The Next Phase of Humanity with Metadreamer | Layer Zero

⬆️ Join The Bankless Nation https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe to listen to the Ad-Free version of this episode https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/early-access-the-internet-reset-alexis 🚀 ------ Metadreamer is the founder of Metafactory, the “digiphysical culture factory for the metaverse." He is a software engineer and designer in the DAO space, and has contributed to MetaGame, SourceCred, Coordinape, and Metacartel Ventures. Dreamer is a DAO-er, touching many different parts of the Ethereum ecosystem. Every conversation we have with him is cerebral, as he is a cosmically deep thinker. He embodies core values of crypto such as optimizing for collaboration over competition, an abundance mentality, and a ‘Yes And’ approach to coordination. The code we write can impact society for the better, and throughout this conversation, we explore the purpose of the crypto movement—with this new technology, we can change culture. Metadreamer’s is a revolution to build a better society. ------ 📣 ZERION | Trade Across 7 Networks and 500+ protocols https://bankless.cc/Zerion ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 👀 POLYGON | LAYER 2 DEFI https://bankless.cc/Polygon ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🦊 METAMASK | THE CRYPTO WALLET https://bankless.cc/metamask 💳 LEDGER | THE CRYPTO LIFE CARD https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♂️ ALCHEMIX | SELF REPAYING LOANS https://bankless.cc/Alchemix 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Metadreamer 5:27 Lowest Hanging Schelling Point 8:32 Seeking Purpose 12:05 Value vs Money 16:44 Expressing Value On-Chain 22:57 Attestations & Irrigation 29:07 Retroactive Public Goods Funding 35:44 Data & Value 41:10 Verifiable Credentials & Nature 45:05 Fear of Death 51:30 The Meta Goal 57:30 Rebirth & Terence McKenna 1:04:15 Allowing for Emergence 1:09:28 The Purpose & Psychadelics 1:14:16 Advice for Noobs 1:19:00 A ‘Yes And’ Mentality 1:21:00 An Optimistic Closing ------ Resources: MetaDreamer on Twitter https://twitter.com/META_DREAMER?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg https://twitter.com/META_DREAMER?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg MetaFactory https://twitter.com/TheMetaFactory?s=20&t=F1T6UwK1wM_FE1AX6vsRWA https://twitter.com/TheMetaFactory?s=20&t=F1T6UwK1wM_FE1AX6vsRWA MetaGame https://twitter.com/MetaFam?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg https://twitter.com/MetaFam?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg SourceCred https://twitter.com/sourcecred?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg https://twitter.com/sourcecred?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg Coordinape https://twitter.com/coordinape?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg https://twitter.com/coordinape?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg MetaCartel Ventures https://twitter.com/VENTURE_DAO?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg https://twitter.com/VENTURE_DAO?s=20&t=7d9hnQI1a-meDKaia1fiSg ----- 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  If your DAO isn't moving atoms in the real world, it's not doing anything.

• 0:06David 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 it's composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. CypherPunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with MetaDreamer out of the MetaFactory DAO. But MetaDreamer, he's a DAOer, so he's a part of many different parts of the Ethereum ecosystem. And every time I talk to MetaDreamer, either through Zoom, or on Discord, or in real life, the

• 0:46David Hoffman?

  conversations just get really, really cerebral, really, really cosmic. And he's one of the guys out there that I think really embodies the core values of what makes this crypto space tick. The leaning into collaboration over competition, and like this yes and mentality, and this how do we create an abundance mentality rather than a scarcity mentality, and really focuses on what I really try and get out of these Layer Zero podcasts is ultimately, the code that we write will ultimately come to impact society for the better if we design these systems correctly. And so he's very tapped into the whole point about crypto is

• 1:28David Hoffman?

  to change culture. The whole point about this whole revolution in digital money and digital finance is to have a better society. And I think a lot of people, when they come into the crypto space, they feel that, but there, in my mind, is not enough conversations explicitly talking in that direction. And so that is what Bankless Nation, you are about to listen to, right after we get to some of these fantastic sponsors that make the show possible. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys. And that's why so many in the Bankless Nation already have their Ledger hardware wallet. And brand new to the Ledger lineup of hardware wallets is the Ledger Nano S Plus, a huge upgrade to the world's most popular hardware wallet. With more memory and a larger screen, the Nano S Plus makes it easy to navigate and verify.

• 2:10David Hoffman?

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• 2:47Speaker 02

  So you've got some money, but how are you going to use it? You want to spend.

• 2:51Speaker 03

  You, me, shopping, now, bro.

• 2:54Speaker 02

  When you know you should be saving.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  You'll never buy a house at this rate.

• 2:59Speaker 02

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• 3:48David Hoffman?

  Polygon is Ethereum's largest and most vibrant scaling solution to date. With millions of monthly users and all of the biggest DeFi apps, the Polygon ecosystem has turned into a blossoming metropolis of DeFi activity. Transactions on Polygon are quick and cheap, allowing users the freedom to achieve their DeFi goals, all while being economically anchored to Ethereum. But Polygon isn't just the proof of stake sidechain. The Polygon team is building a suite of scaling solutions, including Polygon Hermes, Midan, Nightfall, and Zero, all with different design choices in order to be optimized for all possible crypto use cases. If you're a developer who wants to build on the Polygon ecosystem, go to the link in the show notes to check out their fantastic documentation. And if you're a user who just wants to experience fast and cheap DeFi, you can bridge over

• 4:30David Hoffman?

  your ETH or other tokens and start playing around with any of the thousands of applications that are available on Polygon. Hey, matter, dreamer. How's it going?

• 4:38Speaker 00

  Pretty good, man. How are you, David?

• 4:40David Hoffman?

  Pretty good, pretty good. I think for the rest of this podcast, I'll just call you Meta. How about that?

• 4:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 4:44David Hoffman?

  Or maybe Dreamer.

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Dreamer, probably.

• 4:45David Hoffman?

  Dreamer?

• 4:46Speaker 00

  I don't want to be referred to as Meta.

• 4:47David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. Okay. As soon as I said that, I was like, ah, wait a second, it's probably gonna be the other one.

• 4:52Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 4:53David Hoffman?

  So, Dreamer, who are you? Tell me about yourself.

• 4:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, I go by Meta Dreamer. I'm a software engineer and designer. I've been working in the DAO space for just over two years now. Founder of Meta Factory and worked on a bunch of projects like Metagame and Sourcecred and Coordinate and part of Metacartel Ventures. And yeah, just someone helping to figure out where we're all going.

• 5:22David Hoffman?

  Where are, where are we going? Wow, if we could only answer that question. Dreamer, I think one of the reasons why I wanted to pull you on Layer Zero is because every time you and I have had conversations either through Zoom or in real life in person, they always seem very cosmic. And these are my, my types of conversations. And so that's where I hope this conversation goes. I, I hope to just make it, I hope it ends up very, being very, very cosmic. I'm gonna have to figure out how to get there. And I think the first question that I want to ask to figure out how to get there is, what do you really care about, both inside of crypto and outside of crypto? What's, what really just stands out as important to you? What's, what do you fixate on?

• 6:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think like, it's kind of like from my name itself, I guess. It's like, you know, not trying to fixate on like the surface level things, but really trying to understand the underlying causes or sort of, you know, what's this like, what's the root cause of this, you know, so that meta level. You know, whether it's like, you know, within crypto and like figuring out like what, what type of things to build. Or even just like philosophically or on a like socio-political level, like kind of breaking down what's really going on and going deeper than just like. You know, narratives that people hear or things that we, you know, like, I think a lot of people, it's just like more so about

• 6:47Speaker 00

  taking the things they hear from other people and sort of like recycling it or regurgitating it. But for me, it's like trying to like break sort of what's like the underground mycelial network, you know, not necessarily the forest, you know, it's like the whole thing of like, you missed a forest for a tree. It's like people missed the mycelial network underground for the forest. So, yeah.

• 7:08David Hoffman?

  There's always one more stage of meta that we can get and you're trying, you're always trying to chase the meta.

• 7:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I guess like the, the purpose of it is sort of, you know, I, I do think that, you know, things, if you solve things at like the primitive level, then you can like solve those problems downstream. And, you know, that's how you also solve the most problems possible is like, you know, find the, the, I said this once, what was it? Yeah. Find the lowest common shelling point of something. And like, if you make like a 1% improvement there, it could end up being like thousands of percent improvements in many areas, just because, you know, it's downstream of a lot of these other things. So I think, like, yeah, that, that's like sort of important to me is like, you know, what's the, like,

• 7:56Speaker 00

  it's an engineering mindset, you know, which, you know, I went into school for computer engineering, but it's like, you're always min-maxing, right? Like, what's the, you know, how do we get, like, what's the lowest budget we need for this project? So it gets built to spec, et cetera, et cetera. But, you know, really in a more like philosophical way of like,

• 8:15Speaker 00

  what's like, you know, the lowest hanging fruit, lowest hanging shelling points that we can address to make the most impact. Cause I don't think there's any end destination or some sort of happy state that we're working towards. It's like all about the journey.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  So, yeah.

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  I, I definitely resonate with that. I think a lot of people in the crypto industry resonate with that journey of like trying to find the most bang for your buck when it comes to changing the world. The post, post-college, I was always focused on like, how do I? Help people feel better the most. And so that led to a degree in psychology. But then I got, then I realized like, oh, well, nutrition also is really important to helping people feel good. So I layered on nutrition and all of a sudden I was like super fascinated with the way that the food that you eat impacts your psyche. But then I realized you have to layer on physical movement on top of that. It's like, all right. So then now I'm interested in a career path that was one part psychology, one part nutrition, one part physical movement.

• 9:16David Hoffman?

  And I was trying to figure out like, how do I make a holistic career out of all these things? And I saw just a bunch of bureaucracy, but then I found crypto. And I was like, I was learning about money and finance. I was like, oh, well, I mean, if I'm really focused on trying to make the most amount of people feel the best. I would probably try and rework the money in the finance system. And so that's, that's as soon as I kind of realized that about crypto, that crypto is going to, exactly what you said, be like the lowest common selling point. It's like, oh, well, I was immediately just captivated by crypto because yeah, I can just, you can just have so much influence on the rest of everything about the way humanity works. Would you say that that was kind of a similar path that you found when you're going into crypto?

• 9:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would definitely say so. It's interesting too, because my wife's a dietitian. So we get that crypto diet combo. But yeah, I think like the, you know, even if you're like the bureaucracy thing is like, you know, that's everywhere. It's omnipresent, right? Like the whole, you know, people get convinced into thinking like we're in like a war of like left versus right or blue versus red. Or like, you know, this team versus that team. But the real sort of the split is like the elites versus the masses. And that's apparent in every industry across every domain. And, you know, I think going back to the thing of like, you know, solving things at the root level.

• 10:41Speaker 00

  Money at the end of the day, for better or for worse, powers like everything in the world, right? So if you can make improvements on how money is distributed and, you know, the access people have to it. And, you know, the not even going beyond money, but even the concept of value itself. And how we like engage with that as a society. You make improvements there, then it applies, you know, across the board. And I think, you know, for any like smart person who like wants to make a change in the world, I really think crypto is the place to do it. And whether it's like, you know, I think it also crypto space needs to also like evolve a bit too, where we need to get past like some of the technical stuff to actually like application, like

• 11:24Speaker 00

  it's no longer about who has like the best L twos, but who can use L twos to like make the best most real world impact, right? I think you said it once before of like, if your Dow isn't moving atoms in the real world, it's not doing anything. So I think we're in that phase now where, you know, the tech is pretty much like a solved problem. It's a matter of time, I think, until like certain things get implemented. But it's really time to like start walking that walk. And I think you can apply crypto principles to pretty much like every industry, you know, with matter of fact, you were doing it to fashion, but it it it goes beyond that too. So I think, you know, people getting involved in crypto now is just like getting involved with internet stuff back in the nineties, you know? Whatever you're doing, the internet's gonna like boost your ability to do it.

• 12:06David Hoffman?

  Would you say the value is a lower common denominator, a lower, what was the phrase you used, lower?

• 12:13Speaker 00

  Lowest common.

• 12:14David Hoffman?

  Common selling point? Would you say value is a lower common selling point than money? As in like value is below money?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  Yeah, I would say so. If you think about, so money itself, if you think about how money was created, it was created as a means to convert one form of value to another, right? Like if I had a tomato and I wanted to get a haircut, I would have to either like barter that, which is harder to do. But if I can sell the tomato and then use that money to buy a haircut, then I can sort of achieve what I want. So money is a means, not the end itself, right? But the problem happened is like money became the only thing that's like quantify, like objectively quantifiable and measurable. And it's the whole saying of like, you optimize what you measure. So when money became quantifiable and measurable, it became the measuring stick in how we like organized everything.

• 13:02Speaker 00

  The whole game turned to like, let's maximize GDP, you know? And we we all sort of convinced ourselves that. That's really what we're trying to go for. Or that's the measure of like success or value is like money itself. But money, value is actually everything outside of money. Money is just a way to convert from one form of value to another. So if you can create things that are not money, but serve the purpose of like converting one form of value to another, then you get to move into this like post-money society where people can actually communicate and coordinate or, you know, around value itself in its more pure form. Um, instead of only having to go through money. Cause money becomes a bottleneck in a way where you look at, you know, the Great Depression, like all the factories were there, all the people were there to still work on those factories.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  The, the whole thing came crashing down because of the money broke, you know? So I think, you know, money is still going to serve the system. It's still going to exist. It's not going to go away, but it becomes a means to an end. And instead of optimizing for money, we actually make value itself more objectively quantifiable. And we can use cryptography for that as well. So, you know, we've used it for money because money is what we've known all our lives. But in the same way, you can record like a number in a contract that represents some token balance. You can also record like verifiable statements or attestations or all these things, which, you know, I can then quantify my values or what I think is valuable. And if you have a bunch of people quantifying what they think is valuable, you can run algorithms on that.

• 14:32Speaker 00

  And then figure out as a group, what do these people think are valuable by summing it all together? And then what that gives you is like a real time map of like what's valuable or not, you know, in a bottom up way. And we're not sort of agreeing or trying to come to consensus on like what's valuable because that's impossible. It's all subjective, but we can get some sort of common ground by summing together our individual perspectives to get like the intersubjective sum. And then that is a map of what's valuable. And then once we have a map of what's valuable, we just like sprinkle money on it. Cause then you just like money is the sort of water and that water gets distributed to what people have attested to being valuable. And then that acts as like, again, a part of the system. But instead of like optimizing for the water itself, we're optimizing for the fruit that we're growing with the water.

• 15:17David Hoffman?

  Okay, I didn't expect this to get so cosmic already 10 minutes into it. This is beautiful. Let me, let me try and like reiterate what you said, just to make sure I'm following along. So we have all of these like pockets of value on around the world, right? Got the shoemaker, the tomato grower, the pencil maker. But all of these are valuable, you know, pencils and tomatoes and shoes are valuable for their own particular reasons. But we use money as like this intersubjective layer to instantiate the value that we have everywhere in the world. And it's like a communication between all of these very non-fungible forms of value. You know, while many, many, many tomatoes can all be alike to each other, they're still very different from many, many apples and pencils and houses and cars.

• 15:59David Hoffman?

  And so we, the money, money is currency is like this fungible value tool to connect all of these other distinct pockets of value separately and allow us to communicate value. But then you said like, oh, then it kind of leads us to optimize for the wrong things, right? Like we optimize for GDP. And Andrew Yang talks about this a lot where like if we keep on optimizing for GDP, we're just gonna drive ourselves off of a cliff. Like we're gonna optimize for GDP out of a cliff. And it was what you said when like all the factories broke down, like if the money breaks, well, there are still tomatoes to grow and there's still pencils to make and there's still like shoes, shoes to wear in fashion and stuff.

• 16:38David Hoffman?

  But we don't, we've lost our ability to communicate the value between all of these things. And so I think that gets really, really interesting when we put all of these expressions of value on chain, where like DAOs have their own native tokens, which are imbued with some sort of sets of value. And they can be right next to another DAO with another token with another set of values. And sure, we have like the stable coins and the ether, but we also have the native DAO tokens. And since it's all on the same substrate, we're all able to communicate value a little bit more efficiently, a little bit more directly without perhaps having to go through an inter-money layer. And where does it go from here?

• 17:22David Hoffman?

  Is it, first off, is that a pretty, a good summary? Or would you change anything to that? And like, kind of where does it go from here? Because there's always the idea of like, oh, we'll go back to a barter society because we'll have 10 bajillion tokens. But I think a lot of, a lot of economists would, would say like, well, no, because you still need the money.

• 17:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. No, I think that's a great summary. I think the where it's going from here is like most more than anything, it's like a real mentality shift, you know, we have to do, I think it's more about unlearning these things than it is about learning new things. And the the mentality shift is like,

• 17:58Speaker 00

  you know, the way we like value something. So right now, there's this disconnect between value that's created in society and where money goes, right? So a teacher, for example, arguably generates an incredible amount of value for society because they literally educate the people that then go on to like do all these things, right? So they're upstream of a lot of value that's created. But they don't really get any sort of upside on that value, or they don't sort of realize the, you know, teachers are underpaid overall in society because, you know, the value they create is disjointed from the value they receive. The value they're receiving is in the school board here. It's like not along the same like pipelines as the value they created. And then if you look at an investment banker, for example, like, you know,

• 18:43Speaker 00

  arguably, they generate much less value for society. They're mostly just like, you know, acting as like analogs between like other people's value creation. But because they sit at the intersection where money flows, like they essentially get much more of that upside, not because they're generating more value, but because they're closer to proximity to where like financial transactions are happening. So in society right now, the closer you are to where financial transactions are happening, that's what indicates like, you know, how like successful you'll be. If we change that where money can, you know, actually track value more directly, then like it changes the game where instead of like the narcissists or like the psychopaths who can like,

• 19:26Speaker 00

  you know, become these like CEOs and like do these crazy things. Like instead of them making the most money, the people that make the most money in society would be the ones that are generating the most value as attested to by the sum of everyone's like individual opinion on what's valuable. So if you think about like democracy, it's a very like lossy form of governance because we're essentially trying to Take all these like nuanced opinions of like three hundred million people um in the States at least and then like condense it down to like a binary decision of like this party or that party. So like and it's really never about like left or right or any of that or it's what it you know it is and Andrew Yang says this too is like

• 20:06Speaker 00

  certain problems need left thinking and certain problems need right thinking in different amounts and different places at different times. So to like condense that all, it's just like all that does is actually m- make sure these problems never get solved so that the elite can stay elite and then the people can just sort of continue to play that game and think that they're solving something or sort of making an impact. So uh once you can like the what this does is if everyone's making attestations on what they find is valuable at all times then like we get a real time like uh intersubjective emergent democracy where it's like I don't have to like you're not to like elect a representative to represent your views on a certain area like it decentralizes it where you can just express your views yourself

• 20:51Speaker 00

  and everyone's views are on some common substrate which can then be like composed and interpreted and you know uh be used to like drive decisions or make you know governance and you know that what that gives you is like that nuance where you can like height down to like the individual like hyper target exactly the needs and you know values of like each individual member of society. So instead of trying to like fix problems from like the top down where it's like you know you can try to like implement this one law and then like it fixes five things but breaks six other things and then you do that again and like fixes some things and breaks and we've been doing that for a very long time and like it's not really I'm not really optimistic that it's gonna actually progress us fast enough to where we need to be to actually like get out of the sort of you know timeline we're in.

• 21:36Speaker 00

  Uh but I think going the other way around uh is like a potential we we could address it in that way. But again, it takes like you know uh i- it's the same thing like with the internet, right? When internet first came out, people were just like, how do we put radio on the internet? How do we like put books on the internet? How do we take what we know and just like apply this new thing to it instead of like you know the Internet native companies like, you know, Snapchat or Instagram or Facebook like they took that medium and, you know, utilize its strengths and unique advantages in a way that wasn't ever possible before. In a way that like you couldn't even like really think of before if you just held on to like existing notions of what you had. So in the same way, I think,

• 22:16Speaker 00

  you know, it'll, the new system will look like very different and sort of, that's going to be the future of like social media as well. Instead of like just communicating information online and trying to like influence others to do things. We don't have to influence anyone. We can just be constantly making attestations on what we, what we find is valuable around us. Right? So like social media, I think it starts to become more decentralized as well, where it's like really more about you and your relationships and the people you work with and these sort of like networks rather than, you know, oh, here's a big influencer with a million of followers. It's like, that's very like, you know, one to many, but I think it's going to become more many to many. And instead of just information, also communicating in value through these like direct attestations.

• 22:57David Hoffman?

  Yeah. What, what does an attestation look like? Or is it more of an idea? Cause like the, I think the most like basic reductive version of an attestation is like, I am a student at school and my teacher taught me something really useful that day. So I pull out my phone and I give her five stars. Like is that, is that the attestation we're looking for?

• 23:16Speaker 00

  I think like, yeah, there's attestations that are made all the time. They're just not recorded or captured or, you know, made verifiable. And sort of, you know, the whole crypto methodology. So if, uh, you know, like however, like if you get paid from your DAO, that's an attestation. If you like vote on a proposal, that's an attestation. You could, we could actually create systems for like direct attestations to like, you know, uh, like imagine like personal tokens and you can like, whoever you give your personal token to, that's essentially an attestation of some sort. So I think attestations will take many forms and it's not really about creating this new system that we have to now learn how to use and adopt,

• 23:57Speaker 00

  but more so like mapping our existing behavior and like building the technology around that. And that's like another thing like I'm really sort of, I really prioritize is, you know,

• 24:08Speaker 00

  Creating technology and organizations and everything around the people instead of like molding the people around the technology or organization. So you know, in traditional startup or company, it's like all the employees are sort of forming around the corporation. And it's like, you know, they're sort of changing their identities or the way they're working or the things that they're doing to like conform to what this organization needs. I think that will change in the future where at the center will actually be individuals and then like communities and groups of people and then organizations and products and tools will essentially be built around them to like conform to what they're doing and what their needs are. And so in that sense, it's like kind of flipping the table a bit, like finding out that like Earth is not the center of the universe and you know, something like that.

• 24:52David Hoffman?

  So the idea would be in like, instead of having the corporations that control us in our nine to five jobs being the center of the universe, it flips it on its head and the corporations actually respond to the humans and answer to the humans rather than the humans answer to the corporations. And it's all through the primitive of attestations, like attestations are how this is unlocked?

• 25:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you know, if you make a tweet, that's also an attestation. If you say something like, oh, you know, we should do this or this project is dope, you know, those are all attestations. It's just that they're not quantified or verifiable or you know, but if that exists in a web three medium where you can actually, when you say that, oh, you support this, that this is actually like a cryptographic record of something, you know, like there's an NFT that represents that, whether it's an organization or a event or whatever it is, you can like point to that thing. And then you can, once you like map that out, then that same, it essentially builds up this irrigation system for the infinite garden, right? Right now, if we're talking about the infinite garden of like, everything humans are doing, the way the irrigation system works is like, there's a big bucket of water,

• 25:59Speaker 00

  like certain buckets of water and then people are certain sort of, you delegate allocation of money to someone else, right? So like, I'll take a bucket of water and then my job is to go try to find out where the soil is dry and then pour some water there. But like, on the way, I'll probably drink half the bucket because I got thirsty. And then, you know, all these other things of like, someone creates like a To like, you know, take all the water from everyone else and like all these things happen. Instead, what this is, is like, we have like sensors that can read the moisture levels of all the soil everywhere. And this like automated complex irrigation system that can like sense exactly where water is needed and what amount at what time and instantly like get that water there. So I think in the world, that's how money will serve us is like based on what the humans want and what the humans sort of

• 26:44Speaker 00

  like instead of like getting rid of our humanity and sort of like suppressing who we are to like be this sort of like robot for the corporation. And then I think that's a symptom of the industrial age, I think. But yeah, instead of doing that, it'll become like we express who we are, what our needs are. And then the irrigation system is like something we collectively like govern and influence and we can control how it's set up in our certain communities, but it it it provides like it moves the resources from where they are to where they're needed. And if you think about in the world, like there's no shortage of money, right? The issue is, is just like stuck in these pockets. So like, imagine this like scenario where you had a society where everyone got paid like $200 an hour, but you couldn't keep more than five grand in your bank account or in your wallet.

• 27:30Speaker 00

  And then what that incentivizes is if you want to actually make the most of it, you actually have to spend it. So it incentivizes people to like actually get capital moving through the system as much as possible. In that system, you actually don't need a lot of GDP. Like the amount of money you need in that system is not a lot, but you can get way more economic throughput. So money that's sitting idle is essentially like a drain on society. It's all this value that was like captured and sort of created and sort of stored in this form that's now sitting there doing nothing. That if if there was a way to communicate exactly where it could be effectively used, even the people who are rich and powerful, like the money itself doesn't make them happy. It's it's still in human nature that you derive happiness from like, you know, making others happy or, you know, seeing

• 28:13Speaker 00

  some sort of purpose or influence that, you know, what you're doing. And people like rich people or like powerful people, they might want to influence that through like direct command and control. But if you can know that, you know, if Elon Musk could know that, like, he could flow like a million dollars through this like irrigation system. And it will actually get like really effectively allocated to all these places where it's needed based on attestations of people, then I think people will be much more willing to do philanthropy. Because it goes even beyond philanthropy, it actually becomes like a way to invest in these things that you believe in and you know, ensure that your money like it's like lossless value transfer. Right now, it's way too lossy because you'd be like, oh, I'll give it to this charity and then they'll give it to this nonprofit. And then, you know, everyone's going to take a cut along the way. And at the end, it's like cents to the dollar to like towards the actual cause you wanted to do.

• 28:58Speaker 00

  And that's what happens when you have all the money, you know, all the water being carried by people in buckets instead of being distributed with a advanced irrigation system.

• 29:07David Hoffman?

  So with this like current financial ecosystem that we have and also nation state paradigm. I think a lot of your argument is that the the lossiness is a creates a strong incentive for having a scarcity mindset. Because like if if this paradigm of financial loss, if you do anything, you you have lossy outcomes with your finances in like, you know, like kind of how you were saying, got a bucket of water, walking through the desert. You're going to go from A to B, but you're going to lose water along the way for reasons. If we can build out this paradigm where we don't need, we have much less loss. You also create a paradigm of people that have a lot less of a scarcity mentality.

• 29:49David Hoffman?

  Because like they're less fearful of paying taxes to the government. They're less fearful of donating to charity because they have stronger assurances that the outcome of the resources that they are giving up, they have assurances that it's actually going to actually, there will be something produced as a result of that and they'll be able to like see that manifest rather than kind of just like pray and cross their fingers.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, I think like the idea like we talked with this blog post about like retroactive public funding and stuff like that. And I think that's really sort of on point. And you look at, you know, open source software and all these things like there's that key problem of like, you know, that generates all this value, but there's no way to like distribute value back to them. I think, you know, in that same way of like guaranteeing it's going towards something that was, you know, not only that will create value, but that was proven to have. Created value, like the value was already created. It's just now being retroactively recognized, right? And then that that changes the game too, because then people, instead of like thinking primarily, how much am I getting paid and thinking how much effort to put into that? Based on how much you're getting paid, like, you know, I'm getting paid a hundred grand. So I'm going to put in the amount of effort that would like meet my boss's expectations

• 30:57Speaker 00

  for this like pay grade and then like not anything more than that. But it changes that where like the first thing you'll think of is like, how can I create the most value for the most amount of people? Like what you were saying after university, you know, you wanted to like, make the most amount of people happier than average. And then like, uh, once you do that, then the value, the, the, the money you get out of that would actually map directly to that value you created. Whereas now, now it's like someone could do something that's ultra impactful. Like, you know, the people, the core devs of Ethereum, for example, like I know they're doing it. They could get paid way more anywhere else, but they're doing it because of that fulfillment they get. And that's another sign of like, it's not about the money. It's about, you know, they're getting value in all these other ways. But we should map that to actual value they get from money monetarily as well, too.

• 31:40Speaker 00

  And we can do that if we, you know, have the way to like, recognize that value and then, you know, ensure that it gets distributed to the right people. And I'm, I'm working on a project actually directly for this that was like inspired by the whole guest team not getting enough funding. Where like, we can actually, instead of having to like, give money to like the bosses, their bosses and then like, delegate it to them on how to allocate it to the people. You could run something like source cred on the guest GitHub repo. And then have a map of like, who like did the most work and committed the most code? And, you know, whatever effort they did, even if it's not perfect, it's some representation. Then you can create a contract that's like, you know, and anyone could deploy it.

• 32:22Speaker 00

  Like it's permissionless that would then directly send the funds like to those people's wallets. You know, those devs that directly contributed. And then i- i- if you actually make that system like strong enough where like it you have these like cryptographic guarantees, that could eventually become a thing at a, at a protocol level. Where like protocol fees could actually become like the, uh, the master sort of like source of water that then, you know, gets redistributed out based on direct value created. And maybe not like on the crypto level itself, but there could be protocols above, you know, the base layer chain to do something like that.

• 32:57David Hoffman?

  This is certainly what optimism is trying to do with their, the revenue from my maximum extractable value out of their sequencer. Right? So the idea for the optimistic, optimistic, the optimism's optimistic roll up is that there's a lot of value to be, uh, extracted from fees, from protocol fees, not at the base Ethereum layer one, but the optimism layer two. And that, uh, value that comes from sequencing, the, the MEV gets fed into retroactive public goods funding.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:25David Hoffman?

  So this, this, this like illustration that you are describing is actually being experimented and iterated on in real time with the optimism team.

• 33:33Speaker 00

  For sure. And I see like, you know, when I talk about this being the future, like I, I get conviction and say this because I see everyone else moving towards this as well, you know, like you can start to see the patterns and the structures. And, you know, for me, it's like, I'm not really trying to like, say, I know what's going on. I'm just pattern matching on like what's actually happening. And yeah, I think what they're doing is like really awesome. And it illustrates a great point where there's certain things that will like generate a lot of money. But like the, they, they might not be something that you wanna like, you know, fund itself, right? Like these protocol fees, like that's why people are like, oh, like, you know, projects shouldn't take fees because like what are they needed for? It's just a protocol, it's permissionless, anyone can use it, like, you know, why are the fees going there?

• 34:18Speaker 00

  But and then on, on the flip side, there's all these things that generate incredible value, but don't have a way to be monetized. Or if they were monetized, it would like sort of ruin the point of it, you know? So teams that like build this amazing tech, that's not really like productizable. And they're forced to almost productize it or, you know, add some way of value capture there. That like doesn't fit to try to like, you know, get that value. But I think when we can create that connectivity between these pools, where a lot of that value can accumulate, but you know, it isn't necessarily allocated yet. And then places where it's like really needed, but we don't want to like monetize that thing. Instead of having to like, you know, value these things directly, we can disassociate like where the value comes from and the thing that creates the value.

• 35:02Speaker 00

  So, you know, protocol fees like that, DeFi treasuries, like, you know, yearn, for example, the fees it generates. Like, and they do this themselves right now of like, you know, they really like give back to the community and sort of do a lot of grants and funding. And but it's still sort of people, you know, like manually pouring buckets in places. I think eventually we can evolve that to be even more like decentralized. And, you know, people can still have that influence, right? They would just have like a lot of voting weight, for example, to influence that like irrigation system of like where it goes, right? So they can say, I think it should be here. And then the pipes will like shift here a bit. And then the other guy says, I think it should be there. And then like shift there a bit. And then, once you average it all together, you get like the the outcome.

• 35:44David Hoffman?

  One of the problems that I'm seeing with this is when you talked about like attestations, and then you kind of list some list some activities, like a DAO paying someone as an attestation, or like a tweet can be an attestation. If you extrapolate that, aren't you just really talking about data? And like, how do you standardize data? Because there's so much data out there. And how do you ensure that like the data is the right data? And how do you actually like consume that data in ways that is like scalable?

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Yeah. So I think like the difference in attestations and data is like, an attestation is cryptographically verifiable. So like, if you sign a message that says, you know, I support optimism, or I like optimism, then there's inherent value in that attestation in that like your Ethereum address is attached to all this activity on chain. You know, all these like various forms of identity and reputation that you can associate with that address, that you can then weight the value of that statement, you know, in a certain way. So I think in terms of like how we... Part about this is like normally in a blockchain, you need like there's a scalability issue because you need like global consensus of like, you know, this token move there, this value move there.

• 36:58Speaker 00

  The nice thing about these attestations is it becomes much, much more scalable because the only, instead of like, you know, a bunch of validators in the network needing to verify that information before that block can be processed. The only people that need to validate that information is the people that are carrying or using that information. So you can still use cryptography, you know, because crypto is like way more than just blockchain, right? You can still use cryptography to like record these attestations and as long as you have it in a like, Vitalik talked about this too in ECC is like, we need like a shared state. You know, incredibly neutral shared state in which we can just like dump all the raw data of like what happened. And you know, these are like, this is not like high level data. It's just like,

• 37:42Speaker 00

  you know, just as much information we have on like things that happen that are cryptographic verifiable. And then you can have multiple like entities essentially like curating that information or like filtering that information to represent a certain community's views or a certain product's views or, you know, so the way this like scales and sort of builds up is this composable thing is like, it's not a end to end system. You just want to get like the bottom layer right of just like, let's just get all the data in one place and have it be verifiable. And then we can work from there to figure out how best to use it and associate value to it. And then so you'll have like layers and layers and layers of like higher level sort of interactions being built. In terms like actually, I think Ceramic Network is like a great, great

• 38:24Speaker 00

  project and they're really trying to solve this problem of, you know, acting as like the data layer. It's like L1 for data. And attestations and sort of verifiable identities. So, you know, things like social graphs or even like, like all sorts of data that you just want. Instead of being stored in a server or just in like IPFS where it's like a static blob. It's not like, you can't do anything. You're storing it in a much more composable way where, you know, you can define a data model, for example, in Ceramic. You can, so there's a group right now, I forget what it's called exactly, DAO Stars, I think. It's like a bunch of the top like DAO. People like Gnosis Guild and Dow House and like some Oregon people like a bunch of people kind of working group coming together to define the data model of a DAO.

• 39:06Speaker 00

  So like, you know, there's all these different implementations of a DAO. But if we can at least agree on what are the components of a DAO? And like, you know, the, oh, here's a proposal, here's a member, like, what are these like common denominator fields? If you can agree on that data model, then that like greatly increases interoperability. So we can separate like the data model from like a specific application built on top of it. So, you know, this is what ceramic really enables is we have like, instead of like, you know, there's like, if you log into a website, you have your user account for that website. Instead of that, we just have like a user account that's like sort of universal. This is somewhat your wallet, but the wallet alone isn't enough. You need like all this other auxiliary data and, you know, links and this like graph system on top of it.

• 39:51Speaker 00

  And then any app can be built in the same underlying data. So you, i- it actually changes data ownership too, where you can actually own your data. It's not like, you know, this data is owned by the platform, like you would give the platform access, like read and write to your data. But the data would be like sovereignly like owned by you and you could like control the access to it and everything like that. So that's how it really kind of comes, becomes composable from the bottom up is like getting those primitives, right? It's like the, if you look at DeFi, right? We, it's not like, there's like in 2017, maybe there's like a lot of these like monolithic projects that are trying to be like all in one DeFi platforms and stuff. But that's not, none of those really ended up working out.

• 40:31Speaker 00

  The things that worked out is like, you know, we had ERC 20s and then we had like Ether Delta and then we had Uniswap and then we had Compound and then we had Urn. And these all sort of progressively built off of, you know, a really solid underlying primitive. So I think right now we're really just figuring out these underlying data primitives. And then over time, we'll all sort of build new layers on top of it to get like more sort of complex systems that emerge. You know, again, it's really about like emergence rather than like, you know, trying to pre like premeditate like what is going to happen and trying to build that. You just want to create the, the right infrastructure to allow the right things to emerge naturally.

• 41:10David Hoffman?

  The other person that I know is working on this is the other team is the team at Disco. Are you familiar with Disco? Mm-hmm. Yeah, so the way that I've had this explained to me is with verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers. And like Evan McMullin always describes this as like your loot bag for data, where your Ethereum address can be your loot bag for on-chain tokens, like ERC20 tokens and NFTs, like it's your inventory. But then she says that you need an off-chain loot bag for your data and your verifiable credentials and your decentralized identifiers. And the way that she's explained this to me is that like your Ethereum address, your

• 41:53David Hoffman?

  private keys can unlock your loot bag, but your loot bag can actually rotate out private keys. So like you're not ever tied down to one specific Ethereum address, which makes sense if we're talking about digital identity, right? Like I use many, many, many Ethereum addresses. How can any one of them be my identity, right? How can any one of them reflect my soul? My soul is really an aggregate of all of my Ethereum addresses and much, much, much, much more that has nothing to do with any transaction that's on a blockchain. It has to do with the data of the world that I have both consumed and projected and interacted with. And so it's like she calls it the space between the chains, as in there's all the blockchains

• 42:38David Hoffman?

  in the world, kind of like the root system. But then there's the space between the chains, which is kind of like the mycelial networks of the infinite. My mental model for this was like data is a bunch of like micronutrients and tokens and NFTs and DAOs are a bunch of like macronutrients. And then those are the value, right? The macronutrients are the value, the proteins, the fats. But then you have the micronutrients of the organism, like the little, like the magnesiums and the iron and the molecules. But for an organism to exist, you need all the micronutrients to process, to correctly and efficiently process the macronutrients. And so to put this into crypto language, you need the DAOs, the tokens, the NFTs of

• 43:23David Hoffman?

  the world, the value of the world. It needs the direction of the micronutrients in order to know where to go. And so if we're talking about your irrigation metaphor... Like the the micronutrients of the world are redirecting the flow of water in my in micro ways in order to most adequately produce the outcomes that the organism wants, which is to route the value into the places that the people want it to go.

• 43:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And I think it's it's pretty awesome because like we actually already have the answers in front of us. Like, nature is already a highly evolved value internet. You know, it's its own like distributed like chain, like my cellular networks, you know, they so they do like three things. One, they like communicate information. So like stress signals and like, you know, organisms or plants and stuff and just like information, sort of electrical signals that get communicated over them. They so then we had that with the internet. And then after that, there's value. So, you know, nutrients or carbon or things that sort of travel along these networks. Then we got that with Ethereum, right? And then the third thing that my cellular networks do that we don't have yet is they

• 44:34Speaker 00

  decompose things. So when something dies or something, you know, they rot it and it decomposes and it takes those nutrients and redistributes it out to the system. And we don't have anything for that. And I don't think people have really thought about that too much. It's like, how do we like allow for decomposition? Because the legacy way is like, you know, you create an organization or you do something, you like start a company, you essentially like want it to succeed forever and grow forever. Right? Like that's sort of the game you're trying to play is like, how can you make this thing succeed and grow forever? If you look at nature, the only thing that like grows forever like that is cancer.

• 45:10David Hoffman?

  So it doesn't even grow forever, though, because then cancer ultimately kills the host.

• 45:15Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly. So the only way that so if we try to grow these things forever, the only outcome of that is it'll kill the host, AKA all of us. So to actually avoid that, we need to introduce the ability to decompose things, allow things to die. And I think like this is another sort of trick of like, you know, Western, not not just Western, I think, human nature too, but like this like fear of death and like people not being, you know, sort of come to terms with their the fact that they're going to die or their own mortality. Is like, you know, I think a big thing, cause it's like, then you're just gonna be like, you know, trying to make the most of like, what's here and, and whatnot. So I think death is a feature, not a bug, right? Cause like, imagine if Putin was like, gonna live to be like 200 years old or 300 years old, right?

• 45:59Speaker 00

  Like, then his like, he, he's doing all this like crazy shit now, but like, if he's gonna, if he's always gonna live that much longer, then he's gonna go to like even crazier lengths to do this shit, right? So it's actually good that, you know, at a certain point, he's gonna be like, you know, I'm too old for this shit, I'm gonna die soon, like, I'm not gonna like, all this shit I did is just gonna be left behind. So, you know, that, that is like a feature and then the new can sort of like take that place. But we don't, we don't have a, a way to deal with that. And I think the way it'll actually take place in crypto, um, like, I'll, I'll use the example of consensus, right? So consensus like served a really important purpose in like, you know, bootstrapping a lot of the ecosystem, like, you know, getting the talent, like acting as that bridge from like, you know, pre web three to web three.

• 46:43Speaker 00

  But because there were that bridge, there's like inherently like, you know, they have that like legacy sort of baggage that came along with it and all these like issues and, you know, all this stuff happening with consensus. And it's actually like really hard to try to like fix consensus at its core and, you know, uh, like turn it into something that's like, you know, actually better or sort of like, you know, next generation. The way to do that is actually decompose consensus from the outside in, AKA, take the talent that's there and like deploy them in the web three ecosystem. Cause there's like, it's crazy, cause like, there's an incredible amount of like really like top level crypto talent at consensus who's like been in the space for like, you know, since OG days,

• 47:25Speaker 00

  that are completely siloed from like the rest of the ecosystem, because they're like, oh, you can't work for a DAO, you work for consensus. So like now, all these people are now like not interacting with DAO people at all and not really understanding that side and like, but what would be actually better is if you like, instead of trying to fix consensus, you took these people at the edges and like, you know, DAO pilled them and then deployed them to like, you know, do some like awesome work somewhere else where it's way more impactful. So like, this is what decomposition is, is like. Nature decomposes this old thing that's rotting and dying, takes those nutrients and puts it towards something new that's growing. That's like, it's much better off there. So then, you know, these people, these like, this human resources would essentially be like the fertilizer for the infinite garden.

• 48:09Speaker 00

  That you can then like, oh, this shit died. Like just decompose it and distribute it out there instead of trying to like, put on life support forever and wasting resources and misallocating. And I think, you know, we're trying to do the same thing with how we structure our DAOs and organizations where we should like, start every DAO with the assumption that it's gonna die. And like, prepare for that outcome and, you know, have like, and treat it as like a feature, not a bug, you know? Like, then you evolve it into something else. You take those people and you give them a pathway. Like, people don't have to be afraid of that because, you know, they would be afraid of uncertainty. But if you can give them a certain pathway of like, you know, here's the other channels or avenues where you can like, be deployed or have your influence, then that, you know, it starts to make more sense. And you start being, you stop being worried about this organization dying because

• 48:53Speaker 00

  you're not sort of building your life or personality or whoever you are around the organization. The organization is built around you. So then, you know, if you were to fall off the mothership, that's like scary. But if some like, you know, some aspect, if you were to shed some skin, that's no problem. Right? So it's, it's all connected in that way of, you know, really shifting the mindset on how we think about, how we coordinate and think about value and all that.

• 49:17David Hoffman?

  The Layer 2 era is upon us. Ethereum's Layer 2 ecosystem is growing every day. And we need L2 bridges to be fast and efficient in order to live a Layer 2 life. A cross is the fastest and cheapest and most secure cross-chain bridge. With a cross, you don't have to worry about the long wait times or high fees to get your assets back to the Layer 1. Assets are bridged and available for use almost instantaneously. Across's bridges are powered by UMA's Optimistic Oracle to securely transfer tokens from Layer 2 back to Ethereum. Across is critical ecosystem infrastructure and ownership is being handed over to the community. You can be a part of this story of a cross by joining the Discord and becoming a co-founder and helping to design the fair, fair launch of a cross. If you want to bridge your assets quickly and securely,

• 50:00David Hoffman?

  go to across.to to bridge your assets between ETH, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Bova Networks.

• 50:07David Hoffman?

  Bankless is proud to be sponsored by Uniswap. Uniswap is a new paradigm in asset exchange infrastructure. Instead of a cumbersome order book system where trades are matched with other humans, Uniswap is an autonomous piece of software on Ethereum that lets you trade any token at the current market price. No human counterparties or centralized intermediaries, just autonomous code on Ethereum. Input the token you want to sell and receive the token you want to buy. The Uniswap Grants Program is accepting applications for grants. Do you have something of value that you think you want to contribute to the Uniswap ecosystem? No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Bankless.

• 50:50David Hoffman?

  If you're going Bankless, you need MetaMask. This is your tool to unlock the world of DeFi without giving up custody over your private keys. MetaMask is both a secure in-browser wallet and also a secure bridge for your hardware wallet. You can now trade tokens on any Decks or Aggregators. MetaMask Swap gathers real-time pricing information across all the DeFi exchanges, allowing you to select your best price while getting all the MetaMask benefits of self-custody, lower gas costs, and increased transaction success rates. MetaMask also has a fantastic mobile wallet that I use when I'm out and about, which I use to collect PoApps, NFTs, and do all my DeFi things while I'm away from home. If you haven't downloaded MetaMask, you gotta try it out. Web3 wouldn't be the same without it. Download MetaMask for desktop and mobile at metamask.io

• 51:33David Hoffman?

  and load up your Trezor, Ledger, Lattice, or Keystone hardware wallets so that they too can get into the world of Web3. I think the meta-goal here is to how do we retain and transform value rather than losing it, right? We're going back to like lossiness. The death of organizations is the destruction of capital. But I think what you're talking about is how do we not let capital be destroyed, but instead like let it also be transformed? And I think I'm in the middle of a Ray Dalio's book, which is titled something about like the changing, like lessons or lessons for managing how to survive like a changing world order. And using like kind of the frame of reference that we've been talking about right now, the...

• 52:17David Hoffman?

  And also the fourth turning thesis or the fourth turning theory is also related to this, where it tends to be every 80 years, humans go through like a destruction cycle. Because like our institutions get too calcified, the people and their institutions are too misaligned. Whoever holds the reserve currency of the world has spent it on military for too much. And now no one uses it as a coordination tool anymore. And so like the world order dies. And then there's a period of chaos. And then like a new world order is being born in its place. Like, you know, like the, so it's a little bit like the, we lose the structure. But then like new, new plants grow out of the decaying body of the old structure.

• 53:02David Hoffman?

  But like the thing is like, we want the world to be iterative games, not, not games that, not single games, right? And so like one 80 year long cycle of conflict before we go on to the next 80 year long cycle of conflict is one game followed by another game, not iterative games. We want one game to fold elegantly and gracefully into the next game. Because every time it's like, the current paradigm of the world is always like two steps forward, one step back. And in order, and that's just because we need to take that one step back in order to take two more steps forward. But I think what we're talking about here is like, all right, how do we build systems

• 53:43David Hoffman?

  where we can take three steps forward or four steps forward before we take a step back? And it's all about like, there's this concept of jubilees that has been just ingrained into human DNA since, since before like written history, right? Like, the concept of like sin in the Bible is a very similar concept to like a debt jubilee, where sometimes society just gets like pent, like too much pent up sin in the world. And so we need to have like, we need to just blanket forgive all sin. And that's what Jesus did, like Jesus blanket forgave all sins. And then, and then later on, we got recorded history, things got a little bit more concrete, things got a little bit more like reason, able to be reasoned about. And we went from like sin to like.

• 54:27David Hoffman?

  Debt jubilees and jet do jet debt jubilees are something we all saw all throughout like Judaism and and many, many other like religions and early, early human organizations where like, oh, there's just way too much debt in the system. We just need to wipe it clean so we can take two steps forward, which is very, very destructive because when you wipe debt clean, you're taking value from somebody that was owed that and just like deleting it just for the sake of everyone, right? So there are, there are big losses in the system, but on net, it's the right choice just because so much debt was built up in the system. And now we're coming to that part of like our history, more or less again, right now, this is what Ray Dalio's book is all about is like,

• 55:09David Hoffman?

  there's too much debt in the American economy, like everyone owes debt, the American economy owes debt, the Federal Reserve owes debt, all the other central governments of the of the world owe debt. There's just too much debt in the system. So now we're gonna have to like wipe the slates clean as we have always done throughout human history in order to take two or three more steps forward. And and I think what like one of the meta goals of crypto as human organizational structures is finding ways to not have jubilees because jubilees are always about taking step back. The the goal is to not take steps back. And so when you when you're telling me like, there's the the system where we can build our social structures with like a difficulty bomb baked

• 55:52David Hoffman?

  into them, like a like a dead end in them was like, hey, this is going to die. We can actually have like contingency plans as like, all right, like, well, the goal is to create value and then die and then pass that value along elegantly so that one step forward turns into two steps forward, turns into three steps forward. And perhaps we can have like a a brand new human Renaissance that we've never ever had before.

• 56:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. And I think like, it's just that instead of like trying to delay the death for as long as possible, we're like, you know, because that's the thing is like, we talk about human systems and then like natural systems as if they're like, you know, outside of each other, but we are actually just also a, you know, fractal of nature or a product of nature. So, you know, nature will have its way, whether we Be like the easy way or the hard way, you know, like if we like the longer we work against it, then it'll eventually still have its way, you know, on a long term, like even if we like destroy the world with like global warming or whatever, like eventually it'll come back into balance and you know, like come to the stability again. But I think like the what you're saying about, you know, every 80 year cycle, like,

• 56:58Speaker 00

  I think what we can do is like, instead of having 80 years, we can do it like maybe every eight years or like maybe eight hours, you know, like take it to that level. Cause then what that's how we actually, it's not about we can't, we can't ever like eliminate mistakes from happening, AKA like steps back. But if, if the steps back are happening at a micro level, you know, instead of just at a macro level, then they're much less painful. And when you zoom out, it'll just look like sort of consistent forward progression, even though in between we're like taking all these like steps forward and back. It's just that, you know, we got to iterate much more frequently. Um, I think that's where we'll go.

• 57:33David Hoffman?

  And I'm getting, I'm getting sounds of like an old cranking engine slowly turning over like one revolution.

• 57:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 57:40David Hoffman?

  Two revolutions. But then if we can get it faster and faster, then you saw the engine actually starts to turn and tumble and tumble and tumble. Then boom, we all have, we all have an engine that is doing 80,000 rounds of revolutions per second. And we can actually make some goddamn progress finally.

• 57:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. Um, and I think the, the thing you said about this like, um, rebirth thing, uh, uh, who was it? Um, Terence McKenna, he had this like really good talk that he was giving once, um, about how, and this was in the nineties and this is crazy because it sounds like he's talking about now. But he's saying like the trajectory of the world is just like, you know, we're at a road's end, you know, like things are gonna like, it's too late to sort of fix them and it, things are going to keep accelerating and we're going to go through this process. And that process is actually not a bad process because it's like a rebirth, it's like a birth in a way. So, you know, think about a baby in the womb, right? It's like, it, it doesn't know anything about crypto or the internet or anything, you know,

• 58:33Speaker 00

  it's being fed, it's getting its nutrients. It's like comfortable, warm, like has everything it's needs, you know, in a way that's like heaven for, for that. And then it goes through this like, you know, the, the process of birth is like the most violent part of a pregnancy, right? Like the the transition and like the detachment from like the thing that was created from the creator. So that's the thing is too, we actually have to let go, like the the child has to be detached from its mother. Um, and then, you know, then you get to like, you're in this like world now, and then you like experience that. And, you know, there's this like new paradigm. And I think in the same way, society itself will go through this like violent rebirth. And it's gonna be like, you know, painful and it's gonna be like, you know, we'll be screaming and that's all you can do is scream.

• 59:14Speaker 00

  But like, once we go past that, we'll we'll be in this like entirely new unrecognizable space. That's like, you know, fundamentally different from where we were before. Um, and it's it's crazy too, cause like the the, you know, universe, if you think about like primitives of the universe. A lot of people like who are coming more from like a materialistic standpoint are like, oh, we have atoms and we have molecules. Now we have like quarks and subatomic particles and like trying to find the answers to the universe there. But there's nothing really there, right? Like, there's just like less and less stuff there, there's no like answers there. So it's like, okay, if that's not the primitives, then what are? And, you know, if you think about like the golden ratio and fractals and like, you know, these patterns, the patterns are the primitives of the universe, right?

• 59:57Speaker 00

  If you look at like the structure of a tree and the branches there and how that looks the same as the structure of a river. Um, and how that looks the same as the structure of the neurons in our brain. And how our eyes look the same as like, you know, flower petals or like these things in trees, like those are the primitives of the universe. So if you start looking at those instead, you start to see these these fractals in which like the things that are happening at a micro scale are just like, you know, smaller versions of the larger thing that's happening. And if you think about the process of like, you know, pregnancy and like the embryo, like the baby itself is like actually re replaying the whole history of evolution. You know, we went from like this like tadpole looking thing.

• 1:00:39David Hoffman?

  Speed running evolution.

• 1:00:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, we went from this like tadpole looking thing to this like little like fish looking thing to then, you know, growing arms and like this. But like, so that's a fractal of like all of human history in a way. And in if you think about it, that we can use that as inspiration to know what what to do next is. Like this comes back to like the mycelial networks, right? So if that network pattern we can recognize in nature, you know, you damn well bet that that pattern is going to repeat itself in different forms in the future. So it's almost like an onus to look at that and then, you know, recreate the things that we're building to follow those patterns. Because when you follow those patterns, that's, you know, you're sort of like doing it in nature's way. And like the, this discussion, like, you know, so if you really want to take it to like a meta meta level,

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  you know, when you think about nature itself, like, nature is like the, essentially like the substrate or like the, the, the creation itself, right? But like underlying, there's like, even if you think about humans, like, we actually suck at coordinating. You know, like, none of us really like asked to be here or coordinated us to be here, right? Like, you know, it all, it all sort of just happens, right? And in fact, actually, when we try to exert our own control, it actually like breaks things from coordinating. The more you like let go, like even this conversation, you said like, you didn't want to like set the agenda because that would like constrict you from like the actual good things that would come out of it. So you exerting human control actually.

• 1:02:04David Hoffman?

  For the listeners, that's what I say to the guests on the start of Layer Zero. That's the alpha.

• 1:02:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, that, that breaks down then, and then, like, so you realize like letting go of control is the way for like, it's actually more intelligence and better coordination there. It's like, if you think about like, okay, where is this like root like coordination coming from? That's God. Like, that's what people refer to as God, is that like root coordination?

• 1:02:30David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:02:30Speaker 00

  That's like, you know, and then God's way is like letting go of that like human egotistical like exertion of control and more so realizing that you're on remote control. You're not under control, you're like on remote control and you're like a part of this thing that's like, you know, the nature has been coordinating and, you know, like. Where like Kanye West says this, but like he says, human beings are God's iPhone. Right? It's not like we're not doing the coordinating. We are, but like where the, where the iPhone, we're not the like the person running the iPhone. You know? So it's like where the vehicle in which this coordination happens is like human beings use our phones to coordinate, but the, the,

• 1:03:07Speaker 00

  the phone itself isn't doing it, but we only see the phone. Right? So in that way, I think like the, it really, you know, root coordination, you know? And this is, it's crazy because like people, I think, you know, for reasons like discard religion or like, you know, certain forms of organized religion because of things that's done, but it's actually a misattribution. It's actually a failure of humans, like them like messing up and not doing it properly, not like the religion itself, or you know, the concept of religion or God itself, you know? So people are like, oh, like, why, why did God do this? God didn't do it. We did it. Right? So it's like the like religion or like God's ways, essentially humans like letting go of that control and allowing these things to emerge.

• 1:03:47Speaker 00

  Um, and that's, you know, how I see everything we're doing is like for me, when I like, I could not, if you asked me like two years ago, if I'd be like doing any of this shit today, it'd be like, no way. But like, as soon as I like let go of control and allow things to emerge, like then I'm in places that I never would have imagined. And, you know, I'm like, holy shit. I can actually like, like I see a light at the end of the tunnel for like how I can actually make a difference in the world. And none of this would have happened if I tried to do it my way. You know, I was like, put here.

• 1:04:14David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm. The, the framing of crypto using a biological lens, I think is the most underappreciated and also the most useful. Uh, and when you're talking about like the, the patterns of the universe, right? The lightning in the sky, the arteries in our veins, in our veins and our neurons and like the, and you can find these same, like the roots of trees. These are the fundamental patterns of the universe and how God is the, is the overarching rule set that produces those outcomes. Whatever, whatever God is, is the thing that just produces the. Rules, it is the rules.

• 1:04:44Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:04:45David Hoffman?

  The if this, then that version of the things that make the outcome. That's the archetype for what this thing is. And like, I think as we move into the future and move into, you know, a metaverse and have an even more digitally enabled future than we have today, I think one of the best things that's going to be an outcome of that are people are going to start to view some of these digitally native organization schemes as nature itself. Like right now, we look at like our, our square homes with our square windows and our square like skyscrapers and our grids and our the grids of our roads. And it's like, God, it's so inorganic. It's so fake. Like the, like the, everything is so like manufactured and so wrong.

• 1:05:29Speaker 00

  The cookie cutter houses at M-Con in the mountains.

• 1:05:35David Hoffman?

  But I think as we, as we move into the future, people are going to start to extend what is nature into things like cryptography, things like math, things like what today feels like sci-fi, science, but is actually just once again, the only way that this crypto industry is going to work is if it follows the rules of nature.

• 1:05:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57David Hoffman?

  Because like you said, if you, if you don't follow the rules of nature, it'll get you. And so like the crypto system, the crypto blockchain, the crypto L1 that wins is going to be the one that resonates most with the rules of nature. And because that's the thing that is going to be able to take many, many, many steps forward without having to take a step back.

• 1:06:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, for sure. And I think like overall Ethereum community has done a great job of that. You know, like really decentralizing, allowing things to be emergent. You know, iteratively, like evolving things like, you know, a lot of the like core innovation here. So I think and Vitalik, like he made a, that New York Times thing, I think he made a lot of good points is like, you know, we've done a pretty decent job thus far. Let's like, let's not like mess it up now, you know, it's like, it's like a, you know, we have to, it's like a fire that we're kindling, right? It's like, as soon as it gets a little like grow, we should not just like, you know, run with it and like do whatever and you know. Just like end up extinguishing it. So it's I think.

• 1:06:55David Hoffman?

  Or lighting the forest on fire.

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. And it's like, it's really about nurturing it in the right way and continuing to nurture it. And, you know, we go through these cycles, I think of like, you know, bull and bear. And I think that like helps keep it in balance. So, yeah, I think, you know, again, you know, we're not in control. And I think overall, as long as we're all, you know, operating in that in God's way or in nature's way, that that will have the right outcome, you know, and it's like, that's it's, it's really liberating too, because then you're not stressed about, you know, having to figure it out. It's like, I don't have to figure it out. It'll figure itself out as long as I'm, you know, adhering to these like principles.

• 1:07:31David Hoffman?

  Right. The the bull and bear case, I think, is a great example. There's, there's always been like frustration from the crypto people about like all the gamers of the world that hate NFTs and all the artists of the world that hate NFTs. And like we as crypto people got super frustrated, like you guys shouldn't hate NFTs. You guys should love NFTs. They're going to make your games better. But like, if we really thought about it and we just injected gate like NFTs into all these games. Like first off, we don't have the technology to do that. Like Ethereum would be at capacity, even the layer twos would be at capacity. Solana and Avalanche would be at capacity. And so like the pushback from society about like, hey, I hate your NFTs. Is probably healthy and probably what the crypto community needs because we are not ready to onboard

• 1:08:15David Hoffman?

  another like like 10 more million people. Like we do not have the structure to do that. And so like, they probably would hate NFTs a lot less if we had more scalable blockchains. If we had more better NFTs, if we had better organizational smart contracts around these NFTs. They probably hate them a lot less and they probably adopt them. And then we would probably go through another bull market. But it's one of those things where like, and definitely, I definitely resonate with like, in the in the bear market of 2018 to 2020, like me and a few other people like Ryan, Anthony Sazano, were just shouting from the rooftops about like, you know, Ethereum is gonna, this DeFi thing is gonna be a thing, guys. Like this is gonna work. Ethereum is money, like Ether is money. Like this is gonna happen.

• 1:09:00David Hoffman?

  But then as soon as the bull market started, like at least me personally, I was like, Well, if you don't believe me, like, I guess I'll just stop shouting it because I'm know is just going to unfold the way that it will unfold. And I'm gonna stop trying to like make sure Ethereum doesn't die from a lack of funding because it doesn't have that problem anymore. And now I'm just gonna let, let the, the leaf float on the wind because however it's gonna work is, is gonna be how it unfolds. And I just have to take that on faith.

• 1:09:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And you know, if anything, our purpose is just to like, observe what's happening. And if things somewhere are, you know, uh, like diverting from nature's path, then it's

• 1:09:38David Hoffman?

  Out of balance and misaligned.

• 1:09:39Speaker 00

  Step up there and try to correct it and balance it. But again, it's like, it's not about, it's not about us or like what we want. It's like, it's really about, you know, understanding that, like, what's that core, um, thing underneath. And the, the Quakers, like, they had a very, like, interesting and I think effective governance mechanism. Their governance mechanism as like a decentralized collective of people to figure out like what to do and things like that was to like, come together and discuss and try to like collectively determine like what is God's way? Or like, what would like God do? What's like God's path in this decision? So it's not about what you think you should do or what you think you should do.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  It's about like, you know, collectively trying to like, understand what's like, uh, uh, according to like their principles or whatever, you know, values they have. Like what's like God's path in that thing. And then that's how they would make decisions. So it's not, basically it was like not making decisions, but discovering decisions. It's like, you know, like, uh, dusting for fingerprints, right? Like the fingerprint's already there, you know, dusting it. Just, you know, like drawing the fingerprint when you like put the ink on it, it's just like discovering what's already there. And I think, you know, what, what we do and when we iterate in, in our organizations and the things that we do, it's just like, we, we have, we shouldn't like make assumptions. We should like, look at what's happening and pattern match and then, you know, build like roads on that pattern.

• 1:11:01Speaker 00

  And it brings me back to like this example of my university where they had like the middle, like park area between all the buildings. They were trying to decide how to like, you know, where they should build the pathways between. Buildings. So instead of like trying to decide that, what they did is the first year they just like planted some grass. And then just like let the people walk all over it. And then they looked where the grass was like beaten down the most. And then they built the sidewalks there because essentially people, the students themselves, walking around needing to get to class on time. They like the, the patterns of all their activities summed together to show like this is the most efficient like way to do it. Right? So that's the thing is like the answers are sort of inside us.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  But we have to like let them come out and not try to like let our egos suppress it. And then, you know, when you look at the way they built the sidewalks, it's like, who designed this? It looks like crazy. It's like all the, they also like a bunch concentrated here and then like these weird going in different directions. But it like, when you actually walk on it, you're like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. How did they figure this out?

• 1:12:01David Hoffman?

  I would imagine walking on the, like, again, taking a look at it and be like, well, that looks weird. And then realizing that it's actually super functional would actually be a very trippy moment.

• 1:12:10Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:12:11David Hoffman?

  I think trippy is the right word to describe how like the really, the realization process. Because like, again, there's no grid, like clearly an engineer didn't do this. Or, or somebody with like a fixed, like fixed engineering type mind. I think, I think like trippy would be the best word to, to say the discovery of like, because it's nature, right? This is an expression of nature.

• 1:12:31Speaker 00

  Yeah. And this thing is like, we think we have the answers, but like, we, you know, we, we do, but it's just like in the, in a different place. And I think like, this is like where, you know, psychedelics are really fascinating too, is because if you're like, you know, I could understand someone being like skeptical about this whole theory and like all the stuff I'm saying, like, you know, it's like, ah, it's just like wumbo jumbo. But like psychedelics is a way to like directly prove that to you through direct experience, right? Like, there's like no doubt in your mind that that's like, you know, it's not just like uncovering some fundamental truths about the universe and how it operates. You know, um, so I think the, uh, And but I think again, that's not like an end either. That's just a means to like sort of show you the patterns if you don't already see them, right?

• 1:13:15Speaker 00

  Like even like with psychedelics, like the they're not addictive in that way. They almost like tell you that you don't need to take them, you know? It's just like showing you things that were there the whole time that you just failed to realize or notice. So in that sense, you know, it's like, I think, training wheels, but not necessarily, you know, there's no like you. You talk to people too who have like done this, like, you know, who go really deep into psychedelics and just like taking same doses of like D M T or all these things to try to like discover some sort of truth about anything, but it's like, there's nothing out there. Really, it's like, you know, there isn't a fundamental truth out there. It's just a vehicle to sort of show you the underlying sort of, uh, you know, the, the, the, the cosmic circus, you know, behind it all.

• 1:13:56Speaker 00

  But the, the answers are really in, in what you do, in actions you take and, you know, those sort of things. And again, it's like just fractals of what, you know, many like world religions throughout history have like expressed and, you know, tuned into. And it's just like, we're evolving our understanding of that.

• 1:14:16David Hoffman?

  Dreamer, what advice or just knowledge would you have for somebody who's newer in the crypto space? Well, is there like a, a life rule of thumb or just, you know, rule, the rule that you live by that you have thought is really, really useful for you that you would like to share with some of the newer people in space?

• 1:14:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'd say like, stop trying to learn crypto and start trying to unlearn like web two stuff, you know? I think i- i- it's almost frustrating, I think, to try to like really understand like the whole crypto space before you get this like, you know,

• 1:14:51Speaker 00

  like, uh, put in that effort to like, or it's not even effort, but just be consciously aware of like, you know, assumptions that you hold about things and why you hold those assumptions and allow yourself to like let go of those assumptions and sort of discover things that way. So I think, you know, once you do that, you'll start to see like new patterns that you didn't see before. And I think, you know, the throughout history, it's just really been about, you know, suppressing people's like. Individual thought, because like, you know, that creates problems. It's hard to coordinate that when people are all thinking different things. It's as advantageous as possible if you can sort of make people think in uniform ways and sort of control like how they think and how they coordinate. And that's, you know, what's been done throughout history. But, you know, recognizing that and then starting to realize that it's like,

• 1:15:36Speaker 00

  James Young makes a perfect example of this. It's like this transition to Web three is kind of like, you know, the transition from like serfs plowing the land to then the Enlightenment age, when the serfs were like, oh, hey, we don't have to just keep plowing this land for our whole lives. We can just like go here and do some stuff ourselves, right? And then you had the whole Enlightenment phase. So I think in the same way, that's happening from this like Web two to Web three transition or sort of legacy to like New World Transition is not necessarily, we're not tearing the old world down. We're just like throwing a better party and then people are coming over, right? So it's like the serfs is like, oh, do I want to like slave myself away on this land? Or am I going to go like, you know, make some fun stuff there? And they're of course going to come over there.

• 1:16:18Speaker 00

  So I think, you know, we're not the legacy governments and legacy system. It's going to exist. It's just going to decompose from the bottom up or the outside in until eventually it might not need to exist or it'll take a whole different form. But, you know, we're not trying to destroy it from the top down. Like, that's the wrong way to go about it. And that's like, you know, going to put us in more danger too. So, um, you know, for example, with like money, like right now, government sort of plays the role of like allocating money through taxes. And I think that will change where like tax distribution will sort of become decentralized. But the government will still play the role of being the referee and sort of like, you know, because you there's sort of governance stewards then, instead of actually players in the game, you know?

• 1:16:59Speaker 00

  So I think that's how like we'll sort of meet in the middle is like, we're not trying to tear them down or create a new system. Because if you, if you actually like try to work for any DAO, you'll like realize how broken it is and that there actually is a lot of value in sort of the legacy legal system and the judicial system. And, you know, the, the ways and practices we've been doing like, you don't want to destroy that. You want to like encompass that and do something more, you know? It's like, yes, and not like, you know, not that way and my way. So I think, yeah, um, back to like the original question, I guess.

• 1:17:32Speaker 00

  I think that's one thing, yeah, like unlearn the old mindsets. That's a general rule of thumb. Second one would be like, really like, you know, break things down into its primitives and like compose those primitives. And like, realize that in, you know, collaboration is now a better, more effective strategy than competition. And web two competition was the most effective strategy. The people that can outcompete others won. And crypto, it's the opposite. The people that can collaborate with the most of the people win. So start to like, you know, disassociate yourself with like what you think of an organization or working for an organization. Like, think of it like what you need, what you're interested in, where you can collaborate with others to like move that forward in a meaningful way. And, you know, just like build up from there rather than, you know, a lot of, I see a lot of people, they're like, oh, I need to find some like

• 1:18:18Speaker 00

  company to like, you know, work for who can like, you know, pay me so I can like make the transition. And, you know, it doesn't have to be a binary thing like that. And you don't have to apply those mentalities. Like, think of it more so just like, you know, an online game, right? Like in, and if you're playing like World of Warcraft or something, you'll like create your clan. You'll go like do some battles with friends and then, you know, like if you stop, you know, collaborating with them, it's fine. Or like stop playing with them, it's fine. You go find some other friends to play with. Like, it's, it's like, you know, we almost have to bring back that childlike mindset, how the child's like exploring the world just through play and, you know, experimentation. And, you know, uh, treat it like that, um, more than anything. And, um, you'll start to like figure it out and find your place naturally.

• 1:19:01David Hoffman?

  Talk about the importance of a yes and mentality. Can you define yes and and just kind of explain the yes and mentality?

• 1:19:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think like, you know, whenever it comes down to any disagreements between any two people, it's like very infrequently is it about one person is right and the other person's wrong? It's just that they're both talking about different things from different perspectives, you know, out of different sort of like, you know, needs. So it's like, you know, disassociate the fact that they're disagreeing with you from like your idea being bad. It's like, they're both good ideas, you know, figure out what's the common denominator between them or the pattern between them that allows them to like, you know, uh, and again, think about. The meta level, don't think about what you're disagreeing on, think about why you're disagreeing. Right? And like, uh, disassociate yourself and don't make it personal in that way, obviously hard to do, but um, then, once you like,

• 1:19:51Speaker 00

  do that, you start to pattern match all these behaviors among all these people, then you see like, oh, this, this thing is actually common among all these. So if you can make an improvement here, it'll help all these people, right? It's like, people like, well, we express our like, problems, but like, those problems aren't solutions, right? It's like, you, I think that's a lot, I think some of the issue with like, some like, you know, of the, like, modern, like, left thinking is like, you know, recognizing a problem and then trying to like, address it at that level of like, you know, for example, the whole issue of uh, like, uh, people like getting admissions into schools and like, whether there should be like quota for certain,

• 1:20:34Speaker 00

  like, races or genders to like, oh, you know, we have to like, meet this quota to like, um, you know, so we get more people in because there's not enough like, you know, uh, colored people here, right? I think that's the wrong way to do it because like, that's actually probably more racist because like, you're assuming that those people can actually like, get there through competency that you need to give them this handicap to get there. And, you know, realizing that the problem is not there, the problem is like upstream of that, you know, so like, where can you go upstream and fix the problem there? And then, you know, that will actually result in this outcome that you want, you know, downstream. So, we see the symptoms and try to address the symptoms, but we don't like, think back far enough to like, talk about the real problems.

• 1:21:15David Hoffman?

  Meta Dreamer, last question before we, we wrap this up. Uh, what about the future makes you optimistic?

• 1:21:20Speaker 00

  The thing I'm most optimistic about is like, people, um, you know, again, moving into this like, post scarcity mindset. And like, instead of everyone, even like, people who are rich or poor, it's like, um, Zach from Coordinate said this once, he's like, uh, you know, money, like, uh, I forget how I worded it, but he's like, um, Money is great until you have it and then it becomes a problem. So it's like, this is almost like, you know, if you have more money than you need, then it actually makes you more depressed. And if you have like less money than you need, then it's actually like you're just as sad. So it's like, you can't, even the ultra-rich, like, they're not really happy or content with their lives either. So, you know, the, it's actually like about getting that balance.

• 1:22:02Speaker 00

  And if you have these mechanisms to better distribute value, you can give people guarantees that they'll have their like baseline needs met, you know? Um, and then once you have that and you can go into post scarcity mindset, then I think that'll be like this new sort of like renaissance where, you know, where like really understanding what it is to be human and like the way we're, you know, interacting with each other. And, you know, uh, a lot of the like, you know, I think that will alleviate a lot of like the built up sort of internal like stressors or, you know, if you think about it, like so many of, um, like all the problems in the world could be like broken down into, you know, like, i- if you had a bad childhood experience because like you weren't, you know, your family wasn't well off and they couldn't afford to like do this stuff.

• 1:22:47Speaker 00

  Then that leads you to like all these like emotional issues and like, you know, uh, all these things, like so much of it can be, you know, be broken down into like people not having their needs met and having that like worry of like, you know, what's gonna happen to me tomorrow and that safety. So, uh, true happiness, I think, is not really about like what you can get or like the good things that can happen to you. It's about eliminating how many bad things can happen to you. Cause like, if you've eliminated all the bad things that could happen to you, but like nothing else on top of that, then I think you'd be like perfectly content and happy and sort of, you know, uh, like, uh, at peace with everything. And that's like, you know, a lot of people do have that. It's like, they're just like monks or like very, living like very minimal lives.

• 1:23:28Speaker 00

  And they realize that the, the, the key to happiness is like eliminating like negative, like externalities or negative, the potential for negative outcomes to happen and not necessarily positive outcomes. But, you know, from the Western capitalist view, there's like an advantage and sort of convincing people they need all this and this will make you happy. And you take this pill for that, then you take this pill to like deal with the symptoms of that pill. And then, you know, it's like you shampoo, you like shampoo. Pull your hair to get rid of all the oils and you use all these other hair products to put all the oils back in. And then, you know, the whole cycle. So it just creates this like artificial sort of game that literally leaves us on, leaves us like unhappy at the end of it. We can, we can actually change that. And I see us actually like, you know, getting there and you know, so for me, that's like,

• 1:24:12Speaker 00

  I think it's a race of, race against time more than anything. We're on the right trajectory. It's just, we need to like, accelerate it in the right direction before we like, you know, fly too close to the sun.

• 1:24:22David Hoffman?

  And the dreamer, thank you for coming and sharing your thoughts on layer zero.

• 1:24:25Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. It's great to talk.

• 1:24:26David Hoffman?

  Cheers.

• 1:24:27David Hoffman?

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• 1:25:09David Hoffman?

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