Brandon Nolte
As a podcast listener, welcome to bounty hunter, where we believe contributing to a DAO is the best way to find engaging and rewarding work in the new web three economy. Join us for interviews from community builders, DAO contributors and the best innovators in web three. If you'd like to learn more, please check us out at bounty hunter show.com. In today's show, I spoke with Zack Anderson, a co founder of both converge and coordinate, the latter of which is one of the best ways for DAOs to distribute earnings amongst a team of contributors. We discuss how coordinate can help DAO reflect on what they're prioritizing by looking at where allocations are going, and how this can help facilitate difficult conversations. When that compensation isn't in line with the goals of the DAO. We also discussed what personality types are best suited for DAOs, the value of inperson IRL events for DAO, or web three teams, and a new definition of wag me, all of that and more in today's episode. Zach, thanks so much for joining me on the show. Yeah, it's
Zach
great to be here, Brandon. Thank you.
Brandon Nolte
I'd love to start out in this conversation to talk about before you got into web three in Dallas, can you share with our audience what you were doing for work before you got into this new space?
Zach
Sure. So I spent the first part of my career working at the intersection of business and sustainability. So largely working with your fortune 500 companies figuring out how to be more sustainable, right? efficiency goals, how to reduce water, use, reduce electricity use, how to, you know, have more employee engagement around sustainability, etc. And in doing that work, I worked with a lot of executive teams, and a lot of suppliers and manufacturers and kind of across the supply chain. And I just saw, especially in the context of moving towards sustainability, how crucial collaboration was and, and how bad at it people were, even people that want to collaborate, have a have a really challenging time doing it. So that ended up leading me to co found a group called converge and converge the network of consultants that help people to create impact networks for social and environmental impact. So bringing together government, corporate and social sector leaders to figure out how are we going to steward 500,000 acres of redwoods? Right? How are we going to protect migrant rights across borders, these very systemic issues that people really needed to collaborate on? And, and through that, I just, I learned a lot about network leadership. And, you know, what, kind of the whole world of reinventing organizations and to organizations and what do self managing organizations and networks as opposed to pyramid structures look like? So when I found web three, you know, we had been thinking a lot about how are we going to scale this, this network work, and, and Dallas were kind of hit. As soon as I, as soon as I heard the podcast with a mean, and, and having a walkie about slaying Moloch I was like, Oh, this is, this is what we're about. And I sort of dove in from there.
Brandon Nolte
That's awesome. Can you explain what slang the Moloch? Is?
Zach
Sure, slaying? Moloch is this meme? That? I'm not sure, I think it might have been Amin, who originally coined it, but Moloch is sort of the god of human coordination, failure, you know, Moloch The reason we can't have nice things. And so, you know, slaying Moloch is this idea that, that through coordination, you know, it's coordination all the way down. And if we can figure out how to effectively collaborate and coordinate, we can slay Moloch and start solving a lot of these, you know, wicked challenges that were that we're facing.
Brandon Nolte
Yeah, that's very interesting. It reminds me of one of my favorite books, sapiens, which talks all about how humans evolved to coordinate and kind of take over the world. But really, we're just monkeys who can coordinate better than other animals. Arguably, right? Arguably, yeah, exactly. Yeah. So there's still tons of problems. So it sounds like you, you created this, this group that was really trying to help with sustainability. You got into it. went through through hearing this podcast. And then where did you dive in? Where was your first entry point?
Zach
Well, there were kind of two points a friend introduced me broadly to, to defy, which, which I thought was, was interesting, but just that not as compelling. But it was hearing that podcast and then reconnecting with a friend of mine, who had since transformed into trachea. Optrex, who was a core contributor yearn. And trach. And I had had lots of conversations and ideas and thinking about, you know, what does the next evolution of human organization look like, reconnected and I started learning a lot more about urine and just got really excited, you know, about about the experiment, they were attempting, in addition to all the awesome products they were making, and so started getting involved in urine in in various capacities, mostly just, you know, like anyone in web three, sort of wondering and figuring out, you know, where my eye, where might I be helpful, given my skill set, as a, as a hyper non technical person, you know, it's a little bit harder to find an entry point sometimes, but I started, you know, helping organize meetings and stuff in urine. But it was soon after that, that there was this pain point that your head of rewarding contributors, and that is where basically, we developed coordinate. And so, you know, the launching of coordinate was really my, my fall headfirst deep dive into into web three.
Brandon Nolte
So coordinate was a each run dog food type tool that was started at urine, is that right?
Zach
Yes, it was. So it's very much a tool built, you know, by by a DAO for DAO. And it has its roots in in lots of different ideas and things. But one of the one of the places that came from was converge, converge, never had anyone on on a salary, or even how to payroll, our model was because we were consultants doing client work largely for for big foundations, but we would, we would invoice a client, and then put that money in the middle of the table, and the team who had worked on the project would have a conversation about who should get what, based on the work we had done. And that was our that was our only method of payment for all and still is a converge, but for for all eight years, we just use that. And so that's why old coordinate was was an attempt to sort of scale that and have an asynchronous process where many people can participate.
Brandon Nolte
So I'm trying to picture this, you you go off with a bunch of really smart people, consultants, and you you come back to the table with a hoard of cash. It's a little crude, but you come back with some some money and you have to kind of discuss who's going to get what How did those conversations go? Typically,
Zach
it's funny, we jokingly we call that Thunderdome. Like, it's more often kind of a love fest, but they really go, you know, starting out of sort of saying, like, you know, everyone kind of says, here's, here's what I think my number is, you know, so if we've got 30 grand in the middle of the table, I might say, I think I should get, you know, eight and a half 1000. Because I did this, this and this, you know, I think you should get 12 and you should get 750 or whatever, so, or everyone just says their number, and then they're like, Okay, well, we're, we're over by this much, you know, and then we start kind of horse trading. But really the power of it isn't in the allocation, it's in the conversation, you know, and what we ended up finding is that it's just really good for Team hygiene, you know, because we can talk about all the, you know, even if you love your colleagues in your, in your an awesome team, there's there's going to be frictions that that come from collaboration, and they're going to build up. And so it's a time to sort of be able to kind of, you know, air out all of these little petty grievances that we accumulate. And it's also a chance to really give kudos and recognize people, you know, so that the feedback that comes with, with some weight to it, because of actually has has money attached, you know, so if I say, oh, Brandon, great job on the podcast that that hits one way. And if I say, No, you should get an extra $1,000 Because that podcast was amazing. That that hits different, right. And the same way where it's like, I think you've been phoning it in the last few episodes. Like To be honest, right? I'm just like, that's hard feedback to give. But yeah, you know, we're talking about who earned what, and everyone really needs to feel whole and reciprocated as part of that process. Well, they were they were great conversations.
Brandon Nolte
That's super cool. I mean, it sounds like everyone kind of came out the other side net positive from the experience being able To express maybe even grievances that they held back from people and actually being able to let them go or discuss them and hash them out as a group. I'm curious, how long did these conversations go for? I'm imagining in my head, like an eight hour like, talk fest, but what were they like? Realistically?
Zach
It's definitely not an eight hour talk fest. I mean, you know, you might get into some, some meaty territory, and you end up spending a couple hours. But sometimes it's just as easy is like, okay, there's 30 grand, like, where are we just like, 10 Each, like, it's impossible to quantify these things, like short 10 each. Okay, high five. You know, it really depends on the context, it depends on on the team, you know, if it was if it was folks who I've been, you know, on several projects with and several teams, you, you kind of have just more of a more of a, a trust and a rhythm. You know, as we brought more folks into the process, we learned a tremendous amount about, you know, about potential blind spots, you know, what happens when the team is all male? And then, you know, now there's a, there's a female, that's part of it. And she hasn't been cultivated the same way to think all of her ideals are brilliant, like, unfortunately, men are in Western culture. It's so you know, we really had to had to think about different ways so that everyone could fully participate in those conversations. Even to the point of I'm not sure you know, we jokingly call them Thunderdome, but I think we stopped calling them that just because it's like, it's kind of a joke, but it'll combat
Brandon Nolte
of frame. That's really interesting. So you've, you've got this, really, I would say it's you unique way of kind of sitting down having these conversations and having the hard conversations. But it sounds like you realized, well, if we're going to actually bring this to more than the amount of people that can sit at a table, we need to come up with some sort of software solution. So how does coordinate actually solve this scaling issue? How does it How does it work?
Zach
So at a really simple level coordinate is a way to distribute some budget, right. So just for simplicity, you know, let's say you're you have stable coins, and you have 10,000, stable coins to reward or compensate your contributors. Essentially, all the people who are contributing are in a circle. And in that gift circle, each contributor is given 100, give. And these give are essentially, like poker chips. And so the total number of give equals the total amount of budget. And so when each person has 100, they then distribute to all of the other folks in the circle, according to their own subjective interpretation of what, what created value. And so once everybody gives all of their, all of their give, you've got some percentage of total give that you received, and you get that total percentage of the budget. At its simplest level, that's how it works.
Brandon Nolte
Yep. And so everyone is able to enter who they think should get what, and the software calculates all of the intricacies between the groups, and then you can very much take that take those numbers and make those compensations happen. I'm curious, how are people using this? I know, we're currently using coordinate that bank lists. In fact, I ran a coordinate browned two days ago, I think, for non role holders within bagless within a certain guild, but there's many different ways to use it. How are you seeing people use it today? What's a typical use case within a DAO?
Zach
I think our best use case is, you know, for, for compensating those contributors who are somewhere, you know, in that first, I think of it as like the first circle, you know, if a Dao org structure always looks like these concentric circles, you know, contributors that, that are kind of figuring things out, they want to help, they have some skills to share. And they just start doing right and start contributing. And then, you know, someone sees what they're doing and thinks it's valuable, and they get included in the coordinate circle, and then you can, you can get paid. So a lot of the use cases we're seeing are for those DAO, who maybe have a core set of contributors that are compensated in some, you know, a salary in some way, shape or form. But for that next band out of folks who aren't quite full time, but are adding a lot of value. That's where right now I think coordinate really shines. And it it has some cool features in the way that people can be vouched into the circle when they're adding when they're adding value and recognized by other folks in the communities. So we're really focused on how can that be, you know, how can we keep things decentralized, and really have, you know, a compensation system that is itself decentralized to as opposed to the more traditional, you know, some some black box somewhere figures out, decides who should get paid? What. So, yeah, I mean, you know, there's sort of a bunch of, of different use cases, but fundamentally, it's about people finding ways to, to reward contributors in a way that you don't have some committee making subjective decisions about what's valuable, you put that back onto the community to do.
Brandon Nolte
Yeah, I think that's super clever. The way that I kind of think about it as I've been using it is, it's a peer to peer way to, to share the wealth and share what you think is valuable. And you're right, it's completely different from any other organization that's very top down, you know, you have your set role, you have your set responsibilities, you have your set compensation, and none of that is coming from your peers who are actually probably working with you that closest, which is very interesting, right? So you have, you know, there's there's a little bit of distance from the people at the top who are making the decisions versus the people who are right next to you who are not making the decisions. And that is completely flipped with coordinate.
Zach
Exactly. The The idea is really, how do we, how do we, and this is a question, you know, for all decentralized or self managing orgs is how do we push decisions more and more to the edges, where they're getting made? And recognizing that a lot of decisions are going to be subjective. And so, you know, push those to the places where people have the highest context and the most information in order to make them?
Brandon Nolte
That makes a lot of sense. Yeah. About coordinate, like, it's,
Zach
it's not, it's not the best way to do compensation, but it's just way better. You know, it's not totally fair, but it's fair. And so, you know, our dream one day is we will be, you know, the best way to do compensation. But, you know, the idea is, how do we keep iterating, toward something that's, that's more fair and more rewarding and more fulfilling than, than the way we've done it previously?
Brandon Nolte
Yeah. Well, I think that's very modest of what y'all are building. And, you know, we'll take it right, we'll take whatever thing, whatever tools we can get to improve, because one of the biggest challenges that I've seen hands down is definitely compensation, knowing when you'll get compensated, how you'll get compensated, and trust that it will come in. So there's a whole ecosystem of tools that are helping out with this, but I'm personally glad that coordinate exists right now as a kind of catch all for for other work that you are doing that isn't necessarily being codified into compensation in some way by by the DAO, the Dallas.
Zach
Yeah. And, you know, our hope is that, I mean, kind of, like we were talking about before, you know, at converge, I would say the conversation was way more valuable than the allocation. Here, we hope to build more and more increasing both functionality in coordinate, and then, you know, tools to help support and identify those, those other folks in the ecosystem that are doing, you know, cool things to help upskill folks in having critical conversations with each other in building the kind of self awareness so that we can look at the results of a coordinated circle. And instead of saying, you know, who got that much is this fair? You know, what did I get? Maybe a mindset to approach it with is like, what does this tell us about ourselves? You know, what do we actually think is valuable? Are we all allocating to someone just because they made memes? And they were the most visible? Or do we actually think those memes were super valuable? You know, what do we notice about who we're allocating to, and not allocating to? How can we make that better, and so really thinking of it as, you know, a powerful sort of shared display, that the DAO can then reflect on and iterate toward better and better? And so, you know, thinking of how can we increase the amount of responsibility and gratitude and, you know, encouragement, these things that make for a really good culture, using the results of of coordinate? I think, you know, I hope that more and more we can we can collaborate with others to make sure that the tool is, you know, sparks valuable conversations as much as as a useful way to do compensation.
Brandon Nolte
Yeah, I think that's an admirable goal. And what I like about you said earlier was that it's good for Team hygiene. And this is something that you don't really see in DAOs, or at least the parts that I I've been a part of which is this retrospective, Hey, how are we doing interpersonal? Like, do you have any grievances with anybody now, you know, these are the things that kind of boil up under the surface, and they show up maybe in the coordinate ground or in other ways. And I think there's definitely a huge space here to evolve. That part of the conversation to improve the cohesiveness of teams. So coordinate is is definitely something to help get us in the right direction. Now, I know y'all have a discord. And you said earlier that you're moving towards becoming a Dao, how is that going? And if somebody wanted to join, like, like, what kind of contributors are you looking for in the discord if they're, they're interested?
Zach
You know, it's, it's all of them. That, you know, it's like, we were certainly excited, we're, we're kind of embarking on this community building process. Now, we've developed a lot of governance structures, you know, we were sort of a just a, a small team that really spun up organically from within and around yarn, because we were building this thing for urine. And then we kind of looked up and several other DAOs wanted to try the tool and use it and then, you know, it all just kind of happened. And so, you know, we've been at a fairly small, tight team, but really now excited about expanding our contributor circle. And it goes without saying, but, you know, devs, who are interested in contributing, and in picking up tickets and, and working, we have a community circle that we fund every month, so people can come contribute to the codebase contribute in other ways and and get vouched into the circle. And, you know, you can get get compensated right away. I think, you know, ultimately, who are we looking for? And I think the opportunity for for anyone looking to contribute to a DAO is really, for those folks who have some, some kind of entrepreneurial streak, or spark or a curiosity. You know, there's, there's a lot of conversations that that I see and hear around, how do you onboard people? And how do you give people this, this really clear way to get involved. And that's obviously super important. But what's also important is that people are able to find their way you know, and doers like this, this concept of doers is really important. And I think it's, it's one of the most important concepts in web three, around like thinking like an owner, it's gonna kill me, I can't remember her name, but one of the content people at cabin just read a great thread about this. But that that mindset shift is incredibly important, when you think about being at a doubt, because a lot of us fall in love with this idea of, Oh, I'm gonna be my own boss and contribute, you know, my ideas and, and, and stuff. But it's, it's hard right to take that liberty for finding something and putting it out there and saying, I made this. And then you know, the DAO was like, great, thanks. You know, we don't need this but try again. For the DAO was like, This is amazing. Oh my gosh, like, can you do more of this? Right, but really finding those ways to you know, what, what excites you? I think Drake has a great thread about this looking at using iki. Guy, concept of geeky guy, you know what? to oversimplify it? Kind of what am I good at? What is the downside? And what can I get paid for?
Brandon Nolte
It's a Venn diagram, right? Right. It's
Zach
those four four circles. And it's like, what am I passionate about? What am I good at? What does the DAO need? And then what can I actually compensated for, and sort of trying to, you know, not wait and figure out what lands smack dab in the middle of all four of those, but really iterate your way toward it. And, and coordinate, you know, works, right now, especially works really best for four people that that come and do and then get rewarded for it. And so it really, it turns things on its head a little bit in terms of, you know, a lot of times we're used to going into a job interview and saying, Well, here's what I'm going to do and then get paid and then there's like this already mutual sort of expectation and pressure. Whereas, you know, DAO compensation being retroactive, obviously, that comes with its own whole host of, of challenges, but but one of the really great things about it is it really puts the onus on doers to come find ways to contribute, think about what what brings you alive and see where that fits in the in the data you want to contribute to.
Brandon Nolte
Yeah, I love that. It actually points to Part of the reason why I chose the name bounty hunter, which was this idea that you know, in some way we do have to think for ourselves, in terms of going out there and finding where we can add value. You know, you have to build your skills. You have to look for opportunity. is you have to find where your skills match those opportunities, just like you mentioned. And, you know, with daos, nobody is going to just hand you the job on a silver platter, in the same way that it might be at a traditional company you have to be, you have to have the right skills, obviously, to do it. But it really is a journey of making it on your own. And in with other groups, I don't want to make it seem like it's this thing that you're doing very isolated, because web three is very social. But to me there is that kind of, like you said, spark, that is, it is crucial to being part of contributing, just in the way that just because DAOs are so open and flexible and fluid. So you have to like, make that structure happen, you can't just fit in the structure sometimes,
Zach
right? Or any sort of, you know, this, this principle of emergence is really important in Dallas, that you're sort of mutually discovering this. And I think that the forest metaphor is maybe a little trite, but is is also really apt. You know, when you think about the multiple niches and sort of different jobs to be done in a forest, and in the ways that so many different elements, so many different beings collaborate together to make this thing. And so, you know, another really important mindset shift, when you think about those is this shift from a more mechanistic cause and effect mindset to a more organic, emergent and nonlinear sort of mindset, and, and how to things, how to things get done, how to things happen, how do you find a niche? You know, it's not through analysis and a spreadsheet? It's through sensing and listening and
Brandon Nolte
writing. Yeah, a little intuition, a little conversation a little walking around last for a little bit. For the course,
Zach
exactly, and, and trying things, you know, I think, yep, the shipping and iterating is such an important important part of what it means to be at a DAO contributor.
Brandon Nolte
I love that. I'm curious, regarding coordinate, what's the pushback that you hear from DAOs in terms of why they might not want to use it?
Zach
I mean, more, so I guess not so much, why they might not want to use it. But the pushback and just like challenges with the tool, there's obviously you know, the subjectivity, there's challenges with people, you know, allocating just to people they know, to having visibility, I mean, a huge challenge for DAOs is, is how do you have visibility into what everyone else is doing? If all of a sudden, you know, I'm charged with someone's compensation. And that's why we really, you know, we really encourage people to think about just allocate to those people who you can directly speak to the value that they've added. If everybody really does that, then then you can get a pretty much better representative picture than if everyone feels like they need to allocate something to everyone. You know, yeah, I think you see more challenges in that sort of, you know, 30 to 50. Circles, or are a little bit tough, because you know, everybody or might know everybody, so it feels weird to give them zero. But you also have no idea what they've been working on or the value they've added. So feel free to allocate them to, as opposed to smaller circles. You know, it's it, there's, there's more understanding more I trust in larger circles. I don't feel as bad about, you know, giving to people. I think someone else will handle them. I don't even know who they are, what they're working on.
Brandon Nolte
Yeah, I do have like videos that explain some of these nuances for for users.
Zach
We do and there's more on the way. Uh huh. Uh huh. So, you know, a lot of questions we get around what are what are best practices for a circle? Or? Yeah, exactly. What's the ideal size? And the unsatisfying answer to all these things? Is that it depends. But but we are creating more videos to help people sort of think about, especially I think we can we can do it always a better job of framing, kind of the experience of allocating in a coordinate circle, you know, what's most important is that is that the Tao itself kind of understand, how are we going to go about this? You know, because if some people are like, Oh, I, I'm gonna give to everybody, and some people are like, I'm only going to give to those people who I can really directly speak to. I can create confusing results. You know, yeah. You when you look at the graph at the end, so So having some shared framing a shared display of how are we going to go about this is really helpful.
Brandon Nolte
That makes sense. I'd like to change gears slightly and bring up a couple quotes and tweets that I found very interesting from you. One of them that sparked my interest was you said in a tweet designing and facilitating IRL Tao retreats is a million dollar opportunity right now, and will be a billion dollar opportunity soon. I'm curious why you think that?
Zach
I think that, I think that because because humans are fundamentally social creatures, you know, we've got, depending on when you're counting, you know, hundreds of 1000s, or millions of years of evolution, that that has us communicating largely non verbally, largely, you know, through through energetics, and through smell and body language and all of these things. And, and that's the way that people really connect, you know, I, I have a, I have a theory that sort of you can, you can maintain relationship and trust online, but it's really hard to to initiate and deepen. So, you know, you and I, and no matter how much time we spend together in discord and on Zoom, our are going to be able to connect to a certain level, as opposed to when we meet up someplace for, you know, and have a meal together, yes, it's just there, there is no replacement for it, and they're really, you know, arguably shouldn't be a replacement for it. And I think Dows that are going to be successful, especially long term will have this mixture of connection and competence. So they can get together and execute on things, but they also are all connected through a shared set of values and the purpose that they're pursuing. And, you know, before the the Denver conference, we got the whole coordinate team together for the first time. And, and the amount of, you know, connection and coherence that we came out with, of just spending three days together, has been, you know, invaluable in, in moving us forward. And I've seen this with some other DAOs that, you know, we've designed and facilitated some retreats for, you know, even if we're all you know, sued anonymous or anonymous, when I see your PFP. And you you write a note that said that should have been done yesterday, and that's my only experience of you might that I might land totally different. But if we've hung out and and had some laughs, and I understand more about where your worldview comes from, you're gonna say that should have been done yesterday, I'm gonna be like, I know, totally my bad, right? The level of affordance we give each other when we're in that kind of connection is just totally different. And so I think those that succeed, will, will fall into regular cadences of, you know, probably, I would say, you know, fold out once a year, and then subgroups getting together at other inter interspersed intervals. Obviously, all this depends on sort of size and whatnot. But I think that the IRL experiences, paradoxically, are going to be increasingly important as we are decentralized and live more online. Yeah, I
Brandon Nolte
could not agree more. And as technology has gotten deeper and deeper into my life, I have also thought about this concept of, of bandwidth, like what's, what's the bandwidth of my communication right now with somebody I'm talking to you verbally and auditorily, through the internet, right now, that's only one level of, of dimension to this bandwidth. So it's very narrow. And what you're saying is, in real life, that bandwidth is just maximum, and we can just, you can just get a better vibe and a better read. And so you can deepen conversations with people and deepen their trust and deep end, all of that just feeds into the working environment. And, you know, may even like you said, give people you allow them to cut people some slack or, you know, just, you'll be able to really work with them better and collaborate better. So, I think that's super cool,
Zach
and have their conversations that are just, you know, that are hard to have, period. But having them online, you know, trying to give someone some really critical feedback or talk about, you know, a pattern you're seeing that, that isn't helpful, or hard to do at any point that trying to do it without eye contact, and without sort of body language and without tone. You know, is is really hard, I think, we just have to remember that, you know, we're fundamentally we are these biological creatures, and that, that so much of this is like hardwired into us, and unconscious, you know, what makes us safe when we're communicating. And when we're connecting with people. It's, it's, it's almost impossible to translate that over a screen without having established it in real life first, so I think it will be increasingly important and for, for Dallas to have, you know, I as a as a designer and facilitator of you know, hundreds of these kinds of convenings and retreats. You know, having someone whose job it is to do that is really you important, and I think will be a whole class of service dials are on the way to help the design and facilitation of experiences for data leaders because, you know, asking, asking it to be everyone's job is no one's job. And it's a recipe for a very frustrating agenda, you want to make sure that time is so valuable, you want to make sure you're really thinking about how it's how it's being used.
Brandon Nolte
Yeah, sticking with that nature and organic theme that you were talking about, you have another tweet here, that's a little more, a little more out there. If it's funny, you said nature is a Ponzi, it requires more sunlight coming in to keep the whole thing running. What was going through your mind when you tweeted that?
Zach
I was just, you know, reflecting on a lot of the jokes and memes in our, in our space about, you know, how this and that is a Ponzi scheme. And, and it's like, well, yeah, depending on on how you define it, you know, everything, a Ponzi scheme, but all of the all of the energy that we use is basically sunlight hitting the Earth, right, some of its stored in plants, some of its stored in a lot of plant and animal matter that now has become fossil fuels. But, you know, without, without, without inputs coming in, there's always going to be, you know, some some claps. I think. I think, ultimately, I hope one of the things that we're trying to do with all of this web three and bow infrastructure is, you know, as we create these new economies, can, it's still going to have a Ponzi, but the problem is, like, instead of everything pooling at the top, you know, can it look more like a doughnut or more like, you know, a torus like these, this where the, the inputs that are going in, flow through and then cycle back in, you know, so we can, we can run the same kind of systems, but in a much more circular and generative way. So it doesn't require just ever increasing extraction to feed the bottom of the Ponzi. You know, but can we create? Can we create policies that that have flow through and return back to the bottom? So we need a lot less resources for the same throughput?
Brandon Nolte
Positive some ponzis? Yeah, right. Exactly.
Zach
Exactly. Love that.
Brandon Nolte
Okay, another one that that caught my interest was, you mentioned that you hope that Dallas will someday become a model of personal collective and societal development. I'm paraphrasing. Where Where do you think, how do you think that might happen? From where we are today?
Zach
Oh, boy, that's, uh, the honest answer is, I don't know. But I have some hopes and dreams about it. But we'd love to hear them. You know, one thing I've been thinking about, I don't think I've been thinking about lately. And again, I come from kind of the sustainability world, right. So I've been looking, and I've been motivated by the ecological crisis for, you know, a long, long time. I love the Paul Hawken, quote, he says, if if you look at what's happening to the world, and you're not terrified, you don't have a brain. But if you look at, you know, all the people that are that are working for good, and you're not inspired, you don't have a heart. And, and so I mean, I really think about right now, kind of what we were talking about before, where if you have contributors to Dows, how important that self responsibility is, right? And how that's like a huge gift and a huge burden, where, you know, there is no, there's no one that's going to show up and say, here's what you're supposed to do, here's what your KPIs are, you know, here's how you're going to be evaluated. And here's your path from analyst one to, you know, research analysts to, to manager to blah, blah, blah. And, in a lot of ways, you know, this is the same, it's a fractal like this individual choice that we have to make to take responsibility for ourselves and recognize like, No, this Dow is not just a company that I can kind of jump on the bus and jump off when I want, like we collectively own this thing, we collectively steer it, and that's a huge opportunity. And it's a whole lot of responsibility as well. And the same is true for us, you know, at that regional and bio regional and, and global level, you know, that these problems that we're facing, which are many, no one's coming to do anything. It's, it's a matter of responsibility for us. And so, why, I guess I have a hope on some level that as people engage in these systems, that ask them to take more responsibility to be better collaborators be more relational and be more context aware that that that will create this positive feedback loop up upskilling that that will make us more prepared to collaborate together on what are fundamentally these, you know, massive global problems. And so, yeah, that's kind of the the utopian dream is that Tao has become an opportunity for people to sort of rewire. And, and in taking more responsibility individually, you know, we can then begin to take more responsibility collectively as well. Oh,
Brandon Nolte
yeah, I love that. I mean, it does take a huge amount of energy and input to solve some of these big problems. So yeah, I'm with you, I hope the promise of Dallas is that we're able to scale our coordination and really tackle some of these things that have been sticking around for a while and only getting worse.
Zach
And now we're, you know, there's there's not a lot of choice in the matter now. You know, I I feel like we're we're in the fourth quarter on planning. And this is crunch time you know, we have a well documented from all sorts of different angles change window that we're we're navigating before we are buy a ticket for a certain kind of ride into the future. And so, you know, all these exponential curves are starting to stack up. I love you know, I love this. I love the WAG me, you know, the we're all going to make it me but you can about you know, we're all going to make it like we've made it and we're rich or something like we're all going to make it is we really are all going to make the future like we're going to make it is whatever collective fate we're, we're deciding on. And we are all going to make it so let's do that intentionally.
Brandon Nolte
I love that. I love that. Well, we're gonna wrap up this interview, I want to just say thank you so much for all your time today. It's been really fun to talk about compensation and trust retreats, and the future of our collaboration on this planet. So if people want to find out more about you online, where can they go?
Zach
Well, for better for worse on Twitter at Fifth World Zach comm by the coordinate discord, we're always there. Love to love to hear more about what people are working on how we might collaborate together. Those there. Those are probably the best places.
Brandon Nolte
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks again, Zack. I really appreciate it.
Zach
Hey, thanks a lot, man. It was great talking with you.
Brandon Nolte
Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider leaving us a review on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. This is the single best way to support us. And we'd love to hear from you if you have a minute to share your feedback. Okay, that's all for now. I'll talk to you soon bounty hunter
