David Hoffman
Welcome to layer zero. Layer zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the theorem community. Crypto is built by code is composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it. And layer zero focuses on the people behind the code, because the theory emits people all the way down, and always has been. Today on layer zero. I'm talking with tricky optics. He has been on a number of podcasts talking about very big cerebral topics about DAOs DAO coordination, how DAO coordination mimics nature. And this is all stuff that just really gets my mind going. And I just love all of these very just like far out subjects as you can tell if you've been listening to layer zero podcasts. So we talked about how one of the most underappreciated lens for viewing this crypto industry is one of biology, how DAOs will have biomimicry in their organizational structure and how computers will become part of humans, as we know like we're building our AI, but it's not going to be external to us, it's going to be a part of us, like our DAOs. And so we are just creating these technologically enabled futures these technologically enabled humans, with AI, but also with DAOs and DAOs. Being one of the stories, we talked about how DAOs can help change society from being one of command and control to one of being sense and respond. And how does that change culture when our organizations our institutions don't have this scarcity mentality of resource competition, but instead have this competition of how best can they sense the needs of their constituents and respond to the needs of their constituents with the best possible carrot. There's so many different angles of this conversation that I thoroughly enjoyed with tricky arcteryx. So I think you will also enjoy this conversation as well. So let's go ahead and get right into this conversation. But first of all, I want to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Maker Dow is the OG defy protocol, the maker Dow produces dye industry's most battle tested and resilient stable coin using maker you don't need to sell your collateral if you need liquidity. Instead, you can spin up a maker vault and use your collateral to mint dye directly with maker the power to mint new money is in your hands. The maker protocol is extremely hardened and operated by one of the most experienced DAOs in existence. They've been here since the beginning they've seen it all and so you can mint dye with the assurance that your collateral is safe. Soon maker will be present on all chains and l TOS so minting dye can take place on OASIS, the app virion zapper or any other defy protocol that you use follow maker on Twitter at Maker Dow and learn from the oldest and most resilient down existence. Ave is a leading decentralized liquidity protocol. And now Ave v3 is here on baby three has powerful new features to enable you to get the most out of defy including isolation mode, which allows for many more markets to be launched with more exotic collateral types and also efficiency mode which allows for a higher loan to value ratios and of course portals allowing users to port their Ave position across all of the networks that Ave operates on like polygon, Phantom, avalanche, Arbitron, optimism and harmony. The beautiful thing about Ave is that it's completely open source, decentralized and governed by its community, enabling a truly bank this future for us all to get your first crypto collateralized loan, get started@ave.com That's a a b e.com. And also check out the Ave protocols governance forums to see what more than 100,000 DAO members are all robbing about@governance.of a.com. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative is trying to find the next hidden gem. Also, IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard earned money. Also, crypto Ira lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your alternative IRA or crypto Ira via your 401k or by contributing directly from your bank account. There is no setup or account fees and this is all you need to do to invest in crypto tax free. Let me repeat that. Again. You can invest in crypto tax free diversify, like the pros and trade without tax headaches open in Aalto crypto IRA to invest in crypto tax free. Just go to alto ira.com/bankwest That's a l t o ira.com/bankwest. And start investing in crypto today. Subject. How's it going?
Tracheopteryx
Good, man, how are you? Oh, fantastic.
Unknown Speaker
Fantastic. You've been on the podcast circuit lately. And I think everyone is realizing that you have a lot of interesting things to say. And so I'm bringing you on this podcast because I think I can do it better.
Tracheopteryx
Let's do it. That's great.
Unknown Speaker
I've said it a few times on the show before but I think the most under appreciated lens for viewing this industry is biology. And that's why I appreciate your takes the most is because we're looking towards nature for guidance, more than just trying to you know, top down architects you know, create this thing without any kind of feeling around in the dark, right like crypto. It's a new frontier. We don't really know what we're doing here. We get some semblance of an idea. But I think looking to nature is one of the best guiding lights that we have in this industry. I'm wondering your thoughts on that, to kick this conversation go
Tracheopteryx
absolutely. And just in general, I'm, I'm always looking at ways to expand my perspective and like step back and see things from another, another angle. And I think, you know, we can get so caught up in what we're doing. It's just everything's within this one little space and becomes tautological or something, and it's all just in here. And then, you know, biology is one bigger lens we can look at, and there's many, many others to step back. And, you know, reframe the context of what we're doing.
Unknown Speaker
Do you remember, like that first early moment or aha moment where you're like, hey, this crypto thing relates to nature pretty well? Do you remember the first realization you had with that?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, let's see. I think it was basically right, right away, like I, I've always been interested in, you know, developmental psychology and bio, and physics and various sciences. And I tend to, like, see echoes of things everywhere. And so I think, you know, one of the things that really drew me to, to crypto was DAOs. That was the thing that really from the beginning that that idea. And to me, that was always part of a kind of, I guess biological framing, or at least how I, how it resonated with me.
Unknown Speaker
And was it strictly like the org structure of DAOs? Or how DAOs coordinate you thought was going to be, like, mimicking nature in some way? Or what was the angle? Well, I
Tracheopteryx
guess just I've never really agreed with his idea that we're different than other things, you know, like, like, it's all like, okay, so we have computers, and we have technology. But really, that's just another extension of the phenotype, that's another part of, of this organism. It's all kind of where you draw the circle. And how you draw a boundary around something, well, you define the self like it, it gets very confusing. You look at bees, or ant colonies, or at Savannah, fours are all of these different are the bacteria in your gut or whatever. And this notion of identity really melts away as soon as you kind of interrogate it. And so yeah, like, the human condition of trying to create things and working together, like I started a bunch of companies and ran teams and things like that. And, and to me, it's always very much about that interpersonal piece. And that always felt like part of some expanding Mandelbrot set or something, you know, it's always just on my piece of turbulence. And so, you know, the idea that a DAO could put this structure together, that can hold these types of interpersonal dynamics in this creative energies, you know, is the kind of the first thing I thought when I saw them,
Unknown Speaker
I can't remember where I heard this first, but if you look like at a beehive, or an ant colony, and you're looking at like the bees in the ants, the organism itself isn't the individual ant or the individual bee, it's the hive itself, which makes it intangible, which is kind of cool. Like there is no actual center of a beehive of the organism. It's just like the whole, many, many individual moving parts. And when you talk about the self, like you can even get into the human body and talk about our individual selves, like we have our body, which is our container, but our sales come and go, our brain cells come and go. And you alluded to it like your gut microbiome, which is a very critical part of who you are literally is not part of you. How have you extended this concept of what is alive to DAOs, like, what is alive with a DAO?
Tracheopteryx
Well, you can very easily get into kind of like semantic corruption here by stretching the definition DAO but let's not worry about that for a second and just play with it. And so you can think about like the DAO with him, you can think that just like you say, like, it's a little bit more obvious when you look at a beehive. But it's the same problem, when you look at a human being, you know, there's a notion of cellular psychology or, you know, the bacteria and all of these different pieces that that create this colony, that is me. And that has a lot of the same kind of relationships dynamics as a organization as and you can look at a company like Apple, or you know, and you can think of that as a life form. You really can, the definition of life is pretty flexible. And you can at least it's worth, you know, the curious thought experiment of thinking about it that way. And think about what it if you draw the boundary of life around that organism, what does that do? And how does that function and then around a DAO and just keep drawing different circles and seeing how they, they compare way that
Unknown Speaker
I try and like understanding if something is alive or not, is if it is self interested in his own well being? Right. And so Apple, certainly self interested in its own well being right and will take both defensive and aggressive moves in order to make sure that it stays alive. And so like, you know, if it's self interested, and it's actionable, it is alive, like whether it's like a cell or a company, or a DAO. And I think like, when life begins, like when some sort of life form forms, we started off as singular cellular organisms, but then we started depending on like, newer structures on to the cells that could sense the world around it, right, like receive inputs, and allow it to process data. And so I think lot of what your work has been doing over at coordinate is like building out like one of the first appendages that allows DAOs to like receive inputs to make sure that the DAO can know about the information that it needs to know, in order to self perpetuate its own ideas into the future. How do you feel about this?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I love it. I mean, whenever I'm building things, I'm thinking about biology and science fiction and fucking spirits and all the different things you know, like, that's the terrain I'm I'm walking into. So like with with coordinate? Yeah, I think of it like that, like an Oregon, you know, and particularly, like, I love this idea of sense and respond, which I think I heard from Zack Anderson first, who's a co founder of coordinate, which is a totally different kind of modality for operating, you know, rather than just command and control. This, this kind of dichotomy is one I often use, like, where most corporations and nations about command and control this idea that wait, we can actually work in a different way, which is like listen, and react, you know, sense and respond? And like, what, what tools look like what apps look like that are designed in that way? And to support that kind of interpersonal anti rivalries behavior?
Unknown Speaker
Do you have any just thoughts about like, what society looks like when it migrates from a command and control dominated version of coordination versus a sense and respond like version of coordination? Like if we all shift on the spectrum from command and control to a central respond, like, how would society be different?
Tracheopteryx
Well, I think first thing is that we won't all do that, right. And like, there's always just a super heterogenous diverse population of people, there's always going to be people that are in a rival risk mentality, there's always gonna be people that, you know, are in scarcity ideas, and, and that's okay. But to the point of your question, I think there it does become a threshold, where there's enough people that are starting to work in this sense and respond, abundance mindset that things really do start to change. And I really like one of my, you know, favorite thinkers, Ken Wilber talks about, you know, in the, in the 60s, there was a similar kind of big mindset change, the CounterCultural Movement, you know, which he looks at as being this kind of developmental tear, it's kind of pluralistic intelligence, or the sensitive intelligence and, and because about, like, you know, 10% of the world around that time started to have this level of development, it created these huge systemic changes. And I think we're at a similar, you know, not just me, a lot of people I've read, and others think that we're at a kind of similar fulcrum right now. And that this new level of development, this new intelligent kind of integral, or sense and respond or non rivalrous is starting to get enough, there's enough people with running this operating system, you know, that things like the DAOs, and that we work in happen,
Unknown Speaker
you indicated that, like, the whole command and control type of modality is one of scarcity mindset. Is that true? Can you go into that? Why is command and control a scarcity mindset? And why is sensor and spawned abundance?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, that's a good question. So I can't say that they are both apt like synonymous, but I think they tend to align more. So like, what's the point? Right? Like, it kind of goes back to that, just that question, what's the point? What worldview are we operating from, you know, if you're operating from a worldview, where you're going to die, unless you take this other dude shit, you know, a command and control like program makes a little bit more sense. It's like, let me control all the variables, make sure that I'm safe, you know, create a strategy that I can then execute to get the reward. And then I'm good. And the thing about those strategies first is that they're really closed. It's like, in my little brain, my little view of things like I can control all the variables, and like probabilistically, I'm going to get the thing that I want. And that's going to be good. Like when I get that scarce resource. Now, I've won. But we know that that's never really the case, you just want another scarce resource and another scarce and that doesn't actually solve the problem we're trying to solve. You come from a different worldview. One that's more about the journey than the destination sense and respond makes a lot more sense. And I think it tends, I have to think about this more, but I think you could use sense and respond in a scarcity dynamic as a type of strategy. I think it's more natural fit for different kinds.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, a sense and respond organism, whether it's like something as small as a bee, or as humans or something as large as like an organization, corporation or nation state sense and respond seems to have connotations of like empathy. Yes. And cooperation. Certainly, I think I could say without, you know, too much evidence that people the culture of today, we are looking for institutions and corporations that have more empathy. I think it's something that a lot of like, perhaps the left but has really nailed down but I think we're all kind of looking for it. Is that like these ultra capitalist like late stage capitalist, large corporations are all lacking empathy, right? And maybe it's because they're all operating on this command and control paradigm. And they don't have this sense and respond paradigm. Yeah, there's a thought. If you have any reflections on that one, go ahead.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, yeah, I think that's very true. And there's a lot of ways to look at that. First of all, it can be strategically advantageous to like numb your own empathy if you're in a really hostile environment. So, like, there's nothing wrong first is like, you know, if people haven't developed empathy, or they're functioning in a kind of low empathy environment, like, I don't want to cast any blame or shame there, like that can be the best thing that that person needs to do. And, you know, I think a lot of the systemic issues in the world do come from a lack of empathy. I mean, what are we taught, we're talking about coordination issues, how do we share resources together? You know, if we're playing the resource war game, you know, then, you know, we're really depleting the resources on the planet too fast. And I think, you know, it also goes to notions of divine masculine and feminine and I don't mean female sex, male sex, I mean, you know, the idea of resecting and transmitting and listening and speaking, and the world has been really dominated by a kind of masculine energy for the past long time, I don't know 1000 years or something. And that's manifested through nations conquest, and corporations conquest, and command and control are both these very like emissive, like controlling ideas of subjugating, you know, things. Whereas sensing is more receptive, it's more the divine feminine, and also just more the feminine energy that each of us can source within ourselves, that the world is in kind of dire need for, which also tends to be more empathic, because you're listening.
Unknown Speaker
Do you know if we've ever had a paradigm of sense and respond before, you alluded to like a counterculture revolution in the 60s, and how that became a very strong component of society. But I don't think it necessarily resulted in a complete phase shift from command and control to sense and respond, do you know, if we've ever had a society that was dominated by sensing respond?
Tracheopteryx
It's a really good question. I mean, I think, from the little I've read about, you know, tribal communities, I think there's some examples in those types of, of networks, where it is much more like, you know, you have a really strong matriarchy and a really strong patriarchy, and they both have different roles in the community. And then you have shaman and you have outliers. And, you know, all together, the tribe becomes this kind of organism that can work in balance with the world. So sensory response is much more about balance, like, so much of the command and control stuff that's happened has been about the opposite of balance, not conquest, you know, expansion, by all means cancerous growth, by all means, but that's part of that, you know, critical operating system changes to get into a mode of balance with the environment and each other.
Unknown Speaker
Right. So if I'm interpreting your answer correctly, you just said, like, we haven't had like, a strong dominance of sensor response, since we were hunter gatherers, which was, you know, many, many, many 1000s of years ago is basically before we invented any meaningful amount of technology, right? Like the first version of technology we really invented was the agricultural revolution, and has been command and control ever since it's been the resource game is playing the resource game aggressively ever since then.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, that's, I mean, I've certainly don't have a comprehensive knowledge of everything here. But that sounds right. And a lot of ways and, you know, I was thinking about this the other day to talking to Kevin a walkie like, you know, from the moment of agriculture, like there's some interesting research showing that like, when agriculture as job, we stopped being hunter gatherers, we started having, you know, need to be rooted in certain areas. And then all of a sudden, this notion of paternity certainty became important. Whereas before, there was much more kind of free love in families, like raised the children's treasure as a children's together, all of a sudden, now you have property, and you need to stop that property, and you stop that property with your children. And so you need to know who your children are. And all of a sudden, there's the notion of labor and a workforce rather than beginning. And I think maybe we can read that, like, look, there's this kind of, you know, all of a sudden, masculine imbalance that emerges?
Unknown Speaker
Oh, that's super interesting, right? Okay. So going from hunter gatherers to agricultural revolution, we stopped moving around this society, the action of stopping and like planting ourselves into one place on the earth, because that's where we would need to grow food, right, like you can't move your farm. So all of a sudden, we stopped being nomadic, we started being fixed. And that allowed people to have more things, because then we didn't have to move with them. We could just keep them in, you know, in our hearts in our houses. And then we established property. And then that turned the resource game into like, the next level, right? Whereas it's more than the things we can carry on our backs. It's like the things around us. And then all of a sudden, that kicked off a much more aggressive and less holistically coordinated version of society. Is this the right conclusion to be tracking on?
Tracheopteryx
Let's go with this? Because I think this there's a lot of far out ideas that come from this. So we can say that there has been this kind of arc in history that has started from that transition to agriculture, all of a sudden, you're like locked in a location all the way to let's say, even 2020 Where I love this thing. Balaji row, which was that 2020 was the first year that we became Digital First Citizens, you know, yeah. And I think that that was this kind of germination event of COVID that forced us all to like, move into this new territory of the digital network. And the crazy thing is, that starts to change that constraint of place. Because we've been really stuck into this notion of place and property for 10,000 years. Let's say that that's the ark, that we've just come to the end of a 10,000 year arc in human evolution. And now, there's this opportunity to move around more, you know, like, but move around in this digital space, which has totally new properties. And, you know, when I think about this comes kind of goes back to DAOs, DAOs, you know, this idea of cloud nations to that, we'll be able to create these digital societies. And like, look, there's lots of questions about that, like, we're already creating them. But one cool thing is the kind of modular politics where if DAOs, or digital communities can start to inter mediate between legacy government, like nation states and corporations, and start to take more power and hold more power, which I think they will, because they can out compete financially in many ways, then we'll be able to have this ability to choose our allegiance very easily without moving our physical location, which is like, actually goes back to this interesting idea I learned about number of years ago seasteading by Patrick Friedman was this, this really the idea of the kind of modular politics that the reason that we're fucked is that, you know, we can't move very easily the cost of moving is so high, so you can't change your politics. But if everybody lived on a boat, and we just tied the boats up into a giant island in the ocean, then you could just sail your boat to a different political Island if you wanted to, to, like, you know, but we don't have to have boats we can just do it on on blockchain,
Unknown Speaker
right? Yeah, the every single DAO or every single like nation state in the cloud is inherently opt in, right, like nothing can force you to become a part of it. This is something that's also in the sovereign individual where all these nation states compete on monopolies of violence as in like, who can have the strongest armies, because if you have the strongest army, then you control the world, something I actually got out of Bitcoiners in their reaction to their very, very strong reaction to COVID Is that like a lot of countries started like locking in their citizens, like you couldn't leave Australia for like two years, almost without like a lot of friction. And really, the only people that could leave Australia are the people that are wealthy enough to afford it, you know, being able to like lock themselves into a hotel for two weeks, because that was a quarantine protocol. And Australia wasn't the only one that was like a lot of countries like that, as the Ark of nation states comes to an end, they get more aggro with controlling their property. And one of their nation state properties is there humans that live inside of them, like that's where they get their tax money from. And so the arc of nation states is as they kind of come to the end of their lifespan, they start to clamp down harder and harder and harder on taxes and on their citizens. Meanwhile, and I think we all kind of feel like we're coming towards the end of the nation state arc. Meanwhile, we're creating these digital nation states, which are inherently often which we can choose to align with based on our own personal values. And one of my talks at eath, Denver was about how web three protocols are going to compete for our love. Because of this opt in forcing function, they can only compete with our love for our love, because they only have carrots, they don't have any sticks, right. And so it's inherently a sense and respond competitive environment, it's like going from the nation state environment of who can command and control the best going to a digital nation state environment, which is who has the best carrots, and in which there's got to be a sense and respond, like who can sense the needs of their constituents the best and respond to the needs of their constituents the best?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I mean, it's a much more sovereign kind of place to be right. And I think you can look back and you can see this kind of trajectory of these different dominant coordination methodologies basically, like or phenomena like religion, for a long time was the dominant coordination story on the planet, and like most of the human interpersonal relationships were mediated through that fiction religion. But that didn't go away, when the nation state started to rise to dominance, like just, it started to take some of that coordination function into its sphere. And then the same thing happened with the privatization of so many services through corporations, you know, private prisons, and private services, everything like that. And I think we're going to start to see the same thing. Now with web three. And for instance, privatization of Governance and politics and public goods can all be better, you know, coordinated through these substrates.
Unknown Speaker
It's a really big claim, right? And I love the idea that it makes sense to me. If we zoom out and look at this industry from the 100 year timeframe. It's like, oh, yeah, DAOs will eventually be able to coordinate global resources and coordinate governance way better than nation states. But then it feels like one of those things where it's like, you know, step one, create a DAO, step two, question mark, question mark, question mark. Step three, we control our world like this. Step Two thing I'm really confused about.
Tracheopteryx
Don't worry about the details. We got this covered. Sign your check right here, please.
Unknown Speaker
Do you have any ideas? I was like, What is like the first few steps we need in order to actually unbundle the role of the nation state?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I mean, I have some ideas. And I think the important thing is like, really early, right, like, so we're having all these grand ideas, and that's great. You know, that's, that's, it's inspiring
Unknown Speaker
podcasts.
Tracheopteryx
Like, people are asking me to talk about this stuff. Fuck I'm saying are spouting bullshit. And like, there's all these beautiful sci fi fantasy ideas and like, those are great. Those are let's not forget about the value of those. And look, why are they coming up? Because we're seeing some like, some hook some anchor in this stuff that we don't know shit about yet. But we're like, maybe, maybe, maybe, right. But now, I think one of the things that I'm starting to do this work with a couple of people now to really look at the problems like in really, really, really high detail, like Daniel shmotkin Burgers work and Jordan Hall on the meta crisis. And so working with those guys and like, like, can we define the nature of the kind of systemic problems? It's so it's so hard to figure out, like, that's a long rabbit hole, but just defining what the problems are, and then what the design constraints are for solving them. And then seeing like, Hey, do DAOs like, can we provably say the DAOs have the mechanisms? Or can they have they shown potential for solving these problems? Because we're stuck in this, you know, bad Nash equilibrium right now, where, you know, in this nation state, you know, resource war, a corporate world that we can't get out of do DAOs really, fundamentally change that equilibrium. And we have to actually do the work of proving that. So okay, we're like, it's still KoolAid time, that's fine. Not going to knock it, it's great. I drink it too. And we have to, like, really drill down now,
Unknown Speaker
I'm gonna ask you the same question. Like, where do we start? Like, what is the first W that DAOs? Have? That's going to, like, wake up the rest of the world be like, Okay, that's a real thing. Now,
Tracheopteryx
let's see. Well, I think we're already starting to see some of them, like these massive kind of flash DAOs that coordinate to buy historical relics and, and other things like that. I think that's interesting. But that's just like, kind of like one little like, oh, wow, what's that? And we're seeing these, you know, defy DAOs that are doing these incredibly financial things that are kind of it's like, Oh, that's interesting. But you know, we're not solving major governance problems yet. Right. And I wouldn't suggest that you apply a doubt to the actual governance of a political territory yet. But um, I think we're going to start seeing some impact there. Like, you can imagine some cases where you use DAOs, or web three coordination, to start to become part of it, not just through like donating to Ukraine, but like through some type of decision making or some type of public policy sensemaking I think potentially one way that we start to really see more provable goods.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I was talking with Tarun on layer zero. And he had the idea that the first way we do this is actually through the financial industry. Financial Industry is all lawyers and contracts. So like you put money into the financial industry, it goes through a lawyer written contract, and then it goes out and turns into finance, right, like all finance is, is the combination of contracts and money. That's why smart contracts are really cool. That's how defy exists. But importantly, he talks about how like a lot of the financial industry can be unbundled and like put on and start to use, like crypto rails. And I'm not talking about just creating defy like disintermediate Wall Street, what I'm talking about is like some certain, like financial contracts need to have the price of something in the contract, right? And so the price of something could be in that contract could reference something like a uniswap. Oracle, right. And then it's the uniswap, Oracle that becomes the arbiter of truth. And we can start to like, you know, expand on this. And all of a sudden, the financial industry is being made easier, because it's tapping into the truth of defy, rather than just like hard coding it into their manually inputted smart contract, and then all of a sudden, the financial industry back end starts to be come, whatever the state on Aetherium is, and then we kind of go from there. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, so
Tracheopteryx
I mean, the the kind of like the disruptive innovation model, where like, it just, we're starting to do work in this space that, you know, isn't the same territory that the traditional model has taken. And it all of a sudden becomes useful, and it's a better product, and they start to use it for things and all of a sudden eats away at the whole system. I can see that happening. Sure.
Unknown Speaker
Well, your talk at East Denver was really interesting, because you gave like a scan of an organism really unbundled, and you could see the different parts of the organism and the functioning roles. And you map that out into like a metaphor. It's like, well, this part of the organism is like this part of the DAO, right? And this part of the organism was like this part of the DAO, one thing I think we're that we're seeing is that like DAOs are kind of a little bit of the epicenter for a lot of things in crypto, like first we had defy protocols and then separately we had DAOs and then all of a sudden in like the defy summer what that really was was the smashing of these two particles together, it was just like, let's put the defy protocol into the DAO and like have this same thing, right. And we're actually seeing element finance. Do that right now. So they just launched their token. So now the element defy application is now being put together with the element DAO. But they're also appending on an NFT project. And so now like, what is element? Is it really a defy project, because now it's also a DAO, but it also has its own NFT ecosystem. And so now like this DAO has like three appendages, like it's got the prefrontal cortex, which is the DAO, that's the decision making, then you've got like the digestive system, which is how they DAO Agus energy, which is the defy app, then you have like the cultural expression, which is like the NFT thing. And so like, these are the three things and I think like for every single thing that we invent in this crypto space, like the DAO will be at the epicenter. And we'll just keep on like, appending, all of these things into how and then boom, we have an organism that is like a sense and feel and respond type organism. Yeah, that's on that. And you can you also kind of just give listeners who haven't listened to your East Denver talk, just like a taste of what that was about.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, it was talking a lot about different like biological models for decision making. And minds basically, like the amazing thing about web three is we have this kind of unconstrained networks like you can, all these different people can come together and work on things. And whatever way you want, in a much, much more free and open typography than we're used to in a corporation, let's say, where there's really strict, often roles and reporting and everything, but now as everybody swarming together and do something. And so, like what type of nature of mind does this create, like, you can look at the corporate kind of model for a mind and I kind of use the metaphor of a robot there where you have like a central processing unit, and you have sensors that send information up the direct report to the processor, makes decisions, and then sends electrical impulses to the actuators that then executed exactly, versus like a slime mold, which is more like a DAO or just everything is sensing and responding and moving and making decisions based on whatever it seeing around it. And then there's things in between, to like, I think the thing you're referencing was the stuff on a four, which is a colonial organism that looks like a kind of jellyfish, but it has like, four or five different species that are all in a really strongly coupled symbiotic relationship together, so that they fit together like one organism, which is just wild, which to me felt a lot like like DAOs.
Unknown Speaker
Can you just elaborate on that? Tell me more about that? How does that work? How many different organisms I don't
Tracheopteryx
know that much more about it. But like I've imagined a lot about it's, like, speculate a lot about it. But all I know, like, factually, is that it is a colonial organism, they call it which is made up of multiple different species, but that all function together as a team, as one that looks and acts like one animal. You know, you could say that about the human being in a sense, you say that we got bacteria, right? But this is a little bit like more far out, because you can like see each different animal in there all kind of like fitting together to like float around like a, like a little guy.
Unknown Speaker
That is nuts. How many like these things all have to be like born around each other, so that they can find each other? Like, how does that process work? Do you know about that?
Tracheopteryx
I mean, can we get an expert on to help us? I have the same questions.
Unknown Speaker
Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. I think the the model to extrapolate this to DAOs is that like, there's a lot of overlapping DAOs these days like bakeless, DAO very tapped into manufactory DAO, which is like, is this kind of the idea where just like, we're actually going to thrive not by solo DAOs doing well for each other, but just by apps, sharing resources and sharing capabilities and just hooking into each other?
Tracheopteryx
Well, I think that the whole like, kind of physics and friction of the work decentralized of the work space changes with Blockchain. And with web three, right? And, you know, Jackie rose wrote beautifully about this, talking about the Coase article 1937 article, the nature of the firm, when which this, you know, economist defines, like, why vertical integration basically is a good idea at that time is because of the overhead and you benefit from centralization, why not just a bunch of independent actors work together. At that time, there was no open public goods, infrastructure to allow for that to happen. So you have these monopolies arise. But now we have this open public goods, infrastructure that can allow for decentralized work to and where independent sovereign agents can come together and do stuff and like, as we're starting to, like, skate out under this new ice, we don't really understand it. So what you see is a lot of corporations on the blockchain for lack of a better term that just, you know, repeating the same model that we know, but doing in this new space, but there's also ones that are trying lots of new weird things. And what we're seeing is that the idea of like a corporate entity kind of doesn't make much sense anymore, at least, like what I'm seeing more is these permeable networks where you have like the Yearn protocol and the coordinate protocol and the curve protocol and the Bankwest our protocols and in but there's people that are in all of them kind of working together and working for multiple at the same time and the DAOs are collaborating together. They're they're often, you know, directly interacting between the protocols. So it's this kind of big open mess, like the, the kind of nature of work chain, the workgroup, the boundaries, the surface tension changes, instead of being this big, hard boundary around a 10 30,000. person company can't be the same as this other one. Now, it's as
Unknown Speaker
little non compete clauses. Yeah, you only work for one corporation at a time, blah, blah, blah, blah,
Tracheopteryx
doesn't matter anymore. Yeah. And the coolest thing, too, is like, I believe that it does become anti rivalrous. And that a better strategy in this environment is to be composable. And open and collaborative than competitive and closed, like you will make more money and have a more successful product. If you take that strategy.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah. And you can actually see that concretely in that a lot of DAO discords have channels in them that hook straight into other DAOs discourse, right? Like, these are actually hard coded bridges that we have in our communication, coordination tools, which is what Discord is, is basically DAO coordination.
Tracheopteryx
I was I was kind of blown away with that when I first joined Yearn, like, couple years ago, and like the main, like, chat at that time, you know, there was leaders of like, 10 of the other top protocols, and that I was like, wow, this is like the headquarters and like, it's people from all over defy in here. It's like, like, wow, this is wild. Yeah.
Unknown Speaker
I wrote an article all the way back in like 29. Teen, I think it's basically arguing that defy is not just one thing, like you don't have the uniswap app, you don't have the you don't have just maker Dow you don't have just compound, but like over time, the composability of these things like dye from Maker goes into uniswap, allowing you to go in, you can also get like C tokens out of compound. And all of a sudden, like, it's not just one defi app at a time. It's one defy, superstructure, like these are all composability means all these things are coming together. And if you actually are not composable, then you're left out. And if you're not composable, like there's an insane amount of value, and economic activity going on in the superstructure. So if you're not part of the superstructure, you're just not going to make it, it's advantageous to be a part of the superstructure, to contribute your value to the superstructure, so that you can pull some of that value back out. And so you can start to be part of this like positive feedback loop of composability. And I think what we're seeing is same thing with is going to work with DAOs, where DAOs are just going to become one sort of massive superstructure of DAOs. And we're all going to support each other like kind of individually DAOs won't work. Like they're too messy, they're too chaotic. But when you put 50 DAOs on the same spot, and you have a lot of overlapping talent and labor, people can start to like, meld these things together. And bootstrap themselves.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, it goes to the question of like, what are we doing here anyways? Like, I think we've all gotten really gaslit into this idea that you're supposed to work hard every day and make the product and make the money and like, serve the boss and like, Why, yes, we need food, we need to pick up trash and things like this, like, all those things still exist and are real. And it doesn't require that logic of like, conquest, really, you know, and like, we have to, I have to make my shirts, other people can't take it, and I have to build the walls. And I'm gonna, like have my business plan and sign an NDA. And like, no, that's not the only way to be productive, creative and happy in the world like this, the logic of blockchain and of open source software. And the Internet creates a really different environment to thrive in, which corresponds to a change in global consciousness, that's in the same way.
Unknown Speaker
This is the layer zero, like as soon as we have enough DAOs, to, if not accept everyone as laborers, but to accept everyone as at least consumers of whatever the DAOs got to give the ideas that inverts people's mental models. I said, like how they exist on this world, it's like, you don't go to work for your nine to five, you just got to give the protocol what it wants. And if you don't like giving that protocol, when it wants, find a different one. And keep doing that until you find your place. And all of a sudden, boom, you're in web three.
Tracheopteryx
And what's what's magic about this, it's like, it's really profound that change, really, and it's really new for a lot of people like, and it can be really confronting for a lot of people too, because a lot of us only have this experience of like, our parents, or our bosses or our society, telling us what's good, and what we're supposed to do. And then you have this ladder, that's conceptual, and you climb it and you check the boxes, and now you've done a good job. Good boy, right? But now we don't have that really as much. And all of a sudden, we have to say, Well, why am I doing any of this anyways? And that's like, profoundly valuable for personal and ecological development.
Unknown Speaker
We've hashed this out a little bit, but I want to go back to it. There's always the conversations with technology is the you know, right technology wrong time. Like maybe we're too early. What indications about the current state of the world would you say that is indicative of like, oh, yeah, the world really wants this new like DAO paradigm like this new web three, like what about the world is like really, really ready for this?
Tracheopteryx
Well, I can think of so many things, but it's hard to tell if there's like a kind of causal or just correlative relationships. I mean, you can never really know but know the anti work movement. You know, like all All of these people that are so mistreated by the corporate paradigm and getting paid the minimum wage being so low comparatively, historically, then there was really fascinating thing that happened like with Russia, where there was a massive network effect at play in, you know, where it wasn't just that the EU and the US and some Western countries, a sanctioned Russia was all these businesses pulled out, too. And that wasn't something that you could like control from one hierarchical position, right, that was a network effect, which is kind of like a DAO. And it turns out that the least from some analysis, that that network effect of all of these different agents kind of autonomously deciding to retract their business services, like create a much bigger impact and a much bigger stick, you know, for that behavior. And so it's like, look like the world is trying to form into these networks anyways, and DAOs and web three, are they the perfect kind of, like network substrate for that activity? So it seems there's that and then there's also Yeah, just the, you know, global consciousness change of people wanting to be whole beings and confronting this, like, our parents generation of like, you know, working hard for the system and the depth of the American dream and seeing how, you know, that often doesn't work and, and really wanting something different wanting to be a whole being, you know, with the with the people we work with, and not just have a work mask, like these things have all been developing independently of web three, but they all kind of fit together to support it.
Unknown Speaker
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Tracheopteryx
Well, I think we're making a ton of assumptions, the first thing but also think that that's okay, like I think to assume that we're going to have everything figured out and if like not all the line items are properly annotated, then like this isn't going to work is silly. Like we're at the beginning of a really gigantic change. Like we do not have it figured out that's fine. We can make some assumptions as long as we do it lightly So I think the fallacy is one that it's all figured out, or that it's not going to work. Both of those are similarly wrong. And we don't really know what the financial support is going to be like if there's, we don't know, the future of the market, or the macro global situation. Like, who knows, a lot of those things could put, like crypto is not going to be absolutely definitely turn over the world in the next five years. Like, a lot of us believe that. But there's a lot of ways that nation states could stop that and slit will slow it down, at least, I mean, you can stop it by killing everybody. Which could happen, that would work, at least it'll delay it for I mean, if you think of, I tend to think of crypto really is a developmental like it from a biological perspective, it is a is a force, it's a part of the force of the development of the universe, not something that like one guy is going to figure out. So in that sense, you can never stop it because it's always the next tear for any civilization. But it can certainly be delayed or stopped for 1000s of years.
Unknown Speaker
It's a frequent trope in this crypto space is that like, oh, yeah, we're trying to onboard like x 1 billion people into crypto, right like this DAOs gonna onboard a billion people or as my product is gonna onboard a billion people. Every time I hear that, like everyone loves to say that just because like it's a fun, like, we all want to onboard a billion people. But I'm also at the same time like brah. Like, we do not have the infrastructure to onboard a billion people, man, like every single blockchain would break, Solana would break, arbitration would break like avalanche would break that we literally do not have that block space capacity to onboard a billion people. And definitely with DAOs. Like, no, you can't just go work for a DAO, there's not that much room in DAOs, in its current state of things, like we just do not have that capacity. And so, like, one of the reasons why I think a lot of like, there's the NFT haters out there, there's like the gamers that hate the play to earn gaming revolution. And they just hate all the things that crypto is infiltrating in their industry is like, oh, it Kryptos in frustrating culture, and I hate it. And crypto is infiltrating games, and I hate it. And I think just one of the reasons why they hate it is because it's a natural organic reaction saying, Hey, your guys aren't ready for me yet. Your blockchains have high fees, and your games are boring, and your NF T's are shitty. So what they're really saying is yo, crypto, go figure your shit out, and then come back for me. And I think it's like this natural balancing act of like, we cannot onboard a billion people because we do not have the capacity for them. But we could onboard like, I don't know, the next 1000 In the next month or so. Yeah. And then maybe the next 3002 months later, and then they're gonna help build out some of this stuff. And then, you know, maybe the next month after that, we'll get 5000. But then it starts with, like, perpetuate and roll out. How do you feel about like this model for like, this natural reaction of just like, people hate crypto, and that's why they're not coming over to us, but it's really just them giving us feedback that like, we haven't built out the solution for them yet.
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I think that that's true. And I think it's okay, like, as much as we all are, many of us really want to see total open equal access to all of these tools and to onboard everybody and, and bring DAO technology to underserved communities and change government, we want to do all these things. And it's also okay to realize that maybe not all these things are ready. You know, the the world is full of all different types of people coming from all different perspectives. And we are very privileged in that we've had the education, the opportunity, maybe the support the, the finances, to engage in this new like space, it reminds me of the often used William Gibson reference, like the future is here. It's just unequally distributed. And like we're in the future now, but most of the world's not, and that's normal. That's the way it works. And they will, if this space is as promising and fruitful as we think it is, it will expand and more people will join us here over time as the meaning from both top down and bottom up as as people grow and develop to be able to handle this way of of being. And as the tools become more sophisticated, better, UX more open.
Unknown Speaker
So we're trying to build out these new organizations that sense and respond like sense our needs and respond to them appropriately. Like I say, our web feed protocols are here to compete for our love not to force us into paying them taxes. Do you have just like basic do's and don'ts for DAO builders out there? Like, hey, if you're, if we're building out this DAO ecosystem, and to be an actual new paradigm, not just a recreation of the old paradigm, do you have any interesting basic do's and don'ts for the DAO builders out there?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I think the biggest one is just like take a breath, when you want to get something done, the driving force will be to take something that you know from the corporate legacy kind of coordination system, and just bring that in and apply that to the DAO and be like, Look, maybe this DAOs not efficient enough. So let's implement some direct reports. You know, or you know, what this style is not moving fast enough in any as a strong leader. If you want to do that form of coordination, you can you can create a company what I would say is like I'd be open to the possibility that there are other alternative ways to work and to be, and DAOs are really suitable for that. But it is going to be confronting and it is going to be messy at times. And it's not all figured out. And you don't have to do that. But like the opportunity is there to try new things and to relate to people in a new way. And to allow for the timeline to be a little bit messier. And the product to take a little longer, or whatever else happens, you know, in these spaces.
Unknown Speaker
I was doing a show with treasure DAO yesterday, and they were one of the projects that came out of the blue ecosystem. And they have like, I'm pretty insane. First off their communities extremely energetic. So I know they're doing something right. And then I was unpacking their organization. I was like, Okay, there's a lot of labor and talent here being coordinated. How do you guys coordinate everything as a DAO? And they said, like, oh, yeah, we've actually brought in like, a lot of like web to project managers, like leaders into the Dow, is that like, the old mentality? Or like, how do you think about like, top down project management inside of DAOs? Is that antithetical? Or like, how does this fit in? How does this become a component of DAOs? Well, I
Tracheopteryx
think DAOs are a big tent. And like, they transcend and include the corporation. So you can, it's totally legitimate to do a web two style business in a DAO vehicle, that's fine, you can do that. Nothing wrong with that. And you see that happening. And that can be really successful and can provide a lot of good. And I think the thing that we're all figuring out is, there's also this new other web three native way to work, and it's different and new and not as efficient sometimes, because we're still learning it. And that's, I think, like, the most exciting and interesting place for me, and that's where I've tried to spend all my effort but you know, teach their own everyone you meet people where they're at, and different things are gonna work and different times.
Unknown Speaker
When you say slime mold DAO, I'm thinking of something with absolutely zero epicenter. There's no central point to me. That's actually the original version of a DAO, a DAO has in my mind is Miss appropriately named in this modern day and age like we really have digital organizations rather than decentralized, autonomous organizations. The only true like decentralized autonomous organization that I really think is out there. If you want to be a massive purist, it would be Bitcoin. Ethereum comes second, but there is still some central control uniswap comes to mind where it's code at the center and humans at the periphery. But then if we wanted to, to get into like the Dow model that we kind of know of today of people in a discord making and doing and contributing, do you think that's actually possible to create a structure of a Dow where there is no actual central processing unit and is just slime mold as in like, there's only labor at the margins, there's only people at the periphery without any rules without any structure. But the DAO somehow exists and thrives and grows from the collective labor of it's like a beehive. Right? A beehive without the queen? Like, is that even possible? Do you think that's possible?
Tracheopteryx
I think it is, I think it is, and I'm not sure, I think it's going to be one one of the different shapes that emerges. And there's going to be value in all the different shapes. So like, the thing I often think about with this is like, what is the governance scope? You know, what is this organism doing? What is the what what type of in, so like slime mold is good at certain tasks, and a human being is good at certain tasks. And those are different spaces of tasks, right? So like, you know, Bitcoin is really good at certain tasks. And I loved metallics article on April 1, because like, he made some really good arguments for why, you know, and, and they weren't jokes to me, those were good arguments. And like, that's great. That's one way for what it does. That's the right thing. But if you're trying to, let's say, govern a complex group of many different individuals doing different types of work, like we don't have any way to make that an immutable smart contract right now. You can governing an immutable smart contract, like the uniswap v2 protocol, for instance, like there's a defined set of function calls that can be made, you can create an on chain voting system with on chain execution and have a single channel decision making system, which is a kind of mind. And you can have this big swarm of people that operate it. But that's not the same as uniswap Labs, which is a group of creative workers organizing together to create a work product that has a different governance method. I actually don't know how much about how uniswap Labs works. But a lot of these types of central development companies, corporations work like normal companies, where there's a leader and a hierarchy, and that's fine. The opportunity and the place that I've spent my time is trying to figure out how do you govern in a decentralized way, these groups of creative workers, and we like have some this fascinating potential there because once you figure that out, it breaks all of the limitations like it becomes that like beehive network, you know where some alpha leak we're working on something like this, but ventually like it's not ready for disclosure yet. It allows you to scale like the opportunity and the promise for life. Real decentralized work is I call it the party bike. You know, like 10, people can sit on it. And you can pedal as much as you want. You can drink a beer, you know, one person steers, maybe they get bored steering somebody else gears and you get somewhere cool. Yeah, it's like, imagine that for work, like anybody can work as much as they want, they get the value out of it. There needs to be a whole new set of structures and decision making processes in order to enable that and support that.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, there's like been an explosion of like DAO tooling startups in the last like six months, like, and everyone is building something relatively similar to each other a few differentiating points. Yeah. But like, the number of these projects is like through the roof, I'm thinking like, there's over like, 20 of these, like DAO tooling startups going on, at least, what is missing in the DAO tooling landscape that after like, the dust settles with all these DAO tooling startups, what is the real problems is getting soft? Like, what is the thing that DAO tooling is trying to get done? Right, like, what is the next step for DAO tooling?
Tracheopteryx
Well, man, there's a lot of stuff, I think, a lot of the DAO tooling that we're seeing, and I know a lot of the people working on these things, and a lot of the projects and I think they're awesome, like, there's some really great stuff, going back to the thing we're talking about for like, a lot of it is taking processes that we know about from web to or the normal, traditional corporate world, and making ways to do them easily on chain in pretty centralized communities. And that's great. But the the blue ocean, the the the undiscovered country is, what are the real web three native ways to work. And there's very few tools that are really being made for that, understandably, it's very, very new, and like self shilling a bit like I think coordinate was one of them coordinate is the only form of doing fully decentralized compensation that I know of. And like understanding compensation is a huge challenge for really decentralized creative work, like how do you get paid? How do you share resources? How do you make those decisions and, and the other side of that is the decision making space itself. So we have Unchained, token weighted voting, right. And we have snapshot and things like that, these things are great, but they're just single channel decision making. It's like one thing, you put a proposal up, the people vote on it. But there's so many other types of computational social choice mechanics that are available and really important, because there's all different types of decisions that need to be made in these decentralized ways. But also with the balance of centralization is good for some things. permissioning is good for some things, and decentralized and permissionless is good for other things, and to create tools that allow for a fluid movement, you know, with that's accountable and transparent, to create these structures. Like there's not really any tools that do that yet,
Unknown Speaker
what's the role of data when it comes to DAOs. A lot of DAO workers are individuals who have their own skill sets and their own like resume in working in web three and DAOs, from as far as I can tell, don't have a way of sensing the makeup of an individual worker, how do you think about this problem, and in a database,
Tracheopteryx
I think this is gonna be a huge unlock. And I think ceramic network is amazing. I don't know if you've talked to those guys like this idea, that data verse where basically blockchain for rich data, what that allows for is like, way more composable and easy to start front ends, like, you know, you go to one DAP and you put in your profile and your picture and whatever. And all of that is stored in IPFS, through like, you know, these kind of shared data structures, that then you open another DAP and your stuff automatically populates or you know, you open a Kanban board at D work, which is an amazing like Project productivity tool, startup, and you put in a bunch of tasks, and then you go to clarity, which is another awesome tool. And those same tasks are there because they're both being stored through ceramic network on IPFS. That type of data availability for rich data for DAO workers is going to be like massively massively expensive for the system,
Unknown Speaker
and fits right into the theme of DAO sensing and responding, right, like DAOs can sense their own needs, and then also sense who are the candidates that are best equipped for the DAO to give the DAO those needs and then respond appropriately?
Tracheopteryx
I think this is actually one of the big pain points, like in a lot of DAOs. We talked to a lot of DAOs that they have the same the same problems. How do you surface needed work? How do you create bounties? How do you know who's done what how do you keep people accountable? How do you do offboarding? Like all of these, everybody has these same questions. And I think part of the problem is that without that data layer, that data blockchain, there's not a good enough shelling point for this stuff. Like, there's a bunch of these different boundary systems. But because they don't interoperate, and you don't have it all moving down to one data layer, like none of them is really gaining enough traction. But once we do have that, then it's going to explode. And that's pretty soon
Unknown Speaker
Okay, so this data layer is like an inter DAO communication layer. Is that a way to frame it? I think
Tracheopteryx
you could think of it that way. Sure. It's a public Good. And since for data that many, you know, front ends can bloom from then you can have, like, this is what will beat Facebook, right? Like, you can't beat Facebook because of the network effect. But when every new profile can get stored in the same data structure that's open, you know, and public good, then all of a sudden, it's just gonna start growing, you know, and then you don't have to have the one front end that you know, beats them all. You can have 1000 of them take you
Unknown Speaker
go out and go to real life crypto events, you're at youth, Denver, I saw you at M con, I think you've been to a few others that I haven't been. And I believe if I'm remembering your bio correctly, you also came from like a web to startup world. I think maybe I might be wrong about that. Not web two. But I love to know, tried five tried something. I was an artist and design artists. Okay, anyways, same question, just the culture of the people that you engage with and interact with at these crypto events. What about the culture these like web three enabled individuals? What about the culture in these in real life events stands out to you as unique and compelling.
Tracheopteryx
It's great. It's the least the there's a bunch of different cultures in crypto, right? There's like finance culture, there's investor culture, there's builder culture, there's DAO culture, and like, I didn't know anything about finance before I I wasn't I was an engineer and built code and engineering, various engineering projects. But finance, I didn't know anything about that's not really my people in a way, not that there aren't plenty of them that I resonate with the people I really vibe with. And that when I go to these conferences, I feel like I you know, coming home, in a sense is that there's people making doubts, you know, that are trying to figure out really how human beings can collaborate. And this is something I've cared about my entire life. And this is like, the most important thing that we can figure out on the planet, because that is what makes or breaks, like our ability as a civilization to thrive. And they're not coming from there. It's very new thinking, you know, like very, lots of polymaths, and people with all different information, bring it to share and work together. And it's very open, you know, it's very welcoming, and not competitive, very collaborative. And it's that overwhelming nature of collaborative and open spirit that like, Yeah, I'm a sucker for that any day?
Unknown Speaker
Why does this industry have all of these types of characters? Like, what about this industry attracts that type?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, so I think this goes to my kind of like developmental theory of organizations where, you know, before blockchain, you know, like a human being has these different levels of intelligence, we have survival instinct, you know, we have sexual instinct, we have power, we have heart, we have our voice, you know, we have our cognitive ability, all these different layers, and they'll build on top of each other, in the same way organizations and societies has that too. And so it's like, Where are the jewels kept? Are the jewels safe? And that's the first thing that we all need to think about. Am I safe? And you know, before blockchain, you have to trust the government, and you had to trust the banks, you know, for that personal security. And that's not a very good trust situation. So everyone's kind of starting scared. You're all starting kind of scared. And so you can only go so far. But when you have blockchain, you have this trustless coordination system to keep your jewels safe. And now, obviously, there's ways that they're not safe, but it's a lot better than we had before. And so what I noticed is that from that much stronger foundation, like the other stuff can bloom in like people how many like handshake deals, like I'll send you some eath? Like, send me the tokens later, like, that happens all the time. Like, I was an entrepreneur, I started a bunch of companies, everything was paper, and everything was contracts, lawyers everywhere. It's like, we're way more because of this trust us infrastructure, we're way more trusting, because like, the jewels are safe, and that's profound, that changes everything.
Unknown Speaker
Yeah, I think a lot of this world depends on insurances, right? We have like models of governments where we have slow, medium and fast versions of government executive is the fast Congress or the legislative is the medium. And then the judicial the Supreme Court is the slow. The slow government is the hardest one to change. Right? So when the Supreme Court says, This is the new version of the law, this is the new law, businesses and people have the Mac like the strongest level of assurances that that is going to be the law moving forward, getting something overturned by the Supreme Court is like the hardest thing you can do in a country. And so that gives businesses the assurances that they can operate on those laws, and they can build around them and give us like startup founders assurances that they're not going to get rug pulled, because the Supreme Court determined that this is the law. And I think what I heard from you there is that like private keys, give you just a new level of assurances over your assets that you've never been able to have before. And then like smart contracts give you assurances, and so, and I don't think that like I'll be randomly sending somebody some eath and telling them to just send me the tokens later, probably in 2014 when all of society's on boarded But it's like this colonel, these first adopters who got attracted by this technology is probably a little bit more conducive to that. But I do take your point that like smart contracts and private keys and these assurances allow for the trustless base allows for a trusting structure, like a trustless foundation allows for trust to be exhibited by the world at large, because we don't have to rely, like you said rely on the banks rely on the government or rely on the courts to get things right. Because even the courts can be gamed, like the courts is a game bubble system, where Aetherium is not. And so that imbues whatever gets a built on top of Ethereum is more creative playground for trust to be exhibited.
Tracheopteryx
Absolutely. And it doesn't mean that we should be naive and not, you know, care about OpSec or key management, you have to have that piece too. And you have to know that there are sharks out there. Like it's really important to know what playing field you're on. Are you in an adversarial space? Are you in a collaborative space, you're in a creative space, who to trust in space, what level is that and then operate, you know, in that way,
Unknown Speaker
after m Con last September, I think in Denver, September 2021. A bunch of us went out to just like a bunch of Airbnbs out in like the Colorado countryside. Just for like the weekend just to get away sunlight, just walk around, just go on some hikes. And everyone kind of converged on one Airbnb as the meeting place like the biggest one. And everyone had their stuff like their backpacks with their laptops, and their Ledger's. And so everyone just dumped their backpack into this Airbnb, and we all started going on a hike. Everyone had their Ledger's in their backpacks, and everyone just left all of their Ledger's in the backpack, and just in the Airbnb, and no one thought twice about it. And I only knew about like, 50% of the people in that group. But it was the metal factory. It was like half of them was the metal factory bros. And ladies. And I was like, yeah, like no fucking way, would any of these people like go into my backpack and try and find my ledger? Like, that's not going to happen? And again, I wouldn't do that in 2030, probably, but like with the particular people that metal factory of a particular DAO has created, and just like the collaborative Yes, and culture of that community and others, it just felt so like, no one thought twice about how like, there is like millions and millions of dollars, like collectively on these backpacks that are like laid on the ground. Yeah,
Tracheopteryx
it's amazing. And I think you're right, like part of that is still early. And part of it is that there are high reputation people in this space that understand the substrate that we're working on and are able to trust each other, which, you know, that notion of trust is one that I think about a lot, which is like, there's the impetus in the space, often you see, like, everything needs to be trustless, everything needs to be trustless. And I think that's a great goal in many ways. But it's not reality, because you can't like there is still a hugely important space for interpersonal trust. And like that is where the like, third mind, the mind, between minds, like really emerges, you know, in the collective intelligence is between these interpersonal relationships. And, yes, like those can be broken. And yes, that's okay.
Unknown Speaker
I want to tell a quick story. And it might actually be completely irrelevant, but I think your brain might pick up on something anyway. So I'm gonna go and see what happens. My first job out of school was working at a mental health agency for kids that were deemed by the state to be unsafe to themselves unsafe to others, or just like, not functioning enough to be able to take care of themselves like schizophrenic or whatever. So this work, he worked at this company for a while we had a workshop, like a weekend optional workshop where we would be able to go and work with just like hanging around, traumatized horses. And horses are extremely emotional animals. If you like, walk quickly towards a horse, it'll get scared and run away from you. But if you walk passively, and like, you know, calmly, and not at a direct line to a horse, but like adjacently, and then you go and walk adjacently again, you get closer than the horse is calmer, in response to you. And so the people that were leading these workshops, were getting us to like, Okay, you're going to grab a horse, and you're going to lead it right, you're going to walk with it. And the horse is going to determine whether it's going to follow you or not based on your body language based on like the vibe that you give off. And I was watching one of the therapists that was with us in this organization who was like, kind of a timid guy. Not really too, like, you know, confident he would go up to the horse and like, grab the reins and be like, come on horse, like, we're gonna go now. And the horse was like, What are we doing here? Like, Yeah, fuck off, bro. Like, I'm not going anywhere. It's like he couldn't get the horse to walk. And so like I was watching this happen, and it's like, okay, well, that's not what you do. And so when I did it, I went up and I grabbed the reins. I didn't look at the horse. I just like looked elsewhere and started walking. And the horses immediately started going, it's like, oh, okay, I guess we're going this way now. And the horses started following me. This was a kind of a chaotic workplace. So some of these kids were like conduct disorder, not really able to control themselves. And sometimes they would just like, aggressively act out. And they were like, between the ages of like 13 and 17. And there was one kid who was having an act out moment and like starting to get a little violent. There was a moment where like, I was engaging with him, and I needed to de escalate the environment, but he was being aggressive, being violent like trying to hit us. I can't Number one I set by basically just turned around and walk the other way to disengage. But I'm turning my head away from this kid, so I don't know what he's going to do next. And so I turned away and started to walk away. And in the back of my head, I'm like, he's gonna hit me, he's gonna hit me, he's gonna hit me. But because I acted as if I trusted this kid, and I acted as if I didn't think that he was going to hit me. And I confidently turned away and walked away to disengage. And he didn't hit me, I was like, well, because it didn't hit me, a lot of like, our, what we communicate is how we perceive the world is embodied in our actions, right. And so when we have a bunch of people in a Colorado countryside, Airbnb, and they're all leaving their letters on the ground, we're all indicating to ourselves, like, hey, like, this is the vibe, like, this is the culture, this is the emotional state that I'm going to express that I think that we are in, and because I'm expressing that everyone else also thinks that is true. Reflections on that,
Tracheopteryx
yes, we create our own reality, right? Like, if I am acting from a place of, of confidence, and openness, and no clear direction, and integrity, it tends to create more of that in the world around me. And if I'm operating with a hidden fear in my system, that I won't look at that I'm gonna get hit, I'm gonna hit get hit, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna make that reality happen. And somebody's gonna hit me. Because we tend to miss goes to like spirituality and psychology and all these different wisdom traditions that we tend to recreate the same patterns in our lives over and over again, you know, there's this idea that, you know, the world is this concrete thing that has these specific rules? And, you know, there's an order to it. And it's kind of yes, and no, you know, like, really like reality is this kind of psychedelic experience that each of us is manifesting in our own way. And we can have the ones that are full of suffering, and the ones that are full of less suffering. And each of those is just what we happen to need at that time. I'm not sure that's where you were going with that story. But that's what resonance
Unknown Speaker
No, I was going nowhere with it. But our DAOs like an amplification tool for this kind of like behavior where yeah, if the DAOs just assume that they trust us, and we assume that we trust the DAO, like, do you think DAOs can be like an amplification of just the values that we want to see in the world?
Tracheopteryx
I think that they really are. And I think this is like this development is going in concert, like, at the same time, as these collective super organisms are, are developing, so too, are the parts, you know, within it, like each individual also has to develop. And so that's one of the things that's like super exciting to me about it, like working in a DAO that's not, you know, a company on the blockchain, even a company in the blockchain is going to push you in some areas, but working in a DAO that's, you know, really trying to push down as forward, each person is going to be like, their development gets amplified, I think, and you, you get these lessons and these signals that help you orient to this new way. It's like one of the biggest, you know, risk factors for being obese is having a lot of obese friends. It's like, garbage in garbage out, like what's around us becomes us. And so if you put yourself in a space with all these sovereign beings that are, you know, acting in these more developed ways, like you will take those traits on and you will grow and you'll become more like them. And DAOs become like a shelling point for that type of consciousness
Unknown Speaker
trick. If we zoom forward to like 2015 2016 2017. And we're got gray hair, and old and DAOs are infinite at this point. What do you hope your legacy is? You as an individual?
Tracheopteryx
Yeah, I mean, I just hope I help.
Unknown Speaker
All right, and we're done.
Tracheopteryx
I love working on this stuff. Like I love solving these problems and sharing them with people that I care about and CO creating this thing together. And being part of this kind of movement. It's like it weaves together all of these things in my life that I care about. And I didn't even realize I didn't plan to get into crypto, I kind of got sucked in and 2020. And it's because of all these different things like the psychology, the spirituality of it, the technology of it, the you know, the revolutionary aspects, like, it's so compelling. And so just to, if my legacy is just, you know, someone that added some good to that system. That's, that's all I want.
Unknown Speaker
Jake, you said you were an artist, what were you an artist about? Like, what would you create
Tracheopteryx
interactive sculpture. So so my training was in human computer interaction, I used to invent new types of computer interfaces, physical interfaces, mostly using like, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and industrial design software. And I did that in research for a while, trying to reinvent, you know, computers, basically. And then I started using it to make art. I've always made different forms of art in my life, but then I use that same material, but as an artist, so I made sculpture. That's
Unknown Speaker
really cool. That just opened up a whole nother can of worms. So when Garry Kasparov lost to deep blue, I think or Yeah, people thought was like, Oh, the Chess is over, like the computers are one like the art of chess is lost. What actually ended up happening is that the new frontier of chess came with the grandmasters of the world, the Garry Kasparov of the world, finding their preferred chess AI, and then competing with other grandmasters who have their chess AI. And so I started to become a human computer cyborg. And that was the new frontier. And we've also seen this in online poker too. It's gone from just individuals on a table playing poker to online poker where like the new meta is like how computer enabled can you be like you have scripts running to tell you about like probabilities. And then you have to make the gut choice using that data. And I think there's a conversation to be had about this with DAOs, to where DAOs are, like the cyborg side of us that are doing like the smart contract basic stuff, but it's still humans at the periphery. Do you have any thoughts about like the future trajectory of humans and the digital side of the world that we're creating? Yes,
Tracheopteryx
many? And many, many. I think technology is a part of the human organism. Right? There's this idea. And there has been this kind of misconception, I think that it's something external, you know, and that, and that, like, we need to build an AI that's outside of us, and it's a mirror of us. But really, the progress, the procession of technology is of identity creation. And like, every the phone becomes an extension of the mind is like a cognitive coprocessor. And, you know, just because it's not inside my skull doesn't make it any less me, you know, and I think you people can feel that you lose your phone for a while and you feel a huge sense of loss.
Unknown Speaker
There's a phobia word for this. I don't know what it is. But there's a phobia word for when you do or without your
Tracheopteryx
phone. Yeah. And, you know, I was talking to MetaTrader about this the other day, actually, and maybe what we're doing in DAOs, is we're creating AGI artificial general intelligence, because if you think a lot of the progress in strong AI, you know, has been around constructing these logical systems that get started, Marvin Minsky gave a, you know, famously gave one of his summer students like the job of general computer vision, and like the 60s, like figured they'd be able to solve that and you know, a summer and like the 60s, but realize that, you know, it is not this divorced logical system that can work on its own, it's really a part of the human matrix. And first, then AI developers started to they realize that it needs to be an embodied intelligence, they made robots and they thought that might be a robot body is going to, but again, this is outside of the human. And now you see, like GPT, three, and whatever. They're really synthesis of human beings, because they take all of the human output, and they weave it together statistically into a new output, right? In these kinds of limited domains. But what are DAOs other than, you know, these aligning mechanisms for human output, that can scale and function more rapidly than any other human coordination system before? So eventually, it might be that all of these different human actions are getting woven together through the technology of the DAO to become a real intelligence, you know, operating, maybe not in a realm that we can directly communicate with, but taking action on the same realm, the same planet with us, because that question, it's not outside, you know, it is extension of us.
Unknown Speaker
We talked about the digital, like Metaverse nomadic lifestyle that is now being enabled via DAOs. And really, just like this whole concept of crypto is always about freedom, like the layer zero of crypto is freedom, like crypto is here to do anything is to help us become more free, like Bitcoin. And its 21 million hard cap is freedom from tyrannical monetary policy. Ethereum and smart contracts is freedom from like the capturing a financial system. And then like NF T's is a freedom from just like, I don't know, licensing and like labels and people that tried to own the music industry in a in a corporate sense. It all sets you free. And that's really what technology has always been about is like, how does technology allow us to access the things that we want more. And that's always been what technology is. And really, I'm just seeing, like DAOs as being just like, another instantiation of ones and zeroes that allow us to get what we want out of life even more, until we have these AI developers that are building out these API's. And I loved what you said where they're trying to build it externally, which is like naive, because how can you build something external, when you are the one actually building it in the first place? Like your biases, your values, your culture is being built into the thing that you are building? So there is no even if you try to make some maximally external use can't pull the human out of the technology, because it's the human that built it in the first place. That's why we have a layer zero podcast to talk about these subjects. And so like, can you talk about just like the importance of self reflection about who we are as we build out these technologies and how our own persons get like, imbued into the technologies we create? Oh, yeah,
Tracheopteryx
I mean, the most important question to ask is just what am I to start? You know, who am I what am I in understand the nature of the rally? need that we are in more and more and then see that it's all a piece. You know, it is divine wisdom, lifeforce energy flowing out into manifestation. And we're all a piece of that same thing of God of this, you know, the polarity of the universe in the unity of it all. And that is going to flow through us into technology, it's going to flow through us and everything that we, that we make. And, you know, it reminds me, a lot of people sometimes think of it like the Vulcan fallacy or the Spock fallacy that you can have this purely logical take on the world divorce from your emotions. And the reality is, if you look at studies of split brain patients, like if you don't have access to your emotional system, then you cannot make any decisions. You know, there is no just logic without emotion, like it all flows from that same creative force, and it flows up through all these different layers. So it's the same thing as thinking you could create like this AI that's outside of the human organism, because it's like saying it's outside of life. And without life, it's just dead. It's just concept, which is a part of experience, but not all of experience and experience cannot is irreducible to concept and vice versa. So, seeing it all is just just this divine expression of the universe and action, I think really helps to better contextualize what it is that we're fucking doing in the first place.
Unknown Speaker
trake I think this is a good place to wrap it up, man, thank you for coming on to layer zero and sharing your thoughts. Thanks.
Tracheopteryx
Thanks for having me, man. great talking with you as always, I blast
