# Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta (part 2 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [747], part 2 of 2. 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, 2019-05-10 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM. 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): Post-state governance forms relevant to camp self-governance.
- 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)
  - ConsenSys (2015): Strategic architect at ConsenSys after the Ethereum launch. (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)
  - cryptographic applications: Cryptography applied: from 1990s cypherpunk practice to identity cards, Ethereum and Mattereum. (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)
  - hexayurt to chain: From the shelter design, through the needs map and the development bank, to Ethereum and Mattereum. (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: Smart contracts, law & arbitration (16%); Capitalism, consumption & resources (12%); Climate politics & democracy (12%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: Mars (13 here; 34 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); carbon offset (2 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2019); trade finance (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2017); special economic zone (2 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2018); economic zone (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2013); cheap solar (3 here; 17 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); solar lights (2 here; 12 sources in all, earliest dated 2011, 1 undated); centralisation (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2014); choice of law (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2016); city state (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2010)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): carbon offset
- Importance: core-text score 0.32 (1.00 is the top), number 226 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [572] [How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
  - [735] [Vinay Gupta - Mattereum (2022)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/735.md): close in content (cosine 0.97)
- On the same works, just before: [692] [Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md); [931] [Blockchain and the Future of Humanity | Malta AIBC... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/931.md); [257] [Vinay Gupta - Oslo Blockchain Day - Merging the Physical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/257.md)
- On the same works, just after: [748] [CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit Malta... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/748.md); [750] [CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit / press... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/750.md); [255] [Global Fintech and Blockchain - Imperial College - Vinay... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/255.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: Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta, video, 2019-05-10, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [747], https://guptaoption.com/texts/747.md.

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

## Passages, part 2 of 2
[36:59](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2219s) let's take this broader what's gonna happen to the Peace of Westphalia are we going into a new order is it gonna rhyme with an old order like a federation a Greek city states or the Hanseatic League what is it gonna look like in how is it going to be influenced by DLT and SE Z's okay so this is already out again happened to a very large degree right what do you call the government of a supply chain well at this point supply can't chain company yeah it's a corporation that runs the supply chain so when you started making wealth from trade rather than having wealth grew up out of the ground as plants right and when trade became where the money came from we built governments that regularly trade and we call the governments to regulate trade corporations and you know you remember the old start about 50% of the world's major powers financial powers governments and the other half are companies there are companies which are seeing much bigger than little countries are right I mean if you take place like Iceland or Malta 300,000 citizens and the government's entire budget is like five percent of Walmart's turnover right I don't know if the numbers directly in front of me it might be a half a percent Walmart has two million employees I saw just three hundred thousand citizens you know these are really really really large entities so at that point you know we shouldn't have an illusion here right we haven't yet seen an all-out war between corporation and a small nation state but there's no doubt if that happened the small nation state with leaves right I mean you could argue for example you know fighting about oil in places like Nigeria is essentially wars between corporations and Asian states and the states lose really really really badly so you know we've already got governments that run huge parts of the world in its future that are unelected except you've got this kind of shareholder democracy if you own it in few you could vote on the directors and those systems run just fine without anybody having to stick a flag on them and call them sulfur interesting and how how will this be

[39:01](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2341s) facilitated with BL TNS Easy's how this be better or bigger so the way that I see this is this right we've got a crisis in that we have no ability to mount the global government that after has the ability to get claim under control and it'd be nice if we had a little bit more visible muscle behind biotech regulation nanotech nuclear weapons maybe AI gives me maybe a I because I don't personally feel the AI risk you know like an emotional level I I have a deep emotional relationship nuclear weapons or a deep emotional relationship biotech you've got a strong sense of nanotech yeah I just can't get myself to be emotionally engaged in doing anything about AR so it's somewhere for either don't think it's a problem or it's just not my problem that are other better people do and but one way or another I just don't find myself getting worked up about ironic if it turns out people one that gets us so you know the place where I think that the blockchain is a real future is as the machinery for implementation of international treaties right the peers in the peer-to-peer network of sovereign states they use the blockchain to keep score you make some new international wall and everybody reports everything that's happening relevant to that wall and the blockchain so you can actually enforce that has the potential to Louis the right tree keys for things like climate change that could actually be enforced and wouldn't that be an amazing step for interesting

[40:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2436s) but what would be the catalyst for mass adoption of states of blockchain technology they're all charged and forward in that direction as fast as a little legs will carry them because you know they all want to get things done at the international level and the international machinery is currently really bad you know like the actual implementation processes for international treaties are terribly slow and cumbersome nobody trusts anybody they're all a bunch of thieving bastards so you know once you put something like a DLT into the system so that you can actually keep the game straight it's very possible to have a peer-to-peer network or old peers of sovereigns and they use it to keep track of what the other guys doing to make sure that he's keeping his deal do you think there needs to be some sort of power vacuum or for the international order to get even worse at what they're doing in order for states to consider moving more into DLT to to execute their treaties and transactions I think at this point it's inevitable I mean you know you have you know Microsoft and IBM and Google and Facebook and everybody else charging towards the blockchain as fast as they can get there and they're just gonna sell it into government and governments are gonna solve a whole bunch of their problems using it and you know one thing will inevitably lead to another I don't think there's any question that this is the way the future goes because it's the cheapest easiest way of getting everything done and governments are lazy and cheap and they can never afford to do everything they want to do and the big corporations that help them decide how they're going to do the technology of all settled on some variation of DLT is how business is going to get done you know there are some hard questions about which DLT and we'll control a technical level one handle the cryptography and all the rest of that you know this is not quite a done deal yet but the the general direction of travel is very very clear five ten years from now the first international treaties which use blockchain for day-to-day maintenance of the treaty will come up and then after that it will just become how business is done I'm absolutely sure well then we

[42:35](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2555s) obviously have a lot to do he got do it fairly quickly and it seems it's all about the Internet of agreements and your firm does precisely that what are some concrete practical steps partnerships development that your firm is taking to make it all happen so I say what kind of personal note your but my politics versus you know what I'm talking about here the analysis that I'm giving you here is my analysis of what I think is true and what I think is inevitable what I would prefer is you know an invite and integrative synthetic Anarchy right you know I would like for people to have as much freedom as they can have without chopping off their own finger for the sole right but I also like there to be a world which everybody has health care you know and for me I've largely given up on political vision and I'm just focused on traction right because the problems that we've got are insoluble inside of the industrial partner if we don't you get far away from the industrial paradigm deep into post-industrial space there's no way that we're going to be able to provide a decent standard of living for nine billion people and if we can't provide a decent standard we'll remain billion people we're gonna have constant war or genocide so at this point I'm just trying to throw us into the future as fast as we possibly can because if we don't figure out how to fund you know gigantic new resource acquisition technologies or hugely decrease our footprint by using things like nanotech so you know all of our clothes or two millimeters thick in the last a million years if we don't figure out those kind of radical breakthroughs it doesn't matter what system of political organization we adopt we're all still screwed does that kind of make sense it makes sense we got to make sure that we have a realistic view and sometimes that's a little bit dark but if we address it out of the gate as soon as possible maybe we can do something about it and it just has to be we have to fund technological transcendence you know because it doesn't matter how we organize ourselves if we've got food for you know nine people that are 11 people on the boat there's only so many ways that this can go right you could you can't govern yourself out of starvation you could only use your governments get you more resources it's almost a classical

[44:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2682s) Marxist interpretation and I mean this very specifically the idea that if you have material abundance it becomes to a point that states and even markets to a certain extent break down is that feminism it's just that you know a lot of problems are not soluble in bare our governments they're just soluble in better technology like you just can't govern like if you think of like if you go back like six hundred years right there's no way that you could govern medieval Europe poverty that doesn't involve technological change right there's just no possible social configuration that will produce general welfare with that level of technology and we're still in that trap we must have new technology otherwise there is no desert so maybe perhaps we'll go into

[45:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2727s) a sort of Star Trek type of existence where everyone has their baseline they're able to go out there and explore new worlds well you know if you could figure out how a person can you know make a decent living and without destroying the world or sabotaging the welfare of their neighbors just from you know agriculture and you know localized trade that could support eighty ninety percent of the human race on point seven planets worth of environmental consumption and then the remaining ten or twenty percent of the people that have walked into high burn industrial life cycles that are out there you know developing the vaccines building the rocket ships and all the rest of that stuff they put a lot more load per person on the world but they're also producing Universal benefit and those kind of approaches where we start looking at people individually in figuring out what their environmental footprint is and whether what they're doing is worth it I don't see us getting through the next 50 years without really seriously beginning to look at individual footprint as a foundation for things like taxation and that's things like carbon taxes you know there's no system of governance which doesn't start to price in environmental costs properly which is compatible with monetary survival so

[46:47](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2807s) blotching pigouvian taxes essentially this is the kind of direction I think we're headed right and it's not that I don't want you know a liberal libertarian utopia I would love a libertarian utopia I just can't square that with humans for viable right you know it's a hard bridge right but you know much as I would really quite like anarchy in some form probably you know Spanish model anarcho-syndicalism looks pretty good to me much says that would like the world to work that way I just can't square that with MIT managing you know mitigating or environmental footprint in the point group II don't just you know massively over populate the world strip all the resources you know trash the remaining rainforests turn it into you know palm oil extinguish half of the world species and then hover population drop by 90% in a hard crash right like that's where we're headed right now and governing us away from that you know I don't see anything in the anarchist or the libertarian end of the philosophical spectrum the promises me see you sheets up you don't believe that there there's

[47:48](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=2868s) an emergent self-governance or reaction to these sort of environmental concerns with property rights as libertarians often say oh I mean I think the property rights could do though the first thing you have to do is define the right kinds of property right patent copyright trademark and these are all kinds of property that were created in the last five hundred years that have had enormous impact on the world equity right you know George stock in corporations that was invented from common you know from nowhere limited liability that's an invention practically all the Praetorians won't the corporation to be the foundation of the way that social structures of the bill but the corporation itself is invented by the state and hundred people as a limited liability subsidy right the limited liability is literally a state subsidy so in this kind of context you know it's very clear that we were going to require new forms of property to be able to do large-scale environmental regulation correctly right if you're gonna build a free market the correctly prices things you're going to offer a free market in which it's absolutely compulsory to track the carbon and the beryllium and all the rest of this stuff all the way through from the point birds dug out the ground to the point where the end user you know finally throws away the device and every single gram is going to after me paid for and sure if you set up a market the works that way I think you could have the free market around the world but there's no market for such markets yeah I'm gonna be honest I mean I'm sure this is detective optical problem that we saw the certain point but the sheer magnitude of verification necessary door to determine each individual's carbon footprint so that they can be tax seems astronomical how would you secure an army of Oracle's that are accurate enough to work this out no it's super easy it's super it's so simple I don't want people don't talk about it more how many companies are they that ugly Diggle out with the ground oil we're cool like a thousand right there are lethal Allah break not many really not many they're they're all regulated they're all paying taxes to somebody so you simply track how much oil they take out of the ground and every time somebody buys oil from them you know the money goes into the company and then what comes back out of the company is a receipt for the amount of carbon that you emitted so you know if I buy you know thirty thousand barrels of

[50:18](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3018s) oil from you know United carbon producers right United carbon producers Hans me receipt for you know whatever it would be fifteen thousand tons of carbon emissions and that receipt I can't get rid of that I'm stuck with that until I find somebody to sell it to but I basically buy carbon offset or and until I pay tax on it to a government which then goes and buys a carbon offset on my behalf right so you could very very easily work this through just by attaching the tax burden to the primer oil producers and then they have to pass it down to their customers and by the way offsetting is not expensive right a barrel of oil is currently by eighty dollars if you offset a hundred percent of that co2 it cost you two dollars fifty so

[51:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3066s) response is gonna be a little bit tongue-in-cheek so bear with me so obviously there are only a couple of mining companies for oil just because they're so large and capital intensive sure but Cal farmers and ranchers there's plenty more of them do we how do we track all the emissions from cows but it's an excellent point that is a much harder problem right I mean you know bunch of places the cows are heavily regulate so you know how many had a cattle they have they're claiming subsidies on the damn beasts but you're damn right that that is a much harder problem I don't know how we would approach it for farming and in most cases if they're producing food which will be consumed by humans there is a regulatory framework that knows how many head of cattle they have and you could tie that pretty quickly to a global warming mandate and but you know that's asking for is off the record impossible to find cow plantations you know it's a hard problem for sure but as long as people are collecting subsidies for it you can tax it so an

[52:06](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3126s) interesting thing because we're talking a little bit about rural spaces when I was reading some of more contrarian opinions that you have which the list is long what Katrien what's the lie in a drastic effect very but one of the things that you promote is that there will be an anti urbanization trend following the mass urbanization that we're seeing right now why do you believe that's the case solar panels and wireless internet I mean if you've got solar panels and wireless internet quality of life and villages comes very very rapidly up if you've got solar power wireless internet you know good effective water filters and maybe based on something like graphene and you know decent composting toilets fuel-efficient wood-burning stoves and knowledge of you know high high effectiveness agricultural practices co2 your wife in the villages goes way up again and if you aren't about a very lightweight medical service so that if you get a head injury you could get a grease of carts down and maybe an MRI and call your wife becomes higher than it is in the slums right the farming life you know doesn't entirely suck just because of farming the farming life sucks because there isn't enough density of capital in the villages to provide essential services but you know as the price of providing essential services Falls and Falls and Falls and Falls and Falls because of new technology you could provide high-quality essential services in the village and quality of life were much higher than it is in this one's so I think that we are rapidly heading to that crossing point in the workplaces and decentralized finance is a critical part of that because one of the things you do need performing to be efficient these futures contracts and commercial land and this is a great application of DLT and it's just making the possible for small farmers to get access to real financial instruments to help them manage the kind of slings and arrows that go with being a farmer so Edward Glaeser author of the triumph of the city he comes across a subjection of anti urbanization by giving the Silicon Valley as an example it is an industry town that is entirely predicated on the digital so you would imagine that you would have instead of the Silicon Valley you would have a series of digital nomads spread across the earth but you find even in this industry that there's agglomeration effects and that there's a

[54:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3276s) benefit to meeting in person and in being close proximity physical proximity people how how does your sort of prediction sort of square with that fact if you're a farmer those effects are much smaller than if you're say an artist or a programmer and you know 70% of the human race their population is farmer but do you think that would be the case for long especially with automation I mean we're already getting to a point where farming is just a single dude with the tractor or a couple of tractors and we're gonna have to plant with fully automated tractors you can basically have a corporation owned land and have a bunch of robots going over hundreds of square miles without a single person on it sure I mean you know mechanized aquaculture is for rich people but poor people farm with shovels and that's literally half of the human population and you don't foresee them moving into cities and taking up jobs like program or like artist or other professions that will be in the future I think that there are a limited number of carryin slots for people in the urban world right I mean the the urban economy doesn't work without cheap oil right it just stalls out and the ultra cheap solar panels are coming really really quickly but there's no advantage to being in an urban versus rural location for for in spite of many ways you're better in a rural location and I'm just not sure that the quality of life equation always points towards urbanism and I mean if you think about London for example London is a place where people come when they're young they make a career here the hit middle age and they've got some seniority they wanna you know take their kids and they move out to out of London to raise their kids nobody wants the way for raise our kids in a city even a city as diverse as fascinating as one so I think that there's a strong tendency for people that have a choice of where to live to even move right into the urban core or to move into the villages now that is

[56:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3402s) something I definitely will agree with there is real psychological effects of being in nature for me personally I am moved up many others I've spoke with obviously spending time in a large Dancy center there's a tremendous amount of relief of to spending an afternoon in a park or in a forest and I think there do you think they'll be Eve's is sort of this this nuevo Luddite movement where there's a movement away from a lot of technology use and our phones and maybe even urbanisation itself um no I think the rate limiting step for urbanization is just it's too expensive to live in the city so you stay on the farm breath I mean if this is just you know sheer just straight-up brutal system there might be a bit of you know ruthless global.nomads moving to little villages in Thailand or Korea and you know living close to the wand but they're still basically just travelers right what I'm talking about is the 50-plus percent of humanity that are dirt poor don't have the option to move into a city because they can't afford it and they're just going to Weesa quality of life with technology right where they stand right it's the folks that don't have anywhere to go that are gonna make the improvements in quality of life using technology for the rural populations because they are the rural populations they're just gonna stay right but-- they're gonna buy the bass gear that they can afford and they're gonna go through quality of life or evolution frankly that we wouldn't believe but it's already hot like solar whites in africa are selling like hotcakes they've totally wiped out the need for kerosene in most houses and the quality of life jump is enormous it saves them like $100 a year of kerosene spending and it improves general health enormously because you don't breathe in kerosene fumes all day ting people don't die in house fires and that nobody engineered that nobody architected it was just plain old market dynamics supply and demand and that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about coming because when it's not just solar lights it's solar lights and energy efficient stoves and you know cheap Wi-Fi mesh networking gear or you know you know you wind up in a situation where you've got people you know sitting at home watching HBO in a thin a fat mother hunt and they charge the Android tablet with the solar panel and you know you get three or four hours a night of viewing and then you got charged again the next day like that life cycle the style is coming and I think the quality of life could be remarkably high because that's basically Jeffersonian democracy for you that's the kind of future that Thomas Jefferson imagined for America absolutely an agrarian based democracy

[59:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3552s) based on land ownership you know bad and cheap access to education because you've got the Internet so you don't have this terrible problem the books are expensive in the peasants ringerman now the peasants might be better informed than people the city's cousins but more time to read no absolutely and that's that's kind of it's also indicates why it's so important to have your project moved to the physical world because of right now we have a glut of information but a severe deficit in education and there needs to be a way to get the internet to be beyond just simple influx of useless information to be tangible goods and results that's right that's right I mean for me this is just like it's the next horizon right we break through into the physical world we lay hold of the territory in the same way that the digital guys play hold of information and we do for the real world but the Internet data for data and every physical object has an identifier like a URL but it routes the physical object you can pull the metadata about the physical object back you can learn about what it is if you could write to the metadata because you've got the right permissions you can do things like change the ownership of the old particular Court will recognize the change right that's the world that we want to create a world where you can read and write to the physical world using computers so that we can apply optimization to the physical world just stretch the resources further adue discover new patterns you know what's the equivalent look like a machine translation if we had all the data from the physical world right here's all the information about France share all the information about German we can put them together we can translate nobody thought about be a side-effect of the internet coming to data what happens when the internet comes to the material world I can't even imagine what the winner discovered what we're going to invent once that works all over doing right now is this tricky kind of amphibious stage where you know the Internet people are basically just you know doing the organize and climb up the beach and we tried it with the Internet of Things it wasn't that successful because that wasn't the internet that people wanted in the real world it was great for power companies but didn't really do anything for individuals we tried it again with mobile and that's giving us a little bit of leverage you know but we're still living in the world of anonymous object and once we've got digital handles on things that's remove the creativity starts that's when the fun begins so Vinay we're nearing our time here so for the last question he said that the timeline or you expect exponential change in the Internet of agreements is

[1:01:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3702s) about the next five years can you tell me what you expects your firm and the market to do and the next five years well so we are right about to detonate the bulb right we negotiated a very promising commercial agreement with William Shatner aka Captain Kirk of Star Trek the Priceline negotiated various other rules Danny crane um you know we're partnering with shop or Kapoor you know direct digital identification into Star Trek memorabilia and merchandise as a demonstrator project to show you could do with these technologies and this is huge because people actually knew who William Shatner is and he makes this whole blockchain thing seemed remarkably sane and credible simply by virtue of the fact that he's been around for a really long time talking sense about the future you know he's a known identifiable person with an opinion that people trust and we think that's going to be a big jump forward not just for us as a company but also for the public understanding of the blockchain as review useful thing not some bunch of you know in century ICO garbage right um and what that demonstrates right not immediately immediately were doing stuff in the past but as we begin to build systems in the future what we're going to be doing is we're going to be manufacturing assets that are automatically put onto the bottom that have digital identifier is shipped with them as part of you know standard industrial mass production of consumer goods and we demonstrate it in a place where we've got excellent cultural supporters of a fun project but once that's demonstrated you know you know first we do the Star Trek memorabilia then we do the world and you know that approach you know what happens to that approach in five years anything that you might combine that has a serial number phones laptops televisions tablet cars right all of the stuff that has a serial number you buy it it's got a blockchain registry entry and Mattereum marsett passport as we would call it and that's absolutely standard for amount of attributes you just don't buy or sell modified true goods that don't have that stuff user doesn't have that stuff it's probably a counterfeit you won't be able to get the guarantees to work nobody will sure it you know it's just not a product and that is obviously coming and I think we're well positioned be able to do that first right so that is the step one thing that will do it right and the step two in the step 3 all the stuff to do

[1:04:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=3852s) with resolving the problems our digital identity all the clever complicated things we do insurance to make sure that the digital and the physical when they do come out with alignment and will be tightly connected by insurance so you can get your value back and and what that creates is a world which is fully legible to the perimeter of the numbered items right I don't know whether we're gonna start assigning numbers to things like paperback books or you know balls of you know soda popper burger happens to be I don't know whether we're gonna move out far down the path in five years um I think it's likely to be the manufacture of goods which are serialized even things like pharmaceuticals um but this is who were headed for sure well I say it's only fitting that the first step towards a post singular future would take place with the member of the Star Trek cast I can't tell you how happy we were to hear from mr. shopper happy you know I've been watching Star Trek and similar things since I was a small child right we got the communicators from the world well through Ned Street we got the pads from Apple and we you know are rapidly working on a whole bunch of other technologies which came from those shows like the computer apparently was the inspiration for relaxa you know we're all basically members of the church of Star Trek where they were consciously aware of it or not you know what we want is for the you know vision of the future to be realized right who doesn't want to live in something that's halfway between you know the Star Trek Federation and Ian banks is culture you know we want to offer the hard parts of life onto machines and we need stories that inspire us to do the work of doing that and you know I feel like this is in some ways like the invisible religion of the Nerds is that we can create a utopia that really does work for everybody and we can't do it but just inventing machines solve the hard problems of life for us well vinay it's been inspiring talking to you we have a very clear and grand vision of the future and it's gonna be orchestrated by new models of governance and new technologies so thank you so much I'm for being on the sharp size foundation podcast and we'll talk soon yeah this is really fantastic I really enjoyed it as always we shouldn't chance to talk about those poor kids with their seasteading incident in Thailand and all the other weird jurisdictional stuff can it can it wait listeners with one last thought on this yeah absolutely okay so cheap solar diesel

[1:06:42](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=4002s) is coming right you know the ability to turn salt water to drinking water anywhere in the world cheaply and efficiently it's combination of cheap solar panels and graphene water filters and it's coming really quickly so a water filtration salt water filtration using graphene is going to be one of the first commercial available uses graphene them who you shouldn't miss so what's gonna come out of that is that all the worlds dry coasts and desert islands suddenly become habitable that's the whole coast of Australia it's in the midea it's millions of little Pacific atolls in the middle of nowhere and we're right now freshwater supply is if English stops people living in these places successfully so I think that one way or another we're going to wind up with a massive explosion of new land on earth that suddenly becomes habitable because of physical decentralization of infrastructure you know once you could get clean water anywhere in the world as long as you're within reach of the sea and it doesn't matter whether there's any infrastructure or law there at all huge amounts of terrain become habitable that are currently completely uneaten ah mcfriendly to deal with them and so I think if people are sharp and alert or paying attention to that you'd all tea and they're not shy of getting things done when the time comes and huge amounts of new land are about to become available for colonization inside of existing nation states but in places so remote that movie really cares how you live and so I would command these technologies to the people that are interested in freedom as a lifestyle because I think there's an enormous opportunity opening up and if those places turn out to be well Vonn well-organized pay their taxes and everybody is happy I don't think you're going to see much interest from the nation-states and inquiry too closely about how your local town council makes decisions and if it's electronic decision-making on half of the time people delegate to an AI yeah who cares how's that that sounds fantastic it's just hope it's not within 12 miles of Thailand next time and we all do it is strategically as possible I was so disappointed in the way that when it really was like it just seemed so completely harmless and people freaked out so badly and such a shame I really feel for those guys yeah I use we interviewed Chad for the show and let's make sure to think it out alright yeah I hope so it would be very unfortunate if there were markers I mean I don't mind them sinking a boat but let's hope they don't since the people for that that's a sad note and done but well I mean come on mom a you know tree of liberty right a

[1:09:12](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YB788hhEwqM&t=4152s) lot of tyrants and Patriots right I mean you know there is a level which this is you know difficult work but it's necessary for human beings to continue to live like human beings that we do push against the boundaries and that we do expand them that we do grow then we transform right I mean we will eventually get access to enough real estate you know through space travel through you know colonization places like Mars the moon you know and the orbital orbital platforms and all the rest ah we will eventually get enough real estate that nobody thinks it's valuable anymore which way nobody cares what you do with it right and you will eventually get the ability to travel far enough away from civilization that nobody comes and tells you what to do the frontier that we need is the permanent frontier of space but between here and there it's going to be continual conflict between the people that want to tell all the people were to do with the people that won't be left alone well there you have it Vinay Gupta his realism shifts between incredible darkness to gran utopianism within a single 30 second period well thank you van a really appreciate love to have you in the show hope to have you again and thank you everyone for joining the start size foundation podcast we'll see you next week splendid

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End of [747] Startup Societies Podcast - Episode 34 - Vinay Gupta, part 2 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [748](https://guptaoption.com/texts/748.md) CCForum and Malta AI & Blockchain Summit Malta... (2019); the most closely related, [572](https://guptaoption.com/texts/572.md) How To Address Climate Change: Diplomacy, Politics,... (2022); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.