VDAO Ep.5 Building Local Anti-Fragility Bitcoin, Permaculture & Community Resilience w Steph Curdy

Transcript

The actual value was not to grow my own food. The actual value is to develop a resilient community. It's the people. The people are actually the value. >> Do you think that Bitcoin is like all about anti-fragility in a sense? >> I actually don't think these they're two mutually exclusive systems. I think they're more layered. What if the grocery stores were incapable of feeding a entire city? And so I felt not resilient to a pandemic event. If somebody calls me big fat blue elephant, it doesn't land.

If somebody calls me purveyor of casino coins and scams, it also doesn't land on me cuz it's not what I do. Welcome everyone. And if you're just joining us for the first time, welcome to Vow's Antifragile Network State season on the Greenpe podcast. In this series, we've been exploring in concrete terms how we can build sovereignty and resilience at the level of the individual and the local community. From the digital tools necessary to coordinate global networks to the on the ground tools that can make our lives more antifragile in the physical world. In this episode, we are

talking with Steph Mccertie from Wolram Research, who spent many years building at the heart of tech and crypto. Steph has taken his deep-seated understanding of decentralized systems and is now applying that by setting up his own local antifragile hub within his community. Steph brings a critical understanding of the need for these kind of physical hubs. why self-s sovereignty must extend beyond our crypto wallets to our food, water, and energy. And crucially, he also shares the real world understanding of the kind of challenges and pitfalls that can come up when you make the jump from a digital builder

into a real world builder. Let's check it out. >> Hey Steph, good to see you, man. Hey Chris, how's it going? >> Good, thanks. Yeah, excited for this conversation and uh yeah, to to kick things off, we do this with all our guests and we start with the why. So, as a builder in this ecosystem in crypto, like what is your why? What motivates you in this in this space?

>> I guess we'll get right into it. Um why? My why and what gets me into this space? Well, I guess I've been wandering through many different ideas and ecosystems for the past uh 10 or 11 years. I found Bitcoin in 2015 just kind of from a asymmetric risk point of view. So it's a very nimb point of view. Um, but what really drew me into Bitcoin was proof of work and trying to understand what the intersection of energy and computation and and value were potentially. And so

my why has really been driven by just curiosity and questions around understanding what's going on in the world. and I've followed those curiosities and I've done my best to try and turn those curiosities into income streams or ways of living or you know hobbies or different things that I could take on that really stack well with how I enjoy living life. So my why has been changing and dynamic. Um, it always seems to have this energy point of view to it. And I'm just trying to hone in on what that

means in relationship to the universe and uh, living a good life in my finite time here on planet Earth. >> Nice. So, you've like followed your curiosity down different rabbit holes and you mentioned energy. Um, I know that another interest that you've spoken about publicly on Twitter and so forth is antifragility. And I'm wondering if you could kind of talk us through from from your point of view. Um, like what does anti-fragility mean and and why is it relevant for us?

Yeah, anti-fragility. I would have not paid attention to the word unless it came, you know, uh I I heard it defined and written in the book by Nasim TB called antifragile. And let's see, for me, anti-fragility means to benefit from chaos or disorder or to have negative events one, not destroy you, but two, that somehow there's learning. Let's say learning is kind of this base capacity for which adverse events occur and the entity or system grows stronger because of it. And so like learning is a very simple I

guess example of anti-fragility. It's and and so at a very base level it's like just learn from the world and you become more adapted resilient to it but also you kind of form some some layer of protection stuff like that. So anti-fragility is just this deeply embedded intuitive thing that I think all of us walk around with and Nim TB happened to write about it well especially as it relates to financial markets or risktaking or how to not blow up and it's it's very general so it can apply in many many ways and so ecosystems and and uh economies

if you could design them Well, you would say we want them to be resilient to adverse effects, but we'd also want them to to positively grow as catastrophes happen or as um significant events occur. And so I guess you can think about anti-fragility on different levels of scale um and and so it's scale invariant. So there's a truthfulness to it at many different levels of thinking. And um so I personally just try to employ antifragile strategies. Um I'm not I'm not very um

obvious about it. I don't it's not like I'm writing down a strategy and going to do it. It's just I think we employ anti-fragility in daily life as best we know it and we can always do better. Yeah. So it's come out in a couple ways in my professional and uh personal lifestyles I guess which I could talk about more. >> Yeah. So in in what ways has has this influenced you? I guess starting with Bitcoin was just the idea that the asymmetry of the potential upside of it.

Um, I needed to expose myself to that upside and it was a long shot bet of Bitcoin working, but uh I didn't need to know everything about Bitcoin or how it would play out in 2015. I just needed to know that the potential upside was so big that you needed to give yourself exposure to it. So that it's really like not about knowing everything. It's about situating oneself to asymmetries in a way that don't destroy you. And you know, if I didn't have if I didn't hold Bitcoin, I wasn't going to be destroyed. But if I was an investor or a speculator and a many

thousands% return is is is available, it would just to be about sizing your position, right? Okay. But that's like financial speculation. That's not what all of life is about. But that's something that I that's a playground that I play in. Another one is um let's say in COVID in 2020 I was living in um in urban city in Philadelphia in the United States in a studio apartment um with my now wife and we you know it was like what if the grocery stores were incapable of uh feeding a entire city and so I felt not resilient

to a pandemic event. And that led me to looking for a small uh farm property nearby that I could make my own food or at least begin that journey. Well, I guess my my learning was go apply and and get a piece of land where I could become resilient. And so that was like the response to a to an event. >> I love that you start with Bitcoin here. Like do you do you think that Bitcoin is like all about anti-fragility in a sense like it's kind of it's the basement bet in a way. It's like it's uh for it to succeed

in the long run suggests that the existing system is either in some way going to be very much impacted by Bitcoin or even replaced by the technology that Bitcoin represents. >> I don't think that it's the basement. I think uh or or the foundation or I don't think it's I actually don't think these they're two mutually exclusive systems. I think they're more layered. I think some uh allow you an alternative which kind of is a is a little bit of a release valve on a highly pressurized system that must perform and that a lot of expectations is already built into

that. So you can have things that are release valves um and that are important. Um, I also think that Bitcoin represents a the basically the Cambrian explosion of new economic primitives that we get to that we are just running just a massive trial and error experiment on that is crypto. And that to demonstrate that these types of systems can endure and can accumulate value whether those are going to persist indefinitely or not puts a level of belief and a level of

interest and curiosity into how these systems work. And when you dig into the technical details of how those systems work, they start to reveal like really really profound basement that you can go play in. And and so that's where I find myself now is playing in in that basement, which is going to take a long is, you know, 15 or 16 years since Bitcoin stood on a few giant progressions um in the decades preceding it. But Bitcoin kind of put this moment on the map that you could now do these things out in the open, they could persist, and

you could now experiment in new ways. And since it's open source and it's public, we can now just do this like dialing knobs and we can say, "Wow, I didn't even know this knob existed or there's a whole new platform on top or below those." So, I forget what the question was, but that's I I love it. It's like what you're describing is this questioning process going back to what you said at the beginning about how you're driven by your curiosity. you follow your curiosity and you kind of explore things. Sounds like you came across Bitcoin and then you started you were curious about like what is this new monetary primitive and in the context of the existing financial system it

generates a lot of questions and that becomes like an idea space for experimentation. So in a way you could say like Bitcoin's open opened up the idea space for us to really seriously explore alternatives for our monetary system. And it sounds like you were also applying this to like your food system. You were describing like this situation where you know you're uh thinking about how fragile your food system might be. Like if there's no more food in the shops then where do we get our food from in that scenario? So you start thinking about like okay what could make me more resilient and then you were look you were looking for a bit of land basically right

>> that's right you know I think to some people throughout society and civilization like like farming is the obvious foundation that we sit upon as kind of The for me, you know, born in the late 1980s and then seeing the internet and a lot of my work and professional life, you know, is now done in front of this computer on this chair. I don't frequently have my hands in the dirt doing a thing that has established this

robust foundation for many hundreds and thousands of years. So I'm I'm it revealed to me that there was a disconnect and that disconnect is significant um under some adverse conditions which don't happen every few months. This was kind of the first global pandemic that I've lived through and was may have been the first that my parents had lived through. So there was just not enough like memory built in for understanding black swan events. You know Nim Tab wouldn't even say that CO was black swan event. It was just this is somewhat

predictable now that we are globally connected via trade lines and commercial passenger jets and yada yada. So yeah, it it revealed something that was not there. And I think going back to learning is just what is the obvious kind of takeaway from particular events um to ensure that that robust foundation isn't diminished and is strengthened. So I consider myself as one small part of now strengthening and if I could find other people and other organizations and other Dows and other communities and

ecosystems doing that that is incredibly interesting to me. >> Is it fair to say like you were coming at this from like a a tech background or or at least you were like you you're not someone that came to this that has been like living off grid for years and years. Like you were working in tech. You worked for Tesla at one point, right? Like you you have this background with like technology. You've got an interest in technology, but during the pandemic, you started to think about the systems. You'd already been thinking about the financial system, but you started to think about the food system, the water system, energy systems, and so on. And that led you to this point where you were like looking for land, thinking about farming and all this. And then like what happened next? Where did it

take you? >> Yeah, you could say I'm I'm from a tech I guess perspective. I was working at Tesla but prior to that I was working in investment consulting and uh I now work for Wolf from Research in uh which is a software company that makes math products and scientific research products but uh anti-fragility and the kind of the strategy there is to be barbelled it's to have you know be extreme on either end of the spectrum And if I was, you know, a Tesla electric vehicle

kind of financial markets trying to predict where the where the future is going and computation and all this stuff. That's one end of the spectrum. What is the opposite end of that spectrum? It's my just like obvious answer is permaculture, farming, you know, off-grid living, resilient systems. So it's just about maintaining a balance on those extremes. >> How did you first come across permaculture? Like how how did you first discover it? >> Actually my um one of my best friends growing up is found permaculture and he is now teaching permaculture. And just

by being close to him, he he brought up that design thinking is what per permaculture is. It's like permanent agriculture. How does one do the design thinking on a system that is to sustainably live and produce in in a location. And so it really just starts to turn the engine of the design mind on about natural resources and flows of water and energy and kind of what the outputs are.

And then a little bit of a morality system I guess is baked into that. And so permaculture is just kind of the short way of saying for me it's a short way of pointing to how does one interact with a complex system that is an ecosystem that h that is open and dynamic. It is not closed and it has these many flows and it's about learning that system and designing to it in each specific scenario. So that's permaculture to me. It'll be different. It's a design thinking. So it's that's why it can span any geography, but it'll the design

implementation will be different to each particular ecosystem. >> Cool. So I I want to dive like into the concrete specifics of what you did with your piece of land and like how you apply permaculture and stuff, but um before we go there, like I'm curious because you're you're someone that's been around a lot of these spaces for a long time. you've seen a lot of things unfold in this in this uh time that you've been in there. Thinking about like the meta crisis space, permaculture space, uh even like the crypto space, right? Like you're you've seen a lot of uh emergence out of those spaces. And I'm just thinking about like this from a more perhaps philosophical angle like how do you how

do you make sense of of this this kind of emergence of new primitives as you describe them? So we've got Bitcoin in the financial domain. we've got this emergence of like permaculture experiments although that's maybe that's slightly older than Bitcoin right back to the 70s but it's kind of steadily grown over that period and I think it's fair to say around about the time of the pandemic there was a lot of interest in that kind of approach >> and those techniques so yeah like how do you how do you make sense of this uh and also briefly like conversely like what would you say to people that say that like these are just like either uh I

don't know like woo woo trends or like not really like that adding that much value to the world or like not they're not serious like this is not serious this is just like people playing around like what's your take on all this >> ah I love those questions the first question sounds like how does one do sense making of emergent things across time spans um as at least how I'll hold it. And the second question feels like it's how do you convey a big idea to a a not a cynic but a skep like a a realistic skeptical person

>> for which >> a realist >> a realist >> realistic skeptic >> for which you and I are too like we hold we hold that ourselves and um I appreciate I appreciate that in people that I in crypto because we have to have healthy skepticism in order to, you know, just be honest with ourselves. I guess I'll start on the first question because that's where the second one is easily answered for me. I like to think big, which means I ask myself, how far back in history do I need to go to explain what's emerging now and try to make sense of it? I tend to go back

to the big bang which is a little too far back for um like this conversation obviously but I go back to I it's just it's just like a an open prompt I use for myself that says what history do we need to agree upon in order to understand what we're both seeing right now and it makes sense to both of us. So we want to sense make you and me and we want to be good teammates and then we want to align well on what the next set of events would be or should be or could be. So, it's really about finding a good historical narrative that establishes where

we have a good foundation for sensemaking between the two of us, which might be different than adding another person in and the three of us because I'm okay going back however far or hearing your narrative and I trust in your experience as a human and I discount some of it as that's your personal bias, but it that's Okay, that's my framework for thinking to get me to a place where I can even start making sense and explaining anything emergent like Bitcoin or permaculture. Um, but once I have that, I don't really it's it's not really about like one specific narrative that gets me there. Um, it it's a big it's a big narrative that just kind of says

like the universe is evolving, energy gradients, you know, if you want to be sustainable, there's some inevitable things about the way things will evolve. And I do use Elon Musk's kind of frame of thinking on the big picture because he fundamentally understands that the direction of kind of energy production needs to revolve around the sun in some way. And that's obvious in nature. And so it's kind of it's just like I don't know if it's it's like so obvious, but it doesn't seem to be embedded in everybody's perspective. So I'm I come from that point of view and it leads to some

what seem like potential obvious next emergent phenomena. Um if you if you take that seriously in my perspective I don't know if that answered that question. It does certainly like it sounds like you you are applying you're trying to approach this from first principles and you're you're trying to apply like your understanding of physics and perhaps even your understanding of mass to like these systems and the role of energy within these systems and and not energy in a like energy in a in a like practical sense like the flows of energy in a in a system and how that relates to

physics. >> Yeah. I I call it gradients. Like I'm I'm looking for gradients where there's disequilibrium and disequilibrium will point out to me where free energy exists. It's like that's free energy is the potential to do work. And so it's something that's exploitable. And yeah, I think nature is exploiting gradients. And if if if something new is emerging that I just believe that it's exploiting a gradient. of I point that towards Bitcoin. I just ask what is the disequilibrium that gives rise to Bitcoin? And you could you could start to answer that question with like what is money? and

you'd have to run a particular historical narrative that generally converges on some of the um some of the traditional narratives about Bitcoin and and energy and um well yeah that's a whole that's a whole conversation. >> Should I should I try on the second question? >> Yeah and I was going to ask you about that like what's your take on that? skeptics like how do you respond to skeptics that are like ah you know like the system's going to be fine like what's the point in even thinking about this fragility anti-fragility like just enjoy life forget about it like it's never going to happen

>> first we have to just diagnose like what is what are we hearing from a particular skeptic or like a demographic of skeptics and listening Chris You're one of the best listeners that I've ever met. And Chris and I have met several times in person. Chris is an excellent listener. Um, so I know you know this, but really it's just about trying to empathize with somebody's perspective. And I assume that in the end it like big picture, we're all kind of saying the same thing. So I truly believe that I'm not much different from

anybody else. So I can understand where somebody's skepticism comes from. Um, but if somebody's a skeptic with regards to crypto in general and uh the narratives that is just another casino and that um Bitcoin is is um you know wasting energy and that you can run the narrative on any of these nitpicks on any of these systems that are going through a trial and error Cambrian explosion over a very short time frame, 15 years, which feels like forever in our short time frame. Uh

so it it matters on the particulars, but if we wanted to walk somebody through like your skepticism is heard, like we acknowledge that this isn't all perfect and but what's the point? The point is that money is an information system that is foundational to some scale of civilization. Below some scale of civilization, one can simply use like a handshake or or your word or just you know close relationship with kin and and close friends. So like money is this emergent thing at a particular scale

and money helps facilitate coordination and consensus across different barriers and constraints and those things have I think given us profound abundance to the degree you would have to reference hundreds and thousands of years ago relative abundance. It's an interesting question to me that is unsolved that will always kind of evolve with the size and scale of civilization. So money is not one static unit. It is a evolving thing and there will be many forms of it. And crypto isn't all just money. Crypto is

like how does one do identity well at a certain scale of civilization and how does crypto do privacy well in that same scale and etc etc. You kind of go down the the buckets and it's a massive power shift of how things were and begs the question how things how things are going to be different. You can't say that to a skeptic though, can you? I don't know. We have to do like a particular uh role playinging scenario of skepticism.

>> Yeah, I think uh I think you're right. And I do naturally fall into the role of skeptic in this space. I think it >> you do or do not. I I do like I think and like you said you as well right like you you need to question things like that's part of the the process and in a way like with Bitcoin Satoshi himself that was questioning that was questioning the existing financial system and looking for alternatives and I like how you you raised that point about like listening and I would give that uh right back to you about being a good listener like I I think you're someone that that listens and and tries to understand other people's point of view. And and I think

um the points of connection may be greater than we often realize. Like some skeptics may not be willing to take the leap into say I don't know going to live in a more off-grid way going to use crypto but they may be able to identify like oh the way things were even 25 years ago compared to how things are the systems I depend upon they're struggling there's some issues here they may not be able to fully articulate what the whole like or they may have a different perspective on on what that that means systemically but um they can identify that there's an

issue here and in a way I think crypto and permaculture are taking the next step it's like okay these systems are creaking these institutions are failing we need to really start experimenting and thinking about what comes next after this >> yeah I want to say a couple like now I want to like push back against my own thinking a little bit. Sometimes we like for a skeptic um the fact that stable coins are being adopted and employed like at this point you can assume that they're being deployed at scale. is a crypto infrastructure that's going to be completely

transparent, unknown to that skeptic in the first place that that hasn't even begun to do their homework on kind of the proliferation of of crypto. And like this is a boring behind the scenes fade away kind of thing that you won't necessarily know you're interacting with. There's there's like that line of argument where you don't even need to address the skeptic necessarily. Then there's my own like personal usage of crypto where I still feel levels of anxiety doing certain things or I don't have p I don't have perfect security management for which you know like when

somebody says how should I do it and I say this is how you should do it. It's s slightly different than how I actually do it because I want to give good advice, but you know, I don't want to be responsible for um you know, uh a loss there. And so there's just a little bit I preserve my own skeptic because the words I give are slightly different than the actions I take. And that's okay cuz like this is still we're still growing. Like we're still trial and erroring. Um, I also try and pay attention to many ecosystems, many different blockchains, and I can guarantee that you can't keep track of one single ecosystem and everything

that's going on in it. So, if a skeptic comes and says, "Tell me about this whole thing and how it's going to work." You just can't do it. And you're you're going to fall into their trap thinking that you can explain this whole thing to them. I only just recently started to get confident about knowing how some blockchains are built on what primitives on what core ingredients. I'm a slow learner, but I'm a deep learner and it's just taken me years to to do this. And so now I'm only I I would only speak about some things that I'm that I have confidence for now to a skeptic which otherwise I wouldn't necessarily try to

address everything they were asking about. I would ask their opinion and see how far along they are. And if they ask a question that I can't answer, then I just go take that in private and go and figure it out and maybe hopefully follow up with them. So there's two other two other like skeptical routes that you can play in this and you have to hold all of that at the same time. >> Yeah. And I I guess like even putting the the skepticism aside like who knows what the future holds. Maybe like the crisis the accelerating crisis will decrease or like who knows what the future holds. No one can predict that for sure, right? But even just putting

all that to one side from a purely kind of health and well-being perspective like quality of life perspective, how has having your own kind of small or attempted to build your own small kind of food growing capacity in your life like firstly how have you gone about that and how has that impacted your life? This is about the logistics of permaculture and actually being on the ground and starting from zero and going forward.

>> Yeah. Because that and and maybe you could just talk us through that, right? Cuz like I think we I I've really got a sense of your journey from like questioning some of the systems and then the pandemic was like a real experience of like, oh, this system is super fragile. maybe I need to take some action to improve the resilience of myself and in this local community that I live live in. Uh, and I'm curious like about the practical steps you took like you talk you talked about like going and getting the land and uh getting access to the the the land and yeah I'm just curious if you could talk us through like what you did in concrete terms and also yeah then move on to talk about like how that impacted you and and for for better end like any challenges that

you faced as well. Well, I will try to say in a way that is useful to to the audience. Let's just talk timelines. If there was a let's say lockdown and a real question about availability of resilience and food in a grocery store from that moment was about February 2020. I closed and signed the deed in my name uh for the land which is 3 acres in New Jersey close to where I grew up.

December of 2021. So it was almost two years since a realization to kind of owning land where I could then start to um to actually in you know introduce growing systems there. So in between that time was do you have the money? Do you have the liquidity? Can you take this risk? Where should you look? um can you afford it? What are the steps to procuring? You know, you you have to continuously follow up with the seller. Um they they hear a lot of fake bids come in, blah blah blah, and then you get your hands on the deed and then you say, "Okay, I

am I am now capable of moving forward with whatever decision I want to make here." So uh in terms of permaculture uh one of the main ideas is to observe and take in what this land is saying and is not saying over the course of seasons. So for the next 12 months the main idea for myself and my partner who was that friend his name is Mike who introduced me to peraculture back in the day. He's my partner on this project. We agreed that we would just observe what the land is and we would see it across

the seasons and what happens when it rains and people said that this area floods a little bit. So what can we actually build? So it's about kind of that learning. The second part of this was um this land had been really poorly kept and it was at once a site for junk and so that's part of the reason why I could afford it but was also part of the reason why it really interested me was that if we are polluting the earth can we remediate the land and there's also another part of that which was this is a lowrisk experiment,

meaning anything done to this could be better than what was done to it. So, it felt very lightweight in what I needed to do. Um, and so that lack of pressure and the low cost didn't put this anxiety on me. Let's just say I would I would have anxiety about paying the bills and upkeep and having it need to perform performance anxiety. Um, and so we just kind of had fun there and we brainstormed what it could be and we put up trail cameras and we saw the the um different animals that came across there like turkeys and um foxes

and deer and then what the neighbors thought. So neighbors are also part of this habitat and the neighbors that previously owned the land they had a poor relationship with the previous owner and that meant that they wanted to prevent any other poor relationship but that was in a way that they were asking can we trust you. So it was important to build trust with the local neighbors who would be there 100% of the time because they lived next door and I was not living there. I was still living in the city. And then it was about finding out kind of like what is the soil composition and what are the flows of of materials and water and energy and what

were the regulations that I could do here. And turns out that this land was a bit more restricted than what you would typically look for in a like to build a home. uh you there there's really not a great site to build a home on this land which is good for me and I was okay with that. This was more about growing or you know just uh can I put solar panels out here? Can we throw events out here? Can we bring a community together? And all of those check those boxes. So this is details. I can keep going, but please direct the flow.

>> No, I think it's it's super interesting, man. Yeah, I I'm happy to to just Yeah, keep going on this thread. >> Okay. Well, I'll wrap it up shortly. Uh this is so that's year two was just scientifically trying to get the composition of what was there and what could be there. And then in year three, so this would be beginning of 2024, build some of those foundational systems. So we bought wood, we built a little cabin. It has uh enough size for a queen-siz bed. We put a little outouse. We'll do a com compost toilet.

And we started throwing events, parties, just have people out, hear what people question and ask about. And this is really when we I started participating in Val and Val was a question about how could one build antifragile network states you know how could one do community-based permaculture projects and this felt like right on the money for that and so what could be offered from this lands perspective to help people understand what's possible. I

think I think it's like really important to open up the realm of possibilities again. Have a new Cambrian explosion of trial and error. Well, this is a place where you can really not fail. You're not going to fail out here. If you can clean up the place and build any sort of system and help the ecosystem heal, that's a win. So that brings us to to kind of Val maybe. >> Yeah. And it it's fascinating like the the journey you've been on like and to I guess I just wanted to pick up on the how your original motivation was kind of about um your own personal need for greater resilience. And yet as you went

out there and you built this or you bought this land and you you started building this, you realized that like there's value being created here and having other people come in actually increases the value of that. So, I'm just curious what you think about that relationship between kind of personal what might be considered like self- sovereignty either even if we're going back to like the the kind of crypto take autonomy, self- sovereignty, personal resilience. You have the ability to meet your needs for food through developing this land. And yet from that position you're able to like build community and

like build local community and actually uh enhance the sovereignty and uh resilience of others just by like building your own then spins out and kind of offers that to others as well by the signs of it. >> That's a great question because you're hitting on the actual value here. The actual value was not to grow my own food. The actual value is to develop a resilient community. It's the people. The people are actually the value.

So the point wasn't to grow a few extra tomatoes, but the point was hunters have been using that land for the past 10 years. So when the ownership changed and the hunters asked me to to stay there and continue hunting, the obvious answer was to allow that to continue because this is how the land had kind of been used and it was the right way of um bringing people together and not just kind of that's one example.

Another example would be bringing in my partner who knew more about growing anything than than I did. He was piloting a new um kind of waste to uh product system. So he made friends with a local mushroom grower. These are edible mushrooms. These are, you know, like your oyster mushrooms and your uh shiakei mushrooms. All of the mushrooms you would see in a restaurant or a grocery store.

The local mushroom grower had too much too many mushrooms. They they didn't have enough space for it. So, they needed to get rid of their waste. And that waste would flush two or three more times, which meant there was more mushrooms being produced. But it wasn't economical for them to keep it. So my partner would grab those mushroom blocks, like hundreds of pounds of them at a time, bring them to the space, we would harvest them, and he would sell them to local restaurants. And that was a pilot prototype, but that was that would never come about if I was there by myself. this this like

he multiplied the possibility space a hundfold from what I would have come to and then throwing events and having friends come there uh people got familiar with it and when we needed to build the little cabin it was like hey guys we're going to throw another party this time instead of just sitting on your asses you're going to nail some nails and put this cabin together and that was that was a great experience together.

So in the a very small way those what originated as I'm lacking a resilient food source and I need to fill that gap was finding out that the real value is like building this community and if there was catastrophe or a significant event in the future it's those people that would have any sort of insight or that network is what would actually withstand the catastrophe. It wouldn't be the few extra tomatoes. We would we would all be able to do that together if that makes sense.

>> Yeah, it makes so much sense, man. And and I love that like we started off with crypto and we ended up here cuz in a way and and obviously you mentioned Val there like we found there was a lot of people in our experience in the permaculture community builders that are building self-s sovereignty and local resilience in the way that you describe. And then there's p people in crypto that are motivated by the same kind of vision or ideals. But often in crypto what tends to happen is that we get stuck in this kind of or many people the community in general even I might say get stuck in this kind of PvP player versus player zero sum mentality like this is all just about like getting rich

and and getting like building our bags and like everyone's like competing in that sense u but yet the foundational principles are the same. This is about self- sovereignty. I want freedom like financial freedom. So there's something I think that these two communities can learn from one another really and and perhaps crypto brings like the capital formation side, the monetary primitive side and all that. And uh then on the permaculture side, you've got like yeah your mushroom growers, your builders, your your practical concrete on the ground resilience formation or or emergence of resilient new resilient systems and primitives on the ground.

Cryptos like in the digital sphere. I think bringing these two groups together is where we're going to see the kind of foundations for what could potentially be the next evolution of civilization in my view. That might sound a bit grand, but um that's how I see it and I think what you've been doing is an experiment in that domain. I agree with you and on the execution of it. The there is there is a little something insidious I guess in crypto which is how all the systems play well together and how we all play well together.

The good thing is that when we're in physical space, we're sharing this kind of like a a way to play well together. And when we're in our own digital locations, it's easier to not play well together or there's there's it's it's something kind of below the surface. Like to play well in somebody else's ecosystem is to kind of know how their ecosystem works and what their culture is. And if you're saying do that across a dozen ecosystems, you as an individual is just it's very overwhelming. And and we are fighting for

our um a lifestyle. We are fighting for a livelihood. We're not fighting each other, but we still have to make livingings. And part of that is on a public infrastructure for which most of us are building. We would like to get adoption for that public infrastructure because we're deep in it. We're learning a lot about it. We have a specialty in it. We've put an application on it and that application doesn't necessarily interrupt to every other ecosystem.

So, it's natural to have that. Um, I don't actually know the right way of doing that, of navigating that. Well, some people do it really well. Yeah, that's just an observation, I guess. >> I wonder like if polarization has a role to play here as well, like in terms of just public perception or just general perception. I think for us in the crypto ecosystem obviously we know we work and we uh have been in this ecosystem for many years we know the nuances of it but there is a public perception that or some people some skeptics may hold the

perception that it's all like you know uh I don't know like extreme PVP casino as you described earlier like gambling uh crime like that's the culture. And then on the crypto side, on the sorry permaculture side, you have this perception that it's like communist kind of hippie or woo woo like like even what you described there are some people probably listening being like, "Oh man, this is like communist shit." Like people are helping each other grow mushrooms and like they're all like like what are they up to? like I can just hear it and I'm really

fascinated by these skeptical views because I feel like uh that's where we can learn a lot about how polarization is playing out. But also um you know none of us are drinking the Kool-Aid like neither of us are drinking the Kool-Aid, right, Steph? Like we're not like members of a cult here. So it's like it's important to be able to see to see things from the other side too. >> Yeah. >> So I guess uh to kind of bring things back what um what I see is like you're just building something super valuable for yourself. Even from a purely

self-interest point of view, you are building it for yourself. And yet at the same time you've built your sovereignty and yet at the same time what you're supporting your local community and increasing the sovereignty of your local community. That seems to me to be an extremely valuable use of your time and uh a kind of uh experiment that you've you've been doing. Um, and even better that it's at the intersection of like because you've got your crypto background and your permaculture background and you're bringing them both together in this that I find that really exciting.

>> Thank you for saying that and I will just I'll say that it's just been fun and that >> you're not fermenting your little like communist revolution over there in New Jersey, right? You're just like having fun. >> We're just having fun. I found some people that I like to have fun with, whether they they can be local in in person or whether it's mostly um across these meetings that you and I have. If somebody calls me a big fat blue elephant, it doesn't land.

If somebody if somebody calls me um a per purveyor of casino coins and scams, it also doesn't land on me because it's not what I do. So I guess to the demographic that is that skeptic that holds that opinion and to the demographic that is working in crypto that also holds that true because they are here for the speculative the just kind of the pure casino speculative. that's only going to frustrate them, I think, because they

have to acknowledge that truth about themselves. But I think if you're, you know, that lands on, it lands on you that you're here and that that does not offend you, that you know that you've got some litmus test for being in the right place and that I think you will win um no matter what you're doing. So, I guess that would be my way of actually not wasting any time on the skeptics and not addressing that perceived point of view at all because some of this stuff is going to bypass them directly and be invisible in

the background and it doesn't need to be communicated. for the stuff that needs to be communicated. Um, you're doing it to drive to to provide value in excess of your own like kind of personal self-interest even if you are going for personal self-interest. So, is a win-win in my opinion when you have that orientation. >> Man, I love it. It's almost been like a personal therapy session for me, man. I can only skeptical face >> dialogue can do that. We can we can do that for each other.

>> But no, this is this has been great. I and I fully agree. I think um being uh uh it it doesn't land the the results speak for themselves and look what you have built and so many other people like you around the world, right? are building local resilience that is benefiting their local communities and I think that trend is only going to accelerate because the the benefits are so clear uh regardless of all the noise all the social media like the the benefits are just clear and the journey to reach there the journey you went down there's many different routes but um you

know the the reason to search for answers are only increasing as as uh we as as history unfolds and and crisis increases. So um just to to kind of wrap things up um is there anything else you want to add or anything else you want to say um at this point to kind of pull things together and draw things >> decals? Yes, I do. Thank you. Your words are very kind and they and they land. Um the value there has been great value coming from this experiment and I can see how it's benefited the community around me. Um

but it pales in the comparison of like the value that we need to drive in larger society. like I'm on this podcast, but my partner Mike is currently in a science classroom teaching this to the next generation, and he's on the ground with his hands dirty doing this, getting no recognition. I'm close to people who keep me humble. Um and it's just to kind of point out the fact that there are people that we have no idea about that's doing this on a daily basis that if we could leverage their work and help them accelerate them or,

you know, help ease their burden. Yeah, that's that's the real value in my opinion. So, I just wanted to say that because I I'm doing good things, but you know, there's there's a lot of people doing a lot of good things that we don't hear about. And if if we and VO and and whatever if my experiment can help people, um, that's good stuff. >> Thanks a lot, man. This has been really great. And, uh, yeah, see you soon. >> All right, Chris. Thanks for having me.

See you. I really enjoyed learning from Steph firsthand about the journey he's been on, moving from a builder in tech to building his anti-fragile permanent hub in real life. It's clear that we can approach resilience and antifragility from the point of view of health and well-being. It doesn't all have to be about doomerism and collapsology. Steph is someone who has actively improved his own well-being and is now sharing the blueprint with others. His journey proves that local resilience is not just an insurance policy. It can be a path to a more meaningful life. Join us next week where we'll be meeting with Gardner Lulan, another tech founder

who's taken a leap into becoming more antifragile in their own life. Until then, stay antifragile. Hey,