integrity-verification-as-a-service, participation, & reputation w/ marcus phillips

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.

Uh, yeah, my name is Marcus Phillips, and I consider myself, uh, sort of an outspoken stakeholder in the emerging of our collective infrastructure of coordination. I think a lot about how humans coordinate both historically and now, and what we can do to make citizens of the world we're stepping into better empowered to participate in authorities that emerge.

And I have so many questions, but I'm going to ask you the simplest question, which is, which fictional character would you like to have dinner with?

Uh, yeah, I just recently saw a trailer for an old movie I used to love when I was a kid called Short Circuit. Johnny 5 is this adorable little robot that escapes from a military, you know, experiment base production factory thing, and, uh, and he goes and gains consciousness and wants input.

Wow. And so how much of it is nostalgia and how much of it is, you know, that character's journey that you'd be interested in discussing with?

Well, what a great premise, right? Like, he's an actual anthropomorphic, like one of the early representations we had of this cyborg future. And he was, he was just an adorable kid who wanted to learn and to help people. And he just happened to be equipped with incredibly powerful weapons that, uh, that he needed to be stewarded into the community, um, wisely, such that he could, uh, he could play well with the rest of us who are already here. And, um, I don't know, that, uh, I think it appealed to me as a kid because I, I felt like, um, I felt like it was important that society embrace me and one another, uh, as kindly and open-heartedly as possible. But also, I guess it was kind of prescient, right? Like, that's what we're all living through,

right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's, it's funny. I became a father about 4 years ago, and this transition of, you know, being a child and then having my own child just like really opened up my, my heart and my mind to kind of what you're talking about of like watching and, you know, getting cut off in traffic and being like, oh, that's just a grown-up baby who cut me off and they just want to be loved and accepted and they have a bunch of shit that's piled on. you know, in life that has made life challenging and maybe them rough around the edges that's made me mad in this particular moment. But it really gave me a different perspective. And I'm hearing a little bit of that emotion in that of like, you know, we all just sort of want that, yet life happens. And then all of a sudden, you know, people are assholes and all sorts of different things. So it's a, it's a totally interesting character to have dinner with.

Hmm. I think he's probably learned a lot since since he was first invented. I'd like to know what he learned.

Absolutely. So I would love to know, you talked about this idea of studying governance broadly. What inspires you to want to learn about that and dig into it? What's the inspiration behind that?

I think I just find it difficult to maintain lies and deceitful structures. It's just uncomfortable and expensive. And yeah, I want to live in a world where I don't have to anticipate how people are reshuffling the story. So I have a policy that I've kind of lived by since I was a kid. Maybe it was part of my values growing up, or maybe it was something that I I felt I just had to bet on because it was the only game I knew. But, uh, you know, the policy was just treat everybody like they were part of my family unless they prove otherwise. And, um, you know, I've got, I've got some intuitions around what family means to me, uh, but I'd love, I'd love to be in a world where it was relatively safe to make that assumption about most people you bump into.

Absolutely. And What was the inflection point or the transition point from being interested in that to actually kind of working, contributing, and thinking about that problem space?

Well, I suppose, you know, a long teenage history of idealism and curiosity about how people make group decisions and how different choices prevail as the law of the land. I eventually stumbled into the guy who taught me to program, actually, while I was at university. I wasn't a computer science major. I just took all sorts of classes in it for fun. And as a result, I wound up spending all this time sleeping over at a dorm full of like maybe 8 computer programmers all stuffed in, you know, to save money on a small apartment. And I became the 9th sleeping on the floor learning programming. And the one who I consider, you know, sort of the mentor of the group, he was really into, you know, distributed governance and automation. He built a simulation of how a bunch of independent agents could all self-assemble into achieving some goal. And that was like a physical, visible implementation of the ideas I'd always been interested in. So I just followed that thread until, geez, that was, that must've been about 2000. And it was 2008 when I was in San Francisco and starting to spend a lot more time with cryptographers and security analysts and And more and more of the things I had done in the background as an amateur became, it became clear to me how it could become a profession and a focus. So I've been, I've been thinking about it that way ever since.

Yeah. Wow. That's a, it's a really interesting path in there. And one obviously not as common as you'd like to kind of see, given, I think, the hype and the accelerated growth and all of that. And it's always, it's always a pleasure to speak to people who have been kind of thinking about this way before any of the hype. That game that you referenced, by the way, is it at all anything similar to sort of a more collective, like Game of Life type implementation, or am I off basis on drawing parallels?

Are you referring to the simulation that my mentor wrote? Yes. Yeah. So that actually wasn't a game. It was a simulation of a bunch of robots self-assembling to build certain structures like a wrench shape or a crescent moon. similar to like how drones would co-coordinate to understand like which member of the swarm is going to go where. But he— it was sort of a proof of concept of decentralized decision-making. Right. And since then, that same guy went on to do some really interesting things, writing some of the early voting systems that were using like blind signing and trying to find less fraud-vulnerable patterns of voting for, you know, wherever we want to use them. They deployed them in a couple interesting places. And so those are the, those are the kinds of projects that, that he was working on.

So you talked about this sort of, you know, childhood vision and values and how you think about the world's optimal operation. And then you talked about this, this path that you're going into. You know, what is it like? Why is governance and this type of decision-making and procedures and whatnot, why is that so important for humanity and technology? What do you think makes that so important to you?

Yeah, so I mean, I guess the youthful intuition is just, boy, this could be better. You know, like, why do I have to watch my back? Why do I Why do I have to worry that someone might have a self-interest that differs from mine and that they're going to take advantage of me? I mean, after enough game theory, we all come to understand why that's baked in and why that's always gonna be part of any multi-agent game. But sure, it sure seems like it would be nice to live in an environment where there were regions of better safety for high-integrity collaborators, right? So I pride myself on showing up for the people who I've committed something to. I don't, um, I don't like the feeling even of being absent from a, from a commitment. So as a result, I really like having the option and the opportunity to collateralize my reputation and my integrity as the basis for my membership in teams. I'd like to, I'd like to be welcome in as many teams as possible, um, and I'd like to be treated fairly when I get there. So as a citizen of those teams, there are certain, uh, assurances that can be afforded through cryptographic mechanisms that, that I would really like to see take root in the communities I'm a member of.

Right. Yeah. And you're certainly, you're, you're scratching your own itch a bit there and then, and then building a future that That captures that. And it's certainly, it's a little bit unusual, I think, in this broader space where I think there's often a little bit more, you know, collective thinking of like, hey, you know, the society will be able to do X if we can, if we can just solve Y now. And what I love about the way you're thinking about it is you can actually put yourself back into the shoes and solve kind of from the bottoms up, which in product development, at least in the Web2 world, I've always had much more success building product from that basis as opposed to trying to accomplish some sort of broad fuzzy vision. So I love that approach.

Yeah, it helps me stay focused. I think I've participated when I was younger, certainly, in some of the enthusiasm for my personal vision of how everything could fit together. And the way that I spent the years since I first learned these ideas has been primarily red teaming various architectures that I envision, uh, represent these ideas in practice, right?

Right.

So prior to cryptocurrencies, it was hard to have a conversation with anyone about these ideas and, and get, um, get resonance, uh, have them even identify that something interesting was being discussed in the first place. Um, so, uh, a lot of that time was spent just, um, asking myself the question, okay, but if I presume that there's a flaw in my proposal, what is it? Right. And I always found one. And that actually was a little bit disheartening because I had this conviction that it could be done. And every time I would find a flaw, I would think, well, that's solvable, but every solution feels like a complicated hack. Like, what am I missing about the premise here that makes this problem arise? And so I would go back to the drawing board a little bit and reconceptualize the primitives. and see what world they seemed to lead to. And when I, when I started running out of scenarios that I could think of where the primitives, as I understand them, would work against us as a society, when I started running out, I started just really craving conversation with people who could help me either find the flaw or build whatever safe subset of these tools will help us coordinate, you know, the things we want to work on together.

Yeah, that's a— I love the approach and I love all the thinking of how you got there. It's obviously very intentional and very procedural, which I think is really important in this space given that the stakes— I mean, the stakes aren't particularly high at the exact moment, but getting the foundational and the kind of initial settings and parameters right is high stakes. And so I kind of think about this launching patterns, great to hear, they're sort of thinking at that basis. Changing gears a little bit, what do you think about this idea of governance as a service? Is that the right approach, do you think, for a lot of different things? Like, talk to me a little bit around why that's an interesting strategy to bring high-level governance to lots of projects.

Yeah, absolutely. I think, I think it's a useful phrase. I can certainly pick nits about the phrase itself. You know, I am one member of GovernorsDAO, so as such, I sort of speak for myself, and I, and I, and I don't, I don't, I don't hope even to do a good job of representing governance as a service since I didn't invent that term, but a term that I I certainly do resonate with, it comes pretty close and could be another way to say the same thing, is integrity verification as a service.

Interesting.

So let me, let me pick the nit in public about governance as a service, because I know that the person who wrote that would feel comfortable with me having that conversation with you in their, in their stead and see how it plays out, right?

Yes.

Governance is the goodies at the center. It's the thing that makes the whole project either centralized or decentralized. So the crux of what we worry about, those of us who worry at all about the decentralized future we're going into, is that in the shuffle to decentralize infrastructure, we will lose the narrative and fail to decentralize governance. So the infrastructure will have decisions made about it and about its functioning and about its— the passage of its control from generation to generation that are dictated by the governance that program, that community chooses, right?

Right.

So if governance is the goodies to protect and do our best as a community to leave those authorities in the appropriate hands. Maybe that's our hands, maybe that's someone else's hands, maybe that's distributed hands, maybe that's, uh, some complicated structure where everybody functions like one of the fingers. And my analogy is getting a little strained here, but, uh, there are a lot of ways in which authority can be distributed. And, um, and I'm very concerned about the question, uh, who considers themselves justified in claiming control and ownership of governance authorities. So governance as a service, I want to be careful that we don't send the message that we hope to show up and govern other systems because that— Right. That would make us a weak link in the chain. We would simply become the new centralizers, and I don't have any interest in in recentralizing power away from any of the nodes it's at now to, to me or to other people. Um, I just hope for a functioning society where, um, governance can self-distribute to its most appropriate, stable, robust, uh, rewarding location. And I don't even know how— I don't even consider myself the qualified party to define those terms. Right. I would love to live in a society where, uh, our collective culture has a conversation producing conclusions about what structures can make shared decisions, um, and how we want to negotiate the transfer or delegation of that authority.

Right. And I, I totally— I, now that you've explained it, I can see how, yeah, someone may assume, like, and I, like, I don't know why this is coming to my mind, but I'm sort of thinking the British Empire is in their colonies and sort of like that felt like governance as a service. It's like, hey, we're going to take over this land and we're going to have this symbolic land and you guys are the United 13 Colonies or India and all that, South Africa, all the areas that they've colonized. But that's governance as a service. And then you have to pay all these kickbacks back to the king and all this stuff. And it's

like,

that's certainly not what I hear you trying to build. And I could see someone being sort of misinformed about that. It's really about this idea of empowering them to set it up kind of in their own right. Um, remind me what the— you had kind of proposed a counter acronym or phrase, uh, as a service. What was that phrase?

Uh, integrity verification as a service.

Integrity verification. I love that.

Uh, yeah, I, I think in general, uh, these, these projects that we're seeing attempt to decentralize further, right? Like, I actually think that the ideals in the communities that run cryptocurrencies or, you know, DeFi projects, the people I meet who actually run these things are extremely pro-social. They're extremely interested in the thriving of society. Some of them believe that making a great deal of money is in conflict with, you know, like improving society. Others don't see any conflict and And, and across the board, they seem pretty sincere at first blush, at least in what they'd like to contribute to society. Now, I say at first blush because it would be a really good idea for any such project to make commitments to their community as to what their values are that they're trying to implement with the things they're building. And that those values and commitments and conversations could guide where the governance authority moves over time.

Right.

It could be seen in retrospect as a mistake that we got into these situations where large companies have a power that some tremendous number of people think deserves to be taken back, right? That's, that's an instability in the system, and it'd be nice if we had been having the conversation all along to say, hey, uh, you're gonna build that piece of infrastructure, huh? That sure would be great. Um, we don't want— we don't want you to, uh, become our new dictator as a result. Is that cool?

Right.

And, and that, that agreement could be could be seen and confirmed early on. So that's something that I hope to help do, provide the community with good ideas as to what to ask of the teams that are building these things, and to give those teams good ideas as to how to talk about their values and how to implement structures that give safety to the users they're trying to facilitate.

Yeah, I love the thinking in the framework of how to move through that. It is very refreshing to hear your view on that. You mentioned something around making a lot of money, and is that at odds with the mission and the value of these? And obviously part of your point was that some of that is not necessarily always defined and it could or should be, but some of the conversations I've had with some of my friends from the Web2 world, Is this like there's almost this element of like well you know are you're adding governance and DAOs and all these things but you're doing it sort of in this like neo-capitalistic structure like is that just taking capitalism and the downsides of capitalism even further in amplifying the downsides of that or do you see this as sort of a like this sort of neo-capitalist world that we're potentially in? As being— I'm reframing that question a little bit. I'm giving you kind of false choices, so I apologize. So feel free to throw away my 2 options. But the other side of it, I feel like it could be a path where we allow more people to be bigger shareholders and have more influence in decision-making, that things are more transparent. And so the fact that making a lot of money is baked in there isn't necessarily a problem. It's sort of an exhaust of a successful system. Does that question make sense?

It certainly does, and that doesn't make it easy to answer. I think a fair amount of what we have to do is align our language a little bit. So when we say make a lot of money, we've already kind of given up any shot at coming to see things the same way, because the word money really needs to have a useful definition for us to make any sense out of what comes next, right? So I'd like to offer what I think these— what I think, uh, let's offer a useful definition of money that seems pretty general across how most people use it, right? Money is an attempt by any group of people to implement a proxy mechanism for keeping track of productivity. Who, who produced the goods that we are sharing? Mm-hmm. Right? Does that seem like a fair starting point?

Love that. Yep.

So depending on what instrument we choose and how we specifically implement it, there comes along with that intention a bunch of baggage, a bunch of things that are encouraged and supported that we didn't intend. We weren't trying— for example, the choice of the word productivity. Right? We say that it helps track who produced the goodies. But some of the things we want authority over aren't production. Some of the things we want authority over are— we would like to trust someone to bring a room full of people together who will have a peaceful and joy-filled dinner. That authority has nothing to do with production unless you reclassify group formation as production. But maybe you care more about the integrity of a person who does that than their productivity, right? Right. Maybe you want them to represent the group's interests really well. So as soon as you choose an instrument, you've got all these failure modes that are baked into the game rules that instrument supports. So let me trace back to your question. So, and together we will succeed at figuring out what it is we're talking about.

Let's do

it. So I propose that, let me see if I can rephrase your question. I think your question amounts to, is it okay that some of these founders want to make a lot of money? And perhaps furthermore, is it okay that the work some founders are doing moves us towards a world that looks more dominated by money than the one we're in right now?

Right.

Are those good ways to say what you're asking, or did I miss anything?

Yeah, I think it gets at the crux of it, of like, you're moving into this world where there's like money to be made, which is causing some different types of incentives, but then we're also bringing more people to the table. So I think your question sets that up. You're reframing the question. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, I guess it really depends on what the word money means in a subsequent generation, right? So I would love to earn things that don't resemble the money we talk about today, but in addition to earning the right to have a meal, When, when I'm, when I'm in my old age and, and I'm hoping that people will help take care of me when I, when I can't take care of myself. So that's certainly a thing that money is perhaps trying to do. I'd like, I'd like that to happen for me and everyone. But I'd also like to earn people's esteem and goodwill and respect. Those are things that I just enjoy. I enjoy being in communities where I have earned that. And I enjoy being given a fair game to play where I can, where I can earn it at the speed that, that I, uh, that I, that I, um, I don't want to say deserve because I don't feel so much like I deserve it, but I'd like to, I'd like to know that the ground rules have my best interests at heart. Right. Uh, so I want, I want a lot of whatever that stuff is. Uh, and if you, if you call it money, um, okay, but I, I don't, I don't feel comfortable calling the thing we need to earn anymore money. I think some of the founders of some of these projects agree with that sentiment. They don't, they don't need the money. They need, they need to see the rest of their values, um, enriched. They want to see the world thrive. They want to see the communities that are being good contributors well rewarded. Um, and currently that's all denominated in money, for better and worse. Uh, so— Right. Do they want to make a lot of money? Yes and no.

I see. Yeah, it's a really— it's an interesting framing to sort of say, like, wait a second, let's, let's talk about the definition of money, because it really does reframe the entire question. And, and it's interesting as we think about, you know, taking tokenifying just about everything, right? We're like, in some cases, basically adding liquidity to all these different things that we used to not necessarily measure. And now there's markets for it. And there's— and so it is interesting. There's just broadly think about what money represents. And so I think that the rabbit hole you went down with that, I think actually it helps answer the question indirectly, almost at a pre— not a second order, but like a pre-negative first order. It fundamentally changes the entire question, and I appreciate that perspective on that. One question that I'm seeing kind of debated a little bit in the governance space is this idea of active heavy participation in governance. And you see some of these reports and whatnot of different protocols, and it'll say, hey, 3% of people voted on a particular issue. Do you think active participation by a good, healthy chunk— and we obviously, we probably need to define that word, but you call it a majority of the token holders— is an important component in governance?

When, when the cost of doing so is affordable, yes. If you have a small group, you have a, you have a friend group who organizes events for their community and, you know, the second-degree group, right? That's a small enough group that high participation for something that relates closely to the, to the outcomes that people care about. I can't imagine what it would feel like to be one of 2 voting members on a board that decides what the next event will be. That would feel like a lot of responsibility unless my peers trusted me a lot. Right. Whereas in something like voter participation in some of the larger blockchain projects out there, that's implausible. The only thing one should really expect to happen is that a tiny number of people who believe that Ethereum or some other coin is, uh, the important, the important protocol to weigh in about, uh, that tiny number of people who have time and, and expertise to talk about it are gonna, are gonna be the, the decision makers. There are other structures we can posit with, for example, liquid democracy and similar structures of passing your vote along, or or measuring your network simply to find out dissatisfaction rates, right?

Right.

Any member of the network can do a sampling from their local point in the graph to neighboring nodes and say, have you heard any rumblings about governance issues being a problem? That community advocate role is one that must exist. if you want to run a project that is esoteric and crucial for society. Everybody's gonna have— everybody's a stakeholder in the infrastructure of how we transact everything in the future. So it'd be nice if we could surface those problems through some network that's perhaps optimized through some of these roles that people play and functions that they implement in a decentralized system.

I feel like the first example you made around the lunch or event committee, sorry, the event selection, there was an element I feel like of access being hinted in there, right? It's like, hey, if there's only 2 people making this decision on the behalf of, let's say, 50 people, that sort of out-of-balanceness is the feeling that I feel like you're articulating because the other 48 didn't have the access or the option to participate in that. And then I feel like your Bitcoin Example, in the Ethereum example, there was a bit of a filtering or an expertise or reputation variable in there. So is that a fair sort of encapsulation that as we think about voter participation, the accessibility as well as the reputation, those are 2 variables that you can kind of play with to get a more balanced governance system?

Well, I love that read, and I'm learning from hearing you say it back to me. So it's interesting to look at it through that lens. I was using a slightly different lens that I could clarify, because I think it's another interesting point. But yeah, I think what you're pointing out is really essential. So, you know, that's another interesting lens to look at it through. If I may clarify, yeah, I was thinking of 2 people who are close friends with all 50, and just, they're the only voters who turned up at the booth.

Right, exactly.

And they think, huh, shoot. Am I, you know, like, if the other person in this voting scenario has a political agenda against me and they use, they use this as their opportunity to wage a proxy war about some petty interpersonal issue, then the outcome that the group wants is not about to happen because we will be adjudicating, like, you know, maybe they'll be playing chicken with their votes and I'm going to be asking them. To to to put all of that decision-making negotiation into the bucket where it belongs, but because there's low voter turnout, there's not a lot else that that I don't have negotiating power as the other party in that decision. So I would be uncomfortable as one of only two people showing up to to make decisions on behalf of a group of fifty close friends unless they trust me very much. I might I might have options like report to the community. that I recuse myself because I think I'm not gonna do a great job of negotiating with this particular individual. And I believe this is a great individual who will have a great conversation with another person, or I could have another conversation with another person. I just don't think we're the 2 people to decide this together today.

Right.

That's an option I would have that the community might rely on me to use my discernment to choose. I'm hoping that larger projects like Bitcoin, like Ethereum, and like many of the projects that we're in talks with at GovernorsDAO that attempts to support people in this project, I certainly hope that the largest of projects decides to engage their communities in similar ways, with similar gestures of sincerity of what it is, and even sometimes binding binding themselves into certain decisions that will make clear to the community where this project is trying to go and what outcomes will be considered successful by the founders themselves, uh, and then the people who have authority within those systems.

Yeah, I, I think that fluidity of decision-making and being able to dynamically not only as the individual agent step away from a decision, but the collective replacing that person to make a decision or changing the parameters or the values that they want to go into. When I think of the US political system, which I'll save us from going down deep down that rabbit hole, but I think of that accountability feedback loop and the timeline on it and the lack of dynamicness of the fact that we have the same particular person involved in a million different decisions across a million different topics. Just seems like a very outdated mental model that I suspect in the future we'll look back at and say, why was the same person making governance decisions on healthcare? And then the next one is gun access, and the next one is the military. It's such an interesting thing where there are probably much better representation from that particular geographic region or whatever the stakeholders might be to change that out dynamically. and have shared values across that. And so that's what I love about the way you think about this is that you almost start with the assumption of like, well, of course, it should be fluid and dynamic. And like the person who's in the decision-making seat has accountability to make an assessment of whether or not they even are in a spot to make a decision. It's just a really refreshing perspective. And I appreciate that and hearing that from you.

The comment you made about the US government and how It's got this centralization property, and that we might look back on that as, as having been a quirk of history. I want to, I want to point out what I think is a structural limitation that puts us in that situation, whether we like it or not. The central— the centralized properties of a lot of our systems relate to the fact that we don't have the ability to measure and affect other people's reputations at any distance in the social network, right?

Right. So

no one— I am not allowed to collateralize my reputation among my friends when I do business in the world directly. I have to use— I have to collateralize the reputation of the United States. I have to hand over dollars for everything or some other local currency, but, but, but it's not an option for me to spend a different resource that I've earned through different means that serves a different goal. So for example, maybe I want to meet people who worry about these projects very much, and I do. I really love meeting people who think about these things in similar ways and are trying to make sense of it. I like building diagrams with them and helping them with their project. But there's a, there's a challenge for me in earning the local network social credibility. I just have to do it one group at a time.

Right.

And I would really love to carry with me some of the credibility I've earned in past groups and communities so that when I show up, there's a, there's a visible chain, like direct. I know this person, they know that person, that person knows Marcus, and Marcus is collateralizing his reputation at his local network in order to extend a beacon out to where I am in the network. And I can see provably that he has wagered, he has wagered his credibility on how he and I adjudicate or dispute the outcomes of our interaction.

Yeah, I think that's such a fascinating world that I am optimistic that we will, will be in soon. And obviously there's, there's projects out there that are starting to scratch the surface of this, but you're totally right. I mean, humans sort of, you know, at a tribal level, I think of the old person who's the wise one, and they're sort of naturally in their brain keeping track of all these connections and they're solving these things and they're like, oh, you got to go talk to so-and-so because they're the ones who know how to do whatever. And all of that is, A, I think has changed dramatically through the Industrial Revolution and kind of this new era that we're in, just in the kind of Web2 space information era. And then let alone now we have an opportunity to that over into this Web3 world and quantify it and put liquidity behind it, which I think is such a fascinating, exciting new frontier. And I love the way that you think about it.

I was just going to say, I'm excited to learn more about how you think about it. It's kind of an interesting experience being an interview guest. I'm so often a conversation participant. And I feel like, oh man, I just feel fascinated about you because of the questions you ask. And it takes a lot of work for me to hold back my own interviewer.

Well, yeah, I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, I like to think that I'm asking what a lot of smart Web2 people are sort of arriving on the shores of Web3 and sort of trying to make sense of this half-built world and these people that have been building and very thoughtful, such as yourself, in the space for a very long time. And so I think it's very wise of you to kind of turn back and ask questions to these new arrivals and saying, what type of mental models and baggage are you bringing with you? What types of things excite you? Which types of things are you nervous about? Because that can allow, to take this analogy a little bit further, the city planning to be that much more successful because there's time element baked in there, right? And so how do we make this as accessible and broad appealing? That's the hope with the podcast. But I'm glad to hear that because my answers are far more conceptual and much more layman and Web2-y, for lack of a scientific word, that I spew out on this podcast. But I wanted to ask— Well,

I wonder if I believe you.

I want to ask one more question before we wrap, which is, how do you think about— and I'm going to switch the word DAO to internet-native organization just so we can step back a little bit from the constraints of the word DAO. But do you think that these internet-native organizations is the standard and going to be the standard for future kind of all organizations? Or do you think that we're going to see these governance structures and these internet-native organizations being kind of within their niche use cases similar to the world that we've seen thus far?

Oh, um, well, I'll give you the short answer and then an analogy that I hope really sells my position on this. Neither, but more, more the world where internet native is, is a dominant mode. But I say neither because I see your question as talking about— if I was to port it into the world as I see it, it would be like asking, hey, these These apes have started developing language. They started to talk words at each other that have meanings that are not just, you know, to induce alarm in one another. There's like complex ideas. Will human interaction come to all just be in language, or will language just be kind of like a decorative bauble that gets added? I think, I think like so many features of our coordination technology, like language, like money, like governance, like religion, like— I mean, there's a long list. We're going to see that the ability to communicate at a distance with a verified identity, even if it's fractional, you only know that this is a high-integrity person who remains anonymous, but they have trust within your network, for example. When that becomes a feature we have access to, um, we should expect that, uh, a lot of new frontiers will appear in the existing— it's multiplicative. I don't think that organizations are going to move out of the old structures. It's more like this feature will become endemic to all such structures, and those structures will have a Cambrian explosion of complexity.

I love that you use Cambrian because, uh, Hot DAO Summer is a popular Twitter trending phrase, and, uh, I said, no, it's not Hot DAO Summer, it's Hot DAO Cambrian Explosion. And I wish I would've subbed it out with internet-native organization, but I totally agree with you. Yeah, there's this feature element that humans will be humans and there will be centralized organizations that are leveraging this feature. And then I think there, to your point, there'll be decentralized, very flat, holacracy-oriented co-op type worlds and everything in between. And so I think thinking about it as a feature as opposed to a destination is a smart bet if this were a betting market. Any final thoughts before you hop off, or is there anywhere you want to point people to connect with you?

Through my personal social network. Please come find me through my friends. I would love to hang out with you.

Perfect. And thanks again for joining the podcast.

Absolutely. Lovely speaking with you.

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