identity, a failed social audio network, the AR metaverse, & tokens w/ danny zuckerman

Welcome to the Armada Podcast, where we are focusing in on DAO governance. Let's hop into the show. If you could start with who you are and what you're working on.

I'm Danny Zuckerman. I'm one of the founders of ThreeBox Labs. We've been working on decentralized identity and data for quite a while. Most recently, that is focused on Ceramic Network, which is just going to mainnet.

And so Ceramic is a, like, output or like a project within your Box3? Yeah,

exactly. So Threebox Labs is an entity, been working on various products. Ceramic is an open source protocol for managing data. So we've been driving it, but along with a great community and other collaborators who have been helping along the way.

Super helpful. And I have a bunch of questions on that one, but I'm going to ask you the question of which is your fictional character you'd like to have dinner with?

Yeah. So I feel like I'm missing some better ones, but I go with Jeb Bartlett. I was a huge West Wing nerd growing up, and that got me hooked on politics and more generally just governance and coordination. And talking to someone who's been in a position like that and had to deal with the most complicated issues on the grandest scales, I think would be super interesting. I think there's so many incredibly hard problems that most of us can't even conceive of when we play armchair critic. And then, yeah, that's, that's the show that I watched like every Wednesday night growing up. So Jeb Bartlett.

That is— it is. So that's the second time I think we've had that answer, and I think it was Andrew Beal. And I'll have to connect you guys if you're not connected, because there feels like there is this sort of— maybe that is a sort of breeding ground for people who should be into governance as fans of that show. That's super fascinating.

Yeah, I think there's like a small army of those of us who wanted to be Sam Seaborne when we grew up, but couldn't make that happen. So got into governance in different ways and found our way into crypto.

That is fascinating. And would you recommend— so I haven't watched the show in depth. I've maybe seen an episode randomly here or there. In 2021, with all the different shows I could be watching, would you make an argument that I should pick that up and watch that?

Wholeheartedly. I think I've seen every episode maybe 9 times now, except for the last couple of seasons when the cast and writers had rotated out. It's definitely not the same as watching it in real time when the show just had a knack for anticipating the biggest issues in politics like a year or two before they happened, but I still think it's the best show ever made.

Wow, wow, that's a strong endorsement. And I'll have to, I'll have to take a look at the ratio of episodes to seasons and all that. I'm going through Star Trek. I just finished up, so I did the original, and then I think I did Next Generation, and I'm now I'm in Deep Space Nine, and I'm watching it through a viewer's guide. And it sounds like West Wing, I couldn't get away with a viewer's guide because of Probably a lack of episodic episodes. Is that a fair characterization of that?

Yeah, I think each season could maybe be done on its own, but it's probably more of a start-to-finish situation.

All right. All right. I have to add it to the queue. I appreciate the recommendation. This many people bringing it up in the governance space, I feel like I'm missing out. Now I'm intrigued.

Yeah, we all have our ever-growing queues of TV shows and books that we have to get to. See if you can read them faster than you add to them.

Absolutely. So I want to hear more about Ceramic. It's just such an interesting, cool idea. So I would love to hear, like, how did the idea come about? And then I want to hear about the broadest vision of it.

Yeah, maybe I'll start with the second because that gives a good framing for how we ended up there. But if you think about the web today, um, it, it runs on mostly information data stored in different places, but the only way we've had to store that data was on centralized servers, each app kind of running their own data infrastructure, which is like the raw hardware, but also the data models and schema, and then how they manage that data and update it and access control it. And that's one of the reasons we have this super fragmented, siloed experience on the web today that we think of as Web2. And so if we want to make the vision of Web3 a reality, and in particular, the vision of a much more fluid web, with applications and services that interoperate really well, where you go from, you know, one site to another and bring your data with. What we need is a way to manage all of the information that underlies those experiences, the data that sits beneath the UI. And so there's been some great advances with other protocols and technologies to do this. And so blockchains are a great way to manage and send value and also PKI infrastructure, keys into lots of hands. And then technologies like IPFS and storage protocols like Filecoin and Arweave are great as raw storage, but there's a layer on top of the raw storage, which is managing the information, updating it, access controlling it, and making it possible for developers to set up a data model and store it on, on whether it's Arweave or Filecoin or a server, and then for other developers to discover that and build on it and compose on it. And so The broadest vision for Ceramic is to be this protocol for cryptographically controlled information that power the web of open information. And so that's the vision. The way that we ended at that broader vision was actually working down from the set of needs we've seen in the ecosystem. So ThreeBox Labs started about 2.5 years ago. We had been working on decentralized identity for quite a while. My co-founder at ThreeBox Labs was one of the founders of Uport. Those who have been in the space for quite a while probably know it as the first self-sovereign identity solution on Ethereum. And so we've been making advances on this core primitive of identity, which is basically how do you actually have this identifier controlled directly by a user with which you can manage and control and bring with you your data. And so ThreeBox Labs had built first a product called ThreeBox that was a decentralized Firebase. It wrapped IPFS and OrbitDB and Ethereum keys and signing into a package that made it easier to manage profiles and data, but in this fairly opinionated And what it lacked was a lot of flexibility to let devs choose their own stack, to work across any blockchain, to work across any file storage protocol. And more and more, we saw this missing need for this core protocol Ceramic for managing information at a really scalable way where you have this verifiable information not tied to any one blockchain or tied to any one application, but that works across any developer stack and across any context.

And so what are some of the use cases that you feel are most exciting that developers are solving with Ceramic?

Yeah, I'll talk about a few of them. Most of them concentrate around this area of identity. Identity is such a broad topic. And so I'll get concrete with the use cases, but again, it's really the ability to attach information to an identifier and then use that in some way. most use cases around identity boil down to that primitive. And that's what the identity protocol on Ceramic enables. And so the first of those is being able to have a single identity that works for multiple different keys across multiple different wallets and multiple different blockchains. So a lot of apps in the blockchain ecosystem today, they'll rely on a hex address, or maybe they have an ENS name with a recognizable human-readable name. But all of those are tied to a single address. And so if you have multiple addresses, because that's good security practice, or if you're using apps across multiple chains, or if you're, for example, like trading on Compound, but then also go to Compound governance, you really want to have a single identity with which you can build reputation, whether it's tied to your legal name or not, to build reputation. Or if you go to a DeFi app to be able to see your portfolio across all of your different, as opposed to have to continue switching between your different keys and accounts every time you want to see your different pools on PoolTogether, for example, or your entire portfolio on Zerion or Zapify. And so this ability to link multiple keys to a single identifier is one really important use case. And then once you do that, you can point that identifier at a bunch of information that you can control directly. So profiles is the first example, and then more rich reputation. So storing skill credentials, which Rabbit Hole and Gitcoin and others are doing, is another. And so you start to build up this really rich reputation And then you can extend that further and start to store directly with you all the content that you as a user are generating. So we have a bunch of apps in the community building different content publishing apps and blogs, but it also applies to like comments and posts. So Boardroom is building some really exciting features around ideation and commenting so that you can have an entire discussion right on the proposal for any given project. But all that data, it's signed, it's decentralized, and it's stored with the user. And so it's completely censorship resistant, but they also don't have to run a server to keep track of IPFS hashes. And so this ability to do social media and user-generated content in a completely decentralized way.

Yeah, that's incredible because I feel like those are key problems that have emerged. And obviously these developers and these teams are working on awesome products to go address that. And you talked about identity broadly, and I'm still, I think, piecing together my shaky hypothesis on the future of decentralized identification. But it sounds like from your perspective, with the technology you guys are building and some of the devs are building on top of your platform, you feel like that's— do you feel like it's a solvable problem? Do you think we'll look back in 5, 10 years and be like, oh, like there's this kind of very simple, or maybe standard is the right word, of being able to handle all of that?

So solvable, yes. Solved, no. And I think the really important thing in the identity world is identity is actually a collection of so many different challenges that all get grouped into this one bucket. And so sometimes when people talk about identity, what they're talking about is anti-Sybil or proof of individuality, because they want a crypto network with one person, one vote instead of token-weighted voting. And other times people mean legal identity for regulation. Other times they just mean being able to personalize an experience by drawing on a huge collection of user data. And these have all been grouped under identity. And I think most of the reason that it's been a Frustrating for people watching and waiting for the space to date is most projects have either tried to tackle all of them, and it's just too many different things that need to be done to tackle all of them, or projects have tried to tackle one of them in isolation, which ignores the relationship between them. And so what we've really seen as we've played in the space for five years now is the common thread between all of these different use cases is the ability to dependably attach. information, whatever that information is, encrypted or not, structured however you want it to be structured, attach information to an identifier and be able to use that identifier and that information across a lot of different contexts and to not rely on any trusted third party to know that information is valid and that identifier controls it. And with that primitive, you can do all of these other things. And so one of the things that we're most excited about with Ceramic is yes, we're working on this identity primitive, But we're working with folks like SpruceID and Microsoft and their identity team and BrightID and all these other identity projects that are working on more encapsulated full products for specific problems within the identity space so that we can tie them all together on a common infrastructure. And that lets each of them build on the data that's aggregated by the other. And so I think we're going to see really rapid advances as this starts to come together.

So you said it's solvable, but solved— do you, when you say not solved, is it a journey? Like the delight's in the journey? Yeah, exactly.

These are complex problems and they're not going to be solved overnight, but I do think that we're starting to see some of them knocked down. We now finally have a way to store signed credentials representing skills or proofs with a user and make use of those, and that's a really important primitive. It's not a big leap to go from that to storing, you know, decentralized KYC, which people have been waiting for a very long time, and from that to, you know, look at a collection of credentials and make a pretty good judgment. Yeah, this person is who they say they are for anti-civil reasons. And so I think that, yeah, not solved yet, but we'll start to see them solved in bigger swathes.

Yeah, I think it's such a fascinating space. And you talked a little bit about how the word identity is quite broad. And my last startup that I was working on was around the social audio space. And one of the things that we really prided ourselves in was this idea of a non-binary digital identity. as it related to social media. And so, one of the ideas was really this, hey, you and I might talk about governance and we might talk about DAOs and crypto, and then there's all these tertiary topics in our lives that we could be talking about, but I don't necessarily know if you're into the NBA. I don't know if you're into golf and you don't know if I'm into skiing or whatever it is, right? And so, I think about even just at a simple social element of identity is incredibly complicated, even collapsed into the abstract of just interacting on a social network, let alone the complexity, let alone what you're talking about of this identity broadly of preventing particular governance, like a Sybil attack and one vote, one person, like those things. And it's such a, it's a great kind of rabbit hole word of identity. And you've obviously thought so much about it, but it's really cool to hear that depth into that word. Kudos to you on that.

Yeah. So I actually got into this world in part because I co-authored a book about identity, nothing to do with digital or technology identity. This was 5 years ago. And in doing that, we studied pretty broadly how people think about identity and how academics think about identity. And usually if you hear that word, you think that identity is singular. You think it is static. This idea of you have this one core identity and you think of it as individual. But as much debate as there is about this rabbit hole word, things that we can say pretty confidently is it's not singular, it's multiple, it's plural. We all have multiple identities in different contexts. It's definitely not static. It's dynamic and ever-changing. And it's also, to your point about social, like, it's not individual. It's really a social thing. It's made up of who our connections are in our relationships and communities. And so it's a tragedy that our identity online today is built to be this singular, static, individual thing when identity should be this much more dynamic and evolutionary thing. And that's what we're trying to reflect in the tech we're building.

Yeah. Yeah. You're solving such a more important problem than we were solving with social identity. But yeah, that premise, and maybe I'm just sad that our idea didn't quite work out. But Zuckerberg has said this, that he believed, at least in the early days, it's probably like a 2012 quote, that your authentic self is whole, it is binary, and you go onto Facebook and you express your authentic self. And I think the delta between a 2012 ideology of a social network like Facebook and what we've seen it erode into in 2021, The idea that I am like my truest self on Facebook is fucking ridiculous. And it's, and I just think it's such an interesting point, right? It's like how many founders, especially building social and Web 2.0, and then these 2005, just getting any digital identity was an accomplishment. And I wonder how many of those kind of patterns we are still dealing with that you're having to break out are going to be really deeply entrenched for probably a generation or so. And Web3 is probably the perfect spot to rebuild that. So I'm just, I'm a super fan.

That's good to hear that. So what was the idea briefly around social identity that you were working on?

Yeah, so it was just this idea of we used questions. So we really had 2 like key hypotheses. Like one was that the way that social got so crazy is that it's a, it's currently a push-based model. So I have to think something and then I have to go ahead and I have to choose to broadcast that. And because it's a push-based mechanism, That lends itself to certain types of content and certain types of personalities dominating feeds. I just think of the classic, the things that most popular things on Instagram, right? It's like sex, money, fame, beauty. Like those things are cut, like they have positive feedback loop because the people who want to share those things want to share those things in abundance. And then they get positive feedback loop through the algorithm. So they share more of it. And then the people who don't want to share those things share less of it because they're being signaled to, to not share that. And so why does the average person have the negative emotions? So. We wanted to flip that and make it poll-based. And so it was like, hey, if you and I ask a question, you ask me a question, anyone can answer a question, especially about a topic they're into. So that was this kind of core thing is like, how do we fix social? Let's pull content out of people by asking great questions and use those, have it human-generated as well as AI-generated to ask awesome questions. So think like Quora, but done with maybe the Snapchat DNA and say like, how do we pull this stuff out of people? And then the second piece of it, when I pull something out of you because it's a pull-based model. Now I have the ability to categorize and think about what this piece of content is because you can preprocess it and then facilitate conversations with the people in your life or even that you don't know about that thing. If you ask me about basketball and I answer that and you notice a bunch of other people who are in my social graph have asked about basketball, you can instantly move us into the basketball space and ask us more basketball questions and even facilitate conversation about basketball between us. You and I might connect on the same platform and we might talk about governance. And perhaps that's the only thing you and I overlap in the entire world. You and I might have an incredible relationship only through governance, but if you and I exist on Facebook or even Twitter for that matter, or Instagram, like good luck, because you're going to hear about basketball and you're going to hear about golf and you're going to hear about all this crap that you may not care about. And so that was like kind of this piece of how do you flip social from push to pull? And then how do we use different topics to build out your identity within a specific thing like Google? Circles and Google+, like they touched on this a little bit, but it was way too intellectual and we were trying to dumb it down by using questions. So that's the mini pitch, but it failed miserably, but it might be something there in the next 5 to 10 years that someone will figure out.

Yeah, I love that. I hope someone else does pick it up. I love the inquisitive nature of it to come back to this concept that your identity is always changing and we're actually discovering it and growing it all the time. And so your concept fed directly into that, pulling everybody into these new areas, whether they're already interested or just on the fringe and really priming them to keep growing and keep discovering.

We had a really fun category that we didn't expect to be so amazing, but it was like a would you rather. And we had all the G-rated to X-rated would you rathers. And it was incredible because any question like that, it pulls out a bunch of like philosophical questions, a bunch of personality traits about a person's thing. But it also teases then what are these sort of completely strange topics that you don't think you ever would have talked about or interacted with? And then you're interacting and consuming the content of friends that are doing that same thing, you're able to build a really cool topic graph of these things by having these weird, strange questions that you really can't quite inject in classic Web2 social. So to your point about evolving identities, if you didn't even know to think about that question, let alone answer it, and then let alone see your friend answer it, that might create or at least pull out an element of your personality. in your identity that you didn't even quite realize. And that was just a really cool learning from the project, but I will stop pitching my failed startup on anyone listening.

Yeah, I do love that because it actually can come back a little bit to what is different on Web3 compared to Web2, 'cause you mentioned that just isn't seen in Web2 platforms. But when we start to build our identities around cryptography and have these cryptographic identities that start as completely anonymous, but we start to aggregate data around them publicly or privately, and build these pseudonymous reputations. Maybe some people choose to disclose who they actually are, but the ultimate vision is you have really fine-grained access control over who has what information about you. And that can take a lot of different shapes. I won't go into kind of the technologies we're considering there, but it can happen in a lot of ways, including things like disclosing something in a zero-knowledge way. And so maybe you have this would you rather And you're part of this community that's on this network. And you can see that someone or someone in this group has shared something really surprising or exciting. And that person can disclose that. And you can seek cryptographic proof that it is someone with this reputation or this affiliation, but you can't see who it is. And that's all guaranteed by the cryptography, not a centralized party keeping all that data safe. And so that's like a small example. When we have these dynamic forms of identity and you can mix and match different data at different times, and you can rely on some of these privacy techniques People will be way more free to bring the different parts of themselves across different environments because they don't have to choose pseudonymous or anonymous or themselves fully in any one circumstance. They can do it time by time and app by app.

Yeah, I love that. I hate to admit this on my podcast, but I have a great friend from high school and he's, he's kind of all in on the conspiracy deep, deep down the rabbit hole. And him and I have so many shared interests, but he's also got some way out there beliefs And he's on Twitter and I think he's been banned at this point of some of his beliefs. And again, I won't share any of them because they're just, they're way down the rabbit hole. But I feel bad because probably once a quarter, maybe twice a year, I check out his Reddit handle. I could go to reddit.com/username, and I'm not sure he knows that anyone goes in depth, but the comments that he's dropping across all of these different topics is just, it's so entertaining to me because I know who he is, but these people don't know who he is. And they see these conversations, these arguments, and they like, And it's just such a, like, it's strange form of entertainment for me that I, again, I'm embarrassed to share. But the point that I'm sharing this is that I think you're totally right, is that you could use that in a different structure to actually tease out more authentic conversations within particular verticals. And I think that in that world, he's totally comfortable articulating those ideas and he should feel empowered and great. Go do that. But it's so strange that it's getting laddered up back to this core identity that then someone like me. Can just go to some public Reddit URL and be like, oh, yep. Like I get to see the 9 different facets of his identity exposing his kind of authentic self, which I'm serving up a little bit as entertainment, but it could be far more nefarious than that. It could be far more damaging to a person's reputation for that. It's a really strange thing. And so it's this flash of the dichotomy between what you're building and saying, hey, we could actually do that in a, in a trustless way and in a decentralized Web3 way. And then I'm experiencing, I'm like watching it almost from a Reddit admin perspective of, oh, yep. Like, here's how this person's behaving in all these different ways. It's such an interesting framing for me that I totally agree with you. We can actually be more authentic and actually have better conversations about the things that are meaning to us in that Web3 vision that you were describing.

Yeah, I absolutely agree.

So sorry for everyone that had to listen to my failed pitch. And I do, I have one specific question, Ceramic, that I was looking at this like GeoWeb thing. And it's been like, ever since I saw Pokémon Go, I've just been thinking about this idea of like putting another meta layer on top of the world. And GeoWeb strikes me that it's like totally solving something like that. Can you explain what GeoWeb is?

Yeah, so they're one of the first projects to go live. They've been building on Ceramic for like 9 months now, back to the earliest testnet days. And they're doing, they're building this AR metaverse, but doing it in a really interesting way to try to build fairness in from the start. I think it's well known that Facebook and Apple and Google and all these big tech companies are going after AR as this next big platform, and GeoWeb wants to do that in a decentralized way where everybody owns a piece of it. And so the way they're doing that is basically you have this map of the world, almost this AR metaverse of the physical world, and they've carved it up into parcels of land. And they've got some interesting blog posts on how they actually did that. It's not a trivial engineering task. And they represent each parcel with an NFT. And so that NFT is ownership and rights over that basically digital airspace for that land. But they've done 2 really interesting things beyond that. It's not just like putting an NFT on AR. They've built a pretty complete and compelling system of property for those NFTs and for that land, starting with herberge taxes, which for those who aren't aware, it's this— and I might get some of the details slightly wrong, so apologies. But the way a harborage tax works is the owner of a piece of, in this case, land of this NFT, help assesses a value on that land. Based on that value, they pay a tax that goes into, in the GeoWeb case, a fund that pays for common pool resources. You can think of it as like the GeoWeb network treasury that will fund other public goods like development of the network and governance and other things like that. And so they pay this tax based on a self-assessed value. The catch is anybody can come buy that parcel of land at any time at that self-assessed value. So if you set a really high value, no one's going to come buy it, but you're going to pay higher taxes. If you try and squat on land without paying much taxes on it, anybody else can come buy it from you and use the land. And so ownership over that land then gives you rights to put AR content into this AR metaverse that you can explore with the GeoWeb browser or with any other browser built on top of it. You can put a menu outside of your restaurant, you could put advertising, though we hope that's not really the dominant use case, display information, really anything. They have a cool demo where they're putting penguins all over Manhattan on some parcels that they own. And so it can really fill any use case that you have this one AR platform you can go to. All that content though, so the NFTs represent the, the land. But in this case, the NFTs actually need to be able to control the content that's showing up in this AR metaverse on that parcel. And that's what they're using Ceramic for. Ceramic is this dynamic information network where— so we talk about the role of identity as controlling information and controlling these access flows of information. Users can have identity, but so can NFTs, so could organizations. And so in this case, the NFTs are actually the identities. There's a a spec called NFT DID. So DID is decentralized identity, and it turns NFTs into DIDs. And with that, they can control these Ceramic data streams and store this virtual penguin on Ceramic. And then I can go buy that parcel and decide instead of a penguin, I want to show a rerun of West Wing and drop in the content that is that video rerun of West Wing. And then anybody who walks by that parcel will see that instead. And so you have this ability to attach content really dynamically to these different parcels. And have the single AR metaverse that is collaboratively owned and really fairly operated from a property rights perspective.

Thank you for taking us through that. And I love the tie back to how Ceramic fits in that because I feel like it goes back to like, how does a technology layer like that kind of solve another key use case? I appreciate the taking us through a different project, but doing the best you can. Great. Thank you.

Yeah. And I will, I'll say they're @TheGeoWeb on Twitter, and I'm sure that there's some aspects I got wrong. So if anybody wants to look into it more, I'm sure they'd love to answer questions on Twitter.

Of course. And I'll put a link in the show notes. So you had a great Twitter thread around this relationship between tokens and communities, and you posed 2 questions. Can DAOs bring virtue back to scaled organization, or they accelerate the economics-only mentalities that have been corroding society? And I don't want you to have to repeat the whole thread, and I'll put a link in that, but can you just talk a little bit about, like, how you see the balance of those 2 questions and perhaps a little bit where you think we might be leaning?

Yeah. So I guess I'll start by saying one of the really key questions here is, what are tokens and how are they deployed? And I don't mean that in a super meta way, but tokens are this programmable money. And there's this question of how much are they a mechanism on their own, To just incentivize and align coordination in a way that we've never had before. So that's what hooked me about blockchain early on was it's the best coordination tool we've ever had as humanity if we deploy it right. And can DAOs bring virtue back to scaled organizations? Can we encapsulate both economic incentives, but also other values into this completely trustless architecture that let us scale up coordination around whether it's a for-profit purpose or cross-national governance or just picking up trash, like super scalable, super efficient. And we don't need to introduce these layers of bureaucracy and the principal-agent problem and all of these other issues that happen as soon as we scale past Dunbar's number, which has always been the issue with scaled coordination in the past. And so DAOs might represent a way to get around what is basically corruption as humans try to scale organizations and corruption, both in the way that people think of corrupt governments and actual bribes, but also there's just like a corruption of kind of an aligned purpose that happens naturally with bureaucracy. And so that's one, one way this plays out. And I think the promise of this— the, the peril side is tokens are in some ways money, right? And they're more than economic incentives, but they are also economic incentives. And you could argue that that is their primary use case to date. And to the degree that they're money, I think there's an underappreciation of how money impacts social groups. And people think that markets are a great mechanism for finding the right price for things and for allocating capital. And that's very true, but markets and money work best in like really discrete situations that are purely economic. And most of the situations that we have in our lives are not markets. They are relationships or they are communities or They are just agreeing to abide by laws, so not speeding or not driving on the wrong side of the road, or they're just cultural norms. And so there's these other factors that drive our behavior most of the time that are not markets and are not driven by money. And those factors, we're motivated by other things. So we're motivated by our reputation and status. We don't want to get the reputation of the person who always dips out before the bill is paid or shows up and is obnoxious and no one wants to invite back. And that drives how we behave in certain circumstances and why we might contribute in ways where maybe it costs us time and we don't get any reward. And then there's just cultural norms and values and morality, which are an even more deeply ingrained phenomenon that drives behavior, not just across time the way reputation does, but on an even broader scale. And there's all this research that when you introduce money into situations that are mostly driven by reputation and morality, you don't augment people's incentives, you crowd out the other ones and you can actually have these reverse and perverse incentives where you just turn everything into a market and that's really harmful. And so that would be the peril side is introducing money into environments that have been potentially really effectively guided by reputation or by morality. Maybe we corrupt our morality and corrupt our reputational incentives and actually do more harm.

I love the question. It's an important question for us to contemplate. And the 2 examples that you highlighted are like some of my absolute favorites. And you linked, I think, Moral Economy, which I'll put in the show notes. It reminds me a little bit of some of the work that Daniel Kahneman did with Thinking Fast and Slow and Gary Klein with Intuition and these like System 1, System 2 thinking and how you handle some of these economics. But the example you highlighted, which I thought was amazing, was this Israeli school that added a fine for late pickups and the late pickups just skyrocketed because it was like a $5 fine or something like that. So people no longer had the reputation or their guilt. And so they allowed that. They're like, was it worth me being late for $5? And to your point, that just completely changed the entire relationship that was previously held with some social glue. And so I think it is really important for us to make sure that we're asking these questions and thinking about it, because I do think broadly the people working in Web3 in general were more logical and rational and mathematicians. And so we think about these things of like, okay, what's equilibrium look like and incentive structures? And you get into these sort of weird academic models as opposed to real-world models. I think there's another classic one that's like the economist walks by the $100 building on the ground because it's impossible that it would exist. And then the layman walks by and just picks it up because it's the real world. And occasionally $100 falls out of someone's pocket. And I do think it's something we need to really be thoughtful because that's certainly— if this whole DAO thing fails, it certainly feels like that might be a key culprit of it.

Yeah. And I think the even more nightmare scenario is that the whole DAO thing succeeds. But not in its original aims. And so I look at social networks here. Early on, the narrative around Facebook was it was bringing communities together and connecting people from Yemen to California and these incredibly powerful and good stories. And that was 8 years ago, maybe max 10 years ago. And that was dominantly positive. But then as society adapted to that, it became the norm. Something else happened, which was this communication, which started in this really positive way because we hadn't really adapted. Um, it completely changed the tenor of communication, and every piece of communication became a— I think it was Jonathan Haidt that said, like, every piece of communication became a performance and a chance to build status. And we don't want every social interaction in a DAO to be a chance to build wealth, because then that just eliminates all the other interactions that Shouldn't be market-based and shouldn't be self-interested and will all be much worse.

Yeah, absolutely agree. And I just remembered the name of the podcast, Freakonomics, the book as well. I feel like there was perhaps that was one of those examples of one of the many episodes, but I'll put some show notes on The Moral Economy as well, as well as a link to the thread because it's a great one. I appreciate the in-depth conversation. If you could remind people where to find you, and thanks again for joining.

Yeah, of course. I'm @Dazuck on Twitter, D-A-Z-U-C-K. More importantly, We're at Ceramic Network. And so if you're working in the space, especially working on governance or identity or just managing data, or just curious about how we can build a more interesting web where we're all more in control and can do more interesting things, come say hi.

Awesome. Thanks again.

Thank you. This was fun.

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