The Divine DAO with Tracheopteryx | Layer Zero

Tracheopteryx is the founder of Coordinape, the intersubjective coordination tool. Coordinape allows DAO contributors to collectively reward each other as an alternate—and more elegant—means of compensating work & value. Trach has been on a podcast circuit lately, cruising through big cerebral topics orbiting DAO coordination and biomimicry.—addressing technology and civilization from a biological perspective is underrated. How do we shift from a ‘command & control’ approach to ‘sense & respond’? How can we take lessons from nature and plug them into novel systems powered by technology? ------ 📣 CONSENSYS | M·A·C: NFT Collection for a Good Cause https://bankless.cc/MAC ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA 👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave ⚡️ MAKER DAO | THE DAI STABLECOIN https://bankless.cc/MakerDAO 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave ------ Topics Covered: 4:30 Tracheopteryx & Biology 10:25 Sense & Respond 16:04 Organizational Empathy 21:25 The Digital Shift 27:43 The 100 Year Plan 33:17 Trach’s ETH Denver Talk 40:15 DAO Coordination 46:00 Are We Ready for This? 54:38 Guide for DAOers 1:01:58 DAO Tooling 1:07:51 Crypto Culture 1:16:20 Create Your Reality 1:22:35 Legacy and Art 1:28:20 A Quest for Freedom ------ Resources: Tracheopteryx on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tracheopteryx?s=20&t=0h3kPUe5VlnDmfCi1bpAfg https://twitter.com/tracheopteryx?s=20&t=0h3kPUe5VlnDmfCi1bpAfg Trach's ETHDenver Talk: https://youtu.be/anDAtWrhDnE Yearn Finance: https://twitter.com/iearnfinance?s=20&t=0h3kPUe5VlnDmfCi1bpAfg https://twitter.com/iearnfinance?s=20&t=0h3kPUe5VlnDmfCi1bpAfg Coordinape: https://twitter.com/coordinape?s=20&t=0h3kPUe5VlnDmfCi1bpAfg https://twitter.com/coordinape?s=20&t=0h3kPUe5VlnDmfCi1bpAfg ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  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 which has 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.

• 0:22David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code, but is composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypher punks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with Trey Kiyotryx. 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 the Layer Zero podcasts. So we talk about how

• 1:07David Hoffman?

  the, 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 just computers will become part of humans, as we know, like we're building out 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 these stories. We talk 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,

• 1:50David Hoffman?

  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 Chaky Octorix, so I think you will also enjoy this conversation as well. So let's go ahead and get right into this conversation. But first, a moment to talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard-earned money. Alto Crypto IRA lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA.

• 2:35David Hoffman?

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• 3:17David Hoffman?

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• 3:57David Hoffman?

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• 4:40David Hoffman?

  DApps on Ethereum are already on Arbitrum, with many moving over every day. Go to bridge.arbitrum.io now to start bridging over your ETH and other tokens in order to experience DeFi NFTs in the way it was always meant to be. Fast, cheap, secure, and friction-free. What's up, Trick? How's it going?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Good, man. How are you?

• 4:58David Hoffman?

  Oh, fantastic, 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.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  Let's do it. That's great. Thank you.

• 5:15David Hoffman?

  I've said it a few times on the show before, but I think the most underappreciated 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 top-down architects, you know, create this thing without any, you know, 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 going.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And just in general, I'm always looking at ways to expand my perspective and like step back and see things from 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.

• 6:19David Hoffman?

  Do you remember like a first early moment or aha moment where you were like, "Hey, this crypto thing relates to nature pretty well." Do you remember the first realization you had with that?

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's see. I think it was basically right, right away, like I,

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I've always been interested in developmental psychology and, 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.

• 7:04David Hoffman?

  And was it strictly like the org structure of DAOs? Or how, how DAOs coordinate, you thought was going to be like nature, mimicking nature in some way? Or what was the angle?

• 7:14Speaker 01

  Well, I guess just, I've never really agreed with this 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, what you define the self like. And it gets very confusing. You look at bees or at ant colonies or at siphonophores or all of these different, or 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, of, of trying to create things and working together.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  Like I, I ran a, 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 Manobrot set or something. You know, it's always just some like piece of turbulence. And so, you know, the idea that a DAO could put, put this structure together that can hold these types of interpersonal dynamics and this creative energies, you know, was the kind of the, the first thing I thought when I saw them.

• 8:27David Hoffman?

  I can't, I can't remember where I heard this first, but if you, if you look like at a beehive or an ant colony and you're looking at like the bees and the ants. The organism itself isn't the individual ant or the individual bee, it's the hive itself. Like, uh, it's, it's, which is 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. Uh, 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 cells come and go, our brain cells come and go.

• 9:06David Hoffman?

  Uh, and like, and you alluded to it, like your, your gut microbiome, which is a very critical part of who you are, literally is not part of you. Uh, and how, how have you extended this concept of what is alive to Dao's? Like, what is alive with a Dao?

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's, you can very easily get into kind of like semantic corruption here by, by stretching the, 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 within. 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, and the bacteria and all of these different pieces that, that create this colony that is me.

• 9:52Speaker 01

  And that has a lot of the same kind of relationships, dynamics as a organization has. And you can look at a, a company like Apple, or, you know, and you, and you can think of that as a life form. Uh, you really, 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.

• 10:25David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I, the, the way that I try and like, understand, uh, if something is alive or not is, is, uh, if it is self-interested in its 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, if it's self-interested and it's actionable, uh, it is alive. Like whether it's like a, a cell or a, a company, uh, or a Dao. Uh, and, and I think like, when, when life... Begins like when some sort of life form forms like we started off as singular cellular organisms, but then we started depending on like newer structures onto these cells that could sense

• 11:09David Hoffman?

  the the world around it, right? Like receive inputs and allow it to process data. And so I think what a lot of like what your work has been doing over at Coordinap 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?

• 11:35Speaker 01

  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 weird things, you know, like, like, that's the the terrain I'm I'm I'm walking. And so like with with Coordinap, yeah, I think of it like that, like an organ, you know, and particularly like I love this idea of sense and respond, which I I think I heard from Zach Anderson first, who's a co-founder of Coordinap, which is a totally different kind of modality for operating, you know, rather than just command and control of 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,

• 12:17Speaker 01

  sense and respond and like what it what it tools look like, what apps look like that are designed in that way and to support that kind of interpersonal anti-rivalrous behavior.

• 12:28David Hoffman?

  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 if we all shift on the spectrum from command and control to a sense and respond, like, how would society be different?

• 12:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think the first thing is that we won't like there's we won't all do that, right? And like, there's always just a super heterogeneous diverse population of people. There's always going to be people that are in a rival risk mentality. There's always going to be people that, um, you know, are in scarcity ideas and. And that's okay. I think it's but to the 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 favorite thinkers, Ken Wilber talks about, in the in the 60s,

• 13:30Speaker 01

  there was a similar kind of big mindset change, the countercultural movement, which he looks at as being this kind of developmental tier, this kind of pluralistic intelligence, or the sensitive intelligence. And because about like 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, 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-rivalist, is starting

• 14:10Speaker 01

  to get enough. There's enough people with running this operating system, that things like the DAOs that we work in happen.

• 14:20David Hoffman?

  You indicated that like the whole command and control type of modality is one of scarcity mindset. Is that is that true? Or can you go into that? Why is command and control a scarcity mindset? And why is sensor and spawn abundance?

• 14:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a good question. So I can't say that they are both 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's 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.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  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 resource. 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. But I think it's more natural fit for different kinds.

• 16:04David Hoffman?

  Yeah, a sense and respond organism, whether it's like something as small as a bee or as humans or as something as large as like an organization, corporation or nation state. Sense and respond seems to have connotations of like empathy and cooperation. And certainly, I think it would be, I think I could say without, without, you know, too much evidence that people, the culture of today is 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 like has really nailed down, but I think we're all kind of looking for it, is that like these ultra capitalist,

• 16:47David Hoffman?

  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. So there's a thought, if you have any reflections on that one, go ahead, go for it.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I think that's very true. And there's a lot of ways to look at that.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  First of all, it can be strategically advantageous 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 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 talking? We're talking about coordination issues. How do we? How do we share resources together? And if you if, you know, if we're playing the resource game, resource war game, you know, then, you know, we're really depleting the resources on the

• 17:52Speaker 01

  planet too fast. And I think, you know, it also goes to notions of divine masculine and feminine, and that I don't mean female sex, male sex. I mean, you know, the idea of, you know, recepting and transmitting and listening and speaking and and the world has been really dominated by a kind of masculine energy for the past long time. I don't know, thousand years or something. And that's manifested through nations conquest and corporations conquest and command and control are both these very like, you know, emissive, like controlling ideas of subjugating, you know, things. Whereas sensing is more receptive.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  It's more 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 you're listening.

• 18:48David Hoffman?

  Do you know if we've ever had a paradigm of sense and respond before? You alluded to like the counterculture revolution in the 60s and how that became, you know, I 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 sense and respond?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  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 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 sense and 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, about conquest, you know, expansion by all

• 19:52Speaker 01

  means, cancerous growth by all means. But that's part of that, you know, critical operating system change is to get into a mode of balance with the environment and each other.

• 20:03David Hoffman?

  Right. So if you're, if I'm interpreting your answer correctly, you just said like, we haven't had like a strong dominance of sense and response since we were hunter-gatherers, which was, you know, many, many, many thousands 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 it's been command and control ever since. It's been conquer, it's been the resource game, it's been playing the resource game aggressively ever since then.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, I mean, I certainly don't have a comprehensive knowledge of everything here, but that sounds right in a lot of ways. And, you know, I was thinking about this the other day, talking to Kevin O'Waki, like, that, you know, from, from the moment of agriculture, like, there's some interesting research showing that, like, when agriculture was dropped, 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 and, and families, like, raise the children's, tribes raise the children's together. All of a sudden, now you have property, and you need to staff that property. And you staff that property with your children. And so you need to know who your children are. You know, all of

• 21:17Speaker 01

  a sudden, there's the notion of labor in a workforce right at the beginning. And I think you, maybe, we can, we can think, like, look, there's this kind of, you know, all of a sudden, masculine imbalance that emerges.

• 21:28David Hoffman?

  Oh, that's super interesting. Right. Okay. So going from hunter gatherers to agricultural revolution is we stopped moving around as society and 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 and we stopped, 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, you know, in our huts, 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

• 22:12David Hoffman?

  sudden that kicked off a much more aggressive and less holistically coordinated version of society. Is this the right conclusion to be tracking on?

• 22:24Speaker 01

  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's been this kind of arc in, in history that has started from that transmission, transition to agriculture where 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 Bellagio wrote, which was that 2020 was the first year that we became digital first citizens, you know?

• 22:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  And I think that that was this kind of germination event of, of COVID that forced us all to like move into this new territory of the digital network. And the crazy thing is that 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. And so if we want, like, let's say that that's the arc 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 Dao's.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  DAOs, you know, this idea of cloud nations too, that we'll be able to create these digital societies and like, look, there's lots of questions about that, but we're already creating them. But one cool thing is a kind of modular politics where, you know, if DAOs or digital communities can start to intermediate between governance, 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 outcompete 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 a number

• 24:12Speaker 01

  of years ago, seasteading by Patrick Friedman, was 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 would live 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 blockchain.

• 24:39David Hoffman?

  Right, 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. And something I actually got out of Bitcoiners and 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 wealthy, are the people that are wealthy enough to afford it, you know, being able to like lock themselves into

• 25:23David Hoffman?

  a hotel for two weeks, because that was a quarantine protocol. And Australia wasn't the only one. There was like, a lot of countries like that. And like, as the arc of nation-states comes to an end, they get more aggro with controlling their property. And one of their nation-state properties is their 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. Nation state arc. Meanwhile, we're creating these digital nation states, which are inherently opt in, which we can choose to align with based on our own personal values.

• 26:07David Hoffman?

  And one of my talks at ETH 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 don't have any other. 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 which has 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.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a much more sovereign kind of place to be, right? And I think, you know, 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. Like most of the human interpersonal relationships were mediated through that fiction of 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.

• 27:30Speaker 01

  And I think we're going to start to see the same thing now with on with web three. And for instance, privatization of governance and politics and public goods can all be better, you know, coordinated through these substrates.

• 27:44David Hoffman?

  It's a really big claim, right? And I love the idea. It makes sense to me if we zoom out and look at this industry from the 100-year timeframes, 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 marks, question mark. Step three, we control the world. Like, this step two thing, I'm really confused about.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Don't worry about the details, man. We got this covered. Sign your check right here, please.

• 28:20David Hoffman?

  Okay. Do you have any ideas? It's like, what is like the first few steps we need in order to actually unbundle the role of the nation-state?

• 28:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I have some ideas. And I think the important thing is like, we're 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.

• 28:38David Hoffman?

  Step one, make podcasts.

• 28:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, we're, like, people are asking me to talk about this stuff. I don't know the fuck I'm saying. I'm just 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 is to really look at the, the problems, like, in really, really, really high detail, like, like Daniel Schmachtenberger's work and Jordan Hall on the metacrisis. And so, working with those guys and like, like, can we define

• 29:23Speaker 01

  the nature of the kind of systemic problem? Because it's so, it's so hard to figure out, like, we, 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 that 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 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 Kool-Aid

• 30:05Speaker 01

  time. That's fine. Not gonna knock it. It's great. I drink it, too. And we have to like, really drill down now.

• 30:11David Hoffman?

  Right, right. Um, I'm gonna ask you the same question, like, where do we start? Like, what is the first thing that we do, what's the first W that DAOs have? That's going to like, wake up the rest of the world to be like, okay, that's a real thing now?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  Let's see. Um, well, I think we're already starting to see some of them, you know, like, um, like these massive kind of flash DAOs that coordinate to buy historical relics and, and other things like that. I think that's, 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, DeFi DAOs that are, you know, doing these incredibly financial things that are like, oh, that's interesting.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  But, you know, we're not solving major governance problems yet, right? And I wouldn't suggest that you apply a DAO to the actual governance of a, of a political territory yet. But, um, I think we're gonna start seeing some, uh, some impact there. Like, you could imagine some cases where you use DAOs or, or Web3 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 sense-making.

• 31:25Speaker 01

  I think that potentially one way that we start to really see more provable goods.

• 31:31David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I was talking with a Tarun on Layer Zero and he had the idea that, um, that the first way we do this is actually through the financial industry. So like, um, 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 DeFi exists. But importantly, like a lot of, uh, he, he, he talks about how like a lot of the financial industry can be unbundled and like, um,

• 32:08David Hoffman?

  put on and, and start to use like crypto rails and not, and I'm not talking about just creating DeFi, like, like disintermediating Wall Street. What I'm talking about is like some certain like financial contracts need to have the price. Price of something in the 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 DeFi. Rather than just like hard coding it into their manually inputted smart contract.

• 32:48David Hoffman?

  And then all of a sudden, the the financial industry backend starts to become whatever the state on Ethereum is. And then and then we kind of go from there. What are your thoughts on that?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, 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 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.

• 33:18David Hoffman?

  Sure. Yeah. Well, your talk at East Denver was really interesting because you you gave a bunch of like. I don't know what like like it felt like like a scan of of an organism, right? And like really unbundled and you could see the different parts of the organism and the 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 Dow, right? And this part of the organism was like this part of the Dow.

• 33:44David Hoffman?

  And one thing I think that we're seeing is that like DAOs are kind of a little bit of the the epicenter for a lot of things in crypto. It's like first we had DeFi protocols and then separately we had DAOs. And then all of a sudden in like the the DeFi summer, what that really was was the smashing of these two particles together. I was like, let's put the DeFi protocol into the Dow 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 DeFi application is now being put together with the Element Dow. But they're also pending on an NFT project. And so now like, what is Element? Is it really a DeFi project? Because now it's also a DAO, but it also has its own NFT ecosystem.

• 34:28David Hoffman?

  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 the DAO gets energy, which is the DeFi 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.

• 35:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:04David Hoffman?

  Thoughts on that? And you can, can you also kind of just give listeners who haven't listened to your your East Denver talk, just like a taste of what that was about?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was talking a lot about different like biological models for decision making and minds, basically, like like you can look at, so the amazing thing about web three is we have this like kind of unconstrained networks, like you can, all these different people can come together and work on things in whatever way you want, in a much, much more free and open topography than we're used to in a corporation, let's say. Where there's very strict often roles and reporting and everything, but now it's everybody swarm together and do something. And so like, what type of nature of mind does this create? Like, you know, 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

• 35:53Speaker 01

  central processing unit and you have sensors that send information up, they direct report to the processor, makes decisions and then sends electrical impulses to the actuators that then execute it exactly. Versus like a slime mold, which is more like a DAO, where there's everything is sensing and responding and and moving and making decisions based on whatever it's seeing around it. And then there's things in between too, like the, I think the thing you're referencing was the sifonophore, which is a colonial organism. It 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 DAOs. Yeah, yeah.

• 36:37David Hoffman?

  Well. Can you just elaborate on that? Tell me more about that.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I actually don't know.

• 36:43David Hoffman?

  How many different organisms?

• 36:44Speaker 01

  I don't know that much more about it sadly, but like I've imagined a lot about it. So I speculate a lot about it, but all I know like factually is that it is a like it's 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. But you know, you could say that about the human being in a sense, you say that you got bacteria, right? But this is a little bit like more far out because you can like see each different animal and they're all kind of like fitting together to like float around like a like a little guy.

• 37:22David Hoffman?

  That was nuts. How many like so the 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?

• 37:32Speaker 01

  I mean, can we get an expert on to help us with this? Cause I have the same questions.

• 37:38David Hoffman?

  Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Okay. But I think the the model to extrapolate this to DAOs is that like, um, there's a lot of overlapping DAOs these days. It's like bankless DAO, very tapped into meta factory DAO, which is like, and so 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

• 37:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 37:58David Hoffman?

  Sharing resources and sharing capabilities and just hooking into each other.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  Well, I think that the whole like kind of physics and friction of the work decentralize of the work space changes with blockchain and with web three, right? And, um, you know, Jack DeRose wrote beautifully about this, talking about the Coase article, 1937 article, 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 know, you benefit from centralization. Why don't just a bunch of independent actors work together at that time, there was no.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  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 onto 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, they're just, you know, repeating the same model that we know, but doing it 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 urine protocol and the coordinate

• 39:18Speaker 01

  protocol and the curve protocol and the bankless doubt protocols and 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 often, you know, directly interacting between the protocols. So it's this kind of big open mess. And like the the kind of nature of work change, the work group, the boundaries, the surface tension changes. Instead of being this big hard boundary around a 10,000 person company and it can't be the same as this other one. Now it's this little one.

• 39:50David Hoffman?

  Noncomplete clauses. Yeah. Yeah. Like you only work for one corporation at a time, blah, blah, blah.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Doesn't matter anymore. Yeah.

• 39:56David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 39:56Speaker 01

  And the coolest thing too is like, you know, it does, I believe that it does become anti-rivalrous in 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 project product if you take that strategy.

• 40:18David Hoffman?

  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 discords, right? Like these are actually hardcoded bridges that we have in our communication coordination tools, which is what Discord is. It's basically DAO coordination.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  I was, I was kind of blown away with that when I first joined Urn like a couple of years ago and like the main like chat at that time. You know, there were leaders of like 10 of the other top protocols and I was like, wow, this is like the headquarters and like it's people from all over DeFi in here. All doing it together. It's like, wow, this is wild. Yeah.

• 40:53David Hoffman?

  Uh huh. Um, I, I wrote an article, like all the way back in like 2019, I think that was, uh, called, uh, I can't remember what it was called. Uh, it's basically arguing that DeFi is not just one thing. Like you don't have the Uniswap app. You don't have the, uh, Urn didn't even exist at the time. Uh, you don't have just Maker Dow. You don't have just Compound, but like over time, the composability of these things like, die 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 DeFi superstructure. Like these are all composability means all these things are coming together.

• 41:35David Hoffman?

  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, right? Because you, 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 the same thing with, is going to work with DAOs where DAOs are just going to become one sort of massive superstructure of DAOs. 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,

• 42:21David Hoffman?

  people can start to like meld these things together and bootstrap themselves.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I, 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? Like, yes, we need food. We need, uh, to pick up trash and, and things like this. Like all those things still exist and are real. And it doesn't require that logic of like, um,

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Conquest, really, you know, and like, we have to, I have to make my shit so other people can't take it. And I have to build the walls and 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, 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, right?

• 43:24David Hoffman?

  Right. Now, this is, 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 idea is that it flips people, it inverts people's mental models, I said, like how they exist on this world. It's like, don't, you know, you don't got 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 what you, what 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 3.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  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 consensual and you climb it and you, you know, 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.

• 44:38David Hoffman?

  Maker DAO is the OG DeFi protocol. The Maker DAO produces DAI, the industry's most battle-tested and resilient stablecoin. 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 DAI 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 DAI with the assurance that your collateral is safe. Soon Maker will be present on all chains and L2s. So minting DAI can take place on oasis.app, Xerion, Zapper, or any other DeFi protocol that you use. Follow Maker on Twitter, @makerdao, and learn from the oldest and most resilient DAO in existence.

• 45:22David Hoffman?

  Aave is the leading decentralized liquidity protocol. And now, Aave V3 is here. Aave V3 has powerful new features to enable you to get the most out of DeFi, 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 Aave position across all of the networks that Aave operates on, like Polygon, Phantom, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Optimism, and Harmony. The beautiful thing about Aave is that it's completely open source, decentralized, and governed by its community, enabling a truly bankless future for us all. To get your first crypto-collateralized loan, get started at Aave.com. That's A-A-B-E dot com. And also check out the Aave Protocol Governance forums

• 46:06David Hoffman?

  to see what more than 100,000 DAO members are all robbing about at governance.aave.com. The Brave browser is the user-first browser for the Web3 internet with over 50 million monthly active users. Control your digital footprint with built-in privacy and ad-blocking. Inside the Brave browser, you'll find the Brave Wallet, the first secure crypto wallet built natively inside of a Web3 crypto browser. Web3 is freedom from big tech and Wall Street. More control and better privacy. But there's a weak point in Web3: your crypto wallet. The Brave Wallet is different. Brave Wallet is built natively inside the Brave browser. No extension required, which gives the Brave Wallet an extra level of security versus other wallets. With the Brave Wallet, you can buy, store, send, and swap your crypto assets.

• 46:49David Hoffman?

  And you can even manage your NFTs and connect to other wallets and DeFi apps, all from the security of the best privacy browser on the market. Whether you're new to crypto or a seasoned pro, it's time to switch to the Brave Wallet. Download Brave at brave.com/bankless and click the wallet icon to get started. We've hashed this out a little bit, but I want to go back to it. There's always the conversations with technology, is like, 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 DAO paradigm, like this new Web3? Like, what about the world is really, really ready for this?

• 47:32Speaker 01

  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 you know, the anti-work movement, you know, like all of, all of these people that are so, that are so mistreated by the corporate paradigm and getting paid, the minimum wage being so low comparatively, historically. Then there's a really fascinating thing that happened like in, with Russia, where there is a massive network effect at play in, you know, where it wasn't just that the EU and the US and some Western countries sanctioned Russia, it was like all these businesses pulled out too. And that wasn't something that you could

• 48:17Speaker 01

  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, at 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, for that behavior. And so it's like, look, like the world is trying to form into these networks anyways. And, and DAOs and Web 3 are like 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

• 48:59Speaker 01

  and confronting this, like our, our parents' generation of like, you know, working hard for the system and the, the death 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, a work mask. Like, these things have all been developing independently of, of Web 3, but they all kind of fit together to support it.

• 49:28David Hoffman?

  What do you think are the? The biggest fallacies that we're making right now, like one thing I'm worried about is like, one of the reasons why so many people can work for DAOs these days, whatever that means for that particular DAO is like, well, I mean, 2021 was really bullish for crypto prices. Like, a lot of people are sitting on a pile of savings that they perhaps didn't expect to have. Like, maybe when these savings run out, maybe working for a DAO isn't so glorious anymore. Like, what are our follow-ups here? What are we tripping up on?

• 49:58Speaker 01

  Well, I think we're making a ton of assumptions is the first thing, but I also think that that's okay. Like, I think to assume that we're gonna have everything figured out, and if like, not all the line items are properly annotated, then like, this isn't gonna 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 gonna work. Both of those are, you know, suitably, similarly, wrong. And we don't really know what the financial, you know, support is gonna be like. There's, we don't know the future of the market, or the macro global situation. Like, who knows?

• 50:38Speaker 01

  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 slow it down at least. I mean, you can stop it by killing everybody, which could happen.

• 50:56David Hoffman?

  That would work.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, at least it'll delay it for, I mean, if you think of, I tend to think of crypto really as a developmental, like, from a biological perspective. It is a, is it a force, it's a part of the force of the development of the universe. Not something that like, one guy's gonna figure out.

• 51:12David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  So in that sense, you can never stop it, because it's always the next tier for any civilization. But it can certainly be delayed, or stopped for thousands of years.

• 51:22David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 51:24David Hoffman?

  It's a frequent trope in this crypto space is that like, oh yeah, we're trying to onboard like the next 1 billion people into crypto, right? Like this DAO is going to onboard a billion people or my product is going to onboard a billion people. Every time I hear that, like everyone loves to say that just because like it's a, it's a fun, like we all want to onboard a billion people. But I'm also at the same time like, bruh, like we do not have the infrastructure to onboard a billion people, man. Like every single blockchain would break. Solana would break, Arbitrum would break, like Avalanche would break. We literally do not have the block space capacity to onboard a billion people. And definitely with DAOs, like you can't just go work for a DAO. There's not that much room in DAOs in its current state of things.

• 52:06David Hoffman?

  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, crypto is infiltrating 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. Like your, your blockchains have high fees and your games are boring and your NFTs are shitty. So what they're really saying is, yo, crypto, go figure your shit out and then I'll, and then come back for me.

• 52:46David Hoffman?

  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 thousand in the next month or so. And then maybe the next 3,000 two months later, uh, and then they're going to help build out some of this stuff. Uh, and then, you know, maybe, maybe the next month after that we'll get 5,000. But then it starts to like perpetuate and roll out. Uh, and, and so how, how do you feel about like this model for like, uh, 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 feed, giving us feedback that like, we haven't built out the solutions for them yet.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that that's true and I think it's okay. Like as much as we all or 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 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, 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, the support, the, the finances to engage in this new like space.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  It, 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, as meeting 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.

• 54:41David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. Do you have, um, so we're trying to build out these new organizations that sense and respond, like sense our, uh, our needs and respond to them appropriately. Like I say, our Web3 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 to 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 just like basic do's and don'ts for the DAO builders out there?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think the, the biggest one is, um, just like, take a breath and, and, and when you, when you want to get something done, the, um, the, 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, maybe this DAO is not efficient enough, so let, let's implement some direct reports, you know? Or you know what? This DAO is not moving fast enough. It, it needs a strong leader, like.

• 55:47Speaker 01

  If you like, if you want to do that form of coordination, you can. You can create a company. What I would say is like, like 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. 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.

• 56:26David Hoffman?

  I was doing a show with Treasure DAO yesterday and they have like, they were one of the projects that came out of the loot ecosystem. And they have like, I'm pretty insane. First off, their community is extremely energetic. So I know they're doing something right. And then I was, as I was unpacking their, 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 two project managers, like leaders into the DAO. Is that, is that like the old mentality or like where, how do you think about like top down project management inside of DAOs?

• 57:08David Hoffman?

  Is that antithetical or like, how does this feel like, how does this fit in? Like, how does this become a component of DAOs?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think DAOs are a big tent and like they transcend and include the corporations. 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, the, 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 have to meet people where they're at and different things are going to work in different times.

• 57:56David Hoffman?

  Do you think there's like the possibility of, when you, when you say slime mold DAO, I'm thinking of something with absolutely zero epicenter. There's no center point and it's every, and to me, that's actually the original version of a DAO. A DAO has, in my mind, is misappropriately 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.

• 58:38David Hoffman?

  But like there, but then if we wanted to get into like the DAO 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 DAO 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 its, like a beehive, right? Beehive without the queen. Like, is that even possible? Do you think that's possible?

• 59:11Speaker 01

  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, and 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 Vitalik's article on April 1st because like he made some really good arguments for why, you know, and, and they weren't jokes to me. Those were good arguments.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  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 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

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  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, actually, with, yeah, some alpha leak, we're working on something like this. But eventually, like, it's not ready

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  for disclosure yet. It allows you to scale, like, the opportunity and the promise for, like, real decentralized work is, I call it the party bike. Like, you know, a party bike. It's like, 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's steers, and you get somewhere cool. It's like, 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.

• 1:02:00David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I actually intended on asking this next question before you talked about the little alpha leak. So for the record, 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. But like the number of of these projects is like through the roof. I'm thinking that I'm thinking like there's over like 20 of these like DAO tooling startups going on at least. After like what what does 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 that's getting solved? Like what is the project, the thing that DAO tooling is trying to get get done, right? What is the next step for DAO tooling?

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  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. But like to the going back to the thing we're talking before, like, a lot of it is taking processes that we know about from web two or the normal traditional corporate world, and making ways to do them easily on chain in for decentralized communities. And that's great. But the the blue ocean, 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 is one of them. Coordinate

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  is, is the only form of doing descent 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, right? So we have On-chain 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, you people vote on it. But there's so many other types of computational social choice mechanics that are available and really important,

• 1:04:12Speaker 01

  because there's all different types of decisions that need to be made in 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 it that's accountable and transparent, to create these structures. Like, there's not really any tools to do that yet.

• 1:04:38David Hoffman?

  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 Web3. And DAOs, 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 in the DAO space?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  I think this is going to 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 of the data verse, where, you know, basically blockchain for rich data. And what that allows for is, like, way more composable and easy to start front-ends. Like, you know, you go to one DApp 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 know, you open another DApp and your stuff automatically populates. Or, you know, you open a Canvan board at DWork, which is an amazing, like, productivity tool startup,

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  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. Like, that type of data availability for rich data for DAO workers is going to be massively, massively expansive for the system.

• 1:06:07David Hoffman?

  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.

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  I think this is actually one of the big pain points, like in a lot of DAOs, and we talked to a lot of DAOs, that they have 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, you can't create, there's not a good enough shelling point for this stuff. Like, you could create, there's a bunch of these different bounty systems, but because they don't interoperate and you don't have it all moving down to one data layer, like, none of them's really gaining enough traction.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  But once we do have that, then it's gonna explode, and that's pretty soon.

• 1:07:15David Hoffman?

  Okay, so this data layer is like an inter-DAO communication layer? Is that a way to frame it?

• 1:07:21Speaker 01

  I think you could think of it that way, sure. Or like, it's a public good in a sense for data that many, you know, front-ends can bloom from. And 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 a thousand of them.

• 1:07:55David Hoffman?

  Trey, you go out and go to real-life crypto events. You're at ETH 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 two startup world, I think, maybe. I might be wrong about that.

• 1:08:12Speaker 01

  Not web two, but I.

• 1:08:13David Hoffman?

  Not web two. Tried, tried five, tried, tried something.

• 1:08:17Speaker 01

  I was an artist and designer.

• 1:08:18David Hoffman?

  Artist. Okay, okay. Anyways, same question. Just the, the culture of the people that you engage with and interact with at these crypto events. What about the culture, these, these like web three enabled individuals? What about the culture in these in real life events stands out to you as unique and compelling?

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Well, it's, it's, it's great. It's, um, at 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 wasn't 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, but the people I really vibe with in that when I go to these conferences, I feel like I, you know, coming home in a sense is that there's people making DAOs, you know, that are, that are trying to figure

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  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, it's very new thinking, you know, like very, lots of polymaths and people with all different information bringing 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.

• 1:09:56David Hoffman?

  Why does this industry have all of these types of characters? Like what, what about this industry attracts that type?

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I think it, it, this goes to my kind of like developmental theory of organizations where, you know, before blockchain.

• 1:10:15Speaker 01

  You know, like a human being has these different levels of intelligence. We have like survival instinct. You know, we have sexual instinct. We have power. We have heart. We have our voice. You know, we have our intelligent, our cognitive ability, all these different layers, and they all 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 had 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.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  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. And like, people, how many like handshake deals, like, oh, send you some ETH, 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 papered. Everything was contracts, lawyers everywhere. It's like, we're way more, because of this trustless infrastructure, we're way more trusting. Because, like, the jewels are safe. And that's profound.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  You know, that's, that's, that's, changes everything.

• 1:11:45David Hoffman?

  Yeah. I think a lot of this world depends on assurances, 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. And 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 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.

• 1:12:28David Hoffman?

  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, you know. And I don't think that like I'll be randomly sending somebody some ETH and telling them to just send me the tokens later. Probably in 2040 when all of society is on boarded. And but it's like this kernel, these first adopters. Who got attracted by this technology is probably a little bit more conducive to that.

• 1:13:09David Hoffman?

  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, like you said, rely on the banks, rely on the governments or rely on the courts to get things right. Because even the courts can be gamed. Like the courts is a gamable system where Ethereum is not. And so that imbues whatever gets built on top of Ethereum as a more.

• 1:13:44David Hoffman?

  Creative playground for trust to be exhibited.

• 1:13:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it doesn't mean that we need to be, 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 and it isn't. There are. 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? You're a trusted space? What level is that? And then operate, you know. In that way.

• 1:14:13David Hoffman?

  Dude, after, after M-Con, this, this stood out to me so much. 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, the sunlight, just walk around, just go on some hikes. And everyone kind of converged on one Airbnb, Airbnb as the meeting place, like the biggest one. And everyone had their stuff, like their backpacks with their laptops and their ledgers. And so everyone just dumped their backpack into this Airbnb and we all started going on a hike. Everyone had their ledgers in their backpacks and everyone just left all of their ledgers in the backpack and just in the Airbnb and no one thought twice about it.

• 1:14:57David Hoffman?

  And I only knew about like 50% of the people in that group, but it was the Meta Factory. It was like half of them was the Meta 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 gonna happen. And again, wouldn't do that in 2030, probably, but like with the particular people that Meta Factory of a particular DAO has created and just like the collaborative yes and culture of that, of that community and others. It just felt so, I 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.

• 1:15:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's amazing. And I think you're right. Like, part of that is that it's still early. And part of it is that, you know, there are high reputation people in this space that understand the substrate they were working on and, 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 this 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 the reality. Because you can't, like, there is still a hugely important space for interpersonal trust. And, and like, that is where the like, third mind, the mind between minds, like, really emerges, you know, in the collective intelligences between these interpersonal relationships.

• 1:16:18Speaker 01

  And yes, like, those can be broken. And yes, that's okay.

• 1:16:23David Hoffman?

  I'm gonna tell, 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.

• 1:16:47David Hoffman?

  And then, so this, working, 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 hang around traumatized horses. And horses are extremely emotional animals, right? If you like walk quickly towards a horse, it'll get scared and run away from you. But if you walk, you know, 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, then the horse is calmer and responds to you. And so, they were, the people that were leading these workshops were getting us to like, "Okay, you're going to grab a horse and you're gonna lead it, right?

• 1:17:28David Hoffman?

  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, that was with us in this organization, who was like, kind of a timid guy, not, 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 is like, "What are we doing here? Like, no, fuck off, bro, like, I'm not going anywhere." And like, he couldn't get the horse to walk. And so like, I was watching this happen, and I was 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 horse just immediately started going.

• 1:18:12David Hoffman?

  And it's like, "Oh, okay, I guess we're going this way now," and the horse just started following me. And like, uh, just since I'm going into the story, uh, this, this was a kind of a chaotic workplace. So some of these kids were like conduct disorder, like, uh, not, 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, uh, was having an act out moment and like starting to get a little violent. Uh, and there was a moment where like I was engaging with him and I needed to like deescalate the environment. And but he was violent, he was being aggressive, being violent, like trying to hit us. And I like, I can't remember what I said, but I basically just turned, turned around and walked the other way to disengage.

• 1:18:55David Hoffman?

  But I'm turning my head away from this kid, so I don't know what he's gonna 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. Uh, 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, whoa, that guy didn't hit me. And so like, it's a lot of like our, um, 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 ledgers on the ground. We're all indicating to ourselves like, hey, like this is, this is the vibe. Like this is the culture, this is the emotional like, uh, state that I'm going to express that I think that we are in.

• 1:19:40David Hoffman?

  And because I'm expressing that, everyone else also thinks that is true. Reflections on that.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. I, I think we, we, um, we create our own reality, right? Like, like, I think if I, um, am acting from a place of, of confidence and openness and, um, you know, 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, that I'm gonna get hit, get hit, gonna get, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make that reality happen and somebody's gonna hit me. Because we tend to, this goes to like spirituality and psychology and all these different wisdom traditions that.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  We tend to recreate the same patterns in our lives over and over again. And, 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, um, and we can have the ones that are full of suffering and the ones that are full of, 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.

• 1:21:06David Hoffman?

  No, there was no, I was going nowhere with it. But, um, uh, how do, how do you think Dao's, are Dao's like an amplification tool for this kind of like behavior where if we, if the Dao's just assume that they trust us and we assume that we trust the Dao, like, do you think Dao's can be like an amplification of just, uh, the values that we want to see in the world?

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  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 superorganisms are, are developing, so too are the parts, you know, the, within it, like each individual also has to develop. And so, um, 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 Dao-ness forward, um, each person is going to be like their, their development gets amplified, I think.

• 1:22:07Speaker 01

  And, and you, you get these lessons and these, um, 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.

• 1:22:19David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  It's like we, we, we do, we 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 Dao's become like a shining point for that type of consciousness.

• 1:22:38David Hoffman?

  Trey, if we, uh, zoom forward to like 2050, 2060, 2070, and we're got gray hair and old and Dao's are infinite at this point, uh, what do you hope your legacy is, you as an individual?

• 1:23:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I just hope I help. You know, I hope I help.

• 1:23:04David Hoffman?

  All right, and we're done.

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I just, I, I love working on this stuff. Like, I love solving these problems and sharing them with people that I care about and,

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  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. Like, I kind of got sucked in in 2020.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  And it's because of all these different things, like this cycle, the psychology, the spirituality of it, the technology of it, the, you know, the revolutionary aspects, like, it's, 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.

• 1:23:56David Hoffman?

  Jake, you said you were an artist. What were you an artist about? Like, what would you create?

• 1:24:01Speaker 01

  Interactive sculpture. So, I used, I used technology, so my training was in human-computer interaction. I used to invent new types of computer interfaces, you know, physical interfaces mostly, using like, mechanical engineering and electrical engineering and industrial design and 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'd always made different forms of art in my life, but then I used that same material, but as an artist, so I made sculpture.

• 1:24:35David Hoffman?

  That's really cool. That just opened up a whole nother can of worms.

• 1:24:39David Hoffman?

  So, when Gary Kasparov lost to Deep Blue, I think, or, yeah, people thought, it was like, oh, the chess is over. Like, the computers are won, 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 Kasparas of the world, finding their preferred chess AI and then competing with other grandmasters who have their chess AI. And so it 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

• 1:25:24David Hoffman?

  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, too, 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?

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Yes, many, and I think that's

• 1:25:51David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I bet you do. I bet you do.

• 1:25:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like many, many. I think technology is a part of the human organism, right? There's this idea, and there's been this kind of misconception, I think, that it's something external, you know, and that, and that when we're building these, 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, of identity creation. And, and like, every, the phone becomes an extension of the mind. It's like a cognitive co-processor. 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.

• 1:26:36David Hoffman?

  There's a, there's a phobia word for this. I don't know what it is, but there's a phobia word for if you do or without your phone.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, and You know, I was talking to Meta Dreamer about this the other day, actually. And like, maybe what we're doing in DAOs is we're creating an 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. Like it started, Marvin Minsky gave a, you know, famously gave one of his summer students like the job of general computer vision in like the 60s, like figured that they'd be able to solve that in, you know, a summer in like the 60s. But I realized 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 then AI developers started to, they realized that it needs to be an embodied intelligence.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  They made robots and they thought that my robot body is going to. But again, this is outside of the human. And now you see like GPT-3 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. In these kind 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,

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:28:25David Hoffman?

  And there's, oh gosh, there's so many different directions to go in. But 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's freedom. Like if crypto is here to do anything, it's 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 NFTs is a freedom from just like, I don't know, licensing and like labels

• 1:29:07David Hoffman?

  and people that try to own the music industry in a corporate sense. It all sets you free. And that's really what technology has always been about is like, how do we get, 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 zeros that allow us to get what we want out of life even more. And so we have these AI developers that are building out these AIs. And I love 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.

• 1:29:51David Hoffman?

  So there is no, even if you try to make it maximally external, you can't pull the human out of the, 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 imbued into the technologies we create?

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, I mean, the most important question to ask is just what am I to start? You know, who am I? What am I? And understand the nature, the reality that we are in more and more. And then, you know, see that it's all a piece, you know, it is, it's divine wisdom, life force, energy flowing out into the, into the, into manifestation. And it's flowing through all, we're all a piece of that same thing of God, of this, you know, the polarity of the universe and the, and the unity of it all. And that is going to flow through us into technology. It's going to flow through us into everything that we, that we make. And, you know, it reminds me.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  A lot of people sometimes think like I think of it like the Vulcan fallacy or the Spock fallacy that you can have this purely logical take on the world divorced 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 lot 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 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

• 1:31:42Speaker 01

  to concept and vice versa. So seeing it all is just this divine expression of the universe in action. I think really helps to better contextualize what it is that we're fucking doing in the first place.

• 1:31:56David Hoffman?

  Trey, I think this is a good place to wrap it up, man. Thank you for coming on to Layer Zero and sharing your thoughts.

• 1:32:04Speaker 01

  Thanks. Thanks for having me, man. Great talking with you as always.

• 1:32:08David Hoffman?

  Likewise, likewise. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where

• 1:32:53David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.