The Tinder of On-Chain Voting with Griff Green

Transcript

foreign [Music] ation on the Pod today we have Griff green who is the founder of common stack founder of giveth and token engineer engineering Commons um we are talking on this episode about pairwise which is a new voting user interface that basically makes voting a little bit simpler and a little bit easier on the users to make complex decisions it's kind of right ranked Choice voting in a Tinder style user experiences is I think of a reductionist way to describe it and why is that powerful if we make voting easier for people then they'll vote on more stuff and then we get better Collective

resource allocation we get better funding of public goods which makes people believe in digital democracy more so Griff is one of my favorite Builders to talk to in the space just because he's so prolific goes wide has been doing a lot of stuff with a lot of different dials but he also goes deep with some of the builders in his Network on building new stuff that pushes these state of coordination forward and so I'd say the first half of this episode is talking about pairwise and why that's a powerful new way of doing coordination and voting in the space and then the second half of the episode we get weird and talk about Griff's philosophy on how we could fund public goods with crypto both locally and at a uh at a global level create change with crypto economic

systems it's a lot of fun to chat about those themes with Griff and I think you're going to enjoy this episode coordination Athena Dao is addressing the underfunded areas of women's health such as menopause and endometriosis Athena is a Community Driven doubt giving women a say in decision making and funding the scientific breakthroughs that impact their lives with cutting-edge technology like molecules IP nft framework they invest in research IP that ensures exclusive licensing rights Athena Dao is Raising awareness to women's health research working alongside existing organizations so join Athena Dao today to help change the landscape of women's health research what's up Griff how you doing I live in the dream man how are you I'm pretty good the last episode that we did together was so much fun the 50

different 50 to 100 different coordination mechanisms so I'm excited to to jam again that was like six months ago so what's new on your side uh on my side you know it's just the same old same well just pushing out every you know public goods project that we can dream of over in the giveth Galaxy I'm excited that you're we're talking about pairwise today because honestly it's one of my favorite projects but it you know it's still very Alpha Beta you know in it so it's not really active develop or it's active development but it's not like being used so it never gets the play that it deserves but you know there's a praise and common stack and all the crazy stuff that we do in giveth and uh and now we have uh the giveth Galaxy just did this AI hackathon where everyone's day off to just build

something with AI and I'm talking like devs admins and there are bounties for different uh use cases so just diving into the AI world is blowing my mind you know well uh yeah I feel like you're you're like me and that you like to spend multiple plates at the same time so you're watching on video you see that you're swearing a common stack t-shirt but he's also the founder of giveth and then General magic is sort of your region Contracting firm that you work out of there's probably one or two orgs that that you fly the banner of that I'm that I'm missing there too yeah you know I found a dab node back in the day uh and then praise is probably the other big one and uh actually bright ID I'm a advisor there and then of course you

know uh a delegate for git coin and optimism and Arbitron and ens basically anything in the public goods realm is like I'll be there if I can't I was treating the other day about how some of the best style contributors I know are t-shaped so basically like you go abroad and you have cultural interop with many different projects and then you go deep on one specific thing and I think that I I think of you as like a very shaped person in the ecosystem and that you're sort of cross-pollinating across all these different projects and there's Alpha to be had there by just like sensing and responding to what's going on in the ecosystem for sure but it takes a lot of time as well I'm sure yeah I don't know how you do so much man

I don't have kids you know that makes my life a lot easier but being a dad and doing all this oh yeah totally geez let's so let's dive let's go deep then um we could go Lots broad but let's go deep and then we'll come back to the broad stuff so so pairwise tell me why what and how uh is pairwise and why are you excited about it pairwise is voting with good ux you know that's that's the long and short of it and voting endows right now is just so beautiful it's so painful it's like read all these Forum posts try to get context oh and by the way engage with the Forum posts with that context and defends your opinions against everyone else and you know who's

gonna push back and if you have a disagreement oh and by the way we're gonna vote in public I mean there's just there's so many issues and I'm not going to pretend that pairwise solves any of them but uh or all of them I mean but it's really trying to Target the hardest piece which I think is user experience most votes because they require so much context it's like you have a lot of things to understand and and connect together and then you have to make one simple but huge decision and pairwise flips that around we say hey make lots of small decisions and that will aggregate into an understanding of the big decision right and and that's what I

want to do with voting in General in Dallas is like can we just make voting more like signal aggregation make it really easy for community members big or small and make it easy and fun for community members big or small to come in and just share their opinions share their thoughts pairwise is kind of a first attempt at that and there's going to be more I promise and I hope they don't all come from me I hope they come from everybody because we've got to make it easier for us to gauge the interest of the community and just wouldn't be great if we could just automate like taking those signals and direct the community in that direction what pairwise is really best at is kind of uh we call it ring Choice voting it's it's

like okay what what is your favorite project what is your second favorite what is your third favorite what is your fourth favorite it can be project it can be parameters it can be nfts whatever right it's kind of this curation instead of saying okay take the big list and then order them like uh I was a steward for were you a steward for retroactive public goods funding I was a bad solder in round two yeah and so we had to go through and put all of these percentages in an Excel spreadsheet for 195 projects and it was hard it was it was uh really really difficult and with pairwise that would look so different it would just be like

here's two projects which one deserves more retroactive public goods funding next two next two next two and you're just making lots of small decisions and then we have a an algorithm that can be configured by so one person who's really smart and wants to manage it right that will give out some results and when you see those results you know uh this feature it doesn't exist yet but you should be able to switch them if they're not right you know the cool thing here is it's some it's iterative you can make lots of small decisions you can be you know just sitting on the toilet basically like picking your favorite projects for five minutes and then uh or or 10 if you're having issues and then

move on and go back and forth did a little bit of research before this and it looks like you can check out pairwise at pairwise.generalmagic.io and the primary Innovation is a voting user experience where you just kind of decide the left project to the right project and then do that a bunch of times and then you eventually get to rank all the different projects in the registry kind of like ranked Choice voting style but one of the things that I really like is that people can only only have to have a couple different things in their head at a time in or as opposed to like you said with the retroactive public goods experiment where we all had to decide which of 150 different projects deserve the retroactive rewards that have been done with pairwise then it would just be

very easy to look at uh tuples which basically means pairs of two projects at a time and maybe do that 15 or 20 times and you get a ranked list of the whole registry is that close yeah I mean you might have to do it for 195 projects you might have to do it a lot to get the whole registry it's kind of one of these things where if we train the algorithm right you know you can kind of go back and forth maybe there's some projects that you want to just be like I love these 10 projects so you kind of seed them with some initial percentages but then there's also the project Discovery process you know you get two projects and you're like well I like this one what is that one you know you click it and you're like oh yeah it's that thing

yeah yeah I definitely like this one better you know and it it's just like so much more digestible and then when this project comes up against a project you don't like you're like oh well this one for sure and then you just get all these choices and we can train an algorithm basically to decide a percentage of allocation across the span you just need one person who is configuring it like a snapshot vote you need someone to make the snapshot strategy and same with this one you kind of need someone to decide like you know where do you draw the lines and what's the default experience if you get two projects and you don't know either of them you hit abstain so there will be some configuration and I assume that once we have this out we'll make like default patterns for people

like for retroactive public goods funding if you hit abstain they should get zero percentages you know um but maybe for other use cases you might want that I I really like pairwise because it's a very clear um pattern it's it's almost like Tinder ux but for solving a complex thing just like Tinder does is where it's like well who's going to be your mate uh well or your date and and then you know you make lots of micro decisions well I think those micro decisions are powerful in their Simplicity you know Tinder invited that whole swipe right swipe left uh experience and um I'm actually probably one of the only people in the world but knows this because I used to run an

online dating website in my 20s not because I actually used Cinder but uh yeah what's really beautiful about what they they've done is that the user experience of swiping left or swiping right is very simple but then under the hood you can run some really powerful algorithms around that there's this thing called collaborative filtering and it basically is a way of saying okay if you swiped six times then basically we can use clustering to know that you're like these other users and these other users like these other products or like these other uh whatever and um you can use inference to sort of map preferences and it's very nice for the users because you don't have to go into the and to continue the online dating example you

know you could say like hey I'm a 38 year old man looking for uh women within five years of age of myself within Boulder Colorado um and there's just like a bunch of like things you have to tune in order to search and like think about to set those preferences in in like a traditional search view but with pairwise you just like and then the algorithm learns your preferences from there and I think that that's a really powerful Paradigm that I learned back in like running the dating site and it would just make total sense to apply it to a Marketplace for public goods um as well and so I'm excited to hear about the algorithms under the hood that you're using to turn that data into something useful yeah it's actually the the big brains of colony they're like a

dental project that has been around for a long time since early days ethereum and uh the PHD algo design people actually wrote a paper in 2018 about about how you would do this kind of pairwise assessment and then turn it into a budgeting process it was originally called budget box and actually in our uh first uh call about coordinations we called it budget box uh since since then we rounded branded it to pairwise mostly because it's about we I think it has a lot of General use case uh Beyond budgeting uh well beyond budgeting like uh it can be Winner Takes all you're just the Top Choice wins it

can be um you know an ordered list it doesn't have to have weights or it can have weights and all of those outputs are very simple out of the box with what we have but I'm really excited to go deep with the algo we don't have anything on the roadmap about bringing in clustering yet because I mean we really need a first user and I'm hoping retroactive public goods funding can be that first user that we can design for and then we have a user that we can test our algorithms choices against that's when it becomes like for sure and I do think clustering makes a lot of sense because that will you know if you just have a few active users that are really going deep on these things and you can map

them to choices that other people are making along the same lines yeah I think you will end up with some uh very easy clustering low-hanging fruit to make a better user experience honestly I'm not the algo designer I get to hang out with all these Geniuses that uh you know get to play games and then I'm just like oh that's cool yeah let's do that my main thing is we got to make it easier for people to signal and algorithms will do that well I think that one of the huge opportunity spaces that I see with web 3 is making democracy and collective decision making much more high resolution so we're all sort of coming up in these industrialized democracies where you vote once every two years if you're very involved or once every four

years for for president and for state level voting and of course there's opportunities to be more civically engaged in between those things but what if the data emissions that we're releasing when we fund to get coin grants or we do pairwise or even our social networks can be used in a way to create a more high resolution picture of what the actual citizens actually care about and I feel like there's a lot of opportunities to really optimize ecosystems around our values and do it in a decentralized democratic Way by re-ending these voting interfaces so I welcome The Innovation and I'm excited about it I mean is there more to say about pairwise or should we kind of zoom out and talk about all possible voting systems at this point yeah I think I

think zooming out is good I love pairwise but it's still early days you know we we've only put 10k of funding into it like which is really not enough I mean we it was enough to get our first like uh hackathon style prototype out there but I'm excited for first users so you know call to action or you know Shameless plug if you think that this app is cool and want want to play with it let's talk let's get you playing with it and and we and tell us where it needs feedback and and how we can make it use real use case check out pairwise.generalmagic.io or uh we'll have a link to your Twitter user in the the show notes so people can click on

that in order to get in touch I'm curious how the first experiments went I see at pairwise.generalmagic.io that there's a giveth node there's ens donations there's common stack and then there's a couple other projects there so how did that 10K distribution go was that in the give us space that you all did that the 10K distribution was solely for development we didn't actually use pairwise to the suit but the the actually forgiveth this is my own internal use case one of the things that um we have in gimmick is called give power and it's a way of curating projects based on give tokens uh staked it's kind of like ve curve for public goods in the regen space but uh you know it's very plutocratic and that's not

really very regen and so we were thinking it would be great if project owners themselves had a way to signal on the projects and give that weight for our ranking system to decide which projects should come up first on the on the web page and get more views on on give it right and so we were thinking hey we'll we have this verification system uh it's very good at one person one vote uh kind of a thing we could actually make a project Center like I think you know big green Dow like Kimball musk right their their governance system is really focused on the projects curating each other and saying which projects should receive

funding uh in their in their Dao and I love that and and so we were thinking well we could kind of marry give power which is plutocratic based off of how off the give token and then we could also say verified projects also have a weight and how do the verified project signal though they can't really use give power it doesn't make sense you know so we were thinking well let's make it really easy for these uh how do we make it easy for non-profit uh you know Founders that have a little bit of crypto interest in curiosity to go in and actually vote on projects and so pairwise was the solution for that and then of course we saw it as something

that could scale and so we've been working with it with our community group to get it ready for and people have been testing it and they love it they it's been very successful and same with retroactive public goods funding for optimism that's another beta test I I've we've showed it to several badge holders in several groups and they love it too no one's told me that it sucks so that's that's a good sign well that's really neat I mean be curious I just had a mean solomoni uh on the podcast like 10 episodes ago and I I feel like one of the things that I see in him is that so for those students who don't know I mean founded molok Dao and spanking and rye and now uh privacy pools and um it's it for me it's like the same sort of

profile that I see in you where you're just like very good at getting coordination games from zero to one and in doing it sort of on not a lot of resources and and very quickly and rapidly prototyping so I'll ask I'll ask you the same question that that I asked to mean which is like what's your secret how do you get all these experiments off the ground and and sort of cultivate them to a point where where they're mature because it seems like the amount that you're shipping is is really high I mean giveth has a bunch of different mechanisms and um you know I consider myself a mechanism nerd and I can't even keep track of all the mechanisms given this is shipping so what's your secret with getting all these coordination games from zero to one uh delegation for sure at least like I don't do this stuff

man I don't do anything as far as I can tell you know I I find leaders who are excited about the project and give and trust them to take it to the next level and make sure that there's communication around what resources they need so that we can get there you know there's a lot of failed projects too I've had so many fails and I wouldn't say I'm great at failing fast maybe persistence is another piece you know giveth probably should have died many times over like it's not it's it's been a battle and you know it's probably it rose out of the ashes of the Dow which was my first huge fail and uh and there's been lots of fails since then the common stack like giveth almost died and just became the

common stack it's like every bear Market it's like giveth almost dies this is going to be the first bear Market where it doesn't almost die uh has since 2016. so I would say persistence and delegation well I also think that there's a third thing and that's the I I know this from hanging out with you but you're just genuinely interested in the frontier of what's possible in coordination and I think that that goes back to what we started the episode on which is just being involved in a dozen different projects and and knowing what's current for all of them gives you a sense of the topology of what's going on in the space so uh not to answer my own question for me but that's another thing that I sort of see uh between you and and I mean and anyone else who's

really good at that stuff is is knowing where to invest resources because you're synthesizing information in from multiple places yeah and maybe I'll add one more thing that connects immediately is like a a true passion for change like I think I mean you know his background he's he's from Iran and there's a lot of or he has an Iranian background I should say and he has uh you know a lot of connection there and it's really tough working with Iran like it's tough situations you know and I think that the in the crypto space early days there was a really huge drive to build something better than governments and that sector of crypto has actually grown it doesn't

seem like it narrative wise because the narrative has grown in other directions in a much faster Pace but like in 2013 it felt like the main narrative in crypto is we can build something better than governments now that's a smaller like percentage of the crypto narrative but like if you look at meetups of people talking about that in 2013 you know it was like five people going to meet up and be like yeah we can do better than governments uh and now it's like hundreds of people full-on conferences and that are just focused on that topic but because the number go up crowd is so loud and so big it's almost like they don't exist even though the

growth in that space is huge and I feel like uh at least in the crypto Anarchist space the drive is really strong because people feel like you know it's not just about building a project that will maybe make you money it's about changing the world and when you get passionate people that really believe that they have a solution for some huge problem problem that uh really impacts their lives like for instance building something better than governments for the Iranian people or building something that can you know when you have a revolution you don't just replace one government with another but you replace government with something better you know like that's and that's all coordination you know I it's not something we talk about in the

public good space very much but from my angle that is what it's about being deeply networked being across many uh many different projects um having a Passion For Change delegating and there was a fourth thing it was at the beginning of what you said uh that was persistence yeah I feel that we should do like a meta episode about this like all the best zero to one Builders and Founders what are what are their secrets but uh maybe that'll be a little bit of a teaser for that episode one of the attributes that people like you and Griff or you and amine and other zero one Builders I put like Austin group in that category um I'll I'll share one thing I think that sets a mean apart from like me and Austin for instance is he's a better

fundraiser I I feel like that's been my biggest mistake is like I just don't do the fundraising game and I'm trying to work on it honestly because it seems like the biggest issue but that's holding all of my projects back and I think that's really critical too is making sure that you're fully resourced and in all Dimensions I can see that I mean I think that um one of the things that you pointed out to me that I thought was really interesting is this this idea that there's 10 trillion dollars of capital that goes to public goods um I think that this is a number that you put in my brain and it's just like if you add up all the government budgets and ngos and non-profits just in North America you get to A number close to 10 trillion and you know what would it take

if just for point zero one percent of that to go to web three you know if we believe that web 3 is a better substrate for human coordination we can build networks coordination games what would it take to start routing some of that money away from these high administrative overhead hierarchical uh ngos and deploy them in a more networked way and so you know it's funny to hear you reflect on the fact that you don't perceive yourself as a good fundraiser but uh you really opened my eyes to the fact that there's lots of capital that's going towards public goods it's just not effectively routed so if we can cross that Chasm I think that there's there's a lot of upside but you know there's probably more crypto native ways to bootstrap these tools in until we get to an escape velocity where they're even

legitimate enough for an NGO or a government to use but just just knowing that there's something on the other side of that Chasm for me was a really exciting moment you're the one who opened my eyes to that yeah I really do think that's the best direction for the crypto Anarchist space is uh which is the for me the public good space but uh it is is really this actually not saying governments are bad but saying that we can do some better than governments and not trying to overthrow them or have a revolution but augment them get solve problems they don't want to solve not and in a better way than than they can right like I'm in Costa Rica and before the call we were talking like you know how remote it is like you can probably

hear the birds and and uh there's I'm literally just looking at cows there's no paved roads around here it's all dirt roads that are destroying all the cars and there's really no good way for the people who live here to coordinate around building the roads governments usually build roads and if they don't care about you then they're not gonna build roads for you at least there is clear value to unlock there because our car gets this like it needs a mechanic to do some kind of overhaul every six months because it's like you know it's just going over these rocks and it's like these cars are not made for dirt roads all the time if we could pick these roads like it would it would solve a lot of problems and it would

create value but how do we coordinate around this and and web3 is not ready yet the ux is horrible for coordination like I feel like it's going to be it's something that pairwise and other cool voting strategies like uh prop house is a really nice one all the cool stuff that you have on your supermodular dot XYZ slash coordination is that what it is yeah super modular.xyz slash coordination Dash mechanisms but you can just get it from the nav at Super modular.xyz um you so last episode that you and I did together was all it was a tour of 50 different coordination mechanisms and people were so inspired by that episode and the sort of taxonomy that we put

together that we came up with a visual taxonomy of different coordination mechanisms and you can check it out at supermodular.xyz so this fun way that our work has just sort of ricocheted off of each other um in in in fun ways that's one of the many ways I think that our work has has ricocheted off of each other of course giveth and get coin working together is another and I'm sure there'll be more in the future but yeah it's a good a good show for sure I'll put that in the soda yeah and I I do I mean I gotta give you so much credit because I think quadratic funding is by far the most ready to be consumed mechanism that's out there that can really make a change on the ground and already has like in Denver right

well don't give me too much credit because I'm just the meme Lord but it's uh capping on top of the idea space that vitalik and Glenn in Zoe they're the authors of the quadratic funding paper but uh you know happy to be standing on the shoulders of giants and um hopefully deploying more quadratic funding in more places over the next several years is is what we'll see and um but yeah I think that there's going to be a plurality of mechanisms that fund public goods and create digital democracy and I think that we should embrace the way these the ways they complement each other for sure yeah and I you know I really think that donations and taxes which are the dominant ways of funding public goods in our day-to-day lives like in in on in meat space you know in the digital space creating a

token honestly funds a lot of public goods but in in meat space it's uh taxes based governments government's job is to fill in to create value in the non-excludable space that's that's how I see it in public goods or non-excludable Goods Goods that don't have a business model because there's no customers everyone is the customer and there's like a supposedly a tragedy of the commons this is where governments can use taxes as a funding mechanism to then um build the roads or do environmental regulations provide identity cards you know all of these things that we take for granted that are free there are common pool resources or public goods

they're effectively not excludable value or normally not excluded value there are of course use case situations where governments exclude people but for the most part they're really providing benefit to Society at large taxes are the dominant form of public goods funding and you give the stat of 10 million 10 trillion dollars so that's the US and actually I have the updated stat from the World Bank and it you know the stat doesn't exist really um it was something we had to like look up for every country and then aggregate it they are taxing 25 trillion dollars across the world in taxes are collected

and spent on public goods per year that's 2021. and but also in 2021 that's that's how much taxes were collected but then actually 35 trillion dollars were spent because of course they also print money and go into debt right every year so uh governments and I can give you an Excel spreadsheet that has every country um cited for this uh but uh governments actually are spending 35 trillion dollars every year on funding public goods and they're literally just burning it I mean they kind of have this taxation model and and they can print their own money and and play these games but in the end they they take money

create value and get nothing in return the cycle kind of ends you know whereas in the business model world in the in the excludable world in the excludable goods world you know if you have a movie theater you're selling tickets you get a you get a little bit profit that you can reinvest to make the movie theater better uh if you're providing a movie in the park that everyone gets to enjoy for free you put up the donation box and and you hope to get some funds so that the guy I bring in the projector can get a new bulb when it goes out and so you know the taxation game the donation game really are these dead ends and what I've seen is that this public goods Lego approach where we can bring in the economic games that crypto is really

good at like Bitcoin is providing a lot of value and it's not using donations or taxes it's just issuing a currency and training demand for that currency that primitive is by far the most successful uh ingenious primitive that the crypto space has created and it doesn't even take credit for it you know it's very poorly documented but this concept that you know you issue a currency you use that currency to rewards the contributors and the people of trading value so you don't need a business model because you're rewarding people with tokens that you aren't collecting you're literally just minting and then within the network of value production there is

some sort of demand for that token that can create a market a market for public goods and the market for public goods creators is I think going to be the the biggest innovation of crypto and you see it with nfts or they're just printing an NFC selling it minting it and then they try to add utility to it or governance tokens you know uh or or or of course blockchain tokens where it's like oh you need a little bit for gas but then you get this uh network of value and I'm I'm excited for you know uh an easy way to start these things up because the problem with economic models

is that you need liquidity you need accurate price discovery for there to be Market feedback and that market feedback is critical for these free markets to really work and if you have a low look if you have a startup and you have a low liquidity token you know if no one wants to buy it like nfts the price is effectively zero and that's not the accurate price and so you don't have this like nice feedback mechanism whereas if we can create systems where it's easy to start up a purpose-driven economy uh an economy where you're issuing a token rewarding people creating value and creating demand for that token if there was a cool easy way to start that up then thousands millions

of experiments could start like the effectively the LLC or the the startup road map you know that so many people do in the tech space if we can model that same thing in in the economic uh landscape as opposed to the the revenue business model landscape oh man The Innovation will be crazy and um I am wearing the common stock shirt so our our solution for this is the augmented bonding curve which provides price Discovery and liquidity for for low liquidity markets like uh and our first pilot was the token engineering Commons token and the token engineering Commons Community which is now one of the featured rounds in in uh the and

with the aloe protocol for get coin so that's super cool to see them you know the public goods Lego is really happening uh but it's cool because normally for most quadratic funding matching pools someone is donating into that pool right well for the token engineering columns the twenty five thousand dollars was actually kind of came from an investment an investment in the token engineering field and advancing the token engineering field as a public good and people bought Tec tokens and with the purchase of those TC tokens that money went into a pool where the TC token holders can vote and they chose to allocate 25k into the allo protocol and be part of

this of the beta round forget coin this round and that means that 25k isn't actually a donation it's it's actually part of the economic system working that's super cool and if we can start copy moving that model out of the digital space and advancing nerdy things like token engineering and making it easy for someone who's building the roads here to have a startup to coordinate who wants a road built where who wants this pothole fixed who wants these things fixed okay well you have to invest in my startup to get me to fix that oh and also there's a reputation system where every landowner here also has some voting power and we can kind of

marry the plutocracy with the with with like a reputation system that's not plutocratic so that we can actually you know decide public goods in a better way man I'm just ranting do you have anything before I start changing another topic uh do you want to interject yeah no I'm uh I'm preach I'm in the audience like passing a lighter back and forth or waving a lighter like preach script keep going well one of the things that I think we forget is uh YouTube is a public good Twitter is a public good uh Facebook all of these or in your case what you like call it as a network good and these Network Goods which is like I wish I could get the the term non-excludable uh

um good as a thing um because I think Network good and all these things could kind of fall under that umbrella but uh they have great business models that are providing public goods and my favorite one is honestly just the freemium model you you provide the public good everyone gets to enjoy some level of service for free but if you're a a donor or an investor really if you're an investor in this public goods service then you get Twitter blue for free you know and your tweets get a little bit higher visibility and you know you might have some kind of control over the voting algorithm on Twitter like sorry the the Twitter algo you know you might have

some you know we can start decentralizing these things and we can do a mix of reputation and and monetary contributions and labor contributions and expertise and just being a participant in the game and kind of uh take all of that signaling and actually create the same business models that are working in the Tech Community now where where they're providing public goods to society but it's not applying one to meet space right and also take away the need for revenue and make it focused on economic systems make it focus on liquidity and uh token price and growth

right especially if you have a small startup because like and why I think this is so important is because of Any competition in the public good space right now governments have a monopoly over every public goods vertical that they will choose to control there's one road builder in town that's the government okay uh if you you know you're not going to compete with them if you start if you start a startup saying hey invest in my road building startup so really we'll need to start these things and governments will be the first customer they have to be because they have a monopoly but do they really want to fix the roads that's my question I don't think they do I I think that if you can make the sell to the local community

um Council here I said listen instead of paying for the next two years of road construction invest in our startup and participate with the community we're going to use quadratic funding to crowdfund uh which projects should be solved in the community this six months and prioritize a list with with uh with pairwise or quadratic funding or however we want to do it quadratic voting as well we can we can use multiple coordination games to create a to-do list for the next six months and the local city council could invest in one economy that's taking one strategy that's focused on businesses and maybe

there's another uh um Road building startup that's like actually we're focused on homeowners and that's our chosen audience and they can both be competing to provide Public Services and that's where the magic is if we can have a free market for public goods like we have a free market ish for private Goods then man what a crazy world we would have and uh there would be a lot of opportunity also to start funding things that don't get funding now because the current market dynamics are that you make a profit by externalizing costs externalizing risk so like The Meta crisis and all these

things AI existential risk is a huge topic right now and because there's no real way to address it what do we do you know why every AI startups uh incentivizes is Daniel schweinberger very well pointed out on your podcast which if people haven't listened like go watch Daniel schwannenberger's uh uh podcasts with you they're amazing the companies have a perverse incentive to move fast and break things and uh and externalize the external risk the the existential risk because in and externalize the cost of mitigating extra existential risk because well they have investors and first to Market moves you know is very important so

if somehow we could create economies competing economies that are trying to address existential risk and the ones that succeed people who invest in those economies would actually uh you know if they invested early they make a huge profit and if they could start to mitigate this existential risk and make money by doing it then all of a sudden existential risk effectively can have a number on a spreadsheet that can be competing with the the profitability of getting AI out there that's what really excites me is this ability to get the value of public goods in a spreadsheet so that it's comprehendable by the

shareholders that have a fiduciary duty to externalize cost pollute create existential risk because it's just not on a spreadsheet yet but if there's another group that's saying no that has value and we can quantify it and now we're going to put it it's on your spreadsheet you have to manage it or you have an opportunity to make a profit by mitigating substantial risk because it will collaborate around them yeah I think that it's huge opportunity thanks for letting me rant I kind of just went on like six tangents I well first off your passion clearly comes through when when hearing you talk about this and you know as you're you're sort of taking different paths into discussing the problem space here I was kind of

thinking about how I've been beginning to think about regen web3 and The Meta crisis and public goods as this uh it's a hyper object right so it's an object that has a um a sort of like critical importance to it but you can't touch it um you know something like climate change is the hyper object because you could view it from a bunch of different angles and it's just this like abstract thing and and um you know so the angles that I heard coming from you are uh hey there's trillions of dollars of capital that's supposed to be being put on uh deployed to the public good but it's being deployed in an opaque unaccountable inefficient and often centralized way and uh what if we could build a more more transparent uh programmable

permissionless pluralistic way of solving public goods and then route some of the capital over there I I heard Bottoms Up local regeneration using a pluralism of mechanisms of deployment of that capital I I heard giving public goods a business model in there and helping things get bootstrapped off the ground and then you know I think that like where it Nets out for people is better funding to cause this citizens actually care about if I'm an everyday citizen um then I can be incentivized to if if this Vision comes to pass I can be incentivized to pay down existential risk and to work for the public good and not just to work for only things that I can capture so that's that's me

restating that hey this is a hyper object and that's four different angles of how I look at the hyper object and and you're just kind of crisscrossing in and out would be my somewhat reductionist summary of what you said um so I don't know it's just neat to hear your past come through and I can feel that you truly believe that you're at a high leverage point in which we can create some systemic change and and I feel that too it's the reason why I do this podcast so it's neat to hear it in in your words yeah thanks man and and just to bring it back to pairwise and voting signaling like we got to make it easy for people on the ground to actually give a signal you know and voting every four years or every two years or whenever they do

participating in civil Civic Society in whatever means that they can't it's really not an it's it's really inefficient and I don't think snapshot voting is going to replace it so I I think there's a lot of opportunity for Innovation Way Beyond pairwise like I I want to see the people who are designing the algorithms behind you know what advertisement gets shown on Amazon to me I want to see those people be developing Community signaling pools because like how much energy and and like thought went into which advertisement am I going to show this user based off of their you

know patterns that they were using online right what if we could have our own AI bot on our own dap node that is you know reading all of the transcripts of video calls and messages on different platforms and of course you own that data and then it participates for the signaling opportunities that you have as a person who is in Costa Rica uh who you know and and collecting the opportunities to be part of the various communities and just kind of guesses at what you would want and you can train it you know you you see an email every week and you're like no wait not that one change that vote change this vote but the rest of these seven are great so like you know and like how do we make

the user experience of expressing your opinion uh on on issues that impact to you things that are relevant to you very easy and how do we make it so that if you really don't have an opinion you just burn those off because you don't care so many people are single issue voters why do we have to elect one representative that is supposed to you know Pander to all of these there's no one good representative for each person you're the best representative for you we have to make it easy for your signal to be expressed aggregated and the for the direction of of your local communities to go that way that will be the big unlock I feel like there's a there's a huge opportunity here where we

get higher resolution map of constituent preferences which means better Collective resource allocation uh to the causes citizens actually care about and then it creates this reflexive Loop that's this virtuous cycle where it's like oh I'm going to participate more in the Democratic process because now you know it's there's the ROI for me to do it and that creates a reflexive okay now we have even higher resolution to our digital democracy and better Collective research you know like the loop repeats there and so that that's kind of like it's very reductionist that's what I view a lot of my work and your work and other people who are working on public goods the ultimate Loop that I think that we're going to create ten thousand percent ten thousand percent way more

concise than my rants so one of the things I'm actually this is actually the first time I've talked about on the podcast but uh I'll talk about it now um so the green pill V2 book I'm I'm increasingly thinking that it's not going to be like bigger and crazier theories um or you know um but like abstract ideas I really want to go super ground level and practical with it and so I think that we're going to publish a series of books about local regeneration toolkits so basically it'll be a series of books um all called like green pill how to regenerate your local community and the first will be how to set a social shelling Point how to you know start a Meetup how to get people excited about your the ideas and then the second and

these will be like small little pamphlets they won't even be like full books um so the first one will be setting social shelling points and then the next one will be how to run qf in your local community and then you know maybe we could invite everyone who's working on a crypto economic wave or being in the comments to write a like a chapter or like a a a a a sub booklet about this and so we'll do retroactive public goods funding and I'll invite coordinate to to do one and um so this is my invitation to you to write one about pairwise and we can do one on giveth and give backs and everything like that but actually giving people the tools to regenerate their local communities I think that we're on the precipice of of actually being able to make it happen um and and and so I want to go way

practical with it is is I think what I'm trying to broadcast here and also invite you and give it to to author a chapter or a pamphlet or something to it so um aiming to launch it in the next nine months maybe my December 2024 so uh maybe you I can release that together uh and I'll be all author the qf chapter You author the pairwise and um token bonding her chapters and and we'll just go super practical with it and hopefully let a thousand experiments blossom in all of these local communities to allocate resources better absolutely and and I already see it working uh with the beta round all the I saw a green pill Germany uh raising funds there and I also saw all these

Rydal local notes like all San Jose Medellin Mexico City like uh ref right now is doing an incredible job uh bringing communities together that are interested in the refi space especially focused on environmental impact uh and and I really I I can't agree more with this like I would say double like I feel like crypto right now is very focused on like the cause space and being Global but it needs that local hit too you know it's a great one-two punch where you can have these you know network of Networks overlaying on top of each other the network of networks yeah and um one of the things I really value is just the pluralism of if we were in

web 2 I feel like giveth and get in in git coin would be like elbowing each other out for market share but uh you only get what you give is the meme that I feel like between give it and get coin so uh very very fun to be building this movement with a pluralism of voices employerism and mechanisms and pluralism of funding approaches and that's what's going to make diversity principles value of it and make it anti-fragile too so always appreciate having you on and our discussions uh Griffin and uh we will co-evolve in the infinite gardening together absolutely man I love working with you in any way that we can and and really the whole I feel like the public good space in crypto is so lovey-dovey it's it's so nice to be in that

cooperation mode as opposed to competition mode I don't know how and this is the bear Market imagine what we'll be like in the bull market exactly uh well cool man thank you so much for having me on it was really fun yeah totally um hard to one up the last episode that we did together which I thought was uh pretty foundational but um really excited about pairwise excited about the work that you're doing so call to action for The Listener follow Griff on Twitter there'll be like in the show notes check out pairwise.generalmagic.io any other call to actions for people before we wrap Griff you know donate to your favorite projects on git coin if this goes out in time then it's still open don't don't miss the beta round man it's uh I love you know it's not even about the

donations I love discovering new projects that is the coolest thing The Meta crisis round is full of gems man that round just shelling point of quadratic funding is incredible and if there's a round that is interesting to you the token engineering round or or The Meta crisis round I can really recommend so many cool projects get out there and don't uh and donate and and votes effectively there's two almost nearly two million dollars being distributed to whichever projects you vote on so you donate to that's that's pretty amazing don't tell don't tell them that it's a governance experiment Griff governance feels like

we're donating an e-commerce experience feels like something you do all the time so you're leaking it you're leaking the alpha exactly um well uh thanks again for doing this excited about to see where pairwise goes and keep up the great work Griff thanks Kevin do some love [Music]