later on as you have to send out generation after generation after generation of tenants and additional equipment in terms of bearing the cost what we're hoping to do is create an open source design so we'll do all the designs put them into the public domain find low cost bulk distribution points and then whichever government is paying for that group of refugees can just buy those technologies on the shelf [Music] right now the US government involved in the development but I work remarkably cheaply nope you know even if I don't get paid the work continues so it's a really very kind of guerilla well refugees are a relatively small population it's went nine ten million people and although they have one of the worst living conditions in the world there are many more people who are living in poverty that are actually refugees so what I'd like to see is it approach to do housing for villages and slums which draws in these kind of techniques these kind of technologies but scales through straightforward Commerce if you will want to solar-powered lights and they cost five or ten dollars a feast alive if they want Wood gasification stoves and it

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=300s) costs $20 a piece survive so by developing these technologies kind of under the umbrella of the US government but making sure that they can go into mass production without hypotheses and these kind of things but we hope to do in the long run is change the available technology in the development world and I think that that approach offers a lot of environmental benefits a lot health benefits of more humanitarian benefits without having much of an upfront cost because I like her Edith said change change something for the developing world is evolving world yes and you kicked it oh no I'm sorry okay so I just want you to say to Gabby yes right there okay that line again house yeah how you hope to change so what we want to do is change the available technologies for the developing world so that they have good solutions that they can I four five ten fifteen twenty dollars and what we're trusting is that the free market will take care both resources availability so people will see there's a profit to be made designing these things and selling them but also resource reach like the fact that you can buy a coca-cola almost anywhere on the planet is really important it means that when people want the products they're capable of building a distribution network to carry it so if solar lighting system or a stove system becomes as important as coca-cola is to people they're going to make sure that it becomes available as long as it's a single self and being packaged make those things available all over the place just by publishing the design gradually gradually if people want it the bill buyer and the buyer the buyer gradually spread any tips of cell phones and cell phones have gone global maybe ten years just because they were useful so if we think of it it's trying to make something which is useful scalpel or a cell phone but it solves a secure what is the initial talk for demo purposes we make them a temporary materials so us prices building this size is about $200 the smallest one is 1/4 of this floor space so it's 42 square feet and it's about 6 feet high and it's big enough for just about 2 people and there are 4 sizes from that - one which is larger than this so it's 12 and high 166 square feet you can also

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=450s) extend them and cluster them because they have a hexagonal base you can bring three or four of them together and they fit precisely and then you cut doors to go straight through for one building to another well there are two factors the first is the the military communicators are often first on the scene with the engineers so there are people who are going to be initially facing a population if there is a disaster and by making sure that they understand that these kind of options are available it makes it possible for them to request the materials to be sent I teach people locally how to do the construction so there it's a first population to make aware of the fact that these options are there the second thing is the European Command is in the process of standing up Africa's plan and we think that Africa can on this place which is much more of a direct need for these kind of building options if you're dealing with displaced populations if you're dealing with property even if you just need a cool dust free environment for a radio ring these kind of improvised buildings [Music] and we were scheduled a briefing later on but I told me actually had the buildings out there very well to talk about once you actually have the building that mostly comes down to word of mouth and foot traffic and you know have you seen that trainee how over there they're telling a crazy story about infrastructure and that's really I mean the core approach it's very much true in town because really until you see it nobody will believe it you're building a building up all started in cardboard duct tape [Music] we'll find more information about if you type hexayurt into google h e x a y u RT you'll find a variety of resources online other videos on youtube which show construction there's a website called a propitious org which is an appropriate technology development wiki there's also info share hubbed org which

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=600s) is who are recruiting together Field Manual documenting this and the whole distributed infrastructure picture as part of the IPP project appropedia is an appropriate technology wiki pedia so it's a bunch of bunch of people working together to try and develop a library appropriate technology resources which is licenses in such a way that anybody can use them and therefore purification stoves environmental best practices all of that innocence is there anything else you'd like to add about your project yeah we talked a little bit about the infrastructure package because this in itself is just a building so if you put a hundred thousands of these on a piece of land immediately you're going to lighten up the terrible intersector field you would be able to get the water in the sewage problems a wonderful disease so the building itself is really nothing the important part is it ships with infrastructure so we have an approach to electrical lighting from a $20 a house where you take a single solar panel for village connected to a Wi-Fi charger the people just come charging the batteries of the charger take the room and plug them into a fluorescent light fixture and a 7 watt bulb will run for about 12 hours on Ford of lights it's 2 days worth of light very very low cost for Walter past Roy voters sterilization there's thing called the solar Walter pasteurizer which is basically a plastic bottles in tin foil and that will sterilize drinking water under almost any condition we render compact again similar approaches or cooking there's this thing with all wood gasification still consuming 10 times more efficient with a regular stove that gets you heating into the mix composting toilets we're working with some people to try and design an extremely low cost composting toilet and what you wind up with there is something like a porta potti that simply never needs to be empty and they just run forever and all they produce is composted you can just Park on the edge of town until it degrades all the way into soil and these are revolutionary approaches it means that you can get a high standard of living without having these big centralized plants that are so expensive and so difficult to maintain and this is the real hope when we talk about building resilience in societies when you have a disaster if you roll out systems that just work and keep working you don't have this problem that when you go home everything you built collapses and I think that's really our key take-home here we want to build systems which ones that are installed run forever

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=750s) no consequences it'd be nice if we just gonna get started right now just state your name okay [Music] my official title to my name is Bob Curtis and it's spelled V R T is and I am a contractor working in support of OSD and I I see the office of the secretary of defense for networks and integrated information I was given the task of bringing mr. Gupta here to combine endeavor to help them integrate into the exercise and be able to demonstrate how the hexayurt 244 different nations how easy it is to build and how useful it might be in support of people that are in crisis and need shelter quickly yeah I met him on the Internet and we had a couple of telephone conversations but the first time we've actually met face-to-face [Music] why we often asked myself the same question mr. Gupta was actually able to get the attention of dr. Lynne Wells who's the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for nii for networks and integrated information explain the concept to them and some of the other concepts about how you bring a distributed infrastructure to people who don't have much money or nor much of an infrastructure to support them in the first place and that might be as a result of a disaster might be as a result of just their normal living conditions it fits in the sense that when you go out and respond to a crisis a lot of times the first people on site are the communicators they're the ones that are out there setting up the communications so that the main portion of the response force will be able to talk back to the home base and be able to relay requests for support so a lot of times those guys are the ones that are out there seeing a lot of the needs and this is a good way to get and share information on a technique that can be used to bring something to

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=900s) people in crisis bringing a roof over their heads and some initial safety and and protection and some shelter without having to impact military operations I don't have to give up one of my tents to have a family love it I can continue to use that as command and control structure and we can take something like the hexayurt and that becomes a home for a family at a cost of only two hundred dollars as opposed to the cost of a military GP small okay what have you learned about the project at large that you feel it's the world the military just trying to put this in do this as an implementation elsewhere in the world we've done this before in the States we've been able to take hexayurts out and been able to put them up just go down to the Home Depot order some tape online the logistics of getting that together and making that happen in Germany we're different the building materials are slightly different the tape was a little bit more difficult to have but once you're able to sort that out the concepts for construction were simple enough to translate it well and we were able to get a fire team of about five German soldiers well-trained and putting up a hexayurt not two hours the challenges are really kind of what makes this of value to people in crisis what makes them want to have this as a home instead of if they'll if they're used to living in the slums the cardboard and the plywood that they normally construct their homes from what what will make them want to have this as a better infrastructure and and will make this whole concept that much easier to kind of bring a little bit more stability to people on crisis not the people on the move that's difficult I mean right now which it's very much like the guess the best characterization is aleut the Linux operating system it's kind of like shareware software somebody comes up with the idea and they tell two friends

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=1050s) they tell two friends and you begin to refine the concept we're hoping to create a community of inch that's interested in using this of people who typically respond to crisis situations whether they be military or non-governmental organizations so they can discuss techniques for how how this can be done and and share lessons learned when I get back to the States I'll be blogging on what it is that Binet and I did here some of the lessons that we learned come up with a full bill of material and hopefully use some of your video to demonstrate the techniques that we were able to use and what worked well and then you know in kind of a Wikipedia fashion looking for people to fix our mistakes to add additional concepts to that so that we get information shared around and working in the military it doesn't try and answer it doesn't try and be something for everyone everywhere in one in one instance we're not waiting on the concept so that it works not only in the Arctic but also in the desert this is the content that will work it worked better in some areas of the world rather than others and so we're trying to get it out there in in software we build a little fix a little build a little too little it's the same kind of concept here if it makes sense to use this in a humanitarian assistance mission that we come across great we hope that we get the lessons learned back from that so that we can continue to improve on it there's there's not a formal movement at this at this stage I I guess kind of going back to one of your earlier question what makes us different nobody's trying to sell anybody anything on this point we're introducing the concept and we're and we're introducing that the capability and the context it would be useful at this may be just as useful in humanitarian assistance as it would be to have to take along to the

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EjkJ111M5k0&t=1200s) slums of Rio de Janeiro and introduce down there as the Home Depot of Brazil a quick way of building houses from there for a population that doesn't have a lot of money and it's housing that that doesn't cost a lot of money to have so introducing that concept as well is the u.s. government formally behind us no not at this stage but this this kind of fits a niche of you know we're the we're taking a close pretty close to half of the taxpayers dollars we are expected to respond to crisis our nation our people want us to do that kind of work we need to be able to have options and have choices for doing that efficiently and smartly and and with our partners and with other nations as well we don't u.s. doesn't have to be the first one to use this in a crisis response we've got a fire team of German straight now they may very well be the first ones to use this in a crisis do you think that if more Americans knew about this system and about the project in the back do you think that Martha would be more supportive I'm gonna be interested to see how it develops you know Vinay mr. Gupta and I were talking there's a movement to bring this to the Burning Man festival in California as a as an expedient structure that goes up which is I guess an arts festival is about it probably the best way to characterize it okay I got that wrong I'm sure who knew it's a it's an arts festival formally but it's a kind of a different one not one necessarily the DoD gets exposed to that often and from misty just to kind of get an idea how it's going and it'd be nice to see where this [Music] [Laughter] we did good

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End of [740] Hexayurt Interviews - Vinay Gupta and Bob Vrtis - at Combined Endeavor (2007). Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [639] Stephen Diehl - Smart Contracts for New Entrepreneurs (2017) (no text here); the most closely related, [711](https://guptaoption.com/texts/711.md) Vinay Gupta – Hexayurts, Distributed Infrastructure, and... (2014); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.